by TJ Park
The unintelligible litany flew faster and faster from her lips. He was sorely tempted to put his hand over her mouth to shut her up, except he wasn’t sure he could bear to feel those rapid breathy words moving against his palm. Her grip on him tightened. Despite her injuries, she began to rise from the bed with the need to impress on him the importance of what she was saying. Finally, Doug gave in, bending down so she would lower back onto the bed.
Face to face with him, almost like lovers about to kiss, she insisted on imparting one more message, in Latin he supposed, but different from the other verses she had repeated over and over. She said it with grave import, her gaze penetrating him, marking him. Then a great shudder passed through her. Before it was halfway over, she was seeing through him again. Whatever indeterminate point she stared at was impossibly far away. It wasn’t in this world. She was dead.
Doug pulled back from the deathbed, but she didn’t let go. Her hand should have relaxed in death but still it held to his shirt. He had to dig his fingers under hers to pry it off. That particular ordeal was over. It would be a pleasure to deal with the next.
Cutter.
But first Doug looked for what he’d trodden underfoot in his rush to the bed. A hard object. He spotted it in a bloody boot tread. Picking it up, he wiped it clean on the corner of the bed, then inspected it closely, shaking his head in admiration. Then he turned attention to Cutter, still slumped against the wall.
Sensing Doug’s stare, Cutter weakly tried to raise the pistol in his lap. Doug was over to him in three swift strides, stamping down on hand and weapon. He levered his boot back and forth until he felt bones give way, then picked up Cutter’s pistol and tucked it into his belt.
“Mick. Warlock,” he said, not turning. “Why don’t you go outside for a while? I won’t be long. Shut the door behind you.”
Mick rocked forward. “Listen, Doug … I’ll take care of it. You –”
“Get out, Mick. This time I want to make sure it’s done right.”
He didn’t have to see to know Mick reacted as if kicked. Doug didn’t mind. He waited until he heard the door shut behind him, but not before hearing Mick tell Warlock to get his brainless, bug-eyed head out the door before it was cut off.
Now Cutter and Doug were alone, with eyes only for each other.
Doug crouched down so they could be level. He reached out a hand to see the fatal injury, but Cutter pulled away, clamping his hand tighter over his neck.
Doug held up what he found on the floor, so the other man could admire it along with him. The tiny dagger.
“She did a pretty good job,” Doug reflected. “Popped your jugular, I bet. An average bloke would be dead by now. But you’re not like the rest of us, are you?”
A smile slipped through Cutter’s stony countenance. He couldn’t disguise his ego, even now.
“I imagine you’re too stupid to die,” Doug continued. “I reckon you could survive even this, maybe, maybe. Which is why –”
Cutter spoke: “Take … me … with … you …”
The croaking frailty in his voice fooled Doug for a moment. He thought Cutter was begging. He wasn’t. He was commanding Doug to do it.
Too astounded to be angry, Doug said, “Go to hell.”
Cutter cracked a grin rimmed with blood. “Then … take … you … with … me …”
Doug leaned in closer. “Listen to me, Cutter. I hope you survive this. I honestly do. I want you to live. I want you dragged out of here, fixed up and made well again, so they can stick you in a hole so deep you’ll never get out … not after what you’ve done.”
Cutter had to labour to do it, but he managed to spit it out.
“I’m going to do you, too … Dougie.”
Doug was appalled almost into admiration. Sitting in a lake of his own blood, Cutter did not show the slightest hint he was beaten. His body might be trembling like a windowpane in a gale, but the conviction in his tone was unshakable. To Cutter, this was only the latest skirmish of many, the final outcome of the war far from decided.
In answer, Doug dropped the small dagger in Cutter’s lap and exited the room.
As unsettling as Cutter’s confidence was, Doug could turn his back on it. Cutter might be keen to settle the score, but it wasn’t something he’d be doing in this lifetime.
Doug clicked the bedroom door closed behind him.
“Is he dead?” Mick asked reluctantly.
Doug didn’t lie.
“As good as.”
***
Darkness closed in on them while they waited for the jeep. Clouds stacked on the horizon, cutting the sunshine, piling into mountain peaks ridden by boats with full sails. The air inside the living room was breathless and still and Doug hoped it would remain that way. He did not wish the distant thunderheads to change tack, nor did he want more trouble in procuring the jeep. He had no desire to be caught in any more tempests.
The temperature dropped rapidly, the timbers of the house contracting. As stealthy creaks emanated from joints and joists, a lively imagination might’ve suggested it came from a particular room, the only room kept closed by choice. Doug didn’t want to give Cutter – even deceased – the satisfaction of someone checking to see if he was really dead. Mick wouldn’t look because he had no wish to be reminded of his own culpability. And Warlock … it was not the dead who put him off so much as the idea it might be catching.
Doug looked at the rugs on the walls, losing himself in the patterns.
His vision went haywire and he rubbed his eyes. He blinked and his eyes were befuddled again, but only by a certain location on the wall. He squinted, concentrating, trying to focus on what looked like a rubbishy scrawl marring an area of bare wall between rugs. From a distance it resembled a cloud of locusts. When he moved closer, forced to keep his eyes in a squint, the cloud separated into nonsense. Scribbles. His interest made Mick curious as well. The old man’s eyes became infected in turn; he vigorously rubbed them so his glasses hopped up and down on his nose.
Warlock didn’t want to know about it. He didn’t want to know about anything anymore, keeping his eyes and his thoughts to himself, swallowing like he was trying to choke a boiled egg down whole.
Doug wondered if it was just a bad attempt at modern art, drawn directly on the wall … and he thought graffiti was hard to take! There were no clashing neon colours; the work was done in thick black calligraphy. Something new-agey, he guessed.
But it seemed to throw him off balance more than it should. Parts of it, anyway. One section clamoured like a warning of something dangerous, but he couldn’t figure out why. The scribble did not look like any words or pictures he recognised.
There was another section that screamed like an obscenity. An regular purveyor of jailhouse graffiti, Doug was not easily offended, but this shook him. Again … how? It came from a notion he couldn’t pin down. To look at the thing, it was just another senseless scrawl.
Doug noticed Warlock had finally relented and was looking as well, head canted and squinting eyes. The punk didn’t seem surprised by what he saw, and his gaze wasn’t taking it in randomly. He seemed to be scanning it, like the small print of a contract.
“Is it something you’re familiar with?” Doug asked.
Warlock jumped.
“No,” he said. It wasn’t quite a lie.
“Jesus,” Mick muttered, turning away, “someone should find something to cover that up with.”
Warlock let slip a nervous smile.
In the end no-one had to take up Mick’s suggestion. The scribble on the wall was becoming harder to see; the living room kept dropping into darkness as if someone was twisting a dial, the storm cloud blue-grey light outside resembling a landscape wreathed in fog. The mountainous storm clouds never broke free from the horizon and the sun went down in secret, unseen.
“I hope he’s back soon … the husband,” Mick said, breaking the harsh quiet. “I hate doing this shit in the dark.”
“It’ll be to our a
dvantage,” Doug suggested, wondering if Mick had other concerns than just poor eyesight.
Another creak: a short, sly one.
It could have come from anywhere, not necessarily from the bedroom. Just devious sounds accommodating paranoid minds. But Doug knew he was not alone in imagining Cutter alive. He also caught Mick’s eyes darting toward the shut bedroom door and away again.
It wasn’t the sounds of the house settling that bothered Doug so much. The drawn-out silences in between stoked his unease a lot more. Silence made for all sorts of crazy speculation, like thinking they were noises someone was trying not to make.
Cutter’s injuries were mortal. Doug could not see him lying in wait behind the door, let alone climbing out the window and circling around behind them. Not in his condition.
Yet the descent into dusk didn’t encourage logical thinking. It did not foster faith in an authentic world. The room was disappearing into storm-cloud dark as if it was a motion that could be seen, like the second hand on a wall clock.
“Do you hear something?” Warlock asked.
The failing world was suddenly awash with brightness as powerful lights probed the room, transfixing the men in place. They were caught in the beams like rats, their eyes wide and unblinking. Large, printed shadows travelled the room, accompanied by the rumbling sounds of an arriving vehicle.
In Doug’s head someone was shouting Get down! Get down! Do it before they see you! But he was frozen in place, quite unable to move until he was no longer transfixed by the light.
After what seemed an eternity, the headlights veered away and darkness was restored to the room.
Outside, an engine switched off.
Doug motioned to the others to back away from the door and retreat to the furthest corners of the room. He didn’t think they had been spotted, but at the same time he felt bewildered, wondering if he should be ready for a trap. How did they not hear the vehicle coming? His ears had been alert for every creak and bump.
Warlock was slow to find a hiding place. He kept trying to look through the windows as he backed from them. “I didn’t see –”
“Shut up!” Doug and Mick whispered in unison.
Doug slipped into position behind the front door. He didn’t dare a peek out the window. There were no curtains to hide behind. Outside, a car door cracked open and slammed shut. There was another clunk of a door opening: was there more than one of them? Had the woman got away with a secret cry for help after all? Then Doug picked up what sounded like rummaging, hearing bottles clinking together. He remembered then. The husband – what was his name? Mitch? – had been on a shopping trip.
Doug and Mick had their guns ready. Warlock hurried to get his out, but Mick gestured for him to put it away. Warlock was fine with that, happy to be kept out of it. He hadn’t figured that when someone did come in through the front door, he would be the first person they saw. Doug and Mick were fine with that.
Outside, heavy footsteps advanced over the hard earth, grinding pebbles underfoot. The slow, steady tread halted before the porch. Doug waited, unable to get over the clarity of sound. How in hell had he missed the vehicle’s approach?
There was the sound of dirt scraping underfoot, soft, but prolonged. Doug guessed that Mitch had turned on the spot, either seeing or sensing something out of place. Then he cursed inwardly, remembering the crate. The very reason they were here in the first place had been left on the porch, overlooked in all the drama!
Doug got set to rush out after Mitch, but checked himself in time when the porch steps began to creak. Then came the tramp of shoes to the front door. There was the light rasp of a fumble with plastic bags, then the knob turned and the door swung inward. Doug pressed back behind it, gun raised.
The heavy tread continued – with Doug anticipating the sight of the back of Mitch’s head – but no-one entered the house. Mitch had either turned back to the jeep or was walking along the porch to inspect the crate. Heartily sick of playing hide and seek, Doug slid round the door to jump him … when he heard a heavy creak of floorboards behind him in the living room. He turned and gestured savagely at Warlock or Mick to keep to their places, but saw them where they were meant to be, in their respective corners. The footsteps, though, continued on across the floor with that consistent heavy tread: it appeared that no-one was attached to them.
Though Doug wanted to believe they were echoes from elsewhere in the house, he could place them easily – he always did have sharp ears. The taps briefly lost their sharp timbre as they crossed a rug, and then again briefly when they steered behind a lounge chair. Doug was totally flummoxed. For one wholly disorienting moment, he could only interpret it as Mitch being under the house, treading the boards upside down, with no regard for gravity, or the solid earth in the way.
The steps faltered to a stop in the approximate centre of the room and Doug pictured their maker the right way up again. He knew what had created the pause – the sight of the crazed motif exposed on the wall, the one that began to revolve if you stared at it too long. From the empty area of floor came the crackle and thump of plastic bags being put down. Silence followed.
Doug shook his head. Common sense kicked in: there had to be someone roaming about somewhere and it was just the sound carrying in an odd way. He leapt out the front door. But he saw no-one … not on the porch, not in the yard.
He returned in time to hear the steps start up again from the middle of the floor. They were hurrying now, and he brought his gun to bear, feeling both ridiculous and scared out of his mind. The urgent footsteps neither rushed him nor tried to escape the house, but hurried toward the bedroom. There they stopped briefly before the bedroom door. Then the doorknob turned and the door swung in, on its own.
There must’ve been someone hidden on the other side of the door who had opened it. It was the simplest, most logical explanation that Doug could think of as the impossible footsteps went through into the bedroom.
But all rational thought was banished when the scream peeled back the air.
Doug was struck hot and cold.
The scream refused to end. It had a deep undercurrent, a man’s throaty timbre to begin with, rising into woman’s high-pitched register, then it was no longer human at all, flying away into something almost ultrasonic.
Doug had never heard a cry so wracked with agony, horror and grief. And he was ashamed to admit he had heard a few in his time.
The scream finally fell away. In truth, it cut off without warning. It left behind a desolate ringing in the ears as slow to fade as an afterimage in the eye.
Doug was left grasping for lucid explanations. He refused to shiver. That would only validate his more preposterous ideas. But the shakes ripped through him anyway, impossible to resist. They worked him more brutally since he sought to keep them at bay, but to look at him, they didn’t show.
Mick and Warlock watched from their own remote corners, still firmly set in place, their stricken eyes trying to seek solace in Doug.
Leave me alone, he thought miserably.
“Where did he go? Did her husband run off?” Warlock stammered.
“I thought you said Cutter was dead,” Mick said.
Meanwhile, Doug was still clinging to the theory of people hiding behind doors and hidden sound speakers in floors. “C’mon, I’ve had enough,” he said, despising the weak, watery sound of his voice. “We’re going.”
Nobody had to be told twice.
Mick and Warlock quickly went outside, but Doug ignored his own advice and held back, watching the bedroom, the interior now exposed, but too dark to see inside. The open door began to shift. Starting up slowly, the door swiftly gained speed before it slammed shut.
Earlier, Doug would have dismissed it as the work of a draught of air.
Now, he didn’t know what to think.
The three men made a quick sweep of the yard, two of them doing it without fuss, Warlock imitating what he’d seen actors dramatically do in the movies.
Doug foun
d exactly what he suspected – or, rather, what he thought they wouldn’t find.
“Where’s the bloody jeep?” Mick demanded.
Doug recognised that the old man’s shrill anger was really masking fright. No-one could have run off with the jeep without their knowing; they were surely too on edge to have missed such a happening.
Mick loped off to the far side of the shed, then went behind the house. He came back looking savage.
“Forget it,” Doug said, “it’s gone.” He had to get them moving. Otherwise they would be so preoccupied with trying to figure out the mystery, they would be oblivious when doom overtook them. He had to keep their minds on the thing that had brought them to this.
“Warlock, help me with the crate.”
Together they hauled the crate that was both prize and burden off the porch. Mick followed, watching their backs. Doug’s end of the crate was lifted considerably higher while Warlock’s end kept swooping down and scratching the dirt.
“Where we going, Doug?” Warlock gasped.
Doug said it for Mick to hear, too. “We keep going until we find a through-road. And don’t ask me how far away it is. I don’t know. Or would you rather stay here?”
“No,” Warlock replied in a strained, earnest whisper, “I don’t want that.”
They turned from the small homestead onto a dirt road. It was long and surprisingly straight. Warlock was already failing, his short-lived lifts dwindling into lengthier drags along the ground. Doug, in the lead, did most of the work. Before long, Warlock and Mick would have to take it in turns. Before long, Doug might regret Cutter’s demise.
Warlock tried to say something and his end of the crate ploughed a deep furrow before he could raise it to skimming height again. Doug wouldn’t ease up on their fast pace. Warlock tried again, between gasps for breath.
“Doug. That car. I saw the headlights … but when they turned away from the house I … I couldn’t see anything behind them. I thought that maybe the car was a dark colour … or maybe it was moving fast and I missed it. Then I thought maybe the lights were motorbikes riding side by side. But it didn’t seem like there was anything at all behind the –”