Short Story #1

THE SABLE MASQUE

AW Hendry

The flooding was immense. I looked through my bedroom window at the street below. The black slime that last night had begun to seep up from the drains and to flow languidly down the gutters had risen now to such a level that neither the tarmac of the road nor the grey stone of the pavement could be seen. In their place was this slow moving river of black oil like slime oozing its way towards the center of town.

Cars and pedestrians made their way through the early morning haze seemingly not noticing the dramatic change to the street through which they passed. Seemingly unaware of the viscous filth that pulled and sucked at their feet, that fouled the tires of their vehicles spraying their chassis' with the grim substance.

The house was empty. It had been for years. Years since Kate had left home for her own life and, before that, since Alice had been taken away from us. It had been empty for years; yet now, faced with this horrid phenomenon outside, I felt the emptiness more than ever before. Since those first days after Kate left, those first days without either of the girls. Without my family. I felt the need to talk to someone. To anyone. To ask why they were not more perturbed, more caring, of the effluence that was now flooding the street. How could they bear to walk through it, to even drive through it - for surely that had walked through it to reach their cars?

The houses of Elderslie Road are old red brick Georgian terraces. Front doors opening directly onto the street but elevated by a couple of small steps. The slime was flowing just below the top of the first step, surely they must notice? It is only because of this tiny elevation that the horrid looking stuff was not flowing beneath doors and flooding the houses. At the rear of each house are more steps than in the front which lead down into the back yards so if the flooding was the same in the back then, at least, it would not have come into the kitchen. For now.

#

Whilst waiting for the kettle to boil I chanced a look into the back yard. It too was full of the same black stuff. Unlike the stuff to the front of the house this didn’t appear to be moving. It was just a pool, that had to be at least six inches deep, that filled my back yard from fence to fence. No movement, no ripples, no flow. It just sat there, my garden furniture - a white decorative metal lattice table and chairs - looked strange poking out of the black pool. They cast no reflection.

My coffee was black that morning. I should have bought milk the night before but I didn’t and the thought of walking to the shop at the end of the road was extremely unappealing. As much as I want to talk to someone about what has happened the thought of stepping into that filth makes me shudder. Extra sugar curbed the bitterness somewhat.

I took my time getting ready. I wasn’t going to make myself late putting off walking through the sludge outside but I certainly wasn’t going to be early either. I took the portable radio with me from the kitchen to the bathroom so that I could listen to the news whilst washing and shaving. I was almost surprised when it was clear water that flowed from the taps rather than whatever had covered the street and my backyard. As I shave I listened to the inanities of the DJ and the awful pop music that they played. Pop music wasn’t any better when I was younger, I am not one for rose tinted glasses, it has always been dross. Repackaged perhaps; and given a crisp new veneer every year or two but dross all the same. There is no mention of the black flood on either the news reports or the traffic updates. Perhaps, I thought, it is a localized phenomenon. Perhaps outside Elderslie Road there has been no flooding. It isn’t as if this is a newsworthy area. A young girl was murdered a few streets from here last year and it barely made the news. She was, like most of the residents of this part of town, probably of too dark a hue for the national news. Or perhaps her poor mother didn’t quite fit the correct class or career demographic for journalists to care about. Either way, we rarely make the news around here. Regardless of child murders or floods of viscous ooze.

#

I stood at my front door for a while looking down at the filth. It had breached the top of the first step to my house and I sincerely hoped that it would abate before it rose much further. The thought of coming home to a house ruined by the stuff was almost enough for me to phone in to work and claim sickness so that I could spend the day barricading doors against any incursion of the gloop. My position at work was, however, tenuous at best at the moment and so I didn’t dare miss a day. I had already moved all the books from the bottom shelves and piled them on the coffee table, I had unplugged the electrical gizmos, placing the DVD and VHS players alongside the books. I had emptied the space below the stairs of anything that sat on the floor and emptied the bottom kitchen cupboards onto the work surfaces. There wasn’t much else I was able to do.

I stepped down into the street.

I had expected more resistance than I met. The slime looked to be thick, thick like cornstarch. Kate had shown me, years before, a video on the internet of people running across swimming pools of the stuff. She said it was a non-Newtonian liquid and so behaved like a solid and a liquid depending on how much pressure was put upon it. I was impressed with an 11 year old using a phrase like non-Newtonian even if it meant nothing to me. This filth looked like a pitch black version of the same stuff.

Instead of resistance my foot sank easily into the slime and I had sunk past my ankle into it before my foot reached the pavement. When I tried to pull my foot back out however I found that the slime had become more substantial and I had some difficulty in extracting my foot without leaving my shoe behind. My foot looked like it had doubled in size thanks to the filth that was clinging to it. A man passing by on the other side of the street was looking at me. I gestured at the muck on my shoe, smiled, shrugged and, closing the door behind me, stepped in the black river.

I found walking through the stuff a lot easier if I didn’t attempt to remove my foot entirely from its grasp. This lead to me assuming an odd half shuffle to my gait which considerably slowed my progress to the Crepsworth metro station above Crepsworth Street.

Eventually I reached the gap between the terraced houses of Crepsworth Street and the steep stairs up to the metro platform. Approaching them I could see that the slime was now coating the stairs as well as the streets between Elderslie Road and here. It was being carried there on the soles of the hundreds of shoes that traversed the steps during rush hour. It puddled and pooled in the middle of the steps and, in places, formed extremely slow moving waterfalls, or should that be slimefalls, from one step down to the next.

The platform too was covered in the stuff. Pooling here and there or seeping over the edge and down onto the tracks. There was even a film of it over the touch screen of the vending machine where I purchased my ticket. It didn’t seem to affect the functionality of the device and my ticket finished printing just as the 07:50 to Bagswell trundled into the station. I hurriedly, and somewhat ineffectually, attempted to wipe the thin greasy film of slime from my hand onto the side of the vending machine before boarding the train.

I judged that, given the amount of slime which covered the floor of the carriage and the shoes of the commuters already ensconced aboard, that the flooding was no mere localized phenomena. Something which made the lack of it being reported on the radio rather peculiar. The 07:50 to Bagswell passed through the suburbs of Meritt and Candlewiks before heading into the city proper. One would have thought that flooding in those, more affluent, areas may have warranted some acknowledgement on the air.

As the train pulled out of the station I could see down and across the city. It was clear that almost everywhere, in this part of town, was also flooded with black oil, tar, slime, whatever it was. Cars slew through it; spraying gobbets of the stuff into the air splashing oblivious pedestrians who similarly trudged onwards as though nothing had changed around them.

I noticed that the coats and trousers of my fellow commuters were spotted with the black stuff. Where they were buffeted together by the motion of the train the globs of blackness gelled together and stretched slowly apart as they moved away from one another. Through this motion small webs of black stuff were forming between people. I myself had not been splashed by any passing cars en route to the station yet as I looked down I saw, with disgust, that I was now part of this sticky gelatinous web. A web which connected me to the people directly around me. A strand stretched from my right shoulder to the back of a pasty young man in an ill fitting suit whose eyes were firmly fixed upon his mobile phone. From my left knee a thick line of it hung between me and the rucksack sat at the feet of a young woman whom I recognized from my street. Glancing back over my shoulder I could see more strands joining me to a tired looking woman of about my age, to a broad shouldered man in mechanics overalls and to a woman in a cleaners smock.

I barely managed not to gag as bile rose to the back of my throat.

The doors opened and more passengers boarded. Bumping into one another, into me, pushing me into other people. More strands forming, more of this filth attaching itself to me.

Unable to stomach the cramped conditions of the carriage which allowed for the spreading of this filthy ichor I disembarked hurriedly, pushing against the onflow of passengers, and decided to walk to work. I would be late but I would have rather faced the ire of Alasdair, my supervisor, than find myself vomiting on a train packed full of commuters.

#

The platform at Milstone station was completely deserted as the train pulled out and it was slippery underfoot from the film of black oil which had been dragged up from the streets by people hurrying to work

My coat was covered in trails of the viscous goo, completely ruined. I removed my wallet and phone and, as soon as I had descended to the street, I threw it in the nearest bin. There was nothing I could realistically do about the strands and globs of the filth attached to my trousers. Looking about I realized that I had little idea where it was that I had disembarked. My commute to work had always been performed by train and so the space in between my neighborhood and the city center, where the office was located, were a mystery to me.

A bus passing the station threw up a wall of black slime and I narrowly avoided being covered head to foot. I did however spot that the destination of the bus was Hettingley Square - a small bus interchange not far from my work - and so I trudged off through the mire that the streets had become in the same direction as the bus. Catching a bus was out of the question as each one that passed was just as crowded as the train carriage from which I had fled.

#

It took me nearly an hour to reach work which made me nearly half an hour late. Sure enough, as I walked into the office, there was Alasdair standing beside my cubicle. He caught sight of me and pointedly looked at his wrist which, despite his wrist being completely devoid of any time keeping apparatus, signified he was annoyed at my tardiness.

It may seem strange that I accepted all these this that was happening on face value. That I did not doubt myself when I saw that no other person was reacting to the flooding of the town with this black ooze. The truth is that I did doubt myself. I tried not to believe my own senses when it seemed that I alone was aware of this startling intrusion upon our world. I was, as I am still, convinced that this was no mere hallucination. I may be in my late 40s but I did have a youth. I experimented with LSD and “magic mushrooms” along with many of my teenage friends. I have experienced hallucinations that would terrify most and I have enjoyed them as I could always distinguish what was real from what was not and this slime was most definitely real. I had decided this before I had reached the end of Elderslie Road. The experience of the substance was far too vivid. there was none of the unreality of a drug induced hallucination and so the lack of reaction from my fellow citizens was incredibly perturbing. It also made what happened next even more disturbing.

As I approached my desk the office was filled with the usual low level murmuring and background noise generated by any office. I couldn’t make out, or don’t recall making out, any particular conversations which were occurring as people spoke to clients and potential clients down the phones. Though I, perhaps, wasn’t listening. I hadn’t spoken to anyone so far this morning. I had bought my ticket from a machine and was far too distracted by the filthy oil coating everything on my commute to have paid any attention to the nattering of my fellow commuters on the train.

I walked up to Alasdair, excuses and explanations already forming in my mind. As I drew near he opened his mouth to speak.

He opened his mouth and darkness came out.

I stood, horrified, as the oil, which was now everywhere, spilled from his lips. Unlike the slime that oozed in the streets and clung to my clothes this was hot, or appeared to be so. It was steaming as it flowed down his chin. Black tendrils of steam poured from the viscous stuff. From his mouth. His eyes grew dark at the corners and he wept tears of the stuff until his face was nothing but black, steaming, oil. The tendrils of steam moved as though they were an extension of his body, they did not dissipate as steam does from a kettle. They coiled around one another like dozens of black translucent snakes. When they moved towards me I stepped back and bumped in the desk occupied by Simon with whom I shared the small cubicle. This momentary distraction managed to shake me free from the mesmerizing horror of what was unfolding before me.

Simon made a guttural barking noise. Half bark, half horrid organic belch. A sound one would expect to hear emitted by a tar pit of the sort we see illustrated devouring woolly mammoth in museums and children’s ancient history books. He uttered this awful sound and then darkness spilled forth from his mouth too. Barely containing a scream I turned on my heel and fled the office. Ignoring the lift I raced down the stairs and out through the side exit. Stopping in the alley where the office recycling bins were kept I vomited against the building next door.

#

Avoiding public transport and, to the best of my ability, streets with large numbers of people, I made my way home. It took me nearly two hours to reach Elderslie Road. The slime continued to flow here as thick and vile as it flowed through the rest of the city. On my walk home I noticed that as the day drew on it seemed that people were not so much covered in the slime due to being splashed by passing vehicles or brushing up against one another. Now they seemed to be secreting it themselves. I myself seemed to have avoided this most recent development of this horrifying phenomenon. Perhaps because I was able to perceive the stuff or perhaps I had simply lost my mind. The vividness of the stuff and the rest of the world continued to convince me that this was no hallucination. That something had gone very, very awry with the world. Or perhaps that the stuff had always been there and I had simply not been able to see it.

Once at home I packed a bag and called Kate, leaving a message on her mobile telling her that I was coming to visit. I walked back to the city center and, on the way, withdrew as much money as I could from the cash point. I boarded a train out of town, sitting in the least occupied coach that I could find, and made my way across the country to my daughter. As the train thundered out of the city and across the countryside I saw the same black oil, black slime, covering everything. It dripped from electricity pylons and trees, it flowed down motorways and turned rivers into the picture of an environmentalist's nightmare. The conductor, when she came, was weeping steaming tendrils of oil. The tendrils reached from her face and, as she took tickets, mingled with the tendrils weaving about the heads and faces of the few other passengers in the carriage. I looked down at the back of the seat before me and proffered her my ticket. Not looking up until she had moved on.

The train sped through the countryside, between towns and villages, and the oil was everywhere making a mockery of the clear blue sky and the sun shining brilliant in the sky. If it wasn’t for the unreal nature of what was happening it would have been a pleasant day to spend in the country or in a park somewhere. Especially now that I had, without doubt, lost my job. Not that this was a pressing concern at the time.

I alighted at the station of the small town to which Kate had moved and found, unsurprisingly, that the situation here was exactly the same as it had been in the city and everywhere in between. I avoided contact with the people around me, their heads too a mass of black steaming tendrils, and made my way to Kate’s house.

Kate had moved to this town for work and because she and Mark, my soon to be son-in-law, could afford to live in a nicer house than had they remained in the city. I hadn’t visited them enough, especially not since Alice had died. What were they going to make of me turning up now? Out of the blue, or the black as it were? Would they think me crazy when I told them what I was seeing? Would they be able to see it too once it had been pointed out to them? Would they think that grief and living alone had pushed me over the edge? That I was slipping into some kind of early dementia? My mother had had Alzheimer's, but surely that wouldn’t account for what I was now seeing all around me? By this point I had had a few hours of relative calm on the train and so was beginning to fall prey to the same doubts that I had dismissed just this morning on my way to work. Doubts about my sanity.

There was no one at home when I arrived at Kate’s house. A semi-detached with nice gardens to the front and back. It was no surprise that they were not in, both of them worked full time in the next town along and so I could look forward to a few more hours alone with my doubts. I took myself to the back of their house and waited in the garden. Thankfully their neighbors were also at work. I had not visited enough to know them and I fear that they may not have reacted well to a rather wild eyed, as I imagine I was by this point, stranger hanging about the next door garden unattended.

The hours passed intolerably slowly as I sat on a bench in their garden. The flooding wasn’t as pronounced here as it was in the street to the front of the house. Still, an inch thick film of the stuff coated the lawn and had stained the grass black as coal. It dripped from the apple tree and seeped into the kitchen beneath the back door.

Eventually I heard a car pull into the driveway at the front of the house and I heard Kate and Mark laughing as they closed the car doors behind them. I emerged from the side of the house and they both looked surprised to see me despite the message I had left on Kate’s mobile. She smiled and called out to me. As she came close to embrace me I recoiled. I recoiled from my own daughter’s embrace. She too was covered in the oil. She too had those tendrils of black steam weaving about her head. She too was infected with this horror.

She asked me what was wrong and I understood her. No barking gulps or torrents of slime ushered forth from her mouth. I looked at her. She was my daughter. Always.

“Nothing” - I lied, and returned her embrace.

Feeling the muck seep from her to me. Accepting it.

The tendrils of black steam embracing me as did her arms. Her embrace made the horror that had been coursing through my veins since I left work lessen. Made it tolerable. Made me realize that I could ignore it, pretend not to see it. Was that what everyone else was doing? Ignoring the horror? Pretending the darkness wasn’t there so as to preserve their sanity? Perhaps I too could do this. Perhaps I too could live in a world of black insanity. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad. This illusion; this pretense.

I say her name. My mouth tastes of filth.