I put everything in my bag along with the loaded .38, some clothes, food, and the money I made off of selling Josh the rest of Derrick’s weed that he had grown in the middle of the forest. I was about to leave when I noticed another evidence bag with Derrick’s name on it.
A small cassette tape was inside with the word ‘SORRY’ written in black marker.
I placed it in my bag and tip toed outside of the house, walking the train tracks until I hit the first city.
The warehouse door bursts open and he stares at the car with bloody windows. I lift the .38. The old scabs have fallen off, leaving a pink blotch on his bald head.
‘Hey,’ I say to him.
He turns. Before he can see who I am, I pull the trigger, feeling nothing as I throw his face into the sky, a bucket of bloody birds. He falls to the ground, unknowingly clutching his ruined face, kneeling and still half alive as I walk past him into the warehouse. The door locks behind me and it’s only a short walk down the hall before I see a windowed door leading to the feeding room.
Inside, the man with snaggle teeth and faded tattoos is leaning back on a chair, smoking cigarettes while his feet are propped up on a table. Across from him is a teenage girl tied to a water pipe, blindfolded and gagged.
A shotgun sits on the table in front of snaggle teeth.
Behind him on a tilted rack is the worm. It’s strapped down to the table and a teenage boy is hung above its mouth, head first. The worm is pulsating, glowing, as it digests the boy’s skull. A cylinder attached to the worm’s tail is funneling all of its shit into a plastic container. I check the gun. There’re only two bullets left.
I pause, trying to feel if I’m sweating, shaking. I feel nothing. All I think of is Derrick face down in a ditch under the trestle, the back of his head gone. I think about all the days we walked home together on the tracks, feeling the whisper of these memories.
The door flies open and snaggle teeth is quick. He jumps up from his chair and grabs for the shotgun. I aim for the head but miss, hitting his shoulder instead. He doesn’t slow down. I run towards him as he pumps the shotgun, screaming as I aim my last bullet.
It pokes an ugly hole in his head and the shotgun sprays buckshot across a corner of the room as he falls back and dies, the shotgun still in his hands, twitching in death throes.
The tied up girl moans, shakes from the sound of gun fire. She digs her face into the crook of her arm.
‘It’s okay,’ I shout, deaf from all the gun fire. I rush over to the boy that’s tied up and try pulling him out of the worm’s mouth. The thing’s grip loosens and when the head slips out, it’s nothing but melting bone fragments and jelly for brains dripping down the table towards the worm’s hungry mouth.
I untie the girl. She won’t stop crying. She sees the worm and the dead boy. Now she won’t stop screaming.
‘Come on,’ I shout, taking her outside the room. She wants to keep going, to get out of here, but I tell her to just wait outside. ‘I’ll only be a second,’ I promise her.
The shotgun is greasy from snaggle teeth’s hands and a small pool of blood forms a dented circle around his body. My footprints are red as I step backwards from the worm and take aim with the shotgun. It kicks my shoulder hard and the worm’s stomach explodes in a glorious burst of glowing guts that cover the walls with green pulsating light. Its toothy mouth keeps chewing the air as it quickly dies.
The shotgun is left in the pool of blood next to snaggle teeth’s body. My father’s gun stays with me.
After searching the warehouse for drugs, I leave.
It took me a day to reach the first town when I left home. It takes me about the same amount of time walking the tracks before I feel like I’m no longer in the city anymore leaving bloody foot prints.
The girl was afraid. She wanted to come with me. She kept telling me that it wasn’t over, they’d find her again. I told her she was safe. But I knew she was right. It’s never really over. As long as you remember all the things you’d wish you forget, it’s never really over.
Somewhere along the way I burn my father’s notebook with all of his leads and his theories. I bury the gun in a forest that slopes high above the train tracks. It’s somewhere near West Chester where I finally decide to leave the tracks and hitch hike instead. A minute passes before this guy pulls over in a Camaro with Delaware plates. I tell him where home is and he says he’ll take me as far as Kennetsquare.
‘Do you need a place to crash tonight?’ he asks, glancing at me now and again.
‘No,’ I tell him. ‘I’m okay.’ I look out the window, seeing a faint reflection of myself. I don’t recognize the person I’m seeing in the window. ‘I’m okay.’
‘Well you don’t look it,’ he says, driving down Route One.
I shrug and pull out my tape player to listen to one of Derrick’s mix tapes. I don’t feel like talking anymore. After twenty minutes, I tell the man I need a pit stop. He groans and we pull into a WaWa where I go into one of the isolated bathrooms and rummage through my bag for all the rendered glow I managed to find at the warehouse. Under the bags of drugs is the SORRY mix tape Derrick never got to give me.
I place it in the tape player and hear the Pixies. My feet hurt, so I sit on the toilet while packing the glow, turning up the music as I smoke.
Eventually it hits me and it’s absolute joy, my aches and pains fading away. For a moment my feet don’t hurt anymore. For just a single moment, I forget everything and it’s finally over.
Sharkadelic
Ian Whates
From: Dark Travellings
Remarkably, no specific term has ever been coined for a shark expert. The closest Debra could find was ‘ichthyologist’, which simply means ‘fish expert’. Apart from that there’s ‘marine biologist’ and… ehm, shark expert.
Debra sighed, resolving to settle on a title for the piece later.
She hated that – going into an interview without a tagline in mind, a label. Oh, whatever she initially chose might well change later, once the interview had been concluded and she had the opportunity to hear the recording back with analytical ear, deciding what to include and what to excise, which aspects merited emphasis and which should be reduced to mere passing mention, but winging it without at least something in place left her feeling exposed. Naked.
She hesitated before getting out of the car, studying the man’s profile on her notebook one final time in the hope of last-minute inspiration.
Ryan Turner, 37 years old, born in Cambridge, UK. BSc Marine Biology and Oceanography, Plymouth University.
Following uni, Turner spent six months travelling: Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, China, Hong Kong, and Australia. He clearly enjoyed the experience because soon after coming home he relocated to Oz, where he worked in conservation on the Great Barrier Reef – which was then in a far healthier state than it was reported to be these days – returning to the UK some eighteen months later. His reasons weren’t specified. He landed a job in television, initially working behind the scenes on a number of wildlife and nature programmes, including several high-profile series and an award-winning documentary. He subsequently moved from behind the camera to appearing in front of it, his craggy features and moderated tones becoming familiar to millions, as he gained the reputation of TV’s resident shark expert.
Debra skimmed the list of programmes and the various books Turner was credited with writing. She couldn’t escape the feeling that either she or the profile was missing something. This barely scratched the surface. The résumé detailed an impressive portfolio of work, but there was no indication here that Ryan Turner, marine biologist and TV presenter, was all the while nurturing unguessed-at talent as an artist.
She’d checked – of course she had – and Turner had never been to art school, never received any formal training in that direction – at least not that she could discover – nor had he shown any incl
ination or aptitude to paint. Yet two days ago she had stood in a major London gallery and been staggered by the scope, the sheer emotive power of his work.
She wasn’t the only one. When Turner’s expansive, almost psychedelic canvases first started to surface they took the international art world by storm. The fact that the artist’s identity remained undisclosed didn’t hurt, either; everyone loves a mystery. Each painting was signed ‘Carcha’ in the bottom right hand corner, but nobody was saying who stood behind that opaque pseudonym. Social media got hold of the story and helped fuel the flames of conjecture, with the intrigue soon spilling out beyond the rarefied stratosphere of the art world to capture the public imagination. It even made the national news, as a currently prominent pop starlet admitted to being ‘flattered’ to find her name linked to the enigmatic artist. Her denials did little to dampen speculation.
When it came, the inevitable reveal was perfectly stage managed, coinciding as it did with the announcement of Carcha’s first ever exhibition.
Ryan Turner: really? Nobody had seen that one coming.
Of course, hindsight is a wonderful thing, and suddenly people made the connection. Marine biologist: sharks. Carcha: short for Carcharhiniformes; a taxonomical order that includes the hammerheads and the reef sharks. Add to that the titles he had chosen for his work, many of which could be construed as referencing the sea – ‘Stormfront’, ‘Currency’ (a play perhaps on ‘Current Sea’?), ‘The Net’ (how foolish of them to assume this had anything to do with computers) – and it was obvious really.
Besides, when was the last time Ryan Turner had been seen on telly? A year ago, more than that…? No wonder he’d disappeared from the screen; concentrating on his paintings, no doubt.
News of Turner’s first exhibition, to be staged at a prominent London gallery, sent a frisson of anticipation across the net. Invites to the preview became the hottest tickets in town, but, as a young freelance journalist not long out of college, Debra had little expectation of nabbing one. Despite a couple of notable articles already appearing under her byline, there were far more illustrious reporters in the queue ahead of her. But she had reckoned without Dominic. Sometime lover, constant friend, a dashing figure that flitted in and out of her life like a will-o’-the-wisp, forever treading that delicate line between scandal and acceptability: acerbically funny, handsome, dazzlingly intelligent, bisexual, unpredictable, and frighteningly well-connected Dominic.
‘So, would you be interested in an invite to the Turner preview?’ he had asked over coffee during the most recent of their irregular but always welcome catch-ups. The question came out of the blue, without preamble and unconnected to any previous topic of conversation. It said something for Carcha’s status that Debra didn’t stop to ask ‘which Turner?’ There was only one at this juncture.
‘Are you kidding me?’
He grinned, clearly enjoying her delight. ‘What do I get as a ‘thank you’?’
They ended up in bed; well, it was the least she could do.
Debra chose her outfit for preview night with care: a little black dress with a twist, veering towards the gothic without being brazen. Simple silver accessories – bracelet, belt buckle, decorative shoe buckles – though she did allow herself the luxury of white gold and diamond earrings and the shoes themselves were to die for. Jimmy Choo, with ridiculous four-inch heels that she would never normally dare attempt, but on a night like this they made her feel good. Predictably, most attendees were decked out from head to toe in designer, which was one of the reasons she wasn’t; that and the cost.
She had seen Carcha’s work online and in magazines, but that did little to prepare her for an actual physical encounter – and encounter was the word. Nothing else could convey the exhilaration of setting eyes on these broad, dazzling canvases for the first time. The hushed almost reverent tones of everyone else present assured her that she wasn’t alone in being so affected.
Trial and error taught her not to stand too close; by all means dip in briefly to examine the finer detail or the brushwork if you felt so inclined, but in doing so you risked missing the point. Only by seeing the whole composition at a single glance could you appreciate the full emotional impact of a piece. She watched time and again as distinguished observers stepped forward to peer closely at a given picture, only to shuffle backwards almost immediately, as if compelled to do so.
‘This isn’t just a new way of painting,’ she heard one dapper gentleman – grey goatee beard and cravat – intone to a companion, ‘it’s a whole new art form.’
There was nothing traditional about the compositions – she could imagine her late granddad, who had fancied himself as something of an art lover, sniffing in disdain and dismissing the whole collection as ‘ill-conceived abstracts’ – yet they managed to reflect the world and the experience of living within it far more accurately than a painting that painstakingly strove for realism ever could.
Debra wandered around the gallery oblivious to the other guests, her attention riveted by first one canvas and then the next. No two affected her in quite the same way, though she sometimes detected parallels, a resonance of themes. ‘Depth’ and ‘Horizons’, for example. The former was an interweaving of dark shades: blues and grey-blacks and, on closer examination, purples and deepest greens; a combination that seemed to add texture beyond the two flat dimensions of the canvas. It drew the observer in, compelling you to strive to discern ever more detail, as if staring intently might somehow flake away the paint to uncover brooding secrets hidden beneath. Spend too long studying ‘Depth’ and you risked becoming disorientated upon looking away, left with a sense that while you were so absorbed reality had taken a surreptitious step sideways, leaving you behind.
‘Horizons’, with its subtle striations of pale blue and whites and silvers that drew the eye to the centre, where smouldered a heart of burnt umber and orange-red fire, had a similar effect, but whereas ‘Depth’ threatened to trap the viewer in a dark abyss with no escape, ‘Horizons’ held the promise of propelling you towards that distant sun, of sending you on a never-ending journey, a joyful dream that no one could possibly tire of.
Her favourite piece, though, or at least the one she found impossible to resist, was ‘Sharkadelic’: a vibrant chaos of clashing colours that, paradoxically, meshed into unexpected harmony; unlooked-for beauty arising from the ashes of spent discord. There was something disturbing about the painting, which proved fascinating precisely because she had no understanding of how it could possibly work. She spent long moments in contemplation, trying to decode its success and unable to tear herself away.
‘Surprising, isn’t it?’ said a voice at her shoulder.
‘Yes, yes it is, totally,’ she agreed, before realising that she recognised that voice. Her head whipped round.
Ryan Turner was a little shorter than she’d imagined, but otherwise met expectations in every regard. Handsome, with a lack of the usual celeb polish that still fell short of rugged; the real charm was generated by his smile and those pale blue eyes. In the split second it took her to face him, she did her best to convert her own expression from gawp to smile. Goodness only knew if she succeeded.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt,’ he said. ‘I saw you standing here, so still, so absorbed…’
‘No, you’re not, not at all.’ God, where was the journalist in her when she needed it? ‘But absorbed is the word. This is… remarkable.’
‘Thank you. ‘Sharkadelic’ is probably my favourite work in the whole show. Some of the others here are a little too… safe? But this one, I don’t know, this seems to have a real edginess to it.’
‘Totally, but the others: safe, really?’ She shook her head. ‘They’re anything but safe, or only in comparison to this one. Measure them against all the other stuff being painted today and they cut way beyond the furthest edge.’
He laughed. ‘Thank you. For both your enthusiasm a
nd for such heartfelt affirmation.’
And then he was gone, reeled in by a smart-looking woman who hurried over to aim a perfunctory smile in Debra’s direction and then whisk the Great Man away with a: ‘There you are. You simply must come and meet…’ Agent or manager, Debra assumed, or both.
She could have kicked herself. That was her moment, her chance to ask Ryan Turner about his inspiration, his technique, his magic… And she’d blown it. There wouldn’t be another. Already he was surrounded by sycophants and the great and the good. Somehow he’d escaped the circus for a brief moment and wound up standing beside her. And she had singularly failed to say anything meaningful. ‘Stuff’ indeed: brilliant.
The encounter took on an almost dreamlike quality. So sudden, so spontaneous and so brief; in its aftermath life resumed with no hint that anything out the ordinary had occurred, as if this had been a hiccup, a skipped frame in the reel of existence.
She wandered through the rest of the evening in something of a daze. The crushing disappointment of her own ineptitude acted as insulation against the full effect of the canvases, and she found herself unable to recapture her earlier mood. Turner made a brief speech, though the words slipped through her consciousness with little retained, like water seeping through sand. As suspected, no further opportunity to talk to him presented itself; until she was about to leave.
Having reclaimed her coat from the attendant, she turned towards the door to find him standing there, the smart-looking woman nowhere to be seen.
‘I understand you’re a journalist,’ he said.
‘Yes, I am. Freelance.’
‘Would you like to interview me?’
Fearless Genre Warriors Page 19
