Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror (32 page)

  He whiled around. A figure stood on the grass behind him, legs slightly apart, arms by his side. The lights of the bars and the clubs on the near side of the street turned the figure into a silhouette; the lights from the far side of the canal were too distant to provide any illumination.

  Joe stood his ground, straining his eyes to see.

  The figure didn't move.

  And then a shape ghosted out from behind it. A man.

  "Joe," said the man in a gentle Scots accent. "Didn't mean to make you jump. Well, I guess I did, but you know. . . These are a laugh, aren't they?" He indicated the cast-iron mold as he moved away from it. "Easily recyclable, too. John Mains." He offered his hand.

  "Joe," said Joe, still disoriented.

  "I know," said Mains, smiling slyly.

  He was about Joe's height with an uncertain cast to his slightly asymmetrical features that could go either way—charmingly vulnerable or deceptively untrustworthy.

  "Busy day?" Mains asked, moving dark hair out of his eyes.

  "Yeah."

  "When did you get here?"

  "This morning."

  "How did you get here?"

  "I flew."

  "Shall we?" Mains gestured toward the far side of the canal.

  They walked toward where the road crossed over the canal, and Joe was the first to enter the bar. Rock music played loudly from speakers bracketed to the walls. They sat on stools at a high table in a little booth, and a bartender brought them beers. Joe observed Mains while the scriptwriter was watching the lads in the next booth, and he wondered what anyone would think, looking at them. Would they be able to spot the difference between them? Was Mains's precious track record visible to the naked eye?

  Mains looked back and it was Joe's turn to redirect his gaze.

  Mains said something and Joe had to ask him to repeat it.

  "I said I haven't booked into a hotel yet."

  "It's not exactly high season."

  "No." He took a sip of his beer. "Could you not have taken the train? Or the ferry?"

  "What?"

  "It's not very environmentally friendly to fly, especially such a short distance."

  "It was cheaper."

  "Not in the long run, Joe. You've got to take the long view."

  Joe looked at the other man's dark eyes, small and round and glossy like a bird's. A half-smile.

  "So what have you got for me?" Mains asked.

  Joe hesitated. He wondered if it was worth making the point that he was working for Vos. He decided that since neither of them was paying him, it didn't make much difference. He was about to answer when Mains spoke again.

  "Look, Joe, I know you pitched to write this script, but we do have to work together."

  "I know, I know," Joe shouted into a sudden break between tracks. The boys in the next booth looked over at them. Joe returned their stare, then turned to look at Mains. "I know," he continued. "Here, have a look."

  He handed Mains the camera phone on which he'd taken his pictures, and Mains flicked through them using his thumbs.

  "Great," he said, not particularly sounding like he meant it. "I suppose I was expecting something more atmospheric."

  Joe tried to keep the irritation out of his voice—"I guess the Germans weren't thinking about that when they bombed the place to fuck"—and failed.

  Another group of young men entered the bar. Joe didn't consider himself an expert on the outward signifiers of particular social groupings, particularly in foreign countries, but he wondered if Mains had brought him to a gay bar. One of the newcomers glanced at Joe, then switched his attention to Mains, his eyes lingering on the tattoos on the Scot's forearms.

  "Are you hungry?" said Mains.

  "I haven't eaten all day."

  "Let's go get something to eat."

  As they got down from their stools, Joe felt his head spinning again. He really did need something to eat, and quick.

  They ate in a Thai restaurant. Joe smiled at the waitress, but it was his dining partner she couldn't take her eyes off.

  "You'd better write a decent script, that's all I can say," Joe said to Mains, argumentatively, as the waitress poured them each another Singha beer. "It better not be shit."

  Mains laughed.

  "I'm not fucking joking. When's it set, for example? Is it contemporary?"

  'It's timeless, Joe. It's a timeless story, after all. I'm sure you agree. Grave-robbing—it's never a good idea."

  "Tell me you're not writing it as a fucking period piece."

  "Like I say, it's timeless."

  "Fuck's sake."

  As they left, Mains slipped the tip directly into the waitress's hand. Joe thought he saw her fingers momentarily close over his.

  Out on the street, Joe wanted nothing more than to drink several glasses of water and get his head down, but Mains wasn't done yet, insisting that they go to a club he'd read about near Centraal Station.

  "I'm fucked," Joe said, pulling a face.

  "Ah come on, man. It's new. I want to check it out and I can't go on my own."

  
Why not?
Joe wanted to yell at him.
Why the fuck not?

  But instead he allowed his shoulders to slump in a gesture of acquiescence.

  "Good man!" Mains clapped him on the back. "Good man! Let's go."

  They walked together through the city streets, dodging bicycles. Joe knew he was making a mistake. He just didn't know how big.

  They reached West-Kruiskade. The nightclub—WATT—was located between a public park and an Asian fast food restaurant. Dozens of bikes were parked outside. Bouncers looked over a steady stream of clubbers as they entered. Joe and Mains joined them.

  They waited to be served at the bar.

  "The glasses are made from recycled materials," Mains said.

  "Right," said Joe.

  A bartender cracked open two brown bottles and poured the contents into two plastic glasses.

  "They have a rainwater-flush system for the loos," Mains went on.

  "Brilliant," Joe said in a deliberately flat voice.

  "The lighting is all LEDs. Renewable energy sources."

  "This is why you wanted to come here?" A disgusted grimace had settled on Joe's face.

  "The best part is over there." Mains turned and pointed toward the dance floor, accidentally brushing the shoulder of the girl next to him, who turned and stared at the two men. "It's a brand new concept," he continued, ignoring the girl, who eventually looked away. "Sustainable Dance Club. Energy from people's feet powers the lights in the dance floor."

  Joe concentrated on trying to remain upright. He drank some beer from his recycled plastic glass. Something Mains had said in the restaurant came back to him.

  "You know you said grave-robbing is never a good idea?" Joe looked at Mains, whose face was unreadable. "Surely what we're doing is a form of grave-robbing? Adapting the work of a dead man without his approval." Joe finished his beer. "I'm not saying I wouldn't have done the adaptation, offered the chance, but still, eh?"

  Mains stared back into Joe's eyes and for a moment Joe thought he had outwitted the scriptwriter.

  "I prefer to think of it," Mains said eventually, "as recycling."

  Joe held his beady gaze for a second or two, then, with an air about him of someone conceding defeat but slipping a card up his sleeve at the same time, said, "I have some ideas."

  "Uh-huh?"

  "Mike Nelson."

  "The installation artist?"

  "Works a lot with abandoned buildings, something Vos told me to keep an eye out for. Plus, he's a fan of Lovecraft. He entitled one of his works
To the Memory of H. P. Lovecraft.
Admittedly he's quoting a dedication from a short story by Borges, but why would he do that if he wasn't a fan?"

  "So what about him?" Mains asked.

  "Get him on board as production designer. I suggested it to Vos. Do you know what he said? 'Production design's not art, it's craft.'"

  Mains appeared to alter the direction of the conversation. "Vos optioned your novel, didn't he?"

Joe nodded.

  "You realize if the Lovecraft adaptation gets made it increases the chances of yours going into development?"

  Joe nodded again.

  "It would make a good movie," Mains added.

  "You've read it?" Joe asked before he could stop himself.

  "Vos gave me a copy."

  Joe felt more conflicted than ever. If Vos had given Mains a copy of his book it could mean he wanted him to adapt it, and whereas Joe would rather write any script himself, the ultimate goal was seeing a film version on the big screen, whoever got the writer's credit.

  Joe saw himself buying more beers, which was madness, given how seriously drunk he was by now. He turned around to pass one to Mains, but the writer was not there. The back of his jacket could be seen threading its way between the crowds toward the dance floor.

  Joe looked at the beers in his hands.

  The rest of the evening was a maelstrom of pounding music, throbbing temples, flashing lights. Grabbed hands, shouted remarks, glimpsed figures. Time became elastic, sense fragmentary, perception unreliable. Joe was aware, while staggering back to the hotel, of feeling so utterly isolated from the rest of the world that he felt alternately tiny and huge in relation to his surroundings. But mainly he was unaware of anything that made any sense; there were pockets, or moments, of clarity like stills from a forgotten film. The giant white swan of the Erasmus Bridge glowing against the night sky. A heel caught between rails as the first tram of the day screeched around a bend in the track. His hotel room—leaning back against the closed door, astonished to be there at all. Looking at his reflection in the bathroom mirror and not being convinced it was his, until he reminded himself this was how a man might look after drinking as much as he had. Cupping water in his hands from the tap, again and again and again. Finally, lying in bed staring at the door and hallucinating one of Antony Gormley's cast-iron figures standing inside the room with its back to the door.

  Waking was a slow process of fear and denial, the inside of his head host to a slideshow of rescued images from the night before. Tattooed flesh, strobe lights, red flashes. Someone grabbing hold of his crotch, taking a handful. A mouth full of teeth. The pulsing LEDs in the kinetic dance floor. The Erasmus Bridge. The Gormley figure in his room.

  The open window admitted the sounds of traffic on river and road, the city coming to life.

  Knowing he would soon be spending a long period of penance in the bathroom, he looked over toward the door. The figure he had thought he had seen just before falling asleep was not there, but there was something not right about that corner of the room. He closed his eyes, but then opened them again to stop his head spinning. There was something on the wall, something that oughtn't to be there. Feeling his gorge begin to rise, he clambered out of bed, naked. To get to the bathroom he had to pass the end of the bed where there was a bit of space between it and the wall opposite. The door was beyond to the left. There was something there on the floor, some kind of dummy or lifesize doll, or a picture of one painted dark rusty red by a child. There was a lot of red paint splashed on the floor and the walls and the end of the bed, but Joe had to get to the bathroom. He threw up in the toilet, his brain processing the images from the floor of the room, against his will. All he wanted to do was be sick and cleanse his system. As he vomited again, a small knot of pain formed toward the front of his skull, increasing in severity in a matter of seconds. He knew he had to go out of the bathroom and have another look at the floor between the wall and the end of the bed, but he didn't want to do so. He was frightened and he didn't understand. What he had seen was just a picture; hopefully it wasn't even there, it was a hallucination, like the figure as he'd lain in bed.

  He turned and looked out of the bathroom door. The bedspread had a busy pattern, but even among the geometric shapes, the purples and the blues, lozenges and diamonds, he could see streaks and splashes of a dirty brown.

  He crawled to the doorway, his heart thumping, and peered around the corner. He spent a few seconds looking at the thing that lay on the carpet before retreating into the bathroom and being sick again.

  He remembered Mains telling him, at the start of the evening, that he hadn't booked a hotel room. Had they come back together? Or had Mains followed him back and had he—Joe—let him in? Or had he broken in? Had the glimpsed figure been the writer, not one of Gormley's cast-iron facsimiles? Or had Mains already been there passed out on the floor while Joe was drifting into sleep in bed, and had the cast-iron man done this to him?

  It was no more bizarre an idea than that Joe had done it. Had slashed at the writer's body until it was almost unrecognizable as that of a human being, never mind as that of Mains. There could be little blood left in the vasculature, most of it having soaked into the carpet and bedspread or adhered to the wall in patterns consistent with arterial spray.

  Joe inspected his hands. They were clean. Perhaps too clean. His body was unmarked.

  Very deliberately, Joe got dressed. Stepping carefully around the body, he left the room and took the lift down to the ground floor. He glanced at the desk staff as he left the hotel, but they didn't look up.

  He walked toward the western end of Nieuwe Binnenweg until he found the mix of shops he needed and returned to the hotel with a rucksack containing a sturdy hacksaw, a serrated knife, some cleaning materials, skin-tight rubber gloves, and a large roll of resealable freezer bags. As he stood facing the mirrored wall in the lift to go back up to the fourth floor, he pictured himself as the boys in the bar would have seen him, shouting at Mains. He recalled the waitress in the restaurant, who had been at their table precisely when Joe had been giving Mains a hard time, and then there was the girl by the bar in WATT. The latter part of the time they had spent in the club was a blank. Anything could have happened and anyone could come forward as a witness.