Goodnight, John-boy: Epilogue
When Giles had died after the power drill went through his head, Tristan hadn't been satisfied with the verdict of accidental death. Then his sister-in-law and nephew disappeared overnight.
Welcome to the final instalment of Book Two of my dark comedy thriller series, Read Em And Weep!
If you’re new to the Read Em And Weep series, start with Book One: Serial Killer.
I hope you’ve enjoyed the ride, I do plan on completing the series - in fact I have Book Three: The Grim Reader, already worked out. I just have to find the time to write it!
Next week starts the serialisation of Psychokiller, the comicstrip I wrote with Tony Skinner, drawn by Dave Kendall, for the comic Toxic!
You don’t want to miss it!
Tristan followed the path of chivalry and courtly love. The true path, not the one that knights pretended to follow. Tristan knew that was just to fool the peasants. Chivalry, honesty, truth, honour and gallantry were qualities knights supposedly stood for, but it was a pretence; part of their carefully constructed armour.
He knew they stood for the exact opposite.
Knights had always lived by looting the poor and raping and abusing women. And he certainly had.
His father had explained to him who knights really were. Then and now. The only thing that the romantic version and the reality of knighthood had in common was their superiority over the peasants, who looked up to them and actually believed they were a force for good.
This unassailable truth, according to Tristan, was first expressed by William of Aquitaine, the original troubadour and great crusader, who his father told him to read when he was instructing his sons in the ways of the world. That valiant knight, grandfather of Eleanor of Aquitaine, was the very epitome of chivalry. William had got it so right: ‘So I put my hands beneath her dress … Let others brag about love, but we have the bread and the knife.’
Yes, Tristan had the knife, all right. He had found William’s poetry a great comfort when he was on remand on that rape charge:
I’ll tell how things look to me:
I hate a guarded cunt and a fish hole without fish
And the boasting of prats who never act.
Tristan could afford the best lawyer money could buy, and he got off on the rape charge.
His face had swelled up and he was in agony for a week after the Major had hit him with the typewriter, after he’d stabbed him through the ribs with the misericorde. But he was back at work at Fleetpit now.
He had begun his journalist career as an assistant editor of Tally Ho!, the hunting magazine. Then he was promoted to editor of Diecast and Diorama. His endless knowledge of knights was invaluable there. He used to collect them as a boy. He still had his display shelves of model knights from Castellan Collectibles.
Finally, he became editor of the highly prestigious Chivalry and Livery.
Both he and his brother had been inspired by their father, who had been knighted, and who explained to his sons about the natural order of predator and prey. He said it was the absolute duty of the rich to prey on the poor in order to cull the herd. He said that the rich knew this, but they had to pretend otherwise.
Not to prey on the poor was a betrayal of their function in life.
But it was very important to effectively disguise this fact, just as a predator in the wild camouflages itself with spots and stripes. Hence the fake Codes of Chivalry knights issue to reassure the prey that their predators actually cared for them.
Tristan had sought kindred spirits amongst the Knights of St Pancras, but, somehow, they’d found out he had been in a mental institution, and turned down his application.
It was after he had made his own Greek fire. He’d worked out the ingredients from reading medieval accounts. He had demonstrated the lost secrets of Byzantium by using it to set fire to a peasant’s house. He’d loved watching it burn. He thought the other re-enactors would be impressed. But they were horrified. He’d tried to explain to them that war without fire is like sausages without mustard. They were no better than the rubber sworders. Weekend warriors. To be a true knight you have to live the life. They had reported his arson attack on the council house. It led to him being sectioned.
When he got out, he decided it was better to be a loner. Now, letting himself dry naturally after his cold shower, he started to dress. Natural fibre underwear. There was no polyester in the Crusades. Then the chainmail vest. Galvanised steel: thirty thousand rings. It had taken him two weeks to knit. Always put it on with the pants. That was the rule. Then a linen shirt over the top, so no-one would know.
His thoughts turned to Dave Maudling.
It was time a knight put an end to his campaign of killing innocent people, hiding behind The Caning Commando. Killing was the job of a knight, not a peasant like Maudling.
When Giles had died after the power drill went through his head, Tristan had not been satisfied with the verdict of accidental death. He was merely suspicious at first. But then his sister-in-law and nephew, Sam, disappeared overnight without leaving a forwarding address. When they didn’t turn up for Giles’s funeral, Tristan knew he must investigate. They had to be involved in some way. Despite his best efforts, he was unable to track them down. Mother and son had gone to ground.
They had left in such a hurry there was still furniture and personal possessions lying around their house. He carefully went through his sister-in-law’s drawers and files, checking her documents, but there was nothing that gave him a clue as to their current whereabouts.
Then he moved on to Sam’s room. There was nothing there either: just a stack of board games like Monopoly and Totopoly, shelves of books, records, and piles of The Spanker.
Frustrated, he threw the board games across the room, tossed the books off their shelves, ripped football and pop posters off the wall, and kicked the comics over. Then he sat down in the silent room and pondered on his next move.
Looking at the newsprint comics strewn at his feet, he thought about his young nephew and why he would read garbage like The Spanker.
He thought about setting the comics alight and burning the whole damn house down. In fact, he actually struck a match and was close to igniting the comics. But then he remembered how he was sectioned the last time and realised he needed to calm down. He did this by reminding himself that burning the house was a poor substitute for what he actually wanted to do to Sam and his mother.
He noticed one of the comic strips was circled and asterisked in biro.
A comic was about the only thing he could read through the red mist in front of his eyes and the dull throbbing in his temples.
But when he read it, it only intensified the red mist in front of his eyes and the throbbing in his temples.
The strip that Sam had marked was a puerile story about someone called the Caning Commando, and it gave detailed instructions on how to sabotage an electric cane and make it look like an accident.
An accident?
That electric cane could easily have been an electric drill.
He looked at other issues of the comic. There were more examples where kids could carry out ingenious and secret vengeance on adults or on each other.
He turned to the indicia page and noted The Spanker was produced in the same building as his Chivalry and Livery.
Feeling a whole lot better, and with a new sense of purpose, he left the house.
A few discreet enquiries at Fleetpit, talking to the comic’s art editor they called Deep Throat, and he discovered the Major and the editor Dave Maudling were responsible for The Caning Commando and these insidious, criminal ideas. He wasn’t sure which one, but it didn’t really matter.
They both had to die.
The Major had been dealt with. Now it was Maudling’s turn.
Maudling was subverting the natural order of things. It would be Tristan’s task, as a knight, to put a stop to that. To kill this man whose heart was not pure.
By not pure, he meant someone who was challenging the basis of a society that went back to at least the Middle Ages. This peasant had to pay the price for not knowing his place.
Like any true knight, he was always ready for the Quest.
The instrument he intended to use on his Quest was the Francisca throwing axe.
He went into his large, secluded garden, where there was a range of strategically-placed pumpkins and other targets for sword, axe and bow. Various four-legged foam beasts looked blankly across at him, dutifully awaiting their deaths. Again. Their vital organs were usefully displayed on the outside of their bodies so he knew exactly where he needed to cut and stab and pierce in order to kill them. He would regularly attack and kill this menagerie, striking at their visible organs. And then he would move on to the human foam targets, whose hearts, lungs, and intestines were also revealed externally.
It was his own personal dieorama.
Now he discovered – by attacking a human target – that the theory about the bounce on a throwing axe was correct. Thrown at the ground, in front of the target, like skipping a stone on water, it bounces and flies up into their testicles, guts, or face. However, it may also bypass them. It was satisfying to see his axe embedded deeply in his target’s crotch, but, even after he’d adjusted the weapon’s beard, it was too unpredictable, too random, to ensure it would end up there every time.
He would need to be up front and personal with Maudling to deliver that kind of blow.
Then finish him off with a blow to the head.
He got a length of rope and hung a pumpkin from a branch, then struck down at it, slicing cleanly through its fibrous orange flesh. The pumpkin moved as he struck, but that was okay. Maudling might also still be moving.
Then he tried a sideways swipe on another pumpkin. This time he split Maudling’s face wide open.
He was pleased. He had cut through almost to the spinal column.
He carefully cleaned the orange flesh off the axe with a soft paper towel. Then he oiled the blade and polished it with a lint-free cloth, the kind used by opticians on glasses. He opened a black leather case, which had a foam cut-out in the shape of an axe, and the weapon fitted neatly within.
Goodnight, John-boy is the second book in the Read Em And Weep series and you can buy it digitally or as a paperback.