Debaser

Chapter 1

Framed in the doorway he cursed his trembling fingers as they tried, ineptly, to re-button his fly. He felt sick. The pounding in his head was virtually indistinguishable from the pounding of the music. Through fractionally open, sleep encrusted eyes he glimpsed the carnage. The grey light of morning, intruding through the bare window, had lent the room a lurid veneer, and the grim reality of the situation forced itself upon his attention.
Last night the drugs - more, and more varied than he was used to - had tinted hard fact (their depraved behaviour and its horrific conclusion) with an innocuous shade of fiction. Beneath the half-light of a solitary light bulb - still burning but ineffectual now - it had all seemed different, funny even.
'DEBASER!' screamed the music accusingly. 'DEE-BASER!' it screamed again.
A number of unwelcome sensations were battling for supremacy inside his throbbing chest, welling up and receding, before welling up again more violently. Vague anxiety, the usual victor on mornings such as these, had, on this particular morning, been ousted by dread and panic while despair, biding its time, looked on.
He pressed his hands to his forehead, pushing the palms firmly into his eyes.
'Think!'
Above the din of the music he could hear Dooly whining, by the front door at the other end of the room. The dog's distressed ululations - desperate, pleading - seemed to accurately vocalise his own inner turmoil, and they affected him as the heart-rending strains of a violin might.
'Poor cunt. Must be starvin by now. Just wants to go home. '
He took as deep a breath as his fearful condition would allow.
'Come on, Billy, think! Should wake him up. Make him deal with it. Fuckin psycho! Right! First things first. Switch off that music.'
He took a few timid sidesteps along the back wall, hardly daring to look where he was going. For there, beneath the window, lay the source of his anguish.

Half crouching, with no small effort, he reached out a quivering hand and blindly fingered the front of the CD player. To better orientate his wandering fingers he risked a quick glance over and away and... Click.
'Oh, fuck!'
Outside, the diminutive twitterings of some few birds provided a cheerful counterpoint to Dooly's baleful whining. But their cheerfulness could do nothing to lighten the mood in the room, only serving to bring out in bold relief the full horror of the situation. And it was even more horrific than Billy had first thought: as a result of that quick glance he had made a bewildering, grisly discovery. His sufferings were cranked up to hitherto unknown levels and a tidal wave of nausea coursed implacably through his body. The bile rose to his throat. He rested the palm of a hand against the wall to steady himself and his stomach made a fist. Its contents surged upwards through his trembling frame and were forcibly deposited, with a splash, onto the carpet.

The gestural equivalent, in humans, to the note of hopefulness that Billy suddenly detected in the heightened pitch of Dooly's whining would be the raising of eyebrows. He lowered his. Somebody in the stairwell! He listened apprehensively. Footsteps! Dooly's tail wagged uncontrollably and an involuntary series of expectant yelps emanated from the depths of his animated body. Was someone at the door? He strained to hear, not daring to breathe. Silence. He raised his head slightly. Footsteps, next landing. He released his quivering breath. Neighbours only. But still Dooly... The front door swung vigorously inwards as though dealt a powerful kick by the sole of a heavy boot. It rebounded off the inner wall (leaving a handle-sized piece of wallpaper embedded in the plaster) and swung back towards its assailant. It was halted by a firm hand. Billy, had jolted violently at the noise and instinctively spun to face the intruders, whereupon he had lost his balance and fallen back against the wall. He now found himself staring into the eyes of a somewhat disconcerted policeman, while another younger officer attempted to keep a gathering of nosy neighbours from rubbernecking ghoulishly into the room. The dog, free at last, snaked sharply round the door-jamb and fled through the curious assembly.

That was the last straw. Billy quite simply could not possibly feel any lower than he did at that moment. Then his foot slipped and he dropped arse first into the puddle of tepid vomit. A few drops squirted out at either side of him, splashing his bare forearms. He leaned his head, wearily, back against the wall and even allowed himself an ironic half-smile. His capacity for suffering had, in a few hellish minutes, been utterly exhausted and his captors, who now held his fate entirely in their hands, had, paradoxically, afforded him a sense of release. Even the dampness of the sick, as it seeped through the seat of his jeans to warm his clammy skin, was mildly comforting to him.