The man paid him with a hand that shook with nerves or palsy. ‘Help me with my bag, please.’
‘Right ho.’
The two men held a strap of the sports bag each, and carried what could have been a well-behaved dog, zipped inside a holdall, up to the front door of John’s address. The passenger pressed the bell.
Though Ray heard nothing chime inside the house, John opened the front door within seconds. ‘You made good time,’ he said, as if the passenger had driven the car. ‘She’s been in there long enough. Bring her through.’ He ignored Ray.
With the bag wedged between them, Ray and his passenger squeezed into the hovel. There were more lights on inside the house now, though the place was still dim, as if the shadow upon it would never allow any brightness to grow. When they passed through the room filled with boxed clothes, the passenger paused and said, ‘All these?’
Over his shoulder, John said, ‘And more every year. Mostly kids. Aged nine and ten we tend to find. Now, to the kitchen, if you please. And I’ll tell you where you can set her down.’
Ray struggled into the kitchen with the holdall. Whatever was inside the bag had begun to sniff at his trouser leg through the side of the canvas bag.
The kitchen was remarkably tidy in contrast to the rest of the house. A small table, with a floral pattern printed on its surface, stood at one side of the room with two chairs pulled out as if in anticipation of imminent use.
‘He’ll come in through here, Glenroy,’ John said to the passenger, once they were all inside the kitchen with the holdall.
‘Here? You sure?’ Glenroy asked his host.
Ray’s bafflement and curiosity compelled him to stay a little longer. He wanted to see what was inside the bag.
‘Never fails,’ John said, in a softer voice that Ray hadn’t thought him capable of. ‘This was Wendy’s favourite place. And I always use it for those of you that can’t entertain at home. As long as this is your son’s bag, there won’t be any problem, I can assure you.’
Glenroy nodded and then looked at the back door. It opened onto a cold darkness flickering with firelight. ‘Through there?’
‘We done? I gotta get on.’ Ray said to the men. Neither seemed to hear him, or they were ignoring him. ‘Look –’
‘Just set it down on the patio,’ John said curtly to Ray, and stepped through the back door.
‘Come on, we got to get this done,’ Glenroy said to Ray.
‘What?’ Ray asked.
‘Once you have helped me outside with this, it’s over,’ the black man said.
Ray carried the bag out of the kitchen. He came into a paved yard that cringed beneath an overarching viaduct. But his attention was gripped by the size of the pyre in the yard, set against the far wall. Beside the pyre of bracken and wooden pallets was an oil drum that belched black smoke.
Upon the top of the pyre was an old vinyl car seat. A small set of metal steps, the kind you see in warehouses or large libraries, had been positioned at the foot of the pyre and led to the seat.
Glenroy muttered, ‘Dear God.’
‘This part is always difficult,’ John said, to soothe the nerves of the elderly man.
‘What is this?’ Ray asked, looking from one man to the other.
They ignored him.
John touched the passenger’s elbow. ‘Glenroy, believe me, you won’t even notice the fire as soon as you see your son. Just go and find yourself a seat at the table, and he’ll be here shortly. I suggest you sit with your back to the garden to avoid distractions in what will be a very precious time. You will probably hear a bit of fuss out here, and then your son will arrive and embrace you. There is no need for you to see this part of the proceedings, though some clients prefer to make the offering a joyous occasion.’
Glenroy nodded and headed into the kitchen.
The undisclosed connection between the fire and the contents of the bags made Ray eager to return to his car. It was all getting too weird for his liking, and the sinister implications of the backyard installation was not lost on him. He thought of the black plumes of smoke he had seen at each address that evening. He also recalled the painting of the smoke on the dining-room wall that he’d studied earlier, and not least the distant screams at each address he’d driven to. Ray turned to follow his last passenger out of the yard.
‘Not you, driver,’ John said, in a tone of voice that made Ray tense. There followed the sound of a zipper being quickly undone in the cold air of the cement yard. ‘We’re not done with you yet.’
Ray had heard enough. ‘What’s your game, eh? I’ve been driving –’ he said as he turned to confront the man standing behind him.
But then Ray immediately lost the ability to speak. At the sight of what had just climbed out of the sports bag, and stood upright, the strength in Ray’s legs drained through the soles of his driving shoes. This had travelled in his car all evening. And it wasn’t a dog, a cat or any kind of pet.
‘Now.’ John raised both hands into the air and made a series of rapid gestures as if he were performing sign language. ‘You either take your seat unassisted up there –’ John nodded at the summit of the unlit pyre ‘– or she will be forced to seat you.’
The back door closed. Ray heard a key turn in the lock. He turned and watched Glenroy take a seat at the kitchen table.
‘The duration of the event is mercifully short,’ John said. ‘Only a bit longer than it took you to knock Glenroy’s son from his bicycle on Rocky Lane.’
‘I . . . I . . . I . . .’
‘Yes, yes, that’s all very well. But there are consequences, and it’s getting late and you’re the last one this year, and there’s no time for any fiddle. So please take your seat.’
‘What . . .’
Within the ebb and flow of the firelight, even though the thing on the patio was as tall and hairy as a full-grown chimpanzee, what had been inside the sports bag was not an ape. For as long as he could bear to look at it, Ray could see that it wasn’t a primate because there were trotters on the end of its short rear legs. And though the thing’s face was horribly reminiscent of a pig, it wasn’t a pig either because it stood upright like a child. The little figure shivered in the night air.
When it grinned at Ray, he whimpered and stepped towards the garden fence.
John’s brusque voice penetrated his shock. ‘You’ll only feel the flames for about three seconds, driver. Nothing more is required of you. Then she’ll bleed you out. So I always suggest that you raise your chin, or you will burn for longer than is necessary in this particular ritual. Now, to your chair, please, driver.’
Ray turned and fell at the fence. It was old and sagging with rot. He would kick it down, run.
‘Soon as I drop my hands, driver, she will be released. I can assure you that you will get no further than my yard.’
‘Wha–?’
‘Hit and run,’ John said with all the pomp of a scoutmaster. The firelight from the oil drum flickered across the lenses of his spectacles. Ray could no longer see the old man’s eyes. ‘She followed the scent of your callousness. A challenge we set her. Guilt, shame and even pride are more established spores. And she’s had three of you today, and reunited three mothers with their children, albeit for an incredibly short time.’
‘What is –’
With the impatience and irritation that he had previously shown him, the scruffy old man cut him short. ‘She became a good friend of my wife. After Wendy was killed on a pedestrian crossing, not far from here in 1994. And her killer sat in the chair far longer than you will tonight, driver. So be thankful that time has mellowed me. Time even heals, they say. You even start to forget. This is how I remember. Now, shall we begin?’
Ray gripped the top of the wooden fence. ‘Fuck off!’
John dropped both of his arms and his palms slapped his hips.
Even before he sat in the car seat at the summit of the pyre, Ray had begun to scream.
John stuck a blazing taper of rolle
d newspaper into the base of the bracken. The kindling had been soaked with petrol; the fumes clung to Ray’s face. He looked to the kitchen to appeal for mercy.
Through the glass panel in the kitchen door, Ray saw his last passenger, Glenroy. Over the kitchen table the old man embraced another darker and more indistinct figure. One who had already buried a face that Ray could not see on its father’s shoulder.
Ray screamed afresh when the heat of the flames burst upwards to crisp the hair on his exposed ankles. He dropped his head back, between his shoulders, exposing his throat.
‘Now!’
Hippocampus
Walls of water as slow as lava, black as coal, push the freighter up mountainsides, over frothing peaks and into plunging descents. Across vast, rolling waves the vessel ploughs, ungainly. Conjuring galaxies of bubbles around its passage and in its wake, temporary cosmoses appear for moments in the immensity of onyx water, forged then sucked beneath the hull, or are sacrificed, fizzing, to the freezing night air.
On and on the great steel vessel wallops. Staggering up as if from soiled knees before another nauseating drop into a trough. There is no rest and the ship has no choice but to brace itself, dizzy and near breathless, over and over again, for the next great wave.
On board, lighted portholes and square windows offer tiny yellow shapes of reassurance amidst the lightless, roaring ocean that stretches all around and so far below. Reminiscent of a warm home offering a welcome on a winter night, the cabin lights are complemented by the two metal doorways that gape in the rear house of the superstructure. Their spilled light glosses portions of the slick deck.
All of the surfaces on board are steel, painted white. Riveted and welded tight to the deck and each other, the metal cubes of the superstructure are necklaced by yellow rails intended for those who must slip and reel about the flooded decks. Here and there, white ladders rise, and seem by their very presence to evoke a kang kang kang sound of feet going up and down quickly.
Small lifeboat cases resembling plastic barrels are fixed at the sides of the upper deck, all of them intact and locked shut. The occasional crane peers out to sea with inappropriate nonchalance, or with the expectation of a purpose that has not come. Up above the distant bridge, from which no faces peer out, the aerials, satellite dishes and navigation masts appear to totter in panic, or to whip their poles, wires and struts from side to side as if engaged in a frantic search of the ever-changing landscape of water below.
The vast steel door of the hold’s first hatch is raised and still attached to the crane by chains. This large square section of the hull is filled with white sacks, stacked upon each other in tight columns. Those at the top of the pile are now dark and sopping with rain and seawater. In the centre, scores of the heavy bags have been removed from around a scuffed and dented metal container, painted black. Until its discovery, the container appears to have been deliberately hidden among the tiers of fibre sacks. One side of the double doors at the front of the old container has been jammed open.
Somewhere on deck, a small brass bell clangs a lonesome, undirected cry – a mere nod to tradition, as there are speakers thrusting their silent horns from the metallic walls and masts. But though in better weather the tiny, urgent sound of the bell is occasionally answered by a gull, tonight it is answered by nothing save the black, shrieking chaos of the wind and the water it thrashes.
There is a lane between the freighter’s rear house and the crane above the open hatch. A passage unpeopled, wet, and lit by six lights in metal cages. MUSTER STATION: LIFEBOAT 2 is stencilled on the wall in red lettering. Passing through the lane, the noise of the engine intake fans fills the space hotly. Diesel heat creates the impression of being close to moving machine parts. As if functioning as evidence of the ship’s purpose and life, and rumbling across every surface like electric current in each part of the vessel, the continuous vibration of the engine’s exhaust thrums.
Above the open hatch and beside the lifeboat assembly point, from a door left gaping in the rear house, drifts a thick warmth. Heat that waits to wrap itself round wind-seared cheeks in the way a summer’s sun cups faces.
Once across the metal threshold the engine fibrillations deepen as if muted underground. The bronchial roar of the intake fans dulls. Inside, the salty-spittle scour of the night air, and the noxious mechanical odours, are replaced by the scent of old emulsion and the stale chemicals of exhausted air fresheners.
A staircase leads down.
But as above, so below. As on deck, no one walks here. All is still, brightly lit and faintly rumbling with the bass strumming of the exhaust. The communal area appears calm and indifferent to the intense black energies of the hurricane outside.
A long, narrow corridor runs through the rear house. Square lenses in the steel ceiling illuminate the plain passageway. The floor is covered in linoleum, the walls are matt yellow, the doors to the cabins trimmed with wood laminate. Halfway down, two opposing doors hang open before lit rooms.
The first room was intended for recreation to ease a crew’s passage on a long voyage, but no one seeks leisure now. Coloured balls roll across the pool table from the swell that shimmies the ship. Two cues lie amongst the balls and move back and forth like flotsam on the tide. At rest upon the table-tennis table are two worn paddles. The television screen remains as empty and black as the rain-thrashed canopy of sky above the freighter. One of the brown leatherette sofas is split in two places and masking tape suppresses the spongy eruptions of cushion entrails.
Across the corridor, a long bank of washing machines and dryers stand idle in the crew’s laundry room. Strung across the ceiling are washing-line cords that loop like skipping ropes from the weight of the clothing that is pegged in rows: jeans, socks, shirts, towels. One basket has been dropped upon the floor and has spilled its contents towards the door.
Up one flight of stairs, an empty bridge. Monitor screens glow green, consoles flicker. One stool lies on its side and the cushioned seat rolls back and forth. A solitary handgun skitters this way and that across the floor. The weapon adds a touch of tension to the otherwise tranquil area of operations, as if a drama has recently passed, been interrupted or even abandoned.
Back down below, deeper inside the ship and further along the crew’s communal corridor, the stainless-steel galley glimmers dully in white light. A skein of steam clouds over the work surfaces and condenses on the ceiling above the oven. Two large, unwashed pots have boiled dry upon cooker rings glowing red. From around the oven door, wisps of black smoke puff. Inside the oven a tray of potatoes has baked to carbon and they now resemble the fossils of reptile guano.
Around the great chopping board on the central table lies a scattering of chopped vegetables, cast wide by the freighter’s lurches and twists. The ceiling above the work station is railed with steel and festooned with swaying kitchenware.
Six large steaks, encrusted with crushed salt, await the abandoned spatula and the griddle that hisses black and dry. A large refrigerator door, resembling the gate of a bank vault, hangs open to reveal crowded shelves that gleam in ivory light. There is a metal sink the size of a bath tub. Inside it lies a human scalp.
Lopped roughly from the top of a head and left to drain beside the plughole, the gingery mess looks absurdly artificial. But the clod of hair was once plumbed into a circulatory system because the hair is matted dark and wet at the fringes and surrounded by flecks of ochre. The implement that removed the scalp lies upon the draining board: a long knife, the edge serrated for sawing. Above the adjacent work station, at the end of the rack that holds the cook’s knives, several items are missing.
Maybe this dripping thing of hair was brought to the sink area from somewhere outside the galley, carried along the corridor and up the flight of stairs that leads from the crew’s quarters. Red droplets as round as rose petals make a trail into the first cabin on a corridor identical to the communal passage on the deck above. The door to this cabin is open. Inside, the trail of scarlet is
immediately lost within the borders of a far bigger stain.
A fluorescent jacket and cap hang upon a peg just inside the door of the cabin. All is neat and orderly upon the bookshelf, which holds volumes that brush the low white ceiling. A chest of drawers doubles as a desk. The articles on the desktop are held down by a glass paperweight and overlooked by silver-framed photographs of wives and children at the rear of the desk. On top of the wardrobe, life jackets and hardhats are stowed. Two twin beds, arranged close together, are unoccupied. Beneath the bedframes, orange survival suits remain neatly folded and tightly packed.
The bedclothes of the berth on the right-hand side are tidy and undisturbed. But the white top sheet and the yellow blanket of the adjacent berth droop to the linoleum floor like idle sails. There is a suggestion that an occupant departed this bed hurriedly, or was removed swiftly. The bed linen has been yanked from the bed and only remains tucked under the mattress in one corner. A body was also ruined in that bed: the middle of the mattress is blood-sodden and the cabin reeks of salt and rust. Crimson gouts from a bedside frenzy have flecked and speckled the wall beside the bed, and part of the ceiling.
Attached to the room is a small ensuite bathroom that just manages to hold a shower cubicle and small steel sink. The bathroom is pristine; the taps, shower head and towel rail sparkle. All that is amiss is a single slip-on shoe, dropped on the floor just in front of the sink. A foot remains inside the shoe with part of a hairy ankle extending from the uppers.
From the cabin more than a trail of droplets can be followed further down the passage and towards the neighbouring berths. A long, intermittent streak of red has been smeared along the length of the corridor, past the four doors that all hang open and drift back and forth as the ship lists. From each of these cabins, other collections have been made.
What occupants once existed in the crew’s quarters appear to have arisen from their beds before stumbling towards the doors as if hearing some cause for alarm nearby. Just before the doorways of their berths, they seem to have met their ends quickly. Wide, lumpy puddles, like spilled stew made with red wine, are splashed across the floors. One crew member sought refuge inside the shower cubicle of the last cabin, because the bathroom door is broken open and the basin of the shower is drenched nearly black from a sudden and conclusive emptying. Livestock hung above the cement of a slaughterhouse and emptied from the throat leaves similar stains.
Before You Wake Page 5