The shadow people, p.6
The Shadow People, page 6
7
Jimmy had lapsed into a strange nightmarish sleep. Even in the darkness of his dreams though, in which blurry figures appeared to be sliding in and out of doorways and climbing stairs, he had continued to feel the nagging pain in his hands and his elbows and his knees. It was like hearing a dentist’s drill, endlessly screeching in another room.
After about an hour, he was woken up by a bustling sound, followed by feverish whispers. He opened his eyes to see that the men and women had gathered around him in a semi-circle, and that they were all holding up lighted candles and night lights. They were clearly excited, and their excitement seemed to have intensified their smell. Sweat, and urine, and dried blood, and something else too, a distinctive herbal aroma, like thyme.
The man who was now wearing Jimmy’s anorak started howling and rhythmically stamping his feet on the floor, and the others joined him. A few seconds later, the women started to accompany them with a high, tremulous ululation. They howled and ululated louder and louder, and stamped their feet until the floor shook.
Half-deafened and numb with pain, Jimmy turned his head to look at Cathy, nailed up beside him. Her head was still hanging down, and her eyes were closed, and Jimmy wondered if she was dead. In a way, it would be a blessing if she was. Even if God didn’t exist – even if there was no sunlit Heaven where she could hug their little Sam again – even if death was simply like being asleep for ever – anything had to be better than the never-ending agony of being pinned to this wall, and mutilated, and surrounded by these howling, ululating creatures.
Jimmy turned back to the men and women, looking from one face to the other, trying to see if he could make any kind of connection or elicit even the slightest flicker of sympathy, but he had no response from any of them. Both men and women stared at him glassy-eyed, baring their teeth as they howled and stamped, and sticking out their tongues lasciviously as if they were performing a haka, that threatening Maori dance that the New Zealand rugby team acted out before every match.
This wasn’t a challenge though, like a haka, because Jimmy and Cathy were helpless, and in no position to fight back. Jimmy also saw that as well as sticking out their tongues, they were pretending to bite at their fingertips. He was overwhelmed with a sudden dreadful suspicion that made him shiver, even though he was nailed to the wall, and he almost tore his right hand away from the plaster. Could it be that they were hungry?
They kept on howling and stamping for another three or four minutes, and Jimmy saw that some of them were actually salivating, their chins dripping with spit, even though they came no closer. Then, abruptly, one of the men let out a weird ooh-aah-yee! sound and they immediately stopped stamping and fell silent. The fiftyish man with the broken nose had entered the room, and was standing by the door with a ragged shawl draped around his shoulders like the tallit shawl worn by rabbis. In one hand he was holding a sagging plastic shopping bag. He made no sound, but lifted the other hand, and all the men and women shuffled back toward the wall that was decorated with the image of the goat-headed man, to give him plenty of clearance. All of their candle flames dipped in unison, as if something were approaching from the corridor outside, causing a silent draught to blow in front of it.
The fiftyish man stepped back, and opened the door wider. A woman appeared, at least as tall as he was, and enormously obese. Her head was covered by a grey knitted balaclava and two hats perched one on top of the other – a wide-brimmed fawn fedora with a black bowler cloche hat wedged onto its crown. She was dressed in layers, with a purple fringed rug wound twice around her neck. Underneath the rug she was wearing a brown ankle-length overcoat, which was unbuttoned to show a herringbone jacket and a dirty white turtle-neck sweater. Her huge belly hung pendulously over the top of her waistband, as if she were carrying a dead lamb inside her sweater. Her mustard-coloured corduroy skirt was spotted and stained, with a fraying hem, and the heels of her rumpled boots were worn down.
Her face was moonlike, with clotted eyelashes and a snub nose and strawberry-red lips. She was heavily made-up, with eyeliner and blusher on her cheeks, and a beauty spot. All in all, she looked like a giant matryoshka doll.
She made her way slowly into the centre of the room, and as she did so the men and women held up their candles and started to hum. She ignored them, and approached the painting of the goat-headed man, and they parted to let her through. She reached up and pressed her hand flat against the man’s erect penis, closing her eyes for a few moments as if she were drawing strength from it. Then she turned around and beckoned to the fiftyish man, and let out an extraordinary squeal from the back of her throat, more like a puppy than a woman.
The fiftyish man reached into the plastic bag that he was holding and brought out a wedge-shaped object, like a small brown shoe. He waved it from side to side and so it took Jimmy several seconds before he was able to focus on it and realise that it was a severed human foot. Its skin was crisp and bubbled and its toes were tightly curled over, as if it had been fried.
The fiftyish man handed it to the woman and she crossed over to the wall where Jimmy and Cathy were nailed up. She looked at Jimmy with an expression that was soft and almost affectionate, and she even smiled.
‘Why are you doing this?’ Jimmy whispered.
The woman continued to smile, but said nothing.
‘Why can’t you just let us go? You have no idea how much this hurts.’
The woman made a noise like a cough, but with her mouth tightly closed, so that it sounded as if she were trying to tell him that she didn’t care.
‘Please… I need to take my wife to a hospital. Please. I’m begging you.’
If the woman understood him, she showed no sign of it. Still smiling, she lifted the severed foot and held it within an inch of his face, and it was then that he could see that its toenails were painted pale blue, even though some of the varnish had flaked off when it had been fried, or however it had been cooked. It was one of Cathy’s feet.
With great theatricality, the woman slowly spun the foot around and around and then raised it to her mouth and bit into the side of it. As soon as she wrenched the flesh away and started to chew it, the men and women in the room began howling and keening and stamping their feet again, and chanting a word that sounded like ‘Hed-dah! Hed-dah!’
Jimmy couldn’t bear to see the woman eating the flesh from Cathy’s foot, and for a few moments he squeezed his eyes tight shut. But then he felt a scratching, jabbing sensation against his bare stomach, and when he opened his eyes he saw that the woman was prodding him with Cathy’s toes, demanding his attention.
After that, he watched dully as she used her teeth to worry the skin and muscle away from the foot bones. She kept her eyes on him as she chewed, unblinking. Eventually she spat out a pale-blue toenail, and then held up what was left of the skeletal foot like a trophy.
‘Hed-dah! Hed-dah!’ the men and women chanted.
The woman gave Jimmy one last enigmatic smile and then she turned around and walked back across the room to the figure of the goat-headed man. With some difficulty she lowered herself down on one knee and reverently laid the bones of Cathy’s foot on the floor in front of him. The men and women hummed again, and kept on humming when the fiftyish man took hold of her elbow and helped her to stand up.
The woman clapped her hands, and the men and women carefully set down their lighted candles and night lights all along the skirting board, so that the room was still illuminated, but from below, so their faces all looked like Hallowe’en masks. They gathered around Jimmy and Cathy again, and this time they were all grinning, as if the woman had now given them permission to satisfy their hunger.
Three of the men slid carving knives out of their jackets. One of them came up to Jimmy and pricked him in the chest with the point of his knife. He was unshaven, with a bandana around his sweaty forehead, and two of his front teeth were missing. Jimmy looked into his eyes, trying to understand what he was thinking, but it was like looking into an animal’s eyes. The man was obviously feeling some emotion, but whatever it was, it was incomprehensible.
‘What are you going to do?’ Jimmy asked him. ‘Kill me?’
The man leaned so close to him that Jimmy could smell his foetid breath.
‘You’re not going to kill me, are you?’
The man gave a complicated snort, but didn’t answer. He raised his knife and Jimmy felt an ice-sharp pain just below his breastbone, followed by a cold sliding sensation all the way down to his genitals. He closed his eyes, hoping that he had fallen asleep again, and that this was nothing but a dream. But then his insides suddenly felt as if they were dropping out of him, that same feeling he had on a roller coaster when it went plunging downward from its highest point.
He opened his eyes and looked down. The man had cut him wide open and all his intestines had tumbled out and were hanging in bloody festoons between his thighs. He was in such shock that he found the sight fascinating more than frightening, but he understood in a detached way that he was going to die. He turned toward Cathy to tell her one last time that he loved her.
It was far too late. Even if she had not died earlier, she was being rapaciously attacked by a man and a woman with knives, who had not only disembowelled her but were prising her ribs wide apart so that they could crack them free from her spine, and were cutting thick slices of flesh from her thighs.
As his sight gradually faded, and darkness began to fill up his brain, he saw the woman grip Cathy’s hair and start to saw off her head.
He died before he could see the woman tossing Cathy’s head into the hotel laundry trolley that the young man with the Mohican had wheeled into the room, on top of her intestines and her liver and the flesh from her hips. His own bowels would follow, and his ribs, and finally his head. All that would be left of Jimmy and Cathy, nailed to the wall, would be their spines and their pelvic girdles and their leg bones, with a few red rags of skin and flesh attached to them. Only their arms would remain, spread wide, as if they were worshipping the goat-headed man on the opposite wall.
8
Jerry was cramming sausage and sourdough bread into his mouth when Jamila said, ‘I still can’t be sure.’
‘Sorry,’ said Jerry, covering his mouth with his hand in case he spat some out while he was talking. ‘You can’t be sure about what?’
‘That painting on the wall – that man with the head of a goat. Goats appear in almost every religion in one form or another, did you know that? In some of them they represent goodness and purity but in others they represent evil. Jesus in the Bible separated the sheep from the goats on Judgement Day, didn’t he? The sheep were blessed and sent to heaven and the goats were cursed and sent to hell, and even now we refer to goats as being bad, don’t we?’
‘Not me, skip. But then I can’t say I know any goats, not personally, so it’s difficult to form an opinion.’
They were sitting next to a bare brick wall in Mud, the Australian coffee house on Mitcham Road, only two minutes’ walk away from Tooting police station. Jerry had been ravenously hungry. When he had returned to his flat from Kennington late last night, he had eaten nothing more than a Bombay Bad Boy Pot Noodle, and even that had been hard to swallow after seeing Babar Malik’s smashed-up body and PC Bone’s severed hand with a bite taken out of it.
He had ordered Mud’s wild mushroom special, which was two slices of sourdough with two poached eggs, a grilled sausage, red onion jam and a heap of mushrooms in pesto sauce. Jamila had ordered nothing more than a cup of lemon tea.
‘I was so struck by that man with the head of a goat because my aunt in Peshawar used to have a picture in the hallway of her house on Warsak Road and it was almost exactly the same.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘No. It was only a small picture, and it was very dark and dirty so that you could hardly make out what it was. But when I was young and I went to visit her, it always used to fascinate me, especially since it had a ghiin. That means willy.’
‘So why did she have a picture like that? Don’t tell me she was a secret devil-worshipper.’
‘I was always too afraid to ask her, but when I was about twelve or thirteen I was spending the weekend with her and she caught me staring at it. That evening she explained what it was, and why she had it hanging there.’
Jerry prodded some more mushrooms onto his fork and said, ‘Go on.’
‘She said it was a picture of Balaa, who was one of the gods of Pragata. In the Kalash religion, there are two realms – Onjeshta, the realm of purity, and Pragata, the realm of impurity and evil. Balaa means “monster” and he was one of the most powerful gods of Pragata. Sometimes he was called “The Shadow God” because he lived in the darkness before you were born and the darkness after you die. He was best known for his power to protect evil people from justice. If you were a murderer, or a thief, he would make sure that anybody who had seen you committing a crime would either lose their memory or suffer a fatal accident, so that they couldn’t give evidence against you.’
‘Just as well the Merton Abbey mob never got to hear about him. If we hadn’t had all those witnesses who saw them shooting that geezer – well, we’d never have got them all banged up.’
‘My aunt told me that about ten years before, her eldest son, Ghazan, had a fight with another boy at his school who was a bully. He had stabbed him and the boy had died. At least twenty other children were in the playground at the time, and some of them did not like Ghazan at all, so they were prepared to stand up in court and say that they had seen him do it.’
‘You’re not going to tell me she got in touch with this Balaa?’
Jamila nodded. ‘She said a prayer to Balaa, begging him to make all of the children who had witnessed Ghazan killing this bully completely forget everything that they had seen. But she knew there was a high price that she would have to pay.’
‘From what I’ve read, you can get off a murder charge in Pakistan if the victim’s family stands up in court and forgives you, can’t you? Which in real life usually means you’ve offered them a sizeable bung. What’s a monkey in rupees? That’s the money they have in Pakistan, isn’t it?’
‘That’s right. A monkey? Five hundred pounds? That works out at more than a hundred and five thousand rupees. But the family of the boy that Ghazan had killed were not prepared to forgive him, not for any amount of rupees. She had to pay Balaa, but not with money. And this is what disturbed me so greatly about what we saw in that old carpet factory, and in that tunnel.’
‘It didn’t exactly fill me with joie-de-whatsit either.’
‘Before he will consider helping you, Balaa demands that you eat human flesh, as a sacrifice to show your devotion to him. He also demands that you remain loyal to him for the rest of your life and say a prayer to his image every day. That is why my aunt had his picture hanging in her hallway.’
‘Don’t tell me she ate some human flesh.’
‘All she told me was that the daughter of the woman who lived next door to her had a stillborn child.’
Jerry was about to help himself to some more mushrooms, but his fork froze in mid-prod.
‘You’re having a laugh, aren’t you? She ate next door’s baby?’
‘She was crying by then, and she couldn’t tell me any more. But that was the implication, yes. The thing is though that it looks as if the members of this cult, whoever they are, they’re doing the same. Eating human flesh and saying prayers to this goat-headed creature who looks like Balaa.’
‘So who do you think we’re looking for? A bunch of Pakis? Sorry – people of Pakistani origin?’
‘I have no idea, Jerry. The resemblance between the painting on the wall in the tunnel and my aunt’s picture, it may mean nothing. You can find so many pictures of demons with goats’ heads, in so many different cultures.’
‘What’s the plan, then?’
‘We can ask around in the local Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities, in case anybody has heard about this cult. Maybe they thought nothing of it, and dismissed it as a rumour, but it still might give us a lead. I can go and see my friend Chakshan Varma at the Muththumari Amman Temple in Upper Tooting Road and perhaps also visit the Shree Ghanapathy Temple in Wimbledon.’
‘Okay. While you’re doing that, I can drop into some of the Indian restaurants along the Broadway and see if they’ve got wind of anybody eating anything apart from bhuna gosht.’
‘Very well,’ said Jamila, with an unexpected smile. ‘But I shall be checking your breath afterwards. I know that you are addicted to curry.’
Once Jerry had finished his mushroom special, they walked back to the station. They found Tosh Brinkley and Simon the train spotter waiting for them in the reception area.
‘Have you been waiting long?’ Jamila asked them. ‘I thought you said nine-thirty.’
‘No, only five minutes. Hardly any traffic for some reason. It’s like the end of the world out there.’
They went upstairs to the office that Jerry shared with Edge, although Edge was in court today. Tosh had brought his laptop and he set it down on Jerry’s desk and opened it.
‘It’s going to take at least another week to complete a full examination of all the human remains we collected from the Royale factory. But I thought you’d find it useful if I gave you a preliminary report, so you’d have a clearer idea of what kind of offender you’re looking for. And Simon here has been doing some research on the location and where PC Bone might have been abducted to.’
‘Well, that could be very helpful,’ said Jamila. ‘DCI Saunders sent two units out, one to Kennington Tube station and the other to the Oval. If PC Bone was taken out of the Underground system, he must have passed through one of those stations or the other, but neither unit found any trace of him, nor could they find any witnesses who had seen him.
‘They carried out another search along the tracks overnight when the power was switched off. They took along a dog unit too. But still nothing They’ll be doing it again though, just to make sure they didn’t miss anything.’
