Flesh and Coin (The Mulrones Book 3) Read online

  It was one of the reasons she rarely confronted Hattie.

  The reason Hattie left without Cathy breaking her hand on the girl’s snide face. Cathy was too damn old to do anything much about the girl and her ways. She wasn’t fool enough to think anything she did would amount to much, either way. Some people were set young, it seemed. Maybe, Cathy thought, the same applied to her. A spinster, people would’ve called her back in the day. Maybe some still would. She was stubborn and liked what she liked, but she’d never considered herself a nasty person. Unlike Hattie. That girl was rotten to the core.

  Either way, Cathy might be too old to slap some sense into the girl (who’d left early and surly) but she could still read, and Charlie could still listen.

  “More?” she asked. It was well past the end of her shift, and the night girls were coming on, but time meant little to Charlie.

  “If you wouldn’t mind…maybe just another chapter? I feel a bit brighter tonight.”

  “I don’t mind at all,” she said, and began the next chapter.

  *

  The phone on Hattie’s lap beeped and lit the dark interior of the car. She looked down, away from the winding black road, and smiled when she saw who the text was from. Dull day, going home to her parents’ house, with nothing at all to do.

  She sent a text back and then followed the road through to the woodland drive, pulled the car to the side of the road and waited. Maybe ten minutes passed, while she smoked a cigarette in her small car and tapped ash into an old Coke can, it being too cold to open the window. She played Candy Crush on her smart phone for maybe five of those minutes, until she got bored and stared into the darkness instead. The interior of the car was beginning to get cold and mist up when she finally saw headlights in the distance.

  Took your fucking time, you old bastard, she thought.

  The approaching car slowed and stopped close to her trunk. The lights went out. In the darkness Hattie wondered if it was him, or someone else. Someone coming to kill her. She shivered, thrilled a little at the thought, though she did not quite know why.

  A shadow in the darkness approached her side of the car. A dark man, dark clothes, dark night. Could have been anyone.

  But it was just him.

  He’d do in a pinch.

  She had to start the ignition on before the electronics in the car would work, then, lights on the dashboard glowing, wound the window down, so from her low compact car she was looking at Mr. Caulden’s lowest button on his shirt, peeking out from beneath his fancy suit. But that wasn’t what she wanted to see.

  “Hattie,” he said.

  “You’re a naughty boy, Barty,” she said. She knew he didn’t like that, and she smiled in the dark, lit only by the dying light of her cigarette, orange, and the battery sign, red. “It’s cold. I’m not getting out of the car.”

  “I’ll get in then.”

  “Don’t think so. Unzip.”

  “What?”

  “Right there. Unzip. I’ll blow you. Too fucking cold for anything else.”

  He sighed, but he didn’t sound too put out.

  Caulden obliged, already half-hard. Hattie smiled and went to work, until she felt him beginning to pulse. Then, while he wasn’t looking, she took a photo of herself, his dick in her mouth. When the flash blinded them both, he spurted in her face, but she didn’t care. She was laughing, he was swearing.

  Keep me fucking waiting, she thought. Keep me waiting in the fucking freezing cold?

  “What the fuck are you doing?” He made to grab the phone with one hand, trying to put his dick away with the other. Hattie scooted over to the other side of the car, too quick for him.

  “Uh-uh, naughty boy,” she said. ‘You made me wait. I was cold.’

  “Jesus, Hattie, I’m sorry…but give me the bloody phone.”

  “Don’t think so,” she said. His cum was warm on her face. Hot, even. “Here’s what I’m going to do. If you’re a good boy, do as you’re told, I’ll keep it. Maybe I’ll show it to a friend or two. If you’re a good boy.”

  “What? No…what?”

  “If you’re not nice, Mr. Caulden, then I’ll just post it right there on Facebook.”

  “Hattie, for fuck’s sake!”

  He sounded angry, and she was enjoying his anger. Thrilling, like, wondering if he’d hit her, try to throttle her, even. She smiled at him, flicked the locks on the doors, but left the window down.

  “I press this button, I send it out. You going to be a good boy?”

  Caulden’s face dropped. Almost looked like he’d had a stroke.

  Hattie laughed again.

  “What do you want?”

  “Give me…a hundred quid.”

  “Hattie, this is blackmail.”

  “You came on my face, and I’m cold. Worth a hundred quid, isn’t it?”

  Caulden, she could tell, was furious. But instead of becoming frightened, she was getting turned on. When she got turned on, couldn’t get it, she got frustrated, and that made her angry. She considered forcing him to go down on her, something, anything.

  But she figured she’d pushed it far enough. It was some kind of second sight she had.

  He sorted through his leather wallet, which was fat with notes. With a shaking hand he passed the money through the window.

  “Next time you want sorting out, don’t keep me fucking waiting in a cold car in the middle of nowhere. Put me up. In a B&B or something. Treat me like a fucking lady. All right?”

  “I will, Hattie. I’m sorry…just let me…”

  But she’d already pushed the button to close the window. She flashed him the picture on her phone while he stood, dumb, on the side of the muddy road. His face was priceless.

  Then she started the car and left him in the road, standing around in the cold with his come drying on his posh suit, just like it was drying on her face.

  IV.

  Just a Ghost in a Bed

  Charlie had little concept of time. He was just a ghost in a bed. But Cathy looked tired, and it was dark beyond the grand windows. The home was lit from the outside with powerful lamps placed in the ground, pointing toward the impressive frontage of Old Oak. Charlie remembered that, from long ago, when he was first taken to the hospice.

  Since he’d died, been chained within his morphine haze and the memory of his pain, he had seen nothing but the ward, the bed, and Cathy, reading. He spoke to her, she spoke to him. She saw him, understood him. She was possibly insane, possibly some kind of hedge medium who saw the dead where others only saw Charlie’s seemingly empty prison bed.

  He loved her for it, and she was tired, because she was seeing to his needs. She had no one to look after hers.

  Apart from you, Charlie.

  Can a dead man, a murderer, and a living, breathing angel, be friends? Was what they had a kind of friendship?

  Charlie didn’t have the answers. Sometimes things seemed clear to him, other times, everything was confusing, like the pain he felt even now, when he should have moved on, over the bridge, into the castle, to the other side. Confusing, muddled, like the sights and sounds on the ward right now.

  The fog was rising.

  “Cathy,” he said, his voice weak, his throat parched, never able to take a drink again. He watched the fog while she watched him. He tried to hide his fear for her. Fear of what was in that fog, steadily rising from the ground, through the walls, building into a wall of murk and mist.

  “Charlie?”

  “You look tired. You should go home. Get some rest.”

  They never spoke about his death. Never had. Possibly never would. To do so, Charlie feared, might break the spell. Cathy seemed to understand this, too.

  “I don’t mind,” said Cathy, but her eyes told the truth. Dark circled them.

  Charlie smiled, that lopsided grin that women might have once liked. Loved, even.

  “I do. Go on, Cathy. I’ll be here when you come back. You read me some more. Okay?”

  Cathy smiled. She w
anted to kiss him on the cheek, show some kind of humanity, some contact to pass what she could not say. But she did not. She closed the book and placed it on the nightstand.

  “You want the light left on?”

  “Sure,” said Charlie, watching her, watching the fog. “I’d like to think a while. Nice to have a little light to shine to see the thoughts go by.”

  “You’re an interesting man.”

  Charlie figured it was a compliment. “Thank you,” he said. “And you’re an angel. You know that, right?”

  Cathy smiled, broad and unguarded.

  “Night, Charlie.”

  “Night,” he said in return. He watched her leave, feeling something he hadn’t thought he’d ever feel again—his heart, thudding in his chest. Just a haunted memory, but the relief he felt when Cathy’s footsteps finally quieted as she reached the carpeted hall was powerful enough to shake him.

  Cathy was his. His friend. She didn’t belong to Shadowman.

  And knowing he was coming, expecting him, Charlie watched the shadow rise through the fog. Shadowman was more solid than Charlie had ever seen him, and somehow familiar. Faceless, yes, but Charlie knew him.

  This night, when Charlie beckoned, the Shadow came.

  *

  Once, Charlie had form, a body with fist and muscle and fight within. Now, he was nothing more than a memory of a man; a withered shade tied in death to a lonely bed, watching men die, removed and unaffected. Charlie had killed a boy of seventeen with his fists, and gone to prison for most of his adult life. He’d died in this hospice, the fight gone, even then. Just a shade, now, he cast no shadow, he had no fists to fight with, no passion.

  But a spark, something within, that made a man stare up on moonless nights and watch the stars. A spark that had seen him through, until the end. It rose in him now. Something more powerful, perhaps, than violent reaction, more powerful than religious and staid acceptance. A thing that drove and burned bright in the greatest of people. Maybe the thing that tied him and Cathy together in their strange friendship.

  That power, that thing that saw Charlie through the hardest of times in life, was not gone. Not buried along with his corpse in a sad, untended grave.

  But here, now, alight in his soul.

  His curiosity. The fox within, sniffing and hunting and searching for answers. A light against the darkness, and a foil with which to duel the dark and familiar face that came and stood at the foot of his bed. The Shadowman it was, but a memory, too. The memory of a man that Charlie could not grasp, like trying to catch a shadow in his fist.

  “What are you?” he said, his voice shaking though his tried to speak firmly, without fear. “Who are you?”

  “I am yours,” said Shadowman, simply, and the answer snuffed Charlie’s hope until there was nothing left but blackness.

  *

  It was 1992. Charlie was in his prime. Just past his birthday, two years to go before thirty. He didn’t know, right then, that he’d be hitting nothing but punching bags and weights in three months’ time.

  Drinking Stella Artois too fast. He’d taken a pill, an ecstasy tablet, in the shape of a diamond with a light blue color and a quick come-up. The pills were a hangover from the ’80s and his raving days that he still enjoyed on rare occasions. He’d never really gone hard on acid, but he had a soft spot for ecstasy, and plenty of good memories, too. Couple of blanks, maybe, but it was a small price to pay.

  Charlie and three friends were all drinking too fast. But they were in their late twenties. Middle-age fat, slowing metabolisms, daily pills, heart murmurs, aching guts…these are things that don’t exist for those still in their prime. Old age is a different country, unimaginably alien.

  A guy, muscled (summer, Charlie thought as he tried to grasp some meaning from this dream or vision…it was summertime) in a tight, thin shirt. Big shoulders and an angry face. He looked like trouble the first second Charlie saw him. The first instant. Others in the pub felt it, too—there was a moment of hush that traveled in a wave through the throng, then faded back to the noise of a pub in full flow and packed with drunk people and the heavy feel of cigarette smoke in the air.

  The lad with all the muscles and the feel of psychosis or just ordinary rage about him shouldered Charlie’s friend on the way back from the bar for no reason at all. He tagged Charlie’s friend (Rasher, they called him at football, but Charlie couldn’t remember why) hard enough to knock the glasses from Rasher’s hands. Carrying four beers with no tray, without sticking your fingers in the beer? It’s not easy. It’s a good trick. Rasher was a top lad, Charlie remembered. Never did know what happened to any of his friends. They dropped him like a beer shit on a Sunday morning. After…

  After I left this man-boy leaking brains out of his…

  Out from his ear. Hit him too hard. Broke my hand. Right?

  Right?

  Suddenly, outside the dream, Charlie’s shade shuddered and shivered, head to toe, like he was having a convulsion. Like he’d taken a blow to the head, rattled his brains, with nothing more than the force of memory.

  Charlie’s ghost eyes rolled in his head and foam came from his mouth as he was thrust away from his thoughts roughly.

  The Shadowman watched, impassive, little more than a heavy shaded thing of smoke formed from the unnatural mist in the home.

  “Back. Go back.”

  No, thought Charlie, but he had no choice. The Shadowman at the foot of his bed demanded it.

  And suddenly, he was back. Back, lost, in the memories of the past once more.

  The angry guy wanted a fight. Charlie and his friends got up from their table and went to sort it out.

  “You fucking arsehole,” Rasher said. He was angry. Angry guy was angrier than Rasher, and just a young lad, Charlie saw. Built, strong, and dangerous. Suddenly, Charlie wanted to let it go at a couple of pints on the floor and walk away, all of them.

  He wanted to say it. Wanted to tell Rasher to leave it and walk away, to keep the peace. To keep them as they were. He wanted to cry out, “LET THIS NEVER HAPPEN!” To never go to jail, to never spent his days in jail, to never be a ghost in a bed.

  But he didn’t, and things moved on.

  “Settle down. Just an accident, right?” David Fairbanks, one of Charlie’s friends, put a gentle hand on angry guy’s shoulder. The guy, some kind of market lad by the looks of it (his clothes, something in his face?) lashed out with a big heavy fist with a lot of young muscle and rage, knocking David out cold.

  Charlie picked up David and a woman screamed. Charlie looked around and saw that the guy had just smashed a glass over Rasher’s head—blood was everywhere.

  What the fuck? This didn’t happen. This didn’t happen…

  One second, just four men in their prime drinking and talking bollocks, like people did. Charlie’s cigarettes were back on the table, and as he looked at Rasher’s pouring face he thought he wasn’t going to get his cigarettes back. He was going to spend the night looking after Rasher in the hospital, desperate for cigarettes.

  Charlie’s thoughts and Charlie’s memories splitting, tearing at his ghost. His ghost, on the bed that was his prison, shuddered as the past sundered him.

  Charlie laid David down and he didn’t have a fucking clue what to do, because there was blood all over the place, the young guy was flailing at anyone within range. Charlie felt like pissing himself. Suddenly, the young man, big to begin with, grew and grew in Charlie’s eyes, until he was a hulk of a man, awesome in his rage, a machine made to destroy. And Charlie was in his path.

  Then, Rasher on the floor, a girl who’d taken a glancing blow to the face with something sharp (a Stanley knife, thought Charlie, but didn’t know why. He didn’t remember a knife. He didn’t remember blood and glass, knives and screaming).

  David was out cold resting awkwardly against a chair. He’s the lucky one, thought Charlie.

  On the heels of that thought, I’m going to have to do something. Do something about this. Charlie, on a pi
ll and drunk, trying to sort out the fucked-up mess. Trying to save someone’s life, anyone’s, from the wheeling psychopath with the glass and the knife and the fists and…

  The young guy, the lunatic bent on killing someone, slashed with his blade and blood fountained from someone Charlie didn’t see. A couple of bigger men were trying, desperately, to put the lad down, but no one wanted to get near him. Someone actually hit him with a chair, and he didn’t go down.

  And then something came over Charlie. Not bravery, not alcohol, or drugs, or anger, even. Just something cold, like a winter squall that sent shivers down his back, made his bladder weak with the sudden sense that his entire body was frozen.

  The guy who’d set it all off seemed to realize he was in some serious shit, like he’d just come back from within some land in his mind where Herculean fury was the norm. Girls were screaming, people were on phones, backing away. The young guy took a look around, waking up to what he’d done, but smiling, too. Like he was saying “fuck you” to each and every person in the pub. There was blood on his face, on his shirt. Charlie wasn’t sure if it was his. He thought not.

  The lad strode—didn’t flee—to the door. A blast of high summer heat hit Charlie in the face and he sent it back with the ice that suddenly ran in his veins.

  People were moaning, swearing, screaming. Blood and glass, pieces of a chair. Voices on mobile phones. Charlie didn’t hear anything but the roaring of his own blood pounding in his ears. He pushed himself up from the floor beside his unconscious friend David, stepped over Rasher, bleeding on the floor, and followed.

  God help him, he followed.

  *

  “What are you?” Charlie asked again, once more a ghost with little but the memory of flesh. He shook, sure he felt cold and pain and the addling addiction of morphine more fully than a man with bone beneath would. He felt those memories to his core, in his soul, as though they were no longer figments of a ghost’s fevered dreams, but the only reality there was.