I circled round through the graveyard until I could see the back door of the vestry up ahead of me. It was standing ajar. I walked out into the open, heading towards it, but was stopped before I’d gone ten steps by a breathless chuckle. I froze, looking around for the source of it.
There was a man propped up against the cemetery’s further wall, his head lolling forward on his chest. He had long, lanky hair and he was wearing a stained mac. He looked like a drunk searching for an impromptu urinal on his way home from the boozer, but a second, slightly less cursory glance more or less ruled that out. The stains on the mac were dark, irregular spatters: the dim light didn’t allow me to be certain, but they looked like blood. The side of his skull was smashed in, and one of his arms was dangling uselessly, like a pendulum, swinging slightly from left to right as he shifted his balance.
A zombie – and one who’d been taking a lot less care with his mortal remains than Nicky did.
Some suspicion that I couldn’t quite explain to myself made me veer in his direction. Maybe I recognised him from somewhere. Maybe I just didn’t want to have him at my back as I went into the church.
‘You okay there, sport?’ I said conversationally as I approached him. I was rummaging around in my pocket for the myrtle twig, but it wasn’t there. I must have left it on the floor at Imelda’s, where she’d probably have treated it like a dead rat: dustpan and brush, no direct contact, sterilise afterwards.
The man lifted his head to stare at me through the one eye he had left. He grinned, too, although it was difficult to see through the tangled thickets of his beard. Yeah. I had him placed now: he was the guy at the mall who’d shot Juliet through the chest and whom she’d then kicked arse-backwards through a plate glass window. Judging by appearances, it hadn’t done him a bit of good.
‘When will it come?’ the man asked me. His voice was low, and it had a horrible liquid undertow to it. He grinned, showing shattered teeth like a bamboo pit-trap. ‘When will it be here?’
‘Tell me what it is, I’ll give you an ETA,’ I offered. ‘What is it you’re waiting for?’
A shudder went through him. ‘The thing that ate me,’ he muttered, his head sagging again. After a long silence he added, as if to himself, ‘Got to finish . . . Got to finish the job. Can’t just . . . eat me and then spit me out.’
Torn between pity and nausea, I turned back toward the church door. That was when he came at me.
He was a big man, and he had the advantage over me in weight. He charged into me like a trolley car, ungainly and not even all that fast but pretty much unstoppable. As I fell he came down on top of me, clawing at me with the fingers of his one good hand, laughing deep in his throat as though the whole thing was a huge joke.
I brought my head up fast, ramming it into the bridge of his nose, and I heard the bone snap with a pulpy sound like rotten wood giving way. No blood flowed: he didn’t have a heart to pump it with, and it probably wasn’t liquid any more in any case.
He got his fingers around my throat and started to squeeze. His head bowed towards me, his mouth working hard as if he wanted to devour me as well as kill me: the sour stench of his decaying flesh hit me, and my head reeled. Starting to panic now, I rolled to the side and swung a fist up into his stomach as hard as I could. He was too heavy to shift, and he didn’t react at alclass="underline" no functioning nerves, either.
But he only had the one arm that still worked and both my hands were free. Feeling like a bastard, I groped my way up his face even as my vision started to blur, and put his other eye out with my thumb.
He jerked his head away from me, flailing to fend me off now that it was too late. I brought my knees up to my chest and kicked outwards with both legs, sending him flying backwards against a gravestone, where he fell in an untidy heap. He clawed weakly at his face, mewling like an animal. Slow spasms passed through his body, and his legs moved alternately as if he thought he was upright and walking. He reminded me of a toy robot I’d had as a kid: a clockwork one, made in Hong Kong, that kept on striding along until it wound down, even if you kicked it over onto its side, even if it wasn’t going anywhere.
I got up and staggered towards the zombie, resting my weight against the gravestone so I could lean forward and look at him. If the damage was bad enough his ghost would let go its hold on his ruined flesh. But it might take a long time, and in the meantime he was trapped in there: blinded, terrified, his immortal spirit still shackled to his half-pulped brain and trying to make it work.
I didn’t have any choice. I took out my whistle, my hands shaking, and put it to my lips. Our little tussle among the tombstones had given me a reasonably strong sense of his essence, his ‘this-ness’: enough to get me started. The notes tumbled out into the darkening sky, feeble and tentative but enlivened by an unintentional vibrato. The dead man stared up at me with the sightless holes that had been his eyes: his mouth moved, making a string of incoherent sounds that rumbled beneath my playing as if he was trying to sing along. Then he stopped, and whatever spark was still animating him went out for good.
I went to put the whistle away, but then thought better of it. Holding it clutched in my hands, ready to play, I crossed the grass towards the vestry door.
It was hanging on one hinge: without Susan Book to unlock it for her, Juliet must have just kicked it open. I stepped inside, the bitter chill closing over me as though I’d stepped through a hanging curtain, invisible but tangible.
The church was dark. Of course it was: light had a tough time of it in here. I hadn’t brought a torch, but I wasn’t sure how much use it would have been in any case.
The heartbeat was clearly audible now: a slowed-down loop of sound, lapping insinuatingly against my ears like waves against a rock.
I went forward one step at a time: slowly, slowly, letting my feet slide across the floor rather than lifting them, so I didn’t go arse over tip in the dark. The frigid air was absolutely stilclass="underline" the only thing that told me when I’d reached the end of the transept and stepped out into the larger gulf of the nave was a change in the timbre of the echoes my footsteps raised. My arm brushed heavily against something, and there was a reverberating din as the something fell over and unseen objects rolled away across the floor. The table where the votive candles stood. I ignored it and kept on going.
Maybe a dozen steps further on, the tip of my foot touched something on the floor. I knelt down carefully, explored its outlines gingerly. It was a human body, completely unmoving.
I had to put the whistle away now, though I’d been clutching it like a diver clutches his lifeline. I got my hands underneath the body at shoulder and knee, and hefted it up. I suppose I’d expected Juliet to be heavy, because the impression she makes is so strong: because her physicality is denser and more vivid than anyone else’s by an order of magnitude. But then again, her body is made of something other than flesh. In the event, she seemed almost weightless.
As I lifted her, I felt the presence that was living in the stones of the church turn its massive attention towards me. There was no sound: no vibration of any kind in the still air. It acknowledged me without sound, and with a vast, vindictive amusement.
I staggered back the way I’d come, Juliet cradled in my arms. But I lost my way in the dark and walked into a wall. I had to follow the wall along, bumping my shoulder against it every few yards to keep my bearings, until I found the transept going off at right angles. I trod on one of the fallen candles and my foot twisted out from under me so that I almost fell. The building was throwing everything it had at me, trying to keep me inside while the cold worked on me. My teeth were starting to chatter, and my chest hurt as though I was breathing in icicles.