Midnight’s Fables

The Truth of Sarah Kirkleigh

You had asked Midnight to tell you a story it liked. You don’t know why you were so horrified by the story that followed. It didn’t even end, it just stopped two-thirds of the way through.

“Why did you stop the story there?” you ask. Was it because it was scarier that way, sadder? Or was it because the ending was… better? Because Midnight ended on a sour note before John could have escaped?

“I think it fits the story better. You never know what any of it was about, you never learn what happened next. I could tell you about John opening the box. I could tell you about what came out of it. But I think if you’re left wondering… your mind can come up with a thousand things more terrifying, and then you’re afraid of a thousand things, and not just one,” Midnight said, as though with a smile.

You think you see something lurking in the shadows of your host’s form. It is a hole in the world, and beyond it, in the darkness, in the gloom and the black… you think you see… a shape, no form, no substance, just a silhouette, black on black, ebony upon midnight, but… something is there, in the darkness. Beyond the outline that talks to you and tells you stories, there is something else, hiding in the dark. Something that watches you from the shadows.

Something… hungry.

You shake your head to clear your thoughts and take a few steps away from Midnight, which cocks its head in confusion. You shut your eyes to turn and look away from it, but… in the darkness behind your eyelids, the same shadow waits for you.

You open your eyes instead and stare at the ceiling. The patterns in the stone there seem to crawl with it too, something hidden, like one of those magic-eye pictures, something lurking unseen, just out of your perception, yet staring you in the face.

“What happened to John?” you ask, trying to distract yourself even as the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end, even as your spine is wrapped in tension, your body urging you to flee.

“He died,” Midnight shrugs. “It was over quite quickly, but he died alone and very, very afraid. I can show you what killed him if you like. Or a thing like it. I have a specimen here in the museum. Taxidermied, not live, but still.”

You shake your head, trying to look somewhere that isn’t crawling with the shapes of the watching shadow, trying to move your gaze somewhere that it does not linger. “No, thank you.”

“Would you like another story?” Midnight asks cheerfully.

Does it not understand your fear? Does it not grasp your discomfort? Or does it understand them better than even you do? Does it know exactly what it’s doing?

You’re not sure which would be worse. Being trapped in the endless museum of horror that belongs to an eldritch entity that cannot grasp the concept of your fear and discomfort, or being trapped in the museum of one that understand them perfectly and is carefully manipulating you to feel that way by choice.

“If you’ve got one to share,” you say absently, knowing full well it does.

You need to stop looking at Midnight. The more you look at it, the more you see the things that live in its silhouette. And the more you see them… the more they seem to see you. The more they spill out and into the shadows inside your eyes…

Midnight leads you along for a time, which at this point seems meaningless entirely, before reaching a display case with a crumpled and badly stained adoption certificate, the writing too smeared to read. You try not to think about how red those stains look…

“This is the tale,” Midnight says proudly, “of Rebecca Miser and the truth of Sarah Kirkleigh…”

***

Sarah couldn’t believe her mum was gone. She’d had the call, the funeral, the burial, all the paperwork, the lawyers, the death certificate, and now... now she just had the house. Full of stuff from a whole life well-lived, now ended. Now for her to try and sort through it all. Decide what to keep, what to donate, what to throw away... but all of this was her mum’s. Her whole life, these were the things her mother had found precious, worth keeping. How could Sarah look at any of it and decide it was waste, not worth keeping, in need of throwing away?

It was on the seventh day of the cleanup operation that she found the certificate. Tucked away in a cardboard box, covered in cobwebs in the attic. An adoption certificate. For... Sarah...

Sarah wasn’t adopted. Not just that she hadn’t been told about it and this was a surprise, but... she’d seen photographs of her parents when they were younger. Seen pictures of her mum pregnant, taken a few months before Sarah was born. She’d seen baby pictures and... and photos from when her mum was her age and the resemblance was uncanny, she... that wasn’t possible.

Sarah hadn’t been adopted. Of course she hadn’t.

So why was there an adoption certificate for her in the attic?

***

Over the following weeks, Sarah spent a great deal of time contacting the registry office, trying to determine the truth. Was she adopted or not? Was the history she had been presented with true, or was it this certificate? The adoption certificate was dated when Sarah was three years old, so it was very possible that she wouldn’t remember a life before her parents, though it was also dated for shortly after her father had died, and she did have memories of him. At least... she thought she did. Vague memories, impressions... could she be remembering another life, another father... all along, had she been remembering her birth father and not the late husband of the woman who had raised her?

Questions like these swam through her mind endlessly, day in and day out, for weeks. She hadn’t the time any longer to declutter her mother’s house, she needed to find the truth. Who was she really? Who had she been? Was this some strange sick practical joke – something her mum had notoriously hated – or was this the proof of a dark and secret truth?

After weeks of searching, the truth was revealed, hidden in two birth certificates, four death certificates, an adoption certificate, and a change of name...

Sarah Kirkleigh... was dead.

She’d been dead for decades. She and Matthew Kirkleigh, her father, had died together in a car crash when she was three. Her birth certificate, her death certificate, and her father’s death certificate showed that story quite neatly. Her mother had been left alone, a widow whose toddler was gone... living in a nightmare no doubt.

Sarah... that wasn’t her name as it turned out, but it was the only one she’d known... Sarah couldn’t help but feel sorry for her mother. Her little family torn apart, the people she loved cruelly destroyed and taken away from her... the pain, the anguish she must have felt... Sarah wouldn’t have blamed her if she’d gone mad.

As it turned out... that seemed to be exactly what had happened.

Sarah was not Sarah Kirkleigh, that much was now clear. The name she had been given at birth was Rebecca Miser. Like Sarah Kirkleigh, she had been a blue-eyed brunette child with short parents. Like Sarah Kirkleigh, she had been born in March 1997. Like Sarah Kirkleigh, her father had died when she was three. The difference was, Rebecca’s mother had also died, while Rebecca herself had lived. A little girl, terrified and alone, suddenly orphaned, her parents taken from her...

Sarah, not-Sarah... was holding Rebecca’s birth certificate. Her own birth certificate. And the Misers’ death certificates. Her birth parents. The father she remembered. Not Sarah’s dad, hers...

There was a change of name form too, and of course the adoption certificate.

Sarah’s mum had... replaced her... her own daughter... with Rebecca. She hadn’t just adopted the girl uncomfortably soon after her husband’s and daughter’s deaths, she had changed the girl’s name to that of her dead child.

All these years, Sarah had been living with a stolen identity. The name of a dead little girl. Sleeping in her bed, living in her house, raised by the girl’s mother...

All of that alone was a nightmarish revelation that broke her heart and turned her entire world upside down. She rejected the name. Of course she did, it felt vile, grotesque... like wearing a dead child’s clothes, she had been wearing Sarah’s name and identity all this time...

She was Rebecca. Rebecca Miser. All her life that she remembered, her GCSEs, her A-Levels, her degree... more names on more forms and all of them, she now knew... wrong.

All of that was a world-shattering revelation.

And yet that was somehow just the tip of the iceberg.

Because her birth parents and her adoptive ones had known one another. They had been friends, members of the same church, and her birth parents and the real Sarah and her father... they had all died in the same car accident. All six of them had been in the same minivan together when a madman in a stolen bus had crashed into them, killing four of the vehicle’s six occupants, before fleeing the scene and eventually being found dead on the railway lines a few miles away, seemingly having thrown himself in the path of a train.

Sarah – Rebecca – had known none of this. She had been told her father had died in a car accident when she was three and had been given no more details. None. She had never even heard of the Miser family. She and her new mother had left that church and moved away shortly thereafter. She hadn’t known any of that either.

And so she embarked on a journey to her home town, as detailed in the birth certificate she had discovered, and sought to find out what her life had been, and what it could have been, had tragedy not struck.

***

The so-called “church” looked more like a warehouse, specifically a thoroughly abandoned, dilapidated warehouse. Red bricks blackened with countless decades of soot and ash, sat by the side of a reeking stagnant canal in Birmingham, the roof hollow and caved-in, the windows broken or boarded up, chains across the doors. Signs that foretold of the coming of the Antichrist and the return of the Messiah still were pasted all over the outside of the building, though now they were faded, crumbling, and peeling off.

Truth be told, the entire place gave Rebecca the sense of a cult compound more than a genuine church, but… this is where she’d come from. This was where all the paperwork said she had been raised, been christened, where her parents – birth and adoptive – had been married… this was where she had begun. So she ducked under the chains and slipped in through the front door and with torch in hand entered the ruins of the old building. The interior was much like the exterior, with plaster and paint peeling off the walls, broken glass and wood and detritus scattered across the floors and piled up in the corners, everything stained with mould and mildew and damp, and a stench of musty decay that permeated every breath of the air.

The hallway beyond the entrance had a corridor leading off to either side, and a large double door directly ahead, or at least the ruins of them. One door was torn apart at the bottom, as though dogs had chewed at the wooden splinters trying to get through, while the other door hung from its hinges, leaning into the room as it stood ajar. She tried not to think about the fact that the splinters of wood on the first door were pointing outward, as though something had been gnawing its way through to try and escape…

She pushed through into the chamber beyond, clearly the main gathering hall of the community, with lines of pews for the faithful to sit, and a pulpit at the forefront, elevated on a stage that was also home to the instruments of an orchestra, though the piano looked more like a burned-out car wreck than a piano, the flutes looked more like human femurs, and the violins looked like contorted, frightened children.

Light came in through broken windows at the tops of the walls, and a layer of filth and dust and rot and decay seemed to cover every surface. A film of grime and thick cobwebs lay across the ground, the pews, the walls, the stage floor, the instruments… everything.

The mould squelched underfoot, and the floorboards creaked and groaned and bowed terribly with every footstep Rebecca took.

She had hoped something here would jog her memory. That she would see something that might remind her of the life she had lost, but… if this place had ever been a home to her, it was dead and rotten and in the past as much as her birth parents.

She strode up towards the stage, gazing at the pulpit and the grotesque instruments that stood, abandoned, beside it. They looked placed. As though the band might return at any moment, pick up their things, and begin playing. The place didn’t look abandoned or forgotten. It looked like everyone had simply decided to put things down, walk away, and never come back.

But why? Why would the entire religious community leave like that?

Wood splintered.

Rebecca dropped.

She fell amid the broken boards and the wretched mould and rot, and landed sharply on her ankle which bent with a crunch as her weight collapsed to the concrete ground below.

Rebecca cried out as she fell and landed, and groaned from the throbbing, sickening pain that radiated from her ankle. It was sharp and she dared not look, dared not move, as she felt her foot grow warm with the flow of hot, fresh blood. Her blood.

She shone her torch around wildly, trying to get her bearings, trying to see what kind of nightmarish dungeon she had found herself in. The basement was the same size and shape as the gathering hall above, with dim light filtering through the slats in the floorboards of the ceiling. Stairs came down from behind the stage, rotten toys and old dolls were piled in the corner, there seemed to be a kitchenette off to one side, and a lone mattress and sheets, stained crimson, bright and red and glistening, as though the blood were still… fresh…

Her torchlight froze as she pointed it towards the wall beneath the broken door into the chamber above. There… she thought at first that the wall was smeared in blood, that a hole had been carved into the redbrick and painted with gristle, but… it was not a wound.

The shape was of course familiar to her in an instant, as it might be to any woman. The lips to either side, the hooded node above, the orifice that disappeared into the darkness beyond the wall. It was fresh and pink and red and healthy and… alive.

Ever so alive.

The wall possessed, intimately… a vulva. Labia, clitoris, vaginal opening, it was… a vulva.

Rebecca stared in utter confusion, pain and fear and shock momentarily forgotten as the jarring imagery presented before her filled her mind with so much mystery and incongruent confusion that she just… stared.

It pulsed, ever so slightly. Quivering, gently, as though a racing heart pumped hot, fresh blood through thick arteries behind the wall. It was alive, it was…

Discharging…

Something clear and pale and sticky seemed to ooze from within, mixed with what looked like blood, creating a pink concoction that filled the air with the stench of flesh and iron so much that Rebecca gagged, and almost tried to stand and flee, though the pain in her ankle returned with vengeance as she did so. She screamed and cried out in pain.

A scream and a cry came, muffled, from behind the wall. The oozing pulsed and gushed, and the orifice quivered and… stretched…

Rebecca screamed in horror as she realised what was happening, and began scrambling and limping as she tried to get away, not looking back as the cries grew louder, as the gushing sound grew thicker, as the squelching began…

She reached the bottom of the stairs as something slick and wet and heavy struck the ground with a resounding thud. Rebecca began trying to scramble up the stairs, half limping and half dragging herself, screaming for help as she heard wet footsteps begin to slowly pad along the concrete behind her. She reached the top of the stairs and emerged up behind the stage above as the footsteps began to creak up the wooden steps and knowing there was nothing else she could do, she turned slowly.

A voice she recognised but could not place whispered to her in the dark, “sister…”

Her torchlight fell upon the thing in the dark below as it climbed the steps after her.

Newborn, umbilical still attached, placenta dragging behind it, naked and covered in thick and oozing slime and mucus and blood, hairless, scarless, yet fully grown and adult, Rebecca stared back at her own newborn eyes, blinking in the torchlight.

“Sis… ter…”

Rebecca screamed, her lungs emptying themselves completely at the sight of the thing in the dark.

She never got the chance to fill them again…