The room must have been a lounge room once, but the carpet had been pulled up, exposing the concrete floor, and all furnishings had been removed. Constance, still saddled, was hitched to a long metal railing that had been installed at some point since the house had been abandoned. A single shattered window let sunlight into the room, and the other window was boarded up. A basin half-filled with water had been set on the floor beside the railing, and some attempt had been made to strew dried grass on the hard concrete.
Patrick’s cheeks grew hot and his chest tightened. He’d neglected his duty to his horse. She’d carried him through a desert wasteland with stoic endurance, and would carry him to his destination without complaint. She deserved better.
He crossed the floor and unsaddled her, then stroked her side, checking for signs of stress. She whickered softly and turned to nuzzle at his ear. Patrick rubbed her down and cursed himself for his stupidity. Charlie was too small to tend to a horse, and these people would know little about tending them. He hadn’t seen any since leaving Bundaberg.
One of the panniers carried grain mash, and Constance snorted eagerly and buried her muzzle in the bag when Patrick offered it. He tied it around her neck and let her munch for a while, internally berating himself.
If she became unwell he would be forced to stay in Miriam Vale. Or he’d have to leave her behind and continue on foot. The former made him uneasy, the latter was suicide. Patrick tried to convince himself that his duty was paramount, that God would protect him, but he was a long way from the seminary and the people here were hostile, the town decaying.
He put his arms around the horse’s neck and breathed in her earthy scent before he untied the pannier and gave her a last pat. Constance whinnied as he headed back to the pub for food. The sun glared down, bleaching the colour from all he could see. The streets gasped for moisture, cobbled with rock and broken bitumen and sand.
Bailey grunted when he saw the priest.
“Could I get a bite to eat?”
The publican pointed to a blackboard. “I do a noon special. Hope you’re not fussy.”
Patrick prayed it wasn’t rats. “Not at all.”
Time dragged on, each minute reluctant to give way to the next. A slender fellow with mutton-chop sideburns pushed the door open but let it shut again when he saw Patrick at the bar. The next man to enter was short and dark with curly hair, and he too left at the sight of the priest sitting alone.
“You’re bad for business.” Bailey glowered as he set a bowl on the bar and pushed it across. Patrick inspected the contents. The brown sludge steamed, and smelled of unidentified meat and pepper. The priest sampled it. It was decent enough, better even than some of the food he remembered from his novice days.
The door whooshed inward. Light and dry air invaded the pub. The man, silhouetted in the entrance, stood at the threshold and called out.
“Had enough of this, Bailey. Want him gone.”
“Yeh, Morgan, I know,” the impassive barkeep replied. “He’ll be leaving this evening. Now off with you.”
The door swung shut. Patrick stared into his stew. “I’d like to help you,” he said.
“Ain’t nothing the likes of you can do for us.” Bailey slammed a glass onto the bar, the burn on his face flaming. Liquid sloshed over the edge and splattered on Patrick’s hand. “Lemonade?”
“Thanks.” Patrick took a cautious sip. Still warm and sour. “When were the Brothers of Mercy here?”
Bailey shook his head. “Best you stop, now.” He leaned over the bar and looked into Patrick’s eyes. “You’re not like them others, I know that but I ain’t the majority here, you understand. Folks here are angry, and seeing you has flared it up again. You just eat your food and be on your way and don’t be talking to nobody.”
Patrick swallowed. The mouthful of stew he’d forgotten to chew slid painfully down his throat. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”
“It ain’t worth much, God-man.”
Patrick hunched over his bowl and shovelled the hot stew in as fast as he could. The sounds of Bailey tidying, sweeping, the clinking of glasses, the squeak of chairs, all melded into a meditative hum as Patrick contemplated his options. The sharp scent of vinegar roused him from his reverie as Bailey ran a rag along the bar.
“Finished?”
The priest handed his bowl over. Bailey disappeared out the back with it. Patrick tapped his fingers on the bar and recalled his lessons. Souls that didn’t cross over were trapped in purgatory, repeating the same movements over and over. It was difficult to free them, doubly so if their loved ones clung too tight. He scrunched his face, the quandary almost defeating him. These men were living for their dead womenfolk, not for God.
The men of Miriam Vale must be brought back to God’s will. His face smoothed, and he straightened. As Bailey returned Patrick pushed the chair back. It screeched on the wooden floor. He hurried to the stairs.
The man called Morgan blocked his way. He grinned, showing broken teeth. A crimson smear marred his cheek.
“What do you want?” Patrick asked, his heart hammering.
Morgan held up his hand, a twisted red claw. “Have you ever seen a human candle?”
Patrick backed up, shaking his head. “It wasn’t—”
“Your kind did nothing to stop ‘em. They herded our girls into the claws of the crab, claimed they were sinners, tied ‘em up and burned ‘em alive, even the young ones. We got the bastards, killed ‘em all. Was too late, though, wasn’t it? Had to put a bullet in my wife’s brain, put her outta her misery. You ever had to do somethin’ like that, God-man?”
His bowels loosened. “I’m sorry.”
Morgan leaned in, his foul breath made Patrick’s eyes water. “Yes. You’re all good at saying sorry.” Then he pushed past Patrick and went into the bar area.
Patrick’s body was hit by tremors as he trudged upstairs. It was one thing to speculate, another thing to have his suspicions confirmed. Nothing in his training had prepared him for this. In his room he knelt and prayed, asking God for guidance and forgiveness. As afternoon fell toward sunset the words came to him, planted in his mind by divine will. He knew what he must do, knew the time and place.
Patrick wiped the sweat from his brow and sat on the bed. “Thank you, Lord.” He stretched his shoulders. “I won’t fail you.”
* * *
The timing had to be just right. Dusk was the liminal time between day and night, one of the transition points that caused the veils between the worlds to thin. The spirits would be able to escape purgatory to enter Heaven—or Hell, if that was their fate—but they needed a priest to entreat on their behalf.
Patrick could see the train station from his room. The site of many departures and arrivals would be the best place to send the spirits on their final journey. Patrick tiptoed down the stairs, his breath shallow. He slipped past the entrance to the bar where the room swarmed with patrons, and then he was out into the street and running across toward the train station.
The sun had not yet sunk below the horizon. Patrick exhaled, his throat tightened with nerves as he climbed the stairs to the platform. He took a deep breath and focused on the rusting train tracks.
“Holy Father, bring these women forth from Purgatory so you may judge their sins.” The air froze. His skin pebbled with goosebumps and he opened his eyes. Ghostly apparitions stepped forth onto the platform, as though alighting from an invisible train. The women of Miriam Vale, old and young; beautiful and not, their ethereal forms clad in the garb they’d been wearing in the pub the night before.
They were not happy to see him. The face of the one nearest was set in a soundless scream.
“Forgive me,” Patrick said, his chest hollow, “you must understand. It’s necessary. This is His will.”
She shook her head, radiating a sadness that shredded his heart, then pointed behind him. The spectres watched as he swung around.
The boy, Charlie, stood in the parking lot across the road, pee
ring at him. He disappeared into the Hotel.
Patrick took a deep breath and the words spilled out. “Forgive these women their sins and receive them into Your Heavenly Kingdom. Allow the survivors a chance at living.”
As he stumbled over the last words Patrick threw himself down the stairs. He tripped over the uneven ground, aiming for the derelict house Constance was stabled in. His blood thundered in his ears and his lungs burned as he neared the gutted shack. The forlorn apparitions trailed after him, fading as the daylight dimmed.
Patrick flung open the door to carnage. Blood streaked the walls, and Constance—a whimper strangled his throat. He bent and stroked her soft muzzle. “I’m sorry,” he said as the tears flowed. He heaved the panniers over his shoulders and walked to the doorway, weighed down by sorrow and fear.
“You won’t take them from us again.”
Bailey hefted an axe, flanked by the rest of the townsmen. The transparent women stood in a line in front of them. One by one they raised their hands, and each blew a kiss to the men. Then the sun slipped below the horizon, dragging the unwilling ghosts down with the last rays of light.
“It’s too late,” Patrick said, sobbing. “They’re gone.”
“What have you done?” Bailey’s face paled as he turned. Cries of despair rang out from the throng of men behind him.
“They’re gone!”
“Veronica! Ronnie!”
“Bring them back!”
Ice snaked down Patrick’s spine. He sniffed but snot leaked from his nose.
“I sent them to our Heavenly Father, to receive his judgement. You all need to move on with your lives.”
“You should have left well enough alone.”
“I was only trying to help!”
Bailey’s eyes narrowed. “I told you there was nothing you could do for us, God-man.” The husbands and fathers and sons and brothers who’d watched their womenfolk die fanned out on either side of Bailey as he lifted the weapon.
“Why did you have to kill the horse?” Patrick could barely see through the watery haze.
Bailey swung around, glared at Morgan. “We could have used a horse,” he said, teeth gritted. Morgan scowled.
Charlie ran to Bailey’s elbow. “Make the bad man go away, Papa,” the boy said.
“With pleasure,” Bailey replied. The men of Miriam Vale surrounded Patrick. His voice quivered as he prayed loudly, breath coming in gasps. He’d done as the Lord instructed, hadn’t he? The Lord would save him. He would. I don’t want to die.
The decrepit buildings of the town were tombs in the purple light of dusk, and Patrick realised that the shades of their memories were all these men had of the women they’d loved, twice taken.
Patrick heard the wailing lament of the women of Miriam Vale in the whistling passage of the axe.
Reasons to Kill
J.C. Michael
No one paid much attention to the stranger when he moved to town. What a costly mistake that was.
We couldn’t even say for sure when he moved in. Of course, a group of us went to welcome him once we noticed someone started to clear and tend the garden, but when he saw us coming he shot inside and declined to answer the door. We only bothered once more, at Christmas, but again he decided he didn’t want to respond to our knocking. We left him a gift all the same. Some of the townsfolk felt uneasy, but the majority of our small community said live and let live. The town was ample, big enough for all of us, and there was no reason to impose ourselves upon the man. But that was before spring came. Before the Watson kids went missing. With those three unaccounted for, the youngest of them only seven, our feelings toward the stranger in our midst developed from a mild curiosity, to a worrying concern.
* * *
“We’ve searched everywhere,” said Peter Harrison, for what seemed like the hundredth time.
“You can’t have, otherwise you’d have found them.”
It was a fair point—and you could expect nothing less from the children’s mother—but all the same, Harrison had done all he could to try and find her two sons and daughter. We all had.
“We all know we haven’t searched everywhere so let’s quit gabbing and go knock the bastard up out of bed. And if he doesn’t answer I’m busting the fucking door down.”
I took another drink. God how I missed proper beer. It was Paul Robertshaw who’d spoken, and his sentiments were no doubt shared by the majority of those present. It was virtually a full gathering of the town, thirty out of the thirty-six of us. Other than the three missing children, and the stranger, only old Clifford and his daughter were missing; him housebound, her laid up with flu.
“We know nothing about the man,” said Harrison. “What if he’s armed and doesn’t take too kindly to us breaking into his home in the dead of night?”
Paul stood, and I knew what was coming. Harrison may have organised us into the self-sufficient community we had become, and by doing so become our un-official leader, but Paul had known his own mind ever since primary school. If he’d decided to do something, no-one was going to stop him.
“Then I’ll take my own gun and give him fair warning. He answers the door and lets us check it out, or he’ll let me in—at gunpoint.”
“And if he answers the door with a gun of his own? What then?”
Paul looked at the young woman who’d spoken and shrugged. He and Sarah had never seen eye-to-eye over much.
“Fuck knows, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”
* * *
Ten minutes later we were walking across town, both of us armed, both of us nervous, neither of us willing to show it.
“You know as well as I do we’ve been lucky this past year,” said Paul as we walked through the deserted streets. The quiet was sinister, like those first few weeks. It was a feeling whose return was unwelcome.
“I know.”
There was no option but to agree. The world had come to a standstill, yet we’d buried our dead, and carried on. The movies would have you believe that there’d be post-apocalypse anarchy, the countryside awash with murderous gangs pillaging what was left. It wasn’t like that at all, as far as we knew. In some ways, now was better than before. Less people. Less stress. Less noise.
I guess I was lucky, having no family to lose when the outbreak hit. Still, it wasn’t a bad life for the survivors, even those who’d lost their nearest and dearest. Growing your own food was hard work, yet rewarding, and the sense of community was something which had been absent in the modern world. Harrison, who’d studied history before going into ‘retail management’ and running the local newsagent’s, reckoned it had been exactly the same after the Black Death. The same natural resources, but far less people. I’d no idea if he was right, but either way, life wasn’t that bad. To be frank, I preferred growing my own food and trading with my neighbours, rarely leaving town for anything more than a walk through the countryside, compared to the forty mile daily commute I’d once endured just to sit in an office staring at a computer screen.
* * *
When we reached the house we could see the light from a candle flickering in one of the downstairs rooms. We stopped at the garden gate.
“How you want to do this?” asked Paul.
“Buggered if I know. It was your idea.”
“Well, I’ve been thinking,” he said.
“First time for everything,” I couldn’t help but reply.
“There’s no point stirring things up too much. Why don’t we just shout from here? Tell him there’s some missing kids and the town needs to know he isn’t involved. We want a quick look round, and then we’ll be on our way.”
“And if he doesn’t respond?”
Paul looked at me, fear and resolve in his grey eyes. “Then I’m going to shoot out one of his upstairs windows so he knows we mean business.”
As it was, it didn’t come to that. Paul shouted out that we were looking for some lost children and, after a twitch of the curtains, the front door opened. We l
ooked around the house, upstairs and down, attic and basement, garage and garden shed, and saw nothing out of the ordinary beyond the stranger himself. He was far from ordinary. The desiccated and cracked skin covered in yellow scabs gave us a whole new topic to worry about—the stranger was infected.
* * *
Everyone was still at The Boar’s Head when we got back. None of them took the news well.
“How the hell can he be infected?”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Can we catch it?”
“Oh God!”
“Is it a new strain?”
“We need to get rid of him!”
“Why is he still alive?”
There was a whole raft of questions and statements, but no answers or suggestions. The outbreak, to our knowledge, had lasted seven weeks. People fell ill by the thousands, their skin drying out and cracking before oozing with a mixture of blood and pus which scabbed over like miniature mountain ranges across the skin. From the formation of the first yellow scab death came within seventy-two hours. The whole process didn’t appear to be that painful, physically, although the mental anguish was undoubtedly torturous. The infected just got drowsier until they fell asleep and their heartbeat slowed to a stop. Nobody got better. Isolation made no difference, nor did excessive contact. The theory was that the infection had spread weeks, months—maybe years—previously, and simply taken a long time to incubate before showing any of the symptoms which heralded Death’s imminent arrival. That was why neither quarantining the victims, nor locking yourself away, did any good. If you had it, you had it, and you’d had it—simple as that. Infected before you even knew it existed.
Why did some of us survive? Was it genetics? Luck? Or even divine intervention? No one knew. Maybe we’d just missed the infection when it had first spread. We all had ideas, but with the vast majority of the world’s scientists and doctors suffering the same fate as everyone else, there were no definitive answers.
Suspended In Dusk Page 13
