Bone Harvest

by James Brogden

  ‘You can have forty if you like,’ said Everett, still smiling, ‘but for every pound over that twenty I’ll pull a tooth out of your head and make you swallow it, how about that?’

  Matt flinched backwards and the man in the dark shirt laughed. ‘Oh, I’m just fucking with you, don’t worry. But twenty’s it. You can negotiate when you’ve got something to negotiate with. In the meantime, beer?’

  They went to the Golden Cross where Everett bought him a Stella and sat down opposite with a pint of ale. It wasn’t especially busy in the pub, but there were a few faces he recognised, so he made sure they took a table that was well hidden because he didn’t want people to think he was gay. He could feel the guy watching him as he drank. ‘What?’

  Everett gestured to the bandage on his hand right that had been there since he’d put his fist through that shed window. ‘I was just wondering when you were going to take that off, that’s all.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean it’s healed, hasn’t it? It’s been healed for a long time, if I’m right. Maybe a day after you did it? Two? Three? It’s a bit hard to tell – it’s slower the first time but it gets quicker as your body gets used to it.’

  Matt felt himself grow shivery and hot all at the same time, and his pulse began to beat heavily in his head. There was no way this guy could have known that. No way. He hadn’t even shown his mum. She taken him to Accident and Emergency straight after and a nurse had put five stitches in his hand, and the next morning they’d been lying there in his bed next to freshly healed skin. He’d been so freaked out that he’d wrapped his hand up again and tried to pretend that nothing had happened, because it was wrong, wasn’t it? It was unnatural and there was something wrong with him.

  ‘Just who the fuck are you, mate?’ he demanded.

  Everett sipped his ale. His smile had gone. ‘I am the man who is going to help you make something of your life, Matthew Hewitson,’ he said. ‘I know what is in your veins, and I can show you how to use it. I will give you strength, and long life, and power over your enemies. Oh look,’ he added without sounding surprised in the least. ‘There’s one now.’

  Later, it would occur to Matt to wonder whether Everett had known all along who was in the pub and had deliberately set this up, but by then it was too late. He looked over to where Everett was indicating, and saw Lauren sitting at a table with her new boyfriend (and his ex-mate) Darren, along with two other lads he didn’t know. She was dressed in her work suit and looked smart and sophisticated. It was humiliating. ‘Fuck,’ he muttered. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Everett. ‘That’s not how this works at all. You never move for someone else again.’ He took another swig of his pint, stood up, and Matt watched in horror as he went over to Lauren’s table with a big shit-eating grin on his face. He tried to shrink further into the corner as words were exchanged, faces turned his way, and Everett came quickly back towards him with an apologetic shrug and four furious-looking people close behind. ‘Sorry, Matt!’ he called. ‘I tried to tell them but they’re just too stupid to listen!’ Everett plonked himself back down in his chair, took a drink, and winked at him.

  Lauren’s face was like thunder as she stormed up to their table. ‘Who the fuck do you think you are, giving orders?’ she yelled at him.

  ‘What? I—’

  ‘And who’s this twat you’ve got delivering your messages?’ By this time Darren Turner and his two mates had arrived, and they were both bigger than him.

  ‘I think it’s his new boyfriend,’ sniggered one of them. Everett tipped him a salute with one finger, still smiling serenely.

  ‘Your fucking pub, is it?’ Darren shouted. ‘Your fucking pub?’

  ‘Listen, Daz—’

  Then Daz grabbed a fistful of Matt’s t-shirt and instinct took over. He was hardly aware of what he did next. This wasn’t one of those choreographed fight scenes from films, this was the ugly, free-for-all scrapping that he’d learned in the school playground, all flailing fists and lashing feet. If it had been a Friday night and the bouncers had been there he’d have stood no chance. Even so, outnumbered three-to-one, he should have been getting the shit kicked out of him but, impossible as it seemed, he was winning. Fists came at him and he felt nothing. Someone’s nose crunched beneath his forehead and he laughed at their squeals. Someone else was on the floor, curled up around his foot and vomiting and Lauren was screaming at him to stop but this felt good, for the first time in his life he felt like he could dole out some of what he’d always had to take and it felt good, and then Everett was pulling at him and they had to leave before the pigs were called.

  * * *

  ‘You’re stronger now,’ Everett said, as he pulled the van into the farmyard and killed the engine.

  ‘No shit.’ Matt had blood all down the front of his t-shirt and covering his hands, but he was grinning like a loon. ‘Want to tell me why that is?’

  Everett shook his head. ‘You need to come in and meet Mother. She’ll explain everything.’

  He led Matt towards the farmhouse, past a couple of old farts that Matt recognised from the allotments, who were painting one of the outhouses.

  ‘What are they doing here?’ he asked, pointing.

  ‘They’re doing here what we hope you will be doing here: helping us to build a new church.’

  Church. So, they were a cult. That explained a lot. He was led into the living room, where a young woman with dark hair was sitting at the big table, working at a laptop. He recognised her from the barbecue, though he couldn’t remember her name – she’d been the one handing out the food. She closed her laptop as they entered, rose and embraced Everett. ‘My darling!’ she beamed. ‘Have you found him?’

  ‘Yes, Mother, I have. This is Matt. Not Matthew.’ He called her ‘mother’, but the way they kissed was not any way a son should kiss his mum. There was some seriously fucked-up shit going on here.

  She turned from Everett, and welcomed Matt with a little bow of the head. ‘Matt. We have so longed to meet you,’ she said.

  ‘Who are you people? What is this place?’

  ‘With respect, those aren’t the questions you most want an answer to, are they?’

  ‘I’m pretty fucking sure they are.’

  ‘How about “why can I do what I can do”?’

  ‘Okay, yeah, let’s go with that.’

  ‘You are blessed, Matt. You have been sanctified through the consumption of the first flesh, and it has made you strong. Do you like being strong?’

  ‘Well, I have to say,’ he said, looking around at the huge fireplace in its naked stone wall, the massive ceiling beams, and the kitchen counters busy with pots and pans, ‘it makes a pleasant change.’

  ‘We’ve made you strong, and you can strengthen us in return. We need people in the community who can be our eyes, ears, and hands. In return, we can offer you money, power, influence, girls.’ She shrugged. ‘Or boys. We have room here for you if you want, unless you like still living at home. More importantly, we can offer you purpose. You can help us to build something truly great. When have you ever had any of those things that you didn’t have to fight for?’

  ‘Not very often, that’s for sure. I got to be honest with you, though, whatever religious thing you’ve got going on here, I’m not into that. So, if you’re thinking of going all Wicker Man and dancing around naked and burning cops and shit, you can count me out.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she smiled. ‘We don’t do that kind of thing. We’re really very normal people once you get to know us. We’ve been watching you for a while, and we think you’re just the sort of person we need.’

  ‘Right.’ He looked around some more, spotting a shelf crammed with bottles of fancy-looking booze. He turned back to her. ‘Can I have a car?’

  ‘Everett will go shopping with you tomorrow.’

  He grinned. ‘Great. I’m in.’

  10

  INFECTION

  DAVID MET DEN
NIE KEELING AT THE ALLOTMENTS ON his way back from work. The message that he’d got from the regulars at Rugeley police station had said that she’d called in a report of a missing man, and uniforms had checked his address but found no sign of him. Could he, as the Neighbourhood Watch Liaison, have a follow-up chat with her and ask around for friends and relatives of the missing Mr Overton? Not a problem, he’d replied. Usually it would have been the last thing he’d have wanted to do after a long shift at the works, but he didn’t feel as fatigued as normal. In fact, for the last couple of weeks he’d been feeling great – he was sleeping well, that niggling shoulder trouble from the old rugby injury had gone, and he was even thinking of taking up running again. He put it down to the effects of an early spring, and if this was climate change then fair enough. One thing about it that frustrated him was that his shift times meant that he couldn’t help Becky care for Alice much more during the day. The other thing – which was entirely selfish, he knew – was that as the sap of the world seemed to be rising, well, so was his. He hadn’t felt this horny since he and Becky had first started going out, maybe even since he was a teenager. Their sex life had tailed off naturally after Alice had been born and then much more dramatically since she’d fallen sick, but it hadn’t been a major problem because they were both exhausted most of the time and if the spirit hadn’t exactly been unwilling the flesh certainly had. Recently, though, he woke up some mornings with the warmth and the smell of her lying next to him and an erection so hard that he could have used it to plough a field.

  He stowed that line of thought firmly away as he parked at the allotments and met Mrs Keeling. She repeated for him what had happened the day before. ‘Has there been any word yet?’ she asked. ‘I’ve asked around here but he didn’t say anything to anybody about going away – but then he was never down here very much.’

  ‘Things like this always take time,’ he said. ‘More so these days, what with all the cutbacks. The regulars are going through his things, trying to track down any relatives. What we can do right now is have a quick look in his shed, just to make sure.’

  Her hand went to her mouth. ‘Oh God, you don’t think…’

  ‘No, I don’t think. It’s just something to cross off the list for the investigating officers, that’s all.’

  He’d already called Angie Robotham, who met them at Overton’s plot with a pair of bolt-cutters. It wasn’t likely that the missing man would be in there if it was locked from the outside, but David liked to be thorough. From the frosty way the two women greeted each other there was obviously something going on between them, but that was their business. Overton’s shed had seen better days; the tar-paper roof was mossy and torn in several places and the windows were green with mould. Hard to see what was inside, whether it was empty or if, God forbid, the missing man was lying in there. His plot wasn’t in a much better state – mostly overgrown with weeds except for the one patch that he’d started to clear. Angie cut the lock free and David pushed the door open, bracing himself for the smell of rotting flesh.

  The shed was empty – if shelves teetering with towers of old flowerpots, a ragged cane chair with a mouldering cushion, boxes of slug pellets, and cobwebs garlanding rusty rakes and trowels could be called empty. On the chair was a book, its pages open and bloated with damp, over which a large black spider ambled. My place now.

  ‘Well, that’s a relief,’ Dennie said.

  ‘Except that we still don’t know where he is,’ Angie replied.

  ‘Okay, well,’ said David, closing the door. ‘I’ll put a message out through the OWL for people to keep their eyes open and tell us if they know anything. Realistically it’s all we can do at the moment.’ And he still had to get home to help Becky with dinner. He’d messaged her that he was going to be a bit late, but he didn’t want to push it.

  * * *

  There were no silver linings to his daughter having acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, none whatsoever. She was into the maintenance phase of her treatment which meant that at least she was being treated on an outpatient’s basis and able to come home, and was utterly exhausted and in bed by eight in the evening – but the fact that this left David and Becky with some time on the sofa to catch up with each other’s day wasn’t much of a consolation.

  ‘Her white cell count is still a bit down,’ she said. ‘So, Dr Barakhada has said that he’s going to up her antibiotics just in case, but apparently her MRD results are good which means that she’s on track for the summer. I told her that she might be able go swimming again, and you should have seen her face.’ Becky snuggled up against him, resting her head on his chest, and he stroked her hair.

  ‘Maybe I should book some time off and take us to the beach,’ he said. ‘I wonder if Cornwall is still there.’

  ‘I would hope so! I can’t wait to be able to do normal family things again.’

  He hadn’t meant to take the conversation in that direction, except maybe he unconsciously had because now all he could think about was that Cornwall holiday when it had just been the two of them, in their twenties, spending long days in the sun and Becky had worn that backless one-piece swimsuit that had slipped off so easily.

  ‘I’ve got an idea about a normal family thing that we can do right now,’ he suggested, moving his hand down to stroke the back of her neck.

  She sat up and looked at him in amazement. ‘Seriously? I’m thinking of what a relief it’s going to be not to have to take my daughter into hospital to have drugs pumped into her stomach and your take from that is “take me now, big boy”?’

  ‘Becky, that’s not what I meant—’

  ‘Well, it sounded like that to me. I’m knackered, David, I can barely keep my eyes open. And you should be too, the shifts you’ve been pulling. How you can have the energy to want… I just don’t know.’

  ‘I know, I’m sorry, love. Look, let’s just forget it and have an early night – not that kind!’ he added hastily, wondering how hard it would be to fit his other foot in his mouth. ‘A nice, clean, vanilla-flavoured early night. With reading and pyjamas.’

  A small smile quirked the corner of her mouth, and he thought he might have got away with it. ‘Vanilla-flavoured?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he mumbled miserably. ‘I just know I’m a shit, and I promise I’ll keep my hands to myself.’

  * * *

  He was as good as his word. Becky was asleep and snoring moments after her head hit the pillow, and he stayed up reading an Ian Rankin thriller. It wasn’t even eleven o’clock when he heard the shuffling of tiny bare feet on the carpet in the hall outside, and then Alice was in the doorway, her hair mussed and her face red and puffy with sleep.

  ‘Daddy?’ she murmured. ‘I don’t feel well.’

  It was as if invisible hands had placed defibrillator pads either side of his naked heart and hit him with a million volts. A little over two years ago he’d taken her for a swimming lesson at the leisure centre and been helping her get changed afterwards when she’d said those exact same words: Daddy, I don’t feel well. He’d dismissed the slight temperature and the bit of a rash on her tummy as the results of the heat and humidity in the changing rooms, and given her some Calpol when they’d got home, but at teatime she’d said it again, Daddy, I don’t feel well, and this time she’d vomited – the milk that had come up had been pink, but she hadn’t been drinking strawberry milk that time. It had been blood. His baby’s blood. She’d been rushed to hospital, and within hours had been diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, was on a drip and surrounded by friendly but urgent-faced people in white coats, and the nightmare had begun for all three of them. He was told that even if he’d taken her straight to hospital the moment she’d said it the first time, those few hours wouldn’t have made a difference, but he didn’t believe it.

  Now, those words now bypassed his rational brain completely and jerked him out of bed in a panic sweat.

  ‘Becky, wake up,’ he said, shoving her, and at the same time falling out of bed to knee
l down in front of Alice. ‘Honey, what’s wrong? Are you in pain?’

  ‘David?’ Becky was sitting up in alarm. ‘What’s going on?’

  He put a hand to Alice’s forehead. It was like touching the side of a furnace. Her hectic colour had nothing to do with sleep.

  ‘Hurts here,’ she murmured, touching the place high up on her chest where the port for administering her chemo had been installed, just under the skin.

  ‘Jesus, Becky, she’s burning up. I’m going to call an ambulance.’

  Infection. Next to the actual cancer itself, it was the thing that they dreaded most. Alice’s immune system had been levelled by the same methotrexate that was taking out the cancer cells, so any infection could become life-threatening very quickly, and places like her port were especially vulnerable. She was on preventative antibiotics anyway, but it seemed that on this occasion they hadn’t been enough.

  ‘Come on, Wondergirl,’ said Becky, sounding calm and controlled. ‘Let’s get you back to bed.’ She turned haunted eyes to David and whispered, ‘Just get them here fast.’

  Becky took her back to bed and he heard her running cold water as he picked up the house phone and dialled 999. He stammered through his answers to the call handler’s questions, and was told that an ambulance had been dispatched and would be with them in ten minutes.

  ‘Ten minutes,’ he told Becky. She had pressed a cold, damp hand towel to Alice’s forehead and was stroking her hair. ‘Do you want to, uh, get dressed and get her stuff together, or, uh, maybe should I…?’

  ‘I don’t really care, David,’ she said. ‘Just as long as they get here.’

  But by the time he’d thrown some clothes on and taken over from her while she did the same, ten minutes had passed. Then eleven. Then twelve.

  ‘Why aren’t they here?’ he growled, staring out of the window at the road which remained stubbornly empty of blue flashing lights.