That Summer He Died (13 page)

It felt good, just lying here, wrecked, imagining the crawling sap. He could stay all day, no worries. He smiled at the thought of lying here stoned, tried to picture looking down at himself from the top of the tree; he wanted to see if he looked as totally content as he felt. He checked out the colours of the leaves, wished he had a pen and paper here to record them with. There were words in his head he wanted to get down, whole books he suddenly wanted to write. Feeling this relaxed, this released from pressure, they’d come easy, he reckoned, and regular, like the slow, unhurried beat of his heart. He shifted his focus to the sky and watched the dead cells, or ‘floaters’ as his mother had called them, rise and fall across his eyes as he tried to track them and hold them still.

‘Munchies,’ Alex called.

A crinkling sound. James felt something land on his chest.

James’s hand roamed across his body until it located the chocolate bar that Alex had just taken from his rucksack. He slipped a piece into his mouth, closed his eyes and gently chewed, savouring the sugary sensation.

‘Come on,’ Alex said. ‘Let’s go check out the woods, like the good copper said.’

His words came at James as through in a dream. He opened his eyes. His teeth were slick with half-chewed chocolate. James slowly got to his feet. He massaged his neck.

‘Have I been asleep?’ he asked.

‘Yeah, about half an hour.’

Alex was already heading for the woods. James fumbled for his water bottle and drained it, incredibly thirsty. Picking up the rucksack, he stashed the empty bottle inside.

‘Hurry up.’

Alex’s voice was distant. He was ten yards away, fading into the sun-starved gloom of the woods, the colours of his clothes being subsumed by the patchwork of green and brown. His body faded like a ghostly vision, leaving James alone for a few seconds, scratching his head, staring down at the impression he had left on the ground where he’d dozed off.

He looked around for Dan, but he was nowhere to be seen, and so he set off in the direction Alex had gone, following him out of the sunlight and into the woods.

The debris of fallen leaves and twigs crackled beneath his feet as the canopy of foliage thickened above his head. He trod deeper into the false twilight, the sound of his steps softening as the ground slowly slid into rotting mulch.

He felt the drop in temperature and drew his arms around his body and rubbed at the cold. Sunlight filtered down in sporadic shafts from the sky above, leaving dappled patterns on the patches of ground.

There was no sign of Alex. James walked on, quickening his pace, ducking under branches and navigating brambles and pools of black, unruffled water, assuming each time that the next obstacle he overcame would bring him in sight of the others.

Eventually, though, he stopped and listened. He heard nothing but the sound of his lungs churning out the humid air. He turned full circle, attempting to get his bearings. But no matter which way he looked, the woods left no clues for him to move either back to the cliff, or forward towards Alan or Jack’s homes.

He stood motionless in a vertical shaft of weak light, a member of the Starship
Enterprise
crew waiting to be beamed up from an alien and potentially hostile planet.

‘Alex!’ he shouted. ‘Dan! Where are you?’

A faint echo, then the same suffocating silence as before.

‘Hey,’ he called out again, unable to eradicate the hint of hysteria from his voice. ‘If you guys can hear me, shout.’

Nothing. He stared around again, at a loss for what to do next.

‘Aaaaaargh!’

The scream came like an explosion, sending James diving into the mud. A flurry of motion. He spun on his heels to face it. A swirling blur. Then definition: arms, flailing like windmill sails in a hurricane, flashing towards him out of the undergrowth, and Dan’s face warped, grotesque, a Hallowe’en mask, with his mouth wide open in a scream.

‘Gotcha,’ he shouted in triumph, leering over at James, his dark eyes sparkling like wet pebbles. ‘Man, you look like you’re gonna squit your pants.’

Before words found their way to James’s tongue, another noise assailed him. More purposeful this time. Behind them. James turned and there was Alex, walking towards them, holding a stick before him like a fencing sword, menacingly swishing it through the air. Speared on its end was a rabbit, half-decomposed, half-eaten. Its dirt-encrusted bowels lay exposed, like someone or something had tried to turn it inside out.

‘You wait till you smell it,’ Alex sniggered, only a couple of feet away now. He thrust the stick forward, causing James to leap back like he’d been confronted with a flaming torch.

‘Keep that the hell away from me,’ Dan warned, his voice wavering awkwardly between appreciation and disgust.

‘”Run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run,”’ Alex softly chanted, turning from James and striding towards Dan. Still advancing, he glanced at James. ‘Ever been hunting?’ he asked.

James stared back, confused, regretting the fact he was still so stoned, feeling fear creeping up on him, feeling himself losing control. He didn’t want to get lost again. He didn’t want to be alone.

‘It would make a neat change to see a rabbit hunting a human, I reckon,’ Alex said, running his tongue with slow deliberation across his lips. ‘Do you reckon so too, Dan?’

‘I suppose. . .’ Dan’s face twitched with apprehension, a combination of intuition and experience suggesting to him what might be coming next. ‘It would be pretty weird.’

‘Then, run,’ Alex screeched, lunging the stick forward, and shaking the rotting creature impaled on its tip before Dan’s face.

‘Shit,’ he bellowed, a look of mock terror on his face, as he twisted round and broke into a run.

‘C’mon,’ Alex laughed at James, starting off down the channel Dan’s bulk had carved through the woodland landscape. ‘Let’s get this rabbit its first kill.’

Alex’s laughter was contagious. James felt it bubbling up inside him too as he joined in the chase. A rush of adrenaline. Primitive. Unstoppable. Sounds cracked and popped in his ears, filtered through the dope in his veins. The brambles, bracken, trees and flowers on either side of him slid into a brown blur, rushing past like a muddy stream, or the view from a train. He stumbled over roots and rocks and ruts on the ground.

‘C’mon, rabbit,’ Alex was shouting. ‘Smell the blood.’

And then there was a yelp. Bestial. Like a dog bounced off a car bonnet, a fox disappearing under a pack of baying hounds. James’s pace slackened instinctively in response to the sound.

Everything turned to slow motion. Alex stopped, maybe ten yards ahead, at the top of a mud bank. He was looking down, the stick raised at his side, his silhouette that of a Zulu warrior. But then, as James drew level with him, he saw Alex’s arms drop to his sides. The stick fell to the ground, jolting the rabbit’s cadaver free, so that it rolled down the slope and slumped in an unidentifiable ball at the bottom.

‘What?’ James was saying. Something in his mind was telling him to turn, to leave this place.

Alex faced him. His lips made shapes, but no words came. He pulled his shades from his face and for the first time James saw his sky-blue eyes. More words. But James’s heart was thundering too loud in his ears for him to hear.

He looked down the slope. Dan was at the bottom, huddled like a foetus in the womb, his knees jammed up against his open jaw. But it wasn’t Dan that James’s eyes focused on. It was what lay next to him. It was what the blizzard of angry flies were swelling and shrinking over, buzzing like a distant motorbike. It was the clear picture of the man lying there, the glimpses of skin amongst the filthy clothes. It was the maggots crawling across that ragged flesh, the flies squatting to add to their numbers.

It was the corpse of Jack Dawes, the man they’d come here to find. Despite the fact that flies massed along the long, deep gash which split the face in two, James knew that this was so.

*

Alex was the first to react. He half-slid, half-stumbled like a novice skier down the mud bank towards his friend.

He hesitated when he drew level with the body beside Dan, then knelt down beside it. As he waved his arm, the swarm of flies that had masked the dead man’s face soared upward as a unit, wheeled, and then disbanded, scattering into an aerial battle of swirling black.

Dawes. It was definitely Jack Dawes.

Gagging, cupping his hand and clamping it over his mouth and nose, Alex stood up and stepped away.

As the frenzied flies descended and settled like frog spawn back on the dead artist’s face, James just stared, taking in the mud-smeared shirt, following the stripes down its sleeves.

For a moment, his brain refused to translate what he saw. Because something was wrong. Something didn’t fit. There, where the sleeves ended, right where they were squared off in neat stitching and wrapped tightly around Dawes’s wrists.

James’s brain finally flashed up the message.

The hands weren’t there. Oh, Christ.

The hands weren’t there.

He didn’t even get the chance to feel sick. It just came up in a jet. Busting through his teeth with the pressure of a fire hose, forcing his jaw open. His eyes streamed water. But he couldn’t blink. He couldn’t look away. He felt the vomit, warm and heavy, running down his chest, gluing his shirt to his skin.

The message flashed up again. Insistent, challenging him to continue denying what he saw with his own eyes. No hands. Just stumps, bloody and raw, protruding from Dawes’s sleeves like joints of meat in a butcher’s window.

James used his arm to shield his eyes. The world plunged into blackness. The smell of vomit. And beneath that, baser, pungent as goat’s cheese, another smell. Foreign. Beyond his experience. The smell of death and degeneration.

When he uncovered his eyes, he saw Alex was crouched beside Dan and calmly talking to him, not turning, not running away. How could he do that? How could he stay so calm?

Dan’s voice rose in volume. But the rushing sound in James’s ears would not leave, kept him from understanding Alex’s words. Alex slapped Dan then, hard across the face. Dan did not react. Alex repeated the action, harder, and this time Dan flinched. He raised his hand to protect himself.

‘Get a grip,’ Alex snapped. ‘Stand up.’

Dan was shaking. He was starting to cry.

‘Now,’ Alex shouted, grabbing him by the arms and yanking him to his feet. Dan’s eyes rolled loosely in their sockets. ‘Say something,’ Alex was shouting. ‘Say something, you stupid prick.’

‘I—’

‘You what, you dumb shit?’

‘Ph-phh-phhhhh—’

‘What?’

Dan tore free from Alex’s grip. He stumbled back a pace and collapsed on to his knees as if in prayer. His head lolled forward and his hand hovered over his knees. Something maroon and sticky was smeared across the skin where his shorts tapered off.

‘Phhh . . .’ he groaned, screwing his eyes up. ‘I phh-phhh-fucking fell. . . ‘On him. . . He’s all over me. . . all over me. . . look.’

‘Get up,’ Alex said. ‘Now. Get on your feet. You can’t stay here. It’s gonna fuck you up. You’ve got to move.’

But Dan couldn’t move. He looked to James for support and wailed, ‘I can’t.’ He stared at his knees again. ‘All over me,’ he sobbed. ‘Look, he’s all over my fucking legs. . .’

‘So what?’ Alex said. ‘He’s dead. Get up. Get a fucking grip.’

Dan glanced at the body and started shaking and whimpering. Snot bubbled from his nose. Tears ran down his cheeks.

‘You scared of him? That it?’ Alex said. ‘You scared of a fucking dead man?’ A hiss of derision burst from his lips.

Alex walked over to the body.

‘Look. . .’ He waited for Dan to turn, his blue eyes shining with something James could not understand, some kind of excitement, some kind of thrill. ‘Do it, you fat fuck. Look at me now.’

Then, the second Dan did look – and James could barely believe what he was seeing – Alex dropped on to one knee and pushed his hand firmly through the swarm of flies, pressing his palm on to Jack Dawes’s face.

What the fuck?

Alex raised his arm into the air. The same dark brown filth on Dan’s knees now lay in a thin film across Alex’s palm. He stood up and walked back to Dan.

‘See? Nothing to be afraid of. Now get the fuck up,’ he said.

He held out his clean hand and Dan took it, still mesmerised by the sight of the other one. He allowed himself to be hauled to his feet.

‘Good.’ Alex said, pushing him forward, towards the bank, away from Dawes. ‘Now let’s get the fuck out of here. I need a cigarette.’

*

On the other side of the bank, Dan sat rocking on his haunches on a patch of grass, tearing clump after clump of turf free from the ground and rubbing furiously at his legs.

‘It won’t come off,’ he kept muttering. ‘It won’t fucking come off.’

Alex reached out a hand and firmly wrapped his fingers around Dan’s wrist. ‘It’s gone,’ he reassured him. ‘You’re clean.’

Dan didn’t reply for a moment, then slowly nodded and dropped the clump of turf he was holding. Alex wedged a lit cigarette between Dan’s fingers, but he made no move to smoke it.

‘One of us should go,’ James said. ‘One of us should go and get help.’

‘In a minute,’ Alex said, his shades back on, his voice soft, soothing, like it had been when he’d been stoned. ‘Finish the cigarette first. Get our heads together. It’s probably the last breather we’re gonna get today. Savour it.’

James’s heart was still doing the hundred-metre sprint. ‘Savour what? There’s a fucking dead man on the other side of that bank.’

Alex laughed. ‘No kidding,’ he said, and lit another cigarette.

How could he laugh? James suddenly wished Alex wasn’t wearing shades again. He couldn’t read anything into his face, had no option but to rely on the even projection of his voice and take his words at face value. Was he really not affected by what he’d just seen? By what he’d just done? Or was this his way of coping? Had his mind somehow switched off to it? Was that what was really going on? Had Alex too slipped into some kind of shock?

James remembered the flies closing over Alex’s hand like quicksand. He wished he’d never left London. He wished he were not here.