‘Call them again.’
‘I’m sure they’ll be here…’
‘Call them again.’
So he called them again. He was put through to a different dispatcher who said, ‘I’m very sorry about that, sir. We’ve received a high number of call-outs this evening, but I can see that an ambulance is on its way to you and should be with you in three to five minutes.’
‘Well, is it three or is it five?’ he snapped. ‘My wife, who’s looking after our daughter – you know, the one I told you about? The one with leukaemia? She’d quite like to know.’
‘All I can say, sir, is that I’m very sorry, but I can see—’
David slammed the phone down.
Three minutes became five, and five became seven.
He marched back into Alice’s bedroom. ‘I’m taking her,’ he said.
‘No you’re not,’ she said, and she was right; he knew as well as she did that it was at least a half hour drive to County Hospital in Stafford before Alice could get treatment whereas the ambulance crew could get an IV line into her the moment they got here. He’d seen the quality of emergency services deteriorate terribly in rural parts of the country like this as he’d grown up – it was part of the reason why he’d volunteered as a Special in the first place – but he couldn’t bring himself to believe things were so bad that it would take nearly an hour for the ambulance to arrive.
But they had to arrive first.
It couldn’t have been more than a minute or two, but it felt like geological ages, watching the sweat breaking out on his baby’s forehead and seeing her twist and moan with discomfort as the infection rampaged unchecked through her already beleaguered system. Eventually there were flashing lights outside, and a heavy knock at the door.
11
SNARES
WITH SPRING CAME RABBITS, INCLUDING IN THE fields around the Farrow’s farm, and Gar was showing Matt how to make and set snares. Matt had not been keen about the idea to begin with because as far as he was concerned rabbit trapping was for pikeys and gyppos, plus Gar scared the absolute shit out of him, but Mother had insisted, and he had quickly come to learn that when Mother snapped her fingers everybody at the farm jumped. And it turned out that it was actually quite fun.
He had to admit straight up that he had no idea what Gar was. Everett had claimed that they were brothers, and Matt had shrugged okay, whatever, but he wasn’t sure that the pair of them were even the same species. He was like something off one of those programmes about conjoined twins. He had hair growing down his back. Not long like a girl’s, but as in thick black hair growing out of the skin down past his shoulder blades. And there was definitely something wrong with the guy’s head – maybe it was in his genes or maybe he’d had an accident or something, because who had teeth like that? But that was only on the outside. Gar was a man of few words, conveying all the meaning he needed in just a few grunts, and he appreciated that. Gar listened instead of delivering speeches, and Matt appreciated that too.
For most of his adolescence the countryside had simply been miles of fuck-all between where he was and where he wanted to be, navigable only by sucking up to mates with cars or spending what little he had on Ubers – but never the bus, not that there were any, and only under the most dire of circumstances begging a lift from his mum. He walked when he had to, with headphones in and face to his phone. It never occurred to him that there might be anything worth looking at on the other sides of the hedgerows.
Gar took him out into the field behind the stone barn just before dawn. The air smelled clear and damp and dew soaked his ankles as they walked, Matt hurrying to keep pace with Gar’s enormous strides. But he slowed down as they approached a stile in the hedge, turned back and mimed shh with a finger to his lips, then indicated that Matt should go first over the stile. Matt eased himself slowly through the gap in the hedge, and as he saw dozens of furry shapes bounding away with their white tails flashing he felt a surge of childlike joy that he hadn’t experienced in a long time. Gar joined him, and showed him the trails that Benjamin Bunny and his mates had made coming through hedgerows, and the burrows where they were hiding.
‘Supper,’ Gar had said, pointing, but since his mouth couldn’t form p’s correctly it had sounded more like ‘suffer’.
Matt didn’t know how Everett’s group was funding itself but it seemed that there was a genuine need to feed quite a few mouths. Sometimes people stayed to supper, but none of them were accorded the privilege of being allowed to live at the farmhouse like Matt was, and he appreciated that most of all. So when Mother said that Gar was to teach him how to snare rabbits, he hadn’t complained.
The first time he’d got bored and started checking his social media, Gar had slapped the phone out of his hand and grunted: ‘No.’ The second time, Gar had grabbed it off him and squeezed it until Matt could see it actually bending, and when Matt had pleaded with him to stop he’d given it back and repeated: ‘No!’ and Matt stashed it away.
But Gar’s heavy fingers were also oddly delicate when it came to the practice of setting snares. It was a lot easier than he’d expected: a wide slip-knot of wire with its free end tied to a stake and hammered into the ground on one side of Benjamin’s trail, and hanging loosely on a smaller stake on the other side of the trail, so that the open mouth of the snare’s loop covered the trail itself, about half an inch above the ground. Mr Bunny came hopping along, popped his head through the snare, strangulating himself as he tried to escape, and hey presto – rabbit stew. Together he and Gar set a dozen of these around the farm, and then came back the next day to see if they had worked. There were three rabbits, one of them in a snare that Matt had built and set completely on his own, and he felt another swelling of a long-forgotten feeling. This one was pride.
The rabbit was still alive, having got a forepaw through the snare too and so prevented itself from strangling, and it kicked and thrashed in exhausted panic, its eyes wide and rolling, as he knelt down beside it. Having only ever seen them as roadkill, he marvelled at how soft and fluffy its fur actually was.
Gar grunted, and mimed a twisting motion with both hands.
‘Really?’ he asked. ‘We’ve already got two. Can’t we let this one go?’
Gar repeated the motion.
Matt sighed. ‘Sorry, chum,’ he murmured. It was a word he’d heard Everett using, and it sounded nice and retro. The rabbit froze in terror as he pinned it to the ground with one hand, feeling how warm it was and its tiny heart hammering away, as he loosened the snare with the other. Without trying to think too much about what he was doing, and trying not to get bitten, he grabbed its head and twisted it sharply a hundred and eighty degrees, hearing the sharp crack of its neck breaking. The hammering heart stopped.
Gar’s heavy hand clapped him on the back, and there was that feeling of pride again. Matt looked at the small grey corpse in his hands. Snares were one thing, it was like fixing a punctured bicycle tyre or rolling a spliff, but he hadn’t been sure that when it came to it he could actually kill another living creature.
Turned out he could.
‘Cool,’ he said.
* * *
Later that day, Everett showed him how to use the tractor’s back-hoe to dig a trench behind the big tool shed. He assumed it was for burying rubbish, and Everett said, ‘In a manner of speaking, yes.’ It was a lot fiddlier than making a snare, as there were levers and gears to deal with, and he nearly took out a fence by mistake. It was only a short trench, a little over two metres long by half a metre wide, and he saw that one had already been dug and refilled nearby. The long mound of earth looked weirdly like a grave.
‘Hey, who are we burying?’ he joked.
Everett smiled and said, ‘Haven’t decided yet.’
* * *
‘Is everything set for Torelli?’ asked Ardwyn, a week before the second tusk moon.
‘All set,’ said the deserter. ‘I still think it’s a shame, though. I quite liked him.’
He’d chatted with Ben Torelli a few times at the allotments. Torelli grew things that didn’t need an awful lot of looking after, like spinach and chillies, and his plot seemed to be mostly an excuse for him to sit out on clear evenings smoking dope. Everett had joined him once or twice out of politeness, but also as a way of sounding out how useful Torelli might be to the Farrow; he’d been at the barbecue and eaten the first flesh, and thus was hallowed. The discovery that he was also ex-army had led Everett to feel that there might have been the possibility of a connection based on shared experiences, albeit within reason. Anecdotes about the Great War were obviously off-limits, and Everett’s own apparent age meant that he probably didn’t look old enough to have served in anything much before Iraq, Bosnia at a push. He also knew that a confrontation with the authorities was inevitable at some stage and fighters were always useful.
But Torelli was another loner like Overton, and the fact that he was unlikely to be missed was more useful to Mother, it seemed.
Torelli rented a small flat in a new housing development on the western edge of the village, which had been built on the site of an old colliery. Thirty years after the miners’ strike had killed the industry it had been sold off and the pits back-filled with concrete, but there were still areas that surveyors had marked as too unstable to build on and so these had been left to grow wild – not open countryside, not park, but edgeland; a loosely connected archipelago of untamed places known locally as the Links and used by dog-walkers, teenagers, courting couples and residents like Torelli taking a shortcut between the village high street and home.
He worked driving forklifts for a distribution warehouse near Lichfield, and his habit, rain or shine, was to get home from his shift, head out to the allotments for a peaceful spliff where there was less chance of nosy neighbours causing trouble, and then saunter home again, usually via one of the village’s fast-food places to pick up something for his dinner.
On the day of the tusk moon Moccus blessed them again with rain, because it made it so much easier for the deserter to pull up beside Torelli as he was walking home, head down and hood up against the weather, water streaming from the plastic carrier bag that swung at his side. Everett had timed it so that he caught the man on an empty stretch of narrow lane running through the Links overshadowed by trees; another few yards one way or the other and Torelli would have been on a footpath and Gar would have had to get out for him, making things potentially a lot more complicated.
He slowed and wound down the passenger window.
‘Ben!’ he called. ‘Hey, Ben!’
Torelli looked up, and his face lit with recognition.
‘Give you a lift? It’s pissing down.’
‘Really?’ Torelli replied drily. ‘Hadn’t noticed. Cheers, mate.’ He opened the door and climbed up into the van, bringing with him the smell of doner kebab and marijuana. ‘You’re a life saver.’
‘You’d better believe it. Where do you live?’
‘I’ll direct you.’
He had no intention of doing this on an open road, no matter how narrow, where anybody might happen along. For the first ‘wrong’ turn he was able to claim driver error. For the second, that he knew a quicker way to correct the first mistake. By the time he’d taken a third wrong turning he could tell that Torelli was becoming suspicious. The vessel was no fool, no slow-witted beast like Overton, and the deserter found himself beginning to enjoy this. Torelli might actually prove to be a challenge. There was a wire fence and a gate that they’d cut the chain from earlier in the day, which led into a wide, derelict area of old gravel piles overgrown with weeds, between which ran the long-rusted rails of a narrow-gauge track that had once been something to do with the old colliery.
Torelli didn’t express surprise or confusion, and he didn’t demand to know what the fuck was going on. If he had, which was what Everett and Gar were expecting, the whole thing would have been over quicker and with a lot less mess. As it was, Torelli simply ripped the passenger door open and legged it.
The deserter grinned. ‘Gar!’
But Gar was already moving.
He burst from the back of the van like a bull at a rodeo, and powered after Torelli who had chucked his carrier bag away and was angling between two of the large conical piles of overgrown spoilage. Torelli wasn’t wasting his breath in screaming or trying to attract nearby help because he probably knew there wasn’t any, and again Everett felt that grudging respect. He floored the accelerator and the van’s wheels spat gravel as he steered between two other heaps in an attempt to head the runner off. Torelli by now must have seen that the whole area was fenced off because he started slogging it up the slope of the nearest pile, either because he thought somehow he could jump over the fence from there or maybe just because his soldier’s instincts told him to gain higher ground.
They were good instincts. Gar was starting to huff a little as his feet slipped and dug into the loose surface; being significantly heavier than his quarry, it must have been like trying to run up a sand-dune for him. Torelli paused, picked up a lump of sharp-edged concrete about the same size as his head with both hands, and lobbed it at Gar. Gar tried to dodge, but he couldn’t move very far to either side and the missile bounced off his right shoulder, cutting it open in a red splash. Gar roared in pain and fury.
‘Not happening, chum, sorry,’ said the deserter. He slewed the van to a halt on the other side of the small mountain on which Torelli was currently playing king-of-the-castle, leapt out and sprinted up the slope. Torelli turned to meet him; his eyes were wide and his nostrils flaring, and wet hair hung in his eyes.
‘What the fuck?’ he gasped, and just kept repeating, ‘What the fuck?’
Some part of Torelli was enjoying this, the deserter knew, but he didn’t have the time to indulge this luxury, and he drew his Webley. He’d had it since the trenches and it had done him good service ever since. He kept it in perfect working condition even though he’d rarely had to use it in the last few decades; these days mostly just showing it to someone did the trick, as it did now. Torelli’s hands went high, and he stepped back.
‘Hey, wait, man, I don’t know what this is about, but—’
Then Gar slammed into him from behind. Torelli went down hard. Gar roared and stamped on his lower leg, and the brittle snap of breaking bone was almost as loud as the gunshot would have been. Torelli twisted and howled. Before Everett could stop him, Gar stamped on the other leg and broke that too. Everett had heard most sounds that a human being in agony could make, but this was loud even so.
‘Gar! For God’s sake man! Muffle that noise!’
Gar clamped a hand over Torelli’s mouth but the screaming just went on behind his fingers. Between them they dragged him back down to the van, tied him up and gagged him, then looked at Gar’s shoulder. It was a deep gash, and his arm was already red down to the elbow.
‘You’ll survive,’ Everett said, and it was true, the blessing of Moccus would ensure that this would heal in a few days, but in the meantime it was bleeding abominably so he did his best to wad it up with some old dust rags that were in the van. When he’d finished he nodded at Torelli, who was semi-conscious with shock, moaning and writhing, and said to Gar, ‘You’re going to have to carry that now.’
Gar indicated his wounded arm and made an indignant sound.
‘I don’t care. It serves you right for losing your temper.’ He started the van and drove them back to the farm.
That evening the weather improved enough for them to see the tusk moon in a narrow band of clear sky low down on the western horizon, chasing the setting sun into darkness, and as if that were a sign from Moccus the replenishment rite was completed in the early hours of the following morning without complication. Unlike the first vessel, who had just wept and trembled, Torelli fought right to the end, which the deserter found satisfying; Moccus would need something of that defiance when he rose anew.
Another piece of good news was that the old woman seemed to have taken t
he hint and was not sleeping in her shed. So too, the others that they had brought into the periphery of the new church had been sent home, including the boy; it was one thing to ask them to sweep floors and dig holes, but quite another to expect them to accept the necessity for the use of human vessels in the replenishment. Once they had seen Moccus arise with their own eyes, however, things might very well be different.
Ardwyn, Everett and Gar returned in high spirits, but as they approached the farm gate Everett peered through the windscreen at a pale blur which had formed in the very periphery of the headlights.
‘What’s this?’ he murmured.
The blur resolved into a human figure: an old woman, wearing only a nightdress, standing barefoot in the middle of the road by their gate.
The deserter cursed. It was Denise Keeling, and she had that damned dog with her.
12
SOMNAMBULISM
SABRINA IS BOUGHT FOR DENNIE FROM A CRAFT FAIR IN Loughborough in the winter of 1960, when she is six years old, and quickly becomes her favourite toy. She is a rag doll, with mitten-shaped hands and round feet, golden hair in a long pony-tail and large friendly eyes. She wears a pair of baggy knickers and the fabric of her body is printed so that it looks like she’s wearing a vest too, and a white blouse under a pink pinafore dress, which fastens up the back with pink flower-shaped buttons. She does not have any fancy lace, ribbons or flowery patterns. She looks happy, calm, sensible, and down to earth; the kind of no-nonsense friend that you can rely on in a tight spot, who will keep your secrets, and never shirk from telling you the truth, even though it might sometimes be a bit painful.
Dennie’s mummy and daddy enjoy watching her play with Sabrina, having tea parties and conversations, but they never suspect that Sabrina might be actually talking because Dennie is the only one who can hear her. And Sabrina always tells Dennie the truth.
Most of the things she tells Dennie are helpful, like where Mummy’s spectacles are when she loses them, or what the weather is going to be like before a family trip to the park, or that Daddy’s car is just about to appear around the corner at the bottom of the road. Dennie quickly learns not to tell her parents everything that Sabrina says because Dennie sometimes forgets and does things like telling her mother who is on the phone while it is still ringing and they give her some very odd looks that she doesn’t like.
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