The Dark Corners

by Robert J. Tilley

  At the time of his fumbling use of the alarm-button it had felt as though he’d managed to depress it fully, but what if it had developed a fault? He felt a fresh wave of despair. Maybe help wasn’t coming at all, his fate sealed by a bad wiring connection or some such. He stifled a sob. You have to keep him talking for as long as possible, he told himself, try to reason some sanity into his disordered brain. It’s probably jour only chance now.

  Through parched lips, he said, “I don’t understand any of this. You say I’m going to murder someone, but you haven’t told me who or why. Who are you, anyway, and what makes you so sure it’s me who’s going to do it? You didn’t actually see it happen, you’ve admitted that, so how can you be certain that it’ll be me and not somebody else?”

  There was no instant reply. The man coughed frequently now, his already laboured breathing clearly aggravated by the fumes emanating from the open can by his feet. At last, he said, “You’d derive no comfort from knowing any of those things.”

  He persisted. “It’s only fair that I know. Right now I haven’t harmed this person, and that means I’m innocent! I’ve committed no crime, and I wouldn’t harm anybody, I just wouldn’t!” He repeated his earlier plea. “Tell me who it is I’m supposed to kill, and I won’t do it, I swear on my mother’s grave I won’t:”

  A grotesque smile formed on the grey face. The man emitted a cough-punctuated travesty of a laugh that continued for a while before he spoke again.

  “A singularly empty promise, since your mother’s alive and well and will outlive you by many years.” His contempt was manifest. “In any event, that kind of assurance is meaningless, because if you live circumstances will eventually guarantee that you commit this atrocity. Simply the fact that killing you now may prevent it means that I have no other acceptable choice.” He studied him thoughtfully, then shrugged. “I suppose it’s only reasonable that you should be told. Death can often be seen as pointless, and at least it’ll make you understand why yours will have meaning. Mine, too; a matter of secondary importance, but I find it consoling.”

  He lowered his gaze, staring blankly at the floor as he talked, his narrative punctuated with regular pauses to enable him to gather his breath. “My parents had a troubled marriage. My father was frequently unfaithful, but most damage was done by his seemingly uncontrollable rages. He was unemployed for much of the time, and his frustration often led to his using violence towards my mother and I. He would often beat me for no good reason, and he struck her many times, usually for defending me. She once told me that this aspect of his behaviour was brought on by his dreams, nightmares that he couldn’t articulate clearly because they contained terrors that he couldn’t identify, and that we had to sympathise and not condemn him.”

  At least he’d achieved his initial aim, to keep him talking. He said, carefully, “It sounds like he was sick. Did your mother ever try to persuade him to get help? Psychiatry, that kind of thing?”

  “He refused to consider treatment. I imagine it was because he was terrified of having to face the things that were concealed in his dreams. Perhaps he was afraid that exposure to them would be the road to insanity, and as long as they remained hidden he was safe from that.”

  “Why didn’t your mother leave him, get the two of you away someplace where he wasn’t likely to find you?”

  Again the grey features twisted into a smile, this time a bitter one.

  “Compassion was a strong part of her nature, and it was also clear that at the very least she’d deluded herself into believing that she still loved him, despite his infidelity and violent outbursts. He possessed the usual qualities that encourage us to make fools of ourselves in that respect; good looks and charm, which in his case was an earthy and purely superficial attribute that he turned on and off like a tap whenever it suited him. It was a relationship that I never understood and never could, but love’s frequently an irrational emotion, of course, incomprehensible to the onlooker.” The man shrugged, wearily. “Perhaps I’m underestimating the depth of her feelings for him, but whatever they were she still recognised that he posed a risk as far as I was concerned and lived in constant fear for my safety. Despite that, she felt it was her duty to stay with him in the hope that eventually she’d be able to persuade him to accept the need for the kind of outside help that could exorcise his demons. After I was born she gave up her job to be with me until I reached school age. When I was old enough to be safely out of his way during the day, she did part-time work whenever it was available.”

  He did his best to introduce a sympathetic note into his voice. “That must’ve been tough, raising you with money only coming in sometimes.”

  “She’d inherited some from an uncle who’d died shortly before she met my father. Whenever it became necessary, she dipped into that. Just before I reached my teens, it had all gone. When it had, he looked for more elsewhere, which came as no surprise to me.” Cynicism coloured the rasping voice. “At a very young age I’d realised that he saw her principally as an accommodating meal-ticket who was illogically prepared to put up with his womanising and ill-treatment.

  “At the time he had a temporary delivery job that took him to other towns in the county. When he was in Gallerton he met a woman customer who ran her own successful small business and had also received a substantial settlement at the time of her divorce. He had, as you’ll have already gathered, a way with women, and he courted her, convincing her that he was unattached. Although her money was the initial attraction, after a while he found himself in a more serious relationship than he’d anticipated.

  “He decided to leave us, but on the day that he was packing his belongings my mother returned home earlier than expected. He was furious at being caught in this way, and there was an argument that escalated to the point where in order to hurt and humiliate her even further he told her why he was going. My mother was stung into responding by telling him that she’d find this woman and tell her the facts of his marital status and of the way he treated us. Faced with the possibility of losing both his new amour and the improvement to his personal circumstances her money would bring, he panicked.”

  The cynicism had gone now. Raw emotion had replaced it, thickening his voice into a relentlessly harsh sound, unsteady with deep feeling.

  “He beat my mother unconscious and set fire to the apartment, seeing this as a means of both ridding himself of her and destroying the evidence of his brutality, hoping to convince the authorities that she died accidentally after somehow causing it herself, but the rescue team managed to recover her body before it could be burned. The coroner’s report concluded that she’d been alive when he started the fire, and that her death had been caused by smoke-inhalation.”

  He talked on, temporarily lost in his memories; about his father’s arrest and subsequent confession when confronted with the testimony of a neighbour who’d detected smoke before seeing him leave the apartment, the court’s condemnation of his utter callousness towards her and his total lack of regard for the building’s other occupants, his imprisonment for first-degree murder and his suicide several months after his incarceration.

  He slowly shrank in his chair as the man’s story unfolded. Dear Christ, he thought, appalled. Surely he can’t be thinking that I’m—? No, that can’t be right! He hastily slammed a shutter closed in his mind, and plunged in again.

  “I don’t understand how anybody could do something like that. I guess he got what was coming to him, all right. So what happened to you afterwards?”

  “I was taken in by my mother’s parents. Shortly before her marriage to my father, something that they’d strongly advised against, they moved several hundred miles away, and after that underlined their disapproval by rarely contacting her. Her misguided loyalty to my father meant that they’d never known the truth about his treatment of her and me. After her death they attempted to assuage their consciences for ignoring her by treating me as the son they never had.

  “They were fundamentally decent peo
ple, and deeply regretted what they saw as their sin of omission. From that point on my life vas stable, and I buried myself in my school studies, principally as a means of trying to blot out the horrors that I’d gone through before. I had a natural bent for the sciences, and eventually became a researcher in the quantum physics field, finally working on a programme that’s made it possible for us to step back in time. That’s how I’m here, of course, against all the rules governing use of the process, I should add.”

  Clearly animated by this ostensible reference to his work, the grey-faced man continued talking, about the existing limitations of what had been achieved so far and how they hoped it would develop in the future, temporarily engrossed in his fanciful exposition.

  His relief at this unexpected diversion was short-lived. Insistently now the thought that had intruded so jarringly moments before returned, brusquely sweeping aside his initial rejection, demanding acceptance. He tried desperately to dismiss it again, but this time it refused to retreat, its glaring obviousness peremptorily swamping his resistance and rapidly forming an impenetrable barrier against any possibility of denial.

  It’s true, he thought, dazedly. Dear Christ, the crazy bastard thinks he’s talking about me! For some insane reason he’s selected me as the target for his delusion, identified me as the monster he’s been describing!

  My name! Of course, that’s it! He’s confused me with somebody else called David Simmons! He sobbed at the deadly irony of this coincidence. It left unexplained how the man’s tortured memories had deformed themselves into his belief that he’d travelled back in time to wreak vengeance on his parent, but perhaps his sickness was responsible.

  Whatever the nature or cause of his obvious illness his condition could have affected his mind as well as his body, drawn him into this feverish fantasy. Maybe he really was involved in some scientific programme that was investigating the possibility of time- travel, and if he was it was perfectly logical to assume that his afflicted state had resulted in his conviction that they’d succeeded, and that his dream of revenge would become a reality.

  Yes, that made its own twisted kind of sense. But even though he’d reasoned out the most probable explanation for this lunatic belief, he still had to face up to the obdurate fact that words were still his only weapon, an acceptance of the meagreness of his memory that left him feeling hollow, teetering on the very edge of despair.

  He dragged himself away from it with every ounce of mental effort that he could muster. Use them, then, he urged himself, exhaustedly. Use them, and keep on using them as long as possible. Maybe help’s still coming after all, but either way you have to keep him talking. Whatever you do, though, don’t push, try to force the issue. Challenging him was a waste of breath, so simply denying that you’re his future father won’t get you any place. What you’ve got to do is coax him, gently lead him to the realisation that there’s no way you could possibly be the murderous bully he thinks you are; convince him that you genuinely are appalled by what he’s told you, and that the whole thing’s a terrible mistake.

  Barely conscious of what was being said during the man’s discourse, he suddenly realised that it had ended. Caught off-guard, he swallowed hastily, and blurted: “You’ve had a real tough time, mister, that’s for sure.” What to say, what to say? Quick, quick, you mustn’t hesitate! He seized on the first thought that came to him.

  “Do you know what he was going to do about you if he’d gotten away with it? You say he’d fooled this woman into believing that he didn’t have any kind of ties, so he couldn’t have taken you along with him. I guess that’d have been the last thing he’d have wanted to do, anyway.”

  Was that anger he saw again beginning to cloud the leaden face? Oh, God, he thought, sickly, am I doing this all wrong?

  Panic froze his imagination. Helplessly locked on the course that his inattention had hurried him into taking, he babbled on. “I mean, was he just going to disappear after a while, simply dump you, or was he planning to kill you too before he took off? Either way that’d have brought the police—” He faltered to a halt, shocked into horrified silence by the now unmistakable effect of his words.

  The grey features were dark with fury, a reaction that brushed aside his clumsy edifice of interest like so much matchwood. He quailed before the basilisk glare, despairingly recognising that instead of easing; the man towards acknowledgement of his error his attempt at ingratiation had in all probability just confirmed his own certain death.

  The man said, “Trying to change my mind by undermining my determination with a show of interest and mock-sympathy is quite pointless, believe me.” His voice was harshly implacable, with a vicious edge to it that cut into his consciousness like a razor-edged knife, “Even so, I’m going to answer your questions, so that before you die you appreciate the lengths that he was prepared to go to, to achieve what he thought of as his freedom.”

  His hands, which had been moving restlessly on the arms of his chair, now gripped them tightly. “Before taking his own life he wrote me a note, but in view of ray age and its contents it was withheld from me. It was only when I reached my late teens and asked my grandparents if he’d mentioned me before doing away with himself that they reluctantly told me of its existence. They’d kept it, and since by then I’d matured beyond my years they decided that I was capable of facing the truth, and gave it to me.”

  The rasping voice was gradually thickening again.

  “I’d naively assumed that it would contain at least some hint of remorse, perhaps even a request for forgiveness for the things he’d done. Instead, I found myself reading the self-pitying ranting of someone who clearly only considered his own wants and appetites. In it, he admitted that in the panic of the moment he’d overlooked the problem that I’d pose afterwards, and told me that if he hadn’t allowed himself to be rushed into doing what he did he’d have waited until I returned home from school and then subjected me to the same treatment that he’d meted out to my mother before starting the fire. With both of us dead he could have gone to this woman unencumbered; able, in his own words, to make a clean, fresh start, even if he hadn’t been unlucky enough to be caught, he said, he couldn’t have killed or deserted me soon after my mother’s death without arousing suspicion.

  “This meant that my continuing existence would have robbed him of what he wanted, and he damned me for it, saving that he wished I’d never been born.”

  Rage and contempt clotted the grating voice.

  “These twisted regrets for what might have been were the last outpourings of a sick and sadistic mind before he ended his own wretched life with a knotted shirt-sleeve around his neck, a suitably shabby finish to a life that should have ended many years earlier, before he could inflict his brutality on someone who wasted her own life by convincing herself that he deserved her love and tolerance and pity.”

  Provoked by the vehemence of these final words, a paroxysm of coughing wracked the man for a full minute. When it eventually subsided, he sat slumped in his chair, breathing deep, shuddering breaths, his eyes closed and his grey features now drawn to the point of emaciation.

  He wrenched desperately at his bonds, shaking his head wildly in repeated denial. “No, no, you’ve got this all wrong!” He was gabbling, almost incoherent, all thought of gradual persuasion abandoned. “I’m not him, I’m not! There are Simmons’s all over, don’t you see? It’s a common name, like Smith, and Jones, and Brown, and Green! In any case, I couldn’t do any of those things! I couldn’t hurt people like that, especially if they were my own family!” He writhed helplessly, sweat and tears intermingling as they streamed down his face. “I couldn’t do things like that, I just know I couldn’t!”

  The man slowly roused himself again. Apart from the visible tremor of his hands, now resting claw-like on the arms of his chair, he was suddenly calm, exhibiting no sign of the passion that had possessed him a short while before.

  “The seeds of extreme cruelty are in all of us. Circumstances dictate
whether or not they ever influence our behaviour.” The sunken eyes watched his contortions detachedly. “History’s shown us that subjected to the right stimulus they can turn perfectly rational and humane beings into savages, capable of atrocities that would normally be beyond their imagining. The desire for retribution can become that kind of cancer, something that I can personally vouch for. As to your identity, do you think I’d forget my father’s face, his voice? Believe me, they’re like festering sores in my memory.” He shrugged. “You may well be telling the truth about yourself as you are now, but unless you die before these things can happen that’s the unspeakable creature that you’ll become, for whatever reason. Remember, I’ve seen and suffered the abominable things that you’d do, and I’m going to change them if I can. The only chance of that is by killing you, which is why I must do it.”

  The words struck him like a barrage of heavy stones, remorseless and unforgiving, stunning him once more to near-insensibility. He sagged beneath their onslaught, again conjuring up the earlier image of himself crouched in petrified stillness on the flimsy transparency suspended over bottomless darkness, only now this wafer of protection was inexorably tilting as though on some unseen axis. He felt himself slipping and opened his mouth to scream when something halted his slide, a mental handhold that he clung to with one final surge of hope.

  “That can’t be true, it can’t!” He was shouting now, his voice hoarse and ragged with desperation. “But even if it was, don’t you see what killing me would mean? You won’t exist, because you couldn’t. If I die now there’s no way that this woman and I could become your parents, don’t you see that?”

  Through the water filming his eyes he again saw the travesty of a smile distort the leaden face.