Breaking Point (15 page)

“Ted. We know who y’are. And who you’ve been working with.”

“P-p-p-protected!” His voice sounded mushy. Shattered. I knew it was him, but he sounded alien. Like a damaged recording.

“Not so much, Ted. There’s a change coming. A refocusing, you might say.”

“B-b-b-b...”

“Shhh. Shh there, Ted.”

There was silence for a while. Almost silence. I heard my Dad’s ragged breathing but nothing else. I thought about looking down, to see if I could see the gun, then immediately realised my stupidity. No way my head was moving, trapped by the helmet between the sofa and the wall.

“Now Ted. Bad news. We gonna have to kill you. Sorry...”

“N-n-no!”

The frame rocked again, and I heard a wail, abruptly cut off.

“Ted! That’s the bad news. There is good. Ready to hear the good? Ted?”

Pause.

“Good! Good, Ted. Here’s the good news. It doesn’t have to be painful. We’ve no desire for you to suffer anymore than you already have. We just need you out of the picture. Understood? But there’s no need for things to get messy, now.”

“What...”

“The puff, Ted. We know you just got it last night, payment for holding the crates. Tell us where it is, and this’ll all be over.”

“Oh fuck...”

“Ted...”

“Okay, okay...”

“It’s a simple question Ted. Don’t make me ask it again, or...”

His voice was so small as he said, “In the sofa.”

I barely heard the laughter of the men. My pulse was drumming like I’d just run a cross-country course flat out; I was sweating, panting. I heard more grunts, a thump followed by a yell, and the frame moved forward from the wall. The suddenness of the movement dropped me to my knees. The sound of the helmet scraping down the wall was huge from the inside, but it must have been covered by the grinding of the sofa against the floor.

I heard ripping sounds, then “Good. Thanks, Ted. Keith, you got the tools?”

There was a brief pause, then my Dad, shrieking in raw panic. The sound felt like it was rattling in my skull.

“No! No, you said quick; you said...”

His voice became muddied again, but that tone kept washing over me... desperate. Empty of hope.

“You’re a message, Ted. Need them to know we’re not fucking about. Like I said, nothin’ personal.”

“You got him?”

A second voice, speaking for the first time. Deep. Flat. My father continued to grunt and yell, incoherent.

I forced my eyes to open. In the almost blackness, I made out the darker shape of the gun on the floor in front of me.

I took a single second to curse myself inside. For forgetting. For letting him suffer this long.

My hand closed on the gun handle. It felt cold.

The timing was split-second perfect. The instant before my knees engaged to push me up, something slammed into the sofa, pinning my head back against the wall. I heard scrambled movement, yelling; my Dad’s voice suddenly clear again

“HELP! HELP ME! HELP...”

A collision. The sound of something huge and wooden hitting the floor.

Two steps, three, staggered.

Then a thick crunch. Something heavy dropping to the ground.

Pause.

“Fuck! Didn’t know the little bastard had it in him! You okay?”

“Fine.” That same flat voice. Bored even.

“Did you kill him?”

“Dunno.”

“Well, fuck it; may as well finish it anyway.”

The sound of movement. Something being dragged. I flexed my shoulder, leaning into the sofa, seeing if there was any give. Nothing. It may as well have been nailed in place.

I was trapped.

I heard more movement. Then, “Hold him.”

“He’s out!”

“Hold him.” That dead tone again. No inflection. God, please stop this.

I heard a loud bang. Metal on metal. My father screamed, a raw, wet sound. No words.

“Hold him.”

“I’ve got him, I’ve got him! Fucking get on with it!” God, please…

More scuffling, then another bang, another howl. This one pushed Dad's voice higher, then it cut out. My heart beat -- once, twice, three times -- then he yelled again. It was loud, and went on for a long time. Long enough that I guessed he only stopped when he’d run out of breath.

After that, more crying. I felt like I was falling. I saw the blood on the glass. The picture from the wall. Jesus. Looking down at me.  I cried out with my mind, and my father cried out with his voice. It happened at the same time. Like he was speaking my thoughts. Like he could hear me.

“In the name of God, stop this!”

There was a pause. I could hear my father’s wet, ragged breath. I flexed again, uselessly. My entire body was beginning to shudder with reaction.

“You’ll be with Him soon enough.”

A meaty thud then, as Dad called out once more, a shriek. Then there was just a wet, ripping sound. It carried on for a while. There were grunts. A couple of splats.

Then silence.

“We good?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Let’s go get the lorry.”

“All right.”

I heard movement, a scraping, wood on wood. A grunt. Suddenly the pressure of the frame was released.

“The fuck you doing?”

“It’s untidy. Plus it’s in the light. Didn’t want anyone seein’.”

Pause. I hear a loud sigh. Then a dry bark of a laugh.

“Okay. Come on. Need to get this shit packed away before sunup. Let’s roll.”

I lay there panting as their footsteps left the room, willing life to my muscles, but there was nothing there - I felt drained of energy, spent. My legs wouldn’t support me. I had no balance, felt woozy.

I didn’t jump up. Didn’t shoot them. Didn’t move at all. Just waited till I heard the door close. Till I heard footsteps dying away. Eventually, as if from a great distance, I heard a car engine start up.

I was still on my knees. The gun in my hand was a lump of heavy, useless metal. My breath fogged up the visor of the helmet. I tried not to tremble. I closed my eyes.

I prayed.

God, if you can hear me. Lord, hear my prayer. God, I need you to spare him. I need him to be alive. You can do it, God. You can do anything. I haven’t looked, so if he’s... if it’s bad, you can take it back, God. You can make him well. You can make him alive. 

I felt the cold from the gun spread, up my arm and across my chest. Into me. I shuddered again, eyes still closed, teeth gritted.

You need to do that, God. You need to make him be alive. Because if yo
u don’t, Lord, if I stand up and he’s... Lord, if he’s dead, if you’ve taken him...

I am going to fucking get you. I am going to make you pay.

Look inside me, God. Tell me I’m lying.

I knelt there in the dark with tears running down my cheeks; running hot and cold, with rage and fear. Waiting for something. Waiting for a sign.

My father coughed.

My heart surged in my chest. Relief. Tears.

Salvation.

Thank you, God.

I finally managed to stand on wobbly legs, propped against the wall, and faced the corner of the room. I took off the helmet, had one last deep breath, and then turned around.

The moonlight from the window lit his body. His face was black with bruising, eyes shut from the swelling. Blood was caked around his lips, dark in the pale light. His mouth was open, tongue lying limp and flat. His arms were spread. My mind flashed back to the statue on the wall at home. I looked to his hands.

Nailed to the floor. Straight through the palms.

I sensed a darkness across his chest in my peripheral vision. I didn’t want to look. My eyes moved anyway.

They had split my father’s belly wide open. His innards had been pulled out and strewn about his abdomen and legs. They hung off him like obscene Christmas decorations. Black pools of blood sat on the wooden floor. My gaze moved back up to his chest. It didn’t move.

He was gone. My mind knew it straight away, felt the fact slide into place, lock down. My father was dead. Murdered.

God had not taken it back. He had not saved him. Had not let me save him. This too slid into place, a solid fact, indisputable. I had felt… something. But these were the facts. And I had made a promise. But was there even anyone to make that promise to?

I turned away from my father's ruined body.

The crates had been moved. The top one had been replaced at an angle and I could see a large hole in the side where two of the planks had shattered. It must have fallen when my dad tried to run, when they...

This must have been what jammed me back in place when I could have saved him.

The crate had killed him. Simple physics. But who controls physics? Who made the rules that let it fall? Who let it trap me? Anyone? No-one?

I walked over to the crate and put my hands inside. I felt fabric. I gripped two fistfuls and pulled. It snagged, heavy and bulky, but eventually it came.

I held it up in the moonlight.

Well, well. My eyes began to fill with tears again, as I thought about what this had cost me. What it might mean. Too high. Too high a price by half. But at least the road ahead was clear. I checked my pocket, felt the screwed up paper there.

Yes. Okay. If that’s your will, Lord.

And if not, if you’re not there at all, at least I’ll know for sure.

I didn’t look back at my father’s body as I walked out of the hut.

***

As I write this, it’s the evening of Saturday 22
nd
July, the year of our Lord 1995. I paid cash for the hotel room. Made a quick trip home first – not really advisable, but unavoidable. Under Dad’s bed, I found something else that might be useful.

I’ve made a phone call, made the necessary arrangements with my friend. By the time you read this... no, you may not know. Best not to say.

On the hotel room floor are three items. One is the vest I removed from my dead father’s crate in the beach hut. Wires lead from grey bricks into a black plastic grip with a red button. An afternoon’s research at the library told me what I need to know about how it works, and gave me a good idea of how powerful it is.

In the middle is my father’s gun.

Next to that is the flyer I was given by the woman in the street, a lifetime ago. I’ve opened it up, flattened it down as best I can. The service is tomorrow, in a community centre. 9:30am start. Teenagers and adults only. Not that I care, of course. Still, another interesting coincidence. Or not.

I look from one to the other. Thinking about coincidence. About God. About faith, and tests.

About my father, nailed down and gutted.

I fucking warned you, God. I told you. I promised.

I look back at the bomb vest.

I promised.

I’m coming for you, God. I’m coming, and I think you’re going to have to show up for this one.

If you’re there, you’ll have to come.

If.

I look back at the flyer, at the name of the service. I feel my face twist. After a second, I realise I’m smiling.

“Have you Fallen? Are you Down? Do you feel Trapped, surrounded by the Walls of Sin?

Friend, you need a

GODBOMB!”

AFTERWORD

As I always say, if you're going to steal, steal from the best. I'm enough of a Stephen King fan that one of the things I most enjoy about his short story or novella collections is that he'll often put a shortish section at the end of the book, talking about each story, and how it came to be. If, upon reading this, you immediately find yourself thinking something along the lines of 'You, sir, are no Stephen King!' you're dead right, and if you have no desire to get a peek behind the writing curtain, that's just fine as paint. Go with my sincere blessing and thanks for getting this far, and if you're so minded, please leave an Amazon review, good, bad or indifferent. Reviews are the life blood of humble indie authors like me, and every single one helps. Even the bad ones. And again, sincerely, thanks for reading.

Similarly, if you're one of those people (like, occasionally, me) who sometimes skips ahead to the end of the book, well, this is your last chance to turn back before I spoil at least some of the plot twists in the proceeding stories.

Throat clearing out of the way, let's talk about the Breaking Point quartet. Starting with...

Lifeline

In the late summer of 2013, I finally finished a distance learning course, in order to gain a qualification that I thought would help me with my day job. I learned a lot on the course, but the single most life-changing thing it taught me was this: if I put my mind to it, I had an extra eight to ten hours a week when I could be doing something actually productive, over and above the hours I spent at the day job keeping a roof over my head. This felt like powerful information.

Coupled with that awareness, I had also, by sheer coincidence, finally picked up Stephen King's 'On Writing', a birthday gift, and proceeded to read it over the space of about three days.

Life often feels like a badly written novel – full to the brim with clumsy coincidences and ludicrous happenstance, as well as heavy handed symbolism. If it had been a movie, there would have been light pouring out of the book as I read, a choir of angels singing, perhaps. It's not inconceivable that James Brown in a preacher outfit might have been pointing at me and yelling “DO YOU SEE THE LIGHT?!?”

You get the idea. I found writing. Or writing found me.

The question became, what to write about?

Eventually, it came out of a series of self-imposed writer challenges. The first was that I needed to try and write something longer than 2000 words – or to put it another way, I needed to write something that would take more than a single evening, because I never had before. I felt strongly that I needed to learn the discipline of coming back to the coal face every night, hacking away at the story whether or not I felt like it. I'd written very occasional short stories in the past, but all of them were strictly one sitting deals, and this had to be different.

The subject matter, sad to say, also came about not in a flash of inspiration, but again as a challenge: could I write extreme horror? Torture porn? Could I stomach it? Could I stick it? Could I keep it interesting, sustain both the horror and the tension, without it becoming boring, an exercise in gross out for gross out sake?

And out of these questions came the killer question, the one that became the key that turned the lock, which was this; does it still count as torture porn if told from the victim’s point of view?

That last point was especially important to me, and became even more so as the writing went on. Not to go overboard on the soapboxing here, but much as I am a fans of Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs (and I am huge fan of both) one of the frankly troubling effects they've had on the culture at large is the notion of the psychopath as some super-intelligent post-morality Nitzhien superman, not least because that image is, not to put too fine a point on it, bollocks. The vast majority of psychopaths are of average intelligence at best, and whilst possessed often of a certain well cultivated surface charm, generally have all the depth and complexity of a hungry toddler. Also, not to belabor the obvious, but they are bad people who do bad things, and I'm deeply weary of the continued cultural celebration, if not worship, of these dumb, vicious assholes. It's become a cliché to observe that, in school shooting after school shooting, we know the names of the perpetrators, but rarely the victims. I wanted to speak for those victims, at least a bit, by putting them, not the psycho, at the center of the action – a process I would repeat for my novel, GodBomb! Some readers of both tales – only a few, actually, but some – mentioned some dissatisfaction with that – a desire to understand 'the other side' better, to try and get into what makes the bad people tick. And to be clear, I'm not wagging my finger at that impulse or taking the moral high ground – Like I said, I love Red Dragon as much as the next man, probably more (and also, I wrote The Loving Husband and Genesis) but... Well, two things. One, there's plenty of stories out there that do that (some even written by me, if that's your bag), and two, that's just not the story I wanted to tell this time. If that disappoints, that's on me, not you, but at least now you know why.

I guess I should also own up at this point to something that'll probably get me drummed out of the horror writers club: I'm really squeamish when it comes to body horror. I love Cronenberg movies, I think he's an incredibly gifted film maker, but the films themselves frequently make me want to throw up. Similarly, I'm so freaked out by the notion of 'torture porn' movies and the whole grindhouse/exploitation scene in general that I've studiously avoided most of them, and the couple I have put myself through suggest that was the right course of action for me to take. So to say with this story I was operating outside of my comfort zone is something of an understatement.

What I was actually doing, creatively speaking, was jumping off a cliff. With no idea how to get down, and no map.

And look, smart money says, don't so this. Smart money says if you want to write in a genre, read in the genre, get to know it, figure out what's out there, then try and figure out what you can bring to the table that's different. Find your niche, in marketing terms. Don't do the research, you risk reinventing the wheel in all kinds of ways, and looking like a hack into the bargain.

But here's the great thing: if you're writing purely for pleasure, just to see if you can, none of that matters. Market doesn't matter. Niche doesn't matter. Whether or not it's derivative or hack or hell, even just plain bad, doesn't matter.

All that matter is telling the best version of the story that you can.

And that was me. So I did.

I made some other decisions: the guy on the bike would be me with the numbers filed off (because I was trying to do enough new things that also having to think 'in character' felt like it might slow things down, whereas I figured I could at least gauge honestly what I thought my own reactions might be). The villain would be loosely modeled on the only human being I've ever met that I feel confident describing as genuinely sociopathic. Most of the story – perhaps all of it – would take place in a single room, with a bricked up window. And, as previously noted, the story would be POV the victim.

That was it. That was all I had.

So I started writing.

It took about four weeks, from first word to last. I got stuck exactly once, at the point at which Frank feels his phone vibrate in his pocket and wakes up, and his attacker confronts him. I couldn't figure out how Frank could get past that without giving himself away, and I put the story down for a couple of days to puzzle it out. That was the only sticking point, and I left a ghost of it in the story, letting Frank's mental wheels spin for just a moment, which I think works okay. Other than that, it was plain sailing, and the only edits that have been made are technical, not story based.

(Actually, that's not true. There was one other story edit, one that really pained me to cut – in the original draft, I had Frank with his eyes shut crying, and the landing of the tears on his bare palms were what alerted him to the information that his arms were untied. It was a really cool moment, with only one tiny problem – his hands weren't bare, but gloved. I squirmed for about a minute, but it had to go.)

I got lucky in a few ways, I freely admit. The most obvious way is that Frank survives. At the time I wrote the story, I wasn't aware of the general feeling about first person narratives that killing the narrator at the end was bad form, if not a story destroyer. Part of me still feels like that's a taste issue – honestly, it's not like you didn't know it was a work of fiction when you picked it up, and what's the point of fiction if it can't take us from time to time into impossible spaces? - but I understand now that for many, perhaps most readers, it feels like cheating, extant some exceptional, in-narrative reason for it. Still, when I sat down to write, I was blissfully unaware of this almost-rule, and as I commenced the story, I honestly didn't think there was much chance that Frank would survive the night.

Luckily for me, Frank had other ideas.

I can't recall now exactly when it was in the writing that Frank first asserted himself to me, but I remember being surprised by it, and a little spooked. He'd thought something I hadn't expected, displayed a spark, a will to survive, that I found both exciting and... disconcerting. I decided to honor it, to let Frank show me what he had, and if that sounds like so much hippy bullshit to you, I can only shrug and agree. Nonetheless, that's how it happened.

See, it turned out Frank didn't give a fuck about a writing exercise, or the finer points of if torture porn still counted as torture porn if told from the victim’s point of view. Turned out all that Frank gave a shit about was getting home to his wife. So I let him try, and when he made it out, by the skin of his cheek, I was, frankly, delighted. I felt like he'd more than earned it, and besides, by then, I kinda liked the guy.

Which is more than I can say about my next narrator...

The Loving Husband and the Faithful Wife

This was the second piece I wrote, and came out of another challenge – could I write a first person narrative in such a way as to convey information that the narrator themselves was unaware of, such that it became clear to the audience that something the narrator believed implicitly to be true was actually false?

I suspect this idea was rooted in reading Boswell's 'Life Of Johnson' several years ago. It has been said that there are only two books after the reading of which you feel as though you actually know the person about whom the book is written personally. One is the New Testament, and the other is 'Life of Johnson'. Personally, I'm not sure about the New Testament, but I can agree with the assessment of Boswell's tome – by the end of that brick of a book, you do indeed know Johnson as well as Boswell himself did.

In fact, you know him better.

There's at least one sequence I can recall when Johnson, is, simply put, winding Boswell up, taking the piss out of him, and Boswell completely fails to recognize it. In the book, Boswell laments his friend’s apparent obstanence on some point or other, and as the reader you're almost laughing out loud, because by this stage, you've got the measure of Johnson's character well enough to realize that he's just pulling his mate's leg. I mean to say, by that point, the book has so faithfully portrayed Johnson that you know him better than the books author.

To say this baked my noodle was something of an understatement, and I wondered if it could somehow be done in a story. I set off to find out.

And oh hell, look, you've read it, so you know - I didn't quite manage to pull it off. Ambiguity, sure – did the wife really have an encounter with 'bad boy'? - but that really counts as a failure, as far as the exercise is concerned. After all, if I'd done it right, you the reader would KNOW it hadn't happened, even as our Husband was convinced it did.

Nonetheless, I'm happy with how the story played out, and especially with how people have responded to that ambiguity. Because I've had it all, from 'he's an essentially decent bloke who'll never do it again' to 'you just know he's going to do it over and over again', from 'nobody needs someone that far up their ass, what a creepy relationship' to 'that relationship was so beautiful'.

And I just love that. I may not have nailed the effect I was going for, but in the attempt, I found something else, something that I'm still playing with today in my writing; the notion not merely of the unreliable narrator, but the notion that all narrators are, by definition, unreliable. As, come to that, are readers.