Black

TIM LEBBON

She only screams for the first two minutes. Some of the screams may be words in her own language, but if so, they are a curse. She still makes noises after that but they are unconscious and dead, not echoes of life. He hears the knife going in, whispering through skin and flesh, grating on bone, its serrated edge sucking like a jelly shaken from its mould as he pulls it out. He is changing this mould radically. She sighs, but it is gas escaping her rent body. She coughs, but it may be blood bubbling in her throat. Still he stabs, slashes and gouges, just to make sure. He tries to concentrate on the white-hot anger and rage he feels, propagating them in the hope that they might camouflage the worrying excitement. The pleasure. He’s enjoying this. She begins to drip from the edges of the table, more solid scraps of her following soon after, and a steady rain of fluid patters down onto the flagstone floor. He closes his eyes and listens, trying to distinguish the cleansing rain outside from that within. He’s still shaking with fury, fear and dread, and even though he knows that what he’s doing is so wrong, he cannot take it back. He will not take it back. It’s her fault, it’s the fault of her kin and kind, and this is his release. At least he can smell the truth of that.

Ed carved another niche into the damp plasterboard wall. As the knife penetrated and pink plaster squeezed out he expected blood to well from within, the wall to quiver and scream and smell of insides. He expected this every time, and every time it did not happen. Yet the fear was always just as fresh. Sometimes he believed that every memory he had was made up, pulled together hurriedly by his still-waking mind before he could become fully conscious and realise that he was actually no one at all.

The only real memory he could never doubt was of the murder that had changed his life.

‘Thousands,’ he said, standing back from the wall and surveying the damage he had wrought. The bare painted partition was scarred across its surface with a mark for every day he had been here. They started in the left bottom corner as inch-high, delicately cut indicators, the tender slices of a surgeon operating on his own child. But now, the latest was the hacking of a murderer. Tracing them from left to right did not tell his story, because at some point he had decided to mix in the marks, make them disordered and confused. Not his story, no, but perhaps his state of mind.

‘Thousands of days.’ He’d counted to begin with. Each mark added to the number he kept in his head, the length of time he’d been here, and because back then his memory still was not too bad he would wake in the morning and remember the number from the night before. Then he’d started to forget, and it had become necessary to re-count the marks several times each week. This he did not mind, essentially - he had nothing better to do - but it was tedious and, as the violence of the knife strokes grew, all but impossible.

So now he left it at this: thousands. With what he could remember of his life, that was as good as for ever.

The flat was sparse and dirty. He ate take-out food mostly, and old boxes and bags and sachets were piled on the kitchen surfaces, plates in the sink waiting to be washed when all the clean ones were used. The bin stank of mould and rotting meat. Ed liked that. It reminded him of what he had done, and he only wished he had the conscience to view it as a punishment rather than simply an annoying smell. He paid for his food with a debit card from a bank account that seemed always to honour the transaction. He had an idea that he’d had a good job once. Perhaps he was still being paid. He didn’t deserve it - he felt that he was deserving of very little, and he knew the dead woman would agree - but it was there, and he needed to eat, and his scruples hardly went that deep. If he’d once had morals, they’d been slaughtered by that knife as well.

The same knife he now used to mark the passing of his own life.

He’d have laughed at the irony if he hadn’t sickened himself so much.

Ed put down the knife and went for a walk. He did this most days, wandering past the greasy take-away food bars, the tacky cheap jewellery shops, money lenders and video emporiums and dingy pubs, their closed doors and smoky interiors almost begging potential customers not to enter. Passing faces he did not know, he acknowledged no one and, in turn, was ignored. He was certain that sometimes they did not even see him. He’d read somewhere that the human mind filters out everything not required from its surroundings, otherwise the information input would be far too massive. He liked not being a part of anybody else’s life.

Ed preferred living in the city because he could be just another mystery, even to himself. He deserved no less. As happened every day, flashes of what he had done haunted him; tastes, sounds, feelings, smells of his crime assailed him at every step, either reflected in shop windows, carried on the air or manufactured inside his head. Trying to ignore them was like trying not to breathe. Accepting them, suffering, was all he could do to make amends.

He certainly did not deserve to meet Queenie.

On that hot July afternoon when he first saw her, he simply watched. He hadn’t had sex since the war, rarely even masturbated, but seeing the woman in the park stirred feelings that surprised him with their intensity. He wanted her, yes, but he was also interested by her. The strange things she did went some way to explaining that, but also the way she moved, the clothes she wore, the way she flicked her long hair back over her shoulder quickly and impatiently, as if it were merely an annoyance.

Ed sat on a bench by the pond and tried to blend into the background. He hated being noticed at the best of times, but now, watching this woman, he craved invisibility. The more fascinated he became with her and her actions, the less he wanted to meet her.

She must be planning something, he thought. Scouting the area for a filming. Or perhaps she was an artist. She was lurking beneath a clump of trees at the edge of the park, holding something up to the sky - a light meter, Ed guessed - taking photographs, scratching around at the foot of the trees with a small trowel as if looking for buried treasure. She kept out of the sun. If she did emerge from beneath one group of trees, she would quickly cross the sunlit grass to another area of shadow. Her skin was dark and weathered - she obviously spent a lot of time outdoors - but she seemed to much prefer the comfort of shadows to the hot caress of the sun. Ed could relate to that. He wondered what crime she was trying to hide from.

It took over an hour for her to notice him. In that time he sat motionless on the bench, the sun slowly burning his bald pate, hardly even twitching as a group of teenagers cycled by so close that one of them touched his shoe with his wheels. He watched her set a camera on a tripod and take one photograph every five minutes, fix small boxes to several trees with nails, sweep leaves away from the bole of a lightning-struck tree as if to reveal its skeletal underside. She finally sat down and took a bottle of water from a rucksack … and that was when she saw him.

Ed held his breath, startled, as she froze and stared across at him. She was too far away for him to see her expression clearly, but she put her bottle down and stood without looking away from him.

His heart began to race, sweat popped out on his skin, his sunburned scalp tightened. She was not only standing, she was walking, coming out into the sun and seemingly oblivious of it for the first time, striding across the grass and glancing away now and then, though infrequently and not for long.

He felt her attention upon him, like fresh sunbeams cooking his skin.

Ed stood, turned his back on the woman and walked quickly away. He aimed through the kids’ playground, dodging toddlers as they darted around his legs and hoping that he could lose her through there if she chose to follow. But when he looked back over his shoulder he saw her standing by his bench, hands on hips, staring after him. She shielded her eyes as he looked and he thought perhaps she smiled. But it could have been a shadow pulling at her lips, making him see something that was not really there.

He left the park without looking back again.

He has swelled insides before, of course, but never like this. In the war he has seen more dead bodies than anyone ever should, two of them - the rebel unwilling to give up his guns, the government soldier angry and aggressive at his intrusion - the results of his own actions. He hates every single corpse because they remind him of why he is here, what these people are doing to each other, and each shot, shattered or gutted body seems to be one more mocking taunt aimed directly at him: we’re doing this, they say, and you can’t stop us. So he has smelled insides … but never this close up. Never this fresh. Blood mists the air as he strikes, copper tints overlying the rich tang of burning from-outside, strong and vital as he breathes it in, sticking inside his nostrils, embedding itself to remind him of this moment for ever. The smells change as his stabbing arm becomes heavier and the knife impact further down his victim’s body: sickly-sweet as the heart is punctured; acidic as the stomach is torn open; and shit. Underlying it all is the cloying stench of cheap perfume. It’s intended to remind him of roses and honey, he supposes, but in reality it’s the aroma of desperation. Any idea that a clean and scented body can superimpose itself over the horrors happening here must be desperate, and he wonders when she found the time or inclination to buy this. He imagines what he is doing as some sort of alternative perfume advert for TV and almost smiles … almost… because then the mouthwatering smell of roasting human hits his nose from outside. He wonders what he will eat tonight. He swallows a mouthful of saliva and tastes death.

He didn’t know he was going back until he opened the door of his flat and ventured out into the twilight.

The park closed at eight o’clock, but he knew plenty of ways in. He spent a lot of his time wandering, day and night, and the park was always a convenient and innocuous venue. No one would see him in there, if he so chose, and he could hide and watch and wonder just what he was missing. Sometimes he saw someone walking on their own, but their expression was always happier than his own. On other occasions he spotted couples sitting or strolling hand in hand, and they reminded him that he had forgotten so much. Once he’d seen two people making love on a park bench, trying to be secretive about it, but the woman’s increasingly frantic movements and gasps revealing their passion. He had stayed and watched until the end. The movements and sounds reminded him of the woman he had murdered, even though their cause had been much different. Perhaps he knew why it was called the little death.

They had all made him mad, every single one of them. Every word and gesture and smile that marked what they were doing to their country and kin as normal drove him into a frenzy. He’d been sent there to protect them from themselves - he’d killed for them - and yet they willingly went about their continuous self-destruction.

Sent there to protect them. Ironic.

He walked along darkened streets, moving quicker through pools of light thrown by streetlamps. He’d been here for a long time, the marks on his wall testified to that, but still he found his surroundings unfamiliar. It was as if the scenery was frequently rebuilt and reordered, mostly to resemble its former self but with a few vital differences that prevented him from recognising it totally. Stopped it from ever feeling like home.

He reached the park and climbed die wall at one of its lower stretches. He could hear kids playing around near the bandstand, glass smashing as they lobbed bottles down the concrete steps, so he turned the other way. The pond was just around the corner, and next to it the trees, and within their deeper evening shadows perhaps he would find the secret of why the woman had been there.

Ed looked up and saw the full moon, stars quivering with atmospheric distortion. He tried to appreciate the beauty of the view but, as ever, he could not realise any sense of wonder. It was long gone. The shadows pooled around the bench he’d sat on earlier seemed deeper than normal, thicker, untouched by moon-or starlight. He wondered whether someone had spilled something, but he had no wish to venture close enough to find out. The shadows seemed … there. Something, not nothing. A definite presence rather than an absence of light.

Ed moved his head to get a full view with his peripheral vision. He did not like what he saw, but then he rarely did. Someone - perhaps it was his mother, although she was swallowed up along with most of his early memories - had once told him that if he was stressed or woundup he should see the beauty in things. The movement of a tree, each leaf performing its own independent dance to create a wondrously pure choreography. Or the way light fell on a puddle, a reflection of the world in there, a whole universe in a splash of water. Roses swaying in the breeze, waves of that same breeze rippling across a field of long grass, a flock of birds twisting and turning like one organism, not a thousand. All things of beauty, none of which Ed could see. Now he would see only a stump blown apart by shellfire, a porridge of blood and oil in a landmine crater, a hand clawed in the still air … and his knife stealing what little beauty he’d managed to find in that foreign country.

Before they sent him there, he’d never even heard of the place.

‘Look just to the side of what you want to see,’ a voice said. It was deep but evidently female, husky and knowledgeable.

Ed spun around, fearing an attack by the teenagers but knowing straight away that he’d found her. Or rather, she’d found him. He wished he’d stayed at home. ‘Who’s there?’ He was not used to talking with people, and the quaver in his voice embarrassed him. Scared of the dark, she’d think. Maybe she was right. Ed liked to exist in shadows, but perhaps it was his fear of them holding him there, a guilt-induced masochism.

‘You saw me earlier.’ She came from the night beneath the trees, stopped a few steps from him and switched on a torch. His vision was stolen for long seconds. ‘Come back for another look?’

‘I was wondering what you were doing.’ Ed could see the woman silhouetted before him. She pointed the torch at the ground behind her, throwing her face into deep shadow. He wondered whether she had two eyes, a nose, a mouth, or something wholly different.

‘Why?’

It was not a question he had expected, although he’d been asking it for hours. He was not used to interacting, and to find something of interest like this was a surprise. Anything of pleasure would be mocking the life he had taken. Sometimes, on the worst of days, even breathing felt bad.

Everything went back to that. His life began in a foreign country when he was a murderous twenty-two.

‘Well, you seemed so…intent. What is it? Animal research? You filming squirrels, or something?’

‘I’m waiting for a murder.’

‘Murder.’ Ed felt cold, his balls shrivelled and an icy, accusing finger drew a line down his back, nail cutting to the bone. Murder. One day he feared they’d come visiting, the fellow soldiers who’d brought him back and let him go, letting the incident fade into the shadows of war, honour amongst thieves, that sort of thing. There’s always been that fear … but it was a yearning as well. He could not bring himself to account for what he had done because he was a coward. It would take someone else to do it for him. Murder.

‘There’ll be one here soon. That’s why I’m here. I’m … sort of an early warning system, I suppose. Dark, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’ He’d noticed. The woman turned the torch off and for a moment, an instant, it was pitch black. Then his night vision moved in and he could see the shadows forming around them. The woman seemed nearer than she had been. And when she spoke again he was sure he could smell her breath.

‘They call me Queenie.’

‘Why?’

‘Avoidance Queen. I avoid most of the important things in my life.’

‘Like what?’ Ed saw her shadow shrug but she offered no response. ‘So what’s your real name?’

‘You can call me Queenie, too.’

‘So what are you avoiding here? Searching for a murderer, you say?’

‘That’s not what I said. I’m looking for a murder, not a murderer.’

Ed felt that she was playing games, but perhaps it was simply that most of his conversations were with himself. He stepped back a couple of paces, shoes whispering across the soft carpet of pine needles. The air felt thick. Movement was difficult ‘You can’t have one without the other.’

‘Well…’ She giggled quietly, little more than a heavy breath through her nose. ‘Sometimes a murder is just a death brought on too soon.’

This was too close. Ed felt memories tapping the inside of his skull like little insects, flying around and seeking escape, trying to force themselves upon him once again. They often used devious means, these memories … jumping out of doorways and the TV screen, emerging fully-fledged from single phrases, smells and sounds and sights inspiring their own dark memory cousins. He lived that time enough without actively bringing it on.

‘I have to go,’ he said. The instant he spoke everything went quiet, a deathly silence, the air swallowing movement and sound and seemingly solidifying around him. Even the shadow of the woman became solid and still, from living to statue in an instant. He turned to leave. She touched him.

‘Don’t go,’ she said. Her fingers bit into his arm, but in desperation rather than anger. ‘Please … I don’t get to talk about this much. It’ll go dark, it always goes dark, and in the blackness there’s murder. Please! People just don’t listen, they say I’m mad and walk away. Don’t walk away.’

‘What are you doing?’ Ed said. Was she playing with him again?

‘I’ve put light meters on the trees. And time-lapse cameras. I hope they aren’t stolen. I’m waiting for it to go dark.’

Ed almost stayed. She’d piqued his interest, demanded his attention. Some of those things she was saying … Sometimes a murder is just a death brought on too soon … He wanted to become involved.

But he could not allow that. He was nothing, no one, and he did not deserve anything like this.

‘It is dark,’ he said. And as he walked away, trying not to hear her muttering behind him, he whispered to himself: ‘It’s always dark.’

She offered for him to taste her. Maybe that’s why he’s killing her, but he thinks not. Her underwear is still tangled around her ankles, and as if to taunt him the taste of women comes out from behind his teeth, dripping from the roof of his mouth like ghost memories burrowing down from his brain, laying tangy caresses on his tongue. Perhaps if he’d accepted her invitation his rage would have been subsumed. Maybe she would still be alive. But time could not be reversed. Drowning out that sweet taste of love is the bloody taste of death. Her blood is in the air, misting when the knife comes out and permeating the dank atmosphere of the alley, more spilled blood in this bloody land, soon the air itself will taste of blood if the killing goes on, the hate and murder born of the differences passed down from father to daughter, mother to son. He wonders whether their respective gods find it all amusing. And he tastes a bitter, furious anger swimming there in the blood, black spots of rage camouflaged in the very physical taint of the woman’s death. He swallows, rubs his tongue against the roof of his mouth in an effort to distil the taste …because it scares him. It scares him because he knows it cannot be his own, his anger is false because he does not truly know what these people are going through, why, what they really feel … his is a tourist’s rage at something that offends him, and it could never taste this bad. He spits and it lands on the woman. The taste grows worse. Hands lay on his shoulders, heavy and invisible, but for now they do little but help him thrust the knife in again. There is no one else here but him and the woman, but those hands have the feel of him, and the bitter tang of dread floods his mouth as blood arcs across his chin and teeth.

This time, he knows the dread is his own.

And he sees what he has done

Ed woke up from dark-soaked dreams to a dawn barely any lighter. He glanced at the clock blinking beside his bed. Must be wrong. It should have been daylight by now. Even through the hangover, die searing pain behind his eyes and in his throat that was testament to his binge the previous night, he knew he should be seeing more than this.

He rubbed his eyes but it did not help.

Queenie. She sprang into his mind and ambushed his thoughts, turning them away from the urge to vomit and then drink some more. If he went back to the park today she’d still be there. Sitting beneath the trees perhaps, or adjusting the equipment she’d placed around the little copse, replacing batteries, examining film and data tapes. Light meters? Strange.

Ed managed to haul himself upright without puking, but then he stood and swayed as his senses spun and swapped places, and he vomited down the wall. Standing there, leaning against the woodchip wallpaper as he heaved gushes of liquid poison from his guts, he noticed how each splinter of wood in the wallpaper had its own definite shadow. Most of them were small, little more than smudges, but one or two of them seemed far too large. As he gasped in air and tasted foulness, he picked at one of these wood chippings and felt it crumble between his fingernails like a desiccated fly. He dropped the dust to land on the puddle of puke, and seconds later the shadows faded away.

Ed rubbed his eyes and sat heavily onto his bed. He was used to waking like this, even welcomed it sometimes, but it often lowered whatever defences he’d managed to erect against the memories plaguing him. Trying to rub the ache from his eyes he saw her face as she realised what he was about to do, her eyes widening and filling with something that would have scared him had he not had the upper hand. Pinching his nose and snorting to force out the damp remnants of vomit, he smelled insides other than his own, parts of her that should never have been touched by daylight. And the ringing in his ears, the rapid pumping of his heart as it struggled to purify his system, both could have belonged to her, a fearful whine and her heart galloping with fear.

It’ll go dark, it always goes dark, and in the blackness there’s murder.

Ed tried to revive himself because he needed to think, and like this it hurt. He drank a pint of water and washed down three aspirins, opened the windows to his dank flat and leaned out to let the fresh air do its worst. He could just about make out the park from here, its oldest and tallest trees peering over rooftops. The sky was clear, but the streets were shaded, not shadowed but unclear nonetheless. The brightness of the day had been turned down. Some cars had their sidelights on. A young couple were standing on the street corner, whispering like lovers, but Ed thought not.

There was a knock at the flat door.

He spun around and leaned back against the window sill to steady himself. The knock came again and he nodded, yes, he hadn’t imagined it. No one had come to his front door for years other than to collect monies due. He usually had it to give them, but still he resented their intrusion into his own private world. They looked at him like voyeurs, their eyes cameras to record and incriminate … or perhaps he just imagined it.

‘Who is it?’

‘It’s happening,’ a voice said. Queenie. So much mystery in that one statement, so many possibilities (you’re caught, they know, you’re a murderer, time to run, run again).

‘What’s happening?’

‘It’s growing dark. The light’s losing out, no one has noticed yet but all the readings hold up. Let me in. The landing light’s bust.’

Ed stepped to the door, drew the bolts and swung it open. Queenie entered without an invite, wafting cheap perfume and the smell of cleaned clothes. If she had slept in the park, she’d made an effort to be presentable before coming here this morning.

‘Nice place,’ she said, looking around at the scarred walls and the refuse littering the floor and tables, and Ed hated the sarcasm, really hated it, his resentment running deep.

‘I live like I live.’

Queenie’s eyes widened

her eyes widened and filled with something fearful, frightening

and she started talking excitedly. ‘The murder’s soon, it has to be,

the darkness is here and soon it’ll be black, black as night without stars or moon, blacker than last night, but in the day.’ It sounded like she was looking forward to it.

‘Eclipse?’

She shook her head. ‘No, not eclipses. Every time it’s happened before it’s been localised and has gone unreported, even from the authorities. I’ve followed the places it’s happened, always got there after the event, been trying to narrow down future locations… find a pattern.’ She looked pensive for a moment, glanced around his flat at the mess of Ed’s life, then back at him. ‘Maybe I’ve found it,’ she whispered. Then she became animated once more, excited. ‘There’s been no film of it, little talk about it in the media. Well, Fortean Times picks it up sometimes, of course, and other folks like that.’ She looked at him and, as if knowing how all but his worst memories were lost, she smiled. ‘Blackouts.’

Ed frowned at this strange woman who seemed to have some sort of claim to him. He’d seen her twice but already she was confiding in him, passing on something she was obviously passionate about, letting him in. ‘I really don’t want any part of this,’ he said, and even as he spoke it was a lie.

She looked at him, eyebrows raised and lips pressed together. ‘You’ll see it soon enough,’ she said, and still he could not read her.

‘Why should I see blackouts?’

‘Why shouldn’t you? You live here and this is where it’s going to—’

‘But why do you think I of all people should see it? Why … pick on me?’

Queenie was silent for a while. She seemed confused. ‘Well, I didn’t. You came looking for me.’

Ed could only stare at her, standing in the middle of the room he had yet to invite her into. And suddenly, amazingly, there was a stirring in his groin, a hardening so uncommon in all the years since his time in Eastern Europe, another use for the blood he now thought of as impure and tainted with the murder, the murderous attack it had fuelled.

That made up his mind. ‘Out.’ he said.

‘But I have to tell you. Don’t you want to know? Don’t you understand what I’m saying here?’

‘No I don’t, it’s a load of shit you’re trying to feed me, I don’t know what’s wrong with you and I really, really don’t want to know. Out!’ He did want to know …

‘But I’ve been told I can give you a chance.’

Ed shook his head, loosening those strange words from where they had stuck. Denying them. It was just too complicated. ‘Get out of my flat!’ he hissed.

Queenie made to move towards him, faltered, took a step forwards. Ed really thought that she was coming for him, her hands would come up and she would hold him or hit him or something equally inexplicable. But after standing there for a few seconds, glancing out the window over Ed’s shoulder, looking into his eyes and searching for something in there, she turned and left.

The door snicked shut and Ed looked at the clock. Not even midday.

He picked up his knife from the bedside table, looked for an unmarked spread of wall and carved in his mark for today.

And kept carving. Silent, his breathing even, his eyes open but unseeing, hands clenched around the haft but unfeeling, the scratch, scratch, scratch going unheard, Ed carved days that never were into his wall, spanning midnights and middays without blinking, weeks passing with only a spot of blood where he’d nicked his finger, the wall filling faster and faster as months sliced by.

Fooling himself, an ironic deception, with cuts.

By one o’clock, when he opened his first bottle of wine and stared at the sun hanging weakly in the clear blue sky and the shadows hunkering unreasonably around doorways and beneath cars in the street down below, Ed had been in the flat for another six months.

Four o’clock came. Ed had consumed two bottles of wine and was slowly working his way into a third. Bad Hungarian red. There’d been a scare a while back about anti-freeze in the wine, poisonous, bad for you, and Ed had been concerned and worried. That was before he’d been sent to Eastern Europe. Now he wished it were true. Not brave enough to take his own life, he often thought that a freak death like that would be rather poetic.

As usual when he got drunk it was not the shimmering loss-of-control felt by most other people. His limbs went numb, yes, and his voice would undoubtedly slur had he cause to use it, but the main effects were more insidious. He felt the light leaving him. Both metaphorically and literally his light was fleeing, bleeding from organs pickled and ruined by bad alcohol: metaphorically, because he was losing the last dregs of hope, decency and guilt that still held out against the dark cancer of his soul; and literally, because on occasion he saw the dark.

He could never have mentioned that to Queenie. He rarely even remembered because it happened so infrequently.

He saw the dark.

Shades of grey where there should be colour. Light bulbs fading and flickering as if gauze was being waved before them, the black gauze of mourning, not wedding-white. Shadows sitting in the sun. And just as soon as he became sober the next day he forgot about it, cast it back into the depths of his mind where other memories dwelt like monstrous sea creatures, cruising the darkness and rising only occasionally to assault the small barren island his life had become.

Strangely enough, he did not feel under siege. Sometimes it was the exact opposite; sometimes, he thought he was a threat to everyone else.

He can see her. Obviously he can, he’s murdering her after all, but he can really see her. Not the composite image of a human being our brains usually perceive - that face, those grey-green eyes, two arms, birthmark on the neck … all go together to make someone we know and whom we never really see - but the actuality of her as a person made up of many, many things. He’s destroying those things, slicing them asunder as if working on an item in a biology class, and perhaps this is why he sees her as she really is. Because her eyes are wide open and filled with something he hates, hates and fears, while she is still alive they are filled with anger and rage and something that can only be curse, a horrible look that he wants to slice out, the look of someone who has won, someone who knows that victory is not hers now but will be in the future. So he slashes at her eyes and it takes several stabs before they both go. Her right arm begins to twitch, jumping on the concrete paving slabs, blood is pulsing from several cuts down near her hand where she’d initially tried fending him off, and every now and then her limbs enter his peripheral vision like curious ghosts watching over his shoulder. He feels the rage rising, something so basic and pure that he fears it more than he can understand, because it is not his own. He can almost see it. Black spots dance before his eyes, speckling in and out of existence like flies popping in and out of the dying woman’s flesh. At first he thinks they are in his eyes, because he’s in a white-hot panic as he keeps stabbing, slashing, gouging. But then he blinks and wipes blood from his face with his left hand, and the spots are still there. He moves his head from side to side and they do not move with him. They are separate from him, more of the woman than him, and her rage must be far, far more powerful than his own. He realises then how pathetic and self-obsessed his murdering this woman is. As if he could possibly solve anything by taking one more life, a life he had come here to protect at that. But he sees the knife rise and fall, rise and fall, sees flesh opening up, sees parts of the woman that should never have been seen, ever. When he was young he’d peel a banana and think I’m the first and last human to ever lay eyes on this piece of fruit flesh. Now he is the first and last to see a different flesh. He feels the warm dampness of it on his skin. And the rage rages on.

Ed surfaced slowly from another drunken, dream-filled slumber to find that it was early evening. And at the window in his flat’s messy living room, something was fluttering against the glass.

He sat up quickly, trying to shake the fuzziness from his eyes, and he listened for the scraping across the glass. There was nothing. He stood, pulled the net curtain aside and thought he saw a bird. It took a few seconds to realise that whatever was out there was not solid. It was like a breeze given form, physical yet with nothing firm enough to be seen, stalking across the glass, trying to gain access.

‘Get lost,’ Ed said, opening the window. The thing dissipated when there was no longer glass between them. Perhaps it had been a shadow cast from somewhere far off.

The street was quiet and still, but Ed saw that things were wrong. The dark, he thought, it’s the dark come before the murder, but he was thinking in Queenie’s voice.

He needed to go and find her. He needed to know what she knew of the dark. The dark, and the rage he sensed was drawing near again.

He left his flat as he had so many times before - without hope.

Outside, night was forcing daylight into hiding. House windows no longer reflected the cloud-smeared sky, the cars and people travelling through the streets or the facades of buildings standing opposite. Now they were black, as if the light had already been sucked from the buildings’ innards, leaving only a void to press against the glass on the inside. Ed sensed a pressure behind these windows - he could almost see the glass bowing outwards - and he walked closer to them. Moving away from the road towards a more noticeable danger felt good. Once or twice he thought he saw himself reflected in there, but the light was fading fast now and he could just have been a shadow. Perhaps it was even someone walking behind him, keeping step, but when he glanced over his shoulder he was alone.

The animals knew that something was amiss. Pigeons huddled together on window sills, heads tucked beneath wings but looking up frequently, unable to sleep. Occasionally some of them would take flight, as if touched by nothing that could be seen. Cats sat behind several windows observing the street, watching the pigeons roost and panic, their heads turning here and there, none of them licking their paws, none outside in the street. There were no dogs sniffing along the gutter or pissing against garden walls, no magpies or crows or sparrows fighting over the remains of burgers trodden into pavements, no bees buzzing between gardens, no flies aiming for nostrils or eyes.

Another flock of pigeons lifted from a garage roof, their wings applauding the strange silence that had fallen over the streets. Even though cars travelled back and forth and people walked the pavements, sounds did not seem to echo, and Ed constantly brushed at his ears as if expecting some deadening material to be draped there. A car passed ten feet away, but its motor could have been coming from the next street. He coughed and felt it thrum through his head and chest, but its sound was dull and muted. He saw other people acting in the same bemused manner: rubbing their ears; watching cars drift quietly by; stamping feet or making some other noise to test their perceived deafness. It was as if the air was thickening, damping sound and diluting echoes into dull mumbles of what they should have been.

Cars approaching from the direction of the park had their headlights on full. Those moving the other way soon turned theirs on as well. The traffic was moving even slower than the usual rush-hour crawl.

Ed left the residential street and walked past the first of the shops. A man was busy pulling down a shutter and padlocking it into place, glancing warily over his shoulder as Ed approached.

‘Who are you?’ the man asked.

‘No one.’

‘Something’s going to happen,’ the man said, eyes dancing in their sockets like loose ball-bearings. He couldn’t keep his gaze in one place. ‘Something soon, and something bad. Maybe there’ll be a riot. Do you think there’s going to be a riot?’

Ed looked along the shopping street at the cars wending their way home, the people minding their own business even more than usual as they hurried, heads down, inexplicably trying not to bring attention to themselves. ‘I quite doubt it,’ he said, but the man was already hurrying away.

A motorcycle passed by accompanied by an explosion of shadows. They buzzed the bike like the dregs of a bad dream, black butterflies, negative snow, but totally without form. The motorcyclist was waving his left hand around his head, flicking his hand at the air as if trying to sign to someone behind him. Ed watched his hand and wondered what he meant.

The shards of shadow darted at the rider’s helmet … and disappeared.

Ed saw what was about to happen, but he could do nothing to help it. He tried to draw breath but it was like breathing in the middle of a thick fog. His lungs felt heavy and fall, but not with air. And then the bike flipped sideways, the rider left his mount, the machine hurtled up onto the pavement and through a shop window - the smashing of glass sounding like wind-chimes in the distance - and the street came to a standstill.

At last, Ed could shout. ‘Watch out!’ he croaked, realising how foolish it sounded now. Realising too that he had allowed someone else to die. If only he had shouted … if only he had been able to warn … The man lay half-beneath a parked car, his helmet askew on his head, the car body dented where he had impacted. Someone was kneeling beside him and reaching for the helmet and lifting the visor, tugging, taking it off…

Ed ran across the street, not wanting to see what gushed out when the man’s head was released. He dodged between the stalled cars and the drivers staring in blatant fascination at the scene unfolding in the gutter behind him. He did not look at any of them. He knew what they were feeling because he felt it himself sometimes, a revelling in the pain of others that helped him live with his own agonies. It was necessary, he supposed, and it kept him going however much he had no desire to carry on. They were shocked and excited, and pleased that their own troubles had been unloaded - for however long - on someone else. Something strange was happening right here and now, but a man was dying in the road. For a while, that would obsess these people and give them an escape.

Looking down, Ed saw shadows writhing across his legs as he ran through the beams of car headlights. They seemed to be stitched into his trousers, swathes of dark fluttering behind him like loose cloth. He ran on without looking down again.

‘Oh God!’ he thought he heard from behind him, but it might as well have been a cry from hidden memory.

He had to find Queenie. Night was falling too early. And try as he might, Ed could not shake the ever-increasing certainty that he had seen it all before.

He can feel blood on his hands. The hard haft of the knife in his right hand counterpoints the warm wet thing he holds in his left, his palm pressed flat to the body’s chest to hold it against the wall as he drives the blade home, again and again. A few moments ago he could still feel its heart beating, but that gave out with a spasm, as if the big muscle was trying to force the knife back out with its own violence. The blood from there seemed warmer than the rest, more sticky, like sweet treacle instead of runny syrup. The body is sliding down the wall so he pushes harder, trying to keep it upright, his blows striking its shoulders and neck as it moves down, then its chin and face. His finger slips inside a cut as he pushes and he turns it around in there. He can’t help comparing the feeling with one more loving and sensuous. Something scratches his finger - a bone splintered by the heavy knife - and he moves away, letting the body slump to the ground. His face is dripping with sweat, cool where sprayed blood dries there, soon to be a crust, cracking and flaking away like red autumn leaves. Something else settles around him. Heavy and dark and intimate, it reaches out formless hands to steady him, or perhaps to push him down. It enters his throat and makes it hard to breathe. For a second he feels a sudden, total rush of antagonism, fear and hate … unbridled hate… and then he is running. His feet slap on the pavement, rain taps patient fingers on his forehead and scalp, there’s plenty of time, it says, and his clothes catch and scrape where he is sweating. He is running. Again.

As he reached the park the dark had already won.

The streetlamps were still on but their light was weak. Car headlights struggled to part the air, their beams all but ineffectual now. Since running from the crashed motorcycle Ed had seen two cars hugging lampposts, and another one burning where it had come to rest on its roof. Burning, blazing, the stench of roasting meat bringing back dreadful memories, the sight of flames … but the flames looked weak and far away, as if he was viewing them on a videotape, a copy of a copy of a copy. They appeared weaker than they should, too. Perhaps the fuel was trying its best not to burn today.

The normal had changed. People were not coping.

And then he wondered why he was running. He was searching for Queenie because she’d told him about this, and deep inside beneath those noxious memories he thought he knew much more than he’d like to believe. But he’d just seen someone die, smelled more people burning in their crashed car, and even then he could hear the muffled sound of smashing glass and a scream, penetrating the darkness as effectively as a sigh into a pillow. He sought danger, felt more comfortable in its presence, so why was he running? Why not stand still and let it come? He would not fight. He would accept whatever the darkness had chosen for him because he knew it, he had seen it

(and smelled it and tasted it)

and although he could not accurately recall when and where, he knew it must have been at the murder. When he was killing that woman, subsumed by his own rage and impotence and anger, the darkness must have touched him.

But a greater rage had been with him as well, something far beyond his own.

And that curse in her eyes.

He climbed the wall. The park was much darker than he had ever seen it. No stars peered through the cloud cover, no streetlight bled through the railings, but Ed knew where to go. He’d been there before and she would be there now. He would find his way in the dark.

‘Can you feel it?’ Queenie said as he neared the copse of trees. ‘Can you feel the rage?’

Ed stopped and tried to locate the voice. It had come from his left, he thought, over where the trees gave way to the shrubbery bordering the stream. He paused, held his breath and waited for her to talk again.

She whispered in his right ear, ‘I’ve never known it so powerful.’ She touched his shoulder and walked behind him, drawing her hand across the back of his neck and scratching him with her nails. It was not sexual, he knew that right away, because it hurt. She was trying to hurt him and he didn’t know why.

‘What’s happening?’ he asked. If felt like a foolish thing to say. He should know. But right now, standing here in total darkness, a strange woman threatening him and turning him on, he was more confused than ever.

‘I’ve always arrived afterwards.’ He could smell her breath, garlic and staleness, no vanity there. ‘After the event, watched them clean up the bodies and take them away, seen them put it down to just another murder.’ Her voice sounded stronger than it had before, and the more excited she became the heavier the accent. He’d not noticed it before now, perhaps because it brought back way too many memories. She was foreign, but her grasp of English was perfect. Ed wondered if she knew that she was letting it slip. ‘But with each one the blackouts lasted longer, because they were searching … searching for you, Ed.’

‘Me?’ He could taste her hate. ‘Me?’ He felt her breath caress his ear and neck. She was standing so close that her heat touched him in waves.

‘You fuck.’ She spoke quietly, but her voice was loud with venom and anger and rage. And her accent, far from distorting her words, made them all the more clear to him.

‘You’ve tracked me down,’ he said, wondering if Queenie was a daughter or a niece to the woman he had killed. In a way, he was glad. He waited for the attack.

‘I didn’t. They did. My mother and the other dead. You’re not as invisible as you think. Every time you kill she sees, and she knows your mark, and together … they track you again. It takes time. But they find you.’

They?

‘Their hate for you blocks out the sun.’

Ed stared up into the blackness and wondered just what he was looking at. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Murderer.’

‘Yes … But I still don’t understand. Was she your mother? I can’t see you. I’m so sorry, whoever she was I’m so sorry, but I’ve lived with it … really, it’s destroyed me, you don’t know how much.’ He should have been crying, but he felt nothing, no sympathy or regret. He thought of all the things that could have been, but he could not remember any of them.

‘Destroyed you?’ Her voice was breaking now, rage giving way to tears and perhaps increasing because of that. ‘Destroyed you? I identified … I named my mother by looking at her jewellery. That’s why we knew it wasn’t just another ethnic killing in that bloody war: she still had her jewellery. Anyone else would have taken it. Destroyed? She was ruined. I couldn’t even look her in the face to say goodbye.’ She sobbed as a memory came back. ‘It was gone.’

Ed opened his mouth, but there was nothing he could say. Darkness flooded in and sent searing pain into his teeth, dried his tongue. Why was she Queenie, the Avoidance Queen? Her life? All of it? Maybe she’d shunned her future just to do this, track him.

‘So now you’ve found me—’

‘They’ve found you. My greatest desire - my fantasy, my dream - is to see you in pain caused by me. It’s what I’ve given up everything to achieve. But I dare not argue with them. They have much more reason.’

They, they, they?

She touched him again, a callused hand coming around his throat to hurt but not kill - there were others ready to do that, more in the dark than Queenie - and Ed reacted quickly. He grabbed her wrist and twisted, brought his other arm around to strike out at where he thought she should be. His fist connected with something, he didn’t know if it was hair or her woollen sweater, and then he was running through the park, the ground invisible but still there for now, and behind him he heard Queenie shouting something after him but, thankfully, her voice was lost.

He had to get home. Back to the flat, to relative safety, before she found him again. Before they found him… whoever they were. Already he could sense faces pressing against his mind, demanding entrance, requiring acknowledgement. They were still too far away to recognise.

Still running, he came to the park wall. The level of the ground was raised almost to the wall coping, but on the other side there was a five-foot drop into the street. Ed tripped over the head of the wall and fell out into space, arms pinwheeling, a frantic squeal escaping him for a second before he struck the pavement below. His head met with the kerb, and it was only as he faded into a stunned daze that light seemed to offer itself, a flash of white pain from inside. In that light, as if born of it, memories swam and enlarged, vicious memories of that time years ago when he had changed and destroyed his own life by taking someone else’s.

But they were all wrong …

The woman lying on the compacted mud floor, yes, the smell of burning outside, her eyes cursing him as the knife came down again—

And the woman, already a corpse, pressed against a wall with one hand while the other carves in, her blood running down his arm beneath his sleeve, coating his teeth as it sprays—

And blood staining the clean white sheets beneath her as it rains outside, the stink of the city rising up as the violent storm washes them from the gutters—

And the knife grates as it slips from her outstretched hand and calls sparks from the pavement down by the river—

And in the back of the car, thinking she was there for something else, his shoulder and head pressed awkwardly against the roof as he tries to swing his arm back and forth, back again …

And others.

One tastes of cinnamon, another smells of vanilla; one feels cool and calm even under his attack, another is hot and fevered; one goes quietly, another sounds like a steam-engine whistle as she screams …

Others. Many others.

And with all of them, the fury and rage.

Ed came around, dizzy with the shock of memory and the impact of his skull on the pavement.

What was he? What kind of animal, monster … he should stay where he was, wait for the sad heart of this darkness to find him and exact the revenge it had been seeking for years. Growing all the time, expanding, because every time it drew near he repeated his crime, fed it a fresh rage to find him with next time, more anger, and in a way he supposed he was providing for his own punishment.

So he should wait and submit…

But there was still time. It was looking for him, a deeper shadow in this blackness, even now he could hear a scream as someone was picked up and tossed away when the dark realised it had the wrong person.

I should submit … I’m an animal … all those people, all that life … there’s still time … I should die … I can escape … I’ll let her, let them kill me … I can find light again.

Confused, crying, terrified, wretched, Ed felt his way along the boundary wall of the park, knowing he was going the right way. Cowardice and an instinct for survival - really for Ed they had become one and the same - drove him on. If Queenie was following, he did not hear her or sense her, and she would be as blind as him. He wondered what time it was and whether anyone was even doing anything about this, this weird darkness that had fallen, no stars no moon no lights, artificial light swallowed and beaten back like clouds of leaves before a hurricane. And he realised that he did not care. Because no one could do anything.

This was all for him.

He ran, letting go of the wall and launching himself into space. He tried to steer by sound and touch alone, but every mutter he heard became the scream of one of his victims, every thud of his foot on the road was a knife driving home. He ran through the landscape of his murders, remembering more than he ever thought he could have forgotten. And there were always more memories to come.

Ed found his way home, read the house number by touch, kicked open the front door, ran up to his flat. He had no idea how. He wondered, as he fumbled the handle, how many times he had done this before.

He flicked on his light, expecting nothing, and seeing only a ghost before him.

‘Mother!’ Queenie shouted, screamed. ‘Mother, he’s here, get him, get him!’

‘Shush!’ Ed hissed, almost laughing at how ridiculous that sounded.

‘Mother!’ She screamed again and again, the drastically weakened effect of the ceiling lights making her seem almost transparent, a smudge on his vision, nothing more.

‘Just stop!’ Ed shouted. He could hardly hear himself. Maybe the dark was eating at his ears, burrowing in to reach his brain because she, and they, had found him already. He wondered how many …

‘How many?’ he asked, but Queenie was screaming louder now, her own voice and rage seemingly able to penetrate the damping effects of this blackness, rattling the windows and setting his hair on end.

‘Mother, mother, mother!’

He scrambled around, looking for the doorway and escape, hand alighting on something else entirely.

‘Mother, mother …’

He lunged at her, the knife an extension of his fear.

‘Mother…’ And then Queenie was quiet.

He worked for five minutes, reminded of all the smells and tastes and sounds that haunted his memory, and taking in some new ones. Once or twice, as Queenie slid further down, the knife went straight through to the wall, marking a few more bloody days in his life.

He left the flat, feeling his way through the dark, feeling it thicker around his neck and heavier on his eyes, wondering just when it would become too hard to push through, too there. But it never did.

He felt the rage, old angers rising and a fresh, new hatred giving the blackness an electric edge. ‘Sorry Queenie,’ he whispered, but really he wasn’t sorry at all.

Perhaps soon, when the memories were lost again, he’d imagine that he was.

He found his way to the back door of the block of flats. It was rarely used and he had to kick it open, but outside he ran straight into a car. He could barely breathe now, they were coming, and pure instinct drove him on even though he knew he was finished. Like a man putting his hands over his head to save himself from a falling building, Ed continued to fight and struggle on. To pause, to wait for the inevitable, was too much for him to do. He was too scared.

He opened the car door, reached in and found a torch. And it was only when he clicked it on - shining it around the car at the other torches, batteries, gas lamps, flares, fireworks, cans of petrol - that he realised it was his own.

Ed carved another niche in the timber panelling above his bed. There were over two thousand scratches there already. It still didn’t feel like home.

He waited for the timber to bleed red sap, but there was none, it was dry. He expected this every time, and every time it did not happen. Yet the fear was always just as fresh. Sometimes he believed that every memory he had was made up, a whole lifetime manufactured in his sleep and given vent in his waking hours.

The only real memory, the one he could taste and smell and feel, was of the murder that had changed his life.

Tim Lebbon’s books include Mesmer, Faith in the Flesh, Hush (with Gavin Williams), As the Sun Goes Down, Face, The Nature of Balance, Until She Sleeps and White and Other Tales of Ruin. His novellas White and Naming of Parts were both awarded British Fantasy Awards for best short fiction as well as being nominated for International Horror Guild Awards. His short fiction has been published in many magazines and anthologies, including The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Night Visions n, Keep Out the Night, Foreboding, The Darker Side, Dark Arts, October Dreams, The Children of Cthulhu, Phantoms of Venice, The Mammoth Book of Sword and Honour and The Third Alternative, while a serial novella will run in Cemetery Dance magazine. Future books include Dusk and Dawn, a fantasy duology from Night Shade Books; Into the Wild Green Yonder, a collaboration with Peter Crowther from Cemetery Dance Publications, and a novella collaboration with Simon Clark for Earthling Publications. ‘I’ve always been interested in guilt, how people handle it and how it affects them,’ explains Lebbon. ‘Everyone’s guilty of something and we all cope in different ways. Some people can bury it, however bad it may be. Others are destroyed by it, however minor the transgression. And some, like the main character in “Black”, are in denial. But however it’s handled, guilt is tenacious. It gets you in the end.’

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