Christopher Fowler - Personal Demons

'That's bloody cheerful,' snapped Woody.

He threw her a sudden odd look. 'Why are you pretending to be a man?'

'Just give me a hand with this.' She and several of the others shifted one of the heavy drinks tables away from the wall and set it on end, blocking the broken window nearest the entrance. Bax and the bouncer were training extinguishers on the fiery fluid seeping through the windows from more burning Molotovs. People were motivating into groups, at work on separate sections of the room. It was as if a collective intelligence had kicked in to make them perform the necessary protective actions. The explosion of wood and glass that erupted near Woody caught everyone by surprise.

'Fuck me, what are they using?' Jack straightened up and looked out through the jagged hole that had been punched through the shutter by some kind of large calibre ammunition. Following its flight path he found one of the barmen clutching his shoulder as blood pumped between his fingers. The bullet had passed through the boy's T-shirt, grazing the soft flesh of his armpit, and had gone on to explode a bottle of Schmirnoff above the bar. Within moments, two customers had torn tea towels into strips and were staunching his wound. Another gunshot blast ripped through the steel sheeting on the main window of the dancefloor, but failed to find a target, smashing into the plaster ceiling rose in the centre of the room. Surprisingly, nobody screamed.

'Everyone seems so calm,' said Woody as Bax reappeared.

'Never underestimate the balls of a queen, honey. Half these guys grew up getting punched out by parents who won't speak to them until they're on their deathbeds.' He didn't say whose deathbeds he meant, and Woody didn't ask. The rending noise that began at the farthest window alerted them to the fact that someone outside was levering the sheet-steel away with a crowbar. 'Oh shit.'

Suddenly the sheeting was off and the inner window was being smashed out with boots and batons. Wood and glass splintered everywhere as dark figures struggled to climb in through the gap.

Jack swept the beer glasses from the other huge drinks table. He and Bax upended it, and with the help of four others ran it face-out at the breach. The heavy oak top crashed down over the limbs entering from outside. There were yelps of pain and rage as injured body-parts were withdrawn. Everyone fell against the back of the table, determined to hold it in place by sheer weight of numbers.

'The cops aren't going to get here in time, are they?' said Woody, pushing with all her might.

Another gunshot exploded the piece of window that still showed above the table edge. The bullet ploughed into the ceiling, and a shower of plaster cascaded over them. Bax wiped his hand across his neck to find flecks of blood from the fragments of glass. The guttural roar from outside sounded like football fans raging against a missed penalty. The table swayed and rocked but remained in its place. More petrol bombs were being thrown at the windows beyond the bar. The bouncer left his post at the doors and ran toward the spreading flames with his extinguisher. The room was filling with dense smoke. There was an explosion of glass on the floor above them, but they had no way of knowing whether it was caused by a rock or a petrol bomb.

'Simon?'

The boy drifted through the crowd and passed Woody like a wraith, staring hard ahead. He was moving quickly toward the club's temporarily unguarded entrance.

'SIMON!' Woody left the others rammed against the great table and ran toward the boy, who was reaching up on tiptoe to release the bolt at the top of the door. He had drawn it halfway down when she barrelled into him, knocking him aside. ' What the hell do you think you're doing ?' she heard herself screaming.

When he turned his translucent eyes to hers, his serenity was the peace of inner madness. 'Let me open the door.'

'They'll come in and they'll kill us, don't you understand? You can't reason with them!'

'I don't need to reason with them. I have the boy within me.' He ran bony fingers across his chest. 'I reached out to him and took his pain. It's safe inside me now.'

There was another terrible eruption on the far side of the room. Somebody fell back with an agonised yell. 'How can that be?' she shouted, shoving at him, 'how can that be?'

'I know his suffering. I've lived with such pain all my life, I'm a fucking magnet for abuse and I'm dying from it, do you understand?' He tore himself free of her and stood alone.

Others had seen what was happening and were moving toward them. 'They'll kill you, Simon,' she said. 'They'll tear you apart with their bare hands.'

'Of course they will. They must have someone to blame. A whipping boy.'

'But the real culprit – '

' The real culprit is far away. I can't catch him. I'm not clever, all I can do is take the pain. From my father, from the crowd outside, I can absorb their darkness. It's what I do, how I survive. Feeding on the violence of others.' He held her with a look she would never forget to her dying day. 'Someone once told me about the army.'

'What army?'

'Everyone has an army in their heart, an army that rallies when its host is most in danger, an army that fights back with all its might until every last one of its soldiers is dead. But I don't. I have no army. There's nothing inside me fighting back, there's just a black hole.' He smiled at her. 'Don't look so worried. I know how to make the most of it.' As he had been talking to her, he had raised the entry-door's floor-bolt with his boot, and now he shrugged himself away to release the top bolt in one swift, simple movement. The door suddenly opened inwards and he slipped through it before anyone could realise what was happening.

Woody screamed after him but the others had crashed forward to slam the door shut once more. She begged them to open it, screamed and pleaded until her throat was raw, but they carried her away to the side of the room, where Bax gave her water and sat her down. She regained her breath, stopped crying and waited.

They all waited.

Outside, Simon stood before the seething crowd with the placidity of a medieval child-saint, a sickly hermaphrodite that raised its arms in preparation for final absolution. His moon-blanched face was tense with sexual anticipation, his body illuminated by dozens of flashlights as the figures around him surged and erupted forward. In the distance the riot vehicles could be heard arriving. The mob took the sound of their sirens as a call to action and fell upon the boy, slashing and punching at him with everything they were holding, machetes and carpet-cutters, butchers' hooks, bread knives, daggers and carving-forks. Obviously those inside the club were unwilling to take the rap for the murderer and had forced him to step out in the open. They had no loyalty to one another and probably all deserved to die but this one, this one had to suffer properly for what he had done.

But then the swinging boots and arcing knives slowed their rhythm. Gradually the shouts died down and stopped. For a few moments total silence descended on the neighbourhood. Then a few of the women started to scream. The crowd slunk back from the grotesque remains of their victim, slipping in crimson mire. A sense of shame and horror descended over them as they listened to those inside the building putting the remaining fires out. Weapons were released from bloody hands as men began to cover their faces and weep. Some fell to their knees. Others stumbled into the arms of their women like lost children. As the police disembarked from their grid-covered vehicles, one of the wives came forward and laid her coat across the shattered skull of the boy who had drained their rage away.

Inside the club, the sudden silence was eerier than anything they had heard so far. Woody put her eye to one of the bulletholes and watched as nearly three hundred men, women and children were herded back to the far side of the street. At the corner of her vision she could see the edge of the pavement, and a pale leg lying in a pool of blood, its foot severed at the ankle.