by Alan Baxter
David threw his hands up. “What the fuck? Dude, what are you doing? You can’t . . . ”
“Can’t I?”
The alley walls pressed in on either side. The illusion of safety glowed just metres behind the man with the gun, a street running by. A car slid mockingly past as David weighed up his chances of bolting, zigging and zagging in the hope that The Suit would miss until he was in the safety of crowded Surry Hills streets.
“I can do whatever I want as far as you’re concerned.” The Suit slipped the gun back into his jacket.
David’s heart raced against ribs. “You just killed him.” Stating the obvious was all he could manage.
“Unfortunately, he could see too much. Much like yourself. You, however, have the option to walk away. Go and hide in the bottom of a bottle again, David Johanssen. It’s what you’re good at. Forget all about this.”
David shook his head, his knees knocking. “How can I forget about this? This was murder!”
The Suit smiled a sad smile. “Who will miss him?”
“I will!”
“And you must walk away. We can take care of you too, if we have to. Just as easily.”
“There are plenty of people who will miss me. My family, whether they hate me or not, my job.”
“Everyone knows about you and the bottle, David. Don’t be naive. It would be child’s play to be rid of you.”
“So why not just shoot me now?” He was amazed that he had laid down the challenge but the reporter in him, the part always desperate to know the story, had to find some answers.
The Suit laughed. “The Lord said unto Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” and Cain replied, “I know not. Am I my brother’s keeper?” and the Lord said, “Your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground!” Stupid you may be, David Johanssen, but you are largely innocent. It is offensive to spill the blood of the innocent upon the ground.”
“You fucking what? You quote the Bible at me while he’s lying there with his brains across the road?”
“Walk away, Johanssen.”
The Suit turned and left, hands clasped behind his back. For several minutes David stood and stared at the end of the alley. Boris lay on the road, his wide, surprised eyes staring up to the sky, a shining pool of blood making a gory halo around his matted hair. With a cry of despair David turned and ran. His shoes slapped the pavement, his lungs burned from the effort, sweat poured from his face. He raced block after block, tears mixing with the sweat until blackness closed in at the edges of his vision. He slowed, gasping, hands on his knees, swallowing the urge to puke. Voices and carousing sounded ahead of him. The doors of a pub, people on a balcony of the second floor over the street, laughing, drinking, unaware of murder. He staggered inside, drawing deeply of the processed, air-conditioned coolness.
Still gasping for breath he slapped his wallet onto the bar. “Double bourbon, straight, and a schooner of New.”
*
It was well after midnight when David staggered from the pub, his vision a blur. He was barely able to stand, yet the image of the bullethole in Boris’s head refused to go away. Blood and brains were branded on his memory in an ugly puckered scar that would never heal. A bouncer outside the pub grabbed his shoulder as he fell towards the kerb. “Buddy, you’ll get yourself killed.”
“Fuggen shit if I care . . . fuggen Boris brains . . . blood and fucking company man!”
The bouncer held David as he swayed like a fleshy flag. “How’s your luck, here’s a taxi. You remember where you live?”
David managed to slur his address.
The bouncer helped him into the cab, telling the driver where to take him. He even found David’s wallet and handed the driver a twenty dollar bill in advance. David was grateful. Somewhere deep inside he recognised these acts of kindness and it made him want to weep. The burly goon of a security guard acting so out of stereotypical character, the suited, respectable looking “company man” committing a murder, poor, broken Boris getting his brains blown out. Humanity was one fucked up organism and he was sick of it.
Images blurred and tumbled through his mind as the city lights strobed by the taxi windows, then he somehow managed to find his building, his door, his key, his bed.
3
For the second time in two days David woke fully clothed on the bed, his brain slamming against the inside of his skull. His eyes felt like someone was hammering tiny nails into them. His phone was ringing. “Yeah?”
“You know what time it is, you drunken fucking bum? You coming to work today?”
David stared myopically at his watch, moving his arm back and forth in an attempt to find focus. Eventually he read 9.35. “Fuck, Terry, I’m sorry. Listen, I had a really messed up night last night. I was following up on a great story, but it all turned to shit.”
“And that affects your ability to come to work how, exactly?”
“Well, listen, I saw a man killed last night.”
“What? You fucking serious?”
“Yeah, I’m serious. I couldn’t handle it, I drank too much . . . fuck, Terry, I have to go to the police station today. I don’t think I can come in.”
He could hear Terry’s measured breathing at the other end. “Are you bullshitting me?”
David ran his tongue over his teeth. It was like licking a warm, mouldy towel. “No, I’m serious. There may be a story in it yet, but I don’t know. I’ll call you back later, okay.”
“Find me a story!”
“Yeah.”
He hung up. Black spots made random patterns across the dirty white paint of his ceiling, messing with his vision. Was he going to go to the police? Walk away, Johanssen. He should probably do just that. What would he tell the police anyway? He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, cursing his weakness. Drinking was one thing, but getting this drunk two nights running was ridiculous. He’d be six feet under in no time if this carried on. He crawled off his bed and into the shower, shaved, and took himself to a cafe for a greasy breakfast and as much coffee as he could manage. It was the kind of extravagance that he could hardly afford, but he decided he deserved something to help him back from the brink.
Feeling a lot better full of bacon fat and caffeine, he sat and thought. Going to the police was useless, as he had nothing to tell them. He was fairly convinced that Boris’s body would have been tidied up by whoever this “company” was, and that any forensics in the alley, should there be any, would prove useless. Boris wouldn’t have left many records. But David felt that he owed something to poor Boris, who suddenly seemed incredibly innocent in all of this. There was also the matter of Stella and the possibility that he could make some more money, give something extra to the boys and maybe get a chance at seeing them again. It was all bullshit, but he had to hang onto something, anything, that might make him feel vaguely human. Something to make him matter. He preferred it when life had been a drudgery of irrelevant stories and staring at Mandy’s tits.
Walk away, Johanssen. How did they know so much about him? Who the fuck were they? And what was up with Boris and his lack of memory and disappearing tricks? Like it or not, David wasn’t going to be able to let this go. He remembered an old joke: Why do men chase women they have no intention of marrying? Same reason dogs chase cars they have no intention of driving. The same thing applied to David and a good story.
Although this did seem like the kind of story that could get him killed. Boris and his brains floated across his mind’s eye again, and he whimpered. That was a trauma that would haunt him forever. The casualness of the killing, the complete lack of concern, lack of emotion. He might be killed just as casually.
Then another thought crossed his mind. So fucking what? His life was bullshit stories for a bullshit paper and staring at a nineteen year old’s tits for thrills. He had a wife and kids who hated him, a bedsit full of mould, and some weird affliction brought on by fucking with forces he didn’t understand. He might as well be dead for all he was worth. Maybe, just maybe,
he could find the story here. You can tell my story. Death or glory.
*
David stood on a street corner near the Mission Australia building. The pale blond guy was in his usual place, crouched by the wall, staring into the gaps in the world. David tried to see what wasn’t there. Lamashtu might have ruined his family, ruined him, but she had revealed some power in him. It was power he would rather not have, but he had learned to make use of it.
He’d found himself getting drunk in a bar in Newtown a year or so back and a wild, New Age chick had started talking to him, obviously tripping out of her mind. She was all flowing cotton and no bra and he had watched her tits sway under her dress as she talked with her hands. The more he drank the more it amused him, and he started talking about stuff he usually kept private. He told her about the patterns he could see around people, and she had told him he was just so lucky because he could see auras. You could tell all kinds of things about a person by their aura.
She was right. He had learned to read what different colours meant, read a person’s emotional state. It would have been nice to know more about her thoughts on the subject, but the alcohol had made him bold and even the acid in her brain didn’t stop her being grossed out by a man of nearly forty leaning in for a kiss. She was barely out of her teens. She had slapped him and called him a creep before storming off. When he left an hour later she was all over some uni student, grinding on his hand up her skirt. David had never felt older in his life. They looked like children.
He tried to read the pale man’s aura now. A heat haze in washed out colours gently shimmered, telling him nothing. He compared it to other people walking past. That girl was all purples and reds, anxious, that guy was showing depression in charcoal black streaked with blue. He looked back to the pale man . . . nothing. No emotion, no sense of self. Boris had carried a strong sense of desperation, but not this guy. It must have been born of Boris’s ability to recognise his condition, while this one was simply lost in his.
David approached him. “Hey buddy.”
The man’s eyes, palest blue like arctic ice, shifted slightly as his focus changed. “You again.”
“You remember me?”
“You were here before.”
“I was.” He had a short term memory at least. “I asked if you remembered your life before this. Do you remember anything?”
The man slowly tilted his head to one side.
“Any really strong memories? Anything that made you happy or sad or scared?”
The ice-blue gaze slid away again, drifting into nothing.
A deep voice boomed. “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you!”
A tall, bearded man stood behind them, smiling broadly. He was dishevelled and dirty, a tangy rank odour drifting off him. His hair was greasy and lank about his shoulders, tiny bits and pieces clinging in it. “Sorry, what?” David asked.
The man’s smile broadened. “Friedrich Nietzsche.”
David stood, turning to face the man. “Is that right? David Johanssen.”
The man laughed heartily. “Billy Patterson. Friedrich Nietzsche is the wise one. Good to know ya.”
“You know him?” David gestured towards the pale man.
“Yeah, I’ve seen him here plenty. Tried to have a convo with him, you know, just shoot the shit, but he can’t string a sentence together. Seen some bloody awful shit, I reckon, and it’s broken him.”
“He ever say as much?”
“Nah. He just has the look about him of someone who looked into the abyss. And the abyss looked back.”
David nodded, lips pursed. Was that a possibility? Were guys like the pale man and Boris and Dreads people who had seen something so traumatic that it had wiped their minds? Was it possible that they could have all shared the same traumatic experience? Boris had seemed to think they were all alike at some fundamental level.
Maybe Billy’s diagnosis was feasible, but it still provided no root cause. He would need to know what the trauma was to get any answers. He studied Billy’s aura, watching the purple of anxiety and madness threaded with a dark, heavy red of anger. Forced happiness greens fought to keep afloat. Billy had a nasty temper buried in there, but he wasn’t like the pale man. One like me, not one like Boris. David pulled a few bucks from his pocket and offered them to Billy. “Thanks mate. Be nice to him, eh?”
Billy took the coins with a nod. “I’m nice to everybody, me. You have a good day!”
“I will.”
David turned, walked slowly away, seriously doubting that he would have a good day. With a decisive sniff he headed back towards Surry Hills, to the alley where Boris had died. Boris had said it was important, that something happened there. Or that something would happen there. Perhaps Boris had been foreseeing his own murder.
Rather than walk the length of the alley, David went the long way around and stood at the top of the slope, looking down at the site of Boris’s slaughter. Sure enough the road was clean. Much cleaner than any other part of the alley, scrubbed back to raw bitumen, evidence of evidence removed. He looked up at the surrounding buildings. Residential flats, small offices of import/export businesses, and wholesalers. It would be like looking for the proverbial needle to check all these little boxes for traces of the company.
When he reached the clean patch of alley, he pressed his palm to the ground. Faint echoes of Boris, his madness and desperation. He felt Boris notice The Suit and go silent, a sense of terror and wonder. Boris knew The Suit, but he couldn’t place why. He loved this man and his mind stilled at the mere sight of him. Boris was trying to remember why he loved him so much when the gun flashed and something punched him sharply in the head. The last thought that flashed through his mind, Where do I go now?
David stood, gently flexing his fingers. A brotherly love, as though they had been family. David turned back to the other end of the alley. He put his palm against the road where The Suit had stood, taking a life as casually as brushing dust off his cuff. A shock bounced through his hand, driving into his shoulder, firing a flashgun in his head. He stood involuntarily, stumbling backwards, tripping over his own feet and sat heavily onto the bitumen several metres away. Gasping for breath, heart racing faster and faster, he thought he would suffer a heart attack and die right there, just centimetres from where Boris had fallen.
The rushing in his body eased slowly. He gulped at the hot summer air, the smell of trash in the alley clearer than ever. His heart rate began to steady. He stared at the spot from where The Suit had fired, where he had tried to put his hand. Beyond the mental shock he had received, all he could remember was a sense of incredible power. Not just ordinary strength, but a preternatural, supernatural authority. If David’s own unwanted abilities were measured on a scale of one to ten, it wouldn’t matter what he scored. The Suit would be in the thousands.
A tremor passed through David. He held up his palm, searching for answers between the life line and heart line. His whole body tingled, tiny sparks coursing through every nerve. He felt invigorated and violated.
The image of The Suit standing at the end of the alley, gun raised, floated against David’s retinas. The shock of the connection had branded the image on David’s backbrain, overlapping the memory of Boris and his exploded skull.
David coughed a single, selfish sob. He didn’t want these things in his head. He didn’t want to be able to see people’s fucking auras, or feel what they felt when they died. He just wanted a normal life, whatever the hell that was.
He left the alley. Fuck it all, he was going to have a drink, forget about everything and go back to work tomorrow. He missed Mandy’s tits. He even missed the mundanity of the crappy stories he had to cover. Bollocks to all of this.
As he walked something dragged at him. He stopped. Something had hold of his soul and was trying to pull it away from him. There was no pain, but a distinct discomfort. He tried to walk away again and the feeling intensified, n
auseating him. He turned, let the sensation draw him back, and the feeling eased. The mental image of The Suit clarified in his mind. He walked out the end of the alley, along the street, turned into another, always letting the sensation guide him. All the time he was getting a clearer image of the man in the suit. Boris’s murderer. Some connection had been made in the alley with the shock that had almost killed him.
Whether he liked it or not, he was going to see the man who had killed Boris.
*
David followed the sensation for a long time, sweating in the summer humidity, cursing everything. A building loomed before him, red bricks beneath peeling white paint. Dozens of old fashioned sash windows, split and flaking, the glass smeared and cracked, a large roller door off to one side. Metal steps led up to a door on the other side of the building, six symmetrical glass windows painted in above a cracked wooden panel. His heart raced. He was here. And something told him they knew he was here. There was really nothing else for it. He walked up the metal steps and banged on the door with his fist, three heavy blows.
Nothing happened. He pressed his ear to the door, heard nothing. He pounded again. “Fuck you.” He tried the handle. It turned.
Inside was an office, simply an old wooden desk with a black office chair behind it. Nothing else. Another door led out the back. David ground his teeth. “Seriously, fuck you.” He strode across the office and pushed open the second door. It opened into a huge warehouse space. Off to his right was the other side of the roller door he had seen from the street. A mezzanine level circled the walls, six or seven metres above the floor, the ceiling the same distance again above that, grimy skylights shining through the square onto the concrete floor below. Scattered around on the floor were sofas and armchairs, beanbags and beds. People lounged on the furniture, some clothed, some naked. In one corner two guys were enjoying a gymnastic threesome with a young girl, thrusting and laughing. Other couples, threesomes, men and women, men and men, draped over chairs and couches. Others sat around reading, some playing video games or watching a giant plasma TV in the far corner. David stood, mouth agape.
