by Shaun Hutson
Reece nodded. ‘I’m supposed to have him out by nine.’ He looked at his watch. ‘It’s quarter to, now.’ He turned his gaze back to the Health Inspector who rose to his feet, fumbling in his jacket pocket for his car keys.
‘Come on, then,’ he said, irritably.
‘I’m only doing my job,’ Reece protested, following the younger man out of the office towards the stairs. They descended hurriedly and Brady led him out to the waiting Vauxhall. Reece slumped heavily into the passenger seat and rummaged around in his pocket, finally producing a packet of Rothmans.
‘Don’t smoke in here please,’ said Brady, looking at him disdainfully. ‘If you want to die of lung cancer that’s your business. I bank on being around a bit longer.’ He twisted the key in the ignition, stuck the car into first and pulled out.
Reece took the cigarette from his mouth and pushed it carefully back into the packet. He found a packet of mints in his other pocket.
‘Is it all right if I have one of these?’ he asked, defiantly. ‘Or are you frightened of catching diabetes too?’
Brady looked at the big man as he pushed the mint into his mouth.
‘Do you know what they use as sweeteners in those?’ he asked, a slight smile on his lips.
Reece shook his head, gazing out of the front window.
‘Recycled pig swill,’ Brady told him, laughing aloud as the bailiff coughed and spat the mint out of the open window.
In five minutes they had reached Ron Bell’s house.
Reece was out of the car with a speed implying relish and Brady could see the slight hint of a smile on the big man’s lips. The Health Inspector locked the car and followed the bailiff, who, by this time, was through the gate and heading up the path to the front door of the house. Brady walked more slowly, his eyes moving slowly over the building and the garden. Jesus, he thought, talk about run-down. The grass on either side of the cracked path brushed against him as he walked and he lengthened his stride to avoid the scurrying ants which were oozing up from the crack in the granite like soil. The windows reflected the sun back at the two men, and that combined with the filth on them, made it impossible to see inside. Reece knocked three times on the front door and waited for an answer. Brady wandered across to the nearest window. It had wooden shutters on it, the wood itself rotted and yellowed in places. One was hanging off the hinges. He put his face to the pane and squinted into the gloom, trying to make out some sign of movement in what he took to be the dining room.
Reece banged the door again, harder this time.
‘Perhaps he’s out,’ said Brady, wearily, sauntering back to the door.
Reece ignored the remark and repeated his frenzied attack on the door, as if willing it to open by itself. Brady shook his head.
‘Bell,’ shouted Reece, looking up at the windows of the first floor.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ said the Health Inspector.
‘I’m going to break in,’ Reece told him. The bailiff strode off down the path to the window where Brady had just been. He took off his jacket, wrapped it around his elbow and, with one powerful backward stroke, broke the glass. Lumps of dirty crystal fell into the room and landed on the bare floor. Reece reached through and opened the window, hoisting himself over the sill. He landed on the broken glass which crunched beneath his heavy shoes. Brady followed him, the sound of the crushed glass reminding him of walking in heavy frost. Both men were immediately assailed by the smell of damp and Reece coughed, waving a hand in front of him. Dust particles floated lazily in the rays of sunlight which cut through the gloom.
‘Bell,’ Reece called again but only silence greeted his shout. He pointed to a door at the far end of the room and the two men headed towards it.
It was Brady who heard the sound first.
‘Listen,’ he said, lowering his voice for reasons even he didn’t understand.
Reece stopped impatiently and cocked an ear in the direction of the sound. It was a high pitched, unceasing, hum which grew louder as they approached the door. The big man looked at Brady and shrugged. The handle to the door was rusty and pieces of brown metal peeled off like scabrous flesh as the bailiff turned it. It swung open with a loud creak and both men walked into the sitting room.
The stench which met them was almost palpable and even Brady recoiled at its ferocity. He just had time to register that the high pitched hum was coming from the TV which was still on, then his attention turned to the thing in the centre of the room.
Reece too saw it and Brady was vaguely aware of the big man sagging against the door frame, clutching his stomach.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he groaned, trying to retain his breakfast.
Brady took a step closer, the realization slowly spreading through him. The shapeless mass of torn flesh and shining bone which occupied the centre of the room was all that remained of Ron Bell. The Health Inspector moved closer, as close as the choking odour would allow him. The room was like a charnel house. Congealed blood was splattered up the walls and around the body, its rusty colour matching that of the old door handle. One sightless eye fixed Brady in a baleful stare. He pulled out his handkerchief and pressed it to his face but the foul stench even seemed to penetrate the material.
The corpse still retained some shreds of flesh, covering the shiny bones like wisps of gossamer, and clumps of hair still clung defiantly to what was left of the head. The mouth was open, revealing many rotted teeth, the lower jaw having been eaten through. It yawned soundlessly, the ligaments and tendons which had held it in place were gone. Part of the nose remained, the solitary nostril choked with clotted blood.
Reece seemed to have recovered his wits a little and he looked over at Brady, who was still kneeling beside the mutilated body.
‘What the fucking hell happened to him?’ gasped the bailiff, his breath coming in short gasps.
Brady didn’t answer, he had finally managed to tear his gaze away from the body long enough to study the bare floorboards around it. They felt spongy because of the congealed blood which had soaked into the wood but it wasn’t that which attracted the Health Inspector’s eye. It was the shiny substance which seemed to cover the floor, sparkling like oil on water when the sun catches it. He noticed that it was all over the corpse too.
‘How long’s he been dead?’ asked Reece, wiping a thin film of perspiration from his face.
Brady shrugged. ‘It’s hard to say. From the appearance of the body I’d say he’d been dead for months but…’ He allowed the sentence to trail off. He stood up. ‘You’d better phone the police.’
Reece nodded, happy to be able to escape the reeking confines of this slaughterhouse. Brady heard him exit then he leant back against the door frame, his eyes sweeping around the room.
There was more of the shiny substance on the far wall, only there it seemed to break apart into small trails each about an inch wide. He stroked his chin thoughtfully and looked down. There was more of the stuff at his feet. He knelt and felt tempted to touch it, much as a child does with something that arouses its curiosity but, at the last minute, he withdrew his hand, reaching instead to the inside pocket of his jacket. He took out a pencil and poked the end into the shiny stuff, seeing that it was fluid, but thick and sticky and, when he removed the pencil, the mucoid slime stuck to it. Brady wrinkled his forehead and laid the pencil down on the nearby sideboard.
He took one last look around the room and hurried out to see where Reece had got to.
The high pitched hum of the TV continued.
Four
Night brought with it a cloying humidity which made sleep, for many people, difficult. There was no moon and just the sodium glare of the street lamps penetrated the darkness.
Some of the houses on the new estate overlooked Ron Bell’s house and some of those tenants had watched that afternoon as first the police and then an ambulance had arrived at the old place, but few had taken much notice. Perhaps the bloke had been taken ill, a heart attack perhaps. No one knew. No one cared. Some w
ere pleased that he was gone, perhaps now the house would be sold to someone who would look after it and preferably to someone who would get that maze of a garden into some semblance of order. But, the subject of Ron Bell and his house was only of passing interest to the inhabitants of the new estate. Now, with night well and truly upon them, they tried to sleep in their little houses which had become like ovens due to the weather.
In dozens of red brick dwellings, they dozed, snored, made love, watched television or sat and talked. Crying children were attended to, pets dozed in the heat and, somewhere on the estate, a couple of tom-cats fought out their nightly duel. They hissed and spat at one another, scratching and biting in one of the gardens until a well-aimed ash-tray, thrown from one of the bedroom windows, put an end to their squabble.
Silence descended once more.
In the cellar of Ron Bell’s house it was silent too, except for the slurping, sucking sounds the slugs made as they slithered over one another. There seemed to be so many of them now. The cellar was filled practically to overflowing and, besides, their source of food had disappeared. Their hunger became uncontrollable and they began to slither up towards the hole in the bulkhead, towards the night air. Some burrowed through the ground, others slithered through the waist high grass which parted as if moved by some invisible hand. Their jet black colour helped them blend into the night.
But most crawled to the sewer cover which lay in the garden. Rusty and covered in moss, it was surrounded by broken concrete and the slugs found many holes. They crawled down into the black depths, welcoming the wetness which enabled them to move faster. Many even slipped into the filthy water, carried along by its flow.
Through the earth, over it and swept along by the fast flowing sewers, they moved towards the new estate, an invisible unstoppable black horde.
Five
Mary Forbes watched as her two children disappeared around the bend in the road, waving to them one last time before she retreated back inside the house. She smiled happily to herself as she crossed to the windows in the front room. She unfastened them and pushed them open, allowing the slight breeze to blow in. It brought with it the heady scent of lavender and Mary looked out into the garden with pride at the blossoming purple flowers. The DJ on the radio told her it was eight fifty-one and then his exaggeratedly gay banter was mercilessly replaced by the strains of a Perry Como record. Mary began to sing along with it while she bustled through the house, raising her voice as she went into the kitchen. She took the breakfast dishes from the table, shaking her head when she saw how much the kids had left on their plates. It hardly seemed worth giving them anything. Such a waste, with food as expensive as it was! She shook her head as she shovelled it into the pedal bin with a fork. Perry Como meandered on and Mary joined in mightily when he got to the chorus, her voice rising above the chink of plates as she washed them. When she’d finished that particular task she cleared the table, tripping over one of Jack’s slippers as she did so. She glared down at the offending article for a second, making a mental note to tell him about it when he got back home that evening. No wonder the kids are untidy when their father sets them this sort of example, she thought to herself. She and Jack had been married for twenty-four -years and, not a day had gone past during that time when she hadn’t had to tell him about his untidiness. He said she should stop nagging but Mary was proud of her house and how neat and tidy it was and she aimed to keep it that way. Whether the rest of the family liked it or not.
Sundays were the worst. She was always up at eight and, dead on nine, the hoover went on. The rest of the family always complained but Mary was oblivious to their protestations as she happily whizzed through the rooms with the cleaner, singing along with the radio like some demented char-lady.
Perry Como finished singing and the DJ told her it was nine o’clock. Mary dried her hands and, with the plates left on the draining rack, she scuttled upstairs to fetch the hoover.
It was the same routine every day, it never varied. Seven a.m. get up. Quarter past, get Jack and the kids up. Breakfast, get Jack off to work, make sure the kids were ready for school then, from eight fifty onwards, the house was hers. Washing up, hoovering, dusting and Mary loved every minute of it. She usually finished her housework around eleven and then she either took a trip into town (less than five minutes on the bus from the new estate) or she had coffee with one of her many friends. If there was one thing Mary enjoyed more than housework, it was a good natter.
‘Did you hear about her at number 36?’
‘I see so-and-so is ill.’
‘Someone told me that whatsisname is having an affair with that woman, you know the one.’
But the thing which pleased her most of all was how much cleaner and tidier her house was compared to those of her friends and she felt a particular swell of pride when they told her how nice her place looked. Mary would just smile and tell them it was hard work with a family like hers but it was worth it.
Now she roared from room to room with the hoover, still singing loudly to herself despite the fact that the radio was drowned out by the din of the cleaner. She pushed it rapidly before her like some kind of jet propelled mine detector. The dusting was completed at a similarly dizzy pace and, at precisely ten fifty-three, Mary tucked her duster away neatly into a drawer and wiped her hands on her apron. However, with it being Friday, there was one more thing which she had to do. Retrieving a tin of polish from the cupboard, Mary armed herself with a fresh duster and headed out to the front doorstep.
As she opened the door, Mrs Banks from next door passed by and the two women exchanged brief pleasantries before Mary knelt to begin her last job.
It was as she took the lid off the polish that she noticed the first of the slime trails.
Mary looked at it, watching as it glinted in the sunlight. Then she saw another, and another. The whole step was criss-crossed with silver threads, some hardened the others still fresh and sticky. Mary followed the course of one fresh trail, noting that it ran across the step and up the inside of the concrete porch. On either side of the porch she had baskets of flowers and, as she stood up she saw a lump of what looked like phlegm hanging from the first of the suspended baskets. She leaned closer, peering inquisitively at the almost transparent lump but, as she looked closer she could see that the stuff was like frog-spawn only instead of being round, these things were cylindrical. With a dark centre they hung in clusters of about twenty or thirty. Mary noticed that there were five or six of these clusters on each of the hanging baskets and she felt an almost unnatural disgust as she looked at them. She told herself she must show Jack when he got home, then, careful not to touch the jellied lumps, she took her duster and knocked each one from the hanging pots.
She returned to the slime trails on the doorstep and set about removing them, polishing away feverishly until all traces of them were gone, then she closed the door. But, as she put the lid back on the polish, she wondered once more what those mucoid clusters on the flower baskets had been.
Brady brought the Vauxhall to a halt and switched off the engine. He hurriedly got out of the car, anxious to be free of its stifling confines, impatient to breathe the sweet summer air once more. He locked the door behind him and strode across the deserted street to the first of the houses he was to inspect. Elm Drive was the last street on the new estate to be filled, with families due to move in at the beginning of the following week. The council had asked him to give the houses a quick look over before the new tenants took up residence, just to make sure everything was all right. But Brady’s mind was not really on his present job as he walked up the short front path to the first house. Burned deep into his mind was the image of Ron Bell’s mutilated body. The police had arrived within five minutes of Archie Reece’s call, the ambulance another five after that. The body had been removed by two young ambulancemen, one of whom had vomited at the scene of carnage in the old house. The local police inspector had been unable to offer much in the way of explanation, insisting t
hat they would have to wait for the results of the autopsy before pursuing any investigation. Brady had mentioned the incident only briefly to Kim, telling her that Bell had been dead when they found him, but dispensing with the worst details of the ghoulish find.
Now he stood before the front door of number one Elm Drive, fumbling in his trouser pocket for the set of pass keys which he’d been given. His jacket was draped over his shoulder and Brady could feel the perspiration sticking to his back. The concrete of the path felt hot beneath him and he could feel its searing warmth even through the soles of his shoes. The sky was cloudless, the sun hanging there defiantly. The whole town was enveloped in a blanket of blistering heat. It was like walking about inside a huge oven.
Brady found the key ring and tried one of the keys, muttering to himself when it didn’t fit the lock. He tried again.
Another failure.
He sucked in an impatient breath and pushed the third key in. This time it turned and the front door swung open. He stepped into the cloying humidity which was the hall way. The place smelt of fresh wood and his shoes beat out a tattoo on the concrete floor as he walked from room to room. He finished downstairs, did a quick tour of the upper floor and then, satisfied, moved to the next house.
He repeated the procedure in the remaining nine buildings on that side of the road, then crossed and continued his inspection of the buildings opposite.
As he entered the penultimate house, he looked up to see a couple of kids cycling past on their way to school and the Health Inspector glanced at his watch. It was almost one fifteen. After he’d finished checking these last two houses, he told himself, he’d go and get some lunch.
It was as he closed the door behind him that he saw something glinting in the rays of sunlight which fell into the hall.
Brady paused, letting go of the front door, his attention riveted to the glistening thing before him. He stepped closer, crouching slightly to get a better look.
