The Mandrake Effect– ONE– by P J Searle

The Bronx, New York City: A filthy, near deserted, street offering an array of drunks, lowlifes, and vagrants sitting and lying in doorways. The graffiti-covered walls still showing pre-aerosol relic tags: Aggies, Baldies, and Shamrock Bitches.

A scratchy rendering of Hendrix’s All along the Watch Tower is just audible, emanating from a disused warehouse. Inside the decaying building, the music is now blaring, an ode to a living nightmare, serenading the flotsam of society who stagger, sing and dance in disunion to the music. Drugs and cheap drinks are for sale behind a makeshift bar, which is overlorded by Nathan, a huge, fastidiously dressed black man. As the congregation dance their hellish quadrille another man, for all-the-world a latter-day Comanche – sans tomahawk and bow and arrow – bursts in from the fire-escape window and calls to the barman.

‘Nat! Cops! Bust!’

Nathan grabs up money and packets of dope and follows the 2nd man out of the window. In an instant, the place is crawling with cops. Doors rip off disused offices and storage rooms, one after the other. The last door busts open under a shoulder-charge. A swarm of flies momentarily obscures the policeman’s view. Gradually the flies settle and he makes out the decomposing remains of a corpse.

‘Mary mother of God… mercy on us!’ The policeman recoils in shock and disgust crosses himself and vomits.