“Yes, sir.”
“And, Carl?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Make sure we never see each other again.”
Carl drops his head and slinks out the back door. He slides the door closed behind him, sealing in Basil and the unconscious Paul.
Basil wanders his apartment, looking for a length of rope or cord or something else with which to immobilize his comatose houseguest. The best he can find is the octopus of cables connecting his television to the port in the wall, but he’s not about to part with the conduit for his beloved TV programming just to string up a would-be assassin. He decides to call Anton.
Anton, to Basil’s surprise, answers on the second ring. Basil explains the situation, and Anton appears at Basil’s front door less than five minutes later, armed to the teeth. First he hands Basil a length of rope, followed by a roll of electrical tape and, finally, a used plastic drop cloth. The remnants of a six-pack, two lonely cans of beer, dangle from his fingers by a plastic ring.
Anton nods toward the unconscious man on Basil’s floor. “Where you bury body?” he asks.
“He’s still alive, near as I can tell,” Basil replies. “I just want to make sure he’s secure when he comes to.”
“You want beer?”
“No, thank you. I’m surprised you like that swill.”
“When in Rome,” he says. “In Leningrad, I drink Stoli. In U.S., I drink Anheuser-Busch. I blend. Who is man on floor?”
“Someone who wants me dead.”
“He lose.”
“Yes. He lose indeed.”
Basil twines the rope around the man’s wrists and ankles, and then winds the electrical tape around each knot. Once he’s confident the man cannot escape, he slaps the man’s cheeks—gently at first, then roughly. He sits Paul upright, though the man refuses to stir. Perhaps he put too much spin on the frying pan. The guy could have a broken jaw. Or a grievous brain injury. Or a severed spine.
“Piss on him,” Anton says.
“I think I’ll just use water. Thanks for stopping by, Anton. You probably shouldn’t be here when he wakes up. You don’t need the aggravation.”
Anton rubs his hands together, as if absolving himself of any responsibility. He points toward the far wall, newly caved in, and says, “Tomorrow I bring spackle.” He and his two cans of beer take their leave.
Basil goes to the sink and fills a bowl with cold water. He then stands over the unconscious man, Paul, and drips the water onto his forehead. When that doesn’t elicit a response, he dumps the rest of the bowl across Paul’s face and chest. Paul seems confused when he opens his eyes, finally.
“Hey,” Basil says. He snaps his fingers to get Paul to focus. “Do you know where you are?” When the man doesn’t respond, he asks, “Do you know who you are?”
Paul takes a moment to study his surroundings, and then he focuses on Basil. His expression shifts from confusion to contempt.
“Your end is near,” the man says.
“Clearly,” Basil replies. “It’s Paul, right? I sent your pal Carl on his way. I’ll make this brief: Please tell Edna that if she’d like to have a civilized conversation, I’m all for it. But please tell her to call first, rather than having her idiot cronies drop by at such an impolite hour.”
Basil can feel Paul’s hatred for him.
“Isaiah,” Paul says. “Chapter fifty-nine, verse three: ‘Your hands are stained with blood, and your fingers with guilt. Your lips speak lies, your tongues mutter malice.’”
“So sweet of you to say, Paul. Look, it’s getting late and I need my beauty sleep. Make yourself comfortable.”
He peels off a length of electrical tape and goes to place it over Paul’s mouth, but Paul does not cooperate. He lashes out and bites Basil’s palm, sinking in his teeth.
Basil doesn’t flinch, though Paul’s teeth hit bone. Instead, he lifts his hand until Paul comes entirely off the floor. The man’s jaw muscles cannot take the strain, and he falls to the floor in a heap. This time Basil forgets his tenderness, and roughly slaps the tape over his captive’s mouth.
“It’s a damned shame, Paul,” Basil says, studying the blood dripping from his wounded hand. “You know nothing about me, but you assume I’m here to do harm simply because of the way I look. I hope you realize you’re the invader here. You’re the aggressor. You’re the one who’s spilled blood tonight—all in the name of a supposedly civilized god.”
He places Paul in a chair and winds the tape around his arms, legs and waist.
“You’ll be safe here until morning. Now if you’ll please shut up for the next few hours, I need my shuteye.”
Chapter 24
Consumed
Hours later my feet descend the stairs and lead me into the light of day. I can still taste Alice on my overworked lips. I can still smell her, her sharp musk lingering in my whiskers, on the tips of my fingers.
The yellow-gray gloom stings my eyes. The sun hangs low in the sky, the perfect white orb cutting through the haze of cloud cover and coal smoke. The sun’s return brings a smile to my face.
Alice has slain me, and part of me is thankful for this death, for now I can have my resurrection. In this state I have no strength, the slot between Alice’s loins having sapped all the might from my body. Now I must satisfy yet another appetite, by filling my gut.
The bakery in Owlsditch bustles in late morning. I ask the woman behind the counter for half a loaf of bread. She, the baker’s wife, squints at me and shows a toothless grin. She must smell Alice on me too.
“Two more gone missing just last night,” the baker’s wife says. “Two more, just up and gone, as if God came down and plucked ’em right up. It’s the monster, I’d bet, sent here by God himself, ’cause he don’t like what we been showing him.”
“All things take care of themselves in time,” I say.
I dare not share my intent to fell Old Billy.
I collect my bread and weave out into the street, renewed by my solitary purpose. I have my bread, I have my will, and I have a clear mind, thanks to a proper night’s sleep beside a randy young tom who knows how to warm a man’s blood.
The only necessity I lack is the means to stop Old Billy’s black heart.
A wagon passes, hauling hay for ponies and sheep, presumably. The wheels dig for traction against buried stone. The muleskinner whips the arse of his sickly draught ox, and the wagon lurches forward. Long-handled farm tools clatter against the boxboard.
Barring a pistol, a spear will do just fine. I smile at my good fortune.
With all the stealth I can muster, I cross the street and follow the confetti of straw. As the wagon stops at Owlsditch Mews, the muleskinner slides from his perch and limps into the stables.
Ankle-deep mud tugs at my boots as I creep to the rear of the wagon. As I pull on a long wooden handle, out comes a thatch of hay woven into the four iron prongs of a pitchfork. I toss the fork back into the wagon and yank on the second handle, knowing the muleskinner will be returning at any moment. The wooded handle ends in a splintered point. It will make a fine spear. The shovel’s broken-off spade sits on a patch of loose hay. I take my spear and slip away.
My belly full and weapon secure, my thoughts turn to the task ahead. If I were Old Billy, where would I be? Close to my hunting grounds, but not too close. I imagine the scaly bugger balled up like a sleeping cat, tail curled over its nose, its body waiting for some unspoken signal that the sun has retreated, the world of shadow begging its return.
As I head toward London Bridge, memories of Alice consume my mind.
The fingers of my right hand find their way to the space beneath my nose. Alice’s ripeness takes me back to the previous night. My trousers tighten.
“Focus on Old Billy,” I whisper.
The beast would be nimble and unafraid of heights. Perhaps the beast has coiled itself in a belfry or a church steeple. No, in my mind it is a creature of the earth, borne of the soil, so it will want to be encased, as if in
a tomb. It will favor someplace quiet, damp and cool, far from the fuss of humans, until it is time to feed. Clever Old Billy would have chosen somewhere with multiple points of ingress and egress.
London’s streets bustle with industry. On every unoccupied plot, workmen piece together structures of brick and timber, bone and blood. They carve up the earth with glee, adding to London’s blight. Already the city booms with constructions of every sort, from the medieval palace to paupers’ shacks. Why must they add to the congestion? To lure in fools like me, I suppose.
Old Billy could be anywhere. I will know the place when I see it.
I consider my connection to this thing, this stranger in a strange land. Perhaps the fabric of our bond stems from the fact that neither of us is welcome here.
A dark cloudbank moves in, and the light shifts. The dross and din of enlightened London fall away, and I tramp lonely streets abandoned by all but rats and curs and orphaned beggars. At least the mud has thinned, as my boots find purchase on bare brick.
I roll the cold from my shoulders as I approach a massive stone edifice. Its three crumbling stories have done their best to find a way back to the ground, but the bones still stand. Shaggy brown vines snake up the walls. Glass crunches beneath my boots. Absent their panes, the windows are open sores, invitations to pigeons and vagrants—and perhaps the accursed creature that will make meals of them all.
“As good a place as any to begin,” I declare, though no one listens.
I skirt the building, looking for a proper way in, and I find it in a boarded-up doorway with a few planks dangling from rusted nail heads. Perhaps the doorway had once been well capped, but someone or something went to the trouble of breaking the seal. I duck beneath a horizontal beam and nudge open the door with my elbow. Shedding old paint in long strips, the door yawns open to reveal an empty space—perhaps an old factory floor where important widgets were once made, or a storehouse where munitions for war were once kept at the ready for swift shipment to foreign lands in need of taming.
Footprints checker the dusty floor. They seem of human origin. Most of them, anyway.
I hold my spear before me. When I find Old Billy, lost in his murderous dreams, I shall drive the spear through his brain, then his heart, until his limbs cease their thrashing. The dirty work done, I will retrieve the nearest constable to prove the deed has been done and collect my twenty pounds in reward. Then this peasant life will fall behind me.
My eyes seek signs of life, signs of movement, yet they find nothing notable on the empty first floor save a broken chair and a clutch of dirty bed sheets drawn up into a pile. An able nest, perhaps. Chains dangle eerily from the ceiling. I am thankful for the light from the knocked-out windows, yet I know I will have to enter darker places if Old Billy and I are to find each other again.
A moment later I arrive at another doorway, pressed open with a gentle palm. A stairway leads to a windowless cellar. The light goes only so far. I take the steps two at a time, going as quietly as I can, but the weight of each footfall announces my approach. Twelve steps later I enter the cellar’s mouth—dimly lit, cold, heavy with the odor of a caged animal. My boot clips something on the floor and sends it sailing. The ribcage of a small animal ricochets off the wall and breaks into a dozen discrete bones.
If only my bride could see me now, hunting monsters with nothing but a broken spade in hopes of sending the bugger home to the inferno. How ridiculous.
This is all for her. Or is it? If it were, I would have stayed home in Berwick, built a life with her there. Instead I escaped to a loveless place that holds nothing for me. If she had been my sole concern, I would not have propelled myself into Alice’s arms—or, more to the point, between her legs.
Shame darkens my mood.
I look up from the filthy floor, eyes wide in the dim light, and shudder at an alarming sight: a silhouette at the edge of the shadows. I crouch to my knees, spear ready to do its job, and wait for the attack. Instead, the silhouette stays put, still as a mannequin. Slowly it sways. Then, it lurches forward, and I fall onto my arse. My spear traces a violent arc across the dusty floor.
The fumes of gin, the tang of sweat.
As the old man clamors past me, he tramples my right foot. He trips as he gets to the staircase, his face smacking the wall. He climbs one stair at a time, hand gripping the banister, struggling with each step, gasping for breath. The vapors of gin trail him. He gets to the top of the stairs and roams the floorboards.
Columns of dust cascade from the ceiling.
My heart stutters in the aftermath. I fumble for my spear, and my hand grips something soft and somehow familiar. The smell hits me first. I squint to see, but the stink tells me I have thrust my hand into a smear of human feces. I yell in disgust and wipe the foulness from my palm. After feeling around for the handle of my spear, I scout for any signs of Old Billy. Finding none, I climb the stairs and find my way out to the street.
Thick, gray clouds have moved in. The sun has gone into hiding yet again.
I am man enough to admit my ineptitude. Scared stiff by an old sot, with the stink of yesterday’s breakfast marring my hand—annulling Alice’s lovely musk, most regrettably.
I must press forward.
Three more burned-out tenements, an old church and an abandoned factory black with soot produce no more clues in my search for Old Billy. In all, I have found nothing but a growling street cur tending to her puppies, desiccated turds and piles of time-bleached bones from four-legged beasts.
Then I find the entrance to the tunnel by the edge of the Thames. Where it leads, I cannot know, but I must explore. I wander in near darkness for an hour, maybe two, my feet soaked and stinking of sludge. Panic fills me, but I tamp it down by telling myself, “No one else can do what I must.” I turn back only when I realize the foolishness of my endeavor: wading through an inky tunnel filled with other people’s waste, searching for some thing that could kill me before I have the chance to smell it coming.
Some time later I find myself within range of the tunnel’s exit. My belly swells with fear, figuring now, my feet a mere Gunter’s chain from the care of sunlight, Old Billy will take me in his claws and relieve me of the burden of my viscera. But as I step into the light, I realize I am safe. Soggy to the bone, but safe.
My feet know the way home, wherever home is—back to a random dry spot on Monument Bridge, I suppose. My mind wrestles with thoughts of my bride, of Alice, of Old Billy, as I put Owlsditch behind me.
An old man with soot on his face runs past. Then another. The commotion builds with every forward step. Then the telltale smell of burning wood fills my nose. Ashes ride the air. Even in the gray sky, I see the column of smoke rising. I follow the ink-black tendril, seeming to lead me toward to the base of Monument Bridge.
Scores of Londoners stand at the span’s entrance. Smoke stings my eyes. I push my way through the crowd. Two constables sprint toward the scene. I follow, curious.
About halfway onto the bridge, the constables stop well short of the blaze. Even from here I can feel the heat on my face, but I cannot tear my eyes away. The inferno consumes the blacksmith’s. The roof of the building where I had stored nearly every penny—the fruits of my backbreaking as a canal pickman—collapses before me.
I sink to my knees, mouth agape. For I realize I am seeing my future alight, melting into the earth.
Chapter 25
All Eyes on the Grim Horizon
Basil stands over Herbert’s left shoulder, arms crossed, as the graphic designer taps away at the ivory keyboard.
Through the magic of software, Herbert wraps words around images on a digital canvas that only a few minutes earlier had been a featureless white sheet.
Basil’s amazement with man’s technology has not dulled. Even now, more than a month into his adventure, he finds a new reason each day to believe the universe has no boundaries.
“You’re too good for this place, Herbert. Just look at that masterpiece.”
&nb
sp; A blood-red devil with googly eyes, fangs and a pointy van dyke, stares back from the screen. A cloud-shaped word bubble hooks into the space between the tips of two shiny black horns jutting from the cartoon devil’s forehead, each one perched above a thick, well-tended eyebrow. The Devil Smoke logo—the L capped with the prongs of a pitchfork, the viper-like S complete with slits for eyes and a slinky, bifurcated tongue—looms in the upper-right corner. Herbert adds a textbox in the center of the word bubble and fills in the space with seven random lowercase letters, not a single vowel among them.
“What do you want it to say?” he asks.
“Go with this: ‘Sinfully good’.”
“Good enough for now. You’ll fix it later.”
“I’m not used to seeing you so excitable.”
“Working here, I rarely have reason to get excited about much of anything. You should know better than anyone. Stimulation doesn’t just waltz through the door of Savage Communications every day. But this—this is fun.”
“Precisely. That’s why you should look elsewhere when I leave here.”
Basil eases Herbert’s office door to a close until the lock clicks into place. Bulcavage is nowhere to be found—out pounding the pavement for new business, apparently—but they’re hardly alone. From her over-perfumed office just two doors away, Karen is surely plotting Basil’s demise, her ear pressed to the wall as she admires the army of Persian cat figurines crowding her desk.
“There’s not much else in Beak, at least not in this line of work,” Herbert says. “I’ll be here for at least another year or two. After that, who knows?”
Although subtle, the tint of disappointment colors Herbert’s words. Basil sees an opportunity to intervene.
“I don’t know why you feel indebted to stay here. Someone like you should have no problem finding good work wherever you wish to call home.”
“You could say the same. You’ve got a real knack for this stuff. Hell, we should branch out and do our own thing, start our own agency. Why take a piece when we can have the whole pie? We could call it Teak Demon Communications.”
Burn, Beautiful Soul Page 21
