No One Gets Out Alive (58 page)

The brown leathery flesh of the tiny arms of the thing in the box suggested they were dry, and had been preserved at some time. Sticklike arms either side of elbow joints no bigger than dried
dates, ended in hands too finely detailed with little digits and fingernails to be fake. A round wooden object, like a wooden bowl, was clutched by the small, withered hands: a drum skinned in dark
leather or hide. The little body was clad in what looked like a once-white but now filth-smeared dress of calico or lace, made for an infant, like an old-fashioned christening dress.

The small withered head was entirely black, almost black enough to obscure the features. But the skull was covered thickly with more hair than such a tiny scalp could ever feasibly produce. A
wig. A wig of various tones and hues revealed as the light moved across it. Donor hair.

The mouth was open, or what remained of the lips were parted, and a small row of yellow milk teeth were revealed in a grin. The head’s tiny eyes were closed, something for which Amber was
deeply grateful.

A long satin sheath covered what served for legs and feet and protruded from beneath the hem of the gown.

‘Don’t . . . don’t touch it. Please,’ Amber said as Josh reached inside the box.
Just let me destroy it.

His hands paused in their descent. ‘I don’t understand . . .’

Amber waited for Josh to finish the statement, but he seemed disinclined or too preoccupied to follow his own train of thought.

‘The body,’ he eventually said. ‘I can see it.’

Amber tried and failed to swallow the bolus of dread and anxiety that clogged her throat like putty stuffed into a wet pipe. She wanted to tell Josh to get away, to just get the fuck away from
the thing in the box, but she could not find her voice.

‘It’s . . . It’s stuck to . . . The head is stitched onto the body . . . It’s a snake. A black snake. The hair is real too. The dress. Jesus, the dress . . . Look at the
dress . . . Torch, here, shine it here.’

Amber could barely move her arm, let alone direct the torch beam onto the front of the small, tatty figure’s dress, partly obscured by the leathery drum that hung about its neck and
nestled into what she had thought was a lap, but must be a coil hidden by the dirty calico gown, the satin sleeve made for a tail.

Josh took the torch from Amber’s hand. ‘Look.’ That was all he said as he directed the beam onto the front of the dress, at what resembled childish, beaded necklaces festooned
about the doll’s neck. But under closer examination the stiff, brown, petal-shaped objects, that at first appeared like dried fruits or spices, were revealed to be ears: shrivelled human
ears. And between such ghastly decorations, what, at a casual glance, may have looked like dirty sea shells or unpolished stones strung on a thong, grew large in her comprehension as teeth. She was
looking at human teeth. Some were black with a great age, others a mere ivory-yellow because they had been harvested in more recent times.

‘Fingers. God, there are fingers stitched into the fabric. Toes. Amber, we need to—’

Josh failed to finish another sentence. Instead he stood up quickly, his hand dipping in and out of the pocket of his jacket in one smooth motion, and he barked in a voice she had never heard
before, ‘Stop right there!’

Amber flinched and issued a small shriek. Then she noticed Josh’s eyes, and how inside those brown eyes disbelief fought with horror and the honed expertise of a man of war, who now
pointed a firearm at an enemy. She turned to follow the direction of his gaze and found herself staring into the gaping mouth of the garage.

She screamed.

And the thin, dirty figure that Amber saw clearly, before it moved past the front of the garage and out of sight into the darkness of the driveway, she managed to ascertain was female.

Female and naked, with blood-blackened ankles and wrists, and something pulled tight about its throat, like a dog leash. What little she saw of the trespasser’s face that was not concealed
by filthy, tangled hair was bloodless, and so white it could have been blue. But the dark mouth had hung open in imbecilic wonderment. And such eyes as it had were colourless.

The figure had moved its head in their direction, rather than directly at them, and then staggered away in confusion. As it stumbled out of sight, the piteous breaking voice of a distressed
young woman filled the otherwise silent air of the night. ‘I . . . don’t . . . where . . . where . . . this . . . am I?’

Amber turned her face to Josh, as if in need of some acknowledgement that what she had just seen had indeed been seen by her friend too. But her eyes moved past him to what lay behind, and to
something that had recently altered within the broken earth at his heels.

Inside the little box, and within the small black head, a pair of marble-white eyes had opened.

It was time for her to take control and to protect Josh, because she did not like the way his hand shook; a hand that gripped a gun that was connected to an arm that also
trembled, directed by a traumatized mind behind a bloodless face that jumped with tics.

‘Josh. Josh, mate. She’s making us see them. Her. In the box. They’re not really there. And there will be more of them. Please, Josh. Look at me. We’ve got to get rid of
it. Outside. And burn it. A gun is no good.’

And while she tried to talk Josh down from wherever his senses had climbed, so taut and trembling, Amber kept her eyes on the wooden chest behind his heels. She gently and carefully eased
herself around his body to get closer to the crate that carried the tiny black queen, because Amber felt as if her life depended upon the shutting of the purple velvet curtain, and the concealing
of those small white eyes, that were no bigger than pebbles but now shone horribly from the dull black leather of the face.

Slowly, almost unable to move her feet in fear, Amber inched towards the box and then quickly flicked the curtain across the figure inside the crate. She bent her knees and raised the heavy
vessel from the earth and instantly hated the idea of the chest’s occupant being so close to her throat. Such was her revulsion of what she carried, she nearly dropped her cargo, twice.

Her passenger stank of earth, of death, and of the reeking dusty darkness it had resided in for a century. About the box hung the fragrance of 82 Edgehill Road, and the scent of those who had
lain so long beneath its floorboards and crouched inside its walls. And so powerful was the odour of a history black with murder, she could have been inside that old house in Birmingham again.

Tears welled over her eyes, and then those tears rolled down her cheeks. ‘Petrol,’ she barely managed to say. ‘Josh, petrol. Quick. Quickly. The fucking petrol!’

She wasn’t sure he heard, because he did not move for the petrol can, but stood immobile, an arm raised, as he stared at the mouth of the garage, perhaps wanting to unsee what had so
recently staggered across the driveway.

Amber stooped and hooked a finger around the plastic handle of the can. Out into the darkness on unsteady feet she carried the Black Maggie, and her sloshing can of fuel, out of the garage and
across the rear of her car, down the side of her house, headed for the rear garden.

Instinct demanded she take
it
away from the house, get it outside, out of the lightless confines it seemed to favour, off the property, and out of the back gate, so it could burn in the
very fields that had been blessed by the sacrifice of its most devoted disciple.

Josh came after her, in silence. At least she hoped it was Josh so close to her heels, but she was too afraid to look behind to make sure.

The security lights clicked on around the farmhouse when she stumbled beneath the sensors on the walls. But beyond the boundary of her property, the night and the fields of night were obsidian
black, and more silent than she had known any place on earth.

And she only slowed and then stopped mere feet from the aperture between the side of the house and the perimeter wall, that opened onto the lawn of the rear garden, when it appeared to her that
another visitor was down there, waiting somewhere upon the orange-tinted grass. A visitor with a voice that was all too familiar.

‘And then you said . . . I said . . . I wouldn’t . . . unreasonable . . . but who was I . . . you, you told me . . . you swore . . . it was . . . meant something . . . a sign . . .
frightened, the more I . . . and now I know . . .’

‘Don’t look, Josh! Please God, don’t look at it! We’ve got to get this lit. Burn it. Now! Burn it. Burn it. Burn it. Burn it.’ And she kept on repeating the phrase
in this unreal night to remind herself of her purpose and the sole intention of this rickety journey she had made into the flood-lit garden.

Another stood on the patio, but Amber refused it her attention. ‘Don’t look, Josh. Please don’t look,’ she shouted again into the cool air, as if to press an oversized
lid onto the tin of her own red madness and the white lightning of hysteria that sparked and flickered amidst her disintegrating thoughts.

What she saw in her peripheral vision, this pale and wasted and unclothed thing with its bony arms raised to the black sky, Josh must have seen in greater detail, because he began to say,
‘What? Who? Amber?’ in a voice like a little boy.

A fourth intruder spoke, but Amber turned her face away the moment she saw the brown, bandy legs of a silhouette, too thin to be alive, that skittered more than walked across the ground on the
far side of the garden, as if it were circling them on the terrible shanks that serviced as legs. ‘Involved . . . you are . . . you said . . . not that simple . . . must understand . . . Not
going . . . refuse. I said it. I said it . . . wouldn’t stop . . . and look . . . what happened . . . the lights . . . even listening.’

‘Stop! Right there. Stop!’ It was Josh shouting behind her.

Amber left him and headed to the garden gate that stood before the acres of night-drowned maize. She did nothing more than flinch when the handgun began to pop.

‘Donegal, you bastard!’ Josh shouted from a position closer to the house, before his voice seemed to continue from a distance as if the plain they stood upon had expanded, stretched
impossibly. ‘Stop, Donegal. Or I’ll drop you.’

She kept her eyes down, on the grass, on her feet upon the grass that was real, tinted amber by the lights that were real, attached to the house that was real. She was moving, she was breathing,
she was carrying something so heavy her arms screamed in pain and resistance, and her hands began to numb, which meant she could feel and that this was all real.

At the edge of the orangey light that lit up the inside of the treeline and the stone of the perimeter walls, and in a fashion that inappropriately suggested a nocturnal celebration was about
take place, Amber detected fresh activity that brought her to a stop. There was a bustle of vague silhouettes gathered about the rear gate. Their faces were indistinct, but their thin arms were
raised in the darkness. But whether in awe or from some mute and desperate plea for mercy she did not know. She looked away. Out of the bustle she heard Ryan call her name once:
‘Steph!’

But from the old oak tree in the bottom corner of her garden, others demanded her attention.

She steeled herself and did not look again at the four women who kicked their little booted feet, as they swayed and buffeted each other beneath the limb they hanged from. They were as real as
the blanched bark of the tree they swung below. A mere glance had informed her that the eyes of the hanged were open and bright and that their dark mouths were moving and mouthing things she could
not hear.

It was a dream. She was seeing things from a dream. Being made to see things from a dream.

‘Dad, help me now! Dad. Please, Dad. Josh! Help me now,’ Amber shouted as she cried, and turned her head to find Josh.

There he was, on his hands and knees, his glasses gone. He had taken some of his clothes off, his jacket, his shirt. His pale, freckled torso shone like a grub as he went round and round on his
hands and knees, in a circle on the amber grass, blind but talking to himself. With each hand he slapped the earth in some demented rhythm.

A tall, blackened silhouette, a scarecrow vestige of a freakishly tall man, now stood upon the patio. Beside the lanky figure, a smaller, withered creature wearing glasses and a dirty coat
grinned at Amber. It cupped its shrivelled genitals inside a thin, brown, four-fingered hand.

And in her panic and disorientation her vision skimmed the upper floor of the farmhouse. Indoors, all of the lights burned brightly. Thin, naked shapes draped in polythene clattered their
fingers against the window panes. Amber tore her face away from the house and looked at her feet.

Beyond the line of trees on her left, a little boy she could not see broke into song:

‘All around the Mulberry Bush, The monkey chased the weasel. The monkey stopped to pull up his sock, Pop! goes the weasel. Half a pound of tuppenny rice, Half a pound of treacle. Four
maids to open the door, Pop! goes the weasel.’

Ryan called to her again, from behind her back this time, from nearer the house. His mouth was no longer full of blood. His voice was clear. ‘Steph. Help me.’

She used all of her will and concentration to prevent herself turning her head.

Inside the wooden box a small drum began to beat a rhythm she had heard before. The sound tried to put an end to her heartbeat.

Josh’s hands fell upon the grass in time to the beat of the tiny leather drum.

She stumbled to the bottom of the lawn, before that backdrop of so many blackened and piteous figures, half concealed by darkness. A scant-haired congregation of stained bones was waving; their
gaunt postures quivered as with the ecstasy of having risen.

Thine honour, these maidens, thine honour, the corn doth rise like grass.

Then silence came, and darkness, total darkness, as if all of the security lights and the lights inside the house had failed. This was followed by a distant scream that made Josh sound feminine.
And into the black came the noise of a pack of dogs fighting each other, snarling, scrapping over something on the ground, somewhere far off. She thought she heard the gun again.