A belt buckle like an Iron Cross around the neck. A pencil-drawn swastika. An SS-style shoulder patch. In one house in Clontarf, a guy named Terry has a toy soldier shrine in a foil-lined cardboard box.
Votive offerings. Symbols of fear, not worship, not support. Warding off Kurt and his unholy wrath.
I shouldn’t be surprised. They all gather together in Duff Alley off East Wall Road to drink Tenants Super until someone passes out or pisses themselves. And they talk, and share stories. Chinese whispers. Some believe them, some don’t. But they all listen.
They say Kurt’s the son of an SS officer. They say he’s raped and killed more than two hundred men. They say his website has more than a thousand followers, all over the world, who take perverse delight in making each victim last as long as possible. They say-and when I tell Curt this he practically wets himself laughing-that he has a fourteen-inch dick and that most of his victims die from blood poisoning caused by massive anal tearing.
Iron Kurt.
My creation. My Frankenstein. My cartoon monster.
And then Keith disappears. One day, gone. No one knows where. No one’s seen him. They find his trolley round the corner from a soup kitchen on North Quay, but he never comes back for it. Shit happens, these people move on.
William stops picking up pay for his rats and vanishes from the hostel he’s been staying at. Someone tells me he’d been beaten up and his badge taken a couple of days before.
I stop seeing Terry. When I go to his house, his toy soldier shrine is still there, but he’s gone. The neighbor says the last they saw of him, he was going to get a pint of milk. A couple of the others disappear too.
Duff Alley gets very empty, and the conversation there becomes very muted. They get drunk, huddle together, and after dark they whisper that Iron Kurt has come for them. And now I’m
shit
scared.
Another trip to the piss-stained steps outside Michael’s flat. He’s almost the only one left, and I need to know what he knows. To find out if he can reassure me. Keith left for Cork. William found a winning lottery ticket in the street and moved to the Caribbean. Some other Gardai told the Duff Alley crazies to get out, so they’re meeting somewhere else now.
When I knock on the door, I hear a wet thudding noise from inside. When I try the handle, it’s unlocked. When I should turn and run away, I push it open and walk in.
The sickly sweet smell of blood on the air. The acrid spike of human waste. The cloying taste of someone else’s sweat. Michael lies in a crimson-splashed, naked tangle in the middle of his living room floor. The carpet around him soaked black with blood. Legs splayed at an unnatural angle, and pink-yellow ribbons of intestines running from the split and tattered gash that yawns between them.
He twitches, and I realize he’s still alive.
“Michael? Can you hear me?”
Whimper. Twitch. One eye creaks open and fixes me with a stare of utter agony and shock.
“Who did this? What the fuck’s going on?”
“Kurt? You’re sure? Christ.”
I should be calling an ambulance. I should be calling my colleagues. “Where is he now?”
Michael’s eye looks down. Pleading. Betrayed.
He thinks I did it. “I didn’t tell him,” I say. “Jesus, Michael, I wouldn’t even know how. I swear to you.”
“
“What did he tell you?”
As Michael’s head drops to the carpet, something thumps out in the stairwell and my heart jumps into my mouth. Again I think about running, but I don’t. Again I think about calling the station, but to tell them what? That some kind of phantom is stalking lunatics on my beat?
I step outside, check the stairs with shaky steps and trembling hands. And there’s nothing there.
When I come back down to Michael’s flat, the body is gone. So is the blood that soaked the carpet a moment ago. Is the smell gone as well? I can’t tell. But there’s no sign that Michael was ever here. And was he-could I be imagining it? Could all this be in my head, a product of my own fear?
Fuck. Fuck.
When I search the flat, I can’t see any of the protective trinkets the others had. He was an unbeliever.
I’m not. Not now.
When I walk away from Michael’s, I see the tall figure of a bald man watching me from the trees on the far side of the park across the street. He’s massive, and bare-chested. The dark outlines of tattoos that litter his skin flicker and swirl like flames. He points at me, long and hard, then slides back into the undergrowth.
So now it’s been four days since then, since I called in sick. Since I barricaded myself into my flat, to wait for the end. In the yellow glare of the forty-watt bulb, in the air that reeks of stale sweat and fear, I’m protected by a butcher’s knife and an Iron Cross. A spray-paint swastika on every wall. A replica of one of those Nazi imperial eagles they’d carry everywhere in those films. Terry’s foil-lined box with his tableau of half a dozen toy German WWII soldiers.
Maybe they’ll help me. I certainly won’t step beyond their protective radius.
Because Kurt is coming to kill me. His creator. To close the circle. I’m the last one he’s looking for here. And he won’t let me go. I know it.
Soon I’ll hear his footsteps on the stairs. Slow, heavy, deliberate.
Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.
THE DEATH OF JEFFERSBY KEVIN WIGNALL
Heg the Peg was the end of it. Marty had known from the start which creek he was up; this was just the confirmation on the whereabouts of the paddle. If it had won, he’d have been in the clear, or as near as made any difference.
True to its name, though, the first race had finished five minutes ago and Heg the Peg was still running. So much for Bob and his cast-iron tips, straight from the stable, the whole crowd of them laying money on it like it was the only horse in the race. If there was any cast-iron, it was in Heg the Peg’s saddle.
So now Marty had two choices. First was finding some other way of raising two thousand euros by the end of the month-and frankly, that was looking about as likely as the stewards disqualifying every other horse in the last race.
Second was borrowing the money off Hennessey and paying back the interest for the rest of his life.
Three choices-he could tell McKeon to sing for the money, leave Dublin, leave Ireland, and find a monastery in Bhutan that was recruiting. Four choices-his next fare could be some crazy American on his first trip to Dublin, wanting to hire him for the whole week, money no object. You never knew with the airport.
The door opened and Marty turned off the radio.
“Wynn’s Hotel, please.” English, in a suit, overnight bag; no big tip here. The fare leaned over and handed him a piece of paper with an address on it. “Could you stop here on the way? I’ll give you a good tip.”
Marty glanced at the address. It wasn’t far out of the way.
“No problem. First time in Dublin?”
“Yes it is.”
