Road of the Dead (10 page)

Jess stood up and put the bottle of water in her pocket. “Ready?” she said, looking down at me.

I got to my feet and we continued on up the hill.

“She was found just there,” Jess said quietly. “Under the thorn tree.”

We were standing beside an ancient stone circle at the end of a short grassy track near the top of the hill. The old granite stones were half-buried in the ground, spaced about a meter apart, forming a ragged ring about four meters across. Grass was growing inside the circle—lush and thick and green—but outside the ring there was nothing but dry grass and rock. I didn’t understand it—the geography, the history, the shape of the land—but it didn’t matter. I didn’t have to understand it.

This was the place.

The ring of stones, the stunted thorn tree, the dying wind…

This was where it had happened.

It should have looked different in the daylight. Without the storming rain, without the night, without the purple-black light that rolled the sky to the ground…it should have been harder to believe—but it wasn’t. It was midnight in the middle of the day, and I could see Rachel lying there naked and dead in the dark.

I could see it all too clearly.

I could feel her death.

Jess’s dogs could feel something, too. They were sitting off to one side of the circle, both of them whining quietly. Their hackles were up, their ears were flattened against their heads, and their backs were arched in fear. I didn’t know if it was Rachel’s death they could sense, or if there was something else within the stone circle that frightened them, something that only they could feel—an aura, a power, an unknown force. I didn’t know if I believed in such things, but as I gazed around at the lichened rocks and the wind-sculpted thorn tree in front of me, I knew what I could feel: I could feel Rachel dying, the Dead Man breathing, the rain running red with blood.

And I believed in that.

I could see the Dead Man in the shadows of the thorn tree. He was dark and sharp and dirty…his face a broken
black knife. His hands were scarred. He was bleeding, scratched, bitten. Yellow-eyed. He had nowhere to go. Nowhere to hide.

I turned around and looked at Jess. She was standing a few paces behind me. The dogs were lying down beside her now, their heads held low to the ground.

“Who is he?” I asked her.

“Who?”

“You
know
who.”

Her eyes flickered, and for a moment I thought she was going to lie to me again, but when she spoke her voice was true. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was going to tell you…I just didn’t know if I ought to or not. I mean, there’s no proof or anything…it’s all just rumors, really—”

“Tell me his name,” I said quietly.

She looked at me. “Selden. His name’s John Selden.”

“Selden?”

She nodded.

I brought the Dead Man into my mind and tried putting the name to his broken face—
Selden, Selden, John Selden…?
The words fit. The name
became
him—he
was
John Selden.

“Who is he?” I asked Jess. “What does he do?”

She shook her head. “He’s nothing…he doesn’t
do
anything. He just hangs around on his own most of the time—skulking around in the woods, or on the moor…” A look of disgust crossed her face. “He’s a creepy little shit.
I caught him watching me once. I was out walking the dogs and they started barking up a tree, and when I looked up I saw Selden sitting in the branches with a dirty little grin on his face…” She looked at me. “He hasn’t been seen since Rachel was killed. The police have been looking for him, asking questions, searching his room—”

“How would he have gotten here?” I asked her. “How would he have gotten Rachel up here?”

“The village road’s just down there,” Jess said, pointing down to the right of the hill. “See? Behind that little copse.”

There was a lay-by at the side of the road, a little gateway through to the copse, a pathway up the hill…it wasn’t far. Less than a hundred meters. It wasn’t too far to carry a body. I gazed down the slope, imagining the Dead Man toiling his way up the hill, clambering over the rocks, carrying my sister’s body through the storming rain…

Why?

Why did he do it?

Why did he kill Rachel?

Why did he bring her up here?

Why?

I could feel my head spinning with questions now. Why had no one mentioned John Selden before? Why was Jess telling me about him now? Who was he? Where did he come from? Who’d killed him? And why? And what had they done with his body…?

And then suddenly I was feeling something else—a familiar race of blood in my heart. It was the same sudden fear I’d felt on the night Rachel died, only this time it was coming from Jess. I looked over at her. She was staring up ahead, beyond the ring of stones, where three slouching figures were coming down the hill toward us. They were walking side by side. The two on the outside were carrying shotguns; the one in the middle was Red.

I
studied the three men as they approached the circle of stones. Red hadn’t changed one bit—he was still wearing his grubby red suit, still smiling his sharp-toothed smile, still fixing me with his wrong-looking eyes. With his hands in his pockets and his suit collar turned up, he looked like some kind of weird rural gangster. The other two were walking vegetables. The one on Red’s right was a Potato Man—fat head, seedy eyes, flaky brown skin—while the one on his left looked like a bean sprout on legs. Tall and skinny, with a bulbous head and horseradish fingers and eyes that could make an onion cry. Potato Man was wearing an army jacket and boots; the skinny one was in a sleeveless nylon jacket and a baseball cap. They both had their shotguns slung over their shoulders, and neither of them was smiling.

As they reached the edge of the stone circle, I felt Jess
move up beside me. She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t have to—I was
with
her now, sharing her senses, seeing the three men through her eyes. She recognized Red and Potato Man, but she hadn’t seen Skinny before. She knew what he was, though. She’d seen the likes of him a thousand times before—we both had. He was a fear-sucker, the same as the other two. And they were all getting ready to feed. We could see their mouths drooling at the scent of our fright, and there was nothing we could do to hide it. We were
scared
—period. But we could still function. We could see the dull glint of their double-barreled shotguns. We could see the dead rabbit stuffed into Potato Man’s pocket. We could see the finger of rabbit’s blood smeared on his face.

We both thought they might stop at the edge of the stone circle, but they didn’t. They were senseless—unaware of unseen things. They just walked straight across the circle without so much as a thought—under the thorn tree, over the ghost of Rachel’s body, through the shifting shadows of the Dead Man, and right up into our faces.

“Hey,” said Red, flicking a smile at me. “How’s your luck?”

It was the kind of question that fear-suckers use to start a fight—
What are you looking at? What’s your problem?
—and we both knew it was pointless trying to answer it. Red knew it, too. I could tell by his laughing eyes, by his nodding head and his twitching shoulders. I could tell by the
way he grinned and wiped his nose on the sleeve of his jacket.

“All right?” he said.

My mind flashed back to the day before.
All right?
he’d said to me then, and then I’d just kept my mouth shut and waited for Cole to do his stuff. But now I was on my own. With Jess.

Red smiled at me. “Where’s Jackie Chan?”

“Who?”

He punched the air, making me flinch, but when he grinned again and grabbed his throat and groaned, I realized he was reminding me of what Cole had done to Big Davy.

“Must be nice having a big brother like that,” he said, taking his hands from his throat and grinning again. “I wish I’d had a brother to keep all the nasty big boys away.” He made a show of gazing around the stone circle, then he turned back to me. “Looks like you’re on your own today, though.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“No?” He looked around again, staring through Jess as if she wasn’t there. “I don’t see anyone else,” he said, turning to the Potato Man. “You see anyone else, Nate?”

“I don’t see shit,” Potato Man grunted.

Red turned back to me. “You must be seeing ghosts, boy. There’s plenty up here—pixies and shit, ghouls and ghosties…” He raised his hands, widening his eyes and moaning, like a child playing at ghosts. Then he
dropped his hands and winked at me. “Oh, yeah—we
always
got plenty of dead stuff.”

I was thinking of Cole now. Wishing he was here, wishing I was him, wishing I could take this stuff without my heart jumping up and down like a frog. I wished I had some control over the things inside me—the mechanisms, the signals, the reactions—but I knew I was wasting my time.

“What you doing up here, anyway?” Red said to me. “This is forestry land. It’s private. You’re trespassing.”

“You’re breaking the law,” added Nate, the Potato Man. His voice was so lazy and his accent so thick I could barely understand what he was saying. I looked at him. His lips were loose and his tongue was too fat for his mouth.

“What?” I said.

“Whut?” he echoed.

Jess suddenly let out a sigh—a loud and exaggerated yawn of boredom—and all at once everything switched to her. Nate and Skinny just swiveled their heads and stared at her, but Red made a big show of it—widening his eyes and stepping back in mock surprise as if Jess had suddenly appeared from nowhere.

“Shit,” he said with a grin, clamping his hand to his chest, “where d’you come from? You nearly gave me a heart attack, man. How d’you
do
that?”

Jess said nothing, just stared at him with a slight shake of her head.

Red leaned forward and cupped a hand to his ear. “Say
what? Come on, speak to me. Tell me how you do it. Come
on
, don’t be shy—I won’t bite.”

When Jess still didn’t answer him, he grinned again and spoke to her in a stupidly simple voice. “You…speakee…English? No? You…pikey…yes?”

Jess’s eyes showed nothing.

Red leaned back and spoke to Potato Man. “You know any pikey words, Nate?”

“Tarmac,” he grunted, “caravan…not guilty…”

“Hedgehog,” added Skinny.

Red laughed. “Hedgehog?”

“They eats ’em.”

“They eats anything,” Nate said.

“You wish…”

They all laughed again. It was the same old sound—the sound of the grown-up playground—and I could tell that Jess wasn’t bothered about it. She knew as well as I did that, in itself, it was nothing. It was just a warmup, a bit of sparring, a blast of hot air to get things going. When the laughing stopped—that was the time to start worrying.

I glanced at Jess and saw that she was standing with her hands held down at her sides, the palms facing backward, keeping her two dogs behind her. They were sitting motionless, their jaws set tight and their eyes fixed on Red and his boys.

Red said to Nate, “Give her the rabbit.”

“What?”

“The rabbit…give her your rabbit.”

“What for?”

Red ignored him, turning to Jess. “You want a rabbit? A nice little bunny?” He started making eating motions, smacking his lips and rubbing his belly. “Yum yum, very nice…you like?” He grinned his grin. “You likee fresh meat? Nice and tasty—”

“Hey, shit-head,” Jess said quietly. “Let’s just get it done, OK?”

Red leaned back, doing his mock-surprise thing again. “I’m
sorry
? Did you
say
something?”

“Look,” she said patiently, “we’ve all got better things to do than stand around here listening to you all day, so why don’t we just cut the crap and get on with it. We’ve done the funny gypsy stuff and the dirty little jokes…what else do you want to do? You want to scare the kid some more? Impress your friends? You want to say some naughty words?”

Nate and Skinny were smirking at each other now, but Red didn’t think it was funny. His smile had thinned to a white-lipped scar.

“Come on,” Jess taunted him, “say something funny. Insult me. Let’s have some more of your gypsy stuff.” She snapped her fingers. “I know, how about the interbreeding thing? That’s always a good one—incest
and
race. Two insults for the price of one.”

Red’s staring face had drained to a pale white mask, the
whiteness stained with angry red blotches. His skin was so tight that when he spoke, his lips barely moved. “Race?” he hissed at Jess. “
Race?
You’re not a
race
, you’re just a waste of blood.”

“That’s more like it,” Jess said, clapping her hands. “That’s
excellent
. What else have you got?”

I could feel the bad stuff coming now, and I guessed that was Jess’s intention—get it on, get it over, get it done. Normally, I might not have minded—but this wasn’t normal. This was a twitchy red lunatic and two big vegetables with double-barreled shotguns.

I looked around. Red was wired up—his head nodding, his elbows twitching, his face a mess of pale-skinned tics—and the other two were beginning to get the message. Their smirks had gone and they’d put their dead faces on. Their eyes were jumpy and white. Nate had taken the dead rabbit from his pocket and was holding it by its ears, swinging it gently against his leg, and Skinny was leering at Jess and scratching his crotch.

There was absolute silence for a moment, a silence with no time and no feeling. I could hear the world ticking inside my head—
tick, tick, tick…

And then Jess said to Red, “Is your boyfriend going to give me that rabbit or what?”

And that was it. Everything just
erupted
. It was all so cold and quick and dull that at first I didn’t know what was happening. Nate’s arm came up and I saw something shoot
through the air and smack into Jess’s face with a muffled thump, and then she was staggering backward with blood on her face, and the dead rabbit was lying on the ground at her feet. Before I could tell if the blood was hers or the rabbit’s, Skinny had stepped over and leveled his shotgun at my head.

“On the ground, boy,” he hissed.

As I lowered myself to the ground, I looked over at Jess and saw her setting her dogs on Red and Nate. Red had turned around and was snatching the shotgun out of Nate’s hands, and as the two dogs raced toward them, Red pushed Nate in front of him and shouted in his ear—“Get the bastards!” Nate swung a booted foot at Finn, and as the lurcher yelped and jumped to one side, Tripe zipped through Nate’s legs and went for Red’s ankles. Red swung the shotgun and cracked the barrel into Tripe’s head, and the little dog went down. It whined a little and tried to get up, but Red hit it again, harder this time, and I heard something crack…and this time it didn’t get up.

Jess screamed.

It was a terrible sound, the scream of a torn heart, and it ripped the air to ice.

Nate was grinning now, stomping after Finn, and Jess was screaming at him and screaming at Finn to get away and screaming at Red that she’d kill him…

And I couldn’t do anything. I was kneeling on the ground with a shotgun barrel pressed between my eyes.
Skinny was shoving it into my head, trying to push me right down into the ground, trying to buckle me, trying to
bury
me…

But I wasn’t going down there.

I strained my head against the pain and kept my eyes fixed on Red as he walked up to Jess with the shotgun in his hands. He had his smile back now. It was tight and hard and flecked with spit. Jess was still screaming at him.

“You
bastard
! You shitty red
bastard
! You’re gonna—”

“What?” said Red. “I’m gonna what?”

“You’re
dead
,” she spat.

“I don’t think so.” He smiled. “I think you’ll find that crippled rat over there’s the dead one—”

Jess lunged at him, but he quickly raised the shotgun and aimed it at her head. She stopped right in front of him, staring down the barrel of the gun, and I could feel her torn between fear and anger. She wanted to rip Red to pieces, and she was almost sure he wouldn’t use the gun…but she wasn’t quite sure enough.

“Go on,” he said to her, “try me—see if I’ve got the guts.”

She stared at him for a long time, staring painfully into his eyes, and then finally she took half a step back. “I’ll see your guts soon enough,” she said quietly. “I’ll see them ripped from your belly and thrown in the dirt.”

Red just smiled at her. “Pick up the rabbit,” he said.

“What?”

He waved the shotgun at the dead rabbit on the ground. “Pick it up.”

Jess looked at the rabbit. She wiped some blood from her face, then looked back at Red. “Go to hell,” she told him.

He smiled at her again, then looked over at Nate. He was stomping around in a patch of tussock grass away to the left of the stone circle.

Red called out to him, “You got that dog yet?”

“I think he’s gone,” Nate called back, still looking around. “I lost the bastard.”

Red shook his head and looked over at Skinny and me. I was hurting now. The barrel of the gun had broken my skin and I could feel a trickle of blood running down my nose. My legs were numb from kneeling in the dirt.

“Hey, kid,” Red said to me. “What d’you reckon your life’s worth?”

Even with a gun at my head, I thought it was a pretty strange question, and for a moment I actually found myself thinking about it—
What
is
my life worth?
—but the thought didn’t last for long.

Red said to Jess, “What do
you
think his life’s worth?”

Jess shook her head. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Why don’t you just—”

“Shoot him,” Red said to Skinny.

Skinny looked at him. “What?”

“Shoot the mongrel bastard.”

Skinny hesitated a moment, then turned back to me and slowly cocked both barrels of the shotgun—
click, click.
I felt the faint vibrations echoing through my skull.

“Don’t be stupid—” Jess started to say.

“Pick up the rabbit,” Red told her.

“What?”

“Just
do
it. Pick up the rabbit and I’ll let the kid keep his head.”

She looked over at me. We were only a few meters apart, but it seemed like a thousand miles. Our eyes met for a moment, and in that moment neither of us knew anything. Jess looked away and I saw her bend down and pick up the rabbit.

She held it out to Red. “There—satisfied now?”

“Eat it,” he told her.

“What?”

“Eat it.”

“I’m not going to—”

“It’s only raw meat.” Red smiled. “I’m sure you’ve eaten worse. Come on…it’s not a lot to ask for the sake of a little kid’s life, is it?”

“You’re out of your
mind
.”

“I’ll count to three.”

“Listen—”

“One…”

Jess was sweating now, the moisture mingling with the dried blood on her face. Her eyes were sick and confused.
As she looked over at me and tried to speak, I suddenly felt my brother’s heart inside me. I couldn’t feel
him
, but I could feel what made him, and I just didn’t care anymore.