Holiday of the Dead (45 page)

The blockade was littered with decaying, properly dead and half eaten corpses. Most of them were soldiers and there were weapons scattered around them. Larry whistled in appreciation as he helped himself to an M-16. He tossed Hank one as well.

“Bad ass,” he commented as he saw Beth test the weight of a discarded USAS-12 automatic shotgun. “Now that’s some firepower.”

“Didn’t help these guys much though, did it?” Beth said as she examined the boats moored up in the distance. “Either of you guys know how to sail? We don’t want something that’ll run out of fuel on us and leave us stuck in the middle of nowhere.”

“Larry knows everything there is to know about boats, lady. We’re going deep sea fishing,” Hank informed her.

Beth’s expression was a mixture of pity and hope as she offered him a smile. “I hope so,” she said. “I really do.”

“Wait up a sec!” Larry ordered them as they started for the docks. He disappeared into a nearby gas station and emerged a few minutes later with his M-16 slung over his shoulder and carrying two cases of Bud Light and a bag of ice. “If we’re taking a fishing vacation, for who knows how long, by God, we’re going to do it right!”

The docks were clear of the dead as they boarded a small white fishing boat by the name of
Seahorse
. Larry cast off its lines as Beth and Hank loaded up what few supplies the three of them had been able to loot from neighbouring boats. A lone dead man came shuffling down the dock towards them at the last moment as the boat drifted free of the dock. Beth raised her automatic shotgun and put five rounds into its chest, cutting it in two.

“That’s for the girls,” Larry heard her whisper under her breath. He put a hand on her shoulder. Tears rolled down her cheeks. Larry pulled her to him and hugged her tight.

“It’s going to be okay,” he assured her. “We’re safe now. It’s all over.”

As the sun set over a dead world, the sail boat glided across a languid sea. Larry and Beth reclined in lawn chairs on the deck with cold beers in hand as Hank stood at the boat’s side railing, his line cast, and fishing pole in hand. “You see, Larry,” he told them. “Don’t you feel better now? This vacation rocks!”

THE END

HOME IS THE SAILOR,

HOME FROM THE SEA

By

William Meikle

I smoked too many cigarettes, sipped too much Highland Park and let Bessie Smith tell me just how bad men were. For once thin afternoon sun shone on Glasgow; the last traces of winter just a distant memory. Old Joe started up “Just One Cornetto” in the shop downstairs. I didn’t have a case, and I didn’t care.

It was Easter weekend, and all was right with the world.

I should have known it was too good to last.

I heard him coming up the stairs. Sherlock Holmes could have told you his height, weight, shoe-size and nationality from the noise he made. All I knew was that he was either ill or very old; he’d taken the stairs like he was climbing a mountain with a Sherpa on his back.

He rapped on the outside door.

Shave and a haircut, two bits.

“Come in. Adams Massage Services is open for business.”

At first I thought it was someone wandering in off the street. He was unkempt, unshaven, eyes red and bleary. He wore an old brown wool suit over a long, out of shape cardigan and his hair stood out from his scalp in strange clumps. I’ve rarely seen a man more in need of a drink.

Or a meal.

He was so thin as to be almost skeletal, the skin on his face stretched tight across his cheeks. I was worried that if I made him smile his face might split open like an over-ripe fruit.

“Are you Adams?” he said as he came in. He turned out to be younger than I’d first taken him for, somewhere in his fifties at a guess, but his mileage was much higher. “Jim at the Twa Dugs said you might be able to help me.”

He sat, perched at the front of the chair, as if afraid to relax. His eyes flickered around the room, never staying long on anything, never looking straight at me.

Time for business.

He laughed, making it sound like a sob. He took a bundle of fifty pound notes from his pocket and slapped them on the table. I tried not to salivate.

“No. This is no job for the terminally narrow-minded,” he said. “I need somebody with a certain kind of experience.
Your
kind of experience.”

Somebody put a cold brick in my stomach, and I had a sudden urge to stick my fingers in my ears. I got the whisky out of the drawer. I offered him one. He shook his head, but his eyes didn’t stray from the bottle. I poured his measure into a glass alongside my own and sent them chasing after each other before speaking.

“And exactly what kind of experience do I need to help you?”

A good storyteller practices his tale. At first, when he tells the story, he sounds like your dad ruining his favourite dinner table joke for the hundredth time.

Oh wait … did I tell you the horse had a pig with him?

But gradually he begins to understand the rhythm of the story, and how it depends on knowing all the little details, even the ones that no one ever sees or hears. He knows what colour of trousers he was wearing the day the story took place, he knows that the Police dog had a bad leg, he knows that the toilet block smelled of piss and shit. He has the sense of place so firmly in his mind that even he almost believes he's been there. Once he’s done all that, he tells the killer story, complete with unexpected punch line.

Then there’s the Ian Duncan method … scatter information about like confetti and hope that somebody can put enough of it together to figure out what had happened to who.

I raised an eyebrow, and that was enough to at least get him started.

“It was four years ago we bought the hotel in Largs,” he started.

“Well there’s your first mistake,” I replied, but he didn’t acknowledge me. Now that he’d started the story, he meant to finish it. The tale he told would have been outlandish to anyone else’s ears, but like he’d said, I knew better, from bitter experience.

I let him finish – sick customers, ancient curse and all, before asking the important question.

“And how do you think I can help?”

Just telling me the story had taken it out of him. I forced a glass of whisky on him – it was either that or watch him die in the chair. He almost choked on it, but managed to keep it all down before replying.

“Come down for the weekend. There’s a room I need you to see. Maybe you’ll be able to make sense of it where I can’t.”

I
wanted
to say no, but he’d put his money on the table, and that got my attention. Besides, his story had me intrigued, and I hadn’t been
doon the watter
to Largs since I was a lad.

What better time than a holiday weekend?

Largs is where old people go to die – a Victorian seaside resort that is itself dying slowly of neglect. The Vikings tried to sack it eight hundred years ago. Maybe it would have been better all round if they’d succeeded.

I’d spent many long weekend trips here as a lad. My parents couldn’t afford to go any further afield, and to a young boy one beach was as good as another, even if the weather was rarely good enough to take advantage on the long patch of golden sand to the south of the town. As I got off the train I could already see that the place hadn’t changed much. It was raining, that steady drizzle peculiar to the west of Scotland, the kind that you just
know
is going to last all week.

Luckily I didn’t have to go far. Duncan had given me instructions before leaving me in the office, but I could have found it with my eyes shut as it was on the sea front, two hotels down from the Barrfields Theatre and next to the putting green where my dad used to swear for Scotland.

The Seaview Hotel lived on past glories from the days when the middle class of Glasgow filled it every weekend of the summer. Back in the twenties it had been the height of fashion, but now it exuded the faint whiff of decay. It was a rambling, Edwardian building, with thirty rooms and nearly as many corridors. The décor was all mock-Scottish; dark furniture, stuffed stag heads and heavy on the tartan for wallpaper and carpets; a hideous red and yellow that clashed with everything else in the hotel.

Duncan met me in the hallway and led me through to the dining room. There were six patrons sitting at a table by the bay window, and not one of them looked like they were going to last out the day, being as thin and wasted as Duncan.

“Jim McLeod was an old Navy man. He retired to Largs with his wife and had this place built. It was to be their dream home, but she died before it could be finished. After that McLeod became a collector,” he said. “And he wasn’t fussy about where he bought his pieces. Many of them were stolen to order from other collectors or museums. The story goes that someone took umbrage and laid a curse on the whole hotel.”

I nodded.

“But here’s what I don’t get. Why now?”

Duncan didn’t reply, but I saw a look in his eyes I recognised. He was hiding something. And he was afraid to the point of abject terror. I took pity on him.

“Let’s cut to the chase. Show me this room you told me about, and we’ll see if we can get to the bottom of this.”

The room at the highest point of the hotel was packed wall to wall with antiques. Even to my unpractised eye I knew that there was a small fortune just lying there in the accumulated dust. From the look of things McLeod’s passion had been African tribal masks, and a variety of them leered down from the walls interspersed with weapons and beaded necklaces. But the thing that Duncan had brought me here to see was spread out under a pane of glass in a long display case.

At first glance it looked like a crude map, tracing a journey across Africa, ending at the mouth of the Zambezi River.

“McLeod thought it belonged to David Livingstone,” Duncan said. “But I can’t see it myself. Livingstone was a devout man of God. He wouldn’t have anything to do with this depravity.”

I saw what he meant as I leaned for a closer look. What I had taken for paper was in fact skin, so thin as to be almost translucent. I didn’t have to ask the question.

A map made on human skin, drawn in blood.

I had a good look at it, but it seemed I had already got as much information as I was going to get. Duncan was looking at me expectantly.

“Well, what do you think?” he asked.

I was still unsure exactly what he wanted from me. Sure, the curse
seemed
to be working … residents in the hotel were certainly wasting away beyond even what you’d expect in a pensioner’s graveyard like Largs.

But how could I find out why?

I only knew one man who might help, and I was loath to involve him. I’d damaged my good friend Doug enough in too many cases. He was at his happiest right where he now spent most of his time, deep in the stacks of the Hunterian Museum storerooms.

I sent him a couple of pictures by email from my mobile phone, knowing even as I hit
Send
that it might be some time before he got back to his desk to receive them. In the meantime, I needed to maintain the illusion that I knew what I was doing.

My plan to interview the guests came to nothing, mainly because two of them were dead face down in their soup, and the other four were too far-gone to notice.

Duncan showed little concern, and only became agitated on my mention of calling the Police.

“There’s no need for that Mr. Adams,” he said. Once he’d written me a cheque for an extra five grand I came to agree with him. I helped him drag the bodies out of the dining room. It took little effort – the old folks weighed no more than a small child at most.

Duncan had me take them out the back of the hotel and left me alone for a minute – long enough for me to wonder if the five grand was enough.

To either side the adjoining hotels had bowling-green flat lawns, lush and verdant. The Seaview on the other hand looked like someone had ploughed the lawn over, leaving lumps and bumps across the whole surface. It was only when Duncan came back with two shovels that I realised why.