by Bill Hussey
‘To be fair,’ she said, ‘Brody’s involvement in the attack is based on circumstantial evidence. Any theories?’
‘Well, Brody obviously told Agnes something extremely upsetting. Otherwise, why would she have locked him in here?’
‘What are you talking about?’ Dawn asked. ‘The door was found open.’
‘Then someone else opened it. Look at this.’
He waved her over to the window. It was made up of a large frame that held two sashes. Jack pulled the cord and lifted the lower sash. Cold, moist air crept into the room.
‘Have you ever read the Murders in thef Rue Morgue? Locked room mystery by Poe?’
‘You don’t think Brody was a giant orang-utan, do you?’ Dawn frowned.
‘You were the one who said ‘kinda strange’ was my speciality,’ Jack grinned. ‘But I think that theory’s a bit out there, even for me. No, what I mean is this: when examining the room, DI Stephens and his boys have made the same kind of mistake that the police made in the Poe story. They found the door open but the window closed, so they just assumed Brody exited via the door. But feel the weight of this sash, if it’s not clasped open from inside it’ll fall back into place and lock. And look here, at the trellis frame outside the window, see how it’s scuffed and pulled away from the wall? Jamison told us Brody was quite active for a man of his age. Suppose he heard the commotion downstairs as the nun was attacked. If the door was unlocked, he would have run down the corridor and taken the fire escape. Instead, he goes to the window, opens it and climbs down the trellis. The sash snaps back into place and locks. The intruder takes Brody’s key but, finding the priest gone, he leaves the door open and replaces the key back on the hook downstairs.’
‘That’s assuming a lot,’ Dawn said. ‘I suppose your theory could be proved or disproved by taking prints from the outside sill, but it sounds far-fetched. Who was this intruder? Why would Brody fear him? And how did he avoid the cameras?’
‘Okay, I get the point,’ Jack said, snapping the sash back into place. ‘But one thing I’m sure of: it wasn’t just a knock on the head that turned that old woman’s mind. She saw something she didn’t like.’
Seventeen
It was after six when they arrived back at the station. Jack told Dawn that he needed to catch up on some paperwork and that he would see her in the morning. She brought him a sandwich from the canteen and left without a word. There was a single-mindedness about her that Jack admired deeply. She was able to set aside her personal feelings when working. Like this afternoon, when the average person would still have been smarting from his behaviour in the car, she had exuded professionalism.
It was past eleven when Jack cleared his desk. He took a couple of aspirin and tried to moderate his coffee intake. The nervous energy he was working on could tip over into a paranoid jitteriness if he wasn’t careful. He stretched back in his chair and unwound the bandages from his knuckles. The cuts were still angry and weeping. His phone rang. In a few short sentences, Bob Peterson gave his first day’s report. Jack replaced the receiver without commenting. He began to think about Jamie. Jamie spellbound before the bridge, staring at the wet footprints of a man who wasn’t there. Jamie from the dreaming, dead and pleading:
‘Jack, save me … He’s coming. He’s so close …’
Someone coming. Someone close. But who, or perhaps more precisely, ‘what’? Simon Malahyde or that dark other from the vision? Jack brought his fists down hard upon the desk.
‘The boy’s sleeping. Now, a nice glass of merlot, I think. So, love, you gonna tell me what’s the matter with our J?’
Tom Howard poured his daughter a glass of rich, sweet-smelling wine. Dawn rested her back against the trembling refrigerator and felt some of her exhaustion melt away. Her father told her how Jamie had spilled the beans about this Jack character. They’d had a little chat, and the boy got the wrong end of the stick and took off. He’d been distracted and tired when he came back, so Tom had sent him up to bed. There hadn’t been a peep out of him since.
‘Something’s going on with him,’ said Dawn. ‘And with Jack. I just don’t know.’
‘Boy’s obviously fond of the fella. You too, I reckon. Don’t turn your head, love.’
Dawn burst into tears. She felt her father’s arms around her. He lifted her head and brushed her face with gentle fingers. For the first time in her adult life, Dawn found herself confiding in him. His quiet questions made her wonder why she had not sought his comfort and counsel in all these years. In her youth, he had been her first port of call in a storm but, since Richard left, she had been too ashamed to go to him. She asked herself why this was and could think of no satisfactory answer.
Bringing her story up to date, she said, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with him. He crumbled today. He admitted he’d lied and then pushed me away again. I felt this morning like I was pushing against a false wall and now the wall’s broken down. But there’s nothing behind it. And that’s worse, in a way.’
‘He said he would be bad for you and J. Do you believe him?’
She shook her head. ‘It makes no sense.’
‘And this asking after Jamie,’ her father continued. ‘Why’s he doing that?’
She finished the merlot in three long gulps, appreciating it only as an aftertaste at the back of her throat.
‘He’s concerned. I think he wanted to make sure J was handling the split okay.’
‘Right, so what’re you basing your real worries on? Let’s say he just wanted out. Men don’t always have their reasons. What else worries you?’
‘I don’t know.’ Hot tears began to slide down her cheeks again, but there was something functional about them, they did not burn her eyes this time. ‘He’s putting in for a transfer. It frightens me, Dad. I don’t know why. I’ve never relied on anyone really; to feel safe. But him going away. It makes me feel … vulnerable.’
Dawn poured herself another drink and stared into the ruby red of the merlot.
‘Why?’
‘Because … don’t laugh, Dad, I swear … because he’s good.’
‘Sound like your mother.’
‘I know. It isn’t like me to say things like that. That’s why I think it must be true. He is good, and he’s terribly worried about something, and I think it must be to do with Jamie. That’s why I can’t let it go.’
Jack Trent stood on the towpath overlooking the canal. A bitter wind cut up from the estuary and whistled over the lip of the catacombs that towered above him. Prisms of ice floated downriver, glinting like stars and cracking wide as the frost took hold. There were days in his memory, only a few weeks old, when smartly painted barges and narrow boats passed along the waterway. Children played into the late evening along the hedgerows on the far bank. Games that the modern world could not touch. Often, Dawn brought stale bread and they fed the grebes and mallards. Now the birds and the children and the boats were gone. Now she was gone, and it was cold and dark.
The great solstice clock of the cathedral tolled twelve. Jack roused himself and decided to go back to the office. There was no point in heading home only to be haunted by questions. Work would calm him. He started up the stairway.
As he ascended, his gaze passed over the catacombs. These ancient subterranean burial recesses, banked one on top of the other, reached up a good forty-five feet from the canal path to the cathedral grounds. Their hiding place had been discovered when work on the cathedral foundations was begun in the eleventh century. Overnight, so the story went, the tombs had been stripped bare, the spoils of long dead heathens divided between the bricklayers of the new temple. Eight centuries later, the Victorians restored the crypts and, in their peculiar desire to emulate the ancient world, sanctified the ground and packed the recesses with their own dead. A stairway had also been installed for mourners to parade up and down. Steps were laid against the graves and iron girders driven deep into the pits.
Now many of the nineteenth century sealing plaques had crumbled aw
ay. In several places across the wall, dark mouths yawned, their lips dusted with pebbled stone.
Jack was halfway up the stairs, the catacombs at their ninth layer, when he heard the voice.
‘Help me. Please, is someone there?’
He looked over the handrail. The towpath was empty. There were no hedgerows on this bank, no places to hide. From where had the voice come?
‘I can see you.’
Jack stumbled back against the handrail. The voice – closer, louder – had echoed out of the recess just level with his head. The plaque – inscribed, ‘Mr Edward Peakes, Born 1810 Died 1892. ‘The Lamb Walketh At My’ – was half torn away. The hole was quite large enough for a child to crawl through. It had been a child’s voice that called out to Jack. He approached the aperture.
‘Hello? Are you trapped? Can you hear me?’ His voice boomed in the cavity. ‘Listen, I can’t see you. I have a torch in my car. Just wait and …’
‘Don’t leave me. I’m afraid.’
Jack put his face to the opening. The moon threw a tongue of light into the tomb, just enough to see an accumulation of sweet wrappers, takeaway boxes and crushed drink cans. Beyond that, there was no telling how far back the hollow reached.
‘Are you there?’ Jack called.
‘Yes. In the dark.’
‘Can you move?’
‘I can’t get out of the dark.’
‘Let me …’
‘I’ll never, ever get out of the dark.’
‘Look, I’m going to get my torch. Don’t be frightened …’
‘I’m falling!’
Jack thrust his hand into the grave. At that moment, clouds veiled the moon and the light was lost. Jack’s fingers, his hand, his arm, disappeared into impenetrable blackness. He felt around, meeting only stone chippings and sweating rock. There was nothing in there. No child. No-one at all. He started to withdraw his hand when something tickled the tips of his fingers. Something cold. A cry caught in Jack’s throat. At first, he imagined the impossibly preserved skeleton of Edward Peakes, sprung out of its casket and leering like a hideous jack-in-the-box.
‘Is that you?’ Jack asked.
The left side of his face flat against the catacomb wall, veins roped his neck and arms as he strained further into the hole. Fingers clutching, he met something that felt like a hand. He snatched at it, and the extremity responded, holding him fast. But there was something wrong. The contours and pressure of the hand were not those of a child. Jack tried to pull himself free, but the grip transferred to his wrist and tightened. His cheek ground against the stone as cold fingers interlaced his own. The voice spoke again, deeper this time:
‘Non Omnis Moriar.’
This was not the dreaming. This was not the Demons. This was something else. Something equally frightening and perhaps even more real. Jack had never seen a ghost. He had seen visions of the dead and dying. He had seen those creatures that nestled inside his mind, but although they were monsters, they were at least living things. He knew, with an instinctive certainty, that whatever was inside the recess, gripping his hand, was dead. And now it was moving. He could feel the cool touch of it reach along his arm.
Jack strained with every muscle. He managed to drag his shoulder free but his forearm remained locked in that vice-like grip. Moonlight broke through the clouds and now he could see once more into the recess. A body, no larger than that of a fair-size dog, clambered through the cavity and approached the little envelope of moonlight. Its skin, caked in filth and streaked with clotted blood, gave it a coat like brindled fur. Bright, baleful eyes added to the animalistic nature of the thing.
Jack put his foot against the wall. He kicked at the plaque and felt his hand slide out of the grasp. He cracked his tailbone as he fell into a sitting position. Sickened, dazed, he held up his hand to the moonlight. It was sticky and red, but the blood was not his. As he looked up, fingers, with nails bitten down to the quick, arched over the plaque.
‘Non omnis moriar.’
The voice still echoed, but was close now to the opening.
Jack scrabbled to his feet and turned, as if to retreat back down to the canal. He caught sight of what lay below and stopped dead. A dense mist had banked along the towpath and was now swirling at the foot of the stairway. If he went that way he would have to go slow. There were no railings fencing the canal. An image of himself tumbling into the waters filled his mind. He saw his struggle to break the surface. Saw the hands that reached out for him from the polluted depths. Hands like those that now caressed the lips of the tomb.
He made up his mind. He would have to climb the stairs to the cathedral. That would mean passing within three feet of the recess. He put his back to the railing and edged up the steps.
‘He’s coming for Jamie. You cannot save him.’
Jack inched along the rail. Felt his bladder tighten. Tried not to look, but could not help staring into the catacomb. Coils of frayed rope lashed the child’s wrists. Beneath them, old weals started to weep. He paused. A memory stirred: frayed rope on the cabin floor. Someone watching from the shadows of the workshop door …
‘Remember, Jack,’ the boy in the catacomb whispered. ‘Remember well. Remember him.’
The child crept into the light.
Jack screamed. His muscles bunched and weakened. He dropped to his knees. He could do nothing now but sit and watch.
Agony, defined in terms of flesh, emerged to meet him.
The child’s head, swollen to twice its natural size, sat slantwise upon a broken neck. The force of the skull trauma had crushed and tugged his features into grotesque positions. Whatever facial characteristics remained as perceptibly human were only recognisable as such in the way a fractured nose, or elongated eye, might be picked out of a funhouse mirror. The mouth, toothless, was dragged down to the chest by a shattered jaw. The left eye had been punched back into the cranium. The nose, torn from the face, had left behind a pair of tear-shaped slits. Overall, the effect was as if someone had peeled away a young face and moulded it to fit an ulcerated skull.
Jack stared. The horror of what he saw made the world fall away and even the darkness retreated. Everything narrowed and focused on the impossible thing climbing down out of the hole.
‘Jesus Christ …’ Jack whispered.
The boy was naked. His chest was caved in and ribs poked like white spears through his skin. He shambled forward in awkward, jerky movements. It appeared that his legs were intact, and Jack wondered if he had been dead so long that he had simply forgotten how to walk. The boy staggered as far as the rail and collapsed. He laid his head in Jack’s lap and began to cry. The weight of the skull told Jack that this was not a product of his imagination. There was a child sitting here beside him, dead, but still suffering from the blows that had killed him. Jack laid his hand against the boy’s crown and felt the pulse of fluid trapped there.
‘Who did this to you?’
The stump-tongue clacked out the words:
‘He is coming, Jack. Not long now, not long at all. He is coming and you must be ready. The Doctor will see you soon …’
The boy’s breathing became more even. His misshapen head lay still in Jack’s lap. In the darkness of the catacombs, and upon the cathedral steps, the dead were sleeping.
MONDAY 28th OCTOBER 2002
Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.
Samuel Johnson, quoted in Life of Johnson by James Boswell, 1791
A library is but the soul’s burial-ground.
It is the land of shadows.
Henry Ward Beecher, 1813–1887
Eighteen
It was still night. That was all Stephen Lloyd knew when he came round. Before he realised how much his head ached and how painfully the chains cut into his wrists and ankles, he saw that he had been stripped. Fear sat like a hot brick in his chest. The gag in his mouth made him want to barf, but he held it back. Where was he?
Try to think.
He had planned to meet his dad at nine-thirty p.m. on the Renton playing fields, hoping that the conditions would be fair enough to observe the 51 Pegasi star of the great Square of Pegasus. His dad told him that it would be quite faint but, with a clear night sky, they should be able to see the distant sun. Stephen had gathered together his binoculars and a downloaded sky-map and set out. Before leaving the house, he stuffed his dead brother’s baptism dress into his rucksack.
The priest. Fuck, yes: the Priest.
The priest who had met him as he walked home from choir practice at St Brigid’s just a week ago. The priest who’d said how sorry he was to hear that Stephen’s little brother had died at only a month old. And who, after buying him a McFlurry and blah-blah-fucking-blahing for ages, offered Stephen forty quid for the dead baby’s baptism stuff.
‘You want Kyle’s clothes?’ Stephen had asked.
It had seemed odd, but experience told Stephen that priests always had weird ideas. Bread into flesh, water into wine, that kind of bullshit. His mum said he had to respect them, but his dad, who blamed his mum’s church-shit for their break-up, said that priests were the weirdest headcases going.
‘Most of ’em are little boy-type queers, Stevie. So you kick ’em in the orbs if you have to.’
‘His baptism dress, yes,’ the priest said. ‘We have lots of funny ceremonies in the church. You know that, being a good altar boy. Now, one of those ceremonies involves the baptism dress of your dead brother. No need for you to worry about the whys and wherefores, but you must bring it to me. Traditionally the Church makes reparation, which means I give you money, for the loss.’