Bone Harvest

by James Brogden

  Mother was sitting cross-legged in the middle of a patch of bare soil where the false floor had been, chanting as she rocked back and forth with something across her lap that looked like an alpine horn made out of fused vertebrae. But she was altered; her beauty had become ancient and hard-edged, like a tree aged almost to stone. The earth in front of her was black and glistening, saturated with blood, and on the other side a girl was kneeling with her neck outstretched over it – tied, gagged, and held in place by Everett. The butcher had one fist in her hair and the other holding a black sickle-blade to her throat, and was grinning with teeth filed to bloodstained points. This was what Everett and Ardwyn really looked like, Dennie understood, in the place where the echoes came from, the place that only Sabrina could see. Lauren Jeffries turned pleading eyes to her.

  ‘The police…’ said Dennie, but that was as far as she got.

  Everett’s cannibal grin widened as he swept the knife across Lauren’s throat.

  * * *

  David was being chewed. He was face down in the dirt under Gar’s full weight, and the only thing stopping Gar from taking off his shoulder and left arm along with it was his jacket, which had so far resisted being torn. He actually heard one of the bastard’s teeth squeal as it scraped his shoulder blade, like a carpentry nail being dragged along glass. Gar’s breathing was full of gasps and crackles, and David hoped that he’d suffered a punctured lung.

  Viggo came at Gar again, and he was forced to relinquish his human prey once more. Weakened as Gar was by his chest wound, the dog easily bore him to the ground, and it was all David could do to flop to one side as they came down right next to him like falling giants, with Viggo’s forelegs planted on Gar’s chest and his muzzle working at the boar-man’s throat – worrying, tearing, flinging pieces of flesh, and fan-sprays of blood while Gar squealed and beat at him weakly and more weakly still until he wasn’t moving at all. But Viggo kept snarling and ripping all the same.

  David was dimly aware that somewhere Dennie was screaming, but there was nothing he could do about it.

  That was when the allotments were bathed in blue flashing lights and the sound of sirens.

  * * *

  Dennie screamed, but it wasn’t just her voice screaming. Sabrina was screaming with her, screaming through her, and for a moment she was there in the shed for all to see, raging and accusatory. Everett reeled in bafflement at the sight, letting go of Lauren, who slumped forward onto the blood-soaked earth, making hideous gargling sounds as her lifeblood jetted into it.

  ‘What is this?’ he snarled. ‘What is this!?’

  Then police sirens split the night and a patrol car slewed to a halt diagonally across the neighbouring allotment. Doors slammed, radios barked, voices shouted.

  ‘The end for you,’ Sabrina told him. ‘Mud and worms and nothing else, Deserter.’

  ‘NO!’ He tossed the knife aside and produced a pistol, then shoved past her and out into the night.

  ‘Everett?’ cried Ardwyn. ‘Everett, don’t you dare leave me!’

  But he was gone, and the door swung shut behind him. His pistol cracked once, twice, and there were more shouts.

  Dennie fell to her knees by Lauren, whose terrified eyes were rolling in her shock-pale face. She was trying to say something but could only make wet sounds. Dennie clamped her hands to the appalling wound, her hands instantly slicked – thinking how hot the girl’s blood was – and screamed, ‘Help us! For God’s sake somebody please help us!’ The headache was building, harder and faster than before, and blood was pouring from her nose to mix with the gore.

  ‘Your God,’ sneered Mother. ‘Your bloodless, impotent God. Meet mine.’

  She raised the bone horn to her mouth and blew.

  * * *

  It was an act of pure desperation. Ardwyn had no idea whether four vessels would be enough. The replenishment had always required six to be complete, but that had been with swine. Human blood might be more potent, who knew? The bone carnyx might summon Moccus whole and entire, or not at all, or as some half-finished thing. She might be arrested, or even killed by men with guns. The only thing she knew for certain was that it was over, at least like this, and that she could not leave him in the ground to languish half-born. So she blew the bone carnyx and summoned her god to life – whatever form that took.

  * * *

  Dennie felt the ground begin to convulse and did her best to twist her body around to shield Lauren while trying to maintain the hold on her throat. The girl’s shuddering was becoming weaker. Sabrina had disappeared, or retreated into her again, and the shed had resumed its normal dimensions as her sight left Dennie. Hands flailed upward through the blood-mired soil and something with arms and legs and a head but otherwise obscured by the filth that hung in clots from it, crawled like a lizard out of a swamp to stand, trembling and weak, at the edge of the pit.

  ‘My… lord?’ murmured Mother.

  Its head swivelled towards her, and then back to regard Dennie.

  Dennie knew those eyes. The last time she’d seen them, they’d been glazed with death and staring up at the shovelful of soil that she’d dumped on them in this very spot. The fact that they had subsequently been exhumed and reburied elsewhere didn’t change the truth that this place was where the rootstock had originally been planted – all the innocent blood that had been spilled here since was the fruiting scion, and this hybrid thing that glared at her with Colin Neary’s eyes above a tusk-filled muzzle was the result.

  ‘That’s not possible…’ she whispered.

  ‘Interfering old witch,’ he snarled, and reached for her. ‘Her blood is mine!’ The creature wasn’t reaching for herself, Dennie realised, but Lauren.

  ‘You’ll have to get through me first,’ she replied, and something of Sabrina must have still been in her voice because the creature hesitated.

  ‘You there, in the shed!’ shouted a woman from outside. ‘This is the police! Armed units are on the way! Step out now!’

  ‘My lord Moccus,’ said Ardwyn. ‘There’s no time. You must leave now while you can.’

  Moccus uttered a squeal of rage and frustration, and fled the same way that Everett had done a moment ago. Someone outside screamed, ‘Jesus, what the fuck is that?’ Moments later the shed door was pulled open and torchlight blinded them, and hands were dragging Dennie away while voices bellowed at her. She saw a female Asian officer bend over Lauren.

  ‘It’s okay, love,’ Sergeant Prav said to Lauren, whose face was ashen, her sightless eyes gazing up at the ceiling. ‘Help is on its way. You’re going to be okay, you hear me? You’re going to be okay.’

  Then the rail spike hit Dennie right between the eyes and the world went away.

  6

  DESERTION

  THE DESERTER DID THE THING HE DID BEST, WHICH was to run.

  He burst from the shed and fired twice in the direction of the police lights to keep their heads down as he ran for the boundary fence that gave onto open fields. He saw Gar being savaged by the old woman’s dog, but sped by without slowing down. Sorry, chum, he thought. Trying to escape in the van was out of the question. Even though these first two officers were easily evaded in the confusion, soon there would be helicopters, cars, and the most up-to-date surveillance technology. There was no way he could outrun them, so the next best thing was to do what he had done at Loos – hide, sink, go under, and try to come up safely on the other side. Even the furrowed ground of the plots reminded him of No Man’s Land, the bean trellises like barbed wire in this light.

  He clawed his way over the boundary fence and dropped into nettles and brambles on the other side, fought his way clear of them and dashed off along the fence until it began to run behind houses, then met a hedgerow that he turned to follow downhill, deeper into the field.

  Behind him, the screams and shouts faded. Midsummer dawn was drawing the world around him in dim pastels, and dew soaked his trousers as he plunged through another field, and then another, over stiles and past
fleeing sheep and puzzled-looking cows.

  When he emerged onto a narrow lane between high hedgerows he stopped, stood very still, calmed his breathing and listened.

  No shouts or sounds of pursuit. Possibly the faintest hum of a helicopter but equally that could have been distant traffic. A blackbird was trilling its morning song. It was tempting to feel optimistic, except that behind and underneath everything was that rolling wall of thunder that had pursued him ever since he had dragged himself clear of the French mud. In the hundred or so years of his life since then, it had sometimes seemed very near and sometimes – usually when he was with Ardwyn – so far away that he could forget about it for a while. Right now it was so close it felt like a tidal wave at his back threatening to fall on him.

  They’d soon be throwing a circle around the area and filling it with uniforms, so he needed to get out of that circle as quickly as possible now. He set off along the road in the direction where it seemed to curve a bit more, for no other reason than it might give a better chance of cover if the first vehicle he saw was a police car.

  Headlights swelled ahead, and he hesitated. It might be the police, and they might not have their flashing blues on, but he thought that unlikely given the hue and cry that must be erupting now. If he hid and it wasn’t then he’d have missed his chance.

  So he stood in the middle of the road and thought Well, if this is it, this is it.

  The car that screeched to a halt in front of him was a grubby white thing with mud all up the wheel arches, and by the time the driver had wound down his window and was shouting: ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ the deserter had walked up to the passenger side, opened the door and pointed the Webley at him.

  ‘I think I’m going to paint the inside of this car with your brains, chum,’ he said. ‘Unless you take me where I want to go.’

  The driver – a potato-shaped man with a shaved head – gaped at him.

  ‘I’ll take that as a yes,’ said the deserter, and got in.

  ‘You can’t… you can’t…’

  The deserter shut his door and pointed the gun right in the driver’s face, thumbing the hammer back. In the enclosed space of the car its mechanism was very loud. ‘Drive or die,’ he said. ‘Up to you.’

  Pale and trembling, the man set off again. ‘Where to?’ he asked.

  ‘For the moment, that way will do,’ said the deserter, pointing his pistol at the road ahead.

  As the light grew so did the vague stirrings of a plan to keep heading north until he hit the Peak District and then try to get lost in its moors and valleys. There was a hut he knew, and maybe a gamekeeper who still remembered him. For all their technology there were still corners of the world blind to prying electronic eyes.

  They came to a junction where their lane was crossed by a larger B-road, but with no signposts to tell him what lay in either direction.

  ‘Which way?’ asked the driver.

  He didn’t know. Nothing looked familiar. The terrified man behind the steering wheel was breathing very quickly and the stench of his sweat was nauseating. It was all the deserter could do to resist putting a bullet in him right here and now.

  ‘Turn right here,’ he said, because a decision had to be made, even if it was the wrong one. If this is it, this is it.

  As the driver indicated and started to turn the steering wheel, flashing blue lights appeared to their right and a pair of police cars came barrelling down the B-road towards them. The deserter pressed the gun’s muzzle into the man’s doughy flesh above his hip. ‘Now don’t be doing anything silly there, chum,’ he murmured. ‘Just let them go by.’

  But potato man must have had some steel buried in all that lard because he stamped on the accelerator and pulled right out in front of the approaching police cars. The unexpected lurch caught the deserter by surprise, throwing him back and against the door, and by the time he brought the gun to bear again the driver had yanked his door open and was jumping out, screaming: ‘He’s here! He’s here! He’s here!’

  The deserter cursed and fired, and the man went down with a red splash between his shoulder blades. The leading police car skidded to a halt while the one behind swerved around.

  The deserter leapt out of the car and ran off along the grassy road verge, hunting for a break in the hedge to his left that would give him access to the fields. There were plenty. He ducked through one, earning a nasty laceration across his face from a hawthorn bush for his carelessness, and down a muddy bank. He had no idea where he was running – he just headed for the nearest stand of trees in the hope that the cover might help him in some way, but he was barely halfway when he heard the burr of a helicopter and it appeared, hovering over him, keeping pace as he ran, communicating his location to ground forces. He fired off a round at it, aware that he only had two remaining in the cylinder, and the helicopter swerved and retreated to a more diplomatic distance. Down towards the trees the ground became more boggy, and he found himself near a cattle-feed station – a drinking trough and a metal pen where hay was dumped – and a wide area surrounding it had been churned to mud by countless hooves and liberally splattered with shit. It slowed him drastically; he sank up to his ankles and had to fight to drag his feet clear with every step. When he looked back he saw two black figures back up by the road, walking at a crouch with rifles raised, and an amplified voice from the sky bellowed: ‘Armed police! Stop where you are! Throw down your weapon or you will be fired upon!’ He screamed his defiance at them and fired off his last two rounds. The figures threw themselves flat to the ground and he thought Ha! Let’s see how you like grovelling like worms! There was a rapid crackle of automatic weapons fire and all of a sudden his legs stopped working, dropping him face forward into the mud and shit, but he raised himself up on his knees and pointed his empty pistol at them and a bullet tore off the top of his head and that was that.

  * * *

  Matt heard the helicopter and distant gunfire and cowered deeper into his hiding place.

  It was the ruin of an old Victorian pumping house right down by the river, built in the county’s industrial heyday when the Trent was used for miles along its length by hundreds of mills, factories, and farms, many of which had long since been demolished or abandoned to be reclaimed by woodland. Nothing much was left but the redbrick shell and half of the roof which had survived because of a rusting framework of scaffolding holding it up, probably from some past attempt to renovate the structure. The interior was a litter of overgrown rubble; ivy scrawled itself all over the scaffolding, hazel and buddleia bushes sprouted from the walls, their huge brush-heads of purple flowers thickening the air with perfume, while in the part that was open to the sky, whole birch trees had taken root in the floor.

  His dad had shown it to him, back in prehistory on the rare occasion when he’d been taken fishing, and as far as Matt could tell, he was the only one who knew about it. There was no graffiti or drugs trash or used condoms to suggest that the local kids or junkies used it, probably because there was no road connecting it to town, only a farm track through several locked and rusted gates or a tricky path to be picked along the river’s edge that disappeared when water levels were high. It was situated on an inward bend of the river with vegetation crowding the steep banks in either direction – too much of an expedition for a high or a quick fuck.

  He sat in the corner, knees drawn up under his chin, and rocked back and forth, still shocked at how quickly everything had gone to shit.

  Pimblett smacking him in the head like that had been a lucky shot, but he’d forgotten that the guy had also eaten the first flesh and a blow that he should have been able to shake off had hit him like a truck. By the time he’d come to his senses, Gar was down and having his throat torn out by the old woman’s huge dog, while Everett was shooting at the cops and legging it for the field. Matt had crawled off between the plants and sheds and done his own disappearing act before things could get worse. He wondered why he’d never told Everett about this plac
e, but judging by how easily Everett had bottled it that was probably a good thing. Maybe some part of Matt had always known deep down that Everett couldn’t be trusted.

  He didn’t know what had happened to Mother. The cops would be all over the farm by now, so he couldn’t go back there, and his mum’s place would also be one of the first places they’d look for him. He had no food, no money, and only the clothes he had on. He felt like an animal – one of those rabbits, its head in the noose, pulling and pulling and strangling itself until someone like him came along and did it a mercy by breaking its neck. He felt lost and bereft in a way that he’d never known; even before Ardwyn and Everett, when he’d had no job and nothing to do except hang around the village, there had at least been home and Mum and the vague sense that something would come along once he finally pulled his finger out and got on with his life like everybody kept telling him to. But now…

  He cried, despising himself for being a pussy even as the tears fell.

  When he heard someone moving through the bushes outside, he picked up half a brick and got ready to go down fighting – but at the sight of the thing that appeared in the doorway he dropped it and stared, slack-mouthed.

  It looked like the result of someone trying to do a jigsaw puzzle of a naked man, but with some of the parts jammed in upside down or back to front or missing, replaced by crude home-made pieces, or even pieces from a different puzzle altogether – one of an animal, perhaps, with coarse hair and tusks. It looked like a child had tried to make a man out of Play-Doh while blindfolded. It looked like the stone carving of a giant lost in the desert for a thousand years, sandblasted by storms until parts of it were blurred smooth or destroyed. It looked like all of these to some degree, except that none of them fixed him with its eyes like this, or spoke.

  ‘I smelled you,’ it said, and its voice too was only a rough approximation of human words. There were fragments of squeals and echoes of howls in it. ‘You have my flesh.’