by Adam Nevill
‘Come on, we got to get this done,’ Glenroy said to Ray.
‘What?’ Ray asked.
‘Once you have helped me outside with this, it’s over,’ the black man said.
Ray carried the bag out of the kitchen. He came into a paved yard that cringed beneath an overarching viaduct. But his attention was gripped by the size of the pyre in the yard, set against the far wall. Beside the pyre of bracken and wooden pallets was an oil drum that belched black smoke.
Upon the top of the pyre was an old vinyl car seat. A small set of metal steps, the kind you see in warehouses or large libraries, had been positioned at the foot of the pyre and led to the seat.
Glenroy muttered, ‘Dear God.’
‘This part is always difficult,’ John said, to soothe the nerves of the elderly man.
‘What is this?’ Ray asked, looking from one man to the other.
They ignored him.
John touched the passenger’s elbow. ‘Glenroy, believe me, you won’t even notice the fire as soon as you see your son. Just go and find yourself a seat at the table, and he’ll be here shortly. I suggest you sit with your back to the garden to avoid distractions in what will be a very precious time. You will probably hear a bit of fuss out here, and then your son will arrive and embrace you. There is no need for you to see this part of the proceedings, though some clients prefer to make the offering a joyous occasion.’
Glenroy nodded and headed into the kitchen.
The undisclosed connection between the fire and the contents of the bags made Ray eager to return to his car. It was all getting too weird for his liking, and the sinister implications of the backyard installation was not lost on him. He thought of the black plumes of smoke he had seen at each address that evening. He also recalled the painting of the smoke on the dining-room wall that he’d studied earlier, and not least the distant screams at each address he’d driven to. Ray turned to follow his last passenger out of the yard.
‘Not you, driver,’ John said, in a tone of voice that made Ray tense. There followed the sound of a zipper being quickly undone in the cold air of the cement yard. ‘We’re not done with you yet.’
Ray had heard enough. ‘What’s your game, eh? I’ve been driving –’ he said as he turned to confront the man standing behind him.
But then Ray immediately lost the ability to speak. At the sight of what had just climbed out of the sports bag, and stood upright, the strength in Ray’s legs drained through the soles of his driving shoes. This had travelled in his car all evening. And it wasn’t a dog, a cat or any kind of pet.
‘Now.’ John raised both hands into the air and made a series of rapid gestures as if he were performing sign language. ‘You either take your seat unassisted up there –’ John nodded at the summit of the unlit pyre ‘– or she will be forced to seat you.’
The back door closed. Ray heard a key turn in the lock. He turned and watched Glenroy take a seat at the kitchen table.
‘The duration of the event is mercifully short,’ John said. ‘Only a bit longer than it took you to knock Glenroy’s son from his bicycle on Rocky Lane.’
‘I . . . I . . . I . . .’
‘Yes, yes, that’s all very well. But there are consequences, and it’s getting late and you’re the last one this year, and there’s no time for any fiddle. So please take your seat.’
‘What . . .’
Within the ebb and flow of the firelight, even though the thing on the patio was as tall and hairy as a full-grown chimpanzee, what had been inside the sports bag was not an ape. For as long as he could bear to look at it, Ray could see that it wasn’t a primate because there were trotters on the end of its short rear legs. And though the thing’s face was horribly reminiscent of a pig, it wasn’t a pig either because it stood upright like a child. The little figure shivered in the night air.
When it grinned at Ray, he whimpered and stepped towards the garden fence.
John’s brusque voice penetrated his shock. ‘You’ll only feel the flames for about three seconds, driver. Nothing more is required of you. Then she’ll bleed you out. So I always suggest that you raise your chin, or you will burn for longer than is necessary in this particular ritual. Now, to your chair, please, driver.’
Ray turned and fell at the fence. It was old and sagging with rot. He would kick it down, run.
‘Soon as I drop my hands, driver, she will be released. I can assure you that you will get no further than my yard.’
‘Wha–?’
‘Hit and run,’ John said with all the pomp of a scoutmaster. The firelight from the oil drum flickered across the lenses of his spectacles. Ray could no longer see the old man’s eyes. ‘She followed the scent of your callousness. A challenge we set her. Guilt, shame and even pride are more established spores. And she’s had three of you today, and reunited three mothers with their children, albeit for an incredibly short time.’
‘What is –’
With the impatience and irritation that he had previously shown him, the scruffy old man cut him short. ‘She became a good friend of my wife. After Wendy was killed on a pedestrian crossing, not far from here in 1994. And her killer sat in the chair far longer than you will tonight, driver. So be thankful that time has mellowed me. Time even heals, they say. You even start to forget. This is how I remember. Now, shall we begin?’
Ray gripped the top of the wooden fence. ‘Fuck off!’
John dropped both of his arms and his palms slapped his hips.
Even before he sat in the car seat at the summit of the pyre, Ray had begun to scream.
John stuck a blazing taper of rolled newspaper into the base of the bracken. The kindling had been soaked with petrol; the fumes clung to Ray’s face. He looked to the kitchen to appeal for mercy.
Through the glass panel in the kitchen door, Ray saw his last passenger, Glenroy. Over the kitchen table the old man embraced another darker and more indistinct figure. One who had already buried a face that Ray could not see on its father’s shoulder.
Ray screamed afresh when the heat of the flames burst upwards to crisp the hair on his exposed ankles. He dropped his head back, between his shoulders, exposing his throat.
‘Now!’
Eumenides (The Benevolent Ladies)
During his first day at work the only thing that had enthralled Jason was Electra, and her legs. For the next two months, in the logistics office of the distribution centre of Agri-Tech, his admiration became a fixation.
Whenever Electra walked away from his desk, Jason was mesmerised. When his wayward scrutiny lowered to her legs, she seemed to be forever moving away from him, whilst tantalising him in a way that was more torment than pleasure.
Electra was the only light within the darkness of his working life, the sole distraction he welcomed. And even though his position at the distribution centre seemed intent on erasing the last of his individuality, and his hopes for anything better in life, Jason secretly tingled in anticipation of each working day because she was always in those days: sweetly perfumed, tastefully painted, soft, virtually mute, a silky presence with thighs that susurrated between the desks and the grey metal shelving. Electra was a siren mounted upon tipped heels that created their own strange music as she teetered along the concrete-floored aisles, or sent a staccato beat across the vast tarmacked spaces, designed for cars and delivery vehicles, under the forever grey of sky engulfing Agri-Tech.
Jason’s job and office, both confined within the enormous but sparsely staffed ‘logistics hub’ for agricultural machine parts, were in a place that did not matter. Agri-Tech and the town that hosted it, Sullet-upon-Trent, were part of the North Midlands that wasn’t quite the Black Country or Staffordshire; a bit of both but not regarded as either. Sullet-upon-Trent, or ‘Sully’, had no meaning geographically, culturally or politically. It boasted no public life or attractions for visitors. The area was a kind of anti-matter, stuck at the intersection of new, fast roads that swept people past it.
Within a
week of Jason’s hasty departure from another dead space just beyond the M25, in what might have been Buckinghamshire, where he had landed after university, five years before, when aiming for London’s media world, he’d become even more disappointed with Sullet-upon-Trent. It now seemed to him that his life was destined to waste away among dual carriageways, metal fences, eerily quiet industrial estates, white vans, new houses built on railway embankments, and warehouse-style shopping malls containing pet suppliers and white-goods stores the size of football stadiums.
He’d found that Sullet-upon-Trent and its ilk offered the antithesis of a life that one could engage with, embrace or be invigorated by on any level. Such locations offered existences rather than opportunities to attain any kind of essence. They remained areas devoid of vitality. He’d also discovered that the places of work within them were usually created, and peopled, by concentrations of the unimaginative.
Sully filled Jason with a particular apathy and inertia common to such zones. They made him listless, but occasionally eager to scream or laugh hysterically, or to inflict physical damage upon his surroundings. Increasingly, the longer he lived in Sully, he thought of himself as a caged ape, a primate dressed in a cheap suit, one abandoned in a narrow and littered cement enclosure, forever bereft of visitors; a forgotten and unexceptional creature that incessantly slapped its own face with a big leathery hand.
Jason only kept his mind alive by ordering books online and reading them patiently in his room. He sought self-knowledge as well as answers about how better to deal with his lot until he managed to escape Sullet-upon-Trent. His reading was also an attempt to cup his hands around the small, bright flame that three years at university had ignited. If that tiny fire were doused he feared who he might become; perhaps a man who would forget who he had once been.
Here, as with his last job, his colleagues were mostly men. Painfully ordinary men, but somewhat cynical and given to a limited discourse that revolved around football, cars, IT, gaming, drunkenness and handheld gadgetry. Even in its briefest form the office discourse made Jason’s heart smoulder with a frustration born of morbid boredom.
Online dating sites had only returned the profiles of eight single females within his reach geographically, and the profiles had all looked fake. Romantic opportunities to relieve his demoralising loneliness were slender. The Sully women that didn’t leave the area appeared to marry early and become mothers even earlier. Only Electra appeared different. Who was she and what was she doing here? No doubt she had not long left further education and had a boyfriend.
Whenever he came across her during the lunch intervals, she was sitting on one of the solitary benches set around the warehouses on grass verges. These grassy patches were criss-crossed by roads without pavements. Jason would pick his way clear of subjects that might encourage any mention of a man in her life. If she did ever confess to such, Jason knew that his reaction would be so emotional that he would be unable to disguise his colossal disappointment. For as long as she never revealed a significant other – a Gaz, Baz, Nigel, Anton, Leon, Jay or Ste – his wishful thinking about her might continue undiminished. When one of his male colleagues stood before her desk and made an innocent stock-related query, it evoked spasms of jealousy so intense they left Jason dizzy.
Perhaps she was religious and saving herself. This was possible because the only jewellery she wore was a crucifix of white gold. Jason fancied that he might convert to anything just to be with her.
In Jason’s company, during his lunchtime intrusions, Electra remained passive, half-smiling and monosyllabic. But he often harboured a suspicion that she shared some knowledge with his colleagues about him, and that his interaction with her was embarrassing to her. He suspected that Electra was humouring him.
On the occasions Jason sat beside her, his head would thump with blood while his mouth issued inanities and observations so lifeless and charmless that self-mutilation seemed the only fitting antidote. She would twist strands of her shoulder-length hair around a finger and then peer at them intently with her young green eyes, not nervous but not restful either. Her legs would always be crossed, her lined skirt slithering back from the leading knee while one foot bounced a high-heeled shoe upon its hidden toes.
Such was his obsession with the girl that on the final day of his probation period he summoned the courage to ask her out. As Electra made tea for the entire office, Jason followed her into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door for no reason and said, ‘We should go out sometime?’
After he’d made the request a silence thickened within the staff kitchen as if the very air had become gelatine. The space inside his ears roared as loudly as an underground tunnel filled with freight trains. As quickly as his disintegrating thoughts could manage, he tried to remember his rehearsed get-out clause.
What had he been thinking? He was at least ten years her senior. He was a pest. The insidious word hissed through his mind like a serpent in dry grass. To finally be reduced to this at his age. It made him want to tear his shirt from his untrained, freckled torso. He’d embellish the action with the howl of a thwarted beast. He had finally lost his reason and was no longer an acceptable person.
‘OK. Where’d you wanna go?’ Electra said, without looking at him, her indifference created anew as boredom in his eyes.
She was bored. Bored with it all, like him. Not enigmatic, mysterious, coquettish or coy, or any of the things that his imagination had conjured up. She was merely young and bored. He perceived this as the stark walls of the room shuddered back to their former dimensions.
So certain was he of failure and rejection, Jason had not thought as far ahead as where they might go. ‘Where’s good to go . . . to go round here?’
Electra frowned. ‘Nowhere much. Beside the zoo.’
Jason rented a room in a large subdivided Victorian house in the town’s oldest street, an area unhappily separated from where it had originally been founded after the county’s lines were redrawn in the sixties. Initially, Jason had hoped to have his own place in Sullet-upon-Trent, but, even so far away from London, his credit-card debt consumed most of his income and he was forced to cohabit.
All of the residents of the house were male, older than Jason, and appeared even more weary and disappointed than he felt. If he could not break his current encirclement of poorly paid employment without prospect, in negligible places set beside motorways, then his new neighbours, he realised, were portents of his entire remaining future.
Only one resident of the house ever engaged him in conversation, though Jason wished Gerald had remained as secretive, sullen and retiring as the other grey figures that huddled in front of muttering televisions in their rooms. But Gerald was one of those unfortunate individuals who hated being alone, yet had few social graces and no emotional intelligence. Gerald was also an autodidact on council politics, which he interspersed with political history, both moribund and local. He always spoke through a knowing half-smile, in an ironic tone that helped Jason understand why housemates often murdered each other.
But Gerald liked an audience and had selected Jason to fulfil that function when Jason, making an effort to be the gregarious new boy, had been moving his meagre belongings into the house. A geniality he now paid a heavy price for whenever he used the kitchen.
That part of the building had become a kind of trap laid by the spidery and withered Gerald. His door on the first floor would click open whenever anyone entered the kitchen to boil a kettle or prepare a meal. The insect-like figure would then descend silently and hover about the kitchen door, as if weaving an invisible web that his victims would fail to break through, should they decide, quite reasonably, that hunger and thirst were better alternatives to Gerald’s company.
But the night before his ‘date’ with Electra Jason saw a rare opportunity to employ Gerald’s local knowledge to some purpose. An opportunity he had never before discovered in their one-sided interactions.
Jason took a ready meal down to the ground
-floor kitchen, and, with a magician’s flourish, hit the open door button of the microwave. The appliance’s bell pinged loudly, and within three seconds the door of Gerald’s room clicked open.
‘Evening,’ Gerald said from the doorway, and followed this with his customary embellishment, ‘How’s life down pit?’ At which he chortled through his beard, close to tearing up with delight at his own jest.
Jason cut the preliminaries. Tonight, he’d let Gerald in. ‘I had no idea that Sullet had a zoo.’
Gerald stopped smiling and frowned. ‘It doesn’t. Not in all the years I’ve lived here. And I would know. You can trust me on that.’
Jason had such faith in Gerald’s local knowledge that this news filled his head with a terrible confusion that lapsed into dread. Electra had made a fool of him then? If Gerald said there was no zoo in Sullet, then none existed. And wasn’t a zoo a place where older men, like dads and uncles, traditionally took younger girls, like nieces and daughters, on innocent days out? Electra’s offer to meet him outside the gates of the zoo the following morning, on Saturday, must have been a disingenuous, mocking rejection that he’d been too stupid to recognise.
When Jason arrived at work on Monday and he accused her of playing a cruel trick, she would say, Did you really think? No, tell me you didn’t. I was only joking. No, wait, don’t tell me you actually went and looked for a zoo? In Sully? He could almost hear her voice. His disgrace and humiliation would reach the forklift drivers by elevenses. The material he’d gifted his colleagues with, for endless pranks and jibes about all things zoological, was limitless. Why had he been so gullible? Sullet had no cinema, no theatre, museum, bowling alley. It was simply a place where people existed. Recreation was sought out of town. So how could it possibly boast a zoo?
‘But that was a roll-up right there. Typical really.’ Gerald’s voice returned to Jason as he stood in shocked stupefaction before the microwave oven. ‘As usual the money wasn’t there. Gibbet was running the council into the ground at the time. So instead they used the budget on roads that no one needed.’