by N. P. Martin
At first I just thought the guy was catching my eye by accident, as there were was a group of girls sitting by a table not far from me. I thought it was maybe them he was looking at as he tried to get their attention. But as time went by, I caught the guy staring at me too many times for it to be accidental. There was no doubt he had an interest me for whatever reason, a reason that wasn’t too hard to work out given the threat that was made to me earlier. It would seem that Jared was having an eye kept on me. Maybe it was even more than that. Maybe the guy at the bar was waiting on me to leave so he could jump me outside.
Well, I thought. There’s only one way to find out if that’s true or not.
Draining the last of my pint, I placed the empty glass on the table and started crossing the floor to the front doors, glancing as I did so at the young bruiser at the bar, nodding my head at him just to let him know that I was onto him. He stared back, seemingly unconcerned that his cover was now blown, nor seeming in any hurry to follow me out as he continued to stand with his half empty pint glass.
When I got outside, I zipped up my jacket against the cold and started walking down the street, unsure of where I wanted to go. At this point, I was only worried if the guy from the bar would follow, which he didn’t appear to be. I even stopped down the street to stare back at the pub as I waited on him to exit, but after a few minutes, it became clear that he wasn’t going to.
Maybe I was wrong about him, I thought. Maybe the guy was just one of those insecure types that you often meet bars, guys who think it manly to stare menacingly at other men to try and exert their dominance, and in some cases, to start a fight. The longer I waited on the street, the more it became clear that the guy from the bar had nothing to do with anything, otherwise he would have been out following me by now.
Shaking my head I decided to hit another bar before heading back to the hotel, hopefully to wake up tomorrow with news from Benedict. But as I turned around, I immediately walked right into somebody who was standing just behind me. I was about to apologize when I looked at the person’s face and realized straight away that it belonged to the man from the hotel bar, Jared’s silent and intimidating sidekick. Up this close, he was even more scary than he was in the bar, and he stared at me with dead gray eyes for a second, long enough for me to know that he wasn’t about to let me walk any farther.
But before I could even react, the man in the shabby dark suit suddenly swung his fist at my jaw, having given no indication the he was going to do so. The second his knuckles connected with my mandible, I knew I was a goner. For a split second, I saw stars before my vision turned black and I felt myself fall to the ground.
A second later I was out for the count.
When I woke up I knew there was something wrong. Something didn’t feel right. I couldn’t move for a start, and I realized that my arms and legs had been zip-tied, with my arms being forced behind my back. Underneath me felt cold, like metal, and I also had the sensation of movement under me as well. I tried to sit up, but couldn’t. For some reason, my whole body felt like it was made from rubber. More than that, I could hardly think either. My mind seemed to have turned to mush, preventing me from organizing or holding onto any thought for longer than a second. My vision too was blurry, with things fading in and out as if I’d just necked a full bottle of whiskey in one go.
Then I heard a voice that sounded like it was coming from very far away, a voice that I recognized but couldn’t think who it belonged to. "You’re awake I see," the voice said, sounding as if it was being digitally manipulated, pulled and stretched so much it was difficult to even comprehend the meaning of what it was trying to impart. "In case you’re wondering, Mr. Chance, you’ve been drugged to stop you using you magic. Enjoy the trip," the voice added. "It will be your last."
From some distant part of my mind, the name Jared floated into my distorted consciousness, and on some level, I realized that I had been abducted by him and the cult, and that I was possibly lying in the back of a moving vehicle. Beyond that, I didn’t know much of anything. I hardly knew my own name, for god’s sake. Whatever drug they had given me, it was seriously messing with my mind, to the point where I was hallucinating badly, and not in a good way. I was seeing the faces of demons that would suddenly morph into the face of my mother and father, and into the faces of all those I had dealt with recently—Drakkar, Hedrema, Sorcha, Iolas, even the bloodied face of the child killer I helped Drakkar murder in that Cork prison. Everything was swirling and blending and morphing and twisting, so much so that I ended up vomiting and lying there in a pool of sick as Jared chuckled to himself like a demon watching a damned soul trying to escape their punishment in Hell.
Whatever the drug was in my system—a huge dose of LSD perhaps?—it was serving its purpose well, which in this case was to keep me subdued and unable to access my magic. I just didn’t have the concentration to even begin to tap into my powers, never mind use them to escape. I was fucked basically, and completely at the mercy of Jared and whoever else was with him.
What felt like hours later, the sense of motion beneath me finally stopped as I continued to lie there, my face covered in vomit, though I didn’t care about that. I was more worried about the fact that demons were whispering in my ear and poking their long fingers into my jellied brains, scraping their fingernails against the inside of my skull, the noise like fingernails on a blackboard, but magnified to excruciating levels. "Stop…just stop…please…" I was muttering to myself.
"Are you having fun there, Corvin?" Jared asked, sounding like he was bellowing into my ear, causing me to shut my eyes and shutter. When he laughed, his voice sounded slowed right down to a sickening crawl, the impossible bass tones of it making me feel sick again.
But before I could vomit up any more of the Guinness in my stomach, I felt myself being lifted up and then dragged out of the vehicle I was in, back out into the freezing night air that all but shocked the breath out of me and caused my mind to suddenly come into full focus, long enough for me to see that two men were holding me up under the armpits as they dragged me along a pathway and then down onto a grassy bank. Walking just ahead was Jared and the man who had knocked me out on the street.
"We were thinking that it might be a nice night for a swim in the river," Jared was saying as the river he talked about loomed in my vision, looking to me like a huge black snake slithering its way slowly over the land. "I hear the water is lovely at this time of year."
Something like anger boiled up in my belly as Jared’s voice reached me, though I was too fucked up to do anything about it. Deep-seated survival instincts were screaming at me like people on a distant shore, but I was so far out in the vast lake of my mind that I could barely hear them. Don’t get me wrong, I was no stranger to tripping. I had taken LSD in the past, and what one might term as 'heroic' doses of magic mushrooms as well, so I wasn’t exactly a lightweight when it came to hallucinogens. Which must mean that Jared had given me a massive dose, well beyond what I or any normal person would be used to. If he was trying to kill me with the drugs alone, he was doing a good job of it, at least in my mind. If I ever survived this encounter—and let’s be honest, it was looking extremely unlikely that I would—I would be having flashbacks for months or years afterward.
But that’s if I survived. My mind wasn’t that addled that I didn’t know what was coming next. The bastards were going to dump me into the river, probably with my arms and legs still zip-tied.
"Over here looks like a nice spot," Jared said, suddenly veering left, the two men holding me changing direction as well as they dragged me ever nearer the hungry snake that couldn’t wait to swallow me whole.
At some point, the men holding me stopped walking and I suddenly found myself facing Jared’s now grotesquely handsome face, his eyes and lips seeming out of all proportion to the rest of his face, made all the worse by the fact that his head would split into two and then three, each head seeming to slide behind one another so I didn’t know where to focus.
"My my," Jared said laughing to himself. "You are pretty messed up there, aren’t you? You should see your eyes, Corvin, they make you look crazy and terrified at the same time."
"I’m…" I started to say, but stopped when I found I couldn’t form the words, either in my mind or with my mouth.
"What’s that?" Jared said leaning closer. "What are you trying to say now?"
"…kill.."
"Kill?" He laughed, as did the two men holding me. The other man, Jared’s older sidekick, remained totally silent. "Do you mean you want to kill me? Or do you mean are we going to kill you?"
I tried to speak again but found my jaw too slack to do so.
"I understand if you want to kill me, Corvin," Jared said. "And I’m sure if things were different that you might actually do it. But things are not different, are they? You’re tied up by the side of a river, so full of drugs you can’t even hold yourself up. You’re the one who is going to die here, Corvin my friend."
My lips were moving, but nothing but garbled nonsense was coming out. Jared stood there frowning at me like I was some pathetic old dog that needed to be put down as soon as possible. Then he shook his head and addressed the others. "Fill his pockets with stones before tossing him in," he said.
At which point, I was held up as Jared’s sidekick proceed to fill my jacket pockets with large stones that felt as heavy as lead. I couldn’t even lift my head to look at him as he did so.
"As far as anyone will be able to tell," Jared said as someone cut the ties around my arms and legs, causing my whole body to drop. "You simply fell in the river and drowned after a heavy drugs binge. Your death will be looked at as nothing more than a tragic accident."
"Anyway," he went on after his sidekick had finished weighing me down. "I hope you enjoyed your stay here in Kilkenny. Say hello to the fishes for me, won’t you?" He laughed at his own joke, as did the others. Except the shabby suit man, that is. Never him.
As Jared walked away, the men holding me dragged me toward the waiting black snake, pausing just on the edge of the bank for an elongated second as they steadied themselves just before flinging me forward into the air, so that I tumbled down into the waiting mouth of the snake that proceeded to swallow me whole, taking me deep into its cold, dark belly.
Needless to say, the water was shockingly cold when I was plunged into it. Some survival instinct in me tried to activate my limbs so I could keep myself afloat, but that was impossible with the drugs in my system and the stones in my pockets weighing me down. In seconds, I sank to the bottom of the river, the current beginning to move me downstream despite the weight of the stones in my pockets. My eyes were open, but all I could see around me was a black void, and as my lungs began to fill with water, I had a sudden flashback of the time I nearly drowned in the Atlantic while trying to contact Manannán mac Lir. He had saved me then, but I knew no one was going to save me this time. As my consciousness started to leave me, I tried one final time to use my magic, tried to utter the words of a spell underwater, which didn’t work at all needless to say. After that, I stopped struggling and merely allowed the current to carry me along the river bed. Soon, my whole body became numb and a kind of serenity came over me, magnified by the drugs, and I knew there was nothing left to do but wait for death to claim me.
Chapter 14
Except, for some reason, death didn’t claim me.
I woke up coughing and spluttering as I rolled onto my side and spewed river water out of my mouth, clearing it out of my lungs so I could breathe again. When I was done ejecting all the water, I lay there for a moment as my mind began to gather itself. Looking down, I say I was lying on grass, and before me was the river that I had previously been at the bottom of.
But how did I get out again? Did I somehow use my magic to save myself?
I didn’t think so.
Then I heard a voice beside me that made me sit up in fright. Standing over me was a figure, dripping wet, someone I recognized from somewhere, but I couldn’t think were from. A man with short-cropped hair and a barrel chest. "You’re lucky I decided to come out of the pub when I did," he said. "You were seconds away from death in that river."
As my eyes regained their full focus, I suddenly recognized him as being the man from the inn, the one who I thought had been watching me from the bar. "You…" I said, hardly able to think properly, my mind still skewed by the drugs.
"Don’t worry," he said, seeming unaffected by the cold despite being soaked to the skin. "I’m not your enemy. I just saved you."
"Who…" I tried to say.
"I’ll explain everything once we get out of here. Can you walk?"
I tried to get up and then shook my head. "No…"
My savior leaned over then and lifted me up, holding one of arms across his shoulders as he proceeded to walk me over the grass. I was shivering badly at this point, and with all the drugs still in my system, I was also hallucinating like a motherfucker, though not quite as bad as before.
"My name is Jonah," he said as he carried me along. "We need to get you somewhere warm and out of those clothes before you get hyperthermia. I’ll take you to my flat. It’s not far."
I merely nodded, seeing no reason to argue with him. Soon I was being bundled into the back of a car and a blanket was thrown over me. By the time Jonah got into the front and started the car, my body was shaking from the cold, my teeth chattering loudly as I turned on my side into the fetal position, gripping the thin blanket around me as if it was the only thing keeping me alive.
Jonah blasted the heat in the car, which did little to alleviate the deep chill in my bones. "We’re almost there," he said as I shut my eyes against the hallucinations that were still coming, and which continued behind my eyelids, making me feel as if I was still lying on the bottom of that river bed as death took me in its long embrace.
At some point, I must’ve lost consciousness, because I woke up to find Jonah slapping me around the face, shocking me back awake again. "You can’t go to sleep!" he said, his voice loud in the confines of the car. "We’re at my flat now. Let’s get you inside."
He basically pulled me from out of the car and held me up while he closed the door. In the darkness, I had very little idea of where we were, except that it seemed to be some quiet street. Jonah all but dragged me along from the car to the front door of his flat, pausing to open it before carrying me inside, taking me down a narrow hallway and into a small room, turning on a light that hurt my eyes so much I had close them.
"You need to warm your body back up," he said. "Can you stand on your own?"
I wasn’t sure if I could, but I nodded anyway. When he let me go, I somehow managed to keep my legs from buckling under me as I realized we were standing inside a bathroom, and that Jonah was now turning on an electric shower.
"Take your clothes off and then get into the shower."
I tried to do as he asked, but stripping my clothes seemed like too monumental a task. "I can’t…"
Jonah sighed and then started to take my clothes off for me, getting no protest from me. Soon I was naked and being guided into the shower, the hot water cascading down on me almost a shock in itself after the extreme cold I’d had to endure. There was no denying, though, that the warmth beginning to permeate into my bones felt good, and I soon found myself closing my eyes as I slid down the tiles and sat on the shower tray, allowing the hot water to fall on me as my body began to relax in gratitude.
"Try and stay awake in there," Jonah said, his voice sounding far away to me. "I’m going to get changed and get you some dry clothes. I’ll be back in a minute."
I nodded with my eyes still closed. "Okay…"
A while later, I was sitting in Jonah’s small living room as he sat across from me in an armchair holding a cup of tea in his large hands. I was on the sofa, a cup of hot, sweet tea in my own hand, my body having mostly recovered from the shock of my late night dip in the river. My mind, however, hadn’t quite recovered yet. The hallucinogens
were still very much doing their thing, causing me to feel like I was present in some alternate reality that was constantly shifting around me, exploding with patterns and colors for no apparent reason. Any time I would look at Jonah, he would seem different than the last time I’d looked at him. One minute he had the head of a gray alien, the next an old man with impossibly long eyebrows that hung halfway down his face.
"What did they give you?" he asked.
"I don’t know," I said. "Some sort of hallucinogen. LSD maybe."
"You still look messed up."
I smiled stupidly at him. "I know…"
He shook his head. "You’re a lucky man, I tell you that."
"Your yellow T-shirt is blinding me." I looked down at the red sweatshirt that was far too big on me, and the blue jogging bottoms that extended over my feet. "So is this outfit I’m wearing."
"Better that than dead."
I nodded. "That’s a good point...thank you for saving me…Jonah. Who are you anyway?"
"My name is Jonah McQuillan. The men who tried to drown you tonight belong to the cult that killed my little brother."
I sat up straighter when he mentioned the cult. "You know about the cult?"
"Like I said, those murdering bastards killed my baby brother." His face was intense as he stared at me. "I saw you earlier today talking to that sicko Jared O’Hare at the Hibernian."
I was confused. "You were following me?"
"Not you, them. I have been for a while now, ever since I found out what happened to Daniel."
"Daniel?"
"My brother. He was only eight years old." He sat forward in his seat, putting his tea cup on the floor before staring hard at me. "What’s your association with these people? Why did they try to kill you?"
