Graham had been driving cabs for the best part of twenty years, ever since he had lost his job in the early Eighties, with a little help from Maggie and her boys. At the age of forty-one and with little in the way of desirable skills he had fallen into driving private-hire in a fatalistic fit of desperation. OK, it didn't pay wonderfully and the hours were awful but at least it got him away from his wife, which in it's self, he recognised as a blessed relief.

That he should arrive home each evening, worn and depressed after a twelve-hour shift was inevitable, as inevitable as dog shit on the pavement. Why he shouldn't question the reason he still worked such long hours was understandable. In his road drained eyes his wife was nothing but a life sucking, moaning bitch. End of story. If you could get a word in edge ways.

The truth is that after thirty-five years of marriage they had both given up trying, trying to love each other that is. Whereas neither had given up trying to despise the other, a skill that they found hard to perfect due to the fact that they were forever refining and honing their hate. There they were, two fighting cockerels, driven by a need to revile that was now so deeply ingrained that it was indistinguishable from nature.

After so many years living the job, things were very much routine, well most of the time. The transfers of whores from the obvious facade of massage parlour to West End client and back again. Escorting escorts everywhere in the alliterated comfort of his red Ford Escort. Delivering parcels, no questions asked, while doubling up the fare with a septuagenarian line-dancer and her weekly shopping.

In twenty years of driving the streets of his city he thought he'd seen just about everything. He believed that nothing could surprise him. Funny how you can be so wrong. Not so funny when you realise just how wrong you can be.

It had been a grey day in late autumn. Bins and cars deposited rubbish into oily puddles in a deciduous downpour. The sun, low in the sky, played peek-a-boo with sullen pedestrians, heads bowed in disdaining reverence. Business had been slow, people preferring to stay in and hide from the impending threat of winter. The dispatch office had offered up a cash job and Graham had been surprised that he had been the only taker. He should have seen this as an omen, instead he thought amen.

The fare turned out to be a man of the cloth. Starched dog collar over black cotton, which on closer inspection was washed to charcoal and frayed at the cuffs. Unusually the priest was wearing a large ornate pectoral cross, blatantly displayed, a muggers prayer. In a time of spiritual understatement the priest looked out of place and a little out of time.

The priest, who gave no name but Father, asked to be taken to the East Side of the river. This sluggish ribbon of dilute sewerage divided the residential west bank from the industrial hinterland of the east. Graham could think of no church on the East Side, not even a disused one, swallowed as the industry encroached.

As they wove their way through the rush hour traffic Graham heard the priest start to mutter beneath his breadth. He was unable to tell what the Father was saying but it had rhythm and pace, Graham also knew, instinctively, that it had meaning. As he piloted his red Escort towards its destination Graham noted how the rush hour traffic so prevalent just a little earlier had dissolved away into the grey half-light of dusk. Soon they were alone on an enclosed road, a red pac-man between industrial cliffs.

Their destination turned out to be a nondescript industrial building, old enough to be frocked in redbrick and asbestos. The priest, still chanting, signalled that Graham should pull over and stop. He handed over two twenty-pound notes and exited the car without a word. In silence Graham sat and watched him enter the building by steel shuttered door. Strange place for a priest.

It was almost dark now. The buildings crowded in to stare at Graham as he lit a cigarette. The match flared and his eyes reflected red mimicking the shell of the car. As he turned to reverse out of his parking spot his eyes fell upon a briefcase on the rear parcel-shelf.

Damn, the priest must of left it.

He killed the engine and got out the car. A chill wind knifed him as he opened the hatchback to retrieve the case. With a shudder Graham turned to follow the priest.

On entering the building through the unlocked shutter Graham found himself in a small entrance hall off which two doors led. Behind the first was a small office area. It showed little in the way of occupation beyond a battered old sofa illuminated by a standard lamp, low wattage bulb deplete of shade. Upon the sofa lay an open copy of The Old Testament, but were was the priest?

Graham could have just left the brief case upon the sofa and gone, but his curiosity had been awoken. Retrospectively he should have remembered the cat.

He approached the second door. As he placed a hand upon the steel knob a shiver went through him, with a sense of expectation he opened the door. He crossed the threshold into a large dark space probably occupying the rest of the inner shell of the building. All was black but for the illuminated priest kneeling in the pale light of a fluorescent tube in the centre of the room. He was about twenty yards from Graham but the low intoning of his prayer could still be heard in the silence. He was not alone.

Just outside of the ellipse of light, cast by the tube, moved people. They were silent and vacantly moved from one foot to the next as if dancing to the rhythm of the priest's prayer. Graham was nervous. Should he call out to the Father or leave the case by the door and silently leave? As if hearing his thoughts the priest's congregation turned to look at Graham.

He screamed out loud in shock and horror.

Where faces should have been there was nothing but gaping voids filled with darkness that was so thick, kisses would of choked upon it. Disturbingly they wore perfect human form, but instead of being made solid by flesh and bone they were vessels of emptiness. They were animated black holes sucking the heat out of the air, so that the priest's breath solidified into clouds of steam. Graham could taste the despair. Both priest's and monster's.

Graham slammed the door and ran from the building dropping the case in his haste to leave. He scrambled into his car but before he could start the engine and escape the priest walked out of the building waving frantically for him to wait. Graham popped the passenger door lock and the priest got in, he looked even older than Graham had remembered. His starched dog collar seemed to be the only thing stopping his head collapsing forward; he was a broken man whose only sustenance came form his faith.

The priest was not followed. Graham didn't have to exit the area like an extra from some budget horror movie. In truth he wished he could of. He wished he could of left and forgotten everything, but the priest had a story to share and stories are hard to forget.

These people, as people they were, were not monsters but the sad casualties of an eternal war. As this odd couple sat in the darkness of the cab the priest recounted a tale. It was a tale that would have been unbelievable, had the evidence for it not been standing merely yards away.

The priest's tale was of the reality of the battle between good and evil. A battle as physical and real as any war that has scarred this earth. The Prince of Darkness, The Fallen Angel Satan was preparing himself for an assault upon heaven. The shells of the people residing in the empty shell of the building were the unliving proof of this war.

As far as the church could be sure, these remnants of people, were the waste products of hate being removed from the human form forcibly. Agents of the Devil seemed to be harvesting this hate to fuel his growth. Satan was on the move and his appetite was insatiable, but these days of increasing disillusionment offered a veritable finger buffet of choice.

The priest belonged to one of the old schools. His world was one in which good and evil still held sway. He was an anachronism in a modern world that preferred to place it's faith in unit trusts and fortified bran flakes. A world in which God or the Devil were nothing more than interesting advertising concepts.

The priest had been sent to tend to this most downcast and abject of flocks. Sent because he believed. There was little he could do, as their essence was gone. His was very much a waiting game. All he could do for this detritus of humanity was comfort it until nature took its course.

Graham had sat silently while the priest talked. In his voice he had recognised the tone of a man who believed whole-heartedly in what he said. This was not a preacher. Graham sort comfort in the succession of cigarettes that he smoked. He took another from the pack and lit it on the butt of the one in his mouth, a chain reaction to an unwanted stimulus.

The problem with stories is they are hard to forget and those with a sting in the tail are the hardest.

The priest turned to Graham and looked him full in the face. The moon had risen pallid in the clear night sky. Stars were scattered across the surface of heaven like the milky bloom on a jet damson. God hid upon high and fear filled his space.

" Of course this is the fate of all those that hate " said the priest in a clear measured voice.

Was he aware of Graham?

" We are all but food for the Devil, entrees before the final bloody reckoning ".

With these words he opened the car door and alighted the crimson cab. As he turned to close the door he leant in, face wan and lined in the moonlight, and said:

" I don't know who's going to win the war and on nights like this I'm scared it won't be us ".

The door slammed and Graham was alone in the cold.

The cab radio crackled and Graham started. It was late, perhaps later than he thought. He turned off the radio and headed for home, his internal autopilot took over and in a thought he was there. He would be careful, he knew the Devil was at large. He rummaged in the boot of his blood red car and retrieved his salvation.

He opened the front door of his house and found every light burning brimstone. He walked into the living room where his wife sat with her back to him on the sofa. Her voice came like a banshee, shouting that his dinner was in the bin, burnt by his own failure to arrive home on time. Still she didn't turn to face him, choosing the comfort of the television in preference.

Graham was sure what he must do.

He raised the wheel brace above his wife's head and rained down a hail of blows upon he fragile skull. She suspected nothing.

When he had finished he felt empty. Thirty-five years of caged hate was sluiced from him. A lifetime of resentment beat out in a macabre Morse code.

He was saved.

He had saved them both.

Redemption comes in many different guises.

The rest is on the record. Graham had phoned the police to report what he had done. They had arrived to find him sitting quietly beside his wife's battered body, he held the four pronged wheel brace to his chest, like a blooded cross.

I am the duty solicitor and I am at a loss as what to do. My client wants the above story recorded as his statement. He swears it is the truth and to his own sanity.

If it is the truth then we are all lost. If he claims sanity he is lost.

I know I must defer judgement to a higher power. I wish the psyche team would hurry up and arrive.

The end

Copyright © D J Manion 2003