“I’ll
sing you nine, O”
Brothers,
who the fuck would have them? Eddie had always hated his brother
Ronnie, even as kids. He remembered his parents forcing both of them
to Sunday School and being
taught the
tale of Cain and Abel. He got a different message from that than the
teacher tried to give. Cain was the law abiding son, like
Eddie. Cain knew that the animals were filled with the same breath of
life as he, that Abel’s sacrifice of livestock was a blasphemy, and
yet, Abel was the one the Lord had favoured. Cain, the good son, was
not jealous of this, he was enraged by the injustice and had thought,
if animal sacrifice granted
such favour then human sacrifice would bear
greater
rewards.
In
a way Cain
had been right. So
Eddie had
concluded
as
he packed the claw hammer, rope candles and bible into his black
Adidas sports bag. Cain had
been specially protected by God. Those
unique interpretations of the bible fables that had lead him down the
road he was now on. His brother too, to be fair, but Ronnie was, as
with everything in his life, greedy and complacent. When they had bid
Lord Malphus
into
their kitchen, thirty years before, Eddie had been courteous and
humble, as the books had advised. Ronnie, treated the demon
like a barrow-boy, demanding, vaguely
contemptuous and had
the sheer brass neck to
haggle with the creature. Malphus
knew a mark when it saw one and so Ronnie, thinking he’d bettered
that Devil, went off triumphant, high on his own power. Or so he
thought. The high was just like any such drug, addictive. It wasn’t
long before Ronnie was doing the full Crowley kick. Whores, smack,
conversations with the Guardian Angel, all that shit. Eddie
had warned him several times, but Ronnie’s descent into Hell had
already begun, Malphus had merely given him some bait and was slowly
reeling him in, dragging him through the depravity and darkness,
marinading his soul in uncommon debauchery. Eventually Eddie got the
call. Ronnie needed help. Malphus had possessed him.
“Green
grow the rushes, O!”
The
exorcism had been rough. Both were as far from being men of God as
Job (whom, according to Eddie, upon learning what God had done to him
had rended
his garment and rejected Jehovah “I abhor you and this world you
have made, and pity us who liveth within”). Neither was prepared
for Malphus’ tenacity and so, in the end, they just made a deal.
Eddie lifted a baby from its pram as the child’s mother gabbed to
her friends in a supermarket. A host for Malphus. His friend Gordon
Harper knew a really shady guy called Big Skinny and for four grand
the horrible looking weirdo had set up this young Catholic
girl with learning disabilities to take the fall. The beast left the
infant a grey husk and the young woman spent four years in Carstairs
before being packed off to a convent somewhere in Eire. After that,
Eddie, like Pilate, washed his hands of his brother and the whole
affair. Despite cutting all ties with Ronnie after that ugly debacle,
Eddie would hear rumours about his brother; a stint in prison;
trouble with the Thornliebank mob; tales of blood sacrifice.
Eddie shrugged them off, he didn’t know nor did he care. When the
stories all stopped he assumed his brother was dead, until he
appeared on the front of the Daily Record, apparently he was a “Sick
Guru” luring young men and women into his depraved sex and drug
cult, near Dalry. Eddie blamed Ronnie and that journalist for his
mother’s heart-attack and death the following day. He had vowed
that if he ever came across Ronnie again, he’d kill him.
“What
are your nine, O?”
That
day had come. Ronnie hadn’t even been out of Bar-L six months when
he was up to his old tricks again. He’d holed up in a one bedroom
flat in Wine Alley and was, by all accounts, burned out by locals.
He’d ended up in Grimry, working in the Gartland Pub apparently,
which was the first honest work Eddie had ever heard of him doing.
Eddie didn’t care, not until he got the call. “Alright, big
yin?” that familiar contemptible voice had said, the
desperation saturating the sounds. Eddie should have hung up. He
should have told him to fuck off. He should have warned him that if
he ever tried to contact him again he’d get Mr Skinner to tie him
by the throat to the back of a train. Eddie, idiot that he was said
“Whit the fuck do you want, Ronnie?”
Ronnie
had become infested. When he had been a child, he’d had a tapeworm
which somehow had managed to lay eggs in his brain. He’d had
convulsions, had been ill for a long while and, if the truth be told,
had never been the same after that. Some essence had been robbed by
those parasites. What filled him now was no accidental ingestion of
cestodes, but the deliberate possession by all manner of etheric
parasites he could call up from whatever spell-book he could find. He
was riddled with them and as he said “I’ve OD’d on demons.”
Upon
hearing this, Eddie had slammed the phone down. No! It was as simple
as that, his brain, his body, his nerves, even the squirming in his
stomach told him not to go. Let his brother be devoured by the things
he had called up. It would be a fitting end, no one would ever blame
Eddie and the world would be rid of a scourge. And yet… Ronnie
needed put down, it would be a mercy. No one else was going to do it.
Cursing himself for his suicidal sentimentality, he picked up the
sports bag and headed towards Grimry.
“Looks
like I’m my brother’s fucking keeper after all,” he hissed at
the sky as he left his house. As if God was listening to someone like
him.
“Nine
for the nine bright shiners.”
As
its name suggested Grimry was not a pleasant place, mostly it was a
slum, perched on top of a hill that looked across most of the
East-End
of the city. It was an abandoned place, where the tenements were
still stained coal black, having being neglected in the city-wide
renovation policies. The bus dropped Eddie off at the bottom of the
hill, in Murcroft, a hundred yards or so from the Grimry train
station and the notorious White Feathers pub. A long grey concrete
stairway scarred the hill and so Eddie ascended into the district
where his brother was just one of the many dark tragedies hidden
behind filthy windows. On Brond Street, he watched two children –boys
who could not have been older than
five- and a small dog with mange chase rats up and down the
garbage-choked
gutters. Mostly all of the windows on the street were dark or
smashed, any tenants having long since left. A smattering of
houses still remained lit. He quickened his pace along the narrow
road, turning onto Linnock Road, another suffocatingly narrow street
which housed a row of shops; a bookies, take-away, newsagents and
off-licence. It acted as a hub for the people of the area and even
though all were long closed, shuttered for the night, there were
still those who loitered with various intents. Eddie did not like the
scene. There were two little girls arguing over a plastic scooter
beside an overflowing bin. Three shady lads stood under a
street-light, corner-boys punting cheap and nasty hash to the locals.
By the looks of them business was far from booming. A carful
of neds kept them company, blaring noisy pop music out the
windows of their second hand hatch-back. At the other side of the
shops was a gaggle of young women, all sitting on a small wall,
gossiping and smoking. The oldest was no more than twelve, hags in
waiting, he thought. As he approached he decided to speak to the
corner boys but was distracted by an unpleasantly frog-like man who
was walking towards him. “Lookin’ fur somethin’?” The man
asked through phlegm webbed vocal cords.
“Aye.”
Eddie said, curtly.
The
man gave a smile containing blackened remnants of teeth. On his
cheeks, he had some strange skin disorder, or fungus growing, lots of
little white bubbles of flesh that looked like the top of a
cauliflower. “So whit’s yer pleasure? Hash, smack? You want a
girl?” He asked, gesturing to the young teenage girls smoking by
the wall.
Eddie’s
stomach churned. “Naw, for fuck sake, I’m lookin’ for Keller
Row.”
The
sleazy toad gave him a horrified look, which Eddie could not believe,
given his previous question. “Whit wid ye want tae go there fur?”
“Tryin’
tae find my brother, he lives there.” Eddie said losing patience
with this slimy little runt.
“Right,”
the little man croaked. “Go doon this road tae the crossroads at
Graspton Avenue, then take a left doon that tae ye reach a lane on
yer left, cut through there an’ ye’ll come oot facin’ a
laundrette. It’s up an tae the left of that. Jist… be careful,
that place is dodgy.”
“Cheers.”
Eddie said, concerned by what this creepy pimp considered dodgy. He
marched off just as it began to rain. He followed the instructions
and by the time he reached Graspton Avenue he was soaked and the
streets were slick with oily puddles, the gutters became small lakes,
with trash floating on top like a regatta of discarded fag and crisp
packets. At the crossroads, he was startled to find one of the poles
of the street lights had been painted red and tied to it was a goat.
The poor thing was drenched and bleating. Eddie began to feel
trepidation and a sense of dread, far off, like a distant
thunderstorm.
“Eight
for the April rainers.”
The
lane was about five foot wide, an alley between two sets of
dilapidated tenements, each bordered by a rotten crumbling wall. The
alley was bloated with bin bags and overgrown weeds. Underfoot, the
cracked and muddy Victorian cobblestones were slippery and so he
slowed his pace. Something moved, behind him. Eddie felt a surge of
panic as he saw something slowly emerge in the darkness, a shadow,
human shaped, rakish and groaning. “Goat any sper chinge?” the
voice croaked. A tramp who’d been tucking in for the night, sensing
a rare opportunity.
“Naw,”
Eddie replied curtly and moved on, his heart still racing. He came
out and, as described, faced “24 COINOP Laundry”. He could see
inside, the blank fluorescent lights flickered like they were sending
morse code messages to some unseen spy. Three old women sat inside
smoking and watching the machines like they were watching their
favourite soap operas. All the other shops were closed, the street
was empty, except for a dog, hopping off into the shadowy horizon. He
looked left, saw the slope up a hill and began to walk up it. As he
did, one of the old women in the laundrette popped her head out of
the door. “Hey young yin! Show’s yur wullie!” She cackled.
Eddie heard the other two inside howl with laughter. He shook his
head, chuckled and moved on past the haggard old bags. As he climbed
the small slope he began to feel nervous. Here, the lights were out
and the only illumination was from a few of the flats that still
remained inhabited and from the distant pale stars glinting between
holes in thick clouds. At the top he looked left and there it was.
Keller Row. As he made for it a gang of young boys sped out of one of
the dark closes towards him. All of them wore tracksuits and baseball
caps, so they
waddled towards him. A
little march of ducks, each doing the little cocky walk, wiggling
their shoulders like a whore wiggled her hips.
“Whit’s
in the bag, auld yin?” One asked. He couldn’t have been more than
fifteen, he had a long chib mark on his chin. They were common
amongst that socio-economic group, akin to some kind of primitive
ritual scarring, a signifier of manhood, or perhaps just of a
proclivity towards violence and poor impulse control.
“Nane
o’ your business wee man. Get tae fuck,” Eddie growled.
They
surrounded him. The tallest came up to his neck and that one was
clearly the most cautious. It was the mouthy one he had to take out.
He’d played this game for decades. Drop the mouthy one hard and
fast, they were always the leader, once his wee gang saw him buckle
they’d all buckle too. As if to prove his point the one that spoke
to him first pulled out a pen-knife. The blade was short but still
enough to kill.
“Open
the fuckin’ bag or yer gettin’ ripped,” the mouthy one said.
“Awright,
fuck sake, keep yer hair oan,” Eddie said, hopefully convincing the
lads he was scared. He unzipped the back and opened it up, as if to
give them a good look inside. As the mouthy one leaned in and took a
look, he laughed pulling out one of the expensive candles. “Connels?
Whit ur they fur, expectin’ a power cut?” he sneered
sarcastically. As he looked around for appreciation of his wit. Eddie
grabbed the hammer from inside the bag and with all the strength he
could muster, scudded it across the lad’s jaw. The crack was so
loud it echoed before the boy went down screaming, incoherently. An
arc of blood, black under the orange lights spattered on the damp
tarmac.
“Bolt
ya wee fuckers,” He ordered. And bolt they did. He shook his head
and walked up the street away from them. At a safe distance, they
shouted threats, but he didn’t listen. He had other work that
needed attending.
“Seven
for the seven sisters in the sky.”
The
street itself was half ruined. Most of the tenement buildings had
burned out or collapsed over the years and there were no cars, nor
street-lights on the
Row. It was a bad place, he knew. In the fifties it had been the home
of notorious child killer, Aidan Cameron. In
the sixties, a fringe
Christian
cult had committed mass suicide in a second floor flat of number 15,
which no longer existed. Twelve
men and women had hanged themselves from the rafters in the attic,
which caused the roof to collapse. It was only this collapse that
brought it to anyone’s attention. In the 70’s a family of
Pakistani immigrants had been burned to death in their home by a gang
of drunk football fans. Keller Row had a bad history, so much that
even the drug dealers and gangsters avoided this dead, bleak place
along with the birds, weeds and rats. It was the perfect breeding
ground for evil, a Petri-dish for corruption and malevolence. Even
the air seemed thick, potent with potential malevolence. It took him
some amount of mental fortitude to step on those cracked and broken
paving stones. Ronnie had said he was at number 23, second floor, to
the right. It was easy to find given there was only three blocks
left. He found the close, narrow, doorless and covered in graffiti
and stepped inside. The place smelled of stale dampness and pungent
shit, a pile of which he found by the back entrance, a great
spiralling pyramid dung, replete with a cluster of flies which
swarmed around it like it was some kind of faecal cathedral. There
was a puddle of piss next to it, in which an island of vomit sat. The
owner of these fluids was curved against the back wall, twisted limbs
and head at a strange angle. A woman, in her thirties, nude, long
dead, covered in scratches and bite marks, human bite marks. Eddie’s
stomach roiled, he knew who’d killed her, there was no doubt in his
mind about that. He winced and continued up the dirty stairs. It was
time to receive his mark of Cain.
“Six
for the six proud walkers”
Outside
the flat he could see the door, covered in scratches, symbols, signs,
glyphs and from inside he could hear something, humming, a quiet
singing, a song he hadn’t heard since he was a kid, since they were
both kids, in the scouts, “Green Grow the Rushes O” it was
called. Weird. He knocked at the door. “Ronnie, open up, it’s
Eddie.”
“Door’s
open,” said a voice that was not Ronnie’s, it didn’t even
attempt to disguise the fact. An oily, perfidious groan, derisive and
deep. Eddie paused took a deep breath and pushed open the door. A
black cloud of flies spewed out the instant there was a crack between
door and jamb, they brought with them a hot sulphuric stench of rot,
an aroma of The Pit. Eddie swatted the foul buzzing things away and
held his breath to stop himself from being sick as he pushed the door
open wide enough to see.
The
walls were black and moving, swarming with insect life, lit only by
four pale candle flames which lay on the floor around the points of
the protective circle Ronnie had drawn on the floor. Only four, the
fifth, at the cardinal point of the pentagram had been snuffed out.
Inside the circle, was a ragged seeping bruised hive of bloated
flesh, punctured all over, from which flies and beetles crawled. His
brother’s face remained somewhat recognisable, but what looked out
from behind those blood filled eyes was not. “Eddie,” it said a
gurgling chuckle. And the fifth candle was out. His brother had not
been protected. He wondered how many were inside the remains,
hundreds perhaps. He didn’t care to attempt a count, didn’t care
to rescue his brother or put him out his misery. It was all too
overwhelmingly horrible. Whatever was left of Ronnie had been
appropriated by the demons. His ritual had failed, the fifth candle
was out. A legion of demons in flesh shuddered on a floor. Mere
seconds had passed before Eddie closed the door, much to the delight
of the demons. The laughter sounded like the canned laughter from a
sit-com, only phased and warped and completely sardonic. They began
to sing again.
“Five
for the symbols on your door.”
He
heard the infernal chorus
sing as he ran down the
stairs. He needed to get out, get away from this fucked up mess.
Eddie needed fresh air, needed to breathe, to stop his heart racing,
to stop the dryness in his mouth and the cold sweat dripping down his
back and drenching his palms. By
the time he escaped the close his brain was swimming, he felt dizzy,
unmoored
from the physical world around him. He sat down on the stairs at the
entrance and just breathed, trying
to reconnect to reality. Sitting
there, he noticed the pipe fastened to the wall at the close
entrance. The pipe snaked up the wall inside the close, lagged metal,
stretching up the stairs and spreading into each flat. He followed it
downwards into the ground and realised, it was a gas pipe. An idea
formed in his mind. He stood up,
took a deep breathe and began to test the tightness of the couplers.
The first few were stuck fast and so he went back inside, trying each
of them until one gave. Eventually one budged slightly. He knew he
had to be careful, the slightest spark and he’d go up along with
the building, possibly half the street. Like a safe cracker he slowly
unscrewed the coupler until the faintest hiss could be heard and that
garlicky gas smell tingled his nostrils. He
loosened it slightly more and then, satisfied, climbed to the first
floor landing and opened his bag. He removed the bloody hammer, and
took out the candles he’d brought. Now he used them to perform
another ritual, one of thermodynamics, of combustion. A
banishment rite of black science, he chuckled to himself as he lit
two of the candles. He let the wax begin to melt until he had a large
enough pool to affix all of them to the floor, then lit them all and
ran. He charged out of the close, down Keller Row and turned right
down the slope, reaching the bottom as the gas finally ignited. Even
from there, perhaps a hundred yards away he could feel the heat from
the blast. Slate, brick, sandstone and small chunks of what looked
like burning asbestos rained down, illuminated by the fireball.
“And
four for the master builders,”
Eddie
watched for a moment before running again, past the laundrette. His
ears were still ringing, he could not hear the chattering of the old
women, now stood on the street amazed by the inferno Eddie had
conjured. They all turned to look at him. They were all saying
something but he couldn’t hear anything but a whooshing bell sound.
It didn’t matter, he’d done what he’d came
to do. He ran past them, back
through the lane, where he stopped, both to take a breather and so he
was not accosted by the tramp. Cautiously he walked through, as the
noise in his ears faded, but still he could hear ringing. Distant but
not internal, it sounded like a telephone. The tramp had gone, or
vanished under the rubbish for the night. It didn’t matter, he’d
done what he’d came to do. He came out onto the crossroads off
Graspton Avenue. The few remaining
residents were hanging out
their windows watching Keller Row go up in smoke. To the left of him
he saw the light pole, the goat was still there, but it had had it’s
throat cut, moments before. It staggered and stumbled into a pool of
its own pissing blood as it bleated its way to death. He could see no
sign of who killed
it, but it didn’t matter, and where the fuck was that telephone
ringing coming from? The
sound was of a telephone ringing in Hell.
Eddie spotted an old rusted
red telephone box about 100 yards down the street. For some reason he
knew the call was for him, he could not have explained why. He
tortured himself with indecision, should he answer it or run? What if
it was Ronnie? Could it be? He was losing his grip on reality again
and was stunned to find himself in the booth, which reeked of urine
and ammonia. He lifted the receiver.
As he did, he heard a chorus, it came from the speaker, from the
windows of the tenements, from the 24 coinop, from the old bags and
child whores, from the corner boys and the ned with the broken jaw.
It echoed through the night, a glorious triumphant song, a moment of
malevolent rejoicing.
“Three,
three the rivals!” they sang,
from behind broken windows and filthy blinds, from the black avenues
and alleyways, all of Grimry seemed to be singing. Blind animal panic
propelled him from the booth. This was no district of Glasgow, this
slum belonged the abyss. Eddie ran and ran and ran. On Brond street,
there were two pale demonic infants devouring
the dog they’d been out ratting with, their faces stained with
canine blood. They stopped their feast and sang.
“Two,
two the lily-white boys all dressed up in green O!”
Eddie
screamed as he ran past them. It was momentum and terror that pushed
him headlong towards the stairway on the slope down to Murcroft and
sanity. He had built up too
much and toppled down those concrete steps, muscles torn to shreds by
snapping bone as he tumbled down. He felt the ribs stab through his
lungs, his vertebrae pop and scrape against the edges of each stair,
the shattering of his skull. By the time he stopped, halfway down he
was no longer able to move, to feel his limbs, paralysed, in terror,
but still alive. He hoped he would live, prayed to that useless
fickle bastard above for salvation. Each breath was like a supernova
of agony flaring through him. He lay there, a crumpled broken thing,
staring up into the drizzle of the night, each drop sparkling and
glinting like glitter.
And
then, standing in front of him, was his brother Ronnie, grinning. All
the sins of Hell were written on that face of his, a twisted
perversity of his sibling. In his hand was a hammer. Eddie wanted to
plead with him, to tell him he’d won, that whatever was inside him
now had been victorious and to plead for mercy, but he could not
speak and he knew there would be no mercy. As Ronnie raised the
hammer he sang, a soft lullaby to take Eddie into the endless night.
“One
is one, and all alone and ever more shall be so.”
Comments
Post a Comment