0513485001343534196 christopher fowler (20 page)

'I can keep pace with you, no problem,' she said defensively.

'Come and give me a hand.'

The two bartenders were ignoring customers in order to conduct some kind of odd argument with each other. Something was clearly wrong for them both to look so worried. 'What's going on?' Bax shouted over the music as one of the boys distractedly took his order.

'They found some little kid on the wasteground this afternoon,'

explained the barman. 'Dead. Raped. A little boy.'

'Christ. That's terrible.'

'Yeah. One of the customers just told me there's a crowd hanging around outside.'

'What do you mean?'

'A bunch of people who live on the estate. At least, that's where he thinks they're from.'

Bax was appalled. 'They don't think the person who did it is in
here
?'

The barman looked at him as if he was stupid. 'I wouldn't be surprised

- would you?'

News of the boy's death had swept around the estate with electrifying speed, and as it passed along each street it gained gruesome new details.

The boy was local and liked by all. Some other kids had seen him talking to a man, not someone from around here, a visitor, a stranger. The only people who came to this area did so to frequent
that
pub across the road. The pub was just five hundred yards from the wasteground, the perfect sanctuary. They were shielding him inside, protecting one of their own. In the minds of the growing mob, deviants of that nature knew no difference between love and rape, between adults and children.

At first there had only been a handful of people on the pavement outside, but over the last hour the numbers had swelled until there were more than a hundred restless men and women. The police had been called to control the crowd, and at the moment were nervously discussing the problem in the next street while they awaited the arrival of the two Armed Response Vehicles they had requested. Their relationship with the estate residents had never been an easy one, and at this point one wrong move, one misunderstood command, would start a riot.

They lingered outside, the dark faces of the multitude, muttering to one another, cupping matches in their hands to light cigarettes, shifting back and forth from one group to the next trying to glean details, waiting for news, waiting for action, and not prepared to wait much longer.'

When you think about it, this is really silly. A bunch of grown men standing around in their underclothes.' Woody slid her arm around Bax as they watched the dancefloor, but her eyes kept straying to the dark recesses beyond. Jack was still at the counter having an intense conversation with Simon and the barman. 'Oh, I don't know,' said Bax.

'It's kind of like having X-ray vision. Didn't you ever see Ray Milland in
The Man with the X-Ray Eyes
? Anyway, nobody's hurting anyone else, so where's the harm?'

The noise of the brick cut through even the fuzzing bass sound of the track playing over the speakers. It clanged against the steel shutter next to the entrance and the bruit echoed through the club. A moment later the DJ cut the music. Muffled shouts could be heard outside. A chunk of concrete resounded against another of the shutters. Scuffles and angry yells broke out behind them as the rear door to the bar was hastily slammed shut. One of the barmen crashed a heavy iron rod across the door and locked it in place.

'What was that?' Woody looked back, shocked by the noise.

'They've broken in through the window of the corridor between the bar and the cloakroom,' said Bax. 'They can't get in here. But we can't get in there.'

'What does that mean?'

'It means, my dear, that we can't get our clothes back.'

'Let me get this straight,' said Woody, raising her hands in rising panic.

'We're locked in here, in just our underwear, with what sounds like a lynch mob outside howling for someone's blood.'

'
Our
blood,' said Bax. 'You're one of us now. Congratulations. You always wanted to be one of the boys.'

'Well, someone will have to go out there and tell them there's been a mistake.'

'Good idea, Woodson. You wanna handle that?'

Jack reappeared beside them as another hail of rocks clanged against the shuttered windows. 'I don't think they can get in. This place is built like a fortress. Besides, the cops should be here in a minute.'

'Well,
that's
reassuring. I feel better already. Let's have another drink, turn the music back on and dance.' Bax raised his glass just as -

incredibly - the technotrack really did resume, bleeding a thudding beat through the speakers. 'Jeezus, I don't believe these queens!'

'It's like I said, they could tango their way through the stations of the fucking cross.'

'Somehow I think it's gonna take more than a sense of rhythm and a pair of cha-cha heels to get us out of this situation.' A few guys had returned to the dancefloor, mainly the ones who were tripping. Everyone else was standing back by the bar, watching the sealed-up windows with increasing nervousness.

'How many of them do you think are out there?' asked Woody.

'A couple of hundred by now,' replied Simon, who had appeared beside them.

'Oh yeah?' Bax wasn't prepared to allow the newcomer into their circle just because Jack sometimes spoke to him. 'How do you know that?'

'I'm sensitive to shifts of mood. A bit psychic. My mother, my
real
mother, was a medium.'

'Just great,' moaned Bax, 'we've gone from the
Twilight Zone
to the
X-Files
. I'm gonna see what's happening.' He headed off to the entrance, where the club's bouncer was watching the street from his peephole in the door.

'What's going on outside?'

'Some kids just climbed that pole over there and cut our phone lines.

Now they're all just standing around like a bunch of - lemmings - or something. Like they're waiting for a signal.' The bouncer motioned him away. 'I'd get back from the door if I were you.'

Another hurled chunk of concrete hammered against the panels, shaking the air. The noise level on the street was rising as the crowd gained confidence and found its voice. 'Can't someone call the police on a mobile?' asked Bax.

'You won't get reception in here. The cops are probably waiting for ARV's. They're equipped to deal with stuff like this. Nothing for us to do but wait.' The sound of glass exploded on the other side of the door, and suddenly a pool of burning petrol was fanning through the gap beneath it, illuminating the room and turning the air acrid.

'Fire over here!' bellowed the bouncer. Bax jumped back, grabbed at the stack of listings magazines behind him and stamped a pile of them over the searing patch, spattering gobbets of flame over his boots and bare calves. The bouncer, the only fully clothed man in the building, found a small C02 extinguisher just as another burning cocktail shattered across the plywood-covered window to the left of the entrance. The wood panel quickly heated and caught fire, then the inner window cracked with a bang and burning petrol began to drip down the interior wall. They could hear the mob outside cheering each direct hit.

This time the dance music stopped for good. Some clubbers were arguing with the staff, others were shouting at each other, but most were just standing around in shock, unable to go anywhere or do anything.

Woody looked around to find herself left alone with Simon, whose face had drained of blood. He had the exotic look of an albino.

'Are you all right?'

'He wasn't frightened,' he said in a clear loud voice, as if answering a distant enquiry. 'Not until the very end.'

'Who wasn't frightened?' she asked in alarm. The boy's skin was prickling, his eyes staring off at something, a view, a tableau she could not see. He was breathing too fast, starting to shake. 'Here.' She grabbed a plastic bottle of Evian from the bar, snapped off the cap and made him drink.

'It's too late,' said Simon, water spilling from his mouth. 'The man has gone now.'

'Which man?'

'The one who hurt him, who made him bleed. The one in the big car.'

He was shaking uncontrollably now, edging into spasms. 'He said he only wanted to look, to touch. He lied, he lied - '

'Can you help us?' she called to a man standing behind her. Simon was thrashing violently in her arms and then, before anyone could come to her aid, he was still once more and breathing normally. The attack had ended as quickly as it had begun.

'I'm fine now, really.' He disentangled himself from her embrace and rose unsteadily to his feet, a look of mild surprise on his face.

'Are you quite sure?'

His colour was returning. He gave a wan smile to show that he was fine.

Frustrated by his own inaction, Jack was asking one of the barmen what he could do to help. 'Is there any other way out of this room?'

'No, only through the bar and upstairs on to the roof.'

'We can't stay in here. We'll be burned alive. Do you have a sprinkler system we can turn on?'

'No,' said the barman helplessly. 'The place still qualifies as a pub, not a music venue. It's not big enough to require one. The only water supply is in the sinks and dishwasher behind the counter, and out with the clothes-bags.'

'Then I guess we'll just have to hold out until the police take charge.'

'There are enough of them outside to murder us all,' said Simon softly.

'They won't stop until they've performed a sacrifice.'

'That's bloody cheerful,' snapped Woody.

He threw her a sudden odd look. 'Why are you pretending to be a man?'

'Just give me a hand with this.' She and several of the others shifted one of the heavy drinks tables away from the wall and set it on end, blocking the broken window nearest the entrance. Bax and the bouncer were training extinguishers on the fiery fluid seeping through the windows from more burning Molotovs. People were motivating into groups, at work on separate sections of the room. It was as if a collective intelligence had kicked in to make them perform the necessary protective actions. The explosion of wood and glass that erupted near Woody caught everyone by surprise.

'Fuck me, what are they using?' Jack straightened up and looked out through the jagged hole that had been punched through the shutter by some kind of large calibre ammunition. Following its flight path he found one of the barmen clutching his shoulder as blood pumped between his fingers. The bullet had passed through the boy's T-shirt, grazing the soft flesh of his armpit, and had gone on to explode a bottle of Schmirnoff above the bar. Within moments, two customers had torn tea towels into strips and were staunching his wound. Another gunshot blast ripped through the steel sheeting on the main window of the dancefloor, but failed to find a target, smashing into the plaster ceiling rose in the centre of the room. Surprisingly, nobody screamed.

'Everyone seems so calm,' said Woody as Bax reappeared.

'Never underestimate the balls of a queen, honey. Half these guys grew up getting punched out by parents who won't speak to them until they're on their deathbeds.' He didn't say whose deathbeds he meant, and Woody didn't ask. The rending noise that began at the farthest window alerted them to the fact that someone outside was levering the sheet-steel away with a crowbar. 'Oh shit.'

Suddenly the sheeting was off and the inner window was being smashed out with boots and batons. Wood and glass splintered everywhere as dark figures struggled to climb in through the gap.

Jack swept the beer glasses from the other huge drinks table. He and Bax upended it, and with the help of four others ran it face-out at the breach. The heavy oak top crashed down over the limbs entering from outside. There were yelps of pain and rage as injured body-parts were withdrawn. Everyone fell against the back of the table, determined to hold it in place by sheer weight of numbers.

'The cops aren't going to get here in time, are they?' said Woody, pushing with all her might.

Another gunshot exploded the piece of window that still showed above the table edge. The bullet ploughed into the ceiling, and a shower of plaster cascaded over them. Bax wiped his hand across his neck to find flecks of blood from the fragments of glass. The guttural roar from outside sounded like football fans raging against a missed penalty. The table swayed and rocked but remained in its place. More petrol bombs were being thrown at the windows beyond the bar. The bouncer left his post at the doors and ran toward the spreading flames with his extinguisher. The room was filling with dense smoke. There was an explosion of glass on the floor above them, but they had no way of knowing whether it was caused by a rock or a petrol bomb.

'Simon?'

The boy drifted through the crowd and passed Woody like a wraith, staring hard ahead. He was moving quickly toward the club's temporarily unguarded entrance.

'SIMON!' Woody left the others rammed against the great table and ran toward the boy, who was reaching up on tiptoe to release the bolt at the top of the door. He had drawn it halfway down when she barrelled into him, knocking him aside. '
What the hell do you think you're doing

?' she heard herself screaming.

When he turned his translucent eyes to hers, his serenity was the peace of inner madness. 'Let me open the door.'

'They'll come in and they'll kill us, don't you understand? You can't reason with them!'

'I don't need to reason with them. I have the boy within me.' He ran bony fingers across his chest. 'I reached out to him and took his pain. It's safe inside me now.'

There was another terrible eruption on the far side of the room.

Somebody fell back with an agonised yell. 'How can that be?' she shouted, shoving at him, 'how can that be?'

'I know his suffering. I've lived with such pain all my life, I'm a fucking magnet for abuse and I'm dying from it, do you understand?' He tore himself free of her and stood alone.

Others had seen what was happening and were moving toward them.

'They'll kill you, Simon,' she said. 'They'll tear you apart with their bare hands.'

'Of course they will. They must have someone to blame. A whipping boy.'