Or the thing that was William.
The thing stands like a wreck in the doorway, its hand sliding down the wall leaving a dark trail of blood and pieces of what must be flesh. The other huge arm is out and holding the doorframe as the rest of the creature stands like it’s deciding what to do. It looks into the room through yellow slits for eyes that are surrounded by scales, not skin. Its grey hair hangs down, matted, untidy, slick with blood, and its mouth is a great wide gash with no lips. It snarls and its oversized teeth grind together like the bit of some great drill. They make a high, squealing, grating sound as pieces of yellow matter are squeezed through them like meat through a mincing machine. A powerful, snake-like tongue, black and long, darts from the hole and catches pieces of shattered bone and tissue before they can drip to the ground. It slaps around the opening and then vanishes back inside.
Pete feels his legs giving way. He’s going to hit the floor.
‘Drover.’
The creature that is William snaps its head up, as if hearing the name brought him back to life. Its eyes flash around in their sockets and settle on the three people huddled at the other end of the room. Its mouth twists up at one side, a crooked smile, and the two holes that might be a nose flare open. William takes a long stride forward.
Drover lifts the shotgun and Pete hears two, quick, deafening explosions.
Parts of William’s chest fly from his body and he drops to his knees. Pete feels Lily pull him towards the hallway.
‘No,’ Drover shouts, as Pete fights back. ‘We got to finish this off. We got to kill it.’
‘We can’t,’ Lily says, and Pete can now see she is crying. Her face is white and wet, her eyes pink, and she, too, has blood on her skin and he has no idea where from. But Pete doesn’t care where Lily goes now. There’s no escape from this. There is only one way out.
Then, he hears William groan and he looks across the room to see there is blood up the walls and dripping from the ceiling. Parts of William’s chest have been ripped open and some of his insides are showing. Drover is forcing two more cartridges back into the gun.
‘Bring it down, Drover,’ Pete yells. ‘Again, keep doing it. But not the heart.’
‘What?’
If he can get the knife and cut out the heart then they can kill this monster.
But as he takes a step and comes up beside Drover, William crashes onto all fours and his head rises up to look directly at the two boys. Pete thinks it’s like looking down on some wild, mythological creature that’s crawling back up from hell. It’s what happens when you go on the ghost train, Pete thinks. You go down but you come back up changed. You come back up bad, evil like this thing, wanting to kill people. That’s bad. It’s bad to kill people, even by accident. He looks at Drover.
‘Did you kill my dad?’ he asks.
‘Pete, what the fuck?’ Drover snaps the gun back together.
The thing that is William leaps from the floor. It springs forward, mouth wide, teeth sharp. The long-fingered hands reach out, the razor sharp nails like claws pointing directly at the boys. It screeches. Suddenly, it slices one claw down directly through Drover’s left shoulder.
Drover falls back in shock. He screams in pain as the nail slices in deeper, a wide, hair-thin paper cut that reaches down deep, cuts through his bone, slices through his veins, brings blood pouring from him.
And then the thing is rearing up above Drover who holds the gun up hopelessly for protection. The mouth opens impossibly wide, the eyes and nose-holes flare and the thing shrieks out and roars.
But the gun roars back and William is blasted backwards a pace. He hits the ground, on his back, his shriek cut to a groan which quickly falls into silence.
Pete sees William lying on his back, motionless, on the floor. He is aware of Drover struggling to his feet, his left arm dangling, blood dripping from it.
Pete looks down at Drover. ‘Reload it,’ he orders, and then he asks, ‘Did you kill my dad?’ He feels for the knife tucked into his belt. It is still there.
It’s all a mess but for some reason he feels calm now. For some strange reason he knows that this is what he has to do. It’s like he came here for this reason. This is why he was in the woods today with Drover. This is why the two of them came to be here. This is how the story is meant to end. The handle of the knife feels solid, real. It fits his grip perfectly. He pulls it from his belt.
He knows what he has to do.
‘Did you?’ he repeats, and his voice is calm and strong.
‘No,’ Drover says through gasps for breath. He’s not looking at Pete. He has stepped forward. William is not getting up but Pete knows he will be, in time.
Drover leans against the table for support. He cries out in agony as he jerks the shotgun open. ‘It’s the last one,’ he says, his body shaking. He tips out the two just spent and uses his teeth to insert the last cartridge.
There he is. Drover is standing right in front of Pete. Pete has the knife in his hand. Drover has just shot this thing, this was-a-man, shot him right there. Two times. He didn’t flinch. He lifted the gun and pulled the trigger. No accident.
‘The truth, Drover,’ Pete says, and his words sound like a warning.
‘Bloody gun!’ Drover is struggling with the last cartridge.
‘Tell me.’
Drover turns to Pete and Pete sees that William is starting to stir again. The creature has been knocked back, its body a heaving mass of black blood and insides, ripped clothes and yellow-white stuff, but it is still heaving. He is still breathing.
‘Please tell me the truth, Drover.’
His friend looks him in the eye and says, ‘No, I did not kill your dad.’ And Pete knows he is lying.
He lifts the knife, puts a hand on Drover’s shoulder, and lunges forward.
Twenty-nine
THE KNIFE IN HIS HAND gives him strength. He knows it is a very old knife, a ritual knife, one that he might have heard about in stories; the kind of thing that his creatures and inventions, his fantasy world-dwellers, would have used for old rites and ceremonies. It’s the kind of knife that you only get to touch once in your life, and only then when you are sacrificing someone on an altar. It’s a special knife and it is doing its job right now.
As he feels the blade cut into the flesh, Pete’s mind jolts to something else. It’s like his brain doesn’t want to compute what he is doing, what has to be done. It’s strange, he thinks, to have your heart stabbed like this, to learn that the man who was your best friend cannot tell you a simple truth; to learn, after all these years of trust and loyalty that he still lies to you even though he says he doesn’t. Drover simply could never tell the truth. Perhaps that is it. Perhaps he had something wrong with him that meant he had to lie all the time. But, then, why would he tell Pete that he would never lie to him? It’s easy. Because that itself would be a lie. But, how can someone be so bad as to lie to their friends?
The knife is slicing slowly through the flesh. Pete’s mind has slowed everything down for him so that what feels like minutes is in fact only seconds, but it’s giving him time to work things out. It’s only taking a moment. It will all be over soon.
Funny that, isn’t it? Having your heart, the emotional heart of you, cut away by the only person you have in the world. Will there be others? If Pete goes on, through the woods into whatever comes next, will there be others? Lily perhaps? He can hear her crying on the floor, no doubt upset about her granddad, hoping that he will live, hoping that if he does he will spare her. Maybe she is hoping he will die. She did just kill her parents and killing a person, Pete knows, is wrong. She must be feeling as mixed up as Pete is now. But, she’s not feeling this satisfying ripping of flesh. She’s not getting her hands warm with someone else’s blood. She’s not taking her anger and disappointment out on living, breathing
flesh. She’s not enjoying revenge like Pete is. He’s not the vengeful type, though, so why does it feel so right to be doing this?
Because this is Pete’s story. This is where he was meant to come to, to this desperate point, and there’s no use fighting it. This has to be done.
‘You’ve gone and done it, Pete.’ He hears a voice. Not a man’s not a girl’s, just a voice. It’s not his own. ‘Pete, you’ve done it.’ Maybe it is Lily’s voice after all.
‘Jesus, what’s that?’ someone is shouting now. ‘What have you done?’ Someone right next to him is screaming in his ear and everything is speeding up again. No slow motion now. It’s all racing back to him. Someone is pulling him back but all he can see is the blood on his hands.
‘What the fuck have you done?’ It’s Drover shouting at him, but it’s not Drover’s blood. ‘What the fuck is that?’
‘It’s the heart,’ Pete says, and he is looking at it. Red, with yellow strands across it, big and fatty and surprisingly heavy. It’s also still warm, hot even.
Pete gets to his feet and looks down at the blown-wide cavity that was William’s chest. The face has gone, half blasted away, half human again. The mouth is a mouth, he has his nose and one of his eyes. Funny, Pete thinks, Myles’ face was half and half, Drover’s is as well, half with blood from the freezer. He wonders if his own face is a half-mask.
Drover is shaking him. ‘What are you doing?’
‘It’s the only way,’ Pete says. ‘Now we can kill it. I’ll eat it, you shoot me, it dies. Story ends.’
‘He’s right,’ Lily says. She has stood up. She is standing next to Pete on the other side. ‘It’s in the book. One of us can eat it and we’ll get the gift. Leave it alone and he,’ she looks at her dead granddad, ‘comes back again. It starts again.’
Pete holds up the dripping heart in his hand and shows it to Drover.
‘This is the gift,’ he says. But, Drover still doesn’t understand.
‘It’s the truth,’ Lily says, looking directly at Drover. ‘Someone has to do it.’
Pete hears Drover draw in a breath and his focus shifts from the heart to the body. There’s some strange, dark presence rising from it. He can’t see it but they can all feel it. The room dims, the garage door slams shut. The door to the hall swings and crashes closed. But the back door flies open letting in the sounds of the forest, amplified and wrong. Screeching, grinding, wood against wood, wind in leaves, rustling, howls, voices from the past, many voices, no words, just sounds as the yellow lights crowd the house and those dead wait for release with the death of the gift, or wait for more eternity if the gift lives on.
‘We have four minutes,’ Lily says.
‘I don’t get it,’ Drover says through sobs of pain. ‘Pete, just go. Run.’
As if reminding him, the screams from outside intensify. Things scrape the windows, the door rattles and the room dims further.
‘I can’t do it,’ Pete says, and drops the organ on the floor. He turns away and starts to retch at the thought.
‘What the…? Fuck!’
Pete turns to see Drover fall, like he’s been pushed over by something unseen. He feels a heavy, ice-cold presence around him like a wind. He stands his ground, holds the table, as it blows past him and then slams into Lily. There’s something free in the room, some presence. Freed from William’s carcass, it is now moving from one to the other, trying to decide where to settle.
‘Is it true, Pete?’ Drover is shouting over the noise of the forest, against the rush of the invisible. ‘Is that one of your stories or is that true?’
‘You can feel it, can’t you?’ Pete shouts back. ‘You know it’s true.’
‘What do we do?’ Lily is crying again.
‘Is it the only way to be saved?’
‘Yes, Drover. If I eat it and you kill me, the thing dies. You get the money and go.’ Pete has found strength from somewhere. He drops to his knees and reaches out for the heart. ‘Do it, quick. Take Lily, get away, buy yourself that fairground and ride the ghost train.’
Drover crawls towards him. ‘I can’t, Pete.’ His face is screwed up. It’s confusion, Pete can tell, but it will all be clear soon.
He understands that Pam told the truth. He accepted the lore, the story. He always knew this story, just not how it ended. But he knows that, now. He knows he has to take the evil away.
‘Hey,’ says Pete, reaching for the heart. ‘Maybe I’ll get to ride the ghost train and come back, do you think?’
‘That train ain’t for you, Pete,’ Drover says, and he reaches out as well. ‘That train ain’t for people like you.’
Pete feels him grip his wrist, the two of them on their knees, on the floor, among the blood, among the money, in this lonely house in the middle of a forest, with death and the dead all around them. It feels right to Pete. It feels like a really good thing to do, to save his best friend, to let him have what he wants. All he has to do is eat this thing.
But, what feels really right is Drover’s hand on his wrist. It slips back. It holds Pete’s hands and he is suddenly so filled with warmth that tears come to his eyes. He looks at Drover. He has to know, before he goes, he has to know that Drover likes him enough to tell him the truth.
‘Did you?’ he asks, and can tell that Drover knows what he is asking.
But, then, it all goes wrong. Drover lets go of his hand and instead he feels something heavy being put into it. It is the gun. Why does Pete want the gun?
‘Look at me,’ Drover says, gasping through the pain. ‘I’m on the way out anyway.’
He’s got the heart. Drover has picked up the heart and is holding it in one hand, the other is hanging uselessly by his side. Drover’s blood is still gushing from the wound.
‘No, Drover.’ Pete’s voice is weak.
‘I’ll do it,’ Drover says, his voice weakening. ‘You’ve got one cartridge. Aim it right here once it’s all gone.’
‘Make sure he eats it all,’ Lily says as she gets down beside Pete. ‘Eat it all. Kill him, straight after. We’ve only got a few minutes.’
Drover lifts the thing up and looks at it. Around them the room starts to settle. The sounds outside fade to hushed anticipation. The light remains dim and the unseen presence hangs over them waiting to see where it will live next.
‘Or you could eat it,’ Pete says, and turns to Lily. ‘Like you were meant to. It could stay with you. We could stay with you. We could look after you. Drover can deal with the money. We can live in this house. You take it.’
‘Pete, I’m dying.’
‘And what’s to stop me killing you two if I do?’ Lily says. ‘No.’ Her voice suddenly sounds like her mother’s. In an instant, presented with what she has killed her parents to avoid, she has gone from being the frightened little girl to the hard-faced woman that her mother was. ‘He eats it, you kill him, you and I have everything we both want. I’ll buy you a poxy fairground, if that’s all you want.’
‘We can get him to a hospital…’ Pete is fighting for the right way out. ‘I can eat it…’ But, there is no right way out of this. ‘I don’t know what to do! Tell me what to do, Drover?’ He turns back to his friend.
And sees that Drover has already started to eat the thing. There is blood and a small piece of muscle hanging from his mouth. Drover is gagging against the texture, the feel of the warm pieces of flesh that he is forcing himself to swallow.
‘No!’ Pete yells, and tries to grab the heart.
‘You stupid, thick, idiot!’ Lily is screaming at him. ‘Let him eat the fucking thing, then kill the bastard. He doesn’t deserve to live.’
Why is she screaming at him? There is no sound to shout against now, but her voice is loud and shrill. She is laughing, he realises. This is what she wants.
‘Now, there’s no wa
y out, is there?’ she says, and her face is malicious. ‘He’s doing it. You have to kill him. Shoot him, Pete, or else...’ She slaps the blood on the floor with the palms of her hands and it splashes up. Her tone is now threatening, her face tight and ugly. ‘Or all this will be your fault. Don’t forget where my mother worked. Who we know. Let him eat it, kill him, or I’ll kill him, either way it’s ended and I get the house and the money, and the freedom from this bloody mess.’ She grabs his hair tight, and it hurts. ‘But mess me around and you will be the one going down for the murders. I can see to that.’ She pushes Pete away.
William is starting to stir again.
Drover is forcing himself to swallow another lump of raw muscle. His jaw is moving in slow, deliberate circles. He is making sucking sounds as he forces the blood down his throat.
Pete is crying. He can feel the shotgun in his hand. He is shaking his head.
Blood everywhere. On his face, on his clothes, on the gun, he can smell it. He has never smelt so much blood before.
Pete stands and points the gun towards Lily. ‘What if I kill you?’ he says, finding some strength from inside. ‘What happens then?’
Pete swings the gun back to point at Drover. He grips it tight with one hand while he quickly wipes the tears and blood from his stinging eyes. His lids want to stay closed but he must force them open. He has to aim. There is only one cartridge and one of the two people on the ground in front of him has to die.
‘I don’t know what to do.’ He screams it as he sobs it as he chokes on the words.
‘Pete, look at me. Look me in the eye.’ His friend is calmer now. That’s the voice Pete likes to hear, the one that tells him what to do. ‘You gotta kill me. She’s right. I deserve it. You know that, you know what I did, you know it, Pete. Kill me and it’s over. Look.’
His best friend holds out his hand and shows Pete the last remaining piece.
Lonely House Page 28