Mad Stacks: Story Collection Box Set

by Scott Nicholson

  It’ll go dark, it always goes dark, and in the blackness there’s murder.

  Ed tried to revive himself because he needed to think, and like this it hurt. He drank a pint of water and washed down three aspirins, opened the windows to his dank flat and leaned out to let the fresh air do its worst. He could just about make out the park from here, its oldest and tallest trees peering over rooftops. The sky was clear but the streets were shaded, not shadowed but unclear nonetheless. The brightness of the day had been turned down. Some cars had their sidelights on. A young couple were standing on the street corner, whispering like lovers, but Ed thought not.

  There was a knock at the flat door.

  He spun around and leaned back against the window sill to steady himself. The knock came again and he nodded, yes, he hadn’t imagined it. No one had come to his front door for years other than to collect monies due. He usually had it to give them, but still he resented their intrusion into his own private world. They looked at him like voyeurs, their eyes cameras to record and incriminate … or perhaps he just imagined it.

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s happening,” a voice said. Queenie. So much mystery in that one statement, so many possibilities (you’re caught, they know, you’re a murderer, time to run, run again).

  “What’s happening?”

  “It’s growing dark. The light’s losing out, no one has noticed yet but all the readings hold up. Let me in. The landing light’s bust.”

  Ed stepped to the door, drew the bolts and swung it open. Queenie entered without an invite, wafting cheap perfume and the smell of cleaned clothes. If she had slept in the park, she’d made an effort to be presentable before coming here this morning.

  “Nice place,” she said, looking around at the scarred walls and the refuse littering the floor and tables, and Ed hated the sarcasm, really hated it, his resentment running deep.

  “I live like I live.”

  Queenie’s eyes widened

  her eyes widened and filled with something fearful, frightening

  and she started talking excitedly. “The murder’s soon, it has to be, the darkness is here and soon it’ll be black, black as night without stars or moon, blacker than last night, but in the day.” It sounded like she was looking forward to it.

  “Eclipse?”

  She shook her head. “No, not eclipses. Every time it’s happened before it’s been localised and has gone unreported, even from the authorities. I’ve followed the places it’s happened, always got there after the event, been trying to narrow down future locations … find a pattern.” She looked pensive for a moment, glanced around his flat at the mess of Ed’s life, then back at him. “Maybe I’ve found it,” she whispered. Then she became animated once more, excited. “There’s been no film of it, little talk about it in the media. Well, Fortean Times picks it up sometimes, of course, and other folks like that.” She looked at him and, as if knowing how all but his worst memories were lost, she smiled. “Blackouts.”

  Ed frowned at this strange woman who seemed to have some sort of claim to him. He’d seen her twice but already she was confiding in him, passing on something she was obviously passionate about, letting him in. “I really don’t want any part of this,” he said, and even as he spoke it was a lie.

  She looked at him, eyebrows raised and lips pressed together. “You’ll see it soon enough,” she said, and still he could not read her.

  “Why should I see blackouts?”

  “Why shouldn’t you? You live here and this is where it’s going to--”

  “But why do you think I of all people should see it? Why … pick on me?”

  Queenie was silent for a while. She seemed confused. “Well, I didn’t. You came looking for me.”

  Ed could only stare at her, standing in the middle of the room he had yet to invite her into. And suddenly, amazingly, there was a stirring in his groin, a hardening so uncommon in all the years since his time in Eastern Europe, another use for the blood he now thought of as impure and tainted with the murder, the murderous attack it had fuelled.

  That made up his mind. “Out.” he said.

  “But I have to tell you. Don’t you want to know? Don’t you understand what I’m saying here?”

  “No I don’t, it’s a load of shit you’re trying to feed me, I don’t know what’s wrong with you and I really, really don’t want to know. Out!” He did want to know…

  “But I’ve been told I can give you a chance.”

  Ed shook his head, loosening those strange words from where they had stuck. Denying them. It was just too complicated. “Get out of my flat!” he hissed.

  Queenie made to move toward him, faltered, took a step forward. Ed really thought that she was coming for him, her hands would come up and she would hold him or hit him or something equally as inexplicable. But after standing there for a few seconds, glancing out the window over Ed’s shoulder, looking into his eyes and searching for something in there, she turned and left.

  The door snicked shut and Ed looked at the clock. Not even midday.

  He picked up his knife from the bedside table, looked for an unmarked spread of wall and carved in his mark for today.

  And kept carving. Silent, his breathing even, his eyes open but unseeing, hands clenched around the haft but unfeeling, the scratch, scratch, scratch going unheard, Ed carved days that never were into his wall, spanning midnights and middays without blinking, weeks passing with only a spot of blood where he’d nicked his finger, the wall filling faster and faster as months sliced by.

  Fooling himself, an ironic deception, with cuts.

  By one o’clock, when he opened his first bottle of wine and stared at the sun hanging weakly in the clear blue sky and the shadows hunkering unreasonably around doorways and beneath cars in the street down below, Ed had been in the flat for another six months.

  Four o’clock came. Ed had consumed two bottles of wine and was slowly working his way into a third. Bad Hungarian red. There’d been a scare a while back about anti-freeze in the wine, poisonous, bad for you, and Ed had been concerned and worried. That was before he’d been sent to Eastern Europe. Now, he wished it were true. Not brave enough to take his own life, he often thought that a freak death like that would be rather poetic.

  As usual when he got drunk it was not the shimmering loss-of-control felt by most other people. His limbs went numb, yes, and his voice would undoubtedly slur had he cause to use it, but the main effects were more insidious. He felt the light leaving him. Both metaphorically and literally his light was fleeing, bleeding from organs pickled and ruined by bad alcohol: metaphorically, because he was losing the last dregs of hope, decency and guilt that still held out against the dark cancer of his soul; and literally, because on occasion he saw the dark.

  He could never have mentioned that to Queenie. He rarely even remembered because it happened so infrequently.

  He saw the dark.

  Shades of grey where there should be colour. Light bulbs fading and flickering as if gauze was being waved before them, the black gauze of mourning, not wedding-white. Shadows sitting in the sun. And just as soon as he became sober the next day he forgot about it, cast it back into the depths of his mind where other memories dwelt like monstrous sea creatures, cruising the darkness and rising only occasionally to assault the small barren island his life had become.

  Strangely enough, he did not feel under siege. Sometimes it was the exact opposite; sometimes, he thought he was a threat to everyone else.

  *

  He can see her. Obviously he can, he’s murdering her after all, but he can really see her. Not the composite image of a human being our brains usually perceive—that face, those grey-green eyes, two arms, birth-mark on the neck…all go together to make someone we know and whom we never really see— but the actuality of her as a person made up of many, many things.

  He’s destroying those things, slicing them asunder as if working on an item in a biology class, and perhaps this is why he sees h
er as she really is. Because her eyes are wide open and filled with something he hates, hates and fears, while she is still alive they are filled with anger and rage and something that can only be a curse, a horrible look that he wants to slice out, the look of someone who has won, someone who knows that victory is not hers now but will be in the future. So he slashes at her eyes and it takes several stabs before they both go. Her right arms begins to twitch, jumping on the concrete paving slabs, blood is pulsing from several cuts down near her hand where she’d initially tried fending him off, and every now and then her limbs enter his peripheral vision like curious ghosts watching over his shoulder.

  He feels the rage rising, something so basic and pure that he fears it more than he can understand, because it is not his own. He can almost see it. Black spots dance before his eyes, speckling in and out of existence like flies popping in and out of the dying woman’s flesh. At first he thinks they are in his eyes, because he’s in a white-hot panic as he keeps stabbing, slashing, gouging. But then he blinks and wipes blood from his face with his left hand, and the spots are still there. He moves his head from side to side and they do not move with him. They are separate from him, more of the woman than him, and her rage must be far, far more powerful than his own.

  He realises then how pathetic and self-obsessed his murdering this woman is. As if he could possibly solve anything by taking one more life, a life he had come here to protect at that. But he sees the knife rise and fall, rise and fall, sees flesh opening up, sees parts of the woman that should never have been seen, ever. When he was young he’d peel a banana and think I’m the first and last human to ever lay eyes on this piece of fruit flesh. Now he is the first and last to see a different flesh. He feels the warm dampness of it on his skin. And the rage rages on.

  Ed surfaced slowly from another drunken, dream-filled slumber to find that it was early evening. And at the window in his flat’s messy living room, something was fluttering against the glass.

  He sat up quickly, trying to shake the fuzziness from his eyes, and he listened for the scraping across the glass. There was nothing. He stood, pulled the net curtain aside and thought he saw a bird. It took a few seconds to realise that whatever was out there was not solid. It was like a breeze given form, physical yet with nothing firm enough to be seen, stalking across the glass, trying to gain access.

  “Get lost,” Ed said, opening the window. The thing dissipated when there was no longer glass between them. Perhaps it had been a shadow cast from somewhere far off.

  The street was quiet and still, but Ed saw that things were wrong. The dark, he thought, it’s the dark come before the murder, but he was thinking in Queenie’s voice.

  He needed to go and find her. He needed to know what she knew of the dark. The dark, and the rage he sensed was drawing near again.

  He left his flat as he had so many times before—without hope.

  Outside, night was forcing daylight into hiding. House windows no longer reflected the cloud-smeared sky, the cars and people travelling through the streets or the facades of buildings standing opposite. Now they were black, as if the light had already been sucked from the buildings’ innards leaving only a void to press against the glass on the inside. Ed sensed a pressure behind these windows—he could almost see the glass bowing outwards—and he walked closer to them. Moving away from the road towards a more noticeable danger felt good. Once or twice he thought he saw himself reflected in there, but the light was fading fast now and he could just have been a shadow. Perhaps it was even someone walking behind him, keeping step, but when he glanced over his shoulder he was alone.

  The animals knew that something was amiss. Pigeons huddled together on window sills, heads tucked beneath wings but looking up frequently, unable to sleep. Occasionally some of them would take flight, as if touched by nothing that could be seen. Cats sat behind several windows observing the street, watching the pigeons roost and panic, their heads turning here and there, none of them licking their paws, none outside in the street. There were no dogs sniffing along the gutter or pissing against garden walls, no magpies or crows or sparrows fighting over the remains of burgers trodden into pavements, no bees buzzing between gardens, no flies aiming for nostrils or eyes.

  Another flock of pigeons lifted from a garage roof, their wings applauding the strange silence that had fallen over the streets. Even though cars travelled back and forth and people walked the pavements, sounds did not seem to echo, and Ed constantly brushed at his ears as if expecting some deadening material to be draped there. A car passed ten feet away, but its motor could have been coming from the next street. He coughed and felt it thrum through his head and chest, but its sound was dull and muted. He saw other people acting in the same bemused manner: rubbing their ears; watching cars drift quietly by; stamping feet or making some other noise to test their perceived deafness. It was as if the air was thickening, damping sound and diluting echoes into dull mumbles of what they should have been.

  Cars approaching from the direction of the park had their headlights on full. Those moving the other way soon turned theirs on as well. The traffic was moving even slower than the usual rush-hour crawl.

  Ed left the residential street and walked past the first of the shops. A man was busy pulling down a shutter and padlocking it into place, glancing warily over his shoulder as Ed approached.

  “Who are you?” the man asked.

  “No one.”

  “Something’s going to happen,” the man said, eyes dancing in their sockets like loose ball-bearings. He couldn’t keep his gaze in one place. “Something soon, and something bad. Maybe there’ll be a riot. Do you think there’s going to be a riot?”

  Ed looked along the shopping street at the cars wending their way home, the people minding their own business even more than usual as they hurried, heads down, inexplicably trying not to bring attention to themselves. “I quite doubt it,” he said, but the man was already hurrying away.

  A motorcycle passed by accompanied by an explosion of shadows. They buzzed the bike like the dregs of a bad dream, black butterflies, negative snow, but totally without form. The motorcyclist was waving his left hand around his head, flicking his hand at the air as if trying to sign to someone behind him. Ed watched his hand and wondered what he meant.

  The shards of shadow darted at the rider’s helmet…and disappeared.

  Ed saw what was about to happen but he could do nothing to help it. He tried to draw breath but it was like breathing in the middle of a thick fog. His lungs felt heavy and full, but not with air. And then the bike flipped sideways, the rider left his mount, the machine hurtled up onto the pavement and through a shop window—the smashing of glass sounding like wind-chimes in the distance—and the street came to a standstill.

  At last, Ed could shout. “Watch out!” he croaked, realising how foolish it sounded now. Realising too that he had allowed someone else to die. If only he had shouted … if only he had been able to warn… The man lay half-beneath a parked car, his helmet askew on his head, the car body dented where he had impacted. Someone was kneeling beside him and reaching for the helmet and lifting the visor, tugging, taking it off…

  Ed ran across the street, not wanting to see what gushed out when the man’s head was released. He dodged between the stalled cars and the drivers staring in blatant fascination at the scene unfolding in the gutter behind him. He did not look at any of them. He knew what they were feeling because he felt it himself sometimes, a revelling in the pain of others that helped him live with his own agonies. It was necessary, he supposed, and it kept him going however much he had no desire to carry on. They were shocked, and excited, and pleased that their own troubles had been unloaded—for however long—on someone else. Something strange was happening right here and now, but a man was dying in the road. For a while, that would obsess these people and give them an escape.

  Looking down, Ed saw shadows writhing across his legs as he ran through the beams of car headlights. They seems to b
e stitched into his trousers, swathes of dark fluttering behind him like loose cloth. He ran on without looking down again.

  “Oh God!” he thought he heard from behind him, but it may as well have been a cry from hidden memory.

  He had to find Queenie. Night was falling too early. And try as he might, Ed could not shake the ever-increasing certainty that he had seen it all before.

  He can feel blood on his hands. The hard haft of the knife in his right hand counterpoints the warm wet thing he holds in his left, his palm pressed flat to the body’s chest to hold it against the wall as he drives the blade home, again and again. A few moments ago he could still feel its heart beating, but that gave out with a spasm as if the big muscle was trying to force the knife back out with its own violence. The blood from there seemed warmer than the rest, more sticky, like sweet treacle instead of runny syrup.

  The body is sliding down the wall so he pushes harder, trying to keep it upright, his blows striking its shoulders and neck as it moves down, then its chin and face. His finger slips inside a cut as he pushes and he turns it around in there. He can’t help comparing the feeling with one more loving and sensuous. Something scratches his finger¾ a bone splintered by the heavy knife¾ and he moves away, letting the body slump to the ground. His face is dripping with sweat, cool where sprayed blood dries there, soon to be a crust, cracking and flaking away like red autumn leaves.

  Something else settles around him. Heavy and dark and intimate, it reaches out formless hands to steady him, or perhaps to push him down. It enters his throat and makes it hard to breathe. For a second he feels a sudden, total rush of antagonism, fear and hate…unbridled hate…and then he is running. His feet slap on the pavement, rain taps patient fingers on his forehead and scalp, there’s plenty of time, it says, and his clothes catch and scrape where he is sweating. He is running. Again.