Introduction:
Hello there,
Welcome back to the Midnite Market of Malevolence. For issue two of this series of terrifying tales I have for you a horror/thriller/crime story based during the tail end of The Troubles. I initially wrote this story for a short story competition that was to be judged by Benjamin Percy, who is a writer I respect a lot, but I didn’t get shortlisted. For shame.
I still liked the story though and thought you would all too. So please do give it a read and a share with your friends and enemies if you liked it. Also, if you are wondering what happened to the Ghost of Simon Cowell. I killed him with a rock for stealing my socks.
Driving in Circles:
A perfect night for mania as a full moon tucked behind a blanket of wispy clouds hang above Belfast, spots of light touching the streets below. A car sits on Lower Shankill Road surrounded by Unionist murals dedicated to fallen paramilitaries, the ultimate honour for any young man on this side of the Peace Wall; a mural paid for in blood. Northern Ireland is British, and that’s a cause worth dying for. Lights off, the engine purrs as the driver lights a cigarette with the in-car lighter. The smell of burning tobacco strangles the air and the front-seat passenger hands a shadowy steel Beretta into the back seat.
“Right, Conleth. This is the spot. Get in, do the business and get the fuck out. We’ll be waiting here.” Explains the man in a strong Dublin accent. Dessie Maguire didn’t grow up on the streets of Belfast, but he’s made it his home for the past twenty years. Self-imposed exile over the border after shooting an unarmed security van driver in a raid gone wrong.
Conleth stared down at the gun in Dessie’s hand. He’d never seen a gun before. Marty Moran had brought a bullet to school once and paraded it around like Al Capone.
“It’s me Uncles but don’t tell anyone I have it!” He said. Conleth held the bullet in his hand that day, but bullets are nothing, just metal and powder without something to make them useful. That very thing now waits for Conleth to grab hold of it. He hesitated for a moment, wondered how he got here and pondered ways to get out of the situation, but those thoughts came and went like a racecar. Everybody knows of Dessie McKenna, whether through respect or fear, and everyone knows what you’re getting yourself into if you get involved with him.
Conleth reached out and grabbed a tight grip of the gun. He’d sealed his fate when he climbed into the back seat of the car.
“Are you sure this is him?” Conleth stuttered, his words cracking out of his arid throat.
Dessie and the driver looked at each other. They exchanged no words, but both knew what the other was thinking. They’d done this dance countless times before. Today was just another day clocking in and hoping to clock out at a reasonable time.
“Listen, Conleth. Nothing happens around here without Billy Scanlon knowing about it. He might not have pulled the trigger, but he sure as hell made the call. I can promise you that, son. He’s a butcher, no two-ways about it and if we don’t do something about it, he’ll bury a lot more people’s brothers. Our people.” Dessie stated, a reassuring hand squeezing Conleth’s shoulder.
“Now go and serve your community.”
Conleth nodded, pulled his scarf up over his nose, and hopped out of the car. A tsunami of thoughts and worries crashed around his brain, but they couldn’t halt his march. When you agreed to do a job for Dessie McKenna, whether it was picking his winnings up from the bookies or shooting a UVF leader dead in his own home; you did it.
Conleth bent down into a crouch and headed towards Billy’s home, almost tripping over the front garden fence as he stepped over it. He stopped and took deep breaths to compose himself; the pistol vibrating in his shaky hands. Focus, Conleth. It’s you or him, he thought to himself, a feeble rallying call to ease his nerves that did little. Conleth surveyed what he could of the house as he approached. Two front rooms, one on either side of the door, but only the room to the right had a light on. The curtains were closed, but the room was alive with chatter from the occupants or the television.
Conleth crept towards the front door and grabbed hold of the handle. The thought that the door could be locked hadn’t occurred to him until the moment he pushed down on the handle. His heart jumped around his chest as panic grabbed hold of him. What does he do if they locked the door? Smash a window? Sneak round the back? Knock the door and hope to Jesus, Mary and Joseph that Billy opens it? He couldn’t go back to the car with a simple “sorry the door was locked. Let’s go home”. He might as well turn the gun on himself in that situation. He was so focused on overthinking Plan A, he never considered Plan B. Though he wouldn’t need it; luck was on his side as the door pulled back the latch and creaked open.
Conleth stepped through the door, and into the vinyl floored hall. His eyes darted around the room, assessing his new surroundings. He spotted stairs at the back and off to the left, with a door leading to the kitchen over at the right. Directly to his left was a door to the unlit room and to the right lay the previously scouted living room. The sound of Only Fools and Horses emanated from the television and out into the hall through the slightly ajar door. Not the worst last show for someone to watch, Conleth thought. The panic that strangled him had eased, and his rapid thoughts had slowed. He stepped over the threshold and accepted the reality of the situation.
Conleth shuffled himself over to the living room door and took a moment to collect himself. After three deep breaths, he stood up straight and barged into the room with the pistol held in the air, ready to shoot. Billy was nowhere to be seen, the gun aimed solely at the head of a young boy sitting on the floor playing with Action Man figures. The boy didn’t move. Frozen to his spot, he sat and stared down the barrel of the gun. His wide-eyes screamed with fear but he made no sound. Conleth matched the boy’s stillness. He felt neither calm nor panic, neither fearless nor fearful. Conleth stood as stiff as marble and just as lifeless.
“What the fuck?!?” a panicked voice screamed. The scream grabbed Conleth out of stasis. He spun to his left and pointed the gun towards a balding man in tattered builder’s attire, standing in the doorway between the living room and kitchen, clasping a cup of tea in his hand. He fumbled the cup and dropped it as Conleth pulled the trigger. The click of the jammed gun drowned out by the smashing cup.
“No, fuck! NO!” Conleth pulled the trigger again-and-again, but the bullets weren’t leaving home. Billy, shocked to be still standing, dove through the air towards Conleth and the boy. Conleth froze once more. Billy crashed down between them and shielded his son while the boy continued staring at Conleth.
Conleth muttered a feeble apology and fled back out the front door into the dead of night. As he fled Billy’s house, so to do his getaway vehicle, wheels spun on the tarmac and sped down the road out-of-sight from a gang of raging locals descending upon the unknown vehicle sitting in their estate. The foolish young man stood alone in the garden of his failed murder target, broken weapon in hand and a raging mob now turning their attention towards him.
Conleth considered raising his broken weapon at the crowd. It was banjaxed, but they needn’t know that. In the end, the risk was too great. He placed the gun inside his jacket, pivoted on the spot and made a break for Billy’s back garden, crashing through the fence’s gate and into the garden. He darted through the garden with no clue of where he was going. He could only run and hope to formulate a plan. Conleth was sure he heard a gunshot ring out from behind him. He didn’t have the privilege of looking back. If they’d shot him, he would collapse eventually, but until then he’d soldier on. He leapt over a fence into a neighbouring garden, ran through that garden and leapt into another, then another and another.
Conleth stopped in the final garden of the stretch of houses and hunkered over to catch his breath. His lungs felt like balloons ready to burst in his chest. He remembered an old football coach shouting at the players to stand up straight when catching their breath, not to hunker over and inhale the ‘dirty’ air they just exhaled. Conleth didn’t listen then or now.
“Fucking asthma,” he wheezed.
The track of gardens and fenced hurdles had ended. A road awaited on the other side of the final fence. A car pulled up on the road and the doors swung open in tandem. His route to safety blocked forced Conleth down the garden in search of safety. At the end of the garden, he found a locked shed. The thick silver padlock laughed at his panicked face shining upon its surface.
“Check the gardens. The wee wanker couldn’t have gone far,” a voice barked.
“Shit, shit, shit!”
Panicking and with danger closing in, Conleth ran for the back door of the house and stepped into the utility room on the other side. The sound of the door erupting open alerted a man in the kitchen watching TV. The man leapt up from his seat with balled fists raised in front of his face. Conleth pulled the gun out from inside his jacket and pointed it at the man, lifting his finger to his lips. The man stood still, taking slow, deep breaths. His fists opened and pointed to the sky, his bottom lip trembled.
A knock came from the back door and the man’s fearful face morphed into confusion. Conleth kept his eyes and gun on the man and nodded in the door’s direction. The man got the message and opened the door to a flustered neighbour standing in his garden. Conleth crouched down, out of sight behind the kitchen door.
“Joe, why are you in my garden?” the man asked.
“Sorry, Fred. We’ve a wild Provo wandering around the estate. He ran off through these gardens. Have you seen anything yourself?” Joe replied. Fred bit down on his trembling bottom lip and shook his head.
“Me? Have I seen anything? Eh...no, no, I haven’t. He might have run through me garden but I’ve been watching tele. Wouldn’t have seen anything meself, unfortunately.”
Joe poked his head up and around Fred, scoping out any angle in the house he could from the doorway.
“Is Michelle home?”
“No, she’s working nights this week,” the shifty homeowner responded, a rare moment of truth easing his nerves slightly.
“Fair enough. Well, if you see anything, you know where to find us.” Joe threw a nod towards Fred, placed his hands in his parka’s pockets and left out back through the side-gate he entered from.
Fred eased the door closed and leaned against it, his forehead resting on his arm. Heavy breathing resumed.
“My daughter is sleeping upstairs. Please, don’t hurt her. You can take whatever you want, but we don’t have much.” Fred said. If the boy was going to shoot, there was little he could do to stop him.
“I won’t hurt you. I just need to know my best way out of here without running into those gobshites,” Conleth replied, lowering his weapon down by his side.
“The Peace Wall is out there behind us. The hedge at the back of the garden is thick, but you can squeeze through it and down into the ditch behind and out to the road on the other side.”
“Cheers.” Conleth replied and left.
The hedge was thick but manageable, the ditch behind it though had been much deeper than Conleth expected, almost tumbling into it as he pushed through the hedge. He slid down into the ditch at a snail’s pace and climbed up the other side, hunkered down behind some badly kept bushes, and assessed the area. There was nowhere to hide on the road, Conleth had to be sure to pick the right time to make a break for it, a British Army jeep drove by the ditch, its powerful headlights shone into Conleth’s eyes and stole his sight for a moment but whoever was in the vehicle hadn’t spotted him.
With no sign of any other vehicles around, Conleth made his play. Leaping out from the bushes and sprinting across the road towards the Peace Wall, the monolith of murals stretched down both sides of the dimly lit street and out of sight into the shadows. The closest gate to him was northwards. He turned on a swivel and belted it up the road, tearing across the tarmac as fast as he could. Conleth had been sport mad all his life, but he’d never sprinted as much as he had tonight. His legs ached, his shins pulsed, and his ankles swelled. His heart and lungs bulged in his chest, brushing his ribs. The night was late and the gates of the Peace Wall could be closed, but still he ran; he ran without giving thought to his fears. He ran because he had to. He only wished he had done so when it mattered. Conleth rued his decision to join Dessie’s crusade. He was angry and desperate for retribution, easy prey for vultures like Dessie Maguire. Conleth shook his head in disappointment at his past self and the choices he’d made. He should have never shaken Dessie’s hand that day, he should have mourned like the rest. It was too late for that now. He could shake his head until the cows came home. It wouldn’t un-shake Dessie’s hand.
He wasn’t sure what he’d do if he survived. He couldn’t stay in Belfast, that’s for sure. They’d come looking for him. He couldn’t trust that rat bastard Dessie, either. He left him to die and he may look to finish the job himself if he learns Conleth survived. Set it up as a revenge hit and turn him into a martyr so he could shake the hands of more angry lads looking for payback. His best option was to flee to Glasgow and get a job on a fishing boat like his cousin Seanie, not a life he would have imagined for himself but a life far removed from Belfast and the violence that had engulfed it. Tears welled up in his eyes, thinking about what he’d almost done… what he had done, only to be saved by a faulty firearm. Had it not been for that, he would have murdered a man in cold blood right in front of his child and in a few years’ time somebody would come to shake that boy’s hand.
Shaky legs continued to run, each ache begging Conleth to stop and rest. He refused, wiping the tears from his eyes and pushing himself forward. He tried to clear his mind as much as he could. He couldn’t focus on his future or past right now. He could only focus on the task at hand; surviving. Once he’d crossed the partition to relative safety, he could worry about his future, though that crossing into safety wasn’t as close as it seemed. A hulking mass of metal locked shut greeted him at the checkpoint zone. Near the locked gate stood a group of soldiers. Beside them was the car that had brought Conleth over the partition. The two other occupants sat on the damp tarmac in handcuffs. The soldiers hadn’t spotted Conleth; their focus lay with their conversation and the two paddy prisoners they had apprehended. One soldier sat on the bonnet of the car while the others stood over the prisoners, each smoking a cigarette. One of them playfully kicked Dessie on the ground.
“That’s no way to treat a law-abiding citizen.” Dessie whinged. The soldiers laughed.
The gate was a no-go but Conleth refused to lie down and quit; he was getting home either by foot or by casket. Staying out from the glow of nearby streetlights and the gaze of the soldiers, he crouched down and snuck across the checkpoint lot. A smile snuck its way across his face for the first time that night as he thought of those two weasels in handcuffs. Even a night from hell can have moments of heaven sprinkled in.
The Peace Wall checkpoints were the easiest way to cross back-and-forth between the city’s two sides, but they weren’t the only way round. Conleth thought back to his schooldays, and the hidden routes through fields, quarries and tunnels he and the other Catholic kids would use to move between areas when collecting material for bonfires. It had been years since he needed to use them but he still knew them as well as the Celtic’s European Cup winning team, there was a route nearby it was one of the longer ones but it was near and that’s all that mattered, even if he had to run back to the very place he was fleeing. Back into the fire.
A full moon still hung in the night sky, wispy clouds had thickened, but the moon could still see down at the world below. It had watched Conleth as he fled from danger, and it watched him now as he ran back towards it. He had no other choice. To get to his route to safety, he needed to face danger head on. While fleeing he could run, crouch and hide as the cloak of a hood and half-face mask hid his identity but now his hood and mask were down as he stood up straight and walked back into the estate as if he was walking to the shops for milk and bread.
Crouch-walking through a residential area would do a little in the way of blending in, add a hood and mask to the mix, and even a blind drunk could tell you were an intruder. Conleth walked along the empty street with the confidence of a man who was meant to be there, but unbeknownst to him, the empty streets weren’t because of a school night. The gang members in the area had sent word out for all residents to get inside and stay inside lest they want to bring trouble to their door.
He had only to walk through the estate to the old quarry behind and the adjacent field blocked off by a busted chain-link fence to reach the route home he so desperately craved. His shoulders dropped and his breathing steadied with each step along the vacant path. He thought the trip was going to be easier than he first feared, but his pursuers had manufactured those calm feelings to lower his guard. Like a fish hypnotised by the light of a predator, the empty street hypnotised Conleth, but eventually the light goes out and the predator strikes. Keys turned in an ignition and a waking engine roared, headlights flicked on, and beamed down at Conleth. He stopped on the spot at the sight of the car blocking his path to safety. He hadn’t time to think of an alternative as the screeching wheels sang on the tarmac and the car propelled forward.
Up above, a chasm split the row of terraced houses in two, forming a thin alleyway to safety. Conleth took off running again. With the car fast approaching, he pounced on the alleyway, sliding through the gap and shooting into the shadows. The wail of burning rubber rang out from behind him.
“Get out and get after the bastard. NOW!” screamed the driver as car doors slammed to a close at the alley’s entrance. Conleth didn’t look back for a second. He knew they were stepping into the shadows. He knew they were on his tail, but he was out in front and he was leading the dance.
Conleth approached a fork in the T-shaped alley. Instinct drove him to the left, but he approached the corner too fast, flew around it and lost his footing on the uneven, pebble stone peppered surface. His palm shredded across the stones as he flung it down to ease his fall. His blood-soaked hand throbbed as he clambered to his feet and continued to run. The sound of footsteps behind him got louder. The end of the alley was nearing, blossoming out into four gardens like a suburban flower, instinct grabbed hold of the wheel again and drove him to the furthest right garden, three bins sat beneath a garage roof a storey-high on a two-storey home. The outer and middle bins stood firm as Conleth leapt up on them, empty glass containers and bottles dinging off each other among the multitude of rubbish. The last bin, newly emptied or unused, trembled beneath his feet. The lid collapsed in under the weight of him bouncing off the surface, propelling him onto the galvanised roof. His legs dangled down as his arms lay soaking in a puddle keeping him up, his friend Mac had told him to do more pull-ups in the gym, he wished he’d listened, barely mustering the energy to climb up on the roof, he stood to his feet and a gunshot rang out.
Across the road lay a field, torn asunder by machinery and closed-off by temporary fencing. Conleth fell from the roof and onto the bonnet of the car below, crashing into the front windshield. A web of cracks flowed out from where he had landed while the car’s alarm blared. Conleth rolled off the bonnet and toppled onto the driveway, labouring back to his feet. His side swelled and stung and blood dripped down onto the pavement he had just climbed up from, but he didn’t notice. He lumbered across the road toward an adjacent field, now just another building site, torn asunder by machinery and closed-off by temporary fencing.
The builders hadn’t secured the fences properly; Conleth lifted one up and released the hook that hugged it to the fence beside it. Pallets, scaffolding, bricks, machinery, and barely built homes cluttered the site. He remembered when he was a kid, his cousin - the fisherman - had stolen a JCB with his friends and used it as a battering ram to break into a clothes shop. That’s how he ended up in Scotland, that’s how he started catching fish. Conleth wondered if anyone wanted to be a fisherman or were they all just running from repercussions.
Just past the myriad of materials and machinery lay a relic of the past, a barn that had slept in the field for decades. The farmer was dead, his crops and animals gone too, but among the articles of the field’s destruction lay the barn, rotting and derelict. The roof had collapsed long ago, but still it stood. As he approached the barn, Conleth gazed at its imposing size. From a distance, it looked big, but up close, it was a behemoth. A wooden monolith standing alone in a dying field, one of its doors hung from a single hinge. Conleth struggled to move it aside to enter.
Inside, the barn was desolate. Rusty chains hung down from the roof, clinking together by gusts of wind poking through holes in the walls. On the ground lay sawdust and withered hay, a broken ladder led to nowhere at the back. In the middle of the barn lay a chest, obsidian black with red-tinted metal squeezing it together. Conleth swore it emitted a sound, a beckoning call for him to approach, one which he obliged, stepping forward and onto the dry rot planks hidden beneath a pile of pale hay, their only colour gifted to them by Conleth’s dripping blood. The planks snapped beneath him and he tumbled into darkness. If the chest had truly called out for him, it was now laughing at him as he plunged into obscurity, crashing onto the muddy surface below the barn with a thud.
“Ugh...” Conleth groaned, all he could muster while face down in mud. Eventually, he climbed back to his feet, dazed and disorientated. He looked up to the hole and saw how far he’d fallen. It was a significant drop and not one he’d be able to climb back up, not without the broken ladder in the barn at least. Conleth’s wound wailed on his side again. The shock of the fall had worn off, and he had finally noticed the blood. There was so much blood. It stained the hand he used to inspect the wound a slick crimson, as if he dipped his hand in a bucket of paint. He was battered, bloody, and bruised. He wasn’t even sure he was alive, but he was standing, so he carried on down the only route afforded to him. As was the case so many times tonight, Conleth had no options on where to go. He could only go forward and there was no use looking back.
The narrow space beneath the barn was allergic to light. Whatever light had found its way down there had done so through the hole in the barn. Every step Conleth took plunged him deeper into isolation and uncertainty. The enclosed route seemed like an old mine shaft or a long forgotten medieval tunnel, the kind that royals and nobles used to flee an invasion or the kind that invading forces used to attack in the dead of night, ending any battle before it began. Whatever it was mattered little. The tunnel reeked of death.
Most people can’t describe the smell of death, but when it meets their nose, they know exactly what is. It tears through your nostrils and strangles your senses. That smell, that sick, anomalous stench, dominated this tunnel and overwhelmed the senses. Conleth pulled his mask up over his nose again, but it didn’t matter. The smell had already clung to his nose like a parasite. The further Conleth walked, the worse the smell got. He knew he would soon approach the source. Light found its way back into the tunnel, a beam poked its face through the wall of darkness up ahead, Conleth had been taking his time through the tunnel, holding a hand out for balance against a wall and inching himself across the rocks beneath his feet but the glow of light that gifted him back his sight had kicked him into gear. With the thought that a way out may only lay up ahead, he ploughed through the shaft and out the other side.
Behind the blanket of light lay an open area with another slim tunnel on the other side, darkness seeping out from its opening. The blood-soaked sand beneath Conleth’s feet pulled him down and rose to his ankles, his dripping wound further dyed the sand. Chains on the walls held bones in their grip. On the ground lay the remnants of a shattered rib-cage, and in the centre lay a carcass flung across a stone table. Conleth approached the body. The smell intensified as he did. Despite the rot and decay, there was a sense of familiarity that Conleth couldn’t shake. The man was naked and grey, his skin ice cold as Conleth reached out and grabbed his shoulder. Conleth knew who it was before flipping the corpse over, but he hoped he was wrong.
“It can’t be you,” he said... but it was. Conleth flipped the man over and wailed out in pain. Looking back at him was the desolate corpse of his brother. His sunken face devoid of eyes, woodlouse swarmed around inside the sockets. A centipede squeezed out from a bullet hole in his neck and writhed down towards his open chest, cut down the middle and flayed open. A slew of insects helped themselves to his rotting organs. His heart was missing.
Tears rolled down Conleth’s face and soaked his mask. He screamed out again; he damned anyone he could; he screamed, and he screamed. The light in the room dimmed, the shadows from the tunnels poured out. Waves of obsidian nothingness crashed into the room and suffocated the light. Darkness crawled across the walls and roof, pulling everything into its never-ending mass. Conleth squeezed his brother’s rotting corpse in his arms as the darkness reached out and grabbed hold of him.
A perfect night for mania as a full moon tucked behind a blanket of thick clouds hung above Belfast, spots of light touching the streets below. A car sits on Falls Road surrounded by Republican murals dedicated to fallen soldiers, the ultimate honour for any young man on this side of the Peace Wall; a mural paid for in blood. The North of Ireland is Irish, and that’s a cause worth dying for. Lights off, the engine purrs as the driver lights a thin cigar with a Zippo. The smell of burning tobacco strangles the air as the front-seat passenger hands a stainless steel Beretta into the back seat.
“Right, Callum. This is the spot…”