The Midnight Men and Other Stories (13 page)

It happened just like before.

One second Leroy Defoe was smiling, laughing at Shelley’s extrovert stunt, his big head of dreadlocks caught in the sun like Medusa’s snakes, the next moment Travis found himself looking into a death’s head. Once more the skull, ringed with fire, stared back with its hollow, soulless eyes, a dream of death given life in the waking light. And in his head, the echo of a single gunshot.

Travis retracted his hand and let out a yelp of horror, a cry that was swallowed by the noise of the crowd. Travis stood rooted to the spot, letting the wave of shock cascade across his senses. Shelley was still bouncing up and down next to him.

“Travis! Did you see what I did? Did you see it?”

He dared to look back at Defoe now, and was partially relieved to find that the death’s head was gone.

But the fact was, he had seen it. And he knew what it meant. Sometime soon - anytime soon - Leroy Defoe was going to die.

“Travis?” Shelley was shouting, concern in her voice now. “Are you okay?”

He looked up at her, his head moving on his neck painfully slowly. “He’s in danger,” he told her.

“What?” she said.

“Someone’s going to try and kill Defoe. Here. Today.”

“What are you talking about, Travis?” she said, her excitement quashed. “How do you know that?”

“I don’t know. I just . . . feel it.” He began looking around the campus now, his eyes darting from one block to another, from the halls of residence to the refectory building.

“Travis,” she said. “You’re scaring me.”

The police had made sure that there were no open windows anywhere on campus during the visit. They seemed to have done a good job, as every window was shut-

Except for one.

“Oh my God,” he said. Without further deliberation, Travis turned and pushed his way through the crowd, desperately trying to catch up with the group surrounding Defoe.

“Hey!” he was bellowing. “Listen to me! Let me through!”

But the crowd would not yield where Leroy was present and Travis was squeezed out the rear of the mob. He saw a policeman standing alone on the bank and ran over.

“Hey,” he said, breathless and slick with sweat. “There’s a window open up there!”

The cop didn’t seem to see Travis, his attention fixed on the moving crowd.

“Listen to me, dammit! Fourth floor of the Jessup Building! Look!”

“Don’t worry about it,” the cop shouted, moving Travis out of his line of sight.

“Don’t worry about it?” Travis screamed back. “There could be an assassin up there!”

The cop waved him away. “Very funny, son. Everyone’s a comedian today.”

“I’m not joking. I think Defoe’s in danger! You have to believe me! You have to do something!”

The cop suddenly grabbed Travis by the shoulders. “Listen, smartarse, there’s no bloody assassin up there! There’s only the faculty on that floor. If you must know, they have an armed police officer with them. It’s common practice. Now if there is an open window up there, it’ll be the lookout position for that armed officer.” He raised his voice even louder at the last: “Don’t worry about it!”

Travis wrestled his way out of the officer’s grip and stumbled away, angry and delirious with fear. An armed police officer? An open window? Travis was a big follower of the great conspiracy theories of the Twentieth Century. Who was to say that an armed police officer wasn’t the one about to pull the trigger on Defoe? He looked down at the press of bodies surrounding Defoe, then looked up at that solitary open window. Then he started to run.

When he reached the front doors of the Jessup building, there was no one to stop him. All the police were lining the route, and Travis was free to sprint across the lobby to the elevators. He hit all three call buttons, but--just his luck!--none of the elevators were waiting on the ground floor. They were all resting on the fourth floor - where the faculty were watching.

Where the open window was.

The death’s head flashed in his mind for a moment, vivid in its detail, terrifying to behold. Deep in his subconscious, he could still hear the echo of a single gunshot.

The last time he’d suffered this premonition, he had lost his brother, even though he’d had the power to save him.

But what is possible to change the future? Could he alter events? Could he have saved his brother if he’d tried hard enough?

He had to believe that he could. Otherwise, he reasoned, why was he given this power of precognition? What use would a power like that be if not to change futures?

Cursing the elevators, he ran for the stairs, taking them three at a time, his heart pumping like a piston.

All this time, he’d felt that following in his brother’s footsteps was the road to redemption, but now he wondered if fate had put him on this road only to bring him to this day, this hour, this moment.

Was this his chance to make up for his former failure?

He decided it was. He would not let Defoe down.

He forced himself to climb the steps faster, his mind fixed on the singular purpose of trying to avert this tragedy.

He staggered onto the fourth floor landing and paused momentarily for breath. His legs were on fire after climbing four huge flights of stairs at a sprint. He performed a quick mental calculation to work out that the window which was open belonged to the male student’s toilets between lecture rooms 4.2 and 4.3. He was jogging down the hall towards them when a terrible guttural shriek filled the corridors.

His heart seized in his chest. The scream had come from the other side of the male toilet door. A voice in his head, the voice of survival, told him to turn around and run. But the other voice, the voice that was chasing redemption propelled him on. He kicked the door inward and quickly assessed the scene.

Slumped in the nearest open cubicle was the body of a police officer. His throat had been cut and his dead eyes were staring glassily into the toilet bowl beside him.

Travis saw no death’s head vision.

It was too late for that.

Another man was crouching at the window. He was wearing a janitor’s boiler suit, but it was definitely not the grey-haired janitor they all knew as Reggie. This man was holding a police-issue rifle, and Travis could see that it was trained on the car park below. The man turned to face Travis, anger flashing like fire in his ice-blue eyes. His face was slick with sweat, and the John Lennon glasses he wore had slipped to the very end of his nose.

In those few seconds, Travis read the man’s mind. He was thinking he could probably get off the fatal kill-shot before Travis crossed the room. He would have to deal with Travis after.

Accordingly, he turned back to the rifle, hastily relocating his target in the scope. Travis pounced, but not quick enough to stop him pulling the trigger. The single shot filled the room like an explosion and Travis felt sharp stabbing pains in both ears. He fell on top of the man, and they struggled together for an eternity, before the shooter sent Travis skidding across the damp tiles. The assassin whirled around, pointing the smoking rifle in his direction. Somehow, Travis managed to grab the end of it, forcing it downward. He found himself wrestling with the man in a silent dance, their grunts and curses echoing noisily around the tiled walls, the dead policeman looking on, unconcerned with their life and death struggle. It became a battle of wills, as both men sought to raise the end of the rifle to point at the other. Holding the barrel of the rifle at arms length, they pulled and shoved, wheeling round and round in a giddy dance and then—

The killer’s face transformed into a bleeding skull. Empty sockets, purple and blue-green flames, death.

Travis lashed out at the grim spectre with all his strength. The man stumbled back into the window frame, tripping on the booted feet of the dead police officer, and losing his grip on the rifle. Travis watched as the grim death’s head vision vanished, to be replaced by the gaunt features of the assassin. He hung in mid-air for a protracted moment, fear in his eyes, then disappeared from view.

Travis rushed to the window ledge and watched the man fall. He dropped four storeys, never making a sound, and hit the concrete floor of the foyer with a sickening thud.

Travis had to look away, feeling suddenly weak, sick, exhausted. Below, people were rushing to the bloody, broken body. A woman was shrieking like a banshee. And amidst all this, a small voice in the back of his mind was trying to congratulate him.

He had succeeded. He had stopped the assassin.

But had he?

The killer had managed to get off that single shot . . .

In the car park below, Travis surveyed the chaos that the assassin’s bullet had caused. Students were running wildly in all directions, leaving lines of scattered policemen in their wake. The direction of movement was away from the small group of security guards surrounding Leroy Defoe. Travis felt a hollow sensation in the pit of his stomach. Defoe had to be dead.

He had failed again . . .

But then, Defoe’s hand thrust up from the cluster of black suits, offering a defiant peace salute to the world.

Travis’s heart soared. Leroy Defoe was alive!

He shut his eyes now, and tears came—bitter-sweet tears of relief, sorrow, and salvation. He collapsed against the window frame, utterly exhausted.

“I did it, Carl,” he whispered. “I did it.”

Then he heard the raised voices in the corridor, on the other side of the toilet door. The cops and the security people would no doubt be heading straight for the one room with the open window.

He turned then, and caught his reflection in the long panelled mirror which ran across the entire wall above the sinks. His face was gaunt, a pallid hue, but what shocked him most was the sight of the rifle clutched in his hands. He looked down at it numbly, then back at the mirror, in time to see his reflection change.

His features erupted in a tower of flame and all that was left was his ivory-white skull. The fires of the death’s head ringed his countenance.

Of course, he realised. You can’t really cheat Death. There has to be balance. He may have averted Defoe’s death, but Death itself would not leave empty-handed.

He had just enough time to let out a bitter laugh before the door was smashed inward and three armed police officers crowded into the doorway, waving guns and screaming wildly at him.

There has to be balance . . .

Before he could let the rifle drop to the floor, a shot rang out, deafening in that confined space, and it was the last thing he knew.

It took him ten minutes to choke the life out of the old crone. It would have been quicker if she hadn’t put up such a superhuman struggle; but then, he’d expected that of her. Witches don’t die without a fight.

When he placed his thumbs over her windpipe she immediately began to lash out, kicking at his shins until they were bruised black and bleeding, scratching at his neck and face with her long, scarlet fingernails, leaving a set of four deep gouges in each cheek, her legacy of hate tattooed indelibly on his skin. She’d have taken his eyes if he hadn’t bitten off both her thumbs in the fight.

Micawber, her cat, appeared at one point during the struggle, and for a moment Henry thought it would come to her aid. But it only hissed at him and vanished from sight.

In the end she was left with just her voice, but he knew from past experience that this was her most powerful weapon. She let out a stream of black curses, promising him vengeance from beyond the grave. But as her eyes rolled up into her head, and her face turned deathly white, he felt oddly calm. There was nothing she could threaten him with that would be worse than the lifetime of wretchedness she had already subjected him to. She had kept him under her malign spell for forty years and now it was going to be over. As she breathed her last, his eyes filled with tears - tears of physical and mental relief. Then she went still.

He checked her pulse.

The witch was dead.

In the silence of the dusty old kitchen he stared down at her body, legs splayed, her hands (bleeding profusely from the bloody stumps of her thumbs) stretched into claws, her face white and contorted into a silent grimace. But he couldn’t relax, couldn’t quite convince himself the nightmare was over.

It was her eyes. They were open, staring straight up at him, a demonic light still flickering. He crouched down and tried to close the lids, but they kept springing back open. She was still speaking to him through those hate-filled eyes. He still felt her hold over him. Hanging his head in resignation, he realised he would have to perform one last act to ensure she was truly dead.

The head would have to come off.

Wiping absently at the blood which coursed down his cheeks and onto his shirt, he went out to the shed to fetch a shovel.

***

Henry had spent the last two weeks building a false wall in the basement of the house, ready for this day. He’d left a portion in the middle unfinished, a vertical gap wide enough to slip her body inside. He wrapped her corpse in cellophane, and when he dropped it behind the wall, it made a rubbery squeaking sound as it hit the cement floor. He did the same with the head. But before he placed it behind the wall, he looked through the cellophane and studied the eyes. Yes, he told himself, the fire’s gone out now. She couldn’t harm him. The spell was broken, the curse lifted.

“Goodbye you witch,” he said, removing the wedding ring from his finger. He tore a small hole in the cellophane where her mouth was and pushed the gold band between her crooked yellow teeth. “Happy anniversary,” he whispered, and rolled the head through the gap in the wall.

Then he set about mixing the cement and, for the first time in years, he began to whistle a happy tune.

***

He snapped awake in the early hours, disturbed by the pressure on his chest. There was no light in the room, but it took him only a moment to realise that the black shape weighing down upon him was the cat.
Her
cat. Micawber, that filthy bag of shit!

Then the pain came, and he realised in a rush of terror exactly what the cat was doing to him. Jolts of pain in his neck, the sound of tearing meat, and the cat’s hot, fetid breath.