by Simon Clark
‘Too interesting if you ask me,’ Eve said with feeling.
‘Bye, Eve.’ He kissed her on the cheek. ‘Good luck with the exams.’
After the farewells I walked him to the car.
‘You don’t think it was me at the station, then?’ I asked, as he opened the car door.
‘You? No, impossible. As I said you stank like a monkey, had stubble all over your face, a right mess.’
‘What was he wearing?’
‘He looked as if he’d dressed himself at random out of a charity sack. Baggy old jeans, plaid shirt with the sleeves flapping. Cruddy shoes with the soles hanging off.’
‘The kind of shoes Old Snotter would wear?’
‘Exactly what Old Snotter would wear.’
‘Did you notice him today?’
‘What? Old Snotter? Probably not. I didn’t go into the square.’
There was a pause before I asked, ‘Do you think it could have been him that attacked you?’
‘Old Snotter?’ He laughed. ‘The municipal derelict? He’s as much a fixture as the railway station. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. Besides, it looked nothing like him.’ He frowned. ‘Whoever attacked me certainly stank like him, though. Why ask?’
‘It doesn’t matter. Nice car.’
‘Yeah, they give me a car for the job, then pay me a pittance so they can balance their books.’ For a moment Tony took in the scenery as if this row of peaceful houses interested him. ‘You know, Mason,’ he began, ‘I really believed it was you who shoved me in front of the train.’
‘You think I could do such a thing?’
He gave me an odd little smile. ‘Mason Konrad. The nicest guy in college. The kind of guy who gives up his seat for the elderly on buses … never says mean things about people behind their backs. Mason Konrad: people praise him for being pleasant and considerate with never a cross word.’
My laugh was forced. ‘Stop it, Tony. I’m no saint.’
‘No, you aren’t a saint, Mason.’ He glanced round to make sure he wasn’t overheard. ‘Because I’ve seen another side to you, haven’t I? One which made me believe that you could throw me on to a railway track where I’d be cut to pieces.’
‘If you’re talking about what happened that New Year’s Eve it was a long time ago.’
‘It was. Yet I still remember it like yesterday, don’t you?’
I said nothing.
He’d gone too far to stop now. ‘A drunk shoved you out of the way. The Mason Konrad I’d grown to know would have shrugged it off. Not that night though. You punched him so hard I threw up when I saw the state of his face.’
‘It’s ancient history, Tony.’
‘Two days later my dad read aloud from the newspaper that the guy had been so badly beaten he was still unconscious in hospital. My dad reading that over breakfast comes back to me so clearly I can still remember how the scrambled eggs tasted. I haven’t eaten them since that day.’
‘Tony—’
‘You nearly killed that drunk, Mason. Only you and me knew who did it. And we’ve kept quiet about it for twelve years, but you know something? Keeping a secret is corrosive. There’s not a week goes by when I don’t think about the guy with half his face hanging off.’
I stayed silent. But a taut silence. The same edgy quiet you get before an earthquake lays waste to a city.
Tony gripped the top of the car door like he needed something firm to hang on to. ‘And you ask me if I thought you could push me in front of a train. What do you think?’
A moment later he drove away down the street. There are some things you force yourself to forget, aren’t there? Then there are other facts that you keep to yourself. The drunk who pushed me, then tried to put a knife in Tony’s back. Tony never saw the knife. He only saw me knock the man down. I shook my head as I returned to the house.
chapter 9
Summer days. The sun works its magic on mood. If it had rained for those three days since I returned home, or we were gripped by churning fogs that could have seeped from some old Dracula film, then I’d have brooded over what had happened to me in recent weeks. Call it repression. Call it selective amnesia. But I didn’t dwell on all those slayings I’d witnessed – not even the man who’d been crushed beneath the wheels of his own truck.
They were three busy, sunlit days. I tackled that tree to my mother and my neighbour’s satisfaction. Jack gave me a bottle of his home-made parsnip wine that gifted me the best night’s sleep in ages. I painted the kitchen, de-junked the garage, fixed a cabinet door, did a pretty nice valet job on Mom’s car, then turned my hand to alfresco barbecue meals. If life could remain like that.
On the night of the third day – that fateful night – Eve and I skimmed a purple frisbee to one another on the back lawn. The air was still. A red sunset painted the horizon. Mom sipped a glass of chilled white wine on the patio as she glanced at her magazine. A time of family togetherness when we were happy, content to be living in the warm, tranquil moments of now and not thinking about anything in particular.
‘I’ll varnish the lawn furniture tomorrow.’ I caught the frisbee. ‘The weather looks set to stay fine.’
‘You’re supposed to be having a break.’ Mom sipped her wine. ‘You’re my son; you don’t have to earn your keep.’
Eve laughed as the spinning disk nearly flew over the fence. Deftly, she plucked it out of the air. ‘I’ll give you a hand, Mason. My first class tomorrow is in the afternoon.’
‘Don’t let me keep you from your studies … by the way, good throw, it nearly took my head off.’ I grinned as I made a pretence of fixing my head back on my shoulders.
‘It would have been a big improvement. Sheesh, I can’t believe how warm it’s getting. Anyone for ice-cream?’
‘I’m fine with this, thank you.’ Mom waggled her glass to show it was still half full, then she added, ‘Don’t use the chocolate fudge; that’s left over from Christmas. There’s a new tub of cherry at the back of the freezer.’
‘OK.’
Of all the memories of my family I have those moments are the ones I replay most.
I woke drenched in petrol. Vapour filled the room so thickly you could almost carve it with a knife. The sheets were dripping. My pillow had become a wet sponge. The landing light shone through my bedroom door to reveal a figure.
The fumes made me cough. I was convinced the figure was the Egyptian mummy that had visited me in my childhood. ‘What are you doing?’
When the figure stepped into the light its face became clearly visible. The simple fact was: I saw myself standing there. Or, rather, the man who’d stolen my face. He raised a hand which held a cigarette lighter. His thumb rested on the wheel that would ignite the flame that would turn my bedroom into a furnace, in turn that would cremate me where I lay in the petrol-soaked bed.
The monster with my face smiled. ‘There can only be one of us, can’t there?’ He straightened his arm as a prelude to setting fire to the bed.
‘Get out!’ A second figure seemed to explode through the doorway. It collided with the Echoman, the cigarette lighter flew from his hand. Mercifully, the lighter wasn’t lit.
That second figure was Mom. For a split-second I stared as she wrestled the Echoman back so forcefully he lost balance to crash back against the closet.
‘Mom!’ I yelled as I sprang from the bed. ‘Get away from him. Call the police!’
‘No,’ she shouted, as she struggled to hold on to the writhing version of me (a version she can’t have recognized yet in the gloom). ‘We’re going to get this thug out of the house first! He’s poured petrol all over the stairs. If he gets the lighter.’ She didn’t say anymore; she didn’t need to say anymore. That mental image was blistering in its own right. If this thing gets a flame to the fuel the entire house will explode – it’ll take us with it. Our plan came as an instinctual thing. Just get the man out of the house. Then call the police.
At that moment I heard Eve shouting as we dragged the guy out on to the
landing. She was in her pyjamas; my mother was in a nightdress. This was no way to fight a war with the intruder, but we had no choice. Petrol fumes filled the stairwell. The intensity of the stench sickened me. All it needed was a spark … a tiny, little spark…
Spluttering, choking, coughing, eyes streaming we wrestled with the Echoman.
Eve was saying, ‘Oh, my God, oh my God …’ I knew she’d seen the man’s face. She realized he was identical to me. All that separated us from indivisibility was that I wore shorts and a T-shirt; the monster wore jeans that were too big for him and a plaid shirt with sleeves open at the cuffs so they flapped like bird’s wings.
Eve cried, ‘Mason, there’s someone on the stairs!’
For some reason I can’t explain I expected to see Natsaf-Ty sitting there with his wise old face turned up to watch the battle raging on the landing. Only running up the stairs came a middle-aged guy with short silver hair. A stranger, for sure, yet I knew what he was. In his fist he carried a wrench. And, yes, I knew what he’d do with that. He applied it to the back of my head with enough violence to prove he didn’t care whether I lived or died. The landing walls flew away from me into darkness. Whether I hit the floor hard or gently I can’t say.
chapter 10
My eyes are open. I know they’re open. I’ve touched my eyeball with the tip of my finger to make sure. It’s there: moist … spherical … an organ that can alternate between an internal or external existence – OK, I’ve established that. So if my eyes are open why can’t I see a damn thing? If I’ve thought those words once I’ve thought them a hundred times as I lay there. When I woke after being knocked unconscious in the house I found myself on a flat, tiled surface. Kitchen floor? Bathroom floor? A morgue? The morgue thought sent strange notions through my head. If all the dead came back to life would they fill the morgues with the living? Then would they bury all of us who are still alive in the cemeteries? Listen, you must never ever trust a dead man; they become such slippery characters … At that moment I was too dizzy to sit up straight, my thoughts too muddled.
But then a lot of things made no sense to a brain that felt inflamed and swollen inside my aching head (my fingers had already explored the cut in my scalp where the wrench had smacked it). I heard running water. A skittering sound came close to my ear; a smell of animal; when the skittering came closer I reached out to feel a small body covered in fur. It darted away from me. Then a thudding, something like a gigantic heartbeat. After that footsteps – only they made a clanking sound as if someone walked on a steel grid. These footsteps moved above me, backwards, forwards, halt, forwards again. They weren’t rushed. Just a measured pace as if someone went about their business on a metal grid above my head. Then came a scream. The sound shocked me into sitting upright. Eve? It sounded like Eve. Instantly the screams stopped. Silence. A long silence, the kind your ears fill with the gush of your own blood pumping through arteries. Next: those clanking footsteps again, someone walking without hurrying across their metal grid. Now what? Shout hello? But the danger there is if it attracts unwanted attention? It might be safer to stay silent.
Get moving, I told myself. Find a light switch. Even though my head echoed with the pain of being whacked by a wrench, I reached out. For a moment there was only air round my fingers, then I found the flat vertical plane of a wall. This felt like concrete. A moment later my fingers traced a line of mortar, so a wall of concrete blocks above a tiled floor. No window frames, no cable tacked to the wall that I can follow to the switch. With no other option I used the wall to guide me through the darkness. Still I couldn’t see a thing; not a glimmer; not a pinpoint of light. Darkness clogged my eyes; I stared hard into that essence of distilled night. This was dark and silence fused into a world of nothingness. I’d moved for perhaps fifteen paces, with my fingertips fumbling along the wall, when my foot stopped sliding across the tiles because it struck an object. I bent down to feel what it was. Cold tiles. Grooves in between. I moved my hand a few more inches in that total darkness.
Then my fingers touched a soft object. Bare skin, splayed digits. Another hand. Undeniably another hand.
‘Mom … Eve?’ Wherever I was they had to be here, too. The Echomen must have brought us. ‘Mom? Is that you?’ Relying on instinct, I reached out to where the head must be if this figure in the dark was sitting on the floor. My fingers made contact with a face; it was easy to find the shape of the nose, a cheek, then jaw covered with stubble. My gasp of surprise seemed to act as the trigger. The man grabbed at me from the darkness. Even though I couldn’t see him I sensed the bulk of the guy as he grabbed hold of me to tug me down to the floor.
‘It’s OK, it’s cool,’ I panted. ‘I won’t hurt you.’ My hands went up in a way to show I didn’t mean any threat, but could he see them? Of course, he couldn’t, so he threw punches at me. Though I didn’t see them I heard his grunt as he struck out; his fists buzzed by my ear. Then he hooked his hand round the back of my head. When he dug his fingers against my head wound it stung so much that I quit being gentle Mason Konrad.
‘Hey, hey. Stop that.’ I managed to ward off his swinging arms. ‘I’m not here to hurt you. Hey, what did I tell you? Stop trying to hit me.’ The punch slammed into my ear. ‘Damn it, I’m like you. They put me here. Now, stop—’ He grabbed my head then tried to bash it against the concrete wall. I heard him grunting with exertion but he said nothing. The smell of his perspiration was acrid; if anything it reminded me of animal cages at the zoo.
‘Enough!’ When he didn’t quit I reached up to find a mess of straggly hair. Though I couldn’t see it I knew I had a good grip so I dragged his head back by his locks. Grunts of pain exploded from his lips. ‘Stop it! Stop fighting me!’ I don’t know. Maybe he was deaf, or he couldn’t speak English. Instead of the pain from having his hair yanked persuading him that fighting in total darkness wasn’t a good thing, he came back at me throwing punches. OK, I couldn’t see them, could I? I felt them. So I punched back, landing a few in his face. The blows broke up his grunts to create a stuttering effect. Then I had an idea. As quickly as I could, I got the wall to my back; when I judged he was coming back with a flurry of punches I slid downward. Just in time. A succession of thuds came from just above my head as the stranger boxed with the wall. This time he cried out in pain as he planted what must have been a terrific punch into solid concrete. Now I was crouching in front of him with my head level with his unseen waist – and not far from his equally unseen groin. But it didn’t take night vision to judge where his balls were. I threw a vicious upper-cut between his legs. With a howl he went down. This time I didn’t waste time. In a moment I’d got the bastard on his back, then with my legs straddling him I felt where his face was with my left hand then I let him have the full force of my rage with my right fist. I held the head down by the hair as I delivered ten full-blooded punches into the centre of his face. When I was too breathless to punch I used the flat of my left hand to bear down on his throat. Of course, it was too dark to see what effect it had on him. But after a minute using my body weight to compress his windpipe I climbed off the guy as I panted, ‘Leave it now … no more fighting …’
The choking sounds he made were the loudest noise there. In fact, they echoed back like they were amplified. Exhaustion wrung me out. All I could do was lean against the wall. My guts shook; the pain in my hand from punching hurt more than the pain in my skull.
A moment later a light shone down from above. It plunged vertically through the darkness like a column of fire. It not only dazzled, it seemed to drive hot wire into my eyeballs. Confusing images leapt at me. Grey concrete walls. White tiled floor; a black strip running across it. The floor sloped. In the centre of the column of light the guy I’d fought lay flat on his back. Both arms were out by his sides, one leg was raised so the knee pointed up at the ceiling. There wasn’t much to make of his face because it was such a fucking awful mess of blood. Shit, it looked as if pieces of raw steak protruded from his right cheek. His straggly
blond hair radiated from his head like a fan of spikes. Most noticeable was the way his mouth was open wide – so wide you could have popped a whole apple in there. And he was making this croaking sound as he struggled to breathe. Then the light went abruptly out.
One image stayed though. I’d seen the back of his hand. There, as clear as day, had been a scar. A Y-shaped scar. Just same as mine. Here in the darkness, I’d just fought an Echoman.
Minutes later, a shuffling sound. Someone crawled over the tiled floor. I saw in my mind’s eye that the stranger was coming to attack me again. Even though his face was a bloody, crapped-up mess, he just had one thought: to kill me. I readied myself. Even when the noise vanished to be replaced by silence, I tensed myself. At any second the attacker would launch himself at me from the darkness. This time I couldn’t afford to stop short of killing the man. Either it would be me or Echoboy. Mercy is weakness.
Instead of hearing movement the figure bumped against me. Again, I’d seen nothing. The first I knew was physical contact. I grabbed for where I guessed the neck would be; what I must do is get hold of the throat then strangle the monster.
A surprised gasp followed by, ‘Please …’
That had been a female voice. This wasn’t time for being timid. By instinct alone I felt for her arm. Instead of a limb I found I was touching her upper-body. What my fingers found left nothing to the imagination. A pair of naked breasts, then a smooth torso that was bare as far as the outward curve of the hip. Below that I didn’t go. Five minutes ago a stranger tried to murder me. Right at this moment I had a naked woman in my hands.
chapter 11
The woman’s body had a warmth that made me reluctant to withdraw my hand. Even though she was naked there in the darkness she didn’t attempt to flinch away from my touch or make any protest – or make any comment, whatsoever.
Taking a step back and putting my hands by my side I asked, ‘What’s your name?’
