Together, they hoisted the body and carried him up the stairs to the second floor, laying him on the bed in what had been his room.
Pete stood looking down at the blackened face for a moment. Spike stepped back and walked around to the other side of the bed.
Watch him! the Voice cried out.
For a moment, Pete thought David had come back to life and was addressing him. He looked down. The body lay there, eyes closed and unmoving.
Pete turned to see Spike watching him intently.
“Spooked?” Spike asked.
Pete nodded. “A little, yeah.”
Spike came over and clapped him on the shoulder. Pete felt a tremor, as if he’d been touched by something evil.
Spike looked him in the eyes. “It’s just a dead body, mate. No need to panic. Let’s keep a clear mind and we’ll all be fine till we get off this fucking island.”
“Yeah — right.”
They walked back downstairs together. As they were passing the drawing-room door, Pete heard the Voice again.
Count them! it said.
He felt a jolt of fear as he turned around. He already knew what he’d find.
“Look!” He stopped and pointed to chessboard. There were now five pieces down on their sides. A black bishop had been placed beside the rook.
“Who’s been in here since this morning?” Spike asked.
“Everybody,” Pete said. “We all have.”
Spike shook his head. “Well, I don’t know about you, but I can count only three dead bodies. Why do you think this has anything to do with anything?”
“I told you,” Pete blathered. “Every time someone dies, another piece gets turned down. Who … who’s doing this to us?” He sank to his knees, pulling at his hair. “Oh, fuck!” he screamed.
“Pete, get a hold of yourself,” Spike said. “You’re only making it worse for everyone else.”
Pete looked up at Spike. “This is all your fault.”
Spike grabbed Pete by the shoulders and shook him. “What do you mean by that?”
“You know exactly what I mean,” Pete said menacingly.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Spike slapped him across the face. Pete cringed and held his arms up in defence. “Now just shut up. We’re not telling anybody else about this right now.”
They continued on down the hall to the mud room, where Sandra and Verna had put on checkered jackets, and hiking boots. The rain gear was still hanging in a corner. The two men waited as the women brought it to the entrance.
Pete was paler than normal, Sandra thought. It was the shock. The four of them put the gear on over their clothes without a word then crossed to the front door.
They all glanced into the parlour through the open door as they passed. Crispin sat alone.
Spike stopped and looked at him for a moment. “We’re going out now. We shouldn’t be long. Will you be all right?”
“I’m sure I’ll be fine,” the critic replied, staring vacantly off into the distance.
“I’ll tell Max we’re going out and remind him that you’re staying,” Spike said.
He raced up the stairs and knocked on the green door. Max opened it immediately.
“We’re having that look around the island now,” Spike said. He glanced over Max’s shoulder where Sami Lee sat silently rocking herself in a window seat. “Crispin’s staying inside.”
Max peered cautiously out into the hallway. “I’ll come down with you and lock the door behind you when you leave,” he said. “Sami Lee’s scared. I want her to know she’s safe in here. You’ll have to knock when you want back in.”
“All right,” Spike said.
Sami Lee looked panicked when Max told her he was going downstairs. She clung to him and begged him not to leave. When he persisted, she agreed to go down with him. They closed the door behind the group and watched them trek off in the rain.
Max went to the parlour and looked at Crispin. “You’re cool as a cucumber,” he said “Doesn’t any of this faze you?”
Crispin turned his head in Max’s direction, but his eyes seemed to be watching something in a far corner of the room. He shrugged. “I can’t control what’s going on here, so I’m not going to waste time and energy getting upset over it. Someone will come for us eventually and we’ll all get out of here. If we keep our heads, there’s no reason the rest of us shouldn’t be fine from here on. Now that we know what’s going on.”
“That’s probably what Newt Merton thought,” Max said. “At the very least, I think we should be wary of everything that goes on around us at all times. Don’t trust anyone.”
Crispin nodded. “A wise sentiment.”
After a moment, Max said, “Can I get you a drink?”
A wry smile formed on Crispin’s face. “You’ve just told me my life is in danger and I should be wary of everything and everyone around me, but you’re offering to serve me a drink that I can’t see you pour?” He laughed. “But yes, of course. Why not?”
Max went to the kitchen and returned with a bottle of wine and three glasses. He uncorked the bottle in front of them. The room was oddly silent except for the soft pull of the cork releasing and the hiss of the rain outside. Crispin fiddled with his recorder and stared off into the distance while Max poured. Sami Lee kept her eyes trained on the drowned landscape outside the window.
They sat and drank in silence. It was some time before anyone spoke.
“Any sign of them?” Max asked, finally.
“Nothing,” Sami Lee said wearily.
Max began to sing softly: “On the first day of shagging, my true love gave to me a love song full of hate …”
Sami Lee’s frown stopped him dead.
“The Ladykillers’ extremely memorable ‘Love Song to Sid Vicious,’” Crispin said, stating the song’s subtitle.
Max snorted. “What the hell were we thinking, anyway?”
“Why Sid?” Crispin asked after a moment.
Max shrugged. “We were all stoned on heroin at the time. It was just the thing to do back then. You know what they say — if you can remember the eighties, you weren’t really there. I suppose thinking of old Sid came naturally. It’s the way he chucked it, right? But what was in my mind while we were writing that song was how he killed his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, in the Chelsea Hotel. I mean, it may sound crazy now that we’ve lived a little, but it all sounded so fucking glamorous at the time, if you can get into the headspace.”
“I’m not sure I can,” Crispin said archly. “Expressing violence in lyrics is one thing, but actually committing violence against another human being isn’t that easy for me to understand. Maybe you could enlighten me as to how something like that could possibly be considered ‘glamorous.’”
Max shot him a look to see if the critic was putting him on, but the expression on Crispin’s face said he was deadly serious.
“How she died, I mean. You know — they were both strung out on heroin and lying in bed in the Chelsea and, I don’t know — something must have happened between them, because the bugger stabbed her and then lay back down in bed and went to sleep. It’s like total fucking End Of the World time and he doesn’t even know he’s done her in.” Max looked around in exasperation. “Fuck — she was the one who got stabbed and even she didn’t know it. So she, like, bled to death there in the bathroom while Sid was asleep in bed.”
Crispin nodded. “And four months later Sid’s mother killed him by shooting him up with a heroin overdose while he was asleep. Was that glamorous too?”
Max looked over. “Yeah? I never heard that bit.”
“It was in a recent biography of the Sex Pistols. Sid’s mother confessed just before she died of cancer. At the time he died, though, she said she found a suicide note from Sid saying he’d made a death pact with Spungen. I guess she changed
her mind.”
“Yeah? Holy shit!” Max exclaimed. “I always thought Sid’s death was too convenient. The stuff that people do, huh? I heard one of Sid’s biggest fans wrote him a note after the murder telling him God would forgive him if he confessed and sang Diana Ross songs.”
Crispin turned his ethereal gaze toward Max, that unflinching, impenetrable stare. “We’ll never know, will we?”
Outside, the rain continued to gust in a constant, cold stream. Four figures reached the centre of the island and stopped.
Spike turned to the others. “We’ll do this boy-girl, boy-girl,” he said. “It’s safest that way.”
He waited till they turned to listen to him, sheltered beneath their hoods and huddling against the cold and damp.
“What we need to do,” he said, “is circle the island in opposite directions around the cliffs and then meet back here in the centre. It should take ten minutes at most. We’ll be able to see everything there is to see that way. Remember that we’ll never be so far apart we can’t hear if the other team calls out. You might have to yell loud, but just do it. If we hear you, we’ll come running.”
The others listened, eyes wide, blinking away the rain.
“And don’t try anything brave,” Spike continued. “If you see Edwards or Harvey or anybody you don’t know, just note where they are and come back and get us. Once we determine where they are and whether they’re armed, then we’ll decide what to do. Okay?”
Heads nodded.
“Sandra, you go with Pete. Verna, you come with me.”
Spike watched as Pete and Sandra disappeared around a grove of trees. He turned to Verna.
“It’s just you and me, kiddo,” he said.
“Cozy,” Verna said, heading in the opposite direction from Sandra and Pete.
As they moved along, Verna slipped on a rock and stopped to tie her bootlaces tighter. Spike went on ahead, pushing aside the branches of low-hanging trees. Verna noticed he was walking oddly. She couldn’t remember having seen that before.
“You have a limp,” she said, catching up to him.
He shrugged. “It acts up when it’s cold and rainy, like now,” he said. “I had a bout of polio as a kid. Not a severe case, as it turned out, but it left my right leg a little weak.”
“Lucky it didn’t leave much lasting damage,” she said.
“Not to me, no. But my brother died of it. From what they can tell, I passed it on to him.”
“That’s so sad,” Verna said. She hesitated. “My little brother died, too. Little Tyler.”
They were making their way with difficulty through a patch of dense brush. Verna walked in front, while Spike followed behind.
“How did he die?”
“Motorcycle accident,” Verna said. “At least it looked like an accident. I suspect otherwise.”
“Tough luck,” Spike said.
“He was troubled, my brother. I think he resented the kind of upbringing we had as kids, though we both went our separate ways by the time we were in our late teens. We didn’t have a happy childhood and I think he couldn’t face a lifetime of more of the same.”
“Parents, huh?” Spike said.
“Yeah,” was all Verna said in reply.
Spike’s mother had given him no hint that she favoured his brother over him, but Spike felt the withdrawal of her affection after his brother’s death. He hadn’t been too young to make the connection. He grew up believing he’d killed his brother. His father had been an emotionally repressed blue-collar worker who never spent a great deal of time with his family. As a result, young Elyot managed to find ways to distract himself while he was growing up. Drugs, minor break-and-enters for which he never got fingered, and once a fruit-stand holdup that netted him a total of fifty-two dollars. The cops had come sniffing around his door, but ultimately he realized they had nothing to pin it on him, so he lay low till they went away. He never tried it again, knowing they were just waiting till next time. That was when he decided there wasn’t going to be a next time.
At seventeen, he dropped out of school for good, but he’d already started a band and soon got a few gigs at local punk clubs. He met Max and Pete and Kent a few years later and joined their group, abandoning his own as too amateurish. The Ladykillers already had a repertoire, but they had just lost their singer, who got married and let his wife browbeat him into dropping out. Spike fit the bill. It was a match spawned in purgatory, as he liked to say when they finally broke into the industry full-time.
Spike’s reminiscences were interrupted by something rustling in the brush off to the right. He held up his hand to shush Verna, but she was already aware of it. Her eyes turned on him, big and round with fear.
He pushed a branch aside and let out a yell as a large black shape leapt past him and tore off down the path with a growl. He was startled only for a moment before he burst out laughing.
“Fucking dog!” he yelled, his rain-streaked hair hanging down in strands. “I thought the fucker was going to kill me.”
Verna watched him with a mildly amused look on her face, but said nothing. She cocked her ear to listen for sounds from Sandra and Pete, but all she heard was the rain coming down all around.
On the far side of the island, Sandra stood on the cliffs looking in the direction of the mainland. It couldn’t be seen for the fog.
“You’d never know it was out there now, if you hadn’t seen it with your own eyes,” she said.
Pete stood off to one side. He hadn’t said a word the entire walk. She looked over at him. He kept his head turned aside.
“I didn’t mean to make fun of you about your OCD earlier.”
She waited, but there was no reply.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Nothing to talk about,” he said, and continued with their hike.
In the parlour, Max had just finished pouring the last of the wine into Crispin’s glass. The critic held it up to his nose and sniffed. The recorder turned silently on the table beside him.
“I truly believe my sense of smell is that much stronger to compensate for my lack of sight,” he said, with an air of satisfaction.
“Yeah?” Max said.
Crispin nodded. “If I told you I thought Sid Vicious was an unbelievably stupid twat, what would you say?”
“I’m not sure. Back then, I might have taken a swing at you, blind or not.”
“Apart from killing his girlfriend, he once used soiled water from a toilet to shoot himself up with heroin.”
Max guffawed. “Yeah — that sounds like Sid, all right. He did a lot of fucking stupid things. No more sense in him than … I don’t know what.”
“But you admired him?”
Max nodded. “Sure. We all did. It was like the Pistols gave us a licence to do whatever we wanted to do, you know?”
“Was that a good thing?” Crispin asked.
Max stared at him with incomprehension. “Of course! I never knew it was all right to sound terrible until I heard the Pistols, you know? They were just fucking awful and I ran home and played their record for Pete and my friends and I said, ‘We can do that.’ And we did.”
“Your first recording was quite memorable,” Crispin said. “It actually sounded like the Pistols.”
“We were trying to sound like the Pistols, of course. Everybody did back then, but I liked groups like the Ruts and Stiff Little Fingers. Here on the west coast, we had the Germs. Stupid fucking Darby Crash with his passion for cutting himself with broken beer bottles. He couldn’t do himself in fast enough once Sid was gone. It was like a fad for a while. Lots of people wanted to die.” He nodded to himself before continuing. “I always thought the Clash was overrated, though. But you couldn’t really imitate the Pistols. It was just impossible.”
Crispin nodded. “How do
you see music today?”
Max sneered. “Corporate bullshit. It’s all marketing.”
“Some would say that’s all punk ever was in North America. A facade with a built-in marketing campaign and fashion to match. Rip a T-shirt and add a straight pin. And voila! You’ve got a punk movement. What happened to all that righteous indignation and anger?”
Max shrugged. “It went away, I suppose. You can’t be angry forever. It was too destructive to last. But those of us who were there will always be changed by it. Punk wasn’t just the music. It was a lifestyle. We lived it!”
Crispin sipped his wine. “How do you want to be remembered?” he asked. “What do you want people to say about you when you’re gone?”
“I want them to understand that I’m not really nasty or vicious. I’m not a bad-ass. That was just the press making me out that way.” He leaned over and kissed Sami Lee on the cheek. “I love my girl, Sami Lee. I always treat her right.”
“It’s true,” Sami Lee said. She smiled grimly and took a drag of her cigarette.
“I like people around me to be happy — as long as they don’t piss me off, of course.”
Max smiled broadly before remembering Crispin was blind. He sighed and turned to look out the window.
The trek took Spike and Verna to the far side of the tiny island in less than ten minutes. They stopped to listen, but there was no sign of Sandra and Pete.
Verna looked worriedly at Spike.
“You don’t think …?” she began.
“If they found Edwards and there was trouble, we would have heard something from them.”
Verna looked meaningfully at him. “What if it’s not Edwards?”
“Not a chance, “Spike said scornfully. “Pete’s a bit odd, but he’s not a killer.”
“What if it’s Sandra, then? She’s a pretty hard-done-by lady. She definitely shows signs of addiction to something. I think she’s pretty hardcore.”
Spike lifted his head and howled into the rain. “Ha! Max is ‘hardcore,’ not Sandra.”
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