He needed Pops to make him get well.
Summoning one last, supreme effort, Billy pushed against the enduring pain, trying to rise by first reaching his knees. His jelly legs were still trembling from the effort of propelling him across the landing, but that pain was nothing compared to the fire burning inside his head. He braced his hands against the side of the bath and tensed to push those last few inches, but his willpower simply evaporated. He crouched there thinking that someday, someone was going to find a pile of bones where he was now. Billy the Skeleton. Billy the bag of bones. Bone man Billy, that's who they're gonna find Mr Barney and his policemen.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
He pushed upwards.
The withered muscles in his shoulders shrieked with the fury that lanced pain, his right elbow threatened to give way, but as he felt himself start to topple. Billy reached out and snagged his good hand around the handle set into the side of the tub. Kicked out, somehow jack-knifing himself backwards. The sores on his chin puckered as his face tightened into a mask of raw determination; a swollen blister, peppered with hair from his top lip, broke with a wet, popping sound, streaming fluid into his mouth.
Billy sucked on it greedily, chasing the tang and the moisture. He arched his back and twisted, pushing again. Dizzy and breathing heavily, he greyed out into the haze.
* * * * *
He swam, slowly, back to reality, hearing the dim, goading voice of his father in his head: “Billy, you fuckin' reee-tard! I can't be-leeve you just pissed your pants! For fuck's sake boy! Thirty-Three an' you still piss in yer pants like a bairn. Christ, boy, what am I ganna do with you?”
The front of his mind seemed dimly aware of the pain, thirst and hunger eating at his insides, while somewhere way down low in the back, primal instincts were taking over. Thoughts. A chain. Not him and paradoxically all of his own. He saw the world from quite a different angle, the ceiling having been replaced by the shallow trough of the tub, scaled with lime and hard water. Blood was rushing to his head. He twisted, only to see the side of the bath come level with his face.
Upsides down, Billy-boy, upsides down's all.
Reflexively, Billy arched his back, wind-milling his arms wildly to try and hold himself up long enough to peer out of the trough. In the brief freeze-framed second the move allowed, Billy saw his legs still set firmly on the floor, while his body had folded double around the pivot of his waist.
He let himself slouch, slumped forward into the beckoning tub, face under the mouth of the mixer-tap, his own mouth open, burning with thirst. He wriggled farther in spite of the pain it caused, dragging his legs in until he was lying flat on his back, feet hanging out of the back of the bath tub, cracked lips open under the taps, tantalized by their promise.
Reaching up brought a fresh surge of pain and heat. When his fingers closed around the cold aluminium, he could do little more than gasp and wheeze like an asthmatic, his head thrown back, mouth wide in anticipation of the water to come raining down so soon.
Lying there like that, head back, face glossy with the sheen of sweat, hair plastered in clumps to his forehead, Billy looked like a cranky old scarecrow laid out in an enamel sarcophagus and just waiting to drown.
It took an agonizing, endless, five minutes of sweat running into his blinking eyes and gentle, weakening pressure to bring the faucet around. Water came gushing, splashing over his face and into his open mouth. There was so little left of him to burn. He was physically empty. A husk. Mentally spent. Cracked lips parted further, trembling under the spray of lukewarm water; he coughed feebly, choking, his whole body shuddering under fresh waves of agony as more liquid tumbled in to fill his dehydrated mouth.
Billy swallowed involuntarily, his sandpaper-raw throat hacking, hungry to absorb the moisture. For a while, with the water level rising around his shoulders, Billy was quite sure he was going to puke, but mercifully, that boiled sickness passed.
Water lapped into his mouth from the side. Only then did he think to move to unblock the plughole before the water level rose so high another blackout promised more than just the possibility of drowning.
The fierce heat in his stomach subsided, quenched by mouthfuls of lukewarm water, leaving him hollow and hungry. He drank by tilting his head to the side and slurping. His clothes clung to him in places, saturated, and flapped like unsecured tents in others, full of air.
Billy closed his eyes and lay back, soothed by the slight warmth of the quarter-full tub, feeling the strength seep back into his bones each time he swallowed, listening to the water gurgling hungrily in the plughole as it drained away.
Finally, moving with all of the co-ordination of a jelly sack stuffed with chicken-bones, Billy struggled out of the bath and made his unsteady way downstairs, pausing in front of the full-length dressing mirror in the hall to gawp at his unfamiliarly slack features.
This illness of his had stolen away his open, earthy looks. The skin no longer fitted his face. It hung slackly, like water-logged towels on a wind-starved washing line. A cluster of ragged, blistering sores had sprouted up around his mouth and chin. A few had burst at some time during the onset of the first haze and his arrival at the mirror. His profile looked like a jumble of badly put together bones beneath a loosely fitting sheet of skin; all elbows and knees and ribs. His eyes, however, glittered, clear and yellow like marbles of polished topaz.
Scarecrows eyes, that's what these are, scarecrows eyes.
Billy could hear the sounds of the television coming from the living-room.
From nothing a black rage built in him. He wanted to shriek and hack and lash out at the face looking back through the mirror. It wasn't him, whoever he was. It wasn't him.
It's Billy-boy, that's who it is. . . Billy-boy the Scarecrow Man. . .
The fire lit inside his stiffening penis as his bladder evacuated itself. Hot urine trickled lazily down the inside of his leg. Still dribbling, he staggered through to the lounge. The rage subsided as quickly as it had risen, leaving him deflated.
Confused.
Through the window he could see the barn and the lightning split trunk of Hangman's Oak, the screaming man, in the courtyard. There were trees in the near distance (and the bad place), and hills the other way, but a fine, gauzy mist that wasn't quite rain bleached the world of any sharpness or definition.
It was hotter in here, stiflingly so. Hotter than it had been upstairs. He breathed in the sour-sweat reek of turned meat.
He turned away from the window. By the hearth, in a high-backed armchair, someone he knew he ought to recognize sat, watching the bright images conjured by the television. He was in his late sixties, blue and bloated, and several days dead by the looks of him. His silver-grey hair was plastered flat to his scalp, while vacant eye sockets, ragged with dead tendons and nerve endings pondered the delights displayed by the black and white television set.
Blow flies were gorging themselves all over the old man, squirming through the limp striated flaps of muscle where his ribcage had been torn open to expose grey, fat-flecked and crusty tubes of intestines. Dirt had gotten into the wounds.
Slippers had been jammed on the old man's feet, and his fingers positioned so they clawed at the chair's armrests, just like Captain Kirk's did on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. Billy had put them like that. One hand was stripped down to the bone. The old man looked as if a spasm of agony had taken him moments before Shylock turned up looking for his pound of flesh.
He studied the dead man in his favourite chair a moment longer, confused by it all, and then turned away, heeding the growing rumbles of his stomach. Death didn't look all that mysterious laid out so openly, just messy.
He went through to the kitchen, looking for something to eat.
His clothes clung uncomfortably as he moved, the water soaked into them getting uncomfortably cold.
Cupboards lined one wall, breakfast bench and boiler another. A stainless steel drainer and sink unit stood under the room's only window. Mismatched
dishes were racked up on the drainer, waiting to be put away. The plastic bin liner that had come wrapped around Pops' head was balled up in the sink, covered with rosy splashes of blood and rain water. First things first, he hefted the floorboard and slotted it back into place, closing the hole in the floor. Then he turned to the plain, meagrely stocked cupboards.
One was part filled with tins of soup and beans and other labelless non-perishables from the store. He took down a can of beans, and then rifled the drawers for a tin opener. As an afterthought, he went on through to the pantry. The old round-edged Frigidaire refrigerator was purring quietly.
Like the cupboards, the fridge belonged to the Old Mother Hubbard School of housekeeping. The best Billy could rustle up was a plate on which two defrosted steaks swam in their own rich blood. It was that or sour milk and blue stripped mould-cultivating cheddar.
Billy wandered back through to the living-room, plonking himself down in a seat next to the old man in his armchair without so much as a second thought.
Meaningless images from a tea-time soap danced across the screen, blue-white light slithering out across the room, shaping furniture and bodies in it like lumps of Playdoh .
Billy didn't waste his concentration on the small screen. With a nod in deference to the dead man, he began greedily spooning cold beans from the tin. He hadn't realized how painfully hungry he was until the first mouthful settled in his shrivelled stomach.
He slurped tomato juice from the spoon, coughed, a raspy, croupy wheeze, and sneezed, a clot of runny mucus bubbling in his nose, splashing flecks of snot over the plate of steaks. He wiped one of the pieces of meat clean.
Licked his lips, savouring the moment of anticipation.
Blood dripped back onto the plate as he lifted it to his hungry mouth.
He looked at it, curiously, for a moment, wondering what to do with the pound of prime cut, and then tore a chunk off with his teeth.
“Good stuff,” he said appreciatively, backing it up with a wet smack of his lips. He chewed, the animal's blood, already the colour of rust, dribbling down his chin.
- 46 -
Barney Doyle was glad to turn his back on the sudden swamp of chaos descending on his up until now peaceable stationhouse, even if it was only for half an hour.
Across the street, Sam Ash was busy helping Andy McKenna, some city hotshot who called himself D.S. Devlin, and his fresh-faced contingent over from Newcastle CID to take over the old youth block building. The High Street, a ribbon running no more than five hundred yards end to end had mutated into a single lane car-park.
Sixty officers had landed with Devlin, and while the hunt for Johnny Lisker had suddenly elevated itself into the big leagues, Barney felt as if he and his boys had been shut out and left somewhere in the minors.
The youth block resembled nothing more than it did a squat explosion of lime stone dumped carelessly in the middle of the picturesque street; a horse shoe knitted over with ivy climbers (an attempt at false dignity, he'd always thought) that clung to the porch and arched over the long windows as if they were making a home out of a magic cottage and not a playground for increasingly cocksure kids. The date stone set into the lintel above the door dated it as 1889.
Until as recently as yesterday the windows had been boarded and the porch door nailed shut. Now, a portable incident caravan filled one side of the playground, and a motley assortment of Fords, Vauxhalls, Skodas and white vans were slotted in wherever they could fit. The second contingent of the ever-multiplying convoy had descended on the village just after dawn, some of the drivers squeezing their vehicles into the block's playground, others, most, filing up to park in an uneven line that ran the fifty yard length of the youth block's low slung stone wall.
Barney sighed wearily.
Devlin's lackeys were in there now, probably trying to drag blood from the stones that were Old Man Lisker and Dave Lockley, not that Barney fancied their chances. Jeff Lisker was, more than likely, still well out of his head, and as of Thursday night, young Lockley seemed to have lost the power of speech altogether.
He'd had everyone out grinding their arses to the bone – poor old Charlie Adams had wasted most of yesterday commuting between Eddie McMahon's bedside and the handful of witnesses that had come forward, and as yet they had nothing concrete to show for it.
The playground itself was acting as a harbour for the milling bodies, locals and policemen alike. A uniformed officer was standing guard by the half-open porch door; a large man with what Barney would have described as “a face even his mother couldn't love.” He had his hands clasped around a steam wreathed mug, and seemed to be contemplating some secret within the chipped porcelain. Among the villagers, Barney noted several shocked faces and wide eyes, and heard the almost constant undercurrent of muted chatter, which, strangely, put him in mind of the hush normally associated with a Chapel of Rest.
Heading off down the bank, in the general direction of Evie's restaurant, he found himself, and not for the first time, pondering the bleak workings ticking away behind Johnny Lisker's state of mind. According to the handful of witnesses he'd spoken to personally, the stabbing had been pretty much a heat of the moment thing. A clash of personalities that had escalated all too quickly into violence. That Lisker carried a knife was no surprise. The boy was a menace and everyone knew it. That fact that he used it, however, was.
This was Northumberland, not New York for God's sake.
But that morning Barney Doyle had woken up with a new resolution in mind. From now on in nothing, no matter how extreme or unlikely, was going to surprise him anymore. Let precious bloody Todd Devlin be surprised by Brent Richards' stone-walling.
Gone to Brussels? Bollocks.
Barney breathed deeply, tasting the tang to the summer air, the freshness of the countryside, and that somehow indefinable quality that marked the richness of the season, all in one.
He clanged down the short flight of iron steps and onto the Waters edge's broad terrace, skipping through the maze of wooden picnic benches. The main part of Evie's restaurant faced out onto the lake, the half-glazed partition wall giving the diners an unbroken view of the eddying water. The black, hand lettered sign over the door had been his idea.
He was struck by the aromas of baking and spices almost as soon as he pushed the patio door open.
“Morning, pet,” Barney called through.
Its days as a working boathouse were long gone; Evie had inherited the four walls from her Pa more than twenty years ago, and against all the well meaning advice neighbours offered at the time, had sunk every last bean into converting it over.
The dining area was empty, but it was still early for the lunch crowd.
Evie looked up from wiping down the big kitchen table as he came through the swing door. She was a comfortable looking woman, happy with her lot. Large, friendly eyes and an ever ready smile.
Seeing the baleful expression pasted over Barney's usually cheerful face, she stopped swabbing at the immaculate table, throwing the dish rag in the direction of the double sink unit, and switched on the Cona machine. Bubbles rose slowly, gurgling. It made him think of the old coffee advert when the woman hid in the kitchen, making silly noises. He watched Evie, but her lips weren't moving so it wasn't a put on. The extractor fans hummed loudly, a swarm of angry bees, fighting for attention over the gurgling percolator.
The kitchen was white-tiled and excessively bright; fluorescent strip lights and carefully angled spot lights chasing away every inch of dark. There was a large oven set into the far wall, and a line of gas burners beside it. Evie looked as if she was about to say something, but the oven timer buzzed and she bustled over to attend to the pastries first. Barney pulled up a spare seat and sat himself down at the empty table, content to watch his wife at work. Barney never tired of watching her cook. It was akin to standing in the epicentre of a tightly reined in hurricane.
Controlled chaos, but only just. He dug around in his coat pocket, taking out his cigarette rol
ler and liquorice papers. This once he didn’t care about any no-smoking laws.
“Quiet for a Sunday breakfast,” he observed, running the roller through his fingers.
“Come on, Sherlock, how many times do I have to tell you?” Evie scolded lightly and without shifting her attention from the steaming tray of pastries.
“How about calling it a special occasion?”
“You know the score. There's a place out on the terrace for special occasions. Not in the kitchen.”
“Okay,” he shrugged, letting out a practiced and long-suffering sigh, slipped the roller and papers back into his pocket. “I get the message. Smoking's bad for my health.”
“Certainly is if you try it in here,” Evie agreed sweetly. The kitchen was cold, despite the radiators and the ripening warmth of outside. “Anyway, and to what do I owe the pleasure?” she asked, pouring two mugs of coffee and joining him at the table.
“I needed a break from the circus. This hotshot city fella, Devlin's just about taken over the youth block, and every bugger else seems to be hanging on his every word. This whole thing’s bigger than our missing kids.” He gave a sharp laugh that contained precious little humour in it. “And it's pretty plain they don't want an old sod like me getting under their feet while they play detective.”
“Aw, it can't be that bad, surely?”
“Believe me, Evie pet, it sure as hell can.”
“You worry too much is all.”
“'Yeah, sometimes, maybe. But I don't like it, Evie. I can't seem to scratch the itch that says this thing's turning into a damned nightmare. I can't seem to forget about that fella in the woods. And now I get the feelin' they're squeezing me out this side, too.”
“Trust me, Sherlock, it’s just that fertile imagination of yours playing tricks. You wait and see.” Evie moved to pour a second mug of coffee, wiping her flour-dusted hands on her apron as she did so. Barney couldn't help but smile when he saw the sparkle behind her eyes slip into humour when she saw he was watching. “And don't even think about trying to sneak a cigarette while my back’s turned.”
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