The Unlucky Man (15 page)

Corg drank, seriously and continuously, propped up on one of the small beds, a battered old glass in one hand, the ever diminishing bottle in the other, eyes fixed on a horizon I don’t think the rest of us could see.

"You know, he talked about you," Loess said suddenly, talking to me in a low voice that I had to lean in to hear. "Mr Happen." She corrected herself, "Not about you, about the Unlucky Man. He’d say the name after some of his trances, or before some of his crazier plans got put in motion, he’d say the Unlucky Man would come and end us all. I think he was scared of it, like the boogeyman or something."

"Scared of me?" I said, uncertainly.

"No," she said, reaching out and touching my hand, a small reassuring gesture that sent electricity dancing through my fingertips. "I mean, I know what I said just now, but he never talked about
you
, just about the shadowy figure in his head. That was the Unlucky Man, not you. He never talked about Jon Hesker."

I liked how my name sounded on her lips.

Time passed slowly. Loess took up a seat at the plastic table and set about the delicate business of disassembling and cleaning her weapons, fingers working with a speed and dexterity that told me that this was a common, ritual occurrence.

For my part, I positioned myself at the window, staring out of it but not really seeing. Warm and fed, I found myself drifting in and out of a waking dream. In truth it had been recurring since the mist; the same feeling of nothing beneath me but falling shadow, the world disappearing and reappearing with each heartbeat, melting and coalescing back to life over and over again until I shook myself, told myself to focus and gained a few minutes grace before the whole thing started over again. Drift and settle, break and fall, wake and dream and fade to black.

It was gone midnight when we heard the sound of an engine, a low growl that startled us all from a half sleeping inertia. We waited, silent, breath held in tense anticipation. Then came a knock at the door. It was a small, surreptitious noise, a knock that sounded almost like it hoped it wouldn’t be answered.

Gun held low by her side, Loess padded to the door and, with a glance back at us, threw it open. The figure she revealed was a short man, bedraggled by the fallen rain, reddish hair spilling out from under a porkpie hat rammed down hard over his ears. He was pale with heavy bags under eyes which roamed around constantly like he was trying to see everything all at once.

He was dressed pretty much as I remembered from my previous quick glimpse of him, another florid shirt beneath a sodden and dripping beige trench-coat. Everything he wore clashed like the colours of a cocktail you might buy in a Caribbean theme bar.

"Whimsy?" Loess asked.

He nodded. "Funny," he said, "When we spoke, I didn’t picture you for a blond." He smiled ingratiatingly but it froze on his face when he saw me. He whistled. "So you really aren’t dead?"

"Nope," I said, gesturing him over the threshold, "Come on in."

I proffered him a tumbler and he took it appreciatively. His movements were jerky, like he was wired on too many energy drinks. Taking off his hat he shook his head like a dog then apologised, taking a seat at the table, steaming in the warm air from the heater.

He looked me hard in the eye. "I’m sorry," he said, much to my surprise, "That I couldn’t help you. Before. Back at the station." He looked like he honestly meant it. "I’ve been moving around so long, I didn’t dare get caught in the open. I thought maybe I should, I don’t know... and then it was too late."

I shrugged. "So help me now."

With a sigh he drained the whiskey and Corg, only a little grudgingly, refilled it.

"I’ll tell you what I can," he said. "But before I do I got to warn you, what I know doesn’t amount to much and some of it is going to sound pretty crazy."

Corg snorted. "Believe me," he said, "Our litmus test of crazy has changed a lot in the last few days."

The little man nodded again. "Well I guess you’ve earned the right to hear it, but don’t say I didn’t warn you." He grimaced. "How to start though?"

"The drug?" I said, thinking about the now oddly familiar way the black substance in that little capsule had rolled and coiled on itself, round and round into oblivion. It seemed as good a place to begin as any.

"The drug," he echoed darkly. "No, we’ll get to that. Let’s start with the man who shot you. Work up from there. His name is Wychelo. My understanding is he used to be a gun for hire, but now he’s on a chain for the power behind all of this."

"And who is behind all of this?" Corg interrupted.

"I wish I could tell you," Whimsy said, spreading his hands flat against the vinyl of the table, "But they’re official, that much I do know. Under the radar but they’re an agency for sure, sanctioned by some part of government, somewhere. They supersede the cops and they operate under a total media blackout."

"And you don’t know who they are?"

"No," he said, "I’m sorry. I know that they report to a body named Control, but that's about it. I don’t even know for sure if Control is a person or a group of people. I’m not sure most of them even know for definite." He paused and took a heavy slug of whiskey as the lights flickered.

"So the drug," he said, "This is where things get strange." We all drew in a little closer. What did I imagine was to follow? Not what did.

"Have you ever been to a place and thought, I don’t know...There are places," Whimsy said, seemingly slipping off track, "Where the world gets... thin."

"What?" Corg demanded, "What does that mean?"

Whimsy pulled a pained expression and tried again.

"Places where strange things happen. Places where the shadows stretch too long, where everything just sort of feels wrong."

"What is this?" Corg said, pushing himself back from the table. But I was thinking of what I’d seen, what I’d felt, as the mist rolled in, crowding with half glimpsed shapes, and his words didn’t seem so odd to me. Whimsy carried on determinedly, directing his words at me exclusively now. Perhaps he could see something in my face.

"You know what I’m talking about, I know you do, I see it in your eyes. There’s a place – I don’t know where but in the mountains somewhere – they call it the Black Well, or the Hole or sometimes just the Pit and it is a pit, a chasm full of shadows that aren’t really shadows at all. There’s something down there, in its depths, a reaching, waiting darkness. They found it, and they harvested it, somehow, and they made it into pills."

He took a deep breath. "That’s what Mackay was bringing when he fell onto your car. Somehow he had got a pill out of the lab and was bringing it to me. But Wychelo sniffed him out first."

"But why to you?" Loess asked, "What’s your angle here?"

Whimsy rubbed at his eyes, "I was part of a group dedicated to following this through, bringing it to light. Scientists mostly, not spies or anything like that, ordinary guys who got mixed up in this simply by being a part of the wrong lab at the wrong time. They brought me in when I was still a licensed investigator to help them make sense of things. They wanted to let the world know what was going on."

"But why?" Corg asked. "What are
they
doing?"

"They’re making an army," Whimsy said darkly and I noticed a small tremor run through his hand holding the glass. "Someone’s using the drug to create their own personal army of unthinking, unflinching soldiers."

A shocked silence followed his words. They begged so many more questions but it was Loess who spoke next, voicing a concern at something that Whimsy had said that had passed me by.

"Why do you say were?" she asked. "You
were
part of a group."

He fixed her unblinkingly. "Smart question. Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies. You sure you want to know?"

She nodded.

"All dead," he said plainly, "Bar one, my man on the inside. I haven’t heard from him since what happened to Mackay." He laughed, one sharp exhalation. "In fact that’s the only reason I’m here at all – I waited longer than usual to burn my number in case he called."

He swallowed the last of the whiskey, coughing as it hit the back of his throat.

"And call he did," he said with a flourish. "He wants to meet me – meet us. Tomorrow, says he has something huge."

In the silence that followed, I surveyed Whimsy with new eyes: beneath his diminutive and scruffy facade there was a toughness, something unyielding and oddly impressive.

"Your source ever mention an unlucky man?" I asked at length, deliberately not catching Loess’ eye as I said it. He thought about it for a moment then shook his head.

"Doesn’t ring a bell," he said, dismissively. In truth I wasn’t even sure exactly why I had asked.

The small, rumpled figure looked around at us, his audience, assembled in a half moon around a sticky vinyl coffee table as the lights flickered and, outside in the storm, a long drum of thunder rolled.

"Are you in?" he said, a shade hopefully. I got the impression that Whimsy had been alone for a long while, existing in a solitary confinement of his own making to ensure his survival. Having found like minded company I didn’t think he was keen to lose it so soon. He seemed slightly uplifted too, as if sharing the burden of his knowledge had given some unexpected catharsis. Looking around at the faces of the others I saw in their eyes a look I guessed was mirrored in my own: what choice did we have?

"We’re in," I said at last, and it felt very final. In the morning we would head back into the city and everything that waited there for us.

Once, long, long ago, when the world was still young, the beast had stalked its surface and hunted beneath the heat of the sun and the cold of the moon. Its shadow had been cast long over the face of the world and it had known no boundary, its only compulsion was hunger, its only desire to consume.

And then Man came. At first the beast was wary of this new creature, so alike the other beasts it had hunted and yet so different. It watched as Man developed, became increasingly complex, increasingly able, increasingly hungry; and it saw in Man something of itself. And Man fed the beast.

Swiftly it came to realise that, in their actions, these new people could revere the beast, make it strong. With every base action, the beast was worshipped, strengthened, confirmed and it knew in Man a power like no other it had ever known before, and exulted in it.

As the years passed, many came to understand the beast and to fear it and they built fires to keep out his dark and huts to shut out the night. They daubed symbols on the walls of their caves and shunned the dark places of the world. They huddled in the light as their holy-men chanted and burned spices and wove twigs and painted their faces and did everything else they could think of in the hope of keeping it at bay.

Later, they built churches and consecrated the ground and built stronger walls of stone and slept with lights burning to keep out the cold winds of the dark on which the voice of the beast might still be heard. And some of their measures worked and some did not.

There were others though who welcomed the beast with open arms. They worshipped it, built their own churches of bone and blood in its honour, long halls of painted skulls and sharp spikes within which were carried out dark acts in its name that fed and nurtured its dark soul.

To these people the beast was generous, granting them power and dominion, bought at a price, over their peers. Many was the village sheltering in the dark forests of the old world as the shadows lengthened, shutting out the night with candles and lanterns safe behind heavy shutters and doors locked and bolted whilst the tall castles of those who had thrown in their lot with the darkness loomed terrible above them and the night echoed with the screams of those giving their lives in honour of the beast.

In this way, the beast was kept strong without the need to hunt and feed for itself and less and less did it venture abroad beneath either sun or moon and in this lay its undoing. As time passed the beast became ineffable, a thing of legend, an idea out of nightmare, out of superstition. Still fed, bloated on the supplication of dark deeds, it crawled into the dark like a bulbous fat spider and slept, safe in the knowledge of its own never-ending superiority.

For a long, long time it slept, and when it awoke it was alone.

The world had changed, Man had changed. No longer did it worship the beast for the beast had become a part of its own consciousness. The dark acts of Man were now simply that and no longer an offering to the old dark god. No longer was it fed.

When it emerged from the dark it found it no longer had substance, could no longer rend and tear and alter the minds of men save those already disposed to hear it. For an age it crawled the surface of the earth searching for a way to return to what it once was until at last, defeated, it slunk into the deepest, darkest hole it could find and in the shadows waited sullenly in a state of hibernation for the world to change once more.

As it slept the shadows grew long and deep around it.

It didn’t awake until it felt, for the first time in many ages, a mind it could reach out to. It was the mind of a young man, part of a scientific expedition, almost entirely devoid of anything that might have been deemed humanity, ruled entirely by an all encompassing ambition and desire for power. Into this emptiness, the beast, now nothing more than shadow and suggestion, found it could pour itself like poison and be heard.

The owner of this mind was named Horst and the beast gave unto him what he wanted: the power to bend others to his will, even allowing Horst to take away some of itself, its shadow, for in awaking and making this connection, the beast found itself more whole than it had in centuries.

But it was not yet fully whole, nor could it be, although its presence was felt more strongly by many as it reached out to those minds that could feel it, searching without success for one who could set it free. Many minds were tipped into madness by the probing of the beast’s feelers, and many dark actions could probably be attributed to its suggestion. Still, however, it was trapped, despite its own and Horst’s attempts at liberation. But the beast understood now what it needed. Its bonding with Horst had weakened the boundaries keeping it at bay, holding its old world from leaking back through into this new one of Man’s creation.

The beast now knew instinctively what it had to do: to grow new life in the real world and in so doing force its way back into the world of men. Only then could its truth no longer be denied and the walls holding it in check would crumble forever. Two worlds would be forced once more into one.

For the best part of a lifetime they searched for the right mind to impregnate with this chaos seed, for this one unlucky man.

In the end, it had been by chance that they found him.

Horst sat behind his desk, false window now letting in a cold, winter light. In his hand was a clear glass ball, its black contents curling and rippling like smoke. Its presence comforted him: when he held it his consciousness felt expanded; he could feel the life surrounding him through the cold concrete walls, could almost hear the thoughts of the teeming workers, like ants, who populated his buried fortress. Beneath his feet he could feel the air filling empty cells that waited to be filled. He was aware, too, of the empty, soulless silence of his drones, his new army, their minds like blank slates waiting to be written on.

But they had lost the man Hesker. He had felt the disruption in the usual patterns of the world as the confrontation in the mist had unfolded. He was aware, too, of the changes in the walls of the world, as they grew thinner, stretching out as Hesker and Wychelo, both touched by the beast’s shadow, were drawn together each into the other’s orbit.

The black vapor in the ball on his desk had darkened and expanded, filling the orb until it appeared as a smooth rock of obsidian, glowing with its own sickly light. The voice in his head was practically purring.

But then they had lost Hesker. This was a concern.

No.

The word whispered from all directions at once, filling his mind. The glass ball grew warm in his palm.

 Soon
. The voice whispered. The black smoke twisted and writhed.

 Soon.

***

"What is it with you and stations?"

This one was old and deserted, slowly crumbling, like everywhere else I had seen of late, into dereliction. At some time in the past an effort had been made to board it up, but those boards had long since been loosened and pried away by vandals or kids or someone else entirely.

"Believe me, not my first choice," muttered the scruffy private investigator. Whimsy had become even jumpier as we reached the city again, and worse still as we stood in the shadow of the old train station. He jumped at every small noise, every twitch of shadow.

He’d told us that the tunnels below street level led, in their dark and twisting manner, to an underground silo. This line had long since been decommissioned and fallen into disrepair, but it wasn’t impossible to imagine that it could still be used. You heard stories about people, mainly derelicts and bums that no-one believed, witnessing ghost trains zipping along the old lines in the dead of night. Stranger things had quite definitely happened.

Whimsy’s contact was planning on making his escape along one of these tracks. He was done, apparently, and what had happened to Mackay was the final straw. He would meet us here - the first place he possibly could - give us everything he had, unburden himself, and then he was out, off to somewhere where he could disappear completely for a long, long time. Apparently the risks represented by walking those old tracks were less concerning than staying put and hoping for the best.

We pushed our way through the gaps in the fronting and made our way into the deserted building. Inside the air was thick and heavy with some kind of cloying organic smell, like a butterfly house full of rotten fruit. Yet it was oddly cold and water dripped through the decaying roof, running in heavy flows in a few places, where the ongoing rain had proved too much for the shaky construction, and leaving green moss like stains over the clouded, old and broken glass.

Here and there light lanced in swells, dust swimming thickly in the beams. The whole place screamed of lonely neglect.

Moving slowly, we made our way down to the platform, through the foyer whose glass roof was thickly caked with dirt from the city outside.

"Anyone else notice how quiet it is?" Corg whispered, the words ripping jarringly into the silence. He was right - outside the city was waking up, cars were passing, pedestrians were going about their daily routines, joggers jogged, dogs barked, motorists shouted abuse at one another and furiously pounded their horns - yet in here it was deathly still, tomblike, the only sound our footfalls, muffled by a permalayer of dust.

"It’s like a mausoleum," Loess said.

"Thanks," Corg muttered, "You’re doing wonders for my nerves."

"Come on," Whimsy whispered urgently. I noticed he was popping with sweat. It was running in rivulets from under the brim of his porkpie hat.

"Down here," he said, gesturing at a set of wide marble stairs.

The feeling was starting again, that pumping at my temples, pressure building, pricking at my skin. The air was growing thick with static once more.

At the bottom of the staircase was a long platform, bridging two deep tunnels: twin nebulous black holes. I took a step towards the gaping mouth of the right hand tunnel, a deep circle of yawning , gritty darkness.

"Which way?" Loess said, then, "Hesker - you OK?"

I only half heard, my focus was almost completely lost in the tunnel’s entrance. I felt it calling to me, gaping like a hungry mouth, waiting. Waiting for me to slip and tumble in, to be swallowed by the darkness. Suddenly I felt cold, icy wind emanating from the murky depth, whispering out like fetid, decayed breath.

And there was a noise.

This at least I knew wasn’t in my head, because Corg’s head whipped round to stare into the blackness too. When he turned back his gaze was like flint.

"I thought there were no trains down here," he said, voice like shards of glass.

"Shit," Whimsy whimpered. "Shit."

"What the fuck’s going on?" Corg hissed.

"Your man’s sold us down the line," Loess muttered.

The noise was louder now, a rising roar in the throat of the tunnel, fire in the belly of the beast.

Whimsy suddenly burst back to life. "Go," he hissed. "Now - there’s still time." He was backing up as he spoke, almost at the foot of the stairs.

"Wait," Loess said, unsure, moving after him.

"Damn right we should go," Corg growled in agreement, though he didn’t move.

"Come on!" Whimsy said again. "He wouldn’t have given me up easily, he’s got to be dead too, there’s nothing for us here now." He had reached the bottom step and suddenly lost all sense of composure, turned and bolted up the marble.

"Wait!" Loess shouted after him, giving chase up the staircase.

The roar was filling the station by now. I knew I should run too but I couldn’t. Everything I was was tied into that sound, it was in my head and in my blood. My eyes were glued to the tunnel mouth and any second I knew something was going to emerge from the darkness.

Something.

Anything.

Then it was gone, the reverie broke like water against the shore, bright light flared in my eyes and I was myself again, but it was too late.

The train bellowed into the station, screaming to a tortured halt in front of me. It was just a single dirty old carriage but it was packed to capacity, full of vacant eyed grimly identical figures in matching gray boiler-suits. Each one of them stood too motionless and rigid to be right, each of them was armed, each of them was deadly.

At their head, colourless eyes glinting in triumph, stood Wychelo.

"Fucking run Goddamn it!" Corg bellowed, grabbing at my arm and dragging me into action. Finally my legs came back under my control just as the train doors were sliding open with a hiss and the carriage’s passengers began streaming out onto the platform.

We ran. Without direction or thought we ran, somehow not in the direction we had come – the direction that Whimsy had gone and Loess had followed in – we were turned about and heading down the platform and by the time we realised it was too late.

We stumbled down a dark corridor, the sound of heavy footfalls close behind us. My blood was loud in my ears, pumping as we raced downwards, feet slapping against the chipped and faded green tiled diamonds on the floor.

At the end of the corridor stood an old elevator - the type which is really just a cage on a pulley system. Our only option, we hurtled into it, smacking into the back lattice wall of the cage, making the whole structure shake and roll alarmingly. I spun, punching wildly at the buttons. The doors slid in slightly with a dull metallic wheeze then stopped dead. I tried again then hammered all the other useless buttons whilst Corg wrenched at the front of the cage, trying to create some kind of a barrier between us and the small army in the corridor bearing down on our iron prison. They were rusted in place.