by Deck Davis
It was that frame of mind that brought me back to the moment, back to the cab where the cab driver stalked through the streets toward the address Molly had given him. Wren sat beside him, nervously drumming his left hand on the window, with his right hand inside his coat pocket, no doubt touching the piles of stones he could use as wards.
I was in the back, and the seat next to me was empty. We’d left Molly in the bunker, safely imprisoned behind one of the bunker’s great iron doors that locked from the outside. Right now, I imagined her pacing up and down her cramped concrete tomb, and I hoped she was stewing on it all. I hoped she was full of regrets and worry.
“Catch the fight last night?” said the driver.
“I don’t like boxing,” said Wren.
“Who was it?” I said.
“Gundogan against Thistlewaite. Gundy knocked him out in the ninth. Dead on their feet they were, but what a blow. Almost smashed his gumshield down his throat. Thistlewaite needs to watch out, you know. That’s three knockouts in a row. Wants to think about hanging up his gloves or he’s gonna to end up punch drunk. Slop for brains. They worry me, sometimes, those lads.”
Hang up his gloves. What a phrase. What was a boxer once he took his gloves off for the last time? That was the thing. You started training when you were fourteen. Maybe earlier. Year by year you got more serious, and you’d have people telling you that you can make it, that you can be a pro. Then you took your first fight, and things exploded from there. Bigger fights, more money, more hangers-on. If you weren’t fighting, you were training for a one. In the brief breaks you got between fighting and training, all you could do was imagine what kind of fight contract your promoter would pull out of his ass next, and how much money that one will get you.
One day, the gloves have to come off. What then? Where are the hangers-on? Everyone faces it sometime. They ride out their peak, and then after that it’s the fall. Mine happened in a different way to most, but it happens to everyone, sure enough.
There was something the driver said that made me really think about it, and for the first time in a while, I felt a stirring of gratitude.
Punch drunk. Or, to give it a scarier name, the one that used to give me nightmares, dementia pugilistica. A decline in brain power to the point it looked like you had dementia. Then there were the memory problems, the slow movement, Parkinson’s. At least that hadn’t happened to me…had it?
The driver slammed on the breaks. He honked his horn. “Fucking cyclists,” he said. “Pardon me. Excuse my Parisian.”
I felt sick, but it wasn’t from the sudden stop. It was something deeper, it was a feeling that started in my brain, one borne from my thoughts and that had twisted its way through me until it settled in my stomach.
Too many blows to the head. Dementia pugilistica.
Too many blows to the head.
Early dementia. Memory loss.
How would that look, exactly? Would the person suffering from it even realize?
Would they start to see things? Would they imagine things? Would they concoct a story in their heads? One with demons and hunters and vessels and wards, and nurses eating rats and traps made from screaming faces?
The driver smacked the steering wheel. “Hurry up, damn it,” he said. “This light. This light every time. I swear it stays red just to piss me off. Turn green, for god’s sake…”
“They work on a timer system,” said Wren.
“I know how they bloody work!”
Could I have imagined everything? Was that possible? That I’d been pounded so many times that my brain had taken sanctuary in a tale of good and evil with magic and powers and things most people in their right minds wouldn’t have believed?
Wren looked back at me. “When get there,” he said, obviously watching his words in front of the driver, “we better take a walk around the place. Check it out.”
“What exactly are you boys doing?” said the cabbie. “The place is a dump, you know that, right?”
“We know,” said Wren. “We’ve got business there.”
“Right y’ar.”
The nausea welled in my stomach. I didn’t know if it was anxiety about what lay ahead or worry about Ruby or some toxic mix of the two, but I was doubting myself. Not just myself but everything, the fabric of all the things I’d seen and done since losing to Franz Huck. I had to do something. To prove it to myself that I hadn’t taken so many punches over the years that my brain had abandoned ship.
I leaned forward as the car slowed to a stop, and the driver muttered under his breath about hitting yet another red traffic light.
I pulled up my sleeve, and I peeled off the black glove on my hand.
“Excuse me, pal,” I said. “Take a look at this.”
The driver muttered to himself some more. I needed him to turn around, I needed him to prove to me that these horrible thoughts were just nerves, and not realization of something worse.
“Hey,” I said.
He turned to look at me. He looked at my face, then glanced at my left hand.
He shuddered a little, as though it was an instinctual reaction to my hand, as if the cells in his body urged him to recoil. Then he gathered himself. He pretended he hadn’t noticed anything.
But I knew he’d seen it. The flesh on my hand. He was doing what people normally did when they saw something unusual; he was being polite.
Wren was glaring at me now, as if to say, ‘what the hell are you doing?’
“It’s a burn,” I told the driver. “Got it when I was little. Went too close to a bonfire.”
Not only did this ease the tension, but it dragged reassuring words from the driver’s mouth. “Looks nasty, that bugger,” he said. “Bet it hurt like hell fire.”
“You could say that.”
He’d seen it. He’d seen the demon flesh. This was real, and I was stupid for thinking otherwise. Or maybe not stupid; scared. It was a seed of doubt going full bloom and turning into a weed in my stomach, spreading and smothering and filling and choking, and I needed to grab the root and rip it out.
“Here we are,” said the driver, stopping the car.
When I looked out of the window, the nausea welled up in me and became a torrent.
Even if I hadn’t been staring out of the window when the taxi stopped a few buildings away, I would have known where we were. There are certain places in your life that don’t just sit in your head as a memory, as a wash of color fading more and more as the years go on. Some places get inside you fully, so that you can hear the creaks of the doors and the way the wind sounds when it rushes in, and you can smell the carpet and the paint, and you can picture yourself there, the way the aura of the building feels when you walk through it. Maybe it’s a happy place, a grandparent’s house where you’d spend summer days while school was out, and you could smell the sweetness of the hot chocolate your grandma would make, and you’d hear the buzz of the bees from the flowers in the garden your grandad dedicated his retirement to.
Or maybe, like me, the memory was rooted in a bad place. The kind of place where, when you thought about it, the wind sounded like a ghost, and the mere mention of the name of the place sent a chill through you, it took you hurtling back into your nightmares where you heard the gasp of the crowd, the tremor in the ring-doctor’s voice, the pounding of the ambulance crews’ boots as they rushed into the ring, even though the worst had already happened. The nervous chatter of the crowd as they discussed what you’d done, their voices almost turning into a hiss, then dribbling into silence as the stewards escorted them out and you were left alone.
Everyone has a place they never want to go back to. Mine was Harbinger Hall, at one time a stage for theatre productions, for orchestral performances, and for fights. A place that was once a source of pleasure for most people but became a symbol of personal hell for me. A place that had closed down, and that I thought I’d never have any reason to see again in person.
Could I even go inside? I imagined Harbinger Hall
as it was now; decrepit, the bricks crumbling, rain spattering in through holes in the roof and drenching the carpet and making the place stink.
I imagined something else; a trap like the one in Stopwatch House, except the faces etched into the trap walls were all the same. They were George La Nana, his eyes lifeless, his skin a mess of bruises.
I got out of the cab on autopilot. Wren joined me on the street, and he passed a ten-pound note through the window, and then we walked away.
“You okay?” he said.
I was dimly aware that the driver hadn’t left. That he’d killed the engine, and he was watching.
“Joshua?” said Wren.
I needed to get a hold of myself. This was an abandoned theatre, nothing more. The ghosts of that night weren’t trapped in its walls. The only thing on its walls were the insects and the damp, and maybe old posters advertising performances that never happened because the owner had been forced to shut the place down.
“I’m fine,” I said. “It’s just this place. It’s where George La Nana died.”
“Molly told me about that. I didn’t want to ask.”
“I’m sorry about her,” I said, wanting to take the attention away from me and my story. “It must have been tough hearing what she’d done.”
“It’s not your fault, so you don’t have anything to apologize for.” Wren reached up and squeezed my shoulder. “I was a dick before. Now it’s just us, I wanted to get all that bad stuff out of the way.”
“Forget it. I wasn’t the greatest guy in the world. Sorry for punching you when we first met.”
“Well, I did hold a knife to your neck.”
“True. You kinda deserved it, really.”
“True.”
Harbinger Hall was two streets ahead of us. There was a metal fence around the entrance steps, with a sign on it warning trespassers that the construction company – who didn’t seem to have gone near the place in years – weren’t responsible for any injuries sustained on site. Alastor was inside there, somewhere, and he had the Grandmaster with him, and he’d have been stupid if he didn’t expect us to come looking. That meant we’d be even more stupid to just walk in there through the front doors.
When we came to a side street, I took a right turn.
“The hall’s that way,” said Wren.
“Did you think we were going to walk in the front door?”
“I thought we’d climb through a window, or something.”
“I have a better way.”
The side street was dirty. The back yards of abandoned businesses looked out on it. Years ago, this place was filled with takeaway shops and diners. The owners would greet theatre-leavers with the smells of pizzas, burgers, friend onions, spicy chicken kebabs. When the Harbinger closed down, their line of business was cut. The eco-system of the area had failed with the closure of the theatre, and the rot had spread from business to business until the whole area was a lonely, silent, dump.
We came to the end of the side street, where a three-story Victorian house watched over us. On the top floor, black blinds covered the windows. The glass on the second and first floor windows were smashed.
I opened a 7-foot tall black gate and crossed into the back yard of the house. To my right, there was a stone alcove where they’d have stored coal years ago. Near the wall of the first floor, there was a slanted door cut into the ground. A thick, rusted bolt kept a latch shut. I unhooked it and pulled the doors, to reveal a set of stairs.
“Another basement?” said Wren.
“A tunnel. I fought at Harbinger Hall, remember? The owner kept telling me about it. Back in the forties, this was one of the biggest venues in the country. This is a tunnel they built so that when the air raid sirens went off, the stars didn’t have to huddle with the general public. They extended it later so that musicians and actors and fighters had a way to leave the hall in secret. Escape the paparazzi and all that.”
“This’ll lead straight to the hall?”
“Better than going through a window, right?”
The tunnel led us through into Harbinger Hall. We emerged in the cellar of the theatre, where old props collected dust. A werewolf glared at me from a shadowy corner, eyes hungry and teeth bared, and I’d have been worried if it wasn’t clearly a cardboard cutout. It was like a forgotten museum down there, every prop an artifact of a past evening, a past performance, where the spectators would have settled into seats facing the stage, some of them holding their children’s or husband’s or wife’s hand, others shoving popcorn into their mouths. The people on stage would do whatever their craft was; they’d act, they play instruments. For the performers it would be the culmination of years of training, a crystallization of hard work and talent all in one night. For the spectators it’d be something they’d looked forward to, maybe something that got them through boring days at work. Now, the remnants of the performances were in a darkened cellar, abandoned and forgotten. Some of the props were old, and the performers probably dead. The spectators too.
Wren nudged me. “The door’s over there.”
We climbed the steps out of the cellar and emerged into a long hallway with a series of doors on either side. I knew this hallway; I’d walked down it once, years ago. I’d had my team with me then. My trainer whispering last-minute advice into my ear, my promoter walking beside me, almost shaking with excitement at the prospect of my fight and of the prizes that waited when I won. I remembered the stone ceiling above us vibrating with the footfall of the spectators above. Their drunken chatter and yells had drifted down here, their excitement about the fight meeting with my nerves.
But it was different now. My team was gone, the hallway was silence, and the only person with me was Wren.
I raised my right hand and pointed my demon eye ahead, at the double doors at the end of the hallways. I knew what was behind them.
Aura detected. Strength: 45%
Power accumulated: 68% [32% to level 2]
“He’s through there,” I said.
“Where does that lead?”
“To the hall itself. The stage. The ring.”
We walked down the hall toward the double doors, our lonely footsteps echoing. Tension built inside me the same way it had that night years ago, when I’d taken the same walk, where the stewards had opened the double doors to reveal a dazzle of spotlights, and the hum of the crowd rushed to meet my ears, and the voice of the stage announcer boomed out as he introduced me.
‘Coming to the ring, with a record of eighteen knockouts…’
But it wasn’t George La Nana waiting for me now. It was something else, a stronger enemy, not flesh and blood but something other. Alastor, the nemesis demon.
“Are you ready for this?” I said, but I didn’t know if I was really asking Wren, or myself.
“No,” said Wren.
“Me neither, but it’s now or never.”
“I know. We couldn’t wait. We couldn’t prepare. If he kills the Grandmaster…”
“I know.”
We walked through the double doors and into the atrium of Harbinger hall. It was a cavernous space, with the roof so high that the shadows made it impossible to see where it ended. Our footsteps echoed out too loud. I felt the same churn of fear and tension that I had all those years ago.
I looked around. I looked for Alastor, I readied myself to feel that same, horrible feeling I used to get when someone dark crossed my path. I knew what that feeling was now, but being able to put a name to it didn’t help.
Alastor wasn’t around. Instead, there was just a man. A man in the center of the boxing ring they’d never dismantled, because the hall had never been used again after my fight with the Babe.
Across from the ring, over in the shadows, there was a metal safe, chest-high and covered in dust. Beside it was a raised platform, a stage where people used to perform.
The man was floating just above the centre of the ring with his arms stretched out horizontally, as if he’d been fixed to a cross. It wasn�
�t a wooden structure holding him upright, though, it was beams of red light, almost spectral but with a mist seeping off them. He wore black trousers and a white shirt, and the shirt was unbuttoned all the way down to show his chest, which was a mess of bloodied skin and red welts and whip marks and cuts and scratches.
His face was bruised black almost beyond recognition, but the more I looked, the more I recognized him. It was the cabbie, the man who kept pictures of his family in his car, the one who worked every hour he could to send his child to Disneyland.
Wren grabbed my arm. “That could be Alastor’s vessel,” he said.
I pointed my demon eye at the man, but the voice in my head was silent. I cast my eye around the atrium, but nothing spoke to me.
“It’s not him,” I said. “I know him.”
“Who is he?”
“A cab driver.”
“What?”
I ran across the atrium and to the ring. I grabbed a rope and pulled myself up, and I parted the ropes and stepped into the ring. I didn’t do my customary three jumps this time. I didn’t look around and take in the crowd, because this time there was nobody to watch me.
The cab driver looked at me. His face was pain-filled, his eyes vacant with only a flicker of life in them.
“Joshua,” he said.
I felt pity for him then. Pity for this man who’d been dragged into a demon’s game for a reason I couldn’t fathom. If he was a friend, or someone close to me, maybe I would have understood why Alastor had brought him here. But he was just a cab driver.
I looked at the beams of red light that somehow held him upright. Something inside me warned me that I shouldn’t touch them.
“Can we get him out of this?” I asked Wren, who was below me, looking up at the boxing ring.
Wren reached into his pockets. “Let me check. I don’t know what it is.”
“It’s no use, Wren,” said the cab driver.
Wren looked up. “You know me?”
“Of course.”
I was beginning to understand then. Not fully, but realization was stirring.
