Garbage Man (9 page)

Mrs. Ahern couldn't resist one last try. As softly as she could manage and using all her energy to restrain her utter affront she said:

‘Why don't you come to church this Sunday, the three of you? Try and see things another way?'

‘Why don't you get lost?' said Aggie.

Mrs. Ahern's lips tightened over whatever more it was she'd wanted to say. She nodded to herself almost imperceptibly and turned away. The retreat was more of a hurry than a march. When she was out of earshot, they all released sighs. Aggie took out her cigarettes and offered them to Moira and Don. Such inclusion was not wasted on him. He swelled up to their stature.

‘Fucking curtain-twitching bible-bashing Nazi bitch-bag,' said Aggie.

The three of them went slack with laughter.

***

Mason replaced the photo of the farmer with one of tens of thousands of others he'd taken. It was very similar; this time a wistful model staring through a window on a rainy day, her fingers holding the nets so she could see out. It was for a catalogue selling floaty, hippy outfits. The model had no soul. The picture had no soul. It was black and white. It was perfect. Now the walls were sealed with lies again, not a true moment among the jigsaw of framed images. He stood back and smiled.

That night he travelled back across the barren brownland to the landfill. He hurried to keep out the chill. Once through the disguised hole in the fence he found the freshest area of soil. This was where they'd been dumping and compacting that same day. Now the ‘cell' was filled and covered with earth. He removed his shoes and socks and stepped onto the soft warm humus. He flexed his feet and gripped the earth, let it get stuck between his toes and under his toenails. It was like coming home. He gave himself to the sensation of being ‘drained'. All the worry over the girl, the memories of his time in the woods, they seeped away like pus into a clay poultice.

His mind slipped its mooring.

At first the vibration was in his head. He felt giddy with it and his teeth buzzed where they met. It was like having the cone of a super-woofer placed against his occiput. A subsonic noise shook his cranium at some wavelength that threatened to unpick the sutures of his skull. Even this was not unpleasant in the state of consciousness he'd reached.

Then the buzz extended to the rest of his body and he came back to himself. He opened his eyes. His entire body was oscillating. It wasn't in his head at all, it was rising up from his feet. He looked down. It wasn't so dark, he couldn't see that his feet had already sunk in to the ankles. He didn't move.

The vibration became a rumble - he could hear it all around him now. He could feel it in his chest. His heart stumbled over its own rhythm. The Earth was shaking now. His knees responded like shock absorbers. And then the shaking became too strong for his legs and he fell to the soft earth. There was thunder under the ground. His hands sunk through layers of soil. His body followed them. There was soil in his mouth, grit forcing its way under his eyelids, trickling into his ears. He would have screamed if it hadn't been a waste of the only breath he had left. The world itself tremored and he feared he would either be buried or flung off into space. Anoxia made sparkles behind his crushed-shut eyes. He had to breathe but if he did he'd breathe the earth into his lungs and suffocate. The sparkling became brighter and he began to relax, knowing it was wrong but not being able to resist.

All movement ceased.

Mason pushed his way back out of the soil, trying to spit out dirt and breathe at the same time. Particles stuck in his throat. For several minutes he believed he would still die, only above ground. But each in-breath revived him and each exhalation cleared the earth from his airways. He cried mud; shook soil from his ears.

When he was able, he stood up, wiping his face and blowing his nose onto the landfill's covering of clean soil. The touch of his bare soles against the earth held no comfort for him now. Before he was able to walk clear of the newly covered cell, he felt the welling of treacly warmth rising through the topsoil. There was no need to stop and examine it this time; he knew exactly what it was.

Feeling only guilt and not knowing why, he made the darkest shadows his companions all the way home.

***

Ray woke, eyes wide, fully conscious. The whole flat was shaking. He could hear the glasses rattling in the kitchen cupboard, the cutlery shivering in its drawer. His mobile phone chattered towards the edge of the bedside table and fell off.

Seconds later the vibrations receded, to a tremble, to a buzz, to nothing. Heart racing, he reached out to Jenny and squeezed her hand

‘Did you feel that?' He whispered. She took a few seconds to reply.

‘Feel what?' she said eventually with a sleep-weighted tongue.

It took only a few minutes for him to get back to sleep, such was the level of dope in his system. In the morning, all he retained was a vague sense of anxiety.

***

Tamsin's dreams lengthen and intensify. Sleep becomes exhausting, and yet, come the morning, she remembers nothing. Sometimes, she notices Kevin looking at her over his paper at breakfast but he never asks if she's all right.

Since the true agony of the fall - the baby's awakening as she thinks of it whilst dreaming - the scenario is different. When she arrives at the sky-penetrating building the baby is gone. The roof-light is already broken.

She flies in, feeling something close to panic. She must find the baby. She is responsible for it. Here in the dream, feeling responsibility is perfectly natural. Down through the broken-toothed mouth of glass. The corridor is dim now that the only illumination comes from the skylight. There is no electricity in the building. No need for it because there are no people. She knows the building is empty from top to bottom and that the baby should not hurt itself with fruitless searching. But, just as she knows the building is uninhabited, she knows the baby will never stop looking.

There's a zigzag blood trail in the corridor, still wet, and she remembers the baby's injuries. There's a spike of glass the size of a knife blade piercing its eye and embedded in its brain. It really shouldn't be alive. It has crawled over the broken glass, apparently injuring itself further, in order to test every door. She follows the blood trail, still floating, still controlled by the entity. The meandering red smear on the never-carpeted concrete widens, wettens. There are scratches in the stain where the glass it's dragging with it cuts into the concrete, occasionally snapping off and leaving a bloody fragment. There can't be this much blood in the tiny child's body, can there?

She follows the trail around a corner.

Somehow the baby has found an open door. The blood leads through it. She follows. She comes to a bathroom. The baby has found nothing but a small pack of razorblades. It plays with them as though they are cards, lacerating its fingers to the bone until every blade is sticky and slippery. Some of them are stuck in its palms. The baby stops for a moment and looks around. Does it hear her? Does it know she's there? She prays it will see her with its one good eye; acknowledge her at the very least. Then she knows the baby won't be lonely any more. But the baby doesn't see her. It isn't looking for her. It's looking for other toys to play with. The baby smiles through its broken mouth, dribbling cherry saliva. It turns to crawl out of the bathroom pushing the razorblades deeper with every shuffle. One lodges in its knee, opening up the leathery pad there to bring a fresh welling. The blood lubricates its progress towards the kitchen.

There's something in there it wants. She sees it first, precariously positioned at the edge of a work surface. The baby crawls right to it. It looks up and sees the knife-block but it cannot reach.

Don't do this, she pleads. Why are you doing this to yourself? No words are allowed to come forth.

The baby begins to bang on the cupboard doors below the surface. Its broken arm has knitted but at an unnatural angle. The tiny sharp-edged bones still protrude from a wound which will never completely heal. With the second ‘elbow' of its broken arm and the other hand variously pierced by razorblades, it beats the cupboards hard. The vibration affects the knife block, bringing it nearer to the edge.

No, baby, don't do that. Her scream is cave-silent.

The inevitable happens. The knife-block tumbles spilling its seven blades out as it falls. The block hits the baby's head and bounces away heavily. The knives enter the baby's body easily, as though it were made of fresh cake. They slide in deep. Deep enough to stay. The baby pauses, turns. Some of the longer knives have passed right through it. She sees the points poking downward from its chest as it screams. She can't hear the screaming. She only feels it, deep inside, her spirit being murdered by the baby's pain. She wants to weep and cannot.

The baby is crawling again. Back out through the open door. Back into the corridor where it resumes its wounded seeking.

She is with the baby at the top of the stairs. The stairs descend a square shaft in flights, with landings on each floor. They lead down into darkness. They look eternal but this is only because she loses sight of them somewhere very far below. There is a railing but the baby could easily slip through. It has stopped bleeding now but that barely seems a mercy considering the many impalings which are now part of its existence.

It hesitates at the top step. It is clear the baby does not understand stairs. She notices the baby isn't as chubby as it was before. She can see its ribs when it breathes and there's a squeezebox wheezing coming from the places where it was penetrated by knives. It tries to crawl down anyway and topples forward, smashing its nose on the corner of the second step before it gathers momentum and begins to roll with real force. Each bounce hammers steel or glass deeper into the baby's body. It hits the wall at the bottom of the first flight which slows it but does not stop it from rolling down the next flight.

And the next, and the next.

The entity compels her to follow.

Down into the darkness where, for a long time she is aware only of her own descent and the vibration of flesh and bone and glass and metal being resisted by man-made stone. She is blind for a time and then the entity forces her to see in night vision - grainy black and white and only directly ahead of her eyes. All the rest is a tunnel of darkness or shadow.

The baby has been falling for hours. It is thinner and every part of it has been smashed ragged. It retains its piercings almost possessively but its once-angelic roundness is now all broken corners and snapped edges.

They reach the ground floor. She is right behind, unable to weep with relief for the infant. She would cry a dead sea if the entity allowed her but it won't. There's not much flesh left on the baby now. Mostly it is a crawling pile of broken bones, already fusing into crippled angles and deformed shapes. One hand is now only a stump of broken razors. Its toes are tiny sharp bonelets. Bones which should have been ribs grow like spines from the baby's back. Its other eye is gone now.

Blind, shattered, emaciated, the baby still searches.

***

Many, many times she follows the baby on its journey down from light to shadow to darkness.

On the ground level, everything is dirty, messed up, abandoned looking. As though people were here once. Everything is broken as if a bomb exploded. She is back again, watching the bone-baby, the razor-baby, crawling. The only sound is the scrape of its knife-points and bones over the concrete. The baby has still not found what it seeks.

There has been a pause in the dream for what feels like decades when she's here. The baby has reached the ground floor but has found nothing. If anything, it is searching with even more determination now.

This time, it finds something.

Right in the centre of the ground floor there is a square opening. The hatch is open. It looks like some kind of maintenance shaft and she is able to peer down while the baby skirts its edge. It's deep, too deep for her to see the bottom.

Don't do it. Don't go in there.

The baby hooks its crippled razor hands over the lip of the hatchway and pulls. She falls right behind it. It is in these descents through the air that the bone-baby knows its greatest and most short-lived pleasure; weightlessness means no pressure on its fractures and punctures. When it falls, it is free.

She sees a ledge below them. The baby hits it, crushing both its legs before bouncing slightly and falling again. This happens many times. She would weep if her eyes weren't as dry as dust.

Finally the baby hits a dirty, debris-strewn floor. It hits with the sound of splintering. With her monochrome night-vision, she sees the bone-baby lying still and she feels a welling of terrible sadness and terrible relief. She wants to touch the dead bone-baby but the entity won't allow it. Then there is movement. The rising and falling of crush-damaged lungs, the beating of a torn but resolute heart. The bone-baby lifts its broken skull, lolling dislocated but still attached to its neck. It scents the darkness and begins to drag itself along through the rubble. Its metal and bone protrusions catch on corners and tear its body open further. It crawls on.

Then she can see something ahead. It's a faint glow, rusty looking beyond the shadows. The bone-baby is eager. It crawls faster, scraping along like forks on china, like fingernails on a blackboard. She is suddenly afraid. More afraid than she has ever been before. The bone-baby makes progress towards the light. The passage grows tighter around them. Soon the baby's spikes and breaks are catching the walls above and below and on both sides. She finds it hard to breathe as the space grows narrower. The baby gets stuck at the end of the passage. It is only inches from the light. She sees it straining its broken body, more glass and razor and steel and bone than flesh now, straining towards the red-orange glow.

She knows the baby is crying in frustration but the entity won't let her hear it.