A Boy Who Came In from the Cold Ch. 17

"I went back with tools, petrol and some tapers from the boat after they had dumped me on the beach," the handsome Italian told him in a cold, grim voice. "I grew up in the country, I know how to get a job done properly. I screwed slats of wood over the windows while they were sleeping, nice and quiet. Then I poured the gasoline through a few broken panes and lit it. I went to a bar nearby and watched it burn."

Rayne lowered his hands. His mouth fell open in silent dismay and he began to shake his head incredulously.

"Y...you..."

"He will not bother you again, Rayne. This I promise," Aldo told him impassively.

He pulled his sweater back on, wincing at the pain from the cruel scars on his back. Rayne Wilde stared at him, stunned and horrified by what the Italian had just told him.

"He's...?"

"He won't hurt you any more. Don't ask me anything else, okay?" Aldo closed his eyes.

"Jesus!" Rayne exhaled quietly.

"If you talk to the police, you know nothing about this, do you understand?" Aldo lifted his head, fixing the boy with that stony gaze once more.

Rayne nodded mutely. He did not plan to stick around long enough to speak to the cops, besides which, he was already nervous in case one of them turned out to be Armand Picot or his associate Pasqual. That was just about his level of luck right now.

"I won't say anything," he promised, shuddering with combined horror and the ongoing shock of withdrawal.

"Good," Aldo said with a hint of finality. He closed his eyes again, his brows drawn together as if he was in pain or thinking very intently. "I will stay with you until Anthony wakes."

"You don't have to stay," Rayne told him. "I haven't got any gear. It's not as if I can take anything."

"I will stay," Aldo responded more firmly. "Who knows what you will do?"

Rayne scowled at that, but he did not argue. He did not have the strength to argue. Instead he wriggled back down beneath the duvet and tried to sleep. Aldo lay down beside him after a little while and put one arm around his shoulders, holding him. This time, Rayne did not try to push him away.

It took a little over a week for him to stop shaking but Rayne reached a point about half way through the battle of wills between himself and Ant when it got easier. The pain began to diminish and he was able to eat without being sick or needing to rush for the toilet. Knowing that Ant did not trust him was probably the worst part of the whole endeavour; that and having to empty his bowels in front of the man. Rayne had never been shy but he was quite a private person and found it quite disturbing having to put up with being watched whilst he performed the most mundane and intimate functions. He was not even getting paid for this!

"You could turn your back," he suggested bitterly, huddled over the bowl, shaking like a drunk.

"You think I enjoy this?" Ant asked in retaliation.

"I think you get off on it, yeah!" Rayne sneered; then he doubled up in pain as his gut spat liquid fire and the exchange was forgotten.

One morning, Doctor Mahmoudi came around to talk to Rayne about his test results. The Doctor had taken mandatory blood tests but he had also taken semen samples and DNA swabs from the boy's mouth and rectum when Ant informed him that the boy had been raped. Ant left them alone reluctantly, not entirely trusting Mahmoudi although he was forced to concede to Rayne's request for privacy.

"How are you feeling?" Mahmoudi asked solemnly, coming to sit on the edge of the bed once he had examined the boy again. As ever Rayne was uncomfortable letting the old man touch him but he did not resist the examination, only wincing a little as Mahmoudi eased a swab into his rectum to check for signs of infection.

Perhaps out of respect for Rayne's condition, he was also dressed this morning, in grey linen trousers and a pale blue shirt, open at the neck. Rayne could not look at him. He was afraid of what the man had come to tell him but also wary of losing control of his will and his emotions. They had come through so much this week and with one little jab of a needle, Mahmoudi could take things back to normal. He seemed as conscious of it as Rayne was for he made no direct allusion to the heroin.

"I feel like shit," Rayne admitted, sitting up now. "But I feel a bit less like shit than I did five days ago."

"Good," the doctor declared with a little smile. "I would like to talk to you for a short while, Rayne. You have been riding your luck and it was inevitable that sooner or later you would take a fall. But the news is not all bad. Your HIV samples have once more come back clear, although I would suggest that you get another test once you have returned to the care of your own doctor in London."

Rayne did not have the heart to tell him that he did not have a doctor in London and it was unlikely that he would go back there at any rate.

"Unfortunately," Mahmoudi added, making his heart sink a little way, "you have gonorrhoea, although this is eminently treatable and we have caught it early so you should make a full recovery."

"I knew something was wrong," Rayne admitted, nodding his head rather awkwardly. "I mean... I've been uncomfortable all week, what with one thing or another but..." He shrugged and looked vaguely embarrassed.

"It is not an insurmountable problem," Mahmoudi told him kindly. "You should refrain from sexual congress for a little while and ensure that you use contraception when you resume. Okay? I will give you treatment for this illness and monitor your progress. Now, I must say that the DNA swabs we took were not very helpful. You took steps to eliminate the evidence of your assault did you not?"

Rayne lowered his head, sensing disapproval in the doctor's tone.

"I didn't do it on purpose," he said. "I just felt dirty. I wanted to... to get everything out of me!"

"You cleansed yourself thoroughly," Mahmoudi inclined his head in Rayne's direction. "You have suffered no further internal infection and in that respect what you did was a positive thing. However, we have precious little evidence with which to find and prosecute..."

"I don't want to find them," Rayne interrupted him rather more coldly. "I don't ever want to see them again. They can rot in hell for all I care."

"They should rot in jail," Mahmoudi corrected him. "What they did to you should not be encouraged. It paints a picture that the Cap Authorities are not keen to show to outsiders. These men are still at large. What if they do this to another boy? Someone younger, perhaps... less experienced?"

Rayne looked at him defiantly. His green eyes were pale and very hostile.

"They won't," he said, remembering Aldo's words to him the other night.

"What makes you so sure?"

"They came for 'me'," Rayne told him, folding his arms defensively. "It was no accident that I was there when it began. He came looking for me and he made sure that I got what he wanted me to get."

"You are telling me that one man instigated this assault upon you?" Mahmoudi asked carefully. "The man who abducted you previously, perhaps?"

"I'm telling you nothing," Rayne said quietly.

"You are protecting him?" the doctor queried incredulously. "Why would you do that?"

"I'm not protecting him," the boy retorted at once.

"You are protecting someone else then?" Mahmoudi tilted his head to look beneath Rayne's heavy black forelock and up into his angry, defiant emerald eyes. "Perhaps you are protecting the person who went to that man's house and burnt it to the ground five nights ago?"

Rayne looked at him directly but said nothing. His jaws were clenched furiously.

"Perhaps that person could not be blamed for his emotions," Mahmoudi continued in a low, pleasant voice. "He had seen with his own eyes what your abductor had done to you and encouraged other men to do to you and he wanted that man to suffer for his crimes."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Rayne said atonally. "Give me the antibiotics and go away. I didn't want to talk to the police and I don't want to talk to you."

"Three men died in that fire five nights ago," Mahmoudi continued as if he had not spoken. "One did not. He escaped badly burned through the front hallway where the fire was raging at its highest. He will be disfigured for the rest of his life... 'if' he lives."

"I don't care!" Rayne snapped.

"I think you do," Mahmoudi said in a calm, persistent voice. "I think that you care more than you pretend. I think that you would like to know who was the man who escaped the fire, even though his windows and doors had been barred shut and plainly he was intended to die. I think that your friend Mr Wright started that fire, Rayne and that you feel a great responsibility..."

"NO!" Rayne was on his feet, shaking his head furiously now. "Get out! Ant was with me! He was with me all the time! Now get lost!"

He was still shaking long after Mahmoudi had gone, leaving a small bottle of tablets with Ant and refusing to discuss what had been said in the room whilst the other man was absent. Rayne felt sick. What would happen if Mahmoudi went to the police with a story like that? He was livid with the doctor, and with Aldo for doing something so stupid and with Phil for telling him in the first place, but most of all with himself for being the catalyst. If he had never been born the world would have been so much the richer!

Rayne paced up and down the bedroom with his hands clenched into small, impotent fists, driving his fingernails into his palms with grim determination until the blood dripped through his fingers. Ant tried to soothe him but he would not be calmed. He paced restlessly. Ant caught him and made him sit down but the minute he let go, Rayne was on his feet again, stalking around the room like a miniature tornado. He could not understand why Ant did not see it. At times like these he needed Junk. If he could just sit and smoke for a little while the anger would go away. He would feel better.

The older man was shadowing him as he turned and caught sight of himself in the mirror, a pale, scrawny, hysterical thing; mad eyed and reckless. No wonder so many people abandoned him. He truly looked insane. Rayne balled his left fist tightly and smashed his knuckles into the glass, feeling a moment of exultation as the shards splintered around him in all directions. He heard Ant utter a violent imprecation then he was on his knees in the sea of broken glass, laughing like a demon. Long fingers closed around one of the large shards and he slammed the point through the back of his right hand even as Ant jumped on his back and grabbed him around the neck, pulling him away.

Rayne lay, transfixed by the sight of his own blood as Ant sat on his chest, pinning him down and screaming for all he was worth, bellowing for help like a wounded bull. The blood was fascinating, so much of it, so incredibly rich and red. It pooled on the floor around his trembling hand and he smiled incredulously as he stared at it, deaf to the commotion that had erupted all around him. At some point other people flooded into the room and he was held down. He was conscious of Mahmoudi's presence and Thierry crying in the background. Terry Goodwill was shouting something at Ant and Aldo was kneeling by his head, stroking his hair. He looked up at the Italian shocked to see that Aldo was crying too.

"It's all right," he tried to whisper. "It'll be all right. I won't tell anyone."

His voice was so weak that nothing more than a little gasp came out. Aldo stroked the pad of his thumb over Rayne's lips and stared down at him with glittering eyes.

"You must be out of your mind," the Italian sobbed.

"Yeah..." Rayne nodded a little, forcing a bright, brave, nervous smile. "I thought you knew."

At some point he was sedated, which was such a relief that he simply closed his eyes and let the pleasure wash over him. It was not Diamorphin but the slight fuzziness it brought to every sense stopped him shivering. He shut everything out and some time afterwards he lost consciousness. There were no dreams, he simply slipped into a delicious blackness that wrapped him up like a sheet of cold velvet.

THREE WEEKS LATER:

"As cries for help go, that was some holler!"

Rayne was not really listening to the words. He had been sitting on the edge of his hospital bed for about ten minutes just staring at the enormous figure squeezed into the impossibly tiny visitor's chair beside it. His eyes devoured every inch of Patrick J McNamara's huge bulk. The man was dressed casually in snug blue jeans and a shimmery gunmetal-grey vest that hugged his sculpted physique to perfection. His dark red hair was pulled back into a shaggy pony tail and tinted glasses perched on the hook of his aquiline nose looking like miniature spectacles framed by that big, tanned, beautiful face. He felt small and frail and exposed in a white hospital gown, open at the back so that he had to hug the material around his body to keep out the draught. His bare legs swung impatiently like a child's from the lip of the mattress. They had let him paint his finger and toenails, although they trimmed them for him every week, and he stared at the little black nails now, thinking that they were like tiny claws.

"What are you doing here?" he asked at last, when Paddy seemed to run out of words or find his bemused silence disturbing.

"I came to see 'you', stupid!" the Irishman reached across and squeezed his right knee in a huge, hot hand.

Rayne shuddered slightly, but it was not an unpleasant sensation, just an awkward one. He wanted to throw his arms around the man and hold onto him but he sensed that Paddy would be uncomfortable with that so he just sat here, trying to memorise every inch of the fellow before he vanished again.

Ant's words came into his head, unbidden. 'Everything stops! You just feel your whole life flow into orbit around that person...'

'It's true then,' he thought, his reactions still fogged by the drugs they had been giving him. 'It does... everything stops!'

"So... you can see me..." Rayne held his hands out and forced a brittle laugh. "Funny that... most people seem to try and look through me, or look at something else. They visit but they don't really want to 'see' me. They want to see something they've... made happen. They want to see me turn into a normal person but I'm never going to be one of those am I?"

He felt his throat close and stopped talking before he did something ridiculous in front of Paddy McNamara. That would be awful... even more awful than being stuck here where people thought he was crazy and kept him out of reach of sharp objects and filled him with drugs that left him feeling nothing; no hope, no desolation, no euphoria, nothing.

"What happened?" Paddy asked simply. "What the hell happened to you, baby? I turn my back for five minutes and you do something crazy. What in the name of God possessed you?"

He was on his feet now and cupping Rayne's face in his hands. The boy just stared up at him, blinking back the shimmering well of tears.

"I didn't go there on purpose," he keened quietly. "I didn't know..."

His visitor took one small, bandaged hand in both of his own.

"What about this?" he wanted to know.

"It was an accident," Rayne told him breathlessly. "I fell on some glass."

"That is not what I heard," Paddy sat down beside him on the bed and Rayne reached for him. It was instinct really. He needed to feel warm and the Irishman was giving off so much heat.

"No one speaks English in here. I've no idea what's going on," he said conversationally, snaking his arms around Paddy and leaning into him, breathing in his clean, warm, delicious scent. "They cut my nails and they wash me and they give me drugs. Sometimes a man with the weirdest accent comes and talks to me for a bit. I think they want me to say that I'm crazy so they can lock me up. They ask questions but they never tell me if I give them the right answers or not."

Paddy stroked his hair tenderly for a little while then encircled him and held him in those powerful arms. Rayne thought distantly that if he really wanted to, Paddy could easily crush the last breath from his body. What a way to go!

"'Are' you crazy?" the bigger man asked at last.

"That depends... Are you working for them?" Rayne looked up at him and smiled helplessly.

Soft, warm hands stroked his face fondly.

"You are still so beautiful, even in here you take my breath away," Paddy said in a quiet, awed voice. "So smart and stubborn and fragile..."

"I am not fragile," Rayne retorted at once. "If I was fragile I'd be dead."

"True," the older man conceded wryly. "Did they tell you that Christophe died?"

He nodded once, expression guarded. The police had come to the hospital. They had been the ones to tell him. He presumed that they expected him to break down and admit to everything but he had said nothing. Rayne was perplexed by their mute acceptance of this. In movies people shouted and yelled and asked for lawyers but he did not see the point in asking for anything. If he kept his mouth shut, in the end everyone went away.

"You know who killed him, don't you?" Paddy stated evenly.

A little shake of the head was his only response. Rayne looked away from him, out of the window. It was a nice view, down through some trees into a little park. He enjoyed looking at it but he needed to see other things right now. It would be nice to trust Paddy McNamara but right now he trusted no one.

"There was a fire," he mused at last. "It was an accident."

"Like hell it was!" Paddy laughed hoarsely. "Rayne, 'I' know who started that fire. I didn't come here to interrogate you."

"It wasn't Ant," Rayne said, turning back to face him earnestly. "He was with me all the time that night. He was trying to keep me off Heroin."

He closed his mouth a little too late, forgetting that Paddy hadn't known about the Junk. Small white teeth pulled his lower lip between them and bit down anxiously. Ah well... For a moment Paddy McNamara just looked at him as if he had never seen the like of Rayne Wilde before.

"You're a bundle of contradictions aren't you?" Paddy murmured at last.

"If that's a polite way of saying you don't hang around with fuck-ups, I understand," Rayne told him in an offhand manner, shrugging him off at once.

"Just when I think I've got you pegged, you throw another curve ball my way," Paddy chuckled, shaking his head.

"Talk English or don't bother," Rayne said, folding his arms and looking away suddenly. He felt like a child whenever he spoke to Paddy, as if something was going on just out of his reach and he would never understand it. The Irishman always seemed to be laughing at him.

A gentle hand stroked the back of his neck. Paddy whispered; "I know that Ant didn't start the fire. I 'didn't' know that you were an addict, but it doesn't change anything right now."

Rayne drew his legs up and hugged himself, keeping his back half turned so that he did not have to look Paddy in the eye although he knew that the Irishman was still watching him. Once he might have been able to kid himself that P J McNamara would let such a blatant evasion tactic go by but he knew by now that this was a vain hope. Paddy was thinking over what he already knew; putting together the clues. It was only a matter of time. He had not released Rayne completely. That steady hand kept contact with the back of his neck, stroking him gently; holding him without restraining him. If he tried to leave; if he just got up off the bed now and tried to walk away, he wondered would the other man let him. Then he remembered that there was no point. The last time he tried that three orderlies had carried him back in here, strapped him to the bed and sedated him, ignoring him as he yelled that he could walk on his own.