The lights of the vicarage were still on, and at the sight of Saul Bulmer reclining easily in his study chair with a mug of cider in one hand my fury redoubled. He looked up in surprise, but although I had rehearsed my denunciation a hundred times during my journey I now found myself unable to bring words to my lips, nor to act. Not so Saul Bulmer. One glance must have been sufficient to tell him that I knew his crimes and in an instant he was upon me. I threw up an arm to guard my face from his blow, realising too late that it was a feint. The heavy pewter flagon from which he had been drinking cracked onto my skull, once, twice, and I knew no more.
When I regained my wits it was to find myself securely bound into his heavy lectern chair, also gagged, with a wad of sour chamois leather packed into my mouth and tied off. My head was cut, the hair on one side caked with blood, and the room seemed to swim before my vision. It was moments before the full horror of my situation sank in. Saul Bulmer sat opposite me, drinking from the same flagon with which he had rendered me insensible, the side still smeared with my blood. His eyes were full of malevolence, and as he saw that I was conscious he spoke.
‘You know, don’t you? Why couldn’t you leave well enough alone, damn you? Now I find myself forced to dispose of you, but how? An accident, perhaps, struck by a passing vehicle? Hard to arrange.’
I shook my head in urgent remonstration, but he ignored me and continued his horrifying deliberations.
‘Down the shaft of an old mine, perhaps? Easy enough, but there would be questions. A Quæstor does not disappear without them, damn you. No, it must seem a justifiable accident. Off the cliff perhaps, the victim of a foolhardy walk in the moonlight, or drowned while taking a morning swim in ignorance of the rip tide? Both ideas have merit…’
He trailed off, rubbing his chin as he pondered. It is an ill thing to be helpless and faced by a man bent on your murder, your death postponed only until he decides how best to escape the wrath of the authorities. In those first few moments I came close to losing my mind as fear and despair crowded in, and it may well be that I sat bound to that chair for far longer than it seemed. Nor do I remember how Violet Meeks came to be in the room, only that suddenly she was standing there, perfectly still beside the study table. Even at that awful moment I felt pity for her, as there could be no question that having come in on us she would share my fate, or so I thought. He saw her and turned, surprised, then angry.
Her movement was a blur, so fast and so brief that I did not even realise what she had done until Saul Bulmer toppled from his chair to the floor. I did not realise she had caught up the ornate paperknife he used for his correspondence, nor thrown it, but there he lay, on his back, the knife sunk to the hilt in one eye so that the carving of the Blessed Ignatius that formed the handle seemed to stand in obscene juxtaposition from the socket. He never uttered a sound.
I turned to Violet, relief welling in my breast as I struggled to express my gratitude for my salvation. She took no notice, at first, a soft smile playing on her lips as she looked down on her handiwork. Her expression grew grave once more as she spoke, her voice calm and soft.
‘It is done, if I did not mean it to be this way.’
She stepped forward, to draw the knife from the corpse’s face with no more concern than had she been tying her shoe lace. The blade she wiped on a tissue, before cutting the cord that held the gag into my mouth. Even as I spat the foul tasting piece of leather from my lips I was babbling my thanks.
‘Bless you… the Lord bless you, Violet.’
To my surprise her face flushed, and her words were rich with anger as she answered me, the first time I had ever heard her speak with emotion.
‘Your Lord is not my God.’
New fear hit me as I realised the implications of her words, for as she had spoken she had raised two fingers of her forehead in the sign of the horns. I was helpless, in the presence of a Satanist, a worshipper of the demon Herne, Master of the Wild Hunt, one who had just killed a man with a single strike. Yet as she moved the knife once more it was not to plunge it into my chest, but merely to cut the bonds that held my body to the chair. I relaxed a little, still cautious as she worked to free me, allowing her to speak without answering.
‘You may give me up, if you wish. I ask only an hour’s grace, surely a small price for your life? That, or you may help me dispose of this carcass and support me in my testimony, which will be simple. He left the house late, to walk in the moonlight. I went to bed, and in the morning he had not returned. His body will be found on the rocks beneath Youlstone Cliffs, the head terribly crushed. Which is it to be?’
She had cut the final tie, freeing my legs. A dozen questions crowded my head, not least a demand to know how she could remain so terribly calm with Saul Bulmer’s body cooling on the floor beside us. Rather than answer her, I babbled something about my report and the questions my superiors would inevitably raise should such a supposed accident occur on the same night I had returned to make my accusation. She answered promptly.
‘Does anybody else know?’
‘That I have returned? Yes, the wagonet driver for one, but of my findings, no, save for Emilia Turner.’
‘Emilia will be glad he is dead. She will say nothing. He ruined her.’
‘I know, and others too, by exaction, seduction…’
‘Thirteen in all. I should have taken him long before, but let justice be mine.’
Saul Bulmer was beyond the reach of Church law and no doubt already in torment for his many sins. I, meanwhile, had a choice, to betray Violet, or to betray my vows. It was a choice I had already made.
‘Justice is yours. You have my word.’
We set about our grisly task. Saul Bulmer had been a large, corpulent man, but I was taken aback by the ease with which Violet lifted him, taking his upper body while I held his legs. Just three times we were obliged to rest as we crossed the moonlit field behind the vicarage, keeping to the shadow of the hedge, my heart in my mouth with every step and every sound. At the cliff’s edge we stopped. I began a prayer for the dead man’s soul, for all that my words felt hollow, but Violet responded with a hiss of impatience.
‘He is bound for your Hell, and eternal torment. Spare your prayers.’
‘Yet still…’
I broke off as she slipped her arms under the corpse, lifting his full weight to hurl him from the edge, and as she did so she gave a sharp cry, perhaps merely for her exertion, perhaps of exultation. I stepped close to the edge, allowing myself a measure of appreciation for the irony of his fate when it might have been the very one he chose to inflict on me. The moon lit both cliff and sea, but Saul Bulmer’s body had vanished into the gloom and no sound came back to us save the crash of the Atlantic breakers far below. For a space we stood together at the edge of the cliff, Violet Meeks and I, surely as strange a pair as ever had come together in that place, and on as strange a mission. At length I ventured a question.
‘You said that you had not meant it to be this way. Am I to suppose…’
‘You are. He would have walked out one evening and never come back, as indeed will be the tale.’
‘You are confident in your strength.’
‘He was nothing. A braggart, a bully. He was also slow and clumsy.’
‘Against you, I have no doubt of it. Where did you learn to throw with such precision?’
‘It is a gift from my God, as is my strength.’
‘And your youth, if the question is not impertinent?’
‘It is. One task yet remains.’
With that she slipped over the edge of the cliff and began to make her way down to where a mangled corpse lay somewhere among the shadows.
Thus I became complicit in the death of the Reverend Saul Bulmer, I will not call it murder, and in the life of Violet Meeks. That night, and over the succeeding days, I learnt much. Bulmer was not the first. There was Piers Myton, as I had guessed, his death no suicide but the result of her careful machinations. Having visited his crypt I could feel
no sympathy for him, only a certain awe for her calculated lethality and indifference to what might have happened to her had she become his victim rather than the reverse. It seemed likely there were others, but she was reticent as to the details, as she was to her age, admitting only that she had dedicated her time in this world to the destruction of those priests who abused their power and privilege.
I also learnt that I had been mistaken in assuming that her avowed worship of the demon Herne had made her a threat. While I could not accept Herne the Hunter as other than an aspect of Satan, as such in opposition to the Lord and therefore inherently evil, she believed the reverse. One night, as we sat together in the vicarage, I attempted a theological disputation in order to show her the error of her ways. She proved as fervent in her belief and as clear in her logic as I, so we chose to let the matter rest. Nor could I bring myself to criticise her for her lack of moral scruple, given that I owed my life to her flexible attitude towards the Prime Commandment.
When I eventually submitted my report it stated simply that the Reverend Saul Bulmer had not been responsible for any financial misdemeanours, which was true save for the distinction between a bribe and a charitable donation and that was not apparent in any ledger. By then his death had been accepted as a tragic accident, to my profound relief, although the memory of hauling his corpse to the cliff edge at dead of night will haunt me to my grave, and beyond, while I prefer not to know precisely what Violet did down on the rocks to ensure that no suspicion would attach to the manner of his demise.
I myself spoke at his memorial service, as did Lady Morwenstow, although with the coming of judgement we will both no doubt be called to account for the words we spoke in false eulogy. Violet showed greater honesty and declined to attend the service, or perhaps it was that as a worshipper of the Horned God she preferred not to enter the church. When I came out she was gone.
The Captain
Adam Marek
Greg heard the beep of the dump truck’s reverse alert and was instantly awake. He charged down the stairs, caught his fingertips sliding across one of the many bolts on the door. ‘Stop!’ he yelled, but his voice was lost in the sound of the truck’s wheels crunching gravel and the hissing of its hydraulics.
The two men in the truck paid no notice to his shouting and arm waving when he burst out from his front door in his pants and t-shirt, walking in the way that one must on gravel in bare feet. The truck was as tall as his house and it was yellow. Already the dumper was inclining, the arms telescoping out, blotting out the low morning sun, and scaring off a gutter-full of house sparrows.
‘Stop!’ Greg called again. ‘Not there you idiots!’ He ran round the side of the truck, climbed up onto the driver’s step and banged on the glass with the bottom of his fist. The man in the driver’s seat turned his head to look at Greg in a bored way, raising his eyebrows. He pushed the red button on the dash. Greg’s expletives came out in an eloquent flurry, flecks of his spit spattering the glass. The tailgate dropped. The dumper continued its incline, until gravity broke the inertia of the bodies inside, and it spilled them in a great heap before Greg’s front door.
Arms and legs wrestled against each other as they fell. Heads banged against heads and against his doorstep. Pale ankles bashed on bootscrapers.
‘Not there!’ Greg yelled one more time.
The truck’s hydraulics chugged four times, repeatedly driving the dumper trailer up a few degrees, pushing out the remaining bodies, the ones that were stuck. These last few dived out, eyes still open, mouths agape, surprised refugees emerging into freedom after days in the dark.
◊
Still in bed upstairs, Amanda wrapped her arms around her head, a soft helmet that covered her ears against her husband’s shouting, his kicking of the front door. Cruelly, the clock showed just two minutes until it was time to get up. She did not feel that she’d slept at all, but she must have done, and with her mouth open, because her throat was sore, and her front teeth were dry and sticky. The minute went quickly, and she felt she’d wasted it worrying through the list of things that needed to be packed for today’s party.
◊
In the kitchen, Greg had left the door flung open. Barely a sliver of sky and hedge was visible round the steep slope of corpses.
‘Every damn time!’ he said. ‘The two minutes it would take them to open the gate and drive down into the field costs me a whole bloody day!’
Amanda shut the door against the smell from outside and moved around the kitchen like he wasn’t there, pouring the last of the orange juice from the box into a cup, eating a piece of buttered toast which she’d folded in half for speed. There were three plastic crates on the dining room table, and into these she put boxes of eggs, bags of flour, cocoa and packs of butter, and then, as a protective layer over the top, two-dozen freshly washed children’s aprons.
‘I’m going to have to pay Wilkie and James to come help me again,’ Greg continued. ‘I’m going to call the council about it. I’ve had it this time.’
‘Don’t,’ Amanda said. ‘You’ll make things much worse.’
‘I’m losing money doing something they forced on me,’ he said. ‘It’s not…’
‘Fair?’ Amanda said. ‘Show me one person who can say they’re getting a fair deal.’
‘I was going to say efficient,’ he said. ‘If their drivers were just two percent more helpful, I could have my day back.’
‘At least they let us keep the place,’ Amanda said. ‘We have to be grateful for what we’ve got.’
‘You always say that.’
‘Other people are much worse off.’
‘I have to call them. I have to. This is driving me crazy.’
‘You’ve got more than yourself to think about now,’ Amanda said, her fingers spread wide over her bulging stomach.
‘Just two minutes,’ Greg said. ‘Two minutes and who knows, maybe I could actually grow something.’
Amanda put one crate on top of another and hefted it up on top of her stomach.
‘Good god woman,’ Greg said, ‘put that down. Let me do it.’
‘I’m going to have to do it myself at the hall,’ she said.
‘Get Melissa to help you.’
‘Melissa is never on time.’
Greg took the two crates from Amanda and she picked up the remaining one. Together they side-stepped out of the door, round the heap, being careful not to tread on fingers, trying to ignore the faces.
◊
A big black limousine with the two little red flags mounted on its bonnet was parked up outside the town hall. Either side of the car were two military trucks. One of the many soldiers gathered around the trucks walked out into the road in front of Amanda’s little Ford van and raised his hand.
Amanda wound down her window and smiled at the soldier. ‘Good morning sir,’ she said. ‘I’m here for Governor Franco-Basoni’s party.’ She inflected her voice at the end making it sound like a question.
The soldier called over one of his colleagues who was carrying a clipboard.’
‘Your name?’ he said.
‘Amanda Melman,’ she said, ‘from Cele-bake-tion.’ She gestured to the side of the van, where the name of the company was printed.
‘ID?’
‘It hasn’t arrived yet,’ Amanda said. ‘I have this problem every time. They misprinted my name. I sent it back three months ago. I’m just waiting for the new one. I keep chasing them.’ Amanda took her bag from the passenger seat and pulled out a handful of envelopes. ‘I have utility bills,’ she said. ‘And as you’ll see, I’ve got cake-making stuff in the back. I’m not a terrorist, I promise.’ Amanda made a big smile. It was not returned.
The soldier with the clipboard took the envelopes from her, opened up a couple and scanned through the bills. The other soldier walked around her truck, crouching down to examine the wheels, kneeling on the road to peer under the chassis.
‘Okay,’ the clipboard soldier said. He scored a line through
her name on his sheet. ‘Park around the back.’
‘Thanks,’ Amanda said. ‘My friend who works with me will be arriving in a few minutes too. Her name’s Melissa Hale. Just so you know.’
The soldier stared at her in a way that caused Amanda’s cheeks to flush red. She wondered whether maybe she had breached some line of formality, and replayed what she’d said, in case there was an ambiguity that the soldier may have misinterpreted.
He waited the longest time before saying again, ‘Park round the back.’
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Have a lovely day.’
Her hand went to the window handle to close it, but she stopped and put her hands back on the steering wheel. The first soldier kicked her tyres as she drove away. She watched them watching her in her rear view mirror all the way to the car park.
◊
Wilkie arrived with James in James’s truck. The three men stood at the foot of the stinking mound of people, which was already attracting a noisy cloud of flies.
‘Jeez,’ Wilkie said. ‘What a thing to wake up to.’
‘You know what scares me?’ Greg said. ‘That one day this will become so normal I won’t think about it.’
Wilkie put both hands flat on top of his head and gazed up the edifice of limbs. Many of the bodies were wearing suits. Smart shoes stuck out here and there, still laced. Women’s bare feet with painted toenails. Wrists with watches that were still ticking. ‘You should be more scared that you’ll run out of land and they’ll stop your subsidy,’ Wilkie laughed. ‘Then you’d be really screwed.’
‘You can always dig deeper,’ James said.
‘Very profound,’ Wilkie said. ‘Come on Stephen Hawking, let’s get this shifted before the sun gets hot.’
The New Hero: Volume 1 Page 26