by Mark A. King
“You can, sir,” Robbie replied, pleased with his convincing performance. “I’ve got your back.”
“You’d better, bird-boy. Otherwise, I’ll trace everything you’ve ever cared about and I’ll destroy it while you watch. Then I’ll come for you. Now, it’s time to go back to the girl, the witness at the newsagents’. You know what needs to be done. I’m coming with you. It needs to be quick. No mess. Most importantly, we need that phone back or we’re both dead men walking.”
As they scrambled through the streets, following the ever-closer pulsing map-pin icon on Ryan’s smartphone, Robbie tried to whistle to himself, like a bird, in an attempt to mock Ryan’s perception of him, but his mouth was dry, the sounds were intermittent, and his croaks sounded more like a toad than bird.
Robbie had thought he might let the girl go when he found her. Tell her to keep hidden and disappear entirely, or he’d be forced to make her. How would Ryan have ever known? If he had to knock her out and steal the phone he would, but the more he thought about it, the more he realised there wasn’t any justification for killing her—not like the others. What she’d already gone through was shocking.
Ryan’s insistence on joining the hunt would mean choices, choices Robbie wasn’t ready to make.
They were approaching Cleary Gardens, a greenspace which was set back and concealed from the charging double-deckers, weaving black cabs, and brave cyclists throwing their lights and noise pollution onto the pavements of Queen Victoria Street.
The gardens were walled from the front, obscuring any violence that would take place to the twelve-year-old girl inside. The perfect sort of place for Ryan to force Robbie to kill her and be certain that another loose end had been removed. It was unlikely that anyone would be inside the gardens—nobody who mattered, no credible witnesses. Only winos, junkies, and tramps use these spaces at night—even then it’s only for a few hours before they get moved on or locked out. Not the sort of people to talk. Even if they did, they’d be considered unreliable.
Robbie started to wonder what would become of him if he managed to do everything that Ryan wanted. In all probability, he’d be next to be killed.
Ryan nodded towards the square gardens. Robbie approached cautiously. The walls concealing the gardens were topped with wrought-iron fences, crowned with decorative spikes. The gardens appeared to be closed. Finding a way in would hardly be a challenge for them, but Robbie did consider how the girl could have managed scaling the obstacles with her disability.
Once inside the gardens, Robbie and Ryan were well masked by the foliage, which sprouted and clung to every brickwork support, pergola, and arbour. The place was built between the city and the docks. Robbie could see ruins. Some toff might say they were Roman and try to visualise a Roman market, but they just looked like unsightly rubble to Robbie. The gardens were tiered, with hard landscaping softened by greenery. Robbie didn’t know the names for any of the plants or shrubs, but he knew it was a place of solitude and reflection in the middle of the sweeping lights and harsh noises of the city night, the sort of place a child might choose to die in, if given a choice.
They approached the centre of the pin-icon on the map. They traipsed the pathway framed by chunky wooden beams. Ahead sat a scattering of park benches.
On one of the benches lay a slumbering shape.
It was not the missing girl.
It was a teenage boy.
Maria
Slumped, cold, and drenched, I dragged myself up and away from the Thames shoreline.
I had almost died. Perhaps I had. I shuddered, not with the cold, but with the memory of the visions I’d had. Echoes of people who lived and died, connections with those who were in danger.
I had seen beyond my own life and seen through the eyes of others. In the darkness people suffered; they were open to being used by others because they were lost, so very lost. Despite the furnace heat of the city, the Thames was cold, and after the visions had faded, I shivered with the cold dampness that clung to me. But deep within my skin, held within my skeleton, was a warmth. I realised my purpose. I could do something to help these people.
I stood and stretched my body. Is it wrong to wish away who you are? For a moment I hoped that my medical conditions had been fixed, or cured, or lessened in some way. But the tightness, the aches, my very way of life for the last twelve years had not changed.
I trudged back to the streets and made my way up an overpass, each step a damp and heavy reminder of my condition. Up on the bridge, with the zipping cars and black cabs passing underneath me, I could see the glowing elegance of St. Paul’s cathedral.
What forces had brought me to this place? It had to be more than chance. I thought about Saul, the man who persecuted Christians and then transformed into Paul, a man and a saint, central to the spread of Christianity. I did not know what to make of those stories anymore. I did not know what to make of my faith, either. Who was I to question infinite worlds with infinite possibilities? I would no longer believe what I was told without questioning. I would no longer accept my role in society. I had nothing to be scared of and everything to live for.
I ambled across the bridge, glancing at the towers in front of me. Light spilled out of the dark blocks and merged with the faint city glow. The building ahead looked like a thin, dark bug with tens of square eyes. The top floor of the building was lit, windows on all sides, blinds partially drawn. I wondered who might be living in the apartment and what their lives might be like. Such a blessing to be living in the regal shadow of St Paul’s and beside the flow of the Thames.
When I blink, it comes to me…
Isla. Her name is Isla. She is ten. She is not the daughter of the house, though they paid good money for her. She was promised safety, security, a place where dreams come true, and a family that would protect and love her. And with all their hearts her pseudo-parents protect her, for she is a valuable asset kept under lock and key; she is too precious to leave to chance—they can’t afford to have people asking questions. They protect her from the authorities, for on paper, she does not exist. When she sleeps, she dreams of piles of clothes in boxes. Clothes donated in collection bags—good people believing their unwanted items were going to charities to help those less fortunate than themselves—but this is her life, what she does every minute of every day. In the endless piles of stolen donated clothes, she sorts, she cleans, she fixes. Her fingers no longer bleed. Bleeding means lost profit, more work, and punishment. She has learned that the hard way. The bones in her hands ache, and what little sleep she gets is disturbed and restless. They love the work she does for them, the profits she generates. What is not to love? She does as she is told. She makes them happy. They want more children just like her. They have arranged to buy another one to join her.
I clutched the cold iron railings. My legs were weak and sore, and I couldn’t be sure if I was trembling with the cold, my physical stress, or the events I had seen and witnessed. I slumped to the ground on the pedestrian overpass. There were people underneath it, in cars and on the pavements.
Don’t look. It is too painful to look. How many more children are there like Isla? How many more like Archie?
I sensed the call of a million desperate and oppressed voices. People trapped by the darkness inside themselves. Victims of the darkness inside others.
There were many words I could use to describe this force: darkness, shadow, andhakāraṁ, but the closest was Latin, umbra, the darkest part of the shadow, a place where no light reached, a spectral image or apparition. Umbra came to be as I was drowning.
Deep within myself, I knew umbra was inevitable, even necessary. I also knew my life could no longer be the same as it once had been. I felt the power of the city throb in my rapid heartbeat and stream through my veins; it tingled on my skin and danced on my fingertips. Such excitement, pleasure, and escape—this London was a place to let go, to be who you always wanted to be. But it was a mirage—it was a glossy brochure selling metropolitan dreams to
the desperate. The darkness could be a trap or an addiction; a single taste of it was never enough. It consumed people’s hearts, and there were consequences—almost always for those who least deserved them.
I did not ask for this gift—or responsibility. I do not want it. I am not strong enough. Yet I knew there was no going back. I was still Maria, but in my moment of rebirth I had become Merla Kali, too. Before, I did not know who she was or what power she possessed. Now, I could see everything. Time and space were nothing more than simple names that humanity used to explain concepts that were beyond comprehension.
I had walked these streets in other worlds.
I thought about the cold, dark waters of the Thames. The man who’d tried to kill me, the darkness had grown inside him like a hungry cancer. He’d thought nothing of what he would do to me, what he had made Archie do before.
Is it any better than the darkness I felt for him? I wanted him to die. To suffer. How different from him was I, really?
Water dripped from my clothing onto the cars below. Perhaps the drivers felt a sprinkle on the roofs of their cars as they passed? They were unaware that I was above them, reborn into something new.
Archie offering to help me had given me hope. I’d begun to think about finding my Dad. Then I’d almost drowned.
I thought about Dad again. I had spent nearly all my time here running, hiding, defending myself. When not concentrating on survival, my mind stuck on replays of the events that led to me travelling to England. How I had manipulated Am’ma, her death, my guilt—which would never go away. I had barely thought about Dad. This was his city; he was not a stranger here.
I wanted to hear his voice. What a thing! I did not know if I could cope with hearing him again, but I knew it was all I wanted. I wished I had been able to use the phone to email him. That dangerous phone was from the newsagents’, from one of the criminals.
I was back in the newsagents’ again. Am’ma smiled at me. I wanted to hug her. To say sorry. To say that I would not let her down and I would live a full and happy life and make her proud. But she grinned at me in a way that all mothers do, a knowing smile that said she already knew.
I watched the robbery take place again, but this time I felt no panic or fear. Everything that I could have lost had already been taken from me. The robbers briefly talked about needing the money for an exchange later; they said the details were on the phone.
Later, when Am’ma had been taken from me, I’d stolen the phone, and the twiglet man with the medusa hair said, “I need that phone. It belongs to Western.” Except, he really said, “I need that phone. It belongs to Westbourne.”
I’d heard it wrong, before.
As Maria, I wanted to stay in that place. To rewind, go back. To be cradled by Am’ma. Again and again, I wanted to return to the moments before Am’ma was taken.
As Merla, I knew I needed to be the protector and not the victim. There were people who needed me. Westbourne was a cancer growing inside the city, and the phone could bring her down.
My clothes were finally starting to dry, and the trembling in my body had eased.
Archie had the phone, but I needed it back. I clambered to my feet, less weary than I had been. I pictured Archie. I headed towards St. Paul’s as that was where the sense of Archie was stronger.
People rushed around me in blurred shapes. They didn’t see me, too busy hurrying home, or scurrying to bars or shops—most were on phones or lost in music. Walking near them, I felt their loneliness, their fears, their doubts—all dark spaces held within. For a few, there were even darker places.
How could I fix all of this? Was I even supposed to?
I neared the square gardens, approaching Mansion House station. It was locked, but I knew Archie was inside. I could feel him when I blinked, and if I closed my eyes for longer, I could see his shape—but this meant seeing others, and the images were too numerous and strong. This is how Whoopi Goldberg’s character must have felt in that really old ghost movie that Am’ma liked to watch with me, the one where all the spirits came to her. Except mine were more like vague outlines, and mine were still alive.
“Hello,” I called. “Are you in there, Archie?”
Whispers echoed off the stone walls. It was not Archie.
Two men. They wanted to harm him, but they were looking for me.
My vision started to darken; first at the edges, then rapidly spreading inwards.
No. Not now.
My eyes were moist, but I was not crying. I dabbed them with my fingertips. Looking down I saw blood.
My legs started to give.
My legs, why is it always my freaking legs?
I pushed the umbra away, the bad feeling that swelled off the whispering men in waves. I thought of Am’ma, of Kerala, of sunlight filtering through the coconut palm groves.
The darkness eased.
I approached the metal railings. I knew I did not have the muscle control to climb them, and even if I did, it was likely I’d impale myself.
“Hello! Archie! Is that you?” I shouted.
That should do it.
More whispering.
The men spilt, their footsteps diverged.
One of the men was approaching me. I could see his silhouette through the spotlights that beamed onto the garden shrubs.
He was thin and tall; he wore a suit that said he was rich, and on his face, he had an expression that only existed on fairy-tale villains.
He flashed a crocodile smile.
I returned a fake smile. Despite his darkness, he did not scare me. He was the snake dancing to the tune of the snake charmer. I knew I was perfectly safe behind the metal fence.
So I thought.
A hand smothered my mouth, and I was wrestled backwards into the body of the other man who had crept behind me.
I tried to shout and scream, but his grip was firm and strong.
As if reading my thoughts, he growled, “Bite me and you’ll regret it.” He dragged me towards the railings and pinned me against them. “Looks like we won’t have to find her after all,” he said to the tall man.
“Must be our lucky day, Pigeon. Bring her in, and we’ll have ourselves a teenage party. She can join sleeping junkie over there.”
The man raised me up on to his shoulder like I was made of air.
Don’t shout. Don’t call. Archie is in there. He still has the phone, and screaming will only make them more angry with him. Despite what had happened to me, Archie had, when it mattered, saved me.
Bundled only inches from the spikes, I couldn’t help but gasp as I was handed from one man to the other. As the tall man in the suit had me in his arms, he squeezed my body, pushing out my breath. I was sure my bones would crack if he continued to crush me. It was his way of controlling me, of telling me not to mess with him.
As he held me, I could feel what he felt—not as if I could read his mind, more a sense of what he was and what he aspired to be, the familiar melody of a chorus rather than the individual notes of an instrument.
I wriggled and squirmed, desperate to escape. Was I feeling his personality, his soul, his aura, or his very being? Whatever it was, it filled me with emptiness. He held only greed, power, and violence.
What had he done? What was he about to do?
He dumped me onto a park bench. I straightened and huffed out a deep breath that must have sounded like a bratty teenager. Wet, gloopy liquid touched my fingertips as my hands pushed against on the slats of the bench.
Archie!
On the ground a few feet away from the bench, Archie lay curled in a ball like a frightened animal.
Alive, but injured and scared.
“Glad you came,” the tall man growled at me. “We thought you had the phone, but as it turns out, this kid had it. He put up a fight. Vicious little toe rag. He stood no chance. Do you know how important this device is to us?” He held up the phone briefly before putting it in his pocket.
I had an idea. The phone clearly had information o
n it that they didn’t want getting into the wrong hands. It also tied the robbery to someone who was working for them. But this wasn’t the movies. I kept my mouth shut.
The other man cleared his throat. “Maybe we should leave them alone, boss.”
“Don’t be so spineless, Pigeon. This is what I do. This is now what you do.”
The man called Pigeon shifted his weight between feet and scratched his silver hair. “It might be what you do and what you’d like me to do, but hurting kids is going too far.”
“Remember your ex-girlfriend, Pigeon. If you’re not going to help now, then I doubt you’ll help with her later. If you’re not going to take care of her, then I’ll have to do it. I might just make it look like you got violent with her. It’s the sort of thing the police won’t even investigate. Open and shut case.”
The man in the suit closed the gap between us. He looked at Archie before stepping over him. He stared at the lapels of his suit, tutted, then licked his fingers and rubbed at what might have been a bloodstain. “See, the thing is, I’m not as worried about kids as my friend here. The phone wasn’t the only thing we were interested in. This whole mess was caused by a couple of our employees being careless. Now I’ve got to fix the mistakes. Witnesses and evidence need to disappear. My boss is not happy, which means I’m not happy. A job is a job. It’s nothing personal.”
He stopped cleaning his suit and fixed his gaze on me. His eyes were grey and cold and empty of anything human. He moved towards me with a speed I hadn’t anticipated. I stood to run, but my legs buckled. I remembered the computer game, Block Alchemy. In his desire to hurt—or kill—me, this man reminded me of the monster called the Emptyman, who lived at the end of the game, in the level called Purgatory. He was the creature that ran the mobs of monsters, with his tall empty body and staring, hollow eyes.
I lay on the ground next to Archie. The Emptyman stood over me. Thoughts of Am’ma and Dad filled my head. I pushed away the images that flooded my vision of what the man in the suit was about to do to me. But there was something else I felt, something almost as powerful as the Emptyman’s desire.