Survival of Thomas Ford, The (22 page)

The Subaru was devouring the hillside. Jimmy was impressed. The Pole seemed to be pulling something terrible out of the vehicle’s engine, something beyond the scope of metal, oil and fuel.

“I think you’re going to beat the record,” Jimmy’s new, quiet voice said from the passenger seat. “Me and Robert got almost all the way to the caravan a few weeks ago. The day the woman went into the loch. The Volvo’s a good car for a mission like this eh? Subaru’s good too mind.”

Lanski turned quickly to look at Jimmy. Saliva had seeped from the edge of Jimmy’s mouth and shone in the reflected headlight glare. Lanski thought it was blood for a moment, then he turned to face the hill again. There was a surge of cleansing energy within the Pole’s kidneys as he thrashed the Subaru’s power out against the hill’s gradient. The car’s broad nose lurched in the air. On the right, the abandoned tractor and van were coming up fast. Jimmy looked past Lanski’s long nose and out the driver’s window. He saw the corroded wheel arch on the tractor’s near-side.

“That’s all like sculpture eh?” said Jimmy.

He laughed.

“All them vehicles like, it’s no like an accident at all eh?”

The Subaru engine screamed.

“Whoooo,”
went Jimmy weakly.

A grinding, horrible sound came from the engine. Jimmy shook his head.

“No, man, we got higher with the Volvo. No kidding. You’ll see our tracks maybe. We parked up here all that night.”

Jimmy remembered the cold air on his back as he’d danced here in Lorna’s boots, the white butterfly dancing with him invisibly in the utter darkness before Robert had spoiled it, turning on the headlights. Jimmy had known the butterfly was there dancing with him by the brush of its wings against his naked body. He hadn’t known it was a butterfly. It hadn’t mattered to him if it was a butterfly or a ghostly mouth, the dance had been all that mattered. Now it seemed the dance was nearly done.

The Subaru lost all momentum and came to a stop. Lanski pulled the handbrake up hard. His long wrist reached up to the ignition key as Jimmy watched. It seemed to take years for the Pole’s hand to turn the key. When the engine died there was not the pure silence that Jimmy had expected. The generator’s roar penetrated the Subaru’s shell. It was only then that Jimmy consciously noticed the area of light further up the hill, where the caravan was.

Jimmy frowned, then smiled.

“My dad’s generator, I’ve not seen that going since I was wee! That’s mad, man, that old thing still going.”

Jimmy turned to look at Lanski. The front of the Pole’s face was pale from the headlights, but the side of his ear was silver from the moon.

“We should have stayed here to live, you know that, Lanski? My dad was going to build a house for us up here. It’s a strange place, man.”

“Your father is crazy now boy. Like an old, white wolf.”

Lanski sniffed.

“This place is like where I grew up, boy, in
Poland
. My grandmother had an old house in the forest there.”

Jimmy blinked, staring at Lanski’s ear. It was easier to keep staring at the ear than he felt it would be to turn his head to face the front again.

“Were there wolves there?” said Jimmy.

Lanski nodded.

“What did you do with them?”

Lanski frowned.

“We left them alone, if they left us alone.”

Lanski looked at the McCallum boy’s face. It seemed one side of the boy’s face had become slack, the mouth and eye had started to hang low on one side as though the boy’s face had melted there.

“Can you walk, boy?” said Lanski.

Jimmy tried to shrug. He couldn’t be sure whether his shoulders had actually moved or not. Lanski stepped out of the Subaru, onto the angled track. He walked uphill and across the beam of the headlights. He opened Jimmy’s door and leaned over. He undid the seatbelt and placed a palm against the wet material wrapped around Jimmy’s wound. His hand came away hot with Jimmy’s blood.

“Come on,” said Lanski.

He held one of Jimmy’s hands and lifted the boy by the shoulder of his jacket, until Jimmy was standing shakily on the hillside path.

“I don’t know man,” said Jimmy in a whisper that Lanski only just caught over the wind. “I feel pretty funny, man. My feet feel funny. I can’t feel my feet like.”

Jimmy laughed breathily.

“I know I’m standing on them like, but I can’t feel them.”

“Walk on them anyway,” said Lanski.

He put an arm round the boy’s waist, careful to keep his hand and arm off the wound. They moved slowly up the hillside, in the Subaru’s headlight beam. Lanski was carrying most of the boy’s weight. The roar of the generator grew louder and more insane with each awkward step the Lanski-Jimmy three-legged beast made up the hillside. They passed beyond the range of the Subaru’s headlights and into a moonlit zone. Jimmy and Lanski both watched Jimmy’s feet which made odd, floppy movements as the boy tried to keep walking on the hillside. Lanski’s arm, supporting the boy’s weight, felt leaden already. Dragging Thomas Ford had drained that arm’s power for tonight. Jimmy looked up and saw the perimeter of the generator lights. Through the trees ahead he saw the shape of the aluminium caravan.

“There’s our home man,” said Jimmy.

Lanski couldn’t hear him over the wind and the generator. He leaned his head closer to the boy’s mouth.

Jimmy nodded and kept looking at the caravan.

“There were cats under us,” he said. “It was warm in the winter man. No-one’s thought of that yet eh? Only my dad. Cats under the floor.”

Lanski looked at the boy’s laughing, twisted face. The boy’s weight seemed to have doubled. There was no way to get him much further. Lanski looked at the caravan’s shell and headed them towards it.

The generator was screaming by the time Lanski leaned the boy’s weight against the aluminium and let him go. Jimmy’s body twisted as he slid down and landed on his side in the dead leaves by the caravan’s base of raised brick. Lanski watched him look around for a few seconds, confused. Then Jimmy arched his back, dug into the ground with his feet, and levered himself until he was sitting up against the side of the caravan. The space in the bricks at the caravan’s base, where the cats had gone in and out, was just by Jimmy’s hand. Jimmy looked at the space as though he expected to see a cat come out. He shifted his hand jerkily and poked it into the dark hole.

Jimmy blinked and looked up at Lanski. He swallowed.

“There’s nothing you can do,” said Jimmy. “No-one could ever do anything about my dad.”

Lanski couldn’t hear over the generator. He squatted down beside the boy and looked at his mouth.

Jimmy shook his head.

“I danced naked in the pure darkness with a white butterfly, just down there man. I had Lorna’s boots on. Robert saw me.”

Lanski watched Jimmy’s face as the boy laughed. Lanski looked away, and up, towards the moon. He stood abruptly and walked across to the generator. He pressed his thumb against the fat button and the engine came to a stop with a last, slow grinding whir.

“You stay here, boy,” said Lanski. “I go and see then, if you’re right, that nothing can be done about your father.”

Jack McCallum stopped shoveling and stared down the hillside at the silence and darkness where the generator lights had been.

“There was enough petrol for hours,” said McCallum to Ford. “Maybe the old thing gave up finally after all these years eh?”

Jack smiled and shrugged.

“I should get a new one anyway. All I have to do is steal one off one of my own sites.”

Jack laughed in the moonlight.

“You’re a strange man, Ford. You left your wife to die in a car and you’re still whining about it. But here you are watching me burying your new woman and you do nothing.”

Thomas Ford’s mouth opened and worked silently for a moment. Jack McCallum shook his head. He dug the shovel hard into the pile of earth at his shoulder.

“What do you do for a living, Ford, if you don’t mind me asking?”

Ford did not answer.

“I don’t think you work with your hands, Ford, do you? That’s the trouble, there’s too many folk around these days who don’t ever make anything real with their own two hands. It makes you a baby your whole life, that sort of thing. You have to get a feel, like, for the earth and the stones and that. It makes you sleep better at night. I’ll sleep well tonight, see, after this.”

Jack sprayed a thin layer of loose soil across the girl from one end of her to the other. Thomas Ford stared. The blankets were gone now, hidden by the earth. Ground was being laid down on ground now, covering the girl. She was gone already.

Thomas Ford let out a low moan as he stared at Jack McCallum’s face.

Jack looked back at Ford in the silver light and grinned.

Down the hillside, in the darkness among the tight-packed trees, Lanski stopped walking as Thomas Ford’s low wail travelled through the air toward him. The sound seemed pitched at some perfect frequency that stole Lanski’s energy and left him weak and shaking as he stood. Not far from him, the gang of feral cats sank their bellies to the earth and hissed as the sound reached their more sensitive ears and souls. Lanski blinked in the darkness. Another sound came down the hillside. It seemed to Lanski like the sound of earth being broken by a shovel. He focused on the sound’s direction and began walking again through the leaves. A clearing appeared ahead, moonlit and open. Lanski hesitated, then walked into the light there.

The cats saw him appear, from their hiding place in the trees, a tall, pale spirit he seemed to them, as he travelled through the open area.

Lanski stopped halfway across the clearing and stood to listen again. The wind picked up for a second, then Lanski nearly cried out at what felt like a kiss on his cheek. He flung up a hand wildly. He blinked and stared around the air above his head. The kiss came again and this time Lanski saw the butterfly. He put his hand down. The boy had said something about a butterfly. Lanski’s grandmother had made him listen, again and again, telling him that she had believed his father had come back to her, often, as a white butterfly, following her and staying with her as she walked in the forest alone. Lanski had only half-listened to the old woman, but he remembered her words now. Lanski’s eyebrows raised and his lips parted as he watched the butterfly dance in the moonlight above him. He began to take a step forward but the creature darted towards his face so suddenly that Lanski felt forced to move back. He could still hear the regular and unmistakable sound of earth being shovelled further up the hill. But the idea had come into Lanski’s mind now that the butterfly was not only a butterfly and that it was warning him. Warning him not to go further. Lanski stood in the clearing, shaking his head, trying to get the idea out of his mind. It was not his own idea, it was an idea of his grandmother’s. She was dead, like her cat, Ixor, both of them buried in another country, on another continent. Their bones should be silent now, not interfering with things so far away from themselves. But they did interfere. Lanski wasn’t sure now. He remembered Ford telling him not to come back here.

He had probably killed McCallum’s son, taking him here, instead of to a hospital.

If he kept on going, what else could happen?

The sound of the shovelling filled Lanski’s ears as he stared at the white creature’s floating, vibrant dance.

The shovel was starting to hurt Jack McCallum’s hands now, at the palms and the area between thumb and forefinger. How long had it been since he’d done any real work? Maybe not since the last time he had to come out here and bury someone. Was it getting old or just getting soft that was making him like this? Jack couldn’t tell. He had waited for Ford to do something, to stop him, but Ford was obviously broken, just like Shandlin had gone as he watched his own grave being dug. Jack could understand it better tonight than ever before, the thin membrane that existed between who you were and what you could crumble into. Jack knew it didn’t take much and it didn’t take long. Even before the trouble with Jimmy, Jack had felt something weakening at his centre. It had been the butterflies that started it, they had been getting to him gradually. The butterflies and the gas. When Ford talked about the butterfly and the gas a few minutes ago, Jack had ignored it and pretended not to care, but his gut had twisted. Someone else then had seen it. It wasn’t just an illusion in Jack’s brain. It was real. They were all over the hillside now, these white butterflies. It wasn’t like the cats that might be out there. If the cats were out there, then Jack knew why they were there, he knew he had brought them. But the white butterflies were another matter. Jack knew there had been none here until he buried the first body.

The gas was even worse. The gas was coming up from the earth exactly where the bodies had been buried. Jack had seen it and gone to the library, then later on the computer, looking for information about bodies and gas, but everything he read told him that it was impossible for gas to be emitted this long after the burials.

Jack had seen hazing in the air over the grave of the Irish builder from twenty years ago, down by the abandoned tractor, he had seen that the last time he came out here. It was gas, like Ford said. And the butterflies seemed to be attracted to the gas.

McCallum paused, with a shovelful of earth held heavy and ready to throw on the girl’s mound. He looked up at Ford. He could see tears on the man’s cheek, under the eye that still worked.

“You shouldn’t take it personally Ford. That’s what I think I’ve learned after all these years. I mean, you didn’t choose to drive your car into the loch eh? No, it was my boy that made you do that. I don’t think we choose much eh? Not really. This is all…”

Jack stood straight and waved the shovelful of earth around in front of himself, in a gesture that seemed to include the grave, the girl, the moonlight, and the whole tree-laden hillside.

“It’s all, sort of, impersonal eh? That’s how it seems to me.”

Jack shrugged. He smiled.

“My wife’s probably waiting for me at home right now. Well, she will be. Cathy. She’ll be awake and worrying about me, and about my boy.”