by Ed O'Connor
‘What the bloody hell?’ He dropped the phone as a sharp blow struck him squarely in the face. He fell backwards onto the sofa. Underwood was on him quickly, slamming the side of Heyer’s head with the wooden grip of his hammer. Heyer slumped, bleeding, to the floor. Underwood gasped for breath in the heat of his triumph. The surprise in Heyer’s eyes had been a joy to behold. He gathered his strength and hauled Heyer’s wheezing body into the kitchen.
Julia Underwood had been vaguely aware of background noises, but the softness of the double bed had drawn her back into a deep sleep. Even the buffeting wind at the window and the muffled crashing of the sea didn’t bother her. In fact, she found it comforting – hypnotic, almost. She turned over and dreamed of music.
Underwood tied Heyer’s hands and feet tightly with rope and dragged him from the house. The spiteful air tore at Underwood’s clothes as he hauled the groaning man to the cliff edge. It was only twenty yards but it required a monstrous effort: the sweat seemed to freeze against his skin like water frosting against glass. The pain was driving at Underwood’s chest, seemingly growing more acute with every heartbeat. His thoughts scattered in all directions like chickens evading a fox. Concentrate.
Underwood pulled the prone form closer to the cliff edge, until Heyer’s head hung – face down – over the precipice. Blood streamed from his head wound and fell in dark beads into the void. The terrifying drop made Underwood nauseous but his fury drove him on; the hissing of water on the rocks seemed deafening to him now. It was as if the taste of Heyer’s blood had excited the waves into a fury of hunger; they were reaching for the wife-fucker, begging to pull him down with them and tear the flesh from his adulterous bones.
Underwood hesitated. The moment had come. He had to decide. He had the power to reduce Heyer to his elemental parts: smash him back into water, iron and carbon, reduce him to silt and fish shit. He could dissolve Heyer into the waves.
The thought was stimulating. When the sunlight evaporated the sea water, he would watch Heyer rise with the steam, he would deride the blackening clouds and mock the man that he’d imprisoned there. When the rain fell from the sky, he would stand agape and feel the droplets splash Paul Heyer onto his tongue. He would drink himself turgid and piss the bastard back into the sea, entomb him in the cycle for ever.
It would be easy.
Julia was in the house, warm and unaware. Julia Cooper, the little girl who made him cry. Julia Underwood, the woman who no longer loved him, reborn as Julia Heyer. She was shedding the unwanted skin in her sleep. How would she react to her lover’s reduction, Underwood wondered. How would she regard his dissolution? Would she tingle at his cold touch whenever she swam in the sea? Would she howl her pain at the godless sky when she tried to hold her martyred lover and he ran uselessly through her fingers? Would she drink the rainwater with relish and draw the man inside her for ever? Would he swim in her saliva and linger in her tears?
Would the memory of the man be more potent than the reality? Underwood’s heart burned in his chest and he sank to his knees on the yielding earth, close to exhaustion and uncertain of how to proceed.
He had become a stranger to his own mind, uncertain of its capabilities. His rational mind was like a frightened bird, floating on an ocean of anger and despair; unable to fly, too scared to dive. Memories flared at him, made acute by his pain, merging and folding until he came to confuse them with imagination. A marriage without love; a marriage without sex; a marriage without children. He was existing without living. Maybe he had died the night he and Julia had first met and had existed since then only in a terrible purgatory; scrambling blindly in circles unable to climb to the light.
So where was he now? On top of the mountain, perhaps, one short step, one killer blow from paradise. Would his guilt and despair die with Paul Heyer? The question surprised him: emerging without warning from a primitive part of his brain that hadn’t yet learned to deceive itself. Why should he be stricken with guilt? Julia had betrayed him. She had disavowed their marriage; the holy fucking union. He had done nothing wrong.
He almost believed himself: the burden of half-invented evidence was almost compelling. Then, as the truth gradually broke through his inventions and contortions, somewhere far out on the surface of the churning water the bird broke free and started to fly. For a split second Underwood saw the terrible virulence of the lie and realized it had infected everything. The truth was that he had failed her; he had fallen short of her expectations. He had failed to return the love she had so willingly offered. The guilt didn’t come from his failure. It came from his denial of responsibility. He was a horror to himself.
Paul Heyer could suddenly taste metal. Rusty metal. There was noise and he was cold, very cold. There was pressure on his chest. He had trouble breathing. His head pounded as he struggled to understand where he was. Something warm tickled at the corner his mouth. Blood. He remembered Underwood, standing right behind him – inside the cottage. He tried unsuccessfully to move his hands and then snapped open his eyes.
For an instant he thought he was dead and staring through the gates of Hell itself. Water smashed and snarled onto the rocks below, far below. Was he falling? Panic seized him. He clamped his eyes shut as the stones and foaming water suddenly seemed to rush up at him. He braced for the terrible impact: the crushing of his ribcage and rupturing of his organs, the dashing of his brains against the rocks. The Spartans threw their weakest children off mountain tops. Unnatural selection. Perish the thoughtful.
The pain never came.
The kitchen door crashed shut with an impact that shook the entire cottage and Julia Underwood sat up bolt upright in shock. Paul wasn’t there. The bed was cold. Had he gone outside? She swung her legs out of the bed, her naked skin pimpling in the chill air, and pulled on Paul’s dressing gown.
‘Paul?’ she called out from the top of the stairs, suddenly afraid. The old house rattled in reply as another gust threatened to tear it from its foundations. Julia cursed and hurried downstairs. The wooden floor felt freezing against her bare feet. She turned on the kitchen light. There was no sign of Paul.
Outside, Underwood saw the light and brushed away his tears as if embarrassed by the glare. He noticed Heyer was moving. He was alive, straining at the rope. This was the pathetic offspring his life of failure had produced. Throwing the child from the mountain top wouldn’t lighten his guilt. It would be a further act of denial.
Underwood looked out across the black water into the very eye of time. He thought of a second of compressing time; of imagining every emotion, action, decision of his life crushed into a nanosecond. That would have been ideal. There would have been no time to become bored, no time to make mistakes, no time to become isolated. However, time passes slowly and agonizingly, lingering on failure and disappointment the way traffic slows to study a road accident. Life itself is a purgatory; a common bath of pain in which we struggle to purge the consequences of our mistakes. Guilt is the torture of the piteous.
Underwood could see Julia looking out through the kitchen window, straining her eyes to decipher the darkness. He remembered they had bought their first home together in the summer of 1983. The previous owner had been a widower. He had been in his late sixties, worn down by life and loneliness and with deep lines of sadness cutting across his face. He lacked the energy to maintain the house. John Underwood had pitied the old man, sensing his pain and resignation. He had been struck by the contrast with his own situation, then so full of promise. The old man had seen it as well. Eighteen years later and Underwood knew that he too now faced the void alone. There was always time enough to make mistakes, and to dwell on them.
‘What the fuck’s going on?’ shouted Heyer above the screaming wind. ‘Get me away from the edge.’
The only real sin is to sharpen the agony of others. Life is an agony, but a shared agony; a shared bath of pain. For in a common bath of teares it bled. Which drew the strongest vitall spirits out. Perhaps the agonies of fury and failure had d
rawn out the ‘vitall spirits’ of his brutality. He had been reborn in a bath of tears: now he was reaching for the light, gasping for air.
Underwood thought suddenly of Elizabeth Drury, suspended in a solution of blood and water: returned to a prenatal state in death. He hadn’t thought of that before. Drury and Harrington had entered death as they had entered life. Except, he remembered, their eyes had been torn out. Two left eyes. Was the placement of the bodies in water intended to signify that they too had been reborn? Was the removal of the eyes some kind of rite that occasioned the transformation? Why would you need two left eyes?
‘Listen to me,’ Heyer gasped. ‘This is crazy. Look at yourself. Look at what you’re doing. Don’t throw your life away.’
Underwood looked down at Heyer and then beyond him to the black hissing mass of shale and rock. The pain in his chest was growing ever more acute. An uncomfortable sense of his own fragility twisted at his guts. He felt a cold stab of panic. Walking into the night alone suddenly terrified him. Heyer tried to shift his weight away from the cliff edge. Underwood knelt on the man’s back and entwined his fingers in Heyer’s hair.
‘My life?’ Underwood shouted. ‘What do you mean, my life? You have walked into my life and taken what you wanted. This is all that’s left, my friend.’
‘This won’t help you,’ Heyer gasped as Underwood’s weight bore into him. ‘She’ll hate you.’
‘Do you read the papers?’
‘What?’
‘Do you read the fucking papers?’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘I’ve spent the week chasing some maniac who hacks women’s eyes out.’
‘Bully for … y – you.’ Heyer spat the words defiantly as the air was squeezed from his lungs.
‘And you, you’ve been screwing my wife – buying her clothes, buying her dinner, buying her a fucking holiday.’
‘Fuck you.’
‘Maybe I should hack your eye out.’ Underwood squeezed the sides of Heyer’s left eyeball with his thumb and index finger. ‘You couldn’t buy another one of those, could you? I could open you up so we can all see all the nasty conniving shit that goes on in the back of your head.’
‘You’re pathetic. If you were going to kill me you’d have done it by now. You’re just a bully. Julia was right about you.’ Heyer’s head was throbbing, he was nauseous, the night was whirling disturbingly around him. ‘You’re just a coward.’
But Underwood wasn’t listening. A terrible realization had sliced across the surface of his brain like a razor across skin. He struggled to follow its insane logic. Why do you need two left eyes? What do you gain from having them – unless …
Underwood stood and Heyer’s chest heaved as the pressure on him was finally released. He dragged oxygen back into his desperate lungs. Why do we have two of everything? Two kidneys, two lungs, two eyes. Underwood watched the flickering lights of a passenger plane crawling towards him across the night. By some curious and terrible osmosis the idea was creeping into his consciousness.
What do we gain from having two of everything?
He dragged Heyer away from the cliff edge and hauled him to the beach path that uncoiled steeply downwards about ten yards away.
Insurance. If one kidney stops working, you still have another. Does the killer have one eye? Jesus – is he walking around with a ravaged eye rammed into an empty socket? How would you lose an eye? Maybe he’s been in a car accident. Maybe he was a soldier. Underwood tried to concentrate his madness away. The eyes were dead and useless: they were most likely terribly damaged. What use would they be? The killer is almost certainly male. If replacement is his motive, wouldn’t he have chosen male targets? Were the eyes intended for someone else?
He steadied himself against the wind. Julia has two men. Why? Because one stopped functioning so she got herself another. The simplicity of the equation made him feel desperately sad. Half of the double helix sloughed away in that moment: only despair remained. Maybe he could purge the guilt after all: progress through pain. Maybe she deserved the chance.
‘Do you love her?’ Underwood asked suddenly.
‘Of course I do,’ Heyer growled.
‘Say it.’
‘I love her.’
‘Say it like you mean it.’
‘I do mean it. She knows it. Now so do you.’
The weight had lifted slightly. Slowly, as though waking from a terrible dream, Underwood turned his back on Heyer and walked unsteadily towards the light.
Julia couldn’t see anything, despite straining her eyes at the dark shadow of the clifftop. Her irritation at not being able to find Paul was rapidly being replaced with a profound sense of unease. The house was alive with strange sounds. She sat down in an armchair and gathered Paul’s dressing gown tightly around her. Where is he? She turned on a reading lamp and felt the chill air rush at her ankles as the kitchen door clicked open. Relieved, Julia jumped to her feet and, stepping quickly over the cold wooden floor, came face to face with her husband. He stood motionless in the centre of the kitchen: ill, gaunt and broken-hearted.
Underwood tried to order his thoughts through the pain that was gnawing at his insides. Japanese soldiers placed hungry rats on the stomachs of Allied prisoners of war and then covered the rats with metal tins. The animals chose the path of least resistance and ate their way downward. He felt that pain now: hungry rats tearing through his flesh, scrambling furiously over each other in their frenzy to escape. He gasped for air and steadied himself against the kitchen table. Blood in the bathwater signifies rebirth. Why do you need two left eyes? Dexter would know. Alison is clever. Ali is a star: sharp like salt on your tongue. Didn’t Stussman call that wit? The killer would appreciate it.
Julia’s gut twisted into a knot of fear and pity.
‘John?’ He looked at her, through her and behind her. ‘What the hell are you doing?’
Underwood blinked away the madness and found his wife at the centre of his field of vision.
‘Hello, Julia.’
‘Where’s Paul?’
Underwood turned his head slightly towards the kitchen window. ‘Getting some air.’
‘What have you done?’ She was scared now. There was blood on his hands.
‘I thought the two of you needed some space.’ Underwood stepped in front of her as she made for the kitchen door. ‘So I created some.’
‘For Christ’s sake, John.’
‘I’m not going to hurt you, Julia.’
‘If you’ve hurt him, I’ll never forgive you.’
‘You wouldn’t, anyway. It makes it easier, doesn’t it? Gives you a reason to hate me.’
‘I’ve got plenty of those.’
‘I think you feel frustrated, disappointed, let down, blah, blah, blah. But you don’t hate me, Julia.’
‘I’m working on it – and you’re helping.’ She tried to push past him again. He held her wrist, firmly but without malice. He wondered how long he could hold her. She was strong and his energy was bleeding away. The rats were in his head now, scratching and tearing at his brain.
‘Do you remember what your mother said about me, when we got engaged?’ he asked.
‘John, let me go.’
‘She said that one day I’d break your heart.’ Underwood hacked agonizingly – dark strings of blood flew onto his free hand. He seemed surprised. The wreckage inside him was oozing to the surface. Julia watched in horror.
‘You’re ill. You’ve got to get help.’
Underwood swallowed the warm glue that hung in the back of his throat. ‘Was she right, Julia?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Right at the beginning. She could see how much you loved me. She knew I could never live up to that. She knew that I could never love you unconditionally like you did. She saw that something was missing. And you know, after a time, I realized she was right. I couldn’t.’
Julia felt tears of frustration and waste welling up behind her
eyes, crawling up from the great cave of grief inside her. ‘Why not? Why couldn’t you? That’s how I loved you.’
‘That’s why.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I lied to you, Julia. I let you believe I was something, someone that I’m not. I made you love me. I didn’t want to lose you. So I gave you the person you wanted for as long as I could.’
‘Why have you never said this before?’
‘If you could see into my head you’d know. It’s a bad place to be.’
‘But why?’
He fixed her with a sad, hopeless gaze. ‘I don’t know,’ he said despairingly. ‘The things I have seen; the things I think. You wouldn’t want to go there. I locked you out. I didn’t want to ruin you with it.’
‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘If you really knew me, you wouldn’t love me.’
‘That should be my decision, not yours. Besides, I know you better than anyone.’
‘Except me.’
A wave of anger washed over her. It was insulting of him to claim that she didn’t know him. She had spent twenty years with him.
‘You don’t know yourself at all,’ she said bitterly.
Underwood released his grip on Julia’s wrist and immediately missed the urgent spring of her pulse against his fingers. He knew she was gone. She was dead to him now. He would never touch her again. He sat down. He was falling through the branches: there was no one to catch him. ‘Four dead bodies,’ he said quietly. ‘Lifeless, mutilated things reborn in tears and blood. Two of them, two women, had a bad thing done to them. Can you guess what?’