Witnesses

by Anthony Watson

  “We are witnesses, my friend. Witnesses…”

  Church shook his head. “You’re talking in riddles again, man! What do you mean, we’re witnesses? Witnesses to what?”

  Dreschler continued to stare at Church, maintained his grim expression. Slowly, he got to his feet, walked away from the Captain. Still facing away from him, he began to speak again. “To the end of the world. We are witnesses to the end of the world.” He took another sip of coffee.

  Church’s mouth fell open. His mind raced. What did the man mean? Was he mad? The calm way in which the German had spoken argued against this being the case and, as he sought for words to give some kind of response, images and memories flooded his mind from the last few weeks, remembrances of things that defied logic, explanation. Things that, were he to describe them to anyone, would themselves sound like the ramblings of a madman. Had he himself not witnessed what could only be described as hordes of demons – not once, but twice?

  “Armageddon is upon us, Dominic.” Dreschler had now turned to face him, silhouetted against the west window. Limned in a corona of light his appearance was almost… angelic. A dark angel, though, surely. “And we are key players in the sequence of events that will unfold.”

  Church’s stomach lurched and he felt giddy. What Dreschler was saying was outlandish, beyond belief, and yet he knew his words were true. Something within him was responding to them, agreeing with them. Still, he shook his head. “What are you talking about, man? What do you mean we’re key players? You may be deluded into believing whatever it is, but this has nothing to do with me!”

  Dreschler smiled and nodded sagely. “Look within yourself, Dominic. You know I speak the truth. You know – you feel – that what I’m saying is true. Go with your feelings, they will not betray you.”

  “Right now I feel angry! I’ve had quite enough of this, this poppycock! Release me at once or do whatever it is you’ve brought me all the way out here to do.”

  Dreschler shook his head slowly. “I’m not going to do anything to you, Dominic. It’s out of my hands now. I merely had to bring you here so that together we can fulfil our destiny. I’m not going to harm you.”

  Church flung his mug onto the floor, spilling its contents as it bounced across the stone, the noise echoing around the church. He leapt to his feet, lunging at Dreschler, but felt sharp pain in his wrist and shoulder as the handcuffs held him back.

  Dreschler stood stock still, did not even flinch. “These are the two olive trees and the two lampstands that stand before the Lord of the earth,” he said, quietly, calmly.

  “Stop playing games!” Church shrieked, but Dreschler ignored him, simply walked past him towards the door. “Take some time, Dominic,” he said as he reached the door. “Calm down and contemplate what I’ve said, and what you feel within you.” He opened the door and took a step towards the porch. “We’ll talk again. But first I must find us some breakfast.” He nodded at the rifle slung over his shoulder and stepped into the porch, pulling the door shut behind him.

  Church slammed his fist into the pew, relishing the pain. “Just tell me!” he screamed, his words met only by the crashing of the door in its frame, absorbed into the ancient stone and wood surrounding him.

  * * *

  Despite everything that had happened, Dave slept. Perhaps because of everything that had happened, he experienced his recurring nightmare, the one in which he was a passenger on board a hijacked airplane. He’d been having it for so long now, and so frequently, he’d forgotten whether he’d started having it prior to his PhD beginning – and was thus some kind of subconscious stimulus to an interest in the topic – or after he’d begun his studies, the dream a result of his mental shuffling of information about the topic. Whichever, the nightmare had lost none of its efficacy and, as every time before, it thrust him into wakefulness with a jolt which made him gasp out loud.

  “Morning!” said a voice he took a moment to recognise. Dark looked over his shoulder at him from the front seat of the car, a grin on his face. “Bad dream?” he asked, insincerity dripping from every word.

  Dave groaned again, rubbed his eyes. “Yes. Thanks for asking,” he replied. He glanced around him. The car had stopped, pulled over to the side of the road, beneath the spreading arms of a huge oak tree. A red glow suffused the sky above the horizon, eating into the grey twilight that shrouded them. Scanning the landscape around them revealed more trees, stone walls dividing fields containing a mixture of crops and livestock – pale grey blobs in the distance slowly resolved into grazing sheep as Dave’s eyes adjusted to the gloom.

  A back road in the countryside. The perfect place to murder someone then dump their body.

  “Where are we?” he asked, rubbing the stiffness from the back of his neck.

  “Close to where we want to be,” Dark replied. “Still a way to go yet, though.”

  “Why don’t you just get it over with now? Save us both a bit of time. Well, save you a bit of time, I mean. I’ll be past caring really.”

  Dark laughed. “Why, Dave, I’m sure I don’t know what you mean! Are you suggesting I’ve brought you all the way out here for some… nefarious purpose?”

  “The thought had crossed my mind, yes.”

  Another chuckle, this one lacking some of the humour of the first. “Oh, Dave, you don’t need to worry about that! You have my word I’m not going to hurt you.”

  Dave noticed the inflection in Dark’s voice on that particular word, but didn’t question him on it. “Then, if it’s okay with you obviously, I’d quite like to go home now. Please.”

  Dark did not respond immediately, simply sat looking at Dave with a benevolent look on his face. Eventually he spoke. “We are going home, Dave. Both of us.”

  Hope flickered briefly in Dave’s heart before he realised that Dark’s response was another enigma he’d have to decipher rather than a statement of truth. “I’m guessing there’s no point in asking what exactly the fuck you mean by that?”

  Dark smiled again, his chin dimpling as he pressed his lips together tightly. “Time will tell, Dave. All will become clear.”

  “Were your parents enigmatic arseholes, too, or is it a skill you’ve developed over the years?” Dave didn’t even try to keep the anger out of his voice.

  “I can tell you’re frustrated. Come, let’s get going. The sooner we get there, the sooner all this will make sense to you.” Before Dave could utter any kind of response, Dark turned the key in the ignition and the car roared into life. The sound of it disturbed a couple of magpies which had been roosting in the tree above them. Dave watched the birds take flight and flap away towards the next copse of trees.

  One for sorrow, two for joy. He recited the old rhyme in his head. Two for joy? He doubted that.

  The car lurched as it pulled away, climbing out of the pothole in which it had settled into when Dark had parked it. The road was paved, but single track only. Compacted mud, showing the patterns of wide tyre treads, ran in double lines along it, suggesting it was mainly tractors rather than cars that passed along it.

  “Did you manage to read everything?” Dark asked, not turning this time, concentrating instead on guiding the car along the narrow road.

  Dave glanced over to the bible on the seat beside him. He had read the bookmarked pages, but had been unable to make sense of anything he’d read. Losing your best friend to suicide and then being kidnapped were not the best preparation for bible class. The passages had been from the Book of Revelations, which, as far as he could remember, was all about Armageddon and the end of the world. Quite why Dark had wanted him to read those passages in particular was beyond him. How it was relevant to the situation he now found himself in was a mystery too. “Yeah,” he replied. “I read it. I think that’s what sent me to sleep, it wasn’t exactly a page-turner.”

  “Oh, Dave, you do make me laugh. It doesn’t matter. I’ll explain everything once we get there. I just thought, what with your intelligence and education, you might have
gleaned something from it. I’m sure it’ll all make sense later on.”

  Cheeky bastard, thought Dave, and picked up the bible, flicking it open to the marked pages.

  “Oh, no time for that right now,” Dark said as the car slowed to a stop. “I need you. Pop out and open the gate, will you?”

  Dave peered past Dark through the windscreen. A metal gate, green paint flaking from it, blocked the way along the road. “Come again?”

  “The gate. You need to get out and open it, otherwise we’re not going anywhere.”

  “Excuse me? You what? What makes you think I’m going to do that?”

  “I repeat. We’re not going anywhere unless you open the gate.”

  Dave folded his arms. “Sounds good to me. What did your last slave die of, by the way?”

  Dark turned to stare at Dave. “I killed him, when he refused to open a gate for me.”

  Dave laughed. The most humourless laugh ever. “What’s to stop me just running off?”

  Dark smiled. The most humourless smile ever. “The fact that I will come after you, and find you. And kill you.”

  Dave was speechless. The intensity of Dark’s stare frightened him. He believed every word that had come out of his mouth.

  “Open the gate, Dave. There’s a good boy.”

  Dave searched desperately for some reserves of courage but – as on that night in Ali’s Pizza Emporium (which seemed a lifetime ago) – found the well was empty. Blushing, more with embarrassment than rage, he slid across the car seat and opened the door, hating himself even as he did so. That had been a power play, and Dark had well and truly exerted his dominance over him. Self-loathing, rather than any kind of common sense decision, prevented him from making a bid for freedom. He walked to the gate and pulled back on the bolt holding it shut, wincing at the screeching noise of metal scraping over metal. He walked the gate open, stood to one side as the car passed through it. He closed the gate again behind them and returned to the car.

  “Thank you,” Dark said as he clambered back inside.

  The car pulled away, the rising sun reflected in its rear window.

  * * *

  Two more gates required negotiation along the increasingly narrowing road, and both times Dave meekly obliged, getting out of the car without having to be asked. The road narrowed even further as they made their way along it, and eventually lost its paved surface, turning into a track made up of unevenly laid stones. Dark dropped the car down into second gear as it bounced and jarred its way over the stones. Dave grimaced every time the wheels fell into one of the many potholes, worried for the vehicle’s suspension.

  The walled fields gradually gave way to open countryside, the topography becoming ever hillier, so that as well as negotiating the uneven surface of the road, the car had to climb and descend huge undulations. This was a bleak and uncompromising landscape, but undeniably beautiful, the splendour of the unfolding vistas were enhanced by the early morning sunlight.

  And then, just as it seemed the jouncing, bouncing journey would never end, Dark pulled off the stony track onto a tarmac strip that cut across a plateau of grass. A small metal fence, no higher than Dave’s knees, separated the track from the open ground across which it ran.

  “There it is,” Dark said, “our destination is at hand.”

  Dave shuffled forwards on the seat, grasped the backs of both front seats and leant forwards to peer out through the windscreen. The track wound its way up towards a raised area of ground, the inclination steep and bordered on one side by a set of fearsome looking crags, the exposed rock strata of a tilted tectonic plate. Images from his school geography textbooks intruded on his mind. This was the Whin Sill, a distinctive feature of the Northumbrian landscape. The cliffs were impressive enough on their own, but the small stone church perched above them added another layer of grandeur and drama to the scene. The church, so it would appear, was to be their destination, and Dave stared at it, awestruck, as the car made its way along the track towards it.

  “It’s beautiful,” he managed to gasp, all concerns and fears momentarily forgotten, swept away by the majesty of the scene in front of him.

  As the car approached, more details of the church became visible: a small bell-tower perched above a grey slate roof, the buttress of stepped stonework giving the impression that it was crumbling, although this was obviously not the case. A stone wall surrounded the church and the cemetery which lay in front of it, sprawling over the hill atop which the building stood. Ancient headstones filled the graveyard, and Dave spotted an obelisk, brown in colour, standing among them.

  The car slowed, coming to a halt alongside the wooden gate that granted access to the cemetery and church beyond. Dark killed the engine and sat back in his seat. He sighed deeply, a sound of contentment. “At last, we are here.”

  He opened the door and leapt out of the car. “Come on, Dave, we’ve made it. Let’s go!”

  With no enthusiasm at all, Dave climbed out of the car. A cool breeze he had been unaware of as he’d opened and closed the gates now blew around him. They were on much higher ground here, far more exposed. The scenery, however, was stunning. Rolling hills surrounded them, criss-crossed by hedges demarcating the edges of fields. Small copses of trees were scattered around, and these may have hidden buildings. But, as far as the eye could see, the church was the only manmade structure visible.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Dark said, and Dave had to grudgingly agree. Bleak and desolate but also beautiful. Yes, definitely. “Okay. Can we go now?” Dave asked.

  Dark laughed, a deep, hearty sound, and slapped Dave on the back. “But we’ve only just got here! Surely you don’t want to leave already?”

  “Actually…” But he had no chance to finish the sentence. Dark grabbed him by the arm and spun him around to face the church. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get inside.”

  Dave made to protest, but the other man’s grip on his arm was tight enough to hurt, only loosening when Dark released him in order to open the wooden gate leading into the cemetery and the path running up to the church. As they ascended the slope, the landscape beyond the building slowly unfurled. They were indeed very high up and the vista that presented itself beyond and below them shared the same features of rolling moorland and checkerboard fields.

  Dave had never felt so far beyond the reach of civilisation.

  * * *

  “Just tell me!”

  Chris jumped at the sound of Dilly’s voice..

  “Just tell me,” she repeated, this time more quietly, little more than a mumble. Chris made his way over to the pew on which she lay stretched out, covered by a woollen blanket. She was still asleep, but obviously experiencing vivid dreams. Beneath her eyelids, he could see the movement of her eyeballs flitting from side to side. Fresh beads of sweat had broken out on her forehead and he wiped them away. She was burning up.

  “Will she make it?” a voice from the back of the church said.

  “I don’t know,” Chris replied. “It’s touch and go.”

  “Only one more night to get through. Mere hours to survive.”

  Chris felt for Dilly’s pulse. Her skin felt clammy to his touch. It was there, a delicate fluttering, but there nonetheless. “She’ll make it,” Chris said. “She has to.”

  His companion joined him alongside Dilly. Placed a hand, cold as the grave, on his shoulder. “And you, my friend. Are you ready for what lies ahead?”

  Chris didn’t look at the other as he replied, instead kept his gaze fixed on Dilly’s face, her features now relaxed after the trauma of her bad dream. “More than anything I am ready for tomorrow,” he said, his voice strong and confident. “To be so close to fulfilling my destiny is beyond anything I have ever experienced.”

  His companion chuckled, a deep, rasping sound and took his hand from Chris’ shoulder. Dark folds of cloth tumbled down to cover that clawed hand, hiding it – and the black talons that terminated each skeletal finger - from sight. “You have done well,”
it said, “very well indeed.”

  Chris stood, turned to face the thing next to him. “It was an honour and a privilege,” he said, his words once more eliciting a chuckle from the hooded figure. Deep within the darkness of the cowl, two red orbs glowed momentarily brighter.

  Dilly groaned again and Chris glanced over at her nervously. Just one more night to get through.

  * * *

  The autopsy has raised as many new questions as it has answered. In the harsh light of the mortuary the extent of the injuries suffered by the man are plain to see – the amount of damaged flesh on display far outweighing the undamaged. Every part of the body is scarred with deep lacerations, many so deep that bone is visible through them.

  The massive trauma suffered by the outside of the body is reflected within, revealed by the pathologist’s scalpel and saw. The victim’s heart is missing, the evidence pointing to it having been torn out rather than removed carefully. Amongst the new questions raised by the post mortem is how this has been achieved when –amidst the multitude of wounds on the chest – none is sufficiently large enough for the organ to have been removed.

  The injuries to the head are as a result of blunt trauma, though the exact nature of the instrument involved is still to be determined. A hammer is most likely. The lacerations covering the body have been made by a pointed implement, rather than a blade. Puncture wounds, themselves numerous, back up this supposition.

  The note you now stare at, still encased in its protective plastic envelope, had been pinned to the corpse. No ID has been found, the victim is still unidentified. Given the state of the clothing found on him, best guess is he is – was – a vagrant. You do not know who he is – something you have reiterated to your colleagues more than once. A random killing then, but made into something more by the note. A message then? But from whom?