A Violent Man ( the story of Thomas Flynn )

by Michael Siddall

  The Abbot smiled in silent wonder as she climbed on board, flinging her arms around Thomas, kissing him repeatedly as the old cart rolled gently down the long dusty road to an even louder hail of cheers.

  *

  Later that night, thunder rumbled somewhere overhead and rain poured down as a mysterious masked man peered out of the shadows at a lonely young woman making her way home. He rubbed the scar on his left forearm superstitiously and drew a dagger from his belt, waiting for her to get closer. But just at the last moment, she turned a corner and disappeared back into the night. The man cursed silently.

  Suddenly, the thunder of hooves roused him, and in the narrow alleyway he couldn’t determine the direction the sound was coming from as it filled the air about him, gathering momentum. He slunk back into the shadows as the ground began to tremble with a rumbling noise, the shiny glint from his razor sharp dagger the only tell-tale sign that he was there at all.

  The thunder of hooves passed by and faded, replaced by a song that echoed softly through the dark ally. It came from a tall, slim female figure that stepped out of the shadows and approached, and as she came closer, singing softly, the masked man recognised her as the cook from the Dog and Duck. When she was within range he pitched forward without a sound, dragging her back into the shadows out of sight and then he raped her, slit her throat and stabbed her to death, leaving her where she lay.

  In that same moment, not so very far away at the old Abbey, Thomas, taken by a fever was curled up into a quivering ball, rambling on about another murder. The Father Abbot and Lira did their best to calm him down, but he wouldn't be calmed. ‘I saw it,’ he said with snarl. ‘And I believe it. I'm not mad. I am not mad.’

  Laying there on the bed he was in such a state that he looked devil possessed, so Lira sedated him with the powerful drug, Henbane, and he fell into a deep sleep. However, even as he slept he rambled on about the murders in detail, even down to the clothes the killer and victims were wearing and the triangular scar on killer’s left forearm. The Abbot stared hard at him and began to chant some mystical sounds, waving his hands over him and Thomas calmed and stilled. Now he looked as peaceful as a new-born babe does, curled in the foetal position, so the Abbot led Lira to the Great Hall to talk, leaving him sleeping where he lay.

  ‘Has Thomas gone mad Father Abbot?’ she asked as they walked.

  The Abbot shook his head. ‘I think not, my child. I think his visions are all too real,’ he said. Stopping and turning he stared out of a high arched window at the distant skyline and thought for a moment. ‘There is a killer of women out there on the loose somewhere, and your husband has some kind of mental link with him, of that I'm sure.'

  ‘How can that be, Father?’ she asked.

  ‘God works in mysterious ways my child and I cannot fathom those ways. Thomas sees his gift as a curse, but I see it as a gift, because he may be the one to catch the killer.’

  The Abbot’s wise words shocked Lira, but the fact that her husband wasn’t mad after all reassured her. ‘He’ll be alright won’t he Father?’ she said gently.

  ‘My child, whatever happens is God’s will,’ he said, ‘but I'm sure he’ll be fine when he's rested and well enough to travel home.

  That night Lira sat by Thomas’ sick bed keeping vigil over him, and he whimpered and moaned in his sleep, his haunted eyes flickering open briefly every now and again, gazing around the room. Then he would sigh and ask where he was, and she would tell him that he was with her at the Abbey under the watchful eye of the Abbot. She stroked his forehead gently, holding a bowl of water to his cracked, dry lips and he would drink, be calm and still again for another short period and then twitch, scream and whimper fitfully, finding himself trapped at the centre of another hellish vision.

  He was watching a young woman from the shadows…

  He was stalking her…

  He pitched forward grabbing her, his hands tightening about her neck…

  A dagger glinted in the dim light…

  He raped her and then slit her throat…

  Then he stabbed her to death and everything went black…

  And even in his sleep his face contorted into a mask of horror because he had witnessed another brutal murder.

  *

  A new day dawned in a haze of soft sunlight and it crept over the countryside bursting forth as each spider’s web became a glittering necklace and each dewdrop a sparkling jewel. Birdsong rang in the air, piping in the new day, and no day was as beautiful as this one. Yet nature’s extraordinary extravaganza seemed lost upon the swordsman Thomas Flynn. He was still fast asleep with both eyes tightly closed.

  Lira however, had woken early and was helping Friar Hugo with the breakfasts for the other inhabitants of the Abbey. It was a simple meal of honey cornbread, apple and carrot, but at dinnertime they would serve salmon baked to perfection, garnished with cream cheese, cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower, washed down with their own brew of aged best mead – the Abbots favourite tipple.

  Breakfast however, came and went, so did dinner and there was a mass clattering of chairs and the scraping of forms in the Great Hall as everyone was seated on both occasions, but nothing woke Thomas, not even the tolling of the Abbey bell for the evening meal. And so, he slept on through the night and into the middle of the next day, until finally his eyes sprang wide open and he beamed like the sun on a midsummer morning, greeted by a chorus of ooh’s and ah’s from several Friars tending his every need.

  They had shaved him, cut his hair and braided it, bed-bathed him and covered his body in oil from head to toe awaiting his awakening, and now he was finally stirring. He brushed the Friars aside impatiently, stretching and yawning and ran his tongue over his teeth, screwing up his face. ‘Ughh, my mouth tastes like a dung heap. How long have I been here?’ he asked.

  ‘Several days, my son,’ said Friar Mortimer. ‘We thought you would never wake.’

  Outside the high warm sun shone down, but there was grim news of another murder from a young boy runner who had arrived breathless at the Abbey gates carrying the message. Now the Friars rebuilding the dry stone walls were digesting the report as he informed them that someone had found a young woman’s body in the middle of a field, on the back of a hay cart, and as usual she had been brutally murdered. Would they come with him – the boy asked – and render assistance as there was a baby trapped under the cart, crying. The terrible news quickly reached Thomas’ ears and he dressed quickly and set off with the Friars as time was of the essence for the baby’s sake.

  Once again a dark shadow was casting itself over the whole of Nottingham. Murders such as these happened in bygone days but not in the present. Well not until now, Thomas told the Friars as they made their way over the hillside to the field where the boy had made his grizzly find.

  On reaching the field and finding the cart, the scene that greeted all horrified them, and the sight that met one of the Friars eyes sickened him so much that he couldn’t keep his breakfast down in his stomach. The young woman had been stripped naked, raped, stabbed and bludgeoned almost beyond recognition, but this time her throat hadn’t been slit.

  There was blood everywhere. It was in the cart, soaking the hay, on the ground staining the grass and even in a pool of water some yards away. The young woman put up a hell of a struggle, Thomas thought, and then they were all startled by the babies cries from somewhere beneath the cart, and the cries were so shrill and sobering that it brought Thomas back from his thoughts and he swung into action immediately, scrambling under the cart. Then he gasped with shock as he came face to face with the tiny infant, who couldn’t have been more than a few days old, and he found it hard to believe that the child’s mother was dead.

  Picking the child up, he cradled it and began to cry, something he had hardly ever done since he was a child himself, and somewhere deep inside he was screaming that the loved and needed die too. There was a bleakness in his eyes that made them seem to sink deeper into his skull and he gazed despa
iringly at the child not knowing what to do, feeling so bad inside that it was as if some unknown force was pulling him through a keyhole and stretching him thin.

  Everyone loves their mother, but now this poor wretched child doesn't have one, he thought, sobbing against the baby’s shoulder, cursing God for taking the mother away with such savagery, and the murder reminded him of his own mother’s death at the hands of his father.

  Now the boy child looked peaceful, his face relaxed. He could even have been sleeping in Thomas’ arms he was so still. He cuddled the child and rolled to his knees, climbing out from under the cart, handing the baby to Friar Hugo, who looked astonished and awed by the size of the tiny child. The boy was hardly bigger than his hand. ‘Why does God allow this to happen to an innocent?’ Hugo asked suddenly, questioning his own faith.

  The Father Abbot shook his head. ‘Ours is not to reason why, my son,’ he said solemnly.

  At that moment, Lira came running across the field and spotted the young woman’s torn body. She wanted to scream but didn’t. Her eyes were bleak, dark, haunted and despair washed the radiant colour from her face. Turning, she stared at Thomas with a look that none of what was happening could possibly be real. But it was all too real.

  ‘I knew the girl,’ she said, a tremor in her voice and she began to cry.

  Thomas moved to Lira, wrapping his arms about her, cuddling her, looking so sad and he didn’t utter a word because there was nothing he could say that could make things better. Even worse was the fact that he seemed powerless to stop what was happening, even though he did have some kind of psychic link with the killer.

  Some days later, following the young woman’s funeral, Thomas sat playing in the sandbox in their back yard at the Dog and Duck with Olivia, filling sand pails with a small shovel, one after the other, making her a castle, placing tiny flags on the turrets and sculpturing miniature windows, a drawbridge and moat. While not so very far away at a local meeting the Sheriff of Nottingham was telling a gathering crowd that all of the murder victims were women and were all raped, stabbed and their throats slit, except for the last victim.

  At the back of the meeting-hall Thomas’ long-time friend Dody listened to the Sheriff rant and rave and remembered rumours of a spate of similar murders in London several years earlier – three to be exact. So after the meeting and much later that day at the Dog and Duck while having a drink and a meal, he told Dardo that the killings were similar and it could be the same assassin. However, his friend scorned the idea because there had been a ten-year gap. ‘No killer would wait that long,’ said Dardo, ‘and certainly not a crazy man like this one.

  ‘He would if he’d been in jail or at sea for a long time,’ argued Dody.

  *

  That same evening just before sunset a camp-fire burned low in a cave and a tall man, over six feet with a mop of dark, curly hair and dark eyes shivered, pushing the hurtful memories of his horrific childhood from his mind. I hate all women just like I hated my own whore mother, and I'll kill and keep on killing until someone stops me, he thought. And in that one instant he felt a surge of pure hatred and anger like no other he had ever felt. Then he laughed madly and it echoed eerily throughout the halls of the cavern, dying away slowly like the low rumble of an approaching storm. He came to his feet rebuilding his confidence. His experience with the woman in the hay cart had unnerved him badly. The baby screaming and crying under the cart had filtered into his brain and he couldn’t shake it loose.

  He had once been a handsome man, but as a young boy his own mother had called him ugly, drumming it into his brain from a very early age, even though she had complemented his only brother so charmingly, and the only thing that stopped her from saying it was when she was murdered. But now with the onset of mental illness and self-harming, he was ugly, a bizarre caricature of a man, his face criss-crossed with deep scars.

  He made his way over to the cave entrance, staring out. A huge swatch of green dominated the valley before him and a meandering river dissected the checkerboard of meadows and fields which had an odd haze hanging over them, partly obscuring Nottingham castle. It was swathed in mist and shadows some miles distant from where he was standing, and it seemed a dark forbidding citadel, appearing almost ghostlike within the swirling haze. He squinted against the muted light of the setting sun to see more clearly, but the mist closed suddenly and the castle was gone.

  Now he vividly remembered those long days and nights of torture on the rack, in the thumbscrews, the floggings and the threat of being hanged, drawn and quartered in that very same castle. He began to cry and dropped to the floor in a quivering ball, huddled against the cold stone wall. I'm a human being for God’s sake, he thought, so why has no one ever loved me or treated me like one. Yet something eminently inhuman beaconed from his eye.

  Chapter 18

  Thomas Flynn was also a troubled man. He was angry inside and seemed unable to rise above it. In the old Abbey he went along a corridor to where it branched and turned left, humming impatiently as he passed each closed door, when suddenly a voice boomed out behind him and he jumped a foot. ‘Well then, here you are wandering aimlessly. Are you looking for me, my son?’ said the Abbot. ‘Are you alright?’

  Thomas turned at once, only to see his friend dressed in his old familiar habit, which cloaked his stooped, scarecrow form. He stiffened smiling weakly, his mind racing. ‘We need to talk again Father,’ he said.

  The other nodded, his shaggy brows lifting slightly. ‘We do indeed. Would you mind if we walk while we carry on our conversation my son?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Thomas fighting his emotions to stay calm. Taking a deep breath he shook his head, but he could still hear the words of the priest at the young girl’s funeral in his mind and visualise her torn body. It haunted him. The priest’s voice had seemed so calm and rational, but there was nothing calm or rational about murder.

  He threw the Abbot a glance as they rambled through the corridors of the Abbey and out into the grey daylight. It was drizzling. Both men were distant and solitary and a world apart, but trying hard to come to terms with what was going on around them.

  ‘Does everyone love their mother?’ asked Thomas suddenly.

  ‘Why do you ask this question?’ said the other with a queer expression.

  ‘Because the man who climbs inside my head didn’t,’ answered Thomas.

  ‘I dare say there are some mothers that you can’t love, and some fathers, but they don’t want you to love them,’ announced the Abbot.

  Thomas nodded slowly, memories of his own parent’s abuse flaring in his mind. ‘That’s so true, and the murderer tries to distract himself from his traumatic memories with silence, but most of all with the company of the dead,’ he said sombrely.

  ‘Then life has more than likely been unkind to him. Life is hard, holding many cruel surprises and sometimes we find ourselves stumbling around in the broken pieces of our lives wondering why we even exist, but it is all Gods will my son,’ said the other.

  Thomas shook his head. ‘I don’t understand why life is so hard if God is good,’ he offered. ‘Why would a good God let so many terrible things happen, particularly to innocent women and children?’

  ‘Because God gives us free will and choices, but we're no better than animals,’ the Abbot enlightened. ‘I’m sure God is sat somewhere, sad-faced and disappointed by our behaviour, gibbering on in a language that only he can understand.’

  ‘You talk in riddles Father, or am I going mad?’ said Thomas trying hard to think what was best to do for all concerned. ‘So is this mind linking with a killer a curse or a Godsend that might actually help me catch him?' Suddenly, there was incredible pain in his temples that made him feel sick, and fell to his knees clasping his head in his hands.

  ‘What's wrong my son?’ asked the Abbot, distraught by Thomas' pale, shocked face. Now a hollow look of terror shadowed his eyes, making them seem darker than ever before.

  Thomas shook his head violently. �
�Get out of my head and leave me alone,’ he shouted.

  Instantly, the Abbot realised that Thomas was having another vision. He was shaking his head in his hands as if he were trying to rip it off to relieve himself of the incredible pain. Then the sound of laughter drifted into his mind.

  ‘Ah, what a tangled web we weave, when we try to deceive,’ mocked a voice. ‘You have no sense of humour man. Do you not find it ironic that I can see what you see, and sense what you sense, just like you know what I am doing at this precise moment?’

  ‘Get out of my head, you murdering son-of-a …’ he shouted again, stopping short of finishing his sentence.

  The Abbot took him by the shoulders and shook him. ‘Come back to me my son?’ he said, the light of madness in his eyes.

  Thomas closed his eyes and opened an inner pathway, falling back into himself. The move was sudden and unexpected but it worked just like the last time he had tried it, and the dreadful mocking voice faded away saying, ‘you whoreson bastard, you can’t get rid of me that easy. I’ll be back.’ Then it was gone and he climbed back to his unsteady feet, opening his eyes. They were haunted by what he had seen.

  Moments later, he had a sudden, sickening flashback. The murderer was stepping through rusty gates, quiet as a mouse as a horrible howl rang out through the darkness. He was carrying a bloodied head while talking to it as he cut off the ears, nose and gouged out the eyes with a sharp hunting knife. Then he fed them to a ghostly looking hound that raised its head howling repeatedly as the moon shone between the clouds, lighting a ruined manor house. Thomas sensed that the people who once lived there had fled years ago, fearing for their lives, running from the one he was now linked to by some inexplicable turn of events.

  Later that evening, Thomas stood on the Abbey wall sniffing the breeze, listening to the night-time sounds of the forest. The evening remained calm and still but he stayed alert, praying that it would pass uneventfully for once, and on reflection he could see the wisdom of the Abbot’s words concerning man’s free will and the choice to do good or evil. And so, long after he had retired for the night he sat up thinking. But before he fell asleep, a thousand mad ideas pounded through his brain on how to catch the killer, and each was wilder than the last. However, the one thing he was sure of was that the mind-link between them had to be the answer to his problem – if he could somehow control it.