‘Where’s Donna?’ asked Pankowicz, looking around.
‘Didn’t she come out with the rest of you?’ replied Trish.
Dobson turned back to the small room that they’d just left. ‘Donna!’ she called.
In response came the sound of a girl’s voice, singing. It was accompanied by harsh, rhythmic scratching sounds, as if two bricks were being grated together repeatedly. The reverend entered the room first, her cross held high, the others close behind.
They saw Donna with her back to them, standing at the far wall by the wide rectangular hole of an unfinished window which had most definitely not been there before. It opened onto the site, but a cage of scaffolding on the outside of the unfinished house would have stopped her from climbing out and escaping, if that had been her intention. It obviously wasn’t. Instead, she was scratching at the mortar around one of the breeze blocks on the bottom edge of the opening, using a fragment of broken brick but also picking at it with her left hand, digging and plucking sharp fragments loose with her bare fingertips and throwing them aside. Her flesh was shredded, and the masonry wet with her blood. And all the while she sang in a high, childlike voice, something that sounded like a nursery rhyme except that the language was either nonsense or else so old that they couldn’t understand it.
‘Donna?’ ventured the reverend.
Donna stopped both digging and singing, but didn’t turn around. When she spoke, the voice that came from her was still that of a child but there was something deeper underneath it, something hoarser and immeasurably older. ‘You sanctimonious cunt,’ it snarled. ‘I knew a priest once. He was a good man. He took a dying stranger into his home and nursed him even though he knew it meant his own death. What have you ever done but hide behind a barrier made of your own precious piety and self-righteousness? You dare preach hospitality and protection here, of all places?’ She resumed digging and scratching, having succeeded in loosening the brick that she was working on a good way already, so that it rattled in its hole like a rotten tooth as she worried at it.
‘Heavenly Father,’ the reverend prayed, ‘in the name of Jesus Christ, we bind this child to the will and purpose of God and we loose her from every attempt of the evil one to influence any part of her life. We ask, Lord, that you cover this child with the blood of Christ—’
‘You refused us what pittance of charity it was in your power to bestow,’ the voice continued as she chipped, scratched, dug. ‘You turned us away when we were most in need. You killed us. And now you, who should know better than most about succouring the needy, you come here to my home. MY HOME!’ she shrieked, so loudly and suddenly that some quirk of the echoes in the building’s shell magnified it and hammered it into their skulls so that they clapped their hands to their ears and cried out. ‘And you talk to me of blood!?’
With a grunt she succeeded in pulling the block free in two great chunks. Peter wasn’t surprised to see that it was hollow; true to Nash’s cost-cutting priorities the houses in this development were constructed with cheaper hollow blocks reinforced by metal bars running up through them. She’d pulled the block apart, using her bare hands in a way which hurt just to look at, and in the gap had exposed the rusted rebar from inside.
That done, Donna stood and turned to them, but she wasn’t Donna Russell, Director of Financial Services for Haleswell Village Trust, anymore. Her face was ravaged with black lesions that leaked a foul-smelling pus, her throat bulged with grotesque swellings, and the glittering scorn in her eyes was something that he had only ever seen on one other face.
‘You think it is your piety that protects you from me?’ Hester laughed. ‘You cannot keep me out forever. In time the Lord will deliver me unto you, “for He shall bring down their pride together with the spoils of their hands. And the fortress of the high fort of thy walls shall He bring down, lay low, and bring to the ground, even to the dust”.’ She crossed the room in a heartbeat, and before Rev. Dobson could flinch away clasped the reverend by the face with Her ruined hand, its fingers black with gangrene, painting her crimson from brow to chin. Dobson gagged at the smell. Hester pressed Her mouth to the back of her hand so that without it between them the two women might have been kissing, closed Her eyes and sighed, ‘Oh, there will be so much blood.’
* * *
For one of the very few times in his life, Nash found himself frozen with indecision. It wasn’t fear – fear was a child’s reaction to the threat of getting caught, more like the adrenalin high of an extreme-sports junkie. This paralysis was a total systems crash as his brain struggled to find an appropriate response to a completely alien set of circumstances. He couldn’t understand what he was seeing, as he watched the impossibly diseased Donna attack Joyce, and in the end he decided that he didn’t need to. It was actually very simple: the woman who kept him safe from the thing that wanted him dead was under threat.
‘Donna, get off her!’ he shouted, hefting the heavy Bible in both hands and raising it at her like a club. ‘Snap out of it, woman!’
She rounded on him, snarling, her dead black fingers hooked into claws, and he brought down the Bible to protect his eyes, but the blow never came.
When he looked, she was reeling away from him in baffled fury. ‘Where did you get that?’ she demanded. ‘How dare you have that!’
In the chaos of the moment he was only aware that everybody seemed to be shouting at once; it was only afterwards that he thought there was anything odd about it.
‘Give it back!’ she raged. ‘That belonged to a man who should have been a saint! You’re not fit to lie with his dogs!’
Sensing an advantage, he pressed it, raising the Bible and advancing towards her. She backed away another step, and he grinned. He didn’t know why it was causing her such consternation, and he didn’t much care. ‘You’re welcome to take it off me, if you can.’
Her scream of frustration split the air, and she spun to face the window opening again, with its waist-high gap in the brickwork filled only with the upthrust spike of the rusted rebar. Too late, he realised what she was going to do, and he screamed, ‘For God’s sake, Donna, NO!’
But she planted her hands either side of the gap, raised her head high and slammed it down face-first onto the spike. There was a crunch which sounded like someone driving a knife into a cabbage, her legs spasmed for a moment, and then she was still, bent over as if praying, and fixed in place by the rebar through her skull.
* * *
‘Oh my God, Toby?’ Maya’s eyes were wide with fear. ‘What’s going on?’
From their hiding place behind a stack of pallets, they could clearly hear the shouting coming from inside the half-built house.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘But I think I need to go and see.’
Maya put a hand on his arm and dragged him back down. ‘You can’t!’ she said. ‘We’re not supposed to be here, remember?’
He remembered. This had turned out to be a bad idea, pretty much right from the start when he’d had to come up with a story about why his parents were involved. He obviously couldn’t tell her the truth, and what had started out in his head as a harmless bit of spying on a bunch of dumb adults had quickly mutated into a nightmare of awkward questions.
He shook off her hand. ‘Something’s gone wrong!’ he said. ‘I need to help them.’
‘Then call the police,’ she told him. ‘Actually, I will.’ She dug out her phone but he grabbed it from her. ‘Hey! What the fuck? Give that back!’
‘You can’t call the police.’
‘Give me my phone back, you asshole!’ Her eyes were blazing with fury. She tried to seize her phone but he kept it out of reach behind his body.
‘You can’t call them,’ he insisted. ‘They won’t be able to do anything. Besides, you were the one who said we’re not supposed to be here, remember? We’ll both be in the shit.’
‘Fine! Let them…’ she waved in the general direction of the building. ‘Whatever this is. Now give me my phone or I’ll tell
Rajko that you brought me out here to have your wicked way with me.’
Toby handed the phone over, and she started backing away. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what this is all about but I have to go.’
‘I understand. I’m the one that should be sorry. I thought this was going to be just a bit of a laugh, you know? I’ll talk to you about it later, yeah?’
She nodded, turned and ran. In the end he never did get the chance to talk to her about it, and the last he ever saw of her was as she disappeared amongst the towers of scaffolding. When he turned his attention back to the situation, someone was reeling out of the front door – it looked like Al Pankowicz, and he was weeping. Then his dad appeared, supporting his mum, and they fell at the threshold.
‘Mum! Dad!’ he screamed, and ran to help.
His dad looked at him dazedly. ‘Toby? You shouldn’t be here.’
His mum was trying to get up again, so he got his hands under her arms and pulled. She swatted at him. ‘Get away!’ she gasped. ‘Don’t go inside…’
‘What happened? Mum, what happened in there?’
Then Mr Nash appeared, supporting Reverend Dobson, whose face was streaked with blood, and Mr Singh who looked like he was sobbing.
That was the point at which he pulled out his phone and dialled 999.
29
THE PILGRIM BADGE
‘TELL ME AGAIN WHAT THIS THING ON THE BOTTOM is,’ said Nash, sliding the embroidered bookmark across the desk to Simms. It wasn’t so much the bookmark itself that he was interested in, as the gleaming metal badge-like object which had been sewn onto it at the end. The archaeologist had told him once, when he’d first found it and passed it on to Nash just as an historical curio. Once he’d realised that it wasn’t especially valuable, Nash had given it to the reverend because it seemed like a church thing, but that had been a year ago and he wanted to hear Simms again in case he’d missed something important the first time around. Nash was fidgety and out of sorts. Partially it was the shock of seeing Hester make Donna do that to herself yesterday. The rest of Sunday had been written off by interviews with the police, who thankfully seemed to be going with a theory of suicide brought on by some kind of religious fervour. But half a bottle of whisky hadn’t made sleep come any easier for him.
Markes and Singh hadn’t come into the office that morning, and he couldn’t blame them. Pankowicz was probably holed up at the White Hart, letting his bar staff run the pub – wherever he was, he wasn’t returning Nash’s calls. The Feenans – actually, he didn’t give a fuck what the Feenans were doing, just as long as their wankstain of a kid didn’t come near him. The reverend was at the rectory with the doors locked and the curtains tightly drawn. Nash didn’t think she’d noticed that he’d taken the bookmark, but if she had she wasn’t making a fuss about it. It would have seemed utterly trivial. Nash was hoping that it was the exact opposite.
‘It’s a pilgrim badge,’ said Simms. ‘Fourteenth century. Pewter. Not that rare or valuable, I’m afraid.’
‘Spare me the Antiques Roadshow bullshit and just tell me what it means.’
Simms crossed his arms and sat back. ‘If you want a professional consultation you can make an appointment tomorrow and I’ll invoice you. If you’re here in my home on a Monday evening asking for a favour you’re going the wrong way about it.’
Nash closed his eyes and breathed deeply, pinching the bridge of his nose as if suffering a headache. ‘Lewis, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s been a…’ He uttered a short, high laugh. ‘Well it’s been a bit of an awkward few days, to be honest with you. I’m sorry. Please…’ He gestured for the other man to continue.
Simms sighed and picked up the badge again. ‘Lots of people went on pilgrimages in the Middle Ages,’ he said. ‘From all walks of life, not just the clergy. They’d go to the shrines or burial places of saintly figures, like Thomas Becket at Canterbury, for worship and miraculous healing. A pilgrimage over long distances on foot was a dangerous undertaking and when they got to their destination they found people selling these decorative badges as souvenirs of the journey. They were cheaply made, cast in pewter, and depicted the shrines, a bit like postcards, or faces of the saints themselves, or stories from their lives.’
‘So this is just a piece of medieval tourist tat?’
‘In a sense. Some of them were quite sexually graphic, too – flying phalluses and vulvas with arms and legs. There’s evidence that pilgrims enjoyed the opportunity for casual sex along the way, so some historians think that these badges could have been a way of letting other pilgrims know you were available and what you were into.’
‘Seriously?’ Nash shook his head, amazed. ‘So it was basically a medieval Club 18–30 booze cruise?’
‘For some, yes. But that didn’t stop it from having deep religious significance for them at the same time. It’s only our modern culture which separates sexuality and spirituality. A pilgrim badge was also a status symbol to the people when you got home that you’d fulfilled one of your obligations as a Christian of good standing in the community.’
‘So it could have been owned by literally anybody.’
‘Yes. This one, of a ship with figures, is from Becket’s shrine, illustrating his exile to France following a confrontation with Henry II.’
Nash took the badge back and examined it more closely. It was exquisitely detailed, showing every board of the steeply curved clinker-built keel, the rudder and the anchor, figures in chain mail at bow and stern and the saint standing by the central mast at the centre, and not just ropes running from deck to topmast but even the twists in each rope. Many hours of devotion had gone into crafting its original – for thousands of copies to be cast and sold a penny a piece to make a quick profit. Nothing new there, he supposed. ‘Is it something that people might think would protect them from the Devil?’
‘I wouldn’t have thought so. A good old-fashioned cross would do the job better, wouldn’t it?’
Nash pocketed the badge and stood. ‘Well, thanks for that,’ he said.
‘Does that help?’
‘I don’t know,’ Nash replied. He couldn’t think of a reason why a piece of mass-produced junk would have had such an effect on Hester. It was like discovering that a vampire could be repelled with a piece of Lego. ‘I honestly don’t know.’
* * *
Nash was sitting on one of the park benches by the village pond, staring blankly at the squabbling ducks when the man from the Diocesan Deliverance Ministry found him. The dwindling twilight of a summer evening streaked the world with long shadows.
‘Richard,’ he said, sitting down beside him.
Nash nodded, but didn’t look up. ‘Malcolm.’
If it hadn’t been for his dog collar Father Malcolm Powell might have been mistaken for someone doing an impersonation of a seventies geography teacher, with his unruly mass of curly brown hair, glasses and a scruff of beard. ‘I would ask after your health,’ said Father Powell, ‘but in the light of recent circumstances…’ He shrugged and tailed off awkwardly. ‘Please accept our deepest condolences.’
Nash wasn’t so easily disarmed. ‘You’re doing the rounds, I take it, now that the police are finished? Who have you spoken to so far?’
‘Just Joyce. She blames herself, obviously.’
‘I don’t think there was anything she could have done differently.’ He waited, but the priest just shuffled his feet and scratched his nose. ‘That was your cue to tell me that we should have waited for your lot before taking matters into our own hands.’
‘I’m not here to apportion blame, Richard,’ Powell said gently. ‘I’m just here to find out what happened.’
‘You’re recording this, I take it?’
Father Powell took his phone out of his jacket pocket. ‘Do you mind?’
Nash uttered a short laugh. ‘Why would I mind? You can add it to all the other records that have been collected over the last few hundred years and have done fuck-all good. You can put it
next to Donna’s bloodstained clothes in a nice little plastic bag.’ It didn’t make any sense but he didn’t care. He was pissed, and scared, and he hated feeling the latter most of all. ‘I mean what good does your ministry actually do, beyond replacing those of us that She manages to bump off?’
Father Powell ignored Nash’s little rant. ‘Joyce told me that the entity actually retreated from you when you confronted it with the pulpit Bible from St Sebastian’s. Is this true?’
Nash sighed. Might as well play the game, then. ‘Yes, it is.’
‘You understand how unprecedented that is. Short of the parish stones we have never found anything that the entity has been repelled by. What do you think was different this time?’
With the pilgrim badge resting against the skin of his chest, hidden underneath his shirt and hanging on a slim silver chain about his neck, Nash looked at Father Powell squarely and said, ‘No idea. You lot are the experts.’
Father Powell looked at him for a long time without answering. Nash thought it was likely that the priest knew he was lying, but what could he do about it? There was no way Nash was going to give up the one thing that could save his village from that dead little bitch.
‘I did examine the Bible, obviously,’ Powell said eventually. ‘It’s quite a nice one. I was particularly taken by the number of ornately embroidered and decorated bookmarks it has, although one of them, I did notice, appeared to be missing something. There were a number of loose threads as if something which had once been sewn onto it had been subsequently cut or ripped off. Do you know what that might have been?’
‘You’d have to ask Joyce that.’
‘I did. She said it was just an old pilgrim badge that must have fallen off either some time earlier or in the commotion. I checked with the investigating officers, who said that they’d found nothing like it at the scene. I mean it’s probably got nothing to do with the entity, although interestingly, Joyce told me that it was you who had originally given the badge to her, nearly a year ago.’
Nash waved his hand airily. ‘I have this archaeologist fellow I know who looks out for interesting things for me. I thought she’d like it.’ That much at least was the truth. ‘As you say, probably nothing to do with “the entity” at all. But if I see it I’ll be sure to let you know.’
The Plague Stones Page 22
