Kristy was shocked to see just how organised the operation was, picking up from scratch, and just how quickly and efficiently they set the wheels in motion. She didn’t know how the next night was going to pan out, and to her surprise, she found that she didn’t care. They were doing something positive, she was doing something positive.
When Nev mentioned the need for “tooling up” she grinned ferociously -- desperately -- back, her clenched teeth a razor-slash of pearl that bit down hard to conceal the scream. Striking back, she told herself and wondered if you were meant to feel sick to the core when you struck back.
- 50 -
As Alex watched Johnny's back scamper a retreat back up the hill towards the Judas Hole, he couldn't help but imagine the blood and the knife into his trembling hand. The knife with which he was as good as stabbing it. He sniffed, chewing nervously at his lower lip.
Around the hill itself, the few hunters that remained seemed to have lost their appetite for the kill. Alex hung back. Ran fingers through his knotted hair. Fingered his earring, counting to fifteen beneath the shallow tides of his breath. Now, or never. He pushed himself to his feet. Scuttled forward, pushing back the thorny branches, checked both ways, waiting for one of the uniformed dog handlers to crest the hill, and then bolted for the relative safety of the next stand of trees thick enough to offer any sort of cover, thirty metres down.
Halfway there and he was breathing hard, cursing the tightness in his lungs, and labouring. Alex ducked down into a loose crouch while he caught his breath, then up again and running. At the trees, Alex virtually staggered to a halt, needing the strength of the tree trunk for support, gasping hard.
Rogan's farm was still a long and difficult descent away, much of that descent scrabbling over loose shale without so much as the odd boulder set firm for support.
The thinner air up here, as marginal as the difference truly was, was making breathing far more difficult than he might have hoped.
Alex looked about once, and then pushed off again, ducking down low and skidding to a halt twenty metres on; on the fringe of the scree slope. He shrunk himself as small as possible. Threw a glance back the way he had come, unable to resist, and then plunged on, sliding and stumbling down the slope, hands out for balance and being scraped and cut away into ribbons by the sharp edges of rock slicing away beneath them. His feet skidded, scraped and dragged, scuffing up dust and shale and making such a godawful rolling racket as if he had kicked up a small landslide on all sides. Without the sweeping wind funnels, the noise might have carried half a mile.
With the wind, there was no way of telling whether it carried ten feet or ten miles.
The peculiar thing being that despite the bleakness of a moment before, despite the isolation he had felt -- and the self loathing -- betraying Johnny, the rapid, stumbling slide into the unknown was exhilarating. There was a real adrenal buzz to tackling it head on, wind in his hair, sun on his face and at his back.
Coming to the fence, Alex stopped his stumbling run, shading his eyes with a hand. Even this far away, the outbuildings appeared eerily still; it wasn't so much the way they looked. The few fine hairs bristling at nape of Alex's neck (and the skin beneath) crawled, tasting the isolation coming in on the drafts of air funnelling through from the barns and brick-clad houses; they felt abandoned.
The sun was a copper globe hanging halfway in the sky, its flat bottom dragging above the bony spines of the ruined oak, the hideous branches clawing at the underside of the fiery ball, trying to wrench it back to the blazing noonday vertical. There, trapped by the sheer magnetism of Hangman's Oak, the sun offered no panacea to sooth the barrenness surrounding Frank Rogan's farm. No cold comfort.
Alex stumbled forward, climbing the fence. The grass was longer on this side. The roots still clogged with the dewy moisture of the last rainfall sucked at his dragging feet.
Maybe this wasn't such a good idea, he thought to himself, and then banished the doubting voice to one of the dim and dusty recesses at the back of his mind. It had to end here, that much he knew. He had to stop stumbling blindly from one disaster to the next without so much as a second's thought. He wasn't some mindless puppet blundering along the course of his master's damned horoscope. Okay, he thought reasonably. That means taking over the controls. Going home. Facing the music from all fronts. And hoping for more than just a little slice of luck along the way, he felt like adding but checked himself before he could.
There was no one to be seen, but still Alex's advance grew ever more cautious as the cluster of buildings neared.
Somewhere a crow cawed raucously, shredding the little that was left of his composure. He edged on. Close to, the buildings were still, and – perhaps surprisingly – quiet. There were no signs of activity, however small. No signs of anyone having been around for quite some time, in fact. Alex dismissed the most direct route, through the forecourt and down the slope to the trees, in favour of skirting the farm itself by going around the side of the connecting barns and keeping away to join the gravel road further on down.
Alex ran on, slower now, casting the occasional look back the way he had come.
Within spitting distance of the old caravan, he stopped running altogether. Someone had put one of the windows out. Broken glass fanned out to create a dangerous carpet beneath the empty frame.
And something was banging. No, Alex realized, picking his way slowly closer, banging was the wrong word. It sounded as if something was jammed and chunking over and over as it tried to wriggle its way out of whatever predicament held it in this eternal chunking loop. There were other sounds, too. Lurking below the chutter-clunk. A low and droning spiral that fractured into a multitude of ever diminishing, erratic whines.
The caravan's door was shut, the curtains pulled across from the inside. Alex walked up to the door, twisted the handle and pushed tentatively, already cursing his curiosity for dragging him this close.
“Fuck,' he cursed aloud, pushing the door all the way open. It was too dark to make out anything beyond the threshold, beyond the odd shape and outline where the shadows were just slightly darker, that shade more substantial.
There was no breeze in the caravan to shift the hot, heavy air. And the flies had started to come. That accounted for one of the two distinctly separate sounds he could hear. The swell of their buzzing intensified as they went about worrying the shadows. From where he stood at the door, they looked to be congregating on the rucked up bundle of pillows, sheets and blankets heaped high on the mattress, so he went over to the window and pulled back the polythene curtains. Sunlight streamed in, swamping the room with its cheerful grin. Alex turned back to the crumpled blankets and the put-you-up bed and had to reach out to steady himself.
The pallid montage of body, blanket and blood refused to register. Suddenly, the air inside the cramped caravan was thick and uncomfortably cloying, as if the ethereal hands that had toyed with his lungs and throat all the way down the long scramble were squeezing, and squeezing hard.
Alex's grip tightened on the doorframe as his legs sagged under the combined weight of his body and the shock of the ghastly find, threatening to dump him unceremoniously amid the clutter of beer cans and dirty clothes. Sickness clogged in his throat. It wasn't a candy floss sickness, he could tell that much immediately, because it wasn't dissolving to the more pleasant sickliness of sugar. The tightness was like a wad of cotton wool being jammed down to block his windpipe.
Gasping each increasingly more difficult to catch breath, Alex lurched away from the door. It wasn't a step that carried him towards the curiously slumped body on the blankets. A muscle cramped through the length of his right thigh in a repulsive shiver. His fingers uncurled, curled again, this time missing the crutch-like support of the doorframe. The clunking he had heard outside was louder, harsh and intensely repetitive.
Mike Shelton -- at least he presumed it was Mike, even though he couldn't see the face -- was slumped forward from the sitting position, his forehead touching
his crossed ankles, the knife protruding from between his legs like some gross, distended metal erection. Without the brittle crust of rust hardening around the corpse, it might have been possible for Alex to convince himself that Mike was either sleeping or locked in some deep, meditative trance with his work clothes neatly folded on the bed beside him.
Alex couldn't breathe. Couldn't force the air down into his lungs. Dizzy sickness lurched up his throat, vomiting back the shallow mouthful of air he had half-succeeded in hacking into his heaving lungs.
Desperately, he fumbled for his inhaler, finding only keys and coins in his pocket. No blessed puff from the magic wand of the great wizard Ventolin.
Got to relax. Got to get calm. . Stay calm, breathe. Got to. Got to. A drink. . . Get a drink. Water. Yes. . .
Alex staggered forward the two steps, stumbling and almost falling in his need to do something, sucking at the air without actually breathing any of it in. Asthma attack. Gonna have an asthma attack. Got to calm down and breathe. Got to breathe. . .
He hooked his hands over the sink and hauled himself up, his gasping giving way to something nearer hyperventilation. He gulped down a glass of water, almost choking in his desperation to swallow. Tremors coursed through his body, starting in his hands, working methodically through to his feet. His head and shoulders never moved. A second glass full of cool blue, this one splashed over his face and down his tee-shirt, took the edge off Alex's panic.
He started trying to hold his breath for longer, and then longer still, sucking in fresh air in ever widening gulps. He remained leaning against the sink unit a moment longer, gaze drawn back up the hill, the first of the farm outbuildings creeping into the periphery of his otherwise blank stare. Like that, caught like a ghost itself, Frank Rogan’s decaying farm was transformed into a place for phantoms. Anything rather than turn to look at the collapsed Buddha on the put-you-up.
But he could not postpone the inevitable forever. Steeling himself, Alex turned, slowly, to look, and stepped a grudging step closer. Seeing Mike's body for the second time diluted some of the shock, but none of the horror. Needing to be distracted by anything, he sought the source of the incessant clunking. Far too quickly for his own piece of mind, Alex saw the cassette recorder with its tape jammed and the automatic shut-off constantly trying to do just that. He walked over to it and thumbed down the stop button.
Without the clunking to work as a counter-balance, the buzzing of the flies seemed impossibly loud.
The body hadn't stood up and crept out -- as Alex had more than half hoped it would -- while his back was turned. Not realizing he was even doing it, Alex reached out to touch the corpse, felt the icy shock of cold charge through the nerves in his fingertips in the half second before his touch upset its delicate balance, and it slumped to one side in a stiff-jointed heap.
Alex could see it was Mike now, though his face had discoloured to a purplish blue where the blood had drained away to pool in the back of his brain.
Mike's eyes weren't the empty marbles he had become conditioned to by the big and small screens and their glamorised re-enactments of death. The last tormented glimmer (itself too fleeting to fade completely) burned across his face was so utterly desperate it shattered any illusions Alex might have harboured concerning death and glory.
It was so painfully apparent that Mike Shelton had suffered -- and tricked by rigor mortis, his body at least, was suffering still.
Blood was on his lips and between his teeth from where, taking that final, shuddering gasp, he had bitten through his tongue.
The sideways slump had dislodged the knife, so it lay now half covered by Mike's discoloured thigh.
Alex stooped to pull it free, compelled by a sick mixture of fascination and curiosity. The knife felt oddly heavy in his hand, as if by plunging into Mike Shelton's lifeblood it had somehow sucked the very essence of the man into its grey blade.
He turned the knife over in his hand, fascinated by the sheen and the separating blood-streamers beading down the blade.
Alex shook himself then, like a dog emerging from the depths of Devil's Water to the sun, dislodging the soupy sense of unreality and detachment that had his mind away in some far off hidey hole.
He let the knife slip through his fingers.
Staggered clumsily back and away, through the flies to the door and out beyond. And then he was running for all he was worth, and then some. Though he didn't know it, tears were streaming down his cheeks.
* * * * *
He ran until he thought his heart would burst, and only then did he realise his panic was chasing him back up Moses Hill. By then Alex was close enough to the farmhouse for the silhouetted claws of Hangman's Oak to snare his feet in their shadows.
A phone wire hung overhead, a gentle arc from pillar to post to the farmhouse itself, disappearing into the wall just below the guttering. He still hadn't stopped running, merely slowed to a jog, his eyes darting frantically every which way, searching out the phantoms in their hiding places.
The phone line offered a link back down to civilization. A way to re-establish a foothold in reality. Alex couldn't stop seeing Mike Shelton's face. Couldn't stop seeing that look of defeat in his eyes. The look that was already his personal phantom. The ghost he was going to carry with him for today, for tomorrow and maybe for a whole lot longer besides. Any chance of shutting it out, he was going to take, no matter how slim. Any chance at all. He slowed to a walk short of the door. The wind that before hadn't so much as bothered him left him so cold now. Even his goosebumps had goosebumps. But maybe it wasn't all the winds’ doing. The clustered outbuildings had an atmosphere all of their own, noticeably colder than the hillside. As if a huge and rolling cloud had taken to blocking out every last warming ray from the sun above, and was itself chilling the fields below.
The porch door was closed. Alex knocked, and waited but no one came to answer. He tried the handle, giving the door a slight push. It opened.
Inside was dark, hot and stuffy. He could feel the waves of heat churning in on themselves as the sudden rush of fresh air surged in from behind him. The smell of the place was rank and stifling.
None of the lights were on, and in the two windows Alex could see, the curtains had been pulled across to keep it as dark as was possible.
“Anyone home?” he yelled, moving through the Spartan kitchen to the hall. Things were scattered everywhere. Knives, forks, spoons and every other household utensil where the drawers had been up-ended and turned out across the wooden floor. Here again, the light was kept down to a minimum. He tried the switch but nothing happened. The phone was on a stand in the hall, at least. No need for him to go rooting through the dark looking for it. “I'm just going to use your phone, and then I'll be on my way. Okay?”
Still no one answered, so he picked up the handset and tapped out nine-nine-nine. Listening to the dialling tone spiral, he realised, more likely than not, he wasn't alone in the house after all. The muted sounds of a television set were coming under the living room door.
Alex hung up just as the telephonist was asking which service he required.
All the while, the rotten smell grew stronger, accompanied now by a strange, peppery odour, musty and cloyingly astringent. Alex stood and listened and shuddered. The sounds of daytime television creeping through, suddenly and strangely threatening beside the damp stillness this side of the divide.
The sludge sloshing about inside his stomach walls was going to need more than a glass of Alka Seltzer to settle. Alex held there a second, hand set on the door handle, waiting for a flush of dizziness to pass, then snatched and pushed it open forcefully enough to slam the door into the wall before the hinges could pull it back. His head pounded. The back of Alex's neck had burning needles jabbing into the base of his brain with each step as he moved into the living room.
Billy was sat on the floor, his back to Alex, his attention given over to the array of knives fanned out around him, as if he was in the process of counting out an
eenie meanie selection with a variety of blades for players.
Billy did not look up, as Alex expected, to see who it was that had walked in on him counting out his knives like the nursery rhyme king in his counting house.
All of a sudden, Alex felt as if he had just stepped out of an elevator only to have the floor fall away from under his feet and his body free fall into Hell.
Again in here, the curtains had been drawn across the windows to keep the light out -- or the darkness in, Alex found himself thinking crazily. Occasional slivers of yellow made strong enough inroads on the plains of darkness for it to look as if fingers of light were trying to reclaim this room from the clutches of the dark.
The rush of reeks this side of the door were overpowering; meat and dirt. The meat turned and attracting the attention of flies, as the body of Mike Shelton had been; the dirt bringing back all the sense-memories of the Judas Hole, so recently abandoned.
Dampness, sweat and the chilled, peppery taint of below ground.
In the living room's only high-backed chair Frank Rogan sat watching the grey antics of the chat show on the box. Blue and bloated and several days on the wrong side of an impending demise, Frank was the feasting dish for an army of blowflies. Clusters of eggs hung in minute sacks, in his nose and the rusty sockets where his eyes should have been.
Looking at the shrunken, sallow-faced old man the words “Frying pan” and “Fire” sparked across his mind. The blowflies were crawling all over the old gardener. Lichen had started to fur the grey-white protrusions of bone where dirt had been worked into the many wounds; noticeably the vertical slice from throat to groin.
Bizarrely though, the first things Alex noticed were the slippers jammed onto the corpse's feet, left slipper on right foot and vice versa.
“Oh, sweet Jesus God almighty. . .” The words came out at little more than a whisper, but that very hushed quality doubled, tripled, their conviction and jerked Billy Rogan's eyes away from his shiny fan of knives. He shinnied back, eyes darting, feral, his few scraps of hair stuck in wild tufts. Blisters cropped the whole patch of skin from below his nose and around his mouth, a good many raw and weeping. Alex saw a scarecrow in second-hand and discarded clothes, and then he saw an animal -- a cornered wolf -- and only then did he see the frightened man shinnying away from him. And that was in a glimmer, the veil hastily pulled back as Billy sprung into the attack.
Sufferer's Song Page 31
