by Wayne Hill
The scene cuts out and Hector is once more back to the charnel house arrayed in front of him. He remembers how the riflemen looked before, when they were alive, and how they look now. “I just wanted to sit quietly and have my drink,” he says to the assembled anatomy. “Just look at you now. You all look ridiculous! All fucked up! You were all so sure of yourselves and now you’re just ...? Well, I’m not sure what you are now.” Hector points to an indistinct mound of offal. “This guy’s definitely a building I’ve seen before, some place.” He pauses and shakes his birdlike head wistfully. “You could have just got me another drink. It was: Oban; no ice; three drops of water. You were all completely irresponsible. Oh, well, maybe next time, then ... maybe. Look after yourselves —” here he points to the two cadavers he had labelled as the seaspider — “especially you! You have two bodies and one head now, so there’s definitely more to think about. Like, for instance: don’t fucking smash a stranger’s drink; don’t attack my friends; and, finally, don’t be rude to people you don’t know, because you never know who’s out there just waiting to turn you into a pile of intestines with a face. Understand? Yes? Good. I’ll be back later for the rest of your ribs...and ummm ...teeth; tips of fingers, maybe.” Before he leaves, he speaks again to the seaspider and points to the two piles, one of ribs one of limbs. “And you, don’t you take any shit from these two jokers — you look fantastic!”
Everyone quietens when Hector, dripping blood and bone fragments — a length of intestine, still leaking shit, trailing on one of his feet — pushes through the saloon doors. He walks to the bar, trailing a strong metallic odour — the inner stench familiar only to huntsmen and butchers — and sits down. The smell is cloying, and it sets some patrons retching again.
A few moments later, Jonesy reappears behind the bar, having only just finished treating Tommy in Marie-Ann’s old room. Looking from Hector to his uncomfortable clientele, Jonesy thinks, Just in time to diffuse this bomb. Putting out fires everywhere, me. This is all Bowden’s fault. The fucker is always fuckin’ fishing!
“Right!” he shouts to the pub. “Everyone get back to what they were blethering over —” He reconsiders. “Actually, fuck it! Time, people! Everyone back to their homes! We’re closed for the night! Hector and I have a few things to work through! Yeah — that’s right — everyone fuck off! See you tomorrow, around one pee em!”
Patrons scramble for the exit, as if they had been waiting for permission to leave. Most hurry out unsteadily, some are carried out, unconscious. One or two skid-over in pools of vomit or the trail of gore and shit tramped in by Hector.
Jonesy pours a double Oban over ice for Hector, ensuring to carefully drip in three drops of water. “I had those guys right where I wanted them, Hector, but your help was much appreciated. One of those shits shot your drink, eh?” Just as carefully, Jonesy appraises Hector, and slides him his scotch. “You alright, fella?”
Hector shrugs and sips on the single malt. Jonesy has no idea how Hector drinks in that pointy mask, the technology is beyond him. The glass tips, the whisky goes up to the mask and then disappears. Not a drop lost. “I've just ripped four people apart, Jonesy. I used the head of one of them like it was a bowling ball, and then crushed a couple of skulls together like coconuts.”
“Yeah, I know. I seen all that. What were you doing with all that sawing business?” asks Jonesy, his curiosity too great to be assuaged without an answer.
“I cut off some of their limbs,” Hector simply says, as if that answered everything.
“Riiight —” Jonesy says grabbing the bottle of Oban and pouring himself a large glass. It’s like pulling teeth, with Hector, sometimes. “Were you thinking of using them for a bit of shark bait for trolling?”
“That’s quite a good idea, but no,” says Hector. “I was going to bury a leg or two out there, near Hendricht’s spud patch. Put them in a shallow grave and then use the maggots for fishing.”
“And the rest ...” prompts Jonesy.
“Sculpture.”
“Sculpture? Lord have mercy! What of?” asks Jonesy wiping beads of flop sweat from his wrinkled brow with the back of his hand. “They’re human limbs, man! Who the fuck would want to look at a human limb sculpture?” Talking to Hector was like juggling chainsaws whilst naked tightrope walking ... on razor wire.
“Me. I would,” says Hector, sipping at his drink, contemplating. “I wanted to make the Arc de Triomphe, or Cathedral Notre-Dame de Paris, they both remind me of severed bodies. I moved both during my Cruster days. They were fairly hard to shift. I thought we would have the least trouble with the Arc De Triomphe, and we did. We took them out there into the meteor belt. It’s now an historic entrance to an awe-inspiring dome. It was an art colony. Filled with dancing girls and acrobats, painters and sculptors. I told them that I was an artist, too. They laughed at me. It pissed me off, at the time. I may have lost my temper. I used to have a very bad temper.”
Jonesy baulked. Used to have a bad temper? Used to? Fuckssake! How much worse could he get? Keeping his dangerous thoughts to himself, he continues in his role as barkeep-psychiatrist. “And how do you feel about it now?”
Hector just shrugs.
“Just out of interest, Hector, whenever you ever feel like you’re not ... right ... what do you do?”
“I take myself off for a walk in the ocean”.
“Good, good. Just so long as you feel alright now, though. Good.”
“I don't feel a thing.”
“You do know what I mean, don’t you Hector?” Jonesy stares right into the glass windows that are Hector’s eyes. He stares for a long time, unwavering, until Hector finds something in Jonesy’s look, something he can recognise as humanity, as friendship.
“I'm trying. I go further down the rabbit hole each day. There’s not much of the real me left, if I’m honest, Jonesy. Not now.” Hector says, looking at the amber liquid in his glass but not drinking.
“How do you see all this ending, Hector?” asks Jonesy. “What’s the best-case scenario for someone like you? What you did out there, to those men — and I know they deserved every bit of it — it was a hell of a thing.” He stares into Hector’s visor plate again. “I know there’s a human still in there, somewhere. Hector, you’re still in there, man. I feel it. I know it. You just hold on in there. We need men like you — although there’s only one of you!” Jonesy pours himself another drink and makes Hector another, in a new glass (to mellow on the bar while he finishes his last one), talking as he does so. “I'm thankful for what you did. I am. I remember how we found you, trapped under that boulder. And we, your friends, all helped you get better, didn’t we?”
“Ah, I see,” Hector says, “you want me to move on.”
“No! No, no, no. Don’t you fuckin’ think that of me!” says Jonesy, slamming down his drink and vehemently jabbing a finger under Hector’s — for want of a better word — nose. “You’re welcome here, man. As long as you want. Everyone, that knows you, loves you, Hector. No, we are just a bit ... um, how can I put it? ... a bit concerned for you. Most days, you just sit here, not saying a word to anyone. Some people — those who don’t know you like I do — think you’re going to eat them, for fuck’s sake!” Jonesy — his grain-spirit supplemented Irish temper starting to ebb — notices his finger still jutting towards Hector’s immobile head. Aghast, he whips it away. Even friends should not cross certain boundaries, and every person’s boundaries were in different places. Making friends was about discovering the extent of those lines; keeping friends was about staying the right side of them. “Look,” he says, “maybe you need a hobby ... besides corpse sculpting, I mean.”
“I’ll tell you what, Jonesy,” says Hector, his electronic crackle, echoing in the empty bar. “If I start to lose the plot, if I kill someone I shouldn’t ...then, well... I give you — and only you — permission to kill me.”
“You’re a Cruster, Hector. You’re indestructible. Nobody knows how to kill you.”
Hect
or shrugs and sips a little more scotch.
“You don’t even know how to kill yourself ... do you?” asks Jonesy, genuinely interested.
Hector stares ahead, perhaps looking at himself in the bar mirror — lost in its reflective depths like many before him. The silence stretches out uncomfortably before he answers. “I thought drowning at first. But, as I breathe the water in, the suit filters it out. I tried blowing myself up a couple of times. We set explosive charges when we shift most of the buildings that we relocate. One time we had set charges deep down below Himeji Castle — it ended up on Ganymede, as the entrance to a dome there — and I put my head over the explosives. That didn’t work, either. I just spent two dull days buried under ground, before my team dug me out.”
Jonesy looks at the blood-soaked Cruster, as he thumbs tobacco into his pipe. He takes a few sips of his Oban before saying, “Well, we have a problem, then, Hector. Because, although I do like you — as I said before, we all do — you’re a fuckin’ ticking time-bomb. You are a psychopathic, indestructible killing machine. Which is fine, I don’t mind that at all. It’s just that maybe, sometimes, perhaps, you take it too far. That’s all I’m saying. What do you think?”
Hector shrugs.
Jonesy sighs. He bends over and rattles around under the bar before emerging and setting a large blackboard face-down in front of Hector. Grabbing several big boxes of matches, he empties them all out on the board. “Here,” he says, pointing at the mound of matches, “show me what a building looks like. What about Jefferson’s Monticello?”
Hector cocks his head at the matches, looking even more like an inquisitive raven. He sets aside his nearly finished drink and picks up a match. He stares at it for a long time. Then slowly, deliberately, he sweeps the board of matches and begins cutting match heads off and gluing them together using his magic suit with assured, precise motions. Satisfied, Jonesy smiles and leaves Hector to it. After all, he thinks, the beer lines don’t clean themselves, do they? The lazy fuckers.
Less than an hour later he comes up out of the cellar to find Hector quietly putting the finishing touches to a beautiful representation of Neo-classical architecture.
“Grand, Hector,” Jonesy says, marvelling at the intricate match-building. “That’s just grand. Nothing at all like a corpse, now, is it? But it is just perfect.”
“I keep them all with me — every single one. Every stone or plinth, every window frame, every door. I visit them in my rest. The great domed cathedrals of Italy, the cut stones of York Minster, and the smaller ones, too. I moved St. Wallburg to Mars. I set the Las Lajas Shrine on Phobos. I know them from the sewer systems to the spires. I spent a week just wandering around La Sangrada Familia, you know. Gaudi was a genius. Did you know he died admiring it? Got run over by a vehicle when he was backing away from it, taking in its form. Buildings have souls. They are designs of the heart and mind realised in three dimensions. They are a glimpse of a bygone time. A time lost to the tides of change and entropy. A good Cruster knows this. It was an honour to have done the job for as long as I did.”
“I don’t know this Gaudi,” muses Jonesy, leaning against the bar, using the back of his arm to wipe the sheen of sweat away from his brow, and toking on his pipe. “I’ve seen images of the building, though. I never knew all the work that went into getting those buildings and bridges up to the biodomes. It’s fascinating.”
Hector nods, still looking at his match-building. “I could always work out the safest way of moving any building or bridge, without even seeing them. All I needed was a brief description and I knew the monument, knew the logistics of the operation, and got on with the job. I felt at peace being down there. Away from people; away from everything. Maybe the silence helped me to recall a distant memory, half forgotten. A scene from my old life, and a feeling of love.”
“So, you can love, then?” jokes Jonesy, smiling his toothless grin — his pipe dancing on his puckered lips as he speaks.
“I felt ...something. It’s more a memory of how it felt. A partially remembered dream, blurring at the edges, floating.”
“Floating?”
“Well, maybe not floating,” Hector says, picking up his newer drink. “More like submerged, and slow moving. Like an angler fish, deep in the ocean. With the tiny lantern lure shining in front of his huge fangs. Smaller fish find it. The light, that is. Get eaten. The clever ones just admire the light from distance. They look at it for what it is: both attraction and death. The unfortunate ones are those that never see the light.” Hector stares into his new scotch and takes a large swig.
“What’s the most dangerous, fucked up mission you had, Hector, running with the Crusters?”
“Every single one,” says Hector, downing the rest of his Oban.
“Go on, you old pike! Spill it! What the fuck happened?” asks Jonesy laughing.
“What’s that up there, Jonesy? The bottle with the shells on?” says Hector, looking to sample another of Jonesy’s finest whiskys.
“You know damn well what that is!”
Hector shrugs.
“There isn’t much left, you miserable gorecrow!” says Jonesy in mock annoyance. “Go on, then seeing as it’s you.” Jonesy climbs up a stool and, wavering slightly, on tiptoes, pulls the shell-encrusted bottle down.
“The Heydar Aliyev Center,” Hector says, watching Jonesy share out the remaining scotch into two lowball glasses. “Baku area. The sea was swarming with 50ft long sharks. White ones. Seven of my friends were lost. They were taken down and never seen again.”
“Fuck! I fuckin’ hate sharks,” spits Jonesy.
“The White House had monster squids living in it. They ingested three of my team before they fled down into the abyssal depths. It’s no fun being indestructible sometimes.”
“What happened to them?”
“Dunno. Maybe in the guts of a sperm whale? Or just lodged under a rock, someplace.”
“Didn’t you have any tracking equipment, so you could — you know — find out?”
“All Crusters have built-in trackers. I’m sure I could find them.”
“Well, why don’t you?”
“For the same reason nobody has come to get me off this island.”
“What? If you need them, you know where to find them?”
Hector shrugs.
“You’re one cold son-of-a-bitch, Hector’ says Jonesy, shaking his head.
“I know,” says Hector. “I was a fucker even before they glued me into this thing and sent me to work the bottom of the ocean. Now I’m pulling people’s heads off and playing with their organs.”
“Another drink?” smiles Jonesy, wiggling a bottle of bourbon.
Hector shrugs again. “It can’t hurt.”
“Well, it can’t hurt you.”
“You’ve no idea,” Hector says, sliding the glass over to his friend.
UNFORTUNATELY FOR TOMMY Salem, on that fateful night with the riflemen, Jonesy had forgotten to put The White Shite (as he so colourfully called it) onto Tommy’s wound. His bullet hole caught a nasty infection and his right-hand had to be amputated. Jonesy felt bad for almost a full day, afterwards. He nurses Tommy back to health and gives him a room at O’Shea’s for life. (“Yer never fuckin’ out of here, anyway!”) Tommy is absent from the hectic social life of the pub and the Lanes for the next few months. The patrons occasionally notice him drifting down from Marie-Ann’s old room and out the back door to the food parlour, where the gifted cook of O’Shea’s — a very portly man named Toad — keeps a prize selection of dried meats and fresh vegetables. Tommy goes past the food and past the graveyard to an old granite stone slab bunker. The bunker had been built many millennia back by the Guardians, as a granary for the prisoners. Tommy had been going out there more frequently, and this had been noticed by many of the usual bar dwellers. They all witnessed the sullen secretive demeanour, but no one confronted him. Perhaps they were wary of his temper. Perhaps they knew how fresh his loss was and wanted to give him his spac
e.
One day Jonesy joins Tommy down in the bunker at the bottom of the graveyard, and Tommy makes a Request. He wants Jonesy to chop off what is remaining of his right arm.
This behaviour is not uncommon in victims of the Dionysus virus, although Jonesy had never seen the attraction himself. Sometimes they started to hate certain appendages, and, in extreme cases, Jonesy had witnessed many cutting at their arms, or noses or feet. He once saw a woman take a bowie knife and cut out a large slab-like orange segment from her upper arm and stuff it in her mouth like a gum shield.
To witness Tommy going through this mental torture is challenging for the man, despite Jonesy having the empathy of a brick. He did feel terrible for the boy, though. Tommy reminds him of a memory he had long forgotten. Something about honour? No, that isn’t it. It’s less white than that. His brain swims in a haze of spirits and foggy recollections but refocuses when he notices Tommy talking to him.
“I need your help, Jonesy. Will you do it or not? Do I really have to go and ask Toad?”
“What are you on about, Tommy? You’re going funny on me, boy, I can tell.”
“Tommy Salem’s gone, Jonesy. I am Splinter Salem. This is me surviving. Tommy was too weak.”
Tommy offers Jonesy the machete in the cold, dimly lit bunker. Jonesy takes it only because he trusts it in his hand rather than that of an unstable youngster.
“Listen, Tommy,” says Jonesy, not unkindly. “I know you’ve had a tough time, but everyone loses the things they love in the end. And, whether it’s the woman on your arm, or your arm itself, you must get on with life, son. You’ve just got to wise up! You can’t spend the rest of whatever life you have down here in this stone tomb, calling yourself a fuckin’ skelf. Am I getting through to you, sunshine? Take me, for example. I've had nothing all my life. There have been women, sure. They come and they go, and they make you feel worthless — but that's just fuckin’ life, kid! We all go through it, at your age. And losing your first love is terrible — the first cut really is the deepest. But you get tougher. And scar tissue stops future cuts going as deep. It’s shite being young and nothing seems to go right for you, no matter how hard you punch. Sometimes it’s best to be like that huge fuckin’ tree outside. He bends with the breeze; he doesn’t resist it. And he never breaks. All those that do come to you in search of war, murder them with words and wait until they hit you first. Then you win because you are in the right. You can’t go around smacking people you don't know, Tommy. Because that means I just have to go and kill them. Or get Bowden or Hector to do it for me. I don’t have a problem with that ...it’s just... I don’t want to be that person anymore! Just like you don’t want to be Tommy Boy anymore. Is any of this reaching you? You seem confused.”