Bleeker Hill

by Russell Mardell

  Maddox started to descend the stairs, the tugs on the cigar getting stronger, the smoke thicker. ‘I caught up with him the next morning and ripped his neck open with my bare hands. Then I killed his sister and her boyfriend. I burnt his house down and stole his car. Then for three days I stalked his wife. When I found her she was in bed with another man. No moral code, you see, Mia? She begged for forgiveness of course, offered me her mouth and her snatch in return for her life. She blamed everyone else, of course she did, she blamed her husband, she blamed the injustices of life, she would have blamed the weather if I had let her carry on. As it was I dumped her out of the window in the all together. Bitch landed in the bins.’

  He reached the base of the stairs and moved out to the right, the low throbbing at the floor stopping for him as he set his path, then starting again in a grotesque rumble as he walked on. ‘Why does this matter to you, Mia? Right? Why do you care? If you’ve any sense you know that you can’t escape me, you can’t hide in here forever, sure, you know that. You know that, right? You aren’t stupid. Right? You push me and I don’t relent, you see? I don’t relent, Mia, I bite. Maybe the rest of them give a damn about you and care that you aren’t harmed, but I don’t. You make this any harder than it needs to be and I might just lose my temper. I got no compunction about paining you Mia, and if it came to it I’d put a bullet in you in a heartbeat. Perhaps you want to think on and decide how long you want to draw this out?’

  Three amber lights were set into the right hand wall just beneath the ceiling, housed in cages thick with flies and insects. In the orange wash at the walls he could see more scattered blood patches. There was a smell of disease and decay, a pungent aroma somehow trapped in the corridor, ebbing back and forth between the walls and the open doors. He pulled down to a squat, the rifle rested in the crook of a shoulder and with his free hand he thumbed the walkie-talkie attached to his jacket.

  ‘Frank? You hear me?’ He dropped his voice to a whisper and was met with silence. ‘Frankie? You out there?’ He raised his voice and said the words again. The walkie-talkie crackled briefly, indecisively, and then cut out. Maddox released the button and stubbed out the cigar, pocketing the end. ‘Party loves you too, baby,’ he chuckled and pulled himself back up, yanking his jacket up over his nose against the eye-watering smell that was washing up and down the corridor.

  There were three doors positioned along the left hand wall, three small squares of piss-yellow light coming from the inside as light bulbs gave their last squeeze of life. He turned into the first doorway, walking through blood and brittle shards of bone on the floor like they were water and fag ends. A man’s body lay on a trolley in the centre of the room, stripped bare and bluer than the ocean in a child’s painting. Something was attached to his head, a strap, something holding him down tight. The man’s eyes were two blackened, crusted eye patches staring up at the ceiling. On his chest was a bloodied tool, something metal and medical, and something Maddox afforded only a token glance before sauntering out of the room. Nothing to see here.

  The next room was all but empty, again there was the bloodied floor, the suspicious looking lumps and splats underfoot, and in the middle of the room another trolley, but this one was empty, the holding straps ripped off and lying like dead snakes on the floor. He swept the room once, took in the opened cupboards and the spilt drawers, the medical implements on the floor and the insects dive-bombing the light bulb, but there was nothing there to hold him. He backed out into the corridor and turned off towards the third room.

  He knew she was there. He could feel her. He thought he saw a faint shadow dance across the yellow light spill, convinced himself he heard a noise coming from beyond the doorway, but more than either of those things he could sense her in the room. He pulled up by the doorjamb and dropped the rifle to his side, listening, breathing in his own odour from underneath his jacket, patiently waiting for her to reveal herself, playing with her from his position of strength.

  ‘You’re not seriously going to make me come in there are you?’ He brought the words out with a nasty laugh. ‘You got nowhere else to run to sweetheart, only choice you got left is doing this the easy way or the hard way. I’m good either way. I’m easy.’

  There was a small tinkling sound like glass shards scattering to the floor, then the room settled again. The low thrumming underfoot was growing in a steady pulse and he could feel it vibrating through his boots. Another fleeting shape etched over the light spill as something passed across the room.

  ‘I will make you a deal, Mia, how about that? You come out here now and I promise I won’t hurt you.’ He began to tap the rifle barrel against the wall, slow methodical taps like a metronome, counting her out. ‘You don’t want me to come in there, because that would make you stupid, that would make you seem belligerent and foolish and then that’s going to make me angry.’

  A thin metal chair leg slowly rolled out of the doorway, past his boots and then across the light patch into the shadows, coming to a stop against the wall with a delicate clunk. Maddox buried the rifle butt against his right shoulder and looked back to the side of the doorway.

  ‘You wanna play? I can play, Mia.’

  He was about to step forward when a loud blast of noise shot from the walkie-talkie and made him jump. He fumbled a huge fist on to the tiny unit and lowered the volume. Turtle was shouting through the other end like it was a can on a string.

  ‘Maddox? You there? Come in. Over.’

  ‘Don’t shout in my fucking ear!’

  ‘Is Frankie there? Did he come by your way? I can’t find him. Came down this corridor and found the walkie-talkie and the gun but he’s not here. Anything?’

  ‘What do I care, Turtle? Deal with it. I got me a little hunt of my own.’

  ‘Hennessey’s kid? Nah that’s all sorted, you can get back to the others.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘What the hell you do to her, man? She looks scared to death.’

  ‘What? When did you see her?’

  ‘I’m looking at her now,’ Turtle lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘Shit Maddox, girl looks like she’s seen a ghost.’

  Maddox quickly pushed off the wall and swung around into the room preparing to fire. It was larger than the previous two, but as before it was a solitary trolley set in the middle of the floor that caught the eye. Another body, another man, some nameless stranger, lay strapped to the trolley, his naked body a revolting mix of blue and red. There was shattered glass on the floor, a small bank of medical equipment against the back wall and a broken and legless chair toppled on to its side in one corner. Beyond that there was nothing else in the room. Maddox stood alone.

  4

  Turtle remained several steps behind Bergan as they walked their side of the building. At the start he had tried to make conversation with him, his natural chatty impulses heightened by his unease at the surroundings and the unrelenting nervousness he had been feeling since ploughing into the frozen body of Connor, but Bergan wasn’t biting. The great giant merely wandered on, checking doors and empty rooms, feeling out the lay of the building. He never once turned back to Turtle, that horrid warped impression of Bergan’s impassive, blank face remaining blessedly out of sight, soaking up the drabness ahead and not the shit-scared chef behind.

  He could hear Bergan talking to himself, mumbling into the air, not quite words but sounds, expressive utterances sighing out of his mouth, articulated in some unseen place and escaping out of him in every breath, every heartbeat. He seemed to be walking differently too; there was something off about his usual, casual stride. He had always walked like a man who knew he held total control over everyone he spoke to – because he did – but now his walk seemed to stutter and falter every other step, like a limp; his great big army boots scuffing at the floor. Still he fiddled with the pistol, spinning the chamber, pocketing the weapon and then pulling it out again several steps on as if he had forgotten he had it. For Turtle, more than the ghostly face, the faltering walk and
the random, alien words, it was Frankie Bergan’s measure of seeming indecisiveness that really scared him.

  They arrived at a giant pair of double doors at the end of a corridor and Bergan led them through into a huge arched room. Even in the half-light, Turtle could see how grand and imposing it was, with its wide walls and an unnecessarily high ceiling. Bergan flicked on a switch at the door and a long line of lights flickered and popped high above them like muzzle flashes at the ceiling, blasting the room with an ethereal brightness that made Turtle blink in discomfort. The room stretched a long way back and along each wall were a line of symmetrical beds with upright lockers separating each. At the far end of the room an empty doorway led to a toilet block and a line of sinks. It reminded Turtle of an army barracks and a hundred war films he had seen as a boy. Each bed was made; the duvet turned back, the pillows plumped, the ordered clinical nature of it all wildly out of step with the neglected rot that they had encountered so far. Moving closer he started to run his hands across the metal bed supports and they came away smeared with a light stickiness. A tap was dripping further on in the toilet block, the steady plop-plop of water magnified against the wide emptiness that seemed to pull out all around them. The room was a veritable palace compared to everything else they had lived and breathed for the last countless days.

  ‘Y’know, for the first time in I don’t-know-how-long, I don’t actually feel I’d catch a disease if I touched something. Things looking up, Frank!’

  Bergan stopped halfway down the room then turned away, retreating back to the corridor again.

  ‘Frank? Hey, Frankie, I gotta take a piss. You mind?’

  Bergan made no response, merely stopped in the doorway, his back to Turtle. Turtle crossed between the beds and wandered into the toilet block. The tiled walls seemed to shine for a single, split-second as he entered, the grouting between each as clean as freshly fallen snow. The floor, whilst not quite buffed like the walls, was still slick underfoot and he felt as if he were ice-skating as he crossed it to the urinals. To one side, next to the sinks, was a small row of shower cubicles and Turtle couldn’t help but smile as he unzipped his flies.

  ‘Damn, they got showers too. Man, what heaven that is. These clothes are beginning to feel like they’ve been painted on. Frank? You hear me?’

  Turtle craned a look back through the open doorway and saw that Bergan hadn’t moved, his giant frame was still there, gazing ahead into the corridor they had just left. Turtle shook his head, turned back to the matter in hand and began to whistle a happy tune, a tune that soon rose in pitch perceptively. Finishing up with a shiver and a satisfied sigh he moved across to the sinks and tried to tighten the dripping tap. It wouldn’t budge, not even a fraction. Swivelling it around the other way the handle suddenly came off in his hand and the tap gurgled and burped and then released a torrent of scalding water into the sink, a huge cloud of steam blooming and building and eventually blowing up in front of Turtle’s face. He could feel the sharp slash of the heat on his hands instantly as the water hit the sink and spat up on to him and he stumbled back, clasping them together at his chest. The steam grew, billowed upwards and started to fill the room. Turtle rubbed his hands together trying to soothe out the pain and then shook them down at his sides, combing at the cool air with his frantically dancing digits. He crossed to a sink further along and spun the cold-water tap, letting the water splash and soak his hands and the pain slowly numb out.

  The mirrors above the sinks were now thick with condensation and he rubbed at the nearest one with a clenched fist. He gazed back at the stranger before him – the tired and haggard face, the greying and unkempt beard, and the greasy tangle of hair, blacker than it should have been. He looked like one of the bums that used to scavenge in the bins outside his restaurant in the capital, all those years ago. He used to chase them from the place with a kitchen knife. Disgusting tramps. This guy looked hungry, you could see it in the eyes, ravenous eyes, and the hollowness in the cheeks. Poor bastard. Turtle watched him disappear in the steam cloud, the condensation creeping back, smearing over him, blocking him out. He felt something shift inside him as his heart tried to switch places with his stomach.

  He turned back to the first tap, pulled his sleeve down over his right hand, then took up the handle and wedged it back on, turning it quickly back to its original position, the water plop-plopping away again in small drips as if nothing had ever happened. He wafted a hand at the last of the steam and as it parted his eyes instinctively went to the mirror above the sink, preparing to greet the unkempt stranger once more. At first he thought he was seeing things, but as the steam thinned and he blinked and looked again he realised what he had thought he had seen was not in his mind but directly in front of him. Or rather just behind him. The stranger was there, but he wasn’t alone. There was a black shape under the condensation at the left hand edge of the mirror; a figure, impossibly tall and shrouded in clothes as black as the night sky. A hand was out before it, long twigs of fingers reaching for the back of Turtle’s head.

  Turtle spun around, his boots slipping on the slick ground as his backside slammed into the edge of the sink. There was no one behind him. He jumped forward and yanked open the curtains on each shower cubicle. He found no one. Nothing. Back at the mirror he saw only the terrified tramp-like stranger, the warped, mimic of a face he barely recognised.

  ‘Hey, Frank! Frank?’ Turtle seemed to fall into himself, his distracted mind yanked back as if tethered. ‘Frankie?’

  Turtle backed out of the room and turned into the sleeping quarters, his right knee banging instantly into the metal support of the first bed. He looked up quickly to the doorway and was about to call for Bergan again, when he noticed the doorway was empty. Bergan was gone. Stumbling forward and shoving the bed out of his way he hobbled to the door, the pain now in his knee not being heard past the overwhelming panic consuming the rest of him.

  He looked up and down the corridor and then back into the room almost as if expecting to have found that he had walked past him, but Bergan was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Frank?’ He whispered his name, then said it louder, and then finally called it, first down one side of the corridor, then down the other. There was no reply, not even a sound; there was nothing except the steady plop-plop of the dripping tap and the pounding of his heartbeat.

  He didn’t see the pistol and the walkie-talkie until he stepped out of the doorway, the toe of his left boot making contact with the walkie-talkie and skittling it across the floor. He could hear Maddox’s voice on the other end briefly and then even that fell silent. For a moment he just stood there stupidly, not knowing what to do, then he gathered up the pistol and the walkie-talkie and regained his position, looking up and down the corridor, a pupil waiting for instruction, a frightened man looking for answers.

  When the footsteps came they were so light at first that they didn’t register. A small delicate shuffle, they seemed unable to find purchase on the ground, undecided and unsure, they didn’t sound like footsteps at all, they sounded like someone sweeping the ground. Then, slowly, along the left hand side of the corridor a shape arose as if dragged from the cast shadows on the floor and moulded into something vaguely human. At first it was a silhouette, nothing more, and then as it drew nearer it began to be coloured in by the light of the room. Turtle stood there watching, his mouth hanging open at one side, the pistol in one shaking hand, the walkie-talkie bunched up in the other, and he didn’t think to use either. He was incapable of anything logical, nothing seemed to make sense except standing there like an idiot, and in that he excelled.

  Mia was in front of him, standing at the edge of the light from the room, staring back at Turtle from a face as bright as the moon. Her eyes burrowed into him, pleaded with him, but she said nothing. She just looked.

  ‘Mia?’

  There was no reply, but she seemed to smile, fleetingly.

  ‘Are you okay, Mia?’

  Turtle fumbled at the walkie-talkie, the pu
ny little unit felt wrong in his hands, like it would break. ‘Did you see Frankie? He was just…never mind.’ He took the walkie-talkie to his mouth, almost swallowed it and spoke loudly, firmly, his purposefully loud bluster shattering the unnerving silence. ‘Maddox? You there? Come in. Over.’ Mia lowered her head, the dark curtains of hair falling over her luminous skin. ‘Is Frankie there. Did he come by your way? I can’t find him. Came down this corridor and found the walkie-talkie and the gun but he’s not here. Anything?’ He stared back into the room, across to the sinks and the showers and the brightness seemed to wink at him with a mischievous malevolence. ‘Hennessey’s kid? Nah, that’s all sorted, you can get back to the others.’ Turtle lowered his voice. ‘What the hell you do to her man? She looks scared to death.’ He glanced back at Mia and saw her hands clenching at the air, her body tightening. ‘I’m looking at her now. Shit Maddox, girl looks like she’s seen a ghost.’

  There were more footsteps in the corridor, this time just beyond him, heavy and firm and coming closer. He looked up expectantly, the walkie-talkie slipping out of his hand and on to the floor with a delicate thud.