Nailed by the Heart (32 page)

The
mental video in his head played footage of a hungry tiger restlessly
pacing backward, forward, backward, behind the bars of a cage. The
bars were all that separated it from its small territory of the cage
and the sunny walkways of the zoo, filled with soft and tasty Homo
sapiens. Easy meat. The bars of the cage were growing flimsy now.

"Dad,
when are we going down the cellar?"

"Not
now, David. Some time soon, eh?"

"Dad
..."

"Don't
worry, kidda. We'll go down and have a good explore when we get the
chance."

"But
I've been down there tons of times. I want to show you something.
It's dead interesting."

"You've
been down before? When?"

Ooops!
David realized he shouldn't have told him. After all, he wasn't
allowed down in the cellar.

"Just
a few times. It's great down there."

His
dad was definitely not smiling. "What's down there, David?"

"Come
on, I'll show you."

David
grabbed him by the hand and pulled him to the door.

In
the corridor they met Tony. His face was red and he was panting.

"Another
one, Chris."

"What?"

"Mrs.
Christopher. She tried to ..." He noticed David. "She tried
to end things." Tony turned and spoke in a low voice that David
wasn't supposed to hear-but he did. "In the toilet. Plastic bag
over the head, tied a ribbon around her neck to seal it."

"Suffocated?"

"Damn
well nearly succeeded, too. Ruth found her just in time."

"Go
play, David, there's a good lad. We'll go down later, eh?"

Then
his dad and Tony hurried away.

Life
went on.

In
a slow, half-hearted kind of way.

That
evening the LPG bottle that fueled the caravan's gas cooker ran dry.
Tony helped Chris to change it. They manhandled the empty bottle
through the doors into the seafort building, along the stone-flagged
corridor and into one of the store rooms. In here were another five
of the blue metal cylinders, all full and each almost the size of
Tony Gateman.

Five
full cylinders, thought Chris. A lot of gas. Enough to last well into
the summer. If we live that long.

A
lot of gas. He turned an idea over in his mind like an archaeologist
examining a new artefact. A lot of gas.

"You
know, Tony, before the fresh water runs out we could rig up something
to distil sea water. That way we'd have an unlimited supply. We're
already bringing it up by the bucketful on a line when the tide's
in."

"It's
an idea." Tony's lack of enthusiasm was hardly subtle. He wasn't
interested in turning sea water into drinking water.

What
was wrong with the man? Didn't he want to survive?

"I'll
start looking around for some tubing. See if I can rig something up."

Tony
simply nodded as he helped him hoist one of the full gas cylinders
upright. As they got ready to drag the cylinder to the caravan, Tony
looked up at Chris and asked, "Did you hear a sound?"

"A
sound? What kind of sound?"

"It
doesn't matter. It's nothing ... Come on."

In
silence they pulled the full cylinder out through the doorway, the
metal base making a rasping sound that rumbled down through the
corridor, like the respiration of some great animal waking from a
deep sleep.

Mark
Faust pulled the blanket over his shoulders. Only half-past seven in
the evening, but nonetheless he tried to sleep.

He
lay on his side on the stone floor in the gundeck room, one arm
pillowing his head.

Outside,
the mist imperceptibly shifted down from white to gray as, unseen,
the sun slipped below the horizon.

Inside,
the Reverend Reed snored thickly in the corner, his face red from the
gin. Maybe he had the right idea. Sweet oblivion.

Mark
now appreciated the attraction of killing yourself. Dead, you feel no
more pain, or distress or misery.

The
Christopher woman, when they had brought her around after tearing the
plastic bag from her head, had given such a groan of disappointment
at having life thrust back at her that it made him wonder if they had
done the right thing. Maybe they should have just turned away and
left her.

Then
again, maybe if he had never left the States everything would have
been different. MAYBE. The world was full of maybes. Maybe if Hitler
had died in that gas attack in World War I; maybe if Charlie Manson
had stopped a Vietcong bullet with his face; maybe if it rained for a
year in Ethiopia and turned the deserts green; maybe if he had stayed
at home in Boston, USA, he would be sitting in front of the TV now
with a beer. A wife cooking him supper. A daughter on a date. A son
practising power chords on an electric guitar in the garage with a
couple of friends. MAYBE ... Those kind of maybes were as hard as the
nails going through Christ's hands and feet into the solid God-given
wood.

He
rolled over onto his back, trying to sleep.

He
felt like the condemned criminal, lying caged in his cell, waiting
for the last walk down to old Sparky. This was a post mortem
existence. Waiting, waiting, waiting.

When
would the end come?

Problem:
remember Wainwright and Fox?

Death
would be no ending, no finality.

It
would be the beginning of something else.

They
would wake up on the beach. With new companions.

The
radio should have been an ear to the outside. News reports, music,
weather bulletins, time checks. The sounds of a normal world.

After
five minutes, Ruth switched it off. She had scanned every wavelength
from AM to FM. All that came from the speakers was the hiss of
static. Which sounded very much like the surf that beat upon the
beach.

Chris
had been shifting junk in one of the store rooms, looking for an
axehead to hammer onto the shaft he had armed himself with. That's
when he saw the thing on the wall.

Despite
his exhaustion he had shot backwards from a crouching position like
an athlete.

"Jesus
Christ."

With
an involuntary movement of disgust he covered his face with his
hands. Then, swallowing down the unpleasant taste in his mouth, he
looked again.

There,
stuck to the wall, was a cluster of growths the color and texture of
white cheese, the largest the size of a dinner plate.

What
the growths actually were he did not know. But he knew what they
looked like.

Clinging
there, to the stone wall, just inches away from him, was a human
face.

Later,
he sat on the caravan steps, tapping nails into the end of the
axe-handle. He'd not been able to find an axehead but he'd found a
huge hammer-head caked in rust and mold. Its solid cast-iron weight,
as big as two fists side by side, felt reassuring. Ruth leaned
against the caravan wall, a cardigan around her shoulders against the
chill night air. They talked in half-whispers.

"What
are we going to do, Chris? David's six years old. He's just a baby."

He
said nothing; he tapped another nail into the end of the shaft to
secure the hammer-head.

"Chris,
we can't go on like this. Have you seen how much water is left in-"

"I
know, Ruth. I know ... I've tried to talk to Mark and Tony. I said we
needed to rig up some apparatus so we can distil fresh water from sea
water."

"And
what did they say?"

"Sod
all. Mark's retreated into himself-depressed. He blames himself for
not being able to kill those things out there. Gateman seems content
to sit and wait for some kind of supernatural cavalry to come
charging across the sand."

"And
what do you think, Chris?"

"As
Mark said when-if-it comes, this supernatural power, the first to
grab it is going to be the winner."

"But
we don't know how to do that."

"By
sacrifice, according to Tony. We give something so we can get
something in return. In this case that bucketful of miracles Gateman
goes on about."

"What
do we sacrifice?"

"Search
me."

"Has
Tony said anymore about this sacrifice thing, Chris?"

Chris
turned around to look at her, standing there in the near-dark. He
could no longer see her face, but he sensed something immense
troubling her. She wasn't asking him these questions because she
didn't know what Tony had said; she knew well enough. He realized
that his wife was using the questions to direct his train of thought.

Sacrifice.

It
always came back to that. As if sacrifice was the only solution.
Sacrifice. It was unthinkable. He could not even accept the idea of
it. It was as if his mind were a computer into which someone was
struggling to insert a new programme. It refused the reprogramming.
This mind would not load that barbaric concept. It belonged in the
tomb with those long-dead men and women who had practiced it.

Chris
changed the subject.

"Is
David asleep?"

"He
should be. I left him looking at a comic, but he's exhausted."

His
wife pulled the cardigan closer around her shoulders and shivered.
"Perhaps someone will come, Chris. It's Monday tomorrow. There
have to be deliveries to the village. It's not as if we're on an
island."

No,
we're not an island, thought Chris, but for all the contact we have
with the outside world we might as well be on the dark side of the
fucking moon.

He
tapped the final nail into the wood.

"Oh
God! Get it away, get it away!"

Screaming.

"God!
Oh God, oh God, oh God, God, God, God... Please ... Oh-oh ..."

Ruth
was first to reach the screaming woman as she ran from the seafort
building. Immediately she stopped screaming but clutched the side of
her head and sobbed breathlessly.

Chris
didn't know the woman's name; she was in her mid-fifties, very thin,
with tied-back gray hair.

A
couple of the other villagers came to see the cause of the commotion,
but significantly most didn't bother to rouse themselves from their
apathetic slumbers.

Tony
Gateman, who had been standing on top of the wall, came puffing down
the steps, his face red beneath the thickening stubble on his cheeks.

"What
happened?"

"I'm
not sure," said Ruth, holding the sobbing woman.

Chris
immediately thought the woman had found someone who had succeeded in
committing suicide, but all she could pant out was that she'd seen
something.

"Get
her into the caravan." Ruth sounded in control. "We'll get
her a drink. ... She's calming down now."

Ten
minutes later, a blanket around her shoulders, cupping a steaming mug
of tea in her hands, she was able to talk.

She
had been to the toilet, one of the old ones in the seafort building.
When she had finished she had looked down into the bowl as she got
ready to pour down a jug of sea-water to flush it. The waste from the
toilets simply discharged via a wide-bore pipe straight into the sea.

What
she had seen there had nearly paralyzed her heart.

Squeezing
up around the U-bend as tightly as a rat squeezing through a piece of
hose had been a human face. Chris imagined a flat, expressionless
face squeezing up through the hole through three pints of water and
urine in the bottom of the bowl.

It
had been the strange, flattened face of a girl, its eyes as dull as
those of a dead fish on a slab.

She
hadn't remembered much after that.