‘The fates want you to keep the unnecessary deaths to a minimum-’
Minimum? Geoff thought uneasily. ‘There aren’t any unnecessary deaths in my plan.’ No one seemed to be listening. The voice from the darkness simply spoke over him.
‘We’re puzzled as to why you haven’t done it already.’
‘I’m planning it and I’m doing it my way,’ Geoff said, firmly.
He struggled to get to his feet. His head touched the roof of the van but he was moving slowly and stopped himself from banging into it. Standing stoop-shouldered, with the torch beam still landing bright on his eyes, he tried to decide what to do next. Someone tried to push him down but this time Geoff thrust their hands aside. He glowered menacingly into the shadows.
‘I’ve had enough of this shit,’ he growled.
The words sounded ludicrous coming in his own voice. It was a melodramatic and macho exclamation and unlike his usual meek way of addressing people. Yet, for some reason, the words carried enough weight to make the shadow hands disappear back into the darkness.
‘You’ve already said that I’m expected to keep the unnecessary deaths to a minimum,’ he reminded them. ‘You’ll open this van door now if you don’t want to become statistics in those unnecessary deaths.’
There was a muffled discussion and then the van door was pushed noisily open. The breeze from the cool night was a refreshing balm on Geoff’s cheeks. He wanted to sigh with gratitude. There had been a brief moment when he wondered if he would escape the van. Now he could see that his first hunch had been correct: they were simply trying to intimidate him.
‘Why didn’t you snatch it today, when you had the chance?’
Geoff thought about the moment when he had been sat at Black’s desk. The idea of grabbing the skull at that point had seemed almost irresistibly tempting. He even recalled thinking, at the time, the skull had been promising to protect him if he should grab it and run.
‘I’ll get the skull when I think the time is right.’
‘We need it urgently.’
Geoff jumped from the van and started walking into the night. ‘Keep kidnapping me and threatening my life,’ he grumbled. ‘That’s going to make it happen with much more urgency.’
37
He used brandy to help himself sleep. The bottle had been a present from someone who didn’t know his drinking habits. Geoff suspected that the brandy was one of those gifts that had been passed from one giver to another and to another. For six months it had sat in the same cupboard where he kept tins of beans and packets of crisps, gathering dust on its slender shoulders. Geoff would have probably passed it onto some other hapless recipient if he hadn’t decided to open the bottle one night when he had been tired, a little drunk, and in need of something alcoholic to slake his thirst.
Geoff had managed a single measure of the brandy and then decided the fiery taste on his throat, and the scent that stung like vinegar in his nostrils, was more than his delicate palette could tolerate. But, to give proper credit to the drink, the brandy had helped him sleep on that occasion.
He pulled the bottle from its place beside the crisp packets and poured a generous measure. Hopefully it would help him sleep this evening. He thought of diluting the bitter flavour with Coke or lemonade before deciding he was sufficiently manly to tolerate the drink neat. He downed it in one and imagined his breath was suddenly dragon-like with the flames that burnt his throat. Once he’d stopped coughing, Geoff poured himself a second shot and began to sip at the liquid with tentative urgency.
He did worry that it was dangerous to be drinking.
He had taken an excessive amount of painkillers throughout the day. He had taken so many that he worried that his body could react badly to the combination of drugs and liquor. He was also worried in case one of the many people who were currently trying to beat him up decided to break into the house whilst he was inebriated. When he was sober and in a position to protect himself, Geoff knew he remained a fairly easy mark for any thug who wanted to lay into a human punchbag. This evening, exhausted, aching and a little bit pissed, he figured kittens and children could easily beat him insensible.
And yet, as much as that thought worried him, Geoff knew it was also true that he needed to get a proper night’s sleep. His rest had been broken and wearisome the previous night. He’d endured a difficult day where the world was made foggy from his unrelenting weariness. He didn’t think he could tolerate a second day that was made so unbearable. If his need for sleep meant he had to finish the entire bottle of brandy, even though the liquid tasted like rusty robot piss, he was determined to do whatever was necessary.
He passed out in his chair with a late night poker game on the TV.
‘You’re a murdering bastard, Geoff Arnold. A murdering bastard.’
Geoff shook his head. He wasn’t a murderer. Couldn’t the stupid bitch understand that?
There was the citric sweet scent of van van oil. He caught notes of lemon grass and citronella along with the pungent taste of ginger. The room seemed to be lit by the flickering light of a candle.
But he was no longer in his room.
He was in the Raven and Skull offices.
‘You’re a murdering bastard, Geoff Arnold. A murdering bastard.’
Nicola was shouting the words at him. She did not look happy.
‘I’m not a murderer,’ he told her.
He looked around and guessed that the time was close to midday. That thought was confirmed when he saw a desk clock with the second hand creeping slowly towards noon. As the second hand of the clock touched twelve there was a tremendous explosion. He turned and glanced in the direction of the sound. Something horrific had tortured the wall that housed the lift shaft.
Alarm bells were ringing in a siren wail. Sprinklers, seeming sympathetic to the distress, began to shower a shock of ice cold water over everyone and everything.
Murdering bastard.
He ignored Nicola’s words and pulled himself from his chair. Earlier, he had thought the room was lit by guttering candlelight. Now he could see he had been mistaken. The offices were lit by fluttering fluorescents, struggling to illuminate the room after whatever power surge had caused the catastrophic explosion.
Murdering bastard.
He climbed slowly out of his chair and waited for a moment. Others from the shared office of the accounts department and customer services were already leaping out of their chairs and hurrying to the site of the disaster.
Roger Black stepped coolly from his office.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ Black called. ‘What’s happening?’
‘The lift’s exploded.’ The person who replied was raising their voice to be heard above the alarm. ‘The lift’s exploded and I think Shaun was in there. I think there was a woman in there with him as well.’
Black shook his head.
‘Abandon the building,’ he declared. He stepped into the accounts department and told Geoff to abandon the building. Then he headed off in the direction of the CNS department to give them the same command.
Geoff watched a flood of staff, soaked from the sprinklers and ducking from the noise of the alarms. They were all heading towards the staircase doors.
You murdering bastard.
Geoff walked over the Roger Black’s office and stepped calmly inside. He found himself grinning at the gold-plated skull on the desk. There was a smear of something red on the jawbone but he ignored that. Instead he lifted the skull and was surprised to discover that it barely weighed anything.
Is this all I have to do?
You’re a murderer. You’re a murdering bastard.
He shrugged off the accusations. Nicola always tried to be melodramatic whenever she thought she could get away with it. Even in his dreams it seemed she felt a need to act like some lunatic portent of doom. He hurried out of the office and headed through the doorway marked EMERGENCY EXIT: STAIRS.
He woke up muttering the words, ‘I’m not a murderer. I’m
not a murderer.’ And, whilst he wasn’t sure why he should be saying such a thing, he felt as though he now had an idea for how to acquire the skull.
38
Geoff was zombied through his Tuesday.
He woke up and made a breakfast of burnt toast and tepid coffee whilst continuously yawning. Even though he remembered a series of striking and vivid dreams from his night in bed, a series of dreams that were somehow disturbing and mysterious yet enlightening, it felt as though sleep had evaded him.
His eyes were grainy.
The world around him seemed grey and bleak.
His body was plagued by all the aches and pains that came from his previous day’s beatings. He interrupted his morning shower to take painkillers and grimly chew them. The pressure of the water’s jet was too intense on his bruised face. It hurt to soap his chest because he suspected he was now the owner of a freshly broken rib or two. His knuckles, which he had scraped bloody when he feared his money had been stolen, were still a raw mess of slowly-healing flesh. Studying the blackened edges of his torn skin, flinching from the sight of the exposed pink underskin that looked so painful when he flexed his knuckles, Geoff wondered if he had picked up an infection.
What if I just take the money and run?
The idea sauntered temptingly across his tired thoughts but he knew it wasn’t worth considering. Don would track him down and beat him to a pulp for the affront of embarrassing him. More likely, if Don caught up with him, the sadistic thug would do a damned sight worse than merely beating him to a pulp. Don had already threatened Geoff’s genitals. Geoff didn’t know if that was symptomatic of the man’s repressed homosexuality, or simply indicative of the most terrifying threat the man could make. Regardless of Don’s reason for making the threat, Geoff didn’t want to find out the man’s motives: he simply wanted to avoid the risk of having his favourite parts damaged by a malevolent psychopath.
Not that Don was the only thing that Geoff had to fear. If Geoff did decide to flee with the remaining forty thousand in his possession, he guessed the Church of the Black Angel would want to do something about recovering their losses. He didn’t think the members of the church were particularly well-organised but they had managed to track him down quite easily the previous evening. Geoff wasn’t sure if supernatural forces genuinely guided them, but considering the way they had snatched him from the street and used the word ‘sacrifice’, he felt sure they would have no qualms about exacting a bloody and sadistic revenge if he crossed them. Without needing to dwell on the thought, he knew that vengeance from the Church of the Black Angel would involve candles, fragrances and wicked, curly knives.
‘Take the money and run?’ He shook his head. ‘Not a good idea.’
He dressed in the cleanest clothes he could find and hurried out the door. The skies were heavy with the prospect of thunderclouds. The day promised to be long and bleak. The journey was made tedious because he shared it with irritating busloads of school-bound teenagers and the miserable thumping ache over his bruised and blackening eye. Painkillers had eased the stiffness in his ribs to a mild nuisance but they hadn’t touched the raw discomfort of his face. He arrived half an hour early and settled himself behind his desk to try and deal with the Raven and Skull accounts in readiness for Roger Black’s audit.
The accounts were a chore made demanding because they were so monumentally tedious. Six members of staff were working on completing the input of the year’s purchase ledger and sales ledger invoices. Once the ledgers were finalised and signed off they would then be passed on to the company’s external accountants. The company’s external accountants would then be able to export the information into pretty little graphs that Roger Black could likely understand. Geoff was behind on the portion of data input he was expected to complete but that knowledge didn’t worry him. Rather than fretting about the data input, he was spending his time slyly snooping around the offices so he could draw his own schematics of the building and get a better understanding of how to steal the skull.
Nicola saw him making the drawing during his lunch break. He was nursing a mug of extra strong coffee and half a pack of painkillers.
‘What are you drawing?’
He glanced up at her and shook his head in disbelief.
He was sitting in the Raven and Skull staff canteen and he wasn’t going to say aloud that he was drawing a diagram of the building’s CCTV cables so he could work out how best to commit an undetected robbery. As Nicola sat down facing him he folded a clean sheet of paper over his drawing and took a slow swig from his mug of coffee.
‘You look like shit,’ Nicola told him.
‘Yeah,’ he agreed. ‘Although, on the bright side, I’ve not been beaten up so far today.’
‘Donny shouldn’t have done that yesterday. He can be a prick.’
She placed a concerned hand on his.
Surprised by the contact, he allowed it linger there.
‘Donny wasn’t the only one that tried beating up on me yesterday.’
He told her about his encounter with the Church of the Black Angel. He mentioned the van, the suggestion of a sacrifice, and the way he had felt lucky to escape with his life.
Nicola stared at him with slack-jawed amazement.
‘They had you in a van? And there were four or five of them? And you just got up and walked out?’ She clutched his fingers so tight he was stung by a moment’s pain. Her nail had accidentally caught on the frayed edge of one sore and swollen knuckle. ‘You’re so brave, Geoff. Have I ever told you that?’
He pulled his hand away. ‘What do you want?’
‘I don’t want anything.’
‘You’re being nice to me. You’re showing me sympathy. You must want something.’
She laughed as though he was joking. Her smile was broad and bright but there was no trace of humour in her eyes. ‘What are you like?’ she giggled cheerfully. ‘You say the most outrageous things.’
‘What do you want?’
She sighed and seemed to put aside the pretence with one long exhalation. ‘Where’s my money?’
‘Your money is safe.’
‘I want it now.’
‘You can’t have it now. We haven’t done the job yet.’
‘You gave Donny his money last night.’
‘Donny was threatening to remove my balls.’
‘I could threaten you,’ she said. ‘I could threaten you with…’
‘Don’t say it,’ he broke in. He held up his hand in a STOP gesture. ‘I don’t know what you were going to say.’ He shook his head and added, ‘I don’t want to know what you were going to say. But I don’t want you to say it.’
She glared at him with obvious menace.
‘We have to work together on this job,’ he reminded her. ‘We have to trust each other. I’m not going to be able to trust you if you’re threatening me with repercussions, am I?’
‘I suppose not,’ she agreed. ‘But I just–’
‘Let’s leave it there,’ he said, firmly. He kept his tone hard with an authority that sounded alien to his own ears. ‘I’ll pay you as soon as I receive the second half of the money from the Church of the Black Angel. You have my word on that.’
‘What if someone kills you before then?’
He ignored the question and sipped at his coffee. It felt as though a tooth had been loosened when Don struck him. He could feel the hot liquid of the coffee touching on a raw nerve. He winced from the pain and put the mug unhappily back on the table.
‘You’re not thinking of backing out, are you?’ Nicola asked.
Geoff glared at her.
‘Why the hell would I back out?’ he demanded. ‘I’ve already put a hundred grand’s worth of effort into this project, and I’m getting paid less than seventy after all the expenses I’m paying out. There is no way I’m backing out now.’
She glanced nervously around the canteen and Geoff realised he had raised his voice too loud in protest. He quietly cursed himself for being so
careless. He knew the mistake came from tiredness but that excuse didn’t make him any less anxious that someone might have overheard what he said.
He rubbed a nervous hand against his brow.
The flesh felt greasy with perspiration. The touch of his fingertips was enough to spark a blister of pain from his throbbing forehead. He winced unhappily.
Nicola placed a hand on his.
She remained silent until his gaze met hers. When she did speak she had lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘Didn’t the Church of the Black Angel say you’ve got to kill someone?’ she asked, softly. ‘Isn’t that what you’ve just told me?’
Geoff shook his head. ‘I won’t be killing anyone. I’m not a murderer.’
The words stirred a memory from the night before. He didn’t know why they should resound through his thoughts so powerfully but they seemed to be the strongest memory he carried from that night’s dream.
‘I’m not a murderer,’ he said again.
His arms prickled with gooseflesh. The words sounded like a lie.
39
By the following Monday Geoff teetered on the brink of exhaustion.
Every night he had retired to bed drained from a wearisome day at work. Every morning he had awoken as though there had been no sleep whilst his eyes were closed. On two of the nights he had tried to enhance his slumber with alcohol.
It didn’t work.
One night he had tried to get himself fully stoned with the remnants of some hash that had been hidden in his kitchen since he first rented the flat. The hash came from a nugget of quality Moroccan Gold. The first hit sent him floating. But, even though it took him higher than he’d been in a long time, Geoff awoke the following morning with the now familiar sense of exhaustion that was quickly becoming the bane of his existence.
On the Saturday night he tried to tire himself out with sex.
He bought a cheap bottle of wine and suggested to Nicola that they should discuss their joint venture back at his place. Half an hour into the ‘discussion’ she was naked and sucking on his erection. Before midnight had arrived they had wearied their way through a handful of orgasms for her and a final, climactic explosion for him. The whole experience had been exhausting, slightly perverted, and thoroughly enjoyable.
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