Hero In [Parts 1 & 2]

It starts with people needing some help. It might be a girl you like, or some guys you’re trying to impress, or even just an old buddy you bump into on the street. The important thing is that you’ve got a reputation for smoking weed and they’d like some. Maybe they’re new to town, or they want to throw a party and want to impress someone as a one off, but they need you. They need your help. So that’s what you do. You start to “help” them out by buying weed on their behalf and then you start charging extra because it soon becomes regular and it’s more than just a favour, and then you realise you’re putting so much time into it you need to find someone who sells large amounts at a discount.

Eventually, you realise weed won’t cut it. The margins are too low and the work’s too hard. By now you have four phones, way too many friends on Facebook, a day job you fucking hate, and so much of your time goes into being a dealer that you’ve given up hopes of it just being a hobby. Oh, and of course, you have your own addiction to take care of. Most of the time you’ll be lucky to break even, but selling weed helps. Maybe the guy you buy off mentions mushrooms, or MDMA, or something else that’s common.

But the important thing to remember is that it’s a surprisingly short road to heroin. It pays the most, weighs very little, and you don’t have to worry about spreading yourself too thin. Now you’ll be able to get a little book of real valuable repeat customers. And, if you’re like me, you might just have had enough sense to never try your own product. But it’s still a problem. Every person who buys is a ticking time bomb, a walking liability. And every day you work this job, you’re not doing something else, something with prospects. And it only takes one arrest to fuck it all up, and it only takes one idiot to lead to that arrest.

See, what I did was I went after a certain kind of client, someone who through luck and opportunity is rich enough to hide their addiction. Someone who doesn’t “look” like an addict, if you get what I mean. They’re hardly immune to the effects of addiction, but consequences are a lot less severe for the upper classes. Good thing that applies to their dealers too. It’s nice to have clients who don’t die every few years. That’s not to say their health is my number one priority, but I’ve known most of them for going on eight years. I’ve helped them move, fix broken down cars, find dates, rehearse presentations, pick up deliveries, and on one occasion I even baby-sat one of their nieces while they got high in the garden shed.

Sadly, I would have to admit that they’re my closest friends.

And about a fortnight ago something bad happened to each and every one of them. Normally I like to sell all my goods on a Sunday, no open door policy and no phone calls. I keep a consistent routine and it avoids trouble but last Tuesday I had one of them knocking at my door. I was pretty pissed to have this guy, Rolo (don’t ask, not his real name), turn up out of the blue. That’s not how I like to do things, and I was pretty damn close to not opening the door. But, as you might guess, junkies are resistant to denial and he wasn’t going to go away out of politeness. So, in the end, I let him in.

But to my surprise, he wasn’t there to buy. He came straight in and put a brick of the stuff in my hand, leaving me totally speechless. He then went on this winding rant about his childhood and the things his mother did to him and the scars she left and after a long, long time, he eventually got to the point:

“I found it,” Rolo told me. “I found it in a gutter on the side of the road, way way out in the middle of nowhere. I was driving home and my wife she’ll… oh man I just spotted it. What a weird thing, right? My headlight caught it and I was like ‘wait was that… no fucking way!?’ But it was. Just a brick of the stuff waiting for me in a ditch in the middle of nowhere and…”

He paused and bit down on his thumb so hard I thought he was going to snap it off like a baby carrot.

“I’ll kill myself if I have this much,” he said. “I know it, you know it, everyone fucking knows it man. You can’t give me all of this. You can’t. I looked at that brick and I realised I’d be dead within a day. And you… you’ve been so good to me. How much do I owe you? Like, seriously? All those times?”

“You don’t owe me anything,” I said. “You’ve been paid up for years.”

“It’s not about that though,” he replied. “It’s about the gesture. You helped me. So… here’s what I’m thinking. You take this and you just… you sell it? And any money you split with me and then I use that money to buy more stuff off you when I need it. That way I never have enough on me to just… go crazy. You know? I can’t even tell you how much strength this took, by the way. I’ve been driving the streets for like 5 hours just thinking this through carefully. I took the elevator up here three times. But… I know it’s what I need. I can’t… I can’t leave this place with that brick.

“I’ll kill myself.”

I weighed it up in my hands. It was easily worth a grand and I had to admit, what he said made sense. There was no way any addict could be trusted with that much, least of all him. And, just to reiterate, it was worth a shit load of money.

“You found this?” I asked, clearly incredulous. I glanced at the gold leaf symbol stamped onto one side, failing to recognise it but feeling an intense anxiety in its presence.

“In a fucking ditch,” he said, his face elated. “Someone must have just chucked it! Whoosh, straight out the window.”

“Alright,” I agreed. “This is… this is a good deal,” I added, hesitating for reasons I couldn’t say. But I decided I was just being irrational because, by all accounts, this was a fucking good surprise. Free money is always a good surprise. “Come on,” I told him. “I’ll weigh a little out for you.”

Instinctively he reached into his pocket and started counting notes.

“It’s your stuff,” I snapped and he laughed at himself. But I just shook my head and took it to my scales, where I began taking off just a little to give to Rolo. Pretty soon I was left sitting in my flat on my own staring at the brick with a sense of confusion, partly at the preceding events, partly at the strange pit in my stomach, and partly because that symbol made my eyes hurt.

Over the next week that brick was sold in pieces to each of my customers, slowly whittling itself down until about half was left. Bit by bit I sold it to all eleven of my regulars and then, bit by bit, none of them came back. When it came to Sunday—a day where my phone is normally lit up and my door’s a fucking tambourine—there was silence. I tried calling them all but there was no answer for each of them. I cannot stress to you just how weird this is. Heroin addicts don’t skip appointments with me. It just doesn’t work like that, not unless they’re dead.

And that was a harrowing thought to have.

All of them?

Man, even back then I took a long hard look at that brick. Something about it had bothered me the entire time, and now I was truly worried. Do you know what they’d do to me if I sold bad drugs to eleven different middle-class Londoners? One of them is a blonde girl in her twenties. Fucking blonde.

Do you have any idea how bad that would be for me?

My first stop was the news. At least three of the people I sold to were Oxbridge graduates with banking jobs, and I figured if they died it’d be in the papers somewhere. People love those kinda scandalous stories, so I started Googling names until I got a hit. It was… not what I expected.

That blonde I just mentioned. I’m gonna call her Milkybar, anyways she turned up in one paper having gone missing, last seen a few days before. It was a plea from her husband and parents, asking for her to come home. The paper mentioned her addiction and there were worries she’d relapsed or worse, died. Well, I was worried too, but what I knew that they didn’t was that Milkybar had a small flat she rented in a friend’s name where she smoked before going to work. I also happened to have a key from a misguided attempt at seduction (long story).

I had an address and access. And I rushed there hoping to God I’d find her partying her tits off or handcuffed to a bed deep in withdrawal.

If only.

I entered quietly only to find a dingy shithole in a high-rise apartment that was a huge step down from the last time I’d been there. Somehow, there were signs of decay. I mean, ten plus years of rot and decay. Wallpaper was peeling, the ceilings were yellow, pipes had rusted, plaster had chipped, the windows had faded. I’d been there just a year before and it had been a newly decorated flat. It wasn’t squalor that had done the damage, no. It was derelict, broken down the way old houses are. Nothing about it made sense to me. I triple checked the address but sure enough, that was the right place.

So I kept looking and eventually I found Milkybar. At least, I figure it was her because of the clothes. Really, I guess all I found was a pile of bones in a sundress with some faint straw-coloured hair. Her skull, her mouth, was wide open and the sockets empty and it just looked like she was in pain. And the porcelain tub was all stained a dark red, looking an awful lot like a puddle of blood. I felt like I’d stumbled into a crypt, the way her bones looked brittle with age, with little teeth marks from rats.

Was this a bad attempt at faking her death? I wondered.

After a little more poking around, I found some papers stuffed between her pelvis and her dress. I pulled them out and unrolled them, recoiling from the smell, and read. I don’t wanna put it all up in print, but she wrote about some fucked up stuff. Real nasty messed up things, like “I just saw Se7en” messed up. It nearly made me sick and, struggling to understand anything in the moment, I put those crazy words down to her having a fucked up troubled mind.

After looking around a bit more and not finding anything, I took the notes and left. At the bottom of the last page she’d sketched symbol from the brick in my flat and that freaked me out. None of the people, aside from Rolo, could have possibly seen that symbol, and I did not like it being there one tiny little bit. It left me shaken, not just because of the potential trouble it might bring, but because I was worried that it really was Milkybar in that tub, and that something awful had happened to her.

So I decided to check up on the others. It wasn’t easy, but I managed to visit at least two others before morning.

The first of the two was a guy I’ll call Snickers who, if you can believe it, was a professor of English Literature at KCL. He was something of a tortured artist when he was younger, and while he later grew up and let go of the “artist” part he guarded the “tortured” part like a tiger protecting her cub. When I first knocked the door of his own personal little fuck-pad, I heard what I’d best describe as a kind of quiet sobbing and some shuffling. I wound up banging at his door for a good ten minutes before someone finally let me in and it wasn’t Snickers.

The guy didn’t even greet me or look surprised. He was a young man, early twenties, and I’d have bet my life that he was one of Snickers’ many student hook ups. Not that it mattered, but I followed him carefully as he held both his arms and shivered violently, tears streaming down his cheeks. Both of us sat down opposite one another and the first thing he said was not what I expected at all.

“What the fuck happened man?” he said, stifling a sob.

“What?”

“Where am I?” he asked. “I don’t. I don’t… what the fuck happened man? Where did we go?”

“Where’s Snickers?” I asked.

“What the fuck? We were all there! You saw exactly what happened, man. They made us watch. All of us, me especially. You saying you don’t fuckin’ remember?”

“I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else,” I answered. “What happened her?”

The kid stopped and stared at me for a long minute before sniffling and pulling his knees up to his chest, holding them close while he rocked back and forth. His eyes were distant, and when he spoke next he didn’t talk to me.

“I thought you were Dan,” he said. “Who are you?”

“I’m a friend of Snickers,” I answered. “I was worried something had happened.”

The kid laughed and for a brief moment I saw a network of cuts leading down his neck onto his chest.

“I don’t know,” he answered, a quiver in his voice. “We were here, we got high and then… Jesus Christ,” he broke down, holding his face in his hands and crying. I waited patiently until he could resume. “Oh it was fucking awful man. You don’t even know. They just… they didn’t even come, we went to them man, floating through… through… I don’t even fucking know, the sky? We just all wound up there washed up on the shore and then they came and they took us and I thought it was just a trip, y’know? Just a bad trip but it weren’t like that at all. Oh fuck man my mum, oh my God how am I even going to explain this to her. We’ve been gone so long…”

I looked around for a moment and took in the state of Snickers’ apartment, noticing the strange dust that coated everything and the peculiar person-shaped imprint on the sofa.

“How long were you gone?” I asked.

“You should know man you think they let us keep fucking clocks? Where are the police? Where are the ambulances? It’s been a year at least…”

“Nooo,” I said. “I saw Snickers just a few days ago.”

“No…”

“Yes,” I answered.

“No they kept us for years man…”

I stood up and the boy flinched. But I happily showed him my phone and the date and even let him scrawl through BBC News for a good few minutes.

“No no no,” he mumbled before looking up at me, pleading. “It wasn’t just a dream man, we fucking lived it. We lived it every day for years, all four of us. You don’t know what it was like, the things they did to us. What they did to Snickers…” he burst into tears and this time I realised he wasn’t going to recover quickly. I asked him if anyone else was around and he feebly pointed towards a nearby bedroom door.

What I found inside that room was not what I expected. You could have hung it a modern art museum and no one would have noticed. Milkybar upset me but I’d done a good job convincing myself it was like a big elaborate ruse. It’s easier to believe that than God knows what. I mean, what was the alternative? That those things she’d written were true? Years spent taken away and subjected to humiliation, degradation, and unspeakable torture?

But that room… I couldn’t convince myself that was a ruse. I couldn’t rightly say if Snickers was in there. But whatever it was, it had been a person once, and now it knelt on the bed in a position of supplication. Their face… it didn’t really exist anymore except for the mouth that had been cut so far back into their head I could glimpse vertebrae. The rest of the skull was just smooth pitted wrinkled skin, like a person’s thumb after a long bath. The skin of their armpits, where the arms and torso met, had started to melt together forming a broken webbed joint that forced their arms into prayer.

All along their abdomen and back, human teeth had been implanted only to keep on growing into strange bones that broke apart stitches and surgical staples, turning into grotesque hairy, toothy, tumours that covered their midriff like barnacles on a ship. They knelt in a pool of crimson liquid that looked much deeper than it was, rising to their belly button. The strange lapping water gave off the strange sensation of looking down onto an enormous blood-red ocean. At moments it looked as thin as water, other times it looked as viscous as slime mould. Rising up out of it were ten different limbs, each one thinning unnaturally until it terminated in a single lonely toe. New joints had been added to them, seemingly at random, so that this person was hunched over their branching legs like an immense mangrove tree rising out of a blood-soaked swamp.

And marching up out of the waters was a forest of mushrooms no bigger than my thumb, tiny and identical like neat, orderly buttons, their caps opening and closing in a rhythmic dance that made my skin crawl. And then something twitched in the water, looking for the world like a breaching fish. And I was out of there, unable to even think or reason what had happened in clear terms.

“Look what they did to us man,” the boy screamed as I stumbled past him, tearing open his shirt to reveal a single large black equine eye embedded in his chest. “It took years to grow us into this. Fucking years,” he screamed, his shrill voice following me all the way down the hall.

And with that I was back in my car shaking, barely able to think. At this stage I was doing mental back flips to explain what I’d seen and somehow I got it in my head that what I needed to do was to check up on the others. It had to be fake, I told myself. The only way I’d prove it was if I followed things up. I had to know, it’s the human condition and I couldn’t walk away. I couldn’t retreat. I couldn’t possibly accept living in a world where anything I’d seen in that flat was real.

I drove away from that block way too fast but eager to get on and find answers. The closest place next on my list was an office run by a man I called Aero. He fancied himself as a sort of Gordon Gecko, Wolf of Wall Street kinda guy, but he was the richest man I knew and whip smart to boot. I hoped to God he wasn’t in on all this bullshit and could offer some kind of help or explanation.

Earlier that year he’d given me a security card for his building and I luckily fished it out of my dash before going in. He had a floor or two in this massive high-rise and I got the card out ready to explain why I needed to enter the building at 2am to some bleary-eyed security guard only to find the front desk empty. It was a simple flick of a switch to open the elevator, but I couldn’t stop staring at the half-drunk cup of tea waiting for the guard.

Probably gone to the loo, I thought, before briefly touching the ice-cold cup and realising that wasn’t the case at all.

Man it was dark in there, and unsettling in the way that night-time offices always are. Any place that goes from busy to quiet has that air about it. The sense that once everyone goes home something comes slinking out of the shadows to stretch its legs. I felt like I was intruding, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave it yet. I was secretly trying to tell myself I’d been hallucinating in Snickers’ place, and I desperately wanted someone to reassure me that was true.

I used the card to get access to Aero’s floor and walked out into an otherwise dead office-space. Even though the sky in London isn’t very clear, I could still see a full moon hanging over the skyline, following me like an eye as I walked along the enormous windows.

Aero’s office was easily found. It was the only one with the blinds pulled shut, unlike the others that were as clear and transparent as a scientist’s beaker. His name and title were on full display and I could have walked right in, but something about the silence unsettled me. There was the sense that someone was moving around in those shadows, ducking and scuttling below cubicles and desks, just out of sight, whenever I turned. So I tried to peak through the blinds of his office first without going in, just to get a sense of what was in there.

All I could glimpse was a desk chair facing me, and the dark outline of someone sitting in it. Steeling my nerves, I forced myself to open the door and found a desiccated corpse waiting for me. Although the skin was leathery and dry, pocked with peeling blisters and signs of decay, enough of the features remained that I could easily tell it was Aero. Unlike the others he looked asleep, peaceful even. For a moment I stared at him, lost in the silence, when something behind me fell over and I whipped around, heart thundering.

It was Aero, though younger looking if I’m honest. It was strange to see him and for a moment I looked back and forth while he stumbled in, stopped to take a breath with his hands on his knees, and then finally fell onto the floor where he began to cry.

“What happened?” I asked, walking over to him.

“How long?” he asked.

“Huh?”

“How long have I been gone?” he asked. “I’m amazed any of this is still here.”

“Not long,” I answered.

“I spent so long waiting to come back,” he said. “I thought I’d never see this place again.”

“What happened?”

“Oh who knows,” he said. “I just need you to take me home. It’s been so long I don’t even…” Aero stopped to stare at me for a moment, his face wrought with confusion. When I told him my name he looked deeply thankful. “That’s right,” he said, nodding. “Yes I remember you now. And my… did I have a wife?”

“No,” I said shaking my head. I almost said something else, standing there so close to him. Looking back, I’m glad I didn’t. Instead I asked, “Aero man, you gotta tell me what the fuck is going on? Who is that in your chair?”

“I guess I um, I wound up going somewhere, you know? It was beautiful. They uh, they gave me everything. Everything I could ever want. Even eternal life? I was there for a lot longer than just one life time. That,” he said, pointing to the body in the chair. “That’s the old me. You can’t imagine how amazing it was. It was beautiful, but I just missed home, you know?”

He laughed and reached his hand out to touch the carpet.

“Home sweet home.”

He looked at me, facing the moonlight for the very first time, smiling and an inexplicable wave of revulsion washed over me. I had to swallow it, trying hard to ignore the bile rising in my throat. It was hard to see, but something about his pallor unsettled me.

“Come on,” I said, let’s get you home. Once more a look of confusion briefly flashed across his face, his eyes flicking to his surroundings before landing back on me.

“Of course,” he said, nodding slightly. “Home.” I reached down and pulled him up, trying not to wince at the slick feel of his cold palms. Leaning down when I did, I couldn’t help but notice a speck of blood across his shoes.

“They gave you everything?” I asked.

“Oh everything,” he said, suddenly gushing. “A human could want for nothing. Oh the food, the clothing, the knowledge. It was divine.”

“And the women?” I asked.

“Magnificent,” he smiled.

“Good,” I said, trying to hold back a cry.

Aero was gay.

“Let me go get my keys,” I said, my voice just starting to break. “I dropped them a while back.” I turned and went to leave, stopping for a moment in the doorway to look at the doppelganger. He was staring at me, his eyes overcome with a frightening intensity. At that moment, I dropped the pretence and ran, making for a twisting path through the office and doing my utmost best to ignore the sounds of wet footprints behind me. I don’t know if he was breathing or panting, but it sounded like a gale wind passing through a bee-hive. I was desperate to put something between this thing and myself, and for a moment I almost ran to the elevator but at the last moment images of me slamming my finger into the call-lift button burst into my mind, and I went for the stairs instead.

The first thing I saw when I opened it were the remains of the security guard. Unlike everything I’d seen so far, something about him bent over, blood pooling around his shredded entrails, that grounded me. He hadn’t been altered, he’d been assaulted and from the looks of it stabbed, repeatedly. I nearly slipped in his blood, but I was careful, managing to shuffle around it before bounding down those stairs, leaping three or four steps at a time, almost willing myself to fall just in the hope that it’d get me down quicker.

Above me, that thing burst into the stair well. I half expected it to taunt me but it just made these shrill, almost bird like cries of joy. It wasn’t far behind me and it closed the distance fast. It was barely a single flight behind me when it spread its arms, let out a swine-like squeal, and jumped headfirst in my direction.

It broke its neck almost immediately, falling in a broken pile of muscle and bones by my feet. It was like it didn’t even know the limits of its own body, and I shuddered at the thought of what it might once have been. As it lay there, a small pool of that crimson fluid slowly oozed out of every orifice of and from it rose thousands of those brown mushrooms, smoothly gliding up out of nothing with the grace of a dancer. Barely a minute later and the flesh within had started to crumple and fold leaving loose skin hanging off like clothes on a washing line, the slackening mouth leering at me like a drunk idiot’s grin.

I don’t remember much else from that night. I awoke in the driver seat of my car a few hours later, engine idling at a green light as a van driver went caveman on his horn. I drove home, ready to write the whole mad night off, eager to pretend it hadn’t happened. It was something I might have managed were it not for the brick waiting for me in my flat. Now I’ve finally caught up with my rest and I’m left wondering if it’s worth checking out the other eight people. I have maybe a night or more before the police realise I’m the common denominator for a lot of carnage and misery, and maybe getting ahead of it is the only chance I have of knowing what the hell to do.

But today I dreamed. I dreamed of a city on a coast with blood-red waters, a collapsed moon hanging in the sky. I dreamed of things that live there, filled with ambivalent sadism. I saw dungeons and torture chambers filled with people toiling away, and amongst them I saw Aero, Rolo, and Milkybar, old and frail, beating rocks with stones while shadow-covered figures grow ready to satisfy strange and unspeakable desires.

And I awoke, with that brick in my hand, the symbol burning into my palm.

-

Snickers, Aero, Milkybar, Rolo, Galaxy, Mars, Wispa, Lion, Crunchy, Twirl, Flake.

It was late afternoon and it had been a few hours since I’d woken up. I’d written the names across a piece of paper and crossed out the first three, dragging the ball-point slowly across my own hand-writing like I was vandalising a gravestone. That left eight to go. I couldn’t forget those remaining names, even as I sat and waited, keeping an eye on the news, watching closely for signs of the inevitable shit show I knew was coming my way. By then there’d only been two things of relevance. One was a news article wondering why the bones of a 60-year-old woman were found in a dress belonging to Milky Bar. And another was a report of a fire in Snickers’ flat. I didn’t know if bodies were found or not, but that’s all anyone said in the article.

I knew the police must have be baffled and I couldn’t blame them. I realised quickly they’d want answers, and I thought that was funny in a twisted sort of way. Not just because I knew sweet fuck all, but because despite knowing nothing I still, somehow, knew more than everyone else. It’s just I didn’t have a clue how to put it all together. I still don’t, even now.

I know for you reading this, it’s just is a story. I know that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But for me it was what I saw with my own two eyes and it meant that… I didn’t even know what it meant. A philosopher could’ve written a hundred books based on the things I’d seen and heard.

But I just wanted to feel normal again.

And after I crossed out those first three names, all I really wanted was to un-fuck my fuck up. I was never a good person. You think I couldn’t have had that stuff tested? Or that it didn’t occur to me something awful might happen? You think long-term planning comes easy to someone like me? I’d been coasting along for years waiting for the hammer to fall. It was all just about having fun before it came crashing down. It was about distraction. It was always about distraction. I’ve always been an idiot. Not a mean-spirited person… just a fucking moron.

When I was a kid I drove drunk through a neighbour’s fence and I remember my Dad asking me over and over:

“Do you know what it took to fix this?”

He was screaming at me. “Do you have any idea what I have to do to make this go away?”

When my old man got angry, he spoke in questions no one was meant to answer. It was like he was trying to do your thinking for you, trying to get you started with the hope you’d never stop. And that’s what I wanted right then: someone to think for me, to tell me where to go. But I had to make do with myself, so I started wondering which of those eight remaining names might be able to help if they were somehow still alive. Thoughts of leaving the country came to mind, and with that so did Flake, who owned a very large (and dodgy) logistics company that brought goods over from Calais.

But Flake was a peculiar guy at the best of times. Out of everyone I knew he was the most criminal, not in the “stealing cars” sense, but in the “has photos of him meeting Prince Andrew” sense. I also knew he owned some nearby clubs which were big into S&M. I’d heard of sordid gatherings in the deep-down dark and I could well imagine Flake in some seedy basement with his sinewy neck and nose full of coke, thrusting away at a doped-up stripper.

The idea made my skin crawl, but I threw on some clothes and made the long walk to the dingy street where his club was. I found the entrance empty, with no sign of staff on-site. That made some sense, since it was midday but the place still felt weirdly abandoned anyway. This was a huge night spot, a place of glamour and fun where drinks cost a fortune and taking a picture of the wrong person could get you kicked out and your phone ‘confiscated’. But looking at it in daylight, all I saw was a stair way leading down into darkness that looked strangely uncanny. The walls were made of cheap plywood spray-painted black, there were signs printed out in A4 and taped to the walls, the permanently-open glass door with a flimsy aluminium frame had a big crack running down the central pane, there were scuff marks and rubbish all over the tiles, and there was the faint smell of piss and vomit all around the curb outside. Oh, and a few used condoms too.

Just a few hours before people were living a dream down there, one with neon lights and pounding music in a dark boundless room filled with beautiful strangers. Their minds free of inhibition and filled endless possibility for adventure. This was where people escaped the tedium of day-to-day life, but looking at it then and there, stepping out of the way to let a woman with a pram walk past while the winter sun hung low behind me, all I saw was a grotty little shithole.

“Hello,” I cried out, looking into the emptiness. I could just about make out a doorway at the foot of the stairs, its frame lit up by flashing lights but no music. “Is Flake there?” I asked. “It’s a friend.”

But there was no response, so I started going down, taking it one step at a time and stopping often to call out for a member of staff. Downstairs, I found the first part of the club. It was a small dancefloor covered with cheap linoleum, and in one corner there was a tiny bar stocked with common brands. There were some chains on the wall, and some artwork showing butt plugs and people in gimp masks, but I was actually quite surprised at how tame it was.

Then again, this was the part of the club anyone could get into for just £15. I’d been in there once, and back then it had seemed so much bigger, so much cooler, and a lot less mundane. I imagined this was the time of day cleaners and waiting staff had to run around and flush away the condoms, scrub the floor, flush the toilets, and try to undo the damage of the previous night.

But why were the lights still going? There were still plastic cups all over the floor and half-empty beer bottles littered the few standing tables. In one corner there were three booths with leather seats and exposed sponge, and on one I saw a jacket and on another was a handbag. I backtracked to the toilets and noticed lines of coke still laid out on the toilet cisterns. Walking back out, I briefly looked up at the sunlight coming down the stairs and felt a strong desire to go back up. But Flake was my best chance of a half-decent future, and I convinced myself I was being irrational.

Looking around I found another two floors restricted for VIPs, and while the decoration was a bit nicer and the artwork more explicit, they weren’t anything special either. This was where people might pay more to be able to do coke in peace, or to try and impress a date. And while they were still eerily silent, filled with empty drinks and rubbish, the DJ stations empty, their apple mac laptops left sitting on the screensaver, I hadn’t glimpsed anything truly weird yet.

Next floor down I found an office with no name on the door. I entered, took one glance at the massive oil painting of a naked woman wearing furs and riding a horse, and the swivel egg chair made of lilac velvet, and I immediately guessed the office belonged to Flake. I also recognised the replica revolver he left openly on his desk, but when I looked behind through the drawers, I could see no sign of the real one I secretly knew he owned.

And in one corner was a doorway, leading out into a series of humid and cramped tunnels. Here all signs of glamour disappeared, exposing bare concrete walls and dusty stairs, and I wondered if Flake even owned this part of the underground. Pretty soon there were branching pathways and it felt more like hauling ass through a maintenance area, with even the sound of trains audible in the distance. I would have become lost amongst it all, were it not for the enormous chalk arrows drawn on various walls with the letters VIP written under them.

Following them, I came to an oak panelled door looking awfully out-of-place down among all the steaming pipes. I guessed it was actually the sub-basement to one of Flake’s personal properties, making use of the underground tunnels to create a route between different buildings. It was actually pretty smart since it let people enter one place and leave another. I pushed the door open, seeing pretty much what I’d expected all along.

It was, and there is no better word for it, a sex dungeon. Whether it was all above board, the kind of place where people deliberately recreated seedy fantasies, or an honest-to-god dungeon for the unwilling, I couldn’t say. It was a long, wide room with six cells on each side. The construction was serious, with wooden beams and dusty brick walls, with solid iron bars that slid across each cell. Above me I saw dozens of red lightbulbs, only one of which now worked, casting the long room before me in a dismal shade of crimson.

Close by was a desk, or I guess what you might call a workbench. Various straps and leather bindings were in the process of being worked, and hanging up on row after row, all neatly arranged in order of size and shape, was a series of medical instruments I couldn’t even guess the meaning of. They were all metal clamps and strange hooks, although one was slightly familiar, something I remembered from my days reading Horrible Histories. It was a pear of anguish.

I would have been scared in that place under normal circumstances, but all the tools had a faint patina of rust across them, tarnishing their once gleaming stainless steel. The floor was caked in filth, every corner and beam strewn with thick overbearing cobwebs, and a smell hung in the air that made me think of age, or ruins. Something you’d smell if you were cracking open a coffin, or a crypt.

“Hello?” I cried out, and something shuffled in the darkness. “Flake?”

“Help…” someone wheezed, and in a distant corner I saw a shadow move behind the bars of one of the jails.

Carefully, I approached it. I went to take a step toward the bars, when the same wheezing voice cried out again.

“Don’t!” it said. “Please don’t.”

“Flake?” I asked. There was a long pause, and then:

“Yes, that’s me. How are you here? Did they take you too?”

“You’re in your club,” I said.

“Oh,” the voice said. Whoever was speaking had so far refused to step out of the shadows. “How long have I been back?”

“I don’t know.”

“I thought it was another one of their games.”

“I’m definitely here,” I said. “Flake, you’re alive, which… which is better than everyone else. We need to get you to a hospital.”

“No,” the voice cried in anguish. And then, once more in a sullen whine: “No.”

“Come on,” I said. “We have to…”

Something in the cell shuffled backwards, hiding from me as I stepped forward.

“I’m not for looking at, not anymore. You need to leave, but first, I need my gun. I remember you now. You need to help me. Get me my gun.”

“What for?” I asked, already knowing the answer. There was a long pause. Somewhere a pipe creaked, and water dripped loudly.

“They went into my head,” he began. “They switched pleasure for pain, and then they put me in a room with nothing and they watched. They watched me bite and pull and peel and twist things off knowing what kind of person I was. When I lay there, flaps of me hanging off the bone, my nails chipped and ragged from scratching at myself, they came in and patched me up, melting flesh like candlewax to run smooth again and fill the craters. They never replaced, just repaired.

“Then they put me back in the room with something new. A piece of wood, a slither of metal, a nail… I spent my time in ecstasy it was…”

The voice was a ragged baritone that chilled me to the core.

“…fantastic, terrible, brilliant, awful. By the end I didn’t even know. And then… after a while they took whatever wires they’d switched, and switched them, leaving me in agony for years. And then, they did it again. And then again. And again…”

There was a crack, a sound of bone snapping into place. I imagined him sitting upright to face me, though I could see nothing. “No one should see me like this, especially not me. I don’t even want to see your reaction. Just find that gun. Yes… yes I do remember you now.”

I looked around and glimpsed a revolver on the floor.

“Will it work?” I asked. “Things down here… they’ve aged.”

“Let us see,” he groaned. I took the gun and held it through the bars for a moment, but no hand came to take it. “Throw it on the floor,” he said. “Then turn around.”

I did just that and waited for a brief moment. Then, when I heard a faint click, some strange instinct came over me and I turned just in time to see the barrel pointing in my direction. I cried out and ducked, only for the hammer to fall and nothing to happen. Flake turned the gun around in his hands for a moment before throwing it at the wall in frustration.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I screamed.

“You have to understand,” he wheezed, my feet carrying me back away from the cell. “It was an act of kindness.”

I kept backpedalling until I bumped into the cell behind me.

“You belong to them as much as me,” he said.

I reached behind me, my hands gripping the bars with white knuckle terror. “I was just trying to spare you,” he added.

Something behind me clicked, the bars of the cell behind me slid open.

“It was such a big party…” Flake said, his voice a desperate teary whine. “I was not alone.” I turned, my feet and hands numb with terror as the dungeon bars slid clear and the darkness within was exposed.

Something stepped out. For a moment, in that abysmal red light I saw a young girl with pale blue eyes, the lower half of her face obscured by a mask, her shoulders bare, and her torso wrapped in a strange quivering dress, almost like a ball gown that swept the floor. She took another trembling step and I saw her eyes, cataract riddled and distant. And there was no mask, only a swollen tongue that rolled out of her mouth twisting into a strange geometric shape, reaching past her collar bone where it bifurcated, once, twice, again and again in a fractal pattern that dazzled the eyes, each new division growing thinner. It was like a house of cards that hung down from her mouth, each new level brandishing more strange tendrils. And they didn’t stay still, but instead picked at grubby dust along the floor and curled upwards, passing bits of detritus along each layer until it settled on her tongue.

She walked blindly forward but moved quick enough that I didn’t have time to stop the bottom of her dress from brushing up against my foot.

“Don’t touch her!” cried Flake. “Get away get away!”

I tried to back away but fell down, overcome with panic and confusion. It all happened so quickly, even as those tendrils wrapped around my foot, and then my ankle, burning and stinging my skin. Thin barbs buried themselves into my flesh, lifting my leg up towards her mouth as she gazed down at me with a strange, empty hunger. It was the hunger of a microbe absorbing another.

Those things were pulling me towards her mouth, and while I had no idea how or if she could even eat me, I didn’t want to find out. I started kicking, shuffling, writhing, but it just brought more of my leg in contact with the broken net of her tongue until my leg was bound up to the thigh. Desperately, I started to look around and found a shard of broken glass from the bulbs above. I grabbed it and turned to cut at the strange tongue but those things lashed out and clamped onto my hand with terrible speed. I managed to pull away, pulling the barbs out with a sound like popcorn popping, thin tendrils snapping back like severed rope.

“Help me!” I screamed, starting to feel a dread panic come over me. “Anyone for the love of fucking God please help me please!”

Suddenly, a loud bang filled the room. Its echoed thundered in the empty dungeon, so loud I closed my eyes only to hear a strange wet thud. I opened my eyes tentatively and saw the gun’s barrel poking out of Flake’s cell once more, shaking so hard I’m surprised he hit anything at all.

Before me was the girl, her tired young face still vacant, brown bangs hanging low on a large head with pale skin. Even now her strange tongue continued to work, slapping outwards onto the concrete like the legs of a starfish. I started to tear those translucent vein-like protrusions resisted out of my leg, briefly looking down at the girl. Finally, I asked the inevitable:

“Fuck man, how old is she?”

Flake started to laugh.

“I was still aiming for you,” he said, ignoring my question. “I can’t tell if you’re lucky or unlucky.”

I almost turned to demand he answer my original question, righteous anger flaring up, except I was stopped by a terrible sound. I was stood at the far end of the room, at least another half-dozen cells between me and the entrance, when a series of dull clanks rang out. One by one, more of the cell doors opened.

“You need to leave,” Flake groaned.

I didn’t argue, I just ran. I ran straight out, ignoring the sounds of shuffling feet as strange things came out of the darkness. Desperately I tried to follow the arrows, only to turn one corner and glimpse a strange shadow waiting for me at the end of one hallway. It receded into nothing the second it caught me looking, but I knew it was waiting for me. I couldn’t go back the way I’d come. This had always been a trap, so instead I ran off at random and veered down random tunnels and halls desperately willing myself to get lost.

Eventually, I found myself bursting through a door, ripping the old frame off its hinges, and falling right onto the floor of the London Underground. Crowds of people made room around me, utterly disinterested in the homeless looking man who’d come staggering out of a disused maintenance tunnel. Without help, I had to drag myself to standing, only drawing attention when people started to notice the blood pooling around my leg.

It hadn’t stopped hurting, not even for one second. But I still managed to drag myself out of that place and out onto the streets of London where I finally collapsed, sobbing. I’d never felt relief like that to be out in daylight, and yet by the time I’d finished I looked up and saw the grey sky thinning. Already the sun was setting, and a winter night was starting. Terrified, and in immense pain, I began to shuffle my way home.