by Joseph Kiel
As she picked the letter up off the floor, she saw that Henry’s name was handwritten on the envelope. She grabbed the sandwich then took it straight to him.
‘Not eaten yet, have you?’ Aurelia asked as she walked through the grand mahogany door.
‘Not had time,’ Henry replied as he lifted his eyes from the stack of papers on his desk.
‘I got you a sandwich from Bon Appetit. Bacon and brie.’
‘You’re an angel.’
She smiled to her boss then placed the paper bag down on his desk. ‘Oh yes, and one other thing. I found this just now.’
Henry squinted as she handed him the envelope. ‘Thanks.’
‘You look confused. Maybe someone has written you a love letter.’
Henry nodded a laugh. ‘Trust me, there’s no one I’d want to be exchanging love letters with.’
Aurelia looked to her feet. His comment seemed a vague but rare glimpse beneath his shell, but as he held the envelope between his fingers, she noticed him now withdrawing as the smile on his face turned into a stern, serious look. She didn’t know much at all about his private life, only that he’d been married when he was younger and now lived alone. Henry didn’t talk much about himself, which was a shame, for Aurelia was always captivated in those rare moments when he did.
‘Anyway, thanks, Aurelia,’ Henry said. ‘For the sandwich.’
‘You’re welcome.’
She smiled to him, but immediately realised it was a wasted smile as Henry’s gaze was fixed on the envelope. Eventually she left the room and returned to her desk.
Henry knew straightaway whom the letter was from. He knew that for the first time in eighteen years he’d heard from The Harbour Master.
A dozen thought processes were igniting inside his brain like electric shocks, all speculating on the reasons why he might be writing to him, and as he held the envelope, he noticed his hands were unable to hold it still. Instead of just staring vacantly at it, Henry picked up his letter opener and sliced it open.
He read it just the once, and then immediately went to his cabinet to pour himself a glass of brandy. He could have done with playing some more Mozart too.
There were no threats in the letter. Henry’s old boss made no declaration of war on the Fires or wished any sort of plague on their house. There was no seething resentment about Henry’s past actions behind any of the words. It would not appear to be a letter written by someone whom Henry had let down royally. All that was a long time ago anyway. Perhaps The Harbour Master had moved on now.
What he did talk about in the letter was, to no surprise, the Akasa Stone. On that matter he didn’t go into great detail either. As they had thought, it was The Harbour Master who’d employed The Reaper, the man who’d taken the stone from Vladimir’s very clutches. The letter didn’t make any apologies for what had happened, or offer Henry any condolences, whether they be sincere or sarcastic.
All it said was that Henry needed to meet with him soon to talk about ‘the stone they had taken from the heathen David Tyler’. What that actually meant was that Henry would be meeting with The Harbour Master’s representative, most probably Stanley Navarro, for The Harbour Master rarely spoke face-to-face with anyone other than his very closest cohorts.
As for why he needed to talk to him, Henry couldn’t really tell. Perhaps he was going to allow him to view the stone, maybe even let him get his hands on it for a few moments. Perhaps a rival Akasa Stone searcher might appreciate how soul-destroying it must have been for Henry to have been so close to obtaining it.
It would be somewhat out of character for him though. He wasn’t a man who cared for the emotional needs of his fellow humans, especially those who were once his enemy. But maybe things had changed him since owning the Akasa Stone, or rather the stone had changed him. Isn’t that what it was supposed to do?
Chasing that rainbow again, Henry. As always you’re trailing down that street called No Hope!
Impossible. Especially after what Henry had done all those years ago, how his actions had catalysed the chain reaction.
Henry poured some more brandy into his glass. He had a meeting with someone in half an hour but right now his focus had been obliterated anyway, his head messed up by the bad memories that had just been unsettled. They were like a pack of wild jackals released from a cage as they now ran riot in his mind.
What could he have done? If he’d had any idea that Floyd was a complete psychopath then he wouldn’t have been there in the first place. It was The Harbour Master’s fault for not telling him what Floyd was all about.
Henry was only supposed to be an accountant anyway! That’s what he’d been employed for initially, balancing books, not collecting the debt to make sure they balanced. That was Floyd’s job.
Why didn’t you just stick to your boring office job?
Henry knew why he hadn’t wanted to stay cooped up all day looking at numbers. He was young and he needed excitement. Perhaps he wanted to find out exactly what this Network was all about. Or maybe it was just in later years that he would kid himself into thinking his eyes never wanted to be blind.
Eventually he’d taken the lid off and looked inside. He was even summoned to The Harbour Master one time, the meeting where he had talked to him about Nephilim and the son of Jared and lots of other things that Henry didn’t follow. But as his role began to expand, it felt like there were no limits, as though he was a man with fire in his hands for the first time, feeling the seductive power filling him.
It wasn’t long before Henry was to see Floyd’s true colours. It was that damned Forseti affair, that strange man who’d taken the city associates for a long and merry ride and run up a tremendous debt along the way, all thanks to the Dark Harbour greyhounds. They’d underestimated him severely, but The Harbour Master would take care of him.
Floyd, with the young Maristow in tow, had gone to the guy’s house to sort it out. One way or the other, the case was going to be closed by them. Why it hadn’t occurred to Henry that the guy’s family might also be there, he just didn’t know. Even so, he would never have imagined that Floyd would have ‘used’ them to try to settle the matter. Worse still, Henry never would have imagined that he’d just stand back while Floyd got on with it.
Henry had broken eventually though. Seeing Floyd slice open the wife’s face with razor blades, and then seeing him remove all the fingernails on the young daughter’s right hand went a long way, but it was Floyd’s next action that had pushed Henry over the edge. Those were the type of visions that felt like they’d been permanently etched onto the mind with a blunt chisel.
So Henry intervened and from that moment on things changed forever. The job was botched, the associates were livid, Forseti slipped away, and Henry was no longer employee of the month at the Network.
Instead of running away, which is what he should have done, Henry just sat it out as he waited for his men to come and slit open his throat, or douse him in nitric acid, or maybe plant a bomb in his car. As the weeks turned into months, he eventually realised that none of those things was apparently going to happen.
Realising that he still had a life, he eventually decided to get back on with living it. He went back to his blissfully boring accountancy and chased up some of his original clients whom he’d abandoned when taking the full time position in the Network.
One of those clients was a certain Alan Hammond, a solicitor in the town. Alan had been pleased to hear from his old associate but instead of wanting Henry to do his books once more, Alan had presented him with a different business opportunity.
More than that, Alan had asked Henry for some help on something. He would eventually let him in on a secret that Henry would promise to keep for the rest of his life. Such was the path that he’d had to take with Halo of Fires. It was necessary though. He’d had to take it to make up for his waywardness under the Network, to help redress his karma.
As the jackals began to prowl away into the hazier nooks of his mind, Henry ope
ned the paper bag and brought out the bacon and brie sandwich. He took one bite but swallowed it awkwardly. He knew that if he ate much more he would only be bringing it back up again, and so he returned the sandwich to the bag and sipped some more brandy instead.
The phone rang, and Henry jumped as though that bomb had finally gone off. After clearing his throat, he picked up.
‘Henry Maristow.’
He heard the sound of busy traffic on the other end of the line and then: ‘Henry, it’s Devlan.’
‘It’s who?’
‘It’s Devlan,’ the voice replied, thicker and huskier.
‘So it is.’
Henry heard a truck roar past, and the proceeding silence soon became tense.
‘How can I help you, Devlan?’
‘Floyd… he’s lost it.’
‘He’s lost it?’
The roar of traffic swelled just as Devlan was answering the question and Henry didn’t hear a word.
‘Devlan, why are you phoning me?’
More silence, then: ‘I need to talk to you.’
‘Then talk.’
‘I think… I think we could both do with each other’s help right now.’
‘Why would I need your help?’
‘Because… Floyd… You don’t realise what…’
The phone went dead. Henry dialled 1-4-7-1 but there was no number listed.
His mouth was completely dry.
Part 7: Seductions
Chapter 7.1
The evil goblin was not being so malignant. He still sat at the cathedral organ with his creeping fingers outstretched as they hovered above the black and white keys, but it seemed he didn’t know which ones to press.
His fingers must have been crawling back and forth and side to side, trying to find the best position at which to attack the notes, to create the most suitable noise that needed to be echoing throughout the corridors of Danny’s mindscape. Should it be a horrible mess of too many incompatible notes pressed all at once, maybe even using his head as well to bash against the keyboard? Or should it be a gentle melody of haunting yearning?
Danny’s emotions had reached a stasis. It was almost as if he was caught in some sort of suspended animation. He knew his feelings were still in there somewhere, but recent events had seemed to mask them, like stony clouds blocking the sun.
He hadn’t seen Stella since that day on the sands. From being everywhere she’d gone to being nowhere. Everywhere Danny looked he found only unfamiliar faces with cold, dead end eyes.
Had life stopped? He wondered if he had actually died, whether Michael hadn’t rescued him in time and the surf had inched up the beach and smothered him. It had been nearly a week since that day and Danny was still wearing the same clothes. Carrying his Dickens around everywhere, he felt like Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense, but unless the bartender at The Waggon and Horses was secretly another Cole who could see more than just the liquid spirits that hung from his bar, Danny had to conclude that he was indeed still alive.
He sat on a stool at the bar, staring at the beer towel with the reassuringly expensive brand name staring back at him in big red writing. The universe was going to hide her from him but it wouldn’t stop taunting him.
Danny hadn’t made any advancement on his poem, which was still tucked within the same pages of Great Expectations, at a roadblock of inspiration as Danny would perhaps never now find the word he’d been looking for that day.
Maybe Danny’s feelings had reached a point where words were no longer adequate, where their power was too futile for what he wanted to express. Maybe his feelings had grown so ineffably strong that there was simply nothing he could now do about it.
‘There is no word,’ Danny mumbled to himself, prompting the bartender to prick his ears as he wondered if he was asking for another drink.
Danny looked like a typical lost soul however, drowning himself in alcohol and searching for his epiphany within the deluge.
At least Danny had control over this poison. It was better than drowning in a whirlwind of frustration of which he had no control, as it was only the cruel hand of fate that controlled those strings, pulling Danny’s desire and misfortune into all sorts of perverted and sadistically twisted contortions.
Someone sat down next to him. The prickly vibe he felt told him it wasn’t just any random person. He could feel the person’s eyes on him like a cold draught.
He peered round to see a stubble-faced Samuel Allington staring back at him. He looked like a completely different person to the one who’d waltzed into the pub and bought them all drinks that evening. This Samuel Allington had lost his glow.
‘I knew I would find you in here sooner or later,’ Samuel said to him.
‘What do you want with me now?’ Danny replied with a sigh.
‘They told you why they came for you, didn’t they? You know you shouldn’t have done what you did, don’t you?’
‘What do you think I did?’
‘Please! Don’t play the innocent card. I saw you. I saw her kiss you!’
‘Yeah, exactly. She kissed me. I didn’t do anything.’
Samuel fell silent for a moment as the two of them stared at each other like wild stags about to attack the other with their verbal antlers.
‘What the hell are you, Daniel? You work in a chip shop or something? Still a teenager I think. What do you… What would she see in someone like you? Just keep away from her, man.’
‘I think I got the message.’
‘You know, everyone’s in love with her, someone like her. Hard not to adore someone like her, isn’t it?’
‘Look, mate…’
‘But I don’t want no complications,’ Samuel interrupted. ‘She’s engaged to me. She’s mine.’
‘Yeah, because I’m the complicated one,’ Danny muttered.
Samuel broke his stare and looked at the half empty bottles hanging above the other side of the bar.
‘There were two places I could have gone after I saw what you and her got up to. It had to be one or the other, but in the end I chose to go to the less severe of the two. Did they… did they really break your nose?’
‘Yeah,’ Danny replied.
‘They weren’t supposed to do that. I just wanted to scare you most of all.’
They did that too, Danny thought to himself.
‘Now the other person I could have turned to was for something a little more drastic. There’s this guy in town called The Reaper. You heard of him?’
Danny shook his head.
‘Well, he kills people. If I’d wanted to go that way. He’s going to be my next option, in case you didn’t get the message the first time round. I just wanted to leave that on your mind.’
Samuel stood up. A numbing chill juddered through Danny’s body. His mouth was too dry to respond, even after taking another comforting swig of Jack Daniel’s.
Before Samuel disappeared, it appeared there was more he wanted to say, more that he wanted to unburden.
‘People think they know me,’ he said quietly, his voice low and bleak. ‘They think I’m this cheerful, friendly mister ray of sunshine. They’re all wrong. I got this nasty black dog syndrome. He bites pretty bad sometimes. A lot of times. Nothing I can do about it.’
The black shape of Samuel Allington evaporated from the corner of his eye and Danny scrunched up the beer mat. All of a sudden he was grateful for his emotions being in suspended animation, and that Stella was no longer lurking on the fringes of his world.
He now hoped for a different mathematical probability, that he would never see her again for the rest of his life, for now his life depended on it. It was the best way. He just didn’t want to put his self-control to the test. With her… he knew it was impossible.
With a deep sense of mourning, but not knowing exactly what he was mourning, Danny took the final swig from his glass.
He decided he would go home. It was safer there. She wouldn’t be there.
Chapter 7.2
Eddie didn’t know why he was wasting his time staring at the empty page. The deadline for the essay was eight days away and there was no way he was going to complete it in time. He couldn’t even start the essay by then. Besides, the assignment brief was about as inspiring and inviting as a cold, steal wall. Surely Eddie would have more luck penetrating a bank vault than somehow finding a way into understanding this boring heap of shit topic.
On his desk there were three textbooks that he’d taken out from the library weeks ago when they were first given the brief. He knew how these assignments worked: you scanned through the books to find relevant quotes to make it look like you’d read and understood the entire book, and then you slapped them in wherever you could. Eddie had flipped through one of them, but his search was fruitless. The tree of knowledge that he looked towards now was in its late Autumn, only providing dead leaves that idly fell and meandered nowhere.
There was his failure in one blank piece of A4 paper. It was his failure to find anything that could inspire him, to find a career he could commit his life to. It’s how it seemed to work with everyone else, like they’d all tapped into their genetic code and cracked their soul purpose.
Yeah, I’m going to Luton University to study Drama and then I want to be a drama teacher… I’m going to take my NVQs and then I’m going to be a mechanic…
Everyone encapsulated it so well, had it all worked out so simply. Why couldn’t Eddie? It sometimes felt that he brought nothing to the world. The page was as empty as himself. Devoid. Barren. Doing nothing. Bringing nothing.
But worse still, Eddie didn’t even care.
