Berserk (10 page)

They wouldn’t find us,
the girl’s voice muttered in his mind.
Mister Wolf would put us back in the hole with my mummy and daddy and brother.

Tom gathered up the body once again, trying to pile the chains on top so that he could lift them all as one. The load was heavy, and he did not think he would be able to move very far like this. Even as a young man he would have found it difficult. Now older, having spent an afternoon digging and pulling out corpse after corpse from that hole, he was almost at the end of his reserves of strength.

Not far to go,
Natasha said.

“Stop it,” Tom whined, “just stop talking in my head.”

The girl fell silent and for that Tom was glad, though he could still feel her in there. Quiet, still, but waiting. Her presence was like a hollow in his mind that he had never noticed before, a place begging to be filled.

He was panting from exertion now, bent low with his burden. He had the feeling that without the chains the girl would have been incredibly light, but there seemed to be no way to separate her from the bindings right now. He could not do the same to her as he had done to her family.

Break us away,
she had said. Tom had paused, uncertain, but Natasha insisted.
I’ve been here for a long time, and they’ve been dead here with me. Break them away. They won’t feel it anymore.
Stamping, kicking, bending to grab bones and pull them from the twists of chain, tugging, snapping, until he could lift the chains clear of the other bodies and wrap them around Natasha—

As Tom left the hole, a deep sadness had exuded from the little girl, both her body and her strange mind. He supposed it was a form of letting go. But he knew from experience that this would never be complete.

“I know how you’re feeling,” he whispered as he struggled onward. Though Natasha did not answer, he felt her listening. “I lost my son. And even though I don’t think he was in that hole, he’s still been lost to us for ten years.”

dead.
My family are lost and

“I don’t know what you are. You pretend to know about Steven, but you can’t. You’ve been down there . . . so you say. How can you know?”

We’ll talk more later,
Natasha said.
But if Mister Wolf catches us, time will stop. For both of us. I’m very scared.

“I am too.” Tom was not sure whether it was the answer the little girl wanted—

Little girl? She’s a dead fucking bundle, a bag of bones, and it’s your own madness driving you to do this.

—but it was all he could give her right now. The truth. He was scared, and confused, and close to exhaustion.

Tom ran. Not because of that gunshot or the shadow of the man he had seen climbing the unclimbable fence, but because of the seed of hope that had been planted. The hope that Steven may yet be alive. Small and unlikely though this seed was, it fuelled whatever madness had taken him and drove him on.

* * *

Here,
the voice of the girl said.
Behind this rock. Climb up and wait on top.

“You see it?”

I see through you. But now I’m cold
. . .
I’m cold!
She sounded pained, tired and distant, and in Tom’s mind her voice was very small, the echo of a child from far away.

“What is it?”

The bullet
. . .
still in me
. . .

“What bullet?” The voice drifted away, and Tom felt something leave his mind.

He closed his eyes. He felt so alone, so cold and alone and abandoned, even though it had been his own choice to come out here into the wild. Now it was dark and Jo would be panicking. It was a sensitive time for both of them, and all sorts of thoughts would be running through her mind. She would have called the police, but they would probably not begin looking for Tom for some time. He seemed to remember from all the TV police shows he’d seen that an adult was not a missing person until they had been gone for three days, or five, or some other statutory time.

He looked down at the shape at his feet, the mummified girl wrapped in chains, and the unreality of this bit at him again. He had come out here to look for Steven’s grave – and yes, to dig it up, he supposed that had always been his intention. And now he was lost on the Plain, trying to hide away from a man with a gun, and he had a child’s body at his feet. Not a normal child, either. She was misshapen, mummified . . . and after so long, still
there
. A ghost? A monster? A vampire? Tom believed in none of them – not even ghosts, not even after Steven – but there was
something
happening in his head.

“I’m going mad,” he whispered at the dark, but there was still the body. He could reach out and touch her leathery skin, feel the cool chains retaining the coldness of the grave. However mad he may be, he still owned his senses. The slickness of the metal, the smell of the pit, the sound of the night-time breeze wandering across the Plain, carrying with it the echoes of ages—

Footsteps?

Tom picked up the girl and hurried around the rock she had pointed out. His heart thumped, and the pursuing man (
Mister Wolf
) would surely hear that, so he breathed again, opening his mouth slightly and breathing light and shallow.

Silence, but for the breeze. Tom eased himself up onto the rock and hunkered down low, suddenly realising that he would be offering his silhouette to anyone who cared to look. And if Mister Wolf caught them he would put Natasha back into the ground with her family, and probably take off her head to ensure that she was dead.

Tom almost laughed.
Take her head off?
This was madness, pure and simple. He ached to feel the heat of Jo’s breast as he cried into her chest, the soothing hush of her voice, her hand stroking his head as she calmed him down and forgave him his madness, as she would always forgive everything. He stared into the growing dark and silently mouthed his wife’s name—

And then the footsteps came again, a few seconds of rapid padding before they stopped. Tom turned his head slowly to look the way he had come, and he saw a shadow kneeling beside a clump of ferns.

He’ll see me. He’ll look up and see me, and I’ll feel the bullet before I hear the gunshot.

But Mister Wolf did not see. Instead he stood, hurried over to the large rock and knelt almost directly below Tom.

Tom raised himself onto his elbows. Looked down. Saw the top of Mister Wolf’s head, and the glint of metal in his hand. And without thinking, he knew what he had to do.

Natasha!
But the girl remained silent.
Sorry, Natasha.
And then Tom shoved her body, chains and all, over the edge of the rock.

He heard a grunt from below, and then a longer groan.

Wolf wolf wolf wolf wolf!
Natasha cried, and Tom winced at the terror in that little girl’s voice. He stood and shuffled to the edge, trying to gauge the distance to the ground. He could make out the sprawled figure of Mister Wolf, and beside him the twisted shape of the body and chains. He jumped, landing beside the man, falling back and cracking his head against the rock. Even as Tom cried out in pain he heard another groan, a long, low sound that must mean that Mister Wolf was hurt, if not unconscious.

The gun!
Tom thought. He remained leaning against the rock, feeling a dampness on the back of his head as blood seeped from his skull.

You’re bleeding!
Natasha said.

“It’s not too bad,” Tom said, and he thought,
How does she know?
It felt like a lot of blood, and in his madness would he really feel the pain? Even if his skull was cracked would his sudden lunacy let him know about that? He thought not. And yet, in the same instant, he decided that it did not matter.

He pushed himself away from the rock. A breeze swept in across the moors and his back felt cold, sweat and blood cooling and sending a chill through his shoulders. He closed his eyes, remained on his feet, shook the dizziness away. When Mister Wolf groaned again Tom stepped forward. He had no idea what he was doing. Here was a soldier, a killer, armed and ready to shoot, and Tom was tackling him. He had never done anything like this in his life before. The nearest he had come to any sort of trouble was helping a young lad being mugged outside a town centre pub in Newport, and even then the cowardly assailants had run off with a shouted “fuck you” over their shoulders. Now he was standing over a prone man, looking for a gun.

He laughed. He could not help it. The sound was frightening in the darkness; it was the sound of a madman. But it also comforted Tom because it was a real voice, not a whisper in his head—

Lots of blood!

—and not the wild sound of the Plain at night, when anything could be about.

He stepped over the shadow of the fallen man, waiting for a hand to close around his ankle to trip him. But Mister Wolf groaned again, and Tom felt a smile in his head.

“He’s not dead,” Tom said.

Kill him,
Natasha said. She still sounded weak and distant, and behind the words there was a vulnerability that was almost hypnotic.

“No!”

If you don’t, Daddy, he’ll wake up and
—

“I’m not your daddy! And I’m not killing anyone.”

Tom bent down beside the man and felt across the ground. His hand soon closed around the cold metal of the pistol, still clasped in Mister Wolf’s hand. He pried his fingers away from the grip. Even in unconsciousness the man held tight.

Kill him, Daddy.

“Shut up.”

Natasha’s voice withdrew from Tom’s mind, and again that sense of loneliness washed over him. His head had started to ache from the impact. Blood dripped cool down his neck and between his shoulder blades. As he stood with the gun in his hands, dizziness assailed him once more and he staggered back to the rock for support.

The gun was surprisingly heavy and very cold. Tom weighed the weapon, resting it in his splayed hand and moving it slightly to get the feel of it. He could see very little, and he thought that keeping hold of it in the dark would be dangerous. He’d likely shoot himself in the foot. He had no idea about safety catches, how to hold or fire it, so he swung back, threw the gun and held his breath until he heard a dull thump from somewhere out on the Plain. With any luck it would be buried in the muck. He thought that the chance of this man – whoever he was – finding it upon waking was very remote.

The possibility suddenly hit him that this may well be Nathan King lying before him. Tom knelt and rested his hand lightly on the back of the man’s head. It came away sticky with blood, and there was slight movement as the man breathed and twitched in unconsciousness. He moved down and felt beneath the torso. This man was heavily built and felt fit, not fat like King.

Whoever it was, he could wake at any moment.

Tom knew what he had to do. He felt his way to where Natasha and her chains had fallen after knocking out the man—

was
She won’t be there, she never
there, it’s all in my messed-up mind!

—and there she was, hard and alien beneath his fingertips. How could there be anything alive about her? But such questions, Tom knew, avoided the obvious facts about the last couple of hours. The mad part of him snickered at his denial, and the old Tom, who had come here ten hours earlier searching for a simple truth about his lost son, was suddenly someone from his past. It was a lifetime ago that he had left his wife, come out here and found the impossibilities that had driven him mad.

There’s no corpse wrapped in chains,
he thought, gathering the metal loops onto Natasha’s chest and stomach and lifting her,
and if even if there were, she wouldn’t be talking to me in my head, a ten-year-dead girl talking in my fucking
head! As he started back in the direction of the grave and perimeter fence, he waited for that tingling feeling in his mind, the one that would warn him that the dead girl was about to speak again. But for now there was only silence. Carrying his madness in his arms, Tom walked across the dark moor.

* * *

He knew when he was nearing the pit. He could smell it: the stench of the grave.

The weight in Tom’s arms was becoming unbearable, but he knew that if he set the girl and chains down now, he may never make it to the car. He would lie here all night, cold, damp from dew, and he may well die of exposure, adding his own fresh corpse to the body count this Plain had already notched over the years. Either that or Mister Wolf would regain consciousness, find him lying here and throttle him. So he walked on, willing his legs to move another step, drawing cool breath into his burning lungs, doing his best to ignore the pains in his arms. His muscles and shoulders ached. If only he could get rid of the chains!
Then I could carry her forever.
He thought of Jo, his wife from so long ago, sitting in the living room of the cottage they had hired and crying into a clump of tissues, not knowing whom to call or what to say when she did. And that forced him on. So much had changed since he had seen her last. So much, except for his love.

Should I tell her about Steven?
He thought not. He was not sure, not
certain
. . . but then he felt that touch at his mind again, the caress of Natasha about to speak. And although the girl said nothing, her presence was enough.

He passed the open grave and the bodies spread out across the heather and grass. Whatever Natasha was thinking this close to her dead family, she kept to herself. Tom was relieved. Her voice was that of a young child, and yet it was so totally
wrong
that he relished this silent time. Perhaps later she would speak again and he could begin asking questions. But for now he had only one aim in mind: make it back to the cottage. There he would hide the body in the room below the kitchen and try to comfort Jo, come up with a story, a lie. He had lied to his wife before and he had not liked it then. But sometimes lies are uttered in the most benevolent of voices. To protect. To insulate loved ones from an insane truth. Some lies are created for love.

He walked in a straight line when he could, hoping to reach the fence and then eventually the crawlspace beneath. He stumbled, either on rocks or the twisted stems of ferns or old heathers, and a couple of times he fell, dropping Natasha and landing on his face on the damp ground. Each impact hurt the back of his head more than anything else, and he gingerly explored the wound there, wondering whether he’d done worse damage than he had at first thought. It felt tender and soft, but if he winced against the pain he could press hard enough to feel his skull. There was no give to it, and that at least was a good sign. But he also knew that he had lost of a lot of blood; he could feel it cold across his back and shoulders.