Ivory (28 page)

Martin’s grip
leapt from the staff as if it had become scalding hot and the staff
pulled itself free under its own weight and drummed to the floor.
Tentacles of blood scaled the muslin from the face that was now
completely caved in to the head in a dark mess of blood, tissue,
brass threads, cables and cogs. Martin fell onto his rear with a
thud that rocked the furniture and rattled the jars and gourds and
scrabbled away from the scene. He sobbed as the blood followed him
from where it had sprayed onto his clothing and his face.

The room was
darkening, the fluttering shadows at the corners of the workshop
grew thicker and details of objects became obscure as the light
began to weaken. Seeing that the candles still burned, he wondered
if the darkness was his own weakening consciousness, yet the
shadows were not descending over the whole scene but creeping in
from the corners, stretching across the walls and reaching out into
the room, consuming features and furniture in an increasingly
imperceptible blackness. There was a rumbling noise, at first he
thought it thunder but it didn’t undulate and was constant, except
that the sound was building. There was a vibration from the bare
dusty floor boards, and then he saw that the shadow was in the
middle of the room. Yet it wasn’t shadow, there were tendrils of
black smoke filtering through gaps in the boards over an area of
around a metre in diameter, coiling into each other, reaching for
the ceiling but tumbling back down upon itself before it could make
it, forming an eddying hunched figure of smoke. A fire in the room
below? Then Martin remembered Ebony’s story of the Demons that had
offered Ebony his deal. They had arrived in smoke.

He raced
across the floor on his hands and knees, his pace broken by his
frantic swipes at the tears and crimson wetness on his face, he
tumbled through the door and onto the landing and staggered to his
feet in a clumsy descent of the stairs.

Despite the
urgency in his panicked escape and avoiding looking at Ebony’s
body, there was something different about the hallway beyond the
change of landscape caused by the books that had fallen. Things
were moving. He froze on the stairs and the sound of his heavy
footsteps was replaced by the Great Mephisto slapping his paddle
hand against the glass of his case. The Hellequin that had been at
the pianola now crouched at Ebony’s side stroking his arm in jerky
movements of affection and mourning. The mechanical boy poet
stabbed the sharp nib of its pen into the floor using it to anchor
a grip and drag its torso and wooden base into the hall, its face
shattered from its drop from the cabinet. Martin’s attention was
snatched back and forth in the hall as movement gave away the
presence of more dolls and moving creations that had migrated from
the room dedicated to Ivory to reach Ebony’s body.

White hot pain soaked into his ankle, dropping him onto the
steps. He could feel the thing at his leg and saw it as a rat in
his mind and kicked instinctively backwards at the creature.
Instead of hearing a squeal and feeling a soft body pinned to the
riser, he heard the crunch of something harder. He swiped at his
ankle and
knocked a broken Hellequin
tumbling down the stairs. He studied his fingers and found them
slick with blood from his wound. The hand that rested on the step
beside him flared into his awareness as it rode a surge of pain. A
second Hellequin crouched, its head attached to the back of his
hand by its mouth, Martin prized at its small hard head as its bite
closed more. Waves of pain battered his consciousness with dazzling
light, followed by an instant numb headiness as he pulled the thing
off him.

He studied the
squirming doll, its masked head unhinged in a maw that spread from
ear to ear to reveal a ragged trap of angled blades soaked with his
blood. He threw it onto the landing behind him. His ear roared with
pain as another Hellequin fell upon him from the top of a stack and
clamped onto his flesh, he pulled it free and felt that part of his
ear go with it. He dropped the doll, scrambled to his feet and
tumbled and stumbled down the stairs.

The Great
Mephisto sat in his box, his head turning from Ebony to Martin, his
shuttered glass eyes wide and his hinged mouth agape within its
limited expression of shock and grief, its paddle hand slamming the
spidery cracked glass as if in protest at Ebony’s death. Martin
leapt over Ebony’s body and picked his way through the spilled
books and moving things that closed in upon him and fumbled with
the door, he pulled it open and floundered through then slammed it
closed against the nightmare.

“
Oh god! Oh fucking Christ!” Martin was shaken to find that he
was back in the present. Before an Ivory who had seen into his
thoughts. Seen what he had done. He wanted the sanctuary of memory,
to return to his flight from the house so that he could avoid the
present situation, the horror of yesterday was nothing compared
with the terror he felt now. He slammed the door of the family room
shut, sure that she would stop him, but it struck the jamb with a
resounding crash. He jammed the key in the lock, his heart
pounding, knowing that he wouldn’t get time to turn the key before
she would turn the handle and force the door open. He locked the
door, and he leapt away from it in surprise that he had succeeded
in shutting her out.

“
Oh FUCK. Fuck. fuck.” He trailed.

The warnings
were true. He feared the prophecy, and feared for himself. He
realised he was wasting time, that she could find something to
break open the hard wood door. He fumbled with the knife and the
rolling pin again, his grip weakened by the excruciating pain from
his injured hands, he returned to the glass of the French
doors.

Martin dropped
his tools, startled by a top panel of the door exploding into the
room in a spray of splinters as Ivory’s fist punched through. Her
arm snaked after it and reached for the handle. She pushed it down,
but made no attempt to force it open; instead she appeared to be
steadying herself on it. Suddenly a foot came gracefully through
the hole in the door. Martin knew that this was his moment, as the
gap would be too small and she would wedge herself in the door if
she tried to climb in. He could attack her there and then and
finish this, yet to pick up the knife and to stab it into her… He
couldn’t do it.

Her face
appeared in the hole, her features passive and emotionless, her
eyes cold and impossible to read. Her head and body jerked into an
angle that looked unnatural, as though her spine had abruptly
broken, and then impossibly she leaned in through the narrow gap.
The arm and leg that were the other side of the door followed her
through and incredibly, but undeniably, she was standing in the
room with him. Her head disjointed from her body at an awkward and
painful looking angle, her right shoulder unfeasibly higher than
her left, her body appearing broader and her chest flatter. She
jerked again, three times, and her head set back into place, her
shoulders realigned and her body narrowed and her chest expanded
back to its original shape and size. All through this
transformation Ivory’s glistening obsidian eyes were fixed,
unblinking, on Martin.

“
you wanted answers.”
A sound
permeated the air in the wake of her words.
“you wanted to understand me. you wanted to experience me.
you wanted to know me completely.”
His
mind swelled with a sudden swarm of moving images merging in and
out of each other; Ivory sitting on the floor of the lounge of her
home reading arcane literature, Ebony stroking her hair absently
whilst listening to crackling 78’s on a gramophone. Ivory guiding
the blind Ebony through unfamiliar places so he could learn the
route. Ebony’s voice, soft low and reassuring; “You will have
someone that loves you innocently, and not through your hold over
man and woman.” Ebony and Ivory practicing Tai Chi together in
their garden.
“his was the only mind that
I could hear.”
The pair of them bent over
mechanical creations in his workshop, Ebony teaching her his
skills. Her arm reaching through the letter box and disjointing
unnaturally to reach the key, finding it wasn’t there – looking
through and seeing Ebony’s body. The images vanished, the montage
of her life snatched away from him. The collective whispering sound
in the air was faint and illusive in its direction and
source.
“you took the person that cared
for me without sin.”
The ululation built
in pitch and volume and became sympathetic to Ivory’s
lament.
“you have destroyed all that I
have. destroyed all that I stood to gain.”
The sound built to a multitude of distant howls.
“you think you did it out of love.”
The howling drew closer.
“you did it to force me to love you.”
The howling spiked his ears and was all around him.
“you will know retribution.”

Martin
recognised the sound, the sound that he had first heard when his
car had careened towards her, the sound he had heard again when
King had been killed and again when Ivory fought off the pimps. His
hands were seized by a life of their own. His nails clawed at his
flesh, and despite the pain his hands continued in scoring the
lines that would draw his guilt. The blood washed over his pale
skin and ran up his fingers until they were gloved in scarlet. His
possessed fingers raked his nails at his eyes and dug at his lids
until they were tatters. He snatched up the knife with a certainty
that was not his own and held the tip poised. His eyes twitched in
their sockets, seemingly the only parts of his body within his
control. He screamed out against his hands. Pleaded with himself,
with Ivory, with a God he now found himself praying existed and
would aid him against this unnatural creature that was assaulting
him.

Without any
hesitation that suggested his own will, he smoothly and slowly
moved the knife tip towards his right eye. Even when he felt the
sting of the metal as it pierced the sclera and vitreous jelly
spewed out onto his cheeks he did not stop. Half the world vanished
and he vomited over himself.

At a moment
when he thought the experience could become no worse and be no more
painful, he moved the knife to his remaining eye. The clear fluid
mingled with his blood creating a cascade of pinks and red. The
world was gone, all he had was darkness. Blinded, he felt himself
discard the knife and his stubby fingers continued to work as they
delved and rooted his burst eyes from his head in explosions of
pain that pounded against the back of his skull. Yet whatever force
possessed him it would not let him pass out.

Blind to
everything but himself he felt his fingers find the hardness of his
keys and they wrapped around them. He heard the loudness of
movement at his ears as he forced the keys to follow the spiral of
the flesh into his head, pushing further, churning painfully in the
canal of his ear until his efforts were met with a thunder equal to
that of the storm outside. He repeated the torture on his remaining
ear and an explosion was the last thing he heard as the world
became silent and he descended into a world of only physical
sensations, smell and taste. Martin jumped up with a muted
awareness of his lungs exhaling a scream he could not hear.

He could feel
the blood of his work running from his face down his neck, wetting
his clothes to his chest. He staggered about in his own silent
Hell. His leg hit something hard and he fell forward. His hands
rushed out ahead of him in an instinct to break his fall and for a
moment he felt the cold glass of the coffee table. Then solidness
disintegrated, and there was pain again as he dropped the remaining
distance to the floor. The shattered glass of the tabletop
splintered around his outstretched hands, tearing them to ribbons,
shearing tendons and scraping the bones with vibrations that ground
in his mind.

Rolling around
on the floor he could feel the thick pile of the carpet, and the
sting of the broken glass. Grateful for every millisecond of
sensation from the soothing softness of the carpet, before the
onslaught of pain forced the feelings out. He could feel his arms
moving but could not guess at the actions his own hands made. Then
his lips were stinging in the middle of a scream. He tried to close
his mouth but his thick slick fingers forced their way in. The
glass shards filled his mouth gluttonously. Martin bit down on his
own fingers, as he did so he realised he was force-feeding himself
shards of glass, cramming them into the sensitive interior of his
mouth. Martin rolled onto his side and spat out the glass, blood,
and the lining of his throat with ribbons of his tongue.

Martin did not
see Ivory step over his cowering form and take the keys, or hear
the front door shut and lock behind her as she disappeared into the
storm. Tortured by his own hand and now sealed entirely in his own
dark void, with no eyes to see, no ears to hear, no hands to write
and no tongue to speak. Silenced in a torture he could not share.
Without senses he was trapped in his inner world. The blackness
summoned his deeds like phantoms in the night. One by one they
came; King, Jenny, his sons, Ebony, the faceless male, all there to
haunt him. The people he had sacrificed in his lust for Ivory.

Epilogue

Candy
stood at the mouth of the alley that led down to the front door of
what had been King’s flat. She looked up at the dark husk of the
building. The ground floor windows were crudely boarded with planks
that left gaps wide enough for the blackness within to be seen, but
not wide enough to allow for any light to pick out the details of
whatever was within. The windows of King’s first floor flat were
vacant, the wooden frames cracked and blackened into charcoal.
Through these she could see the bared rafters of the loft from
where the roof had collapsed, and the night sky coloured a dusky
orange by the streetlights, giving the appearance of the fire’s
ghost haunting the charred flesh and ribs of the
building.