by Helen Grant
Veerle swung her little rucksack off her shoulder and rummaged inside it until her fingers closed around the screwdriver she habitually carried with her. She pulled it out of the bag, holding the metal shaft so that she was wielding the handle like a club.
‘Look,’ she said loudly, and he must have glanced her way, though she didn’t see his head turn, because he flinched back as though she had taken a swing at him. ‘If you don’t open the door I’m going to break the glass on the safety hammer with this and then I’m going to smash a window.’
There was a silence, and then Veerle heard the sigh of the hydraulic doors opening.
‘Thank you,’ she said as courteously as she could, and bolted down the steps and off the bus.
‘Fucking kids. I should report you to—’
The rest of his words were cut off as the bus doors closed again. Veerle wasn’t listening anyway; she was running along the pavement, her rucksack banging against her back, dodging round other pedestrians. The road was long and straight and the distance between herself and the stop called Kasteel seemed far greater than she remembered; the familiar landmarks of petrol station, blue-painted apartment block and doctor’s surgery that lay ahead seemed like peaks in a mountain range she had to scale. She had thrown herself into the run without trying to pace herself; very quickly she was breathless and her side was aching.
Veerle glanced behind her and the bus still hadn’t moved.
Keep running. You did the right thing.
Veerle looked ahead and she didn’t seem to be any closer to Kasteelstraat than she had been before. She came to a side turning, and there was a car approaching the junction but she ran across anyway, ignoring the angry bleat of the horn.
There was the petrol station on her left. Her lungs were a tight mass of agony; she was sucking in air but it didn’t seem to be doing any good, it was like breathing soup. Still she forced herself to keep stumbling on.
When she passed the doctor’s surgery she could see the bus stop quite clearly. There was nobody waiting.
Thank God, thought Veerle. She couldn’t imagine how agonizing it would be having to wait for the people to be picked up before she could enter the castle grounds unseen, or having to waste time looking for another way in. When she was twenty metres away from the stop, she cut diagonally across the road, looked around once to make sure that there was nobody watching, and then dodged in between the fence panels that covered the castle gateway.
With the cover of unkempt foliage at her back she felt safe from prying eyes. All the same, she didn’t want to approach the castle at full tilt, arms flailing, breath sawing in and out like a bellows. Veerle slowed to a walk. She looked at the old building standing silent, an island in its surrounding sea of overgrown grass, seemingly deserted, the ancient brickwork gilded by the evening sunshine. She was filled with a sudden foreboding.
Don’t be so stupid. You think Kris is going to stand at the front door waving a flag?
Obviously he would be inside, out of sight. Obviously. All the same she fished her mobile phone out of her pocket and checked it, just to make sure there were no messages, no last-minute changes of plan.
Nothing. Veerle slid the phone back into her pocket and kept walking, letting her ragged breathing become slower and more regular. She kept watching the front of the castle, but there was nothing to see; this late in the day the low sun was reflected dazzlingly in the windows, obscuring what lay behind the glass.
Like mirrored sunglasses, Veerle thought. She had always disliked those – the way the wearer could see you but you couldn’t see their eyes, couldn’t see where they were looking.
Now she was stepping off the grass and onto the overgrown gravel of the drive. The front door was visible under the stone canopy. Veerle could see that it was closed.
Shouldn’t it be open, if Kris is already inside?
But she supposed he might have closed it after him, not wanting to advertise his presence if anyone else turned up.
Get a grip, she scolded herself. You’re already late. Stop speculating and just get inside.
Veerle crossed the last few metres as swiftly and quietly as she could, and then she was standing outside the heavy wooden door with her fingers on the metal handle. On impulse she put her ear to the wood but she could hear nothing from inside, nothing at all. Silence. Peace.
Veerle opened the door and stepped into Hell.
54
THE DOOR BEGINS to swing open and the first thing that hits Veerle is the acrid stink of petrol, so thick on the air that it is like a hand around her throat. Even before she realizes what it is, her imagination blooms with orange fire; she can almost hear the roaring of the flames. Conflagration is only a spark away. It is a dangerous smell, a fatal one, and every instinct in her body is telling her to run, but she overrides the urge because she has to know what has happened to Kris.
His name is running through her head – Kris Kris Kris, like the throbbing of her own blood through the veins – and she is very afraid that it is no longer a name at all but an epitaph.
Veerle takes a step forward, and now she is inside the castle, fully enclosed in its space, in the poisonous fume-ridden air, like an insect in a killing jar. She feels light-headed, slightly sick. Drawing breath is disgusting – she imagines the oily residue of the petrol fumes coating the inside of her throat, the labyrinth that is her lungs. Her gaze is darting about like a trapped bird, beating at the walls and the windows, and now she sees Kris lying on his side on the dusty floor and she feels a great jolt of shock, like a kick to the chest.
Three long strides and she is crouching over him, hands outstretched, wanting to touch but not daring to, silently praying that this is unconsciousness and not death. Then she sees it. For half a second she can’t make sense of it, the flash of red and yellow that has nailed the black leather to his shoulder, and then she sees that it has gone right through him and is protruding from his back. Something like an arrow. Someone has shot Kris.
Briefly she thinks she will vomit. The toxic stink of petrol and the sight of that gleaming rod with its pointed tip piercing Kris, spitting him like a piece of roast meat – it’s too much.
He’s dead, she thinks, pressing her hand to her mouth, and it is just beginning to occur to her that she may be dead too, that she needs to get out of here, when she sees Kris move. His face is a terrible grey colour, the lips almost blue, and she thinks he looks like something out of a zombie movie, the living dead, but still he moves. His eyes flutter open and his mouth is working, though nothing audible comes out.
Kris is paralysed by shock; it has hardened around him like cement overshoes, weighting him down as he drops into the endless freezing dark, drowning in it. He sees Veerle but he is not sure whether she is really there or not. There is something he must tell her, something terribly urgent, but the left side of his body has imploded. He is choking with the heavy stifling pain of it and he thinks perhaps he really is drowning; perhaps her pale face leaning over him is glimpsed on the dock as he slips down into the black water.
Veerle hears something then, something stirring deep within the old building, like claws scrabbling within a nest, the dragon uncoiling as he prepares to take flight, to explode into the air on leathery wings. Time is short, the passing seconds flee before the dragon like a flock of shrieking bats. If he finds the pair of them here like this, they are both dead.
Veerle is afraid to move Kris, afraid of what the working of the arrow-thing will do to the inside of him, but she is more afraid of what will happen if she leaves him here. A single spark and the whole castle will go up. She takes hold of Kris under the arms, wincing away from the point of the thing protruding from the back of his jacket, and pulls. Kris is taller than she is, heavier, and he is a dead weight. The muscles in Veerle’s back flex; she bites her lip. Tomorrow her back will hurt her – if she is still alive tomorrow. Right now there is no pain because adrenalin is running through her like an electric charge, but still she is not movi
ng him fast enough, she knows that. She has dragged him over the threshold where the evening air is blissfully clean and sweet, but she can’t drag him all the way to the road before the person who is in the castle catches them.
Veerle’s head comes up as she hears a new sound, a metallic clank. She thinks she knows what that sound is: the sound of an empty petrol can being cast aside.
Now he’s going to come for us.
She starts to shake Kris’s shoulder, tentatively at first, and then as hard as she dares.
‘Kris! Wake up!’
Veerle looks over her shoulder into the interior of the castle. Nothing to see yet, and anyway her eyes are blurring with tears, the fumes are so strong. She thinks she hears footsteps. In desperation she grabs Kris’s hand. She can’t think of any better way to bring him round than to bite him. She sinks her teeth into the soft flesh at the base of his thumb, bites down hard.
Kris’s eyes open, and now Veerle thinks she sees some recognition, some awareness in them in spite of the fog of pain clouding his consciousness. He looks at her like an animal staring out between bars.
‘Kris, you have to get away from the castle,’ she tells him, and when he looks at her uncomprehendingly she slaps him on the good shoulder. ‘Go!’ she screams at him.
She is sure she can hear footsteps now. Time has run out. Her mind is wheeling, a bird circling a desolate crag. What to do?
No time no time no time—
In a split second she makes up her mind. It’s a desperate plan, it’s an insane plan, but since she can’t get Kris away any faster it’s the best she has.
Veerle steps back inside the castle and closes the door. She is aware of someone approaching rapidly, of footsteps ringing out like a series of shots on the tiled floor, but she is focused on the polished wooden staircase, measuring the distance between her and it as she races across the hallway. There is a roar of rage – or perhaps it is jubilation as the hunter sights the prey – and a sharp brittle sound like something snapping. Veerle tries to duck, still running, and something passes by her, so close that she thinks she feels the air parting, cloven in two as the bolt streaks over her shoulder and punches into the wooden panelling.
It takes up to thirty seconds to reload a crossbow but Veerle doesn’t know this. She flails and scrambles her way up the staircase, expecting a second bolt at any moment, one that will puncture her flesh as mercilessly as the one that has skewered Kris. There seem to be more stairs than she remembers. It takes for ever to get to the top, and even though she isn’t standing in petrol any more, in that conflagration-to-come, her flesh is still wincing away from the pain she expects to come screaming at her on red and yellow wings.
Veerle reaches the top step and scans the wooden floor of the landing. She sees what she was looking for – Thank God, thank God, it’s still there! – and lunges for it. Then she runs to the carved wooden banisters that form a kind of balcony on the first-floor landing and leans over, making sure she’s in his line of vision. She’s waving the thing she snatched up from the floor. A box of matches, the ones Kris used to light candles when he came here at night. Her best, her most desperate plan: a threat. He is standing in petrol; she isn’t.
Then he turns and she sees him clearly and she nearly drops the matches altogether. She knows who he is.
Time has turned inside out. The years are streaming past her, running backwards. She is seven again, and the cool sensation under the palm of her hand is not wood worn smooth by the years but stone. The stone window ledge. Seven-year-old Veerle De Keyser looks out of the bell tower of the Sint-Pauluskerk, looks down from her eyrie, and far below her she sees a killer.
She screams, and the scream echoes down the years to where the grown-up Veerle, seventeen years old, leans over the wooden banisters in the old castle and sees a dead killer standing below her.
It’s impossible. The hairs stand up on the back of her neck. Nine years dead, she thinks. But there he is.
He has aged, but not as much as you would think. He still reminds her of a shark, with that blunt head of his, the hair close-cropped, and that great cruel mouth, and the eyes so small and dark and dead. She can see nothing of humanity in those expressionless eyes, just the blind instinctive drive to hunt and kill. He is powerful too – you can see it in the broad, muscular shoulders. Fight him? She might as well throw herself into an industrial machine and hope to come out whole.
Veerle thinks her mind is giving way; she thinks she is dead. She cannot possibly win this one. You cannot fight a dead man; you cannot fight Satan. You cannot fight . . .
‘Joren Sterckx,’ she says, and she is surprised at the loudness of her own voice. Veerle looks down at him and she still has the matches in her hand, held aloft, but he has something else in his hand. A knife. She can see how big it is, even from here, how wickedly serrated the blade. The sun is low in the sky now; it streams through the dusty windows and turns the metal to flashing gold. So clean, that blade, so very sharp. She does not know how Joren Sterckx can be here, in the castle, when Kris has told her he is dead. Perhaps Kris has lied to her, perhaps he was mistaken, but none of that will occur to her until much later. She simply sees the incomprehensible, the impossible, a dead man walking. She looks at the knife though, and she knows what that means.
De Jager does not bother to try to run at her. He knows he will get her in the end. He begins to move towards the bottom of the staircase.
‘Stop!’ screams Veerle, and when he glances up at her, his expression almost uninterested, she lets him see the matches. She takes one of them out of the box and flourishes it. ‘I’ll light it,’ she tells him. She wishes her voice wasn’t wavering so much. She wonders whether fire can even hurt him. Dead nine years, she thinks, sickly.
De Jager looks up at her, his eyes blank and reptilian. In the dying sunlight his skin is almost golden. Veerle thinks of a mythical creature. A basilisk.
‘Go away,’ she says, and her voice rises to a scream. ‘Go away or I’ll light it.’
De Jager takes another step. ‘You won’t do that,’ he tells her. It is the first time he has spoken, and suddenly he becomes more real. Whatever he is, however he can be here when Kris has told her he is dead, he is not a ghost. He is solid, a living man.
‘I will do it,’ Veerle shouts down to him, and for good measure she adds, ‘Fuck you.’
The invective bounces off De Jager as uselessly as a pebble off plate armour. He would not bother to argue with her, but he sees some merit in pointing out her mistake to her, watching her pathetic attempt at resisting him turn to panic. It will add a certain piquancy to the hunt, which will be lacking if she just stands there and lets him cut her down.
‘You won’t do it,’ he tells her, ‘because you’re trapped up there. If this floor burns, you burn too. And so does Kris.’
He sees her react to the name Kris. She is losing her nerve. He takes another step towards the bottom of the staircase, watching for the moment when she will break and run. If she is corralled up there with no way out, there may even be time for him to reload the crossbow.
‘That’s crap,’ shouts Veerle. Her chest is heaving; she is a hair’s-breadth away from bolting. All the same, he keeps an eye on the match in her hand. If he can get onto the bottom stair before she tries it—
‘I’m not trapped!’ she screams at him. ‘There’s another way out.’ She sees him pause, taking this in. ‘Didn’t you check?’ she shouts. ‘Klootzak!’
De Jager stops walking. He looks up, looks at the dark-haired girl leaning over the banisters, her face alight with savage jubilation. Doubt crosses his mind. This is a new experience for him; he examines it as though it is a strange alien artefact that he holds in his hands. He did check the castle, but now he wonders. A building of this age is a maze, a patchwork of architectural features of different periods. Is it possible that he has missed something: a door, a concealed staircase? The question is important. He does not want the girl to escape. She has seen his face.
All this passes through De Jager’s mind as he stares up at her, although none of it shows in his expression.
Is she bluffing?
De Jager decides that Veerle is not bluffing. She has another way out. He must move before she can burn him, and he must stop her getting away.
Things happen very quickly. De Jager lunges for the staircase. He focuses all his energy on that, on getting his feet off the tiled floor with its deadly slick of petrol. He’s still not home and dry because the air is full of it, that poisonous stink. If she lights a match now he’ll be crisped like a moth flying into a barbecue.
She doesn’t light it, though. He charges up the stairs at her and she just stands there with the match in her hand and her mouth open. It is darker up here than it is on the ground floor and her face is a pale oval in the dim light. In another moment she will have to abandon her threat and make a run for it. De Jager wants her to do that. He wants to smell the fear, he wants to feel the ancient floorboards thundering under his feet as he bears down on her with the knife. The hunt, that is what he wants. He towers over her, and now he has the satisfaction of seeing her back away, turn to run.
Let us finish this.
De Jager takes something out of his inside pocket, something small and square that glints dully in his thick fingers. A wind-proof cigarette lighter – considerably more reliable than a match. He flips the cover open, letting the girl see it, letting her know what he thinks of her empty threat. Then he runs his thumb down the wheel, and the instant he sees the tiny flame spring up he hurls the lighter down, over the banisters, towards the tiled floor below.