He smiled in spite of himself.
“So. . . You want to be. . . A fuckin’ Jedi?” he mimicked, sweeping his branch across Johnny's ribs. Johnny was too slow in dodging, and only just succeeded in bringing his own wooden sword up in time to catch the blow before it cracked into his chest.
They circled warily, both looking for the obvious break.
Rain blurred everything they saw.
Johnny came at him.
“Just like old times,” he gasped, grinning again. The most frightening thing about that grin was the way Johnny changed in its company. The way the lights went out behind his eyes. In the warmth of the rain, Alex found himself hating that idiotic grin.
He wanted to wipe it off Johnny's face, with his wooden sword if he had to. He lashed out again, feinting a telegraphed headshot, only to drop to one knee at the last minute and cut low for Johnny's ankles.
Johnny saw this play quicker and skipped over the whipping arc without much difficulty. He came down awkwardly though, his leading foot twisting on the edge of a fist-sized stone that flipped out from under him. He stumbled, throwing his hands out to steady himself, without success.
Now, Alex thought, the adrenal surge hammering through his head in an endorphin rush. It’s over. One shot to stun. One to disable. One to finish the job. He pulled back in a two-handed lift, aiming to ram the butt end of the branch in Johnny's face while he flapped helplessly.
Go on. . . Whack him now. No one to see. . .
But he threw it aside instead. Rain and his sweat mingled like lovers. Johnny was laughing like his collapse was the funniest thing in the world right then.
Alex looked up at the moon and hated God and the Devil in equal measure. In his mind he gave the Old Men of the Stars and The Pit the finger, the most obscene gesture he knew.
He sat down hard, out of breath, hearing nothing but the sigh-thump of his own blood in his ears.
Alex had no answers.
- 38 –
Until then, Kristy had never thought of fat old Oliver Hardy as the Voice of The Prophet of Doom, but starring another fine mess square in the face it was hard to see how the parallel had eluded her for so long. What was the line from that song: “You've got to throw the stone to get the pool to ripple”?
Looking at it that way, her impromptu conversation with Brent Richards had more in common with a boulder than any pebble she'd come across. She harboured few illusions, that spur of the moment phone call to Havendene had made one hell of a splash. From now on in it was just a case of sitting tight and seeing what the shockwaves stirred up.
* * * * *
Kristy spent much of the afternoon trying to hunt down an old solo album by Daryl Hall without any great success, and ended up trading plastic for a peculiarly titled CD, Funk O' Metal Carpet Ride, on the strength of the one single she thought she remembered from her Uni days. The remainder was plagued by drunken Newcastle United supporters celebrating Sunderland's relegation at the feet of every team in the Premiership. Shopping worked on her like an amnesiac, buying a black lycra mini skirt that wasn't so much mini as micro, stopping off to get her shoes heeled at a while-u-wait cobbler's and picking up a paperback of Ben Shelton’s Uneasy Streets served to help make Saturday more normal. Admittedly, the lycra skirt would probably never find its way out of either bag or wardrobe, but that wasn't why she bought it.
The waiting went against the grain. Every instinct said she ought to be up and at Richards playing the terrier, not sitting out the gloomy afternoon in a cheap cobbler's booth. Kristy dropped in on Jessie Stevenson, hoping to call in a favour she wasn't even sure she was owed. Her plan was simple enough. Get Jessie to cover for her on Monday and Tuesday, slip something by Spencer Abel under her by-line, so she had three more days to dig the dirt on the deadly doc. The only drawback was plain in Jessie's face; she was less than delighted with the prospect of two days worth of extra work, so Kristy found herself going cap (and photographs) in hand to Spencer.
She decided it was probably best to play this one straight down the line. To keep it that way, she even made the effort to cross her legs secretary-style over her preferred scholarly ankle-cross which, for some reason she could never quite fathom, riled a good many higher-up's in the newspaper world.
Spencer greeted her with his habitually laconic smile. He had given up on the ponytail, so his hair fairly flopped over the tortoise-shell rims of his reading glasses. She wasn't at all surprised to see his woollen sports jacket hung on the back of his chair, nor that it now looked six-days slept in.
“Surprised to see me?”
“You, of all people, never fail to surprise me, kiddo. I don't suppose this is in the way of a social call?”
“Afraid not. I think those winged pigs we were talking about just touched down about ten miles from here.”
She could see by the puzzled expression stamped on his ruddy features he hadn't the vaguest idea what pigs she was talking about.
“You've lost me,” he admitted. He toyed with an ivory black artist’s pencil, rolling it between thumb and forefinger while she sketched in the details of yesterday and today, the pencil's arc becoming tighter and less controlled as she talked about Jason's tangle with the animal kingdom. Twice it skittered across the table and onto the floor.
She showed him the pictures. The one he looked at longest was one of the two she herself had picked out as she badgered Richards’ receptionist. Looking at it was like glimpsing the other side of the mirror and seeing your worst nightmare. The photograph showed the round metal drum of an industrial sized rubbish bin, angled so the camera caught the contents, which happened to be broken-backed, shaven-headed laboratory rats, cabbage leaves and potato peelings. He looked at that photo with its bold and glaring condemnation, then flicked back through the run of shots Jason had run off to establish some sort of continuity.
“Can't say I share his taste in munchies,” Spencer said by way of a wisecrack, and then, more seriously: “So what do you want to do with these?”
“Jason said to use them, but I want more.”
“Glad to see you're thinking. As far as I can see it, we've got some photos of badly treated rats and a badly beaten bloke on his back. Not much of a case all told. Certainly not damning evidence on its’ own, but it all adds up. Now, we could run something on Kelso being savaged by Richards’ dogs, and make a few veiled hints at why he was there in the first place. Some of the stuff we might want to sit on for a while, though. See where it takes us. There’s a hell of a lot of coincidences here, kiddo, and I've never been one for believing in coincidence. Put them in a line. Judith Kenyon goes missing. The gardener photographs her and a heavy going into the health farm, then he goes missing and the local police find the heavy swinging from the trees. Add that little lot to the animal laboratory and the assault on Kelso and you've got a pretty nasty set of circumstances.”
“We could go to the police,” she suggested, knowing he wouldn't accept that option. Abel was old school. You cracked it open before you handed it over. That was the golden rule.
“And let them go blundering in? Nope. Not on this one. If the local plod can't make the necessary connections, I don't think it's up to us to point him in the right direction, do you?”
“Maybe not,” Kristy agreed, and then pressed her advantage while the ball was still in her court. 'So give me time. Let me roll with this one.”
“And if I do, Kristy, do you think you can handle it any better than the others out there? What makes you think this fella's yours to crack? I'm interested. Tell me.”
“The truth? Okay. I want him. It's as simple as that. I want to crucify him.”
“What about simple things like the truth?”
Kristy half-smiled. “That, Spencer, is what's going to crucify him.”
* * * * *
Uncollected mail lay stacked up against the door, brightly coloured envelopes left to drift on the coarse welcome mat; junk mail mostly, unwanted by the block's other tenants. Kristy flick
ed through the envelopes to satisfy herself none of the backlog was her responsibility, then went on up.
The obtrusive odour of a fry-up hung heavily. Vivaldi was playing in one of the other flats; Spring Danza Pastorale: Allegro. The powerful violin put her in mind of Nigel Kennedy's popular virtuoso. The gritty nail-on-glass sounds of the rain had come up with her, and a bluster had the hall window rattling. It was a lonesome sound. A little creepy, too.
The door to her flat wasn't locked, which was wrong.
Very wrong.
She tried to remember her going out that morning. Had she been so preoccupied with Jason's well-being that she'd forgotten to set the snick or double-lock the deadlocking mortise? It was no good, the best she could come up with was maybe she had, maybe she hadn't.
Vivaldi slipped into the tamped sounds of Summer, setting next door's terrier off with its yapping.
Kristy was shaking, and for no other reason than maybe she had locked the door after all. She didn't want to go in but she did at the same time. She wanted to prove to herself that she had simply forgotten to lock the door on the way out; and she didn't want to open the door for fear of what she might find behind it.
It didn't matter that she told herself she was just being stupid and that she couldn't very well stand there all day, something inside said she didn't dare open the door to her own home.
In the end, she just pushed the door open and expected to see the worst; drawers yanked open, paper strewn everywhere, clothes torn, even shit smeared across the walls.
There was that, and more.
What looked like blood had been smeared to make a border three fingers thick that started and ended back at the front door. The bookcases had been overturned, the books thrown about in a jumbled scatter of personal things. The television screen had had a foot kicked through it. Someone had even taken the time to drop their trousers and take a dump in the bucket seat of her sofa, and then smear the faeces over the leather like a child’s finger-painting.
Kristy felt sick. Violated. And this wasn't the worst of it, by far. In the kitchen, every pot and every pan, plate, knife and fork had been pulled out of the cupboards and draws and tipped onto the floor. The blinds had been yanked out of the roller.
She could smell burning.
The chip pan was on the back burner, fat crackling and spitting. She really wished she hadn't seen what was being crisp-baked in there, but she had.
Three rats.
Where it hadn't been shaved, the fur shrivelled back in greasy clumps of golden-brown wire. Clots of yellow fat baked solid into the sockets where their eyes had burst during the slow cooking.
Bones, from the shattered spines, protruded through split skin and the few knots of grease.
Kristy threw up into the sink and set the tap running.
In the bedroom, the covers had been thrown back for another shit-sketch to be dumped on the mattress. Five rats had been nailed to the room's walls; two above the headboard, one above the door, two above the window; the blood-border circling their small bodies twice in a grotesque emphasis.
In the bathroom, the sink and bathtub were both overflowing with red tainted water and eviscerated rats floating belly-up. The blood-border thinned and ran in streaks over the ceramic tiles, but the warning it spelled out was clear enough:
I SEE YOU, CUNT!
She had the “more” she'd asked for; a whole shitload of it waiting to explode in her face just as soon as she wanted to pull the pin.
- 39 -
When the music stopped, there was only the sound of screaming.
The screams were carried to his ears by each breath and gust of wind, then whiplashed away into the sucking vacuum, leaving Billy's face red and smarting with the sting of tears and shock.
He stopped to listen. The odour of animals clung to his nose. He was sweating. Cold beads of perspiration. Another breath shook a few more leaves into the gutters and eaves.
Then he heard the scream again.
A shrill, piercing cry of terror that cut through the colourless twilight with the precision of a surgeon's scalpel. The climbers on the coop walls trembled in the persistent wind, the only movement in the otherwise still panorama.
Forgot to feed the birds, his conscience prodded at the sight of the tattered sheets of newspaper tacked up at the windows like curtains. Broken glass rattled in one frame.
“I'm coming,” he shouted, catching his breath. One of his bootlaces was undone and trailing under his feet. The old farmhouse, daunting, dark and neglected for too long. Through the tattered flaps of old news he could see into the blackness of its heart. It was okay to go in during the day, when it was light, but in the dark it was scary. The paper curtains fluttered again, like broken wings trying to kick up and fly.
There was a snap-crack inside, then another scream.
“I'm coming,” he said again, more in the way of a whisper this time. Slowly, fearfully, he pushed open the rotting door and stepped over the rusting ploughshare that had fallen across to block the doorway and through the arc into the black. The air in here was thicker, cloying, clogging, with the reek of rotting feed and stronger, the smell of urine.
There was another smell and that one made Billy want to lose control and wet himself all over again.
Danger.
They were in here.
The thought of them being this close set his heart pounding.
He reached out for the bicycle lamp hanging down from a rafter and turned on the dusty light.
There were pigeons everywhere. Every ledge, every flat surface. They lined up with heads down, feathers preened, a carpet of feathered bodies. Stairs climbed between the cages, the risers carpeted by agitated birds jostling for position. They all seemed to be intently peering up at Billy, sharing the same frightening mixture of excitement and curiosity smouldering behind their black eyes. The din and furore around and about him was making Billy's head reel.
He took a shuffling step forward, careful not to lift either foot from the floor, just in case he brought it down on the back of one of his birds.
The world tilted crazily out of focus again, but this time his vision didn't snap back into place.
A pigeon was pecking viciously at his ankle.
Billy lifted his foot to kick out at the hungry bird and saw the bloody clots of feathers sticking to the soles of his heavy work boots. The ghost of the tiny bones breaking and crunching was still echoing. He stared, horrified, at the flat carpet of carcasses trailing in his wake.
“Nooo. . .”
He hadn't said that. The denial belonged to a young boy. A frightened young boy who had left his pet birds to starve; eat or be eaten, it was the law. Only the strong get to survive. The word had come down from the third deeper blackness of above.
It made his skin creep.
He heard another sound while he hesitated, not unlike laughter, then the snap-crack whip of K'tuttch.
A whimper cut short by a shuffle of feet and a thud.
Billy rushed up the stairs, not thinking about the birds being crushed by his stamping feet anymore.
“Please no. . . Won't do it again. . . Please no. . . Won't.”
Billy didn't need a light to see the boy, no older than seven, on his knees, or the stripped welts across his bare back.
“Please, Pops!” The voice turned into a strangled coughing choke that either of them might have made.
A grunt from the man standing over him.
Another sharp K'tuttch as he brought the belt down on the boy's back.
That scream fading into a whimper.
“This hurts me son, this hurts me,” he heard and remembered hearing Pops say as he belted him again.
“Pops, please don't,” Billy begged for the coughing boy. Part of his mind, the scared young boy of seven part, tried to warn him that getting involved was probably a mistake, but it never got the chance. He caught the stink of his own fear. Dizziness and sickness filled his head. He couldn't understand why he couldn't see
Pops’ face. There were no shadows to hide it.
For a moment there was complete silence.
Billy froze, his heart thumping, petrified as Pops turned on him. He recognized the belt by its buckle. It was Pops’ cleansing strap. Billy couldn't shake the feeling of dislocation.
“Billy you fuckin' ree-tard,” Pops lisped in a slow, dragging, gritty voice.
He shambled forwards, wrapping the cleansing leather around a bloated hand that had been flayed and planted with pigeon feathers. His eyes were slits of black, nose and mouth stuffed with feathers.
Billy backed off; tripped and fell backwards. Pops glared at him with the eyes of hungry pigeons. He rolled and scrambled to his feet again, back-pedaling. He stumbled again, feeling the crunch of a pigeon under his boot. He felt downy hands wrap around his throat.
Pops’ face seemed to be made out of melting pigeons. An inch wide chasm of nothing between head and shoulders. Billy struggled. Jerked back. Twisted. Squirmed. Batting at the hands crushing the bones in his neck. He rolled and struggled to his feet, trying to tear free of his father's grip.
He lashed out, his hands jamming into a wound that split Pops’ body from pubic bone to throat. The abdominal walls closed on his fist, spewing a steaming, glossy, blood-slicked tangle of half-consumed guts.
Billy tugged, yelling, trashing, trying to yank his hand free of the muscular vice. Birds broke and flew in a wild flurry of wings. The air filled with their cries. They came out of the cuffs of his work clothes, from the slash in his chest, his head. Downy feathers clotted with blood.
Pops started to collapse in on himself.
Crumble.
Something tickled Billy's face.
Licked across his eye.
“LEAVE ME ALONE!” he screamed and begged from somewhere between the borderlands of panic and insanity.
Sufferer's Song Page 18