The Plague Stones

by James Brogden

  There were promises of blood and fire and vengeance.

  He listened and agreed.

  There were instructions.

  Then Her dead blood touched the core of him and his heart gave a great staggering leap of protest, almost stopping completely. He reeled away from Her grip, light-headed and retching, and fell on the grass.

  * * *

  When his eyesight returned he saw that She was gone. What an idiot he’d been, to imagine himself dead earlier. What stupid, childish self-delusion. He knew what death felt like now – its merest fingertip had brushed his soul and that had almost finished him. But he had a taste for it now, and he knew exactly who to take it to. Hester had shown him how.

  Her will be done.

  32

  DESECRATION

  FOR SOMETHING DESIGNED TO KEEP DEATH ITSELF AT bay, thought Rajko, the parish boundary stones were pitifully easy to destroy.

  He started with the Epistle Stone by the postbox, since it was on the corner of two relatively quiet streets where he was least likely to be disturbed. Hester had said that he probably wouldn’t be able to get to all of them before being caught, but the more he could desecrate the weaker the blessing would be against Her. The stone here was at the base of a waist-high wall made up of odd-shaped natural rocks, mortared and whitewashed, but with plenty of gaps and crevices between them. It was some kind of granite, with carvings that had been eroded over time. He set down the heavy sports holdall and looked around for any witnesses. It was after one in the morning, but he wanted to make sure. He wanted to do this right. For Her.

  Satisfied that he remained unobserved, he took from the holdall a foot-long cold chisel of the kind used on construction sites for breaking up lumps of concrete, and a short-handled sledgehammer. He wedged the tip of the chisel into a gap next to the boundary stone and gave it an experimental tap with the hammer. It bit into the mortar and held. He drew the hammer back and whacked the chisel as hard as he could. The shock of the blow jarred his arm and put a spike of pain through his wounded hand but the chisel drove deeper, so he whacked it again, driving it deeper still until it became stuck and he had to knock it from side to side to loosen it so that he could pull it out and drive it in on the other side of the stone.

  It shifted, like a loose tooth in its socket.

  He looked around again; nobody seemed to have been disturbed by the noise. At least, nobody who was coming out to do anything about it.

  He worked around the stone methodically, knocking it looser and looser with each blow until there was a big-enough gap above it that he could get his fingers over the top and pull it free from the wall, toppling it onto the pavement where it lay in a litter of mortar fragments.

  He paused, hands on his knees, to catch his breath. His arms ached and he had a thumping headache – worse than yesterday’s, despite dosing up on paracetamol and a line of ketamine. The aches and chills had started after his communion with Hester, and he knew that She had passed something on to him through Her blood, so he’d got together what he needed as quickly as he could without alerting his Uncle Andrii or any of the other members of the extended Gorić clan who had stayed after the daca. He suffered an evening of being the focus of their awful pity, their drunken, tearful hugs, their sympathy that he was so young to have to become a man when all he wanted to do was scream at them How am I supposed to be a man when there is no family left to be a man for?!

  He grabbed the hammer with both hands and brought it down on the stone from overhead, and with a crack like a gunshot it split in two.

  And She was there, standing on the other side of the wall, smiling Her blessing at him. He felt the aches and fatigue melt from his bones in Her presence.

  ‘One,’ he said to Her.

  She nodded. Continue.

  He packed his tools back in the holdall and went off to find the stone above the Oxfam shop.

  * * *

  He managed to take out the Horse Stone, the Red Stone on the village cenotaph, and the Bumping Stone – which only had to be levered out of the pavement with a crowbar – and She followed him each time, waiting just on the other side of the intangible barrier which he was taking apart piece by piece, and with each one She seemed to come closer, clearer.

  Things began to unravel at the Sunrise Stone by the Rec.

  He’d cut the lock off its protective railing with a pair of bolt cutters and was pissing on the stone while he worked out how to destroy it, because it was easily the largest of the parish stones and his exertions had taken their toll, when he heard voices, low in murmured conversation, coming towards him. Hurriedly he tucked his dick away and crouched down by the stone which, large as it was, couldn’t hide him completely. He could only hope that the semi-darkness would take care of that; it was nearly three in the morning but streetlights still didn’t help.

  The murmurers came closer – one male, one female, walking with heads close together over the glow of a phone screen, and he thought great, he was going to get away with it; the brightness of the phone would bugger their night vision and he’d just be one shadow amongst many. They were passing him, and he saw with surprise that they were two students he vaguely recognised from the year above him in college, when a fit of coughing struck.

  It didn’t just strike him – it grabbed him, clenched his ribcage in giant fists and squeezed a volley of harsh barks from his lungs so violent that it felt like he was hacking himself inside out, and when it finally released him he was light-headed and gasping for breath. There was wetness on his hands and the stone in front of his face. It gleamed black in the streetlight, and he knew that it was his own blood.

  ‘Is somebody there?’ The boyfriend.

  A phone camera-torch lit up and found him.

  ‘Oh my God…’ The girlfriend.

  ‘Wait – is that Rajko?’ said the guy. ‘Raj, is that you? It’s me, Ben – Ben Hannan, remember? Jesus, man, are you okay?’

  Rajko used the stone to drag himself to his feet. ‘Hi Ben,’ he said. ‘Hi, uh…’

  ‘Izzie. Porter.’

  ‘Sure. Izzie.’

  He remembered now. Ben was round and ginger and studying something to do with business, and Izzie was into eighties retro and doing something with electronics. It was exam season so they’d obviously been doing a bit of late-night revision of human anatomy and reproduction in the Rec. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Hester and Her followers, almost close enough to touch the railings. Could Ben and Izzie see them too? Were they that close?

  Ben was still babbling on. ‘We heard you’d left. Sorry to hear about what happened to your family. Jesus, that’s awful. What are you doing here, man?’

  ‘Oh just desecrating some stuff. You know.’ He wasn’t going to get the chance to physically damage the stone now; his piss and blood would have to do.

  ‘Ben,’ murmured Izzie, ‘we should go.’ She was wide-eyed and nervous, and had a right to be. Rajko’s reputation went before him, never mind that right at this moment he must have looked terrible. He wiped the blood from his mouth with one sleeve and picked up the nearest thing to hand, which was the bolt cutters. He was feeling better already, though he knew it was only temporary.

  ‘No, sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to hurt you but I will fuck you up if you try to run away.’

  Ben tried to laugh it off, a high-pitched, quavering bray of a laugh. ‘That’s not funny, man—’

  Rajko didn’t bother answering, just took a couple of quick strides out of the railed enclosure, bunched a fist in the front of Ben’s hoodie before the other lad could do much more than back away a step, pivoted, and flung him inside. He bounced off the stone with an oof!

  Izzie screamed.

  He grabbed her too and held up the heavy jaws of the bolt cutters in front of her face. ‘Shut up,’ he suggested, ‘or I’ll hurt you. A lot.’

  Her screams subsided into snivelling, and he bundled her inside the cage with her boyfriend.

  ‘Give me your phones,’ he o
rdered.

  They obeyed, and he smashed their phones on the pavement.

  He made them take their arms out of their hoodies’ sleeves and then used the empty sleeves to tie them to the railings like straitjackets on opposite sides of the stone so that they couldn’t help each other get free. He couldn’t do anything to stop them shouting for help, but then this wasn’t a residential area and it would take time for someone to respond, and he only needed a breathing space to get the last two done.

  * * *

  There was no way he was going to be able to break into the White Hart without setting off the burglar alarm and getting grabbed by the pigs long before he had a chance to do damage to the Ale Stone. Fortunately, the stone was part of the hearth at the base of the main chimney – all he had to do was get up onto the roof.

  A table in the beer garden gave access to the sloping roof above the delivery yard, from which it was easy to boost himself up onto the tiles of the single-storey restaurant. He went along that to the main building, and then used the old iron guttering to get up onto the steep roof, finally following the corner of two adjacent slopes for purchase along old and cracked tiles up to the spine of the roof where he found the main chimney stack.

  Sick as he was, it was physically draining, and all the climbing was doing terrible things to his bad hand. He rested to catch his breath, stifling another coughing fit in the crook of his elbow. Gingerly he unwrapped his wound and examined it, though it was impossible to see much in the glistening mess.

  Still, it was a decent view from up here, he thought, looking over the immediate environs of Haleswell, north across the neighbouring suburbs to the bright glow of the city centre and south to the dark countryside of Warwickshire. From a vantage point like this a man could watch a whole empire burn.

  He’d left the holdall below, but carried up the few things he needed in a smaller drawstring bag around his neck, which he set out carefully along the roof ridge: a plastic funnel, a packet of children’s party balloons, a cigarette lighter, a packet of Rizla rolling papers, and an aluminium camping thermos full of petrol.

  As a kid he’d always loved making water bombs.

  The chimney pot was covered by a wire mesh anti-bird guard, but he kicked that free, unconcerned about the clatter it made falling down the roof. Filling the balloons in the dark was actually easier than he’d feared; a little trickier fitting a Rizla into the knot of each balloon’s neck as he tied it closed, but not impossible. He lit and dropped each one in quick succession down the chimney. Some would go out, but only one had to take.

  And take they did.

  He was rewarded by a bright yellow bloom and a gush of heat from the chimney pot, followed by the almost immediate shrilling of a fire alarm inside. Abandoning his gear, he slithered as quickly as he could without breaking his neck back to the ground, grabbed the holdall and ran as flames rose in the pub windows. He wished he could stay to watch it burn. He really should have left this until last, but he’d wanted to save a treat for himself: there was only the Feenans’ stone to go.

  * * *

  The fire alarm ripped Alan Pankowicz from sleep and he thrashed out of bed, tangling himself in the bedclothes and falling to the floor. The manager’s flat was on the inn’s second floor at the back, above the kitchens and the office where the alarm control box was situated. Gritting his teeth against the braying noise, he opened his bedroom door and headed for the staircase without stopping to put on either his dressing gown or his slippers. It was his bare feet which felt something small and furry brush past them as he reached the first riser, and then the exquisite, bone-deep sting of small teeth which bit into the Achilles tendon of his left ankle. His scream was lost in the noise of the alarm. Howling, he bent, twisted, swatting at his foot as he pulled it up, horrified at the tugging weight of something which had its jaws locked into the back of his ankle and wasn’t letting go. His fingers closed on the plump body of a rat – one of Hers, obviously – and squeezed with vicious glee, but by then he was already losing his balance and toppling towards the drop. He flailed with his other arm, and his fingertips briefly slipped over the smooth wood of the banister before losing contact with it and he was falling, tumbling headfirst, a series of concussive jolts as he hit the stairs with pelvis, rib, shoulder, and then there was a tremendous crack! as his neck snapped and then there was nothing else at all.

  33

  INTRUSION

  WHEN THE LIGHT WOKE TRISH SHE THOUGHT THAT Peter had got up to use the loo, so she pulled the covers over her head and turned away, already drifting back to sleep, until her knee grazed his thigh and he rolled away from her with a snort, which couldn’t be right because how could he be in bed if he was in the bathroom too? Plus, the light was coming from the other direction – from the bedroom window.

  And now she could hear grunting and metallic ringing noises like a blacksmith’s anvil coming from outside.

  She jack-knifed into a sitting position, wide awake and terrified. Bright, cold halogen light was streaming through a gap in their bedroom curtains from the security floodlight bolted to the rear of the house.

  They were being burgled.

  ‘Peter!’ She kicked him awake.

  ‘Whudizzit?’ he mumbled.

  She was already reaching for her phone. ‘There’s somebody in the back garden. I’m calling the police.’

  ‘What?’ He struggled up, knuckling his eyes.

  ‘Don’t do anything!’ she hissed, dialling 999. ‘Let the police look after this!’

  ‘What, you mean like last time?’ he growled. ‘Fuck that.’ He started climbing out of bed.

  ‘999, what service please?’ asked a female operator.

  ‘Peter!’

  ‘Miss?’ said the operator. ‘Do you need the police?’

  ‘What? Yes!’

  ‘Transferring you now.’ She rushed after Peter and got a hand on his shoulder as he opened the bedroom door but he shook her off and carried on downstairs, dressed only in his t-shirt and boxers. Then there was a male police emergency operator asking for her address and whether she was in any danger, and by the time she caught up with Peter he was gripping a poker from the fireplace and heading towards the back door.

  ‘Mum?’ Toby was on the upper landing in his pyjamas and Aston Villa hoodie.

  ‘A patrol is on the way,’ said the operator. ‘Can you stay on the line please, Miss?’

  ‘Toby, go back to your room and don’t come out until I say so.’

  ‘Miss?’

  ‘Mum, I think Maya’s brother Rajko is trying to wreck the stone.’

  ‘What?’ She hung up and flew after her husband in only her nightshirt.

  In the glare of the security floodlight she saw everything. She saw Peter running at the Gorić boy with the poker upraised in his fist like a sword, yelling, ‘Get the fuck away from my family!’ She saw Gorić’s triumphant grin as he stood above the parish stone that he’d managed to halfway unseat – it was sitting aslant in a yawning hole with the pry bar that he’d used, and she saw that in a gesture of infantile vindictiveness he’d spray-painted on the stone a cock and balls in poisonous green. She saw his crudely bandaged hand, dripping red, come up to meet Peter’s attack. They grappled. Gorić fell and Peter went with him, the pair of them rolling on the grass, punching and kicking, Gorić finishing on top, kneeling on Peter’s forearm so that he dropped the poker with a grunt of pain, planting his bloodied hand in Peter’s face as he pushed himself back up. Peter grabbed at his ankle as he tried to lurch away, the lurch turning into an uncontrolled fall, arms outstretched, hitting the stone with one hand and his forehead which made a dull crack! and the stone was finally shoved past its tipping point, toppling onto its side. Gorić fell beside it, groaning. Peter climbed to his feet, wiping his face and spitting out whatever had got into his mouth.

  ‘Mum? Is Dad okay?’ Toby had been watching all of this from the back doorway.

  She wheeled on him. ‘What did I tell you?’ she snapped.
‘Get back upstairs! The police will be here soon!’

  Peter advanced on Gorić. ‘They’re going to lock you up and throw away the fucking key,’ he said. ‘Should have happened a long time ago.’

  Gorić’s groans had turned into a strange kind of laughter; giggling mixed with phlegmy coughing. Blood streamed from a gash in his forehead.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ Peter demanded, standing over him.

  ‘Peter, please, leave him alone,’ Trish pleaded. ‘Let the police take care of him.’

  Gorić giggled again. ‘Police aren’t going to be shit all use to you.’

  ‘What are you on about?’

  ‘She’s here… She’s here… and all of you… all of you are fucked!’

  ‘Mum…’ Toby’s voice was the low mewl of a terrified animal, and he was pointing to the end of the garden, where Hester and Her followers were emerging from the shadows into the brilliant glare of the security light. There was nothing to hide their wounds or their weapons, or the naked hatred on their faces. Peter scrambled away from Gorić, grabbed up the poker and rejoined his family.

  The dead girl walked up to the fallen stone which had for so long marked the limits of Her reach. She prodded it with Her bare big toe, and smiled.

  And stepped over it.

  ‘Get in the house, now!’ Trish ordered.

  They darted into the utility room and slammed the back door. Trish locked it, then twisted the small knobs at top and bottom which engaged the deadbolts.

  ‘Deadbolts,’ she said, and uttered a high little laugh.

  ‘What?’ Peter was staring at her.

  ‘Bolts to keep out dead people.’

  ‘That’s not fucking funny!’