All the creatures are coming

The bear with red cherries for eyes grinned horribly as it carefully manicured its dreadful claws with the emery board discovered at the back of the bathroom cabinet.

“All the creatures of far and beyond will play a part in your demise,” it whispered through fish-tainted breath.

Damon reached for the fork but it wasn’t there. Forks were banned from the house, ever since the incident with his mother and the postman.

The cherries glistened, full of demonic fruitiness. Damon grasped again, the back of his hand brushed the bottle of indigestion remedy for a moment too long and with its loose cap, it tumbled to the floor, spilling its chalky, minty contents over the tufted rag rug.

The bear laughed and held the emery board out towards Damon’s face. Damon could see fine particles of bear claw across its surface.

“Try this. It’ll scratch away anything. Even that itch you’ve had for, oh, how many years?” The bear raised its eyebrows and cocked its head to one side. “But of course, the back-scratcher had to go, didn’t it? Such an elegantly carved bone creation. But your mother… and your subsequent fork issues…”

Sweat poured from Damon’s furrowed brow. He wiped it with the back of his hand. ‘But red?’ The glistening substance shone on his skin like a translucent coat of sickly smelling paint. The bear continued.

“But spoons. We have copious amounts of those. Not so good for stabbing but perfect for…” and with no warning, he flicked the emery board in Damon’s face and with his giant, manicured paw, the bear lifted a jade handled silver teaspoon to his cherry eyes. Scoop, scoop. The eyes were plucked out and swiftly deposited into the fish-stinking mouth.

Damon yelled out in horrified disgust, his arms flailing, he knocked over the bedside lamp and thwacked a hand brutally against the wall. The framed poster of Edward Landseer’s ‘Titania and Bottom’ hanging above the bed, dropped to the floor with a heavy thud.

The bedroom door flew open, yellow light streamed in from the landing.

“Damon! What on earth?! Are you alright son?”

His mother, Andrea, stood aghast in the doorway. She stalled for a moment before dashing towards her son, who had tumbled from the bed and was laid face down on the rag rug. Andrea shrank back at the white, sticky substance coating her son and the floor, and nodded a sigh as she noticed the upturned bottle by the skirting board beneath the window.

“It ate its own eyes,” muttered Damon, his voice thick and full of rug.

“What did?”

“The bear…”

“Oh Damon! The shortest night of the year and you still manage to have nightmares!” Andrea crouched down, resting her head on the floor next to her son’s. “Come on now, it was all just a dream,” she said.

Twenty eight years since the incident, and still the terrors came in the night. No doctor or psychiatrist could help, even if they had been in full possession of the facts it was questionable if they could. They predicted that with time, Damon would grow out of it. But now, many years later, Andrea was reconciled to the fact that he wouldn’t, and that he’d stay at home for as long as it took. Undoubtedly forever. No woman would want him for a husband. Not with all the thrashing and shouting, the terrors and moaning. Let alone the cutlery issues.

Damon closed his eyes. The smell of his mother’s heady perfume, mixed with the minty odour of the indigestion medicine, made his stomach retch, more so as the diabolical image of the bear and its cherry-less eye sockets showed itself on repeat in the slideshow that was his mind. Always on replay.

“Just a dream,” he muttered. “Go on mother. I’ll sort out the mess.”

Andrea grabbed onto the window ledge and pulled herself up. She wasn’t as young as she used to be. Time was edging away from her faster than she’d ever thought possible.

Downstairs, Andrea filled the kettle to make a cup of tea and watched the sun rise over the thicket at the end of the garden. As the glow of the newly dawning day filtered through the net curtains, she considered her lot. How, on this powerful moment in the calendar, she could make the most of the lengthened daylight. How she might reclaim what was hers.

Upstairs, Damon righted the lamp and turned the rug over to hide the stain. The picture of Titania and Bottom could stay where it was behind the headboard. He’d always hated it. The unsettling look of stupidity on the half-human, half-donkey Bottom’s face, whilst the surrounding fairies and creatures brought together a disturbing blend of fantasy and reality. Damon’s mother had come across the picture at a car-boot sale and was quite transfixed. Why she thought it was appropriate for her son’s bedroom remained a mystery, but there it had hung for the last twenty-eight years, ever since he’s been fifteen years old.

At the time, his father had commented but had been immediately met with a glare from Andrea. It was shortly after that, and after the postman incident that Damon’s father found a job working on the oil rigs in the North Sea and had barely been seen since.

In the kitchen, the kettle clicked off with a rattle and Andrea poured the boiling water into the herb-filled teapot, stirring slowly with a gnarled piece of hawthorn from the tree at the foot of the garden. The heady aroma of basil, rosemary and sage floated on the steam and she carried it carefully to the table.

The sun began to climb its longest arc, light stretching through the window and across the kitchen floor. On the hill, a madman ran in circles, seeing nothing and shouting at everything.

Andrea contemplated the past twenty-eight years. She had loved her son, of that there was no doubt, but Cecil, the postman who had brought her every need and desire to her door had evoked a deep passion and purpose within her that Damon’s father had never succeeded in. And the love for a son, that is a different thing entirely. ‘But love can only go so far and does not always mean happiness. A love that brings misery and unfulfillment is the worst kind.’ Andrea mused over the pot inhaling deeply as the herbs opened doorways in her mind that she had kept securely locked for years.

Damon sat on the edge of his bed, head in hands. The bear’s voice still resounded in his ears, pounding behind his eyes. Its words, though twisted and bizarre, had meant something. He knew he needed to change.

He looked up at the place where the Landseer had hung. It felt colder in the room without it but he was glad the stupefied Bottom was no longer looking out at him, trapped in his own stupidity. Damon had been only a boy when what he saw had set upon him a dark disturbance, always there, at the corners of his waking, in his disrupted sleep-stricken mind. But he had never blamed his mother and she had never uttered a word to him about the incident.

Damon made his way downstairs slowly, one step at a time. His fingers dragged along the wallpaper. Memories of that day fleeted across his eyes. His mother astride the table, breasts heaving, buttocks quivering. Cecil, the postman, his eyes glazed in ethereal ecstasy as his hands moved across his mother’s pale skin. The moment of his presence. His mother screeching as she saw her son in the doorway. Her ecstatic moans morphing into sinister cries as she inflicted the damage, screeching at the confused and bewildered Cecil. ‘Why are you here? What are you doing to me?! The boy, the boy!’ The hideous sounds from Cecil’s wide open mouth as the fork that was lying at a place setting plunged over and over again. Mutilated. His softest parts disfigured and red.

Damon vigorously shook his head, as if doing so might erase the memory forever. Had he been a more enlightened, less closeted and controlled man, Damon may have summoned the courage to understand what had happened and why. But he had always been small and immature for his age and joys of the flesh were alien to him, even at the age of fifteen. And at forty-three he was no wiser and had no concept of why his mother had turned so viciously on her lover that day.

Andrea was sitting at the table. Her hands placed lightly in her lap, eyes half closed. Her cup and the teapot both empty.

“Mother?”

Andrea opened one eye slowly and looked at her son, as though taking a moment to consider him.

“Good morning. Feeling better?” She rose and took her tea things over to the sink. “I’ll sort some breakfast for you in a moment. Just want to pop upstairs. Make sure you’ve straightened everything up properly.”

Damon took his usual seat at the table. The chair furthest away from the scuffed indentations in its wooden top that acted as a permanent reminder. A ritualistic marking, like the ones on the ancient stones at the edge of the moor.

They had got used to not having any forks in the house. Spoons tended to suffice and if life could be bearable with an absence of pronged cutlery then that was how it was. Andrea had tried to maintain Damon’s emotional balance, though his father’s persistent absence and the onset of the nightmares had not made it easy. That is how it came to be that the household was bereft of forks. The mere sight of one sent Damon into severe palpitations.

In her son's room, Andrea pulled the Landseer print up from behind the headboard and reinstated it on the wall. She gazed at it. The dumb creature had everything. ‘But it isn’t real. She doesn’t really love him.’

She looked out between the frayed curtains to the summer day that was blossoming beyond the grimy window pane. There were moments that she remembered, the whispering of wind over the moors and the hills as she and Cecil had joined there so many years before. There had always been ways, if you knew the right time. ‘What time is better than the day with barely any night?’

Later that afternoon as Damon watched a western on the old black and white television in his room, Andrea gathered herbs in the garden. The turning of the year. She could feel it in the soil and the warm ground underneath her bare feet. She sat for a while with the herbs in her basket and gazed out to the hill where she knew the mad man would be. Her heart burned beneath the sun.

Returning to the kitchen she prepared the tea. Valerian root, chamomile, lemon balm and lavender. Her son would be down soon.

Damon turned off the afternoon feature film. He’d seen it before and it hadn’t been very good the first time round. His stomach rumbled and he wondered if his mother had baked anything sweet that afternoon. He hesitated as he shifted off the side of his bed and looked up at stupid Bottom amidst the fairies, aggrieved that it had found its way back onto the wall.

‘That’s not real life… but… what is real life supposed to be?’ Around him, the years of his youth looked back at him from the shelves and surfaces. Worn toys of boyhood. Nothing to show that he was any sort of a man.

Downstairs, Damon found his mother sitting at the kitchen table. She was wearing a long flowing cotton dress of green and yellow that he’d never seen before and her eyes looked glassy, as though she’d been peeling onions.

“I’m hungry mother.”

Andrea sipped her tea and closed her eyes, taking a deep breath as she did so. Then she opened them, matched with a wide smile. Almost too wide.

“Always hungry,” she smiled through gritted teeth. “There are some fresh cherries from the tree in the garden. I’ll get them for you and make you some tea.”

“Cherries…” Damon sat down and watched his mother take the wooden dish from the fridge. She placed it in front of her son and then fussed around the teapot, cleaning it and adding a new concoction of herbs.

“This is a new brew I’ve created. I think you’ll like it.”

Damon stared at the bowl of red fruit. Dark and shining. He pushed it away to the centre of the table.

Andrea poured the brewed tea into Damon’s favourite Mickey Mouse mug and handed it to him as she sat down opposite.

“You remember the postman, don’t you?”

Damon nodded, slowly. His lips felt dry. Lips that had once, as a teenager, trembled the words, ‘what are you doing mother?’. He sipped the tea. The fragrance was unusual but it was sweet, just how he liked it. He could taste the lavender and chamomile. It reminded him of his mother’s scented bath salts.

“He endured something he didn’t deserve. But I had to protect you.”

She reached for one of the cherries, turned it to her face, then pushed the glistening fruit between her lips, a smear of juice at the corner of her mouth.

“I had to make sure that you always saw me in the best light,” she turned a moment and looked wistfully out of the window towards the hills, “and that’s why I reacted in that way I did.”

Damon took another gulp of tea. This was not what usually happened in the afternoon. Usually there was a pie, or cake. Not his mother talking about something he did not understand.

“Mother… I don’t think I want cherries.”

“That’s okay son. Just drink your tea.” Andrea’s tone was calm. She watched as Damon sipped the rest of the brew. “You shouldn’t have seen it. But then again, you shouldn’t have kept it all these years either. You never let it go. And look at what’s become of you. What’s become of me.”

Damon’s hand trembled, twitching toward the table. “I tried,” he whispered.

“You didn't. You kept me trapped in this house, with your dreams, your whimpers, your gasping fits.” She paused as though holding something back. “Even the forks. I tried. But you’ve kept me here and now....”

Andrea rose to her feet. Her presence seemed suddenly larger than the room.

“So I made a decision. The longest day. The only day it can work. I want a life back, Damon. I want to breathe again. I want to walk on the moors and the hills. I want to feel him again... even if I have to manifest that from destruction.”

Something shivered in the air. A pressure filled the room. Damon felt his head becoming heavy, like when he’d been ill as a child. His hands felt as though they didn’t belong to him. His tongue lay heavy in the pit of his mouth.

“All the creatures are coming,” she said softly. “They’ll be kind to you there Damon. You won’t feel anything.”

Andrea pulled the fork from the deep pocket of her flowing green and yellow dress. Its silver prongs were long and sharp, designed for stabbing deep into fleshy meat.

Damon leaned back. His voice cracked as he formed clumsy words with his numb and bloated tongue.

“Mother... where did you get that fork from?” His voice thick with fear.

“I had to keep just one. I knew that one day I would need it. Don’t worry son. You drank your tea like a good boy. You’ll be happier. I’ll be happier.”

Andrea stood over her son, one hand on the back of his head, the other still wrapped around the old fork, its silver prongs darkened now. She didn’t weep but turned her face to the window, where the light had begun to shift.

She stepped outside barefoot, the bloodied fork still gripped in one hand, the dress fluttering about her. Through the garden she flew, past the rows of rosemary and bindweed, over the low stone wall beyond the thicket, toward the hills.

The mad man spun slowly, arms outstretched, his hair matted and wild, face turned to the sun. His mouth moved soundlessly, words lost to the wind.

The hill was swathed in golden light, the grass dancing and full of life. At the top the mad man sensed Andrea’s approach. He shouted out to the golden breeze that played over the stones.

She ran to him. Alive again. He felt her skin, still soft as it was then, once more beneath his fingers. His dead eyes filled with a light he could not see and they began to dance. The creatures shifted and ambled at their return. The sun, like an open eye in the middle of the sky, pulsed with heat, and the air shimmered with the echo of time that had shifted and rejoined itself. Their laughter, joyous yet strange, spiralled over the moor, over the stones.

Reunited in summer’s passion, Andrea and Cecil, twisted and entwined as shadows rose behind them, spun in glorious ecstasy, their feet never quite touching the ground.

Back at the house, the windows began to darken. In the kitchen, the cherries bled slowly into the wooden bowl. His head lolled to one side on the table, Damon’s eyes opened wide, glassy and hollow for one final time.

As the longest day became his darkest night, Damon saw two figures dancing on the hill. He closed his eyes. This time there were no nightmares, and far away, from the depths of some old hollow, the corners of a bear’s mouth twitched.