Chasing the Dead dr-1

by Tim Weaver

  ‘It matters to the people who love him.’

  He watched me for a moment. ‘You don’t know anything, David. Most of their families don’t care if they’re dead or alive.’

  ‘You think Mary cares whether Alex is alive?’

  ‘She does now she’s seen him.’

  ‘She did anyway!’

  He paused for a moment.

  ‘Like I said, I didn’t have a choice with Alex. My hand was forced.’

  Then I lost my train of thought. The dull ache came again, but this time it was stronger. It flared in my groin. In my lower back.

  I sucked in some air.

  ‘This thing is out of control,’ I said.

  The sound of my voice amused him. He leaned in a little closer to me, stooping slightly, looking up at me. ‘Oooooh, ouch,’ he mocked quietly. ‘Does it hurt?’

  My mouth was filling with saliva. And I was sweating. Trails of it were coming off my hairline and running down my face. Deep inside — in my stomach, at the bottom of my throat — vomit bubbled, burning in the middle of my breastplate. Worse was the feeling emerging from the base of my back, in my groin, crawling up my spine. As every nerve end started to fire, my back tightened, the skin stretching across my muscles. The pain was focused there. Whatever they’d done to me was in my back.

  Andrew stood again, staring down at me with a mixture of amusement and disgust in his face. Picking up the chair, he moved back towards the door and disappeared inside. He slammed it shut behind him — and I could feel the vibrations pass across the floor. Pain suddenly burst its way out from my back and into the centre of my chest.

  ‘Fuck!’

  I yelled out again.

  It felt like someone was squeezing the life out of my heart. When I tried to shift my weight from one side to another, it was torture. My whole body spasmed. And, finally, my wedding ring fell, pinging against the floor of the fridge and rolling away.

  The door opened again, and Andrew emerged from the darkness without the chair. The scourge was hanging from his belt now. Clasped in his hands was a long mirror. There were marks all over it — greasy drag marks, as if fingers had clawed across the glass.

  He stood in front of me, the mirror turned away, and pulled the scourge from his belt. He held it up by its handle, so the tassles dropped down in front of me.

  ‘After I left the army, I got into some trouble,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t find work. I missed the routine the military had brought to my life. The discipline. So, I resorted to stealing, and I hurt some people. And after that, I deservedly went to prison.’

  He glanced behind me, and then back.

  ‘But after I got out, I found God. I really found Him. Eventually, I even managed to get to the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem. I saw the path Jesus walked on his way to the crucifixion. You gain an appreciation of what he had to endure when you visit those places.’ He paused. Dropped the scourge to his side. ‘And afterwards, you look at people differently. You look at yourself differently. You realize, if people could experience even a little of what he had to go through, they might have a greater appreciation of what they’ve been given in this life.’

  I couldn’t think of anything but the pain now. Couldn’t force up any more anger. Couldn’t concentrate on his face. It felt like the skin was slipping away from my back. I lifted a hand, shaky like an old man, and touched my back. There was blood on my fingers.

  ‘Legion brought an idea to me one day. At first I thought it was a little… medieval. But then when I considered it some more I realized the kids we took in were exactly the sort of people I was thinking about when I visited Israel. Like me, they never appreciated what they’d been given in their first lives. The opportunity. But if they could get a taste of what Jesus went through, if they could carry around with them a reminder of that, maybe they’d appreciate life more the second time round.’

  And then he turned the mirror.

  I looked into the reflection.

  Legion was standing in a double doorway behind me, dressed in black, like Andrew, but with a white butcher’s apron on.

  I swallowed. Coughed. Hacked up saliva.

  When I looked in the mirror again, Legion was a step closer, his mask up on the top of his head. He was the same man who had come up to me in the pub in Cornwall, except now he looked more manic. More frantic. As if on the cusp of something exciting. Something he had been desperate to do for a long time.

  He glanced at Andrew and back to me and smiled, his tongue breaking through between a flat, lipless mouth.

  His tongue.

  I could see it now. Dark, almost crimson. Forked. His arms twitched and his legs spasmed, as if electricity was pumping through him.

  ‘Wait,’ I said quietly.

  And then he stepped aside and I saw what was behind him.

  Through the double doors was a small room, probably fifteen foot square, with very high ceilings. It was another fridge, but the walls were painted black. In the centre of the room, under a spotlight, almost touching the ceiling, was a huge wooden crucifix made from railway sleepers. At each end of the horizontal sleeper were handcuffs. Midway down the vertical sleeper was a footrest.

  Legion stepped in closer again and grabbed the back of my chair, pouncing on it like the closing jaws of a bear trap. Then, slowly, he started to turn me around. The chair scraped across the floor, the legs catching, until I was side on to the mirror.

  I turned my head and looked at my reflection.

  ‘What the fuck have you done to me?’

  My back had been whipped with the scourge while I was knocked out, leaving thin slivers of pink skin, running in lines across my back, from the base of my neck to three-quarters of the way down my spine. The rest was just flesh.

  ‘He seems worried,’ Legion said, smiling.

  Andrew nodded. ‘We all get like that at the end.’

  Then Legion reached for the mask on top of his head and pulled it down over his face. And — as I desperately tried to move, tried to will myself to fight back — I felt a needle enter my neck again.

  39

  I felt the pain before anything else. From my neck, all the way down through my chest, into my groin and the top of my thighs. It felt like I’d been dropped into boiling hot water. My skin was on fire. Every movement of my chest, every expansion of my lungs, made it worse.

  In the darkness, I could hear someone moving around. Footsteps, barely audible. And a squeak, rhythmic and soft, like the wheels of a trolley.

  I opened my eyes.

  My head was forward, against my chest. Gravity had forced it there. When I tried to straighten, to look around, agonizing prickles spread across my neck and back.

  I breathed in.

  I was handcuffed to the cross, five feet off the floor. The ceiling in the room was about three times as high. The soles of my feet were flat to the footrest and my arms outstretched either side of me. I was still only dressed in boxer shorts.

  The room was cold. I wriggled the fingers on both hands, trying to get my circulation going. But the movement of the tendons sent a ripple all the way up my arms and into my shoulders. I sucked in as much air as I could for a second time, and closed my eyes.

  Darkness. Solitude.

  Then the squeak came again.

  I opened my eyes. To my left, a metal trolley — the type used in operating theatres — moved into view. Legion’s fingers were wrapped around the handle. On top, in individual metal plates, a scalpel and a hammer sat next to two pencil-sized nails. Next to that was a third nail: bigger, thicker, longer — like a rusting iron tube. It must have come from the sleeper itself.

  As the trolley came to a stop, he spent a moment making minuscule adjustments to the position of the instruments on the plates, before slowly turning his head towards me. A long drawn-out movement, his eyes never blinking inside the mask.

  He disappeared from view again. I tried raising my head, forcing back the pain, and could see the double doors into the next room, where
I’d been sitting before. But now the doors were closed.

  I looked left.

  There was an aluminium stepladder leaning against the wall. Legion came back into view, picked up the stepladder and looked up at me. His eyes moved again, back and forth across my body, his tongue making a scratching sound against the inside of the mask. And then he placed the ladder underneath my left arm.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ I said, looking down at him.

  He didn’t respond. Instead, he picked up the scalpel and climbed to the second step of the ladder. As he leaned towards me, the mask stopping about a foot from my face, his odour started to fill the air, pouring off his body. Suddenly, he seemed more threatening. I looked down at the scalpel and back up to his eyes. The more dangerous a man, the more difficult it was for him to suppress the darkness in him. His smell was like an animal scent: a warning not to come close unless you were looking to get hurt.

  ‘Why are you doi—’

  Lightning fast, he swiped the scalpel across my hip. I cried out, automatically trying to reach for the wound. My arm, tightly handcuffed, locked into place on the sleeper.

  Legion descended the ladder again, his eyes dancing with enjoyment now. When he got down, he tossed the scalpel on to the trolley and looked up. Watched me for a moment. Enjoyed the sight of my face wincing. The pain started to spread out from the cut, across my skin, under it, into my muscles and bones.

  He scooped up the hammer and the thinner nails, leaving the third, larger one on the tray. Then he started to climb the ladder again.

  ‘It’s amazing how much punishment the human body can take,’ he said, his voice short and sharp. More clipped than I remembered, like his mouth was full of glass. ‘The lengths it will go to in order to survive.’

  At the top of the ladder, he glanced at me, lowering his head slightly. I imagined, behind the plastic, he was smiling. Enjoying this. Feeding off my pain. And I imagined his face — in that moment — wasn’t all that different to the one on the mask.

  ‘Stop,’ I said.

  He ignored me, selected one of the nails and pressed the point against my index finger. It was razor sharp, immediately piercing the skin.

  ‘They tell me you’re right-handed,’ he said.

  ‘Stop.’

  ‘So, we’ll have some fun with the left first.’

  ‘Stop.’

  He smashed the hammer against the head of the nail. I felt it carve through my finger, out through the fingernail, and split the sleeper beneath — then, seconds later, I felt the pain. Immense waves of it, crackling down my arms and into my hand like a lightning strike. I yelled out, the noise bouncing off the walls and coming back at me.

  ‘The hand’s a very complex piece of anatomy,’ Legion continued, his voice even and serious, talking over my cries of pain. He placed the tip of the second nail against my middle finger. ‘Twenty-seven bones, including eight in the wrist alone. Muscles, tendons, ligaments, cartilage, veins, arteries, nerves… You’ve got to make sure you don’t hit anything important.’

  My hand started twitching, like a dying animal left in the road. He watched it for a moment. Tilted his head. Studied me, like I was on the other side of the glass in a zoo.

  Then he hammered the nail through the second finger.

  I screamed out.

  ‘We’re going to kill you, David,’ he said.

  I screamed again, even longer and louder, trying to force some of the pain out through my throat and drown out the sound of his voice. But he just waited for me to quieten. And once I did, he reached into the front pocket of his apron and brought out a syringe.

  ‘But first you’re going to feel…’

  He raised the needle.

  ‘… what it’s like to be resurrected.’

  * * *

  I died quickly.

  All sound was swallowed up. Light turned to darkness. Then the darkness changed and suddenly I was looking down at myself. My near-naked body frozen on the cross. The handcuffs on my wrists. Legion watching me from below. I could see everything: the top of my head, the nails, the scourge marks on my back. I still felt conscious. I could still feel the wood of the cross against the back of my arms, and my inner voice telling me, over and over, that I wasn’t dead yet.

  But then something shifted.

  A feeling washed over me, like the little control I’d had left was slipping away. And — as that went — scenes from my life began to play out. In the forest with my dad. Sitting beside his bed when he’d died. Meeting Derryn for the first time. The day I asked her to marry me. The day we got told we couldn’t have kids. The day she told me to find the first missing girl.

  ‘It’s perfect for you, David.’

  Her voice again. And after her voice, a different kind of darkness: devouring everything, consuming it, until all that was left were the echoes of voices I once loved.

  And beyond that, waves crashing on top of one another.

  Like the sound of the sea.

  Family

  There were four in a group, digging flowerbeds in the earth outside Bethany. Across from them, a man and a woman watched. He was forgetting so much now — dates, faces, conversations he’d vowed never to lose — but he remembered their names. The man was Stephen, the first person he’d met when he arrived on the farm. And the woman was Maggie. He didn’t remember much about her. He wasn’t sure he had ever spoken to her. But he knew her face. In the darkness at the back of his mind, where he stored what he was determined they wouldn’t take, he had a clear memory of her, leaning over him, clamping his mouth open and taking his teeth.

  It was early spring. The earth was wet. He scooped up a pile of soil and tossed it to his side. Further down, he could see Rose, the girl who had been punished, like him, by being taken to the room with the rings. He’d got to know her quite well. They’d spent three days in that room together until she’d been taken away. She would talk to him a little, tell him things — as much as she could remember, anyway. And then she was moved on to the next part of the programme. She looked better now — less grey, more colour — but she also barely seemed to remember him. Sometimes he would pass her and he could see her big, bright eyes linger on him, her brain firing as she tried to remember where she’d seen him, or what they had talked about. But most times, she just looked right through him, as if he were a ghost passing across the fields of the farm.

  He pounded the shovel down into the ground and felt it reverberate up the handle. The fingers of his hands throbbed for a moment, and then the pain faded into a dull ache. He turned his left hand over. At the fingertips, where once he’d traced creases and lifelines, were patches of smooth, white skin. Wounds. Half an inch across and vaguely circular in shape. When he turned his hand over, he could see the same wound, replicated beneath the veneer of the fingernail. Except, while the nail had grown back, the space around the wound hadn’t fully — and never would. It dipped, like a groove; a bloodless, colourless patch of skin.

  The last stage of the programme.

  The programme destroyed and rebuilt them, ready for their next life. A new life free from the memories of addiction, and rape, and violence. But free, as well, from the memories of anything else they’d once done. Any places they’d been. Any people they’d loved. By the time the programme was over, they had no recollection of their first life. And no past.

  Except he did — and always would.

  He slid a hand into his pocket and touched the top of the Polaroid. He didn’t need to take it out. He knew what it looked like. Every inch of it. And he knew what he was going to do with it if he ever got the chance. He’d fought the programme all the way through. And the memories he’d managed to cling on to, in his pocket and in his head, they would never get to find.

  * * *

  He pulls up to the kerb and kills the engine. There’s a crack in the windscreen, from left to right. In the corner, over the steering wheel, he can see blood. A lot of blood.

  He gets out and locks the doors.r />
  At the front of the car the grille is broken, one of the headlights has smashed and there’s blood across the bonnet. Splashed like paint. Running across and down, covering the badge and the lights, the bumper and the registration plate. He turns and looks up the path to the house.

  Through the window, he can see his dad.

  He moves quickly up the path, on to the porch and opens the front door. The house smells of fried food. In the kitchen he can see his dad, standing over a frying pan, moving the handle. His dad doesn’t notice him at first, then — as he turns — he jumps.

  ‘Oh, you frightened me,’ his dad says. He looks him up and down. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I did it, Dad.’

  ‘Did what?’

  ‘Al.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘I took care of him.’

  His dad smiles. ‘You talked to him?’

  ‘No. No. I mean I took care of him. Like we said.’

  His dad frowns. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘We can keep the money.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The money,’ he says, a little more desperate now. ‘We can keep it. We can do what we want with it. Al’s gone, Dad. I took care of him. He’s gone.’

  ‘What do you mean, gone?’

  ‘You know.’

  ‘No, I don’t know. What do you mean, gone?’

  ‘Gone,’ he says quietly. ‘Dead.’

  His dad’s face drops. ‘You killed him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Wha— why?’

  He frowns. ‘The money.’

  ‘The money?’

  ‘Remember we talked about it. About keeping it.’

  ‘You killed him for the money?’

  ‘For us.’

  ‘Don’t bring me into this.’

  ‘Dad…’

  ‘Don’t you dare bring me into this.’

  ‘But you wanted to keep the money. To take care of Al.’

  ‘You offered to talk to him, not kill him.’

  ‘Dad, I thought that’s what you wanted.’

  ‘I wanted you to talk to him, to reason with him.’