ill at ease 2

by Stephen Bacon

  And it was more than enough. For what seemed like an eternity, Tim stood as motionless and unthinking as a marble statue. Then the policeman’s words and the images from the previous night’s dream began ruthlessly to slam through his mind. He felt the blood drain from his face and his already-delicate stomach filled with a thousand fluttering wings. Hot coals and ice cubes chased one another up and down his spine, and he broke out in a cold sweat.

  “… the body of a teenage boy…”

  Stab. His victim squirming in agony and terror beneath him. The fear in Carl’s eyes was like a drug. Tim wanted more. Stab.

  “… positively identified as Carl Mayfield…”

  The boy who had tortured him day after miserable day for ten interminable years, had hurt him, had degraded him, and had enjoyed – no, had gloried in! – every moment. Stab. What does it feel like to be on the receiving end for a change, Carl? Like it, do you? No? Well, tough shit. Stab.

  “… the extreme nature of the injuries…”

  Carl lay still and silent in a sea of blood. But it wasn’t enough. He had to be made into nothing, into no one. Just as Carl had made Tim into nothing, no one. Slash. The knife sliced into a sightless, staring eye, which spilled ichor, shrivelled. Slash. The mouth, now an extended slit in the face, grinned like that of a grotesque clown. Slash. Most of the nose was cut off and fell on the crimson-stained pillow next to Carl’s head. Slash slash slash slash slash. Flaps of skin opened, fell away, revealing the flesh, bone and sinew beneath. There was nothing left of the face except raw meat and scored bone. Carl had ceased to be.

  “… case of murder…”

  Punishment. Justice. Satisfaction. Vengeance.

  “… murder…”

  Murder.

  Oh. My. God.

  Tim walked back the way he had come, no longer really knowing where he was or where he was going. All he could see in his mind’s eye was himself stabbing Carl – murdering him. But that had been a dream, make-believe, wishful thinking. It hadn’t been real.

  Or had it? He remembered that odd time slip, the complete blank between weeping beneath the yew tree the previous afternoon and waking from the dream that morning. More than twelve hours unaccounted for. What had happened during those hours? What had he done?

  When he reached the end of Sandringham Close and turned the corner he suddenly felt naked, exposed, watched by thousands of pairs of knowing, accusing eyes. He ran home. His fumbling fingers struggled to get his house key into the lock, nearly breaking it in his desperate haste. After what felt like an eternity the lock mercifully clicked and he stumbled inside, slamming the door closed and again fought to lock it. He ran upstairs, to the safety of his bedroom, and once the door was closed he rushed to his window and yanked the curtains shut. He paced up and down for a moment, falling to his knees when a wave of inarticulate thoughts and physical weakness overcame him. He curled up on the floor and wept.

  It was a dream! Only a dream! There was no way on earth that this could possibly have been real! He was Tim Slater. He was nothing, no one, a pathetic coward who couldn’t even stand up for himself, who threw up at the mere thought of going to school, even of going outside, and who would certainly never have the stomach for anything like this no matter how much he might want to. The fact that Carl had apparently died a brutal death that same night had to be pure coincidence. It just had to be!

  But it wasn’t, was it?

  He crawled to his bed, pushed it to one side and threw back the rug that lay beneath it. He lifted the floorboards to reveal his stash of secret things, things he didn’t want anyone to see or know about. Porn, mainly, but he also kept his savings – such as they were – and the diaries in which he had poured out a decade of impotent rage and venomous feelings. The cash, DVDs and the notebooks were there – but so was something else. A stuffed carrier bag that shouldn’t have been there. He pulled it out.

  He didn’t want to open it, but he couldn’t stop himself. Carefully he reached into the bag and pulled out its contents. A blood-soaked shirt that may once have been white. A pair of black trousers. A pair of black trainers, one stuffed with socks, the other with a pair of boxer shorts. A knife, caked with blood and tissue. Except for the blood, all were common, nondescript items that could have belonged to anyone. Maybe, just maybe, it had been someone else who had murdered Carl, and were trying to shift the blame onto him. Maybe, just maybe, the dream had been a coincidence after all. He clung to these impossibilities with insane, cracked hope, and gingerly picked up the shirt. He turned up the collar which had remained comparatively clean. His mouth dropped open in a silent, horrified scream when he saw the name tag sewn inside it.

  Timothy Slater.

  ***

  Tim was heading away from Kingley Chase with no clear idea of where he was going or what to do. He knew only that he had to flee. He had no future if he stayed. It was only a matter of time before someone at school told the police about him and how much he hated Carl, and he’d seen enough CSI episodes to know that he was bound to have left something of himself in Carl’s bedroom – DNA, a hair, a fibre, something to link him to a place he had no possible reason for ever visiting. They would send him to prison, where he had no doubt he would be brutalised over and over again. There was no way that they would just give him a slap on the wrist and let him off with a caution. So he had no choice but to run, to disappear and hope that one day he would find a way to live with what he had done.

  These thoughts didn’t come to him as reasoned, orderly deliberations; rather they were a confused mess of images edged with terror. It had been instinct that had made him empty his backpack and replace its former contents with the bag of bloodied clothes, the incriminating diaries and the jam jar of loose change he had saved. It had been instinct that had urged him to raise the hood on his nondescript sweatshirt. It was instinct that was driving him out of the town via the quietest road. The road that passed by the farm – and the yew.

  A car sped by. Automatically he lowered his head and hunched his shoulders, hiding his face. He was half expecting the car to stop, the driver to get out and arrest him and take him back, and it was only a matter of time before someone recognised him – Kingley Chase was the kind of town where most people knew each other. He had to hide somewhere, wait until dark, think about where to go and what to do next. He caught sight of the lonely yew, remembered its trunk of great girth with its hollow. The combination of late summer flowers, tall grasses, the hollow and his dark clothing should shield him from all but the keenest and searching of eyes. He heard the purr of another approaching car. That settled it. He forced himself through a gap in the hedge into the field, and made his way to the tree as carefully as he could.

  He hid inside the ruined trunk of the tree and sat there for hour upon hour, desperate for clarity of thought. He needed to plan, to decide the best course of action, to figure out how he would rebuild the pieces of his shattered life. But he couldn't. His head was spinning, and before long everything else was, too. All he could think of was Carl’s murder, and the horrific way he – yes, he, Tim Slater – had committed it. Worse still was the memory of the way he had relished Carl’s fear, Carl’s pain, Carl’s death, and the sense of power and freedom it had brought him. He’d revelled in taking Carl’s life. But not now. Now he saw it for the sickening act it had truly been.

  Dusk. In the distance, the tall grasses rustled. Someone with an unsteady, irregular stride was approaching. Terror coursed through him, and his heart beat painfully in his chest like a piston. He crawled deeper into the hole in the trunk, hoping against hope that the person would pass by him without noticing he was there. But the ungainly footsteps kept coming. Came into sight.

  Tim was too shocked to scream. He felt the blood drain from his face and his extremities, and shivered with sudden cold. Adrenalin flooded his brain and muscles, and he rose to his feet to take flight. But there was nowhere to run to.

  “Not real,” he whimpered. “It’s in my head. It can�
�t be real!”

  Like the dream, Tim? That wasn’t real either, was it? Yeah. Right.

  The thing shambling towards him had been human once, but it was no longer recognisable as such. Its torso was a mess of blood and stab wounds, and here and there Tim could see slick, internal organs glistening in the dying light. The upper half of its body was covered almost entirely in blood, viscous, drying, no longer a deep crimson, but a dark rust colour. Its face was the worst part. It was nothing more than strips of flesh, scored bone and torn sinew. One eye, a withered piece of gristle, dangled uselessly on the exposed cheekbone; the other, lidless and bloodshot, stared at Tim, dulled by death yet aflame with hatred and accusation. There were holes where the nose should have been. Its near-lipless mouth was fixed in a permanent, rictus grin made even more hideous by the displaced jaw. The incongruously perfect teeth parted, the mouth awkwardly opening in a silent scream.

  It was Carl, or at least a warped, grotesque effigy of him. Tim had no doubt that he – it – was hell bent on vengeance. It shuffled closer. Reached for him.

  “You’re not real! You can’t be!”

  Oh really?

  Tim tried to push the apparition away, but instead of touching something solid, his hands and arms flailed at thin air. Carl’s single baleful eye suddenly burned with malevolent humour, and the ruined throat uttered a gargling bark of laughter. Tim was helpless against the wraith in front of him, and both he and Carl knew it.

  “Oh God, please, no!”

  Still Tim tried to fend Carl off. Still Carl kept coming. Kept reaching. Tim sobbed in abject terror when Carl’s wounded hand reached for, and then into, his chest. There was no pain in the physical sense. Only a descent into a nightmarish hell where everything was agony, anguish. Carl’s icy, phantasmal hand closed around Tim’s heart, squeezing it, freezing it. Hell intensified, drowning all thought, all reason, all awareness.

  Yet something primal remained to Tim. Something so basic that it was beyond Tim’s own control. Unconsciously, Tim’s fingers reached for the carrier bag, scrabbled around in it. After what seemed like an eternity they touched something solid, metallic, and closed around it in a vice-like grip.

  The knife.

  With a scream of hysterical terror Tim slashed at Carl. Miraculously, Carl released him and backed away, staring at the blade that had killed him with a look of recognition and fear. With crazed hope, Tim got to his feet and moved forward out of the hollow, continuing to brandish the knife at the abomination before him. But the blade sliced only emptiness, and the ghost of Carl remained untouched. Carl stood still, lowering his head to watch the wavering blade cut through his non-corporeal body. He uttered the guttural, rasping sound that passed for his laughter. With deliberate slowness he raised his head to stare at Tim, the expression of mocking humour returning to his single eye as he realised the blade could no longer hurt him. Tim gave a keening sound and cowered away, still waving the knife in front of him. His foot caught on something, and he fell heavily on his back, becoming entangled in the tree’s strong roots. He was trapped.

  Carl advanced, and straddled Tim in much the same way as Tim had straddled Carl the night before. Tim sobbed, begging for mercy, but his pleas went unheeded. He still held the knife before him, in a vain attempt to hold off the vengeful ghost. Carl cocked his head, the maimed mouth widening into a grin. He raised his hand, closed it around Tim’s, his spectral fingers sinking into Tim’s own. Tim cried out as his fingers burned with cold. The cold spread into his hand, his arm, but gradually lessened – until only numbness remained.

  Look at me.

  Tim couldn’t help himself. He stared up at the face above him. It was no longer the repellent mask it had been. Instead it was the unblemished, good-looking face that had plagued Tim night and day. And yet, in one way this was the face of a stranger. Its expression was wrong. The eyes, which Tim had only seen shine with cruel humour and loathing derision, seemed now to express comfort and pity. The smile that played around the perfect lips was not Carl’s usual hard, malevolent grin of one who has found his victim, but was instead gentle, almost kindly. He looked like an angel. A merciful angel. An angel who might just forgive.

  A shadow was cast between them. For a moment Tim did not see it, so riveted was he by the angelic face above him. But then the silhouette moved, broke Tim’s contact with those mesmeric eyes, and now the shadow caught his attention. He drew in a sharp, feared breath when he realised what it was.

  It was his own hand. The hand that still wielded the bloodied knife.

  But it was not Tim who had raised his hand. He couldn’t even feel it – it was as though it was no longer even his. And it wasn’t. Carl’s ghostly fingers were still inside Tim’s own, and Tim watched with rising horror as those fingers manipulated their grasp on the knife so that the blade pointed downwards. Tears of terror flooded his eyes, streaked his face.

  “Please,” he whispered, “I’m sorry. Oh please, please forgive me. Please!”

  Forgive you? Yeah. Right.

  Carl’s face suddenly contorted in fury, and dissembled into the mess of shredded skin, torn sinew and shattered bone Tim had made it. And with a sure strength Tim couldn’t possibly have mustered, the knife plunged down, its blade piercing Tim’s flesh and bone as though they were butter. Carl released Tim’s hand and stood over him.

  Tim gasped. A tremor ran the length of his body. He looked at his chest; saw in shocked disbelief the knife protrude from it. He tried to pull it out but already his flaccid fingers were too weak, and he could do nothing but watch as a dark stain spread rapidly from the wound. The pain was indescribable, and Tim’s body shook with it.

  He was dying. With every beat of his slowing heart he felt his life’s blood flow from him. His breathing became shallow; his lips moved in a silent, unintelligible prayer that even Tim did not understand. He was beyond pain now, beyond thought. His staring eyes did not see the darkening sky or canopy above. They saw only Carl, hovering a few feet above, bathed in a light dimming in an encroaching blackness that had nothing to do with the coming of night. And as Tim’s body let out its last fluttering breath and lay still, his soul began to rise from it. Carl gripped him with powerful hands that burned with cold. Tim tried to fight, to flee, but there was no escape. Carl pushed him into the great tree trunk which encased them both and held them imprisoned. Just for a moment Tim heard the howls of other souls trapped within the tree, and knew that his had become only one of many distorted faces in the tree’s bark, to be seen only from the right angle and in the right light. Tim’s shrieks joined the cacophony, but those tortured voices soon became nothing more than the whispering of leaves in the wind.

  Tim became blind and deaf to everything except the vengeful, haunting presence of Carl and his own anguished shrieks. Carl laughed, a dry, rasping sound, and Tim knew that Carl’s torment of him had only just begun.

  Afterword

  When the idea first came about to write an afterword to explain why we wrote the stories we did, I thought, yeah, no problem, I can do that. Truth be told, though, I struggled more with this afterword than I did with the story – and considering I spent months in a state of panic at having to write something that would not pale into insignificance compared to the work of the massively talented writers I’m collaborating with, that’ saying something.

  Around the time I was invited to contribute to Ill At Ease 2, a YouTube video about bullying was going viral on Facebook. The boy on the video used the simple expedient of holding pre-written cards up to a camera, yet, to me, managed to convey the anguish of being a bullying victim far more eloquently than the spoken word ever could. Whether the video was ‘real’ or not doesn’t matter – the end result was that that boy in torment really got into my head – probably because to a certain extent I can identify with that boy. I wasn’t really bullied at school, but I did spend my first months at secondary school being teased and laughed at by my peers. I joined late in the school year, and not only was I the new kid,
but I was the foreign kid who couldn’t speak English properly. In the early months, every time I tried to say something, they would laugh at me because I couldn’t make myself understood. And there were other cruel things they did to me – things I’d much rather not go into because they’re in the past and should remain there. Suffice it to say it hurt. A lot. And although the bullying and teasing didn’t last long, it changed me from a confident, happy child into nothing short of a shrinking violet with no confidence in herself or her abilities. You see, the hurt and the memories remained strong enough for me to spend the rest of my school years trying to blend into the background, hoping I wouldn’t be noticed – and this is, to a certain extent, true of me even now, 35 years later.

  So I found it relatively easy to put myself in that boy’s shoes and imagine how he must feel. I found myself constantly thinking what it must feel like to dread every morning, knowing that the day will not pass without pain and humiliation. To be filled with self-loathing because you believe you’re the nothing, the no-one your bullies treat you as. To have all self-esteem stripped away because you are forever the victim and simply can’t stand up for yourself and fight back. To know it’s never truly going to end because even when you leave home and can take that opportunity to reinvent yourself, the memories of those awful days will always haunt you. And, of course, what it would be like to suddenly snap. In the end, these thoughts so preyed on my mind that the only way I could exorcise them was to write the story.

  And so ‘One Bad Turn’ came into being. And it was really Tim Slater (and Carl Mayfield, who quite simply would not be denied) who determined the way the story was going to go.