My name is Emma Rose Darcy, I have a Bachelor's in Creative Writing and History, and a Master's in Museum and Heritage Studies. I have been writing for over a decade but in the last few years have moved from writing fantasy to horror. I live in rural NSW Australia.
I have 6 short stories published in anthologies, two of which are being released this year, the details of which I am happy to list on request. My short story Return to the Labyrinth was long listed for the Joyce Parkes prize.
TO BEAR WITNESS
by
Emma Rose Darcy
There were three of them waiting in the living room, like the set up to a bad joke. A priest, a psychologist and a ghost hunter sitting in their separate corners, exchanging wary glances. The silence, which had long ago ceased being awkward and become stifling, was periodically interrupted by the unmistakeable sound of ecstatic, rigorous sex.
After an hour the priest rose to his feet, nodded goodbye to the two other men and picked up his effects. He was about to open the front door to leave when a woman, the same harried looking creature who had ushered them in when they arrived, fell down the stairs. In a crumpled heap on the floor, she ignored the flustered attempts of the two other men to help her up. Her eyes were fixed on the priest.
“Please, don’t go!” She begged. With her arm outstretched to him, it was easy to see that from fingertips to the sleeve at her elbow, her arm was covered in bite and scratch-marks. “You can’t go, you haven’t seen her.”
“Mrs Bancroft,” the priest said, “I came in good faith, to help someone you told me was suffering.” Above them, the rhythmic thumping of the furniture became frenzied, and a woman’s voice howled in animalistic passion. “It doesn’t sound like anyone is suffering.”
“Who is up there with her?” The psychologist asked.
“There’s no one with her,” Mrs Bancroft sobbed, “She’s alone in her room.”
The smell coming out of the room, even with the door closed was indescribable. The wood of the floorboards was scorched along the threshold as if when opened tongues of flame licked out.
“What is that?”
“Brimstone.” The priest replied, grim. “Sulphur. Mrs Bancroft, if an exorcism was— There is a process, an assessment by people much more qualified than I—”
“Just look, please,” Mrs Bancroft gestured to the room with hands that looked like they had been plunged into boiling water. “Please, just look.”
Besides the priest, the psychologist was feeling a little out of his element. There were physiological ailments which could account for a sulphurous stench. A shared psychosis between these women, he thought as he stared at the inflamed bite marks weeping on the woman’s arms, where their religious mania fed violent acts against each other. But all of that left his thoughts the moment the ghost hunter opened the door.
With his hand on the doorknob, the ghost hunter was already imagining the documentary he would film about this. He hadn’t brought any of his gear, anticipating the usual knocking pipes, draughty hallway stuff he had to wade through. But, in his mind’s eye he was in the room with his full set up, recording this bitch levitating. Head spinning. Soup spewing. Whatever she wanted to do. He registered that the doorknob was hot, and that as the door opened he felt a lurch in his stomach which he hadn’t felt since he was a little kid. The washing machine tumble sensation of imminent vomiting. Of fear. He looked into the room and forgot all about his documentary.
Behind him, the priest uttered a single blasphemous curse.
“You must look,” Mrs Bancroft muttered, satisfied, and returned to biting herself, “She wants you to look.”
There was no furniture in the room. The woman, barely more than a girl, was a monolith in the dark. A resplendent beast, decadent in voluptuous coils of her own hair, oily with blood. With eyes black and bottomless, she drew the three men into the room and the door closed behind them.
All about them, even in the dark, they could feel the words scorched into the floor, the on walls. Under the blood and the filth.
The woman was beautiful, illuminated only by moonlight, standing before them. Each man was sure she was looking only at him. There were marks on her body which filled him with loathing and desire, as they drew the eye to where she was vulnerable to both pleasure and pain, and he felt himself torn in both directions at once. Slowly, she let her hands drift across the roadmap of her wounds, until they reached the rift of her groin. She began to tear at herself.
“No,” the ghost hunter cried out, but as he moved to stop her he found himself grasping instead, feeling that surging need to vomit rise up in him again as his hands sank into her up to the wrists. They fell, locked together to the floor. The wet sound of her flesh giving way accompanied by his ragged, horrified breaths.
“I have to go,” The priest said, his voice an explosion of sound although he had barely the conviction to mumble. He turned to fumble at the door. On the other side, Mrs Bancroft held the door closed.
“She wants you to look.” She said, prim as a schoolteacher.
Behind him, the psychologist had turned away, and was standing in the corner with his hands over his ears. He muttered and sang to himself so he could not hear the girl being torn apart, and he would not look. “Tell him he has to look,” The voice of Mrs Bancroft came from the other side of the door, “It’ll be worse for him if he hides.”
The priest couldn’t see how it could possibly be worse. He went to the psychologist and tapped his arm. “You have to look.”
“No.”
“Look, or it will be worse.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
The ghost hunter had collapsed in the remains of the woman, weeping and shuddering. The priest helped him up. They watched in mute horror as the flesh on the floor began to slither and reform, until the woman was whole again, yet more damaged, still beautiful. Her black eye fixed on the psychologist and she crept upon his turned back and while she was busy devouring him, still choking and wailing, the priest and the ghost hunter stumbled from the house into the night.