Flesh and Coin (The Mulrones Book 3) Read online

  But he understood that somehow, suicide was not allowed. Not for him.

  The end of it all was a button push away on an infusion pump loaded with bliss. Morphine in such an amount, taken at once, that could put a bull to sleep. But it was a small torture, too. Death, again, beyond his reach. The fog that morphine brought, the promise of oblivion, was rationed.

  Here is a blade. If you can reach it, you can cut the bonds that stop you from reaching the blade.

  Joseph Heller, Charlie thought. He thought of Vonnegut, too. So it goes, he thought.

  Of all the books he’d read, all the movies, the music. The drugs he’d smoked and swallowed and sniffed. He thought of these things through a haze and the memories he saw were obscured by cataracts. Milky, pale and blurred things, distorted until he could not even tell their shape.

  Charlie drifted, and with his weak arm pushed the button on the morphine pump that fed into his leg. He hated himself for it, but even the fog was better than the pain.

  He opened his eyes for a moment, wondering if his angel, Cathy, had come. The room was clear until the large dose of morphine hit his system, atop the rest already in his bloodstream.

  In the ward where he rested, shifted, ached, cried, there were a total of eight beds.

  Four beds on each side. He didn’t know the names of the other people. The bed at the end (the good bed by the window) had been filled already since the big man had been called from pain and taken to someplace else, someplace Charlie hoped was better than this festering hole. Charlie remembered the big guy that had been there well enough, despite the fugue he lived in, and that he’d died. Death had called and the big guy had answered. Now someone else was waiting to cross the bridge. An old man, Charlie saw, like most on the ward. Skin waxy and thin, toothless maw open as he slept and struggled for breath.

  Beds didn’t stay empty for long. Dying was popular as ever in this place.

  As Charlie looked around at the people on the ward the fog rose up from the shiny floor. The haze of winter sun from the distant windows seemed to hold the fog back for a moment, and Charlie thought of Cambridge, being a student, round the Backs, smoking a little weed. Puffing thick smoke into the bright summer sun and holding a girl’s hand.

  He couldn’t remember her name. He fought against the encroaching fog, suddenly sure her name was important. But the fog rose over Cambridge in his mind and in the ward, too. It covered his fellow roommates, obscuring their features until they were little more than shapeless lumps atop slippery mattresses.

  Sure it was the morphine haze rising, and then, sure it was not, because within the fog, a man made of shadow and dark black smoke that roiled upon itself rose. He came from the earth, the floor…from somewhere deep below.

  Charlie tried to push himself up higher on the bed, to call Death over. He was ready. He’d been ready for months. Too afraid to finish it when he could, to helpless to finish it now.

  But Death had no eyes for Charlie.

  The hoary bastard faced Charlie, true. He knew Charlie. Charlie could feel that hit him in the guts, face or not, fog or no.

  Yet when Charlie raised a weak hand to beckon, because he was too fucked up on morphine to manage much more than a grunt, Death turned his back. Turned away, like Charlie was beneath him, unwanted, unimportant. Instead of Death’s embrace, Charlie felt his cold indifference.

  He’s not Death…

  The fog rose. Someone cried out. Agony, bad-trip screaming. Death was upon the man opposite Charlie.

  But something was wrong. The fog wasn’t pure any longer. It was red.

  *

  Blood seemed to fill the eerie fog in an instant, as though the shadow had severed an artery. Charlie didn’t see where the blood came from, or what caused the wound. He saw what happened to the blood, though.

  A burst of blood on the fog, like a red mist on the unnatural air. It hung in the air. Could have been a moment or an eternity—Charlie couldn’t tell. He was good at drugs. Always had been. There was some kind of time disparity on certain drugs. Morphine was one; weed another. Time slowed, or perception sped, but either way Charlie saw the blood hang, and the shadow that was not Death took the blood. He didn’t bathe in it or drink it, but absorbed it—each miniscule drop.

  Time didn’t mean much to Charlie. Dying-time was slow. Morphine time was slow. Between the two he could have stayed there for a week in real time, living-time. He felt as though time was slow enough to dodge a bullet, had he wished. He wanted to be that blood spray, whether pain came with it or not. Pain was nothing now but a marker on the bridge.

  Death turned to face Charlie, then. This time, no mere shadow. Not a thing of smoke any longer, but heavier. Full of the dead man’s life.

  The Shadowman was not Death, but a stealer of death. Charlie understood, now, more than he wished, because within his fugue he could hear the man opposite crying out.

  “Where am I?” he said, but not like a man with advanced Alzheimer’s, or someone lost in a shopping mall. The anguish in his voice hurt Charlie’s heart.

  “Where am I?” he cried.

  Which was impossible, but true, regardless of Charlie’s wishes. And the fact that he was dead?

  The man’s torso was in two.

  Suddenly, Charlie didn’t want the shadow to look his way. Wanted the shadow to leave, fuck right off, never return.

  But the shadow walked, or swam, through the fog. More solid, though not all the way (solid enough, thought Charlie, to tear a man in two) but he seemed heavier…and menacing in a way he hadn’t been the time before, when he’d taken the fat guy.

  Shadowman came through the fog until he was at the foot of Charlie’s bed.

  “What are you?” said Charlie, still aware of the dead man’s lost voice from beyond the fog.

  “Not Death. Not for you.”

  Tears, unbidden, pooled in Charlie’s eyes. Because he was afraid—terrified, in fact. Ashamed, too. He wanted death so bad…even at the hands of this creature.

  ‘There is no kingdom for you. There is no peace for wicked men. Like him…and you,’ said the shadow.

  Charlie closed his eyes before he begged.

  When he opened them again, it was morning and the body, the blood, the police, the forensics crew, filled his vision.

  *

  There is beauty in a job well done.

  A cup of tea, brewed to perfection, just the way you take it. It might be with sugar, strong brown tea, weak, with a dash of milk or a dollop. It might be a joint of such remarkably fine construction that you can barely stand to set light to it. Falling down, seven-quid drunk on strong, cheap lager when you were a fighting man, barely into your thirties, a man who’d never settled on much of anything. There might be a kind of savage beauty, too, in a man that could kill with a punch, make a man’s brain fluid run from his ear.

  The man opposite was severed, ruined. Charlie, from his bed opposite, could see the man’s insides. Some parts he recognized, like ribs, and the horridly blackened and shriveled insides of his lungs. What looked like a sack, perhaps his liver, perhaps not. When the police lifted the bottom half of the man from the bed, Charlie saw far more of the man than he could ever wish.

  “There is no peace for wicked men,” the Shadowman had said. What could the old man, now halved, have done to rouse some demon, some angel, of vengeance from heaven or hell? A ghost made of mist and fog and shade?

  Charlie was aware of sobbing, coming from outside the ward. It sounded female. No wonder, he thought. Such a sight would unmake many men or women, regardless of fortitude. He only hoped his friend Cathy had not seen the man’s insides.

  No peace, thought Charlie. And it was true. The man still spoke. Charlie could hear him, hear his voice, or his thoughts, or his echo. He was not sure.

  “Where am I?” said the ghost, like he could not see.

  “What is this? What is this place? Am I dead? Someone?”

  “I can’t see. I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry for what
I did. God forgive me…not this…not this…”

  Charlie lay, listening, for a long time, until his own pain became too much and tired, he slept. When he woke in the dark, he heard the echo of a scream, as though from an endless hall behind a closed door. The man’s memory, his ghost, his voice, were silent thereafter.

  The police never did ask the dying what they saw. Charlie would have said: Shadowman. But they never did ask.

  II.

  Burning John Mortimer

  The funeral of John Mortimer was precisely ten days from his death. Time enough for the family to get together, Cathy supposed.

  She rose the morning of the funeral like she did most mornings. Not begrudging the day, like some, nor quite relishing it. Just awake, opposed to asleep.

  Cathy drank a cup of tea first, with her only cigarette of the day (she believed it kept her regular).

  Five a.m., drinking and smoking, the haze of morphine passing with each sip. She took her tea strong and smoked a full-strength cigarette down to the filter. She didn’t rush. Some people smoked so fast, like it was just another chore in a long day full of chores. She smoked and enjoyed her cigarette.

  In the summer, she sometimes took her morning ritual in the small garden at the back of her house. Now, winter in full flow, she sat huddled under a blanket in her modest conservatory in the dark. It wouldn’t be light out until around eight a.m., and the funeral wouldn’t start until eleven. But she woke at five, no matter what time she went to bed. She was old enough not to bother trying to change it. On the very rare occasions that she did try to go back to sleep, she invariably woke feeling grouchy and out of sorts.

  She wondered who would make it to the funeral. While she wondered, her mind drifted back, time and again, to the murder of Philip Kingslake, the man mutilated in his bed.

  He’d been severed in two, as though with a guillotine. Cathy’s mind did not shy from gore, though thankfully she hadn’t seen the poor man’s remains. Lizzie, the day receptionist at the Old Oak Hospice, had told her more than enough, almost with a sense that she was taking a little glee from the act of describing the murder.

  For Cathy, she had never seen such a sight, nor did she wish to. She’d seen plenty of bad deaths in her years at the hospice—men reduced to crying children, begging for death to come and take them. To Cathy’s mind, that was worse. The casual unmanning of people with infirmity, losing their sense of self and all dignity over time, most times even aware of what they had become, and what was in store.

  But the idea that someone had walked into the ward, murdered Mr. Kingslake, and walked right out again with not so much as a trace of blood elsewhere in the home, but for that on the unfortunate man and his death bed. According to Lizzie, the bed and floor had been wringing wet with blood. There should have been footsteps. Something to indicate that a man with a weapon sharp enough to chop a man in two had come and gone. But there had been nothing. Not even a sign of how he had entered the home. There was a numbered keypad to enter, and only staff knew the code, not even visitors, because some of the patients also suffered with dementia. By and large, the residents weren’t able to walk, but the owner, Caulden, would not take chances with his precious residents and potential lawsuits should one somehow manage to wander away and die in the woods, or God forbid, get hit by a car.

  Thankfully none of the residents but Charlie had seen a thing. She could only imagine what a terrible sight it must have been. Death was rarely easy, she knew. Dying in fear, though…that had to be hard on a soul.

  Shadowman.

  That was what Charlie had said. That the Shadowman had killed Mr. Kingslake. But he’d said the same of John Mortimer, too, and that had been natural causes without a doubt. The old man had just run down.

  Shadowman. Not Death. No. Shadowman, he’d said. He’d been lucid enough when he said it that the word struck Cathy and stuck with her.

  What was Shadowman? A killer dressed all in black?

  Charlie had been afraid. She’d never seen Charlie afraid. Though he was dying, he didn’t need to put up a front, pretend to be a brave man. Mostly, the men on the ward were stoic when they were lucid.

  Charlie wasn’t putting up front. He truly wasn’t afraid of death. But he was afraid of Shadowman.

  Is he real?

  Cathy shook her head, even though she was alone. Of course, there was no such thing as Shadowmen. Plenty of psychopaths with dark clothing in their wardrobe, though.

  Cathy thought about the death of Philip Kingslake for a long time. Thought about a man cut in two, so cleanly, with no trace of anything but the wound, and the blood, and not so much as a mark on the bed. She thought about it for so long, in fact, that she smoked two more cigarettes than she should, and her tea went cold.

  *

  It turned out to be a good thirty-minute walk from the bus stop to the crematorium where they’d burn John Mortimer’s mortal remains. Cathy guessed the pallbearers would be thankful, in Mortimer’s case, that they only had to do half a job.

  The funeral was already underway by the time she arrived. Her feet burned and ached and sent buckshot agony right up into her calves and she was grateful Mortimer hadn’t been more popular—there was plenty of room in the chapel and Cathy was able to take a seat at the back, nearest the entrance. She could have sat wherever she liked, but one side was family—this time all three children turned out to mourn in their smart black getups. The other side seemed to be for friends. Old guys, mainly. Gray trousers, blazers. Some kind of emblem, she saw when they turned and looked at her with suspicion, like she was about to steal their sausage rolls at a buffet.

  Arseholes, she thought, but cursed herself too, for being uncharitable.

  They did, however, look like members of some kind of gentlemen’s club—Roundtable, Rotary, something like that.

  Either way, it wasn’t her concern.

  ‘Mind your business,’ her mother had told her. Cathy did. For the most part.

  Most funerals were sad affairs. Not all—sometimes people liked a little joke among the tears. A lighter moment. Not this funeral, though. The club guys were stern, stiff backed. The children, grandchildren, cousins or whoever, were quiet. A few tears among them, a nice eulogy, and a good solid service—morose, quiet, uninspiring—but solid. No frills, but not too shabby, as funerals go, Cathy thought.

  Cathy always came to the funerals of her residents. She wasn’t rent-a-grief. She didn’t cry (hadn’t yet, anyway, and didn’t intend to start). She just felt she should see it through. In a way, even more than Charlie’s mysterious Shadowman, death was Cathy’s business. It wasn’t rent-a-grief, no. More like the full service. Doing a job till the end.

  *

  When the curtain fell, hiding Mortimer’s casket, Cathy was happy enough to leave first to avoid questions and condolences. For just an instant, as she left, she thought she heard screams, like someone in mortal fear, rather than pain. She knew the difference. She paused in the vestibule, not entirely sure what to do, or if she really heard what she thought she heard.

  It’s nothing. Just a hangover. You’re an addict. Addicts hear things. See things.

  For some reason Cathy thought that maybe the screams were muffled…like they came from within a box.

  She moved on, though, and as she left the chapel, the sound faded to nothing, so she could convince herself she was not mad, not having aural hallucinations, and that she hadn’t just heard a dead man in a casket screaming in terror.

  Dead man without a doubt, because she was damn sure John Mortimer was dead.

  *

  “Cathy?” said the funeral director as she stepped outside. He stood before the long black car that was no doubt reserved for the family. The hearse was parked behind on the cemetery road, full of flowers, some said John, some Dad, some Granddad. The funeral director had his hands clasped before him when he spoke, unclasped when he came forward to shake her hand. For a moment, still thinking of the awful sound within the chapel, she struggled to find his
name.

  Portman? Mr. Portman? She couldn’t remember, though. Not for sure.

  “Hello,” she said, and covered her ignorance with a reserved smile people use by way of greeting at funerals.

  “How are you, young lady?”

  Portman, if that was his name, had earned the right to call her young lady. He looked as though he was somewhere in his seventies. A well-turned-out man, good at his job. Thoughtful, considerate, dignified.

  “Keeping busy, I guess,” she said. “And you? The family?”

  Cathy had met the man enough times to inquire after his family. It was, after all, a family business. She hadn’t met him enough times, it seemed, to remember his damn name.

  “Son’s in Ireland for the week,” he said. “My daughter…”

  He left it hanging. She felt she should pick it up, but the truth was, her feet were hurting, it was her day off, and the odd sensation she’d had within the chapel had unnerved her.

  “Children can be a trial,” she said, not to commit, particularly, one way or the other. She didn’t have children, and didn’t think herself qualified to comment. But then she had to say something, and he’d made one of those open-ended statements that didn’t lend itself to a simple answer. Cathy was in a mood for simple answers, though she didn’t think she was due any.

  “That they are.”

  He wanted to talk about his things. She wanted to talk about hers. But not with Portman or whatever his name was. She didn’t want to tell him, really no more than a passing acquaintance, of the muffled cries she thought came from a dead man’s casket.

  “I’m sorry,” she told him with her practiced smile. “I have to get home.”

  He nodded. His every motion, every expression, practiced, too.

  “Take care of yourself, young lady.”

  “You, too,” she said. Not a moment too soon. The vicar, minister, whatever he was (it hadn’t been a church service, and she was never too sure of people’s denominations) emerged, and the first of the mourners right behind him.