The Winter Man

by Perry Bhandal

  ‘When I looked into his eyes, I knew he’d suffer quietly. His pain would eat him from the inside as he watched those that took his loved ones live free. His suffering borne in acquiescence. His hands tied by the very laws that let the rapists and murderers go free. Revenge, retribution, an eye-for-an-eye, these would rage inside him and he would suppress the instinct that should have poured forth a spasm of violence but instead was transformed into an acceptance of injustice because it came from a man in a fucking judge’s wig.’

  He paused, leant back, took a long drag on his cigarette and blew three smoke rings one after the other. He contemplated their expanding and dissipating shapes in the moonlight for a moment. Then he bent forward to continue writing.

  * * *

  An orange sun sat low on the horizon. A seven-year-old girl, Sara, her fingers on the window frame, stood looking out of the train cabin at the scenery speeding by. She closed her eyes for a moment and let the sun warm her face.

  Seated across from her was a man and his wife. Their names were Blake and Julia. They were her new father and mother. It had taken many months and many visits before they had finally been able to pick her up and take her to her new home; their home. Opposite them sat a much older Chinese man, Ray, and beside him his daughter Serena. They had always accompanied Blake and Julia, when they had visited. Ray had said to her that not only had she got a new mum and dad that day she had also got a new uncle and auntie. Ray had adopted Blake a long time ago and now Blake and Julia had adopted her.

  Sara missed her foster mother, Irene, dearly. She was the only person who had ever cared for her. Her real mother and father were out there in the world somewhere. Her father had left before she was born and her mother then decided she didn’t want her after all and had left her on the steps of a church.

  Sara had been the last of Irene’s foster children, not because nobody had wanted her. On the contrary she was usually the first choice of the many childless mothers and fathers. It was Sara that chose not to accept them and Irene had always been beside her, strong and unbending. The mothers and fathers had been disappointed and as she grew older and bigger surprisingly the offers of adoption did not diminish in favour of the younger boys and girls.

  There were many who had tried to pressurise her and Irene, but to no avail. Once Sara had made up her mind; Irene would support her unconditionally. There was one woman, very rich, who came alone, her husband away on business. She had pushed and pushed. Sara knew she didn’t want to go with her, no matter what she promised. The woman was bad inside and she scared Sara. The more Irene said no, the angrier she became. Sara almost said yes when she saw the sadness in Irene’s eyes as she read through a thick bundle of papers that a smart man in a suit had handed her.

  When Sara said she would go, it was the only time she had seen Irene angry. ‘You will never doubt me, I will never doubt you,’ Irene had said with a tear in her eye and steel in her voice.

  And that was it, settled.

  The rich woman eventually gave up. A few more came and went and then they stopped coming altogether.

  She would often sit on Irene’s lap on a warm evening. She would stroke her hair and together they would watch the sun go down. Sara thought that she would be with Irene forever.

  Then this serious looking man, and his pretty wife arrived and Sara knew her time had come. Irene noticed the difference in her straight away. The second time they came they brought with them an older man and his daughter. The older man was like Blake but he did not have the sadness inside him. The older man’s daughter was beautiful and strong. She moved so gracefully like a ballerina. Sara wanted to be just like her when she grew up. So, Irene did the necessary work with the legal people and the papers were signed and she said goodbye. And that was it, she had her Papa and Mama. Blake and Julia. And she had an uncle and auntie, Ray and Serena.

  Blake told Irene she was welcome to come and stay with them and see Sara whenever she liked. Sara was happy. Irene was happy. But they both cried like babies when the time came to say goodbye. ‘Not goodbye, au revoir,’ Julia had said. ‘It means see you again.’

  The sun had dipped behind the trees and flashed by the speeding carriage, projecting little flashes of light on her face.

  Ray smiled at her and nodded towards Blake.

  ‘Say cheese.’

  Sara turned to look at him just as Blake clicked the shutter of a small digital camera. He examined the picture of her on the screen. He smiled and held out his hand to her.

  Sara went to him and Blake lifted her onto his lap. He always smelled so nice. He took a small jewelry case and opened it. Inside was a gold eternity pendant on a chain. He took it out and placed it around her neck.

  Sara took it in her fingers.

  ‘Do you know what it means?’ asked Blake.

  She shook her head.

  ‘It means forever.’

  She smiled.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  She placed her head on his chest. Blake kissed the top of her head and together they watched the sunlight flickering through the trees.

  CHAPTER 2

  7 years later...a demon’s muse...

  Seven years later.

  Blake held the target in his mind’s eye. The edges of his vision contracting until all that remained of the concentric circles was the black bullseye. He held his arm rock steady bringing his breathing down to a barely audible whisper. He exhaled and pressed the trigger.

  A puff of compressed air ejected the pellet at five hundred feet per second into a circle outside the bull’s eye. Other small, dark holes pocked the paper at varying distances from the unmarked centre. There was a time when that area would have remained unmarked.

  Blake inhaled. Breathing normally, he lowered the pistol and with his free hand removed his shooting glasses. Dark brooding eyes set in an angular, handsome face framed by long, black, wavy hair. His six-foot-two frame was once lean, but work, family life and not enough hours on the track had softened some of the once straight lines.

  Blake stroked the sleek barrel of his pentathlete’s pistol. It was far from a non-lethal weapon. He knew the significant damage the ejected pellet could do to flesh, sinew and bone. How it would deform on impact, its smooth outline warping into a ragged sliver of metal, catching and raking all it sped through. Not enough to kill perhaps, unless you knew where to aim and could hit it. Blake suppressed the succession of images that carouseled in his mind all too easily. A part of him, deep, buried, uncoiled in irritation at his derailing of the train of thought. He pushed at the thoughts like he had been taught and the darkness faded back and whatever it was that had risen fell back to sleep. He packed the pistol into its case and slipped it into the sport’s bag by his feet. He brought up a knee and pulled it back, warming up for a track session.

  A small break in the seemingly endless grey clouds sent an angled shaft of light into the stadium, making the silver floodlights glitter. Blake turned his face up to the sun, letting the unexpected light warm his face. Then the clouds reformed blocking out the shaft as one would an unwelcome visitor, once again muting the colours of the stadium.

  A dark movement in his periphery drew his vision to the sloping roof of the stadium, but when he turned to look there was nothing there. Shaking his head, he set his stopwatch and began a slow jog around the track.

  A tiny robin zipped across the field and came to a rest on one of the empty stadium seats. It watched as the solitary man suddenly picked up speed, his legs pumping hard, his arms wheeling, straight hands cutting the air.

  Far above it sat a jet-black nightmare. An eyeless elongated head framed by the hinges of huge thick folded leathery wings. A torso with muscles in all the wrong places, overlong sinewy arms and legs, and too many fingered clawed feet and hands. Had it made itself visible, that is what the man would have seen. Others would see something different. For all men’s nightmares were not the same.

  Light frayed and fell at the edges of the
creature as if being eaten. It hadn’t always looked like this. There was a time when its light would have eclipsed the sun. The creature and its kind had many names. But if it had to choose one it would be ‘Erebus’.

  It watched the man pick up speed and thought about what was to come. It wished it could warn the man. But that would mean that what was to come would not. And it could not allow that, for without it, both it and the man would have no purpose. The darkness did not feel, just as the dead did not feel, but a part of it did not wish to see the man suffer. But, it would watch him suffer and, when the time came, it would watch him make others suffer.

  It observed him stop abruptly and kneel down, his chest rising and falling and his head bowed as if before a king.

  On the track Blake winced as he prodded the tendons around his knee joint. He shook his head, stood up gingerly testing his footing before hobbling across the track to pick up his sports bag. The dark thing watched him disappear into the stadium.

  CHAPTER 3

  now...blake’s fall...a psychiatrist’s dilemma...monsters...

  Six months later. The present day.

  The asylum lay flat on the bleak horizon, the buildings at its edges crumbling like the minds of its inhabitants. It was getting late and deep inside the layers of walls and locked doors Dr. Rivers was tired. It wasn’t that the shadowy world of his patients’ minds didn’t fascinate him, many of them did, it had simply been a long week and he’d had enough of other people’s delusions. One more assessment and he would be able to call it a day.

  Before going into the windowless assessment room, he observed the cuffed and seated man through the one-way glass. He tried to gauge the best way to open the interview in order to get to the information he needed. The cuffs on the man’s wrists were attached by a chain to a heavy steel ring on the floor under the table. Someone had obviously decided he was dangerous. His eyes were closed and Rivers could see the side of his face was bruised and his lip split. The wounds looked fresh. The rest of his face was obscured by lank curtains of hair. Palming the remnants of his own across his shiny skull and taking a deep breath, Rivers opened the door and stepped in.

  The man didn’t bother looking up as Rivers slapped the thin printed file onto the table and took a seat opposite, his ample frame overflowing the edges of the plastic chair, making it creak ominously.

  ‘Blake Mandel? My name is Doctor Rivers.’ The introduction remained unanswered. Rivers leant back and studied him for a moment. ‘What happened to your face?’ he asked, falling silent as he waited for a response.

  Blake eventually lifted his head, looked him up and down and said nothing and then up at the clock hanging on the wall opposite as if he hadn’t heard, watching the minute-hand move on another notch. A throb of frustration began to pound behind Rivers’ brow. He shook it away. It often took him a while to assert himself with his patients. It was a skill that did not come naturally to him, unlike others. But he generally found he could prevail in the end, finding the necessary keys to unlock all their blackest secrets. Patience and persistence were everything.

  ‘Have it your way.’ Rivers opened the file and slid a photograph across the table. It was a picture of a charred corpse strapped to a chair.

  Blake looked up at the picture of the former child trafficker J-Mac and remembered.

  His blood sodden form stirred on the floor. A stream of cold water splashed his face forming rivulets of pink and red around it. Blake prodded J-Mac’s chest with the tip of his boot making him whimper. He took a deep, tired breath, blowing at the strands of hair obscuring his vision. He released a band from the back of his head and shook his hair free. He poured the remains of the water onto his face, shivering as its chill trickled down the inside of his coat.

  Above him, the strip lighting beat a harsh electric glow on the concrete floor of the workshop. The remains of engine blocks, rusted and never to run again littered one side of the iron and cement structure. The walls, once white, had over time slowly become the grey that signaled the end to all things, the most fitting of colours for this night.

  The air was damp and freezing. It made his joints ache. J-Mac had shown a resistance that was unbecoming of his slight frame and musculature. He pulled the chair he was tied to upright.

  There were times during the night when J-Mac’s pitiful mewling almost pierced the cold vast deadness that had become his core. But he had witnessed him at play; videos of an engorged malevolence loose and the death of innocence painted in vivid pinks and reds. Images that had emptied his soul and refilled it once more with a cold rage that made him want to destroy the world and everything in it, because a world that could produce such things deserved to end.

  Blake pulled him upright, his head flopping from side to side as he did and checked the saline drip attached to his arm. The bag was almost empty. J-Mac’s unconscious body struggled weakly against his bonds. His legs were bare, copper wiring around his knees, the ends tied together and angled up. Blake bent and forced one of his eyelids open, waving a torch across it, checking dilation. He turned and wheeled over a large battery on a trolley.

  J-Mac moaned, his gaze moving from the trolley to Blake as he attached two cables to the wiring round his knees. Hyperventilating, his teeth gritted and bared, J-Mac snarled as Blake tripped a switch. J-Mac’s body snapped rigid and began to shake.

  Blake watched the thrashing form threaten to rip itself from the chair, his own face, cold and impassive. The tape held firm against the jerking limbs. Tiny fissures made their way along J-Mac’s teeth as his muscles fought to close the gap between the two parts of his jaw. An incisor cracked, spilling new blood over the rim of his lips. Blake watched it bubble and drip down his chin for a few seconds before turning and breaking the connection. Devoid of its sustaining force J-Mac’s body sagged back into unconsciousness, his head lolling forward.

  Blake poured cold water over his hands, washing blood away.

  There was nothing more for him here.

  He took a capsule from his coat pocket and snapped it open under his victim’s broken and bleeding nose. J-Mac recoiled, his eyes struggling to open amidst the bruising and swelling. It wasn’t going to be enough to bring him round completely.

  And Blake wanted his full attention for what was to come next. From another pocket in his coat he produced a leather pouch containing an adrenaline auto-syringe. Kneeling down beside the chair he punched it into J-Mac’s chest, bringing him back to total consciousness with a huge gasp of air. Blake took hold of the man’s broken chin, ignoring his shriek of pain and held up a photograph, forcing him to focus his swollen eyes onto it. Recognition flickered.

  Blake slipped the photograph into his pocket, straightened, removed the automatic from its holster, methodically screwed in the silencer, looked him straight in the eye and shot him in the head. The Glock round entered his forehead dead centre at one thousand one hundred feet per second. A high velocity shockwave formed around the bullet creating a moving cavity ten times its diameter. The brain tissue that sprung back in its wake was mush.

  J-Mac was brain dead before the bullet had penetrated two centimetres. Some destroyed brain tissue ejected from the entrance wound but most packed up against the sides of the cavity formed by the projectile and blew out the back of his skull spraying the floor with blood and cranial ejecta.

  Blake unscrewed the silencer, secured the automatic back into the holster, picked up a can of accelerant and poured it over the twitching corpse. Stepping back, he struck a match and threw it.

  He watched the body burn for a few moments and then turned away.

  Outside the warehouse the winter wind bit into him as it howled around the corners of the empty buildings, offering J-Mac’s burning body a final lipless lament.

  He pulled his phone from his pocket and switched it on. A police profile image of J-Mac dominated the screen. Blake deleted it. It was instantly replaced by the image of another man, Horowitz. Blake looked at it for a moment, then pocketed the phone. He pu
lled his coat collar up and buttoned it across his neck. He took a deep breath, the coldness numbing the back of his throat. The air tasting of gravel. The night air seemed to be composed of ice vapour. It seeped through his clothes, sizzled in his lungs. Small wisps of smoke began to roil from under the doors behind him.

  He felt the darkness inside him subside, sated for the moment by the night’s events. Free of its grip he shivered. Tiny contractions rippled across his shoulders, chest and arms. He blew out the last of the stagnant air that he had shared with a dead man.

  He looked out onto the empty street, past the abandoned industrial units that sat brooding on either side, their smashed windows watching him like sightless eyes, everything bathed in the pale-yellow light from the sporadic street lamps still drawing power from some distant grid.

  That he could do such things, he would not have believed.

  So much had withered and died, surrendered to the darkness. Perpetual night filled him now.

  He stepped into the street and into the dark.

  The demon crouched on the edge of a rooftop. The ice wind swirled around it, colder when it had passed. The man stood in the pool of yellow light. It had felt the connection with him slowly rise as the torture built to a crescendo. The walls of a heart that were black opaque had glassed and he had glimpsed inside and the sleeping thing inside had risen its head sensing kin. Then the shot and a curtain of inky blackness like dark pressure drew across as the man’s life drained from him, pushing it away.

  The demon spread its focus. The city beyond pulsed like an open wound. The man below had scribed his own mark in blood extending it to this dark forgotten place.

  It watched him step into the street, walk below and then beyond into the shadows until he was gone.

  Later, alone in bed, he watched the curtains breathe gently in the cold draught blowing through the gaps in the window frame. He felt the chill caress his face and waited for sleep to take hold, hoping that he would not dream. Nightmares he could handle. They were no different from his waking life. But dreaming, especially those dreams, no.