Hangman, page 11
*
Warren was suddenly by Sam’s side.
The giant punched a man in the face with his massive right fist and the man crumpled like a puppet with its strings tangled, a jumble of arms and legs. He charged through three, four people, shouldering them aside and rammed into the door, driving it shut with the force that only a big man like Warren could manage. Sam slashed at a man holding a saw with her tiny knife. She opened a small cut on his forehead, then John blew a hole through the man’s chest from behind, turned and shot another woman low down in the spine.
“Sam!” shouted Warren over the screams and shouts from outside the door, as the remaining damned villagers heaved against it. Sam could see the effort it took Warren to hold that door closed.
John was sweating and panting, too. He was ashen, like he was in the middle of a heart attack. And maybe he was.
Sam was under no illusions. From a quiet breakfast alone reading her second novel, feeling proud of her achievements, she was suddenly fighting for her life with a tiny knife against hundreds of villagers with hammers and shotguns and worse.
“Sam!” shouted Warren again, and she turned her face to him, blinking, not realizing she’d been staring at the bodies heaped on the floor. She’d been crying, too. For how long she didn’t know. The hand holding her tiny knife shook.
“You need to lead William from this place,” said Warren, his shoulders straining under his jacket, his feet slowly being pushed backwards. It was only a matter of time before someone thought to put a shotgun against that door and end it all now.
It was insane, Sam knew, just as she knew it was a nightmare from which there was no escape.
“What? There’s no way out. These people are all crazy! You said yourself there’s nowhere to go. No way out.”
“There’s one way. It’s dangerous. You have to go, though, because John and even I cannot hold them. I was a fool. I thought we could find sanctuary in the church, but he’s too strong. There’s a way out down, through there,” he said through gritted teeth. “Maybe you can make it, but you need William. He’s—he’s the only one who can do this. And Sam, you need to protect him with your life.”
It’s funny, thought Sam. Not so long ago she’d been thinking about a sweet boy over breakfast. Now she was responsible for an orphaned child in an insane world that had turned on its head.
“Trust in William. He’s special. John and I will hold them off.”
The door slowly, inexorably, opened inward. Warren looked at Sam. John shook his head. “Go now, Sam Green! Run, run for your life.”
She cried, turned, and fled along the aisle to the altar and the small, somehow special boy, praying his heart out.
*
“Push, my flock,” said the monkey. “Push.”
The flock pushed. The shotgun bit again and again, but they were the multitude and the shotgun would run out of teeth with which to bite soon.
And then it did. It fell silent.
*
“Big fella!” shouted John. “We might be in a bit of trouble,” he said as the shotgun clicked dry and John found no more shells in his right coat pocket.
“Fuck it,” he said, seeing Warren’s face and understanding that neither of them stood a chance of making it out alive.
“I’m sorry, John,” said Warren.
“Don’t be,” said John. “I’m dying anyway.”
“Doesn’t have to be hard,” offered Warren.
“Thanks, but I reckon hard or easy, I’ll take a few of them with me.”
“Me, too,” said Warren.
John flipped the shotgun around and held it by the barrel, like a club.
Warren understood just as well as John. There would be pain to come, but they could lessen the odds. Give Sam and William a chance, at least.
“You ready for this?” said Warren, heaving against the door, somehow holding back the multitudes with the strength of his arms, but more with his will.
John nodded.
“Let’s give them hell,” he said, and Warren let the door go so that the first few of the villagers tumbled into the church in a heap of arms and legs. John started swinging low, and Warren stamped down on heads and arms and legs with his massive feet in his size fifteen boots. Bones cracked, spines snapped.
But there were more. Always more.
*
36.
Sam skidded on the ice as she knelt and took William’s arm. He looked around, falling silent for the first time since beginning to pray.
“William, we’re going now. Going.”
“Daddy?”
“We’ve got to leave him,” said Sam, feeling like the biggest shit in the world. William smiled, looking over her shoulder at something she could not see. She could hear the screams from the front of the church and knew she didn’t have time to look back. She couldn’t.
“It’s all right,” said William, still smiling at something over Sam’s shoulder. “It worked.”
Too late, thought Sam.
“Got to go now, William. Got to go.”
The little boy nodded, and held out his arms to be picked up, like a toddler might, and Sam scooped him up under his armpits and ran to the back of the church in a kind of loping run, trying to keep her footing on the icy flagstones, hoping, praying, the big man had been right, that he and John wouldn’t sacrifice themselves in vain. She didn’t feel bad about running. She knew if she didn’t, she’d die, too, and William right along with her.
You’re responsible for the boy, Warren had told her, and she felt that deeply. She had to protect the boy. She had to run with him. It was the only way.
The door at the rear of the church was open and she could see a trapdoor, with stone steps leading down into the deeper darkness underground, the kind of darkness that had never felt the sunshine.
She took the first steps down, carefully, carefully, and descended into the dark with the sound of screaming rage and agony at her back. She took a deep breath and walked forward, blind.
But William was not.
*
37.
An old lady with a wicked crick in her neck did for John. She put a fork into his eye. John didn’t know what it was that took his eye, but the woman had a penchant for sticking things in people’s eyes.
John roared in agony, and then someone drove a spade through his foot, nearly severing his toes. In some distant part of himself, he watched his own death, aloof, the pain something that was happening to someone else.
He fell to the floor, screaming, but not really caring because he’d been dead, really, the moment he’d had his last heart attack, and that hurt worse than any of the other indignities. He’d been dead the moment he’d been diagnosed with cancer, dead since he lost his wife. He didn’t care.
He fell to the floor, his head turned to one side, dimly seeing Warren fighting on like some wild animal, savage and beautiful to watch.
Then a man loomed over John and stuck the barrel of an old side-by-side flintlock shotgun into John’s chest and pulled the trigger, blowing a hole right through him.
Detached, still, John realized he could still think.
He thought back to a day before his wife died, when they’d still been young, and she’d been on his arm in London’s Camden Park. She’d had a red dress on, and damn, hadn’t she looked good?
Then everything went dark.
*
It took four men to hold Warren down. One on each arm, one on each leg. Still he struggled and fought. He bore so many wounds that his coat was a ragged mess. His face bled and his steel eye was coated with blood.
The four men dragged the walker out of the church and held him on the frozen footpath. Warren felt his presence. The servant. At last.
Could he take him? Could he turn the tide, end this thing before the Hangman could be called down?
He ceased his struggles, lay still, and turned his face up to finally see his enemy.
He wasn’t much to look at: just a scruffy, bearded old man, there in the thick fog, ice frosting his gray beard.
“Face me, then,” said Warren.
A small ugly teddy bear hopped onto the servant’s shoulder, and Warren understood that he’d lost, completely and utterly. The bearded man wasn’t the harbinger at all. He was just a monkey.
The teddy bear seemed to grin at Warren Johns.
“Why bother?” said the monkey.
Sanctifying the church, the long flight, the fight, all the blood and anguish ... all in vain.
Unless Sam and William could somehow make it out ...
But Warren knew he’d never know either way. Tonight, on Gallows Night, he would be dying.
“Get him, bring him,” said the monkey to his faithful. The monkey leaned over Warren, looking straight down at him, that ugly fucking teddy on his shoulder. “Where’s the other one?”
“Fuck you,” said Warren, and smiled, because he might be for death, but he would still deny the darkness to the end.
“Take his eye,” said the monkey.
Warren fought then, but they fell on him, a mass of people, holding him down, strong hands holding his head.
Someone popped his eye out. Warren gritted his teeth so hard that he felt them crack.
“No, not that one,” said the monkey.
And still Warren wouldn’t scream.
*
38.
Mummy led the way. William couldn’t see anything but his mum, glowing in the dark. She was so bright she should have lit the walls, but her light didn’t go beyond her form.
William wondered where his dad went.
The last he saw of him was in church—waving. Not hello, but good-bye.
William cried softly, so that Sam wouldn’t hear him. In many ways, for a seven-year-old, he was remarkably pragmatic. He knew his mother was with him, and that would have to be enough.
The boy wiped his tears away and concentrated on the warmth of Sam’s hand in his, and the sight of his mother ahead of him.
The passageway was so dark he couldn’t see where to put his feet, couldn’t see the walls, had to trust completely in his mum. But then he always had, hadn’t he?
The passageway was long, so long. Full of the sounds of screams and gunfire from behind, from the church, and Sam’s and William’s footfalls on the damp stone underfoot.
Two sets of footfalls sounded through the passageway as Sam and William followed a dead woman to safety. They walked for a long time, down an old path, perhaps forgotten by everyone in the village but God. Silently they walked. There was nothing to be said. They bore witness to the violence behind them through the echoes of pain.
But they came out in the village, and the sounds of gunfire and screaming were gone. William knew, as he stepped out into the freezing night, that John, the old man, was dead back in the church. William felt his passing, just as he’d felt his father pass while he prayed to God.
Now they were far away from the church—William didn’t know where—there was no sound, just the thick fog, but William understood just as well that they didn’t need to see, because the dead could.
They followed, and his dead mother led them through the deserted village, until they came to a house full of plants.
*
“Sam,” said William, and Sam looked down at the boy. She thought she’d feel sorry for him, or perhaps motherly toward him, but there was something ... some strength in him that made him maybe tougher than she was. They were both frozen from the walk, but the boy almost seemed to glow.
After the day she’d had, she didn’t even think it strange anymore that the boy’s dead mother had led them out of the church. She’d seen so many strange things this day. So many terrible things. So much death.
“Yes?” she said, watching the little boy, only a few years out of being a toddler, still with that boyish roundness to his face, feeling like she wanted to smile, even though she was terrified. The boy was beautiful, innocent. Pure.
“I don’t know what this means, but I know I have to take the scales from your eyes. Do you understand?”
“No,” she said, frowning. “I trust you, though, William.” She felt she should add something more. She wanted to ... keep him happy? She didn’t know for sure, but she knew she liked him, this tough little kid. “We’re in this together. I’m not going to let you down, okay?”
William nodded. “We’ll get out,” he said. “I’ll show you how.”
Then he put his little hands over Sam’s eyes. She felt warmth, a kind of delicious warmth that seeped through to the back of her skull. And suddenly, she could see. Really see. And the first thing that she saw was the house with the plants in all its glory.
“Do you see now?” said William. “Do you see?”
“Oh my God,” said Sam.
She saw it for what it was. Not just a house with plants, but a house overgrown with them. There was so much plant life that it practically covered the windows, and in some cases bigger ones had grown through the curtains. She imagined the carpets and ceilings too, would be hidden under foliage and bloom. She looked up and saw that creepers were coming out of the eaves of the house, and down over the chimney.
What should have been tumbledown, unseemly, dirty, was somehow full of grandeur.
Then she saw him, the Green Man, walking up to a space between the plants, before the window. She could barely make him out through the thick fog, but she could tell that he beckoned them on and in.
“Come on,” said William, and took her hand. He drew her to the front door. They didn’t need to knock. The Green Man opened it for them, and opened his arms wide. Somehow she could tell he was smiling, even though his face was gnarled and knotted like old wood and his hair and body were covered in lush greenery.
Without any doubt whatsoever, without reservations, she and William both stepped into his embrace.
*
The Green Man didn’t speak, couldn’t speak, because he was more plant than man. He led them into the house.
He turned his back before a tree and gave them a piece of fruit. It was no fruit that Sam recognized, but she took a bite without even needing to see if William took a bite of his.
She bit into it and she could tell the Green Man was happy. And his happiness was infectious. The terror and the horror washed away, if only for a minute.
Then he held out his hand and they looked where he looked, with his sparkling green eyes, upward.
Upward, to somewhere that couldn’t exist. Someplace else.
Climb, he seemed to be saying. The opposite to the passage under the church, a place full of sunshine. A way out.
Sam took William’s hand and squeezed it. Then she put her foot against a creeper running up an impossibly large tree and began to climb.
They climbed for what seemed like an eternity, hand over hand through a great tree that led up toward a bright blue, crisp sky. After a time Sam’s arms and legs burned and shook, but still she climbed. She looked down, under her own armpit, and saw William following her up the vine, his knuckles white from the effort of grasping the creeping plant that ran around the tree.
She smiled at him and he smiled back.
She wondered if the fruit she’d eaten had been drugged, or magical, because somehow she got her second wind and managed to clamber on, up and up, ever upward.
The sky began to narrow down as she climbed. At first she didn’t understand, but as they got higher, she realized they were ascending the tree, but climbing toward a hole in the sky.
Impossible, yet true. The sky focused down to a narrow point and suddenly as the realization that they were headed for a hole; she was no longer climbing a vine on a tree, but climbing a rusted old iron ladder.
The smells changed from fresh air to sewage and rot.
“Sam,” said William below her, and she could hear the fear in his voice.
“Something’s wrong,” he said. “We’ve got to go back. We’ve got to go back.” And for the first time she understood that for all his show of strength, William was terrified.
She looked down again, hoping to reassure him, but she couldn’t, because there was nothing below William. An endless black hole, leading down to who knew where.
“We’ve got to go on,” she said. “And William?”
“Yes?” he replied, his voice trembling.
“Don’t look back. Okay?”
There was a pause and then he said, “I already did.”
*
They had no choice but to go forward, along the dangerously rusted old iron ladder, bolted to a wall that ran thick with slime and grime from hundreds of years while this place had been forgotten.
Upward, breath coming in hard puffs now, desperate to get free of this place of rot and ruin.
Upward, toward the light, and hope.
But then out into the village, in the village where there was no fog, no screams ...
Sam pulled herself over the lip of what looked like an ancient drainage hole, reached down for William’s hand and drew the boy up, thinking how light he felt in her hand, her hands that were more used to a keyboard than heavy lifting.
But Sam noted, in that cold, detached way of hers, it was the middle of the day, and there were no cars on the street. No people.
Something was wrong. She felt it. The Green Man, that good man ... he’d been tricked, because he had undeniably felt right.
There was but one way to find out where they were. Search this strange unknown village for the place where it all began. The Noose and Gibbet.
They walked along the street they’d found themselves on, using the church spire, glimpsed through the roofs of quaint, thatched houses. No smoke drifted from their chimneys.
As she walked, William’s hand in hers again, the sense that something was terribly wrong grew. She shivered as they came to the village green.
