The Blood of Angels

by Stephen Gregory

  After another minute, the boy came into the house again and stood at the living-room door.

  ‘Look, Mr Clewe,’ he said very softly, so that Harry opened his eyes and turned round. ‘I’ve been upstairs for these.’ He was holding up the butchering knife in one hand and the torch in the other. ‘And I’ve been to the car for these.’ He’d brought the axe, the sledgehammer and the splitting wedge.

  Straight away, he knelt to the body of the windsurfer.

  This is what he did.

  He peeled off the windsurfer’s suit. It came away without any cutting, folding like a blubbery skin, and the coiled entrails slithered into the water and quivered like the jellyfish that the tide sometimes left in the house. The windsurfer was wearing a pair of red briefs. Christy made to pull them off as well, but then, changing his mind in deference to Mr Clewe, he left them on. At a nod from the boy, Harry took hold of the torch and switched it on, because an early dusk had made the room almost as dark as night. He aimed the beam exactly where the boy told him to. Harry’s mind was blank and empty. His veins were ice. His heart beat faintly, the softest of thumps in the cave of his chest. But his hand was steady, so that the pool of light was as still as the rock pools where the sea had been. Quite numb, he watched without blinking, without wincing or flinching, as the boy set to.

  Christy had had a good teacher. Harry Clewe had taught him, out in the yard, to use the axe, the wedge and the sledgehammer on the driftwood they’d brought from the shore. The axe was heavy and very sharp. When the boy brought it down on the wind­surfer’s left shin, it cut straight through and embedded itself in the floorboards. The foot was severed entirely. The boy took aim, and the right foot was off as well.

  Breathing hard, he panted, ‘Help me to turn him over, Mr Clewe,’ and together they rolled the youth onto his belly. With the rhythm and accuracy of an experienced woodsman, the boy swung the axe again. It shone in the torchlight and hit the target behind the windsurfer’s right knee, so hard and so swift that the blade was through, splitting the gristle and cartilage and thudding into the floorboards in one blow. The left leg, too, cut cleanly at the knee.

  At this, Harry dropped the torch. It landed with a splash. Suddenly overcome, as though all the nightmares he’d ever had were welling inside him like an unbearable migraine, he clapped his hand to his mouth and staggered for the door. It was too much for him. Retching so hard that he thought his chest might burst, he stumbled out of the room and collapsed on the stairs.

  The boy shrugged. He picked up the torch and stood it upright on the floor, so that a creamy moon quivered on the ceiling. He rested for a minute. Out in the hallway, Harry sat on the stairs with his head in his hands, and he listened as work resumed.

  The crunch of the axe.

  The ringing of the sledgehammer on the splitting wedge.

  The crunch of the axe.

  The squelch of footsteps across the room.

  The crunch of the axe.

  The thud of heavy, lifeless objects dropped here and there.

  The boy worked until the body was no longer human, until it was only the bits of a dead thing, like the other dead things that the tide had fetched up and dropped and left behind on the waterlogged fields. It held no horrors for Christy. Peeled out of the glistening black suit, the flamboyant athleticism all gone now that the arms and the legs were stacked up like stiff, hard pieces of wood in different corners of the room, it was no more human than a drowned sheep or a beached porpoise or a stranded jellyfish. But it still had the red underpants on, maintaining an absurd decency, despite everything that had happened to it.

  Harry listened, unable to move, paralysed with horror. He listened as the boy continued, unflagging, unhurried, and he matched the sounds to the technique he’d taught him. Notch with the knife; fit the wedge and slam it home with an easy swing of the sledgehammer; chop with the axe. Let the weight of the tool do the work. So Christy notched and wedged and chopped and didn’t stop until the windsurfer was butchered meat.

  Mid-afternoon. Outside, dusk was turning to twilight. Inside, the torch seemed very bright in the dark room.

  ‘So it’s done,’ the boy said at last. He was exhausted. All the panic, all the splashing and thrashing and squealing commotion and then the strenuous business of the abattoir, had overwhelmed him with weariness. He’d been up to his neck in icy water and then working hard all afternoon. He dropped the axe where he’d dropped the wedge, the sledgehammer and the knife, and he dropped himself to his knees on a bed of weed.

  ‘It’s done,’ he whispered, meaning to call out to the man but too tired to raise his voice. He squeezed his eyes shut and stayed still, blank with shock. He didn’t hear Harry come into the room.

  Harry stooped for the torch, which, having toppled over, was spilling its light in a yellow pool. He found it, straightened up and slowly pointed the beam around the room. It was as though he was seeing it for the first time – a strange room, so tall and wide that the corners were a blur of cobwebs where the torchlight fell; whose floor was a rubble of shingle and boulders, puddled with sea water, strewn with green and black weed; where a figure knelt as though praying, head bowed, breathing very loudly; where pieces of meat lay scattered about, gleaming white and red as the torchlight touched them . . . A very strange room.

  The boy started to tremble. His teeth were chattering very loudly. Zigzagging the torch, Harry lumbered across the room, sank to his knees and enfolded him in a huge, pungent embrace; and Christy, responding instinctively, lifted his own arms, wrapped them around the man’s thick, baggy waist and linked his fingers on the other side. They squeezed with all their might, widower and orphan, bonded by the murderous nightmare they were sharing.

  ‘Don’t worry, little Christine! You’ll be all right! I promise you’ll be all right!’ Harry was whispering, pressing his mouth in the long, fine hair, where, despite the wading in the sea, despite the gory work, the perfume was still strong. ‘But you’ve got to go back straight away, or else you’ll be in trouble with matron. You’ve done enough. I’ll do the clearing-up. There’ll be nothing left for anyone to find. Go back to the home now! It’s getting late!’

  They hugged one another, holding their bodies as close and as hard as they could. Christy was trembling with cold, or sobbing, because Harry could feel the shoulders heave as he pressed his hands on them. But when he lifted the soft, pale face with his fingers and stared down into the bleary grey eyes, he was amazed to find that the beachcomber was laughing . . .

  Christy was laughing so much, silently, uncontrollably, that tears ran down his cheeks and into the corners of his mouth. He tried to speak, throwing his head back and spluttering incoherently, but it was simply too funny for words . . .

  As last he succeeded. He struggled out of the man’s arms and bent to pick up the torch again. He flashed the light around, play­ing it on the bits of the carcase he’d dismembered.

  ‘Trouble, Mr Clewe? Trouble with matron?’ he hooted. ‘We’ve shot a man with a gun! We’ve bashed his head in with a rock! We’ve chopped him up into little pieces! But worst of all, I’m going to be late for Mrs Bottomley’s roll call! Big trouble, that is!’

  Shrieking with laughter, he dropped the torch again and bolted from the living room. He leaped across the hallway, slithered past the piano and was gone. No goodbye, no thank-you-for-having-me. Harry heard a few more hysterical squeals, receding as the splashes of Wellington boots faded away, and then there was silence. The torchlight shone from the seaweedy floor and smothered the walls in grey-green cobwebs. It was the only light in the world. He was alone in the living room.

  Living room! He giggled at the inappropriateness of the word. Dying room, death room, slaughterhouse, abattoir . . . more like it. He picked up the torch and beamed it at the hands and arms and feet and legs which, an hour before, had been expertly manoeuvring a windsurfing board around the house; at the head which had grinned with so much youthful arrogance; at the flayed flesh and exposed muscle which
had bent the sail to the wind. Living room! He giggled again.

  The laughter was infectious. Whatever it was, hysteria brought on by exhaustion or a release of tension once the killing and the butchery were done, Harry succumbed to it. The giggle grew bigger and bigger until it overwhelmed him and he felt his body shaking. He welcomed it. He warmed to it. He stood in the middle of the room, where the sand was soaked in blood, threw back his head and roared with such hectic madness that his body coursed with heat. As he did so, the weariness fell from him. He steamed with life and strength. The whole house seemed to tremble, as his guffaws rang to the ceiling.

  And through the noise he heard an answering cry: two voices from upstairs, muffled behind a closed door, but also hot and keenly baying. The dogs . . .

  He’d forgotten them. He stopped laughing and he listened. He wiped the tears from his face, he tasted the salt in his mouth, and he heard that the dogs were scrabbling too, as they howled and belled. Driven wild by a scent that had drifted up the stairs and into the bedroom, Gog and Magog were tearing at the door with their blunt claws, banging with their heads, clashing their teeth together. They were mad with hunger.

  Harry worked quickly, fired by a new strength. With his hook, he scrabbled in the shingle and found the ring of the trap door; he heaved the door upwards. For a moment he pointed the torch at the deep, black water, as though he could see something moving down there. The cold rose from the flooded cellar, dank and stale like the air from a grave, so that he recoiled and let the trap door bang wide open. He crossed the room and hooked the black rubber suit, bundled it up and tossed it into the water; an invisible current sucked it away, out of sight beneath the floorboards. He moved to the fireplace. There, he seized the windsurfer’s head, swung it back to the middle of the room and splashed it into the cellar. It sank, the blond hair fanning like the tendrils of a jellyfish, and disappeared dimly into darkness. Harry slammed the trap door shut and bolted it carefully.

  So the room was ready for the dogs.

  Chapter Sixteen

  He slung the tools into the hallway and went slowly up the stairs. Pausing for a moment on the landing, he looked out of the window. He could hear Gog and Magog flinging themselves about, barging into the furniture, knocking over books and newspapers, upsetting plates, scattering cutlery. Snarling horribly, they battered at the door with all their weight. But Harry ignored them. He stood at the landing window and looked out.

  There was more light left in the day than he’d thought, after the flickering shadows in the living room. He could see across the foreshore to the distant beach. The tide had gone out. The fields were a mess of mud and puddles, driftwood tangled with weed, a debris of plastic bags and bottles and rags, oddments of clothing and dis­carded shoes. The ditches were flooded. The walls were rubble. The hedges were broken and dead, now that the tide had torn up their roots. A heron was stabbing for eels that the sea had left behind. The crows had come to the foreshore, where there were plenty of dying and drowned things to be picked at. In this world of drenching and darkness, the windsurfer’s sail shone like a pool of purple water, and the board itself was bright and white. They would have to be moved.

  Taking a deep breath, he flung the door open and flattened himself against the wall. The dogs fought to get out, jammed for a second until they burst through, and then hurtled downstairs. They skidded in the shingled hallway, turned right and disappeared into the living room.

  ‘Get on with it, you monsters!’ he whispered. ‘Eat yourselves sick! Don’t ever say I don’t feed you properly!’

  He went into the bedroom, moving fast because night was falling and there were things to be done while there was still some light. He built up the fire; the room was in chaos, where the dogs had been brawling, but the fire was the most important thing. He waited and watched to make sure that the flames had caught, then he came out of the room, closed the door and went downstairs.

  Gog and Magog were doing their part of the business. Harry glanced into the living room, as he barricaded the dogs inside by dragging the shattered doors together and winding the handles together with twine; he didn’t want the animals to carry pieces of the windsurfer out of the house. Gog was in one corner, crunching bones, chewing splinters. Magog had dragged something to another part of the room and was standing over it, rasping with a long, pink tongue. Already, in the time he’d taken to go in and out of the bed­room and mend the fire, the dogs had eaten the sweetest morsels: now they were settling to the main course. They would be busy all night, unhurried, insatiable; they would chew and swallow the nub ends of the toughest bones. The few remaining shreds would be scoured out by the next tide. Whatever the dogs left, the sea could have. By noon the following day, the house would be scrubbed as clean as a slab in a butcher’s shop.

  He squeezed out of the front door, promising himself that sooner or later he’d try and shift the piano, and he trod around the yard. It was a still, mild twilight. The last time he’d followed this route, he’d been up to his chest in water and the spray had been lashing his face. Now the sea and the wind had dropped. He bent in the slime where the board and the sail were lying, wound a tangle of nylon cords around his hook, gripped a corner of the sail and started to pull. It was a clumsy contraption, bigger and heavier on the waterlogged ground than it had looked when it was afloat. With great difficulty, he dragged the board across the fields. At the same time, as though it were a conspiracy to make the job as tiresome as possible, the last of the daylight disappeared. In the darkness, Harry struggled with all the weight and the infur­iating confusion. He swore, he spat, he gritted his teeth. He hated the purple sail with a terrible hatred, more than he’d ever hated it before, even when the blond youth had flaunted it close to the house; he loathed the board, which caught in every root and rut and rubbled stone wall. It took an hour, with the dregs of his strength, to manhandle it onto the beach.

  At last he could float it. Up to his waist in the water, he slid the board out to sea. He pushed it away, heard it slap on the waves, saw the sail spread like an oil slick, a black stain on the grey surface, and he waited until he could no longer hear it or see it. Then he waded to the shore. He didn’t know where the windsurfer’s board would go in the night, as the tide continued to fall; he didn’t know where it might be beached, the following day or the day after that. Miles away, wherever the currents took it . . . He didn’t know and he didn’t care. Drained of strength, drained of feeling, he stumbled across the fields and back into the house.

  Upstairs, stripped and dried and snuggled in bed, he stared at the firelit ceiling. He could barely remember how the day had started; the events of it were such a nightmarish jumble. Too tired to unravel them, to make any sense of them, he shut his eyes on the dancing flames and fell into a dreamless sleep.

  Chapter Seventeen

  There was a thin, blustery sunlight the following morning, when Harry Clewe came downstairs and undid the twine from the living-room door handles. He shivered, with a blanket wrapped round his shoulders. His fingers trembled on the troublesome knots. But when he managed to push the doors open and they banged on their loosened hinges, he found that Gog and Magog had done a thorough job. They’d left nothing but a few scraps.

  He shuffled through the shingle, scuffing with his boots at tag ends which the dogs had chewed and rejected. Gog and Magog hardly stirred as he walked slowly about the room. They stared bale­fully, yawning, panting, lolling their tongues, and when he clapped his hands at them to move, they lurched to their feet. They were stiff from lying all night on the wet weed; they were thirsty from swallowing salt water; they’d eaten until they were almost immobilised by the weight of the meat in their bellies. Gorged full, they could hardly walk. When Harry swung a boot as they waddled across the room, they growled very deeply, showing bloodied mouths; they hadn’t the energy to snarl or snap, although, in their old age, they’d become as ill-tempered as their master. Their breath was vile. Their coats stank of the blood and guts that had spilled
into the shingle.

  Wrinkling his nose in disgust, Harry kicked the dogs out of the house; they went out of the front door, in search of fresh water. He collected his tools from the hallway and followed the dogs outside, where he rinsed the knife, the sledgehammer and the axe in a flooded ditch. Returning to the yard, he put the clean tools inside the Daimler.

  And then, that morning, the tide came in. It slid across the fields, encircled the house and slithered into the hallway. Slowly, nosing a scummy foam, forcing clusters of bubbles from the compacted sand, it flooded the downstairs rooms. For a while, it was still and calm. It didn’t seem to deepen. It lapped at the skirting boards in an idle, desultory way, like a guest unsure of whether to stay or leave. But all the time, the swell was driving from the ocean, across the shore, over the fields and through the front door. By noon, the water had reached the sixth step on the staircase. Gradually the wind increased. It bore the sea inland. Bigger and bigger, heavier and heavier, foam-capped waves rolled through the windows. Soon there was a churning commotion throughout the house.

  Harry watched from the landing. He sat on the top step, hugging his knees to his chest and chuckling like a boy. The dogs crouched on either side of him. He flinched from their fetid breath, shoved them away when he saw something like a toenail caught in their fur, but still he grinned and chuckled. He heard the thump and suck of the waves downstairs, felt the house shudder at the weight. He thought of the scouring of sand and shingle, the scrubbing of barnacled boulders, the cleansing, the rinsing, the sting of salt. Good! What better way to remove the remains of a murder? To have a pair of great gluttonous hounds crunch and swallow the body, and then to have the sea come in, thousands of tons of endlessly recycled water, to flush out every speck of the evidence!