by Paul A. Rice
Someone coughed and then gurgled, a death rattle. He heard the sound of movement followed by a soft whimper. Ken considered lobbing his last grenade through the door, but the thought of messing about with his pockets again didn’t take his fancy. Instead, he blasted off the rest of his magazine at the room, watching as a dark spray of blood and hair erupted onto the surface of the open door. He had never been one to hesitate when it came to some trigger-pulling, and the ammo wouldn’t be a problem, either – he’d just take theirs.
Silence and cordite smoke filled the space around him. Ken’s ears were ringing but his blood was up. No need, the men were down, and down for good by the looks of things. He quietly reloaded, reaching into his thigh pocket for a fresh magazine, eyes never leaving the target area, hands automatically going through the drills. Having completed the task, he turned away from the mesmerising sight of their blood as it made a last bid to send him nuts, sliding in crazy patterns down the white surfaces of the wall and door.
Ken jogged over to the far end of the room and took cover behind a large stack of filled sandbags. They’d obviously been placed there in readiness for some hardening of the building, he didn’t care – sandbags were good when it came to stopping bullets, unlike plasterboard. After waiting a further ten minutes, sitting stone-still, eyes scanning the rest of the room, Ken rose to his feet and sidled up to the door, stepping back slightly as he neared, giving himself a wider arc of fire in case any of them proved to have more patience than he did. He looked inside – the men were both dead, blasted to hell, their insides spread all over the place.
Ken dragged them into the main hall and did a quick check of the bodies.
Not a single thing was on them. No papers, no identity, nothing. He checked the others and achieved the same results. ‘Who are these guys – why did they just attack the bunker like that, I could’ve been anybody...what the hell is going on?’ He turned and took a long stare at the stiffening corpses, then gathered some of their ammunition for a re-supply.
Ken let his eyes cast around the room one more time. There was nothing to be seen and the place was now silent, but something weird was going on, definitely it was. Like an automaton, he dragged the corpses over and rolled them into the office, before slamming the door on them and turning back to stare at the large, empty room. Then he grabbed a couple of sandbags and humped them over to the main door, sliding its bolts, top and bottom, and stacking the heavy bags of sand against it. Not permanent by any means, but enough to give him some time if there were any other enemy on their way. In a sudden burst of crystal intuition, Ken knew there wouldn’t be. He still left the door blocked, though.
An hour later and having seen no further trace of any enemy, or any other entranceways, Ken had checked the whole building. The task turned out to be far easier than he had thought it would be at first: at one stage it had been a huge single room, but the spooks had partitioned off some smaller rooms and then turned them into offices. There were only eight of these rooms and he’d quickly cleared all of them, including the one masquerading as a morgue, soon finding himself at the opposite end of the building.
Looking back towards the main door, Ken scanned the room with his eyes again, just to get his bearings, he was panting and the wound on his cheek was throbbing again. Crouching down on his haunches, back pressed against the ancient wall, he waited until he had caught his breath a bit. He wasn’t exactly sure what to do next – half of him just wanted to get out of the building. And yet he knew, because the graffiti had said it was so, that Mike was here. Deciding to stay inside and knowing there was only one way in which he’d find out, Ken relaxed slightly and looked around.
The building must have been approximately two or three hundred feet long by about half that in width, maybe slightly wider, it was hard to tell as the curvature and height of the ceilings played tricks with his eyes. He guessed that a professional archaeologist would no doubt find out all sorts of wonderful things in this flea-pit of a country, the trouble was that no-one really gave a toss these days, the last thirty years had almost been solid conflict, and by all accounts the previous centuries hadn’t been a picnic, either.
These days it was all about the money and the guns, especially the money. Ken frowned to himself. ‘It’s a complete tragedy, that’s what this whole, crazy place is, a total and utter mess!’ The thoughts waded idly through his head as he sat and watched a shaft of sunlight streaming through the door.
Then he had another thought, a bitter self-admission. ‘But, then again...I’m here making money from the back of the war, so that makes me just as guilty, I suppose?’ He stared at the room with its bloodied door. ‘Plus, there are those guys…’ The downer of post-battle shock settled like a stone in his guts. ‘I’m still at it, why can’t this lot just leave me alone? I’m sick and tired of killing people...Jesus, what a crock of shit you are, Ken!’
He never used to have thoughts like that, but as he became older, things seemed to have mellowed a touch, these days he thought more about the madness of his own life. Ken guessed it was probably down to spending half of it in cesspits like this place. It made him think all right. Lately, he seemed to be doing a lot more thinking and a whole lot less trigger-pulling. Well, except for today.
‘What a bloody mess!’ His whispered admission did nothing to help dispel the sudden dose of reality. Shaking his head, Ken hefted the rifle onto his crouching thighs and decided to sit for a while longer, just to let his thoughts try to find some reasonable sense of direction.
After about five minutes, he rose to his feet and stood listening for a few more seconds. There hadn’t been a sound for the entire time he’d been in the Funny House, except for the shooting and the death rattle. In fact, when he thought about it, there hadn’t been much noise since the storm. Just the voices in his head were all Ken had heard for the last couple of days, and they were starting to get right on his nerves. But this building felt as though it wanted to say something, or at least someone in it did. He groaned and turned away, deciding that he needed to do a more thorough check of the various offices.
He made his way toward the first one on the left by the main door, Ken had only been looking for threats when he’d carried out his initial clearance and hadn’t paid any attention to what each room held. The rooms were divided into eight in total, four on each side of the long central corridor. Starting at his end, he worked his way back and zigzagged through each room until he had cleared all eight of them, finally ending up back at the entrance door.
Each of the rooms had been almost identical in their layout, with a desk, two chairs and a small refrigerator as their only furnishings. There was a weird looking telephone on each desk, none working, and a computer monitor with keyboard and wireless mouse. There were occasional pens, a few paperclips and some other office bits and pieces lying around, but apart from that it was what the spooks would have called ‘sterile’.
His thoughts clarified the situation. ‘Yep, somebody’s cleaned up around here, that’s why they hadn’t bothered to lock up after they bugged out...nothing here to be stolen and hopefully no-one else here to give me grief, either – where in the hell is Mike?’ He shrugged off the thoughts and decided to take five minutes to make a plan.
As he stood inside the entranceway, he noticed a picture hanging over the door. It was mounted in a beautiful, hand-carved frame and was quite stunning. Staring upwards at the object, Ken guessed that it must have taken a very skilled person an extremely long time to produce. The picture was also of the finest quality. It was a painting, or at least it looked like a painting and appeared to be a depiction from a scene in Egypt. The pyramids were so detailed that it was hard to tell whether or not it was a painting or a photograph, he couldn’t really see, and the fact he was cricking his neck by staring upwards didn’t help. He decided to get a chair and pull the picture down.
Picking up one of the chairs from the room nearest to him, Ken put it next to the door and stood on it. Even then it was still
a bit of a stretch to lean across and lift the picture off the wall. He placed one hand under the centre of the frame’s base, and then, steadying the top corner with his other hand, lifted it gently upwards. He took his time as he didn’t want to drop it and risk damaging the exquisite frame. The weight of the picture took him by surprise, so he applied more force into his lifting motion. As he did so, Ken sensed a form of resistance. It was like trying to thrust two magnets together, that invisible but very real kind of pushing sensation. He felt it in his head and on his chest, while the cut on his cheekbone flared with bright pain.
Then, with a slight give, the picture was in his hand. Its weight, although solid, had become more familiar. The unexpected release nearly caught him off balance and he barely avoided pirouetting off the chair. Regaining his balance, he stepped lithely down from his plastic perch, turned around, placed the painting across the seat and then stood back to admire it more carefully.
Remembering, he reached into his left thigh pocket and pulled out his spectacles. Flicking the case open, he put the glasses on his nose and peered at the picture. With the lenses on, Ken was truly able to appreciate the quality of the picture frame. It was made from a type of wood he hadn’t seen before and shone with a goldish-green hue. There were intricate carvings and inscriptions cut into it. They had a mesmerising effect on him and he had an idea there was a story within their graceful flow.
He had to force his eyes away in order to see the painting properly. It was a wonderful scene, perhaps an aerial shot of the pyramids, it looked as if it had been taken from an elevated angle and Ken saw almost every detail on the group of pyramids in the photograph – that’s what he now thought of it as, a photograph – it was awesome and he guessed that it was probably a recent one as there were people in the picture. They were all dressed up in the local traditional clothing and appeared to be working flat-out on the reconstruction of the stone tombs. Ken concluded it was a print of a photo. He took his glasses off, placed them into the case and slipped it back into his pocket.
‘Still, it’s pretty damn cool!’ he thought to himself.
If he made it out of here, then he was going to find a place for it back home, definitely. Deciding to stash it in one of the offices, he picked up the picture and holding it out in front of him, glass side up, walked to the nearest room. He hadn’t taken three steps when a flash of green light caught his eye, it sparked briefly and then was gone. Stopping in his tracks, Ken peered down at the glass, thinking that it must have been a prism effect from the sunlight shining through one of the room’s high windows. ‘I’m sure I saw green...sure!’ He knew his mind hadn’t lied, he had seen it, and he knew he had. Holding the frame out at arm’s length, he raised it up towards eye level and then looked again, more carefully this time.
Every hair on his body rose with a crackle; he felt the blood pumping in his neck so hard that it made a pulsing sensation against his jaw. Ken stared at the picture in disbelief, there before his bulging eyes sat a holographic image, an image that was moving gently from side to side like the needle on a compass that wasn’t exactly sure where north lay. It looked as though it was actually rising above the surface of the picture. Time began to stand still for Ken.
As he stood and stared at the painting, he started to sense his surroundings rushing past, blurring with speed. ‘Engine room, this is your Captain speaking: Full-speed-ahead.’ Ken’s thoughts fluttered alarmingly.
Spinning around, he stared at the walls of the old room, they hadn’t moved an inch. To his great relief, almost as soon as it had arrived, the whole sensation of ‘moving’ had quickly subsided. He shook his head and turned to gaze down at the picture once more. Ken watched as the image shuddered and swirled in front of his eyes, and, although he knew that he was probably imagining things, he sensed an emotion, as though an angry air of impatience was exuding from the spearhead.
‘Come on, come on, man...hurry-the-fuck-up, let’s go!’
How Ken knew this was beyond him, but he felt it, definitely.
Then the nausea hit him and the room started spinning like it had before. Ken realised that perhaps now would be a pretty good time to sit down and do some serious thinking. He needed a drink, he needed to scream, and most of all he needed to run. Half of him wondered if it wasn’t the lack of food that had given him the mother of all hallucinations.
His inner self laughed out loud at the ridiculous thought. ‘Be a man! You’re now firmly up shit creek in a wire canoe, without a paddle! So, get used to it, let’s just see where this leads us, shall we?’
Kneeling down, he placed the picture gently onto the roughened stone floor of the ancient Afghan building and stayed squatting above it for a few seconds; eventually, and with a cracking of joints, he raised himself to the standing position. Weakness finally overcame him and he stumbled backwards until his legs hit the chair. Totally shattered, Ken collapsed onto it and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. He looked at the photograph, painting...‘Or whatever the hell it is...’ and noticed that the spear was now clearly visible from any angle and seemed to have risen about a foot above the glass.
Ken’s mind did a flip as he realised the strange truth about his emotions. He didn’t think of the spearhead as scary any more, instead he saw it as beautifully magnetic – it seemed to pull him, inviting him to follow. It was grey-green and gave off an aura of...of beauty? He didn’t know what it exuded, exactly. But he did know that it scared the hell out of him. Ken grunted, and with some deal of effort pulled his eyes away from the entrancing image.
‘What the hell do I do now? The bloody thing’s looking at me!’
The thoughts were draining, his brain felt as though it had shrunk and his eyes as though they were full of grit. His mouth was dry and he thought seriously about running again. He placed both hands on his head and ran them down over his face, the thick layer of stubble rasping against his cracked fingers as he did so. He needed to get his head together, but couldn’t seem to focus his eyes properly. Half-petrified and half-calm, Ken knew that he was starting to get into a real mess.
Sagging back, head resting upon the wall behind, he closed his eyes and tried to think. The exhaustion was overwhelming and he felt his brain going into shutdown mode of its own accord. ‘I’ll just have five minutes,’ he thought, and then fell over the precipice of his exhaustion into the pit of a black and dreamless sleep.
***
Waking up thirty minutes later, he sat still for a moment or two, gathering his thoughts and building up the courage to look at the picture again. Staring down, he could see that the spearhead was still floating above it, serenely hovering in the air and waiting for him. ‘Okay, I’ll be right with you,’ he murmured. Ken was also about to say something like: ‘Right then, what now?’ But, before he managed to speak, the spear rose up away from the picture and flew off down the corridor, zooming into the last office on the left. Strangely, this didn’t surprise him as much as it should have. He grunted: ‘Perhaps I’m just getting used to this?’ No-one replied to that ridiculous question. So, Ken did the honours himself. ‘Perhaps...perhaps fuck all – perhaps my arse!’
He turned away from the thoughts and scanned the corridor, faded green eyes catching the pulsating glow of light emanating over the top of the office partition-walls. The radiance of the light cast ghostly green shadows onto the ancient ceiling of the room. This alone added to the surrealism of the whole situation. It was calling him, beckoning for Ken to come and see.
‘Okay, fine...I’ll be right there!’ he said, in disbelief at his own words. ‘Just let me get my act together, and I’ll be right there!’ In a daze, he turned away to gather up his belongings. Grabbing the rifle and spare magazines, he followed the route the spear had taken. Upon reaching the door he paused, took a deep breath, and then stepped into the office where, apparently, his new-found guide should be waiting for him. He wasn’t to be disappointed. The spear was there, hanging upside down in the air over the desk.
; It looked like the ‘Down’ call button for an elevator. ‘The trouble is that it’s not on a wall, is it? This isn’t a bloody lift, and I’m definitely going barking mad!’ he whispered. Ken’s head filled with the madness of his own words.
He shouted out: ‘Woof fucking woof!’ and then giggled insanely. The whole thing started to fill him with an overwhelming desire to run. Run until his lungs burst and the blood seeped from his eyes.
Mr Tiny agreed: ‘Yes, run and never turn back, not ever!’
Ken’s left leg began shaking of its own accord and he thought about sitting down again. Then he had another thought: the spear reminded him of a bonus icon on a video game. Upon reaching it, the player gets an extra life or a bigger weapon, or something.
He growled: ‘Oh yeah, that’s me for sure! Super-Mario-Ken, that’s just brilliant!’ As his voice echoed through the empty office, he couldn’t stop himself and hurriedly turned to see if there was anyone watching him – it sure felt like there was. Gathering himself, he took a deep breath and then moved in the direction of the strange hologram. As he approached, it glowed and then moved an inch further down, nearer the desk. For one second he thought it was going to impale itself in the cheap wood like some cartoon arrow. Ken needn’t have worried because all the spear did was to simply hover in the air above the desk, no strings attached.
He leant the rifle against the wall on his right and peered at the top of the desk. Nothing there except a bit of dust. Crouching down in front of the desk, he looked beneath it, even checking the rough underside, not a thing. He rose to his feet and stared down. ‘What the hell am I even looking for...a sign, some papers, what – why this office, what’s the big deal with this particular desk?’ His thoughts started to gang up on him again – he pushed his rising frustration away and forced himself to inspect the top of the desk for a second time. There was still nothing that appeared to show him the next move, one that the spear obviously wanted him to make. Ken had no idea and so decided to reach out and see what would happen if he touched the spear, maybe it would lead his hand to something.