by David Wood
He didn't answer me; not in any way I might have wanted. My light burned fitfully, fluttering in the subterranean draft as any natural torch might have. I was suddenly clammy, with sweat on my face and wriggling down the back of my neck. In thirty paces the sewer-passage ended in a larger chamber. A thin trickle of slimy water seeped down a groove in the brickwork, puddling on the uneven floor. I could hear the distorted drip-dripping echo of water as it splashed and broke. The walls of the chamber were wet. Water continually seeped and dripped and trickled from the low ceiling. My white incandescence flickered on the shiny walls.
The sound of water, the brittle light, the oppressive warmth, the finality of the rock and the staleness of the old air. I felt my pulse race. Fire, water, stone, air. An underworld of elemental purity, simplicity. I felt its pull in my bones and its song in my blood.
He was here.
A wreck of a man huddled against the wall where, so long ago now, the lost childhoods had swept me through their number. There were no pale faced miracles holding the old man up. The walls were riddled with stone-clinging lichens that gave the lie to their weird green luminescence. God help me, my heart lifted at the sight of him. The flesh on Malachi's face was shrivelled, the bones sharp beneath where the rags had slipped from his brittle frame, but flesh and bone weren't the malady – the sickness went deeper and burned brighter. It was his cancer.
'Don't look at me,' he pleaded, his ruined hands drawn up over the gapingsockets where the dirt-black bandage had slid down over his cheeks. They were windows into the man's soul and it was a black place. Black and bloody.
I stared at him. Wanted him to say something. Explain.
'Why did you do it?' I asked finally. 'Why did you kill her?' I needed to know; but I already knew the answer. Malachi needed a sword and if I wouldn't fight for him, then maybe taking away everything that I had would make me fight for myself. A gloss of feathers to throw me into the path of all the wrong conclusions, the ones I needed to believe in, the ones he needed me to believe in, and suddenly I was The Devil's Right Hand, hungry to kill, hungry to make the Bird Man my victim. . . I was everything Malachi had asked me to be back on the bridge that night. . . It was sickeningly obvious.
'I don't want to die.' He was staring at the mess of his hands like they were leprous. Traitorous things. I could empathise with that.'I'm scared, Declan. I'm so scared. I don't want to die. Not like this. . Please. . . What have I done to deserve this. . ?'
What had he done! I wanted to take them, his crimes, and ram them one by own down his throat until he choked on them.
But to look at him, the old man was pitiful. It was hard to believe this wretched creature huddled up like a foetus was behind Aimee's death, but if I needed it, if I needed cold hard evidence, I had Matthew's immolation to bludgeon his guilt home. The incandescent truth fire.
For just a second I didn't know whether to pity him or despise him, seeing him here like this, pathetic, wretched. I slipped my hands out of my pockets, oblivious to the fresh stigmata that disfigured them with freshly drawn runnels of blood where the silver daggers had relinquished their hold on me. There was enough hate in him for the entire city. I had to focus on that. On the hate.
'I'm not evil,' he said so quietly I thought for just a second I'd imagined hearing it, but I'd heard it, and he couldn't see it, couldn't see the evil in what he had done.
'It's over, Malachi,' I repeated, wanting him to look at me, to see me, eyes or no eyes. 'The Bird Man is tearing the place apart stone by stone. You haven't got a prayer.' I said it quietly, almost sadly, but any sadness wasn't for Malachi. I knelt down beside the old man, took hold of his chin and turned it until he faced me. His skin felt dead already. Dead but not cold dead; hot dead. 'I've got something for you,' I mouthed, flatly. 'You could call it my last gift. I'll call it pain because that's what it is, and I want you to have it back in the only way you understand.'
That gift I called pain was a grubby little pigeon feather clotted with a single red drop of life stolen from the ninth floor a converted loft. One tiny feather and yet so symbolic of his betrayal.
I touched the feather against his cheek, where the skin was cracked open and oozing thick ochre tears, touched the tip against the rim of the old man's eye socket, drew it along the rim; dipped it inside. Into the black fires that smouldered there.
He didn't flinch at my invasion. He twisted his head up to glare defiantly at me. It was strange, uncomfortable, the way his cavities sucked out the bleakness of my heart. My grip on his jaw tightened. He was mine. This was for Aimee. No more lies and cheap tricks. It was over. My fingers sank into his cheeks, forcing his jaws apart.
'You're. . . killing. . . yourself,' he gasped, a thin ribbon of blood spilling out over his lower lip where his gums were ripping as he tried to talk. The effort cost him.
'Oh, no,' I hissed, leaning in close, pushing my face right up to his, close enough to taste the plaster and cement on his breath. 'I'm dead, Malachi. I'm dead and you killed me. Just like you killed Aimee and all the others. So I guess it doesn't matter anymore, does it. I've got nothing to live for, so why should I care whether killing you is going to hurt me. I want to hurt.'
And I did. I wanted to hurt, to burn inside, to feel every ounce of his suffering. I wanted to scream and scream and scream. And I wanted to make him scream. Wanted to pull down on his jaw until the skin around his lips ripped and bone wrenched out of its socket.
I knew I could do it then.
I knew it would be too quick.
And I knew that it didn't matter.
I needed him dead. For Aimee. For Chaz. For the Scarecrow and the Tin Man. For the Cowardly Lion. The bag lady and the evangelist. For all of them.
I slipped my right hand into my pocket, curled it around the silver vulture talons. The grip felt natural; so right. My left hand tightened on his jaw, my fingers sinking into flaking flesh.
'I'll never forgive you,' I said, softly. 'Because you're wrong, I'm not like you.'
'You are,' he mumbled. 'Just like me. Do you think we did what we did, killed all of those people, because we wanted to die?'
'No,' I withdrew the vulture talon from my pocket. I could hear wings, beating, beating, beating. My head was light, like I was on the edge of passing out. Wings beating, beating, beating. . .
'How do you think I became what I am?' He hissed, suddenly angry, suddenly confident in anger, stronger for it. 'I wasn't born this way. I'm man made, like all of the worst things in this world. I'm like God, my heart is the heart of every man' He choked off suddenly, gagging as I rammed the silver blade into his gut.
I just couldn't bear to hear another word come out of his lying mouth. The blade sank into his stomach and he screamed, I got that much from him as I pushed, pushed, forcing the blade through his belly, the talon slicing him open, stripping away the skin, all the time his screams rising and rising.
'Some God,' I spat viciously, yanking the talon upwards, pulling the walls of his stomach apart so he spilled his guts. Blood, red blood, normal blood, soaked my hand as it plunged into him. His intestines uncoiled like maggots, insects, squirming faces and bodies screaming and sharing his agony. The blade doing all the talking I could stand.
In that second Malachi was a construct of suffering souls, limbs bent and twisted; insubstantial, almost ethereal, composed of a vileness and corruption that shamed the city above.
This was the real heart of the city.
Cold and cruel.
Cruel and cold.
'This is for Aimee, you bastard. . .'
I didn't flinch as I skewered Malachi up against the sorrowful wall, empty of its lost childhoods. I thought only of my dead, my ghosts, as my grip on the Bird Man's silver dagger tightened and I pushed harder.
For Aimee. . .
I clenched my teeth and dragged my hand out from beneath the barbed talons, raking the blades through the back of my hand. The agony was real and excruciating, the pain boiling, but the act of killing made
it bearable. This was my kill.
'And you're wrong, we're not the same,' I rasped, but I knew that we were. This proved it; the way my heart soared. Killing was in my blood. Burned in there with the dark heat of an irresistible toxin. A euphoric delirium that was impure, sickening and exciting all at once. It didn't matter what badge I was killing in the name of, I was killing. And it felt good. That made us the same beast.
Instead of pulling out, I reached back into his body, hammered down on the talons of the silver dagger until they curled around the old man's spine, and kept hammering until the point of the blade sunk deep into the wall. With the one blade he was crucified. A fitting end for a self-proclaimed deity, I thought dryly, using the second dagger to unman him before I nailed it through his throat. Beat it into him with my bare fists. The wall seemed hungry to sample the silver, eager to open itself for the eight inch blades.
I stepped back, shaking with a cocktail of emotions; anger, exhaustion, desperation, fear, emptiness.
Suddenly there were no voices inside my head; nothing.
He convulsed once, and then his head came forward. It was all over. That worst of all. It was over. Malachi was dead and now I was truly alone. Everything and everyone taken or sent away from me. I thought I was going to vomit. I looked back at Malachi hanging against the wall like a side of meat.
Small black dots were growing on his face, like moles, but growing from birthmarks until they were more like mouths. And they turned on him. Patches of fire damage where the decay fell into Malachi's broken face, consuming him. The tramps had done their worst. Rain and pain were all I could imagine being left out there. Rain and pain, a new anthem for the streets. But was it so new? Standing there, the blood red roses of the streets smeared on my hands, I didn't think so.
There were no screams for that half-moment. Only wingbeats whispering in the seconds before they rose beyond bedlam.
The wingbeats of the Bird Man's pets.
Five
The first of the Bird Man's flock, a pigeon, broken-winged and twitching, settled on the dead man's shoulder. Malachi's head had lolled, chin down in the hollow of his clavicle. The bird pecked at his forehead, once, twice, three times, drawing out a ragged line of bloody holes above the old man's eyeline. The holes might easily have been the shallow wounds left by a crown of thorns. More birds settled on his arms and head, pecking, pecking at him. . .
Behind the birds came the tramps, bringing their fires with them.
Crohak was back there somewhere. I could hear his damned laughter as he savoured this last twist in the war of the streets.
Against the wall, gore spilling down the crack between body and brick, a raven took flight, its claws embedded in Malachi's scalp. The old man's head jerked back so suddenly his mouth fell open in a macabre kind of surprise.
Birds of all kinds, sparrows, starlings, pigeons, jays, gulls, and feathers, wings and more feathers, swept out of the darkness behind me to strike at him, his chest and face, legs and arms. Ones and twos, tens and thousands it seemed as the tiny creatures slashed with their claws and beaks, and then the first Martin found the gap that was Malachi's open mouth and darted inside, wriggling and using its wings to navigate his throat.
The noise was a shrill cacophony of wingbeats and bird cries as more birds followed the Martin explorer. Quickly his skin was an undulating mass, and then the first bird came out, bloodied, through the cavity in his chest, its eyes glistening madly. Changed forever by what it had seen.
I caught the stink of my own fear. Suddenly the chamber was claustrophobic. Dizziness and sickness filled my head.
Malachi was a living sculpture of wings and feathers, his eye sockets slits of black, nose and mouth stuffed with feathers like some gross totem pole.The dead man glared at me with the eyes of hungry pigeons.
I backed off a step; tripped and fell. Rolled and scrambled to my feet again.
In the pandemonium the Bird Man had pushed his way through to stand at my shoulder. His laughter had stopped, but his eyes still glittered with its remains. That glitter was utterly mad. He placed a bony hand on my arm, not to restrain, not to comfort, just to let me know he was there.
'I killed him,' I said, needing to say it.
This was what he had wanted from the outset. This was why he had sent his Oz Parasites after a no account jazz pianist who was all for prostituting the little talent God had given him. A restoring of the balance. A cancelling of old accounts. Scores settled. Retribution: That word again, and all the baggage that it carried with it. Retribution.
'Go,' he whispered. 'Get out of here. This isn't for your eyes.'
‘The hell it isn't,' I said. I’m a part of it, I have a right to see, after all, it’s me they’re killing.’
Malachi's face seemed to be composed of melting pigeons. Blood ran from his face in a hundred places. And then he disappeared beneath the wild flurry of wings, a living bird totem. The air filled with their cries and the sound of barely dead flesh being torn from Malachi's bones as they picked him clean.
'I said go!'
I shrugged off the Bird Man's hand and turned.
I sensed them before I saw them.
They were all there, the ghosts and apparitions, victims one and all, come for the finale. Gaunt cheeks and sallow faces, fear and hunger looking on. Clothed in rags and dreams, and in the centre, in the heart, a boy clutching the leather lace of a necklace. He threw it at the floor, at my feet. And all I could think was that I knew that boy. He skin was pallid, his belly distended as if he had suffered from malnutrition when he was alive, but I recognised him.
My first true ghost.
I stopped inside his shadow, Malachi's skeleton forgotten. Left for the birds to pick clean. I knelt to gather his trinket, thinking to give it back to him. The icy metal branded the shape of the wing-spread bird into my palm but, even as the soft flesh sizzled, I couldn't prevent my fist from clenching around it, claiming it. I thought for one fleeting moment that this was my cleansing fire, come to purge me of my dead and their mocking faces, that this was salvation in the form of a child, but I tasted the lie as it touched my thoughts. This was no cleansing, no salvation – it was a branding.
The dead boy laughed. Dead laughter. No sound at all leaking through his broken lips, but he laughed and I knew exactly how it sounded.
I saw the first black spot, nothing more than a mole, creep into the calloused pad of my index finger, then I stopped looking because I didn't want to know. The betrayals had come full circle. The streets were mine now, pawn crowned, and with them the crimes of two hundred years.
Welcome home, son. . .
And you know, the boy did look a lot like Matthew; the positive and the negative, black and white, and as I stared into his eyes I saw a haunting similarity there, too. They might almost have been the same boy, but I never heard Matthew laugh.
He doesn't know. . .
I held out my hand, offered him the bird necklace, knowing he wouldn't take it back.
This was my burden.
I carried it with my white light as I walked out into the rain to see what was left of my city.
Fade. . .
Revenge at first thought sweet,
Bitter ere long back on itself recoils.
John Milton, Paradise Lost.
It's A New Dawn, It's A New Day, And I Feel Good. . .
The moles grew into sunspots, and quickly into greedy mouths, hungry to suck at the rain as I came out of the underworld.
And already the fires were burning out. They left behind a smouldering, immortal city.
My city.
I keep my treacherous hands in my pockets now, the angels muzzled by their fabric prisons, because I can't bear to hear the words of deceit they whisper in my ears.
It only took a few days before The Devil's Right Hand Murders fell off the front page and landed somewhere near the shirtless page seven slab of meat, out of sight, out of mind. No one cares and it’s no surprise. They're still looking for me b
ut they're not going to find me. They're looking in all the wrong places.
Malachi and Matthew are with me, my dead. As are the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion. The clergyman. The bag lady, the evangelist and the ventriloquist's dummy. Chaz. Aimee. . . They won't leave me. They walk in my shadow. They won't go away. . .
It all started here, on this bridge.
And this is where it ends.
In the rain.
I like the rain. I like the way the rain and the lights combine sometimes to conjure tragic faces. I can hear them calling to me, from behind the gates of heaven. They have blind windows for eyes and concrete miracles for a heartbeat. I can hear my own driving hunger for death in their voices.
Can you smell it? Hickory? I can.He’s out there now. He always is.That damned smell haunts me. I can’t stand it.
I called Ciaran from the box on the corner an hour ago. We talked about nothing and said our good-byes. It was a difficult nothing because, I think, we both realised it was supposed to be so much more. We told each other to take care. I was crying when I hung up, but I said my good-bye.
I said my good-bye.
Told him I loved him; that was what mattered. Nothing else.
Told him I saw a wino take a beating from a gang of kids yesterday, toecaps lacing into his bloodied face over and over again to whoops of delight from the ten year olds.
Told him there are no New Dawns, just lots of old ones.
It makes me sick but I didn't make it my fight.
It chose me.
I don't want it.
I don't need it.
It brought me here though, to the bridge. Had me make the call to Ciaran.
I was looking for someone to talk to before I took the long walk, one step at a time into the arms of oblivion. I wanted to convince someone that I still cared about this city of mine, but the truth is I wanted to convince myself that I cared and I couldn't do that because caring for these people would hurt too much after what they have done to me.