The Unlucky Man (10 page)

So this was the Make It Happen Man. He was not at all what I had expected.

He was a tall, gaunt figure, old but in no way diminished by age. Thick white curls rolled back from his brow, flowing above a face of weathered and thickly lined leather skin. His was not a kindly old face, however, but rather the unyielding countenance of a feared and respected teacher. Old ink showed on his skeletal fingers and across the backs of his hands, faded sigils and angled characters in a spreading blue green that may once have been black.

But it was his eyes that surprised me the most: one dark as oil, the other rheumy and white and surely blind, peeking like a marble from beneath a scarred and puckered lid. He smiled very slightly at Corg, a glint of sharp gold teeth catching the light cast by the oil lamp on the mammoth desk.

His voice, when he spoke, was deep and resonant, at odds with his advancing years. "Alexander," he said, "It has been some time." He raised a hand in a vague gesture taking in the room around us.

"Please excuse the mess, but we find ourselves living in interesting times." He grinned a big, predatory golden grin, picking up a heavy based tumbler and swirling the liquid within. "And to what do we owe this unexpected pleasure?" He inflected the final word with enough venom to make it plain that we were far from welcome in his rotten castle. Behind him I caught Baldman’s smirk.

Corg spread his hands in an imploring gesture.

"We’re in trouble Mr. Happen," he said earnestly, "We could use a place to lay our hats for a while, whilst the storm dies down." His words sounded small, muffled and swallowed by the thickly scented hostile air.

"So it is charity you would ask from me Alexander?" He murmured. "Until, as you say, the storm dies down." Happen’s measured facade twitched with an emotion I couldn’t read.

"But it isn’t going to die down," he said, a strange glint in his one good eye, a smile that wasn’t really a smile at all playing at his lips. "The storm is here to stay." He sipped from his glass, a small amount of liquid escaping to roll down his lined and whiskered chin. "We are at war Alexander," he said, "Lines have been drawn in the sand. We have larger considerations now." He leaned forwards in his seat, leather creaking under his shifting weight.

"You know," he said with the air of one sharing a secret, "I wasn’t even going to let you come here. It’s only for Loess’ sake that you’re here at all. She fought your corner valiantly you know, said that we owed it to you for the risks you have taken in the past. She says we owe it to you to trust you, but trust is a commodity with which I recently find myself in short supply." His mismatched eyes flashed dangerously in the reflected gas-light.

"But it is strange, I feel, that you choose this day to come knocking unannounced at my door." He cut his glance towards me and the temperature in the room seemed to plummet. "Unannounced and with a stranger in tow." His eyes met mine – and widened. He faltered.

Suddenly all the colour drained from his face. His lips were pressed back against his teeth so hard they were paper white. He convulsed in one sharp spasmodic movement, letting out a strangled cry. Without warning, the tumbler in his hand shattered, one minute it was whole and the next a million tiny crystals exploded into the air, spilling golden liquid onto parched boards that swallowed it greedily.

From out of the shadows Baldman re-emerged, hand on the gun concealed under his dark jacket, but the stricken old man at the desk waved him back. His eyes still bore into mine, both of them, thought I had the disquieting notion that the cold marble orb was the one he was really seeing me with. Cherry red droplets dripped unnoticed from his fingertips.

"It’s you," he rasped and the look in his eye said he recognized my face though I knew we’d never met before. "You," he croaked, "The Unlucky Man." His words tumbled out atonally, like those spoken in a dream and I heard them both from his pale lips and echoed in my head, drumming at my temples with every syllable.

"I knew you would come. I’ve seen it." His skin looked suddenly thin and pale as paper. "Chaos follows you; death is in your footfalls, Unlucky Man." He spat the words at me and, as I heard them, something shifted once more in my head and I felt the dark particle coil and flex itself, almost like an animal that recognizes its name being spoken. Happen, too, it occurred to me was touched by the same darkness.

"You should not have come here." Mr. Happen still spoke like someone asleep but his gaze didn’t flicker from my face. "You bring chaos everywhere your crow shadow touches. It will be drawn to you." There was pain etched in his features, a thin line of blood ran from his felt nostril. If this was a parlor trick, I thought, then it was a damn good one.

"We’ve done terrible things," Mr Happen whispered, "And you are our reckoning. I knew you would come, I wanted to be ready." He shut his eyes, his face creasing with an emotion I couldn’t even begin to read.

"It will be drawn to you," he repeated in a whisper.

An enormous booming crash rocked the building. It felt like some massive object had collided with the outer walls. Everything shook, plaster drifted in torrents from the ceiling, the light flickered as the floor bucked and swayed.

"What the hell was that?" Baldman grunted as the door opened and Loess stepped into the room, white and anxious.

"Time to go," she said urgently, a worried look on her face. The sudden cacophony seemed to have roused the Make it Happen Man from his trance as, with an effort, he pulled himself up onto his feet.

"We cannot help you," he repeated in a whisper. "We will show you the way out and then you will go. Take your troubles with you." Without another word or a backwards glance he limped from the room, wiping the blood from his face with the back of his hand. We followed, subsumed by his entourage, into a long austere green corridor much like the ones we had entered through, at the end of which was another door leading, I guessed, to a staircase back to ground level.

We were about halfway along the floor when the far door opened, a cluster of figures emerging from the gloom beyond. They looked at first glance for the most part like our escorts - grim, dishevelled, grimy - but there was a uniformity to their unkempt appearance that was lacking in Mr. Happen’s ragtag ensemble.

For a long, tense moment they looked at us and we looked straight back, suspended in a moment of perfect stillness. But it couldn’t last.

The first bullet took Baldman through the lens of his wraparounds. I heard the glass pop as his head cannoned backwards then his legs splayed and he went over like an unruly mannequin. Somehow, as he fell, I got a hand under his jacket, popped the clip on the holster, and brought out his pistol, firing off round after round into the shadowy gaggle of figures at the end of the hallway as more shots followed.

To my left, Loess had her weapon out and was firing too, whilst everyone else seemed frozen in icy shock. The noise was incredible in the confined space, every shot a boom of thunder, every burst as bright as lightning. Penned in the narrow confines of the doorway they never stood a chance.

The echoing silence after the last shot had fired was deafening as the door at the end of the hall quietly slid closed, cutting off the bilious tableaux beyond. Two of our group were fast cooling on the wormy carpet: Baldman and another whose name I’d never learned and never would.

Loess was the first to speak. "Come on," she said. "We need to find another way down." We reversed our footsteps, heading back the way we had come and taking a right into a room that must have cornered the building. A great, dirty window looked out over the desolate wasteland below.

"Who the fuck were those guys?" Corg demanded.

"No coincidences," Happen growled. "Chaos draws chaos like a black-hole swallowing light."

"Which way now?" Voices were raised in a clamor of differing opinions but I was no longer listening. Through the glass I could see that it had finally stopped raining, but the sky was so dark and thick with churning cloud that it could have been night once more. It was not so dark, however, that I could not see the figures moving about below. These weren’t Mr. Happen’s men, of that I was certain.

A glint of light caught from something shining for a brief moment out of the murk, a long, cylindrical object being hefted to a shoulder, its bearer kneeling awkwardly in the sticking sludge. I rubbed at the grime on the window, spreading it like green algae under my palm, squinting down, trying to make out what was going on. Suddenly it swam into focus and was only too clear.

"Shit!" I shouted, pushing away from the window. "Get out of here! Down!" But it was too late. I caught the plume of smoke through the glass, heard, or imagined I heard, the keening whistling whine of the rocket, and then everything exploded in a crunching ripple of shattered glass and crumbling masonry. Someone was screaming, maybe several someone’s, as the world went red.

And then I was falling as the ground rushed up to meet me – gray and massive - with crushing speed as, in a moment of pain and exclamation, everything melted mercifully to black.

I awoke, face down in sucking, swallowing mud. For a moment I scrabbled ineffectually in the grey, suffocating slime like some kind of Western Front nightmare before at last I found some purchase to claw myself free.

I pushed myself up to rest on hands and knees. My head was throbbing, ears full of a tinnitus ring. My whole body ached and I was covered in ash and soot and caking filth. But I was alive once again and otherwise, after a moment taking stock, seemingly undamaged. I thanked my lucky stars, wondering how much longer what luck I seemed to have could possibly hold.

A moan away to my left brought Corg into focus. Stumbling to my feet, I half fell and half limped over to where he lay. A large gash was leaking blood that, against his deathly pale face, looked shockingly red. Still, I judged him to be in one piece and more or less whole and unharmed as well.

"You OK?" I asked stupidly, helping him to his feet, his hand feeling cold as a corpse’s in my own. He grunted as a scream cut through the cold air, suddenly strangled out into nothing. It was an awful noise, more animal than human, and the silence that followed rang heavy with finality.

I squinted through the floating smoke, trying to get my bearings, trying to work out what I had heard and from what direction it had come from.

"This way." We stumbled our way across the uneven ground, splashing through deep puddles of sinking water and fighting against mud that wanted to swallow our feet whole. The going was tough, pulling ourselves through a mix of debris and torn up, broken rock. Gradually, out of the smoke and haze, was unveiled a sight from someone’s macabre imagination.

Erected like some kind of gothic monument, a broken, standing frame and some wire rope had been re-purposed into a makeshift gallows from which the Make it Happen Man gently swung.

The mist and smoke swirled and eddied around his suspended feet as the shapes of more figures were gradually revealed. There were three of them, distorted silhouettes rendered nightmare like and inhuman in the drifting mist, busy in their work. Supported between two of them was the pale and seemingly only semi-conscious figure of Loess. The third figure, bald and heavily muscled with a spike of black beard oiled and gleaming like a sharpened eel, was uncoiling another loop of cord in his hands. I glanced up past Mr. Happen’s swaying form: there was still plenty of room on the frame.

Without another word I started to run. Careering across the broken wasteland I slammed into the first figure I reached, one of those holding Loess, and tackled him to the ground, sending us all sprawling into the freezing mud. From the corner of my eye I saw Corg charging in just behind me, bringing up a crunching knee into the face of the other man as he struggled to rise, knocking him flopping back over once more.

I grappled ingloriously with my opponent. Somehow, he had found a grip around my neck and was exerting an iron pressure. Together we spun and twisted in the coating sludge. Still dazed from the fall as I was, he was gaining a definite advantage now that the shock of my attack was negated. I had lost the element of surprise and, with it, the flow of battle was turning against me.

I hammered at him with my fist but those blows that landed felt imprecise and weak and he drove home his advantage of greater weight and stability. It was getting harder to think as the pressure around my throat increased and I sunk slowly further, the darkness in my mind growing. Dark spots were developing in front of my eyes, expanding as my consciousness faltered.

I scrambled desperately in the muck with my hands, but they felt stupid and heavy, like two bloated lead balloons at the end of arms made of rubber. My muscles were liquefying, losing all strength and responsive feeling. The numb, pawing fingers found something heavy, a solid shape in the muck, and somehow closed around it as, with the last of my strength and fading will, I swung whatever it was towards the snarling head above me. With satisfying, cracking weightiness it made contact and suddenly the pressure abated as he slid away from me.

For a moment, I could only lie there in the wet earth, sucking in great ragged breaths. But there was no time to rest and, with an effort of will, I pulled myself in a loose circle back to attention.

I heard the click as I regained my feet: Corg was on his knees, the barrel of a pistol pressed hard against his temple, the spike-bearded giant grinning at the other end, a feral satisfaction gleaming in his beady eyes.