Deadlift

by Craig Saunders

  Harmon was, they thought, insane.

  And of course he was.

  He’d seen his parents murdered at the age of five, and had been insane, utterly, complete, irrevocably insane for his entire childhood and beyond.

  The laundry room was full of cotton clothes, detergent, and two industrial-sized washer/dryers.

  The residents wore uniform clothing, like prisoners, but they were not, specifically, in the facility because of crimes committed, but because they had been sectioned, against their will for the most part, under the Mental Health Act.

  Some were dangerous. Some were violent, even. Some were only ever a danger to themselves. The staff were careful, the clothes were difficult to tear, to make into rope, to hang. Knives in the canteen were blunt. The smoking room was under observation, constantly.

  Cotton isn’t especially flammable. Good thick cotton takes a lot of burning.

  Harmon took three sets of clothes from the laundry room, put them on himself, so that he looked a little larger, a little bulkier, perhaps, but less suspicious that a man carrying a bundle of clothes around.

  After that, he headed to the toilets on the second floor of the facility, and took all of the toilet paper from the large holder attached to the wall, which he wrapped around his legs, and between the three layers of his cotton trousers.

  He did the same in the first-floor toilets, but on his top half.

  Cotton, alone, takes some burning. Tissue paper does not. Tissue paper is very, very flammable. So flammable, in fact, that in seconds a sheet of tissue paper will burn to nothing but light ash, drifting upward in the air.

  A lot of tissue paper, however, might just do the trick, thought Harmon.

  In many ways, Harmon was still a five-year-old child. Insane with grief. A victim as much as a murderer.

  He lit himself.

  The tissue paper worked well enough and Harmon died, finally, of his injuries after three days in an intensive care unit in a hospital.

  When he died, he was just a boy. A five-year-old boy, in a cold hallway with frost on the windows. His feet were cold.

  He lay down in bed with his dead mother and his dead father.

  They were cold together.

  * * *

  Lowe pleaded guilty as soon as he was asked the question in court. And still the case took nearly two years to come to its end. The only witness to anything criminal at all, really, was Lowe himself.

  The evidence, the physical evidence, was confused at best.

  The jury took a long time to deliberate. Lowe waited patiently.

  He didn’t care, he didn’t listen.

  All he wanted was to own his own guilt. To pay his debt. To be a beast in a cage, once again. It was the only place he belonged.

  * * *

  Lowe watched the trial like a man might see a movie in a cinema. Engagement, but detachment, too. It was just a movie. It wasn’t him. Wasn’t his life.

  He’d removed himself from the movie, and he didn’t want to see it anymore.

  But he watched because he had no choice. Some he didn’t hear, because his hearing never fully recovered. Some he did, and didn’t understand. Some made no sense at all, and plenty was entirely new to him.

  He paid attention, as best he could.

  He sat still and didn’t fidget. In fact, he barely moved at all.

  He answered, politely, in as much detail as he could, each of the questions asked.

  He was called, called again.

  Experts in their chosen field were called. Policemen. Hotel residents, neighbors of the men involved.

  Lowe watched and listened, like a man watching a movie about the life of other men, including his own.

  Otaku. The Man with the Gun. Freya. The Man in the Mask.

  Two assassins, working together for many long years.

  An extraordinary woman.

  And an insane, tormented man, driven to lunacy by the murder of his parents, and by a sackcloth mask.

  Which was never found.

  Driven to kill and kill again, according to Harmon’s last testimony.

  But no murders were ever committed.

  But Lowe had seen the mask. He’d felt the mask.

  No record of a payment from Lowe to Otaku.

  But he’d paid the man £2,500, from his own account.

  The only evidence, the only real evidence, in the end, was the tangled mess in the hotel, and David Lowe himself…and the evidence suggested that David Lowe had killed two assassins, sustained massive injuries about his person while attempting to save his wife, and that he had also apprehended Harmon, who, it emerged, had paid the assassins to have Mr. Lowe, the unfortunate Mr. Lowe, killed.

  Everything Lowe said muddied waters that the jury, the police, the judge, the barristers, the press…everyone…wanted clear. They only wanted the crisp, clear water of a mountain stream and Lowe had nothing to offer them but an inner-city sewer. They didn’t want it, didn’t want to hear it.

  They wanted a hero.

  Lowe’s sense that he was watching a strange movie unfold before him strengthened, solidified.

  Until, finally, when the jury’s deliberations were ended, when the judge made his final statement and sentenced Lowe, the movie ended.

  * * *

  The court usher bade Lowe to rise, which he did.

  The judge put his hands on his face, rubbed his eyes. Like a man suffering from severe exhaustion. He pulled off his wig, leaving a long fiber behind, across his largely bald pate. The judge seemed unaware of the remnant on his skull.

  Lowe felt for him, but he was eager to have it all done, to go to jail, to die. He wished for nothing more than to feel the trap beneath his feet open. To drop, to feel his neck snap and die with a grimace upon his face.

  “Mr. Lowe…” the judge began. Then, the sense that the world was somehow wrong, insane like the man named Harmon, crazed beyond belief, grew and grew.

  “Mr. Lowe. I find myself faced with perhaps the most unusual of cases I have ever presided over, and also perhaps one of the saddest. I am faced with a man bowed by obvious grief. A terrible set of circumstances. The events that transpired at the Regal Hotel will forever be etched in my mind, I fear, as they will in yours. Before me I see a man stricken with sorrow. A man who would take the burden of his wife’s murder. And yet I am presented with no reasonable evidence to establish this fact, but for the word of a grieving husband.

  “No evidence. I say this because I cannot allow that the prosecution have showed beyond reasonable doubt the case against you, Mr. Lowe, no matter how fervently you might wish it were otherwise.

  “I have no monetary trail, but two dead killers for hire. I have no corroborating witness, because the only other man present on the floor during the events was ruled insane, his testimony largely, therefore, impermissible in this trial, and has since committed suicide, driven by his own grief and terrible demons.

  “I have your wife, Mr. Lowe. Murdered, without a shadow of a doubt, by an explosive placed by the man known as Otaku. I have bullet wounds sustained upon your person from a gun fired by the killer’s partner, whom you did kill, without a doubt. With your bare hands whilst sustaining life-threatening injuries, which no court in this land would find you culpable of. Nor, for that matter, is this a trial for that killing, a killing for which you have not been charged.

  “It seems, Mr. Lowe, that what we have, instead, is a man grieving a terrible, terrible loss, a man who has suffered immense injuries and survived against all odds. A man who has ended the deadly careers of two killers for hire. A man, in short, who I believe was somewhat confused, following such injuries, and such emotional trauma, and who is suffering from terrible, unenviable, survivors’ guilt.”

  Lowe, listening to the judge’s ruling, stood utterly, completely still. Even though he stood taller than everyone else in the courtroom, and raised, in the dock, not one person looked at him. Everyone who could, looked to the judge.

  Lowe wanted to jump on the
trapdoor beneath his feet, but it was solid, shut. He wanted the noose around his neck, but his breath came easy.

  What?

  He could breath, but he could barely think beyond that.

  The judge, once again, rubbed at his balding head, like a man with a terrible headache.

  “I am taking, therefore, the unusual step, of finding you guilty of absolutely nothing. I am ordering your immediate release from custody. Ordering you, Mr. Lowe, to live your life. I am, in fact, dismissing all charges against you, and God help you, Mr. Lowe, for as I understand it, a fragment of bone remains in your skull, perilously close to your brain. I hope you live, sir, and take from all this the fact that your wife, Mr. Lowe, the unfortunate Freya Lowe, will be your judge and companion until your end. As perhaps, is fitting.”

  Lowe, a man whose legs could lift several hundred pounds and barely ache the following day, sat down with a thump. The world disappeared from under him. His mind reeled, as though reliving the blast over and over again, the force of it reverberating inside his skull.

  * * *

  Later, David Lowe stumbled, shocked, from court.

  A free man.

  * * *

  In his chambers, the judge put his hand inside his robe and touched a crusted, heavily patched sackcloth mask.

  Inadmissible, he thought. Not impermissible.

  No one noticed, said the mask.

  And the mask was right. It did not make mistakes.

  XIX. A Moment in Time

  Many people live their lives in the shadow of one or two events. Hubs around which their lives spin, and keep on spinning. Moments they orbit in their minds forever more.

  Each day, following the trial, David Lowe, the quiet man, walked the thirty minutes it took to the gym. In his iron church, he prayed for forgiveness, in his own way.

  Penance, he supposed.

  Self-imposed. There were no preachers, no reverends, no priests.

  There was only his own will, fighting against the impossible. Nothing was impossible. Nothing. Not if the mind believes.

  He focused, every day, sitting in his gym gear, before the power cage. He took a flat bench easily in one hand and placed it before the cage. He sat. He looked at the empty bar on the rack. An Olympic bar, bare. Nothing at all. Nothing without weight upon it. Just an empty page in a book, a clean table, an empty pan in a chef’s kitchen. Dormant. Still.

  Just a bar.

  It was nothing.

  The mirror behind it, too, empty.

  * * *

  People noticed the giant who sat, never touching the weights, every single day the gym was open.

  In time, they worked around him. He became a feature. People spoke about him, sometimes to him.

  But it was a church and the man was praying. In some way the men and women, sweating, shouting, fighting their own demons with iron and steel like knights in battle, understood that he prayed.

  They didn’t know for what.

  It wasn’t their business. His demons were too large for them. A man like that? He had to have some bad fucking demons, they’d say, hushed, in the showers after, posing and evaluating each muscle before the mirrors in the changing rooms.

  Bad demons, indeed.

  Until, finally, he sat before the cage, watching the bar. Watching the mirror.

  The day he’d start lifting again.

  His penance was paid. He knew it was true. Without any doubt.

  He knew his time was done, because there, in the mirror, a young woman stood in the doorway, as though unsure she should be here. Like she’d taken a wrong turn somewhere between the studios where people did kickboxing exercises and yoga and aerobics.

  David Lowe closed his eyes, remembering her standing there, remembered the time he’d stopped, tired, and looked into the mirror and saw her standing there. He remembered her waiting for him in the coffee shop. His terror at the sight of her open desire, her interest.

  The one good thing in his life.

  Lift.

  He looked at the bar, and the mirror, and his wife’s ghost standing there. She was smiling, her hands loose at her sides. Confident in herself as she’d always been. His complete opposite, in many ways, and perfection together.

  But for his jealously. His insane jealously.

  I killed you, he said to the ghost in the mirror.

  She shook her head.

  He didn’t understand what she meant. Was he absolved? Penance done? Did she forgive him, hate him, love him, still?

  She walked toward him. Unlike his memory.

  This didn’t happen, he thought. This didn’t happen.

  Of course it didn’t. Of course it wasn’t her. He looked again and realized he was crying and his tears had blurred his vision.

  She was an older woman than the Freya of his memory. Good-looking, but he was dead to attraction or admiration.

  And yet, looking around, she wasn’t approaching anyone else. She was coming to him. Straight to him.

  The woman stood before him. Unabashed, though she stood before a giant of a man with tears in his eyes.

  “Every day you come. Every day. You never lift. Sometimes you cry. Why don’t you lift?”

  She sounded European, like from the eastern part, somewhere with a hint of Russia in its history.

  He frowned, disarmed by her openness.

  “I lift,” she said. “I’m a woman. I lift. You don’t lift, but you are a big man. Strong, yes? No?”

  She hadn’t taken a wrong turn. She’d turned toward him.

  He didn’t want to cry, but he did. This woman whom he didn’t know, but who knew him, who’d watched him sit for nearly two years.

  She wasn’t lost. She was in his church. In her church, too.

  David Lowe looked in the mirror and Freya was there. God, she was stunning. She wore her silly aerobics outfit, just like the first time he’d seen her.

  She nodded, turned, and was gone. Just like a memory, a ghost, something passing and ephemeral.

  “Lift. Feel better,” said the woman beside David Lowe.

  The woman by his side was real.

  Freya was not. Freya was gone. But she’d been real, too. Real as a ghost could ever be.

  David wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. Something sharp scratched his hand, just a little scratch, which didn’t hurt at all, but he felt sudden agony in his eye. Not like sand in his eye, but like a shard of glass.

  “Wait,” said the woman. “You have a thing.”

  No guile at all, the woman reached forward with steady, strong hands and before David could even blink plucked something from just beneath his upper eyelid.

  It was white and it was sharp.

  It was bone. Freya’s bone.

  She’s gone.

  She’s really gone.

  “Is that bone?” said the woman.

  David held his hand out. She placed it in his huge hand.

  He nodded. “My wife’s,” he said.

  The woman nodded, too.

  “Lift,” she said. “You feel better.”

  David stood and walked to the rack.

  Lift.

  Freya nodding. The woman with the Eastern European accent watching, smiling.

  People in the gym finished their sets, sweating, panting, and stopped. They watched.

  David was no longer aware of them at all.

  He was aware of the bar. The plates. The iron. The church.

  He placed a plate on one end of the bar. Then the other. A plate there again, and then the other end.

  He didn’t count the weight. The gym was silent. It looked like a good weight.

  David Lowe ducked his head, then stood beneath the bar. It felt like a good weight. Felt solid on his shoulder, like a warm hand touching, saying it was okay.

  It wasn’t okay. It never would be.

  But it could be better than it was right now.

  He pushed his legs straight and took the full weight on his thick muscles at the base of his neck—his trapezi
us. The weight settled into his thick bones. For an instant, his shoulder blade—his scapula—pained him. The weight pushed down against the base of his spine, too long rested. Some small pain, but nothing awful. Nothing permanent.

  Lowe stepped back from the rack.

  Squatted down, slow, testing, feeling out the weight.

  The weight, the pounds pushing down on him, felt good. It felt great. It felt better.

  David Lowe went down with the weight across his shoulders. For a moment, he wondered if he’d break. Then he came back up, because he had to.

  About the Author

  Craig Saunders has published more than two dozen short stories, and is the author of many novels and novellas, including Rain and The Estate, and the forthcoming DarkFuse titles Bloodeye and Flesh and Coin. He writes horror and fantasy for fun and humor when he’s feeling serious, which isn’t often.

  He lives in Norfolk, England, with his wife and three children, likes nice people and good coffee.

  Find out more at:

  www.craigrsaunders.blogspot.com

  or

  www.facebook.com/craigrsaundersauthor

  About the Publisher

  DarkFuse is a leading independent publisher of modern fiction in the horror, suspense and thriller genres. As an independent company, it is focused on bringing to the masses the highest quality dark fiction, published as collectible limited hardcover, paperback and eBook editions.

  To discover more titles published by DarkFuse, please visit its official site at www.darkfuse.com.

  Table of Contents

  DEADLIFT

  Connect With Us

  I. The Deadlift/00.01.36

  II. The Other Man

  III. The Woman in Red

  IV. Deadlift/00.00.45

  V. Dinner with the Woman in Red and the Other Man