I was ready for him, in any case. I kicked him in the testicles; even on a twelve-year-old, that has its stopping power. As he doubled over, I hooked his legs from under him and then stamped on his head.
After that I could take my time in binding his hands behind his back, slipping the ready noose over his head and hauling him up to hang beside his little sister.
I’d introduced myself to the family the year before. Just one short year, summer to high summer, so many dreams I had, all gone to spoil in a single afternoon.
I slipped my way quietly, indirectly, into their consciousness, so delicate a touch that at first it left no mark of mine, no aluminium oxide dusting could have found me out. Plausible deniability, a cynic I suppose would say. I say that it’s wisdom to be cautious, to step lightly, to let nothing show that might have stayed hidden; I say that events have borne me out in this. It’s always easiest to withdraw early, to leave nothing behind but the fading memory of a sour note. So I was taught, so I have found to be true; so I hope to teach to others eventually. I wasn’t given the time this year, alas.
And it had started so well, all the signs were there and I was feeling so pleased with myself and with my targets. Two little children, ten and eleven years old, as I’d discovered, new to the area and thrilling to the possibilities of life, on the verge of great change, great discoveries: they came out of their house one bright morning to find the family cat busy in the garden, licking at what must at first have seemed to be a rag of ancient fur, some discarded tippet.
They came closer and discovered just how wrong they’d been. The thing was quite fresh, wet with blood, gobbets of dark flesh still clinging. After a while they shooed the cat away — no easy task, it was persistent and possessive of its treasure — to crouch themselves in its place and look over what they had. Perhaps they’d been thinking squirrel, thinking this a trophy hunted down and dragged in from the park. Wrong again.
Eventually, at last they will have seen it for what it was, the skin of a skinned little dog, a Yorkshire terrier. No sign of the flayed corpse, they will have seen, only the hide: and that like a message, pegged out on their lawn.
It was a message, and it did its work. They spent five minutes or more just looking, touching, talking, before the girl went with consent to fetch their mother, to show and share this interesting thing.
While she was gone, the boy touched bloody finger to pale lips and curious tongue behind; I knew then that I had him, and that in him I had them both.
That was what I thought I knew, at least; it was all I thought I needed.
The next night, the boy was awakened unexpectedly, perhaps by the strangeness of the light that was falling on his face. He’d left his window ajar as was his habit, but had pulled the curtains hard against the night; now they were drawn back, and something that was not the moon flickered and faded beyond the glass.
It may have taken him a minute, five minutes, even half an hour to find the courage he needed to get out of bed. A boy who likes the daylight, exposure, revelation — such a boy might well allow himself the luxury of fear unobserved.
Eventually, though, curiosity won as it had to; there at least I had not been wrong. He pressed his face tight against the window, and saw an old-fashioned lantern hanging from a branch of the cherry tree that grew in the garden, whose reaching leaves hung just a foot or two short of the house. They must have obscured his view at least a little, but still he will have been able to see the nightlight that burned in the lantern’s base, and that something obscure hung above its steady flame. He may have seen movement within the lantern’s glass; he may have heard a faint buzzing; he may even have smelled the faint scorching of rank meat.
After a while, there were two faces; he had fetched his sister. Perhaps at her urging, he opened his window wide and they both leaned out as far as they could, as far as they dared. The lantern was beyond their reach, though, and the twigs of the tree offered no support to a climber. At last he closed his curtains, and they both went back to bed.
In the morning, when they looked, they saw nothing in the tree. Neither the night that followed, when they looked again. On the lawn, though, at some distance from the house, a ring of faint light must have caught their eyes, where the lantern hung from a pole set in the grass.
The night after that, there was a figure sitting below the pole.
Attentive children know when they are being summoned; the hopeful, the self-aware respond.
They came down in dressing-gowns and slippers, stepping lightly and breathing hard, holding hands against the mischief and moment of the night. I greeted them with a glance and a nod, before turning my attention back to what I held in my hands.
‘What are you doing?’ It was the girl who stole the privilege of asking; her brother seemed not to resent it, despite his being the elder.
‘Waiting for you.’
‘No,’ she knew that already, ‘I mean, what are you doing?’
‘Ah.’ I peeled my fingers back to show her, to show them both. ‘I’m just pulling the wings off this fly, with these tweezers here, to see if it hurts.’
‘Does it?’ the boy asked in a whisper, as though it were an experiment he’d thought about but had never quite brought himself to the point of making on his own account. Likely it was. Good boys are not wanton.
‘Oh, no.’ I favoured him with a broad smile. ‘It doesn’t hurt at all. Want to try?’
A gesture brought their eyes up to the lantern, only a short time before they must have checked it out for themselves; the noise and the smell were both invasive, on that still summer night. It was more than a beacon, set to attract moth-children to its light. I was using it as a vivarium also, breeding a mass of bluebottles in the nightlight’s heat, feeding them on what remained of the Yorkie as it ripened.
Some few of the flies escaped from the children’s unaccustomed snatchings when I unlatched the lantern’s door and swung it open, but there were plenty to spare. The girl squealed in triumph as she snared one; the boy echoed her a moment later.
Neither one needed to borrow my tweezers, their fingers were small and nimble enough for the task. Wings and legs, taken one by one, afforded some little satisfaction but deliberately not enough; their eyes strayed back to the reeking dangle of the dog’s body. I smiled, and opened the door again to blow out the little flame.
‘Go back now. I will see you another time.’
I let them wait, let them watch in vain for almost a week before my lantern drew them out again. This time I had a rat splayed out on the ground before me, belly-up, its legs pinioned with wire hoops and its tail threshing. Not a street-rat, I’d bought it in a pet shop: white of fur, pink of eye, quivering of whisker.
I showed them a scalpel, wouldn’t let them touch either the blade or the rat, not yet; learning is a process, a progress, step by careful step.
Slowly, carefully, I made my incision through fur and skin and into the belly of the beast. Then, with another length of wire bent like a crochet-hook, I began to pull out its intestines and lay them around the creature on the grass.
‘You see?’ I said, my voice soft but pitched to carry above its agonised screaming. ‘It really doesn’t hurt at all. ’
Neither did it. I passed my hook to the boy, and he dabbled and tugged and felt no pain. The girl was a little hesitant, thinking perhaps she might prefer just to watch; I said I had saved the best, the last of it for her. Guided her hand on the little hook, in and twist and draw slowly, slowly: the rat’s heart came out amid a tracery of arteries and veins and for a moment, for a brief sweet moment it was beating still as I laid it in her palm.