The Sixth Soul

by Mark Roberts

He blinked and wiped his eyes. She plucked the spoke from the velvet lap of the altar while his attention was diverted.

  Ready to proceed once more, his eyes scoured the altar, his expression full of confusion as he bent to search on the ground through the thin veil of white smoke.

  ‘Is this what you’re looking for?’ asked Sarah.

  He lifted his head, giving her his full face as a target. She aimed the spoke directly at his right eyeball but he turned suddenly and the sharp tip sank directly into his cheek.

  She had sat up to maximize the power of her arms to push, holding the spoke and feeling the tip pierce the fleshy wall of his mouth, travelling further into the space behind his teeth.

  He howled, a noise neither human nor animal, filling the basement. She ground the spoke in and felt the side of his tongue writhing. It was thick and hard. With her other hand she grabbed his hair to steady the target and thrust the weapon deeper into his tongue.

  His hand shot up to her face, catching her in the eye. She let go of his hair and seized his right wrist, pulling his fingers towards her lips and biting down as hard as she could, feeling but not hearing the crack of bone.

  She banged his skull hard with her elbow, grabbed his hair again and pushed his head down against the direction of the spoke as it wriggled through his tongue, deeper and deeper.

  She felt the slide of the spoke change as it escaped from his tongue through the top surface. She pushed the spoke harder still and it connected with the inner wall of his other cheek. She forced his head down onto the altar. His left eye met hers, and she spat his fingers from her lips.

  ‘I’m not your mother.’ Her words tasted of his blood.

  She pushed again and the spoke drove through his cheek, the tip piercing his skin and digging into the velvet and wooden surface beneath.

  She looked for the hypodermic needle and was crushed to see it roll off the edge of the altar and onto the floor, now invisible in the smoke.

  He raised his bleeding fingers to her throat but when she took hold of his wrist again he snatched it away.

  The tip of the spoke sank into the wood. She turned and turned it.

  A wave of weakness hissed through her, the surge of energy with which she’d fought back ebbing away, leaving her feeling light-headed. She resisted the sensation with all her being.

  She held his head down on the table as the smoke curled into her nostrils and hit the back of her throat.

  The spoke was firmly embedded in the shallow surface of the altar, his face pinned sideways to the velvet covering.

  ‘These are my fingers and these are my fingernails,’ said Sarah, holding her jagged nails close to his fast-blinking eye. ‘These are the nails of the five women you murdered. On behalf of us all, I have a message for you.’

  He shut his eye tightly. She clawed at the lid with two fingers, digging into the eyeball beneath, feeling the curve between eyeball and skull. She tried to gouge out his eye but he rolled his neck against the altar and her fingers slipped off. She formed a fist and punched the tip of his nose. She punched again and again but with each blow she could feel her energy sapping away, the force reduced with each strike of her fist.

  Blood poured from the corner of his mouth onto the velvet, and he became still.

  She stooped to break his nose with her front teeth but couldn’t bend forwards sufficiently.

  She banged her fist down on the side of his head. He made no sound.

  His body sagged into limpness, his weight supported by the tip of the spoke embedded in the surface of the table, his face wreathed in smoke.

  She tried to climb down from the altar but tumbled off into the gathering smoke, her legs seizing up beneath her.

  They were dead from hip to toe with chronic pins and needles, but she could still feel her arms. Getting onto her hands and knees, she crawled away, her eyes stinging in the smoke, her vision blurred.

  The nearest doorway. A way out. It was a basement. Stairs up. Maybe in the nearest room beyond the doorway. Light poured in, through the smoke that chased her, and she dragged herself towards it.

  She glanced back at his inanimate figure impaled on the altar.

  He fell down and sprawled in a heap on the ground.

  In the doorway to the next room, she looked for the stairs but all she saw was a shelf. And on that shelf five dead babies in five jars, and a sixth empty jar on the end of the row, the space awaiting her child.

  ‘David!’ she called. But she knew he couldn’t hear, knew he wasn’t coming. If she didn’t get out fast she was going to die in there, and her baby – with the other five – would be fuel for the flames of Herod’s terrible needs. There was no time to mourn the dead. She turned around rapidly. Only time to save the living.

  She had to get past him in to the furthest room and, in that moment, she cursed her luck for taking a wrong turn away from the altar. There must be stairs in the room in which she’d been held.

  The smoke was rising to waist height, spreading out in the unventilated basement.

  Sensation had returned to her thighs but not to her knees, calves or feet as she dragged herself across the ground.

  She reached the doorway and pulled herself to her knees, moving on all fours through the smoke, trying hard to hold her breath, squinting through the stinging smoke.

  Smoke twisted around the concrete floor. Through the doorway she could see the stairs. The way out. The spiralling smoke.

  Her knees and palms were skinned on the rough surface of the floor. She picked up speed, her target the bottom step, every movement of the knee and hand a fraction closer to escape.

  The bottom step. She touched it, the blessed wood of the stairway to safety; she touched the wood, staining it with blood from her hands.

  The stairs led up to a door, a hatch to the ground floor above. She took in a deep breath, preparing herself to face the ascent, determined to climb on her knees and haul herself up, via the banisters, with her hands.

  She caught her knee on the edge of the bottom step but managed to lever herself onto the first flat surface. She held the sides of the stair with her hands while her eyes followed the rising smoke to the hatch from where a hook hung down. The hatch was unlocked. She began to entertain the prospect of survival as she struggled to the second step.

  Sarah rested her left foot on the ground but it was still dead to sensation. She could not climb the steps on foot.

  On the third step, she counted another eight to go; eight steps and an open doorway, the path to life.

  Then, she felt a sharp pain in her right ankle and turned.

  Eyes and teeth. A hypodermic needle spearing her ankle. His face completely lanced by the spoke, entering through one cheek – impaling his tongue, which thrust out accusingly between his teeth – and sticking out through the other, its tip broken at the end.

  Blood ran from the corners of his mouth and the tips of the spoke.

  One eye was raw, red and swollen.

  A sea of dizzy surrender washed through her.

  He said something foul and incomprehensible, but the malice of his tone was crystal clear.

  She was falling, beneath the gaze of the eyes, within range of the teeth.

  Eyes and teeth and metal spoke. She crashed backwards, head first, her last sense to close down, hearing, catching his scream of rage as she tumbled into darkness.

  67

  ‘Can’t you go any faster?’ asked Rosen again. ‘What’s wrong with you, Carol?’

  ‘We’ve got to slow down, David—’

  ‘Do you think I don’t bloody well know why you’ve had to slow down?’

  ‘We may be doing just under fifty, but we’ve been hitting over a hundred since London.’

  The sign on the road south told Rosen they were close to Alciston, where they were to meet the waiting officers from Sussex Constabulary.

  He glanced at the speedometer and Bellwood was right. They were tipping 50mph in a maze of winding lanes.

  ‘I feel
like I’m betraying her,’ he said, turning off the siren and watching the needle descend, to forty, thirty twenty and below, finally reaching a standstill.

  Rosen was out of the car before Bellwood put on the handbrake. A man was advancing towards him.

  ‘DCI Rosen?’

  ‘Yes. DCI Murphy?’ A terse nod of the head was his reply.

  Night was falling fast on the East Sussex road; birds were calling, nesting, under the moon forming behind a thin bank of cloud.

  ‘Caxton Farm?’ urged Rosen.

  ‘OK, you’ve got two ways into the farmhouse. Front and back. The approach road at the front is a glorified farm track. At the back of the house, you’ve got fields, rolling South Downs. From the back of the house, he’s got a crystal-clear view of anyone coming at him from the fields. Therefore, if he’s got a firearm, and you’ve got officers approaching the rear of the house, they’ll be going home to London in body bags. If you go in from the front, there are visual obstacles. If you go in from the back door as well, approach it from the front, move down the side of the building and keep tightly against the wall as you turn the corner. But be quick.’

  A woman, with her back turned to him, drifted into Rosen’s line of vision. Her hair, her stature, her clothes made her look just like Sarah. Hope flooded him. He opened his mouth to call her but before he could speak her name, the woman turned. Her face was completely unlike Sarah’s.

  Clasping a phone, she looked at Rosen and said, ‘Mary Sands, primary hostage negotiator. He’s got a landline but he’s left the phone off the hook.’

  Anguish drowned him and, for a moment, he didn’t know where he was or what he was doing. A hand gripped his shoulder and he turned to the source.

  It was Bellwood, with Gold standing just behind her.

  ‘CO19 are here and already in place,’ said Bellwood.

  Rosen looked at Bellwood and Gold, two human beings whose lives he was about to risk.

  ‘Gold and Bellwood, you’re to enter through the front door. I’ll take the other ram and go in through the back. You come in only when I’m inside and when I order you in.’

  A Sussex ambulance pulled up at the back of the group, trying to negotiate the narrow gap. It moved slowly and the group shifted as one to allow it past.

  The driver leaned out of the window.

  ‘Wait at the junction,’ Rosen instructed him, wondering if this was the ambulance that would be carrying Sarah back the other way, dead or alive.

  The ambulance heaved back to the junction. Chief Superintendent Doug Price of CO19 stood on the other side of the narrow road.

  ‘Front and back entrances are covered. No sign of anything moving at the windows. He’s got six Heckler & Koch carbines pointing at him. He can’t get away alive.’

  Night had fallen and the country darkness was deep.

  If he hasn’t escaped already, thought Rosen. If she isn’t already dead.

  68

  Running was hard. The ram in his hands heavy, the ground at his feet cracked. Potholes threw up stagnant water into his shoes, soaking his socks. He paused, weighing up the farmhouse, his breath short, his chest tight. He ran, his left ankle bending, almost but not quite twisting, in yet another of the terrain’s deceptions.

  As he arrived at the farmhouse, night clouds fell away from the moon and an unsteady light filtered down onto the building.

  ‘Carol?’ His voice was little more than a gasp because of his shortage of breath.

  ‘David?’ She was at the front door, in place with Gold.

  ‘OK. I’m going for the rear entrance.’

  The back of the farmhouse was now washed in moonlight, reflected in the glass of the rear door and casting an ethereal sheen on the yard. It was there that Rosen saw the ambulance parked at the back of the house, not entirely covered by the large tarpaulin draped over it.

  At the back door, Rosen thought he could smell smoke. The wooden frame collapsed with one swift hit of the ram and Rosen was inside the darkened kitchen.

  He shouted, ‘Bellwood! Gold! Now!’

  The front door slammed from its hinges and Gold and Bellwood were in the house. A point of torchlight skittered at the front.

  There was definitely smoke, but no perceptible source of fire.

  Rosen saw a pinpoint of light reflected in Bellwood’s eye as she entered the kitchen. Her torch picked out and settled on a break in the regular wooden pattern of the floor. It was the hatch into the basement.

  Smoke leaked from its four sides.

  Rosen dropped the ram and raised the hatch, allowing a torrent of smoke to pour out from below.

  There were steep stairs leading down, wreathed in smoke.

  ‘Light!’ he called to Bellwood.

  She threw the torch and he caught it, his senses sharpened, the pain in his legs and chest evaporating, the blood banging in his head like the primal beat of a war drum.

  ‘Listen for the call!’ he commanded, descending into the basement.

  He had tilted his head and caught the best lungful of oxygen available to him, and held on to it, but almost lost it when his torchbeam of yellow light revealed a bloody hand mark on the bottom of the stair.

  She had tried to escape, bleeding and afraid, she had tried her best to live.

  He shifted the torch to his left hand and pulled out his gun with his right.

  ‘Sarah? Sarah?’

  She didn’t reply.

  It was like being blind. Finding a wall, he kept his back to it, negotiating the room by the touch of his shoulder. He moved swiftly but played the light carefully over the smoke.

  He picked out a shape, a coffin, he thought at first glance, but it wasn’t a coffin. It was too wide.

  ‘Sarah?’

  She’s dead, he thought.

  Rosen turned ninety degrees, his shoulder still against the wall, and kept moving round the first corner.

  ‘Sarah?’

  She is gone. I have nothing; therefore I have nothing to lose.

  There was a half-door in the wall. He opened it and shone his light into the darkness. It was a tunnel leading upwards at an angle of forty-five degrees. The grain chute.

  The smoke stung his eyes and filled his lungs but he moved with increasing speed, racing around the perimeter of the room, and came to a door frame.

  He shone his light into the middle room.

  A machine of sorts.

  His torchlight stroked the letters on the hoist. Faboorgliften. He had no idea what it was, other than that here it had been used as an instrument of torture.

  A table and the fierce source of the heat. It looked like a huge barbecue. The flames around it licked and spat.

  The cloth on the table was burning.

  Rosen held his torch between his teeth, grabbed the smouldering velvet and pulled it down onto the ground, covering the fire and burning his left hand as he did so. The cry of pain stuck in his throat while the flames on the ground did battle with the suffocating velvet.

  He backed away from the fire, glancing over his shoulder into the smoke, and dragged his light along the wall to the doorway of the third room. There was nowhere else she could be. When he whispered, ‘Sarah?’, he could feel the proximity of another human being. He sensed her presence, in a recognition that had been years in the making.

  He trained the light down. Sarah was on the ground. Her face was unblemished, her body soaked in blood.

  ‘David!’ Bellwood’s voice, mute and muffled, filtered through the ceiling above him. ‘David! He’s in there! He’s just torched the stairs!’

  Sarah’s body seemed to be lying on a red blanket. Rosen kneeled down next to her to find it wasn’t a blanket. It was her blood soaking her clothes. He shone the light in her face. Putting the torch down, he picked up her wrist to feel for a pulse.

  But there was none. Then, he detected the faintest sign of one but wondered if he was imagining it.

  In the dim light, he saw the desecration of her body.

  He had ne
ver seen so many separate wounds on one person.

  In that tortured moment, he sensed that they were not alone. A foot banged on the floor above and Gold shouted, ‘David! David! Call my name!’ His feeling was confirmed by a single exhalation behind him. Rosen looked over his shoulder but the smoke was too thick for him to see.

  Sarah didn’t appear to be breathing. He angled her head, held her nose and, breathing into her mouth, laid the heel of his hand in the centre of her chest. He started to pump at her heart, hearing an unpremeditated howl rise from the centre of his being.

  Her flesh was torn, and her blood seeped through his fingers as he gave cardiac massage.

  In the distance, he became aware of Bellwood’s voice, and of Gold calling to him, but they were far, far away, shouting about fire and calling the name David, but he didn’t connect it with himself. It was a call to some other person in some other place.

  He slid his hand under her head to reposition it. Her face appeared clearer through the murk and, with his fingers in the dampness of her hair, he wondered how it was that after such an ordeal she could look so young. He’d left her alone that morning, and as night gathered around him, he was just too late.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Desolation overwhelmed him and for a moment his mind went blank, his concentration crumbling. Time and place vanished. There was just smoke and desolation. And then a little sound right behind him.

  The sound, a footstep, brought him back. Under cover of the smoke, something was creeping up on him.

  Rosen turned and stood up in the same instant.

  The face seemed suspended in white smoke, a disembodied head hovering, observing Rosen as if he was a specimen in a jar.

  It was the little boy in the locket, worn by time, the unspeaking face beneath the black slick of hair.

  He stood impassively, holding a metal spoke. It pointed upwards, as if in accusation. He remained still and silent in the swirling smoke, blood leaking from two facial wounds.

  And then he spoke, but the word was slurred and inarticulate.

  ‘Canathus!’

  ‘Capaneus? There’s no such person as Capaneus, Dwyer.’