F-Stop

By A. James Bedingfield

A circle of children shake agony from the bones of a bird. A soul-bending African ritual obliterates the mind of a U.N. Peacekeeper. High art meets low morals in this macabre tale of deceit, manipulation, and human indignity.
When his father dies, David Prior is stripped of the bedrock upon which his moral foundation is built, and he is left exposed to influences both benign and evil. On his right shoulder, the angel of family; David's mother and sister provide what strength they can, and the possibility of retaining his sanity. On his left, a devil resurrected from childhood; Victor Tournhomme is playing a far more serious game than David could ever have imagined.
David retreats to the family farm seeking solitude, and it is here, among the out buildings and snowed-in woods, that the specters of the past begin to crowd his mind. As David grapples with the brooding aftermath of childhood atrocities, Victor Tournhomme sets the wheels of his psychosis in motion.
Victor, like David, earns his living as a photographer, but when work ends for the day, Victor truly comes out to play. Capitalizing on David's vulnerability, Victor forwards a proposition which pits all of David's angels and devils against one another in a titanic ethical struggle, the outcome of which will reveal the depth of both men's resolve.
The madness accelerates as a mentally ill rapist, Victor's violently unstable brother, and the unfortunate figure known in adolescence simply as Tomb, in turn play their roles. When every piece is in place, and all of the players deemed ready, Victor plays his hand.
Believing himself prepared for the events to follow, David agrees to meet with Victor at the farm, but could never have anticipated Victor's true intentions. Face to face with death itself, only an eleventh hour turn of events can spare David the hell that has been meticulously crafted for him alone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: A. James Bedingfield
• Release date: Mar 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311195395

Book preview

F-STOP

A. JAMES BEDINGFIELD

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2014 A. JAMES BEDINGFIELD

License Notes: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Ebook formatting by www.ebooklaunch.com

Table of Contents

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

XVII.

XVIII.

XIX.

XX.

XXI.

XXII.

XXIII.

XXIV.

XXV.

AFTERWARD.

I.

Prior’s Poultry Farm, Alberta. Summer, 1980.

Look! He’s dancin’!

Victor’s face was gnome-red in the firelight, glancing in and out of definition with the chicken’s spastic shadow.

We stunned it first by short, sharp whacks to the head with green birch twigs and Commando Fingersnaps from Brice. He had the fattest fingers. Once the bird was quiet, twine could be tied around it’s neck and tightened up. Then lighter fluid was squirted onto the woodpile and the fire was lit.

The four of us, Terry, Brice, Victor, and myself, had spent every available minute of that summer at war on The Compound. That’s what we called it. Others might call it my grandparents’ chicken farm, but to us it was The Compound, and before the tide could be turned, vital information needed to be extracted from one particularly stubborn POW.

~

I wouldn’t let myself, but it sure would have been good to stop it. There was actually a point when the chickens could have lived, had I acted. Had I taken action, and just done what I wanted to, everything would have been alright. But that moment came and went while I chewed my nails and thought about it. The fat white bird that knew nothing about bad, dirty hands that constrict, or twine that chokes, was lost forever while I thought about it. And then it was beyond what I wanted, and dead.

While I wondered what was good, bad took over. It’s feathers blazed off, flesh popped and sizzled, and I swear there was a point when I saw it ask for help. Perhaps that was emotion running wild, but when it’s beak was cracked and curling and it had finally stopped dancing and there was nothing left to laugh at, I’m sure it knew all about me.

Later on, after we’d pissed out the fire and burned each other with bones, I was able to make some sense of what I had seen and nobody else had. All the madness of agony I had seen while Brice fired questions at the burning mess, Terry sang an improvised national anthem, and Victor delivered rapt color commentary, boiled down to one thing.

The primary code of atrocity is tit for tat.

II.

Mozambique. 1992.

On the twenty-fifth of January, 1992, at precisely two-seventeen p.m. Greenwich Meantime, and at an altitude of approximately fourteen thousand feet above Windhoek, Namibia, a small cloud began to form. By eight p.m., the cloud had passed over the sleeping sands of the Kalahari and into Zimbabwe, darkening and growing by the mile. When at last the sun abandoned the African continent in search of new America, what had once been a single cloud was now an anvil-headed front some twenty-two miles wide, gliding into the dry, hot air of Mozambique with a stealth that blackened stars.

The first of the rain hit ground as loose as flour, raising tiny plumes of dust that spiraled into updrafts and were swept east by the subtropical jetstream to travel the globe as far as Norway, Nepal, and Argentina. Rain pummeled the parched canopy of forest and washed out roads, isolating villages for what would be days as wildness wasted the African sky.

There were dancers a mile beneath the storm; mud men and bare-breasted women alive in blood-colored fire, twisting and bending grotesquely to the rhythm of skin drums and bone pipes. For two days and three nights they danced, circling the flames like unwinged wasps and collapsing one by one into black convulsive ecstasy. In the long, low hut, upwards of forty dancers had gathered to enact the Krin-Ati, or rite of healing.

Having entered in robes of hand-dyed red, the majority of them had discarded their dress as the heat inside raised snakes of steam on the rain battered roof outside.

It was now the second night of dance, and possessions were becoming more frequent as the Loa, or guardian spirits, were enticed to dance within the skins of the celebrants, several of whom were at any given time lying prostrate in the churning mud, ridden echoes yawning from their gaping mouths. The drums were manned by teams in rotation, six men relieving six others at approximate intervals of eight or nine hours. Even when the drummers changed, the rhythm never broke, being picked up by the fresh team so that two men beat each skin in tandem until the exhausted one fell away.

Pulse at the heart of time.

At the head of the hut, the Bokor, a priest of sorts, stood upon a platform of squared logs behind an altar fashioned by his predecessors over a century previous. He was dressed in red like the rest, but set apart in this by a complicated lexicon of symbols sewn into the fabric of his garments as years had passed and his favor among the Loa had increased. Upon the altar before him, a small fire was maintained with grasses and bark that smoldered in a wooden bowl, and from which the Bokor would periodically smoke.

The Bokor had occupied the altar since before the dance began, arriving a day before the drummers to sanctify the hut with smoke and songs. For extended periods he would sit slumped against the altar with his chin in his chest and arms hanging loosely at his sides. At such times he was said to be in direct dialogue with the Loa, and specific rhythms were drummed out to assist him.

On the second night, the frequency and duration of these trances increased, and a wave of excitement swept over the heads of the dancers like wind through dry leaves. Behind the altar, the Bokor was standing bolt upright, mouthing the benediction of the Loa through a thickening screen of smoke and extending a long black arm blindly toward the object that had lain hidden beneath a woven blanket to his right since the dance had begun.

Reaching the blanket must have been like touching a battery. Wild energy exploded from the Bokor’s eyes like animate venom and he tore the cover away, unveiling the corpse so violently as to almost topple it to the floor.

To all but one of the congregation, the dead body was no surprise. All but one had known from the beginning what the Bokor had beside him beneath the coarse woolen cover, and all but one were prepared for what came next.

~

Richard Tournhomme had come to Mozambique as part of the United Nations Peacekeeping force deployed to de-mine the region and monitor the cease-fire since the collapse of the Marxist government in 1989. He had at first been stationed in Maputo, but was soon moved to a remote base in the northern province of Nampula, where the local population was largely unaware that any change in government had transpired, and communication was notoriously poor. The duties of Richard’s unit were mostly matters of monitoring and surveillance, the irony of which was not long in the making. Nightly patrols, which had at first been cautious and well-armed affairs, quickly became farcical, entire villages lining the roadside at points to beg and stare at the white-skinned men in uniform.

As much as Corporal Tournhomme fascinated the local population, they in turn fascinated him. At times when activity was slow at the base, he would wander into the neighboring villages to trade for artifacts and learn the basics of their speech, often returning well after dark, disoriented and drunk on bootlegged rum.

It was on one such foray that Richard first came into contact with the Bokor. He had made a friend in Akello, the son of a hunter, who was willing to show Richard the workings of village life for whatever souvenirs could be spirited away from the base undetected. One afternoon, as the hunter’s son was explaining the hierarchy of elders in exchange for a UN tee-shirt, he stopped mid-sentence and held a smooth hand up to Richard’s chest, listening like an animal. Akello told Richard that he was sick. Richard didn’t know it yet, and it didn’t really show, but Akello knew these things, and Richard was sick.

Inspired more by curiosity than by any faith in the boy’s prognosis, Richard had accompanied Akello to the home of the Bokor, and there among the hanging bones and smoking herbs, it was decided that a healing dance was justified.

~

As the patient, Richard was the only one present at the ritual not dressed in red. Instead, he was draped in a simple white sheet, and by the time the Bokor unveiled the corpse on the second night, he was the only one dressed at all. He had watched the dance thus far from the rear of the hut, participating in a cursory fashion only so far as was necessary to render him less conspicuous. In truth, he need not have bothered. In spite of the fact that the ritual was being enacted on his behalf, there was not a single one among the wildly moving throng who paid Richard the slightest mind. They spun around him in a stomping, howling mosaic, eyes turned upward or closed entirely, more likely to bowl Richard over and trample him underfoot that to notice his reticence.

When the Bokor pulled the cover from the corpse however, all of that changed. Immediately the drummers doubled time, fresh vigor from some dark reserve driving power to their shining arms. The dancers, in turn, intensified their throes, collapsing in trios and pairs until the mud floor became an orgy of twisting, gleaming flesh, and only Richard, the Bokor, and two impossibly tall hunters remained on foot.

The hunters, whom Richard recognized from Akello’s recent lessons on village life, strode effortlessly over the human floor to flank him like guards. In a voice that was the forest itself, the hunter on Richard’s left recited an invocation to the Loa, while on Richard’s right there was produced a tiny bowl of bright yellow liquid which he was instructed to quickly drink.

Had he been handed human blood, Richard’s unwillingness to drain the cup could not have been greater. The smell was hard and thick like urine, and when the first drop hit his tongue his stomach tightened convulsively, all but spewing the broth into the mud. But the Bokor had Richard nailed to the spot with eyes fueled directly by the storm that split the sky overhead, and Richard at that moment could no more have refused the cup than flown.

The effects were immediate.

Sour heat hammered into Richard’s gut, cutting the legs from under him like a scythe. A moment later it was as if his limbs had become inflated, swelling to aching enormity in a second and as tight upon his screaming bones as winding snakes.

For what felt like an hour, Richard was left alone among the slick and groaning bodies. The hunters who had administered the drug were standing where they had been when he fell, and with an effort, Richard was able to crane his neck back and look up at them. It was the last movement his body would allow before the colors came.

Detectable only peripherally at first, and as difficult to comprehend as the paralysis that had frozen Richard’s body, the colors moved over and through one another in mimicry of the bodies on the ground. They crept onto the edges of his vision; featureless and frantic worms of dayglo brilliance writhing like live bait and marching steadily over all he saw until the madness of the hut became the madness of a multicolor blindness and Richard Tournhomme was as powerless as the dead.

Through spaces in the roof, tropical rain tapped and clicked onto hot black skin, falling into rhythm with the drumbeats as the thunder rolled away. There were hands on Richard’s arms and legs, hands that worked with purpose, discernable in that from the heated press of random limbs that ground and fell across his body in the mud. He was hoisted, and sensed through the shouts and blackness that he was being carried toward the altar, presumably by the hunters who had drugged him.

In the part of Richard’s mind that woke up at a certain time of day, knew when to eat, and obeyed the laws of physics, the journey from where he had fallen, to the altar, could not have taken more than twenty seconds. But that part of Richard’s mind was no longer at the helm. Instead of being carried thirty feet through a pagan orgy by two African bushmen, Richard Tournhomme was transported from shore to shore across a river of liquid night, pitching and reeling at the hands of twin monstrosities which held him fast mere inches above the grasping muscular waves.

When the colors finally broke, Richard was prostrate and disrobed upon the altar. There was time for his eyes to focus mere seconds before being bodily turned and staring, still paralyzed, into the reptilian face of the Bokor.

Richard could not tell when the drums had stopped, only that they were silent now. The rain took up their incessant demand, hypnotic and cruel upon the congregation. There was a thump beside him, bouncing his skull against the ancient wood as the hunters dropped the corpse so close that it’s coldness could be felt.

Perhaps if Richard had blacked out at that moment, much of what would follow could have been averted. But Richard’s brain would not succumb just yet. Not before the Bokor had sucked a long cloud of white smoke from the bowl upon the altar. Not before the shapes and sounds on the edge of his sight told him that the Bokor was breathing that smoke directly into the mouth of the corpse and then sucking it out again. And not before the Bokor’s head, as wild and black as a negative sun, had descended over his own and pushed it’s lips onto Richard’s mouth.

And breathed.

III.

Edmonton Alberta. October, 2000.

At the turn of the century, I was taking photographs for money. Victor Tournhomme, a childhood friend with whom I had somehow managed to stay in contact for over twenty years, was also taking photographs at the time, but hardly for the same reasons.

As for myself, my work was certainly not the swimsuits and sunsets in Milan variety. More along the lines of City Dedicates Walking Bridge To Long Serving Alderman, and Peonies Still A Winner In Prairie Soil. You get the picture. It was freelance work for St. Albert’s weekly Gazette; special events, high school sports, and the occasional portrait thrown in for this or that small town MLA on a grass roots roundup of local favor. Repetitious, tedious, chronically devoid of artistic merit, but long on autonomy, and that’s how I like it. If I chose to work, I worked. Money was not a problem for me, not by any means due to excellent remuneration within my field, but rather on account of the fact that I simply didn’t spend any.

I considered this my pronounced modesty of living. Friends and family, however seemed to prefer the term miserly, or tight. (For the parking meters! my sister had announced one Christmas upon my opening of her latest gag invention. The gift had been a quarter with a small hole drilled in the center through which was passed a length of string. Never pay for keeps! she added with a wink.) Thanks Deb.

Afternoons, I generally spent dealing with the details of day to day business. That is, processing film, making prints, paying bills. Believe me, that shit really piles up if you don’t pay attention, and more often than not, I didn’t. But without at least some effort being made, the wheels would simply cease to turn, so every day; around two, I put on my serious hat, and assayed to stem the tide. It was there, and under those circumstances, that the news reached me.

David! It was Deborah, her voice shaking. David, there’s very bad news. Perhaps you should sit down.

What’s the matter Deb? Are you okay?

There was silence for a moment. Then I heard a wet sniff and she cleared her throat. I could sense her gathering herself on the other end, calming herself in order to speak.

It’s Dad.

Then I knew. Remission had been pronounced a distinct unlikelihood almost a year ago. Over the last six months, his decline had been swift, visible, and brutal, and I suppose we had all been preparing for this day on the inside. People always do, don’t they? They pile up sandbags around the inevitable for weeks and months, sometimes years, and although everybody’s doing the same thing, and everyone can see everyone else, nobody says a word about it. They just keep on piling up those bags and avoiding eye contact while the rain falls harder and harder.

I felt suddenly very small, and spoke for the sake of speaking.

When?

This morning. Early.

"Are you alright?"

There was another little silence, and then she managed to say No before subsiding into long, low sobs that emptied me entirely.

Where are you? I asked quietly.

A deep breath, and then, I’m with mom. At the house.

I should come there now.

Yes. Her voice came thin and tight, like a radio in a storm. It wouldn’t be long before the tears took her away completely, and so they should, but perhaps the sound of my voice would comfort her, so I pushed on a little.

How’s mom?

Um, not good. She’s upstairs right now, not seeing anyone. She asks for you of course, but no one from outside.

In very serious situations, reality takes a long, stupid moment to sink in. It’s as if the man inside your brain needs to check his sources before taking anything to heart. The deepest cuts often go unfelt until you see the blood, and men have lost legs without a sound.

Listen Deborah, I’ll be there as soon as I can.

I can’t remember saying goodbye or hanging up the phone, I just left everything. I don’t think I even locked the door on the way out.

~

My parents’ house was a two hour drive away; north through the city, out past the suburbs, and into the faceless expanse of fallow countryside which made an island of civilization, hemming it in like water that had somehow gelled and become traversable. Urban gave way to rural seamlessly and practically unnoticed, the horizon expanding gradually on all sides until only intermittent rows of pine marked the vanishing point, darkening to smudges in the waning daylight. Clouds had begun to build in the afternoon, and by now had consolidated their occupation of the firmament in a milky grey thickness. A rising wind was perceptible in the bend of the trees, and a tight sickness began to gnaw at the bottom of my stomach.

I was briefly overcome by the morbid sensation that all of this was simply not real; not merely some mental vertigo or disassociation, but a sense of unreality in the material aspect. The dusk that gathered over the fields only served to intensify the sensation. Details fell away and vanished; houses, barns, trees and granaries were swallowed whole by dark and distance with such inexorable voracity that I almost entertained the idea that some new strain of night had developed, a physical night. Even the car around me felt soft and lacking in mass, as if my fingers might sink clear through the rubber of the steering wheel and hang weakly in the air, still curled like frozen paws.

I questioned the advisability of continuing that way. Commuter traffic had begun to thicken on the highway, and it was almost fully dark before I thought to turn on the headlights. But by then I had almost arrived, and within minutes, pulled to a stop on the dark slab of driveway that ended at the house.

None of the outside lights were on, and only two shone through the windows of the house; one from the living room, pale through thick netting, and one upstairs-the master bedroom. I killed the engine and shut off the lights, invoking silence broken only by intermittent ticks of cooling from beneath the hood. My hands were shaking, I remember that. I remember looking down at them, ghostly pale in the dark, and trying to steady them, not for my sake, but for theirs. The living room curtains twitched, and Deborah’s slim form stood out for a moment in silhouette before receding, only to reappear seconds later in the doorway.

She hugged herself in the chill and peered out through the darkness. We must have stayed that way for a full minute, neither of us moving nor looking away, and inevitability gaining ground every second. Then I was walking toward her, and we went in together, not speaking.

The house was quiet, and cold despite the fire in the den. If you’ve never seen a Jewish house in mourning, I can tell you right now that it’s not a pleasant thing. No house is pleasant under those circumstances, but a Jewish house is something else. Death moves right into a Jewish house. It doesn’t just hang in the air quietly like solemn respect with the faint smell of piety. Rather, it settles in like a guest with a job to do; a visiting official billeted for the duration of some nasty business and insisting on certain things while it is there. I looked around me, consciously avoiding the hallway mirror which, like all the others in the house, was covered up with thick black cloth.

Mom still upstairs? I asked quietly.

Yes. I think you should go up right away.

It was hard to look at Deborah. Her face was swollen from crying, and her eyes stood out sorely from the pallor of her skin, but I would not have shown her anything but strength at that moment had the world depended on it. I nodded assent, lowering my eyes, and walked toward the stairs.

Coming? I asked.

I’ll be right up. I just want to put the kettle on. Shall I bring you a cup?

Please.

I walked to the bedroom door and stopped, listening in the hall. No sound came from within so I knocked softly. There was no answer right away, but I did hear some movement inside; the rustling of clothes and a quiet cough.

Mom? It’s me, David.

More rustling and another cough.

I pushed the door open and stepped inside. She was sitting with her back to me on a chair in the far corner of the room. Beside her, the bedside table drawer was open, it’s contents strewn untidily on the bed as if she had been searching for something. If she had noticed my entrance she didn’t let on, and as I stood there in silence, I saw that her poor, small shoulders shook ever so slightly. Words would not come. I simply stood motionless and looked, like a burglar in a church.

There is a bond between mother and son. Something lifelong forged in the womb. Something universal, infinite, and all pervading. An emphatic rhythm metered out carefully over nine months between two hearts. A rhythm and a sympathy which, though the world distracts and damns the bond by hours and years, echoes loudly and forever in the memory of those hearts, and speaks clearly when called upon.

She felt me standing there and raised her face to me, not with surprise, nor embarrassment at showing the wounded eyes of frank, open grief, but with a sad and tiny smile. She studied me that way for a long moment, smiling that tiny smile, and almost seemed glad before her eyes fell away in a torrent of tears and her small arms reached out, imploring embrace. I held her as tightly as I felt she could bear, and would not have cried myself, had I not felt the cold wetness of her face against my neck.

After a while the tears subsided, and I raised myself to sit on the bed beside her, carefully clearing a space amongst the items scattered there. Most of those things I had not seen since childhood, and the rest, not ever. As my mother wiped her tears and blew her nose wetly into a crumpled tissue, I began to pick through them.

There were photographs of course, mostly instamatic snapshots taken on family vacations, but also a few old black and whites from my father’s days with the Territorial Service in England; fading images of mustachioed and khaki clad men seated on wooden mess chairs with