The Unlucky Man (4 page)

As he made his way onto the escalator he lit up a dog eared rollie, pluming thick acrid smoke in his wake. He sucked in an appreciative lungful and wished, not for the first time, that he’d chosen a less exposed rendezvous destination.

Shit, Whimsy thought as the escalator reached the pinnacle of its rise and spewed him out into the grubby ticket barriers. He hated being this visible, too many people, too many unknown faces.

Relax, he told himself, if it was a trap, you’d already be dead, and there was something to be said for safety in the anonymity of numbers. Still, Whimsy knew the only reason he had lived so long was a mixture of paranoia and his uncanny ability to effectively disappear, to melt away and stay away.

His ticket popped out of the machine and he pocketed it once more, noticing as he did so the story on the scrolling news screen. Some funeral parlour downtown was burning down.

And then he was out into the station proper, into the newly breaking commotion.

"My God," he breathed, the words escaping out in a breath full of dirty smoke.

Like a scene out of a movie, there were a lot of panicking people on the move, crushing back into one another, screaming, forming an open half moon, at the centre of which a figure lay in a spreading pool of blood. He was still clearly fighting to hold on to life but Whimsy didn’t need a doctor to tell him that it was a battle he was losing. The guy on the floor thrashed and, for the briefest moment his eyes met Whimsy’s own.

He felt a flash of ice in his blood, not least because no one ever looked straight at Whimsy. He knew then that he had come too late.

With a supreme effort, Carver Whimsy forced himself to remain calm. Running will get you dead, he told himself, stay with the crowd, don’t draw any attention to yourself, stay calm, walk away. Still, some sense of something akin to responsibility made his feet heavy, his exit slower than it should have been.

I’m sorry, he thought, gaze riveted to the prone figure, unable to look away. Head thick with guilt, Whimsy beat his retreat, feeling sick with himself, with what he’d seen and the need to be free of it that was tearing at his gut. Without seemingly moving, Whimsy melted back onto the throng. Where he had been seconds before, a guy in a corduroy blazer was screaming into his phone whilst someone else gripped his shoulder. And, in this manner, Whimsy insinuated himself into the mass of shifting humanity until he was lost in the crowd.

I watched him go, not angry, not anything really. I was way past that. It didn’t matter now, nothing did. Worlds swam.

A sudden, incongruous, memory leaped unbidden to mind. When I was a kid, perhaps six or seven, I remember I used to ask questions constantly, the way a lot of kids do: why is the sky blue? Why do we have feet? What’s grass made of? That kind of thing.

I remember that it used to really get on my old man’s nerves, I could keep it up for hours. One day we were in the city -we didn’t live in the city but in a small community an hour or so away from it – and it was a hot, sunny idyllic summer’s day, least ways that’s how it looks in my memory. On this day, I remember seeing an old guy, a bum, rifling through some garbage cans. He looked, to my child’s eyes, a bit like a grubby Santa with a huge, tangle of beard covering half his crinkled face.

"Why is that man so dirty?" I asked my father, just loud enough that I guess it must have been awkward.

"Jesus Johnny," my father shot at me, scowling, "You keep asking so many questions, one day someone’s gonna take a pop at you."

Now, with a pumping hole in my chest, I remembered that. Someone finally took that pop, I thought.

And then there was the shadow. It spread over me, a cool dark breeze, inky clouds obscuring the too bright light. I realised my eyes were closed and struggled to open them, to look into a gaze straight out of another world.

I wanted to think these eyes were like none I had seen, but that wasn’t true, I’d seen them yesterday, looking down from a fire escape as some poor soul cooled on the smashed up wreck of the car we used to ferry the dead.

It might seem like I’m retreading old ground, but things get clearer with retelling. Without blinking or breaking eye contact, the guy with the outline-eyes reached into the pocket of my suit jacket and pulled out the deathly capsule. It was this that he placed between my teeth.

The thing dissolved. Acid taste. And my mind dissolved with it. I saw the world fall apart on the wings of a million crows.

"What do you see?"

I told him.

"The sky is falling."

He nodded, his voice telling me he knew exactly what I meant, even if I didn’t any more.

"Then you’re already dead."

He put the gun to my heart and pulled the trigger.

In an old fashioned, lushly bedecked office a man sits behind an enormous dark wooden desk, inlaid with green leather, his face hidden in shadow. The ornate chandelier above him is unlit and there is no natural light as this office lies deep underground but a clever arrangement of devices means that fake spring light softly illuminates the room from behind a large, frosted bay window on the western wall. Art hangs on this and all of the other walls too, hunting scenes in the main housed in lavish gold frames over old fashioned bottle-green wallpaper that matches the darker thick-ply carpet. This is a room out of time.

The man at the desk is named Horst, although few would dare speak it to his face, or anywhere where they thought he might hear which, arguably, is everywhere. He sits like a neat spider at the centre of the web of what they refer to as Control: to all intents and purposes, he is Control.

He is whip lean, middle aged, with an uncompromising rigidity in his appearance: short, neat iron grey hair, closely cropped beard. He wears a plain, dark military tunic. Everything about him is a straight, efficient line.

He sits now peaceful and still in his immaculate, expansive office, one room in a colossal bunker buried beneath enough earth and concrete to survive an apocalypse that Horst thinks just might, if he plays his cards right, possibly be on the verge of happening. Below his feet are rooms and rooms of storage, barracks, living quarters, labs, technical hubs, weapons testing facilities and the housings of the hundreds of other requirements to keep his bunker fortress ticking over effectively. There are warehouse storerooms full of canned food, great storage tanks of fuel and even filtration works to provide clean air. In the event of their failure, there are also reserve oxygen tanks to keep at least some of the work force, as well as Horst himself, alive for quite some time.

Below all of these again lie the more sinister levels, expunged from the blueprints that all but the most trusted have ever seen. These are the floors that house the cells, a level of dark, hopeless square pits built to house unfortunate prisoners who should never again expect to see the light of day, at least not before they have talked and certainly not in the same way as they did before they went in. They have seen scant use so far, but Horst envisions a day, soon, when they will be pressed into greater service.

Although the cells in themselves, cramped, windowless and dark, are enough to break the spirit, there are other rooms down there too with purposes darker and more sinister still. These rooms have tiled walls for ease of wiping down and sluice drains in the floor to wash away the evidence of what has been carried out in them. They had already seen a certain amount of use.

Gradually the sound of booted feet ringing on concrete breaks into Horst’s attention, growing louder and louder until he knows that the looming shape of Rift, his most prized servant, is waiting just outside the heavy portal leading onto the office. There is an electronic buzz and Control presses a switch on the underside of the desk, causing the heavy metal door to swing silently open.

A hulking menace enters, all brawn and bulbous muscle. His hair is shaved close to his skull, his face heavily scarred but the cold light of cunning shines in his small eyes. Rift represents the highest point of success in Horst’s dabbling experiments with the shadow.

"Report," Horst commands in his quiet, even voice.

"All targets terminated, sir," barks the giant. "Bar one. The driver was not present when the unit entered the funeral parlour. Wychelo has reported successful elimination of the other witness, however. Orders?"

Horst sighs. By his own command, all actions relating to the substance, the shadow, no matter how trivial, have to filter through him, but sometimes it could be so obvious.

"Find the driver. Kill him."

With a crisp salute, Rift leaves the room, allowing the great outer door to slide shut in his wake. Alone once more, Horst opens a drawer and removes from it a small glass ball which he places on the desktop. Within its depths, the same shadowy substance curls like tempestuous cloud.

 Patience.

He hears the words whispered in his mind and the contents of the orb boil and flow.

 Wait
, it whispers.

 The Unlucky man is waking up.

***

I awoke from nothing into something. As consciousness, as life, flooded back into my body, I was aware on some level of compressing, of a rushing all encompassing everything being condensed and forced back into a frame too small to house its enormity, like a balloon filling too quick with air, ready to burst. And it hurt, a raw red, flaming pain that spread and roared through my whole being right to the tips of my extremities. I screamed, not yet aware of myself, of what or where I was or how I came to be there.

I felt as if I was growing from the inside out, unfolding, speeding through birth into life as blood, boiling hot and full of potential, spread and flowed through cold arteries. My heart pumped, my lungs inflated. With a rush my ears filled with forgotten sound - although the only noise at present was my own thrashing and howling as I convulsed and hammered against walls I could neither see not hear but that hemmed me tightly in on all sides - and my eyes opened and slowly swam into a new focus.

My void was dark. And cold.

Sucking in deep, steadying breaths, I stopped my manic spasming movement and lay still, awareness slowly seeping through me, panting and shivering as my body gradually came back under remembered control.

I shifted to the right on cold metal and came up against resistance in the shape of more cold metal. The same thing to the left and I could sense the weight of confinement pressing down bare inches from my face. So, I was in a roughly human shaped metal box. And it was very cold. I felt my breath mist and crystallize against the cold steel. The darkness was total.

Having asserted control long enough to deduce all of this rationally, my mind took a backseat for a few moment as my body took back over, thrashing senselessly against the walls of its prison, an animal panic guiding limbs that smashed and beat in all directions.

A new scream started to build in my throat and I gave it full vent. Born of anger this time, not fear, it emerged as a grating, half mad roar, bouncing and whooping around my cage. Just as the crescendo reached breaking point and the dim idea that this wasn’t really working started a slow ferment in my thawing brain, there came the scrape of metal on metal and I was flooded with light.

For a second or two my eyes stopped working altogether as utter pitch darkness became blinding white clinical light, cutting into my newborn senses and sending my retinas into momentary shutdown, or overload, or something. When I adjusted, the gurney bed had been pulled out of the hole in the wall and two very pale and scared looking guys in scrubs and white coats were staring at me in bewildered panic.

One of them found his voice. He was skinny and pale as milk, fringe plastered with sweat to his forehead. He wore thick round glasses behind which swam red rimmed eyes big as saucers. His voice shook when he spoke, fear making him a high falsetto.

"Um," he managed, then stopped and cleared his throat, bringing his tenor down a few octaves.

"Dude," he said uncertainly, "You’re dead."

"No", I replied in a voice as rusty as old nails. "I’m not." It gave me pause for thought. "Not anymore."

The cold was prickling at my skin, should have been giving me goose bumps, I was naked after all, my sparse covering of plastic sheet having been lost somewhere in the transition from gurney to standing. There was a tag attached to my right toe. It said Hesker, Jonathan G on it. It’s Jon, I thought, detachedly.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I was screaming in panic, or I should have been, the voice of logic trying to set alarm bells ringing. But it was a small voice, the little one that whispers in the dark of the mind. It was easy to switch off. Not just to shut out either, but switch off completely.

"What was it like?" the second doctor whispered eagerly. This one was older and didn’t look at all scared now. Rather, I fancied I could see the germination of an idea twinkling in his eye.

Pause. "I don’t know." It was true, there had been something, I felt sure, but it was slipping away like a floating dream, like mist lost in the morning sunshine. Then it was gone altogether.

"I need to get out of here," I rasped, to myself as much as to them. The blank in my mind was cracking open as a rising tide of shattered memories came flooding in. Station. Gunshots. Crows.

"I need to go…"

"You can’t go," the older doctor interjected sharply. He was ashen faced and bearded, definitely in charge. There was a note to his tone that said that when he spoke he was used to having people listen.

The twinkle had taken root in his eye now and I could almost hear the whirring of his brain as he stared at me, hungrily assessing the potential of the situation - medical journals, articles, who knew? I’d been shot twice, once through the heart and at close range yet here I stood. I was dead when they put me in that drawer which, I guess, made me a medical miracle. Any shock he might have felt had evaporated as his mental compass swung due money.

Looking past him, a big heavy door on the far side of the room, just beyond another steel table hooked up to a compacted arrangement that ended in what looked like a shower head, beckoned invitingly.

"I’ve called security," the older doctor said, clearly anticipating my intentions. On cue, my exit swung open to admit into the room a burly, red faced security officer in a too-small blue-grey shirt tucked into matching trousers. A baton hung casually from one meaty paw, bouncing against the stripe on the pant-leg of his uniform and the expression on his face made it quite clear that he was itching to use it.

"You’ve been through immense trauma," the doctor said, soothing as oil. "We need to run some tests, make sure you’re alright now."

I looked down at the clean wound on my chest: a small round circle in the flesh, smooth, not bleeding, not doing anything. With exaggerated care I touched a finger to the wound. Nothing. No pain, no involuntary flinch, nothing but cauterized cold skin.

"I feel fine," I said, edging a cold finality onto the statement.

"I’m leaving."

I took one step towards the exit again and the tip of the baton came to rest threateningly against my exposed chest, it’s tip almost exactly matching the smooth mark of the bullet’s entry. Memory flooded back in an unstoppable torrent, filling in all the blank spaces in my mind until I was whole again, all apart from one small spot that couldn’t be filled. It was into this vacuum, the legacy of whatever other had been between the bullet and the meat draw, into which I looked now and found cold, dark nothing.

I slapped away the baton with the flat of my palm and slammed my fist into the guard’s ample gut. He doubled over around my hand and tried to stumble backwards but I had a steel grip around his throat, lifting him until his feet were forced onto tip toes to stay in contact with the floor.

I don’t know how it happened, I’ve never been much of a fighter, never really had the need but in that moment my mind was blank, my body totally in control. That little voice, the doubter and second guesser, that had whispered to me in the crowded dark of my apartment was gone, sucked into the insatiate void taken root at the centre of my self.

I receded from it, and it was like the lights came back on. If I let it, I thought, it would swallow the rest of me. I could feel its hunger, on some tangential level. If I let it, it would swallow the world.

I let go of the guard and he crumpled with a whimper. The older doctor backed up so sharply under my stare that he bounced off a metal gurney, sending its contents of strangely archaic shiny instruments clattering across the floor.

"I’m leaving now."

"Wait." It was the younger one who, having seemingly enjoyed the show, had found his normal voice at last, which sounded more like it belonged to a surfer than this skinny intern.

"Dude," he said, "You’re going to need some clothes. Can’t go traipsing in your birthday suit, you know?" I looked down at myself in all my glory. He was probably right.

"Wait here," he said. Avoiding the narrowed eyes of his superior, he ducked out of the door, returning a moment later with a hemp holdall decorated with a variety of pins from which he produced another rumpled pair of green scrubs, the twin of those he wore.

"They might be a bit ripe but, you know, beggars and choosers right?"

They were but I was grateful all the same as I pulled them on. Halfway out the door I paused and tapped my wounded chest, addressing myself to the intern rather than his superior. "This going to leave a scar?"

He grinned. "Fucked if I know man," he said, "But, hey, chicks dig scars right?"

I bolted out the door.

The early afternoon air was wet and fresh and cut through the stale feeling in my lungs beautifully as I sucked down great breaths of it. I’d been putting off thinking about what I was going to do next but now it seemed it was time to face up to the question.

Up ahead, in a small and poorly tended park, an old man wrapped in faded tweed was feeding seed to the pigeons. I watched for a while as they flocked and swooped beneath the muted brilliance of burnt autumn leaves. But something in the movements disquieted me, something in the flap of wings and the flurry of feathers bringing back to mind the crows that I had, what, seen? Maybe felt would be more accurate. Or hallucinated?