Exit Unicorns

by Cindy Brandner

  She nodded, not looking up, her hand streaked and sticky with blood pressed hard into the boy’s neck.

  It took five minutes, though it felt like five hours, to locate a phone, to assure the barman he was neither dying nor about to make a long distance call to foreign relations. He dialed the number slowly, reciting the numbers off as though they were a child’s nursery rhyme.

  The voice that answered, on the fifth ring, was tired, annoyed and in no mood, Duncan suspected, to be running out into the night at the behest of a total stranger. “I’d like to speak to James Kirkpatrick,” he said trying for a strong and commanding tone.

  “This is he,” came back the curt reply.

  “My name is Duncan MacGregor an’ I’m callin’ fer Pamela or rather on behalf of her, I was to tell you that Pat is badly hurt, an’ I can vouch for that an’ that yer to meet us under the shipyard bridge, she said ye’d know where an’ that I wasn’t to tell anyone else, I was only to talk to yourself.”

  There was a long pause at the other end of the line. “Have you quite finished then?” asked the voice, still curt, but now with an underlying note of urgency.

  “I have,” Duncan replied meekly.

  “Is she hurt?”

  “Yes, in a manner of speaking, you could say she’s pretty bad off.”

  “You go back, you help her in any way you can and you tell her I’m coming.” The phone went down then with a sharp click and Duncan swallowed a lump of nausea in his throat. This was not a man to cross; however, Duncan also sensed this was a man that could handle the travesty of this evening.

  It was three minutes hard run back to the train, where he saw to his dismay that the train had been moved off the tracks for the night and was shuttered in darkness. Dear God, were they locked in for the night? If so, there was hardly any way to get them out without raising one hell of a lot of unwanted attention. He glanced about wildly, half-blind with desperation and saw a dim flash of white. Beyond the lights of the train yard, in the phosphorescent blue of late night he saw her and, slumped, in her arms was the boy, still unconscious. He ran for them, head pounding, throat constricted.

  “He’s coming,” he gasped out, stopping abruptly some two feet away from her.

  “Do you know where the bridge is?” she asked desperation written clearly across her face.

  Duncan nodded.

  “You have to go and get him, bring him here, I cannot move Pat, I had to take him off the train and I’m afraid of what that may have done. Bring Jamie to me, please.” Her voice was pleading, her eyes bright with tears and he wanted to tell her that she needn’t beg, he would fly to the ends of the earth for her at this moment, he would run as far and fast as need be in order to flee from the images on the train. In order to grasp back something that he had lost irrevocably on the train, something inside of him that had turned its face in disgust and pain as he saw men become beasts and take far more from a girl than her body could offer.

  It was a hard ten minutes to the bridge and when he arrived there he couldn’t speak, his bruised throat clutching for air, his legs feeling like jelly underneath of him. There was a man waiting beside a somber gray car, a man who stepped forward sharply and grabbed a heaving, winded Duncan.

  “Where is she?”

  Duncan gasped and flailed in the general direction from which he’d flown. He was thrust unceremoniously into the car and asked directions in a brutally direct voice. Duncan gestured and croaked and prayed with half his mind that they would make it there in one piece. However fast the man drove though was more than equaled by his precision. They were on the edge of the trainyard within minutes.

  She was collapsed on the ground, still bare from the waist up, her coat gone to cover the boy, who lay frightfully still and inert on the ground. She gleamed there under the moonlight, blue, black, ivory, like some glowing, too fine jewel. The man went to her first, ripping his jacket off, covering her and then turned his immediate attention on the boy. He felt down his body, pressed his thumb into the boy’s wrist and then turned to Duncan,

  “Give me your shirt.” Duncan obeyed without question, shivering as the night air hit his body. The man stripped down as well, tied the clothing together into a crude, makeshift stretcher, then said,

  “Duncan, you’ll have to help me, Pamela roll Pat up on his side, the right side, put one hand on his hip and one on his shoulder, we need to avoid his ribs at all costs, Duncan we’ll put the stretcher under him, then ease him back onto it. Gently and slowly.”

  Duncan gratefully followed his commands, making each step and move as he was instructed until the boy, Pat, was lying on the back seat of the big gray car. The girl huddled in the front and Duncan was about to back away, head for home or the hills he cared not which, when the man’s voice stopped him cold.

  “Get in the car. Until I know exactly what happened tonight and who did it, no one goes anywhere.”

  It didn’t even occur to Duncan to make a run for it. There was that much authority in the man’s voice.

  He sat in the front, the girl wedged between himself and the man, from the back there was no sound, not even that of breathing.

  When they stopped at long last, Duncan gazed out in stupefaction, realizing quite suddenly what shock had hid from him previously. His father had shown him the house and told him the tales of it more than once. Kirkpatrick’s Folly. He’d never thought to be on the inside of it though and had he ever had such small daydreams, they certainly never included this sort of dire circumstance.

  “I’ll need you to help me get Pat inside,” the man said and the knowledge of exactly who this man was, shook Duncan’s staid soul to the core.

  For the next half hour, he followed orders precisely and without hesitation or thought. The boy (he tried desperately not to think of him as Pat, somehow him having a name made the situation that much worse) was moved inside, to a downstairs room obviously prepared for him. There was a small, gray-haired man present, whom Duncan realized shortly was a doctor. Only this house on the hill could exert the summons that would bring a doctor on a housecall.

  He lost track of the girl (it was even harder to think of her without a name, but he was grimly determined not to, just the same) in that first half hour and sat finally when it seemed everyone had disappeared, waiting until the man (Lord Kirkpatrick, god help him) told him he could go. If he hadn’t been entirely certain that he would be hunted to the ends of the earth like a dog, he’d have run for it at the first chance.

  He was completely disoriented and frightened by the whispering voices he heard upon waking some time later. It came back to him in bits, the events of the night and he had to hold his head in his hands for some moments to control the nausea that surged through him. He stood then, trying to locate the voices, realizing that they weren’t whispering, but just distant from him.

  He walked down the thickly carpeted hall, towards the sound, individual words forming out of the up and down cadences of agitated speech. ‘Boy, stranger, not certain, multiple breaks,’ these words made themselves clear and then hesitating by a set of oak double doors, Duncan heard the conversation of the two people inside.

  “Honestly James he should be moved to a hospital, he’s going to require surgery, who on earth is he? Even the pope goes to hospital.”

  There was a murmured reply that Duncan could not make out and then a sharp intake of breath from the doctor and “well yes I can see the difficulties presented there, however we could make up a feasible story, it’s possible to the inexperienced eye that this could seem like the result of a car accident. We’ll take him in under an assumed name, I have to be certain that there’s no internal bleeding and that arm will need pins, it’s broken in at least five places that I can discern, heaven knows what will show up on x-ray.”

  “And the girl,” came the other voice, hard and flat.

  The doctor sighed before replying, “L
ess physical damage but Lord only knows what happened, she’s not saying much. She was raped multiple times though, I can tell you that. There are cuts in her mouth that would indicate—” Duncan plugged his ears and slumped against the wall. He didn’t need to hear what the doctor was saying, he would never forget what had happened to that girl on the train, that girl who had been laughing, green eyes shining at her friend and then only moments later had been kneeling on the dirty floor of the train, naked, mouth forcibly opened by the blunt, brutal hands of Bernie, opened to receive him in terror and disgust. Duncan felt the nausea sweep him again and unstopped his ears. “…left her with some antibiotics to deal with any secondary infection, stitched the tear in her vaginal wall—took four stitches that. She’ll have to be checked again on a fairly regular basis, god knows what sort of venereal diseases those animals might have and of course there’s always the possibility of pregnancy. She’ll need help, Jamie.”

  “She’ll have it,” was the terse reply.

  “Fine, be certain she takes the antibiotics. I want to see her again in a week, here if that’s better for all concerned but now I have to arrange to get that young fellow to hospital.”

  “We’ll follow later,” the man named Jamie said.

  “Not to hurry, he’ll be unconscious for quite some time,” there was a deep breath, whether the doctor’s or Jamie’s, Duncan could not tell, and then, “this is really a police matter, if it should somehow get out of my hands at the hospital...”

  “Don’t allow it to,” came the reply, “the RUC are hardly likely to look with sympathy on her case once they realize who she is or rather who she lives with. Regardless, she refuses and I tend to agree, this system would only re-victimize her and if her,” he paused and coughed, “husband were to find out there would be hell of a kind you can’t quite imagine to pay.”

  Duncan raised his head at that. Husband? The girl had a husband? This was getting messier by the minute. He stood and looked around in bewilderment for an exit and finally decided on the door off to his far right when a cool voice said, “Duncan, I’d appreciate it if you’d stop eavesdropping and come in.”

  Duncan meekly did as he was told.

  The eyes, green as jade, held no mercy, no compassion. Nor did the face, hard and composed against its bones, betraying nothing, unrevealing of what stakes this man held in tonight’s events.

  “Sit,” said the man, whom Duncan had seen only in magazines and on the television where he constantly seemed to be evading the camera, even while facing it directly.

  Duncan sat and found a glass of whiskey placed in his hands.

  “Drink it, you’ll need it before you see an end to this night.”

  Duncan drank it, eyes filling with tears from the strength of it.

  “Now you will tell me what happened tonight.”

  “I didn’t—I couldn’t—” Duncan began, tripping over his tongue in his nervousness.

  “For some things Duncan,” the voice was mild, though it held the sting of poisoned honey, “excuses may be applied; in this situation they are not acceptable.”

  “Yes, sir,” Duncan replied, free hand bunching the cloth of his trouser leg.

  The story came out then, from start to finish—the game, Bernie’s resulting mood, the couple on the train, the brimstone smell of hatred and danger in the air and his knowledge of what was about to take place from the instant Bernie set eyes on the girl. What had been done to the boy, what had been done to the girl in its detail and grotesqueness. He did not spare himself even the tale of his own cowardice. Through it all the man who sat in front of him uttered not a word, not a sound, nothing to indicate that the story touched him in the slightest. Finally, to his own relief he burbled to an end and was grateful for the silence that followed. A paper and pen were placed in his hands a moment later.

  “The names of the boys, first and last, middle if you know it. Where they live, where they wander, what they eat and to whom they pray, no detail is to be considered too small.”

  “I—but—” Duncan began to protest but the words quickly wilted on the vine as he looked up and met the unemotional gaze and ungiving mouth of his host. Here, he thought, was someone far more frightening than Bernie. Excuses did not apply and would be less than welcome. He would have to take his chances with Bernie. He wrote the names and across from them all the habits he understood if not of the individual boys, than of their neighborhood, of their race, the dark haunts, the appetites bred in some by poverty and ignorance, in others by some vicious twist of nature itself.

  “Thank you,” said Lord James Kirkpatrick when Duncan handed him the paper, trembling, that could signify a swift and ugly end to his young life.

  “What now? I mean shouldn’t the police be called?” Duncan asked desperation spilling out and ahead of his words.

  Folding the paper in half and laying it with a light hand beside him, James Kirkpatrick said, “I think you will find this entire situation simplified Duncan if you abandon pretense.”

  “No police then.”

  “No police.”

  “What do I do, where do I go?” Duncan asked with the anger of one who knows home is not an option.

  “Perhaps a university overseas, in a place where the pearls of democracy float toward the shore rather than away and men,” the green eyes, lightless and dense, met his own like the thrust of a sword to a soft vulnerability, “still have the ability to dream.”

  Duncan took the point as he was indeed meant to. “But how, I don’t know anyone or anything—” he faltered, aware that he was treading on ground not of his own making.

  “Duncan you will find life considerably less confusing if you realize that all things can be arranged piecemeal to become a, if not familiar, at least livable structure. Do you understand?”

  Duncan, for not the first time in his abbreviated history, thought miserably that he did.

  In the time it took to mount the stairs, traverse the hallway and enter his own bedroom, Jamie had sorted, sifted and refined his emotions for the task that lay ahead of him. He opened the door to the room and closed another within his mind, recently cracked to light and hope. He turned to the paler declivities of the brain, ones without emotion and frailty and put the hasp firmly to its lodging and slid the bolt home. There was no place for weakness here, he must tonight and for possibly a great deal longer be the flesh to blunt the knifepoint, the beebalm upon the thistle, the sponge to sop the venom from wounds unseen. He put away from him, as the man in the psalm once had, the things that could or might have been.

  She was no more than a huddle of wool and linen on the bed, the bedside lamp providing only a small halo of light that puckered in folds and hollows.

  “Pamela?” he whispered, but to his ears overly alert and sensitive, it seemed a shout.

  “Can I have a bath now?” she asked, voice small but steady. “Now that the doctor is done.”

  “Of course,” he said, grateful to have a task, however small, with which to occupy his hands.

  He started the bath, adjusted the water and then rummaged through the cupboards to find some scent, to take from her nose, at least, the memory of the train. At the far back of one shelf, pushed carefully there after his wife had left, were rows of small dark bottles, stoppered with old, cloudy glass. Oils from flowers and fruit, from herbs and trees, elixirs to bind thought and fear, for Colleen had been very desperate to believe that anything might help, even the bitter scent of dead blossom. He picked up the one closest and read the carefully lettered label in Colleen’s small, precise hand. ‘Betony- For Purification and Protection against evil.’ A bit late for that he thought but dropped a small stream of it into the water. ‘Heather- to guard against violence and aid in the conjuring of ghosts,’ read the next. Again too late, he returned the bottle to its place and chose another. ‘Fragaria Vesca- Strawberry- For Love and Luck.’ The irony of that for before
tonight she had seemed imbued with an uncanny amount of both. Jamie unstopped the bottle and scent wavered out, rising on the steam like berries crushed between pale hands. He added it to the bath. The last bottle he chose lay on its side, the color of rubies with an amethyst stopper. He remembered finding it in an antique store in London, how the day had been full of rain and heavy gray clouds and the bottle had glowed from amidst a clutter of glass. How it had seemed a bit of magic in a bad time when so many things were fading to black and white. Colleen had loved it, as she always loved pretty, abandoned things. It had become the talisman of her collection, the genus loci that would keep and contain the magic, turning mere liquid into medicine that would make whole all the parts of their lives. Fairy nonsense and as history had borne out it had not worked. Happiness could not, it seemed, be found, much less bottled.

  He turned the vial carefully in his hands, the label worn and smudged and the glass cold where it had once possessed an unnatural warmth. ‘Balm of Gilead- To Mend a Broken Heart.’ Jamie emptied the entirety of it into the bath.

  He sensed her in the doorway behind him and closed his eyes in a hasty and wordless prayer before assembling his mask and turning to give what he might and restrain what he could not.

  “Do you need my help?” he asked, no trace of anything but a careful gentleness in his words.

  “I can’t seem to stop shaking enough to get the buttons on the shirt,” she gave a short bark of laughter that was dark and strangled in its infancy.

  She wore an old nightshirt, all Dickensian white cotton and pleated creases that Colleen had given him as a joke one Christmas. The buttons, tight and flat, were numerous and a challenge to even the steadiest of hands. He unbuttoned them slowly, hands light and mind averted. He pulled it over her head and laid it aside, then gave her his arm to lean on and assist herself into the bath. Once she was settled, soap, shampoo and cloths at hand he turned to leave the bath.

  “Please stay, I don’t want to be left alone,” she said.