Notorious - John Jones (read after .TXT) 📗

his house, carrying the bike in, and closed the front door. He hung up his jacket, picked up the bike and carried it through into the kitchen, as he did every time he’d been out riding. He would always put it out on the patio, and lock it to a drainpipe. Despite this area not being particularly known for thieves, he trusted nobody.

 

He flicked on the light as he entered the kitchen, and his suspicions were confirmed. He slowly put down the bike. I’ve been burgled, he thought. Someone had invaded his privacy. It was then that he heard the stairs creaking. Footsteps. A rush of adrenalin shot through him in the form of fear. They reached the hallway and he heard them walking towards the kitchen. He frantically looked around for a weapon, and saw a steak knife on the counter. He snatched it up and spun around as Isabel walked in, an axe in each hand.

 

Her face was statuesque, showing absolutely no emotion. Robert pointed the knife towards her. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he was sure she looked familiar.

“You…you just git out ma house. Or I call the police,'' he said.

“Get out!” He gestured to the back door, but Isabel simply came at him, as though she had not only not understood, but not heard him at all.

 

With the right axe, she swung at his face, but the knife was on its way to point at her again, and he leaned back. The axe chopped at his wrist, cracking the ulna bone. He screamed and staggered back, dropping the knife, clutching the wound. Blood streamed out, splashing the floor and his trousers.

 

Isabel came at him again, raising both axes. One hit his cheekbone, the other cracked his clavicle. He raised up both arms to protect himself, staggering back over the bike. Collapsing onto it, he rolled onto his front in an attempt to scramble away, but he didn’t even begin before Isabel stepped across to him and sent blow after blow into his back.

The blows were soon concentrated around the same place, his lower spine. She hacked away at the vertebrae. Robert screamed throughout, but was ignored. Blood spattered her face and body-warmer, pooling onto the tiles beneath the bike.

 

After a couple of minutes, she had to stop because of sheer exhaustion. As she regained her breath, Robert tried to crawl forward, but found it difficult. His spine had been severed, but the skin across his stomach was still attached. He managed around two feet, skin tearing as he did, his innards oozing out onto the bicycle spokes, sinking through them to the floor.

 

His mind was still in shock, and there were ruminations of pain somewhere on the outer edges of his psyche. Isabel stepped across to him again. She felt as though she could continue, and had no hesitation in doing so. She began to hack away at the back of his neck. With the blades being relatively small, she found herself tired again fairly quickly, but did her best to continue.

 

Robert yelled again, trying to raise a hand in a plea for her to stop, but it was though she could not see it. She was much too focused on chopping away. The spinal cord was severed for the second time, and with one final, hoarse cry for help, Robert seemed to quickly relax. He was deflated. He was dead.

 

With a sudden burst of energy, like a runner slowing down who sees the finishing line, and finds a hidden force to cross it, Isabel sent both axes into the back of his neck and left them there. Blood spread around his head. It was caked on Isabel, dripping from her hands. She stood there for a while, regaining her breath, and after a few minutes, reached down and grabbed his hair. She found it difficult to drag him, but eventually the stomach skin tore away and the innards spread across the tiles as she took him out onto the grass.

 

Leaving him near the spade, she went back and picked up his lower half. She wrapped both arms around it, her footsteps splashing through the blood as she took it outside and placed it next to his other half. Back in the kitchen, there were crushed pieces of liver and spleen to pick up, along with the intestines and pieces of vertebrae. She had to make a few journeys to pick them all up and take them out to the others.

Exhausted, Isabel sat down, crossed legged next to the spade. Gripping it with both hands, she leaned her head against it. After five minutes, she stood up, and began to dig.

 

It was another twenty minutes before she walked back into the kitchen, soil mixing with the blood on her hands like a second skin. She opened the fridge, found a bottle of milk, and poured herself a glass, barely taking a breath as she drank it all. She walked into the hallway and went back upstairs to his bathroom.

 

There was only a small mirror between the basin taps, and she set about cleaning herself. She thought that he could have done with a new towel, as the only one she could see, which was over the bath, had unsightly stains on it, and looked as though he had never used any other. She used it anyway, deciding not to bother getting a bath. After a few minutes, she was satisfied that her face and hands were clean. The body warmer took most of the splashes. She took it off and threw it into the bath. Her dark green tunic was matted in places but she decided it would do for the journey home.

 

Walking down the stairs, she went into the kitchen and switched off the light. She was cold, and saw that beneath the stairs, several coats were hanging up. Choosing the warmest, a stone sport jacket, she put it on, and left the house, closing the door quietly behind her.

 

The sky was a dark, monestial blue, with black creeping in. Street-lamps had recently illuminated, and most vehicles had their headlights on. She left the gate open as she walked in the direction of Penketh, her home. Mrs Caley across the road was outside, watering the plants in her hanging basket. She had to stop and stare at Isabel, simply because of where she had come from. Well well, she thought, a girl leaving Robert’s house. A ‘person’, other than him, leaving his house. There’s a first time for everything.

23

 

Curio nodded, disinterestedly. He was stood at his landline telephone, listening to Mrs Abercrombie as she talked about her husband. For nearly twenty minutes, all he had said was: ‘Ye’, ‘really’, or ‘right’. It was another ten minutes before she finally let him go, and he was relieved to put down the receiver.

 

He walked through into the kitchen. On the door, there was a photocopy of a book cover which featured the stern face of the author, behind him a silhouette of a castle. There were no castles in it, or references to the past. ‘There and back’ by Daryl Paloma, was basically his account of his tour of the other side by his guardian angel.

 

Often at night, in his dreams, he would be awoken by Aisha, to walk amongst fluttering petals, to see his relatives who had crossed over, to taste the crisp, fresh atmosphere of paradise. His trips there had now ended. It was basically Aisha taking him for a visit of where he would cross to after his death.

 

On his last visit, she had told him that the next time he came, he would stay there permanently. There had been no more visits after that, and Daryl could not just sit by and not tell people. He had to let the world know by writing his account of his experience. Daryl had not always been on the straight and narrow. At one point in his life, he had found himself homeless, and taking hallucinogens to forget his circumstances. It was here, at his lowest ebb, that Aisha came down to visit him, and he then knew that he had to clean himself up, get back on track, and become an example to others in similar predicaments.

 

Curio opened a tin marked: ‘Sugar’. In it were four ginger biscuits which he took out and ate on the way back to his computer. Switching it on, he sat in relative silence, crunching away as the machine started up. A few minutes later, he was browsing through the message-board on ‘Uncanny kingdoms’, and began to read the messages on a thread entitled: ‘The facts of Aliens’.

 

It was basically somebody writing about how they had seen foreign objects in the distance. Where else? outside their kitchen. This simple observation was their evidence of life beyond the stars. The lights darted about the sky like confused fireflies. That was it, that was proof. Aliens existed, and to the observer, was fact. They were however, only a few steps away from believing fully the truth about abductions. Now that they knew aliens existed, then the reality of abductions was not too much of a step to take regarding their convictions.

 

‘Taser09’ from Phoenix, Arizona had written in one of his posts from the original thread he had started, in reply to ‘Owl hunter’, about those with secret knowledge about what the lights were: ‘Yes, no question about it. Why is it always us kept in the dark? We know, though. They think they can fool us, but they are wrong. Those crafts were definitely over that military base, and I reckon it proves that the government know about them, but they’re not telling us, as usual’. ‘Owl hunter’ had replied:

 

‘I heard once that the government have known about aliens for years, but it would create panic if they told the world. So it’s they who examine the aliens. I don’t know about abductions. Maybe there’s different species of them. The weaker ones get caught by the military, taken in and examined. Others maybe experiment on humans, and animals. Remember, animal mutilations still happen today, but nobody sees it. These aliens must be more intelligent than us. They must be to build such specialised ships’. The following reply was from ‘Abe’:

 

‘Strange isn’t it? how these aliens can build such fantastic spaceships, fly all the way to earth, then dart about the planet and not be seen by anybody except the ‘government’. Funny how the government knows everything doesn’t it? When you’ve no answers yourself, the government’s always to blame. Have you ever stopped to consider the fact that these lights might not actually be UFOs? or is that too much for you to comprehend? If they’re not, then what of other cases? Oh no! Maybe they’re not UFOs either. Maybe aliens don’t exist at all. These beings come all this way just to communicate with the government? Seriously, how likely is that?’. Hello Abe, Curio thought. I think you’re the one who doubted me. He then began to type a reply:

 

‘Abe, you’re the one who doubted my abilities. I seem to remember you wanting more evidence of my ‘powers’. Well I’ve more news that will dampen your argument against me. Remember I had four psychic detections in a row. Well it’s now FIVE. Five in a row. The police came to me first. Soon after that, a man came forward to hand himself in. He confessed, and it was proven to be him. So put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mr Cynic. Surely now, that is proof that I have a gift. Not only have I proven that I can find missing persons, I can commune with spirits, predict the future, and believe I can psychically heal. Not just those, but many others besides. Science cannot answer everything.