Chapter Text
It was on a Saturday night that I first saw him. The whole bar went quiet when he entered. The held breath before the scream. I swirled the American Honey in my rocks glass and drank in the tense atmosphere from my place in the dark corner of the room. The man was entirely oblivious to the mood of the room or was smart enough to not let it show. Either way, I didn’t think he would last too long, thought he’d get ‘lost’ on his way to the bathroom and I’d be the one to stumble over his naked corpse in the alley later. He seemed too clean, his posture too straight, clothes crisp. He was obviously out of place, and we all knew it. I noticed Black Benny’s gang eyeing him up. Nelson’s too. I smirked in the darkness of my booth. Things had been boring lately, I could have done with some entertainment. If Nelson got him, I might have even gone to the Arena to see if he lasted longer than a single round. I never got the chance. The man simply ordered a drink and spoke to the bartender. Then he left. The gangs didn’t even get a chance to case him out properly. Hell, I didn’t even see his face, just a black suit with a dark red waistcoat. His face hidden by dark locks of raven hair, oily like lurking shadows on mouldy walls. It was long enough to brush his collar bones. All he left behind in the silence of the bar was a glass covered in condensation, still full of Fireball. He didn’t drink a single drop.
The appearance of the man in the bar was strange. Out of the ordinary. Strays didn’t often drift into our bar, legitimate citizens even less so. And even when they did, they didn’t act like that. I couldn’t even remember the last time a law-abiding citizen had walked through those doors, if they ever had. To have a man like that come here, when even the most disreputable stay away? Well, it was an oddity to say the least. Those clothes he was wearing weren’t cheap, not by a longshot. Even the way he walked and stood screamed that he didn’t belong here. He was so out of place among torn jeans, bare chests and tattoos that it was jarring. A few strode up to the bartender, probing for answers. They needn’t have tried, that man was as tight-lipped as they came, I knew that that was a road that would lead nowhere. I leant back and crossed my arms, staring at the empty rocks glass reflecting a distorted light show onto the oak table.
It’s safe to say that it was at that moment, the first time I saw him, as the bar returned to normality around me, that I was enraptured by the mystery of the Well-Dressed Man.
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It was months before I so much as caught a glimpse of the Well-Dressed Man again, this time in the alley ways branching through the E-Sector, the poorest and most dangerous section of the city. The place was like a maze if you didn’t know the routes. Lots of dead ends, deadfalls and loops. You can get lost for days walking through it, if you don’t get ‘greeted’ by one of the many gangs in the area. We call it Labyrinth for obvious reasons. The bar I was drinking at all those nights ago was more or less the gateway to the Labyrinth, it was one of the only places in the sector that you could get food or drink that wasn’t poisoned or rationed so it became a neutral zone. No blood shed within its walls and if anyone disturbs that balance, well, they don’t last the night. The point here is that to get to the Labyrinth you have to go through the bar, there used to be other entrances, but they were destroyed in the last Cull, only the one in the bar survived, we named the bar The End. Ominous and foreboding, with a promise of morbid mystery, much like the bar itself.
I liked the Labyrinth, there was a satisfaction in roaming aimlessly through the alleyways. There were ghosts here, the Null, and sometimes, they let you see them. They lived in every shadow, crack and crevice, they kept to themselves mostly and were generally unbothered by the human life that walked those alleys. At all hours you could hear their whispers, feel it tickle the edges of your mind, see them flicker from the corner of your eye. That day though, it was silent. As soon as I stepped outside, I was disturbed. The Null sent most people insane with their vague existence, to those of us that moved past it, their presence became to us as birds are to forests. Their absence was unnatural and concerning. I had never heard the Null fall silent and lay still.
I moved cautiously through the alley, unsure for the first time. I didn’t know enough about the Null to know why they would be silent. Was it like birds when a predator is near, or is it a predator before the strike? Was it merely a waiting silence? The distinction mattered and the uncertainty of it was unsettling to me. I finally decide to head towards Black Benny’s gang, they were the closest, also the most revolting but I would tolerate it for answers. I smelt it before I saw it. Blood. Not an unusual smell. But the strength of it. Undoubtably a massacre, a gang battle most likely. But that didn’t feel right to me. I couldn’t smell any gunpowder or smoke. Then, as I turned the corner, I saw the ramshackle wood door leading underground to Benny’s safehouse. It was open, gaping like the jaws of a dying beast gasping for breath. The smell came thick from those jaws, blood and death and fear, so thick I almost choked on it. My breath came hard, heart beating fast, muscles lose but rung with tension, vision sharp and narrowed on that door. Fight. Flight. I hadn’t decided but I trusted my instincts and trusted my body to know what to do. And then, from the murky depths, ascended a black suit and a red waistcoat.
My heart stuttered in my chest, not in fear but in surprise. I watched him clean his hands with a red cloth, casual and confident as though he’d done the same a thousand times before and would do it a thousand times more. The tension left me all at once as a slightly savage grin appeared on my face. Good on him.
The Well-Dressed Man became a near constant presence in my life after that. Sometimes smoking in a dark corner, embers setting his face in an eerie red glow beneath his long locks. At other times he drifted by my booth as I reclined with a glass of vintage rum, a purposeful hand gliding across the edge of my table. Each day he came a little closer, gazed a little longer. I felt his presence at all times, as though he were my own personal shadow. I found that I did not mind. not like everyone else seemed to, cowering at his presence, I felt no need to. The monster in me recognised the monster in him. I didn’t mind sharing my territory, not with him, and after I destroyed Nelson’s gang for crossing me, he didn’t mind either. He had been waiting outside, and when I walked by him, he pushed off the wall he was leaning against to walk by my side, flicking a cigarette into the bloody gutter.
He never told me his name, I never asked. I knew him by the scent of cigarette smoke and rusted iron that clung to his clothes like perfume, I knew him by his silence and his strength, standing with all the bearings of a king, untouchable. And he knew me. An unseen hand that refills glasses of spiced rum on scarred wood, a mouth that quirks at my sly quips, a warm shoulder pressed firmly against my own as we wait at a frozen ally corner. We stand together sometimes and listen to the Null. Their speech like traitorous whispers in our minds. Thoughts of hope, of trust, of comfort in shared understandings. I knew him as I knew myself. We were monsters, beasts. We did not care that there were no others like us, apex predators among scavengers. We had each other, our silent understanding and quiet comfort.
And that was all we needed.