She was terror.
Chapter Twenty Two
The storm, the power failure, being trapped with the creeping things in the shadows, they all seemed there to build the terror, the terror she wanted him to experience before she struck. Her head dipped and her glare narrowed. A force tore through the atmosphere of the room, passed intangibly through his body but jarred his mind within an agonisingly white hot aura.
“remember!” The voice was not in his ears, but in his thoughts. “show me what you did.” Ivory’s lips did not move, but he knew the voice emenated from her. “REMEMBER!”
Martin dutifully obeyed Ebony’s order to follow him and leave the house, but in his curiously automaton state Martin failed to take adequate care in his navigation of the stacks on the landing. His leg toppled papers and crudely bound books, and they slid from one another and spilled around Ebony’s feet into a skidding tumble down the stairs. The remaining stack leaned into Ebony’s legs, and thinking Martin was attacking him he spun and brought the head of his staff into what would have been a brutal uppercut had Martin been where Ebony thought him to be. In changing his stance Ebony allowed the angular flow of papers and books to replace his flat purchase of the steps, causing his feet to skate on books and slip on loose leaves.
Martin found his reflexes were his own again and he clutched at the front of Ebony’s shirt to save him from the fall. Pain flashed up his spine with the urgent report that he was supporting all of Ebony’s weight. The decision to let go was instinctive, but it was still a choice. He let go. He knew that the sickening realisation of what he had done would be infinitely replayed and re-experienced in his psyche.
Martin clenched his eyes shut and thrashed his arms about his head trying to swat away the mental control Ivory seemed to have over him. “REMEMBER!”
Martin watched passively as Ebony twisted in an attempt to kick his feet into footings on the steps but toppled headfirst. This time Ebony did find a step. With a resounding thud the impact of his face upon the edge of a step obliterated his nose and shattered his cheek bones. Ebony’s legs cart-wheeled high over his body and sent him tumbling down the stairs, scattering books and papers as he went. He grunted with each impact before his head hit the hall floor and his body catapulted past his head and smashed into the Great Mephisto with a force that rocked the amusement on its feet, Ebony slid off the magician’s casing at a right angle to the stairs but his head remained where it was, and with the sudden wrench of his bodyweight the fibrous neck muscles ruptured with the sound of thick dry rope being twisted. The body flopped to the floor in an unnatural pose. Death wrestled with life and won. The body settled into its resting place and did not move.
Martin stood at the top of the stairs staring down at Ebony, his head was now at an impossible angle to his body. Books continued to thud down the stairs after him and papers fluttered gently onto steps or rested upon Ebony’s person. The house was still and Martin was now alone. He reached down and picked up the staff that Ebony had dropped. The staff with its prophecy of men and women in throws of violence and clambering over corpses for their love and lust of Ivory. Martin stumbled from the top of the stairs and slammed the door of Ebony’s workroom against his own fulfilled place within prophecy.
He swung the staff wildly about him in a blind rage at the room. His swipes were followed by thuds that he assumed were books batted from bookcases, the smash of jars and the hollow pop of clay gourds, as he destroyed the fantasy Ebony had built. The room swirled about him in a blur of motion with items exploding. The stumpy head of the staff struck from surface to surface, again and again until there was one impact that he couldn’t ascribe an identity to and he came to a halt, panting and sweating from his exertion yet the red mist continued to veil his vision. Martin staggered from his dizzying dervish and he realised the red rage was not an internal state but the muslin drape before his face lashed with blood. He relaxed his posture and loosened his grip on the staff but found it resisted him. It was lodged in a cavity that the impact had created within the face of the body.
Martin’s grip leapt from the staff as if it had become scalding hot and the staff pulled itself free under its own weight and drummed to the floor. Tentacles of blood scaled the muslin from the face that was now completely caved in to the head in a dark mess of blood, tissue, brass threads, cables and cogs. Martin fell onto his rear with a thud that rocked the furniture and rattled the jars and gourds and scrabbled away from the scene. He sobbed as the blood followed him from where it had sprayed onto his clothing and his face.
The room was darkening, the fluttering shadows at the corners of the workshop grew thicker and details of objects became obscure as the light began to weaken. Seeing that the candles still burned, he wondered if the darkness was his own weakening consciousness, yet the shadows were not descending over the whole scene but creeping in from the corners, stretching across the walls and reaching out into the room, consuming features and furniture in an increasingly imperceptible blackness. There was a rumbling noise, at first he thought it thunder but it didn’t undulate and was constant, except that the sound was building. There was a vibration from the bare dusty floor boards, and then he saw that the shadow was in the middle of the room. Yet it wasn’t shadow, there were tendrils of black smoke filtering through gaps in the boards over an area of around a metre in diameter, coiling into each other, reaching for the ceiling but tumbling back down upon itself before it could make it, forming an eddying hunched figure of smoke. A fire in the room below? Then Martin remembered Ebony’s story of the Demons that had offered Ebony his deal. They had arrived in smoke.
He raced across the floor on his hands and knees, his pace broken by his frantic swipes at the tears and crimson wetness on his face, he tumbled through the door and onto the landing and staggered to his feet in a clumsy descent of the stairs.
Despite the urgency in his panicked escape and avoiding looking at Ebony’s body, there was something different about the hallway beyond the change of landscape caused by the books that had fallen. Things were moving. He froze on the stairs and the sound of his heavy footsteps was replaced by the Great Mephisto slapping his paddle hand against the glass of his case. The Hellequin that had been at the pianola now crouched at Ebony’s side stroking his arm in jerky movements of affection and mourning. The mechanical boy poet stabbed the sharp nib of its pen into the floor using it to anchor a grip and drag its torso and wooden base into the hall, its face shattered from its drop from the cabinet. Martin’s attention was snatched back and forth in the hall as movement gave away the presence of more dolls and moving creations that had migrated from the room dedicated to Ivory to reach Ebony’s body.
White hot pain soaked into his ankle, dropping him onto the steps. He could feel the thing at his leg and saw it as a rat in his mind and kicked instinctively backwards at the creature. Instead of hearing a squeal and feeling a soft body pinned to the riser, he heard the crunch of something harder. He swiped at his ankle and knocked a broken Hellequin tumbling down the stairs. He studied his fingers and found them slick with blood from his wound. The hand that rested on the step beside him flared into his awareness as it rode a surge of pain. A second Hellequin crouched, its head attached to the back of his hand by its mouth, Martin prized at its small hard head as its bite closed more. Waves of pain battered his consciousness with dazzling light, followed by an instant numb headiness as he pulled the thing off him.
He studied the squirming doll, its masked head unhinged in a maw that spread from ear to ear to reveal a ragged trap of angled blades soaked with his blood. He threw it onto the landing behind him. His ear roared with pain as another Hellequin fell upon him from the top of a stack and clamped onto his flesh, he pulled it free and felt that part of his ear go with it. He dropped the doll, scrambled to his feet and tumbled and stumbled down the stairs.
The Great Mephisto sat in his box, his head turning from Ebony to Martin, his shuttered glass eyes wide and his hinged mouth agape within its lim
ited expression of shock and grief, its paddle hand slamming the spidery cracked glass as if in protest at Ebony’s death. Martin leapt over Ebony’s body and picked his way through the spilled books and moving things that closed in upon him and fumbled with the door, he pulled it open and floundered through then slammed it closed against the nightmare.
“Oh god! Oh fucking Christ!” Martin was shaken to find that he was back in the present. Before an Ivory who had seen into his thoughts. Seen what he had done. He wanted the sanctuary of memory, to return to his flight from the house so that he could avoid the present situation, the horror of yesterday was nothing compared with the terror he felt now. He slammed the door of the family room shut, sure that she would stop him, but it struck the jamb with a resounding crash. He jammed the key in the lock, his heart pounding, knowing that he wouldn’t get time to turn the key before she would turn the handle and force the door open. He locked the door, and he leapt away from it in surprise that he had succeeded in shutting her out.
“Oh FUCK. Fuck. fuck.” He trailed.
The warnings were true. He feared the prophecy, and feared for himself. He realised he was wasting time, that she could find something to break open the hard wood door. He fumbled with the knife and the rolling pin again, his grip weakened by the excruciating pain from his injured hands, he returned to the glass of the French doors.
Martin dropped his tools, startled by a top panel of the door exploding into the room in a spray of splinters as Ivory’s fist punched through. Her arm snaked after it and reached for the handle. She pushed it down, but made no attempt to force it open; instead she appeared to be steadying herself on it. Suddenly a foot came gracefully through the hole in the door. Martin knew that this was his moment, as the gap would be too small and she would wedge herself in the door if she tried to climb in. He could attack her there and then and finish this, yet to pick up the knife and to stab it into her… He couldn’t do it.
Her face appeared in the hole, her features passive and emotionless, her eyes cold and impossible to read. Her head and body jerked into an angle that looked unnatural, as though her spine had abruptly broken, and then impossibly she leaned in through the narrow gap. The arm and leg that were the other side of the door followed her through and incredibly, but undeniably, she was standing in the room with him. Her head disjointed from her body at an awkward and painful looking angle, her right shoulder unfeasibly higher than her left, her body appearing broader and her chest flatter. She jerked again, three times, and her head set back into place, her shoulders realigned and her body narrowed and her chest expanded back to its original shape and size. All through this transformation Ivory’s glistening obsidian eyes were fixed, unblinking, on Martin.
“you wanted answers.” A sound permeated the air in the wake of her words. “you wanted to understand me. you wanted to experience me. you wanted to know me completely.” His mind swelled with a sudden swarm of moving images merging in and out of each other; Ivory sitting on the floor of the lounge of her home reading arcane literature, Ebony stroking her hair absently whilst listening to crackling 78’s on a gramophone. Ivory guiding the blind Ebony through unfamiliar places so he could learn the route. Ebony’s voice, soft low and reassuring; “You will have someone that loves you innocently, and not through your hold over man and woman.” Ebony and Ivory practicing Tai Chi together in their garden. “his was the only mind that I could hear.” The pair of them bent over mechanical creations in his workshop, Ebony teaching her his skills. Her arm reaching through the letter box and disjointing unnaturally to reach the key, finding it wasn’t there – looking through and seeing Ebony’s body. The images vanished, the montage of her life snatched away from him. The collective whispering sound in the air was faint and illusive in its direction and source. “you took the person that cared for me without sin.” The ululation built in pitch and volume and became sympathetic to Ivory’s lament. “you have destroyed all that I have. destroyed all that I stood to gain.” The sound built to a multitude of distant howls. “you think you did it out of love.” The howling drew closer. “you did it to force me to love you.” The howling spiked his ears and was all around him. “you will know retribution.”
Martin recognised the sound, the sound that he had first heard when his car had careened towards her, the sound he had heard again when King had been killed and again when Ivory fought off the pimps. His hands were seized by a life of their own. His nails clawed at his flesh, and despite the pain his hands continued in scoring the lines that would draw his guilt. The blood washed over his pale skin and ran up his fingers until they were gloved in scarlet. His possessed fingers raked his nails at his eyes and dug at his lids until they were tatters. He snatched up the knife with a certainty that was not his own and held the tip poised. His eyes twitched in their sockets, seemingly the only parts of his body within his control. He screamed out against his hands. Pleaded with himself, with Ivory, with a God he now found himself praying existed and would aid him against this unnatural creature that was assaulting him.
Without any hesitation that suggested his own will, he smoothly and slowly moved the knife tip towards his right eye. Even when he felt the sting of the metal as it pierced the sclera and vitreous jelly spewed out onto his cheeks he did not stop. Half the world vanished and he vomited over himself.
At a moment when he thought the experience could become no worse and be no more painful, he moved the knife to his remaining eye. The clear fluid mingled with his blood creating a cascade of pinks and red. The world was gone, all he had was darkness. Blinded, he felt himself discard the knife and his stubby fingers continued to work as they delved and rooted his burst eyes from his head in explosions of pain that pounded against the back of his skull. Yet whatever force possessed him it would not let him pass out.
Blind to everything but himself he felt his fingers find the hardness of his keys and they wrapped around them. He heard the loudness of movement at his ears as he forced the keys to follow the spiral of the flesh into his head, pushing further, churning painfully in the canal of his ear until his efforts were met with a thunder equal to that of the storm outside. He repeated the torture on his remaining ear and an explosion was the last thing he heard as the world became silent and he descended into a world of only physical sensations, smell and taste. Martin jumped up with a muted awareness of his lungs exhaling a scream he could not hear.
He could feel the blood of his work running from his face down his neck, wetting his clothes to his chest. He staggered about in his own silent Hell. His leg hit something hard and he fell forward. His hands rushed out ahead of him in an instinct to break his fall and for a moment he felt the cold glass of the coffee table. Then solidness disintegrated, and there was pain again as he dropped the remaining distance to the floor. The shattered glass of the tabletop splintered around his outstretched hands, tearing them to ribbons, shearing tendons and scraping the bones with vibrations that ground in his mind.
Rolling around on the floor he could feel the thick pile of the carpet, and the sting of the broken glass. Grateful for every millisecond of sensation from the soothing softness of the carpet, before the onslaught of pain forced the feelings out. He could feel his arms moving but could not guess at the actions his own hands made. Then his lips were stinging in the middle of a scream. He tried to close his mouth but his thick slick fingers forced their way in. The glass shards filled his mouth gluttonously. Martin bit down on his own fingers, as he did so he realised he was force-feeding himself shards of glass, cramming them into the sensitive interior of his mouth. Martin rolled onto his side and spat out the glass, blood, and the lining of his throat with ribbons of his tongue.
Martin did not see Ivory step over his cowering form and take the keys, or hear the front door shut and lock behind her as she disappeared into the storm. Tortured by his own hand and now sealed entirely in his own dark void, with no eyes to see, no ears to hear, no hands to write and no tongue to speak. Silenced in a torture he could
not share. Without senses he was trapped in his inner world. The blackness summoned his deeds like phantoms in the night. One by one they came; King, Jenny, his sons, Ebony, the faceless male, all there to haunt him. The people he had sacrificed in his lust for Ivory.
Epilogue
Candy stood at the mouth of the alley that led down to the front door of what had been King’s flat. She looked up at the dark husk of the building. The ground floor windows were crudely boarded with planks that left gaps wide enough for the blackness within to be seen, but not wide enough to allow for any light to pick out the details of whatever was within. The windows of King’s first floor flat were vacant, the wooden frames cracked and blackened into charcoal. Through these she could see the bared rafters of the loft from where the roof had collapsed, and the night sky coloured a dusky orange by the streetlights, giving the appearance of the fire’s ghost haunting the charred flesh and ribs of the building.
For all Candy’s attitude she had often experienced some anxiety when approaching King’s flat, but even though he was long dead there was a feeling breathing a chill down the back of her neck. King was gone, but the building had taken on a life of its own. There were stories circulating that it was haunted and that King’s tortured soul remained in Arven Road watching the girls he had once ruled, unable to take his cut or a free touch, but possibly responsible for keeping other pimps off his old turf and keeping the girls safe. Over the last few months several rough punters had received beatings severe enough to make would-be pimps consider that whoever was running Arven Road now was not worth messing with. Yet if someone had taken over then they had not stated their claim or approached the girls for their cut.
Ivory Page 20