Free The Immaculate by Mark Morris Page B

not, look at them too closely. He could hear a clock in the room, a slow sonorous ticking. He pulled out one of the unoccupied chairs with a dull scrape and sat down.
    As soon as he did so he realised that the table and chairs were much larger than they had appeared to be. The top of the table came to his chest, and though he stretched he could not quite touch the floor with his feet. He stared at his hands, not daring to look at his fellow diners. For, indeed, they
were
dining; Jack could hear the chewing and swallowing sounds they made, the smacking they made with their lips, the slurping and sucking and grunting that was more porcine than human.
    And then one of them spoke to him, and Jack almost screamed with the shock of it.
Look at me,
the voice said. There was a threat in there, a dark undertone of menace. Jack did not want to look, but he knew that if he disobeyed, something very, very bad, something indescribably awful, would happen to him. He knew this because it had happened to him before . . . and would undoubtedly happen again.
    And so he looked. He raised his head and he turned it in the direction of that terrible voice. The first thing he saw was the mouth—the slobbery lips, the blocky grey teeth and black gleaming tongue. There was food in the mouth, stringy and wet with juices. It was being mashed by the teeth; morsels of it, hanging over the lips like tiny eels, were sucked remorselessly into the maw. The face was huge and rubbery, misshapen as a caricature. Jack saw a prickly beard, a huge nose bulbous as a pear, a ridged slab of brow and wiry eyebrows. The eyes were mean and bulging, the irises completely black. The instant he looked into that face, Jack was hit by two sudden and shocking revelations.
    This monster was his father.
    His father was the ogre from his book.
    Jack was astounded that he had never realised this before, though now that he had it made perfect and terrible sense. He looked down at his lap, upon which now rested the book in question. It was entitled
The Bumper Book of Fairy Tales,
and the cover depicted a princess in a ball gown and tiara kneeling beside a stream, apparently talking to a frog on a lily pad. Jack opened the book, turned the pages until he found the story he was looking for:
Jack and the Beanstalk.
He turned to the page that he knew had a picture of the ogre crouched malevolently over a pile of gold coins, but upon reaching that page he was shocked to discover there was only a black rectangular box instead of an illustration. Once again Jack looked up at the ogre, his father. He saw those black bulging eyes glaring down at him and knew he was in terrible, terrible trouble. The ogre’s lips flapped and writhed.
Look at your mother,
it said.
Look what you’ve done to her, you little shit.
Jack turned his head to look at the table’s other occupant.
    He saw a woman with white-blue skin and black hair. This was his mother, the way Jack always thought of her. Her face was calm and still, her eyes closed. She wore a white gown that seemed to billow gently in some breeze that Jack could not feel. Her arms were held slightly out from her body, palms up; the image was somehow saintly. All that spoiled the aura of peace were the growing bloodstains on the bottom half of the robe, bloodstains that started as coins of red, and quickly expanded to the size of plates, and then coalesced into a single crimson mass, spreading and covering the white cloth.
    Jack saw blood running down the smooth white flesh of his mother’s legs and wondered how, if she was sitting behind a table, this could be so. Then he realised she was no longer sitting; she was rising like an angel into the air. She rose above the table and hovered there for a moment. Blood dripped from her robe; Jack heard the insignificant
pat . . . pat . . .
sound of it striking the wooden tabletop. Slowly, she opened her eyes, and Jack saw that the eyeballs were completely white—and even though they