Sacrifice of Fools (22 page)

Batmobile! Yah!

Two cars turn between the sandstone gate pillars and crunch up the pink gravel drive between the rhododendrons.

‘We’re doing the wrong jobs,’ Detective Chief Inspector Willich in the passenger seat comments, observing the Scrabo sandstone pile of nineteenth-century bourgeoiserie among the mature shrubs. ‘If you really want to coin it, invent a religion.’

‘Tell me that again when we’ve got him in an interview room,’ Roisin Dunbar says.

The two dark Fords draw up at the foot of the worn steps leading to the glassed-in porch. Security lights flick on, AI-guided security microcameras lock on to the figures stepping from the open doors.

Her team orders up behind her. Roisin Dunbar faces the front door and assertively presses the bell push. A speaker gives her three bars of ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ and a chip-personality says. ‘Welcome to the home of Pastor McIvor Kyle. Please state your name, your business, and whom you wish to see.’

‘Detective Sergeant Roisin Dunbar. Police. We have a warrant to search Pastor McIvor Kyle’s premises.’ The team try not to laugh as the door-dog prissily answers, ‘Pastor Kyle has been notified of your presence and will receive you shortly. In the meantime, I shall play you some music.’ It’s ‘Burdens Are Lifted at Calvary’. The door-dog gives them all of it, followed by ‘Safe in the Arms of Jesus, Safe in the Arms of Him’. After that, ‘The Old Rugged Cross’.

Roisin Dunbar is not going to ask pretty-please of a chunk of silicon.

‘Barry, give him a call on your mobile.’

The police admire Pastor McIvor Kyle’s view of the lough and the lights of Holywood beyond. An aircraft lifts off from the City Airport across the river. Container ships are moving in the channel.

‘He’s not answering.’

‘Right, lads. Barry, Doug, Kev and Joe, round the back.’

Dunbar tries the door-dog again. She gives it one bar before using the police over-ride to put it into receive-only mode. Still Pastor McIvor Kyle does not answer the call.

‘Sarge! Boss!’

She’s glad she’s wearing heels she can run in. The big plastic cod-Victorian conservatory juts out from the back of the house like a penis extension. It glows with lamps. Dunbar wonders how they did that nice pink speckle effect on the glass. She wonders further; why are her officers standing on the lawn with strange, lost boy looks on their faces? There’s a figure sitting in a cane chair in the conservatory, lolling back against the glass. She stops. There’s something amiss with it. It has no head. That pretty pink dapple effect is blood.

‘Jesus,’ Willich breathes.

The seated figure is dressed casually, but its identity is immediately apparent. Below the ragged stump of neck is a clerical collar, once pure white, now washed-in-the-blood red. Its lap is a mess of raw flesh. Through the smeared glass Dunbar can make out another figure front down on the floor. Hands are outspread, gripping the tile-effect vinyl. A lake of blood has leaked from the cauterized arteries of the neck and congealed. This figure is wearing a long floral print dress with a cardigan.

‘Sarge, one down in here!’ Barry is at the kitchen door, peering through the glass.

‘An ambulance. Get a fucking ambulance!’ Dunbar screams as she runs to the kitchen door.

‘Bit late for that,’ someone says as Barry unsnaps his mobile.

The third body is on the kitchen floor, another woman, curled around her own dismemberment as if in shame.

‘Get us in there,’ Willich says thinly. ‘There may be survivors.’ But he isn’t convincing anyone. Nothing has been left alive in that house.

‘It’s open,’ Barry says, looking in amazement at the handle in his hand as if he has broken something not his.

‘Boss!’ Kev has made it to the double garage, where there is an Alsatian-sized dog kennel. There is a dark huddle half in, half out of it. ‘They killed the dog! They killed the fucking dog!’

In their last couple of years on the Woodstock Road, Karen had had a cat, an evil black bastard tom with half its tail missing. Stumpy, she had called it. She hadn’t so much had the cat as the cat had had her. It had come in out of the entry and she’d given it chicken bones and scraps and once you start that you never get rid of them. It fought and it sprayed and it stank of piss but Karen had to have it on the bed at night. It would sleep between them, languishing in body heat, purring asthmatically. If you tried to move it, it would draw blood. Gillespie would toss himself awake in the night, not knowing why he had woken, and though he could never see it, for no one can see a black cat in a dark bedroom, he knew that the thing was staring at him. He could feel the heat of its eyes on his skin. He could not drift back into cramped sleep while he felt its eyes on him. He knew that the reason he had woken was because the cat had opened its eyes. It could do this any time it wanted, open its eyes, and wake him.

He wakes, but it is not dark. It is not the front bedroom of the terrace house on Hatton Drive. In the waking moment he does not know where he is; it feels like some fragment of a dream, but eyes have woken him. He can feel the heat of cat eyes watching him. He tries to sit up. Enormous pain. Everything pain. Everywhere. He can’t find the top of the bed. It seems to go on for ever. Jesus fuck, the pain. He rolls on to his side and meets the eyes. They are watching him from a distance of centimetres, cat eyes, slitted eyes.

‘Piss away off, cat,’ he mumbles at them.

The cat lifts its head off the bed. It turns it to one side, quizzically. It blinks its big eyes and then says something to him.

‘Fuck!’ Andy Gillespie is halfway across the bed that seems to go on for ever. It feels like he’s getting smacked about all over again, but he wants away from that
thing.

The cat that talks shrieks and leaps up. It lands on its back legs and skitters away with cockroach speed, across the bed, on to the floor, through the open door. Flailing stick arms, spindly legs; it’s a cat-monkey thing from hell, wailing.

‘Jesus!’ Gillespie bawls.

A silhouette appears in the door. Outsider tall. Outsider thin. Ounserrat Soulereya, dressed in a pair of baggies and nothing else. The cat-monkey thing from hell is clinging to her side, like a cat-monkey thing from hell should. Its mouth is clamped to her single breast.

‘You are awake at last, Mr Gillespie. I am glad. I am sorry that Graceland alarmed you.’ She murmurs something in a language Gillespie does not understand. The thing on the tit looks up at her, blinks and twitters a response.

‘What?’

‘The doctor in the casualty department advised that you have rest to assist your recuperation. I was recovering from
kethba
so Ananturievo gave you some pills to make you sleep. I fear he may have given you too many.’

Lying on the back seat of the cop car, watching the street lights strobe through a pain so intense it was almost bliss. Feeling he’d brought the car seat with him, glued to his back, into the casualty department, into the cubicle, into the X-ray department, can’t you see it?, I’ve got the back seat of a car rammed up my spine. Faces asking him his insurance details and when he couldn’t provide them, trying to sell him a policy. Faces doing things at very great distances, with immensely long arms, like machines. Robot cleaning, robot bandaging, robot injecting. He remembers saying the word ‘No’ a lot to a policewoman in a beige coat who kept morphing into a vision of the Virgin Mary. No, no no, no charges. No pressing charges. Another car — a taxi — more lights, and something picking him up and leaving the back seat where it should remain and carrying him up endless stairs that smelled funny. Funny smelling stairs. Immensely long machine fingers, undressing him.

He’s bollock naked, in a bed, in a room, in a flat, in a
planha,
in the Annadale Embankment Hold. He’s freezing cold. There’s what feel like fur under his ass. The bed is the room. It looks like it’s grown from the walls. Several people could sleep in it together. Several people probably did. They like to sleep together, curled up in each other’s body heat. Kiddy and Mummy and non-paternal Daddy and wur Andy. There were four in the bed and the little one said…

‘Graceland?’

‘I wanted it to have a human name as well as one in Narha. Is it not a fine designation?’

‘Graceland.’ The thing is looking at Gillespie now. Way too much knowing behind the slits of its eyes. It spits out the tit, scrambles down its mother and scurries across to the edge of the big bed. It props its chin on the fur mattress and stares at Andy Gillespie. ‘What time of day is it?’ he asks. He’s not sure what way the light falls this side of the river, but it looks odd.

‘It is sixteen o eight. You have been asleep for ten hours. Fortunately, you avoided major injury or fracture of limbs, but you have sustained heavy bruising and contusion.’

He can’t move. His muscles have locked. He looks at his hands gripping the edge of the silky white covering; they’re swollen and black. He doesn’t want them to be his. They don’t look like the hands he knows. They look like vile black insects that have swallowed his good hands while he slept.

‘I am not long awake and aware myself,’ Ounserrat is saying as Andy Gillespie tries to lift the sheet and look at the damage down there without tearing himself into pieces of pain. Oh Jesus, it’s a mess. ‘It is a strain, going into
kethba.
And I was concerned about the blow I had taken to the belly. I had to monitor the state of the embryo.’

‘You’re pregnant?’

‘Semi-pregnant. Graceland is one of a pair of twins, but I chose to bring only it to parturition. I am holding the other embryo in stasis until such time as I can afford to raise another infant.’

Semi-pregnancy. ‘And is it, ah, all right?’ Graceland’s squealing something to its mother. Ounserrat speaks to it in the same familiar-yet-alien burble. Is there a Shian kid-speak? He thought they all learned Narha the way he learned Narha, through the chemicals. He can make out a word here, a word there, but they’re either inappropriate or incongruous.

‘All is well, Mr Gillespie. Lesbianism will be born whole and sound.’

‘Lesbianism?’ Some time he’s going to be able to stop asking questions. But not quite yet. ‘You have a name for a foetus?’

‘It must be called something. It is at the stage where an identity is imprinted. The name spoke itself in a dream, while I was recovering energy after
kethba.’

Gillespie tries to lie back in the huge bed that fills an entire room. Slow agonies. Is that a heartbeat he can feel underneath the soft, warm fur? The fucking thing’s alive. Everything’s flesh with these people. Then: ‘Who hit us?’

‘I suspect it was minions of Mr Gerry Conlon. While you were talking with your acquaintance, I noticed the club owner speaking on the telephone and looking in your direction.’

‘Shit.’ Then; for it’s an afternoon of abrupt transitions, ‘Shouldn’t you be out delivering pizzas?’

‘Not today. Not any day. I have been made unemployed by Pizza Di Action.’

‘Ach, I’m sorry.’ You and me, both touching bottom now. Heroes without a dime. It’s never like this on the television. Perry Mason never has to worry about his bank balance.

‘It is not so bad. I would have had to give it up soon anyway. The case is becoming demanding. The loss of income will affect us, but Not Afraid of the River will come to an agreement with this Hold to allow us to continue to reside here in the transients’ hall.’ Gillespie winces as he tries to sit upright. It takes a second for Ounserrat to read the expression. ‘You are in pain, Mr Gillespie. Would you care for a painkiller? The doctor in the casualty department gave me a prescription. Ananturievo had it filled this morning at a dispensary before he went out to hunt. They are most powerful.’

‘Actually, could you turn the heat up? I’m freezing my balls off in here.’

Ounserrat wrinkles her nose. Perplexed. Puzzled.

‘Really? If anything we find this apartment too warm.’

‘At least give me my clothes back, then.’

‘They are being cleaned. But you are most welcome to borrow anything of ours that might fit.’ And look like a nightmare drag queen. He pulls the pure white sheet around him. There’re miles of it, like God’s parachute. He tries to get up. Grit teeth. Close eyes. Shit.

‘Mr Gillespie, this is not advisable.’

‘I need to, you know. Go pee.’

‘Do not trouble yourself, please. The bed will take care of it.’

‘The bed?’ Still no end in sight to the questions.

‘Yes.’

They expect him to piss himself. A grown man, wetting the bed. Does it handle number twos as well? Probably, knowing these people.

‘I think I will have that painkiller now.’

He sleeps without realizing he’s slept and wakes in the dark. Same bed. Same room. Same smells. It was not a dream then. Ananturievo’s home from the hunting. He’s a couple of inches shorter than Ounserrat, otherwise the only distinction is his smell. It was the smell that woke Gillespie. Like fungus and whiskey. Gillespie remembers that smell quite well. The season is starting. He’s brought two seagulls strung through the nostrils with a bootlace, and a Jack Russell terrier. He caught the seagulls down by the King’s Bridge, and the terrier in the Ormeau Park. When the season comes no small animal is safe. Public parks become killing fields while the
kesh
chemicals are flowing. Dog walkers beware. Ounserrat examines the bag and feeds it to the protein converter in what had been a Housing Executive standard-issue fitted kitchen. In a couple of hours something like an edible turd will extrude from its sphincter.

Ananturievo’s itchy, agitated. He can’t stay still. He frets and rushes around the little flat while Gillespie eases himself out of the big fur bed and painfully gets dressed. Graceland clings to the Outsider’s hip, protesting endlessly. Ananturievo’s smell is everywhere, even on Andy Gillespie’s freshly laundered clothes. It’s the dancing, Ounserrat explains. It’s harder for males. The hormones are harsh with them, and he is an early starter. Ounserrat follows him, smoothing his hair, stroking his skin. They throw streams of high-velocity syllables at each other. The words fly past Andy Gillespie, wrapped up in layers of shirts and socks and shawls and still warming his swollen fingers in his armpits. Words he thought he knew now seems to have a totally different meaning, while familiar names are replaced by unfamiliar. This is more than the mode Eamon Donnan used for the inadequacy of a word to fully express a concept. This is like a new language growing out of the one he understands. A forked tongue. But he doesn’t ask them what they mean when they say a word. He holds himself at a distance, like a guest in a house where a married couple want desperately to have sex.