Oliver Clarke's Blog: Little Slices of Nasty, page 19

Pietr the Latvian by Georges Simenon #BookReview

In Simenon’s first novel featuring Maigret, the laconic detective is taken from grimy bars to luxury hotels as he traces the true identity of Pietr the Latvian.

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Title: Pietr the Latvian | Author: Georges Simenon | Series: Inspector Maigret #1 | Publisher: Penguin Classics | Pages: 176 | ISBN: 9780141392738 | Publication date: 1930 | Source: Self-purchased

‘Pietr the Latvian’ is the first of Georges Simenon’s many Inspector Maigret novels. There are some 75 of these, as well as numerous short...

Mike Hammer – The Night I Died by Max Allan Collins, Marcelo Salaza and Marcio Freire #BookReview

Mickey Spillane’s tough-talking, brawling, skirt-chasing private detective Mike Hammer returns to comics in this thrilling noir series, based on an original plot by Mickey Spillane, written by Max Allan Collins.

When a chance encounter with a captivating femme fatale leads to a violent mob retaliation, hard-boiled detective Mike Hammer finds himself dodging both bullets and hard broads as he undertakes the most dangerous case of his career.

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Title: Mike Hammer – The Night I Died | Author: Max...

Forget My Name by JS Monroe #BookReview

How do you know who to trust… when you don’t even know who you are?
You are outside your front door.

There are strangers in your house.

Then you realise. You can’t remember your name.

She arrived at the train station after a difficult week at work. Her bag had been stolen, and with it, her identity. Her whole life was in there – passport, wallet, house key. When she tried to report the theft, she couldn’t remember her own name. All she knew was her own address.

Now she’s outside Tony and La...

Where The Truth Lies by MJ Lee #BookReview

DI Thomas Ridpath was on the up in the Manchester CID: a promising young detective whose first case involved capturing a notorious serial killer. But ten years later he’s recovering from a serious illness and on the brink of being forced out of the police. Then people start dying: tortured, murdered, in an uncanny echo of Ridpath’s first case.

As the investigation intensifies, old bodies go missing, records can’t be found and the murder count grows. Caught in a turf war between the police and...

Shotgun by Ed McBain #BookReview

Halloween put the hex on the men from the 87th Precinct. It was a bad time for solving a neat stabbing and a messy double murder.

Steve Carella remembered how Detective Kling had rushed outside the apartment to throw up.

One thing about a twelve-gauge shotgun at close range. It makes it tough for a cop to pick up the pieces.

In more ways than one…

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Title: Shotgun | Author: Ed McBain | Series: 87th Precinct #23 | Publisher: Pan | Pages: 158 | ISBN: 9780446609739 | Publication date: 1969 | Sou...

Night of Obscene Horror – Chapter Twenty Three

WARNING: The following chapter contains scenes of extreme violence and depraved sexuality that are not for the faint of heart or easily offended. Enjoy ;)

New reader? Find all the chapters here: http://littleslicesofnasty.wordpress.com/gallery/night-of-obscene-horror/

 

10th September 2013

Green sat still, his body solidly fixed in the chair as he watched the events through the window. Beside him, West was similarly motionless. He could feel the excited tension in her body, building like a living thing, like the frantic crescendo of pleasure leading to an orgasm. This was what she had been waiting for.

On the other side of the glass the pale woman collided with the fat man, he got his hands up but not in time and she slammed into his body with a force that rocked his chair backward. The front legs left the ground and for a second Green thought it might topple over but the weight of the woman on the man’s lap brought the metal legs back to the floor.

The whole scene was playing out silently, like some freakish old movie. Green watched as the woman leant in towards the man as if she was going to kiss him. He felt for a moment as if he was spying on some lovers’ tryst, and then the woman’s mouth opened wide and she bit into the man’s upper lip. There was something in her eyes, something feral and not quite human. The frenzied, faraway look of a mad dog or someone who has just woken from a nightmare.

The man’s mouth dropped open in shock and he swung up at her with a clenched fist. The lip was stretched from his mouth to the woman’s, the skin horribly taut. His fist slammed into the side of the woman’s head and it bounced on her neck like a ball floating on a rough sea. Her eyes blinked shut for a split second but her teeth stayed fixed in the fat man’s lip. It stretched further, obscenely far, the flesh pulled so thin that it was almost translucent. Green thought it must tear, imagined it suddenly ripping like the skin of an orange, but it held and then the woman’s head snapped level again and her eyes opened. She bit down harder and now there was blood, flowing freely from around her lips and out of the corner of her mouth. The man lashed out at her again and this time she didn’t even seem to notice, it was as if the madness inside her was giving her a terrible strength.

Green saw the muscles in her jaw clench tighter and she jerked her head backwards. This time the skin didn’t stretch, it tore apart like wet clay in the hands of a potter. There was a spray of blood that covered both their faces and then the woman spat a chunk of rubbery flesh onto the white linoleum. The man’s thin pink lip and grey stubble lay there in a growing pool of crimson.

Green tore his eyes from it and looked at the man’s face. The stained and uneven teeth and rotten gums suddenly visible where the lip had been just moments before. He looks like he’s screaming, thought Green, then realised he probably was.

Behind them in the room the younger man stood. Green saw the motion and thought he might be about to intervene, to pull the woman off the other man’s lap. Instead he quickly unfastened his trousers and let them fall to the floor. He pulled his semi-erect penis from his faded boxer shorts and began to masturbate, his eyes fixed on the ruined face in front of him.

The fat man and the woman were oblivious to this. He had stopped hitting her; she sat on his lap contemplating him curiously, enjoying the sight of the damage she had wrought on his face. She looked like a cat examining a freshly disemboweled mouse. Staring back at her, the man lifted a hand to his mouth, feeling for the warm skin that was no longer there, his fingers colliding instead with the hard enamel of his blood coated teeth. They rested there for a moment and then he let his hand fall to his lap.

The man’s expression was appallingly calm. A minute ago he had looked like he was fighting for his life, now he seemed willing to accept whatever horrors may come. Green wondered if he had been infected by a similar strain of madness to the woman.

She moved again then with the speed of a snake and this time he did nothing to stop her. She tilted her head sideways as she darted it forward and clamped her mouth onto his puffy, red veined, alcoholic’s nose. Her jaw clenched again and she shook her head from side to side like a dog gnawing a bone.

“Jesus,” West murmured next to him. She had a note taking application open on her tablet and was frantically recording the events.

“Is this not what you expected?” said Green.

“It’s exactly what I expected,” she replied, and he could hear the excitement in her voice. “It’s just happening too fast, much too fast.”

Green looked back through the glass in time to see the pale woman spit the fat man’s bulbous nose out of her mouth and onto the floor. It landed on its tip, bouncing once and then coming to rest at the feet of the darker woman. He realised he had forgotten about her, so mesmerised had he been by the violence in front of him. She seemed oblivious to what was happening around her, her face transformed by a look of serenity like a nun might wear. As he watched she stood from her chair, her foot knocking the severed nose away from her. She moved like a sleepwalker across the room: past the younger man, still aggressively pumping his erection; past the fat man whose face was now split by a gaping, oozing wound that ran from his mouth to his eye; past the pale woman in his lap who was merrily licking the blood from around her mouth.

The walking woman reached a wall and stopped. She placed both hands flat on it at breast height, then pulled her head back. Green knew exactly what was going to happen, but he couldn’t drag his eyes away from the horrible scene. Even as she slammed her face into the wall his gaze remained fixed on her. The first blow shattered her nose, smearing it across her face. The second opened a deep gash in her forehead, it opened like a mouth, skin parting to reveal the pulsing flesh underneath. The woman calmly smashed her head against the wall a third time and when she pulled it back Green could see that the shape of it was now wrong, her brow dented flat where it should have been gently rounded. It reminded him of the Italian and he looked away.

“Should we stop it?” he said.

West looked at him and smiled. “How? Look at them, they’re lost to the world. Every one of them has had their mind shattered. Death will be a blessing.”

“But why?” said Green. “Why do this?”

“Because we have to get it right,” West said, looking back down at the notes she had made.

Green looked back through the glass and saw that the pale woman was still sitting on the fat man’s lap. Her hands were on his cheeks and clasping them, her thumbs resting on his eyes. He sat there motionless as she slowly forced those two digits into his eye sockets. Green could see the tension in them as they pushed against the small hard orbs. The left one went first, the eyeball popping in its socket, the clear jelly that had given it shape spurting out around the woman’s thumb and running down the man’s face like tears. The right eye followed, giving up and crying in sympathy for it’s partner. The woman kept pushing her thumbs into the now empty sockets, driving them deep into the wet cavities until they had disappeared completely. Blood ran freely down the man’s cheeks, mixing with that which seeped from his ruined nose and mouth.

The woman pulled her thumbs out suddenly and Green imagined he heard a wet sucking pop from each socket as they came free. He knew that was impossible though, everything he had witnessed had been without a soundtrack. The most explicit silent movie ever made.

Green felt his stomach churn as the woman raised each thumb to her mouth and sucked it clean. Until now it had all seemed horribly unreal, something he could dismiss as a nightmare or an hallucination. Suddenly he found himself remembering each of the four as he had found them on the streets. Unfortunate souls he had plucked from their bleak existence and delivered into something far worse.

The fat man was slumped in his chair, unconscious or dead, it was hard to tell which.

The Romani woman was on the floor, collapsed in a heap below the wall stained with her blood.

The black man was still masturbating. He walked awkwardly, with his fallen trousers tangled around his ankles, and his hand stroking up and down with a mechanical rhythm. He stopped when he was in front of the fat man and stood there gazing down at the ruined flesh that had once been a face.

Green realised what he was about to do and managed to turn his head away before the man ejaculated.

Want to read on? The next chapter will be available on Wednesday 14th May

Night of Obscene Horror – Chapter Twenty Two

New reader? Find all the chapters here: http://littleslicesofnasty.wordpress.com/gallery/night-of-obscene-horror/

 

Chapter Twenty Two

10th September 2013

Green sat watching through a thick glass pane. There were four people on the other side of it, four of the unfortunates he had found on the previous day. Two men and two women sitting there staring blankly at each other. The room was bare except for the chairs they sat on and a water cooler in one corner. A small video projector was suspended from the ceiling and Green knew that there were also recessed speakers pumping music into the room. He couldn’t hear it, but if he rested his fingers on it he could feel the vibrations of it. It was loud enough to inhibit conversation in the other room, West had told him, and it was somehow part of the experiment she was conducting. The presence of the projector made him think he’d been right about the film being part of it too.

‘Notte di Orrore Osceno’. That name had been echoing around his brain since his trip to Rome. He hadn’t seen the film, never would, but it had gotten under his skin somehow. Those few frames he’d looked at in the Italian’s apartment were still burned into his brain. He’d been in it, the man had said, had he meant that? He would only have been a child when the film was made. It seemed an odd coincidence that he had what Green believed to be the only remaining print of the movie. He saw the man’s twisted body in his mind’s eye, surrounded by glass and blood and gave a little shudder. Death was part of what he did, but it wasn’t all of it.

West was sitting next to him, but he was trying not to look at her. He could feel her presence though, the of his body tingled from it just as his nose prickled from her perfume and his ears rang with the soft sound of her breathing.

‘I’m falling in love with this bitch,’ he thought to himself. ‘Melting for the ice maiden.’

“It’s time,” she said, and Green allowed himself to turn and look at her. She stared back with those cold eyes and then allowed herself a smile. “I think you’ll find this interesting, Mr Green.”

West had a tablet computer on her lap and she used it now, tapping and stroking the screen. Green watched her long, slender fingers and wondered what they would feel like wrapped around his cock. He felt a stirring there and looked away, fixing his eyes on the four homeless people in the room again. The two men couldn’t have been more different from each other, one young, thin and black, the other old and white with a belly that pushed against the stained t-shirt he wore. Both the women were young, one had the dark complexion of a Romani, the other the pallid, dry skin of a junkie. She looked to Green like she’d been scrubbed with bleach. Both the woman were slim, and he supposed at some time they may have been attractive, but the streets had beaten the spark of life out of them, and with it anything that might have been even vaguely alluring.

As Green watched them, the four all reacted to some change in the room. He knew that West had triggered it somehow, with the computer in her lap; when he lifted his fingers again to the glass and felt the absence of the pulsing rhythm that had been there a moment ago he knew what it was. She had stopped the music.

Her fingers tapped and swiped the tablet some more and the lights in the room dimmed. Green knew that the glass separating him and West from the four test subjects was silvered on the opposite side, and he noted that West dimmed the lights on their side of it as well so that they remained invisible to the unfortunates they were observing.

Through the glass light as the projector sprang into life. Green could see the bright beams cutting through the darkness of the room, but not the images that they projecting on the wall. He wasn’t sure if it was West herself, or some unseen lackey, that had arranged the two rooms, but whoever it was they had clearly positioned the chairs on this side of the room so that they couldn’t see the film.

The fat man took a sip from the plastic cup of water in his hand and then wiped his sweaty forehead with the back of his hand. It was warm in the room, Green could tell that just by looking at them. Warm enough that all four had each drunk at least one cup of water from the cooler in the corner.

“There are three ingredients,” West said as her four subjects turned to watch to watch the movie. They had been told that was what they were there for, that it was what they were getting paid for. None of them had questioned it.

“The film is the final one, the most important one, but we believe it will be more effective if the subjects are properly conditioned first.”

Green said nothing, he could tell that West wanted to talk, that she wanted him to know how clever she was. Green wasn’t a talker, he preferred to just get on with things and let other people worry about what his motivations were.

“The music we were playing was composed by an eccentric composer from Japan named Yuji Naja. Naja’s work is highly experimental and has never been performed outside of his home country. His most famous work is eight hours long and designed to be listened to by an audience that is asleep. Many who have tried that claim to have had particularly unsettling dreams, not just when they were listening to the music but for days afterwards.

“Naja enjoyed a certain popularity in Asia briefly, with a certain type of listener, but has fallen out of favour in the last decade following his statements of support for Aleph, the terrorist group responsible for the Sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway in the 1990s. When my client tracked him down he was more than happy to take a special commission for a generous fee.”

“Fascinating,” said Green. If it had been anyone other than West he might, by this point, have told them to shut up. But West was someone he didn’t want to upset, both because she was paying him, and for other reasons.

He fixed his eyes on the people in the room while West carried on talking, trying not to let his irritation show. All four of them were staring at the spot on the wall where the film was being projected, they were watching it avidly, eyes fixed. There was a fascination written on their faces that seemed to Green to go beyond the desire to get paid. There was a tension in the body of the pale woman that hadn’t been there before. She was stiff with it, her muscles as taut as those of a runner in the starting blocks. That part of Green’s brain that he relied upon in moments of danger started sparking, the brief flashes it let out were too short-lived for him to see things clearly, but it was enough to put him on his guard.

Next to him, West kept talking.

“And then there’s the water, laced with a psychotropic drug that will make anyone who drinks the water far more open to suggestion than normal.”

Green saw that the tension was creeping into the body of the young black man. The tendons on his neck were suddenly standing up and Green could see the sheen of sweat on them. As he watched the man took a swig of water from the cup in his hand and Green wondered just how much West and her people really knew about the cocktail of factors they were mixing in that room.

She turned towards him as she kept talking, but he wasn’t even hearing her now, all he could focus on was what was happening in the room in front of him. But what was happening? Nothing more than what he had been told to expect, and yet every nerve in his body was alert.

West was still talking at him when something changed and his brain flicked from alert to something beyond that.

“Shut up,” he hissed at West, and as he said it the pale woman exploded out of her chair and threw herself fat man.

Want to read on? The next chapter will be available on Saturday 10th May

Night of Obscene Horror – Chapter Twenty One

New reader? Find all the chapters here: http://littleslicesofnasty.wordpress.com/gallery/night-of-obscene-horror/

 

Chapter Twenty One

15th November 2013

Henry closed the door of the projection booth behind him and let out a sharp breath. He was in control again, back in his own domain. He knew exactly what he needed to do and he knew that he could do it.

He walked to the desk in one corner of the small room and pulled a pen from a small pot that sat on top of it. There was a flier there for some previous all night show and Henry turned it over and started writing on the back.

The woman had given him a simple timeline to follow, a series of tasks that needed to be completed at certain times. He noted them down, eager to commit them to paper before they escaped his memory. Once the short list was completed, he neatly folded the paper and put it into his pocket. As he did so his fingers brushed against the smooth enamel of his wife’s tooth and he felt that panic rising in his chest again. He closed his eyes and pictured Mary.

“Please God,” he murmured, “please give me the strength to do this.” He couldn’t remember the last time he had prayed, but that simple act calmed him and he set to work.

Ray stood by the main doors of the Embassy, looking out at the waiting hordes. He felt like a character at the climax of a zombie movie, debating whether to end it all by letting the dead in.

He looked back at Jackson and Mark sitting side by side in the ticket booth.

“You ready?” he asked.

“As I’ll ever be,” Jackson replied. Mark nodded. He was quiet tonight, Ray noted, he’d keep an eye on him. As long as he did his job it didn’t really matter but he liked to think the people who worked for him didn’t hate the experience too much, even Henry who definitely had something else on his mind.

Ray turned back to the doors and bent down to raise the bolts at the bottom. His knees cracked as he did it, another reminder that he was getting older. He straightened and reached up to pull the top bolts down. He could feel the tension out there, the excitement radiating off the waiting fans. The next forty five minutes or so would be tough, getting everyone in, getting the tickets sold and the drinks and snacks bought, but once the audience were all seated and the lights went down the hard work would be over. As soon as the silver screen flickered from the kiss of the projector and the magic started happening Ray would relax. It was the people waiting outside he did it for, the ones like him who the multiplexes didn’t cater for.

Ray stepped back as he pulled the doors open and watched them parade into his empire, nodding at a few faces he knew, welcoming his customers. It felt good, tonight was going to be a good one, he could feel it.

Jackson watched Ray standing at the door and felt herself smile. It wasn’t voluntary, he just made her feel good. She hadn’t told any of her friends about him, not that she had many. Partly it was because she didn’t want to jinx it, whatever it was that they had. Partly it was the age thing.

She hadn’t told her mum either. She knew what the response would be, could almost see the words spewing out of her mother’s always painted lips. “He’s old enough to be your father.” That in itself would trigger a long silent reverie as her mum wept inside for her dead husband. Jackson had barely known him in person, he was present only in memories that never quite felt real and in the black absence he had left in their lives. She could have coped with that if the old woman hadn’t mentioned it daily, calling up the mythical memory of the man who could have solved every problem they had if he hadn’t been so selfish as to die.

Ray wasn’t a father figure, she told herself, just a man whose confidence gave her confidence. He was calm, kind and reassuring. Not strong in a physical sense, certainly not compared to some of the self-obsessed gym bunnies she’d dated, but totally in control of himself. When she was with him she was able to relax in a way that she couldn’t usually. She could give herself up to him and the moment, be herself with no fear of judgement. It wasn’t a feeling she was used to, certainly not one she’d experienced often in the first twenty years of her life.

She watched as Ray disappeared behind the wave of people entering the cinema, until just the top of his head was visible, then she turned her eyes to the queue in front of her and started serving them.

In the projection booth Henry opened the third of the film cans containing the print of ‘Notte di Orrore Osceno’. He carefully lifted the film out as he’d been told to and placed it on top of one of the other cans. He ran his fingers over the smooth metal base of the can, searching for something the woman on the phone had promised him was there. At last he found it, an almost imperceptible lip near the edge. He dug a fingernail under it and worked at it, pulling it up enough to grasp it with his fingertips and peel back the false bottom of the can. Beneath it lay a single compact disc. Henry stared at it. It looked so innocent, just an unlabelled disc like someone might have in their car or resting in an office drawer. For Henry it was far from innocent, it was part of the first thing the woman had asked him to do.

Mark sat in the ticket booth, taking cash and credit card payments and handing over tickets. There were faces he knew in the queue that stretched away from him and Jackson, a lot of them. They were people he’d met in other places, in darkened rooms, sitting with them and watching and listening. Planning. Waiting for the time to come, the time that was tonight. He felt a wave of nervous energy coursing through his body, an excitement like he’d never felt before. A sick thrill at the knowledge of what he had done earlier and what would happen later.

He’d been told it so many times that he believed it like he believed that the sky was blue and water was wet. Tonight was going to change the world.

Want to read on? The next chapter will be available on Wednesday 7th May

Night of Obscene Horror – Chapter Twenty

New reader? Find all the chapters here: http://littleslicesofnasty.wordpress.com/gallery/night-of-obscene-horror/

 

9th September 2013

Green had been back in London for a week and already he was wishing for a job that would take him overseas again. He might not like the heat abroad, but at least it would have given him a break from the terrible drabness of England. There was colour everywhere to be sure, the bright friendly shades and logos of a million aggressive corporations, but that didn’t hide the tired Englishness underneath.

As he walked along the South Bank, heading east towards London Bridge, he stared in disgust at the coffee cups in the hands of seemingly every person he passed. People cried recession and yet they were more than happy to hand over their hard earned money to multinational companies pretending to be cool. It all made him feel slightly sick, and ashamed to be a citizen of a country that now seemed to spend more time complaining than it did doing.

Despite the millions his country men spent on coffee everyday there really was a recession, and it was because of it that Green was out on the streets so early. It was 6:20 am and he was looking for volunteers. Seeking out the kind of people who would be attracted by the idea of a fast, easy buck and who wouldn’t ask too many questions. Green didn’t know exactly what West was going to do to these people, but he suspected that it was in some way related to the film he had retrieved. He had no reason for that suspicion other than the coincidence of timing and a nagging feeling in the pit of his stomach that there was more to that damn film than met the eye.

She may not have told him what she was going to do, but West had provided very strict instructions about the kind of people he should be rounding up for her experiment. She had told him to find subjects who were young and hungry for money.

There was a third criteria too, one that West had hinted at but not explicitly stated. These should be people who wouldn’t be missed. Green didn’t dwell for too long on why that might be.

This was the first scouting expedition he and been on, but he had no doubt he would find someone. Walking by the Thames, he had already seen half a dozen homeless people who he could have approached. The issue with all of them had been the presence of CCTV cameras in the vicinity. Green didn’t intend to do anything that would raise immediate alarm, but he didn’t want to leave a trail either.

He thought back to his planning and the factors that had chosen him to choose this as the optimal time and decided that he had been right. There were two sorts of people out on the streets this early, the homeless and people hurrying to their jobs, still wiping the sleep from their eyes. The latter would likely be too preoccupied with getting to where they needed to be to pay attention to him. The former were his target. It was the damned cameras that were causing him a problem. He’d used them to his advantage in Rome, but here in London they felt like a menace. What did it say about a society that it felt it had to be constantly observed? They made his skin itch, he didn’t like the idea of being watched, and he liked the fact that people blindly accepted it even less.

Up ahead was a road leading away from the river, he turned up it, the London Eye at his back. The great structure loomed up over the city like it was watching it, like an abstract representation of all those bloody cameras. We like them so much we made a monument to them, Green thought as he walked. Wasn’t Big Ben like that too? Four watchful eyes at the top of its tower staring down on the inhabitants of the city and making sure they behaved.

He turned right off the street he had walked down and walked along behind County Hall. After the openness of the South Bank and the river he felt almost claustrophobic to have buildings on either side of him. He stared ahead, trying to ignore it. Focus on the job, he told himself, it’s not even a difficult one. After all her flattery he had been amazed that West wanted something so mundane. Maybe that in itself was a test.

Up ahead he saw someone sitting in a doorway, two legs poking out onto the street, dirty white trainers on the ends of them. Green paused and knelt, untying and then retying his own shoes as he looked around him. He could see two cameras on the opposite side of the road, mounted high on the side of a building. They faced up and down the street, away from his target. There was another atop some nearby traffic lights, but again the lens was pointing away from those legs.

Satisfied he was safe, Green rose to his feet and walked forward. He stopped at the doorway and turned to look at the woman sitting there. She was young, less than twenty, he judged, and had the worn out look of someone who had been on the streets for a while. He’d seen plenty of her kind in his years as a police officer, people the world had given up on and who had given up on themselves. Men and women who carried with them a despair that infected those around them, so that no-one but the equally desperate could bear to be near them for long.

The woman looked back up at him standing there.

“What do you want?” she said.

Green started on the story he’d concocted. He explained that he was a university professor and that he was conducting research into the psychological effects of homelessness. He told the young woman that he was looking for interview subjects. He had funding to pay the subjects, he told her. Even to his own ears the words sounded like lies, but he could see that she believed him. That blind acceptance unnerved him, made his stomach turn. Part of him wanted her to see through the deception and run from him.

He thought of West in her office, telling him what she wanted him to do without telling him why, and knew he had been just as blindly obedient as the woman in front of him now was. Just as unquestioning and willing to hear only the parts he wanted and not rock the boat. He’d wanted to be the good boy his mother had always told him he should be.

For a second he wanted to slap himself. to stop the spiral of self doubt before it consumed him as he knew it would. Instead he clasped his hands in front of his groin and pinched the loose skin on the back of his left between the thumb and forefinger of his right. He twisted it sharply, gripping and turning as far as he could. He felt the wave of pain travel up his arm to his brain and burn through the clouds of doubt. It was like a drug travelling through his veins and bringing the lucidity he needed.

I’m doing this for me, he told himself, for the money and because West is a good client and if I impress her there’ll be more work. Besides, I’ll know soon enough what her intentions are, and when the time comes if I need to walk away I will.

“Where do I go then?” the woman in the doorway said. Green bent and handed her a card, it didn’t have a name on it, just an address, a date and a time.

“That’s where and when,” he said, then pulled out his wallet and gave the woman a ten pound note. “And that’s to help you get there. If you make it I’ll give you another hundred.”

“I’ll be there, you see if I don’t,” the woman called after him as he walked away. Green thought it was about 50/50 that she would just spend the money he’d given her on drink or drugs and forget about the card altogether. It was a calculated risk, his plan was to find enough potential subjects to fill his quota even if some did forget to show up.

The time on the card was a little over twenty four hours away, the place was an industrial estate in the East End; the ink that both pieces of information were printed in would fade to nothing in about thirty hours. What Green didn’t know was whether the lucky ones would be the people who made it to the rendez vous to pick up their hundred pounds or the ones who woke up with a hangover and blank piece of paper that meant nothing to them.

Want to read on? The next chapter will be available on Saturday 3rd May

Night of Obscene Horror – Chapter Nineteen

New reader? Find all the chapters here: http://littleslicesofnasty.wordpress.com/gallery/night-of-obscene-horror/

 

15th November 2013

Henry hurried back to the Embassy. He wasn’t worried that his absence would cause a problem, it wasn’t unusual for him to pop out before a screening started, once he’d got the projector prepped. Especially on an all nighter he liked to get some air before the show began. He was filled with anxiety though, and every moment he spent outside the cinema was a moment when he wasn’t doing what he needed to do to protect his wife.

He glanced at his watch as he neared the building. Still plenty of time, the doors would be opening soon but he had half an hour or so even after that. He could see the long queue leading from the main doors of the cinema, snaking away along the wall and around the corner. There were a lot of people there, more than usual for sure and he knew there would also be a last rush before the first film started. Word must have got out about the screening of ‘Notte di Orrore Osceno’. He was nervous about the film, even more so now that the woman on the phone had given him her instructions. It was just a film, he kept telling himself, so what he was being asked to do couldn’t do any real harm, could it?

He reached the front of the cinema and kept walking. There was no point trying to get through the main doors, Ray would keep them locked up tight now until the published opening time. Henry felt in his pocket to check he had his keys and felt the metal there, warm from his exertion. There was a service entrance at the rear of the building, he’d use that to get in, avoid setting the queue into a frenzy when they thought the doors were opening .

As he walked along the line he glanced at their faces. He recognised some of them from previous shows but not all, not be any means. He saw the drunk who had stumbled out of the off licence earlier talking with a group of his friends, gesticulating and laughing as he told some pointless story. Henry glanced down at the carrier bag of beer at the guy’s feet and wondered if Ray would let him in with it. If it was Henry’s business he would have stopped that kind of thing, partly because they sold beer inside anyway, but also because the more drunk people got the more likely they were to cause trouble. The crowd they had in were usually pretty good, more likely to nod off than start a fight. but it only took one.

Ray didn’t seem that bothered by it though, he had a very laid back attitude to everything and it had got worse since he’d employed that girl, Jackson. Henry wondered if there was something going on there, if Ray wasn’t having some mid-life fling. He shook his head. It wasn’t his business, and tonight he had far more important things to worry about.

Henry kept walking, noting again how many people there were queuing. He saw that many of them had bags; backpacks and shoulder bags rather than carrier bags like the drunk’s. More alcohol, no doubt. Although the group he was walking past didn’t look they were having much fun, just standing together in silence staring forward.

Henry reached the end of the queue and walked to the corner of the alleyway beyond it. He stopped there and looked down it; the light from the street allowed him to see most of it. The cinema’s bins were visible and he knew the door was just beyond it. There should have been a light above it, but the bulb had gone a few weeks before and Ray hadn’t gotten around to replacing it.

He turned down the alleyway, and as the walls closed around him the noise of the street faded away until he could hear his own breathing. It was fast and ragged and sounded panicked, like the noise an animal would make when cornered by a predator.

“Get a grip,” he muttered to himself. “Mary needs you.”

He stopped and took three slow, deep breaths, then walked on, keeping his eyes on the concrete path for any rubbish that might have fallen or blown out of the bins. The last thing he wanted to do was tread on a bottle and land on his arse. His eyes had started to adjust to the darkness and when he looked up he could see the door a few feet in front of him. He reached into his pocket again for the keys and pulled them out, find the right one and raising it to the lock when he got to the door. He was turning it when he heard the footsteps behind him.

Henry’s heart leapt in his chest and he turned, alarmed, to see a tall male figure walking towards him, the lights of the street throwing the muscular body into silhouette.

“Who are you?” Henry said. “You shouldn’t be here.”

The figure was silent. Oh god, thought Henry, it’s one of them, one of the people who took Mary. I’ve done something wrong and they’ve come for me.

“Who are you?” he said again, sounding braver than he felt.

The figure took a step forward and Henry felt his body tense reflexively, then the other person spoke.

“I’m sorry, Henry. It’s me Mark. I saw you walk down here. Can you let me in? I can’t get in the front way now.”

Henry felt his breath leave him in a sudden rush. It was the new usher. A quiet student who seemed like a good enough kid apart from his occasional flakiness.

“Mark, why are you so late? It’s not long til the doors open.”

“I know, I know. I got caught with something. A favour I had to do for a friend. I…”

“Don’t worry about it, I’ll let you in.” Henry just wanted him to shut up. He needed to get up to the solitude of the projection room so he could think. He didn’t know Mark well, but he knew he was working tonight and that was good enough.

He turned back to the door and opened it, pushing it open and stepping into the store room beyond it. The room contained supplies for the bar, bottles of spirits and barrels of beer as well as boxes of crisps and other snacks.

Mark followed like a puppy. “Thank you so much.” Henry could see him now, he had a backpack too, hanging loosely from one shoulder.

Henry grunted then closed the door and checked it was secure. “Come on, we both need to get to work,” he said and opened the other door of the room, walking through into a corridor that led to the fire exit to the main auditorium at one end and back to the foyer at the other. He turned left and walked towards the foyer, he noted as he moved away from the store room that Mark wasn’t following him and he wondered for a second why, before deciding that he didn’t care. All that mattered was doing what he needed to for Mary.

In the storeroom, Mark listened to the sound of Henry walking away. When the footsteps faded to nothing he swung the backpack from his shoulder and opened it. He knew he didn’t have long to do what he needed to.

Want to read on? The next chapter will be available on Wednesday 30th April (which also happens to be my birthday)