by Ingrid Fry
We stood in silence staring at the illuminated numbers above the lift.
‘Shit! Quick, get out of here!’ I said, bolting around the corner to hide. The guys followed me, bewildered.
Ding. The lift doors opened. Silence. They closed.
‘What?’ the guys said.
‘There’s a camera in the lift.’
‘Oh, shit yeah,’ Jason said.
Ashley nodded. ‘Ah, yup.’
‘We’re screwed,’ I said. ‘The camera would’ve caught us going to level B5, along with everyone else—the hoods, Mike, the other two employees.’
‘Well, let’s take the stairs out,’ Jason suggested.
‘It doesn’t matter! Don’t you get it? The cameras will catch us once we leave the stairwell. And it doesn’t matter if we can make it out without being seen—they’ve got vision of us going in. The police are going to be all over us, especially after what happened at home.’
‘Maybe the camera’s not working,’ Ashley said. ‘Half the time they don’t, you know.’
‘So, what do we do?’ Jason asked.
‘Right,’ I said, thinking out loud. ‘They already know we’re in the hospital, with you being admitted an’ all. But even though the camera caught us going down in the lifts, they’ll have no real evidence implicating us with Mike’s disappearance. We returned, but the hoods and Mike didn’t. They could’ve left through a back door. All we have to do is formulate a good reason as to why Ashley, then me, went to Level B5, and why you came after us.’
‘Um, the locker?’ Jason said. ‘Would it be sterile on the inside?’
‘Shit!’ Ashley said. ‘The body bag’s in the locker and my writing’s on the tag. Plus, there’ll be blood in the office where Jason first shot Marlon.’
‘I forgot about that,’ I said. ‘And, I don’t think the locker would be sterile. Ashley, can you—’ But he was already gone, racing along the corridor to deal with the remaining evidence.
‘Let’s sit in the stairwell while we wait,’ Jason said.
Cupping my face in his hands, he fixed me with his laser beam gaze, dialed back to a soft level one. His thumbs brushed my lips, and he took my face to his, kissing me tenderly. Dialing up the passion, his kiss was deep, urgent and fraught.
He came up for air and whispered, ‘I thought I’d lost you.’ He kissed me again, and felt all over my body, as though to make sure I was really there. He sat me on his lap facing him. I wrapped my arms and legs around his body, and I kissed him back, my heart on fire.
The stairwell was cold and dark, but we were hot and alight. Jason grabbed my jeans and underwear, pulled them down, and pushed himself hard into me. He yanked my top out of the way, and his mouth sought my breasts.
Oh, my God.
This business of narrow escapes, close shaves, and death evasion did wonders for a man’s libido and a woman’s love life. I surrendered to the pleasure exploding in my body. This was way better than make up sex, because we hadn’t argued—just nearly lost our lives, was all.
‘Whoa! Hello! I leave you kids alone for five minutes.’
I felt Jason waving Ashley away.
I whispered to Jason, ‘Later, we’ve got to go.’
‘I can’t go anywhere yet.’
Ashley laughed. I extricated myself from Jason’s grasp and stood, holding up my wayward jeans.
Jason mock glared at Ashley. ‘Your timing’s absolute shit, mate.’
I thought it was pretty darn spot on. Place and time, Jace, place and time.’
‘You should talk, Ash. Pot kettle black, mate.’
Hot and flustered, I stood fanning myself with my free hand.
Ashley flashed me a grin. ‘Want me to hold your pants so you can fan yourself with both hands?’
‘Don’t let him anywhere near your pants,’ Jason said.
‘Did you fix everything?’ I asked Ashley.
‘Yep. All good. Got the tag, bag, found some bleach, gave everything a wipe, and Bob’s your uncle.’
‘All quiet?’
‘Like death. Now, you two have obviously formulated a plan of action whilst I was away?’
‘Umm …’
‘Lazy bloody loafers. I actually put some thought into it, and here’s how we play this. We take the bloody lift like nothing’s happened. All casual like, we go and have something to eat at the café. Jason checks out of the hospital, and then we all go to a hotel for the night.’
‘Terrific plan,’ Jason said sarcastically. ‘Mind snappingly brilliant. Must have been a real brain strain to come up with that one.’
Ashley looked hurt.
‘Don’t be mean,’ I said. ‘There’s actually not much else we can do. Let’s face it, we’ll most likely have to deal with the cops, so let’s look as innocent as we can. Ashley’s right.’
Ashley nodded his head, looking vindicated. He didn’t say anything, but his thoughts were in my mind: See, Jason, huh, huh, see? Not so stupid after all.
Ashley rubbed his chin with a weather-beaten hand. ‘We do need an explanation as to why we were down here in the first place, but.’
Jason stared at Ashley, and then at me. ‘I know. You’re having an affair with my best friend.’
‘Jason!’ I said. He held up his hand to cut me off.
‘Hear me out. I suspected something was wrong when Ashley, and then you, disappeared for a long time. I started searching and discovered both of you having it off in an office on Level B5. Ashley and I had a fight—explaining our state of dishevelment—and then we headed back up and checked out. We didn’t hear or see anyone or anything else. That’s it.’
Ashley nodded. ‘Sounds good to me.’
To my ears, Jason’s explanation sounded like an accusation, and it upset me.
Ashley seemed more than happy with the whole idea and said, ‘To make it more convincing, Mags could go back with me and—’ He stopped short when he saw the look on Jason’s face.
‘Yeah? What else would you like to do to make it more convincing, Ash?’
Ashley was upset. ‘What are you saying, Jace? Do you actually think something’s going on, because of the love bite? Then know it ain’t so. Maggie’s not my type. It’s why I quit our relationship ... um, sorry, no offence, Maggie.’
‘None taken. I think.’
Jason looked sceptical.
‘Come on, Jace, you know the type of sheila I like.’
‘Tall, blonde, skinny, big boobs with legs up to here?’ Jason suggested.
Ashley grinned. ‘That’s the one!’
My heart sank. ‘The stereotypical Barbie doll.’
Ashley gave me the thumbs up.
Jason seemed satisfied and backed off. He stood and held my hand. ‘Are we all good to go then?’
Ashley agreed, and so did I, though I didn’t feel good. If I wasn’t Ashley’s type, what was it we’d had? Our feelings were deep, so I’d thought. How could I have been so wrong? Well … he had broken it off. I was a fool.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ Jason said.
I was seriously going to die if I didn’t have food in the next five seconds. ‘Are we doing the café or not?’
‘Yeah, stuff it,’ Jason said. ‘I’m famished, and at this point, even canteen food sounds appealing.’
‘Should I come too?’ Ashley asked.
Jason paused. ‘Sure, why not. We can debrief and refine our story.’ He winked at Ashley. ‘Maybe we can change what happened here so we can still be friends.’[19]
Chapter 20: Moral Dilemma
It was late in the day, and the only thing on the menu at the hospital café was toasted ham and cheese sandwiches and coffee. The coffee was delicious and the sandwiches tasted extraordinary.
Ashley munched away on his. ‘How good are these? Food tastes way better when you’re starving, and I could eat the arse out of a low flying duck.’
Jason winced. Ashley could be as rough as guts at times.
‘Now, guys, you need to bring me up to speed wi
th what the hell’s going on,’ Ashley said. ‘What’ve you got yourselves into?’
I dug down deep and summoned the energy to talk. ‘Yes, of course. I’ll try, but we don’t really know what’s going on. And we haven’t got ourselves into anything. Something’s gotten into us ... or me anyway.’
‘Tell me what you know.’
‘It all started when I took Boo for a walk.’
Ashley nodded. ‘To clear your mind?’
‘Yeah, yeah, the usual, you know me. We stopped outside a house and I caught sight of a weird shadow in an upstairs window. There was a buzzing in my head, all the atoms in my body went haywire, and everything started to spin like I was on a merry-go-round. I must’ve blanked out for a second, but the next thing, Boo and I found ourselves a whole block away. I didn’t know how we’d got there.
‘My body was buzzing and my face burned like fire. Then, there was this tawny frog mouth always staring at us and ... and I ran home to Jason. Boo was freaked out the whole night with a massive hackle running along her back which wouldn’t go away ‘till morning—’ I stopped to sip my coffee. My hands trembled so much I could barely hold the cup.
Ashley looked at me in concern. ‘Crikey. Take a breather. Do you need to stop?’
‘No, I’m fine.’ I wanted to get it all out in one go so I could focus on eating. I so needed to eat. I took a breath, stared into my coffee cup, and went for it. ‘Anyways, the next night we returned to the house to check things out. The front door of the house was open, and Boo yanked free, raced into the house and disappeared. Our mobile phones wouldn’t work, and no one seemed to be home. Jason tried the neighbours with no luck, and I went into the house to find Boo.’
Ashley glared at Jason. ‘You let her go in the house alone?’
Jason glared back. ‘No, I was trying to find a neighbour. She entered of her own accord.’
Ashley rested his chin on his fist and gave me a look. I rolled my eyes at him.
‘Inside the house, everything was out of whack. Things were distorted—sound, movement, time, space, dimensions—the laws of physics had left the building. Jason came in the house to find me. He saw it too ... it wasn’t one of my ghosts or visions ... it was a shadow creature, a Dark Force, half man half demon, like a walking black hole. It came for us; we were trapped upstairs, and as it moved, things were being sucked into it, bugs and dust ... dust was the first thing to go.
‘To escape, we ran and found ourselves in a weird expanding and contracting room. Boo was there with a night light, that wasn’t a night light, but a floating crystal. The Dark Force creature came into the room, and we were going to be toast, but the crystal was blasting out light, fighting it off. We were trapped but Boo put her paw on the Crystal, and we disappeared from the room in a flash of light. We awoke back home, but couldn’t remember anything until much later.
‘In the meantime, we noticed the dust had disappeared from our house, and the shadows were inordinately black. We couldn’t remember anything, so didn’t twig about the danger. I tried to retrieve Boo’s ball from under a cabinet, and the Dark Force was there waiting for me. It was hideous, Ashley; the pain was excruciating. My body started to disintegrate as it held me in its grip. It was eating me. I was nearly dead when Jason found me, and then it got him too. Boo saved us. She came in with the crystal. She must’ve found it in the back yard, maybe she hid it there. Maybe it was the one from the first house; I don’t know. But the crystal saved us. It repelled the Dark Force, and healed our wounds, but I think it used all its energy in the process. It’s lifeless … you saw it.’
Ashley sat there looking stunned. He turned to Jason for confirmation. He nodded.
‘This is insane,’ Ashley said.
I rested my head in my hands to try and cope with my pounding head. Talking about what happened had brought it all back. I had to get it out, and fast.
‘It’s all true, Ashley. I lost half my face, head, arm and leg. Jason lost his arm, and other bits, and then we blacked out for a few days, and awoke in our garden fully healed with all our missing limbs grown back, which was good, and then I tried to reach out to Dad with my mind to try and find him, and something horrible possessed me and made me go crazy, and I tried to kill Boo and Jason, and a bit of the thing is still inside me so I can’t get angry, I mustn’t get angry, if I get angry it triggers, and I become a demon, it takes me over.
‘I’m a monster, a ticking fucking time bomb of a monster waiting to explode and take out anyone or anything in my way. That’s when you came in. It’s what happened and why Jason had to go to hospital, I tried to kill him.
‘And then there was the weird woman who came to tell us about Dad ... how he accidently brought a cockroach back from CERN, and how the roach had been affected by experiments at the Hadron Collider, giving it the ability to make people crazy, how he was attacked multiple times by psycho people under the influence of the cockroach, and how it had the ability to destroy people by generating a black hole, turning them into dust, and sucking everything not tied down into it. You saw it. You saw it happen in the morgue. Our contact with the crystal has changed us. We can regenerate. Jason is stronger, my psychic abilities are better, and Boo ... it’s done things to her. She seems to have the strongest connection with it.
‘I think the cockroach and the Dark Force are separate entities—they feel different, but they’re connected somehow, maybe working together. I don’t know, but I do know they want the crystal, and the crystal is connected to me, us, Boo, so the entities are after us because we have the crystal, but now the crystal is dead, so I don’t know why the hell they wouldn’t sense that and leave us the hell alone, and I don’t know how to get this dark matter atom out of me. I don’t think I can, and I’ll be forever contaminated unless I kill myself which may solve the problem. That’d do it, I reckon. I need to kill myself.’ I looked up from my coffee into the stunned faces of Ashley and Jason.
No one spoke.
The whirr of a nearby vending machine filled the area. It was especially annoying. It seemed to be the only sound in the room.
Whirr. Whirr. Whirr. Buzz. Whirr. Whirr. Whirr. Buzz.
The heat rose from my gut into my face. I stood and kicked back my chair. I was going to smash that machine to bits.
Jason gripped my arm. ‘Breathe. For fuck’s sake, Maggie. Breathe!’
Jason and Ashley took long, slow measured breaths and waved their hands in slow rhythmical movements, encouraging me to follow the pace of their breathing, like I was in labour or something. I was in labour; I was about to give birth to the monster.
Breathe.
In. Out. Slowly. In. Out. In. Out. Dolphins. Think dolphins.
Calmness returned.
Ashley’s eyes were wide with horror. ‘Holy Hell!’
‘You saw her face?’ Jason asked.
Ashley was pale. ‘Hell, yeah.’
I wiped the sweat from my brow with a serviette. ‘All up to speed now, Ashley?’
He looked at Jason, then back at me. ‘You’re kidding, right? This is candid camera stuff, a set up?’
I shook my head in the negative.
‘No joke. Not kidding,’ Jason said. ‘It’s the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the whole friggin’ mind blowing, horrific, unbelievable fucking truth.’ He directed his laser beam gaze right into Ashley’s brain.
Ashley snapped a plastic fork in half and jumped at the sound of it. ‘I believe you. Fuck me.’
‘Enough with the language,’ I said, ‘or there will be nothing to distinguish us from the bad guys.’
‘Humph,’ snorted Ashley. ‘Everything under control now? You okay, Maggie?’
‘As good as I can be for the moment, all things considered.’
Ashley had developed a permanent head shake. ‘Bloody hell.’
Jason lowered his voice to a whisper and put his face into serious mode. ‘Now, Ms. Maggie, what in God’s name did you think you were doing with the whole Marlon Brando, femme fatale thing?
’
Ashley wiped crumbs and butter off his mouth and wiggled his eyebrows. ‘Yeah! I was going to ask the same thing. You’re dead set nuts, Maggie.’
‘What did you think I was doing? Coming on to the guy? I was creating a well-crafted distraction. It was a Mexican standoff. Somebody had to do something. So, I did, and you guys just stood there staring, doing nothing. Fair dinkum unbelievable.’
‘Fair go,’ Ashley said. ‘I was about to kick his legs out from under him when you dropped your strides.’
‘I was going to kick the instrument trolley into him,’ Jason said. ‘He really did look like Marlon Brando, didn’t he?’
‘It was his weakness,’ I said. ‘He would’ve heard he resembled Brando over and over, and he felt like Brando. I knew it. I could perceive his fantasies, and mentioning the butter scene—his mind was captured. It totally distracted him from the job at hand. You saw his bloodied shirt. He was dying from the gunshot wound that happened in your tussle. He wanted to live out his fantasy before he died.’
‘Jesus, you played a risky game,’ Ashley said. ‘It could easily have gone pear-shaped. He could’ve taken us out, dragged you to the tearoom, buttered you up, and had you squealing like a pig.’
‘Ashley!’ Jason and I said simultaneously.
‘There was no tearoom, no fridge, no butter. I made it up,’ I said.
‘Still. No matter. Very dangerous.’
‘I’m glad you guys finally came to your senses and cottoned on. I thought you were both going to stand there and watch him take me out to the imaginary tearoom.’
Ashley grinned. ‘To be honest it was the long, slow bend forward that got me.’
Jason rolled his eyes at Ashley. ‘You’re a degenerate.’
‘I’m only human.’
‘I learned the move from the Maestro,’ I said.
‘Really? The Maestro?’ Ashley said. ‘That sounds about right.’
‘You know her?’ Jason and I said simultaneously.
‘Yeah, why? Shouldn’t I?’
‘How do you know her?’ I asked.
‘Your dad introduced me.’
‘When?’