by David Wood
Then she was in my arms. My fingers dug into the putty of her flesh; kneaded her to be alive. For it to be this morning again, before Ciaran's phone call, when things were simple and sleep still had the power to cancel all pain.
I stumbled out of the bathroom. Stopped moving inside the feathers and blood. The pain inside those four walls was claustrophobic. I stared at the open door and all I could think was that I didn't say good-bye. That now I never would.
Seven
The blood red rose flowered over my heart, Aimee's blood sowing the seed of despair that dragged me down nine flights of stairs with her limp body heavy in my arms. I wasn't thinking. Just walking. My feet moving.
I carried her into the street, not knowing why, only that I couldn't leave her up there. Out into the blur of cars.
The tramps had gone, leaving the street too empty. It ought to be raining, I thought crazily. Rain to purge the streets. There was no heart. No honesty out there.
She was too heavy but I wouldn't let her go. I couldn't see. I just pulled her closer to me and trusted my feet.
People stared; I know they did. Saw me, the desperate wailing man carrying his dead lover through the crowded grey streets, committing me to their memory. Christ, there was no way they could ever forget me, not if they saw me then, like that. I waltzed with shadows, a stumbled lonely dance; Gueca solo, my dance of grief through the streets strewn with broken dreams; cameras recorded me as I carried Aimee out of the complex, my head thrown back to look at the sky because I couldn't look at her.
It should have been raining.
A single pigeon nestled on the flat roof of the newspaper shack on the opposite side of the road; the bird had no eyes with which to watch me. It's presence sent a bone deep shudder through me. I screamed something at it and the little bird took wing, throwing its shadow over me. Its shadow a parody of that damned necklace. . .
It really should have been raining.
The pavement pulled at my feet, an enormous ribbon of molasses spilled out across the street to hit and stick with the beating of the sun. I pulled my feet just as they pulled me. Walked out into the middle of the road ignoring the blaring horns and screeching wheels. I was out of my mind. The front end of a car clipped my trailing leg; it span me but I kept on going oblivious to the rants of road rage venting in my wake.
Could I stop? Could I stop, even if I wanted to? I doubted it very much. Aimee's body felt boneless in my arms. Her head lolled all the way to the middle of her back as if the column of her neck had been severed. I walked as if I had been hypnotized, the wind crying with me. On and on, not looking down. I couldn't look down. Without really knowing, I knew where I was going. To a hole in the side of Dog's Leap Stairs and its funnelled secret passages with its ghosts and its demons. And to the man that brought me back from the dead.
Eight
Brought me back from the dead. . .
I found the door into the soul of the city; it was open, expecting me.
An open door in the side of a wall halfway up a never-ending staircase. I could smell my own fear. Smell the twisted sense of loss that I held in my arms like a lover. Smell the stench of the sewers and the filth that was the city. Smell, smell, smell. . .
Gagging, I kicked the door open. The sound careened around the darkness behind, futile and hopeless, like the report of a dead man's gun discharging at ghosts. And I walked inside, walked with my ghosts, carried my ghosts, cried for my ghosts. 'Malachi!' I called, hoarse with grief. My word echoed back to me on the old air, alachi. . . achi. . . hi. . .
I closed my eyes and started to walk. Counted the steps once more. The gentle turn to the right. The emptiness of the place was complete and claustrophobic; just the steady drip dripping of water. I walked, listening for the elegiac whispers of the dead childhoods, treading in the same footsteps that had made me a modern Lazarus. But the voices were silent.
'Malachi?' I called again, forcing strength into my faltering voice. 'Malachi?' alachi. . . achi. . . hi. . .
Nothing.
Then a faint sound:
A car.
In the streets above.
I opened my eyes again, drank in the darkness and tried to make sense of it.
Something was weakening; whatever held this place from reality, whatever kept the old man's stony heart beating and his cemented blood flowing, it was weakening. I could feel it because it was weakening me, too.
And then I saw him; a frail shadow of a man swathed in rags that looked to be crumbling to dust. He shuffled forwards, needed the wall to support him. I didn't move; I could feel hope disappearing. He was a husk. A shell. He didn't have the strength to keep himself alive let along work miracles, but that didn't mean I was going to forgive him for his weakness when I needed his strength. Oh, no. He owed me. That was all that I could see. It was his fault and he owed me. 'Help me,' I breathed into the black. Aimee felt dead in my arms. He stopped. Seemed to be drawing something off the air. For just a second he appeared to grow, to resemble the Malachi that had forced sight back into my stolen eyes. 'Bring her back. . .' I pleaded. But then he was just a sad old man again and the magic was gone. His time was passed; Crohak was winning the battle, winning the war.
'I can't,' was all he said. His voice was flat; deathly. I heard the accusation in there. He held his hands out to me as if making an offering of them. The skin was dehydrated, layers of the dried out stuff blistered and flaking away from the knuckles and fingers. Fissures ran through his palms, cracks no longer.
Malachi was crumbling, the truth was in his hands.
I clutched Aimee hard, refused to let the thoughts his hands stirred intrude.
'I want her back, Malachi. I want her back.'
One word:
'No.'
It hit me like a hammer. Have you ever been betrayed?
'You want to talk about betrayal, old man? This is betrayal. This is fucking betrayal,' I was walking towards him, I couldn't help myself. I wanted to rip the cloth away from his eyes, gaze into the pit where his eyes had been and see his soul for what it really was. See the blackness. I lifted Aimee's body. Thrust it at him. Made him see her. What he had done to her. 'I want her back. You're going to give me her back.'
'I haven't got the strength, child. I'm dying.'
'No,' that word again, mine this time.
'Yes,' Malachi said, bone weary. 'I am dying. It is as simple and as cold as that. My time is nearly come. It takes what scant will I have to keep you alive, child. To keep you breathing and seeing and walking. I haven't the strength to carry three souls. I can barely manage two, and for how long I can fuel two, I don't know. . . I need you to fight for me. I need you to be my sword, to cut out the hate and the malice that is Crohak, or it's over. For both of us.'
'I don't. . . I can't. . .' I was lost. Without Aimee it might as well have been over. 'Tell me one thing,' I said, needing something to hate, something to blame for the way my world had fallen apart.
'Anything,' the old man wheezed, reaching out to steady himself on the lifeless wall of culled childhoods. Where were they now? Could they die again, like this?
'Look into my mind and tell me it is not true.'
'I don't. . ?'
'Look into my head, see what I see and tell me it is not true. Tell me the New Dawn is a lie. Tell me you weren't part of it. Tell me!'
Malachi touched his fingertips to my temples, the touch tightening slightly but lacking the strength of his last invasion. His fingers trembled badly under the influx of my most recent memories and turmoils. The interior of St. Thomas's, the vicar, his words, visions and delusions and the claws from the votive candles. Liar. The images tumbled out of my head freely this time; I propelled them, hurled them at the old man, wanting him to hurt. Needing him to hurt. It was different this time. I was in control, dictating what he saw, making him see what I wanted him to see, what I needed him to see; to deny. The defiance was mine. The power the magicwas mine.
And I hated it because it meant
I was like him.
I hated it because I couldn't bring her back.
Malachi withdrew his trembling fingers a beaten man.
'I can't.'
Theme Three. . . When the World Comes Down
Cities are the sink of the human race.
Rousseau,
Emile.
The hum of human cities torture.
Byron,
Childe Harold.
It is a city where you can see a sparrow fall to the ground, And God watching it.
Connor Cruise O'Brian.
Killing In The Name Of. . .
One
Aimee's pale and beautiful face was on my pillow, one more nail in my dead, dead heart; her body left underground and not coming back outside of my memories. And her face. . .
The film of skin peeled away from her head had been laid out smooth so that the features above the fabric were clearly hers.
It was a rag, no trace of the girl, no phantoms to ignite the grief, it was a dead rag left to taunt me. I let the gauze curtain slip through my trembling fingers, and turned my back on the last vestiges of humanity.
I had gone back to the flat above the TheatreVillage. My head was a mess. I didn't care. It span with images of my flat face on the television screens silenced by the glass of the High Street. With the sounds of what they might have been saying. They would be coming for me.
I wanted to taste blood.
Wanted to bump into one of Crohak's Oz Parasites and trade pains, mine for his.
Wanted to take razors to the sides of his cheeks and draw them down, then lift the mask off and see what kind of monster truly lay beneath the dirt and the grime and the sour smell of whiskey.
Wanted to make that monster bleed and scream, scream and bleed and hurt.
That most of all.
Things were scattered everywhere. Knives, forks, spoons and every other household utensil I had ever hoarded, the drawers on the floor where I had turned them out across the feathered carpet. I sat down cross-legged amongst the clotted feathers, the knives fanned out around me, counting them out like some grotesque nursery rhyme king in my counting house; a long handled knife with a serrated edge, cheesewire garrotte, and a pearl-handled cut-throat razor, my three.
I made my choices quickly, my head buzzing with the one question: Could I do it? Could I kill someone?
I stood and caught sight of myself reflected in the panoramic window, looked and knew the answer was yes, yes I could do it.
Two
So I went out to catch me a killer on the dirty streets.
For three nights I slept under the concrete of the Concourse, ate out of dustbins and washed in the public toilets with their permanent fusion of urine and cigarette smoke. The tiles were always wet with something and the troughs stuffed with wadded toilet paper so they overflowed on the flush. I came out feeling dirtier than when I went in.
The days were spent going over the same old ground, too frightened to return to the empty flat now that I had committed myself to this course of action.
I sat on the wooden bleachers beside Leazes Park watching out for ducks, imagining people children throwing bread, and couples messing about in the flat bottomed rowing boats.
The cold flame of anger dwindled during those desperate few days, but never quite extinguished. Always when I needed it, I saw grim reminders of Aimee – sometimes in the way someone walked or tossed their hair, sometimes in the cold stone of theplace where I sheltered, and sometimes in the sound of a song. Always Aimee to fan the flame. Keep it burning bright. Thanks to the streets I learned to come to terms with myself again. I still ached but I learned to savour the taste of retribution on my tongue.
And I was right. They were talking about me on the news and in the press. The gutter rags called me a savage, The Devil's Right Hand, and put my face next to the dead clergyman on the front pages, while the blind televisions showed the overhead time-lapse shots of me running down Northumberland Street and the security-cam shots of me carrying Aimee out of the flat in my arms, the grainy low-res. black and white not picking up the blood on my clothes.
No enhancements of these home movies, no clever but impossible zoom-ins to hear my breathing or see the sweat running down my cheeks and the insanity-fire in my eyes.
They didn't show the truth, just a fragment, and because of it they were damning evidence in the eyes of the world.
I had been displaced from my own life, my direction stolen from me. Between Malachi and Crohak they had bled me until I had nothing left but a few instincts and reflexes that could have belonged to anyone.
Suddenly I was an outcast.
And that was where I wanted to be, one of the folk on the fringe.
A street dweller.
And it paid off…
I found the Tin Man.
Three
There was a cold drizzle in the air; the taste of blood on the rain.
It was by chance. I had taken to following the army of deadbeats and junkies on the off chance that one of them might lead me deeper into Crohak's labyrinth. Money changed hands in blind alleys, phials and sachets and powder and whatever kind of death you were looking for was there to be bought if the money was right.
The walk took me up through the maze of streets that emerged on the northeast side of the city, through the rank and file of deserted shops with their split levels of broken windows and boarded-up fronts. A few people were out in the drizzle, squashed into their coats as they shuffled towards the takeaways and off licenses on the ring road. Broken glass and yesterday's news clogged the gutter along with Styrofoam burger boxes and crushed Pepsi cans. I smiled as I kicked a dented can into the path of a trundling car, remembering the literal translation of the 1970's advertising campaign: Come alive with Pepsi, which on a two-way Japanese bypass became: Pepsi brings your relatives back from the dead.A promise I doubted very much they could keep.
The rain made everything feel grey and drab; depressing.
The kid I was following made a left towards a disused car park. He moved lightly, like he was in a huge hurry to get to wherever it was he was going. In truth, the car park wasn't disused, it was misused. People didn't take the risk of leaving their cars alone to fend for themselves within the fourteen low-ceilinged flights, sub-levels and ramps because the 'joyriders' had taken over and made a game of racing around the tight circuit they made. They called it The Graveyard. Kids flocked to watch the nocturnal challenges hungry for the buzz these things radiated. It would be another hour or so before the spectators descended. A little longer for the pushers and the boy racers.
I followed at a distance, walking in that ever so slightly out of control see-saw the drunks adopt when they spy a patsy. The kid wasn't bothered about me, that much was obvious. He was chasing along a white line that had nothing to do with road markings.
It left me cold.
He cut in between a bricked up Skoda and an Escort that had had its windows put out by a chunk of concrete that was still on the driver's seat, banging on the bonnet of the Skoda with a clenched fist. I heard him howl like a dog on heat. He was racing, all right. I followed him between the cars. The rain had got in and mildew was growing on the leatherette seats. The car was going nowhere anyway. The radiator grille was missing, and so was the engine.
Green garbage sacks printed with a portcullis bowel spilled their contents into the centre of the pavements where they had been split by scavengers. Rotten food, crisp packets, polystyrene casings and filthy rags. Nothing of any use to anyone; nevertheless, fingers had gone through it, looking.
The street reeked.
This was a bleak frontier to the not-so Brave New World.
The boy picked up his pace, started to skip along the pavement, kicking at the heart of a cabbage with his sneakered foot. There was only one place he could be going now that he had past the closed gates of an old timber yard. The multi-story.
A car engine gunned somewhere; a mechanical war cry.
The challe
nge was taken up by the drizzle which hardened into a steady, noisy, rain that stifled the tribal roar.
I hurried after the boy, in through the paint-flaked door of the stairwell. The whitewash on the concrete breeze-blocks was black where fires had burned out on the stairs and a thick-layered mural of colour-blind graffiti and litigious slogans decorated the rest.
The door closed slowly behind me, wheezing like an asthmatic. Like everything else in this place, it didn't fit into its frame. His footsteps were loud in the confines of the tower, echoing his flat-footed ascent. Rain had pooled around the bottom step, and in that puddle the rind of a lemon was half-submerged. The cloying tang of urine clung to the stairwell. I could hear the low, deep throated rumble of duelling cars. Either braver than I thought, or simply more reckless with their timing than I had imagined. I could hear the kids, too, urging and goading.
I pressed my face up against the broken glass window of the interior level door. There was little to see; the rears of a blue Sierra Cosworth and a flame red Porsche 928. Bodies clustered around the drivers' windows. Torn tee-shirts and tattoos of women and Indians. I swear I could almost smell the danger burning off them. A hand was on the roof of the Cosworth. I could just make out the blue markings of a tattoo. HATE, I guessed, or NUFC. He didn't look like a candidate for LOVE brandings.
Other motors were lined up in the parking bays, waiting their turn to challenge the pack leaders.
I removed my shoes and started to pad carefully up the cold stairs. A twisted and blackened spoon lay on the fourth, an all too real marker of another game in progress. It was the first time I had gate-crashed The Graveyard, but I had heard plenty of horror stories about it. The chase is basically a bottom to top one without rules and a full frontal lobotomy seems pretty much a necessity for the drivers. Other than that, it’s a cake walk.