“I don’t give a fuck what you are. You’ve spoilt me for life. I’m a wreck.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I hope you never have to.” Billy walked around Sean in a wide arc, as if fearful of a repeat attack.
“Billy–”
“Fuck off.”
Sean trudged after him as he returned to the changing rooms. The others had finished cleaning themselves and were standing around outside, hair nicely combed and glinting in the pale sunlight, sports holdalls slung over shoulders, car keys clinking in their fingers. Billy dumped the nets and went inside. Sean followed.
“I want to help you,” Sean said. “I want to get Vernon Lord. I think he had something to do with the death of this girl.”
Billy said nothing. He slowly peeled the kit from his filthy body. Sean turned away. “Who was the other guy who turned up after I left you that day, Billy? The man in the mask?”
He heard Billy snort behind him. The squeal of a tap was followed by the blast of water on tiles. Sean turned to see Billy eclipsed by a cloud of steam as he began to soap his body. “That was Dr. Chater.”
“Dr. Chater?”
Billy’s hair stood up in soapy tufts. His eyes closed as shampoo creamed across his face. He looked impossibly young. “Yeah,” Billy said, spitting out water. “Vernon has a deal sorted out. He finds prime cuts and Dr. Chater comes to harvest them.” The steam from the shower dissipated under a breath of air from outside.
There was still plenty of moisture in the changing rooms, sluicing along the floor, hanging in the air, but none of it could help the dryness that stripped Sean’s throat in the second that Billy’s body became visible.
Billy stood in the cubicle, rinsing his gelded body with a flannel. Wintry sunlight diffused by the frosted windows turned his flesh to powder; the spasming striplights arranged on the ceiling softened him to such an extent that it seemed the angles of his bones had been sanded down. Sean stared at the mangled nub of his pubis, beribboned with shining scars, as if a slug had made criss-cross journeys across him. And then he noticed Billy was watching him. As Sean made to say something (what comfort could he have offered?) Billy made a barely imperceptible shake of his head and, bringing his finger to his lips, locked the words Sean might have uttered deep inside him for ever.
“CHRIST, WHY?” EMMA asked him.
They were sitting in a café. From his seat, Sean could see through the misting windows to the muddy fields they had just departed. The sugar in his weak, hot tea was slowly making inroads to the core of his shock, thawing him, bringing him back. He shrugged.
“Billy said something about a deal. I’ve got a horrible feeling about this.”
“What?”
“I think... I think that Vernon is selling organs to someone over there.”
“In Tantamount?”
“I think so. I think he’s harvesting organs here and giving them to Tim Enever to sell over there.”
Sean told Emma about the package Tim had been carrying. It had been a smallish parcel, wrapped as the cuts from a butcher might have been wrapped. He told her of the blood that had seeped to the bottom of the parcel. “I thought it was something he had bought. For lunch. I’ve seen Tim eat the most God-awful lunches when we were working. Anaemic meat puddings, ribs from the Chinese takeaway that looked way out of date; it wouldn’t have surprised me, what he had in that parcel for his din-dins.”
“Why Billy? What’s so special about him?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s because there’s nothing obviously special about him. Maybe that’s it. On the surface it looks as if he’s being chased for dosh. Nobody looks twice. Happens all the time for those poor bastards.”
“What about the others you visited?”
“Jesus,” Sean said shakily, his hand trembling against his cup. The rattle of it against the plastic table drew attention from some of the other customers. “Those poor bastards.”
“Hark at him!” cawed a craven figure who seemed to have created himself from the sooty skin on the wallpaper by the café window. “Precious little wanker. Have some respect. Don’t think you’re any better than the rest of us.”
“God forbid,” spat Emma, screeching her chair legs back on the lino. “Come on, let’s go.”
Outside she held on to Sean while he tried to make his legs work properly. The cuts in his thigh were bleeding again, showing through the thinning denim. “God, I’m a mess,” he said wearily. His face was grey and scooped-out, like a pumpkin for Halloween.
“Over here you’re a mess. Over there, in Tantamount, you’re strong. You’re unbelievable.”
“Oh, go on,” Sean said, affecting a camp voice. Emma laughed.
“It’s true,” she said. “I watched you run after that Tim guy. You were incredible. People stopped to look. You were strong and fast.” Emma took his head in her hands and drew it towards her. She kissed him on the mouth, gently at first, but with mounting desperation, as if trying to feed off some of the steel she had referred to.
“I should check on those others,” he said. “Make sure.”
Emma nodded. “Okay. I’ll come with you.”
HE WAS GLAD of that, in the end. Although he was not attacked by the people he had had to disable when he first came with Vernon Lord to visit the old woman, Mrs Moulder, in the tiny flat near Runcorn’s Shopping City, the presence of danger was very real and constant. Emma helped just by being there. She lent him the mettle that she thought she had seen in him in the other place, over there.
Her door was closed but the latch was off. Inside, the smell of death was overwhelming. There were no signs of struggle, but there was an intense feeling of a presence in the flat which they both acknowledged.
Emma said, “It’s as if someone has just left the room, do you know what I mean?”
Sean nodded. “Or is hiding. Is still here.”
They found Mrs Moulder in the kitchen. Sean said, simply, “Cheke.”
If her method of dispatching victims was becoming more skilled, the manner of her disposal of the bodies was shockingly clumsy and tokenistic. Mrs Moulder had been forced into the oven, but when Cheke had found she would not fit, the old woman had been abandoned, half-sprawled on the floor, her head burned like a forgotten roast. An older wound in her chest told the story of Sean’s first visit here. A story, the ending of which he had not been privy to. The ribs had been snipped open and bent back to reveal the heart, which was no longer there.
Cheke had half-heartedly begun hacking off Mrs Moulder’s legs, but had given up, no doubt bored. The body was partially digested too: a naked portion of the abdomen bore sucker scars and the flesh had turned to porridge. Presumably Cheke had given up on this idea too when she realised how pointless it would be to assume the form of an elderly blind woman.
“I’ve seen enough,” Emma said.
“She’s closing in on us,” Sean observed. “When we give her the slip, she simply goes back to the trail and rubs it out bit by bit until she makes fresh contact.”
“When does it end?”
Sean squeezed her arm. “When we go down. Or her. Don’t lose that thought. She’ll have an Achilles heel.”
They were on their way out of the flat when Emma halted Sean, her voice a whispered, frantic appeal. In the cracked, foxed mirror hanging in the hallway, trapped between the silvered background and the solid reflections of Sean and Emma, Cheke lingered, in the act of departure. Emma reached out for Sean and held tight to his hand as they studied the wolfish profile and the volley of deep-red hair that tumbled across her shoulders. The eye regarded them, unseeing, yet giving the illusion of awareness. It hung there, beneath the lid, sly, gem-bright. Teeth glistened between slightly parted, ruddy lips. She had a bloom about her, even in the ghost of this reflection. She was formed. Ripe.
“She looks so real,” Sean said. “She looks... beyond real. Jesus.”
He delved for some kind of conversation as they drove back to town, but nothing could
penetrate the vision they had witnessed. He guessed that her reflection, in its reluctance to leave the mirror, counted for something, might point to a weakness, but was baffled as to what that could be. He had been shocked by the perfection of the woman. She looked so hungry and ambitious, yet utterly fulfilled at the same time. She was an advert. She was aspirational. His lust stirred at the thought of her wide, thick mouth, the carnality that played in its shape. She had developed so much in the short time since her last attack it seemed impossible to believe it could be the same woman.
“How far can she go? Where can it take her?” Emma asked. He saw in her glazed countenance how Cheke had stayed with her too.
“I don’t know,” Sean said. “But she’d have us as a part of her in an instant.”
Saying the words, he hadn’t meant to invest them with enthusiasm, although that was how it had sounded. Would it really be a bad thing to have your make-up absorbed by her, to become a part of the perfection she was zeroing in on? Would it hurt so much? He thought of her body opening, sliding across his, the heat as she sucked him into her. To be indivisible from her.
He swallowed thickly and wound down the window, allowed the frigid January air into the car.
“She would kill us in a second,” Emma said. “No mercy.”
“I know.”
“Be strong,” she said. “Be careful.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE: MASH THIS
THERE WERE OTHERS.
Sometimes they appeared as subliminal slivers of colour and movement. Sometimes they loitered. Will slowly began to understand the migrations here, but he never got over the patterns of damage, the abundance of injury in all its manifold, grotesque variations.
Joanna said, “Look.”
A boy and a girl hurried along a path flanked by fluorescent yellow mushrooms. In contrast to her brother, the girl seemed to have only superficial injuries: a slight concave aspect to her skull, a ragged wound that flapped on her arm. Half of the boy’s head was hanging down his back, like some ghastly pony tail. They skipped and giggled, oblivious to their plight, excited instead by the lure of this strange wonderland.
“Look.”
A woman was trying to pick the crystallised cobwebs from hedgerows packed with thorns and fingers and teeth. She kept forgetting, it seemed, that she no longer had the hands to perform the task.
“Look.”
An elderly man with bulging eyes and empurpled skin tried to force his fingers into his gullet to remove a chicken bone that was lodged there. Somebody had performed a tracheotomy on him: a black hole in his throat wheezed and sputtered as he calmed down, realising that he could quite happily exist here with the foreign body trapped in his windpipe. Somewhere, a surgeon might be operating on him now, trying to remove the bone, trying to bring him back.
“Look. Look. Look.”
He did not become inured to the circus that passed him by as they sought the train station. When he asked a woman for directions, he completely missed what she said to him, partly because of his fascination at the sight: the mouth through which the instructions were coming had been widened by the blade of an axe that separated her face; partly as the words were rendered unintelligible because of it.
In the end, a man with a sanitised, almost beautifully neat incision across the centre of his forehead pointed them towards the station. Will led Joanna through a ticket barrier that was unmanned and over a small footbridge to a similarly unpopulated platform.
“If we were in real-time,” Will posited, “this train might actually take about a thousand years to get here.”
“Don’t,” Joanna admonished. “That’s just too bloody cheery.”
He asked her about Harry and her job. She was studying to become a barrister. Harry worked in the City, part of the pinstripes and braces brigade. “But he’s all right, believe it or not. He makes lots of money, but he’s not a wanker.”
“It feels funny, doesn’t it,” said Will, “talking about this kind of stuff while we’re standing here, waiting for a train? Especially when we’re not waiting for a train. We’re lying on crisp white sheets in a hospital somewhere, while the machine that goes bing! goes bing! by our beds.”
Joanna nodded. “It’s grim, when you think of it, that everybody in a coma thinks about a place like this. Our minds come up with this. Of all things.”
“Yeah,” said Will. “Imagine what we’ve got lined up when we die. It won’t be The Magic Roundabout, that’s for certain.”
There was the sound of a whistle, splitting the cold, foggy air. In the distance, smoke billowed into the sky. A minute later, the snout of a steam train rounded a curve in the land and bore down on the platform, pistons shunting the train forwards, the sound of the engine chuntering happily. The engine was created from bones. Skulls adorned the buffers; ribs that could have only come from a whale bent around the wheel arches.
“Nice touch,” Joanna said, as the train drew alongside. A becapped figure leaned out onto the footplate and beckoned them to hurry aboard. The point of an iron had been driven into his eye; the rest of it stuck out, the flex dangling as though he were a robot with his innards unravelling.
Will and Joanna found themselves alone in the carriage. The seats were beautifully patterned with gold thread, the wall space ornamented with sketches of steam trains in full flight. The train gathered pace, forging a path through the busy sprawl, nosing into a countryside filled with mountains and veldt and vast lakes that bubbled and geysered what might have been tar, what Will hoped was tar, many metres into the sky.
They bought tickets from an inspector in an immaculate black uniform who, like Will, sported a gunshot wound. His, though, was located under his jaw. It had made an exit wound through his nose, turning that part of his face into an extraordinary melange of pink tissue and black, burnt meat.
“I’b god a dreadful aib,” he said, apologetically. “I could neber eben pid draight, neber bind blow by own head off.”
A haughty voice came to them, crackling over the tannoy, to direct their attention to some piece of local interest or another. Somebody else came by with food for them. A woman asked if they needed their shoes cleaned.
Somehow, Will fell asleep, a weird sleep within sleep, in which he dreamed of his real life, his animated life. In it, he was sitting with Elisabeth and Cat and they were enjoying lunch together on a sunny patio. There was wine and cheese and fresh bread and fruit. He kept wanting to turn around to look at the lawn that was behind them because he could hear something approaching, but Cat kept stopping him.
“You don’t want to see, I promise you. It’s best you don’t see.”
Elisabeth would back her up, craning her neck to look at whatever was coming towards them. She’d pull a face and nod. “I’m with Catriona on this,” she’d say. “It’s probably best all round if you just sit tight. Maybe, if you’re quiet, it will go away.”
Joanna woke him from this uneasy snooze. He found he had been crying.
“How long have we been on this train?” he asked her, in an attempt to deflect her curiosity.
“You’ve been asleep for an hour or so. Whatever an hour means here.”
The crisp, authoritative voice burst out of the tannoy soon after, as if invited by Will’s impatience.
“We shall shortly be arriving at Mash This,” it said. “Please ensure that you take all your belongings with you. Have your tickets ready for inspection and leave no blood or body parts behind. Enjoy Mash This and be sure to travel with us again soon.”
Will collared the inspector as the train drew alongside the platform. Three children in swimming costumes were waiting to climb on board, shepherded by a lifeguard in mirrorshades with a shark bite the size of a dinner plate in his abdomen.
“What’s in Mash This?” Will asked.
“Whad idn’t, sir? Bash Thid id the playboy cabidal of our liddle world here. Ib you can’t bind a good tibe here, you bight as well be dead.”
They presented their tickets at the boo
th and were waved through onto the station concourse. Grunge music was being played at ear-splitting volume from speakers set into the ground that were as regular as cats’ eyes.
“What exactly are we looking for?” Joanna asked.
“I don’t think I had anything specific in mind,” Will said. “But take your pick. I think we’ll find it here.”
A taxi pulled up alongside them. A yellow cab that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the streets of New York, if the driver had been able to do something about the bubbled and blistered appearance of his skin. “Blowtorch,” he said, conversationally as they piled into the back seat. His eyes followed them in the rear-view mirror. They were large and vivid, almost obscenely big, like orbs of white icing on a sticky treacle cake. “Hurts like nothing you would believe, until the nerve-endings get fried off. Wife had it arranged. Hitman with an imagination. Not what you want, really. But the last laugh’s with me. I lied when I said I’d leave her everything. She’s in the hospital now. Tears streaming down her bloody face. ‘Pull through, Freddy,’ she’s whining. ‘Attaboy. You can do it!’ I tell you, it will be a tragedy if I come out of this. I’m having a fantastic time. But listen to me blabbing on. Where can I take you?”
“I could do with a drink,” Will said. “Know any good bars?”
“Do I know any bars? If people had nicknames around here, mine’d be Freddy ‘Bar-knower’ Fisk. Sit back and enjoy the ride. I hope you remember it after a night out at the place I’m going to take you to.”
The ride was like something out of a nightmare. The road was a trampled approximation of flatness, comprised of ancient speakers and strobe lights. Music was everywhere; rock competing with opera, acid jazz trying to subdue hip hop, reggae jousting with bhangra, all of it at volumes designed to make the ears retch.
Walking wounded shuffled along pavements or sat in recesses away from the throng nodding their heads to the variable beats. Great palaces of litter had risen from the sides of the road and faced each other across the traffic, a death’s door Vegas. Edged with flashing lights, they begged and bossed passers-by to come and watch dancing girls, and lose their money at the gaming tables. Other, less obvious attractions jostled for attention: gladiatorial bouts; suicide pits where failed souls could watch how-to videos by people who had checked out properly; mutilation chic clinics where those embarrassed by their wounds could glitz them up into this season’s must-haves.
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