Mad Stacks: Story Collection Box Set

by Scott Nicholson

  The same knife he now used to mark the passing of his own life.

  He’d have laughed at the irony if he hadn’t sickened himself so much.

  Ed put down the knife and went for a walk. He did this most days, wandering past the greasy takeaway food bars, the tacky cheap jewellery shops, money lenders and video emporiums and dingy pubs, their closed doors and smoky interiors almost begging potential customers not to enter. Passing faces he did not know he acknowledged no one and, in turn, was ignored. He was certain that sometimes they did not even see him. He’d read somewhere that the human minds filters out everything not required from its surroundings, otherwise the information input would be far too massive. He liked not being a part of anybody else’s life.

  Ed preferred living in the city because he could be just another mystery, even to himself. He deserved no less. As happened every day, flashes of what he had done haunted him; tastes, sounds, feelings, smells of his crime assailed him at every step, either reflected in shop windows, carried on the air or manufactured inside his head. Trying to ignore them was like trying not to breathe. Accepting them, suffering, was all he could do to make amends.

  He certainly did not deserve to meet Queenie.

  On that hot July afternoon when he first saw her, he simply watched. He hadn’t had sex since the war, rarely even masturbated, but seeing the woman in the park stirred feelings that surprised him with their intensity. He wanted her, yes, but he was also interested by her. The strange things she did went some way to explaining that, but also the way she moved, the clothes she wore, the way she flicked her long hair back over her shoulder quickly and impatiently, as if it was merely an annoyance.

  Ed sat on a bench by the pond and tried to blend into the background. He hated being noticed at the best of times, but now, watching this woman, he craved invisibility. The more fascinated he became with her and her actions, the less he wanted to meet her.

  She must be planning something, he thought. Scouting the area for a filming. Or perhaps she was an artist. She was lurking beneath a clump of trees at the edge of the park, holding something up to the sky – a light meter, Ed guessed – taking photographs, scratching around at the foots of the trees with a small trowel as if looking for buried treasure. She kept out of the sun. If she did emerge from beneath one group of trees, she would quickly cross the sunlit grass to another area of shadow. Her skin was dark and weathered—she obviously spent a lot of time outdoors—but she seemed to much prefer the comfort of shadows to the hot caress of the sun. Ed could relate to that. He wondered what crime she was trying to hide from.

  It took over an hour for her to notice him. In that time he sat motionless on the bench, the sun slowly burning his bald pate, hardly even twitching as a group of teenagers cycled by so close that one of them touched his shoe with his wheels. He watched her set a camera on a tripod and take one photograph every five minutes, fix small boxes to several trees with nails, sweep leaves away from the bole of a lightning-struck tree as if to reveal its skeletal underside. She finally sat down and took a bottle of water from a rucksack…and that was when she saw him.

  Ed held his breath, startled, as she froze and stared across at him. She was too far away for him to see her expression clearly, but she put her bottle down and stood without looking away from him.

  His heart began to race, sweat popped out on his skin, his sunburned scalp tightened. She was not only standing, she was walking, coming out into the sun and seemingly oblivious of it for the first time, striding across the grass and glancing away now and then, though infrequently and not for long.

  He felt her attention upon him, like fresh sunbeams cooking his skin.

  Ed stood, turned his back on the woman and walked quickly away. He aimed through the kid’s playground, dodging toddlers as they darted around his legs and hoping that he could lose her through there if she chose to follow. But when he looked back over his shoulder he saw her standing by his bench, hands on hips, staring after him. She shielded her eyes as he looked and he thought perhaps she smiled. But it could have been a shadow pulling at her lips, making him see something that was not really there.

  He left the park without looking back again.

  He has smelled insides before, of course, but never like this. In the war he has seen more dead bodies than anyone ever should, two of them—the rebel unwilling to give up his guns, the government solider angry and aggressive at his intrusion— the results of his own actions. He hates every single corpse because they remind him of why he is here, what these people are doing to each other, and each shot, shattered or gutted body seems to be one more mocking taunt aimed directly at him: we’re doing this, they say, and you can’t stop us.

  So he has smelled insides…but never this close up. Never this fresh. Blood mists the air as he strikes, copper tints overlying the rich tang of burning from outside, strong and vital as he breathes it in, sticking inside his nostrils, embedding itself to remind him of this moment forever. The smells change as his stabbing arm becomes heavier and the knife impact further down his victim’s body: sickly-sweet as the heart is punctured; acidic as the stomach is torn open; piss and shit.

  Underlying it all is the cloying stench of cheap perfume. It’s intended to remind him of roses and honey, he supposes, but in reality it’s the aroma of desperation. Any idea that a clean and scented body can superimpose itself over the horrors happening here must be desperate, and he wonders when she found the time or inclination to buy this. He imagines what he is doing as some sort of alternative perfume advert for TV and almost smiles … almost … because then the mouth-watering smell of roasting human hits his nose from outside. He wonders what he will eat tonight. He swallows a mouthful of saliva and tastes death.

  He didn’t know he was going back until he opened the door of his flat and ventured out into the twilight.

  The park closed at eight o’clock, but he knew plenty of ways in. He spent a lot of his time wandering, day and night, and the park was always a convenient and innocuous venue. No one would see him in there, if he so chose, and he could hide and watch and wonder just what he was missing. Sometimes he saw someone walking on their own, but their expression was always happier than his own. On other occasions he spotted couples sitting or strolling hand in hand, and they reminded him that he had forgotten so much. Once he’d seen two people making love on a park bench, trying to be secretive about it but the woman’s increasingly frantic movements and gasps revealing their passion. He had stayed and watched until the end. The movements and sounds reminded him of the woman he had murdered, even though their cause had been much different. Perhaps he knew why it was called the little death.

  They had all made him mad, every single one of them. Every word and gesture and smile that marked what they were doing to their country and kin as normal drove him into a frenzy. He’d been sent there to protect them from themselves—he’d killed for them—and yet they willingly went about their continuous self destruction.

  Sent there to protect them. Ironic.

  He walked along darkened streets, moving quicker through pools of light thrown by streetlamps. He’d been here for a long time, the marks on his wall testified to that, but still he found his surroundings unfamiliar. It was as if the scenery was frequently rebuilt and reordered, mostly to resemble its former self but with a few vital differences that prevented him from recognising it totally. Stopped it from ever feeling like home.

  He reached the park and climbed the wall at one of its lower stretches. He could hear kids playing around near the bandstand, glass smashing as they lobbed bottles down the concrete steps, so he turned the other way. The pond was just around the corner, and next to it the trees, and within their deeper evening shadows perhaps he would find the secret of why the woman had been there.

  Ed looked up and saw the full moon, stars quivering with atmospheric distortion. He tried to appreciate the beauty of the view but, as ever, he could not realise any sense of wonder. It was long gone. The shadows p
ooled around the bench he’d sat on earlier seemed deeper than normal, thicker, untouched by moon- or starlight. He wondered whether someone had spilled something, but he had no wish to venture close enough to find out. The shadows seemed…there. Something, not nothing. A definite presence rather than an absence of light.

  Ed moved his head to get a full view with his peripheral vision. He did not like what he saw, but then he rarely did. Someone—perhaps it was his mother, although she was swallowed up along with most of his early memories—had once told him that if he was stressed or wound up he should see the beauty in things. The movement of a tree, each leaf performing its own independent dance to create a wondrously pure choreography. Or the way light fell on a puddle, a reflection of the world in there, a whole universe in a splash of water.

  Roses swaying in the breeze, waves of that same breeze rippling across a field of long grass, a flock of birds twisting and turning like one organism, not a thousand. All things of beauty, none of which Ed could see. Now he would see only a stump blown apart by shellfire, a porridge of blood and oil in a landmine crater, a hand clawed in the still air … and his knife stealing what little beauty he’d managed to find in that foreign country.

  Before they sent him there, he’d never even heard of the place.

  “Look just to the side of what you want to see,” a voice said. It was deep but evidently female, husky and knowledgeable.

  Ed spun around, fearing an attack by the teenagers but knowing straight away that he’d found her. Or rather, she’d found him. He wished he’d stayed at home. “Who’s there?” He was not used to talking with people, and the quaver in his voice embarrassed him. Scared of the dark, she’d think. Maybe she was right. Ed liked to exist in shadows, but perhaps it was his fear of them holding him there, a guilt-induced masochism.

  “You saw me earlier.” She came from the night beneath the trees, stopped a few steps from him and switched on a torch. His vision was stolen for long seconds. “Come back for another look?”

  “I was wondering what you were doing.” Ed could see the woman silhouetted before him. She pointed the torch at the ground behind her, throwing her face into deep shadow. He wondered whether she had two eyes, a nose, a mouth, or something wholly different.

  “Why?”

  It was not a question he had expected, although he’d been asking it for hours. He was not used to interacting, and to find something of interest like this was a surprise. Anything of pleasure would be mocking the life he had taken. Sometimes, on the worst of days, even breathing felt bad.

  Everything went back to that. His life began in a foreign country when he was a murderous twenty-two.

  “Well, you seemed so … intent. What is it? Animal research? You filming squirrels, or something?”

  “I’m waiting for a murder.”

  “Murder.” Ed felt cold, his balls shrivelled and an icy, accusing finger drew a line down his back, nail cutting to the bone. Murder. One day he feared they’d come visiting , the fellow soldiers who’d brought him back and let him go, letting the incident fade into the shadows of war, honour amongst thieves, that sort of thing. There’s always been that fear … but it was a yearning as well. He could not bring himself to account for what he had done because he was a coward. It would take someone else to do it for him. Murder.

  “There’ll be one here soon. That’s why I’m here. I’m … sort of an early warning system, I suppose. Dark, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.” He’d noticed. The woman turned the torch off and for a moment, an instant, it was pitch black. Then his night vision moved in and he could see the shadows forming around them. The woman seemed nearer than she had been. And when she spoke again he was sure he could smell her breath.

  “They call me Queenie.”

  “Why?”

  “Avoidance Queen. I avoid most of the important things in my life.”

  “Like what?” Ed saw her shadow shrug but she offered no response. “So what’s your real name?”

  “You can call me Queenie, too.”

  “So what are you avoiding here? Searching for a murderer, you say?”

  “That’s not what I said. I’m looking for a murder, not a murderer.”

  Ed felt that she was playing games, but perhaps it was simply that most of his conversations were with himself. He stepped back a couple of paces, shoes whispering across the soft carpet of pine needles. The air felt thick. Movement was difficult. “You can’t have one without the other.”

  “Well…” She giggled quietly, little more than a heavy breath through her nose. “Sometimes a murder is just a death brought on too soon.”

  This was too close. Ed felt memories tapping the inside of his skull like little insects, flying around and seeking escape, trying to force themselves upon him once again. They often used devious means, these memories…jumping out of doorways and the TV screen, emerging fully-fledged from single phrases, smells and sounds and sights inspiring their own dark memory cousins. He lived that time enough without actively bringing it on.

  “I have to go,” he said. The instant he spoke everything went quiet, a deathly silence, the air swallowing movement and sound and seemingly solidifying around him. Even the shadow of the woman became solid and still, from living to statue in an instant. He turned to leave. She touched him.

  “Don’t go,” she said. Her fingers bit into his arm, but in desperation rather than anger. “Please … I don’t get to talk about this much. It’ll go dark, it always goes dark, and in the blackness there’s murder. Please! People just don’t listen, they say I’m mad and walk away. Don’t walk away.”

  “What are you doing?” Ed said. Was she playing with him again?

  “I’ve put light meters on the trees. And time-lapse cameras. I hope they aren’t stolen. I’m waiting for it to go dark.”

  Ed almost stayed. She’d piqued his interest, demanded his attention. Some of those things she was saying…Sometimes a murder is just a death brought on too soon … He wanted to become involved.

  But he could not allow that. He was nothing, no one, and he did not deserve anything like this.

  “It is dark,” he said. And as he walked away, trying not to hear her muttering behind him, he whispered to himself: “It’s always dark.”

  *

  She offered for him to taste her. Maybe that’s why he’s killing her, but he thinks not. Her underwear is still tangled around her ankles, and as if to taunt him the taste of women comes out from behind his teeth, dripping from the roof of his mouth like ghost memories burrowing down from his brain, laying tangy caresses on his tongue. Perhaps if he’d accepted her invitation his rage would have been subsumed. Maybe she would still be alive. But time could not be reversed. Drowning out that sweet taste of love is the bloody taste of death.

  Her blood is in the air, misting when the knife comes out and permeating the dank atmosphere of the alley, more spilled blood in this bloody land, soon the air itself will taste of blood if the killing goes on, the hate and murder borne of the differences passed down from father to daughter, mother to son. He wonders whether their respective gods find it all amusing. And he tastes a bitter, furious anger swimming there in the blood, black spots of rage camouflaged in the very physical taint of the woman’s death.

  He swallows, rubs his tongue against the roof of his mouth in an effort to distil the taste…because it scares him. It scares him because he knows it cannot be his own, his anger is false because he does not truly know what these people are going through, why, what they really feel … his is a tourist’s rage at something that offends him, and it could never taste this bad. He spits and it lands on the woman. The taste grows worse. Hands lay on his shoulders, heavy and invisible, but for now they do little but help him thrust the knife in again. There is no one else here but him and the woman, but those hands have the feel of him, and the bitter tang of dread floods his mouth as blood arcs across his chin and teeth.

  This time, he knows the dread is his own.

 
And he sees what he has done.

  *

  Ed woke up from dark-soaked dreams to a dawn barely any lighter. He glanced at the clock blinking beside his bed. Must be wrong. It should have been daylight by now. Even through the hangover, the searing pain behind his eyes and in his throat that was testament to his binge the previous night, he knew he should be seeing more than this.

  He rubbed his eyes but it did not help.

  Queenie. She sprang into his mind and ambushed his thoughts, turning them away from the urge to vomit and then drink some more. If he went back to the park today she’d still be there. Sitting beneath the trees perhaps, or adjusting the equipment she’d placed around the little copse, replacing batteries, examining film and data tapes. Light meters? Strange.

  Ed managed to haul himself upright without puking, but then he stood and swayed as his senses spun and swapped places, and he vomited down the wall. Standing there, leaning against the woodchip wallpaper as he heaved gushes of liquid poison from his guts, he noticed how each splinter of wood in the wallpaper had its own definite shadow. Most of them were small, little more that smudges, but one or two of them seemed far too large. As he gasped in air and tasted foulness, he picked at one of these wood chippings and felt it crumble between his fingernails like a desiccated fly. He dropped the dust to land on the puddle of puke, and seconds later the shadows faded away.

  Ed rubbed his eyes and sat heavily onto his bed. He was used to waking like this, even welcomed it sometimes, but it often lowered whatever defences he’d managed to erect against the memories plaguing him. Trying to rub the ache from his eyes he saw her face as she realised what he was about to do, her eyes widening and filling with something that would have scared him had he not had the upper hand. Pinching his nose and snorting to force out the damp remnants of vomit, he smelled insides other than his own, parts of her that should never have been touched by daylight. And the ringing in his ears, the rapid pumping of his heart as it struggled to purify his system, both could have belonged to her, a fearful whine and her heart galloping with fear.