Stuart MacBride - A Dark So Deadly

‘HELLO, CAN YOU HEAR ME?’

‘Your hairy friend doesn’t shut up, does he?’ Mother shrugged her shoulders. ‘Anyway: even if Jeffries was still alive, he’d be in his seventies by now. Doesn’t sound very abducty, does it?’

‘So Monaghan knew Jeffries was dead, knew his house was abandoned, and registered the van to this address, in a dead man’s name, because he knew no one would ever check.’

‘I’M NOT KIDDING ABOUT HERE!’

McAdams spat into the long grass. ‘The Dog Man is stuck. Inside the brambles’ clutches. Their thorns bind him tight.’

Mother nodded. ‘Exactly. So we need to ask: how did Monaghan know? Does he have some connection with the ecclesiastical trust? How many other empty properties does he know about? Because one of those is where he left Ashlee and Abby Gossard before jumping in Kings River.’

‘ARE YOU BUGGERS DEAF OR WHAT? SOMEONE NEEDS TO GET IN HERE, NOW!’

She scowled into the brambles. ‘Callum, I hate to ask, but can you go see what he’s yelling about?’

Oh, lovely.

Callum stayed where he was. ‘Maybe we should get this ecclesiastical trust to go through their financial records and find out what other empty properties they’ve forgotten about?’

‘SOON AS YOU LIKE!’

Callum growled out a breath. Buttoned up his suit jacket. ‘ALL RIGHT, ALL RIGHT! God’s sake...’ The long grass was sodden with weeks of rain, making his trousers stick to his legs, soaking through his shoes and into his socks. Urgh...

Dog Man had flattened a path into the brambles and he followed it. Dropped to his hands and knees and picked his way into the spiky mass of horrible bloody stabby jabby— ‘OW!’

This stuff was worse than barbed wire. At least a million times sharper. And the bloody thorns came off and stuck in his good hand and they grabbed at his suit jacket and— ‘OW! AAAAARGH! I HATE BRAMBLES!’

He battered at them with his filthy fibreglass cast, but they just bounced right back at him. Only now they were angry. ‘AAAAAARGH!’

Another ten feet of horrible jaggy stabbing needle-jabbing horror and he emerged into a little hollow, ringed with the old yellow-grey corpses of long-dead brambles. Officer Hairy the Dog Man was sitting off to one side, but Penguin the useless cadaver dog was right in the middle, surrounded by what looked like burrows. Not tiny ones like you’d get with rabbits, but bigger. Maybe a fox, or a badger?

Penguin was lying down, tail thumping against the earth — dry in here under the canopy of horrible spiky tendrils.

Callum sat back on his thighs, still hunched over to avoid their spiny crown. ‘You better have a damn good reason for dragging me in here, ruining my suit, and look at my bloody hands!’ Literally — covered with scratches and puncture marks seeping red, peppered with dozens of tiny brown thorns. Even the fingertips of his bad hand were lacerated where they protruded from the cast.

Dog Man pointed at a white rock poking out of the ground near one of Penguin’s front paws.

Only it wasn’t really white at all, it was a sort of off-ivory colour, the size of a half-deflated football. The rock had holes in it, exposed where it poked out of the dirt: one roundish, one an arrow shape. Wait a minute, were those teeth ?

It was. It was a skull, lying on its side, one eye socket and half the nasal cavities exposed to the air, the rest buried beneath the ground. And it was definitely human.

Maybe there was a good reason no one had heard from Paul Jeffries for over twenty years.

A Whole Lifetime Ago

Paul smiles and nods. Wise and trustworthy as the fat bitch in the cardigan drones on about ‘Jesus’ and ‘love’ and ‘forgiveness’ and all the rest of the crap people like this always drone on about.

The vestry is hot and sticky, even with the windows open.

That’s the problem with Catholics, though, isn’t it? The lingering heat of Hell is never far from their guilty little consciences.

She’s still talking — that glistening mouth with its red liver lips. All pious. Like she’s never sucked a dick in her life.

Blah, blah, blah.

On and on and on.

A thick floral stench rolls off her, mingling with the sweaty taint of corpulence.

You know what would be nice?

No, what?

Strangle her. Right here, right now. Wrap your hands around that greasy throat and squeeze till her eyes bulge and all the blood vessels burst and flood with red and keep squeezing and squeezing ...

‘... don’t you think, Father?’

Paul blinks. It’s not the fat bitch, it’s the priest in his long black robes. Dressed like a jackdaw. Desperate to be strung up on the back fence to act as a warning to others.

He clears his throat. ‘I do indeed.’ He gives them the smile and the nod he’s practised so many times in front of the mirror. The one he uses to pretend he’s human like the rest of them.

But the stench in here is getting too much to bear.

So he makes a big show of looking at his watch. Rolls his eyes and tuts. ‘Sorry, I’m afraid I’m going to have to dash. But perhaps we could pick up where we left off next week?’

The man in the dress nods. ‘Oh, we’d like that, wouldn’t we, Margery?’

‘Oh yes. Yes indeed.’ She puts one of her flabby hands on his arm, warm and sticky even through his jacket and black shirt, globbing into his skin. ‘Do come again. I’m so glad we could help.’ Then she hands him the cheque with his name on it.

He slips it into his jacket. ‘And please, pass on my thanks — and the thanks of all those poor neglected children — to your kind and generous congregation.’

The fat bitch stops at the threshold, but Father Crossdresser follows him out into the church.

There’s a wee boy singing somewhere: ‘Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus, Dominus Deus Sabaoth...’ the sound echoes off the walls like an air-raid siren for the damned.

‘Well, Father Jeffries, I must say, I’m deeply impressed by the work you do with these poor deprived youngsters. It’s an inspiration, it truly is.’

‘Pleni sunt caeli et terra gloria tua. Hosanna in excelsis...’

Paul gives him a little modest shrug. ‘We all must do what we can.’

‘Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini. Hosanna in excelsis—’

‘NO! NO, DAMN IT, OLIVER!’ The exasperated voice of some poor sod trying to make a kid do what it’s told. ‘How many times? It’s pronounced, “ex-chel-cees”. We’re going to stay here and do it again and again until — you — get — it — right!’

Paul turns, and there’s his own little burden, sucking his thumb like a baby. Five years old and he’s still sucking his thumb. How is he ever going to be a man, acting like that? So Paul raised his voice over the wailing chorister. ‘Justin, thumb out of the mouth, eh, champ?’ He forces a smile. ‘You’re a big boy now.’