Four
Eyes had gone to the safehouse as quickly as he could after receiving the
message. It was a gut feeling, but if the other side wanted to undermine him,
to potentially destroy him, it was there, he thought, that they could do the
most harm. It was where Nascine would go looking for him if she suspected
anything.
Six
Coins had told him “there’s a hole dug up in Murleg’s Bog.” Murleg’s Bog. He
had never wanted to think about Murleg’s Bog again.
Chris
Thatch was thirty-two, a rather talented young Rookery Thief who had spent much
of his short career at the Oakshurst field office and spoke fluent Hesaian.
Though recruited out of the Royal Marines, he didn’t have a soldier’s roughness,
and was instead a fairly quiet and empathetic person. He was employed primarily
as an analyst in his time at the Rookery, reading Hesaian newspapers all day
while he was down there, and somehow conjured the desire to read novels in his
free time. Like Four Eyes, he wore spectacles. Indeed, the two of them had similar
physiques and coloring – tall, with chestnut hair and lantern jaws. They would
be described in the same way, though they would not be confused for one another
by sight.
The
House did things in its habitual way. Four Eyes found his instructions in a plastic
bag at the bottom of a stream in Kiterine Park. There was a duplicate key to
Thatch’s house under a loose brick in a back-alley in Canwick, and a knife
hidden in a window-side planter one block away.
It
was the habitual House way, and so Four Eyes did not ever touch the key or the
knife. Another Agent would do that. But because he was most personally invested
in seeing Thatch taken care of, he was instructed to be present at the
disposal.
He
drove there separately through a dense blanket of fog, using the unlocked car,
its key in the ignition, which had been left outside of the coffee shop where
he was told to wait. They were miles outside of Ravenfort when he came to
Murleg’s Bog, the vast watery pit.
The
man driving the lorry was bundled up in a thick jacket, scarf, and cap. It
wasn’t terribly cold. He had wiry grey hair poking out from under the cap and a
big red nose that spoke of alcohol and possibly skin cancer.
Four
Eyes walked over to the lorry driver. “Is this where they get the peat moss for
the whiskey?” he asked.
“Nay,
peat bogs be a track or two up north, by Calico-on-Whaye. This here’s Murleg’s
Bog.”
Satisfied,
Four Eyes nodded and moved to the back of the lorry. The driver made no move to
follow. “You stay back there. I’ll tell you when I’m done,” said Four Eyes, as
if the driver needed to be reminded.
The
driver would not know what was in the box. Thatch’s body had been put in an ice
chest, per instruction. They had waited three days, per instruction. And he was
now being put in Murleg’s Bog, per instruction.
Four
Eyes looked around. They were far enough from the road that no passing motorist
would see. The air was thick with fog, and the bog might have stretched on
forever.
Four
Eyes raised the door to the back of the trailer. The ice chest was a pale
blue-green with slightly rusted chrome handles. There was no ramp or even
dolly. So he climbed up in the back of the trailer and heaved at the ice chest.
It
was far lighter than he expected it to be. The chest slid easily across the
trailer’s floor and tumbled out of the back of the lorry.
It
hit the gravel road with a sickening crack, and the door fell open, propping
the chest up, with Thatch’s body spilling out underneath it.
Four
Eyes swore and then jumped down from the trailer. “Don’t suppose you could help
me?” he called back to the driver.
“Can’t,
mate. Instructions, you know how it is.”
Four
Eyes rolled the chest back so that its opening would point up again, but it was
very difficult to do so without Thatch’s body tumbling out of it. He found that
he did not want to touch the body. He wanted to somehow avoid it, only placing
his hands on the rectangular shape of the ice chest, but he could not coax the
body to fall into place as it should.
Even
when he had finally managed to right the ice chest, Thatch’s arms and one of
his legs were poking up. Four Eyes groaned, averting his gaze as best he could.
The
man did look a bit like him. But death and freezing had done odd things to his
face. Blood oozed out of his opened throat, still carrying crystals of ice, but
returning to liquid with each passing moment.
Gingerly,
Four Eyes took Thatch’s leg by the trousers and attempted to push it back in.
He did not have such a luxury with the arms, on which the sleeves had been
rolled up. After a deep breath, he picked up one of the frigid, stiff arms and
folded it over Thatch’s chest before doing the same with the other.
He
pressed down on the door. It would not latch shut.
He
opened it again, hot frustration replacing his chilly disgust. He pushed down
on Thatch’s foot, which he decided had been why the door was not shutting. Yet
when he tried again, it would still not close all the way.
He
tried again, but the chill of the fog and a growing anxiety that the lorry
driver would abandon him began to gnaw at him.
This part should be over. He thought. They should have planned this correctly!
By
all rights, he should not have even been there, doing this. His job was to
impersonate Thatch and find Jaroka. What purpose did this exercise serve?
After
four more attempts, he slammed the door down. There was a crunching sound. It
was unlike anything he would have expected to hear from a body. He looked into
the chest. Thatch’s skull had been visibly cracked.
Four
Eyes’ stomach churned, but he realized that this was, likely, the best
solution. He slammed the door down again, and again, and again. Bones began to
break, and he could hear and smell the dead flesh getting torn and pulverized
as he brought the heavy ice chest door down on the body of Chris Thatch.
The
door finally closed completely. Four Eyes collapsed over it, only now
registering how fast his heart was beating and how loud the pulse of blood was
thundering in his ears.
He
heaved and shoved and very gradually moved the Ice Chest to the edge of the
bog. It hit the surface with a clap, but as the fluid around it began to bubble
up, the chest slowly sank. Within ten minutes, there was nothing but muddy
black.
As
if the driver had somehow known when it would sink, at that exact moment, the
lorry pulled away, leaving Four Eyes with just his own car.
In
the basement of the Exbrooke safehouse, Four Eyes looked down at the ice chest,
still black from the foul ooze of Murleg’s Bog. The latch had been torn off,
which felt almost like a personal insult. The body was still in there,
preserved, frozen, one bloodshot, accusatory eye looking up at him through
shattered spectacle lenses.
They
had known. Had it been the lorry driver? Was he working for the other side? Or
perhaps that thick fog had done more to disguise their observers than it had
for him. They knew.
Four
Eyes realized he had become the protagonist of one of the gothic horror stories
that this dead man before him had been known to read.
He
attempted to think in practicalities. The body would have to be removed, but
this would prove trickier in a place as dense as Exbrooke. He would need some
sort of vehicle to transport it. Alternatively, he could walk away and await
further instructions from Six Coins.
Yet
the curtness of Six Coins’ warning had suggested a state of panic and disarray.
He was on his own. He would be forced to improvise.
Only
then did it occur to him that perhaps it had not been Six Coins who had given
him the message. Perhaps this was a trap.
And
right on queue, above him, he heard the back door open - the one with the
smashed lock. Someone was coming. Four Eyes stepped away from the body of Chris
Thatch and stepped back into the shadows, drawing his knife.
The
stage was set, and cruel eyes in an old man’s head – a head rimmed with wiry
gray hair – watched the house where Four Eyes held his knife to Gilbert Tartin’s
throat. The young Agent and the middle-aged Thief both waiting breathlessly as
Emily Nascine, the third and final player in this performance, made her way
down into the basement of the Exbrooke safehouse.
The
man with the wiry hair sat on a park bench, sipping from a cup of coffee – foul
stuff, but not as foul as the “coffee” his superior had given him the week
before. He no longer looked like a lorry driver. He was in a business suit, his
wiry hair tamed backward. He had the Ravenfort Ledger folded over his knee and
he made a token effort to appear engrossed in the financial section.
And
behind him, standing by a pond, sprinkling breadcrumbs for the ducks, there was
a man, or rather something very old in the shape of a man. He wore a slender
iron crown and a black cloak as dark as night. No one saw the man in the crown.
(Copyright Daniel Szolovits 2015)
