Defiled Earth and other tales Page 2

  From this night forward, Cormac began to believe there must be such a thing as angels, though Christ knows he didn’t deserve any celestial protection. His desperate hand brushed against something wooden.

  It was the handle of his spade.

  He’d brought it tonight as an afterthought and dropped it before unclipping Jimmy Hodge’s corpse. He grabbed it, swinging it down in a furious arc on Moscrop’s head. It made a sound like a watermelon splitting. In a frenzy, Cormac pulled the spade out and brought it down again and again until the head resembled a bolognese mix.

  Could he detect a weakening in Moscrop’s grip? He couldn’t be sure.

  He hacked away at its arm, beating it until the bones cracked and the muscle tore. He watched with untold relief as the arm severed under his brutal attack and the thing’s chest spasmed. Moscrop’s other hand released its grip and the torso slipped immobile into the bog’s depths again.

  Cormac scuttled backwards on the ground, gibbering while trying to distance himself from the bog’s edge. Fear galvanised his frame and brought him to his feet.

  He stumbled between the stone monoliths and ran, breakneck down the hillside. Twice he toppled, rolling through the heather, picking himself up again to resume his panic-fuelled, flight.

  At last, knees-buckling, he fell upon the butcher van bonnet, ragged breath wheezing in his lungs. He shifted over, sagging against the van and raised his face to the sky. The last thing he saw before he lost consciousness was the still baleful face of the moon, looking down in condemnation.

  ~ ~ ~

  He woke up. At home. In his bed. With a gasp, he sat up, back ramrod-straight.

  How had he got here?

  He remembered the thing grabbing him, fending it off, his headlong flight back to the van, the moon—then nothing.

  Was it all a dream?

  He looked down at his naked chest, eyes following the contours of his oversized pectorals with their covering of wolf-hair, until they rested on his abdomen. There, like black contrails running down his flesh, were deep, ragged claw marks.

  ~ ~ ~

  Night-time found Cormac hunched over the bar at the Pig and Whistle on Tremont Street, nursing a double vodka. The Boss had kept him busy with errands during the day. Lean on a debtor here, collect from a pusher there, it was standard fare. But the Boss’s men gave him a wide berth. Didn’t they think he saw them nodding surreptitiously, or heard them dropping their conversation when he entered the room? He forgave them when he looked at himself in a public toilet mirror. The gaunt, pale face of a stranger stared back. Dark crescent moons drooped beneath his eyes and his skin glistened with a cold sweat.

  Christ, I look like Sylvester Stallone’s mum.

  He told the Boss he was knocking off early which didn’t meet with any opposition.

  “You need to get your head down, Cormac my lad. Your face looks like a badger’s arse,” he said.

  He ignored Augit’s advice and made a bee-line for the pub. He knocked back three doubles in quick succession and was well plastered by the time regulars started rolling in. The noise increased as punters bantered together and placed orders for the first of many drinks.

  The rotund barman, Gerry, poured multiple pints and delivered shot after shot of spirits. It wasn’t long before the nightly detail of help arrived and the three of them fielded orders barked like machine-gun fire from the patrons. It was all typical steam-letting for the end of a long week’s hard graft.

  The crowd became a blur to Cormac; a foggy haze in his peripheral vision. But gradually, through the fumes of his alcoholic stupor, a niggling apprehension was building. There was that suspicion of eyes upon him again, watching with malign intent. The smell of Grieve’s Bog drifted to him across the bar like a miasma.

  I need another shot.

  He signalled with a raised glass to Gerry. The barman, sweat dripping into his greying beard, raised a glass to an optic of vodka in response.

  It was then that Cormac saw him.

  A figure, dressed in a grey hoodie was sitting alongside him, nursing a pint of Newcastle Brown. The head was covered, but Cormac knew who it was. The blood drained from his face and a tonne weight pressed down on his belly as he stared, petrified. The figure turned its head slowly and the cold hand of fear tightened its grip on Cormac’s mind.

  Its face was peat-black, encrusted lumps of skin flaking off like fossilised sunburn.

  It leered at him. “Remember me, Squeak?”

  “Jimmy, I ....”

  “What? Didn’t expect me to turn up again?”

  It was Jimmy Hodge’s voice alright, only tinged with a grating croak, like the thing had permanent laryngitis.

  “I buried you. In the peat bog,” Cormac said. “It’s twenty fucking miles from here. How did you -?”

  “Hah!” Jimmy-Thing said, its breath stinking like the devil’s arsehole. “It was worth dying just to see the look on your face, Squeak.”

  Gerry returned with Cormac’s drink. He eyed him up and down. “Everything alright Cormac?”

  Gerry was looking right through the ghoul at him.

  “Tell him everything’s fine, Squeak.”

  “Sure Gerry,” he said. “Just put it on my tab.”

  Gerry waddled off to serve another weekend warrior. Cormac turned his attention back to Jimmy-Thing.

  “You thought you’d—how would old man Augit put it … erased a problem?” the thing said. “Trouble is, nothing stays put in Grieve’s bog.”

  Cormac wanted to push past Jimmy-Thing and run into the night, but his legs were clamped to the bar stool in a rictus of fear. “Nothing?” was all he could mumble.

  “Oh, I’m not alone.” It raised a blackened finger and pointed to a table across the bar where three figures were seated, each bound in filthy, tattered rags. In unison they turned to face Cormac. Their visages were the stuff of nightmares. Pitch-coloured skulls, cracked with age stared at him through hollow eye-sockets. Caved-in rib cages peeked through the remains of sackcloth jerkins, and sleeves hung in shredded fragments from shattered arm bones.

  “See, I’m in good company. The virgins of the moors can’t rest either. You have to understand they were cut off in their prime. Never had a chance to lie with a man or bear children. I told them you’d be up for a shag, Squeak.”

  Cormac leaned backwards, repulsed by the prospect of what Jimmy-Thing was suggesting. The bar stool tipped him to the floor and Jimmy-Thing was on him in a second, its zombie face pressed right up to his.

  “Well, what do you reckon, Squeak? Fancy dipping your wick in fifteenth century pussy?”

  “What do you want?” Cormac cried.

  “Me? I’d like to watch while you dry dock with their dusty klats. Then, I want to kill you—nice and slow.”

  Cormac’s mind raced, trying to shake off what he hoped was a vodka-induced delusion. But the thing’s face was still there, blue lips peeled back over rotting teeth. None of the other patrons registered what was going on. It was like this private, macabre performance was being played out just for him.

  “But it wasn’t me who topped you. It ... it was Parky and Baz,” Cormac said.

  “Don’t you worry about them,” it said “they’ll have their come-uppance. But I want to start with you. My brother-in-law insisted.”

  It was all Cormac could take. The adrenaline kicked in, releasing sugar to fuel the fight or flight reflex. He kicked at Jimmy-Thing, thrusting him back across the floor, and scrambled to his feet. He staggered in the opposite direction, knocking over a small table in his wake.

  “Oi, Cormac. You’ve not paid for your ...” He didn’t hear the rest of Gerry’s cry. Bursting through the pub’s side door and into the alley beyond, he careened down the passageway, his feet skidding off the rain-slicked, cobbled surface.

  He bounced off the alley wall on a right angled turn, then came to an abrupt halt.

  There, in front of him, crawling along the narrow
ginnel was a sight to surpass even the depths of terror he had faced in the bar. Bobby Moscrop was crawling towards him at an impossible speed. Its mulched head couldn’t speak, but the intention was clear. Wriggling up the passageway, it hauled itself forward using its only remaining arm, leaving a trail of grey, sticky effluvium on the ground.

  The alleyway was so narrow, Comac could rest both arms on the walls. He spun round, looking to run back the way he had come, but there, unavoidably, were Jimmy-Thing and his undead harim.

  “I told you Bobby was pissed off with you,” it said. “Guess it’s time for a showdown.”

  The animated corpses shuffled forward, while behind he heard the wriggling Moscrop closing in.

  He looked around, desperate to find some kind of weapon. Regrettebly, he’d not packed his Bowie knife. He didn’t even carry a knuckle-duster.

  There was nothing he could use. Empty lager cans and a used condom were the only objects littering the floor. He looked up at the sky, as if beseeching the heavens for salvation, but the silver glow of the starlit night was all he could see.

  He had seconds before they would be upon him. Was this how his life was to end? He didn’t know what he dreaded more; sexual congress with the undead virgins, his flesh ripped apart by Hodge and Moscrop, or what might lie beyond the veil of death.

  But Cormac Leary hadn’t survived in the dark shadows of Tyneside’s underworld this long by sheer luck. He had a survivor’s nous, and it came to his aid in this most dire of predicaments.

  He turned sideways and pressed his back against one alley wall. Placing one foot and then the other against the opposite wall, he used his hands to edge upwards. His thigh muscles took the strain as his hands and arms provided equal pressure on the rough, brick surface.

  He shimmied up just out of reach of the undead’s grasping arms. Fear gave him extra reserves of energy as he settled into the technique, and soon he was half-way up the walled alley.

  His advantage was short-lived. Bobby and the sacrificed virgins were looking up as Jimmy-Thing copied his technique and climbed after him. The thing had incredible strength and stamina, together with a vengeful ire; all of which meant that it was gaining on him.

  Sweat dripped off Cormac’s face and blood off his hands as the brickwork chafed and grazed his skin. Jimmy-Thing reached up and grabbed hold of his hanging coat, tugging at it viciously. Cormac was dragged downward, the soles of his trainers sliding down the edifice. The thought of falling back into the alley and being set upon by the peat-spawn filled him with despair—despair so great he nearly gave in to the rising sense of futility and let go.

  Then Jimmy-Thing slipped. The thought that it could make a mistake, wasn’t impervious to all nature’s laws, renewed his strength.

  He held his position with one arm, muscles shaking as they held his body in place, and slipped the other arm out of the coat. Jimmy-thing’s weight did the rest. Caught off balance, it lost its footing and tumbled onto the hag-pile below. Cormac heard the satisfying sound of bones snapping and splintering.

  He didn’t dare look back and scrambled the remaining distance in less than sixty seconds. It took his last reserves of strength to elbow up onto the flat roof space, where he rolled over the moss-covered felting and lay on his back, wheezing heavily.

  Nothing crawled up after him, but he couldn’t take any chances. He sat up, every muscle protesting its agony and staggered across the rooftops. He barged round chimney stacks, trying to avoid the porcupine nest of TV aerials and radio antennae. He jumped across another narrow gap, traversed a stretch of terraces and saw the curved iron rails of a fire escape ahead.

  Although it was shaky, and threatened to pull away from the house, it held long enough for him to reach ground level again.

  The journey back to the car, the meandering trip back to his house and the fumbling of keys at the front door were completed in a hazy mind-fog. He had enough presence of mind to lock and dead-bolt the door behind him, before staggering upstairs and falling onto his bed. The velvet cloak of sleep descended, anaesthetising him through the cold, dark hours of the night.

  ~ ~ ~

  The sky was overcast with a dense, leaden blanket of cloud as Cormac steered his car into the travellers’ site the following morning. Children of all ages hung around like a flock of starlings looking for amusement in their primitive domain. A soccer game was in progress between two unequal teams of primary age kids, and as he slowed the car, a muddy ball sailed over the bonnet.

  He pulled up in front of an immaculate static caravan adorned with hanging baskets, each filled with begonias and lobelia. It was an effort to force his tortured body out of the car, but he goaded his stiff muscles and aching back into action and slammed the door closed.

  “Haway, if it isn’t Squeak Leary. What happened to yer ‘ands?” The quip came from a teenage boy with chavrons in his grade one haircut. Normally, this would have earned him a slap round the ear from Cormac. Instead, Augit’s hit-man looked at his bandaged hands, then back at the boy with a stony gaze. It must have been something the boy saw in his eyes, but it caused him to stop short of any further bravado. He turned his attention back to the scrum of teenage flirtation which was the perennial, traveler grabbing ritual.

  Cormac climbed the wooden steps to the caravan and knocked three times on the thin, fibreglass door.

  “It’s open,” came the elderly voice from inside.

  He swung the door back and stepped into a smoke-filled time warp. It was as he remembered from twenty years ago. A collection of ceramic horses on staggered shelves, hand-embroidered cushions on the settee, dream catchers and bird mobiles hanging from the ceiling, everything immaculately placed. And there in the corner, seated as if she had never moved over the years, was Billy’s aunt.

  “I wondered when you’d come knocking at my door again.” She was staring at the wall to Cormac’s right, both eyes filmed with milky cataracts.

  “You did?”

  “Sure as the crow flies straight. The Leary family have always consulted us Hallidays in time of need. Now, before you sit down, pour yourself a cup of camomile tea. You look like you need something to calm your nerves.”

  “But ... I thought you were-”

  “Blind? A man sees with his eyes, a wise-woman sees with her soul. You’re carrying a dark cloud of despair, Cormac Leary, and maybe I’ve a tonic for you. Chances are it’ll taste more bitter than the tea you’re about to drink.”

  At her words, a shroud of unease dropped over his heart. He poured from the pot deferentially and took a seat opposite.

  “Cormac,” she said, as if tasting the name in her mouth. “You know what it means, don’t you?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Impure son. You’ve no need to tell me how you spend your time working for Derek Augit, or what goes down when you do your rounds of the small men, the brothels and the pushers on those estates. You’re just like your Grandda was, only meaner.”

  Cormac swallowed. The last time he felt this kind of shame was at the age of fifteen, when his Ma had scolded him for lifting her smokes. He’d only wanted to impress his mates, but Ma convinced him he’d done the equivalent of shagging a sheep in front of the neighbours. “Stealing from your own family?” she’d said. “How could you stoop so low?”

  But now, confronted with his subsequent sins, purloining his mother’s camels seemed small potatoes.

  “Your Grandda carried the shadow and I see it still—perched on your shoulder.”

  “What’s this shadow you’re talking about?” he asked, the natural squeak in his voice rising to a high-pitched tweet.

  “The Leary curse. Black thoughts, black words and black deeds. They hang round you like fart gas after a meal of turnips. But I know you’ve not come here for confession. The Learys have never shown remorse and you’re no different are you?”

  Cormac looked away.

  “No, didn’t think so,” she concluded. “So, now your
demons have caught up with you have they? Your Grandda died at the age of thirty nine. Throat slit by his own wife. Only the Gods know why she didn’t do it sooner, the years of abuse she suffered at the hands of that man. He was a real shit.”

  “I thought he was taken out by the Fossets over a turf dispute.”

  “That what they told you?” She laughed. A dry crackling rasp hacked out from lungs lined with Black Russian tobacco-tar. “It wouldn’t do for Seamus ‘The Gent’ Leary to go down in history, served up as worm-food at the hands of a woman. But that’s how every cursed Leary has met their end. You’ll be no different.”

  Cormac took a deep breath in. This was no rambling of a mad crone. Her intimate knowledge of his life and family history, together with the events of the last three nights, put paid to that notion. “A curse?” he said. “Isn’t there a way to escape it?”

  “A curse ain’t so bad. You can look at it one way and accept that you’re doomed. On the other hand, you’ve been given a heads-up about how you’ll meet your demise. A curse is a promise from the divine—and we all know the gods relish keeping their promises.”

  Somewhere at the back of his mind the dungeon door closed and he felt the future rushing to meet him in a claustrophobic wave.

  “There’s got to be a way of avoiding it,” he said, more to himself than the woman. He undid the collar button of his shirt and gulped down some tea. It burnt his gizzard but he didn’t care.

  “Well, maybe there is and maybe there isn’t,” Aunt Halliday said. “It all depends on how much you’ve become attached to your lifestyle.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean repentance. Atonement. Two words that’ll stick in your craw like fish bones.”

  Cormac understood repentance. It meant admitting you were wrong, changing. He knew he’d done a lot of shitty things. Deeds that would make the average man in the street blanch at the mere thought. But being a heavy, a hired gun, was what he was good at. The only thing he was good at. How could he walk away from his very nature?