Bleeker Hill

by Russell Mardell

  Turtle was approaching Sullivan, a friendly hand up ready to move him away, but Sullivan beat it back instantly. Mia was frantic in Maddox’s grip, her legs kicking out wildly, sweeping past Sullivan.

  ‘Don’t get involved, Sullivan.’ Turtle was trying to move between them but Sullivan wouldn’t let him.

  ‘He’s already involved, isn’t that so killer?’

  ‘Let her go.’

  ‘Look at you, standing up to the big, bad bully. Your little letter-writing bitch would be positively gooey eyed right now wouldn’t she? Think she going to think her husband’s a hero, do you?’

  ‘Don’t push me, Maddox.’

  ‘There are no heroes left, killer.’

  ‘I’m no hero. I’m just pissed off.’

  ‘You think she’s at home counting the days until you return, I bet you think that don’t you?’

  ‘Don’t…’

  ‘Or perhaps you think she’s dead? Because I think she is. Because you know what? When we are done here, when I’ve put you on your arse, I think I might go search her out. Send her your love. What do you think?’

  The rage was instant and over powering, Sullivan felt it submerge him, soak him, and he seemed to be on Maddox before he even realised it himself. A fist slammed into the side of Maddox’s skull as a knee jerked up into his groin, and as Maddox recoiled, Mia took her chance and swung her head back into his face. The burly brute staggered back into the wall, one hand shooting to the pain breaking over his face, the other grabbing at the side, probing at Sullivan’s neck. Mia fell to the floor, landing gracefully on her haunches, and then she was up quickly, pushing off and running at speed down the right hand corridor, disappearing into a gloom that seemed to be pulsing out around them all.

  Turtle was at Sullivan, pulling his arms, trying to prise him off. Maddox was gaining hold now, bringing his huge size to bear, roughly grabbing at Sullivan, one hand at his neck as the other clubbed clumsily at his body. The rain of blows were hard and quick, and even after Turtle had wrestled Sullivan away, Maddox had one last parting shot to offer, a giant fist swooping through the air and landing just under Sullivan’s ribs. Sullivan fell as a horrid rasping wheeze escaped his throat, and as he fell he took Turtle with him, the stocky chef landing flat on top of him; the cherry on that particularly squashed cake. A few seconds later and Maddox was leaping over them both and beating a path after Mia, chasing her down, his loud and heavy footfall pounding through the corridor like a twenty-one-gun salute.

  Turtle and Sullivan clambered up and slumped against the wall.

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘Define okay, Turtle.’

  ‘Yeah, I know, I hear you.’

  There was a sharp clicking sound coming from the other corridor – once, twice – and then it stopped. They looked up quickly, their laboured breathing catching momentarily in their chests, and it was almost with surprise that Sullivan found they were looking across at Bergan. He was checking the bullets in Mia’s pistol, slamming the chamber closed then easing it out again, spinning it and then pushing it shut once more. It was him, unmistakably Bergan, but somehow what Sullivan saw there felt like an impression of the man. A gunslinger waiting down a duel on the barroom steps, that’s what he looked like to Sullivan, and with his great hands swamping the pistol, it seemed almost comical, as if he were playing with a child’s toy. It was his face that betrayed the image. Half turned to them, and just resting on the edge of the shadows in the left hand corridor, it was not just devoid of expression, but it seemed, of anything human at all. It was as if those corpse eyes had finally sucked the last signs of life from him. He looked grey, ashen, and his skin appeared to have creased and sagged, and as he looked across to them he seemed to be looking through them, choosing not to see them, and even as he spoke, the words seemed to be an offer, detached syllables put out there, waiting for someone to stumble by.

  ‘With me. Come on.’

  Turtle peeled away from the wall, breathing deeply and gently tapping his chest. ‘Yeah, Frank, it’s just…I’ve gotta…’

  ‘With me. Now. We have to secure this place.’ Bergan turned from them and began to wander slowly down the left hand side of the corridor, his words trailing behind him, waiting to be caught. ‘Don’t you want to be safe? We all want to be safe.’

  Turtle scrunched his face up to Sullivan who replied with a shrug.

  ‘That seem normal to you?’ Turtle whispered, nodding to Bergan who was now barely visible in the gloomy corridor. It took Turtle a moment to respond to Sullivan’s slowly developing smile. ‘Define normal, right? I hear ‘ya. I hear ‘ya.’ Turtle scuttled away, following Bergan into the corridor and then slowly disappearing from sight. ‘Hold up, Frank, I’m coming.’

  The pain from Maddox’s punch was stuck like indigestion just under his heart and Sullivan’s slow breathing was doing nothing to shift it. He straightened and stretched, his bones clicking and throbbing, their wailing articulating in his skull and a delicately blooming headache. He shuffled over to the doorway and then pulled up short. Kendrick was there again, leaning across the shaft of light, his body angled in the doorframe and he was flexing his small, and improbably neat hands, his garish watch poking out from under a sleeve and catching and reflecting the unforgiving glare of the room.

  ‘Sorry,’ Sullivan said looking over Kendrick’s shoulder, one blood streak just visible on the cold, white wall behind him. ‘What’s the matter?’ Stepping to the side he could just make out Davenport under Kendrick’s outstretched arm, he was sitting on the gurney, his legs swinging back and forth like a child waiting for his supper. His face was expressionless, staring absently at something across the room.

  ‘You let her escape. Why would you allow that?’

  ‘Maddox was roughing her up. Terrifying her. Why would you allow that?’

  Kendrick was stepping forward, his hand smoothing down the doorframe before dropping to his side, the watch sucked back under his sleeve. ‘Are you questioning me?’

  ‘She’s just a kid.’

  ‘Don’t ever question me.’

  ‘I wasn’t aware I was. I just got a line I don’t cross.’

  ‘No you don’t. You don’t have that luxury any more.’

  ‘I won’t see her hurt.’

  Kendrick leaned forward and spoke into Sullivan’s face. ‘Then don’t look.’ He stepped aside and shoved Sullivan into the room.

  Sitting in the blood pool, slumped in one corner, was an old man. In the palm of one hand was a scalpel, and along one exposed arm what appeared to be roughly scrawled letters. Beneath the letters the man’s wrist had been slashed.

  ‘Ellis Schaeffer,’ Kendrick said to Sullivan, extending an arm to the bloodied heap as if it were a formal introduction. ‘I would say Mia has one or two things to explain. Would you not agree, Mr Sullivan? Perhaps you’d be so good as to go help find her?’

  Sullivan tilted his head and slowly read the word scratched into Schaeffer’s arm, whispering it to himself before saying it again to the room.

  ‘Leave.’ He turned to the others, furrowing his brow. ‘Leave?’

  ‘Now,’ Kendrick cut in, holding an arm to the open doorway.

  Sullivan took his cue and slowly ambled from the room, Kendrick following to the doorway, watching him disappear, and then turning to Davenport and the expectant gaze he could feel at his back.

  ‘Not a word, Eddie,’ Kendrick said. ‘Don’t say a fucking word.’

  2

  Somehow it was easier for Sullivan in the oppressive gloom of the shelter. It was like a dream; a deep sunken unreality where he could hide from the horrors the waking day presented. His memories came with definition in the darkness. She was there in the darkness, they both were – his wife and his daughter – and they walked with him, sat with him and breathed with him. Moving through coffin like corridors, wading through the hanging, thick gloom, searching for that frightened girl, Mia, he suddenly felt a cool otherworldly calm hug around his body. It was an e
mpty dream that he could populate as he saw fit. It was skewed and shifting, but he held it for as long as he could, fighting away the thoughts of where they had been, and what he had seen.

  “Leave the light on,” she would say. “It’s not that I’m a baby any more, it’s just that there are things in the darkness. Bad things. It’s where they feel safe.” She had meant it. Believed it. That was always the dangerous thing…belief. Maybe it was just the young that had it nowadays. “I saw something in my cupboard. It spoke to me…”

  There was something off about where they now were – Bleeker Hill, that old story that held the stench of death from the crumpled pages of a history – it didn’t take a genius or a madman to finger the sensation. “It was where the bad people went,” his teacher at school had said. It was a scare story, a monument to the blurred line between good and evil. The line that was now impossible to see. He remembered old sepia photos in big old battered books, of convicts lined up before a self-appointed court in the great house that now lay in ruins. He was sure he could remember photos of them tied to the trees too. But perhaps, he tried to convince himself, that was merely his imagination, the corruption of a memory, blackened and bent by where he now stood. Whatever it was, whatever it had been and whatever explained the dream-like calm that now caressed him, there was definitely something wrong with this place, and Sullivan knew it. He had felt it as soon as they crested the hill and stood there looking down at the burnt carcass of the house. He knew the others had as well. Turtle, certainly, and surely Bergan too; the great expressionless giant had looked lost. He remembered what Turtle had said to him: “Stories, that’s all, just stories,” and the image of Schaeffer’s bloodied body swam up into his vision as if he were floating through his eyes. Then there was the naked blue body pinned to the tree with the look of frozen horror on his face, and also the body in the snow with the wound at its head. For the briefest moment the darkness in front of him seemed to turn, to mould over a shape, and then it broke away, hanging at the walls like blackened cobwebs.

  “Stories, that’s all, just stories.”

  He felt a chill run through him as he turned the next corner.

  It was all in the mind, that was how these things worked, that was what he told himself; the power of suggestion, the fear of the dark, the terror of the unknown. You could create horror from anything if you attached a history, a story. And what had he been told anyway? Nothing. Yes, they had killed people on Bleeker Hill in the dark old corners of time, but so what? With all that had happened in the most recent pages of history did such things even carry an echo any more? Then there were some missing workers, and was that so strange? People had died here in the past and the Wash had killed and maimed and destroyed people in the present, but did any of that really matter? There was hardly anywhere people hadn’t died these days. He remembered the first dead body he had seen, that had been a horrible sight; a maimed torso in the back of an old van, slumped over, the bloody pulp of a face squashed against the glass, looking out at the world beyond through wide, surprised eyes. There was a period after that where he would see them daily. He would see them on the news when that was still broadcasting, and in the blurred masses of the lawless that swept through the streets consuming all. He would see them in the flames of the buildings, and the fire of his dreams. Everywhere. He couldn’t remember the point where he became desensitized to the sight. Perhaps everyone had. Maybe that was the tipping point where everyone realised all hope was lost. At that understanding he fell back once more to the memory of that young kid in his house and in that moment everything connected, the images painted bright and brilliant and unavoidable, even if he closed his eyes – especially if he closed his eyes.

  He was coming in from the garden, through the kitchen, along the corridor adjoining the living room, and his wife was screaming upstairs. His daughter was huddled in one corner of the living room, crying, her face buried in her hands.

  “Why is Mummy screaming? Who is that man upstairs? Is it the man from the cupboard? Please tell me it’s not him! I didn’t mean to speak to him, I promise I didn’t!”

  Sullivan had gone straight for the gun. That wretched gun that his wife had bought. Bought? She said, “bought” but he had never believed her. She had found it, maybe plucked it straight from the hands of a corpse, she never said and he never pushed. She had been the one that demanded it. He had never wanted it, refused to allow it, was fearful of it, of what it meant to them. Was it giving in? Or maybe letting go? But at that moment he went straight to it like it were the most natural thing in the world. She had placed it on the bookshelf in the living room, high out of reach of their daughter. He found it immediately. No searching, there it was, falling straight into his sweaty grip. The living room door clattered open at that moment and there was his wife stumbling in. The kid was behind her, his pockets bulging with possessions; necklaces around his neck, at least five, and watches on his wrist. The kid was lunging towards him, pushing his wife away, his arms were out before him, reaching for Sullivan and his face was contorted by an effort he seemed to never have used before. But there was fear there too. He saw the gun, he reacted to the gun, and he tried to shove it away. They tilted over a chair; Sullivan cracked a knee against a table, there was more screaming, wailing, and then there was the gunshot. The full stop. The start of the next chapter. It was the loudest sound Sullivan had ever heard. He was staring down at the kid’s chest, the gaping bullet wound, and then he had fired again, then twice more. He had fired the gun empty and then slumped to his knees next to the kid’s body, next to that harsh, unforgiving stench of death. He had convinced himself that the gunshot was still echoing through the wound. He had, in one brief thought, imagined that the initial wound at the kid’s chest was like one of those seashells that when you hold them to your ear you can hear the sea. He told himself that if he were to hold his ear to that first wound he would hear the echo of the gunshot again. His wife was at his side now, holding on to his wrist above the gun, and he could feel the perfect smoothness of her hands and then her slender, toned arms as she hugged him and wouldn’t let go.

  I pulled her head away. I wasn’t going to let her see the blood and understand death. I refused to let her be lost to me.

  He heard his name whispered quietly in his ear. It pushed through his mind then disappeared. He was half in a dream, but reality was pulling at his body, picking up his thoughts like driftwood and washing them away.

  Sullivan was yanked out of his self-indulgent dream. He was swaying on his feet and shaking his head, standing in the centre of a half-lit corridor and looking at a great black shape in the middle of the floor, just up ahead of him. Around him he heard music, a gentle tinkling of notes, light and airy and played with the most wondrous heart. He turned a full circle in the corridor, looked up and down, but could not place the source of the noise. He moved to the wall to his right and pressed an ear close and then did the same to the left. The music neither grew in volume nor faded away. It was constant and it was everywhere, yet it was also just quiet enough to convince him it wasn’t there at all. Almost at that thought the music stopped and a chill ran down his back as if ice were falling from the nape of his neck.

  He walked forward a few more paces and the black shape in the middle of the corridor revealed itself to be a large chair, much like a dentist’s chair, with long armrests and a high back, supporting raised sections for the legs. At each armrest were metal cuffs bolted on at the ends and at the back of the chair there was another to be fastened around the neck. The chair looked unsteady, the metal base rusted and dented. He approached it, ran a hand over the armrests and the back and his hand came away sticky. He passed it and moved on, and then something stopped him, a sound, a small creaking. Then something else, some instinct or suspicion, made him look back. The chair had turned itself around, swivelled on the fragile looking base, and was now facing him again. He hadn’t noticed the writing on the wall when he first entered the corridor, his attention had been at
the chair and at the beautiful music, but now he saw the words and they seemed as big as he did, and he couldn’t believe they had been there before. Written in a deep, crimson colour, the colour of dried blood, THE PARTY LOVES YOU was scrawled along the left hand wall.

  3

  Maddox pounded along corridors and down staircases. He passed empty rooms, emptied rooms, his rifle up in front of him, his eyes growing accustomed to the drabness, seeing just enough, seeing what he wanted to see. From time to time he caught Mia’s footsteps up ahead and quickened his pace, then they would stop and silence would return. But not quite silence. There was something there, something underneath it. The lower he got in the building, the further into its core, a low rumbling noise seemed to grow from the floor, reverberating in patches up the walls. The building’s power source, its generator, he was sure of it, yet it sounded off, different, at once like a purring engine and then as ugly as the struggling death throes of breaking machinery.

  Stopping at the head of yet another staircase, Maddox plucked out a cigar, clamped it into his mouth and sparked it up, sucking the smoke in through quick puffs. He listened, and he waited. Turning first to the left hand side of the stairs he slowly craned over and looked down, then he did the same on the right and then returned to his stationary position at the top and swung the rifle into both hands and popped the magazine out. Three bullets were counted into a palm and then fed back. He sighed over the fat cigar, his breath breaking the smoke cloud, and rammed the magazine home.

  ‘You think you can hide from me sweetheart?’ he said into the darkness beneath him. ‘You think you can sneak away into the shadows and I’m not going to find you? You really have no idea who I am do you?’ He listened again for a moment, for a movement, but there was nothing. ‘One time, few years back, in the north of the old country, I stalked this girl for three days. Three whole days on her tail. Yeah. Three days without sleep. I tracked her across the whole city. She thought she could beat me, you see? She thought she could outdo me, her and her bastard of a husband.’ He laughed to himself as he leant on the recollection. ‘We did this job you see? A diamond haul it was, my biggest score, a big fat win for everyone. But what I didn’t know was they had no moral code. My partners had no code, Mia, neither of them. She started playing whore with me as we divided the haul, brazen little slut. Hands everywhere. Got her pinkies between my zip, got me ready, and got me thinking things I shouldn’t have been thinking. But it was a scam you see? A diversion. Her old man sneaks up on us whilst she’s doing her thing and he shoves a knife in my back. They left me for dead, Mia. How unfair, wouldn’t you say? They took the stash and left me on the floor with a knife between my shoulder blades and a raging hard on between my legs. No way for a man to go out, Mia.’