by Deck Davis
Or maybe not. Maybe there was no boyfriend. Maybe she was here waiting for her friend, her father, her brother, her sister.
“Yeah, I’m Josh,” I said.
“I saw you fight once,” she said. “It was years ago. You were against-”
“Wait…don’t tell me,” I said. “I bet I can guess. What year was it, and which arena?”
“The Liverpool Elm, 2002.”
The memory was a bittersweet one, because it was before I fought the Babe, back when everything was on the up. “Hernan Badaye,” I told her. “I knocked him out practically as soon as the bell rang in the second.”
“You were brutal,” said the girl. There was a light in her eyes that shone, but it had been absent when she’d just been sitting and waiting. She was younger than me, maybe by eight or nine years, and she was pretty. Not in a Hollywood beauty kind of way, but in a way I preferred more. Rougher, with a little bit of edge. In other words, she hadn’t made an effort to look perfect. How old was she really? For some reason, I felt like I needed to know.
“I was brutal? Efficient, maybe.”
She shook her head. “No. Nobody could stop watching you. You were seething. I think if there wasn’t a contract, the other guy – Badaye, did you say? – he’d have run home and got under the covers.”
I laughed. I’d never seen myself as a scary fighter. I was a little cold in the ring, but that was an image a lot of guys portrayed.
“He was dropping his right hand miles before he swung a left. He might as well have been shouting when he was going to commit himself. When a guy does that, you don’t have any choice but to knock him out.”
“Your eyes were scary, Josh. Is it okay if I call you that?”
“Sure.”
“I was fifteen at the time. My Dad used to drag me all around the north west when he was following Joe Hammerschmidt. You remember the Hammer?”
“Heavyweight?”
“Big prospect before Tony Hugill’s right hand found him out.”
“You’re really into boxing, huh?”
“I was more into spending time with Dad, at first. He only started taking me after he and Mum split, and my brother went to university. But yeah, I started to love it.”
I started to feel strange while she talked to me. She was oversharing. I might not have been renowned for my defence in the ring, but outside it I kept a tight guard. It was one of the things that ruined my relationship with Glora after fighting the Babe. I hardly spoke a word to her.
This girl was nice, but I felt a little shifty in my seat. I glanced up, hoping to see a nurse calling my name, but there weren’t any.
The girl moved up a seat until she was next to me. She smelled of sweat, like she’d recently been for a workout. Her right cheek wore the faint traces of a bruise. She’d tried to cover it up but she hadn’t done a good job. Or maybe I’d had so many bruises I was just attuned to noticing them.
So, who was she waiting for? The question seemed all the more important now because I wondered if it was an abusive husband, if he knocked her around a little and tonight she’d fought back, and instead of leaving him she’d come to the hospital because they were married, and in her family, marriage meant for life.
“Are you okay?” I asked her.
“What?”
“Your face. Was it a boyfriend, or something?”
She smiled. It was a malicious one, wide and toothy. “So, a girl has a bruise, and your mind leaps to domestic abuse?”
“Forget it.”
She playfully punched my shoulder. “I’m messing with you. I spar a little, that’s all. And my guard is about as good as yours.”
“You didn’t tell me your name,” I said.
“Molly Murillo,” she said, sticking her hand out. The sleeve of her hoodie scrunched up a little and a bracelet poked out. It was loose around her wrist, and little charms were hanging from it.
I shook her hand with my right. Her skin was warm, and her grip felt nice to touch. There was something reassuring about it.
“Listen, Josh,” she said, leaning and speaking quieter, like this was a secret conversation between us. “You ever get a weird feeling?”
“Like what?” I said.
“Like something isn’t right. Or someone isn’t right.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. Franz Huck flashed in my mind; his dark eyes, ringed with black as if he hadn’t slept. The feeling he gave me, one that turned my skin cold even after the ring-walk and jumping my customary three times, even after the pre-fight adrenaline had hit.
“Who are you really, Molly? What are you doing here?”
She leaned closer now. I smelled stale cigarettes. I could see the back of her neck, and the shadowy beginnings of a tattoo that ran further onto her back, maybe down to her ass. Her right earlobe also had a hole with an earring missing, and so did both her nostrils. Her hair was lighter at the roots while the rest was a dark brown. It was a dye job she hadn’t topped up in a while.
“You’ve always had this feeling, haven’t you?” she said, her voice different now. It was knowing.
“What feeling?”
“That something isn’t right.”
“Who the hell are you, really?”
“You’ve sensed dark things, Josh.”
Huck’s eyes. Not just him, though. Dozens of people over the years. Like the teacher in my high school. I didn’t even want to think his name. He’d always had this smell around him, sour and almost fiery, but nobody else could smell it. He seemed like such a good guy, but fifteen years after I left school, the police raided his house. They found necklaces, rings, and bracelets belonging to five women who’d gone missing.
And now. The feeling was back, here in the waiting room. I glanced around; the old man was done with his crossword. I saw it on the seat next to him; unfinished, the prize unclaimed. He wasn’t going to divorce his wife and go travelling any time soon. Then there was the receptionist, busy as hell with the constant ringing of telephones and the people approaching her desk. Nurses walked through, and doctors breezed across the waiting room without even looking around. Some orderlies dragged trolleys, mops and buckets, while others carried boxes and picked up rubbish.
Among this throng of people, I could feel something. It was faint, not as strong as the feeling I’d had in the past, but it was there. A lurking darkness, a seething of something bad somewhere in the hospital. It wasn’t centered around one person, at least not that I could see. Maybe it wasn’t from the hospital at all. Maybe it came from outside.
Molly leaned even closer. I could feel her breath on my earlobe now. Her lips were practically touching me. “We have an offer for you,” she said. “Special work. Lucrative.”
“Who’s we?”
She slipped something into my pocket. I took it out and saw her name and number written on the back of a receipt for a bottle of vodka.
Across the waiting room, a man was standing by a set of double doors. He wore a long, white coat. His hair was gelled back into a quiff. “Mr. Tempest?” he said.
I stood up. “I better go.”
Molly nodded. “I’ll expect to hear from you, Josh.”
“Don’t count on it.”
“You’re mistrustful. I get that. But after the doctor gives you the news, you’ll have to think about the future.”
“The news? What?”
It was too late. She was gone. And the doctor was waiting to see me now. “Let’s get you x-rayed,” he said, as he held the doors open for me.
Chapter Three
When the bad news you’ve dreaded actually hits you, it’s not a punch to the gut. I guess it depends on how long you’ve stewed on it; bad news coming unexpectedly can certainly smack the wind out of your lungs. If you’ve been thinking about it for a while, then when you hear the words it feels more like a shower of freezing rain. It hurts a little at first. It stings on your skin. Then it numbs you, and even though you can feel it in your bones, the rest of you has no sensa
tion anymore.
The doctor was an older guy with a haggard look about him, the kind that said he didn’t really have time to be attending to someone like me, that his knowledge and experience was wasted looking after the drunks and stragglers in an inner-city hospital.
He had asked me all sort of lifestyle questions. He didn’t have a clue who I was; he took one look at me and assumed I was some thug, and that I’d broken my hand in a street brawl. The contempt in his voice was faint because he tried to hide it, but it was there all the same. Even explaining I was a professional boxer didn’t thaw him out.
An x-ray and a three-hour wait later, and he gave me the news. It wasn’t just a fracture this time. I’d broken my 5th metacarpal bones so badly that tomorrow, when the pain really kicked in, it was going to be hell to even look at my hand. The healing time for a normal person and for normal hand use was eight weeks with surgery, but double that if I wanted to punch things again.
“The problem is, Mr. Tempest…”
“The surgery isn’t the problem?”
“Your hand is mangled. Sixteen weeks is optimistic. If I was a gambling man, and I’m not since my wife made me quit, I’d say you’re looking at twenty. But even after that, I fear that you have weakened the bones too much. The body is a marvelous thing, but you can only punish it so much.”
“What are you saying?”
“I would give serious thought to a change in career.”
“Won’t it heal?”
“It will, but I think if you fight on it, we’ll see you back here again. Let me be blunt. You’re reached a point now where things are stacking against you. It’s the tipping point of age, where your body starts to get annoyed with the things you put it through.”
“Let me get this completely straight. Are you saying I can’t fight?”
“I’m saying you can, but I can almost guarantee we will see you here again. And the injuries will only get worse.”
Glora had always said I’d reach this point. That a time would come when my body would start to feel the effects of my career, and that I’d have to think about what was important to me. Did I want a body that didn’t ache in old age? Did I want a mind free from the effects of concussion and knockouts? Everyone in the business knew a guy who was punch drunk; a guy who’d bit the canvas so many times he was stupefied. You saw ex-pros in their fifties talking as if they’d gone senile. I didn’t want to end up like that. I didn’t want to get so I couldn’t use my left hand for anything.
But then again, if I didn’t fight, what was left?
I didn’t have a college degree, and the last real job on my CV was when I labored on a building site when I was sixteen, years before I turned pro. If it was just me to think about, maybe I could get a job in a bar or something, but that wouldn’t cut it here.
Suddenly, the future was a dark place for me. When I tried to see it, it had no shape. My life up to then had been ruled by routine, save for the years after the Babe, before I picked myself up. It was a routine I’d used as a crutch, one that meant I didn’t have to make decisions. Everything was set out for me in a dazzlingly clear way; up before the sun. A five-mile run. Then breakfast, the same one every day, with the ingredients picked from a sheet a nutritionist had made for me years ago, back when I was rich and important enough to need one. After that’d I’d hit the gym, where I knew everyone, where I had the same locker with the same gym clothes in it, the same pile of loose change for the vending machine, though the coins themselves had to be replaced, of course.
Thinking for myself was a scary prospect. Without the runs, the gym, the sparring, I’d have to fill my day another way. I’d have to make choices. And that, well that worried me most of all.
Leaving the hospital, I felt the same old anger bubble up. The same one that had gotten me in this mess in the first place, that had made me punch the locker.
Biting it down, I shoved my hands in the pockets of my hoodie. That was when I felt the note.
“I didn’t know what to order you,” said Molly. She stirred sugar into the black tar in her cup, twirling the spoon almost hypnotically. The café light was bright, almost too-bright in a way, as though the owner fitted the lights with extra-strong bulbs so that the wash of white dazzled his customers. What reason he’d have for doing that, I didn’t know.
Whatever it was, the glow lit the faint bruises on Molly’s face, and it showed her pink scalp beneath her pulled-back ponytail. It illuminated the holes in her earlobes and nose, mostly healed as if she’d recently decided to stop wearing rings in them.
I had a cup of tea in front of me. It was strong, the way I liked it. A good cup of tea was the color of He-Man’s skin.
“I had you down as a coffee man,” Molly said.
“It gives me headaches. Keeps me up.”
“You know that there’s caffeine in tea, right?”
“You said you had a job for me.”
“Straight to the point, huh?”
“I’m tired. My face is stinging, I don’t know if im coming or going. I had some bad news tonight.”
“At the hospital? I figured you would. Don’t worry, Josh. We can fix you up.”
“Fix me?”
“Your hand. Not the way you think, though.”
I looked around. It was an all-night café, the type that never shuts. The waitresses cleaning tables were zombies, the patrons even more so. Apart from a group of drunks, stragglers from a bar called The Liquor Store across the road, the few people sitting at tables were quiet. One guy had a full English breakfast in front of him, a plate filled with sausages, bacon, eggs and beans, even though it was 2AM. The sight of the food turned my stomach, a side-effect from the codeine the doctor had given me. He’d strapped up my hand, and I was supposed to go back for a cast on Tuesday.
Molly stopped stirring her coffee. She let the spoon clatter on the table. “I’m going to tell you some things,” she said, conspiratorially, as if it was a secret between us. “If your head is fogged now, it’s going to be worse when I’m done.”
“Who are you, Molly? Really, I mean. You weren’t waiting for anyone in the hospital, were you?”
“I was. I was waiting for you.”
“Why?”
“Listen, Josh. Do you ever get the feeling something isn’t right? Or that someone isn’t right?”
“You said this before. What do you mean?”
“Like, you take a look at someone. Maybe a bus driver. A guy tending bar. A woman in the supermarket. You look at them, and you get a kind of itch. Like something’s roughing up your insides. The day seems a little darker. It’s like the sun hides way.”
The feeling. Franz Huck’s eyes. It sent a shudder through me.
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying some people’s bodies are more in tune than others. They can sense things other people don’t. I think that you’re one of them.”
“Maybe I should have had a coffee after all.”
She smiled. It was a nice smile. Maybe the first real smile I’d seen directed at me in weeks. “Maybe you better listen,” she said. “Don’t interrupt, just listen. And see how you feel after that.”
What did I have to lose? All that waited for me at home was a cold flat and an empty bed, and if I managed to sleep, the only thing waiting in the morning was realization that everything had crumbled. Sure, maybe I’d have a few minutes when I woke where my brain hadn’t thawed, and the bad stuff wouldn’t flood back straight away. But sure enough it would, eventually. Missed mortgage payments, broken metacarpals, surgery, no guarantees I could ever fight again.
As well as that, listening was something I was good at. After all, I’d done it all my life. As a pro, I always had a gaggle of people telling me what to do; my trainer telling me what I needed to improve on, my promoter telling me which fights he thought I should take. It hadn’t stopped there; when I got home, I’d have Glora telling me I was away too much, that my long training camps made her lonely, that when I took fig
hts in Belgium, Germany, Finland, it made her scared, because there was something she didn’t like about being in the house on her own.
But she’d stopped saying those things to me now. My trainer was long gone, and there was no promoter telling me to take this fight or that fight. One by one, the voices had stopped.
Even if nobody told me what to do anymore, I still knew how to listen. “Go ahead,” I said.
And she did.
The things she told me that night, there in the all-night café where club zombies sat at their tables nursing coffees, where the man chewed on his bacon, they’d stay with me forever.
She started with the feeling. The sense that someone, a stranger, or maybe a neighbor, a friend, hell, anyone, that something wasn’t right about them. Like a darkness seeping out of them that only I could sense.
That took her into a new avenue. She put a name to those kinds of people.
Demons.
Creatures from some god damn underworld, like a myth or folktale but the way she said it with such conviction… Her voice was strong, her smile was gone. I listened to her talking about demons walking in human skin, and I found myself believing her.
Then she told me that for every force, there’s one that opposes it. Laws of physics. Except, the force opposing the demons wasn’t one from a dry science textbook, it was something else.
“Hunters,” she said.
“Demon hunters?”
“People who keep things in check.”
“And this…you said you had a job for me?”
“Do you have a phone?” asked Molly.
I tapped my pocket. “How do you think I called you?”
“Hand it to me.”
I passed her my phone. I don’t know if it was the blows I’d taken I the fight, my mangled hand, or worries about Ruby and mortgage payments, but I did what she asked. I gave her my phone.
“This thing is ancient,” said Molly, playing with my phone. “It has a maps app, right?”
“Yeah, just scroll along. Second page.”
“Got it.” She messed with the phone a little, before handing it back to me. “I’ve stored a location on your maps app. Get some sleep tonight. Hell, sleep all day tomorrow. But when you’re ready, come to us.”