Rottenhouse

by Ian Dyer

  ‘I get that. I do. I can’t imagine what it must be like to lose your wife and daughter. The thought of losing you makes me want to be sick. I just thought things would be different I suppose. You guys have barely talked; you’ve spent no time together. I thought it would be all hugs and long talks and stuff and I would be like a fifth wheel for most of the time. I feel if I were to ask him right now for permission to marry you he would laugh in my face and call in the Chairman with his large truncheon.’

  Lucy smirked and then realising how that must have sounded Simon chuckled. He moved in close to her and the two of them shared a brief cuddle.

  ‘I guess I thought it would be a bit different too,’ Lucy said as she removed herself from the embrace, ‘But he isn’t that type, yaknow. He doesn’t really do that kind of thing I guess.’

  Simon nodded.

  ‘Give him another day or two. That should get him used to having company again and maybe then I shall speak with him. Don’t worry, Sausage, by week’s end it will all be alright and I am sure that you won’t have to have the old Chairman’s truncheon waved in yer face.’

  Simon lent down and picked up his camera and the backpack whilst Lucy looked at her watch. She looked tired but content. Up here, in the clear air with the wind whipping around she looked more beautiful than she had ever done before. Simon could no more understand the rhyme or reason of why she was with him than he could understand the fundamental laws of quantum mechanics. But maybe that was the problem, there was no problem, but sometimes we can’t see ourselves for what we really are. Sometimes it isn’t about the looks; it isn’t about what we wear, and from what circles we climb. Occasionally, like with Simon and Lucy, it came down to two people that met, fell for each other, and now want to make that bond eternal. Love is blind and all that.

  Simon had endured many obstacles in his life. What was one more?

  ‘Do you mind if I head back.’ Lucy said, ‘You can’t really get lost up here, and the house you can always see. Especially with Big Boy.’

  Simon shook his head and put on the backpack. ‘Nah, it’s cool. I shall only be out for another hour or two anyway. Be careful.’

  The two kissed and just as she was about to head off Simon added, ‘The sex, last night. Were you…okay?’

  She turned and looked at him, the sun glistened off the stream in the background and up above them a crow cried out.

  ‘Dunno. Don’t remember much. Twas I not to your liking, sir?’ She curtsied, pretending to outstretch her invisible dress.

  There she goes Simon thought, there you go, dodging the subject with a joke. Usually it’s a counter argument, isn’t it, but I’m guessing the air has you all a fluster.

  ‘You weren’t your usual self, is all. Bit; lay there and take it for England, that’s all.’

  ‘Must have been more tired than I thought. I’ll make it up to you I’m sure.’ With that she turned away with a wave.

  And that’s that I guess. Conversation over…

  ‘Simon!’

  He turned and saw that Lucy was stood there; her light blue vest top hitched up revealing her pert breasts in the summer sun. She had a massive grin on her face, her eyes wide with enjoyment and glee as she bobbled up and down so that her tits moved in time with her.

  Simon laughed and grabbed his camera.

  ‘Fuck off!’ she yelled and as quick as she had got them out they were put away again and she was headed off back down the valley laughing as she went.

  6

  Twenty minutes later, as Simon was trying desperately to capture the right angle of a gnarled old tree, there came a blood curdling scream from down in the valley. He ran to where he and Lucy had been and looked down to the valley floor. He couldn’t see much, the sun was bright today and a haze was all around him. He narrowed his eyes and knew; even though the person that was down there could have been anyone, that it was Lucy.

  Another scream came, a scream he knew, he recognised, and this set him into a death defying run down the valley slope. Skidding down the hill Simon leapt the wall like a hurdler making sure to hold his camera tight so that it didn’t bash his teeth out. Big Boy jumped about in his back pack and he could feel it digging into his spine. The straps of his bag dug into his skin under his arms and the weight of it threatened to topple him over onto his arse. The closer he got, the steeper the slope seemed to get and he was sure that there wasn’t so many rocks and rabbit holes to contend with on the way up. And when the ground began to level out and the small wooden bridge could be seen he saw that Lucy was stood next to the stream but looking away from it and facing him but her eyes were closed and her hands were covering her mouth and her hair was blowing wistfully in the breeze.

  7

  A few meters from Lucy he slowed to a jog. His heart was pounding its way out of his rib cage and his legs burnt. Whatever had made her scream he couldn’t see, it was hidden behind a tangle of bush and river grass that poked up from the edges of the stream like old man’s hair.

  ‘Lucy? You okay?’ Simon said breathlessly

  She shook her head keeping her hands over her mouth and her eyes closed. He could see her chest heave in and out in, much like a woman in childbirth was trained to do.

  Simon was closer now, his heart still raced like a thundering train. He could hear the stream as it careened through tiny rapids. But there was something else in there, a bigger obstacle that was throwing up splashes of crystal clear water into the air and over the bank.

  ‘What it is?’ Simon was close now and was just about to take hold of Lucy but she stood away from him, turned and threw up; her sick flowing onto the crisp green grass like a spilt paint tin. ‘Fuck.’

  Lucy continued to throw up as Simon took off his backpack and placed his camera on top. He walked over to her and now that she was knelt down; her hands on her knees, Simon held back her soft but sweaty hair as she brought up what remained of her breakfast. Simon held her hair back and stroked her bony back for a few minutes, looking occasionally over his shoulder, until Lucy seemed as though she was done.

  ‘Aww Christ,’ she said spitting out a wad of brown phlegm.

  ‘Salright, Luce, salright.’ Simon let go of her hair and rubbed her back one more time before standing.

  Lucy coughed, seemed as though more sick would come up, and then wiped her mouth with a tissue she had taken from her shorts. Still hunched over and with a hand on her head she used the other to point to the stream. It looked like she went to say something and her mouth opened a couple of times but no words came out.

  Simon patted her on the back. ‘There’s water in the bag.’ Said distantly as he walked over to the edge of the stream. His heart picked up pace again, blood pooling in his ears, heating them up and his hands were sweaty. The memory of when he was a boy and had found a dead tramp in a back alley came to him; how he had felt scared, sick, but at the same time excited that he had seen death and not ran away like the rest of his pals. Still he couldn’t see what was in the water and what was causing the splashes of water to venture high up into the air.

  Now that he was closer the water splashed onto his shoes and he could feel the coldness seep through the fabric, through his socks, and touch his skin.

  The smell coming from behind the bright green grass and tangle bush intensified the memory of the dead tramp in the back alley. It had been stinky, really stinky, like age old meat left in the sun for too long. The tramp hadn’t left its mortal coil for long, perhaps two days Simon had been told, and so wasn’t in the gloopy stage yet, but still the smell that had oozed from it and flowed up Simons nose like a thick putrid milkshake had, and still was, the most disgusting thing he had ever smelt. Simon’s thoughts then turned to the splashing he had heard the night before. The footsteps that he had heard on the road outside of the house and then the sounds of the animal as it trundled across the bracken and fallen twigs and then splashed into the stream in search of a drink.

  Dead animal. That’s all this is. Probably half eaten
by wolves or some shit like that

  8

  Craning his neck so to see whatever dead animal it was that was lying in the river his stomach churned and his throat became a nursery of sick as the lifeless left eye of Stevie Johnson stared right back at him.

  9

  Simon took a step back in shock, ‘Aww jeez.’

  There was a soft whistle as the wind whipped up from the stream and through the rushes across from the body. He went to say something, felt his guts ripple, decided not too and took a step forward. He thought his own breakfast was about to come hurtling up the one way express backwards but it stayed down and he took some careful breaths, much like he did when there had been about seven pints of Peroni piled down his throat. The water lapped over Stevie’s corpse. As it flowed over him the water was tarnished with blood which dissipated further downstream. His legs and feet were completely submerged whilst the rest of him poked out of the water like a stick in a pile of mud. His body was twisted round as if startled by some silent whisper and it looked as if the current of the stream, strong after yesterday’s rain, had dragged him some twenty meters from where he had entered.

  Now Simon was no detective but to him the cause of death was pretty obvious and he peered in closer, some cold and wretched part of him taking hold, and felt his own eyes wince in pain as he looked at the hilt of a knife sticking out of Stevie’s right eye socket.

  The current didn’t push that all the way in. A hand did that. A strong hand.

  ‘God-damn,’ Simon wheezed, ‘what the hell did that?’

  He could hear Lucy greedily drinking from the bottle of water and though he wanted to turn and see that she was alright his morbid curiosity took over and his eyes remained firmly fixed upon the knife jutting out from Stevie’s head like a murderous exclamation mark.

  Lucy stopped drinking, the bottle of water expanding with a crack and exhaled. She let out a deep satisfying belch, took another swig, and then poured the rest into her hands and splashed her face with it.

  Simon watched in wonder as the water started to lift the corpse a touch and as if it were still alive Stevie’s arms floated further to the top of the water; the cuts and bruises from the night before a fresh bright red against his pale dead skin. Behind him, what felt like miles behind him, Lucy mumbled something that he couldn’t make out nor cared to. There was an urge inside of him. An urge he had felt before but in completely different circumstances and it troubled him. It intrigued him.

  They leak. They bleed. They don’t stop once they started

  Simon’s foot twitched at the thought of the small hands as they wrapped around his bare skin trying to drag him down into that eternal black nothingness.

  ‘You listening to me!’ a voice from beneath a mile of ocean said, ‘I’m going to get my dad. Stay here and make sure…make sure… Just stay here, okay?’

  ‘Okay.’ His own voice was as far away as Lucy’s and he turned and watched her run back toward the house, her hair a mad twist of wet hay. On the soft breeze he caught the scent of fresh sick and he spat into the water; the white frothy head of the phlegm mixed in with the red tinged water like satanic cordial.

  ‘You aint going nowhere, are ya Stevie? Looks like you had yerself an accident.’

  Stevie bobbed and nodded as the fresh water continued its ceaseless efforts in trying to drag the body further downstream.

  10

  Simon took a step back, transfixed on the body for a moment longer. Then a familiar, but surprising urge took over and he grabbed his camera. He took seven shots. Three were full frame close ups of the face, two were of the whole morbid scene, one was taken upstream; the body almost hidden away which would make for an odd treat for the viewer as they scanned the image. The final image, the one Simon got that ear burning sensation over, he shot with the camera on top of the tripod so that he could slow the shutter speed down and thus giving the water a mystical, floating look, as it lapped over the body of Stevie Johnson.

  11

  The camera was quickly put away and the tripod folded back up as if it was never thought of as he heard footsteps walking across the wooden bridge.

  He wasn’t really traumatised by what lay in the stream, taking those pictures had proved that, but now that the adrenaline was wearing off Simon was slowly realising that what he was seeing here was not only a murder, but a murder that he had some prior knowledge of. His heart skipped a beat and all of a sudden it was a hotter day than it had been two minutes ago. He was next to a dead body. A murdered dead body for Christ’s sake, and here he was taking pictures like he was on some kind of busman’s holiday. What the hell had he’d been thinking?

  Another one of those wretched black crows cackled overhead. Simon watched it swoop down like a fighter plane on some low level bombing run. The crow spotted him, the body bobbing in the water too, and then the bird turned and headed off toward the village screaming bloody murder.

  Simon heard a large splash of water as Stevie’s body slipped a touch and now the water level was up to his chest. Sooner rather than later the whole body would be under and taken away on the current. An image of himself, diving into the water and trying to rescue a dead body flashed before him. There would be questions no doubt. He would be questioned by whatever called itself the police around here.

  No police round ere, lad. Don’t need it

  Surely not? But then again, Mr Rowling’s complete denial of a drink driving law made Simon think that there probably wasn’t a police force around here and that they, by some weird set of coincidences, managed to fall outside the umbrella of the modern world in more ways than he thought possible.

  A few heavy heartbeats later Lucy and Mr Rowling were standing next to him and both seemed out of breath. Lucy was as pale as the body floating in the stream next to them whilst her dads face was bright red and his cheeks were puffing. He not only looked tired from the quick walk he had just made, he also looked flustered – unhappy – but not concerned or distraught which was what Simon had expected.

  You’re a fine one to judge, Simon, he thought to himself, you’ve just spent the last twenty minutes taking pictures of that poor bastard as he floated on a watery deathbed.

  It would have been an odd sight to anyone passing by; two people dressed for the summer in shorts and t-shirts stood next to a man seemingly set for a cold winters day, as Mr Rowling was wearing thick beige trousers and on top a green sweater made out of the thickest wool Simon had ever seen.

  ‘Can’t believe it.’ Lucy whispered, ‘He’s just dead. Dead. I was just coming home.’

  ‘Alright, Barbara. Calm down. You’ve seen dead animals before. This aint no different.’

  ‘No different,’ Simon spat, ‘No different. There’s a guy dead in the water not five feet away with a knife sticking out of his face.’

  ‘Simon.’ Lucy whispered as if that would calm him down. Simon quickly looked at her and his eyes said all she needed to know and she shrank back a little so that the two men were between her and the stream and the body.

  ‘That aint no animal, Mr Rowling. That’s Stevie Johnson. You know him, yeah; he’s that poor bastard that was beaten half to death last night.’

  ‘Simon, don’t make yerself a spectacle.’ Mr Rowling said calmly. ‘And watch yer language, too. Nowt the time for such a like as that.’

  Simon shook his head and threw his arms out to the side like a child at the end of a particularly random tantrum.

  The sounds of a thrumming engine made all three of them turn toward the bridge and the road that lay just beyond.

  ‘That the police?’ Simon asked.

  Lucy shook her head and he could see by the look on her face that she was ashamed of that fact.

  ‘No. Then who is it?’ Simon said.

  Mr Rowling put his hands deep into his pockets seemingly unconcerned that there was a body of a man floating dead in the water just outside from his home. Simon couldn’t tell if he was deep in thought or just had plain ignored him; Mr Rowlin
g’s only sign of life at that point, with his back turned to Simon so that he was facing the sound of the engine, was that of his body heaving with every staggered breath.

  Lucy stood there like a scarecrow.

  Simon was just about to ask who the hell that it was coming up the road in what sounded like a van from the 50’ss when there was a squeal of brakes and the thrumming engine ceased in a couple of cancer ridden coughs.

  ‘Don’t need police, Simon. Never have, never will. We stick together here and do things how they should be done, yaknow what I mean.’ Mr Rowling said as in the distance whoever was in the vehicle got out and closed the doors behind them sending nesting birds flying into the unbroken blue sky.

  12

  ‘Best yago back tahouse, you two. Leave this to us now.’ Mr Rowling picked up Simons back pack and handed it to him. Simon had no intention of leaving and so he took the back pack but straight away handed it to Lucy.

  ‘I’m staying, Mr Rowling. Lucy, you can go back. I need to be here.’

  ‘Be here for what, Simon?’ Mr Rowling asked.

  There was a tension in the air. A static built up, and Simon could feel it like you can feel the electricity coming from overhead pylons. There was a sound to this tension and it filled Simon’s ears like a white noise.

  ‘I don’t know Mr Rowling. Curiosity. A sense that there has been a crime and that I am a part of it. I don’t know.’

  ‘We don’t need you, Simon.’

  ‘Yeah, come on, Si,’ Lucy said, ‘Come back to the house with me. Leave that to Dad and the others.’

  ‘I’m staying, Luce. This aint right.’