Blood and Ink Read online

  Blood and Ink

  Brett Adams

  Other books by Brett Adams

  Dark Matter

  Strawman Made Steel

  A Dweoming Well Book

  Copyright © 2020 Brett Adams

  All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events of locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Schrodinger’s Cat Limerick © an ‘old amateur astronomer’

  limericastronomyhints.braintidbits.com

  Book Cover Design by ebooklaunch.com

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  “The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.” – T.S. Eliot

  ~

  Any fool can hold a gun.

  For proof, I offer myself. Crouching there in the shadowed stoop opposite the café, I held the Glock raised before me, gripped double-hand. Easy.

  Fully loaded, a Glock 17’s steel, brass, plastic and propellant totals thirty-two ounces. Weighs less than a can of beans. And any fool can hold a can of beans.

  What’s more, if the Glock is typical—built, as it was, by a man with no firearms experience to win a contest by the Austrian Ministry of Defense—any fool can design one too.

  But to fire one at a human being?

  That, it turns out, takes a devil.

  It’s like they say: pressure can make a diamond, or a stain. It all depends on what’s being squashed.

  Squatting there in the shadow, one shoulder braced against a dirt-encrusted brick wall, trying to keep the Glock’s sight trained on the kid’s chest as he sauntered to the café entrance, I was beginning to fear I was from Stainsville.

  The problem wasn’t the occasional yellow flash of a taxicab, or the stink of rotting trash wafting out of the gutter. I had clear sight across the street. There was no wind to speak of. I knew the chambered hollow point round would expand when it punctured his flesh with a good chance of smearing an artery or organ.

  Everything was ready.

  Except me.

  My hands were jittering like a junkie in withdrawal.

  Maybe it was nerves? I know it wasn’t guilt.

  No, I wanted a tight bead on his chest. I wanted my bullet to tear him a new hole. Was giddy to see him ragdoll to the ground, and watch his blood sluice onto the street.

  Those are the perks of an Angel of Death on an avenging mission.

  My real fear was that my body was falling apart. That the stresses of the past weeks had caught up with me, and the flesh-machine named Jack Griffen had finally thrown a cog. That deep down, part of my constitution had ruptured. Now, when I needed it one last time.

  Maybe murder took more than a professor of literature had—particularly a forty-five-year-old professor of literature with a diabolical heart condition and a fear of needles.

  Why not? Everything else had broken.

  I strained again to still the tremble in my arms. Just one more shot.

  Because—oh, boy—I meant to murder. Just once. First and last on my scorecard.

  My one hope was that before he died, he had the presence of mind to look for me. I wanted him to know I made it. Me, Jack Griffen. I played his game. And he lost.

  I’m tempted to ask, “How did it come to this?”

  Fact is, I know precisely how it came to this. Our journey is documented in ridiculous detail on his blog.

  1

  Fifty-six days earlier

  The knife was six inches long.

  Its handle was hardwood wrapped in brass wire, its blade acid-etched with a Native American icon of a snake. A scalping knife.

  Hiero laid the blade across the palm of my hand just above the first knuckle, on the fleshy part of the fingers.

  In hindsight, it probably should have concerned me more when he burst into my office brandishing the knife, quoting Homer, “The gods are hard to handle—when they come blazing forth in their true power!”

  But to be honest, in the months I’d known Hiero, I had come to expect anything.

  “Describe it for me, Professor,” he said.

  “Professor?” I said. “You haven’t called me that since the first day you walked in here.”

  “Maybe I’m feeling nostalgic.” He leaned toward me across my desk. “Come on. How’s it feel, the blade’s touch? Like a line of fire?”

  This close, I noticed the livid skin of a graze on Hiero’s normally immaculate forehead. But the feel of razor-keen steel on my skin left no room to consider its significance.

  Fighting the urge to flinch, I shut my eyes. In the darkness I tried to shrink my world to the feel of that line of pressure on my skin.

  From somewhere outside a shriek of laughter echoed through the grey buildings of the English Faculty. The campus was slowly draining of students on a post-exam high.

  “It feels . . .” I said, groping for the right word. “Wet.”

  My eyes snapped open, fearing for a moment that the blade had drawn blood.

  “Wet?” he said, voice flat. “That’s the limit of your imaginative reach: wet?”

  I nodded, a trifle guilty, and the scratch of his pen on a notebook was the only sound for a moment.

  He put the pen down, and wit
h the ghost of a smile, shifted the knife blade. He lifted it and rested the last two inches of steel across the base of my index and middle fingers.

  “Now you have a choice: two fingers, or—” He angled the blade, moved it down. “One thumb.”

  Not exactly Sophie’s Choice, but my mind refused to work with the blade touching me, so I stalled.

  “Last time you made us drink that bottle of five-dollar wine.” (A shattering hangover eclipsed the fun of trying to write how that felt.) “The time before you punched me in the neck. When are you going to threaten me with donuts?”

  He withdrew the knife and sat back. From a box on my desk he took a chocolate, popped it into his mouth, and chewed. The aroma of chocolate wafted past me. They were a gift from a failing student, but I never ate them. Hate chocolate.

  I snatched my hand back, and noticed the glimmer in his eye dim a little.

  But only a little—it never quite died with Hiero. He lived high octane, as crazy as that sounds for a kid meeting in the cool evening hours with a crusty professor of literature.

  I watched him scratching in his notepad, and wondered if I’d miss our talks when he returned home. He was on exchange, and semester had almost finished. The next day he was flying back to the US.

  “You told me to research, Jack.” His hand rested on a leather folder he’d laid on the desk, his touch almost a caress. The folder had been with him for weeks now. Its cover was brown and worn like a sailor’s skin.

  Research? I had. Three weeks ago. Straight after he’d told me his secret: he was writing a novel.

  “Not just any novel,” he’d said. Hieronymus Beck only had one novel in him, but it would be a cracker. A Catcher in the Rye. An immortal novel.

  When I pressed him about it, he said he didn’t want to spoil it, but confessed it was a murder mystery. And since then, he’d remained uncharacteristically coy.

  Tonight was my last chance to grill him, face to face. The teacher in me wanted to convince him that it was the details—the verisimilitude—that made a novel ring with truth. Made it endure.

  More than that, I’m ashamed to admit. There was a rare spark in Hiero. If this novel did, against all odds, turn out to be a bestseller—or, God forbid, a classic—this was my last chance to be the guy who coached him to greatness.

  Selfish, I know.

  I took a breath and dove in. “Who’s the victim?”

  His gaze settled on me again. Behind those eyes I fancied I could see his mind calculating whether or not to entrust me with his baby.

  Then—

  “This guy,” he said.

  Progress, at last.

  “How does he die?”

  “Death.”

  “Hilarious. Knife wound?” I said, glancing at the knife, which he had thankfully set down.

  He shrugged.

  I pressed. “Bullet, strangulation, poison? You must know.”

  “All of the above,” he replied, deadpan.

  Gen-Y—always want all the options.

  He took a sheet of paper from his folder and wrote again.

  “What about forensics?” I said. “Murder always leaves a mark on the world.”

  I hunched forward onto my desk, tried to coax a tell from his poker face.

  “What trace evidence will your medical examiner find? Is it poison? It’s poison, isn’t it.”

  He didn’t deny it, so I latched hold.

  “Poison offers plenty of ways to fork the reader’s attention, but you need to be precise. Hemlock isn’t arsenic.”

  “Hemlock,” said Hiero, “causes dilation of the pupils, dizziness, trembling, paralysis, whereas arsenic causes headache, drowsiness, diarrhea, white patches in the fingernails.”

  “Wonderful!” I said. “But cold. Here’s the twist: hemlock grows by the side of the road in Washington; Arsenic looks like cholera in Haiti. See the potential?”

  “My novel isn’t set in Washington or Haiti.”

  “Don’t be obtuse. Just nail the detail. That’s where the devil lies.”

  From where I sat, I read upside down as he wrote, ‘detail’ and ‘devil.’

  He lifted his gaze, and his deep grey eyes smiled from behind a curtain of chestnut fringe: “I’ll research.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was humoring me, so I made one last pitch for attention to detail.

  “Agatha Christie—goddess of murder mystery—knew her poisons so well that a real murder was solved using her novel, The Pale Horse. It practically introduced the world to the lethal efficacy of thallium, and described the symptoms of thallium poisoning better than the medical journals. The very year the novel was published, 1961, the British serial killer known as the Teacup Poisoner began experimenting with it. Heck, just ten years ago a girl in Japan, an admirer of Teacup, killed her mother with thallium and blogged about it. You know you’ve hit the detail when your novel informs real life.”

  Hiero snapped his folder shut. “Life and art.”

  “Art and life,” I replied, in what had become an in-joke.

  Through my office window I saw evening had thickened to night. A hint of damp drifted through the old iron-wrought air vents, and with it the tick and croak of frogs.

  I leaned back in my chair and let my eyes roam through my office. My gaze inevitably fell on the bookcase taking pride of place on the long wall. Its shelves bowed under the weight of classics.

  Art. Art was going to kill me. They could write that on my headstone.

  Hiero caught my glance. In a moment he was out of his seat, and at the shelves. As he scanned the spines, he murmured, “Chandler, Lewis, Nabokov, Salinger, Tolstoy, Vonnegut . . .”

  This was no book-of-the-month portfolio club set. These books were marked by life, picked from charity shops, garage sales, laundromats, each stained by the grit of life, dog-eared by fingers uncaring or eager.

  How I loved those books. How I hated those books.

  “These guys are gods,” breathed Hiero.

  Gods?

  “Come on, Hiero. They’re writers. Leave divinity to the surgeons.”

  A curious smile lit his face when he turned toward me.

  “No, I’m serious, Jack. Gods. Know why?”

  I spread my arms, “Explain the theology to me.”

  “Who alone knows a man’s thoughts in the last moment of his life, as a bullet tears his brain apart?”

  Jesus. A sudden thought disturbed me. Hiero could be manic; was he suicidal?

  “You’re going to say, ‘God’?” I said.

  “And writers, Jack. Authors.” He sat again, hunched toward me, his shoulders trembling with contained energy. “Only God and Hemingway could know that, at the very end, the Old Man dreamed of lions.”

  “So you’re a god?”

  He smiled, spread his arms wide. “Well, I’m writing a novel.”

  Who was I kidding; I would put a thousand bucks on Hiero never finishing his novel. He had that mania that might never settle on anything in life.

  “There’s just one thing that destroys your theory,” I said. “These authors, these gods of yours, Hiero: their creatures are fiction. Make-believe. They live in worlds built from dreams or nightmares. If anything, false gods.”

  Night had taken the corridors when we said our goodbyes. I locked up my office in the pale green light of an emergency exit sign.

  —And slipped on the tiles. I crashed onto my hip and sent my briefcase careening into the darkness.

  When I’d collected myself, I discovered what had caused my fall. I’d slipped on a leather folder. Loose paper had slewed from it across the tiles. I gathered them up, then held the folder up to the poor light.

  Printed on one side of the folder in permanent marker was Hieronymus E. Beck. And below that,

  Blood and Ink.

  I’d slipped on the notes for Hiero’s novel.

  And my life would never be the same.

  2

  As I drove home that night I struggled to drown the pity I felt for Hiero.<
br />
  Back in the US, without my goading, he would probably forget about writing. He’d travelled halfway round the world for my tutelage, but hadn’t bothered turning up to my lectures. Couldn’t blame him on that; these days, half the kids stayed home and watched the videos.

  Besides, he lacked talent. Real talent. With his looks, he would have more chance in Hollywood. I convinced myself it was a good thing he had lost his notes. That even if I knew where he lived, I wouldn’t return them.

  But my conscience must have been uneasy. At my apartment, I ate a microwave dinner at my writing bureau, and examined his notes.

  The folder held even less than I’d first thought. Besides loose paper, there were five sets of stapled pages, each of two or three sheets, and all titled Research. The cover page of each set appeared to be a typed template. Hiero had probably paid twenty dollars for a decrepit typewriter from a charity shop. Another Hemingway-wannabe.

  Shit — guilt, guilt.

  I retrieved the topmost set and held it to the light to read. The first line of the template began ‘How’. Next to that was written in curling script ‘Asphyxiation’.

  So I was holding a template for murder, and Hiero had begun with the pointy end of the stick, the means.

  Below, written in the same curling script were the words ‘Where: Point Walter’.

  The name was familiar to me. Point Walter lay on the other side of the river, a spit of land surrounded by nature reserve. If I stood on tiptoes on my balcony I could probably see the light on its jetty.

  Next came ‘When: ‘Neath the Rising Sun’ (and my author brain grimaced at the incorrect capitalization).

  Below that, the last item, ‘Who: Female jogger. Redhead.’ An ellipsis, then ‘large-breasted’.

  I gave him a tick for the hyphen, then laughed, thinking Hollywood and Hiero would get along fine.

  A memory of my ex-wife killed the moment. I read on.

  Below the cover page lay freehand notes. Hiero had made a study of methods for asphyxiation. Under Garroting, he contrasted the effects of different kinds of rope and wire. The likely particulate trace evidence left by each, the texture of abrasion left upon skin, the chance of rupture, and the likelihood of crushing the windpipe cartilage. Wedged among the paragraphs were diagrams of the larynx, littered with details of angle and force, and calculations of the minimum required strength.