Tenth Man

by Tamara Sheehan

Chapter 14

Mbeki wheeled on him. “What the hell are you playing at?”

Saul’s knees threatened to buckle. “Now, Howie,” he whispered.

Mbeki shook him. “What now?”

“Now.” Saul cried again.

“Shut up.”

“Now, now, now!”

Mbeki lurched forward, sagging to his knees, eyes rolling heavenward. Howie fisted the big man’s hair and drove his face into the wall. Mbeki fell at his feet. Blood and mucus ran down the paint.

Saul twisted away, heard Howie crowing, “You gonna hit me, you gotta put me down!” He dropped down where Toven was crouched.

“You’re all right, Toven,” Saul whispered. Toven’s face was grey, he looked as if he might be sick, eyes squeezed shut, a sheen of sweat on his face and forehead. He shook so hard his teeth rattled. “I told you we’d look after you. It’s all right.”

“We are in deep,” Howie said, sidling up close to Saul. “Is he freaking out? Cause if he’s not I think we should get out of here.”

In the hallway, Mbeki moved. He groaned, pushed himself up to his knees, then rocked to his feet.

It was the sight of Mbeki’s expression that shook him out of his grief into clarity. Audel’s man was staring at them, grinning. Blood splattered the crisp white shirt he wore, stained the tie like tar. His smile was a grotesque mimicry of pleasure and surprise. Blood fell out of his mouth like saliva.

“Just like your dad.” Mbeki said, each step carrying him closer to Saul. “A real rat king. A lord among vermin.” He spat a clot of blood and phlegm on the carpet. “Could have gone to the top but wouldn’t do as he was told. Wouldn’t shut the hell up.”

The grotesque smile widened. Smashed teeth glimmered in the blood. He was looking at Saul as he spoke. “Nice guy, your pop, but too smart. Too smart for his own good. Just like you.”

Mbeki reached down and snatched Toven by the scruff of his neck, dragged him, yelping, to his feet. Saul knew he should move but stood, rooted, the smile impossibly wide, a gash in his face, leaked blood all over Mbeki’s chin. Saul marveled, disgusted, at it. The big man threw open the curtains and hauled on the sliding door.

Toven twisted and squirmed, kicking, punching at the big man’s side. Sidestepping the clumsy punches, Mbeki pulled him out of the apartment. He spun the smaller man once around, threw him down onto the deck. Then he bent, retrieved Toven by hauling him up by his hair, examining his expression with casual brutality.

Saul was suddenly awash with vicarious panic. Cold wind was whipping up off the concrete. The city was alive, swollen with people. Cars raced like miniatures below them, brilliant blue and red. The noise of a thousand cars, footsteps, voices, ringing mobiles, the ambient sounds of other lives tumbled up the them. The world was vast, rolling below. He felt the ground tilt as a wash of vertigo knocked him down.

Pinioning Toven against the rail, Mbeki began working the small man’s face so that he could see only the writhing city below.

The sinews of Toven’s neck coiled like wire, blue veins sprang to the surface of the skin. Toven began to scream.

Before Saul could move, Howie was there. Primed like an explosive, his body taut, he delivered two blows in quick succession under Mbeki’s ribs.

The man bellowed, abandoned Toven, turned on Howie. “You’re gonna wish you’d never touched...”

Mbeki’s lips were moving, his voice almost too soft to hear above the noise of the city. Howie stood frozen, staring at the big man, nodding, paling. He sank down to his knees.

“Leave him alone!” Saul threw himself at Mbeki. It took all his strength and weight to knock him back. Mbeki righted himself before the sliding glass door. His lips were moving.

“...troublesome...” The words were loud, inside, but as if transmitted through a badly tuned radio, the sense of them faded in and out. Mbeki was grinning at him, that broken, glistening smile. “...crush you like your father...”

It hit him like a blow. Saul felt the blood drain from his face, the decent of sudden weight in his stomach.

“...don’t think we can’t kill you, too...”

Sickness and elation welled up. “I knew it, I knew it!” He was shouting, circling Mbeki, being circled. “You killed my dad. You killed him. Why my dad? Why mine?”

“...of you...”

As if someone had flipped a switch, the violence and energy he felt suddenly drained off. He sagged to his knees, staring at Mbeki. “Me.” He said. His body felt hollow and heavy.

“...you...”

The voice inside his head was gnawing, chewing like acid through layers in his mind. It unfolded his brain until all that Saul was had been laid out before him like pictures on a table. Terror, Audel’s strange arrival, Toven, the familiar, magic. It flashed like flickering TV channels in his head. The watch he kept. His father. The bombs. Howie. Bridget. Dad.

Mbeki was speaking, full of the answers that Saul had wanted for so long. He strained to listen, to quiet the incessant screaming in his mind and hear what the man was saying to him.

“Crushed... enough...”

“What?” Saul asked. “I can’t hear it. Speak up.”

“...Listen closely.”

Yes, listen.

“Your old man should have kept his mouth shut.” Mbeki’s voice was suddenly clearing. He listened intently, found the ambient sounds fading, Mbeki’s voice growing easier to hear and understand. “If he’d cared about his kid, he’d have talked less.”

“I used to hate how he would boast about me, about the magic and all of it.” Saul reflected. He grinned fleetingly. “And I was right, look what I’ve become.” His thoughts seemed to have become public, vocal. It was as if his mouth was a speaker for his brain. He knew he should have felt embarrassment, felt anger, but all he could muster was dull curiosity. “I’m nothing to be proud of. Not worth the sacrifice of a better man. Why kill him?”

Mbeki seemed to misunderstand him. “How else could we have stopped him?” Warm hands encircled his throat. “His plans. How could we have kept them in their place?”

There was a strange comfort in Mbeki’s grip. The cool air touched his face. He was dully satisfied that all his questions were being answered as if he’d found a journal or a reel of film. He could almost see Mbeki’s reasons, almost read his thoughts, just as Mbeki was reading his.

Saul’s thoughts seemed muffled as the squeaking of mice. He couldn’t hear himself think, had to speak to hear the sound of the words. “Why my dad? Why didn’t you kill me?” He heard only Mbeki’s voice in his head; He closed his eyes to hear it better.

“I’m about to.”

He realized it was long since he’d had his last breath. Something deeply buried stirred. He’s in my head, Saul realized, the comprehension impossibly slow. He’s a wizard. He’s controlling me. And then, He’s killing me.

And yet he wanted nothing more than this. He closed his eyes and waited.

“Wake up!”

The cry made both of them look up. Saul’s slow mind registered the shape of Toven, hands gripped together over his shoulder like a man about to roll dice. He was shouting words Saul could not hear, moved in a blur of muted color. Toven’s hands connected with Mbeki’s startled, ruined face.

He saw Mbeki roll backward into the apartment, a splotch of blood on the carpet marked his passage. The big man came to his feet, regarded Toven with a quizzical look. Saul felt his mouth twitch in a smile, so strange was the expression on Mbeki’s smashed face.

“You’re up to your neck in it. All three of you.” Mbeki said. And then he turned and limped from the apartment.

Saul sagged against the railing and stared at the place Mbeki had been standing. His throat itched madly. He coughed again and again.

Someone was pulling him. Howie was pulling him. Toven took him by the other arm, sobbing, half dragging him back into the apartment. He saw Howie stumble down the hallway, heard the heavy thud of the deadbolt sliding into place.

He gazed up at Toven, as one looking at some distant thing. “You knew what he was. You knew.”

With that accusation hanging in the air, Saul lurched to his feet and stumbled into the bathroom. The floor was cool, his expression in the mirror was of a man who had been stunned by a heavy blow. Red welts were rising like bee stings on his neck.

Nausea began to turn his insides. Saul had never seen it before, but now Mbeki had stripped away the layers that had veiled it from him: Saul realized he could manipulate others as he himself had been manipulated on the balcony.

All the layers of his self had been torn aside by Mbeki’s magic. He’d knelt, passive as a child at on a funfair ride, and calmly accepted Audel’s man as his personal angel of death. He knew now that others would be the same, that he could command and people would act and never question the act had been against their will.

He stared at himself in the mirror. It seemed impossible that he should know so much and still be Saul, the same man staring back from the mirror, the same unhandsome face. What more was there, now the questions had been answered?

He pieced it together: The old man’s boasting had been his own undoing. He fervor for change and his pride in his ugly, pugnacious son. He had known better than Saul ever had that a wizard could make people do anything.

Saul licked his lips. His skin was cold and slick. His mind was riding the loop of his memories, filling in the gaps in his knowledge as it went.

The circumstances of his father’s death should have neutralized the threat of the son, but instead it had radicalized him. He had joined an anti-war group, they had shattered golems with bombs of petrol and fertilizer. But the plant had withstood them, their inept direction of will and desire, their youth and idealism. Saul’s violence had failed to mend the tears.

It hadn’t taken long to realize there was no going back. He’d gone to ground, with the help of friends, he’d constructed a new life, buried his past and quietly, continually, hunted for reasons. Why my dad? Now the answers he’d been seeking had come to him. He felt as if someone had kicked him in the chest.

What now?

Revenge.

He reached out with his mind, found Howie. Rather than feel for memory, he extended his own consciousness, his voice into the other’s mind. Come here.

Howie’s face appeared around the lip of the door. He wore a neutral expression like a man facing a someone with a clipboard and a survey on the street. Saul realized Howie would stand there until he was told what to do, maybe until he starved to death, if Saul willed it. His breath shook a little as he exhaled. A shiver of fear and excitement went through him.

Run some water. Howie leaned forward and turned on the taps.

Go back to the living room. Howie nodded at Saul, as if he were seeing him for the first time, and padded away.

It took no effort to formulate the order, to think at once within and outside of his mind. A thrill went up his spine. It was so simple a trick he wondered how he had not figured it out before. He wondered if Mbeki would be ready for it.

The knowledge was filling him up. He looked at the water splashing in the basin, whirling down, into the sewers. Audel had my father killed. He means to kill me. He doesn’t know Mbeki showed me how to do it. I can make him tap-dance naked wearing tapioca on his head if I want. A laugh escaped. Some part of him gorged of fierce joy, on the power he could exert, simply by thinking, by doing as Mbeki had done. I ran last time. He thinks I’ll run forever.

He splashed his face with the water, turned off the taps and, baptized, went back to the others.

Proceed to chapter 15...