Hellbound: The Tally Man

by David McCaffrey

  He glanced in shock at the gun on the pavement trying to process what was happening as Milton jumped to his feet and charged at Joe, the precise right hook connecting with the side of his head and sending him stumbling against the car. He blinked, trying to focus on the man standing in front of him as Milton grabbed the gun from the floor and aimed it at his head. Joe managed to force his legs to work, diving out the way as a bullet whistled past his face and smashed into the passenger side rear window.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” he shouted at his attacker.

  Milton placed his foot on Joe’s chest and checked the street around him. Usually, you body checked enough people on Denny Street to be a UFC fighter, no matter what time you were out. Tonight though, there was no one.

  As Joe watched Milton tighten the suppressor and point the gun at him, his hand groped clumsily for the wrench. He felt his fingers curl around the cold handle as adrenaline brought on by the fear of death surged through him. He swung it into Milton’s kneecap, taking a small amount of satisfaction at the crunching sound he heard accompanied with Milton’s loud scream.

  Joe reached up and grabbed the barrel of the gun, aiming it away from his face and swung the wrench again, this time connecting with the side of Milton’s head. He ignored the sickening crack it made as it struck his cheekbone, blood spraying from the now open wound as his attacker fell sideways and onto the street.

  Joe glanced up the street towards the office and saw Paul staring back at him. He felt relief at seeing him and irritation that he obviously hadn’t moved during the attempt on his life. Joe began to move towards him, his legs suddenly feeling like two columns of concrete. He glanced back a few times to see Milton moaning on the floor, holding his face as though his hands were all that was keeping it together.

  Paul stepped quickly towards Joe as he reached the office and pulled him into the building. He offered himself as support, but was quickly waved away.

  “I’m okay,” Joe insisted. “Where were you when I needed you?”

  He noticed the confused look on Paul’s face that told of the value he placed on his own life. “Never mind. Have you called the police?”

  “Yeah, there on their way, though I’m not sure they believed me. Don’t often get armed gunmen on Denny Street.”

  “No shit.”

  Joe’s legs gave way from beneath him and he slumped down against the wall. His ears were still ringing from the blow he’d received to the side of his head and he found himself shaking from the sudden release of adrenaline. In between shudders, he realised that whatever he was onto had people worried. Powerful people. And that meant, whatever it was, it was real and tangible, not the fantasy he had begun to suspect it could be. Why else would they send someone to kill him? It was a new experience for him. He’d had death threats before, but never any that had actually followed through.

  Joe listened for the sound of sirens in the distance but heard nothing. “Jesus. Someone riots about student fees, the police are here in a flash,” he said. “Someone tries to shoot you in the street, and they’re nowhere to be fuckin’ seen.”

  Paul stepped outside and looked round the corner of the building. He moved back in and touched Joe gently on the shoulder. “I wouldn’t worry about it too much, son. You’re the only person they’ll be talking to.”

  He pushed himself up and followed Paul’s pointing finger back outside and up the street towards his car. Milton had gone.

  “Shit!”

  At that moment, he realised something else. The prescient feeling he had had earlier had just occurred. Wherever his investigation went from here, Joe knew it would be a place far from good.

  ‘Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.’

  Dr. Alexis Carrel

  Chapter Sixteen

  22:58

  “IT’S going to get bad for you, my old friend.”

  Those words had played repeatedly in Obadiah’s head all the way back from Cooke’s Pub. Tom Jacques, his only friend in life, had delivered those baleful words in his melodic Irish lilt – not as the shy reticent boy from Killarney, but as a poised advisor delivering a threat. And now, standing before the front door of the house, bathed in the night that had once embraced his solitary existence, Obadiah experienced a gut-wrenching emotion long-denied to him by his cold, calculating immorality: Fear.

  Tommy had been right. Obadiah had always wanted to be part of the world and Eva and Ellie had given him the chance to reclaim his place in it. He had been allowed to imagine what life would have been like had he taken a different path. The thought that his chance at redemption could be stolen away from him was terrifying.

  You will suffer here…

  Obadiah moved to the front door, noting it was slightly ajar. Giving it a gentle push, he let it swing open as he stood on the threshold, listening. Moving through the silent hallway into the kitchen, he sensed the ambience of death.

  His pace quickened with his pulse. Moonlight bathed the downstairs rooms, illuminating recognized objects - Ellie’s toys … an empty wine glass, Ascending the stairs, his heart pounded so hard he thought it might knock him over. His legs became lead, forcing him to grip the handrail as he reached the landing. Soft, ambient light shone softly from beneath the master bedroom door. Reaching for the door handle, his palms clammy, Obadiah entered the bedroom.

  ‘You’re here to suffer, plain and simple.’

  Eva lay face-down on the bed, her legs spread apart, arms fastened to the posts. Her nightclothes had been lifted and placed around her lower back, bloodstains spreading out across the sheet beneath her neck like a Rorschach image. Ellie was lying next to her mother, curled up under the crook of her arm, the child in her pajamas, Snoopy pulled in tightly to her chest as though a protective guardian.

  Obadiah moved slowly towards the bed, numb with a grief that impaled his heart, leaving him feeling something he had never considered possible – powerless.

  The butcher of dozens leaned forward to examine the remains of the one woman he could never have harmed, his hand gentle as it graced her forehead. Eva’s skin was already cold – Obadiah estimating her death had been a good four hours ago. Her blue eyes remained open, the colour now sapphire due to their lack of oxygen. All the joy and happiness they had held was gone, vanquished by an act that had left her mouth slightly parted in its final cry for help. The side of her face was bruised, her jaw broken.

  The horror of it all washed over him in waves, and he recognized the emotion as shame. Welcome home, Tally Man, you’ve come full-circle.

  Trying to instill order to his racing thoughts, he reached over and gently stroked Ellie’s face, the extension of his hand seeming to come in aching, strobe-like moments. He was surprised to find her skin warm, her body shifting gently beneath his touch…alive!

  Moving with purpose, he strode around the bed and scooped her up in his arms, pulling her close to him, her face in the crook of his neck. She was most likely in shock, either from what she had found or what she had been made to witness.

  As he turned round, he saw the note.

  It rested beside Eva’s body, the handwriting neat and concise. The message pulled at Obadiah’s memories, its words taunting and gleeful.

  Nature doesn’t recognize good and evil, only balance.

  The words sat like a stone in his stomach. He crumpled the note, Ellie stirring in his arms. Obadiah felt her body begin to shake from the adrenaline being released in such a small frame. She pulled Snoopy tightly to her and opened her eyes, looking at him with a hollow expression.

  “Daddy?”

  “I’m here,” he replied - so softly it surprised him. Shifting her away from the horrific remains of her mother, his hand hovered tentatively over her head, as though he were afraid to show affection. Yet he did it anyway without really understanding why, as though his body were guiding him to behave in the most appropriate manner given the circumstances.

  Obadiah remained motio
nless for what seemed like an eternity, his hand nestled softly on Ellie’s head, her small frame shaking in his arms. He glanced once more at Eva’s body, almost sad that he had to leave her behind. Through her, his mind had irreversibly been opened up to other possibilities, possibilities that had allowed him to see what he looked like through a looking glass darkly – a hateful bastard allowed one last chance to see life that existed outside darkness. Eva had been one half of the light that had allowed him that chance. The child he now held in his arms was the other. He would be damned again if something was going to happen to her.

  Seeing his wife lying there, lifeless and barren, he felt an anger that made him suck the air through his gritted teeth. Concerned about his daughter, he stepped into the hallway and pulled the bedroom door closed, sealing in the horrors behind them.

  Moving forward towards the stairs, Obadiah suddenly shuddered in pain, as if his back had been stung by a thousand wasps. Dropping to one knee, he lowered Ellie gently onto the floor before he rolled over and collapsed.

  “Daddy, what’s happening?” Ellie cried, her hands pressed to his chest. She was almost frantic with terror as she watched him writhe in agony against an unknown torture.

  As had happened before, the pain slowly began to ease, allowing Obadiah to push himself up from the floor. Reaching around he touched the top of his shoulder blade, knowing that if he were to look in the mirror he would see that more tally Marks had reappeared on his back.

  “Daddy, are you okay?” Almost hysterical, Ellie placed her hands frantically over Obadiah’s face and body as though making certain he was real.

  “It’s okay,” he tried to assure her weakly. “I’m okay.”

  Ellie began to cry, the unimaginable suffering she had experienced breaking free from her small frame, her voice spiraling up as she spoke. “But Mummy…she’s in there and she won’t wake up. I lied down next to her to try and wake her up, but she wouldn’t. Someone came and was hurting her…I tried to stop him…I shouted for him to stop hurting my Mummy but he didn’t, so I hid in my room with Snoopy and waited for the shouting to stop and when I went in to see Mummy she was sleeping but I couldn’t wake her up…”

  Ellie pressed herself into Obadiah’s chest, now shaking uncontrollably, her body wracked with emotions. He picked her up again and moved stiffly down the stairs, grabbing the car keys from the table and continuing to scan the darkness of the house as they moved through the hallway and out the front door towards the car.

  The street was deserted as they crossed the moonlit pavement, Ellie whispering quietly to her beloved stuffed toy that everything was going to be okay. The air was silent, breathless, shadows marking their route as though illustrating the safest way to travel. He swapped Ellie’s position in his arms and opened the car door, placing her gently on the back seat.

  Climbing behind the wheel, Obadiah leaned back and closed his eyes. In his prior existence, his sole purpose had been his taking of human lives. Now everything had changed – he had to keep Ellie safe.

  As he started the engine and pulled into the road, Obadiah found the night that had once been his friend was now a vast and lonely place.

  Dr. John Franklin, BS.c. HONS, PH.D. M.A., M.CLIN, PSYCH. A.F.PS.S.I.

  Case Number: 01020541/27

  Subject: Stark, Obadiah James (a.k.a. The Tally Man) cont.

  Victim history continued:

  The subject murdered a further two women during 1993; Rebecca Collins and Wendy Marrin. Sara Morgan, attacked that same year but survived her assault, has been the topic of much debate over the years, with suggestion that the circumstances surrounding her kidnapping and subsequent ordeal were deliberately orchestrated by the subject in order to enhance the legacy he was creating for himself, however this is pure conjecture. As far as I am aware the subject never knew of her survival.

  Twenty four year old Sara Jayne Morgan was living and working in Monroe, Louisiana at the time of her kidnapping. Picked up in a bar by the subject on 18th June 1993, she was subsequently discovered lying at the side of Highway 80 just outside Ruston. Unconscious and barely alive, the lower half of her face appeared to have been blown off, with little remaining of her jaw. During my interview with the subject, he acknowledged that he had taped a firecracker inside her mouth and lit it. When asked why he had done it, he replied that whilst “she was extremely attractive and one half of me wanted to get to know her, the other half of me was curious as to how pretty she would be if part of her face was missing.”

  Sara Morgan was treated at Northern Louisiana Medical Centre and, to everyone’s surprise, survived her ordeal, though not without having to undergo intensive facial reconstruction and skin grafts. Unable to speak at the time and to this day without using an electrolarynx she was however, following her extubation in Intensive Care, able to provide the Police with a crude drawing that would associate the subject with the media name that would forever be associated with his crimes. Sara had drawn a picture of a tattoo seen on the subject’s back during her ordeal; a tombstone etched with the tally marks in batches of five. From that point onwards, though the police tried to keep the information hidden from the newspapers, the subject would forever be known as The Tally Man.

  Though her survival was seen as a small victory, it was believed in some quarters of law enforcement that she had been allowed to escape rather than procure release herself, lending itself to the theory that the subject had let her escape in order to secure publicity. A key analyst within the FBI stated that Obadiah Stark was too meticulous and calculating an individual to let something as easy as an escape route go un-noticed and it was more than likely he was unaware of her survival.

  Excerpt taken from interview with Obadiah Stark (dated 15th April 2010):

  “Legacy? I don’t know about that, but what I do know is that there are two types of people in the world; those who make things happen and those who wonder what happened when all is said and done. I made things happen. Those people don’t know how to make things happen for themselves, so how can they hope to make things happen for others?

  “As to the legacy issue, that isn’t something which can be left to chance. It’s something that requires determination, based upon the life you lead. I fashioned my life to ensure that I touched people, made a difference in my own way. I wasn’t trying to make the world better than I found it. I was trying to show those who try to structure the world and make it fit into a specifically shaped box, that they were wasting their time. I simply showed them how pointless they efforts at controlling everything is. Besides, a legacy is just an idea that encompasses the past, present and the future. It shows you where you have been and where you are going. My actions were a journey from success to significance. I’m not a monster; I was just ahead of my time.”

  It was following the murder of Wendy Marrin that Obadiah Stark appeared to pause his activities for a six-month period. The reasons for this sabbatical remain unclear, During our interview, the subject failed to divulge exactly what he did during the aforementioned period, but whatever his actions, December 1993 saw the discovery of Siobhán Duggan’s body in an alleyway in Slane, Ireland. No link was made initially between the subject’s crimes in America and a murder in a small town on the bank of the Boyne. However when Katherine Keld’s body was discovered in a cave outside Ardfert near Tralee, the local police force or Gardaí theorised a link between the murders due to similarities with the victims in the USA. Subsequent liaisons with the FBI and Interpol identified a high probability that Obadiah Stark had proceeded to continue his work on the shores of Ireland. The subject’s links to the country were not realised at the time and therefore it was implied that his choice of location was arbitrary.

  ‘The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who use them.’

  Phillip K. Dick

  Chapter Seventeen

  October 3rd

  00:26

  Fe
nit (An Fhianait)

  County Kerry, Ireland

  THE act of deceit is something that some find easier to commit than others. Some may do it to protect those they care for, others to gain a stronger position for themselves. Deceit is often seen as the raison d’être of the politian, whose very existence is seen by some to be solely for the purpose of inveigling and obfuscating the truth.

  It must be used delicately, for like a snake coiled around the wrist, it can have a nasty habit of causing a serious injury if you don’t handle it with care. For those who use it to serve their own ends, very few would weep when it all comes tumbling down around them.

  But for those who use it in the pursuit of protecting those they care for, it can become an altogether different beast. In those circumstances, deceit can be seen by the deceiver as the right thing for the wrong reasons. It is always a matter of perspective, and how the deceived will choose to view it. Will they see it as a noble sacrifice, or a selfish act?

  * * *

  Joe closed the front door with more relief than he cared to remember. Moving through the living room to the kitchen, he poured himself a large JD and grabbed a packet of peas from the freezer before crashing onto the settee. Swirling the bourbon around the glass, he took a large mouthful, enjoying the warm, astringent sensation before swallowing it.

  Pressing the peas to his cheek, Joe allowed himself a moment to consider how he had ended up the focal point of a murder attempt. The intricacies surrounding Stark’s execution were becoming a little more sinister and suspicious with every passing day. Someone’s cage was obviously rattled, someone who perhaps stood to lose a great deal if he actually uncovered anything solid. Right now all he had was supposition, heresy and chary behavior, but based on tonight’s escapade he knew he must be close to something others would rather keep hidden.