Target Down - The Ghost Assassin

The Bath House

A fresh dawn breaks the dark colors of night on a narrow road of Alanya, a picturesque tourist town on the Turkish Riviera. Remarkable views of the sun gleaming off the cerulean blue waters below and sending it's morning light through the town. The houses quaintly decorated with planter boxes, sprouting colorful flowers under their windows with darkly stained wooden window frames. Alanya is a close, tightly knit yet bustling country town, a place where everyone knows everyone.

As the light of morning brightens, a group of well fed men, dressed in light, comfortable cottons, congrigate at the doors to the only bath house in the town. Shaking hands and patting one another on their backs in greeting and conversing happily while waiting for someone with keys to unlock the burly double doors to let them in.

Beyond the double doors, the dimly lit place, the heavy steam congested into the rather small private space by four walls, almost concealing evenly spaced pillars and half walls of the showers lined up against one of the walls, billows out as soon as the doors are swung open. Conveniently placed shelves packed neatly with rolled up, white towels by the entace wall to the showers.

The white, mosaic tiled walls trimmed with a row of deep, glassy, cyan blue blocks breaks the monotony of white, drips with the condensation of cooled down steam from the numerous, deep pool like, heated baths in the room's foundation, giving the walls a sleek yet sweaty and slimy appearance.

The sound of men making their way through the bath house doors to partake in their weekly ritual of cleaning and meeting away from any and all unwanted ears. Like a secret club with the same non disclosure rules as the likes of freemasons and just as misogynistic.

A rather short, insignificantly uncharismatic man, strips of his clothes, habitually grabs one of the rolled up towels from the shelf as he strolls towards the showers and nonchalantly mumbles his answers, to his following friends questions, into the thickened steam of the room. He takes to a bucket sized stools under one of the shower heads and starts his cleaning routine before he makes his way through the fog towards the only bath that vaguely seems to already have an occupant.

He takes the few steps into the bath slowly, with one of his hands resting on the rim of the bath for support, so that he can adjust to the pools heat before wading himself to a space on the concrete bench that runs the inner perimeter of the pool and makes himself comfortable, leaning back and slinging his arms onto the rim of the pool as he always does and lets out a relieving sigh as he releases his stress out into the waters that now surrounds him.

Bringing his head back up from the sigh he has just released, he starts a conversation with the hazy figure relxing opposite him, tempting him with small talk before any of the other men join them and the heftier conversations begin.

To his surprise his companion says nothing and just carries on sitting there.

He tries again a bit louder to catch his attention, thinking the echoes coming from the men at the showers is muffling his attempts at talking about the weather.

Again. Nothing.

The lack of response from the other occupant creases his forhead, brothers are not accustomed to rudeness or being ignored. This so called brother seems to have a serious lack of manner.

Does he not hear him? Does this man not understand him? If not, he shouldn't be here. This is a private bath house. He shouldn't have even been able to get in here.

His frown deepens. Realizing that this man made it to the bath even before he could and yet he was the first one through the doors. Did this imbecile not shower before slinking into the bath?

Again he tries to get the man's attention, gaining a few of the showering men's attention instead, but with no luck. Now agitated by this man's discourteousness, answering some questions being shot at him from the showers, he stands up from his concrete seat and pushes his way with distress across the bath towards the conceited, basking man.

His anger adjusting his tone before his eyes adjusting to the fog, he starts cursing at the man now before him, demanding to know how he got to the bath before him and wanting to know who he was and why he was so uncivil and ignoring him. Until his tempered filled arms which where waving around like a father scolding his son, shifted the fog in swirling waves separating the two of them.

The shock temporarily paralyzes the short, perturbed man, who was standing waist deep in the bath, his arms still fixed, mid-air in the motion of his cursing. His eyes fixated on the man before him. Recognition draining every ounce of color from his face.

The unresponsive man who was being subjected to a lesson in manners was leaning with his back against the edge of the bath, arms hanging loosely in the water at his sides, his head slumped backwards on the bath's rim. An etched expression of irrevocable shock on his face, leaving him with his mouth agape and his eyes wide open and bulging from their sockets. His skin burnished, wrinkled and discoloring underneath the substantial fog wafting up from the heat of the bath. His dark, curly beard glistening with water droplets and it's ends seized and plastered around his neck with a few clumpy strands interposed between his skin and the gelled, thickening red sludge trailing out from his throat which has been surgically sliced into a perfect neck tie, show casing the inside of the man's windpipe like a it was on display in a trophy case. The now stilled water around him dyed in the same color as the sludge which has congealed around his throat and down his chest leaves a red oil slick around the man like a devilish halo.

The short man releases a string of panic at high pitches that would make a soprano proud as he tries to rush closer to the man sporting the new tie. His screetches rippling through the confines of the private bath house sending the group of men, in various stages from undress to showering, into a complete frenzy. Each one rushing to the bath to be witness of the cadaver amidst them.

Leaving the few late stragglers still at the door to call the authorities, while the rest of them all wail out, "Feroz!!!"

Another target is down.