Chapter Fifteen

It was silent for a long time. So long that, when the sea had drained out, the man and the boy were still kneeling in the pools it left behind. The room was twilit, although it was only midday; the cobwebbed cornices of the high ceiling were lost in shadow and the walls were cast in a submarine gloom. For more than an hour, without moving a muscle, the boy stared at the hole in the windsurfer’s stomach and all the stuff that had come out of it; while the man, his head bowed as though he were praying, stared at the blooded ammonite.

Christy moved first. He lowered his hands from his hair, dropped them into his lap and knitted his fingers together. Harry glanced up. His own fingers started to move, caressing the sticky, dark clots on the fossil. Still, for another ten or fifteen minutes, neither of them spoke. The room grew darker. The shadows, which had formed on the ceiling like thunder clouds, seemed to fall until they cloaked the huddled figures and the body of the wind­surfer which lay between them. Soon, the bright blond head had gone dull, and the guts were as black as the rubber suit they’d spilled out of. The man and the boy looked at one another until their faces were lost in darkness. Harry let go of the ammonite, so that it rolled into the puddles with a splash and a thud . . . and this, the first sound in the house since the ammonite itself had caused such a deadening silence, signalled that the silence was over.

The boy blinked very hard, as though he’d been asleep and had had a nightmare. When he saw that the nightmare was real, he gasped, peering again at the dead body. He looked at the pulp where the face had been, trying, in his mind’s eye, to rearrange the teeth and the splintered cheekbones to resemble the face that the youth had had. He pointed to it, lifting a trembling hand.

‘You did this, Mr Clewe’, he whispered. ‘Not me. He was alive until you did this.’

There was another silence. In the darkness, Harry shrugged and nodded. ‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘I did that.’

Then, with his hook, he pointed to the wound in the youth’s belly that the shotgun blast had made. ‘And you did this, Christine,’ he whispered. ‘Not me. He was alive until you did this.’

The boy shuddered so violently that his teeth rattled. ‘Yes, Mr Clewe,’ he whispered. ‘I did that.’

So they stared at the wounds they’d made. When Harry said, ‘We both did it, we did it together,’ the two of them nodded their heads. Harry reached over the mass of the windsurfer’s body. Christy reached out as well. And they joined their icy hands, grip­ping until they could feel the warmth of a bond between them: a bond forged in blood, sealed in silence.

At last Harry stood up. He heaved himself to his feet, aching with a terrible cold in all his bones, and stretched his arms and legs to get the circulation going. Treading across the room, he gently put the ammonite beside the photograph of Helen. Then he leaned his forehead on the mantelpiece and closed his eyes. He remained there, without moving. He tried to think what he was going to do next, but his mind went stubbornly blank. After a while, he heard footsteps go squelching out of the room, but he didn’t lift his head or open his eyes to look. He listened as the footsteps crossed the hallway and tramped upstairs, as the bedroom door was opened and then closed a few seconds later. The footsteps came downstairs, crossed the hallway and went outside, through the front door. Harry didn’t know why the beachcomber had gone upstairs and then outside. He didn’t care. He rested his forehead on the mantelpiece and squeezed his eyes shut.

After another minute, the boy came into the house again and stood at the living-room door.

‘Look, Mr Clewe,’ he said very softly, so that Harry opened his eyes and turned round. ‘I’ve been upstairs for these.’ He was holding up the butchering knife in one hand and the torch in the other. ‘And I’ve been to the car for these.’ He’d brought the axe, the sledgehammer and the splitting wedge.

Straight away, he knelt to the body of the windsurfer.

This is what he did.

He peeled off the windsurfer’s suit. It came away without any cutting, folding like a blubbery skin, and the coiled entrails slithered into the water and quivered like the jellyfish that the tide sometimes left in the house. The windsurfer was wearing a pair of red briefs. Christy made to pull them off as well, but then, changing his mind in deference to Mr Clewe, he left them on. At a nod from the boy, Harry took hold of the torch and switched it on, because an early dusk had made the room almost as dark as night. He aimed the beam exactly where the boy told him to. Harry’s mind was blank and empty. His veins were ice. His heart beat faintly, the softest of thumps in the cave of his chest. But his hand was steady, so that the pool of light was as still as the rock pools where the sea had been. Quite numb, he watched without blinking, without wincing or flinching, as the boy set to.

Christy had had a good teacher. Harry Clewe had taught him, out in the yard, to use the axe, the wedge and the sledgehammer on the driftwood they’d brought from the shore. The axe was heavy and very sharp. When the boy brought it down on the wind­surfer’s left shin, it cut straight through and embedded itself in the floorboards. The foot was severed entirely. The boy took aim, and the right foot was off as well.

Breathing hard, he panted, ‘Help me to turn him over, Mr Clewe,’ and together they rolled the youth onto his belly. With the rhythm and accuracy of an experienced woodsman, the boy swung the axe again. It shone in the torchlight and hit the target behind the windsurfer’s right knee, so hard and so swift that the blade was through, splitting the gristle and cartilage and thudding into the floorboards in one blow. The left leg, too, cut cleanly at the knee.

At this, Harry dropped the torch. It landed with a splash. Suddenly overcome, as though all the nightmares he’d ever had were welling inside him like an unbearable migraine, he clapped his hand to his mouth and staggered for the door. It was too much for him. Retching so hard that he thought his chest might burst, he stumbled out of the room and collapsed on the stairs.

The boy shrugged. He picked up the torch and stood it upright on the floor, so that a creamy moon quivered on the ceiling. He rested for a minute. Out in the hallway, Harry sat on the stairs with his head in his hands, and he listened as work resumed.

The crunch of the axe.

The ringing of the sledgehammer on the splitting wedge.

The crunch of the axe.

The squelch of footsteps across the room.

The crunch of the axe.

The thud of heavy, lifeless objects dropped here and there.

The boy worked until the body was no longer human, until it was only the bits of a dead thing, like the other dead things that the tide had fetched up and dropped and left behind on the waterlogged fields. It held no horrors for Christy. Peeled out of the glistening black suit, the flamboyant athleticism all gone now that the arms and the legs were stacked up like stiff, hard pieces of wood in different corners of the room, it was no more human than a drowned sheep or a beached porpoise or a stranded jellyfish. But it still had the red underpants on, maintaining an absurd decency, despite everything that had happened to it.

Harry listened, unable to move, paralysed with horror. He listened as the boy continued, unflagging, unhurried, and he matched the sounds to the technique he’d taught him. Notch with the knife; fit the wedge and slam it home with an easy swing of the sledgehammer; chop with the axe. Let the weight of the tool do the work. So Christy notched and wedged and chopped and didn’t stop until the windsurfer was butchered meat.

Mid-afternoon. Outside, dusk was turning to twilight. Inside, the torch seemed very bright in the dark room.

‘So it’s done,’ the boy said at last. He was exhausted. All the panic, all the splashing and thrashing and squealing commotion and then the strenuous business of the abattoir, had overwhelmed him with weariness. He’d been up to his neck in icy water and then working hard all afternoon. He dropped the axe where he’d dropped the wedge, the sledgehammer and the knife, and he dropped himself to his knees on a bed of weed.

‘It’s done,’ he whispered, meaning to call out to the man but too tired to raise his voice. He squeezed his eyes shut and stayed still, blank with shock. He didn’t hear Harry come into the room.

Harry stooped for the torch, which, having toppled over, was spilling its light in a yellow pool. He found it, straightened up and slowly pointed the beam around the room. It was as though he was seeing it for the first time – a strange room, so tall and wide that the corners were a blur of cobwebs where the torchlight fell; whose floor was a rubble of shingle and boulders, puddled with sea water, strewn with green and black weed; where a figure knelt as though praying, head bowed, breathing very loudly; where pieces of meat lay scattered about, gleaming white and red as the torchlight touched them . . . A very strange room.

The boy started to tremble. His teeth were chattering very loudly. Zigzagging the torch, Harry lumbered across the room, sank to his knees and enfolded him in a huge, pungent embrace; and Christy, responding instinctively, lifted his own arms, wrapped them around the man’s thick, baggy waist and linked his fingers on the other side. They squeezed with all their might, widower and orphan, bonded by the murderous nightmare they were sharing.

‘Don’t worry, little Christine! You’ll be all right! I promise you’ll be all right!’ Harry was whispering, pressing his mouth in the long, fine hair, where, despite the wading in the sea, despite the gory work, the perfume was still strong. ‘But you’ve got to go back straight away, or else you’ll be in trouble with matron. You’ve done enough. I’ll do the clearing-up. There’ll be nothing left for anyone to find. Go back to the home now! It’s getting late!’

They hugged one another, holding their bodies as close and as hard as they could. Christy was trembling with cold, or sobbing, because Harry could feel the shoulders heave as he pressed his hands on them. But when he lifted the soft, pale face with his fingers and stared down into the bleary grey eyes, he was amazed to find that the beachcomber was laughing . . .

Christy was laughing so much, silently, uncontrollably, that tears ran down his cheeks and into the corners of his mouth. He tried to speak, throwing his head back and spluttering incoherently, but it was simply too funny for words . . .

As last he succeeded. He struggled out of the man’s arms and bent to pick up the torch again. He flashed the light around, play­ing it on the bits of the carcase he’d dismembered.

‘Trouble, Mr Clewe? Trouble with matron?’ he hooted. ‘We’ve shot a man with a gun! We’ve bashed his head in with a rock! We’ve chopped him up into little pieces! But worst of all, I’m going to be late for Mrs Bottomley’s roll call! Big trouble, that is!’

Shrieking with laughter, he dropped the torch again and bolted from the living room. He leaped across the hallway, slithered past the piano and was gone. No goodbye, no thank-you-for-having-me. Harry heard a few more hysterical squeals, receding as the splashes of Wellington boots faded away, and then there was silence. The torchlight shone from the seaweedy floor and smothered the walls in grey-green cobwebs. It was the only light in the world. He was alone in the living room.

Living room! He giggled at the inappropriateness of the word. Dying room, death room, slaughterhouse, abattoir . . . more like it. He picked up the torch and beamed it at the hands and arms and feet and legs which, an hour before, had been expertly manoeuvring a windsurfing board around the house; at the head which had grinned with so much youthful arrogance; at the flayed flesh and exposed muscle which had bent the sail to the wind. Living room! He giggled again.

The laughter was infectious. Whatever it was, hysteria brought on by exhaustion or a release of tension once the killing and the butchery were done, Harry succumbed to it. The giggle grew bigger and bigger until it overwhelmed him and he felt his body shaking. He welcomed it. He warmed to it. He stood in the middle of the room, where the sand was soaked in blood, threw back his head and roared with such hectic madness that his body coursed with heat. As he did so, the weariness fell from him. He steamed with life and strength. The whole house seemed to tremble, as his guffaws rang to the ceiling.

And through the noise he heard an answering cry: two voices from upstairs, muffled behind a closed door, but also hot and keenly baying. The dogs . . .

He’d forgotten them. He stopped laughing and he listened. He wiped the tears from his face, he tasted the salt in his mouth, and he heard that the dogs were scrabbling too, as they howled and belled. Driven wild by a scent that had drifted up the stairs and into the bedroom, Gog and Magog were tearing at the door with their blunt claws, banging with their heads, clashing their teeth together. They were mad with hunger.

Harry worked quickly, fired by a new strength. With his hook, he scrabbled in the shingle and found the ring of the trap door; he heaved the door upwards. For a moment he pointed the torch at the deep, black water, as though he could see something moving down there. The cold rose from the flooded cellar, dank and stale like the air from a grave, so that he recoiled and let the trap door bang wide open. He crossed the room and hooked the black rubber suit, bundled it up and tossed it into the water; an invisible current sucked it away, out of sight beneath the floorboards. He moved to the fireplace. There, he seized the windsurfer’s head, swung it back to the middle of the room and splashed it into the cellar. It sank, the blond hair fanning like the tendrils of a jellyfish, and disappeared dimly into darkness. Harry slammed the trap door shut and bolted it carefully.

So the room was ready for the dogs.