“It's over, Johnny. Time to go home,” Alex said as calmly as he could.
“No fuckin' way, pal. No way. Unh-hunh. No way. You stay right here or I'll rip your fuckin' bollocks off, pal.”
The quality of light filtering through shrank back as a cloud passed over the sun, the crazy leaf-shadow patterns merging to throw a dusky cloak over Johnny’s washed out, hate ravaged features. Nature’s effect was frighteningly chameleonic, the ease with which he melted into the foliage, right up to the fringe of invisibility.
“No, Johnny.”
“Fuck you, mate,” Johnny spat, back-handing Alex across the face with enough of the fury he felt burning him up from the inside out to leave angry red indentations in the shape of his stunted fingers.
Alex took it without flinching.
“Enough, Johnny. Come on, before we can't ever go back down there. We can't live like this. Not like animals.”
“Fuck you, man. . . Fuck you. I ain't no animal. No. . . No. I'm not going back there. You can't make me. No one can make me doing anything. Not if I don't want to. No way. They just want to get me. They don't care. They set me up. Beckett, that fuckin’ bastard son of a bitch. He finished the kid off then told the pigs it was me. Bastard’s set me up. Fuckin’ bastard wants to see me hang. You want to see me hang, huh? You want that? Well, YOU WANT THAT?” Johnny had him by the scruff of the neck and was shaking Alex as if he really and truly thought he could make the words he wanted to hear rattle out between Alex's clenched teeth.
The woman had stopped and was looking about as if she’d heard Johnny’s outburst, but then she was on her way again, satisfied the words she must have thought she heard were nothing more dangerous or revealing than the multitude of sins carried with the sighs of the wind.
“You know I don't, Johnny. We were friends once, weren't we? I can still remember the good times we had mucking about up here, but I just can't carry on like this. They've sent dogs for Christ sake. They're serious about finding us. They aren't just gonna forget we came up here. And we haven't got anywhere to run that’s going to be any better, or safer, than here.”
“We can stay here, Alex,” Johnny protested, a nervous twitch to his lip betraying his own desperate need to believe his own assurances. 'Then when it cools down a bit we can head up the coast. Whitley, Blyth, maybe even Seaton Sluice. We can work the caravan parks and the amusements. It'll be fuckin' sound, just the two of us, yeah?”
Alex couldn't have explained, even to himself, why he lied, but lie he did, as much to himself as to Johnny, and as much for his own benefit. “Yeah, maybe we could.”
Johnny grasped his half-hearted maybe with both hands. “Yeah, yeah. It'd be fuckin’ wild, man. Just you and me, sword brothers. We could cruise the beaches for pretty birds to pluck. . . Fuck it, we could share ‘em. You and me, nothing's too good for us, man. Shit, now you're in I'll show you my magic watch. Still got it, kept it ever since we were kids. Remember. We both had them, but yours didn't work so you threw it away. I've still got mine, and it works,” he said it like he was letting Alex in on some great secret, which, to some closed off part of his heroin-addled psyche, was exactly what he was doing.
Alex didn't have the faintest idea what Johnny was trying to let him in on. He couldn't remember ever throwing a real watch away, not after how long it took to convince his folks to buy him his first plain-faced Timex.
Johnny stared at him, willing Alex to remember, but when he wouldn’t, made as if to tap out the special input code on his wrist watch, where the keypad would have been. Still drawing a blank, he said: “The Omega Man?”
The Omega Man?
The Omega Man? What the hell. . ?
Ben Murphy, he remembered the name vaguely. Jesus Christ, Alex realized suddenly, he's still got the plastic watch and he thinks he can make himself invisible. . .
“'Where is it?”
“In my pack,” Johnny smiled indulgently. “Want me to fetch it?”
Alex looked down the slope, to the ever-diminishing outline of Kristy French, and then up again at Ben Shelton and Daniel Tanner, knowing that he had no realistic choice other than to tell Johnny to go and fetch the plastic toy from the cave, turn Judas himself, and do a runner while Johnny was away.
“Yeah,” he said, already picking a covered path for his flight between tree and scree, boulders and bracken, to the farm buildings and down to face the music.
* * * * *
Righteous fire burned, engulfing Todd Devlin. A headache, already a dull nagging sensation extending from the top of his skull down to the tip of his chin and all across his face, chipped away at him.
It wasn't an unpleasant burning this holy fire, but it made him remember or think of chocolate men, he couldn’t reason which; put them in the microwave and they melt, as he was, from the inside out. He was disorientated, dizzy. Some part of him, dislocated from the black hole that was his essence, his rage, was aware of his fists sledge-hammering into Brent Richards’ face, and his bloodied knuckles reshaping the doctors bone structure as easily and effectively as if it were constructed from sausages of plasticise beneath a Papier Mache mask.
And it was done in silence on his side.
Richards, doubled up, sank to his knees, coughing blood. Devlin hammered a punch into his face, mashing the cartilage beneath his nose. Blood was streaming from gashes above and below his eyes, and where Devlin's fists had ripped the flesh off the inside of his lips against his salesman's tombstone teeth.
The rage was on him, undeniable, irresistible, backing his clenched fists up with the steel of vengeance and madness. And all he could see, eyes open or closed, was that child bleeding between her legs as Scott Jordan carried her down the stairs from Richards’ bedroom.
He grabbed Richards by the hair, dragged him forward off his knees and started cracking his head off against the corner of the desk again and again.
“Can't. . . I can't. . .” Richards blubbered, a whimper.
Devlin yanked him back, tugged him around and bounced his head off the wall. For the first three cracks the bones sounded hard and solid.
On the forth, it started to soften, wetness seeping into the cracks.
* * * * *
“. . . SEE!”
* * * * *
Devlin staggered away from the wall, breathing hard and exhilarated, passing Andy McKenna and giving him a wide berth.
McKenna searched his face, his own looking vaguely green in the jaundiced indoor light. Devlin ignored the Detective Sergeant and kept on walking, through the doors and through the cloakroom.
“Devlin!” McKenna yelled after him, rushing to catch up. “What the hell did you do to him?”
“Nothing he didn't deserve,” Devlin assured him.
“Nothing?”
“Absolutely.”
“Jesus. . . What did he say?”
“You don't want to know.”
“Tell me.”
“Okay. He likes fucking little girls. They're tight enough for his pencil dick to do the business,” Devlin replied, off hand and. dismissing McKenna, he strode out into the playground ignoring the press of photographers and journalists and their barrage of unintelligible questions.
He was hot, burning up and frightened. The frenzy, once he had understood it for what it was, was surprisingly cool, focused and directed on something as damned near to defenceless as he had ever crossed. Done with a clear head and now he needed a drink, badly.
- 49 -
Robin Stone was an anomaly. Five foot five, a red head in well cut Levi's and a plain black polo neck that accentuated as well as it complimented her slight frame so she appeared most definitely feminine. Certainly not the run of the mill student activist in sexually ambiguous dungarees and braided, greasy hair. Her eye make-up had run into a damp watercolour collage of grey-black kohl where she had been crying.
She sat alone, wrapped in a shawl of solitude and loneliness that persisted despite the proximity of children and parents at play. Broken up
bread chunks scattered in loose circles around her feet, being studiously ignored by the shuffling parade of ducks, had succeeded in drawing the unwanted attentions of a scraggy mongrel. The mutt was all stuck out ribs and sunken hollows of malnutrition. They made a poignant picture, the sad girl in the park and the starving dog at her feet, fleeting that it was. With a cock of its hind leg the mongrel showed exactly what it thought of starch and pre-digested wheat germ.
“Jason. . ?” Robin asked, already knowing the worst but looking to Kristy for a denial she knew wasn't coming. She wasn't looking at Kristy when she spoke. Two little girls ran by, racing, screaming their excitement, their screams like sweet music weighed down by the sombre atmosphere immediately present between the two women and radiating out across the water in waves. One of the girls broke away from the chase to steal a few chunks of bread to force-feed the ducks, everything becoming a pantomime to keep Robin’s eyes busy and give her the excuse she needed not to look Kristy’s way.
Oblivious, boys were dancing and splashing, full of the joys of summer. The water in Leazes Lake was so beautiful, deep blue glitter sprinkled with the sun.
“He was killed this morning.”
A wino, gaudy in his Hawaiian palm-print shirt, shuffled their way, and then on, leaving the air momentarily tainted with his unpleasantly rancid tang.
“Oh. . .” It was little more than a shaky exhalation, but that in itself said more than words in a situation where words would so obviously only dilute the full and overpowering essence of emotion behind them. Still, and irrationally, it left Kristy feeling angry all the same.
“I realise this must be a shock, but I haven't got the time for the preliminaries. We need to talk. Can we go somewhere?”
Robin Stone shook her head, massaging her right temple then squeezing the bridge of her nose. “Why not here? Is it something you'd rather not risk too many people hearing by accident? Is that it?”
Kristy, her eyes still stinging from tears and her already tenuous composure smarting from the girl’s quick, all be it shrewd judgement, flicked a glance to left and right and then straight ahead, trying to see everywhere there was to see all at once and not really seeing anywhere. The park was full of groups, families, friends, the occasional couple, and the few wandering souls inevitably drawn to the powerful, almost magnetic, attractor of those groups at play together, and though they were still very much alone, they appeared content to be so. And she took a guess: “For one thing, I can see three of your friends doing their damnedest to play inconspicuous, and I wouldn't bet against there being others who aren't quite so terrible at mingling,” Kristy looked hard at Robin, biting her bottom lip thoughtfully before adding, “at least I hope they are your friends.”
Robin raised an eyebrow.
“Okay. C'mon then, lady. Let’s go back to my place. We can talk on the way.”
* * * * *
So they walked, and they talked. Down past the towering spotlights and terraces of St James Park and into the sordid no man’s land between the West End and the North Side where the university had converted row upon row of three-story terraces into halls for the more affluent members of its student body.
Robin rented out a room in the end terrace overlooking the back of the football ground. Kristy was getting used to taking part in one sided conversations of late, first Devlin and now Robin. The young Animal Rights girl wanted to know everything there was to know, and she wanted to know it yesterday. To that extent she was very much like Todd Devlin, but second time around Kristy was wise to a few more of the rules that went along with the game. Certain things she kept to herself, waiting for what she hoped would be the right moment to give voice to her worst and most natural fears. And they were not as alone as Kristy had hoped. Two men, both young, and possibly twins, both with the same look of bookish academia to their just-showered ringlets, pale complexions and tinted John Lennon glasses, hunched over cups of something hot and talking quietly, smiled at her when Robin finished her brief, muttered introduction but didn't move to leave them as Kristy half hoped they would.
A strange collection of pictures and posters made up for the damp and peeling wallpaper, The Jesus And Mary Chain, Jesus Jones, The Cure, Debbie Harry, and the ever-present Pink Floyd's The Wall and Dark Side Of The Moon that Kristy remembered well from her own days as a student, overlapping Ban Vivisection, Ban Animal Testing Now and One World, One Colour posters.
Robin offered her a coffee, or something stronger. She took the offered bottle of Pils and then took a seat amongst the clutter of old newspapers, set text books and magazines, drinking deeply.
Kristy stared down at the bottle, her face not hiding her anxiety. The peculiar combination of good spirits and anger entirely gone. Responsibilities and duties she didn't fully understand weighed heavily on her, the emotional baggage of self-doubt and uncertainty fracturing the mask of calm optimism she had told herself she was going to wear for this meeting.
“God, give me strength,” she murmured.
Robin turned to look at her. “I think we're getting a little bit out of God's depth here, sister.”
Kristy almost smiled at that, the thought of the Old Man with his white beard drowning in a vat of quickening tar, coming to mind from nowhere. “And the Devil's for that matter,” she amended.
Settling herself down on the arm of the couch, Robin nodded her agreement, and offered a second nod of encouragement for Kristy to finish re-capping the few actual (and undisputable) facts she knew about Brent Richards, assuring her that Nev and Gary, the two brothers still engrossed in their stream wreathing mugs, had every right as much to hear what Kristy had to say as she herself had.
Kristy was less than sure, but couldn't see what else she could do under the circumstances. She picked up talking about the photographs, fanning them out on the table, picking out the one shot of the laboratory rats with their razored scalps and shattered spines piled in the bin.
“Bastard,” Robin growled, her brow furrowing angrily. She pushed the offending photograph away. Nev leaned in on elbows, attentive. A four-inch scar sliced out a 'V' down his right cheek, a blush of harsher pink where the scar tissue hadn't healed fully. A bottle, Kristy surmised, looking at the wound and the way it stretched down from his temple and curved into his mouth. It made his already intense smile rise up the side of his face, strange beneath his blue shades.
“It certainly looks like this guy is dabbling in things better left alone, and I see where we could come in. But why get involved lady?” The last, the question, was put mildly enough, but Kristy had no illusions. It was as much a trick as the rest of it. The wrong answer now and it would all be for nothing; Jason, Judith Kenyon, Frank Rogan, Monk Sanders and the others she didn't know about. The roll call was growing at an alarming rate. And what for?
It wasn't something she had consciously been thinking about, more a germ that had spent the last fifteen hours festering at the back of her mind.
She leaned forward, her fingers interlocking, thumbs wanting to turn circles on each other, but kept them in check. “Because,” and here Kristy paused, not sure she should go on after all. Not sure she should give voice to the darker side of her imaginings. But she said the worst, regardless. “With or without you, I'm going to kill him.”
There was a heartbeat where the tick of the clock was all, then:
“I think you're crazy, lady.” From Nev. Cracking his knuckles one by one, he shook his head. Kristy couldn't read the intent of his slowly spreading knife-slice smile.
Robin nodded her agreement. Gary frowned, considering. Immersed in dark, mazy thoughts, his smile was a pained one. Even without the benefit of his brother's scar, it seemed somehow grim. Forbidding. Kristy shrugged wearily. Her face equally grave. ”And there's the truth to it. Now I suppose you'll be calling the police. No, maybe not them. The men in the white jackets to take me away?”
Nev smiled with three-quarters of his face. Spread his hands wide, almost as if he were bearing some special, inner sa
nctity. Making an exception on her behalf and trying to convince her it was against the norm. “Not just yet. But maybe later.” Something else was there in his smile; something she had seen before, and recently; something that set her to thinking about Todd Devlin. Dangerous eyes. “Right now I think we need to get you a pen and paper. You've got some drawing to do if we are going to pay a visit to this health farm of yours.”
* * * * *
She drew two very rough maps with the stub of a pencil Robin had found jammed down between the cushions of the settee; one of the roads leading to the grounds of Havendene, pin-pointing the gateways, the lake and the pagoda; the other an amalgam of memory and guess work giving a very general guide to the layout of the clinic itself. Where Richards' office was in relation to the main doors. Where Jason had found the rats in the bin around the back, and the few other details she thought she could remember.
She wasn't happy with either, but supposed they would be enough to get someone there, sooner or later, and she wasn't entirely sure she could do any better, even given the luxury of more time, so they would have to suffice.
There was undeniable electricity in the air. A buzz. Robin and Gary were suddenly taking her seriously. Kristy couldn't pin down the moment when their attitudes had changed, only that they had, and that the shift had been dramatic. Suddenly both of them were treating Jason’s photographs and her confused testimony as the opening brief for their hastily convened Council of War.
There was a strange moment when Nev asked if Kirsty had a light and all she could think of was Jason's favourite gag; when he'd pull a car-lighter from his pocket and say, “Sure, if you've got a car,” but even that passed.
Telephone calls were made, one to Claude Gibb Halls across the city, aimed at bringing in the Student Activist’s equivalent of the Securitate, another aimed at summoning reinforcements from the local Hunt Saboteurs; and maybe in that way it was becoming a Council of War, demarcation lines being drawn out.
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