Why am I thinking things like that? I still have decades left. I am not going to die in this godforsaken church.
Wallace hopped up from the floor and headed out of the church’s exit corridor. The church’s interior was quiet. There was only a few people still alive inside, but right now they were making no noise and he could not see their candle-light.
“Hello!” Wallace spoke out, not knowing what else to say. “Where is everybody?”
“They are all dead,” said a voice from the front of the church.”
Wallace gulped and tried to force down an air bubble trapped in his throat. He knew who was speaking to him. Could hardly believe it, but he knew. “Jack the Raper?”
“That is what they call me. The unwashed, sinners. They read their papers, enjoy their trash, and scurry about their rancid little lives with utter disdain for the gifts they were given.”
Wallace took slow steps forward. “By God?”
“Of course,” the voice almost spat the words. “Who else? All of you came here tonight for selfish reasons. You seek his comfort when it suits you, but when do you give back anything of yourselves.”
Wallace stepped up before the altar and was surprised by who he saw. He shook his head. “But, you were dead.”
“Did you check my body?” Father Pitt asked. “Perhaps you should have. Now everybody is dead. And you will follow. The Lord has rained down an icy death upon us all, but you are not worthy to die by his majestic hand. I will do his bidding until my time is nigh. I will slice out your life like I have so many before. I will violate your sinful orifices and revel as your soul descends to Hell.”
“You’re a fruitcake.”
“No,” said Father Pitt, leaping forward like a man half his age. He drove a long thin blade into Wallace’s guts and looked him right in the eyes, smiling. “I am God’s will. And soon I will join him in the Kingdom of Heaven. Goodbye Doctor. Give my regard to the serpent king.”
Dr Wallace hit the floor, dead. The final victim of the man they called Jack the Raper.
WINTER BEFORE LAST
The drive had been a long one. Bristol was a long way from Stoke and the Boxing Day journey had been slow and cautious, the roads slippery with ice and slushed snow. Harry hated winter, hated the cold. In the summer, people came together – BBQs, festivals, zoos, and theme parks – but in the winter people stayed away from each other, wrapped up warm and ignored the outside world. Winter was the season of isolation and loneliness. Yet, out of all the dreary winters of Harry’s life, this one had been the best. Sure it was damp, icy, and grey; sure he had spent the last week with his wife’s condescending parents; and sure he was itching to get back to work, but this winter was great for one reason: Toby.
Of course he had spent several Christmases with his son already, but those had been interspersed with work and commitments. This year his furniture business was successful enough that he had been able to leave the running of it to his cousin and take a massive ten days off to spend with Toby and his wife, Julie. It had been total bliss to watch his son open his presents on Christmas morning, ripping open the packaging on his new bike and then moving on to the wrapped-up Nintendo DS beneath Julie’s parent’s tree. He’d never seen his son so happy, and he had never been so happy himself. What Julie had gone on to tell him that night had only made the day even more special.
He still couldn’t believe she was pregnant.
“You paying attention?” asked Julie, sitting on the passenger seat beside him.
Harry turned to her and smiled. “Yeah, sorry. I’m just so happy. Life is pretty good, huh?”
Julie smirked and shook her head at him. “I think you had a better Christmas than little man.”
Harry glanced back at his sleeping son on the back seat and agreed. In fact, he may have had a better Christmas than anyone.
“Anyway,” said Julie, “you should have come off at junction 16. You just missed it.”
Harry shook his head, annoyed with himself. “Bugger it. Okay, I’ll come off at the next one.”
Julie mumbled something under her breath and Harry just about heard her.
“Did you just call me a fish head?”
Julie shrugged. “Dunno what you’re talking about.”
Harry huffed. “Oh, really? Well it sounded like you called me a fish head.”
“Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t.”
“Well, that’s rich, coming from a dog head.”
Julie hit Harry in the arm, causing him to swerve slightly. “Cheeky sod.”
“Whoa! Watch it, woman, you’ll have me in a ditch.”
Julie laughed. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to endanger your perfect driving record.”
“Always pays to be safe. Baby on-board.”
Julie looked back at her son and smiled. She was so beautiful as a mother. There was something about her now, that Harry loved, which had not been there before Toby’s birth. It was something unexplainable to anyone without a child of their own.
Harry was just about to say, I love you, when something caught his attention from the corner of his eye. The sight was followed by a lot of chaotic noise.
“Shit!” Harry saw the vehicle on the opposite side of the motorway swerve. It careened across several lanes and came crashing up against the central reservation several yards ahead. His stomach fluttered and he thanked God for the near-escape, but then the speeding vehicle cartwheeled into the air, flipping the balustrade upon impact and hurtling, end over end, down the other side of the motorway; the lane that Harry was occupying. Harry would have liked more time to react, but before he even thought to swerve out of the vehicle’s path, his entire being seemed to shudder as his consciousness was battered from his body.
***
Harry opened his eyes and then closed them again. A light had burned his eyes and he had to flutter his eyelids until the dull aching went away. He found himself staring at a blank white ceiling with a small, tinted window looking out at star-filled sky. It was a vehicle; the back of a van perhaps. When a paramedic appeared in his field of view, Harry realised he was lay in the back of an ambulance.
The woman’s name badge read: Penelope. “Hey there,” she said. “Everything is okay. You’ve just been in an accident.”
Harry shot up on the stretcher. “My son…my wife?”
The paramedic tried to ease him back down but he resisted. “There are people trying to help them right now.”
“Help them? What do you mean?”
The woman looked him in the eye for a moment but could not hold the gaze. Something seemed to trouble her. Harry didn’t feel like getting information about his family second hand from someone else. He pushed the woman aside forcefully and stumbled off of the bed. His legs felt like jelly as he hit the tarmac outside the ambulance. His breathing was painful too, but none of that mattered. He needed to find his family.
There were flashing lights all around him and fluorescent white jackets flitting to and fro. The motorway had been closed off, probably by sideways police cars at the entrance to each junction. Harry staggered forward. There was a huge fire truck up ahead and it blocked his view any further down the road. People seemed to be congregating in that area and he headed towards them, as fast as his confused feet would take him.
“Excuse me, sir?” A police officer walked up to Harry with a palm raised. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“Harry swiped at the hand in his face and snarled. “Where is my family?”
The officer stepped towards Harry, but backed off when he saw that there was no chance of his authority holding any weight. The man tried a different tact. “They’re being rescued now.”
“Rescued from what?”
The police officer sighed. “My name is Officer Tonks. Why don’t you come and sit down with me and we’ll have a chat about what is going on.”
Harry looked at the man and saw genuine compassion, but that didn’t change the fact that Harry didn’t want a conversation with anyone but his wif
e. He turned away from the officer and hurried towards the fire truck. The man did not give chase.
Once Harry reached the bright red vehicle, he saw the wreckage beyond. His brand new Mercedes was a ball of twisted steel and a mangled truck seemed to be entwined with it. Before he knew it, Harry was vomiting all over the floor. Maybe he had a concussion, but he was pretty sure it was purely because of what he was seeing.
Despite his injuries, Harry ran forward, dodging past anybody that tried to stand in his way. Over at the pile of compacted vehicles, two firemen worked at the steel with heavy cutters. When they saw Harry coming at them, wild-eyed, they stepped aside with concern.
It was then that Harry saw what was left of his family. He could make out Julie’s crushed face, squashed beneath the Mercedes window strut. One of her eyes seemed to bulge from her socket. Harry fell to his knees and tried to reach out to her, but he could not. As he tried to crawl his way into the car, he saw the mess that had been his son. Toby’s body no longer resembled human form. If it were not for bloody scraps of clothing and puckered flesh and protruding bones, Harry would not have even known it was his son.
Harry screamed out, loud enough to reach the moon. Someone pulled him back by the armpits and he kicked out and struggled. The person turned out to be Tonks and the officer was no longer willing to stand by. He controlled Harry’s body with a well-trained grasp of how joints and pressure points worked. Harry was forced by his twisted elbow to walk away from the scene.
“Why?” Harry cried out. “Why are they dead and not me. Why am I fine?”
“I’d say because you’re lucky,” said Tonks, “but I think you’d probably hit me. You were thrown free from the car upon impact. So was the driver of the other car. Your family…well they didn’t have the luck that you did. I’m sorry, Harry, I really am.”
Harry felt weak and struggled to keep his legs from folding like accordions. “How do you know my name?”
“Paramedics found your driver’s license in your wallet. Would you like me to contact anyone?”
Harry shook his head. “…No. I-I will do it later. I want to see my family. I want them out of there.”
Tonks nodded. “I know you do. They’re working on it. Let’s just get you to the hospital for now. There’s no way to deal with something as terrible as this, so don’t try.”
Any fight Harry might ever have possessed was gone from him now. He allowed the officer to take him by the arm towards the ambulance and he would also let them take him to the hospital too. There was no reason to resist now, no reason to fight…no reason to care. Harry’s life was without purpose and always would be from now on.
As he neared the ambulance, Harry noticed something up ahead. There were two other police officers standing with a weary-looking man. They were breathalysing him. Harry’s own breath caught in his chest and the only way he could let it out again was by talking. “Is that the other driver?”
Tonks seemed to stiffen then and started leading Harry at a slightly different angle, putting distance between them and the other officers. “Yes,” he said. “He says he doesn’t know what happened. He’ll be taken in for questioning once the paramedics clear him.”
“Why are they breathalysing him?”
“Standard procedure,” said Tonks without missing a beat.
Harry nodded and let the officer think he was satisfied with the answer. Really, he was taking one last, long look at the man that had just murdered his family, and committing his face to memory. Harry realised that, in actual fact, his life still did have a purpose: to take the life of the man that took his.
Enjoy what’s left of your life, whoever you are, thought Harry, because I promise that this will be your Final Winter.
BOOK 4 OF 5
THE HOUSEMATES
“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
– Edmund Burke.
“Competition is a sin.”
– John D. Rockefeller
“Game Over.”
– Jigsaw, Saw (2004)
DAY 1
The ferry glided ashore. A bus waited on the hill. Rain came down in silver sheets against the velvet darkness of the endless night.
Damien didn’t like wearing the hood over his head and had managed to peek out from beneath it several times in the last hour. It was uncomfortable being in the dark, unable to see, unable to even hear properly.
Damien’s hosts had told him that the hood was necessary – that the location of the island must be kept secret. The only information they had divulged willingly was that his destination was somewhere off the northern coast of Scotland. The atmosphere’s cold, penetrating bite made it easy to believe that Damien had been taken north. He rubbed at his shoulders.
Freezing my bloody knob off here.
Not wanting to push his luck, Damien pulled the hood back down over his face and listened intently. It sounded like the captain of the small passenger ferry was about to give orders.
“Okay, everybody! I’m afraid you will have to leave your hoods on for just a little while longer. The house is just over a mile inland. A bus will take you there now, and then you can finally take the hoods off and settle in.”
There were sighs of relief from all around. Damien wasn’t sure how many other people were on the ferry with him, but he estimated at least ten – definitely enough bodies to constitute a crowd. They were all wearing hoods the same as his.
So I have about a dozen competitors. That puts my odds of winning pretty low.
Near the ferry’s bow, a man had begun ushering everybody ashore, barking orders in a clipped tone like machine gun fire. Damien stumbled past the gruff gentleman and was hustled along onto what felt beneath his feet like a wooden jetty. The freezing rain made him shudder as he left the shelter of the boat.
Remind me never to come to Scotland again if this is what it’s like.
Damien started up an incline, towards where he imagined the bus was parked. An engine idled nearby and the acrid odour of spent petrol mingled with the scent of wet soil. An owl hooted.
When Damien finally stepped onto the waiting bus, he greeted the heavenly warmth with glee. It must have been several hours since his journey had begun and he was starting to feel the weariness in his bones.
Damien’s hosts had collected him from a train station in Sheffield, where he had then been driven even further north for almost three hours. That was when he had been told to put the hood on. He was ushered onto a waiting coach with several other people and then continued on yet another leg of the journey, which had ended with the trip on the ferry from which he had just departed.
The hood prevented Damien from seeing who his companions were on the bus, but he heard some of them chatting blindly up ahead as he navigated the aisle.
Time became a blur. Weariness and boredom had led to a dazed passing of seconds and minutes and hours until Damien felt nothing but the desire to sleep. He was glad to hear he was now only a mile away from his final destination.
Thought I’d never bloody get there.
He groped his way along the aisle of the stationary bus and found himself a seat on the left. He sat down and relaxed back into the soft cushion.
Oh, yeah. That feels better. My arse is killing me.
Just another twenty minutes and this wretched trip will be over.
Nerves began to tickle at Damien’s psyche as he sat there and waited for the bus to get moving. The bizarre nature of the situation began to sink in. Home seemed far away; he already missed his friends, his work, his old life. It was a situation he never would have got himself into usually, but…
When needs must…
The Devil drives.
Damien felt someone dump down on the seat behind him. The bus grumbled into gear and started moving. The rain continued falling heavy, thudding against the window panels on both sides.
Damien closed his eyes beneath his hood and allowed himself to rest. He was worried that rest would be
hard to come by during the days ahead.
The bus sped up, jerking and hopping as it traversed uneven terrain. A couple of times it felt as though the vehicle had gone off road completely. There were no sounds coming from outside, no noise from other traffic, no grinding steel of industrial buildings. Wherever the bus was heading, it was seemingly in the middle of nowhere.
The stranger who had sat on the seat behind Damien leant forward and whispered. “Pretty exciting, huh?”
With the hood still over his head, Damien was unsure if the woman’s question had been directed at him. After a few seconds he decided that it was and gave a reply. “I don’t know if ‘exciting’ is the word I would use.”
“Really, then how would you describe it?”
“Overdone.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean this is all a bit dramatic. We’ve been whisked away in the dead of night under the cover of darkness to a destination we know nothing about. Is it really necessary?”
“It’s just part of the experience. Putting on a good show.”
“It’s stupid.” Damien sighed. He pulled the hood off his head and blinked his eyes. He’d had enough of being in the dark. It was ridiculous. He understood the need for privacy, to a certain extent, but he was done feeling like a prisoner of war.
“Sir, please put your hood back on!”
Damien glanced down the aisle to see that the bus driver was twisting around. The man was skeletal with cheekbones that leapt out at right-angles. Beside him stood a colleague, a burly man in a set of black overalls and work boots.
“Sir,” said the burly man beside the driver. His dark eyes had narrowed and were targeted at Damien like rifle sights. “Put your hood back on or you will be disqualified. You must obey the rules at all times. That is what you agreed when you signed up for the show.”
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