by H T G Hedges
At last I would be able to bear it no more and would be forced to turn around but it would be gone, lurking in the shadows at the edge of my dream until I turned my back once more. Then I’d hear it creeping back out of the dark on velvet feet to give chase once more.
As I continued to run, the moon had slowly changed, altering its appearance as the landscape around me grew darker and more dangerous, jagged shards of rock cutting at my feet until I was leaving smears of deep ruby blood glistening on the outcrops as I passed. It would make me easier to track I remember thinking with the scattered logic of the dreamer.
By the time I stopped, the moon above was a dark crimson scar against the bruised sky and had started to melt in on itself, bleeding tendrils of pinky-red corruption into the lightening sky. It made me think of the way ink runs into water only slower and, somehow, much more disturbing. It was as if the whole sky was being infected by the poisonous juices hemorrhaging from the blistered moon.
Now at last I stopped, on the edge of a narrow valley at the centre of which a skeletal, broken tree burst from the ground, standing white and bonelike, an obscene and unnatural centerpiece to the blasted nightmare landscape. Something about its bare fingerlike branches raking at the sky stopped me where I stood, shaking and sweating with trepidation.
From behind rose a long, low growl as my pursuer entered into this broken arena, its long shadow falling over me, cold and deadly as icy water.
With no choice but to continue, I steeled myself for the descent into the lee of those crooked branches when I realized there was a figure in the shadows surrounding the trunk. He was tall and thin, his face lost in the gloom, waiting in silent, patient solitude, steady and unmoving as stone.
With agonising slowness, the sun was rising, spreading a drab luminescence across the blasted clearing, slowly revealing the waiting figure. As the light continued to move I saw long limbs; elongated ivory arms ending in spiderlike, pale hands, one wrapped over the top of the other, ragged nails thick with dirt and mud.
The light moved on and was almost at his face. I screwed up my eyes, suddenly certain that I didn’t want to see whatever was to be revealed. I felt the hot breath on the back of my neck, closer and fouler than ever. There was nowhere to go. I opened my eyes.
I woke up.
The dream had filled me with a deep and uneasy sense of foreboding for the day ahead, but I tried to put it to the back of my mind. I took another sip of coffee but it tasted burnt like ash in my mouth and I poured it away. Two crows sat watching me from a telephone wire across the street, their strange, serious eyes contemplating my movements as I forced myself to eat an apple and nibble at a stale cookie. I was still feeling queasy when one of them gave a loud, harsh caw and took to the air, making me jump.
My God, I thought, I need to get a grip. The second crow gave me a long look of agreement before following its companion, black feathers ruffling against the cold sky. It was time to go, I thought. Best not be late for my date. I grabbed my phone and keys and left the flat, making a mental note to call the boss on the way and let him know I’d be late.
The line clicked off into a dead white buzz. I flipped the cell shut, deciding I would tell Danvers where I’d been all morning when I got back. It was unusual not to be able to get through to the parlour, still he could chew me out later, or not, depending on his mood. It was just entering the dying light of rush hour and the station was easing to a steady trickle of people; aimless day trippers mostly and tourists with just a smattering of hassled looking suits who were either late for work or important enough to carve their own hours.
Overhead, the great glass dome of the roof was a uniform soulless grey, rippled with rain drops. According to the monstrous gold-plated clock over the escalator, I was about fifteen minutes too early, so I bought a copy of The Standard and another coffee and settled at a plastic table, sprayed to look like metal, in front of a pretzel stand done up as some kind of wooden shack with a straw roof. It was like something you might hope to see on the white sands of some beautiful tropical beach between the cobalt blue of the ocean and the mirrored sky.
Flicking through the paper proved disheartening at best. There was a report of more buildings on fire across the bridge and somebody had dug up a pit full of bodies behind some old hotel. I sighed and laid it aside. Cigarette smoke wafted from somewhere, peppering up my nose. I coughed and brushed it away. I was dressed for work and they didn’t like it if you turned up smelling funky. Smoke was especially bad for a cremation. Made sense, I guess.
I glanced at the clock again. Still ten minutes. I sipped my coffee - it was good this time, grit black and bitter, swamp thick. Smelled just like burnt rubber. On the far side of the concourse an overweight commuter in a floral shirt shouted at a ticket clerk, waving his arms in over-wrought dramatic flourishes at the bemused attendant.
A woman in a severe cut charcoal skirt suit was sipping a coffee at the table across from me, dark hair pulled back in a no nonsense ponytail. One perfectly manicured fingernail tapped a machine gun rhythm on the screen of her mart phone. I spent a few minutes half trying to catch her eye but she was having none of it. Killed some time anyway.
Muffled music floated on the lifeless air, all hi-hat and deep bass escaping from a set of gleaming heavy gold ear-cans tangled in some kid’s curly black hair as he swaggered on by with practiced nonchalance.
People watching killed another five minutes as I waited for Whimsy to show his face. A face, I thought, that I didn’t know. Still, I was where he’d told me to be and that was as much as I could do for now. The pill in my pocket was a dead weight, heavy with questions.
Time ticked by slowly in acid green digits. Idly I brushed lint off a black sleeve, straightened a pant leg, adjusted my tie. Seconds passed like pouring syrup, not so much ticking as oozing immeasurably.
Something on the rolling news screen caught my eye…
I heard the noise as I reached again, unconsciously, for the styrophome coffee cup. A pop and a rush like thunder that shattered the ambient bustle, like a train approaching the platform. I heard it, felt it, didn’t understand. And then my chest exploded outwards.
Swamped, mugged by the pain I jerked backwards in the aluminium chair, toppling it backwards, my legs sending the light table arcing through the air, coffee and ashtray spiralling off over the ground.
I toppled backwards in slow motion, screaming the pain I could barely register and flopped onto the floor. What started as a tumble was, by the time it finished up, too wet and messy to live up to the name.
I hit the floor, blood spray painting my landing. I am street art, I thought in one ludicrously detached moment before everything closed back in. Then I lay still, panting and pumping out blood, fingers sliding around in it as I struggled for purchase, tried to cling to a life I knew was in its terminal moments.
Carver Whimsy stepped onto the platform, just another morning traveller in a like-minded sea. Bedecked in a faded Hawaiian shirt and cargo pants under an overlong black leather jacket, he cut an unlikely figure. Whimsy looked so much like a play-actor investigator - was so incongruous in any setting - that he became at times almost invisible. Like a strange aroma, he lingered in the background until he was a part of it. In his profession such a skill could be invaluable. It had certainly saved his life.
As he made his way onto the escalator he lit up a dog eared rollie, pluming thick acrid smoke in his wake. He sucked in an appreciative lungful and wished, not for the first time, that he’d chosen a less exposed rendezvous destination.
Shit, Whimsy thought as the escalator reached the pinnacle of its rise and spewed him out into the grubby ticket barriers. He hated being this visible, too many people, too many unknown faces.
Relax, he told himself, if it was a trap, you’d already be dead, and there was something to be said for safety in the anonymity of numbers. Still, Whimsy knew the only reason he had lived so long was a mixture of paranoia and his uncanny ability to effectively disappear, to me
lt away and stay away.
His ticket popped out of the machine and he pocketed it once more, noticing as he did so the story on the scrolling news screen. Some funeral parlour downtown was burning down.
And then he was out into the station proper, into the newly breaking commotion.
"My God," he breathed, the words escaping out in a breath full of dirty smoke.
Like a scene out of a movie, there were a lot of panicking people on the move, crushing back into one another, screaming, forming an open half moon, at the centre of which a figure lay in a spreading pool of blood. He was still clearly fighting to hold on to life but Whimsy didn’t need a doctor to tell him that it was a battle he was losing. The guy on the floor thrashed and, for the briefest moment his eyes met Whimsy’s own.
He felt a flash of ice in his blood, not least because no one ever looked straight at Whimsy. He knew then that he had come too late.
With a supreme effort, Carver Whimsy forced himself to remain calm. Running will get you dead, he told himself, stay with the crowd, don’t draw any attention to yourself, stay calm, walk away. Still, some sense of something akin to responsibility made his feet heavy, his exit slower than it should have been.
I’m sorry, he thought, gaze riveted to the prone figure, unable to look away. Head thick with guilt, Whimsy beat his retreat, feeling sick with himself, with what he’d seen and the need to be free of it that was tearing at his gut. Without seemingly moving, Whimsy melted back onto the throng. Where he had been seconds before, a guy in a corduroy blazer was screaming into his phone whilst someone else gripped his shoulder. And, in this manner, Whimsy insinuated himself into the mass of shifting humanity until he was lost in the crowd.
I watched him go, not angry, not anything really. I was way past that. It didn’t matter now, nothing did. Worlds swam.
A sudden, incongruous, memory leaped unbidden to mind. When I was a kid, perhaps six or seven, I remember I used to ask questions constantly, the way a lot of kids do: why is the sky blue? Why do we have feet? What’s grass made of? That kind of thing.
I remember that it used to really get on my old man’s nerves, I could keep it up for hours. One day we were in the city -we didn’t live in the city but in a small community an hour or so away from it – and it was a hot, sunny idyllic summer’s day, least ways that’s how it looks in my memory. On this day, I remember seeing an old guy, a bum, rifling through some garbage cans. He looked, to my child’s eyes, a bit like a grubby Santa with a huge, tangle of beard covering half his crinkled face.
"Why is that man so dirty?" I asked my father, just loud enough that I guess it must have been awkward.
"Jesus Johnny," my father shot at me, scowling, "You keep asking so many questions, one day someone’s gonna take a pop at you."
Now, with a pumping hole in my chest, I remembered that. Someone finally took that pop, I thought.
And then there was the shadow. It spread over me, a cool dark breeze, inky clouds obscuring the too bright light. I realised my eyes were closed and struggled to open them, to look into a gaze straight out of another world.
I wanted to think these eyes were like none I had seen, but that wasn’t true, I’d seen them yesterday, looking down from a fire escape as some poor soul cooled on the smashed up wreck of the car we used to ferry the dead.
It might seem like I’m retreading old ground, but things get clearer with retelling. Without blinking or breaking eye contact, the guy with the outline-eyes reached into the pocket of my suit jacket and pulled out the deathly capsule. It was this that he placed between my teeth.
The thing dissolved. Acid taste. And my mind dissolved with it. I saw the world fall apart on the wings of a million crows.
"What do you see?"
I told him.
"The sky is falling."
He nodded, his voice telling me he knew exactly what I meant, even if I didn’t any more.
"Then you’re already dead."
He put the gun to my heart and pulled the trigger.
Waking Up
In an old fashioned, lushly bedecked office a man sits behind an enormous dark wooden desk, inlaid with green leather, his face hidden in shadow. The ornate chandelier above him is unlit and there is no natural light as this office lies deep underground but a clever arrangement of devices means that fake spring light softly illuminates the room from behind a large, frosted bay window on the western wall. Art hangs on this and all of the other walls too, hunting scenes in the main housed in lavish gold frames over old fashioned bottle-green wallpaper that matches the darker thick-ply carpet. This is a room out of time.
The man at the desk is named Horst, although few would dare speak it to his face, or anywhere where they thought he might hear which, arguably, is everywhere. He sits like a neat spider at the centre of the web of what they refer to as Control: to all intents and purposes, he is Control.
He is whip lean, middle aged, with an uncompromising rigidity in his appearance: short, neat iron grey hair, closely cropped beard. He wears a plain, dark military tunic. Everything about him is a straight, efficient line.
He sits now peaceful and still in his immaculate, expansive office, one room in a colossal bunker buried beneath enough earth and concrete to survive an apocalypse that Horst thinks just might, if he plays his cards right, possibly be on the verge of happening. Below his feet are rooms and rooms of storage, barracks, living quarters, labs, technical hubs, weapons testing facilities and the housings of the hundreds of other requirements to keep his bunker fortress ticking over effectively. There are warehouse storerooms full of canned food, great storage tanks of fuel and even filtration works to provide clean air. In the event of their failure, there are also reserve oxygen tanks to keep at least some of the work force, as well as Horst himself, alive for quite some time.
Below all of these again lie the more sinister levels, expunged from the blueprints that all but the most trusted have ever seen. These are the floors that house the cells, a level of dark, hopeless square pits built to house unfortunate prisoners who should never again expect to see the light of day, at least not before they have talked and certainly not in the same way as they did before they went in. They have seen scant use so far, but Horst envisions a day, soon, when they will be pressed into greater service.
Although the cells in themselves, cramped, windowless and dark, are enough to break the spirit, there are other rooms down there too with purposes darker and more sinister still. These rooms have tiled walls for ease of wiping down and sluice drains in the floor to wash away the evidence of what has been carried out in them. They had already seen a certain amount of use.
Gradually the sound of booted feet ringing on concrete breaks into Horst’s attention, growing louder and louder until he knows that the looming shape of Rift, his most prized servant, is waiting just outside the heavy portal leading onto the office. There is an electronic buzz and Control presses a switch on the underside of the desk, causing the heavy metal door to swing silently open.
A hulking menace enters, all brawn and bulbous muscle. His hair is shaved close to his skull, his face heavily scarred but the cold light of cunning shines in his small eyes. Rift represents the highest point of success in Horst’s dabbling experiments with the shadow.
"Report," Horst commands in his quiet, even voice.
"All targets terminated, sir," barks the giant. "Bar one. The driver was not present when the unit entered the funeral parlour. Wychelo has reported successful elimination of the other witness, however. Orders?"
Horst sighs. By his own command, all actions relating to the substance, the shadow, no matter how trivial, have to filter through him, but sometimes it could be so obvious.
"Find the driver. Kill him."
With a crisp salute, Rift leaves the room, allowing the great outer door to slide shut in his wake. Alone once more, Horst opens a drawer and removes from it a small glass ball which he places on the desktop. Within its depths, the same shadowy substance curls l
ike tempestuous cloud.
Patience.
He hears the words whispered in his mind and the contents of the orb boil and flow.
Wait, it whispers.
The Unlucky man is waking up.
***
I awoke from nothing into something. As consciousness, as life, flooded back into my body, I was aware on some level of compressing, of a rushing all encompassing everything being condensed and forced back into a frame too small to house its enormity, like a balloon filling too quick with air, ready to burst. And it hurt, a raw red, flaming pain that spread and roared through my whole being right to the tips of my extremities. I screamed, not yet aware of myself, of what or where I was or how I came to be there.
I felt as if I was growing from the inside out, unfolding, speeding through birth into life as blood, boiling hot and full of potential, spread and flowed through cold arteries. My heart pumped, my lungs inflated. With a rush my ears filled with forgotten sound - although the only noise at present was my own thrashing and howling as I convulsed and hammered against walls I could neither see not hear but that hemmed me tightly in on all sides - and my eyes opened and slowly swam into a new focus.
My void was dark. And cold.
Sucking in deep, steadying breaths, I stopped my manic spasming movement and lay still, awareness slowly seeping through me, panting and shivering as my body gradually came back under remembered control.
I shifted to the right on cold metal and came up against resistance in the shape of more cold metal. The same thing to the left and I could sense the weight of confinement pressing down bare inches from my face. So, I was in a roughly human shaped metal box. And it was very cold. I felt my breath mist and crystallize against the cold steel. The darkness was total.
Having asserted control long enough to deduce all of this rationally, my mind took a backseat for a few moment as my body took back over, thrashing senselessly against the walls of its prison, an animal panic guiding limbs that smashed and beat in all directions.