The shadow people, p.18
The Shadow People, page 18
‘Stop!’ he shouted, even though his ribs hurt so much that he could barely breathe. ‘Stop, you bastards! Put her down!’
The two men took no notice, shuffling past him and carrying Linda out through the front gate. She was silent, and Jerry saw that her arm was swinging loosely, which meant that they must have knocked her out, or worse.
He managed to climb up onto his knees and reach for the windowsill so that he could haul himself up onto his feet. But he was still kneeling when a third man appeared out of the house – the bearded man who had followed them from Amen Corner. His terrier was with him too.
‘Bring her back,’ Jerry croaked at him. ‘I don’t know what you’re up to, but I’ll have you for assault and abduction, and you’ll be banged up for years.’
The man snarled at him again, took one step forward, and kicked him in the stomach. Jerry doubled up and knelt with his forehead pressed against the wet terracotta paving tiles. He heard the man snarl again, and then walk away, with his terrier pattering after him.
*
Biting his lip to suppress the pain, Jerry managed at last to climb to his feet. He went out of the gate and looked down Crowborough Road, but the three men and Linda had gone.
He limped back into the house, stumbling over the broken front door. Nora’s living-room door was wide open now, and her television was still blaring. She had been watching Michael McIntyre’s The Wheel, and the audience was roaring with laughter.
‘Nora?’ he called out. ‘Nora, are you okay?’
There was no answer, so he stepped into the room. The first thing he saw was the diagonal streaks of blood across the yellow tiled fireplace. Looking around, he saw blood spattered across the flowery wallpaper over the couch. There were even fine drops of blood on the ceiling.
He found Nora behind the door, lying on her back with her arms crossed over her pullover and her grey pleated skirt lifted to expose her pink support stockings. Her head was smashed so that her face was flat and unrecognisable and her brains had squirted out of the splits in her skull and become tangled in her thin white hair.
Jerry stood staring at her for a few moments, breathing slowly, trying to keep the ham roll that he had eaten for lunch where it belonged, down inside his bruised stomach. Then he turned around and mounted the stairs as quickly as he could, to find his phone.
22
Sek was woken up by the sounds of screaming and snarling and doors banging from somewhere downstairs. He sat up and listened. He felt strangely detached from reality, as if he were floating six inches off the floor. After he had eaten, Apo had given him another cupful of calla dew, and he had slid down into unconsciousness almost at once. He could only suppose that one of the tribe had carried him upstairs and tucked him into his sleeping bag. It was growing dark outside and five night lights were flickering in the opposite corner of the room, in the pattern of a pentagram.
He climbed out of his sleeping bag and went to the door to see if he could find out what all the noise was about. As he started to walk along the corridor to the staircase, Laurel Eye came up the stairs. She had twisted her coarse brown braids into a tall pyramid on top of her head.
‘Oh! You’re awake!’
‘All that screaming woke me up. What’s going on?’
‘You don’t have to worry about it. But don’t go down there. Some of the men are fighting.’
‘What are they fighting about? I should tell them to stop. I’m Sowber Sek now. They have to do what I tell them.’
‘I know you’re Sowber Sek and Hedda knows that, and so do the rest of our tribe. But some people from another tribe have arrived and they don’t yet know who you are.’
‘But why are they fighting?’
‘I’m not sure. I think they want to stay here but Hedda says they can’t. There isn’t enough room and there isn’t nearly enough for everybody to eat.’
‘There are lots of empty rooms,’ said Sek. ‘And Faust sent two girls out, didn’t he, to the food place, to bring back vegetables and milk and bread? And when it gets dark we’ll be going out again, won’t we, to bring in more opfers? If there’s more of us that need feeding we’ll just have to catch more of them.’
‘Yes, but Hedda doesn’t want this tribe here. I don’t think she likes Mody – he’s their chief. And she says that if they come to join us, the comelings are much more likely to find out that we’re living here.’
‘They’re going to find us anyway if they carry on making all that noise. I’m going down.’
Laurel Eye caught Sek’s sleeve. ‘No, Sek. You’re only a boy and you could get hurt. I’m supposed to look after you.’
Sek pulled her hand away. ‘I’m not just Sek, I’m Sowber Sek. And I can look after myself.’
He started on his way downstairs, with Laurel Eye following close behind him. The screaming and the banging had stopped now, but he could still hear growling and snarling and arguing.
When he reached the reception area, he found that it was crowded on one side with Hedda’s tribe, some of them carrying hammers and sticks, and on the other side by at least twenty men and women he had never seen before, although they were dressed in much the same way, in hooded duffel coats and puffa jackets. There was a strong smell in the air of body odour and dried urine and smoke.
Hedda was standing in the middle of the reception area. Facing her was a short bald man with a bushy grey beard and a belly so huge that he had only been able to fasten the toggles of his brown duffel coat halfway down. A man was lying at their feet with his arms and his legs spread out. His face was smothered in blood, but Sek recognised him as Apo, who handed out the calla dew. His eyes were wide open but they were staring at nothing.
On Hedda’s right-hand side, two of her men were holding the arms of a tall, thin, spidery man with near-together eyes and protruding teeth. He was trying everything he could to free himself, kicking his legs in a gallop and then tilting himself violently backwards, but another of Hedda’s men came up with a kitchen knife and prodded his waterproof jacket with it, and gave him two or three threatening grunts, and after that he kept still.
The crowd of Hedda’s people all shuffled back when Sek appeared, to give him space to walk up to Hedda. Some of them reverentially placed one hand on top of their heads, and some of them murmured, ‘Got it, got it.’
Sek approached Hedda and the fat bearded man. He looked down at Apo and saw that one side of his forehead had a semi-circular dent, as if he had been hit with a scaffolding pole. There was no doubt that he was dead.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked.
‘There’s been a fight, Sowber Sek,’ said Hedda. She pointed to the tall, thin spidery man. ‘This piece of excrement was demanding that Apo give calla dew to all of these people, but Apo said he wouldn’t. He lost his temper and hit Apo and killed him.’
‘The calla dew isn’t yours alone,’ protested the fat bearded man. ‘It’s high time you shared it out more fairly. All of my people are always suffering because you’re so tight-fisted with it.’
‘That’s because it can’t last for ever,’ Hedda retorted. ‘If I let you have as much as you want, it would be gone in a few weeks or even days and then what would you do? And like the morons you are, you have killed the only one among us who could have worked out how to make us more.’
‘We still need somewhere to stay, and food to eat. At least until we can find ourselves another shelter.’
Hedda put her arm around Sek’s shoulders – not in the way that she had first hugged him, like her own child, but gently, and respectfully, as if she were holding a saint.
‘Sowber Sek, this is Mody, and these are Mody’s people. They have arrived here without warning and demanded that we take them in and look after them. We all used to live together but Mody always wanted different rules, and more food, and more calla dew. So in the end they went off to live in another place. We kept supplying them with calla dew, but only if they brought us an opfer in return for every cupful.’
She turned back to Mody and said, ‘Mody, this is Sowber Sek. He has shown us that he is the “got it”.’
‘Why have you come here?’ asked Sek. ‘What’s happened to your other place?’
‘It was all burned to ashes in a fire,’ said Mody. ‘We were forced to leave and now we’ve lost everything – not that we had much to lose. But our muster has gone, and that took us over a year to put together.’
‘Your muster?’ asked Sek. ‘What’s that?’
‘Never mind,’ Hedda interrupted. ‘This member of Mody’s tribe has murdered our Apo and that means that our whole future is threatened. As I said, the calla dew won’t last for ever, and here’s Mody and his ragged gang of fools, complaining that we don’t let them have enough.’
‘After the stress of that fire, Hedda, we desperately need some now,’ said Mody. ‘Look at Sabina, with her dogs. She’s shaking like a tambourine.’
‘So where are your opfers?’ Hedda demanded. ‘You know what the price is, for each cup of calla dew.’
‘How could we catch opfers when we were running for our lives? In the name of the great one, Hedda, have some pity. If you take us in now, and give us calla dew, I promise you that we will go out tomorrow and fetch you all that you ask for, and more.’
‘I am not a believer in promises,’ said Hedda. ‘I can’t count how many people have made me promises, ever since I was a young girl, and where did I end up? Raped more times than I can remember, hungry, abandoned, and living on the street. It was calla dew that saved me, and so I will never give it away lightly, and for nothing.’
She turned around to the tall, spidery man. ‘We can start with him. As a punishment for murdering Apo, and as an opfer.’
‘What? That’s Biro! He and me, we’ve been together for more than ten years! We’re like brothers! He lost his temper, that’s all! His mind and his body, they’re crying out for calla dew! All of us are crying out for it!’
‘Mody, I don’t care. If you want to show me that when you make a promise you can keep a promise, then give us your friend here to prove it. There’s not too much meat on him, is there, but it’s better to have a marrowbone to suck than nothing at all.’
Biro struggled again, but Hedda’s two men held on to him. ‘I didn’t mean it!’ he shouted, in a ragged voice. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt him! But when I asked him for calla dew he told me to go and fuck myself and turned his back! It wasn’t even me that hit him! It was my need! It was my need, Mody, it was my need!’
Hedda lowered her head so that her face disappeared into the shadow cast by the brims of her hats. Without looking up, she said, ‘You can’t have calla dew without an opfer, Mody. At least one opfer. What do you think, Sowber Sek? Do we punish this Biro for killing Apo and eat him for our supper tonight, or do we forgive him and let him go free?’
Laurel Eye came up and stood at Sek’s side, holding up a candle. The candlelight gave Sek a more cherubic appearance than usual, with his plump face and his curly blond hair and his sweater two sizes too large for him. Laurel Eye said nothing, although her bottle-green glass eye was reflecting the candlelight and winking at him, as if to suggest that you have the power now, Sek. You may be no more than eight years old, but you have the power of life or death.
Sek felt that power rising inside him. It was the most wonderful sensation that he had ever experienced. He felt strong, and grown-up. In fact, he felt invincible. He was more than a boy who could work magic that made everybody bow down before him. He felt that he was a living instrument of the goat-headed god – a high priest in a religion that was twenty times older than Christianity. In a way, he was a god himself.
‘Well?’ said Hedda, her face still invisible. ‘Do we spare him, or eat him?’
Mody dropped to his knees and clung on to the hem of Sek’s droopy sweater. ‘Please,’ he begged.
Sek remembered a film he had seen about Roman gladiators. He didn’t know where or when he had seen it. He might even have actually been there in the arena, in person. But he recalled clearly that Caesar had turned down his thumb to indicate that a defeated man should die.
He went up to Biro, looked him in the eye, and smiled. Biro gave him a nervous smile in return. Then Sek raised his right hand and turned down his thumb, like Caesar.
‘You’re supper,’ he whispered.
At once, Biro was forced down onto his knees. The man with the kitchen knife promptly came up behind him, reached around, and sliced his throat so deeply that his head dropped back as if it were on a hinge. Blood spouted up into the air, spattering Mody, who was still kneeling down next to him. Mody held up both of his bloody hands and let out a long, wavering howl of despair. Almost all of his men and women cried out too, and the young woman called Sabina fell sideways onto the floor and lay there shaking and trembling, with her two dogs circling around her and whining in distress.
Hedda groaned and lifted her head up so that Sek could see her doll-like face. To him, she appeared to be bright-eyed with glee, but if he had known about orgasms, he would have recognised her reaction to Biro’s execution for what it was.
*
That evening, the kitchen was crowded. Hedda’s people sat on one side of the table and Mody’s people sat on the other. All six of the ovens were open, so the heat was intense. There was very little roasted meat, apart from two ribcages that had been split into four, and four legs, and a heap of intestines that had been chopped up and mixed with carrots and swedes. The girls that Faust had sent out to the Tesco supermarket had shoplifted five French loaves and these had been sliced and toasted and thinly spread with fish paste.
Hedda and Mody sat at the head of the table, with Sek sitting between them. That afternoon, three of the women had gone out to Kennington Park and cut branches from a laurel hedge, which they had plaited together to form a crown for him, so that he looked like a miniature emperor.
A few members of Hedda’s tribe and Mody’s tribe were talking among themselves, but most of them were staring at each other across the table with suspicion and hostility. Mody’s people had always been more passionately devoted to the goat-headed great one than Hedda’s, and they had insisted on singing a long prayer of thanks before they started eating, while Hedda’s people were already twisting off ribs and cramming squares of scorched intestine into their mouths with their fingers.
Mody himself sat hunched over a bowl of soup made from potatoes and the shredded meat of human feet, which had one of the strongest flavours, seasoned with thyme.
‘We’ll need at least six opfers to feed this crowd,’ said Hedda.
‘You don’t have to tell me,’ said Mody. ‘I’ve made you a promise and I’ll keep my promise.’
‘But when you bring them back you must take the utmost care not to be seen. I mean it. Look at all the people we have here now. The comelings have already found Hiker’s place at the old carpet factory. If they discover us here, it would be a disaster.’
‘If they find us we’ll just have to fight back,’ Sek declared. ‘We’ll have to kill more of them. Then they’ll leave us alone.’
‘Oh, you really think so?’ said Mody, putting down his spoon. ‘That shows how much you don’t know about life, little boy. The comelings didn’t care if we lived or died when we were out on the streets, even though we weren’t doing them any harm. We call them comelings, but do you honestly believe that they’ll be frightened to take their revenge on us if we start to kill more?’
‘You should never speak to Sowber Sek that way,’ Hedda admonished him. ‘He’s quite capable of making you disappear into thin air, or ordering you to be turned into tomorrow’s breakfast. And speaking of that, here’s your chance to show me that you do keep your word.’
One of Hedda’s women came away from the ovens, carrying a wooden chopping board. She was a wide-hipped woman, with a red headscarf wrapped around her sweat-studded forehead. Although she was so hot, she was smiling triumphantly. Balanced on top of the chopping board was Biro’s head, his hair frizzled, his face charred black, with cracks in his cheeks where his scarlet flesh showed through. The heat of the oven had popped both of his eyes and his lips were shrivelled into a tight circle as if he were saying ‘oh!’ in dismay.
Hedda slid Mody’s soup bowl to one side, and the wide-hipped woman set down the chopping board in front of Mody so that Biro was facing him.
‘There,’ she said. ‘Your friend for you. Not a rare friend, I grant you, but medium rare!’
With that, she gave a wheezing laugh, and took out a knife and fork from her apron pocket, setting them down on the table for him.
Mody stared at Biro’s blackened features for a long time, and Sek saw that there were tears glistening in his eyes.
‘Go on, Mody,’ said Hedda. ‘You’ve had only a little soup so far. You have to keep up your strength. And your promise.’
‘I can’t,’ Mody told her, shaking his head. ‘I knew him for so long. We did so much together. He always helped me out when times were bad, and most of the time, the times were terrible. I couldn’t have made it without him.’
‘Do you want to be cooked, the same as him?’ said Sek.
Mody turned around to face him. ‘So you think you’re a Sowber, do you?’ he sneered. ‘Well, I think you’re nothing but a snotty-nosed kid who’s full of himself – not a “got it”. Make me disappear, can you? Go on, then! Make me disappear! Or prove to me, here and now, that you’re a Sowber, because I don’t believe for one moment that you are!’
Everybody at the table went quiet, and Sek heard two or three of them sucking in their breath. He looked round at Hedda, expecting her to support him and tell Mody not to speak to him with such disrespect. But Hedda simply shrugged and said, ‘Show him, Sowber Sek. Make him eat his words – and then his friend.’
Sek was taken aback, and started to feel panicky. There were no polystyrene cups on the table, so he couldn’t perform his cup-disappearing trick. Anyway, they had all seen that one already, and if he botched it they would realise at once that he wasn’t a real magician. He still found it hard to believe that they had been so impressed by it in the first place.
