Duet

by O'Gorman, Brian

  “Are you having a party?” she said.

  “That’s right. My friend here has come into some money and we intend to celebrate,” said Jack. Patrick nudged him to try and shut him up.

  “Is that so, and am I invited to this party?” said the girl.

  Jack looked her up and down, she wasn’t bad looking and she had some very unusual piercings round her face and one through her tongue.

  “Sure you are,” said Jack, ignoring Patrick widening his eyes at him. “Just come along to 76 High Street when you are done and you can come and get drunk with us.”

  “Sounds like a blast,” she said and took their money.

  Once they were outside Patrick confronted Jack about the girl.

  “What the fuck were you thinking?” he said.

  “Look, it’s just a social experiment. I just want to see if having money around can get you more fanny, that’s all. If she turns up, then we know it doesn’t. If she does, then we know it does and we can take advantage of it.”

  It was hard to argue with logic like that. Jack’s logic normally was a little bit off kilter, but what the hell. What was the worst that could happen? So a strange girl from the shop could turn up on their doorstep, perhaps one of them could get lucky, so what right?

  They got back to Patrick’s house and began to unpack their purchases. They both lit up cigarettes and opened themselves a can each. They clashed them together and drank deeply. They didn’t want the effects of the earlier cans wearing off too fast. They went downstairs to Patrick’s basement living room. This was Patrick’s favourite room in the whole house. There was only one small window which looked out onto the street at the back of his house. There was never much light in there and it was only during the late afternoon that the sunlight went near the window. He had spent many hours down there, sitting in silence, without even the television for company and he would think over the car wreck that had been his life so far. He had made good on most of it so far but everything had always seemed tainted, perhaps slightly poisoned. This room had always been a good place to put the world top rights, whether it was on his own or with company. Tonight he needed to get things into some sort of perspective, and Jack was the only sounding board that he had.

  They sat down, Patrick in his moth eaten recliner and Jack on the sofa, their beers safely stashed in a pile in the corner of the room. There wasn’t quite enough sunlight left in the day to keep the room illuminated so Patrick clicked on the light.

  “I don’t really know where to go from here Jack,” said Patrick and took a long pull on his cigarette.

  “Well buddy, the only thing I can say is this. Everything has changed for you from now on. The life that you had yesterday is nothing like the life you are going to have tomorrow. You have to go with it bro. I mean, just imagine this, you will never have to work another day in your life every again and you have the dough to go and do something with the time you have left. You could travel the world, see things that you never ever thought that you would see, meet people you thought that you would never meet. You can have a new car, a new house that you actually own, things that a lot of folk in this world will never get to experience. You’re lucky bro,” said Jack and drank off half his can. He belched contentedly and offered Patrick a cheesy grin.

  Again, it was hard to argue with Jack’s logic.

  “But where do we start Jack?”

  “Start with the basics bro, start with a celebration of the biggest thing you have ever had happen to you. Start with a night out like we have never done before. Show everyone in that shitty little pub that we have been going to for the last ten years that you are now the man.”

  “Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. We could get new suits and a flash car to drive us around....”

  “Now you’re talking bro,” said Jack and uttered a loud belch.

  “I need you to do something for me Jack, a real big favour.”

  “Name it,” said Jack and lit a cigarette.

  “I want to give you two million.....”

  “Hold it right there bro, I don’t want no charity, this is your money.”

  “I know, but I don’t want to do this on my own. I can’t do this on my own. If I’m going to millionaires’ row I want you to come with me,” said Patrick.

  “Tell you what bro, ask me again in the morning and if you are serious then it’s a done deal,” said Jack.

  They spent the next two hours discussing all the places that they could go and visit and all the boy toys that they could buy. As they became more and more drunk, their ideas became more and more outlandish and ridiculous. Their conversation was eventually interrupted by a knock at the door. Patrick made his way up the stairs and opened the door to find the girl from the shop standing on his door step.

  He guessed that money did talk after all.

  9.

  God told Mask that he needed to go home. He had managed to clean Denton’s blood off his hands but the rest of him was still splattered. Lucky for him that the morning sun had not quite peeked over the horizon when he set off. There was nobody around at this time of day, even in a busy city like Hemmington. When he got back to his flat on the top floor of the block of flats he lived in, he immediately went for a shower so he could wash off the remnants of Denton’s blood. He hung his mask up on the hook next to his front door and went straight into the bathroom. The flat was really starting to smell bad. Not that it bothered him, but the smell might start attracting attention from the wrong sort of people. People were nosy cunts, there was no doubt about it. Even when he first moved in, he had been tormented by three people, two of which he had killed. One of them had been a real piece of work called John. John had knocked on his door and told him how things worked in the neighbourhood. John apparently thought that they were in Brooklyn rather than Hemmington, and he told Mask that he was the man who got things done. Mask had invited him in with the promise of a large joint and a discussion on the skills that he had that John could possibly use. John had come inside and walked through to the living room. Mask had quickly ducked into the kitchen and grabbed his large carving knife that he had freshly sharpened that morning. John was stood in the doorway of the living room and he turned around just in time to see Mask coming at him with the knife. He wasn’t quick enough to stop the blade from plunging deep into the middle of his throat. Mask drew the knife out and John went to his knees, clawing at his neck and making a sound like a person who was gargling mouthwash. Blood was jetting between his fingers and frothing out of his mouth. He eventually went down and on his side and Mask had lit a cigarette and sat in his chair watching John die. He watched him gouging and pulling at his throat, trying to clear the blood from his airway so he could breathe but it was all in vain. He lost consciousness and he died twitching and writhing as his body made one last desperate attempt to cling to life. Mask sighed at the inconvenience of having to get rid of another body, but it was his God’s will that he sends him the sinners of the world and that’s what he was going to do. It was easy to get rid of the bodies as his tower block was located just a stone’s throw away from the cemetery. All he had to do was wait for a funeral and the grave diggers to put a hole in the ground and he could throw a body in there and put a thin layer of the dirt over them, nice and simple. And that’s what he had done with John. The body had stayed on his living room floor for a few hours whilst he went about his daily business of eating and watching television and each time he left the room and entered it again he stepped over it without giving it a second thought. Then he had systematically dismembered the corpse and bagged it up. When night had fallen he had taken the bags to the graveyard and dumped them into the open grave the same way he always did. He had no idea just how many he had killed. After the first ten he had lost count. The other member of suicide towers had been a girl called Mel. She had the look of someone who was on the darker side of drug addiction. She had hollow rings under her eyes and she looked like she needed a couple of good meals to bring her back up to op
timum body weight. She had knocked on his door looking for someone called Jay. He had shrugged and told her he didn’t know the name but it could have been the person who had lived there before him. She had been wearing the shortest skirt he had ever seen in his life and it made the rage within him start to rise. His God was telling him that she needed to be sent for judgement, so he had invited her in for a drink. He had barely got her in through the front door when he had grabbed her by the hair and dragged her into his bedroom. He had pinned her to the bed and reached down to tear off her underwear. Amazingly, she had reached down to his fumbling hand and done it for him. She had told him that she like it rough, it turned her on. He had plunged his penis into her and at the same time clamped his hand around her throat and began to squeeze. He was pretty certain that he had felt he come almost straight away and the clamping hand had helped on her way to another one. But then she had realized that it was becoming difficult to breath. The hand around her throat squeezed harder and his other hand came up and pistoned a fist into her face. It struck her in the mouth, knocking out three of her front teeth. Blood began to pour from her mouth and all over his bed as she thrashed her head from side to side. He carried on punching her, his pumping hips never missing a beat. He kept on until she lay still and the colour of her skin had begun to turn a dark shade of blue. She had been dead for five full minutes when he finally ejaculated into her. He lay on top of her battered body for a moment and then he tore her top open. He put his mouth around one of her exposed nipples and bit down as hard as he could. He pulled his head back and kept on biting until the nipple tore off her body. He spat it out onto her bloodied face and then stood up so he could admire his handy work. He kept her for a few days and satisfied his needs with her stiffening corpse until she began to smell bad. Then he took her out to the cemetery along with the rest of them.

  After each kill, he felt a sense of uneasy calm come over him. The voice of God inside his head wouldn’t torment him, nor would the sounds of children laughing, or the almost inhuman screaming that he would hear inside his mind in the dark hours of the night. The killing took it all away, for a while anyway. There was a part of him that had always known that he was sick, he knew that for a fact and he knew that Richard Hurst held the key to his redemption. He could give him the cure for his madness. That was why he had needed to pay Hurst a visit. But it hadn’t all quite gone to plan. The madness was still there within him but it was somehow quieter, somehow more manageable. When he had killed Denton, he was almost at peace. Now, sitting in his dishevelled flat, naked except for a pair of shorts, he knew that there was one more piece of the puzzle. He had to go and visit the next one in line, the one that Denton had called Patrick. He needed to go and find him and then he could persuade him to help. He could be very persuasive if he wanted to be and he knew that he could persuade Patrick to help him. He would wait. He would wait until Patrick had found what his Daddy had made for the world. He would wait until he knew what it was all about and then he would go and pay him a visit and persuade him to help him find his redemption. Until then, he would serve his God with fresh souls.

  10.

  The girl from the shop had left the following morning before the two men had even woken up. She had helped herself to five hundred pounds of Patrick’s money that was strewn around the living room floor. She felt that she had earned it, considering that they had both fucked her on the money that was laid out all over the floor. She had come up with that idea. There could have been no bigger turn on for her than knowing what it felt like to have sex with a millionaire or two. She had wanted both of them at the same time, but neither of them would agree to it, choosing instead to take it in turns. She didn’t mind, she was still getting two for the price of one. She went out of the front door and headed home, the wad of money stuffed into her small hand bag. She never went back there again and neither Patrick nor Jack missed the money, nor did they ever see her again. Two weeks later she had gone on a night out with friends to Hemminton and had run into a tall man wearing all black clothes and a strange white mask that only left his mouth uncovered. He had dragged her down an alleyway to the back of a closed pawnbrokers and raped her whilst smashing her head into a brick wall. He had carried her lifeless body to the river that ran through the bottom end of the city and dumped her in. It was a further eight weeks before her body was found.

  Patrick and Jack finally surfaced at around one in the afternoon and began the task of managing their raging hangovers by going up to the local cafe and ordering a full English breakfast each. The combination of greasy food and several cups of tea made them both feel a hell of a lot better.

  “So, what’s the plan for today?” said Patrick.

  “Well my friend, I think we should head off into Hemmington and get some new clobber for tonight, and we should do it with some style bro, take a look at this,” said Jack and showed Patrick his phone. He had found a website that hired out limousines and drivers. Patrick looked at it and laughed.

  “What’s so damn funny?” said Jack, smiling.

  “This is so crazy, you want us to go around in a limousine, like we are celebrities or something?”

  Jacks smile turned into a full on shit eating grin. “You bet. Come on Patty, we have dreamed of doing shit like this for years, now we have a chance.”

  Patrick thought about it for a moment. It sounded crazy, but it also sounded like a hell of a lot of fun. “Book the fucking limousine,” he said.

  Jack laughed and dialled the number. When he had finished talking he was smiling again.

  “What are you smiling at?” said Patrick.

  “They’re coming to pick us up right now,” he said.

  “From here? Jesus Christ,” said Patrick, horrified. But at the same time he couldn’t help but feel a bright spark of excitement in his insides. He drank more tea and looked out of the window onto the main street of Newtown. It wasn’t a big town but it was big enough and vibrant enough to have a lot of people out there on the street poking around in the local shops. He knew that everyone would start staring the moment a limo pulled up outside. He had a conflicting set of emotions about the whole thing. A part of him wanted to be humble about it all but another side of him wanted to be brought out of anonymity and into the limelight. Damn it, he thought that he had earned it with the life that he had been handed so far. He knew Jack wanted to show off a little, so why the hell not.

  “When should we start drinking?” he said.

  “Well good buddy, I think we should kick things off mid-afternoon. We will go and get a little shopping done and then we will get this party started. Did you post it on Facebook yet?”

  “No I didn’t. I don’t want to seem like I’m boasting about it, do you know what I mean?”

  Jack shook his head, “Dear Patrick, you are so fucking humble it takes my breath away. I’ll tell you what, I’ll put it out there, then we can guarantee that the Millstone will be full tonight. Besides, I got way more friends than you, you ugly bastard,” said Jack and picked up his phone again.

  “Yeah, yeah, fuck you too. We will see how ugly I am now that I have a few quid in the bank.”

  “You got a point there boyo. Money makes ugly men fuckable. By the end of this month your dick will have dropped off after all the action you are going to see bro.”

  Patrick leaned forwards and lowered his voice. “Did you think about what I asked you yesterday, about the money.”

  Jack opened his mouth to protest and Patrick raised his hand up to silence him. “Look, think of it as a safety net. If something happens then there is a backup. You would be doing me a favour.”

  Jack snapped his mouth shut and sighed. “O.K. but I am only doing it under protest, you got that?”

  Patrick smiled and went to work on his own phone. After a few moments he had transferred two million into Jack’s account. His details were stored in Patrick’s phone for all the times he had been short, which was pretty often. He had always offered the money back, but Patrick had
never taken it. He knew Jack was scraping by most of the time and he was only too happy to help.

  “Buddy, you just joined the millionaires’ club,” said Patrick.

  Jack couldn’t help but suppress a grin. “I will take good care of it bro, and just to show you how committed I am, breakfast is on me you can pay for the limo.”

  Patrick laughed and drank the last of his tea.

  “O.K. I have put word out that we are stinking rich and we will be celebrating down the Milly tonight. I’m not touching this phone again until we have got back from shopping. Let’s see what happens,” said Jack. He held the power button on his phone and it shut off.

  Patrick felt the worm of excitement wriggle inside his guts again. This was going to be a day like no other almost on cue, the limousine pulled up outside the cafe. It was the biggest car that Patrick had ever seen in his life, it seemed to go on forever. Pretty much everyone who was out on the street stopped to look at it and perhaps to see who it was for. Jack laughed and clapped his hands.

  “Time to go buddy, we have a new life to get working on,” he said.

  “I just don’t believe it,” said Patrick.

  They both stood up. Jack went to the counter to pay the bill and Patrick went to the door of the cafe. The other patrons of the cafe were watching the limo very closely. There was a buzz of gossip going around that there might be a celebrity in there. The driver of the Limo was waiting dutifully by the rear door. Patrick was stood transfixed. He had never even seen a limo up close before, let alone been in one. Jack suddenly came up behind him and clapped him on the shoulders with both hands.

  “Come on buddy, let’s go paint this town amber,” said Jack.

  Patrick stepped out of the cafe and out of his old life forever. Things were just never going to be the same ever again.