The morning sun was bright in a cloudless lazuline sky. It felt warm on his back. The air was fresh.
Blake had been shopping and the carrier-bag clanked as he walked back to the house. He didn’t see the woman sitting in the parked car opposite his front door because he no longer looked around him when he walked. She saw him approaching in her rear-view mirror and got out of the car as he turned through the front gate of his house.
He opened the front door, the sound of the brass key in the tumbler loud to his ears, the hinges grinding as they swung open. and stepped back into the gloom and silence of the house. A pile of dying flowers and unopened cards lay in the corner of the hall. He dropped the bag onto the table with a clunk and turned to close the door, coming face to face with Stephanie on the doorstep, tears streaking her carefully made-up cheeks. They stared at each other for what felt like an age until she finally found her voice.
‘I’ve gone over what I was going to say to you a thousand times,’ she said, not bothering to dry the tears. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say. I’m so sorry’
‘It’s not your fault,’ he said. ‘You should go home.’
‘I heard the phone. I ignored it. I ignored her.’
His eyes welled up, he marveled they still had tears to give. He closed the door, leaving her outside. It wasn’t her fault. He had heard it too.
He went through to the lounge, the harsh sunlight sliced by the edges of drawn blinds and sank back onto the sofa in exactly the same place he had been for the previous few days, staring at the dim reflection of himself on the blacked-out screen of the television. He pulled a fresh bottle of scotch from the bag, twisted off the top and took a swig, feeling a brief flush of warmth as the alcohol coursed through him. He took another swig, sinking back into the flattened cushions and staring up at the ceiling.
He had no idea how long he sat there, open bottle in his lap, before he felt an overwhelming need to go upstairs to Sara’s bedroom, as if drawn there by an invisible rope. The daylight coming through the cracks in the blinds had changed to the yellow glow of the street lights. He bounced against the wall and the banisters as he blundered his way up the stairs, fell through the door and sat heavily on the edge of the bed. He squatted there for a few moments, as if allowing the feelings time to seep through the alcoholic haze, and then started to sob uncontrollably. He curled up like a foetus, his face buried in her clothes, weeping himself to sleep again, a deep, blank, dreamless sleep, more like death than rest.
When he finally woke, his eyes gummy with sleep, morning light streamed through the silver slats of the blinds that he and Sara had put up when decorating Sara’s room recently. They illuminated faint markings on her door frame. When he squinted hard he could make out the first entry, written in her spidery seven year old hand, and he felt like his heart was breaking all over again.
He staggered to the bathroom, retching painfully into the toilet bowl before collapsing onto the floor. Without opening his eyes he fumbled for one of the many bottles littering the bathroom until he heard a slosh. Bringing it to his mouth he gulped it down, almost immediately he threw up over himself.
He had cried so much his eyes had dried up. The tightness would remain behind them but nothing would come. He had neither the strength nor the will to pick himself up. He stayed there for several hours, a man broken on the anvil of his own grief, deconstructed, in pieces. The force that held them together had gone, sending fragments falling away, joining the gathering pile of his vomit. Even the small persistent voice that had hovered at the edge of his consciousness, pleading with him to get up, became silent.
Eventually the bottle was empty, forcing him to pull himself up and stumble down the stairs to the lounge in search of another, eager to get back to oblivion.
The alcohol did its work and soon he was unconscious again. This time when he woke he found himself lying on the lounge carpet, a trickle of bile running from the corner of his mouth across his cheek and pooling under him. When he tried to move his head the pain was too much and so he stayed still, staring across the floor.
The days merged into nights, the nights into days. The sun lay flat in the sky, like a pause. He lay on the floor in a slowly expanding pool of himself, dead eyes staring unblinking into nothing.
Every so often he would shift. A numb arm or leg, released to allow the blood to seep back in.
This time it was an arm. He rolled over, pulling it free, and faced the sofa and another bottle.
Without moving his head he was able to stretch out his arm and touch it with the tips of his fingers. Making a mighty effort he moved a couple of inches further across the carpet and managed to get a grip and pulled it to him.
His brow furrowed at a dark shape silhouetted by the dying afternoon light. Something was wedged under the sofa. He couldn’t remember seeing it before. He blinked, hoping it would disappear. It didn’t
Shifting, he reached for it with his numb arm, cold fingers curling around a jagged shape, the pins and needles made it seem electric and alive. He dragged it close.
It was a monster. A plastic toy monster. Blake rolled it over. Black body, a wide blood-red mouth, yellowed needle teeth, black wings folded back. A serpent made human. He forced his alcohol-soaked eyes to focus. Incredible detail.
He turned the thing in his hands. It had no eyes. It was not unfinished. It was deliberate. Who on earth would make such a thing for children? Blake never recalled seeing Sara with it.
He struggled into a seated position groaning as his head swam. He brought the monster closer.
And it squirmed in his hand.
Blake shouted and threw it, scrambling back, kicking at it with his feet. It disappeared. Where did it go? Where the hell did it go?
He pushed himself up, stumbled to the windows and pulled at the blinds almost ripping them from their moorings. Sunlight flooded in, making him shy away like a vampire caught unaware.
He dropped to the floor and scanned in all directions, under the sofas, coffee table, chairs. He couldn’t see it.
He took up all the cushions, checked all the drawers, behind books, everywhere. Nothing. The door had remained shut. It could not have got out that way.
He returned to the floor under the sofa. In the gloom was a dark shape silhouetted by the dying light. He reached for it, fingers curling around it.
It was the wallet from Sara. Blake sat up and opened it. Sara’s picture. He pulled it out. Sara filled his vision. The smiling face, small hands resting on the window ledge.
He carefully prised the photograph free and held it up to catch a shard of light. His hand shook uncontrollably and he steadied it with his other hand in order to continue looking. A movement on the blacked-out television screen caught his eye and he saw that it was his own reflection. It was a shameful sight. Staring back at the photograph he willed the hand holding the picture to stop shaking, closing his other hand into a fist, digging his nails into his palm.
He moved to slip the photo back into the wallet. Wedged in the corner was the memory card he had handed to Julia.
He sat up straighter, turned it over in his hand. He looked up at the dark silhouette in the television screen and then the memory card.
Later during the night, it came to him. He could feel it at the edges of his consciousness, hidden, waiting for sleep to take hold and, like a nightmare, it emerged from the darkest recesses of his mind. The demon momentarily held in his hand. But this one towered over him and he could not help but kneel before it. It balked at his fear, telling him that it loved him. He rose before it and it raised a claw-like talon to his small face and wiped a tear from his eye.
‘The last one,’ it whispered, ‘I do not want to see any more.’
It beckoned him and he stepped into its shadow and suddenly the pain was less. He felt the coldness of its embrace, felt it hardening the softness inside him. It flexed.
‘Do you wish to be like me?’
Blake looked up into an eyeless face from he
ll.
‘I wish to be like you.’
Thereafter, it came to him every night, holding him to its unyielding chest, callusing the fragile, tempering the brittle, banishing the weakness, making him strong and whispering its will. He often woke to find things smashed around him. Splinters frequently flamed in the soles of his feet and the knuckles of his fists. The face that greeted him in the mirror was bruised and battered with dark lines under the eyes. It was different from the face he had known, from the face he had come to hate, the face that had been weak. The one that had allowed them to take from him at will.
He liked this new, damaged one.
For a moment the old face appeared. The one his Sara had loved. Sara would not have liked the other one. It would have made her afraid. He looked away, his throat filling and his legs sagging beneath his weight.
‘I do not want to see any more.’
Darkness shifted. His legs did not buckle. He looked up in the mirror. His daughter would not have to see this face because she was dead, but others would. They would see this face.
One day he cleared the house of everything that would remind him of them: Pictures, clothes, presents. Everything. He piled them high in the garden and set them alight. The pile struggled against the inferno before eventually succumbing. This time when he turned away, his eyes were dry.
CHAPTER 12
rafiq...the gun...a demon’s flight...the first target...
That evening, shaved, showered and coldly sober, Blake weaved his way through a busy late-night street market. He did not pay attention to any of the produce laid out on the brightly lit stalls or respond to any of the blandishments of the costermongers who called out to him. Instead his eyes searched the scruffy shops that lay behind the stalls, thrown into the shadows by the bustle and colour of the awnings and displays of brightly lit fruit, exotic vegetables, cheap toys and household gadgets. He saw the one he wanted, pausing for only a second, glancing over his shoulder to check that no one was watching, before diving into a wholesaler of vehicle parts.
A bell warned of his arrival as he opened the door into the chilly gloom inside.
An enormous man was standing behind the counter checking a delivery. The man lifted his eyes from the paperwork and looked him up and down.
‘I’d like to speak to Rafiq,’ Blake said.
‘There’s no Rafiq here,’ he replied, going back to his work.
‘Torres sent me.’
He looked up again and stared for a little longer before picking up a phone and speaking in Arabic. Putting the phone down, he gestured with his head towards a door at the back of the shop and watched as Blake let himself through.
The room was part office part storage.
Three men dotted the room. None of them looked like they were in the auto part business. All were dark, hard looking. Only one was seated behind a small desk, his fingers tented, rocking gently on the chair, examining Blake. Rafiq.
One of the other two finished a call on his mobile phone and pushed back from the table he was leaning on and approached Blake towering above him. He smelt fresh, clean, a hint of expensive aftershave.
‘What is your name?’
‘Blake.’
‘Blake what?’
‘Blake Mandel.’
‘Well, Blake Mandel. What do you want?’
‘I want a gun.’
The man’s expression darkened.
‘What did you say?’
Blake’s expression remained impassive.
‘I said I want a gun.’
‘I heard what you said.’
Blake debated whether to antagonise the man but decided to focus on getting the gun and getting out. He has assumed his garage mechanic Torres, who had recommended these men had had a little more influence. It was rapidly becoming apparent that he was held in about the same level of esteem as Blake was.
‘Torres said you could help me.’
The second man decided at that point the conversation justified his involvement.
‘How you know Torres?’
‘He services my car.’
Both men broke out into laughter. The man seated at the desk, presumably Rafiq, was more restrained and simply smiled. The first one’s face hardened.
‘You ever handled a gun? You ever seen one?’
He didn’t wait for an answer as he slipped a hand behind his back and pulled out a huge automatic. He snapped it up to Blake’s head digging it in.
Blake turned so that muzzle pressed against his forehead. The man pressed down on the trigger slowly. The hammer rose. Blake didn’t not flinch, his eyes steady on the man. The hammer fell. Click. Nothing. The other man laughed.
‘He ain’t afraid of you.’
‘We’ll see,’ replied Blake’s tormenter unhappy with being made a fool of.
He expertly swapped the empty cartridge with another one from his back pocket, presumably full.
Blake simply watched, impassive. The man chambered a round and held it back up to Blake’s head. Blake stayed where he was and held his gaze as the man’s finger tightened on the trigger.
‘You afraid now motherfucker?’
‘Enough.’ Rafiq commanded with a deep voice.
The man turned to look at Rafiq who simply gestured with his head. The man eased off the trigger and lowered the gun.
Rafiq considered the tall brooding man, seemingly devoid of fear.
‘Torres told me you’d be coming. Heard about your daughter and your wife. Some men, they would curl up and die. But not you, eh?’
Rafiq pondered for a few more moments then nodded to Blake’s now docile tormentor. He took a package wrapped in a cloth from behind the counter. It was a small revolver. He dipped back under and came out with a box of bullets.
‘Five hundred.’
Blake took a wad of cash from his pocket and counted out the money. He picked up the gun, turning it over in his hand.
‘There is nothing quite like a man who has nothing left to lose,’ Rafiq said, but Blake didn’t respond.
He wrapped the gun back in its cloth and put it, along with the ammunition, into his coat pocket. Rafiq continued to watch him for a few more moments and then reached behind him. He came back up and threw something at Blake. He caught it, surprised to find it was a slim, battered, leather bound book. The cover simply said ‘Erebus’ by ‘Nathaniel Winter’.
‘What’s this?’
‘A helping hand. From someone who once found himself in the desert.’
‘I don’t need religion.’
‘You won’t find god in those pages.’
There was a terrible sadness in Rafiq’s eyes and expression that would have filled the Blake of the past with dread.
He nodded, pocketed the book and moved to walk out of the room.
‘Next time someone’s about to blow your brains out step into it.’
Blake turned back to Rafiq.
‘If you really have nothing to lose,’ said Rafiq with a shrug.
Blake stepped out of the room. Rafiq watched him go, his fingers tented, contemplating the man. He had seen his fair share of men embarking on revenge. Most, if not all, hopelessly ill equipped for the world they were about to enter. He recalled the words of his former boss when a man very much like Blake had come to him wanting a gun to kill a man who had wronged him.
‘Turn away and put it out of your mind. This is not your world and you can’t come into it late. There are no training courses. They will see you coming from a mile away. You won’t see them coming at all.’ Yet the man had insisted and his boss had relented. A week later the man was dead and the gun unfired.
This Blake was different. There was something in his eyes that had frightened Rafiq. Something he had only ever seen in the coldest of men. That was something that could not be acquired. Only born into. Rafiq shivered despite the warmth.
The demon floated high above the city. It did not see the grids and lines of buildings and roads. In its place was an amorphous mass of
light, every colour of every brightness, intertwined. The reds were of interest. Tiny blips of violence that spread out shifting and changing the colours around it. The city shifted beneath it. A tiny shard of familiar blue caught its eye. Faster than any machine and with a fidelity that would never be equaled the demon’s gaze zoomed in on the man as he stepped from the autoparts shop. In the man’s pocket was an object heavy with potential that pulled the man further towards his destiny darkening everything around it.
A part of the city had settled into a slowly pulsing uniform white like a cloud. The demon stretched out its wings. And then suddenly it was in the midst of the cloud, the serrated edges of its wings cutting a livid blood line through it.
It completed its swoop and came to float in the sky above once more to examine the results. The red line morphed and twisted turning men on men, women on women.
Blake returned home and unwrapped a new smartphone. He powered it up and inserted the memory card. Faces appeared onscreen like cards on a roller deck. Straw at the top. Blake swiped him away. Another face filled the screen.
Chicken Jack.
That Blake had decided to kill him was a given.
He only ever had two choices. One freedom from pain, the other moments of catharsis. He had tried the first, a slow alcohol induced death lying in a pool of his own piss and vomit that would have given him his eternal peace. But then ‘it’ had arrived, whispering, showing him the one true path.
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