We burned the dolls.
Susan knew a spot, out by the overground railway lines near Archway. She used to smoke hash there with her ex when they were teenagers. It’s where she thinks she conceived her son, Mickey.
It was desolate. Empty. Near night.
There were four of us now – the broken man, the rotting woman, and the couple turning to ash and stone. We’d all moved into Rita and Imran’s, waiting for the end. Our thoughts were… it was hard to concentrate. On a given afternoon you could find any of us staring out the window, or into a painting on the wall, or just standing still with our eyes closed. Thinking of someone. Of a son. A time when we were happier. A man we once loved. The only giveaway being a finger bending at an impossible angle, or the necrotising smell of flesh turning sour. Rita and Imran were inseparable now – she had so little mobility, most of her joints turned to stone, her speech slurring as lockjaw took hold. And Imran kept bursting into flames. Turns out having an inflammable wife can come in handy.
So we thought, all told, the dolls weren’t helping. Holly’s – that chubby little two-month-old who’d died (or… stopped working?) the moment she had – was clearly responsible for accelerating her deterioration. Sucking all the fat and all the life out of her. I kept picturing that black bile spilling out of her as she screamed.
The dolls didn’t resist, which was at least something. They had always been strangely pliant.
We started a fire, old wood and cardboard boxes and… I shouldn’t laugh, but when Susan’s lighter wouldn’t work, we used Imran to get the fire going.
I wanted to give Derek a final kiss, or a hug, or tell him I loved him – not him, exactly, but some way of telling him and the other guys I’d been obsessed with that I was sorry for how I’d treated them – but I was afraid to get too close. In case my neck snapped. So I just instructed him to walk into the fire.
And he did. His chinos going up, then his plaid shirt, his beard catching, his skin melting… he waved. I cried. But nothing broke.
Next were Rita and Imran. The dolls held hands as they walked into the fire. Imran’s was wearing a t-shirt that said “COCO’S LIZARDS ARE REAL SLUTS”, something he’d picked up on the gap year in Asia where he’d met Rita. Rita’s doll was wearing unflattering shorts and a bikini that dug into her baby fat. They looked so… gormless. And happy.
Then they burned.
Last was Susan. The hardest.
Maybe kids were just simpler to put together – less complex responses, less complex personalities – but of all the dolls he seemed the most real. She had never really let go of him, even as we could see what it was doing to her. She had one tooth left. Her left eye had deflated, giving a window into the socket. A wound on her leg was wide open and spreading rapidly.
Still she touched his hair. His skin. Read to him at night.
Perhaps it made perfect sense. I read that when you grieve a child it’s a double grief – the loss of the person that existed, but also the loss of the person they could have been. That second loss… it’s all imaginary, really. A doll can cover that off pretty well.
She wouldn’t let go of him.
Even after she told him to walk into the flames, she wouldn’t let go.
Rita grabbed on to her, loosening Susan’s grip on the thing. Holding her back – she could have called him out of the fire as he walked in, but instead she just groaned, watching him burn.
Then I limped towards the flames. Holding the envelope. The one Angela had given us.
We’d agreed not to even look at it. Instructions for how to become one of them – “one” being the operative term, because she’d implied it would only work once. Become like Angela, Maddy, Leila, the others… survive what was being done to us, but at the price of taking on that hunger. Down the line, doing to someone else what was being done to us, whatever form it might take. To rot, to burn, to melt, to grow, to break, to scratch, to weep, to die. Another year, decade, century, moving around the world, alone or part of a group… I wondered if Angela and the others had been made this calculating by the desperation, the desire to survive, or if the… the becoming did something to their… sense of morality.
I’m Irish. I don’t use the word “soul”.
Rita had wavered, said what right did we have to deny the others a chance to survive this – but then Imran brought up Holly. If any of us were to throw our hat in with Angela and the others, weren’t we just as responsible for Holly’s death? Or another Holly, down the line, just as innocent, just as troubled?
Later, I heard them in a quiet argument – Imran voicing the fear that if Rita did this, and survived, she’d want to be around the kids after Imran died… and what if she started to feed on them?
In the end, I just said that I was going to burn Angela’s instructions along with the dolls. Take it out of the equation. They all agreed.
I watched the paper burn, joining the embers of the little boy, then returned to the group.
Susan was groaning – I held her close.
“It’s okay. It’s not him. It’s better now. We have more time. We’re together now. We’re all here.”
She crumbled. I could feel her skin shifting, the rotting flesh underneath moving around.
“We’re together now. We’re all here.”
I wanted to throw up.
“We’re together now. We’re all here.”
I’d already decided, after all.
To betray them.
It was nothing in particular that triggered it. I’d just… decided. Like flicking on a light switch. I would use Angela’s instructions, and become something else, and then I would no longer be in pain. It wasn’t a moral choice, it was just the pain. That’s all. I couldn’t deal with the pain.
That night, everyone went to bed, and I took the instructions out of my jacket pocket. I’d burned something else in the fire, a random bill.
The letter was fairly straight-forward.
“Drink a cup of brine.
Walk seventeen steps North.
Feed on the blood of a fawn, directly from the wound.
Punch your fist into the ground four times.
Then it will be done.
We’ll see you soon.”
I left the house, got an Uber to Clissold Park – it wasn’t far. There was a deer sanctuary there, I knew there’d be fawns because they’d just posted on their Instagram that there’d been a couple of healthy births. I had a pliers in my backpack, for the fence. And a kitchen knife, for the rest.
It was bright, thankfully. Moonlit.
I shuffled across the park, trying not to think about anything but the text of the letter. A cup of brine. Walk north. Drink the blood. Punch the ground.
The brine was easy – Rita loved pickles, had a jar of high-end brine-dunked ones in her fridge. The rest would be… it would just need to be done.
Then I saw something strange. Which is saying a lot, considering everything I’d been through. But this was… utterly fucking mad.
It started with a silhouette. Against the moon. I saw a shadow pass by, something high up, maybe twenty feet off the ground. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness, so I could follow its movement.
It seemed to be a figure, but they were flying… no, not quite flying. It was like they were bouncing, or… I blinked once, twice, half to clear my vision, but also just to almost reset my brain, try to figure out what I was seeing.
Then I spotted the rope. And the cinderblock.
The figure – it was a woman, I could see now – wasn’t flying. She was floating, inexorably upwards, and the only thing keeping her tethered to the ground was a rope, one end tied to her arm, the other tied to a heavy cinderblock. She was “hopping” by yanking on the rope – the cinderblock would raise off the ground, floating ten or fifteen feet forward, momentum carrying her, and then land again. Before she repeated the process.
I was breaking, Susan was rotting, but this woman was just… floating away.
She was also heading straight for the deer sanctuary.
I picked up my speed – again, I can’t describe how strange this all was. Me, with fifty broken bones, limping across the grass, and this woman bouncing along like the park was some seabed that she was anchored to. As I moved closer, I saw that she wasn’t “this woman”, she was specifically the old biddy who’d been at Ocras, who’d complained about the food and wheeled her little shopping bag everywhere with her.
Now we were racing across the park. She’d made it to the fence first, but I could see she was at a disadvantage – she couldn’t get her cinderblock over the ten-foot chicken-wire fence, so was instead pulling herself down to the ground. Maybe she had some pliers too.
As I got closer, she saw me.
“She made you an offer too, yeah? Old bitch.”
Jacinta – that was her name.
I didn’t reply.
Just got to the chicken-wire, pulling out my pliers, snipping away at it, trying to make a hole big enough. I had to ignore her. Keep moving forward. Brine. Blood. Dirt.
Then I was rudely interrupted by my cheek being sliced open. I winced, screamed, pulling away – Jacinta was hovering above me, one hand on the rope tethering her to the ground, the other holding a Stanley knife. Intended for a fawn but now being repurposed.
She roared at me.
“I’m a lot fucking older than you you little shit but I don’t intend to die.”
A weakness then, a quiver.
“I won’t.”
I turned with my pliers and snipped her rope.
She didn’t even scream, just floated, floated, floated away – crossing the Moon one last time, and then so far away I couldn’t even see her anymore.
I turned back to the chicken-wire. Don’t think. Don’t think. Don’t think.
Through, into the park, finding the deer.
Again, there was some cutting of wires, but it was simple enough. One of the fawns was sleeping at a distance from the mother – again, I didn’t think, I just went over and plunged the knife into its neck. It barely kicked, barely struggled. Somehow, the mother didn’t wake up.
Then I counted the steps away – I had my phone out, making sure I had my compass directions right.
I paused in the right position. Looked at the Moon again. It really was a beautiful night.
I drank the brine – I’d actually brought a cup with me, to drink from, just in case that was actually vital to the instructions. Then I walked the seventeen steps North – I wondered if I’d be penalised, as seventeen steps for me wasn’t much in my current condition.
At this point tears were running down my face. My body feeling the guilt, even if my brain wouldn’t engage with it. I fell to my knees, buried my face in the open wound on the fawn’s neck, slurping up the blood, sucking it in. It was disgusting, so metallic, but I wasn’t sure how much I was supposed to ingest, so I kept drinking and drinking and drinking – it was mixing with the brine, so hard to keep down.
Eventually I just couldn’t drink any more, so smashed my fist on the ground.
My left hand. The ring finger – the first bone I’d broken – cracking again as it smacked into the soil. Once. Twice. Thrice.
A final time.
I stopped, falling back on to the ground. Looking into the sky. Wondering where Jacinta was. If she’d already succumbed to oxygen deprivation somewhere in the stratosphere.
I held up my ring finger, freshly broken, hanging at a strange angle, silhouetted against the moon… and watched it snap back into its correct position.
And I knew it had worked.
The other bones began to shift back into their rightful place.
I started screaming, the doe woke up, and I passed out.
-—————————————————————————————-
“Police are still asking for members of the public to provide information on a recent stabbing at Shah’s corner shop in Whitechapel. A woman in her late 70s who was a frequent customer was found standing over the victim – Abdul Shah, 23 – holding a knife she had brought from home. Witnesses say that she was repeating the words ‘I loved him, like Tadhg, I had to’. The police are looking for anyone named Tadhg (Irish, pronunciation varies) in the Whitechapel area who may be able to help with their inquiries.”
So it worked.
Angela just left some details out. Repercussions. Reverberations.
That’s me, by the way. “Tadhg”. Don’t worry about the pronunciation – I won’t be around for long.
When I woke up in the deer enclosure I was completely healed. Every bone in place, not just healed but unbroken, like nothing had ever happened to them.
To wake up without pain is an ecstasy I’d forgotten. The doe was in the corner, mourning her fawn. The sun was rising. I snuck out before anyone else. Booked myself into a hotel – I’d stolen a bunch of cash from Rita and Imran’s before I left, they had hundreds in a tin in the hallway, for when the cleaner would come.
I didn’t want anyone to find me. I just wanted to be in that hotel, not in pain. I went on Grindr. Had some fun. Drank wine. Bad wine, cheap wine, great wine. Lived like a king. Jumping through logical hoops to keep my guilt in the rear-view mirror. To forget that on the other side of the city Rita and Imran and Susan were dying, but also feeling betrayed.
Trying to be happy.
But I was barely 24 hours into my stay when I saw the first report, on the news – local stuff, nothing major. A murder, near Clissold Park, near the deer sanctuary. A man in his 50s, running screaming through the car park of his local church at a woman – screaming that he loved her, he couldn’t stop thinking of her. Bashing her head to a pulp on the church stoop.
It seemed too much of a coincidence.
Another one, less than twelve hours later. A schoolgirl took out her art teacher with a pair of scissors, screaming that she loved him, this was how it had to be.
She was also saying my name.
Then, on the third day, there was a knock at my hotel room door.
It was Ezra.
Angela had sent him. A welcome party, of sorts. She figured that since me and Ezra had gotten so… close, he might be the best person to bring me into the fold. He had wine and snacks. We drank and ate and he told me how he’d ended up with Angela – he’d had AIDS back in the 80s, and Angela’s group had offered palliative care. He’d been left with a big heart – he’d always had a big heart, he said – but now it was growing larger and larger in his chest, pumping harder and harder, giving him cardiac arrest after cardiac arrest after cardiac arrest. It had been unbearable.
So he’d taken the way out – and survived.
I asked him about the murders – he said it could happen, especially in highly populated areas. The alchemy occurring in the body and the brain of the “afflicted” could ricochet outwards when they were healed, spreading like an infection.
It should die down, he said.
I told him about the woman in her 70s who’d murdered the corner store employee she had a crush on.
Ezra took my hand.
I kissed him.
We made love.
There was no pain. It was so lovely.
Afterwards, I watched him sleep. He really was very beautiful. Perpetually old, I supposed, but in that clean lined way that some older men have. When the body has settled, the skin has sagged a bit, but rather than looking spent they look like… old ships. Robust. Storied. Sexy.
I watched him sleep, then took the marble clock from the bedside locker and bashed his head in.
He twitched a bit, so I hit him again. And then he was gone.
I sat there beside him, for five minutes. Waiting for something to happen. But nothing did. My first fear was that I wouldn’t be able to kill him, that he would refuse to die – but I could, and I did. My second fear was that there would be immediate repercussions – that Maddy would sense it and put me to death from wherever she was. But she didn’t. Either because she didn’t know I’d killed Ezra, or because now that I was one of them her tricks didn’t work.
Both were fine by me.
Because now that I was healed, I knew it was time.
To finally do it. Kill Angela. Kill them all, ideally, but especially her. I have this hope – this odd, stupid hope that if I can just kill her then it will leech the infection out of Susan and Rita and Imran.
But even if it doesn’t work, at least Angela and her people will be dead. And me, after, obviously. I’ll go for something quick – I’ve already done slow dying and it’s not fun.
If you’re reading this, Susan – please just… I don’t know. Not forgive me. I don’t deserve that. I don’t want that, at all.
Just… know that I understand now. I was obsessed with Derek and I was obsessed with Jim and I was obsessed with Victor and I was obsessed with every man I ever met and I called it love but it wasn’t.
Because this is love.
I love you.
I love Rita.
I love Imran.
I love my aunt Nóirín, who took me in when anyone with any sense wouldn’t have.
I loved Holly, too. Who needed it most.
And now… I’m going to take all that love I have…
..and use it to make Angela pay.
Wish me luck.