Nailbiters

by Kane, Paul

  ‘What’re you talking about, Benjamin?’ Never Benny or Ben; always Benjamin. ‘Have you been watching those silly cartoons again?’

  ‘No.’ Benjamin looked up and to his astonishment saw a small black No float out of his mouth, because of course he’d been watching cartoons, couldn’t get enough of the things if the truth be known (ha!). His eyes followed the word as it joined its brethren, and they welcomed this small but powerful addition to their ranks with open arms. The more the merrier. The more the thicker, and velvetier…

  The worse the lie, the more letters he would add to the cloth, and the more substantial those letters would be. Just like at that birthday party when he was ten, and he deliberately pushed his cousin Faith down the stairs, breaking her arm. It was her own fault, she’d been badgering him the whole time about borrowing his Etch-a-Sketch – his fucking new Etch-a-Sketch, mind! – so he’d seized the opportunity during a dizzying game of tag.

  Cue ambulance, and more fast-talking. ‘I didn’t mean to, it was an accident. You know how clumsy she is anyway.’ Words, blacker than black. Words to cover up hate and hurt. To cover up the top of his arm as well, spreading down across his chest. Benjamin, though, had grown used to the substance by now. Had lived with it just as someone might live with a mole or a birthmark, although they don’t usually get bigger or seep through your proper clothing when you aren’t looking.

  A good job he had adjusted, because in the years to come, through adolescence and into young adulthood, the material would spread even more. Yet, having said that, he did find he could control it more now, could choose whether to display it or conceal it. But every time he bullied some innocent boy and denied responsibility…every time he and his gang (a gang he formed quite early on in secondary school) vandalised or generally terrorised…every time he’d sweet talk some girl into putting out, and later claim that he’d done nothing of the sort, particularly if complications arose…every time he stole or stopped out late or did errands for the local faces…the suit of lies would gain a little bit more in essence and durability.

  By the age of seventeen, it was already down to his waist, having encased his arms and settled completely across his broad shoulders. Just as the ‘jacket’ had grown, so too had he, into a handsome youth with twinkling eyes and a charming grin. A wide boy, but dangerous with it. So dangerous that the joy riding he encouraged his friends to participate in finally resulted in a crash that left one member of his gang paralysed, and another with a punctured lung. Benjamin, who’d been in the passenger seat, had belted up before the journey began and so escaped any serious injury. He also escaped any serious blame or repercussions. It wasn’t his idea, you see. He hadn’t egged the others on or talked them into doing it.

  More lies; but they got him out of a tight spot once again.

  Unfortunately the families of his cohorts didn’t see it that way. Nor did the local villains who used him occasionally for services rendered; his brush with the law made them nervous. So it was time for him to leave the area, make his way down south to seek out his true destiny. He told his mum and dad he was going to town one day, then never came back. A small falsehood really, but with tremendous repercussions.

  It wouldn’t be the last.

  Benjamin worked in a succession of jobs on his travels, paying for his journey to a better mode of life. Selling used cars offered him a decent living for a while (‘One previous owner, very careful driver, hardly ever used it…’ Cut-’n’-shuts? he didn’t know the meaning of the word), as did telesales after that (‘Can you afford to take out life insurance, sir? Can you afford not to, that’s the question?’). But they never really satisfied him. Nor did the succession of faceless women he bedded in his early twenties, telling them yes of course he loved them, of course he’d stay with them – that no way was he like all the other bastards out there. Nevertheless, he’d always move on in the end.

  No, it was the big cities that offered him the most opportunity. He somehow found himself involved in investments, in stocks and shares. This was how he came to make his fortune. This was where his talents truly came into their own: juggling figures, buttering up clients, conning…no, persuading people to part with their hard-earned just to furnish him with a big house – a des-res complete with swimming pool – and a sports car (personalised number plate, 160 mph on a good day, 200 on a bad one). And the clothes, don’t forget the clothes…silk shirts, handmade ties, designer suits – not that any of these could match the suit that had shaped itself around him during this time. Benjamin liked that one the best of all. He’d become very comfortable with it in fact, so comfortable he took pride in adding more blackened phrases to it, would stop and admire it in shop windows, the jacket done and the trousers coming along nicely. It was almost his mission to complete it, to try and finish the suit.

  Benjamin was becoming a man of many words. All of them false.

  He also settled for just the one woman; well, he married her at any rate. Penelope was the daughter of one of his work associates and he really thought he’d loved her there for a while. She was so…so…Penelope. Unlike all the others, he didn’t lie to her. Not at first. He meant what he said, even if that didn’t do anything to enhance the suit. It was getting its fill from other sources anyway.

  ‘…and forsaking all others, as long as you both shall live?’

  ‘I do.’

  Except he didn’t, did he? Benjamin could only curb his appetite for so long. The women were there, and the affairs were a buzz. He’d been stupid to think he could spend the rest of his life with that single, solitary woman. God, she was just so…sooooo Penelope. The only thing now was that she’d take him for all he’d got if he tried to wriggle out of it. Besides, he secretly enjoyed all the planning, the subterfuge, the ‘I was just having drinks with the boys at the club,’s, and the ‘I completely lost track of time,’s. Plus, of course, it all added to the suit’s finery.

  Consequently, for a long time things were fantastic. They were the best few years of his life, bar none. He even branched out into other areas of business, making even more money out of back-handers and decidedly dodgy deals. It was an easy racket, and he covered his tracks at every turn.

  Then, one day, everything just started to go wrong. A friend…(more of an acquaintance really, for Benjamin never really had any true friends; he was constantly using them, betraying them and letting them down)…anyway, this person once told him something that had stuck with him, albeit at the back of his mind. A sage piece of advice if he had but known it, except Benjamin dismissed it with all the casualness of a fortune cookie prediction.

  They had said to him:

  ‘You know, whatever you do in this life, good or bad, always comes back to you threefold. Karma I think they call it. Oh, you can get away with anything for a while – and though it may seem like the bad people get all the luck in this world, it’ll catch up with them sometime. I firmly believe that. You get your “reward” eventually.’

  Benjamin’s own eventually came when the stock market took its first sucker-punch.

  Like so many other brokers, he danced around the inevitability of it all, made promises down phone-lines that he could never, ever keep; made assurances that were worth nothing on paper or in the ether.

  ‘Don’t worry, it’s just a temporary thing. What’s a few points here or there? The market’s well on its way to recovery. Just give it a bit more time.’ He said this while he withdrew large amounts of cash from the system, covering his own back, in more ways than one, and making sure that when the other boot fell he’d still be sitting oh-so pretty. It didn’t matter about the suicides that would pave his escape.

  At the same time, however, several of the apartment blocks built by a construction firm he’d invested in had been found to be hazardous in the extreme. Benjamin denied ordering all the cost cutting, palmed it off again on the little man. But he couldn’t do that when the reporter from the Daily Archer came a-calling, claiming he’d done some investigating of his ow
n. Not only could he tie Benjamin in to several illegal porn and drugs operations in the East End – blame his teenage roots – but he also had proof that the high-flyer had been diddling his taxes for years.

  A meeting to pay the man off had led to another push down another flight of stairs: concrete ones. This time the victim hadn’t survived. Another kind of investigation was bound to ensue…

  Not only that, but Benjamin’s string of other women were becoming more and more demanding. It was growing harder to keep track of them all, and Penelope was becoming very suspicious indeed.

  So the lies flowed like booze at a bachelor party. More elaborate pantomimes than even he could’ve contemplated at school. Still the suit was always hungry for more. Craving them, feasting off his paranoia and insecurities. It became fat on the profits of his wrongdoings. When he looked in the mirror or a shop window now, he hardly recognised the thing, and there was no chance of concealing it. No longer smart and elegant, it weighed him down, added pounds to him, and seemed to be growing out of all proportion. Just growing and growing and—

  Everything spun out of control. There were too many balls in the air for Benjamin to handle. His lies were no longer convincing, his memory jumbled and confused. His reward? He lost everything. The money, the prestige, the power, his marriage.

  Then eventually he lost his very freedom, thanks to an eyewitness testimony to the reporter’s death.

  ‘I sentence you to life imprisonment!’

  But it didn’t matter anyway. The suit, and in particular the jacket, now trailing down over each arm, was binding him, contorting him and pinning him back. Trapping him inside it until he couldn’t possibly hope to break free. Making a mockery of him and the man he’d once been.

  So yes, as he sat alone in his cell, Benjamin did contemplate what the nature of his condition actually was. What the lies made up. Why the suit had come to him – unless all the liars and cheaters of this world had their own suits, of course.

  As he did so, his arms snapped back around him, cocooning him, Benjamin still told his lies. He simply couldn’t help it. He lied over and over again, to his fellow inmates – when he was allowed to see any – and to his keepers. But most significantly to himself, pretended that everything was going to be all right. Pretended that this hadn’t really happened to him, that the suit wouldn’t squeeze the life out of him one day, or cover his face and choke him in the night. Pretended that the suit of lies didn’t really exist in fact, which was, perhaps, the biggest lie anyone had ever told.

  And maybe, just maybe…

  The most dangerous lie of them all.

  A Suspicious Mind

  I’m caught in a trap,

  I can’t look back.

  Because you’ve taken out my

  Eyeballs baby.

  Oh why can’t you see…

  What this is doing to me,

  All your hooks,

  And spikes, now baby?

  We can’t go on together,

  With your suspicious mind,

  And we can’t live our dreams,

  With your suspicious mind.

  When that old friend I know,

  Dropped in to say hello.

  Nothing happened,

  I swear now baby.

  There’s no need for that.

  For the power saw.

  Can’t we just talk about this,

  Now baby?

  We can’t go on together,

  With your suspicious mind,

  And I can’t live it seems,

  With—

  About the Author

  Paul B. Kane is an award-winning writer and editor based in Derbyshire, UK. His short story collections – as Paul Kane – include Alone (In the Dark), Touching the Flame, FunnyBones, Peripheral Visions, Shadow Writer, The Adventures of Dalton Quayle, The Butterfly Man and Other Stories, The Spaces Between, Ghosts and Monsters. His novellas include Signs of Life, The Lazarus Condition, RED and Pain Cages. He is the author of such novels as Of Darkness and Light, The Gemini Factor and the bestselling Arrowhead trilogy (Arrowhead, Broken Arrow and Arrowland, gathered together in the sell-out omnibus edition Hooded Man), a post-apocalyptic reworking of the Robin Hood mythology. His latest novels are Lunar (which is set to be turned into a feature film), Sleeper(s) (a modern, horror version of Sleeping Beauty), the short YA novel The Rainbow Man (as P.B. Kane), the sequel to RED – Blood RED – and the bestselling award-winning Sherlock Holmes and the Servants of Hell from Solaris.

  He has also written for comics, most notably for the Dead Roots zombie anthology alongside writers such as James Moran (Torchwood, Cockneys vs. Zombies) and Jason Arnopp (Dr Who, Friday The 13th, The Last Days of Jack Sparks) and as part of the team turning Clive Barker’s Books of Blood into motion comics for Seraphim/MadeFire. Paul is co-editor of the anthologies: Hellbound Hearts (Simon & Schuster), stories based around the mythology that spawned Hellraiser; The Mammoth Book of Body Horror (Constable & Robinson/Running Press), featuring the likes of Stephen King and James Herbert; A Carnivàle of Horror (PS Publishing) featuring Ray Bradbury and Joe Hill; and Beyond Rue Morgue (Titan), stories based around Poe’s detective, Dupin.

  His non-fiction books are: The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy; Voices in the Dark; and Shadow Writer – The Non-Fiction. Vol. 1: Reviews and Vol. 2: Articles and Essays. His genre journalism has appeared in the likes of SFX, Fangoria, Dreamwatch, Gorezone, Rue Morgue and DeathRay. He has been a guest at many conventions, including: Alt. Fiction five times; the first SFX Weekender; Thought Bubble in 2011; Derbyshire Literary Festival and Off the Shelf in 2012; Monster Mash and Event Horizon in 2013; Edge-Lit in 2014; HorrorCon, Liverpool Horror Festival and Grimm up North in 2015; plus The Dublin Ghost Story Festival and Sledge-Lit in 2016. In addition he has been a panellist at FantasyCon and the World Fantasy Convention, was a fiction judge for Sci-Fi London 2016 and is currently serving as co-chair of the UK arm of the Horror Writers Association.

  His work has been optioned for film and television, and his zombie story ‘Dead Time’ was turned into an episode of the Lionsgate/NBC TV series Fear Itself, adapted by Steve Niles (30 Days of Night) and directed by Darren Lynn Bousman (SAW II-IV). He also scripted The Opportunity, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, Wind Chimes (directed by Brad Watson [7th Dimension] which sold to TV), The Weeping Woman – filmed by award-winning director Mark Steensland and starring Tony-nominated actor Stephen Geoffreys (Fright Night) – and Confidence, starring Hellraiser and Nightbreed’s Simon Bamford. You can find out more at his website www.shadow-writer.co.uk, which has featured such guest writers as Dean Koontz, Robert Kirkman, Charlaine Harris and Guillermo del Toro.