Then it's the other.
More talking, more pleading, but however tightly he'd tied her to the chair and however much he had threatened, Cole could not bring himself to torture her. And really, looking back on it, he believed that nothing would have made her talk.
Because she was scared.
Please, tell me or—
Or you'll shoot me?
And perhaps that had been her mistake: not believing that he would.
Cole marked this as the point when he had grown up. Leaving the army had turned his purpose into a private crusade. His shoulders had bowed under the weight of guilt and responsibility, and he spent many waking hours convincing himself that he was doing everything right. There were no voices, no jealous gods giving him their time, but there was God, present at every twist and turn of his life and listening to his fears and hopes. He knew what Cole was doing, and He knew why, but that did not make the remorse and doubt any less difficult to bear.
Cole let go of the balustrade and smiled as the woman glanced across at him. She smiled back, then went back to playing with her children.
I'm doing all this for them, he thought, patching any holes in his conviction. He had just killed a friend. He shook his head to dislodge the memory and it slipped down through the grates in his mind, under the skein of reality he had created over the past ten years, finding itself prisoner with so many other memories, ideals and discarded morals that he worked so hard to keep subdued. That false vision of reality kept them all hidden away. The memory would come back, he knew that, and would haunt him forever, just as the memory of Sandra Francis' death haunted his dreams. But even as Cole walked along the landing and down the external staircase, Nathan King became a man he had once served with at Porton Down, a fun friend, a good soldier. He was a million miles and ten years away from that corpse already cooling in the filthy flat.
Cole climbed into his Jeep. Salisbury Plain was about two hours away. He could be there by dusk.
For a long time, Tom could not move.
The corpse of the child still lay where he had found it, wrapped in chains and virtually buried in filth. It had been a girl; he could see her long hair (and hear her voice, that was a girl's voice), and she wore the rotten remnants of a dress. It may have been pink once, but burial had bled all colour to a uniform brown. Between the chains he could still make out the patterned stitching on the chest, flowers and butterflies and everything a little girl would love. It was a long dress, sleeveless, something for the summer, not this cool autumn day. Her leathery skin seemed unconcerned by the freshness in the air. Her face (it should be looking the other way, not at me, it shouldn't have turned to me) was a mummified mask of wrinkles, a dead young girl with an old woman's skin. The creases around her eyes and the corners of her mouth were deep, home to muck and tiny, squirming white things. Her mouth hung open, filled with mud. Her eye sockets were moist, dark, and not totally empty. The eyes sat like creamy yellowed eggs, waiting to birth something unknowable.
Her hand still touched his arm. He remained motionless, staring at the places where her fingers squeezed, the slight indentations in his skin, hairs pressed down, redness around where her fingers touched him because she was squeezing him.
Tom gasped, realising he had not breathed for many seconds. A breath shushed across the Plain, shifting grasses and setting a spread of nearby ferns whispering secrets. He could not take his eyes from the girl.
"That's not squeezing me, it's just touching me," he said, staring down at the hand. He raised his other hand, ready to lift her mummified arm and set it down across her chest. "I shifted her … she moved … her arm lifted and fell, all because I shifted her, all down to gravity …" He breathed hard between each phrase, trying to force away the dizziness that blurred the edges of his senses, determined to ignore the feeling that the corpse was about to move again. Every instant held the potential of another squeeze, another touch.
But her fingers are pressing—
Tom pulled away and the little girl's nails scratched his skin.
"No!"
The girl's body settled back into the mud, the chains holding her tight. They clinked as she shifted slightly—
Gravity, it's gravity.
Then a small slick thing slipped from a hole in her shoulder and scurried across her body.
Tom crawled backward out of the grave, pushing with his feet, pulling with his hands. There was no sign of Steven down there, not exposed at least, and he could not go back in to go deeper, he just could not. Jo would be frantic by now—it was mid-afternoon already and the sun was dipping to the west, ready to kiss the horizon and invite in the dark—and he suddenly realised just how many hours he had lost here. His shoulders and arms ached from the exertion, and his heart galloped hard.
"Oh Jesus God fucking hell," he moaned, closing his eyes and trying to understand what he had done. It was a moment of reason in madness, clarity in confusion, but the moment was chased away. He felt it leave, lifting its legs and sprinting from his consciousness as a strange voice forced its way inside.
Are you Misterwolf?
Tom's eyes snapped open. The child's corpse was shifting. He could not see actual movement, but the sinking sun reflecting from the moisture on its body was wavering, the reflections stretching up and down, left and right, repeating their rhythmic movements. As if the body were breathing.
No … no, not Misterwolf.
Tom was shaking, his eyes watering. He wondered whether it was that giving the corpse an illusion of movement.
"No," he moaned, filthy hands pressed to his face as if to squeeze out the truth. "No, no, no." He scrambled to his feet and backed away. His heels tangled in the outstretched legs of one of the excavated skeletons, and as he tumbled backward the voice came again, an invader in his own mind.
Don't leave me again, Daddy, not after so long!" It was wretched, this voice, and pathetic, and altogether terrifying.
Tom fell back into a skeleton's embrace. The impact shook its arms and they clanked against him. Bones cracked and crumbled. He screamed. It was a full, loud screech that hurt his throat, and the sound and pain brought him briefly up from the dark depths of disbelief that were pulling him down, drowning him. He found his footing again and backed away, treading carefully this time so that he was not tripped, stretching his legs back over the bodies he had dug up and laid out to view. He kept his eyes on what he could see of the corpse wrapped in chains. He could not really think about the chains, not yet. That was for later. Their reason for being there, their intention … that was for much later, when he was away from here and crying in Jo's arms, begging her to go home, continue their life, accept the lie and try to find their way with Steven's memory intact and unsullied.
Please …, the voice said in his head, and Tom screamed again. So cold … so alone … I hurt. It was the accent that terrified Tom the most. The words were bad enough, and their implications, but the accent was one he could not place, a smooth-flowing speech that he was sure he had never heard before. If he was imagining this voice, he could have never invented something he did not know.
"This is real," he said, and though she did not speak, he knew that somewhere in his mind the dead girl smiled.
Tom backed farther away, knelt in the heather and stared at the open grave. The bodies he had brought out were catching the setting sun. He could smell their decay, even this far away. Perhaps they would rot faster now that they were uncovered. Some were skeletons, others had traces of skin and flesh … and the little girl, with her wrinkled skin and those ping-pong ball eyes loose in their sockets …