Sin (34 page)

Was the storm Joy had foretold
actually in me? Thunder? It did seem as if a tempest raged in the
pit of my stomach, but it could equally have been the gods having a
bitch fight - pulling hair, slapping and clawing.

Either way, the sudden absence
of force made me catch my breath and I gasped. Jersey turned and in
the light from the gods' playground above I could see the shock in
his eyes. And the blood. And from his nose. And his ears. Then his
knees bent in different directions and he toppled backwards, his
head making a dull thud as it connected with a gro-bag lying on the
floor.

Dirt to dirt.

I looked from Jersey Dead to
Caroline Alive and, in the same gods' glow, saw that she saw me,
and that she smiled. Then her eyes closed and she, too, fell to the
floor. There was no lifeless collapse, just a fainted fall.

I walked over to her and knelt.
She'd made me smile too many times in the past, as quiet as she
was, to realise, on waking, what could have transpired here. I
searched through the jacket that Jersey always wore and the
trousers that were almost undone until I found the syringe of
forgetfulness he'd intended for his intended victim. In this I
couldn't help, though it pained me, but agree with the corpse whose
pockets I'd just pillaged.

I wiped the blood from
Caroline's nose, there was just a little, took her arm and pushed
up the sleeve. Then, as tenderly as I could with a needle,
administered the drug.

"Just a little prick," I
whispered, "but he's gone now."

Now what? Should I leave the
pair, dead and dazed, and run? Or hide? Or run and hide? Or hide
them? Or risk moving them out of the nursery back into one of the
many store rooms or vacant cells of the Institute? I certainly
couldn't carry them both together. I wasn't a big, strapping bull
of a man, I was just me. Strong enough but I'd never be a contender
for World's Strongest Man, going up against Geoff Capes or Lars Van
Danish or whoever was this year's champion. World's Strangest Man,
maybe, but I didn't think there was a prize for that and I doubted
they televised the championship anyway. Besides, Jersey would be a
literal dead weight - not for any championship, just for moving him
- and Caroline as good as. Eventually they'd be found and I'd be
seen, and then the game was up before I'd had chance to roll the
die.

I stood and looked around.
Options, options, come to me, give me chances, one, two...

Over in the far corner was a
wooden panelled box. Six feet square and five feet high with faded
paintings of trees, hills and approximations of animals - a rabbit,
a fox (that looked more like a map of Australia), what could have
been a deer but what may have been a dog - adorning the sides.
Flies buzzed energetically over its top, a simple handled cover,
diving every so often to head butt the surface. The compost heap.
Fermentation Central. On the odd times the patients had made it
into this forbidden land, the box had become home to various items
of clothing, including underwear, a wig, false teeth and even an
equally false arm. The latter was the most curious as the only
prosthetically challenged person in residence had a false leg, not
arm. Barring that and those, though, Glenn used the compost heap
religiously. Natural was best.

There was an extraction unit
above the box that hummed and chittered and, for a moment, I was
back on holiday in Luxor, Egypt. The scarabs were chattering to
each other below my balcony as I looked over the Nile to the lit up
mountains of the Valley of the Kings.. To the left, the south, the
sun set, changing the sky to deep orange as, on the far bank, smoke
rose from small fires. The feluccas drifted on the water, the
occasional flash of a tourist's camera capturing the setting sun
before the boats had to race back to be moored before darkness. It
was a childhood dream come true and I'd gone with the woman of my
dreams. Beautiful, sensual, funny and amazing in every way, Luxor
and fiancée alike.

We hadn't fallen out, my fiancée
and I. We couldn't fall out. But she did take the bus to work each
day. The Number Five, usually.

A moan, a breath from Caroline
snatched me back, thankfully, from the banks of the Nile to the
banks of the compost heap. The extractor, I realised, sounded not
so much like the casual banter of beetle buddies as it did like a
frayed wire complaining that the electricity had to spark across
the gaps and was tired of doing so, and warning that it might just
fail if it didn't get fixed soon. Not wanting to argue with or risk
the wrath of an irate fan, I made my choice.

I scooped up Jersey's body, then
put him quickly back down as I realised I wouldn't be able to carry
him all that way. I decided his mode of transport wasn't really
going to bother him too much in his present deceased condition, so
I grabbed his arms and pulled. His shoes squeaked too loudly along
the floor so I had to stop to remove them, tying the laces to his
refastened (by me) belt. Briefly, I wished I could teleport him as
I could myself, but knew I couldn't control my own destination and
didn't want him ending up in Jack Duckworth's bathtub - there
wouldn't have been room, what with the polar bears. It felt like
four days but was probably more like four minutes, with an indirect
route thanks to the chaotic spread of tables and benches, before
we, my passenger and I, reached the compost box. I was panting but
didn't pause as I lifted the lid then dragged, pulled, swore and
pushed Jersey's body inside.

I looked in before lowering the
top. It was almost empty. I could hope that the gardener just threw
rubbish in until it was full and didn't care to witness its
decomposition. In that case, Jersey could be hiding in there for a
good while before being discovered. I could hope, but I knew, with
my luck, someone would walk in straight after I left with the sole
intention of investigating the compost heap. The owner of the false
arm, perhaps.

I hurried back to Caroline and
was relieved to find her exactly as she'd been left. I'd half
expected, or a little more than half, to find her gone. She'd be
crawling along the corridor to collapse at the feet of a patrolling
orderly or, even better, a returning Dr. Connors. She hadn't moved.
She was even snoring softly.

Caroline I could carry, albeit
not too gracefully.

Attempting the scooping again,
this time with a much lighter and less deader person, I picked her
up and threw her over my shoulder. No. That sounded like I
manhandled her roughly. I didn't. She was delicate, in spirit as
well as in body, and I couldn't bring myself to be harsh with her.
She wasn't here by choice. I lowered her onto my shoulder, that was
better, and I did my best, now that one was two, to slip out
silently from the nursery. It was only then that I thought of CCTV
cameras. I didn't know, had no idea, if any closed circuit sentries
scanned the room with their beady black eyes. My long chats with
Jeremy, from which I gleaned so much information I would never have
discovered otherwise, being insane or dangerous or both, hadn't
mentioned any such security.

Well, Dr. Connors was going to
find out which was correct, insane or dangerous, and I looked
forward to discovering that myself too.

As for the cameras, if they'd
seen me it was tough and too late. If they hadn't, it was an
unexpected bonus. One less thing on the catch me if you can list.
One less way to grab Sin by the head and shake him until all his
secrets fell out.

The corridor was in almost
darkness. A high windowed hallway connected the nursery to the
institute proper and, at this late hour, it was lit purely by
starlight and the ambient almost-light of night time. That was fine
with me as the fact that the whole corridor was, more or less, one
long slice of gloom saved me the trouble of slipping from shadow to
shadow. I reached the opposite end before I'd barely had chance to
breathe then realised I'd been holding my breath. I let it out
slowly through my nose and forced myself to breathe as normally as
the weight on my shoulder would let me.

The double door at this end
wasn't locked. It didn't have a lock. Each door had hinges, a hand
plate to push either way and a kick board at the bottom for the
times you had your hands full or you didn't get lucky with your
wife the night before and didn't have a cat handy. I went to push
it open but stopped. My fingers had made contact with the rectangle
of metal worn smooth but dirtied by so many previous fingers.

This was it. Just as I could
feel the thunder grumbling inside me, I sensed that somewhere there
was a whirlwind on the other side of this door. Whether I was the
dervish in question or whether it was Connors didn't matter. There
would, most likely, be collateral damage. Casualties of a war I
hadn't even known raged.

I could step through the door
right into the face of the night watch, which was usually whichever
orderly couldn't pay his rent that week and needed the extra cash.
Or, in the case of Nathan, couldn't pay his dealer. Jeremy told me
about him. Nathan's extensive crack habit was the only thing that
stopped him being a patient himself. Once or twice a patient was
allowed to do the rounds when there were no takers for the overtime
or Connors wanted some free labour. Wayne Privet, who was so tired
of jokes being made about his surname had tried to change it to his
nickname 'Whippet' - he no longer wanted to be 'hedging his bets' -
was an insomniac, and his perpetual lack of sleep made him jittery.
A perfect candidate for the graveyard shift. The twilight tour. He
wouldn't fall asleep on the job and his scream, if surprised, was
loud enough to bring the whole house tumbling down. He suited his
name, though - Whippet. He was lean and wiry. Less meat than a
McDonalds. Wayne the Whippet wasn't the sort of person you could
like, but you didn't dislike him either. His nervousness was
infectious and just a few minutes in his manic company was enough
to make your stomach churn and your skin sweat. He was still one of
the gang however. A fully fledged member of Us Not Them, so in that
respect, he was okey-dokey, along with that pig in the pokey.

The Whippet, the Bender and the
rest were, without even realising it, relying on me, The Reverend
Sin. Perhaps my name suited me more than I'd known. Perhaps I was
here to save them all. Dr. Connors wasn't the clever, influential
psychiatrist who took all in and ran a successful mental home. He
was a monster. He was a killer. A puppeteer, with no strings to
hold him down. He was who knew what else.

I paused, still, and took a deep
breath. I held it. I had no choice but to hold it. I felt something
change. Something in me. I looked up, out of the windows, up at the
night sky, and I could have sworn, just for a second, all the stars
had suddenly winked out as if the nine billion names of God had
been found.

I don't have epiphanies on a
daily basis. Not often at all. A sense of awakening to a knowledge
that should have been there all along and that shocks you with its
simple, but profound, enlightenment. When the stars came back on,
if indeed they'd gone out in the first place, I knew.

From the beginning.

From the bus.

* * * *

Barry Coombs. Loser
extraordinaire. Lifelong welfare sponger, the type that had never
had a job, or any intention of having one, but could still drive a
car, smoke sixty cigarettes a day and drink a bottle of vodka a
night. The type that was proud of it. I didn't know if buses had
seat numbers, but if they had, Barry Coombs would have been sitting
in, poetically almost, seat 13, top deck. He always sat on the top
deck because, from being a surly schoolchild, he thought it was
clever. Tough. Hard. He nearly always sat, anally almost, in the
same seat. It was his place. His domain. He marked his territory by
scrawling profanities on the back of the seat in front. He'd stub
out his cigarette in the cushion next to him, but slowly so he
could see the material burn. On that particular bus, because even
though he always took the number five it wasn't always the same
vehicle, he'd managed to almost finish burning the second 'R' of
his name. On another he'd only completed the initial 'B'. On
another bus still, Barry had written, in scorched circles, the full
word and even managed to underline it in a line of cigarette burns
that could have been the Morse Code for S.O.S.. The
dots-and-joined-dots-to-make-dashes were deliberate. Barry was
clever for knowing something like that, he thought. He was a brain.
That was how he knew that today would be a good day. He was tired
of not being able to feed his children properly on his fortnightly
social payouts. He was tired of only being able to afford the cheap
shop's own vodka and not the decent stuff. He wanted more than the
crappy camel dropping fags he bought for £20 a sleeve from his mate
at the house on the corner.

What could go wrong? Barry had a
plan. Of course his plan had taken all of the time it took to eat a
bowl of Frosties to work out. Barry didn't need to spend too much
effort on his schemes. He was a brain. He actually called himself
that but, if any of his ideas came to fruition, it was purely by
chance. Barry was a brain. A legend. But only in his own head.

He knew how the Post Office
worked, having cashed his giro cheque there for as long as he could
remember. In fact, he was in there so often, over the years, he'd
grown friendly with the staff. They must have liked him - they knew
his name, the names of his children. Polite people don't do that.
Friends do. So they naturally trusted him, he thought.

The gun wasn't his. Not exactly.
He'd found it on the waste ground that had been allotments once
upon a time. It was already loaded, but he'd never used it. The
most he'd dared was to hold it in his hands, test the gun's weight
and feel, ask if his reflection felt lucky, punk. Today, though,
was a good day. A good day to fire a gun, or at least threaten to.
A good day to earn a bit more dosh. A good day to become a man.