by David Wood
They carried me to the foot of Crohak's avian throne. My head swam with images of a kid having spikes driven through his knees. I screamed but it wasn't much of a scream really. It was stillborn in my throat.
The Bird Man fingered the skull of a pigeon locked in the armrest of his hideous chair, his lifeless eyes watching me intently as his cronies dumped me unceremoniously at his feet. The corpse of a butterfly lodged in its beak.
I tried to look up but a cramp ripped through my stomach, curling me back into that familiar, safe, foetal ball. 'Why don't you just kill me,' I gasped, finally catching my breath.
'Because there is something you should see first.' The pathos of his offered explanation made me want to laugh, but wanting and doing were very different beasts.
From somewhere in the darkness, I heard a bolt being shifted and a heavy door being opened. Crohak's tongue clicked absently against his palette. He prised the struggling butterfly out from between the bird's beak, and rolled it delicately between his fingers until the poor thing was dead, its brilliantly coloured wings mashed into its ochre-leaking body. He wiped it on his coat. I struggled to rise as more newspaper light spilled into the open space bringing footsteps and a dragging shuffle with it; someone was coming.
Two more of Crohak's beggar army, and between them they dragged an unmoving body. It's head was down against its chest, hair fallen over its features, but it was recognisably male. It became a he and his clothes were wet, soaked in something. Ignoring me, they took him to their master and backed off.
The Bird Man tangled his fingers through the mop of hair and jerked the head up so it had to stare at me.
Twenty
“Matthew!'
His eyelids flickered but didn't open. His face had taken a severe beating. Purplish bruises mottled the swelling where his cheek and brow were fusing. Bite marks. Cuts and lacerations that made a patchwork of his ebony complexion. Blood crusted around his mouth and broken nose where his lips had been carved away, exposing gums and bloodied teeth.
The Bird Man loosed his hold and Matthew's ruined head sagged back onto his chest.
There was a thick, unpleasant smell clinging to the stifled air. It cloyed at the back of my throat like. . . petrol.
'Is this what you wanted me to see,' I shouted hoarsely, venting my hatred for the Bird Man and all he stood for. 'You've hurt somebody else. Am I supposed to be impressed or intimidated? You can't take anything else way from me so why don't you just get it over with and kill me now. I'm tired and I think I want to die. So just do it will you.'
'Bring me the torches,' he said to one of his flunkies. The beggar scurried forward with a brace of burning paper torches. They didn't flake into charcoal almost immediately, they held their cold blue flame.
Somewhere in the crypt a fly was trapped. It buzzed and fretted. Crazily, as if on some unconscious level I had known what was coming, I couldn't think why anyone would have wanted to be a fly on the wall for this.
The Bird Man touched the fire to Matthew's hair. It caught and roared, a blue streak that raced down the length of his broken body. In a second he became a crumpling ball of bluish fire. The petrol or whatever it was Crohak had soaked his clothes in seemed to suck the flame into Matthew. He flapped and staggered, but there was no putting the fire out; his skin was already charring. The air burned with the reek of tainted flesh. His black ringlets suddenly ignited in a halo of fiery light. His screams were terrible.
The Bird Man's sugared voice was suggestive, enticing: 'Look at him.'
And I did. I watched his stumbling fiery dance. My numb body shivered reflexively but it might as well have plagued someone else for all I felt the convulsions. My mind could feel no connection with my shrivelled body. A bleak hiss of idiot noise monopolised the space between my ears. Matthew was a blur; streaks of light and dark dancing to the insistent rhythms of the fire as it consumed him. The flesh didn't cavort or fight the fire, it burned, blackening and blistering, the blisters bursting and weeping and burning and blistering again in a cycle of consummation. And where it bit and burned brightest something else danced within the washed out blue flames. The lies were told. This was another sight, the lie in Matthew, the most treacherous of them all. I was sickened beyond death. The fire ate at him, demanding satisfaction, and I was helpless to prevent it. All I could do was utter a tiny mewling sound as the flame's story spread out across living flesh.
Story. . .
They wanted to unveil the truth, in this game of deceits and lies the washed out flames wanted to open my eyes to the truth. They danced higher and deeper every second and through them I could see another sky, another world; a world where Aimee was blackening a string of sausages in the grease and oil of the wok, still alive and angry because I'd gone out without so much as a good-bye peck.
'Look at him.' Again that hypnotic lure, drawing me deeper, opening the cracks into this new world wider and wider until the brittle tethers holding me to my Aimee-less world were stretched to breaking point. And I wanted to jump head first into the impossible. Embrace the ecstasy of being with her again, getting a second chance to put things right.
Our eyes met, though she couldn't have seen me, couldn't have known, couldn't have understood my second chance for what it was. And then they stole her away from me again.
'I'm sorry,' I said silently, unable to turn away as the dead reclaimed her for one of their own with vengeful hands. There was barely a ghost-image of her to focus on, but her attacker was real, solid, undeniable. I felt that other world opening up beneath my feet. My balance on the lip of the Abyss Line was teetering. Worst of all, I wanted to fall off into the mouth of madness. Wanted it to be all over and didn't care if it ended this way or any other. Matthew's lipless mouth twitched, trying to scream but forming words I couldn't read for the fire.
'Forgive me,' he tried to say as, inside his evanescent flame, he took Aimee's life with the blades of twin razors he had slipped on over his thumbs.
And it was Matthew, Aimee's killer.
'Look at him,' the Bird Man insisted, fanning the flames, feeding them with the dirty blood of the truth.
I didn't want to look, to see, not anymore than I already had. The skin came away from the hollow of her breast-bone. She was screaming inside Matthew, her skin slick, gleaming with the sweat of her fear. Screamed as the blades teased the skin away from her face. I felt her agonies as if they were my own, heard Malachi in another time begging my forgiveness for a betrayal I hadn't been able to understand then, and saw Matthew unmake my one hope of salvation.
The truth, the whole truth. And nothing but. . .
Darkness, light, darkness. . .
Feathers drifted and settled in the focus of my vision; feathers thrown into the room by Matthew. Lies like everything else.
As I began to understand so Matthew began to cave in on himself, the washed out blue eating him until it was impossible to see his limbs through the conflagration; the heat taunted me as it refused to burn out, showed me Aimee bleeding into the water of the bath, her face pressed against the black tiles. She stayed there, a ghost chained to the body of a corpse, long after Matthew died. The death-fire refusing to let her rest, tearing at Matthew until his body shared the wounds that had killed Aimee, burned them into him.
He blistered, his lies becoming dust with him.
I began to cry then, finally, Aimee's ether-face dissolving in front of me. And I wished, oh dear God how I wished, that I had never found the truth. I sank to my knees, my face in my hands, the faces of my innocent dead pressed against my eyes, and I wept for the demon Malachi had made me in his quest for a sword to cut out the cancer.
To cut out the Bird Man.
Twenty-One
I felt the Bird Man's hand on my shoulder and shook it off. I wanted to be alone with my grief but he wouldn't leave me. He wanted something and I knew what that something was.
'How do I hurt him?' I said, giving it to him.
And the pain inside started to ebb away.
&nbs
p; Streets of Blood-Red Roses
One
The Bird Man's beggar army savaged the streets of the city while dark birds wheeled overhead, beady eyes cast coldly over the dam as it finally broke; cast coldly over the swearing and the jeering of the rag clothed savages as they stripped the carcasses of parked cars and bricked out the glassy eyes of the condemned buildings. They communicated in a ragged semaphore of destruction. Fear of the Bird Man driving them, twisting their arms and their hearts. They were wired. Throwing fucks and bastards and cunts into the air as if they were cans and stones and bottles. Things and words of violence. The empty cackle of a bag lady, sounding so utterly animalistic, punctuated the madness.
And I watched, my mouth dry. Malachi had killed to make a fighter of me, taken things from my life, precious things, and twisted them to look like Crohak's doing. Lies and deceits to force my hand. Make me fight back. Fight for him and his stinking streets. Fight against the swill that was rising up against him now, rising up all around me. Rising up at my word. I could taste the deliciously scary tang of violence unleashed and it was sweet. This uprising was what I had asked for. Hell, I had demanded it. Because of me the beggars were fighting back. No more pissing about with spray painting walls and burning out derelict slums. This was confrontation. This was fighting back with a viciousness that wasn't about to be denied by bricks and mortar and blue uniforms with PVC shields and night sticks.
But none of it scared me; none of it touched me.
But something did scare me: the elemental dance of death cavorting along the same night time street which revenge had me walking. It was by my side, cradling my hand in its own.
Whispering the words of the bone garden inside my head.
Two
This kind of violence wasn't mine. Mine was more intimate. For sharing one on one. Right up close. This was theirs:
A child of seven hurled a halfbrick through the plate window of a pub with its flaking sign of broken doll parts. Right through the centre of the blue star. The glass shattered. A homemade firebomb, a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale with a petrol-soaked rag stuffed in its neck, disappeared end over end through the mouth of broken glass, then broke itself with a soft crump as it spread its insidious fire through the dimmed heart of The Broken Doll, catching the crushed velvet and the wood with its own kind of intimacy, making a lover of it. The fire took in the lounge bar, a tight series of miniature detonations marking the deaths of the optic-bound spirits, the heat blossoming. Quick and deadly. Bodies being beaten back by the licking flame.
Two more cocktails of fire plunged into the blaze, and there was no stopping the burning as it lit up the sky.
And that was the start.
A foot smashed the indicator light of a drab grey Nissan in the car park. A gruffly slurred voice yelled: 'Jap crap!' And a double-fist smashed the windscreen. Blades slashed the tyres.
Grinning, yelling and screaming through the rising cries of the alarms, Crohak's beggar army ripped through the patrons car park.
I stood unmoving in the centre, my feet straddling the faded white line, feeling like a conductor, feeling the intensity of the energies flowing through me, channelling them, directing them. And yes, savouring them.
The wind wailed with the banshee voice of the dead; that was how it sounded to my ears. The cripples, the beggars, the poor, come back to gloat as history righted itself and their city drowned under a fresh river of pain. Smoke, dust and ashes marked the heart of the city. And here they were, the dead in the heart of the city.
More tramps hammered on the metal shutters of the ATS tyre garage across the wide street, their faces lit eerily by the blazing pub as they beat them down with their fists. The cacophony was manic, beating, beating, beating, massive metal wings, but then the rollerdoors screamed one terrible scream and gave in, ripped from their mount and sent tumbling. More bottles of fire were thrown into the darkness, their rags blossoming into circles of flame that chased up the banks of rubber tyres.
Poisonous black smoke quickly choked the conflagration, spilling out of the doorway to throw its pall over the street. But even that black pall was broken and, in places, night became as light as day where buildings crumped and burned. Shops and stores, a car showroom with its cluttered forecourt. The windows were put through, alarms triggered, but the beggar army walked through the broken glass to claim the spoils before they torched the insides; a cascade of junk, shattered television sets and stereo equipment, the tangled and melted plastics of ghetto blasters, radios, and the rags of clothes. The destruction was systematic.
A woman's head shattered a window.
The hands behind her let go, letting her collapse over the windowsill. Her arms flapped, ineffectual wings that couldn't hope to slow the speed of her descent. Blades of glass still embedded in the frame tore into her throat. Her screams didn't die until she did and by then the tramps were climbing over her body to get at the electricals.
Everywhere there were more smashed cars, and out there, somewhere in the night, the first of the sirens.
It was as though the night itself were burning and I had the power of flame in my hands. Not just a conductor, an ignition. The heat that battered me from both sides was overbearing but it wasn't cleansing. Sweat streams evaporated on my face. I needed a cleansing kind of fire. My heart beat to a frenzied tattoo. I needed to throw myself into that blaze and come out remade. Malachi was my fire and let that fire try to consume me. . . There were no tears left inside. I was going to die, but that didn't matter. Malachi was going to die for what he'd done to me, the whole fucking city was going to die if it had to, but it was going to be me that did the killing.
Me.
Three
There were fires in the sky that seemed to stretch from horizon to horizon.
Children on the streets, fighting, screaming, yelling, come out to play at riots while the adults barked at the moon.
The fires extended all the way along what had been Northumberland Street, glowing like bloody rubies behind veils of smoke, dust and ashes. The height and heat of the conflagration blazed brightest from the shell of the glass-cased precinct on the west side. The jewel in the crown. Furious licks of flame sent cracks chasing through the plate windows, showering a glassy rain down with the sprinklers as they drizzled over the inferno.
I touched the tools in my pockets, silver daggers, one in each. Silver daggers. Silver to kill a werewolf, and, so it seemed, silver to kill a city. The blades were fairly plain, straight-edged, eight-inch, whisper thin, but the hilts were far from plain; vulture talons raking out so they clawed like barbs into the wielder’s hand as they nestled between his fingers, the three talons furrowing into the declivities between each knucklebone. The Bird Man's claws. I fingered the cold metal. The silver daggers whispered their own sweet words of violence in the shivers that chased up my melting skin.
The city was ablaze and, small comfort that it was, the old man had to be hurting.
I watched the flames rearing high above the ridge of the precinct's green-smeared roof and scanned the broken street for signs of Malachi. I didn't expect to see him, not out here in the middle of his own death throes, but he must have known he couldn't hide from the Devil's Right Hand. . .
Four
I turned my back on the inferno; savoured its blistering caress on the nape of my neck, its fiery fingers dragging down my spine like the claws of Asmodeus.
The old department store was the last thing I saw burning before I took the long climb up Dog's Leap Stairs into the heart of Malachi's twisted Never Never Land. The department store where granddad had bought his first pair of football boots and I'd promised to buy my first piano. Timbers inside ashed and cracked and came down. Seeing it burn made me angry and sick; that place was my heritage. What right did Malachi or anyone else have to take it away from me?
What right?
The door into the side of the bridge was open. That wasn't quite true. The doorway was open. The door was buckled and warped by some k
ind of symbiotic fire damage the riots callous flames hadn't made it this far down the hill, yet. But they were coming, racing to be with the old man of the city. Black soot smeared the ancient timber, the rivets melted into flatheads. Cracks had opened between the twisted panels. I pushed the door further open and went inside, into the darkness, bringing my own shining light. I burned white in the dark, like that pinprick of the spectrum I had fallen into within Malachi's miraculous body, and around me the darkness fled.
I could see the dinginess of the old man's grotto painfully plainly. Sewer passages and filth; the rotten detritus of the world above. I wondered fleetingly what had made me think there was magic down here. This was Toyland with the mechanical guts ripped out of it, a wooden box stashed away in the bottom of an airing cupboard, dulled paint chipped and flaking, all of the mystery gone because I wasn't a child looking at it for the first time. There was no awe.
I wasn't innocent.
I had been betrayed. I knew what it felt like.
It felt like I'd had my heart ripped out of my chest.
My footsteps were loud. I thought of other footsteps, ones left in the holy water spilled from the font of St. Thomas's. That voice: Liar. Another murder by Malachi's hand, his crimes stacking up against him.
No, I wasn't innocent, and neither was he.
I looked at my white-burning hands, at the shadows of the faces I had claimed in the name of retribution, an eye for an eye. Killing them wasn't retribution or atonement or anything else. Killing them had been a mistake. Lies and deceits. But there would be retribution; a final reckoning. Now I was a proactor. The next few minutes were going to be my doing.
I clenched my fists, yelling: 'Malachi!' into the grotto as it twisted away in front of me, letting him know exactly who it was that had come for him; as if I needed to. 'It's over, Malachi!'