The Unlucky Man (3 page)

Then the moment passed and I was back in my flat, where, of course, I’d always been, staring at the sun-faded brown leather of the couch, and the only noise was the beat of my heart and the steady rhythm of the rain against the windows.

But I knew that - whether I wanted it or not - trouble had already found me.

Taking a deep breath I punched the numbers into the phone and waited.

Someone picked up after fourteen rings. I have no idea how many I would have left go unanswered before I gave up.

"What?" A voice suddenly barked down the line, then, "Who is this?" It was a male voice, fast, angry with a think burr. He sounded all at once jumpy and pissed off.

"Whimsy?" I said, my mind still reeling from the drink and whatever - if anything - had happened a few moments ago.

"No, fucknuts, that’s my name," Whimsy shot back. "Try again. Who are you?"

"My name’s Hesker," I said, "Jon Hesker."

"Never heard of you," it sounded like herd-a-you in his thick accent. "I’m going to hang up now."

"No wait, listen," I said, "Look, you’re right, you don’t know me and I don’t know you, but some really odd shit happened to me today and your name sort of fell out of it."

The only response from the other end was a slow, considered intake of breath, and then, grudgingly, reluctantly, he said, "Mine is not a name I want falling anywhere. Speak."

"Right," I said, "Well, I guess I might have some bad news for you," and I told him everything that had happened that day, about the backed-up traffic and about the guy who fell from heaven and ended his days leaking fluid over the front of Corg’s car. I told him about the shadowy figure glimpsed on the fire escape, about his strange eyes and the thrill of fear he sent down my back as I felt his gaze falling on me. Eventually, I told him about the scrap of paper with his hastily scribbled number. Whimsy listened in silence, but I heard him suck in another breath when I told him about the poor guy’s final moments of trauma on this earth.

When I was done, I asked simply, "You knew him?"

"Yeah," came the distant reply from the receiver after a pause in which I’m certain decisions were being made.

"Yeah, I knew him. His name was Charlie Dwight, we were in business together, back when I was still an investigator, for a while… and he gave you old Carver Whimsy’s name, eh?"

"Um," I said, momentarily blindsided by the full unveiling of that unusual name, "I guess so." I in turn hesitated for a moment. Did I really want to tell him the rest? I hadn’t even told the detective. But then, maybe, he could shed some light on things, I reasoned. For all I knew, I told myself, it was nothing anyway. Nothing enough to murder someone over.

"He also gave me something else."

"Something else?" He sounded tense again, like he’d been expecting something more.

"What?"

"A Pill," I said.

"A Pill?"

"Yeah," I said, then, "No, more, you know, like a capsule, with-," I struggled to find the right word to express the thing I was looking at, to communicate the empty feeling it left in the pit of my stomach. But Whimsy cut me off before I ever found it.

"Fuck," he breathed, more to himself than to me. "He got it."

"Got it?" I echoed blankly, "But what is it?" Putting voice to the question I really wanted answered.

"It doesn’t matter," Whimsy said. "Not right now anyway. We’ve talked too much on this line already. Listen," and now he sounded truly edgy, his voice low and urgent, "We need to meet. I need to see that pill, make sure. You’re in the city right?"

"What?" I said, surprised by the sudden development. "Yeah, but -" he cut me off again - talking to Whimsy was proving to be a challenge, like trying to catch a rabbit as it veers and bounces ahead of you.

"Tomorrow," he said. "Ten o’clock, Central Station. I’ll find you."

"OK," I said feeling that we were drawing to a close but that I was no closer to any sort of understanding.

"But wait, isn’t there anything else you can tell me?" I was looking back again at the shadows crowding out my apartment, trying to dispel what I’d felt earlier and the hollow feeling it had left in the air, listening to the rain fall like nails on the glass…

"Yeah," he said. Hope burned and died as I recognised the smirk in his voice. "Don’t eat the pill."

He hung up.

No worries there.

Outside Hesker’s apartment, in the cold, dark shadows across the street beneath a tangle of spouting gutters, colourless eyes watched the light flick off, their owner waiting impassive as a statue as the water cascaded and fell.

***

The morning dawned cold and grey, heavy with the promise of more rain. I had slept badly once more, plagued by strange and troubling dreams, snatches and chunks of which returned to me as I nursed a coffee with creamer and watched from my window as the ashen world below began to come alive.

I had been running across a broken, twisted landscape beneath a moon that was bright and massive above me, a bulbous monstrosity that swallowed most of the sky yet gave little light for all its incredible size. The ground beneath my bare feet was hard and smooth like volcanic rock, and shone black in the weak light of the celestial body.

And something was chasing me. I think it may have been a wolf, though bigger than any natural wolf that I’ve ever heard of in waking life.

That was my feeling, but I couldn’t say for sure, I never saw it. I did hear it though, and I remembered the visceral sound of long claws scraping against the stone as I sipped my coffee and felt the breeze whispering through the open window and across my face, reviving me slightly, but reminding me also of the feeling of breath on the back of my neck as the stalking creature closed in on me.

At last I would be able to bear it no more and would be forced to turn around but it would be gone, lurking in the shadows at the edge of my dream until I turned my back once more. Then I’d hear it creeping back out of the dark on velvet feet to give chase once more.

As I continued to run, the moon had slowly changed, altering its appearance as the landscape around me grew darker and more dangerous, jagged shards of rock cutting at my feet until I was leaving smears of deep ruby blood glistening on the outcrops as I passed. It would make me easier to track I remember thinking with the scattered logic of the dreamer.

By the time I stopped, the moon above was a dark crimson scar against the bruised sky and had started to melt in on itself, bleeding tendrils of pinky-red corruption into the lightening sky. It made me think of the way ink runs into water only slower and, somehow, much more disturbing. It was as if the whole sky was being infected by the poisonous juices hemorrhaging from the blistered moon.

Now at last I stopped, on the edge of a narrow valley at the centre of which a skeletal, broken tree burst from the ground, standing white and bonelike, an obscene and unnatural centerpiece to the blasted nightmare landscape. Something about its bare fingerlike branches raking at the sky stopped me where I stood, shaking and sweating with trepidation.

From behind rose a long, low growl as my pursuer entered into this broken arena, its long shadow falling over me, cold and deadly as icy water.

With no choice but to continue, I steeled myself for the descent into the lee of those crooked branches when I realized there was a figure in the shadows surrounding the trunk. He was tall and thin, his face lost in the gloom, waiting in silent, patient solitude, steady and unmoving as stone.

With agonising slowness, the sun was rising, spreading a drab luminescence across the blasted clearing, slowly revealing the waiting figure. As the light continued to move I saw long limbs; elongated ivory arms ending in spiderlike, pale hands, one wrapped over the top of the other, ragged nails thick with dirt and mud.

The light moved on and was almost at his face. I screwed up my eyes, suddenly certain that I didn’t want to see whatever was to be revealed. I felt the hot breath on the back of my neck, closer and fouler than ever. There was nowhere to go. I opened my eyes.

I woke up.

The dream had filled me with a deep and uneasy sense of foreboding for the day ahead, but I tried to put it to the back of my mind. I took another sip of coffee but it tasted burnt like ash in my mouth and I poured it away. Two crows sat watching me from a telephone wire across the street, their strange, serious eyes contemplating my movements as I forced myself to eat an apple and nibble at a stale cookie. I was still feeling queasy when one of them gave a loud, harsh caw and took to the air, making me jump.

My God, I thought, I need to get a grip. The second crow gave me a long look of agreement before following its companion, black feathers ruffling against the cold sky. It was time to go, I thought. Best not be late for my date. I grabbed my phone and keys and left the flat, making a mental note to call the boss on the way and let him know I’d be late.

The line clicked off into a dead white buzz. I flipped the cell shut, deciding I would tell Danvers where I’d been all morning when I got back. It was unusual not to be able to get through to the parlour, still he could chew me out later, or not, depending on his mood. It was just entering the dying light of rush hour and the station was easing to a steady trickle of people; aimless day trippers mostly and tourists with just a smattering of hassled looking suits who were either late for work or important enough to carve their own hours.

Overhead, the great glass dome of the roof was a uniform soulless grey, rippled with rain drops. According to the monstrous gold-plated clock over the escalator, I was about fifteen minutes too early, so I bought a copy of
The Standard
and another coffee and settled at a plastic table, sprayed to look like metal, in front of a pretzel stand done up as some kind of wooden shack with a straw roof. It was like something you might hope to see on the white sands of some beautiful tropical beach between the cobalt blue of the ocean and the mirrored sky.

Flicking through the paper proved disheartening at best. There was a report of more buildings on fire across the bridge and somebody had dug up a pit full of bodies behind some old hotel. I sighed and laid it aside. Cigarette smoke wafted from somewhere, peppering up my nose. I coughed and brushed it away. I was dressed for work and they didn’t like it if you turned up smelling funky. Smoke was especially bad for a cremation. Made sense, I guess.

I glanced at the clock again. Still ten minutes. I sipped my coffee - it was good this time, grit black and bitter, swamp thick. Smelled just like burnt rubber. On the far side of the concourse an overweight commuter in a floral shirt shouted at a ticket clerk, waving his arms in over-wrought dramatic flourishes at the bemused attendant.

A woman in a severe cut charcoal skirt suit was sipping a coffee at the table across from me, dark hair pulled back in a no nonsense ponytail. One perfectly manicured fingernail tapped a machine gun rhythm on the screen of her mart phone. I spent a few minutes half trying to catch her eye but she was having none of it. Killed some time anyway.

Muffled music floated on the lifeless air, all hi-hat and deep bass escaping from a set of gleaming heavy gold ear-cans tangled in some kid’s curly black hair as he swaggered on by with practiced nonchalance.

People watching killed another five minutes as I waited for Whimsy to show his face. A face, I thought, that I didn’t know. Still, I was where he’d told me to be and that was as much as I could do for now. The pill in my pocket was a dead weight, heavy with questions.

Time ticked by slowly in acid green digits. Idly I brushed lint off a black sleeve, straightened a pant leg, adjusted my tie. Seconds passed like pouring syrup, not so much ticking as oozing immeasurably.

Something on the rolling news screen caught my eye…

I heard the noise as I reached again, unconsciously, for the styrophome coffee cup. A pop and a rush like thunder that shattered the ambient bustle, like a train approaching the platform. I heard it, felt it, didn’t understand. And then my chest exploded outwards.

Swamped, mugged by the pain I jerked backwards in the aluminium chair, toppling it backwards, my legs sending the light table arcing through the air, coffee and ashtray spiralling off over the ground.

I toppled backwards in slow motion, screaming the pain I could barely register and flopped onto the floor. What started as a tumble was, by the time it finished up, too wet and messy to live up to the name.

I hit the floor, blood spray painting my landing. I am street art, I thought in one ludicrously detached moment before everything closed back in. Then I lay still, panting and pumping out blood, fingers sliding around in it as I struggled for purchase, tried to cling to a life I knew was in its terminal moments.

Carver Whimsy stepped onto the platform, just another morning traveller in a like-minded sea. Bedecked in a faded Hawaiian shirt and cargo pants under an overlong black leather jacket, he cut an unlikely figure. Whimsy looked so much like a play-actor investigator - was so incongruous in any setting - that he became at times almost invisible. Like a strange aroma, he lingered in the background until he was a part of it. In his profession such a skill could be invaluable. It had certainly saved his life.