BiteMarks (23 page)

The three figures weave around each other like ballroom dancers, well rehearsed in their craft. The movements are silent, with neurotic adjustments and re-adjustments of cutlery and glassware from the supervising mother. Faces are blank as kabuki masks; there is an eerie robotic quality to the scene that might be beautiful in another setting. The lights are dimmed moments before he graces them with his presence, he makes an unhurried show of scrutinizing the set up before signaling his approval and taking a seat.

A lightening bolt of pure fear sets Meg's hands trembling. She takes deep breaths to steady them and then dishes up a large bowl of the adulterated aromatic curry. She carefully transports it through to the dining room, the heat edging slowly towards uncomfortable on her fingers by the time that she sets it down in front of him. He inhales deeply enjoying the exotic scents, deep, rich and sweet, and then takes up his fork and savors a first mouthful.

* * *

None of this is how I'd envisaged that it would be. In the colorless Gothic nightscapes of my thoughts and dreams I was always alone; the case thrown open by a genius glimmer, a sudden realization of the devious significance of the Fanged Man's pathology thrown up by the link that I feel with this monster that uncovered his dark lair. Instead, the flat is stunningly normal, the dark green wax sheen of ivy clinging around sash windows, with children playing out in the street in front – a bright blur of color and laughter presided over by smiling women with tired eyes. 

For the first time I am starting to realize how much I've needed this investigation and all of the run off from it. There's nothing like extra purpose to distract you from the banality of your everyday issues. Now I am a little shocked to find that the whole thing may be about to end and the realization is already a disappointment of sorts. I think about Cristal's words to me from her hospital bed, her face torn to shreds but the visible eye burning with desire for vengeance. She had asked me to find the man who had done this to her and kill him.

“
Do you think he's in?” Marcus looks rattled his speech a fraction faster than usual.

“
There's an upstairs window open, so I reckon so. Most people in these parts are careful about security if they want to hang on to their possessions for any length of time.”

“
Do you think somebody like this is scared of things like burglars?”

“
He's just a man. Whatever evils he commits or has suffered and whatever madness lurks in his head, that's all he is. He may not feel things exactly like you do, but he functions well enough to have made it this far.”

“
Since you understand him so well I'll follow you in.”

Marcus pats me on the shoulder and gets out of the car. The downstairs neighbor intercepts us before we're halfway up the path, a harassed looking woman with a black eye and a missing front tooth. She's probably only in her mid-thirties, but carrying the years like a heavy wooden cross.

“
It's about bloody time.”

“
Sorry?”

“
I take it you've come about the freak upstairs?”

“
Is he in?”

“
I'd say so, judging by the noises from the other night. Besides, I haven't seen him go out since.”

“
Noises?”

“
Are you two a bit slow? I reported all of this, it sounded like they were killing a cat or something up there.” Marcus looks at me, he caught the plural too.

“
He doesn't live alone then?”

“
I didn't say that, just that he wasn't alone the other night.”

“
We'll head up there and check it out then.” I accompany the statement with a congenial smile of professionalism.

“
If it's not too much trouble for you,” her voice dripping with sarcasm.

She looks at Marcus, giving him an approving appraisal and smiling a gap-toothed smile. “Of course you could always stop in when you're done if you like … ”

“
I'm flattered but I need to see what's going on upstairs first.” He gives her a quick smile and follows me up the concrete steps to Dodd's flat.

“
It's all right, Marky boy, I don't mind covering for you while you check out how the other half lives.”

“
I hope he bites your neck when we go in,” comes the muttered reply.

“
Oh, don't be like that.”

The conversation dies at the doorstep, good natures banter and smiles fluttering away on the breeze, no pretenses now. In case we'd been in any doubt that this was the place, the wooden door has been decorated with bloody fingerprints. The prints form the shape of a single deep red eye, with the glass circle of a spy-hole in the center serving as a pupil. I see you.

I reach out with my thoughts, trying to sense the vacuum presence of this half-crazed man, in many ways my double but in others a different species. I feel nothing.
Will you try to fight me, or will you gaze into the darkness in my eyes with your own and see that it's all over for you now?

“
Mate?” Marcus points at the window on the front of the flat, at the fat iridescent flies careering in as others weave out drunk and gorged.

I drive my shoulder into the hard door, smudging off old blood with my white shirt and smashing the flimsy lock away from its housing. The interior is bare and squalid, the floorboards exposed but not like the ones where I live, these are dirty and untreated absorbing light where mine reflect it and they rob the small space of all vitality. There are sharp carpet gripper strips exposed and still nailed in place along the skirting boards. I kick open the internal doors as I go, door handles slamming back off furniture and walls, no need to shout out our presence even if I could speak right now he'll already know that we're here.

Strangely, the first thing that I notice in the room is not the blood or the mutilated body, although I am of course aware of its presence on the floor, it is the sun streaming through the open sash window. A fat orb weaver spider is in the center of the opening, its web kissed into golden threads by the light. Flies lay placid in the aftermath of gory banqueting, some are too bloated to fly and rest stupidly on the sill, others are stuck to adhesive threads unable to struggle, wheezing and awaiting a silk cocoon and the vampire sting of an eight-legged death.

Marcus' intake of breath as he enters the room pulls me back away from the details. The shushing sound coming from his pursed lips could be the beginning of an expletive or an attempt to soothe us both in the face of this obscenity. The grotesque thing laid out like an exhibition piece before us had once been Brett Dodds – the Fanged Man. That was before the machetes reduced him to a bloodied inhuman carcass.

He is naked, on his knees, but body slumped backwards and mouth open wider than should be possible, inch long fangs bared in a simian scream. A closer inspection reveals the slits in the corners that stretch the agonized grimace into this cavern of gore, and the chop of a blade into the spinal column at the base of the brain that allows the head to loll backwards and the jaws to hinge open so unnaturally. This is tableau – a display for us to find. The frenzy controlled by men who know death's face like their own.

I am reminded of clinging images from the past that stopped me in my tracks; a triptych by Francis Bacon, slaughterhouse chic in those tormented forms. Here are the purple brown aromas that the cruel compelling art only suggested – we are all only meat in the end. The soundtrack a buzzing drone that if left would strip him back to featureless bone. Here is your monster, a psychotic abomination composed of claws and teeth and madness wrapped in skin, now stripped and butchered. I can see the self-inflicted scarring on his chest, a livid phoenix carved into the flesh, a short rebirth and then death again.

They tracked him down first, doors opening for them that would slam in the face of a uniform. Now they taunt you with your failure, denying you this chance at some sort of closure, showing you how easily they can take this life away and by implication how easily they believe they could take yours too.

I am in a trance now, nothing else here except me and that dead man that could have been me in a different existence. Looking into his pale filmy eyes I see reflected the white lenses of the smiling murderer who I know did this. The swelling rage inside me is colder than the broken body of Brett Dodds.

Chapter 15

I cannot hear the world around me in the aftermath of the discovery of Brett Dodd's body. I have a vague awareness of a voice that must be Marcus, a slight pressure on my shoulder that could be his hand, but the words are lost in the ether and only the impressions of tone and cadence remain. I feel like the hand is holding me upright and clutching me to the soft insubstantial tendrils of the real world at the same time. Please don't let go, I want to say, I might not be able to come back if you let me drift away; but my lips are sealed as if stitched shut and my tongue is stuck fast to the floor of my mouth like a pin to a magnet.

I help to cordon off the scene, retreating outside and retrieving police tape from the car, a mute on the exterior, accepted by the arriving Criminal Investigation Department and Crime Scene Investigators, as shock at the horrors inside the flat. I am aware that it is not the case at all, that I needed to catch Dodds myself, to look into his eyes whilst there was still light in them and see for myself whether there was something in them that I recognized I wanted to catch him, to visit pain on him if he decided to fight, to kill him if it meant exorcising certain demons. Most of all I needed to show myself that he wasn't like me at all.

The scene quickly becomes clogged as more people arrive, death drawing a different swarm now to displace the first. In my eyes it plays out like time lapse imagery; everybody bustling, smoking, talking and joking at a speed ten times my own.

There are fragments of conversation gradually pulling me out of the silence, emerging from those that are processing the scene as well as from the speculating crowd that is beginning to gather at the edge of the police cordon. The words buzz into my consciousness as I try to chase them away; I don't want distraction now I need space to think through things clearly. 

"Apparently it's the psycho that's been ripping up the tarts in there."

"So what's happened to him then?"

"Don't know, but there's a crime scene van, so either he's dead or they've just found a couple more under the floorboards." A nasty appreciative laugh from the others listening to the self appointed reporter in the crowd.

"Might mean that the rest think twice before turning tricks in my front garden every night. Natural selection if you ask me; apparently he didn't attack any decent women, just the junkie slags."

"Why do you reckon he did it?"

"Probably got sick of seeing them around like everybody else round here and flipped out. Perhaps he caught something from one of their discarded needles when he went out to fetch his paper in."

"Shame if he's dead then, there's still a few more walking around when the sun goes down. Reckon we should advertise for a new one – wanted street cleaner." Cue more of the nasty laughter rising from ignorant mouths.

Eventually I find myself ushered away from the chaos, instructions being given for Marcus to deliver me home. 

"Aww, is the big tough police man upset by a bit of blood and guts?' The mocking words directed at me as Marcus puts a placating arm around me and ushers me into the car. 

For once he does not need to worry about a potentially explosive response to the taunts, from me; I feel as if I have had all of the blood drained from my body and that I have now joined the ranks of the walking dead. I'm numbed as if anesthetized. 

I ignore the jeers that start up in response to the first vindictive shout, and retreat further back inside myself again, processing what has happened and how I feel about it. Strange how you can devote all of your working hours to the assistance and protection of others, but still end up hated by the total strangers you swore to protect. I duck into the car and pull the door closed.

My last image of the scene is the excited animated faces of the crowd reveling in this drama unfolding on their doorstep. They begin to crane their necks for a better view as the covered body is removed on a stretcher, the thick material failing to hide a bloodied hand that splays its fingers out from one side.. The car rocks me gently, holding me in a wrap-around embrace, the smell of new leather driving the wet red stench of ripe blood away for now.

* * *

“
I beat him like he was a dog.”

There are heavy tears in the old man's ice blue eyes and years of sorrow pressing down on the vocal chords strangling his deep voice.

“
He was a frail child, always sniveling because somebody had taken something from him or given him a bloody nose. He came to me, his own father, for comfort and protection and I was disgusted at his weakness. I tried to knock him into shape, to toughen up his hide for the vicious world out there.”