Fascinated Read online

  Fascinated

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

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  31

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  33

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  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

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  43

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  45

  Copyright

  Fascinated

  Miles Gibson

  For Susan

  ‘Scum always floats to the top’

  Conrad Sluggers

  One day Frank Fisher leaves his house, walks to the post box on the corner of the street and disappears.

  He turns the corner and is suddenly gone, as if the street has swallowed him. The neighbours see nothing. His wife, Jessica, slumped in the sofa, watching TV, makes a nest from a pile of embroidered cushions, yawns and falls asleep. No one sees Frank vanish.

  It is a little past three o’clock but on this dismal winter afternoon the city is already steeped in darkness. Lights shine from parlour windows along the terrace of narrow houses. The sky is a swirling, sulphurous gravy. The pavements are greasy with rain.

  Frank turns the corner and is about to step from the kerb when he sees a Mercedes swerving towards him and a man somersaulting into the gutter. The man has been thrown from the back of the car. He’s a large old man in a black overcoat that fans from his shoulders like wings. He hits the pavement, rolls forward, grunts and turns his face to the sky. The face is bruised and flecked with blood.

  Frank shouts and shrinks back on tiptoe. He thinks the old man is dead. And as he stands there, shivering and confused, two men climb from the car and saunter towards him through the gloom. They are tall men, as lean as shadows, dressed in expensive charcoal suits and highly polished shoes. They are silent and staring. They move with the easy grace of panthers.

  ‘Did we kill him?’ asks the first of them as they approach Frank. His name is Harry Cocker but everyone calls him the Beast. He bends his head and grins. His green eyes shine with satisfaction.

  The corpse groans and blows a glistening bubble of blood.

  ‘No,’ says Frank. ‘Thank God, he’s still moving!’ He glances up at the two men. His breath is a soft explosion of steam.

  ‘Stubborn bastard!’ says the second stranger. His name is Lloyd and he’s proud to be Harry’s half-mad brother. He pushes Frank aside and begins stamping on the old man, snorting and clapping his hands like a murderous flamenco dancer.

  ‘Leave him alone!’ shouts Frank. He is so astonished that he runs forward to knock Lloyd Cocker from the old man’s chest, catching him with his shoulder and pushing him away. He’s forty years old next birthday and that’s too old to brawl in the street. But he won’t stand and watch an old man beaten to death.

  ‘I’m trying to kick-start his heart,’ grins Lloyd, stepping aside and watching Frank spill onto the pavement.

  Frank scrambles to his feet and nurses his elbows in his hands. He’s twisted a leg and his knuckles are bleeding. He hobbles in circles, trying to shake out the fire in his bones. The Cocker brothers ignore him.

  ‘Help me get the bastard into the car,’ says the Beast as Lloyd returns to the trampled corpse.

  Frank watches them haul their victim from the gutter and drag him across the street. They drag him by his ankles with his arms trailing loose and his head wrapped up in his coat.

  ‘That man needs a doctor!’ shouts Frank. ‘You’ve got to get him to a hospital. He could have internal injuries.’

  His voice sounds small and remote, like a cry for help from a locked room. He can’t believe this is happening.

  ‘It’s a waste of time,’ says the Beast mildly. ‘But don’t worry, Skipper, we’ll give him a decent burial.’ They cram the old man into the back of the car and try to cover him with a blanket to prevent him leaking into the pigskin upholstery.

  ‘I’m calling the police!’ warns Frank. He glances up and down the empty street. He doesn’t know where to turn. Why doesn’t someone run out to help him? He wants to see large and angry women, dressed in pinafores and slippers, emerge through the rain like a battle fleet, armed with rolling pins and pokers. He wants to see big-bellied men in shirtsleeves, horse brasses on belts, marching shoulder to shoulder towards him. He wants the world to be different. He doesn’t want to be Gary Cooper. He begins to limp towards the nearest house with a lighted window but, as he approaches the privet hedge, the light flicks out before him.

  The Beast shakes his head and turns away from the car. He is holding a baseball bat in his fist. As he moves towards Frank he raises the bat against his chest. He advances with a queer little dancing stride and the rain seems to spark on his black leather shoes.

  The first strike catches Frank against his neck, nearly knocking his head from his shoulders. His mouth springs open and blood sprays from his nose. He twists and staggers and falls to his knees.

  The second strike catches him across the spine, knocking him forward and cracking his face against the kerbstone.

  The Beast raises the bat for a third and final strike but Frank has already gone.

  When he opens his eyes he is slumped in the back of the car and sharing the blanket with the corpse. His head feels crushed and his shirt is clammy with blood. He tries to search for his face and probe the pain in his neck and throat but, when he makes an effort to raise a hand, his arm refuses to obey his command and he finds he can’t work his fingers.

  He manages to tilt his head and squint through the window but sees nothing beyond the darkness and rain.

  He thinks, in a few minutes I’m going to die. They’ll stop the car and drag me into a ploughed field, set me loose to flop around until I suffocate in the mud. They’ll shoot me in the back of the head and roll me into a ditch where the dogs and the crows will pick at my bones. He thinks of Jessica, watching TV, waiting for him to walk through the door. How long has he been away? How long will it take her to miss him? He’s going to die and she’ll never find him. He’s going to die without warning or reason.

  The Mercedes swings from the road, lurches down a flooded gravel track and shudders to a halt. For a few moments there is nothing but the hammering rain and the click of the windscreen wipers. The brothers sit, as silent as lovers, staring out at the night.

  With a great effort Frank manages to pull himself up against the edge of the door. Through the beams of the headlights he can see a landscape of twisted peaks and toppling spires. A nightmare of rusting carcasses, ashes, rags and bones. Ribbons of tattered polythene slap like prayer flags from the spires. Glass glitters in the floodlit peaks. Below, in the gulleys and ditches, melting into a poisonous broth, lie the bloated bellies of mattresses and the skeletons of small machines. They are perched on the edge of a rubbish dump that seems to stretch to the end of the world.

  As Frank struggles to make sense of these surroundings, the Cocker brothers clamber from the car and retrieve the old man. The body topples from the seat and slithers softly to the ground. The brothers roll it to the edge of a crumbling precipice and pitch it into the da
rkness. Lloyd grins and peers after it. The Beast finds a handkerchief and carefully wipes his hands.

  Frank closes his eyes and tries to hide beneath the blanket. These are his executioners. Here is the killing ground. He wants to shake himself awake. He wants to find himself, thrashing and shouting, in the safety of his own bed with Jessica complaining beside him and the radio playing the early news and the dream dissolving in morning sunlight. He wants to gather her into his arms and tell her how much he loves her and run his hand beneath her pyjamas until she pushes him away, protesting and laughing, and struggles downstairs to make coffee.

  Lloyd seizes him, yanks him out and throws him into the mire. Frank shouts in pain and starts to crawl away on his hands and knees. His arms collapse and send him sprawling. He reaches out, choking in mud, groping for a hiding place under the car, but the Beast drags him back and Lloyd kicks him over the precipice, down the slippery slope to hell.

  Jessica wakes up and knocks a cushion to the floor. She swings her legs from the sofa, reaches out and switches off the TV. It is dark. She stretches and yawns and wanders into the kitchen. She calls out to Frank but the house remains silent. It is four fifteen by the clock on the wall. A little after six thirty by the electric clock on the oven. She turns, walks into the hall and calls again.

  ‘Frank?’

  The hall is empty. The light from the street is a soft, phosphorescent bruise in the frosted fanlight above the front door. She walks quickly to the back parlour but the room is deserted. She returns to the hall and creeps up the stairs, waiting for him to pounce from the darkness, shrieking and laughing and rolling his eyes. She hates it when he plays this game! Ten years of marriage and still he behaves like a schoolboy.

  ‘Frank!’

  She stands motionless, a pale ghost on the empty stairs, listening for the slightest movement in the rooms above, refusing to be drawn any closer into his trap. She imagines him wedged behind the bathroom door, pressed on tiptoe against the wall, trembling and tense, an immense grin on his shining face. She throws open the door, banging it hard against the wall, and glares indignantly at the empty bath, the gleam of the washbasin, the clutter of bottles and tubes on the shelf. The cap is missing from the Colgate pump. The Listerine bottle is empty. The basket of fruit-flavoured novelty soaps still gathers dust in its corner.

  ‘Frank?’

  He has to be somewhere in the house. How long does it take him to post a letter? She creeps into the bedroom. The furniture is steeped in darkness. Rain rattles against the window. The bed with its winter eiderdown remains undisturbed, a slumbering elephant. She snaps on the light, hurries barefoot across the carpet and closes the curtains, turning quickly to catch any demons that might have followed in her footsteps.

  ‘Frank?’

  She whispers his name to the wardrobe, the bed and the chest of drawers. It is nineteen thirty by the clock on the bedside table. A little past five o’clock by the watch on her wrist. She shivers and tries to wipe away the gooseflesh on her arms. It’s stupid to feel so frightened. How long does it take him to post a letter? She stares at herself in the wardrobe mirrors. She is wearing one of his old shirts, the collar frayed, a button missing, the big sleeves rolled to her elbows. She makes an attempt to push the shirt-tails into her skirt. She needs a drink. She must try to pull herself together. Her face is still creased from the crush of the cushions and her cropped hair is standing in spikes.

  ‘Frank?’

  The reflection makes no answer but stands staring hopelessly into her face. She swears softly, raking her scalp with her fingers, and turns in a circle, spooked by the swirl of her own leaping shadow.

  She runs downstairs, switching on lights in every room, shouting his name and banging doors to drive away hordes of scuttling goblins. She pulls on her shoes, throws a coat round her narrow shoulders and runs from the house, into the bitter winter night, towards the corner of the street.

  It stops raining. The sky clears and the moon sails over the peaks and spires turning mud into molten bronze and broken glass into diamonds.

  Frank lies sprawled in a bed of shattered chicken bones. For several minutes he’s been watching the corpse struggle to rise from its shallow grave. The battered body keeps clambering to its feet and then falling backwards into a pool of luminous water. When it finally manages to balance itself, it stands pulling coathangers from its limbs. Now it turns, totters forward in its squelching shoes and looms over him, its big face varnished with mud and its fingers dripping moonlight.

  ‘I thought you were dead,’ whispers Frank. His tongue feels torn and his throat is filled with gravel.

  ‘I thought you were dead!’ grins the corpse. He stretches out an arm and shakes Frank warmly by the hand.

  ‘Frank Fisher,’ croaks Frank.

  ‘Webster Boston,’ beams the old man. He tightens his grip and tries to haul Frank to his feet but Frank shouts in pain and falls back into the chicken bones.

  ‘Where does it hurt?’

  ‘Everywhere!’ gasps Frank. He counts his fingers with his thumbs and moves his head in a crunching circle. The pain is trapped in his ribcage, kicking against his heart and lungs.

  ‘Stay there.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I’m going for help,’ says Webster Boston. He plunges his hands in his waterlogged pockets and strolls away, picking a path through the petrified forest.

  Frank settles back in the chicken bones and turns his face to the moon. He must be patient. He must keep his courage a little longer. He is waiting for a rescue team to appear above him on the ridge, men shouting down to him, rope ladders, flashlights and dogs. They’ll haul him from hell in a cradle and bundle him into an ambulance. He can call Jessica from the hospital, explain what happened and ask her to collect him. Will they try to hold him overnight, marooned in a pair of borrowed pyjamas, left to sleep on a rubber sheet in a ward full of shrunken old men? He hates hospitals. He’s afraid of them. The smell of death and disinfectant. He won’t do it. He’ll walk home barefoot if they take his clothes. He wants a hot bath, something to drink and the sweet oblivion of his bed.

  He might be interviewed by the police and asked to describe the attack. Vicious. Nasty. Unprovoked. The assailants. A brief description of the assailants. Unpredictable. Dangerous. Violent. Sympathetic noises from the assembly. Helping the police with their enquiries. And is he prepared to pick them out at a formal identity parade? He doesn’t know. It was dark. It happened so fast. He realises, with dismay, that the faces have already turned into phantasmagorical masks, with scarlet sequins for eyes and the grinning jaws of wolves.

  The moon drifts higher and the wind begins to sweep through the crumbling parapets and towers, ploughing puddles and whipping at a thousand polythene banners. It must be late. How long does it take him to post a letter? He manages to raise an arm against his chest and tries to search for his watch, but the wrist is thickly bandaged in mud. It’s so cold that he can’t feel his legs. He won’t last long if they fail to find him. He’ll die in the ditch and his pickled body will turn to leather. The peat-bog man. Recovered in a thousand years. His head on a plate in the British Museum.

  He must find shelter. The carcass of an old armchair lies, trapped in mud, a few yards away on the other side of the pit. If he can crawl into its sagging arms he’ll be saved from the freezing wind.

  He levers himself against one shoulder, paddles his feet and manages to roll himself onto his stomach. His ribcage seems to bend out of shape beneath his weight and he screws up his eyes, concentrating, waiting for the pain to loosen its grip. He slithers forward, folding and kicking his legs, a swimmer in a dark, gelatinous sea.

  When Webster Boston returns, Frank has managed to drag himself to the armchair and lies exhausted before it, with his head half-buried in its rusted springs.

  ‘Frank?’

  Frank groans and tries to pull out his face but he knows that he hasn’t the strength to do any more than work his lungs and keep his h
eart beating.

  ‘I found a telephone at the top of the road – we’ll soon have you out of here.’

  ‘Webster?’

  ‘What is it, Frank?’

  ‘Can you help me into this chair?’

  Webster bends down and gently hoists Frank into the mess of stuffing and springs. He straightens Frank’s shoulders and tries to scrape the mud from his face.

  ‘What’s your line of work, Frank?’

  ‘I’m a marketing man. You’ve probably heard of the Fancy Wholesale Tropical Fruits Corporation?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They trade in fancy tropical fruits.’

  ‘Is that right?’ Webster looks baffled. He casts around in the mud, finds a twisted metal crate and sits down beside his companion.

  ‘Kumquats and pawpaws,’ whispers Frank, trying to explain, wanting to talk away the pain that is burning under his skin. ‘Pomegranates and limes.’ Twenty years in command of a desk. He’d been planning to die from atrophy. Laid to rest on the boardroom table, mourned by the senior secretaries, his long-service medal around his neck. He hadn’t expected a stranger to beat out his brains with a baseball bat.

  ‘Remember Spangles?’ says Webster, staring at his hands.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Life’s always sweeter with Spangles.’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Spangles. Five-fruit Spangles. They used to cost thruppence a packet. You never see them any more. It’s like White Heather Assortment and Blue Bird Liquorice Rolls. You get used to them. You get a taste for them. And then, overnight, they’ve vanished.’ He sighs and pokes an ear, grieving for the fate of Five Boys Chocolate and long-lost rolls of Army Mints.

  ‘What’s your line of work?’ prompts Frank, fighting the silence, trying to get him talking again.

  Webster blinks and pulls the finger from his ear. ‘I’m a soldier of fortune.’ He begins to fish in his pockets. His overcoat has been torn to rags and the rags hang from his arms like strands of melted tar. After a long search he pulls out a shrivelled bag, which he peels apart to reveal a handful of amber buttons. He picks at one between finger and thumb and offers it to Frank.