Ivory (9 page)

Martin shook
his head. “I don’t want that.” Martin felt his own anger take hold
and he decided he didn’t have to talk to King. “Ivory, that’s not
what I want at all. I will pay you for sitting for me, just
sitting. Being painted. I will pay you the same as what you would
earn on the street if you like.”

Suddenly Ivory
was standing separately from King, a fluid movement that left King
startled. She smiled and nodded at Martin’s offer.

“
Hang on, I negotiate the deals here.” King lunged at her, his
rough hand landed on her shoulder. Her arm circled and shrugged off
his grip without any apparent effort, but seemingly with enough
force to send him stumbling into a wall under his own
momentum.

“
No, fucking way! That did not just happen!” He peeled himself
from the wall and burrowed a stare of pure hate into Martin’s
flesh. “You want her? You can fucking ‘ave her.” His fingers
snatched round the neck of the whiskey bottle and he slashed it
through the air.

Martin and
Candy yelped and ducked, covering their faces as the body of the
bottle exploded against the chimney breast. Ivory held her ground
only turning her face to avoid the flying shards. It didn’t seem
the instinctual recoil that Martin and Candy had just shared, but a
motion of calculated defence. King held the bottle out like a
jagged bouquet and jerkily thrust the ragged remains of the bottle
in Martin’s general direction.

Martin’s
bowels loosened and his sphincter burned. He stammered around
unformed objections and pleas, and staggered backwards as King
closed in and the weapon became focussed on him as a target.

Candy jumped
from one foot to another in terror and impotence, her only
contribution was to thicken the air with curses at King to distract
or stop him. It didn’t work. He came around the glass table
slashing and thrusting his blossom of jagged petals at him, forcing
him into the bay window and cornered him.

“
I am gonna make you so fucking ugly you won’t even be able to
pay someone to fuck you!”

King stood
glaring at him over the weapon. The rage in those eyes being
directed at him was enough for him to feel mortal fear, but
consideration of the broken bottle and the taut arm ready to lunge
it into him brought him close to blacking out. King held the pose,
outwardly savouring his despair, as if it was charging up his power
and ability to visit the cruelty of pain and disfigurement.

King roared.
It was the most horrifying noise Martin had ever heard because he
knew in that nanosecond that it was a primal venting of the rage
that drove the jagged shards at his throat. It made contact with
Martin’s arm, snagging on the cuff and sleeve of his thick wax
jacket. Somehow he had broken the paralysis that seized him and
blocked the attack. The white-hot pain was instant and robbed him
of all his strength, and the force behind the blow sent his arm
away from defending his face. He clutched his arm to his body and
sobbed over the blood welling and dripping from the fresh rents in
his coat. He became light headed, his legs springy, causing him to
stumble back. His heels scuffed against the skirting board of the
bay window and his head struck against the glass. There was no
retreat. No escape. King drew back his arm and struck his weapon
out.

Chapter Six

The shards
plunged, spliced and gouged flesh. A gruff yell strangled into an
agonised scream. Martin stood paralysed with fear and confusion at
what had just unfolded before him.

King clutched
his thigh. Stunned. Only able to react to his pain. The arm that
held the bottle hung limp at his side while the fingers of his
other hand frantically danced and drummed at the wound in an
attempt to staunch the flow of blood. Ivory stood close to King
with a blank detached stare. No emotional reaction at having turned
King’s attack on himself with a lighting speed grab of his arm,
followed by a graceful but powerful twist of his wrist so that his
own force sent the bottle into his leg.

“
Fuck Fuck, FUCK!” King whimpered and shouted through gritted
teeth as he continued to try and staunch the bleeding, hopping on
one leg and throwing his head back as if the pain was a beast on
his back that he could shrug off. King slumped against the wall and
sucked lungfuls of air in against the pain. Martin took the moment
to inspect his own injury, the cuff of his coat was punctured and
bloodied in several areas, but his wrist had only shallow thin
cuts. They were painful but they were scratches compared with
King’s injury. The leg of King’s jogging bottom was almost
completely dark red below the wound and clung to his upper thigh in
its wetness.

Suddenly King
launched himself from the wall, anger and hatred snarling his face
up. He grabbed Ivory by the jaw, bloodying her face under his
crimson grip. He laughed manically and triumphantly at having
caught her, and tugged her head roughly to one side. It happened so
quickly that Martin stood, stunned, yet there was no reaction in
Ivory’s face, as though she had no fear of him.

“
Fucking turn on King would you? You girls all know that
deserves punishment.”

King brought
the jagged end of the bottle up into Ivory’s face. Instinctually
Martin yelled in horror and crossed the room in two strides and
shoved King as soon as he was in reach. Martin’s blundering lunge
jogged King’s aim and the jagged glass overshot her face and
snagged in her hair, but King’s fist and the neck of the bottle
struck her cheek. Ivory did not recoil from the blow, but seemed to
toss her head away from it and arched herself backwards, staying
ahead of the attack. Her move caused King’s lunge to stretch
further than he was prepared for, and he continued to stumble off
balance from the momentum of Martin’s shove. Ivory stepped
gracefully around him as King fell.

The air
whistled, the singular noise becoming a wheezing howl that
shattered into multiple unearthly voices screaming out. King’s
stumble became an exaggerated tumble and the screams stopped dead
as King fell, leaving only his cry of terror in their wake. He
landed at the centre of the coffee table and passed straight
through, the glass splintered into long blades catapulted inwards
by his weight, turning the entire surface of the table into a giant
man-trap. The glass sheared flesh, hacked through organs dug into
bone. Blood dashed and sprayed in every direction as each blade of
glass simultaneously cut and skewered him.

Candy, Ivory
and Martin stood motionless at the sight before them. King lay in a
twisted tortured position. Large triangles of glass stuck out of
his chest. Another wider piece stood out from his abdomen, almost
shearing him in two. All the peaks bloodied and gored in scarlet. A
criss-cross of scratches transformed King’s bared flesh into a map
of agony. A piece of glass winked from his eye giving the
impression of twitching life.

Candy was the
first to react by launching a spray of vomit through fingers that
had tried to seal her mouth against screaming. She fell to her
knees and heaved until she could heave no more. Yet Ivory stood
motionless, with her face sprayed and smeared with blood but free
of reaction, her cold black eyes glittering with the orange and red
light of the room. For the briefest moment Martin found himself
frightened by her hellish vision, until the context of her
appearance returned with King being the aggressor in attempting to
kill Martin and nearly shredding Ivory’s face.

Martin’s eyes fell upon the bloody body again. His mind
trying to understand the last seconds of King’s life. He didn’t
understand how
Ivory had managed to escape
King’s grip, how King had gone from the aggressor to the
victim,
how the table had done so much
damage, and what had been the source of the scream that had haunted
Martin once again.

His
concentration was shattered when King flew to his feet as if pulled
by wires. Glass tinkled and sparkled around him as it tumbled from
his body. King’s monstrous face twisted around a wordless roar, his
mouth awash with blood. He threw himself at Martin and they both
fell. Martin’s eyes clenched as he struck the floor, the air forced
from his lungs, whistling in the air. It felt different to being
winded. He couldn’t catch his breath to replace the supply that had
been knocked from him. He could still hear his breath hissing out
of him, but as he swallowed mouthfuls of air he realised he wasn’t
keeping it.

He opened his eyes and the twisted, scarred, hellish face of
King stared into his, blood and saliva oozing from his inanely
grinning mouth. King lay on top of him his embrace holding him
still. Martin looked down his body for the hissing gurgling sound
and saw that their bodies were joined by four glass shard that
skewered them together like meat on a spit. Three of the jagged
shards met his chest and nailed his lungs to the floor boards. He
wheezed his last breaths as King’s blood mingled with Martin’s and
King breathed his last insane words;
“My
blood flows in your veins now. We are the same, you and
I.”

Chapter Seven

Martin
convulsed in phantom pain and awoke. He found himself staring at
the familiar wall of the bedroom he shared with Jenny. Sweat beaded
on his forehead as big as rain drops. He panted for breath and
found that he had no trouble taking. He looked down his body under
the damp duvet. His hairs were matted to his flabby chest and
stomach, but with sweat not blood. Of course there wouldn’t be
blood. He lowered himself back onto the pillow and glanced over at
Jenny who was sleeping. She had become used to his night-time
restlessness over the past year so he hadn’t woken her. He was
relieved. He didn’t need her fawning over him to talk about what
was wrong.

He rolled over
and turned his back to her and stared at muslin drapes backlit with
the pale orange light of night time in the city. His nightmare had
brought back the events of the evening. As if the actual events
hadn’t been frightening enough to revisit, his mind had created an
alternative ending to the horror. King had not risen from the dead.
He had hoped for movement, some miracle that the glass had missed
every vital organ so that he wouldn’t have a man’s death on his
conscience, but King’s ruined body had laid weeping blood across
the floor for the corrupted soul that had festered within.

He was
dead.

Martin had
been involved in a man’s death.

Ivory had seemed unaffected by it. There was no look of
disbelief, no torment of guilt at playing a part in his death, only
a brief cock of her head in a gesture of curiosity at the novelty
of such a death. Candy’s reactions were of a contrasting extreme as
she screamed, howled and sobbed and attempted to drag Ivory from
the scene. However, Ivory resisted her frantic encouragement to
leave as her curiosity seemingly extended to observing Martin’s
paralysis from the disbelief and guilt at being involved in the
killing of another man. Finally, as Martin’s troubled mind accepted
what had happened and the urge to escape took hold, and he began
the frantic calculation of any evidence of his presence, Ivory
smiled at him.
That
smile. It made even less sense to him on this occasion. Was
she that unaffected by what had occurred? She gave into Candy’s
insistence and disappeared out the door.

She was gone
again.

In Ivory’s
absence he found clarity defined from being alone with a dead body.
He took the glass he had held earlier and pocketed it, then
snatched up the folder King had given him to look through. Both
items would hold Martin’s fingerprints. He searched the sparsely
furnished flat and couldn’t find any other portfolios that might
link Ivory to the scene. He couldn’t do much for any hairs or DNA
that Ivory may have left in the bedroom. He didn’t want to think
about King and Ivory in there, not that he needed to as those
moments were already preserved in the photographs in the folder.
Candy’s vomit was also something he couldn’t remove, which was
worrying as it could lead the police to her. Martin was not going
to the police and Ivory seemingly couldn’t communicate, so Candy
was their only vulnerability. He prayed that her presence at King’s
death would dissuade her from wanting to be associated with it.

Martin had
returned to Jenny and explained that he had sustained his injury
slipping on petrol at the petrol station, and cut himself on broken
glass that had been on the forecourt. He had refused to go to
hospital to get it looked at so Jenny had tended to his wounds and
bandaged them. As the evening had closed in and he had lain quietly
in bed, desperate for sleep, the worry had crowded in on him. He
had seen so many detective and forensic shows on TV that he knew
there would be leads that could implicate all three of them being
at the scene. Martin’s blood was one he had forgotten. There must
have been blood on the carpet from his wounds. Although Martin
didn’t have connections with the area, Candy and Ivory did and they
would be leads to him.

Then there was Richard Hadleigh. He was sure this boy was
meant to be the weapon for his destruction. As he had made his
erratic escape through the back streets, he broke out onto York Way
with its mix of shabby Victorian and 20
^th
century industrial
buildings, and narrowly missed a cat and had been forced to swerve
to one side. His headlights lit up the pavement and the long brick
wall that ran the length of the railway track to King’s Cross
station, plucking several loitering pedestrians out from the shadow
of the night. They were spaced out down the street. All male. The
only face he saw was the one immediately framed by his lights.
Richard’s. It had been so shocking to see someone that he had
recognised that Martin’s reaction had been to yank the steering
wheel to one side and slam his foot on the accelerator and tear
away from the moment.