BLACK AND WHITE

Chapter Three: Seeking Out The Light

A bell was ringing. Somewhere. Didn't sound like a church bell or a school bell

(a church bell or a school bell what are you saying when did you last hear anything like a church bell or a school bell)

from out in the distance. I stretched out an arm. It felt like someone had strapped a car to the end of it. I winced, choked and wished I had a cigarette.

Then the darkness started to fade back, slowly, colour filtering in from some unseen white point. I squinted and cowered. The light was blinding.

And then my eyes adjusted, and I realised I was in the docks somewhere. The air stunk of rust, oil, fumes and the dirty old Hudson. The scent of the city, pure and distilled. There was another smell there too, beneath it all. A real sharp, acrid stench, one that made me think of abandoned backwater shacks, forgotten cellars, narrow alleyways, shallow graves. It was the smell of death – and it was everywhere.

From behind me someone chuckled, deep, smug and completely in control. It was Potemkin. But he looked like he'd crawled straight out of a nightmare. Half his face was blown clean off. Blood had matted along the other half of his face, thick and black in the hazy grey light.

"Well," he grinned. "What I wouldn't do for a shot of vodka right now, eh, Payne?"

"Seems like you've had one too many," I grunted, standing on unsteady legs. "You're off your head."

This amused Potemkin. Right now it seemed anything would amuse him. Once you've had half your face blown off all life seems like one big joke. He laughed endlessly, one big cackle that seemed to bounce off all the old buildings around us and fly off into the Atlantic somewhere.

Finally, coughing and spluttering, he turned to the blanket next to him. "Know where we are, Payne?" he said. When he talked I could see the tendons in his jagged, mangled mouth twist and contract. I'd have thrown up, if I had anything left in me to do it.

"The docks," I shrugged. "But it's not right, none of it. I keep expecting to see Elvis chasing a white rabbit down a hole or something."

"Are you familiar with the idea of purgatory?" Potemkin continued. "You know – the realm between heaven and hell, the great big waiting room before the afterlife? When all your deeds hang in the balance and your destiny lies ahead of you, and all that crap?"

I slammed a hand on my head. "And I thought today couldn't get any worse. Oh, man."

"You're here," Potemkin said, "because you've got some unfinished business. We're all ciphers, right? Little men in the great big chess game. Your role's not over yet, Payne. You've got a lot more destiny to dole out. Lives hanging in the balance. Like this guy here."

Potemkin's arm, broken in three places, stretched and reached for a dirty grey blanket next to him. I could hear the crackling, like the sound popcorn makes in your head when you eat it, and the muscles stretching like piano wire. It cheered me up slightly, made me think the pain in my arm was a weekend cruise to Aruba.

He flung the blanket back with as much ceremony as a dead guy can muster. Underneath, curled into a foetal position, was a familiar figure.

"Alex?" I said, stepping forward. "Is he ok?"

"Maybe," Potemkin shrugged. "Maybe time's running out for him, and some very nasty men have him in their gaze. Maybe if you don't get your act together and wake up, he'll be a goner."

Alex's pale face, as frail and pitiful as a sleeping child's, seemed oblivious of our presence. I reached out and slipped a finger under his neck. No pulse. Why the hell would he have a pulse? Right now we were nowhere-men, in a nowhere-place. I was pulse-checking Casper the Friendly Ghost.

"How?" I asked. "How do I save him?"

"That you'll have to figure you out for yourself," Potemkin replied. "And you don't have much time to do it."

He was right. Above us the black towers had started to twist and buckle, curl like fingers. New York was morphing into a giant steel hand, flexing for the first time in centuries. The twisting steel screamed like a thousand car brakes, a sound that filled my head completely, pushing it to the absolute brink of explosion.

"Run, Payne!" Potemkin cried. "Run like the wind!"

I swept my arms beneath Alex, hitching him up. The blanket slumped to the side and tumbled away.

Beneath our feet the pier was starting to shudder. The fingers were clenching, closing in. The dirty water beneath us was starting to bubble ferociously, to boil up. Nowhere to run. As the fingers closed in, Potemkin started giggling insanely.

Black tentacles, huge whipping worms, shot out from the bubbling water. They blasted through the ancient pier wood, sending oil canisters, hunks of wood and rope all flying into the air. Potemkin's laughter turned into a hopeless scream as the worms twisted around him and wrapped him up tight. He flailed desperately for a moment, and then the tentacles yanked him through the pier, into the bubbling water below. Something grumbled in the depths, barely audible under the destruction.

So long, Dmitri. You'll not worry about the cold again. Not where you're going, you poor bastard.

Clutching Alex in my arms, I ran along the pier. Hunks of steel and concrete were tumbling down around me like meteors. Those black snake-tentacles were bursting through the pier beneath my feet, to my right, ahead of me. I ducked and dived past them. For a ghost, Alex felt like a dead-weight.

Then the pier was shattering beneath me, completely, and the water was flying up to meet us like a black fist. As it swept us away my world was blown into darkness.

And then I was awake, and standing on solid ground.

My eyes adjusted for a second. I was standing in a dark chamber, an empty void. There were mirrors around me, circling me, throwing my reflections back at me from a hundred different angles. I peered in one and saw my face thrown back at me from a million angles and a million nowhere places. I thought of kaleidoscopes I'd played with as a kid, watching and twisting the images into a thousand new forms.

"Didn't know you were such a narcissist, Max," a voice said from everywhere at once. A female voice, a little husky, but for all its flaws it was gorgeous. The most perfect voice I'd ever heard, Adelina Patti after a pack of Lucky Strikes. "You of all people should know the penalty for vanity."

"You've got to flaunt what you got," I choked out. My voice bounced back at me a thousand times, like my image, bouncing round inside my head till it faded into a dull ring that wouldn't leave me.

I'm not doing that again, I thought. Not for a long while.

And then she stepped out, from behind the nearest mirror, the most knockout dame I'd ever seen. She was a hottie, this one. They came from all round the world, just for a glimpse of her face. She was Helen of Troy to power infinitum, her face launching fleets of ships from all over the place, half of them risking life and limb for the briefest of peaks. They stuck her gorgeous face on postal stamps and postcards and tour-guides.

Lady Liberty was smiling. For some reason that was the scary part.

"Someone like me," she said, "Has every right to be vain. I've got the looks, and I've got the body to boot. I've got men who'll travel to godforsaken backwaters to kill and be killed. I've got folks who'll sit in their rooms and obsess over me till they're gone enough to blow up a skyscraper. Men will do anything for me, Mr Payne."

"You're not my type," I replied. "I hate to disappoint you, sweetheart. Girls like you chill me to the bone. And I'm a happily married man."

Lady Liberty laughed a little. Her laugh was as sweet as a song, as sweet as Star-Spangled Banner bouncing round a Montana valley or a Nebraska corn-field. I could listen to it forever.

"I've never needed to marry," she said. "But my children will always be there to support me. I'm sure you've met them. They're quite prolific. The single mother who drowns her baby, just to get enough money to stiff her heroin addiction. The eleven-year-old boy carving a dummy-cross in a bullet and mumbling death threats to his teachers. The gang of men in darkened basements, looking over blueprints of office blocks and making bombs out of soap and orange juice. All my kids, Payne, and they've all done me proud."

Suddenly my reflection slipped away, distorted. My shape transformed, and in each mirror a new image rippled into place. In one was Michelle, smiling, beautiful. In another, Alex Balder. My mother. My father. Friends from school. All the people who'd ever meant a damn to me.

For the first time I noticed that Lady Liberty had ditched the torch. In its place was a revolver, a six-shooter like something from the old west.

"I know you think you can win this, Max," she said. "But no-one puts one over me and my city. New York's always going to be standing there. You can take out The Hood, you can take out this Man In White – my children, all of them – and I'll still be standing, still watching over everything. I'll have my revenge, Max. I don't need to kill you. But I can take away everything that matters to you."

She fired, a volley of bullets that flew wildly around me. The mirrors shattered, Michelle's and Alex's and all the other reflections exploding into blue shards that flew into all directions around me. I cried out in horror. What looked like blood splashed from behind the mirrors, thick black streaks against the glass.

Over it all, Lady Liberty was cackling.

"You cops," she smirked. "You think it's all straight-forward, all in black and white. All it takes is a few bullets and a woman's scream, a child's cry, to tell you that there's cracks you can slip through, cracks that'll lead to lives that are nothing but grey and hopelessness. Good and evil's a bad joke, a kid's story. Enjoy this life while it lasts, Max. One day soon we'll get together again and talk, and I'll put you straight."

The mirrors and darkness fell away, and as I hovered back into reality, I could still hear Lady Liberty's giggling.

I didn't think I'd be forgetting it anytime soon.

To be continued…