THE OLD DARK CURIOSITY SHOP

THE OLD DARK CURIOSITY SHOP.

“I don’t believe it!” Tom stopped dead in his tracks at the sight of the old corner shop. He had been out walking confidently around his criminal kingdom and came upon the shop he was sure was derelict just a few days ago.

 Yet here it was open again after Twenty years.

 Those passing Twenty years had seen him rise to number one. The place looked the same, as if someone had simply come along and cleaned the windows and touched up the paint, clearing all the neglect of time.

“How could this of happened so quickly?” He shook his head and frowned.

 There were the familiar old advertisements for snacks and drinks plastered across the windows.

“It’s the same as that night!”

 His surprise turned to anger, the old anger was building up in him, an anger he had learnt to control and use. He bit it back down, he couldn’t lose his head now, not this close to a deal with the Richardson gang from across the river. There was too much money to lose by letting that anger get the better of him.

He had been Fourteen when he decided to rob this shop because he needed somewhere to vent the hatred, fear and violence that dominated his home life. A drunken father who often used him and his younger brother as punch bags and a mother who did drugs to anesthetise against the world of pain they were all in. It was his brother Alan’s brutal death that drove him through the doors of this corner shop all those years ago with a beast in his heart. His father had used his fists once too often and his brother had been beaten to a comatose death. The drunken fucker had been arrested and only served Eight years for manslaughter, the slimy defence barrister using the word “Unintentional” over and over again. The pathetic judgement put a bottle of pills into his mother’s hands that ended in a fatal overdose. Tom had felt the cancerous hatred his father had planted grow and that night in this shop it had exploded, brutally igniting his future career of violence.

He had intended only to rob the place. Yes, he was going to smash the shit out of everything but did not plan to hurt anyone. But the thick and heavy baseball bat in his hand and the cowardice of the terrified shop assistant merged into an explosion of violence that left the assistant maimed for life and Tom feeling a surge of pleasure the like he had never felt before.

He pushed the shop’s double doors open and he glanced over to the raised solitary till point cubicle, Christ they had even put that thing back in place.

 There was nobody there.

“You’re taking a chance!” he laughed to himself. “Lots of bad people around here.”

He stepped inside, took a quick glance around and noticed immediately that there were no cameras, just like all those years ago. It was the reason he had gotten away with the attack. A few weeks later he wondered if he could get away with another one. He chose a drug dealer, a weedy, rat like bastard that used to do his trade not that far from the store. Tom was patient and careful, two traits that made him very successful in the business of violence that would eventually lead to a lavish lifestyle as well as a fearful respect from the local population. With a few vicious strokes of the bat, he sent the man to hospital for six months never to return to the area. Tom did the same to a few other local dealers over a period of four days and he quickly replaced them with his own cronies. The main suppliers, scumbags to a man, didn’t care who shifted their poison and easily came to an agreement with him.

But there was one last thing that had to be done to exorcise the past.

The day his father came out to prison was the man’s last day in this world. Tom pretended to be the dutiful son, spoke empty words of understanding and forgiveness. His father was a shadow of his former self, so it had been easy to settle things. He took him out for a drink, just one his father had said, because he had cleaned up in prison.

 But once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic.

 At closing time, he helped the drunken old fool to the place of execution and Tom made sure the last thing the evil fucker saw was his grinning face as he bludgeoned the life out of him.

 Once again his unnatural luck allowed him to get away with it.

“Christ I haven’t seen them in years.” He stopped at the sweets display. “Toffo, Secret, Texan, Spiral, Applause..”  He shook his head, “Still selling the same old shit, they must be really old stock.”

“Can I help you Tom?” the voice came from close and he spun around expecting to see someone standing next to him, but there was nothing.

“What the fuck!” he tensed, he had been in this type of situation many times before. His response was to take stock, prepare himself and wait for his opponent to make the first move, actions resulting in him always coming out as the victor.

 But where had the voice come from?

And how did they know his name.

“Don’t be afraid Tom,” the voice spoke softly, a man? Familiar? “You’re amongst old friends!”

His eyes darted bird like around the store. “Old friends..?”

There was a movement from the end of the aisle and he saw a man, something was familiar about him.

“We are all here Tom,” the man began to advance and he recognised his first ever victim, the shop assistant!

“How the fuck,” he backed away and then stopped himself, he never backed away from anyone or anything.

Suddenly the assistant’s face became bloody and distorted and Tom recognised the horrific injuries he had inflicted.

“No,” he felt something unfamiliar.

Fear!

The thing, because it couldn’t possibly be a man, advanced. On each step a new gory face would appear. He recognised them all, faces he had dealt with over the years, people he had sent either to the hospital or to the morgue. Victims of his hatred born out of abuse and the absence of love.

“We have never forgotten you Tom,” the thing was almost on top of him, he could not move, frozen by the proof of all the terrible things he had done. “We’ve come to take you home Tom, take you to where you belong.”

The final face was that of his father, grinning through the pulp of his injuries. The last thing Tom saw was the shop around him bursting into flames and the terrible heat began to sear his flesh.

His father rasped, “Welcome home son!”