Dark Harbour: The Tale of the Soul Searcher

by Joseph Kiel

  ‘Of course. The student end,’ Vladimir added.

  The two vigilantes didn’t appear to want to say anything more. It felt an unusual situation for them all to be in, but then what would two Halo of Fires members have in common with two college students?

  The traffic ahead crawled along slightly and Jake slowly caught up with the red taillights of the car in front that blurred through their rain-drenched windscreen like simmering hellfire. Suddenly Larry breathed in, about to spark up some conversation.

  ‘Could I get you guys to go beat someone up for me? If I wanted to.’

  Vladimir and Jake remained quiet for a moment, probably waiting for each other to deal with the question.

  ‘You got someone in mind?’ Vladimir eventually asked.

  ‘No. I just mean hypothetically. How much would that cost, just out of interest?’

  ‘I thought students were poor.’

  ‘Yeah. I just wondered.’

  ‘Who says our service costs anything?’

  ‘Do you ever go and kill people?’

  Vladimir paused, looking Larry over. He then turned to Eddie. ‘Is your friend trying to tell us something here? Did his professor give him a bad grade?’

  ‘Most likely.’

  Vladimir’s mobile phone started ringing and it killed the conversation. ‘Excuse me a second,’ he said as he turned round to answer it.

  Larry and Eddie both looked out of the side windows, pretending that they weren’t compelled to listen in.

  ‘Hello… Yeah all sorted… No, no we’re not there yet… Because we got held up!… What?… That’s a new one… You want all that tonight?… We can’t do that, we’re already tied up… Who?… Junior?… Yeah I appreciate that but there’s no way I can get to the beach and sort that out beforehand. You can’t get anyone else to do that for us?… I know it’s short notice!… Yeah I know, I don’t have time, I… Can you hold on a second?’

  Vladimir pulled the phone away from his ear for a moment. His jaw became very tight and he made an idle clicking sound against the roof of his mouth with his tongue, as though giving an indication of the ticking cogs that were trundling in his mind. He shared a quick glance with Jake and they knew straightaway what the other was thinking.

  ‘Okay, Henry,’ he said as he brought the phone back to his ear, ‘Yeah, leave me the details out… Catch you later.’ He hung up.

  ‘You think that’s a good idea?’ Jake whispered to him.

  Vladimir didn’t answer. He just cleared his throat.

  Chapter 5.3

  The storm disappeared as quickly as it arrived. Like an angry snake that had spent its sticky venom all too quickly, the clouds were soon exhausted so that there was no more rain to squeeze out of them. Other than a drenched town, the legacy of this outburst was a cool breeze and lethargic clouds that refused to release the late evening sun.

  Danny and Michael gave up waiting for their two friends and went to The Waggon and Horses without them. Instead of having their usual Friday night doubles contest, they just played a few relaxed frames on their own. Larry and Eddie would most probably arrive there later.

  ‘How’s Faridah these days?’ Danny asked as he stood chalking his pool cue. ‘Heard from her recently?’

  He went for a ball on a tight angle and smacked it firmly into the pocket. Danny was on fire tonight, playing like a professional.

  ‘She’s good. She called this week.’

  ‘You guys going to meet up again this summer?’

  ‘I’m hoping so. Depends if she can get the time off.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  Danny arched over the table again and pocketed another one of his reds.

  ‘And how’s your assignment going?’ he asked next.

  ‘Slowly. Wish I’d picked a different story to be honest. It’s been a bit difficult to research.’

  ‘You still got a while left though, yeah?’ Danny asked as he played his next shot. Finally he missed one.

  ‘Yup,’ Michael replied, watching the balls clinking around the table and slowly coming to a stop.

  Danny sat down but Michael just stared thoughtfully at the pool table as though he was divining something in the arrangement of those yellow and red spheres.

  ‘Your go,’ Danny prompted him.

  ‘What happened to you, bud? Seriously, you’ve been like a different person since yesterday.’

  Danny looked a little self-conscious but Michael could clearly see the newfound excitement in him. Things that would have been an irritation to Danny before were now like a special gift from the universe, every moment of his life becoming a sparkling moment of magic.

  ‘Something happened yesterday,’ Danny whispered.

  ‘So I understand,’ came the reply. But the voice did not belong to Michael. They both turned around.

  ‘Just what have you been up to, young Daniel?’

  There stood a stranger dressed completely in black. He could have easily just materialised from the pages of a Bram Stoker novel such was the fire in his eyes, a blaze that seemed to be polarised through a tampering of his soul forces, freezing the eternally glowing shine of his complexion like the beautiful Dorian Gray. He was darkness and radiance in one.

  With his lordly appearance, Michael imagined that he could have just slashed his way out of the celluloid of a science fiction film with a red laser sword, or stepped from a police box as the latest regeneration of a wandering traveller of time and space.

  The man was multifaceted yet menacing mystery, as Vladimir was to everyone.

  ‘Who the heck are you?’ Michael asked as calmly as he could.

  Vladimir took a pace forward, both of his hands clutching onto the lapels of his long coat, holding them as though he’d just pulled them apart to reveal an insignia on his chest.

  ‘Santa Claus visits the good boys; I visit the ones who don’t make his list,’ Vladimir replied to Michael. He edged closer to Danny who stood from his stool and slowly started to back away. ‘And this little one here has been a very naughty boy.’

  Michael was perplexed, thinking this must have been a case of mistaken identity. What could Danny have possibly done?

  ‘You’re Halo of…’

  ‘Yes we are.’

  Two hulking brutes appeared out of nowhere. They both gripped Danny’s arms, towering above him like two wolves with a rabbit under their paws.

  Michael threw his arms up in the air and yelled: ‘Hold it!’

  Strangely, they both paused and turned towards him with their steely eyes. Michael’s mouth went dry. They were absolute giants and seemed to radiate an unnatural force from every one of their bulging muscles. All of a sudden, Michael lost his words, not that he really had any to begin with.

  ‘Yes?’ Vladimir asked.

  Michael collected himself. ‘You can’t do this. What the hell did he do?’

  ‘Okay, I can understand your concern, just like a good friend should do,’ Vladimir said to Michael. ‘The problem is, Danny has been playing around with someone else’s girl. Someone else’s fiancée indeed! And this someone else is kind of distraught right now.’

  Michael again looked at Danny, the confusion now etched firmly onto his face. ‘Who?’

  ‘Okay,’ Vladimir said to the Powers, nodding.

  While Clint held Danny in place, Jake slammed his fist into Danny’s nose. The dazed young man fell to the floor as two lines of blood streamed over his mouth. Clint picked him up again while Michael could only look on helplessly.

  ‘Stop it! What’s going on?’ Michael demanded.

  ‘Dangerous game kid, moving in on someone else’s woman,’ Jake said to Danny.

  ‘Yeah! Jake can tell you a thing or two about fast women,’ Clint added.

  ‘Okay guys, let’s get him outside,’ Vladimir cut in.

  ‘You’re not taking him anywhere!’ Michael shouted as loud as he could, hoping to draw even more attention to the drama taking place right here in this normally unassuming pub.


  No one else felt inclined to intervene. Everyone else present just looked on like frightened little rabbits themselves, staring at the two wolves and the one raven, grateful that they weren’t being torn apart by them.

  ‘Are you going to stop us?’ Vladimir asked.

  ‘Even if I wasn’t a pacifist, I’m really not that dumb,’ Michael said as he watched the two giant vigilantes dragging away the semiconscious Danny.

  ‘Sounds a bit of a contradiction,’ Vladimir replied as he turned his back on him.

  Michael knew there was no way he could fight these thugs physically but he wasn’t finished yet.

  ‘What are you going to do with him then, you cold-blooded child killers?’

  Vladimir paused. By now Jake and Clint were just disappearing out the door.

  ‘Nothing too permanent. Okay? Your friend didn’t plant a bomb or anything.’

  He tried again to leave.

  ‘You’re not going to kill him then? Not like those two school kids you murdered?’

  Vladimir immediately stopped dead. He slowly turned to face Michael, his eyes alight. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘You murdered a teenage boy and his little brother!’

  Something quite startling happened next. Vladimir suddenly hurtled towards Michael at full speed like a roller coaster with failed brakes. Something savage was exploding inside him as though Michael had just reached inside him and flipped on a very dangerous switch. Vladimir reached forward and grabbed the mouthy young man by his throat, pushing him down onto the pool table, leaning over him, wanting to squeeze his neck so hard that no more words would come out.

  ‘You killed them!’ Michael spluttered. ‘He was just a six-year-old boy and you killed him!’

  Vladimir’s black button eyes were open as wide as they would go and he looked down on Michael, snorting like a bull. A multitude of different verbal responses had flooded his mind at once and drowned each other out.

  The vigilante’s large black eyes hovered above him. They were like looking into a mirror and all Michael could see in them was a distorted, perverted version of himself, a Michael possessed by a demon. He closed his eyes as he searched for more stinging words.

  ‘My brother told me! He knew that boy. Simon Tuckwell was his name! He was friends with him at school before you went and murdered him!’

  The fire burned in Vladimir’s blood, starting to consume him. Gradually his eyes began to shrink a little, becoming aware of this blazing reflex, realisation creeping into his features that he had to calm down. And collect himself. This was only stupid hearsay being spouted and this wasn’t the proper way to react to it. This wasn’t the way Vladimir acted normally.

  He released his grip on Michael’s neck and straightened up his body.

  ‘How old are you, pacifist?’

  ‘Twenty.’

  ‘A little too old to be telling playground stories, isn’t it?’

  Michael steadily propped himself off the pool table. He shrugged.

  Vladimir went on: ‘Halo of Fires didn’t kill Simon Tuckwell. That may have been the story, but it’s not the truth.’

  ‘Like I should really believe you. Maybe one day they’ll dig up his little brother’s skeleton and find your calling card on it.’

  ‘You see, you have no idea what the hell you’re talking about. I don’t even know why I’m here talking to you!’

  ‘Too bad you guys hid the body so well,’ Michael said, hoping he could keep this conversation going for as long as possible.

  ‘Look, the Fires came to help the kid, so he could hide from the killers that murdered his family. Somewhere that no one would ever find him.’

  ‘Is that the truth?’

  ‘The police searched for him. No one ever found a body!’

  ‘So Jeremy’s alive somewhere?’

  Vladimir’s mouth remained shut and he swallowed hard.

  ‘But what about Simon?’ Michael persisted. ‘Who killed him if it wasn’t you?’

  ‘Why the hell do you think I’m going to tell you?’

  ‘There’s two, possibly three, unsolved murders. The killer needs to be found and brought to justice.’

  Vladimir stared at him blankly then took a step backwards. It was time he should leave. He’d been drawn into this bizarre conversation too much already, and he didn’t even know he was talking to a student journalist.

  ‘Possibly three,’ Vladimir muttered.

  He centred himself once more as he recomposed his magnificent aura, and then glided out of the building like a bird that had just straightened its ruffled plume.

  Danny felt smothered by the enveloping blackness, his mind flailing around as it frantically tried to grasp onto whatever it could, to somehow break out of the nightmare that was impossible to break out of. The stuffy air was thick and bitter, filling his lungs like molten rock.

  Where was he? Where was Michael? Where was his world? He was now in a realm of nothingness, a purgatorial stasis. Danny could not even die in his death. He reached around himself in his juddering tomb, which rocked and swayed him about. He could see absolutely nothing.

  Suddenly his tomb stopped vibrating. Silence, then clicks and thuds. Footsteps. That angel of darkness again, lifting the lid, dull light sluggishly creeping inside. As if there to administer his last rites, the three faces looked down on him, tinted by the sickly orange hue of the light. There was no escaping that raven-like angel and his two demons. His fiery eyes kept peering down on Danny and it felt like they were piercing into his soul. He knew what this meant. Nevermore. It was the answer to everything.

  Here on the shores of his underground world, the raven controlled all. Danny could hear the roaring of the waves. Stirring and roaring. Stirring and roaring. It teased from him a memory of the day before, of sitting by the shore with that enchantress. Gone was the beauty that he’d looked upon yesterday. These wicked waves would wash him down into their black beyond.

  Why, oh why, had he been tempted by her? Why had he risked incurring this wrathful consequence by venturing into her world? It seemed that Danny was being delivered the ultimate punishment, for treading where he shouldn’t have done, for roaming into the forbidden heights that he had no right to soar in. They weren’t for someone who’d been assigned a safe life of normalness. Ordinary people weren’t supposed to fly with the angels.

  He was shoved into a grave. The two demons piled in the earth as the raven, dressed in his deathly black plumage, stood watching like a servant of the netherworld.

  They spared him his sight. Danny could still see through his bleary eyes, and his head would forever face those roaring waves as he would gaze on them for eternity, a twisted reminder of his sin and her world.

  A world that he should never visit again.

  Michael had darted after them. As soon as that angry vigilante had walked out of The Waggon and Horses, Michael followed stealthily, like James Bond. Up the road he saw Vladimir approach a black car as the two thugs stuffed Danny into the boot. They then all piled into the car and trundled away, slowly and calmly, like a hearse on its way to a funeral.

  With his sight fixed on that Mercedes, Michael had run after them as fast as he could. He wasn’t used to running but he wasn’t unfit either, so he kept a steady pace. With adrenaline in one’s blood it was amazing what the body was capable of. At the end of the road the car had disappeared out of view as it made a right turn towards the beach. Michael kept running.

  He eventually found them again. The car was the only vehicle in an empty carpark by the seafront. Michael hovered behind an ice cream stand as he caught his breath. He could feel his limbs shaking with all the excitement, but right now he had to hold himself together. Through the gloom he could see the three vigilantes emerging as they walked up the steps from the beach, back to their car. Where was Danny? He scanned the beach but there was no one else around. Had he escaped? Was he still in the boot?

  The two big thugs sat on the bonnet of the car for a moment and folded t
heir arms. The one in black looked around the carpark as though someone had just called his name. With a seemingly preternatural sense, he picked out the person who was spying on him. Michael.

  An eerie chill ran up Michael’s body. How did he know he was there watching him? He stepped out from the stand; it seemed pointless hiding any longer. The man just nodded his head to him but Michael didn’t know what that was supposed to mean. Michael stayed still as he stared back at him. His black eyes couldn’t penetrate him from here. It didn’t feel like the last time he would ever see this man, and maybe the man knew it as well. Two opposing forces on each end of the spectrum, and here they were sizing each other up.

  Vladimir ordered his two Powers to get in the car and start it up. Michael decided to approach him.

  ‘What have you done with him?’ he called out.

  ‘You’re a persistent fellow.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘He’s dead, obviously. That’s all we ever do. Just go round killing people. Go dig up his bones if you want,’ Vladimir said as he pointed towards the beach.

  Michael looked over there. He could see what looked like a football just a few yards up from the drift line. Or perhaps it was a rock, or maybe some kid had left his bucket there.

  ‘Why do you do this?’ Michael asked him.

  ‘Take a look at the world, kid. Nobody knows what right is anymore. I bet you’re religious, aren’t you?’

  Michael was a little surprised at the man’s observation. He didn’t reply.

  ‘See, people needed that moral compass before. But now they’re throwing them out and using the ones they were born with. Trouble is, people don’t know how to use them.’

  ‘Danny’s a good lad. He doesn’t deserve this. He wouldn’t ever intend to hurt anyone.’

  ‘The road to hell.’

  Michael shook his head as he continued to gaze at the round object down there on the beach. He eventually realised that he was looking at Danny’s bloodied head. He was buried to his neck in the sand.

  Vladimir caught his gaze. ‘I guess I can go now. Not everyone comes here to die.’