by P. R. Black
Vonny had indulged the drinking, which started the moment their visitors arrived. Clive and Prill had thrown themselves into it, surprising their hosts. The former, a somewhat austere man in late middle age, but fit and healthy with it – the outdoor life clearly working for him – had been all too eager to sample a “wee shortie”, as Seth referred to The Good Stuff. Already depleted by those two stolen fingers from the night before, the bottle took a terrible beating.
Quickly the conversations had split in half as the parties sat on the patio, looking out over the trees, the clear sky and a paintbox patterning of stars up above. It was bitter out, but the newcomers had insisted on sitting out, and Vonny had provided fleeces and tartan blankets, unpacked just that morning.
‘Nice smoke, all the same,’ Clive said, taking a draw of his own cigar. ‘Only, you know you’re not meant to inhale, right?’
‘Ah, that’s a habit that dies hard.’ Here Seth winked. Vonny restrained an urge to stop him. New neighbours plus drug references? Not the best idea, she thought, taking a sip of Chablis.
‘I wish we had this patio, Clive,’ Prill said.
‘It’s something else,’ he agreed, leaning back in the chair. ‘Feel like I’m on holiday – and we’re just across the road.’
‘You’re welcome any time,’ Vonny said.
‘You could fall in love with a house like this.’
‘We’ve fallen in love with the place, that’s for sure.’
‘But surely your farm’s a terrific patch?’ Seth asked. ‘You guys are in with the bricks here, I’m guessing?’
‘You could say that,’ Clive answered, considering a plume of smoke as it dissipated into the frigid night air. ‘But who’s to say we’ll stay here forever? Owning the farm is a dream, but I’m getting closer to retirement age. Prill and I don’t have any children, you see, so there’s no one to take on the work.’
‘What do you grow?’ Vonny asked.
‘All sorts – barley, rhubarb – pumpkins, now there’s a crop for you! People have a go at Halloween – being turned into more of an American tradition – but it hasn’t half given us a boost, the more popular pumpkins have got.’
‘Used to be turnips, didn’t it?’ Seth mused, boozily. ‘They had it in Scotland. I had a Scottish mate who claimed that Halloween was a spooky Scots, Celtic-y type thing. They claim everything, though, the Scots. Tarmacadam, bagpipes, tartan…’
‘Oh, I should know,’ Clive said. ‘Second name Fulton. We’ve got our own tartan.’
‘Whae’s like yese?’ Seth roared.
Clive only smiled in response, then returned his attention to Vonny. ‘So, we do OK, but harvest time gets harder and harder for me… And looking after the sheep and cows is labour-intensive, every day. It’s a lot of ground to cover. We’ll have to see. Sometimes we dream of a little cottage somewhere, don’t we? Maybe even keep a little corner of our land, then sell the rest. What do you think, Prill?’
‘News to me,’ Prill sniffed. ‘They’ll carry me out of here in a box. I think we could extend, though. That’s a possibility. Well… I think my glass has gotten a little bit damp, Clive, wouldn’t you say?’
Clive sighed, and accepted his wife’s proffered glass. ‘Just as well we brought two bottles, eh?’ he said, grinning.
Vonny and Seth shared the briefest look, one only couples could share.
*
Seth twirled his underpants around the end of his toe, then almost overbalanced as he lobbed them into a corner. ‘Good night that, I thought,’ he said, similarly struggling to get into a pair of pyjama shorts. ‘Nice couple. That Prill’s a bit of an odd one. Though I guess she was blazing drunk. Thought we might have to stick her in our wheelbarrow. Even though Clive didn’t seem to get drunk, no matter what we poured him.’
‘Unlike you,’ Vonny said. She was lying in bed with a book open, but struggled to put more than a sentence or two together. It was possible she had overdone it a little. ‘So, that little chat you and Clive had, when you thought I wasn’t listening… What was that about?’
Seth lay back on the bed and snorted. ‘You’ll have to give me some details, there?’
‘When he talked about how you were “getting on with our new friend?” Like a schoolkid trying to talk in code. What did he mean by that?’
Seth’s eyes closed, and his breathing became regular.
‘Seth! I’m talking to you.’
But, by God, he actually had passed out, his mouth agape. Vonny, stung for a moment, considered nudging him awake. Then she threw back the covers and stomped off to fetch a glass of water from the en suite. She’d ask him about this, tomorrow.
She liked the en suite, but the ante-room had an unsettling effect in the dark. There was too much glass around, and its edges reflected the moonlight in razor-edge slivers. There was something she disliked about it, robbed of the crude illumination of the light switch, with only the warped light from the frosted windows. As if in a gesture of reassurance, she touched the toasty radiator. At least the heating system worked like a dream; you would never have known about the frost and the freezing fog that had descended outside, unless you opened the window.
When she returned to the bedroom, she gasped. Seth was stood in the middle of the floor, gazing out beyond their balcony towards the jagged treeline, etched against the darkest blue of the sky.
‘What is it?’
‘Security light came on. Didn’t last. Just a bloody fox or something. I didn’t think about that, you know. That you might get foxes in every two minutes. Should dismantle it, really.’
‘Go back to bed. It’s fine. There’s no one out here.’ Vonny slipped into bed. Fresh, crisp sheets; cool against her face, her neck. One of her favourite things. And plenty of space out here to dry them outside, too. Nothing better than clean sheets dried outside. ‘Now I’m worried about the caravan, though.’
‘What… you reckon it might get broken into?’
‘Or stolen. Maybe we should take it back?’
‘We’ve got too much to do at the moment. Besides, it’s coming up to Christmas.’ He got in beside her, and his breathing grew more regular. To be fair, his ability to pass out at a few seconds’ notice was nothing new. It was an old trick, and one she envied – there had been many nights, tortured by problems both brand new and historical, when she wished she had it. So she got a fright when he said, without opening his eyes or changing his sleeping position: ‘We’ve got the Tin Coffin until the new year. No rush taking it back, no sense piling on the duties. Best we…’ He hadn’t fallen asleep again; it was a genuine pause.
‘Yeah?’
‘Nothing. Thought I heard a noise.’
‘God’s sake!’
‘Y’know, I didn’t think it would bother me, but it does. The idea that we’re all alone out here. Barring the neighbours, half a mile away. There’s something weird about it. You say, “There’s nothing there”, but there is. There’s a whole bloody ecosystem. All watching us. Spiders, rats. Wicked witches. Mad murderers with masks on.’
‘Shut the curtains, then,’ Vonny mumbled.
And she must have fallen asleep, quicker than she gave herself credit for. The next thing she was aware of was shrugging something off her shoulder, and said, ‘I’ll tell you when I am quite ready. No thank you, no bus for me.’
Then a hand gripped her shoulder, hard, definite, concrete, painful, real. Vonny’s eyes flew open.
She was looking into the face of the devil. The actual devil’s face, red skin, needle teeth, orange eyes and two obscene horns, curving outward from the head.
‘Get up, both of you!’ the devil screamed. ‘Now!’
26
Vonny waved her hands, as if dispersing smoke. But the devil remained. The mask was expensive and horribly detailed, with alternating shades of light and dark red delineating the angles and contours of the face. The devil’s eyes were yellow and slit horizontally, like a goat’s. Two real, darting human eyes were visible through holes in t
he mask, just underneath. The mask had long, thin teeth painted into a leer above a classic saturnine beard.
‘No,’ she said, ‘no, wait, wait.’
‘Out the fucking bed!’ the devil shrieked, tearing off the quilt cover. Vonny cowered, hands clutched to her chest and knees drawn up to her chin. She might have screamed.
Then she saw the machete. The main light had been switched on. The machete looked new. The blade was polished to an almost ceremonial sheen. It was half a metre long or more, and razor-tipped. The devil waved the blade in front of her face. ‘Out of the bed! Do it! Run, and I’ll take your fucking leg off!’
She got up. The mewling sound came from her own throat. The blade followed her progress and she cringed. She wanted to fold up on the floor. Her bladder had already gone; the wet was cold on her pyjama bottoms.
‘Now stand against that wall and don’t move or I swear to God, I’ll…’ The devil’s voice rose to an almost unearthly pitch, distorted beyond any rational sense.
Seth bucked and twisted like a cat tossed off a shed roof. Once he’d sprung out of bed and disentangled himself from the inside sheet, a skull loomed in front of him. Again, the mask was detailed, possibly one of a pair alongside the other man’s devil covering. Cracks stretched across the dirty white expanse, some of them joined by what looked like sutures, and black hollows surrounded the eye sockets and enhanced the effect of the cheekbones. If the devil’s smile was restrained, the skull’s mouth gaped in unholy mirth.
The skull carried a samurai sword. The blade was held high, and just far enough away to make a sudden grab for it impossible.
‘Fuck is going on man? What’s the game here?’ Seth stood up on the bed, clutching the under sheet to him – the ludicrous effect of a cartoon elephant shrieking upon sight of a mouse. His jaw literally dropped at what was unfolding in front of him.
‘Let’s be calm, here.’ The man in the skull mask held up his free hand. He had a placatory tone, and sounded much younger than the devil mask man, who was taller and stockier.
The intruders wore black from head to foot. Then Vonny noticed something that made her sob aloud. Both the intruders wore plastic coverings on their feet.
‘Oh, please don’t cry, come on,’ Skull Face said, soothingly. ‘There is absolutely no need for any unpleasantness. You could treat this as a kind of social call.’
As he said this, the Devil’s heavy breathing hissed out through the slits in the mask. The hand holding the machete towards Vonny trembled.
Jake. This had to be down to Jake. Something to do with Jake! They found us!
‘It’s OK, honey, shhh,’ Skull Face said. ‘We just want the stuff. Give it to us, and we’ll be on our way. Understand me, big guy?’
Seth’s lips quivered, but he had recovered some poise. He squared his shoulders. ‘I do not know what the fuck you’re talking about. Get out of my house, now.’
‘Wrong answer,’ Skull Face said. He inched closer. ‘I think you know exactly what I’m talking about, and exactly where it is. Take us to it, and you both survive. In fact, if you do the right thing, you could both go back to bed, wake up, and pretend this didn’t happen.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Seth said again. His eyes watered, and he chewed the inside of his mouth nervously. He dared a look towards Vonny, who still sobbed.
‘We just moved here,’ she managed to say, ‘we just built the house. We don’t know anything about it, or anything about Dan Grainger.’
Skull and the Devil shared a glance, at the same moment Vonny and Seth did. Seth jerked his head – whether indicating she should shut up, or a response to something he didn’t like, Vonny could not say.
Skull said: ‘That’s interesting. Dan Grainger, you said? He seems an interesting character. Why don’t you tell us about him?’
‘We don’t know anything,’ Vonny stammered. ‘We know he lived here before us. We won the plot in a raffle. That’s it, that’s the only connection. There’s no stuff. Whatever it is you’re looking for.’ She wiped her streaming nose with the back of her hand, like a child.
‘You did find the car, though,’ Skull said. ‘The star prize! Whereabouts did you find it? As a matter of interest, you might say.’
‘Near a shed out in the woods,’ Vonny said.
‘Just stumbled over it, yeah?’
Somehow she found it harder to stare into the illusion of the empty eye sockets in the skull than she did the cartoonish gaze of the Devil, though the latter stood closer. ‘Yeah, pretty much.’
‘Well. I guess it doesn’t matter where and how you found it,’ Skull said. ‘We think the stuff was in the Datsun. At least, it was, at first. That much we know. I’ve got a… Well. People we know have access to a sniffer dog, and when we showed it the old Datsun at that guy’s lock-up, it just about landed on its back with its feet in the air. Daft thing was on its way back to the sixties. And you know what that means? That means the stuff was in the Datsun at some point. Maybe even in the recent past. Now, I had a word with the guy at the lock-up, the classic cars guy, and he doesn’t know anything about any stuff. I believe him. You know why? Either of you can buzz in with the answer, here.’
Seth said nothing. Vonny said, miserably: ‘No, we don’t know why.’
‘Because, after we made it clear we would crush him to death until he told us what we wanted to know, we threatened to take his fingers off.’
‘I was going to take his balls off,’ the Devil growled. ‘That’s a bit of motivation for anyone, right there.’
‘We need the stuff,’ the Skull said. ‘Right now.’
The words tumbled out of Vonny’s mouth, just about making sense and no more. ‘I told you we don’t know anything about any stuff! Leave us alone! We have a security system – you’ll be plastered all over it. It can dial into the police. Probably has, already. If you leave now, you’ll get away.’
Skull and the Devil both laughed. ‘Your security system?’ said the former. ‘You mean the one connected to that little console there, beside the bedside table? That one? The one with the panic button? The one with the little red light? That one?’ He jabbed a finger at the panel next to the bed. ‘Notice anything odd about it?’
Vonny’s breath caught in her throat. The console was dead. No digital figures on the display. No status readout on any of the cameras and sensors. And no red light.
Seth spoke, his voice cracking with strain. ‘Look, lads, let’s not do anything daft. Right?’
‘“Lads,”’ sneered the Devil. When he twisted his head to do so, Vonny caught sight of a tattoo at his neck. Flames, red and orange, styled like Hokusai’s wave. ‘“Lads”, is it? He’s seeing sense now.’
Skull nodded its head vigorously. ‘Oh yeah. He wants to be friends. He’s making a deal in his head. He really, really wants to. I can sense it.’
‘Just make sure you leave her alone. All right? Don’t hurt her.’
‘You’re in no position to seek guarantees,’ Skull said. His tone was not so much cold, as completely devoid of emotional content. It might have been a remark about mild weather. ‘You’re in no position to demand anything. You know what we’re talking about. You know what we want. So, take us to it. Right now. Or we’ll start hurting her.’
The breath, whistling through the apertures in the Devil mask. The eyes – the true eyes – behind the red and black rubber casing, plotting a haphazard course across several points on Vonny’s face and body.
Seth took a long time before he answered.
‘It’s not in the house.’
27
‘What stuff?’ Vonny screamed. ‘There’s no stuff!’
Skull chuckled. ‘Too late. He’s told us there is. Now, here’s what we will do. Big guy, you’re going to walk very carefully in front of me and keep those hands up in the air when you’re doing it. You, sugar tits, will follow behind with my friend the Devil. I don’t think I have to explain what’s going to happen if either of you decides to do anything uninte
lligent, do I?’
Vonny glared at Seth, horror taking over as her dominant response now. He had found something. He knew about the stuff, whatever it was. He fucking knew.
‘Move,’ said the Skull. He took two careful steps back, towards the patio door to the balcony, holding the blade above his head. Seth stepped off the bed.
‘Can I get my slippers on?’
‘Slip your feet into them, my friend. Get yourself comfortable.’
Seth did so, slowly and carefully sliding his feet into the footwear, then walking towards the bedroom door. Skull, watching closely, let him get a couple of steps ahead, then followed up. Vonny gasped as he darted forward and placed the point of the sword between his shoulder blades. Seth’s shoulders jerked, and he stopped.
‘Just letting you know how quickly I could do it,’ Skull said, in that same detached tone. ‘Ever had a shish kebab? I love shish kebabs.’
‘You’ve made your point,’ Seth said, quietly.
‘OK. You seem like a clever fellow. Lead the way.’
When they had both disappeared outside the door, the Devil glared at her and grabbed Vonny by the shoulder. She cried out, as he shoved her roughly in front of him.
There was a minor struggle outside the door. Seth, his weight brought to bear. A grunt, maybe his, maybe Skull’s. ‘No, don’t!’ she cried out.
She saw the blade raised towards Seth’s neck, a silver spark jumping between two silhouettes. Shadow Seth raised his hands and stepped back, his pyjama top collar caught in Skull’s other hand.
‘Problem?’ The Devil barked, at Vonny’s ear.
‘No problem,’ Skull said. ‘Let’s keep it polite from now on, yeah? I don’t want to have to plunge our genial host here before he tells us what we need to know. Maybe in turn, you could treat the lady nice?’
The intruders paused a moment, and something unreadable passed between them.