Rings by Adam Parry.
Last winter a tree in the garden had been
blown down by a particularly vicious storm and since then a ring of mushrooms
had grown about where the trunk had been. They were going out for the day Beth,
his sister, knowing Ray’s taste for psilocybin, with a surprising flurry of
anger kicked and stamped the mushrooms, killing them dead.
‘Beth! What have you done?’ He cried out:
‘They’re not Magic Mushies,’ He added trying
to tell her calmly, but her face was flushed and there was danger in her eyes,
‘well they are magic but ancient magic. You shouldn’t break a mushroom ring the
fairies get angry.’
She laughed at this and walked on ahead of
him to the car.
‘They’re old, old magic.’ He said lamely,
but she wasn’t listening. Ray started to weep when he sat beside her in the
passenger-seat, such a dread had overtaken him. He knew deep and instinctively
what would happen to her and couldn’t stop crying. He was inconsolable, not
that she tried to console him. She gripped the steering so strongly her
knuckles were red and drove off forcibly, and it seemed she were behind the car
pushing it down the hill.
Still harsh images filled and flailed his
brain, full of the horrors he foresaw would happen to her but I could not stop
weeping, and certainly inconsolable although she tried.
‘Let’s go back to the house,’ she said, already
missing her day in the sun. She told him, as his whole body was racked with
sobs she heard Ray say breathlessly:
‘You shouldn’t, you’ve woken them, You
shouldn’t ….’ He ranted incoherently. She unlocked the door for him and helped
him to his spot where he proceeded to pull at his grey hair. And incoherently he
ranted. ‘The world is six thousand years old. Ain’t it Jesus?’ he said
sarcastically, ‘no, but old and ancient more than you could ever imagine ,’ Beth
said to herself I don’t believe in magic and in his pixies and fairy rings.
Still he weeps waiting the end of the
world, Beth brings him a cup of tea and tries to get him on the sofa so he
could relax. She brought a Wagon Wheel and he just looks at them as she tries
to give them to him. She leaves them on the table by the sofa and kneels on it,
his face made washed and bright faced by his tears. He smiled when he saw her.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I’m worried about you,’ She laughed,
‘I’m fine, silly, I’m worried about you.’
He grabbed her arm his long, dirty nails cut
into her soft freckled flesh,
‘You must take care you have
to beware’
And over and over he said the
same words his voice darkening with each word as his nails dug deeper in her
skin. ‘Ow’ she said and released herself from his grip.
Slowly, very slowly his maniacal sobbing
subsided, and Beth began to think again, but now the house was so silent and it
unnerved her. She could get the Dr or at least a nurse and some kind of
sedative to calm him down. Or maybe the hospital.
Ray knew already a ghist had come into the
room, he could see it through his third eye. The ghist lingered around Beth
completely unaware of it, it’s fingers catching in her hair touching the bare
flesh on her arm. And there! There was another, laughing at the first as it’s
unsubstantial finger’s swept over his sister like a caress, the new one came
closer invisibly plucking at her skin like the ghist was trying to pinch the
woman awake. Ray had to close his third eye so he couldn’t watch or hear the
scornful laughter of the ghist.
He stood, surprising her.
‘We have to go,’ he cried out and grabbed
her arm again, pulling her to the front door and pushing her outside. ‘Go to
the car.’ He watched her half-heartedly walk to the car, linger and look back
at him. When he saw she had put her seatbelt he grabbed his coat followed after
her, almost running to the passenger side door and shakily attaching his
seatbelt. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Where to?’
‘To Mum’s she’ll know what to do.’
‘She’ll tell you to get ECT,’ she laughed
bluntly but he didn’t like the way she spoke so sarcastically and why was she
laughing?
He
pretended to ignore her, breathlessly, the words were too difficult to speak he
told her to go to the Health Centre, ‘they’ll know what to do.’ He looked out
of the back of the car as they began to drive off down the hill, he was sure he
saw a ghist running behind them, or was it just a windswept shadow on the road.
‘Quickly,’ he demanded. Then she hears him laugh, he had never seen a ghist
running, it looked ridiculous, but then there was a second ghist running beside
it both almost catching up with the car. ‘Faster.’
Beth didn’t indicate as she turned down the
long shallow road to the Health Centre and nearly hit someone, she yelped but
carried on down the road while that someone stood shaking, and gave her the
finger. Three ghist engulfed this
someone, Ray saw, and they doubled over vomiting, then the disinterested ghist
ran on again after Beth’s car, a third from out of the shadows of a garden
joined the other two running behind the car almost reaching it more emerging
from the corners of his eyes swung from tree to tree that lined the road, Ray
lost count of how many there were. All their eyes fixed upon his sister,
greedily.
He could hear them screech with pleasure
as the nearest jumped onto the car urging the others on. He told her to go
faster and laughed sharply when the ghist fell off.
‘I’m going to kill someone.’ Beth said,
slowing down.
Out of his third eye the ghist, at three
of four jumped onto the back of the car and carefully tried to make their way
forward to Beth’s window.
‘They’re here,’ he called out. ‘Beth you
have to shake them off.’
‘Who? Who? Have you taken your meds
today.’
She parked untidily in front of the Health
Centre, quickly he got out of the car closing his third eye alarmed by the
vision of the ghist swarming over her as she got out and slammed the door of
the car, he led her through the sliding
doors and into the sanctuary of the Reception. Behind him as he muttered
prayers he saw the ghist angrily scraping and scratching at the closed sliding
doors.
She turned to face Ray:
‘What are we doing here?’
‘I need to see my doctor, persuade her to
give you a sedative.’
She laughed that laugh again, making him
feel stupid, but she could not see the ghists.
‘Me, you more like.’
He turned to the Receptionist and asked
if he could see Dr Helen.
‘She’s with another patient,’ the young
despondent looking woman said. She looked up from her computer. ‘You might be
able to see her in forty minutes.’
‘Forty?’ He repeated anxiously. ‘OK
then.’ But, it wasn’t OK, wasn’t fine, the thought of so long a wait made his
fear grip him more tightly, he turned to Beth behind him, but she was gone, his
frame of vision was filled exclusively by the ghists at the sliding door
grinning at him with expectant triumph. Ray felt he had been punched in the
face and looked about desperate for the sight of his sister, this way and that
his sight lurched from the door, to the unconcerned Receptionist and the faces
of the people dumbly waiting to be called in by a Doctor, then suddenly he saw
her staring at a picture of Dunnottar Castle part of an exhibition by
Stonehaven Artists. He walked over to her, and said in a pretence at
cheerfulness:
‘Only forty minutes.’
‘Only?’ She looked at him angrily. He
shrugged and took a seat, took the book he always carried with him: The
Nonviolent Revolution by Nathaniel Altman, his distracted mind urging Beth to
sit beside him, but defiantly she stared at another watercolour painting then
moved on to a charcoal sketch that seemed to twist off the canvas, he looked
down and tried to concentrate on the words in the book, but he’d get to full
stop of one sentence then go back to its start, then again until the words
began to lift off the page like flies off rotten meat and form in the waiting
room air into spider’s webs that clung to the corners of the room, out from
webs cautious spiders emerged. The spiders eyed Beth standing there and slowly
they fell from the webs on threads all about her. His face fell back to book
but the pages were empty and about him the room grew darker and the webs
multiplied and the bravest spiders fell upon Beth’s back and began inching
towards her pale neck her jugular vein pulsing, it seemed she could feel his
eyes staring at her and she’d turn her head, causing the spiders to retreat,
and look at him with complete despite.
Suddenly the room became as dark as the eyes
of a psychopath and he saw as one then the other ghists entered the waiting
room. He wanted to be sick. They encircled his sister their fists raised they
were carrying daggers.
Unexpectedly, before time, surprising him Dr
Helen, like a flash of lightening obliterating the dismal ghists sent the
spiders scurrying back onto the pages of the book and burnt away the webs,
appeared in the waiting room smiling as if there was no death. Beth sighed as Ray
put a bookmark slowly and carefully between the pages of Altman’s book, rose
from his seat and slow as a sleepwalker followed them into the doctor’s office
with its brightness and health engulfing him and leaving him without the
memories of what was outside the door.
Ray as
he looks in the Doctor’s kind eyes, he knew she was aware of his agitated
distress and felt a great calm envelope
him like a gentle storm overcoming him. Beth sat at the desk commandeering the
whole of the office, with its bright posters of Barcelona and other cities
which Dr Helen must have visited and by the desk there was a tank full of tiny fish.
Ray watched the maybe a hundred fish over Beth shoulders. He sat at the seat
beside Beth but would rather sit anywhere else, not beside her, his sister,
rather in the lap of Dr Helen but he had no choice. A rank smell came into to
her office after as the attack upon them in the waiting area the spiders and
the ghists had left their mark upon Beth,
their greasy fingerprints, the webs matting her hair, it seemed she wore a
cloak of black and he was afraid to look
at her, already the destruction of the fairy ring was causing changes in Beth,
and feared what would come next and transform her into death. The Doctor smiled
a gesture that made it seem her arms encompassed him.
‘What
can I do for you?’
Ray
started to answer but Beth butted-in and didn’t allow him to interrupt. She
said:
‘I
don’t think Ray is very well he’s been bursting into tears as if there’s a wolf
howling within him and he’s saying the strangest things. It is quite upsetting
he has had trouble before but not like this. I think he has stopped getting his
medication. Is there something you can do?’
‘And
you? Ray what has happened to feel so sad? Last time I saw you, you seemed
fine. Do you feel ill? Dr Helen said.
‘No
knowing him he just wants to be the centre of attention when he was in.’ Beth
answered tartly.
‘No.
No. It’s not me, Beth is in trouble she broke something inside of her. Help
her…’
‘ He’s
been like this all day. He’s not making sense.’
With
compassion in Dr Helen turned her gray-eyes on Ray – as he stumbled over his
words in an effort to explain
‘I
know when she’s going to die. And the life she has left will be filled with
anguish and despair and you must help her now so she does not make it worse. I
know now when she going to die and I cannot help her alone, will you help?’
‘I
don’t need help.’ Beth said
‘She’s
dying doctor, she doesn’t believe me, but she needs protection. Please.’
Beth
almost screamed ‘Ray calm down.
‘He
isn’t psychic, psychotic perhaps, how can he know when I’m going to die, he’s
crazy’
‘No.
No’
Ray
began to cry again envisioning the terrible life Beth will have. The thoughts
triggered new visions from his third eye. He heard a thudding on the doctor’s
door loud and resonant and clanging deep inside him. Then from behind the desk
where Dr Helen sat, a ghist appeared, then another, spiders he hadn’t noticed
until then began to drape Beth with their dark constricting web. The banging on
the door stopped and for a moment or a minute Ray wasn’t sure how long there
was a terrible silence in the room, he could see his companions were speaking
together but he couldn’t hear what they were saying, then from behind his chair
came terrible growling like a dog about to attack as the door began to open. He turned and shuddered
overwhelmed with fear. A creature neither ghist or spider came into the office,
like a leper mishappen, it’s body parts twisted and missing. Coated with black
tar that drip-dripped on the office floor smoke lifted into the confined room
growing denser and as dark as a star abandoned dark as the creature advanced into
the chilled and gelid air that choked the office. The tar had burned holes in
the carpeting, Ray shaking with fear tried to hide from it, to get swallowed by
the fabric of the chair, but the creature brushed past him and as if Ray were
not there then the thing walked into the desk through it advancing on Helen,
she did not react, she could not see or feel as the creature entered into her
body then vanished as if he were wearing the doctor like a second skin.
Dr
Helen decided Ray was too distraught and overwhelmed with paranoia, she turned
to Beth. ‘I can you give him some sedatives, if you think you need them?’
‘No
doctor,’ he cried out. ‘She can’t fight it. She has to rely on me to keep her
safe.’
‘Yes
doctor.’ Beth ignored him. ‘Give him the sedatives, he is scaring me. Won’t
they stop all the craziness of today? He needs your help. Please.’
Possessed
by the creature she wrote out a prescription for Ray as the leprous being
within giggled at the back of his mind, she looked at Sara. ‘The chemist will
be open, get this filled and make sure he takes them. Then make an appointment
for next week and we’ll see how his getting on.’
Beth
almost had to prise him from his chair his hands gripped the armrests. Why won’t she listen, he thought. Resigned,
he felt week and invisible he let Beth drag him from his chair and she pushes
him from the doctor’s office. She raced for the car, no ghists attacked her,
Ray laughed thinking of them running away terrified by the powers’ in the
Health Centre or perhaps the
insubstantial beings flown from the earth by an esoteric wind away, up the
empty street, quieter than roads during Lockdown, he scanned for spiders the
webs about Beth but seemed free of them. He took his seat, The engine running
louder than his thoughts, he blurted out scared of Beth’s answer:
‘Could
we go to the river!’
‘Good
idea.’ In no time they got to the end of the street, and waited to turn onto
the main road beyond the bar’s car park but at the junction a seemingly endless
amount of cars with no space to cross Beth launched into a particular vicious
road rage incidence that grated-on Ray’s nerves and he told just to be
patience. But she was about to start a
second bout of road rage as she had waited and wasted her time in the hot,
green day they sat there stuck for what seemed half an hour, yet finally a
kindly god-blessed driver left room for them to cross, and swiftly she went through
the gap, with a wave of thanks, to the far side of the main road. They made
their way to the river down the side streets of the valley. She parked down in
the car park by the Catholic Church. He thought back to creature he had
conjured in Dr Helen’s office had it taken over the doctor completely or would
it leave her now the mushrooms’ curses
piled upon Beth now she had left the office. But, he thought sadly, would it slowly transform Dr Helen into that misshapen,
leprous creature into the antithesis of the wondrous psychiatrist
They
got out of the car and under the weight of the sun walked to where the Lover’s
walk began, or ended. To their surprise they saw without going down the side path
skirting the church that led to the river was barred over with a sign saying:
Closed.
Tree Felling in Progress.
Together
they turned back disappointed and without speaking went up to the defunct
rail-less railway and platform where a little further along was a picnic area
with a panoramic view over the bend in the river. However this too was barred
with a similar sign. They tutted in unison.
Almost
back at the car Ray told her he was going to walk up to the chemist and she
could pick him up outside.
‘Don’t
take the pills til you get back to the flat.’
‘I
thought we were going for a run to Banchory.’
‘No,’
she said bad temperedly. ‘I’m tired. I’ll just take you up the hill,’
‘Fine,’
he said and walked as fast as he could away.
Straight
away he almost collided with a lycra and his bicycle he swerved passed it and
walked quickly back up the valley, crossing the railway line with no rails and
the empty platform of the local station that closed sixty years ago, passed the
red house and up his steep muddy shortcut using the trunk of a small tree to
push himself up now to the next exhausting and painful incline instantly
wanting to lie down once he’d met the main road again but he pushed his way on
and into the chemist.
He
hadn’t seen Beth drive by and presumed she was still at the car park suffering
through the hell of one of her migraines.
The
Grass, as he called her, in her black clothes with black hair and the black
look she gave him as he pushed his way in was alone at the dispensary counter. He
liked to call her The Grass as he was always buying far too many boxes of
proplus and codeine and he’d heard her blabbing to Amber the Lady Pharmika
who’d later given him a hard time about it
when he was hungover and really didn’t need a telling off that day. He bought shaving foam while the prescription
was being filled out. He didn’t have to wait long. As he did he remembered her
first day when he told her she suited the place already and she had smiled, but
she was just pretending to smile. He couldn’t remember her real name.
Beth’s
yellow car was parked outside, but she wasn’t in it. For a moment a new panic
started but then he saw her coming out of the library next to the chemist. They
mirrored each other getting into the car opening the doors at the same time and
closing them with a slam like the furling and unfurling of the wings of a
yellow parrot. Neither of them spoke as they drove back up to the house at the
top of the valley. He persuaded her to have a cup of coffee. Reluctantly as she
had so many things to do, yet she, more tired than she had been for such a long
time sat in the garden while he went in and put on the kettle.
On the
sideboard he crushed up the sedatives with a large silver spoon. Put half of
into each of their cups with some golden syrup
and took the cups out to the garden. She scowled at him as if she were
sick of looking at his tear-streaked face she had had to witness since the
baby, had been a baby.
Sipping
the hot sweet liquid she said that’s nice, he took a big gulp and watched as
she drank hers in the garden’s heat. Soon they were both asleep and dreaming on
the grass.
Beth
wasn’t sure where she was waking from a dream or dreaming the July sun shone
down on her she was sitting in the grass with her back resting on a dry stane dike
with her mobile phone at her ear words were singing out of her mouth but she
didn’t know who she was speaking to someone was looking at her but she didn’t
turn her head to see who it was just kept her eyelids almost pressed together
by the heat she could hear the voice on the other end of the mobile but didn’t
know who it was who was speaking or what they were saying some foreign language
she had never learnt she almost turned to see who was looking at her she didn’t
feel uncomfortable under the stare only familiarity companionship love she
wanted to ask the voice on the mobile who they were but knew she would be
misunderstood so she ended the call pulling herself off the grass whoever was
looking at her, stopped, moved their gaze and now could only see his back
turned from her walking away along the path in the direction she was sure they
had just come the figure was only a few strides ahead and she followed now
beside her a dog walked with them it might have been a short way they had
walked or much longer but the dog barked and she could see they were walking
along a muddy path by the river what river she did not know and figure ahead of
her hadn’t turned and the dog barked and barked happily as it went to the water
she threw a stick and the him slid into the slow flow of the river and swam out
she called the dog back and reluctantly he re-emerged and lay the stick at her
feet so she tossed it for the him again and again further out than before and
the river slick hound found it and swam back to the muddy bank before she had a
chance to call come back the figure his stick with the back turned towards her it
was still only a few strides ahead she started following again and the dog
swimming returned and walked beside her ahead the figure turned round a bend in
the path passing out of sight and she hurried her forwards and when they came
back into view they were sitting in the grass at the side of the path a fire
was blazing and a pan of water was boiling bent over the pan of water the
figure fed the water with somethings one after another and stirred the mixture
with a stick when she sat across the fire from the figure she was proffered the
pan and was told to drink the water now it was quite cool but despite the
reassurance of the words tentatively she
took a few sips then swallowed more gulp after gulp until the pan was dry Beth
wasn’t sure if she was dreaming or waking up from a dream or dreaming.
Ray
was standing over her with a broad grin on his face; she smiled sleepily.
‘I
thought you were dead,’ he told her.
‘No,
I’m fine.’
He
searched with his third eye:
The ghist
were gone there were no spiders no webs here no lepers only a golden, sun coloured dog licking her face greedily as if she
tasted divine.
‘That
was good tea,’ she said, then remembered the tea had been in the dream, but he
had given her the tea before she fell into the dream talking to someone she
didn’t know on a mobile who spoke in an unfamiliar language.
Ray
moved away and stood over the place where the old storm toppled tree had been
and saw that there was a ring of mushrooms growing as if they had been there
forever.
He
turned back to her and told her matterfactly that she was going to have a
wonderful summer.
(4199
words)
