The Man in the Moss (81 page)

           
He clambered to the top, staggered out on to the deck
clutching for support at the thick copper pipe connecting the malt mill to the
mash, the big Luna around him, his old mates. Get um out, a voice was rasping
in his gut. Gannons. Get the bastards out. Get the brewery back for Bridelow.

           
He leaned, panting, over the side of one of the tuns and
his breath echoed in its empty vastness.

           
One more flight. He went three-quarters way up to a door
that'd always been kept locked for safety's sake for as long as he'd worked
there.
           
Voices behind it.

           
'... not terribly subtle. What time is it?'
           
'Coming up to eleven-fifteen.'

           
'No time for that, then. Really, I' - a light laugh,
half-exasperated - 'just can't get over what you've done. I really didn't think
you were that clever. Now, look. You know, presumably, that we mustn't actually
kill you. Not yet, anyway.'

           
'Don't care. Do what you want. You're just a slag.
Couldn't have a ...'

           
A crash. A moan. A rolling on floorboards.
           
All right, come on, pick him
up. Sit him next to his dear daddy. Let him have a good whiff. Bind his arms
very firmly, palms up, OK? And at approximately ten minutes to twelve … are you
listening? At ten minutes to twelve, you can open his wrists.'

           
Frank was in a fog. He heard it all but couldn't make
sense of the words and some kept repeating on him.

           
Kill... whiff...
palms up ... open his wrists.

           
It was a woman's voice, not a local accent. More words
rambled down the steps, Frank's brain tripping over them, sometimes he seemed
to hear the key words before they joined actual sentences.

           
Trickle.

           
'Don't go mad. Just want a trickle at first. Steady plop,
plop, plop. We'll be well into it by then. Once you get the trickle going, you
come back and join us. Very quietly. You say nothing.'

           
Blood to blood.

           
'What if he screams?'

           
'He won't. If he does, you can cut another vein. Slow
release is best. I mean, I was going to do this anyway; this way we get an
instant connection, blood to blood.'

           
blood to ...

           
'Oh, yeah? And who would it have been if this one hadn't
suddenly become available?'
           
. . . blood?
           
'Oh.
Right
.'

           
Frank's hands were sticky on the iron stair-rail. Brain
couldn't handle it. Past his bedtime. Turn back, go home, sleep it off, eh? But
there was a voice he recognized, the voice that said it didn't care, the voice
that called the female voice a slag. The voice of the owner of the wrists which
would be opened at precisely ten to twelve, but just a trickle unless it
screamed.

           
Frank screamed. Frank was screaming now.

           
As all the lights went on, Frank screamed, '
Dic
!' as a figure shimmered in the
doorway at the top of the steps and a new smell mingled with the malted air, a
smell just as warm, just as rich, just as moist, but ...

           
The new smell went up Young Frank's nose and forced his
mouth wide open like a bucket. He belched up half a gallon of beer and bile,
which spouted up in a great brown arc and then slapped down on the metal steps.

           
'Manifold. You dirty, uncouth lout. Should have guessed.'

           
Frank looked up into supercilious, wrinkling nostrils.

           
He began dumbly to move up the steps, his shoes skidding
on his own vomit, his hands trying to make fists, his chest locked tight with
hatred, his drink-rubbery lips trying to shape a word which eventually came out
like another gob of harsh sick.
  

           
'...
Horridge...
'

           
Gonna have you, said the rough voice in Frank's gut. This
time gonna take you apart, you smarmy twat.

           
He slipped, and his hands splashed on the steps.

           
Shaw Horridge stood quite relaxed in the doorway, a shred
of a smile on his lips. 'You are an absolute oaf, Manifold.'

           
Frank's fists turned into claws and he took what he
imagined to be a great leap up the final three iron steps towards Horridge's
throat.

           
Horridge didn't move at all until Frank's head was on a
level with the top of the stairs, at which stage a foot went almost idly back.
And then - momentarily - on top of mellow aroma of malt, the sour stench of
vomit and the sweet-rancid essence of rotting flesh, Frank experienced the
absurdly pure tang of boot-polish as Shaw's shoe smashed through his teeth and
was wedged for a second in his gullet.

           
Choked, retching, he threw up his arms to grab the foot,
but the foot was ... receding, just like the rest of Shaw Horridge.

           
Young Frank realized he was flying slowly and almost
blissfully backwards.

           
It seemed a long time until he thought he heard a
metallic
ching
as his head connected
with something solid (metal everywhere in a brewery) and a dull, fractured
crump somewhere inside his brains, wherever they might be splattered.

CHAPTER
V

There was a rustling over
the tumbling water noise; this was what awoke her (how could she have slept,
how
could
she?) And half a second
later there was a light in her eyes and people moving behind it.
           
Two of them.

           
Moira reared up, back to the tree, a spitting cat. 'Come
on. Come on, then ...'

           
Hands curling into claws. Pray that one is Stanage.

           
Because she would die before they'd take her back. She'd
die raking his face.

           
One of them gasped.

           
The other said, 'By 'eck.'

He'd heard it before, so it
was no big surprise. The hackneyed country and western, with chorus.

                                   
Leave your sorrow
                                   
Come
and join us
                                   
Shed
those sins,
                                   
Fold
the joy within …

           
One time, Macbeth had directed this made-for-TV picture
about the crooked evangelist Boyd C. Beresford the Fourth. Spent a whole ten
days cruising the Bible Belt, stuff like this churning out of the car-radio,
out of hotel-room TV sets, out of mission halls and marquees - until even arid
atheism began to look like a safe haven.

           
So he was not impressed. Not even when they started
singing in tongues, because he knew how easy this stuff was to fake, even while
you were convincing yourself you weren't faking it. And all the healing that
lasted just long enough for the relatives to throw in a two hundred dollar
donation.
You feeling better, sister? Or
maybe your faith isn't yet strong enough for you to be healed?

           
'Go away. Begone, heathen!'

           
This real big Born Again Christian on the church door.
Stained jeans and a grungy parka. Tattoos on both wrists, one involving what
looked like it used to be a swastika on fire before it got reprocessed into a
bulky crucifix. Fascist punk finds God. It happened. Classic demonstration of
what Cathy had said earlier about one extreme igniting another.

           
'Listen, I don't plan to cause any trouble,' Macbeth said
wisely. 'All I want is to talk to Joel Beard. I would like for you to bring him
out here. That too much of a problem?'

           
Cathy had said, 'Mungo, you have an open, honest face.
You've got to get to Jowl, talk some sense into him. Long as you go easy on the
casual blasphemy, he has to listen to you - you're not from Bridelow and you're
not a woman. Tell him what you like, but get him to evacuate that place. They
think they're safe in there … they're just so naïve, they're children …'

           
The big guy with the ex swastika said, 'You got five
seconds to get them filthy heathen feet the other side of this sacred
threshold.'

           
Beat up on a pagan for the Lord. Jesus.

           
'Listen,' Macbeth said urgently. 'Go tell Joel that
Pastor Mungo Macbeth of the, uh, East Side Evangelical Mission, would like to
speak to him.'

           
'You're lying,' Swastika said, but with audibly less
conviction than a moment ago.

           
'God will forgive you for that,' Macbeth said. 'Maybe.'

           
'He's not there,' Swastika blurted out.

           
'He is everywhere,' said Macbeth.

           
'No, Joel. I mean Joel. When we got here we couldn't find
him. He's vanished.'

           
'What do you mean, vanished?'

           
'He's just gone.'

           
'Well, where'd he go, for Chr … Where might Reverend
Beard have gone?'

           
Flash of fear in the guy's small eyes. 'Why d'you think
we're praying so hard?'

'So your friends have
returned.'

           
John stood, bathed in blue light.

           
The blue was in the old glass around the enormous
lantern. Round panes, set in the four exterior walls, were frosted white.

           
There wasn't much to it; Joel had expected more, perhaps
the remains of a clock mechanism, but there was no sign of there ever having
been one.

           
'I knew they would,' Joel said. 'I knew it was impossible
for them to forsake their God for very long.'

           
John smiled, his teeth shining blue.

           
'Still,' Joel said. 'I won't say I'm not relieved. Shall
I go down? Tell them what we are going to do?' He moved towards the top of the
stone steps.

           
'Lord, no.' John's face grew solemn. 'They've fled once.'

           
'Yes,' Joel said. 'I'm sorry.'

           
The room was about nine feet square. In any other church
it would be the belfry; here it was the lamphouse. The lantern hung from the
pinnacle of the roof. It was perhaps five feet in diameter.

           
There was lead around the rims of the glass circles in
the walls, but no remains of numerals; it had clearly never been a clock.

           
Inside the bluish milky glass set into an old iron frame,
he could make out the incandescent shapes of three big electric bulbs.

           
John said, 'Used to be an oil lamp, you can tell. Big
candles before that, probably. A lure for the spirits of the Moss.'

           
Joel remembered his nightmare in the cellar room,
imagining the lantern laying an ice-blue beam over still water.

           
Channels of rain glistened like icicles on the glass. The
light was quite ghastly, dehumanizing. John, with his pale, flat face, looked
almost demonic. Joel glanced sharply away, afraid of the illusions this evil
light could evoke. Though they'd been up here over half an hour, he became
aware for the first time of a small door in the shadows to his left.
           
'What's in there, do you
know?'

           
'Let's see, shall we?' John moved lightly across the
boarded floor, pushed and twisted at a handle. 'No ... 'fraid it's locked.'

           
Joel closed his eyes and listened to the singing. The
hymn was trailing into a drone of tongues, male and female voices flowing into
a bright river of praise. He tried to let it flow into him.