He unrolled bandages, poured disinfectant and got to work patching himself up.
Later, his body thrumming with pain killing drugs and a quart of spirits Blake sat on the bed, towel wrapped around his waist. He looked around the dark room and shivered. He should really get up and close that window. The painkillers had kicked in dulling the sharp edges of the pain. The spirits made the room spin slightly. He felt wretched. He always felt wretched afterwards. Not like in the beginning when he felt the release, that moment of stillness, when everything faded.
He didn’t have the strength to move so he just sat and stared at the floor. Slowly details began to resolve themselves. The dust gathered at the edges of the dark worn carpet where it met the scuffed sideboard, like the sprinkling of dandruff across the dark greasy collar of tramp’s coat. Shiny, compressed puddles of carpet marked the comings and goings of the rooms many occupants. The same bodies going through the same motions time and time again each leaving their own tiny impression in this small space. The visible manifestation of physical space shared across time.
A long legged spider lay broken and desiccated at the edge of the curled floor. Someone had kicked it into the sideboard, a small dark smear marked where its keratin body had been smashed open. He imagined it scratching away its final moments, long legs flailing, uncomprehending, attached to the sideboard by its own innards. It had fallen to the floor, peeled away from its insides as they dried out, its now paper-thin body bent in two, its forward legs holding it up, one bent backwards touching the hanging head down as if in deep thought.
Rainer stepped out of the hospital and towards the cordoned off hulk of what was left of the Landrover. He nodded to the armed policemen.
He opened the driver’s door and peered into the shattered glass covered interior. He checked the central console, empty. He opened the rear doors. On the floor was a man’s coat. He checked the pockets and found the book, Erebus.
He straightened up and leafed through it and stopped at the creased photograph of a young girl at a train window.
The daughter of the man that had become an assassin.
Blake lay on his bed, awake. The sheets red where blood had seeped from the wound at his waist. He shifted painfully onto his good side waiting for the painkillers to kick in. The curtains moved gently in a draught from the window and before he knew it he was back there again.
A naked Stephanie pulled Blake to her. They kissed. They started taking off their clothes. Sara turned to see a man following her.
He felt a familiar uncoiling arresting his fall. Inky tendrils suffusing his muscles, penetrating his heart, wrapping a cold embrace around his mind. The darkness pushed the past from his thoughts, emptying his mind. The last thing he saw before sleep took hold was its eyeless smile.
The ceiling was high and raftered, holding banks of powerful xenon strips bathing the interior with an artificial daylight. On the far side above a set of large wooden double doors was an enormous blank viewscreen.
The seating was composed entirely of boxes, which seemed to have grown up over time into small mountains of creaking packing cases, pallets and containers of all shapes and sizes around the oddity at its centre. Some of the peaks had reached the high roof above. Some of the bigger crates had the sides removed and makeshift benches set inside for groups that wanted to sit together. The place smelled of fresh straw and pinewood. The crowd fanned out and clambered over the timber stacks like ants. He found a spot near the top and sat down.
Below him, a circular grassy knoll of the most lustrous deep green grass formed the outlandish centerpiece. Fifteen meters in diameter it rose gently to a height of two meters before flattening out at the top into a space just large enough for two men to stand on.
The overhead lights dimmed and across from him someone lit a spotlight casting a circle of light over the doors under the viewscreen. The viewscreen itself flickered on and displayed a crisp amplified image of the doors.
One of them creaked open and a small man stepped out carrying a microphone. His entrance was so unceremonious that for a moment Blake thought he’d been shoved out the door for a joke. He was old and oriental looking, mid fifties dressed simply in a shirt and trousers. He had what looked like prescription glasses with lenses so thick that they had become mirrors in the spotlight. He raised his arms up and the crowd burst into a round of applause. He jogged sprightly up to the top of the grassy knoll and bowed to all corners. He quieted the audience with a raised palm and flicked on the mic with a squeal of feedback.
‘Put it in a pick…and slip it in real quick,’ he said sharply, his meaningless words snapping like dried brittle twigs.
‘Fire or stone…knife or bone?’ he asked the audience, the spotlight glinting off his mirrored lenses, like tiny flashes of lightning.
‘Fire,’ shouted someone from the darkness.
‘Knife,’ came another one
‘Bone,’ another voice boomed.
Then the rest of the crowd joined in, individual utterances swallowed into the slowly building racket. He stayed where he was, an indulging smile played on his lips as he removed his glasses and rubbed small dark eyes with the back of his hand before replacing them.
The din rose in volume and pitch as screams of ‘fire’, ‘stone’, ‘knife’ and ‘bone’ vied for superiority. Slowly out of the cacophony came a low bestial clamor, a sound like the baying of dogs.
It took hold throughout the crowd and quickly overpowered competing voices.
‘Knife…Knife…Knife…’
The decision made, the little man raised his hand again to quiet the din. He bent to the microphone. The noise from the crowd petered out.
‘Throw it in the air…watch it…cut in two.’
The spotlight swiveled away back to the double doors and blinked off as the main lights flickered back on. He looked around for the little man, but he seemed to have disappeared. A glint of light caught his eye and he spotted him again sitting on a box at the edge of the knoll. He decided to call him Mr. Mirrors.
The double doors opened and two young men walked out. Something unclean rippled through the silent audience. Bare chested and dressed in long black silky boxer shorts, they were both masked, both slim, graceful, dangerous. Blake named them Swan and Claw.
They stopped at the foot of the knoll and sat on their knees. Behind them two masked men brought out a heavy chest and settled it down between them. The chest looked old, rusted metal hinges. Another masked man joined them bearing a briefcase. He flipped it up and placed it on top of the chest, flicked the locks and opened it. It was full of neatly stacked cash. Two million dollars to be exact. The winner’s prize.
The briefcase snapped shut and the moneybearer stepped back.
More men came out, four of them, all dressed in red jumpsuits wearing white balaclavas. They looked like a formula one pit team, but instead of pneumatic wrenches they carried large suitcase shaped medical kits. They walked around the knoll and fanned out at the far end, opening their cases and readying various pieces of equipment. He spotted a defibrillator, rolls of bandages, emergency suture kits, medical saws, cutting instruments and labeled vials of clear liquid. It gave him a strange feeling watching them, preparing.
The two men who had brought in the chest opened it and spilled its contents onto the ground. A small mountain of sharp things glinted dully.
At a signal from Mr. Mirrors the combatants moved to the pile to choose their weapons. Behind them the moneybearer began carefully removing wads of cash from the briefcase and piling them on top of the empty chest.
He sat back and let the dreamlike scene sluice over him. He found it jarred in him. It was like watching a couple of impoverished shoppers digging deep into the bargain bin as the shop assistant counted the days takings.
It surprised him that he still had it within him to be affected by something like this. Was he beginning to care what adult men and women did to each other? He searched his feelings, tapping at the cold hard parts of hims
elf, looking for any breaches, any signs of thawing. But he found none, just the chilly echoes of indifference.
‘What grown men and women do to each other, how they abuse each other is no longer of any concern to you.’
That was a law he had bound himself to. What his adopted mentor, Nataniel Winter, had bound him to.
But it was flawed and he had, over time, come to realize that. He had set himself against those that were profoundly immoral or wrong. Those that deliberately caused great harm or pain. But he had also set myself blindly against all those of adult bearing. Why? Because it was easy, He didn’t have to differentiate or care. If you were an adult you were dead to him. He concerned himself with avenging only his daughter.
And with that, he had failed, in part, to see the truth of what he sought to protect and avenge.
‘It is rare to find innocence in those of many years’.
But there were exceptions and the existence of those exceptions was the reason why he felt troubled by the scene unfolding before him. He doubted very much that there were any innocents among them here tonight. But his intuition told him, it was one in which there had been. Innocents had died here and would do again.
He shifted on the hardwood trying to get comfortable. The young combatants busied themselves sorting through the pile, testing for weight, balance, sharpness. Around him the audience watched mesmerised, gazes flicking between the two of them and the money piles.
A ripple of contaminated excitement and anticipation from the crowd snapped his attention back to the scene below.
Claw had turned back to face the knoll, his chosen weapons in both hands. A few seconds later Swan followed suit. They had both selected a large wicked looking cleaver and a smaller blade. A bell rang out and the two walked forward onto the knoll and either side of it. They came to stand in front of the men in red and, to his surprise, placed their weapons on the ground and then dropped their shorts.
The viewscreen image tilted up from the black pools of silk at the combatant’s feet and came to rest on their inner thighs. He felt his balls contract horribly at the thickly serrated line of scars that ran along the length of the soft flesh between their crotches and knees where chunks of flesh had been torn out. At the knees the wounds looked recent, barely healed. None of this made sense to him. But it was about to.
He watched, balls crawling, mouth copper dry, as two of the men in red knelt down in front of them with something that looked like a bolt cutter, but with the cutting end replaced by a saw-toothed mechanical jaw.
At a nod from Mr. Mirrors the men pressed the open jaws against a piece of fresh skin and squeezed.
The crowd winced.
Claw and Swan didn’t even twitch as the steel cut deep into their thighs, gouging free a thick gobbet of flesh about the size of a big man’s thumb.
From their kneeling positions the men in red held them aloft like tiny dripping trophies.
Claw’s had come away clean, but the serrated edge of the flesh clamp used on Swan hadn’t formed an even cutting surface. When his was pulled away a thin ragged strip of flesh tore away with it, tapering up the inside of his leg to his crotch.
Swan vacantly looked down from the dripping pulp along the tattered skin ribbon.
He didn’t know exactly what had been done to these two men, drugs, hypnosis or a combination of both, but the effect was to make them impervious to pain and shock, both physical and mental. You could have taken their legs off and they wouldn’t have felt a thing, nor cared. The thigh slice, as it was known, was a test of their readiness, both in terms of physical pain suppression and mental apathy to physical injury. It was one thing to be able to ignore the pain of losing your hand but another to ignore its loss and carry on regardless.
The mental state that these men were demonstrating meant that they would fight until their bodies were physically incapable of articulating their thoughts into physical acts. They would still try and throw a punch despite having no arms. This was what the crowd had come to see, and paid dearly for. In a competitive marketplace, this was the key differentiator for this product. Fights to the death were nothing new, men still fought and died in pits, warehouses, castles, basements, yachts, ships… They took all manner of drugs that turned them into rage filled, turbo charged, psychotics incapable of feeling pain. But they did not fight like these men would. They did not retain the guile, the clear headedness, the cold calculation and finally the option to cut their losses and give up, to fight another day. This was the elitist version of the age old duel. It required not just money, but skill and knowledge passed down over the centuries that only a few possessed thus elevating it far above the common. After all anybody can put two fools in a ring and pay them to try and kill one another, it was just a question of money, the amount being dependent on the desperation of the fools concerned.
No this was entertainment for the privileged, an aristocracy that felt pride in being able to appreciate the nuances and subtleties in a skillful duel between two highly trained and disciplined artisans.
‘Bollocks,’ he said to himself.
It was nothing of the sort. That was just the bullshit they used to delude themselves. Simply another object for the avaricious and heartless to consume. Men whose desires knew no bound other than their ability to articulate and satisfy them. Their grasping, rapacious appetites would never be assuaged. Their covetousness and materialism sucked at the earth, at opportunity, at love, at joy, at peace, depleting it, killing it. They were vampires, the true vampires. Not the black cloaked, fang toothed men and women in the silly movies and books. Those were simply an expression of humanity’s collective subconscious’s attempt to describe the acts of men like those that surrounded me here. No, these were the real vampires.
If only exposure to daylight were enough…
Speaking of vampires, he looked across at the man-mountain sat directly across from him on the other side of the auditorium. Erovan Ryakorum. He seemed rapt, his eyes alive, flicking between the screen and the scene below.
Blake tried to look away from their notched upper legs but couldn’t, it was appalling and mesmerizing at the same time. Blood oozed thickly down their legs but was stemmed quickly by some kind of blue coagulant spray. Their legs were wiped down and bandaged up. The bits of flesh were placed on a small bronze pan under which was an ornate stove, unlit.
This was taking the whole ritualistic nonsense a little too far. He started to feel a little nauseous at the ultimate fate of those two small pieces of flesh.
The bell sounded again and both men pulled up their shorts, gripped their weapons and turned and walked to stand either side of the knoll. Things were starting to move quickly now.
The screen switched to a fixed aerial view.
The bell sounded again. The effect of the it was astounding.
It was like a switch.
Without warning, both men burst into an explosive run up the sides of the knoll, each vying for the superior top spot. The audience erupted.
As their chests cleared the lip of the flat-top they launched themselves at each other, swinging the heavy cleavers in a wide horizontal arc.
The cleavers cracked together, the weight & violence of the blow embedding the blades into each other. They both planted their feet solidly on the ground and heaved back trying to pull the blades free.
Swan let go.
Claw fell back, unbalanced, feet scrabbling for purchase, the handle of Swans cleaver dragging across the grass blade locked to his.
Swan switched his small blade to his right hand, pulled it back over his head and whipped it at the struggling Claw.
He turned and ducked his head in time to save his eye. The knife cut cleanly through his cheek, leaving two halves of it flapping.
Weaponless, Swan aimed a dropkick at Claw’s bleeding head, hoping to boot him off the coveted flat-top.
Claw stamped at Swan’s cleaver.
It broke it free of his own.
Swan connected with Claw’s
chest, bowling him over the edge of the flattop.
Landing on his side he quickly scrambled up…but toppled over as he tried to take his weight on a foot that was no longer there. Landing on his side, he took in the severed foot, busily pumping hot blood over the grass.
Claw meanwhile was up, cleavers swinging in both hands as he raced up the slope, shoulders and chest covered with blood seeping from his open cheek.
The crowd screamed at him.
Swan turned quickly onto his front and pushed down with both arms like he was doing a push up. He brought his good leg up and stood on his remaining foot. Claw cleared the horizon. He powered at Swan bringing both cleavers down and across in a parallel arc impossible to step inside and impossible to dodge. Swan threw his foot at Claw’s face.
Laughter filled the barn as the foot hit Claw in the face, making him turn away. Swan stepped back as far as he could, driving the jagged edge of his severed bone into the earth. The upper blade whistled past his upturned chin, barely missing his exposed neck, the lower slashed across his belly and into his upper thigh. Swan lunged forward, stepping inside the twisting Claw, as he tried to swing the cleavers around for another arc, and kicked him in the balls with such force that it lifted Claw off the ground.
Disappointment rippled through the crowd, He could see individuals and groups shaking their heads in disbelief.
They thought he’d lost it, kicking a man in the balls when he could feel no pain was pointless. He must have forgotten about the anesthetics in his panic.
But Blake saw it for what it was, a killer kick designed to do one thing; break the man’s midriff. He’d connected just above the penis at the hernia point. Damaged enough, he would have effectively separated the man’s upper and lower body.
Swan fell onto his back, his upper thigh muscle twitching spasmodically in reflex trying to control the leg. Swan pulled the cleaver free.
Claw was on his hands and knees. There was something terribly wrong with him. The upper and lower parts seemed to be trying to work independently of each other. It was like watching an insect that had been broken across it’s back.
The Winter Man Page 25