Blood On Borrowed Wings: A Dark Fantasy Thriller

by Darren Stapleton

  I avoided catching any disturbing glimpses of myself in the mirror, disrobed and started the water running in the bath.

  I checked out my bumps and bruises. My arm hurt, but it was a deep-seated, background pain that abated with a few flexes and bends of the muscle. A couple of my knuckles were an angry purple and felt too tight when I clenched my fist. There was a small, dark, circular bruise from the mosquito sting of the syringe in my leg and the usual plethora of small niggles and pains extra-physical bouts usually bring on. I was in remarkably good shape considering the last couple of days’ events.

  I had definitely been in worse.

  ‘I’ve set you some clean towels and a robe outside the door,’ said Pan through the white, glossy wood. ‘You should burn your clothes, or failing that, I can wash them for you now if you toss them out.’

  I opened the door and passed them out.

  Pan looked down, ‘What about your underwear?’

  ‘That I will burn,’ I said.

  She handed me the towel and robe and closed the door.

  Bright strip lighting careened off the tiles and gloss and left no room for shadows or introspection. I turned it off and allowed the low light of late afternoon to filter in through the high frosted window. I opened it to allow fresh air on my naked skin and it felt like a shower in itself. Steam from the bath had covered the window in condensation and rivulets courted then married on their journey south to the lake on the sill at the river’s end.

  I turned off the tap, tested the water with an intrepid toe, winced and then decided too hot was just right. I lowered myself over the course of a century, quiet ooh’s and aah’s accompanied my weary descent and immersion. The hot water boiled my blood and sent a vital communication of warmth to my tired aching muscles and sagging skin. Impossibly I felt even more tired, my eyelids chafed and scratched across the pocked lunar surface of my eyes. A cool breeze occasionally crept in through the window, a welcome interloper, and the contrast on my wet steaming skin was sweet, delicious, like drinking iced water from a hot cup.

  I sank further down into the water and decided that this must be what dying was like: the pure white, the sensations, the immersion, the sighing of your own physiology as it relinquished to a temperate oblivion.

  The losing of yourself.

  I slipped entirely under the water, closed my eyes and held my breath.

  My aches and pains dissipated, tried to fade away.

  But the feeling of unease stayed, sank with me.

  It settled undiminished, at the bludgeoned core of my mind to the underwater soundtrack of my lub-dub heart.

  *

  I awoke, inhaling and spluttering bathwater, uncertain of how long I had been asleep, though the water was still warm. I clambered from the bath and dried myself briskly with the plush towel. I felt worse. Like the brief sojourn into slumber had offered me a sniff of the drug I really needed and it now tortured my body with the racks and convulsions of wanting and withdrawal. Gravity had a much more serious claim to my body, it exerted its downward force strenuously, pulling my limbs at their sockets, exerting its full force on the lead weights that were my hands and feet, pulling down the roller-blinds of my eyelids. My autonomous movements were now physically exacting. It was an effort to lift an arm, to shuffle a leg, to pull myself into the robe.

  It was an effort to blink.

  I shambled and lurched back along Pan’s hall. The stained glass was dull; the sun had escaped the day. As I passed the kitchen, now at my right, I smelled the soapy wet aroma of clean laundry. My clothes were drying, draped across the back of one of the pews, the wood was darker in places where the water had dripped and pooled. It would take a while before they would be dry.

  I entered the main living area, lit subtly by the half-light of two strategically placed lamps, I was glad I did not have to waste energy on squinting. Pan was seated in an impossibly big, easy chair, wearing a robe identical to mine. Her legs were tucked under her and she had an empty tumbler cupped in both hands, like she still didn’t want to spill whatever had once been inside.

  ‘Better?’

  ‘Yes. Thanks.’

  ‘Did you let the water out?’

  ‘I think so.’

  She sighed and started the considerable task of rising from her chair.

  She was tired too.

  ‘Your clothes are drying in the kitchen and your whisky’s on that table there.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  I walked over and picked up my drink. The coaster tried to come with it, so I held it to the table as I lifted the glass. It left a wet ring.

  The ice had already melted and thinned the colour but not the effect of the whisky. I drank deeply. It went down cool and smooth, like a new water source pushing and piling its way over barren rocks and gravel to forge a new mountain stream through the scratchy gulley of my throat.

  ‘There’s more in the kitchen if you like. Ice too. Don’t forget to use a coaster. I’m off to take the plunge. See you next year.’

  She spoke in a staccato, sentences falling over themselves in a machine gun jumble. Or maybe that is how I was hearing it.

  ‘Thanks.’

  She left the room, her bare feet slapped along the hall floor.

  I sat down, fell into a comfortable easy chair.

  I felt like we were an engaged couple and our conversations were full of the banalities of everyday chores and life: the washing, the bathwater, the coaster.

  The matching robes.

  I even matched the décor.

  The easy chair became easier and I sank further into the enveloping cushions.

  As if to reinforce the illusion of our marital status, Pan admonished me about leaving my underwear ‘all over’ the bathroom and informing me that I had not drained the bath of its silty contents after all. Though her voice was powerful enough to drift the length of the corridor and through the two closed doors between us, it seemed as if she were shouting off the edge of Nimbus itself, that she was an aeronautical mile away and her voice nothing but a thin feather cast onto the breeze.

  *

  The breeze teased the child’s unkempt fringe into motion as he chopped wood. He rested his hatchet down to swipe the hair away from his forehead and eyes then picked it up to continue. He chopped. A log split and tumbled, dousing the dry forest floor in viscous sap. Pine needles rustled as the cut logs rolled then came to rest. He retrieved them, dropped them onto a pile and placed another log onto the stump. He raised the hatchet and chopped again, the sound of his keened blade against the stump base echoed back off the pine trees encircling the small clearing. It sounded like the report of someone’s bones cracking.

  That a child was working here was not odd. Many children were put to trade in the bustling cities and markets, but few were found out in the country, and fewer still in this climate of fighting and uncertainty between the Blackwings and Slayers. The unpopulated areas of Nimbus were battlegrounds, the skies above them where the fights took place. Farming and hands-on, labour-intensive work happened the length and breadth of Nimbus: tilling soil, digging and planting. In some cases children worked the land, though that was frowned upon, not as a practice but whenever a dead child’s bloated shadowy corpse made the news again.

  The child looked like one of those unnamed Lowland faces now: grubby, weather worn and far too young to be proficient at such laborious occupation, especially on Nimbus. The dirt on him had accrued in layers, forming an impermeable barrier that commonplace soap and water would have no hope of penetrating.

  Or maybe it was there as a defence to keep his youth, his promise, his innocence sealed in.

  One of the uncut logs tumbled off the pile and stopped a couple of yards from my feet. He smiled at me then looked at the log, a non-verbal request for me to return it. I smiled back, a non-verbal acceptance and stooped to pick it up. He did not care about our uniform, the size of our patrol or that ten Slayers were stomping right through the middle of his backyard. It had been well
publicised by Velena Rose that, following the recent assassination attempt, Slayer presence would be stepped up on Nimbus. People, winged or otherwise, were aware of the fierce, uncompromising training and formidable reputation of the Vanguard Slayers, yet here was a child of no more than eight years old facing down the entire unit and smiling.

  Something was not right.

  He removed his red bandana, made a play to wipe away the sweat on his brow, only he didn’t. He held it in the air and waved it.

  A signal.

  Still smiling.

  Then I heard them.

  All hell was not let loose, it was contained, magnified, amplified in the small forest copse, surrounded by trees and woodland thicket.

  *

  I opened my eyes for a brief instant and was in a strange room, a thick cotton robe draped around me, the taste of a whisky going bitter and dark on my tongue. I was too warm, but too warm was good. I hunched further down into the chair and fell deeper, the child’s smile drifted back up to me as I unwillingly descended, through the fugue of exhaustion into sleep. His smile...

  *

  His smile.

  Staring at his smile as he waved the bandana.

  I shouted to the other Slayers, but my voice disappeared into molasses. I don’t even know if the sound emerged or if the intention was all that revealed itself; the sound dying in my throat. I watched the boy raise his hatchet and throw it at the back of my brother, leading the troop.

  I watched my brother fall.

  Blackwings fell out of the canopy then. They dropped like autumn leaves, their descent dark, random. Inevitable. Their feathers looked like shadows falling upon us, blotting out the sun as they swooped down. The resonating twang of bowstrings and bolts slamming into my brethren was their prologue; the sound of my friends hitting the floor their denouement. We were greatly outnumbered but we fought back fiercely. I can remember Griffon removing half a black feathered wing with his cutting wire; saw Gull take two down with his bow then fall as he was clubbed. The crack of his skull rang out and carried further into the surroundings than any battle cry or exclamation ever would. I watched as my brother tried to stand, looked down at a bolt sticking out from my thigh and then up to see a Blackwing angling his head forward and falling from the canopy down towards me. He was screaming like a banshee. Hate curled his lips back into a dark crimson trapezium, his eyes were wide and empty.

  I did not feel pain.

  Or fear.

  I reacted how I had been trained to react.

  With speed and indifference.

  And then with rage.

  I shot a bolt into his open mouth then ducked as he sailed over my head and crashed into thick bushes, still gurgling the scream defiantly as if his voice had not realised what had happened. I dropped and rolled, caught sight of someone else rushing in towards me and threw out a vicious club swing that connected just above the Blackwing’s right eye with a sickening thud. He tried to parry with a raised arm that I grabbed at the wrist, pulled up towards the air, snatched a bolt from my hip quiver and then rammed it into the soft fleshy indentation of his exposed underarm.

  He screamed.

  I let him writhe away and tried to get to my brother.

  Doc Carlow had hooked his hands under my brother’s armpits and was trying to drag him off the path into the cover of the thicket.

  A Blackwing emerged from the undergrowth behind them, stepped out like an apparition, his black feathers fanned out, framed the moment in dark aspic and I tried to scream a warning that was once again lost into the raucous cacophony like a raindrop into the coursing, inevitable torrent of a waterfall or an improbable wish dropped into a stagnant, long dead well.

  He leered as he brought the club down onto Doc Carlow’s head; the swing looked like he was at a funfair, with a loaded mallet trying to hit the bell at the top of the scale. Doc flailed, his eyes rolled in their sockets as he dropped my brother to the floor. Doc span as he fell as if trying to corkscrew himself into the ground. His assailant was smiling around sharp angled teeth. I closed in to hear Doc, now lying on his back, asking something of him, but as I got closer I realised that all Doc was saying was the same syllable over and over.

  Duh. Duh. Duh.

  I loaded my bow.

  ‘Is there a doctor in the house?’ the Blackwing said, then laughing, smacked a fierce clubbed blow onto the curve of Doc’s forehead.

  I watched Doc twitch the involuntary jerks of a dying man, when the circuitry is compromised and the electrics are shutting down.

  I ran at the Blackwing. Had to keep him off my friend. Felt the bolt in my leg snap from the exertion, like a twig underfoot on the woodland floor. Someone moved towards me from my left, I swung my bow up fluidly and watched as the armature impaled him up into the angle of his ribcage. He lifted off the floor.

  Then the world stopped.

  Sound bled out and white began to wash down over all the colours and pain.

  The eight year old boy looked up into my face and then down at my bow stuck in his guts. The hate and bloodlust disappeared, was replaced by the tears and fear of a boy lost, a long way from home. I watched as the light slowly faded in his confused eyes. He had brought about the deaths of my company, of my brothers-in-arms and he got what he deserved.

  And, heaven help me, I was glad I had ended him.

  That was the worst thing.

  Glad.

  What I had done was understandable, inevitable even, but my reaction? How I felt about it? I had killed a child. Killed him. And it felt justified. It felt right. It felt, well, it felt good.

  I would never get over that, how could I?

  Away in the distance I heard the sound of our reinforcements approaching but I was disconnected now. Inside something had slipped into the mud. I fell to my knees. An arc of blood exploded from my scalp as a club hit home. It splashed across the dappled floor and the Bethscape Woodland backdrop like incongruous paint, as if an artist had been careless betwixt palette and canvas.

  It looked so red on the greens and browns.

  The world stood up pushing leaves and twigs into my face. I could smell the loam, the dampness of decay and fertile sponginess of the earth filled my head, then I slipped into the dark welcoming mud.

  I wanted death, welcomed it.

  It felt like going home.

  Drake.

  *

  Drake.

  I felt like I was rising to the surface, but I was drowning.

  Drake.

  My ears filled with a rush of water and my lungs burned as I clawed for the surface, my arms scrabbling in the watery depths, bubbles caressing my skin and refusing to let go as I spiralled upwards.

  Drake.

  I snapped awake with a jolt and strange feeling of disorientation, at first mistaking the lamplight as sunlight on my face and my robe for an embrace. My legs kicked out involuntarily and I think I let go of a little whimper as I was birthed once again into a world full of the present and harsh realities that had felt crushingly heavy before I had slept but that now, after my dream and full colour recollections, seemed to me to be reassuringly day-to-day meaningless and banal.

  I remembered I was at Pan’s even before her face swam into focus in front of me.

  ‘You nearly kicked me.’

  ‘Sorry, didn’t know where I was.’

  ‘Your legs were going like a little Swampland dog.’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘Most entertaining. I was letting you sleep but then you started whimpering, like something inside was dying.’

  I shook my head to try and dislodge any tattered remnants of sleep then sat up, adjusting my robe and moved my whisky glass. It had left a small wet circle on top of the table.

  ‘I’ll get a cloth. Refill?’

  ‘Yes. Please.’

  She turned to go into the kitchen and I watched as her hair, still damp, splayed out fanned tendrils. The curls, now wet and the colour of dark treacle, were beginning to reassert the kinks and b
ends that were as much a part of her personality as her looks. I caught a pleasant, calming aroma of flowers as she went by. A few drops of bath water spotted my face and neck, not unpleasing in the warmth of the room and my thick, enveloping robe.

  I heard the somehow reassuring clatter of Pan in the kitchen and slowed my breathing down. I had lots to do, even more to think about, but now was not the time. I needed to wind down, try to eradicate the aches and pains of the last few days, take my chance to rest and recharge, heal and repose.

  I could think tomorrow.

  As if to juxtapose my recently acknowledged malaise, Pan bustled back in, tutted as she wiped the table down, dropped a coaster, placed my drink carefully on top of it then adjusted the position of my drink so it was easily within my reach.

  ‘You would make someone a fantastic wife.’

  ‘Hah!’ she said. ‘There’s a big difference between what I do and what a wife or girlfriend would do.’

  ‘And that difference is?’

  ‘I do not cost as much.’

  I laughed into my glass then sipped whisky. It opened up constricted channels in my scratchy throat as golden warmth pushed down my gullet to leave a pool of settling lava smouldering in my belly.

  ‘Is that good?’

  ‘It will do.’

  Pan sat in a chair opposite. I admired the smoothness of her legs as they disappeared in the plush cotton fluff at the hem of her robe as she folded them beneath her to sit. The lamp’s amber glow diffused on the soft lines of her shins and slender, toned calf muscles.

  She smiled, aware I had been looking.

  ‘How’s your jaw?’ I said, though I was not sure if it was an attempt to distract her or myself from the sexual tension I could feel building.

  ‘Still attached, though it feels like it has been replaced upside down and backwards.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said.

  ‘So am I.’ She looked far away then, distant, as if trying to focus on something beyond the clean crisp lines of her walls to some secret beyond them, lost in the Lowlands night. She was chewing her bottom lip.