Burrow

By Derek Heath

BURROW

by Derek Heath

Born with an agonising mark on his face in the shape of a crescent moon, Elliot Carlisle-or Moony-has lived with pain for most of his life. When he and his wife, Sarah Lee, move to a remote cabin on the riverbank to make a fresh start for themselves and try to repair

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pope Lick Press
• Release date: May 16, 2024
• ISBN: 9781915272911

Book preview

Burow by Derek Heath

Paperback ISBN:

978-1-915272-93-5

Copyright Derek Heath © 2024

Cover Design © Derek Heath

All rights reserved.

Thank you for buying an authorised copy of this book. This is a work of fiction and any similarities with real people, places, or events are purely coincidental.

First edition published © 2024 by Pope Lick Press.

BURROW

DEREK HEATH

Pope Lick Press

Derek Heath © 2024

This is a ghost story.

All our stories will be, in Time.

CHAPTER ONE

DEAD THINGS ALL AROUND

OCTOBER 2021 | 1

Moony had never vomited blood before.

He fumbled behind him for the frayed cord beside the bathroom door, keeping one hand on the bowl to steady himself. His stomach heaved as the rancid yellow glow of the light rolled down the tiles. It flickered and his knees sagged into the floor. Hardwood boards beneath a peeling, vinyl laminate. Groaning quietly, he let his mouth hang open and closed his eyes.

‘Everything all right up there?’ Sarah Lee called from the kitchen.

Moony heard the thwump of a cardboard box hitting the wooden countertop. He tipped his head back, repulsed by the coppery stink of the vomit in the bowl beneath him. Bile gushed up his throat and tossed him forward again. His forehead smacked the cold edge of the toilet and a cold shock rattled his skull as red strings swung out of his nostrils and splashed the inside of the bowl. He spluttered and more came; crimson swirled amid all the yellow. The light flickered above his head. The bulb flared and a strained orange fluttered across the tiles. It died as the last stream of blood unfolded over his lip.

For a moment he knelt there, connected to the bowl by his chin with a single, drooling string of red. It could be cancer, he thought. He felt sick to the stomach, but the vomit was all fluid, like his pancreas had ruptured. Pancreatic cancer was a thing, though. Uncle Ted had died of… what, stomach cancer? No, it had started in the stomach, but it was when it spread to the lungs that it had killed him. And now Moony was dying of the same thing. He must be. Couldn’t be anything else.

Wooden stairs squealed behind him and shadows lurched across the tiled wall.

‘What are you doing in here with the lights off?’ Sarah Lee scolded, reaching for the cord. She tugged it and it pulled taut with a click. Nothing.

‘It’s dead,’ Moony said. He leant back to wipe his mouth and the long string of blood snapped and fell—plop!—into the bowl. He grimaced. ‘First on the list of things to do, right?’

‘First on the list is that dodgy board in the bedroom,’ Sarah Lee said, leaning forward to glance past him. Long, straight black hair fell in her face and she grimaced as she saw the mess in the toilet. ‘Actually, first is flushing this, if you don’t mind. Then you can help me unpack. Then you can fix the dodgy board.’

‘What dodgy board?’

‘In the far corner, where the wardrobe is? The carpet’s all frayed there and the board’s basically rotten beneath it. The whole floor might need replacing.’

‘Making this bulb number four on my long, long list –’

‘If you had a real job, I’d let you off,’ Sarah Lee said. ‘But if you’re going to be hanging around this place all day while I’m off making the real money…’

Moony groaned, standing up from the toilet and jamming the flush down with the heel of his palm. ‘Now you’ve got me hoping it’s cancer.’

‘Hey,’ Sarah Lee said firmly, ‘don’t be a tit. It’s not cancer. You ate something bad. Probably snagged your throat on a naff crisp on the drive up.’

Moony shrugged. He stood six inches taller than her, and in the cramped bathroom he was a monster leering over a pale-skinned ghost. The faint red light of sunset crept in through a frosted-glass window. He smiled. The pain in his stomach was fading. He said, ‘We can make this work.’

She leaned up, pressed her lips almost to his. Her nose was soft and flat, but his was broken and jutted awkwardly from his face. The two brushed together. ‘You stink,’ she whispered, and she wheeled around and left him in the bathroom.

Moony’s hands lingered by his sides. His throat felt dry and scratchy. Leaning back on his haunches, he looked out onto the landing. Faded shadows coiled around a rutting banister rail. The stairs moaned. ‘Lee, where’s my toothbrush?’

‘You’ll find out if you come help me unpack!’ she called up.

He hesitated. Sickness welled at the back of his throat. He felt… off. It had come on almost the very second the heel of his boot had hit the earth. Like the moment he’d stepped out of the car, the moment the dirt had touched him…

He should have known, he thought. That the price of this place was too good to be true, that there was something wrong. Christ, when they’d driven the last stretch of winding tarmac into the woods, when they’d come across that fox… he should have known.

Moony crossed the bathroom and looked through the frosted window. He could only make out faint shapes through the swirls in the crushed glasswork: the blur of the river, way down below at the back of the house; the velvety green of the forest on the other bank. A stripe of orange bleeding down the frame. And his reflection, warped and distorted. The awful birthmark on his right cheek. He had been sick long before he’d gotten here.

We can make this work, he thought.

‘If you got to say something twice,’ Uncle Ted had always said, ‘then the first time didn’t convince you hard enough.’

‘Well, you died,’ Moony murmured, ‘so.’

And he turned away from the window and stepped out of the bathroom, flushing the toilet once more for good measure and wincing as the lurching, gargling sound sapped away the pounding in his head.

2 | 2021

Sarah Lee had offered to take over the wheel once they passed into Suffolk, but Moony told her no, it’s all right, try and get some more sleep. Just as long as she was sitting on his left, he thought, she wasn’t staring at it.

The deformation had been etched into his flesh from birth: a hideous blotch of flaking, crimson leather that curved from the corner of his right eye to his lip. A crescent moon that covered his cheek, tight and twisted so that it tugged at the skin around it. The skin there was cursed. He was clean-shaven now, but when he had tried in the past to cover his birthmark with stubble it had grown patchy and white on that side of his face.

When he cried, the tears from his right eye seemed to burn away before they could run down to his chin.

‘Is this it?’ Sarah Lee said, nodding out of the window.

Moony dipped his head a little, squinting through the windscreen. The sign for Weeping Village (A Friendly Place: Population 216) was faded and cracked, jutting out of a growth of bristle and brown thicket on the verge. ‘Almost,’ he said. ‘The woods are just past the village.’

‘Not much of a village, El,’ Sarah Lee murmured, drumming slender fingers on the doorframe as they rolled through a narrow marketplace. ‘You’ll have to come up here for some things if the movers don’t turn up tomorrow.’

‘They’ll turn up,’ Moony said. The high street was empty; they cruised around a wide scythe in the road and passed terraced houses on either side. Redbrick and stone turned to plaster and low, crumbling walls fell away as the terraces thinned out. And then they had left the village, and the road begun to thin too, swerving around a bank of trees on the left. Spindly trunks began to thrust up at the verges and wind backwards into the pastures at the very edge of the Weeping outskirts.

The birthmark was blood-red at the edges and scattered with yellow stars. The darker flesh was criss-crossed with pale scars where it had separated, split, hardened over time. There were times that Elliot Carlisle could hardly see out of his right eye, times when the white filled up with a swirling red mist and he had to lie down or the pain would knock him down.

Shadows sprayed the windscreen as the road coiled along the broken edges of the forest. Through bands of brown and gold, thick swathes of shadow grew and pulsated. On the back seat, cardboard boxes rattled among the suitcases and duffel bags.

Quietly, Sarah Lee laid a hand on his knee. ‘Nearly there,’ she said.

The tarmac narrowed again and bent around the edge of the forest, doubling back on itself to slip into the trees as though it had carved itself a back entrance. It wound across to the right and the flayed canopy above, dashed through with sunspots, painted shades of yellow on the roof of the car. the battered old Volvo flashed with rust as it slid between pale, red trunks and followed the tarmac into the dark.

The worst thing about the mark was the name it had earnt him. Moony. He had tried to shake it off, but now it was burned into him like the mark itself. The only one that seemed to remember his real name was Sarah Lee, and even she rarely used it.

He wondered how long it would be before he forgot who he was entirely.

‘Do you think we could try again?’ Sarah Lee said suddenly, pulling her hand away. She looked across at him, ice-blue eyes drilling through the space between them. Moony kept his eyes on the road, but he could feel her watching his face; it was like one of those moments when she seemed to remember that half of his skull was burned and ruined, and her gaze lingered for just a fragment of a second too long.

‘We are trying again,’ he said, but he knew what she was talking about. ‘This move, the new house… this is us trying again. You know, you’ve got your job, you’re still doing what you love—I’ve got a couple of commissions lined up, and once they’re done I’ll head into town and see about renting a studio, selling some paintings from there—’

‘No,’ she whispered, turning her eyes away from him again. Her hand rested briefly on her stomach, then fell away.  ‘I mean, do you think we could try for… you know… forget it. It doesn’t matter.’

‘It does,’ he said, reaching to shift the car into third. His knuckles brushed her thigh. He could swear that she shivered. ‘I’d like to try again. If you would.’

The canopy grew thicker and banks of darkness filtered across the tarmac. Moony flicked on the headlights.

Light played off the fuzzy orange flanks of the corpse in the road.

‘Jesus!’ Sarah Lee reeled, gripping her seatbelt as Moony pulled the car onto the other side of the road. The Volvo’s front tyre clipped the rump of the dead thing and the chassis juddered as it dipped off the road and peeled back up again; Moony swore, jamming on the brakes and righting the car as he glared up into the rearview.

The brake lights bathed the carcass in red. Its eyes were rolled upwards; its white belly was yellowed and mangy. Its rump was wet and sloppy and its tail was scuffed into the tarmac. Flies skittered across its shoulders and throat.

‘God, that’s disgusting,’ Sarah Lee said. ‘D’you think it was run over?’

Moony swallowed. His eyes were fixed on the mirror.

There were no tracks on the fox. The mangled rump was his doing, the pockmarks of red the work of the flies. Its skull was largely intact, save for a rivet of black flesh where the lips had peeled back and the tongue rolled out.

‘It looks like it just… dropped,’ Moony said, and they drove deeper into the woods.

3 | 2021

There were vibrant colours, among the dull blacks and browns of the Weeping woods. Splashes of fruit and flower in the trees smeared blood-red paint into the oily wax of the rotting leaves; dazzling spirals of crimson ivy and hibiscus curled up the wider trunks and purple bruises spread over pale bark where the branches had been strangled. Thick, white roots were sprayed with orange clumps of fungus and the blue tips of flowers sprouted from thorny beds. But a closer look at everything betrayed the colourlessness of it all; the scattered reds in the canopy were the bitemarks of disease, and the dark ivy just a bitter remnant of some once-green plant. The fungus was decayed and the blue flowers were thick with mould and the bristling fuzz of age.

The tarmac turned to dirt and the edges of the track pawed madly at earthen verges, overtaken with sagging thickets and leaves. The Volvo was wide enough that the tyres seemed to chew at the forest itself, and they swept slowly through the shadows, following deer tracks embedded in the dry soil of the path until, finally, the trees opened up and they came to Salem House.

The path spread out and pooled into the shape of a small, square driveway. The trees at its edge had been cleared and rough-hewn stumps scattered the clearing; the canopy seemed to break up above the cabin, and where the sunlight bled through it lashed the dark, pine slats of the roof with streaks of amber.

‘It’s smaller than it looked in the pictures,’ Sarah Lee said quietly.

Moony eased the car forward and tugged gently at the handbrake. For a moment they sat there with the engine running quietly. ‘It’s nice, though,’ he said, ignoring a sudden twisting pain in his stomach. ‘Even a little place like this isn’t usually this cheap, these days. It’s nice. We did good.’

‘We should have come and looked the place over before we bought it,’ Sarah Lee whispered. ‘You know, like normal people.’

‘Fresh start,’ Moony said. ‘Remember what we said? Leap of faith. It was cheap, and it’s… nice… and we can do it. This is what we need. Remember? Something unknown.’

At least, that’s what you said, he thought.

‘Hey,’ he said, turning to her as he cut the engine. He held out a hand. ‘We can do it.’

She smiled at him. After a moment, she took his hand and nodded. ‘We can.’

He leaned across to kiss her. As their lips touched, he laid a hand on her cheek. She kissed the left side of his mouth, her breath drifting over the tip of his tongue.

Untouched, the birthmark stung a little.

4 | DECEMBER 1943

Delicate threads of colour rippled at the tip of the needle as steel pins pressed the flattened wings of decorated carcasses into the corkboard. Screaming kaleidoscopes were labelled and trapped; scarred thumbs, moist with saliva, brushed the soft edges of still antennae so that they stood upright.

Outside, almost quietly, the world burned.

The cabin was a soundless smudge of brown and grey in the decaying greens of the forest. Around the back of the broken little shack, a wide river carved a path through frost-sprayed tangles of foliage. Overhanging thickets drooped in the grey-green water; flayed stalks bobbed their withered husks into a cold, fast-flowing stream of slate that fizzed and crackled with foam where it touched the banks.

The forest canopy sheltered the river from the barrelling explosions of flame that burned the clouds orange, but still streaks of gold bristled at the tips of low, roiling waves on its surface.

Damp, half-rotten stilts jutted up from the water, hugged by rings of scum and moss where they broke through the surface. They thrust awkwardly at the cabin that leant over the bankside, a mess of poles and cracked shafts propping up a veranda that ran along the entire back wall. Shadows leeched off the slanted, wooden ceiling of the teetering bank-house, popping and dissipating whenever brilliant, bright ribbons of fire thrashed across the sky. The rumbling of aircraft far above the canopy sent savage vibrations streaming down the trunks and into the earth. The windows of the little cabin were boarded up so that only the softest lamplight slipped through the glassy edges: burning squares of amber in the crooked panelling.

The hunched back of the collector stiffened as he heard movement. Behind him, the staircase groaned softly. The pin in his hand trembled lightly as he turned his head. The little girl stood halfway down the stairs, looking down at him with one hand on the banister. In the greasy, flickering light of the gas lamps in the living room, she looked like a ghost.

‘I can’t sleep,’ Evangeline said. Straight, blonde hair framed a slender face and, dappled by shadows, seemed to shift and knot around her throat. A soft pink nightdress almost fluttered in the candlelight.

Not moving from the table in the open kitchen, the collector raised a finger to his lips. He smiled, but his eyes flickered to an armchair across the room. Beside it, a brass record player scratched Peggy Lee’s Why Don’t You Do Right out of the particles of moonlight in the stale cabin air.

Susan was almost a decade younger than her husband, but the cancer had drained most of the energy from her—first from her legs, and then when it spread to her throat, from her voice and her heart. Now, she spent most of the day asleep and most of the night vomiting weak strings of bile into a metal pail beside the bed.

But then, the collector had always wondered if this house had made her sick. They had lived here for so long, and the earth was so acidic and rotten, that he wondered if moving back to the city would help her to pass on quietly. Maybe even bring her back to him. But they couldn’t go back to the city, not now. They were safe out here.

Bloody Germans couldn’t hit them out here.

‘What are you doing?’ the little girl whispered, coming over to him from the stairs. There was a soft clip as her feet slapped the tiled floor of the kitchen area, and then she was standing over the table and looking across the corkboard.

‘They’re butterflies,’ he told her, laying a withered hand on her back while the other gestured weakly. ‘Did you ever see butterflies like this, back home?’

The girl shook her head. ‘We had birds.’ After a moment’s pause, she said, ‘I don’t like birds anymore.’

On the corkboard, three dozen flat corpses shrieked silently. Peggy Lee warbled, and the collector frowned. ‘Why not?’ he said quietly. ‘The birds around here are nice. You know, in the forest—’

‘I don’t like them,’ Evangeline said. ‘I dream about birds…’

The collector paused. An already-wrinkled brow, scattered with liver spots, furrowed a little. Silver hair bristled across the scraps of his scalp that were still blessed with healthy follicles. ‘Bad dreams?’

Susan had always had bad dreams. She used to tell him about them. But she seemed happier now. Ever since the evacuee had come to join them here, she had seemed… healthier. The vomit was paler and less frequent, and she stirred from her sleep less violently.

Perhaps she was finally dying.

‘What’s this one?’ the girl said, jabbing a finger at the corkboard. It hovered over a splash of crisp, spread brown and yellow.

‘Pyronia tithonus,’ the collector smiled. ‘The gatekeeper. You like that one?’

‘I…’ the girl shuddered, suddenly. The collector’s fingers were splayed across her spine, and he felt it twist. ‘I want to go home,’ she said. ‘I don’t like it here.’

He swallowed. ‘I know. I’m sorry. I wish we could be… younger, and better. And I wish your mother could be here. Your dad, too. But we will keep you safe, child. I promise you. Always.’

‘Will you read to me again?’

‘You know, those fairytales won’t help your dreams,’ the old man whispered. ‘You’re surrounded by miles of forest, Evie. And you want to hear stories about big bad wolves?’

With that, his fingers danced right up her spine to the base of her neck and she giggled.

Slowly, the collector stood. A thin, off-coloured shirt sagged at his caved-in gut and his bones strained wetly. Thick bands of light flickered across his face and pushed dark fingers into the deep pits around his eyes. He reached down and took her hand, nodding towards the stairs. ‘Let’s go and get you to sleep, then, shall we? Before all the nasty creatures of the woods come and—’

It sounded like a slamming door, but it came from beneath them. From underground. The little girl drew in a sharp breath as the collector’s fingers tightened around hers. ‘What was that?’ she whispered.

In the living room, the needle had jerked a little with the tremoring of the floorboards, and a faint screech slithered across Peggy Lee’s voice. Susan stirred in her chair and a thin, green river of drool ran down her chin and connected her weathered skull to the breast of her nightshirt. ‘That’s impossible,’ the collector breathed, his eyes on the cellar door beneath the stairs. ‘It can’t…’

And then he let go of Evangeline’s hand, turning to look back at her as he moved towards the door.

‘Go on upstairs,’ he said. ‘Find a nice story. I’ll be up in just a moment.’

‘What’s down there?’ the child said, gazing hard at the cellar door.

‘Now, Evie. Please.’

She nodded. But she remained right where she was, watching as the old man crouched before the staircase, reaching a trembling, disease-riddled hand for the doorknob and turning it with a soft, dull click.

Something fluttered in the shadows at the bottom of the stairs as he looked down into the basement, eyes widening. ‘Impossible…’ he whispered. The shape lengthened, grew taller.

Peggy Lee fell silent as the needle juddered into the middle of the disc with a shriek. The collector stared blankly into the room below the earth and watched as a tall, broad-shouldered figure raised its head to look back up at him. Blood pooled from the silhouette’s chest, but the blood was discoloured and pale and smeared so that it looked like oozing bile.

There was a hatchet in the figure’s hand, and something else, something undiscernible—something yellow and shining—clutched in the fingers of the other. Candlelight flashed across his face and twisting shadows leapt across his features, made him seem as though he was… flickering. He was something ghostly, something ethereal.

A wash of darkness passed across the little house. Somewhere in the far, far distance, concrete ruptured. The collector almost fancied he could hear the wail of sirens.

The lanky silhouette smiled up at him and began to climb the stairs.

OCTOBER 2021 | 5

Sarah Lee Carlisle stared out of the kitchen window as she unpacked, shuffling cutlery into a drawer beside the sink and grimacing as her nails scraped the hardwood. The ground floor of the little house was open-plan, and the back of the kitchen bled out into the living room behind her. The tiles ruptured and split at her heels as a deep, ugly shag carpet took over and consumed them; the walls were plastered, but in places the off-white had crumbled away to reveal the wormy woodwork beyond.

Absent-mindedly, she tucked a strip of nicotine gum under her tongue and begun to work at it. She could see the car through the grease-stained glass, both back doors wide open, cardboard containers spilling out into the earth. The blunt nose of the vehicle was draped in shadow, and the ragged driveway had grown darker since the sun had disappeared, but through the opening in the canopy moonlight cascaded own and threw tangles of blue into the undergrowth.

Something moved, out there in the woods…

‘El!’ she called, keeping her eyes on the window. Dust particles swung from the frame on thick bands of cobweb. The wind had picked up, and clusters of leaves filtered across the driveway. Perhaps that was all it had been. Just the wind, the shadows. The dark. ‘Moony? Are you still up there?’

‘One second!’ he called back.

Sarah Lee went back to unpacking. She had emptied the first box of crockery and all that was left inside it now were the scraps of bubblewrap she had stuffed between the plates. Quickly, she folded the box and turned to a duffel bag on the counter.

The worktops formed a horseshoe shape around a small, wooden table in the middle of the kitchen, the two prongs of the shoe jutting out from the wall atop crooked posts and half-closed cupboard doors. She unzipped the bag and thought of home.

Bedroom stuff. They could sort it out later. She’d ask him to help her with the bedsheets.

This is home, now.

She went to zip the bag closed and froze. The pale glare from the bulb above her head glinted off a square of glass buried among the pillowcases. A photo frame. She reached for it, delicate fingers curling around the thing as she lifted it to the light.

The two of them, in black and white. She had just graduated. He was dressed in a suit. Thin and lanky and turned, just a