Ник Харкуэй - Angelmaker

“So I finished him off, and then I gets my saw out and turns to the nearest moaning ghost and I says ‘All right, my poor dead matey, I’ve to cut you open now, and I mean to do it, so you may as well hop up on this table and spare your grieving relatives an ugly mess!’ Hah! He near peed himself then, and of course the Waiting Men come in and gave me the nod. Said I’d shown the Quiet, you see, which of course I had, and I never knew.

“Well, that was all good fun and actually I was a fair bit proud, after, of how I carried it off, and Jack Ascot said—he was nearly a hundred by then—he said when they had Vince Alleyn’s test back in the day, they done a thing much the same called the Bloody Bride, and a woman from the local butcher’s shop wore a set of cow’s intestines around her neck and a slashed-open wedding dress. Vince damn near fainted, and then after, blow me if he didn’t walk right over and kiss her on the mouth. He passed right away, and married the girl, to boot. Anyway, Jack said he hadn’t seen much better since.

“So come the day, we had young Vaughn’s test, and Richard said we’d best find something particularly dark, because his son had a steady nerve.

“Now, in the book—there’s an actual book, can you believe, and I imagine it’s worth a ton of money now, there’s likely only the one—there’s about a dozen really awful things they used to do. About the worst is to get the corpse of a condemned blasphemer and sew it up with cats inside, then tell the lad doing the test it’s your dear old mum or someone close. As ghoulish as it comes. Modern times, of course, there’s no way you’d get away with something like that, even if you were of a mind. But they found a way for Vaughn Parry, and this is what it was: they got a dead ape, and they shaved it all over and drew on a sailor’s tattoo, and then they put it in a suit and smashed the head up some so you couldn’t immediately say it wasn’t a man, just a really ugly one. And then—well, they couldn’t use a cat, that wouldn’t be right—so they caught a fox from the rubbish tip, knocked him out with a bit of doped luncheon meat, and stitched the poor dead ape up around him. And then they put Vaughn Parry up to bat.

“So they did it in the Alleyn place, because there’s a two-way mirror so old Vince could keep an eye on his lads while they were working and be sure the thing was done respectful. And we all crowded in to see what would happen. There’s Vaughn, working away, and the belly of the ape wriggles and heaves, and Vaughn glances over at it, but it’s stopped, so he goes back to work. And then a moment later it happens again, and then there’s this appalling noise, I swear you never heard such a thing, a scream fit to make you think someone’s being crucified, right there beside you, and the nails going in through bone and gristle. I swear, Joseph, I never heard such a noise. And we all thought it must be Vaughn, seeing what was happening, but it wasn’t. It was the fox, screaming for his life. Vaughn… he reaches over like he’s passing the gravy on a Sunday, and cuts the ape open, then goes inside for the fox and lifts it out, and without barely looking he snaps its neck and goes on with the job. And my dad, who never speaks in these things, never says a word, because he’s a shy old bugger, he says ‘Ah, well,’ like that’s decided something. And everyone leaves. They don’t bother to go and get Vaughn and tell him the gag. They up and leave. And the next day, when he comes looking, they won’t none of them talk to him, or even look him in the eye, and finally he goes to Roy Godric and asks what’s the matter.

“‘Sorry, Vaughn,’ Roy says quietly, ‘but you’re out. You failed your acquaintanceship . You’re done.’

“Now, I’ve never heard of no one failing before. Not passing, yes, but you just try again. But failing , so the Brotherhood won’t ever take you, I didn’t even know that was possible.

“‘What? What do you mean?’ Vaughn wants to know.

“‘Just what I say, Vaughn, boy,’ Roy says. ‘You won’t be one of us. Not ever.’

“‘But I passed! Look what you did, and I passed. I showed Quiet . I know I did!’

“‘No, boy. You ain’t got the Quiet. And you ain’t now, nor never will be, a Waiting Man. Now, off you go.’ And he points at the door, and Vaughn Parry just goes, because he doesn’t know what else to do.

“‘I’m sorry, Richard,’ Roy Godric says to Vaughn’s dad, and Richard, instead of getting angry, he hangs his head and he says he’s sorry too.

“‘But you knew, Richard, didn’t you?’

“‘Aye,’ says Richard Parry. And then he goes off after his boy.

“Well, God, I sat there and I drank my drink and wondered if I came close to having that happen to me. And finally, after I’ve nursed that same pint for an hour or so, and more stared at it than drunk it, my dad comes and sits himself down opposite me.

“‘All right, Billy?’ he says.

“‘All right,’ I tells him, but I’m not.

“‘Poor bastard,’ he says.

“‘I suppose he’ll find another job, then, and Richard will train up one of the other lads or something.’ And my dad looks at me as if I’ve gone funny in the head, and I realise he’s not talking about the son at all. He’s talking about the father.

“‘Dad,’ I say, because I need to know, Joseph, my world’s upside down and I’m confused because there’s rules I don’t know about and penalties I hadn’t imagined for breaking them, ‘what did Vaughn do wrong?’

“‘It’s the oath,’ he says, ‘the Waiting Man’s Promise. Remember?’ Well, of course I do, but there’s nothing in it says you kick a lad out on his arse for doing well on his test. ‘Say it to me,’ Dad says, ‘and think it through.’ So this, Joseph, is the oath we all take, and I’ll thank you not to noise it about.

“‘To wait up with the dead; to take what they have no use for and set it aside, that the corpse looks lively on the day; to see the dead from bed to dirt, and no indignity more than what fate inflicts; to serve the wailing widow and the lonely man with grace, and carry the Waiting Man’s Quiet like a comforter, that is lent at need; to hear the Screaming, and let it have no voice; to preserve the silence of the dead, and keep their secrets; to take fair payment and seek no favours; and to move on, without regret.’

“‘Aye,’ Dad says. ‘And there’s the rub. Young Vaughn, he ain’t got the Quiet, he’s got the other thing. He thinks he’s got the Quiet, Billy, and that’s as well. Because the truth is, he’s got the Screaming, and Richard knew it. He opened that poor monkey like it weren’t even a clutch purse, and he snapped that fox without a thought, and the whole thing as if he was making porridge.

“‘When you took your test, Billy,’ he says, ‘you smeared the pink on that lad’s cheeks, and gave him too much dark around the eyes. In the morning I had to redo him, he looked like a Chelsea trollop. But one thing you done perfect, and I was never so proud. In your heart, you cared about the dead man, more than you wanted to get out of that room or show you knew it was your test or anything else. You cared about a dead, gone bugger you never knew, and you laid him out, because you’re a Waiting Man. But Vaughn, he didn’t flinch because he doesn’t care one bit. And he doesn’t care about the living neither, not even a little. Vaughn Parry looks at us, and he sees corpses walking. He didn’t flinch in there because he’s always seeing dead men shudder. It’s how he lives. He was born dead himself, and that’s what the Screaming is. It’s a body walking without a heart to feel for anyone else. And if ever he realises that, Billy, you best not trust him, for the Waiting Man’s oath ain’t there for a laugh or our convenience. Them as have the Screaming, Billy, they’re empty inside, and the things they can do when they start to understand what they are, they’re black and cold and not for good fellows to dwell on. Time was the Brotherhood didn’t just test the twices , but every lad in a village, and they’d have marked a lad failed the test, and maybe a month later there’d be a coffin weighed double going in the ground and some young fellow with rot in him instead of life would be never more seen. That’s how it was.