Tea, screams, and the bus home

The wall collapsed in a relentless shower of ancient and neglected masonry. As the pieces rained down unforgivingly onto Louise, they fell bouncing off her gentle body and onto the cold marble, leaving blood and shattered bones to mark their descent. Louise stumbled under the fusillade and sank to the floor, her head in a spin. One of the larger, more elegantly decorated pieces of the now shattered archway tumbled and finally gave way, coming down onto her skull. The last of Louise’s air escaped from her inactive lungs as she quickly expired.

At the same time, on his way past the theatre Maxwell was confronted by an elderly man, shabbily dressed in soiled rags as damp as the night.
“Spare the price of a cup of tea?” the old tramp asked. Maxwell leaned forward out of the shadows and looked darkly into the dirty face of the tired man. “Look into my eyes old man, and tell me what you see there”.
The old man looked long at Maxwell, and almost immediately, his lips started to quiver, and tears began to trickle down his cheeks. His skin grew cold, and his breath short. He let out a whimper, turned and fled from Maxwell in a fit of dead panic. He ran headlong into the street and into the path of an oncoming bus – the driver saw nothing until it was just too late. Somewhere in the distance a woman screamed, and the last thought of the frightened vagrant was one of sheer uncontrollable terror.

The calm after…

Maxwell slowly picked up the blood-stained hammer with his left hand – the quill gently rested in his right, its delicate white plumage still untouched by the flashing violence that had passed only moments before. He lifted himself up off his knees and shuffled over to where a thin shard of dust-filled light cut from the boarded window to invade the disordered room. He faltered slightly, the loss of blood from his leg wound making him dizzy. He turned his back against the dirty boards and sank down to the floor again. The recently disturbed dust and dirt in the small room had mixed with the sweat on his face and hands to form a layer of scum that somehow lent itself to the drama of the violence he had just engaged in. Ah, violence, sweet violence – he had instigated it and carried it out most exactly, but was at the same time quite horrified at how passively he felt he had also witnessed it. He replayed the scene over and over again in his mind, often several different portions at once. The tramp was younger and stronger than he had first anticipated, and dragging him down the corridor had taken more energy than he would have liked, but, he had to admit, this had made the battle more rewarding. It has been said that you can often tell the strength of a man by the scream he makes at the moment of death. Well, this one’s scream had showed an inner power that impressed Maxwell very much. Through the blood and the dust, Maxwell smiled a happy smile as he played the quill feather gently over the hairs on the back of his wrist.

Salvation is only an alley away

“If You Need Help in Understanding Its Meaning, or If You Have a Personal Problem Concerning Your Relationship With It, Perganums Will Always be Pleased to Help You.” The large, incandescent neon letters hung ominously on a board by the doorway.

Louise hadn’t spoken to Maxwell for nearly three months now, not since the last few days of Rehab. Her own images were still with her – the emotional bloodletting, blurred anguish and confusion – making her balk every now and then as she considered what the next meeting between them would be like. Inwardly she knew exactly how it would be – a gently reserved greeting with no mention of the fear that would rise up in their throats at the thought of what they had once done to themselves, and each other. She knew Maxwell was almost certainly still going insane, but she also knew that she neither could, nor would, simply let herself stand idly by. This time there’d be none of the private jokes, however – no friendly intimate touches, or tender smiles they’d once shared. His powerful and active mind would still be there, but through her single act of what he saw as betrayal she had finally and irrevocably tainted it. Reluctantly, she stepped out of the rain, and shuffled inside to see the Man.

Clive Loves His Neighbours

Clive hated his neighbours from the very start. It wasn’t just the three under tens moving into a house with no outside space that worried him about the inevitable junior stair Olympics, nor the industrial sized drums of cooking oil unloaded from the van that suggested the lingering smells of fried grease to come. No, it wasn’t just that, it was all of that, and everything else that was on its way. And, sure enough, Clive lost his quiet evenings, his bedroom smelled like he lived above a chip shop, and he slept poorly, from the very day they moved in.

Clive like his peace and quiet, and he liked to go to bed early sometimes. He liked to sit and read, but the screaming and shouting meant that more often than not he went to bed when family obnoxious next door went to bed which was always late, and he was always too tired by that time to pick up a book and lose his now rare, and all the more valuable for it, nap time. He spent a small fortune finding the right earplugs – not too cheap (still heard them), not too expensive (missed his alarm) – and of course ran the risk of pissing off Danny and Alice, his nice neighbours on the other side, if he took up the tuba in protest. Danny and Alice were nice because he never heard them, not like family obnoxious, but he didn’t think they’d be too impressed if he started playing the tuba at five in the morning. Not that Clive would have been too impressed with himself had he in fact done that. He’d tried reasoning with them. At first he’d knocked on the door and asked them to keep the noise down, talking about mutual respect for one’s neighbours. Then he’d knocked on the door and explained that the separating wall was very thin and that they might want to keep the noise down because he could hear everything they said (shouted) to (at) one another. More than once. He’d even tried knocking on the separating wall, and shouting back, by way of demonstrating the thinness of the wall. More than once. In fact, he’d banged so hard one evening that he’d cracked the plaster, so spent the following Saturday morning patching and painting because of it. He was not a DIY enthusiast, so this only added to his resentment. No, none of those options had provided any succour, so he took to wearing the earplugs around the house, and in doing so he briefly rediscovered his love of foreign cinema. Unfortunately, this seemed to affect his balance so it was all too short lived.

He felt that he’d been so unlucky with choices beyond his influence, of rental residents not of his choosing, that the hate he’d come to hold for them was utterly visceral. It was one particular evening, as he was listening to them play their most recently invented game of how far can you throw furniture, that he came up with a plan. To be fair, he’d been thinking of several plans for a couple of months now, but all of them had seemed pretty stupid and pointless, but this latest … this was the one, he was sure of it. He started work almost immediately. The separating wall, once it went up into the attic, didn’t meet properly with the roof beams and the resulting gap appeared just big enough for him to get access to the attic space of family obnoxious, so up he went. Once he was in, he gently crossed the ceiling space to the loft hatch. With very little effort he was able to lift the hatch away from its recess, and take a look down to the landing below. He knew this was the right thing for him to do, and could feel his heart racing. Softly, he lowered the hatch back into place, returned to his side of the attic and back into his house. It would work. This would SO work. He suddenly felt very calm, and he allowed a small smile to cross his face – a place which one of those hadn’t visited for quite some time. The next morning, he made a series of small but vital purchases from the various DIY (he almost shuddered) stores located nearby, and waited.

Eventually evening came, accompanied by the inevitable screaming, shouting, banging, crashing and furniture callisthenics that had become the norm. Only this time, Clive revelled in it. This time it fuelled his purpose, cleared his head, and served as a window for preparation in which he laid everything out in front of him. Clinically. Calmly. As evening turned into night, and the witching hour approached, the hellhounds finally fell silent. It was time, he knew, as he reached for the surgical gloves and double-bagged his hands and fingers.

He unfolded the plastic sheeting next to the ladder beneath his own loft-hatch, stepped on to it, and opened the packets containing the coveralls and overshoes. Once he was dressed, he opened the other packets, and slipped the contents into his pocket. Remaining on the sheeting, the empty packaging went into one of the plastic bags he’d brought from the kitchen. Once he was up in his own attic, he put on the balaclava and crossed into the neighbouring attic. He opened the loft-hatch of family obnoxious and lowered himself quietly on to their landing using the lightweight escape ladder he’d bought earlier that day. Without a sound, he reached into his pocket, pulled out a brand-new box-cutter, and headed for the first bedroom.

He stood over the first one, and steadied his breath and his hand. Jesus, his heart rate! He took a moment, and felt himself calm. It was now or never. Do it, do it now, or resign yourself to only more of the same hell that you’ve been living for months, do it. He leaned in, and in one swift smooth action severed his first carotid artery. The pillow turned an instant crimson, but not a sound broke the silence. Clive’s heart rate levelled out at possibly what you’d call a “general calm”, and he moved on. One room after the next, he silently dispatched each one of those he’d come to despise. He went downstairs and unlocked the back door, thereby ensuring that any fibres or blood he may have picked up would transfer along the way. If the trail went cold immediately under the hatch, it could spell trouble.

Back up on the landing, he opened one of the plastic sacks he’d left at the foot of the ladder, removed his coveralls, rolled them up and put them at the bottom, dropping the box knife on top. Next came the overshoes, followed by the top layer of gloves. He tied the sack, and climbed up the ladder, taking all evidence of his having been there with him. Once in the attic, he pulled up the ladder, and secured the loft-hatch. When he was back on his own side, he untied the sack, and put the balaclava and second layer of gloves inside. He was done. He went into the kitchen, made a cup of tea, and congratulated himself. That house would be empty for months.

Tincture

Gloria told him that application of the tincture would likely result in what she called a temporary and harmless darkening of the soul.

He looked at her quizzically, “erm… yeah, not sure about that?”

“Oh shut up and get it on you. Like I said, it’s temporary.”

“You also said harmless – what happened to harmless?”

“It might … just a little …”

“What? Just a little what?”

She shot Derek a stern look, and started to rub it in vigorously, before he could say anything else. Gloria had soft warm hands, and he felt the heat penetrate into the back of his neck as he closed his eyes and tried to relax. The tincture looked like it had a dangerous attitude, like thick sticky engine oil, but smelled much softer – innocent, almost. He felt odd for thinking like that, but then all of a sudden Gloria’s hands felt really good as his shoulders dropped and he felt himself sink into darkness as all the tension slipped away, his mouth curving into a contented smile.

Derek woke up three days later, in a hedge at the back of Swindon Railway Station car park, covered in blood, with a pounding headache. A cursory onceover showed that the blood wasn’t his – at least not all of it…

Wedded & Deaded

Georgina – Georgie to her friends, at least she would have been if she had any – had long since decided to kill her husband as soon as the wedding night had concluded. If she was honest, and she was almost always brutally so, she was only waiting that long for the sex. After the proposal, it seemed to have dried up a little, and she quite fancied going out on an endorphin high.

A Higher Authority

His plaintive voice echoed out through the fog and across the water. “Arienne!” Again he called, this time with a greater urgency than before. “Arienne, for Christ’s sake! Don’t piss about.” Laurence could no longer tell which way was the end of the jetty and which was the start, he had turned this way and that so many times looking for her. As if in desperation, he finally cried, “Look, come back. OK? Enough is enough.”

“Here I am, silly.” Arienne stepped out of the eerie mists, giggling as she did so, her dark cloak swirling around her feet, creating whirls from out of the evening’s dense moisture-sodden air. Quite theatrical, she thought. Laurence did not appreciate it the same way as she did – he actually seemed furious.

“You shouldn’t wander off like that.”

“Why ever not?” she smiled.

He looked into her eyes, a dark serious frown covering his face, “You just shouldn’t. Not here. It isn’t right.”

Again she smiled, “Why?”

Laurence stepped over to Arienne and took her by the shoulders. He moved in close to her until his nose was almost pressed against hers, his offensive breath hanging conspicuously between them. The blood had drained from his pink, slightly flabby features, and Arienne suddenly stopped smiling. She began to look a little worried. Looking her straight in the eye, Laurence lowered his voice to barely a whisper.

“Do you not understand what’s happening? This place. This…” His voice choked halfway through his sentence, as his fingers pressed through the velvet of Arienne’s cloak and into her shoulder. “You were gone too long.”

“A moment or two, that’s all.”

“No, it was longer than that – an hour maybe. Time here is … odd, somehow.”

She pulled away, nursing her shoulder. “You’re odd. I think I’d like to leave now.”

Laurence snorted, but continued to look her in the eye. “You don’t get it, do you? Pick a direction – I don’t see the end. There’s nowhere to go.”

“But that doesn’t make sense, there’s always a way off – either the end of the jetty, or the start – I mean, it’s fifty-fifty, right? And if we pick the wrong way first, it’s just a lightly longer walk back. Come on, let’s go. I mean, it’s not like it can go on forever, right?”

Arienne reached for his hand, and Laurence reluctantly let her take it. She pulled him forward into the mist, and as they started to walk side by side, Laurence felt his sense of dread rising more strongly. He knew that this just wasn’t going to end well for either of them.

They’d been walking for a few minutes, when Laurence asked Arienne, “when did we get here, can you remember?”

“Well, earlier this evening, I suppose – don’t you remember?”

They’d stopped walking now, and Laurence turned and looked at the water.

“No, that’s not right, I … I remember it differently. The lamps weren’t lit. Was it dark? Actually – no, I’m not sure I remember it at all. Tell me the first thing about this place that you remember.”

“Oh, you’re just tired. And crabby with it, by the sounds of it.”

“I’m serious!” the pitch of his voice rising, as he spun round to face her, “stop fucking about and THINK! What’s the last thing you remember? In fact, wait – who the fuck are you?”

“Stop it Laurence, you’re scaring me”

He stepped back from her, his hands outstretched, but she came forward to close the small gap between them. He stepped back again, “Stay where you are. I mean it.” He closed his eyes tightly and opened them again, perhaps hoping in some way that everything would be different when he did, but of course it wasn’t. It was the end of a day he didn’t remember, in a place he didn’t recognise, with a woman he didn’t know. That’s when he heard the rumble – a deep rumble that vibrated in the pit of his stomach. He pushed Arienne, and as she fell to the floor he turned and ran back in the direction from which they’d come.

He wasn’t a particularly fit man, he knew that, so it was only a few minutes before he became out of breath and needed to stop. As he bent over panting, his hands on his knees, he looked behind him, but there was no sign of her. He listened for footsteps, but none came. He even listened again for the rumble, but he heard nothing. He didn’t care, and started to run again. He just wanted to get off this damned jetty.

After a while he thought his chest was going to explode, either that or his legs would give way, and as he stopped and sprawled on the floor, he suddenly remembered something about himself – he was married. Or had been, right up until he’d killed her by overloading her with insulin. He’d needed the money to pay off his loan shark, who he’d subsequently also killed. In his panic, he’d accidentally run him down with his car on his way to pay him off. He felt dizzy. As he pressed his forehead to the boards, another sudden rush of images hit him. He knew Arienne. Not only that, but he also knew that she was incredibly dangerous. Christ, what was going on?

“Here I am, silly.” Arienne stepped out of the eerie mists, giggling as she did so, her dark cloak swirling around her feet, creating whirls from out of the evening’s dense moisture-sodden air. Quite theatrical, she thought. An especially nice touch, she thought, was the Berretta nine-millimetre in her left hand.

“Fuck.”