There’s a gap in the fence which leads down to the dull grey factory building surrounded by weeds higher than the smashed-in first-storey windows. Stepping over a pile of abandoned scaffolding poles, he reaches down to pick one up, feeling the weight of it, feeling the potential. It doesn’t matter what Markham has in store, as long as Nathan gets to see him die first, before he does: horribly, painfully – wonderfully.
As Nathan steps into the building his entire body is trembling. It’s dark inside, and he worries that unless he finds a light switch he will miss everything that is about to happen. He slides his hands along the wall but quickly gives up. Turning round, he lets the door swing shut behind him and walks into the darkness until, suddenly, the scaffolding bar knocks against something. It moves. He lunges forward taking a great swing, as if the darkness itself could be broken. And it is. A tiny split of light appears somewhere near the floor as the obstruction reveals itself to be no more than a thick, heavy curtain.
He wants to push on, he wants to push through, but his imagination is holding him back, assembling every little detail: the vivid colours, the sharpened silence, the smell of fear, of sweat, of blood. But Christian’s body could be just a few feet away; he could walk through this curtain and find him contorted into another hideous joke, his fingers severed, the flesh peeled from his back. The thought of that makes Nathan hesitate, and then do something he’s never been able to do before, not in his forty years of life: he turns it off. Only reality lies ahead of him as he pushes back the curtain and slips through.
The man Nathan has come to kill is standing in the middle of a blinding circle of light. A flash of brilliant pain slices Nathan’s brain in two as he propels himself forward, letting out a scream that falls dead against the darkness. The old man doesn’t respond, just stands there carefully folding what looks like clothes. The metal pole is raised high above Nathan, and his eyes are locked on his target’s head. A single strike and it will all be over. A single strike and it will have begun.
And yet that strike doesn’t come. It’s not that Nathan wants an explanation, it’s not that he wants to hear him speak – they’ve heard more than enough from him already – the problem is… the problem is … Nathan doesn’t know what the problem is. All he knows is that his body is in revolt. He’s lost control. Or has he found it?
‘You have to do it,’ says Markham, without turning. It’s the same voice as the one on the phone just an hour before, but it’s even flatter and more lifeless than it was back then. ‘If you don’t, she’ll die.’
Nathan’s arm is still frozen above him and starting to ache. It would be so easy to bring it down, break the man’s head the way his own head feels like it’s breaking – he’s done it before a thousand times in his imagination – but suddenly he’s lost.
‘She?’ he says.
There’s no response. He wants the old man to turn round so he can see the truth in his eyes. Perhaps that’s what’s holding him back? He reaches forward to grab Markham’s shirt, but the tips of his fingers start to tingle and he finds he can get no closer. All he has is his voice.
‘Who will die?’
Nathan lowers his arms and draws in a deep breath, desperate to summon up the strength. All those years of dreaming about killing without reason and yet now, with a man who deserves to die more than anyone ever could, he feels utterly impotent.
He looks at Markham, trying to harden his gaze and focus. Here is the man who killed two mothers, who tortured and beheaded a dad, who killed a stranger for simply living in the wrong place, and a doctor to try and frame his brother. Here is the man who has killed his brother! And yet… He hears the pole clang to the floor before he’s even realised he’s let it go. He’s a coward, nothing more. A fraud, who has built his reputation on being able to read the darkness in the minds of others and totally misread the darkness in his own.
He’s alongside Markham now, staring at the side of the old man’s face, and he’s amazed to see that there are tears running down his cheek. It looks real, as does the expression of utter hopelessness. Markham is not looking back at him, just staring at that curtain of darkness ahead, and Nathan finds himself doing the same. The two of them stand shoulder to shoulder, with no understanding of the situation they are in.
The room is silent, save for the laboured breathing of Markham and the occasional shuffle of birds up on the roof. Nathan finds himself starting to drift, but not to the usual places his mind would wander. Instead, he’s thinking about the warmth he’d felt being near Katie, and how the strength he found in their connection is being re-established. It feels, in part, like a betrayal of his brother, but he lets it in. He lets Katie in to the hole that his brother’s absence has made in his heart. He knows she is nearby. And that she is in danger.
He grips the old man’s shoulder. ‘Where is Katie?’
‘You haven’t totally lost it, then!’
The voice is unmistakable – an echo of his own. He spins round, but there’s only endless darkness.
‘I’m sorry,’ Markham says in a trembling voice. ‘I did what you asked. I’ve done everything you asked. Please! Please don’t hurt her!’
The curtain is drawn back and a man steps through, only, he looks nothing like Christian: big features, all bloated, fat and twisted. And yet… and yet… Nathan can’t help but draw in every disgusting detail until the reality finally dawns. The last time he saw his brother was six years ago, and when he said goodbye on that day he believed with the heaviest of hearts that it was for the last time. Now with every fibre of his body he wishes it had been.
‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost, big bro,’ says Christian.
And there can be no doubt now, not with that voice and those eyes and that smile. The years fall away and so does the mask created by the hand of a plastic surgeon, perhaps the same surgeon whose body was found in their basement. The last couple of days have been horrific, one nightmare after another, but this goes far beyond anything he’s had to deal with.
To believe that his brother might be ‘The Cartoonist’ is hard, but not impossible, given their family history, but to try and accept that Christian is capable of this… He’d thought there was no limit to his imaginings, no depth to which he couldn’t descend, but Christian has proven him wrong.
‘Why?’
‘That’s your problem, Nathan; you’re always asking stupid questions. Does there need to be a why? Can’t you just do what feels right?’
‘How can what you’ve done ever feel right?’
‘Okay,’ says Christian, holding up his hands defensively. One of them is wrapped heavily in a bandage, and Nathan is reminded of what his brother has been willing to put himself through just to bring them to this point and get his attention. ‘We were born this way.’ The crooked smile on that crooked face starts to grow. ‘Plus, it’s fun. A game. A challenge.’
His brother’s eyes dance with madness. For so many years he’s wanted to be like him, to be living that life on the beach with the wife and child. Now he can see the lie laid bare, and his anger builds as rapidly as it left him when he’d stood behind Markham with a metal pole in his hand. He bends to pick up the pole again. Had he somehow known the truth even then? Was that what had held him back?