Raven and Skull

by Ashley Lister

  Caffeine Nights Publishing

  ASHLEY LISTER

  Raven and Skull

  Fiction to die for

  Published by Caffeine Nights Publishing 2016

  Copyright © Ashley Lister 2016

  Ashley Lister has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998 to be identified as the author of this work

  CONDITIONS OF SALE

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, scanning, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher

  This book has been sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental

  Published in Great Britain by

  Caffeine Nights Publishing

  4 Eton Close

  Walderslade

  Chatham

  Kent

  ME5 9AT

  www.caffeinenights.com

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-1-910720-54-7

  Cover design by

  Mark (Wills) Williams

  Everything else by

  Default, Luck and Accident

  To Tracy, love always

  Acknowledgement:

  I couldn’t have written this book without support from a lot of friends and family: too many to name individually. It would also have been impossible to write this story without the inspiration of so many writing students who’ve taken the time to share their work with me. Thank you all.

  Raven and Skull

  1

  ‘Tell us about a time you nearly died, Tony.’

  Heather’s suggestion was greeted by a barrage of laughter.

  There were half a dozen of them sitting around the table – the last souls left in an otherwise empty bar. Drained beer bottles and lipstick-smudged glasses stood between them like abstract monuments to the memories of good times gone. The darkness outside the bar window was fading to the apocalyptic grey of another dawn.

  Tony glanced at his five colleagues and flashed an automatic grin. He hadn’t yet drunk enough beer to be light-headed, but he could feel the mood around the table was shifting. The evening had started as an early weekend escape from the offices of Raven and Skull; a two fingered salute to the workplace in the time-honoured tradition of every godforsaken Friday. After a grim week working nine-to-five – a grimmer week than any of them were used to suffering – Geoff’s idea that they should get pissed and have a laugh together had seemed like a stroke of pure genius. But now, whilst the maudlin veil of melancholy felt like it was finally lifting, Tony thought it was revealing something strange, unpleasant and potentially dangerous.

  It was no surprise that they were talking about death.

  Given the events of the previous week it would have been more surprising if that topic hadn’t come up. But the fact that they were laughing about the subject seemed somehow unnatural, twisted and grisly.

  ‘Go on,’ Becky encouraged.

  Out of all of them, Becky looked the worst for wear after a night on the sauce. Geoff had nudged a glass of red down her white blouse, leaving a bloody stain over her right breast. Her usual pristine office composure had been destroyed as the night dragged her downwards. She now wore snagged tights and a snapped heel. With her hair awry and her eye make-up smeared, she looked like she had fought her way off a mortician’s slab. Smiling blearily, and clearly unaware of how wrecked her appearance was, Becky slurred her words when she repeated her request. ‘Go on, Tony. Tell us a story.’

  ‘Someone get the next round,’ Tony decided. ‘And I’ll tell you a story.’ He raised a warning finger as Geoff disappeared in the direction of the bar. Glancing purposefully at Heather, he said, ‘But I won’t tell you about a time I nearly died. I’ll tell you about a time when I thought I was going to die…’

  2

  ‘Wednesday night I worked late. Ordinarily I’m the first person out of the office come five thirty. The idea of staying on to catch up with work is unheard of. But, with us being hit by three deaths in that one week, I was trying to clear a backlog of my own work and struggling to organise interviews, redistribute accounts, deal with client apology letters and get on top of all the rest of that miserable nonsense. I’d locked myself in the boardroom on the fourteenth floor and I was working with four laptops and the active paper files for Chloe, Nicola and Shaun.’

  Geoff had brought a tray with fresh drinks. When those three names were mentioned all six of the colleagues raised their glasses in silent toast to the memories of Chloe, Nicola and Shaun.

  Tony took a deep breath before continuing. ‘I’d got my iPod playing,’ he admitted. ‘I don’t normally use the thing whilst I’m supposed to be working but I figured it was late, I was alone in the building, and there was no chance I was going to miss a call or not hear someone talking to me. And I think it was helping me to get through the work more effectively. I’d got it tuned into my classical tracks, I was listening to Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre, and the job was moving along with surprising speed. I was lost in my own little world of file allocations, schedules and prioritising.’ He drew a deep breath and said, ‘I looked up from my paperwork and almost shit my pants. Moira was standing over me.’

  Heather laughed.

  Becky sprayed a mouthful of red onto her skirt. The droplets looked like something from the blood spatter analysis of an inner city’s forensic laboratory.

  Geoff sat back in his seat, chuckling.

  Cindy and Richard pressed close together in their single seat. They smiled approval and nodded for Tony to continue.

  ‘I hadn’t realised Moira was in the building,’ Tony went on. ‘I hadn’t thought there was anyone in the building. The iPod, and my involvement in the files had created a vacuum where nothing else existed. And so, when I looked up and saw that stone-faced old hag from accounts glowering down at me, I came close to having a heart attack. I pulled the earphones out of my ear and tried not to look like I’d just soiled myself…’

  3

  ‘Mr Wade,’ Moira began.

  She had the sort of raspy voice that suggested a lifetime of smoking and lungs the colour of a tramp’s underpants. Tony could hear every syllable struggling to make its way through layers of yellowing phlegm and tar-blackened bronchioles as Moira gasped his name in her gravel-strewn death rattle.

  ‘I’m glad I found you here alone, Mr Wade. I’ve been wanting to talk to someone from management.’

  Tony pointed to a seat and waited for Moira to sit down. His heart pounded from the surprise of discovering he wasn’t alone in the building. He didn’t particularly want to talk with Moira – ideally he would have been happier finishing his work and going home – but there was no polite way to dismiss her from the office without causing offence. Telling himself that a break from the workload might not be such a bad idea, he stretched his neck until it cracked and then he settled back in his chair.

  ‘What’s the problem, Moira?’

  Silence.

  He could hear the sounds of the office around him as the building breathed. The heavy sigh of an expectant printer, the constant whisper of fluorescents above, and the tinny faraway crackle of Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre building to it
s distant conclusion from his iPod speakers. He studied her eyes – the whites turned rheumy yellow and the pupils a black that was unnervingly deep – and waited for a response. Although Moira had been with the office since he began working there, it was the first time he had sat in the same room with the woman and studied her at such close proximity. Her hair was a tangle of grey barbs. Her face was a relief map of porous flesh and ravine-deep wrinkles. There was a wart on her jawline, a gnarled lump of discoloured flesh sprouting a dozen short black hairs. Tony thought the hairs looked like insect legs wriggling from beneath her skin. Previously, he had thought Moira was another of the forgotten office drones; a dinosaur from accounts plodding towards extinction. But staring into her eyes, he got the impression that she might be far more than he had ever imagined. The thought trailed an icy finger down his spine.

  ‘What’s the problem, Moira? What did you want to talk about?’

  ‘I think I might have killed them.’

  In her raspy, cancerous voice, Moira’s admission sounded gruesome. Tony’s smile faltered and he fumbled with the iPod for a moment to silence the nuisance of the whispered music.

  ‘Killed them? Killed who?’

  ‘Chloe. Nicola. Shaun. I think I killed them.’

  ‘They weren’t murdered,’ Tony reminded her. He wasn’t sure what he had expected when Moira appeared in his office but this confession was so far removed from his expectations he found himself doing mental gymnastics as he tried to understand what she was saying. ‘Chloe had that unfortunate encounter with her boyfriend, Nicola had–’

  ‘I know how they died, Mr Wade,’ Moira rasped. She didn’t bother to hide her impatience. She sat close enough so Tony could smell the foetid scent of her breath when she spat the words. The pungent fragrance reminded him of sweat-stained sickbeds.

  ‘I know that they died of supposedly natural causes,’ Moira assured him. ‘But I still think I might have killed them. I think I might have killed all of them. And more besides. I think that’s what I do for Raven and Skull.’

  ‘Why do you think that?’

  ‘I’ve been knitting.’

  This time Tony knew he was responsible for the protracted silence. He tried to work out if Moira’s comment was as absurd as it initially sounded, or if he could possibly be overlooking something obvious.

  ‘You’ve been knitting?’ The conversation had the surreal headiness of something from an art movie or a badly translated foreign language sitcom. He understood the words but the meaning behind those words was just a little bit beyond his grasp. Tony closed his eyes and rubbed the heel of one hand against his forehead. For a brief instant he expected Moira to have disappeared when he opened his eyes. To his disappointment, he found her still sitting there and facing him. Drawing a deep breath, he said, ‘You’ve been knitting. And you think that killed Chloe, Nicola and Shaun?’

  Moira nodded.

  Forcing himself to appear patient, Tony asked, ‘Why would you think that, Moira? You’ll have to explain it to me because I can’t quite see the connection.’

  She graced him with a look of contempt that he had seen before. It was the same belligerent question he had seen in the eyes of too many lesser ranking employees who were either disgruntled or disappointed. It was a silent expression that asked, ‘How did you get to be in such a responsible position when you know so little?’ Since moving up to management level Tony had become used to receiving the expression. It was most often shot at him during disciplinary hearings and assessment reviews.

  ‘I knitted for each of them,’ Moira began. She lowered her gaze to the file-cluttered surface of the boardroom table. Her creased and time-rumpled features looked painfully heavy. ‘I knitted for Chloe, Nicola and Shaun,’ she murmured. ‘And now they’re all dead. It’s my fault.’ She hitched a breath – the sound of an ugly animal in pain – and then raised her gaze to meet Tony’s. ‘Have you ever heard of the Fates?’

  She was making no sense and was jumping sporadically from one topic to another. Tony wondered if she was always like this or if this evening’s irrationality might be symptomatic of some condition. If he had known her a little better he would have felt qualified to judge. Because this was proving to be the longest conversation he’d ever had with Moira, he felt cruel deciding she was a headcase just because her way of speaking didn’t perfectly match his expectations.

  ‘The Fates?’ he repeated. He wondered if it might be a brand of knitting wool or maybe some pop group from a bygone era with which she was more familiar. Either seemed likely and promised to make as much sense as anything else in this abstract conversation. Glancing slyly at one of the open laptops on his desk, noting that the time was getting late, he fixed his smile into a rictus of forced politeness and said, ‘No, Moira. I don’t think I have heard of the Fates. What are they?’

  ‘The Greeks called them the Fates. Clotho. Lachesis. Atropos.’

  Tony said nothing. He was trying to think of a way to get Moira to leave the office so that he could finish the remainder of his work and then puzzle about the new problem of the woman from accounts and her questionable sanity.

  ‘The Fates controlled every destiny. Clotho span the thread of life. Lachesis measured the length of each thread. Atropos cut the thread with her abhorrèd shears.’

  ‘One of us is fucking crazy, Moira,’ Tony thought. He wondered if the crazy person in the room was the one spouting rubbish about Greek mythology or the one sat listening to her instead of getting on with a demanding workload of unpaid overtime.

  ‘Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos,’ Moira repeated.

  Tony didn’t know why but those names conjured up images of three haggard crones bent over with age and the weight of their onerous tasks. It was easy to see them as the witches from Macbeth with their plotting, cursing and general doom prophecies. A rash of goosebumps tickled down his forearms.

  ‘Greek gods,’ he said, nodding. ‘Is that who they were, yes?’

  ‘No.’ She regarded him with another sneer of contempt. ‘The Fates weren’t mere gods.’ She spat the final two words with a disgust that was palpable. ‘The Fates were so powerful that even the gods feared them.’

  ‘And what does this have to do with–’

  ‘The Fates had the perfect system,’ Moira broke in. ‘Clotho span the thread of life. Clotho was responsible for the quality and colour of each person’s life. Lachesis used her measuring rod to decide how long each person’s allotted time would be. And Atropos ended each of those lives with her abhorrèd shears.’

  ‘Abhorrèd shears,’ Tony thought. ‘That’s twice she’s said that now.’ He didn’t like the phrase – it made him want to shiver and shift in his seat. ‘I still don’t see what these three–’

  ‘They were like the Holy Trinity,’ she exclaimed. ‘The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit: one in essence.’ Her low, raspy voice had increased in pitch and volume.

  Listening to her, Tony had the lunatic idea that he was hearing something older than time. There was the mad thought at the back of his mind that, if he concentrated just a little harder, all her words would begin to make sense and he might stumble on truths he had never really wished to uncover. He rubbed his forehead again.

  ‘It’s been a long day,’ he began, wearily. ‘And you must think I’m a real idiot for not getting this straight away. But I don’t know how your knitting and these three gods–’

  ‘Fates!’

  ‘–Fates,’ he amended, ‘all tie together with Chloe, Nicola and Shaun’s deaths.’ He flexed a grin that was meant to inspire sympathy and maybe some understanding.

  Moira stared at him with dead black eyes.

  ‘What am I missing?’

  ‘I think I’m the Fates,’ Moira told him. Her voice had returned to its previous tone. She spoke in a low, coarse whisper. ‘I’m the essence of Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos.’

  Tony nodded and tried to present a facade that was solemn with sympathy and sage understanding. ‘Nutty as a fucking fruitc
ake,’ he decided. First thing in the morning he was going to send a memo to human resources and have them arrange a leave of absence for Moira. If there was any way of insisting on a psychiatric evaluation before she was allowed to return to the office then he was going to make that recommendation too.

  ‘Last week I took it upon myself to knit Chloe a woolly jumper,’ Moira said, earnestly.

  Tony glanced at the open laptops and realised his overtime was now a lost cause. It would take the best part of an hour after he was rid of Moira to get his thoughts back to the zone where they had been when he was reorganising schedules and remembering the technicalities of all the clients being dealt with by Chloe, Nicola and Shaun. The thought was disheartening and he had to make a physical effort not to show his anger to Moira.

  ‘I’d thought she looked cold,’ Moira continued. ‘I know it’s fashionable for young girls to wear short skirts and next to nothing in the way of clothes, but Chloe always looked chilly because of it.’

  ‘Chloe died of extensive head trauma,’ Tony said, softly.

  Moira wasn’t listening. ‘I remember cutting the final thread for her jumper at ten o’clock on Sunday night. Last Sunday night. The news had just come on the telly. When I close my eyes I can still hear the theme tune to the news. That and the rusty snipping sound of those abhorrèd shears.’

  Tony studied her, warily.

  ‘When I came into the office on Monday, I had the jumper wrapped up in a parcel for her. Nicola was crying and she told me that Chloe had died the previous night. She told me that Chloe had died at ten o’clock – just when I was cutting her thread.’ Moira stayed silent for a moment, allowing Tony to digest what she had said.