Night of Obscene Horror – Chapter Twenty

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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