The Summoned by Alex Sinclair

(Adult content – refer to the tags at the bottom of the page)

Mick blindsides me as I finish a cigarette and I fight the urge to crack him.

I’ve never liked him. His teeth are black from all the bootlicking and he’s punchable in a way that would make a heavy bag jealous.

“Alright, big man. This is for you. Cash upfront and the addresses.”

Big man has an edge to it that tells me he thinks he could do me regardless of the size difference.

The snow sits piled up around us on the empty street like ash from a nuclear blast and I spit the taste of tepid tea and crap fags into it.

He hands me the money and tells me where I can find them.

I can feel the guv’nor’s essence all over him and he’s not been to sleep. I know this because Mick’s seen the same things I’ve seen and I will never sleep again.

What we do is starting to show which is why I avoid mirrors.

“He’s happy with you, you know. Very happy. Keep it up and you’ll make it through this.”

I bristle like a freshly kicked dog.

He talks to me like he has a horse in this race but the stupid prick doesn’t realise we are both cast adrift in a storm with no end.

Mick’s eyes are red piss holes and he keeps looking over his shoulder as if he expects the guv’nor to come up behind us.

He smiles sickly at me and punches me lightly in the arm as his eyes bounce around inside his sockets.

He’s burnt down to the filter.

I’d love to iron this tired little cunt out, but he’d probably be thankful for the rest.

“Alright, I’ll see you on the other side.”

No, you won’t, I think, hell’s exclusive suites are private, and with any luck I won’t even hear you burn.

I get in the van and grope the money for a second, trying to turn myself on, but my greed makes me cringe. The money may as well be dogshit.

#

I make my way over to a little boozer on the Whitechapel road to settle my nerves.

The landlord Albert did a ten stretch back in the day for nearly killing a copper.

We met in Wandsworth, down the punishment block.

We used to take all the water out of our toilets and chat through the pipes and complain about all the screw-spit in our porridge, but since then his conversational skills have gone downhill.

It suits me fine.

I drain a loveless pint and a raw glass of Bells and then I stare into space as I prepare for the next few hours.

#

Everyone carries a piece of hell in their hearts, and it’s up to them to cast it out before it destroys them.

By the state of things, no one is doing a very good job.

I park the van down a quiet side road a few streets away from the first one and I climb out as the wind runs past with a razor and leaves my face raw.

The dark always seems to be waiting in the sky for its chance to crash down on the city like a piano dangling from a rope.

I wish some cunt would hurry and find the scissors.

It’s about time we were put out of our misery.

This city likes the night, and tonight was going to be deep and dark enough for the city to drown itself in.

I pass a tramp in a doorway lined with pieces of newspaper.

We are all homeless from the jump, evicted from where we belonged a long time ago.

The dosser is dead and the bottle of hand wash is stuck fast in his bony little hand.

I don’t begrudge him.

He was dead the moment he took his first breath, just like all of us.

I walk through Limehouse to the old warehouse.

I fondle the perpetually cocked Derringers I carry in each pocket with fingers as cold as the barrels, but I doubt I’ll need them. The guv’nor doesn’t leave survivors.

The warehouse is abandoned and graffitied with pigeon shit.

It’s crumbling into dust as the psychic rains wear it away, and soon there will be nothing left of anyone.

I make my way around the back as casually as I can, trying to be sly even though there is probably no point.

I slip the key into the battered door and let the darkness suck me in, and I can immediately smell the blood above the mouse turds.

It sticks to my throat and fills my mouth with the flavour of panic.

I let my nose lead me to him, and there he lays, a mutilated saint carved out of wax stretched out in pained supplication before the god that never cared.

Terry’s skinny legs have been shattered into jagged kindling.

Club hammer my bet, and they’ve pedicured him with bolt cutters.

One eye has popped out of its socket and it stares up at me from the floor.

“I’m sorry Terry. I always liked you. But it was stupid to try and cheat the guv’nor the way you did.”

The echo in the empty warehouse tells me what a hypocrite sounds like so I shut up.

Dead men tell no tales, so it stands to reason that they don’t want to listen to any either.

I take off my coat and pull on my thick rubber gloves.

I take the plastic sheet out of my bag and lay it out, along with a few bin liners and a roll of gaffer tape.

I take out my knives and begin.

#

The river is scribbled with moonlight.

I follow the black water as it snakes through the city like a length of intestine, keeping my eyes peeled for old Bill, wishing I had a pinch of charlie to keep my eyes wired on the roads. But I’m too scared to be tired.

There are worse things than the old bill at work tonight.

I wonder what the dead would give to have the chance to do it over again.

I wonder what they’d do for just another second and I realise they probably welcomed the end once they saw what had come for them.

The dead say a lot with their slyness.

They remind you that people are just symbolic meat.

#

I’m in an old meat packing plant down the docklands.

Rats zoom about the floor with the dark slimy on their backs as a lone insomniac seagull squawks blindly in the sky outside.

Gordon is hanging from a hook that reaches into his arse like a steel finger and his hands are clasped together as if in prayer.

Death is religious, my old man used to say, and each smile is a slur on god.

Gordon’s hands are pinned in place with a twisted mass of nails.

I liked Gordon but he had those loose jaws and flapping gums.

Always a story. Always an excuse.

And look where his fairytales got him.

His mouth is taped and his cheeks are bulging with the parts missing from between his legs.

I stare into the congealed pool of blood underneath him expecting to see the guv’nor’s reflection, but it’s just me and the rats.

A train clatters arthritically and some pigeons above me coo from the rafters as if to say get on with it, we’re bored.

I take off my coat and get to work.

#

I’m in a stale office that sits above a gutted factory.

I look through the window, down at the sad heaps of defunct machinery, and then I will myself to look at their handiwork.

I’ve known Pinky for a long time.

We came up together through the borstals, and I even kissed his sister.

Hard bastard, all knuckles and neck.

He has been skinned alive and his tongue has been torn out.

His flayed face is pinned to the door, smiling dementedly back at himself.

They have illustrated the walls with his blood.

What’s left of Pinky is laying on his desk, naked in a way I never hope to experience, but alive.

He gurgles as if he’s impersonating a drain or a baby, goo goo ga ga.

I put the derringer to his wet head and fire, deafening myself as the bullet thuds into what’s left of his brain.

I look around at the symbols, at the writing on the ceiling and I wonder who is really in control.

I wonder who calls the shots now, the guv’nor, or the things he’s in league with.

I can smell them, and I know they will be waiting for me in my dreams should I ever sleep again.

If I believed in god now would be a good time to pray to him I think, but I don’t think he’s listening.

I think he stopped a long time ago.

#

There’s a reason people use the phrase deadweight. There’s nothing as heavy as death, and I can feel the back axle sagging. I’m surprised I’m not kicking up sparks.

Nearly there, I tell myself, dump this lot in the river and you are home and dry, and then I see the smear of blue lights in the rearview and I hear the siren running up behind me.

I pull over and kill the engine.

I watch him get out of the car, six feet of hero with a look of mean-eyed dumbness kicked into his face.

He’s got something to prove, they all do, and I can tell by the way he walks toward the van that he’s going to make an example of me.

He’s envisioned moments like this, played these scenarios out again and again in his head.

He raps on the window with his knuckles, readying himself for his big moment in the pantomime.

I don’t want to do this.

“What are you doing driving around at this hour?”

He gives me that look that all coppers are armed with, that look that tells you you were guilty from birth. He’s arrested me already. I can see it in his eyes.

“Just taking a drive. I’m a night owl.”

He scoffs and tells me to get out and open the back.

“Get out of the van and open her up,” he says, like some dumb Yankee sheriff.

You stupid cunt, I think, you could have let me go.

I climb out and come up behind him with the piano wire as he cringes at the fresh stench pouring out the back of the van.

Death and its silly theatrics.

When it’s done I throw him in the back with the rest and put a plaster on my hand.

Then I take them to the river.

#

I tear through an entire packet of fags as I wait for Mick.

Cigarettes are food for the desperate.

My father used to call them his little soldiers of death when he wasn’t stubbing them out on my arms or slapping the smile off my face.

Mick pulls up, looking profoundly pursued.

“The guv’nor wants to see you,” he says, and my legs go boneless.

“Leave the van and get in the car.”

I don’t bother wrestling with Mick’s artificial authority. I just get in.

We drive into a night that stretches out in front of us forever.

“The Somalians are running scared. We control all the top-shelf merchandise in the city now. It’s ours.”

I look at the desperation on Mick’s face and think we are all running scared. We control nothing.

#

Mick waits in the car as I walk down the alley.

When I met the guv’nor he was already a legend and I was just a pissant.

He was a whisper on your wife’s lips and he was the broken jaw that followed it should you take any umbrage.

Like any god, he moved in mysterious ways.

Superstitious and loved a graveyard.

He took me in when I had nowhere to go, and he sorted my old man when he saw the bruises.

I wanted to help so I dug the hole.

He taught me what a waste of time fighting was by showing me the true wisdom of the gun and he filled my pockets with readies.

Once I was big enough I started in on the mugs around the manor, collecting what was owed with a fearful vengeance.

The guv’nor gave me purpose and for a while, the going was good, until the assassination attempt.

Resentment is a virus you see. It spreads from man to man, turning them into traitors.

Jealousy is a flower that blooms in the dark.

But he didn’t die, and now he’s made a deal with something and the rats are running scared.

The summoned he calls them, and they have given him power beyond description, but at a cost, and now we have to play along or die because the guv’nor wants the whole stinking city.

#

I go deep down the alley and the guv’nor is there, lying in wait.

I don’t look directly at him but I can see he is rotten.

Bloated.

His skin is the greyish green of a bad prison dinner and I can hear the television static buzz of a thousand flies dogfighting for the right to lay maggots in him.

He glides toward me like a bad dream and I can see things squirming inside his fine-tailored suit.

He was always the best-dressed man I knew.

He told me that your clobber was as important as a suit of armour for a knight.

Oh my god. Oh my god.

I look down.

His feet aren’t touching the floor.

“Nice to see you son. How’s your mother?”

His voice is as lifelessly dry as a lizard scuttling through a bombed wasteland.

Mum is long dead I think.

“She’s good. How are you keeping?”

“Never better,” he says, and the summoned come out of the shadows behind him.

There are three of them that I know of, and I keep my eyes fixed on the guv’nor’s handmade Italian shoes because just a few seconds of eye contact with the summoned will send me screaming into the laughing academy.

I see the black, barbed armour fused into the scorched flesh and I hear the hisses.

I choke on the sulphur, wondering how much this brief encounter with them has shortened my life.

Just being near them means I’m damned.

I squeeze my eyes shut as they come close.

Their cold metal claws are evil icicles that leave a trail of slimy frostbite on my skin.

I don’t move. I can’t move.

“You’ve always been loyal,” the guv’nor says to no one in particular.

“Reconfiguration is only the beginning. Expansion awaits, as do rewards beyond your wildest dreams.”

There’s a pause that takes an eternity, and then the guv’nor tells me what he wants me to do.

It’s a wonderful life I think to myself.

#

Mick drives up to the top floor of the multi-storey car park.

Mick pulls up next to the van and whimpers.

“Christ.”

He rubs his temples with shaky fingers and tries to light a cigarette.

I put a Derringer behind his ear and pull the trigger.

He stiffens and goes argh like a zombie stricken with belly ache.

For a minute I think he’s acting, just playing dead.

It’s never real when you do them yourself because you can’t believe how easy it was to take it all away from someone.

I leave him there slumped, and I walk out of the car park.

The Guv’nor told me it was all about sowing seeds of terror for the sheep.

#

I head straight to Irene’s.

She will be up, and if she isn’t I’ll just sleep on the doorstep.

Fear like any stimulant comes with a crash, and now I need to embalm myself with a needle of night night juice to come back to the land of the living.

I met Irene after my first stretch.

Jail was sleepless, a live burial of screaming steel.

Dreams don’t die quietly.

When I got out I hit the library to bask in its ambience.

No people or the mechanical ticking of their time bomb brains, each of them just waiting to go off.

Just knowledge patiently waiting to give itself to anyone prepared to accept it.

There she was, browsing the shelves with eyes the same startling blue of a blowtorch flame, the rough love bite of a prison tattoo crawling up her neck.

I went home with her that day.

When she took her clothes off I saw the track marks on the pale veal of her body, and she told me that heroin was the hug she’d never had.

We stay out of each other’s way and we don’t judge, which is the best imitation of love the broken can offer up to each other.

I turn a blind eye to the tricks and she doesn’t ask questions about nights like this.

When I get there the darkness is just beginning to drain out of the sky like blood draining out of a face, leaving the sky with a faint blue tinge to it.

She leads me straight to the shower and scrubs me like a priestess ritually cleansing a corpse-king for burial.

When we are done she wraps me in a dressing gown and sits me on the sofa with a big glass of whisky as she cooks up a shot.

I barely feel the needle slither in.

#

When I open my eyes again the night is sitting there waiting for me.

I’ve either slept through to the next night or the sun never came up.

Maybe the night finally won.

I eventually get dressed and tell Irene I will be back in a few hours.

She doesn’t care.

She’s switched from brown to white now, she’s climbing back up the ladder, gaining mania at every rung.

She’s got punters to see anyway, tricks to turn.

I pull on my clothes and head to Alberts as a stale snowfall begins to sprinkle down on me.

#

Albert’s pub is empty and as quiet as a grave.

Only the old TV makes a noise.

The news is on and a severe-looking presenter is telling me about a wave of ritualistic violence that is sweeping the city.

“Hundreds of savage attacks..”

“Albert,” I call.

Floorboards groan above me.

The air is electric with bad energy.

“Victims tortured and skinned alive..”

“Albert,” I call again as I lean over the bar.

There are two kinds of quiet and this is the wrong kind.

The shattered glass crunches under my feet.

I see the blood.

“Parts eaten…”

I turn around and start to run as the guv’nor’s words ring true in my head.

Reconfiguration is only the beginning. Expansion awaits.

#

When I get back to Irene’s it’s over.

The door has been smashed down and claw marks race up the walls to the bedroom.

It’s like I’m a cart on a track because my legs carry me up even though my brain is screaming for them to stop.

Some things you see stare back at you long after you’ve turned away and shut your eyes.

Irene is on the bed, contorted.

They’ve twisted her into something I no longer recognise.

I fall to my knees and they come for me.

I don’t struggle, I just keep my head down as I am swept out of the house.

#

When I open my eyes I know I’m not dead but I wish I was.

I’m taped naked to a heavy chair in the cavernous house the mayor owns out in the sticks.

Everything is painted with gloom and imbued with the unreality of a nightmare.

The shadows shift, and distorted echoes murmur from within the vast house.

The summoned are lurking.

“Soon the whole city will be screaming,” a warped voice says, followed by a horrific bark of a laugh.

Somewhere a scratchy gramophone slurs out eerie music.

The mayor is here, naked in the candlelight.

Whatever is inside of him is in control now and I can see it trying to climb out of his mouth.

He is becoming something else.

There’s an axe in his hand and I spill my guts as he undulates toward me.

I tell him I couldn’t help it.

“It was Gordon and Pinky’s idea to top you. All I did was go along with it, that’s all.

They forced me to pull the trigger.”

I’m only half lying.

I didn’t want to pop the guv’nor but there wasn’t much choice.

It’s dog fuck dog on the streets.

I beg a bit more but he isn’t listening.

“Are you ready?” he says, taking a fresh grip on the axe.

I hear myself say yeah as I think what it’s going to be like to abandon my body, and where I’m going to go.

I think I’ve got a good idea.

Alex Sinclair

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