Michael Marshall - The Straw Men

activity inside me, turning over, ready to run — but having no idea what direction to go in. 'You tossed this place hard?'

'I took carpet up, I went under floorboards, I went in the roof and shone a flashlight in the tank. I looked inside the phones. There's nothing else here. Of course — I can't tell what might be missing.'

'Me neither,' I said. 'I didn't come here enough. The only thing I noticed was the videos.' I frowned. 'Wait a second. When I was here the other day I put the mail here. Now it's gone.' I looked up at him, suddenly sure I was onto something.

'Relax, detective. A couple hours ago an old guy picked it up. Beaky, said he used to be your folks' lawyer. I let him in, explained I was a friend of yours. He was cool about it, though he did look like he wanted to check how many spoons I'd stolen.'

'Harold Davids,' I said. 'He said he'd keep coming by.'

Bobby smiled. 'Ward, you got enough weirdness going on without looking for it. Stop being so paranoid.'

We heard a loud shattering sound from the sitting room. We started moving, but not quickly enough.

It's not so much a sound as a feeling of immense pressure, and as shocking as being a child smashed across the face by someone who's never hit you before. If you're close enough to an explosion, what you're mainly aware of is the thud of your head and chest, an impact that turns any noise into a deep sensation, a feeling that the world itself has been knocked out of its path. The sound itself seems secondary, as if you're hearing it days afterward.

It seemed like I hit the wall immediately, hard, and smacked face-first into a row of pictures. As I hit the ground, my head full of white light and surrounded by falling glass, there was another, quieter explosion, and then I was hauling Bobby off the floor and toward the remains of the front door.

We careered down the path together, slipping and falling on the wet flagstones. There was another detonation behind us, much louder than the first. This time I heard the whistle and fizz of things flying around me, the whupp-a of air compressed and released. Bobby kept scrabbling forward, using his hands to keep us moving. I screwed up his efforts by turning to look back at the house, and we tangled and ended up skidding flat on our backs on the wet grass. The whole of the outer wall of the sitting room was gone, and the interior was already beginning to burn. I couldn't take my eyes off it. When you see a house on fire it's like watching the burning effigy of someone's soul, like seeing the grave work of worms writ sixty feet tall.

By the time I'd pushed myself up Bobby already had his phone out and was walking away, looking over the fence. I took a few paces back toward the house. Maybe I thought I could go back in and put the fire out. Or that I should save some things. I don't know. I just felt there ought to be something that I could do.

There was another small detonation, and I heard things break deep inside the house. The heat was building rapidly. The rain had slackened into a faint drizzle, and I remember feeling that this was about typical. It had rained hard all afternoon. Why not now?

Bobby ran back over to me, snapping his phone shut. He had a small cut on his forehead, which was dripping blood.

'They're on their way,' he said. I couldn't imagine who he would be talking about. 'Who are?'

'The fire brigade. Let's go.'

'I can't go,' I said. 'That's their house.'

'No,' he said firmly, 'it's a crime scene.'

When we reached my car he walked quickly all around the vehicle, looking carefully at the ground. Then he went down on hands and knees in the mud and peered up underneath. He got back up, rubbed his hands, then unlocked the door. He squatted down and looked under the driver's seat, then popped the hood, walked round the front, and looked at the engine.

'Okay,' he said. 'We'll take the chance.'

He closed the hood and walked back to the driver's side. He stuck the keys in the ignition, winced at me, and turned his hand. The engine started, and nothing exploded. Bobby breathed out heavily, patted the top of the car.

'But we didn't hear anything,' I said. 'No car.'

'Not surprised,' he said, and his voice was a little shaky with relief. 'Area like this it's easier to lose yourself in backyards than on the road. I'd stash a car downhill and come the last quarter mile on foot. Though if it had been me, we wouldn't be having this conversation. You hear the way it kept futzing after

the first explosion? Someone put it together in a hurry and screwed up.'

'What difference? Surely the first blast takes the whole lot up?'

'The sections got blown apart by the ignition charge. Someone tried to put together a real mother, and

it blew itself apart before it could go off properly.' 'If we'd been in the sitting room, it would have been enough.' I abruptly rubbed my face with my

hands. 'I guess Chip delivered the message.'

'Sure looks like it.'

'In which case…' I looked at my watch. 'They put this whole thing together in just over an hour,

including someone getting down here.' I noticed I was bleeding briskly from a gash on the back of my hand, and wiped my jacket over it.

'Like I said. They rushed it.'

'They may screw up on the details, but they're definitely on the case, wouldn't you say?' In the distance I could now hear the sound of approaching sirens, and across the road I saw front doors opening.

'They bombed my parents' house,' I said, incredulously, turning to look at it once more. 'Like, with a bomb.'

The burning house looked bizarre, a point of utter wrongness amongst a street of perfect little dwellings. I turned to look at Mary's house across the hedge. A few lights were on, and the front door was open.

'You're dealing with Grade-A cocksuckers,' Bobby agreed, slapping the top of the car again. 'And now let's leave.'

But by then I was running, slipping and careering down toward the gate. I heard Bobby swear and start after me. Near the end of the path I thrashed my way straight through the hedge and into Mary's front yard. I'd barely made it into her property before Bobby grabbed my shoulder and spun me round.

I shrugged him off, tried to keep walking up the yard. He reached for me again, but faltered when he saw what I'd seen, and then he was moving faster than me.

She was lying half on the porch, her head and shoulders tipped downward onto the steps, one arm thrown out by her side. At first I thought maybe a heart attack, until I saw the blood all over her, the pool already turning sluggish on the weathered wood. Bobby dropped to one knee beside her, supporting her head.

'Mary,' I said. 'Oh, Jesus Christ.'

Between us we pulled her gently round so that she was lying level. Her breathing was ragged. Enough light was thrown by the fire next door to make the lines in her face look like canyons. Bobby was searching through the folds of her clothing, finding hole after hole, trying to stanch blood that didn't seem to be flowing as fast as it should. She coughed, and a slug of something dark glotted up into her mouth.

Before this I had only ever seen an old woman, one of those people who clutter up the lanes of supermarkets and stand waiting for buses, who know or care about what gift people are supposed to give on which anniversary, who look papery and cold and as if they can never have been any other way.

People who can never have been drunk, or clambered over forbidden fences, or moved, giggling, so that someone else gets stuck with the wet patch in the bed. Dry old sticks who you cannot credit with having loved someone, not someone alive anyhow, not someone who wasn't just a memory, whose resting place was now decorated with fading flowers that only she remembered to bring. Now I saw someone else. Someone she'd once been and presumably remained, beneath the patina of failing cells and dry skin and wrinkle canyons and grey hair curled and cut short. Behind the disguise the years had conferred, behind the mistaken assumption that because of her age she had never been, and wasn't still, somebody real.