by Gary McMahon
Pierce struggled up off the sofa, still dressed in yesterday’s clothes, the stale smell of unfinished sex clinging to them like a string of dried semen. In his trouser pocket he found a folded sheet of paper. The discovery did not come as a surprise. He unfolded the sheet and read the words printed on one side:
all questions answered.
On the reverse side of the piece of paper was a badly photocopied image of an unnumbered page torn from the Scarbridge A-Z. He slipped it into his notebook, and sat down before making a decision that could potentially change his life.
V
Pierce walked the drowsy streets, following the map to the nearby warehouse district. Early morning joggers and waking street people ignored him as he cut a swathe through their routines; he was like a windblown scrap of litter, passing them by without being registered.
Soon he reached the place, an abandoned factory on the outskirts of a group of residential units with To Let signs nailed to stakes outside locked doors. Pierce walked towards the building marked with a large red “X” on the map, and found a corresponding symbol marked on the corrugated steel wall of a temporary office unit. The marking was strangely familiar, yet he was certain that he’d never seen it before. A flattened figure of eight enclosed within a circle, like a deflated representation of something that he should be aware of.
He crumpled up the paper in his fist and let it fall to the ground; a slight wind, low to the ground, blew it away. Pierce reached out a hand and pushed the iron door set into a crooked frame. The door opened easily. He was expected.
Without giving himself time to change his mind, Pierce stepped over the threshold and into a darkness so thick that it felt like cobwebs on his skin. The door closed behind him, swinging silently on oiled hinges, and he was suddenly more lost than he had ever been before.
A light went on ahead of him, too bright; blinding in its intensity. Halogen bulbs set into some sort of mobile wooden framework all attached to a little wheeled cart. A large black man, naked to the waist and sweating profusely, pushed the trolley towards Pierce, a cruel smile on his face. Another man – this one Caucasian, fat, and completely naked, manned a camera that was bolted below the lights. His small, stubby penis jiggled due to the erratic motion of the trolley, and he idly scratched at his balls with the hand that was not fondling the camera’s lens.
“Greetings” said a familiar cultured voice – the one Pierce had spoken to over the telephone. And then a tall, thin figure stepped into the light, shadows quivering at his back. “I’m glad that you could join us. Personally, I had high hopes from the start; you seemed like ideal material for what we have in mind. You possess great persistence.
“But everyone must first endure our strict interview and vetting procedure, and also pass certain psychological tests, before moving on to the final stage.”
The man was carrying the biggest knife Pierce had ever seen, and its curved blade glistened beneath the attention of so much artificial illumination. The prostitute from yesterday stood behind this third, almost elegant, man; she was dressed in a shiny black bondage suit, with deliberately placed slashes at the breasts and crotch. Her head had been shaved, even the eyebrows removed; the skin there was raw and red, like prepared meat. “Dobry den,” she mumbled, smiling through a bright silver zipper that was crudely stitched to her thin lips.
Pierce began to cry.
“There’s always something in the way,” said the man with the knife, slipping off his heavy overcoat to reveal a clean, white butcher’s apron with nothing beneath. “Cutting you off from personal happiness and fulfilment; or interrupting that perfect view; or keeping you from your dreams and goals and aspirations.
“And we have that something right here, where we can use it to our own rather perverse – and very profitable - advantage.”
Pierce looked again at the camera, at the startlingly bright lights. “All this…this preparation and skullduggery, just for the sake of snuff films?”
“Oh, no,” said the calm, neat man. “That’s not even the half of it. By the time we’ve finished with you, you’ll be wishing simple snuff was all we had to offer.”
He smiled, and it was cold as steel, sharp as the knife clutched so delicately in his manicured fingers.
The darkness behind the man shimmered, and Pierce caught sight of something moving there, something beyond the blackness that gathered at the edges of his vision: a long, fat, coiled presence with far too many thick, ropy erections and moist gaping orifices. Then a shape like a fat snake slithered out of the darkness and wrapped around the cultured man’s ankles; he kicked it away, smile still lodged firmly in place on his sharp-angled skull.
Pierce strained to see what was there, waiting for him behind the facade, but he couldn’t quite focus…there was something…something in the way. Then he realised that was exactly what he’d been looking for - whatever was in the way.
The fat man behind the camera giggled boyishly; the muscled black man barked a strange, animal laugh. The gent in the butcher’s tabard took the girl by her hand and led her onwards towards their cowering prey. She moved sinuously, like a serpent: all loose joints and rippling muscles beneath her soft and lustreless flesh.
Pierce fell to his knees, too weak to protest; too broken now to fight for whatever scrap of sick, twisted film footage his life had become. Their hands were upon him, stripping him bare, and then he was dragged into that twitching darkness, accompanied by the sound of many hungry mouths opening, of fluids ejaculating prematurely against the cold concrete floor.
The next thing he became aware of was the clamouring attention of scores of tentacle-like appendages, the eager sucking of sticky disc-like growths, and a pain so sharp and exquisite that it could almost be called pleasure. He soon succumbed to the grasping darkness, accepting that whatever was in the way would always be there, blocking his view of a better place. And the camera caught it all, in extreme close-up.
VI
Sleeve notes from an illegal bootleg DVD of an underground horror film called Something in the Way, confiscated in a Soho sex shop November 2005:
A depressed office worker seeks meaning in his life, and discovers a strange sexual cult operating out of the decrepit warehouse district. Here he finds either the answer to his deepest prayers or the realisation of his worst nightmares.
Crudely captured in jerking hand-held camera techniques, this is an example of guerrilla filmmaking at its most transgressive, uncompromising, and unsettling.
No official record of this title has been traced, and cast and credit lists are currently unavailable.
A horrifically mutilated body found buried and partially burned on a Scarbridge rubbish dump was today identified as that of Martin Pierce, 38, an Office Manager recently diagnosed as suffering from severe depression. Police are investigating Mr. Pierce’s death, and a spokesperson admitted that foul play was suspected.
From The Scarbridge Echo
6th March, 2005.
A STILLNESS IN THE AIR
Darkness. A stillness in the air. Thunder. Wind.
Grant stood just outside the automatic doors, waiting for his senses to adjust to his new surroundings. His ears still felt as if they were stuffed with cotton wool and his left arm was tingling from where it had gone to sleep resting on the arm of the chair. He’d flown business class – an extra sweetener from the newspaper who’d bought his story – and had enjoyed sipping red wine as he travelled from L.A.X. to Leeds/Bradford airport to begin his new life. The fee for telling his story had been huge, but he’d argued that it was necessary to finance this fresh start. Money was no longer a concern.
Thunder rumbled again – or was it just the sound of jet engines raking the sky as another plane took off? The wind caressed his legs, wrapping around his shins like a ragged sheet. He watched the people around him as they moved through the endless set of small routines that made up their lives. Soon he would be one of them, faceless and free; but first he needed to find his hotel and g
et a good night’s sleep.
A short oriental-looking man emerged from a recessed doorway as Grant climbed into the back of a cab at the taxi rank near the exit. The man wore a long, grey overcoat and held a compact digital camera to his face. He snapped off a few shots and then walked away, head down, feet moving quickly across the smooth paving stones as shadows skipped away from him.
Just a tourist, thought Grant. Nothing more.
“The Happy Inn,” he said to the driver, slamming the door as the cab lurched away from the kerb. Jangly Asian music played quietly on the car stereo; a disembodied voice crackled instructions to other drivers on the two-way radio.
“Cold night,” said the driver, his moist brown eyes blinking in the rearview mirror. He was unshaven; his hair was thinning on top. His smile was brittle, like something that might break at any minute.
“Yes. Chilly.”
The man nodded, as if Grant had made some wise philosophical statement, and then returned his attention to the road. Had Grant noticed a glimmer of recognition in the man’s narrowing eyes? It happened all the time, and had been the main reason for his troubles: a simple case of mistaken identity.
Grant had always had what his mother had called “one of those faces”. Bland, run-of-the-mill, there was nothing about his features that particularly stood out; but he was always being mistaken for someone else, mostly people he did not know, had not even heard of.
There was, of course, the oft-recited story of how, when Grant was a child, his mother had rushed into a store for some cigarettes, leaving him outside in his pram for a matter of seconds. When she returned, there was an old woman bending over the pram, talking to baby Grant. The old woman insisted that the child was her grandson, and demanded to know who Grant’s mother was and what she was doing with the boy. It was only when the police arrived that the misunderstanding could be cleared up.
Then there was the time he’d travelled from New York to Boston on a Greyhound bus, and spent half the journey talking to a middle-aged man who swore that Grant was his cousin, Jed from Atlanta. No matter how much Grant assured him otherwise, the man had been unswerving in his belief that they were family.
So many times he had been mistaken for others.
Just one of those faces, the kind easily mistaken for someone else.
Out of habit more than anything else, he kept a copy of the grainy police photofit in his wallet; and when he looked at it now, with the advantage of hindsight, he supposed the shape of the face was the same as his, and the eyes held a certain familiar slant. He had not noticed the resemblance at the time, but someone had. When armed police had kicked in his door at three in the morning, the shock causing his mother to suffer another massive stroke, he’d been caught entirely by surprise.
“Nearly there,” muttered the driver. This time he did not glance at Grant in the mirror. The music faded out, replaced by more of the same. The radio crackled.
They had held him for forty-eight hours in a cramped interrogation room, denying him food or drink, and by the time the error had been admitted and he was allowed to go, his mother was dead. When they finally caught Norris Steele, the Florida construction worker who had killed and mutilated twenty-two women, the focus had finally shifted from Grant and he was allowed to grieve. The press finally left him alone; his life, now in tatters, was his own again.
During the high-profile trial, Grant received a letter from an expensive law firm with an offer to settle out of court for the “inconvenience” caused by his wrongful arrest and subsequent detention. It was a lot of money but Grant’s ambulance-chasing lawyer had urged him to hold out for more. Eighteen months later he was a millionaire.
He’d always wanted to visit Yorkshire, the birthplace of his grandfather, so here he was, ready to set up home and blend into the greater mass of humanity and lose himself in glorious anonymity.
Drizzle glazed the windows and when he looked out of the car the darkness seemed to writhe like a mass of blackened muscle. Dour streets of identical back-to-back houses passed by in a blur; the occasional pale face peeked out from a curtained window. Grant’s mother had never seen this part of the world, but had always wanted to come to her father’s homeland. Grant carried her memory with him, hoping that it might somehow help her see the places she had longed for near the end of her days.
“The Happy Inn,” said the driver as he pulled into a sudden left turning, rear tyres skidding on the gravel. The hotel was brightly lit and a group of figures stood outside on the steps smoking and chatting in the rain.
Grant paid the fare and jogged across the forecourt, dodging puddles and holding his small suitcase above his head to keep himself dry. He ignored the faint stirrings on either side of him, in the waist-high conifers flanking the path, and climbed the steps to enter the building. One of the smokers who stood there stared hard at him, an elusive expression flickering across her face; then she looked abruptly away, her eyes once again dull and disinterested.
The hotel lobby was slightly shabby and in need of a coat of paint. Pot plants wilted in the corners and by the entrance to the bar there stood a dilapidated antique coat rack.
“How long will you be staying?” asked the petite receptionist when he checked in. The question filled him with a sudden sense of terror: his mind went blank and all he could think of was all that he’d left behind.
The receptionist’s smile faltered; her eyes narrowed with suspicion.
“Possibly as long as two weeks. Until I can get settled in the area.”
The girl repositioned her smile and filled in the necessary paperwork.
Upstairs in his room, Grant unpacked his few belongings. The rest of his stuff would be shipped out from L.A. as soon as the house was ready. He had not even seen the property selected for him by the newspaper, only photographs. It was a four-bedroom detached house in a semi rural setting. The kind of place he’d always dreamed of but never expected to be able to afford.
Wind rattled the windows. Rain splattered the glass. When he turned around, Grant thought he saw a thin figure ducking down beneath the plastic sill. He blinked slowly, squeezing his eyes hard. When he opened them again he felt better but still not fully back to normal. It would take time for him to retake possession of his own mind; everything felt out of reach, as if he were separated from himself by a thin sheet of unbreakable glass.
He put away his clothes and lay on the bed, on top of the covers. Pushing off his shoes, he flexed his toes. The ceiling above the bed was chipped and stained. Paintwork peeled like old scabs. Beneath the bright exterior, the hotel was slowly falling apart.
Grant stood and went into the bathroom, turning on the shower. He undressed in the tiny cubicle, listening to the hot water as it spluttered to life. Steam filled the room, erasing his reflection in the mirror. Before it vanished completely, he experienced a surge of almost heartbreaking loss.
He stayed in the shower for over thirty minutes, scrubbing his flesh raw under the hot jet. No matter how much pressure he applied, or how much soap he used, he never felt clean. The stain of all those deaths was upon him, even though he had nothing to do with the crimes. Murder crept up on him, hovering around every corner, loitering at each junction in the road. Rooms filled with dread piled above him, tottering on their feeble foundations.
When he stepped out of the shower his skin was bright red, almost burned. He wiped clean a patch of mirror with the palm of his hand and stared at his face in the glass. He no longer recognised what he saw; the murderer had stolen his features and made them into something monstrous.
Steam churned in the air, as if grasping hands were fighting at its core.
“Leave me alone.” The sound of his own voice shocked him, and when he looked into his eyes in the mirror they were empty.
He dressed in silence, after hanging his coat over the mirror on the bedroom wall. He combed his hair as best he could and left the room, heading downstairs for dinner.
Grant made plans as he ate his bland pasta
dish. Once he had the keys to the house he would buy new furniture and try to assert what remained of his character and make the place his own. It would be difficult, it would take time; but time was all he had.
The staff floated around the room like surly phantoms, filling wine glasses and coffee cups, taking away plates, bringing in the next course. Grant studied them, watching their repetitive movements. Now that the furore had died down, he could be normal again, just like these people. No one here, in this ancient country, knew his name: his was just another ordinary face passing momentarily through their lives.
Once he’d sold his story and the newspaper ran the feature, he could no longer appear in public back in L.A. Everyone recognised him, and the only thing worse than the constant recognition was the look of pity he saw in people’s eyes. Occasionally, that look would be one of fear. Despite the real killer being caught, and even though Grant’s name had been cleared unconditionally by the courts, women still looked at him as if he was a monster.
Here, in Yorkshire, he would never have to suffer that look again. He might even find someone, and learn to love in a way that had been denied him back home.
Someone dropped a plate in the kitchen. The sound of breaking china was sharp, invasive. When he looked towards the kitchen door, he glimpsed furtive movement outside a nearby window, like a scribble in the dark night air. Surely the newspaper had not sent a journalist to tail him and file a follow-up story? It was part of the deal his lawyer had brokered that he should be left alone for the rest of his life.
A female voice whispered behind him; the sound of brittle laughter erupted in another part of the room. Paranoia swamped his senses and he got up from the table to leave. Eyes flashed his way as he passed by; a couple stared from across the room.
