The Messengers

by Edward Hogan

  The theme from Top Gun played as Johnny climbed through the ropes, and he wore big reflective aviator sunglasses like they did in the film. Granddad slapped him on the back and took off his glasses. Johnny opened his mouth wide and stuck his tongue out — a little habit he had. I tapped Mum and did an impression of him. She smiled weakly.

  Granddad tightened the straps on Johnny’s head guard, took the knotted towel from around his neck, and then tied his bootlaces. That’s when I started to get worried. How was Johnny going to win a fight if he couldn’t even tie his laces?

  The other lad was tall and strong. He looked like a man, really. His name was Gary “Basher” Bradley. I felt like you do when you get on a theme-park ride and the wheels start to turn, and you know you’ve made a terrible mistake. When the bell went to signal the start of the first round, the men in front of us stood up, so I couldn’t see. They were cheering for the other guy. “Kill him, Bash!” “Do him!” “Go-o-o on, Basher!” they shouted.

  Mum didn’t bother to stand. She just stared into the backs of these men. I climbed on my chair and peered over.

  I didn’t know anything about boxing, but I learned quickly, and I didn’t need anyone to tell me Johnny was losing. Basher Bradley had him in the corner of the ring and was pounding him in the stomach. To my relief, Johnny danced away from him and shrugged. He smiled, as if to say, “Is that all you’ve got?” Typical Johnny.

  But Bradley had more.

  Johnny was trying to protect his stomach, and Bradley landed a right cross (I know all the names of the punches now) on Johnny’s chin of steel. Several things were horrible to me. The first was that Johnny’s gum shield shot out and skidded across the ring. I didn’t know he was wearing a gum shield — I didn’t know what a gum shield was — so I thought a piece of Johnny’s jaw had been chipped off. I was too upset to scream. I couldn’t even turn away. When you watch a boxing match, you feel like you’re taking part, especially if someone’s getting a beating. And in some ways, just by being there, just by watching it happen, you are taking part, aren’t you?

  Anyway, the worst thing about it was that Johnny didn’t go down. He stayed on his feet for another two rounds and took all sorts of punishment. I was the one, in fact, who hit the floor. I caught a whiff of smoke, and the last thing I remember was looking up at the ceiling, beyond Mum, beyond the fat men who were throwing air punches of their own. The ceiling had fancy swirling borders and a chandelier hanging like a bunch of flowers.

  During the weeks I spent in Helmstown at Auntie Lizzie’s, I kept thinking back to that day, the fight, and that first blackout. The memories kept intruding: waking up in the bedroom of my Nana and Granddad’s house in Whiteslade; Johnny standing over the bed; the trancelike state I was in; and the sudden urge to draw. I suppose it was natural that I would remember my first blackout so clearly. After all, it changed my life.

  With no chance of getting any sleep, I decided I might as well get up and do something semi-constructive. It was pointless, lying there just thinking about Johnny.

  I always had the hope, especially late at night, that he might have found his way to an Internet café and e-mailed to say he was safe. At around one a.m., I left the spare room and crept around Auntie Lizzie’s big house. It was beautiful, all dark wooden floors and clean cream walls. Books everywhere. It was a world apart from our flat back home. Auntie Lizzie had married Robert, an architect who had his own practice, whereas my mum had married — well — my dad, who I’d never even met. “Don’t screw your life up for love,” Mum had always told us.

  Our flat was so small, you could barely breathe without waking someone up, but here, there was space and privacy. I sneaked up to the top floor, into Uncle Robert’s study, and turned on his iMac. While I waited for it to fire up, I looked out the window. A black cat with white socks slinked along a low wall outside a house across the street. I’d seen the cat before. It was the one I’d drawn after my last blackout. It looked up at me now, its eyes lit with the reflection from the streetlight. Accusing me. I shuddered and closed the curtains.

  There was no message from Johnny, and I didn’t know what to do anymore. I’d called all the guesthouses and B&Bs back home, and the few friends that Johnny had, but they were quick to distance themselves from him now. I’d called them cowards.

  I Googled Johnny and tried not to read the old news reports. There was no further information, so I went on Facebook and checked up on my friends back home. Keisha, my best mate, had updated her status four hours earlier:

  Keisha McKenzie misses Frances Clayton.

  I commented that I missed her, too, and wrote that Helmstown wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I spent a bit of time looking at the pictures from a recent party and felt annoyed that I was missing out on the summer holidays — the time when everybody had those life-changing experiences — but what could I do?

  I checked my e-mails one last time. There was still nothing from Johnny, only a single unread message from someone called P. Kennedy. Junk. Then it hit me. The man from the beach hut. How did he get my e-mail address?

  I don’t know if I can handle this, I thought. But I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep until I’d read what he had to say. I opened the e-mail.

  It was a short message, with a link:

  Dear Frances Clayton,

  Be here at 11 a.m. tomorrow and you will begin to understand. I know you think I am strange, but if I am, then so are you. I want to help.

  Regards,

  Peter Kennedy

  I clicked the link, and it took me to a map. The map showed a network of streets in Helmstown, near the seafront. Halfway along one of the streets, Landsmere Road, was a red pushpin.

  I didn’t write the address down, and I tried to forget the time. But I knew I would remember both of them, and I knew I would be there. Peter Kennedy flashed into my mind, bits of him. His lips, the workman’s boots, the streaks of paint on his long fingers. I had spoken to him only for a few minutes, but I couldn’t get him out of my head. It was a raw, dangerous sort of feeling.

  I updated my Facebook status:

  Frances Clayton is in a right state.

  I didn’t wake up until 10:30, when I heard music downstairs. I threw on some jeans and a top, and went down to the kitchen, where Auntie Lizzie was dancing to Lady Gaga. I’d always thought of Auntie Lizzie as a bit of a style icon. Her hair was light brown, smooth and bobbed, like a better version of mine. She wore elegant glasses, wide-legged trousers, and a soft camel-colored sweater. “Babycakes!” she shouted when she saw me. She grabbed my hands and started moving me to the beat. I tried to pretend that I was too tired for dancing, but I couldn’t stop myself from grinning.

  Uncle Robert was sitting in the corner, nodding to the beat and drinking coffee from a tiny cup. Robert was a good guy, but he was one of those Helmstown dads who thinks he’s down with the kids. He had stubble, wore hoodies, and had longish gray hair, which was supposed to look wild, but I knew he had it trimmed every fortnight. He was into Italian food and fashion: espressos and expensive loafers with no socks. He said “hey” instead of hello.

  “Morning, Uncle Robert,” I said.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “You not working today?”

  “No. I’m taking a day off.”

  “Getting your hair cut?” I said. Uncle Robert smiled. He pretended to like my sass, but I could tell it made him a bit uncomfortable.

  “Actually I thought it might be nice if we all went out to the Downs. There’s a few good hikes. We thought you should get some fresh air.”

  “Can’t do it, sorry,” I said. “I’ve got to meet someone.”

  “Oh, right,” said Uncle Robert. “That’s nice. Who is it?”

  “Robert!” said Auntie Lizzie. “Don’t pry.”

  “I’m only taking an interest, Liz. Besides, Frances is staying in our house, and we always tell each other where we’re going.”

  The old we trick. We do this, we do that, we’re part
of a team. Uncle Robert and Auntie Lizzie weren’t exactly strict, but they had their rules and boundaries, and I reckoned Robert worried that I might lead Max astray.

  “Come on, Fran, cough it up!” said Uncle Robert, smiling. “Where are you off to?”

  “I’m going to one of those little beach huts to meet a suspicious-looking older man.”

  “Ha-ha,” Uncle Robert said. “You’re very droll.”

  I turned back to Auntie Lizzie, who was still lightly holding one of my hands. “Did Mum call?” I asked.

  “No, Fran,” Auntie Lizzie said. “But sometimes I miss the phone.”

  “Especially when it doesn’t ring,” I said. “Anyway, I’ve got to go.”

  “You could call her, you know, Frances,” Auntie Lizzie said.

  “I’ve tried. She doesn’t want to talk to me.”

  Auntie Lizzie winced. “Do you want me to wash anything for you? I could unpack your bags, hang up the rest of your clothes,” she said.

  “No,” I said sharply, thinking of the drawing at the bottom of my kit bag. I calmed my voice. “That’s very kind, Auntie Lizzie, but I’ll be fine.”

  I put my shoes on and walked out the door. The black cat with white socks stood on the low wall across the road. An old woman, who must have been its owner, shuffled down her path and stroked it. But the cat was looking at me. Looking daggers.

  I have a bad sense of direction, so I had to use the map on my phone to find Landsmere Road. Standing at the top of the street, I was overtaken by the sensation that I’d been there before. The sunlight was weak and turned the big white houses a lemony color. The street funneled down toward the sea, which cut the sky in half. Sometimes, in Helmstown, the sea appeared to be as tall as a building. It loomed in the background in a way that I found unsettling. Peter Kennedy was nowhere to be seen, and I thought about leaving.

  A car pulled up to my left, and a woman got out. I recognized her vaguely — the thin arms, the blond plaited hair. Then it clicked. The woman was from the postcard. I looked around. I was standing on the street that Peter Kennedy had painted. I began to feel a little queasy, but I didn’t start to really freak out until the woman opened the trunk of her car and hefted a big box onto her thigh.

  “No,” I said to myself. “This is stupid. It can’t be.”

  Then the traffic warden ambled around the corner, checking his little handheld machine.

  Up above, there was the noise of a man unlocking one of the flaky old windows on the top floor of a whitewashed house.

  The image from the postcard was slowly emerging into real life. And it was almost complete. I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t. I felt as if I were making it all happen somehow, although I couldn’t do a thing about it. I could barely even move.

  The man leaned over his windowsill, lighting the cigarette.

  The traffic warden stopped by the white van to examine the parking permit in the window.

  The thin woman with the plaited hair hauled the box a little higher and began to struggle across the road, and with one last act, the scene that I remembered from Peter Kennedy’s postcard came together:

  A blue car swerved from the main road into the street and smacked the lamppost at speed, the bonnet crumpling around it like a grasping fist.

  I was already running. I could not speak or call out. All I could hear was my own breathing, loud and frantic. The thin woman dropped her box, and books skidded across the road. A man came out of one of the houses and ran down the steps from his door. “I’m a doctor,” he said to the other people in the street, who were moving toward the car. “I’ve called an ambulance.”

  I stopped a few meters from the front of the car and stared through the windscreen. The driver was motionless, his head resting on his shoulder in a way that didn’t look right. I managed to gasp out some words. “I think it’s too late.”

  The doctor stopped and frowned at me. Then he turned back to the car. He opened the door, and the driver’s arm slipped out. The doctor crouched down and held the driver’s wrist, checking for a pulse.

  The doctor slowly bowed his head.

  “This can’t be happening,” I whispered to myself, waiting for a sudden wave of nausea to pass as a crowd gathered around the car. I tried to track back. An image of Peter Kennedy’s face came to me, half bright in the light from his desk lamp. You will need to talk, he had said after giving me the postcard. Thinking of those words, I was flooded with anger. He knew. Somehow, he knew. I didn’t know what was going on, and I wanted to dismiss the whole thing as some kind of prank. But the man in the car was real. And he was dead. I straightened myself up and started walking toward the seafront. Then I began to run.

  It had been a long time since I had run so fast and with such fury. The sea rose up, its horizon not wavy, but a hard ruled line. I sprinted past the big white houses and the pretty lawns, the Coffee Shack and the skateboarders, the noise of sirens already ringing out. A man with a gray whippet and a takeaway coffee stumbled out of my way. I ran until I reached the beach huts, which were colorful in the daylight, bright and sickly.

  His beach hut was closed and locked, but I could smell recent cigarette smoke. I knocked. Nothing. I wasn’t in the mood to wait. I wanted answers. Stones from the beach had spilled onto the path. I picked some up and hurled one at the door.

  “Jesus!” he shouted from inside. I heard something topple over. Good, I thought.

  “You’re in there, I take it?” I shouted. I cocked my arm, ready to throw the next stone.

  “Just a minute, for God’s sake,” he said.

  He opened the door and raised his arm to his face, thinking I was going to throw the stone. I dropped it and he relaxed.

  “You owe me an explanation,” I said.

  “Look, come inside, will you?”

  “No way. You’re in no position to tell me what to do.”

  He straightened up. I felt the power shift in his favor. “I think I am,” he said.

  I paused and closed my eyes. In my mind, I saw the driver of the car with his head on his shoulder.

  “He’s dead. That man is dead,” I said. The reality was only just hitting me.

  “Come inside.”

  I had to stop myself from shaking. “What’s going on?” I said. I squeezed into his hut, and he locked the door, muffling the noise of the sea as surely as if he’d put his hand over its mouth.

  Peter sat in a chair, looking up at me. The sleep-mode light of a closed laptop blinked in the corner.

  “At least tell me who he was,” I said. “Because you know, don’t you?”

  “He was Samuel Richard Newman, and it was his time.”

  Samuel Richard Newman. The name from the postcard.

  “You knew. I don’t know how, but you knew what was going to happen. And you made me watch it. I could report you.”

  He looked at me sadly. His stubble was blond, like little splinters of light wood, and his eyes were green and bright in the gloom of the hut, like they’d soaked up the light from the sun outside. “Report me to whom?” he said.

  “The police. I could call the police,” I said.

  He sighed as if he felt sorry for me. “And what would you tell them?”

  I realized how my story would sound to a normal person. They’d have me locked away in ten seconds flat.

  “Listen to me, Frances, because what I’m about to tell you is important. You have something special. A power. A curse. Call it what you want. I knew it the moment I saw you. I can help you use it. Responsibly. Accurately. So it does no harm to you or the people you love.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said. “This isn’t about me.”

  “Let me tell you what happened to Samuel Newman and my part in it. Some of this is going to sound familiar to you,” Peter said. He shifted his long legs, and his boots made a rasping sound on the dry wooden floor. “Two days ago, I was taking a late-morning walk along the beach and I began to feel light-headed. This is nothing new to me. It’s been happ
ening since I was a boy. I sat down on the stones and I passed out. Some time later, I woke up in a daze and walked back here, to the hut. I began to paint the image you saw on the postcard.”

  He paused, waiting for me to say that this had happened to me. I didn’t give him the pleasure. But I did think of the drawing I had done after my most recent blackout. I had thought that I was just a messed-up kid, and as long as nobody saw the images spilling out of my head, then everything would be fine. Now I was beginning to recalculate my life, and I didn’t like the numbers I was getting.

  I shook my head. “No,” I heard myself say.

  “Yes,” Peter said, and then continued his story. “I studied the scene with my jeweler’s loupe — the little magnifying glass — and began to work on finding the man in the car. The recipient. I had to work fast. The knowledge that’s been passed down tells us that we have two days between the drawing and the death. You have to deliver the message in that time, or else . . .” He trailed off, blinked, and then picked up his story from a different place. “Anyway, I knew I had seen his blue Fiesta before, and I was able to trace him from the number plate. He worked in a call center. He was single. He liked dance music. When you saw me with the loupe yesterday, I was checking the details for the last time.”

  “Are you seriously telling me . . . ?” I hesitated. It felt like if I said the words, I’d somehow make it true. “Are you trying to tell me that the drawings I do . . . the paintings you do . . . become real?”

  “Not until the recipient sees the message. Of course, he or she doesn’t see the real image the way we do. From what we can work out, they just see a collection of random shapes. Most messengers believe that the image somehow seeps into the subconscious. Nobody really knows how it works. But the recipient has to look at the postcard to make it happen.”

  I thought for a moment, then gasped. “You made me deliver it to him! You made me . . . You’re saying I killed him.”