The Lunatic Messiah

by Simon Cutting

  We didn't go north as I'd told Lucy of course, and instead, we go only as far as a hotel in King's Cross called the Valhalla. It's a run-down sort of place, with uneven steps leading up to a door that was once red, but is now chipped and faded. When we open the door, a fat man in a singlet looks over at us with complete disinterest.

  'We need a room,' says Evan.

  The man nods and wipes a greasy hand on his singlet before opening a book in front of him. On the counter is a black piece of plastic that says "Tony Shapiro - Manager". It seems a bit of a strange affectation when I notice that the sign on the wall behind him advertises rooms rates by the hour.

  'Number ten is free,' he says. 'How long do you want?'

  He looks at all three of us as he says this, and there is obviously some kind of bizarre idea in his head that we have an orgy planned.

  'We need the whole night,' Ada says, and he grins lasciviously.

  'Right. Let's say sixteen hours. I can do that for a hundred and twenty bucks.'

  Evan curses, but digs into his wallet. We could have stayed somewhere much nicer for that price, but it's too dangerous to go bargain hunting. Tony looks us over again, and then pauses on me. He frowns as he examines my features more closely and I frown back at him.

  'Do I know you?' he says.

  'I doubt it,' I reply.

  He continues to look at me, and I can almost hear the cogs in his clockwork brain ticking away as he tries to recall me. Eventually he just shrugs and checks his watch.

  'Right, it's five now, so you've got until nine tomorrow.'

  'Fine,' says Ada and she takes the key from him, heading up the stairs without waiting for us.

  Tony grins at Evan.

  'She's eager, huh?'

  'That's my wife you're talking about,' he says angrily before following her.

  'Hey, whatever you say, buddy! Everybody comes here with their wives.'

  Tony's watch is a gold Rolex and I lean in to look at it. It's exactly like the one that Harry gave me outside Ganesh's but when I look down at my own wrist I am not wearing a watch. Tony notices me admiring it and holds it up for me to see.

  'Nice, huh? That's real gold. Customer's appreciate a bit of class.'

  I don't answer him, but follow the couple up the stairs with a strange sense of foreboding.

  Ada is sitting on the bed, flicking idly through twenty five channels of shit, and Evan has gone to take a shower. Although she acknowledges me, she only seems to do so if I draw attention to myself. It's as if I'm still not entirely real to her, and they both seem to have taken my appearance incredibly calmly. Not one of them questioned for a second whether they should wait for me when they were fleeing, and neither of them have since asked me who I am or what exactly I'm doing here. I examine the scar on my hand again where the knife went in. I can see it now, the jagged shape of the blade entering and exiting, and the puckered skin on the back of my hand that's slightly raised. It doesn't look like I ever got stitches for it either, as it has healed very badly and there's no tell-tale train tracks. It doesn't explain the scar on my back however, or the one on my neck, but thinking of the guillotine I have a horrible suspicion of how that one occurred. I try not to think about it and instead focus on the bizarre stains that seem to cover one corner of the room. In front of the bathroom door there is a large dark brown patch and the walls near the door and inside the bathroom are also scarred by this horrible brownish tinge. Random splatter marks, distinct but faded, abound. I walk over to the nightstand, where what looks like a handprint in the same colour stains the wood, right next to a deep burn mark where somebody has put out a cigarette. Ada doesn't pay me much attention, apart from to glance over when I cough, but she is quickly distracted by the television again. Even the sheets are spotted with brown, so it looks as if they haven't been replaced in quite a few years. Evan walks through the open bathroom door where he has been having a shower, wearing a once-white towel around his waist. It too is stained, and it appears that it was probably used to clean up after whatever horrible accident occurred in this room.

  'There's no hot water left,' he says, removing his towel and throwing it onto the bed.

  'Evan, a bit of modesty,' I suggest, and he just turns and looks at me as he starts to pull on his boxer shorts.

  'You could have taken your own room,' he replies.

  I'm not sure that this is true at all. When we arrived, I tried to wander away from the two of them to check the road and make sure that nobody was following us, but it didn't seem to work. There wasn't anything physical stopping me from doing so, but there was something mental. A sort of block that made me incapable of straying too far away from them. The dream wants me to see what's going on. I wait until Evan is dressed and then he stretches himself out on the bed and throws his hands behind his head.

  'What are you watching?' he asks Ada.

  'It's a special about men who dress as women and the women who dress as men who love them,' she replies.

  'Yes,' I say. 'I'm sure they're all struggling to come to terms with their self-image, but don't you think there's something more important we could be doing?'

  They both look at me benignly, or bovinely. They look like my students. Like cows in a field, turning to watch as a truck drives past. I sit down in the chair and place my hands on the armrests, although I quickly take them off again when I find it sticky with mystery brownness.

  'Gavrilo just tried to kill you both. We've gotten away this time, but he's going to come back. He's not going to stop until at least Evan is dead.'

  'Me? Why me?' Evan whines.

  'I don't know why. But Grey ordered it and Gavrilo will do it.'

  Evan remains lying down, but Ada sits on the edge of the bed and stares at me.

  'Why kill just Evan? We're both working for him. Why not both of us?'

  'I'm sure he will kill both of you, but the order was just for Evan. It's Evan that Grey wants to be rid of.'

  'But...'

  'Wait a minute. How did you both get involved in this sort of thing anyway? What the hell are you doing transporting bio-weapons for?'

  They look at each other, and then shrug.

  'I dunno,' says Evan.

  'What do you mean you don't know?'

  'Well Gavrilo approached us in the train station one day and we just sort of agreed to do it.' Ada says.

  'Why did you agree?'

  She puts her hand to her forehead, trying to quell some sort of migraine.

  'I wish I knew the answer to that question but I honestly don't. Just a month ago I was a kindergarten teacher.'

  This is certainly news to me. Ada seems exactly the type of woman who would be a kindergarten teacher. I'm not exactly sure what kind of person an international bio-weapons smuggler should be, but I doubt that I've ever met one. Evan doesn't really seem the type either. He's far too cowardly and possibly a bit stupid.

  'What were you before all this?' I ask him, but he looks a bit embarrassed.

  He looks to Ada, who answers for him.

  'Evan was unemployed at the time. I was supporting him until he finished his arts degree, but there were several opportunities...'

  'Okay, so Evan was a dole bludger, and you were a kindergarten teacher. Now let me ask you this question. Don't you think it's a little bit strange that somebody would approach two people in a train station of that description and offer them a chance to be smugglers?'

  If either of them found it strange they showed no sign of it. Evan seemed particularly unconcerned by the concept.

  'I think it's a little strange that there's an old man sitting in our hotel room who appeared out of thin air and is asking us questions, but you don't hear me going on about it.'

  I sigh and get to my feet. It's difficult to be rational in such a surreal situation. I pace back and forth in front of them with my hands clasped behind my back in a suitably subdued style and then clear my throat once for effect. Their eyes follow me, largely because I'm blocking their view of the te
levision.

  'Consider this. You were not smugglers at all. You were in fact just drug mules. You were expendable and not part of the operation at all.'

  I'm disappointed by their reaction. A gasp would have been nice, but they both just nod in agreement, and look at each other to confirm that this is in fact exactly what they were. I raise a finger to silence them as I have another point to make.

  'Then consider this. The mule is a vehicle.'

  This seems to silence them, but only because they clearly have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about.

  'What does that mean?' Ada finally asks me, which is unfortunate because I have absolutely no idea what it means either.

  I was hoping that they could offer some sort of insight into this particular message but they seem as bewildered by it as I am. I decide to use a different tactic.

  'Tell me exactly how you met Gavrilo Yama.'

  Ada shrugs.

  'There's not much to tell. We were drunk, I can tell you that much.'

  'Well not that drunk,' argues Evan.

  'We'd just been out in the city celebrating because I'd been offered a permanent position at the Lindfield Institute of Early Schooling. That's just a fancy name for a kindergarten, hardly more than a day-care centre really, but before that I'd been working as a temp. The money was really good. It's where rich people send their children so they don't have to raise them themselves. Money had been getting pretty tight for a while there and Evan was having trouble finding a part-time job that fitted in with his classes.'

  I laugh and Evan glares at me. He knew as well as I did that he hadn't once even tried to find a job because that was the exact same excuse I used on Mary when she supported me as I went through Teacher's College. Ada seems unperturbed so I let her live on in blissful ignorance of her folly and she continues the story.

  'Anyway, we'd gone out and gotten really drunk on Oxford street, and we ended up having to get a train home from St James. I remember that Evan was absolutely falling over drunk because he'd been drinking Tequila Sunrises all night.'

  'I wasn't that drunk,' he argues, but she dismisses this with a wave of her hand.

  'Tequila Sunrises, huh?' I say.

  'They were two for one! It was happy hour.'

  'Anyway,' continues Ada with some annoyance, 'I was trying to get him into the station but he kept slipping on the stairs, and then when we got in there I couldn't even find the platform straight away, because I was pretty drunk myself. We were wandering back and forth but kept ending up next to this same newsagent somehow because every time I had to pick Evan up off the tiles I forgot which direction we'd come from.'

  'I wasn't that drunk!'

  'You were, sweet. You threw up when I finally got us to the platform. Remember?'

  Evan doesn't argue the point, but he clearly doesn't remember it either. When I was his age I had been much the same. I would drink until there was no point in drinking any more, but then of course I would drink some more anyway. It was something I grew out of the older I got. There seemed very little point spending half my life drinking so much that I couldn't remember it and the other half (the half that I could remember) feeling so bad that I 'd swear never to do it again. Most of my memories from that period of my life are hangovers, with only a few vague recollections of the fun that preceded them.

  'So Evan fell over again on the platform, and his head was just over the yellow line and a train was coming. It wasn't going to hit him or anything, but I tried to move him a bit or get him up or something when I saw her.'

  'Who did you see?'

  'Lucy. That little girl of his. The one who...'

  'The terrifying one?'

  Ada nods, and a chill runs up her spine that makes her head jerk slightly. A physical sensation seems to inhabit the very mention of Lucy's name. I can understand the feeling, and my hand tingles where she pressed her nail into my scar.

  'She said that her father wanted to speak to us and that we could make a lot of money. Gavrilo was sitting over on one of the benches watching us. Straight away I didn't like him. He had this look on his face that I just couldn't stand, but we went over anyway and he started telling us about Grey and what we would be doing, right there in front of everybody.'

  'Yeah,' Evan says. 'It was weird. He was talking about all this illegal stuff quite loudly and anybody could have been listening. At first I just thought he was crazy, but he gave us this briefcase and an address.'

  'A briefcase filled with money?'

  'No, a briefcase filled with custard. Of course filled with money! Twenty five thousand dollars it turned out to be.'

  'But why did you take it? I mean, Ada had just gotten her new job. You were going to be okay for money and this guy was clearly insane. Why didn't you just say no thanks and get out of there?'

  To my surprise, Ada reaches out and takes Evan's hand, and squeezes it. They both seem to be a little lost for words so I give them a moment. Ada finally speaks just when I think they don't have an answer to give.

  'It was Lucy. That... girl. She was just staring at us the whole time with this little smile on her face and I could feel myself, I don't know, slipping? As if she was drawing something out of me with those eyes of hers. Drawing out the will to resist. I didn't want to take it. I knew it was ridiculous but for some reason we both just agreed. It was like being hypnotised. It felt like a dream.'

  'Or a nightmare. They had us go to Beirut, Los Angeles, Cape Town and finally Delhi,' says Evan.

  'I know about Delhi. I was there.'

  They both look at me shocked.

  'You were there? Where were you? Were you sent to watch us?'

  I shrugged. It was a good question.

  'Apparently so, but I wasn't sent there by Grey. I don't know why I was there any better than I know why I'm here now. You two shouldn't even be talking to me,' I say as I wander back towards the chair. 'I mean, most people would be terrified by my mere presence here, or at the very least curious about where I came from, but you two seem totally calm about the whole thing.'

  They've both stopped listening. As soon as I moved away from in front of the television their eyes were drawn back to it. They're both now watching an infomercial about an exercise machine that lets you "melt those pounds away" but unless it's referring to melting away English currency in five easy payments then it's clearly a scam. I get up irritably and switch off the television and their attention focuses back on me again.

  'I saw you getting that catheter,' I say, and it has the desired effect.

  Evan winces at the memory, and I must say that I get a slightly unpleasant sensation in that area myself.

  'Why would you bring that up? I'm sure I still have a piece of it in there, actually, Ada, because the other day...'

  'Do you think Gavrilo will catch us?' Ada says nervously.

  'I don't know. It's best not to think about some things.'

  'Like catheters,' Evan says, squirming on the bed.

  'Just get some sleep. I'll be here when you wake up.'

  Evan looks at me oddly.

  'So do you sleep?'

  I nod.

  'I'm asleep right now, as far as I know. Probably having a seizure. My wife says they're becoming quite frequent. Get some rest.'

  They settle into bed unselfconsciously and Evan places his arm around Ada after a few minutes of fussing around, and then they both lie still. I turn off the light and reach into my pocket, hoping against hope to find a packet of Acobapoc in there. To my absolute delight I find the same one I currently have in real life. I can tell because the corner of the cardboard is ripped so, apparently, you can take it with you. I pull one out with my teeth and open the door quietly so as not to disturb them, but I fall back in surprise as a thin little hand comes through and grabs my wrist. Its grip is tight and it's located below a pair of eyes that sit above some teeth which in turn are located on the head of the body that's grasping me. That's exactly how my thought processes work as I see Lucy in the doorway, her
hand grasping mine and her eyes ablaze with malevolent joy. Her mouth is twisting with excitement and rage and her teeth are jostling for position to leap forth and bite me. She screams then, the words forming out of the horrible inhuman cacophony that emerges from her tiny throat.

  'I CAN SEE THROUGH YOUR LIES!'

  She releases me then and as she runs away from the door she seems to fade to mist before my eyes, mingling with the night air. It's silent again, and Evan and Ada are still sleeping, but Gavrilo's scout has done her job. The Furies know where we are.

  20