Hangman, page 2
“I won’t.”
But when she got her phone from the car, she had no signal, and her gaze went back to the dead boy.
“No bars,” she said to Grant. “No signal. What do we do?”
Grant thought about it for a while. What to do? Cut the boy down? Untie the rope? He wasn’t sure he could bear the thump if the boy hit the ground hard. Maybe the police should do it. But it didn’t sit right, leaving him hanging there. Didn’t sit right at all.
Grant closed his eyes while he tried not to think about the boy, hanging, twisting and swinging. The creak of the wet rope against the bough he’d hanged himself from. Hanged himself ...
How the hell did he get up there?
How did the boy tie the rope, drop himself …
He climbed. Of course he climbed. Tied the rope, climbed the tree ...
He didn’t, Grant, and you know it.
Suddenly he was aware of William standing beside him. He’d got out of the car and was looking up at the tree. He must have climbed into the front.
The way he knew things spooked Grant out. The way he figured things out for himself before anyone had to teach him. William just knew things, and as weird as it was, that was all there was to it.
“Didn’t hang himself, Daddy,” said William.
Marianne let out a sob.
Grant thought for a while longer, holding William against his leg and Marianne against his shoulder.
“We’ll have to go into the village,” he said.
Into Frampton.
“Can’t just leave him hanging,” said Marianne.
“The boy’s not there anymore,” said William.
“Shut up!” said Grant.
“Grant!”
Grant clenched his jaw and tried to calm down. Marianne freaking, him freaking, and William doing that weird shit again.
“Sorry, William. Come on, in the car. Let’s go get some help. He’s dead and the police’ll see to it.” Even to himself, he sounded cold. But it was the only way he could handle it. He could feel himself shutting down. Shutting it out.
Dealing with it, like a man should, like he felt a man should, even though all he really wanted to do was go home. He didn’t want to go into Frampton anymore. A weekend break at a hotel called the Noose and Gibbet suddenly seemed like a terrible, awful idea.
*
William stood beside his father and wouldn’t move until Grant gently steered his son toward the car. Marianne was already in, pulling on her seat belt.
“In the car,” he said, shutting out the image of the hanged boy as best he could. He tried to concentrate on his boy, getting him into the car.
He checked Marianne through the windshield as he walked William back to the car. She was shaking. They were all shaking.
“Don’t go into the village,” said William.
“Got to, son. It’s the closest place and we have to call the police, because we’re adults. We can’t just drive away. Okay?”
“Don’t go,” said William.
“Got no choice,” said Grant, and wondered how many times he’d thought that, felt it, in his forty years on earth.
He put William in the car and pulled his son’s seat belt across his lap and chest.
Then, shutting down, driving. Concentrating on the road but thinking about a hanged boy, seeing the body still. The wipers were slow-going against the drizzle falling and the misty air. The heater wasn’t the best, so he had the window down because the windshield was misty. He could barely see, and nearly didn’t spot the man walking in the road. As it was, he still couldn’t brake in time to stop the car from hitting the man.
*
5.
Warren Johns had many defining features. The one people noticed first was his height—all six feet seven inches of him. The second was that there was something not quite normal about his left eye.
Most people never got far past these two details to notice that he was, in fact, an extremely bright and capable man. He had to be. He’d been living on the road for the last eleven years, roaming from town to town, skipping the cities whenever possible. He’d always been fed, always watered, and he’d never been arrested by the police—no mean feat for a homeless black man roaming the English countryside.
He heard the car before he saw it, heard the squeal of the tires. He hopped from tired old tarmac and up onto the verge, but the car was going too fast for his long legs to react quickly enough. The car clipped him as he jumped, flipping him into a field. His legs went out from under him and he slammed his head. Something cracked in his back, or maybe it was a rib breaking. It winded him. His eye popped out.
He lay there for a second. A car door opened, then another. Two people in the car. No, three, he thought, as a second later he was aware of a man’s voice saying, “Wait there.”
Warren Johns noticed things other people didn’t, was more observant than most people with two eyes and good ears.
A woman said, “Just leave him—”
He groaned, tried to speak, but something was broken inside. He couldn’t talk. He could feel himself drifting.
His good eye, his only eye, flickered shut, and he was close to passing out.
“Just leave him,” she said.
Just leave me? thought Warren. His eyelid flickered, then the day turned dark, but rain still fell into the socket where his glass eye had been.
*
Grant pulled hard on his hair and chewed furiously on his nicotine gum, staring with hatred at Marianne’s phone, which still had no signal.
“Just leave him,” said Marianne, and he looked at her like he’d never looked at his wife in the whole history of their marriage, a marriage that ran like a pitted and potted old country road.
Even now, on the road to Frampton, their marriage was getting bumpier. He could almost feel them jouncing as they traveled into new territory, and his wife basically suggested they leave a traffic accident ... maybe even leave a man to die by the side of the road.
“What? Did you just say that?”
“Yes, Grant, yes. I did. How do you know it wasn’t him that strung up that ... that boy?”
Grant could see she was getting hysterical, but he thought if he hit her, he might just hit a little too hard and then he really would be a bastard. It was one thing admitting a one-night stand to your wife and ruining your marriage. Another to break her nose, maybe a cheekbone, from a hard slap.
His marriage was on the rocks as it was.
The man in the field groaned and tried to speak. Maybe it was just some kind of fever-dream talking. Grant didn’t know. All he knew was that he’d just found a kid hanging from a tree, hit a guy with his car, and he had his wife freaking out on him and his son in the car.
“Get in the car,” he said. “Go into town, like we planned. Get help. I’ll stay with him.”
“What? He could be a killer.”
“But he’s probably not,” said Grant, looking down at the man, wondering if his eye was always missing, or if he’d knocked it out.
Of course he hadn’t. There would be blood.
There might be blood yet, he thought, looking from the unconscious man with one eye to his spiteful wife. But he bit his tongue. He knew Marianne bit her tongue, too, plenty of times. Standing over the huge black guy, he wondered for a second how long they could go on biting their tongues before they bled.
“Grant—” she said, and he wanted to hit her again for the whine in her voice.
“Just do it, Marianne. Get in the car with William. Go get help. I’m not going to leave you here with this guy. If he’s angry when he comes around…if…he might be pissed off.”
“Grant—”
“Go,” he said through gritted teeth, because he didn’t want to shout at her. “Go,” he said, “And for fuck’s sake, when you come back with the police in tow, make sure someone fucking smokes, okay?”
He could see she was thinking about telling him he was supposed to be quitting. If she said it, that would be it. But she just turned and got back in the car.
Grant took his coat off as he heard Marianne and William driving away. He didn’t have a clue what to do with the man he’d hit. He shrugged out of his jacket and laid it over him, though it barely covered half of his torso. Shock, exposure ... he didn’t know what the risks were, but the drizzle was steady and it was cold enough to raise the hairs on Grant’s arms under his jumper. Plus, he had no idea how much damage he’d done with the car. For all he knew, the guy was dying. But he couldn’t leave him.
He thought, just for a second, about going through the man’s jacket: a big gray woolen thing, much better for the cold than his own southerner’s jacket. He thought for a long time, standing there in the rain without his own coat on, about going through the unconscious guy’s pockets, just in case he was a smoker.
“Could just find out who he is,” he said, kind of talking to himself, kind of trying to justify it.
Thought about searching the big guy’s coat again and again and couldn’t get off it ... Thought about kicking his own arse for thinking such a thing. Then he searched the coat anyway.
There was almost nothing in his pockets. Grant found one thing only—a slightly elliptical steel ball.
It took him a while to figure it out, but it was an eye. A prosthetic eye.
*
There was something wrong with William, Marianne realized, as she drove towards the village. Her son shook, he was pale. She wondered if he was in shock. But then she knew he was odd. Not autistic or disabled ... just odd.
She never did figure out a better way to describe it.
He knew things, it sometimes seemed, like when he was younger, and she was thinking of giving him a bath, he’d just get up and start taking off his clothes. She’d say, “William, wha’cha doing?” in that kind of kid talk adults engage in with children. He’d say, “Bath,” and that’d be it.
“You okay, William?” she said, keeping her eyes on the road for the most part, checking for a phone signal when she was on a straight stretch.
Trees grew up high along the road. Sometimes she passed fields, seeing a church spire in the distance. Then a patch of trees and she lost sight of the church, only to emerge from the woods again to see the church off in the distance once more, getting no closer.
“William?”
Her son was silent, staring ahead at something she couldn’t see. Staring at the future.
“Mum? I want to go home,” he said.
She ignored him, because she was past the old church, on a bend, and as she came around she was in the village proper, in the village green. There was a pond in the middle of the green, Georgian houses on one side, a few shops, a little newsagents, a post office, and there, on her side of the road, an actual gibbet, with a long noose hanging down. She was there: the pub and hotel where they wouldn’t be staying, not anymore, but they’d have a phone, and someone to help, someone to sort out the fucked-up mess that was their weekend away.
Noose and Gibbet the sign above the door read. She got out of the car, slammed her door, and took William from the car into her arms. He was still light, only a boy, and she carried him like a smaller child might a teddy bear.
*
6.
There are things in the world that most people don’t see. Places that kind of make the eye slide over them.
Some people can’t help but see those kinds of places, whether they want to or not. William Bridges was one such person.
The only places Marianne Bridges saw of interest on the drive in were the shops, the townhouses, the church, the Noose and Gibbet.
That place made William’s heart pound, but the other places on the way in, the people, made William want to wet his trousers, and even though he shook with fear and a strange unnatural cold that seeped into his bones, he wouldn’t pee his trousers like a little kid.
The village was strange. Weird. Frightening. And his mummy couldn’t see it.
Before they got to the pub, William saw plenty of sights that scared him. Like the house with the plants taking over inside. They were growing through a whole room, and he saw a man walking around among the plants … no, the plants were growing through him.
There was an old abandoned house by the school, almost falling down, but something that once had maybe been a beautiful building—something cold and dark about the place, something terrifying.
Mummy didn’t see the trash collector, either. William didn’t know why or how she didn’t see him because he was right there, right in front of the pub, with a cigarette in his mouth. Daddy called those little nubby cigarettes “dog ends.” That cigarette burned, despite the soggy rain.
He smoked, and something troubling hung from the front of the old man’s cart. A child’s toy, like an old teddy bear, torn and filthy and scary.
Some people see those things, some people don’t. Mummy didn’t see them. Her eye slid past.
William was shaking and crying when she took him from the car, but she didn’t listen. Adults never do.
She just put it down to shock and carried him, struggling, in her arms into the pub, through the front doors and into the deserted lobby.
*
Sam Green pushed her plate away with her breakfast half-finished, and stowed her Kindle in her handbag.
No one came to refill her coffee cup or take her plate. She shrugged. She might be a big posh writer, but she wasn’t quite up to kicking up a stink about some shoddy service. She was English through and through. She wasn’t good at complaining. Grin and bear it, she thought with a grin. The absence of the waitress wasn’t enough to dampen her mood.
Rising, she walked through to the lobby and straight into a woman with a crying child on her hip, looking like she was ready to drop a load and had run out of toilet paper.
Sometimes Sam wished she wasn’t a writer.
Wasn’t a charitable first thought, and when the woman asked for help she felt like a complete shithead.
But not for long.
“You’ve got to help me,” said Marianne to the young girl. It didn’t register that the girl was carrying a handbag and wearing jeans.
“Okay?” said Sam Green, framing the question in her head. WTF, she thought.
“My ... shit ... there’s a body hanging from a tree on the road ... my husband ... hit a man with his car. Ran him over. He was driving. I wasn’t,” she added. “The body ... hung ... dead.”
Hanged, thought Sam and hated herself a little.
“I don’t work here,” she said, thinking she sounded stupid even to herself. “But come on. There must be someone around.”
For whatever reason, Sam didn’t panic. She heard what the woman with the child said, plain as anything. A hanged man, a car accident. It didn’t faze her. She didn’t know why. The words played over and over in her mind and she tucked them away, maybe for later use. She couldn’t help it. She didn’t like it, but even at twenty-one she knew she was a born writer and she had to obey the muse. She began thinking while they called out for someone and rang the bell on the lobby counter.
She began thinking about a story, the words played over in her head. Hanged. Run over. Ran him over—she preferred “ran over”—sounded like something you might to do someone again and again. He hated him so much he hanged him, then ran over him again and again. Over and over to make sure.
“Hello? Hello?” called the woman, her voice becoming increasingly desperate, and Sam began to realize how urgent the situation was, managed to gee herself out of writer mode and into person mode.
No one came at the woman’s calls. There was no one on the front desk. There wasn’t a phone either. The waitress wasn’t around, nor was the old lady who seemed to take care of housekeeping all by herself.
“The chef,” said Sam, thinking at last. Hanged. Ran over him. Ran him over ... Not run down. Run over. That was what the woman had said. “Must be a chef on. I just had my breakfast.”
Sam followed Marianne as they went into the kitchen through a swing door.
*
William could see the blood on the walls and finally his bladder did let go. Let go completely.
“William!” said his mum, holding him out. “Sorry,” she said to the chef who stared at them.
The chef was wrong, thought William. He wore those black and white chessboard kind of clothes that chefs seemed to wear on the television shows sometimes.
William started screaming. He didn’t want to, but he had to get Mummy and the nice lady out. Away. Anywhere else.
He started screaming and couldn’t stop, because it was a frightening room, and the chef was wrong, like one time he’d been watching Avengers and knew, just knew, that Black Widow was wrong.
There was a body on the chopping board. Half of a human, or it had been once, and the chef was chopping up a rack of ribs.
William could see it, but he didn’t think his mum or the lady saw it, because they were telling him to shh now, shh now, and apologizing to the chef.
“Thank God you’re here,” said Marianne.
William didn’t know what to do, so he bit down on the webby part between his mum’s thumb and pointing finger. She screamed and slapped him. William was so shocked he stopped crying, just for a second.
His mum shook him on her hip, like a baby. Like she hadn’t just been bitten or slapped her child for the first time. William could sense her panic, but he was sobbing so hard now he couldn’t stop and tell her.
He tried to tell her. Tell her about the chef, and then, looking over her shoulder, tell her about the woman with the knife. Both his mummy and the lady were looking at the chef. Only William, looking over his mother’s shoulder so he didn’t have to see the man butchering, could see the young girl, about the same age as Susan, his babysitter, only William could see the terrible look in her eye as she grinned, crazy, inhuman, raised the knife, silent behind his mum, his mummy and he cried so hard he couldn’t say anything, couldn’t stop ...
