Far back in the distant tunnel of his mind he was away from this place, Kathleen and his girls’ safe with him; on a beach somewhere permanently hot where the sun always shines and bad things don't come true. He watched in sickened disbelief as his arms pushed him away from the wall, his right hand slowly working the lock of the shed door, the whole scene only a pale blur as the earth and brick walls seemed to spin around him. Repelled by his loss of control but too much at the mercy of the need to worry about it, frightened but so so hungry.
His metabolism was running wild, like a great foundry furnace out of control, raging fire.
The noise of the rain grew louder until the hard slap-patter of it on the concrete throbbed in his ears. The invasion came with a sharp suddenness that made Daniel cry out in pain. For a second he felt dizzy again, confused. He wanted to scream over and over. He was trembling violently, his mouth moving silently over a litany of words he didn't own, something inside pushed, slackened his resistance, broke it, and then nothing mattered outside pleasing the string of voices cluttering his head.
There were no burning lights now, no sense of elevation. Daniel felt soiled and dirty and beaten. Back down that distant tunnel, the real Daniel Tanner who had escaped with wife and family intact, was blissfully ignorant, deluding himself, knowing he was weaponless against the evil in his other, unable to stir for fear of being silenced while he rummaged through the clutter of garden tools and household junk with what amounted to manic glee, taking a strangely intense pleasure pulling aside spades and growbags and step ladders until he could get through to the back shelf and claim his prize, a petrol driven power-saw, from the debris. The dusk and shed-shadow threw its uncharitable light over his pale flesh, accentuating the sores around his mouth and nose, which looked ready to burst in the sickly light. Viscous juice ran from the broken skin. He emerged from the shed holding the power-saw high like a distended trophy. He breathed deeply, dizzied by the blood-smell in the air, and was surprised by the deceptive strength in his arms.
The wind that had come with the rain, or borne it, dropped to nothing. Daniel had always been leery of the big Black and Decker power-saw, but in his hands now it felt like a natural extension of his limbs, not some dangerous but necessary tool that might run off at a bloody tangent if it wasn't handled with the respect it was due. The shifting perspective both delighted and frightened Daniel Tanner.
“Things to be done,” he mumbled to himself, hurrying out of the garden and into the street. Daniel saw an image of himself in his mind’s eye: Engulfed in a righteous flame, like an angel, he was bringing down the twin pillars of the welcoming arch, venting his fury and frustration, carving into the wood with the blade of the power-saw, forcing it upward like a blade through a ripe young belly, tearing it open, bringing it down. He let out a shrill howl of eagerness, running to reach the street. He would fell the arches and then he would come back, slip up on them from behind and slit their bellies. With guidance he realized he had the cunning to do it; needed to do it, ram the knife in deep into Kathleen’s belly, yank it free, plunge it into that flat plane, tear her open. Cut her, cut her. . . and when she dropped with the kitchen knife still in her, he would go at her with his bare hands, no, something heavy to smash her bones to splinters, break her arms and legs.
By the time he reached the end of the High Street and the start of the Spine Road, Daniel was shrieking the worst fuck-curses he could think of at the moon and the trees and the streets and houses behind him and just about anyone who would listen, spittle flying from his lips. Having surrendered to the collective consciousness behind that primeval, cold and calculating fury, his head was wrapped in the cottonwool-ecstacy of the one surprise he had feared even more than the loss of control, from even before he opened his eyes: it felt good.
By the interwoven trees he took a fighting stance, bracing himself for the kick of the saw as he powered it up with a yank of its ignition cord. Even with him braced the thing bucked in his hands like it wanted to be away and doing the cutting for itself. Daniel smiled a sharp smile as he reined it in, feeling the power there in his hands, the cutting power. He placed the first incision flat; three feet from the base of the trunk, the second on a diagonal forty-five degrees from the horizontal brought the tree crashing down across the road. The interlaced branches cracked and snapped but some wouldn’t let up on the pretense of being an arch and refused to yield their hold so the welcoming arch looked more like a flat line and a taut catapult string ready to unload Greek fire on the village two hundred yards down the lane. Daniel listened to the power-saw as it started talking to him, then moved to the other side of the road. Identical cuts felled the second side of the botanical arch.
He stepped back to look at his handiwork, a handkerchief over his mouth and nose because it was difficult to breathe out here. The two trunks lay across the road, forming a natural barrier that would take some negotiating with anything other than feet.
There was no natural path around the felled trees, the sawn-off ends were both buried deep in the hedgerows either side of the road.
He turned and walked away from the downed trees, treading the first and last steps on a path he never imagined for himself. He believed – honestly believed – that within the four walls of his house on Brewer Street lay his own exorcism. A belief that was fanned by the tiny demons resident in his consciousness.
He walked back slowly, cutting, cutting. . . while damnation walked down the road towards him in the shape of Billy Rogan, Pops’ old shotgun broken and lain over his left forearm.
Billy walked past him in a daze, mumbling what sounded like: “Scarecrow, scarecrow,” under his breath as he clambered up the barrier of the old welcoming arch to man the barricades. He healed the breach in the shotgun, dropping two cartridges into the barrel-mouths and locking the barrels off, his body alive with jitters and ticks, anticipation gleaming in his sickly eyes.
Daniel tore his own eyes from the boy-man perched on the tangle of dead trees and displaced rookeries, and turned his thoughts to home, sweet home.
- 63 -
Bogged down by the ridiculousness of the last day, Ben Shelton did the only thing he could in the circumstances, he walked through to the kitchen, rifled the refrigerator for a cold Snickers and set the kettle boiling for a fresh round of coffees.
Watching the steam evaporate as it drifted out of the kettle’s spout, he let his thoughts meander to the woman sat waiting for him in the breakfast room. He couldn't think about Kristy as his lover; they weren’t lovers, they didn't behave like lovers or treat each other like lovers. If she had asked, being clinical – or cynical – about it, Ben would have described the afternoon as honestly as he knew how; energetic, with some of the best sex he had in this or any other life (though there wasn't a vast back catalogue of previous earth-moving experiences available for off-the-cuff comparisons), but being blasé about sex was all too easy. Something different had been there with them in the family room, it wasn’t just sex, and he understood that much about the blistering frisson that was there between them. According to Mike, sex was something other people suffered – there he was again, damn it – Okay, so maybe they weren't lovers yet but surely they weren’t that far away.
“Mind if I put some music on?” she called through then, catching him off guard and away in la-la land.
“Help yourself, I'm sure something in there'll fit,” he called back, then wished he'd spared the funny because he couldn’t see her face to see whether it went down like a pork pie at a bar-mitzvah, as his jokes usually did. It must have been a symptom of this early stage of the relationship, because normally bad jokes and the idea of restraint never collided in the same thought.
To his pleasant surprise she picked out one of his old Stones albums, the rough, jangly sound of “19th Nervous Breakdown” coming through to the kitchen with her when she had finished raiding his record collection.
“Good choice,” he said, passing Kristy her coffee as the lights and music both died
suddenly, Jagger cut off in his prime by what Ben assumed was a blown fuse. When he looked out of the kitchen window he saw otherwise, the entire sweep of the hills were black, no backsplash of light from Westbrooke. “Don't worry; we've got candles around here somewhere.”
“I guess power cuts go with the territory?”
Ben couldn't help himself: “Yuck, yuck,” he agreed, slipping into his Jed Clampet voice. “Living out in the sticks we get used to ‘em an’ scratching ‘round in the dark. No worries little missy, ain’t nothing out they're's gonna hurt ya none wif big butch me round to scare ‘em off like,” it took him a second to realise she was laughing at him, and another to realize it felt good having someone there to laugh at his line in crummy impersonations and even crummier jokes, even if she was only laughing because they were that bad.
Moving hand over hand in the darkness, Ben edged his way carefully around to the drainer and the drawer beneath it where he kept all of the odds and sods he couldn't work out what to do with; keep or throw away. First time, he found the box of candles, getting them lit, however, was no mean feat in itself.
He so much wanted to say something just right then, doing his hey presto act with candles and matches, to get her laughing again and hear the sound of her enjoying his company, but his mind was a complete and utter blank. “Just like me,” he muttered instead, which earned a puzzled:
“Pardon?” from Kristy.
“Well, damn it, I can't think of anything witty to say when I need to,” Ben said with a weak smile and a half-hearted shrug that said he felt just about as stupid for his admission as he did for his failure to come up with a halfway decent icebreaker; his honesty won a wider smile and a gentle laugh from Kristy anyway so he didn't have to feel so bad about being an idiot.
He couldn't pretend he wasn't shaken by their conversation, he would have been an even bigger idiot to try and pass it off as something and nothing to worry about both at the same time; it beggared comprehension, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t stew over it, worry. One of these freaks had gotten to Mike, Kristy had said as much when he’d pressed her over it; admittedly, she had only ever implied that Judith Kenyon or one of her ilk had murdered Mike, but it was a pretty damned heavy implication when all was said and done; and he trusted her, which surprised him more than any strange and fanciful thing she had to say about how Mike had died or what went on behind the local health farm’s closed doors.
“What was that?” Kristy said then, her face troubled, concerned by whatever it was she thought she had heard.
Ben heard it too, but he wasn’t about to tell her what he thought it was; people just didn’t go around using chain-saw’s in the middle of a blackout, even this far into the country; but the longer he listened to the distant, insistent whine-purr, the surer he became. Someone was out there, using a chain-saw in the dark and the pouring rain.
Holding a candle by the base, Ben walked through to the family room. “It's okay, boy,” he soothed, seeing Scooby up, standing with two paws on the picture window’s sill. Still trying to calm Scooby, he heard one almighty crash, then another, a full minute later.
“Stay here,” Ben said, grabbing his wax jacket off the back of the armchair. The order was meant for Scooby, but Kristy heard it and misunderstood his meaning entirely.
“The hell I will,” she said, ducking past him to the door. Ben stared at her back as she dashed out into the storm, as if she were the last enigma left in the world. There was little else he could do, so he followed her into the rain, calling for her to wait while he caught up. Her grin, when he finally did, was infectious.
She looked a picture, rain streaming down her cheeks, her hair already wet, starting to frizz. Maybe it won't be so hard to fall in love with this girl, he thought, falling into step beside her, his own idiot grin starting to take over his mouth.
- 64 -
An entire world was out there waiting for a young man like him to come and shake it by the roots, or so his mother kept telling him.
Ever since last Sunday, carrying that poor wee bairn down the stairs, Scott Jordan had started having doubts about the old girl's wisdom. Tonight, for instance, the night seemed as cold and empty as a dead girl's heart.
The emptiness was something Scott felt rather than saw. The night was brimming over, as ever, with the chaos of life and nature’s creation. His own heart was the only hollow, dead thing in this night. Fine and then gradually thickening rain slanted through the headlight beams, but the storm wasn’t going to fill the void, either. He wondered if anything ever would.
The dark swirling rain broke and ran on the glass, no street lights to break or relieve it. Hunched forward over the steering wheel, squinting through the smeared windscreen, past the waterlogged wipers, Scott sighed softly. He glanced at his reflection in the rearview mirror and tried to smile. It was a weak, pale effort. A ghost of the real thing. Barren, tired, melancholy. His mind was anywhere but on the stretch of road leveling out in front of him. The grim, grey stone arches of the old Kingsbridge School house had all but been devoured by the storm. Scott gently applied the brakes, cutting his speed slightly as he eased down through the gears for the turn out onto the High Street. It was like driving blind.
He almost didn't see the little girl with rain drenched hair and bicycle in time. She was standing in the middle of the road and looking straight at him through the headlights and the slanting knives of rain, her bicycle turned sideways as if its thin metal tube frame was enough to shield her from the impact of Scott's Ford. Slamming the breaks on full, and wrenching the steering wheel around hard onto opposite lock, Scott tried to take the skid around the girl, but as the brakes locked the wheels started to aquaplane over the slick asphalt. With a deep, rising horror Scott felt sickeningly sure he was going to slide all the way into the girl’s bicycle, and the girl was going to go up over bonnet and through the windscreen.
The girl was frowning at him through the rain, a disconcerting, pained and distant look that had nothing to do with fear of being run down, today or any other day. The smooth, greasy feeling of the Ford sliding out of control was like the transition between scenes in a nightmare.
Scott was screaming; he knew there were more things he could do to avoid hitting her, things he’d been trained to do, but couldn't for the life of him (or her) remember what they were; all he could manage was to stand on the brakes again, willing them to bring the Ford up short, yank the wheel back into the direction the slide wanted to take him, hope the slide didn't become a fatal spin, and start praying, as if prayer and willpower might work where brake pads alone could not.
And maybe God was listening, because as he felt the rear end of the Ford start to go behind him and started hearing the dreadful sounds of death; first the bicycle crumpling beneath the impact of the Ford, then the girl’s bones, the tires caught their grip. He slid to a halt less than a foot from the girl's bicycle, still screaming, his fingers locked so fiercely on the wheel it would have taken the jaws of life to pry them free. He had never experienced such an intense feeling of relief as he did then, seeing the little girl still standing directly in front of his slewed and stalled Ford.
Close up, the girl couldn't have been any older than six. Ignoring Scott, she wheeled her bicycle forward and then rested it up against the Ford's radiator grille, before stepping back into the rain-suffused darkness outside of the headlight's beam.
In what by rights should have been the silence after the crash, Scott’s heart was the only thing he couldn’t hear.
The car was suddenly rocking on its suspension as kids swarmed out of the darkness to swamp it with their small, angry bodies, pounding the bodywork with bare fists and feet, and anything else that came to hand. An aluminum baseball bat and a cricket bat wielded like an axe slammed into the driver’s side window.
An idiot-grinning face loomed right up at him from the side of the car, then another, mashed flat up against the glass. Scott gave an involuntary cry and jerked back into the bucket seat, wre
nching his super-glued hands from the wheel. He jerked his head crazily upward at the sound of the baseball bat coming down hard on the roof. Vacuous eyes stared at him silently, caught up in a curiously morbid fascination.
One of the faces had a rash of wart-like swellings around the mouth and chin, a slick dribble of saliva running from the corner of its mouth. The kid pressed its bulbous nose flat against the window.
More kids crowded around the car, eerily quiet as they climbed over the bones and onto the roof. Suddenly petrified, Scott started the engine and threw the Ford into reverse. It barely moved three feet. A hand smashed through the glass of the side window, groping at his hair, tugging, then jerked free as the cricket bat smashed into the beveled plane of the windscreen, cobwebbing it into ten thousand imperfect shards of glass that somehow held together until the bat smashed into it a second time. The shattered glass sprayed into Scott’s eyes in a blinding hail that fell like knives.
Riven by fear, Scott’s breath came in short gasps. He swung his eyes around, past the press of juvenile bodies, trying to find an avenue of escape; even if it meant shoving the door open and taking his chances by making a run for it. I could die here, the thought suddenly lanced through his shock-frozen mind.
One of the kids on the bonnet leaned in through the wound left by the shattered windscreen, reaching for him, pawing at him, his eyes alight with hunger.
Scott slammed his hand down in the centre of the steering wheel and the horn suddenly blared, shattering the blackness. The kid reaching in through the window laughed loud idiot laughter into his face. Others took up the laughing cry. Soon the street echoed with idiot threatening laughter.
Around him, the Ford started to rock with a violent rhythm as the kids rolled it from side to side on its shocks, pushing it up on the springs and then letting it crash back down again. They were trying to roll the car over, Scott realized, still paralyzed by the brutal, sudden, frightening intensity of their attack.
Sufferer's Song Page 41
