Past Darkness (15 page)

K
arl and Naomi sat on the bed, facing the dressing table near the far window. With the lights turned off in the room, the streetlamp directly facing the window filled the room in a weary greyness.

Karl reflectively watched his own reflection in the dullness of the table’s mirror. He looked wasted and lost, like a book with missing pages, or a man for whom time had finally run out. A glass of brandy rested tantalisingly on the small bedroom table, but he refused to touch it. He would do this without the assistance of Mister Hennessy.

Naomi, wrapped in a nightgown, was looking concerned. A terrible tension was stalking the room, like a hand grenade with the pin about to be pulled.

‘Why don’t we get into bed, Karl? You’ll be a lot more comfortable.’

‘Thinking of sex again, Miss Kilpatrick?’ Karl false-smiled. It made him look even older than he felt, right at this moment
in life. ‘Remember after we first met, and were getting to know each other a bit better?’

‘Haemorrhoids, love of brandy, divorced, lousy at gambling, great at sex…?’

‘No, that was you. I’m talking about me!’ said Karl, smiling.

They both laughed. A nervous laugh. Unnatural.

‘I confided in you about my mother being attacked and raped, and then murdered, by Walter Arnold, when I was nine?’

‘Yes, and I know how hard is was for you to discuss it.’ Naomi squeezed Karl’s hand reassuringly. ‘Don’t bring up the past, Karl. You know it’s not good for you.’

‘But the past is killing me, destroying the present. That’s why I need to lance it from my system, once and for all. I need to put myself back in the driving seat, instead of just being a hijacked passenger. Remember how I told you that Arnold left me for dead after stabbing me multiple times?’

Naomi shuddered. ‘Yes.’

‘What I
never
told you was that he…he…’ Karl’s voice trailed off. He inhaled a large gulp of air, and then very slowly exhaled. ‘He…raped me…’

Naomi looked stunned. Her mouth opened, but no words came out. Her eyes registered shock and horror. She tried to regain her composure, but failed.

‘Karl…oh my Karl…’ She wrapped her arms protectively around his neck and shoulders. Her eyes began to fill with tears. ‘My poor Karl…’

‘Don’t start with the crying. This is hard enough for me. And if you continue squeezing my neck, you’re going to break it,’ Karl said, hugging Naomi reassuringly before easing her grip on his neck.

Naomi wiped away her tears, but more followed. ‘Why… why didn’t you tell me this before? Didn’t you trust me?’

‘I’ve never told
anyone
; not even Lynne when I was married to her. Not my father. You’re the first.’

‘But why did you wait this long, keep it all bottled up inside of you?’

‘Perhaps it was just a macho thing; that men can’t be raped. The stigma of it, and the shame.’

‘Shame? But this…this had nothing to do with you. You were the victim, a child.’

‘I know that. That’s logic speaking, but the reality is a different animal entirely. I’ve always felt ashamed about it, as if I somehow contributed to the rape. Even in the psychotherapy sessions I was given after my mother’s murder, I never once mentioned the rape. I was afraid of how the psychotherapist would react to me. I don’t want sympathy or pity, just understanding of the way I behave sometimes. Joking and laughing about things I shouldn’t. Of things I have done…’

‘Things? What things?’

He looked away, unable to meet her gaze. ‘Terrible things…’

Naomi reached over, tenderly clasping his head in both her hands.

‘Look at me, Karl.
Look
at me.’

Slowly, his eyes rested on hers. He wanted to dissolve away into them, wanted them to erase all the bad things. The nightmares. The perpetual darkness.

‘You, Karl Kane, are the best thing to
ever
happen to me. Full stop. You’re the kindest, the most loving, the most big-hearted man I know. Do you understand that? Do you
understand
how much I love–’

‘I killed two young girls…children…’

Naomi’s face turned to the colour of damp snow.

‘What…? What are you talking about, Karl? Why would you say something so horrible?’

‘Ann Mullin and Leona Fredrick. Both aged eight. Raped, then murdered.’

‘But…Arnold committed those horrible crimes, not you.’

‘I could’ve prevented him. That makes me equally guilty.’

‘No. That’s ridiculous. You can’t think that way.’

‘Is it? For years, I lived with nothing but revenge on my mind. Revenge, to kill Arnold for what he did to Mum, to me. Then, one Good Friday night, many years later, I had the opportunity. I’d been watching his habits and behaviours for over a year, following him all around Belfast. I knew that every second or third Friday he went to his favourite restaurant, Fiddler’s Green–’

‘Fiddler’s Green…? The beer mat?’

‘That’s right. I was armed with the holy trinity of retribution: gun, determination and justification.’

Outside the apartment, a heavy rain began to assault the window, as though a million crows on the verge of starvation had found victuals scattered in the wilderness of God’s open palm.

Karl listened to the rain intently, almost hypnotised. He shuddered.

‘It was raining that night, also, just like this…’

He reached and lifted the brandy glass to his lips. This time, he surrendered, filled his mouth with the agreeable liquid. Let it sea against his parched tongue, as if it could exorcise the bad taste of memory. Swallowed what his mouth held. Set the glass back down.

‘I followed Arnold when he came out of Fiddler’s Green. I followed him along the Antrim Road. Pitch-black night, as dark as the devil’s heart. Little or no traffic, human or metal. I came within arm’s length of him when he suddenly stopped dead-weight in his tracks.’

‘Did…did he see you?’ Naomi had been hanging on to every word, like a butcher’s hook embedded into bloody meat. Tense, she had barely moved a muscle, trapped in Karl’s dark, claustrophobic world of violence and retribution.

‘He’d stopped to take a piss. I walked closer; so close I could smell the stench of that piss, the booze seeping through his filthy pores, his Old Spice aftershave, the greasy Brylcreem stuck to his hair.’

‘You don’t have to continue, Karl. It’s okay.’

‘I aimed the gun at the back of his head, thinking of the evil he had perpetrated, on Mum, on me. I tried to say his name, make him turn around, face me. But my tongue refused to move. I squeezed on the trigger, gritted my teeth, waited for the explosion of brain and skull, but…I couldn’t do it. I had the bastard in my sights, and I couldn’t fucking do it.’

Karl’s hands were trembling with anger. Knuckles white, almost popping from their fleshy enclosure.

‘
Easy…easy, love,
’ Naomi whispered. ‘
You’re better than Arnold. That’s why you couldn’t do it
.’

‘Within forty-eight hours, he had abducted little Ann and Leona, raped and murdered them in the most brutal fashion. They were out egg-painting on Easter Sunday. I could have saved them, but I was a coward.’

‘That’s guilt talking, Karl. You can’t change the past. Arnold murdered Ann and Leona. Not you. He was given life imprisonment for that.’

‘The law deemed him insane when he murdered my mother. He was put away for five years in a mental institute.
Five bloody years
! Can you believe that? Had he been given life at the time, he wouldn’t have been out on the streets, able to murder those two kids, twenty years later.’

‘The whole thing was a travesty of justice, Karl. Nothing can change that, no matter how much you persecute yourself.’

‘Justice? Justice had nothing to do with it. Money was the principle factor. Arnold came from one of the wealthiest families in Belfast, and to this day, I believe the so-called judge – that fucker William Pickering – had his pockets filled with blood money by Arnold’s parents for a shorter sentence.’

Naomi held him, rocking her tired and defeated partner –
her man
– gently, whispering soft and calming things into his ear meant for him and no other. He closed his eyes, allowing his body to move with her gentle sways. She hummed a song, something barely audible and arcane. Something magic. Something only women know the meaning to, and hold its trust in their bosoms.

He couldn’t remember when exactly he had fallen asleep, but he did, in her arms.

D
espite the fierce storm raging unabated, Scarman had taken to a narrow vein of backroads and unventured pathways, all overgrown with wild, thorny bushes and weeds the size of menacing triffids. The rain fell like freezing ball bearings, increasing the weight of the darkness. The weather suited his purposes well.

This nighttime world he traversed seemed void of all moving and breathing things, long abandoned by gods and good people. To Scarman, though, it was faultless. It filled him with an inexpressible sensation so wondrously sweet he felt a renewed understanding of his own destiny and footprint in life.

After five minutes of walking, slowed and hindered constantly by the undergrowth, he came to the lone and lonely farmhouse. It waited there for him like a resigned silhouette clipped from funereal paper. The sight made him grin his wolf’s grin. He was the aggrieved party, the police, the prosecution,
the expert witness, the judge, the jailor, the executioner, the undertaker. He was the hunter.

The back of the house was blocked by congregations of rusting machinery, along with rotten timber felled eons ago by the eager axe and wiry muscles of promise and enthusiasm. Now, all life was gone; relegated to an era long departed and long forgotten. Neglect had finally been crowned prince and conqueror.

Scarman approached the side of the house, populated by two rusted tractors and moss-covered equine items, soldiered side-by-side with an army of worthless tools, as ancient as anything utilised by Noah in his wooded chandlery as he waited for the great rains of judgement to burst forth.

Edging himself up to an ageing, naked window, he peered where his eyes guided. The window belonged to a one-time bedroom, now chock-a-block with floor-to-ceiling clutter. Paper mainly. Reams of books towered in skyline formation. Magazines carpeted the floor. Yellowing newspapers suffocated ancient and rickety-looking furniture. Beyond that bedroom, the hallway; beyond the hallway, the living room, a sequence of shapes and shade. In the living room, shadows fashioned from a log-fed fire danced in crazed movements.

Rain was sloshing against the windowpane, interrupting his voyeurism. Still, he was able to catch a measured view of the living room, and a pair of legs stretched out. The legs were almost hugging the blazing fire. A shotgun rested not
too far from the legs, like a faithful hound awaiting its master’s deadly command.

He slid back down to the ground. The wetted muck was becoming swampier. Less traction accorded for his intended deeds.

Deadly, dark deeds.

The rain continued its unpitying torrent. Drowning him. He almost missed the basement door, camouflaged as it was in dung and wet leaves.

Looking all about, he schemed and weighed options, purchasing a rusted pipe, flattened and eroded by time and the elements. With this, he began to scrape away leaves and roots and dung. It was human dung. Not animal. He uprooted the dung, digging under it. Its belly glistened like something malevolent from a cursed swampland. The slimy mess clung to the pipe like a crazed dog in lockjaw. The stench was overpowering. Male in all its ugliness. Not like the young girls’. No, not like theirs at all.

He pictured the ancient farmer eating all those filthy turnips, sprouts and spuds, shovelling them down his toothless mouth before going to the shitter, sitting down and releasing his load like an animal giving birth. He hated the farmer even more now, quickly horseshoeing the bar’s metal lip between gaps in the wooden shutters and bordering cement.

His brute force laid siege to the primitive doors, until they eventually shuddered, then splintered into surrender.
He pulled back the remains. Darkness beckoned. As he was about to enter, something bit him in the leg.

King stood, snarling, face pulled back over its skull, red eyes wide, teeth bared and prepared for battle.

‘
Easy boy
…’ Scarman hissed, turning carefully, hoping not to spook the dog into attacking him. He clamped the rusted pipe in his fist, and readied it.

King leapt forward, snapping at him. He threw a wild swing. The pipe hit King on the side of the head. King yelped, but came right back again, knocking the pipe from Scarman’s hand and sinking its curved teeth into the leg of his trousers. A tug-of-war ensued. Scarman pulled on the trouser leg, struggling to free it from the dog’s grip. King dug its heels in, its head tearing from side to side in a sawing motion.

‘Bastard!’ This time Scarman lashed out, landing a solid kick to King’s nose.

The creature whimpered loudly, then turned and ran as fast as its feet could carry it.

Shaken, Scarman entered the basement, and was immediately swallowed up.

In front of the comfort of his fire, Francis reflected on Karl’s visit two days ago. Perhaps he shouldn’t have proffered the information about Cornelius and Martha Johnson having
an affair? He had clearly seen the shock in Karl’s eyes, and also the hurt. It was the last thing he had ever wanted to do, to hurt the lad.

‘Damn it! You’re like an old wine vessel, bursting at the seams.’ He couldn’t stop admonishing himself. ‘Can’t keep anything in. You damn fool. If Nora still lived, you’d have had a verbal lashing from her.’

The thought of his beloved wife instantly made him feel terribly alone and melancholy. He craned a log from a side-basket, and unceremoniously dropped it into the grate. Sparks spat out at him, landing on his liver spots and withered hands. He watched the sparks die on his skin. If they caused pain, he did not submit to it, nor offer deposition.

Standing up from the large, threadbare armchair, he removed Karl’s card from the top of the old working table. He tried the phone again. The third time today. Still not working. Power lines brought down by the storm.

First thing in the morning, he’d call Karl, tell him about the new owner in the old house. Something not right about the man. Those eyes.

Francis Duffy didn’t scare easily, but he had to admit to himself, the eyes
had
unnerved him. He was relieved when the man quickly closed the door in his face.

Francis put the card back on the table, and walked over to the cupboard. Removed a solitary teabag and the sugar bag. Placed the teabag in the teapot. Clicked the kettle’s water
into life, and went back to making himself comfortable in the armchair.

The logs sparked, hissed and spat, lighting up the room in sporadic bursts, like a miniature fireworks display. He stared into the flames’ dancing tongues, licking at the trembling logs. They were hypnotic. He thought he saw Nora’s face in them. She was smiling at him, calling out his name.

Francis…Francis…

That was when he noticed the shotgun had vanished.