Decay Inevitable (50 page)

“He isn’t here! You should just go away! I’ll give you money!” The daughter now, Honey (what a name for these parts, Jesus!), yelping at him, her big eyes flicking to her choking mother and her senseless father as she held out a blunt letter opener to defend herself. He decked her with a clip from the bat to the top of her head. “Keep your money,” he said.

He found the old man in a sleeping bag in a bedroom filled with cigarette ends and beer cans, soiled underwear, and towers of foil cartons.

“Excellent,” he said, noticing that the man hadn’t tried to make a noise. He regarded Sean calmly with the black, shark’s eyes they all possessed; even held out his arms when he was reached for. He had been waiting for this. Perhaps he had been wishing for it.

The old man didn’t cry when he saw his damaged family. As they left the flat he seemed to sigh with contentment.

“Too right,” growled Sean. “Anything you come to now is a blessing. Consider this a rescue.”

At the car he paused a while to search the horizon. No lights anywhere. Once this place had been a riot of colour and bright windows containing families watching television or eating supper, laughing or fighting, but always together. Now the population had thinned out. Those who had survived had run or tried to protect their dead. Those who were dead were directionless, without anchor. They wheeled around like seagulls playing on thermals, or like a confused compass. When Sean came to call, they pretended they were normal human beings leading normal lives. Normal people, with pieces of them dropping off while he chatted amiably with them in a doorway, the rope coiled around his shoulder burning with intent.

After the man was hanged and the shaved fibres from the rope deposited between his ash-grey lips, Sean dumped the body over a fence separating the rear gardens of a terraced house from a stream which dribbled along at the bottom of a deep gulley. Back in the car, he had barely started the engine before the next one came through to him.

It lives alone,
Will said.
It’s lost. It’s lonely. It’ll go without a struggle. It needs this. And it’s this way, Sean. Come on...

He powered the car too quickly for an hour and a half until he had reached the outskirts of a conurbation hanging on the edge of Birmingham like a wart on a scarred face.

Make a left here, Sean. Keep going. Just keep going...

There had been months of this. Closed doors, lonely motorways, miles and miles of self-doubt and nausea. He didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. He asked Will once, do the dead breed? and Will had laughed hard and for a long time without answering him.

...keep going...

He knocked at the door this time. He knew he didn’t need to break it down. He waited for an age, but that was okay. He didn’t mind waiting. It gave him something else to do. Something different. He clenched the rope in his fist as he heard footsteps approach the door.

She opened it wide. Late at night, all alone, but what did she have to be frightened of? He gazed at her for a long time.

“I wondered if it might ever happen,” she said.

“I have something I need to do,” he told her.

“I know. I know.”

She didn’t fight him, or plead with him. She even helped him to get the rope over a branch of the ash tree in the garden. He kissed her beforehand because she asked him to, and he would have backed out of it if she hadn’t coaxed him to carry the job through.

As she swung, just before the end, she reached out her hand and he took it. He held it until it closed and shuddered into a fist. Lifting it to his face, Sean pressed his lips against the tiny aperture that her forefinger had made behind the curled thumb, and whispered a message and a promise.

A proposal.

A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

C
ONRAD
A. W
ILLIAMS
was born in Cheshire in 1969. He sold his first short story at the age of eighteen and has gone on to publish around eighty more to a variety of magazines and anthologies. He is the author of three novels, four novellas and a collection of his best short fiction. His book
The Unblemished
won the International Horror Guild Award for Best Novel. He is also a past recipient of the British Fantasy Award and the Littlewood Arc Prize.

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Emerging six months later from a coma, Paul discovers that Tamara is gone and a child killer is haunting the beaches. The villagers, appalled by Paul’s cheating of death, treat him as a sin-eater. They bring him items to dispose of, secrets far too awful to deal with themselves. At least he has local nurse, Ruth, to look after him. And Amy, a damaged soul with a special gift. She befriends Paul and together they unearth clues that might explain the shocking history of the village, and suggest the murders are anything but.

Meanwhile, Paul begins to suspect there is more to Tamara’s disappeareance than meets the eye...

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