The dark confides, p.6
The Dark Confides, page 6
‘It’s on,’ Aileen said.
He pointed the remote at the TV and brought up the time. Nearly ten. ‘When?’
‘Now.’
He just sat there, thoughts warring, struggling to pull everything together.
‘You there?’ She was chewing something, grinding it between expensive teeth, probably ice, but he was seeing bird bones.
‘I’m here. Where about?’
‘Hold on.’ The fizz of a bottle being unscrewed, poured. ‘He didn’t say. Just said he’d text you.’
‘Okay. Wait, how’s he got my number?’
‘Guess. We’ll speak soon.’
But she didn’t hang up and neither did he. They stayed on the line, the silence between them strange, almost accusatory. He listened. He could hear music, a male voice he didn’t recognise, faint, maybe on a TV, maybe not. She finally hung up.
He got dressed and put on his coat and on another phone texted Margot what Aileen had said to him. It’s on. He made a black coffee and paced about in the dark. The TV flashing madly across the room set his shadow ducking and weaving. On the TV a science documentary about the lifecycles of parasitic flukes, some of which need only one host to complete a lifecycle, where some need two to four hosts to complete their life cycle.
Margot texted back: Stay in touch. Be safe.
An hour passed. He took off his coat and made more coffee. He tried to shake off the decayed adrenaline and fear with exercise. He warmed up, shaking his limbs loose and rolling his shoulders, his head, and then stood there shadowboxing on the geometric rug. He didn’t stop until his heart was bucking, his limbs were burning and he was fighting for breath. He took a couple of painkillers and a beta-blocker with coconut water, arm shaking as he held the glass.
Two more hours passed. He sat on the couch drinking coffee, by now medicinally distant, occasionally checking his phone while watching the wordless mouths of TV presenters, singers, actors. Actors. Safe make-believe bullshit. Pampered prima donnas. Fakers lying for a living. At least he lived his lie. They can play anyone except ordinary people. They are the only people who have experiences whereby they are—and they love to tell the gripped talk show host all about this—‘humbled’. All they have to do is learn lines written for them by writers and say them in a way a director has instructed. They don’t have to write dialog or design sets or choose camera positioning. They are told what to say, when to say it, where to say it, why they’re saying it, and how to say it. And get paid by the millions. They drive the fastest, safest cars and live in the biggest, grandest places imaginable. Unlimited freedom, choice, opportunity. They are bulletproof. Ichor flows through their veins. They own the world. All others are ants in their garden. If God exists it exists for them alone.
At two in the morning, while he gazed flatly at a reality TV show in which perfectly lit models opined ineloquently on the agony of beauty while sprawled beside a dollar-shaped pool adrift with the shadows of palm fronds, he got a text from an unknown number. The text read Watermill and was followed by an address. He googled the address and found a row of coastal mansions with huge block-paved granite driveways and unobstructed views of the Irish Sea. He assumed Watermill the name of one of the houses, and after some digging found he was right. A house worth almost five million. The rich, too good for lowly digits.
He took a diazepam and was about to leave when he stopped dead in the living room and shut his eyes, breathed in, held it. Memories flooded him from his previous operation, his previous life, his previous love. A memory dump of near-death proportions. He opened his eyes wide and inhaled. ‘You can do this,’ he said. ‘You’re nearly there. You’re unbreakable. Do not fuck this up. Do not fuck this up. Do not fuck this up.’
He was walking through the snow to his car in the deep silence when he saw parked across the road an old Aston Martin DB5 in pristine condition. Obscenely conspicuous among the pedestrian family cars. The driver window was rolled down a few inches. Wet eyes in the dark watching him. He looked around. The road was empty. Snow softly falling, settling without sound. He looked both ways before crossing the road to the Aston Martin. Everywhere leached of colour and dead still as if nuclear winter had fallen. The night artificially bright. He bent at the waist and looked in at the driver. The passenger seat was vacant.
‘Can I help you, mate?’ he said.
The driver sat looking out the windscreen, smiling serenely to himself. A man in his late sixties with thin white hair, steel stubble, pouches of dark skin under his eyes, and a badly set nose rivered with veins.
‘Get in. I’m taking you to Lord Søren.’
‘Got my own ride.’ Bale pointed at his car up the driveway.
The driver didn’t look. ‘That’s not going to happen.’
‘No?’
The driver smiled. ‘Get in.’
The window went up and the engine came alive, white exhaust pluming from the rear. Bale straightened up and looked around again. A little mackerel tabby sat watching him from under a parked car. He walked around the front of the Aston Martin, watching the driver through the windscreen, and got in. The drive took them under the river and down into the concrete corridors of the M53, heading south. The car glided.
‘Nice car. You ever taken it for a proper spin?’
‘It’s not mine to spin.’
Bale was looking at the carcass of a huge badger smeared across the tarmac when he realised they’d gone past the exit he’d planned to turn off at. ‘The address I was sent is back that way.’
Nothing.
‘Where are we going?’
‘The address was a decoy.’
‘A decoy?’
‘For watching eyes.’
‘Who said anyone’s watching?’
The driver didn’t answer.
They entered Wales and Bale looked out the window across snow-blanketed fields that ran on into near dark. Distant lights strung out there in the void as if some franchisee reaper had demarked his own grim acre wherein to make his claims.
They came off an exit into a vast industrial estate in Wrexham. Single storey units and warehouses, corrugated iron roofs and rusted railings. The car pulled up on a sloped concrete apron beside a dark blue Mercedes panel van whose decals had been peeled off but were still visible. G4S. He shut off the engine and got out, walked towards the unit without a word. The unit lay low with a semi-cylindric roof like a Quonset hut. Bale sat there watching the driver push open the door and vanish inside.
He got out and looked at the van, an armoured vehicle used by security for shifting huge sums of real money. He checked to see the driver wasn’t looking and then stood on the van’s doorstep and pulled himself up by the side mirror, shone a pocket LED light through the glass. A black gym bag lay in the passenger footwell. Nothing else. He stepped down and looked around. Listening. A far-off helicopter. Sound of trucks navigating the maze of the estate.
He entered the unit, moving slowly down a dark corridor of concrete block walls and poured concrete floors towards the white rectangular outline of a doorway. He stopped outside the door, straining to hear anything inside. Beside him in the dark came a disembodied voice.
‘Remove your clothes.’
He stepped back and looked blindly about. ‘Who is that?’
‘Remove your clothes or walk.’ The driver.
‘Where’s Søren?’
‘Remove your clothes or walk.’
He finally understood. ‘Søren?’
‘You think I’d let anyone else drive that car? I won’t tell you again.’
‘Why?’
‘Surveillance equipment is very small these days.’
‘I’m not wearing surveillance equipment.’
‘Then you won’t mind removing your clothes.’
‘Okay. You want me to take my clothes off? I’ll take my clothes off.’
And he did.
‘Leave your phone and your watch here. You can keep your socks on. Cold floors.’
While Bale stripped, Søren lingered in the dark like some second-rate Erebus. Bale left his watch and phone on his pile of clothes as instructed. Only when the soft rustle of his undressing had stopped did Søren open the door and enter the room. The door closed and the shadows reset. Bale stood there naked in his socks in the dark and the cold with his skin constricting tightly about his bones.
‘Come in, Bale,’ Søren called. ‘There is greater shame than nakedness through that door.’
Bale opened the door and entered. Then stopped. The door shut behind him. He was in a large square room, broad, deep and high. Row on row of moulding machines and acrylic baths and hot tubs hanging from rails. Two clothed men sat behind him on plastic folding chairs against the rear wall. One squinting against the rising smoke of his own cigarette, the other holding a phone to his ear, apparently listening but not talking. Søren stood beside a naked man bound to a chair. The man, ginger and goateed, was badly hurt. His chin pressed into his bruised chest. Red drool hung in strands from his bust mouth. One of his shoulders was dislocated, abducted humerus bulging out against the skin.
‘What is this?’ Bale said.
Søren lit a cigarette with a match, sucked the cigarette and blew out the match on a breath of smoke. His eyes moved up and down Bale’s naked form, grey smoke sliding liquidly from his nostrils. He placed a hand on the bound man’s slipped shoulder and the bound man stirred and tried lifting his head, moaned out and gave up.
Bale stood withered in his nudity like an old tree. He looked around that cold and dusty space. The men sitting behind him silent, watching. At Søren’s feet stood several large chemical containers. Søren saw him looking.
‘Fluoroantimonic acid. The strongest known superacid. You could dissolve a blue whale to a hill of slush in a few hours with enough of this stuff. Why do you cover yourself? I told you. There is greater shame in this room than nakedness.’
A door opened and Bale took a step back as another man emerged. He was built like a bull and wearing only black leather biker pants and boots. Bare chest and thick hairy arms smeared with blood, blood up to his elbows. His head stood encased in a full-face helmet. The biker cop.
‘What the fuck is this?’ Bale said.
‘This one here is undercover police.’ Søren patted the ruined man’s luxated shoulder and the man stirred again and then sank back into the diabolic halls of agony he was privately attending. ‘And that one through there, see him? He’s an informant.’
He pointed to the cop and the cop stood aside revealing a man in the room hanging naked from his wrists, which had been tied behind his back by a rope run through a ceiling pulley. His toes hovering an inch off the floor, head hanging, arms pulled back, waist dipped, knees bent. He looked as if he’d been frozen during a dive towards the concrete.
‘That setup is called the strappado,’ Søren said. ‘A technique revived in Guantanamo, I believe. One undercover, one informant.’ Sulphur-coloured teeth appeared as if he were smiling. ‘I like the balance of such things. Uniform distribution.’
‘Who’s he?’ Bale jutted his chin at the cop. ‘I saw him …’ He trailed off when Søren drew from his double-breasted jacket a huge hunting knife with a mat black blade.
‘What would you do with this one?’ Søren said.
‘What?’
‘With our rodent friend here.’ Søren balanced the knife by its point on the UCO’s dislocated shoulder.
‘You’re asking me?’ Bale said.
‘I’d like your opinion.’
‘How do you know he’s undercover?’
The cop laughed inside the helmet.
‘It’s our business to know such things.’ Søren stropped the knife on his own thigh. ‘How would you put him down?’
‘You want my instruction?’
‘I want your soul. I want it bottled and shelved like everything else that’s of curiosity to me. But something tells me I’ll have to wait a little longer to gain possession of that black bauble. So for now, yes, I want your instruction.’
‘No.’
‘No can’t or no won’t?’
‘There’s no difference.’
‘The difference is will.’
Søren pulled on the cigarette until its tip glowed orange and then set it burning on the edge of a stack of wooden crates. Smoke streamed from his mouth and nostrils, swathing his head, as if he were cooking on the inside. ‘It makes me wonder,’ he said. ‘Does the negress drool down your dick in spite of, or because of your timidity?’
Bale looked at the cop. What else did he know about him?
‘I know, I know, she’s mulatto, but find a big black spider among the layers of a nice white birthday cake and the entire cake is ruined, is it not? That cake would be called a spider cake and the only thing talked about or remembered about the cake would be the spider. You could carefully eat around the spider, nibble at the edges, but …’ He shrugged and pulled a face. ‘Tell me, does her cunt suck? I suspect all negresses do. They appear built for it, don’t they?’
Bale had no words for Søren’s degenerate wondering. Then the two men behind him appeared at his side, standing close enough for him to hear their breathing, to smell winter coming off them.
‘Step closer,’ Søren said. ‘Come. Come.’
Bale moved forward.
‘Closer. You’re here to see the sky fall inside the heads of men.’
Bale moved closer still.
‘Now take the knife.’ Søren held out the knife.
‘Shoot them,’ Bale said. ‘Just shoot them. Put them out their fucking misery.’
‘Shoot them? Do you really think a bullet sends a message as vivid as bladework and acid baths?’
‘I won’t do it.’
‘How about we trickle a smidge of acid down your lugholes, a drop in each eye. Deaf and blind in seconds. Like being awake in death. Or maybe we could pipe you a bellyful and make you watch your own torso fall apart. He’s dead anyway. It’s up to you whether you follow him into the dark.’
Anger was mixing with fear. A toxic alloy. There was no way out. He couldn’t flee naked, barefoot and outnumbered. What was he protecting besides his own innocence, his integrity, his morality? Abstract concepts that lost all meaning in the face of such horror. He could kill the UCO swiftly and end both their miseries or he could permit their torture and death. There was no choice.
He took the knife from Søren and stepped up to the stricken officer. He looked at the spot in the stomach where the knife would go, focusing on that spot alone, a pale pink wall, blocking out everything around it, dehumanising its owner. Then he sunk the knife to its bolster, let go and stepped back. The officer silently jerked forward and his eyes whited, rolling back into his head as if to see where all his blood was going.
‘Is it real to you now?’ Søren said.
Bale couldn’t tell if he was talking him or to the officer. The blood flowing from the officer’s stomach eventually slowed in sync with his retarding heart. A sickening glug. The V of his crotch flooded. Bale’s socked toes flushed with warmth and he looked down. The blood had spread to his feet. He stepped back, darkly smearing the concrete, and peeled off the socks, tossed them like blood-gorged leeches.
The biker cop stepped over the widening pool eating up the floor, picked up an acid container, and vanished back into the room where the informant swung. The door closed.
Bale looked at the ceiling striplights down there in the officer’s blood puddle. Like looking through red glass into Hell’s attic.
‘Get dressed,’ Søren said. ‘You’ll catch your death.’
Afterward, while Søren, the cop, and Bale watched, the two men put on paint masks, goggles, and rubber gauntlets, cleaned everywhere up, and then and folded the corpses into two fifty-five-gallon, Teflon-lined drums and filled them with fluoroantimonic acid.
‘Put them in,’ Søren said, pointing at Bale’s socks on the floor.
Bale picked them up and dropped them in a drum. One of the men donned a welder’s mask and sweated the lids to the drums with an acetylene torch and then the two men took the drums away. Bale wasn’t told where. He asked. Søren just looked at him.
Bale and Søren stood shoulder to shoulder before the bathroom mirror, washing in silence. The cop, who’d still not removed his helmet, had used wetted paper towels to wash his chest and arms of the caked blood and left without a word. Søren wet his hands and slicked back his thin white hair and lit a cigarette and watched himself smoke in the mirror. Bale washed his hands for a time, cautiously watching that deviant Narcissus beside him. Then Søren dropped his cigarette in the deep double sink and looked at his watch.
‘It’s my seventieth birthday today. I’m very excited.’
He drove them back. Motorway lights sliding across the car. The engine and the rumble of gritted roads merged and became a complex and menacing hum of background noise. The pressure in Bale’s head swelled until his ears needed to pop just to clear out the dread. Søren was grunting as he adjusted his trousers. Bale noticed the old man had an erection.
They were undertaken by a black Corvette hurtling through the night at over a hundred sixty miles per hour. The sunlike roar of its engine alarming in the dead of night. Søren cruised on at the speed limit, apparently unfazed, leisurely smoking with the window down a crack. A three-tier transporter laden with wrecked cars had ploughed through the median and shed its automotive load across the lanes. Neither said a word.
The car had barely stopped outside his apartment when Bale swung open the door. He had one foot on the curb when Søren said, ‘Believe me, I understand the lure. Plump pink cunts and plump pink mouths indistinguishable in all that dark flesh. Difficult to see which end is which, isn’t it? Worry not. Your secret is safe.’
Bale got out. Before he shut the door, he leaned over and said, ‘Tell your police dog if I see him following me again, I’ll personally cut his fucking throat. Happy birthday.’
