“I can’t believe you did that to us,” the first man said, planting a hand on my chest and pushing me back into the hall.
I stumbled back a couple of steps, caught by surprise. I hadn’t done anything apart from pour myself a nice single malt and light up a cigar (hand rolled on the thighs of Cuban virgins if my man was to be believed). It was my only ritual, but I’d done it ever since I finished writing The Secret Life of Colours when I was 21 and I had thought it was just what writers did. Though back then it had been a stringy liquorice-papered cigarillo not a big fat Cuban. It was the ritual that was important, not the smoke. It’s the little things like that that keep us in touch with the kids we’d been when we set out on this journey of ours, right? My friends joked that my cigar’s got an inch longer and thicker for every zero tacked onto the end of the advance. If only they knew. The bank account had plenty of zeroes but they were in the sort code and the international routing number, not the balance.
“Inside,” the shorter of the two barked. He sounded like some sort of genetic cross between man and Pitbull. He looked like something else entirely. He was ugly. I mean really ugly. It took me a moment to realise he suffered from some sort of deformity and wasn’t just pig ugly. It was his skull. It was oversized and lumpen, as though bloated by elephantitis. I was struck by the ridiculous cartoon ‘super villain’ quality of it: the hunchbacked dwarf with a giant brain his skull can barely contain. If I’d written it, he would have been plotting to take over Metropolis whilst Clark Kent was tangled up in his telephone booth, or Gotham while Batman was tongue-tied with the delectable Ms. Vale. Let’s just say that my Spidey Senses weren’t just tingling, it was full-scale warning sirens, high alert, DefCon whatever the most worried/paranoid number is. Right then, as the dwarf pushed his way into the cabin it was off the charts.
Of all the most ridiculous things, I thought about the whiskey—a 21 year old single malt, my favourite tipple, not that I’ve ever been a drinker—on the reading table beside the copy of the latest manuscript and wondered if I’d get to drink it. And then, my second thought was simply: thank God I’d finished the manuscript. It wasn’t a book yet—I didn’t think of it that way until it came back from the publishers all bound and prettied up, right now it was still a raw manuscript. But it was finished. I’d emailed it away to my agent. The stack of papers here was purely symbolic. It made me feel good to have them printed out and piled up so I could look at all of those white A4 pages with a sense of achievement. I’d done it. Finished. I didn’t want to be the guy who died with his masterpiece unfinished and it was left to some hack like … well … like me to finish it.
He put a gnarled hand flat on my chest and shoved me back again. My hip caught the corner of the dresser behind me hard enough to bring tears to my eyes. I twisted and stumbled, falling to my knees. I looked up at the pair of them standing there all spit and bile, as a third character, a short woman—no more than five-three—stepped out of the shadows. She was pretty, or she would have been but for the scar on her left cheek that hadn’t healed properly after it had been badly stitched. I recognized the sort of wound—there was only one makeshift weapon I could imagine that caused that kind of unstitchable flap: a Stanley knife with two stainless steel blades instead of one. The trick was to wedge a matchstick between the blades to push them apart.
She was whiplash thin without being even remotely delicate.
She wore a workout top that revealed the incredible definition of her upper body. To use the kid’s vernacular, she was ripped. There were tramlines and the ripple of taut abdominals visible through the cling of her tight vest. In the moonlight her olive-skin looked almost opalescent, like an oriental glaze, and so very seductive. I’ve always had a weakness for that kind of look. I think it’s the stomach, those tight muscles and the promise of the belly button like it’s the most sensual secret of the body; this little intimate hollow like the bay at the nape of the neck or the crease between the legs that just isn’t seen all the time. That’s what secrets should be. Even now, facing the likelihood that she wasn’t here to tie me down in the good way, I couldn’t help but appreciate the raw physicality of her body and the beauty that went with her being so in control of it. It took me a moment—the space between heartbeats was always a line I liked to use when I was writing, we all have ticks, writers, if you read enough of our stuff—to realise that her almond-shaped eyes were incongruously blue. It was almost as though they had been Photoshopped there by a careless artist. Those two imperfections, the scar and the too-blue eyes only served to enhance her beauty, not detract from it.
She didn’t say anything as she walked over the threshold into the cabin. She wore standard issue military jackboots and combat fatigues. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and as she stepped into the light I could see the outline of a bolt piercing through her left nipple pressing against the cotton vest.
It’s the writer in me. I can’t help it. I heard someone say, “God is in the details,” once and ever since then I’ve been obsessed with the minutiae of every scene. I’m always looking for the little unique tell-tale details that’ll give my characters more life, like the bolt piercing, like the pustules around the monstrous deformity of the dwarf’s skull and the rust on the row of buckles that climbed from the tall guy’s ankle to just beneath his knee. I was always looking for little things to make my stories come alive. Apparently, I couldn’t stop looking for them, even when the shit was hitting the proverbial fan.
Close up, I didn’t recognize any of the intruders, but I felt like I ought to. There was something naggingly familiar about all of them, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.
They certainly weren’t my usual midnight callers—that was limited to delivery guys, and be they of the pizza, Chinese or Indian variety they always came bearing food. These three came empty handed. The tall guy wore a most peculiar pair of brass glasses that appeared to have more than a dozen interchangeable lenses attached to them on a series of hinges. Each lens was a different coloured filter, meaning they could be selected and adjusted in hundreds of permutations to shift the wearer’s perception. If he so wished the world could indeed be rose-tinted. I smiled at that observation, despite myself.
As though reading my mind he reached up for the lenses and shuffled them, choosing, I realised, to see the world in various hues of black.
I wished that wasn’t an omen, but what else could it be?
Still on my hands and knees, I looked up at him. The rest of his ensemble was no less a mismatch of environments or generations, and no less disturbing. He wore a long leather duster like a cowboy fresh off the high plains, and beneath it, a lace brocaded red waistcoat that would have suited a Venetian gentleman during the height of the Renaissance, and leather bolo tie. The steel toecaps of his boots were covered in mud from the hike to my isolated cabin.
Finishing the manuscript alone in the cabin instead of at home in the warmth and comfort of my city centre apartment in the company of my wife was another one of those rituals I’d become so obsessive about over the years. For obsessive read predictable.
“What do you want?” I sounded pitiful. I knew I did. If I’d been writing the scene I would have given myself some sort of backbone. As it was, the reality left me completely invertebrate.
“I thought you’d be more … impressive,” the woman said, finally. She had an accent. I couldn’t place it. Eastern European over Eastern, maybe? Still, full of promise, even if that promise was of impending pain.
“Disappointing, isn’t it? Like looking into the face of God and seeing nothing more than a miserable excuse for a human being,” the lens man said. “There’s nothing divine about this cocksucker.” He pronounced it cocksuckah, stretching out that last syllable like he was relishing a fiery slug of bourbon. I’d heard someone else speak like that before. That same intonation. Who?
“Take him through there,” the woman said, inclining her head to indicate the front room.
The two men obeyed without question, es
tablishing once and for all the hierarchy here. They grabbed me by the arms and legs and dragged me through and dumped me in front of the roaring fire. It was banked high, the logs, still damp, spat and snapped as their sap shrivelled beneath the heat. I lay on my back. I didn’t dare move. I expected them to start kicking. To beat me. That was how these home invasions went down, wasn’t it? The intruders burst in, beat seven shades out of anyone unfortunate to be inside, and then left with whatever they’d come looking for. I wasn’t about to fight back. I didn’t want a beating to escalate into murder.
The woman looked around the room, taking it all in. I knew what she was doing. She was marking the various points of ingress and egress. She settled down into my high-backed leather armchair—it was the only chair in the room with its back to the wall, meaning there was no way anyone could sneak up on her from behind while she was sat there. It was also my favourite seat in the old cabin. She reached down and took my whiskey from the table beside her and downed it in one swallow. I guess that answered my question about the whiskey’s fate.
The dwarf and the lens man took up places on either side of the room, meaning I couldn’t look at all three of them at once. I had to keep moving my head, eyes darting between them.
“Shall we get started, Lise?” the lens man asked.
Lise.
Again, there was something very familiar about the name. The name, the eyes, the scar. I knew this woman. I was sure I did, but I couldn’t think straight. Mind you, right then I would have been hard pressed to remember my own name, even without a gun to the head.
“There’s something I’ve always wondered about you, Mr Writer Man. Why do you hate women so much? Because you do, don’t you? It’s in so much of what you imagine. Stuff like The Horned Man and Walk the Last Mile, they’re full of hate. You might dress it up as fantasy but what you are doing is taking stuff that is important, stuff to be cherished, and fashion the most ugly trick, and it is a trick, because once we trust you, you betray us by taking everything that we’ve told you we cherish, everything we’ve shared about life that is important, and you don’t just twist it, you pulverise it. You grind it until there’s nothing left to love. There’s so much hate in you.”
I looked at her. She was wrong. She was so wrong. I didn’t hate women. I was uncomfortable around them because I thought they were all better than me, but that wasn’t hatred, it was more akin to worship. I tried to defend myself. “JD Salinger wasn’t Holden Caulfield,” I said. It was a stupid line. I’d used it before. It was meant to separate the writer from the words, but people didn’t seem to believe that just because I could imagine something didn’t mean I believed it. I wasn’t God. I was just a guy who told stories. It didn’t help that when I was younger I’d used pretentious lines like, “I don’t write stories, I write little pieces of me,” so I could sound like a tortured artist and impress the ladies in the audience who always wanted to believe there was something more to me than just the words on the page. “I’m not Noah Larkin or Haddon McCreedy or any of the other characters I’ve created.”
“Aren’t you?” she said, her voice laced with so much sarcasm it fairly dripped from her tongue. “I’d say that was precisely who you were, Steve. You’re more alive in them than you are in your own skin. Haven’t you even noticed that when you explore that darkness in you, you instinctively name your monsters Steve? Don’t think we hadn’t noticed. Now, take a look at yourself. Find some clever words to deflect from the truth and make it sound like you are a good, healthy, decent human being. Make it sound like you are someone to be admired. That’s what you do, isn’t it? Play with words. Invent. Lie.”
I did neither. I only had eyes for her. And the only thing I could say was, “I don’t understand.”
“You give life to these things. You put them out into the universe. It is about time you took some responsibility for the by-blows of your imagination. As I said, there will be a reckoning.”
“We really should wait for Crohak to join us,” the lens man said, shuffling uncomfortably from foot to foot.
“I don’t think he’ll mind if we just warm things up a bit first,” the woman said. “Maybe loosen our boy up by breaking a few fingers.”
Crohak?
Now that was a name I hadn’t heard for half a lifetime.
Crohak, the Bird Man. King of the tramps, beggars and thieves of my hometown, Newcastle.
But Crohak wasn’t real.
He was a character from Laughing Boy’s Shadow. I’d made him up in 1995. What were these people? Über fans come to torture me whilst getting their freak on pretending to be characters out of my books? Was it some sort of fucked up roleplay? The joy of living a half-public life was you attracted all sorts of idiots, not all of them healthy. Naked photos through the mail was one thing, but going all Annie Wilkes on your hero’s arse was something else entirely.
I was breathing hard without being able to catch my breath. I knew I was on the verge of an asthma attack. My inhaler was in other room. I reached out, looking for help. If they knew me as well as they seemed to, they must have known how bad my asthma had become over the last decade. It verged on emphysema now. It didn’t matter that I’d never smoked, that I battled to keep my weight down and for most of my fifties had run 10k a day four days a week. In my sixties the Carr Gene had taken hold. I was the very image of my grandfather, and would no doubt go the same way if this lot didn’t kill me first. “My inhaler,” I said. “Please.” The woman just shook her head. I knew then that they had no intention of letting me leave the cabin alive. They were here to kill me. That was their fucked up game. So be it. I wouldn’t whimper or plead or beg for my life. The book was finished. My masterpiece. And as she’d said, quite rightly, I only ever lived in my stories. But I would carry on living in them, too. I’d always known that. And that was what I’d meant by writing little pieces of me. I was scattering my soul out through the universe one piece at a time to live all by itself. The dark stars, the northern lights, they were just glimmers of creativity let free.
I’d been in a really dark place when I’d written LBS, and took all of that existential crap out on poor old Declan Shea, my erstwhile jazz-playing alter ego in the pages of the novel. It happens to me a lot. I find myself getting pretty low during the winter months. Technically, I believe it is called SAD, seasonal adjustment disorder. What it means is that during the winter I tend to write some bleak, gut-wrenching stuff. Like LBS, which was written during one long unending winter of the soul. I killed poor old Declan on page 66, I think, something like that, and then tied his soul to the city meaning he could never cross the bridge into Gateshead and leave Newcastle. To do so meant the complete disintegration of his essence. Really, despite all the trappings of fantasy what it really was when it came right down to it was a guy’s (quite like me) descent into madness. It wasn’t exactly the stuff kids playing with train sets and willow cricket bat guitars that had been my youth. That should give you an idea as to my state of mind back then. Crohak the Birdman. I hadn’t thought about him in forever. He really was the very worst of all the traits my psyche had been able to dredge up back then. I guess the writer in me would call it catharsis, writing out the horrible stuff to heal myself. I’m not sure what the human being in me would call it. Another thing I used to reckon was that it was my responsibility as a writer to face the darkness. To write stuff that tackled uncomfortable subjects, not to shy away from taboos, but rather to rip them open and leave them raw. Mercifully, that old version of me is long since gone, swallowed by thousands of bad decisions and half-reached goals and all that’s left of him is me.
“No need,” the dwarf said, looking up at the ceiling. “He’s already here.”
“Fuck!” Lise snapped, pushing herself up out the chair. The transformation was as shocking as it was sudden. She wasn’t just tense. She was wired. Primed to explode. And, stretching the old cliché, she could go off at any second.
“Did you really think he wouldn’t come?”
She didn’t answer the dwarf.
“We’ve made contingencies,” the lens man said. With a flick of the wrist a long iron baton slid out from inside his sleeve. There was dried blood on it from where his last victim had taken a beating. “It just means we have to cut the fun short.”
I really didn’t like the sound of that, being as I was fairly sure I was the fun.
The woman must have seen the look of fear on my face because she took a moment to crouch down beside me, almost like petting a dog, and said, “Don’t worry, Steve. You won’t feel a thing unless we want you to.”
I heard the first bird settle on the roof of the cabin. A moment later wings battered the glass as dozens and dozens of starlings hammered into the window. It held but for how much longer I didn’t want to guess.
“Keep him out,” Lise ordered the lens man.
He tapped his baton against his thigh, and then shifted the arrangement of lenses on his glasses. I had no idea what colour he had chosen to see the world in now, but could only assume he saw some sort of benefit from the ever-shifting hues. He walked over to the window, setting himself, hands on hips, in front of it, to wait for the inevitable implosion of glass and birds.
“We can’t hope to keep them all out,” the dwarf muttered. He actually looked more frightened than I felt. There was something very weird going on here, beyond the obvious. “Who are you expecting?”
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