by Adam Nevill
Following her interrupted shower, Amber had summoned the wits and presence of mind to change while Josh stood outside the door of her bedroom. Out of his sight, she had buried her face in a towel and smothered the sobs and tears that came as an aftershock; the residue of a sexual assault by a dead man who had followed her to Devon from Birmingham: Arthur Bennet. ‘That old perv’ had not yet made an appearance at the farmhouse, and she had wondered why. But he was here now. Perhaps he had saved himself for a special occasion. Maybe the Praetorian Guard was being summoned from the earth and the darkness now that she approached the source: Old Black Mag. Black Maggie. Whatever was here was growing in strength and intensity day by day; had built and was showing more of its black hand. Messengers were revealing themselves to her. She sensed an eagerness for her capitulation.
‘I don’t know if you should stay, Josh.’
He looked up at her, surprised and seemingly disappointed at her remark. ‘Eh?’
‘I don’t think that what is down there is something within your remit, mate. Beyond the call of duty and all that. It might seem funny coming from me, but I don’t think I can guarantee your safety if you stay any longer.’
Josh smothered a smile and attempted to inject some levity into the half-demolished garage they stood inside. He tapped the pocket of his jacket. ‘I’ve got your little friend.’
‘Won’t do much good in this situation. And I’m a bit concerned I might not be safe from you if you’re susceptible to what might be down there.’
Josh stopped smiling. ‘I’m not leaving you. Not like this, kid. Not here. So you want to take the first shift with that?’ He nodded at the trowel. ‘Or maybe we’d both be better off using spoons to get this dirt shifted. But let’s get cracking. I feel like it’s going to be a long night.’
Amber nodded her assent. ‘Before we start, how are you at siphoning petrol?’
NINETY-TWO
Josh was the first to break the silence. ‘What the fuck?’ He was asking himself the question as much as directing the query at Amber.
They stood together, a few feet back from the lip of the crude crater they had dug into the soil of the garage floor; stood side by side, their shoulders not quite touching, in the place they had withdrawn to after Josh had used a broom to knock and brush the last chunks of soil, and the last scattering of stones, off the polythene-wrapped lump they had exhumed.
It had taken them a long time to get used to the sight of so many earthworms as they worked the soil. Some of them had bled as they were severed by the trowel. Thick, coiling, undulating, meat-rich earthworms; a few as long as small snakes that seemed to suck themselves back inside the holes uncovered by the trowel. ‘You ever seen so many bloody worms?’ Josh had asked her. At that point Amber had decided against explaining why she thought the worms were present in such great numbers.
Nearly two hours passed in the time it took them to dig deep enough to isolate the full length of what the plastic coated; they had used the trowel until their hands were blistered, and a rake from the garden, and a piece of wood to break up, to dig, scrape, scatter and expose what lay beneath. By the time they had finished digging they were filthy, their jeans smeared with brownish red stains from the clay, their hands dark and encrusted from pulling up lumps of earth and scooping out handfuls of moist debris.
The wreckage was lit up yellow from the lights in the ceiling; the room smelled of damp mud, concrete, timber, the cool evening air that had settled over the exposed ground as if it were now coming inside to reclaim what was no longer concealed.
Amber’s entire body ached, her head throbbed. She felt slack from head to toe, and weary enough to lie down and pass out. The only thing keeping her exhaustion at bay was the shock and horror of revelation – perhaps the final revelation that went some way to making the impossible seem less implausible, and maybe even less preposterous to Josh now too.
He was struggling with this, though not physically. Fatigue was not his problem. He wasn’t young, but he was fit and strong, his capabilities discreet, carefully hidden; he had nothing to prove, which she had always liked. Instead, Josh was wrestling with the ideas she had introduced into his world; the notion that not only did spirits exist, but in some instances they had not entirely separated from their physical remains after death. If that wasn’t enough, she’d also claimed the absurd, the improbable and the ludicrous: that something much older and more powerful than these spirits had kept them in a form of tormented captivity, while using their suffering for malicious purposes against her.
Beneath the polythene that was heavily stained on both sides, the man-sized contents were obscure. The enclosed object was as long as only the tallest of men could be when lying prostrate. At the sides of the tomb, the long arms seemed to have broken free of the polythene.
‘There’s more down there than just the body,’ Josh added, while squinting into the cavity.
Amber had thought the same thing as she had watched Josh wipe away the last of the object’s covering of dirt. There was another, smaller lump beneath the feet of the figure in the grave, also wrapped in polythene, though more carefully and tighter than the body was parcelled.
‘Come on.’ Josh stepped back to the cavity. ‘Scissors. I’ll need scissors. Or a knife. Let’s get this over with.’
The idea of opening the man-sized package filled Amber with nausea; she had forced Josh to dig this thing up, but now lacked the strength to see the occupant of the makeshift tomb revealed. If the inhabitant of the grave was unwrapped then what else might be disturbed along with its unstable vigil beneath her home?
‘Should we…’
Josh looked over his shoulder. ‘What? Call the fuzz? I think we should. That’s a body, kid. A body. We think we know whose it is, but we need to know how it got here.’
By itself, she nearly said aloud. The idea that she was looking at some kind of deranged self-sacrifice and self-imposed interment was making her feel faint with a disgust and dread that would not abate through prolonged exposure, but only grow. Concepts such as familiarity could not be experienced before such matters; her entire experience with the Maggie was one layer of ghastly disbelief and shock laid over another, again and again, until you lost your mind or took your own life to escape …
‘Go on. Josh. Get it open.’
Amber looked at the red petrol canister that Josh had placed on the driveway beside her car. Burning a body, even his body, after all Fergal had done to her and to others, seemed as barbaric and savage and demented as the impulses that had driven Fergal Donegal in life, in death, and beyond death. Torching his remains might even be beyond her.
Josh nodded and knelt down beside the polythened corpse. ‘Better fetch those scissors, kid.’
Amber went back to the kitchen, all the time wanting to shout, Please don’t get so close. But how else could Josh open the plastic casket? She returned with her Wusthof scissors, their razor sharp blades only thus far used to cut a string of sausages and the tops off a few packets of pasta, a usage they would never know again. She handed them to Josh and he took them like a preoccupied doctor might take forceps from a nurse in theatre.
‘Jesus,’ he said with a gasp after the first incision, and leant his buttocks back onto his heels while he covered his nose and mouth. ‘Jesus Christ. He fucking stinks.’
Amber winced and pulled her hooded top up to cover her own mouth and nose as the brain-deep stench of putrefaction filled the garage.
Hurriedly, Josh pushed the scissors along the length of polythene, his balance almost gone, his actions ungainly as the smell interfered with his concentration. When the plastic shroud was cut from bottom to top, he stepped away from the grave, coughing like a bear, with the end of his barks almost breaking into regurgitation. ‘Torch,’ he gasped more than said.
Amber handed Josh his black Maglite. ‘Baghdad. Basra. Last time I smelled that,’ he whispered. His face was white. The dirt smeared across his jaw made the bloodlessness of his face appear more vivi
d. And Amber’s heart cracked for him. He was doing this for her: being confronted by things he would never forget; things that collaborated with other vile memories he’d tried to bury at the back of his own mental garage.
Please, please, please let this end here.
‘This our man?’ Josh said, his face a grimace as he trained the torch beam onto the head of the thing in the grave. Amber moved up beside Josh and stared down at what the torch beam lit up.
The remains of the blackened head reminded her of a photo she had seen years ago, of a long-dead explorer mostly preserved by snow and ice. It was hard to tell whether the remaining flesh of the face had withered tight to the skull after death, or whether the half-starved wreck of a body had been laid down in the crude plot.
Not much of the face was left for examination. One eye socket was mostly bone and one cheek was entirely missing. Long teeth were exposed through the missing flesh of the cheek and jaw, as if they were staring at a cadaver post-surgery. The mouth had dropped open and the face issued the unpleasant aspect of a whinnying horse with blackened teeth. The damaged side of the narrow head was smooth and earless.
‘Strangled,’ Josh said, his voice subdued. ‘You can tell by the tongue.’ That was visible at one side of the lower jaw, bulging and blackened like a plump fig found in some forgotten king’s barrow. ‘It’s still there.’
‘What?’ Amber’s voice was a ghost.
‘Ligature. Looks like string. We’ve seen it before, kid.’
And so they had; a length of what looked like the same gardening twine that the Bennet family had used to throttle young women in their terrible house was still wrapped around the corpse’s pinched throat. ‘Fuck sake,’ Josh added, and gripped the back of his own head.
Amber didn’t have the wherewithal or strength to ask Josh to elaborate on what he was feeling. She just stared into the pit, mute with the personal horror of what she had done to Fergal’s face with the acid. Because she had dissolved an eye, a cheek, the flesh of one side of his jaw; she had even rinsed away an ear. His agony must have been monumental, the lingering, long-term pain insanity-vast; this was screaming in the night, every night, begging for death pain. And he had carried that suffering for three years. Three years.
‘Suicide.’
‘What?’
‘He did it to himself. Look at his right hand.’ Josh shone the torch onto the visible blackened and skeletal hand. ‘He’s holding the end of the twine. He made a slipknot and put it round his own bloody neck and pulled it tight. Jesus wept. Jesus Christ Almighty. He buried himself alive and then strangled himself…’
Amber wasn’t sure why, but she started to cry, maybe even for the long, emaciated and blackened shape that lay upon its bed of filth. And in some unexpected turn in her emotions she remembered his face in Svetlana’s prison cell, when Fergal had tried to kill the girl with his battering fists, that punched and punched her face through a thin, cheap pillow on the bed that he had tied her to. And in those final moments, his expression had briefly changed and she thought she had seen a boy, a child, deranged by fear and grief and suffering.
What lay beneath.
Josh either sank to his knees, or volunteered to squat in the interest of comfort, Amber did not know which, until he shook his head and said, ‘Look at the edges of the soil. The stuff we took out.’ Josh picked up a clump of mud. ‘The edges are straight. He dug the hole. He cut a layer of clay into deep, thick slabs. So he could neatly lay them back in place over his body from inside the grave. So they would fit together without leaving gaps. Covered himself up from his feet to his head in polythene and then added a thick layer of soil, block by block. Started with his feet and then worked his way up to his head. Meticulous. And after he’d covered his face, he must have pulled that cord … Jesus wept. He even made arm holes in the polythene so he could wrap himself up before he placed the slabs of clay on top of himself. He must have spent ages preparing his own death. Lain very still, in that polythene, in the darkness, under a layer of soil, and just … bloody topped himself. Why? Jesus Christ, why?’
To set her free. He gave himself so she could reign again, so the corn would grow high.
They remained silent for a moment. Amber crouched down and took the torch from Josh because he was no longer shining it into the excavation site. She straightened her back and moved the light onto what lay below the corpse’s feet. The polythene object, buried beneath the soles of Fergal’s decomposing trainers, suggested the right angles of a square: the top of a box. She swallowed. ‘Her. It’s her. Inside that. The box – it has to be the box from number eighty-two.’
Josh looked up at her with his tired, pale, dirt-streaked face. The expression of revulsion and fear in Amber’s expression must have registered, because he turned his head back to the grave so quickly he lost his balance and fell onto one hand. Then stood up. ‘What the fuck is this?’ He clambered down into the cavity and felt around the top of the box. Then pulled it upwards. The polythene rustled and soil slid from the wrappings. Through the cloudy and dirt smeared plastic, Amber could see wood.
On the soil floor beside the grave, Josh cut the polythene and the parcel tape that had been used to protect and preserve the box and its precious contents. Once the box was unwrapped, Josh placed it upright before them and drew the little purple curtain to one side, as if he were revealing the stage of a small, portable puppet theatre.
It was not possible to fully see the second occupant of the grave. But impressions and details did drift out of what Amber initially revealed with the torch light.
‘Oh God. It’s a child,’ Josh said, as if to augment her shaky comprehension.
The brown leathery flesh of the tiny arms of the thing in the box suggested they were dry, and had been preserved at some time. Sticklike arms either side of elbow joints no bigger than dried dates, ended in hands too finely detailed with little digits and fingernails to be fake. A round wooden object, like a wooden bowl, was clutched by the small, withered hands: a drum skinned in dark leather or hide. The little body was clad in what looked like a once-white but now filth-smeared dress of calico or lace, made for an infant, like an old-fashioned christening dress.
The small withered head was entirely black, almost black enough to obscure the features. But the skull was covered thickly with more hair than such a tiny scalp could ever feasibly produce. A wig. A wig of various tones and hues revealed as the light moved across it. Donor hair.
The mouth was open, or what remained of the lips were parted, and a small row of yellow milk teeth were revealed in a grin. The head’s tiny eyes were closed, something for which Amber was deeply grateful.
A long satin sheath covered what served for legs and feet and protruded from beneath the hem of the gown.
‘Don’t … don’t touch it. Please,’ Amber said as Josh reached inside the box. Just let me destroy it.
His hands paused in their descent. ‘I don’t understand…’
Amber waited for Josh to finish the statement, but he seemed disinclined or too preoccupied to follow his own train of thought.
‘The body,’ he eventually said. ‘I can see it.’
Amber tried and failed to swallow the bolus of dread and anxiety that clogged her throat like putty stuffed into a wet pipe. She wanted to tell Josh to get away, to just get the fuck away from the thing in the box, but she could not find her voice.
‘It’s … It’s stuck to … The head is stitched onto the body … It’s a snake. A black snake. The hair is real too. The dress. Jesus, the dress … Look at the dress … Torch, here, shine it here.’
Amber could barely move her arm, let alone direct the torch beam onto the front of the small, tatty figure’s dress, partly obscured by the leathery drum that hung about its neck and nestled into what she had thought was a lap, but must be a coil hidden by the dirty calico gown, the satin sleeve made for a tail.
Josh took the torch from Amber’s hand. ‘Look.’ That was all he said as he directed the beam onto the fr
ont of the dress, at what resembled childish, beaded necklaces festooned about the doll’s neck. But under closer examination the stiff, brown, petal-shaped objects, that at first appeared like dried fruits or spices, were revealed to be ears: shrivelled human ears. And between such ghastly decorations, what, at a casual glance, may have looked like dirty sea shells or unpolished stones strung on a thong, grew large in her comprehension as teeth. She was looking at human teeth. Some were black with a great age, others a mere ivory-yellow because they had been harvested in more recent times.
‘Fingers. God, there are fingers stitched into the fabric. Toes. Amber, we need to—’
Josh failed to finish another sentence. Instead he stood up quickly, his hand dipping in and out of the pocket of his jacket in one smooth motion, and he barked in a voice she had never heard before, ‘Stop right there!’
Amber flinched and issued a small shriek. Then she noticed Josh’s eyes, and how inside those brown eyes disbelief fought with horror and the honed expertise of a man of war, who now pointed a firearm at an enemy. She turned to follow the direction of his gaze and found herself staring into the gaping mouth of the garage.
She screamed.
And the thin, dirty figure that Amber saw clearly, before it moved past the front of the garage and out of sight into the darkness of the driveway, she managed to ascertain was female.
Female and naked, with blood-blackened ankles and wrists, and something pulled tight about its throat, like a dog leash. What little she saw of the trespasser’s face that was not concealed by filthy, tangled hair was bloodless, and so white it could have been blue. But the dark mouth had hung open in imbecilic wonderment. And such eyes as it had were colourless.
