Ben Cheetham - Blood Guilt

Now another change came over Jones. When he next left the house, a new haggardness had come into his face. His piggish eyes shone with a repulsive light — a light of hunger that, day by day, grew until it was feverishly bright. He often took to muttering to himself, occasionally nodding or shaking his head in response to some internal dialogue. One day the head shaking grew more agitated, until it seemed there was a full scale row going on between Jones and his mind’s voice. He looked more crazed than dangerous. Someone to be pitied rather than feared. But Harlan felt no pity. He simply hoped something was coming to a head within Jones, so that he could get far away from here and start living.

That night Jones’s bedroom light came on at the usual time, but after half an hour or so it went off. Harlan frowned up at the window, wondering what was going on. Had Jones worked up the courage to sleep in the dark? He doubted it. More likely the light-bulb needed changing. Several minutes passed. The window remained dark. Another thought came: what if Jones had switched the light off because he was leaving the house. He waited a couple more minutes. Still no light. No sign of Jones either. Maybe he’s sneaking out the backdoor. The thought prompted Harlan to jump out of his car and sprint to the end of the street. He peered cautiously into the alley, which was patchily illuminated by house lights. Jones’s house was unlit at the rear too. Harlan squinted, straining to penetrate the darkness. He thought he could see something by Jones’s gate. Something moving. An arm. On the edge of his hearing, he caught the sound of a lock clicking. A figure moved away from the gate, back turned to Harlan, hurrying. It was Jones! Harlan couldn’t see his face, but he recognised his thin, scruffy hair and hunch-shouldered gait.

Hugging the shadows, Harlan followed Jones. After ten or fifteen minutes, they came to Lewis Gunn’s church, and the thought flashed through Harlan’s mind, is the preacher in on this? But Jones headed past the church. He crossed the road and descended some steps at the side of a canal bridge. His pace slowed as he made his way along a towpath illuminated by the moon and the ambient glow of the city, which seeped through the hollowed-out hulks of derelict steel-mills — mills where, Harlan recalled, Jones had once worked. A tall wall overgrown with vines and other creeping plants ran alongside the path. As the hum of the unsleeping city receded, Harlan became hyper-aware of every sound he made — the faint crunch of his shoes on the hard-packed pebbles, the rustle of his clothes, the murmur of his breath, the thud of his heart. He allowed the distance between himself and Jones to grow, until Jones was little more than a faint outline against the darkness. Then suddenly, as if the ground had opened up and swallowed him, Jones disappeared.

Heart lurching, Harlan rushed forward as quietly as he could. He almost missed the door. It was set into the wall at the bottom of several worn stone steps. A straggly beard of foliage overhung it. He could just about make out the words ‘DANGER! KEEP OUT!’ daubed in white paint. Brushing aside the foliage, he looked for a handle. There was only a keyhole. Feeling around the edge of the door, he found a gap he could slide his fingers into. The paint crackled and the hinges squeaked as he pulled the door open a couple of feet. The noise reverberated almost painfully in his ears. He slid through the gap and found himself in a cavernous, dank building, its floor strewn with the debris of its partially collapsed in roof. The mill had long since been stripped of its blast furnaces and other machinery, but the smell of coal and smelted iron still hung faintly in the air. His attention was attracted by the rattle of metal against metal overhead. Craning his neck, he made out the dim shape of a walkway suspended thirty or so feet above the factory floor. There was no sign of Jones, but it had to be him up there. Who the hell else would it be?

Harlan scanned the moonlight-mottled walls for a way to reach the walkway. There was no stairway. To his right a metal ladder was bolted to the wall. He picked his way through the rubble to it and grasped a rusty rung. ‘BEWARE! DANGER OF DEATH!’ was painted in foot tall letters on the wall. Harlan reflected that whatever was up there Jones had to be desperate to see it if he was prepared to risk hauling himself up this death-trap. The ladder rattled against its bolts as he climbed. He emerged through the walkway, which was about five feet wide and attached to the roof beams by metal rods. The walkway traversed the right-hand wall of the foundry. As Harlan edged out onto the metal grating, it swayed a little, but held. At its far end was a door. Cautiously opening it, he saw it led to another walkway that bridged a narrow gap between the mill and a door to the uppermost floor of a neighbouring building. A sickly, yellowish light glimmered through the cobwebby, cracked panes of windows to either side of the door.

Hunching low, Harlan crossed the walkway and peeped through a window into an attic room maybe twenty feet wide by thirty feet long. Jones was stood with his back to him at its far end. In one hand he held what appeared to be some kind of oil lamp. With his other hand he removed bricks from the wall. He reached inside the hole and withdrew a black plastic sack. He put down the sack and took a cardboard tube from it. Very carefully, he slid a bunch of rolled up canvases out of the tube.

I’ve got you, thought Harlan. I’ve fucking got you! With a look of twisted glee, he burst into the room. Jones barely had time to turn, before Harlan was on him. He knocked Jones to the floorboards with enough force to wind a bull. Thrusting a knee into Jones’s back, he twisted the canvases out of his grasp and unfurled them. His triumph dissolved into sick rage. There were three paintings. Two of them were of young boys he didn’t recognise. The third was of Jamie Sutton. The artist had captured perfectly the benumbed horror in their eyes, the agonising vulnerability of their naked bodies, the destruction of their innocence.

What is right? The thought tolled in Harlan’s mind like a death knell. He savagely dismissed it. In that instant, he didn’t care what was right. He only knew that he wanted to kill Jones so badly it gave him the shakes. He snatched up a brick and raised it over Jones’s head. Jones struggled weakly, whimpering, “Please, please don’t…”

Harlan’s shaking intensified. Tremors contorted his face, as if he was torn between two directions, two warring identities. A wild voice — a voice he barely recognised — burst from him. “Do it!”

In reply, Garrett’s accusing voice rose into his thoughts, you’re a menace to society.

“Kill him!”

Garrett’s voice came back, a madman.

There was a sudden splitting, dislocating sensation in Harlan’s head. “No,” he cried, silencing both voices. He slammed the brick against the floorboards an inch from Jones’s skull.

Jones’s screamed, then realising he was unhurt, gasped out, “Thank you, thank you.”

Harlan ground his knee into Jones’s spine. “Shut the fuck up or I’ll change my mind.” He returned the canvases to the plastic sack. There were other things in there too — pencil sketches, bundles of Polaroids. He jerked Jones to his feet. As he did so, Jones grabbed the lantern and swung it at him. The lantern shattered, splashing burning oil over Harlan and the sack. He dropped the sack, and frantically patted out the flames on his arms and chest. Scooping up the burning sack, Jones ran for the door. Harlan pursued him, catching him up as he reached the walkway. Jones flung the sack over the railings, before pitching forward onto his face. Harlan watched it sail through the darkness and hit the concrete thirty feet below, bursting and scattering its contents like burning coals. He watched any chance of connecting Jones to Jamie Sutton go up in flames.