by Rhys Thomas
Knocking on the door, he went into the living room. Standing in the corner, next to the TV, was a man with dark hair, cropped close to his head. He was wearing a grey tracksuit and a pair of white trainers. His eyes were narrow and as they met with Sam’s, silence fell across the room, like the shadow of a cloud blocking the sun across a farm field.
‘Sam. You’re home,’ said Sarah. She was standing in the middle of the kitchenette, beneath the harsh white light. There was a note of distress in her voice.
‘I am.’
The silence fell back in.
‘This is Zac.’
His mind searched the memory files and suddenly clicked into place.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Nice to meet you.’
‘You too, wee man,’ he said.
He was tall and lithe and there was an edge to him. The Scottish accent was faint but there, and the ‘wee man’ comment was definitely filled with passive aggression because Scottish people surely don’t go around calling people wee man. Zac made no move to shake hands so Sam didn’t either.
‘Zac’s staying here for a while,’ she said.
‘Here?’ Sam said, pointing directly at the floor.
‘In town,’ said Zac. ‘Fresh start.’ He smiled.
This was bad. The corner where Zac was standing was the one where the lamplight didn’t reach and he was half in shadow. He was one of those people who put a disturbance in the atmosphere, the way a patch of ocean changes when a shark is present. It was hard to believe that Sarah would ever go out with someone like this.
‘What’s that?’ said Sarah.
Sam held up the box in his hand and felt stupid.
‘Viennetta,’ he said. ‘I’d better put it in the freezer.’
As he crossed the room Zac watched him.
‘Sarah said you work in a factory,’ he said.
‘It’s a wholesaler,’ said Sam. ‘We don’t make anything.’
What was he doing here?
‘Do you want to stay for dinner?’ Sarah said.
Zac shifted and coins in his pocket clinked.
‘Nah, you’re good. I’d better be off.’
‘OK, cool,’ said Sarah. ‘Well, it was great to see you.’
‘Aye, you too. We’ll go for that drink sometime, yeah?’
Sam opened the freezer and felt the cold touch his face. It was so quiet he could hear the hum of the refrigeration element. He closed the freezer and turned around. He’d been in the flat less than a minute but it felt like an hour.
‘Well, I’m off,’ Zac said.
He moved across the small room like a wild animal in a cage, then stood at the door, turned, and winked at Sarah before leaving.
They listened to him going downstairs, opening the front door. The sound of it closing was like a gunshot. Sarah glanced at Sam and smiled, then followed Zac out of the room. Quickly she came back again.
‘I just wanted to check he’d actually gone.’
‘You think he might have pretended to go?’
She leaned her back against the closed living-room door.
‘No, I don’t know. He seemed on edge.’
‘How did he know where you live?’
‘Urgh, I told him. I didn’t think he’d just turn up unannounced.’ She pushed herself away from the door. ‘Sorry, I was just a bit taken aback. He’s not a bad person. He’s just a little lost.’
‘Well, he is a drug dealer,’ said Sam.
Sarah went into the kitchenette, where there was a pile of unchopped radishes.
‘Not a real drug dealer. He just used to do a bit, you know. And it just snowballs without you realising.’
‘Right. He did used to sell cocaine, though.’
‘Sam, please, it’s no biggie.’
She picked up the chopping knife.
‘You’re shaking,’ he said.
She turned away from him. Her hair was tied back but a few strands were hanging over her neck. Her shoulders slumped.
Sam turned her around.
‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘He’s gone now.’
She sniffed. ‘It’s not that,’ she said, ‘I’m not scared of him. I’m just sad.’
He hugged her.
‘He’s not a bad person.’
‘Has something happened?’
She swallowed. ‘He’s been to prison.’ The words hung in the air for a moment. ‘I know it’s stupid and he’s not part of my life any more and he probably deserved it, but how’s he going to get on with his life?’
‘He’ll be fine,’ said Sam, trying to soothe her.
He felt her shake her head.
‘He won’t. Something’s gone out of him. He’s changed.’
Sam didn’t say any more to this. He remembered a holiday in France when he’d gone out into the sea, as deep as his neck, and the current had pulled him out. He’d been able to swim back easily enough but that moment when he tried to plant his feet on the ridges of sand and there was nothing there, angling his toes down and failing to gain traction, the sensation of a great force having control over him, was how he felt now.
‘God, I’m a mess,’ said Sarah, and she laughed and pulled away from him. ‘I’m gonna go and clean up.’
She’d left her laptop open. On the kitchen counter the screen glowed ghostlike. The Facebook Messenger chat window was open in front of a BuzzFeed article. He knew he shouldn’t do this, and he swore he would never do it again. He wouldn’t even read what had been written, because that would be such a breach of trust. This wasn’t to check up on her, he suspected her of nothing. All he needed was an address.
The Phantasm #011
And the Tower Blocks Wept
Every great civilisation has its own myth system. In Sumeria the gods created man to ward the animals, in Greece Zeus defeated the Titans, in Finland bears became the embodiment of the forefathers, and in Rome the boatman collected you from the banks of the Styx to take you to the next world. Stories bind civilisations, shared around the campfire, spreading like a warm blanket across the lands, bringing people together in a way nothing else can, and in the middle of the twentieth century the greatest civilisation of them all, the American West, created a new structure, of men, men and women, with incredible abilities, with masks over their eyes, working together to fight injustice. The superhero was born. The world made more sense with them in it than not. Earth was a hard, scary place; war reached terrifying new scales, there were weapons that could destroy the planet, economies collapsed, terrible things happened in secret camps and only in darkness can heroes be born. Imagination sets us free, stories make us feel safe, and now, in the darkest time of all, they are spilling into reality, falling off the pages of the books and into the real world. Men and women everywhere, with nowhere else to turn, are dressing as mythic heroes and taking matters into their own hands, hitting the streets, trying desperately to hold back the dark tide that only used to happen in stories. All over the world it is happening. Something must be wrong.
Patience is a virtue and in this part of town virtue is given short shrift.
He waits. He waits. He waits and watches.
Our hero can’t help but wonder. What would his great love think of him doing this? And yet he knows it does not matter. He can no more abandon the mask than a pope might abandon his robes.
The target emerges from the stairwell at the bottom of the high-rise. Hood pulled over his head, he plunges his hands into the pockets of his puffer jacket and moves into the night. This night he has a shadow that is not his own, stalking him, watching, waiting.
Modernist bridges cross filthy culverts.
Having attained through cyber espionage the name of the estate where he resides, the hero stalked the local store for three nights in plain clothes until at last the target showed his face. Following him home was easy.
It’s the same every night. The candlelit windows in the top floor of the tower block go dark and the target walks, on foot, a circuitous route, to a thin alleyway between two of the high-rises. It is
a place of darkness, and though it might be true that only in darkness can heroes be born, for every yin there must be a yang, and villains too have their own origin story to tell.
There is a good peeping spot, higher up, halfway along an elevated walkway, and here our masked crusader waits, crouched, watching with his night-vision goggles through metal bars.
Sometimes the client waits on foot, sometimes he is sitting in a beat-up old jalopy, sometimes he is on a bicycle. In the four days so far it has never been a she. The exchange takes place in the centre of the alleyway, where they think nobody can see. They think wrong. Night vision can see. The lens in the camera mounted on a tripod for stability against the retinal insertion points of the night-vision goggles can see, just as cameras placed against the eye of a telescope can discern the mighty rings of Saturn. Yes. The camera never lies. The camera is a man of truth and honour.
Money changes hands. The silent vigilante shakes his head. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but old dogs still need to eat. That’s why they resort to old tricks. Come on, Rover, jump through the hoop, there’s a good boy.
The target exits the alleyway while the client leaves from the far end and is on his way. On his way down a dark path, but that is of no concern to the Phantasm. He knows the best treatment here is to cauterise the wound.
This night is different. The target does not return back to his high-rise the normal way. He is going somewhere else. He steps into lanes and down side streets and the hero follows. Is there a second deal? What’s going down?
What a fool this target is. He has already repaid his debt to society and now he is busy rebuilding his crime credit rating. It is so sad. Whatever happened to the self-worth drawn from a day of good work?
He zigzags through the estate until, at last, the landscape becomes familiar again and the target has returned home. The hero remembers how drug dealers take different routes to avoid pattern and suspicion. But his distraction techniques are nothing compared to the Phantasm’s tracking skills. He has Bear Grylls on series link. He waits as the target disappears back up the stairwell, and he sees the light come on in the flat on the top floor. The target, unseen, relights his candles that glow in the darkness every night. It is a sad and lonely existence really. Perhaps he will give him one more chance. Perhaps when he returns to his lair he will delete the photos from his camera, as he has done the past two nights. The first night the photos were blurry, hence the tripod and hours of practice in the belfry; the second time he’d experienced a change of heart, for Samson Holloway is a better man than his alter ego.
For now his work here is done. Danger lurks everywhere. Perhaps there is another adventure to find this night. He runs down the empty street unseen, until the darkness consumes him.
Chapter Twenty-Six
There was a whooshing sound and the American woman’s voice said to Sam, ‘You’ve got mail.’ Sam sat forward. This was from one of Japan’s major car manufacturers, querying an air shipping bill of £4,343. They wanted to see the standard authorisation sheet for air shipping but, of course, it didn’t exist because it had never been returned to Sam. He did, however, have the emails explaining how air shipping costs would be incurred following the Suez Canal incident if they didn’t say no, which they didn’t. He fired off the emails and tried to ignore the low fizzing of dread that was operating slowly at the base of him. He was getting lots of these emails now.
It was OK, though. He’d taken the small square pad of paper from the miniature shipping pallet on his desk and jotted down some figures. The sales revenue from his accounts per year was just north of one million pounds and the profit margin was 30%. That was a lot of profit, even after VAT and corporation tax and whatnot, and Sam’s wage was minuscule in comparison. Also, he’d calculated that over the years he’d been there he’d given the company eight whole months of unpaid overtime. The air shipping costs might sound like a lot but they were nothing, really.
The next day even more querying emails appeared from other clients. ‘This could be described as an avalanche,’ he said aloud, under his breath, in the middle of a twenty-five-minute toilet/composure-regaining break, during which he leaned against the wall inside the cubicle and tried to stop sweating. When he got back to his desk he pinged off those original emails stating he assumed they were OK with incurring the costs because they hadn’t replied. Emails that seemed very puny all of a sudden. He’d sent a few WhatsApps to Sarah from the cubicle but she hadn’t replied, even though they’d arrived at her phone and she’d read them.
In the afternoon the big Japanese car manufacturer wrote back.
You’ve got mail had become a banshee call now and filled him with horror.
The email said that, without the signed authorisation sheet, they would not pay for the air shipments. Sam reread the message but it couldn’t really be clearer. He was fucked. What if all the other clients refused to pay? Which was definitely what would happen. The slow dread that had been bubbling away started to rise through him. He thought of Zac dealing his little drugs in the middle of the night and how much easier that life seemed, and how unfair it was that Zac got to sit in his nice, cosy flat watching TV all day while honest people like Sam had to endure this.
For the rest of the afternoon he went through the old courier bills to tot up all the air shipments, and at this point the dread morphed into panic and then finally something else. Sam tried to conjure the word in his mind, and finally decided on terror. He was feeling a cataclysmic sense of terror as he stared at the calculator screen.
£60,057
Probably best to say nothing. Just say nothing and sit here and pretend absolutely nothing is terribly, terribly wrong. He considered some options. Selling his house was one. He could pay back a lot of the money that way. The other option was simply never to return to work. If he opted for this, could they have recourse through the courts? Was the scale of his mistake so big they could prosecute him? Much in the same way that CEOs sometimes go to jail?
He considered another twenty-five-minute toilet break, which would take him nearly up to home time, but they might get suspicious. Instead, he lifted his clipboard off the nail stuck into the side of his desk and pretended he needed to do something in the warehouse.
When he got home Sarah was already waiting outside in the car.
‘You know you should really give me a key,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to steal anything, I promise.’
Sam laughed.
‘I’ll get one cut for you,’ he said, though he had no intention of doing so because, of course, she might find all his Phantasm kit. Since they’d been together the flashes of dread had been growing steadily. Whenever she was over, he’d started feeling on edge. She had no problem wandering around the house, and when she headed towards the room where he kept his secret chest he became gripped with panic. He knew he needed to do something but didn’t know what. With the mask on he felt invincible, and he’d achieved more in the last few months as the Phantasm than in his whole life as Sam Holloway.
As they went down the hallway to the kitchen she said, casually, ‘Ugh, Zac keeps messaging me. He wants to meet up.’
This wiped out all other thoughts.
‘Oh, OK. Are you going to?’
‘I don’t know. What do you think?’
He switched on the lights and caught sight of their reflection in the window, of the two of them, together, like they were normal people in a normal relationship.
‘It’s up to you,’ he said.
Sarah threw her bag on the floor.
‘I don’t know. I feel sorry for him.’
‘You moved away to get away from him,’ he said, picking up her bag and putting it neatly on one of the kitchen chairs. ‘If you ask me, it’s kinda unfair what he’s done, moving here.’ Kinda unfair meaning completely fucking mental.
‘Yeah, I know, but . . . I don’t know. He needed to get away from his hangers-on. Maybe I should meet up with him and tell him how I feel.’
&nbs
p; She sat at the kitchen table and picked up Sam’s tablet and started flicking through it, the blue light casting weird patterns on her face. He wished he could tell her Zac was dealing drugs again. He tried to gauge her anger on a scale of one to ten if she knew he’d dressed up as the superhero and stalked her ex-boyfriend for a week. It would probably be pretty high.
‘You can do whatever you want,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about me, I trust you. But make sure you do what you want, not what he wants.’
She looked up from the tablet.
After a simple dinner of baked potatoes with tuna mayo, red onion and chopped peppers and a salad, they went into the living room and started watching a film on Netflix with Sarah snuggled up to him. As she flicked through pages on her phone the stress of the day fell away. Her being like this towards him was still weird but less so every day. His arm was a little distended and he was getting pins and needles in it but it was fine. He stared at her face for a while – she was lost in the Internet – and when she looked at him he grinned very widely.
‘Look at us two having a lovely time,’ he said.
‘Shut up,’ she laughed, and went back to her phone.
Sam watched the TV and they fell into a silence, and over those minutes he tried to fight off the feelings coming back in, of worry about work, about her finding out about the Phantasm, and then, more strongly, about Zac.
Before bed, Sarah decided to take a shower and left Sam alone downstairs. He listened to her moving around, making sure she wasn’t anywhere near the secret chest. When he heard the shower come on he picked up her phone and it came to life. He noticed she had downloaded the app and was logged into her Facebook.
He looked at the ceiling, and listened to the sound of water hissing.
Quickly, he went into her photos and scrolled down. He knew this was awful but he had to see. Then he had a better idea, and found Zac’s page, and scrolled through his photos. Why was she looking at Facebook so much now when she never used to use it? The most recent photos were dated eight months previously, meaning he was no longer using Facebook, or not posting at least. It didn’t take long to find pictures of her and Zac, happy together. He had longer hair then and looked much better than he had when Sam met him in her flat. There were lots of pictures of them sitting on sofas in dingy-looking living rooms, with lots of people. And they were happy. They were having a good time. Sam scrolled further down, a year and half backwards, scanning each scene, of pubs and barbecues and so many friends. They didn’t look very savoury but there was no denying how much fun they were having.