Hinton Hollow Death Trip

by Will Carver

  ‘Even if I wanted that to be the case, my hands are tied. There will be a united front on this one like there is about anything that seemingly goes against the town. We won’t be bullied out of living our normal Hinton Hollow lives. You must know that? The show must go on.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘People still work in very tall buildings in America,’ the chief interrupted. ‘Londoners still get on the bloody Tube every day. And the children of Hinton Hollow will still pop their ties into a lazy half-Windsor knot and trudge up the path to their schools in this crazy wind in order to learn their readin’, ritin’ and rithmatic.’ He attempted a West-Country accent for the last part though Pace knew not why. Perhaps attempting to detach himself further from the ordeal through humour, make it less real.

  ‘Well, I hope you don’t mind me saying, sir, but that’s fucking ludicrous.’

  ‘Welcome home, Mr Pace. I believe Owen Brady has some information that may prove pertinent to this case.’ He raised a ginger eyebrow.

  ‘Sure. Sure. I’m on it. Just need to make a quick phone call.’

  Outside the chief’s office, Pace took out his mobile phone. A text from Maeve.

  It was too much to deal with.

  He was going to text back.

  I gently placed my weight on his shoulders and he put the phone back in his pocket. Ignoring her again. To his peril.

  KEEP UP

  ‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.’

  Father Salis did not recognise the voice on the other side of the partition.

  Darren had never been to confession. He never went to church. That’s not who he was.

  Darren woke up, he ate breakfast, he went to work, pushed around some livestock, stunned them, cut them, skinned them, made them into deadstock, went home, ate, drank, masturbated and watched something on television while stroking the cat that was next to him on the sofa. That’s what Darren did. What he used to do. Before he punctured his pet repeatedly with a greasy butter knife.

  That’s why he was at church. He wasn’t himself. He was doing things that he would normally never do.

  But these things were inside him.

  And I was his guide.

  ‘It has been forever since my last confession.’ Darren didn’t really know what he was doing or whether he even thought there was a God but he’d seen enough films to know that the thing you say after forgive me is a statement of how long it has been since your last confession.

  ‘Forever?’ Salis asked. His voice was calm, it sounded as though he was smiling.

  ‘I’ve never been, Father.’

  ‘And what brings you here today?’ Nothing could have prepared Father Salis for the response.

  ‘I punched a pig.’

  I could have reached into the priest here and pushed a button that made him laugh. But I let it go.

  ‘I’m sorry, you … punched a…?’

  ‘Pig. Right on the snout. And I rubbed salt into the cut. And I kicked it.’ Darren hung his head.

  ‘And where did this happen?’

  ‘At work.’

  ‘You work with animals? On a farm?’

  ‘Something like that, yes.’

  The slaughterhouse was like The Split Aces club, it was on the outskirts of Hinton Hollow but still within its boundaries. Near enough to know it was there but far enough to ignore. Nobody really wants to understand where their meat comes from and nobody wants to talk about anything that might happen at the club.

  ‘Ah, go on.’

  Darren explained what had happened on that first night. How he’d become so enraged with the animal and taken out his frustrations in a physical way. To Father Salis, Darren seemed mild, perhaps remedial, and repentant.

  ‘You regret your actions.’ It was not a question.

  I could see that Darren did not like the statement. So I pushed him. I turned it up to a six.

  ‘I didn’t realise this was a sorry chamber, I thought it was about confessing.’ He sat up straight.

  ‘Yes, of course. But you are seeking the Lord’s forgiveness so there must be some remorse, some regret.’

  I turned Darren up to a seven.

  ‘Well, I can’t stop thinking about it. Running through it in my mind over and over. The thing is, when you start, the sound these things make when they are heading inside to die, it’s terrible. Really. Horrific. But you get used to it. You start to not hear it. And they are screaming, Father. It’s like they know what’s coming.’

  Then he leant in towards the partition. Father Salis was turned to the side, listening rather than looking.

  ‘You start to like it. That noise, it’s like whale song, eventually. You need it to get you through the day. I bet you have some things that help you get through the day that you’d rather not talk about, Father.’

  Darren watched to see if Salis was uncomfortable.

  The priest didn’t move. He listened.

  ‘The thing is, the day after, I found that I couldn’t eat meat. I just couldn’t do it.’

  Darren waited for a response.

  Salis was quiet.

  Turn up to eight.

  ‘But it didn’t mean that I didn’t want blood. I’d had that cat for seven years. I loved him. He was my companion. He was always there with me.’

  ‘A cat?’

  ‘Yes. A cat. Keep up. My cat. He got a hair in my sandwich so I held him down by his neck and stabbed him through his ribs until he stopped moving. And you ask me if I regret what I have done? My only regret is that I didn’t do it sooner.’ He growled the last sentence through the dividing wall and, before the priest could look up and ask anything, Darren was gone.

  I wondered where Darren would go if I dug a little deeper. Was it within him to take things further. To move on from the animals to humans? And is it my fault for unleashing something or is it yours for being so awful that I had no choice but to.

  MOTHERS

  There were three schools in the parish of Hinton Hollow.

  Hinton Hollow Primary School had the largest intake of children in their infant and junior years because it was the biggest and also located more centrally. The ever-changing catchment areas did not seem to affect HHPS. If you didn’t live within the Hinton Hollow border, there was no sense in applying.

  Stanhope Church of England School was different. It sat on the border of Hinton Hollow and Roylake, the front gates opening out onto the Stanhope Road. The actual building was on Hollow ground but it accepted children from beyond the invisible town lines. Both were great schools. High-performing. High-achieving schools.

  The third was the closest secondary school in the area and sat at its northern tip. The bricks and concrete were actually Twaincroft Hill structures while the playing field fell on Hollow earth. Liv Dunham taught there.

  All three schools were open on that third day, that hump in the week that would prove more difficult to get over than any other Wednesday in the town’s past. And every school was resolute in the decision to carry on, business as usual. None more so than HHPS, where bunches of flowers had already been laid in the park, propped up against a tree that had a snapped line of police tape tied around the trunk, rasping in the gale that had been dancing all over town trying to blow away the shadows. But summer was as dead as Jacob Brady.

  Parents walked their children to school as usual, stalking the paths in closer packs, some looking around at the woods nervously, others telling themselves that lightning wouldn’t strike the same place twice.

  The teenagers at the secondary school seemed unaffected by the events. A kid had been shot, and they’d already established a pattern of victims that they didn’t seem to fit into. Surely it couldn’t happen to one of them.

  On day three, that bump in the road of the week, they were right. They were lucky. Parents feigned strength and solidarity as they dropped their children in the playground, many of them waiting until the bell rang and the kids lined up in their classes to enter the hopeful safety of bricks and mortar.<
br />
  What the people and police were looking for was a child killer. That’s what they had wrong – in the beginning. The truth was, it had always only been about the mothers.

  On that morning, as children filed into their classes and parents walked wearily back to their homes and RD’s wife cut a carrot cake into twelve slices and Owen Brady sweated in a cell and Detective Sergeant Pace walked back to his room at The Arboreal, Oz Tambor was lying in the boot of a car with a coat wrapped snuggly around his torso, craving sugar.

  And I was there.

  Brewing another storm.

  The wind was yet to build enough courage to penetrate deep into the woods, so everything was still for Oz, all but the fluttering of the highest leaves, the ones that would whisper to him. As long as he was in the woods, he was not alone.

  The wind picked up throughout the day, breaking garden fences and felling roadside trees. Roof tiles clattered downward, smashing as recycling tubs took trips across pavements. Those were the least of Hinton Hollow’s problems.

  By the time my sinister tempest reached the middle of the woods, swaying the branches above the boot of that hatchback, the gentle murmurs had transformed into shrieks in Oz’s ears and he would know he had to get out of that car.

  NOTHING STABLE ABOUT IT

  She’d thought it was a heart attack when her chest tightened and, as she lay on the floor, her head propped up by a pile of unwanted baby garments, she imagined it might be the end. She’d been working so hard. And she was old. Too old, maybe. She had always believed that slowing down would have been the thing that killed her.

  When the pain moved into her right arm, she almost let go. Mrs Beaufort seemed to remember something about a pain in your arm when you have a heart attack. But perhaps it had been the left arm. In any case, she couldn’t die. Not there. Not then with a customer in the shop. A new mother, too, for crying out loud.

  Somehow, I always felt like she could see me.

  She was the only one.

  Her skull started aching, her neck stiffened and her jaw may have tightened – though that may have been a possible symptom that never actually occurred, she was just recalling some of the questions from the paramedics. Or was it the doctor? She wasn’t quite herself yet. Maybe she never would be again; the darkness she feared was just outside the door to her ward. And I wanted her different.

  THINGS I LIKE AND THINGS I DO NOT LIKE

  I like the children.

  I like music.

  I do not like Mrs Beaufort.

  The fear of her own mortality had come second to the fear of scaring poor Katy Childs to death. That was when she called on the strength of the Lord to keep her eyes open.

  REASONS PEOPLE TURN TO THE LORD

  The comfort of having faith, something to believe in.

  Familial pressure.

  Having a sense of place, like you belong.

  Loneliness.

  Desperation.

  Father Salis had been the first to visit. In truth, he expected to see old Mrs Beaufort for the final time. His eyes were red and sore when he arrived, but he covered it well. She could tell he’d been upset, of course. She knew everything about everyone, sometimes before they even knew themselves. She’d made quite the habit of predicting pregnancies and she had a nose for matrimonial unrest.

  Mrs Beaufort explained to Father Salis that the Lord had carried her from the moment her head hit the folded baby-grow – aged three to six months – and the reverend had ad-libbed that he still had much work for her to do. Father Salis pushed his prepared deathbed speech to the back of his mind for use at another time.

  It wasn’t a heart attack that she suffered.

  ‘Then what was it, doctor?’ she asked, slightly uncomfortable that she did not know his name. She knew everybody’s name. She had only ever visited her local physician, Dr Green, this was a very rare trip to the hospital for Mrs Beaufort. She had only been a handful of times since her birth over eighty years before.

  ‘Stable angina.’

  Mrs Beaufort let out an involuntary snort as she laughed.

  ‘Stable? There was nothing stable about it, I’ll tell you.’

  That reaction was me.

  The doctor, a young – too young in Mrs Beaufort’s mind – Pakistani man smiled at his patient, flexing his bedside-manner muscles. Ordinarily, Mrs Beaufort would have smiled back, instead, she eyeballed him as though he’d just asked her how many men she’d slept with. It switched him immediately into clinical professionalism.

  ‘I’m sorry. Yes. Stable simply means that it can be controlled a little easier. You are not in a lot of danger but an attack could flare up if you are overworked or find yourself under stress.’

  ‘I run a shop in Hinton Hollow, Doctor…’

  ‘Choudary.’

  ‘I run a shop, Doctor Choudary. And a little boy has been killed in my town.’

  Father Salis had informed her of the news she had missed while she had been in hospital overnight. He hadn’t wanted to but Mrs Beaufort could be very persuasive when she wanted to be.

  ‘I’m sorry. I heard about that. But that is exactly the kind of thing you cannot concern yourself with while you recuperate, Mrs Beaufort.’ He was flustered by the old woman’s strength of character but mindful of the message he had to deliver.

  ‘But I am concerned, Mr Choudary.’ She deliberately replaced the word doctor.

  ‘Yes. Of course you are. You just need to be mindful of your activity. You are in excellent health for a person of your years. You are not overweight and your smoking habits were limited to a very short time in your thirties.’ Mrs Beaufort balked at this comment, embarrassed. It was an era when cigarettes were as normal as drinking milkshakes but she somehow felt ashamed of her weakness.

  OTHER WEAKNESSES OF MRS BEAUFORT

  Picking up people on grammar mistakes.

  Young, red-haired women.

  Ice cream with evaporated milk.

  Wartime encounters with US soldiers.

  RD’s hands.

  ‘So, if I keep working and worrying, it will happen again? Am I supposed to sit on the couch and watch television while my brain turns to liquid?’ She pushed herself into an upright, seated position, strong enough not to rely on the mound of pillows behind her back.

  ‘No, Mrs Beaufort. I’m saying that overworking can trigger another angina attack, and they’re not pleasant, as I’m sure you agree.’

  She nodded.

  He explained that he was prescribing her glyceryl trinitrate. Should she experience any of the symptoms of an attack, she should take her medication. It would ease the pain within minutes.

  ‘You can take it as a preventative measure should you know that you are about to embark on an activity that may be strenuous, but that does not mean you can take it every day in order to work as hard as you do now.’ The doctor was slightly condescending with this final piece of advice. He knew there was a risk of offending an elderly lady, but he felt the message needed to get across.

  He informed her that she was now free to leave but that he would advise that she stay for an extra day of rest. Then he left, walking straight through the darkness of the doorway, I never even touched him. Not one bit rubbed off on Doctor Choudary. But I wasn’t there for him. I was waiting for the old lady who knew everybody in town. The friendly grandmother figure who people could turn to with their problems, including the local reverend. It was the sweet, gentle mother of Hinton Hollow. The one pressing her cold, bony finger repeatedly against the red button that would call a nurse. That was who I wanted.

  She didn’t fool me.

  I grabbed her by the hand and led her.

  ‘Yes, Mrs Beaufort. How can I help? You know, you only need to press the button once…’ Mrs Beaufort rolled her eyes as the nurse reached behind her bed to fiddle with a button that would reset the call.

  ‘I need to make a phone call. I’m leaving this godforsaken place.’

  She’d only been wheeled into the ward on
the afternoon of that first day, it was day three when she hit her buzzer over and over. That wasn’t long. Certainly not enough time for the doctors, nurses, orderlies or other patients to know and understand that the woman in room six, the one with the hardened, narrowing arteries was no longer Mrs Beaufort.

  PARISH RELOCATION

  Father Salis was safe. There would be no intervention from me.

  I would not change him.

  THERE ARE TWO RULES

  Leave the kids alone. They start off good.

  Leave the priests alone.

  They lock up too much inside.

  Another way in which evil presents itself is the dog collar. See also: Catholic guilt and parish relocation.

  From the beginning, I have not been able to control the effects of my touch. I can tease out your inner turmoil by latching on to your hidden truths, but I cannot decide how your own personal evil will manifest itself.

  There is a certain stigma surrounding this pillar of the Christian community. It comes from somewhere real. It comes from somewhere dark. It comes from somewhere that has been hidden and moved around and obfuscated in order to protect the name of the church.

  It has not come from me.

  I leave the priests alone.

  One thing I have learned from watching people over time is that taking something away from them leaves them yearning. That thing missing from their lives is the thing they search for when I grab hold of their insecurities. Abstinence often leads to promiscuity or infidelity or inviting a prepubescent choirboy to sample a glass of the sacramental wine before telling him that God wants him to swallow your poison.

  These priests, these abstainers, they carry some of the worst things inside of them. And that evil often gets aimed at children.

  I like the kids.