by Mark A. King
But you got caught while helping me out. You got too close. They found out and you paid a heavy price for me. “You spent months in hospital. I was foolish. I shouldn’t have told you.”
He stepped back, looked at her, and said, “You look almost as bad as I do. What’s been going on? What can I do to help?”
“Why would you want to help again?”
Raf adjusted his cap and rubbed the stubble on his chin. From how he looked at her, she knew the answer already, which made her feel worse about involving him again.
“I need to find Maria Mathan. I don’t have anyone else I can turn to. I don’t trust the my unit.”
“Corrupt police? Governments that turn an blind eye to criminals? People in power making the world dance to their tune? Shocking.” Raf smirked. “It shouldn’t be a surprise, Iona. It’s what we’ve always suspected.”
“I thought I could change it from the inside, Raf. But, in all honesty, I haven’t got any further than I did with you, when we were working on hacking from the outside. This time it’s different, I have a lead, Raf. A codename given to me by someone who has no reason to lie, someone who once saved me. The events since the killings at the newsagents’ have troubled me—why aren’t they trying harder to find Maria? I’ve been suspended—and I’m just about the only person working on Operation Scythe that has done anything proactive. All this is linked, Raf, I’m sure of it.”
“What about the suspect? Haven’t they identified him?”
“That’s exactly what I mean. Don’t you think it’s a little convenient that Leo Jeffers has been named as suspect and everyone is now looking for him? While Maria Mathan has almost been forgotten? Do you really think Leo Jeffers will be arrested, Raf?”
“No, he’ll be killed. If he’s linked to the criminal gangs at the heart of Operation Scythe—those with money and freedom at stake won’t want him in custody. They will want all this noise to go away, and the safest thing to do is to remove all links to the robbery.”
“There’s more,” Iona said, walking into the station and standing to the side of the concourse. “The reporter, Danielle Greene—”
“The one who’s been talking about police corruption and loves a conspiracy theory? The one who hung you out to dry?”
“Yes. That’s the one. She’s meeting me here. Soon. I think she can help me. Help us. Like I said, I can’t do this alone, Raf. I need your help.”
Iona had only asked for help once before and the consequences were written in the lines in Raf’s face as he smiled.
“Hooking up with a suspended police officer and an untrustworthy journalist to fight a criminal gang that has powerful connections and that severely hurts people like me—what could possibly go wrong? Count me in.”
Cal
I saw Rod the hypnotherapist again, several times. At first, I was concerned that because my experiences were not related to PTSD, my anxiety would worsen, as I still didn’t have any answers. But I found that that I was relieved, like the pressure had been lifted, that perhaps this could all be fixed, over time, with a variety of different techniques.
I returned to the GP’s. He prescribed new anti-psychotic drugs, which did not make me feel sick, or worse, make me feel like a detached robot. I returned to my mindfulness programme with renewed vigour, optimism, and hope. My sessions with Rod became less intensive, and I could start to appreciate myself for who I was, accept my failures and not continually question my ability to cope with seemingly mundane tasks.
I had not been visited by the bowler hat-wearing deity, Abna Neito, since my first session with Rod. I was thankful for this; I was concerned I’d be Sectioned. Even so, part of me wanted this to happen, to receive treatment, help, understanding. The other part of me feared it. I didn’t feel particularly ill, but isn’t that what ill people often say? I also feared the stigma. Despite the awareness of mental health issues, some people would be judgemental.
Could I ever return to work? Would I want to?
I’d thought about the hypnotherapy and the suppressed memories of being down in that tunnel shaft, a boy realising he was not a man after all. I was alone and the darkness was engulfing me. I could sense it all around me like it was alive.
I open a slit in one eye and dare to peer downward. A face stares at me. The dead, bloated faces in the water have become full, real bodies, climbing the ladder. The stench of decay and rot fills my nostrils, seeping down my throat urging me to gag.
I have not even been underground for an hour yet. I am trying to save the battery in my feeble torch, for what, I don’t know.
The dead rise all around me.
My eyes are now squeezed tight. So tight that I grimace and I feel like my eyeballs might pop under the pressure.
I feel the dead climb over me. My ears try not to hear my name called in numerous dusty, arid voices. I feel them on me, but they are weightless. They are images in my mind, but they are as real as everything I have ever experienced.
I hear the scratching and clawing of more of them. An innumerable volume coming from the lower rungs of the ladder.
I sense their loss and pain.
I want to shout. To holler. But there is no one who will hear me, and my lips must remain tightly closed.
My bladder releases. My embarrassment is a whisper against the screaming voice of fear.
I pray to whatever god will listen.
But what god listens to stupid kids doing stupid things?
I think about letting go. Let the fall take me before the spirits do.
I could not drop even if I wanted to. My legs are like a tyre with a puncture. My hands are numb and slick with sweat.
I start to daydream. Beaches. Sunlight. Anywhere other than here. I hum a lullaby, but the tune is meek and unconvincing, even to me.
There is a noise below. It is like steam hissing, only louder and more urgent.
The unfulfilled lives of the dead disappear.
My arms and legs relax so much that I jolt instinctively, snapping to stay alive—like falling in a dream.
The hissing stops. I hear a voice. I fear that I am already dead and this is my afterlife.
“Come down now, it’s okay,” a female voice says. “They’ve gone now. They won’t hurt you. There is nothing to fear here.”
Abna wasn’t the first entity I’d met.
She had been with me for as long as I could remember.
Abna was real.
She was real.
There was no avoiding it.
This was happening.
I would have to face it.
Night | rise
He watches the day fade.
His power is waning.
Nightfall is a myth. The darkness doesn’t fall—we are conditioned to notice falls.
The darkness rises, creeps, and consumes everything—but the eyes of the body are distracted by the colours of the sunset—until it’s too late.
In the space between the sun and the stars, it’s time to…
…return home.
Home is where the heart is.
Home is where she knows what she has to face now.
Charlie opens the door. Inside there is broken glass. She pushes Noah behind her and enters slowly, her crutches grinding the shards.
“Stay back!” she shouts to Noah. He whimpers. Charlie turns. “I’m sorry sweetie. Mummy just wants to check the house before we go in. Stay here. Don’t move. I promise it’ll be okay.”
Charlie makes promises she’s not sure she can keep.
Behind her precious boy, the summer evening paints colours over London that Monet once painted.
Tables and chairs are overturned. The TV is decimated. Pictures of her and Robbie are ripped and torn.
“Stay back, baby,” she calls to Noah, just to be sure.
Further in, Noah’s bedroom is drenched. Would Robbie really have stooped as low as to have thrown beer in there—or worse?
In her bedroom, she gasps.
Words, writte
n in what looks like blood, but is actually the entire contents of the burgundy lipstick he once bought her, scrawl over the wall.
The words sting like strong antiseptic on a gaping wound.
Bitch. Cripple. Ungrateful whore.
She has been through so much.
How could he do this?
What did she do to deserve such spite?
In the space between the sun and the stars, it’s time to…
…ask questions.
“Who’s this?” Danielle asks.
“It’s my friend, Rafel,” Iona replies.
“Do you trust him?”
“That’s a fairly stupid question to ask. But, yes, I trust him with him life. Tell us what you know.”
Iona knows this part of the Tube station entrance is the ideal place to meet. A camera blind-spot, people passing in waves of motion and noise—making it hard to be overheard and easy to spot anyone tailing them.
Iona glances at Raf. He will know if Danielle is lying. The only person he’s ever gotten wrong was Iona.
“Operation Scythe hasn’t been going well, has it, Iona? It was supposed to get to the heart of organised crime. Yet, even you, supposedly one of the best hackers in Europe, couldn’t make progress. Ever wonder why that was?” says Danielle.
“I have my theories.” Iona remembers Jimmy Kinsella’s words.
“What if someone in your unit was closing links faster than you could find them? What if the operation is just a front—just designed to make it look like the unit is working hard to protect the city? But in reality, there was never any chance of it succeeding, because the very people it’s trying to catch are being aided and abetted by those within the unit?”
Just like Jimmy said. But it can’t be Armitage, not after everything she’s gone through. But someone like Coleridge—she would have the skills. Plenty of Iona’s colleagues have been evasive and unprofessional since the case started. Proof is another matter.
Iona glances at Rafel. He is a ball of nervous energy. “I’m not being funny,” he intervenes. “But if you’re so sure of all this, why haven’t you taken it to the police? Why haven’t you broke the story?”
Danielle is relaxed, as if she has rehearsed this question. “Take what little information I have to the very people who would want to hide it? I can’t break a story I don’t have. I can hint. I can seize every moment of incompetence and suspicious activity and exploit it—as I did with the events at the newsagents’. But I need other people to help me. It’s in all of our interests to crack this.”
Iona has nothing to lose. If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten. Something needs to change. “What do you need me to do?”
Danielle Greene looks around, but the throng of people passing by are uninterested in their conversation. “If I can get you a link, a way in. Can you help me to investigate it?”
“On one condition,” Iona replies.
“Anything.”
Images fill Iona’s mind of the last time she was here at the station:
The look on Maria’s face when Iona told her she was a police officer. The emotional knife-gouge inside her gut, seeing Maria blaming Iona for not having stopped it.
Maria Mathan is alone in a foreign city. The dangers to her are growing. Iona’s gaze is firmly on Danielle Greene. “You’ve always had an issue with the unit, and sometimes it has seemed personal, Danielle. You said I was near the newsagents’ when the attack happened and Maria Mathan went missing. You’re right. It’s something I’ll regret for the rest of my life. You can hang me for it, but it doesn’t fix anything,” Iona says, watching Danielle Green as she nods. “I need you to help in the search for Maria Mathan. It’s gone quiet. Drum up interest. Keep it in people’s minds. As dangerous as it is for her already, it will become more so over time. This case was everything to me, but not anymore—I also need redemption, I need to put past mistakes behind me.”
Iona and Danielle Greene exchange numbers.
Iona looks at Raf, her eyes watery and barely able to maintain contact. “I can’t change what has already happened. But Maria Mathan might end up suffering further because of me and my blinkered obsessions. It’s not the first time someone would have been badly hurt because of me, is it?” Iona gently caresses Raf’s facial scars. “I won’t allow it to happen again.”
In the space between the sun and the stars, it’s time to…
…make a transition.
“My name is Cal, and I deserve to be happy,” I repeat to the mirror. “My name is Cal, and I forgive myself.”
I have been assured that this is good for me and my mental wellbeing, but I’m not convinced.
Instead of hiding from Abna and the woman on the lake who also saved me in the tunnel all those years ago, I seek them.
I have to put my fears behind me. What sort of life will I have otherwise?
Always wondering if I might have imagined everything, when I know now, at this precise moment, that everything is real.
I walk the evening streets. Edging the Tube stations, not yet brave enough to go down, but the fact that I can stand in the entrances is progress. I feel good about my newfound clarity and conviction.
I hold the Tube map in my hands, proud that my fingers can run over the colours, lines, and circles, instead of my entire hand trembling.
The terrible events of the Tube lines, the recollection of events of my childhood in the dark, that watery shaft of voices and lost lives—these things no longer hold me in their invisible stranglehold.
I heard someone once say that these hours were crepuscular, but it’s not a word I’d use. It’s a time of waiting and nothingness—too dark to enjoy the daylight, not dark enough to revel in the promises of the darkness. I will Abna and the woman to find me.
On the street, between Hyde Park Corner and Green Park stations, the wind slithers through the gaps in the city’s buildings like a serpent—slinking, twisting, occasionally striking from nowhere without warning. These are streets where royalty have tread, where traitors have plotted and where, more recently, gods have walked.
Then I hear it…
At first just a whisper. Then a murmur. I know it is not just the whistle of the alleyways or the buffering of the towers.
No.
It is her.
The voice I had heard all those years ago under the city streets.
She calls to me, but I can’t understand the words. Accents and words that are ancient and modern. Latin, Gaelic, Hindi, or Mandarin, I cannot tell. It is a melody of voices. A song of the ages.
She has come back for me.
Night | time
She whispers seductive promises to the weak. She calls to the unfulfilled when they should be resting. At night the city is a body in slumber. Tired and exhausted, the heart slows; muscles relax, and cells replenish. Millions of disparate organisms rest—this is a time for idling. Even in darkened hibernation, the body is alive, and for some, there are dreams to fulfil. For others, there are nightmares to endure.
Robbie
Robbie Hawke had given everything to Charlie Banks, but she’d never appreciated him. He’d given up his life of carefree abandon and his close friends to play the part of the doting partner and the closest thing to a caring father Noah was ever going to get.
Teaching the kid to punch and defend himself should have won Robbie praise. Instead, he found himself receiving criticism, then being dumped.
Was it his fault Charlie got involved in something she shouldn’t have? No, he just had to deal with the fallout—the extra hours at the factory to make up the money they were short. Then coming back to a demanding kid when all he wanted to do was kick back, relax, and sink a few tins.
Messing up Charlie’s place was satisfying. Pent-up frustration surged through his arms as he flailed through glass, wood, and anything else he could atomise.
Every object a row. Every fragment of glass an opportunity he had been denied.
Rob
bie remembered who caused this trouble. It was that junkie twat, Leo Jeffers. Leo had been pestering Robbie for months—snide put-downs at what Robbie had let himself become, offers of unmissable opportunities, hints at big jobs and crazy money. Leo said these jobs would get him respect, make him part of something—make him feel like someone. But Leo himself never seemed to have money, though he talked about robbing places. Leo said if he could get the money, he could buy goods to trade—especially people—which were far more valuable than dodgy knock-off DVD’s or bags of skunk. He knew people that knew people. Leo had a part of the future, so he said.
How was Robbie supposed to know Leo would actually go through with it? That he’d rob the very store that Charlie happened to be in? An accident, some freak coincidence, but Robbie couldn’t help but think fate was conspiring against him. On the other hand, what would have happened if he’d have been with Leo Jeffers? Would he have been able to stop it from happening? Not much chance of that, he’d been unable to even get agreement on how to help raise Charlie’s kid.
Smashing up Charlie’s place had taken time. He had gotten carried away. He was late for work. Tardiness had become more frequent since he found himself playing the role of father, mother, and double-wage earner.
Robbie’s manager at the poultry processing factory had no tolerance for late staff. The minimum wage they were paid depended on punctuality, extreme productivity, and above all, complete and utter respect for the manager.
Employees were constantly reminded that there were queues of people waiting to work at the factory. Hard to believe. A life on benefits would be better, surely—but the belief that benefits were easy to come by and keep was a fallacy, based on that one in a million who managed to play the system and who the tabloids caught. Mostly what waited for workers on the other side of the factory doors were food banks, occasional benefits, and stretching pennies.
As he approached the factory line, Robbie thought about Wallace, his manager. He’d be watching from his office on CCTV, his suit buttons straining to contain his beer-belly as he grabbed his crotch while he watched the workers bent and stretched.
