On the Third Day

by Rhys Thomas

  ‘No.’ McAvennie held up his palms. ‘This is not the way.’

  ‘Forget it, George,’ he said. ‘Empathy and compassion you say. Well, where’s the empathy and compassion for Benjamin? Look at his kid, for Christ’s sake.’ He gestured to the body. ‘I’ve had it. We need to do something.’

  ‘Revenge won’t solve anything.’

  ‘Just shut up,’ Adam’s father shouted.

  Everybody turned to him.

  ‘My son is dead. And somebody has to pay.’

  ‘I’m with you,’ someone shouted.

  All around her, people started moving back up towards the camp.

  Adam’s father ran his hand through his thin blond hair. His anger was stronger than his grief and he left the child’s body in the sand because he needed his vengeance.

  ‘Please,’ McAvennie called after him, but his voice was lost beneath the din. Unmoving, he watched the crowd follow Benjamin.

  ‘What’s going on, Gran?’

  She didn’t answer her granddaughter.

  For how much longer could McAvennie hold things together, she thought, as she watched him make his decision and start running up the beach towards the mob.

  The wind blew through Charlie’s hair and it felt good. His body felt insubstantial. The light of day was fading and soon the night would be on them again.

  ‘Do you ever think about your husband?’

  ‘Every day.’

  He looked at her. Her face was white and the skin over it was loose. She always looked tired, her hair was lank and unkempt and the tip of her nose always red. The baby in her belly was huge and it seemed that every time she moved it took a massive effort. All of these things made Charlie think of her as being impossibly strong, with a machine inside her turning interminable rhythms of survival.

  ‘At least you have the baby.’

  He noticed something change in her face. He had said something wrong.

  ‘The baby isn’t his.’

  His mind stumbled as he cursed himself. He lowered his jaw to speak and felt his cheeks redden.

  ‘It’s OK. Something happened,’ she explained. ‘My brother-in-law – you never met him – he looked after us and then one day –’ she shrugged – ‘he got ill.’ She thought of Crowder, of how Joseph had told her he had killed him. ‘It’s like you said, some people find it easy to be good and some people find it hard. He was a good person, really.’ She wondered if Charlie would ever again be the same person who had visited her that night before Christmas. She hoped he would. But it was going to be a long way back. ‘It’s the ones who find it hard but do it anyway who are the real saints,’ she said.

  She was standing alone outside the lighthouse as she watched the people approach the outbuilding. There were too many of them to count. They reached the wooden door and tried the handle but it was locked. Some of them went to the small, square windows and peered inside. They were shouting and trying to force the door with their shoulders. There was something in the outbuilding and they wanted it very badly. Miriam stepped forwards and almost toppled with the weight of the baby.

  McAvennie appeared from the crowd. He ran around the edge of the group and tried to get near the door. Fields was there too, along with some other men who made up McAvennie’s team of helpers.

  McAvennie was trying to stop them. He had forced his way through the crowd and taken up position between them and the door. His wide arm-span reached from one side of the door to the other and he wedged each of his palms into the frame so that nobody could get past.

  Miriam waited at the back of the crowd. Through the heads and shoulders she found a clear line of sight.

  ‘You mustn’t do this,’ he shouted. ‘We need him.’

  The crowd jeered back at him, a mass of distressed noise.

  ‘Out of the way, George.’

  There was a patch of space between McAvennie and the rest of the crowd. She could see the profile of a man with thin blond hair and spectacles. He seemed to be crying. A fierce anger was scarred on his face.

  ‘Let us past.’

  ‘Don’t you see that if you do anything to him then that makes us as bad as them?’

  ‘How dare you?’ screamed the man with thin blond hair.

  ‘They did it first.’ This came from a second man, with a thick brown beard and long hair.

  ‘Give him to us, George,’ the blond man shouted.

  Miriam stood on tiptoe. The crowd started shouting again. Their voices were furious. Something very bad had happened.

  McAvennie tried to silence them but it was not working. There were too many of them and they were too volatile. Fields and some of the other men formed a line around McAvennie to keep the crowd out.

  Angered by the men’s protection of whatever was inside the building the crowd drove suddenly forward as one, the sound of shouting and screaming heavy on the air.

  Miriam grabbed the arm of the woman in front of her. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘They’ve got one of those pigs in there.’ The woman faced forward and threw an angry fist into the air.

  McAvennie had disappeared beneath the swarm of people. The sound of cracking wood crunched out over the noise of people shouting and the door to the outbuilding swung quickly open.

  Barging and shouting came from within the small hut and then the crowd reversed itself and began to fan out into a ring, five to ten people deep.

  Miriam saw a man thrown into the centre. He stumbled but kept his footing. She only caught a glimpse of him before the crack in the ring of people closed and all she could see were the backs of heads and shoulders. He was wearing black combat trousers tucked into heavy boots, a black shirt and a black army jacket. Around the top of his right arm was tied a red band. Seeing him there, in the daylight, induced a wave of nausea.

  His hands were tied behind his back.

  This crowd was baying for blood. There was something within their anger that could not have existed before; something wild and uncivilized. Whatever it was that had happened had triggered a ferocious, animalistic blood lust in these people. It was tangible in the air. The danger was intimidating in its immediacy. The crowd was entering something close to a frenzy.

  McAvennie pleaded for reason.

  ‘You can’t. After all we’ve done. Please don’t do this. If you do this everything will have been pointless.’

  ‘They killed my son.’

  The words snagged on Miriam’s attention. She looked at the blond man again. Tears stained his face. Something started to make sense.

  McAvennie had scrambled into the centre of the ring and was standing between the blond-haired man and the prisoner, who was expressionless in the violence around him.

  ‘Why are you defending him?’

  ‘We’re not killers. If you do anything to this man you will have to live with it. It doesn’t matter what he’s done – that’s irrelevant. It’s what you do that matters.’

  ‘He doesn’t deserve to live.’

  ‘He’s the only thing keeping them from attacking us. He’s the only thing we have to bargain with.’

  ‘I don’t care . . . My son is dead, George.’ The blond man opened his lips and his teeth clamped together.

  The tall man with the brown beard shouted, ‘Why are you so worried about them attacking us anyway? There are more of us than there are up there. We’re armed. We have men who know what they are doing.’

  The crowd started shouting again. Miriam strained to hear the conversation between McAvennie and the men near the front.

  ‘Strength in numbers,’ the man in the brown beard added. ‘That’s what you always say.’

  McAvennie shook his head. ‘But we don’t have to fight. Why does everyone think that’s the only way to solve this? The world is a bigger place now, much bigger than it was. There’s room enough. We don’t need to fight and die.’

  The man in the brown beard grabbed his hair in exasperation.

  ‘That’s not how those people think, George. Ar
e you being deliberately naive?’

  And then, without warning, he pounced. Tired of speaking, he pushed McAvennie aside and lunged at the prisoner. In a tangle of arms and legs they toppled to the floor, where Miriam lost sight of them. The crowd was shouting and cheering. She saw, through the writhing mass of people, the blond-haired man step forward. McAvennie grabbed him and said something and looked at him pleadingly but the blond man broke eye contact, pushed past him and disappeared beneath the crowd of heads and pumping fists.

  The crowd was shifting. Bodies collided with Miriam and she was too heavy to get out of the way. The crowd enveloped her as the centre of the ring moved towards her. She caught glimpses of the assault through the bodies. Everybody was attacking him. His body was being dragged around the grass in all directions, everybody taking turns kicking him. They were going to rip him apart.

  Miriam tried to get out of the maelstrom but it had its own force and she could not push against it.

  ‘Make room,’ somebody called.

  From the other side of the ring Miriam saw something that made her feel sick. A large rock was being passed over the heads of the crowd. It was about the size of a skull. Over the aeons the ocean had moulded it into a perfectly smooth egg shape. When they saw it coming, the crowd’s cheers ballooned savagely.

  The blond-haired man saw it and lifted his arms for receipt. He held it above his head and turned to the prisoner. He paused. The front rows of the crowd became hushed in a collective intake of breath. And then the blond-haired man dropped the rock.

  The prisoner tried to shift out of its path. The rock glanced off the top of his head and fell harmlessly to the ground. Miriam breathed all the air from her lungs. She could see everything now. McAvennie was being held back by the man with the brown beard. Fields and the others were being similarly restrained.

  ‘This has to happen. It’s only fair,’ she heard someone say.

  The blond-haired man moved in and lifted the rock once more above his head. The prisoner was more animated now. He wriggled to the edge of the ring but was always rolled back in by the crowd. His face had rivers of blood flowing all over it.

  Miriam pushed past the few people in front of her and into the open space. She looked about her, at the crowd goading the blond-haired man on. Their faces were not human. This could not happen. It was too savage.

  ‘Wait.’ Her voice was a scream.

  The blond-haired man turned to her as if he would listen to what she was going to say, almost as if he wanted a way out of this. And then somebody grabbed her. Strong arms pulled her backwards.

  A stranger’s voice whispered in her ear, ‘Just let it happen. You can’t stop it.’

  The blond-haired man stepped over and around the squirming prisoner, unable to get a clear shot with his boulder.

  The captive said something in a foreign language. This only served to enrage the crowd, who were appalled that this man might plead for his life on English soil but without its language.

  A spasm of horror went through Miriam as a middle-aged woman stepped out of the crowd and fell to her knees behind the prisoner’s head. She took his skull between her hands. She was screaming at the blond-haired man.

  ‘Now. Go on. Now.’

  The blond-haired man steadied himself. He planted his feet on either side of the doomed man’s hips and his whole chest rose up as he filled his lungs with air.

  The rock came down hard and direct. The sound, the dull thud that was too quiet for its consequences, was the only sense of the incident that Miriam absorbed. When she opened her eyes again the hostage was still, his head facing away from her. The crowd was silent.

  A voice was calling from somewhere down the hill. They could hear it now that they were quiet.

  ‘Wait,’ it called. ‘Don’t do anything.’

  The words were clear.

  A man was running over the grass towards them. He was carrying a child.

  ‘Don’t do anything,’ the man called again.

  The child had its head buried in the man’s shoulder. One of its arms dangled limply at its side. As they came closer it became clear that blood was dripping from the child’s hand.

  ‘Who is that? Is that little Trio?’

  The child’s long hair moved and he turned to face the crowd. It was a little boy of eleven or twelve and his face was smeared in tears and blood from his hand.

  ‘They have our kids,’ called the man.

  A kinetic terror fired through Miriam.

  ‘Don’t touch our hostage.’ The man ran over to McAvennie and stopped. He was panting. ‘They want to trade. We have to give them their man back.’

  The boy’s hand was wrapped in a blood-soaked handkerchief. The blood had saturated the cloth and was dropping to the ground in viscous globes.

  ‘My God, what have they done to him?’

  Fields unwrapped the handkerchief. The corpse of the prisoner lay forgotten near the outbuilding. As Miriam watched her eyes were drawn to the man who carried the boy. He and McAvennie were looking at one another. David looked young, despite his beard. His eyes carried a deep worry that he conveyed in silence to the man standing opposite.

  The handkerchief came away from the child’s hand and Miriam involuntarily covered her open mouth with the back of her fingers.

  The boy’s little finger was missing. It had been severed at the second knuckle leaving a bloody, painful stump. A woman behind her screamed.

  ‘Where is he?’ asked David.

  McAvennie looked at him, unable to answer. Nobody said anything. Their heads turned collectively to the lifeless husk of the hostage the men at the top of the hill wanted returned.

  David said nothing when he saw it. The arm around the little boy pushed up so he could get a better grip and that was his only reaction.

  McAvennie put his hand on the top of Trio’s head, nearly covering it entirely with its immense span.

  ‘It’s OK, Trio lad,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a finger off and it never harmed me.’ He held up his hand and showed the boy. McAvennie smiled at the child. ‘Tell me what happened.’

  The little boy’s voice was lower than Miriam had expected it to be. He told McAvennie about how he and his friends had escaped from the camp and climbed the cliff path, where they had been caught. Fields tried asking which other boys were with him but McAvennie stopped him and said to let the boy finish. Trio told them about the merciless way in which they had killed Adam and of how they had taken them all to the cellar in the house at the top of the hill.

  He told them about how they had come for him and how they had sent him back to the camp with their message, and how they had cut off his finger so that the camp knew they were serious, and finally how David had seen him coming down the hill and run out to him and carried him back to safety.

  When Trio had finished he put his head back on David’s shoulder. The crowd waited for McAvennie’s reaction. Just moments before they had betrayed him utterly. They had taken the trust he had in them and scattered it to the wind and now here they were, Miriam observed, following him once again.

  He tapped Fields’s chest.

  ‘Come on,’ he said.

  The two men went to leave.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ said the blond-haired man, sweating, his voice still saturated with anger.

  McAvennie’s face twitched at the man who had just killed their only hope and then, at last, he smiled.

  ‘I’m going to talk to them.’

  Everybody shook their heads and started mumbling.

  ‘You can’t. What can you say to them?’ a woman said.

  McAvennie just shrugged. ‘What I’ve been saying to you all, all this time. I’ve got to try and stop this before it goes any further.’

  ‘You don’t understand—’

  ‘Stop it,’ he said loudly. ‘I’m going. Look, I’m not your leader. I didn’t ask to be in charge. All I’ve done since this camp started was what I thought was the right thing to do to make things work.
And that’s all I’m going to do now. I have to go and talk to them. You say I’m naive –’ he looked at the big man with the brown beard – ‘but everyone has some good in them, even those men up there. I just need to find it.’

  And with that the crowd desisted. McAvennie and Fields walked away over the grass towards the road.

  Miriam had so far managed to keep her dread under control. What she was thinking had long odds. Surely she would know if it was true; she would feel it inside because everybody had attuned to the new world and developed that nebulous sense that had been dormant before. But then she realized that the dread that engulfed her was that sense. It was telling her that her fears were true.

  She struggled to catch up with the man carrying the boy. The baby was so heavy. Adrenalin pushed her body on.

  ‘Wait,’ she called out.

  When he saw that it was Miriam calling to him, David stopped.

  ‘I need to ask the little boy,’ she said.

  She looked at Trio and he looked shyly back.

  ‘Who were the boys you were with? What were their names?’

  Trio didn’t say anything. His large, hazel eyes were glazed with a patina of moisture. He was becoming upset again.

  The dread inside her was mushrooming. Her head felt light.

  ‘Was one of them called Edward?’

  The little boy turned his face away and placed it back into the shoulder of the man who carried him. He nodded.

  A series of emotions lay before her like a steep, stone staircase: fear for her son, an instant longing to have him back, anger that he would have done something so stupid, despair that he was gone. She needed to move, to find Mary, to find her mother. One leg in front of another, she told herself; don’t think.

  The crowd left the lighthouse and went down into the flat valley. Hundreds of people had gathered near the main entrance of the camp. By now, everybody knew that something bad was happening, that a child had been killed and that a gang had gone to the lighthouse for vengeance, that more children had been kidnapped and were being held in the house at the top of the hill.