by Paul Starkey
Then pain roused her as hands clasped her upper arms. She was being lifted gently, and had only been raised a few inches off the floor, but it almost didn’t matter, any movement would have sent the same stabbing pain through her body.
Someone screamed.
“I’m sorry,” she heard Tyrell say, and only then did she realise it had been her.
Her eyes were damp with tears; she blinked them away and twisted her head so she could look at him, she tried to smile but doubted the emotion reached her lips. “Not…your…fault,” she managed, each word punctuated by a gasp as a new spasm of pain hit.
She wanted to tell him to put her back down, but she knew she was going to die, and oddly it bothered her now how she died, face down in a rug didn’t seem proper somehow. “Help…me,” she muttered. “Over to the wall.”
“Are you sure?” She saw horror reflected in his eyes, and figured she must look pretty bad.
“Sure…”
And together they moved. The pain was like a succession of harsh waves that washed over her, and her head swam as consciousness threatened to desert her. Ironically it was the pain itself that kept her focused, kept her awake. She bit down hard on her bottom lip, tasted blood in her mouth and didn’t know if she’d bitten into her own flesh, or whether it was the result of some internal injury. Her right hand gripped the gun tight and this helped with the pain. Between the fingers of her left hand she felt the blood flow increase, each little movement sending a fresh gout of blood between her fingers, hastening her end.
Eventually though she was sat against the wall, with the door to the burnt out room to her left. She kept her hand clamped to her back, even though it wasn’t doing any good, and even though it meant having her arm bent at an uncomfortable angle. Her legs splayed out in front of her, she could no longer feel them. She looked down at the tips of her boots and tried to make her toes wiggle. Nothing happened.
The SIG in her right hand hung in her lap, the barrel flush with her inner thigh. She should have felt the warmth still emanating from the hot metal, but she didn’t.
She could still move her head at least, and she turned towards John Tyrell who knelt by her right side. He looked like hell, his face was covered in soot, and beneath the dust his skin was deathly pale. His breathing was harsh, irregular, and he was shaking.
But he was alive and, she intuited, uninjured. His eyes were wide, he was scared, not for himself, but for her, and he clearly didn’t have a clue what to do.
“I’m sorry,” she said softly.
He frowned.
“For stopping you…” she winced, was it her imagination or was the blood flow easing? That should have been comforting, but it wasn’t. She felt her body begin to shiver, what parts of her body she could still feel at any rate.
“It’s ok,” he said, with a shrug that said it didn’t matter. The schoolboy was back again, a naïve child who didn’t have a clue how to keep his true feelings from showing.
She smiled. “I didn’t do it for me, idiot,” she whispered. “Did it for you…couldn’t let you kill him.”
He frowned. “I don’t…”
“Shut up,” she said. “Don’t have long so I’ll do the talking.” He looked chided, but he did as she asked. “That’s better, old man.” And she smiled again. “I couldn’t let you kill him, because this house would turn against you if you did.”
Confusion danced in his eyes. “But I’m already guilty, the house knows…” he realised he was talking and shut up.
She shook her head, tried to anyway. “No, the house knows you’re innocent. The John Tyrell who’s guilty, the John Tyrell who did terrible things doesn’t exist anymore.”
He shook his head. “He does. The doctors said my memories of those seventeen years were gone, erased, but this house…this house made me see things, memories.”
She wanted to shrug her shoulders, but her body wouldn’t obey. “Maybe that was part of the process. Maybe it was testing you?” She chuckled; it came out little more than a gurgle. “It let you open the door. When it could have kept us both locked inside with the flames, it allowed you to escape.”
“Us to escape,” he corrected.
“I was lucky enough to be right behind you.” Was it her imagination, or was it getting darker. “I’ll tell you another thing, well ask you a question. What did you see, outside the front door once Felix had it open?”
He frowned. “I don’t follow.”
She smiled. “Exactly. I saw…things out there. So did Ibex, that’s why he ran upstairs. You didn’t. And the drawing room door? You never tried to open it; we just assumed you were as culpable as Ibex, as me.”
A noise sounded, back down the corridor, coming from the direction of the landing. It sounded like something being dragged along the floor. Tyrell turned his head to look, squinted, then shook his head.
Another sound now. From the opposite direction.
“I don’t have a lot of time, John I…agh!”
He snapped his head back round to look at her. “Chalice!” he cried out, his hands seemed frozen in mid-air, as if he desperately wanted to do something with them to aid her, but knew this was impossible.
She was blowing air out between her lips now, creating a faint whistle. “Sorry. A little unexpected stab of pain there, it’s gone now…I’m…” she wanted to say she was ok, but that would be a lie. Instead she merely reiterated, “It’s gone now.”
“I need to get you out of here.”
“No,” she said. “You need to get Tom out of here, need to make sure he and Felix are safe.”
The sounds coming from either end of the corridor were getting closer. She knew what they signified, and judging by the look in Tyrell’s eyes, so did he. “They won’t hurt you if I’m with you,” he said.
She smiled wryly. “Really? They may have let me through the door but the house still torched a room you were in to get to me.” She shook her head, stopping when it made her feel nauseous. “Besides, I’ve got at least one bullet in my back, think I’ve lost too much blood, plus I got burned back there as well. Can’t feel my legs, can’t feel much of anything. No, I’m not going to make it. Either my injuries or this house are going to finish the job; but you don’t need to be here to witness it.”
His eyes danced left and right, she could almost hear the cogs inside his head whirring. For all the illness that had debilitated him, despite losing so much of who he was, who he’d been, he retained enough knowledge to know she wasn’t lying about death being close at hand.
Still he wasn’t prepared to let go. “I’m not leaving you. The least…the least I can do is wait here with you until…” his voice broke, he began to gently cry.
“It’s ok,” she said softly.
He shook his head vigorously. “No it isn’t. Nobody should die alone.”
She managed to cock her head to one side. “John, everyone dies alone.”
More shuffling, she turned her eyes to the right and saw something move out of the gloom, several yards away. At first she took the shape to be a wolf, given it was slunk so close to the ground. Then she realised it was Brendan, slowly crawling towards her.
She heard Tyrell gasp and followed his gaze, to the left. There, roughly the same distance away as Brenan, the figure of Lucy Parish stepped out of the shadows. Her head still hung low, hair still draped over her face. Her shoulders were slack, and her arms hung loosely by her side. Chalice remembered how strong those arms had seemed when they were gripping Ibex, and a shiver danced halfway along her spine until the nerves were too damaged to register it.
Lucy wasn’t moving any closer though, and when Chalice looked back, neither was Brendan.
“I hate to say this, but what are they waiting for?”
“John, I think they’re waiting for you to get out of the way,” she said with a smile. It was curious how calm she felt, and she wondered if it was the damage to her nervous system, or something less rational behind this serenity. Maybe everyone became th
is accepting this close to death.
He rested a hand on her shoulder. “What did you do that was so very bad?”
For a moment she considered not telling him, how to explain in just a few words the mixed up emotions of a nineteen year old girl pushed into a situation older and wiser heads would have struggled with, trying desperately to fit in in a foreign land, torn between her new homeland, the place of her birth, and a man who was alien to both.
“I killed the man I loved.”
He said nothing in reply, didn’t even seem that shocked, as if he knew somehow that sentence didn’t even begin to explain the circumstances. She looked at where Lucy stood. The corpse wasn’t moving, as still as a statue, but she knew they wouldn’t hold off for long. Just like she knew Tyrell wouldn’t leave her.
She took her left hand away from the wound, she doubted it was staunching much blood anyway. She reached up and rested bloody fingers against his hand. He didn’t flinch, didn’t recoil in disgust as her blood, still warm, was smeared over his fingers.
“Like I said, it wasn’t easy living in Israel. It’s a fallacy that somehow all the Jews and ingenious Arabs hate each other, never talk to one another, but there’s always an undercurrent there. I’m not a Jew, so it was easier. Went to college and met a boy named Hakeem.” She closed her eyes and could see his face, those warm brown eyes, always alive with joy, his crooked, ever so cute, nose( result of a rifle butt when he’d been ten and foolishly thrown stones at men with guns), his smile, wide lips that seemed to swallow her whole when he kissed her.
“Chalice?”
She opened her eyes. “It’s ok, John. Just resting.” She took a breath, wondering how many more she had left. “Hakeem. We fell in love.” No need for details, no need to say he’d been her first, that the pain of separation, even for a few days, had felt like the worst agony in the world back then, before she’d known the truth, before she’d know what real pain was like. “He was an Arab, from a good family, intelligent, well educated, but he was a believer too. Not like those idiots you get these days, he wasn’t a fanatic, didn’t believe in 72 virgins or holy war, but he wanted freedom, wanted a homeland he could be proud of, and he was happy to live side by side with the Israelis, he just didn’t think they felt the same.
“He tried to do it peacefully, but he was impatient. By the time I had to do national service he’d already fallen in with the wrong crowd. We kept in touch but it wasn’t the same, his friends didn’t much like me, and my…” she licked her lips. “My fellow soldiers, nobody was really my friend, they didn’t like him much. Still sometimes, late at night when I was on leave and we were alone, we could pretend.
“It was a night like that when he let slip that he once or twice he’d driven a lorry back from a small village near the Lebanese border. It was supposed to be legit, delivering medical supplies on behalf of the Red Crescent, and most of the time it was.”
“Most of the time, but not all the time, right?” said Tyrell. “I remember things like that,” he shrugged. “That was Ireland of course, but I imagine it was much the same. What was he smuggling?”
“He didn’t always know. Mostly it was people, in as well as out, but sometimes weapons. There was a tunnel. It led from the village to a remote spot inside Lebanon.”
“I’m surprised he told you.”
“He was drunk, drunk and in love, and I should have kept it to myself. Should have told him to never do it again, but I was drunk too, and the next day I don’t know if he even remembered telling me.”
He frowned. “You turned him in?”
She wasn’t able to shake her head, the muscles wouldn’t turn anymore. “No. I resolved to keep it quiet, though I kept turning it over and over in my mind for days afterwards. I’d pretty much decided to warn him off when my unit was sent out on manoeuvres, not far from that village.” She looked at Lucy. This was taking too long. “There was an incident on a small Jewish farm. My unit was the first there. We found the entire family dead at the dinner table. Someone—we never found out who—tossed a grenade into the room. Half a dozen dead, no survivors, though at first we thought there was. A little girl in a highchair. She was surrounded by death but there wasn’t a mark on her, or so we thought. The back of her head was missing...”
She saw him wince.
“I was angry, we all were, mad with rage, so when I told my colonel that I had an idea who was responsible he didn’t question my intel.”
“You led them to the village.”
“Yeah…” she took a deep breath, funny how something you took for granted became a luxury in your final moments. “I think I expected we’d seize the place, go in hot, maybe there’d be some shooting, but it’d be clinical…It was anything but. We had tanks with us, and the colonel stopped us a mile or so from the village.” She closed her eyes, and she could still see the muzzle flares, still hear the thunderous roar of the main guns…
“Chalice?”
Opening her eyes was hard, and for a moment she didn’t think she’d manage it. She smiled. “Stop frowning John, or those lines will stick.”
“I’m not going to apologise for worrying.”
She would have shrugged if she’d been able. “Where was I? Oh yeah, tanks. They levelled the village, then we went in. I was in shock, striding through ruined streets like a robot, I think if someone had run out I’d have shot them automatically, but there was no one to shoot. The place was practically deserted thankfully, a dozen dead, most of them militants.” She felt tears in her eyes. Let the sobs come. “One of them was Hakeem. He’d been…he’d been…” she couldn’t go on, rage welled up within her alongside the tears and she gripped Tyrell’s hand tight as she let out a cry that wasn’t so much born of pain, as it was of anger and hate, much of it levelled at herself.
Her cries did it. Lucy began to shuffle forwards. Chalice didn’t need to turn her head to know Brendan’s corpse had started moving too. “Get out of here!” she shouted in Tyrell’s face, her throat raw as the wound in her back.
“No,” he said, and she saw the ghost of the man he’d been, strong, determined, stupid. Wonderfully, nobly stupid.
“Fine. Fine. Stay with me, but do me one favour.”
“What’s that?” he said, eyes locked onto hers, which was where she wanted them.
She gripped the pistol tight in her hand, prayed she’d have the strength to do this. “I never knew my father, and that’s a terrible thing for a daughter.”
“I…I,” he began.
She never got to hear the end of the sentence. Her right arm moved, not far, just a few inches, but it was enough to prod the barrel of the gun against her stomach, angled slightly upwards. As she began to pull the trigger she hoped it would be enough. In the moment before the hammer fell her vision began to fail her as the gloom around her deepened, but still she thought she saw a wispy, nebulous figure standing behind Tyrell, a young olive skinned man, smiling down at her with wide, open lips…
Then the darkness swallowed her whole.
Chapter Fifty four
The SIG was small calibre, and the shot was muffled by her body, but still the single gunshot that took Chalice Knight’s life boomed like a funeral bell, and the reverberating echo of its passing seemed to linger in the air, or maybe just in Tyrell’s ears, long after the shot had been fired.
He’d still had one hand on her shoulder when she did it, and her fingers had clenched, involuntarily, with death, her nails digging into the flesh of his hand there, her blood mingling with his.
He barely felt it. He just knelt there, staring into eyes that had held life just a few moments ago, yet were now as lifeless and arid as the surface of the moon. She might have been dead for hours, days even.
The tears that had begun earlier hadn’t stopped, they’d merely slowed, but now the rain began again, and in the end it was the sting of salt touching his lips that shocked him out of the paralysis that had gripped him.
“Oh, Chalice,” he whispered softly. Gently,
oh so gently, as if she were only sleeping and he feared awakening her, he lifted her fingers away from his hand.
As he took his palm from her shoulder, her body slumped to the side, sliding along the wall and leaving a bloody smear with its passing. He reached out to grab her arms, at first intending to lift her back up, until he realised this was pointless, instead he merely eased her passing to the ground, again gently, afraid of hurting her despite the fact pain was long behind her.
He laid her on her back. Her eyes were still wide, staring up at the ceiling. He closed them with bloody fingers. Then he gently lifted each of her arms and laid them across her chest. Not once did he consider checking for a pulse. Death was unmistakable.
With her body in repose, he sat back, shuffling until he was up against the far side of the corridor. Only then did he focus on the gun. It had tumbled from her grip as she died; reflexes, sometimes the involuntary muscle spasms of death caused you to tighten your grip, sometimes loosen it.
He should pick the gun up, he knew, pick it up and be ready to defend himself against…
His head shot up, banging the back of his skull against the wall. The pain was a further jolt back to reality, and he looked down the corridor. Brendan’s body still lay there but…but it wasn’t moving, and the lights, the bulbs in the ceiling shone brightly.
He turned his head hesitantly to look in the opposite direction, pausing to stare at the gun, knowing he could never bring himself to touch the instrument of Chalice Knight’s demise, no matter how much he might need it.
He frowned as he stared down the corridor. He could see all the way to the end now, all the way to the top of the staircase that led downstairs. He saw a body draped over the bannister, so that only its legs were visible. Ibex.
But closer— a lot closer— Lucy.
Tyrell frowned. Had he been so shocked by the gunshot that he hadn’t heard her body fall? Somehow he made himself stand. His legs were like jelly, from fatigue and fear in equal measure, and he had to reach a hand out to the wall to steady himself as he took hesitant steps towards where the body of Lucy Parrish lay.