by Bill Hussey
‘Why don’t you ask Mum?’
‘The Bible tells us that a sibling must give the clothes freely. You remember that passage?’
‘Course,’ Stephen lied.
‘And anyway, why share the booty? I need these clothes so that your brother’s soul may ascend to heaven. You want him to be at peace?’
I don’t give a monkey’s, Stephen thought.
Ever since Kyle stopped being Kyle and had become ‘Dead Baby’, things had gone bad. His mum was always at church, lighting her stupid candles. His dad had pissed off long ago. Stephen didn’t blame his old man, but resented the bastard’s hypocrisy. It was all right for him to leave the twenty-four-seven wail-a-thon, but ‘You stay and be strong for your Mam, Stevie’. But if things were going to the shits then there was only one person to blame: Dead Baby.
Without fully realising it, Stephen had started capitalising that moniker the day his dad left. The kid had been cute when they’d brought it home. All pink and a bit yellowy, and smelling clean, like a deep, sterilised cut. Stephen had liked him when he’d been Kyle. But Dead Baby – purple-lipped, frozen-faced, little fists clenched at the sides of his head – he had ruined everything. So, sure, the priest could have his clothes. Stephen would be quids in and it was one less thing for his mum to blub over.
They’d arranged to meet at nine-fifteen, but not at St Brigid’s and not at the Lloyd house. Stephen had asked why and had been given the kind of look that could curdle milk at fifty paces. Hadn’t he read his Bible? Didn’t he know that this very special rite – this offering of baptismal garments – could take place neither on hallowed ground nor at the place where the child had died? It must happen somewhere secret, somewhere that was special to Stephen. There followed a long pause. Stephen was unsure. Ah well, the priest had shrugged, if he couldn’t think of a suitable venue then the money – a good sum of money – could always be put to other uses … The paper factory on Steers Mill Road, Stephen suggested. Perfect. And afterwards the priest had offered him a lift to the Renton playing fields.
That’ll really piss Dad off, Stephen had thought, seeing me pull up in a priest’s motor. Can’t wait to see his face.
The factory forecourt would be the meeting place but Stephen had arrived early. He decided to take a look inside the old building. Getting into the abandoned factory was easy. The local council or whoever kept boarding up the back window and Garry Skeet – head nutter of the gang Stephen sometimes hung around with – kept prising it open with his crowbar. The only difficulty was hitching your bike up and lowering it in.
Grit peppered Stephen’s face as he freewheeled his BMX through the old shop floor. The bike had been a guilty present from his dad, and Stephen took every opportunity to plough it through stone chippings and broken glass, relishing the dumb look of disappointment when he’d turn up for their weekly stargazing with scuffed tyres and scratched alloy rims. He spun a few tailwhips, nearly skewering himself on a broken water pipe, and tossed the bike into a corner. Then he climbed a heap of pallets to the high windows and watched the switch-on of the dump floodlights. Most people thought he was tapped, but he loved the way the stink rose from the garbage hills and turned the light hazy shades of orange and purple. Those swirls of colour made him think of gas clouds raging across the planet Jupiter.
Stephen’s eyes snapped away from the dump. A juddering thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk-reeech sounded from the front of the building. The factory’s rolling steel doors had ratcheted halfway up and jammed. Headlights shone bright blades through the holes in the grille and silhouetted the lower body of a man standing outside. The priest ducked beneath the unresponsive roller door. He had a sheet of tarpaulin rolled under his right arm, and a pair of bolt cutters, which he dropped with a clang on the concrete floor. He stared at Stephen without saying a word.
‘I’ve … I’ve got it here,’ Stephen said, pulling the robe from his rucksack.
‘Come here. Into the light.’
This was fucked up. The priest was different. Not the funny, soft-touch old bastard he’d been a few days ago. He was dead-eyed, his movements sort of mechanical.
Most of ’em are little boy-type queers, Stevie …
He eyed the BMX. It’d take too long to shoulder it up through the window and the priest’s car was blocking the front. The best way out was to dodge past the old fucker and duck under the grille. He dropped down from the pallets.
Have to make it look natural at first, though, he thought. Then make a sudden break.
As he walked towards the priest, he looked up, casual like, into the rafters. The ticking over of the car engine rumbled between the struts and beams. He wondered why the birds that nested in the roof hadn’t scattered at the sound of the snapping locks. It seemed that they had abandoned the factory. Maybe they had all migrated. All save one. A single black bird or crow. High up, hopping around as he passed under its rafter, cocking its head and watching Stephen’s progress.
Inch by inch, as he approached, the shadows withdrew from the priest’s face and the glare of the headlights seemed less like a halo about his head.
‘Well done, boy,’ the priest said, taking the baptism dress.
‘Yeah. The. The, erm, money?’
‘All in good time … Tell me, do you feel a twinge in your soul as you sell your dead brother’s clothes?’
‘S’just Dead Baby things,’ Stephen replied, wishing that Garry or one of the gang would just please turn up. Make the break. Any minute.
‘Pragmatic child … I wonder, can you see him? No? Some can, some cannot. Strange, as he’s standing right behind you.’
Stephen turned – Fucking Dumb Ass. Pain licked across the back of his skull. His brain bellowed. Then there was nothing. No. Wait. There had been a split second when he’d woken up inside a kind of box, like a coffin. He’d heard the car engine. Everything was dark. He must have passed out again.
And now, here he was. Chained like one of those dancing bears he’d seen in a wildlife appeal on TV. He half-giggled, half-sobbed, as he thought:
Dad’s gonna be really pissed when I don’t show … ha-ha-ha …
His stomach clenched and felt small. He realised that, as frightened as he was, he was also very hungry. Just then, as if to taunt him, he imagined that he could smell the scent of roasted meat. It grew stronger. It wasn’t imagination. There really was a salty, rich aroma wafting from behind him. It sharpened his senses. His eyes focused. He made out more of the cellar.
Orange light danced on the sweating walls. A shovel, encrusted with brown smears, stood against the boiler. Slats of wood were nailed across the window above his head. A blade of moonlight sliced between the boards and cut across the neck of a dead boy sitting opposite. Stephen’s cries died in his throat. It was as if he knew that a scream would be a poor response to such a sight.
The kid’s head looked all out of shape, like a roughly plumped pillow. Beetles skittered in the matted hair and something shiny and black suckled in his torn, hanging mouth. At last, Stephen found his voice and started to cry. He kicked out with his trussed legs, trying to get upright. Instead, he slid lower down until his feet pounded against the torso of his dead cellmate. The smell wafted through again. Cooking. Cooking meat. Sunday roast.
There came a squeak of metal and a wall of heat hit Stephen’s back. Something flashed in front of his eyes. A thin knife held in the priest’s yellow fingers. If he hadn’t been sick with fear, Stephen might have laughed at the stupid rubber suit the old boy was wearing.
‘Hello. Awake, are we? Not to worry, you’ll sleep again soon,’ the priest promised. ‘Oh, I see you two have met. This is Oliver. Oliver, this is Stephen. There’s no time for you to become friends, I’m afraid. Now, Oliver, let’s get to work, shall we?’
The priest tugged Oliver’s legs and the body toppled to the ground. Then, sitting astride the boy’s thighs, the man plunged his knife into the stomach. There was a little blood, not much. Throughout what followed, Stephen Lloyd’s reason dr
ipped away under the white heat of his terror. He alternated between screaming and pleading, but the old man’s work went on uninterrupted. Finally, Stephen realised that it was no good appealing to the priest (I won’t tell, I promise. Even if you take another kid. You do what you like to them. Just please let me go.) and he turned to God. His whispered prayers, mocked by the unimpeded passage of the blade, went unanswered. And so he gave up on God, too, and waited quietly for his turn to come.
If he had been rescued from that cellar, Stephen’s mind would never have recovered from what he witnessed there. During long nights in psychiatric wards, he would have recalled the glint of dead eyes, and a broken jaw stretched into a rakish grin. It was a blessing then, in some ways, that Stephen Lloyd was not rescued.
His time came. He saw the feet planted before him and waited. Seconds stretched beyond their allotted span. Maybe the priest had changed his mind. Maybe. The shovel fell and he felt the rolling shock of fractures snake across his skull. His head on the stones, he experienced the second blow as something distant. Chunks of his brain were closing down and he could no longer understand the sensory signals telegraphing pain. It was with only mild curiosity that he felt the tug of the spade nestling inside his head. The metal was cool against the heat of his mind, against his thoughts. He almost resented the fact the priest worried the shovel free. At last, it was torn out, and his brow, fringed with a patch of hair, went with it. His vision darkened. All that was left to him was the whistle of the spade, the crack of bone and the suck of pummelled meat.
In the dim reaches, he felt a tiny hand steal into his own.
‘I’m sorry, Dead Baby,’ he said. Kyle giggled.
He lifted the baby and kissed its forehead. Then, with his brother clasped to his chest, Stephen Lloyd crossed the space between worlds.
Nineteen
It was 00:12 by Jamie’s Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man alarm. Sleep would not come. However many times he went over what had happened by the bridge, all he could remember was his anger. Then nothing, until the fat bloke with the Elvis quiff had asked him if he was okay. Whenever he concentrated on what had happened in between his mind started shutting lots of doors. The only thing he recalled was a feeling. A realisation that he’d been too hard on Jack; that he should forgive him. That if he didn’t, something terrible was going to happen.
The child vanished like a drawing on steamed glass. Jack held out his hands, as if to recapture the image. He longed to comfort the dead boy, to ease his wounds and banish his nightmares. At first, he thought he still heard crying, but the sound defined itself as the sough of the wind. Fingers outstretched, Jack dropped his keys into the gutter. Somehow, he was no longer sitting before the catacomb. Instead, he stood on the kerb just outside the cathedral gates. Snatching his car keys from the foamy drain water, he wasted no time in getting into his car and driving to the station.
His nerves were shot and he yearned for the stability of solid police work. He went straight to the basement and sandwiched himself between the stacks and a row of computer terminals. His eyes burned in the green glow of the microfiche.
Doctor: both Sister Agnes and the dead child from the catacombs had mentioned a ‘doctor’. He ploughed through records and case notes, but was unable to find mention of a physician who had lived in Crow Haven in the last fifty years. He moved on. At two a.m., having cross-referenced several names through both paper and electronic files (Malahyde, Simon; Malahyde, Anne; Malahyde, Peter; Brody, Father Asher) he found an original one-sheet report, dated 5/6/95, that detailed the brief abduction of Simon Malahyde, ten-year-old male, by Father Asher Brody. Jack found that he was not surprised by what he read.
Geraldine Pryce, headmistress of the Crow Haven primary school, had reported Simon missing at 1:34 p.m., after the child did not appear for afternoon registration. A search was begun, conducted by PC Clive Grainger. It was Grainger who found the boy at five-ten p.m., wandering out of Redgrave Forest and towards the school. Simon was unharmed, except for bruising to his wrists and ankles, where he had been bound. He told Grainger that Father Brody had taken him to a clearing in the forest and held him there for four hours. Remarkably, the child seemed unperturbed by his ordeal.
Brody, who was later found dishevelled and exhausted, had minor lacerations to his face and hands and a slight cut beneath his ribs. He was unresponsive to questioning, and would not say why he had taken the boy, or how he had sustained his injuries. He would only speak to his friend, Father Garret. As the child was unharmed, and his mother had shown no interest in pressing charges, the CPS decided not to prosecute. The condition insisted upon, however, was that Brody be retired into the care of a secure home.
PC Grainger initiated an extensive search of the forest, in order to ascertain the location of the clearing for evidence gathering purposes. However, his team was unable to locate the glade. When Simon Malahyde was later questioned by a child psychologist, he would only say that he and Father Brody had been ‘playing a little game’.
The July 2nd edition of the Gazette for ’95 reported that Father Brody had been sent to St Augustine’s Care Home for Retired Priests in Brookemoor-upon-Fen. The abduction was not mentioned. The article cited exhaustion as the cause of retirement.
Discounting the possibility that Brody was crazy, what did this suggest? Perhaps that he had known something was wrong with Simon. Known it and had taken the boy in order to … To do what? Once again, Jack found that he had no answers.
Grey hints of morning strained through the pavement level windows above his workstation. He switched to his other night’s researches. His plan had been to begin from October and work back through the missing child reports on the Police National Computer. There were only three unresolved P61 missing child forms filed from the area for this year.
Turning over the details of a runaway found living rough in Nottingham, he was confronted with the school portrait of Oliver Godfrey. He had expected to find a photo of the boy in the records but the living, unmolested face, frozen in the photograph, shocked him nonetheless. Those were the gimlet eyes that had stared from the darkness of the catacombs. Those were the hands, with the bitten down nails, that had clawed out of the tomb. This was the boy whose arms had been bound by the frayed rope from Simon Malahyde’s cabin. Oliver’s disappearance was dated 21st June 2002. Had Simon abducted and murdered him, or had the mysterious thin man from the dreaming been responsible? And did Oliver’s fate now await Jamie?
‘What are you doing down here?’
Jack folded the report into his jacket pocket. Dawn moved between the stacks, took a seat at the cramped desk and glanced through the Brody notes. She looked tired.
‘Had a hunch about the priest,’ Jack said.
‘Interesting … You know, this gives me an idea,’ she said. ‘When I was at uni, I did a module on Stockholm Syndrome. In some kidnap cases, victims begin to identify with their abductors and with the ideas which motivate them. It’s common where someone has been taken, threatened with death, but shown tokens of kindness. Hostages have even joined the same terrorist groups as their abductors rather than be set free. It says here that Simon showed no antipathy towards Brody after the kidnap. Say the relationship endured. Maybe they wrote to each other secretively. When he’s old enough, Simon breaks Brody out of his confinement …’
‘He was ten years old when he was taken, Dawn.’
‘An impressionable age.’
‘No. I’ve read about these cases. Simon was abducted for only a few hours. I don’t think that’s enough time to bond with a kidnapper. In any case, Simon, unlike Brody, has never abducted a …’
‘I think it’s possible that he has. That’s why I came to find you. The body of a little boy was found this morning in a lay-by on the Saxby Road. The kid hasn’t been officially identified, but I’ve checked the PNC upstairs and reckon I’ve got a possible ID: Oliver Godfrey, disappeared June this year. This was found at the scene. Might’ve dropped out of Simon’s pocket when he dumpe
d the body.’
She held out a plastic evidence sleeve. Inside was a car key and fob that sported the Triumph motor company badge. Jack was certain, even before he saw the inscription on the back of the fob, that this was the missing key from Simon’s abandoned car. He turned over the evidence sleeve and the word ‘MALAHYDE’ glinted before his eyes.
Oliver Godfrey’s corpse was a dirty brown colour, shot through with licks of green that reminded Jack of a patina of oxidation on copper. His hairless body was bloated; oddly flabby looking. There was severe trauma to his head. Cut into the boy’s stomach were deep, diamond-shaped incisions.
Jack approached the slab. There was no doubt. This was the mutilated face he had seen a few hours before. Only then, it had been ghostly. The sounds of the mortuary seemed distant: the ticking refrigeration unit, the squeal of the gurney being pushed down the corridor, the plink-plink-plink of water dripping from swan-neck taps into stainless steel sinks.
‘Inspector Trent? Jon James, I’m one of the technicians here. We’re still waiting on Professor Jackson, the forensic pathologist, and either coroner or parental consent for the post mortem but that, of course, is a formality.’
Later, Jack would find it hard to remember the face of the technician, Jonathan James. He had listened attentively enough, but his vision was turned inward. The slits in the corners of Oliver’s mouth made it look as though the dead boy was grinning. Oliver Godfrey, the child from the recess, now the child on the slab, was confirmation of the reality of what he had seen in the broken catacomb. Confirmation also of Oliver’s warning: He’s coming for Jamie.
He: for once, Jack forgot about the skeletal figure from the dreaming. The key was concrete evidence and it gave him a real figure upon whom to pin his fears: Simon Malahyde.
‘Now, I’ve seen a photo of Oliver,’ James said. ‘This is him. Same facial spacing, same skull shape. We’ll confirm ID in a few hours. He was beaten with a flat, wide object. Probably a spade. The killer stood in front and above him. If you look here, you’ll see that the back portion of the parietal bone has been crushed with downward thrusts. I’d say he’s been dead for over twenty-four hours. PM lividity,’ James pointed to the deep purplish-red of Oliver’s feet, ‘is complete and rigor is well advanced.’