Hangman, page 6
Fuck it, she thought. No sense in freaking herself out. But if he knew things, no harm in asking.
“Do you know how to get out of here?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “But Mummy says there’s a box of lightbulbs on a rack over there, and you can put a new one in. Then we can see. She says we need to see.”
*
Finding the bulbs in the darkness wasn’t easy. Sam didn’t doubt that the boy knew there was a light in the storage shed, because he was so sure, but also because it made sense. A dark place like this, no windows...there had to be a bulb. Otherwise how would the shopkeeper see, with it so dark in the winter mornings and evenings, when he was putting his stock out?
He couldn’t, was the answer to that.
Sam rooted around on the shelves looking for a box of bulbs. All the boxes felt the same. Maybe she could ask the boy’s dead mother to narrow it down a bit for her. She almost laughed at that, but she didn’t ask, because she thought if the boy, or his mother, could narrow it down, she might just start crying. Then they’d be in real trouble.
As she searched the boxes, each wrapped in tight cellophane, she started to worry about the fat man and his wife coming back. How long would they be gone?
What were they waiting for? Would she hear them coming, or would they just barge through the door suddenly and rush the two of them?
She thought about trying to push a shelf against the door, to buy them some time, but then there would be no light coming in at all.
“Fuck,” she said, searching what felt like a hundred boxes.
She figured if the boy’s father said things like mucking fuddle in front of the kid, he’d probably heard worse.
But still...
“Sorry, William,” she said.
“It’s okay. I can show you where they are.”
She was frightened to let the boy show her, because on top of all the other things happening, the little boy was freaking her out.
But they needed to work together, didn’t they? There were two of them. She could be an adult and take responsibility, or be mature instead and let William help her.
“Please, William,” she said. “Can you see?”
“No, but Mummy can,” he said, and she wished she hadn’t asked.
He took her hand and guided her. “Mummy says they’re on the top shelf. Hurry, though. Mummy can see, but I don’t like the dark.”
Sam picked up a box and felt the rattle of fragile glass within. The box was light, too. Not filled with chocolate bars, but bulbs. She slit the cellophane with her nail and took one out.
Fucking great, she thought. Bayonet cap in the dark. Her favorite thing to do, putting in awkward bulbs.
“William? Where’s the socket?”
“Here,” he said, pulling her by the hand. She followed him across the space, bumping into the shelves as she walked.
Reaching up and waving her hand around, she hit the fixture and set it swinging. Finally, she managed to grab it. Swore again trying to get the bayonet cap to sit in the fixture. Asked William for help to find the switch, then flicked the light on and wished she hadn’t, because there was a body in the shed with them and William really didn’t need to see it. She screamed, he screamed, then she put his head into her hip and cried, really cried, because what she thought was a nightmare hadn’t even begun.
*
In the sudden glare of the bare overhead bulb everything was illuminated in a white glow. Sam hadn’t realized how long she and William had been in the dark. Her eyes had adjusted to the almost complete absence of light over the last few ... minutes? Hours? She had no concept of time. She didn’t wear a watch, either, and her bag containing her smartphone was back at the hotel.
All these thoughts ran through her head at once, it seemed: the glare, the rows of shelves, the dead man with parts missing.
It looked like somebody had tried to eat him alive.
*
16.
The guy flicked the shotgun. Grant flinched, expecting the old bastard to blow his head off.
“Come on. Round the back gate. Quick as you like, young man. And don’t think about trying nothing funny. I’ll shoot you dead. You believe that?”
Grant looked down at the ragged mess at his feet. He felt his bile rising, but he nodded. Didn’t want the old man to shoot him for puking.
“Good. Come on. Get moving, before he finds you. You don’t want that, sonny Jim.”
Grant didn’t know who “he” was, but he figured the old man meant Warren Johns. He didn’t know if he was suddenly better or worse off.
He walked out of the old lady’s garden and through the back gate to the old guy’s house, who tracked his every step.
“Come on, you great fairy,” said the old man, stepping back to let Grant walk by. Being called a fairy irritated Grant a little. But a man with a shotgun pointed steadily at your head put all other indignities in their place.
The fact that the gun didn’t waver was somehow more frightening than the fact of the shotgun itself. Grant looked right at it, couldn’t help, and noted how the gun smoke still wafted in the misty air.
“In you go. Slowly, now.”
Grant headed in through the old man’s back door, into a small kitchen, a replica of the old lady’s kitchen, but a hell of a lot messier.
His eye watered like a bastard and it hurt like one, too, but he was so terrified he kept his hands raised the whole time, like in an old cowboy movie, even though the man hadn’t told him to reach for the sky or anything like that.
“Just tell me before you kill me, have you seen my wife?”
The old man laughed, a soft kind of phlegm-filled gurgle. “I saw her. I’m not going to kill you. Not unless you make me. You taken sacrament yet?”
Grant frowned. What the hell was the old man talking about?
“I can see you look confused, but that don’t mean nothing. You’re gone, you’re as good a liar as before. You eaten human flesh?”
Fuck, was the old man going to try to make him eat someone?
“What? No!”
“Hmmm ... prove it.”
“What? I can’t ... how am I supposed to prove it?”
The old man laughed again. “Ha. Just fucking with you. I saw your wife. Went into the pub across the street. Saw her before the mist got too bad. You want a cup of tea?”
“What?” said Grant.
“That all you can say? A thank-you might be nice,” sniffed the old man.
“Thank you?”
“Well, I guess begrudging thanks is better than none. Sugar?”
“What?”
The old man shook his head, broke the breech on the shotgun, and went to make tea.
Grant stared after him, wondering how the fuck the whole world had gone mad in the space of a few hours on one cold, misty morning.
But it wasn’t just mist, not anymore, was it?
Because when he looked out of the old man’s front windows, through the frilly nets, he couldn’t see anything. Nothing at all. It was like the world outside had shrunk to just a few feet.
*
“John,” said the old man, coming back with a cup of tea. He wasn’t carrying the shotgun.
He passed the tea to Grant, who took it with shaking hands.
“John?”
“Settle down, sonny Jim. Take a while to get your head around it, probably. I never shot anyone in the head with a shotgun before. Made a hell of a mess, didn’t it?” The old man barked a laugh. “Boom!”
Fucking hell, thought Grant. Tea with a madman. He could probably overcome him ... he was old ... but then maybe he was some kind of trained killer ...
“Were you in the war?”
“I’m not that bloody old! No, shooting club. Clay pigeons. You know?”
Not really, thought Grant, but nodded and drank his tea, half hoping the old man had put some LSD in it so the world would make some kind of sense.
“Mr. John, no offense, but I really want to get my wife and son and get in my car and drive away from here, because everyone, including you, is fucking nuts.”
The old man shook his head, joviality gone suddenly. “I don’t think you can, Mr….?”
“Grant. Grant Bridges.”
“Well, Mr. Bridges, you see, it’s Gallows Night tonight, and them that’s gone over, well, they’re calling on a bad, bad man. Gone, that’s what I call them. The ones who’ve eaten flesh.”
The world seemed to be spinning on a different axis suddenly, and Grant flopped down into the nearest chair he could find. Nothing made sense anymore. Nothing at all.
“John,” said Grant. “I don’t mean to seem rude…no, I do…but what the fuck are you talking about? I need to leave. I won’t tell anyone about the shotgun. I won’t. If you were going to kill me, you would have by now, I get that. But please—”
“Slow on the uptake, aren’t you? You can’t get out. I don’t care who you tell about the shotgun, because by the morning I won’t be here. Neither will you. So you be as rude as you want, young man. I don’t care. I’m past caring. Got cancer, so he doesn’t want me, but I’m not giving up just yet. You want to give up, be my guest.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
John shrugged and stroked some tea dribbles from his thick gray beard.
“Well, I can tell you what I know, but you won’t like it.”
“I don’t like anything right now, least of all your shitty weak tea!”
John laughed again.
“Mr. Bridges, you’re a breath of fresh air, you really are. Put your feet up. We’ve got a bit of time. I’ll tell you a story.”
“I’m going to get my wife and son.”
“Sit down, Mr. Bridges,” said John in a voice cold as stone. “You listen, then if you want, we’ll both go. You go off half-cocked you’ll just end up dead, or gone. One amounts to the other, far as I can tell.”
Grant sat back with his head in his hands, then pulled on his hair, frustrated, angry, frightened, and pissed off that this old man could scare the pants off him, then confuse him so badly that he was actually considering listening to the lunatic’s fucked-up made-up stupid story.
“Got any cigarettes?” he asked.
“Sure. Rolly all right?”
“I’ll fucking eat it if I have to,” said Grant.
*
17.
Warren Johns’s amazing second sight availed him nothing as both his real and steel eye scanned through the thickening mist.
No, he thought. It’s fog now.
He rubbed at his face and his palms came away bloody. His coat was splattered with blood, his hands slick with it. It didn’t matter, though. He’d be drenched in it by the end of the day.
If he could, he’d kill the whole town, but if he could just bring the balance back, even the playing field, maybe he could stop the Hangman from coming through.
Could he help those who still lived?
He didn’t know.
Maybe he could save Grant Bridges. Maybe he’d have to kill him. Being a walker didn’t give him second sight. He knew some things; others remained a mystery to him as anyone else. Like where Bridges had gone.
The fog deadened sound so completely he had no idea where Grant Bridges’s footsteps had ended. For a while he had been able to track them—there was nothing wrong with his ears.
Then nothing.
Grant Bridges had joined the field of play, and the man had no idea what the game was.
And all the while, out there, somewhere, was the other one. The servant.
Warren could feel him like a snake slithering along his spine.
And he could feel something else, too. Something that tickled his senses in a way he hadn’t known for ... ten years?
God, he thought. Ten years.
A decade since he’d met another like him, and now, on this night of nights, there was another in the village.
Another walker.
*
The big man strode through the town, unable to see more than a few feet in front of him.
Warren Johns’s face was grim. With all the blood and other matter caked in his hair, towering over most people, with thick dark skin and a steel eye—Hollywood’s wet dream portrait of a psycho killer.
He prowled the streets, trying to sense, to smell, one or the other. The walker or the other one, the servant.
But the servant was dancing around him. He could feel him, his filth, out there in the fog, but he couldn’t hear him, couldn’t see him.
Was he ready to face him?
When the time came, he’d know.
He had to believe that.
Why was there another walker in the village? What did it mean?
He heard a scream, a man’s high scream, but deadened, like it had been indoors. He scanned the fog, trying to figure where it came from, but couldn’t get a grip on it.
“Fuck,” he said simply. For all his remarkable skills, he couldn’t see through fog, he didn’t know the future, and he couldn’t find one annoying little man.
Then he heard the unmistakeable blast of a shotgun. And yet still he didn’t know where it came from.
He walked towards where he felt the shot had come from, and found ...
A field. He was in the middle of a field. He must have been turned around at some point. He turned to follow his footsteps back.
How the hell didn’t he notice the sound of the road changing to hard dirt?
“Because he’s playing tricks on me,” he whispered. He almost smiled. The servant was strong—very strong.
Warren Johns needed to see what was real, and what was not.
He closed his real eye and saw through cold steel. Steel could not be tricked.
The fog was still there, because the fog wasn’t a fake, but the road was now under his feet. Not dirt. He wasn’t in a field. He stood on the village high road.
He didn’t worry about cars or people coming for him. There was no one. They’d be low, hiding, at least until nightfall—when they were strongest. When they’d call him back.
Until then it was Warren Johns’s time. Time to take the town back, if he could. If not ...
He’d worry about that if it came to it.
For now, he had two simple choices: find the servant or the walker.
He stood for a long time, head bowed, one eye shut. Then he nodded to himself and strode forward into the fog.
*
18.
The street sweeper, Terrence, puffed away on his little dog end, waiting for the big man to move off, seeing which way he’d turn.
Despite the fog, the sweeper saw much. In many ways he was stronger than the walker. Stronger in the sight. He could see through the fog while the walker could not.
Physically, he was no match.
“But it’s not all about brawn, is it?” he said quietly, giggling, well hidden from the prowling walker in the mist. He puffed on his little cigarette and then put it, still lit, behind one filthy ear for later.
He pushed his cart off towards the Noose and Gibbet, the gibbet slowly looming out of the fog, and then the hotel itself.
Terrence left his cart at the bottom of the steps leading up to the lobby, which was filling with freezing fog, and already there was a thin coating of ice on the rug at the entrance, and over the heavy black door.
Even with the fog filling the lobby, the carnage was obvious. The chef and the waitress looked like they’d died in a clinch, killed by a jilted lover, or a cuckolded husband. Their faces were mutilated, limbs and fingers missing. Blood spray and splatter covered the carpets, the walls, the tiled floors. The blood had congealed and frozen so that it looked like black ice.
“Well, you’re a beast, aren’t you, walker?” said Terrence to himself with a phlegm-filled chuckle.
He walked through to the kitchen, drawn by the smell of blood and death. In the kitchen he found the body of the little man’s wife, and the housekeeper.
“A full house,” he said, nodding, appreciating the man’s work. A suffocation and a broken neck. A powerful man. A good adversary, perhaps.
“Fun!” he said, and picked at Marianne’s cold fingers, nibbling the flesh from them and then picking his yellowed teeth clean with a finger bone.
Just a snack, but he took whatever chance he could to take sacrament.
“Got to grow up big and strong,” he told his teddy bear back at the helm of his filthy trash cart, and headed off into the fog.
*
19.
Sam tried to shield William from seeing the mutilated man at the back of the storage shed. William shied away from the scene anyway.
She moved closer, fascinated, repulsed, but storing away the sight in that part of her that observed the world with cold detachment. Most of the man was intact, but his throat had been cut, and his trousers removed. Thankfully his underwear was still on. It would have been worse had he been naked from the waist down.
Parts of the flesh from his thighs had been removed. The wounds were ragged, like the flesh had been torn away, and Sam could only imagine it had been teeth that had caused those wounds, nothing surgical or sharp, even. The wounds were too untidy.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” she said, turning back to William. She needed the boy awake and alert. Couldn’t let him drift into shock or inaction.
“William? Any ideas?”
The little boy nodded. “Mummy says the door has a padlock on it. But there’s a loose panel at the back. Behind the ... dead man. He tried to escape, she said.”
Sam fought down her panic, because if the man had tried to escape and couldn’t… He wasn’t a small man, either. Probably stronger than she was.
But then she was a runner, wasn’t she? Her legs were strong.
She pushed against the panel, leaning over the splayed man, and felt some give. It was wooden, and would splinter, even if she could break through. The noise ... would it bring the fat man and his wife?
Would they be coming anyway?
Of course they would. She couldn’t take the chance that they had any longer. She had no concept of time, save that it was still daytime. She didn’t feel like she’d been under for a long time—she’d had coffee with her breakfast and felt no urge to go to the toilet. She didn’t think it had been longer than maybe an hour. But then she couldn’t know for sure, and she definitely couldn’t know when the fat couple would return to eat them.
