Life's Lottery

by Kim Newman

  He’s killed with his own hands. He’d do it again if it’d help. If he can kill Shane and put the blame on you and James, he’d have a way out.

  You sit up and tell James.

  ‘We should be watching Shane,’ you say, ‘not just keeping ourselves safe.’

  ‘Hackwill’s in the four-poster, next door,’ James says. ‘The others are all downstairs, in the one room. Except Shearer’ — he still hasn’t come back. ‘Hackwill can’t get to Shane without tripping over Jessup and Sean.’

  ‘Jessup’ll back him. And Sean’s expendable.’

  You get out of bed.

  Go on to 264

  254

  ‘I’m going to walk to the village and get help,’ you say.

  Hackwill snorts.

  ‘James will stay behind to look after you.’

  Your brother nods.

  ‘I’ll take Mary,’ you say.

  As you walk, you explain what you think has been happening.

  ‘James was a Marine,’ you say. ‘Physically, only you or Shane could stop him. You’re not in the game any more and Shane is thick as a brick. He’ll get to Hackwill.’

  You take your time about getting to the village. You spend the night in a sleeping bag in a dry-ish spot under tree canopy, mostly making love.

  Back at the cottage, James will be killing. You don’t care if he does them all, though Sean and Shearer aren’t really involved.

  But Hackwill. Fuck him to death, Jessup and Shane too. Lose them. You wouldn’t mind. Then it’s up to James.

  You don’t think he’ll let himself be caught. The reason for dawdling is to give him escape space. He might make it out of the country. Or he might throw himself into a river and be swept underground. Would your brother do that?

  For him, this is personal. It is for you too, but he was the one dragged into the copse, you came along later. He was the prime target.

  Once he’s got rid of Hackwill, he might have a sense of closure. He might see his job as being to get out of the way, passing everything on to you and Mary.

  You imagine him gone, leaving you and Mary to continue together.

  When the police get to the Compound, things aren’t what you imagined. Shearer is dead, and so is James. Hackwill’s story is that James went mad, killed Shearer — as he had already killed Warwick and McKinnell — and Shane had to break his neck to save the others.

  You can’t imagine Shane killing James in a fair fight. It was the old gang from the copse, Hackwill and Jessup.

  Hackwill becomes a hero for surviving. No one worries about the Discount Development. Millions more pour in.

  James is buried, remembered as a mad-dog killer.

  You and Mary stay together, looking after each other. You marry and have two children, Job and Julienne. But there’s always something missing. Not just answers. You can’t help feeling you’ve not earned your ease. At a crucial point, you turned away, looked after yourself. That beating in the copse taught you a lesson. Maybe you should have saved the heroic spurt for when it counted.

  Mary has to look after practical things. She eventually resents that. After ten years, you split up. By now, Robert Hackwill is the richest man in the West Country. And Shane Bush is mayor of Sedgwater. You live out your life in mild disappointment. Somehow, without meaning to, you let everybody down.

  And so on.

  Begin again?

  255

  The police don’t dig deep enough to find out about the copse. But a pubful of witnesses remember you and James telling Hackwill and Jessup to fuck off just before the Falklands War. And the business with the road-widening scheme (your house still stands, derelict) comes out. In James’s office, which the police seal, they find a file of documents relating to Hackwill’s extensive dodgy deals.

  The business of who killed whom is impenetrable, especially since James and Hackwill were stabbed with the same knife, the one used on Mary.

  It is Shearer, you’re certain. But the police let him go. You try to get in touch with him but he doesn’t want to see you. He is scared of you, which could make him the murderer, or suggest he thinks you’re the murderer.

  You don’t suspect yourself. You’re not a split personality, with unaccounted-for memory blackouts during which you might be a homicidal maniac. Besides, you have an alibi: you were walking into the valley. You couldn’t have loitered, done the murders, and made it to the village.

  Some back-packing amateur Sherlock demonstrates you could have done it. Out of public-spirited bloody-mindedness, he covers the distance between the Compound and the village in a little over a day, with a Cloud 9 TV camera team hovering overhead in a helicopter. Of course, he doesn’t do it in a thunderstorm. He doesn’t say you did do it, just shows you could have done. After the programme goes out, the police um and ah about trial by satellite television and the lack of concrete evidence against you. They don’t bother you any more and pursue other lines of investigation. Despite an extensive search, no vehicle tracks are found, but the police claim to believe someone could have driven up to the Compound, killed everyone, and got away clean.

  You get anonymous hate-mail accusing you of murder. Helen Hackwill brings his two children, Samantha and Colin, to look at you, and spits in your face. So she has no doubts. Your business is gone. Mum has a coronary and dies. Marie-Laure can’t stand the hassle and flees.

  There’s an emptiness in you. Not knowing what happened at the Compound eats you up. If you could fold back time, you’d send James for the police. You’d rather have died up that Welsh mountain, if it meant understanding.

  But you never find out. You never put it together.

  You manage to scrape out some sort of life. Every few years, an Unsolved Mysteries show digs up the mountain massacre and profiles you — triggering another wave of nuisance calls — but nothing is ever settled.

  Mary changes her name and disappears.

  Shearer commits suicide in 2002. His note reads, ‘I didn’t do it.’ You realise he was persecuted like you.

  It has to be one of the dead. Mortally wounded, he killed until he died. But who? Hackwill? James? Shane Bush? Sean the bank manager?

  No, that doesn’t compute.

  You die not knowing.

  Go to 0.

  256

  You kiss Mary goodbye, trusting her to keep a watch on Hackwill, and set out through thin drizzle.

  The grass is as wet and thick as kelp. You know this will be a long walk, and you don’t exactly have the most exhilarating company.

  First, you try to get to Shane by jamming a wedge between him and Hackwill.

  ‘I hope you’re not being fitted up, man,’ you say. ‘You know how Robbo likes to walk away clean, leaving other folk to take the blame. This isn’t two years for GBH or a suspended sentence for insider dealing. This is life for murder.’

  Shane grunts.

  The November sun comes out, casting a cold light over the sodden landscape. It’s quite beautiful. The smells are incredible. You wish you were with Mary, to see the world in a new light.

  ‘Boss Cat,’ Shane says, after hours of quiet. ‘It weren’t called Top Cat.’

  ‘It was in America,’ you say. ‘The BBC changed the title because of the cat food.’

  You’re walking up a mountain road. There’s a spectacular view coming up. You wonder if Shane will notice.

  ‘Why isn’t kids’ telly any good these days?’ he asks.

  ‘Because you aren’t a kid any more?’

  ‘They Power Rangers, though. Not like Thunderbirds, is it?’

  ‘They’re still showing Thunderbirds. It gets good ratings.’

  ‘Thirty years’ time, they still be showing Power Rangers? Fuck no.’

  You come round the shoulder of the mountain. You stand almost at a peak. Below you is the valley. You can see the village. It’s a clean, lovely sight.

  You and Shane stop and look.

  ‘The first time I met you, you asked me about Man From U.N.C.L.E. Then
you beat me up.’

  Shane smiles. ‘Not your life, is it mate?’

  He picks you up and throws you off the mountain.

  As you tumble, you think of Mary, with an extraordinary mix of love and panic. You’ll die, you know that, but will she live? If you’re being killed, she probably will be as well.

  You’re not sure how you feel.

  You break your neck on the first bounce, and are dead when your body stops rolling.

  Go to 0.

  257

  You run after Shearer, rain on your face, lungs desperate for air, legs weakening. Shearer, without thinking, outpaces you and pulls ahead. You collapse. Mary picks you up. You didn’t realise she had run with you.

  You see Shearer stop, turn to look at you. What is he thinking?

  You’re gasping for breath. Mary holds you up, hugs you and kisses you.

  Shearer starts walking away, determined. Then he begins to run, properly. Before, he was just haring off. Now, he knows where he’s going.

  ‘He’s getting away,’ you say.

  Mary shakes her head. ‘No. He’s just leaving.’

  There’s a lot of confusion about what happened. Kay Shearer is sought for questioning, but never surfaces; you assume he has left the country. No murder charges are ever brought, but Shearer is generally thought to have been the killer.

  The police investigation ruins Robert Hackwill. A simple look into Warwick’s files discloses monumental fraud, and casts a little doubt over Shearer’s guilt.

  You and Mary see a lot of each other. And try to forget everything else.

  And so on.

  Begin again?

  258

  James lobs the rock. It arcs through the air and bounces off the shale two yards above Hackwill. The councillor looks up. The rock buzzes past his face. A mini-landslide falls around him.

  You let go your own rock, which slaps down on Hackwill’s back. His cry echoes but is lost in the rushing of the river.

  ‘Come on up, you bastard,’ you shout. ‘You can’t get away.’

  Hackwill doesn’t move, either to crawl up to you or scurry down away.

  James throws another rock, which thumps against Hackwill’s head. He whoops as if he’d just bowled out the captain of the visiting team.

  You see a smear of red on Hackwill’s face. Then he rolls, over and over. He disappears, over a drop and into the river. His body is never found.

  Ten years into the new century, you wake up. You’d dreamed yourself back to the mountain. Vickie shifts beside you, too deeply asleep to be disturbed.

  In dreams, you often go back. Minute things occur to you. The experience of those few days has still not been exhausted.

  ‘Mary’s knife,’ you say, aloud. The words fall flat, not echoing in your familiar bedroom.

  Maybe it wasn’t hers.

  You pick up the bedside phone and thumb-key James’s code. This isn’t the first time you’ve done this.

  Maybe Mary showed you Sean’s knife, so naturally, it wasn’t bloody. Maybe hers was thrown into the bushes, gory to the hilt.

  You cut off the call before James can be wakened.

  You lie back, convinced you’ve understood something. But it’s just a stray night-thought. You don’t want to bother James with it.

  His wife isn’t as heavy a sleeper as Vickie. She’d be woken by the call too.

  Your brother’s wife. Mary.

  And so on.

  Begin again?

  259

  First, you check the other bedroom. The four-poster is empty. You have a gut-sick feeling. Hackwill has had the whole evening to stew, to think it through. And he’s clever.

  He must have asked Warwick to come for a walk, ‘to talk things over’, ‘to settle all our problems’. Then killed him. He’s a fucking cool hand.

  In the dining-room, you find Sean dead. Shane, Jessup and Hackwill are gone.

  The next morning, Mary comes back with the police. Hackwill and Jessup, suffering from exposure and shock, come out of hiding. They were in Colditz.

  A Welsh copper comments that he wouldn’t keep pigs in quarters like that. He clearly thinks you and James are sadistic neo-Nazis.

  Shane is dead at the bottom of a cliff. Shearer, also dead, is with him.

  Hackwill blurts out a story about being afraid of the mad Marion brothers and gathering his forces to make a run for it. When they found Sean dead, they thought you had killed him and would come for them next.

  He was wrong, he says. The real murderer was Kay Shearer. He ambushed them as they were struggling across country, confessing — according to both Jessup and Hackwill — to all the killings in a convenient Bond-villain rant before he and Shane went off the mountain together.

  Very neat.

  Mary advises you not to make a fuss.

  If you let Hackwill’s version stand unchallenged, go to 270. If you try to get the truth out, go to 297.

  260

  Occasionally, you’ve wondered what was in Sean Rye’s HOUSEKEEPING file, the one you put back unexamined. Now that you have that moment again, you act differently.

  Inside the file is a report, typed on a sheet of flimsy paper, from someone with an office in Kuala Lumpur.

  The words don’t make sense. They are in English and fit into sentences. But you can’t understand.

  Thierry Lethem, according to this, has bestowed his money — all £6.5 million — on children’s hospitals in Thailand, Vietnam and Singapore. Now he lives in Tibet, in a cave. Not as a monk, but as a hermit. He has left everything behind.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ you repeat.

  ‘Some people are saints,’ Sally Rhodes muses.

  ‘There must be some trick. He’s shed his identity to escape.’

  ‘That’s exactly what he’s done.’

  ‘No. I mean, escape with the money,’ you say.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  You can’t imagine it. You write Sally a cheque and leave.

  If you go home, go to 276. If you go to Tibet, go to 281.

  261

  ‘I’m not into this,’ you mumble, tasting the drink on your tongue. ‘I’m …’

  Shearer’s eyes flash anger. ‘Thought you’d wind up the queer, breeder?’

  You can’t think. You want to deny that.

  Shearer has a grip on you, strong hands on the back of your neck. You try to fight but your arms are like wet fish. You protest but Shearer twists you over, face into the mattress. Your open mouth jams against a bedspring.

  ‘Fuck you,’ Shearer says.

  Your rectum is split open as he rapes you.

  It’s one of those experiences — first kiss, first sex, first bust-up, first baby, first kill, first dead parent — that ought to change everything. It does but not the way it should. The shock is that the rest of the world is the same.

  It’s you who are changed. It’s you who are raped.

  Shearer fucks you and leaves you on the bed, the bedclothes on the floor. Then he goes to what was your bed and gets a good night’s sleep.

  You lie there, too hurt to sleep, too worn out to move.

  At breakfast, you’re locked inside your own skull. It’s raining too hard to climb a mountain. James gives everybody the day off. He’s feeling generous and you’re in no mood to argue with him.

  Shearer and Warwick are in full couple mode, sitting together, not needing to talk.

  Shearer will tell Warwick and Warwick will pass it on. Everyone will know. Bastards.

  You get on with life but it’s as if you were behind a barrier of invisible cotton wool.

  When the week’s over, you take no joy in sending Hackwill home humbled, or the deepening of James’s attachment to Mary. You don’t feel anything about Kay Shearer.

  You’re not going deaf or blind or losing your sense of taste or smell. You’re just distracted.

  You don’t even think much about the rape.

  But you’ve been dislodged from the world. You see spiders in
the shadows. You see things that didn’t happen. They all have the same weight.

  You’ve been slivered off from your real self. You are alone and dwindling.

  Years pass. You continue as you are, glimpsing impossibilities, not caring about them.

  You could avenge yourself.

  There are aspects of you which would spend years plotting and executing revenge against Shearer, taking from him everything and everyone he loves, leaving him alive but a human shell. But it seems a fantasy.

  Too many possibilities seem like fantasies: you might as well retreat to old dreams of piracy, or imagine yourself battling alien invaders, or living the life of a heartless stud, or solving complex murder mysteries, or travelling through time, or slipping between worlds.

  Other yous might do those things. But you’re the you who does nothing.

  And so on.

  Begin again?

  262

  Three days later, when you’re all getting your stories straight for the police, Kay Shearer’s body is pulled out of a culvert, where it was washing against some rocks, about to be swept under the earth.

  There’s an open verdict. It could be accidental, it could be suicide. When he ran out of Castle Drac, Shearer didn’t care any more.

  Because he’s dead, Shearer never has to answer charges for the murders. You and Mary argue about it for the rest of your lives. You think Shearer killed Warwick and McKinnell; she says Hackwill has got away with it.

  As far as you know, Hackwill prospers.

  You and Mary live together, but don’t have children.

  Something lasts.

  And so on.

  Begin again?