The tide receded; the storm was over. For a few more hours, the waves in the hallway broke on the lowest steps of the staircase and rearranged the boulders around the remains of the piano; at last, with a powerful sucking of shingle and weed, they withdrew through the front door, fell back, drained across the fields and the foreshore and into the estuary. The sea dropped and the wind dropped. The boy lay unconscious on the stairs until dawn.
It was a still, soft dawn. The sky was a wash of silvery cloud, pale and luminous. There was no wind at all, not a breath. The tide had gone a long way out. The sand flats were exposed, grey and glassy smooth; a trickle of creeks zigzagged through them to the distant sea. The world was lit by a watery sun. After the violence of the storm in the night, the morning was so mild that a haze of mist shimmered like steam on the foreshore and the air was quick with midges. Hundreds of waders and wildfowl were feeding on the marsh. A heron stalked in the drains, where a feast of fish had been stranded by the falling tide.
This was the world the boy found when he woke up.
No. He didn’t wake up, not really, although he opened his eyes and groaned. His body hurt, so that he tried to gaze around without moving too much. Manoeuvring himself upright, he sat on the staircase, hugged his knees to his chest and stared at the wreckage in the hallway; and then he stood up painfully, for he’d been lying on the stairs for hours, wearing nothing but the wet wedding dress, while the storm had been howling around him. The dress was very dirty, with great rips in it; as he limped across the hallway to the front door, his legs were white in the angled sunlight. He stood there for a while, because the sun was good on his face and his bare shoulders. He smoothed back his hair with his hands and saw that the gloves were soiled too.
The morning was lovely. It made the blood stir inside him, as though he’d been dead and was alive again, had been dead asleep and was wide awake again. But no, he wasn’t awake. His mind was blank, his eyes were blank. He saw the world as a gull would see it, through cold gull’s eyes, where all that remained after the storm was bleached and broken, to be picked at and turned over. The boy was in shock. Perhaps he would be in shock for ever. So he went from room to room, turning things over with his feet, picking at things with his hands, and he did things that a waking, conscious person could not have done.
This is what he did.
He trod through the wreckage of the living room. A flock of starlings rose from the seaweed and whirred about his head before aiming for the windows and disappearing across the fields. He looked around him, but he didn’t see the woman’s body: it was floating face down in a rock pool, tangled in fronds of kelp and bladderwrack. He didn’t see the windsurfer’s head: it had rolled into a mat of grasses and driftwood. He didn’t see the sheep’s head, where the starlings had been picking at it.
He bent down and picked up the ammonite. Something in the shape and the heft of it made him frown, as though it stirred the dimmest of memories . . . but he couldn’t remember what the stone was for. Turning to the fireplace, he looked at the photograph on the mantelpiece. He looked for a long time and he wondered if it was a photograph of himself, a woman holding a big stone in her slim, white hands. He didn’t know who it was, and there was no one to ask. He put the ammonite on the mantelpiece, beside the photograph, where it seemed to belong.
There was a man on the floor, lying on his back in all the boulders and weeds. He was middle-aged, rather stout, with quite a lot of wiry, peppery-grey hair, and he was wearing a dark suit over a shirt and tie. Hard to describe the face . . . one side of it was an ordinary man’s face, with a bushy eyebrow and a carefully shaved cheek; the other side was pressed in, buckled, but pink and clean because the sea and the sand had scoured it. The boy bent down to have a closer look. He studied the face and he even picked up the heavy, cold iron hook to see if it might help him to remember who the man was. The face was familiar. He’d seen it before, somewhere, some time. But, though he knelt at the man’s side and felt at the hook with his fingertips, the boy couldn’t quite place him.
Hard to tell what sort of a man he’d been: good or bad, kind or cruel, funny or sad. Perhaps he’d been all of these things, at different times, in different places, with different people.
Hard to tell how long he’d been dead, because he was so cold, as cold as the coiled black stone which had been lying on the weed beside him . . . as though he’d been dead for ever, as long as the stone had been dead.
An ordinary-looking man, who’d had an ordinary life. Whoever he was, he was smiling very faintly, as though he’d just got the point of a silly little joke that had been eluding him for a long time.
Christy couldn’t place the man. Neither could he remember how he himself had come to this extraordinary house with the birds and the beach inside it.
Straightening up, he smoothed out the dress he was wearing and the gloves, which came to his elbows. He touched the pearls around his neck. These things were a mystery to him as well. But he liked the feel of the silk on his skin and the weight of the pearls on his throat; he liked the toss of his hair, and when he stepped across the room to the window to feel the sun on him, he liked the way his body moved inside the long white dress. For a while he remained at the window, looking out at the fields which were strewn with wreckage and seaweed, and he listened to the cries of the wildfowl on the distant estuary. He puzzled at the house, where, by the look of it, the sea had come in during the night and left a man lying in the living room; he puzzled at the clothes he was wearing and the way he felt in them.
He tried to remember what he was doing there. He tried to remember who he was, but no name came to him. He tried to make sense of it all, to decide what he should do next. But he was numb. The calm of a lovely morning settled on him, and there was no sound or movement to nudge him awake.
Until at last another sound came to him, from somewhere inside the house. He cocked his head and listened. It was a sound from upstairs . . .
Something was moving up there, stirring slowly, blundering from wall to wall and nuzzling a door, trying to get out. Scratching. The scratching grew louder and louder, more and more frantic, as though there was more than one thing trying to get out. A bark, more of a yap, high-pitched and hopeful . . . another bark, more powerful, more urgent . . . and then, deep-throated, bellowing barking that sounded as if a pair of the hugest and hungriest of hounds were desperate to break free and come hurtling downstairs in search of food . . .
The noise was a trigger in the boy’s head. Suddenly, as clear and as calm as the Boxing Day morning, he knew what he was going to do. And he knew how to do it, because he’d done it before. Quite unhurried, moving here and there with a small, thin smile on his face, the boy got busy.
There was a knife lying in the seaweed, close to where the man was lying. It was as sharp as a razor. As the boy ran it up and down the seams of the man’s trousers and jacket, the material fell open. He stripped the man completely, using the blade on the shirt and tie and underclothes and tugging the remains of the clothes from under the dead weight of the body. The shoes and the socks came off. When the man was entirely naked, the boy trod out of the living room, across the hallway and stepped through the front door; the piano had gone, smashed to pieces by the storm in the night. He crossed the yard, struggled to open the big, rusty, silvery car because there were banks of weed and rubble heaped around it, leaned inside to pull out the tools he wanted: the axe, the wedge and the sledgehammer. He carried them back to the house.
No preliminaries. No wavering. No thinking to be done. The boy got busy.
The body was slabby and white, less than lifeless, simply a poundage of meat. It was cold and very stiff, the fossil of something that had lived a long time ago and been buried under the weight of the sea. The boy jointed it at the wrists and ankles, at the elbows and knees, swinging the axe with power and rhythm and accuracy. He breathed easily. The axe was heavy and beautifully balanced. The blade was keen. Let the tool do the work, someone had once
told him . . .
He stacked the hook and hand and feet, as well as the forearms and lower legs, in a corner by the doorway. Then he took the knife to the thick throat, parted the skin, made an incision big enough for the wedge to balance in, and he swung the sledgehammer. Let the tool do the work . . .
With a crunch, the wedge was through. A single, effortless swing of the axe, and the head was off. The boy picked it up by the hair, which was coarse and thick like wire wool, and he put it on the mantelpiece. It seemed to belong there, beside the ammonite and the photograph.
Ignoring the hysterical noises from upstairs, he worked for another hour. It was clean work, because the body had been tumbled by the surf all night; opened up, it evacuated into the sand and seaweed which the storm had left in the room. In any case, the wedding dress was already soiled, because the boy had slept on the staircase and there were traces of blood where his thighs had been cut. So it didn’t matter if the satin was spattered when he jointed the ribcage, when something squirted from a ruptured organ, when he smeared his hands on the sequinned bodice. The dress dried on him. The dogs were maddened by the sounds and the scent that came to them, up the stairs, but the boy shut out their furious barking. He worked steadily, methodically . . . flaying, flensing, dismembering.
Until there was no body. Only meat, skilfully butchered.
And then he was tired. He dropped the tools and crossed the room to the doorway. He paused there for a moment, looking back to the man’s head on the mantelpiece. Now he could place it. The name came to him.
Mr Clewe! Harry Clewe, the strange, solitary man who lived in the strange old house on the seashore, where the waves came in and out as though the downstairs rooms were part of the beach. Harold Vivian Clewe!
What a Christmas they’d had together! But always, after Christmas, such a lot of clearing-up to be done . . .
The boy went out of the room, across the hallway and up the stairs. The door of the little bedroom banged and bulged as the dogs hurled all their weight at it, and the sound they made was no longer barking but a horrible, keening howl of uncontrollable hunger. He turned the door handle and dodged to one side. Gog and Magog came out like a pair of locomotives. They ignored the boy, or didn’t see him. Huge and slavering, they launched themselves from the landing, crashed down the stairs, skidded as far as the front door before they could stop themselves and scrabble for traction in the banked-up shingle, and then they swerved into the living room. Immediately, there was quiet. The dogs stopped howling. From the landing, all the boy could hear was the subdued gurgle of big snouts into soft meat, big teeth on moist gristle.
He didn’t stay long in the little bedroom. The fire was out. The dogs had overturned the table and chairs to get at the remains of the feast. They’d licked the plates and the pots clean, and broken some of them in their frenzied brawling. The carpet sparkled with splintered glass from all the wine bottles they’d knocked over. The bedding was strewn everywhere. The Christmas tree was felled. The curtains were down, wrenched from the windows. It looked as though the storm had been in the room, but Gog and Magog had wrecked it, hearing the shouts and the gunshots in the night, lusting for meat in the morning. The boy closed the door. He went down the corridor and into the honeymoon bedroom, shutting the door behind him.
When he drew the curtains, the morning light fell into the room. The dust swirled in the air as he opened and closed the door and crossed to the window. The chandelier tinkled. He saw the wardrobe wide open, the gorgeous dresses flung on the floor, his own clothes dropped in the corner; the burned-out candles; the glasses and the brandy bottle; the imprint of two bodies, side by side on the four-poster bed. He sat at the dressing table and looked at himself in the pitted, tarnished mirror.
‘Oh dear,’ he said. He turned his head this way and that, tilted his chin, licked his lips and pursed them. ‘Oh dear, oh dear. What a mess! Now, do something with yourself.’
The silver comb and the silver-backed brush were close at hand. He reached for them, the gloves no longer white but soiled red and brown and black, and he worked at his long, blond hair until it shone like gold. Taking the same lipstick he’d used the night before, he applied it to his mouth so that his lips gleamed and his teeth seemed to glisten by contrast. When he angled his head at the mirror, his hair swung soft and loose around his ears, brushing his bare shoulders. The pearl necklace slithered on his skin.
At last he was satisfied. He smiled at himself. There was some brandy left in the bottle, so he drained it into one of the glasses and drank it down in a single gulp. His body was flooded with warmth. His cheeks reddened and his eyes sparkled.
‘That’s better!’ he whispered, his throat hoarse because of the heat of the brandy. And at that moment, the name came to him. He remembered who he was.
‘Christine!’ he said to the girl in the mirror. ‘That’s better, Christine! Now you’re lovely again!’
At the first sound of the helicopter, she tugged her eyes from the mirror, looked out of the window and saw the big yellow machine beating along the foreshore.
With a dazzling smile at her own reflection, she stood up. She adjusted the straps of the dress and swirled the sequinned folds around her. Hurrying to the landing, down to the hallway, careful not to trip on the mass of material, she burst from the front door and into the sunshine of a glorious winter’s morning, just as the helicopter was hovering over the field at the front of the house.
She forced her face up into the blast. She shouted and waved and saw a man wave back at her. She clutched the dress with both hands, gripped with her gloved fingers to control the shimmering, frothing stuff in the wind from the helicopter’s blades. The machine landed, the blades slowed down and the buffeting decreased.
A man in a yellow suit and a black helmet dropped from the helicopter. Bent double, he ran across the waterlogged field. He paused there and he stared, his mouth open, his eyes wide . . . not expecting to be met by a girl in a wedding dress, a pretty, smiling young bride whose lips were red, whose eyes were bright, whose hair was fine and shining as though it had just been brushed. He gaped at her. The dress was torn, her legs were bare and white as the blast from the helicopter lifted the gauzy material. There was blood on the bodice, smeared and dry, and there was blood on the gloves as well. She had blood on her thighs, a virginal bride so urgently deflowered that she’d bled into her wedding dress . . . He glanced past the girl’s shoulder at the derelict house, and tried to shout something at her, but his words were lost in the whirling noise.
Christine guessed what the man had said. Glancing round to see the dogs coming through the front door, she giggled and called out as loudly as she could, ‘Don’t worry about them! They’ve been fed this morning! All the Christmas left overs!’
The blades of the big yellow machine had slowed down. The ugly, buffeting noise had stopped. The morning was still and quiet again. Another figure in a helmet and a yellow suit jumped out of the helicopter. The two men walked towards the house, warily skirting the dogs, which were too bloated to do more than raise their hackles and snarl. One of the dogs had been holding something in its mouth, but it dropped whatever it was into the mud, the better to show its teeth . . . and the men, who’d stared so curiously at the bloodstained, bright-eyed, Boxing Day bride, stared at the thing that the dog had dropped before they disappeared through the front door of the house.
Christine followed them. She leaned at the living-room window and looked in.
One of the men had crossed to the middle of the room. He was nudging the seaweed with the toe of his boot, turning something over, and then he knelt and picked at the weed with his hands. Crying out, he recoiled so suddenly that he fell backwards into a rock pool. He leaped to his feet and stood gaping at the mantelpiece.
The other man, who’d gone into the room for no more than a few seconds, had stumbled straight back into the hallway. He was sitting on the stairs, with his head between his knees, retching very loudly, retching and spitting and retc
hing again.
Christine turned away from the window. It was another ugly noise that the men had brought with them, to spoil the stillness of a beautiful Boxing Day morning. She hoped they wouldn’t stay long. Now that she’d tidied the downstairs of the house, clearing the mess of a hectic Christmas, the sea would come in and rinse everything clean. She had a lot to do upstairs. The little bedroom was upside down, but she’d soon have it right again, and a good fire burning. In the meantime, waiting for the men to finish whatever they were doing and leave her in peace, she crossed the fields away from the house.
She walked with a swing of her hips. She liked the way she felt, the way she moved in the long white dress and the way it touched her all over. Lifting the hem to try and keep it out of the mud, she wandered to the beach, arranged herself on a boulder and tilted her face to the winter sunshine. She sat there, swanlike. She smiled to see that the swans, unafraid, had come to feed on the foreshore.
She sat and she smiled and she thought about Harry Clewe. She wondered what sort of a man he’d been: good or bad, kind or cruel, funny or sad. No doubt he’d been all of these things, at different times, in different places, with different people.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stephen Gregory (b. 1952) was born in Derby, England, and earned a degree in law from the University of London. He worked as a teacher for ten years in various places, including Wales, Algeria, and Sudan, before moving to the mountains of Snowdonia in Wales to write his first novel, The Cormorant (1986), which won Britain’s prestigious Somerset Maugham Award and drew comparisons to Poe. The book was also adapted for film as a BBC production starring Ralph Fiennes. Two more novels, both set in Wales, followed: The Woodwitch (1988) and The Blood of Angels (1994). His work attracted the notice of Oscar-winning director William Friedkin (The Exorcist), and he spent a year in Hollywood working on stories and scripts. More recently, he has published The Perils and Dangers of this Night (2008), The Waking That Kills (2013), and Wakening the Crow (2014). His latest work, Plague of Gulls, was serialized electronically by The Pigeonhole in 2015.
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