by Iain Scarrow
“Go away,” the cop said.
“I have rights you know,” she said, chewing gum, smiling white teeth at the cop.
“Not any that I’m aware of,” the cop said.
“I’ll sue,” the girl laughed.
“I thought you were Sue,” the cop said.
Now everyone laughed. Even Mark couldn’t help but laugh.
“Joker,” the cop said.
“Look if you guys want to go kill yourselves, do it quietly,” Bluto said leaning over the table at Mark. “We’ll shovel up the pieces, just don’t get us involved in your creepy little suicide pact.”
Mark looked around at the pale-magnolia walls of the interrogation room.
“Am I being charged with anything?” he asked.
“This time,” Bluto grinned, “no.”
Mark rubbed at his wrists.
“Then maybe I should be,” he said standing up.
“You can collect your stuff at the front desk,” Bluto said without looking up as he filled in a form.
Mark stepped out of the room and walked along the corridor, passing by the closed doors of other rooms; all of them with VACANT signs displayed in the slots.
“What kind of weirdo reporter doesn’t own a camera phone,” the cop at the front desk asked as Mark stood there waiting for his things.
Another cop flicked through Mark’s notebook. “Interesting,” he said.
“Don’t tell me you can actually read?” Mark said, snatching his notebook out of the cop’s hand.
14
Collins the ex-never-ever-was-an-estate-agent had bodily shrunk back from flubberized to anorexic now that his appetite had sprung a leak into another dimension.
He grabbed a writing pad and doodled on it a green Biro as his tongue poked in and out the side of his thin lips to aid his concentration.
“That damn house, what the hell was it called again?”
He grabbed the big white envelope from the coffee table, the envelope that had been delivered to his IRS invisible crank-realtor office a couple of weeks earlier.
His shirt buttons had stopped straining.
He slumped back, cigar ready, whiskey ready, and opened the envelope again. He pulled out the pages and squinted at the blocky words under the orange lamplight (couldn’t stand those new age light bulbs), and read them, over and over again.
“Brock House … Reliquary … priceless … unbridled power …”
He dropped the pages onto his lap and stared up at the ceiling, at the cigar smoke ingrained fleur-de-lis cornice as if there was something hidden there; a meaning, a message, something deadly, mean, and satisfying. Something buried like twinkly fairy lights inside a radioactive candy floss served up on a stick to a kid on a stick by a fat faced clown at a funfair. And somehow that thought pleased him, but what did it mean?
He thought about it harder and harder, until a word slithered out between his teeth all on its own.
“Power.”
He sat bolt upright as if he’d been zapped by a Taser.
“Christ, yeah, that’s it, power!”
He slumped back again with a big grin stretching the skin of his ever shrinking mug shot.
“Man, but that word feels so good.”
15
Mark went home, slammed the door, marched over his front room floor, and pulled up the old sash window as far as it would go before the swollen wood got in the way and jammed it, which wasn’t far at all, and a dragon fly flew in.
He chased the dragonfly out, crashed the window shut again, then yanked a pack of Marlborough Lights out of his pocket.
He ripped off the cellophane. Crushed it into a tiny ball of hate for mankind, pinged it at the wall (fuck it) and lit up the cigarette as he stared through the closed window at a deep orange dusk drawing over the rooftops out back like a warm fluffy comfort blanket. And as steam rose from those hated coolers out there on the rooftops Mark almost collapsed when his veins shrunk to the width of pins on his first draw on a cigarette in a year.
He grabbed a wooden chair, its maroon seat dented by God knows how many backsides since the fifties, and down on it before he had a chance dropped flat as a jellyfish out of water as the nicotine took hold.
I’m gonna finish this damned cigarette even if it kills me.
He leaned on the windowsill with his elbow down, and chewed on a thumbnail. Thinking as he drew in more smoke he blew it at the closed the window. The dragonfly came back, the dying sunlight throwing off splinters of red and tangerine through its transparent wings as it hovered up and down at the other side of glass, until it finally gave up and flew away again.
It’s like being dropped underwater trapped inside a goldfish bowl.
Stars emerged as the sky grew darker. Mark sat back. The legs of the old wooden chair creaked under him.
“And the throat of winter will soon be on its way.”
Hate winter. Hate tinsel. And hate flying even more. Hate everything about the modern…
His cell phone rang.
He jumped.
“Shit!”
He took it out of his pocket and looked at it.
Don’t recognize the number. A landline? A call box? They still have call boxes?
And answered.
“Yeah?”
“Sorry.”
It was John.
“For what?” Mark asked.
“Me for causing you trouble.”
“You’ll be the death of me,” Mark said. He blew at the end of his cigarette. It glowed vermillion in the dark. “A long slow death,” he said.
“I want to make it up to you.”
“By saying goodbye?” Mark said. “Farewell? So long?”
He realized he didn’t have an ashtray.
He looked around, ash ready to fall, then grabbed the old sash cord and pulled down on it. The window went up. He flicked the ash out. And the dragon fly zipped back.
He let go the cord and the window slammed down like a cleaver.
“It sounds kind of noisy there,” John said.
“Daddy long legs attack,” Mark said.
“Maybe he’s trying to tell you something.”
The dragonfly buzzed up and down on the other side of the glass again.
Mark stuck his tongue out of it.
“Yeah,” Mark said, “like what?”
“They’ve been around a lot longer than we have, you know.”
The dragon fly flew away.
The sky grew even darker, and windows glowed in the distance; white, amber, orange; square windows, oblong windows.
Mark pulled up the window again, stubbed out his cigarette on the sill, sparks flying.
The dragon fly didn’t come back.
He left the window open.
“So why are you calling me?” Mark asked peering around at the world outside, keeping a lookout for the flying insect’s thread-like little legs, its rainbow transparent wings.
“To say that I’m sorry. To try and make it up to you.”
“You’ve said that,” Mark said. “You’ve said it twice. And it’s starting to bore me.”
He rubbed his forehead.
Still no dragonfly.
He frowned.
“Still wanting to talk to me?”
Mark flicked another cigarette into his mouth.
It worked.
Just like the old days.
He grinned around the cigarette clamped between his lips.
“Do I have a choice?” he asked.
He lit up, leaned back, and looked out the through the gap under the open window.
Clear stars, infinite sky.
Now all he needed to top off his bad luck day was for a flying saucer to zip in from nowhere and Mark to be without a flash-cam at the ready to photograph it in black and white glory.
“Only without that notebook of yours this time,” John said.
“Then there’s not much point in talking to you then, is there?” Mark said.
“How about talk
ing to me instead of interrogating me like everyone else only ever does, talking to me as if I’m a real human being for a change?”
“You have the pastor for that,” Mark said.
“Everyone interrogates me, Mark. No one ever talks to me.”
Mark dropped the mobile from his ear onto his lap, closed his eyes and sighed. Opening his eyes he put it back to his ear again.
“What have you got to talk about?” he asked.
“Everything.”
“And does that entail talking about how you came by that ancient pan scrubber pod thing you just happen to have found?”
“I can do better than that,” John said.
“Yeah?” Mark said.
“Yeah,” John said, “and it’ll blow your mind.”
16
Mark pulled up his rusty old Mustang Ford at the side of a deserted side street and switched off the engine. The metal of the hood clicked as it cooled down.
A low evening sun shone a flat disk of colorless white ice at the far end of the street making pin-like shadows of the broken lampposts, and their protective coverings that were hanging off or had been smashed away completely.
What the hell have I got myself into?
He felt as if he was sitting inside a protective bubble, and not a very protective one at that set against the alien landscape outside of rotten abandoned doorways, crumbling concrete steps and overhanging parapets streaked dirty brown where the rain had finally eaten through to the iron rods inside, rusting them. The place was all blistered paint, rotten wood, and broken windows staring out blindly like hollowed blackened eyes over a potholed blacktop covered in a carpet of glass fragments, glittering like scattered jewels. Each jewel glinting with the bleaching rays of the flat white sun disk at the far end of the street that was lined with discarded newspaper sheets plastered to the sidewalk sharing the desolation with what was left of the skeletal wings of mummified birds, now nothing but feathers and bones and beaks and claws.
Newsprint, Mark realized, was fast becoming as extinct as papyrus had become extinct for the pharos. News was no longer real black ink on physical paper, but electronic, fake and transient; an illusion of pictures with forever fewer black words hovering above a background of cocaine-white radiating from handheld plastic screens.
He rubbed at his eyes and shook his head. It was like experiencing the death of a child; a child who was dying of starvation in front of his eyes. And there was not a thing he could do to stop it.
When he opened his eyes again he saw a figure step out from one of the deserted doorways.
It was John.
Mark watched him turn around to face his Mustang Ford, his little knapsack on his back, and saw that he was barefoot.
Mark got out. But he left the door open and stayed close to it.
“Hi,” he called.
John looked over, unmoving, unblinking.
“You wanted to talk to me,” Mark said. “Remember?”
John stood there saying nothing.
“Changed your mind?” Mark asked.
He could feel his guts dragging.
This is going to be as easy as pulling my own teeth.
“Okay, John, no notebook this time,” he said, letting go of the car door and holding up his hands, “just like you asked.”
John walked towards him. Mark cringed with each footstep the guy took and thought he saw a pale-blue flicker of light with each piece of broken glass that his bare feet came into contact with.
Has to be a trick of the light.
There was a lump of jagged glass.
He almost called watch out, but John seemed to sidestep it without even needing to look.
John walked to the other side of the car and stopped.
“Wanna get in?” Mark asked. “We can go for a bite to eat. My treat.”
“I don’t need charity,” John said.
What is it with this guy?
He resisted the urge to jumped back into his car and drive away into the coming night, the darkness, and race under streetlights flashing over his windshield and leave the lunatic standing there. He’d already caused Mark enough grief. Why stick around for more?
Instead he took a breath, held it, let it out, and forced himself to smile. But the smile gave him face ache.
This wasn’t turning out the way he’d hoped it would.
How can a guy who sounded so full of life less than an hour ago now sound so much like a brain dead zombie?
Before he could say anything else John opened the passenger door, ducked down below the roof of the car, and climbed in.
Mark just hoped the interior wasn’t going to stink.
He climbed in behind the steering wheel, slammed the door, said nothing, and drove them off down the deserted street. He didn’t even know where to. But anywhere seemed better than here.
“Cheeseburger?” Mark asked. “We could have a Big Mac and fries.”
“I don’t eat meat,” Mark said.
Christ!
“Fries then,” Mark said, “with lots of ketchup.”
“Okay,” John said, “and a side salad with an oil dressing.”
Mark pulled up at a Macdonald’s. He turned off the engine, reached down and cranked up the handbrake hard.
“Ready to go in?” he asked turning to John.
John looked at him, serious faced.
“Looking like this?” he asked. “They wouldn’t let me in the door.”
Mark sighed.
“Yeah,” he said. “Maybe the no shoes part would get them thinking that you’re some kind of weirdo, and we can’t have them thinking that can we?”
Marc opened his door, swung out his legs, then had second thoughts.
He reached for the keys under the steering column, pulled them out, and pocketed them. It looked like a crass move. It felt even crasser than it looked.
“Nothing personal,” he said. “But this heap of junk is all I have.”
“I can’t drive anyway,” John said looking straight ahead.
Mark leaned over again.
“In that case,” he said, and stuck the key back in the ignition. “Okay, so anything else besides just fries and a side salad to go.”
“Coffee,” said John. “Black. I don’t take anything that comes out of, or off, of an animal.”
Mark climbed out of the car, resisted slamming the door, and went into the MacDonald’s for their orders.
The place was empty.
And as he placed his order it felt as if a finger was tapping at his back, making him want to turn around, to look out the window and see if John, and his cars, were still there.
He fought against it.
Order served, he grabbed it, and walked out into the street.
He was surprised to see his Mustang still there and John still in it.
He climbed in.
“You can eat,” Mark said. “I’ll drive us somewhere quiet.”
He tossed his own Big Mac on the dash.
But John didn’t eat his fries either.
“Brock,” he spoke the word as if he was in a trance.
“Rock?” Mark asked twisting his head round to look at John at the same time as he pulled down on the steering wheel, turning the car around the corner, driving anywhere, not knowing to where.
“Brock,” John corrected.
“Weird sounding name,” Mark sighed shifting to a higher gear.
“Old Celtic name for badger,” John said.
“And this place called Brock. Is it close?”
John seemed to think about it for a minute, his eyes staring through the windshield.
“It’s outside the city,” he said. “It can be a bit hard to find unless you know where to look. But it’s not that far when you know how.”
Not far meant an hour’s drive along back roads and dirt tracks. Mark thought the wheels of the Mustang were going to be ripped off.
He stopped at a gap in the woods where they were surrounded by what he might call, as a city
boy, moth eaten trees with broken branches. Some of the trees were stripped of bare of their leaves and looked as if they had been dead for years, spindly, wiry things set against the dying light of day. He thought better of staying around too long. It looked creepy. And it felt creepy, too.
And here I am stuck inside a rusting tin can with a lunatic.
He reached forward and switched off the engine.
“Okay,” Mark said leaning back, wriggling his shoulders to get more comfortable. In truth there was a growing strain in his back that was growing by the second.
“This is as far as I go,” he said. “I don’t think this old clunker of a tank would make it back out, never mind be able to take us further in.”
John stepped out of the car without speaking and took his paper bag of fries and coffee with him.
Mark would have taken a bite out of his Big Mac, but it must be frozen by now. Not a good appetizer.
The headlights didn’t show up too much. And what they did looked dead and as gray as ash.
He watched through the windshield as John walked off down the overgrown dirt track ahead.
Now what?
He looked around, around the blind spots, trying to see if something was coming; a passing truck, a ghost, a yeti.
But there was nothing
The trees didn’t look too safe either the way they leaned over at such a steep angle, as if something had sucked them in towards each other and their branches were straining out like the arms of dying bodies. So many of them reaching over like that that they blocked out most of the night sky.
God almighty.
Last thing I need now is for the battery to go dead on me.
Everything went black.
He blinked, heart thumping.
Be careful what you wish for.
He took a breath, reached forward, then pulled the key out of the ignition and pocketed it.
He opened the door an inch.
The courtesy light flashed on and nearly blinded him.
He pushed the door a little further out.
The door creaked. A nettle snapped around the side and night air rushed in at him.
He got out, hands high to avoid being stung, and shoved the door closed. A weird mixture of odors hit him all at once: pine needles, mold and rotting pears.