by Dave Watson
I had moved like Griff.
As I stood there, trying to accept this information, I caught a glimpse of movement on the other side of the road. Feeling it before actually seeing it.
And there it was again. That sniggering thing.
It was barely a shape at all. It had no physical form, and was more of a curious bending of dark light that seemed to scuttle back and forth in the air along the cliff top.
The feeling of hate emanating from this thing was so strong and forceful that I felt my spirit quail once more before it. There was a subliminal sense of hunger and need from this shape shifting spectre.
But now I could sense hesitancy there as well. Frustration. The thing across the road was aware of the change in me, of that I’m certain.
Then it was gone again, and I stood alone there at Bennane Head.
Chapter 29
Kyle Densmore, standing mystified in his son's empty bedroom, flinched at the sound of breaking glass from downstairs.
“Phil?” he called in concern, briskly descending the stairs again to the ground floor. “You in the house?”
More noise from downstairs; the tinkling of glass, a hard thump. Coming from the direction of the kitchen. The rear patio door.
His heart pounding, Kyle ran the length of the entrance hall and pushed open the door to the kitchen. The patio door lay open; a gaping hole in the glass, fragments littering the floor. Kyle stared in shock at the mess, still taking in the scene as a voice spoke up behind him.
“Alright, dad.”
Kyle spun around and had time to register a gaunt unshaven face with mad eyes beneath a black woollen beanie hat, then the house brick the intruder had used to smash the patio door crashed into the side of his head, spilling him to the floor among the fragments of coloured glass.
His elder son stood over his inert body, expressionless.
James Densmore calmly set the house brick on the kitchen counter, went to the cupboard under the stairs and found his dad's golf clubs just where they’d always been kept. He selected the nine iron then went back into the kitchen. He closed the patio door and drew the curtain across, then turned back to his father, lying unconscious on the floor.
“It’s been a while, dad,” he said as he stepped forward, hefting the golf club.
Chapter 30
I arrived home at around ten pm that evening. The walk back to town from Bennane Head had taken me a few hours, but I didn’t feel tired. My nerves were still buzzing with adrenaline after the events of earlier in the day and I was anxious to get home. It had occurred to me that if my dad had gone upstairs looking for me, he would find my room empty and would probably freak out, and as I didn’t have my mobile (I assumed it was still on my bedroom floor, where I’d dropped it before I found myself inexplicably lying on sand, miles away) I’d been unable to call him. Ever since my mum had died he’d always been highly strung when it came to me. Not that I blamed him. Too much had been taken from the man.
My dad’s car was parked in front of our semi detached house, but the windows were dark, which was odd as my dad usually stayed up till at least midnight before retiring for bed.
As I approached our front gate, a feeling of foreboding settled on my shoulders and almost seemed to weigh me down. The new sensitivity I had picked up kicked in, and I could sense an aura of anticipation in the air. The very atmosphere seemed charged somehow, like before a powerful thunderstorm.
Suddenly afraid, I quickly went to the front door and tried the handle. The door was locked. I checked my pockets for my key, but I had woken up on the beach also without my jacket where I usually kept it. The strange teleportation that had left me on the sands at Bennane Head was becoming more inconvenient by the minute.
I quickly jogged around the side of the house to the back garden, intending to get the spare key my dad kept under the windowsill of his small garden shed.
That’s when I noticed the jagged hole in the patio door.
I stopped in my tracks. Someone was moving about in the kitchen. I could hear the crunch and skitter of glass fragments on the stone floor tiles.
The kitchen light came on and through the window, the interior of the room was thrown into stark clarity as I stood in the darkened back garden. I could see someone in a dark woollen hat and jacket, their back to me. Too narrow in the shoulders to be my dad.
From where I was standing, I could also make out splashes of red on the white walls. A bloody handprint on the kitchen door like a kid’s finger painting.
I froze.
Regardless of how much blood letting I’d witnessed in the past few months, that one crimson hand print on the pristine white kitchen door horrified me in a new and unexpected way.
Without any effort on my part, the world suddenly sped up.
I find myself at the patio door before I even realise I’d started moving. Then I’m in the kitchen. The stranger in black turns towards me as I burst in. Without conscious thought, my right arm shoots out and catches the intruder in the throat. A perfectly placed hard jab to the Adam’s apple; fingers on one side, thumb on the other.
The tall stranger gasps, takes a few steps back and collapses on the floor making strangled sounds.
I scan the kitchen. No one else there. Through the kitchen door to the hallway. My dad lying on the floor. Blood. Not coating the walls as I’d feared, but still too much. To my dad’s side. He’s still breathing. Alive, thank Christ. He manages to speak.
“It’s James.”
A flashback to Griff's last words to me.
Say hello to your brother for me.
I’ve got my dad in my arms, and I’m carrying him up the stairs like he weighs no more than a toddler, though he’s actually forty five years old and weighs sixteen stone, and I’m a lanky teenager.
Into his room, laying him down on the bed. He cries out.
Then the world slowed down to normal speed again.
His eyes were open and alert, though he had a deep cut above his right eye and a sheet of blood decorated that side of his face. There was more blood on his chin and teeth. His left arm seemed to be lying a strange way.
“Can you talk, dad?” I asked. “Are you okay?” A stupid question.
“It’s James,” he gasped, grimacing in pain. “Where is he?”
“In the kitchen. Back in a sec.”
Going back down the stairs, cautiously now, I tried to gather my thoughts. A lot had happened in the sixty or so seconds I’d been in the house. I tried to prepare myself for coming face to face with my long lost brother, but it was too much at that moment. I tried to not think at all and just trust whatever instinct I had.
I pushed open the kitchen door to find him just getting to his feet. He lifted his head at my entrance and we locked eyes. Neither of us moved for a few seconds.
The last time I’d looked into those eyes, they’d been black and expressionless, coldly observing while I was being tenderised by a Titleist nine iron. Eight years ago. I expected hate in his expression. Strangely, I saw a bewildered fear. The same golf club was now lying on the kitchen floor. James started to move towards it.
Again, into fast forward mode. This time I was aware of myself making it happen.
I was on top of him. A brutal short, stomping kick to the inside of his right knee, destroying the ligaments holding the bones together before he had taken a full step. His leg folded in a horribly unnatural outward bend. He screamed once then fell to the floor again, writhing in agony. Time once again returned to its regular speed.
I picked up the golf club.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” I said, trying to keep the tremor from my voice.
“Ma fuckin’ knee!” James wailed. “Ya wee prick, you’ve fucked ma…”
The club came down hard and fast, connecting with his left kneecap with a savagely satisfying crunch that I felt all the way along the shaft of the club and my forearm. He screamed again, then began to whimper pitifully.
“I’m not asking you a
gain, Jim. What are you doing here?”
He started to sob. My brother was broken. His face had hardened since last I’d seen it. His lips were dry and cracked and a large scar that looked like a knife wound scrawled across his left cheek. Heavy, dark blue half circles underscored his limpid eyes which seemed to float in his pale, scraggly bearded face.
“I don’t know,” he blubbed, snot running from his nose onto his upper lip. “I had to come. He made me.”
Confused, I asked “What’re you talking about? Who made you?”
Amazingly, Jim tried to get to his feet again, but his knees were both obliterated and he collapsed back on the floor with a wail.
“Jesus, ma legs. I can’t walk. I need to walk, Phil. He’s got to be dead. Is he fuckin’ dead?” he demanded. “You don’t know what it’ll do to me if he’s not dead. I saw it. Under her coat.”
I hesitated, trying to unravel my brothers incoherent babbling. A terrible idea crept into my thoughts.
“Who fuckin’ made you come here?” I knew what he was going to say next. He was going to say Griff. Griff had made him come.
The pain cleared from Jim’s eyes for second, and was replaced with naked fear.
“Someone phoned me this morning. It was mad. Some mad shit, I didn’t know if it was real or not. Thought maybe I’d had a nightmare. Phil, I didnae have any choice. He hurt me. Fuckin’ hurt me over the phone. And there was some fuckin’ mental shit in the street later when I tried to stop. A wean. That wean’s face...” Jim’s sobs dissolved into a wail of pure anguish. His fists pounded against his head as if he meant to beat out some unwanted memory.
“Who phoned you, Jim?” I asked again. My certainty that he was going to name Griff as the caller proved to be off the mark.
“He said his name was Ozay,” said my brother.
Chapter 31
The day that Jim Densmore heard from Ozay started much like any other.
He got up in the late afternoon, that is to say, he awoke at two pm. The afternoon sun found a gap in the grey clouds that seemed to perpetually crown the east end of Glasgow, and shone through the undressed living room window of the one bedroom flat he inhabited. He didn’t immediately leap from the bare mattress on the floor and start the day with a merry whistle, but rather lazed for a further twenty minutes, one arm thrown over his eyes to block out the sun's glare and trying to think of a good reason to leave the meagre haven of his thin duvet.
He wasn’t particularly hungry, so food was one reason to be crossed off the list. He didn’t need to piss or have a shite, so no cause there. He wasn’t currently employed, there was nothing on TV in the mid afternoon, and he’d no pressing social engagements to attend.
He figured it was safe to say the day could remain unseized for a while yet.
Just as he was considering having a wank to pass the time, the phone rang.
Jim frowned in annoyance. The flat was fucking freezing and the last thing he wanted to do was leave the relative heat of the cheap blanket to have a conversation. He wasn’t expecting any phone calls. Fuck it, he thought. They’ll hang up eventually.
The phone kept ringing. Ten times. Twenty. It seemed to be getting louder somehow.
His headache, born of last nights cider session, was ironically another reason to stay in bed, but the need to stop the phone’s painful shrieking, which made him wince with every ring, drove him naked from the covers. Cursing, he struggled up from the mattress on the floor, yelping in pain as a splinter of wood from the bare floorboards stabbed into his big toe.
“Fuckin’ pain in the arse cunto bastard…” he muttered in fury as he limped to the deafening phone. He angrily snatched the handset off the wall.
“Who the fuck’s this?” he demanded.
There was a weird noise on the other end of the line. No one spoke; there was just a constant static that strangely sounded like a vast crowd heard from a distance. Echoing across the unusual background hiss were short bursts of another sound, like someone harshly whispering in a guttural language. The eerie soft noise made Jim’s flesh crawl for some reason. There was something about it that was just… wrong, yet somehow familiar. A very primal and basic part of his mind seemed to recognise the discordant soundscape coming over the line. That part of his consciousness had been expecting this call in a way that Jim’s normal thinking could never envisage.
“Hello Jim,” a voice broke in. Spoken softly, with a strange accent. A guy. “You need to kill your dad.”
That got Jim’s attention.
He went cold in an instant. As if triggered by the sound of the caller’s voice, the memories which lived in his daily thoughts played themselves over for the billionth time. The hate. The sheer loathing and contempt he felt for his old man. The day he left home was with him always. He’d been leaving home every day for the past eight years, bloodied and exiled. He remembered it with clarity. He’d just been fucking around with his wee brother, giving him a bit of a fright with the lit fag, and then the golf club. Alright, maybe he’d gone a bit overboard, but he’d had a hangover, and the wee cunt was being a pain in the arse. Suddenly his old man had appeared, and had kicked the living shit out of him, then threw him out the house. He remembered how his dad had physically thrown him onto the front lawn, then taken out his wallet, withdrew a wad of bills and thrown them in his face.
Take that and go. I don’t want you here any more.
Jim had lurched back and forth in the small front lawn, seizing up the paper currency and shoving it into his pockets, all the while screaming blood flecked obscenities and curses at his dad, and thinking about how much smack the money could buy.
He’d never seen his family again after that day.
Yes, Jim fantasized about killing his dad quite a bit.
Ever since then, every single face that Jim had ever punched, kicked, stuck the head on or slashed had been his father's. Eight years of hateful revenge fantasies, lived out in violence done to others. Even the women he mugged, fucked up as it was, had his fathers face, contorted in fear as he held his knife to their throats while going through their pockets for valuables. The shop clerk in that carry out shop he’d held up had had his dad’s face. Then the butt of the sawn off shotgun had turned it into pulp. The cunt he stabbed when he was doing time in Barlinne, the screw that had fucked with him. All of them. His father’s hated face.
Strangely though, this time the memories didn’t bring with them the usual frustrated rage. Instead he felt a peculiar numbness begin to steal over his skin in an almost pleasant tingle.
“Who’s this?” he asked into the phone’s mouthpiece, slightly detached. His eyelids suddenly felt quite heavy.
“You can call me Ozay, Jim.”
The caller’s soft voice seemed to cast a lulling spell on him. He felt like he was almost floating. A weird weightlessness washed over him in waves, numbing his thoughts of everything else. He could no longer feel the pain of the splinter in his toe nor the cold air on his skin. There was only this voice. This purring, seductive voice. The eerie hiss in the background was still there, as were the short staccato blasts of that other sound. It all combined to lull Jim into a subtle trance. It was like a very, very good hit of scag.
“I don’t know anyone called Ozay,” he murmured. “That’s a funny name.”
“No, you don’t know me, Jim. But I am funny. I’m so funny I could have you screaming in seconds. You need to kill your dad.”
Deeper he slipped into the spell the caller cast upon him. His jaw hung stupidly open and a long string of saliva spilled from his lower lip as his eyes glazed over, swinging there and running down his bare chest.
“That’s a fine idea,” Jim agreed cordially. A tiny fragment of his mind that was still his own began screaming that this was wrong, all wrong. It was ignored.
“Yessssss,” the caller hissed. “All wrong, Jim. Wrong that he fucked you over. Wrong that the bastard turned you away, made you just another junkie on the street. Do you know he laughs about wha
t he did to you when he’s playing golf with his friends?”
A single tear rolled down Jim’s cheek, tracing a salty path through the beard stubble and joining the warm drool on his chest. His bladder let go and urine spilled down his thigh, puddling on the floor at his feet. He didn’t notice.
“Who... who are you?” he whimpered like a lost child, suddenly a little frightened. “What’s happening?”
Though Jim’s veiled senses couldn’t perceive it, the spartanly furnished room grew suddenly gloomier, as if the sun had slipped behind a thunderhead, and the background hiss on the phone seemed to shrink back as if afraid. The voice on the other end of the line changed slightly. Became rougher. The thing spoke again.
“You know who I am, Jim. I’m the black. I’m the thing you pretend you don’t see from the corner of your eye at night.” The last word was a hoarse, drawn out rasp. Niiiiiight.
The pleasant sensation that held him entranced suddenly melted away to be replaced with a deep hollow despair, so intense Jim swayed on his feet from its impact. His heart rate accelerated and a layer of sweat broke out all over his body. An unbidden picture suddenly bloomed in his reeling mind. A surreal image of a barren desert landscape stretching infinitely under a black sky. Hundreds, thousands of bloody scalps littered the ground like some macabre vegetation. Shadowy creatures like huge crows, but with long, bony arms and glowing eyes sat on barbed wire fencing that stretched away to a sick yellow horizon. A tall slim figure in a crimson red cowl stood facing him. A thing with an animal’s face. All teeth, black eyes and stretched parchment skin. He began to weep.
“I don’t like this,” he blubbered, sinking to his knees, blind to all else but the mental vision of desolation which he couldn’t shut his eyes to.
The voice sniggered back at him.
“Your kind never does,” it said.
The hellish picture in his mind changed to a black skinned hand with too many fingers and knuckles, squeezing what looked like brain. A brutal, crushing pain suddenly exploded through his head, knocking Jim to the floor with its force. He shrieked in agony, dropping the handset of the phone, but still the voice went on inside his head, changing in pitch to a high yammering chant which was almost deafening.