Roughhouse

by Dan Cummings

  Crankenstein’s eyebrows arched up, his consciousness dropping back into the moment. Grainger waited for a reply, mild derision morphing into exasperation. Hurst seemed to be having trouble beginning his sentence. ‘There might be something to what he’s saying.’ His voice dropped diplomatically, his manner slowly becoming galvanized by excitement.

  Grainger shook his head like the words had knocked him for six. ‘Excuse me? Hell of a time to become the household cut-up, doc.’

  Staubach had trouble keeping his depraved attention on Lindsey, with Crankenstein’s unexpected admission adding further validation to what he thought he saw out there during the run down.

  ‘What if I told you, that I encountered an…unexplainable being back in college. It was—’

  Grainger threw a palm up, his voice tight. ‘Maybe you forgot to wear your mask in the lab, but I don’t have time for this shit. Send your assistants home, lock the lab down. We need to take care of Karp and his soon-to-be-brutally-murdered associate.’

  Hurst had his hands in a prayer gesture, praying for his employer’s patience. ‘The strain which was sabotaged in the pond was very unrefined. Back then it was pretty much raw Claviceps purpurea — rye grass fungus. Apart from the few adjustments I made to the molecular composition — reducing the gangrenous effects and convulsions of the alkaloids, elevating the hallucinogenic properties and so forth — it’s amazing Karp survived with his mind still, relatively intact,’ Hurst waxed, growing steadily more animated with the topic. ‘But I won’t draw a line under him being labelled psychotic. Ralph, this is why I never told you sooner, right back when you first hired me, because I knew you’d think I was some kind of maniac. What I experienced was legitimate, and it’s the real reason I have put so much into developing Fable. It could be the biggest scientific breakthrough in…ever! Imagine it, confirming there are other beings out there, other worlds, and it doesn’t even require blasting astronauts and drones into space. Now I’m not suggesting that what every tripper sees is genuine, but there are anomalies, man, it’s part of the scientific process. A pinch of truth in this great big multi-coloured, psychedelic mystery. I’m living proof.’

  Hurst’s eyes danced with brimming exultant energy. ‘And look at Sticky, his hallucinations haven’t been scattershot. During his whole internment here he has constantly shrieked about one thing, that Mr Scribbles character. What if he too has somehow fixated on something we can’t see?’ Grainger looked at Hurst like he had just declared that he was Martian royalty on sabbatical and was tempted to pistol whip some sense into the great mind behind his DIY drug department. Hurst returned an impatient, defensive look. ‘You said yourself; I’m a scientist. It’s in my nature to theorise. Look, whatever Sticky thinks he’s seeing up there is, potentially, due to some form of psychosis, in which case maybe Karp is merely projecting his own actions onto some invisible agent.’ Hurst pursed his lips in consideration. ‘But then, like his friends said—’ he gestured to Lindsey and the hallway Sam had been hauled off through ‘—Karp can’t be in two places at once. Maybe something is helping him. He might have established some form of lasting contact.’ Hurst actually seemed a little despondent and jealous at this.

  Grainger stared his top chemist down, his nostrils flaring in seething irritation. ‘I think after tonight you and I need to sit down and have a frank and serious discussion about your future here.’ Disappointed, Hurst massaged his brow with his fingers, wondering whether it would be a pink slip or a bullet which would terminate his years of hard work.

  Smoothing his thinning hair with a steady, firm palm, Grainger stared at the girl bound to the chair. ‘Whoever Karp is bringing to this party they won’t be nothing some leverage and a few bullets can’t fix.’

  *****

  Sam was so fixated on the burning coal of his severed finger that much of what he had been pushed through was a random assortment of imagery and noise; strobe lights, unsavoury characters and hallways and stairways in disrepair. Now, as he clutched tightly at the base of his truncated little finger, a sudden sense of trepidation filled his chest and populated his every thought.

  The big blond one, Tully, he thought Grainger called him, wrapped one large palm on his shoulder, a taunting light in his heavy lidded eyes. ‘You like playing make-believe, kid? You should get on well with our acquaintance in here.’

  Here meant the paint-peeled door waiting before them. Sam’s shallow breaths tasted of dank and musty wood. The endless throb of aggressive and soulless bass-heavy techno quietly thrummed through the wooden timbers of the cobweb-draped attic like a dying heartbeat.

  Miles casually swatted an errant spider web from his afro and removed a knife from a sheath attached to his belt. As he sliced the tape around Sam’s wrists, his voice was almost gentle, ‘Staubach said you know the cat in here, some entrepreneur called Sticky?’

  Sam’s drowsy eyes skimmed over Miles and somewhere through the heavy cycle of screaming nerve endings he was mildly rekindled with a stark revelation, through this whole ordeal the Phillips-head still held firm between the heavy denim sleeve and his forearm. Sam hadn’t thought about Sticky in a while, presuming him to be dead. He didn’t know what they had done to him, but he didn’t feel that he was in enough immediate danger to attempt some foolhardy move like attempting to kill two clearly lethal and armed fully-grown men with a screwdriver. So he stood there, woozy and bleeding, begging something, God maybe, or just some form of abstract justice, that that impossible frog enjoyed bloodlust enough to storm this fort and provide Sam and Lindsey with an opportunity to get the fuck out of there.

  Get away from Neil, too. Far, far away.

  Tully turned the old brass key, the tumblers clicking with heavy clunks. ‘You might—’ he guessed, ‘be safe and sound in here until that little fuck, Karp, turns up. Then, if you’re still alive,’ he chuckled to Miles, ‘well, you’ll wish you won’t be.’ Miles lazily held his gun on Sam. Tully quickly opened the door into a hell of red and black, shoved Sam over the threshold and then slammed the door and relocked it so fast you would think a lion was kept inside. Tully shivered. ‘That guy gives me the creeps.’

  Sam’s eyes fluttered around the surprisingly large room like startled bats looking for an exit. It was a barren, windowless chamber of creaking wooden floorboards, a long corridor of skeletal wood joists propping up the steep slant of the roof and lit by badly strung red Christmas lights. The perimeter of the whole wide room was untouched by the crimson murk. It felt like he was standing inside some internal organ within a mad architect’s body, a pentagonal prism of meat and blood.

  Over his quick, empty breaths, Sam heard something else. A low, rattle of wet lungs.

  Inflating…deflating…rest…inflating…deflating…rest.

  Unmoving from his position near the door, Sam carefully started to slip the Phillips from the band of his blood-damp sleeve into his right palm, biting his lip in a hot spike of pain as his finger stump knocked against the knuckles of his right hand. Gripping the plastic handle with a tacky palm of sweat and blood, he stared forebodingly at several irregular darker rectangles of space hovering along parts of the attic’s dark periphery. With his pupils dilating he noticed the threatening voids were actually crawlspaces between the joists, a den within the walls. The mouth breathing continued, the rhythm now almost expectantly. Sam heard a shuffle creeping somewhere from within one of the visually impenetrable passageways. It wasn’t until the lithe figure of shadows softly emerged from the possessive grip of the blackness that Sam acknowledged his jaw starting to hurt from the enamel jackhammering of their chattering.

  Chapter 37

  Neil sequestered himself in his room after receiving Grainger and Staubach’s message under the pretence of needing to have a look at some homework. Looking fit to explode, he hit himself in the head several times, unable to stay afloat in his own self-loathing. My fault. All my fault. With a recital of despair, he tried to commune with Frogmore, needing him to get here now. Was he already t
here? Making good on his promise to off Staubach? For all he knew, the situation might already be well in hand and those animals would be breathing their last. But Sam’s earlier remark was amplified by his panic. Could Frogmore survive getting shot? Stabbed? For all of his supernatural gifts, all he had done up until now was kill four young men. Now the game had switched up.

  Neil flung himself from his bed, rifled through his desk drawer and found what he was looking for. If Frogmore wasn’t dead, and deep down, he didn’t believe he was, then he was playing hard to get. This would get his attention. Jesus Christ, he hoped it would get his attention. Neil held the shard of Noakes’s windshield to his left wrist, the vicious tip digging a crater in his skin without puncturing.

  ‘Come on, you son of a bitch.’

  Any second now. He could hear his parents watching TV downstairs, laughing at something. His head ratcheted around, pure, unfiltered need in his eyes. Squeezing his eyes closed, he committed to the drawing of blood, knowing that it would definitely supersede any other priority of Frogmore’s and he would miraculously appear like a bloodhound at the scent. The glass started to dig a little deeper in his shaking fingers.

  ‘Neil, don’t,’ Frogmore spat, those yellow orbs reproaching him severely.

  ‘Where the fuck have you been? They have Sam and Lindsey, they’re going to kill them.’ The room was palpable with tension yet the both of them were being careful not to alert either Martin or Helen, knowing that to do so would only risk further problems.

  ‘I have been resting,’ Frogmore lied without any kind of tell. ‘I knew I might need to conserve my energy should Staubach collude with those reprehensible scoundrels.’ Such bizarre language in the heat of the moment didn’t even click with Neil, everything was so damn weird lately.

  Neil kept hold of the glass dagger, dangling in his fist at his side. ‘We need to go now or he’s going to kill them.’ He was wound so tight he thought his head might pop off. ‘I can’t let them die.’ Without warning, Neil’s voice went dark and firm, sniffing back the emotion struggling to burst forth from within. ‘I’m done trying to pretend otherwise. I know you like killing, protecting me was just an excuse to keep me docile. Well now I want you to kill every last one of them. No remorse. There’s no backing out. They sent me the address. It’s our new Lily Pad.’ Neil swallowed a stone. ‘It’s a half mile from Rawlins Pond. You need to jump us there now.’

  Frogmore quietly watched Neil, his dirty grey throat swelling and deflating smoothly to grotesque proportions, his eyes unreadable. ‘Jumping the both of us will be very draining for me. Best if I go alone.’

  ‘There’s no other way. If I’m not there in person within the next forty minutes he’s going to kill them. And four hands are better than two.’

  Frogmore brooded on this for a moment, finally tilting his head a few degrees. ‘I can’t risk losing you.’ He wasn’t prepared to lose his meal ticket.

  Neil gave him a hard unflinching stare. ‘If you don’t take me…I’ll kill myself. You can’t watch me twenty-four-seven.’

  Frogmore held the dedication of his friend’s eyes. ‘You understand that if you go there you might have to kill too.’ Neil nodded. Frogmore waited him out, pretending to have some internal struggle with his friend’s acceptance, but deep down the thought was like fireworks, colourful bursts illuminating the twisted, lightless path of their future bonding. ‘Then I suppose we should get going.’

  Neil forced a grim expression of bitter determination upon his face whilst inside he screamed loud enough to almost dislodge his resolution. Everything in his bedroom suddenly seemed so fresh and interesting, the details and colours, the memories attached and forgotten to his myriad belongings. He pictured his mom and dad’s faces, carrying them with him, knowing that he was sneaking out of not only their house but very likely, their lives.

  Chapter 38

  ‘I’m really sorry about this. Lindsey, is it? I know it’s trite of me to say, but I’m not actually a bad guy.’ Hurst stirred three sugars into his tea, his invigorated manner creating a rich tan whirlpool in his mug. ‘I can’t believe your friend has actually managed to do it,’ he sounded equal parts fulfilled and jealous, the spoon clinked a fast mindless rhythm against the cup, his baggy eyes content.

  Lindsey’s wrists continued their dogged struggle against the tape. He seemed to have lost his thread before remembering Lindsey was still in the room with him. ‘Whether it be me or someone else, the classic recreational staples or my own personal concoctions, people always have and always will use drugs; the Sumerians were cultivating opium back in 3400 BC, North Africans ingested psilocybin as far back as 9000 BC, the Mayans chewed coca leaves and the ancient Sikhs used cannabis for meditation and as an analgesic.’

  Hurst’s pinched fingers seemed to be pulling knowledge out of his temple. ‘They are believed to have shaped religions, expanded the human conscience and inspired great works of art. It’s the government’s fault really, I hate saying that, sounding like some immature college student having a gripe with “the Man”. But it doesn’t make it any less true. The war on drugs isn’t to save and protect the masses, it’s a continued failure of bureaucratic dominance of the illegal market, and all the while, Pfizer and their like make astronomical capital by funnelling as many pills as they can down the throats of the public who have so much as a runny nose. If drugs were legalised, then the campaign budget could be spent on proper clinical trials, safety measures, policies to ensure that they are monitored, distributed and used with much more care.’ He glanced towards the doorway and sipped his tea. ‘It would also put certain violent people permanently out of business. And of course there will always be those who misuse drugs, but that’s a flaw with humanity and not with substance. People can take something as innocuous as a Q-tip and turn it into something negative. That’s not the product’s fault, people need to own their accountability.’

  Hurst’s expression seemed to convey a sort of conflicted empathy. ‘Which is why I can’t feel too guilty about my professional pursuits.’ Lindsey stared at him through the tears, frantically looking about this hopeless situation for some type of salvation; alas, being bound to a chair in a gangster’s kitchen with cold-blooded killers on the premises quashed any shred of hope she may have harboured.

  Hurst sighed, clearly uncomfortable and wanting nothing more than to be back in his lab. ‘But this is new for me — kidnapping kids.’ He shook his head with dislike. ‘I need you to know that, I don’t know why, maybe to absolve myself, but I don’t get mixed up in this side of the business. I’m white collar all the way.’ Glancing back at the doorway into the hall, and realising that Grainger was still in the front room rallying the troops to butcher some psychotic kid and his supposedly hallucinatory bodyguard, Hurst placed his mug on the counter and approached Lindsey, pulling off the duct tape like a Band-Aid. Lindsey winced from the rough removal, her brown eyes loaded with death for him and everyone else in the house who wasn’t named Sam.

  Hurst leaned in close, a secret on his lips meant only for her ears. ‘Karp…who’s really helping him? Some unhinged relative, or a friend, maybe?’ Lindsey scrunched her lips together like she wanted to tell him something indelicate but held her tongue, looking away instead. ‘Is what Sam says true?’ Hurst’s mood shifted carefully, his eyes still glowing with that fanatical intensity. ‘What I said before was true, you know. I had never told anybody that, I should have picked a more receptive audience I suppose, but…Shit, if only I had had a camera on me at the time. When I was in college, I dabbled for the first time with LSD.’ He looked beatific, his face telling of a meeting with the angels, the devils, the intangibles beyond the grasp of life’s mundane existence. ‘It was transcendental. My friends at the time, they had a giggle, the occasional freak-out, but me…I experienced something more. Man…’ he paused in speechless recollection. ‘Blue lights, tiny and drifting, like little particles of the Aurora Borealis. Such beautiful pageantry.’ He appeared to swallow a lump from th
e memory.

  ‘This strange little goddess appeared. Like a butterfly-lady. She was right there, I know, I touched her.’ He reached out his fingertips as if to relive the tactile sensation, then let his hand slap his thigh. ‘Her voice was like music, ethereal. But I couldn’t understand the language, not for lack of trying. I’ll never do LSD again, mind you, despite the mind-blowing experience, it’s so damaging to the old grey matter. That’s why I do what I do; with each generation of my strain, I refine the chemical bit by bit, improving my product. I aim to make it as physiologically benign as possible without compromising the trip, no, NO!’ He shook his head violently, ‘To call it a mere trip is insulting. The vision quest.’

  He paused a moment, fingers tapping against the cup, then he put it on the table, his eyes urgent and imploring. ‘As my friends were off doing their own thing, the butterfly handed me something.’ His hand gingerly stroked the glass vial hanging from his beaded necklace. The vial contained a small lilac oval, a pattern of purple and blue threads running across it like a delicate brush had painted them. ‘Then she and the lights, poof, gone. This is my compound’s secret ingredient, the special sauce,’ he whispered. ‘I couldn’t bring myself to pass it over to some government facility to steal my glory. This is like nothing else on Earth. But I didn’t want to be known as the fool who simply blundered across a goldmine, some footnote dropped hastily and ineffectually in some scientific journal. I want to make gateways. And this,’ he held up the vial, ‘is the key. I analysed the substance and found a protein with an undocumented amino acid. Working title is Dreamium,’ he chuckled, ‘but I’m not quite sold on that nomenclature yet. After I mapped out the structure of the new protein, I began to amplify the sample, regulating the quantities for each new generation of Fable. This incredible protein reacts with the lysergic acid of LSD in such a way that I believe that once I have mastered the balance, it will offer a smooth, stable, safe and unparalleled transition to another place we could only dream of. I’m talking waking up in a living, breathing cartoon world, man. Up until now my work has generated its share of subjects who have visualised — to varying extents — other beings, sadly, up until now I have largely depended on the hearsay of Grainger’s mules or the occasional first-hand viewing of a subject’s ravings. It’s not enough, I need empirical evidence that someone — anyone — has witnessed another physical, tangible being. Forming a meaningful connection which lasts.’