At five, Harmon didn’t realize this was unusual.
His home was immense for an adult. For a child (always small) it was an entire world, a universe.
He watched Doctor Who. He knew words like universe and dimension. He was a clever child whose parents read to him every night even when he didn’t yet understand the words. He was curious.
He was loved deeply, loved his parents equally in return, and when they were murdered, he didn’t understand at all.
When he put the sackcloth mask over his face the first time, it wasn’t because he was curious, or morbid, or strange, or murderous.
It was simply because he wanted to hide.
* * *
The child Harmon woke in the night. Not sure why he woke. An only child, he was used to the long walk to his parents’ bedroom.
There was a child monitor in his room, but one-way. His cries would be transmitted along the long halls to his parents, who would hear him wake and come to him. Sometimes, though, he woke quietly. Sometimes he needed the toilet, or had a bad dream, or a good one that required him to wake and think a while on it.
Often, he dreamed of Doctor Who. Sometimes he dreamed of his friends at school. Tonight, he woke and hadn’t any recollection of a dream. There was little sound, little light. A night-light in the socket at the foot of his bed (which looked like a pirate ship).
Little sound but for his breathing.
In a five-year-old’s way, he reasoned out whether to stay in bed or brave the dark hallway and the cold parquet flooring to head to his mum and dad’s bedroom.
The journey, and perhaps the cuddles at the end of the journey, won out.
Child Harmon slid from beneath the covers onto the warm carpet of his large bedroom in the lowlight. He padded along the cool hall, wishing he hadn’t put his TMNT slippers in the oven.
Cold on his feet, cold in the air. It was a large house, and his family had money, but even with endless money it would have been impossible to heat the entire house. It was simply too large, too old. There was frost on the single-glazed windows along the hall. One was even open, but too high up for a small child to reach it. Harmon shivered, walked more quickly.
He stepped in something as he reached his parents’ bedroom door. The door was closed, too, which Harmon knew meant his parents wanted to be left alone, even at five years old.
He looked at the wetness on the sole of his foot, but it was very dark and he couldn’t tell what it was. Nor, really, did he care or worry about it. So close to cuddles in his mum and dad’s large, warm bed, he had the goal in mind and little else.
He pushed against the door and entered.
“Mum,” he said.
His mum slept closest to the door.
His dad, on the other side. Maybe his dad was his favorite, but there was little guile in the young boy. He wanted his cuddle, his warmth, their love. He didn’t really, in the dark of night, care whose.
“Mummy?”
No reply. Nothing.
He thought for a second, then crept into bed and snuggled against his mum. He could feel her boobies, kind of a comforting softness.
But the bed wasn’t warm at all. It was cold.
She was cold. Still.
He snuggled harder, insistently, hoping for some kind of reaction.
Nothing.
Then, a light came on. He squeezed his eyes shut.
When he opened them, he didn’t understand anything he saw at all.
His mother was dotted, splashed, with blackness in the softly growing light of a low-energy bulb.
She was quiet. Not snoring, breathing, or waking.
“Mummy?” he said.
He said it a few times until he felt, in a kind of unabashed way that children have, that someone was in the room.
Wasn’t his mummy, she was right there. Wasn’t his daddy. His daddy was quiet, too, but he was there, turned away from him.
“Kid,” said the presence, and child Harmon looked around, blinking in the light.
A scarecrow stood at the foot of the bed, and Harmon was afraid of scarecrows. He’d almost always been afraid of scarecrows.
The scarecrow began to pull its head off, and Harmon screamed, suddenly, screeching.
He was terrified. The scarecrow was taking its face off.
But beneath was just a man. For maybe a full second, child Harmon was relieved. Like it was some kind of joke, or a TV show.
The man threw the scarecrow’s head on the bed, right in front of the child.
“Doesn’t want me,” said the man. “Wants you.”
The man had something sharp in his hand. Like the knives Harmon wasn’t allowed to touch.
“It wants you,” said the man who’d murdered Harmon’s mummy and daddy.
The man put the tip of the knife, bigger than even the knives his daddy used at Christmas, under his chin. With both hands, the man pushed it up into his head, his brain.
He fell on the bed. There wasn’t really that much blood.
Child Harmon knew enough from TV to know the man was dead. He didn’t know his mummy, his daddy, were dead, too.
But he put on the sackcloth mask so he didn’t have to see anything, just in case.
It felt, to his skin, kind of like the bags his mummy used for shopping.
Then…nothing.
VII. Redundancy
The mask was cunning.
It stepped from the suite on the top floor of the Regal Hotel and from the light to the shadows. It watched as the man with the gun walked toward the man it wanted. The power. The rage.
The potential.
The mask watched the small man with the gun approach the giant. It didn’t fret or worry, or even, as such, think.
The man it wanted, the man with the gun…it didn’t matter.
It wasn’t intelligent, the mask. It wasn’t a smart thing.
But it knew what it wanted wouldn’t be put down by the tobacco-smelling man with the tiny gun.
The mask waited, in the darkness at the end of the corridor.
* * *
An elevator is one of the safest methods of transport known to man.
This is, largely, because of redundancy.
Elevators are safe because there are systems in place to protect the people, or cargo, inside of an elevator. Then, there are systems in place to protect those people, or cargo, in the event that the original systems should fail. Then, a third system.
Redundancy.
Firstly, six to eight cables hold a standard elevator. Each cable is capable of holding the elevator alone. Six or eight can handle the weight of the unit, the cab, plus the cargo.
In the extremely unlikely event that the cables should fail, the governor system kicks in—copper shoes that clamp to the elevator and slow its descent.
Should even this fail, there is a third system, a hydraulic buffer, at the base of an elevator shaft, which cushions the impact of a falling elevator.
Redundancy.
The man named Otaku practiced his business in much the same way.
* * *
To ensure that his target, one Mrs. Freya Lowe, was in place when he blew the cables of the elevator, Otaku needed to see. The Other Man wasn’t with her.
No matter. The man with the gun wouldn’t fail him. These things happen, he figured.
He had cameras within the Other Man’s suite. But he also needed cameras within the hallway outside, observing the elevator doors.
The signal was wireless, by necessity. But the signal also had a short range.
So Otaku took a room on the floor below, where he could receive the signal into his tablet.
When Mrs. Lowe stepped into the elevator, he moved his thumb over a button on a simple device to send a signal to the explosive device that would take out the cables.
He hit this. It worked.
Otaku saw the husband, his client, run along the corridor. No matter. These things, too, happen.
That’s what the man with the gun was for�
�
Otaku smiled and felt that singular rush he only ever got when he was blowing things up. The elevator, for a split second, began to fall.
The copper shoes would slow the elevator’s death fall, but the secondary device would bypass the governor and make the hydraulics at the base of the elevator shaft obsolete. Mrs. Lowe would be dead in five seconds, as the device would vaporize her and anything else inside the cab before it hit the bottom of the shaft.
The man was holding the elevator. Didn’t matter.
Doesn’t matter, thought Otaku, more forcefully, this time.
Five seconds. Thirty. One minute.
Something was wrong with the timer on Otaku’s secondary device.
At forty-five seconds, Otaku’s insurance placed the muzzle of his gun against Lowe’s temple.
At a little over one minute and thirty-six seconds, Otaku’s insurance was dead. The bomb, the secondary bomb, had rocked the entire hotel.
And, as he looked at the monitor on his laptop, the man, shot and blown into the ceiling, still lived.
“Fuck fuck!” said Otaku, and slammed the laptop closed, ran to his door with his weapon in his hand, and took the stairs to the floor above, where everything was entirely fucked beyond any reasonably foreseeable amount of in-built redundancy.
VIII. The Right Man
Otaku orchestrated a kind of symphony with his blasts.
His first, the improvise claymore, to sever the cables of the elevator was a low-order explosion. Subsonic, like a claymore or a pipe bomb. It served his purpose.
His secondary device, placed within the control panel of the elevator, was somewhat different. It would, later, upon investigation, be classified as a high-order explosion. He used Semtex for the device. High-order explosions from the more powerful class of explosives cause a supersonic over-pressurization wave.
Injuries from such high-order explosives, especially in a confined space, range through primary to quaternary. David Lowe, as a result, largely, of his change of heart (roughly one and a half hours prior to his wife’s murder-for-hire) suffered all one through four of these injuries.
His eardrums were ruptured, leaving him not with deafness, but a heavy, underwater kind of hearing. His inner eardrum, too, was damaged. His vision swam, his hearing swam, and his balance was so badly affected that he could not stand, but stumbled into the walls within the corridor.
The elevator doors, which he had with all his strength forced open, remained so, while he reeled from wall to wall, disoriented.
Fragments of the roof of the elevator, largely steel, had penetrated his face and upper chest, his shoulders. Something, too, had entered his right ocular cavity. The small piece of debris had skirted the orb of the eye, penetrating his eyelid, and come to rest just between his brain and the eye itself. Blood obscured his vision in that eye, but he would have been largely blind in that eye, anyway, without medical intervention.
A trip to the hospital wasn’t in the cards.
Tertiary injury was from the impact with the ceiling. His right scapula, which had taken the brunt of the blow, was fractured.
David Lowe didn’t know this.
Finally, his face was burned from the fire blast. His skin, puckered and singed only on his face. His clothing smoldered, and a large portion of his thick hair was stubble against his blackened skull.
David Lowe, a giant of a man, stronger, perhaps, than all but ten or twenty men on the entire planet, stumbled, bumped into walls, moved ever closer to the elevator shaft. Deaf, blind, hurt.
Shot, muscles sore, incapable of coherent thought, blown up. But Otaku had made a serious mistake. In trying to take £2,500 without a trace, without a man left to tell the tale, he’d tried to kill a monster…and failed.
No man is unbreakable, but some take a lot more breaking than others. For a man to live—hurt, yes, but alive—after being gunshot and blown through the air, he’d have to be the right man.
Otaku hadn’t figured that into his redundancy plan. That David Lowe was the right man. He’d miscalculated. He’d got it wrong. He’d made a mistake.
The mask, however, did not make mistakes.
The mask knew what it wanted.
The mask, wearing a man named Harmon, ran swiftly toward the giant.
Harmon left the ground, both feet outward, and connected with Lowe’s bruised, bloodied, and weakened chest.
For a second, some kind of animal instinct cause Lowe’s arms to flail, though he had no real sense of the floor, the walls. No sense of the gaping hole behind him.
But still he fell, arms wheeling, into the shaft.
IX. Freya
The heaviest thing David Lowe ever lifted was an elevator with Freya in it. The hardest thing he ever did was talk to her.
It was the easiest thing he ever did, too.
* * *
Lowe was a quiet man. Introspective, haunted by the memory of his father’s fists. Big, strong, terrifying, even, for some people to see.
But he was a quiet man and like many quiet men he lacked confidence. He thought people wouldn’t notice him. Thought a woman like Freya wouldn’t notice him.
Of course she did.
He was hard not to notice. He was six feet five inches tall and the largest damn thing she’d ever seen.
When she walked into the basement gym, she realized it wasn’t the right place for her at all. It took her maybe a single second to realize she was in the wrong place entirely. Everyone looked at her. Kind of like walking into the wrong pub in a run-down housing estate, or walking into the gents’ when you clearly wanted the ladies’ toilets.
She nearly turned right there and walked out. The reason she didn’t was the one man who didn’t look.
David Lowe was staring into one of the large mirrors that ran along a back wall. The gym, somewhere beneath the public swimming pool above, wasn’t what she’d been expecting. She’d expected rowing machines, treadmills, stationary bikes. Maybe a few weight machines, some TVs on the wall, techno or pop or soft rock played through speakers in the corner of the room.
It wasn’t that kind of gym.
Once, she’d stepped into a church for a Christmas service in her native Norway, when she’d been around nineteen. Deep country, everyone had turned and stared. Not hostile, just curious.
This was an iron church. The men within were devout. Fanatics.
Muscle, sweat, iron. Racks with big heavy weights. Nothing plastic, nothing coated like the weights she had at home from the local supermarket. No balance balls, soft mats. Machines, yes, but for T-rows, for calf raises. Cable pulleys, dip bars, pull-up bars, worn belts with chains attached.
And a ton of iron. Iron, everywhere. Big black plates, thick bars. Fixed to dumbbells with big numbers on the side in pounds, not kilos, like her weights, which were 1kg.
She couldn’t convert the weights in her head. 60lbs, 80lbs…she didn’t know. They were big. She was quickly realizing that even if she stayed, didn’t turn around and walk straight out, like she wanted to, she wouldn’t be able to do anything in here. She wouldn’t even be able to lift the smallest weight. She wouldn’t know what to do, how to do it.
Slowly, the men returned to their endeavors. Pushing, pulling. Big muscles on big men. Muscles straining against shirtsleeves. Chests looking ready to explode. Thick thighs with shapes and veins, like anatomical diagrams.
The largest man in the room, the one who didn’t look her way, carried right on doing the same exercise. She’d been standing in the doorway for maybe a minute, give or take. He was still doing the exercise.
A thick bar at the back of his neck, he squatted down, up. Over and over. In some kind of open cage. She figured it was like a safety cage.
Maybe in case of sharks, she thought, and nearly laughed.
If there were any sharks, she thought that maybe the man squatting in the cage would just pick them up by their tails and flip them away, like a kind of cartoon Hulk.
Up, down, endlessly. Red in the face, pu
ffing, straining. There was a lot of weight on the bar and the bar even looked like it was bending a little across his thick back and shoulders.
Up, down.
She wanted to turn and leave. But for some reason she still stood, in her tight shorts she wore for her aerobics class, her tight T-shirt. She looked good, she knew. She was young, fit, attractive. She had good boobs. She knew that. Not a matter of pride, just a fact. Sometimes, between their exercises, the big men looked her way. Checked out her legs, her tits, occasionally her face.
She wasn’t offended, and though she was aware of the glances, she didn’t acknowledge them. She watched the beast in the cage.
Up, down. Up, down.
Relentless and fascinating, for her.
She had, in the end, no idea how long the man did his exercises. Finally, with a grunt that made her jump a little, he crashed the bar into the cage and let the cage take the weight. He saw her in the mirror, watching him.
Blushed.
Cutest thing she ever saw.
* * *
Freya argued with herself for the entire forty minutes it took the man to emerge from his iron church.
She sat in a coffee shop by the entrance to the sports’ center.
She was waiting for him.
Why?
He was a big guy. Interesting, sure. But why?
She couldn’t figure it out. He wasn’t attractive. She didn’t know him, or anything about him. She’d never spoken to him.
She closed her eyes for a second and saw his face in the mirror. And she knew why.
The passion, even with his eyes closed.
She wanted a taste of that. She was attracted not to his physicality, nor his personality. She knew nothing of either.
But the passion she’d seen in his face, with his eyes closed and sweat pouring and his red, hot skin?
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