Ned Beauman - Boxer, Beetle

They shot across the ground, jumped on to my feet and carried on up each of my legs. There was something not quite right about the way they moved, like a cheap animated film. I clamped my mouth shut so they couldn’t get down my throat. I wished the Welshman had already shot me so I didn’t have to die like this.

But then the beetles stopped.

Some had got as far as my groin, which was drenched, of course, in urine. Others had got as far as my armpits, which were almost as damp. There was something almost nervous in the way they milled around the fetid arches of my body, pricking my skin through my clothes with their tiny needle legs — this, I thought, must be what the angels feel like to the pin. One or two detached from the mass, spread their swastika wings, fluttered up in front of my face, gave me an eyeless glare and descended to rejoin their fellows. Then, all at once, in an instant, like a black tablecloth being whipped from a table, they withdrew. I watched the last few hop back into Sinner’s eye sockets. There was silence. Steam, just visible in the dim light from the streetlamps on Back Church Lane, rose from the Welshman’s hollow carcass. I fainted.

At about five in the morning, I was awoken by something licking my face. I opened my eyes. A fox. I jerked my head away, and, startled, it trotted a few steps back. Mangy and thin, it had sinews like twisted telephone wires, a stink like a petrol station forecourt, and a coat the colour of a traffic cone left in a skip full of rainwater. It was — if I’m not making myself clear — impossibly beautiful. For perhaps a full minute, the animal stared at me with a strange scepticism and a boy’s eyes. Then it darted away and up over the fence. I breathed out, and so did the dawn.

A couple of hours later the first yawning Grublock Homes workmen arrived at the site. When they saw the skeletons they wanted to call the police, but I managed to talk them into calling Teymur first. With the mobile phone held to my ear, I explained everything. I don’t think Teymur believed me when I told him that Grublock was dead, but he still gave the order to the workmen to let me go. (One little-discussed advantage of building sites is the fantastic selection of ways to break a pair of handcuffs.) Before I left, I borrowed some gloves and searched through the clothes that still clung raggedly to the Welshman’s remains. In his left inside jacket pocket was the letter from Hitler.

It wasn’t until much later — after all the research and investigation and speculation that has gone into writing this story — that I understood what must have happened. Deep in Sinner’s throat, almost dead, those final two specimens of Anophthalmus hitleri , bred to be indomitable, had managed one last desperate, damaged, awkward fuck; and Millicent Bruiseland, luckily, wasn’t there to interrupt them. Buried ten feet beneath the surface of the rubbish dump, the resulting larvae thrived on the boxer’s flesh. And after those ferocious offspring had reduced Sinner to a skeleton and gnawed the marrow from his femurs, they made do with the toxic borscht of cooking oil and mushy vegetables and bacon fat that pooled in every cranny. Occasionally, they might feast on a dead dog or cat or pigeon, and perhaps, when they were really lucky, one of Albert Kölmel’s younger, more reckless rivals might decide to bury another human body. Later, in Whitechapel’s rather more prosperous years, when a warehouse was built on top of the old site of the dump, they tunnelled up through the floorboards and punctured the tins of baked beans. Weeks or months might go by without food, but — thanks, again, to Erskine — they were resilient enough to survive. Often, they would simply cannibalise each other. Eighty years later, although these grandchildren of Fluek had spread throughout the dump and into the foundations of the adjacent buildings, a miniature London Underground, Seth Roach’s skull was still the epicentre of their colony, so when the Welshman exposed it to the light for the first time since its original interment they devoured him. And the same thing would have happened to me — if not for my trimethylaminuria. Even beetles have standards.

When I got home, the first thing I did was wake up my computer. Stuart was online, and immediately he popped up on my chat program.

STUART: omfg are you ok?

KEVIN: yeah

STUART: did the police come?

KEVIN: no

STUART: what? why not? what happened, then?

I told him, from the beginning. Once or twice I broke off, because there were certain details I wanted to check on the Nazi memorabilia collectors’ forums. When I was finished, he said:

STUART: that’s insane

KEVIN: i know

STUART: so did you ever find out who hired him?

KEVIN: no

at first i believed grublock that it was the japanese

then i sort of believed him when he said it was him, anonymously

then i thought maybe old man erskine

for a minute i even wondered if it might be tara southall

but none of those theories stood up

in a way, the biggest mystery is his thule society tattoo

i’d sort of forgotten about it until just now, but i think, by the end, it had actually begun to smudge

STUART: so it wasn’t a real tattoo?

KEVIN: no

but that’s not such a surprise — it was pretty obvious he wasn’t really from the thule society

STUART: why?

KEVIN: come on, stuart

it’s unrealistic

whatever all those websites might say, they disbanded in the 1920s

STUART: that’s what they want you to think

KEVIN: no, stuart, they did

what’s weird is, why would you even pretend to be from the thule society? what’s the point? who is it going to work on? because there must be only about a dozen people in london who might recognise that symbol

even grublock probably wouldn’t

of course, i would

but why would anyone make such a big effort to fool me, specifically, into thinking the ariosophists were involved?

STUART: yeah i see what you mean

KEVIN: but that’s a bit of a dead end

we can’t ask him

he got eaten by beetles

STUART: which is pretty awesome btw

you have to tell me more about that at some point

KEVIN: yeah i will

anyway, so i was thinking about the other thing i didn’t really understand

it was only two nights ago but it seems like ages

when i posted on the forum about philip erskine, and someone replied asking me about seth roach

‘nbeauman’

who was that?

they never replied again

in retrospect it was less like they wanted to help and more like they wanted to see how much i already knew

bit creepy

STUART: we should hack into the account

KEVIN: yeah, could do

but there’s not really any need

i had another look at his previous posts

i think he’s just a sockpuppet

STUART: whose?

Everyone on the forum, including me, had at least one ‘sock-puppet’ account — some probably had five or six. If you were losing an argument badly and needed reinforcements you would log out of your real account, log into your sockpuppet account, and post something like ‘yeah kevin’s right, any fuckwit knows that.’ It didn’t really help, but sometimes there was nothing else to be done.

KEVIN: stuart, why did the police never arrive?

STUART: what?

KEVIN: when i was in the service station, you said you’d

call them

then again when i was at the building site

but they never came

STUART: i think maybe they thought i was a prank call

KEVIN: you never called them

STUART: i did!

KEVIN: you already know whose sockpuppet nbeauman is

STUART: no

KEVIN: like i said, i looked at his posts

and the only time nbeauman ever posts on the forum is