Bloodeye (2 page)

She wore a white shirt and black trousers, like maybe she’d worked in the pub. Sensible black shoes that a girl wouldn’t wear unless she was restricted to boring footwear by regulations. Almost definitely worked in the pub. No rings (her hands, palms out, were clean and free of adornments). Nails, thick square long timber nails, had been driven, pounded, through her wrists.

The wounds were torn, and there was a lot of blood both up the arms of the girl’s white shirt, down the tiled wall, but not on the floor, because of the water. The water beneath the girl was a little rusty, maybe, from blood mingled with the shit-water.

She’d been nailed up, wrists first…less blood on her feet (nails through the ankle bones, it looked like—her feet and legs were twisted to one side). She’d bled a lot from the first wounds, less from the feet. Maybe unconscious by then. But not dead? A body didn’t bleed as much dead as alive.

Keane figured this as he stared at the body on the wall. Click, click, click. Each shot a nightmare, but not waking nightmares, because he was unmoved. Cold inside, like he was dead himself.

He stood in the sewage, staring up. He didn’t know how long he stood, taking mental pictures of the tableau. The girl’s blonde hair, elaborately held up with pins, some hair loose and hanging down across her face, obscuring the girl’s features and eyes almost well enough to hide the fact that someone had taken her eyes out. Gouged, maybe with fingernails. There were marks on her cheeks, her eyelids were torn. Vicious.

Strong, too.
Who could hold a living person halfway up a wall and still drive nails through bone, into a brick wall?

Click.

Pull out her eyes with their fingers?

Click.

God, I hope she was dead
, he thought.
I hope she was dead by then.

And, as he stood in the pool, cool water seeping over the top of his work boots, his mind finally shifted into thinking. The person who killed her didn’t need to be
that
strong…if it had been the work of more than one person.

Fuck.

A gang? Didn’t have much call for gangs in the south side of Norwich. Maybe some kind of wannabe white gangster types on the north side, wearing their trousers slung low and their caps sideways, but not so much on the south side, where most of the money was. The King’s Arms, too, was a nice pub in a nice suburb. Not the kind of place that needed a doorman on a weekend night. More food than drink sold, probably.

More than one, then, he thought. More than one killer.

He didn’t know why he was thinking about this. It wasn’t his game anymore. He’d left that game. Left it behind when Teresa had died.

Been killed, honey,
she said in his head.

Click
, he thought.

He hadn’t seen a dead body in seven years. But he knew how it worked. Knew the angles, and how the police and the circus would swarm.

Lift her hair, he would say now. Someone would lift her hair, and click, he’d take her face for the camera, for the police, the court.

He didn’t know why he did it, but he found himself standing before her, looking up into her face, head hanging loosely upon her chest.

Most people, he remembered from his past, used to asphyxiate as they tired and their heads were pulled against their chest. Found out a lot about death, had Keane, over the years. Like that pleasant snippet he’d tucked away from a book he’d read about crucifixion.

So, like a photographer at a scene, he looked up into the girl’s pretty, dead face, to see what it was that was tickling at him, tickling the whole time. That there was something else.

And yes. There was. There, under her fringe. Carved in her forehead.

An eye. The third eye.

He jumped back like a man who’d seen a ghost, and his bastard mind said
click click click
as he remembered Teresa.

The third eye, carved into his dead wife’s forehead.

The eye that spoke to him.

And, at that thought, the eye opened.

5

The girl was dead. She was sightless. But that third eye saw Keane Reid very well. Because someone had carved it there, in the girl’s flesh, for Keane. Killed and crucified the girl. Created the flood, had him called.

Power. Thought. Cunning.

The third eye blinked and the girl smiled.

“Keane,” she said, her voice husky and empty and devoid of breath. Her throat ragged from screaming as she died, but nonetheless, she spoke. She saw.

Keane stepped back, heavy boots splashing in the water.
Run,
his mind said.
Run,
said the voice of his murdered wife in his head. But he couldn’t. His legs were weak. His heart beat like he was out of breath from running long and hard, but he wasn’t. His breath was steady. His heart pounded alone. And, realizing he was just afraid, he gulped in air, one great shuddering gasp.

“Keane,” said the dead girl. But it was just a voice in his head. Just in his head.

“I missed you,” she said.

“I fucked your wife’s dead skull, Keane,” said the voice that was in Keane’s head.

I’m having a breakdown again
, he thought. But he knew he wasn’t.

Just as no matter how many times he told himself the dead girl wasn’t speaking in
his
voice, it wouldn’t ever be true.

He was here. He was back.

If he replied, though? It might make it true.

It’s true, honey,
said his wife.
He fucked me in the head and I liked it.

“No.” His voice. Weak, but his.

“She liked it, Keane. She liked it. She liked it plenty.”

“No,” said Keane again. He shook his head. His voice was quiet, robbed of power by horror and fear, just like his legs, barely holding him above the sewage.

He tried to summon the strength to banish him. To shout, to run, to flail, even, with fists and feet at the body on the wall. He could do nothing.

“I’m starting again,” said the cold, dead voice. “I’m starting big, Keane.”

“No,” he said again in that quiet, fearful denial that was the best he could manage.

NO,
his mind shouted, like in the grip of a nightmare, unable to scream and reduced to savage mumbling and thrashing tangled in his lonely bed.

“I’m coming back, Keane, and I’m strong now. Stronger. You’ll see.”

“NO!” Keane shouted. He found it: his rage, down there in the pit. That black pit, in the belly of the black dog, where it lurked.

“FUCK YOU!” he roared and threw himself at the dead girl with the cold, dead voice and with all his strength tore her from the wall, sickening bone cracks coming from her wrists and ankles. The corpse fell face-first into the sewage.

The eye is blind.

Relief washed over him. The cold shivers hit; shock.

Adrenaline fled.

The door crashed open and the young barman, Dan Howard, burst through into the toilet.

Shock on both their faces, but only for a moment.

Dan Howard fell face-first into the water, dead already. The back of his head was sheared clean off from crown to neck.

6

How do you escape a creature, a beast, a man like him?

You run.

Run.

Keane broke for the door, leaping over the sprawled body, and ran. He ran, his feet now soaked from the filthy water seeping over the top, sloshing to the front door, out into a blast of heat that dried the membrane in his nostrils and hit him hard, like a punch to the chest. But he didn’t stop running, didn’t think of his knees and hips shuddering in his boots, ill-suited to his lengthening stride. He ran, forgetting his tools and van. A primal urge, the most immediate option open to him. Distance and speed were all that mattered. Not direction, not yet. Just run, run, run.

Feet hammered the soft, superheated tarmac. His boots, comfortable enough at work, rubbed. His sweat poured from armpits, crotch, back, forehead, belly. A thin running man pounding the paving hard and fast in work clothes drew the eye like a man in running gear did not.

Keane didn’t care. He ran despite the jarring in his joints and his sore heels, already blistering from friction, increased by his wet boots and socks.

Thought was someplace else. This wasn’t the void he sought. This was terror. Pure, simple terror.

He ran on, not going anywhere but
away
. No concept of time, of pain… Nothing mattered but away. Running away.

Wasn’t he always?

Keane’s legs and lungs burned and he realized, as people stared at him and he finally felt their eyes on him, that’d he’d run hard enough that his feet were bleeding at the heel.

He had not just run away, but clear across the city.

He slowed, thinking a little more. Thinking about saving his legs. He was going to need them.

Walking now, Keane looked around himself and found that he’d ended up in Tombland, the old heart of Norwich City. Cobbles one way, Norwich Cathedral the other side, pubs and restaurants in between.

No place of sanctuary, because there was no such thing. No more. Not now. Not, maybe, until one or the other of them died.

I thought one of us had. Seven years ago.

Maybe both of them had. But then, if Keane was really dead, too, then why was he so afraid?

He sat on a bench in the heart of the city, his sweat cooling and his heart slowing and his feet and legs hurting.

He thought for a minute, and realized something fundamental had changed in him while he ran.

He could
feel
.

Didn’t matter what it was he was feeling. That he could feel any emotion at all, that was the important thing.

Terror so deep it had reached him at the bottom of the pit. Terror so powerful it had thrust a dirty and sullied fist into the throat of the black dog and pulled Keane screaming by the scruff of the neck out into the light. Blinking, jaded, frightened (hurt…yes…hurt) but alive.

Terror, yes, but God, he was
alive
. Alive at last.

Keane actually laughed. Threw his head back, laughed into the sky, looking at the spire of the cathedral proud above the old gated wall before him, cross atop gleaming in the bright, hard sky.

People looked at him and he didn’t care even a little bit.

An old lady stopped before him, curly gray hair and a tartan shopping trolley on wheels that it seemed served only to hold her up.

“Young man? Are you feeling all right?”

“Yes,” he said. Oddly, it was kind of true. He probably stank, looked insane. He didn’t care. “Thank you,” he told her. She gave him a distrustful look and moved on. When she’d gone, he laughed again, more quietly this time. Then he pushed himself up and turned back the way he’d come. He didn’t have his van or his wallet, so he set out for home in his work clothes, smelling of shit and sweat, hair mussed, with no money in his pockets.

He had nothing but his legs and his heart ticking and his mind…

He had his mind back at last, and all it had taken was a dead man on his trail.

The cold reality kicked in, then, the shock waned and his mind, returned to him like a lost set of keys or a puppy, began to work again.

The man he’d killed seven years ago, the man who’d murdered his wife, was back.

And still, Keane grinned. He didn’t know why he was grinning. He didn’t care. The grin felt just fine on his face, and he couldn’t have shifted it had he tried.

You might be going a little crazy, baby,
said his wife in his head.

“Yep,” he said. But he didn’t stop grinning.

II. Three Days to Die: ’06

Some days it gets so hot your head pounds and your piss is bright yellow. You drink coffee and tea during the day and beer in a pub garden on the river in the evening, watching the sun fade away over the distant rooftops and hoping for respite from the heat. It doesn’t happen. The beer sits in your gut. You wake many times during the night, let loose a stream of luminescent urine in the half-summer’s dark. 2 a.m., 4 a.m., finally, give up. It’s 5 a.m., you’re up, not entirely awake, not entirely rested. Smelling and sweating already.

You work your tongue against your teeth and lips and palate. Finally getting some spit ready, you cough-spit a brown glob into the toilet, residue of tar and beer and dehydration.