Hangman, page 12
“William,” she said. “What’s going on?”
“Sam, I want to go back. This ... this is worse,” he said. And pointed. And Sam saw.
From the Noose and Gibbet’s macabre signpost hung a body, and she knew they’d been tricked, just as the Green Man had.
“We’re in his world,” said William.
Sam shivered because they weren’t in some kind of paradise, a haven from the madness of the village of Frampton—they were in the Hangman’s domain.
*
39.
The monkey smiled, the smile obscene on his tatty face. He took his roll up from behind his ear and puffed at it until it glowed.
“Where’ve they gone, walker? Where’s the other one? I can still feel him, but I can’t touch him.”
“I don’t know,” said Warren. “I don’t know.”
“I’ll have to find the little bastard myself, then,” said the servant of the Hangman, feeling surprisingly cheerful, despite the unexpected turn of events.
Two walkers in his village.
Careful, he counseled himself. He had to remember that it wasn’t his village.
He was just a man who wheeled his trash cart around Frampton, spreading poison, a tattered teddy riding the front.
That old man weighed Warren Johns’s two eyes in the palms of his hand, still, thoughtful, like a grubby statue of the Lady Justice.
One eye of steel, one of malleable flesh. Terrence squeezed one eye tenderly with a grin on his face that Warren couldn’t see. Like he was enjoying the feel of flesh in his hands.
Terrence was not the dark man, the Hangman. He had to remember he was only a servant, despite the power he wielded in this world.
He smiled that grim smile again, unseen by Warren Johns, as he looked at the blind man before him. The one man who might have stopped the slaughter that was yet to come was tied to old banisters of good sturdy wood in the lobby of the Noose and Gibbet.
The big old bastard hadn’t amounted to much, after all.
Terrence’s grin widened.
He lowered himself with a grunt to his knees so he was face-to-face with the walker.
He popped the big man’s steel eye into his socket.
Warren had been missing that eye a long time. The wound was old and dry. His other socket bled heavily where his one good eye had been removed by a knife.
“See me? Good,” said Terrence, that smile plastered to his dirty face.
Warren Johns said nothing, because his teeth were clamped down tight.
Must hurt like a bastard, thought Terrence, weighing the other orb in his palm.
“I take it you can. Anger, walker, anger’s good.”
“Fuck off, monkey,” said the walker.
Terrence laughed. It was a horrible hacking thing of a longtime smoker.
He tucked the still-lit dog end behind his ear, and it was nearly lost in the matted grey hair that sprouted from his head. He stank of cigarette smoke, and his hair was yellowed on one side, where he always put his cigarette. The cigarette was a dirty old thing, too. Could have been that smoke had never been replaced, could have been the grime from the old street sweeper’s fingers rubbed off on it.
“Monkey? Fucking monkey? You’re a dude, Mr. Johns. A badass, right? What are you, six-seven, six-eight? Got some muscles on you.”
That smile never left the servant’s mouth, but his eyes burned with hatred, and madness, too.
“You’re strength won’t help you now, walker. You’re dead but you don’t know it.”
Then the servant popped the fleshy ball of Warren Johns’s eye into his mouth and crushed it, his own eyes closing as he savoured the taste.
“Delicious,” he said, chewing, then swallowing. “See that? I could cut off your bollocks and eat them, too, and you can’t do a fucking thing about it. Monkey? No, walker. Fuck you.”
Warren strained, trying to break free, to kill the servant, but he could not.
“Me, wiping the scum of your tasty old eye from my beard. Last thing you’ll ever see,” said Terrence, and with a spoon took out Warren’s steel eye, leaving him completely blind.
He tossed it across the floor, like a child’s marble. It rolled to a stop against the lobby counter.
“Come dawn, the Hangman’s coming through, walker, and you’ll hang. You’ll hang.”
*
Terrence walked from the lobby where Warren Johns was bound and out into the fog and the night. He stretched with both arms over his head and twisted. With a great crack his back settled. He sighed in contentment.
The noose and gibbet outside the door of the coach house waited for the fun to begin. The air was full of fog, black without streetlights. Those gone over to the Hangman stood outside the door of the pub, waiting for instructions. The assembled masses, over half of the population of the small village of Frampton. Enough to hold sway on this night, where it all began.
The masses, the faithful of Terrence’s bastard religion, waited eagerly. Their faces were turned to him as one. The old, the young, the frail and the hale. His congregation.
“Time to feast!” he shouted.
They shouted and hefted their makeshift weapons: shotguns, rolling pins, knifes of all shapes and sizes, garden shears and forks, heavy iron frying pans, a cricket bat ...
They headed off into the fog until they were lost to each other, but not to the servant.
Terrence watched them leave, spreading through the village, hunting out those who had not taken the sacrament of flesh and accepted the Hangman as their savior. Soon, the screaming would start. Soon the blood would flow.
Gallows Night had begun.
“Now,” said Terrence to himself. “Where’s that fucking kid gone?”
*
40.
Frost whitened the world that Sam and William walked through. Whitened the corpse hanging from the noose on the gibbet.
Sam Green looked out on a world that had once been lost in fog and was now bright and clear under a perfect winter’s sun. Once, she had been a writer. She still thought like a writer, thought in words and phrases, sentences and paragraphs, sometimes arranging her thoughts subconsciously as they would appear on the page. That seemed like it was a lifetime ago, even though it was only yesterday.
She held William's hand and they both looked at the boy’s corpse hanging from the noose.
“Sam?”
She knew what the question was, and she’d never be able to answer it.
“I don’t know what happened,” she said. “I don’t know.”
She wished she did. She wanted to give him some comfort, but how could she? Everything was wrong. Everything.
Fuck, she thought. She wanted to give herself some comfort, standing there looking at the corpse of the boy named Luke Brightmore, whom she’d taken to her bed not twenty-four hours before.
She wanted to cut him down, to give him some peace.
“He was hanging from the tree—”
“Someone must have moved him—”
“I don’t think so ... I think ... I think this is a different place. In this place, he was hanged there.”
“William, stop,” she said. She couldn’t bear to hear anymore, because she knew the boy was right. They were in another world. Of course they were, and she could see it now, because the scales had been taken from her eyes, hadn’t they?
She wished she were still ignorant. Wished she’d never come to this godforsaken place.
But she had to remember it wasn’t about her. That worried her, in a way she couldn’t define. Like she was a walk-on in a film, an actor playing a bit part. Because the boy, William Bridges, he was the star of the show, wasn’t he?
And her sorrow at Luke Brightmore’s death, and her sorrow at all the deaths, must pale in comparison to the shock William faced every minute in this other world. The boy’s mother and father, both dead.
But, she thought with a shudder of revulsion, seeing Luke Brightmore’s body hanged before her, she’d slept with him just twenty-four hours ago ...
Now he was dead.
The old man, John, with his shotgun, whom she’d stood beside in an insane fight in a church, like some character out of a novel himself, gone. She wished he were by her side now.
Warren Johns, her mysterious savior? She didn’t know. When she’d left the old man and Warren, the big man had still been alive. He looked like the kind of guy who’d survive nuclear war. A behemoth, towering like some obsidian monolith.
Then, after the fight—she’d killed people ... killed, for God’s sake—their long flight through the pitch-black tunnel, led on by William’s dead mother.
The whole day, the whole night ... it all seemed like a dream. Sam could almost convince herself it was a dream, but for the blood on a coat she’d taken from a dead man and the wounds in her arms from knives. She thought maybe she had shotgun pellets in her shoulder, too, but she didn’t want to look. She’d seen so much death during the day she felt lost, adrift. Her detachment was perhaps the only thing keeping her from going insane.
And still the boy, hanged, dead. Irrevocably gone.
William? Why wasn’t the boy crying, howling out his grief?
Because his mother was still with him. Or she had been. She’d guided them. A dead woman, leading the blind through a terrible day and worse night.
Sam took William’s hand in hers, more for her comfort than his.
“William, do you ... do you still see your mummy?”
William shook his head. “She can’t come here. This place ... this isn’t real. But it is. This is what Frampton looks like ... behind things.”
“Behind things?”
William shrugged. “Don’t know how to explain it. But when we went through plant man’s house, we went through—” William shrugged again. “Behind. Out the other side? Don’t know.”
“I suppose we should try to find someone,” she said, though she wasn’t entirely sure she meant it. It seemed most people in the village were nuts…in this other world?
She didn’t want to think anymore, but she knew it fell to her. She was responsible. She had to look after William.
“Okay, Sam,” said the boy. She marveled at his resilience. “Sam?”
“William?”
“Is he ... is this his world?”
“Who?”
“The Hangman?”
Sam bit her lip. “I hope not,” she said, and squeezed William’s hand. “Let’s go. Let’s go find someone and get the fuck out of Dodge.”
William grinned.
“I know. Don’t swear, right?”
“Nope. Funny. Dodge.”
Sam smiled at the boy, because how could she not? He was something special all right.
“Dodge,” she said again. “Like cowboy films?”
“Pow pow,” said William, with that infectious grin.
Sam could almost believe she was out for a day with some cute kid, but she couldn’t fool herself. She could feel the wrongness of this place, this silent white world they’d found themselves in.
Were they any better off than they’d been before?
*
William smiled at Sam, joked with Sam ... trying to make her feel better, even though his heart ached in a way he’d never known. He might have only been young, but he was acutely aware of the things he felt and thought. He’d lost his mother and father, and he knew he should be terribly sad. He knew he should be a wreck, crying, huddled in a ball on his grandmother’s lap. But he wasn’t, and he wasn’t because he’d seen his mother.
He knew, without a doubt, there was life after death. His mother lived on, in his world. But she couldn’t come here, because the dead didn’t live behind, because this wasn’t their world: this was the Hangman’s world.
He was around somewhere, somewhere ...
Waiting.
William didn’t know if waiting could be a place, and not just something you could do. He didn’t know the word for what the Hangman was, but in the same way that William could see the dark places of the world, he could feel the Hangman lurking, waiting. He couldn’t say it better than that.
And there were other things, too.
William was seven but he wasn’t a baby, and he was far from stupid. He saw the newsagents, the butcher shop, the spire of the church in the distance, and he knew this was the world reserved for those that had taken sacrament.
There were many more of those dark places on this side. It wasn’t a mirror image. On the way into Frampton, so long ago, with his mother, he’d seen those dark, thin spots in the village. He’d seen them before, in other places at other times, on trips with his parents, or with the school, every week on the way to swimming lessons.
He saw it from the school bus on the way to the pool, every week. It was just a telephone box. One of the new kinds, with glass that people always smashed. But it wasn’t broken. It was pristine. Like something told people: stay away. Every time William saw that telephone box he wondered if anyone ever used it, and if they had, what had happened to them?
Before his world had ended, he’d wondered, too, about going back to that spot, to see if he could bear to be within that dark box with its shifting colors and new glass.
No more, though.
So he smiled for Sam, and held her hand, because he liked her, and she’d saved his life. He laughed a little, from time to time, too, and tried not to be too sad, or too afraid.
His mum and dad weren’t coming back, and they lived on. No way back for them. No way back for Sam and him ... because those dark places, well, they only ever went one way.
*
41.
Blood trickled down Warren Johns’s face. His head hung limp against his chest.
The rope that bound him to the banister was thick and heavy. The banister was good solid wood.
With no one to watch him, he began to tug against the rope, gently at first, then a little harder.
Just testing.
Blind, but not deaf. He heard a scream in the distance and knew plenty of things from that scream, and from the sound around him.
There was no one in the Noose and Gibbet but him, because only the gone would have been in here with him, and they would have shifted, even if it had just been a slight turning up of their lip. Warren would have heard it.
Something about the way the scream was diffused told him that the fog still reigned. And the scream itself ... Gallows Night had well and truly begun. Those townsfolk who hadn’t gone over to the Hangman were now game, hunted for their flesh, for their heads and bodies and whatever the gone could take, those who’d sold themselves cheap or dear to the Hangman.
Warren had sold himself dear. He’d taken plenty of them with him, and yet still he would hang in the morning, because with the veins in his neck bulging, his immense arms, his chest, his back, everything working as hard as it could, there was maybe an inch of give in his bonds.
He worked harder, straining, stretching.
The boy, he thought. The boy.
The thought spurred him onto greater effort. He couldn’t let the Hangman get the boy. The boy was something special: a walker like him, but something more, too. And he was in far greater danger than Warren.
The banisters creaked and groaned and the rope bit tight, but didn’t give.
But that creaking, that gave Warren hope. Hope only made him feel worse, though, because hope was a sneaky bastard. It had a habit of flitting loose at the last moment.
He renewed his efforts, his thick heavy muscles bunching and flexing and his coat ripping.
His head fell forward again, exhausted. But, the boy, he intoned over and over again in his head, and tried once more.
*
42.
Terrence wheeled his old street sweeper’s cart along the road and the fog swirled around him.
“Monkey?” said the tattered teddy bear at the front of the cart.
“Don’t you fucking start,” said the street sweeper.
“The boy—”
“I know, okay? I’m going as fast as I can.”
The teddy bear climbed on top of the cart and grinned at the monkey. “Go faster,” it said.
The monkey went faster.
*
The Hunter family sat at their round table with pull-out flaps for their evening meal, same as they did every night except Saturdays, when they all watched the talent shows on the television.
Mr. Hunter’s head rested in his dinner. It was sausage and mash, with fried onions, peas, carrots and onion gravy, though the sausages were the frozen kind and not the good ones. A Friday night dinner, spoiled, somewhat, with four heads resting in the congealing gravy.
Two doors down, Margaret Simpson, like the character from the television show, had managed to make it out of her front door before the one-time reverend from the desecrated church crushed her head in with a heavy spade.
Yvette Manson lay on her bathroom floor, her innards in the toilet bowl.
An hour into Gallows Night and the cursed, the damned, the gone, feasted.
*
Terrence puffed away happily on his never-ending cigarette as he pushed the trash cart up to the door of an abandoned house in unkempt grounds next to the village school.
He left the cart at the front step. The teddy bear hopped down and skipped up the moss and leaf-strewn steps through a front door that hung askew on its hinges.
The street sweeper sucked his teeth, watching the teddy bear’s jaunty run, then took a deep drag on his filthy dog end and looked around him. Knew he wouldn’t see this place again.
“Fuck it,” he said. He wouldn’t miss it much.
The roof of the house had all but fallen in. The windows were cracked, some broken. Kids throwing stones. Those kids didn’t know what they were about. Other kids came in, on a dare, once. Maybe they’d been the same kids who broke the windows. Maybe they were different ones.
It didn’t matter to Terrence. In his experience all kids tasted pretty much the same. The night the kids had come in, Terrence had fed well. That was back before he became the servant, before the teddy bear came along and told him about the Hangman.
