by Kim Newman
When they were kids, Terry had enjoyed terrorizing Mr Keough’s tribe of cats, always dragging Teddy into it. Terry had especially liked letting off rook-scarers—the incredibly loud fireworks Dad used to see off field pests—in the road, and watching the animals whizz like little missiles. The main road was a battlefield for cats, and Mr Keough’s platoon had been whittled down by enemy tyres. Also, Teddy guessed, Allison had scored a few kills, passing her work off by leaving corpses where traffic would squash them. It was a van, though, that had done for the boys’ faithful pet, Doug Dog.
The cat was gone, but Teddy heard a whining that came from Mr Keough’s cottage. Teddy didn’t know what it was. It might have been an animal but it might have been human. It was high-pitched and feeble, desperate. He imagined something bigger than a cat, badly hurt. A large dog, crying and drooling. Or an old man, lying face down, making sounds in the back of his mouth, trying to be loud enough to be heard, but incapable of raising anything but a thin, reedy moan.
The light wasn’t on in Mr Keough’s kitchen. The whining wouldn’t stop. It was definitely inside the house. In cities—Teddy heard from his mum—pensioners often died alone, and weren’t found for days or weeks, not until the smell annoyed the neighbours enough. That wasn’t supposed to happen in the country, in a village where everyone knew each other, where everyone looked out for each other. Mum had a whole speech about cities and how heartless they were. It was supposed to stop Teddy thinking about moving away. In cities, you could be robbed and murdered by perfect strangers. In cities, old people were thrown on a scrapheap to rot. In cities, the air was thick with poison fumes. In the country, you could be robbed and murdered by kids you’d been to school with. And old people still died alone.
‘Mr Keough,’ he said, as loud as he dared. ‘Are youm all right?’
The whine caught itself and gurgled something, trying to make words. It was getting dark. Teddy edged around the cottage into Mr Keough’s small, walled-in back garden. There were neglected bowls by the back door, with congealed turds of catfood stuck to them. The concreted-over area smelled like a zoo toilet. By the door was a cat’s-piss-yellowing pile of the Western Gazette, as high as a bench, threatening to topple.
Teddy wished he had a gun like James’s. He ought to be holding it up like a Miami Vice copper, inching towards a door he would kick in. It was open a split, darkness beyond. Someone had spray-painted symbols on the door and the back windows. Mostly Jewish squiggles, incomprehensible. But the crude skull and crossbones were recognizable. The whine was coming in feeble yelps now, increasingly far apart, like someone gasping for breath.
‘Mr Keough? It’s Teddy Gilpin. Youm okay in there?’
The whine was strangled, cut off. He felt his heart stop. The whine began again, frustrated and angry. He breathed again. If it was Mr Keough, at least he was still alive. Teddy guessed how it might have happened. The other night, in the pub, while Mr Keough was waving his petition, he’d been red-faced and flustered, almost weeping with anger. He’d always had a short fuse, getting heated about the festival, or Terry’s stupid antics, or foreign wars. If old people got too steamed, their hearts packed in. Mr Keough could have gone home fuming after his scrap with Terry, and his heart could have burst on him, leaving him paralysed, helpless.
He pushed the door. A sweet, nasty smell seeped out of the cottage at him and he coughed. He stepped on the doormat, and something snapped. Nerves on edge, he ducked towards the floor, mat shooting out from under his daps. There was a thud and the sound of breaking glass. He fell face forwards, hands out to push the floor away. His wrists were slammed, but he wasn’t hurt.
What had happened? The door had snapped shut behind him, one of the window panels smashed outwards. Two small hatchets were embedded in the wood, attached to a three-pronged fork which was fixed to a spring in the ceiling. A third axe had come free and shot through the window.
Carefully, Teddy stood, trying not to touch anything. The tripwire or balance plate or whatever had been hooked to the doormat. The kitchen was a lot like Mrs Conway’s, only smaller and messier. It had that fried-food smell Teddy knew from his own mum’s chips-and-pies-and-fish-fingers repertoire. And there was another smell. He couldn’t hear the whining now. The cottage was quiet as a monk’s tomb.
A muscle in his thigh twitched. His heart spasmed, ready for a motion-sensitive anvil to fall on his head. He couldn’t stay here. He took a step towards the hallway. Nothing happened. Another step. The hallway was dark, and Teddy didn’t want to risk a light switch. But he also didn’t want to chance his way in the dark. There could be any number of traps hidden in the shadows, waiting to tear him apart.
He made out a switch by the hallway door. In the dark, it was a bump on the wall. On the filthy gas cooker was a heavy frying pan, a film of dust over thick grease. After making sure it wasn’t fixed to anything, Teddy picked up the pan. It wasn’t a gun but it was reassuringly weighty, and he was sure a thump with its heavy edge would leave a nasty wound.
Standing back from the doorway, Teddy worked the hall lights with the pan. The lights came on and nothing happened. Except Teddy could hear something trickling, like sand in an hourglass. He held still, waiting, frying pan in a two-handed grip. Then, in the hall, there was a small explosion. And another and, simultaneously, three or four more.
Teddy ducked back into the kitchen, pan up in front of his face.
The noise was the worst thing. It was as if his ears had been clapped by iron hands. It wasn’t possible no one outside the house had heard. But they hadn’t. Teddy waited three or four minutes, shaking the echo of the explosions out of his head. Nobody came. He recognized the chemical smell of the smoke that curled out of the hallway.
‘Rook-scarers,’ he breathed.
He gingerly stepped into the hall, and found the exploded cardboard packet by the stairs. He couldn’t see how they’d been rigged, but one had triggered the others. There was a sooty flash on the wall and the carpet, but no flame.
The whine came again, a final, energies-gathered cry of pain. Hoping he’d come to the end of the tricks, Teddy went upstairs. The landing lights were on. At the top of the stairs, he found Mr Keough, face grey and soft, a splatter of bloody gruel beneath his head. He was stiff and unmoving, mouth open in a surprised zero. His shirt and trousers were open, showing a blue and tiny slug of a dick. The source of the smell Teddy had been sniffing, he had not been making the noise.
She was in the bedroom, fingers hooked into the blankets to keep her from drifting away. Speaking a language Teddy didn’t even recognize, she was barely there. He made out a brown and pretty face and the general shape of a woman, but she was a tattered phantom, lower body and limbs melting into a twist of sheets. There was pleading in her voice. Teddy felt sorry for the creature, whatever she was.
‘Do you want some water?’ he asked, offering the only thing he could think of.
She knew he was there but didn’t answer. Her eyes were solid dots in her indistinct face, burning spots of promise in a thinning mask. He supposed she was a ha’ant. She had haunted Mr Keough. Now he was gone there was nothing to keep her, but she didn’t want to leave. Almost for the first time today, he wasn’t scared. This thing could hardly do him harm. He was more worried about Allison or Terry. The ghost woman must have been beautiful when full. Her face moved like heavy curtains in a breeze, and he thought she looked a little like Jenny Steyning, with her quiet smile and long hair. As he had the thought, the ha’ant became a shade more substantial, lower body dividing into long legs. She wasn’t even wearing a white sheet. Teddy was embarrassed by her nakedness. As she came together, she became obviously female. She was as he had sometimes, in his suppressed thoughts, imagined Jenny must look without clothes.
There was no light in the bedroom, but she had a glow. Her mouth tried to make his name. Teddy shook his head, and she wasn’t so much like Jenny any more. She was a stranger, fast fading away. She pointed at him, and he saw her hand was a gun, a ghost-flesh weapon at the e
nd of her wrist, forefinger a barrel with sight, other fingers curled around like a trigger guard. She had the drop on him. Her face was washed away, just a pair of eyes and a smooth curve of silk like a harem girl’s mask.
‘Believe in me,’ she said, in English, in Jenny’s voice, begging, ‘believe…’
Mr Keough had died quickly, by violence. And this ha’ant who had lain in his bed was slowly coughing her half-life away, neglected. The thing was pathetic. The ha’ant’s gun kicked, and squirted a cloudy lump. Teddy stepped aside and it splashed against the wall.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
He couldn’t help because he couldn’t understand. She must have meant something to Mr Keough, but to him she was ridiculous. She contorted herself, thrusting out breasts like one of the girls in Terry’s magazines, a mawlike smile opening up in her no-face. Her head came off at her neck and floated like a slow-punctured balloon, tendrils dangling towards the rupture on her shoulders. Her eyes closed, and only debris was left. The ghost body came apart like tissue paper in a whirlpool, drifting away and melting. A drape that had been an arm swept against his face and curled around his head. Cold and wet, it became a damp nothing.
He had best get out of the cottage and tell someone—James?—about Mr Keough. The front door was rigged up with a battery, but it was easy enough to pick all the leads away and defuse whatever trick Mr Keough had set. His traps hadn’t kept out the ha’ant who’d killed him. The whole cottage was faded and forgotten, an old person’s place.
He had to find James. He’d know what to do. Teddy took a last look at the door to make sure there were no fail-safe booby traps, and wrenched it open. It was twilight-dark out on the road now, the lamps of the garage and the lights beyond the curtains of nearby houses standing out.
‘You there,’ a voice said. ‘Sonny Jim.’
Two men, indistinct in the dark, stood a few feet away from Mr Keough’s front door. A torchbeam lashed out, and Teddy was blinded and blinking.
‘Edward Gilpin, unless I miss my guess,’ the voice said, ‘brother of the more famous Terrence.’
The other man, who was wearing a helmet, laughed. ‘And following in the family tradition with a spot of breaking and entering, I do believe.’
Teddy could make the men out now. One was a police constable with a face like a shop mannequin, the other a burly man who flapped a wallet of identification at him.
‘My name’s Draper,’ he said, ‘Detective Sergeant Draper. I expect your brother’s told you all about me.’ He slapped his hand with his wallet as if it were a lead-filled blackjack. ‘There are a lot of stories about me, you know.’
Terry had been in scrapes with the police a couple of times, but Teddy couldn’t remember his ever mentioning Sergeant Draper.
‘Taunton Deane’s answer to Dirty Harry, they say.’
The constable laughed again. Teddy hadn’t noticed the first time, but it was a scary laugh. There wasn’t any humour in it, like the laughs Terry gave out before he thumped.
‘Actually, I think Dirty Harry’s a bit of a softie. He ought to try it on with some real hard nuts, like your bleedin’ brother.’
Draper put his wallet in his back pocket and scratched his neck.
‘Let’s take a look inside this house, shall we,’ he said, ‘see if there might perhaps be one or two things amiss, or a-missing?’
Teddy rolled his eyes upwards, and knew it was all over. No way could he explain what they’d find upstairs.
5
A group emerged from the Agapemone, clustered as if shooting their way out of a prison yard. They straggled down the steps around him. Still too bewildered by Sister Janet’s active tongue to keep up, Paul recognized Allison, wilder even than this morning, and Terry, hanging back like an inreserve, off-duty berserker. There were others, a gulping lad pulling a straw hat down on his head, a girl with a tall hairstyle and a Morticia Addams facial. And Allison’s original boyfriend, Ben. The whole crew unnerved Paul. He felt the memory of Terry’s blunt blade at his neck. It was unusual to find such variety in a kid group, he knew. A biker, a goth, a poseur, a grebo and feral Allison. Even in the diversity of the festival, like cult stuck with like. That was the whole point of cults, to be alike, uniform.
Allison saw him, and stretched a smile over her sharp teeth. The goth raised a Fu Manchu eyebrow and fluttered laquered black nails under her chin. The thing these kids had in common was that they were dangerous. Bored and brutal. Everyday evil. The type Paul would have walked past in a hurry with his head down on the Brighton seafront after closing time. They had predator eyes, bloody mouths. Surrounded by the festival crowd, Paul guessed there was no immediate danger. And Allison, he imagined, had some sort of scary soft spot for him.
Beside him, Sister Janet smiled and extended her hands to the kids.
‘We share Love,’ she said, again.
Allison, blinking in the last daylight, laughed in the woman’s face. Janet turned the other cheek, a Christian martyr beyond the reach of cruelty. A Moonie sex kitten, she was probably beyond the reach of anything.
Ben looked directly into his face, his glance a punch in the pit of Paul’s stomach. The world did a simultaneous backtrack and zoom, ground falling like an airliner hitting a pocket of turbulence.
‘Nice to see you,’ Ben said, teeth shining.
He had not seen the boy up close before. At the Pottery, he’d been in heavy shadows. In thinking the biker suffered from a bad birthmark or scar-mottled skin, Paul had been wrong. At some point, Ben had been soaked in acid or burned to death. He wasn’t a natural thing. Like the Martian war machine, he could not be, but was…
‘To see you…’
His face was an open wound, slimily red with ridges of exposed bone like tribal scars. And he wore a ragged sleeveless jacket that stank. It was uncured pink hide, falling apart and dripping. Even if he wasn’t an Angel from Hell, he could pass for an extra from Biker Zombie Holocaust.
‘…nice.’
Paul looked away, and saw Janet still smiling. She couldn’t see anything wrong with Ben. Looking directly at the biker, she appeared to be seeing a normal person. Not everyone saw what he saw, Paul suddenly realized. Everyone saw things differently. He looked back at Ben to be sure, and the dead boy was walking away, followers with him. The crowds parted to make way.
Paul was still shuddering, hands knotted fists, teeth painfully clamped. Somebody was scraping his exposed nerves. As she walked past, Allison reached out and touched his cheek, simpering.
‘Can’t go on meetin’ like this,’ she purred, ‘people’ll say wurr in love…’
She patted him, and touched a finger to her forehead in salute. Then she fell in step, hair and hips swinging, and walked off with the gang.
A toddler with a smiley-face balloon wandered past. The goth touched a sharp knuckle ring to it and it burst. The child began screeching, but the culprit was gone. That small meanness was almost reassuring, as if Ben’s gang didn’t have the imagination for anything worse. But Paul wasn’t convinced. Wells’s Martians. Zombie bike boys. Fish on bushes. There’d be worse.
At the top of the steps, the double doors slowly swung shut. Paul got the impression someone was behind them.
It wasn’t night-time yet. Midges filled the sodium-orange sunset, a cloud of flying nuisances. Out on the moors, the last of the red was reflected by the damper ditches. As the sun went down, the moon tugged at the tides, pulling aside the curtain of reality, letting loose monsters.
Somewhere, a Hendrix-head guitar screech sounded out. With the nightfall, the crowd would get noisier, rowdier, wilder. He tasted the last of Janet’s kiss in his mouth, and spittle-washed it away.
‘Hazel,’ he said to himself.
Somewhere inside the Manor House, Hazel was waiting. Even in his confusion, he knew that this time he must stick to his purpose. Now, his mission was important. He’d go in there, he’d find her, and he’d get her out. Before it was too late.
‘Excuse me,’ he sa
id to Janet, and started up the stairs.
‘Paul,’ the Sister protested, ‘you mustn’t…’
The doors were unlocked, of course. Ben and Allison had just come out of the Agapemone.
‘Paul…’
He took hold of a doorhandle and pulled. The door wasn’t even heavy. The hall beyond was gloomily underlit in the afternoon. Janet was climbing the steps behind him. He stepped through into the hall and shut the door behind him, shutting the Sister out. Three steps into the Agapemone, the world beyond the door was a thousand years gone. Thick walls, Paul supposed, kept out noise. Outside there were crowds. Here he was alone. It was just a hallway. There was a telephone stand and a heavily burdened coatrack. The carpet was worn through in the middle. A notice board had scraps of paper map-pinned to it.
He was inside. Now what? He expected Sister Janet to follow, to continue protesting his invasion. But she stayed beyond the door. If this was a game of touch, he was home safe. Or else he had strayed into a region so dangerous no one dared follow.
‘Hazel?’ he said, feeling stupid. He had no idea how to go about searching a house.
One of the doors off the hall was ajar, a bundle on the floor preventing it from swinging shut. He turned on lights, and the bundle became a woman. Not Hazel. Paul squatted, and saw she was breathing. Her face was familiar, a wing of hair over one eye. She was slumped fainted or asleep in the doorway, right hand open, an empty medicine bottle by it. Alarmed, he slapped the woman’s face. She mumbled. ‘Wake up,’ he said, slapping her again. He looked around, hoping for help. He thought he saw someone, a female shape in a long black dress. But she must be just a shadow. He had no idea how many pills the woman had taken. Was she an attempted suicide or a druggie on a bliss trip? She could just have a bad headache and terrible judgement. The woman coughed and dribbled, a hand up to her mouth.
‘Hello?’ Paul said.
She sat up, eyes opening, then made a face as pain hit her.
‘Are you all right?’