by Heide Goody
“Oh, okay,” said the little woman and backed away. “But we do have the pelmets to dust before lunch.”
Nerys closed the door.
“That should buy us a little time.”
“What’s a pelmet?” said Clovenhoof.
Nerys gestured with her hands in an attempt to mime a pelmet.
“It’s like a mini skirt for a curtain rail.”
“And do they need dusting?”
“Of course they do!” snapped Herbert. “I don’t suppose you’ve so much as run a feather duster over mine, have you?”
“I tore one down and wiped my arse on it,” said Clovenhoof. “And set fire to the other with a flamethrower.”
Herbert gave an anguished groan and made to wring his hands but found that impossible to do with only one hand.
“But since you’ve finished screaming,” said Clovenhoof, “we have some questions that need answering, starting with why in His name have I been living in your old flat for the last nine months?”
“I resurrected someone,” said Pitspawn numbly. His mind had decided to take a short vacation and, in its absence, his voice had slipped into autopilot.
“Don’t worry,” said Clovenhoof, scooping up Ben’s Seleucid sword. “We can soon fix that.”
“No need for violence,” said Nerys.
“Really?” said Clovenhoof, disappointed.
“Not yet. Herbert, you are going to answer every one of Jeremy’s questions.”
“And why will I do that?” sneered Herbert. “Death holds no fears for me.”
“Yeah?” said Nerys, stepping round Pitspawn on the floor to reach a chest of drawers under the window. “But what about socks?”
“Socks?” said Clovenhoof.
“Trust me,” said Nerys and opened Pitspawn’s underwear drawer.
Behind the railings alongside Monmouth Drive, in a corner of Sutton Park much favoured by neighbourhood dogs, there was a planted border of mixed flowers and shrubs. In that thick soil, late summer had brought forth red-spiked salvia and silver-leafed lambs tongue and something entirely new. Emerging from a long sleep, returning to life in an unexpected form, Herbert Dewsbury’s amputated right hand poked its index finger up through the soil and into the afternoon sunlight.
“So you expected my arrival to lead to Ben’s arrest?” said Clovenhoof.
“No,” said Herbert irritably. “I just wanted to inflict you as a punishment on those people who had given me so much pain and grief in life. I wanted to inflict you on the murderer, Ben Kitchen.”
“He didn’t mean to kill you.”
“He had a sword in his hand. I didn’t expect your moronic influence to lead directly to his arrest.” Herbert smiled. “That was just good fortune.”
“And that’s what this is all about?” said Clovenhoof, frowning.
“Yes.”
“The whole Satan on earth business? Revenge?”
“Yes.”
Clovenhoof threw himself against a wall, deep in thought.
“He’s lying,” said Nerys.
“Me?” said Herbert indignantly, stump on heart. “Lie? I’ve told you everything. Now send me back.”
Nerys looked down at the open sock drawer.
“Oh, look.” She pulled out two pairs of socks. “Black socks. Blue socks.”
She pulled the socks apart and then paired one black sock with one blue sock.
“That’s better,” she said.
Herbert twitched. It was bad enough that the socks were dusty and covered with lint. It was bad enough that the man, Pitspawn, had no system for organising his underwear and obviously had low standards of cleanliness and hygiene. But to mis-pair socks like that...
“No,” said Herbert, warding her away. “I can ignore your attempts to upset me.”
“Really?” said Nerys. “But I haven’t put them back in the drawer yet.”
“What?”
Nerys held the mismatched socks over the drawer.
“I’m going to put them back in, stick them right at the back. They could stay there, like that, for months.”
Herbert shuddered and clutched at his stomach.
“That’s... that’s immoral.”
“Is it?”
“Insane!”
“Then tell us.”
“No!”
“Tell us everything.”
“I can’t.”
“Fine,” she shrugged and began pulling socks and pants out of the way to make room.
“Please!” whimpered Herbert, feeling the sickness and goosebumps crawl all over him. “They’ll never forgive me.”
“Who?” said Clovenhoof.
“Michael,” said Herbert. “Michael and Peter.”
Spartacus Wilson, seven-year-old scourge of St Michael’s Primary School, kicked a pine cone at a squirrel but his heart wasn’t in it and the pine cone missed by several feet. The squirrel looked at the pine cone, looked at him and then scampered off into the bushes.
If Spartacus had the courage and the words to admit it, he would admit that he wasn’t enjoying his summer holiday half as much as he had expected. Six weeks of total freedom turned out to be six weeks without a captive audience for his wit, wisdom and acts of gymnastics and sleight of hand. It was six weeks without Mrs Well-Dunn. She had always been the Sherriff of Nottingham to his Robin Hood, the Jabba the Hutt to his Han Solo. Without an evil and incompetent tyrant to rail against, he had nothing. And, worse still, his year three teacher was going to be Mrs Sokolowski, who used to be a Russian spy, had eyes in the back of her head and ate naughty boys for breakfast.
He looked beyond the park fence, at the houses along Monmouth Drive. He seemed to recall that Melanonychia Brown from 2C lived around here somewhere. Maybe she’d like to come outside to have her pigtails pulled. That could be diverting, for a time at least.
A movement in the nearby flowerbeds caught his eye, something small making rapid movements in the dirt. For a split-second, he thought it might have been the squirrel, burying his nuts or whatever it was squirrels buried, but he instantly saw that this thing was too pink, too spindly to be a squirrel. It looked like the hairless offspring of a mole and a spider, a snuffling questing thing.
Spartacus edged closer and crouched.
“Hey there,” he said gently and rubbed the fingers of his outstretched hand together as though he had food to offer it.
The creature turned, stepped up through the shrubbery and onto the grass and Spartacus could see that it was, quite clearly, despite the mud that covered its skin and nails, a human hand.
“Cool,” said Spartacus with a crooked smile.
The summer holidays had taken a sudden turn for the better.
Herbert sat on the floor, doing his best to properly re-pair a dozen socks with only one hand.
“So Heaven’s in just as big a mess as Hell,” said Clovenhoof.
Herbert nodded.
“But this is Heaven we’re talking about,” said Nerys.
“So?”
“Heaven. God. The Almighty. How can it be anything other than perfect?” She shook her head. “Why am I even asking these kinds of questions?”
“Heaven and Hell are ruled by the Other Guy, sure,” said Clovenhoof, “but they’re also bound by scripture.”
“What? So just because some first century fruitcake declares Heaven is a certain size then it must be so?”
“Scripture is written by men,” said Clovenhoof, “but ratified in Heaven.”
“As it is on Earth, so shall it be in Heaven,” said Herbert who had now resorted to using his teeth in his sock-pairing frenzy.
“Exactly,” said Clovenhoof. “Heaven is over-crowded. They need to turf some people out.”
“The Keep Heaven Holy initiative will soon remove those residents who should never have been admitted in the first place.”
Nerys abruptly remembered Herbert’s Keep Boldmere Beautiful campaign and laughed in recognition.
“Clearly your idea,” she s
aid.
“I came up with the name,” Herbert admitted.
“Do you hand out leaflets and window stickers?”
“Cultivating conformity through gentle encouragement is one strand of the programme,” said Herbert with a flickering pout of annoyance. “We will use force on those who won’t comply. However, the first stage of the programme is to ensure that the entry requirements for Heaven are strictly enforced.”
“Eh?”
“We’re not letting in any more riff-raff.”
Something occurred to Nerys.
“What about my Aunt Molly?”
Herbert gave her a scornful glare.
“I think if she’s planning on popping her clogs any time soon she might need to do some serious re-evaluation of her moral st-”
“She died three weeks ago.”
“Oh. My condolences.” A smile played over Herbert’s lips. “Well, I do recall she did complain about the cold a lot. She’ll be somewhere warm right now.”
“Bastard!” she yelled and leapt at Herbert, snatching the sword off Clovenhoof in the process.
Herbert stumbled as she swung the blade at him. The sword passed over his head, decapitated a statue of Shalbriri, demon of blindness, and embedded itself in the plaster wall. As shards of cast resin cascaded down on him, Herbert ducked under Nerys’s arm and dashed for the door. Clovenhoof lunged after him and immediately tripped over Pitspawn. Nerys took a second to yank the sword from the wall and by the time she was at the door, Herbert was down the stairs and out of the front door.
“Oh my,” said Pitspawn’s mum, Phyllis, watching from the hallway. “Another friend?”
She came to the foot of the stairs.
“Nerys dear, could you tell Darren that I do need a hand with the dusting now.” She then took in the sword in Nerys’s hand and the snarl of rage fixed on her face. “Maybe later then,” said Phyllis and took herself off to the kitchen.
Nerys slammed the door behind her and threw the sword on the floor.
“Forget him,” said Clovenhoof. “He’s told us all we need to know.”
“Really?”
“This business, me being here, is all a set up. They want me out of the way so they can shunt their cast-offs into Hell.”
“Including my Aunt Molly.”
Clovenhoof nodded grimly.
“I resurrected someone,” said Pitspawn.
“Yes, yes. Be quiet, Pitspawn,” said Clovenhoof. “I’m thinking. We need to get into Heaven.”
“You mean, like, now?” said Nerys.
“As soon as possible.”
“Can’t you... devil yourself there?”
“I have been stripped of all my powers. And I certainly don’t meet their general entry requirements.” He raised his eyebrows at Nerys. “It’ll have to be you.”
“You want me to go to Heaven?” Nerys put her hands on her hips and threw her eyes to the ceiling. “This is madness.”
“Yup,” agreed Clovenhoof. “But, you know what, it’s either you or the mumbling moron here.”
Nerys looked at Pitspawn, sat cross-legged like a child in the ruins of his summoning pentagram.
“And even though, despite the evidence of this room, I suspect his sins are fewer than yours,” said Clovenhoof, “he’s in no fit state to articulate them and seek forgiveness.”
“You want me to confess my sins?” said Nerys.
“Yes.”
“All of them?”
“Pretty much.”
Nerys stared at him.
“Perhaps we’d better sit down. This might take a while.”
Herbert’s hand nestled contentedly in Spartacus’s arms. Spartacus stroked it and picked a flake of dried mud from between its third and fourth fingers.
“I think we’d best keep you hidden,” said Spartacus. “I bet grown ups will only want to lock you in a cage and do experiments on you and stuff.”
The hand bedded itself down further in the crook of Spartacus’s arms, understanding fully.
“Doesn’t mean we can’t have some fun though,” said the boy.
The hand was in total agreement.
In Spartacus Wilson, this would-be villain of a boy, it sensed a kindred spirit. The hand might once have belonged to the law-abiding and sanctimonious Herbert Dewsbury but now it was a free agent. And although Herbert’s mouth might have spoken of goodness and forgiveness, his mind might have been filled with noble deeds and his heart home to the occasionally charitable feeling, it had been his hands, and this hand in particular, which had led the way in every wicked deed he had done.
The hand liked the idea of ‘fun’.
“There was the time I pulled all the stuffing out of my sister’s teddy bear,” said Nerys. “I also threw her piggy bank downstairs once. And then her, in a cardboard box.”
“Really?” said Clovenhoof with a smile.
“I told her it would be like tobogganing. I stole money from my mum’s purse when I was ten. Several times. And from Mrs Hughes, my form tutor at Greenhill secondary school.”
“Okay,” said Clovenhoof. He went over to the chest of drawers and unplugged the table lamp that stood on top of it.
“Secondary school,” said Nerys, deep in thought.
Clovenhoof sat down with the lamp and inspected how the electrical lead connected to the lamp base.
“Did you commit any sins at secondary school?”
Nerys grimaced.
“Does... messing around with boys count as sinful?”
“Not in my book but what do you mean by messing around?”
Nerys made a variety of hand gestures. Pitspawn, still circling the drain of potential madness, made a strangled noise in his throat.
Clovenhoof nodded solemnly.
“I think we’d better hear it all, just to be on the safe side.”
“Right,” said Nerys. “Then we’ll start with Owen Sellers and the art cupboard.”
Clovenhoof wrapped a length of flex around his hand and forcibly ripped the electrical lead from the base of the lamp.
Ben sat in the back of the security truck, staring at nothing, letting the sway of the vehicle rock him back and forth on the bench. There were four prisoners in the truck. The one in the cage next to him, a lifer from Nuneaton called Winston, leant his head towards the dividing mesh.
“What have you got today?” he asked.
“Preliminary hearing,” said Ben.
Winston nodded.
“You?” said Ben out of politeness.
“Sentencing.”
“I thought you’d been sentenced.”
Winston chuckled dryly.
“The Crown Prosecution Service asked if I’d like some other offences to be ‘taken into account.’”
“What does that mean?”
“They wanted me to confess to some extra stuff, stuff from way back when. Help tidy up some cold cases. You nervous?”
Ben nodded.
“Worried my mum and dad are going to be there.”
“Ashamed?”
Ben shrugged.
“I just want it to be over,” he said.
“Good luck with that,” said Winston.
Ben looked down at his feet.
“These crimes,” he said. “The ones you’re confessing to.”
“What about them?” said Winston.
“Did you do them?”
Winston chuckled.
“This thing.” He raised his hands to indicate the cage and all it implied. “It’s never over. Ever.”
“And again with Adam Davies in the park. Same bush. I only did it because he’d failed his driving test and was really upset and I wanted to put a smile on his face.”
Nerys paused to take stock and count on her fingers although, truth be told, she had run out of fingers quite some time ago. Clovenhoof pulled at the plastic covering over the lamp flex with his teeth while he listened.
“University,” said Nerys, stating it as a title, a new chapter heading in her litan
y of sins. “Freshers’ week. That was a busy seven days. There was Damon. Adrian. Twice. Harjeet. That one with the goatee beard. Can’t remember his name. Jeremy?”
Clovenhoof looked up. He had ripped back the white outer covering and was now paring down the brown plastic within to expose two strands of copper wiring.
“Yes?”
“Does it count as a sin if you were too drunk to properly remember it?”
Clovenhoof paused to give it some thought.
“I think it might actually be worse,” he said.
“Right,” said Nerys, giving up counting on her fingers. “Then there were certainly some extras in there. Maybe I should just give you the highlights.”
“I think the important thing is that you recognise what you have done wrong and wish to atone for it.”
“That would include paying someone to write my dissertation for me?”
“You paid someone to do your degree dissertation for you?”
“I paid in... services. Yes.”
“Mmmm,” nodded Clovenhoof. Happy with the wires, he levered the three-amp fuse out of the lamp plug and replaced it with a paperclip he had found on the floor.
Herbert opened the door of the sub-divided house on Chester Road. His flat keys had been in his pocket when he had appeared in that fat occultist’s bedroom, along with the few coins and the bus ticket he’d used on the day he’d died. It had been two years since he had last stood in the place, but being in the old building brought back so many memories and emotions.
There was that corner of carpet which the property management company promised they would nail down and hadn’t. There was that patch of mildew under the stairs they should also have dealt with. And there was Mrs Astrakhan’s brolly and boots outside her door. He had told her so often that they were a trip hazard but the woman had failed to take action. Herbert suspected her truculence stemmed from being a bit simple.
He took himself upstairs to the first floor and saw the blue and white police tape criss-crossed over Ben Kitchen’s front door. It struck him like a physical blow. That was the flat in which he had died, in which that strange young man had murdered him.
