Wishes
Author: John Rickards
Date: 2016-06-06T23:00:00+00:00
Description: A pair of short stories (~4,000 words) originally published in US anthologies, and both highly regarded. 'Wish' sees the invented urban myth of a Dublin policeman come horrifyingly alive, while '$20 Future' sees just how cheap life can be for a kid in East Africa.

Copyright & Credits

Copyright Sean Cregan 2012. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License. You’re free to share this work with others however you want, and to remix or create derivative works from it. Just give an attribution to the author, and don’t use it for commercial purposes. Enjoy!

Cover image:

‘the wishing well’ by torbakhopper, used under a cc-by license.

Wish

Four days since I called in sick. I think.

I’ve been awake for three of them straight. I think.

My fellow Gardai would piss themselves if they could see me, no doubt. Then they’d have me committed.

But they don’t know. They haven’t seen. They’re all out getting drunk, or off fucking their wives, or fucking their mistresses and lying about it to their wives, or passed out in front of their TVs in their nice safe homes while I’m
fucking
dead.

And I don’t know if even I believe it.

It started with Michael. A mental case, low-grade nut. We have quite a few. A handful of paedophiles, stalkers, minor assaults. Care in the community jobs, not criminal enough to be locked up for good, criminal enough to be in and out of the cells on a regular basis. Since jail seems to do fuck all by way of curing them – worse, many come out of it even more damaged than they went in – my own policy is not to arrest. Talk, threaten, watch, but don’t arrest if possible. Jail only makes them more of a risk to everyone in the long run.

Some of these guys are homeless, but not Michael. It’s a shithole of a flat, though, overlooking the railway tracks not far from where they cross the Tolka, north of Dublin’s city centre. Building that smells of boiled vegetables and cat piss. Walls the colour of boiled vegetables and cat piss.

“That woman hasn’t been poisoning your kitten, Michael. She doesn’t even know who you are. She wouldn’t know how to poison a kitten even if she wanted to.”

“Could swear I’ve seen her—”

“No, you haven’t. She hasn’t done a thing. Trust me on this, okay? Jesus, they train me for this sort of thing, and believe me, if she was guilty I’d know and I’d have dealt with her. You’ve got to stop yelling at the woman and threatening her, Michael.”

Sullen look. A child being unfairly chided. A flash of malice in the eyes. I wish I could make him shut up. I wish I had some way to frighten him into behaving.

Then, suddenly, there it is.

So I do it. I drop the threat. Let the genie out of the bottle.

“And you listen good to me, Michael. You leave that woman alone from now on, or else I’ll send your name, address and photo to Iron Kurt’s Gay Nazi website.”

Let me explain. I have a friend, Curt, who’s funny, erudite, can hold his drink remarkably well, and happens to be gay. One night in Fallon’s, the conversation turns to gay rights and marriage, a subject he understandably feels strongly about. He speaks his piece, and someone else makes some comment about him being a “fascist homo” or something. Funny in its stupidity. And now the remark resurfaces and transforms, blossoming into something so much more.

It helps that there’s been trouble with a couple of neo-Nazi crackpots in the city on TV recently, even after the NSRUS pulled out of Ireland. Nazis make the best bad guys. Ask Indiana Jones. And I see a twitch of fear or homophobia in Michael’s eyes.

“I’ll do it,” I tell him. “And you know what’ll happen then…”

Of course, his mind fills in the blank with its own worst fears. He promises to be good.

And over the next few weeks, he is. And I trot out the same threat to the other lunatics I have to deal with. And they don’t see me as a punisher. Iron Kurt is the punisher. I’m just the messenger. So they don’t even resent me for it.

My fellow Gardai find the whole thing fucking funny. Some of them start using Kurt themselves. And Dublin sleeps safer at night. Kurt’s out there, watching over the city. A spectre in the fog blowing in off the harbour, creeping upriver. A paper tiger keeping evil at bay.

One afternoon, I see William, one of our deranged, sitting in the doorway of a boarded-up shop with an Iron Cross pinned proudly to his battered old blue Leinster rugby top. Next to him is a scratched metal strongbox.

“Hey, William.”

“It’s… you’re gonna beat me.”

“Leave it alone, William. What’s in the box?”

“They’re mine, see.”

“Fine, but show me what you’ve got.”

“It’s private. Mine.”

“Last time we had this conversation, you had a petrol bomb on you. I just want to make sure you don’t have another one. Anything else, you can keep.”

He thinks, pops open the box. Inside, an untidy pile of black fur.

“Why are you carrying a bunch of dead rats around?” I ask.

“They pay me. It’s my deal. Not yours.”

“I’ve got no ambitions of being a rat-catcher. Who pays?”

“The big red building down Castleforbes Road. Food warehouse. To set traps. Ten cents a rat.”

“And you get them somewhere else, they don’t know and they pay you for them.”

“Yeah, it’s a good job.”

“Good for you. What’s with the Iron Cross?” I point at his chest.

“It’s protection, is what. Keith saw Iron Kurt.”

I try not to smile. “Yeah?”

“And he said, you wear stuff like this and you’ll be okay.”

“Unless you’ve been posted on his website.”

“Well, yeah.”

“While we’re on the subject, you’re keeping away from that playground, right?”

He nods vigorously. “Yeah. Never meant to do anything.”

“Did Keith say what Iron Kurt looked like?”

“Yeah. A big guy, tall, built like a brick shithouse. Bald. With a beard. Tattoos all over.”

The real Curt is 5’ 5” and built for comfort, not speed. Again, I stifle a smile. “Yeah, that sounds about right. You’d better stay out of trouble, huh?”

Not long after, I see Keith himself. The shopping trolley that holds his worldly possessions has a bunch of plastic German soldiers on string looped all the way round it like fairy lights. Now that I’m looking for them, I start to notice similar items on most of the other nutcases on my patch.

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 neighbour 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 realise 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?”

“It… Kurt… didn’t…”

“Kurt? You’re sure? Christ.”

“Said… name… site… to punish… I didn’t…”

I should be calling an ambulance. I should be calling my colleagues. “Where is he now?”

Michael’s eye looks down. Pleading. Betrayed. “You said… wouldn’t… website… I… good…”

He thinks I did it. “I didn’t tell him,” I say. “Jesus, Michael, I wouldn’t even know how. I swear to you.”

“He… told…” Michael smacks his lips. Dry mouth. Lost too much fluid already. Bleeding out. Dying.

“What did he tell you?”

“No… he asked… who… gave my name…” Smack. Smack. “I… told him… 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 strides 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 a park across the street. He’s massive, and bare-chested. The dark outlines of the 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 spraypaint swastika on every wall. A replica of one of those Nazi imperial eagles they’d carry everywhere in those old 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.

Thump.

Thump.

Thump.

Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.

$20 Future

It is night when the ghosts come for Abdi. He stands, as he has taken to doing, on the low pile of rubble behind his house. From the top of the mound of stones he can see the stars above mirrored by the waves on the distant sea, as if the edge of town is the edge of the world and there is nothing beyond it but the void. He stands there when the ghosts come so that he will not wake his sisters.  So that if they do wake, they will not see him cry.

His mother, reaching out to him as she calls his name. Sometimes in her soft voice, a voice he only knows from dreams; he was so young the last time he heard it for real. Sometimes she calls to him in the dying screams she let out giving birth to little Aisha, his youngest sister.

Yusuf and his parents, all burnt and broken. Black, staring holes where Yusuf’s eyes were. Everything pinched and cracked just as it was when they found them. Yusuf’s father was a big man, but this had not mattered to the militia.

Abdi’s own father, blood soaking his shirt around the bullet wounds. Silently mouthing something he cannot understand, some word forever frozen on his lips.

Other faces, people he never knew. Never had the time to know. Seen briefly through windshields or walking in the street. No names, but accusing faces. Blood, bullet wounds. Rape and murder. People say it is the way of things, but these ghosts ask Abdi why they died, why they suffered. They plead with him and paw at him, afraid and confused.

His father again, this time as he was before it all went so wrong. Standing tall and wise as he always did, working to provide for their family. He stands at the base of the rubble and holds out the twenty-dollar bill for Abdi to take.

Abdi knows all too well what the money means. He cannot forget the first time his father passed it to him.

*

“Take this to Jama,” he said, pressing it into Abdi’s hand. “He will know what it is for.” The money would have taken his father almost two weeks to earn. He must have arranged something very important with Jama, a trader, and Abdi was thrilled to be entrusted in this way at twelve years of age, even if all he had to do was take the money across the town. He took it and wedged it deep into one pocket.

“Good boy,” his father said and patted him on the head. Abdi trotted out of the door, into the dusty African sunshine.

His good feeling lasted until he ran into the militia. Half a dozen of them, lounging by a burned-out building with walls pock-marked by gunfire. He didn’t recognise them, men of another clan, and he felt fear clench his throat and his heart pounded in his ears.

“Hey, boy,” one of them said as Abdi tried to pass by on the far side of the street. “This is a checkpoint. You think you can walk through here without permission? There is a tax for walking this street. Security costs money. Keeping the streets safe costs money.”

“Of course,” Abdi said. This was the same militia bullshit he had heard so many times. “But I do not have any. I’m sorry. I am just going to take a message to Jama in the market. I have no money.”

The militia man scowled, and his friends gathered around Abdi. “You are not willing to pay for security and safety? Who would not pay for this? Maybe you are a thief or a criminal. Maybe we should arrest you. Maybe you do not want the people here to be safe and secure.”

“No, no. I’m just poor. Please.”

“Let’s check this ‘poor’ boy. I don’t believe him and I don’t like him.” The man leaned in close and stared hard at Abdi. His breath reeked.

Abdi struggled, but the militia held him pinned while their leader checked through his pockets. The man yelled in triumph when he found the twenty dollars and waved it in Abdi’s face.

“You filthy liar! You try to keep this from us? The rich boy does not want to pay his taxes?”

The blow came out of nowhere. The man slammed the butt of his Kalashnikov into Abdi’s chin. Pain seared through his head and he could taste blood and dust as he dropped to the floor. The kicks the man followed up with hammered into his ribcage, but he could hardly feel them. His head swam with agony and he could do nothing more than lie there until the man picked him up and threw him across the street.

As he crawled away, trying to wheeze as quietly as possible, all he could think about is that his father’s money was gone. He had failed his family, and perhaps now they would face hunger and hardship.

*

“Their militia are nothing but pigs,” Hassan said. He was a friend of Abdi’s, at thirteen, a year older than him. Two years before, his father and three other members of his family had died in a fire at a refugee centre. “They should be taught that they cannot act that way.”

It was Hassan’s idea to take the money back. They would steal the money back from another trader, one from the same clan as the militia, and then everything would be equal. Hassan’s older brother, Osman, who had been a member of their own militia, would help them. Bring them guns and knives even though Hassan thought they could do it without any fighting, so long as they were quiet.

Osman looked up from flicking stones into the dust and nodded. “This is right,” he said, with a voice like flat rock. “We don’t make a sound, and we can take what we want. And if they do find us, we will be able to fight them.”

And Abdi again agreed, because he couldn’t face going home to his father and admitting that he’d failed him.

Hassan laughed and patted him on the shoulder. “That is good! Maybe we will even find something for ourselves there.”

Abdi knew then that some people value children as fighters for their ferocity and bravery. But he also knows, now, that children do not think like men or plan like men.

When the three of them reached the trader’s home and climbed in through a window, they were thinking many things. Imagining what might lie within. Worried, perhaps, that the trader would be less rich than they thought. Abdi certainly was.  This could all be for nothing. But none of them expected to find his guards in the building.

Osman had not even reached the stairs when a burst of AK-47 fire cut him to pieces, the bullets shredding his body like paper. As he fell, he turned towards Abdi with a look, it seemed, of surprise and shock. He said nothing. Made no sound at all. His brother Hassan, though, screamed with horror and anguish. The guards fired again and bullets crashed into the walls around the two boys.

They chased Hassan and Abdi into a small room at the back of the building. Hassan, sobbing the whole time, turned and fired wildly through the doorway behind them. Abdi heard someone scream in pain, and someone else yell for them to cover the back. He scrambled through the narrow window.

“Hassan! Come on!” he hissed. But he did not wait for him. Instead, he ran away into the bushes before the guards could come around the outside of the building. Only once he was safe, out of sight in the dry scrub, did he hunker down and turn to look for his friend.

Hassan was still half in, half out of the opening when they caught him. Abdi heard them shouting and silently willed him to move faster, to break free, to run. Then he heard the gunshots and he buried his face in the dirt. When he looked back, Hassan was hanging limp, his blood washing the stones.

He stayed, staring wide-eyed at the scene, for a moment. Then he ran from the house. There were tears in his eyes and his heart was wedged like a stone in his throat.

Abdi still didn’t know if the guards saw him running and recognised him. Or if Hassan was only wounded when they shot him and they hurt him so he would give up their names. It didn’t matter in end, not really.

His father was dead by the time he returned home.

Abdi found him executed, shot three times in the doorway to their home, punished for what they, the children, had done. Abdi’s world ended at that moment. He felt as though everything he had or loved or dreamed was suddenly gone, and he was empty. His sisters were hiding in a closet. The men who did it arrived in a car, they said. Abdi’s father would not let them into the house, even though they had guns and he did not. So they killed him where he stood.

Little Aisha clutched his hand. “Is father hurt?” she said. “When will he be better?”

Abdi could do nothing but stare at the man lying dead on the floor. His father. The man who had raised him for so many years on his own. All gone.

“Abdi?” Aisha said, voice choking. “Why won’t he stand up?”

His other sisters, Hamdi and Habiba, led her away as the tears began.

The next morning, the leader of their militia, Osman’s former commander, came to the house. He told Abdi that he would need to earn money to support his family, but that the clan would not fail them, so long as he did not fail the clan. He would join the men on the roadblocks. He would carry a Kalashnikov and protect their people. He would shoot their enemies and the rewards would be shared by all.

Or he and his sisters would starve.

*

They are all there now. Abdi’s father. Hassan. Osman. And, at the back, another man. One he knows he will never see in this life. A kind, tall man, standing with his arms around his wife and three children, all healthy and strong. That they are all smiling is no comfort to Abdi, for he knows that the man is himself in a future he can no longer have. That his actions have destroyed everything he might have been as well as everything he was.

So Abdi stands there in the night, the ghosts all around him. And he does not fight them and he does not run from them. He stands there, a twelve-year-old man, a soldier and a killer, wishing that his father would speak to him and tell him that this is not his fault. That he does not blame him. That his life will change and he will never have to touch a gun again. That he could somehow give his father back that twenty dollars and stop any of this happening.

Until then, he stands there, crying in the dark.

Afterword

I don’t often write short stories, even less so for anything other than my own amusement, so these two are rarities in that they were written specifically by invitation for US anthologies - Dublin Noir (edited by Ken Bruen for Akashic Press way back in ’06) and Expletive Deleted (edited by Jen Jordan for Bleak House Books in ’07, I think; the book was originally going to be called Fuck Noir until someone pointed out that no bookstore would stock it). Both of them (written, incidentally, under my real name) were picked by Maxim Jakubowski for their following year’s Best British Mysteries anthology that he put together annually, so I made it in twice on the bounce. And bless him for it.

The only requirement for Dublin Noir was that all stories had to be set in Dublin (unsurprisingly). Ken took the unusual step of asking a lot of his mates to contribute, most of whom had never so much as set foot in Dublin let alone have anything to do with Ireland, rather than the great and good of the Irish crime writing establishment. Odd choice, but he blagged it reasonably well in the foreword - all about an outsider’s view, noir ideals of turning the obvious on its head etc. etc. - and the stories were mostly good. My own, Wish, could have been set anywhere, which was handy because it actually happened in Texas - the story (up until a certain point) is entirely true. Both the police officer involved, and the Curt for whom Iron Kurt was named, are real people, and both gave me permission to use the story. The cop, ‘IronRa’ by handle on the old rpg.net forums, used to post occasional tales of his job policing - if I remember right - Austin, and this was one. Curt was by turns horrified and filled with glee at becoming a figure of urban myth. I basically transplanted events to Ireland and gave them a horrible ending. All good stuff.

Fuck Noir came with a different brief, one which went absent from its jacket copy. It was about shock (sweary or otherwise), but also about jolting people out of their comfort zone, making them give a fuck. Jen’s email to me is long-deleted, but it ran rather more eloquently along those lines. So I wrote a story with no swearing in it whatsoever, and almost every review of the collection I’ve seen has suggested that it must have been submitted for the wrong book.

Clearly: fuck those guys.

Seriously, it’s a decent story. I think. Jen loved it. Hopefully you enjoyed it too.

If not, fuck you as well.

(I kid, I kid! It’s all cool.)

- Sean C.

By the Author

Find out more about these titles, get free downloads and more at johnrickards.com.

The Alex Rourke series

The Touch Of Ghosts

The Darkness Inside

Burial Ground

The Desperate, The Dying, And The Damned

The Levels series

The Levels

The Razor Gate

Murder Park

All You Leave Behind

The Surge

Day Zero

Virginia Day Zero (short story)

Other Writing

Hardboiled Jesus (short story)

Wishes (short stories)

Find me:

blog: namelesshorror.com
twitter: @nameless_horror
home: johnrickards.com

Table of Contents

- Copyright & Credits
- Wish
- $20 Future
- Afterword
- By the Author