Road of the Dead

by Kevin Brooks

  I went back out into the yard and headed over to the outhouses. It was hard to tell how many individual buildings there were, as they were all cobbled together with corrugated plastic and scrap timber and twine into one big mutant shack. I could only find two doors, though, so I guessed the whole thing had originally been two buildings. Both of the doors were padlocked and chained, and the windows were all boarded up. The padlocks were no problem—I could have picked them with my eyes closed. But I was in full view of the farmhouse, and it was broad daylight, and I could feel that someone was watching me.

  As I moved away from the outhouses and ambled across the yard toward the lane, I glanced back at the farmhouse. I couldn’t see Abbie watching me—I couldn’t see anything. The sun’s reflection was blazing in the windows like a bright red ball of fire, obliterating everything behind the glass. But as I shielded my eyes and looked away, and the afterimage burned in my mind, I saw a velvet-framed orange disk, rimmed with electric blue, and somewhere behind it, floating in space, I saw a flickering face in the window.

  The lane led upward, away from the farmhouse, winding tightly through the moorland fields. Pale dots of sheep were grazing in the distance, and away to my right I could see the darker dots of cows or ponies scattered across the open fields. Apart from that, and the occasional black trace of passing crows in the sky, the moor was empty.

  I didn’t know where I was going. I was just walking—walking and thinking and drifting in silence. My eyes were open but my outside senses were closed. I was trying to get a fix on Cole—where he was, what he was doing, what he was thinking about. I didn’t really expect to get anything from him, because that’s not the way it works. I can’t just feel something whenever I want to—it has to be there. Trying to feel something is a bit like trying to hear something. If it’s not there, you can’t hear it—no matter how hard you try. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying, does it?

  So I kept on trying as I walked up the lane, keeping my heart and my mind open—just in case—but nothing came to me. I wasn’t too bothered. It didn’t necessarily mean that everything was OK, but I was pretty sure that if Cole was in any kind of trouble, I’d know about it.

  I drifted on, lost in my mind, not really aware of where I was or what I was doing. I could feel the warmth of the air on my skin. I could sense the blue height of the sky above me and the solidity of the earth under my feet. It made me feel small again, as small as the things underground, the virus trails and the beetles and worms…but that was a world away, and the surface of the lane was hard and reassuring, and that, in turn, made me feel incredibly big. It also made me think—for a solitary moment—that I could do anything.

  I knew it: In that tiny moment, I could do absolutely anything.

  “Hey.”

  The voice came from nowhere.

  I shut myself down and refocused my mind and saw that I was approaching the top of the lane. There was a junction up ahead where the lane joined the road from the village, and across the road—on the other side—a line of granite boulders formed a low-lying wall at the edge of a pine forest. There was a gap in the wall, a gateway through to the trees, with two standing stones on either side—and that’s where the gypsy girl was standing.

  It was the girl we’d seen the day before with the old man and the baby. The two dogs were with her again—the lurcher and the three-legged Jack Russell—and the three of them were just standing there, watching me. They all had that same unsettling steadiness in their eyes, and as I walked toward them across the road I didn’t know where to look. I didn’t know how to walk, either. The process of walking had suddenly become really complicated—legs, feet, knees, arms, muscles, bones, joints, nerves…I couldn’t remember how any of it worked.

  “Are you all right?” the girl said as I wobbled to a stop in front of her. I nodded, swaying slightly on my feet. She pulled a bottle of water from her back pocket and passed it over. “Here,” she said, smiling. “You look a bit hot.”

  “Thanks.”

  I uncapped the bottle and took a long drink. The girl watched me, still smiling. She was wearing a loose-knit black sweater and jeans and a pair of scruffy old purple DMs. Up close, she was even more beautiful than before—pale and dark, clear and bright, a purity of curves and lines and contours…

  “Are you going to drink all that?” she asked me.

  I stopped drinking and started to apologize, but I’d forgotten to swallow what was in my mouth, so instead of apologizing I just blurted out a mouthful of water. The girl and the dogs stepped back in surprise.

  “Shit,” I said, wiping my mouth. “Sorry…”

  The girl laughed quietly. “Are you always this cool?”

  “I do my best.”

  She took the bottle from me and put it back in her pocket. She gazed up at the sky for a moment, squinting into the sun, then she ran her fingers through her hair and looked back at me. “I’m Jess Delaney,” she said.

  I nodded, not sure what to say.

  She looked down at her dogs and touched the lurcher’s head. “This is Finn,” she told me. “The little one’s called Tripe.”

  I looked at the three-legged Jack Russell. He was old and scruffy and he couldn’t care less about me. “Tripe?” I said.

  “It’s short for Tripod. He lost his leg when he was a puppy.”

  For a moment I thought she meant lost as in mislaid, and I found myself wondering how a puppy could mislay one of its legs.

  Jess said, “He caught it in a rabbit trap.”

  And I felt really embarrassed again. I looked around for something else to look at—anything but Jess’s green eyes—and I settled on Finn the lurcher. He was tall and tan and smooth and sleek and his eyes were ringed with sooty gray circles that made him look really sad. I went on looking at him for a while, but then the silence got the better of me and I looked back at Jess again. She was smiling at me.

  “You’re Ruben Ford, aren’t you?” she said.

  “How do you know—?”

  “I saw you yesterday with your brother. My uncle told me who you were.”

  “Sorry?”

  “My uncle—the old guy with the broken nose? He told me you were Baby-John Ford’s boys.” The stunned expression on my face seemed to amuse her. “Don’t look so surprised.” She grinned. “Your dad’s famous. Everyone’s heard of Baby-John Ford.”

  “Have they?”

  “Yeah—he was one of the best bare-knuckle fighters of his time. They still tell stories about him. And then there was the trial, of course. And now this…” Her face suddenly dropped. She lowered her eyes, rubbed her forehead, then looked up again. “Sorry…you know, about your sister…I know it’s no good saying sorry—”

  “No, it’s OK. It’s fine.” I smiled at her. “It makes a nice change from getting told to go home and forget all about it.”

  Her face began to lighten again. “Is that what’s been happening?”

  “Yeah, pretty much.”

  “And is that why you’re staying at the Gormans’ place?”

  I thought about it, then nodded. “Yeah, I suppose it is.” I looked at her. “Do you know Abbie and Vince?”

  “Not really. I mean, I know who they are…” She glanced down at her dogs. “I saw your brother with Vince earlier on. They were driving toward the village.” She paused for a moment, then raised her head and looked at me, her eyes slightly hesitant. “Your brother’s not thinking of stirring things up in the village, is he?”

  I stared at her, wondering how much she knew and how much she was just guessing…and for a moment I saw something of myself in her eyes. Not just my vision of her vision of me, but something beyond that—a feeling of me. My feeling for Cole, his feeling for me, all wrapped up in her eyes. She was something else, this Jess Delaney.

  “Do you know where Rachel’s body was found?” I asked her.

  “Yeah,” she said. “It’s not far from here.”

  “Could you take me there?”

 
She looked at me for a moment, then without another word she turned around and headed off into the forest. I watched her dogs trailing after her—Finn loping easily, Tripe scuttling along beside him—and then I shrugged to myself and followed them through the gateway and into the shade of the trees.

  Eight

  Inside the forest it was dark and cool and eerily still. Towering pine trees blanked out the sky, turning the daylight to dusk, and the thick carpet of needles under our feet soaked up the sound of everything. Nothing moved. Nothing stirred. Even the birds were quiet. It was like walking through the belly of an ancient cathedral.

  We walked on in reverent silence: up through the forest, across a dirt road, then over a ditch and along a narrow pathway that wound its way through thick patches of gorse before finally bringing us out onto a broad track of open ground that stretched up into the hills. As we followed the track up a gentle slope, I began to feel something I didn’t understand. The moor felt different—out of place and out of time—and there was something in the air that made me think of sadness and longing, of tears and sweat, of a death-white mist creeping down from the hills and shrouding the land in stillness.

  I looked over at Jess, and I could see that she was feeling it, too.

  “It’s the Lychway,” she said.

  “Sorry?”

  “This path we’re on, it’s called the Lychway. Apparently, if you lived around here before the thirteenth century and you wanted to bury your dead in a churchyard, you had to carry the body all the way across the moor to the parish church at Lydford. The funeral route became known as the Lychway.” Jess looked at me. “Lyche means corpse.”

  I gazed into the distance, imagining medieval funeral processions toiling their way up the hill, clambering over rocks and streams, trailing this desolate path across the moor…

  “Some people call it the Road of the Dead,” Jess said.

  I looked at her.

  “The Lychway,” she explained, “that’s what it means—the Road of the Dead.”

  We continued walking in silence.

  Every now and then we lost track of the path and found ourselves struggling through mossy boulders and kneehigh clumps of tussock grass. I kept losing all sense of direction, but Jess and the dogs just floated over the ground with the uncaring confidence of creatures who’d never been lost in their lives. While Jess forged ahead in an unerringly straight line, and I followed closely beside her, the two dogs trotted along in front of us, crisscrossing the ground, sniffing out birds and rabbits. They looked good—quiet and wild and content.

  We’d left the forest behind now. It was still visible—darkening the flanks of the hill—but as we climbed higher and higher, the trees gradually thinned out and fell away until all that was left was a hilltop wilderness of dry grass and rocks and the occasional wind-withered shrub.

  “I thought you said it wasn’t far,” I said breathlessly to Jess.

  “It’s not as far as it seems,” she replied. “We’ve only come about half a mile.”

  I found that hard to believe—it felt like a thousand miles from anywhere. But then I wasn’t really used to walking through forests and climbing up hills. I was used to roads, buses, tubes, and trains.

  Jess said, “You didn’t answer my question about Cole.”

  “What question?”

  “About him stirring things up in the village. Is that what he’s doing?”

  “Probably,” I said. “Not that it needs much stirring up. You saw what happened yesterday near the gas station?”

  “Yeah.” She grinned. “I saw it.” She looked over at me. “Do you know what Uncle Reason said when he saw Big Davy going down?”

  “Reason?”

  “My uncle. I told you about him. He was with me when you saw us by the camp.”

  “He’s called Reason?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Right…” I looked at her. “Who were the others with you? The young girl and the baby.”

  “The girl’s my little sister—Freya.”

  “What about the baby?”

  “What about him?” Jess gave me a playful look. “What’s the matter? What are you looking at me like that for?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like this.” She made a face, which I guessed was supposed to be me looking shocked. Then she smiled and said, “Did you think the baby was mine?”

  “I didn’t think anything.”

  “Liar,” she said, still smiling. “Anyway, when my uncle saw your brother whacking Big Davy, he said to me—‘That’s a Ford, there. I seen that punch before. That’s a Ford if ever I seen one.’”

  “Really?”

  She nodded. “Uncle used to fight a bit when he was younger. He saw some of your dad’s fights. Bet on them, too. I think he won a lot of money on him once. He always rated your dad.”

  “What does he think of him now?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, you know…”

  “What?”

  “He married a non-gypsy…” I shrugged awkwardly. “You know what it’s like. When Dad married Mum and bought a house and everything, a lot of the gypsies didn’t want to know him anymore. Even some of his own family still won’t talk to him.”

  Jess didn’t say anything for a while. I don’t think she was embarrassed or anything, but I knew it was a tricky thing to talk about. Some gypsies think that marrying into the non-gypsy world is a bad thing. They don’t like the gadje, or gorgers, as some of them call us. They think we’re dirty and corrupt and impure. And I can’t say I blame them, really—most of us probably are. Personally, I don’t care what anyone is—tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief. I just can’t see how it makes any difference. If someone’s all right, they’re all right; if they’re not, they’re not. The trouble is, other people don’t see it like that. They don’t see people, they just see People. They see Gypsies, and they don’t like Gypsies. They see Gorgers, and they don’t like Gorgers. They see a Gypsy married to a Gorger, and they double don’t like either of them.

  “Is it true what they say about your dad?” Jess asked me.

  “Why—what do they say?”

  “He killed a man in a bare-knuckle fight, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah…”

  “One of the Docherty brothers?”

  I nodded. “The youngest one—Tam Docherty. It was a fair fight. There was nothing wrong with it. Dad just threw a good punch and Tam went down and smashed his head on a rock. No one blamed Dad for it. If the cops hadn’t been there, nothing would have happened.” I closed my eyes, remembering it all as if it was yesterday—the midnight phone call, the half-heard voices, then Cole coming into my room, trying to explain, while Mum was crying and shouting and cursing Dad for giving in to his stupid sense of pride. He hadn’t even wanted to fight Tam Docherty. He’d retired from fighting a long time ago. He was a family man now. A businessman. But Tam had kept on calling him out—taunting him, insulting him, humiliating him—and in the end Dad couldn’t take it anymore.

  “The police were already there,” I told Jess. “They arrested Dad and took him in, and the next day he was charged with murder.”

  “They say it was all a setup,” Jess said quietly.

  “Who’s they?”

  “Everyone—they say the Dochertys set up the fight and tipped off the gavvers to pay back your dad for taking out Billy McGinley.”

  “Who’s Billy McGinley?”

  She looked at me, knowing that I knew who he was, but wanting to tell me anyway. “He’s a cousin of the Dochertys.”

  “Yeah? And why would my dad want to take him out?”

  “Because Billy messed up his best friend’s daughter. And she was just a little girl. And your dad’s a decent man.” She reached out and touched me lightly on the arm. “That’s what my family think of him, anyway. We think he’s a decent man who got an unlucky break. The other stuff, the stuff about marrying a gadje and buying a house…well, I know some of
the families don’t like it, especially the older ones, but most of us are fine with it. There’s more and more of us settling down now.” She smiled sadly at me. “There’s nowhere to go anymore. People don’t like us when we travel, and they don’t like us when we stop. Sometimes the only way out is to disappear.”

  We were walking slowly now, both of us beginning to tire. Up ahead, away in the distance, I could just make out the hazy gray peak of a tor, shimmering in the sunlight. In the wavering air, it seemed to have a face—a flat head, a wide nose, the sockets of amber eyes…

  “It’s going to be the same for you if you stay here,” said Jess. “They won’t leave you alone.”

  “Who won’t?”

  “Davy, Red, Bowerman…the rest of them. They don’t want you here. They won’t leave you alone until you’ve gone. They’ve got too much to lose.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She wiped sweat from her brow. “I don’t suppose Abbie and Vince told you anything about the hotel, did they?”

  “You mean the Bridge Hotel?”

  “Not exactly—”

  She stopped suddenly as a distant gunshot rang out from the other side of the hill. I stopped beside her. The dogs stopped, too—perfectly still, their ears cocked, their eyes alert. As the sound of the gunshot echoed dully around the hills, I looked at Jess and saw her shielding her eyes and staring intently into the distance.

  “What is it?” I asked her.

  She didn’t reply.

  “Jess?” I said. “What is it?”

  This time she lowered her hand and looked over at me. Her eyes were masked with that silent steadiness again, but I knew her well enough to see through it now, and when she smiled and shook her head and told me it was probably just someone shooting rabbits, I knew she was lying. There was more to it than that.

  She sat down on a lichen-covered rock and drank from the bottle of water. When she held out the bottle to me, I went over and sat down beside her. The mask had slipped from her eyes now, and I could see that she was about to tell me something. I thought—thoughtlessly—that she was going to explain why she’d just lied to me, but she didn’t. Instead, as I took a long drink from the bottle, she started telling me about a big hotel and a man called Henry Quentin.