“Why such fury, little thief? My gift to you is one many have died to obtain.” She held up the glittering metal. She sliced across my forehead with the scalpel. I screamed, arching up against the merciless straps. The pain was hot and sharp. She cut downward through my cheek. Red wetness dripped into my eyes. Blackness smothered me.
Dirty yellow light. No more straps, no feeling at all. Chanting all around me, from me, through me. Over and over, words whose meanings I don’t know. I can’t stop chanting.
Below me, she crouches over the body still tied to the plank. She lifts her head from her feasting and smiles with her bloody mouth.
“Too long since blood has sated me! You have your reward, little thief!”
I am first among her new worshipers, in a new row on the wall.
AND SOME ARE MISSING
by Joel Lane
The first time, it was someone I didn’t know. Inevitably. I’d gone out to use the phone box, around eleven on a Tuesday night. This was a month after I’d moved into the flat in Moseley. I phoned Alan, but I don’t remember what I said; I was very drunk. Coming back, I saw two men on the edge of the car park in front of the tower block I lived in. It looked like a drunk was being mugged. There was one man on the ground: gray-haired, shabby, unconscious. And another man crouching over him: pale, red-mouthed, very tense. As I came closer, he seemed to be scratching at the drunk’s face. His hand was like a freeze-dried spider. I could see the knuckles were red from effort. With his other hand, he was tugging at the man’s jacket.
Too far gone to be scared, I walked toward them and shouted, “What are you going?” The attacker looked up at me. His eyes were empty, like an official behind a glass screen. I clenched my fist. “Fucking get off him. Go on…” He smiled as if he knew something I didn’t. Then he got up and calmly stalked away into the darkness behind the garages. The man on the ground looked about fifty; from his clothes and stubble, he could have been a vagrant. There were deep cuts on his face, slowly filling up with mirrors of blood. He was sweating heavily.
I ran back to the phone and called an ambulance. Then I went back to the injured man and dabbed uselessly at his face with my sleeve. Now the shock was wearing off, I needed to go to sleep. I looked at my wristwatch; it was past midnight. There was no blood on my sleeve. I looked again at the drunk’s face. It was pale with sweat and blurred by a grayish stubble. But there were no wounds. Jesus, I thought, I’ve started to hallucinate. It’s strictly Diet Coke from now on. Leaving him for the ambulance, I struggled into the building. Living on the top floor meant I didn’t have to keep count. The next thing I knew, my alarm clock was ringing. I didn’t remember setting it, let alone going to bed.
The flat’s okay, though it costs more to rent than a poorly furnished studio flat should. At least it’s pretty secure. You’d need wings or a sledgehammer to break in. Before I paid the deposit, I asked if there was a phone point; the landlord showed me where it was. It was only when I’d moved in that I discovered the phone point hadn’t been used in decades and was no longer viable. When I tried to contact the landlord, a snotty assistant told me it was hard luck, but they weren’t responsible for telephones. I said that having been told there was a phone line, I had a right to assume it was viable. She said they hadn’t told me it was. I thanked her for explaining, then hung up. My hands were shaking. Unless I was prepared to make the landlord a free gift of an installation costing a month’s rent, I’d have no telephone until I moved.
A few nights after the incident in the car park, I woke up in the middle of the night. I’d been dreaming about Hereford, Alan’s home town. We’d spent the last Christmas there with his family. I remembered the cathedral, the old houses, the hills out toward Fownhope that were so heavily wooded you seemed to be indoors. Suddenly I was crying. Then I felt something touch my face. Fingers. They seemed to be following the tears. One of them scratched my right eye. I lay very still, sweating with fear. The touching was gentle, but there was no kindness in it. A cold palm slid over my mouth. I pulled away, then lashed out in the darkness, cursing. Something moved at the side of the bed. I switched the light on, but the room was empty. There was nobody else in the flat.
I was more scared than I’d been when I thought there was someone in the room with me. I’m a real coward when it comes to dentists and hospitals, but with people my temper takes over. A few years ago, I was walking home late at night when I was stopped by this massive bloke. He asked for directions to somewhere or other, then pushed me against the wall and tried to take my wallet. I pushed him hard, shouted “Fuck off” and ran; he didn’t follow me. I sat on my bed, remembering this, staring at the walls of the flat. There was a picture of a town covered with snow at night, done in pastel blue and white on black paper; Alan had drawn that for me. There were Picasso and van Gogh prints, stills from James Dean films, and a sketch of mine that showed an abandoned card table on a bridge over a canyon. I’d filled the flat with images that made me feel at home. But it didn’t work.
Some evenings, my head was full of a violence I could only control by drinking myself unconscious. The new flat had been rented in a hurry, while I was staying with friends after the split. Alan was in love with another man: a bearded American, younger than me and more intelligent. Two years of living together, and now suddenly it was all gone. Hard to believe; but every day I had to rediscover it by waking up. Alan and I were still close: we met regularly for coffee or lunch in the city center, to exchange news or just spend time together.
He wanted to go to America with Paul, and live there. Until that happened, I needed to hold onto whatever feelings for me still lived in him. Perhaps by refusing to let go of him completely, I was damaging both of us—as though the relationship were a kind of wound that we both carried, and which the contact between us kept reopening.
It was at one of those awkward meetings that he told me Sean was dead. I hadn’t known him well—a familiar face in one or two pubs, always chatty, but genuinely friendly underneath the banter. He invented nicknames for people that were invariably perfect, and never malicious. One Sunday afternoon we met by chance at the Triangle cinema, and he gave me a lift home. He struck me then as rather subdued and thoughtful. We talked about people we both knew; Sean said he’d grown out of the scene, and wanted a more settled life.
And now—what, eighteen months later?—he’d killed himself. From what Alan said, he’d been suffering from mental illness and couldn’t see himself recovering. I cried suddenly, briefly. Sean was only twenty-three. I wish I understood why so many people don’t value themselves. Why someone with vitality and humor and warmth should deliberately end his life. Perhaps it’s people like that who get hurt the most, and can’t hide from it. Somehow they come to believe that they don’t matter. And there’s nobody to tell them they’re wrong.
Everyone seemed to be in trouble that week. It was late summer; the days were hot and sticky, you had people wearing sunglasses and carrying umbrellas. That kind of weather makes everyone restless and uneasy. A couple that Alan and I had known for years split up unexpectedly, and had to sell their house in order to live apart. I started losing track of who was seeing whom, and which affairs were open and which were secret.