a friend's request

There was a bitter chill to the air, the creeping winter stretching its long talons through the night, but as nice as the thought would be, it was not the cold itself that sent icy discomfort racing down the man’s spine. What little light the gaslamps in the street below afforded left too much to the imagination, strange shapes flickering and dancing and playing absolute havoc with his imagination. Albert could not say with any sincerity that the world of imagination or that of reality would be kinder than the other, the devil you know and the devil you could never imagine.

But Albert was not alone in the room.

With a dread that seemed to have stolen his wits, he swallowed, mouth impossibly dry. Though losing the battle against his nerves, he managed the impossible feat of dragging his gaze up to settle upon the other man. He was sure his face betrayed him, but his friend gave nothing away.

In fact, Eric appeared almost too passive about it all, thumb looped nonchalantly in his pocket, leaning against the doorframe as he observed the fellow. The chill of the wind outside failed to compare to the passive coldness behind the man’s thick frames.

“Why?” Albert finally questioned, his voice so soft and yet thundered in his ears.

“Does it matter?” came the sigh-heavy reply, brushing aside the concern as if it meant nothing. Did it matter to him? Dear lord, it seemed so easy to imagine that nothing at all could possibly matter to him!

“Does it m- does it matter?” poor, distraught Albert exclaimed, “Of course it matters! Good gods, man, you’ve a dead body in your room! What have you done?”

“I didn’t have a choice.” Eric dismissed as if the presence of a corpse was just as serious as late paperwork.

Albert could feel his temple throb with the promise of a future headache. A headache was far from his greatest concern, the gruesome, visceral mess that had once been a living, breathing person before… well, before they found themself in the nauseating state they were in when he arrived. He never had the strongest of stomachs, so the fact it had not failed him was a pleasant surprise. The closest to something being pleasant in the current circumstances, at the very least.

“Of course you had a choice,” Albert argued, “You always have a choice.”

“Don’t play moralist,” Eric said on a sigh, “I asked you here to help me, not to judge my decisions. There are very few people that I trust in this world, and no other but you that I could ask to do this for me. Would you deny me this?”

Albert folded his arms, more protective than irritated if he was going to be perfectly honest with himself, turning away from his friend. Unfortunately, this did mean he was unpleasantly acquainted with a thick smear of blood on the far wall, which left him a little woozy and so needed to drag his gaze back again. There was no real win, so he just had to settle for the familiar and frightening rather than the grizzly and frightening. Both options were annoyingly frightening.

“It was not my intention to kill him, you do understand that, don’t you?” At long last, Eric allowed himself to drop his steely façade, a plea to be believed, to be trusted in the face of something as terrible as murder.

“I’m glad to hear that.”

“He came for my work, he threatened me. I could not allow anybody to take it from me, especially not now. It is so very unstable, I could not imagine what might come if any of it was released into the world before it was done, before I could refine things to-“ the man paused, catching himself as he grew to passionate, “It was self-defense.”

Albert did want to see the best in people, it felt like a waste of energy to go and assume the worst of people and villainizing innocent people. But, no matter how much he might have wanted to assume the best, he could not justify the wounds away as self-defense. Good lord, he could not even recognise the body as something completely human anymore, helpful little context cues aside. But he kept this to himself, he hardly wanted to set off the man when he had proven a willingness to kill when he felt threatened.

“I am sorry to have had to get you involved, but now that you have been, you’ve no choice but to help me. People are always watching, there is no privacy in this damnable city, surely somebody will have seen you come here, and so if I am to be doomed, so are you. It was necessary, I could not do this alone, and I know you were capable of it.”

“And if I were to refuse?”

“Do you think I would be the only one to rot behind bars?” Eric flashed a strange grin, content with his knowledge of the impossible situation he was creating for his friend, “And you can only imagine the suffering imprisonment would cause a person such as ourselves? Our minds our strengths while-“

“Enough,” Albert all but begged, “I understand. By gods do I wish that I did not, but I do. You’ll doom me, but I shall do what I must, and may something grant me the mercy you’ve denied me here.”

“It is a shame you never did try your hand at poetry, you’ve too much of a flare for the theatrics for an office worker.”

With a good-natured friendliness that felt wholly out of place in such a thick, unpleasant situation, Eric let out a little laugh, clapping his friend on the shoulder. Albert had not realised the distance between the two of them had reduced so much as it had, and the contact was more than enough to make him jump. If he was not feeling quite so on edge as he was, he might have had it in him to offer a nervous laugh of his own.

But, instead, he was just left with the distinct feeling that he was teetering right on the edge of something life changing. The fork in the road of life that he had been until now simply meandering peacefully through, blissfully oblivious to the deviations waiting for him.

“You needn’t look so worried,” Eric remarked (informing Albert that, once again, his treacherous expressions were speaking louder than words could), “I shan’t expect you to get your hands any dirtier than necessary, the blood shall be on my hands alone.”

What a lovely claim, but it was a wasted one. From the moment he set foot in the building he had felt the sticky grime of blood clinging to him like a film. Even if he did not touch a drop, he knew he would feel it no matter how spotless he kept himself.

And yet he took Eric’s word.

Albert had always considered himself a man of, if nothing else, consistent morals. He knew right and wrong and yet all the same, he found himself scrubbing blood as he tried his hardest to pretend the sound in his ears might just be anything but the sound of his friend dealing with viscera and goodness only knew what else by his side. Even his wildest nightmares could not have created the scenario he was living through. It was terrible, horrid, and it had fallen together so smoothly and they had found a rhythm as consistent as clockwork.

Not a word was spoken between the two men, a silent industriousness accompanying a wordless agreement. For what it was worth, Eric did take it upon himself to do the brunt of the more… clandestine areas of the work, Albert taking it upon himself to make it appear as though there had been no work done at all.

By the time the glow of the gaslamps found its competition in the growing sunlight, it would have been so easy to convince anybody that there had never been a body at all. Inconspicuous bags that Eric had insisted he knew how to do away with (Albert did not see what it was that the man had scrawled on a scrap of paper, passed out with hushed whispers in much the same way his own summoning had been undertaken) were all that remained of the man. Nameless to those who had rendered him something that could not be rightly identified as a person anymore.

By the time the last lingering traces of nighttime had been swallowed up entirely by morning light, Albert had set his key in the lock, retreating to the privacy of his home. Slumber would not take him any time soon, and so to put the night behind him, he sought what little escape his mind could secure in the written word, even if the contents of the story escaped him.

Whatever wild stories lay hidden within his books, none of it compared to the strangeness his last few hours had carried and would, no doubt, carry on for as long as his memory would stretch.