TERMINAL, page 2
The van came to a stop at the side of an alien lane and David killed the engine. He leaned forward in his seat, his tight sweaty chest brushing the back of his white knuckles where they gripped the wheel, and scoured the bruised night for something to see. There must be something out there he could recognise. Some landmark or signpost. Some trail of light to follow, but there was nothing. Nothing but the road in the dark. His breath fell shallow and his skin prickled. He had to get himself together. “Come on David. You're a fucking man. A big fucking man, with a big cock and bigger knives. Don’t let this shit hole get the better of you.” His empty sentiment came back at him from the curve of the glass windscreen and above him galaxies spun in a vacuum. He took one deep breath. The cab smelled of man. Of cedar and saltpetre. He blew it out of him and his used air left a smudge on the windscreen. The key turned again in a square fist and the lights copied the engine as it rattled back to life. He would take his cues from the moon, he decided, go north, follow this snaking lane through these black woods and back waters and eventually he'd get to the suburbs, then it was just a little way further to his house and his lockup on the lake, where the houses were a little lonelier, the trees a little thicker, and the sound didn't carry so well.
3/4
The moon led David to a railway track. He took a right and followed it with no little relief. The trains round here all went through the big station, just two miles from his home. He knew if he followed it eventually he'd be back on track, or close enough. He shifted about on the vinyl seat and it creaked and complained under the clammy bristle of his hard backside. Yes, this was better. For whatever reason he had lost his way, but he’d be ok now. He'd be ok. He pressed the pedal. Moths terminated against the windscreen, a pop of blood, a broken wing, an extinguished light. David thought about Patrick, a man too soon. He remembered how he’d scruff his hair when David was knee high to him, looking up to his seventeen years. He saw his white boxer shorts blowing on the line bigger than his own, making a promise to him somehow. A promise he didn't keep.
Eventually David grew tired of the radio screaming so he spun the plastic dial till the sound faded out then opened the window a crack so he could let it all out of him. The night was cold. It bit at his ears, and he liked it. And with the cool sting came the sweet hush of water breaking, the unmistakable snare of sea meeting sand. At first it didn't register as unusual, he just enjoyed the nostalgia that it swept ashore. Him and his brother at the beach, just old enough to take the train themselves, topless and carefree in the low summer sun, and later, under the pier, in the shadows, secrets. And sure enough, just over the other side of the tracks was that dark and endless sea, rolling in and out of itself. No, that can't be the sea. It can't be, I'm many miles inland. That's impossible. Yet there it was, all black and ambivalent, foaming and breaking against the grey sand despite him. He stopped the van and looked out through glass sprayed with rain sent ahead by the purple storm in the middle distance. Boats littered the shore like discarded toys, some broken, some raised for painting, while all around warning lights flashed weakly on beached buoys. There were people, he saw. Three of them. Two adults and a child. They held hands as they walked up a ramp and onto a pier that jutted out like a broken jaw over the black sea, a sea that roiled and rolled madly beneath them, beating the pebble shore. Through the rain they people seemed to him to shimmer in and out of existence. The taller of the two adults stood looking out to sea. At what? There was nothing to see out there. Nothing to see but the seething sea. Not even the stars broke through. It reminded him of a song his grandfather had sung, his grandfather on his mother's side.
Your father went to sea, sea, sea.
To see what he could see, see, see.
But all that he could see, see, see.
Was the bottom of the deep, dark sea, sea, sea.
The taller adult bent down and spoke words stolen by the wind, his face strict but solemn. The child regarded his feet and nodded. Did David see hope in those eyes? No. There was no hope to see here. For a moment they all stood in silence, searching the sky for a horizon, then the two big people each took a tiny hand in their own and swung the child back, then out in a single, damning arc, letting go at the top of it, sending his fragile form spinning out into that impossible sea, eternal and turbulent, smashing him into its liquid glass, his tiny bones breaking, his meagre body swallowed by the riptide. The adults wasted no time, said no goodbyes, they just walked away briskly, the way a couple might approach a waiting car in the rain, then down the ramp and into the shadow of the rusted hull of a listing ferry. A shadow from which they didn’t emerge.
The lightning lit the night, bruised in fire and light, all awesome and terrible like a fight in the sky. And with each crack an image flashed through David’s windscreen. The back of a hand across a purple face. A swollen eye. A burst lip. And then it pealed, the skin came back and David saw inside them, inside the people who terminated in his basement. He felt and heard the eternal stinging echo that rang through them as they bled out, slipping under death's beautiful anaesthesia. It didn't matter. They didn't matter. It wasn't about them for fuck’s sake. It was about him. Fuck them. Fuck their feelings and their lives, no doubt wasted on bad TV and take-aways. He slapped his face. This was no time for sentimentality. He was an animal for fuck’s sake. A big fucking buck with incisors and a hard on. Fuck them. Fuck the world and this rain. Fuck the dead mothers and the potential fathers and the unborn children they’d never meet.
Under the hood of the van cogs whirred and gears clicked. The refined remains of long dead organisms burned hot and bright in controlled explosions, their precious energy propelling him further and further into an uncertain future. David didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything other than getting those two back there into the basement of his lockup before the drugs wore off, then refilling his imagination with their hard bodies, muffled screams and gleaming wetness. Once it was done he could be himself again. He’d dissolve the mess of flesh in the acid bath then burn the bones in the incinerator and enjoy the numbness that saturated him, for a while. That was all he wanted. All he craved. All he had ever needed for sustenance. Bodies. Open. Screaming. Dying. The thought steeled his stare and curled his lip and raised his blood, and all the weirdness of the world fell away.
Distracted by his racing mind and aching balls David almost didn’t notice the mist that crept out of the night and coalesced around him. At first it was no more than a wisp. No more than the steam from his hot engine and his burning urges. Soon though it rolled in thicker and denser, like phantom fingers feeling the dark for him, and when they found him they gripped him, and he had no choice but to slow down in its cloying gloom.
He chugged along. To his left a building materialised from the murk. A long, low shed, all battened and patched. Then another on his right. Then another beyond that. Long, low lean-tos, half submerged in the mist, grey and featureless but menacing at the same time. What were they? He had a memory of this place, he was sure of it. Hadn't his father taken him to places like this? His mind wandered as the van navigated its way slowly through the cotton grey. A sound cut through the cloud that clogged the air.
"SQUEEEEEEE...."
Yes! He knew that sound! It was the sound of a stuck pig. These must be abattoirs. Killing sheds. They were the same as the ones his father had taken him to as a child, packing meat into his own van, before taking that dead flesh somewhere. Everywhere. David remembered waiting in the old man’s van, waiting for him to do whatever he did in the cabins round the back. He remembered going to look for his Dad after waiting too long for him to return, picking through the shadows over plank and iron to the place where he could see through the cracks and onto the killing floor. Pigs, lined up on pointed trotters, bristling and fearful. To this day he could still remember the smell of their frightened piss. It was different to normal piss. Better. And he could remember their eyes catching his own through the gap in the wall, wide then pleading then dead in their heads. Ah yes, how could he forget? He saw God through those eyes. He had been there in their fear and in their final squeal. Stood there at the exit of their lives David had glimpsed inside eternity.
The squeals grew louder. How many were they, these pigs? Maybe a thousand per shed in sheds this size. And how many sheds? He'd passed a hundred if he'd passed one. So many swine, swine now squealing in the mist, riling up at the sound of his engine, whining and scratching and butting the sheds. They creaked, the sheds, he could hear them creak, so he pressed down on the pedal, knowing the damage that many angry pigs could do to his trusty vehicle and his precious cargo. Faster. The van careered through the city of sheds, sharp left, sharp right, tipping and jostling to be free, taking each turn only as the mist allowed it, not sure where the next might be, or when the end might turn up dead. Faster still. Wood splintered and fractured behind him as trotters pounded the ground, pounding in their thousands, getting ever louder, ever closer as the swine surged forward. They were everywhere, all around him, squealing their accusations. He stamped and stamped his leather boots, pedal to the metal, tyres spinning filth into the air, crashing through fence and gate as he hurtled toward the only thing he could see, a single, solitary light, swinging lonely in the distant fug. He crashed through one more fence and then the pigs fell back. They had chased him far enough it seemed, and now they merged into the murk, leaving him freewheeling alone toward the only light he could find.
The light grew and the fog thinned and the van idled to a stop, exhaust pipe coughing into the pallid mist. He wiped the steam from the window and it showed him a bare bulb hanging a few feet ahead oh him, swinging gently from a wire that ran above a courtyard. He was parked on a flaking orange grate that spanned the square, ginger troughs running this way and that. The grates gave off a heavy metal scent that seeped in through the air vents and made his eyes sting and his mouth water. It was quiet, startlingly so given the racket that had chased him here. Quiet except for one noise.
Knock.
Knock.
Knock.
The fog dulled the echo, but he saw where it came from. There was a man, naked but for a leather apron, his features vague in the gloom. He was knocking nails into a structure of wood. Big, square nails. The old kind. David watched. Had the man seen him? He seemed oblivious, or perhaps he just didn't care. David couldn't see the leathered man's face, and he didn't want to. The man climbed up, nailing two-by-four to two-by-four as his creation grew into the mist, swaying sightly with its lack of planning or symmetry. Up and up he went, knocking and climbing, as if he was building his way into heaven, or out of hell. Eventually the man reached his peak and the hammering stopped. He took out a big hook and, with several bent nails, nailed it to the cross bar. Then, with big, tired arms and a heavy heave, he climbed up and sat on his lonely perch. His feet swung idly like a child’s and he looked down at them, sadness running off his chin, raining down into the rusted dirt. David noticed that the feet he stared at were shackled together. Had he been a slave, this weary man? Had he slipped his cuffs to slink away from his chain gang? Walked many solitary miles to find this freedom? Or was he made to build this leaning structure by some unseen warden, somewhere out there, somewhere in the mist? No, David decided, this man was no slave. He was acting as he wanted, no gun to his head, no whip at his back, just all that deliberate knocking and building and climbing. David felt he should call out to the man, ask him what the hell he thought he was doing here? Shouldn't he be tending to those damn pigs back there? Those nails and that hammer would be better suited to repairing those rickety fucking sheds that were not fit for purpose. Did he know anything about gutting a pig? A pig'll fight back, given half a chance, and they can be strong. Damn strong. You've gotta pen them fuckers in tight. David wound down the window to shout out to the man on the edge of his shaky structure, but before David could scold him for his ineptitude the man settled his ankle chains into the rusty hook that hung at his feet and threw himself off the cross bar. He swung upside down in a great arc, loose limbed and languid. The leather apron flapped down over his torso, exposing the naked body beneath, his grey genitalia hanging over his abdomen, lacerated and pathetic in the anaemic light. David shouted, "Are you fucking mad, man? What the hell are you doing?” but before he could pretend to take the action his words implied he might the swinging man pulled a long, dirty knife from the belt around his waist and thrust it into himself two-fisted, then jerked it down, carving a valley through his body from navel to throat. “What kind of abattoir was this?” David thought, “Where the swine ran free and the butchers butchered themselves?” David’s eyes hadn’t left the crucified man for too long but now even he had to look away, and as he did he saw that the pigs hadn’t gone anywhere, they were congregated in the mist, huffing their prayers at this alter of disembowelment. Their rapture rose up, a steaming chorus of trotter and squeal, whining and screeching like ailing infants until they were stampeding once more, hurtling toward him, a rabble of pink and brown.
He had to get out.
NOW.
Eyes wide, brow wet, David stamped down and the engine screeched out of gear. He fought the stick into first and drove forwards, kicking up dirt, no idea how to get out of this schizophrenic place but determined to leave if it took everything he had. He revved past the man on the hook, who convulsed as pipes of his shit and bags of his gasses fell out of him, down over his face, collecting in the steaming trough beneath his makeshift gallows. David ploughed away from him through drifts of angry pig, their hog bodies smashing against the white of the van, testing his metal, popping and bursting and tainting its whiteness with their pork blood and their stinking manure. If he had to drive through acres of pig and shit to get out of here he would, he knew. He would not die here in this twilight zone. He would not die here.
He would not die here.
THE MACHETE MAN
The Machete Man. That was the name the news had given him, for reasons obvious enough. In the boring peace of the eighties the public needed a new monster and he had been only too happy to oblige.
THE MACHETE MAN STRIKES AGAIN
Police report that four more bodies have been found in the Preston area with wounds matching those by other victims of the notorious serial murderer the press have labelled “The Machete Man”. The victims names have not yet been released, and the killer remains at large. Police are warning the public to remain vigilant.”
“MAN SURVIVES MACHETE KILLER ATTACK
A man named by police as Graham Wright is believed to be the first survivor of the crazed killer known as The Machete Man. Mr. Wright, aged 33, was found naked at the side of the A483 near Chester at 2.15 am on the morning of the Sunday 16th January, badly wounded. Our sources claim that Mr. Wright’s feet and eyelids had been severed and that he appeared to have been drugged. Mr. Wright managed to identify his attacker as The Machete Man before being taken to hospital where he remains. Mr. Wright is said to be assisting the Police in their ongoing investigation. The Machete Man remains at large.”
Oh how he loved those headlines. The notoriety was intoxicating. It made him feel God-like. Invincible. The sudden infamy adding fuel to a fire that needed none. There were many, many more victims in those slap dash years, but there were more survivors too. Those that escaped pieced him together to the police, a crowd-sourced composite of torn up paper and skin that became hundreds of his own sunken eyes staring at him from the newsstands. “The Machete Man”. It was a good name. He liked it. Honestly it was all he could do not to get t-shirts made up. Take a look at him then, so cocky, so young, and so sloppy with that big brutal blade of his. Too excited to tie them down or to chain them up or bolt the doors. Too eager to give in to his urges, an opportunist, there in the shadow of his old school on those streets he knew so well, and oh how he loved the struggle. Their wide white eyes and bulging blue veins. It was so primal. So animalistic. He loved the fight, the challenge, and back then he was strong enough to take the risk, but they had gotten away too often, with tales on the tongues he didn’t cut out. Later, as he scrubbed their matter from beneath his nails he’d laugh to himself picturing the pathetic way they hobbled away on stumps as he lay spent on the floor, glistening trails of their own vitality leading back to him, back to the places they lost something of themselves. Alleys where they lost their feet. Warehouses where they lost their souls. They must have thought they’d won by getting away from him. Some victory! A lifetime of PTSD and reconstructive surgeries. Ha! That’s no achievement, he knew. A survivor’s life is no life at all. It had amused him then, and it still did. If he was a younger man, a stronger man, he’d still be swinging those blades with reckless abandon, but life had got in the way. It was disruptive to have to move towns so often, and Lisa asked too many questions at the best of times. And of course a new town meant a new set of rules. A new mask. A new weapon of choice. In the nineties he had been Johnny Five Knives. He made that one up himself. He was sharper by then. Keener. A wolf. Johnny Five Knives tied them all up and split them and slit them with an array of beautiful knives, rolled out in a human leather attaché that he carried with him to this final day. Scalpel, surgical saw, razor blade, utility knife, and, his favourite, the rusty cleaver. He clutched the knives that slit with fists that hit, slicing and bursting, slicing and bursting, till the meat hung loose on the racks and he couldn't tell bowel from brain. No one escaped Johnny Five Knives, no one, but someone did see. He watched the whole damn show. David had known the boy was there from the first incision, crouched in the shadows, a delivery man perhaps? Of course David had seen him squatting there, nineteen if he was a day, trembling, rigid and awestruck. He saw the light catch the boy’s wide wet eyes as he pulled on his mask, a rough-cut sack with two big holes to see you through, and a big red smile to eat you with. Yes, he had seen the boy, so he took his damn time. He hacked and slashed and took off his clothes but for the mask and pressed his flesh and bones into holes both old and new, his audience of one only adding to the theatre of it all. He added acts, chapters and verses, and by the crescendo the boy was shaking so much David could hear his teeth rattle loose in his skull. With the body on the rack and the length between his legs gone limp, David, bare except for the mask and the blood, unchained the door, turned to the cheap seats, metal glinting silver and red, and said,
