The Mountain She Built

By Adam Rix

Some people are born as nothing, die as nothing. Others are born to stand out.
Then there are the poor few, like Hank Forster. They are wrought and forced to be different.
These poor could only dream of being nothing; dying as nothing.

Beeston, Connecticut. 1986.

Hank’s last delivery should be a walk in the park. But as the storm of the century begins to lash at the city, an even more powerful force begins to whip up hell, one so gruesome and deadly that Hank had chosen not to remember its power...

With the charade of his life crumbling at his feet, Hank searches for security in the arms of straight-talking mystic Alina. But her esoteric influence soon draws him into a night of organ trafficking, kidnapping, magic – even murder.

Will Hank be able to save the mysterious young guitar prodigy from the ravenous Briars Motorcycle Club?
Will it be easier for Hank to kill Alina rather than to kill for her?

Hiding in the eye of the storm is an unstoppable, sinister force. Tonight it will take what it came for – come hell or high water.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Adam Rix
• Release date: Jan 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005781385

Adam Rix

Growing up in rural Norfolk, Adam has always been a creative outside observer, soon discovering that being in bands wasn’t where his passion lay. Finding inspiration ‘people watching’ and spending time in nature, he was drawn to darker, psychologically revealing music and fiction which led to a career in music composition and the completion of his first novel, ‘Brittle’: a hard boiled homage to his local city of Norwich.Somehow, whilst being incessantly pestered by his cat, bodhi, he has published three further novels (‘Fallen Cradle’, ‘The Mountain She Built’ and ‘Watashi?’) and continues to write music, novels, TV & Film pitches for love (And money, when it’s offered).

Book preview

It was a place with history, on the intersection where Main Street was collected by the old section of the interstate; on a day where the sky was tumultuous with clouds the darkest, heaviest shade of blue, but with a quality of light that made the world radiant, as if everything had its own luminance. The wind was whipping up hell, and even though there had been no mention of a storm coming up the East Coast, he knew that one was fighting to take control.

This place with history looked decrepit on the outside, the name of the dive bar missing two of its letters, like teeth from a boxcar fighter. PT'S it became known after that, and just before he walked in for the first time. For those in the know it would end up being known for something very, very different, and much more grave than serving Boilermakers and 2-for-1 Tequila Tuesdays.

It’s a hard life. The turn of phrase blinked vaguely into existence behind his mind, partially in jest of itself. He collected his clipboard from the empty passenger’s seat before inadvertently taking a deep, long breath instead of opening the door of Donnelly’s rust-bucket truck to the encroaching storm.

He finally heaved himself out of the cab, not feeling as sprightly nor shapely as he had twenty years before. As he saw it, the wind took offence, whirling up a fist that groped wildly for the clipboard in his hand. He held it tight and tucked it under his jacket, zipping it up over the lazy swell of belly that he was certain hadn't been there eighteen months before. The burbling cloud cover that was swirling past, and the way he squinted up at it was as if to curse it. Stuffing his beanie down over his short, dark hair, he decided it best to get his work for the day over and done with before the storm roared in with even more fists, looking to pick a fight.

His walk up to PT's main doors was broken to a jagged halt when he noticed the padlocked chain binding the two door handles together. Peeling paint, a boarded window or two, and he would have gambled some of his precious pittance that the black swell around and above those boarded windows was fire damage.

He pulled out the clipboard and held the fluttering pages down. The inventory stated Pete's was the drop, and there he was at the printed address. Right on the money...

Well, sometimes these things get muddled. He took a gander through a smoky window, but the place looked just as derelict on the inside as it did on the outside.

A fine streak of hairs from the base of this skull to the middle of his back rippled with a cold, muted terror at the thought of failure; the thought of shrugging his shoulders, getting back into the truck and driving back to Donnelly’s before the storm sucker punched him. He swallowed, cleared his throat and picked up his pace.

He stumbled earnestly up the alley that led to a little lot around the back - a place for cars to park and kids to get felt up on Friday nights, with a covered waste disposal area just off the rear of the building. The worst of the wind was hauling up along the interstate, making the alley somewhat of a respite from the brute force of it, but gusts still cracked like whips around his slacks and jacket as he rounded the corner into the open lot and the back of the building.

There, he jolted to a standstill, his heart flickering with a fear that he couldn’t quite understand or comprehend in the eternal moment of his panic. A warped figure of a man stood staring at him, motionless. He was big and imposing with a heavy knot of jet-black hair gathered across his forehead and over his ears. And this man had nothing to say, only a twisted expression of disgust to give when looking him in the eye.

In the same manner of a timeless moment, the world readjusted itself around him - or his mind readjusted the information within him - and the real, tangible man standing ahead of him dissolved into the crooked reflection of himself in a large, polished stainless steel door mounted into the rear of PT’s, his beanie crammed down over his skull to appear as a rich head of hair. Yet, the reflection didn’t look relieved. It continued to stare at him, frowning slightly, as if his future self looking back and finding nothing but disgust and disappointment in that manifestation.

The door stood out from the rust and rot of the building. There were no windows back there, only a couple of air vents, their fans droning in eerie rises and falls as the gusts of the wind spun them faster. They were like howls of the dead, moaning, begging to be free. He shuddered, blaming it on the wind, pulling his jacket tighter around his shoulders.

He swallowed his nerves and took his balled fist to the metal door, more afraid of the known than of the unknown. Worst thing that could happen was that nobody answered. That was what he thought at the time.

The wind was fired up again. The fans moaned through the vents. A smattering of drizzle caught up in the gale was thrashed across his face as if it was the spittle of God laughing at his dichotomy of fear. He tugged the beanie down over his ears a little tighter and pounded another thunderous knock on the door, knowing which fear drove him more: that of men he knew, not of monsters he didn’t.

'Hello? Delivery...'

The fans in the vents cried like distant ghouls. The wind roared at the end of the alley and whistled through antennas on the roof. But as he stood there, avoiding eye contact with his warped self in the door’s reflection, there was silence and nothing more beyond it.

He readjusted the clipboard under his beige, emblemed jacket that Donnelly insisted he wear, and turned back into the wind down the alley, the first tingling waves of panic beginning to upset his stomach. He leaned into the stiff blast of air, feeling the tickle of sweat forcing its way from his skin despite it, and considered how loud he would be able to knock on the chained doors at the front before he lost his mind completely. The truck out on the street bobbed comically like a bandy-legged 1940’s cartoon character as it was buffeted by the gale.

A snap of wind jerked the beanie back on his forehead. He involuntarily threw up his hands to catch it, lest it become roaming urban tumbleweed, but that pulled up his jacket, allowing the clipboard to drop from beneath the hem. The wind caught it like a sail and it zipped back down the pathway towards that unsettling door in the back of PT's.

'Son of a gun,' he muttered, his legs chasing the thing back along the alley even though his mind was suggesting that he leave it.

It skittered and scraped along the concrete, the pages like tentacular sails carrying it all the way back to where the alley opened into the lot before he could catch it with his boot.

He tried so hard to avert his gaze. He could have turned and walked back down the alley after picking up the clipboard, away from PT’s forever, never letting his eyes jerk back towards that door and the reflection of himself it held. But the man in the reflection had looked so strong and bold, built of stronger stuff that he, and he had to be as certain as he could be that it had been his reflection.

So he looked. His fingers clamped down on the clipboard with something darker than caution over the wind. The man was gone, as was light. A gaping black chasm occupied the world from where the reflected man had stared out, judging him: a void of nothingness that caused his head to spin with a thoughtless panic.

He sighed loudly, grunting with a tension that was causing his hands to quiver, the illusion revealing itself again. There was no way to laugh at it, not in that moment. The door had been opened. Rather than morphing into a lightless black void, it was revealing a darkness inside that was extra thick and viscous. If it had disappeared, if it had been a void, it would have been nothing. But as it was, it was a blackness, but one of treacle thickness, dense and malleable; all too real.

'Hello?' his voice called. Only half a call, really. He licked his lips, then brushed them off with his sleeve when the wind chilled the moisture on them unpleasantly. 'Delivery.'

Nobody answered once more. Nobody came to the door. It was a heavy, sturdy-looking door, and there were open nightlatch deadbolts lining the inside edge. His eyes quickly darting and scanning the door frame and the darkness within, he persuaded himself that, although it couldn’t have blown open, perhaps it had blown open. He looked at the open latches and ignored the busybody voice that explained how the door wouldn’t have unlocked itself, or stayed shut in that weather up until that exact moment if it wasn't locked up tight.

The ghostly, nudging fingers of panic prodded him in the back, whispering in his ear for him to flee, quickly, before the true horror of a reality he had never been open to bared its teeth and tore his body and soul to bloody tatters. But his feet were firm, driven by the darker, tangible fear, and they even took a few tentative steps forward, towards the black, shadowed rectangle of the doorway. Another gust slammed him, stalling his diaphragm in an exciting gasp.

Managing another three steps, he leaned his head inside, over the threshold, and licked his lips, preparing to call out again. It was impossible to make anything out. What little storm light that made it inside just clipped reflective edges and corners, but nothing in particular came into focus. He parted his lips to speak up friendlily when the thought came to him that somebody might be right there in front of his nose, inches away. The gaping darkness of the doorway almost looked like the jaws of a monster when he allowed himself to consider it.

A sudden heave of the gale rushed across his face and he juddered back, taking a stumbling footstep that he knew was ridiculous. But the vision of the jaws and the wheezing breath of the monstrous storm tipped him over the edge. His heart was hammering like the score from an action movie.

Donnelly wasn't the kind of man to return to, not without doing what he had sent you out to do and coming back with the cash. He was the agreeable kind of gutter-rank businessman when he was doing business, but there was a shadiness behind his eyes and within the depth of his cigarette-ravaged voice that gave him away.

'Hel-' His voice caught in his throat. He grunted to clear it before opening his mouth to speak as he took a step in through the void of doorway.

The words were murdered instantaneously by the confusing and frantic strobing of light, microsecond blinks between clear light and pitch-black darkness, like a video of lightning played in fast-forward. It was the piercing quality of fluorescent light, showing snatching glimpses of the outline of the room, remaining as negative images in the moments of shadow. A cacophony of the tube lights twanged with every flicker of light, creating a confusing and jarring experience that cleared his mind of anything but gut reaction emotions: terror and guilt.

A long work surface island ran down the middle of the industrial kitchen inside. There was stainless steel everywhere, every smooth surface of it reflecting the twitching fluorescent lights from the ceiling. One by one, the lights chose to remain illuminated, rewarding him with a less frantic view of the cold, sterile kitchen, and one of eerie calm and stillness. The hard contrast in the lighting made him nauseous.

Beginning to feel that he had a grasp on the situation, he looked down and saw a stream of blood on the floor. Only a little one, but there was no doubt that it was blood and that it was fresh.

The guilt ravaged him as the terror trickled away, drip by drip, as if the blood was his fault; his doing. The scarlet smear swept from behind the long work surface, down the middle of the room, across the open floor leading to the doorway, and all the way up to the toe of his boot. An unusual knot in his stomach twisted itself, his heart twitching in his chest, although it was not an entirely unpleasant stirring. It was a kitchen... there was scarcely a more reasonable place for blood to be found.

He convulsed as something slapped his shoulder from behind, his entire body pulsing in shock before lurching in a spasm, finally forcing the words from his mouth.

'I'm sorry!' He blurted out, spinning around and fumbling to keep a hold of the clipboard. His head sank, bowing, as the humble, shamed dog that he felt he was, subservient to the gaping jaws of whatever monster he would face, his eyes cast down as if to God himself.

Seeing the legs of his doom proved her to be human, at least. She stood in the doorway, blocking his shuffling retreat for the moment, and as before, he was unable to keep his eyes averted from the form of his nemesis. A glance up to her face confirmed his fear: the bared teeth of whatever occupied that dark, sinister place. However, the malice he had imagined on the face was replaced, in reality, by that of contentment; a mouthful of teeth bared in a smile and not that of aggression.

‘It’s okay! Relax, my friend!’ she said, as if to a nervous dog, patting his shoulders with her hands bound within thick rubber gloves, and moving him aside so that she could enter the kitchen, leaving him plenty of room to escape. There was only the most distant hint of Cantonese remaining in her accent, but it was enough for him to find it new and mystical. He learned later that it was Cantonese, at the time not even knowing that there was such a thing, in his ignorance; and in his ignorance had thought it was the most beautifully exotic thing he had ever heard.

‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated, dying a little inside, scratching his chin compulsively and trying to regain his composure. ‘I-I-I’m supposed to deliver.’

She strode across the kitchen floor and wheeled a mop and bucket back to the blood by the time he got all the words out and pointed his shaking finger up to the manifest on the clipboard.

She smiled kindly as she mopped the blood into a watery pink smear. She had a friendly face, smooth and round, and a rugged, no-nonsense way of carrying herself. Despite her height, she wasn’t flimsy or waifish like a lot of women of the time and in that city seemed to be, looking as if this gale would have snapped them like saplings. Although simple, her high-waisted jeans and the rolled-up black sleeves of her olive baseball top managed to display her healthy figure with greater elegance than any evening gown would have managed. She was just that kind of woman. And that made him even more uncomfortable.

‘What are you delivering?’ she asked, interestedly enough, finishing up her mopping and wheeling the bucket back into its corner.

The diluted blood giggled resonantly as it began to trickle down the drain in the floor, stalling his reply for a moment.

‘Err...’ He fumbled with the clipboard. ‘Lager, three kegs. And one of Special.’

‘Special?’ she asked, grunting as she picked up a hefty black bag, and she lugged it towards him. Directly towards him.

‘Yes.’ His eyes glanced down at the clipboard. He didn’t quite trust his short term memory enough not to check it again. ‘Yes: one Special.’

‘What’s that?’ she asked with genuine curiosity, stopping right there in front of his face. He almost forgot that she was holding the hefty sack in her hands as her calm and penetrating eyes fixed into his and waited for his reply.

When he remembered to breath, his eyes dropped away from hers and down to the weighty looking sack that she held up in front of her like an over-sized plush toy she had won at the fair. But he didn’t move. He couldn’t. She had such an alert face and it had short-circuited his brain. She was actually paying attention to him.

Then she spoke again, her smile even broader. ‘Do you mind?’

‘Oh.’ He stammered, then stumbled aside, letting her back out into the turbulent day. He followed her out, around to the waste disposal compound where she tossed the sack in with a pile of others. ‘Special is... I really don’t know what it is. I only deliver. I’m sorry.’ He had to speak up, almost shout to get the words to carry through the seven or eight feet of tumultuous air that he left between them. Her perfectly straight hair strands rose on end, dancing above her head like Medusa’s snakes when she walked back to him.

‘Not to worry,’ she said, still smiling. ‘Pete ordered it, he’ll know what it is.’

Then she grasped his hand for just a moment, leading him back towards the kitchen, and even through the thick rubber glove he could feel just how fine and dainty her fingers must have been.

‘You drink coffee, don’t you?’ she asked, latching the door shut behind them. The roar of the wind became muted and soft, the vents still whirring and moaning but much more distantly, like the ghosts of a dream after waking.

He considered his answer far more carefully than he should have done. He thought about saying yes, I do drink coffee, and I enjoy it very much. In fact, it’s one of my favourite things in the world, but she almost immediately answered her own question, telling him that he did, of course he did, ridiculing herself for asking such a question. He peeled off the beanie and clutched it to his stomach in both hands for a moment, force of respectful habit, and he looked around the pristine kitchen that felt so out of place with the rest of the building. His awkward eyes scanned the room in quick, uncomfortable jerks.

She swirled her hand after slapping down the heavy gloves onto the work surface, gesturing for him to follow as she stepped out of the kitchen from the only exit that led inwards to the rest of PT’s. As he passed the work surface she had yet to clean, his eyes rolled around to stare at a butcher knife smeared with more blood that have been laid neatly on a large bamboo chopping board. Something about the warm, organic bamboo and crimson blood contradicted the cold stainless steel of the rest of the kitchen, stirring a vibration in his lower belly. It looked like an arty shot in one of those crime pulp fiction magazines that he sometimes filched up from the rack at the tobacco store when nobody was around, and flicked through tentatively until his nerves gave out and he slotted it back into the pile.

She led him down a short, rotting corridor, the backstage area that connected the bar to the dressing rooms and the kitchen. More nightlatch deadbolts were on the kitchen’s internal door. The kitchen was an anomaly, one that shone like a star during the day: beautiful but out of place.

She swerved left and flicked on a wall switch as they passed into the main bar and venue space. Dim par cans slowly glowed into life, some with blue gels but most with red. The wind was howling in there, shaking the place like a monster without the dexterity to break inside, but it still managed a cozy vibe, as if the storm was miles away, or in another dimension entirely.

Like a tavern, he thought, in viking days. A snapshot image of himself as a brave, powerful viking drinking a tankard of mead, surrounded by friends and beautiful women danced through his wandering thoughts.

She giggled quietly to herself. He didn’t have the courage to ask why.

She snapped on the red power button of the coffee machine behind the bar, tore open a packet of roasted, salted peanuts, and drizzled them into a bowl that she slid between them on the bar. He stood awkwardly on the other side of the bar, pretending to look around the place with a knowing appreciation, but the truth was that he hadn’t stepped foot into a dive bar like that in his entire life. He found the idea utterly terrifying.

Then he looked over at her, that mild and pleasing contentment on her face as she leaned on the bar and fished up peanuts to her small, plump-lipped mouth, one by one, her eyes watching him without pretense or subtext, and he had to fight the glimmering idea that perhaps he had been missing something in his life by not spending his time in dive bars and scary, grown-up joints.

The coffee machine began to gurgle and drip. The smell would come soon, and the hot, rich liquid was just what a grown man needed on a day like that. It would be a little treat after a good day’s work.

‘Oh!’ she suddenly squeaked, bolting up onto her toes as she remembered something of utmost importance. It jolted him out of his coffee fantasy and into a wide-eyed statue. She smeared her salty fingers down her top and leaned up on the bar, standing on a crate of beer or something behind it, to extend her open hand towards him. ‘Alina.’

He stared. He did nothing but stare for what felt like an eternity, completely unaware of what she had said, the word making no sense and the gesture being so out of the blue that it scrambled his circuits. When it finally sank in, he swallowed hard and rubbed his sweaty palm down the front of his jacket before reaching out and clasping her small-fingered hand. Her handshake was firm and sure of itself without being violent or masculine. It was just about the finest handshake he had ever experienced, making him so much more aware of the skin on his own hand than he had ever been before in his life.

‘Hank,’ he said, before his voice dropped in pitch, almost ashamed. ‘Hal.’

Their hands broke apart as she spent a few seconds in deep thought. ‘I prefer Hank,’ she said, stuffing a fistful of peanuts between her lips, looking him up and down with somewhat narrowed eyes.

He didn’t speak up to agree, even though his eyes glimmered with the words. ‘It’s not my real name,’ he told her.

She fluttered a salty finger in the air as if to debate the pronunciation of potato before licking the mouth-watering salt granules from it. ‘A nickname is a name, that’s what they’re for. You look like a Hank. You’ve got a Hank jawline. You know: strong, firm.’ She played with her own jaw, wringing it around gently to try and emulate, with her finer features, the square structure of his. He lowered his chin as subtly as he could, trying to hide the mixture of blush in his cheeks and his prominent facial features.

‘It’s not my name.’ He knew what he meant, at least, even if he couldn’t convey it in a way to stop her from asking questions.

‘You prefer Hal, then?’ she asked, picking a clump of peanut crumbs from her back teeth with a wooden pick.

His face contorted in a wincing dichotomy. He desperately wanted to say to tell her that he did prefer Hank. He wanted to be Hank, but, ‘It’s not my name,’ was all he could manage.

She nodded considerately and pouted just a little at him. Growing more embarrassed by the silence and her inspection of him, Hank gently kicked at the scuffed wooden floor under his feet. The warped floorboards were old and saggy, and dust motes and cobwebs gathered in the corners and beneath the decrepit tables, their chairs resting upside down atop them to create some ancient ritual altar, legs becoming arms that reached for the flames of heaven. He began to wonder whether those dangerous satanic cults he had heard about on a Sixty Minutes special used that place as a secret gathering spot to commune with Satan. Then she spoke up again, cutting the thought short.

‘Dig in,’ she told him. She was nudging the bowl across the bar towards him with her knuckles when he looked up from his feet and his daydream.

He nodded in a way that didn’t convey the not for me, thank you that he had tried to politely suggest, so he was dragged along by the accident until his fingers were in the bowl, picking out a snack for himself.

‘So, err... you get many people in?’ he asked, shooting the shit as best as he could.

‘This old place?’ She smiled and shrugged coyly. ‘Not like we used to, but times change.’ She trailed off, clearly choosing to hold her tongue, dropping her eyes from him for a moment too long and looking deeply as if either concentrating or suffering the abrupt onset of a migraine.

‘Sure,’ he responded. ‘Got to change with the times.’ He was proud at how much it sounded as if he knew what he was talking about - what she had been talking about.

Her eyes were open and staring straight into his, her cheery expression having slipped away and a dead, emotionless mask emerging from beneath it. Sweat returned to his palms, and the rosiness in his cheeks flared. He was certain that he had offended her, and he tensed, waiting patiently for her to shout him down, boot him out, and definitely strike him.

‘Got to change with the times,’ she repeated slowly, telling him that he had it right, that he understood something that she didn’t expect anybody to understand. ‘Exactly right, Hank.’

He bit his lip, not to stifle the words of correction - that his name was Hal and not Hank - but to stop a smile from erupting across his face. In her delicate, exotic voice, it sounded like the first time he had ever received a compliment, however small, or been correct about something.

Hank.

She poured the coffee and they didn’t talk about it again, whatever it was that she implied and that she thought he understood. He was just happy that she might not think him a complete simpleton, and didn’t for a moment consider that he did understand something, and that she knew it, even if he didn’t.

He finished the cup of mediocre coffee that he thanked her for profusely, then decided that he ought to get to work, not wanting to seem like a layabout on the job, to her or Donnelly. She led him around the side of the building to the cellar hatch doors.

She bent down to unlock the padlock and snap back the bolt. He looked up into the sky, pretending to inspect the storm clouds raging overhead, but he had seen enough of her figure to enrage the fire inside him. He thought all kinds of things, imagined them against his will, and couldn’t stop them from coming. None of them were things safe for a man to think when alone in the presence of a woman he found that real.

He flinched when she touched his arm, his eyes still skyward. She smiled and told him that she would be in the kitchen if he needed anything. He thanked her, apologised for no reason, and watched her pace away in those well-fitting jeans until she rounded the corner. It might have made his fantasy come true, but, in reality, he was glad when she didn’t look back as she walked away. The way the wind was blowing would have shown her a little too much of