Enter The Dark

by Chris Thomas

  ‘Joe?’ asked Rosco. ‘Joe, are you still there?’

  ‘Er, yes. I’m still here,’ he answered, struggling to get any words out. ‘Sorry, yes, it’s horrific, isn’t it? Look, I can’t really speak at the moment, something’s come up. I’ll speak to you tomorrow. Bye.’

  ‘Joe?’

  Even though he heard Rosco, he still hung up the phone.

  Opening up the text, he read it again. Could they really have caused this? It was just an accident. Billy drove his sports car like an idiot sometimes, and there had been numerous occasions in the past when he was lucky to come out unscathed; this must have just been an unfortunate set of circumstances. He tried to convince himself that this had nothing to do with him, but try as he might it was wholly unsuccessful. His world was starting to come down around him; he prayed that it wouldn’t get any worse. But unfortunately, he wouldn’t have to wait long for it to do so.

  ‘Explain this, dickhead,’ shouted a very angry Ellie, as she threw an email printout down on his lap. She stood there, hands on hips, her face bright red, staring at him as he slowly and disinterestedly unfolded the piece of paper.

  ‘Dear Ms Sellars,’ Joe began to read, in an almost sarcastic tone. ‘We are sorry to inform you that your recent payment for the hire of our venue was rejected by your bank due to insufficient funds. We tried to contact you by phone but could not reach you. It is with regret that we must inform you that, due to the popularity of the dates you have chosen, we have been left with no alternative but to offer this date to an alternative client. If you would like to contact us, we would be pleased to assist with making alternative arrangements. Because we were able to find alternative clients… blimey, they use the word ‘alternative’ a lot don’t they … for the room, you will not forfeit your deposit for which I enclose a cheque for one thousand pounds. Yours sincerely, blah blah blah.’

  Joe folded the piece of paper in half and threw it onto the coffee table. He sat there, rubbing the bridge of his nose, thinking desperately for something to say to explain this. After a few seconds of silence he mustered,

  ‘Well, good news we got our thousand pounds back.’

  Ellie could contain herself no longer.

  ‘You total bastard!’ she shouted, gesticulating wildly with her hands. ‘Is this just some fucking joke to you? This is our wedding, which you were supposed to pay for. ‘Leave it to me’ you said. ‘I’ll pay out of my trust fund’ you said. Well, where’s your sodding trust fund gone?’

  ‘I spent it,’ he replied, nonchalantly.

  ‘Oh, that’s OK then,’ she said, mock sympathetically, before exploding into a shouting fit worthy of a banshee on crack. ‘Well we’ve now lost the wedding of our dreams, thanks to you. What could you possibly have spent that much money on without me knowing? Well?’

  ‘Your dreams, you mean. What’s the point in me even trying to explain? Whatever I say has happened to that money will be wrong.’

  Ellie sat on the corner of the coffee table in front of him, arms folded so tightly it looked like they would cut off the blood supply to her head.

  ‘Go on then, try me.’

  ‘Look, I didn’t want to say anything. I wanted it to be a surprise.’

  ‘A surprise? What, that you thought we would get married without a fucking venue?’

  ‘No. Look, we’d said that we couldn’t afford a honeymoon, right?’ said Joe, slightly more confidently, convinced he could make this one stick. ‘So I thought I’d surprise you with an all-inclusive two week trip to the Maldives. I was going to pay for it out of my own savings and then transfer the money from my dividend fund at work to cover the venue hire. But I didn’t realise that it was all going to go through at the same time, and obviously it’s gone wrong.’

  ‘Prove it,’ snapped Ellie.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Prove it. Show me the booking confirmation email or something.’

  ‘I don’t need this. Not only is my best friend in hospital, but now you’re accusing me of lying to you?’

  ‘Don’t play that card with me. You and I both know that it was only a matter of time before Billy ended up wrapping his car around a lamppost or something.’

  ‘How can you be so insensitive?’ said Joe, trying his best wounded puppy expression. ‘Anyway, I had to do it all with bitcoins so that you wouldn’t find out. There is no confirmation email, other than me setting up my bitcoin account. I didn’t want you to find out and ruin the surprise.’

  ‘Well it’s certainly ruined something. So, just to make sure I understand correctly. You blew the money that you had put aside for our wedding venue on a surprise holiday to the Maldives that you paid for with a virtual currency and therefore have no confirmation of anything. But you forgot that the money was supposed to be for the venue, which they have now given to someone else to have a completely lovely day in.’

  ‘I didn’t forget, I just mistimed moving all the money around.’

  ‘The end result is the same. My dream wedding is now ruined, thanks to you. How on Earth do you expect us to find another venue this late on? I knew I should have made you pay the whole amount right at the start. Why did I let you convince me to just pay the deposit?’ she said, sobbing as tears began to roll down her cheeks.

  Joe stood up, wondering to himself if he should try and comfort her. Basing his decision on the fact that if he did nothing she would complain, but that if he tried to show some compassion by putting his arm around her or through some similar act of love she would more than likely bite his head off, he decided to stand back a little.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.’

  ‘Pathetic,’ she said, through gritted teeth, ‘utterly pathetic. You completely ruined what is supposed to be the happiest day of our lives and all you can do is stand there and say you’re sorry. I’m done. I’m going to stay with Mum and Dad.’

  With that, Ellie stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind her. A few minutes later, she reappeared at the bottom of the stairs with a hastily prepared holdall overflowing with clothes. She opened the door and stared at the sorry figure of Joe, who hadn’t moved since she’d left the room. As their eyes met, she said nothing, and just shook her head.

  ‘Please don’t go,’ he pleaded. ‘I’ll make it up to you, I promise.’

  But the wet-fish act did nothing to convince Ellie that he would start acting like a proper man, and she walked out of the house and drove off.

  Another message popped up on Joe’s phone.

  Meet tonight at the warehouse. This can all be over.

  Joe sighed and resigned himself to the inevitable. Anyway, it wasn’t as though his life could get any worse.

  JOE PULLED into the industrial estate. His company had only moved into their new facility a few months ago, the third of five buildings being constructed on this new park. At close to midnight, the place seemed like a cemetery compared to its hustle and bustle of industry during working hours. Even with only three buildings, there would usually be a constant stream of articulated lorries, delivery vans, and forklift trucks whizzing about the freshly laid tarmac.

  He reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a small black box. As he pressed one of the buttons on it, the long heavy green gate rolled to the side. He drove into the yard at the rear of the building. Bringing the car closer to the shutter doors, the security lights on the back wall illuminated the vast expanse of concrete like floodlights during an evening football match.

  ‘For crying out loud,’ he said to himself, as he saw the curtain-sided van with Britten Rashford livery parked outside the shutter doors. Leaning against the bonnet drinking from a thermos of coffee was Mr Ziff, the ‘freight salesman’ from the day before. Next to him stood Mr White. Joe pulled up alongside and got out of the car.

  ‘Good evening, Mister Henderson,’ said Ziff. ‘We didn’t think you would mind if we let ourselves in.’

  Nothing these men did surprised Joe anymore. Plus, he considered that letting th
emselves into his yard was fairly innocuous given what he was beginning to understand they were capable of.

  ‘A fully liveried freight truck and foreign plates as well. You two really have come prepared, haven’t you? At least it might look vaguely like we’re getting a delivery to anyone watching,’ said Joe, as he unlocked the rear entrance.

  The powerful LED lights switched on; he shielded his eyes as the cavernous warehouse was bathed in a bright white glow and the two men followed him in. Slamming the door behind him, he was suddenly overcome with a rage which surprised even him. Grabbing a crowbar from the work bench next to the door, he had finally had enough.

  ‘You bastards!’ he shouted, as he marched towards Ziff, raising the bar above his head. ‘I know what you did to Billy; you’ve ruined my fucking life and now you want me to help you!’

  Ziff spun on his heels and raised his arm, effortlessly stopping Joe’s arm dead in its tracks. The two men locked stares briefly, Joe’s eyes burning with anger, specks of saliva dotting his chin. The lack of emotion in Ziff’s eyes barely had time to register. His other hand reached underneath, grabbed Joe’s wrist, and with the slightest of effort rotated, forcing Joe to his knees. With a hand on the back of his head, his arm bent double, he now found himself staring at the hooked end of the crowbar, which hung barely inches from his eye.

  ‘Mister Henderson, this is entirely unnecessary. And if I may say so, completely futile,’ said Ziff, coldly. ‘It was unfortunate what happened to your friend, but needs must I’m afraid. Now, if you’ve got all of this nonsense out of your system, perhaps we could discuss our situation like grown-ups?’

  He released all of Joe’s limbs whilst simultaneously snatching the crowbar from his hand. Joe knelt on the floor, rubbing his shoulder. He looked up to see Ziff twirling the crowbar around like a tap dancer with a cane, strolling around and casting his eyes over the warehouse.

  ‘What do we think, Mister White?’ he asked his colleague, who had taken on the role of some sort of building regulations surveyor. He was taking photos on his smartphone, and he was sizing up the warehouse using a laser measure.

  ‘We can set the doors up over there, and there’s some decent ceiling stanchions to hang the prize board off. I’m guessing that all of your comms are in that little room over there, Mister Henderson?’

  Joe nodded silently, still kneeling on the floor.

  ‘Excellent. I’ll need to see inside if that’s alright,’ he said, although he had already started to make his way over there, so it didn’t really matter whether Joe said yes or no.

  ‘Right, Joe, I’m going to need you to man up a bit now, OK?’ said Ziff, grabbing him under the armpit and hoisting him to his feet. ‘You don’t have anything to worry about. We know what we’re doing.’

  ‘You’re just going to murder someone in my place of work,’ replied Joe, chewing his thumbnail.

  ‘It would probably be better if you didn’t think of it like that.’

  ‘Oh right, OK then,’ snorted Joe, sarcastically.

  ‘Look, Joe, it’s simple,’ continued Ziff, beginning to sound like Joe’s father. ‘It is in no-one’s interest for this to go wrong. You know what we do. You know how we do it. If we had been complacent, would we have lasted this long doing it? You sought us out, remember. Now you have the chance to go down in deep web history. Anonymously, of course. But think of it, the thrill you experienced when you first installed the browser and saw what it was capable of showing you. Now you can be a part of it. Plus, you don’t have a choice, so you might as well just roll with it.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Joe, rocking sideways as Ziff playfully punched him on the top of the arm. ‘But I want payment.’

  ‘Ha,’ snorted Ziff. ‘You’re only in this situation in the first place because you stiffed us for money, and now you want us to pay you?’

  ‘Look, what difference does it make to you?’ asked Joe. ‘The clown thing said that you don’t do this for the money. My life has been more or less ruined by this. If it ever gets out that I allowed this warehouse to be used for your show, I might as well kill myself. Even if the police find me and arrest me, it won’t be anywhere near as bad as what my parents will do to me. Plus, my fiancée has already walked out me. I don’t want a lot.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Fifty bitcoins. Plus, you’d be guaranteeing my silence even further still.’

  ‘You want us to pay you thirty grand?’ asked Ziff, who was by now slowly starting to like this kid. In the face of everything, he’d managed to find some balls.

  Joe nodded. ‘I kind of promised my fiancée an all-expenses-paid, first class trip to the Maldives for our honeymoon. So, if I happen to make it out of this alive and not in jail, at least I’ll be able to start to rebuild my life.’

  ‘OK, I’ll see to it that fifty bitcoins are transferred to your wallet before the show on Friday,’ replied Ziff, moving to square up to Joe. ‘But if you do anything to jeopardise this operation, I will personally see to it that we hurt you and everyone you care about. Clear?’

  Joe swallowed and nodded.

  Ziff slapped him lightly around the cheek. ‘Good lad.’

  White emerged from the back office, tapping away on his smartphone.

  ‘This all looks good. Very basic security system, shouldn’t be too much trouble taking control of it. Internet access is surprisingly fast for out here in the sticks, must be the fibre optic they put in these new estates. Plus, they very kindly put the junction box for the internet just up the road, so we won’t even need to leave the estate. Anyway, it won’t take us too long to set everything up. A few local cameras we need to take care of, but that’s about it.’

  ‘There you go, Joe,’ said Ziff. ‘I told you there was nothing to worry about.’

  ‘Fine, let’s just get it over with,’ said Joe, edging towards the exit. ‘We close early on Fridays, so there’ll be no-one here from about two o’clock. Just turn up in some sort of utilities or tradesman van, will you? At least make it look like something normal to the neighbours.’

  ‘Not a problem,’ said Ziff, holding out his hand. ‘If I may say as well, you have some really useful props in this warehouse. It’s going to be a blast. See you on Friday.’

  Reluctantly, Joe shook his hand. And with that, the two men climbed into their van and drove off.

  Joe got in his car and drove through the gate. As he watched the large wrought iron construction slide silently across the gap, he couldn’t help but feel that a chapter in his life was about to come to an end. Weirdly, the fear he had felt before was still there, but now it was mixed with that same sort of excitement and anticipation he’d felt the first time he went exploring the deep web. He didn’t really know whether to laugh or cry at this precise moment, but one thing he did know, as he started to drive home, was that in a couple of days his life would be changing forever.

  26

  Cramer McAllister piled another fistful of pound coins into the fruit machine. He rested his pint on its top and pressed the spin button. As he felt his phone vibrate in his back pocket, three cherries rolled into a line in front of him and three more golden pound coins dropped into the tray underneath. With one hand, he collected his winnings and fed them back into the slot, with the other he retrieved his phone.

  Two messages had arrived. He opened the first from a contact simply called ‘Slater’. The message read: 31 Chapman Drive. Posh boy coke pushers. 2gs unpaid.

  Another job for later on that night. Slater was the drugs kingpin in the area and McAllister was his muscle. He was rarely given any more information than that, not that he needed it. This was the part of his job, if that’s what it could be called, that he enjoyed. Generally, the routine involved kicking their door in, messing them up a bit so they knew he meant business, and then, unless they coughed up the money they owed Slater, he would cause them pain in as many imaginative ways as he could think of. Which was a lot. In fact, even if they coughed up he wasn’t going to let it ruin his fun or
make him miss out on doing them over. And his favourites were the middle class mummy’s boys who fancied themselves as some sort of gangland drug lords from the comfort of their plush commuter belt five bedroom houses. He would look forward to that.

  But his other indulgence was men. Young men. And the other message was hopefully going to be tonight’s other little plaything. The text was from an online dating website called ‘Bearz ‘n’ Boyz’. Although the term ‘dating’ was used very loosely. This was a site where men advertised for sex; nothing more, nothing less.

  He opened the text. Eighteen, skinny, shaved. Just the way he liked them. He swiped to accept the meet up and replaced the phone in his back pocket. He carried on playing the fruit machine, waiting for his ‘date’ to arrive.

  THE PHONE on the dashboard vibrated.

  ‘He’s gone for it,’ said Stan. ‘That wasn’t too hard.’

  ‘Not as hard as he probably is right now,’ replied Eric.

  ‘Charming,’ replied Stan, climbing over the back seat into the back of the van, where a slight-set boy, barely in adulthood, sat scrolling through his phone. The boy had an armful of tattoos, as well as various body piercings visible through his tight white vest top.

  ‘Right, listen,’ said Stan to the boy, as he tried to slide his enormous brick of a phone into the pocket of the tightest pair of jeans Stan had ever seen. ‘How the hell do you even walk in those things?’ he asked, rhetorically.

  ‘I’m used to it,’ replied the boy, as he flicked his head to remove a strand of hair that had fallen over his eye. ‘Why, do you like me in them?’

  ‘Shut up,’ replied Stan, bluntly. ‘Right, all we want you to do is go into that pub and find this man. We’ve just hooked you up with him on Bearz ‘n’ Boyz so he’ll be expecting you. Whilst I appreciate that you are a very, how shall we say, ‘flamboyant’ person, I would be hugely grateful if you would try and avoid drawing too much attention to yourself if you can help it.’

  ‘What about my money?’ asked the boy.