“Quinton?” Janet said, her face straightening. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” Quinton tried to brush her comment aside. “Nothing’s wrong, why? Why do you ask?”
And then a strange thing happened. Janet cocked her head to the side and studied Quinton with an intensity he had never known from his mother before. The look was one he hadn’t seen since his days of day drinking and reckless behaviour at the age of 16. More than just concern. A knowing concern.
“Be careful,” she said quietly, seemingly not sure what else to say.
Quinton laughed, a shallow sound. “Careful? Careful of what?”
“Conceiving against the odds? A plain-sailing pregnancy? Your new job? Enough money to buy a new house. I may have been stuck in a dark hole for the last few months, Quinton, but I’m not stupid.”
Quinton’s mouth moved silently, unable to speak the words. What could he say to that?
Janet crossed the room, stood on her toes and kissed Quinton on the cheek. “Just remember, there’s always a price to pay. Trust me, I learned that the hard way.”
Before Quinton could ask just what exactly his mother meant by that, she turned and left the room.
6
“I can’t believe it,” Bryony sobbed, unable to hold back the flood of tears. “My little baby is heading out into the big, wide world.”
Quinton had always thought of Sarah’s mom as something of a drama queen, but even now she had outdone herself. The signs she and her husband, Rick, had spent most of the week painting now rested limply against their Rover.
Sarah nodded. She had been quiet all morning. From the moment that Quinton had driven over to pick her up she had been subdued.
Which was fine by Quinton. He had been struggling through most of the morning, himself. When his tattoo had prickled that night and the call had come, he had made a decision. He would test his theory, fighting tooth and nail to remain in his bedroom and away from that hellhole. Away from his father and the creature who lived in the void.
He had fixed himself firmly in his bed, his right arm clutching his left forearm as it seared with pain. The prickling sensation gave way to a fiery inferno that had Quinton gritting his teeth and sweating through the night.
The sensation had been almost unbearable, something he hadn’t felt since the tattoo had first appeared, and he had almost passed out in Betty’s Diner. Although, this time he most certainly did pass out. Several times, in fact. The pain so severe that his vision went blurry. An unbelievable frustration caused by the fact that, when he eventually resurfaced into consciousness, he found himself swaying outside of the office door. His body a traitor unto himself.
And yet, that still wasn’t the worst part. He could hear the creature calling for him. Not the reassuring, soothing words of his father calling through the door, no. The horrific screeches and cries of a hell-beast yowling the house down. So loud that he found it impossible to believe that the entire neighbourhood hadn’t awoken. That the police hadn’t knocked on his door and threatened to confiscate his pet and drag it to the pound.
At some point in the early hours of dawn, as the sensation finally began to subside and his mind was granted a sweet moment of peace, he realized that the sounds would never wake anyone else. There was a magic in that cry. It was meant for Quinton, and Quinton only.
And he had made Her angry.
Not that it mattered anymore. He had made his decision to break the bond. To cut the ties. Today was moving day, and he would soon be off towards his new life. How could a hell—
hell
—beast call him to his service if Quinton was miles away from where She lived? Sure, his stomach turned at the idea of leaving his father behind, but he had already done that once. He had said goodbye to his earthly father. Surely the second time wouldn’t be much different.
Quinton and Rick lifted the last of Sarah’s boxes into the moving truck. A balding ape with a low brow and arms as thick as tires grunted inaudibly, handed them some papers to sign, then jumped in the cabin and began his journey to their new destination.
“I suppose this is it,” Quinton said, taking a breath and clapping his hands together. “We’ll see you on the other side, I guess.”
Bryony burst into tears and pulled Sarah towards her. Quinton shook Rick’s hand, then turned to his mother who had come out to lend a hand and say goodbye.
“Thanks for everything, Mom. You’ll be okay, right?”
Janet nodded her head.
“I’ll be better knowing that you two are happy.”
For a fleeting moment Quinton felt his stomach tighten. A thought surfaced that hadn’t yet crossed his mind: if Quinton was out of the picture, would his father come after his mother?
No, he wouldn’t. Of that he was certain. The contract was bound in blood and, since Janet was most definitely not a blood relative of his father, then there would be no bonds to tie them.
He hoped.
Quinton stepped back, and took a long look at the quaint little town he had been raised in.
“Come on, you two,” Rick said as Bryony exploded into another burst of tears. “Before your mom leaks so much that we have to get a clean-up on aisle 4.”
Quinton laughed, motioned for Sarah to jump in the car, then they both headed off in the direction of the city, feeling as though they were finally leaving their troubles behind.
Unaware that, for the happy couple, their troubles were only just beginning.
7
Ambulance sirens. Flashing blues lights. Glass which poured like rain, capturing golden glints of light like pixie wings in the midday sun.
The screaming. Oh, the screaming. The soundtrack to a nightmare which had been foretold, but never truly digested. Caught in the throat like acid reflux. The blare from the car horn transfigured into a tinnitus whine reverberating around their heads. The bassline to a soundtrack of horror and destruction.
And still they kept on rolling.
Bouncing, like a child’s tennis ball left to hop down a grassy verge. Tumbling, crushing, the vehicle compacted more tightly with every step. A doom prison meant to choke and scratch and constrict and kill anything inside which lived.
Shutter flashes of memory.
The foggy haze as if waking from some distant dream.
The arm, drenched in blood which pooled around the glass-shattered roof of the car, staining her blonde hair red.
She was dead. Of that he was sure.
Even more so when the paramedics made their way clumsily down the bank, following the aftermath of the crash, crunching shards under heavy boots.
Was the engine on fire?
Maybe.
Something was warm.
Too warm.
Might just be the tears.
Machinery unlike any he had witnessed before. The mechanical whirring as the car lifted and decompressed. Her flaccid body, limp like a child’s plaything carefully withdrawn and placed on the stretcher. A human cocoon to the infant inside, a protective casing tested to its limits.
Run to her. That was all he wanted to do. Run, run, and keep running. Run until she rested in his arms and she could soak up his tears like a ragged sponge. Anything, something to feel connected to her. Her body slipping and sliding in his shaking limbs, lubricated on her own blood.
His blood.
He was bleeding. White fireworks of pain bloomed in his vision. A headache somewhere, a pain he would feel later. Much later. But for now, the adrenaline was his pacemaker, and all of the horror of what had promised to be one of the best days of his life, would catch up and overtake him.
Part III
Honoring the Contract
A dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to sleep, and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist.
—Stewart Alsop
1
The 8pm curfew was ignored, once again. Nurse Hilda, hobbling on her swollen knee could be heard a mile away. Plastic shoes on laminat
e flooring. Clop-step, clop-step, the sound of a limping horse.
She ushered the others out. Young relatives and overtired children were waved out of the ward and ushered into the cold night air. The other pained sufferers, those closest to the healing and the dying, watched the clock and prayed to God that their loved ones would live. That, when the final curfew did come, and they were sent out of the ward for the night, their loved ones would make it until morning. When, at 8am, they would promptly knock on the doors and pick up the hands that they dropped that night. Eyes heavy and bloodshot from another sleepless night.
Not that that will be the nurses’ concern by then. Their shift would have ended, and their inverted workdays would see them sleeping through the long sunny hours, ready to rise with the moon, and get to work all over again.
She pretended to not see Quinton. The bruised, but otherwise miraculously okay, man curled up on the chair in the corner of the room. The man who hadn’t taken his eyes off the woman in bed for over 24 hours. The man who, if his love had been able to hear and interpret the breath passing through his numb lips, was repeatedly working the mantra: Let her live, it’s all my fault. Let her live, it’s all my fault.
Sleep did come, in a sense. Sleep unlike Quinton had ever experienced before. Even when his father had died, Quinton had never experienced sleep like this. Back then he had occupied his mind with books and texts and films, the white light blaring and flickering, fighting the darkness around him while he fought with the holes in his heart, until he eventually fell into a fitful sleep.
Now, though, sleep was the last thing Quinton was aware of. Every blink of the eyelids was a gamble. A roll of the dice. Two sixes and he’d be out for the count, if only for a few dazed minutes. Snake eyes and he’d be staring blankly at her peaceful face, toying on the one hand with wanting her to open those beautiful emeralds and stare back at him. To see him. To give some kind of sign that she was back in this world and together they could live on, work their magic and live the rest of their lives together.
On the other hand, he knew it wouldn’t be that simple. Even sitting in the uncomfortably firm chair that stuck to his back and clawed his damp, sweating shirts back into its polyvinyl cover like the fingers of a thousand small children, he knew that he would never be free.
They had done this.
Quinton had stopped thinking of Her and his father as separate entities the moment he had hit the pothole, felt his eyes grow blurry and swerved sharply on the turn. The moment he felt something akin to the hand of fate—though, what the Devil’s equivalent was, he had no idea—and found himself pulled into a situation from which he had no control.
The car on the other side of the road had been fine; the driver and his 7-year-old daughter a little shaken up, sure, but otherwise as fresh as daisies swaying in the meadow’s summer breeze. Confused as to what exactly had just happened. Not even pausing to look at the destruction left behind them as they rounded the bend and disappeared from view.
Quinton blinked. He had played the situation a hundred times over in his head. The road had been clear. There had been no pothole. Nothing at all, the road top unblemished and smooth. Recent construction had seen to the entire length of road a little over a year ago, causing severe delays that were reported across the local new stations.
So, where the hell had it come from?
Them.
There it was, again. His father and Her united. He could see that, now. The illusion that was his father was nothing more than a puppet on a string. A ventriloquist’s dummy with a piping hot rod up its ass as it executed the Devil’s work. Quinton found himself wondering what spectral vision the Devil had conjured for his father throughout his years of service. Whether his father had even needed motivation, or had the gifts and the powers been enough? How greedily had his father taken the deal that had been offered. His father had always been a small-town man who belonged in the quaint little town. For the latter half of his life he had had everything he could ever have wanted, and things had been good. What did it matter if his nights were taken up with working as an anchoring force to bring Her to the surface world?
But… Quinton? That had been different. Something never accounted for. Quinton wasn’t bound for the small-town life. Quinton had wanted to leave this miserable excuse for a backwards shit stain on the map of the country for as long as he could remember. Ever since his mother had first taken him to the city at Christmas and showed him the lights. The chilly atmosphere, the brass orchestra and the 20-foot Christmas tree left an ever-lasting impression on the young Quinton. An impression that had inspired a need to spread his wings and fly.
You can have everything you ever wanted.
“As long as it’s here,” Quinton breathed.
The clock leaped forward. An hour passed, though it hardly felt like a second. When had the lights gone out?
Quinton straightened his back and stretched, hearing his shirt unstick, feeling the children’s fingers grasping, hating the muscular aches that littered his body. A cut on one leg. A bruise on his hip. A black eye. Had that really been the worst of it all?
Of course, it was. The Devil needs you. You don’t piss off the person who can flick off your life support.
Even his tattoo remained unscathed. Thousands of minuscule glass teeth had revolved around them like snow in a giant’s snow glove as the car tumbled around and around, and nothing. No sign that anything had happened at all. It hadn’t even burned. On the night Quinton first awoke in hospital, it had been the first night in as long as he could remember that it hadn’t been for the tremendous itch on his arm and the calling of Her. Instead, it had been for nothing more than the simple need to urinate. The most basic bodily function of all had him up at 2 in the morning, stumbling through the intensive care ward in search of a place to evacuate his bladder.
Quinton had been discharged the next morning, much to the surprise of the flummoxed nurses who had been informed of the extremity of the crash.
She needs you…
“No.”
Without you, She will die. It’s all on you, pal. She won’t let you go. Not now, not ever.
Quinton’s teeth clenched so hard he feared they might fracture and break. A glass, left on the side tray table for Sarah, caught his eye. Nostrils flaring, he knocked it with his hand and let it fall to the floor. He collected a shard of glass the size of a shark tooth felt its sharpness as he touched the tip of his finger to its point. Blood bubbled to the surface, a dark crimson which looked like oil in the dim emergency lights.
End it. Just end it now. That’s all it’ll take to break the spell. End it…
Whether because of his exhausted and befuddled brain, or whether it was another trick from Her, Quinton didn’t know. All he knew was that he now held the shard in a shaking fist and dragged it across his forearm. He waited for pain to come, for his skin to undo as though it were zippered, blood leaking out in rivulets as he grew light-headed. But that would be okay. At least he’d feel. At least he’d know it could be broken. It could all be undone.
The muscles in his forearm knotted like rope. He poured his strength into the cut, the hand holding the glass turned into a bloody mess as it bit into his quivering palm.
“Quin…What are you doing?” A voice devoid of energy. The voice of a woman coming back from the brink of death, unable to fathom where they were or why her boyfriend was cutting himself with glass.
Quinton’s eyes snapped to the bed, found Sarah’s face. Relief flooded over him, tears stinging his eyes as he moved over to the bed, wanting nothing more than to hug her and sing Hallelujah, but knowing that he couldn’t. Knowing how delicate she would be. Unaware now of the blood on his palms soaking into the plain whites of her bedding.
“Hi,” he said, voice so soft it could have been satin. It was all he could manage through numb lips.
Her eyes found his arm again, the skin drenched in blood. He followed her gaze and raised his arm, suddenly embarrassed over what she was seeing.<
br />
“Oh, it’s nothing,” Quinton said, covering it as best he could with his other hand, despite its bleeding and dripping onto the rest of his arm. He found a box of tissues nearby and dabbed at the wound in a frantic effort to clean himself up. Hoping he’d find water somewhere, or something he could wrap around it all.
He dabbed first at his palm, managing to clot the bleeding as the white tissue turned to a grotesque display of pink papier mâché. “Honestly, I just caught it on…”
His words failed him. He dabbed the tissues against his tattooed arm, expecting the skin to be flayed and torn like shredded beef.
But the damn—
damn
—thing was intact. Not a single scratch across the skin of his arm. His palm had been the source of all of the bleeding. A fountainous gush which had painted the rest of him. The tattooed skin unbroken.
He rolled his arm over, scanning every inch of his tattoo. That word came back to him again – impossible.
Nothing is impossible anymore, is it?
“The…bay…” Sarah managed, her throat dry and underused. Even so, Quinton knew the question that was coming. The dreaded question that had made his blood run cold from the moment the nurse had stood before him and told him the news.
The very same reason a part of him wished that Sarah would not have woken up, just so he could delay the pain that would come from a simple shake of his head. But, no. He couldn’t wish that. Not now. Not now that he knew the true power of the creature that lived in the void beneath his floorboards. He forced the thought away, thinking of anything – anything at all – that would give cause for a distraction. Expecting in the deepest depths of his soul to hear the sudden flatline whine of the heart monitor.
“The baby… What about the baby?”
There. It was out. A curse upon pretty lips.
The Mark of the Damned Page 8
