The Neverloving Dead, page 16
Gethin ran his hands over his throat in the way he often did, huffing lightly. He looked as if he might cry. Patrick knew he wouldn’t, since it wasn’t possible in limbo. He wished he could hug him, but he was afraid it might make him emotional. Patrick, not Gethin. Gethin had Stuart now.
“I can’t do this,” Gethin said. “How the heck am I meant to stop him? I’m not strong enough. I can’t even bloody look at him.”
Patrick didn’t know what to say. He knew it was hopeless, even for Gethin, who was so strong that he’d managed to live even in limbo. He’d kept his emotions, started a relationship, organised a meal supply, even managed to get the police to arrest someone – even if it was the wrong person. What had Patrick done? In two hundred fucking years.
“I just can’t hold my form when he’s there,” Gethin went on. “I lose my shit, then all I do is get more drained. What happens when he stops the van properly, Patrick? He’s gonna kill that lad. I can feel it. It’s like... a lust. But for killing.” He looked sickened to his core.
Again, Patrick couldn’t see what to say. His innards seemed to be seething, but he had to stay neutral. Unemotional. “We both have to stay calm.” It was a ludicrous thing to say. Meaningless.
Gethin gave him a look he hadn’t seen in a long time. It was the look his lover, Julius, had given him when he’d said he wasn’t going to flee to France with him. As if he thought Patrick made of stone. Patrick looked away, hating himself. He wasn’t sure if it was the look, hunger, or the fact he knew he wasn’t indifferent at all.
Perhaps it was just the knowledge that he had always been this way. Even before limbo. He felt suddenly like an abominable coward.
“What was it you told me? You thought I’d get drained and you’d have to help me cos I hadn’t learned to control my emotions?” Gethin said, without any harshness.
“I didn’t mean that, I–”
“Yeah, you did. It’s fine. I’ve heard some variation or another all my life. And look.” He threw a futile look at the partition. “You were right, weren’t you?”
He was wrong, actually – since he couldn’t help Gethin. He had scarcely any more energy than the Welshman. “None of that matters right now,” he replied. “We need to sober him up. The lad.”
Gethin just looked more troubled. “Not a chance. It’s not just alcohol – he was spiked. Roofies, probably. He won’t have peaked yet and Rohypnol lasts anywhere up to twelve hours. Not that he’ll survive them,” he added anxiously. After a while, he said, “Did I tell you he said I was a lot of bother? The killer, I mean. He said I fought too hard. I bet he started spiking them after me. Matt said he didn’t remember much.”
“Fought too hard?” Patrick bit back a roil of anger.
“Yeah. Afterwards, when he took his five hundred quid back, he said I hadn’t been worth raping or killing.” He rubbed his throat again then huffed. “He didn’t know I’d heard him, obviously.”
Again, Patrick had the urge to hug Gethin – tell him he was worth so much more than five hundred measly pounds. But he’d told him the same too, hadn’t he? You and Stuart deserve each other. I’m through helping you, Gethin. You’re not worth my time or my energy.
He felt another wash of shame. The by now familiar constriction around his neck.
Gethin and Stuart did deserve each other. It was he, Patrick, who didn’t deserve anyone. No people, no pleasure, no anything. Perhaps he’d never deserved it – perhaps that was why he’d never been allowed to have it. In life or death. “I’m sorry I was such an arse,” he began. “I know this is my–” The sound of the road changed: gravel.
Gethin frowned at him.
The van stopped.
A second later, the engine cut. There was clunking in the front of the van, a click then a steady hushing sound as the seatbelt reeled back into its holder. The sound repeated.
The driver’s door opened.
Patrick looked again at Gethin, remembering what had been done to him. Not sure what the hell he could do to stop it happening again. Then, mostly because he couldn’t sit in the van with Gethin, he softened his form and drifted through the metal panel behind him, emerging in a dark yard overhung with yews. To one side, a church loomed. A sign read: Church of St John the Baptist. Not St Michael, after all.
Patrick had got everything wrong.
The killer walked around the front of the van, stones crunching under him as he went. He opened the passenger door.
Gethin followed through this side of the van. The goldenness was gone. He looked pale, even for a ghost. Patrick distinctly saw him falter when he saw his murderer, then swallow nothing at all.
“We’re here, Finn,” the man said, wrapping an arm around the young man’s waist, pulling him to his feet. “I’ve brought you home, as you asked. You just need to walk a little further.”
Anger swelled in Patrick. He supposed he shouldn’t be shocked the killer was encouraging the young man to walk to his own murder – that his tone suggested he was performing some kindness. He’d seen enough deaths, met enough ghosts, to know murders weren’t always wall-to-wall violence. He’d walked coldly enough to his own execution.
Seeing it, though. Watching it. Knowing Finn knew nothing of his fate...
“I’ll bloody kill him,” Gethin snarled, turning himself solid as the priest supported Finn towards a side door. The young man’s feet dragged over the gravel.
Patrick’s hand shot out, turning solid just in time to yank Gethin back by the elbow. “You’re too weak!”
Gethin glared.
“Gethin, I’m too weak.” He didn’t like to admit it since physical strength had really been his sole benefit to Gethin. “If we try anything now, there are two of them. Two lots of living energy. I know you think I’m too careful, but if we rush this, we could lose our chance. Wait for him to set Finn down, and then...” And then he didn’t know what. He only knew it would mean they could focus on the murderer. Not worry about his victim.
To his surprise, Gethin didn’t fight him. His form flickered. “You’re too...? Shit, Patrick, don’t tell me that. You’re like... well, I don’t even know what you’re doing here, do I? Why you keep bloody helping me. Duw duw.” He rubbed his eyes. “What the fuck am I gonna do?”
“Gethin, I’ll help you,” Patrick said firmly. “We’ll find a way. I mean, I will.” He and Gethin weren’t a ‘we’. They never would be. The best Patrick could do was help him to get closure and go free.
“I told you. It’s not your fight,” Gethin said. “And all I’ve done is cost you.”
Patrick didn’t get the chance to set him straight. The side door opened with a heavy clunk. The priest guided Finn over the threshold into a dimly lit stone corridor. Patrick glimpsed a narrow, dark crimson Persian carpet, then the door closed.
Patrick and Gethin drifted through it.
Patrick seemed to be feeling his body in a way he hadn’t since he’d died. Dread mostly. Sorrow. Anger that someone could treat another person’s life so lightly. He thought again of Gethin, in his flat, dying as the priest...
He pushed down the idea. His throat tightened. The priest opened another door, leading Finn into a chamber, pushing the door shut again.
Again, Patrick and Gethin drifted through.
To one side was another doorway. Through it, Patrick could see a polished mahogany desk with an upholstered chair on each side of it. Books lined the walls. The room looked warm and welcoming. On its far wall was yet another door, presumably leading to the church itself.
The room they were in was, in complete contrast, small and sparsely furnished. To Patrick’s right was a single bed, a bedside table, a wardrobe and a window draped with heavy curtains. To his left, a reading chair hunkered beneath a tall, fringed lampstand. A large, worn rug covered almost the entire floor. Beyond it was a smaller desk with a framed quote above:
Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle.
Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil;
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray;
And do thou, O Prince of the Heavenly Host, by the power of God,
thrust into hell Satan and all evil spirits
who wander through the world for the ruin of souls.
Amen.
St Michael.
Not a church or a name, but Michael himself. Leader of the Army of God against the powers of Hell. Against Satan. Against evil.
Patrick turned. Looked at the man.
The killer had stopped at the bed. He reached into Finn’s rear pocket, removing his mobile phone and a wedge of notes, setting them together on the bedside table. Gethin stared at the notes. Patrick felt a stirring of rage.
He pushed it down.
“I’ll keep these now,” the man said. “It’s hard for a rich man to enter Heaven. You may find this hard to believe, Finn, but your devilry will be forgiven.” He spoke soothingly. “I absolve all the men I choose, so their purity and beauty may shine for the Lord, unblemished by their fleshly sins.”
Gethin flinched.
The man lay Finn on his back, then stood, which showed the bulge in his trousers – the arousal he was already feeling at what he was about to do.
The rage stirred again. Again, Patrick pushed it away. It wouldn’t help him, Gethin or Finn. It would just drain him more.
“I even absolved the one I told you about – the one who did this to my nose.” He sighed, gesturing to it, as if Finn could see anything with his eyes shut. “The truth is you are all victims of Satan’s snares. His wiles. He takes your beauty,” he touched Finn’s face, expression tender, “then uses you for his ends, as Saint Michael says: to wander through the world for the ruin of souls. Corrupting others. My role is to undo his foulness and bring you into the Light. Clean.”
“He’s insane,” Gethin said, eyes round. “He thinks he’s doing good.”
Patrick could only stand there as the man unzipped Finn’s jeans and began to tug them down. He’d killed Gethin because he’d been beautiful? Because he’d been gay and enjoyed himself? His own bloody life!
It struck him that other than the beauty and the fact Patrick had enjoyed himself so rarely, they were the same reasons he’d been hanged. The same reasons he’d been damned. For eternity. The noose tightened, his future shrinking further as if it were now vanishing entirely. It was all just the same thing, he thought. The same points, around and around. As if people’s bodies weren’t their own. As if their lives weren’t.
He felt his two hundred years like a plague, their emptiness opening out in front of him, instead of at his back. All that time spent trying to have another physical existence, holding himself in near perfect stasis to have it – when bastards like this were still out there, appointing themselves to take it from people. For their ‘own good’.
Because God hadn’t killed Gethin or Matt, had he? He hadn’t even killed Patrick. And he wasn’t about to kill Finn. It wasn’t God. It was people.
The priest unbuttoned his own fly. The Oxford baggies pooled around his feet. He stepped out of them, cock hard, poking out under his long shirt.
“No,” Gethin said, shouting something again about killing him.
Patrick didn’t hear it. A flood of rage welled up inside him at the exact moment a haze descended. A veil. His whole past flashed before him: everything he’d lost, again and again. Everything Gethin had lost. Everything so many had. Wrath solidified him in an instant. He barely had to move. He beat Gethin to the man. He registered the thump his solid form made as it crashed into the priest, the winded expulsion of air from the man, the fact the priest had tripped on something. Was falling.
Patrick didn’t care. He wanted the man to fall. Wanted him on his back. Wanted him to die. Patrick’s outrage, his agony, at everything he’d endured for the last two and half centuries – so meticulously resisted, for so long – outstripped everything. Outstripped him. His own anger was all he could see. All he could feel. And he could feel it. He could feel, at last.
Not just pain. Not just anger.
The need for vengeance.
He didn’t think about how he would kill the man. He didn’t have to. Short of pushing him off a bridge, there was only one way he knew of for a ghost to kill a living man.
The same way he’d killed the man all those years ago – by draining every last bit of life from him. It was the perfect death for the man, the perfect punishment for taking all the life from Gethin, from Matt, from those other men. Just as he’d planned to take it from Finn. Just as the other priest had taken Patrick’s life.
And even better, the priest would be awake for his death. As Patrick had been. He’d see every invisible moment. So he’d be terrified too, certain a demon had caught up with him at last: that he was being savaged and judged. Sucked straight to Hell.
He looked down at the man’s body.
At his dick.
Which was still hard.
Ready for Finn, Patrick told himself. As ready as any man he, Patrick, had ever fellated in the night.
He thought of Gethin’s face. His rage when he’d first seen him do it to Stuart.
His throat tightened.
“Uh... Patrick?”
Gethin’s voice.
Patrick kept looking. It was different, he told himself sternly. He could do this. The priest was a monster. He deserved it. He had raped Gethin with this cock.
It just made him feel even less inclined.
If he didn’t do something, though... what about Finn?
The killer gasped, arms and legs moving, staring around wildly as he tried to propel himself away, half-naked, from a force he couldn’t even see.
Patrick just stood there, panic beginning to grip him. He hadn’t even realised he’d wanted vengeance – and now he’d nearly killed a man because of it.
Killed a murderer, he reminded himself.
Except he was a murderer too. And a monster. Wasn’t he?
“Patrick, he’s getting up!” Gethin yelled. Patrick hadn’t even been looking at the man.
The priest scrambled to his feet, crossing himself, spit spraying as he started muttering something: “Your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, goes about seeking whom he may devour.”
Did he mean Patrick? The priest was surely the devil. The priest was the monster.
The man pushed the curtain half-open, reaching behind it to grab a wooden box. Whether through the intensity of his arousal about Finn or outright terror, his cock was still sticking out rigidly in front of him, swaying in mid-air as he pulled up the lid.
Gethin turned away, retching.
Patrick couldn’t move. He knew he was still solid. He couldn’t be anything but solid: his entire form was pulsing. Not just with rage, but with fear: Of what might happen to Finn if he, Patrick, failed. Of what might happen to Gethin. Would he just stand there retching until he lost all his energy and died, without achieving his aim?
And of what might happen to him. The noose tightened. He was back on the gallows, throat being crushed, black pressure building in his head, panic in his heart as his future tapered into nothingness.
The same thing he’d kept feeling ever since he’d met Gethin.
The priest had taken the lid off a thick, glass bottle. Without a word, he sloshed it in Patrick’s face.
Patrick watched the man’s face morph, eyes widening, a strange rabidity filling his features.
This again.
“Demon!” the killer snarled, shaking the rest of the bottle in his direction, slopping more water on him. It didn’t burn. Water didn’t. Even supposedly holy water. But it would show the priest someone was there. Someone invisible. It would show him where they were standing.
He slung the empty bottle at Patrick then launched himself after it.
Patrick didn’t feel the floor hit his back. He was back to feeling nothing at all. All he knew, as the man landed on top of him, savage and enraged, was that he had to stay solid. If he didn’t, the priest would have all his energy in seconds.
Patrick wouldn’t die, of course – not completely – but Finn would. And Gethin would fail. And Patrick would go out of his mind for the next two centuries, blaming himself for all of it. Losing all control. He knew what he was capable of when that happened. He had to stay solid.
Vaguely, he saw Gethin straighten up, heard him roar something. He couldn’t focus on it. Hands gripped his throat. Squeezed.
Patrick struggled, trying to push the man off.
“Demon!” the man spat again. All Patrick could see was every priest who’d ever snarled it at him – face after face, beginning with this one, flicking back, back, back, ending with the one who’d hanged him. The one who’d watched Patrick choke to death. Patrick had no air to lose this time, but his energy was draining so fast, he might have been sand in the man’s fingers.
Hands appeared – Gethin’s, he supposed – slipping through the priest’s head, trying to drag him away, again and again. The Welshman looked out of his mind, Patrick registered. Probably, he could see his own death happening all over again too. The throttling. The priest’s half-naked body. Finn on the bed.
“Jesus, Patrick, what the fuck can I do?” Gethin yelled.
Patrick couldn’t answer. He already knew he couldn’t keep this up. He was going to be drained into the nearest thing to non-existence possible. And there was nothing he could do. He wished he could have told Gethin before it happened that he was sorry for storming off, that it hadn’t been Stuart he’d wanted, that he’d known Gethin wouldn’t want him so he’d let his emotions get in the way. His jealousy. Because of that, Gethin would have to watch Finn die too – in exactly the way he’d died. Gethin had deserved better than that. He’d deserved to bring his killer to justice.
The killer’s head jerked violently to one side. Out of nowhere, glass showered down.
There was a loud roar Patrick knew, dimly, was Gethin’s. Then a dull, grim crackling sound.
The priest’s glare intensified eerily.
Blood slid down his cheek, dripping into Patrick’s face. Spattering his lip.
