TERMINAL, page 4
“Mr. Jones will see you now", came the response. Cameras above him whirred into position, pointing at his head and blinking red. The gate buzzed once, then clicked. He pushed through it, letting it seal behind him, waiting to hear the magnets re-engage before going any further exactly as the note he had burnt had told him to. Concrete steps ran straight down from a tin shed office adorned with only two stand chairs, a plastic lily, and a stack of papers on a folding table. David left the parcel of unmarked bank notes and the Coke on the table, signed a fake name with a shake of his gloved hand, then started his descent. He followed orange arrows sprayed on white walls and above him the cameras swivelled like inquisitive owls. He couldn't help but jog a little down the well-lit corridors through rubber strips and swinging doors, leaving only his sweaty scent in the air and a digital ghost of himself on some distant monitor. He could hear the pleading already. They said something that sounded like, “Laska budʹ laska. Vidpustit, budʹ laska”
He arrived in a concrete cavern. Lights hung above like flowers growing underground. Cages lined up forever. People inside. Some well fed, some not so much. Some weak. Some strong. Every shape and size. A veritable buffet of bodies. How did they find these places? David marvelled. Every time a new one, every one deep underground. Hidden. Perfect. Had it been some kind of military bunker? What did it matter? He just wished he could stay down here forever with an endless supply of these writhing things. But who could afford it? He could only work so many extra hours and re-mortgage the house so many times. No, this way it was special, and, at his age, better than hiding in shadows.
"I hope they are to your satisfaction 7206", said a disembodied voice over the speaker system. Yes, they were good. So good his blood boiled. He nodded.
"I want to touch them. I want to touch them before I decide". He bit his lower lip to keep it from trembling.
"Yes, we understand that from our previous communication 7206, and we understand you want two this time?
“Yes. Two.”
“As you please. Narrow your selection down to five and indicate your choices using the cards provided. Once you’ve made your choices we will release those cages and let you inspect them more thoroughly.” David looked down at an ornate little table. It had been carved from walnut and had a leather top. Five red cards fanned out on its tan surface, numbered from one to five. "The Products are chained but are neither sedated nor gagged, as requested. Please exercise caution when handling them, 7206. They are prone to biting". David looked down at his hands. Yes, they could bite all right. He prowled the aisles, thrumming the five red cards between his granite fingers. The sound echoed through the concrete hanger under the place where England became the deep blue sea, and in that subterranean place he made his dreadful decisions with a smile stretched across his face, and a bulge in his greasy work-wear.
Before him a cage, one of many, but now one of five with open grates. The inhabitant was chained into a star shape, limbs stretched so wide the skin went white and all the body's secret places were open for inspection. A sign above read £5000. He could see why. It was a beautiful specimen. David's head hung low and he breathed in the deep, slow, rhythmic way that a lion might in the tall dead grass of the savannah. The air smelled of places like this, of metal and bleach. His square shoulders rose and fell with each lusting breath and a wire ran behind his dilated eyes. David stepped through a square hole in the metal grid, and approached his prey for the first time. May I have this dance? he said, and laughed. Chains rattled as the person in the cage whimpered in a strange language, the body trembling as the words ran through it, as if those ancient prayers could change anything now. David's mood hardened and his hand tightened, thick ligaments pulling his battered fingers until his fist was a rock on the end of his meaty arm. It shook in elastic tension. Anger and lust spiralled into each other, combining vapour and static to create an electric instance that became the crack and the bolt at the centre of an ancient storm. Violence was born here, right here in this moment, and in this clashing of elements there was a spark of creation, because David knew nature's dark secret. He knew that it needed men like him. Men willing to do the things he did. Men with holes where their hearts should be. Men with rage where their love should be. With a fist where a kiss should be. Without him, without this tension in his arms and the destruction they wrought there would be no empty spaces to fill. No rot from which to grow new fungus. No clay with which to sculpt new forms. Tear them down, build them up. He was a force of nature, Goddamn it! He swung his arm out, wide and fast. His fist kissed the jaw of the jerking, rattling body in a mist of blood and spit. He felt the skin split and the bone crack and the sound of it rang out through the chamber, setting off a harmony of high-pitched prayers in many languages, an orchestra of ultra violins. He smiled at the music of it. Fear. Beautiful, honest, fear. The most infectious condition known to man, or woman, or child. And that's why he was taking two this time. So one could watch, and both could beg.
David heard the speaker system crackle.
"Please 7206, try and restrain yourself when handling the Products. We understand your.... enthusiasm, but we can't sell bruised fruit."
He grunted to himself. He got it. They had to be perfect, or what was the point?
"I want to know if they're screamers", he said, looking down at his feet like a scolded child.
"I like the screamers"
1/4
The van wove through the broken white line on the black road like a drunken mother stitching. The two in the back, conscious and scared and somehow ungagged, told their tales to the night while David tapped a cigarette from the pack. He flicked it up from the bottom, the way his father did. David wasn't a smoker, not since he was fourteen years old, except for on days like today. Nights like tonight. Nights that had to fade into a nicotine dream. His dad had smoked forty a day, head shrouded in a permanent mist. As a kid David would have to squint to see his own father’s features through the silver smoke that clung to him, like a cloud concealing a mountaintop. He remembered the night the smoke cleared. David stood in the middle of his twenties, his father leaning over the kitchen sink, the only true words ever to have left his mouth still filthy in the air. Words that David couldn't hear. Three words that David wouldn't hear. And then he remembered his knife entering the place where his father's neck became his father's head, piercing his brain, coming out of that same mouth the truth had just fallen from, beautiful thick plasma following those words down into the Sunday suds, making rosé in the sink… So now when he killed, he smoked. A tribute, you might say. Say whatever the fuck you want.
The cockpit of the van filled with smoke and the dirty tar in his veins weighed him down, sick and heavy. He kept the window up and hid in the obscurity. The question of where the van was taking him receded in his mind. He didn't care. He knew it was going down. Down, down baby, down, down. And for all their mumbling protest he was taking the two of them in the back with him, no matter how many Polish prayers they spat.
Rain fell out of the absent sky, thick and viscous, while the cloud he exhaled into the cab made the world outside the windscreen seem like an abstraction. It played games with his eyes. Tarmac and line paint refracted through rain, glass and smoke, and shapes seemed to form through this fractured kaleidoscope. At first they were vague, the way shapes are in clouds when you lie back with your big brother on a playing field, the rough mown grass scratching at your sun-smart skin, but he harder you looked the more you'd swear you saw a spaceship, or a tiger, or your mother’s silhouette, and you'd feel all the awe and the fear and the sadness. And then you’d watch as they dissipated, bled into each other, changed to the next thing, and the next thing, and the thing after that, dying and dying and dying, and the feelings would die too as the clouds came apart, for you, but not for him. He would take them home with him. Take them to bed with him. And you'd crawl in there in the night when you heard his agony through the thin walls, heard him gasping into his fists, curled up, foetal, and you can't be his parent in her absence and you can't wake him up when he takes those pills, and you can't stand to read the words on that note, not beyond that he wants you to bury him behind the house, under the tree he planted for her, and to never breathe a word of it to Dad or anyone. He'd packed a bag. He asked you to burn it. Make the things in it go away. Make it look like he ran away into the night, the way a man might run to a woman, and he did, he ran away that brother, but to nowhere on earth.
David drew on the hot, short butt of the cigarette and it scalded his lips. He winced once and wound down the window. In the dim light he caught his face in the broken mirror. For a second he saw them reflected back at him, his brother, his mother, his father’s empty eyes, a rain slick portrait of too much loss and lust, then the wind blew them all away and he flicked the little burning bullet out into the night. It arced away from him, a firefly, but instead of disappearing in the night like it ought to, like he expected it to, it exploded in a shower of sparks, illuminating what seemed to be a wall of some kind, set back a little way from the road, and sliding silently by. But it was like no wall David had ever seen before. He caught only a glimpse but it seemed to him to be ridged pale pink and wet with juices. The thick hairs shaved short on his neck stood to attention like an army of men marching down his back. In the sputter of that dirty little firework did he see it react? Did he see it contract? Pucker and retreat like branded flesh? What did he see? What did it mean? He leaned over the wheel and frowned at the road in front of him to see what he could see. What was that out there? In the darkness it could be nothing good. Nothing good existed in the dark, he knew that, and it occurred to him that perhaps the blackness out there wasn't a limitless void after all. Perhaps it was a tunnel of flesh. Perhaps it was an ingurgitating throat, he thought. Perhaps. David looked at the road with suspicious eyes and where his two lights fell the surface of the road started to look less like pitted tarmac, and more like the back of a giant black tongue.
LISA
He met Lisa by accident, at night, in a bar. She was hiding there in the blue shadows, where women like her stalked their men. She appeared to him through the dry ice, light both red and blue catching her shallow curves while the fog did its best to soften her features. She showed no caution as she approached him because she didn’t know what we do about him and his lust and his fury. To Lisa David was just one more opportunity, and the beat of the music just a ticking clock. She danced.
"Oh Darlin’, them’s worker’s hands,” she said, running a finger over his scars, dipping and slithering up and down him, hitching up her denim mini skirt till he could read her pink lips. "I like that. Reminds me of my Daddy..." Her practiced voice trailed off becoming 2am vapour. She wiped the remnants of her last line from her crusted nose with the back of a shaking hand. David didn’t care for drugs, but Lisa loved those white lines, those lonely little lines that left ghosts of themselves on her glass table and a space behind her eyes. Cut. Suck. Out all day. Up all night. Hers was a life lived in negative. David didn’t care. He didn’t care what she did to that threadbare body of hers as long as she didn’t look too hard at his.
Synth music blurred the air through broken speakers. Bars, smoke and Fleetwood sleaze breathed out of her, making promises he didn't want her to keep. But she was persistent. Even in those first few moments she was a ball breaker. She liked his hands, and she liked his hard thighs, and a man in a checked shirt. She liked anything she could touch, then she liked him in the bathroom stall and when he finished in her dry mouth and her long dark hair the fire went out of him, and somehow she got his number, written in red on the back of her right hand.
After that she called and called, the phone clattering in its plastic cradle. She needed help moving, then so did her sister, who needed more help than that even. Then she needed someone to pick her up after her knee operation and water her plants while she was out for the count, and before he knew it he was staying there at weekends, and it’s not like he got nothing out of it. The sex was fine. Like having a wank in company. And her place was nice. Nicer than his. He liked the sound of the breaking sea and the lights that shone in from the building across, cracked pink flamingos, and of course an alibi was always useful. Gradually he let her build a life for him and so this was how Lisa fell in love with a bad man. A "Bad Man”. One of the worst. Every day she lived from there on out was a gift he gave her. People would remember his masked versions as merciless, but they would never credit his real face for the daily mercy he showed that dehydrated signet, and sometimes that injustice would wind so tight in him that he would slink into the shadow behind her, his butcher’s knife glinting in the Saturday sun as she talked her shit into the kitchen sink… But somehow over time those words that spewed out of her filled up the space between them and became a cushion that surrounded and protected her, a barrier through which his knives couldn't penetrate. Once her knew her too well to like her, he knew her too well to destroy her, but still, when he sharpened his knives, he sharpened them for her.
But then she got pregnant.
THE SNAKE
David wound the window up tight and quick. The smoke that had kept whatever was out there in the dark hidden had escaped and he found himself alone with clarity, his elusive muse. She arrived in his mind like a shock of salts, bright and sharp. The siren held out gleaming porcelain hands to him and in them, on her silken palms, were a pair of new eyes. So white. So blue. She offered them to him. “Thank you,” he said, “I got so lost. I took so many wrong turns, but these will help me. These will help”. “Thank you,” he said again, but she was already gone. He fisted the pearls she had given him into his tired sockets, rubbing them into place, then opening them for the first time. At once he saw anew. He had been blind, but now he could see, he could see the road for what it was, finally. It was a slick black tongue writhing down a hungry throat. A throat that was gagging on him, choking him down a pipe of flesh. A tunnel that terminated nowhere good. His breath caught in his own narrowed pipes and the engine in his chest faltered and skipped as he realised what had what was happening. He was headed into the belly of a beast. His own beast. A beast that had lived inside him all those years, gestating, growing. Making him hard. Making him weak. A beast whose hunger he had finally had enough of, one that he had regurgitated after hitting that girl. A beast that had exited him by the throat and slithered down the door of the van and away into the obsidian night, growing into something huge, something massive, something vengeful and hungry. Something that had stalked him silently since then and tricked him into driving into it’s gaping maw. David needed nothing more. He didn’t need to see any more of what he knew waited for him out there slinking through the dark. He had to take his life back. He had to get away from this nightmare creature, back to the safety of the bed he shared with his wife, behind a door he’d locked and bolted. With forgotten vigour, his booted feet, and his battered knuckles he smashed at pedal and stick and wrestled the wheel out of fate's hands. The vehicle jumped and bucked and he heard the two in the back hit the metal sides and cry out as he threw the van into reverse and sped backwards, back up that tongue, back up the throat that was swallowing him, and toward the imagined light at the end of this Godless tunnel.
The engine squealed like a stuck pig as it retraced the line he had drawn through space and time. The last light to find him was from the red lights he ran after tearing that girl in two and his moment with Clarity had told him what he ought to have realised for himself. Those weren't traffic lights at all. Those were eyes. The eyes of a monster that he had lived with since he was a little boy, maybe longer than that even. A monster he had kept inside of himself all this time, keeping it at bay with his bloody rituals and their tears and screams. A monster he had finally rejected, casting it out to live alone in the lonely night. But it had tricked him. It had grown and it had tricked him in the blinding blackness and he had been driven distracted into its gaping maw. If he hadn't got wise when he did he'd be soaking in its gastric juices by now, fizzing and corroding and coming apart. Outside the rewinding van he could hear the great snake hiss, its thick spit raining down, tapping on the top of his rattling metal box. He put on the wipers to clear the shattered screen but a terrible belch buffered the van, coming up at him from the pit he was escaping, all acid and steam. Then something clawed at him, a hard green arm, split fingers like dried veins swiping at the furious wipers, tearing them off as the road or tongue or whatever it was buckled beneath him, sending the van up and over it's erratic terrain, smashing into an oesophageal wall, sending sparks this way and that as metal bent and mirrors shattered and broke. Unable to see behind him or in front of him without his mirrors or his wipers or his sense he held the wheel square, said a prayer that wasn't heard and kept the pedal to the metal. The backward speed made his head spin and his stomach turn but then there they were again, those watering red eyes, full of malice and hatred, burning through the streaked and star struck windscreen, rippled, winking and evil but getting smaller and smaller as he pulled away. He was out. He was out. Thank God he was out, but his arms and legs stayed rigid and took him speeding away faster and faster from those diminishing red eyes, until he hit a tree with the van, the wheel with his head, and the world went blacker than black.
