by David Wood
'Don't look around. There's another one rummaging through the skip over there.' I made the gesture with my eyes. I had noticed the first of them, a booze and rain soaked body, propped up against the rusted railings where the Bridge Hotel became one with the Castle Keep. He appeared to be fascinated by the ragged polythene bags snared on the railings spines as they struggled desperately to be free. We were on the darker side of the street, approaching the garage on Lovers’ Lane. The tramp was wearing sunglasses despite the lack of sun. The bridge's sodium lights stole whatever features might have been his. Looking at him, he could all too easily have been a mannequin marooned in my own miserable reality. Headless. Eyeless. Nothing more substantial than a gathering of shadows propped against the railings to ward off wandering spirits. Layers of black rags hung loosely from his shoulders where the shop dummy would have been draped with designer labels. I felt the surge of adrenaline as it flooded into my system to kill the pain for a little while longer. When it returned it would be twice as bad, three times, but for now the adrenaline was succour. Matted tatters and knots of lank hair transformed the body into a man. The rain and the grease of the streets had bleached it from a lacklustre shade of brown into an oily crop of syrup. As a man, he was possibly the most sinister sight I had ever seen, at home among the detritus of takeaway containers, yesterday's news and chocolate wrappers that cluttered the street.
Traffic lights changed their spots, stopping cars that weren't coming.
The tramp looked at us, then looked away towards his companion skulking around the overflowing skip. His mouth moved. I assumed he was muttering some terse obscenity beneath his whiskey sodden breath, but then I heard his mangled whisper-rendition of 'Yesterday'. A hand went up to shield his eyes as if the tired streetlights were dazzling him through the dark lenses. Was he trying to appear casually disinterested? I doubted that very much. Something else was going on here.
The second tramp was struggling to untangle a metre-long metal stave from the frame of a buckled bedstead that had been jammed into the skip along with the melange of metal and torn rubber that made up the jumble of rubbish. I watched his struggle in horrified fascination. Why would he need a weapon unless he had someone to attack. If he had someone to attack, who else was there but us? Until then, I had thought myself desensitised to this kind of menace, but I knew then, without doubt, that I had been lying to myself. Erecting barriers of cardboard inside my head to shutter out the horrors. If something as commonplace as saturated tramps looking for good pickings among the day's litter had me ready to curl up and die, what would another episode of real horror be capable of? Another scene of eyes being clawed out or tongues bitten through? I shuddered. Lying to myself was the safest of the options open to me, I supposed.
'It could be nothing,' I said casually, knowing I had to keep my voice level as much for myself as for Aimee. If Aimee had any idea just how spooked the sight of these two drop-outs had got me, she didn't show it. 'But if I say run, then run. No arguments.'
Not a clever thing to say, under the circumstances.
I felt her stiffen against my side then. I could have kicked myself. She was coiled up almost as tightly as I was. I couldn't even blame my lack of consideration on the selfish part of me because all of me was selfish. I hadn't even stopped to think how Aimee might be feeling. I simply expected her to cope because that's what she did. She coped. Between the two of us something had to give, and I had the distinct impression that things were about thirty seconds away from shooting off every which way.
I shifted my hold on my right crutch, so if needs be I could bring it up to use as a club. My preferred defence would have been flight every time of asking; hardly a viable option after the abuse my body to gone through recently, though, and I was no Kendo expert, so what kind of difference a crutch might make I couldn't have said. At least not truthfully.
The place was too damned dark, with too many enclaves for the bastards to lurk unseen. I knew I was jumping at shadows, but how many more of them were there in those shadows? None? Twenty? Shapes clutching brown paper clad bottles tightly. Stooped. Thick. Heavy set. Skeletally thin. Towering. All of them poised to spill out of the woodwork like lice. . .
I would have killed, right then, for any familiar sounds: sirens; drunken Rugby club banter; even lovers’ soft shoe steps emerging from the lane. But we were very much alone.
The whistling faltered. I was in no particular hurry to discover what had made the tramp lose the melody's thread.
I pulled Aimee closer. 'Come on, let's get out of here.'
Shadows and shadow shapes. Some phantom. Some real.
Even the brickwork of the arches seemed somehow sinister. Decay left room for phantoms where daylight would have decried crumbling mortar and chipped and cracked stones. The recesses were home now to all of the creatures my imagination could spin in less than quarter of a minute.
I didn't want to stop; I don't think I would have, but wants aren't always what we get out of life, are they? I wanted to be anywhere else but Lovers’ Lane, at any other time but now. But that's where I was, and now was most definitely the time, however much I might have wished it otherwise.
It's probably an understatement, but I didn't feel much like whistling a happy tune.
We moved as quickly as we could without seeming to be in a hurry; both of us knowing the last thing we needed was to start drawing attention to ourselves. If Tweedledum and Tweedledee weren't looking for us then so much the better. If they were, well. . . we'd have to cross that bridge when we came to it, and probably quickly at that.
I looked for lights, somewhere bright where people would be congregating. People were our best hope of safety and the nearest sure haven was back at the Bigg Market, too far away by a long way. That limited our choices from Eeenie and Meanie down to just Eeenie. Eeenie being head down and keep walking. I didn't much fancy Eeenie as things stood.
I could hear the railing-bound tramp shuffling after us. He'd given up the pretence of whistling. His steps were a loud cycle of shuffle-drag-shuffle. I started hoping he was lame rather than just drunk. That kind of thinking tipped the odds back in our favour. I wasn't lame, I hurt but I wasn't lame. If push came to shove, I could still push, and if my odds were the ones that counted when it came down to the crunch, well, then we had a chance. However slim.
Tweedledum, Tweedledee's erstwhile partner, was still rattling around inside the skip after his chosen weapon. The longer he was tied up with his fruitless tug-of-war with the bedstead the longer Aimee and I had to make like shepherds and get the flock out of there.
That kind of thinking lasted about twenty-five feet. Shadows I gambled on staying as shadows didn't.
A fist formed around my heart and began pounding against my ribcage. Three of them detached from the darkness. They reeked of stale odours; alcohol, cigarettes, sweat, a fusion of other less normal aromas, and underlying them all, that basest of warning reeks, urine. They were like animals marking out their territories. Piss against a wall and claim it for their own.Vomit on a stretch of pavement. Territorial. The law of the streets. I could well imagine them recognising one another's reeks and knowing well enough to steer clear.
'I think we're in trouble,' I said needlessly. Somewhere along the line I have developed a nasty habit ofreacting to oncoming trouble with bloody stupid understatements like: I think we're in trouble. It must be some sort of bodily defence mechanism. Open mouth, make things sound funny instead of scary, and hey presto! a blanket's thrown over the eyes and suddenly the brain thinks things aren't so bad after all. At least that's the theory.
Aimee squeezed my arm. 'I think you might be right.'
They had slipped out of the meniscus of blackness that stretched across the entrance to Castle Keep. Three body-shapes, the fabric of which could easily have been as insubstantial as a wisp of imagination’s thread, or conversely as substantial as an out-of-control lorry jack-knifing across three lanes of motorway and straight through the central reservatio
n. That made us the oncoming traffic, moving too quickly to slow down, and to follow that kind of thinking through a head-on collision was inevitable. Already I was thinking in terms of damage limitation. I thought I could run, but I had no idea of how far or how long, and I didn't want to force myself and find out that what I thought should see me over five hundred yards couldn't make it over fifty.
I stopped walking. My gaze darted left and right, looking for something anything that I hadn't already seen. Westgate Road was a dark possibility. The windows of Rake's Photocopiers spun back the reflections of the cars racked up outside, massive plates of oily images that doubled the dimensions of the street but halved the opportunities for hiding. If it came down to hiding we were in serious trouble. The narrow street was poorly lit. Quiet. Too quiet. We were on the edge of a city, there should have been more in the way of noise. People laughing. Shouting. Music from the pub across the street.
Maybe there was. Maybe my senses had tuned them out, better to focus on close quarters. It made me all the more certain that the entire underbelly of trampkind was waiting to pour out of the nooks and crannies.
I didn't have time to think about it.
A streetlight transformed the three body-shapes into very real people, lit them sickly. The one in the centre, tallest of the three, was a mass of blonde ratty hair and tufts of beard that belied the gaunt circles where his eyes ought to have been. A bicycle chain was wrapped around his fist, six inches or more dangling in a rusty tail. Either side of him the picture became bleaker. To his left, black hair and scars. At first I thought he was weaponless, but then he raised his hands to touch his cheeks. Each thumb was implanted with a barbed razor nearly two inches long. He made a gesture that I interpreted sickly. His facial scars were self-inflicted. If he moved, I knew I was going to vomit. To his right, thick beard and a strawberry birthmark the size of my hand. The birthmark masked one entire side of his face. His menace was the most obvious of all. A butcher's hook curved out between the fingers of his clenched fist. The hook was imbedded in the flesh between his knuckles.
As with the Tweedles, my mind very quickly provided tags for this freak show: the Tin Man with his razors, the Scarecrow with his mop of blonde and chainlink tail and the Cowardly Lion with his metal claw.
'What's the problem?' I sounded a lot calmer than I felt with the renegades from Oz bearing down on me like something from a bad trip.
The Tin Man laughed and touched his blades to his cheek again, drawing a rivulet of red from the web of blue veins and scar tissue that marred his skin.
I held out my hands, palms up in a shrug that was meant to convey my confusion. 'Do you want money? I have money if you want money. It's yours. I don't want trouble.'
The Scarecrow shook his head. I expected him to say something. He didn't. His answer was to allow another three inches of chain to slink over his knuckles, lengthening the tail's bite.
'I don't want any trouble,' I repeated stupidly. Aimee was keeping very quiet. I sensed movement behind us, wished we'd kept on moving rather than allow ourselves to get cornered like this.
Scarecrow started walking towards us. Unlike the majority of his brethren, he was surprisingly graceful, which wasn't reassuring by any means. I got the impression that in the tramp-world he was somebody. He had a kind of horrific presence. It was almost irresistible. He was confident in his ability; he'd done this kind of thing before.
Scarecrow let chain lick at his rag-clad thigh suggestively, twisting his wrist abruptly to cause it to dance to his tune. I knew what he was saying to me. He was saying: Run, little man. Run. Run as fast as you can. Faster, I'll still reach you. . . I'm the Gingerbread Man. . .
And I couldn't move until he was close enough for me to taste his derelict breath on the back of my throat. He shook his head. A small, economical gesture. His hand came up. I thought he was about to punch me.
Aimee screamed.
It wasn't a punch.
I half-turned to see what was happening, by then the length of bicycle chain was lashing in for my face.
Instinctively, I threw out my arm to block it. Bar taking the chain in the face, it was possibly the singly most stupid thing I could have done. The pain was incredible. It felt as if my forearm had been wedged beneath the wheel of a reversing car. If had been more familiar with brawling, I might have stood a chance, but as it was I was so stunned by the pain in my arm I didn't have a hope of stopping the Scarecrow's next swing. He didn't reverse it. He whipped the length of chain around like a bolo. I took the full force of it across the face. The teeth of the chain ripped through my cheek, widening my mouth by nearly an inch. My hands went up to protect my eyes as my legs buckled and I crashed to my knees. All I could hear was screaming.
The bicycle chain thrashed across the backs of my hands. Tore half of my ear away from the side of my head. I could see the blood on my palms. I couldn't scream for Aimee to run, I could only hope that she would. And that she would find help in any form.
I didn't want her to see them kill me.
'Go. . .' I managed, though it may have been hallucination. My conscience trying to salve itself. I closed my eyes and began counting to forever. I didn't even make it as far as three.
Something came crashing down into the top of my skull.I shrieked. White light exploded in sick fireworks inside my eyes as whatever it was the butcher's hook pierced the bone platelets and punctured deep into the cerebellum. Pain. My teeth bit down on the rubbery flesh of my tongue, neatly cleaving it in two. Blood swamped my rictus-locked mouth, spilling back down my throat. I was dead, my body just hadn't had enough time to adjust to the violence of my demise. The hook pushed deeper, forcing my body into spastic convulsions as the Cowardly Lion began to turn it around, unscrewing the inside of my head.
The streets themselves screamed as I died.
When my hands fell from over my eyes I could still see. The street was awash with a redness my eyes refused to blink away. There was no end to the pain.
The entire world was opening up around me. The sounds my brain had been filtering out exploded in a deafening rush; music from the pub, cars in the night, hubbub. Too late for me.
The pavement was a gigantic black hole sucking at me now, but I couldn't fall into it because the hook in my brain refused to let me go. The Cowardly Lion held me on my knees.
The agony was intense. My whole body was insensate. I felt something push at my back, thought it was one of the Tweedles trying to topple me but then
a full handspan of bedstead ruptured through the walls of my stomach, dragging with it a grey steaming coil of intestine. That coil was like the elastic of my body.
I heard something, vaguely, amid the tidal flow of blood inside my head. I was beyond the reach of sound now.
I tried desperately to hold myself together but I couldn't stop the convulsions. My whole body was at the mercy of an electrical tormentor. My arms flapped, never settling long enough for my hands to clutch at the metal spike, and my guts spilled onto the floor. The weight behind me shoved again, forcing enough of the bedstead through the wound to open me up completely. Striated muscle walls gave way as my insides leaked out onto the road.
I collapsed, pitched forward onto my face.
Rough hands rolled me over. I didn't fight. I counted my blessings on my thumbs; one, Aimee wasn't lying in the gutter beside me, and two, the pain had died. A black puddle was coagulating around my sides. I could only think that it was my nervous system catching up with my brain. I had stopped feeling anything. I knew enough about violence to understand what was happening to me. One by one, functions I took for granted were being shocked into dying. Thought or sight would go soon, if not hand in fist together, and then I would be snuffed out like a matchflame, dead in the gutter.
The way they had man-handled me the kerb had become a makeshift stone pillow. I could still see the ruin that was my body and the parasites pawing over it. I tried but couldn't close my eyes and knew that was another function that had slipped a
way silently; muscle control. Not long now. It was disturbing just how detached I was in the face of death. Even an hour earlier I would have anticipated kicking and screaming insanely, not this clinical calm. That scared me more than the thought of dying. I know that sounds stupid, but it's the truth.
The Tin Man straddled my waist, using his thumb implants to sheer through the fabric of my shirt. He carved an arc under my right pectoral, toying with the flaps of skin he made. Sliced away the tinder pink of the nipple. He didn't stop there. His razors opened up patches of skin, making windows into the no longer secret world of my internal bodyworks.
Doors into me.
We shared blood, mine this time. It seeped into his rags in sunbursts and flowers. My life reduced to chaotic patterns that would in turn reduce to rust and flake away.
The Cowardly Lion's lips twitched. A part of me that didn't need to hear, read his words: 'I don't like him staring at me like that. Make him stop staring at me.'
Smiling, almost, the Tin Man placed his thumbs either side of my eyes and cut into the soft flesh.
He stole my eyes, but not my sight.
I saw his face when he finished dragging his thumbs across the sliced orbs. I saw his look of satisfaction as squeezed them out onto their optic nerve stalks and severed them one at a time. I saw him secrete one into a filthy pocket before putting the other into his mouth. He bit down on my eye before he swallowed it. That, I couldn't see, mercifully.
He disentangled his limbs from mine and rose shakily to his feet.
I saw all of their faces as they huddled over my dead body and it didn't strike me as wrong that I could.
I wasn't scared.
I was beyond being scared.
I was dead.
Two
The Oz parasites didn't leave my body in the limbo of the middle of the road. Instead they dragged it around behind the skip, bedstead and all, and dumped it there. Out of sight, and out of their minds at least.