Hellbound: The Tally Man (9 page)

Joe stared at Margaret intensely. For reasons he couldn’t explain, he suddenly knew she was hiding something. Whether it had been something virtually imperceptible in her tone, her sentence repetition or an electrical current she had given off - he didn’t know what, and he couldn’t explain how he knew. He just knew. In that moment’s pause before she had answered him, he had seen her honesty waver like a flame in a draft.

Joe had no doubt that she wasn’t trying to deliberately mislead him. She was a truthful person who had simply just provided him with a false answer in an emotive situation as to what she had meant. He had sensed her realisation at what she had almost implied by accident, and knew she had then made a conscious, considered choice to alter what she had subconsciously wanted to say. He was no Paul Ekman, but even Joe could sense her leakage of an emotion she was trying hard to conceal.

He jotted on his pad the words ‘Hiding something?’ and heavily underlined it. Joe raised his eyes to see Margaret brushing some crumbs from her lap. Her momentary loss of composure had now been replaced by his original impression of her as strong and focused.

Joe swallowed hard. Was he misreading her statement? Or did she know something? If she did, he had no idea what it could be. The man was dead.

“How did you feel, knowing that your daughter’s killer had finally been brought to justice?”

Margaret’s face took on a hard expression, her voice full of explosive venom.

“Justice? His execution wasn’t justice, it was mercy. Did he suffer in pain and anguish like my little girl did? Did he cry from the pain that I’m sure his others victims suffered? I know you were there, Mr. O’Connell. Do you think his death was inhumane, or practically relaxed?”

Joe considered his answer carefully. “I think that there is no humane way to putting a person to death and that, as a society, we have a voyeuristic urge to observe such acts. I don’t know if I believe in the adage of ‘lex talens’, but I do know that his suffering will have been brief compared to that of your daughter and that there is no real way to ever compensate or balance the loss of a child at the hands of another.”

Margaret nodded her satisfaction at Joe’s answer. ‘Evasive, Mr O’Connell, but I understand your wish not to upset me and I appreciate it. Ultimately, there is no punishment that would have ever been enough for that man. His torment was brief. Mine is never-ending.”

Her eyes began to moisten slightly as she fought back the emotions bubbling beneath her composed façade. Excusing herself, Margaret left the living room and went upstairs, obviously struggling with the discussion concerning her daughter’s killer.

The guilt that Joe had been fighting to avoid began to slowly creep up on him like a moor land mist, embracing him at the ankles and slowly crawling up his legs and across his stomach, provoking a slightly nauseated feeling. He stood and tried to shake it away, telling himself that his questions were necessary to provide a balanced argument to his book. He needed the human emotion to counteract the veracity and repellent detail that Obadiah’s story would provide.

He clicked off the dictaphone and returned to look at the photographs adorning the walls, Joe took note of Margaret’s face. He hadn’t particularly paid attention to it on his arrival, but thinking back to his place sat opposite her, he could now see that where she had once been youthful looking given her late forty-something age, her face had now lost its innocence. Her small, animated features had developed lines and creases from the anguish she had endured, her cheekbones pulling her face down into an almost permanent expression of sadness. Realising the physical toll her daughter’s death had had on her, the psychological stress notwithstanding, ushered Joe towards the realisation that he hadn’t understood anything about Obadiah Stark in the sense that his legacy hadn’t died with him, but was everlasting.

And yet Joe couldn’t avoid the reoccurring sense that Margaret was hiding something. On the one hand, he could accept that her tense sentence structure when she was discussing Obadiah’s suffering was simply a by-product of her on-going pain at her daughter’s loss. But the nosy, journalistic side of him couldn’t shake the feeling that her face had given away a lot more than her speech pattern ever could have.

He turned as Margaret re-entered the room, smiling at her as he moved back towards the sofa. She made no attempt to sit back down. Her eyes were red and swollen.

“I’m sorry, Mr. O’Connell, but I can’t continue our interview. I thought I’d be okay after so long, talking about Kizzie and… him. But it’s still too raw. I do appreciate what Ciaran told me you’re trying to do. But I don’t think I can talk about it anymore. Certainly not at the moment anyway.”

Joe nodded slowly his understanding. Though he was slightly annoyed that she had decided to cut the interview short, he could understand her reasons. Besides, he had enough to get started and was eager to get back to the office to see if he had a response from Victoria Carter.

He projected his most sympathetic voice. “I understand, Mrs. Keld. I appreciate your time today and honesty in what must have been a difficult subject for you.”

“I’ll let myself out,” Joe stated, dropping his notepad and dictaphone in the bag and collecting it from the floor.

Smiling his thanks, he moved towards the front door and stepped outside. The nearby birds in the trees welcomed his entrance back into the bright sunshine. Joe was about to walk through the gate when he felt compelled to turn around. He found Margaret Keld staring at him, her face full of what he could only describe as anguish. He got the distinct impression she wanted to say something to him, but the thought was quickly intercepted by her shutting the door.

As he climbed into his car and drove away from her house, Joe slumped back and let out a sigh. The house and those around it faded away in the rear-view mirror as he recognised the exhaustion he felt from his poor night’s sleep and lack of substantial food – all alcohol induced.

His body sagging in the car seat, Joe wound down the window, embracing the blast of fresh air that engulfed his face. He stared through the windscreen, his mind trying to distinguish between his own interpretation of Margaret Keld’s comments and what, if anything lay behind them.

“…a monster…No remorse…no sorrow or regret…I hope they really make him suffer.”

‘To appreciate heaven well, it is good for a man to have some fifteen minutes of hell.’

Will Carleton

Chapter Six

08:56

HAD Obadiah awoken with his head sewn to the floor, he wouldn’t have been more surprised than he was right now.

As deja-vu went, this was the most absolute definition imaginable.

Deja-dead.

Trying to process what was in front of him forced Obadiah to wonder if he was experiencing a vivid dream. The woman from the photograph, the smell of breakfast, the filtered sunlight through the window and the time on the clock. All were a perfect representation of what had gone before.

Subconsciously massaging the wound-free areas on his body where the Gardaí had shot him, he advanced slowly down the remaining stairs and moved towards the breakfast bar. His eyes never flinched from the woman before him, but she simply returned his stare with a warm expression, pushing a strand of black hair back behind her ear.

“You’re just in time for breakfast.” Eva’s confirmation was met by silence. “Obi?” she questioned gently. “Are you okay?”

Obadiah held his gaze. His respiratory functions seemed to have slowed imperceptibly, his breath caught in his chest.

“Is this a joke,” he managed to gasp, his tone dark and laced with menace as he gestured around the kitchen.

“Is what a joke?” Eva asked in amusement.

“This,” he emphasised, repeating his sweep around the room.

“Obadiah, what’s the matter with you?” Concerned, she moved closer to him and took his hand which he quickly snatched away. Running them both through his hair and clasping them together behind his neck, he blinked rapidly as though trying to clear his vision. Obadiah was quickly becoming less confused and slowly approaching bewilderment.

The little girl at the bench looked at him with a curious expression. “Daddy, why are you sad?” She continued to stir her bowl of mixture as she spoke. Obadiah was wordless. He couldn’t believe any of this. Was he going mad? Had the drugs used to execute him damaged his mind before death?

“This has got to be a fucking joke!” His insistent statement promoted a shocked look from both females.

“Obadiah! That’s enough.” Eva quickly moved closer to her surprised daughter and held her by the shoulders. The little girl had stopped mixing whatever was in her bowl and was staring at Obadiah with widened eyes.

“What’s with you?” Eva persisted. “If you’re sick again, you need to tell me, not behave like this.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Go sit in the room, Ellie. Now, please.” The little girl stepped down from her stool at the sound of her mother’s firm but gentle interjection. Slowly, she walked past Obadiah into the room to his left, confusion concerning the sudden outbursts of emotion apparent in her eyes. Eva followed in her daughter’s footsteps, stopping in front of Obadiah.

“Obi, what is going on with you? You’ve been up five minutes and already you’re acting like a monster, scaring your daughter and scaring me. Tell me, what’s the matter?”

He found himself backing away from her, simultaneously wiping the beads of sweat that had begun to accumulate on his forehead. He needed space to process what was happening.

Eva moved closer, her tone softening as she sensed his discomfort and confusion at something she was not privy to. “Obi, what is it?”

Obadiah ignored her implied concern. “You know,” he responded, placing his palm on her chest and forcefully pushing her back. “Now I think about it, I’m not feeling too good. But you or someone else is obviously messing with me and it’s a big, fuckin’ mistake.”

A burning need to understand rose from his gut, intent on consuming him. Wearing just the pyjama trousers he had awoken in, he stormed through the house and out the gate onto the road, ignoring Eva’s calls of concern from the door. He increased his speed and headed in the direction he had followed yesterday, needing to see the consequences of his actions. He knew their inertia, or a lack of it, would reinforce his wavering certainty of whether the promnesia he was experiencing was coincidental or something more insidious.

As he headed down the avenue, the smell of the autumnal trees and the breeze on his skin teased him with an elemental joke he was not yet in on. And for the first time since his childhood, Obadiah Stark was feeling something he had long ago determined he would never experience again. Fear.

His pace never slowing, he followed the dips and curves of the avenue until he saw the town ahead of him. Obadiah stopped and scanned the surroundings, the cold air biting at his half-naked torso. His shoeless feet were numb, but he didn’t care. He wanted to see the effects of the carnage he had wrought when last here.

He was immediately disappointed. People were going about their daily routines, as they had done yesterday. And they were going about it with the distinct lack of a Gardaí presence. The buildings, shaded in hues of turquoise, yellow and orange, should have been cordoned off following his actions. The town should have been under surveillance, with law enforcement a very tangible presence. Yet, they were conspicuous by their absence.

Taking in the details of every person that walked by him, Obadiah scanned their faces for signs of anxiety or apprehension at his presence. He had expected his profile to be plastered all over the news. But other than a passing interest at his semi-clad appearance, no one seemed to care he was there.

Seeing a newsagent, Obadiah strode over and snatched one of the tabloids from the rack outside. The front page headline protested about the number of soldiers killed in Iraq to date and the Government’s lack of progress in their withdrawal from the country. Conceding that his performance yesterday may not have superseded such political fare, he thumbed to the next pages. A Page 3 girl and an article on an approaching decade of doom for the UK under a Conservative rule greeted him, but still he saw no mention of his name or events.

His reverie was abruptly broken by the sound of someone calling his name. Turning he saw a man jogging towards him, his right hand raised in acknowledgment. For what felt like interminable minutes everything around Obadiah seemed to freeze, with sounds becoming muted and slowing to an imperceptible hum. Then like a recoiling spring, it all became unstuck and returned to a normal rhythm.

“What the hell…?”

The man before him should have had his head facing one hundred and eighty degrees in the opposite direction. That was where Obadiah had left it. Yet his rounded face and lean frame were not contorted in any way.

“Obadiah? I thought it was you. What’s the craic? Why are you half naked, man?”

His heart thudding loudly in his chest, Obadiah glanced around, curious to see if he was involved in a set up to identify him before a team of officers could move in. But all he saw were the human cattle, moving ignorantly about their urbanised pasture.

Letting the newspaper fall to the ground, Obadiah began backing slowly away, his eyes fixated on the man before him. Unable to establish a rational explanation, he began to find it difficult to breathe again, as though a great weight were suddenly pressing down upon his chest.

He suddenly realised he was caught in a circumstance he could not control, an experience alien to him. As incredulous as it seemed, he appeared to be experiencing the exact same day that he had yesterday. Everything happening around him had happened before.

Mark looked at Obadiah, his eyebrows furrowed in puzzlement. “You okay? You look all fucked up.”

Obadiah felt the anger rising from the pit of his stomach. The man stood before him meant that everything he had accomplished yesterday had been erased and reset, the obdurate universe conspiring to rob him of everything and define it merely as prologue. In this reality, where Obadiah Stark stood again in his hometown of Killarney, The Tally Man had never existed.

The increasing bustle of people flitting about him began to feel like insects stinging at his brain. Ignoring the man before him, Obadiah turned around and broke into a sprint almost instantly, eager to get back to the house which was now strangely the only place he felt at ease. Shouts for his attention from the man who should have been dead faded in to the background as he pushed himself faster, welcoming the accompanying shortness of breath.

* * *

Obadiah couldn’t really remember the journey back to the house. His feet had begun to bleed from his lack of shoes, every step now a biting ache. The day slowly brought with it shadows and a biting cold; his anxiety replaced with a need to feel warm again.

Staring up at the house, he regained his breath, imagining what might be waiting for him inside. The woman and child who seemed to know him were actually the biggest conundrum of all. Being back in his childhood home was unbelievable enough, but that two people appeared to know him but have no awareness of his history was mystifying.

Fuck, this is all wrong.

When he had been strapped to the gurney in Absolom, he had believed that that was the end - his end. A cessation of consciousness, with no afterlife and no higher plain of mental acuity. But it had been denied him. Yesterday had not been the opportunity he had originally thought, but a trick leaving him now with an insoluble problem.

Obadiah left the front door ajar as he strode through the hallway and back into the kitchen. He could see Eva stood with her back to him, her telephone conversation sounding heated and desperate. As if sensing his presence, her face displayed momentary shock at seeing him before she slammed the phone down on its receiver and raced over to embrace him.

Moving away, Eva held him at arm’s length. “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been worried sick. I nearly called the Gardaí, thinking you’d had an accident. What’s going on, Obi? Why did you leave like that? And Jesus, you’re freezing cold!”

She hurried upstairs and returned with a blanket which she laid around his shoulders. Obadiah held it by the corners but remained fixed to the spot. He didn’t have the slightest idea what to say.

“What’s your name?” His voice was firm, its insistence for an answer explicit.

“Eva,” she replied sadly. “It’s Eva, Obi.” She moved forward to hold him again, but Obadiah stepped back. The hurt broke over her face like ripples on a lake.

“I don’t know you. I don’t know the child. I grew up in this wretched house, but I don’t know who you people are.”

Eva’s eyes welled with tears at his matter-of-fact statement.

He paused before continuing. “My name is Obadiah Stark. The media call me The Tally Man. I murdered twenty-seven people over sixteen years and was executed in ADX Absolom on September 7th 2011. I expected to be burning in Hell, but instead found myself here, with my tattoo signifying my life’s work gone from my back. I don’t know who put me here, and I don’t know why. I don’t know if God or the devil is playing a game with me. But here I am.

“Yesterday, I walked into town, murdered five people and was shot by the Gardaí for my troubles, which was fine. I hadn’t wanted the second chance. I only wanted out of this shithole called life. But then this morning, I wake up and I’m here again, with no bullet wounds, and everything exactly the same as it was yesterday. A man whose neck I snapped yesterday just waved at me for fuck’s sake.

“I do not care for another sole on this planet. I have never loved anyone and have only ever been interested in one thing – increasing my tally of victims. But you don’t understand any of this, because as far as you are concerned, the man I have just described is not the man you know, is it?”

Eva didn’t reply. As though frozen to the spot, her face had developed a profound sadness that Obadiah was unable to quantify. It was as though her world had just begun to crumble before her and all she could do was watch, unable to influence the outcome.

“Obadiah, you’re sick. You’re really sick and you need to let me help you…let us help you - as a family. The hospital told us that if it progressed further, you may begin to have delusions and hallucinations. Why didn’t you tell me sooner? We can’t wait with this thing, you know that.” Her voice had begun to crack, the emotion becoming too much for her to contain.

Obadiah moved forward a few steps, closing the distance between them, feeling oddly calm in what was a potentially provocative situation. But killing was the furthest thing from his mind.

“I’m not ill,” he stated with a chuckle. “I’m a predator who preys on the human stain. I am a beast.”

Eva was now stood in front of Obadiah, tears flowing freely down her face. She reached out to take his hand, but he rebuffed the offer and move back slightly.

“Obi, you’ve never been in prison, you’ve never hurt a soul. You’re surrounded by people who care about you and who just want to help. Please, let me help you.”

A smile broke over Obadiah’s face as he found himself fascinated at her persistence to help him. Though she obviously didn’t know him as The Tally Man, she appeared to know him as Obadiah Stark who had been sick with what he could only guess was some sort of brain tumour. For a second, he considered whether this could be true. Could his entire existence as a sociopath have simply been a carcinoma-induced delusion? No. The sensation of taking the lives he had taken had been too visceral, the feeling of incarceration in Absolom too tactile an experience to be anything other than real.

“I know you think you know me, but be thankful you don’t.”

Without the slightest hint of emotion, Obadiah turned from Eva and, letting the blanket fall from his shoulders, walked back to the front door, out the house and towards the cliff side that he had observed that first day from the bedroom window.

Reaching its precipice, he could feel the primal force of the water as it crashed upon the shore, its momentum carrying fret and spray towards his forty-foot apex. In his mind’s eye he could see the faces of all his victims as they beckoned him to join them, their appreciation at what he had given them in death etched onto their faces. The sound of Eva calling out his name as she approached grated on his nerves, the child’s voice more serene in its pleas for his attention.