Hangman, page 13
The derelict old house was Terrence’s home, and it was a thin place. Thin enough that if Terrence looked hard enough, he'd be able to see the world behind. And he had. He'd looked good and hard, and taken sacrament long before he'd ever known the Hangman or the bear, long before he became a prophet and a servant, a street sweeper and a gatekeeper.
Terrence had a taste for human flesh.
*
The inside of Terrence’s home was like the inside of his cart, like the inside of his mind. Mildewed walls dripping with moisture, fungus grew in the thin carpet giving off a hideous smell, and bones were strewn in a corner from meals past.
When the little tattered teddy bear had come into Terrence’s life, found on the side of the road, he’d already been wrong, as William would have called it.
Pushing his cart along the road, picking up stray cigarette butts from the curb outside the Noose and Gibbet, the only pub in the village, he’d spotted the horrible thing. For no particular reason he stuffed it at the front of his trash cart. Later he got a bungee cord and held it in place with that.
People never did see the street sweeper, even before he became a creature of two worlds. People never even knew he existed. He pottered, to and fro, around the village, almost invisible to the villagers. Maybe some noticed him. Most didn't. When he'd started preaching, though ... they'd listened then. Enough to sway the balance. Enough to hold the night.
But that little teddy ... that had been the catalyst, for sure. If Terrence was the harbinger of the Hangman, that teddy was his emissary.
At first the teddy bear didn’t do much. Turned its head from time to time. Moved from one side of the cart to the other during the night, so that in the morning Terrence was made to wonder if he was perhaps a little crazy. Small things that someone else wouldn’t have noticed.
Later, not much, but enough so that Terrence recognized the passage of time, the teddy bear began to talk. It knew things, but it didn’t judge. Like the kids that had gone missing that the sweeper had eaten, or the time he’d sucked his daddy’s cock and liked it.
The teddy bear knew all sorts of things about the sweeper. And the thing was, the teddy bear liked those things.
*
43.
Warren Johns drifted in and out of consciousness for a time, floating up, floating down. He was aware of the cold seeping into his bones, and of the fog swirling in through the open lobby door to the Noose and Gibbet. He was aware of the quietening of the screams from the village, and the way the village was almost drugged. The villagers were in a stupor, like the fog was putting them under, some kind of government drug, seeping under their doors and through the cracks in their windows, making them docile.
He became aware, after a time, drifting back up, that there were no more screams.
His naked eye socket, the fresh wound, thudded. Pain ebbed and flowed and sometimes pulled him back under. When he came around again, he strained against his bonds with all his strength, but his strength was waning.
Then, from some place beneath consciousness, he heard footsteps coming up the steps to the front door, across the tiled floor of the lobby, then of someone kneeling down before him.
He’s come back, he thought, but the person didn’t smell right. Smelled old, like a woman who’d gone through the change of life, something pheromone based.
In an instant he swam back up. For a millisecond, he wondered if maybe the person kneeling before him had taken sacrament or had come to save him. But he couldn’t afford to take the chance.
His legs, unbound, whipped up and kicked out with all of his strength. Something in the old woman broke, but nothing serious enough to kill her, because she still managed to jab a knife into him.
He kicked out again, taking her legs from under her, and she fell forward, breaking his nose with her face as she fell. His head flicked forward and he took whatever he could in his teeth. He felt flesh between his incisors. He clamped down and whipped his powerful head back and forth until he was rewarded by her skin coming loose and the hot splash of her blood across his face and down his neck, mingling with his own gushing blood, running down the back of his throat.
At that same instant he heard the clatter of steel on stone, too.
She’d dropped the knife.
He spat up her blood. He was wounded worse than he had been. But now he had a knife. Maybe a knife he couldn’t get to, but he was better off than he’d been before, because that sneaky bastard sense of hope was back and he was all the way awake for the first time in maybe three, maybe four, hours.
Time is getting short, he thought, gagging on the taste of blood.
*
44.
Ice hung from the gutters outside the newsagents across the street from the Noose and Gibbet, where once Sam and William had been held hostage by an insane man and his wife. It seemed so long ago. An age past, like Sam had been just a girl then, and had since grown into a woman. She had no concept of time anymore. It felt like her world had been fucked apart the day before. She bore the wounds, mentally and physically.
What should have been the passage of an hour, maybe two, had turned into a whole new day, or ... something else entirely. Sam couldn’t get her head around the shape of the thing. The way the fog had gone, and the light ...
The sunlight ... The sun hadn’t moved. It hadn’t moved.
“William?”
“Yeah?”
“How long do you think we’ve been here?” she asked, watching for movement in the windows or on the street, but nothing moved apart from them. Even Luke Brightmore’s body, hanging down, was motionless.
The little boy shrugged. “I don’t know. An hour?”
When they’d left the church behind, it had been full dark. Now it was a bright winter’s day, sunshine twinkling from the heavy dusting of frost. Cold, but not freezing. Almost comfortable, in fact, in her borrowed coat.
“An hour?” she said.
William shrugged again. Not the surly shrug of a teenager, but the innocent simple shrug of a young boy who didn’t know the answer to a question. A lazy kind of shrug, but not rude, like it didn’t really matter.
But of course it did, thought Sam, because everything in this village could kill them, and the more they understood, the better chance they might have.
Sam made a point of focusing on that single word. Might. Because she didn’t trust this new, silent world.
There was no sound but for their footsteps. They walked through the deserted, eerie world, looking around, expecting someone to try to kill them, because that was they'd come to know. Death, murder, violence ... it was surprising, how quickly it became the norm. Sam and William could have frozen in the face of such savagery, but they were survivors now. Something had changed in them, something that could never be changed back.
Sam felt like a rabbit, waiting for someone to charge at them, weapon in hand, ready to kill them in a flurry of blows. But life was different now, here in this new world. Where once she’d been content with her words and her pages, and an endless succession of one-night stands, now she had responsibility, for the first time. She didn’t know what to do or where they were, but she knew she had to protect William. No matter the cost.
No matter the cost?
Yes, she realized. She would do whatever she could.
Like finding some place out of the street, away from whatever eyes were watching. She got no sense that people were around at all, but she wasn’t attuned to terror in the way that maybe someone like Warren Johns had been—she was just a writer. Sometimes a runner. She had strong legs and good lungs. If she needed to, she could outrun most danger. But not with William. He was just a boy. He wouldn’t be as fast as her, and she wouldn’t be able to flee danger anywhere near as fast as without him.
It didn’t cross her mind for a minute to leave him. But they needed sanctuary. And she needed to know something first.
She needed some way to make sense of this, some way to cement it, prove it, in her mind. The only way she could do that was to revisit the places they’d been before, and see with her own eyes just how different this place was.
“William,” she said.
“Yes?”
So well-spoken, she thought, for a child. She smiled. It was just a little thing, but she couldn’t help it.
“We have to go in,” she said. “Do you think you can ... you know?” She needed to know if he could handle it—seeing his mother—but the words got stuck in her throat.
No matter. She wasn't surprised to find that the boy understood her, whether she'd voiced the question or not.
“She’s not there. My mum. She’s moved on.”
“I—” She didn’t know what to say to that, so she said nothing. If he couldn't feel her, then she trusted she wasn't there. No body, no blood ... maybe. Just because his mother's body didn't exist in this world didn't mean there weren't others.
Luke Brightmore's body hung as testament to that.
Instead of asking further questions, she took William’s hand and gave him a smile, and he smiled back at her.
With this remarkable boy's strength to guide her, she thought maybe she could face seeing more death.
But she wished she had a weapon. Anything so she didn’t feel so naked when they turned away from the corpse in the noose and headed, once again, into the Noose and Gibbet, the place where it had all begun ...
And, Sam sensed, the place where it would end, too.
*
Sam stood before the black double doors to the Noose and Gibbet, William’s hand in hers. She was squeezing his hand too tightly, but she couldn’t stop.
“Are you ready?”
She was aware of him nodding, and swallowing, but he didn’t say a word. It was good enough, though. She knew he meant to say yes, but couldn’t, because he was afraid. But if he could do it, a little boy like him, then she should be able to, too.
She reached out and pushed against the door. It resisted, a little, and then passed whatever obstructed it and swung open.
There was nothing in the lobby. No people, no furniture. No carpets.
Sam stepped into the pub warily, pulling William along with her. Maybe it would be safer to leave him outside, but she couldn’t know that. She didn’t know anything in this place.
The long staircase to the second floor was made of polished wood. She turned her head to the right, to look in at the small dining area where she’d eaten a good English breakfast—no meat—what seemed a lifetime ago. There was no restaurant in this world. Instead there was a long bar, with plain wooden bar stools, and a dark wood floor, like the staircase. The tiles in the lobby were the only splash of colour—black and red tiles running through ... then she realized that the lobby counter wasn’t there, either. Nothing was like she knew, even back when she’d come to the restaurant with her parents and grandparents as a child.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“I don’t understand, either, Sam,” said William. “But look.”
One more discordant note in a nightmare world that made no sense: a steel orb, resting against the skirting board in the lobby.
Warren Johns’s steel eye.
*
Sam reached down and picked up the prosthetic eye. She weighed it in her hand, much as the sweeper had done before her. It was surprisingly heavy.
“William, I'm sorry. I'm supposed to be looking after you.” There were tears in her eyes, at last. “I don’t know ... I don’t know where to go—” she said. She felt like a failure, like she should have all the answers.
He shook his head.
“We're in this together,” he said. “And we both know where we have to go.”
William was guiding her as much as she was guiding him. And then she realized, he was right. She did know where they had to go.
“We have to go to the church, don’t we?” she said, dreading William’s answer, just as she knew what it would be.
“I know,” he said. “We need to find Warren. He’s knows what this place is. I think this is the place behind the places I’ve seen before,” he said. “I've seen the thin places. But I’ve never been here. Warren’ll know.”
Sam nodded and squeezed William’s hand, both hands bare and cold, but the touch warm.
“What are the thin places, William?”
“I’m not sure,” he said, shrugging his narrow shoulders. “They’re just wrong. Some are good—like plant man’s house. But most, I think ... but then ... plant man’s house came here. This place isn’t so good.” He shrugged again.
Sam shivered. Not good about summed it up. But she still needed to know.
“Do you know ... is Warren alive?”
William nodded, and Sam sighed. If Warren was alive ... he'd have answers. He'd ... what? Protect them?
That kind of thinking'll get you killed, Sam, she told herself. She couldn't rely on Warren. She had to act like it was just the two of them, because until he was there, until she could feel him, solid and real, he might as well not exist.
They left the Noose and Gibbet, taking Warren Johns’s disquieting eye with them. Hand in hand, they headed down the side alley behind the newsagents, the same way they’d fled with Warren the day before, running from captivity.
To the place where they’d found out what the truth of the village was. A place where barbarity held sway, and where the world had turned on its head. It wasn’t just that they’d stepped through into this place. This place had stepped through to their world, too.
*
45.
William was the first to feel it. That terrible sense of wrong. Something's rotten in Denmark, his grandfather would have said. Something's squiffy, he thought, in his father's voice.
The cemetery around the old church was covered in frost, white and twinkling. It should have been beautiful. It was silent, peaceful. No birdsong, no traffic, no people noises.
Then he saw it. The heads. The heads he’d helped carry from the altar to the cemetery.
The bodies. The bodies Warren Johns had hefted so easily.
Not one was anywhere in sight.
“Sam?” he said.
“I don’t know, William—maybe someone came—cleaned it up—”
But why aren’t there any people? thought William, a long way from stupid. Even at seven he knew there would be police all over the little village of Frampton. People would be at the edge of the church, standing around, gawping at the policemen and police ladies. The town would be buzzing with activity.
But that wasn’t going to happen. William knew that. It wasn’t the way this was supposed to end, and really, he knew right from the moment they’d stepped from the house full of plants into this world. They were somehow behind their own world, into something else.
Wrong. So wrong.
*
Sam pushed against the heavy church door, expecting it to be blocked by the bodies of the dead—some she’d killed herself. A grim thought, but one she couldn’t avoid.
But there were no bodies holding back the door. It was just old, and it had settled low on the heavy cast iron hinges. There was no blood. No sign at all that there had ever been a battle there. There was no ice on the floor, like in the church in her world.
She peered around the door, half expecting to have her head taken off. There were times when she wished she couldn’t imagine everything.
The heads were on the altar still, the bodies hanging from hooks.
“Oh ... oh God,” she said. She didn’t want to look, but she couldn’t help it. Each of those heads had glass-eyed stares. Their necks were ragged, almost as though they’d been torn from their hanging bodies.
Then the heads began to speak as one, their teeth chattering as they spoke. The same thing over and over again, like some sick litany.
“Feed us … feed us …”
She didn’t need to imagine what they wanted to eat. She knew that well enough.
“Stay there, William,” she said. “Don’t go in. Okay?”
But she had to. She had to go in. Because she had to know, but mostly because she was a writer, and she couldn’t help but want to see. Like rubberneckers at an accident. She always looked. Stored it away.
Maybe she wasn’t just a writer anymore. She was a survivor, too. But she didn’t kid herself that this was about survival—though that was part of it. This was about knowing, seeing, feeling.
Perhaps strengthening her resolve. As soon as she saw the bodies, she knew she had to find out more. How they were killed, what had been done to them, where the fuck they were.
*
Sam steeled herself and stepped into the church of talking heads and defilement. The heads continued talking, the bodies jounced on their hooks.
She walked down the aisle, looking over everything, cataloguing everything.
The heads, torn from the bodies. The wounds were ragged. No way they were caused by a blade. They’d been ripped. She couldn’t imagine the power needed to rip a head from a human, but she didn’t discount the possibility. Any assumption she made could kill her. Kill them. And it wasn’t just her, was it? There was William, now, too.
The bodies had been skinned, and some were partially eaten. She remembered the body in the stock shed, with chunks missing from his bare legs. The people of this town had turned into cannibals or something like it. She remembered Warren and John, too. Telling her that the villagers had taken sacrament: some dark rite that had changed them, turned them over to the Hangman. She didn’t know who the Hangman was, but she would be just as happy to never find out.
She walked closer to the heads, feeling sick, but unable to look away, as they chattered away. “Feed us… feed us,” they said, and then there was a thump behind her.
Just William, she thought. Maybe coming in, seeing the bodies, shutting the door.
