The Conduit Chapter 2: Bloody Knuckles
- mark-french1
- Oct 4
- 16 min read
North Bay, ON: 1953
The city bus threw its occupants against one another in unison. Heads lolled on shoulders as some fought the motion to stay awake. The metal fan mounted above the exit doors had developed a small tick that did nothing to sooth the air of exhausted tension in the small space. Perfume and cologne fought a losing battle against some of the more animal smells the human body could produce.
A woman in red high heels almost lost her footing before a man in a fedora and short sleeve button-up gave up his seat. She flashed a smile. A blaze of white teeth amongst a crimson slash that matched her shoes. The woman nodded gratefully as she adjusted the paper bags bursting with groceries on her lap. She crossed her ankles, swaying her feet. Her eyes crawling from the grocery bags to the floor around them..
The man shot a scowl toward Horace, who sat next to him in the back of the bus. Horace read the accusation in the glare. Heat burned on his already flushed cheeks. How was he to understand the societal nuances that existed in the micro culture of public transit?
He leaned his slender back against the back of the bus. Sweat coursed down his neck in beads that soaked his collar and back. He refused to unbutton his jacket or roll his sleeves the way many of the other men had done. Horace didn’t equate himself to their level of status. He considered himself more elevated. There was a rhythmic order to the world that only he could truly understand. He had been shown as much in the landscape of his dreams. Let these other subspecies beat their chest for the attention of the fairer sex. Their libido would pave the path to ruin and they, the ever ignorant slave, would gladly walk it.. These thoughts mirrored a memory of Ms. Mooney, his piano teacher. Horace escaped into memory as the bus slowed to add three more people to the crush of bodies inside.
He was nine; Ms. Mooney would loom over him with a foot ruler she used in her day job as an English teacher. If he missed a note she would strike out with lightning fast precision. The metal edge of the ruler biting into the soft flesh of his skin.
Wap he was out of time.
Wap the note is G rather than E.
Wap he hadn’t tucked his shirt in all the way after relieving himself.
“It doesn’t become a man in today’s modern world to look dishevelled” she would often recite as if he hadn’t committed her words to memory the first time his untucked shirt eared him bloody knuckles.
She taught in the basement of her townhouse, Horace learned to battle the heat in that cramped studio. The current wave that seemed like it was trying to snatch the breath from him was nothing compared to the thickness of that studio when the august sun felt like it wasn’t moving an inch toward dusk. It was that heat that alerted him to Ms. Mooney’s state of decay the day she retired to the apartment upstairs and never came back.
Horace was forbidden to move from the piano bench when she was not in the room, but he finished one piece of music, and then another, and finally a third before he couldn’t ignore his bladder any longer. At the time he had been a boy of nine and still took the word of adults as gospel spoken from the mouth of the Lord himself. But disciple of Ms. Mooney or not he was also not a baby anymore and refused to piss himself if he could help it.
He hopped from the stool and ran to the bathroom, his eye never straying from the stairwell Ms. Mooney had descended.
I bet she comes back now he thought. She’ll skin me alive and i’ll have to go right here on the floor.
Horace quickened his step, his saddle shoes slapping against the black and white checker board flooring. It wasn’t until he left the washroom, mind once more able to focus on something besides the call of nature, That he allowed his eye to wander. The studio had tile flooring with a small kitchenette that had a bathroom off of it, a living area where the piano was located, and a small bedroom nestled in the head of a hallway that lead to a small smoking room. The door to the bedroom was open a crack.
Horace tried to walk back to the bench. He was afraid Ms. Mooney would come back and turn her ruler on his rear end as she was apt to do when he was especially recalcitrant or if he continued to foul up a score. But it had been over an hour according to the ornate grandfather clock that swung it’s pendulum like an executioner’s axe, chopping away seconds of the day.
Ms. Mooney still hadn’t come back.
Horace began to believe that she was gone, leaving him alone and forgotten. He sat back at the piano. His fingers hovered above the keys. His eyes strayed to the Chopin on the page, but he was suddenly void of any want to play. His eyes were drawn to the red paint splashed across the bedroom wall. The decadent crimson beckoned him from the sliver he could see through the cracked door. It was so rich and inviting; the colour was a departure from the taupes and blacks of everything else in the townhouse. The contrast tantalised him, as if there was an eclectic hum on the other side of the door that seemed to be sending out a pulse of energy drawing him forward.
Horace slipped from the bench. He moved toward the bedroom. His eyes no longer lingering on the staircase. He splayed his fingers in front of him. A paper thin whisper seemed to seep from beneath the door, from around the crack. It ceased as he put his hand on the wood. It let out a small creak and just about closed. Alarm coarse through him at the thought of closing off the decadent crimson. He placed his hand on the door, softer this time, almost caressing it. His face closed the distance toward the crack in the door and he closed one eye to get a better look.
It was a painting. Horus was so young he didn't understand it. All he saw was a clash of crimson, black and gilded edges. The painting depicted a woman throwing herself onto a dais at the feet of a being who stood with it’s back to teh audience in front of two vacant thrones. The entity was standing like a man but it’s skin was grey. Large muscles had been captured in the oil. The woman before it wailing, bare chested, as the creature held a baby draped in white. There was no softness in the way the creature held the child. It was cradled in one arm as if a loaf of bread instead of a human being.
Horace was drawn to the woman. Her sorrow beckoned him further into the room to stand before the painting.
The air was thick with a cloying stench of vanilla and clove incense that made his head swim.
Her swollen bosom sagged and the softness of her breasts was contrasted with the circular black hole of her mouth and eyes. Her lamentation seemed to be palpable from the portrait. Horace felt something stir within him. A feeling concentrated almost in his centre, that seemed to deepen as his eyes took in the onyx coloured hair of the woman. He brought a thumb up and ran it across the pale skin of her breasts. The feeling within him, like he was on a wave that was rising and falling, seemed to crest and then wash over him, making him shiver.
The painting seemed to lose some of it’s hold on him then and Horace heard a sparrow’s call through the open window. Traffic noises returned to his senses as a horn blared and one driver cursed another one out.
He looked at the picture but it gave him a headache now. He was losing details of the painting now, was the creature holding a baby or was it a scroll? Was the woman young or old?
The creature in the painting snapped it’s head around, looking over it’s shoulder. It was as if it looked directly at Horace. A primal growl filled the room as the swirling smoke from the stick of incense seemed to wrap around Horace’s senses like a binding rope. The creature had eyes that blazed as red as the crimson dais. Horace stumbled backward, not realising how close his face had been to the painting. He was through the door and halfway across the small bachelor apartment before he stopped, his heart rapidly slamming into his chest. Outside a few pigeons took a stunted flight from the sidewalk before landing and resuming their hobbled quest for scraps.
The light in the room had changed. The sun hung low and orange shafts of light bathed the vase of irises sitting on the kitchenette counter. Their yellow and purple was in direct contrast to the heavy colours and smells of the room with the painting. Horace looked over his shoulder toward the bedroom. The door as closed. He didn’t remember shutting it, in fact he was almost positive he hadn't; he just pushed his way through and ended up halfway between the piano and the staircase.
When he finally got the nerve to climb the stairs, he understood that Ms. Mooney wouldn’t have come back no matter how long he delayed, that she in fact wouldn’t be going anywhere at all. Horace found her, Her heart had given out while she carried a tray of ice tea. She lay in a sticky pool of broken glass. A hornet flitted from the sweet liquid, to her nose, to her cheek. It’s antennae dancing and probing.
Her eye stared at the ceiling uncomprehending, yet he thought he could see Frozen in that look of pallid terror.
Horace's memory got fuzzy after that, but somehow the police were called and they arrived around the same time as his mother did. It wouldn't be the first time that day that peeking into a room altered his life forever. Horace reached for the rest of the memory, but ws jarred back to the present by the bus lurching to a stop.
The blonde beside him was standing. Trees filled the windows with a slash of emerald dotted with country homes that were nestled just beyond the rest of the city as it wore forward toward the common buildings of commerce where he lived in his rooming house
As she shuffled towards the door, Horace began to hear the same guttural whispering that began in Ms. Mooney’s home years ago. His mind’s eye conjured those blazing red eyes. Horace stood, trying to get away from the memory. He felt fevered. He knew what he must do. The frail smallness that had never aged from the nine-year-old he was yearned for silence. He had to quiet that god awful whispering, and to do that the entity needed blood, much more blood.
The bus came to a halt. The doors opened. She stepped into the August heat. Moments later Horace was too. In a cloud of exhaust he bent to tie his shoe. The weight of his tool heavy against his leg as he stood. He watched the woman thread down the lane way. Trees on either side of her bent their leafy heads with an almost ancient sentience that regarded the human below.
She strolled at a leisurely pace. Her head took in the snapdragons in the ditch, a cardinal flitting between poplar branches, the wind rolling through the ferns. Her blonde hair was cut in a page boy fashion. Horace unclenched his jaw. A blue jay shrieked. The style wasn’t far off from the short bob his mother wore.
She misleads the men of her life, just as Eunice mislead you. The voice whispered in his mind before letting out a low chortle. She must believe they are as inferior as she believed you to be. The voice in Horace’s mind wavered from a rich baritone to a tinkling Castrato that oozed mockery, yet Horace knew it was only a reflection of the mockery he received his whole life.
The voice switched to that of his mother. Shrill, alarmed, and betrayed as she ran Horace through with her words. Inside Horace’s chest felt like a chasm. A desolate pit where he would stare at the internal abyss that conjured up her final words.
Disgusting little pervert.
The scorch of betrayal engulfed Horace. He shook his head trying to clear it from the memory as he walked along. He slapped a deer fly dead, Its carcass tumbling from his body. Ahead of him the woman tuned left and strolled down a driveway. She adjusted the bags she carried, rolling her shoulders. Horace stepped from the road to the woods, walking paraellel to her now. He squinted through the thickness of a mosquito cloud, but they dissipated as he stalked slowly through the softwood. He drew the knife that was sheathed in his trousers. The blade caught the red light of the setting sun as the beams sliced through the branches.
Watching it Horace was transfixed by the destructive power. Within him he felt a flitting, skittering fright race through. In his mind's eye he saw a nine year old boy, the boy he had been, run from one room to another. The boy sought safety behind a locked door only to find the room behind the door barren of anything save for peeling white wall paper and floorboards dusted with age and sticky with a dark and saturating fluid. The boards behind him creak. A shadow falls across him. After that any shred of fear is swallowed by the familiar desire for blood spilled. Blood of the liar.
Horace knew she was in there, and she must be held accountable.
The basement window was unlocked and slid open after a gentle tug from his gloved hand. He slithered in on his belly, collecting flower bed dirt and last year's leaves that clung to the window frame. The crumbled and clung to his wool jacket. He descended quietly and rose to shut the window behind him. The floorboards above his head creaked with his mother’s dancing foot as the muffled warble of Nat King Cole crooned from the record player in the sitting room. He listened, his fingers twitching to match the piano strokes. His mind crawled back to Ms. Mooney’s apartment, the painting, the stench of her body.
He was in a smoking room. The musk of cigars burned hung in the air as two wing back chairs began to take shape in the gloom. Horace’s senses sharpened even further and he could see a small table between them where a humidor was perched. The fireplace before them was cold. Horace krept from the room. His shoes moved with praciced grace as he seemed to dance with the darkness and the spectres within. He moved passed a billiard table covered in thick plastic, more evidence that the man of the house hadn’t been home for sometime. Likely off on a business venture, albeit one where he didn’t leave the company of his attending secretary . Horace came to a staircase and began to acend them. At the top he found a bar of horizontal light that bathed his trouser in a golden glow. He eased his fingers forard, sweat made the latex cling to them. He pressed the tip of his knife to teh door and eased it open. The bar of light grew.
He inched closer to the crack in the door. His mother as dancing in a sea of chrome and pastel shades. Pale yellow cupboards were set in a sky blue wall that matched the linoleum floor. He watched his mother sway from one counter to another cooking a full course meal for her absent husband, blissfully ignorant of his infidelity. The entity that had hollowed out a section of Horace Franklin, the one that feasted on his childhood fear, whispered truths to him, and right now that was the one it told him of. A man in the heat of passion sharing a bed with a girl just breaking the cusp of womanhood. Her innocence was being pilfered by a man who thought himself to be a casanova. Horace squeezed the handle of his knife. His arm smasmed with exertion. He stared down the woman in the kitchen as she shifted between his mother, and a useless husk of humanity filled with blind trust and ideals inset by a man who would just as soon give her syphilis as he would an engagement ring
She turned and stopped. From the next room came the grainy hiss of the record side finishing followed by the small click of the turntable stopping. The hall clock chimed half passed the hour. Her eyes took in the door to the basement, no longer closed tight, a practice she was in the habit of when Bruce left town.
Horace watched as curiosity bloomed into shock. Her perfectly shaped eyebrows shot up as her skirt settled around her knees, it’s jovial swaying cut short by her sudden cessation of movement. She took a step forward, Horace read the question in her eyes. Was she really seeing it? Was there someone peering at her from the darkness of the basement? The woman took another step. Horace saw certainty in her eyes. She brought a hand to her mouth. Horace exploded from his hiding spot before she could scream.
They started in the kitchen. She rolled an ankle while trying to run for the wall phone, her red high heel breaking underneath her. Horace yanked the knife from its sheth. His fingers invaded the cotton cardigan she wore. He pulled her toward death as his right hand slashed the blade toward her flesh. The sound of her shoes clattering against teh floor was briefly interrupted as she landed a kick that sent Horace toppeling. She made it to her hands and knees before he was on her again. He was a thin man, some would label as frail, but the entity that was slowly carving his humanity out to make a home for itself within Horace Franklin’s body could smell the woman’s blood, and it locked onto it like a wolf to its prey.
They finished in the living room. She managed to scramble away once more. Her name was Rita Miligan. In her final moments all rational thought of calling for help was abandoned. The visage above her appeared as a man, but as it gripped her ankle with an almost burning sensation of iron-like strength, it descended on her with a stench so foul it made her eyes water. The bones rippled and distorted. The eyes lost emotion but gazed at Rita with an intense hunger that oozed sardonic pleasure.
Horace brought the blade of his hunting knife up. It plunged. Blood sprayed the credenza. The turn table broke into pieces as it fell to the floor. This continued as the voice in his head that demanded blood faded into the silence of the house punctuated only by the clock striking the hour.
When it was over, Horace rose. He stepped over her body and through the near silence of the house. He walked passed her meal half made and her groceries half put away. The items for the basement left at the top of the stairs hinting at an almost superstitious fear of the dark.
Outside, sounds of the night followed him. Peepers chirped their haunting chorus while crickets added their reedsy voice to the symphony. In the distance and own asked it's eternal question and was answered with a quirk from a raven.
Horace inhaled the cool night air. He filled his lungs with life as elation danced through his blood. He walked ten kilometres back to the city centre, letting the elation lighten his steps.
The sun rose a few hours later and the city came back to life. It was a day and a half before Rita's body was found. When she was absent from her usual post as bingo caller for the legions Thursday night game, neighbours began to wonder. When she didn't answer her phone those same neighbours began to worry. Finally Juliet Marshall, Rita's best girlfriend, just charged her way down the gravel drive to see what she could see. Peeking into the living room window just about made her feint. The police were called as soon as she could run back to her house phone.
The police acted fast. Two murders in as many months. It was hard to convince the public they were isolated. Especially after the details of the kill became apparent.
“We're in the middle of an investigation” said officer Jacob Francis as the spindly man from the newspaper tried to peer over his shoulder Into the house. A young constable shouldered by the pair quickly, covering his mouth and making straight for the junipers.
Jacob turned his attention back to the newspaper man, preparing to tell him to make tracks. The words died on his lips as the man produced a sum of cash pinched between two long fingers. Jacob didn’t take bribes. He saw them as cheap tactics to fund bad habits. He had friends on the force who would drink away any extra cash they could lay their hands on. Any money Jacob received beyond his salary from the city was considered danger pay, and it went right into the mason jar on top of the fridge. Hellen used it for Christmas and Easter gifts for the family. Jacob saw a thanksgiving turkey in the wad of cash that danced in the wind. He pictured Helen’s smile when he told her to invite her folks for the long weekend. It would be good for the kids to see their grandparents from out of town, give him a chance to relax in the den without having to play dad for a few hours. Hours of peace for five minutes inside? To Jacob that was about as fair a trade as you could get. He snatched up the cash and told the stick man to enter through the back door. Jacob told him to keep his name out of the article.
Horace eyed the basement window as he walked past it. It was still closed tight, wiped clean from a length of curtain slashed from the kitchen window. He walked by the uneven drapes hanging motionless as a haze of sunshine blazed through them.
Rita lay where he left her. One red heel lay in the transom between the living room and the kitchen. It pointed toward her body as if it were a compass needle showing him true north. She was beautiful in her stillness.
He began snapping photos just as he had in the McKay street house. The torrent of ecstacy from the night before stirred, but didn't rise to the full climax he experienced as she struggled against his blade. He felt the frenzy trying to take hold as he snapped more photos, more than he needed. He knew he had to leave, his five minutes were nearing their end, but Horace was rooted to the spot. His legs locked in place even as he urged them forward. His hands moved toward his belt. He tried to stop them. He waged a losing battle against this new impulse. When he woke and dressed that morning, tucking the belt into it’s usual hiding place gave hm a jolt of excitement. He had never brought the muder weapon back to a crime scene. The idea of it passing right under the nose of whatever lummox in a blue uniform they placed at teh door was too enrapturing to pass up. But it would be his undoing now if the kind with the ruddy complexion and hungry eyes strode in now. Horace’s body was still moving against his will. Unsheathing the large blade and slicing into Rita’s cold flesh. The tip of the knife started to creep toward his mouth. As Horace fought against it he also felt an aching hunger bloom beneath his revulsion. He was almost panting. His chest heaving in and out along with his heartbeat.
The blood had a tart and stale taste, as if he was drinking bad well water. He swallowed and coughed once, coming back to his senses. When the facts of what he’d just done settled over him Horace wretched. What had he done? Why had he done it? These were questions that thrummed through his mind as he stumbled through the house, kicking Rita’s shoe toward the door leading to the basement. He lurched through the door and into the beams of sunlight that offered no warmth. Sweat clung to his chest, tangling the coarse hair. The back of his neck felt hot. He moved down the driveway and made his way back toward the bus stop.
On the bus Horus felt chilled and fevered an elderly woman caught his attention. She gingerly tapped the corner of her mouth.
“You've got some jam there. Quick breakfast this morning I bet. Dastardly what happened to that poor girl. The life of a newsman never stops. My Harold was a newsie. The man never slowed down until the Lord made him.”
Horace took his handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed the corner of his mouth. He muttered a choked thanks and set his eyes on his reflection as the scenery outside turned into a blur of green and white. He met his eyes in the reflection of the window. He held them as the bus bounced over the pavement. In a flash his reflection changed and his rail-thin body became something that was blurred and demonic, the eyes as Crimson as the blood he had just dabbed from his mouth.
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