Submerged by BP Gregory
Submerged
A short story
by BP Gregory
Submerged Copyright © 2013 BP Gregory
Lunchbox Copyright © 2015 BP Gregory
All Rights Reserved.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This work is copyright apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968. This work may not be reproduced or transmitted in part or in its entirety in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, nor may any other exclusive right be exercised, without the prior written consent of the author BP Gregory, except where permitted by law.
This is a work of fiction. Places and place names are either fictional, or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to persons either living or dead is purely co-incidental.
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Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. It’s the folk who love books who help writers keep going.
Acknowledgments
Thankyou to my perfectly normal and lovely neighbours, who in all innocence inquired as to whether I’d been murdered, and then chuckled that it would make a great story idea.
Submerged cover image by AlexussK courtesy of Shutterstock.
Something for Everything cover image by MarcelClemens, The Town cover image by Ortodox, Lunchbox cover image by kamontad999 (along with a millipede by Sakdinon Kadchiangsaen), Orotund cover image by Alex Malikov, and Visit the Website image by Peter Dedeurwaerder all courtesy of Shutterstock.
Submerged
The hall floor was no place for an old bastard; but as painfully cramped as the contortion was Brendan remained huddled pathetically below the peephole. Fierce shudders flung off hectic sweat in spatters before it could run into his eyes. And hey, with his hammering heart fixing to thrash its way free perhaps he’d never make it up off the crinkly carpet at all – wouldn’t that be something?
A long time since his corpus ceased being a neglected convenience; by now the damned thing had regressed to a positive hindrance. Luckily the world came pretty much delivered these days, about the best you could say for it. Chuck in a fiver to get it lugged up the stairs he could no longer manage.
So far as Brendan saw, the only dreadful thing about being marooned in his apartment lay right across the way: his brightly-smiling neighbours who’d just graduated in a flash from mere troubling to downright terrifying. Straight to the head of the class.
At first he’d merely despised them cordially, same as any starstruck couple gazing into one another’s eyes. You could see how they formed their own staunch dyke against the world, raw salt in the wound of what Brendan still missed every damn day.
Then came the disturbances.
It was the only possible term, they were so very bloody disturbing, and also incredibly faint. Tenuous enough to convince yourself, after a bit of a rational think, that your florid imagination must have run off. Brendan figured you would have to be a sour, isolated old goat stranded in a dead-quiet apartment to even hear what mindless desperation scritched at the plaster.
Next, the dank tendrils of water that seeped under the crack of their door to discolour the landing.
Brendan had always hated water. Maybe it was the long skinny shanks, but he couldn’t float: without constant exhausting effort it was straight to the bottom and stay there. Damn near drowned on a youth camp before the lifeguard quit ogling pre-teens long enough to figure out that the gangly youth wasn’t fooling.
Having survived the Disaster Brendan limited his exposure to scrubbing his drooping flesh with a cloth at the sink, the shower bone dry. A wash time spectacle of his pallid backside hanging out that would have had Joyita in stitches; although she wouldn’t have put up with an iota of his crazy old bugger nonsense in the first place.
Smelling not quite right, like a tub where you’d cleaned fish but left the scaly jelly to stand for days, the intrusion had lurked innocently beneath the landing carpet … until it came squishing and slobbering in through Brendan’s socks.
He’d not been thinking further than fresh coffee and toast and the bolt of brutal chill up his old legs was such an awful surprise that he half-fell against the wall, hissing shrilly as though scalded.
A flood – well that wasn’t unnatural in itself, however one feels about water. These things happen. But even as the reclusive neighbours replaced his groceries that had sat out in it and got foul they were beaming. Big toothy canine grins that suggested sorry was furthest from the truth.
Wet red smiles that spoke without speaking, leered: hello food, as they savoured his distress. Shuddering with loathing Brendan hurled his socks in the trash like limp dead animals and always wore shoes after that. He’d loved plodding around in his socks.
Once in the wee hours he’d jolted awake to what he tremblingly swore was a cat shrieking in that agonised feline jet-engine register. Long gone by the time he knocked over his lamp and hyperventilated his way to clicking it on as it lay on the floor, but the echoes guaranteed no more shut-eye, pills or no pills. Perhaps ever.
The jet engines had been screaming. The plane going down disintegrated into a mass of shrieking noise. Even after Brendan’s eardrums were repaired so he could at least hear his own anguished sobbing, tucked safe in a hospital bed, he only understood the Disaster as a shattering cacophony.
He certainly hadn’t bloody well wanted to get out of the fuselage into the water. Let him go down with the plane! Somebody ought to. It was a good plane; it’d got them … most of the way.
Joyita had known how to manage him. A fellow came to lean on certainty like that.
They told amused family friends he’d tried to save her from a film shoot, when it was really the other way around. This was a woman who charged straight in and Brendan’s “assailant” had found himself face-down with her knee on his spine before he knew what was happening. Only then did Joyita finally notice the camera.
At her chagrined smile Brendan fell instantly and so hard everyone there saw it, even the lass he was dating at the time which was a real shame.
Not that the face-saving white lie of how he met his wife amounted to much now. All those family friends were long gone.
Partially submerged now, the engines had screamed as he jittered from foot to foot. A racket to blow all clear thought from your mind, tumbling helplessly through the air. And from the ocean Joyita coyly extended her arms to Brendan like a siren, beckoning him down into that icy rank-smelling water that clogged his sinuses unbearably even from up here.
Come on honey. Get those chicken-legs in here.
Joyita’s canola-bright silk blouse that he loved so much, because she scorned its inane cheer and only ever wore it for him, was a drenched ruin that outlined his wife’s chest most becomingly.
I’ll float you. Just like in that spa on our honeymoon.
Bless her for remembering a time like that at a time like this. Closing his eyes Brendan had plunged in obediently.
The cold seemed to slap the life right out of him. The fumes were blinding and he was slipping under no matter how desperately he flailed …
Then Joyita’s warm strong arms closed firmly about him. She floated him, tilted back in the water on the buoyancy of her own body.
I’ve got you love.
As the creepiness escalated, at least the burning envy of his neighbours had withered. Even tolerating them in the same apartment block seemed a ripe perversion of what he’d hoped to have. Brendan and Joyita were supposed to grow rickety here together, and help each
Now things had suddenly become infinitely worse than simply enduring loneliness for the rest of his days, and Brendan scrabbled a bit at the carpet beneath him in a panic. He was alone, and he didn’t know what to do. Not after witnessing what the damn neighbours had just humped up the stairs.
An abduction nightmare. A figure gruesomely swaddled and taped tight in black garbage bags. That thick, slippery type of plastic that nobody splashes out on unless they have some serious repugnance to contain.
It lay gleaming on the landing at their feet as they struggled with their door. Tottering drunk, both of them. Busy stifling inappropriate titters and kissing one another in long drawn out gasps.
The cringing mind frantically longed to dismiss the apparition as a special effect, to restore what sanity had dominated scarce moments before. But even through the tunnel vision of the peephole Brendan’s horrified eye could spy movement.
In periodic heaving bellows the cocoon was sucked concave into that bound mouth by struggling lungs. Heavy plastic, black and shiny as ink, vacuum-formed down over the twisted features with each desperate attempt at a breath.
The labour of levering himself from the floor and up the wall felt almost impossible. Come on man, you can do it! The best he could manage once upright – finally! – was to cling to the door handle and patter rank sweat all over the carpet.
Brendan couldn’t honestly claim to be afraid of being shot of it all. Not like he’d quivered when the blank, black water had lapped all around, and he could feel warm life abandoning him into the searing air one breath at a time.
The sheer intensity of that fear had blown out his emotions, never to recover. Most of what got left inside, as he discovered in the hospital, were merely blackened charred smears. That, and the fading memories of vivid feeling.
What shall we do together?
Joyita’s voice had come suddenly from the dark as they floated in the shattering cold. Her arms alone contained the involuntary trembling and jerking of his limbs. Following the sinking of the screaming plane they weren’t even left with the distant stars for comfort.
Tell me all the things we’re going to do, love. Our whole life. Don’t leave anything out.
Oh his cunning Joyita, keeping their minds off things.
So through chattering teeth, he did. With the fond curve of her lips against his chill ear Brendan told her everything and he left nothing out.
Breakfast together every morning. The indulgent holidays they’d scrimp for, pouring over glossy brochures. He knew exactly what he’d buy her for every anniversary, which earned the warm gust of her laughter against his cheek. And they should go dancing – hey, honey, should we take a dance class? Are you listening?
Ssh now. I see a light, love. Do you see a light?
Their rescuers, plying a bright searchlight over the water as they toiled through the frozen night. To whom Brendan had cried out hoarsely with icy tears of joy running down his face. Unable to hear his own voice, but guiding them in.
Only to be shrieking and writhing to escape moments later. The dinghy was already low in the water with hypothermic survivors stolen from the ocean. They wouldn’t take Joyita, indicating to Brendan with sympathetic but impatient signs that she’d been dead many hours.
Against his will he was dragged from the salvation of her arms and over the gunwale, blinded by the searchlight beam as he twisted back and reached with all his feeble might to pull Joyita from the water. The last he saw of his wife was her beautiful smile shining above that yellow blouse he made her wear, as the depths took her.
Brendan didn’t know how to banish the monsters next door, but bold Joyita sure would. He could hardly do less.
Almost of its own accord his quivering hand jerked the door open and he was charging onto the landing, a liberated burst of old-man smell freed from his hallway. Rather comically, considering what he faced, coming at them in his determination like an out of control tortoise.
The neighbours had at least managed to unlatch their door before succumbing to a tipsy embrace straight from the rushes of a D-grade porn flick. It would never have worked if they weren’t already so off kilter. The woman’s startled eyes popped up over her partner’s shoulder before Brendan’s charge flung the two of them headlong into their own apartment.
Brendan dropped to his knees with an agonised grunt, damn sure he wasn’t getting up this time; and tore at the seal over the captive’s mouth with his blunt yellow nails. His inflexible gnarled fingers were little better than claws at the task: they skittered and slipped.
Then the wrapped figure inhaled. Cerements sealed to its agonised face and with a jab of the thumb he was able to puncture through to the wet mouth beyond, which with a sob immediately hoovered in air almost hard enough to swallow his hand to the damn elbow.
‘Please don’t kill me!’ the liberated voice hissed through the ragged hole, almost inaudible on a fountain of frothy spit. ‘Please. I don’t want to leave my kid all by herself.’
This was somebody who’d already come to the extreme of themselves. In that Brendan recognised a brotherhood, one of facing what was left with life taken away. Now even more than when it was just another human being, he quaked with the desire to save the captive if he could.
Then the neighbours were on him. Bouncing back to their feet like a pair of those awful clown dolls, wide grins painted on their faces. So much for his heroism. Brendan was frail, in a faulty body grinding down in multiplying errors to the end of its life. If they’d clonked him on the head like in a movie it might well have killed him.
But no, like housecats they wanted their nasty fun. One on either side, his neighbours’ avid greedy fingers yanked him into their apartment.
All of the blinds were drawn. A mass of pain from his wild exertions, Brendan was dragged down a hall which was a mirrored reverse of his own and through a lounge that wavered like a disturbing underwater sort of world, his limbs waving feebly as though swimming. Not even a few cold stars overhead for comfort.
Furniture was little more than a series of looming monoliths in the dimness until he or one of his assailants whacked into it, drawing whimpers from Brendan and muffled snickers from them. They were having a marvellous time. Unable to free itself or encompass the proceedings, his mind vainly tried to go away somewhere. Perhaps to that golden paradise before the Disaster.
But reality had no truck with nostalgia. Dropped with cruel indifference onto cold hard tile Brendan howled as with a crack, sickly heat and agony bloomed in the spindly arm that caught his weight. He rocked back and forth – was the damn thing broken?
One of the neighbours, he couldn’t even tell them apart now with their leering wide-open mouths and drooping insatiable eyes, went out; presumably retrieving their other gift-wrapped treat.
The one he was left with loomed overhead and flicked on a light so cold and harsh and startlingly clinical that Brendan cried out again, trying to hide his face in the crook of his good arm. That unforgiving light: This is a place where we dissect people. Right down to the bone.
He was in their bathroom.
Stark tile all around, bluish now in that hard cold light. White towels lined up neatly on a steel rail with surgical precision. Aside from Brendan himself cowering on the floor the only spots of warm colour were a blue and a yellow toothbrush, nestled together in a chipped waterglass on the sink. In his pain and confusion he gaped dumbly up at them, boggling at the ordinariness they advertised.
Oh, it wasn’t fair! It was supposed to be their worn out toothbrushes propping each other up, his and Joyita’s. Everyday implements to be used in tandem as they stood yawning side-by-side at the sink, each morning and before turning in. Socks on in winter, to save their feet from the cold.
A rough hand on his collar dragged him forward. And now he was whining and squealing almost mindle
Brendan’s weeping whiskered face was thrust down into the cold water. His arms threshed and squeaked off porcelain both inside the tub and out, throwing up great sheets of liquid but this wasn’t his tormentor’s first time: there was no purchase to be had. And even should he dig in, somehow, Brendan was weak. A fool who rushed in. While the hand holding him down by the saggy scruff of his neck was calculatedly strong: too strong, steely and without pity.
Had he thought mortal terror dead? Foolish! Here it waited for him again, his departed friend. The old man felt himself coming unmoored with it and what you could generously call his struggles weakened further.
With an influx of the cold, cold water rushing inside, his overburdened chest clenched and writhed once. Then a second time, wiping all that he cherished away.
Barely there anymore, Brendan was no more than the last tiny star high above in a frozen sky when strong hands closed about him from behind. Warm arms pulling him backward.
These had to be new hands: far from callous, they laid him out on the tile with unbelievable tenderness and trembling anxiety. The squeak of plastic bags torn to shreds but still clinging on. Brendan smiled tremulously even though he couldn’t see. All was dark, and though the hands meant well how could he possibly be taken back from the ocean now?
A voice was babbling, panting and almost hysteric in its stumbling outflow, as well it might be. ‘Come on old fella, I’ve got you. Oh come on, please breathe! We’re gonna be ok – those nutbars weren’t banking on two of us, turns out one alone couldn’t manage me. I clocked the lass out cold and then rushed in here and did for the guy holding you under.’
A trembling sniff. ‘Chucked a book through the window on the way and screamed at an old duck walking the pavement to call the police. If it weren’t for you I’d be … Just hold on, the cops’ll be here soon – I can see lights coming up the street …’
I see a light!
Not the flickering red and blue of emergency services but a warm cheery yellow rising out of the dark to greet him. And above it, a smile of such sweetness as to stop your heart.
Oh, I see a light.
The tiles were cold against Brendan’s cheek and he sighed and closed his eyes, exhausted, in a puddle of his own tears.
I’m so sorry I made you wear that blouse. Take me with you, love. Nothing’s ever been nice without you.
And he sank away.