Hangman, page 8
“Grant, you’ve seen some of what’s going on in the village. You think you’ll be safe alone?”
Grant eyed the shotgun. “I feel a little safer knowing you’ve got that thing,” he admitted.
“Well, come on. First, let me see something for myself. Then we’ll go to the hotel, okay?”
“Okay,” said Grant, torn.
But his car ... his car had been parked outside the pub ...
Marianne and William would be safe, surely. Of course they would ... but he was a weak man, in many ways. Grant knew it well enough. For now, he had a cigarette on the go and a chaperone with a shotgun. He couldn’t force the old man to go to the hotel, back to the scene. Of course he couldn’t.
So Grant Bridges walked along like a good dog beside the old man, smoking his cigarette, thinking of perfectly good reasons not to run back to the hotel.
Number one among those was that the big black man might still be around.
*
23.
The sweeper stood at the door of the storage shed, his expression one of fury.
“I swear I don’t know how they got away,” said Dale. “I swear. Please—”
The sweeper turned away.
A small teddy bear crawled through the broken boards at the back of the storage shed.
Dale Smithson didn’t see it.
The teddy bear began to get larger.
“You brought this on yourself, Dale. Remember that. Glory will be denied you,” said the sweeper.
Terrence strode back through the shop in a fury. Let the bear have him, he thought. Let the bear have them both, and fuck them, too. Fuck Dale, fuck his ugly wife.
“Fuck them!” he roared out in fog over the screams.
*
The sweeper took a slow breath and ran a hand back through his greasy yellow-gray hair. His hand came back with a dog end, somehow still alight.
He watched from the fog, which was no impediment to him. He stood outside the newsagents, watching the old man and the young man walking along the street.
He followed, silent, pushing his old cart.
“Coming?” he said as he heard a sound behind him.
A small, grubby teddy bear came out of the newsagents, dragging two heads for the offering.
Leaving behind the corpses of Dale Smithson and his wife Marjory.
*
24.
“I’ve already decided I’m going to take as many with me as I can. If I can find that man, I’ll kill him too,” said John.
There was something terrifying about the old man, but Grant couldn’t just wander off on his own. He’d be lost in minutes.
“Here it is,” said John.
They stood before the butcher shop.
“What do you need here?”
“Not what I need, young man. What you need.”
He smashed in the window with the butt of the shotgun.
“Come on,” he said.
Already Grant was beginning to forget what was acceptable and what was not. Looting, he guessed. Breaking and entering. Burglary ... he wasn't sure what it was. He knew it didn't matter in the slightest, though, because by now he was convinced. The whole fucking town was nuts.
He stepped into the shop.
“See it?”
“What?”
“See what it really is, sonny Jim. See it for what it is. Look at the meat.”
So Grant looked. Really looked.
He’d thought the safest place was with the old man, but now he wasn’t so sure.
There was no safe place.
No safe place in the whole country, because he recognized the cuts of meat in the display case for what they were.
Human organs, legs, arms ...
A grotesquery with nothing on sale but skinned and jointed human flesh.
Grant put his head down between his knees, not sure if he was going to puke or pass out. Turned out he was going to puke.
A little while later, pale, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth, tears streaming from his eyes—whether from puking or the sights he'd been shown, he didn't know.
He realized he had no choice but to follow John. Safest place seemed to be with the man with the gun.
“Understand? Understand why my telling you was no good?”
“Yes,” said Grant.
“Still want to go to the pub?”
“Yes.” Grant nodded. “I need to. I need to.” But he felt like crying, now, because he realized the danger his wife was in. The terrible danger.
You knew all along, his bastard mind chimed in, but he silenced the thought.
“Hold on,” he said. He walked to the back of the counter, his hands, legs, even his head shaking. It wasn’t from the cold. It was from the fear.
He took the two biggest blades he could find in his hands.
He couldn’t see properly, despite the fog, because some crazy old bitch had put a lit cigarette in his eye. He’d seen a man have his head blown off by the very man he was trusting with his life. He'd met a stone-cold killer, seen a boy hanged from a tree. He was shaking, afraid, a weak man, maybe, but he still loved his wife and his son, and he’d do whatever he could to protect them from the lunatics in this town.
“I’m ready,” he said, a blade in both hands.
*
The heavy black doors creaked open, leading into the Noose and Gibbet, and Grant and John walked into the lobby. Grant knew what to expect, John did not.
“My God, it’s got bad,” he said, staring down at the bodies of the chef and the waitress, mutilated in the lobby at the foot of the stairs.
“It wasn’t the villagers that did this,” said Grant. “It was the big man. The big black man. He fell on them in a frenzy. Did this with that cleaver,” he said, pointing at the weapon. “I ran from him.”
John spotted the trail of blood leading to the back of the hotel, which Grant, in his haste to run away, hadn’t spotted before.
“Out this way,” said John, pointing the shotgun at the blood trail. The shotgun was loaded and cocked.
“God,” said Grant again.
“Come on. Quick in, quick out. I don’t want to meet him. The sweeper. Come to think of it, I don’t want to meet the big black fella, either. We’ve got to get somewhere safe, and this isn’t it.”
The two men walked through to the back of the hotel, out to the kitchen.
First they saw the maid, her head twisted at an angle that spoke of tremendous strength.
Grant saw Marianne second, because John led with the shotgun.
Grant dropped both blades and fell to his knees.
“No,” he said, and began to cry. There was no pause between seeing his dead wife, it seemed, and the tears coming in floods. He knelt beside his wife of five years, the mother of his only child, and cried his heart out.
All the while thoughts raced through his head, his mind ticking, his bastard's mind ... thinking still, when he knew he should just shut down. Ticking and thinking about the danger he was in. How close was death now? Was it stalking him?
Somewhere in his grief and his own self-loathing he knew he couldn't give up. Couldn't just die.
Because he still had a son. Didn't he? Didn't he?
He had to believe he did, because William's body was not there.
All the while John watched, watched the back door, watched the front. Waited. He waited for as long as he could.
Then he knew they could wait no longer.
“Come on,” he said. “We’ve got to get to the church. It might be the only safe place left in the whole village.”
Gently, he put one hand under Grant’s armpit and pulled him to his feet. Grant didn’t resist. Helped even. John thought that might be a good sign. There was a place for grief, and God knew there was enough grief in him.
But now wasn’t the time. Now was the time for anger.
*
25.
The door to the church opened and a small old man walked in carrying a bunch of flowers. He wore a flat cap over still-black hair, but was wrinkled so deeply he must have been at least eighty years old, if not older still.
He looked up and saw Warren standing before him.
“Just came to see the missus,” said the old man, like nothing was amiss, and at the same time as he spoke he was pulling a knife from the pocket of his thick winter coat.
Sam screamed, thought about running, but where would she run to?
She didn’t need to worry. The old man was slow and weak, and Warren Johns was fast and strong.
The knife sliced down through the sleeve of Warren Johns’s coat. Then Warren’s massive fist crashed into the side of the old man’s head and caved it in, breaking his neck and killing him instantly.
Sam screamed again.
“Help me,” said Warren, ignoring the dead man, and hoisting down the second of the bodies to the ground.
“Help me,” he said again, looking at Sam, who backed away from him.
“He was gone,” he said simply.
“Gone.” William nodded.
Sam shook her head. “I can’t deal with this,” she said.
“You’ve got to,” said Warren, his voice suddenly harsh where he’d been soft before. “You’ve got to, because if you don’t, you’ll be dead.”
Warren brushed past her, dragging a corpse out of the church. Sam heard the smack of the frozen body on the frozen ground as he dumped it in the graveyard.
“Help me make this place safe,” he said when he came back in, “and then we might have a chance. Might just have a chance, because it’s a long night and we’ve got to get through it somehow. Take the old man’s coat, too, and put it on. Before you freeze.”
Sam looked at the man Warren Johns had killed so easily, dead before he hit the floor. Just an old man. Just a helpless old man.
But then, the knife.
Gone, she thought. She didn’t trust Warren Johns, but she trusted William. There was something about the kid. Something that she’d hit upon earlier. Not just special. Amazing.
“It’s okay, Sam,” said William beside her, as though he was mirroring her thoughts. “You need his coat. Warren’s right. He’s a good man.”
Warren took down another corpse while they spoke. “Now, Sam Green, get fucking moving, before you freeze to death and before the night falls.”
Sam gingerly moved the old man’s body around to remove his coat. Stiff already, she noted. Wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to strip a corpse. She wondered if she could use this scene in a book one day. Then she wondered if she’d get to write another book.
She put the old man’s coat on over her T-shirt and didn’t feel any warmer at all.
*
26.
John’s knees and hips hurt like a bastard as he took the steps down and out of the Noose and Gibbet, leaving four corpses behind them. The gun was heavy in his hands, and despite all the clothes and two coats, he still couldn’t wear gloves. You can’t shoot in gloves. Least, not if you want to shoot for shit. His hands were turning blue, and it was only getting colder.
“Come on,” he told Grant, mentally cursing himself for taking on the man. He probably wasn’t completely useless. He wasn’t far off, though.
“Hang on,” said Grant.
He swung one of the heavy blades with all his strength at the passenger window of his car. The blade bounced back and he nearly took his own head off with it.
“Not like that,” said John. He whacked the window with the stock of the shotgun and it shattered into pieces.
“Like that,” he said.
Grant popped the lock and pulled the door open. He opened the trunk by pressing a button inside the car, walked around it, and took out his bag. There were three bags in there. One for each of them, thought John.
Mrs. Bridges wouldn’t need hers anymore, he thought. He felt sad thinking of her dead in there, the blade stuck in her neck, ice forming over her eyes.
He wondered what she’d had in her bag: maybe a cute nightgown. Something for the weekend, he thought.
He felt bad for thinking it.
“Come on,” he said to Grant.
“Where are we going, John? Where the fuck can we go? This place is—”
John saw that Grant was getting ready to sob again.
He wasn't a tactile man, but he laid his free, freezing hand on Grant's shoulder.
“Going to church,” he said. “Your boy's still alive, that's where he'll be. That's where they'll take him, I figure. That's where it started.”
He didn't add in an if. If the boy was dead or alive, John was damn sure he'd be doing some more shooting, and soon.
The church had been where the sweeper had set up shop. He knew that much, because he'd seen him in there on one of his many trips to the graveyard to visit his wife.
“Going to church, Grant Bridges. Now, are you coming? I've got this gun, you've got those knives. You think you can use them?”
“Fucking right I can,” said Grant, and John grinned. Nice to see a bit of fight in the man.
He grinned, too, because he kind of relished the thought of shooting some more of those bastards. Getting the boy back—of course he's dead, his mind told him, but he pushed the thought away—would be a bonus.
He began to lead the way toward the church and Grant followed right behind him, puffing in the frozen air. John could feel ice crusting his beard. He tried to loosen his old knuckles, but they were seizing up.
Didn't matter, he thought. He didn't want to drop the gun. He wanted to shoot the bugger.
He knew the walk well enough he could make it to the cemetery blind if he had to. He should, too; he’d been walking along that old potholed path every day for going on ten years, since his wife was dead and buried.
He put one foot in front of the other, same as he’d been doing all his life, and with more determination since his wife died. Some old widowers, he knew, rolled over and died. But not John. He’d taken up his shooting. Still went to the pub once a week. Sometimes he talked to people, sometimes he didn’t. He found he talked more outside the pub, these days, with the smoking ban. Smokers always chatted to each other. All the outcasts together.
The fog rolled right in and John limped his way along his well-trodden route, across the road, down the alley past the newsagents, onto the narrow path, and into the church grounds, the graveyard.
*
John swung the barrel of the shotgun up with a flick so the breech clicked shut. Locked and loaded.
He did it because as they came to the entrance to the church there was a pile of ...
Fuck, thought John. Did they even count as bodies anymore? Mutilated, skinned, partially eaten, maybe ...
But there was no mistaking the fact that each corpse was missing its head.
There was a pile of them. Maybe ten, twelve, though it was hard to tell because they were all thrown haphazardly together.
John shivered and the barrel of the gun wavered.
“My God,” said Grant. “I ... I had no idea. No idea. John, what the hell … I’m going to be sick.”
“Suck it up, sonny Jim,” said John. “Suck it up. There’s someone in there, and there’s hell to pay. You ready?”
“Yes. Yeah. Okay.”
John fixed Grant with a grizzled stare. “I mean are you ready? You know what we could find in there—”
John didn't know if Grant caught his drift, but he was glad to see some steel in the man's eyes.
“I'm ready,” said Grant again, this time with more conviction.
“Then what the fuck are we waiting for?” said John, and grinned. His teeth were yellow, and crooked, but it was as good a grin to go out on as any.
*
The door to the church was wide open. Everything was covered in a white sheen of ice: the pews, the baptismal font, the door itself. There was an old man dead on the floor just inside the door, and he, too, was crusted with ice. Grant noted he wore no coat, and thought he must be cold. Maybe it was just shock, maybe he was going mad. He didn't know. He wasn't sure if he cared anymore.
Grant stepped deeper into the church and was stunned for a moment, but only a moment. His wife’s murderer was in the church, that big black giant bastard, turning and seeing Grant with his one good eye and that sickening steel twin, looking at him with no shock, but like it was an everyday job. The man had a corpse on his shoulder. His coat was covered in blood and grime.
He looked like a fucking psychopath.
Things fell into place in Grant's head with startling simplicity.
His son was in the church. There was a woman there, too, but she didn’t register, not immediately.
Warren Johns was standing next to William. The psycho had his son. He had his son.
Warren Johns still had Marianne’s blood on his coat. Grant could see well enough to see that. His wife's blood and the blood of God knew how many others. Here in this desecrated place he looked like a demented preacher. The rows of dead in the pews, the dead hanging from the ceiling, the heads arrayed upon the altar ...
That fucking steel eye. Cold and dead like the congregation.
Kill him, he thought. Kill him now.
His mind shut down and he switched over into a person he didn’t know, the kind of person that could suddenly flip and kill someone in a cold rage. Diminished responsibility, maybe. Didn’t matter. His wife’s murderer was here, in front of him, with his fucking son.
He began to run.
He might have been screaming, he didn’t know.
*
27.
William watched the giant work, carrying out body after body. Those bodies must have been heavy, but the big man never seemed to tire. William felt he should help, but he wasn’t sure if he could touch the heads that adorned the altar.
Sam was helping where she could, but she’d dragged two bodies clear while Warren must have cleared ten bodies on his own, shouldering each corpse like William had seen butchers do in the high street, unloading half a pig or cow from the back of a cooler van.
