Dead Broken - Psychological Thriller / Horror

by Gerard Gray

  Steven picked up the book. “You paid 50p for this book, right?”

  “Something like that… What with post and package…”

  “Yes, yes, yes. But in short you didn’t pay that much for it.”

  “I… suppose.”

  “Do you want to know how much I paid for this book?”

  I didn’t reply. I just stared back at him.

  “This book cost me a king’s ransom – the modern day equivalent of about two million pounds.”

  What? Was he having a laugh? It wasn’t that good a book. I stared at him utterly incredulous.

  “What’s it called?”

  “What?”

  “What’s the name of the book?”

  The title was staring me right in the face: “The youth of today.”

  Steven handed me a sardonic sneer. I sat back in my chair in a bid to get away from him. I was confused and frightened.

  “It has a sense of humour, you know, the book: The youth of today? Not to me it isn’t. I see nothing: nothing on the cover and nothing inside. I won’t be able to read any of it until I’ve paid the cost of the book in full. That’s the deal I’ve made, you see. Money was only the down payment. Do you want to know what I still owe on this book?” Steven’s shielded eyes looked manic, just like my dad’s used to.

  “Souls. I owe it souls. And only after I’ve finally paid for it will I be able to read it. Only then will I be free.”

  I looked back at him in utter disbelief.

  Before I knew what I was doing my head was buried deep in my hands. “I haven’t got time for this?” I said accidentally. I suddenly remembered Rambo and how he had ended up in the fridge. I was in trouble here. My heart stuttered into a run, a heavy sweat prickling my forehead. I had to get away before he did any more damage, but how? I had to get back to my family while I still had the chance, but I didn’t know how.

  “My brother didn’t kill anyone.”

  The room grew quiet, my thoughts no longer running for the door. I forced myself to look the man in the face.

  “He didn’t kill anyone,” he reiterated, picking up the book. “I did. It was me. I killed them all.”

  *

  The three of us were sitting around the kitchen table: Steven, myself, and his double barrel shotgun. I didn’t know what time of the night it was and for some reason he wouldn’t tell me. The sun had long gone, leaving the kitchen lit only by a dim lamp and several candles. We could have been a couple of pirates sitting in the corner of some old shanty, telling each other ghost stories. I listened nervously to the man in front of me, the shadows of the dead dancing all around us. He was talking about his brother.

  “He’s dying of cancer, you know. The papers haven’t picked up on it yet, but he is. He has less than a year to live.”

  I shuddered, my mum’s face appearing before my eyes. I pushed the image back down. My mum had Paget’s, not cancer. This brought me no comfort. I remembered what she had said to me on the answer machine: the doctor wanted to speak to me. Why did the doctor want to speak to me? My mum and dad had been in hospital a lot over the years but only once did a doctor ever want to speak to me. It was to ask me permission to stop my dad’s dialysis. I found myself staring hypnotically into the flame of one of the candles. I should never have said yes.

  The priest’s brother continued with his tale: “He is 68 years old – not old by modern standards. He’s had a good life, though. Despite being a priest he never wanted for anything. Our family is rich, you see – aristocracy, actually.” Steven stopped momentarily, allowing me enough time for this to sink in. I think he thought it might impress me. It didn’t.

  “It was agreed that I would inherit all the money and in return I would keep him in the life he was accustomed to.”

  I flicked my eyes over towards a far wall. I had heard something. The room was quite dark, but I could just make out a door beyond the shadowed figures of the candles. Steven followed my gaze and smiled.

  “Is there someone else with us?” I asked.

  “We’ll get to that soon enough. Let me continue with my brother.”

  I reluctantly returned my attention to Steven; I was sure someone else was in the house with us, though. Every couple of seconds my eyes would dart back to the other side of the room. Manic shadows were leaping back and forth towards the door. It was driving them mad, drawing them in, like moths to a flame. I had a bad feeling about what lay beyond that door.

  “I got married, had a beautiful child – for the purposes of this story let’s call her Jessica. My brother loves Jessica. I love Jessica. She’s twelve now.”

  I cast the door another apprehensive glance. I found myself wanting to look behind it but at the same time not wanting to. Steven waited patiently for me to return my gaze back to him. He wanted my full attention.

  “About ten years ago something happened to my family. My wife and child were walking down the road one day, shopping or visiting the park or whatever they did together. It was a lovely sunny day. They were almost home, almost, when a car came hurtling down the wrong side of the road. In it were three young adults – youths, if you like. Anyway, as this car approached it hit the curb, spun out of control and careened right into the path of my family. My wife must have somehow managed to grab her wits about her and push Jessica to the side. Who knows? She wasn’t so lucky. The youths ploughed into her and on into a wall. She ended up crushed between the wall and the car.”

  The memory of my own car incident skidded and crashed into view. Battery acid squirted into my stomach as the face of the blonde bastard burst into flames before my eyes.

  “Do you want to know the truly horrific part? She wasn’t dead. The three kids, drunk or high or whatever, scrambled out of the stolen car and ran away, leaving my wife to die in agony. If they had called the police, there is a good chance my wife would still be alive today. The doctor admitted that to me.”

  Steven fell silent, waiting for a reaction. I cast the other side of the room another glance. The restless shadows were still darting towards the door, silently hissing their sibilant tongues.

  “I loved my wife more than anything else in this world, more than I love my own daughter. I still do. Can you imagine how I must have felt?”

  I returned my gaze to meet his but made no further effort to reply.

  He smiled back at me bitterly.

  “They found her half an hour later with my daughter sitting beside her, crying. Jessica didn’t know what was going on. The person who raised the alarm said he had heard my wife screaming for a good ten minutes before they actually got to her.” Steven’s face took on a contorted mask of fury. “They didn’t need to hand themselves in. They just needed to make a phone call. Just a fucking phone call.”

  Bang! Both our heads shot to the side.

  “Shut up!” he screamed. “If I have to come in there!”

  I stared at the door, terrified. And then I returned my gaze to Steven. A blind fury was raging in his eyes, burning tears scalding his cheeks. He lowered his voice, bringing it back under control, but he was still staring off towards that door. “When they found one of the kids he had a phone on him. And for that reason alone I couldn’t forgive him. Do you want to know how old he was? Fourteen. Fourteen. He was supposedly the one driving the car. He was fifteen and a half when I finally skewered the eyes from his head.”

  Silence.

  “That was ten years ago. Let’s jump forward to my brother, shall we. He had told me on more than one occasion about the louts terrorising his parish. They had broken into his chapel on numerous occasions. On one occasion they had actually smeared excrement all over the walls, and on that very same night they were caught by the police fornicating on the chapel’s alter. Do you want to know what happened to them? Nothing. They were all minors, so they got away with a warning.

  “It all came to a head, though, when my brother had a breakdown. He just started crying in the pulpit one day in front of his congregation. He was an old man w
ho couldn’t take it anymore. He had just been told that he was going to die. He was being bullied almost daily, and the police were powerless to help him, or so they said. These kids wore their ASBOs like badges of honour rather than shame. It was a joke and the joke was on him. Do you believe in coincidences?”

  I reluctantly dragged my attention back out of the shadows. One of the candles was getting dangerously low, barely keeping the room alive. “Sorry?”

  “I don’t. In general I don’t believe in coincidences. I’d bought the book some years previous and was well on my way to paying it back, when I decided to visit my brother. As I said, I am rich. Jessica has spent most of her years at boarding school. In saying that, I do my best when the school terms are over and my brother knows this. He knows that she needs me; he knows that I’m all that she has especially now he’s dying. Anyway, I digress. My brother was so distraught that he told me everything.”

  Steven placed his hand reverently down upon the book. “There are no coincidences, Peter, and our friend here knows that. I gave this book to him. He read it, completely oblivious to what I was doing. In short, he handed me three lives on a plate. And I ate them all up. As payment, my brother decided to take the blame. He’s dying, you see, and despite the fact that he could in no way condone my actions, he tacitly decided our fates all by himself. And I let him do it.”

  The room grew quiet.

  “Now let’s get this straight, before we go any further, before we begin.” Steven leaned in close towards me. He reached out and placed his large hand firmly on top of mine. I flinched, a shock of electricity passing between us. At the same time, he placed his other hand on the handle of the shotgun. A look of sheer determined sincerity settled across his features. “I need you to understand this, just so that we are clear. There is nothing human about me. I have sold my soul to the devil and I hate myself for it – but that’s my concern. Do you know anything about people who hate themselves?”

  I wanted to pull my hand back from his but I was scared stiff. I stared at our locked hands for a couple of seconds but then suddenly raised my head. For the first time that day I found myself staring him right in the face. He had unwittingly struck a chord with me. Did I know anything about people who hated themselves? Yes, I did as a matter of fact. I had hated myself for ten years. For ten years I had wanted to kill myself almost every day.

  My thoughts stuttered to a halt.

  What changed? When did I stop wanting to kill myself?

  I sat back in my chair, a blinding light exploding in my mind. It had been a purifying explosion, like a neutron bomb, right at the centre of my being. The moment mushroomed inside my head, a nebulous idea being born. And then the radiating aftershock hit me. It travelled through my body at the speed of light, blowing all the acidic memories of the past six months into smouldering smithereens. I closed my eyes, tears beginning to flow, a bitter shiver hugging my spoiled spine.

  What a fucking fool. I was a spoilt little bastard who had never been satisfied, and it had taken until now for me to realise it. I had hated myself for ten years, but I no longer did. Why? Why did I no longer hate myself? My mum had tried to tell me but I had refused to listen to her. Her words had fallen on deaf ears:

  Karen.

  I cringed as the futile truth unfolded before my eyes. Karen was the reason why I no longer hated myself. Karen had given me back my self worth. She had proven to me that I wasn’t worthless, that someone could care about me. She had given me two beautiful sons. She had loved me. And all she had wanted in return was for me to be with her, to sit and watch TV with her, to talk to her. And I couldn’t even do that. I always had to be doing something else, playing the XBOX, surfing the web or whatever I thought was more important at the time. Karen wasn’t the arse in our relationship, I was.

  Steven either didn’t notice the tears forming in my eyes or perhaps he didn’t care. He continued on regardless with his own tale.

  “People who hate themselves are dangerous people. They have nothing to lose; I have nothing to lose. The book has made damn sure of that.”

  “You have your daughter,” I said quietly, not thinking.

  Steven stopped in his tracks, but I wasn’t sure if he had heard me. He hesitated for a second, unconvinced about something. “I do have one moral compunction left, one single cell of human emotion. Do you want to know what it is? It’s that my brother doesn’t know what I am. He thinks I did it for him and Jessica. That’s the only part that kills me. He’s taking the blame for what I’ve done, and he’s doing it for all the wrong reasons.”

  The room grew still. Steven was leaning across the table, his hands clasped out in front of him as though in prayer. Again like before he was staring off to the other side of the room, to beyond that door. His lips were trembling with inner turmoil. He looked like he had finally taken his soliloquy into his head, into some private room.

  Steven fixed his disturbing eyes back onto mine, held my gaze for a couple of seconds, and then began to smile.

  “Do you think I’m a monster, Peter?”

  I said nothing in reply. I think he already new the answer.

  Chapter 18

  The Fall Of Rome

  “We have a lot to get through,” he said, beaming from ear to ear. The beam momentarily flickered, threatening to go dark. Both our heads turned to look in the same direction. The noise was fleeting and had gone before our attentions hit the door. All was quiet. Neither of us said a word. I turned back around to find a madman grinning back at me.

  Right, it was time to get out of here. Up until my epiphany, I had deep down believed that Karen would have been better off without me, that the monetary value of my death would have meant far more to her than the human worth in me living. But that was bollocks. My family needed me just as much as I needed them.

  On thinking this my stomach slid back into a pit of despair. Who was I kidding? I was going nowhere. Not while he had his gun with him, anyway. I was going to have to bide my time until he slipped up somehow. I had to be patient; I almost laughed. My mum has a saying about patience: seldom in a woman, never in a man.

  I was suddenly worried about her again.

  No, I had more immediate things to worry about right now. I reluctantly placed the thought of my mother to the side and returned my attention to Steven. I didn’t know what to believe of his story. Some of it was probably true but it was quite obvious that the man was delusional, that he needed serious help. It seemed like he had mixed together a goodly portion of reality and fantasy to come up with something semi believable. I didn’t believe any of the book crap and I wasn’t going to entertain it for another second. The part about his wife and brother I could quite easily digest, but as for him killing all those kids, I didn’t know what to believe. I could believe that the priest had had nothing to do with it, though, or was that me just being a Catholic?

  I could remember the interviews on the telly from all the people who had known the priest. Every single one of them had vouched for his character. As the old saying goes, you can tell the worth of a man by the counting of his friends.

  “You don’t believe a single word I’ve told you, do you?”

  I hesitated. Was he going to kill me? Why tell me everything if he had the slightest intention of letting me go. The bad guy in the film always monologues just before the end, just before he kills the protagonist. If all goes well for the villain then this will be the only chance he gets to frolic in his own superiority, in his own evil ingenuity.

  “I’m sorry you lost your wife,” I said, trying my best to sound sympathetic, “and I believe that your brother is innocent… I really do…

  “Please let me go. I haven’t done anything to you. Please let me go.”

  Steven slammed his hand against the table. “You don’t believe me about the book, do you? I might convince you yet. You’re a good man, right?” Steven beckoned for an answer.

  “Good? Not really...”

  “That’s good enough. I don’t
know you that well, but I know our mutual friend here.” Steven placed his hand back onto the book. “And I know its modus operandi. So far I have seen nothing in your nature to make me believe you would ever be capable of killing another living soul, right? You find what I’m doing here utterly repugnant, right?”

  “Yes,” I mumbled, tears trembling in my voice.

  “Then why did you kill the cat?”

  My spine turned to ice. I couldn’t think. “I can’t…” I stammered. “I can’t remember doing it. I wish with all my heart that I could undo it, though, that I could go back to that very night and just go to bed. I wish I’d never opened your bloody book. I wish...” I couldn’t complete the sentence. My throat had tightened, the tears beginning to flow.

  “Now that’s the answer I’m looking for: The book. The book made you do it.” Steven placed his hand reverently back down onto the cover. “Kid your self not, Peter; you killed the cat alright. It’s part of the ritual.”

  Ritual? I winced on remembering the state I had found the poor beast in: headless and butchered with candles all around it. I still couldn’t bring myself to believe I did it, though. But all the facts did point to me killing it. Was I capable of killing another living soul? Up until the cat incident I would have said no. It wasn’t in my character in the slightest to do something like that. I found violence abhorrent. When I was a kid the only fights I got myself into, and there weren’t that many, were in the defence of other children less able to fend off the bullies than myself. I found it hard to even kill a spider. When Karen asked me to deal with such things, I would always do my best not to hurt the innocent beast. I would pick it up delicately with some cotton wool and place it gently out the window. I would then make sure that I hadn’t damaged any of its legs before letting it go.

  So how could someone who felt like this suddenly kill a child’s pet for no reason whatsoever? It didn’t make sense. It just didn’t ring true. For a split second I wondered if I could have been framed in some way. I slowly returned my gaze to Steven. And for the first time since meeting him I noticed something that had been staring me in the face all along.