“I must apologise,” said Pierce, the door closing behind him. He strode to the large, laminated table on which he placed the file he was carrying, then took off his jacket and hung it over the back of the empty chair. He looked across at where Stone sat opposite, under the unlit strip light bulging, like scar tissue, above them. Pierce smiled, then glanced around him. The bare room was painted a weak blue. One of the ceiling’s large white polystyrene tiles was cracked and hung down an inch below the rest. Apart from the table and its two grey plastic chairs, there was no other furniture. The only window had brown metal bars fastened vertically across the inside of its opaque glass through which the city’s pale clay daylight struggled. A look of distaste crossed Pierce’s face.
“This,” he said, indicating their surroundings with his hand, “wasn’t supposed to be like this: squatting someone else’s awful office. Before the war, we were to have had our own building; I gather it was to have been rather ornate, architecturally speaking. Now, the bombs and missiles send us scurrying from one address to another, pitifully itinerant. But the imagination was there, Stone, once. It’s a wonder any enterprise ever thought to get the best out of its employees in this ghastly bureaucratic drabness.”
He sat down and opened the file. Stone, watching him, tried to shift his right leg, straining against the plastic ties that fastened his ankles to the metal hoop screwed into the floor. The hoop grated against its base plate. Pierce leaned back to see under the table. “Are they uncomfortable?”
“What do you think?” Stone’s voice rasped as he said this. His hands, laying on the table in front of him, were also cuffed, linked by a plastic cord to the ties round his ankles. He’d slept little for two days and eaten nothing. Tormented by extremes of terrified imagination and desperate hope, he’d managed a nauseous resignation, modified occasionally by the hamstrung promise that this might merely be some form of thuggish warning. His strained self-control yawed wildly between a foundering and gathering courage, and it was from a breathless moment of the latter that he had spoken.
Pierce smiled. He turned a few of the loose pages in the file. “I have to say, this is… well… forgive me, but a little disappointing.” He paused, inhaling purposefully. “Things – as you are no doubt aware – are not going well in our present struggle. Wars are rather like flights: the real danger is at the beginning and at the end. Those who lead us are getting nervous, insecure. Trigger-happy.” Pierce raised his eyebrows, bursting a cyst of fear in Stone’s stomach. “You are part of a general ‘tightening up’. As indeed am I, the pair of us merely little cogs in a vast… well, I’ll spare you the glib metaphors.” Pierce smiled again and closed the file. “So, we’re here, meeting for the first time in this depressingly mundane room which, frankly, demeans us both.”
He stretched, stood up, pushed both hands firmly into his pockets and, with exaggerated deliberation, began to circle round the table behind Stone. “I read your article on militarising the unions. Pretty dull stuff, I thought, though I confess I’m easily bored by that sort of thing. And the one you published in America before the war – on our country’s drift towards the political extreme – also not me.”
“Are they why I’m here?”
“The articles? I really don’t know. I didn’t bring you in; I’ve just been… given you. As I said, there’s a general…” he smiled mischievously, “… tightening of the screws.”
Footsteps approached in the corridor outside. Lowered voices were heard. Both men looked at the door, Pierce standing motionless, his hands still in his pockets, and Stone with his, clenched now, on the table in front of him, the clear plastic ties almost disappearing between the reddening bulges of skin they raised on each wrist. More footsteps, receding this time, then silence. Pierce turned to Stone and raised his eyebrows again. Stone relaxed his arms, opening his fists as much as he could, trying to press his palms against the cool surface of the table.
Pierce walked to the window where he wrapped each palm around a bar savouring, like Stone, the coolness. Slowly, he leaned his forehead against the bars and stared at the opacity beyond. “This isn’t to stop others looking in, you know,” he said suddenly, “this murky glass. It’s to stop you from looking out, seeing things – birds and trees and little children playing – all that stuff round which, apparently, you might hang your resolve. I’m never sure myself, but then,” and he smiled a little, “I don’t like children much.” He released his grip and turned to look at the back of Stone’s head. “I wonder why that is?” He closed his eyes, exhaling a low, unsteady whisper that almost gained voice before it died. Stone, turning his head fractionally towards the sound, wasn’t even sure if he had heard it.
Pierce walked briskly back, sat down and placed his forearms on the table in front of him. “It’s the missiles I hate,” he said, suddenly, as he turned another page from the file which he had opened again. “The old-fashioned air raids I don’t mind so much, the anti-aircraft guns blazing away and the sound of the planes high up. You feel part of something that’s unfolding, but with the missiles there’s no warning: the world shattered on an instant.” He paused, staring beyond the file at the table’s blank surface.
“I was close to one last week. Half a street away. A normal city scene, then a blast of sun-yellow thunder followed by a sharp rain of ruined building, glass and brick falling everywhere, setting off car alarms and screams, and then… a deafening aftermath through which a child was walking towards me, her eyes fixed ahead of her, not even crying she was so shocked. Then other dazed survivors, some screaming, wounded, others stumbling, stunned, from the dark grey dust in the street at the other end of which I still stood, watching, until the sirens and fire wardens and paramedics appeared. Then I turned into another street and another and they were all gone – the drama and its cast – and the city was back to itself, and I was walking to work, here, with my broken nerves inside me.” He turned back a couple of pages. “Your parents are still alive, I see. Still at their old address.”
“They’ve done nothing,” Stone said, more vehemently than he’d intended.
“I know. It seems you had a happy childhood.”
“My parents have done nothing. I swear it!”
Pierce looked at him and sighed. “There’s a lot about you in here. Mostly just factual, of course, but I can infer a fair amount. Not a full biography but… the details… they carry little freights of insight. Now, I want this, our meeting, to be one of equals…” he paused, scanning Stone’s face then, leaning back in his chair, he tapped the edge of the table with the tip of a finger and began, clearly and exactly.
“My parents died when I was a small child; I was raised by my mother’s younger sister, who had no children of her own, though her and her husband had tried for years. He worked away a lot, so my arrival could have been the answer for both of us. Things were, however, more complicated.”
Pierce stood, walked to the wall near the door, turned and leaned his back against it. Watching him, Stone had the impression that this had been rehearsed. “You see, my aunt hated my mother,” continued Pierce, his manner more relaxed, “because she’d been their father’s favourite. He’d died before I was born, but my aunt’s hatred against my mother hadn’t; in fact, being childless had only intensified it, as, paradoxically, had my mother’s death: you see it robbed my aunt of any chance at getting even.”
“My parents were killed in a car crash. My father had been dazzled by my mother, who was beautiful; I’ve seen pictures. Perhaps that was why my grandfather spoilt her. Anyway, my father spent far above his means to win and keep her. He even bought what was almost a sports car to parade her through the town. All rather obvious and pathetic, I’m afraid. He was doubtless showing off to her when they crashed; I was never given the details.”
“I have only one real memory of them, an image, and I’m far from certain it’s genuine. We are standing in a hall and they are walking away from me into a bright light – presumably the open front door. I know that I am not going with them and am anxiously staring up at them from my infant worry, but I can’t see their faces, only their silhouettes against the light. And here I am sure that I’m inventing, because my father is wearing a cap and my mother a headscarf and dark glasses, the two of them like something out of the nineteen-fifties, yet this – if it ever happened – would have been in the seventies. That’s it. They never leave or come back, just hover on the point of going, silhouetted by the great light behind them.” Pierce stopped for a moment.
“Forgive me, I’m digressing. My aunt, denied by the crash, instead directed towards me some vicarious version of whatever revenge she’d meant for her sister. She chose her husband, Jack, as its instrument. Every time he returned from a business trip, she worked on him, endlessly nagging him with all my faults, me, the foundling she’d inherited: her spoilt big sister’s last and greatest act of selfishness. She always managed to work Jack up to giving me a beating. It went on for years. One night, he’d only just got home and she started on about me. I could hear her voice through the walls; I knew what was coming. He soon opened the door to my room, his belt already in his hand.”
“The strangest thing happened though, when it was over. As he stood there, breathing hard, unwinding the buckle end of the belt from his knuckles, I suddenly saw the scene from the outside. I could see how innocent we were, Jack and I, the only innocents in the whole thing, the two of us linked by this shared innocence, like two puppets joined by their strings to the same pair of hands. Neither of us was in charge of what was happening to us.” Pierce looked directly at Stone. “D’you see, we’d both been committed to someone else’s aim? I can’t tell you how much it struck me at the time. Through no fault of my own, I’d been delivered into the hands of others. And here was this man – not a child, but a grown man who could, supposedly, do what he liked – who seemed every bit as powerless as me, every bit as caught up in another’s will.” Pierce’s eyes shivered with energy and his words came faster. “And after that night, I began to see it everywhere and I’ve never been able to stop seeing it, everywhere and every day, a web of interlocking dispossession, a whole pattern of intricate powerlessness rigging the world. I saw it again in that little girl’s face, after the missile strike. I even imagine it on my father’s face, as he drove off on that last journey, in the car he couldn’t afford, next to the woman he couldn’t afford. And I see it in the shaving mirror every morning.” Intent, he leaned across the table. “Can you see it, Stone, in my eyes? Look. Look!” Uncertainly, Stone looked at him. “Can you, Stone? Because I can see it in yours.”
#
“Please,” said Stone quietly, “tell me what you’re going to do with me. Why am I here, really? It can’t just be about what I wrote, surely?”
Pierce looked steadily at him. “What happens here is up to us.”
“But what does that mean? I don’t understand.”
“I’ve had no orders about you, no terse memo to get information or a list of names from you. I have no further insights beyond the rather underwhelming contents of this file, and they…” here a smirk flickered over Pierce’s face, “… suggest that the only threat you seem to pose is to the fulfilment of your own life’s potential.”
Stone leaned across the table, his shoulders hunching round the urgency in his voice. “Then why…”
Pierce stood up abruptly and began walking round the room. “My first day in this job was rather awful. It was in a building not too dissimilar to this, but outside it was very sunny, a bold day with all the clarity of spring. Even in the small courtyard where they took me to watch the shootings you could hear birdsong and feel the sun on your neck. I threw up, and again when they took me to an unremarkable room on the first floor to show me a few of their basic techniques – they all have slang names, you know, these ‘techniques’, an unutterable argot beloved by those who practise them. Have I mentioned that I’m hopeless with the sight of blood? I mean, really, what was I doing there… what am I doing here? I should have been a bank clerk or a jazz musician.”
“You could, still. We could both just walk out of here, into another, better, life.” Stone said, his fear emboldened in spite of itself.
“Naughty Stone!” Slowly, Pierce walked up behind the bound man. “For whatever reason, my superiors persevered with my training; perhaps they could recognise some hidden potential in me, a grim immanence of which I wasn’t even aware myself. They are very experienced in such things.” He bent down, his breathing measured.
“You see, Stone, there is a strain that runs through humanity, a certain strand, stronger or weaker in different people, dependant of course on a whole equation of circumstance and upbringing, of luck and timing and damage and countless other factors. But when enough of those factors do finally conspire, like some rare planetary alignment… well, Stone, what a hideous revelation there is! When the guardians of civilization whisper into a certain type of person’s ear that anything – anything – is now allowed, Good Lord! what comes slithering out. Trust me,” and he leaned closer, his mouth now next to Stone’s ear, “what I have seen in buildings just like this, in rooms just like this… it’s beyond anything that you could… beyond the worst. The very worst.”
He stood up and extended his hand tentatively as if to lay it on Stone’s shoulder but stopped himself and let it drop slowly to his side, before walking to the window. He stared through the bars, then turned and leaned his back against them, the weakening afternoon light partly silhouetting him. “Well, I survived my training, but I’ve never really taken to that side of this business. It’s not in me, it seems. And yet,” here he walked slowly back to the table, sat down and looked across at Stone, “here I am.” He exhaled. “Here we are.”
#
A distant blow, then another. Both men turned their heads towards the sounds. Nothing more until the faint sirens began.
“The other side of the river,” said Pierce. “They had it bad last night, too.” He shook his head. “Many dead.”
“Surely,” said Stone, his voice dropping to a controlled but urgent whisper, “you know the war’s being lost?”
“Yes,” replied Pierce. “The show is nearly over; our tottering state is crumbling into history.” He skittered an arm through the air to denote the passing of unaffected centuries.
“But, there’ll be consequences: trials, scores settled, revenge. This regime and its… they’ll be blamed. You’ll be hunted!”
“You’re not painting a very attractive picture of my days to come, Stone.”
“There isn’t much time.”
Pierce exhaled. “ ‘Infinity in the palm of your hand…’ ”
“Listen to me!” urged Stone, no longer whispering.
“ ‘And Eternity in an hour’ ”
“Why won’t you…”
Pierce bent sharply towards him. “Look around you, Stone. This room is all the world to you and me; this time – d’you know, I don’t even know what time it is – this time is all the time we have. Infinity and eternity for us. This fraction of being is enough for what we need.”
“What do you mean, ‘what we need’?” The control in Stone’s voice failed, his face twisting as he near shouted, “What do you want from me?” Then, in the silence that followed, “What?” he repeated, weakening, pitiful, to a plead in his throat. He dropped his head forward, his shoulders hunched.
“You look as if you’re praying. Will you pray for me, Stone?” Pierce asked. “If, as you say, I am doomed. Will you?” Stone lifted his head, a grimace shadowing his face. “After all, this might be one of my last nights, and I’ve chosen to spend it with you, Stone. Two men balanced, powerless, on the lip of fate. Isn’t that worthy of a prayer?” Outside the door, they heard the guards change, then silence again. Pierce smiled, confiding: “ ‘those who Dwell in Realms of day’. ”
The last light failed beyond the clouded glass, darkness seeping in between the bars.
#
“No,” said Pierce, leaning his back against the door as soon as it was closed, “I’m not having this.” He jutted his head up toward the strip light’s totalitarian whiteness. Stone gave a half-cry as he woke, squinting when he opened his eyes. He’d been dreaming of his parents and of his uncle’s farm where they used to spend their summers, images burnt away by the harsh light.
“Quite” said Pierce, his hand already on the switch. Stunned as much by the sudden dark that followed, Stone’s blindness was then flared by the lit match concentrating everything in the room first on itself and then on the face of Pierce hovering above it, his shadow worrying the wall behind him as he walked to the table on which he placed a bag. From it he drew a pewter candle stick and a white candle. He blew out the match, struck another, lit the candle and twisted it into the holder, its flame juddering uncertainly. Taking from the bag an opened bottle of red wine, its pale cork proud above the neck, and two glasses, he placed all three on the table. Then two plates and a parcel of greaseproof paper which he unwrapped to reveal a large cut of cured meat, two thick slices of bread and a dish of olives.
“There!” he beamed at Stone. He drew the cork, poured two glasses and handed one to Stone, who took it warily in both hands. “Don’t be silly!” smiled Pierce in mock outrage, sipping from his glass. “Cheers!”
Stone drank, though the wine burned his mouth, a taste of the unease that had spread through his stomach ever since Pierce re-entered the room. Again, he had the feeling that all this was rehearsed, the wine, food and candle merely props. A desperate, scared anger rose in him. He wanted the waiting finished, the pain there, its worst over, the sick lying of this taunting game left behind. He placed the glass on the table and strained against the ties, the veins in his neck rising in the gold-yellow glow.
“So, here we are, our first evening,” said Pierce. “And this light… much better than that hideous glare.” He smiled, his face dipping in and out of the light. He sipped his wine. “I do enjoy claret.”
“What do you want?” Stone stared directly at him.
“Just this.” Pierce’s smile was almost apologetic. “To have a drink with you.”
Stone’s body began to shake. “Whatever… whatever this is about… Can’t you… just do it? Stop all this… For Christ’s sake… just… Get it over with!” This last was hissed out, becoming a gasp. Stone lowered his gaze to the table, his frame still shaking.
“No, you have me all wrong,” said Pierce. “This is what I want: us, the candle, the wine, our conversation. Don’t you see? In the middle of all this chaos and pain, you and I are here, drinking claret, talking. I mean, is it not agreeable? In other rooms in this very building unutterable things are being done and yet here, in here, you and I are being… civilised. Don’t you think, eh?” He sipped his wine. “Now, why don’t we have something to eat?”
He reached down into his bag and took from it a small, soft leather case which he placed on the table. Undoing the tie, he slowly unrolled the case to reveal a scabbard of stiff black leather, only six inches long, inlaid with silver filigree, from which protruded a delicate silver hilt, its pommel set with a tiny red stone. Drawing it carefully from the scabbard, Pierce held up a thin blade which, woken by the flame, glinted slivers of candlelight between them. Stone drew away, forcing his back into the chair, pushing his feet into the ground to drive himself from the table.
“It’s a type of poignard,” said Pierce, absorbed. “Useful for a thrust into an opponent’s weak spots between the armour. It’s Italian – Florentine actually – but much smaller and more delicate than was usual. The man who sold it to me thought it might have belonged to an aristocratic Renaissance woman, something with which to defend herself against unwanted amorous attentions in those troubled times. That’s a ruby in the pommel.” He turned the narrow, barely tapering silver-lit blade, slicing the shadowed air. Stone felt the plastic ties searing his wrists and ankles as his weight strained against the chair. “It’s the most exquisite thing I’ve ever owned. I wanted to show it to you.” He turned it again, angling his hand till a moment of flame caught the ruby, drawing red. He smiled. “You and I, Stone, with only a lady’s blade between us.”
He lowered the knife, carved a slice from the cured meat, quartered it, impaled one quarter on the point and leaned towards Stone, proffering the morsel.
“No.” Stone turned his face away.
“Open your mouth,” said Pierce, firmly. Stone shook his head, forcing it back and to one side, as far as he could, away from the blade.
“No.”
“Stone.” Pierce rose, leaning further across.
“Nnn… no.” Stone, his wrists and ankles burning with pain, his whole frame shaking with the strain, couldn’t move back any further.
“Stone,” Pierce moved the blade till it almost touched Stone’s cheek, “open your mouth.” Stone shook his head, his eyes wide. “Stone!” Pierce commanded.
Stone felt the fight collapse in him, broken by all he couldn’t do. He turned his head a fraction, then more, the strain in his body lessening. When he faced Pierce fully, he began to open his mouth, forcing the muscles in his jaws to allow it, to invite in whatever would happen. Then he closed his eyes, screwing them shut, willing the worst to be over. “Your lips,” whispered Pierce, “be careful of your lips when you bite; it’s very sharp.” Stone drew his lips back and forced his mouth to close until he held the meat in his teeth. Delicately, Pierce withdrew the blade and said: “There, all done.” Stone opened his eyes and made himself chew, fighting the sickness in his gorge. Pierce skewered another quarter of the meat, placed it dextrously into his own mouth and chewed briskly, smiling at Stone.
They ate in silence, Pierce cutting the bread and meat into manageable pieces. After that first mouthful, he let Stone feed himself, the cuffed man having to raise both hands to his mouth each time. Pierce poured more wine, humming to himself.
“I remember,” smiled Pierce, when they were nearly finished eating, “the first time I ate an olive, I couldn’t believe how bitt…” the opaque window blazed white then exploded, roaring past them, crashing against the walls. Pierce, thrown from his chair, gasped. Stone’s back and head were forced down onto the table. He cried out covering his face with as much of his arms as the ties would allow. The blast’s thunder was followed by alarms sounding everywhere and screams rising from the street. The building filled with shouts and the sounds of running past the door, more screaming and orders being given, alarms raging and then sirens arriving in the street beyond the shattered window.
Both men were still, curled into themselves, each listening to his breath rushing between the noise. They could both taste dust, as if the darkness was made of it. Pierce rose unsteadily to his knees, searching for the matches. He relit the candle, his arm shaking. “Look,” he said, his eyes wide as he nodded at the table in front of Stone where, somehow, the bottle still stood. Stone lifted his head. Pierce placed his chair back on its feet and walked to the window. “Across the street; that building at the corner.”
“How d’you know there won’t be another?” Stone’s cracked voice was urgent.
“Don’t worry,” said Pierce “if that had been meant for us…” He stared around him, then back at Stone.
“Please untie me!” Stone tried to stand.
Pierce ignored him. “I do hate them, though. Missiles. Did you hear me gasp? I hate them.”
“Please, untie me! Please!” Stone, forcing the chair back, wrenched at the ties till he managed a slouching, simian stance. “Please!” his voice was now thick with panic.
“There are other government offices are in this street.” Pierce walked back to the table.
“Please. Untie me!” He hauled against the ties.
“We’ll be alright now.”
“Please! If there’s another…”
“It’s safe.”
“You don’t know, there could be another.”
“We’re fine. They never…”
“Please!” Stone, desperate, was tugging his arms from side to side, smashing them against the table, crying out. “PLEASE! PLEASE! PLEASE!”
Pierce grabbed Stone’s head in both hand and screamed into the struggling man’s face. “BEAR IT, STONE! BEAR IT! Or I’ll make you scream. I’ll make you scream, d’you hear me! I’ll fill this whole building with your screams. D’you hear me? Do you?” Panting, his eyes scorched with rage, he yelled, “DO YOU HEAR ME, STONE?”
They stood in their own shock, gasping dusty shifts of candlelight, fixed on each other until Stone sank slowly back into his chair, Pierce releasing his hands before he, too, sat down. Both men were still breathing hard. All outside was a cavern of noise. Stone slumped in his seat, hopeless and resigned.
“You’re cut,” said Pierce. He took a handkerchief from his pocket, leaned across and held it gently against Stone’s temple. Then he examined the cut. “Nothing serious. We were lucky.” He smiled, continuing to dab the wound. “That was…” He brushed dust from Stone’s shoulders, hair and face, dabbed the wound again, then leaned back and flicked one hand through his own hair, dislodging dust and a sliver of opaque glass. “That was… terrible… biblical… like the end of things. I…” He stopped. One of the wine glasses lay on the table on its side; he righted it.
The sirens were continuous now, interrupted only by intermittent screaming from the street. Neither man spoke for a while. Suddenly Pierce wrapped his arms across his chest, then flung them wide open, his hands eagerly grasping at the air. “And yet!” he said, his eyes shining now, exultant, in the dusted flamelight, “we’re still here, Stone. Still alive!” He thrust his jaw forward, his face elated. “That calls for a drink!”
#
It came fast to Stone, the inconspicuous epiphany he knew was his only chance. “Can I say something?” His entire effort was in keeping his voice sounding as normal as possible.
“Of course.” Pierce’s face brightened. They had not been talking, listening instead to the sirens which had almost ceased now in the street. Other strikes had called them away. The lights required for searching the rubble were too much of a risk. The trapped and their cries would have to wait for dawn.
“I understand that it’s because of the articles I’m here. They’ve given me to you…” Stone struggled to keep his breathing even, “because they knew that you can get from me what they want. I’m here… we’re here, for that reason.” He bent towards Pierce, “And you have… I mean, I see that now… I see what… I mean… sorry, I’m not saying this right.”
“Don’t worry.” Pierce smiled kindly.
“What I’m trying to say is that… I did write them and I’m here, to answer for it. And I will, I want to! And I can see now that you’re being reasonable and…” Stone’s whole being was in the modulation of his tone, a fraction of anything false and he was finished, “… I was wrong – to be suspicious of you – and I’m sorry, I was… it was just that this… this is… it overwhelmed me and…” there was nothing false in the catch in his throat. “But I know now that I can trust you, I can talk to you. I want to. Please!”
“And I want you to, Stone. I do!”
“Then,” Stone’s words hurried with promise, “I… yes, I did – do – believe what I wrote. I don’t want this war, I never did, and I thought this government… its actions… would make war more likely. But that is all that I’ve ever done… I mean, writing the articles. I’ve never done anything else, never anything to sabotage the war effort or… I’ve certainly never helped the enemy – our enemies – never given information, never… And I’ve never spoken – or written – out against the war since then. Never, not even back at the beginning of the crisis… I mean in those months of the negotiation talks, when it seemed…” Something in Pierce’s expression, a hint of condescending, amused indulgence, stopped Stone. He felt his epiphany begin to slip away. He leaned as close as his ties allowed, his face a near-imploring mask. “I swear to you that I am not lying. I realise now that there is no reason to. You’ve made me – no, you’ve helped me – see that. But the articles are all that I’ve ever done. I’m nothing, nobody, certainly not a threat. Not any kind of one. Anyway, if those articles did ever influence anybody, it was clearly not enough to… I am guilty of them, but nothing… nothing else. I swear it to you! Nothing… I’m… I’m nothing!” His voice had quickened as he spoke, his breathing now rushed, his eyes shining with candlelight and impassioned hope. For a few moments, in only the sound of his own voice, his world – and what he had to do to save it – had seemed clear to him, certain, a thing found alive among the wreckage and taken from danger.
“Oh,” said Pierce quietly. “Oh, Stone, that isn’t it at all.” He now leaned across until there were only breaths between their faces as he whispered: “I have no idea why you are here. I’m not interested in your writings, your truth or anything like that. As I told you, I have nothing to prize from you, no information I’m required to extract, no secrets. For all I know, you might just be a wrong name on the wrong list.” Slowly, he leaned back in his chair and sighed with disappointment. Then, rallying, he put his hands behind his head and smiled broadly.
“The war, as you reminded me, is being lost. Enemy tanks will grind along these streets as their troops pour through whatever’s left of this building – of this awful room itself, even. This whole city will become a burnt hellscape of rubble and rape and pain. And our leaders will flee or bargain to save their own skins or kill themselves. And the millions left alive or half-alive will scrabble around trying to repair their shattered days. That is history, Stone. It’s been happening since they razed Jericho. It’s in the very DNA of civilisation. We trust ourselves to the wrong ideas. Every populist, every dictator, knows that. Our better angels never win for long. They always betray themselves.”
He unleaved his fingers and rested his hands on the table in front of him. His voice softening, intimate and sad, he continued: “Is it any wonder, then, among such vast, brutal and depressing repetition, that I want only something personal, the little time of you and me, sat here in this unspeakable room, trying to share the absurdity and the fear, trying to find something unique between us, and then to preserve it, just for a while. Is it?” He paused, leaning forward. The he extended his hand until the tips of his index and middle finger touched Stone’s hand.
“You offered me the truth, Stone, and I shall offer it back: I do not know why you are here. Some tracery of chance, coincidence and happening have led you, bound hand and foot, into my power. One little shift in the order of things and it could so easily have been different; I could be the one tied to the floor. None of it has anything to do with morality or righteousness or worth. Another shift in the gears and, as that missile demonstrated so dramatically, we might only have an hour, a moment or a month left to live.”
“But I do know that I want to be here – wanted to be here, as soon as I read your drab file. You see, you are something, some part that I don’t fully understand, of what I find myself facing now. I feel compelled, somehow, to be with you, to share this time – however little I have – with you. In a world that is smashed and ending – without sense or reason or point – that knowledge, that fragment of compelling need, appears to be all that I have.” He leaned even closer. “You see, Stone, you seem to be my truth, or whatever’s left of it.”
Abruptly, he sat back in his chair and stared at the floor, some hint of doubt, even loss, in his face. “Oh!” He leant down, picked up the knife, gently wiped the dust from its blade with his finger and laid it on the table, its revenant shine gleaming again, reanimated by the flame’s fevered jig. “I almost forgot.”
Stone half-gasped a cry, as if the knife had struck him. Lowering his head, he began to weep as the hope bled from him. In this room, in this palace of pain, where his bewildering torturer had the power and the time to do as he wished, Stone now knew that he had no chance. There was world enough, and more, to annihilate him. What did it matter what happened to these people – to this cruel smiling man who brought him wine and fear – once they had finished with him? This ledge of terror was all there was, and nothing he could offer would save him. His tears grew and he let out a low, wounded moan that gathered intensity, drawn from the depths of his anguish, a haunting half-howl of despair that filled the room and threw itself into the street beyond where it mingled with the other cries troubling the night.
#
The wine was finished, the candle low, its flame bowing and tumbling, throwing wayward shades drunkenly this way and that across the walls. Stone’s sobbing – all that was left of the desperate, gasping cries of his collapse – had now subsided in turn, his shoulders shuddering only occasionally, his head resting on the table, the ties allowing him to press one hand almost to his brow. He was a husk of himself. Torn with despair, he had cried his whole life away, its precarious assumptions pooling with the tears on the table as he pressed his head onto it, grinding his hopeless anguish between flesh and Formica.
Pierce had watched him through all this, was watching him still, his attention fixed while the waning, candle-thrown shadows stumbled and cowered round the two men. The rest of the building had quietened. Outside, the city, too, seemed spent, curled round its wounds in the near-silent dark.
“Please!” said Stone, lifting his tear-shone face from the table with a great effort.
“What?” whispered Pierce, gently.
“Help me… please!” His voice was strained, barely audible, his eyes wretched.
“How?” Pierce’s hand moved a fraction across the table towards Stone.
“Please!” implored Stone, his head sinking again. “Or… just…” and he mumbled something that Pierce couldn’t make out.
“What?” Pierce leaned closer. “I didn’t…”
Stone, lifting his face in despair, tried to speak but the words clotted in his throat, coming instead in whispered chokes. “F… in… ish… me.” The air left him and he lowered his brow again to the table. Pierce leaned back, watching his shadow lilt and lunge across the walls behind Stone. Then he tilted his head upwards and closed his eyes.
An image from his childhood came back to him, from the holiday with his aunt and Jack, the only one they’d ever taken him on. They’d rented a cottage in a little fishing village, arriving late, in the dark, having got lost. His aunt and Jack were arguing, his aunt screaming Why had they had to bring the boy? Before they’d even unpacked, Jack’s belt had christened the holiday.
The next morning, he’d slipped out of the house before the adults woke and his aunt could start on at Jack again. He made his way, in fear and growing wonder, towards the harbour. He’d never seen the sea before. He stood on the wall, watching in disbelief as a fishing boat left the harbour. The air was so clear, the sun so sharp on the water, the sky and sea so huge, their colours so strong, the wind sounding everywhere with the cries of the gulls and the waves on the shore, the whole vast scene so vivid, all massing around him and above him – this one small boy, the world crushing him, pulling him, carrying him and washing through him all at the same time until he felt drawn apart by it, undone, torn open like a sack or a hide nailed out by the glittering fear and joy – so breathless, scared and yet thrilling with it all, lit by it so that he shone, so that, for a while, he became indistinguishable from it: his breath was its breath, his flesh its stones, his blood its sea, his spirit its sunlight flaming on the water, his voice the waves and the gulls crying and the determined motor of the little fishing boat that seemed to be calling to him, urging him to come away – leave his aunt and Jack and the beatings behind, leave his whole life – and let it lead him out, there, out there, to where it never ended…
A fox cried close in the silent street. Cried again, like a thing in agony. Pierce opened his eyes at the sound. Tilting his head forward, he saw that Stone was staring straight at him.
“I hate that sound,” said Pierce.
#
Stone was emerging from what was left of the night. To Pierce, who had been watching him sleep, the bound man collapsed across the table seemed to be gathering the last of the darkness from the room around him… and remaking himself from it. Those other forms being left behind by the dark – the table, the chair’s back, the extinguished candle stub, the shattered window with its skeleton of spindle bars, the walls’ bare planes, paling with the light – appeared weak stuff somehow, tenuous and uncertain next to this growing solidity of Stone’s. Even the knife, lying on the table between them, looked brittle, a toy’s tin frailty blunted by the dawn. These things, thought Pierce, they don’t stand a chance against him. He could break them, break through them, so easily!
And he felt himself the same as them, a flimsy thing, insubstantial. In the night, in the candle flame and the shadow hours, following Stone through his breaking, Pierce had been sure of himself; he had felt his force, the definitive presence of his being, unarguable between them. Now, though, his own hands when he looked at them were blanched. His skin, unlike the broken man’s, was the pallor of the candle stub and the blank walls; it was as thin as the ashen light trickling through the bars. He, Pierce, was part of the room, receding with it, ebbing with its details, fading in the dawn, leaving all to Stone – the solid man, dark and still, whose stubborn form was collecting its certainty from the retreating dark, reassembling itself as he slept, taking from the night whatever it would need to meet the day.
–
Craig Dobson has had poetry and short fiction published in various US, European and Asian magazines. He lives in the UK. He also writes plays and is currently working towards his first collection of poetry and short stories.
© 2026, Craig Dobson
Halfway Down the Stairs 