Decay Inevitable

by Conrad Williams

  It was dark by the time they entered the churchyard. The building was not difficult to break into. The mustiness, and the creaking of the pews, as if they were in constant use, was a relaxing sound. A small electric fire in the apse helped them to stave off the cold as it built up around the stone walls. A little after midnight, a keen wind caroming around the stones outside, Will fell into a deep sleep.

  SHE WAS JUST like Catriona, in a way, but the muscles in her buttocks and thighs were more defined, her breasts tighter, almost arrogantly proud. She came to him and slid her tongue between his lips before he had a chance to protest. But if he had, he didn’t really believe that it would be himself protesting. Rather a shade, a projection of himself. The man he ought to be. Christ, the way she moved against him. Her prodigious wetness. Her heat. His cock was embedded inside her before he was fully awake. But he couldn’t rise completely from sleep. It was as if the rhythms of her fucking him contained in them some kind of soporific power, an anaesthetic. He wasn’t even sure this was really happening. Some dream... She rode him for a few minutes, her hands in her hair, her breasts gleaming with sweat. She didn’t take her eyes from his once, even when she came, even when, a few seconds later, he came too, stuffing his knuckles into his mouth so that he wouldn’t wake Elisabeth, if she were yet capable of consciousness. Sadie slid from him, and crawled over to her corner to sleep. Or at least, he believed she did, for as soon as the rioting in his loins had ceased, he was out of it.

  WHEN HE WOKE, his legs had stiffened and his arms were sore. He tried to move, but the wrenching pain in his back would not allow it. Sadie’s head was in his lap, her thumb in her mouth. Elisabeth no longer looked as though she was out of reach. She simply seemed to be asleep now.

  Early morning sunlight became blades of colour as it hit the stained-glass windows: a civilised light for a brief time, playing lilac and green upon the nave. To go outside would be to reacquaint oneself with its wintry brittleness. There was no heat to be had from such light. The sun would be a dead, cold disc in the sky, mobbed by mist. You could stare at it at such times. It looked as though it should belong to a more savage, a more distant planet.

  He regarded Sadie’s face in sleep, ironed of its worries. A child’s face. Guilt lanced him. He felt sick. But last night, had it been real? She had been too knowing, too in control, surely, for it to be real.

  “How are you doing?” Will asked, pecking at Sadie’s shoulder with a finger. His voice was cracked with the previous day’s effort.

  “Cold and wet,” she replied, rising. “And stiff.” She stretched and her spine crackled. Even when she reached the limit of movement, the sound continued, scuttling around the cavernous interior. She made no comment on the previous night, nor did she give him a look or a smile that would have confirmed his suspicions. Forget it, he thought.

  “We should get going,” he said. “This place’ll be crawling with dog-collars before long. Eli?”

  She responded to his barking of her name. Her eyes swam, trying to focus. There was even the hint of a smile.

  But then something failed. Will found himself looking beyond her, as if somehow she had been rendered insubstantial by what was shifting slowly behind her, in one of the grainy corners of the church, seeping out of the shadows like a tide of thick oil.

  “Is there an animal in here with us?” Will muttered.

  Eli blinked and tried to move. She slumped to one side and the full breadth of what was coming detached itself from his eye and swelled.

  It remained with him for a while, like a pattern of light imprinted on his retina. The muscled bulk of it, great liquid swirls that might have been eyes. Then it faded and became part of the shadows. In a moment, it was as though there had never been anything there at all.

  “Did you see that?” he asked Sadie, trying to keep his voice calm.

  Sadie was attending to Elisabeth, trying to get her to drink water from a cat’s bowl she had found by the door. Elisabeth was making a sound that might have been “Grue...”

  “See what?”

  “There was something in the corner... Never mind. Forget it.”

  Sadie smiled at him. “You’re just tired, Will. I think Elisabeth will be okay. We should give her a little more time here.”

  Will shook his head and started gathering their things. “I don’t think so. If Eli’s getting better, then she’ll have to do it on the move. We have to find some food too.”

  “Do you have any money? I could go into the village and buy some sandwiches or something?”

  Will fished in his pockets and pulled out a twenty-pound note. It was all he had.

  “Here,” he said. “Hurry back. We’ll wait for you in the trees, where we watched the planes yesterday.”

  Sadie gone, he strapped Elisabeth into the stretcher and criss-crossed the straps around his chest. He checked the corner of the church again but there was nothing there. Too tired. He hoped that was the case.

  Outside, he found a vantage point under the trees from which he could see the motorway and a good portion of the sky. There were no engines thrumming through it. Just the sound of the wind in the leaves.

  “You fret too much, Will. You always did. If you were a piece of jewellery, you’d be a set of worry beads.”

  Will eased himself out of the straps. Elisabeth was cradling her jaw with a hand and trying to unpick the knots that were keeping her in the stretcher.

  “I had a feeling that when you came round your first words would be some sort of crack at me.” He beamed at her regardless. When she tried to return it, her face fell apart.

  “I think I broke my jaw.”

  Will crouched next to her and gently cupped her head in his hands. “I don’t think so. You wouldn’t be able to talk.”

  “I might be able to walk, if you could help me try to put some weight on my feet?”

  “Are you sure?”

  “If we take it easy. What happened, by the way?”

  As they hobbled around the trees, Will explained about the bombs, pointing out some of the visible craters on the road. Thin streams of smoke continued to rise from them.

  “I wasn’t aware of any great terrorist activity going on,” said Eli. “Were you?”

  Will shook his head. This was beyond anything he had read about in the newspapers. Terrorist activity in the country’s history was sporadic; it might run to one or two bombs prior to a long period of inactivity. The peppering of one of Britain’s arterial carriageways pointed to some other organisation with a lot of money and a lot of personnel. Will wondered if the planes he had seen last night were part of it. If they were, and if they had been hunting him, then, by extension, the bombs had been meant for him too.

  Sadie returned with pies from the village bakery and a newspaper. Apparently, there were few people around at this hour. And it helped that it was a Sunday. “Nobody’s going anywhere because they can’t,” she explained. “There were barricades on all the roads in and out of the village. Soldiers with guns. Everyone’s talking about the explosions.”

  Elisabeth and Sadie talked while they ate. Will wolfed his pie and then returned to the vantage point in the trees. Not only must they dodge the surveillance aircraft, if that’s what they were, but now they had troops to deal with.

  “Will!” Elisabeth, when he returned, looked even paler than she had directly after the accident.

  “What is it?”

  She was holding the newspaper open. On page three there was a photograph of Will, the one from his passport. He had had a hangover on the day it was taken. He looked startled, and his eyes seemed somehow too juicy for their sockets, as if someone had bathed them before plugging them back into his face. Next to his photograph was a picture of Cat, from the early days of her pregnancy. They had been holidaying in Greece. She was smiling and her forefinger was pointing to her tummy. The headline read:

  BODY OF PREGNANT WOMAN HAD BEEN ‘FILLETED’

  Will tore the newspaper from Elisabeth’s hands. As
he read the story, his eyes kept returning to his wife’s face. She had been so happy on that day. He remembered that shortly after he took the picture they had made love on the balcony of their hotel room while below a boy carrying a basket of fruit called out: “Meloni, meloni... cool meloni for you hot people!” They hadn’t been able to stop laughing.

  Filleted. Filleted.

  “She’s dead then?” Will said. “What... you can’t survive a filleting, can you? Can you?” He laughed, infected by the blissful memory and the preposterous thought of his wife, sliced and boned like a cut of meat.

  “Will, they’re looking for us. You. They’re looking for you. They’re calling it a manhunt.”

  “But I–”

  Elisabeth reached for him, pain turning her face grey for a second. “I know you didn’t. But they think you did.”

  “She’s–”

  “She is dead, Will. She is dead.”

  He felt the need to run, to take off across the field, screaming until he coughed up blood. He didn’t care who saw him or how quickly he would be caught. He wanted to die. He wanted the people who were responsible for Cat’s death to die. He wanted to kill them. But he wanted to die first.

  Elisabeth saw the tension in him and took his hand before he was able to act upon it. Sadie watched them, wide-eyed, her pie half-eaten and growing cold in her fingers.

  “What do we do now?” he asked, weakly. Continuing their journey seemed pointless on the heels of this discovery.

  “We go on,” Sadie said.

  Elisabeth nodded. “How else are you going to clear your name? You have to go to Sloe Heath. Whatever it has in store for you.”

  Will slumped by the foot of the tree. He couldn’t understand how he had dragged Elisabeth so far when it felt as if he no longer owned any bones, any muscles.

  “We have to get going soon,” Sadie continued. “People are waking up.”

  Will stayed where he was. Cat wasn’t waking up. And he doubted that he would ever wake up again. You had to go to sleep first, in order to wake up. He believed his sleeping days were over for good.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: NEW BLOOD

  VERNON PICKED HIM up outside the newspaper shop on Lovely Lane. It was a cold morning. Mist saddled the railway bridge. Blocks of ochre light hung in the air where the hospital should have stood. The Shogun was the only traffic he had seen since leaving his room ten minutes earlier; he hadn’t wanted to reveal his address to Vernon.

  It was as hot in the four-by-four as it was chilly in the street. A freshener hung from the rear-view mirror, filling the cab with the cloying smell of apricots. On the back seat lay Vernon’s leather coat. Peeking from beneath it was the polished tip of a baseball bat.

  Vernon drove expertly through Bewsey and Dallam, flicking through the gears with fluid familiarity, never taking his eyes off the road. In his seat he leapt in and out of view as they passed beneath the orange sodium lights. Dallam recreation park was wadded with ghosts. The railway track that rose behind it was a wet, trembling line scored through the dawn sky.

  “You had breakfast?” Vernon grunted.

  “Yeah. Muesli.”

  “Muesli. Like it. You don’t bow to convention, do you?”

  “I wasn’t aware that a conventional breakfast existed.”

  Vernon chuckled. He took the Shogun around the traffic island on the Winwick Road at fifty. Long Lane sucked them towards the dark streets of Orford. “Last guy helped me out was an egg and bacon man. All the time, not just for breakfast. Kev, his name was. He only ever ate egg and bacon and your usual trimmings. Thought cabbage was something you pushed around in a wheelchair.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Sad case out in Grasmere Avenue. One of those little rabbit hutches with front doors filled with empty egg cartons. Tasteful, you know. Do you like Level 42?”

  It was seven o’clock. Lights were going on in kitchens. Vernon swerved the Jeep around an electric milk float that bumbled into the road.

  He continued: “Lynne and Gareth Morgan. They’ve got a son, Greg, who is blind. Severe learning disability, apparently. No shit, wouldn’t you?” He looked at Sean and Sean duly laughed. “Got another son, Billy. Billy the breadwinner. Dealer. Small-time. Bit of blow. Pills.

  “Eighteen months ago, Lynne and Gareth had jobs. He was a taxi driver and she cleaned. They bought a car, a dishwasher, and a plasma TV on the never-never. Then they both lost their jobs. They owe fifteen grand. Hence me.”

  He steered the jeep into Blackwood Crescent, killed the lights, and decelerated to a crawl.

  “And the killer. The law centre they depended on for advice lost its funding and closed down. Lynne got another job but she was fired a couple days later. Fell asleep with her mop in her hand. That’s sloppy. That’s just not trying hard enough.”

  “What are you going to do to them?” Sean asked, casually.

  “I’m going to fuck them over with that bat and scream at them until the skin roasts off their fucking faces. That’s what I’m going to do. Whether they’ve got some money for me or not.”

  “What am I here for? Moral support?”

  Vernon laughed out loud. “You’re here to look out for the filth. And keep me covered. Not the man I used to be. People run, I can’t always catch them. You can though. You be my legs.”

  Vernon braked sharply across the road from a series of flats with tiny windows. His eyes were fast upon them. To Sean, it seemed that Vernon was almost meditating, drinking in the shabby detail of the brickwork, the peeling paint on the window-frames, the gaps in the slates.

  “Pass me my jacket please, Sean,” he said. His voice was level and business-like. “And wrap your mitts around that fucking bat.”

  They walked across the road. Vernon pulled on a pair of black leather gloves and relieved Sean of the weapon.

  Vernon said, “Round the back, son. Give us two whistles when you’re in position, then when you hear me bash the door in, close on the back door. Slippery as shitty eels, these bastards. Don’t let anyone out.”

  Sean gave his signal when he had found the corresponding rear gate. The alleyway was filled with sagging sofas and bin bags. He gritted his teeth against the unpleasantness that must be about to ensue. As much as his instinct told him to back off, he knew he must not fail in this task, if he was to get close to Vernon and understand what lay behind the door of the house in the country and what, if any, link to Naomi these men had.

  The sound of the door impacting was swiftly followed by the bark of a dog that ended almost as quickly with a shout and a series of pathetic whines. Vernon was quick. But evidently not quick enough. Sean watched a rear window swing open and a leg clamber out. The yelling inside the house diminished until it was Vernon’s voice that was dominant. Sean couldn’t tell what he was saying. The hooded figure hopped down off the kitchen extension and Sean said: “Hey.”

  The kid took off without checking to see who had hailed him. Sean kept pace easily, even though this area was more familiar to his quarry. He thought he heard Vernon’s Shogun roar into life, but then they had rounded a corner and there was wind in his ears, and the grey, hooded figure was sprinting across a small square.

  At a row of pebble-dashed garages, the kid jinked right and pounded over a narrow field. Progress for the both of them was hampered by hard furrows of soil. Ahead lay a thin wood. Around the wood sprawled building sites in various stages of development: new, cheap housing estates. The houses looked as though they had just been bombed.

  Sean knew he must catch the kid before he reached the leading edge of trees or he would be lost, either to the undergrowth or the many hiding places available in the infant estate. He pushed himself to go faster over the awkward terrain, trying to measure his pace so that he could use the ridges to propel himself. He tried to imagine that the fleeing figure was responsible for something more than a missed payment. Maybe he was. He might be guilty of kicking cats or bullying kids on his estate. He might steal money from his grand
mother’s purse. It helped.

  Sean caught up with him as he attempted to climb through the windowless frame of a partially finished wall, grabbing hold of the loose cloth of his top. The kid was trying to shrug his way out of the garment. Sean hooked his hand underneath his quarry’s arm and drove the limb up his back. In this way the kid was forced to the floor, swearing and screaming that he should be let loose.

  Now Sean did hear the Shogun’s engine. He lifted his head and saw the four-by-four jouncing across the rutted field towards them.

  “What does he want from you?” Sean asked quickly.

  “You fucking what? You fucking know exactly–”

  “How much?” Sean cut in, plying the arm with a little pressure. The kid’s face, now free of his hood, turned pale. He sucked in breath. Sean smelled weed on him, and chocolate. He sported a feeble moustache that seemed to be glued above lips that were too wet and pink to belong to a human being, especially as the rest of his skin was so white. His eye sockets were almost round and the lids made no appearance unless he was blinking, which he was doing now. A lot. He screwed his face up with incomprehension.

  “You what? It’s not money... Who are you anyway?”

  Sean said, “Talk to me. I might be able to help.”

  “Seany. Seany-Sean. What have we here then?” Vernon slouched into the unformed room.

  Sean straightened.

  “Good running, mate.” Vernon swung the bat as though it were a golf club before holding it out and squinting along its length, checking the true. “It’s nice to have a bit of hard around. But not for you though, eh, Billy?”