by Gary McMahon
The scarecrow was laid out on a stainless steel gurney at the centre of the room, the left side of its torso covered by a creased white sheet. The gurney was usually meant for transporting bodies, or parts of bodies, and the strange, stiff, legless figure looked out of place beneath the harsh, bright lights of the lab.
“What do you have for me, Miss Wandaful?”
Wanda grinned. Everyone at the station called her Miss Wandaful. She’d spent a long time protesting against the occasional nickname when it first started up, until finally, after six months on the job, she made the mistake of telling a uniformed officer on a station night out that she actually liked to be called that. Nobody had called her by any other name since.
“Okay,” she said, standing at one end of the gurney. She moved slowly around to the side, pulling the white sheet fully off the figure and placing it to one side. “What we have here is a scarecrow.”
“Gee,” said Royle. “Do ya really think so?”
She carried on, unperturbed. “As you know, there was a photograph of Connie Millstone attached to the scarecrow’s head. From what we can tell, it looks like the girl might have been deceased when it was taken. I’m sorry.” She glanced at him, her face tense. “I was hoping to be able to tell you otherwise, but... well. That’s how it looks. We’ve sent the photo to the main lab for an in-depth DNA analysis. The results should be back in a few days. I can tell you now, though, there were no fingerprints present.”
The too-bright light made Royle feel exposed. His head was aching and his eyesight was blurred. He blinked several times in quick succession, to clear his vision. “Is this an assumption, a hunch... or is it a fact? How do you know she was dead when it was taken?”
“It isn’t fact,” said Wanda. “But it isn’t guesswork, either. From the photo, you can see that the girl’s skin has begun to take on the soft appearance of death; her muscle tone is nonexistent. If it was in colour, you’d be able to see the slight bruising caused by pooling blood and necrosis.”
“What else?” Royle wanted a drink. He was craving whisky.
“This is where it gets really weird.” She reached out and touched the pole that formed the central support for the figure. “This is made of solid oak. The head’s the same.”
Royle moved closer and stared at the pole. The bark had been stripped away; the nude wood looked like it had been smoothed down badly with a low-grade emery cloth. He examined the length of the body, resting his gaze upon the smooth, burnished head. Someone had removed its hat. The wooden head was virtually featureless; only the grain of the wood was visible.
He was reminded of Pinocchio, and of a show that used to be on television when he was a kid: Pipkins. It had scared him so much that he wet the bed. From what he could recall, the kids’ programme was set in an old toy shop where the stuffed toys and puppets were alive: raggedy old Hartley Hare, with his dead eyes and loose stitches; Pig, Topov, and the rest of the gang. Horrible, all of them – grinning dishevelled demons. Dusty, falling apart at the seams... the awkward puppets had populated his nightmares for years afterwards.
Wanda’s voice cut into his thoughts: “There are no oak trees within a twenty mile radius of the Concrete Grove estate.”
He nodded, backtracking from his shabby, flyblown memories. “Okay. I’ll admit that is a bit weird. Why use oak particularly and why go to so much trouble in the first place? It doesn’t make sense. It isn’t logical.”
“Oh, it gets better than that.” She turned and lifted a scalpel from a steel dish on a nearby trolley. Bending forward, she opened the scarecrow’s jacket and used the blade to make a long slit down the front of its charity shop shirt – the two halves of which were stitched together using some kind of thick, fluffy thread. “That’s some kind of natural fibre. Maybe hemp. Again, we’ve sent a sample to the lab for proper identification.”
Royle didn’t speak. He was captivated. He watched as the scarecrow’s innards were exposed.
“What we have here is a mixture of stuff, all kinds of rubbish. Burnt leaves, pieces of paper... all sorts of crap.”
Royle noticed for the first time that Wanda was wearing surgical gloves. He stared at her hands, pale and bloodless beneath the tight rubber layer, and watched as she raked around inside the belly of the scarecrow. A sudden terror filled him: what if she withdrew her hand and was clutching human organs, or, even worse, Connie Millstone’s hand?
“There are a lot of receipts in here – from local shops, petrol stations, that kind of thing. All used as stuffing. What makes them special is that they’re all dated to the exact same time and date.” She stopped and looked up at him. Sweat was beaded on her forehead. Her eyes were shining, eager. She loved her work. “Can you guess when that was?” Her teeth glistened beneath the lights.
Royle nodded. “The day Connie Millstone went missing.”
Wanda nodded. “Bingo. There are also a lot of dried leaves: oak, maple, rowan, rosewood. Each one a species that isn’t present in this area. You have Charlie to thank for that information, by the way. He’s the nature buff. I emailed him some digital images and he looked at them on the beach in Mexico. Isn’t technology wonderful?” She winked. “Rather than stuff this thing with any old kind of rubbish, someone was extremely specific about what they used.” She lifted her hand. Leaves spilled between the fingers. “These things have a special significance to someone, but I’ll be shagged if it means anything to me.”
“So there’s some kind of meaning here. A message. Perhaps even some kind of ritual, perhaps?”
“You tell me. You’re the detective man.”
“Have you sent samples of everything to the main lab?”
“Yes.” She backed away from the gurney, slipping off the rubber gloves. They made a smacking sound as she peeled them from her fingers. “They’re doing every kind of analysis they can think of: chemical, fingerprinting, DNA, the whole deal. We’ve done some of the basic stuff here, of course, but we couldn’t find a thing. No fingerprints, no apparent residue. Nothing. We need to look deeper. They have a lot more sophisticated equipment in the city than our shitty little budget allows for.”
“Sorry. I wasn’t having a dig. Just being thorough. Like you always are.”
She smiled. “I know. It just pisses me off that we can’t get any decent kit in here. Charlie and I have all the skills but none of the resources. If I wasn’t so stupid, I’d fuck off and work in the city. The big lab, where my skill set would be appreciated.” She leaned back against the sink, opening the pedal bin with her foot and dropping the gloves inside. She wasn’t wearing any shoes, just the paper slippers used in hospitals. And morgues.
“I appreciate you. Don’t know what I’d do without you sometimes.”
“Fuck off, copper,” she said, but she was smiling again. The bags under her eyes were huge and dark, like bruises. She was putting on weight. Her bleached hair looked as dry as straw. The teeth she’d recently spent a lot of money on having repaired and capped looked fake, plastic. The job was taking its toll, showing up like minor injuries or subtle deformities on her body.
Mine, too, thought Royle. This fucking job, it’s killing us all.
He looked again at the scarecrow. He could have sworn that the head had not been turned that way, facing in his direction, the last time he looked, but it was difficult to be certain. There were no eyes, so it couldn’t be looking at him; no mouth, so it was unable to grin. But he felt like it was doing both of those things. The smooth, bare wooden head that lacked even the merest hint of a face was watching.
And it was laughing.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
ERIK SAT ON a dining chair and stared at the cat box. He’d found it in the lock-up garage and used it to transport the... the what? That was the big question, wasn’t it? Just what the hell did he have in there anyway? What the fuck kind of creature had those kids found and brought to him?
When Hacky had gone outside and left Erik alone in front of the glass reptile tank, he’d take
n a while to summon his courage. Erik was a brave man, sometimes insanely courageous when forced into a tight situation. He feared nobody. There had been times in his long and eventful life when he’d stood and fought opponents twice his size, or had a go when he’d been outnumbered and backed into a corner. He never ran; never turned his back on a fight. It simply wasn’t in his nature to back down and walk away. But in that lock-up garage, crouching there in the shadows and staring into the glass tank, he’d never felt so much like running.
Erik was miles outside of his comfort zone on this one; his fighting distance had narrowed to almost nothing. He had no frame of reference whatsoever for the thing that had been waiting inside that tank. It was alien, from outside his realm of knowledge. He had no idea how he should even react to its existence.
There was a sound from the cat box; a low, trembling exhalation. He tried to tell himself that it was an animal noise – a mewling or a snuffling, something like that. But it wasn’t. He knew it wasn’t. The sound was... well, it was much too human to be labelled in such a way. The sound, he admitted to himself, was a voice.
“Hungry.”
It had been saying the same thing since he’d brought it back here, over and over again.
“Hungry.”
Erik stood and walked across the room. He waited at the low coffee table upon which he’d placed the battered cat box. Something moved again inside. He heard the sound of tiny nails – fingernails – scratching against the plastic walls of the box.
“Monty?” Even as he said the name of his friend, he had trouble connecting it to the thing in the cat box. He didn’t want to admit this, even to himself, but he knew what was inside that box. “Is it you, mate?” This couldn’t be real; none of it was happening.
But it was happening. He was here, enduring it. This was not a dream. It was reality – or at least what passed for it in these uncertain days.
He waited to hear the same response he’d been getting for the past half an hour.
“Hungry.”
He dipped into a low crouch, his hamstrings complaining as he lowered himself towards the floor. He peered at the slats in the box, glimpsing slow movement between them.
“Fucking hell, Monty...”
He reached out and flipped open the cat box. The lid was on top, so he had to come up out of his crouch to look inside.
The thing... Monty... Monty Bright... that’s what it was, who it was: it was his old sparring partner.
It was lying on its back looking up at the ceiling; the smooth skin of its small, shiny face caught the light. He remembered Monty as a big man, a hard man. He’d taken all kinds of shit to pump up his muscles, and worked out manically at his own gym, lifting weights and doing a lot of heavy bag work. He’d been short but huge; his wide build had been that of a battler.
Now he was small and vulnerable, like a baby, a damaged – or deformed – infant.
Monty’s face was more or less the same as he remembered. It was recognisable, at least, and that was something he could hang on to. Same eyes; same blunt nose; same round head with the hair shaved off. The eyes, in fact, were identical to the way they always had been: clear and intelligent, the eyes of a thinker rather than a brawler.
The rest of Monty was unrecognisable.
The fire at Monty’s gym had been bad, and everyone assumed that the owner had died in the blaze. But surely fire couldn’t do this to a person? Fire blackened and burned; it charred and cooked the meat on the bones. It didn’t... it didn’t shrivel a victim down to a tiny, mutated replica of themselves.
The thing’s body looked as if it had been compressed somehow, crushed and shortened and reduced by the application of phenomenal pressure. Erik remembered how, as a child, he’d put plastic crisp packets in the oven and within minutes of enduring the intense heat, they’d come out shrunk to a fraction of their original size. The same thing had happened to his old friend: the man’s physique had more or less kept its natural proportions, but they’d been reduced by something like a factor of twenty.
Certain physical changes had also occurred.
The naked little body, a solid chunk of muscle, had grown several additional appendages. Monty had developed extra limbs, but ones that didn’t look human. There were what Erik could only describe as tentacles sticking out of his sides, sprouting from the area directly under the armpits and forming a row down the sides of his ribcage. A clawed hand had erupted from his navel, and even as Erik watched it grasped weakly, clutching at the air, the knuckles popping and cracking. There were two toothless mouths in place of nipples; blinking eyes were clustered across his stomach below the ribcage.
This was Monty represented as a monster. He’d become what so many people had thought he was anyway: ugly, monstrous, a vision from a nightmare. The vile thoughts he’d kept locked up inside, the deeds he’d committed, had all manifested upon his flesh, chewing it up, destroying it and remoulding it into another shape entirely. Monty had become the sum of his evils, he had transformed into a manifestation of his deeds.
“Hungry.”
Erik looked at Monty Bright’s small, pink babyish face. The mouth was open. A small, dark tongue darted between the lips, licked the top one, and then was sucked back inside. The lips smacked together, making a repellent sound.
“What... what can I get you? What the hell do you eat?”
What happened to you? What made you like this?
Maybe if he fed Monty, and built up his strength, Monty would tell him what had happened to make him transform into such a strange being. Perhaps he’d start saying something other than that one damned word.
And so he did:
“Blood.”
Of course: there it was. Because monsters didn’t eat tinned tuna, or fish and chips, did they? They didn’t sit down to a nice plate of mince and tatties. They drank blood, like ghouls or vampires.
Erik paused for a moment to appreciate the fact that he was taking all of this in his stride. He should be raving; his mind should have snapped. But he’d seen enough strange things in the Grove during his lifetime to realise that what he saw, what he felt, what he experienced with his normal, everyday senses, was not everything. There were other sights, other experiences, that lay hidden; and sometimes, when the time was right, they popped up into the light and made themselves visible. These things lived inside the black hole, and sometimes they managed to climb out.
This was one of those times.
“Blood,” said Monty again.
“Yeah... yeah, I know. It would be, wouldn’t it?”
Erik had killed two men in his life. The first time had been in the service of his country, when he slit an enemy soldier’s throat during a night-time assault on Goose Green, during the Falklands conflict. He had not been a young man, even then: he was older and wiser than most of his fellow soldiers by several years. It was near the end of his time in the armed forces, and he always thought of it as his final battle.
He’d loved the sound of the knife sliding through meat, hitting the more solid matter of the larynx, followed by the scraping sound as the metal clipped the edge of the hyoid bone. The soft spurt of blood, like a wordless whisper; the gentle sigh of a last breath escaping through the slit he’d made in the man’s body. Silence... beautiful, blissful silence.
The second time had been during an organised fight in a warehouse in Gateshead, when a drug dealer had been trying to muscle in on Erik’s turf. Erik had never liked drugs, but he did like to control how much came into and out of the area. He allowed people like Monty Bright to buy and sell. He didn’t allow no-mark arseholes from across the water to come here and set up their own supply chains.
So he’d seen to it that the chav – who went by the name of Clancy Beevers – got to hear about a challenge. They’d met at three o’clock in the morning, shirtless, no weapons: old school. Erik had beaten the other man to death in less than five minutes. They’d chopped up the body and fed it to pigs owned by a man who’d always claimed to be Eri
k’s second cousin, despite a lack of familial evidence. This man had proved useful on many occasions, so Erik never disputed the claims to kinship. He’d felt an almost erotic charge as he watched three sturdy porkers fighting over the remains of the man’s head.
So, yes, he’d killed before. He’d killed before, and if he was honest, he’d have to say he liked it.
But surely that was something he should only do if everything else failed? Once a man got into the habit of killing, little else would fill the gap that appeared inside him. He’d seen it happen before, with soldiers mostly, but also a couple of times in civilian life. Murder carved holes in the soul, and the only thing that would close them – although temporarily – was more murder.
He shook his head, closed his eyes. His thoughts felt strange, as if they were being massaged, guided. They were his thoughts, of course, but they were much more intense than they should be.
His head swam. His brain twitched. Or that’s how it felt: like the grey matter was flinching away from something, a stark reality that he couldn’t face.
He walked into the kitchen and found the cat sitting near the back door, washing its paws. Its name was Cecil. He’d never liked the cat, and had inherited the thing from an ex-girlfriend who had stolen it from one of her old boyfriends as part of some oddball revenge plot. The animal had hung around when the woman left. Erik fed it and didn’t mind that it slept somewhere around the house, but he never gave it any attention. It was as if he’d been keeping the animal for a situation like this one.