86.

  I panicked. I screamed in frustration and anger. I'd thrown things. I’d curled up, and wept. I'd gone through all the stages of grief, but that didn't change a damn thing. Brick had Sherbert. Brick had my friend, and he was torturing him. He was going to kill him.

  Certainty of action is something people search for their entire lives. What to do next, wondering where their life is taking them. But I'd been handed my certainty. I'd been handed my next steps, and possibly my last. I had to find Brick. I had to confront him. I had to put him down and get Sherbert back. That was the only thing that mattered. Saving Sherbert, whatever happened to me after that was inconsequential.

  I wanted to take off immediately in a blind panic and go straight to Brick and just hand myself over. He might let Sherbert go if he had me, and I almost enacted that plan. Then I paused to think. Brick was a certified psycho. He'd probably kill Sherbert out of pure spite and then kill me slowly afterward. I had to put away the panic and fear. If Brick killed me then he would win. He would escape punishment. I couldn't let him keep hurting people. The only way I could ensure he wouldn’t hurt anyone again… was by putting Brick down for good.

  Deciding you're going to murder a man was oddly freeing. Knowing you'll probably die in the attempt was equally freeing. I looked down at my scarred and battered hands, and a big part of me, the part that lived in the deep recesses of my mind where all the horrors lay, would be glad for it to come to an end. I'd achieved something at least. I'd hurt the Syndicate. Black John was arrested. Brick was a wanted man. Their activities, in my neck of the woods at least, were disrupted for the time being. Maybe that's all a nobody like me could accomplish. Maybe I could go to my grave happy in the knowledge that at least I gave them a bloody nose and a black eye, but I wasn't going to go down without a fight, and I was sure as hell going to try and take Brick with me.

  But how could I? My hands kept shaking, and I felt sick and weak. All the energy I had expended the night prior, all the damage I'd taken, left me feeling empty and powerless. I curled my fingers through my hair, pulling at it, tearing hair from my head as I’d done when I was little. I cursed all the bad luck in my life, all the circumstances that brought me here, cursing how every time it felt like I had just the smallest glimmer of victory and hope, it was always snatched from me as if some cruel fate was sitting back and laughing at all my futile efforts.

  I curled my knees up to my chest, hugged them to myself, and stared at the mess in front of me. My gear was strewn everywhere, all of it covered in blood, debris, and dirt. It was all a mess, a horrifying, terrible mess, and it was all my fault. I slammed my fists into the side of my head.

  “Stupid, stupid! Fucking stupid as always.” I snarled at myself, slamming my fists hard enough to make my brain shake. “Fucking useless idiot!”

  I rocked back and forth, my face buried in my legs, and just as my despair fell into the deepest valleys, the whispers started. They'd been relatively absent in the last 48 hours, ever since my battle with Somnix and the confrontation with the eyeless thing in my head. Maybe they had been there, but I was just too busy to notice them. But they were back now, scratching at the corners of my consciousness, begging to be let in. This time, the whispers came from a direction, they weren't just omnipresent around the back of my ears.

  I lifted my head, tears of rage and frustration filling my eyes, and I turned my head towards the source of the whispers: the Codex. I didn't need to understand what they were saying to understand what I was being told. Did my answers lie there? But more importantly, did I dare to delve into the deeper, darker parts of that text searching for them? I swallowed and scrubbed my eyes, and the suicidal, self-loathing part of my brain took over. Who cared what happened to me? Who cared what happened to my soul or my mind? The only thing that was important now was that I got Sherbert out of where I had landed him in. Sherbert had to come back safe; that was all that mattered.

  I uncurled myself and crawled on my hands and knees to the loose brick under my desk. I pried it out and reached in, grabbing the Codex and the candle. I felt the tingle of anticipation, as if the thing was alive and had been waiting for me all this time, patiently confident in the knowledge that I would return.

  "They always come back." I heard its voice in my head. "They always come back.”

  I wiped tears from my face. My hands were shaking. I threw everything from my desk and placed down the Codex. I turned the lights off and then sparked my lighter, holding it near the wick of the blood red candle. The whispers reached an eager fever pitch in my ears, willing me to light it. I clenched my jaw, closed my eyes, and then lit the candle. The black flame flared to life and the whispers abruptly stopped.

  With trembling hands, I reached for the book and opened it. The familiar pages of dense, unintelligible script met me. I took a small pin from the desk, stabbed my thumb with it, and squeezed until it welled with blood. I let it drip onto the page. My fevered mind whirled with so many thoughts and feelings; it was almost impossible to still it, to find a single, clear, perfect picture. As the blood touched the page and the unintelligible script began to disappear. The ink swirled and reformed in front of me into a single image. Brick's lifeless body, his face a pool of blood and minced meat. The book knew what I wanted.

  "Show me how to kill Brick." I whispered in the darkness.

  The book stayed still. A second passed. Then another. And then, ink bled across the pages in slow, deliberate strokes, forming a single word that felt like a hand gripping my throat.

  "No."

  The sudden urge to hurl damned thing across the room took hold of me.

  “Why not? Isn’t this what you want? Take it, take my soul, take whatever the fuck you’re after but give me power!”

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  "You do not seek what you ask.”

  “Yes I do! He’s torturing Sherbert! He’s going to kill him! I need power, I need the power to kill him!” I shrieked at the book, my voice cracking.

  The Codex didn’t let me finish. The ink swirled, consuming the words on the page. The room around me faded, darkness creeping in from the edges of my vision.

  "To kill is to destroy yourself."

  The darkness around me began to warp. I wasn’t at my desk anymore. I wasn’t even in my flat. I blinked and looked around. I was in a cramped, filthy apartment. I stood in a corner, unseen.

  A boy sat curled up in the opposite corner of the room on a filthy, yellowing mattress. He was small, maybe six or seven, all knobby knees and ribs that stuck out too far. His face was streaked with dirt, his dark ginger hair matted and uneven, like someone had taken scissors to it in a fit of frustration.

  Was that Brick?

  Except this wasn’t the towering brute I’d come to know. This was a child, thin and scared, his eyes darting to the door every time a shadow passed beneath it.

  I heard the front door to the grimy flat opening, the sound echoed through the apartment, raw with fear. Brick flinched. He pulled his knees tighter to his chest, trying to make himself smaller. I heard heavy, unsteady footsteps outside, slowly stumbling closer.

  The door burst open, and a man staggered in. He was drunk, his face flushed and his shirt half-buttoned.

  “What’re you doing?” he snarled, his words slurring together.

  Brick didn’t answer. He looked at the floor, his tiny hands clutching the fraying edge of a blanket.

  “I said, what’re you doing you little shit!” The man lurched forward, grabbing the boy by the arm and yanking him to his feet.

  Brick whimpered, the first sound he’d made, but that just made the man shake him harder. Then Brick cried out as the man pulled his hair cruelly. I yelled at him to stop and rushed forward, but my hands passed helplessly through him. His thick, meaty hand raised and curled into a fist. Tears rolled down Brick’s dirty face but he was silent. The man reared back.

  “Stop it!” I screamed, my heart thundering in my chest, cold sweat pouring down my spine.

  The scene blurred, and I was still in the grimy flat but now I was in the living room by the looks of it. Brick was older now, maybe 10 or 11. He was sitting on the edge of his seat staring at his father. The man was grotesquely overweight now, age and alcoholism had ravaged his body and… he wasn’t breathing. His skin had turned blue. Flies buzzed around the corpse. Brick just watched him impassively, unblinking.

  The scene shifted again and now I was in a dormitory of some sort. It was cold and impersonal. I saw more boys who had the same haunted eyes as Brick, the same fearful way of sitting, as if ready to run at any moment. Where was Brick? I heard the sound of flesh being hit over and over again. The door burst open and I, along with all the other boys flinched and turned towards the sound. There was Brick, maybe 12 or 13 now, being dragged back into the room by two men, their faces uncaring, almost bored. They dumped Brick on the floor. He lay there twitching, one half of his face was swollen and his shirt was ripped from where he had been whipped. He curled up, barely conscious, making no sound.

  One of the boys got up from his bunk and walked slowly towards Brick. He stopped at the boy’s twitching body, hesitated, then stooped down and pulled Brick’s shoes from his feet and disappeared with them. Another appeared and rifled through his pockets while Brick feebly tried to stop them.

  I watched as the scene melted away in front of me, feeling deeply sick and unnerved.

  Now we were outside. Brick was a teenager now. His frame had filled out a bit and he’d grown a few inches. He stepped outside on to the steps of the orphanage, a faded black eye still apparent under his left eye and his hands shoved into the pockets of a jacket that was too big for him. On the street, he spotted a boy his age sitting on the curb, humming to himself as he played with a battered toy car.

  “Hey,” Brick called out.

  The boy looked up, smiling. Brick smiled back. But as he approached, his smile twisted. He shoved the boy, hard, knocking him off the curb and into the gutter.

  “Give me that,” Brick demanded. The boy protested, but Brick raised his fist, his voice low and menacing. “I said, give it.”

  The boy handed it over, tears streaming down his face. Brick walked away, clutching the car like it was a trophy, a thin lipped look of triumph on his face.

  I felt the Codex’s voice in my mind.

  "Nicholas was beaten and abused, over and over, by the people who should have protected him. His world was cruel, and he learned its lessons well."

  The scene dissolved again, and I was back in my room, the Codex open in front of me.

  "He was no different from you," the book wrote. "Both of you were abandoned by the world. But where you turned inward, blaming yourself for your pain, he turned outward, blaming everyone else. He became the very thing he feared."

  I clenched my fists, my nails digging into my palms.

  “And what does that mean? That I should feel sorry for him? Forgive him?”

  But even as I spat the words I felt the lies in them. Brick had ended up in the system to continue to be abused, I had my Grandad, who loved me dearly and was kind to me. Would little Nicholas have become Brick if he’d had Grandad? Even more terrifying… would I have become Brick if I didn’t?

  "It means you must choose. If you kill him, you will carry his weight with you forever. He will haunt you as surely as his father haunted him."

  The ink bled across the pages, forming a final vision.

  I saw myself standing over Brick’s lifeless body, blood pooling around my feet. For a moment, there was satisfaction. This was justice. But then the satisfaction faded, replaced by something darker.

  Every shadow carried his face. Every quiet moment was filled with his voice. The same way his father’s abuse had shaped him, his death would shape me.

  “You’re saying I’ll become him,” I whispered.

  "A soul is rarely sold all at once. Instead it is given away, piece by piece, until one day, you look in the mirror and see what you swore to destroy."

  The Codex fell silent, its pages blank once more.

  I sat there for a long time, staring at nothing. Brick deserved to pay, I knew that. But was the Codex right? Killing Brick wouldn’t just destroy him. It would destroy me, too.

  I looked up at the clock, it was already 11pm.

  I looked back down at the blank book with only one question in my mind, I was willing to die, but was I willing to kill? Was I willing to become like Brick? Would I become the monster that I swore to destroy?