This is not really a short story, it’s the opening scene from a full novel.
What do you think? comments are welcome, the more constructive the better.
It was dark when she reached the door, it felt like the sort of dark that a torch wouldn’t dispel, this was a darkness that felt thick, and dense enough to be palpable. It was dark enough to make reading the door number impossible. The steady hiss of rain adding its own layer of difficulty as though conspiring with the darkness to hinder, perhaps even to prevent her completing her task. Her coat, originally chosen to render her shape androgynous and unidentifiable, now did double service by protecting her from the worst of the water.
In the distance a clock chimed, three long slow bongs, each seeming slightly discordant with its predecessor.
A single streetlight, flickering fitfully some thirty metres away, gave all the light that there was in her world. It looked as though it was about to join the other lamps along the street in their dark surrender to the night.
Thankful for the lack of light, but silently cursing the difficulty it gave her, she reached out a hand to feel for the numerals screwed to the door. They were small to the touch but thick enough that when she ran her gloved fingers around their shape, she could check the number against the one she’d been given. It didn’t quite match–seventeen, definitely seventeen rather than the nineteen she needed. She’d counted the doors along the street; two with mean gardens surrounded by scrubby hedging, a third with a grimy fence. Several had doors that opened directly onto the footpath and one, or was it perhaps two, with nothing there at all. The empty space signifying a minor catastrophe, perhaps a fire or the collapse of some cheap and unskilled construction.
Half way along the street, close by the lamp, she’d passed two cars. Both of them felt and smelled derelict. One of them, the nearest to the flickering lamp, had burnt to little more than a shell. The tyres having melted with the heat and black limbs of fused and discoloured rubber were splayed out from the wheels like the desperate, grasping hands of a dying man.
She paused and took a deep breath, she’d made a simple enough miscount, but that wasn’t a good omen, not for what she needed to do, not when she needed accuracy, indeed precision. For a moment she considered leaving, returning back the way she’d come and putting off the task to another day. She sighed, there was time to do that, but returning to this dismal street on a second night would be beyond depressing.
There hadn’t been anyone on the street when she entered it, and that had been a mercy, so there was no real need to put off her visit. But not even a single soul, damned or not, had been out there braving the gloom and the rain. Only a couple of the windows had even shown a light and those were weak, flickering affairs, their glimmer too poor even to show what life might lie behind the grubby glass.
She retraced the couple of steps back to the pavement and took the opportunity for a look around, a final check of the neighbourhood, confirming to any onlooker that she had simply come by mistake to this door. And that was true. In her world, her very particular world, any truth was rare enough to be savoured.
The street was still deserted, clear at least of people. No movement visible through through the rain, Just the slinking shadow of a cat, scrawny with hunger but cunning enough to seek shelter from the rain and cover from the flickering yellow grip of that one working lamp. The creature slunk, tight against the hedge on the far side of the roadway, limping across the front of a hedge and slipping through the broken panel of a half collapsed fence and out of her sight.
She satisfied herself that there were no human eyes watching her to see and report her presence, to give witness against her as she turned and walked quickly to the next door, each step taking her another metre into the shadows and her quarry..
Tracing her fingers around the numerals one last time she confirmed that she was now at the right place.
Standing closer to the door, pressing herself into the tiny extra shadow offered by the door frame, she inserted her pick silently into the lock and carefully, breathlessly she worked the tempered steel against the pins.
It was the work of moments to spring the lock, but she held the door almost closed while she listened for any response from within. Silence was all she heard, a silence inside as a counterpoint to the steady white noise of the rain outside. Still, she waited a long moment, not breathing, frozen in the damp and the dark.
Finally she moved, gently pressing against the door, controlling its movement, not letting it swing free. She was rewarded by the groan of a hinge not oiled for far too long. Again she froze. And listened.
Could she hear from within the movement of a body stirring restlessly, disturbed by the unexpected creak? Perhaps the sound of someone listening in their turn, listening for her, or someone like her? Then, moving the door again, she caused a little more noise to come into the house.
The door was open enough that she could slip through the gap in silence and once she was satisfied of no movement inside, that was what she did.
She stopped just beyond the door, dripping quietly on the wooden floor and sought to get her bearings. A gentle scent of lavender filled the air. That was unexpected, the sweetness clashing with the damp sour smells from the street.
Slowly she edged a foot out, feeling for furniture and finding none. She guessed the front door opened directly into the living room and there was no wall before her, she took a first step and then repeated the process, and then again, feeling her way. Not even considering using a torch or the main lighting, conscious of the open door behind her ready to betray her presence to the outside world.
When the light came on, strong and bright, it was a shock. Her eyes not ready to be assailed, she screwed them up. And then she saw sitting in a small wheelchair, her quarry. She didn’t move; it wasn’t that she was waiting for her eyes to recover from the sudden glare, it was the shotgun in the man’s grip that held her attention. It was sawn off, the bore looking huge as it pointed at her, surrounded by the crisp silver of bare metal where the saw had left its mark.
She kept her hands visible, holding only the pick she had used on the door. Slowly her eyes returned to normal, her breath steady as she waited for some response. Her training held her in place, the weapon she faced not accurate, but at the range of a few feet in that room a shot would have spread enough to guarantee a hit, whatever she did.
While she waited she studied the man. He was ancient, he looked old beyond his actual years, and those were at least seventy, or maybe seventy-five. Almost bald with a few grey wisps of hair scattered around a head covered in a skin so stretched and tight that it might as well have been painted on his skull. An unshaven chin showing a mix of grey and dark stubble around thin, bloodless lips. His frame as thin and as spare as his head, he looked as though he wouldn’t have been able to hold the shotgun if he’d been standing. A dirty grey, food stained shirt covered his torso and black grubby trousers completed the appearance of a tired, derelict old tramp.
But a tramp with a shotgun, and at that point in their relationship that was the significant item.
He broke the silence between them, his voice thin, weedy, a perfect match for his appearance. “They sent you?” the question darted between them. “A girl? A fucking child? Is that all I am to them now? Somebody they think they can deal with by sending you?” A weedy voice but one laden with scorn.
She said nothing, continued breathing, continued waiting.
“Well little girl, are you going to say something? Has the cat got your tongue? Who are you? What were you told?”
The shotgun had shaken when he spoke, the strength in his grip enough to cope with the position it was in, but perhaps not enough if he was trying to do something else as well. Then he gestured with the weapon, a quick up and down that added an emphasis she couldn’t ignore to his words.
“I’m Kelly. I have no idea why I was sent. I was simply sent.”
“And who was it that sent you, little Kelly?” His voice stayed thin, but it gained a covering of mockery, of condescension, and that grated a little more.
“You wouldn’t know him. He’s new.”
“Oh, I know a lot more than you’d think. I knew you were coming for a start.” He paused while he caught his breath. “Well, not you exactly, but somebody. I hoped it would be somebody better than you though. Somebody I could respect. Somebody that showed my worth. Or what my worth once was.” He glared at her, his breath gasping a little, and gestured again with the shotgun. “So who was it? Give me a name. It can’t matter now.”
She sighed. He was right. It couldn’t matter now. “Clement, Douglas Clement. Been with us less than a year.”
The man gave a grunt. “Tall feller, thin, glasses. Doesn’t look you in the eye. He’s what thirty-five, thirty-eight years old? Dresses like a poncey civil servant, speaks like he’s a plum in his mouth. A nobody, he’ll move on somewhere else once he’s ‘cleared up things’ in the department.” She could hear the quotation marks. “Another bloody butterfly, flitting from place to place, never actually doing anything.”
She nodded. The man had nailed Clement with those few words. She frowned, asking herself how he knew that? Who he was? Who he had been? And briefly, how had he known she was coming?
“So, what happens now?” she asked.
“That’s up to me, isn’t it. I can squeeze the trigger and claim you’re a burglar. I’ll probably get a slap on the wrist for having this old blunderbuss here, but stuck in a wheelchair, ill and faced by an intruder, an armed killer perhaps. Who’d send an old cripple to jail, eh?” He shook the weapon at her again, the muzzle never more than a fraction from her midriff.
She waited, conscious that delay was better than the alternative.
“Or we could work out why you’re here and then we’ll see what you’re really made of.” His breathing was rasping again, as if the act of speaking was wearing away at his larynx and his lungs. “Why they… why Clement, that prick, thought you were good enough to come for me?”