‘Not so fast there, chum.’
‘Daddy!’ screamed Alice, and when he looked the female creature had a knife to her throat and Becky was being held by something with preternaturally long arms and a leering porcine face low down between its shoulders. Then from the trees around the clearing emerged a crowd of squat, loping shapes, and Mark Turner shouted: ‘What the fuck are those things?’ Prav was yelling something and the dogs were barking furiously and straining at their leashes.
‘Everyone just cool your shit!’ bellowed Matt into the noise, which abated slightly. He had his fist curled over the front edge of David’s stab vest, holding him. Once he had their attention he added, with less volume, ‘There is no need for this to get stupid! This is a parley! You get violent, we get violent, everybody loses. Now calm the fuck down!’
David didn’t know how he was supposed to calm down when his daughter was sobbing in the grip of something that held a knife to her throat with fingers that weren’t entirely human, and his wife was pleading at him silently with confused terror, but somehow he managed it.
‘You have guns and dogs,’ said Matt. ‘We have numbers. I kind of think it’d be fun if we all just got into it but my lord doesn’t wish his children to be harmed, which I’m sure you can understand, so we parley, get it?’
‘Parley?’ David swallowed thickly. ‘About what?’
From behind the still-standing base of the column emerged a figure that could only have been Moccus. Dennie’s description of the half-resurrected god didn’t do justice to the appalling state of him; surely such a thing couldn’t live – or if so, it was only by sheer brute force of will. He would have been tall if he hadn’t been stooped over a great cavity in one side of his torso. He would have been human if one side of his face hadn’t been a denuded boar’s skull. He was holding a tattered coat close around himself as if trying to ward off a chill, despite the heat.
‘Colin Neary,’ breathed Dennie. She was leaning on Prav. ‘Dear lord, what happened to you?’
Moccus fixed her with a glaring amber eye. ‘I rather think you know what. You helped, after all.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Prav in disbelief, ‘Colin what-now?’
‘It’s a long story,’ said Moccus. ‘Thank you, David, for bringing this old witch to me. I won’t waste your time; my terms are very simple. Dennie Keeling comes with me, and you get your wife and child back.’ He shuffled towards Becky and Alice, supporting himself on the broken stone as he went.
David wasn’t sure that he’d heard right. ‘Dennie? Why do you want her? She’s not one of your chosen.’
‘No, but she interferes,’ Moccus growled. ‘She pokes her nose in where it shouldn’t go. She sees things she shouldn’t be able to see.’
‘He doesn’t like that I can find him,’ said Dennie, and uttered a laugh so dry it sounded like a cough. ‘As if it isn’t actually killing me, anyway.’
‘You didn’t poke it in far enough, though, did you?’ he sneered. ‘You never actually went so far as to call the police when you knew that Colin was beating Sarah. You just made useless comforting noises and cups of tea while he did it again, and again, until it was too late. And why?’
‘Shut up, you foul creature.’
Moccus laughed. It sounded like something being drowned. ‘Why? Because if Sarah had actually done something about it then you would have had nobody to comfort, would you? Rattling around the empty old family home with just that desperate waste of a husband who you never really had anything in common with except the children, at least until he had the decency to drop dead in his own driveway…’
‘Shut up.’
‘… and the doors that you close because you can’t bear the echoes of your children’s absence.’
Dennie gasped.
‘Oh yes, I see things too. You needed Sarah to fill those echoes, and you let Colin beat her because it drove her closer to you.’
‘That’s not true! Don’t you dare put that on me! You beat her! You’re the monster!’
‘We’re all monsters, my dear. It’s just a matter of degree.’
By now Moccus had reached his wife and daughter. ‘David, you would never have come if it weren’t to save your loved ones and you would never have found me without her, and once I have her nobody ever will. Possibly you’re thinking that this is all a trick and that when you hand her over I’ll just take these two anyway. Well, just to prove that I am a…’ he paused, considering, ‘man of my word I will remove the first flesh from your loved ones and renounce my claim on them. Since they will be of no use to me there will be no reason for me not to return them to you. Don’t worry,’ he added, seeing David struggle afresh against Matt’s grip. ‘It won’t kill them. The hurts that have been healed will stay healed; only illness and age cannot.’ A smile twisted the ruin of his mouth. ‘But it won’t be pretty.’
‘David?’ cried Becky. ‘David, what’s going on? What’s he going to do?’
‘Daddy! Don’t let him touch me!’ screamed Alice.
But Moccus had laid his hands on them.
Immediately they fell to the ground, writhing and spasming, vomiting up gouts of bloody bile – or at least that was the nearest David could get to understanding what was coming out of them. It streamed from his wife’s nose and eyes like ectoplasm and evaporated into the air. It came out of his daughter’s mouth in sinewy strings that crawled up Moccus’ arm, blending and merging with the half-formed flesh, regenerating it, covering naked muscle with skin, plumping it out and filling the holes in his frame – not completely, but by the time the last of it had voided itself out of the girl’s spasming system, Moccus was considerably more finished than he had been a moment ago. It seemed to go on for hours, even though it really could have been only a few moments, and when it was finished Becky and Alice were huddled against the stone, clutching each other and shuddering – but very much alive.
Moccus spread his hands. ‘You see? Now, if you will simply surrender Mrs Keeling to me without a fuss, you can take one of them and go home.’
‘How is this even up to him?’ Prav protested.
‘It’s not,’ said Dennie. ‘Of course, I’m going to go with him.’
Prav uttered a short, hard bark of contemptuous laughter. ‘Oh, that’s not going to happen.’
‘Wait,’ said David. ‘One of them?’
‘Of course,’ said Matt. ‘We’re meant to trust that you won’t call in the cavalry as soon as we leave? Uh-uh. We give you one of yours as a gesture of good faith, we take Dennie and the other one, and once we’re safe and sound we let the other one go. And we all live happily ever after, like baby lambs.’ He looked at Turner and winked.
Prav sighed. ‘Oh, you stupid dickhead.’
Bellowing, Turner threw himself at Matt, and it all went to shit.
Matt swatted Turner away, but in doing so Turner lost his grip on both gun and leash and Hob leapt for the one who had attacked his master. Daz saw his dad knocked flying, let go of Bella’s leash and raised his own shotgun while Bella lunged for Matt too. David saw the female creature that had held a knife to his daughter’s throat bend towards where Alice and Becky lay clutching each other, still shuddering from the effects of Moccus’ exorcism, and he leapt at her, screaming, ‘Get the fuck away from them!’ The female loosed a cry exactly like an enraged boar, mouth agape and grinning with tusks, and turned to meet his charge, swinging her knife. The stab vest turned it, and his momentum carried him into her, slamming her to the ground. His hands were around her throat and he squeezed with the strength of the first flesh while she clawed at him; the vest caught some of her attacks, but she was gouging at his arms too, and his blood was running down them and onto her face.
* * *
‘Oh, you stupid dickhead.’
Prav levelled her Taser on Moccus and fired; the twin barbs struck him squarely in the chest, and the pistol crackled as fifty thousand volts surged along its wires. Moccus looked down at them with a frown like a man seeing a bug c
rawling on him. He plucked them out and tossed them away.
‘Or we can do this,’ he said, and came for her.
Gibbering things were coming out of the trees and a shotgun was barking and Dennie was at her back, hands over her ears, screaming. She dropped the Taser, flicked out her police-issue baton, dropped her centre of gravity into her knees and squared herself to meet the god.
* * *
Mark Turner picked himself up, and looked around for his gun. Daz was blasting at the things that came running out from the bushes. A few yards away, Hewitson was staggering about with Hob locked on his arm and Bella ripping at his thigh. As Turner’s fingers found the smooth steel of the gun barrel, Hewitson plucked Hob away by the back of the neck as if he’d been nothing more than a puppy and flung him at a stone block the size of a fridge. Hob bounced, shrieked, and fell limply to the ground.
‘You little fucker,’ he grunted, and grabbed up his shotgun.
* * *
Dennie cowered amidst the noise. With trembling fingers she fumbled at the gardening utility pouch on her belt and took out the little foldaway pruning knife she habitually carried. Its blade was only two inches long, but it was the only weapon she had.
No, it isn’t, said a familiar voice, and the rail spike slammed her between the eyes.
* * *
The female creature had stopped clawing at David’s arms and instead was pushing at the ground as if trying to dig her way into it. He realised she wasn’t trying to hurt him any more, just get away, so he released his grip and she scrambled out from underneath him and fled for the safety of the tree-line, clutching her throat. He threw himself over to where Alice and Becky were cowering. He clutched them both in his arms and kissed them.
‘Stay here,’ he said. ‘Don’t move.’
‘Don’t go,’ Becky moaned. Alice whimpered into her shoulder.
‘I’ll be right back, I swear.’
He picked up the knife that the female creature had dropped, and went to help Prav.
* * *
Matt shook the other dog free and charged at Daz. Half a dozen Recklings were dead or crippled from his gun, and the rest of them looked like they were ready to break and run. Sus had already legged it. In the dark, and with the element of surprise, they could be vicious little bastards, but in broad daylight with a man shooting at them their natural animal cowardice was taking over. He needed to do something about that.
He ran up to Daz and ripped the shotgun from his grip, flinging it away. Daz swore and punched him in the face but it was a grazing blow, easily shaken off. The first flesh was in him, and he was untouchable. He laughed and dropped Daz to the ground with a fist to the guts, and then kicked him a couple of times for good measure.
Matt turned to the Recklings. ‘Well, come on, you chickenshits!’ he yelled. ‘Take him!’
The Recklings fell on Daz with tusk and claw.
* * *
Prav tried to sidestep Moccus’ charge, but he was fast – God he was fast – had all that shuffling been a sham or was this a last-ditch burst of energy? It didn’t matter either way, because she wasn’t quick enough to avoid the tusk on the boar-side of his face; it was razor sharp and as he passed, it slashed through the stab vest, the t-shirt beneath, and her flesh beneath that in a bright line of red agony. She got in one solid whack with the baton as he went by, but didn’t think it had done him much harm. Then he was past, and behind, and she turned, and this put Dennie in front of her, pointing her little pruning knife at him. It was like seeing a mouse trying to fend off a cat with a toothpick. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a thrashing heap of creatures where Daz had been, and red, too much red, and Mark Turner screaming as he turned his shotgun to bear on Hewitson. The gun barked, and Hewitson’s shirt turned crimson, but he just looked down at it and laughed.
* * *
Sarah has the kitchen knife in both hands as Colin comes at her. He’s drunk and angry – angry about so many things. Losing his job, the bills, the fact that she’s going to have another baby when he thinks they could barely afford the first one. Four-year-old Josh is awake, she can hear him crying upstairs, and she’s tried to calm Colin down so that he’s not making so much noise but he’s just not having it. He’s clipped her a couple of times already and from the look in his piggy little eyes he’s settling in for more, and all of a sudden she realises that she’s just not having it either. She doesn’t want to hurt Colin, but she’s finally had enough of him hurting her, because it’s not just her he’s hurting, it’s the baby inside her too, and she suspects that if his beating causes her to lose it he won’t shed a tear.
She genuinely doesn’t know whether he runs onto the knife or she shoves it into him. All she knows is that once it’s there, it’s not coming out, and so she hangs onto it while his rage turns to surprise, and then fear, and then terror, and then nothing.
* * *
Moccus threw himself at the old woman with the puny little knife, except that she wasn’t an old woman any more, and the knife wasn’t puny at all – it was large and it was bright and when it went into him it hurt like the remembrance of an old death.
Oh, it hurt.
* * *
David plunged the knife deep between Moccus’ shoulder blades, and for a second he thought he saw a much younger woman standing where Dennie had been, but then the god died and the first flesh died along with him. David was seized with a sudden savage cramping low down in his guts that doubled him up, screaming. It felt like he was being twisted in half. He fell to the ground as the cramping spread out through his torso and into his limbs as if clawed things were swarming in his guts, snapping and shredding every inch of the way – and as it went, his body expelled the first flesh from his every orifice and even the pores of his skin.
* * *
Prav clutched at Dennie as she fell. Her nose was pouring blood, her eyes had rolled up to their whites, and as Prav eased her to the grass she began to spasm as if she was the one who’d taken the Taser shot instead.
‘Dennie? Dennie, can you hear me?’
But the only response Dennie made was a guttural throat-deep keening, and she began to foam at the mouth.
‘Oh Jesus, Dennie, don’t do this.’ Prav lifted her head and screamed, ‘Help me! For God’s sake please somebody help me!’
* * *
The Recklings fled at their god’s death and Matt fled with them, taking advantage of the confusion and the fact that Turner had thrown his gun away and was cradling the mutilated body of his son, weeping.
He’d never personally gone cold turkey from heroin but he knew people who had, and this felt like it might be close. He was virtually blind, his legs refused to hold him up, and it felt like every single one of his internal organs was trying to vomit and shit itself out of him simultaneously.
The Recklings had fled and Moccus was gone. He’d felt the death in his blood. He was nothing now – worse than nothing because of the knowledge of what he had lost. He ran deep into the woods and lay and let his body purge itself of the dead god’s flesh, and hoped that it might carry on dissolving, turning inside out and vanishing like a worm into the mud.
But even that mercy was denied.
Before long, he became aware that he was being watched.
Sus was standing over him, bruised and tattered, and she was holding a very large rock in both hands, raised above his head.
‘You brought this on us!’ she snarled.
‘Wait—’ he said, holding up his hands to ward off the blow. It was all he had strength left for, and it wasn’t enough.
Sus brought down the rock, hard.
* * *
Sus gathered those of her kin who still had enough wits to follow, and led them up into the deep woods and out of Swinley as the sound of sirens grew.
7
ECHOES
‘SHE’S HAVING ONE OF HER LUCID PHASES,’ DENNIE’S daughter had said. ‘But please don’t tire her out.’
David went through to the bac
k garden where he found Dennie working on her new vegetable plot. She’d dug up half the lawn into rows marked out with small wooden stakes and was busily sowing something out of a packet, prodding the seeds into the soil with her forefinger. It was August, a time when things should be ripening, but with the Briar Hill allotments either closed or abandoned it seemed that this was the next best thing. Lizzie had told him that the doctors’ advice had been that the exercise and the mental stimulation would be good for her, so Lizzie had let her get on with it. It was a poor shadow of her old plot, he thought.
Viggo lay panting in the sun nearby, watching his mistress carefully. His bandages were gone and he was as mobile as ever: too much of a handful for Dennie these days, so it was her daughter who took him for his walks. He bounded up with a hruff! of welcome and licked David’s hand. Dennie straightened up, saw him, and beamed.
‘David!’
‘Hello, trouble.’ He smiled. He tried not to notice the lopsidedness of her own grin, or the way her left hand was curled as she hugged him.
‘What brings you up this way?’
‘Oh, there are a few things with the house that need doing. Solicitors, estate agents, stuff like that.’
‘So, you’re really selling up, then?’
‘Yeah. It’s for the best. Me and Becky will split the proceeds and there should be enough left over for me to get a flat or something nearby so that I can visit Alice.’
‘How is she after… after everything?’
He sighed. ‘Well, the leukaemia’s returned and she’s back on chemo so that whole bloody circus has started up again.’
‘Oh, David, I’m so sorry.’
‘No, don’t be. Given the alternative, it really is for the best.’ He almost asked Dennie how she was, but it was quite obvious and he didn’t want to upset her. ‘Are things… quiet for you?’
She gave him a sharp look. ‘Do you mean have I had any more visits from Sabrina?’
‘Subtle, huh?’
‘As a brick.’ Dennie swatted him, then sighed. ‘She’s gone. Or at least, she’s back deep now, deep inside where she belongs, and I’m at peace with that. Though I sometimes think—’ she started to add, but then stopped.
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