The Devil Below Us: Chapter Two

This chapter covers serious issues of child abuse and drug abuse and mild profanity, which may cause some readers distress. Please be warned. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental. It is a work of cautionary fiction.

Duo In Carne Una | (And the two shall be one flesh — Genesis 2:24)

Chapt 1 | Contents | Chapt 3

aleb was first damaged at the age of eight.

Although he did not understand it at the time, he knew something bad had happened to him. His guts hurt, but it was not the physical pain that bothered him, so much as not knowing why he was hurting. In his dreams, he would see a pair of motorcycle boots, like a favourite pair his brother had, and then feel a searing pain. He would wake, screaming in agony. He couldn't describe the pain at age eight; had never felt anything like it before. He could now, though. It was like a ball of fire in the very pit of his stomach. Every movement he attempted to make had served to add fuel to flames that seemed to scorch him from the inside out. That's why he called it damage. Collateral damage.

He had believed himself tough; the more damage a man could take, the more it hardened him. But he had tried to hide the hurt in his stomach for a long time after the first time. He remembered not being able to sit down the next morning, twisting and turning in his chair, while trying to eat his breakfast. The slap across his face from his mother had soon put him right, though.

"Will you sit still!" She screamed at him, before landing an almighty smack to the right side of his head, from across the kitchen table. His bowl of cereal spun, to shower him in chocolate coloured milk. He saw stars. Not the type he looked up to watch in the night sky these days when he did crack. Those were distant. These stars had spun and sparkled right in front of his face, diverting his attention, taking his mind off his swelling cheek.

"I got hurts, Ma."

"What you mean, got hurts?"

"I- I don't know. My tummy just hurts. I don't know how."

"You been eatin' too many feckin' sweets from that shop. I told you to stay away from there."

"No, Ma, it's not-" but he was cut short. This time it was a fist. Straight in the mouth. Swallowing the words he wanted to say. He fell off his chair, and began to taste blood.

That had been a first, too. He realised he experienced many of his firsts, at age eight. It was then he learnt to hold in his pain. He never hated his Mum, though. She did right. It was his third year teacher he had hated. He still remembered why.

At his primary school, during class one time, the pain got so bad, he stood up and began to hop on one foot, as though he had to pee. Which he did, right in front of the whole class. His pale cheeks turned bright red. His little brown eyes curtained under long lashes, turned dark. He would use those eyes to his advantage later on in life, but at that moment the hazel hues bled out to blacken with his rage. He would teach himself how to hide that hatred, and only let his eyes smile, even when he was sticking it to some man to rob him of his money.

But that skill came later. A lot later.

Standing there, feeling exposed, his school trousers stained dark, he screamed: "Fecking shut up, all of yous," doing a perfect imitation of his mother.

His third year teacher, a kindly soul, Mrs York, shushed the class and took him by his hand, leading him to the loo. He thought that stupid, because he had already wet himself. As she cleaned him up, he remembered thinking how she was the complete opposite of his mother. A deep, deep hatred for her grew, then. The more gentle she was, the more his hatred grew. He could almost feel it like a seed, like the weed his mate's dad grew in his home, push up from the very earth in him. He wanted to hurt her. Or see her get hurt. But with absolute certainty, he knew he wanted her to have this pain.

"Are you okay?" She whispered the question to him, as though they were in a crowded room. That confused him, too. They were alone in the loo. In his family, no one whispered. You had to shout to get heard.

He remembered nodding to her, but not being able to speak. He felt her kindness hit him stronger than the punch to the mouth his mother had given him. The tears came. He was more ashamed by that, he realised, then letting go in the front of the entire class.

"It's okay to cry. Let it out."

No it wasn't, he thought. It was her fault he was crying like a soft one, anyway. If it were possible, his hatred grew.

"I want to go home," he sniffed.

"I'll call your mother," she said.

He changed his mind at that. "No, it's okay. Can I stay here for a bit?"

Mrs York got up from her knees, as though she understood. "Sure, I'll just find a cover for the class and I'll be straight back, waiting behind tbe door." As she walked out she added, thinking it would help, "We all have rainy days, dear. Without the rain, we wouldn't have rainbows."

From that time on, he hated rainbows, teachers and especially Mrs York. He never thought he could hate anyone as much as her. But that was before he met Dante. He never thought he could love anyone as much as his mum, either. But that was before he met Derek.

erek had been lucky all his life, but you wouldn't know it to look at him.

That's what attracted Caleb to him in the first place. You just had to take one look at Caleb, and it would send off the internal radar the police seemed to have whenever they spied him on the street. Pig sniff, he called it. They could sniff him a mile off. Not so with Derek. You wouldn't know it, because emotion rarely visited his nondescript face. He didn't act lucky. He didn't behave as though he were capable of almost anything, and be lucky enough to get away with it. Not when he was outside, at any rate. It had even fooled Caleb at first.

Derek had cultivated an impenetrable persona of vulnerability: Here was a man who didn't have a cruel bone in his body and needed protection from outside influences. He didn't smoke, he didn't drink, and he certainly didn't abuse drugs. He had no apparent vices, not even emotional ones. As a resident of Downland Street for twenty years, he had witnessed the stark changes, but from a distance, his features appeared stoically calm and reassuringly flat; giving him the appearance that whatever the storms of fate would bring, his stone coloured eyes would remain set to the same facial expression he made sure the world would always see.

Up close and personal, that was another matter. It would only take a few minutes for the average person to start feeling uncomfortable in his presence. Not so, Caleb, though. It piqued his curiosity. On the days Derek went for his daily walks, to get away from the acrid smell and smoke of Caleb's crack, Caleb would look down to see the transformation from the kitchen window. His glass pipe and lighter would shake with glee in his swollen hands, and the white powder, slowly taking flight in his lungs and brain, added an extra dimension to the change he saw in the man Derek was outside, from the masochistic father figure he portrayed inside his home. It never ceased to amaze him. He didn't even rely on drugs to do it.

When he saw how Derek's demeanour would change the minute he stepped out of his flat, it would fill him with awe, and a strange sense of pride. He would watch as Derek shuffled as he walked, a slight suggestive weakness in his gait, or speak soft and quietly, in the rare event he should meet a passing neighbour. Just by looking at him, you would be forgiven for thinking, as his late mother would say, that butter wouldn't melt in his mouth.

Derek later explained it to him. When he had realised his emotionless guile of a middle-aged man had a habit of sending off warning signals in others, he had strictly trained himself to mask that persona with another. To avoid attention, he coated his cold, yet publicly unobtrusive manner, with a layer of vulnerability. It was a clever cover to hide his true complete indifference to the outside world and the majority of the people it. In all his time as a hustler, this was manipulation of a calibre Caleb hadn't seen.

The saying about butter wouldn't melt was apt in more ways than one. Butter didn't melt in a freezer. But no one would ever guess, that once the plug of that freezer was pulled, under the icy exterior there lay a wild undercurrent of passions. Caleb had the scars and bruises on his body to attest to the strength of them. What it took to pull the plug for that intensity of emotion to rear its head, God only knew. Though he wouldn't admit it, even to himself, it frightened Caleb. It excited him, too.

Watching Derek out of his kitchen window every day, he was confident the ice man would teach him to be as lucky as he was.

"Kill your eyes," he said to Caleb, one night, during one of their secret liasons.

Caleb could still feel the collateral damage in his guts; the stubborn pain from the wrench that had kept him pried open.

"You must kill your eyes of all expression. People give away too much of what is inside them with the eyes."

"Well, how do you do it?" Caleb knew how to kill a man, had seen it done, but your eyes? He couldn't do that, but he could smile. He had discovered on the streets that he could get away with a lot by smiling. And getting away with things was a passion of his.

"Imagine that you can't see. Don't look at the thing in front of you. Or see something else. If we are going to do this thing, you have to kill your eyes."

Do this thing. It had given Caleb goosebumps. He meant Dante, of course. To have someone else's life in your hands. To change the course of their life. To destroy them. Now, that was power. He wanted that power.

When Caleb had first met Derek, homeless and sitting on the old man's steps, he had thought he would be hustling some vulnerable grey haired loner for money and a place to crash for the night. Boy, had he been wrong. The day he left his trainers on his old man's steps, was the day his life changed. He no longer dreamt of his brother's boots. He dreamt of Derek's hands.

erek's mother knew of her son's emptiness, however. Caleb would also come to realise that his old's man luck with getting away with things, in no small part also derived from her. It was a mother's love that cemented over all the cracks in his soul. It was also a love loaded with money and connections. She knew, had always somehow known, that there was something not quite right about her son, but a mother's love could not be questioned. She believed it had to be unconditional. Whatever her misgivings, and her son's missteps in life, she was there to protect her only child.

There were many nights his mother had lain awake wondering which side of the family he took after. This side of Derek didn't stem from early trauma or childhood abuse. If anything, he was showered with love and affection from all members of his immediate family. His mother finally decided it came from the boy her son was; there was a God-given chasm inside him, as inherent as the slate colour of his eyes. It wasn't his fault. He was born that way.

She first realised her son's special abilities at the tender age of six. For some reason, only known to Derek, the family dog, Pixie, had attached an intense dislike to him. The feeling was mutual, except Derek didn't make his feelings known. You would never know just by looking at him that he hated that dog with an intensity few people rarely feel. He made no move to win over Pixie with overtures of affection, he just quitely ignored the Jack Russell terrier's sharp barking at him as though he couldn't hear her.

"Derek, would you like us to find Pixie a new home?" She would ask her son every other day, worriedly.

"Why, mum?"

"You two don't get on- I mean Pixie seems..." and her sentences would trail off, because she was too frightened to express her innermost thoughts.

"I like Pixie. She is nice," is all he would say.

It was only when Pixie suddenly fell very ill, that Derek's mum came to understand what her son was born capable of doing. The vet explained that mysteriously, Pixie had been slowly poisoned, possibly by continuing to eat something apparently harmless, like chocolate, which had meant she now had to be put down. No one ever discovered the culprit, and blamed it on Pixie herself. Derek's mum knew, but said nothing.

Even Derek himself never knew why he disliked someone. He only felt the plug being pulled, and the intense hatred was there. It was what happened when Dante moved in to his street as the neighbour in the flat below him. Derek couldn't put his finger on it, but Dante's every action, every word seemed to grate on his sensibilities. Over the months, it grew and burgeoned, taking root in his head like knotweed in a homeowner's garden. Though, as always, you wouldn't know it to look at him.

Derek wouldn't do anything about it, however, because to soil his own hands would mean to reveal his true nature. That wouldn't do. So, he just waited; his hatred unplugged but unnamed, until he met the catalyst to his cruelty. Twenty years his junior, and soneone who pulled his plug another way, his boy Caleb.

Derek had been lucky all his life, but the day he met Caleb, was the luckiest day of all.

Published 21 April, 2026

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