“Well, well, very scientific,” said Marcus, emerging from the shed carrying a relatively new steel wood axe and a small kerosene lamp. “How exactly do you know all that?”
“I don't know... it just makes sense,” I said, wondering a little how I did know. I followed Marcus into the kitchen where he propped the axe against a cupboard and put the lamp on the side, gesturing in irritation for me to try and light it. After shutting the door to keep the rain out I went over and inspected it. There was a little kerosene inside, old but usable. The lamp itself looked an antique, though in quite poor repair. There was the suggestion of some words in an Eastern language raised in the black tarnished metal around the base but I had no idea what it said. I flicked the lighter into life and after a few minutes I managed to get the wick to light. It had once been an old boot lace from the looks of it. It didn’t matter, it burned well enough.
With Perdita staying in the kitchen on my request, playing with a small Russian doll she had found in the study, we once again descended the steps. My heart was racing but this time I was prepared for the sight. Even Cato managed to build up enough courage to join us, though his input to the situation was of debatable worth.
“It reeks,” he said, watching the pitiful marionette from his perch on the bottom step. The light of the small lamp cast a sickly yellow glow over the cellar. I was glad to have it, as the more light that was cast upon the scene, the less terror it held for me. Still the poor man grasped for us with his shattered fingers, never ceasing, never giving up. With a bit more light we were able to see how he had damaged his hands, as there were scratch marks and blood on the roof above him, which he was able to reach from his position. He must have heard us over the past day walking above him, scrutinizing his taste in décor, sampling his food, sleeping in his bed, whilst he was trapped down below, scratching at the interlopers, hungry for whatever was making these sounds. Or was it our smell that drew his hunger? For it was hunger, that much was evident from the way his mouth was flapping open and shut, the ligaments still working against all nature or reason.
“I think it'd scream, if it could breathe,” said Cato, looking up at the blackened skin around the cord that was wrapped tightly around his neck. “But does it need to breathe? Can it make a sound at all if it doesn't breathe? I can just about hear its teeth grinding if... I listen... carefully...”
“Let's finish it off,” said Marcus, testing the edge of the axe against his thumb. He grunted with disappointment as it was a little dull and would need sharpening. He started rifling through the items in the cellar to look for something he could hone the blade on, although there wasn’t much else around, just a dining chair – the same design as the ones upstairs – which had been flung to the corner of the cold brick room when the man had kicked it away to initiate his suicide, a couple of rusty bicycles, and a few bin bags filled with various clothes, books, old household implements and paint containers. He eventually gave up and tried sharpening the blade on the brickwork of the stairway.
“We can't just kill him, we don't know who he is, or rather, who he was. I want to find out more about him before we decide what to do,” I said, holding a cloth soaked in lemon juice over my nose. Cato had begrudgingly fetched it for me as I couldn't stand the stench. Despite Cato's protestations, it didn't seem to bother him and Marcus much. Perhaps I was too sensitive to deal with something like this, although the smell was somehow familiar even though it made me gag, maybe because my life on the island had been nothing but rot and mould.
“It's a mercy to let it die,” said Cato. “Let Marcus do it. We don't need it, it's a danger as long as it's here.”
“Stop referring to him as ‘it’, he may not be a human any more but he's closer to human than anything else here, the closest we’ve ever come to someone else. He must have a name, maybe we can find it on some documents upstairs,” I said, for some reason trying to buy time for this wild cadaver.
“We could call it the soldier... or the brigadier. Yes, I like that,” said Cato, his hands clasped in front of his face in thought. It was somehow fitting.
“If you look closely,” said Marcus, getting so close that the brigadier's twitching fingers brushed his long hair, “you can see his neck isn't broken. I think the roof wasn’t high enough for him to break it when he kicked the chair away. He must have slowly suffocated. That must have been excruciating.”
“Do you think he knew this was going to happen? Did he know he'd come back?” asked Cato, biting the nail of his thumb and quickly spitting it onto the floor. I had seen him go through this ritual before, biting each nail in turn, biting, spitting, bite, spit. I hated the habit but couldn't chastise him without being hypocritical, as I did exactly the same thing when I was tense, and Cato was always tense.
“Maybe this happens to all of us when we die. Maybe that's the way it is, after all, we haven't died yet, we have no way of knowing,” I said, trying to get some insight into the situation by inspecting the brigadier's putrefying features.
“Here, look...” said Marcus, dodging a little to avoid the grasping fingers of the brigadier's right hand before grabbing the wrist above it. There was a wet sound as some dark blood was forced out of the wounds in the fingers as Marcus squeezed, dropping in thick globules onto the floor.
“Don't, oh dear God,” said Cato, turning away and starting to shrink.
“Hold your horses Cato, I'm not trying to make you spew,” said Marcus, struggling with the dead man who had brought his left arm around and was trying to grab him. Because he had nothing to push against Marcus was able to keep him at bay just by keeping a firm grip. Marcus motioned for me to come closer and pointed at the skin between the brigadier's thumb and forefinger. It was hard to see due to the general degeneration of the flesh but there was definitely a bite mark there, made by human teeth from the look of it. The mark was quite small in width, indicating it was probably caused by a child.
“What do you make of that then? Someone not grateful for their supper?” asked Marcus, grinning widely and revealing his perfect white teeth.
“I don't recall seeing many children in the photos in the study and there aren't any real toys in the house. A local child maybe,” I replied.
“Why would they bite his hand though? Oh, you don't think,” said Marcus with mock incredulity, “he was a paedo soldier?” He flung the wrist away, half grinning and half frowning, thoroughly enjoying his own play acting. The brigadier span around lazily on the chord, mouth agape.
“Heh, hehe,” sniggered Cato nervously, growing back to his normal size as the situation grew more comical. “Maybe he was the army's rank and paedophile...”
“You two are...” I started, through gritted teeth.
“Yes?” said Marcus, raising an eyebrow to me. The smile had gone. Blood swam in his eyes.
“Nothing,” I said, turning away. “Nothing at all. I'm going to see if I can find out anything worthwhile about him.”
We searched the house from top to bottom over the course of the day, with the rain a constant companion. In a way it was a welcome investigation, as none of us wished to move on in such inclement weather. We had no idea where we were going but we knew we wanted to get there with dry shoes.
The source of the bite became evident during the afternoon, when I found the spare room mattress just around the back wall of the house, flush with the hedge. It was sodden with rain and covered in sheets which still bore the distinctive mark of blood, despite the water that was soaking into them.
Something made me look up. Perhaps it was a distant roll of thunder or a flash of lightning, or perhaps a sound of some local creature. Whatever it was, it made me glance towards a small area under the trees at the far end of the garden. I could see the ground had been disturbed and there was a visible bulge in the muddy earth beneath the roots of a silver birch. I cautiously picked up a rusting shovel from under a bench in the shed and picked my way over to the mound. There was a smaller clod halfway down the pile and the earth was s
till pretty loose on the top of it. It didn't take much work to scrape it away.
Somehow, I knew it would be a child's hand before I uncovered it. The skin had decomposed for the most part, with bone showing through what remained of the ligaments and muscle, tiny digits stretched in a dead rictus. When I gently uncovered the rest of the upper body, brushing the dirt away as delicately as an archaeologist, I found the resting place of the two bullets from the revolver. The girl's head (I judged it to be a girl due to the large amount of matted blonde hair) had an entrance wound in the forehead and the back of her skull was missing for the most part. There was also a bullet wound in the shoulder, which was now home to a family of worms and maggots. I said a little silent prayer, hoping that the girl hadn’t suffered much before the end. I offered it to any God that was listening, as my knowledge of organised religion was just as incomplete as my knowledge of everything else. Any other wounds the girl may have suffered had been lost as her body had started to break down. I decided that I had learned enough and once again laid the child to rest, depositing the earth back and patting it down. I stood for a few minutes, staring at the mound, wanting it to move, for the child to be alive, truly alive. Why, after coming all this way, was no one alive?
As the evening started to draw in and the daylight began to fade, we sat down around the dinner table with the curtains opened wide to shed some light on the few things we had found which gave us some background on the brigadier. Marcus and Cato were surly and apathetic in turn but Perdita was very interested in all the new items on display, inspecting everything carefully with her small hands.
I had managed to find the likely identity of the poor victim lying beneath the silver birch, as there was a girl of roughly the same age in two or three framed photographs and also in several pictures we had found in photo albums neatly filed away in a bureau. She seemed to be a relative, a niece or grandchild of the brigadier, as she was in a few holiday pictures, boating along the coast, hiking in a woodland and eating Christmas dinner, along with a couple who were presumably her parents. The smiles that ran across all of their faces were a stark contrast to the horror of what had happened within the house. I could still hear the scratching, ever so quietly, from below. I wondered if the parents were still alive or if they had somehow succumbed to the disease also. We hadn’t seen any other bodies but then we still hadn't searched all of the other buildings, and after finding our friend in the cellar we were a little more cautious about charging into the unknown. Marcus kept stealing glances outside through the window but the rustle of the wind on the scattered waste was the only movement he could see.
Cato had stumbled upon various references to the brigadier's army days in a shoebox under the bed. There were notes on tours of duty, commendations and his eventual honourable discharge. I found I could read them all, which meant that at least I had received some sort of education in my past. I felt guilty for the small elation I felt at this realisation, as it had come during such a morbid investigation.
We could find virtually nothing about his days after the army, as if he had shrank away from the world, although we did find a diary of sorts. It was well hidden behind some books on a book case and was written sporadically over a period of time that started a few years ago, judging by the worn edges of the pages. It seemed to chronicle the man’s first relationship, at the mature age of 44. The language was nervous, overly analytical and desperate. Perhaps this was the brigadier’s attempt to awaken his poetic side at the request of his lover but it read more like a science journal. There was microscopic details of supposedly romantic meals, dissection of nuanced signals (real or imaginary, it was hard to tell) and virtually no reference to his own feelings. The relationship soon fell apart but the notes elicited more relief than anything else at this result. Clearly the man had been a fascinated outsider to society instead of a willing participant, studying everything from afar, from his comfort zone. The only time when the writing showed any warmth over details was during the very last few entries, written a while after the car crash relationship. He was describing the visits of his nephew, with their young newborn daughter Jane. He had clearly cared a great deal for his family and had been able to express himself much less nervously and as the entries became less frequent but more meaningful, it was clear that his great niece meant the world to him. The very last entry made my blood run cold in my veins as I read it out to my curious companions.
“'Adam won’t take Janey, he says her fever hasn’t broken, and she won’t recover. I won’t leave her, I’ll have to stay. He’s lost his wife but still he abandons his daughter. I don’t know who I pity more. I don’t know what I’ll do.'”
I carefully closed the pages of the diary and placed it back on the table. Cato was nodding sagely, his eyes closed. He started muttering to himself, filling in the blanks.
“So she died, the fever killed her... except she came back, yes, and bit him. He had to kill her again, put her down. He did the deed on the bed and threw the mattress out, before burying her, digging in the dirt under the tree. Maybe he was crying at the time. Was it the bite, knowing what was to come, or was it reliving what he had been forced to do?” he asked rhetorically, wringing his hands as if he were extracting the details from the air around him.
“Are you a detective or something?” asked Marcus, standing up tensely and looking out of the window at a dark shape flush with a building across the harbour. The clouds shifted and the shadow evaporated. He eased his shoulders a little but carried on watching the periphery, our guard, our sentry.
“I just like the details, if you focus on the details then the bigger picture can’t overwhelm you,” said Cato, slipping off a chair and wandering into the hallway, craning his neck to listen to the constant scratching. Was it louder now or just easier to pick out over the sound of the rain now that we knew it was there?
“Why didn't he use the revolver?” I thought aloud, pulling the gun from the back of my trousers and turning it over in my hands, though it still remained inscrutable to me. “Is it faulty?”
“I wouldn't think so, he obviously took pride, yes, pride in his military trappings,” said Cato, coming back into the room. “I bet he kept it in perfect condition, but... but...” Cato paused.
“But...” said Marcus, exasperated, waving his hand for Cato to continue.
“But he had tarnished it with the killing of his own. He needed to punish himself,” he finished, a faint smile of triumph playing on his lips.
The last item only gave us one detail, th0ugh it was an important one. His chequebook, printed with the name Isaac Lewis. Having a name made me feel better about having to destroy the creature, if it became necessary. He could be laid to rest with a name. I felt that was important. After all, I had no name that I could remember, I was simply 'the one the others talked to'.
The light was fading quickly now, setting the room into a pale monochrome. I stood up, packing the various items away into an old green and black military rucksack we had found during the day. It was large and sturdy enough to carry all the items we felt were needed for our onward journey. I knew that taking up space with Isaac's personal effects wasn't perhaps the smartest thing to do but I felt that I needed something more than food and water at the moment, especially if we found everyone on the mainland in the same condition. I needed to keep some humanity close to me.
We slowly made our way up to bed, all of us glancing at the door to the cellar as we passed it, the desperate grinding of Isaac's bloody fingers becoming softer and more inaudible as we went.
As we lay down to sleep, once more tangled in each others limbs, I started to slip into the space between waking and sleeping, my dreams overlapping the sights and sounds of the room. A memory was being dredged up from my subconscious somehow, mixing with the sound of the rain and the creaking of the house. I had been young at the time and had sneaked into a tool shed, maybe my father's. An old toolbox of odds and ends sat in the corner of the rough wooden structure, a treasure chest of my
steries. It had become the resting place of screws, wing nuts, bits of wood, balls of string, anything that could conceivably be of use one day. I selected a piece of cable, cut diagonally at one end with the other sporting a three pin plug. I swung it experimentally, trying to imagine it was a medieval flail of some kind, yet found it was too short to be a suitable weapon. I contented myself instead with twisting the cable, watching the plastic sheath gradually change from brown to white under stress...
A footstep...
I turned it and wrenched it, the cable becoming warmer through tension, the metal starting to break...
Two footsteps... was it outside the shed? Was I in the shed?
I was in bed...
Three footsteps... on the stairs.
A cable always snapped after it had been put under a huge strain. Of course it did. Everyone knew that.
3
Blood
We could all hear it now as we lay awake together, eyes wide... the slow footsteps on the stairs. How long had we been hearing it for now? There weren't many stairs, maybe twenty at most...
Marcus was the first to react, of course. He hungered for moments like this. He threw Cato aside and leapt out of the bed, running to the door and throwing it open. I followed as quickly as I could and was just in time to see Marcus, driven by rage, slamming into the dark shape at the top of the stairs. It fell backwards, releasing a high scream as it went, cast back into the depths, smashing into the banisters and letting out a final howl as it landed heavily at the bottom.
Marcus stood breathing heavily at the top of the stairs, trying to spot some details in the darkness below. I joined him, craning over his shoulder to look. Without thinking I had pulled the revolver out and was aiming it shakily ahead of me. I could just about make out the silhouette at the bottom, moving slowly, crawling in the small amount of moonlight that was shining in through the open front door...
Heal the Sick, Raise the Dead Page 4