by H T G Hedges
"Baldman," Corg said, extending a hand to meet the approaching man.
"Corg." They shook briefly as Baldman glanced at me with a look from beneath his glasses that set my nerves jangling. There was a feeling in the air, I was growing to realise, a tension like I’d felt back at Corg’s apartment, an electrically static build up. The body language of the group by the van was all wrong, too stiff, too edgy. I got the distinct feeling that we were not at all welcome.
I cut another look at the group. There was something uniform in their appearance, military in style in a mix of dark olive greens and arid desert browns. All of them wore heavy, serious boots. But their similarity went beyond what they wore, they each had about them a dusty, worn aspect, a greyness to the skin, dark shadows beneath the eyes. This serious group seemed a far cry from Corg’s poker party of old.
"Get in the van," Baldman was saying, all smiles that I’d wager never met his eyes if I could see them behind their shields of tinted metallic glass. His teeth were shockingly white and very even. "Give me the keys and I’ll follow in your car."
Reluctantly, Corg did as he was told, though I could tell it was a wrench as he tossed the keys. That he did it at all spoke volumes to how out of our depths we now were. They sailed through the rain and landed damply in Baldman’s waiting hand. Drops spattered against his sunglasses.
"Is this normal?" I murmured to Corg as Baldman moved away.
"Normal?" Corg shrugged slightly, but I could tell he knew what I meant. "I don’t know. Listen," he held in his voice the air of the confessional, "I’ve never met them like this before. Called them before."
That stopped me, despite what he had told me on the ride over.
"What?"
"I mean they always call me, you know, when they have work or need something moving. It’s never been the other way before."
"I’m not sure they’re too keen on it this way round," I whispered.
"Look around," he said. "Everything’s changed out here. Some bad shit has been happening since I was last out here. It was going to hell fast enough then, but this?" He let the sentence trail away.
Ahead of us, one of them swung open the door to the van with a long, rusty groan, the interior looming like a gaping mouth. Everything about this felt wrong, I thought, but I followed Corg as he stepped up into the blackness.
The door slammed shut behind us and, for a second, everything was pitch black. The air, thick and musty, smelled like the inside of a tin can. And then someone flicked on a dull orange portable light and our surroundings swum into a hazy focus. In fact, they looked like the inside of a tin can as well; the walls were a dull grey nothing, the windows covered over with black plastic and taped in place with industrial electric tape.
The only other occupant of the back of the van was a young woman, elegantly dressed in a simple grey two piece suit that fitted her like a glove. Her hair was ash blond, swept back from a round, delicately featured face, her eyes deep and green and flecked with gold.
"Alexander," she said with a perfect smile, gesturing to a wheel arch opposite the one on which she perched. "Have a seat. I’m sorry if this pick up has been a little chilly but your call came at something of a bad time." Her tone was light but there was a tension behind the words.
"Problems, Loess?" Corg asked, sitting as bidden on a curving arch, and affecting an air of nonchalance I knew he did not feel. She laughed then, and it was a warm, honest sound, before waving the question away.
"There’s always problems out here but yes, things have taken a turn for the worse in recent days, as you might have noticed," she said dryly. "But it’s not your problem," she added, changing the subject. "Why do you need to see the boss? You come to confess your undying love?"
To my amazement, Corg actually blushed and she changed the subject again.
"Where are my manners?" she asked, extending her hand to me. As I took it, suddenly acutely conscious of how dirt encrusted my own hands were as I briefly engulfed her own dainty clean one, the van rumbled into life.
"I’m Loess," she said with another smile.
"Hesker," I said, "Jon Hesker. People call me Hesker," I added stupidly. She looked at me for a long moment before releasing my hand and sitting back.
"Pleasure," she said, "So what can we do for you?" Lightening rent the sky above us, followed after a few beats by the drum of thunder.
We rolled along in silence for the most part. I can’t speak for the others but I couldn’t think to talk past the pulsing of my blood in my ears. The stuffy air in the back tasted like old pennies and crackled with unspoken tension. I felt that we’d stumbled into something that it was too late to back out of.
Corg looked on edge too, jaw clamped tight shut, eyes fixed on nothing. I risked a glance at Loess and found her green-gold eyes watching me. I quickly looked away.
"What happened to Ray?" Corg asked her at length.
Loess shrugged, but her face was suddenly very still. "He died," she said.
"I know," Corg said. "I mean-"
"Specifically? His car got rammed by a truck, forcing him off the road. When he tried to extract himself from the wreck, someone put a handful of bullets in him."
Corg pulled a face. "I’m sorry," he said, "He always seemed a good guy."
She shrugged again, mechanically. "He knew the risks," she said but it sounded practiced and more than a little hollow, an ineffective salve for open wounds. "We’ve done as bad."
When we finally rolled to a stop it was a relief. I had the feeling that we had been circling around, taking a winding, inexact route to get to wherever we were going, though whether for our benefit or for some other, more concerning reason, I could not say. As the driver swung open his door and dropped out of sight, Loess quickly leaned forward and spoke to us in low, urgent whisper.
"Listen," she said, "When you see the boss, be wary, he’s been acting odd recently. I’m only telling you this because I like you, Alexander, and because you’ve been good to us. But he’s," she searched for what she was trying to say, "Become intense." She caught Corg’s look, "More intense than usual. Just tread lightly, he may not be in the spirit to help you."
"What’s going on?" Corg whispered back, but she just shook her head.
"No time," she said with a sigh, then shrugged as if to ask what difference her words made. "War."
With another tortured groan the door swung back on its rusted runners.
"Out you pop," Baldman leered, still wearing the shades, "Let’s get this done."
They had brought us to an abandoned building site. Like some kind of barren, lunar landscape it stretched away on all sides in a muddy quagmire, its troughs and pits filling with rain water. It was no man’s land, an unending monochrome monotony. In the distance, abandoned machinery stood empty like great unremembered dinosaur skeletons silhouetted against the clouds, their looming black shapes creating weird, alien patterns against the skyline.
In the middle of the site was a large, half demolished building that, in its prime, must have been an handsome architectural work, now left to rot. It had the air of an institution or an academy of some kind but its original purpose was long since obscured by time.
Now it stood bereft in an empty landscape, crumbling slowly into nothing. Half of the structure, at least, looked to be already gone, the rest kept standing and supported, here and there, by some aged and half robbed-out scaffolding that pointed and stuck out at odd directions lending the whole remaining building a lopsided, nightmare quality.
Awaiting within this skeletal palace, I had been told, was the Make it Happen Man. I’d heard the name before - as something like an urban legend - and was curious to meet this mysterious figure. His name, shortened for convenience to Mr. Happen, was a reflection of his ability and reputation as a fixer: by all accounts he was a man who could find anything, anywhere. My guess was this was how he and Corg had been able to appreciate one another, with Corg eventually becoming a sometimes driver and smuggler of contraband good
s on Mr. Happen’s behalf.
Many of the stories about the mysterious figure attributed his ability to influence events to an almost supernatural force, beliefs that were encouraged by Mr. Happen’s anecdotally ethereal, otherworldly nature. Corg had claimed as much as we journeyed over the old bridge and I was eager to see this eccentric occultist with my own eyes.
We followed Baldman across the site, picking our way carefully over debris and filth, and up a wide flight of carved, crumbling steps to a heavy metal and wood door which swung ominously open as we approached.
"Come on in boys," he crowed, beckoning us through the opening with mock gentility. "Come make yourselves at home."
The hallway into which he led us was old and sad, thick with the stink of damp and rot. The walls were stained by fungus, the carpet threadbare and worm-eaten. Everything was green and brown and sticky with decay.
We followed him through more corridors that echoed the first in odor and appearance and up a flight of creaking metal steps to another level. The rain was pouring through gaps in the ceiling here, dripping and burbling steadily onto the mossy carpet with its flowering of cupped brown mushrooms. The smell up here was even headier than it had been below, thickly cloying and choking. I tried not to think about spores flooding my nostrils.
And then, at last, we were through another door and into a large, open chamber decorated with an opulence so out of keeping with the rest of the building it was disconcerting. Thick rugs adorned the floorboards, colourful and expensively decorated; oriental hangings lined the walls whilst thick incense floated in the air, keeping the stink beyond the door mostly, if not entirely, at bay.
A figure was seated at a huge, dark wood desk that curved majestically into the centre of the room, a glass decanter atop it filled with amber spirit.
"Mr. Happen," Baldman said with deference and a strange almost half bow to the figure behind the desk before retreating to stand in the shadows behind him. I was pleased to see him remove his ridiculous sunglasses as he did so.
So this was the Make It Happen Man. He was not at all what I had expected.
He was a tall, gaunt figure, old but in no way diminished by age. Thick white curls rolled back from his brow, flowing above a face of weathered and thickly lined leather skin. His was not a kindly old face, however, but rather the unyielding countenance of a feared and respected teacher. Old ink showed on his skeletal fingers and across the backs of his hands, faded sigils and angled characters in a spreading blue green that may once have been black.
But it was his eyes that surprised me the most: one dark as oil, the other rheumy and white and surely blind, peeking like a marble from beneath a scarred and puckered lid. He smiled very slightly at Corg, a glint of sharp gold teeth catching the light cast by the oil lamp on the mammoth desk.
His voice, when he spoke, was deep and resonant, at odds with his advancing years. "Alexander," he said, "It has been some time." He raised a hand in a vague gesture taking in the room around us.
"Please excuse the mess, but we find ourselves living in interesting times." He grinned a big, predatory golden grin, picking up a heavy based tumbler and swirling the liquid within. "And to what do we owe this unexpected pleasure?" He inflected the final word with enough venom to make it plain that we were far from welcome in his rotten castle. Behind him I caught Baldman’s smirk.
Corg spread his hands in an imploring gesture.
"We’re in trouble Mr. Happen," he said earnestly, "We could use a place to lay our hats for a while, whilst the storm dies down." His words sounded small, muffled and swallowed by the thickly scented hostile air.
"So it is charity you would ask from me Alexander?" He murmured. "Until, as you say, the storm dies down." Happen’s measured facade twitched with an emotion I couldn’t read.
"But it isn’t going to die down," he said, a strange glint in his one good eye, a smile that wasn’t really a smile at all playing at his lips. "The storm is here to stay." He sipped from his glass, a small amount of liquid escaping to roll down his lined and whiskered chin. "We are at war Alexander," he said, "Lines have been drawn in the sand. We have larger considerations now." He leaned forwards in his seat, leather creaking under his shifting weight.
"You know," he said with the air of one sharing a secret, "I wasn’t even going to let you come here. It’s only for Loess’ sake that you’re here at all. She fought your corner valiantly you know, said that we owed it to you for the risks you have taken in the past. She says we owe it to you to trust you, but trust is a commodity with which I recently find myself in short supply." His mismatched eyes flashed dangerously in the reflected gas-light.
"But it is strange, I feel, that you choose this day to come knocking unannounced at my door." He cut his glance towards me and the temperature in the room seemed to plummet. "Unannounced and with a stranger in tow." His eyes met mine – and widened. He faltered.
Suddenly all the colour drained from his face. His lips were pressed back against his teeth so hard they were paper white. He convulsed in one sharp spasmodic movement, letting out a strangled cry. Without warning, the tumbler in his hand shattered, one minute it was whole and the next a million tiny crystals exploded into the air, spilling golden liquid onto parched boards that swallowed it greedily.
From out of the shadows Baldman re-emerged, hand on the gun concealed under his dark jacket, but the stricken old man at the desk waved him back. His eyes still bore into mine, both of them, thought I had the disquieting notion that the cold marble orb was the one he was really seeing me with. Cherry red droplets dripped unnoticed from his fingertips.
"It’s you," he rasped and the look in his eye said he recognized my face though I knew we’d never met before. "You," he croaked, "The Unlucky Man." His words tumbled out atonally, like those spoken in a dream and I heard them both from his pale lips and echoed in my head, drumming at my temples with every syllable.
"I knew you would come. I’ve seen it." His skin looked suddenly thin and pale as paper. "Chaos follows you; death is in your footfalls, Unlucky Man." He spat the words at me and, as I heard them, something shifted once more in my head and I felt the dark particle coil and flex itself, almost like an animal that recognizes its name being spoken. Happen, too, it occurred to me was touched by the same darkness.
"You should not have come here." Mr. Happen still spoke like someone asleep but his gaze didn’t flicker from my face. "You bring chaos everywhere your crow shadow touches. It will be drawn to you." There was pain etched in his features, a thin line of blood ran from his felt nostril. If this was a parlor trick, I thought, then it was a damn good one.
"We’ve done terrible things," Mr Happen whispered, "And you are our reckoning. I knew you would come, I wanted to be ready." He shut his eyes, his face creasing with an emotion I couldn’t even begin to read.
"It will be drawn to you," he repeated in a whisper.
An enormous booming crash rocked the building. It felt like some massive object had collided with the outer walls. Everything shook, plaster drifted in torrents from the ceiling, the light flickered as the floor bucked and swayed.
"What the hell was that?" Baldman grunted as the door opened and Loess stepped into the room, white and anxious.
"Time to go," she said urgently, a worried look on her face. The sudden cacophony seemed to have roused the Make it Happen Man from his trance as, with an effort, he pulled himself up onto his feet.
"We cannot help you," he repeated in a whisper. "We will show you the way out and then you will go. Take your troubles with you." Without another word or a backwards glance he limped from the room, wiping the blood from his face with the back of his hand. We followed, subsumed by his entourage, into a long austere green corridor much like the ones we had entered through, at the end of which was another door leading, I guessed, to a staircase back to ground level.
We were about halfway along the floor when the far door opened, a cluster of figures emerging from the gloom beyond. They looked at
first glance for the most part like our escorts - grim, dishevelled, grimy - but there was a uniformity to their unkempt appearance that was lacking in Mr. Happen’s ragtag ensemble.
For a long, tense moment they looked at us and we looked straight back, suspended in a moment of perfect stillness. But it couldn’t last.
The first bullet took Baldman through the lens of his wraparounds. I heard the glass pop as his head cannoned backwards then his legs splayed and he went over like an unruly mannequin. Somehow, as he fell, I got a hand under his jacket, popped the clip on the holster, and brought out his pistol, firing off round after round into the shadowy gaggle of figures at the end of the hallway as more shots followed.
To my left, Loess had her weapon out and was firing too, whilst everyone else seemed frozen in icy shock. The noise was incredible in the confined space, every shot a boom of thunder, every burst as bright as lightning. Penned in the narrow confines of the doorway they never stood a chance.
The echoing silence after the last shot had fired was deafening as the door at the end of the hall quietly slid closed, cutting off the bilious tableaux beyond. Two of our group were fast cooling on the wormy carpet: Baldman and another whose name I’d never learned and never would.
Loess was the first to speak. "Come on," she said. "We need to find another way down." We reversed our footsteps, heading back the way we had come and taking a right into a room that must have cornered the building. A great, dirty window looked out over the desolate wasteland below.
"Who the fuck were those guys?" Corg demanded.
"No coincidences," Happen growled. "Chaos draws chaos like a black-hole swallowing light."
"Which way now?" Voices were raised in a clamor of differing opinions but I was no longer listening. Through the glass I could see that it had finally stopped raining, but the sky was so dark and thick with churning cloud that it could have been night once more. It was not so dark, however, that I could not see the figures moving about below. These weren’t Mr. Happen’s men, of that I was certain.