The Blood of Angels

by Stephen Gregory

  He remained on the landing with Gog and Magog throughout the afternoon. He saw how the tide reached its height at the tenth step, how it paused as the wind subsided and the house seemed to sigh with a gentle throbbing swell, and then he watched as the level began to drop. It was deeply satisfying, as good as the sex he could dimly remember: a gentle penetration, a thrusting rhythm, a fine crescendo, a crashing climax, a period of profound fullness . . . a sucking withdrawal.

  It was dusk by the time the tide had gone out again. The down­stairs rooms were a foot deep in pristine sand, salty shingle and the rubbery salad leaves of fresh seaweed. The house was scrubbed clean.

  Harry walked the shore with the gun and the dogs. There was no sign of the board or the purple sail, although he peered to the horizon in every direction. There was no sign of the beachcomber either; he hadn’t expected a visit, after the nightmarish events of the previous day. The tide dropped until the twilit estuary was exposed as acres of sand flats, muddy creeks and a trickling river. Harry spent the evening upstairs in front of the fire, turning a teal on the spit. No, he hadn’t expected a visit, but still he felt a niggle of disappointment that he was on his own.

  ‘Looks like it’s just you and me,’ he whispered to the dogs.

  Gog and Magog lay on the rug, so close to the flames that steam rose from their coats. They’d lost the stink of the night before, after a walk on the beach, a splash and a tumble in sea water as they raced to reach the teal he’d shot. Like the house, they were clean again. They smelled of salt and the cold, green ocean. Without lifting their heads, they opened their eyes and blinked at Harry.

  ‘Just me and you,’ he whispered. ‘Gog and Magog and Harry Clewe. She isn’t coming today. Bloody rude, after all the hospitality we’ve shown her . . .’

  He rumpled their ears, snatching his hand away when the dogs wrinkled their snouts at him.

  ‘And the same to you, too!’ he added. ‘Ungrateful buggers, after all the nice dinners I get for you!’

  He ate the teal, once the skin was golden brown and the juices were spitting into the fire. He wiped his mouth on a corner of his shirt, split the carcase into two pieces and dropped it for the dogs. At midnight he performed his bedtime ritual – trudging downstairs to piss into the hallway, trudging back up again to gather an armful of wood from the bath and build the fire – before closing the bedroom door and snuggling, fully clothed, beneath the blankets. He caught a whiff of perfume where the beachcomber had sat on the bed, and he snuffled at it with his flame-reddened face until he fell asleep.

  He had a disturbed night. He dreamed of women, whose faces swam before him.

  At first it was Sarah, blonde and pretty, the hitchhiker, the rock-climber, the toad-handler . . .

  Then it was Lizzie, flame-haired and pale-faced, his sister, his lover, the mother of his child . . .

  Then Zoë, his blind and brilliant daughter, the shooting star, the star-splitter, the burnt-out star . . .

  Then Helen, warm and fragrant, who’d tried to rekindle some warmth in Harry Clewe before finding, too late, that he was already fossilised . . .

  The faces came to him and drifted away. He heard their voices, their laughter, distant and faint, echoing through all the years since they’d been gone. And at last it was Christine, slim and blonde and pert in the baggy jeans and jacket she always wore. He could hear her childish giggle.

  The dream grew hotter and louder and the faces blurred, loom­ing close, so close that he could see their teeth shining, their tongues pink and wet . . . and he woke with a jump, as though he’d been lifted right off the bed and dropped again.

  Sweating, breathing hard, he lay still, so that the pounding in his head might slow down and stop. And when he fingered his body, he found he was sticky between his legs, for the first time in all his years of solitude and celibacy. He’d had a dream of dimly remembered sex, evoked by the perfume on his pillow.

  Troubled by this, he turned over and stared at the fire. It looked dead, no more than a heap of cooling ashes. And yet, as he squeezed his eyes shut and blinked them open again, he saw a spark, glowing red at the deep, hot core of the embers. Nearly dead, but not quite. A little fuel, a gentle fanning, and soon there would be a blaze again . . .

  And so he thought of his dream. A spark in him, dead for a long time, was now rekindled. He sniffed at the perfume on his pillow and he tried not to think what he was thinking.

  The pulse in his head was loud, a rhythmic thud-thud-thudding that didn’t stop although his breathing was calm again. It was a noise he’d heard before, in his worst and sweatiest nightmares. When he struggled to sit up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed, when he heard the dogs moving as though they’d heard the noise too, he knew that the thud-thud-thudding was not a part of the dream he’d had. The noise was real. It was coming from down­stairs.

  Without stepping into his boots, he fumbled for the torch, crossed the room and let himself onto the landing, leaving Gog and Magog shut inside. His hair bristled, his heart pounded in his chest. A black night, moonless and still . . . the sea like a great, glistening creature curled up at the foot of the stairs, breathing deeply, softly asleep. The thud-thud-thudding was inside the house, inside his head. He peered into the well of darkness. He clicked the torch on. In the grip of a waking dream, he started to go downstairs.

  The water was icy. The footing was treacherous. The torch beam swam on the surface like a jellyfish. Following it, he waded across the hallway and into the living room, and there, as he zig­zagged the light around him to pinpoint the spot where the noise was coming from, he could feel the pounding beneath his feet. The whole house rang with the pulse. He cried out and, careless of the boulders underfoot, surged to the mantelpiece, put the torch beside the ammonite so that the ceiling was brightly lit, and stum­bled to the middle of the room to grope and grapple for the trap door.

  Up to his waist in the swirling tide, he scrabbled on his knees at the sand and shingle where he knew the trap door must be. He thrashed the water to foam. He bellowed hysterically. All the time, the thudding grew louder and louder. At last he felt for the bolt, shot it across, hooked the ring and stood up to try and heave the trap door open. For a moment, the weight of the sea in the room was too much for him to lift. He leaned with every ounce of his strength . . . and then, when the door flew up with a suck of mud and tangled weed, he sprawled backwards and fell headlong in the water.

  Straight away he was on his feet, blowing like a walrus. He seized the torch from the mantelpiece and beamed it into the hole in the living-room floor, the focus of a nightmare he’d had for years . . .

  A body swam towards him. It rose to the torchlight, from the coldest depths of the cellar. Alive and kicking, it pulled through the water with long, strong arms and thrust with limber legs.

  Harry recoiled with a gasp of horror. The body groped through the water and broke the surface with an explosion of air bubbles. No head. No hands. But the stumps reached out, to wind their arms round Harry’s throat and pull him into the cellar . . . He beat and beat at them with his hook until they fell away. Then he leaned to the hole, shone the torch where the body was swimming, and he shrieked with terror as his nightmare came to a climax . . .

  All of a sudden, his fear was gone. When he saw what it was that had floated from under the floorboards, the relief was over­whelming, like another, more breathtaking orgasm. Sobbing, whim­pering, he continued to churn the water in the great black hole . . . for several minutes, slower and slower, more and more feebly, until the dregs of horror dissolved and disappeared.

  At last he was exhausted. The fear had drained him, as much as the exertion of heaving the trap door open and thrashing the water. He barely had the strength, once the surface was still again, to reach into the cellar and hook out the windsurfer’s rubber suit. It was a limp, lifeless thing. Ballooned with bubbles trapped inside it, lit by the zigzagging torchbeam, it had seemed to swim, as though it were alive and waiting to lure him to the bri
nk of the hole. But it was only a length of rubber, a boneless, bloodless skin. Harry cursed himself for dropping the suit into the cellar in the first place. He slung it across the room. He would destroy it the following morning, somehow.

  Indeed, a disturbed night. He was spent, after the sex dream and then the recurrence of his waking nightmare. Returning to the bedroom, he searched in the embers for the spark he’d seen, teased it with paper, built a scaffold of twigs for the fire to climb, and he fed the blaze with driftwood. He kicked the dogs out of the way. Stripped, he dried himself with a blanket, and, in the firelight, he appraised his body.

  Thick-waisted, slabby, but not flabby. Not bad for a man in his late middle age, he thought. As the heat of the flames fell on him, he felt strong enough to get into bed still naked. There, under the blankets, he explored with his fingers, teasing his nipples, stroking his thighs, touching himself in a way he hadn’t been touched since Helen was alive. It was good. And it frightened him too.

  He stopped straight away. He turned over, pressing his belly to the hollow of the bed, and he tried not to think what he was think­ing. But, as he snuffled into the pillow, he couldn’t help breath­ing the perfume on it.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Days passed and the beachcomber didn’t come back to the house. Harry was worried that the matron knew everything. He imagined the scene: the girl in shock, distraught and blubbering, garbling an extraordinary, unbelievable tale of a mad man and a pair of mad dogs in a big old house which the sea had wrecked . . . a tale of shotguns and shootings, of screaming and fighting in flooded fields, of tumbled guts and a sudden slugging with a great black stone . . . of a youth beaten dead and then chopped into pieces. He imagined the matron holding the girl and trying to calm her; how the woman’s expression changed from disbelief to amazement and horror; how, once she’d sedated the hysterical youngster and put her to bed, the matron returned to her office and reached for the phone . . .

  Appalled by this, struggling to control his panic, Harry spent a whole day trying to dispose of the windsurfer’s wet-suit. Without thinking what he was doing, he cut the black rubber into strips, and then, gibbering with frustration, he stumped around the house and backwards and forwards across the fields to find a place to hide them. He tried to burn them, building a fire on the foreshore, but the driftwood was wet and he had no fuel, no oil or paraffin, to throw on it. As he kicked at the smouldering rubber, which, refusing to burn, looked like burnt and blackened flesh, the yellow rescue helicopter beat across the strait from Anglesey, came closer and closer and actually hovered overhead for a minute . . . while Harry flailed at the fire he’d failed to light and scattered the spars with his boots. The helicopter whirled away. He sank to his knees and wept, loudly and shrilly, quite hysterical. At last he calmed himself, seeing that the helicopter had moved to the dunes a miles off, and he gathered up the bits of rubber and carried them into the house.

  Upstairs, he burned them one by one on his fire. It took hours. His eyes stung as the room filled with fumes; the dogs slunk into the fields; and Harry spent an exhausting, frantic afternoon going in and out of the house to see how the plume of thick, black, incriminating smoke was gusting all over the foreshore, as though it couldn’t wait to spread the news of a bloody murder and the desperate attempt at concealment.

  A wearying, worrying day, but at last it was done. The suit was gone, even the zips, which were made of plastic. That evening Harry heaped the fire with the dry wood he’d stored in his bath, so that a sweet, bright, crackling blaze could clear the smell in the house and over the estuary. The dogs came back inside. He relaxed, with his slippered feet resting on the hearth, and he listened to the sea coming into the hallway and flooding the downstairs rooms. As the waves washed the house, the sound seemed to wash the worries from his head. He dozed in front of the fire and then he went to bed.

  He awoke refreshed the following morning. It was a simple matter to clear the grate with a shovel, to carry the clinker of ash and rubber and plastic out of the house and scatter it in the deepest ditch, where the tide would scour it away. Later in the day, he was confident enough to be customarily rude when the coastguards came churning across the fields in their Land Rover, pulled into the yard and asked him whether he’d seen any windsurfers recently; a youth had gone missing, they said, who’d set off from Caernarfon on a board with a purple sail, and they’d found the board on Llandwyn Island, miles across the strait, but no sign of the youth himself.

  Harry shrugged. Savouring the words as though they were crisp, cool grapes in his mouth, he told the coastguards to fuck off. Then he shouted for Gog and Magog, and the dogs came out of the front door so fast and furiously that the piano rang with a dis­cordant thrumming as they blundered their heavy bodies against it. The coastguards jumped into their Land Rover and drove away, axle-deep in mud.

  But still Harry was uneasy. He slept badly. He dreamed of the thudding from the cellar and the things that were floating in it. He would sleepwalk down the stairs and into the living room and wake with a terrible shout, knee-deep in weed and water, holding the dead weight of the ammonite in his hand.

  And, as he put the fossil back on the mantelpiece and saw Helen’s sweet, sexy smile in the honeymoon photograph, he would think of Christine and wish she would come and visit him again. He ached with wanting her.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Coming back at last, Christy was changed. The boy knew it. He was different, after what he’d seen and done in the man’s house. His childhood had gone from him in the course of that long, dark, unforgettable afternoon when he and Harry Clewe had killed and dismembered the windsurfer.

  And for Harry, the girl was different. Christine had grown up. She was more like a woman. She looked at him levelly, with cool, still eyes. Once, he’d exerted the bullying dominance of a rude man over a frightened child. But now, Christine began to exert a kind of authority over him: the authority that a desirable woman can wield over the man who desires her. Harry saw in her eyes that she knew what he’d dreamed, that she knew what he wanted . . .

  For the boy, it was still a game. He could feel the power he had over the man. But it was a dangerous game he was playing.

  Again he heard the tinkling from the locked bedroom. That afternoon, he and Harry had walked along the foreshore with the dogs, and the man had bagged a mallard. They’d eaten the duck in front of the fire, sharing the meat with Gog and Magog, and, all that time, even when the gun had barked with the same explosive bark it had made when the boy had shot the windsurfer from the landing window, neither the man nor the boy had said anything about what had happened. The subject was out of bounds.

  After the meal, Christy took the greasy plates to the bathroom, leaving Harry and the dogs by the fire. Along the corridor, he could hear the tinkling, like ice or glass, from the bedroom whose door he’d tried once before; so he left the plates in the bathroom, tiptoed down the corridor, knelt at the door, turned the handle to confirm that it was still locked, and he peeped through the keyhole. Nothing . . . only the tinkling and a draught of stale, cold air.

  Suddenly, Harry was there behind him. Christy whirled round and stood up, but by then the man had grabbed him by the hair and raised his hook as though he would hit him with it. But Harry didn’t hit the boy. He didn’t bang Christy’s head on the door. He didn’t shout, although his face was swollen with anger. Because Christy simply smiled at him.

  ‘Don’t hit me, Mr Clewe,’ the boy said. He looked levelly at the man’s bulging, bloodshot eyes. He licked his lips and smiled, until slowly, very slowly, Harry lowered his hook and let go of the hair he’d been holding. And then it was Christy who raised a hand and stroked the swollen, panting, purple face which loomed above him.

  ‘Don’t hit me, Mr Clewe,’ he said, so softly that Harry could barely hear the words. ‘You don’t want me to go and tell anyone you’ve hit me, do you? You don’t want me to tell anyone anything, do you?’

  He stroked Harry’s face until the swe
lling and the redness were gone.

  In such a way, the boy exerted his influence, although he still hadn’t seen the room that the man guarded so fiercely. It was a week before Christmas. Every day they walked and shot and cooked and ate together. They shared the childlike fun they’d had before, fishing in the flooded hallway, scavenging the beach, feast­ing on crumpets and fruitcake at the fireside. One afternoon, in a bout of glorious silliness, they sat in the Daimler, the man at the wheel, the boy affecting to fix his face in the mirror inside the glove compartment, and they pretended to go driving. The car didn’t move, it hadn’t moved for years; but they whooped and squealed, lurching and swaying as Harry swung the splendid machine through imaginary bends; they shook their fists at imaginary road hogs; they gestured grandly as though the world had paused to watch them go by . . . Harry would glance at the figure beside him, the latest in a succession of mystifying females who’d complicated the adult years of his life.

  Yes, for Harry, the girl Christine had become a young woman. So that, urgently, uncontrollably, he felt a rising of desire for her.

  Sensing the man’s eyes on him, Christy looked back. The look lengthened. They reappraised one another. There was a sense of anticipation, as though they knew that, sooner or later, their relationship would alter again, reach a critical point and change completely. But neither of them knew when or how it might happen.

  For the time being, bonded by their murderous secret, the man and the boy maintained a fragile, wary union, each afraid of what the other might do or say. In the shortest days and the darkest nights of a wild winter, when the house was filled with wrecking waves and a booming gale, Harry crouched in front of his fire. He stared at the flames. He remembered the touch of Christine’s fingers on his face. And he started to plan something special for Christmas.