Beyond the Shadow of Night(110)

What if he couldn’t pick up?

Asher slammed the phone down and cursed himself.

He left the depot and took a cab back to Hartmann Way.



Fifteen minutes later, Asher rushed from the cab to number 38, panting and coughing, taking no time to gather himself before he rang the doorbell, then hammered on it. There was no answer, so he went around the side of the house, past those kids who were still playing basketball.

He went through the gate into the backyard and approached the back door, next to the woodwork, where the pot of paint still rested on the brick, waiting patiently for Mykhail to continue. Asher’s hand was raised, ready to bang on the glass, when he spotted Mykhail. He was sitting at the table, his head and shoulders slumped over. He was still and silent.

Asher shouted out to him and banged on the door, but he didn’t move at all.

He cupped his hands against the glass and squinted to see better. On the table next to Mykhail there seemed to be a dark pool. And that object next to the pool, was it a handgun?

Oh no. Oh dear God, not this.

Asher turned, and his eyes settled on the brick under the pot of paint. He pulled it out, knocking over the pot, not caring about the spilled paint, then smashed the glass of the door. He reached inside and unlocked it, cutting his forearm on the glass in the process. He flinched, but it didn’t warrant a second thought. A rattle of the doorknob and he was in, almost falling as he ran over and grabbed Mykhail by the shoulders.

For a second he was back at that wretched place again, seeing things no person should ever see, smelling that peculiar coppery saltiness nobody should smell. This figure—still warm, like the bodies he’d pulled from the chambers so many years before—was clearly no longer Mykhail, but something that used to be Mykhail. A crawling pool of blood surrounded the head, a spray dripped down the wall next to him. Each was peppered with fragments of bone and flesh.

Asher hugged the lifeless shoulders and called out Mykhail’s name. Then his eyes settled on the pistol next to Mykhail’s right hand. He picked it up and held it for a few moments, realizing he held a lot of the blame for this. They’d been through a lot together. Mykhail had always been the stronger of them, but now Asher had turned him into the weaker one. He checked the magazine of the gun. It was empty.

He glanced around, looking for bullets. Yes, that was what he deserved. He hunted, checking Mykhail’s pockets and a few kitchen drawers. He found none.

And even if he’d found some, would he have had the nerve?

He started to feel physically sick at the thought, as if he was going to pass out. He returned to Mykhail’s corpse. Below him, on the table, were Mykhail’s glass of juice, his beloved tape player, and an envelope with a name scrawled upon it. In a rage, shouting to his God, Asher slammed his arm down and swung it to the side with so much force that the items flew across the kitchen, bouncing and crashing over the floor.

He shouted again, enraged all the more that there was nobody to listen. He staggered to the back door and stepped outside, where he took in a few lungfuls of fresh air and dropped the gun. Somehow he forced himself to walk on, although he sensed a disconnect between his head and his legs. One foot trod in the spilled paint as he went back around the house, passing the kids again, the nearest two of them giving him a look of fear and backing away. Again, Asher didn’t care.

He flagged down a cab as soon as he reached the next street and jumped in. The driver was talkative and friendly at first, but that stopped as soon as he noticed the deep red blood on Asher’s hands. Asher told him to go the bus depot and started wiping the blood off onto his jacket.

The driver asked Asher if he was okay, and was very quickly told to just shut up and drive on. At the depot Asher headed straight to the restroom to clean himself up.

The bus back to Detroit wasn’t due in for another two hours, so he sat in the waiting room, huddled in a blur of regret and self-loathing. He drifted in and out of sleep, at times hardly aware of what was real and what was a product of his imagination. A glance at the bloodstains on his jacket told him he was trying to escape the horrible truth.

He knew exactly what he’d done. Okay, so Mykhail had done wrong all those years ago, but he was also Asher’s friend, and between friends you understand and forgive, and Asher hadn’t done that. He could never forgive the true Nazis—the masterminds, the planners, the drivers and motivators, those with cold minds who had instigated those terrible things he witnessed all those years ago.

But the people who were given little real choice?

Asher knew from his own experiences that the concept of free will was often a capricious one.

So, yes. He felt responsible for Mykhail’s suicide. But he didn’t take the gun and put it against Mykhail’s head. When the trigger released the hammer, forcing the pellet of metal through his skull, it wasn’t Asher’s finger that had pulled the trigger. But everyone is guilty of something, and Asher had argued with him and badgered him so much it might as well have been he who had killed him.

Well before the bus bound for Detroit was due in, Asher had convinced himself he was to blame for Mykhail’s death. So he went straight to the police station and told them he’d just killed a man. He told them Mykhail’s address and exactly where and how the body lay. They held him while they checked everything out.

In time there was more: Mykhail’s blood all over Asher, Asher’s bloody fingerprints on the gun that was found outside the door, his own blood on the glass of the door, the paint on his shoes, the boys who had seen him running from the house with blood on his hands, the cab driver’s account of a disturbed old man leaving blood on his seats.