The Coop

  It was three hours later when she woke again needing to pee. There was just enough play in the chain to allow her to find a suitable gap in the planks where she could squat and relieve herself. She remembered her father’s warnings on their Maasai Mara safaris about burying any trace of yourself so as not to attract animals and never running when faced by a predator. Even in her panic she knew he was right and that her only hope now was to find the courage to do the same.

  She eased herself to her feet, shuffled along the wooden wall and peered through a gap in the planking into the adjoining room. It seemed to be some sort of aviary. She could hear birds cooing and occasionally something white fluttered past. Oh, my God, she thought. They’re doves. Had Kieron been the man who abducted the woman in the river? Had he been the person she stumbled upon in Gina’s house?

  She staggered back and checked the room, looking for clues. The wall opposite was covered by posters of Hieronymus Bosch paintings; The Fall of the Rebel Angels and Paradise and Hell. Scrawled across the metal ceiling were the words:

  the CHILDREN of HEAVEN LUSTED AFTER THEM

  Her mind was reeling. She tested the ring that she was padlocked to, but much as she tried there was no way she could loosen it without some sort of tool. The slightest effort made her feel weak, and the room pitched and rotated, forcing her to grab for the wall to steady herself. Thankfully, after a few seconds it subsided, but she still felt nauseous and let herself slide slowly down until she came to rest on the floor. Something sharp dug into her thigh. She felt inside the dressing-gown pocket and amongst the detritus found the cause of her discomfort. A metal hairpin without a safety tip. She fished around in the other pocket and found an old handkerchief and three more hairpins

  One by one she started to pull them apart. It was painstaking work and as her fingers tired she resorted to holding one end of the rigid metal between her teeth and slowly prising the other leg open until it straightened out. The metal was stiff and the sharp ends cut her lips and gums. She had nothing to rinse her mouth with, so every few minutes she had to tear off a piece of currant loaf and suck on it to soak up the blood and metallic taste.

  An hour later, totally exhausted, she’d plaited the thin iron strips into a crude fifteen-centimetre shank. Now she had a tool – and a potential weapon.

  When she woke again the room was dark but for the orange blush of the gas heater. She crawled over to the iron ring again and dug at the planking around the edge of it. The wood was soft but the planks were thick and the ring had been tightly screwed into the surface.

  She was still burrowing the wood when she heard the sound of his car approaching. She swept up the wood splinters and, chewing them into a rough paste, desperately moulded them into the trench she’d scored in the wood. She did the same with the current bread to approximately match the wall colour. It was a crude disguise, but in the half-light passable. She still had to find somewhere to hide the shank so it could be retrieved at a moment’s notice. She pulled the embroidered hanky from the dressing-gown pocket and wrapped it around the shank. Then she took a deep breath and reached down between her legs.

  Joshua Moon, a.k.a. James Noonan, a.k.a. Kieron Allen, took a shot of his mother’s morphine. He re-strapped his forearm and, gritting his teeth against the pain, lifted Gina from the freezer and laid her on a clean sheet on the pine kitchen table. He applied foundation to the scar that haloed her neck, disguising his shame, before using a hairdryer to gently bring her body up to room temperature, in preparation for cutting her hair.

  It was a time-consuming process but necessary. He still needed to inject the body with a precise solution of water and formaldehyde to keep it plastic and sterile. He needed the flesh malleable enough to allow him to hook in the wire loops, which the nylon monofilament would be threaded through to keep her and the finished tableau fixed in position, but not so soft that her flesh would tear – a problem he’d encountered with some of his earlier models. Fortunately, he didn’t need to bleed and gut Gina, and any signs of rigor had long left her body which would make moving her considerably easier.

  Once in the coop, he would apply the Duo surgical adhesive and, one by one, the poultry flight feathers until he’d covered her whole body and face. Then he would start on the meticulous over-dressing of the dove plumage, until only her beautiful agate prosthetic eyes, framed in chaste, white down, would be visible. Gina would be resurrected as an angel, but not like the others, she would be Nephilim’s bride.

  The thought filled him with pure joy.

  Forty-six miles away, Helen was in the lounge of Penny Croft’s Winchester semi, a room that looked as worn its owner. Helen guessed she was probably in her forties but bitterness had aged her beyond her years.

  “Joshua Moon or whatever he calls himself now is a lying piece of shit,” she said as she paced the rug in front of Helen.

  “How did you originally meet him?”

  “I’m an oncology nurse. He was referred to the unit for post-operative chemo.”

  “He had cancer?”

  “A genetic abnormality. The Lynch syndrome. He inherited it from his mother. He had to have his colon removed. They should have taken his balls too; it would have saved me a lot of grief. Three years we were together. Three years I nursed and cared for him. Then he got some job in London and everything changed. He started not coming home at night, saying he had to work late, help his mother at her farm on the weekends.”

  “Was it a poultry farm?” Helen interjected, already knowing the answer.

  “Yes, but it was just an excuse. I checked his mobile and found out he’d been using sex lines and online dating sites. He went mad when I confronted him. Accused me of spying on him and betraying his trust. Acted like he was the victim not me. I came home from work the next day and found he’d packed his stuff and left. No note. Nothing. He just took the car and pissed off.”

  “Did he leave anything behind? Anything at all?”

  “He didn’t have anything to leave. He said it was all in storage until he moved into the farm. Some letters came for him. He texted, asking me to forward them to some PO box.”

  “And did you?”

  “No! Screw him. If he wants them he can come and face me like a man.”

  “You mean you still have them? The letters?”

  Penny shook her head. Helen sensed that she was embarrassed, that by admitting it she’d look as if she still harboured some naive hope of him returning. Which was probably why she never reported the car missing.

  “If you want to punish him, Penny, help me find him and I promise you I will.”

  Penny nodded for Helen to follow her into the kitchen. Ten minutes later, sitting at the cluttered pine table, reading through Noonan’s letters, Helen pumped her fist in triumph. The document she held in her hand was an invoice for poultry pellets and was addressed to:

  Mr Joshua Moon. Dark Water Farm, Bignor, West Sussex.

  Hoare frost flowered like a rash on the corrugated roof of the coop. Joshua Moon checked his pockets for his gloves and felt the reassuring handle of the electric cattle prod – an eBay present to himself that had come in useful on occasion. He’d made a cursory check on Laura on his return but, finding her still unconscious with the empty bottle of drugged water beside her, simply turned up the dial on the gas heater and left her to concentrate on his love, Gina. But by now Laura should be conscious.

  He let himself in, switched on the strip light and held out his arms in welcome to the birds. None of them moved. He looked down at the floor and saw why. Two doves lay dead on the shit-encrusted floor. He couldn’t understand what had killed them. Checking the water trough, it became clear. It was bone-dry. Consumed by his problems, he’d forgotten to replenish it and the birds had died of thirst. He stood over their limp white bodies, ashamed of his selfish cruelty. They’d been his friends and he’d abandoned them. Just as he’d been abandoned in the past.

  Laura heard him agonising over his loss. The connecting door swung open and
she saw him through half-closed eyes looming above her. In each hand, he cradled the body of a dead bird like an offering. He knelt beside her and held them close to her face as if somehow comparing or matching the colour to her skin tone. He eased open her dressing gown, pulled out a red felt-tip pen from his pocket and began to draw on her stomach. She hardly dared breathe, praying he would look away for the split second it would take to reach her weapon. He didn’t. Finally satisfied, he laid the dead birds on her belly, mouthed a silent prayer, bent and kissed them and made his way back out.

  She wanted to scream but she suspected that he was listening next door, testing whether she was really unconscious. After an eternity, she heard the outer door bang shut and his feet on the gravel walking away. Only then did she look down at her stomach – and it wasn’t the dead birds that horrified her but the plan for the incisions he intended to make.

  Helen got lost in the warren of country lanes south of Petsworth and only stumbled upon the sign to Dark Water by luck.

  The lake seemed to suck the light from the cloud-swept moon, leaving the track beside it ominously dark. She parked on a grass verge and checked her iPhone. No signal. Calling for back-up was not an option. She should have done it earlier but she’d been preoccupied in reaching the farm and now she was on her own. She smiled ruefully to herself; perhaps she’d wanted it that way all along?

  She climbed out of the car and scanned the rutted track that branched at an acute angle from the road. Three hundred metres ahead it was swallowed by a pine forest. She shivered, zipped her leather jacket tighter under her chin and opened the car boot. Reaching inside a sports bag, she pulled out a can of pepper spray and an ASP baton. She slid the baton inside her knee-length boot, the spray into her jacket pocket and her brass knuckles onto the fingers of her right hand. She closed the trunk, took a deep, deep breath, and started up the track.

  Laura cursed as the shank caught the bottom of the iron ring and dug into her palm. She re-wrapped the handkerchief around her hand and laboriously scraped at the wood again. She was making progress but the deeper she dug the harder it became and she was reluctant to widen the cut, fearing it would make it more likely to be seen.

  “Hello, Laura,” a voice called from outside.

  She froze. It was him. Why hadn’t she heard him approaching? Had he been watching her through the wall? Christ, did he know she had a weapon?

  “How do you like my studio?”

  She could hear him walking around the perimeter of the coop, his footsteps crunching on the frosty grass. She began desperately ramming the splinters of wood back into place. But she knew she wouldn’t have time. She heard the outer door open and the scraping sound of something being dragged along the wooden planking. Shit – the splinters kept falling from the cut. She spat on them, desperately trying to knead them back into position – shit – he was unlocking the interconnecting door – shit – she had to get rid of the shank, do something to distract him.

  “I have a surprise for you.” The door swung open and Joshua entered, dragging a black body bag behind him. “Can you guess who this is?”

  She took a step backwards, horrified of the thought of who might be inside, but still had the presence of mind to block his view from the gouge she’d made in the wall.

  “Don’t be frightened. I am Nephilim, and I’m going to make her beautiful again,” he said as he hauled the body bag onto the workbench and unzipped it with his good hand. “And you’re going to help me.”

  Laura was horror-struck, unable to move or speak. Gina’s whole body had been shorn of hair and she lay amongst a bed of chicken feathers and pure white dove down.

  “And in return I’m going to do the same for you.”

  He watched her reaction and leant down and kissed Gina full on the lips. Laura felt physically sick but she knew that he would only feed off her fear. She swallowed her revulsion and somehow found her courage and her voice.

  “Did you kill her?”

  “No,” he said, full of righteous indignation. “I loved Gina. She taught me the true nature of love and devotion. Something you’ll never understand.”

  “This isn’t love. This is disgusting! You’re insane–”

  “Don’t!” he warned, drawing the cattle prod like a pistol. “Or I will teach you the meaning of sin and atonement…”

  He switched on the baton and, smiling, moved slowly towards her. She could hear the hum from the electrodes protruding out of the fibreglass tip, but stood her ground, repeating her father’s words like a mantra in her head. Never run… Never run…

  “And you, Laura, will lament in tears.”

  Something snapped in Laura; she stepped forward, ripped off her dressing gown and stood, nakedly defiant, in front of him, challenging him, “Come on. This is what you want. Come and take it. Or aren’t you man enough to do it with a woman without drugging her first?”

  Joshua hesitated. Apart from his mother and Gina, the only other women he’d ever seen naked were the victims of his attacks. And now Laura stood in front of him, like his mother had, mocking his masculinity. He jabbed the electric wand against the metal roof above her head, watching the electrodes crackle and spit, and sneered, “I don’t do sluts and I don’t do whores. But if you don’t put your clothes on, I will do you with this and it will burn and hurt. Do you want that, Laura? Do you want to fry?”

  Never run… Never run… Never run…

  “If I’m a whore your perfect sister was too,” taunted Laura, inching closer to the smoking terminals. “Do you want me to tell you about Gina? The men she fucked – that we fucked together?” She could see Joshua’s hand trembling. “The times we fucked each other?”

  The confusion in his eyes, as she smiled and inched even closer. “What’s the matter? Don’t you like it when I talk dirty?” Licking her fingers one by one, she reached slowly down between her legs and smiled, “Gina did.”

  He couldn’t take his eyes off her and her fingers working between her legs.

  “She said I was better than any man.”

  He was transfixed. Laura could feel the shank at her fingertips. She inched forward to within striking distance, gritted her teeth and – whaa-whaa! whaa-whaa! – a piecing alarm wailed a warning, sending Joshua scurrying from the room. She groaned, staring down at the home-made shank in her hand, knowing that the chance she’d waited and worked so hard for had gone. She dropped slowly to her knees and wept. Not just for herself but for her best friend Gina.

  “Fuck,” Helen cursed her stupidity. She’d assumed the house wasn’t alarmed and had inadvertently triggered a PIR sensor whilst searching for evidence.

  She was cowering in the bedroom, watching Joshua through the window as he knelt on the frozen grass examining the neat set of her footprints that led directly up to the cottage. He looked up and saw her, and for a moment she actually thought he smiled. Then he stood and ran.

  She snapped his Samsonite briefcase shut, shoved it under her arm and started for the stairs. But she could already hear him banging through the front door. She backtracked up onto the landing, desperately looking for another escape route. The bathroom door was open and she ducked inside and slipped the bolt. She could hear him pounding up after her. The door wouldn’t hold him for long and there was no way out apart from the window. But it was a twelve-foot drop onto a concrete patio. She swung the briefcase and smashed the window to pieces.

  Joshua heard the breaking glass and knew immediately what was happening. He raced back down the stairs, ripped open the front door and, howling like a wolf, loped around to the rear of the cottage. She wasn’t there. Only his open briefcase lay on the concrete floor. It was empty. His secret was gone. The bitch had tricked him.

  “I’ll gut you!” he bellowed as he kicked the back door off its hinges. But she was gone too. The bathroom door was open and this time there were no footprints leading away from the house for him to track. He let out a howl of frustration, “I am Nephilim. You cannot hide from me!” He began to se
arch.

  Laura could hear him raging and screamed for help.

  Thank God, thought Helen, as she slipped through the sliding metal door of Battery 1, she’s still alive. But she daren’t reply for fear of revealing her own hiding place. She switched off the fluorescent lights and crept into the ominous void, squeezing herself deep between the narrow avenues of cages, watched only by the beady eyes of the occupants.

  Joshua knew she was inside. There was no sign of her on the track out of the farm and no other way out. Besides, who else would have shut off the 24/7 lighting? He hauled open the heavy doors, threw the switch and powered the fluorescent tubes back on. Hollering and howling and clattering the cages as he passed, he started to hunt. The chickens screeched in panic and threw themselves against the cages. Still he couldn’t find her. He ripped open the cage doors. The birds spewed out and surged through the aisles like a tide. He waded through them like a demented shepherd, thrashing them into a frenzy. The air was full of dust and shrieking and feathers. In the middle of the mayhem Joshua found comfort in his hand. Biting it until the taste of his own blood satisfied his lust and he regained his composure.

  It was a vision from hell and Helen could only crouch in the shadows, clutching her baton and pepper spray, transfixed and terrified.

  Joshua strode out into the central aisle so he could be clearly seen, unbuttoned his jacket and shirt and smeared the blood across the vertical scar on his belly to form a crucifix. He held out his arms like a prophet and proclaimed, “I am Nephilim. A giant. A son of God. A hunter… and I will purge you.”