I, Hell (COLLECTED STORIES OF HORROR & SUSPENSE Vol. I)

I, Hell

The Mannequin

50, Berkeley Square

Buried Alive

Silent Screaming Face

The Bar

The Devourer of Men

The Burning House

Tokyo Zombie Apocalypse

I, Hell

1

So this was Hell.

Wish to fuck I’d taken those Sunday School Bible classes a bit more seriously. Turns out it was all true, after all…

What can I say? One minute I was strapped in Ol’ Sparky, cussing down the priest they’d brought in to give me the last rites as a fraud and a charlatan… Then ZAP! BANG! BOOM! and I’m writhing -and-a-crappin’-in-my-pants as 2,450 volts shoot through my body.

And then I was in Hell. Must’ve died and shot straight on down through the Earth’s crust – or wherever the Hell it is that, well, Hell’s located.

Sure was a lot of screaming, wailing and general noise. Also heat. A heat so intense it almost seared the flesh from your bones. It bounced off the red rocks all around and seemed to cook your eyes. We emerged out of a little entrance in this immense rock-face, all us newbies. One after the other, stark-naked and scared shitless. Starting even at this early stage to get the idea that this was it – for all eternity. We’d screwed up big-time in our Earthly existence (and I’ll come to just what I’d gone and done shortly), and now it was payback time.

Oh boy, was it just. As I say, there was heat, rocks and screaming. One hundred million million (or thereabouts) naked souls toiling at these never-ending, mile-high rock-faces with pickaxes and such. No point to the work (I’d find that out soon enough) – but this was Hell, right? Providing a feeling of job satisfaction for Hell’s inhabitants wasn’t exactly top of Satan’s list of priorities.

No, we just chipped away at the rock. Got whipped by the flying demons – sure were plenty of those – and periodically taken away for a bit of torture. Only really happened to the newbies, though, ‘cause once you’d been in Hell awhile your face kind of got known, and so it wasn’t worth the demons’ while tormenting you, as opposed to someone who’d just rocked up and so hadn’t a clue concerning what was what.

The first few months I kind of got picked on. It’s like in those movies when the young punk first goes to prison and so really has to look out for his ass. Well, that never happened to me. Though I still got the pitchfork and heated-poker treatment, which is I guess a whole lot worse. Believe me, everything you see in those medieval pictures of Hell – it’s all true, and it all happens.

Yeah, those flying demons – pitch-black bodies, shiny red eyes, huge bat-like wings – had me howling and shrieking like a lost soul. Which is exactly what I was, come to think of it. Pathetic. Should have just kept my mouth shut and let them get bored. They sawed off my legs a few times with a rusty saw; disemboweled me with a blunt knife… It kind of went on until, weirdly, it just started not to hurt so much, and I didn’t scream so loudly. I mean, after they’d had their fun, I’d somehow be whole and intact again, and so I started to get bored with the tortures as much as they did.

I think the demons realized that I was getting used to the whole torture gig – as strange as that may sound – and so they just left me alone. I’d gotten in with a few other damned souls, had myself a little gang, so I was kind of beginning to figure out what was what. Yeah, those demons got bored with me, and so flew off to find themselves some fresh meat.

Incidentally, when I said that I got bullied for the ‘first few months’, you can take that literally. In Hell (damn straight you need the capital ‘H’), you may be in for all eternity, but that doesn’t mean that time passes any more differently than it does when you’re on the good ol’ planet E.A.R.T.H.

No sir. There’s no nighttime here – and you don’t sleep in any case – but time passes exactly the same as it does when you’re alive. Only then you can look forward to – what? Seventy, eighty years? Just supposing you eat right, don’t get a tobacco habit, get your exercise and such?

Here you get to live for millions of years. More than that, in fact – for forever and ever, amen. So if immortality’s your thing, just do a few things wrong and we’ll see you down here! There’s always room, trust me. Hell just goes on and on and on and on and on. An eternity of blistering hot rock faces and millions upon millions of damned souls toiling away at them, engaged in the pointless work. You’re also tortured by endless thirst and hunger – although, to be honest, once you’ve been forced by demons to eat your own scrotum a few times, being perpetually hungry and thirsty really isn’t that much of a big deal. You’d be amazed at how much you can grow to bear. I’ll say that much for Hell – it certainly toughens you up.

As I say, I’d got in by now with a few other denizens of Hell. Most of them were just men and women like me – people who’d been ‘bad eggs’ (to put it politely) in their life on Earth, and so’d been sent down here once they’d croaked for whatever reason.

But once in a while you came across a serious badass. Someone who made even whatever you’d done not look like so much of a big deal. Someone like Adolf Hitler, for example, who was the person I found myself toiling at a rock face with only two or three months after I first arrived in Hell.

‘Heil Hitler!’ I said to him as a joke, the first time I saw him. Like the rest of us, he was stark naked, and still had in place that infamous moustache. But his physique, at least, was well-developed from the near-seventy years he’d already been down here. Even after just a couple of months, all that round-the-clock swinging of the pickaxe was starting to do wonders for my own, previously weedy figure.

‘Yah, yah,’ returned Hitler, shaking his head with vexation. ‘You think I haven’t heard that, like, so many times before?’

(Here, I should say that everyone speaks the same language in Hell. You open your mouth and whatever you want to say just kind of comes out. You hear the same way. So I was originally speaking in English; Hitler was originally talking in German. But somehow we both understood each other instantly.)

‘Okay, guess that was a bit lame,’ I returned, sweating, stinking and burnt as I wielded my pickaxe. (Never try slackening off in Hell, incidentally – those demons with their bloody whips will be on you quicker than flies on shit.)

Hitler seemed to appreciate my veiled apology.

‘You’re new here, huh?’ he said.

‘Damn straight – just a couple of months or so,’ I returned.

‘What did you do?’ Hitler asked.

‘To be honest, I’d rather not say just now,’ I replied. ‘I wish I hadn’t done it – not just because I’m here – but I got a bit carried away. I was a drug and alcohol addict, you see.’

‘Yes,’ nodded Hitler seriously. ‘Those are bad vices. But no doubt you have heard that I was a non-smoking, teetotal vegetarian?’

Plus you started a world war, and tried to exterminate an entire fucking race, you nutcase I thought, but kept my face impassive as I carelessly replied –

‘Yeah, I heard something like that, anyway.’

‘Well, I still am,’ said Hitler proudly. Like there was some store nearby, where the Fuhrer could run off to get himself some beers, a packet of smokes and a hotdog, if he was so tempted. Everyone here – X hundred-damn-million of us – was non-smoking, non-drinking, non-eating.

There was no other way.

Anyway, I got to hanging around with Hitler. It was just a ridiculous chance that I’d got to meet him, given all the millions upon millions of other souls that are here in Hell, but we kind of got on. That is, I let him rant away, whereas some of the other nudists nearby either slipped away to a different rock face, or pleaded for the Fuhrer to shut the fuck up.

Me, I didn’t care. Yeah, I’d slipped up, done some bad shit and so ended up in this place. Still I thought Hitler had been one of the most evil bastards ever, which made it seem slightly unfair that I now had to toil for an eternity alongside him. But that, you might say, is life. Well – actually definitely not life, but you see what I’m getting at.

As I say, Hitler liked to rant. Cussing down his generals a storm for letting him down at the end of the war, and such. If he told me once how he could have won the war if he’d only been surrounded by the right people, ‘instead of damn cowards and fools’, he told me a thousand times.

He informed me that he’d once crossed paths with Joseph Stalin, who was – surprise, surprise – also down here. That seemed to me to be too much of a coincidence – and Hitler thought the same. He was of the opinion that Satan (more on the Big Boss himself later) had set up that meeting, just to cause himself a bit of fiendish amusement.

But – ‘He had nothing to say to me, and I certainly had nothing to say to him,’ declared Hitler petulantly, perspiring as he slammed the point of the pickaxe into the rock-face, sparks and tiny bits of rock flying everywhere. ‘We just ignored each other.’

He was curious about Pol Pot, whom he’d not met but had heard a lot about from some of the others down here. What exactly (Hitler wanted to know) had this Pol Pot done that was so impressive?

I struggled a bit remembering my history; but once upon a time, I’d been a diligent high school student, and so a few things came back to me.

‘He was this whacko leader of a country called Cambodia, in Asia. He tortured and killed – well, I don’t know how many people. Maybe a third of Cambodia’s total population.’

‘And?’ said Hitler, with a sarcastic shrug of his shoulders. ‘That’s it? That’s what the big deal is?’

Clearly, being in Hell almost seven decades hadn’t mellowed the Fuhrer in any way, shape or form. He was still very competitive in what you might call the ‘genocidal maniac stakes’, and prone to fits of jealousy if anyone talked about anyone else who’d also upped what you might call the ‘evil ante’ – Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, bin Laden and such.

‘I nearly changed the entire world order!’ Hitler would sometimes almost scream, like he was addressing his SS troops back in the day. ‘What did these men do, to rival that?’

I have to say, looking at it that way, he had a point.

I said earlier that I’d become part of a ‘little gang’. Well, Hitler was a member of that – I guess the actual leader, if only on strength of personality – but as for the others…

There’s actually not really that much to say. Just quiet men and women who’d done bad things, and seemed to like to be in the company of the Fuhrer. For all his faults, Hitler was a very clever man, and I think he found in me a good listener and – occasional, given his frequent ranting – conversation partner. So the other rapists, murderers, arsonists, child molesters, serial adulterers and such just kind of listened in, with varying degrees of fascination.

There was one thing that had caught my interest, as first the months and then the years went by and I kind of got used to being in Hell. At first you’re too busy being tortured, and with screaming and begging for mercy, to notice too much except for the scorching heat, the red sky and the endless rock faces. Then you find out a bit about the pecking order around you, who’s who, who’s got some interesting stories to tell and who’s a boring asshole – that kind of thing.

But then you settle down, and start to pay attention to the details. Which is when I really noticed – I mean really saw for the first time – the small cave located relatively nearby, way up in the rock face.

Obviously, I say ‘nearby’ in relation to where I was, but I suspect that for anyone in Hell this small cave appears ‘nearby’. Distance and such things are all distorted and relative in this place.

Yeah, there was definitely an opening of some kind in the rock face. The only opening I could see anywhere, in fact, other than the one right at ground-level that was continually disgorging the nude, bewildered new entrants to Hell.

Eventually I pointed it out to ‘Nazi-boy’ – which was what I’d taken to calling Herr Hitler on occasion, much to his displeasure. Sometimes he’d scream some vitriol at me, and refuse to engage in any conversation for a few days. Once, he managed to stay in a sulk almost two weeks. (I’d told him that he’d demonstrated total idiocy in not invading England when he had the chance in 1940 – like I say, I knew my history pretty well.)

But that day, as I asked Hitler if he knew what that small cave or whatever it was high up in the rock face actually was, he gave a slight, conceited smile.

‘I was wondering when you’d ask me that,’ he said.

One of the jet-black, winged demons with the red eyes flew overhead, and we quickly made it look as though we were working hard. When the thing had passed – and I’ll say exactly what their story was in a while – I said to Hitler:

‘What do you mean?’

‘Everyone always notices that small cave, sooner or later,’ he said. ‘I noticed it within the first year of being here – I mean, started to realize that it had some significance, beyond it just being a hole in the rock face.’

Naturally, Hitler had to get it in that he’d taken real notice of that hole in the rock face quicker than I had. I wondered if this was part of the fabled ‘small man’ complex; and then realized that for all shorter-than-average men who aren’t actually homicidal maniacs resident in Hell, this thought wasn’t exactly fair.

‘Okay, okay – well done you,’ I said, barely keeping the sarcasm out of my voice. ‘Now, if you’d care to enlighten me…’

It was only now that I saw Hitler look almost sad, as he gazed way up at that small opening. His icy-blue eyes were strangely wistful, and the thin upper lip below the moustache (by the way – for whatever reason, nothing like nails or hair ever grows in Hell) trembled slightly.

‘Through there is freedom and salvation,’ he said quietly.

‘What?’ I returned, not knowing in the slightest what he meant.

‘Through there is… is…’

‘Yes?’

‘I can’t say that word aloud,’ he said in a stage whisper. ‘Do I have to spell it out – it begins with an ‘H’...’

‘You mean – Heaven?’ I gasped in disbelief.

Instantly, Hell sort of shook slightly. The winged demons flying overhead made a terrible roaring noise, like bulls. A shrieking arose from the massed ranks of the damned laboring at the never-ending rock faces.

‘Idiot!’ said Hitler. ‘That’s blasphemy of the highest order! You’re for it now!’

Was I just... A winged demon came and grabbed me with its claws and took me to that place. The one with all the saws and manacles and pincers and pokers and flames and screams and cries… Pretty soon I, too, was howling the place down – even after one demon cut out my tongue, and there standing in front of me swallowed it down and rubbed its stomach as though in delight. Then I couldn’t see any more, because they put out my eyes with those heated pokers.

I just screamed for days…

Then, finally intact again and back at the rock face, the nightmare over at least on this occasion, Hitler looked at me, smirked and shook his head.

‘You won’t do that again,’ he observed.

‘No,’ I said flatly. ‘I won’t. But – that cave up there, that really does lead to…?’

Hitler shrugged.

‘So I was told, and everyone else here. Of course, we had to read a bit between the lines to figure it out – we didn’t just go and shout out the word…’

‘Yeah, yeah, all right,’ I sighed, swinging my pickaxe into the rock face. Every blow – received twenty-four hours a day, 365-days a year – painfully jarred my sweaty body and arms. But at least everyone in Hell – men, women and children – was in the same boat, so to speak.

‘But – what if someone were to climb up there, and…’

Hitler sighed and shook his head.

‘You’ve been here for several years – why do you think?’

It was obvious, now I properly thought about it.

‘It’s a Hell –ha! ‘Scuse me – it’s a long, long way up, steep and jagged. Then I guess one of those flying demons would pull you down, soon as they realized what you were up to…’

Hitler shrugged.

‘Well, yes,’ he mused. ‘It’s been a long time since anyone has tried climbing up there – though there have been a few even in the short time I’ve been here.’

‘Short?’ I echoed.

‘Relatively speaking, yes,’ returned Hitler. ‘I mean, I’ll have to be here for a long, long time before I’ve any chance of becoming a demon, for example…’

I’d never realized, until he said this, that that was his intention.

‘You serious?’ I said quietly.

‘Absolutely,’ nodded Hitler. ‘You have to look forward and aim for something, even in this place.’

I found myself admiring his positive attitude. If you could stay upbeat in Hell, you had to be something of a tough cookie.

‘But anyway,’ he quickly continued, ‘such a thing is many, many years off yet. There is a rumor that Genghis Khan was in Hell long enough to become a demon – but some say even that length of time (I mean from when he died until recently) is not long enough. To become so evil that the transformation can take place – so that there is not even a shred of goodness, of basic humanity left in you. That takes a good while, even in Hell – even for someone like me. You? I suspect you’ll have to wait many, many millennia.’

‘Look… wait…’ I stammered, trying desperately to comprehend all I was hearing. ‘We were talking about that small cave… Why it’s there…’

‘Don’t you get it?’ hissed Hitler suddenly. ‘It’s just another torture. It’s a passageway to you-know-where, if you can get up there… But you never will. Sometimes the demons even let you try and climb, because they know you’ll fall long before you reach the cave.’

Yeah – it was one of those climbs that look faintly possible at first… But soon you saw the distance between two rocks (vertically or horizontally) was just slightly too long, or the going just a bit too steep… Not enough to discourage the truly desperate (i.e. the odd person here in Hell), but enough to suggest to a person in possession of a relatively balanced mind that the whole thing was hopeless from the start.

‘The faintest glimmer of hope, way up there,’ said Hitler in a distant voice, gazing upwards. ‘Taunting everyone sent to Hell since the dawn of mankind. And that’s its purpose – just another torture. Same as the heat, the rocks, the never-ending work, the pokers stuck up your ass and all the rest of it. Just… a torture.’

‘You’d… You’d go through that cave, if you could?’ I questioned softly. I’d never seen Hitler looking like this; he seemed almost… vulnerable.

Hitler looked around, as though checking to see if anyone was listening in to our conversation.

‘Yes,’ he said in the faintest whisper.

‘You just said you wanted to become a demon,’ I returned in a similarly low voice.

‘Yes, yes – because that is all I can hope for, here. If I made it up… there’ – Hitler briefly raised his eyes – ‘I could get through, all sins forgiven. That’s something they make sure you learn here, once you’ve been around a while. Salvation’s right up there, perfect paradise or whatever you care to call it. You can be as evil as me and still they’ll let you in – if only you can get up to that cave first.

‘And of course, you never will.’

Turns out I didn’t have to wait much longer to witness one of Hell’s more desperate inhabitations try to make that climb. This guy was big, well-muscled. I wondered if he’d been an athlete, soldier or such when he’d been – well – alive.

He started the climb. Soon X hundred-million of us working away realized his intention and were staring up at him. The flying demons hissed at us and used their stinging whips – but they could hardly chastise the whole lot of us at once. So most of us just continued looking up.

He did pretty well, that guy. Whether because they were too busy with trying to get us to return to work, I don’t know, but the flying demons didn’t even bother snatching him from that rock face. He made his way methodically, fingers and toes searching for a hold in the scorching red rock. Must have been burning the skin off him, but he never faltered. Soon he was so high up he was like a toy figure. His feet slipped a few times and once he was hanging by one hand; but then he recovered and continued with his steady ascent.

‘I never saw anyone get as high as that – he must be a real expert at climbing,’ breathed Hitler. ‘I never thought… but maybe he can…’

Turns out he couldn’t. Suddenly his body just detached from the rock face and he fell back down to ground, his body spinning round and round. The impact was loud, and with his body hopelessly smashed and broken he just lay there screaming. (On Earth, of course, he’d have been killed instantly. Needless to say you couldn’t die here in Hell, no matter what happened to you.)

The demons all gathered round to hiss and laugh at him, jabbering away in their own tongue. (They could communicate with us, but one of the ‘privileges’ of reaching flying demon status was the fact that you got to talk in Hell’s very own language – and by that I don’t just mean the common tongue we automatically spoke as Hell’s accursed laborers. Being able to talk ‘Hellish’ as a flying demon just sort of happened, along with your body’s metamorphosis from humanoid-shape into – well, a flying demon. That is, according to Hitler, who of course knew everything.)

The climber was left screaming on the ground for a good long while – a few weeks – before his body was finally ‘healed’ and he could get back to hacking away at the rock face. Naturally, what had happened to him deterred everyone watching. No, clearly there was no way to climb up to that small cave…

No way to climb…

I caught my breath for a moment. Hitler looked at me.

‘Are you okay?’ he asked, almost with compassion. Strange, the ‘bond’ there now was between us.

‘Yeah, yeah, fine,’ I said quickly. As close as we’d become, there was still no way I was going to tell Hitler what I’d just realized. Or had I? Maybe what I’d suddenly thought was merely ridiculous; there had to be a reason why someone hadn’t come up with such a plan before! Come on! All the millions of people sent to Hell since the dawn of mankind (a great many of them much smarter than me – I’d absolutely no problem admitting that), and I thought I’d figured out a way to…

To what, exactly…?

Escape from Hell?

Then suddenly the red sky darkened, and a great moaning and howling started up. Hitler dropped his pickaxe, and got down on his knees. He hissed at me to do the same.

‘What’s happening?’ I asked, keeping my voice low.

‘This is it – your first time to see our leader,’ returned Hitler, his icy-blue eyes looking strangely excited.

‘What… who…?’ I stammered.

Hitler sighed and tutted.

‘Him – Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub… Whatever you care to call Him.’

And as a colossal shadow slowly spread over that scorching, reddened, rocky land, I slowly dared to raise my eyes…

2

Judge Timothy J. Green had to be just about the meanest son of a bitch God ever shoveled guts into. So it was just my luck that I had him overseeing my trial. Only one thing on my side: Judge Green was particularly notorious for his habit of finding defendants ‘guilty’ who just happened to be a) young, and b) black. As I was young but also white, the color of my skin was at least something on my side – I hoped. But soon as I entered the court room and saw that pompous, fleshy face with the half-moon glasses balanced on the end of that nipple-like nose, I knew I was for it.

It didn’t help that I looked the very picture of a crack- and alcohol-addicted meth head. Long, greasy hair, terrible skin and teeth, twitching limbs and face as I slowly detoxed. As I swore to tell the ‘whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God’ with my hand placed on the Bible, I could see that Judge Green wasn’t all that convinced.

Smart man. I’d tell whatever got me off a class-A murder rap, which in this state would see me going to the electric chair. I didn’t believe in any god, religion or anything like that – but if putting my hand on some book full of ancient fairytales and swearing to tell the truth might at least help to formulate the idea in the minds of some of the jury that I was innocent of the crime of which I was charged…

Well – I could only hope for the best, and use whatever I could to my advantage. My parents had long since washed their hands of me, despairing at their once handsome, high school-attending son having become a drug- and alcohol-dependant petty crook. Oh, they tried to help me any number of times, don’t get me wrong… But always I just took their money, told them a bunch of lies about how I’d clean up my act, and then just threw it straight back in their faces. I knew full damn well just how big an asshole I was; and I didn’t care. I just wanted to get high again.

But first I had to beat a murder rap. And that wasn’t gonna be easy.

My defense attorney (hired by the state) was trying to claim that what had happened was manslaughter. That the old boy had had a weak heart in any case and probably would have popped his clogs sooner or later, regardless of what I did to him. Yeah, I’d told the police all about that, and drunk and stoned and kind of remorseful as I’d been, it still somehow stood up as evidence. My attorney had tried to get my confession dismissed, citing the fact that I’d been extremely – well, wasted. But as this attorney was state-appointed, averaging maybe thirty to forty bucks an hour, he’d not tried all that hard. I was just another punk this pasty-faced, overworked schmuck had to represent, after all – if I got sent to the chair, he’d just get straight on with defending the next bozo.

So, right now I guess you’re champing at the bit to discover what it was I actually did. You could say it started the night me and the other bums were huddled round a big old metal barrel in which was burning a fire. You know the sort of thing – like at the start of a movie. It’s cold, dark; we’re holding out our hands and our breath comes out like thick mist. Kind of suspicious of each other, each one of us hurting in our own way. Never enough junk to get as fully loaded as you’d like. I was in too bad a physical condition to try mugging anyone anymore, even if I was carrying a blade. The state I was in, a schoolgirl would have laughed at me down a dark alleyway. So that was another potential source of revenue kaput.

But the bums were talking. Sometimes it paid just to listen. I had one thing on my side: I was still young. Still in my late twenties. Could still move relatively quick if I needed to, even in my lamentable physical state.

‘…they say he’s got fortune hidden up there,’ rasped one old-timer, who’d a penchant for drinking brass-polish. ‘Doesn’t trust no bank – just hides it away under his floorboards or such…’

Bullshit stories. If I’d heard one I’d heard them all. Some sucker who had a load of greenbacks, just ripe for the taking. I almost zoned out of this scintillating conversation; but then I heard someone else say –

‘You talking about the O’Reilly place? That old nutball?’

That made my ears prick up. There could be only one ‘O’Reilly’ they were talking about. He lived a few blocks away from here – given that ‘here’ was downtown and avoided after dark by anyone who wasn’t a homeless, drink- or drug- (or both) addled bum. ‘Fact he lived not too far from my parents’, in this huge white-boarded house set well back from the road. I knew it well, because in my early-teens I’d done Mr. O’Reilly’s gardening.

Yeah, some old woman at my parents’ church put me onto that one. I never did get to thank her. I’m being sarcastic here. Because O’Reilly – despite being the single occupant of a large house that must have cost over a million bucks to buy even back then – was so tight I guess he cried with one eye. Four-to-five hours’ backbreaking labor in his front- and backyard (and for a twelve or thirteen year old working on his own, these yards were huge) got me around ten bucks, depending on how generous Scrooge himself was feeling. Sometimes it might be as little as five – on occasion he’d go as high as twelve.

‘There you go son; don’t go spending it all at once,’ he’d say, putting this colossal sum into my hand and causing me to look at him slightly, wondering if he was mocking me or not.

One thing I ‘specially remember about working there was when it got to be autumn and winter. Then I’d be freezing outside, raking up leaves or such – working just to keep warm – and I’d see the smoke spilling from out his chimney and I’d know he was tucked up somewhere inside his large house (I never did get to see inside: once he refused me permission to use his bathroom, which ever-after just meant I did what I had to do behind one of the large bushes in his back garden), toasting his toes before a roaring fire.

The miserable old skinflint.

…And here was this old bum saying now that O’Reilly had a fortune squirreled away somewhere inside that house – not in a bank or such. And O’Reilly lived on his own (had done for years, his wife dying even ‘fore I was born), and I was standing round this metal can half-freezing and starving to death, my rotten teeth chattering because I couldn’t afford the various chemicals I needed to keep myself on an even keel…

‘Ah, but he’s got them bars over all his windows and doors, security lighting and such,’ said another bum, younger than the first one who’d spoken. This was Bill, who could go a bit psycho when he got angry. In fact, fair to say he could go very psycho. All of us stood around the burning metal can were ‘fraid of him. Whatever he was doing – fighting to freebasing – he’d take it to the limits. So if Bill decided something wasn’t worth doing (i.e. breaking into O’Reilly’s house to look for this supposed loot), then it probably wasn’t.

Only it was then – almost with something of a jolt – that I realized I had an edge.

To be more specific, I had a key. For an old side door situated on one side of O’Reilly’s house, where it bordered onto a small wood where the well-heeled residents of that area walked their dogs and such.

I’d found it well over ten years before – more like fifteen years before, come to that – when I’d been a bright little eager-beaver of a high school student, slogging my guts out for that miserable old bastard O’Reilly most weekends. Fact was I’d been turning over the soil that was on one side of O’Reilly’s house – the narrowest spit of land just before a wooden fence, the other side of which was this wood – when I’d unearthed this old rusting key.

Straight away I put two-and-two together and figured this key was for the old door that was set into the brickwork on this side of the large house. (When I said earlier about the house being ‘white-boarded’, that was mainly at the front.) I mean, this door was covered in cobwebs, the paintwork flaking. Clearly, this door hadn’t been used in years. But there was a keyhole, and so I put in this old metal key I’d found.

I thought it wouldn’t turn – or else might just break with the effort – but then with a loud click it described a full revolution and this cobwebbed door creaked open.

A small cupboard full of junk, most of which was leaning against this door. Brooms, an ironing board and such. It started to all fall out as I opened the door, and I quickly caught several items before they hit the ground and made a racket.

I cautiously made my way inside. It smelt of age and mould. The broom, ironing board and such were also covered in cobwebs. I guessed nothing in this cupboard was ever used. Only a couple of paces on bare floorboards and there was a door which I was almost certain was going to be locked from the outside – the outside, that is, of where I was. Yet I tried the handle and again it creaked open; and I was in Mr. O’Reilly’s kitchen, which from the look of it had last received a refurb. sometime in the mid-fifties. Blue tiles, blue units, the lot. Then I heard him creaking along the hallway or whatever was just beyond that kitchen, and so I quickly shut the door again, and heading back outside also closed and locked the first door I’d opened.

There was a kind of large, ‘hollowed-out’ rock, for want of a better description, that I’d found in the woods next to the O’Reilly house. I’d started to smoke sometimes, and so I put my cigarettes inside this rock, ‘case my parents found them someplace in the house. Needless to say they were adamantly opposed to tobacco; but compared to what I’d shortly be getting into, cigarettes were nothing…

Anyway, work finished and the whole seven dollars or whatever the Hell it was I got paid received, I snuck over the fence and went into the woods. Found my lonely spot, fished out my cigarettes and lighter from the hollow rock, and lit up, lay back and smoked as the wind blew mysteriously in the tops of the trees, the leaves pattering down all around me.

I was going to be a writer, I thought. Either that or a singer in a famous band – the next Kurt Cobain or Jim Morrison. I felt wild and poetic, totally ready for the future.

I’d not yet any idea that I’d such a weak character, which would so shortly succumb to crippling drug and alcohol addiction, and so conclusively end any such dreams of attaining artistic fame…

…But was the key still there? I thought as I stood around the burning metal drum with the other drug-addicts and bums. I’d kind of placed it in the hollowed-out rock well over a decade before, and then… Well, had just forgotten about it. But now I felt a wave of evil intent rising within me. If the key was there, and I could still open that forgotten side-door with it. And if there was even a grain of truth to the story that that old bastard did have a colossal amount of money stashed away somewhere inside his house…

I’d find it. Oh, believe me, would I find it. ‘Cause I was hurting bad, and I needed a fair few bucks to help get this pain to stop.

I ‘made my excuses’ and snuck away from this exciting little gathering round the oil drum. No one cared where I was going. Not exactly any close friendships here. None of us had a life expectancy of much more than five years anyway. If the others had had any inclination that I had an actual key to the O’Reilly house – this fabled place of wealth and riches – they’d have tied me up and cut off my fingers one-by-one till I told them where this key was hidden.

I walked through mean streets and then into the closed-up shopping area. Started moving into the prosperous residential area –the area where I’d been born and brought up. Where my parents still lived. But no one could help me now – least of all them. I was on a path of total self-destruction. Whether I croaked now, in two days or six months’ time was all the same to me. All I asked was that I was high when it happened.

Which was where Mr. O’Reilly and his apparent riches came in. I entered the small woods next to his house; the wind was blowing, a freezing December night. I walked through the dark trees, careful of ankle-breaking roots and rocks. I’d not been to this rock in years but still I knew the way almost automatically, in this deep windy darkness.

Yes, this was it. I’d found it. I reached in and found not only the key but also an old packet of smokes and a lighter. All covered in cobwebs. Couldn’t hardly believe it when the lighter still flicked into life (cupped by my hands against the wind) and lit a cigarette whose tobacco must’ve been more than a little ‘green’ by now.

I let the smoke hiss out between my rotting teeth. Felt good. Funny thing was that the more I got into the real bad shit – meth, crack and such – the less I found I smoked ‘straight-up’ tobacco. Usually because I was just so financially strapped with supporting all my other addictions, that I didn’t even have the cash for a packet of smokes.

Anyway – I had the key. I crushed out the smoke, and made my way towards the wooden fence (it was still in place) dividing this wood and the O’Reilly house. I jumped this fence noiselessly and quickly – wasn’t exactly my first time breaking and entering – and then crouched down right beside that old door I’d opened well over a decade before.

If there was security lighting, it wasn’t happening along this narrow area between the side of the house and the fence. All I had to do now was to find out whether this key still worked, and then –

Well, I’d come to that if I actually managed to get inside this old skinflint’s house.

I put the key in the lock. Still fitted. Still turned. Made a little bit of noise, but the wind was howling now and so that served to conceal exactly what I was up to. I opened the door slowly, carefully – could hardly believe it when the cobweb-covered ironing board, broom and other junk started to fall out, exactly as it had well over a decade before. No one had been in this cupboard since the first time I’d set foot in it – of that I was certain.

I stopped all the stuff from falling out and entered into the darkness. Old, musty smell strong in my nostrils. Walking carefully, in case my shoes sounded noisily on the bare floorboards. I pushed the next door in front of me very carefully, so it opened just a chink. The kitchen lay in darkness, but outside in the hallway or whatever it was there was light, and I could hear the faint babble of a television.

I made my way out of the cupboard, walking through the kitchen and into the wide hallway. There was a large staircase of dark, carved wood opposite me. The floor was also wooden, with a number of rugs laid down here and there. A grandfather clock situated against the wall just before the first stair ticked the time.

The sound of the television was coming from a room that also lay across this hallway. I moved cautiously towards it. A living room. The curtains drawn across the windows. A large and comfortable-looking old chair was situated with its back to me. A fire blazed in the hearth nearby. The almost antiquated television set lay beyond the chair, its screen facing towards me. Some fat woman was singing opera. Mr. O’Reilly (I guessed it was him sitting in that chair, though I couldn’t see) was humming softly along.

I was hurting pretty badly by now. I hadn’t had any sort of junk for hours, and I was starting to shake and get the sweats. So if O’Reilly had any sort of money hidden in his house, I’d be getting my grubby little hands on it soon enough. That was certain.

I made way silently towards the back of the old chair. Soon I was directly behind it, looking down at the old, thin man humming along with the racket emanating from the TV.

Then – I don’t know if he ‘sensed’ me, so to speak, but he stopped humming and lifted up his head and his eyes to look directly at me. His rheumy grey eyes filled with fear and he opened his mouth I guess to cry out – but in a moment I moved around the side of the chair and grabbed his throat with one hand. With the other hand I covered his mouth. Had this been even a slightly younger, fitter man he might well have been able to resist me and fight back – I was in such bad physical condition – but O’Reilly stood no chance.

‘Where’s the money, you old fucker – where?’ I hissed at him, making my eyes wide and manic. But he just shook his head, and moaned something behind my hand.

As I say, the curtains had been drawn across the windows. When they were opened, they were tied in place with ‘ornamental’-looking red rope. I thought quickly. I dragged O’Reilly out of that chair, pulling him towards the first length of rope, which I wrenched free from its gold hook.

I pushed O’Reilly down on his front, his face in the thick red carpet, and tied his hands behind his back. The second length of red rope I used to fasten his feet. He was crying now, trying to lift his face so he could breath. There was a strong smell of urine. With one knee in his back, I lowered my head to say into his ear –

‘I said, where’s the fucking money?’

‘Please, please, I don’t have any money here,’ he was babbling.

‘Lying old fucker!’ I said, and started slapping him around the back of the head with my hand. All the time I’m thinking about how I’d used to work my nuts off for this asshole as a high school student , which in turn reminded me that I’d once been a young guy full of promise, and not just another hopeless junky, all of which was serving to make me madder and madder.

I pulled him to his feet by his hair, then slapped his face hard so that he fell back down again. He was crying freely now, a big wet stain around the crotch of his old grey trousers. I was pretty sure these were the trousers he always wore when I used to work for him, the miserable old skinflint.

He started shouting ‘Help! Help!’ so I backhanded him across the mouth and then covered his lips again with my hand. But his house was bordered on one side by the small wood, and it was a two-three minute walk along the road before you came to the next house on the other side. So I wasn’t overly concerned that someone might hear what was happening.

‘Where’s the fucking money?’ I said in the most vicious voice I could muster, right by his left ear. I saw that it was full of wax; surprising he could even hear me, really.

‘No, no money, none…’ he was mumbling, his eyes fixed and staring.

It was then I realized two things: Namely, a) he had money stashed somewhere in his house, and b) it was going to take more than a backhander across the face for him to tell me exactly where this money was hidden.

There was an armrest cover on that old chair he’d been sitting upon. Well, actually there were two armrest covers, of course – but all I required was just one. I pulled it off, and realizing it was a little too large for my purpose as it was then managed to tear it in two. I stuffed one of the torn pieces into his mouth – it worked perfectly as a gag.

That done, I left him lying on the floor as I stalked over to the fire. There was a poker and I stuck it into the flames, letting it get nice and hot before I pulled it back out again. I’d left him lying in such a way that he could see exactly what I was doing; and now I turned back round to face him, the poker held in front of me. Steam was rising from the part that had been stuck in the fire.

‘Which eye do you want to keep?’ I asked him, extending the poker towards his face. He gave a slight squeal – about all the noise he could muster, what with that gag being stuffed in his mouth.

‘For the last time – where’s the money?’I said then, as I pulled out the gag with the hand that wasn’t holding the poker.

‘HELP! HELP!’ he commences yelling, so I quickly stuff the gag back in. Then I rolled him onto his back. I wasn’t quite serious about putting out one of his eyes – but there were other ways of persuasion I could employ, to get him to tell me where the money was hidden.

I lifted up his grey cardigan, white shirt and white vest, exposing his scrawny back with its knobbly spine. The poker was still almost white-hot and I laid it for a second or two on that back. O’Reilly writhed and squealed as best he could through the gag; I again put my lips close by his waxy ear and said –

‘I can keep doing this all night, and I fucking will do, until you tell me where you’ve got your fucking money hidden.’

And I put the poker on his back again, the flesh searing straight away. He writhed again; the pain must have been insane, but I wasn’t joking – I was gonna get some cash off him, or I was going to keep doing this until daybreak.

I thought maybe I’d convinced him by now I was serious. I removed the gag, and quickly warned him to shut the fuck up when he started sobbing and begging for mercy.

‘All I wanna hear from you,’ I said, ‘is where you’ve got some money stashed.’

‘I know you,’ he starts babbling. ‘I recognize you now. You’re the Williams’ boy; you used to work in my garden. Oh, please – ’

‘Yeah, and you used to pay me jack-shit,’ I spat, once again getting so mad that I prepared to stick the gag back in and get busy with the poker.

‘Upstairs! Upstairs!’ he called out. ‘Top of the stairs, first room on the right – there’s a big white cupboard inside. Open it, and look under the floor of it – you can lift up the bottom panel. Please, please, dear God, don’t burn me again…’

‘Better not be joking…’ I warned him.

The gag back in place, I left him choking and crying on the living room carpet as I made my out into the hallway and then up that impressive-looking staircase. Emerging onto the long upstairs’ landing, I entered the room I’d been told. I didn’t turn on a light; there was sufficient light from the landing to see this large white cupboard. I opened it, and almost recoiled at the musty mothball smell emanating from the old suits and such hanging inside. What is it with old people that they’ve got such a hang-up about throwing old shit away?

Anyway, then I knelt down, and felt the floor of the cupboard. My fingers found the slightest gap running all around – a square section maybe two foot square. I managed to lift this part up and then I was almost crowing with delight.

Inside was a cavity stuffed full with bundles of banknotes!

I got them all out. I needed a bag or something. I quickly went back down and entered the kitchen. There were a few old shopping bags lying on a small table against one wall. I grabbed one and made my way back upstairs. I filled the bag till it was almost bursting. Still a few bundles remained. I stuffed these inside the pockets of my old jacket. I made my way back downstairs, entered the living room and walked over to where Mr. O’Reilly was lying very still.

‘All right, here’s what we’re going to do – ’ I began. Then I saw that the old man’s eyes were fixed and open, and a strong smell of shit was emanating from his body along with the rank odor of piss.

I didn’t need to make any further checks. This man was very, very dead.

I got out of that house fast. I’d not meant to actually kill the old bastard; I’d just wanted his money. I think I was almost in shock, because I only really ‘came to’, as it were, in the woods. I must have left the house the way I’d come in – must have done – though I couldn’t really remember.

But I had the money and now it was time to get real high. But I was hardly going to go downtown at this hour (or indeed any hour) carrying a shopping bag full of greenbacks. I’d just take one or two bundles of bills with me, concealed in my jacket. So I stashed this bag in a small, rocky opening that was beneath the roots of a massive tree. That would do for now; I’d come back and sort out a much better hiding place before morning broke.

Right now, I just really needed to get high.

Bad move…

Turns out I got so high with my new-found wealth that I’d absolutely no idea what I was doing – or, more importantly, saying. Apparently, I blabbed all about my adventures with the now-deceased Mr. O’Reilly to one of my ‘friends’ (whom I was also treating to whatever their fix was – there’s gratitude for you). This ‘friend’ in fact chose not to torture me into telling where I had all the loot stashed – but instead went quickly and quietly off to the nearest police station, hoping, no doubt, that by telling all about what I’d done they’d earn themselves a few favors, the next time they were caught doing something illegal.

As I say, though, I got so high that I don’t really recall anything. I only really ‘came round’ in the police cell, where I’d learnt that my prints had been found all around the corpse of Mr. O’Reilly. I was somewhat emotional, now stricken with guilt at having caused his death, and so I blurted out my confession.

Still, I might have got ‘off’ on a manslaughter charge. But Judge Timothy J. Green – we’ll end this part of the story as we started it – was determined that I was going to the chair.

‘Your counsel claims that you did not intend to kill Mr. O’Reilly,’ the pompous old bastard said at one point, sitting at his desk and controlling the courtroom like his own personal fiefdom. ‘But the jury may very well ponder exactly what the outcome of applying a heated poker to the naked back of a man in his late seventies, with a diagnosed heart condition, is likely to be.’

This blatant ‘leading the jury’ comment was not even challenged by the useless fucker of a defense attorney I’d been assigned. When I tried to take matters into my own hands, Judge Green just threatened me with being found ‘in contempt of court’.

Yeah, every which way that bastard of a judge was gonna see that I got found guilty of murder and so was sent to the chair. I’ve given just one example of how he set about putting it into the jury’s heads that there was no way I was gonna get off on a manslaughter charge. There were many such examples, all unchallenged by my attorney, who at one point even informed me with a weak smile that the stress of my trial was giving him diarrhea. That guy redefined the word ‘useless’, really.

Judge Green could barely conceal his smile of satisfaction when the jury found me guilty of murder. He read out the sentence of death almost with relish; you could see his pleasure at having another ‘dangerous young enemy of society’ entirely removed from existence. My mother sobbed, and was led outside by my father. (They’d attended the trial in the latter stages, and even came to visit me in my cell once, but we had little to say to each other. We all knew that I was no longer the person who had once been their son. They were now looking at, and talking to, a drug-addict who’d tortured a gentle, reclusive old man to death.)

My death-sentence passed, I was taken to the federal penitentiary. There I spent the next four years on death-row; in my cell most of the time, I was permitted one hour’s exercise in every twenty-four. I thought I’d be here for maybe twenty years – I’d heard plenty of stories about how long it took to get people executed – but I wasn’t much past my thirty-second birthday when I was taken to Ol’ Sparky and told to be seated. The wet towel went on my shaved head; my wrists and ankles were tied in position. A priest came in to hear any last words but I told him to get the Hell out. Cussed him down as a fraud and a charlatan – told him there was no afterlife or anything like that and that he should stop peddling his fairy stories to try and make poor bastards like me feel just a smidgen better.

Ha. Ha.

The only plus-point about this whole situation had been my last meal. Fried chicken, mashed potato and a root beer. As requested. I would have loved a six-pack of Bud’ and a carton of smokes to go with it – but that wasn’t exactly on the menu.

Just before they flicked the switch and let the electricity flow into my skinny body, I saw Judge Timothy J. Green’s face in my mind. The person I most hated in the world – even now, just a second or so away from death. He was the reason why I was being fried, instead of just serving a nice and easy ‘ten-to-life’ for manslaughter.

If I could ever get even with that bastard…

But what was I thinking?

I was dying.

I was dead.

I was in Hell.

3

Copying Hitler – and the X million other damned souls who’d been in Hell for ‘a while’ now – I got down on my knees as Satan’s winged form seemed to fill the entire red sky. Black smoke was continually being emitted from His scaly red body, His eyes glowing with a light that you could best (unsurprisingly, perhaps) describe as ‘unholy’. Two twisted horns emerged from either side of His head, and His laugh mocked all the doomed souls who commenced screaming and wailing, begging to be released from their eternal torment.

‘They don’t get it,’ complained Hitler under his breath. ‘There is no release from Hell. So you might as well just try and make the best of it.’

Like I’ve said already, I found the Fuhrer’s attitude to be, well – heartening. He may well have been an evil son of a bitch during his time as Germany’s leader – but now I couldn’t help but like the guy. Quite a lot, as it happened.

But as I dared to look longer at Satan, I realized something. He seemed slightly tired – a little haggard, even. He laughed and mocked all the damned souls, and the smoke and the glowing eyes and all the other theatrics were all very impressive, but… Well, if you’d have asked me, I’d have said that His heart just didn’t seem entirely in it – for want of a better description.

I had the sudden, ridiculous idea that He’d just been in Hell too long – and then wondered why I’d just thought that. This was Hell, right? Something with which Satan was kind of ever-so-slightly synonymous…

Then He kind of just disappeared. A lot of smoke, rumbling noises and all the rest of it… after which just the flying demons remained, whipping us back to work. Really, I found myself wondering exactly what the purpose of Satan’s visit had been.

Still, I also had something else on my mind. Something I’d been thinking about for a few years now. Even Hitler sometimes noticed if I was a little withdrawn or pensive, asking me what was wrong – and it took a lot for Mr. Self-Absorption to ask a question like that.

I just couldn’t believe that I may have found a way to get up to that tiny cave and… Well – possibly escape from Hell, I guess. I mean: found a way that no one else in Hell’s entire history had realized. Surely I couldn’t be the first…

Surely…

But if someone had tried ‘my way’ already, I’m sure Hitler would have found out about it. He knew so much about everything here, even after just seventy-odd years spent in Hell.

But first I had to conduct a test. It took some time to steel myself for this, as I knew what would happen to me straight after. But, there was something I had to check for certain…

So working alongside Hitler one day (or night, or whatever time it was – that scorching red light never changed), I called out quite suddenly –

‘Jesus Christ!’

Hitler looked at me as though I’d gone completely nuts.

‘Are you an utter imbecile?’ he hissed, his icy-blue eyes now blazing. ‘You’ve already paid the price for blasphemy – and now you go and say such a thing once again?’

It was strange, the way he was looking at me. A mixture of anger and… Compassion? Almost like the Fuhrer kind of cared about me; like we were close friends or something…

However, I wasn’t actually paying too much attention to that sort of thing right then. What I was really focused on as all the other damned sycophants covered their ears and wailed, as Hell shook and the rock walls crumbled and so on – were those flying demons.

Yeah, it was as I’d thought, but needed to see for myself just once more. They bellowed and roared fit to burst – those words caused them pain. You could see that. Serious, serious pain. A few of those flying demons even looked set to drop out of the sky, trying to cover their pointy ears with their black claws.

The words I’d said – Jesus Christ – had actually felt mildly distasteful in my own mouth. Guess I’d been in Hell a few years now, and was slowly beginning to get a bit more evil. Not that I was exactly whiter-than-white when I first rocked up here, however. Much as I may not have actually meant to kill Mr. O’Reilly, I’d still pressed a white-hot poker against his back – twice – to get him to tell me where he kept his loot…

Well, anyway, compared to what the flying demons did to me as punishment for my second blasphemy offence, a white-hot poker pressed against my back would have been a – well, blessing. Instead I was sawed in two from the groin upwards, nice and slowly, the saw naturally both extremely rusty and extremely blunt.

That was for starters. Then came the cutting-off of the ears, the putting-out of the eyes, and so on. The flying demons almost moaned at me as they carried out the tortures, basically complaining that I’d been in Hell long enough now not to make such stupid mistakes as the one I’d just made.

But all through my outward agony and screaming, I thought: Just you wait, fellers. Because I’m gonna be making one of you hurt just as badly as I’m hurting now…

Oh yes.

Anyway, the mutilation and such finally concluded, I was almost instantly made whole again. It was like being Hitler’s buddy had somehow conferred some sort of special treatment on me. I was definitely respected by those other residents of Hell who labored around me, and the flying demons didn’t even whip or bother me much unless I did something really dumb like shout out the voice of you-know-who…

Only that hadn’t been dumb – not like the first time I’d committed my faux-pas. On this second occasion, I’d 100 percent deliberately shouted out the name of old JC himself. Because I’d wanted to check how the flying demons would react.

And they hadn’t disappointed.

Now it was time for stage B of my plan.

You know, the bit where I got the Hell out of – well, Hell itself.

Oh yes, this was it.

But first I had to do me a little faking.

I let a few more months go past. Let the dust blow over from my second blasphemous offence, as it were. Deliberately wound up Hitler a bit more, stating that of course Winston Churchill had been the better wartime leader, as he’d not been the dumb fucker who’d a) lost, and b) blown out his brains in a fit of pique. If ever I thought that Hitler was going to attack me with his pickaxe, it had been then. But ultimately he just shook his head, and with as much injured dignity as he could muster said –

‘You are just a silly, spoilt little American brat who knows nothing about what it was like back then.’

He then told me some stories about his experiences in the First World War – about how he’d been temporarily blinded by mustard gas and such. I have to say, much as I despised what he’d gone and done later, I had to take off my metaphorical hat to him for being one tough son-of-a-bitch.

Finally, it was time. My heart beating so fast in my chest I thought it would burst… Ah – that was how I’d ‘fake it’. I’d not quite decided until just at this moment.

Refusing to give myself anymore time to think, I uttered a shrill cry and fell down to my knees, clutching my chest.

Uproar and hullabaloo. Hitler and several others clustered around me, demanding to know what was wrong. Then they were whipped back by one of the flying demons – as I’d very much hoped they would be. The demon leant its repulsive head in close to me, its breath reeking of decay as it demanded to know what was wrong with me. Because no one ever got sick – seriously sick – in Hell. However old or young they were when they died, even if they’d been half-rotted with cancer already, or had jumped off the top of a skyscraper and splattered themselves all over the sidewalk (yeah, suicide is a sin – just in case you were wondering), in Hell they still found themselves sturdy enough to perform the endless labor which being one of the damned entailed. The only real pain came from the torture and punishments dished out by the flying demons, although ultimately (albeit sometimes after several weeks or months, depending on how long you were being made to suffer), as I’ve said already, you always found yourself whole again.

One thing I haven’t mentioned so far is that before I’d got into junk in a big way, I’d been quite successful at wrestling in high school. I could still well remember a few moves. Plus, all this hacking at the rock-face with the pickaxe these past few years had done wonders for my previously drug-addled physique. (See? Guess that was Hitler’s influence – the way I looked on the pros, as it were, of being in Hell.)

Anyway, in a flash I was up and grabbing the demon around its thick, black, scaly neck as I hopped onto its back. It was about twice my size; there was plenty of space for me between its two wings.

Keeping both my arms wrapped tight around its neck, I hauled myself up slightly and so with my lips close to its pointed right ear said –

‘Our Father, who art in Heaven…’

The demon roared and began thrashing about, trying to throw me off. But, believe me, I’d never gripped anything as tightly as I was gripping that demon’s neck now.

‘…hallowed by thy name. Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven…’

A sickly, burning smell was now emitting from the flesh around the demon’s ear. My words were literally melting its skin; I was causing it the first agony it had probably felt in well over a millennia – since it had graduated from being just another damned soul to a winged demon, I mean.

‘Take me up to the cave way up there now, fucker, or I’ll keep saying this prayer until your fucking head melts completely away,’ I hissed into the demon’s blistering ear.

The demon thrashed around and roared some more – cursing me, basically – but when I began again: ‘…Give us this day, our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses…’ it suddenly flapped its wings and took off.

Some other demons were now flying towards the one I was piggy-backing on. Quickly, I warned the demon to tell them to stay away, unless he wanted to hear further extracts from the Lord’s Prayer.

Just those last two words caused more foul-smelling steam to emit from the part of the demon’s head my lips were close to. He (it, whatever…) shrieked something at the other demons in Hell’s own language, and they at once veered away from what had previously seemed certain to be a collision course.

I should say that as I repeated the Lord’s Prayer, the usual rumblings and such were occurring in Hell itself. All the damned shrieked and covered their ears, and as I rose further and further into the air I could see many hundreds of thousands of those wretched slave laborers, from all parts of the world and from all periods of history. A great mass of naked, burnt, sweating specimens stood against the endless red rock. And they were all staring up at me as I made the first ever serious escape attempt from Hell itself.

The cave was getting ever-closer! I tried to contain my excitement. I had to focus entirely on this, as free from emotion as was possible. One slip up, just one mistake, and I’d either be falling back to ground or else this demon would suddenly have me in its claws and at its ‘mercy’ (so to speak).

Its claws… Yes, that would be how I’d do it…

‘Listen up,’ I said to the demon. ‘When we reach that cave, you’re gonna grab the bottom of the entrance with your claws, and hang there nice and steady. You’re gonna be my ladder, you see, so I can climb up and get in there.’

The demon screeched and suddenly turned completely over, obviously trying to dislodge me. But I had too tight a hold, and first saying, ‘Silly boy…’ I then continued: ‘…As we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil…’

One side of the demon’s head was by now a bubbling, festering mass. Its pointy ear had almost completely dissolved away. It uttered a scream of agony it greatly pleased me to hear – and then pleaded with me not to say anything more. It would do exactly as I wanted, it promised.

Of course, once the demon was hanging from the bottom of the opening, I’d have to move fast. Satan was by now surely being informed of what was happening; he’d either intervene directly, or else order the other demons to pick me off this demon’s back.

So I’d scrabble up, threatening to continue the Lord’s Prayer unless this demon stayed absolutely still, put a foot on its head as I also put my hands on the floor of the cave’s opening – and then I’d launch myself inside…

A few seconds later, and I was doing exactly as I’d just planned. The demon hung there, panting and sweating, its great black wings hanging down.

‘Don’t try anything… I mean it…’ I said, my lips close to the fizzing aperture in its head that had once been a pointy ear. Then I was clambering up, my left foot on its shoulder, my hands on its head. The treacherous bastard began to push away from where it was hanging, realizing that I could no longer talk directly into its ear… I leapt up; my hands caught hold of the floor of the cave’s opening; I hauled myself up and crawled quickly along the narrow tunnel as the demon outside shrieked and spat in its long tongue, which partially wrapped around one ankle before I ‘kicked’ myself free and basically threw myself further along, out of its reach.

And that was it. I’d done it. The sandy floor of this long, narrow cave, and ahead of me…

I don’t want to get into clichés, here. But there really was the whitest bright light ever, from which there somehow radiated immense, profound beauty and peace. I crawled towards this light, crying now, a pathetic sinner who’d somehow escaped the one place no sinner was ever supposed to leave. The light spread out to me, engulfing me, soothing my burnt, bloody limbs and body and my tortured mind. I was engulfed in its eternal, infinite power; it caressed me, cleansed me… I was staring into that bearded face I knew so well and the kindest pair of brown eyes I’d ever seen.

‘Welcome, my son – welcome,’ said a voice that caused yet more tears to flow – like mini-rivers washing all the sin out of my body and mind. ‘You have suffered so much, and yet the fact that you are here is truth of all the goodness that is still in you and always was.’

‘Please forgive me,’ I pleaded, down on my knees, my cheeks wetter than they’d ever been in my life. The deep, kind eyes met my own and stared deep into my soul.

‘Come, my son – come,’ said Jesus Christ; and I followed him into the kind of place you can only dream about.

In fact – forget that.

You can’t dream about it. It was too perfect.

4

When I think of my time in Heaven, I always feel as though there was some sort of music playing. Faint, impossibly beautiful… It wasn’t the sort of sound you heard with your ears – more your soul, if that makes any kind of sense. Although, if you haven’t been to Heaven yet then it probably doesn’t.

Another thing about Heaven was how much more spacious it was than Hell. I don’t want to get into some clumsy routine about there being more sinners than saints, ha ha – but in Heaven you rarely rubbed shoulders with anyone else, where as in Hell it was difficult not to.

I and everyone there was clad in shimmering white. We sat on grassy banks beside a gleaming river and picked the impossibly gorgeous fruit from the low hanging trees all around. Occasionally an angel flew above, great white wings beating, lovely to behold.

Unlike in Hell, however, no one really gossiped. There was no Hitler here to tell me the way things lay. I sort of picked up that the angels were those men who’d followed Christ as his disciples before he’d gotten himself crucified, but that was kind of it. Whether you had to wait a few millennia in order to become angels – as Hitler claimed you had to in order to become a flying demon – was a mystery to me. Maybe there was no becoming an angel.

I’ve said already there was no one like Hitler. That is, there was no one I befriended. Everyone was charming and polite and all the rest of it, but no one struck a chord in me. Also, I didn’t see anyone famous. Just the meek and mild who’d dutifully done their time on Earth without fucking up too majorly, and so were now being rewarded with a little eternal bliss.

If you’re beginning to get the impression that ‘eternal bliss’ was starting to get just ever so slightly on my nerves, you’d be correct. I couldn’t believe it myself at first. Wait, I told myself – you escaped from never-ending damnation to the most perfect place in the universe – and you’re still not satisfied? What the Hell is wrong with you –

There. I’d thought of that place again. The heat, the endless rock faces, the cries of the damned and the shrieks of the demons and… The list just went on. Talking with Hitler, joking sometimes, pulling his leg at other times. Conversation with some other denizens of Hell I’d got to know. They don’t particularly merit a mention individually, but they were okay so far as people who’d been sent to Hell went.

So quiet, peaceful and still here in Heaven. People walking around in their white cloaks with that same funny little smile. One little guy in particular, round belly. Always seemed to pass me round about the same time every day. Looked as though he’d been a proper smug, self-righteous git in his day…

What was I thinking? How could I even be this way, here in Heaven…?

I’d been in Hell, I suddenly realized. It had left its mark in me. No matter where I was now, no matter my previous illusion concerning all my sins having been somehow ‘washed out’ of me by the Man himself…

I knew I was the first soul ever to escape from Hell into Heaven. There was no precedent for what I’d achieved. So who – even JC himself – could say how I’d now react – how I’d now think…?

It just went on and on, over many months and a few years. Inwardly stewing, outwardly adopting the same silly smile as every fucker resident in Heaven. Hoping my strange mood would somehow just vanish, yet also somehow knowing that it wouldn’t.

And that same little guy with the round belly, every goddamn-day walking past me with that smile I was growing to so despise. It was mocking me, I realized. He knew where I’d come from, that I didn’t belong here – every one of these self-satisfied, sanctimonious, smug zombies knew I didn’t belong here. Recently I thought I could hear them whispering, talking all about me, saying that I’d been in Hell and –

Finally, I couldn’t bear it any more. As the little guy with the round belly walked past me one day – there by the river whose water was so impossibly cool and sweet to drink – I sprang up and punched him in the face.

Instantly, Heaven sort of shook like Hell had when I’d blasphemed. Although here I at least knew I wasn’t going to get my arms chainsawed off, or something of the sort.

And so why exactly did that feel so fucking disappointing?

Yeah, as I’d thought, the Man himself appeared. Deep brown eyes looking all disappointed and upset in me. Lecture coming, blah blah.

‘Stow it,’ I said, before JC even had a chance to speak. ‘I want outta here – I want back to Hell.’

‘Walk with me,’ Christ said simply. But his voice no longer sounded beautiful or mysterious; it no longer spoke to my soul. But I’ll always appreciate, at least, the fact that during the long time we walked by the river, he tried his very best to change my mind. Everything was perfect and lovely here in Heaven – and that was the problem. What’s the point of existing, if you don’t have obstacles to overcome and shit to deal with on a regular basis? Challenges, as it were. And you certainly got those and more ‘down there’ in Hell. On the other hand, what the frig was I supposed to do in Heaven for the rest of eternity? Sit by a river, eat some fruit and watch the world go by?

Boooooooorrrrrrrrrrrriiiiiing...

‘Only one soul has ever left here, and – ’ Christ began.

‘Yeah, I know,’ I cut in. ‘And now I wanna do the same. I appreciate what you’ve done for me, really – but I don’t belong here. I’m just not cut out for Heaven.’

Christ gave a deep, mournful sigh. It’s pointless recounting our conversation exactly – that would take pages and pages – but he really had tried to make me change my mind. Now, evidently he realized that I was determined to get back to Hell.

‘Once you go back – there,’ said Christ, ‘understand you can never come back here. Even if you manage to get to the entrance you reached before – it will now be sealed off to you forever.’

‘Not a problem,’ I returned.

With another sigh, Christ sort of waved one of his hands and a mist appeared. Then I saw ahead the cave/portal, through which I could hear the shrieking and howling I’d so grown to miss.

‘See ya,’ I said, walking straight towards this rocky portal. I got down on my knees to crawl through it – and then there was the red light, the heat, the rocks, the legions of the damned toiling away with their pickaxes, the black flying demons whipping them mercilessly…

I was home.

Still, when a couple of the demons noticed me and started to fly up towards me, I got a bit nervous. I actually looked behind me, as though checking for a quick retreat back into Heaven. But there was now a solid rock wall blocking the path I’d taken before, just a couple of feet away from me.

I let the two demons snatch me from my perch. Although, there was in fact nothing I could do to avoid being taken one way or the other. With the two demons each holding one of my arms, we soared even higher towards the red, hazy, burning sky.

These demons were seriously pissed at me. Apparently (so they said), their buddy who I’d forced to take me up to the cave had been turned back into just another damned human soul, by Satan himself, as punishment for ‘allowing’ me to escape.

So the demons stated their intention to drop me from a great, great height, and furthermore to let me lie smashed and screaming on the ground for the longest possible time… I closed my eyes, bracing myself for what was about to happen, and then –

‘STOP!’

The deep, authoritative voice seemed to come from every part of Hell at once. I dared to open my eyes and there was the big guy himself – horns, smoke, scaly whipping tail and all the rest. His eyes gleamed as he pointed one gnarled, scaly finger with a wicked-looking nail towards me.

‘Bring him to me!’ Satan ordered; and then we were sort of flying through all this choking black smoke and suddenly I was in what I can only describe as the ‘boss’s den’.

He was sat on a great throne made from human bones. I thought it looked awesome. On either side of him were bubbling cauldrons of lava or something of the sort. I don’t know what they were actually supposed to do – probably more an image-thing than anything else, I guessed.

The demons forced me down on my knees. I could tell they really, really wanted to get me way back high, so they could then drop me down onto the rocks.

Well, tough cheese, boys. ‘Cause I now had me an interview with the boss-man himself.

Bite me.

‘You escaped to – that place – and yet you’ve come back,’ said Satan in that impressive voice of his. ‘Why?’

I dared to raise my eyes and look directly into his. They didn’t seem angry – more curious than anything else. I decided to lay it directly on the line.

‘Master,’ I said, ‘I much prefer it here. I screwed up in my Earthly existence, but here… Here I feel as though I’ve been given a second chance.’

Satan nodded, his eyes searching my soul to check that what I was saying was the truth. It was, every last word and more.

‘Only one person has ever left – that place – before,’ observed Satan

‘Well, in actual fact been banished – cast out,’ he continued.

I nodded, to show that I was familiar with his ‘backstory’, as it were.

‘But you,’ Satan said then, suddenly appearing rather animated, ‘you not only escape from here, but also return some time later. Do you realize no one has ever achieved such a thing before? You should be proud.’

‘I am, Master,’ I said, before I’d time to check the automatic response. But Satan didn’t seem to object to my vanity at all.

‘You’ve shown you’ve got what’s needed down here in Hell, just in the extremely short time you’ve been here,’ he went onto say. ‘I’ve been looking for… Well, a ‘helper’, if you like, for some time now. Someone to keep an eye on things.’

It was like I’d thought before – the last time I’d seen Satan, I mean. The big guy was a little weary, a little jaded. He’d been doing this gig since the dawn of mankind, after all. He had his flying demons, but they seemed to be more – how can I put this? – brawn rather than brain.

Put it this way – if I was a demon and someone hopped onto my back, demanding that I carry them up to that cave, and saying the Lord’s Prayer (spit) into my ear as a way to make me comply… Why, I’d just pretend to do exactly as they said – only to then suddenly smash them against a rock face as they straddled my back. That would get that little piggy-backer off, for sure.

Easy solution – yet the flying demon who was now just another damned soul hadn’t thought of that one. So I guess Satan was looking out for his ‘helper’ being just that little bit shrewd – just that little bit smarter than your average demon here in Hell.

‘Master, please… I wish only to serve you, however you see fit…’ was all I could say.

Satan nodded, and again pointed his finger at me. Instantly, I felt my body start to change. To get bigger. I was becoming red, scaly. A tail and two horns sprouted. I had wings. I was no longer burnt, hot, hungry or thirsty. I was immune from all human misery and pain. I somehow knew my face stayed sort of the same – enough so Hitler would know me, the next time we met – but I was now a demon.

A special demon. Satan’s favorite. Red, not black. Allowed to keep some of my ‘human’ features. Distinguished from all the other flying demons. And in charge of them. Answerable only to Satan himself – my Master.

Not bad going, considering how ‘little’ time I’d actually be in Hell!

‘Go now,’ said Satan. ‘Fly and become used to your new form. We will talk again in time.’

‘Yes, Master,’ I replied. The smoke appeared – and then I was soaring out, passing over the millions of toiling, naked figures, whooping and rolling in that red sky.

Then I went and found my friend Hitler. He did his best to appear unimpressed, but I knew deep down he was pleased to see me again.

‘Yah, yah,’ he said peevishly. ‘So you decided to come back, huh? And look at you now, Mr. Big-Shot – I’ll have to wait maybe a thousand years or more to become a flying demon, but you…’

He shook his head with exasperation. I actually quite felt for him.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘leave it to me. I can’t promise anything, but maybe if I have a few words with the right person, pull a few strings…’

Hitler stared straight at me, his icy-blue eyes shining with some sort of light I’d never seen before.

‘You’d do that,’ he said quietly – ‘for me?’

‘Yes,’ I returned.

Then Hitler grunted, spat and returned to hacking at the rock face with his pickaxe.

We understood each other. I flew away again – I’d return soon.

It wasn’t long after this that perhaps the most satisfying thing of all occurred. There I was, hovering above the entrance in the rock face – at ground level – that discharged all the newbies into Hell. It always has to be manned; often I just left one or a couple of the flying demons to it, but I liked sometimes just to hang out there, flapping my great wings for all the new entrants into this Kingdom of the Damned to see.

Then who should rock up – who indeed? That pompous, fleshy face; that little nose like a nipple in the middle of it… He emerged like the others, stark-naked, shit-scared, blinking rapidly at the heat, noise and light…

I’d only to look at someone to know what they’d done to merit being in Hell. It was one of my powers, so to speak…

Actually, one thing I should quickly say here… It’s not in fact true that Satan or any of his helpers in any way ‘assist’ people with any evil deeds done during their time on Earth – or that we somehow ‘lead them’ into some sort of dastardly temptation.

Uh-uh. ‘We’ – by which I mean Hell as a whole – are just like a prison, basically. With a mandatory sentence to last for all eternity. We have nothing to do, so to speak, with whatever evil crimes a person may have committed – we just punish them. So, looking at things that way, maybe you can see now that Hell’s been given something of a bad rep.

Are we really that bad…?

Anyway, looking at Judge Timothy J Green, I knew instantly (thanks to my Satan-given ‘super-powers’) that some indecent pictures of children had been found on that sanctimonious, preaching, turkey-necked old bastard’s computer. Charged and released on police bail, his life and precious career ruined, he’d then hanged himself in his garage.

So two counts against him – the kiddie porn and the taking of his own life.

‘Remember me?’ I roared at him, grinning and revealing my fangs as he cowered and held up his hands.

‘No… No…’ he whimpered.

‘Course he didn’t. He’d probably sent a load more people off to Death Row or just jail since between the time I’d been topped and him arriving here. So it was hardly fair for me to expect him to remember lil’ old me in particular…

But I remembered him. Oh yes. And now he was going to get the special treatment. Speaking in Hell’s own language (the ability to converse in Hellish had occurred exactly the same time as I’d been given my new body), I ordered two of the flying demons to take the honorable judge off to the torture area. In particular, I quite fancied taking off that repellent, nipple-like nose of his with a pair of pliers.

That would do for starters.

Then…

Oh, the mind just boggled with possibilities…

The demons picked him up and carried him away, shrieking with fear.

I smiled, and uttered a great roar of laughter, which caused the ceaseless flow of new entrants into Hell to cower and whimper.

Life was good…

Well – not exactly life as such, but…

You get my meaning.

The Mannequin

She’d moved.

Sure as shit she’d…

James Robertson blinked several times, scratched the back of his head and wondered if he was going nuts.

The cavernous store-room was situated right at the top of the shopping center. It was here that any number of things were stored, from the artificial Christmas tree that was several stories high, and required scaffolding to erect and decorate it each year, to the forty or fifty mannequins that were congregated in one corner.

Robertson had noticed her almost immediately. She stood out, for the simple reason that she had on make-up and wore a brown wig. She was also smiling slightly, and her painted eyes seemed to follow Robertson wherever he went in this large, silent room.

None of the other mannequins that had been placed tightly together were so instantly noticeable. They did not have painted eyes, or a wig, or that damned slight smile that seemed to…

‘Stop looking at me,’ said Robertson suddenly, his voice disturbing the stillness of the room. He’d been sent up here with a trolley to get a section of counter for one of the shops downstairs. Only he couldn’t find the section among all the junk that had been placed up here over the years, and this mannequin was severely freaking him out.

He’d first noticed her earlier, when he’d been sent up here to get an ‘On Sale NOW!’ notice board. This was his second week employed at the shopping center as a temporary staff member, and (by and large) it wasn’t so bad. Poor pay – always one of the disadvantages of agency work – but he was at least able to move around, constantly being sent to get or transport something from one part of the mall to another, and the meals at the staff canteen were cheap and tasty.

His friend Lawrence Gallagher, another agency worker, had been doing this job before. But approximately two weeks before Gallagher had just disappeared. Vanished. No one knew where he’d gone and he’d said not a thing about wanting to shoot through. He’d seemed happy enough, just another young man content to do some casual work and get enough money to be able to drink some beer and chase girls most evenings. He’d been one of Robertson’s best drinking buddies – they had a similar sort of humor – so it was fair to say that Robertson missed him quite a bit. Wished he’d get in contact, if only to say that he’d moved on someplace else but was at least all right.

It was also fair to say that Mr. Myers – the boss at the employment agency – wasn’t quite so concerned about Gallagher’s well-being. So far as Myers was concerned, Gallagher had neither snuck off somewhere to take his own life (for reasons of depression or such), nor had he been abducted by aliens.

To Myers, Gallagher had pulled his vanishing act purely out of spite; to try and damage the lucrative contract Myers had with the management team at the shopping mall. The team which often asked Myers to supply the mall with one, two or sometimes three or even four temporary workers.

‘I’m taking you off the warehouse job and assigning you to the mall,’ Mr. Myers had told Robertson in his usual dramatic fashion, making it sound as though he was being sent on some sort of SWAT mission. Robertson didn’t much care either way. Work was work, wherever he was placed. One of these days he’d quit fooling around, and would seek something more permanent – and better paid. But for now, aged only twenty-three, he wasn’t too fussed…

Really, that mannequin was looking at him. Seriously freaking him out. He felt its eyes following him around as he searched for this bit of counter he was supposed to take down to the shop floor. He wanted to get down there as quickly as possible. To be among people, noise… To be away from this cavernous, silent room with this mannequin and its painted eyes and its smile…

But had it really moved? That was the 64,000 dollar question right now. When Robertson had previously noticed it, the last time he’d been sent up to this store room, it had been stood in a certain way. Leaning slightly to one side, its head angled a little to the right. An elegant enough pose, on the occasions it was used to advertise clothing or such.

But now Robertson was damn-near certain that the head was inclined in another direction and it was leaning in another way.

Impossible. It had been placed almost directly in the centre of the other mannequins. So there would be no way of repositioning it without first having to move most of the mannequins out of the way…

And why? For what possible reason would you want to reposition it in the first place – up here in this cavernous store-room that was entered only infrequently?

She’d moved

‘She’? A minute ago he’d been thinking of it as – well, ‘it’, basically. But now ‘it’ had again become ‘she’…?

‘Stop staring at me, goddamn it!’ he almost shouted at the mannequin. He was stood perhaps twenty feet away from it on the whitewashed concrete floor. It – she, whatever – stared back at him, the slight smile seeming mocking but also slightly…

Alluring?

What the fuck? Was he starting to get the hots for a mannequin wearing a brown wig, for Christ’s sake? Sure, it had been a fair while since his last lay, but, come on…’

‘Would you like to fuck me?’ the mannequin said suddenly, her voice sounding low and alluring in the large room.

‘Shit!’ Robertson exclaimed, staggering slightly backwards in his surprise. The mannequin’s lipsticked smile became just a little larger, now exposing gleaming white teeth. Her head moved slightly to look directly at him.

‘I’ll do whatever you want,’ continued the mannequin. ‘Anything at all. I’m your dream woman – I never say ‘no’.’

‘You… I… wait…’ stammered Robinson, his mouth gaping stupidly open.

She seemed almost to drift through the other mannequins stood between her and the young agency worker. None of these mannequins moved… yet somehow she passed through them, to now stand within a few feet of Robertson. The wig no longer seemed like a wig but like real hair. The previously painted eyes sparkled with sexual desire. She was stark naked but had absolutely no pubic hair. She held her full breasts in her hands and moaned erotically as she stared into Robertson’s eyes.

‘Fuck me, James, whichever way you want,’ she said, starting to walk slowly towards him. ‘Do whatever you like to me.’

‘How do you… how do you know my name?’ whispered Robertson, a lustful bulge showing in his jeans. Something faint whispered in the back of his mind, urging caution, telling him to run away and quickly… Then it was banished by the strong sexual instinct. He was mesmerized, hypnotized by this brown-haired, big-breasted, nude, perfect woman who was advancing steadily towards him.

She cupped his bulge with one hand and it was his turn to moan.

‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘I’ll do whatever you’ve seen in those movies you watch and more… But first, a kiss…’

Her glistening red lips battened onto his own, her tongue entering inside his mouth. Her arms wrapped around his body. It was heaven at first; then he thought… ‘Give me a minute, here… I can’t breathe…’

He tried to pull away, gently at first but with increasing panic as he realized that she was holding him fast. He really couldn’t breathe, that tongue now seeming almost to touch the back of his throat, choking him…

He tried to lift up his hands to her throat, to choke her or whatever the fuck he had to do in order to get out of this viselike grip – but it was hopeless. She now felt like hard plastic; she was hard plastic. A dummy to be sporadically placed on the shop floor. A mannequin.

She pulled away from him and he felt a momentary relief before he realized that he couldn’t move. At all. He was frozen upright with his arms by his sides. He couldn’t even move his eyes, which saw her drift back among the mannequins, moving to where she’d been stood before. There was another mannequin beside her; and now Robertson saw (as he’d somehow been wholly unable to see before) that the face bore an uncanny resemblance to the man whom he’d replaced in this job – his missing friend, Lawrence Gallagher. And he saw that the expression in this mannequin’s face was one of frozen despair.

He looked at the other mannequins in his direct line of sight. Now they all seemed different to him, facially-speaking, except for one thing – they all had the same expression as the mannequin which looked uncannily like Gallagher. Yes, every single one of them looked the same – expect for the mannequin that was made-up and smiling slightly, wearing a brown wig.

Robertson couldn’t move, couldn’t cry out for help… He was absolutely immobile and incapable of producing the slightest sound.

He heard the door to this storeroom open. There came the voices of two men talking as they entered.

‘…I sent him up here, least half an hour ago,’ one of the men was saying. Robinson recognized the voice of Ryan Collins, who ran the shopping center’s stock delivery department and who’d dispatched Robinson on various errands.

‘God knows where he’s got t– ’ Collins abruptly stopped talking; then said, ‘Now how do you reckon that mannequin got over there?’

‘No idea,’ said other man, whose voice Robinson didn’t recognize. ‘I’ll just stick him back.’

Robinson was startled when, a few moments later, he was picked up and carried over to where the mannequins were assembled. He couldn’t feel anything in his body, which (he realized) was now, somehow, entirely devoid of clothing. And made of hard plastic. He was set on his feet, facing directly in the direction of the door towards which the two men were now returning.

‘We’ll have to get onto the agency again,’ Collins was saying. ‘Get them to send someone reliable – not like the last two jokers we’ve had.’

‘Reminds me of that guy who started working here a year or so back – remember he just suddenly vanished one day?’ remarked the other man. ‘Went off somewhere and didn’t even bother picking up his pay check…’

‘Weirdoes – the world’s full of ‘em,’ said Collins with a shrug. He let the other man leave the storage room first; and then just before he left, shutting the door behind him, he turned off the light.

There were no windows in the storage room. It was instantly pitch-black. Robinson tried to shout – to scream – for help…

But the sound was only in his mind…

He sensed her giving that slight smile, stood just behind him.

And then there was just silence, and darkness.

50, Berkeley Square

‘Hand of cards, anyone?’ inquired an owlish-looking man of his three friends, one of whom frowned as he sipped his whiskey and soda and tapped his large cigar into a glass ashtray.

‘Oh – stow it, Chapman,’ the man said curtly, the inevitable course of each evening spent at the club having begun to irritate him.

‘I rather feel that Freddy would prefer to be sitting in the cockpit of a camel again, risking life and limb over the battlefields of France, than be sat here with his good friends,’ stated a distinguished-looking man with a monocle, a little older than the other three.

With a gentle smile he glanced at Frederick Mills, requiring the youthful former pilot to give a reply:

‘Well, damn it all, Edwards, perhaps that’s true. I’m beginning to feel like an old man for want of excitement, sitting here each evening beside a fire, drinking too many of these’ – he pointed at his glass – ‘and playing interminable games of rummy.

‘What I’d like is a bit of adventure, or failing that at least a good story.’

‘Well, there’s the rum business concerning that house in Berkeley Square,’ stated a bespectacled and portly little man. He then sipped his coffee (he never touched alcohol), crossed his short plump legs, and gave no indication that he intended to explain the nature of this ‘rum business.’

Edwards and Chapman watched with amusement as Mills twitched with anticipation, taking several furious puffs on his cigar before he demanded:

‘Well, Manny, exactly what rum business? Come on, out with it man!’

‘Surprised you haven’t heard already,’ said Mannersworth mildly, as he sat comfortably back in the large brown leather sofa with his coffee. ‘It’s well known that no one will purchase or rent the place, and for one very good reason.’

Sipping his coffee again he looked thoughtful, and several seconds passed before he said, ‘You see, number seven Berkeley Square is haunted.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Mills.

‘I did of course expect such a carefully-considered response from your good self, Freddy, but do listen to the facts like a good chap before reaching a conclusion,’ asked Mannersworth politely, the tone of his voice nevertheless containing a faint rebuke for Mills’ impatience.

‘Go on, Manny,’ said Chapman quietly.

‘Well, the first, singularly unpleasant incident took place roundabout the turn of the century, and involved a maid who lodged in one particular room – the room in which, it will transpire, is literally where all the trouble begins and ends. She complained to the family employing her of things going bump in the night and so forth, and they of course considered the woman to be neurotic and so paid her no attention.

‘But they paid attention all right when they found her slumped on the floor one morning soon afterwards, whispering, ‘‘Don’t let it touch me’’. The unfortunate woman died two days later in hospital.’

‘A tragic tale, but I rather feel that the woman might perhaps have had some mental ailment which ultimately induced such a condition, rather than the causative effect being a haunted room,’ suggested Mills, as Chapman and Edwards nodded their accord.

Shrugging, Mannersworth replied, ‘Assuming that this is indeed the case, then we move into the realm of quite remarkable coincidence. For everyone consequently staying in this room has had such a malady.’

Smoke slowly spilled from Mills’ dour mouth as he considered this point. He stared at Mannersworth with his piercingly blue eyes, compelling the man to continue.

‘You see,’ said Mannersworth, ‘occupants of this one particular room have either died or been driven completely mad – and I do mean completely – by what they’ve experienced inside it and during the dead of night. There have of course been a few sceptics like yourself, Freddy, who’ve volunteered to spend a night alone in the room, ascribing everything they’ve heard as being superstitious rot.

‘One such man was Lord Robert Palmerston, who as you may be aware won great acclaim for his conduct during the Boer War.

‘Gentlemen, Lord Robert entered that room a stout and Christian man, armed only with his fierce disbelief regarding everything he’d heard concerning number seven Berkeley Square.

‘He was found dead in bed the following morning, his face apparently a hideous mask of absolute terror, his lips pulled away from his teeth and his eyes bulging fit to pop out of their very sockets. He’d quite literally died of fright.

‘Other occupants are either now lying in their graves or occupying padded cells, suffering extreme mental torment which even our strongest drugs can do little to alleviate. Death, it is painfully honest to say, would be preferable.’

A brief silence succeeded Mannersworth’s story. Each of the four men apart from Mills were secretly grateful for the warmth and light of their club, the waiters in white livery serving the patrons with drinks and cigarettes.

Tapping his cigar into the ashtray and looking greatly animated, Mills declared, ‘I’m going to spend a night there myself.’

Adjusting his monocle, Edwards said soberly, ‘It’s to be expected that you’d get a rush of blood to the brain, Freddy. I feel, however, that your short life might be unfortunately curtailed upon you spending the night in such a place. Let it alone, there’s a good chap. You beat the odds in France by not going west – don’t expect such luck to hold out indefinitely.’

‘I cannot believe,’ said Mills with exasperation, ‘that three men of such good stock as yourselves can be so obviously taken in by such a tale, which doubtless becomes more and more fanciful upon each telling. Good Gad, I’m going to spend the night there and a finer night’s sleep I doubt I’ll ever have!’

‘From what Manny’s told us it appears doubtful that you’ll ever awake,’ said Chapman. He looked with customary incomprehension at the former Camel pilot, whose blue eyes now burnt with his resolve to tempt fate yet again.

‘Are you familiar with the story of the Donitz turn?’ Mills suddenly inquired of his three friends, who in turn looked puzzled at one another.

‘You mean the manoeuvre perfected by that German pilot during the war?’ asked Edwards after a lengthy pause.

‘Yes: precisely that. You’ll remember that when Donitz first invented his turn no one could touch him – pilot after pilot bought it when they tried to go against him.

‘Now, without wishing to sound boastful, it was I who rumbled how Donitz did his thing, which suddenly meant that the hound was on your tail with his guns spitting lead into your machine. So I was the one who sent him west, and that was that.’

‘Your point?’ demanded Edwards with some irritation.

‘My point… My point is this,’ mumbled Mills, puffing at his cigar to keep it alight. ‘The amount of bally rumour that sprung up around that Hun and his dratted turn was quite ridiculous; even top brass began to talk as though Donitz could win the war for the Germans single-handed.

‘You see, every once in a while something out of the ordinary comes along and subsequently gets blown out of all proportion. But you’ve only to step back and look objectively at it and it’s no longer a problem; and that’s just what I intend to do with this business at Berkeley Square. Manny, my dear boy – you say that this place is vacant?’

‘Has been for several years,’ Mannersworth confirmed.

‘Wonderful. Well, I shall see about collecting the keys from the agents and spending a night myself in this little house of horrors.’

‘Room of horrors,’ corrected Mannersworth. ‘Only in one particular room has anything bad ever happened.’

He looked suddenly pained. ‘Look here, Freddy, don’t be such an obstinate ass. As Edwards says, just you let it alone. Don’t go meddling in things like this – it’s just not damn healthy.’

‘My mind is made up,’ Mills said firmly.

‘Yes – with concrete, one suspects,’ Edwards stated.

Sighing, he continued, ‘Well, as per damn usual there’s evidently no turning you, so I for one am going to spend the night in the house when you do, although not in that particular room. I’ll not be the one to deny that there’s something ghastly about this whole business.’

Curtailing Mills’ gesture of protest, Edwards said brusquely, ‘And that’s not for debate.’

‘I’ll spend the night there myself, damn it,’ Chapman said suddenly. ‘Freddy’s right, in a way: spending every evening at this dashed club is becoming rather monotonous. I could do with a bit of excitement.’

‘In for a penny in for a pound, I suppose,’ sighed Mannersworth. ‘I’m in as well.’

‘What good chaps you are,’ beamed Mills. ‘Allow me to furnish you all with another drink.’

Motioning a waiter over, he began to give the usual order when Mannersworth said to the man, ‘Look here, Smith, it was you who told me all about that ghastly business at number seven Berkeley Square. We’ve just been talking about it, you see.’

‘That’s true, sir,’ replied Smith, his broad face impassive. ‘And, if I may be so bold, sir, I’ll tell you a little bit more – just last night it claimed another victim.’

‘What, what? Tell, tell!’ demanded Mills.

‘Well, sir, two foreign sailors were apparently looking for a place to sleep, being alone and penniless in London. Reaching Mayfair they consequently came across the empty house, and so they made an entry from the rear and unfortunately decided to spend the night in that particular room. For some reason it was in rather better repair than the others.

‘According to what I’ve read in the ‘paper, sir, it seems that one of these foreign types was unable to sleep, and after a few hours spent tossing and turning he heard what he called ‘crawling noises’ coming from somewhere inside the room. He woke his mate up, the two of them watching as something black and shapeless reared above them.

‘Well, one of the men darted towards the fireplace in search of a weapon while the other took his chance to escape through the open door. He ran out of the house and found a policeman in Piccadilly, the two of them coming back and finding the other sailor dead in the room, a poker clenched in his hand, his expression hideous.’

‘Why, it’s clear as gin!’ declared Mills at once. ‘These two sailors had a fight, as sailors will, and during this tussle one – perhaps accidentally – killed the other and so concocted this little story.’

‘He’s being kept in a cell, sir; that much is true,’ stated the waiter.

‘Yes, thank you Smith. We’ll have those drinks now,’ said Edwards dismissively.

As the waiter walked stiffly away, Mannersworth shivered and said, ‘Freddy, I urge you in the strongest possible manner to forget all about this idea of yours.’

‘No,’ said the former pilot mildly. ‘After hearing this story I feel even more inclined to spend the night at number seven Berkeley Square, with or without the rest of you keeping me company.’

‘You’re a bloody little fool,’ Edwards growled. ‘We’ll have to draw straws on who tells your poor mother the bad news.’

‘Now that,’ said Mills with a suddenly grim expression, ‘is something I’ve heard said before.’

Upon realising his faux pas, Edwards turned slightly red and coughed awkwardly into his fist.

Due to the unfortunate business of the two sailors (with the surviving man ultimately being released without charge) it was a week before Frederick Mills was able to obtain the keys for number seven Berkeley Square, his eagerness to spend the night in the fateful room only increasing with each passing day. Edwards himself paid the trifling sum that was required in rent from the agents, having secretly become rather taken with Mills’ idea.

The four friends met outside the house in the middle of the day and stood looking at it for a while in silence. It was in disrepair, with one window boarded-up and the white paint flaking. A set of wide, crumbling stone steps led to the front door, to which Mills now impatiently gestured.

‘Are we going to stand around all day or are we going to go inside?’ he demanded.

Producing the keys, Edwards said, ‘Well, let’s follow this impetuous little hound to his death.’

Inside the men’s feet fell loudly on bare floorboards as they walked through the large and empty rooms; then standing at the foot of a sweeping staircase they looked upstairs. Of the four men only Mills’ expression was completely free of any concern, and Edwards, Mannersworth and Chapman followed his lead upstairs with reluctance.

They then grimaced as they heard their headstrong friend cry, ‘Why, this must be the room, and a more convivial place I’ve never seen!’

Entering the room the three other men could not help but agree: it bore no trace of the recent tragedy it had witnessed, being bright, spacious and for some reason containing a large four-poster bed.

Pointing to the unexpected item of furniture, Mills declared, ‘I’ll make that up and have a fine night’s sleep, while you other poor chaps rough it downstairs.’

‘And very welcome you are too, old bean,’ shivered Chapman. ‘I wouldn’t stay in this room or indeed any room up here for all the tea in China. It will take more willpower than I care to consider for me even to sleep downstairs.’

‘I’ll have my man Walters furnish this place with mattresses and victuals today,’ stated Edwards. ‘I assume, Freddy, that you’ll be wishing to sleep here this very night?’

‘Certainly.’

‘In that case I suggest that we retire to the club for a good meal, from where I shall telephone Walters.’

‘You’ll have to count me out, I’m afraid,’ said Mills. ‘I rather feel as though I ought to pay a visit to the library.’

‘The library?’ ejaculated his three friends, for there was scarce a less likely place where Mills could be expected to be found.

‘Forearmed is forewarned,’ he said cryptically. ‘I’ll see you chaps back here at about seven, shall I...?’

The four men returned to the house three hours after darkness had descended. There had not been enough time for the agents to have the power restored to number seven Berkeley Square, which as his friends expected did not concern Mills in the slightest.

‘Atmosphere,’ he declared, as they stood in the hall holding powerful electric torches. ‘It makes for good atmosphere. Now, might I suggest that we adjourn to the living room and commence a hand or two of cards?’

Several hours passed as the men drank, smoked, played cards and listened for any unearthly noises. But aside from their low conversation the house was silent, and at eleven o’clock Chapman yawned and said, ‘That mattress of mine is beginning to look damned inviting. I think I might just turn in. But before I do, Freddy, would you mind finally explaining just why you’ve two guns, a bible and a crucifix on your person, seeing as there’s nothing to fear?’

The room’s oppressive darkness seemed suddenly to diminish the light of the torches, as Mills softly replied, ‘I may be, as my good friend Edwards states, an impetuous little hound; but one thing I am not is a fool. Gentlemen, I am one of the few who survived daily conflict in the skies, and I achieved this by preparing myself for every eventuality I could perceive.

‘I am a curious mixture, with an adventurous spirit uncomfortably allied with one of caution. I have prepared myself for the forthcoming escapade by immersing myself in books concerning the supernatural, which provided me with information regarding the antidotes to the black arts. As I said earlier – forearmed is forewarned.’

Edwards and Chapman nodded solemnly, but Mannersworth was unable to resist a jibe at Mills’ former nonchalance towards the supposedly haunted room.

‘But Freddy, my dear boy – as you said yourself, it’s all nonsense.’

‘I believe no more in this piffle concerning a haunted room than I did before, but still –’

Mills stopped talking as something – a floorboard? – groaned overhead.

‘Dash it all!’ Chapman almost squealed, ‘let’s call it quits and leave this accursed place alone. Am I the only one who can feel it?’

The others knew exactly what he meant, even Mills. Their skin crawled as they felt the ominous atmosphere; the crawling, murky sensation of evil, of absolute terror. Each man recognised their own, deeply-buried fears resurfacing – fears that could never be shared with another person, man or woman; fears that shaped their very characters and behavioural traits. The sensation, reflected more than one of the four men, was akin to that of live burial.

‘I’m off to bed,’ Mills said tonelessly. ‘I’ll see you chaps in the morning.’

‘For God’s sake, man!’ cried Edwards, his hand instinctively feeling for the revolver he’d earlier placed on his person. He considered that he’d order Frederick Mills out of the house at gunpoint if he had to. Then he reflected that not even this course of action would force a change of mind in the exceptionally stubborn young man.

‘Goodnight all – I do not expect you to remain here should you not wish to do so,’ declared Mills, and with this he turned and left the room. The three remaining men heard his feet fall on the uncarpeted stairs as he walked up to the room.

‘He’s a goner,’ said Chapman, in a voice more dead than alive with fear.

‘If any one of us gets a wink of sleep tonight I’ll eat my hat,’ growled Edwards, which at least rebuffed Mills‘ suggestion that they might leave him alone in this house.

The strong beam of light from the electric torch picked out the fireplace – from where the dead sailor had taken the poker – and then the four-poster bed. Resting the torch on one pillow and putting his guns, bible and cross on one side of the bed Mills undressed, his jaw involuntarily clenching as he balled his socks and put them on top of his shirt.

Having ordered his guards against unimaginable terrors beside him he got into bed, grateful for the body-warmth that began to radiate beneath the sheets supplied by Edwards’ man for it was a bitterly cold November’s night.

Refusing to consider the dreadful fates of all the previous occupants of this room he closed his eyes, willing that he awake tomorrow morning pure in mind to see the winter sun coming cheerfully in through the curtain-less window.

Mills opened his eyes and everything was still absolutely black: had he turned off his torch? He could not remember having done so. Surely, he thought, there should be a little moonlight coming through the window and so infiltrating the blanketing darkness?

And the silence – dead, dead silence. No; it wasn’t dead; he heard something… A whispering – in the room or just in his mind?

Goose-pimples broke out on his skin, and he felt for what he’d placed beside him. The bible: yes, he could feel the bible. Touching the steel and wood of the two rifles failed to provide him with any reassurance, and he wondered if (as he suspected) loading one with silver sixpenny pieces to ward off evil spirits was just an old wife’s tail. And how, in this absolute darkness, could he tell which was which should he need to? And just where had he put his damned torch? He couldn’t remember.

It was becoming almost unbearably hot beneath the sheets; sticky, almost. His body must be dripping with sweat. Putting a hand under the covers he grimaced – he was pouring. But it was too wet and too sticky, and pulling his hand back out he sniffed it and smelt the unmistakable tang of blood.

Mills bit his lip to stop himself from crying out. It was his imagination, he told himself, just his imagination: there was no blood. But there was – he was now practically swimming in it. The bed must be saturated. And the whispering; that was growing louder, in his mind or in this room he knew not. He was suddenly able to make out what was being repeated over and over in German-accented English: Why you, why you, why you, why you…

‘Why me what?’ he demanded aloud. The sound of his own voice comforted him, dispelling the growing fear that he was fast becoming insane.

Three figures suddenly appeared at the foot of the bed, and with more effort than he’d ever displayed in his life Mills managed to choke the wild yell in his throat, refusing to voice his terror for he was certain that this would have given it fatal permanence.

They were men in various stages of decomposition, all dressed in German pilots’ uniform. One lacked his eyes, and it was he who raised a skeletal finger to point at Mills, saying in bad English: ‘I had vife, children. You grieve zem, shooting me out of sky. I vas but twenty-two.’

The second man, who had half of his green and swollen head encased in a field-dressing, spat in markedly better English, ‘They called you the ‘Ace’, didn’t they? Yes: you were an ace, alright – an ace at murdering young men in their prime, your arrogance never making you question your foul actions. You see three of us, but there are many more.’

And suddenly there was: a room full of horrifically injured and decomposing men. One had no face, just a mass of burned flesh, and from this horrific specimen came the growl, ‘I took sixty long seconds to die, the flames full in my face. Did you think of this, you, as you did your victory roll to show-off to your friends, laughing and saying to yourself, ‘Another Hun bites the dust.’?’

His eyes wide with terror, Mills vividly recalled that particular moment: the Tripehound plunging earthwards in flames, himself saying just that, his roll of celebration, only the cockpit harness keeping him inside his Camel. He understood that the pilot with the burnt face was Donitz, who’d given his name to a type of lightening-quick turn that had cost so many British airmen their lives.

Forcing his tongue to detach itself from the roof of his mouth, Mills carefully replied, ‘It might just as well have been me as it was you. I never extracted pleasure in taking a life, only in the... heat of the moment, one tends to divorce sentiment from one’s actions, and celebrate that which would normally be repellent.’

‘But not all your murders were during wartime, were they?’ said Donitz, and Mills’ assembled victims vanished back into the absolute dark and he bit his lower lip to stop himself from screaming at who he saw now.

The boy’s face was pasty white but the lips were blue, the eyes wide and fixed. It was the face of someone who had drowned.

‘You left me,’ the boy sighed, in a voice as cold as the North Sea. ‘You swam away as I went under for the third time.’

‘Tommy,’ Mills mumbled, his eyes becoming as wide as his dead brother’s, his face as white. ‘The current pulled me away; I had no choice. But for the boat reaching me I would have died myself; we searched – God did we search! – for you, but you’d gone forever.’

Forcing the terror away for a moment, he said firmly, ‘It wasn’t my fault. I was twelve years old and hardly a strong swimmer. What could I have done?’

‘Someone always takes your place in death, don’t they, Freddy?’ said his brother, and Mills bit his bottom lip and his mouth filled with blood as Tommy extended a chalk-white hand which shone in the darkness towards his face.

‘But not anymore. Let me show you – let me show you just what it feels like to drown…’

‘No… No…’

The touch was like ice on his cheek. Mills was unable to be rid of it no matter how he twisted and turned, unable to breathe and with a colossal pressure building up inside his lungs and his head. The bed remained wet and was now freezing cold.

Mills felt the covers close over him and he was sinking, sinking, his eyes all but popping from their sockets and his lips drawing back from his teeth in a death grimace.

Then, with the last bit of air remaining in his tortured lungs, he cried out in desperation, ‘You’re not real!’

Suddenly he could breath, as the covers flopped back and released his head. He lay gasping, his bed now completely dry. His brother had vanished and the whispering slowly diminished in volume until it was no longer audible.

Minutes or hours passed – Mills no longer had any concept of time in this imprisoning and absolute darkness. Sitting up he forced himself to consider what had just occurred, knowing that similar terrors – whatever was relevant to the individual – had either driven previous occupants incurably mad or completely destroyed them.

But he was still alive and (he was sure) absolutely sane. Courage, he thought, courage: he’d stared death and madness in the face for four long years during the war, with men continually coming apart at the seams both in body and in mind around him.

The others are just below me! he suddenly realised. I’m not alone! Considering that he’d braved quite enough for one night, he cried, ‘Edwards! Mannersworth! Chapman! Get up here now, damn you!’

But his voice sounded no more than a whisper in the infinite void of space; he was utterly alone and imprisoned in this room of complete darkness, as he waited as helpless as a baby for the next terror.

This came gradually; a scraping, crawling noise that gradually increased in volume, a shape blacker than black beginning to define itself at the foot of the bed.

And as Mills stared at it he was suddenly given the knowledge of the foulest acts committed by mankind in the past, present and future. He saw into a million corrupt minds and he uttered a hideous, inhuman whine, all reason fast deserting him...

‘Gun,’ he croaked, ‘gun.’

He was alive, alive and still sane: and he had to remain so. His hand stretched out towards the two weapons as he saw millions of people gassed and burnt, a race decimated; he sobbed as he saw a mountain of skulls stretching towards the sky; but his hand closed on a wooden butt and he pulled that particular rifle towards him, something deep inside his tortured mind praying that this was the weapon loaded with silver sixpenny pieces.

Mere lead would have no benefit against this enemy, and there would be no second chance: there were only seconds left.

His trembling index finger found the trigger, and pointing the weapon in the general direction of the black shape he fired. The blast momentarily lit up the area above his bed, and as the sixpenny pieces passed through the shapeless figure it retracted into itself and disappeared.

The horrifically vivid visions inside Mills’ mind immediately became hazy and dim. His head collapsed on the pillow and his breath came in shallow gasps as he gratefully slid into unconsciousness.

Placing a jar of smelling salts beneath Mills’ nose, Edwards said, ‘This ought to do the trick.’

His long face was grim as the grey light of a winter’s dawn began to creep through the wide bedroom window.

The former pilot regained consciousness with a start; momentarily he looked at his three friends stood around the bed without a flicker of recognition. Then licking his cracked lips, he whispered, ‘It’s quite alright – I’m not… I’m not mad, you know.’

‘My dear fellow...’ said Mannersworth. ‘What the devil happened?’

There were things… Mills couldn’t quite remember… His brother?

But his brother was long since dead. He shook his head against vague nightmares and slowly sat up…

He didn’t want to remember.

Edwards pointed to one of the rifles that lay nearer to Mills on the bed than the other.

‘Exactly when did you fire that rifle, hey?’ asked Edwards. ‘We never heard a thing. And just why was it loaded with silver sixpences? They’re imbedded in the wall opposite.’

Try as he might Mills could not recall firing the weapon, or the significance of it having been loaded with coins. ‘I don’t know… But you surely must have heard the report.’

‘Not a damn thing,’ Edwards reiterated, ‘even though none of us got a wink of sleep all night. We decided to come up here when it began getting light.’

‘I feel,’ began Chapman carefully – ‘I feel that we should leave this place immediately.’

Looking at Mills’ ashen and slightly bloody face (it was obvious that he’d badly bitten his bottom lip during the night), Mannersworth said softly, ‘You did it, Freddy, you did it.’

Sudden pride markedly improved the former pilot’s pallid appearance. Stretching out his hand to get his shirt, he replied, ‘Yes, I did, didn’t I? All the same, I’m not sure that it’s an experience I’d wish to repeat in a hurry.’

‘But what happened?’ questioned Mannersworth.

‘I feel certain,’ stated Mills brusquely, as he pulled his shirt over his head, ‘that were I to remember then I would go hopelessly mad and possibly die like those other poor types. Subsequently I have no strong desire to remember. All I know is that the fired rifle went some way towards saving me, even though I cannot remember actually pulling the trigger.’

‘And have you reached any conclusion concerning this foolhardy experiment of yours?’ asked Edwards, thoroughly relieved to see his friend’s fast recovery but disguising this relief by his curt question.

Mills nodded. ‘Yes: that this room is supernaturally fatal to both body and mind. The terrors it contains undoubtedly caused the madness or death of every previous occupant, as I am now certain that they were entirely compos mentis upon entering.

‘In any case, an exorcism conducted in the proper fashion by a priest would doubtless increase the agents’ chances of finally letting or even selling this place. Now, I wonder if one of you good chaps would oblige me in obtaining a taxicab, so to take me home to a much-needed bath? After that I rather feel a spot of breakfast would be in order, possibly at the club which, incidentally, I shall never again criticise for being tiresome.’

Buried Alive

1

It was dark.

I mean, real dark. Like pitch-black, can’t-see-a-fucking-thing dark.

That kind of dark.

Where the hell was I? Just what the hell had happened?

I tried thinking back. It had been around dusk… I’d been making my way back home, having finished a little job I’d been doing at a house nearby…

I guessed, from my splitting headache, that I’d been slogged on the back of the skull. Someone creeping up on me, real quiet… And now I’d woken up here, in this absolute dead blackness and…

Whoa – just back up a second. Exactly where the hell was ‘here’? No idea. I mean, no way of knowing when you can’t see anything at all, right?

So I tried sitting up. Thought maybe I’d get up off whatever it was I lying on, take a cautious walk, feel my way around – that sort of thing.

Only there wasn’t to be any ‘sitting up’. Soon as I tried, I banged my head on something hard. And wooden. Put the palms of both hands against it and tried giving it a push upwards. No dice. I felt the sides, too. Hard; wooden. A boxlike, rectangular-shape.

Can something be boxlike and rectangular? Who gives a shit. Certainly not me, ‘cause it was then I realized…

I was in a coffin, buddy.

I’d been buried alive.

And that was when I started screaming.

2

I screamed till my throat got almost bloody. Screamed like I’d never screamed before. Not even when I tried jumping that spiked fence as a kid, misjudged the distance, and put a near ten inch long gash in my thigh.

I was in the grave, Jack. But I wasn’t yet dead. Nowhere near. In fact, though I was coming on for forty-three, it was only these past four years or so that I’d considered myself to be properly alive.

That may sound like a funny thing to say. I’ll come to what I mean by that in a moment or two.

As for now, I’d finally quieted down screaming and yelling. Finally realized that wasn’t gonna do me much good, whatever the circumstances.

My hands were back down by my sides. There was just space enough so’s I could move them up towards my head – that was how I’d tried giving the lid of this coffin a push.

I felt in my pockets. Strange. Whoever had put me here had taken my mobile phone (I doubt I’d have been able to dial out for help – though can’t really say for sure, given that I’ve never been buried alive before), but had left me my keys and what also hung off my keychain.

A knife. Lockable, small, and real sharp. A useful work tool.

Straight away my tortured mind got to working…

Why the hell had someone put me in a coffin underground – and left me a knife?

3

‘Hello, Mr. Writer Man.’

The voice came so suddenly I almost shit my pants. Surprised I hadn’t done so already, come to that. It was a scratchy, somewhat distorted voice, and came from somewhere down by my feet. There was a speaker there, I guessed not entirely astutely.

‘YOU SON-OF-A-BITCH!

WHAT-THE-FUCK-YOU-WANT-WITH-ME?’ I yelled back, my nerves once again cracking. If I hadn’t have shouted, I’d just have started screaming and crying again. Cursing this voice was about the one way I had of preserving any masculinity I had left.

‘Have you realized that you can still breathe?’ asked the scratchy voice – a question that, perhaps ironically, made me catch my breath. I figured there wasn’t exactly a surfeit of oxygen to be had in a wooden box deposited who knew how many feet underground. I’d no idea how long I’d been unconscious for – plus there was the screaming once I’d awoken, the accompanying hyperventilating and all the rest of it…

If all the air I had at my disposal had been sealed up with me in this coffin, once I’d been deposited underground, I guess I’d already be dead. Might not even have woken up at all…

And perhaps that would have been for the best.

‘WHO ARE YOU? WHAT DO YOU WANT WITH ME?’ I tried yelling again – but I had to admit that my voice sounded neither angry nor even defiant. I was just a skip of the mind away from a real mental breakdown; perhaps total insanity. I was in my grave – still alive – and this harsh, scratchy voice was talking to me like it was Satan himself.

Shit, I thought, maybe it is Satan himself.

Just how bad had I been, in my former life?

Bad enough – I have to admit that. So maybe this was payback time, for all the harm I’d done. No matter how hard I’d tried to make things up these past four years, I’d not yet atoned for all the damage I’d done. I knew that already. So maybe I was in fact dead and this was hell. A hell for all eternity.

Oh Jesus, Mary and Joseph no, please. Help me, please help me…

‘You still there, Writer Man?’ demanded Satan or whoever-the-fuck he was.

‘Yeah, guess so,’ I replied after a few moments. I even tried me a joke: ‘Where do you think I’d have got to, anyway?’

The laugh that came back loosened my guts a notch more. It wasn’t the sort of laugh you ever want to hear someone give. ‘Specially not when you’re lying inside a coffin underground. (‘Scuse me if I keep coming back to that, by the way, but it was kind of preying on my mind.)

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said the Voice. ‘I guess you can go wherever your mind takes you.’

I’d no idea what he meant by that. (Yeah – distorted as the Voice was, it was still definitely male.)

‘Look,’ I said, trying to make my own voice sound firm. ‘Whatever this is about, I…’

‘You have a supply of air – for now,’ returned the Voice, cutting off my own words. ‘But this supply comes with a certain condition.’

‘Wha…?’

‘Tell a story, Writer Man. Right here, right now. Make it up as you go along, if you have to. Say it aloud – it’s being recorded.’

‘What the hell?’ I demanded, though my voice came out more as a disbelieving whisper. This was the third time he’d addressed me as ‘Writer Man’, though I was only really registering it now.

Tell a story? Underground, in a coffin?

Maybe I was hallucinating. No, not hallucinating, given that I was in absolute pitch darkness and couldn’t see a fucking thing… Calm, I told myself. Calm calm calm. Hearing voices – that was the one. Maybe I was just doing that…

No. I couldn’t escape reality whichever way I attempted to turn my mind. This voice was real. And I’d been buried alive. End of story.

‘I don’t hear you talking, Writer Man,’ taunted the Voice. ‘You better start telling a story, real soon.’

‘’The fuck!’ I yelled, my voice catching with a sob. I was dangerously close to hysteria again, regardless of how much I was trying to tell myself to keep calm.

‘Tell a story – the story of your life,’ said the Voice. ‘Else I turn off your air supply.’

There must be a tube going into this coffin, down by my feet, I thought distantly. There by the small speaker that was transmitting this fucker’s voice.

‘Why’d you leave me the knife?’ I asked quietly.

‘I don’t know… perhaps you can weave that into your narrative. After all, this story must end one way or the other…’

It was down to me to figure out what the guy meant by that, I guessed. Like maybe I’d wind up taking my own life, driven to suicide at having been buried underground in a –

Wait.

Who said I was in fact underground? In a coffin, almost certainly – but actually buried…?

A tiny bit of hope filled me. Just a slither. And yet that was enough. I’d been in tough situations before – like I say, it was only these past four years or so I’d considered myself living – and I’d got out of those. So maybe I’d get out of this. ‘Specially as this dumb fucker had left me with a knife…

‘Still nothing…’ said the Voice.

Strangely enough, exciting plots with strong characters weren’t exactly crowding my mind at the present time. Though if I didn’t start talking soon, I’d never talk again.

But there was one story I could tell.

Yeah, there was one. After all, the Voice had ordered me to tell the ‘story of my life’. Guess I’d take him at his word. I’ve always been a literal kind of guy, in any case.

And while I was telling this story, I’d see if I couldn’t get my way out of this coffin.

As I got the knife out of my pocket, I started talking. Real loud – loud enough maybe to conceal what I also now took to doing...

4

I was once a bad man. Not real bad – a murderer, rapist, pedophile or such – but bad enough. What you might call real mean. And I got even meaner when I was drunk. Which was most of the time.

Yeah, soon as I took my first sip of that beer in my teens, I was in trouble. Some people just ain’t made for drinking. And I was one of them – still am, come to that. ‘Cause even though I haven’t touched a drop these past four years, I’ll still always be one of them there ‘alcoholics’.

You getting all this, buddy?

The town where I was born, raised and still live (if I ever get back there) is a rough kind of place. It breeds hard men and women. Main industry is logging, in the woods that surround the town on three sides. Go too far into the woods and you’ll get lost and no one will ever see you again. Best way of giving you an idea ‘bout how large these woods are is to tell how, last year, a chartered Learjet crash-landed somewhere in them – and they’re still searching for the wreckage now. That’s how large the woods are. They can swallow plenty, and hold onto it for a real long time.

But on what you might call the ‘outskirts’ of these great woods, men are employed cutting down trees. That’s what I grew up to do, same as my father and his father before him. Learned how to use the chainsaw and the axe so to make the tree fall in a certain way – the way I and the team I was on wanted it to. No room for error in this job; make a mistake and maybe you’ll be missing a few fingers, your hand or foot. Maybe you’ll just be dead, crushed by several tons of hard falling wood. I’ve seen it happen. Weeping widows and fatherless kids at funerals. Like I say, it’s a hard environment for all concerned.

It was a job I was good at. Back then, no matter how bad the hangover, I was still the best man on my team. That ain’t arrogance. Just fact. I gave the orders, and the men around me followed them. If they didn’t do exactly what I said – and real quick – then there was trouble. Seemed I was always in a hurry; always looking to get work finished so’s I could get back to drinking in one of the inns about town. It was like work was just some sort of interruption to this activity of consuming alcohol. I didn’t even sleep much; just drank. Guess that was what made my temperament even meaner.

I had plenty of bar fights. Usually, I caused them. Often ‘cause of that habit I had of spitting in a beer a man had just bought, if I’d run out of money. Or even if I was flush, but just felt like doing it. Like I didn’t like the look of the man, or thought maybe he’d ‘disrespected’ me in some way.

What a lowdown, sorry piece of stuff I was…

‘Well, look at that – you won’t be wanting that drink now. Guess I’d better have it,’ I’d tell ‘em, giving them a smile and the hard stare at the same time. Some men just gave up the glass of beer and left the inn, cutting their losses – but others tried taking a swing at me.

Their mistake. I never fought by any rules. I hit fast and I hit hard, no matter how intoxicated I was. And I fought dirty. Once I bit a man’s nose almost clean off – they had to sew it back on at the hospital. That earned me a bit of jail-time – my first stint – but I was soon back out, drinking and logging, logging and drinking.

Some of the inns in town tried banning me, but that never lasted long. They’d call the sheriff to get me, if things got too out of hand. So the sheriff was called out plenty of times.

‘You can sleep it off in here, John,’ he’d tell me, putting me in the drunk tank with the plastic mattress. Drunk and mean as I was, I never tried anything on with that man. It wasn’t just the gun and the badge. Or the fact that he was about my own size and build – over six foot, and around two hundred pounds.

There was just this calmness – I don’t know how else to describe it – about Sheriff Parker. No matter how many times he ran me in, no matter what I’d done, I never saw him get angry in any way.

‘One of these days, John, you’re gonna wind up killing someone, the way you’re living,’ he’d tell me, before he shut that cell door once again. He didn’t touch alcohol himself; a clean-living man, devoted to his family, hitting the church pew every Sunday morning.

Yeah, we were about the same size and build. Even had the same type of haircut. So for Sheriff Parker, looking at me must have been like gazing into some real dirty mirror. Sometimes, I realized this. And it made me drink and fight even harder. But there was a poison – a depression – spreading in me, and no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t drown it with alcohol.

It wasn’t like there was anyone close to me. My parents both died early, and I was an only child. Women came and went – usually they stayed just for the night. Always the same kind of woman, too; the type who’d take whatever money was left in my wallet before letting themselves out of my stinking apartment, while I was still in bed snoring like a hog.

Well, pointless spinning this part of the story out too long. My drinking just got worse, and worse. Before I’d usually just got beer-drunk, but now I started hitting the hard liqueur. For the first time, I started to miss going into work. I had another bar-fight, knocked a man’s front teeth out and broke his leg, and got a bit more jail time. Then I was back, hitting the bottle worse than ever…

I wanted to die, Jack – plain and simple.

17 May, 2008 – that’s one date I’ll never forget. That’s the day I woke up caked in my own filth; I mean, everything. I crawled out to the bathroom and caught my reflection in the mirror. I saw a beast; a pitiful excuse for a human being. I’d hurt plenty of people – but I’d hurt myself most of all. I was a sad, weak creature, regardless of my outward size and strength. No one liked me, and plenty hated me; but no one hated me more than I hated myself right then.

And it was then I knew that I’d finally come to the end of the wrong road. I couldn’t go any further. It was time to end all this. I left my apartment and headed towards the woods. I’d just go so far in that I’d get lost, or else take a jump off one of the cliffs or gorges you always came across sooner or later…

Either way, I was determined that this would be my last day alive.

5

I couldn’t see what kind of wood the coffin was made from, obviously – but it was hard. Even using my knife, I was making slow progress scratching away at the coffin lid, at the same time as I poured out my life story to whoever the psycho was who had me imprisoned here underground…

But was I underground? That was what I was determined to find out. It felt good to be doing something; not just lying here in the absolute blackness, passively accepting that I was a prisoner.

No – I was fighting back.

Scritch scratch scritch – maybe the Voice could hear what I was doing. Maybe it was even causing him some amusement. The utter futility of it, I mean…

No – I couldn’t afford to think like that. I had to cling to this one source of hope, no matter how slim it was. Otherwise I was lying in pitch blackness in a coffin – with only this knife as a possible way of ending my torment.

Yeah, I’d figured that out right – the Voice had just stuck this knife in with me as a way of increasing my torture. He was one sick fucker, all right. I wrote stories that were ‘fast-moving’ and ‘thrilling’ (to quote some words that get used real often in the reviews left by my readers), but I don’t think I could ever have come up with a plot like this.

‘No talking,’ said the Voice suddenly.

My words came out sullen: ‘I’m thirsty – I need a drink. Water.’

Scritch scratch scritch – could he hear or not?

‘Finish your story and…’

‘And what?’

‘Just finish your story – I want to hear why you didn’t kill yourself.’

My mind cracked again, just like that. Seems I was having spells of strange ‘acceptance’, punctuated by occasional fits of hysteria caused by the utter horror of the situation I was in.

‘PLEASE, PLEASE WHY AM I HERE LET ME GO PLEASE’ I begged, my nose running as I began to sob. My knife had penetrated the coffin lid – and some soil immediately fell in on my face, through the small hole I’d managed to make.

I truly was underground. I’d been buried alive.

‘Start talking, Mr. Writer Man,’ said the Voice, through what I knew was a smile. ‘Just keep talking – this story of your life – else the air goes off. You wanna die now?’

‘Fuck you,’ I said in what was little more than a sigh. I lifted up my hand, and tried wiping some of the tears, snot and earth off my face.

So long as I kept talking, I’d stay alive.

That was, until the Voice decided that I’d said enough.

That I knew for a cold, hard fact.

6

So I’d decided to die. Just hadn’t quite finalized the details – like exactly how I was going to end it all. As suicidal as I was, I still didn’t really fancy getting lost in those woods and slowly perishing of hunger and thirst. A bit too protracted, that one. Also, taking a jump off a cliff top… Supposing the fall didn’t kill me? Just left my body hopelessly smashed and mangled, and in the most appalling pain…?

Yeah, even at my lowest ebb, my mind was subconsciously going into survival mode. Rebelling at the instruction the weak, pathetic, violent and alcohol-addicted part of me was giving: Do it. Destroy yourself. Because you’ll never be anything more than what you are now – a mess.

I’m still not quite sure why it was, but I was ‘bout the only person in my town who didn’t own a gun of some kind. I think, deep down, that I knew if I had owned a gun, I’d wind up shooting someone. And then I’d do some serious jail time – in a federal prison, not just the almost easy-going, county jail joints.

I thought all this through the murk of what would be my final hangover, that day as I walked into the woods. I avoided the men logging and went ever deeper into the trees. Still knew my way, but sooner or later I’d get lost. Looked like I was choosing the slow way to die, after all.

Soon enough I heard the rushing of water. It was the river where I’d often come as a boy. In those fleeting, glorious years before I’d become just another slave to the hooch. All us kids had been forbidden to go to the river – it flowed fast, and had claimed a fair few lives over the years – so of course that just made us want to head out there all the more. There were small pools formed by the banks either side, surrounded by rocks, that were good for fishing and bathing. Every so often me and the other boys got found out by our parents – and got the strap from our fathers – but that sure never stopped us none.

Maybe I’d wade out into the river, I thought now. Just let the power of that rushing water knock me off my feet and carry me under. It was wide, and deep.

But as I got ever closer to that rushing water, I started thinking I could hear someone yelling. A boy’s voice, pleading for help. I started walking faster – temporarily forgetting my own misery, you might say.

I emerged out of the trees (I’d been following a narrow but well-worn trail) and there, among the rough grass just before the river, saw a bicycle lying on its side. There was also what looked like a lunch pail, and just by the water’s edge a fishing rod and such.

The yelling sounded again. I looked down the river and saw who was making the hollering. A boy, somewhere in his mid-teens, who was clinging to a branch that jutted out low from the bank. It looked old and rotten, and sure wasn’t going to take his weight for long. ‘Specially as that rushing water – swollen by recent, heavy rain – was doing its very best just to snatch him right along to a watery grave. His body and arms were stretched out almost straight, his face facing mine. Any second now it looked as though he’d be forced to let go…

The kid saw me as I started hurrying along the bank towards him. (We were on the same side of the river – that was, you might say, about the one hopeful aspect of this whole damn situation.) Yeah, he saw me, and it sure didn’t do nothing to relieve the fear in his face. For this kid was Sheriff Parker’s boy, who knew like most other people in this town just what a bad-hat I was. He couldn’t be certain I wouldn’t just stretch my leg out and kick him into the water, just ‘cause of who his father was.

Actually, that last bit wouldn’t have been possible anyway. The branch jutted out almost ten foot, from the base of an old and gnarly tree that grew by the water’s edge. Straight away, I knew that any previous plan I had of creeping along this branch to somehow grab hold of the kid just wasn’t going to happen.

‘Help me! Please!’ the boy started screaming. ‘I can’t hold on any longer!’

I didn’t allow myself to think. Just shucked off my shoes, slid down the bank and I’m in the water. Straight away, it was up to my waist – and Christ, so powerful! (I don’t like to blaspheme, nowadays – but that’s sure what I was thinking at the time.)

I had to use all the strength in my legs, just so I didn’t get swept away by this water. The mixture of mud and sand at the bottom was treacherous, too. Soft and shifting, just like it wanted to suck you down and under forever… I grabbed hold of weeds, roots and such jutting out from the low bank above the water’s surface, as I slowly – oh-so-slowly – made my way toward the boy.

All the time the boy’s staring straight at me, eyes fixed in terror. I don’t think he was all that bothered about who I was anymore. He just wanted saving from a watery grave. I moved closer, and closer. Any second I was expecting the branch that boy was holding onto to snap or give way and for him to be snatched away forever by the water.

I didn’t consciously admit this to myself at the time, but somewhere deep down I knew that if such a thing were to happen to the boy, then I’d let myself get taken away by this river too. So this boy’s life was pretty much my own. If fate let me save him, then you could say I’d at least accomplished something worthwhile in my otherwise pretty failed existence.

‘Now just hold on there, son… Hold on…’ I was saying all the time as I approached the boy. Getting nearer… and nearer… And then just as the branch started to tear away from the bank I grabbed his right wrist with my left hand, my right holding onto a bunch of roots and such. It took all the strength I had to pull the boy towards me, and then to help hoist him up on the river bank.

There he collapsed, spitting out water and crying, lying on his back and staring up at the blue sky. Pretty soon I’d joined him, my chest heaving with exertion. I had a pretty good feeling; something almost like pride. Can’t say I’d ever really felt that way before.

‘Thank you,’ he murmured, turning his head to look at me. ‘Thank you.’

I slowly sat up.

‘Come on, son,’ I told him. ‘Probably best you get checked out down at the hospital.’

Well, they still talk about the sight of me coming out of the woods with Sheriff Parker’s son. A bunch of men logging were the first to see it, and a couple of them even made to go for me, until the boy poured out what had actually happened to them. They looked surprised, and well they might. John McCullough – a mean, aggressive, no-good drunk – had saved a boy from drowning, there in that river that was feared by every parent locally?

Wet as I was, I insisted on going right along with the boy to hospital. One of the men gave us a ride in his truck. I sat outside the room while a doctor checked the boy over, with a towel wrapped round me. Then I heard a voice say ‘John’ and I looked up and there was stood Sheriff Parker.

He cried as he shook my hand. He just kept thanking me. Pretty soon, I was crying too. I just felt so wretched all of a sudden, like I’d done this thing and now what? Go back to drinking and fighting all the time? Have another shot at killing myself?

‘Anything I can do for you, John, anything at all,’ Sheriff Parker was saying.

I looked straight at him.

‘Help me get off drink, Tom,’ I said, using his first name for the first time in my life. ‘Help me with that. That’s all.’

He looked back at me, so shocked by what I’d said that it stopped the tears like you turn off a tap.

‘Okay,’ he said softly. ‘Okay.’

That began what’s become a real close friendship. First thing he did was to get me going to church. Said I wasn’t going to be able to turn my life around without the help of a higher power. Yep, I let Jesus Christ into my heart right around that time, and I’ve been the better for it ever since.

After one church service soon after, before I went to my AA meeting in the evening, I had a meal with Tom, his wife and their son – Todd, is his name. I sat there clean and sober and said grace with them, passed the peas and watched what I said and thought. That felt good. Every time I felt like I might take a drink after that, I just remembered how I was capable of feeling human and decent for almost the first time in living memory, and that – along with regular AA meetings and all the rest of it – was enough to stop me touching so much as a drop of alcohol

I went back to logging for a bit, but pretty soon found myself working instead as a general handyman. People locally liked me now – it had been well over a year since I’d turned my life around – and, what was more, they trusted me. They’d go out for the day, to work or such, and leave me the keys to their home so I could put up some shelving, fix a sink, or something of the sort. So that became my own little, full-time business.

I was going to church at least twice a week – got involved with volunteer work too, helping the older folks and such, trying this way and several others to atone for all the damage I’d done as a mean drunk. But I was still sometimes at a loss for what to do in the evenings, now that I didn’t touch alcohol. I never was one for television; but after a while I found I kind of liked to read and then the darnest thing started to happen.

I thought – What happens if I have a go at writing one of these books myself…?

7

I fell quiet for a time, worn out with speaking.

‘Yes – and then what?’ demanded the scratchy voice.

‘Give me a moment, will you?’ I said irritably. Like I wasn’t talking to someone who’d knocked me out, taken me to wherever, buried me underground in a coffin, and was now in control of the air-supply that could be turned off at any second.

‘I know what it is,’ I said suddenly, sullenly.

There was a pause; then the Voice said almost cautiously: ‘You know what?’

‘The reason why I’m here – why you’ve done this to me,’ I replied.

I waited for the Voice to speak, but there was just silence. Dead silence. Almost involuntarily, I emitted a sob. But when I spoke again my voice was calm.

‘I hurt you, didn’t I, back when I was a mean drunk,’ I said. ‘Maybe it was you whose nose I almost bit off, or I smashed your teeth out, or broke your leg…’

I paused; then finished: ‘Well, buddy – you certainly know how to get your revenge, I’ll give you that.’

The Voice gave a slight, mocking laugh, and then said, ‘Come along now, Mr. Writer Man. You haven’t yet finished this story and time… Well, time is starting to get a little short.’

If he’d hoped to cause me yet more mental torture with this final sentence – this veiled suggestion that I’d shortly be dead – then he wasn’t entirely successful. Because this was the fourth time now (or maybe the fifth – hell, who was counting?) that he’d addressed me as ‘Mr. Writer Man’. And this suddenly made me suspect that I’d been way off in my initial suspicion, concerning who’d kidnapped me and stuck me down here…

Yeah, I think I now knew for sure who it was. Not that I’d ever met the man in person; but still, I think I knew why he might have put me down here. There was some sort of reason – no matter how screwed up this ‘reason’ actually was. It had nothing to do with anyone I’d hurt when I’d been a drunk; it was related to something else entirely. To do with part of the person I’d become now I was sober. Inadvertently, I’d planted the seed of my present torture right there slap-bang in the centre of my tormentor’s poisoned mind…

And that (strangely enough, you might think) gave me the slightest feeling of hope. I possibly had one card I could still play – just one. If it failed…

‘Continue, please,’ the Voice now piped up. ‘As I say, you have but little time left…’

Maybe you too, smart-ass, I thought. Yeah, maybe you too…

But if there was any hope of my plan working, I had to start talking again.

So that’s what I did.

8

The sort of books I enjoy reading are cowboy ones – strong but uncomplicated plots, definite good guys and bad guys, Mr. Sharpshooter-cleans-up-the-town type thing. You know, the sort of stuff that never wins no highfalutin’ literary awards, but which still sucks you in right from the get-go. I could give you some names of authors, but I doubt you’ve ever heard of them.

But, also, I like stories that are set in an altered present, or a future where mankind has been affected by some disaster. A massive solar flare, a nuclear war, a terrible plague – you know the sort of thing I mean. The sort of thing that resets the Earth’s clock almost back to the Stone Age, and forces men and women to live in something like a tribal manner.

Well, basically I kind of just mixed the two things up, right from when I started trying to write my first story. Did so on a computer, which was pretty much the first time I’d ever really used one, and also got myself hooked up to the internet.

Well, all this ‘apocalyptic cowboy’ stuff might sound a bit strange, but soon I was working on my book (‘cause this was what it had become – the wordcount just kept going up and up as the ideas kept coming) as much as I could. Still gave most of my time to other people and what I considered to be good causes – I knew I still had quite a bit of payback to make yet – but soon as I was indoors, I’d fix myself a coffee, sandwich or something of the sort, and get right on typing. Got so as I could type pretty fast, too.

I’d started writing fiction just as a hobby; something to pass a few hours on a quiet evening before I went to bed. But as I got more and more into my book, and felt myself beginning to come to the end, I wondered about the likelihood of it maybe being published. Send it off to someone – a ‘proper’ publisher? Try as I might, I couldn’t see what I wrote being accepted by anybody fancy like that.

But then, having done just a little research on the subject on the internet, I realized how simple it was to self-publish and sell your work as an ebook.

Mentioning no names, but I guess we all know what the biggest website is for books (both the physical as well as the electronic variety) – along with a whole heap of other stuff. And this website has a special program, just to help people like me get set up and get their books uploaded for sale. Can even make your book free for a few days, if you want, as a way of promoting it. Couldn’t have been simpler, or more straight-forward.

Well, I had a friend at church who was good at art. She designed me a cover; that was all I needed, along of course with my manuscript typed up as a Word document. I uploaded my book, priced it at a cent under a buck (that was as cheap as you could go) – and then realized, just one month later, that I’d sold almost a thousand copies and earned myself a bunch of reviews, most of which were pretty downright positive.

You might even say I had me some ‘fans’. They asked me when the next book was out, told me how much they’d enjoyed the first one, that it was good clean adventure, etc. Well. I was ‘suitably encouraged’, as you might say. Soon enough I got back to writing again. Seems I’d found my market, right there on my very first book. The second was pretty much the same sort of thing – if it ain’t broke don’t fix it – but still with enough differences that it wasn’t just a carbon copy of the first.

Second sold better than the first, I do declare. By now I was making a bit of money out of the sales – not so much, given the royalty of a book priced at a buck is about thirty-three cents – most of which found its way to some good causes. I was earning enough from my handyman business during the day; I also figured this ‘book-money’ could be used to help repay some of the debt I still considered I owed society. Oh – and I took the lady at church who’d designed the book covers out for dinner, as a way of saying ‘thank you’. (She absolutely refused to take any money, though I did try to offer.) In fact, we started seeing each other. No big deal, everything taken just nice and slow – and that was something else that felt good.

As I say, I received a whole bunch of book reviews, most of which were four or five star. (Five stars is the highest rating you can get, on the site I use to sell my work.) But there were a few negative reviews; comes with the territory. I was on a roll: two more novels (round about 50,000 words) and also some short stories. And it was about this time that I noticed I’d attracted something of a persistent critic.

His user name was ‘Digger’. (You ain’t telling me a woman calls herself that…) Seems he didn’t much like what I wrote – to put it mildly. Everything I published he gave a one-star review, using this strange, old-fashioned ‘Victorian’ - type language. (Really, I don’t know how else to describe it).

‘The author sinks to new levels of banality’ was the title of one review, given for my third book. In another review, he wrote: ‘…while attempting to read this appalling tripe, one can almost hear the creaking of the author’s mind, the bland recycling of already stale ‘ideas’ that insult and demean even the most undemanding of readers…’

Yeah, safe to say Digger didn’t much like what I was putting out. Seems he had a special bee in his bonnet reserved for me, the way everything I wrote got a one-star review from him. You know how it seems some people ‘love to hate’? Well – you get what I’m saying.

I had my army of readers read to leap to my defense, in any case. They’d mark Digger’s reviews as being ‘unhelpful’, and leave plenty of caustic comments below it. Myself, I never really bothered too much about it – until one day a few months back.

I’d had a pretty rare day. I was fitting a new kitchen for an elderly lady I knew from church, in her tiny apartment. The kitchen itself was miniscule, and every which way I turned I seemed to bang some part of my body – my head, mostly. Then, while pouring myself a cup of coffee, the lady’s cat shot out from some place and startled me so much that I jolted, and in doing so managed to pour boiling water all over the hand of mine that was holding the cup. I had to go to hospital straight away, to get my scalded hand checked over and properly dressed.

So I returned home that evening in a bit of a temper. I managed to calm myself a degree with a hot shower and something to eat, and then settled to do some writing. First, I logged on to my author site and checked my sales’ figures. All fine there – reckon about 100 copies of my books, in total, had sold just that day.

Then – well, I had a quick peek to see if I had any new reviews. You show me an author who doesn’t care about that sort of thing. Anyhow, seems I’d got me another one-star review from Digger.

‘Hackneyed and entirely predictable’ was how he referred to the latest book I’d self-published. ‘A dismal, blatant attempt to conform with the current ‘prepper’ fiction trend; the sad thing is, there are enough undemanding ‘readers’ (one uses the word loosely) who will spend hard-earned money on this type of bilge…’

And so it went on. I should have ignored it, perhaps even laughed it off, just like I had every other time. But on this occasion – maybe because of the day I’d had – it got me riled. So for the first time, I replied back to the guy –

Let’s face it, buddy (I wrote as a comment to his ‘review’), the only story of mine you’re gonna want to hear is the one where I’m in my grave.

Yeah, it was a stupid thing to write – didn’t even really make that much sense – and by the time I’d cooled down a few hours later, I went back to delete it. And I found that Digger had replied with –

Challenge accepted.

Well, whatever that meant. But still, I think – I really do – that even Digger would have enjoyed my next book. For months now I’d been contemplating it, planning it. I’d even had to re-jig parts of world history in order to accommodate its sheer size and scope. American virtually destroyed by a nuclear war with Iran; Europe now a communist super-state. Yeah, it was sure shaping up to be something. When I thought about that book, actually, I almost thought Digger had been right. Because compared to what I was next set to write and publish, my other books seemed ridiculously childish. This was gonna be it, Jack – my first number one.

Basically, my new book would start with –

9

I abruptly stopped talking about this alleged ‘new book’ of mine. I gave several loud gasps, and banged on the lid of the coffin.

‘Hey!’ I shouted. ‘HEY! Turn the air back on!’

There was silence; then the Voice came. For the first time he sounded irritated, confused.

‘The air is on,’ he said. ‘So tell me more about this –’

‘Oh please, oh shit, please don’t let me die here,’ I pleaded, tears starting to flow real easy. Didn’t have to do much faking there. ‘I can’t breathe; oh sweet Jesus, I can’t fucking breathe!’

‘The air’s on!’ returned the Voice, now real agitated. ‘Continue with what you were saying or – ’

I hammered hard as I could on the inside of the coffin with my hands and feet. I screamed and shouted, begging for help – for mercy. Then slowly my blows got weaker, and my voice faded away. The last thing I said, almost in a whisper, was –

‘You son of a…’

And that was it. Just silence and blackness left.

‘No,’ came the Voice, now kind of breathless and distressed. Gone entirely was the sort of mocking tone of before. ‘No no no – the story, and… You need to know who put you here, and why, before you die…’

I know full-damn-well ‘who’ put me here and ‘why’, you dumb son of a bitch I thought to myself. But the Voice – or ‘Digger’, as I should call this psycho – hadn’t yet had the satisfaction of telling me all this himself. All he knew was that I’d apparently died thinking that someone I’d hurt in a barroom fight had been the cause of my demise. And he didn’t like that at all.

Also, for whatever reason, I think Digger had been hoping I might say a bit more about this supposed new story of mine. Which, strangely enough, had had one hell of a build up right before I’d suddenly started screaming that the air supply had stopped…

Kind of left things on a cliffhanger, as it were…

Actually, I thought I’d blown it when I mentioned about the comment I’d made on Digger’s review of my book – and the comment Digger had then posted in reply. But I don’t think he had a real high opinion of my intellect, and I’d quickly blundered on like somehow I didn’t get any ‘link’ between the silly comment I’d made about how Digger would only like the story of me being in my grave and that comment he’d posted straight back: Challenge accepted.

And I’d flattered him; stroked him just ever so slightly. Made out like I almost kind of agreed with what he’d said about the stories I’d self-published. I figured that would help my last, desperate plan just a little bit more.

And now he thought I was dead or unconscious or something and that was causing the certified nut-ball immense mental distress. Good; that was the one card I had left to play. That he’d get so angry or upset that he’d…

Doubt suddenly overwhelmed me and threatened to make me cry out in real, final despair. It was so, so quiet – what if he’d just turned off the speaker? Just shrugged and cut his losses, as it were, slightly confused about the air supply randomly cutting off but not really all that concerned? Like he’d had his sick bit of fun, but was mildly annoyed that it hadn’t lasted all the way right to the end… That is, when he’d finally planned to announce that I’d told him all he wished to hear and so was now turning off the air, as he then laughed at my screams, and reminded me that I still had my knife if I wanted to end my own life just that little bit quicker…

…I don’t know how long I was laying there for, thinking such thoughts while my ears all the time strained for any noise – from above. That was my one, solitary hope; my plan, you might say. Namely, that Digger would be so enraged by my premature suffocation that the son of a bitch would actually come and dig me up…

Comeoncomeoncomeoncomeoncomeoncomeon…

Pleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease…

Wait… Yes, there was a faint, muffled noise from above! Oh, dear God –

please! Tears streamed from my eyes, and I fought to control my breathing. It was the sound – still very faint – of something being repeatedly stuck into the ground. Yes – YES! Digger was living up to his name, and was wielding a spade for all he was worth.

And when I got a hold of that piece of –

Watch it now the very toughest, most resilient part of my character instructed the rest of me. It’s not over yet – you make the slightest bit of noise, and you’re done for. He’ll hear and know you’re shamming. He’ll fill your grave back in and go back to wherever he’s been sitting and laugh at your final screams. So you just lie nice and still like you’re real dead. Don’t even think any more than you need to. But then once that coffin lid gets lifted off, you just move as fast and as hard as you ever have in your life…

OK, got it, the rest of me replied in confirmation.

Darkness. The wmph of a spade being stuck in the earth, again and again. Slowly getting louder. The earth must still be loose from where he’d filled my grave in – however many hours before. Day or night up there above? No way of knowing. Please dear God I was soon to find out.

Then I thought – supposing Digger had some sort of weapon on him? A gun, perhaps? I didn’t want to spring out of my coffin the moment the lid got opened, only for him to blast me back down again. Or perhaps cleave my skull open with that spade of his.

Suddenly I knew what I had to do. Play dead. Easy. He thought I was dead, unless he had some insane idea that maybe he could resuscitate me for round-two of his exquisite torture. Yeah – that was probably more like it.

The spade was suddenly scraping on the coffin lid. I almost gave a scream of fear, exhilaration – I don’t know what. I fought back a wild urge to beat on the inside of the lid – perhaps it wasn’t even nailed shut… But if it was, and he heard… And if I then heard my grave being filled back in, I knew that would be the end of me. I’d just go hopelessly mad. I’d had just as much as I could take of all this…

Play dead that tough side of me reminded, almost irritably. I twisted over as much as I could on one side, let my mouth fall open in a silent scream and fixed my eyes real wide. He’d expect to see as much when he opened that lid.

Oh Christ please please please open that lid.

Yes, yes – I felt the first, tentative touch of the wind on my face! Creeping in through the tiniest gap as Digger began cautiously to lift up the lid… Let me tell you, no woman’s touch was ever better than how that breeze felt, blowing right into my coffin. (Incidentally, the hole I’d made earlier with my knife must have got clogged up with earth. Either way, it wasn’t letting in any light or air.)

Then the lift was right off, and the wind and the rain were blowing fully in. I didn’t dare move my eyes, which were fixed focused on the side of the coffin. It was dark, nighttime; Digger was above me.

‘You son of a bitch damn bastard!’ he was crying out. (Actually, his voice didn’t sound so much different than it had coming out of that speaker – like he’d a problem with his throat, or something of the sort.)

He grabbed the collars of my jacket, and hauled me straight up. He was strong, all right. For a few seconds more, I just played nice and floppy and dead.

‘You don’t die yet, no you don’t, not just yet – ’

‘Fuck you!’ I yelled, gritting my teeth as I swung my head round to face him, my hands going straight for his throat. ‘Fuck you, you sick bastard!’

I was almost screaming now, the rain and my own tears virtually blinding me as I did my very best to strangle that man. But still I got a quick glimpse of him; and some distant part of my mind realized something even as we fought…

I’d seen him before. Sure as shit I’d seen this asshole already. Just a few days before. That long, lank blond hair, cut crooked above a low brow, below which were two bulging brown eyes – almost like those of a horse, I remembered thinking at the time. Strange-looking fella, with a sort of hunchback and a crouched-over way of walking.

‘Hey buddy,’ he’d said to me, as I passed him while walking back from the store one morning. ‘Recommend somewhere good to eat?’

I’d pointed him in the direction of a café owned by a friend of mine, just two minutes’ distance away, and he seemed to peer at me just a bit too intently before he said ‘Thanks, buddy’ and walked away. Still, I forgot about that encounter almost straight away. Just figured him for being a bit of an oddball…

Now, I gave a cry of despair as I realized I had – finally – met my physical match. Oh boy, had I just. Because Digger was just almost (how can I best put this?) supernaturally strong; and as he pushed me back down into my coffin, my hands losing their hold on his throat, he hissed –

‘I’ll fill you back in, Writer-Man, and dance on your grave as you lie screaming…’

Yeah, I was giving him about as much trouble as an exasperated toddler gives its father. I figured this guy could carry a coffin – fully loaded up with a corpse – on each goddamn shoulder. Now I was reduced to desperately unloading punches into his right forearm – the one whose hand was keeping me pinned down by the throat in my coffin, and his left hand started to get a hold of the lid.

Yeah, left and right I was punching away at that damn forearm– and I told you before about the damage those punches of mine had done in the past… But they were having no effect now; that thick forearm of his might just as well have been made from iron.

Oh sweet Jesus – he was lifting up the coffin lid with his left hand now. My sight was starting to swim with the pressure he was exerting on my throat with his right; I figured he’d choke me half unconscious; then, while I wasn’t really able to do much, stuff the lid on top and maybe nail it tight shut…

The moon was above me – so bright, clear and beautiful. And this was the last time I’d ever see it. I gave a wretched cry of despair, of utter defeated agony –

And then I remembered.

I had that knife on my keychain. Lying down there by my right thigh.

And it was still open, from where I’d used it earlier.

How much earlier?

Although he was still in my coffin – kind of ‘kneeling’ on my legs – Digger had the lid almost ‘lined up’ alongside, as it were. At the very last moment, he’d scrabble aside and drop the lid before sitting back down upon it. And I’d be screaming and hollering inside, and that would be that.

But just before that could happen – and I still break out into a cold sweat now when I realize there truly was just a second or two to spare – I grabbed the knife and stuck it hard into that fucking forearm.

I’m almost ashamed to say that hearing that son of a bitch shriek like a stuck pig is still one of the most thrilling and exhilarating moments of my life.

And then I went briefly insane. Soon as that hand let go of my throat I was up and just sticking that knife in over and over again. Crying and screaming, yelling curses at Digger as he fell back, desperately holding up his hands in a useless bid to stop my frenzied attack.

I only stopped when the knife went into his jugular and blood sprayed out right into my face. I dropped the weapon, my keys, and covered my face and cried.

When I took my hands away Digger was lying on his crooked back, half in the coffin and half propped up against one side of the hole he’d dug. His bulging eyes were fully open and he was dead. He’d bled right out; I doubt there was anything more than a drop of blood still left in him.

I picked up my keys and then clawed my way up to ground level, fingers and feet scrabbling for purchase in the wet soil. I was about five feet down, I reckon. As I got to the top, I saw that Digger must have thrown the spade out of the hole right before he’d got to raising up the lid.

And that was that. I’d climbed out of my grave. I don’t think there’re too many people who can make a similar claim to that one.

The moon was still big and bold and bright. It illuminated rows of old graves and tombs running away from me on all sides, many of these graves and tombs with their headstones collapsed at an angle. A few statues here and there; an angel with its hands placed together, that sort of thing. An odd, stunted tree. Seems as though I was right in the depths of what was truly a sprawling graveyard.

It was raining fiercely and I held out my arms and stared up at the dark sky and let the water wash away the blood and soil and snot and tears from my face.

The howling wind whipped and tore at me as the clouds raced across the sky and I laughed like a maniac.

I laughed a long time.

10

When the hysteria had passed I walked away from my grave. I’d no idea where I was headed. The lines of tombs and headstones just spread away from me on all sides. The rain continued to beat down but I didn’t mind in the slightest. It was just one of several things reminding me I was alive.

Then I saw something lit up ahead of me. As I got closer I saw that this was a hut with a couple of curtain-less windows, sited close to a set of wrought-iron gates that were chained shut. A road ran away from these gates – one of several I’d seen that cut through the graveyard.

The door of the hut was closed but not locked. I pushed it open. There was a room with a flickering computer and a neatly-made bed nearby. A speaker on the floor, and right beside that a metal cylinder and a box with a flickering needle on its front.

Holy Hannah I thought. Digger, you sure went to some trouble to put me underground.

Yeah – I guessed that cylinder had been my air supply, from when I’d been laid out there in my coffin. Also there was a microphone on the small desk, right there before the computer. As I say, Digger must have done a lot of preparation before he’d put me in the ground. Dug up a whole lot of earth, so to get that pipe and those wires laid.

There’s no mystery as to how Digger tracked me down. Might as well say that now. Because the ‘author biography’ on the internet site I use to sell my books states proudly the town where I live, the church where I pray, and even has a photo showing me standing outside the clock-tower in the town square. So any old psycho who wishes to kidnap me and then bury me alive not only has the name of the place where I live, but also a photo of me to boot – just to assist them in tracking me down, as it were.

There was the time and date on the computer: I guessed I’d been buried alive for almost twenty-four hours.

I took more notice of the interior of the hut I was stood in. So there was a computer and a single bed in the place. Also a chair in the corner, with a rug thrown over it. A room with a toilet and a shower, and a tiny kitchenette. That was about it. The place was so ordered and neat that I wondered if Digger hadn’t been in the military or something.

First things first. I went in and used that toilet. Yeah, I was kinda desperate by now, you might say. Was also pleased I’d voided neither my bladder nor my bowels during my stay underground.

Then I turned my attention fully on the computer. I sat down on the chair in front of it, my hair still dripping from the rain outside. ‘Word’ had been opened up: on the screen I saw written: America has been largely destroyed by a nuclear attack. Europe is a communist super-state.

Son of a bitch. Looks like Digger had been planning to rip me off – despite his apparent hatred of everything I wrote. I’ve heard of plagiarism before but, come on…

But why?

…I’d killed a man. How did I feel about that? Something I’d never done even when I’d been sunk real deep in alcohol. Would the Lord forgive me? I’d not been in control of my thoughts or actions when I’d repeatedly stabbed that misshapen, but insanely strong man. You might say there were some mitigating circumstances, with regard to what I’d done. He had buried me alive, after all….

Hanging on the wall was a set of waterproof overalls, a crash helmet on the floor below them. On a small table near the bed a set of keys and some change. I forgot to say earlier that outside this small hut was an old motorbike and also a small campervan. I guess the campervan was what Digger used to transport me here, after he’d first knocked me out. Maybe I’d make use of the motorbike and overalls in a while. Firstly, time to find out where I was.

Along with the set of keys and the change there were several letters on the small table beside the bed. I even managed a small laugh when I saw the name above the address: Ronald Clarence Digger.

Son of a bitch. It was his real name. Made him the perfect man for his job, I guess.

I’m sorry. It had been his real name, and he had been a gravedigger. Now, he was occupying the coffin he’d fully intended me to lie in for all eternity.

What was typed on the Word document was troubling me, somehow. He’d written all those negative reviews for everything I’d published, so what was with him now apparently trying to use me as a source of…

What?

Inspiration…?

Hang on – just wait one minute here…

I’ll never know quite what made me do it, but I first made sure Digger’s computer had internet connection before logging on. Then I went to the world-famous website I used to sell my ebooks, and typed in ol’ Digger’s full name.

He’d been a writer as well. I checked one of his books. Used the ‘Search inside’ facility to read a bit of it – though that wasn’t much, because the shorter the book, the less you get to read for free. But what I read made me search his Word documents file – and there was the whole of what he’d published, entitled simply Sunrise.

It was beautiful. Utterly exquisite. There are no other words to describe it. I won’t repeat any of it here – that would feel quite simply wrong, somehow. But in a few pages, Digger had managed to describe the supreme state of just being, in a language that flowed like the finest poetry.

I checked more of his books on the internet. I doubt he’d sold even one. Because there wasn’t a sales’ ranking for any of his books – I mean, any number from one right ‘down’ to three million. He’d just one review, as well – for the short essay (or whatever you might call it) he’d entitled Sunrise.

Yeah, someone had given it a review. Along with one single star. Some guy writes some garbage about how the sun comes up (read the review). Hot-dog. If I’d had to pay for this I’d be wanting my money back, but I got it on free promo. download. AVOID.

The review had gotten three ‘helpful’ clicks from other readers. I pictured Digger reading it – and becoming just that little bit more insane.

Yeah, he’d a written a number of short stories, essays, or whatever they were. All published with just a picture of a tree or the rising sun or something as a cover. Some image that was linked to nature, in any case. All these stories were perfect. I’ve never read writing like that. (He’d stored them all as Word documents, which is how I got to read them in their entirety.)

But I found something else stored on his computer. Something that wasn’t so perfect. Namely, Digger’s dismal attempts at writing anything approaching fiction.

Yeah, he’d had a number of goes at writing the sort of thing I specialized in. ‘Thrillers’, basically, set in an altered present/ the future. ‘Prepper’ fiction, as it’s commonly referred to. And at this, Digger sucked hard. Any attempt at setting up a scene, or characterization, quickly fell flat. He’d no idea. He could write this sunrise/sunset/general nature ‘stream of consciousness’ -stuff better than any writer I’ve ever read. But at commercial fiction, he failed spectacularly.

And I guess there are any number of writers just like him. People who self-publish on the internet, full of expectation and gratitude that they live in an era where such a thing is possible, only to then discover that no one’s buying. That no one cares, despite all the hours they’ve put in and all the effort that writing in general takes. Perhaps even getting a few bad reviews – if they get any reviews at all.

And then in their indignation checking out the popular stuff – and finding people like me.

Authors who’ve lucked out, basically, and found a wide readership for what they’re writing – even if what they’re writing isn’t exactly classic literature. And for someone like Digger – ‘cursed’ (as it were) with the gift to write so beautifully about nature and all its glory, but with not a shred of ability to craft anything approaching commercial fiction – that must have been intolerable.

So he’d decided to rip me off. To get me to give him a killer idea before allowing me to perish inside that coffin. That way, at least, he’d get some sales and recognition. (Or so he thought, somewhere deep inside that dark, squirming mind of his.)

And ol’ bestselling author and reformed alcoholic here had the bad luck to live within a 100 kilometer radius of this sprawling, isolated graveyard where Digger was janitor – or whatever his job title was – and so he’d tracked me down and kidnapped me. (I’d learned my current location from the address I saw at the top of the letters lying on the table beside his bed. I knew the name of the area where I was now – and that’s about all I’ll say about that…)

Well, the tables had been turned, you might say. Digger was now lying dead in the coffin I’d previously occupied. I went back out into the night – it had now stopped raining – and walked back to that grave. I got down into it and briefly looked at Digger’s body. (By his feet in the coffin a small hole, in which I guessed was located both the speaker and the pipe that had fed me air – though I sure wasn’t going to start stooping down to look properly.)

I put the lid on the coffin. Then I used the spade to backfill the mound of wet earth heaped up beside the mouth of the grave. .

I hoped God would forgive me. After all, this man had tried to kill me – and in one of the worst possible ways. Really, I’d taken his life just in self-defense. But with my past record, there was no way I could tell anyone about this. One way or another, I’d wind up in jail – of that I was certain. So he was getting buried in secret, right here and now.

I couldn’t really read what had been written on the headstone of the grave. It had been almost erased by the passing of the years and the rain. But there remained the year the original occupant of this grave had expired: 1859.

I guess the coffin of that particular person was below the one I’d lain in, given that it was ‘only’ five feet or so below the surface. Yeah, Digger had used another coffin for me – the basic model, it seemed, without anything real fancy like a velvet interior or such.

So I filled in Digger’s final resting place, threw the spade into a thick clump of bushes, and I walked back to the hut. My mind kind of in a funny sort of place. I guess that’s what they call shock. I put on the overalls and the crash helmet that were in the hut and picked up a bunch of keys that were beside the computer. One of these keys was clearly for the motorbike; another looked like it was for the chain wrapped around the wrought iron gates. There was a can of kerosene for the old heater that was placed against one wall. I emptied this can around the hut. Wasn’t gonna leave no trace of me being here – fingerprints and such.

Digger had been a smoker. There was a pack of Marlboro and a lighter on a shelf, right there alongside a bottle of whiskey. I looked at the bottle, was momentarily tempted and then I smiled. If I wasn’t gonna drink now – after all I’d been through – I seriously doubted I ever would again. But you can never say never.

I got the lighter – a Zippo – walked outside and flicked the flame before throwing it back into the hut. The place was instantly ablaze.

100 kilometers or so back to the town where I lived. I’d find my way on that motorbike (I’d briefly had one as a youngster, so knew how to ride one) – just had to make sure I didn’t get stopped by the law for any reason. The overalls would conceal my muddy, wet and blood-stained clothes, anyway.

Yeah, I’d ride back – and then I’d drop the motorbike off a real steep gorge I knew inside the woods which surround three-quarters of the town where I live. As I said earlier, those woods are so large they can hide a Learjet; so no one was gonna be finding that bike any time soon. Even if they did, however many months or years later, they’d just think it had been some kids foolin’ around.

My apartment was on the edge of the town, fortunately – once it gets dark, the area where I live gets real quiet. So with a bit of luck I’d be able to walk the short distance from the woods to my apartment with no one noticing me. I’d emerge some time tomorrow, telling anyone who asked where I’d been that I’d had a sudden bout of food-poisoning or something, and had been confined to my bed.

Then everything I was wearing now would get secretly burnt up inside a bonfire of dead leaves I’d already raked up in the grounds of the church I attended most Sundays.

But this story would get written up. Of that I was certain. Damned if I’d suffer everything I had – an experience that had pushed me to the very limits of my sanity, and would doubtless supply me with nightmares for the rest of my life – and not get something out of it.

I’d change a few details, obviously – and there was no chance of me publishing it under my real name – but I’d leave enough in so that it had the necessary ring of conviction. Something poor ol’ Digger would never have been able to ‘emulate’, as you might say, even had I told him the entire plot of this supposed ‘super-story’ of mine.

But he’d got what he wanted – ‘the story of my life’ – and, well, here it is. Like I say, a few things changed for the sake of discretion. But also a lot left in that actually occurred.

I’ll leave it to you to determine which is which.

Silent Screaming Face

A story that borrows a small segment of the plot from the movie ‘The Fly’.

George Wilhelm Vanderbilt swore viciously, as the ceiling lights flickered for several seconds before blazing into life. They sparkled on the chrome, glass and white plastic of the machines placed along the walls of the long laboratory.

These machines represented the cutting edge of technology – and more precisely, the attempts at giving mankind a gift that had so far dwelt only in the realm of science fiction.

Vanderbilt and his two most senior employees – men whom he had until recently trusted entirely – had spent countless hours using such machinery, fixing it, altering it, destroying it... All the while endeavouring to make the future the present.

Sheer frustration overwhelmed Vanderbilt’s thoughts. Surely, for Chrissake, given the money he paid his workforce, there should be no difficulty in ensuring that the lighting did not flicker so when turned on!

...Vanderbilt’s biggest accomplishment to date had been to find a cure for H.Z.T, the scourge of mankind that had cruelly followed so soon after a cure had at last been found for AIDS. H.Z.T had destroyed twenty million lives within one year, the virus this time spread through any form of close physical contact, such as kissing.

By the time Vanderbilt had tentatively suggested that he might, repeat might have a cure several countries had declared martial law and the world had teetered on the brink of chaos. He’d actually found the cure several months before, but the right timing had been needed.

And then – oh Christ! – the adoration, the interviews; his sallow, unattractive face staring out from the covers of magazines including Time and National Geographic at everyone who’d ever slighted or mocked him.

Digging into his past, reporters had unearthed the stereotype of a genius: a spotty geek, useless at sport, a failure with female students at the George W. Bush High School’s annual dance.

Vanderbilt had been a loner, his teenage years largely spent behind closed curtains and in front of a computer. Only he’d not been doing what the other students had so crudely suggested, for lust as well as love were emotions alien to his coldly scientific mind.

Vanderbilt had spent more years than he cared to remember impoverished and alone, rarely sleeping, working at Grossman’s Convenience Store during the hours of darkness so that he could support himself as he studied during the day.

And then, finally, a grant; and from this a spiral of bigger and better accomplishments until he gave the world the cure for H.Z.T and was rewarded with fame and wealth beyond even his wildest dreams.

He never admitted that his discovery of this cure had in fact been a fluke, broadly comparable in the circumstances surrounding its development to Alexander Fleming’s discovery of Penicillin. Put simply, a mildly interesting distraction to Vanderbilt’s normal line of work had proved to be the man’s making.

But that was another story...

Vanderbilt employed nearly 500 men and women who formed a loyal and hardworking nucleus for the company he had, with typical immodesty, named Vanderbilt Enterprises. Vanderbilt Enterprises focused on developing advanced energy-saving devices necessary for a world where reserves of natural resources would soon be completely depleted.

Vanderbilt and his two – until recently – most trusted confederates, meanwhile, worked on highly secretive projects entirely unconnected to his company’s purported objective. If successful their latest project would be the company director’s crowning glory; he would be revered as a genius now and by future generations, the man who’d dispensed with the need for cars and boats, aeroplanes and spacecraft.

Anything, in fact, that was a people or cargo carrier. Any person or object would be able to be instantly transported to any destination, be it on this planet, the moon’s Clinton’s City, or the large station that had just been built on Mars.

But the realisation of Vanderbilt’s dream was being balked. He, Raymond Chandler and Richard Myerson were overlooking something – some important factor that remained unrecognised despite the exhaustive amount of research they’d undertaken so far. The two employees Vanderbilt valued most of all were losing confidence in him, Chandler now mocking him by openly talking of the job offers that he and Myerson were receiving.

Naturally, Chandler and Myerson were entirely familiar with the results yielded by the groundbreaking research; and so they would be able to furnish another company with strictly confidential data. Consequently, this company could well become the first to develop a working teleportation machine.

Vanderbilt was all too aware that there were others trying to develop an effective prototype. The thought of someone else beating him in such a way was inconceivable – were such a thing to occur he’d no doubt that he’d kill himself.

No. He had to succeed, and by himself if this was necessary...

Leaving the laboratory Vanderbilt entered a tiny room immediately to his left, from which there came scuffling noises and a faint animal smell. Picking up a cage from the many stacked neatly against one wall, he left the tiny room and walked back into the laboratory. A white rat stuck its quivering pink nose through the imprisoning wire mesh and observed its new surroundings.

‘It’s all in the interests of science, I’m afraid,’ Vanderbilt told the unfortunate creature. He wondered if he was going mad by talking to a rodent. Perhaps he already was: insanity and genius were, after all, natural bedfellows. He shrugged, uncaring.

He placed the cage next to a large, cylindrical machine he’d labelled the Instigator. A bank of buttons glowed blue on one side of its man-sized aperture, and Vanderbilt opened the cage and placed the sedated and thus lethargic rat by its tail into the machine’s cavity. A metal door slid shut and enclosed the rodent. Pressing three buttons in sequence, Vanderbilt then observed a small, neon-green screen as a stream of numbers and letters flew across it.

The Instigator came to life with a soft hum and Vanderbilt knew that the creature had already flown across the laboratory in a stream of atoms, to a machine he’d termed the Receptor at the other end of the laboratory.

The Receptor could have been in Timbuktu or on Mars; this would not have extended the fraction of a second needed for the rat to reach it. Timing was not the problem here.

Vanderbilt walked over to the Receptor, the last in the line of machinery, and before pressing the button that would open its door braced himself for the sight.

It was always disturbing.

The rat’s face had stayed intact – which was a first – but it was frozen in a death-grimace of bared teeth and bulging eyes. The rest of the body was disordered and blood stained, the Receptor once again failing to reassemble the received atoms back in their original pattern. Occasionally a rat would remain agonisingly alive for a few seconds, but on this occasion the creature was most definitely dead.

Gagging at the sight of the mismatched mess, Vanderbilt then slammed his fist hard against the machine, bloodying his knuckles.

‘Why?’ he screamed.

Theoretically it was all so simple: it should be just like shaking a jigsaw onto the floor and reassembling it, only infinitely more quickly. Frustration and exhaustion – he’d not slept a wink in three days – threatened to overwhelm him as he sank to his knees.

Surely there was an answer, a pattern… A simple rule, as yet unknown, that had to be obeyed.

His thoughts stretched out into the void of the unknown: searching, questioning. A different theory was suggested by his mind every second, with each one being immediately dismissed as impractical and incorrect. There had to be an answer somewhere in that void – but just where was it?

Think…

‘Yes!’

At the same moment as he berated his foolishness, Vanderbilt also felt the heady – no, orgasmic – sensation of success. Just how in hell’s name had he overlooked such a simple matter?

He stood up, his hunger and exhaustion now completely forgotten. His eyes lit up with a furious animal energy, dispelling the previous dullness imparted by insomnia. He was now certain that he would truly become a legend in his own lifetime – a rare feat, he considered, for the truly gifted.

A cure for H.Z.T?

That had just been a start to his life’s story.

Uncaringly, he threw aside the mess of the last experiment with his bare hands. These he wiped on his trousers as he ran to fetch another rat. Placing the cage by the Instigator as before, he then lifted a panel to reveal a keypad.

His fingers danced across the keys, as restless as an insect’s antennae as they typed an alteration to the computer’s program – an alteration that would ensure the rat ended up alive and well in the Receptor an instant after Vanderbilt activated the Instigator.

Vanderbilt looked feverishly into the rodent’s red-flecked eyes before taking it out of the cage.

‘You’re making history now, Mr Rat,’ he told the creature.

Giggling like a small girl, Vanderbilt placed the animal inside the machine and punched the three buttons. The machine hummed softly and he ran to the Receptor. He swallowed deeply before opening the door…

This was it…

This was history.

The door opened to reveal an interior that contained nothing other than air.

Staring at the empty space, Vanderbilt felt hysteria well within him. Then a patch of white-painted wall beside the machine caught his attention – what on God’s earth…

No…

Yes.

This was incredible! He’d fused the living and the inanimate: he’d created an environment where life thrived – impossibly. And yet it wasn’t impossible: he saw it happening now with his very eyes. It had just been impossible a few seconds before, in the past. That was all.

The telephone that was placed close to the door rang, and Vanderbilt looked at his watch with some confusion. It was three o’clock in the morning.

He walked over and picked up the receiver. ‘Yes?’

The voice that replied was sly and full of contempt for Vanderbilt.

‘George, it’s Raymond. I’m afraid I’ve got bad news for you.’

The tone of the voice suggested that Raymond Chandler was anticipating receiving the utmost pleasure at giving Vanderbilt this ‘bad news’.

The tall, lank-haired genius stared at the Instigator and did not immediately reply. His thoughts were momentarily elsewhere. Everything was fine: he knew where he’d gone wrong just now. Another quick alteration to the program, and then…

No – he’d alter the machine in a while.

Not just yet.

‘Go on, then, Raymond. Tell me some bad news,’ he said wearily, already knowing what this was to be.

‘Myerson and I have accepted an offer to join I.B Developments, to design and develop a successful teleportation machine. I’ve rung to advise you to abandon your research, as we’ll be taking our combined knowledge concerning teleportation to our new job. That being the case, I.B Developments will certainly be the first company to develop a successful teleportation machine. Tough, huh?’

Such venom, such contempt... Just where had he gone wrong with Raymond Chandler? He paid him a basic salary of half a million dollars and treated him almost as his equal: Vanderbilt, Chandler and Myerson had often worked long into the night to solve a problem, together – as a team. Without their help this laboratory would probably never have been built.

First clearing his dry throat, Vanderbilt then spoke quietly as he pictured Chandler’s expression of spiteful satisfaction change to one of abject horror.

‘You may like to know that I have just solved the problem that had until now stumped all three of us – namely, how to receive a living subject in the same condition as it was before attempted teleportation.

‘Thus teleportation has been snatched out of the future and placed in the present. Global – indeed cosmic – travel in an instant will soon be available. All it needs is an Instigator and a Receptor machine placed in two separate locations, and soon I hope to make the whole process reliant on just the one machine. I will continue to refine and develop my research.’

‘You’re lying.’ The voice was thick as it sneered, but Vanderbilt knew that Chandler did not disbelieve him. From the slight slurring, he also realised that his former employer had been drinking. Having always been teetotal, Vanderbilt was disgusted by such weakness.

‘Come and have a look if you like’ he suggested.

‘I’m there already, you goddamn liar,’ growled Chandler in his thick Brooklyn accent.

Shrugging, Vanderbilt replaced the receiver. Now that his unstinting efforts had at last been rewarded with success he was markedly calmer than before. He craved something to eat, a shower and then a few hours’ complete rest. But now he had to wait for Raymond Chandler – he could not afford to lose the man to another company, for Chandler knew almost as much as Vanderbilt himself and his brain moved only a fraction behind that of his employer’s. For him to take all he knew to I.B Developments could well prove catastrophic, even now.

Chandler was not slow in arriving, as it was only a short, dangerously fast drive from his house to the industrial site in Long Island, New York, where the main offices and laboratories of Vanderbilt Enterprises were situated.

Chandler burst into the laboratory, a short and stocky man, and with his hands planted on his hips panted, ‘Show me, Vanderbilt: prove to me that it works. I don’t believe you.’

Vanderbilt pushed his lank hair away from his eyes, and looked almost sadly at his employee.

‘I don’t know why you hate me so much, or why you’re going to leave. Have I not…’

‘Shut up,’ spat Chandler, his brown eyes burning with hate. ‘I’m going to destroy you – you’re a fucking fraud, living off mine and Myerson’s hard work. You’re nothing but a parasite who’s had a lot of luck – look at the way you found the cure for H.Z.T. A fluke, for Chrissakes! Anyway, prove to me that the Receptor works, you son of a bitch.’

Another unwitting white rat was ready and waiting in the machine. Vanderbilt had already made the small alteration to the program that would ensure the rodent arrived alive and well in the Receptor. Closing the door Vanderbilt then activated the machine.

‘Follow me,’ he said quietly, and the two men walked to the Receptor. Opening the door of the machine, Vanderbilt revealed a rat apparently not affected by the sedative they were given in their food, for it immediately scurried out of the cavity and away from the two men.

Vanderbilt looked at Chandler, triumph etched on his face. For a moment he looked heroically noble, like a Roman emperor who’d come to consider himself a god.

‘Now do you believe me?’ he demanded. ‘Your hard work? I did this by myself, only half an hour before,’ he declared, as the rat careered about the laboratory in its increasingly desperate attempts to find an exit from this strange gleaming place.

Both men ignored the creature as they stared at one another. And the sheer disbelief on Chandler’s face slowly changed to an intensely contemptuous expression.

‘It’s a trick – there was already a rat in the machine before I arrived,’ he said.

‘Go back and check the Instigator, then.’

Chandler did so: it was empty. And as he spoke slowly to Vanderbilt his voice was clogged with hatred, his eyes boring into those that were set like marble in the long and sallow face:

‘Show me properly – use me, and then I’ll believe you.’

Inwardly Vanderbilt crowed with triumph; he’d fervently hoped that the fiercely competitive and often foolhardily brave man would, in anger, volunteer to be the subject.

Vanderbilt raised a hand in an apparent gesture to pacify his employee.

‘I would advise against it; the technology is in its infancy, it might not be safe…’

Ignoring the cautionary words, Chandler stepped inside the Instigator’s man-sized cavity.

‘Activate the machine, Vanderbilt,’ he said tonelessly.

Shrugging his acquiescence, Vanderbilt closed the door. Before activating the machine he typed a quick alteration to its program. This took only a second. He then walked slowly over to the Receptor, but his dangerously calm gaze was fixed on the patch of wall beside it.

He was thankful that Chandler hadn’t seen what he had before and did again now.

George Wilhelm Vanderbilt walked to the phone and quickly dialled a number.

‘Mrs Myerson? It’s George Vanderbilt – Yes, I’m so sorry to call so late… That’s right, it’s an emergency, Raymond’s here…’

Vanderbilt coughed, and felt a little uneasy as he looked back towards the patch of wall at the rear of the narrow laboratory. He’d the strangest sensation of being watched.

‘…already.’ He waited as the woman woke her husband: it seemed as though they didn’t sleep in the same room.

The incredible talent nature had given Richard Myerson for science and technology contrasted strongly with his lack of common sense and his appalling naivety regarding his fellow men: in some respects he was almost simple.

The burly, balding man had somehow formed a deep attachment for Raymond Chandler, following him around with almost canine devotion. Myerson himself had never been insolent towards Vanderbilt, and neither had he ever given any obvious indication that he disliked his employer.

He was, however, an exceptionally intelligent man in his particular sphere, and so could seriously affect Vanderbilt’s prospects were he to be employed by a rival company.

Richard Myerson had become a liability, and thus needed to be dealt with accordingly.

‘Richard – I’m sorry to ring you so late… Yes, if you could come in. Raymond and myself have something to show you.’

Vanderbilt smiled as Myerson spoke, interjecting, ‘Yes, it does work – we’ve been trying it out ourselves, in fact… Would you? Get here as quickly as you can, then, and you’ll be the third man in the history of the world to be teleported.’

Vanderbilt replaced the receiver upon receiving his employee’s enthusiastic farewell – he was leaving immediately – and walked over to the Receptor.

The head of the rat from the second experiment suddenly protruded from a patch of wall to one side of the machine, the white paint completely encasing it as it writhed and twisted in its fight to be free of the strangely fluid concrete. It was just the head, though; and this retreated back into the wall after only a few seconds.

Vanderbilt smiled as Raymond Duskatti’s face now morphed into view, a silent scream stretching his lips before he too disappeared back into the wall.

George Wilhelm Vanderbilt patiently awaited the arrival of Richard Myerson.

The Bar

I’d been living in Japan for almost a year. I liked it quite a lot. Nagashima (the city where I was based) was not too large, and there was a good mix of modern and ancient Japan existing almost together. By which I mean you could visit some temples and such in the morning, and then for lunch walk the short distance to an amazing sushi restaurant that was on top of a futuristic-looking shopping arcade.

I’d been sent to Japan by my company, even though I knew next to nothing about this country and certainly didn’t speak the language. But my Japanese staff all spoke fluent English, and I was assigned an interpreter when this was needed, so I got by perfectly well using only the most basic words such as konnichiwa and arigatou (‘good afternoon’ and ‘thank you’).

Like I say, my staff all spoke fluent English, and we got on well. In fact I became quite good friends with one man in particular – Akira Fukuyama. We often went drinking on a Friday evening after work, visiting a number of bars in Nagasahima’s large ‘pleasure area’ (as it was called in samurai times), which basically consists of almost countless places to eat and drink – and a red-light district.

Well, what pleasures the red-light district had to offer I’m proud to say I never bothered finding out. But the bars were fantastic, open to very late and full of a fascinating array of people – foreign and Japanese. You could go in alone, and still soon be having an interesting conversation with someone. It was a great way to relax and unwind after a hard week’s work.

But, usually, I was not alone. Akira and I were drinking partners. He was married and had two children (I’m still single), but his wife allowed him to stay out as late as he pleased on a Friday night. So we’d visit some bars, get something to eat, and just have a good time.

I’d had to bail out on a Friday evening three weeks before. Came down with a bad cold and had to go home early. Spent the weekend in bed. I got the phone-call on a Sunday evening, when I was starting to feel a little better.

It was the police, asking if I knew anything about Akira Fukuyama-san’s whereabouts. (I was called by an English-speaking detective.)

He’d gone out that Friday evening by himself. He’d been seen in a few bars and then… Well, basically it was like he’d vanished off the face of the Earth.

They were looking for him still. There was not a trace of information concerning his current whereabouts.

So come the end of the week, I decided to go out by myself. I went into Nagashima’s ‘entertainment district’, passing the usual groups of young Chinese women who offered me and any other males they could see a ‘massage’. I visited a couple of bars but found that this evening, for whatever reason, they weren’t that lively.

I went back outside, walking along some of the narrow streets that cut through the entertainment district. It’s almost like a maze; stray too far into Nagashima’s pleasure area and you can get hopelessly lost…

There were groups of Japanese businessmen –salaryman, as they’re called here – and also a number of foreigners including several American servicemen on leave from the nearby military base.

As was usual, a number of attractive Japanese women were stood along the streets, handing out leaflets and trying to get any passing male to accompany them to a ‘snack bar’. This is a place where you sit with female company and get your drinks poured, your cigarettes lit and your ego stroked – all at a price, naturally. Generally speaking, I tended to avoid snack bars. I liked the plain-old ‘standing’ bars best of all.

But this evening, I found myself captivated by one of the women whose job it was to try and attract custom. She was young – certainly still in her early-twenties – and so slender. Her glossy black hair flowed down almost to her waist – and when she looked at me and smiled, I felt something melt inside.

It was like something came over me. I walked over to her and said, ‘Konbanwa.’ (‘Good evening’.)

‘Would you like to come with me to a special place?’ she said in English. Her voice was low and sultry; that ‘melting feeling’ I had inside only intensified.

‘Yes, I would,’ I returned simply. Surprisingly, she took hold of my hand, and we began to walk. I kept turning my head to look at her, and when she met my gaze she gave me that smile that seemed to say: If you’re lucky, I’ll give you an experience that you’ve never had with any other woman…

Yes, even if I had to pay for it (something I’d certainly never done before), I wanted to sleep with this woman. More than anything. I was bewitched by her slender beauty and… Something else; something almost indefinable that lay in her sparkling eyes and that secret smile.

We walked deeper into the entertainment district. Further than I’d ever gone before. Countless small bars and neon signs everywhere. But then the streets seemed to get even narrower and the signs started to thin out. Darker. Much less busy with people now. I’d absolutely no idea where we were; I was entirely dependent on this woman to lead me.

For some reason, I felt the first small prick of fear in my belly.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked the woman, who was continuing to grasp my hand with a strength that was surprising, given her slight build. She gave me that slight, secret smile again, exposing teeth that were so white.

‘We’ll be there soon,’ she said.

The street lighting now was sporadic. Many of the buildings we passed lay in darkness. Then something made me look up at one of the rooftops. Out of the corner of my eye, just for a split-second, I thought I’d seen something dart along the roof, moving at an incredible speed before it again quickly concealed itself from view…

Some sort of animal? And yet the impression I’d got from this briefest of glances had been of a… Well, human shape. But no human could move at such a speed… I must have been mistaken…

I tried to take my hand out of the woman’s grasp, but her grip was like steel.

‘Hey, you know what, I think I’d better head back,’ I said, trying to keep my voice steady.

She smiled at me. A flash of white teeth that I now realized were strangely sharp. Funny how I’d not noticed that before.

‘But we’re almost there… and your friend wants to see you again,’ she said, in a voice which now caused a shiver to shoot down my spine.

‘My… friend?’ I said incredulously. ‘What are you talking about – my friend?’

‘Why don’t you see for yourself?’ she replied, suddenly leading the both of us into a darkened doorway. Then all at once we were in a small bar with a couple of tables and a counter.

There was only one other customer there; a man in a suit who was sat hunched on one of the seats at the bar, his back towards me. The woman working behind the bar smiled at me as I entered, her brilliantly white teeth flashing. She was young, too, and had the same flowing, supremely ‘glossy’-looking black hair that went down almost to her waist.

There were a couple of low-lights, that was all. I instinctively looked back, as though preparing for my escape from this strange place, but behind me was just an impenetrable blackness. I couldn’t even see the doorway we’d passed through, although it had been only a couple of seconds before…

The man sat at the bar turned to look at me, and I gave a gasp of surprise – no, shock. It was my missing friend, Akira Fukuyama. He looked strangely younger than I remembered, his eyes gleaming and oddly yellow as he stared at me. Still the woman was holding my hand; I tried to tear it away as Akira slowly rose from his seat and began advancing towards me, but it was hopeless…

‘He’s been waiting for you,’ said the woman who’d brought me here, her smile very wide now, exposing fanged incisors. ‘We all have.’

‘Hello, Bob,’ said Akira, his eyes strangely glowing, his teeth also sharp and pointed. His voice had changed considerably; now it was like a winter wind blowing through dead leaves. Instantly I felt my bowels loosen. The woman previously stood behind the bar began to come round. She was also grinning. Three sets of glowing eyes in the near-darkness, and the flashing white of those teeth…

I tried to back away, but the woman held my hand so tightly. She started moving her mouth up to my neck. Akira and the other woman were also very near me, now.

I was trapped…

‘You’ll like it here… after,’ said Akira. ‘It’s not so bad, once you get used to it…’

‘Don’t…’ I said, my voice a barely-audible whisper. ‘Please don’t…’

They fell on me – and as the sucking started, I gave my first scream.

The Devourer of Men

A story inspired by the book Papillon (Henri Charriere).

In a small café situated along the Rue des Grands Augustins, close to the River Seine, a fat man sat at his customary table and regretted his life. Once the official prosecutor of the Palais de Justice of the Seine, he now spent his days drinking brandy and boring anyone who would talk to him (and these were few and far between) with his tales of woe.

True, no one now had any concept of the bitch that had been her. A bitch with a God-given face and body; a bitch whose voice had been a silky, bewitching purr; a bitch who had driven Pierre Pradel almost crazy with lust and desire...

When seeking to possess such a bitch (considered Pradel as he stared at his glass), a man can no longer be held accountable for his actions. For possession – absolute possession – becomes a must, a prerequisite for his existence...

And the bitch had worked such feminine black magic on Pradel himself, so that from being one of the most feared court prosecutors in the country he’d fallen to become nothing more than a laughing stock.

No longer was he able to concentrate for any significant length of time. No longer was he able to flatter and sway the twelve country-bumpkin fools on the jury into believing that they were his social and intellectual equals. All his old fire and vigour deserted him; he became utterly unable to practise his own type of black magic any longer. So men – both guilty and innocent – who previously would certainly have been sent to the guillotine or the penal colonies walked free.

And when Pradel had one day discovered that the bitch was busy sleeping with (or so it seemed) half the population of Paris – both male and female – and that the other half of the population was aware of this while he himself had been wholly ignorant, he’d sought solace in the bottle.

Alcohol had granted him the necessary, albeit temporary relief – but what total enslavement it had extracted in return! The years from this point to now… These had passed in a slow, murky haze, Pradel occupying a dilapidated room in the nearby rue des Beaux-Arts, spending every day from morning to late evening in this café.

In the last month, however, something truly wonderful had entered his life. That Raymond did nothing more than offer Pradel a sympathetic ear was of absolutely no concern to the former prosecutor. At least one person did not avoid his company like the plague; at least one person seemed happy just to sit and listen as he bemoaned his useless life.

And this, wholly in itself, was a marvellous thing.

Pradel looked impatiently at his watch: eleven o’clock. In a few hours’ time he would feel weary with the brandy he’d drunk and he would doze in his chair, but at this particular time he was impatient for Raymond’s company. It was likely Raymond would be in soon, for during the last month or so his visits to this small, nondescript café had become increasingly more frequent.

It seemed to Pradel that Raymond enjoyed his company – for there was no other discernible reason for the disfigured man to come to this place.

‘Another drink, Monsieur Pradel?’

Pradel turned to look imperiously at the small, thin, weasel-faced man who’d asked the quiet question. As ever, the thin man avoided looking him in the eye. He seemed uncomfortable under such a stare, and it warmed Pradel’s heart to see a specimen more pathetic than himself – a man so beaten that he allowed his wife to run the café instead of himself. For it was her name above the door, not his, and it was she who gave the orders.

‘Yes,’ said Pradel curtly.

As the thin man filled his glass, a woman’s voice called stridently from the counter:

‘Jean-Luc! Hurry up and take these two coffees to the couple seated outside!’

‘Yes, dear,’ said Jean-Luc wearily, and having poured Pradel his drink he walked hurriedly away.

With a pompous grunt of amusement the former prosecutor sipped his replenished glass, and then started a few moments later as Raymond entered the café.

‘Dubois, get another brandy to this table!’ he bellowed, forgetting in his pleasure that Raymond never drank brandy or indeed any alcohol.

‘Yes, Monsieur Pradel. Good morning, Monsieur,’ said Jean-Luc. He nodded quickly at Raymond, who ignored him.

A man who had at some point in his life suffered severe burns, Raymond shook Pradel’s proffered hand as he sat down. Only one half of his face was able to smile and thus register any pleasure at this meeting; the other half, his left, was an ugly patchwork of raw scar tissue, the muscles forever burnt frozen. Amidst this destruction there gleamed a glass eye.

One of his hands on the same side was similarly burnt – still functional but now more like a claw than a hand – and he walked with a limp, as though his foot or his leg pained him.

His greying hair was brushed back in oiled waves from his forehead. He looked to be somewhere in his late forties or early fifties, while his remaining eye somehow displayed with its gimlet stare unusual strength of will and above average intelligence. His skin was browned, suggesting that he’d spent considerable time in a tropical clime. Like Pradel, he was casually dressed in shirt and trousers.

‘Pierre, how are you today?’ asked Raymond warmly, as Jean-Luc scurried across with the (already greatly depleted) brandy bottle and a glass.

Signifying with a shake of his head that he wanted nothing to drink, Raymond rudely dismissed Jean-Luc. Instead, he listened with curious intensity to Pradel’s answer:

‘I find myself bored, Raymond – bored and disillusioned with Paris. That’s how I am, if I’m to be succinct.’

By now aware that there would be no return inquiry concerning his wellbeing, Raymond said with a sympathetic half-smile, ‘They say that if you’re tired of Paris then you’re tired of life. But they don’t say anything about being bored or disillusioned.’

‘If only I had family, friends – but I have none of these, excluding, if I may be so bold, your good self. No, Raymond, I have no one to help relieve the tedium of my days, to distract me from remembering just how cruelly I was treated in the past.’

Having by now been completely acquainted with Pradel’s history, Raymond nodded his ascent.

Then he started, and gripped the former prosecutor’s arm.

‘Pierre, I might just have a solution to your problem!’

Pradel looked keenly at him.

‘How do you mean?’

‘I have not mentioned this before... I have recently returned from a long period spent abroad, and have purchased a house.’

‘In Paris?’

‘No, I could not live in such a place. It is too noisy, too busy... No – my house is situated on the outskirts of Hesdin, a tiny village in Pas de Calais. It is surrounded by fields and little woods, and there are no other properties close by. As a lover of solitude, it is perfect for me.’

‘And?’ said Pradel testily. He considered that this conversation was fast moving away from the subject of himself.

‘What I mean is this: why don’t you come and stay? I had been meaning to ask you before, but there were… There were a few alterations I had to make.’

‘Alterations?’

Dismissing the subject with a wave of his claw-like hand, Raymond said vaguely, ‘It is an old building... Anyway, why don’t you come and spend a weekend there? A change of scenery will do you the world of good, of that I’m certain.’

‘When?’

‘No time like the present, I always say. Today is Friday, and I’m driving to my house this very evening.’

‘So soon, so soon,’ gasped Pradel, surprised by this possible disruption to his invariable routine. ‘There are things I must do, preparations I must make…’

‘Come now,’ laughed Raymond good-naturedly. ‘You can afford to neglect your duties just for the weekend, can’t you? Treat yourself for once.’

With a shrug of his wide shoulders Pradel signalled his cautious agreement... Then his fleshy face suddenly brightened as he gave the suggestion further thought, and he said, ‘I can hardly wait, you know! What a fantastic idea!’

‘I’ve got to get going, attend to a few matters. Shall I pick you up from this café at about six?’

‘I’ll be here,’ said Pradel with certainty.

Outside the large old house the wind howled and the rain crashed against the leaded glass windows. It was hard to believe that earlier, in Paris, it had been a bright and warm summer’s day.

Stoking the fire into a roaring blaze, Raymond then replaced the poker by the hearth.

‘A nasty night,’ he said.

Nodding, Pradel sunk further into the comfy leather chair that was placed close to the flames. He wondered if he’d made the right decision in accompanying Raymond to this house after all. It had been years since he’d left Paris – years since his routine of leaving his room for the café each and every day had been any different.

And away from familiar surroundings, he’d become steadily more aware that he really knew nothing much at all about this man called Raymond.

It was not as though anything in the man’s manner caused him alarm – Raymond made polite small talk and ensured that Pradel was comfortable and had a drink in his hand. The three hour drive to Hesdin had passed by agreeably enough, with a break for a drink and something to eat at a cafe halfway. But now that he’d time to think, all of Pradel’s old distrust – indeed dislike – of mankind came bubbling back to the surface of his mind.

As a prosecutor he’d quickly conditioned himself to never feel any compassion for a defendant, to never question or indeed care whether the man on trial might be innocent of the crime of which he was accused. To never wonder whether the notoriously corrupt methods of the Parisian police, or the perjured evidence of a witness, had resulted in a man being falsely charged.

As hard as he’d stared at the man in the dock, while holding the court spellbound with the power of his oratory, Pradel had seen nothing. His mind had instead created a piggish mask of filth and degradation that he used to mask the features of the defendant, so that he saw only an enemy of society who needed to be wiped from the face of the Earth.

If the man had not actually been this enemy (sometimes, in his heart of hearts, Pradel had been certain that a defendant was innocent) then he’d still done everything in his power to make it appear that he was. And before the bitch had entered his life and destroyed his career, he’d almost always been successful.

Having worked himself into a state of suspicion, Pradel now set his mind to determining exactly what it was that Raymond wanted.

Money? Was Raymond’s motive to ultimately swindle or rob him in some way? Hardly: he’d already made it perfectly obvious that he’d barely a centime to his name. Could it be, after all, that it was actually just company that Raymond sought? Pradel had never heard him talk of friends or seen him in the company of another man or woman. So it was indeed quite possible that this disfigured man was as lonely as he.

Pradel realised that this suggestion soothed his strangely troubled mind.

As the former prosecutor thought about such things, Raymond sat in the chair opposite and with his single eye stared happily at his captive. The flames of ecstatic joy burnt in his heart as fiercely as those flames in the hearth, so that he placed his hands hard on his thighs to stop his legs from shaking.

Now, after so many years spent dreaming about this moment, he could allow himself a little time to toy with this bastard...

‘What are you thinking about, Pierre? What question grips your soul?’

Pradel looked slowly up at him, thoughtfully sipping his brandy. The fire gave a sudden, fierce crackle, jagged yellow flames shooting angrily up into the chimney. The cracked marble mantelpiece above the hearth was bare except for an old wooden clock whose hands had long since stopped at ten to three. The smell of damp that had greeted the two men’s entry half an hour earlier had begun to diminish with the warmth of the fire; but the brown paper on the unadorned walls had peeled in places, exposing old and fragile plaster.

‘You must forgive my rude silence, Raymond,’ Pradel said slowly, with uncharacteristic humility. ‘For some years now I have been used to my lodgings and the café. This change in scene bewilders me, to a certain extent. I feel the remoteness of this house contrasting strongly with the liveliness of Paris.’

‘Are you sorry that you came, sorry that you’re experiencing this solitude?’

‘Hardly solitude, Raymond, for I’m not alone. I am adapting to a change in scenery, that is all. Familiarity is something that’s not easily relinquished, you know.’

‘But Pierre – earlier in the café you informed me that you were bored of Paris! So much for familiarity!’ Raymond exclaimed, his solitary eye now shining with some strange kind of mischievous pleasure.

Suddenly feeling deeply uneasy, Pradel murmured, ‘Well, all the same…’

‘Do you like familiarity? Do you need familiarity? Do you need to know exactly where you are each day every day, year in, year out? Is that what satisfies your soul?’

Flushing red, Pradel said angrily, ‘I think, Raymond, that you are assuming a touch too much familiarity on too short an acquaintance. I think what satisfies a man’s soul is best known only to himself, wouldn’t you agree?’

He took a gulp from his glass; then he flushed even redder, and held a hand to his forehead.

Closing his eyes, he heard Raymond say, ‘Pierre, what is the matter?’

‘I feel touched by fever. My head aches…’

‘You have had three glasses of brandy…’ Raymond tentatively suggested. He, of course, hadn’t touched a drop.

‘Perhaps… Perhaps… You mentioned dinner…?’

‘Yes, yes, in a while,’ Raymond said brusquely, so that Pradel opened his eyes and looked hard at him. Now seated on the edge of his seat, the man with the glass eye was clearly in a state of excitement.

He said, ‘Please, Pierre, I must return to the matter of our short acquaintance. Or rather, what you believe to be our short acquaintance. For you see, this was actually made nearly twenty years before I walked into that drab café a month or so ago, and sat down at your table for the first time.’

Wondering just what on Earth this madman was talking about, Pradel said slowly, ‘I don’t understand.’

Leaping up from his chair and limping rapidly around the moderately sized, almost empty room, Raymond then cried, ‘My real name is Henri Grandet! There!’

Pradel’s fat face was entirely blank. ‘Is this… Is this supposed to mean something to me?’ he asked quietly. Considering that he was effectively the prisoner of a madman, he wondered if he ought to try and grab the poker, so to use it as a weapon...

Henri’s reaction surprised him: he sagged back into his seat and covered his ruined face with one hand. He appeared utterly crushed.

Seizing the opportunity, Pradel leant slowly out from his seat, his hand stealthily reaching for the poker.

He froze when – still covering his face – Henri said, ‘You do that and I’ll kill you now.’

For a short while Henri remained silent; then he removed his hand from his face, and looking at Pradel said mournfully, ‘I should have known, of course. One of just how many men was I? Of course you don’t remember me. Had I not been so badly burned you would still not have recognised me...

‘But still and all – when I think of the furore surrounding my case, the newspaper reports…! Think, man – think! Henri Grandet: Henri Grandet.’

‘The name means nothing to me,’ Pradel said obstinately.

With a curt nod of his head, Henri stopped looking so sorrowful.

He said brusquely, ‘My story should be heard in two parts, with the latter half first, and the former last. Do you think that after all the time I have spent listening to your ceaseless babblings about yourself, that you can hear my story?’

Again Pradel put a hand to his forehead and closed his eyes.

‘I do not understand… I do not…’ he breathed; then, ‘No – of course I do. It is this wretched brandy that bewilders me. At some point in the past you faced me as a defendant. Correct?’

Henri felt entirely perplexed. There was none of the fear evident in either Pradel’s voice or face that he’d assumed this realisation would have prompted.

‘Correct.’

There was indeed no fear at all. Instead there was a look almost of relief as Pradel said firmly, ‘Then kill me, as is doubtless your intention. And do not assume that you will have the satisfaction of hearing me beg for my life, of seeing tears course down my cheeks. If my life is indeed worth nothing then I at least have my pride, and so I will go to meet my maker armed with the knowledge that I died bravely.’

Henri leaned towards him, and there was no mistaking the vengeance that shone in his remaining eye. He fought valiantly against the overwhelming urge to wrap his hands round Pradel’s fleshy neck.

No, no – he had his plan – he had to stick to it.

‘Do not assume that your death will be quick,’ he said tightly, and at length.

Only for a moment did Pradel’s composure waver. His bravery was proving of great surprise to Henri.

‘So it is torture, is it? What – Dumas’ recipe? Do you intend to place me in some dark room and let me die of hunger? Of course, I should expect nothing less from a man of your ilk. Men of my own station – they would oblige their enemy with a quick death. Such is our type of honour.’

The pallor of the good half of his face ashen, Henri slumped back shocked in his chair.

‘You speak of honour? You, who had me buried alive for a murder I did not commit?’

With another curt shake of his head his composure returned; he said, ‘Enough – you will sit and listen to me talk: you have no other choice. If you interrupt or attempt to flee, I will hold your head in that fire until your face looks worse than my own.’

Obligingly, Pradel sat very still and said nothing. Once again Henri stood up; but this time he limped slowly about the room, marshalling his thoughts.

After a few minutes had passed, he said, ‘I have already explained that this story will take place in two parts – the latter half to be told now, the former… Later. You will extend me the courtesy of listening without interruption, and you will not drink another drop of brandy. I fear that it is not good for you.

‘I begin this tale having made my final, successful break from the penal colony of French Guiana, overcoming all the odds. I have spent seven years imprisoned for a crime I never committed, sent to rot in a hellhole of disease and despair, where further ‘crimes’ such as escape are punished with savage barbarity, both mentally as well as physically.

‘It is again to Venezuela that the ocean currents carry my little boat: unlike the previous time, they will not hand me back to the French authorities as Gomez is no longer in power.

‘I am welcomed like a long-lost brother by the inhabitants of a small village by the sea, and the authorities graciously inform me that I must spend a year here as a kind of ‘probationary’ period. After that, I will be given an official identity card and will be free to go wherever I want; free to leave the country, should I so wish.’

As Henri grew more impassioned by his tale, he walked and talked more quickly.

‘A year passes and I have fallen in love with Venezuela and its people, despite having been treated so abominably by this country in the past. I have learned to speak the language fluently, as I became more than passable in it during my last, two-year stay. But I yearn to live in a big city – I have not seen one of these since I was snatched away from the streets of Paris.

‘What to do? Simple: get to Caracas, as quickly as possible! There there will be ways of making good money, if a man has the zest and vitality for life that is wholly natural to a Venezuelan.

‘Yes: I will make my pile, and then somehow I will return to France and destroy the prosecutor who tried to destroy me. For he bears the most responsibility for my downfall. The jurymen? Thick fools: idiots! Swayed only by which member of the defence or prosecuting counsel has the most persuasive rhetoric, the glibbest tongue! No: I shall do the ignorant jurymen no harm whatsoever.

‘The judge? All that fair-minded man had been able to do was pass on the hammer-blow. It was obvious that he was unhappy with my being found guilty. But wait – les flics. Yes, they’ll get theirs – and in no small measure. Their corrupt methods were partly responsible for my ruin, after all.

‘It’s that prosecutor, Pradel, who’ll cop it first, though. Cop it good and hard. But even after eight years, having thought about it endlessly, I’ve still not decided exactly how.’

Henri gave a sudden, unnerving chuckle; he shook his head.

‘But I’m running ahead of myself here! I’ve only just arrived in Caracas, and the size of the city and its sheer life bewilders me. I have to again learn how to live on my wits, how to first spot an opportunity and then develop it. I make a vow to myself, however, that I will not commit even one crime, no matter how small.

‘For this country has given me my freedom, and so however I get my pile will be done through honest means. Even if I was never guilty of the crime of which I was convicted in Paris, I was still a bit of a rogue. But no more: now I am entirely straight.

‘Nightlife – sweet, sweet nightlife! Who needs the day when the dark holds all the pleasures of the world? And the people who seek such pleasures – drink; brief, unbinding love – they will of course do so in places called bars.

‘So I’ve seen the opportunity: now it’s time to develop it. There is an empty building almost in the centre of Caracas, and through sheer dogged persistence I manage to obtain the money to buy it. Then further capital is scraped together, so that I can obtain the necessary licences to turn my property into a late-night entertainment joint.

‘I buy what I think will be the necessary amount of drink and food; I hire dancing girls and decorate the place in lavish colours. I recruit door staff who will be courteous and yet quick to react should there be even a sniff of trouble. Prices are a little more than usual, but people are paying for a night out at a bar that’s better than anywhere else. That, at least, is what I’m banking everything on.

‘Yes, yes – it’s true! Attendance is better than I’d dreamed: I’d advertised well and now I am reaping the benefits. I am finally becoming a rich man; my ultimate goal, if still very far away, at least no longer seems quite so impossible to attain...

‘...A few years pass. An ugly bastard owns a few joints near my own, and he aims to queer my pitch. Reluctantly, I am forced to concede that living a completely crime-free life is not always going to be possible, if I am to protect what is rightfully mine.

‘Suddenly I turn the tables and the ugly bastard’s bars are my own – but those others which are owned by peaceable men continue to trade as normal. If I am attacked I will come out fighting, but I am no bully.

‘It is important that I continue to focus on my ultimate objective. For living the grand life that I do it would become all too easy to forget all about it – about the hammer-blow that almost wiped me out of existence.

‘But I fail to account for the power of love, until Marie enters my life and bewitches me with her beauty and her sweetness. As perfect a woman as God ever made, she persuades me to confide in her everything that has been gnawing away at my soul for more than a decade.

‘Unbelievably, I find myself making a vow to her: I will relinquish my vengeance. That evil prosecutor, those corrupt pigs: let those bastards die in their beds, if indeed the worms haven’t eaten them already. Why should they worry me any longer, now that I am loved, respected and wealthy? I have escaped the road down the drain: I am truly blessed and happy.

‘Or so I think. Dear God, how cruel you are to me! Who would think that my princess could get cancer at her young age, that her heavenly body could be reduced to skin and bone, that she could be so wracked with pain? The five years I have spent with her have passed in a blissfully happy haze, and now I throw money at doctors but they can do nothing. The disease is incurable. She is dying.

‘She is dead. Completely destroyed, utterly crushed, I take to drink and another ugly bastard sees the chance to make his move on my joint and I do nothing. My days are long ordeals of grief – a grief which is assuaged only by alcohol. I seek death, yet – as before – I refuse to end it all by way of suicide.

‘Instead I pick fights with dangerous sods in the hope that one of them will kill me. Unfortunately, Venezuelan hard-cases have a habit of helping their beaten opponent off the floor and buying him a drink, rather than producing a knife and finishing him off.

‘How long this all continues for I do not know – who can be conscious of the passing of time when reduced to such a state? A strange salvation comes courtesy of a cigarette I drop onto my bed, one night as I pass out as usual. I awake in hospital, severely burnt, my eye gone. A brave neighbour – one of my few friends who did not desert me when I turned wild – saw the flames and broke into my house, saving my life. But it is not expected that I will live, and so I am given morphine to ease my painful passage to the grave.

‘But in my mind I see the fat, sneering face of the prosecutor once again, and I realise that I should never have relinquished my revenge; not even for love, not even for Marie. She will be in my thoughts always, there will never be another woman in my life; but she is gone and I am here. I will not die.

‘Amazed, the doctors finally discharge me. Yes, there certainly will never be another woman in my life, even if I want one: I have been hideously disfigured, and it is months before I can even walk again. But I am grateful just to be alive. I have a showdown with the ugly bastard who took control of my club, and he agrees to buy it off me for an extremely decent price. This price is quickly agreed when I press a pistol against his forehead and state the required sum. He does not argue.

‘Now I have money, what’s next? A false identity card, that’s what. And I realise that God has in fact been kind to me in allowing my face to be destroyed: I could walk around Paris in broad daylight and never be spotted as the escaped prisoner Henri Grandet by either friend or enemy.

‘The card is obtained through an underworld contact of mine, an utterly straight man whose hefty fee guarantees his complete silence. I state the name – not Raymond, by the way – and the date-of-birth that I want printed. I have a photo of my ruined face taken, and marvelling at his work I pay my pal gladly.

‘Christ, I shake with anticipation! I am becoming ever closer to obtaining my revenge, to destroying those who’d sought to destroy me! I leave Venezuela, returning to France with absolutely no problem at all on my bogus identity card. The gendarmes stare at me only out of pity for a limping, one-eyed cripple; but sooner or later a few of them are going to look the same as me or indeed a great deal worse, if indeed they’re not killed by the fireworks I’m going to arrange at thirty-six, Quai des Orfevres – police headquarters.

‘Play it cool, brother, play it cool – that’s what I say to myself a hundred times a day. That prosecutor: you’ve got to take him apart first. You owe him the most of all. Where do I look for him, though? I’ve quickly discovered that he’s no longer the official prosecutor at the Palais de Justice of the Seine.

‘Shit! Did I really think, after all that’s happened in my life, that it would be so easy for me to locate that bastard? God, please hear me now: just this once I need you on my side!

‘I’m staying at the George V hotel, near my old stomping ground Montmartre. I realise that it’s time to find the seediest bar within this district, and to have a discreet word with the old lags who gather there each night. There’ll certainly be a few former members of the underworld there, and such types as likely as not will know all about the whereabouts of one Pierre Pradel. Doubtless several of them owe him a debt or two as well, although I dare not make them party to my plans.

‘I find my bar and enter… Spectacular, extraordinary good luck, quite against the way things usually go for me! Who do I see but an old mate of mine who was put on the same ship as me to French Guiana! We go back a long way, all the way to when I got life for a murder I never committed, and he got ten years for stealing a bicycle. And the prosecutor at both our trials was Pierre Pradel.

‘Of course, such are my injuries that he doesn’t even recognise me at first. When I tell him who I am he is so shocked he cries like a baby. He has long since given me up for dead. We talk for hours: he is doing okay for himself but the appalling severity of the sentence he received for a minor crime still rankles him. He blames the judge until I make him see that it was all Pradel’s fault. This swine caused the hammer-blow to fall: all the judge did was to make this blow official.

‘We talk further, far into the night. More good fortune: my old mate knows where Pradel spends every day. We leave the bar when it finally closes and sit in a small park. My mate agrees with everything I have come here to do; even more, he will help me to do it, so that he too can have his revenge. It would be too risky for me to attempt to buy a house in a suitably remote area of France, even using my false identity – too many questions might be asked. Instead I will give my friend the necessary funds for him to buy it.

‘The rest is up to me. I visit the café and make the fat shit’s acquaintance over the period of a month or so, in between working like a demon to make the necessary changes to the house that has recently been bought in a somewhat remote area of Pas de Calais...

‘I can see that Pradel trusts me – that he delights in having someone to whine to. He thinks I’m his friend! There: everything is in place. Let’s go!’

Exhausted by talking, Henri slumped back down in his chair and stared at Pradel. The former prosecutor’s fleshy face was a ghastly white, and he slowly shook his head as his lips moved noiselessly.

‘What’s the matter, Pierre? Has the cat caught that famous prostituted tongue of yours?’

Pradel suddenly sunk forward; it looked for a moment as though he would fall from his chair to the floor. Stopping himself, he mumbled, ‘So what now, hey, what now?’

‘Pierre, I fear that you’re not well,’ said Henri with deathly satire.

‘I am sick,’ croaked the fat man.

‘It is that brandy – it is no good for you, especially when laced with a certain drug that sends you slowly, if a little uncomfortably, to sleep. You’re almost there now, man: when you awaken I’ll tell you the first half of my story.’

‘Henri, I – ’ Pradel began; then he fell onto the hard wooden floor, where he lay quite still.

Standing up, Henri prepared to carry him downstairs to the cellar. Then from out in the large hall there came the noise of a key being placed in the front door – something that made Henri start...

Darkness – pitch darkness. Who could say how long he’d been unconscious for; and what manner of drug was it that made his head ache so unmercifully now that he’d awoken?

Moaning, Pradel adjusted his position on what he considered was a wooden bench – and fell straight onto the concrete floor.

‘Henri!’ he bellowed, ‘Where am I?’

A strong light suddenly shone above him, although it put the cell only in a kind of murky twilight instead of the absolute darkness of before.

Squinting his eyes, his head pounding, Pradel looked up: ten feet above him were evenly-spaced, thick steel bars, like tramlines. Perhaps another ten feet above these was a narrow walkway; and Henri was stood on this looking down, his forearms resting on a thin handrail.

‘Take a good look around you, Pradel. Take a good look,’ instructed Henri.

Blinking rapidly, Pradel did as he was told. The brick-built cell was approximately eight-foot by eight-foot square, with a narrow plank attached to one wall. In one corner there was a flush toilet and a tiny hand-basin with one tap. Beside this hand-basin, placed on a folded blanket, there was a cake of soap, a toothbrush, a wooden spoon, and a mug.

And above the small door with a little hatch set in it, was the sign: It is forbidden to open this door without administrative order.

‘What are you doing, Henri?’ asked Pradel in a voice he tried to make firm.

‘Let me talk about my trial, Pradel, and all that followed,’ answered Henri, his vague smile just discernible to the former prosecutor as he stared back up at the walkway.

Pausing to light a cigarette, he continued, ‘How certain my counsel was that I would be acquitted of the murder of a small-time pimp! The ‘evidence’ provided by the pigs smelt fishy and prefabricated even to the judge; he hinted heavily at this during his opening address to the court.

‘But I – ah, I was not so sure! Having grown up parentless and wild on the streets of Paris, I’d already crossed swords with the pigs on several occasions. After I’d been ‘interrogated’ about some trifling crime or other, I would leave the station with my balls twisted and swollen, my belly aching after some fifteen-stone porker had used it as a trampoline.

‘So I knew just how determined those bastards could be when they really wanted something – a confession or the like – and I knew that they were now going all out to fix me good and proper. That they knew I had not been the one to kill the pimp – the ponce – mattered not one jot.

‘Still, this would not have resulted in me being found guilty had it not been for you, you loathsome swine. You stared at me dressed in my smart suit, at twenty-four little more than a boy, and you saw only another faceless man who needed to be destroyed.

‘On what did you notch your successes, Pradel? Your bedpost? And just how many were there – how many innocent men did you send to the guillotine or the penal colonies?’

‘Henri – ’

‘Shut up. My counsel fought valiantly, but they were no match against your foul rhetoric. The twelve twats on the jury went away and returned to find me guilty. By some miracle I was sentenced to life transportation instead of death: perhaps it is possible that the fair-minded judge sought to throw me the slightest of lifelines.

‘A few months later, and I was put aboard the boat – the Martiniere – along with all the other poor unfortunate sods bound for French Guiana. I became friends with just one man, who’d received a ten-year sentence for bicycle theft: some other trifling crimes he’d previously committed had been taken into account, all at the encouragement of one Pierre Pradel.

‘He was a little slow, my mate: I saw at once that he’d been sold down the river. We made a pact to escape as soon as we could, together, and I also made a private vow that one day I would kill the prosecutor who’d destroyed my life and also that I would kill as many pigs as possible.

‘The rumour was quickly spread – for those men like my mate and I who wanted to escape – that the hospital block was the best place from which to try. Arriving at the mainland my mate faked dysentery and I appendicitis, so that we were taken straight there.

‘That rumour had not been wrong! This was a soft touch and a half, and I soon got hold of a corrupt medical orderly who said that he could get me a fine boat for two thousand five hundred francs. There were some time-expired convicts on the outside who could provide such a thing, and at a suitably hefty fee.

‘I agreed, and paid this orderly half the sum from the money contained in my charger – a metal tube the size of my thumb that I kept hidden in my lower colon. You can take an educated guess at its entry point.

‘It was at this point that my mate lost his nerve. Were the break to go wrong we would be severely punished, and he was sure that with good behaviour he would get remission on his sentence. His wife, he assured me, was certain to be campaigning on his behalf in France.

‘Inwardly I was sceptical; most women realised that once their man went to penal they were almost definitely gone for good and for all, whether their sentence had been for life or not. The mortality rate in the colonies was sky-high.

‘But I respected his decision and so we shook hands and remained the best of friends. Brothers, almost. Now I prepared to break out on my own, armed with my knowledge of sailing that I’d acquired during a stay in St Malo a few years previously.

‘One rainy night everything was ready. The boat was waiting for me at a point of the river that ran close by the hospital block – the river that led straight to the sea and freedom. I managed to overpower the single screw who guarded my ward; but I must have hit him too hard – instead of knocking him out – which had been my intention – I killed him. Although he was only a screw his death saddened me. Up until this point I’d never murdered anyone.

‘I found my boat, paid some character the other half of the agreed fee, and by chance rather than by judgement – and half-dead with thirst, hunger and exposure – I reached Venezuela.

‘Seven years later this would prove to be my liberation; but now it was under Gomez’s wicked rule and so I was forced to work building roads with a gang of native prisoners. Conditions were hard; men died everyday from underfeeding and the brutal ill-treatment of the guards; but I was blessed with an iron-hard constitution and so I survived.

‘Two years of this I suffered, until finally the French authorities were alerted to my whereabouts and a boat was sent to get me. Back in French Guiana I was tried for the crimes of escape in the first degree and murder – this in itself carried an automatic death-sentence.

‘By stoutly defending myself I managed to get the murder charge reduced to one of manslaughter, and then I was given my sentence: a year’s solitary confinement for escaping, coupled with five years for manslaughter – to be served concurrently. Six years’ solitary in all.

‘So, Pierre, it was straight to the island of Saint-Joseph and the Reclusion Disciplinaire – or, as it was better nicknamed by the lags in penal, ‘The Devourer of Men’. It was certainly sadists of your type of warped mentality who designed this prison within a prison, with its countless dim tiny cells in which a man was compelled to live in absolute silence; never seeing another person, never hearing a word being said.

‘Through a small hatch in the iron door food was given three times a day, and a dreadfully poor amount at that. Deprived of all stimuli, shut up like a wild animal for X amount of years, is it any wonder that men frequently chose suicide as their only way of release?

‘I have tried to recreate your cell in a similar fashion. This is why I had to wait a month before I could bring you here – and, of course, I also used this time in order to gain your trust.

‘First I dug out a great deal of the cellar, so that I would have enough height for this walkway; and then I built what holds you now. Look at these thick steel bars on top of your cell, as I did once upon a time, and imagine screws wearing slippers – so that there should not even be the noise of footsteps – walked ceaselessly back and forth along the walkway, staring down into the dim murky pits at…

‘At what? At men sat with their head in their hands, at men masturbating as the only way of relieving the eternal tedium, at men swinging from a noose made out of their own trousers? This was hell: a hell lost and forgotten on some tiny tropical island.’

Henri paused long enough to light another cigarette.

‘I was put into my cell – number 136 – and for a long, long while I stared at the notice written above the door: It is forbidden to open this door without administrative order. This was all I would be reading in six years. I was twenty-seven – I would be thirty-three upon my release, and as likely as not hopelessly mad. No other convict had ever been given a six-year sentence before: four or at the very most five was deemed to be the limit of any man’s endurance.

‘I tackled the problem logistically: five years was next to impossible to come through; and yet a few men had done just this, without committing suicide and without going mad. So what was another three hundred and sixty-five days?

‘I vowed to myself that this enforced solitude would be only a temporary hiccup to my plans of escape and revenge: that upon my release I would make another, ultimately successful break.

‘Having done this, I took to pacing my cell for sixteen hours each and every day; then, absolutely exhausted, I would fall into a deep sleep during which I dreamed vividly – of family, friends, past loves, beautiful landscapes. Such was how I obtained my temporary release from this living death.

‘How slowly days, weeks, months and years pass without another soul to talk to! There in the passing, nightmare twilight and then complete darkness of a Reclusion cell I fought to stay alive and sane, grimly focusing my mind on the fact that all the time, time was passing. An obvious thing to say, but what significance this had to my situation and what strength it gave me.

‘And the silence – dear God, the absolute dead silence! Occasionally some poor bastard would reach the end of his tether and shout and scream – something which played on my nerves horribly. It is quite depressing to hear a man going mad. It was then that I considered the silence to indeed be preferable.

‘The cells of the suicides were always opened in the dead of night – or, at least, what I judged to be the dead of night. Both men either side of me chose to end their torment this way, and on each occasion I heard the soft voices of two screws talking as they cut the man down.

‘Sometimes… Sometimes a black mood fell upon me, and once I actually took off my trousers before I managed to get a grip on myself. There was no doubt that the odds against me making another, successful escape were high indeed: just how many men had tried and failed already? But even if I was to die while attempting to escape, surely this was better than hanging myself in this small dark hole.

‘Morning: wake up and walk – one, two, three, four, five, about-turn. One, two… Coffee and bread given to me through my hatch: eat this and continue walking. Lunch – soup or something similar; dinner a lump of boiled meat. Hardly enough food to keep body and soul together, and I was certainly burning more calories than I could afford through my ceaseless exercise.

‘But walk I must, on and on and on. Christ knows how many thousands of miles I tallied up during those endless years. And what did I frequently think about as I walked? I’ll tell you: somehow getting back to France and cutting out a fat prosecutor’s tongue.

‘Yes: first his tongue; and then a few days later I’d put out his sharp cruel eyes. That fat shit, he’d take a week to die. How encouraging such thoughts were – this idea that some fine day I’d have this flabby poof on toast.

‘But anyway – six years I got, but the authorities weren’t as cruel as all that: I got a year’s remission for excellent behaviour, for never making a row like so many of the other luckless sods.

‘My door was opened, the Governor himself looking at me almost with admiration and saying, ‘‘Grandet, your sentence is over. This is the 25 November 1939.’’

‘I staggered out of the accursed Reclusion and into the sunlight, which seemed almost to burn out my eyes. God, how beautiful that blue sky was! And the white birds, and the foamy sea! I – I who had never believed in God before now – there in front of three screws and the Governor I fell to my knees and I wept, thanking Him for having given me the strength to survive what I had. Even there in that dim timeless cell lost amongst countless others He’d found me, giving me courage in the dark.

‘Then, quite suddenly – ‘‘You have suffered and you will suffer again, my son, but this time you will do so as a free man.’’

‘Did I imagine those words in my mind, or did I really hear them? Filled with wonder by this and everything that I saw, I made my way towards whatever it was that fate had in store for me.

‘Do I weary you, Pradel, with my somewhat lengthy account? Certainly your concerns are rather more for your present situation than my history, that’s for sure. So I’ll cut a long story short. It was now wartime, France was under the German yoke, and consequently the sentence for a captured escapee was death: escaping was construed as being a desire to join the Free French forces.

‘In any case I was as yet in no hurry to go. I’d never imagined that the five years I’d spent buried in a dark hole could have damaged my mind so greatly, so that I’d have trouble talking to anyone and concentrating on even the simplest of matters for any length of time.

‘Thank God, this mental damage wasn’t permanent. I had a few good friends who fought hard to rehabilitate me, and given the Lord’s help I displayed a certain hardiness and desire to get better myself.

‘Two years passed before I could be thought as being ‘normal’ – a balanced man who no longer talked to himself and who interacted with others in the usual way. I was still on Saint Joseph, which had at its top the grim Reclusion, and now I started planning my escape.

‘A boat: I needed a boat to be built for me. By virtue of my good friends and the money I still had in my charger – this had never left me – one was indeed prepared; but with painful slowness, for as you can imagine construction had to take place in absolute secrecy, with the boat’s different sections being concealed at various points around the island.

‘But at last it was finished, and I would set sail that night from the remotest part of the island: farewell penal, farewell those good friends of mine whom I’d come to love as brothers! They wept as they embraced me goodbye, certain that I would be captured and killed. Not one accepted my offer to come with me. Let the screws capture me, let them kill me. I don’t give a damn.

‘Escape, escape: escape or die! And the guillotine seemed preferable to another spell in the Reclusion were I to be caught.

‘As you know, I wasn’t. That is why I am here now, looking down at you contained in a cage similar to the one that held me for five long years. See, I have even placed a sign reading ‘‘It is forbidden to open this door without administrative order’’ above your door!’

Pierre Pradel nodded slowly, his fat features devoid of expression as he stared up at Henri.

‘So it is Dumas’ recipe, then – your revenge will be as it was in The Count of Monte Christo. You will leave me here to starve,’ he said in a quiet, resigned voice.

With a brusque shake of his head, Henri contradicted this assumption.

‘That’s no recompense for the time and effort it took me to build this cell. No, I will not leave you to starve – and neither will my revenge be as I’d first imagined, with your tongue being cut out just for starters.

‘The good book says an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth: because of you I spent five years of my life buried in a Reclusion cell, so now the same fate must befall you, for the same period of time.

‘So the interior of this cell is all that you will see for the following sixty months, Pradel. The light above you will remain on and every week someone will bring you seven days’ worth of food. It is possible that you will lose a little weight.

‘In keeping with the rules of solitary confinement, you will not speak to the person who opens the trap in the door to pass you your provisions: if you do so, you will be given a warning to desist. Disobey this, and the light will go out for a week. See, it is pitch-black without it.’

Turning off the bulb, Henri succinctly demonstrated his point.

As he turned it back on, the hatch in the cell door opened and he said, ‘This is your first week’s supply of food, Pradel. Hurry up and take it.’

Feverishly hoping that this was a nightmare from which he would soon awake, the former prosecutor took the four baguettes and the large bag of dried fish and fruit from whomever was on the other side of the door. The hatch was too small even to see the person’s hand.

‘I will try to ensure that you receive some variation in your diet, Pradel, but obviously we have to give you food that will not perish too quickly. Water you can get from the tap, as much as you like. I hope that you live to see your release.’

Making a determined attempt to check his despairing cry, Pradel then forced a sneering tone to his voice as he said, ‘Do you think that you will get away with this, Grandet? I have friends, people who will alert the police, people who will – ’

‘You have no one,’ said Henri in a soft, chiding voice. ‘No one at all. You are as friendless as you have always been. Admit to yourself now that nobody will report you as missing. No one cares. You are as inconsequential to society as a down-and-out, which is pretty much what you are anyway.’

This was true, this was true – death Pradel could have borne bravely, even if torture had preceded it. In some strange way this concept had seemed noble to his mind. It would have proved that he’d been right to have dealt with this man so all those years ago.

But this…

This was a living death.

Five years? Good God, when released he’d be aged –

‘Henri! You can’t do this! Have…’

‘Yes, Pierre?’

‘Have…’

‘Yes?’

‘Have pity!’ Pradel finally blurted, as tears began to course down his flabby cheeks. He knew that, as yet, he would not be able to kill himself. There was no bravery or nobility in suicide.

In fact he could not see how he could kill himself, even if he wanted to. The bars seemed too high to be able to reach so to hang himself, for he stood at little more than five and a half foot. And the tiny sink hardly leant itself to any designs of death by drowning...

‘The pity that you showed myself and so many others; men whom you knew way down in that black heart of yours were innocent, victims of a plot cooked up by the pigs?’ asked Henri after a pause.

‘Please...’

‘It’s no use,’ Henri replied, suddenly sounding weary. He turned to walk away as a sudden, wildly encouraging thought struck Pradel.

‘Ha, fool!’ he cried. ‘You forget one thing! Where have I been everyday for so many years, hey? Who has grown so used to my presence – and my money – that they will surely alert the police to the fact that I am missing? Who will give the police a detailed description of you? I am at least remembered as having been a great figure in French justice, and those flics of whom you speak so disparagingly will mount a search operation that is second to none.’

Henri again gripped the handrail, and as Pradel finished speaking he smiled.

‘Such is your dreadful memory for faces, Pierre, that for many years you’ve been staring straight at a man whom you had sent to penal for bicycle theft.’

And at Henri’s side there now appeared a man whose weasel-face burnt not only with triumph, but also with his disbelief that everything had gone so exactly to plan.

‘Dubois!’ blurted Pradel.

‘You fat pig,’ was all the café owner’s husband felt able to say. He was almost entirely overcome with emotion.

‘I am leaving for Venezuela soon, Pradel,’ Henri stated. ‘I will return to France when and if I judge that it is safe to do so, for I go now to deliver a package of explosives to the police headquarters in Paris. By tonight who can say how many pigs will be dead?’

Conscious that time and indeed hope were fast running out, Pradel fixed his trembling gaze on Jean-Luc Dubois.

‘Jean... Jean...’ he mewed pitifully, entirely out of keeping in comparison to how he’d always addressed the thin man before. ‘This man is mad, surely you can see that? This house was bought in your name, wasn’t it? When it is known that I am missing, the police – knowing that I frequent your wife’s café – will certainly go through your history and discover the link between us. They’ll be onto you and this little plan quicker than you can say knife. Think about that, Jean-Luc Dubois, just think about that!’

For a moment Pradel looked as satisfied as if he’d just given the final, extraordinary piece of evidence to a packed courtroom. And appearing suitably concerned, Jean-Luc appealed with his stupid, docile eyes for Henri’s assistance.

‘You know, you know,’ repeated Henri quietly, a little wearily. ‘We’ve talked about this before.’

‘No one knows you, Pierre Pradel,’ Jean-Luc said at length, in little more than a whisper. ‘No one will report you missing. All I have to make sure is that no one’s following me when I come to feed you, just in case. That’s all.’

‘My landlord will notice!’ Pradel cried.

This time Henri intervened. ‘You said to me once that you’d bought your room outright many years back. I took care to find this out, of course. Come now, I’ve not got the time for games. You have a five year solitary sentence to begin, and I hopefully have many flics to kill.’

‘YOUR WIFE!’ screamed Pradel to Jean-Luc. ‘What are you going to say to her each week, hey man? I mean, when you come here to feed me? She’ll notice something’s up, and what do you think she’ll think of this?’

Reluctantly, Henri motioned to someone away from him and his friend to join them. Pradel gave a hideous, canine whine as the fat figure of Madame Dubois bounded into view, her piggy eyes blazing with hate. It was now obvious as to who’d just given him his week’s worth of rations.

‘You took my man away from me for eight long years! Ten it was meant to be, for sure, but eight was just as bad! And now, Pradel, you shall taste the terror, the utter misery, of the unjustly imprisoned. When my man told me who you were, all those years ago when you first entered the café, I pleaded with him to do something. It seemed unbelievable that you didn’t recognise him. But do not imagine that he is as weak-willed as all that: he refused point blank to do take any revenge, and nothing I could say could persuade him otherwise. Oh – I had my ideas! Poisoning your brandy, for example.

‘It took Henri to talk Jean-Luc round, and here we are. Do not imagine that I hate you any less then these two men, even though it was they who suffered at your hands. If it was down to me you’d be eaten alive by rats!’

‘Madame Dubois, I was only doing my job, can’t you see that – ’

‘Silence!’ the woman shrieked. ‘I’ll be taking it in turns with my hubby to drive here and give you your week’s food, and one peep out of you and I’ll turn that light off, you hear? It’ll be a thousand times worse in the dark.’

With this, the three turned as one and began walking away.

As he stared wide-eyed at their retreating shadows on the stone wall behind the walkway, Pradel suddenly shouted, ‘Wait, wait; this is a joke, this has to be a joke. In the name of Christ, you cannot – ’

‘Shut up, Pradel. I’m warning you. One more peep…’

Already Henri Grandet’s voice sounded far away, the last voice Pierre Pradel would be hearing for half a decade.

‘Henri!’ he shrieked.

The light went out.

The Burning House

The large wooden house situated close to the edge of the thick forest was burning fiercely, the fire red and yellow, magnificent against the night’s dark-purple sky. Cinders erupted into the air like fireworks but fell back to Earth well short of the assembled crowd, who stood watching the flames with grim satisfaction. No attempt was being made at putting out the fire, and as the house stood on its own no other properties were in danger.

The forest enclosed two-thirds of the village called Tisakurt, growing either side and meeting a few hundred yards behind the building that was now on fire. Seated on a fallen log just outside of the forest were a man and a woman. The woman was thin and dressed in jeans and a white shirt, watching the flames with absorption.

A short distance away was the inn where she was currently residing. Caroline Dawes was visiting Hungary in her capacity as a freelance journalist, preparing a report on the country and its people, democracy having finally been established two years before in 1989.

Dawes had no real interest in the man who was sat beside her, his face averted away from her own as he silently watched the burning house. He’d come from the direction of the forest five or so minutes after she’d taken a seat on the log.

When the man finally spoke his voice was hoarse, his English heavily accented –

‘Many have prayed for that house to burn for years.’

Immediately sensing an interesting and hence possibly sellable story – and hoping that the man’s explanation would provide the answer to the crowd’s obvious mood of grim satisfaction – Dawes replied, ‘Why?’

The man sighed before replying, the sound strangely lonely, like wind blowing through the branches of an autumn-stripped tree. His face remained inclined away from the reporter as he said, ‘A couple by the name of Kronberg brought that house nearly one hundred years before and turned it into an inn.

‘The husband, Lazio, was a harsh man who often whipped his eldest son Nicholas for failing at school. Unable to take anymore, Nicholas finally ran away. Their only other son died fighting in the Great War, and their daughter fled to Budapest in the hope of a better life. Unfortunately she found only prostitution, drink – and ultimately death.

‘At the end of the Great War the couple sat down and talked. They were in trouble, for they had hardly any money and their future appeared as bleak as their present. Unlike most of their ageing neighbours they no longer had any children to care for them as they grew decrepit, for their cruelty had driven them all away. After hours of debate they could think of only one possible solution to their problem – murder for profit.

‘They planned everything with meticulous care, Lazio digging a long trench in the wood behind the house and filling it with quicklime. The trench was well hidden, but if anyone asked what he was doing he’d only to reply that he was planning to build an outhouse.

‘But people were too wrapped up in their own misfortunes to concern themselves with another’s business, and so he dug his trench of death in peace. His wife, Susi, brought some strychnine crystals, telling the uncaring shop owner that they were being troubled by wolves.

‘From then on, eleven of the guests who sought lodgings at the Kronberg’s inn never left again. If the guest appeared well-to-do then the Kronberg’s would give them a fine meal, and at the end of this meal a special wine would be produced, the guest gladly drinking to the health of their generous hosts. The wine didn’t do their own health any good, however, as it had been heavily laced with strychnine.’

Dawes’ body shook slightly with both the chill of the night away from the fire and the man’s story. The gathered crowd continued to watch in silence as the flames devoured the house.

‘But why did they give such a meal and spend time with the guest before killing them?’ she asked softly, no longer thinking about the stiff drink and the hot shower she’d previously been looking forward to upon her return to the inn.

She saw by an almost imperceptible movement of his thin shoulders that the man had shrugged.

‘Who can tell?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘Certainly not me. Perhaps it was their way of atoning for what they were going to do, strange though this may sound. But anyway – they didn’t intend to murder forever, and after a few years they were sufficiently well-off to agree to seal the quick-lime pit forever after one last killing. ‘Their last ‘guest’ was a man in his early thirties, who said that he’d only recently returned from several years spent in New York conducting business, and who bore the self-satisfied air of someone who’d done well for themselves. And so his fate was sealed, as indeed the trench would be after his death.

‘He talked with such good humour and was so friendly that the Kronberg’s were reluctant to kill him, but his lips curled back as he tasted the ‘special’ wine he was given at the end of the meal. When he was dead the Kronberg’s searched the bags he’d left in the guest bedroom, and with shaking hands found that they were full of money. They were rich beyond even their wildest dreams.

‘But then they found something else: a photo of themselves. And only now did they realise that the genial man who’d insisted that he be called ‘Lucky’ was actually their eldest son Nicholas, who’d run away years before. They found papers in the dead man’s jacket confirming this name, and noticed a scar on his forehead that the boy had received from one of his father’s many beatings.

‘This was all too much for the elderly couple: overcome with remorse they sat with their dead guest at the dinner table, wrote a note confessing what they’d done, and drank the lethal wine themselves.’

The reason behind the crowd’s mood was now obvious to Dawes, who shivered violently and rubbed her arms. She shared the gathered locals’ satisfaction as one side of the house collapsed with a great cracking noise, the burning roof consequently slipping down. As the man momentarily turned his face towards her a sudden wind blew his curly black hair back from his forehead and he smiled sadly, the blazing fire illuminating his pinched and sallow face.

Looking back at the house he said, ‘During the years that followed the house was frequently bought and frequently sold, never staying with an owner for very long for always they complained of a vision of thirteen people seated around a dining table, all with the same horrible grin fixed upon their decaying faces. The house fell into ruin during the 60s, and now it is burning to the ground. The town, and perhaps those who were murdered, are finally free of the Kronberg’s legacy.’

Turning away from the man and the burning house, Dawes searched for her cigarettes in the handbag she’d placed next to her on the fallen log. Only now, as she located her cigarettes and so felt for a lighter, did she abstractly consider the man’s strange attire.

He wasn’t dressed in a modern fashion – not unusual for this area, but the appearance was oddly reminiscent of the 1920s. When he’d faced her his expression had been a little tragic, and when the flames from the house had momentarily burned more viciously they’d highlighted a long white scar on his forehead.

Hands that suddenly felt like ice dropped the handbag, as Caroline Dawes sharply turned her head to where the man was seated.

But she was alone on the log.

Tokyo Zombie Apocalypse

Ikeda-sensei stumbled into the classroom looking like he’d not slept for a month. Usually he was neatness personified; but now his hair was a mess, his glasses askew, his tie undone and his shirt ripped. And his slow, shambling gait was entirely opposite to how he normally walked.

Ikeda-sensei’s class – poised to stand and together announce ‘Sensei, ohiogozaimasu’ (‘Good morning, teacher’) – gave a collective gasp at his appearance. Still, they then began to rise. Regardless of how he looked, to have remained seated as Ikeda-sensei entered would have been unthinkable.

Sat at the back of the fourth-floor classroom, Miyuki Yoshida’s eyes narrowed as she looked at the girl hurriedly getting to her feet right at the front of the class.

Fucking teacher’s pet, that Akane thought Miyuki contemptuously, chewing hard on a piece of gum. She’d decided not to stand up herself. Would just remain seated, staring hard at the teacher Ikeda – and exactly what the fuck was wrong with him today? – while blowing bubbles. She’d done so before. He’d try and stare back at her, attempting to exert his authority, but would just get ever redder and more flustered.

Finally he’d shout at her for her insolence, order her to leave the classroom – something she’d do with deliberate slowness, pursing her full lips at the teacher who was somewhere in his mid-thirties as she passed him on her way out. Miyuki knew she was hot. Fifteen but already showing in all the right places. Maybe Ikeda-sensei went home to his sad little apartment and masturbated over her; imagined her blowing him while wearing her school uniform…

Well, tough luck, Sensei, ‘cause such a scene is remaining strictly in your imagination…

The thin teacher lurched towards the student named Akane. He rasped something unintelligible, his hands reaching out over the small desk to grasp Akane’s shoulders. The girl stood next to her took several hurried steps back, shouting out ‘Kowai-yo!’ (‘I’m scared!’)

Miyuki’s heavily-made up eyes with the long, false lashes – already narrowed in preparation for her staring competition with the teacher – suddenly widened as Ikeda-sensei pulled Akane towards him and sunk his teeth into the side of her neck.

Akane gave a shriek, blood shooting out in a manner that bizarrely reminded Miyuki of a whale spurting water. The other students (it was a mixed class) began to shout and scream, chairs and desks being knocked over with a clatter as they quickly retreated to the back of the classroom.

Ikeda-sensei raised his head, his teeth detaching from Akane’s neck, his chin slick with blood. Akane’s body flopped to the floor, where it lay quite still. It was obvious that the teacher’s bite had severed some major artery and now she was dead…

…Except she then began to rise again. Turning to stare at her classmates with the same glassy-eyed stare as that possessed by the teacher. A huge lump missing from where Ikeda had taken a bite, but the blood no longer flowing. She began to lurch forwards, her lips moving as she rasped some strange noise, her expression vacant and yet also somehow –

Hungry.

‘Shit’s sake,’ muttered Miyuki, as the other students – both male and female – continued to scream and cower against the wall just behind her. Miyuki was so scared she thought she was going to piss in her pants; but she wasn’t going to just stand here whimpering until the teacher and the teacher’s pet reached her and did –

Whatever.

Only now did Miyuki stand, her hands the gripping the back of the wooden chair. She lifted it slightly, experimentally, off the floor. It felt reassuringly heavy…

Lifting it higher, she started forwards towards the staggering, mumbling man and young woman. With a yell, she then smashed the chair down onto Ikeda-sensei’s head.

He swayed but didn’t fall, his lips moving as his eyes fastened onto Miyuki’s throat. One of his hands moved forwards; and as it gripped her shoulder, Miyuki gave a shrill shriek of terror, pulled away and again brought the chair down.

An audible crack came from Ikeda-sensei’s skull; but still no blood showed. Still, he now fell back, his frozen expression registering confusion rather than any pain.

What the fuck is this guy on? wondered Miyuki, as she turned her attention to the teacher’s pet. Miyuki had sniffed glue, taken speed and drunk alcohol – but nothing had ever got her in anything like the state this teacher was in.

And how to account for Akane? Little Miss Perfect Grades, scurrying to school and between classes with her head bowed. On occasion she’d passed Miyuki and some of Miyuki’s circle in the small park nearby, as they smoked and talked too loudly. And Miyuki had hurled abuse at Akane as she passed, encouraging others to do the same…

…But there was nothing bowed or scurrying about Akane now. The top of her previously immaculate light-blue school blazer soaked with blood, her lips twitching as they uttered those guttural, incomprehensible sounds, that glassy, oddly hungry gaze fixed upon Miyuki’s trachea as the strangely claw-like hands stretched forwards…

‘Shit’s sake!’ cried Miyuki, as she lifted up the chair and brought it crashing down for the third time. Straight on the crown of Akane’s head.

The teacher might be on something – how else to account for the fact that he was still standing, and obviously about to lurch towards Miyuki again – but what about Akane? How in the hell was that delicately-built, petite, in-bed-by-nine-o-clock-each-evening girl still standing after that blow which should have split her head straight in two?

To say nothing of the fact that she’d just had half of her neck bitten out, had decorated the walls, floor and even ceiling with her spurting blood before flopping down as though dead – and had then got straight back fucking up again…?

…Again, Miyuki had heard the crack of breaking bone. A noise which automatically filled her with revulsion. Even worse than it had when she’d struck Ikeda-sensei.

And Akane was still standing…

Dropping the chair, Miyuki moved quickly around the two groaning, stumbling figures and headed towards the classroom door. The only way out, unless you fancied a four-storey drop from one of the two large windows set along one wall.

The door was open… but as Miyuki reached it something made her look back. The other students were still there, at the back of the classroom, crying and whimpering and crouched up against the wall as the teacher and Akane swayed towards them.

‘Shit’s sake,’ muttered Miyuki again – her favorite expression. She said it in English, although it came out something like Shittu-sayku, Miyuki having first heard it in some American movie.

As well as Akane, Miyuki had also bullied half the members of this class at one time or another. Had demanded money from some of them, or the answers to some piece of homework just before the teacher arrived. And the other boys and girls were now like so many rabbits, just waiting there to have their own throats ripped out by the snapping teeth of this former math teacher and his star pupil…

Then Miyuki took notice of the fire-extinguisher located on the wall next to the open door. She grabbed at it, tearing out the plastic band which meant that she could now pull the handle and fire –

‘Hey!’ cried Miyuki, white foam shooting out. Ikeda-sensei and the girl turned slowly, almost reluctantly round to face her; and then their jaws sagged open and their hands came up slightly as the contents of the fire-extinguisher covered their faces and body.

‘Everybody out! C’mon – let’s go!’ cried Miyuki. A couple of the boys responded, that was all, staring wide-eyed at the girl with the too-short skirt and hair dyed with blond streaks as they passed. But the rest of the class – some fifteen other boys and girls – remained where they were, huddled against the wall, too petrified to move as the contents of the fire extinguisher began to run out…

‘Go! Now!’ cried Miyuki, dropping the extinguisher and running over to one of the girls, pushing her shoulder. This action seemed to set a precedent: the other pupils at last began moving. But as the final student passed by Akane, the foam-covered, cracked-skulled former teacher’s pet suddenly grabbed at the fleeing boy with her claw-like hands.

Akane snarled as she pulled the boy to the floor with unbelievable strength, the boy screaming as Akane’s teeth then sank into his throat, the hot blood spurting again…

Nothing can be done for that one thought Miyuki, determinedly pushing away the horror, the revulsion she naturally felt at such a sight, replacing it instead with a hard-nosed desire to survive. If she was going to escape whatever the fuck was taking place alive, she needed to keep her wits about her, and her head as cool as possible. Screaming and crying wasn’t going to accomplish anything.

She darted into the corridor outside with those other students from her class who’d also escaped having their throats ripped out. But now Miyuki realized that this nightmare was taking place across the entire school. Here in the corridor students were running past, screaming. Other students were lurching around, some with their teeth and jaws stained red, clawed hands grasping at the clothing of those who sought to escape them.

And there was the Principal. Crouched down, face buried in one side of a gurgling male student’s neck. Miyuki stared, transfixed by the horrific sight. Then she saw the eyes of the bitten student slumped against the wall transform first from wide-eyed terror and pain into a fixed look which clearly indicated death – and then all at once into that already chillingly-familiar, hungry and glassy expression.

The male student began slowly to rise, the Principal also standing up and lurching away from his last victim, his own glassy-eyed stare swiveling around the corridor, searching for another source of warm blood and flesh…

Miyuki tore away her attention. She needed to get out of this school, somehow. That was the only thing she should be focusing on. Blot out the screaming, the terrified faces, the stumbling glassy-eyed whatever the fuck they are…

Then – with a feeling almost of detached, dazed bemusement – Miyuki saw that one male student was filming the lunacy taking place using a smartphone. This student was podgy, with thick glasses. The still-walking, still-breathing stereotype of an otaku or geek – someone who spent their free time absorbed in anime movies and manga, and who went as frequently as possible to Tokyo’s Akihabara neighborhood, where other, like-minded people could be met.

The geek briefly turned his camera towards Miyuki, filming her as he excitedly exclaimed:

‘This is a real Tokyo zombie apocalypse!’

‘Shittu-sayku,’ returned Miyuki, shaking her head. Amid all the screaming and spraying blood, more-and-more students and teachers getting bitten and thus turning into these creatures, it seemed as though this situation had resulted in at least one tubby young manga fan having the time of his life.

Miyuki began to move. Along the corridor, pushing past the bodies of the still-living and the creatures, heading towards the main staircase. That too, she saw now, was condensed with yet more screaming bodies. She took the stairs, shoving her way down. A hand grabbed one ankle and she almost tripped over. She looked down, clenching a fist as she determined to punch whoever it was as hard as she could in order to make them let go –

But it was a girl of no more than twelve. Her terror-struck eyes showing that she was still one of those who hadn’t had their throats torn out, prior to coming back to life.

‘Help me… please…’ she whispered, staring pleadingly at the type of rebellious student whom she would usually have avoided like the plague.

Grabbing the young girl’s upper arm, Miyuki then pulled her to her feet. She dragged the whimpering child down the stairs, pushing through the mass of bodies. Despite the screaming and yelling going on all around – the school’s fire-bell also now beginning to sound – she could hear the child whimpering and crying behind her.

Still chewing hard on her gum, Miyuki briefly pulled the girl to her so close that their faces were nose-to-nose.

‘Shut up, do you hear me?’ she said harshly. ‘Save your energy, and stop bawling.’

The girl sniffed once and then nodded, struck dumb by Miyuki’s chastisement. The pair set off again, now on the second-floor. A blood-stained figure suddenly reared up in front of Miyuki, the scarlet teeth snapping barely an inch away from her face. Almost without thought, Miyuki brought her right knee hard up into the male creature’s groin.

Nothing. A blow which would have instantly brought any living man down to his knees in agony had not the slightest effect on this teenage creature.

‘Shittu-sayku,’ swore Miyuki, starting to feel desperate. She was trying to push the creature away yet it had unbelievable strength. Those snapping, reddened teeth were getting closer… closer…

At the last moment before the teeth buried themselves in her face or neck, some of what Miyuki had learnt in the string of judo lessons she’d taken a few years back bubbled to the surface of her mind.

She stepped suddenly to one side, releasing her grip and so all of the pressure she’d previously been exerting. With nothing to oppose its own strength, the creature that had once been a male high-school student now staggered forwards, overbalancing and so sprawling facedown onto the staircase.

‘Come on – come on!’ Miyuki exhorted the younger girl, as that student stared gawping up at her, as though Miyuki had just done something truly spectacular.

Again pushing their way through the forest of bodies… People screaming out, for help. One girl screamed at a glassy-eyed boy ‘Shintaro – what are you doing?’ in the second or so before the boy-creature sank its teeth into the girl’s neck.

More blood spurting out; more screaming…

…And then, almost at once, Miyuki and the girl were on the ground-floor. The staircase led straight down to the reception area, the reception office and such just before the main entrance.

The whole area was thick with bodies. A bespectacled policeman, who didn’t look to Miyuki as though he was much older than her, had his gun out and pointing at the groaning, bloody creature that had once been the woman who’d attempted to teach Miyuki physics.

‘Halt… halt… I mean it, I really will fire,’ stammered the policeman, his shaking hands and quivering voice betraying his terror.

The thing that had once been addressed by her students as Nakamura-sensei gave a hideous groan and raised her hands, the long, previously stylish nails now broken and blood-stained.

‘I will, I’ll pull the trigger,’ declared the policeman again, his voice starting to become hysterical.

‘Do it! Shoot her!’ cried Miyuki, realizing that any second the policeman was set to become one of these creatures himself.

And yet he did fire, just as the creature laid its claws on his shoulders and so pulled him towards its opening jaws.

Two shots – bang! bang! – fired point-blank straight into its heart.

The thing’s face with the wide, marble-like eyes didn’t seem even to register that it had just been blasted. Its hands continued to pull the policeman towards its teeth; the young police officer gave a shrill cry of terror, the gun falling from his hand as the jaws closed on one side of his neck…

…The young girl pulled her hand away from Miyuki’s, so that she could now raise both hands to in front of her mouth and give an ear-piercing shriek. Miyuki couldn’t bring herself to scold her, this time. She felt like doing exactly the same thing herself.

Quickly looking around to make sure that she and the girl were in no immediate danger (there were creatures all around, but they were currently engaged in attacking other, still-living students, teachers and police), Miyuki then knelt down by the girl and said –

‘We’ll get out of this, I promise. You see over there – that’s the exit. We can make our way to there and we’re outside.’

The girl nodded, Miyuki’s words reassuring and comforting her even as Miyuki felt her own heart sink. For if this was the scene inside this high-school, then what the hell was it going to look like outside?

Only one way of finding out…

‘Okay,’ said Miyuki. ‘Let’s go.’

Again standing up, she took the younger girl’s hand and pulled her through the mass of bodies.

And at once they were outside…

Everywhere there was yet more screaming chaos. People running, shouting, sirens blaring. Those creatures that were stumbling and shuffling around, seemingly so slow, so clumsy and yet almost with every passing second grabbing a new victim from the men, women and children running frantically past and pulling them down to the road or sidewalk that was already hot from the morning sun.

Only the strongest, the toughest of men having a chance in a hundred of being able to wrench themselves free – unbitten. Most people entirely unable to resist as the gnashing teeth tore into their necks, severing the jugular, sometimes biting clean through the trachea.

Miyuki saw one salaryman – a businessman – in a dark suit stand back up, something white and gleaming protruding through the hole in his neck that had been created just half a minute or so before. His eyes were now like grey marbles, his sunglasses lying smashed and forgotten on the sidewalk.

The salaryman stepped out in the road, straight in front of a taxi that blared its horn in the split-second before it smashed into the creature. Up flew the body, landing at the side of the road as the taxi screeched to a half and the driver door flew open.

‘Oh no – I’m sorry, I’m so sorry!’ repeated the driver, running over to kneel by the creature that was now starting to get back up…

Miyuki opened her mouth to shout some sort of warning – but it was too late. With a look of some surprise (evidently at the fact that someone was getting back up, so soon after being struck by a speeding vehicle), the taxi driver bent down to place a supportive hand underneath the creature’s left shoulder…

With a speed which belied the creatures’ usually stumbling, shambling gait, this thing which had cartilage, bone or whatever the hell it was sticking out through the hole in its neck whipped its head around and bit into the taxi driver’s right forearm.

The creature snarled as the taxi driver gave a shriek of shock and pain, moving its head around with its mouth remaining tightly clamped shut on the driver’s arm, like a dog worrying a bone. The driver sank to his knees, blood running down either side of the creature’s mouth, those people running past barely even noticing the spectacle in their frantic efforts to get away.

This scene was happening everywhere, anyway…

And soon enough the look of terror and agony left the taxi driver’s eyes, and there was the gray marble stare as he got slowly back to his feet, the creature that had recently bitten him also now fully rising. The taxi stayed where it had been left, the door open, engine running. Forgotten.

‘Hitomi!’

‘Papa!’ cried the girl whose wrist Miyuki was continuing to grip. Miyuki looked in the direction from where the shout had come. A man wearing a white shirt was running towards the two schoolgirls, the car a short distance behind him with its driver door open and the engine running.

Pulling free of Miyuki’s grip, the girl named Hitomi ran to her father. He held her to him, eyes welling with tears as he said her name repeatedly.

‘She,’ said Hitomi, pointing back at Miyuki with one hand. ‘She saved me!’

The father stared with momentary uncertainty at the older girl with the short skirt and blonde highlights. Ordinarily, he would have been much less than delighted that his precious young daughter was keeping such dubious company.

But then the father shouted at Miyuki –

‘I’m getting out of here – out of this area. I know a place where we’ll be safe, my family and I. And you, if you want. So, come with us!’

Miyuki struggled to think, the screaming and yelling going on all around. Car horns sounding, a vehicle crashing into a glass-fronted shop nearby. Soon enough the roads would be clogged and no one would be able to drive anywhere…

‘Come on!’ entreated the father, now pulling his daughter towards the car. It wasn’t safe to remain in the same place for any length of time; not with the stumbling, marble-eyed creatures that were all the time increasing in number.

‘I… my mother…’ stammered Miyuki.

And then another horn sounded, over a loud rap song blaring from speakers. Miyuki looked away from the father and Hitomi and there was a young man of about twenty, wearing sunglasses, his hair also streaked blond and a cigarette sticking almost defiantly out of the corner of his mouth as he sat on his large, white motorbike.

‘Trouble,’ gasped Miyuki, addressing the helmetless young man by his street name.

‘C’mon,’ said Trouble, an arrogant smirk playing on his tough, handsome face. ‘I know a place we can go; a place we’ll be safe. It’s not far at all.’

It was this last sentence which made Miyuki make up her mind. That, and this chance to finally get to ride with Trouble. She’d always liked him, but he naturally got his pick of the slightly older girls. She’d been out with a few of the younger boys, given a couple of them a hand job, allowed them a feel of what was between her legs – but always her sights had been set on catching Trouble’s eye.

And now here he was, offering her a backie on his motorbike. There was no way Miyuki was passing this offer by, regardless of the present circumstances.

So she ran towards Trouble and his large bike, not even bothering to look again at Hitomi and her father. She climbed on, as the creature that had once been a taxi driver staggered towards them. Revving his engine, Trouble then gave the creature a sharp kick as he roared past it.

Miyuki gave a shriek of laughter. She was with Trouble and he was kicking ass! Living up to his street-name. Everyone else was crying and cowering and getting bitten and getting back up again with that grey marble stare – but here she was sat on the back of Trouble’s big bike with the music coming out of its speakers and nothing was going to get them. Hell itself had better stay out of their way!

…Trouble weaved his bike through the chaos. Streets and roads littered with the stumbling corpses and the shrieking survivors. Cars crashed into each other and the fronts of shops. Some other vehicles still moving, much slower than the motorbikes – Trouble’s and others’ – the cars barely able to pass through the mayhem. And this morning Mayumi had left her boxlike apartment in a drab Tokyo suburb and made her way to high-school, and there had not been the slightest indication that any of this was about to occur…

Just what the hell had occurred – and, it seemed, so damn quickly…?

Miyuki decided that Trouble could fill her in on the details, whenever they got to wherever it was Trouble was taking them. He’d said it wasn’t far – a place where they could be safe. Miyuki still had to tell Trouble that she needed to get to see her mother, at the hospital. Maybe Trouble could take her there on his bike.

Miyuki hoped her mother was safe. She’d done something terrible (although, Miyuki knew she was at least partly to blame for her mother’s actions), was in hospital because of that, and so Miyuki could only hope that these walking corpses weren’t currently stumbling through the hospital corridors, attacking her mother and those other helpless patients lying in their beds…

And yet – whatever was happening seemed to be everywhere. Fires breaking out; a police car crashed into a fire engine, the sirens of both vehicles still blaring as the police officers and firemen fought with the stumbling creatures that were undoubtedly increasing in number with every passing minute.

A fireman sank his axe into a thing’s shoulder, almost severing the arm… And yet the thing didn’t even pause in its stumbling progress, bearing down onto the yelling fireman, sinking its teeth into the front of his neck even as a hysterical policeman emptied his pistol into the thing’s body, the bullets clearly having absolutely no effect…

It was obvious to Miyuki now that these things had to be shot or hit in the head. But then, from her experiences with Ikeda-sensei and the former teacher’s pet Akane, they had to be hit hard…

But the motorbike was leaving the main roads now. Trouble taking them away from the centre of the chaos, the creatures now more scattered, just staggering rather than attacking, the ordinarily quiet streets leading towards the sprawling temple – located at the foot of a mountain that was covered with tombs – offering less targets than the downtown network of skyscraper blocks of offices and shops.

Salubrious homes with beautifully-kept bushes in the front gardens, some with neatly-trimmed bonsai trees by the entrance porch. Fences made from bamboo, although these homes were more western in design than traditional Japanese.

A white net curtain twitched in a second floor window, a scared female face momentarily staring out before it again concealed itself. Miyuki wondered if the woman wasn’t hiding out in this house with her whole family, hoping that this madness afflicting Tokyo – maybe even the whole of Japan? – would somehow just pass…

A final steep slope, the motorbike’s engine sounding as though it was straining slightly, and then Trouble entered into the temple’s car-park. He stopped the engine – had already killed the music – and stepped off. Helped Miyuki disembark, offering her his hand like a proper man.

‘Why have we come here?’ asked Miyuki quietly.

Trouble screwed up his eyes, looking around him. There was no sign of life. They were stood near the temple’s main hall, with its great sloped roof and large wooden beams, but there was no sound of any chanting or such coming from inside.

Then Trouble looked further up the mountainside that was behind the temple and its car-park. The forest of greenery and countless lines of stone and marble tombs disappearing into the hazy morning sunlight. It wasn’t yet real summer, when the temperature was all but unbearable – but still, it was hot enough.

‘Up there,’ began Trouble, motioning towards the sea of trees and tombs, ‘there’s a building. Used to be a house or something, but now it’s derelict. We can hide in there until all this passes.’

‘But – just us? Is anyone else there?’

‘A few others know about it; maybe they’re in there already, or will come in a while. But we should get going – careful, now. Whatever these things are, we don’t want any of them spotting us and then following us to where we’re going…’

Miyuki really wanted to say something, concerning her urgent desire to get to the hospital where her mother was staying. But there was something in Trouble’s voice, his whole attitude, which commanded obedience.

…And it was only now that Miyuki remembered that crazy story her grandfather had once told her. The old man had been dying, his brain half-poisoned by failing kidneys. Whispering some hoarse words in Miyuki’s ear, after she’d reluctantly visited him in hospital following school one day.

You’re a girl, but you’re still my oldest grandchild. Fact is, you’re my only grandchild the old man had declared. I told your father the same thing, but then he just ran off somewhere… Never was any good, that one… So I guess he never told you about – the sword?

At this, Miyuki’s eyes had widened slightly with surprise. No (she’d signified with a shake of her head) the father whom she’d barely known, who’d run off somewhere with another woman when Miyuki had still been small, had never said a single-damn-thing about a sword.

I hid it, continued her grandfather. Once the Americans used those two terrible bombs to finish the war, instead of trying to invade Japan, I hid the sword. Wrapped in oily cloths, so it can be used immediately whenever Japan next faces grave danger. And Japan will face grave danger one day – that’s for certain…

Miyuki nodded again at this and sneaked a look at the clock on the hospital wall. She was due to meet some friends, soon. One said he would be able to bring some alcohol. Already she was starting to come home late, shouting and swearing at her mother when that tired, overworked woman dared ask her where she’d been – saying that she’d been kept up, worried…

I’ll tell you now where the sword is declared the grandfather. So, if the day ever comes during your lifetime when Japan again faces grave danger, you will be able to use it to defend yourself – and others…

Yeah, yeah – whatever thought Miyuki, barely keeping the exasperation and boredom she felt at having to listen to this semi-delirious crap out of her face. She consoled herself with the thought that her grandfather wasn’t a poor man, and so would probably leave her a bit of money once he died – which looked to be any day now…

And then the old man began to describe just where she would be able to find this alleged sword…

…Miyuki followed Trouble closely along the winding paths with the ancient, sagging stone walls that cut through the lines of tombs and the many trees. It was an absolute maze – and yet Trouble seemed to know his way without any hesitation, turning sometimes here, sometimes there, always keeping low, his body crouched.

There were also those creatures stumbling around the mountainside cemetery. On several occasions, Trouble suddenly stopped and almost knelt to the ground, motioning for Miyuki to do the same.

A thing passed ahead, where one winding pathway intersected another. Stumbling, that strange rasping sound issuing from its throat. Dressed in a monk’s robes, the head shaved. It still carried its prayer-beads in its clawed hands, and for a few moments Miyuki thought that it might actually be chanting in that strange, guttural voice…

Then a scream, coming from some other part of the mountainside. A call for help. Miyuki – still distressed by such a cry, although she’d already heard it any number of times today – started to stand, instinctively wanting to help…

‘Get down!’ hissed Trouble, and Miyuki instantly did as told.

‘We can’t help them,’ continued Trouble. ‘Just have to look out for each other – you and me.’

Miyuki felt something warm flare in her chest at these words. You and me. A bond between her and the gang leader; this suggestion that they were in this thing together. Now going to this secret hide out Trouble knew, where they’d be alone…

For a few moments, in the midst of such exciting thoughts, Miyuki forgot all about her mother.

The screaming was abruptly silenced and the stumbling monk-thing stumbled on by ahead. Trouble set off again, his hands with the metal skull rings down by his sides, ready. For the first time, Miyuki felt safe, protected.

And then she saw the house where they were heading. Part of the roof had fallen in, and so had been covered by a blue builders’ tarpaulin. But she’d no idea how they could get inside; the front door and all forward facing windows looked to have been boarded up. Rubble had been disposed off all around the decaying walls of the house; bricks, stone and marble from previously demolished tombs, headless religious statues…

Still not daring to speak, Miyuki followed Trouble around to the back of the large building. This looked to be as secure as the front, deliberately closed off by builders to any potential trespassers.

But then Trouble picked up a screwdriver concealed underneath a rock, and undid the two long screws that were actually the only things keeping the wooden back door closed.

It opened inwards into a dark, earthy-smelling interior, the rooms still partially divided by moldering, sliding doors of wood and paper. Two wooden steps led up from the open back door, and taking them Trouble then looked back at Miyuki.

‘Follow me,’ he ordered. ‘Quickly.’

For some reason feeling suddenly worried, strangely suspicious, Miyuki did as she was told.

They were all alone. She knew that already. For there was no one else inside this derelict building, located smack bang in the middle of a sprawling temple cemetery. She was all alone with the gang leader called Trouble who had the reputation for extreme violence, those bloody, bitten creatures meanwhile stumbling around outside.

Thought Miyuki at once: Maybe I should have got in the car with that girl named Hitomi and her father, after all…

…Trouble closed the door behind them, and put a large concrete block against it, so that it would not swing inwards. It was near-dark; Trouble flicked his lighter, and lit two candles on the ground. There were some old wooden boxes which obviously served as seats. Empty beer cans and a multitude of cigarette ends on the rotting tatami mat flooring showed that this derelict building had – as Trouble had already said – been used as a hideout before.

Only this time, Trouble and the fifteen-year-old schoolgirl named Miyuki were hiding out from the walking dead within Tokyo, and – ?

‘Trouble,’ said Miyuki; quietly, cautiously – ‘What’s happening?’

Trouble shook his head as he lit a smoke. He offered one to Miyuki, who accepted. He lit it for her, Miyuki trying not to cough as she inhaled. She preferred the lightest cigarettes available. The thin ones which came in the pink, feminine packets. Trouble, meanwhile, favored such strong, classically American brands as Lucky Strike and Marlboro.

‘Don’t know,’ he said, his voice low and gruff. As he spoke, he was also obviously listening out for any noise outside. But so long as none of the walking dead happened to lurch past right by the derelict house in the middle of the cemetery and hear talking, Miyuki thought they were pretty safe.

‘Heard something about people getting sick on the subway,’ continued Trouble, crushing out his smoke underfoot and immediately lighting up another. ‘This morning, right during rush hour. Maybe something like that sarin gas attack that happened in Tokyo some twenty years ago… A terrorist thing, perhaps.’

‘What – which terrorists?’ questioned Miyuki.

‘Don’t know – stop asking me so many fucking questions,’ returned Trouble, his eyes boring into Miyuki’s although his voice did not alter its quiet, gruff tone. For some reason, Miyuki found this more frightening than if Trouble had started shouting. But then his tendency to exhibit an outwardly calm demeanor, while at the same indulging in almost psychopathic displays of violence against anyone who happened to displease him, was well-known.

Strange, but only now did Miyuki actually consider that she could phone her mother at the hospital. She really needed to hear her mother’s voice now; really needed to hear anyone’s voice apart from that chillingly calm, low-pitched drawl coming from Trouble.

But as she produced her mobile, Trouble said –

‘What are you doing?’

‘My… my mother is in… in hospital,’ Miyuki almost stuttered. ‘I have to… to ring her…’

‘Put that phone away, and come and sit here,’ said Trouble, his voice still low-pitched and almost monotonous in its lack of tone. He motioned at the wooden box next to the one upon which he now sat.

Miyuki sat cautiously down as she felt the hairs on the back of her neck beginning to rise. She’d always admired Trouble from afar; and now, she considered that maybe she should have maintained that distance.

‘You know,’ said Trouble now, ‘I’ve always liked you.’

‘Really?’ replied Miyuki, her voice sounding unnaturally high and tight even to herself. She was sat with her knees close together, painfully aware of how much thigh her short skirt was exposing.

Then she froze as Trouble put one hand above her knee. Previously she’d felt an undeniable buzz as she’d sat on the back of his motorbike; had felt the dream she’d had of catching his eye becoming a reality, despite how desperate things currently were in Tokyo and perhaps Japan (the world?) as a whole…

But now Miyuki just wished she were anywhere but here. Sat alone with a young man known and feared for his violence and aggression. She just wanted to leave and try, somehow, to travel the several miles to the hospital where her mother was…

But now Trouble’s hand was slowly beginning to slide upwards…

‘Don’t…’ said Miyuki, her voice little more than a murmur.

‘Don’t tell me you don’t want this,’ returned Trouble, as he turned so that his body was closer to hers’, his hand remaining in place. ‘You think I didn’t see how you were looking at me, the times I turned up when you were hanging around with the others – in the park and such?’

‘Yes, the others,’ said Miyuki, as though by trying to change the topic of conversation she could somehow avert this steadily encroaching nightmare.

‘You said… others might be here… Are they coming… soon, do you think?’ she continued, trying to make her voice sound natural but well aware that it sounded anything but.

‘There’s no one else, baby,’ replied Trouble, grinning now. Miyuki had loved his grin, before, Showed just how handsome he was, as well as tough. But now she saw – realized – that it was in fact the leer of an extremely unpleasant young man, who’d brought her all the way to this lonely spot with just one intention in mind…

‘Please don’t…’ murmured Miyuki, as Trouble began to stand, his groin just inches away from her face as his fingers started unbuttoning the fly of his jeans.

‘It’s okay, baby,’ returned Trouble, leering down at her as his bulge began to grow. ‘You just have to suck it at first, nice and slow… Then I’ll stick it in you. Don’t worry, I’ll be gentle – just so long as you don’t try and struggle, or do anything stupid…’

As Miyuki truly realized the trouble she was in, she began to cry.

‘Please…’ she said, her voice choking. ‘I just want to see my mother… at the hospital…’

‘I’ll take you there myself,’ declared Trouble, still in that soft voice. ‘After…’

With that, he took hold of her left breast with his right hand through her school shirt. His left hand producing his erect penis – which was (in accordance with the whispered rumors Miyuki had heard from a few of the older girls) larger than average.

‘No, no,’ said Mayumi, trying to pull away. But Trouble just pushed his cock closer towards her mouth.

‘Start sucking, you little bitch, or else,’ he said, his voice remaining low-pitched but also now harsh and urgent. ‘No one here to help you – no one at all. So, you’d better start being nice to me…’

It was then that something snapped in Miyuki. The same sort of thing that had made her pick up a heavy wooden chair in the classroom and bring it smashing down onto the heads of her teacher and a fellow student. A raw desire for survival – a refusal just to roll over and die without fighting tooth-and-nail first.

So at the same moment as she stood sharply up, Miyuki also shoved at Trouble’s chest with both hands. Not expecting the sudden movement, Trouble staggered a few paces backwards – giving Miyuki the chance to swing the lower part of her leg hard up into the gang-leader’s groin.

The shrill scream emitted by Trouble contrasted greatly with his low-pitched voice of before. Cradling his damaged testicles, his exposed penis now presumably flaccid, he stared at Miyuki with eyes almost glowing red with rage.

‘Fucking little… bitch…’ he hissed.

Miyuki shot past him, towards the door kept closed by the large concrete block. Unmindful even of the possibility that one of those creatures might be just outside. Wanting only to get away from Trouble, and out of this derelict building.

She gave a small cry of fear, for a moment lacking the strength to shift the concrete block.

Then Miyuki gave another squeak of terror, sensing the young gang leader beginning to move behind her, his desire to get hold of Miyuki and do whatever to her overriding even the pain in his balls.

This extra spurt of fear leant Miyuki a momentary spurt in strength. The concrete block was pulled to one side, the door swung open by itself and Miyuki was back out in the sunlight.

She stumbled into the open, a line of tombs stretching out in front of her beyond the long grass and general debris surrounding the house. She gave a sob, knowing that Trouble was behind her, determined to do whatever it took to rape her.

This was the type of animal she’d been admiring all these many months. The type of animal she’d considered was cool personified. He’d taken her here pretending to have her best interests at heart; and yet all the time he’d known that no one else was coming and so he’d be all alone with the fifteen-year-old schoolgirl with the short skirt and the big tits named Miyuki…

He gave a yell as he followed her out. Shouting the type of words very few Japanese men ever said, even in extreme anger. Stated his intention of sticking it straight in her ass. Said that that would teach the little bitch some manners.

Despair had almost fully enveloped Miyuki’s mind when she suddenly remembered. She was currently down on her knees right by the very rock which Trouble had lifted up in order to get the flat-headed screwdriver which undid the two long screws holding the door closed. And Trouble had put it back – obviously this was the recognized place where the screwdriver stayed – so that it was there now…

Miyuki pulled at one side of the rock with both hands so that it rolled over and there was the screwdriver. Trouble’s hands were on her shoulders and he was still stating his determined intention of fucking her when Miyuki suddenly turned and with her right hand stuck the screwdriver hard into Trouble’s left shoulder.

The gang leader gave a shrill scream, the screwdriver going in two or three inches. (He was wearing a black T-shirt, the red writing upon which stated: Fuck off.) He staggered backwards, both hands reaching for the handle protruding from his shoulder, staring at it with a shocked expression. He gave another agonized yelp, pulling it free, then gave a fiendish grin as he stared at Miyuki with wide, almost feverish eyes.

‘Gonna use this to carve your face, bitch,’ he said, giving a slight, but still maniacal burst of laughter.

Miyuki felt her stomach freeze; she was on her back, now, frantically trying to ‘row’ backwards with her elbows. But it was hopeless; Trouble was above her and he now had the screwdriver and his hard-on and he was really going to make her regret the fact that she’d ever hopped on his fucking motorbike and travelled with him up to this lonely mountainside cemetery behind an ancient temple –

…With a snarl, the creature wearing the monk’s black robes (the prayer beads now dangling from just one clawed hand) burst out from around one side of the derelict building. The thing with the bulging, marble-grey eyes and bloody, saliva-flecked jaws fell upon Trouble, who in turn tried to fight it off with his fists. But it was hopeless; Miyuki knew already just what sort of blows these creatures could take and so Trouble’s punches weren’t causing this former monk any problems whatsoever.

With anther snarl, drool falling from its bottom lip onto the gang leader’s now-petrified face, the creature’s claws battened onto Trouble’s shoulders and dragged him up screeching to the opening jaws.

Unusually, the creature didn’t this time take a bite out of the still-living human’s neck. Instead, the teeth sank deep and hard into the middle of Trouble’s face, pulling away with a mass of pink, red and white showing between the jaws, Trouble’s shrieks of agony and the sight of his horribly mutilated face causing Miyuki to cover her eyes and give another sob of utter terror.

…But then she forced herself to pull her hands away, knowing already what was going to happen. For Trouble’s wretched cries quickly subsided, and the monk-thing dropped that young man’s body back on the ground, as though the creature in the black robes had abruptly lost interest in its prey…

And then it happened –

Trouble’s screams had quickly become gurgles, which soon fell into silence, as though he’d simply drowned in his own blood. The entire centre of his face was missing, in any case. It was a hole; an ugly mess of torn flesh, cartilage and bone. He lay there for a few moments, on the grassy ground, his eyes fixed and open…

And then he began to stir, groaning, rising back up as Miyuki saw those same eyes quickly turn from brown to grey – a dull, dead grey. The same color as those eyes belonging to the monk, whose attention was also now fully fixed upon the schoolgirl who was still lying upon her back.

Time to change that last fact. Miyuki got hurriedly to her feet, the two creatures lumbering after her as she began to retreat away from the derelict building. Again thinking about what her dying grandfather had told her, concerning that sword…

A bullshit story, right? A fantasy created by a semi-senile and slowly decaying mind? But here were two creatures staggering no great distance behind Miyuki, with it being a certainty that there were others up on this sprawling mountainside cemetery.

As such, if she had any hopes of surviving – and, moreover, of somehow getting to the hospital where her mother had been taken a week or so before – then she needed to get hold of some sort of weapon.

…I put the sword under one of the tombs belonging to the Takeyama family, who – you won’t know this – were famous translators during the Meiji era Miyuki’s grandfather had told her. People have been visiting those tombs – six of them, in a line – for years. So there are signs all over the mountain, showing people the way there. The sword’s under the second tomb, as you enter the plot through the gap in the low wall…

Shit! Another creature suddenly reared up in front of her, coming from round one of the many stone walls. This one had its right arm gnawed off up to the elbow; but the other hand raked for Miyuki’s face, the fingers like talons.

Miyuki ducked past on the snarling creature’s armless side. Still the teeth gnashed close by her face – uncomfortably close.

But there was a sign for the Takeyama tomb. An arrow pointing in the direction Miyuki was travelling anyway. She carried on, careful not to run too fast, trying to keep her breathing steady but with the occasional sob escaping her heaving chest.

She risked a look backwards and there, like a nightmare, were the three creatures somehow no further away from her than if Miyuki had been going at their own, lumbering gait. How the fuck were they keeping up with her like this?

Another sign now directed Miyuki up a flight of crumbling stone steps, and then right. The creatures rasping and snarling behind her. Were they somehow getting… quicker… at moving? Was she even doing the right thing, attempting to locate this alleged sword? Shouldn’t she just concentrate on getting off this accursed mountainside, before finding a band of survivors she could join…?

…And yet Miyuki had seen first-hand what it was like in this part of Tokyo; people were having to fend for themselves, fighting for their very lives against the ever-increasing number of things. The police, the fire-service – Miyuki had seen the men belonging to these emergency services being overrun by the creatures just like everyone else. Police officers emptying their pistols into the things which just kept right on coming…

Stupid. Miyuki had been wondering what the situation was like in other parts of Tokyo, perhaps even across Japan itself – had never once thought to check the internet on her mobile. She could also try to ring her mother, if she wasn’t captured and devoured within the next few minutes…

Another sign declared that she was now just ten meters from the six tombs, Miyuki passing by another tomb that was still-only half constructed.

Family lines died out… people moved away from the area… So disused tombs were continually being demolished and new ones being built in their place. With space at such a premium in Japan (in death as well as life) the situation could hardly be otherwise.

Whoever had been working here looked to have left in a hurry. Tools were still littered about the site: sledgehammers, spades, pickaxes, crowbars…

It was this last item that made Miyuki think ahead – concerning the tomb she was going to now. When her grandfather’s ashes had been placed in the Yoshida family tomb located elsewhere on this sprawling mountainside, Miyuki had been present. A short service, conducted by a chanting monk. (The same one, Miyuki now realized, who was currently pursuing her along with the faceless nightmare that had once been Trouble and the creature that was missing its right arm.)

…In any case, when it had come time to put the grandfather’s ashes underground, the thick stone slab covering the entrance to the void that was underneath the tomb had had to be prized off using a heavy steel crowbar – a job performed by one of the temple’s janitors. A short ladder went down into the ground, where in the square-shaped, earthy-smelling cavity were several wooden shelves containing the ashes of any number of Miyuki’s ancestors, dating back a couple of hundred years…

So now Miyuki grabbed the crowbar that was lying there before seeing the six tombs in a short line ahead, enclosed by a low, moss-covered stone wall.

She was almost there… The second tomb after that gap in the low wall, her grandfather had said…

With a shriek, Miyuki fell to one side, knocked over by the creature dressed in builders’ wear that’d just emerged growling from out of nowhere. The thing was pinning her down, his drool running into her face, the teeth snapping as it continued to make those guttural, hungry noises…

And the other things were getting nearer. Miyuki could now hear them, snarling. In a few moments they’d be on her and –

With a wild yell, summoning up some sort of primeval power, Miyuki dragged the crowbar she was still holding so that its point was pushing into the area under the creature’s chin. Managed to push her other arm – the left – under the creature’s body, so that she was then able to take hold of the bar with both hands.

Pushing the bar up, up… The thing snarling as the point pressed ever-harder into its larynx, Miyuki wondering if it actually felt any pain, or even the slightest discomfort. After all, she’d seen these things walking around with their very throats ripped out – so what was happening now probably wasn’t going to help save her…

And yet – the thing’s head was at least being forced backwards, one of its hands now breaking off its clawed grip of Miyuki’s shoulder to take hold of the crowbar and try to force it away from under its throat –

Miyuki seized her chance, rolling away from under the thing’s body while it was distracted. Pulling the crowbar free of its grasp almost in the same moment – and then bringing the metal object crashing down onto the thing’s head.

She felt the impact shattering the creature’s skull like an eggshell, the sensation even being transmitted through the metal. But there was precious little blood, and although its misty, marble-like eyes rolled backwards for a few moments, still it began to rise…

As heavy as the crowbar was, it was still little use as a weapon, Miyuki realized. Heavy even to lift, far less swing around as she’d need to be able to do if she was to stand a chance of fending off the four creatures now after her.

No – right now, she had to prize that thick, square-shaped stone covering from the ground below the second tomb and just hope that she’d find the sword lying in the void inside. Plus, she had to do this now, the things all the time staggering closer towards her…

She ran through the gap between the low stone wall. The second tomb from this one – there it was, the stone moss-green and covered with lichen. Crumbling in places through ceaseless exposure to the elements. Miyuki jabbed the point of the crowbar under the thick stone slab and immediately a small chunk of stone broke off, so that with nothing to resist it the crowbar flew up into the air and out of Miyuki’s hands, landing with a steely clang on the stone surface that was before all six of the tombs in a line.

Miyuki gave a moan of mixed frustration and terror. There wasn’t the time for any of this. The things were getting closer, closer…

Picking up the crowbar, Miyuki tried again. This time nothing broke off from the stone slab. It lifted slightly – it was so heavy. There was no way Miyuki was going to be able to lift it clear of the entrance into the cavity...

Again somehow summoning up the fierce, unnatural strength of before, Miyuki slowly pushed the slab sideways. Having to change her grip, move the crowbar along slightly, a rich, earthy smell emerging from the hole that was now half-uncovered.

And there was the short ladder leading down. The metal rungs severely rusted – so what hell state was this sword going to be in?

No, realized Miyuki as she went to climb downwards, just enough space created so that she could get her body inside. The things bearing down on her…

No – this tomb had been created well over one hundred years ago. The sword had been put down here – fifty years before? And wrapped in an oily cloth, so that its blade would not rust. So that it would be able to be used immediately…

And there the sword was, wrapped in thick cloths, on the thick wooden shelf which also held just one jar of ash. So important had this translator named Takeyama and the five others been, it seemed, that, following their cremation, they’d each been given a tomb entirely to themselves – or rather, to the large jar of ash which contained their remains following their cremation…

No time for abstract thought, Miyuki reminded herself severely. Just get the sword and get the hell out of this pit underneath the tombstone. Things were almost upon her anyway – all four of them. She tore off the oily cloths, the blade of the sword a dull silver, the handle wrapped in dark leather. The weapon felt solid, weighty enough but not too heavy – this she could wield in any way that took her fancy. It gave Miyuki a feeling of renewed confidence, as she quickly climbed back up the ladder.

She reached the top to discover that there was not a moment to spare. All four things had now entered through the gap in the low wall and were bearing down on her. The large hole in the centre of Trouble’s face, below the eyes, was a messy pink color, white cartilage and bone showing – and yet there was no longer any blood flowing. That had stopped as soon as Trouble had become a thing. Miyuki was beginning to notice a pattern emerging here.

Trouble’s head was the first thing to get cleaved in two. Miyuki could scarcely believe it. She’d lifted up the sword above her head – and then the weapon’s own weight had basically brought it singing back down, cutting through Trouble’s skull like a kitchen knife through a watermelon. Effortless. The two sides of the head flopping left and right, the squirming halves of the brain almost mathematically divided.

Trouble – or the creature that had once been trouble – abruptly ceased his staggering and groaning. He stood as though rooted to the same spot for several long moments, swaying slightly. And then he fell forwards, face down (so to speak) onto the stone surface.

Miyuki swiped at the thing that had once been a Buddhist monk; and with a facial expression that was almost surprised, the monk-thing’s head separated from its shoulders. The body below, also, now flopped onto the ground, lying quite still.

It was so easy! Miyuki’s hands registered the fact that they held a weapon of superior craftsmanship and quality. Anyone holding such a weapon was instantly much better placed to deal with an attack – even if this attack came from a superior force. From four creatures that might just as well have escaped from hell itself.

Miyuki misjudged her next swing – too low – and the solitary arm still belonging to one of the creatures detached with no loss of blood. Just fell on the floor, where it lay, the fingers twitching for a few moments. Still the armless creature lurched towards Miyuki, jaws gnashing, an almost mournful groaning coming from the throat.

Miyuki swung the sword again – this time putting her own power into the move – and the sword split the armless thing from its left shoulder down to the opposite side of its chest. It detached, the two halves slopping onto the floor.

This left only the creature that had once been a builder. One of those constructing the new tomb that was virtually next to this one, conjectured Miyuki. The thing showed no fear as it continued its advance towards her, although as it had been at the back it had surely noticed the way in which the other three snarling creatures had been eliminated…

With a yell, disgust and horror combining to form a potent mixture, Miyuki raised up her sword before bringing it down exactly centre of the builder-thing’s head. Down went the blade, through bone, muscle and sinew, dividing the creature in two from the knave to the chops.

The two sides fell opposite and didn’t even twitch. Miyuki stood, breathing deeply but no longer struggling with hyperventilation caused by panic, staring at the blade upon which there wasn’t so much blood – that was, considering that she’d just taken four ‘lives’.

She was alone. A female samurai, no longer needing to fear whatever the hell was happening within Tokyo. Her grandfather had told her the truth – had virtually saved her life. Before she’d been scared, running and kicking and occasionally using heavy objects in order to try and smash the things’ skulls in.

But now she had a real weapon. Something with which she was more than capable of defending herself – and others.

Others – her mother. Time to get off this mountainside behind the temple, and to try and get to the hospital downtown.

But before this, a phone call.

In fact two phone calls. First to the hospital. No answer. The next to her mother’s mobile phone, which Miyuki had taken to her mother the first visit she’d made to the hospital.

This time, the phone was answered. Miyuki heard her mother’s voice; quivery, scared – ‘Miyuki?’

Then screaming nearby, that growling of the things; and as Miyuki said urgently: ‘Mom, mom!’ the line went dead.

Grasping the sword tightly in her hand, the very feel of the weapon already somehow familiar, Miyuki began to move…

…When she returned home from high-school that day, the small apartment Miyuki shared with her mother on the eleventh floor of the drab block that was just like all the other drab apartment blocks was ominously silent. And yet Miyuki knew that her mother was inside. Should have been at work in that factory where she frequently worked until eight or nine o’clock at night – getting all the overtime she could – but somehow Miyuki was just able to sense that her mother was in her room, lying on her bed…

She entered and the scene was exactly as how Miyuki had imagined it. Her mother, fully-clothed, lying on her side with her long, graying hair spilling out across the pillow. And yet Miyuki hadn’t pictured the several small, empty plastic bottles lying alongside an empty glass on the bedside table next to the lamp. And a note, which Miyuki picked up with a trembling hand, feeling a scream beginning to bubble up from her chest –

I can’t take anymore (read the note). My life is a total disappointment and I have failed even with my only daughter. I hope people will not judge me too harshly for ending my life this way. I believe that this is the best way. I leave everything to Miyuki, and ask that she at least try to remember me with some feeling of affection – something she clearly does not have for me in life.

The note was signed with her mother’s name. Miyuki dropped it and instinctively put one hand on her mother’s forehead. She murmured ‘No… no…’, certain that her mother had already slipped out of this existence and into the next.

But then – as though some distant, desperate prayer had just been answered by Buddha himself – Miyuki realized that her mother was still breathing.

Just.

Even Miyuki, with zero first-aid training, realized that whatever her mother had taken was very shortly due to shut down that too-thin, prematurely-aged and overworked woman’s body.

And with this realization, Miyuki picked up the phone that was beside her mother’s bed. Starting to become hysterical upon dialing 110; the operator asking her to try and calm down; trying to get an address, then reassuring Miyuki that an ambulance was on its way…

…Holding the sword in her right hand, Miyuki took her mobile out of her pocket with her left hand and accessed the television function.

…Every channel in Japan was busy reporting the chaos breaking out across Tokyo. All normal programming had been suspended. Messages flashed across the bottom of the screen, as television crews and reporters protected by American soldiers and members of the Japanese Self-Defense Force showed the snarling, walking corpses and the screaming survivors running along roads and streets filled with abandoned (and sometimes overturned) vehicles, windows of shops and businesses smashed as a minority of those who lived in the oft-declared ‘safest country in the world’ still took the chance of doing a little looting…

If you have a safe place to stay hidden – remain there declared one of the messages running across the bottom of the screen.

Stated others: There are widespread reports of the dead returning to life and attacking the living… Government declares that all reasonable self-defense measures against those affected by this mystery disease are permitted… This possible ‘virus’ is now known to be transmitted via a bite… Those affected will not recognize even family members or close friends – do not attempt to treat them as such… Reports of this inexplicable outbreak of violence are now starting to come in from several areas outside of Tokyo… The root cause of this problem is as yet unknown… Emergency services in affected areas have been completely overwhelmed… Citizens are advised to stay away from all seemingly ‘safe’ places – town halls, community centers, police stations and hospitals…

Miyuki replaced the mobile in her pocket. Safe or not, the hospital that was perhaps two or three miles away from here was exactly where she was heading now.

At the foot of the mountainside now, leaving the sprawling tombs and the many trees. Trouble’s big white motorbike over to her left on the edge of the temple car-park…

Miyuki’s eyes everywhere, like her ears ceaselessly scanning for any sign of a potential threat. For some reason her jaw was aching fiercely; it took her a few moments to realize the reason why. She was still chewing on that piece of gum she’d had in her mouth since that morning, when Ikeda-sensei had lurched into the classroom and taken a bite out of the teacher’s pet’s neck.

Miyuki waited until she was by a drainage duct before spitting the gum out. Before she would almost have taken pleasure in just getting rid of her gum wherever she was stood – perhaps even spitting it onto a bench, so that someone might sit in it. Such an action would just feel very foolish, now. Futile, even.

Walking down the steep slope and then finding herself in the quiet neighborhood that surrounded the temple, in the cemetery of which most of those living within a several mile radius had their family tomb.

The walking dead were staggering around here and there. A scream came from inside one house and Miyuki almost went to investigate before getting hold of herself. She couldn’t allow herself to be distracted by anything other than a genuine emergency that was happening right in front of her eyes. Effectively blocking her progress, as it were. Otherwise, she’d never get to the hospital.

As to what she’d find there… She refused even to consider such a thought. Whatever was waiting for her at the hospital, she’d be finding out soon enough.

She walked quickly past the staggering corpses, wanting only to use her sword when it was strictly necessary. Perfectly prepared to cut these things in two – as she had already – yet only if this proved absolutely essential for her own survival. Otherwise – given space – it was just as easy (in fact far less labor-intensive) to skirt around them, and continue on her away.

The general racket coming from ahead – sirens, screaming, yelling, crying – increased in volume the closer she got to the city area, quickly leaving this small suburb that was situated next to the temple.

People living outside of Tokyo – particularly non-Japanese people – assumed that Japan’s capital city was all gleaming skyscrapers and luxury shops and far too many people per square-foot. Which was true, of course, in many parts and particularly in and around Tokyo’s centre. Yet there were also the quieter areas, lying some distance outside of the centre – the temples, suburbs, industrial quarters and such. It wasn’t all blinding neon signs and mirrored glass stretching up into the sky.

Yes, the neatly-spaced houses almost Western in appearance, painted in bright colors – blues, oranges and reds – starting to transform now into apartment blocks all clustered together. Shops with names and signs displayed in Chinese characters, others using Western letters…

Miyuki looked into a hairdresser’s and there was the male barber, dressed in his ‘tunic’-like uniform (ordinarily white, but now heavily blood-spattered), scissors and such tucked in the breast pocket. He stared glassily back at her through the large window, his mouth sagging open, half his face eaten on one side.

The sign on the shop’s door declared that it was closed. That, presumably, meant it was still locked. The reason why, perhaps, the barber-creature was apparently trapped inside. His wife suddenly appeared behind him, coming through an entrance which Miyuki conjectured led into their living quarters behind the small business area with its counter, three chairs, long mirror and sink in one corner. She was stark naked, her aging breasts sagging. Something had gnawed at her belly to such an extent that several feet of intestine were also hanging down, dragging along the floor.

Miyuki looked away. People running past her, some bleeding, their clothes torn. Miyuki guessed they hadn’t been bitten because whoever did get bitten changed into a thing pretty damn quickly. That much, at least, she knew for certain.

Cars were everywhere. Abandoned in the road, driven up onto the sidewalk and then crashed into streetlamps or the fronts of shops. Survivors running over the bonnets and roofs of the vehicles in their desperate bid to get away from the glassy-eyed creatures that were everywhere.

The news’ reports that Miyuki had briefly seen had shown American soldiers (usually stationed across Japan in a number of large bases), along with the Japanese Self-Defense Force (the Japanese constitution forbidding the country to have an actual army per se), resisting the creatures – shooting at them.

But here, at least, there was no such military help. Those still alive were definitely on their own. Just one policewoman visible – or at least, what had once been a policewoman.

Now, she was a thing, unconsciously dangling her pistol on one crooked finger as she lurched along, her blue regulation shirt soaked with blood…

And there was the podgy otaku – the geek – from Miyuki’s high-school, running along beside the police-thing. He still had out his smartphone, which he was currently holding dangerously close to the thing’s upper body.

‘…We can see here that this walking corpse – a former member of Tokyo’s police service – was badly bitten on her left arm. Bleeding stops almost the exact same moment that a victim actually transforms into one of these walking things, as I have already shown…’

The tubby male teenager’s voice abruptly cut off, as – with that surprising display of speed of which the stumbling creatures were sometimes capable – the police-thing snarled and turned on him, the jaws opening.

But it was almost as though the otaku had been expecting this. He neatly stepped to one side, and the police-thing passed by him, heading in Miyuki’s direction.

Again following the thing’s progress on his phone, the otaku then gave a sudden cry as he spotted his female classmate.

‘Hey! Miyuki!’ he greeted.

Miyuki didn’t even know his name. She recalled calling him names, certainly; but that didn’t help now.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ she asked incredulously. She stepped widely around the lurching police-thing, still reluctant to use her sword unless she absolutely had to.

‘This is it!’ exclaimed the otaku almost happily. ‘My very own movie! I got so much footage – of these things; of the survivors. Tokyo being basically overrun, the police and such having to retreat. And now there’s you, the girl who basically saved her entire math class – and you’ve got a sword! Is this a main character or what? My movie’s going to go viral when I upload it onto Youtube – I’ll be famous! A new leading director from Japan – Henmi Yamaguchi!’

As the otaku who was presumably called Henmi Yamaguchi babbled away, he was still filming Miyuki, who shook her head and continued walking along the road. She felt as though she was rapidly entering into some grey area of insanity, where the dead came back to life and attacked people; where a man tried to rape her and then had half his face eaten before being cut down with a Second World War sword found in the ground underneath the tomb of a famous Japanese translator…

And now here was this podgy teenager, filming this chaos – this screaming insanity.

‘Quit following me, you dumb little bastard,’ said Miyuki suddenly, viciously, turning on Henmi and almost lashing out at him with the weapon she had in her hand, so acute was her feeling of rage.

‘People are dying all around us; this city is in ruins and you’re treating this like it’s some kind of fucking opportunity for you to make a movie?’ she demanded, her voice wavering between severe indignation and utter incredulity.

‘I – ’ began Henmi; but Miyuki didn’t really want to hear him speak.

‘Your family – what about them? Have you tried contacting them, making sure they’re all right?’ she said.

Again, Henmi made to speak; and again Miyuki made to cut him off, when they were both startled by a wild yell sounding from very nearby.

They looked to see a young shop-worker – white shirt and grey apron still tied around his waist – poised precariously on an air-conditioning unit attached to a wall and to one side of a first-floor sliding window.

This window was open – and leaning out of it were two creatures, one wearing the same type of shirt as the young man. Their arms were outstretched, the claw-like hands missing their intended prey by mere inches. The young man was balanced awkwardly on top of the white, boxlike unit, his fingers awkwardly gripping a section of concrete that jutted out very slightly from the wall.

It seemed that at any moment he’d fall – straight down to the several creatures gathered below him, their own arms reaching up in their earnest desire to rip apart his warm flesh with their teeth. The young man gave another wild yell, his tenuous grip on the ornamental concrete ‘lip’ obviously beginning to weaken.

Followed by Henmi – filming once again – Miyuki moved towards the creatures gathered directly below the air-conditioning unit. With a cry, she lifted the sword with both hands, hoisting it up above her right shoulder and then bringing it around and down in a slashing arc that instantly cut one thing completely in two, just above the waistline.

‘Shittu-sayku,’ sighed Miyuki, as the thing’s upper torso continued to squirm, the arms flapping.

‘…As I have shown in other footage already recorded, these things can only be killed with some sort of severe blow – or, preferably, gunshot – to the head. What has just happened now proves this concisely: one of these creatures cut completely in two, the top half still living, still moving…’

As Henmi continued his breathless commentary, all the while still filming, Miyuki spared him a venomous glance. But the things gathered below the air-con unit were now transferring their attention to her, rather than the young man balanced above. They seemed completely unmindful of the danger presented by the sword, even with one of their members cut clean in two parts which were now lying there by their feet…

Miyuki knew that she couldn’t avoid killing now. The young man was set to fall and when he did he’d land right in the centre of those things. He’d be one of them within the space of a minute. Plus, she’d also now attracted their attention. So her intended actions weren’t entirely altruistic; there was also an element of self-preservation to what she was doing.

The sword lifted and slashed. Lifted and slashed. Even as she slashed and cut, some distant, almost remote part of Miyuki’s mind was astounded at just how familiar this weapon felt in her hands. As though she’d used it before, in some previous existence…

‘…And there, cut clean in half straight down the middle… The student named Miyuki… I’m sorry, I forget her surname – this student of Aoyama high-school clearly an expert at using a sword,’ stammered Henmi, then demanding of Miyuki –

‘Where did you learn to use a sword like that? It’s incredible!’

Miyuki ignored the asinine question, instead now shouting at the young man some ten feet above –

‘It’s okay; they’re all dead. You can come down. Just hang from your arms, and then drop. You’ll be fine.’

The young man did as told, escaping the four pairs of hands which continued to claw at him from the open window next to the air con unit. He fell to the ground, the chopped-up body parts of the things scattered all around him.

‘Thank you,’ he said, tears flowing as he got up to fling his arms around Miyuki. ‘Thank you so much…’

‘It’s okay,’ returned Miyuki in a mumble, arms down by her side, the sword still in her right hand.

Then, abruptly, the young man broke off his embrace, saying as he began to sprint away: ‘I have to find my way back home – to my mother and father!’

‘Just – just take care,’ returned Miyuki, the teenager who was only a couple of years older than herself looking so fragile as he mingled among the other survivors, who were all the while running past… Miyuki hoped he’d find his way home; hoped he’d be safe after she’d basically saved his life…

But…

Then Miyuki turned her attention towards the podgy form of Henmi, who now had the smartphone turned upon himself as he gave a summary concerning recent events, just like a television reporter.

Realizing that the attentions of the teenage girl carrying the sword were now focused upon him, Henmi resumed filming her…

‘You should take better care of yourself, Henmi,’ said Miyuki. ‘Just standing there, filming away without a care in the world. You knew what I was like before – a bully. So with society now breaking down, and this sword in my hand, why do you think my character’s changed at all…?’

A faint, almost mocking smile played on her full lips as she advanced towards him. She raised the sword, staring directly into his face…

‘Wha – ? But… but Miyuki-san, what are you talking about?’ stammered the podgy geek, still filming even in the midst of his terror.

Down came the sword, Henmi giving a screech of terror, pulling his arms in towards him in anticipation of the blow that would cleave him in two…

And yet the sword missed him, cutting instead into the creature that at that very moment laid one of its twisted hands onto Henmi’s left shoulder.

The creature fell backwards, a section of it that ran from the right-hand side of its skull down to the top of its rib cage on the left-hand side separating from the rest of its body. The two parts slopped to the ground, where they twitched for a few moments before lying still.

‘Uh… uh…’ repeated Henmi, his facial color now a little green and with an expression that suggested he’d just pissed in his pants. But still he had his phone raised, filming the dismembered creature on the ground before again directing his smartphone at Miyuki.

‘Watch out, Henmi,’ said Miyuki, giving him a slight, almost mischievous smile before she began walking again.

She knew, without having to look backwards, that he was following her. Still filming, of course.

Let him. Truth was, she was beginning to enjoy – if only just slightly – the attention. She just hoped the geek would keep a slightly better watch on his immediate surroundings from now on. As it was, she was amazed that he had, somehow, so far gotten away without being bitten…

…Miyuki visited her mother three times in hospital. Basically every other day since her mother had been admitted. Doctors said she had some damage to her liver and kidneys because of all the pills she’d taken in her bid to kill herself, but that this damage should repair itself.

Said her mother had been lucky.

Lucky…

Miyuki held her mother’s hand and sat for an hour or so in the late afternoon after school. Not knowing what to say. Her mother shamed, avoiding eye-contact. Also sort of permanently drowsy.

And then Miyuki went home to the drab high-rise apartment. No one checking up on her. She just got up and went to school as normal each day, even with her mother in hospital after a suicide attempt. Miyuki didn’t know what to make of it all. Just met her friends in the evening, in some park, and talked too loudly, smoked cigarettes and never mentioned the fact that her mother had tried to kill herself.

And sometimes Miyuki awoke in the middle of the night, felt guilty and started to cry…

…At last the hospital came into view. Miyuki had trudged for what felt like forever through screaming chaos, society breaking down all around her. Henmi at her side, alternately filming the sword-carrying schoolgirl and then the staggering, lurching creatures that were everywhere. Falling snarling on the survivors, very few people even carrying any sort of weapon with which to defend themselves…

What the hell’s wrong with people? thought Miyuki almost viciously. They basically just gave themselves up as being lost right from the start; virtually allowed these lurching creatures just to pull them to the ground and tear out their throats with those hideous snapping teeth…

A number of times, Miyuki used her sword. Spotting that a creature was about to bite a still-human – but hadn’t done so just yet – and so quickly decapitating that creature before it could claim another victim. On a number of occasions, Henmi trailed a bouncing head along the road with his smartphone, quickly making sure that he then captured the headless body collapsing to the ground…

Miyuki had realized that the lunacy afflicting Tokyo – or at least the part of Tokyo she was in now – needed to be recorded. Not by a TV news-crew protected by American soldiers; but by a student, here in the thick of it, law and order completely broken down.

There – an obvious yakuza gangster (tinted glasses, punch-perm hair, black suit) fought right alongside a hatless policeman, both men firing their guns at the things all around.

Now, they were aiming exclusively for the head.

They’ve realized, thought Miyuki; who then quickly went to the men’s assistance as they both found themselves having to reload at the same time. As though sensing their weakness, the things clustered around them quickly staggered forwards – which was when Miyuki struck out with her blade, fast and hard, Henmi filming at the same as he gave his breathless commentary, the severed heads of the things smacking onto the sidewalk.

‘Hey – thanks,’ grunted the yakuza gangster, his gun reloaded and again taking aim.

‘Where did you get that sword?’ demanded the policeman.

‘You just look out for yourself,’ retorted Miyuki, even now feeling a certain pleasure in back-chatting a cop.

The policeman made to reply; then realized he had his hands full shooting the things clustered all around…

…But here was the hospital. A car park outside the front entrance, a number of ambulances parked haphazardly, their front and backdoors still open. A trolley lying on its side nearby; bloodstains on the asphalt. The two huge sliding glass doors were open. Usually they opened and shut automatically but now, for some reason, they gave a yawning entrance into the cavernous ground-floor of the hospital.

Things staggered around inside, drooling, turning to stare in the direction of Miyuki and the filming otaku as the pair entered. The creatures were dressed in hospital uniforms – white-dressed nurses; blue-suited porters… A number of things were also wearing hospital gowns, slit up the backs so their backsides were exposed. Miyuki heard a strangely distant humming in her ears as she searched for her mother, certain that at any moment she’d spot her…

But, as yet, she did not.

Her mother was on the fourth floor of the hospital. Strange that this whole thing should have started – for Miyuki, at least – on the fourth floor of her school that was several miles away. Miyuki took the stairs. The three elevators all in a row looked as though they were operational – power still on – but no way was Miyuki deliberately placing herself in a confined space.

Henmi followed her up the stairs, which turned at 180 degrees halfway up before hitting the floor above. There were things here, holding onto the handrail, and as they staggered towards her – almost looking as though they’d just miss their footing and fall downwards, but somehow never quite doing this – Miyuki struck out with her sword and cut them in two.

‘Why are we here, Miyuki?’ ventured Henmi, in the midst of all the bloodshed.

‘To find my mother,’ returned Miyuki, the blade flashing down yet again. How many of these things had she killed so far today? Too many; no point even trying to keep count.

They aren’t human – they aren’t human Miyuki forcibly reminded herself.

And yet, she couldn’t forget that they had once been human. Skilled professionals, some of them, working long hours for the benefit of others. Nurses, doctors – what the hell had caused them to become like this…?

Something released on the Tokyo subway early that morning, Trouble had said. But then, who was to say whether that would-be rapist had even spoken the truth…?

…Reaching the fourth-floor now, bodies littering the staircase below. Even Henmi reduced almost to awed silence (although he kept filming) by all the bloodshed – although, given that the things hardly bled if at all when cut, there was hardly any actual blood. But still the floor was sticky, from all the living people who’d had their throats torn out however many hours before.

Still Miyuki kept thinking she was about to discover her mother. Would she be able to cut her down, as she was almost casually cutting down all these other former humans? Would she not just freeze, wholly unable to use her sword, her mother now become a thing bearing down on her, that thin, overworked body given unnatural strength?

Miyuki having her throat torn out first, dropping down to the floor… Then rising back up again, joining her mother as another member of the walking dead, the pair of them descending upon the screeching, tubby otaku named Henmi, who still continued filming even as two sets of teeth tore into his flesh…?

But as the sword flashed this way and that, yet another thing falling slain at her feet, still Miyuki’s mother did not appear. And they were almost at the ward her mother had shared with four other people. It was empty, two beds heavily stained with blood. An IV stand tipped over; Miyuki stepped over it, walking towards the bed that was by the window. The bed her mother occupied.

Next to it, smashed on the floor, was her mother’s phone. As though in a trance, her vision curiously tunnel-like and that strange humming again in her ears, Miyuki bent down to pick it up.

‘Miyuki?’ said Henmi, quietly yet urgently. Irritably Miyuki shook her head; and then she realized. Realized that she didn’t have the time to get sidetracked like this – and there was a note on the table beside her mother’s bed.

Miyuki (read the note, written in a hasty, sprawling hand – the same one used by Miyuki’s mother when writing her suicide note) – if by the slightest possible chance you find this, I may be on the roof of the hospital, with a few others. We will try to get to the emergency hatch that is on the fifth floor. If I didn’t make it – I love you. And I’m sorry.

…Miyuki dashed away tears with the back of the hand not gripping her sword. She knew Henmi was filming her all the while and suddenly she turned on him.

‘How long does the fucking battery last for in that thing?’ she almost snarled, leaning in towards the lens. Henmi backed slightly, but his body was tense with excitement. He’d seen the note also – knew that events were building up to some sort of climax.

Some things were staggering into this small ward…

‘How many of you do I have to kill?’ demanded Miyuki of them, her voice almost cracking with hysteria. She’d taken about as much as any one person was humanly capable of withstanding; her sword flashed out again, almost even without conscious thought, and more body parts slopped onto the floor. She’d cut one of the things from its right shoulder down to the left side of its stomach; still the dismembered part of it – that which had the head and left arm still attached – grabbed at Miyuki’s ankle with the solitary hand as she passed. With Henmi leaning close in to film it, Henmi cut the hand and then the head…

Then she gave a small scream…

Up another flight of stairs, that was now almost crowded with the undead. All of them snarling, clawing at each other and almost fighting in their efforts to get to –

The emergency hatch onto the roof. It had been opened, a ladder leading up to it placed on one wall. And as Miyuki watched, one of the undead climbed the ladder – they could do this! Emerging onto the roof where oh please oh please her mother was along with however many other survivors…

But now many creatures had got up there already, the survivors having nowhere further to escape to…?

With this though, Miyuki was once again spurred into action, forcing herself to ignore the aching tiredness in her arms as she hacked and sliced at the walking dead, making her way towards the ladder.

She cleared a circle around her, the things moaning and drooling several feet away, body parts scattered all around in front of them.

‘I’ll have to go up first, in case there’re any of these things right by that entrance that leads onto the roof,’ she informed Henmi, momentarily pointing upwards.

Then, realizing that the things were again pressing forwards, she said, ‘Make sure you come up right behind me, otherwise they’ll be taking a bite out of your legs…’

With that, sword held in one hand, she began to climb. It wasn’t high, maybe ten feet, and the sky through the square-shaped opening was wonderfully blue. She stuck first her head and then her upper torso through the hatch – there were a number of the walking dead but they had their backs towards her, walking towards the small huddle of survivors who were already huddled in a group by one edge of the flat roof.

‘Shittu-sayku,’ snapped Miyuki, almost irritably. What was it with people, that so few of them seemed able to fend for themselves even in the most basic of ways? They just stood there, screaming and crying, waiting to be bitten…

And then Miyuki saw her mother. In a hospital gown with a long, thin cardigan over the top, stood next to a man dressed in a green surgeon’s outfit, wearing matching clogs and with a white face-mask hanging down.

‘Mom!’ cried Miyuki, at once surprising several of the things into turning round and looking at her.

‘Miyuki,’ came the terrified squeal from below the schoolgirl. ‘They’re almost touching me!’

Miyuki realized that she was blocking the way onto the roof; Henmi had been waiting for her to climb up onto it while the things below made their rather slow but still steady progress towards him.

As Miyuki hurriedly got up onto the roof, beside a huge air-conditioning unit, she risked looking down even as a number of the things lurched towards her, for a moment ignoring the five survivors clustered together close to the edge of the roof.

Henmi came up, his bespectacled face sweaty and red with exertion and fear, still holding his smartphone. Miyuki made an attempt at pulling him up the last few rungs but she didn’t have the strength. Instead it was up to Henmi to almost fling himself onto the flat roof, where he lay gasping, as though he’d just tried running a four-minute mile.

For a moment, Miyuki allowed herself to dispassionately check him over, searching for any bites on his lower legs. The second she saw one – off his head would come.

Yet there was nothing. She would allow him to live; and to resume filming, as he did now.

Things were coming up the ladder and also towards them from up on the large roof. Miyuki thrust down hard through the open hatch with her sword; and the creature that had been clambering up fell away from the ladder, the blade of Miyuki’s weapon speared right through the centre of its head. But this caused the sword to be snatched out of Miyuki’s hand, now falling down to the floor below along with the slain creature.

Miyuki stood up, staring silently at Henmi. The things on the roof were near them, now. Then Miyuki again looked at her mother, who was crying as she stared back, her hands covering her mouth, seemingly unable to speak.

Miyuki ran away from the open hatch, circumnavigating the scattered things lurching towards her and Henmi, as the pair (Henmi following) joined the other survivors stood by the edge of the roof.

‘Mom,’ said Miyuki, as they held each other. Henmi walked in a semi-circle in front of them, filming.

There were seven of them in total. At least five times this number of creatures walking towards them, fanning out almost as though cutting off any plans of a – temporary – escape onto another part of this wide roof.

And more things clambering up the ladder and onto the roof. Coming up all the time. Sooner or later there would be so many of them that there wouldn’t be space enough on the roof…

The surgeon dressed in the green overalls turned and walked towards the very edge of the roof. There was a concrete wall maybe a foot high running around the perimeter – that was all.

The surgeon stepped up onto it.

‘I’m not being eaten by those things,’ he said simply. ‘Goodbye.’

And he stepped off.

Miyuki’s mother and another woman gave a shriek; but the creatures were coming ever-closer. No longer the time for any histrionics. The choice was starkly obvious: to do as the surgeon had just done, or allow themselves to be torn apart by the gnashing teeth that were mere feet away.

As she realized that she would shortly be plummeting through the air, to meet a messy end on the sidewalk below, Miyuki looked dazedly at Henmi frantically fiddling with his phone.

‘You know what we have to do, don’t you, Henmi?’ she asked, her voice sounding strangely distant to her own ears.

‘Yes,’ returned the geek, in a distracted tone.

‘Then why are you still playing with your phone?’

‘I need to get this uploaded, onto Youtube, before I…’ mumbled Henmi, his brow creased with mental effort.

Then he suddenly gave a big sigh.

‘It’s done,’ he declared. ‘I have to die now but – my work has been completed. My film, I mean. Finally, I’ve achieved something.’

Miyuki didn’t really understand but still she nodded. Nothing mattered anymore, anyway. There was almost a telepathic understating between the six men and women left on the roof. They joined hands, Henmi at last placing his precious phone in his pocket, and together with the others stepped up onto the low concrete wall.

‘Don’t look,’ Miyuki’s mother told her. ‘We just step forward and…’

‘I love you, mom,’ said Miyuki, her eyes slightly misted with tears as she stared straight ahead at the city skyline, Mount Fuji there in the blue distance, but her voice surprisingly steady.

‘I love you too, Miyuki.’

Miyuki sensed everyone in the line about to take a step forwards. She began moving her own right leg when –

Whomp, whomp, whomp, whomp…

The sound came from some distance away but quickly grew nearer. A strong wind was now being created by the mighty whirling blades of the colossal green American military helicopter, which circled in front of the six survivors, almost forcing them to take a step backwards off the low wall.

‘All of you lie down, now! On the ground!’ declared a voice (in Japanese), through a loudspeaker.

‘Now!’ barked the voice again; and then Miyuki was virtually pushing her mother and the others to the ground, and slapping Henmi’s hand as he again tried to get out his smartphone.

The living dead were barely two feet behind, snarling and dribbling, about to fall on the seven survivors…

But then the helicopter’s mighty cannons opened up. The noise was deafening, insane; hot metal whizzed inches above Miyuki and the others, chewing the creatures to pieces. Miyuki felt herself being almost peppered with small body parts, the creatures virtually exploding as they were hit with the awesome firepower.

Miyuki’s mother again took hold of her daughter’s hand, squeezing it and squeezing it hard as the American army helicopter continued to fire and fire and fire…

Some months later…

Gentle piano music played, Miyuki and a few other students stood at the front of the school hall, facing the students seated on lines of chairs. But still – despite a new year having recently started – there were noticeably fewer students than there had been…

Before…

The many photos of those who’d died – who’d become the walking dead – from the Aoyama high-school, students and teachers, were displayed on a large white board behind Miyuki and the few others who were today special guests of honor at the high-school’s commemoration assembly.

‘…We know now,’ said the new Principal, stood on a lectern and speaking into a microphone, ‘that this virus was unleashed by North Korean agents on the Tokyo subway, with the intention that it would spread all through the city and into the country beyond, and destroy most if not all of Japan’s people.

‘As it was, however,’ continued the Principal, ‘a relatively small number of people actually proved susceptible to the virus in its natural state. But those affected then changed into – well, we know what. And, somehow, the virus mutated inside their body so that everyone then bitten found themselves becoming the same…’

As she listened to the speech, Miyuki (the lipstick, false eyelashes and short skirt now gone) remembered what she’d seen on television, following the American invasion of North Korea, and the consequent overthrow of the Supreme Leader (since diagnosed as being clinically insane) and his regime.

The country was still under American martial law, with it only being fortunate that the nuclear missile which North Korea had attempted to fire at Japan (once it became obvious that – despite the catastrophic damage and loss of life suffered because of the virus – Japan and its people were not, in fact, going to be completely annihilated) had failed to take off.

And the Americans had found the video recordings. Of all those wretched souls in the brutal North Korean prison camps, who’d had the virus (now ‘officially’ destroyed) tested on them first of all. Those who’d been affected quickly becoming the snarling, claw-handed creatures, and attacking those still-living – who then also, universally, became the same.

‘…We still don’t know the total number of casualties,’ the Principal went on, speaking euphemistically about the number of Tokyoites who’d become the living dead. (Initial reports, concerning the virus spreading outside Tokyo, had largely proved to be false.)

There were still periodic reports of the undead being found, considered Miyuki. In basements, in the woods around Mount Fuji… Sometimes a human was attacked. All those affected had to be killed. No way of reversing the effects of the virus had been discovered. A Buddhist priest said prayers by the side of the strapped-down, snarling creature – and then it was humanely destroyed with a bullet to the head.

‘But, whatever the number, it would have been even higher had it not been for the brave actions of people like Miyuki Yoshida,’ said the Principal. ‘And we begin today’s service by honoring Miyuki for her selfless bravery in undoubtedly saving many of her classmates from the late Ikeda-sensei – and then for all that she did afterwards…’

A reference to the ‘movie’ taken by Henmi Yamaguchi, which had long since gone viral on Youtube. Especially with its ‘false-ending’, which showed Henmi, the main character and several others apparently about to jump to their deaths from a hospital roof. Something which had since led to accusations that at least some of the recording was staged, although Henmi had managed to film the US army helicopter later winching them all to safety, after its mighty cannons had destroyed the undead that had been about to devour them.

It was a video that had made Henmi Yamaguchi relatively famous, and had also made his dream of becoming a successful director perhaps just that little bit more possible. But still, Henmi was not nearly as famous as Miyuki. She’d been contacted recently by a company wishing to make a figurine of her, dressed in school uniform, carrying that sword, to be sold in toy-shops throughout Japan. And she’d appeared on a number of talk-shows; had been asked to provide the voice for a manga movie that would be based on her exploits.

(Not that the movie made by Henmi had shown everything, and Miyuki would never tell of what had taken place up on that mountainside before she’d got the sword left by her late grandfather out of the tomb – a story already almost legend both abroad as well in Japan. ‘Miyuki – the modern-day female samurai’… In any case, so far as Miyuki was aware, the young delinquent who’d been nicknamed ‘Trouble’ was still one of those many, many people who were officially listed as being ‘missing’…)

…The only way of escaping the madness – that was, the still-sometimes incessant limelight – was for Miyuki to immerse herself in her studies. Gone were the cigarettes, alcohol, glue, speed and such. With diligent effort she’d proved to have a remarkable aptitude for chemistry, so much so that her teacher in this subject informed her that there was a chance she might have a chance of entering into the prestigious Todai – Tokyo University…

…Her mother watched on, clearly proud, sat at the side of the hall with the other parents. But a number of these parents were dressed in black, silently weeping, carrying framed photographs of their deceased children…

The father and mother of the small girl named Hitomi, saved by Miyuki as she’d fought her way out of the high-school, nodded to her each time they caught her eye, silently and respectfully conveying their continued gratitude…

But Miyuki focused now on her mother. She’d dyed her hair, gained some weight, no longer had to work so hard, what with the money Miyuki had earned through her (albeit often unwanted) celebrity status. And Miyuki was now the dutiful, caring daughter, and her mother was clearly happy…

And that – just in Miyuki’s world – was all that mattered.

Still, as the Principal continued to sing Miyuki’s praises, a growing feeling of embarrassment caused her old, rebellious side to surface just for a moment.

‘Shittu-sayku,’ she murmured; although she was careful that she covered her mouth as she spoke, and then forced a small cough – so that no one noticed, or heard.

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Table of Contents

I, Hell

The Mannequin

50, Berkeley Square

Buried Alive

Silent Screaming Face

The Bar

The Devourer of Men

The Burning House

Tokyo Zombie Apocalypse