Chapter 25

BLOODBATH

Paul Sharpley straddled Spencer and slapped him across the face.

“Where’s my fucking console?” he said.

Michael Sharpley stood over them, sneering. Lethal prowled the cellar, punching his palm over and over, spitting and mumbling.

Spencer looked directly into Paul’s eyes.

He got another slap across the face. It stung, but he didn’t care. Not anymore. He felt different.

It happened when he’d fished the butcher’s knife from the briefcase. It was as if a surge of electricity had powered through him when he gripped the weapon.

Acid pulsed through his veins. Darkness filled his heart. The devil had his back.

“Where’s my PS3?” growled Paul.

“Weren’t yours in the first place,” said Spencer.

Paul gawped.

“Smack him again,” said Michael.

“Let me stamp on his head,” said Lethal. “When can I shank him?”

Two years before, Lethal had killed a boy of fourteen. The kid had been walking home from the Barrowmore youth center with his ten-year-old brother. Lethal was walking the other way.

“What d’you say to me?” he asked the boy.

The boy had said nothing, according to his little brother.

Lethal attacked him. He punched him. The boy keeled over and hit the ground. Lethal stamped on his head till it popped like a balloon.

Lethal bolted. The brother named him. But Lethal was somewhere else. The Sharpleys said so. His mother said so. A girl he was screwing at the time said so.

There is always a judgment.

Paul said to Spencer, “That was mine. I nicked it. It was above board. Fucking grabbed it off the shelf and legged it. It was me who took the risk, you wallad.”

“I took the same risk coming into your flat.”

They laughed. Paul said, “Too right, man. Big risk. Risk that’s costing you your balls.” He smacked Spencer again and then stood up. “Where’s your mate, Slow Joe?”

“Back there in the shadows,” said Spencer. “He’s dead. I killed him. Go see. In the shadows.”

There was a moment of silence, and Spencer sensed the trios fear. They were looking around in the dark, their eyes skating the gloom. They were tense, ready to leg it at any sign of danger.

Then Lethal said, “You couldn’t kill the light.”

“Go see, Lethal. Go see his body. Back there in the dark. I sacrificed him.”

“You what?” said Paul.

“Fuck, it’s gone cold in here,” said Michael Sharpley. “What is this fucking place?

How’d you find it, Spencer?”

“I think it found me,” he said.

In one movement, he sprang to his feet and plunged the knife into Paul’s belly.

The Sharpley boy folded. His mouth dropped open, astonishment in his eyes, his shirt soaked with blood.

He gurgled and staggered, and his brother shouted, “You fucking bastard, Drake,” and lunged at Spencer.

A shriek halted him.

Spencer followed the noise.

Lethal screamed again. But his cry was cut short. A darkness enveloped him.

Michael said, “What the fuck is that?” Panic laced his voice. He staggered about.

“Where’s Lethal? Paul? Paul, where’s Lethal?”

Paul groaned, the knife in his guts. He fell to his knees. He made a noise that sounded like pleeeeeease to Spencer, but it may have been the air wheezing out of his body through the hole in his stomach.

The darkness moved away from Lethal, as if a magician had whipped a cloak away to reveal his trick—a red raw grin widening across Lethal’s throat. His head tilted backwards. Blood poured from the ear-to-ear smile. The weight of his skull made him topple over, and his body hit the ground, hard.

“Help me,” said Paul, squealing. “Bruv, help me, I’m dying. I want our mum. Get our mum.”

But Michael backed away. Unlike Spencer, he hadn’t seen what was behind him. It was that darkness again.

He retreated into it, disappearing. From within it came his screams.

And then he stumbled out of the pitch-black, screaming still. He wheeled, and Spencer saw that his back, from nape to arse, had been sliced open. The skin had been pulled apart like a coat.

Spencer gasped at the sight of the throbbing organs caged inside Michael’s ribs.

Blood gushed from his cleaved body.

He shrieked and twitched.

Paul moaned. He called for his mother again. His brother died, his body arcing and spewing blood.

Spencer stared at Paul. He wondered if he should help him. The Sharpley lad was groaning. He was obviously in agony. He clutched his belly. Blood soaked his shirt. His face was pale. He was crying and asking for his mum.

“What part of him would you like as a memento of this occasion, Spencer?” said a voice.

He looked up.

It was Jack.

The dark man bent down and plucked the knife out of Paul’s belly. He licked the blade.

“Good knife, this,” he said. “Butcher’s knife.”

Paul unleashed a scream that almost peeled the skin off Spencer’s face.

Jack knelt.

“Let me help you, bright eyes,” he told Paul.

Jack eased Paul’s hands away from the wound.

Black blood pulsed from his belly.

“Help me,” wailed Paul.

Jack plunged his hand into the wound.

Paul shrieked, his body stiffening.

Jack laughed and held him round the neck with his free hand. He dug around in Paul’s belly, the Sharpley boy twitching. His eyes were like an antelopes in the jaws of a lion.

Jack pulled the intestines out of Paul’s belly. They coiled from his body, a blue-gray snake. The youth howled. He twitched. His face stretched. Yards of innards came out, and Jack piled them next to the boy, who screamed and screamed and took a very long while to die.

Spencer smelled death and shit before he fainted.