Blood Crazy

by Simon Clark

  My parents are close behind me now. I don’t know why they hate me. The world has gone mad. I understand that. But I can’t understand why it’s happened to mum and dad. The truth just won’t sink into my head. All I can do is run and run. I’ll find a place where they’ll never find me. An island. I’ll live there like Robinson Crusoe.

  In the corner of the barn lay a skeleton picked shiny white by rats. In a detached way I noticed his quartz battery watch still kept perfect time. The second hand swept round and round, ticking away the seconds for its dead owner.

  I dropped the diary by the skeleton.

  ‘Mark … You didn’t run fast enough, old son.’

  The next day I was back on the road by, according to Mark Woodley’s watch, 7.09.

  I found a motorway and headed north. Although flurries of snow blew across the empty lanes there was no reason why I shouldn’t be pulling up in front of the hotel in Eskdale by suppertime.

  Then I came to the line that stretched along the central reservation as far as I could see. I drove along them for three miles before actually registering what they were.

  I slowed down. Every ten yards a wooden frame in the shape of a letter Y and six feet tall had been set in the turf. To each frame someone had been nailed.

  This was crucifixion on a scale the world had never seen before. I rode past the nailed bodies and inside I felt nothing. All I wanted was to get home and see that Sarah was safe. This was just another atrocity. No worse than the latest … or probably the next.

  I had gone another mile when I saw the flash of gold ahead. I slowed down to a crawl. The material of the clothing of one of the corpses was shiny.

  I stopped alongside the body.

  ‘Trousers … I’ll get the bastards for you. Believe me, I will.’

  The blood on his dead face was dry; his hands nailed to the top of the two prongs on the Y-shaped frame were blue.

  Then a finger moved.

  ‘Trousers?’

  With an effort so huge it hurt me to watch, he lifted his head to look at me. There was no expression on his face as his eyes fixed on mine.

  ‘Jesus … I’ll get you down, Trousers. You’ll be all right.’

  He shook his head. Again the movement was painful to watch. I looked down at his feet.

  Whichever bastard Creosote had nailed him there had also removed his feet. Leaving him with the choice of hanging by the nails through his hands, or bearing the weight on his two frozen ankle stumps.

  He watched me through the crust of blood.

  ‘I’ll do it, son. You know I will.’

  Slowly he turned his head to one side. I slipped the rifle off my shoulder. At first I was shaking so much I could not aim properly. Then I took a deep breath. The shaking stopped. I squeezed the trigger.

  The birds flew up from their feeding grounds at the sound of the shot. I fired again. Then again.

  After I made sure his hurting had ended I rode off the motorway at the next exit.

  I rode slowly along the silted-up roads, the back tyre sliding at every bend.

  I was perhaps seventy miles from home when I saw the mountains rising up ahead of me to merge with the cloud. I pushed on faster hoping to cross them before dark.

  But I should have known HOPE was an animal in danger of extinction now. Before I even reached the foothills the bike’s motor gave an almighty bang and seized.

  It didn’t take me long to discover the piston had cracked. I shouldered the rifle and backpack and began to walk.

  Ahead the mountains looked bleak. The wind cut through you like a blade. Then the snow flurries became a blizzard.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  This Cold Will Kill Me

  The road took me up the mountainside. I’d never been as cold as this. Christ, it was a supernatural cold that felt as if it blew in through my chest, punching through blood and lungs and heart like ice nails, then tore out through my back.

  I crunched on through the snow.

  Every so often I’d stop to scrape snow off a road sign so I’d know I was still heading in the direction of home. Would I be glad to see Sarah. Thoughts of snuggling up to her beneath the covers warmed me. It kept me going.

  Ahead the road ran up the mountainside but it would be suicide to follow it now. I’d have to find shelter for the night otherwise the cold would kill me. I took a fork to the left which ran steeply downhill toward a lake in the valley bottom. There’d be a house or barn there.

  At least going downhill was easier. I even ran for a while to stamp the blood round faster through my body.

  I reached the edge of the lake and began to follow the shoreline road. The lake itself was massive, stretching away into the distance like an inland sea.

  Here and there yachts wallowed cock-eyedly in the water where they had been abandoned all those months ago.

  After a while, the road took me into a forest. At least it was more sheltered from the wind there. The snow fell gently like feathers to the ground.

  It grew darker. Another hour of daylight left. I had to find shelter. Already my feet were numb and lights began to twitch in front of my eyes.

  ‘One day you’ll do something right, Nick Aten …’ I bollocked myself to keep awake. ‘You screwed up in Eskdale, you screwed up in Leyburn … if you’d got half a brain you could have kept Sheila alive … you could have kept the bloody lot alive … Doc said they thought you were the bloody messiah sent to save them. Now, that’s a joke. You let them die, Aten … You could have saved them … You could, you stupid shitter, you could …’ I was trying to feel pain, remorse, guilt … anything. Because at that moment I only felt a numbness icing its way into every part of my body.

  ‘Could have done it. Could’ve built them a balloon … could’ve floated them out. Cabbage brain, Aten … Cabbage brain …’

  How I did it I don’t know but I found myself deep in the forest. Somewhere I’d lost the road in the snow.

  ‘So you’re taking the easy way out, Aten. You’re going to lose yourself, then you’re going to curl up in the snow and die … Ha, bleeding ha! Coward. You’ve found a way to escape the truth at last.’

  And what is the truth, Nick?

  ‘Simple, St Dave Christ Almighty Middleton of Doncaster … I should have listened to you – done what you said. I should have stayed in Eskdale and run the place myself. There, I’ve said it, so you can take that Holy Joe smile of your face or I’ll—’

  I lunged at the face with its sincere smile … My hands hit a tree. I looked round, panting. ‘Hang on, Nick, old son … You’re coming apart at the seams.’

  Cutting down to the water’s edge, I headed along the shore. I was tripping over my feet now, like a drunk trying to make his way home.

  Someone was swimming in the lake. Cold in there, Trousers. Best wait till Spring at least. Cold mountain water … I shook my head and saw the swimmer was a branch floating by.

  I walked on through a world that had lost all its warmth and colour to become black and white. White mountains, black trees, white ground, black water …

  Going to die, Aten … Maybe this is best … feel nothing no more …

  ‘Hello. Are you lost? Hello? Can you hear me?’

  Standing in front of me on the beach were two figures, wrapped like Arctic explorers.

  The tall one said to the other, ‘Timothy, put the bow down and help me get him to the boat.’

  The shorter one, a chubby mongoloid boy of about sixteen, with a concerned look on his pink face, grabbed me by the arm and all but carried me down the beach to sit me in the back of a rowing boat. Then he and the thin one rowed us out into the lake.

  I sat there like the ice man of Alaska. My brain had stopped working, so at that point there seemed nothing bizarre about riding in a boat across a five-mile-wide lake in the middle of a blizzard.

  Eventually, I could see an object ahead, floating on the water. Just a collection of lumps. Nothing recognizable. The two rowed hard toward it.

 
We were nearly alongside it before I realised it was a group of huge steel barges, the kind they use to shift coal or rocks. They tied up alongside a low platform, then the mongoloid boy lifted me out.

  Suddenly there were young kids milling about, the thin kid was giving orders in a low voice, and I was being pushed up a set of steps into an enclosed passageway.

  With a clutch of excited kids pulling me by the arms and coat, they took me through a doorway into a room. I stood there blinking in the brilliant light from neon strips in the ceiling.

  ‘Josie, switch on the fire. Yes … On full. Good girl. Here you are, friend, sit down.’

  I sat down in front of a three-bar electric fire and stared blankly at the glowing elements.

  It seemed distant but in the room there was a lot of excited movement as children pulled off my coat, gloves, boots.

  ‘Put his rifle somewhere safe … Carefully now. That’s right … In the cupboard. You’d better lock it and give me the key … Now, something warm to eat.’

  A girl of around seventeen put down the sewing she’d been working on. ‘I’ll get it. There’s hot soup in the galley.’

  I sat there in the armchair, feasting on the heat beating out from the fire, and feeling my feet and hands hurting as they thawed. More than once I wondered if I was dreaming all this, and that I was really lying unconscious in a snowdrift. But as I looked round at the paintings on the walls I reckoned even my brain couldn’t come up with those.

  Adam, that was the name of the thin one, was open and friendly. After I’d changed my clothes and returned to the lounge, he told me about themselves. ‘We’re a small community. Thirty-eight in all. At first we lived in a hotel overlooking the lake but we had too much trouble from the afflicted people so I was told to collect the barges from the quarry at the far end of the lake, moor them here as far from the banks as possible and build houses inside of them.’

  ‘You were told?’

  ‘Yes. The Lord spoke to me. He told me how to keep these children safe from harm.’

  I just nodded. So he was a religious nut but who cares? They’d got somewhere bright and warm, and for me that was all that mattered.

  ‘I was seventeen when it happened,’ he said, putting his long fingers together like he was praying, ‘I worked at the monastery in the next valley. You see, I was too young to become a monk but I had already decided to devote my life to God … It was His will that the brothers and Father Abbot became sick. So I went out and gathered all the children I could find. Eventually I moved them here to the Ark.’

  Sitting on the carpet looking up at Adam was virtually the entire population of his community. With the exception of the mongoloid boy, the girl who’d brought me the soup and a pair of Oriental girls, the rest were under the age of eleven.

  Adam continued speaking in his soft monk’s voice. The children gazed up at him in adoration. ‘The Lord instructed me. He showed me where there are generators on the shore that are powered by water from mountain streams, and how to run the cable out here so we have electricity to warm us and cook our meals.’

  While we talked I found my eyes being drawn back to the paintings hanging from the wall. They looked like primitive cave paintings showing stretched-out men and women building houses, farming, sitting with children on their knees listening to musicians playing flutes. On the end wall was a painting running from ceiling to floor showing a tall man in that stretched-out style with his arms raised in praise to the sun rising above a mountain. The mountain looked like the one I nearly died on. The young man looked like Adam.

  ‘Interesting paintings,’ I said. ‘Who’s the artist?’

  ‘That’s our Bernadette.’ He smiled at the seventeen-year-old girl who sat sewing on the sofa. She pushed back her short dark hair and smiled shyly.

  Adam said, ‘She paints what she dreams. And I believe the dreams are sent to her by the Lord. These paintings are very special to us. They are signs from Him for all of us to see. They show us images of ourselves in this Ark; and of how we will live in the future.’

  I didn’t go for this The-Lord-Will-Show-Us-The-Way business but these kids had certainly got themselves a nice place to live. And it was safe. The Creosotes were showing single-minded determination in destroying their young, but I couldn’t see how they could get their paws on this place.

  Adam talked. I politely listened. After all, I was their guest so it seemed a way of paying for my lodgings to listen to his God-given plans.

  Adam was just describing how they were bringing in the sheep to fields nearer to the lake when I was hit by a fit of sneezing.

  ‘I think that long walk took its toll on you, Nick. Bernadette, find something for Nick’s cold, will you, please?’

  Obediently she put down her sewing and disappeared from the lounge.

  ‘You look exhausted, Nick. And these days we have to be more careful of coughs and sneezes. You’d best spend a couple of days in bed.’

  ‘Thanks, that’s kind of you. But I need to be moving on in the morning. I have to get back home. There’s a community of people in a lot of danger. Only they don’t know it yet.’

  ‘If you must, you must, Nick. At least get a good night’s rest. You’ll have a room of your own and tomorrow we’ll send you off after a good breakfast with our prayers.’

  ‘Eh … thank you, Adam.’ Awkwardly I smiled at the clean faces looking up at me like I was the Bishop of Bangor. ‘Thank you.’

  Bernadette came back with a bottle of grey liquid and a spoon. I had hoped the something for my throat would have been a mugful of brandy. This, which she spooned into my mouth, tasted of cough sweets and kerosene.

  I was then shown my bedroom, very cozy with sheepskin rugs on the floor and Bernadette’s wacko pictures on the wall. I turned to say goodnight to Adam and saw all the children cramming into the corridor to watch me.

  ‘Goodnight.’

  ‘Goodnight, Nick,’ they said in chorus.

  I shut the door, peeled off my clothes and hauled myself into bed. The comfort and warmth were exquisite. For a while I tried to stay awake and work out how the Ark was composed. Inter-connecting Portacabins inside the barges, I guessed. Certainly a neat trick with the waterpowered generators, though. Hats off to Adam with his bucketsful of divine inspiration.

  I yawned. Suddenly I felt so tired I ached, as if Slatter had done a clog dance all over me in his pit boots. The old monster Slatter. What was he doing now? With any luck someone would have shot him, or maybe he’d ended up Carrying The Can.

  I dreamt that night Sarah made love to me. I lay on my back and looked up to see her there in the gloom, her long blonde hair trailing forward over her face to brush against my chest.

  ‘It’s all right, Nick. Everything’s all right. Lie still … Don’t try to move … ah … That’s it … Oh! That is perfect.’

  A confused dream. I only remember fragments. Sarah. Her long hair. Behind her the wacko pictures of long men on the wall. Then the burning rush that comes bursting and sparkling through your body.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  This Is Where We Start to Get Answers

  The days that followed were, in the main, a blur. Bernadette thought I had some kind of infection or ’flu. I was weak, feverish. Nights I would soak the sheets with sweat and dream that Sarah made love to me. In the near darkness I would see her silhouette on top of me, her long hair flowing down across her breasts.

  During the day I would take short walks around the decks.

  Children fished from the platform. They’d sing as they cast out the lines. One morning they were singing carols.

  ‘Only ten days until Christmas,’ a boy told me cheerfully. ‘Adam says we can have a tree and decorations and things.’

  Christmas? I leaned against the railing. Hell, how long was it since my parents took me from Eskdale? Eight weeks? I needed to get back. And now.

  All I wanted was to get to the shore, then I could hit the road again. Maybe I’d find a car. With a car I’d be
back in a day. If I walked it’d take a week.

  Adam walked by. He wore jeans and a lumberjack shirt but he should have worn a monk’s habit. ‘Don’t overdo it, Nick. You’re still unwell.’

  ‘I feel fine,’ I lied. ‘Have you a car? Or a truck?’

  ‘No. In a dream the Lord told me not to use them. Too noisy. We don’t do anything that will bring attention to ourselves. We light no fires that would make smoke. By night the windows are shuttered so no one will see the lights across the lake. When we hunt we use bows so there are no gunshots. Come on, friend. Inside where it’s warm. I’ll ask Bernadette to bring you tea.’

  ‘Yes … Oh, that’s it. Nick. Keep it there, keep it there, I-ah … Oh, yes. Yes …’

  Sarah came in the dream again. Swaying backwards and forward above me. In the dark all I could see was the shape of her head and her swaying hair.

  ‘Still not feeling any better?’ Bernadette spooned more medicine into my mouth.

  ‘I don’t feel ill … Just weak. I can hardly climb the stairs.’

  ‘Do you want me to ask Timothy to help you back to your room?’

  ‘No, thanks. I like it in the lounge … Are you still painting the pictures?’

  Smiling, she nodded. ‘Mmm … When God puts the dreams in my head.’

  She left singing. I wondered if she was a bit simple.

  I’d spend the day sitting, watching the Ark’s inhabitants. They all worked hard, even the youngest children. They were clean, obedient. When Adam spoke they listened with love and respect. Twice a day they held services and sang hymns.

  All I could do was sit there, hoping that tomorrow I would be fit enough to continue back to Eskdale.

  That night as I got ready for bed I saw something catch the light on one of the sheepskin rugs.

  My heart beat harder when I picked it up.

  As long as my arm, it was a hair. I put it against my dark jeans. There was no doubting it. It was blonde.

  I rubbed my face trying to get my sluggish brain in gear.

  The dreams I had. Sarah making love to me. Dreams can be funny, unsettling, erotic – but one thing they do not do is leave physical evidence behind. I wound the hair around a pencil and put it in the drawer.