It could hardly be called a kick. Despite years of neglect made visible by thin,
almost transparent patches of rust and jaggedly flaking automotive paint, the front
wing of the little Austin Metro barely flexed under heel. It was raining fit to flood the
world, a storm brewing up with the wailing mewl of legion cats being chased by
battalion dogs. The driver of this last example of a long since fallen British
automotive empire splashed disconsolately towards the rear of the vehicle, depressed
the already sticking boot release with the heel of his right hand, and heaved at the
tailgate with his left. He could barely see through the streams of water running across
his horn-rimmed, circular, bottle glasses, and to look at him dripping and sodden in
brown tweed and corduroy waistcoat, as thin as a rake and far too short to be a
policeman, you would think him incapable of exerting the slightest force upon fresh
air. He pulled at the tailgate, screwing up his scrawny, twitching features, and slowly
but surely, emitting mineral groans and metallic shrieks, the metal and glass door
began to inch upwards until, with the tailgate at seventy-five degrees, the little man
was able to clamber onto the space made by the flattened seats, cross his legs, and
utter a loud harrumph.
“Bloody car”, he muttered. “Bloody sodding British Leyland. Bloody Red
Robbo. Seemed like such a good idea at the time. Just goes to show you, doesn’t it!”
The little man, who looked to all intents and purposes like a fifty-year old
accounts clerk, the sort of man who is equally hen-pecked and ignored because his
entire being is made up of nothing but disappointment, pulled a red handkerchief from
his jacket pocket, wiped first his brow and then his glasses, and then finally, and with
an almighty bulge, he blew his nose. It was just a question of time, he thought, just a
question of waiting. He stared out of the back of the Metro, stared down the long,
straight highland road, and settled himself into a damp and steamy slump. He seemed
to know instinctively that eye of the storm would come from the east, from the
direction that lay behind him, in his long distant past, and slumped forward as he was,
he began, as he always did in such circumstances, to count the tufts in the grey and
threadbare boot carpet.
Moving like a dense, liquid shadow across the deeps of the ocean, a black
Aston Martin swept spray and stones out from under its wheels as though the driver
was desperate to dam the flood before it should lift Noah’s ark from dry-dock. The car
bent the feeble light of afternoon, absorbing the dull residue of day under dusky
thunder-heads, so that nothing definite, no edge, no gleam of paintwork could be
discerned by the passer-by, and with good reason. The vehicle sported crepuscular
additions and modifications such as fins and bat wings, horns, antlers, crossed bones
and the flying remains of bloody pelts, and hanging from the rear-view mirror was a
collection of shrunken Jivaroan heads, each one bobbling with every bump and twist
as if in wild, drunken conversation. The driver of the diabolical sports coupe
hammered the throttle at every turn, singing raucously and with absolute abandon
every word of O Fortuna from the opening of Carmina Burana.
He wore black from head to toe, was tanned and lean under a shock of black,
flowing hair, showing the aquiline profile of a true son of the Julian clan, except for
the silver bar that pierced the bridge of his nose. He wore eye-liner as black as coal,
and constantly flipped the sun visor up and down to check his reflection in the mirror
as he spun the car through sluicing puddle and gravitational turn. To finish the
demonic effect, a stuffed raven mounted on a piece of polished mahogany was nailed
to the rear parcel shelf. The driver laughed out loud as he surveyed his little world of
perfectly stitched cow hide, walnut veneer and deathly totem. The effect was just as
he wished it to be today. In the fullest and most satisfied of baritones he let rip the
lines:
“hateful life
first oppresses
and then soothes
as fancy takes it”
With the rain slanting across the road and the windshield wipers sweeping
furiously across glass, the black Aston shimmied around a tight right hand bend,
sliding out at the back. Opposite lock. Ease off the power and then on again. A brief
flash of red brake light in the gloom and then the snake back onto the straight and
true. Revolutions. The growl of pistons exploding as they chewed up fuel. The driver
beamed like a supernova going critical, lighting up the cabin with his wide, wild eyes
and his deep bellow. The road stretched out before him, long and dark and shining,
just as the crow flies towards a departing soul. The car kicked once and lifted at the
front end as the tyres fought for grip, and then, amid a sea of spray, she bit hard into
the tarmac and hauled her graceful weight forward at an ever increasing rate of knots.
The joy of it. The driver revelled in the fact that he could see virtually nothing, sure in
the fact that he was master of the little that he needed to survey, certain in the
knowledge that nothing in this world could alter the progress that he made towards his
next destination. He knew not where that destination might be, only that he would be
there when it happened, when the cataclysm erupted. He was always there. Always.
Out on the hard shoulder, cocooned within the thin metallic hull of his
dilapidated Austin Metro, the small wee man in tweeds and corduroy had now
counted for nearly an hour, but instead of marshalling his thoughts towards the
infinite number of tufts woven into the boot carpets of this modern, global,
automotive world, he found now that his concentration wavered. He looked up and
back out along the road, and there, sure as eggs are eggs, he saw headlights piercing
the dank mildews of the afternoon. Despite the driving rain and the whipping wind, he
heard the growl of the monstrous motor clearly. He cocked his head, listening for the
tell tale whistle of slipstream and the dark, forbidding rumble of eighteen inch rims,
and then smiled. It was a long time, an epoch or more, since they had last met, this
accountant and the onrushing demon in black, but now the time had come to ask again
that one fundamental question. They were, after all, brothers of the blood, members of
the same trade guild, and as such the one would surely stop for the other.
The ribbon of wet sheen running towards the horizon begged the driver of the
Aston Martin to put his Cuban heeled boot through the floor, and he duly obliged. The
car sat up and seemed to skim across the surface water like a steroidal jet ski, and still
he pushed and pulled at the wheel, desperate for more speed. At first the driver
thought that the dull, humped shape at the side of the road was just a rocky outcrop or
an orphaned section of dry stone wall. The road was straight and true. He had no need
to pay attention to any landscape other than that small slice of the world contained
between the edges of this black speedway, and yet, as he reached terminal velocity,
something made him notice the further extremes of possibility painted upon the
horizon, beyond the vortex that he created.
The shape by the side of the road began to take on a disturbingly amusing
familiarity. It was pig-like, a creature that grunted and snuffled through the
undergrowth at the margins of every road, short and hunch-backed and wallowing.
Just one second later, with another impossible distance of road covered, he saw an
opened bonnet. He laughed long and hard again, booming out his mirth in the womb-
like cabin of his thoroughbred steed. The thing out there was nothing more than a flea,
a parasite on the arse of an Arabian stallion, and yet, like that flea, this dull object
existed in imperfect partnership with the king of horsepower. The flea could also ride
the wind and run before the desert storm, just as he, the demon was doing now.
He felt compelled to look into matters more closely. He felt a sudden, urgent
curiosity that brooked no flight or fancy. He simply had to prod and poke, and so,
stamping on the brakes, he sent the car into a slide, spinning her round on the tarmac
amid a wail of ebrased rubber and straining chassis bolts, until, with the hills and the
sky melded into one grey-green-purple blur, he found himself some four hundred
metres beyond the porcine wreck, facing back the way he had come. He smiled in
anticipation of the stick and the squeal, and made the Aston Martin growl back along
the road slowly and with extreme prejudice.
The diabolic driver of the Aston Martin pulled up alongside the Metro and
peered through the passenger window at the wreck of a car parked on the hard
shoulder. His gaze was returned from a face in obscure profile, ringed with a moist
halo of condensation. A drowned rat, he thought, a drowned rodent waiting out the
flood in his shabby little nest, and yet he felt a certain thrill at the sight of this weedy
little specimen, as though they were joined by an invisible umbilical cord. He
manoeuvred the Aston Martin onto the hard shoulder and stilled the throbbing beast.
The rain seemed to be easing off, although the sky remained low and smothering. He
opened his door, climbed out of the car, and stretched himself out to his full height
and width.
As a physical specimen, he was entirely the opposite of the poor wretch sitting
cross legged in the back of the Metro. Standing at more than six foot tall, with a broad
expanse of muscled chest revealed beneath his snugly fitted black shirt, the creature
epitomised vigour and action, an unstoppable force made flesh. As he walked he
could feel his hard and defined physique ripple under tight, figure-hugging cloth. His
face wore a permanent smile, a smile that started in his eyes and spread across the full
depth of his features, a smile that warned, a smile that promised destruction once the
fun was done with.
On reaching the broken down little heap, he wrenched the tailgate fully open
with leonine ease, bent down, and peered into the darkling interior of the vehicle’s
boot space. “What in the name of all the fates have we got here?” he mused, grinning.
“Ah, yes, the runt of the litter. Homo Patheticus. An ACCOUNTANT, if I’m
damned!”
“It’s all very well you saying that”, squeaked the mousey little man, “standing
there like Adonis, but I’ll have you know I’m not afraid of you. Oh no, certainly not. I
knew you’d stop…and I’m a very good accountant. The best.”
The man in black paused for a second, and then stood up again, puffing out his
chest, and roared, “Not afraid? NOT AFRAID! Don’t you know who I am? Ha! I am
Death, the destroyer of worlds, the bringer of the final pain and the ultimate darkness.
I am he who sweeps away mortal dust. I am the storm, the tempest, the earthquake,
the volcano, before which nothing can stand!”
Under a damp and billowing sky he towered over the accountant, hands on
hips, and waited for the whimper, but the only the sound to be heard was the scud and
rasp of wind though stubby heathers and grasses, and a slight, almost effeminate
cough. The little man in tweed and corduroy slid forward and sat on the lip of the
boot, dangling his legs over the precipice between bodywork and muddy gravel. He
looked up at the giant in black. “So am I, in a way”, he said quietly, wiping
condensation from his thick, bottle glasses.
“What?” roared the leviathan beast standing on the hard shoulder. He bent
forward again, gripping this non-descript, runtish specimen by both shoulders. Face to
face, spitting fire and brimstone and venom, he roared, “Watch!”
The world seemed to split in two, with each half spinning in a different
direction, creating a whirlpool of light and matter, through which images began to
appear. With each vision of destruction, the man continued to roar out his
accomplishments.
“I it was who threw down Knossos and trampled the Greeks underfoot with
Persian soldiers. Pompeii fell under my gaze. I was the surge that killed millions by
the banks of great Huang He, and it was I who blew the winds of the Bhola Cyclone
so hard that men and women crumpled.”
With each item listed in his panoply of destruction, images flowed and twisted
together, images of limbs and contorted faces, of blood and bone and rock, and in the
midst of it all, as if conducting a violent symphony of discord, there stood the man in
black, his flowing locks streaming in the winds and currents of calamitous fatality as
his arms gesticulated wildly.
“See me! There! It is I who ruptures the earth to make mountains out of the
sea. San Francisco was a moment of merriment, and Ashgabat and Kanto and
Tangshan. The Black Death I made in your image, flea, and my coup de grace…I was
the Somme and Passchendaele and Ypres, and then, when the boys came home, I was
the mutant influenza. I am famine, I am a feast of mortality, and where my journeys
end, wherever I choose to lay my head, there will come the end of days for millions. I
was the horror propelling the imaginations at the Wannsee Conference, the obliterator
of souls in their mass confusion and terror. I was Ethiopia. I am the mud slide and the
flood. I am the crack and the fissure and the disintegration of Chernobyl. I am
catastrophe!”
Amid the flames and falling limbs, the man in black burned and fevered,
recounting every event, every malevolence, every act of desolation, and through it all
he smelled again the viscera of sweet perfection, except that in the telling of these
disasters, as each tale and count multiplied, so he also smelled the dust of extreme,
paper-thin age. The stench of slow decay and natural putrefaction, of simple eternal
failing, filled his nostrils and gagging, he broke the spell. The images vanished and
the world snapped back to the dull grey of light rain falling on barren hills. He thrust
the little man back into the boot of the Metro.
“You!” he shrieked, pointing at the unkempt little accountant as the man
slowly emerged again from the rear of the car.
“Yes. Me.” replied the accountant. “I knew you’d get there. Eventually.
You’ve changed. When we started all this you were…smaller…less bombastic.”
The accountant stood up, the crown of his head reaching only the breasts of
the man dressed in black. Thrusting his hands into his jacket pockets so that he could
draw it close around him to keep out the chill of the twilight breeze, the smaller of the
two men stepped out into the road and looked first East and then West. There was
nothing to be seen, nothing that signified light and life and hope. The monster in black
took an involuntary step back towards his own car, and seemed to shrink visibly in
height and width.
“And you” whispered the startled man in black, “you look so unadventurous,
so benign…so invisible. How…no. I see it. Each of us becomes more and more what
and how we are. For a true killer, brother, you’re mean on they eye.”
The accountant shrugged his shoulders, took a packet of low tar cigarettes
from his jacket pocket and offered one to his companion, who shook his head. “Suit
yourself”, he said as he lit up and inhaled deeply. “It’s not as though it makes any
difference”. He offered up a thin smile.
“Do you remember the bet? Of course you do. Daft bloody question. All those
ages ago, back when the apes crawled out of the trees and first began to name the
rocks and the winds and the moon as gods…we agreed then that we’d each take them,
in our way, and see who could claim the most souls…”
He took another long drag on the cigarette.
The lion in black tossed his mane and stood tall once again, recovering his
composure. “I remember the bet”, he replied, “and the optimism of our youth.”
“I have to say you’re impressive these days, in spite of your age, and your
inventiveness is stunning. Just when I think you can’t come up with anything new you
give me Pol Pot…quite brilliant. You put me to shame really, with my little ways and
my tidy ledgers…bar one fact. You’re falling behind, brother, a long way behind in
the counting. Every little death, every disappointment, every tiring of the spirit,
they’re all mine, remember. I am the cloud, the dullness of depressions that slip ankle
and bind neck. I am all those moments when the poor creatures realise that everything
is in vain. I don’t do glossy, brother. I’m not the spectacular, the summer blockbuster,
no, I’m the winter chill in their bones. I am the reason why they wait out the years
without hope. None of it’s dramatic, not in your way…I mean, how do you make a
public drama out of the long drawing down of a cancer, or the slow meander of a mild
epidemic, or that fatal nudge into oncoming traffic? Oh, I do things with a flourish
sometimes, I suppose, the knife and the psychosis, but no, my book is made up of
dark matter, whereas yours lists the stars that shine for bright, sparkling mortality.
Unlike you, who prefer a broad brush, I see the intricate beauty of the devil in the
detail. So, brother, I’ve sat here in the rain with one purpose. As ever I’m here to
ask…do you concede?”
With that he stubbed out his cigarette, walked away from the man in black
towards the front of his battered old car, and slammed shut the bonnet. Behind him he
heard a deep sigh followed by a long intake of breath. Here it comes, he thought, the
pomp and splendour.
“I will never concede”, roared Goliath in his mourning attire. “I have a new
plan, brother, a new device, subtle and sure and global. Waters rise even as we speak.
The furnace heats. A tide swells, a tide of souls that moves to my imperial call as
inevitably as the seas ebb and flow to beckoning mother moon. We’ll count again
soon enough and see how the reckoning falls. Even then, I doubt if either one of us
will give the other satisfaction.”
They both stood in the middle of the road now facing one another, the giant
standing with his hand on his hips, his hair thick and full on the wind, while the
mouse stood hunched in his jacket, his glasses perched on the end of his thin nose.
They looked each other in the eye for a moment, each of them dipping into the well of
endless night, before breaking away and staring out towards the scarred hillsides
leading towards Ben Mor Coigach.
“You’ll be off on your way, then?” asked the smaller of the two.
“I must. Destiny calls my little fish to the net. What about you? Your transport
looks a little dishevelled?”
“Yes. It is, as you put it, somewhat dishevelled. Anyway, I’m tired of it. I
believe a lady of a certain age will come along the road shortly in a late model Ka.
That’s a safe and reliable little car, I believe, and anyway, I must have a chat with her
about the disappointment she feels with her fat and flabby husband. Maybe, in her
grief, I can make her an offer she won’t be inclined to refuse; an autumnal, evening
walk upon the mountain for her, perhaps, in return for a slow descent into diabetic
coma for him?”
The brothers both smiled, being equal and opposite parts of each other, the
reticent introvert and the feral extrovert, the immovable object and the unstoppable
force. Before he climbed back into the cockpit of his thoroughbred machine the black
clad beast stopped and turned to look once more upon the now wistful face of his
twin.
“I suppose there really is no end to this, is there?” he asked.
“Not as long as there’s an unclaimed soul, a red ink pen and an accounting
ledger to hand”, said the other, reaching for another cigarette.