A Fistful of Knuckles (28 page)

I will not run! I will be a man! I will NOT run!

Coloured light bulbs flashed and fizzed, revealing the Nehru man’s monstrous head in shifting hues of red and green and purple; for a moment, it seemed as if the man in the suit was even more covered in tattoos than Patsy – but then Sam saw hints of movement, the squirming of maggots nestled in the rotten flesh, and he realised what he was seeing was a mouldering cadaver.

That’s not part of the ride,
he thought to himself with shocking clarity.
I don’t know what that is … but it’s real. Whatever it is, it’s
real!

The festering corpse turned slowly. It was aware of Sam. It wanted to see him, even though a flashing yellow bulb threw its sickly light into empty eye-sockets busy with earthworms.

In the next moment, the light shifted once more, and the scream of a siren split the air, and the corpse in the Nehru suit was Patsy O’Riordan, glowering furiously about, his narrow hands flexing as if he were about to smash the entire ghost train to splinters.

‘Patsy!’ Gene barked. If he too had seen that ghastly, mouldering horror, he certainly didn’t
act
like he had. ‘Pack it in! You’re nicked!’

Patsy grabbed one of the empty carts and wrenched it clear off the tracks. He hurled it at Sam and Gene, who threw themselves out of the way as it crashed past them.

The noise and violence brought out a scream of terror from Tracy, who suddenly broke cover from behind a skeleton in a gibbet and made a break for it. Annie popped up, reaching hopelessly for her, trying to drag her back.

Patsy wheeled round, glaring at Tracy.

‘Stop,’ he intoned, his voice shockingly calm and level.

At once, in spite of herself, Tracy stopped. Coloured light bulbs flickered and flashed about her.

‘Come ‘ere,’ said Patsy.

Tracy’s eyes were two round circles of terror.

‘Tracy, run!’ Annie cried.

‘I said come ‘ere,’ Patsy repeated.

Years of brutal conditioning took over. She could not resist. Tracy began shuffling towards Patsy.

‘Okay, babes,’ she muttered. ‘I’m coming, babes.’

Annie flung herself between the two of them: ‘Tracy, I said
run!
’

With terrible speed, Patsy lunged forward. Something snapped in Tracy, and she bolted, shrieking and howling. Patsy clamped his hands around Annie’s throat and lifted her clear off the floor.

Sam and Gene kicked into action together. They powered forward and flung themselves at Patsy, launching themselves against his back like two men trying to bring down a tree. Sam battered at the rough, hard back, hurling punches at the rock-like head. He felt an elbow slam into him and send him crashing into a row of skulls that clattered about him in chaos. Leaping to his feet, he saw Gene being flung back and falling amid a confusion of bloodied metal spikes. Patsy was still holding Annie by the neck, letting her feet kick wildly in the air. Her face was bright red – but then, as the coloured bulbs went through their cycles, her face became pink, then green, then yellow, then blue. Patsy shook her. Annie clawed desperately at his hands, then her arms began to go limp and her eyes rolled upwards behind the fluttering lids.

One of the skulls Sam was lying amongst turned towards him. In the sad, frail voice of the Test Card Girl, it said: ‘This isn’t a ghost train, Sam. It really is Hell.’

Sam kicked the skull away. With a barbaric, inhuman cry, he jumped to his feet. Something rushed past him in the darkness. He ignored it and lunged at Patsy – and instead found Annie lying sprawled across the little railway tracks, unmoving. Instinctively, he flung his arms about her, not thinking of Patsy or why he had dropped her, not thinking of the thing that had raced past him in the dark, not thinking of the Test Card Girl, or Gene, or the crazy crashing and bellowing that was suddenly going on only a few feet away from him, or anything except
her,
his Annie, his love.

A pulse! She’s got a pulse!

Placing his cheek to her mouth, he sensed a faint flicker of breath.

It was only then that he looked up. Patsy was lumbering and veering about madly, striking blows at a man who had leapt up and was clinging to him like a monkey. Sam glimpsed a spider tattoo on the man’s neck; it stood out with sudden lividness in the garish red glare of an electric light bulb. The sharp stink of paraffin reached Sam’s nostrils.

Spider hooked his legs around Patsy’s knees. It was enough to topple him, bringing him crashing down into a mass of coloured light bulbs which at once popped and shattered. Electricity crackled. Sparks flashed. The paraffin ignited. The two men, locked together in their death struggle, went up like torches.

The sudden flames illuminated the interior of the ghost train, revealed the wires, the pulleys, the shoddy props, the cut-price sceneries. It was all cardboard, plastic, and fake cobwebs.

It’s not Hell at all. It’s just a ride.

Gene fought his way out from a tangle of papier maché dungeon, took one look at Spider and Patsy burning together, then turned sharply to Sam. He reacted to Annie’s limp body in Sam’s arms.

‘Tell me she ain’t snuffed it!’ he barked.

Sam looked down. Annie’s eyes struggled open. She coughed feebly. It was enough. It was more than enough.

‘Let’s get her out of here!’ Sam cried, and Gene was right there, hoiking Annie up and, without grace or ceremony, throwing her over his shoulder. He loped between the little carts and burst back out through the Mouth of Hell, back into the open air, back into
life.

Sam raced after him – then paused. He glanced back. Patsy was back up on his feet, burning. Spider was still clinging to him.

Spider knew what he was doing. He didn’t want make it through this … all he wanted was to take that bastard with him.

Ablaze, Patsy flailed about blindly, slowed, then sank to his knees and toppled over. Spider clung to him for several more seconds, then went limp, like a puppet suddenly losing its strings.

They sat together in A&E. Sam cradled his mangled arm and winced; from time to time, he remembered the bruise along his jaw where Spider had punched him, and he winced at that too. Annie sat beside him, her eyes bloodshot, her hands gingerly cupping her darkening neck. Across from them, the stretched, blackened skin of Chris’s massive black eye glistened painfully; and beside
him
sat Ray, picking crusts of dried blood from his moustache and from time to time testing his swollen nose to check if it was broken.

Standing looking down at them at all, his hands clasped behind his back like a stern teacher with his class, Gene glowered slowly from face to face, narrowing his eyes and tightening his jaw. His own face was still half-and-half, purpled all down one side so that he resembled some sort of carnival performer.

‘Well, playmates,’ he said at last. Stiffly, painfully, everybody turned their heads to look at him. ‘Let’s just hope the Queen don’t swing by for a how’d-ya-do, us lot look like shite.’

Nobody said anything. One or two of them
couldn’t
. But they knew that, in his way, Gene was expressing his relief that all his officers were, if not in one piece, then still alive and repairable. It was the nearest thing to sympathy any of them could expect from the guv. But it was enough.

Gene peered sceptically about at A&E.

‘I’ve seen more than enough of the inside of this place already,’ he muttered. ‘All the medicine
I
need’s down at the Arms. I’ll be with Dr Nelson if any of you feel like joining me later.’

He swept his gaze over his battered team one last team, less out of expectation of a reply than from a grudging admission that he was proud of them. And then, without further ado, he turned on his heel and strode swiftly away.

‘Know what?’ said Chris suddenly, getting to his feet. ‘I think I’ll join him. Just a shiner, nothing life-threatening. Anyone else comin’?’

Ray flicked away a crust of dry blood and rose from his seat. He pinched his nose and gave it a tug: ‘Nah, it ain’t busted. A couple of stiff ones, that’ll put us right. What about you two?’

Sam’s arm was a mess and needed dressing. Annie could barely make a sound and was awaiting a neck X-ray.

‘Stupid bloody question, really,’ Ray admitted. ‘Still – we’ll keep a couple of places reserved for you. If you feel up to it.’

Together, Chris and Ray limped out.

Sam and Annie sat together, alone now except for the bustling nurses, the porters, the patients and their relatives going in and out of the waiting room. They didn’t say anything, nor did they have to. They each knew what the other was thinking.

From across the other side of the waiting room there was sudden shouting. A large man was throwing his arms around, bellowing aggressively at the nurses who were trying to help him into a wheelchair. He was clearly drunk. He raised his fists, his thumbs tucked pathetically inside his clenched fingers.

‘Get your ‘ands off me, you dopey mares! I’ll twat you right out, ya ‘ear me? I’ll smack the lot o’ ya into next bloody week!’

Watching him, Sam felt nothing but a dull sense of boredom. He had had a bellyful of machismo. He could not even summon the interest to be appalled.

As the loudmouth threatened the nurses, he slowly became aware of the three men who had come back in from outside, drawn to him by his raised voice. The three men stood over him, very close; one with a huge black eye, the second with a swollen nose and a moustache all crusted with congealed blood, the third sporting a bruise that covered half his face. In that moment the loudmouth, pissed as he was, sensed something, some power in these men that it was beyond him. He knew that he was on the very cusp of an unpleasantly physical encounter. He was out of his depth.

The fight draining out of him, he sat meekly in the chair.

‘Thank you!’ snapped a nurse at him, angrily throwing a blanket across his knees. And then, to the three men, she said warmly: ‘Thank
you
.’

Without smiling, the man with the bruised face winked, tugged the lapels of his camelhair coat to straighten them, then turned on his heel and strode out into the night, his two loyal companions flanking him. Three men, in a man’s world.

‘I’ve brought you some grapes,’ said Sam, setting them down by Annie’s bedside.

They were in a side ward, nurses and medical staff bustling along the corridor just outside the door. It was mid-morning of the day after the showdown in the fair. Sam’s arm was neatly bandaged and still reeked of TCP. Annie was propped up in bed, kept in for a day or so purely for observation, her neck a mass of deep purple bruises, but otherwise unharmed.

‘Can you eat?’

‘Very slowly,’ Annie breathed, her voice hoarse and rasping. ‘And only mushy stuff.’

‘God, you sound sexy.’

Sam couldn’t help himself. Annie rebuked him by threatening to punch his bad arm.

‘Okay okay! Truce!’ He smiled at her. ‘For a moment last night, I thought I’d lost you.’

‘What happened to Spider?’

‘He’s dead. So’s Patsy.’

‘And Tracy?’

‘Don’t try and speak, Annie. Rest your voice. Tracy’s fine. Upset, but okay. She’s been crying over Patsy all night apparently, saying she loved him. To be honest, I don’t know if she means it or not. The girl’s a mess. She needs help.’

Annie nodded, then winced.

‘You tried to save her,’ Sam said. ‘You put yourself between her and Patsy. That was brave, Annie. I’m proud of you. It’s the sort of thing that-’

Gently, she laid a finger on his lips to silence him. He took her hand, kissed it, and cupped it in his own.

‘Let me say just one thing,’ he said quietly. ‘I think you’ll sleep easier from now on … now that Patsy’s gone. I … can’t explain it. But I think I’m right.’

She waited for an explanation, but when it became obvious she wasn’t going to get one Annie settled back against her pillows and closed her eyes, letting her body get on undisturbed with the task of repairing itself.

Sam was tempted to ask her about her sneaky manoeuvre behind his back, speaking to the guv about Sam’s undercover operation and getting him involved. Why hadn’t she confided in Sam about it? Had she thought he’d react badly, that his manly pride would be wounded at the thought he couldn’t manage the operation without Gene?

What does it matter what her motives were? She did the right thing. God alone knows what would have happened if Gene hadn’t turned up with reinforcements. She did the right thing to speak to him. She showed good sense. She acted like a good copper. What else matters?

He tucked her hand under the starched bed sheet, kissed her forehead, told her to get plenty of rest, and, with reluctance, left.

The fair was gone. The rides had been dismantled and hauled away. The common ground upon which they had stood was now just an empty patch of mud – except for the remains of the ghost train. What was left of it stood alone and forlorn, a burnt-out metal skeleton surrounded by flapping police tape and guarded by a single uniformed bobby.

Sam momentarily imagined Patsy’s charred remains still smouldering inside.

No. What’s left of Patsy’s now in the morgue. There’s no trace of him here – except ashes, perhaps, and some lingering stink of burning.

So. Was that it, then? Had the Devil in the Dark been destroyed?

‘Well? Has it?’ he asked out loud, waiting for a reply from the Test Card Girl. But no reply came.

I don’t know what that Devil was, or where it came from … and I don’t know what the hell I saw last in the ghost train. A corpse … a rotting corpse dressed up in a Nehru suit … a festering body, and yet somehow alive and conscious. I’d seen that damned thing before, lurking about in the shadows, hovering on the edges of nightmares … And Annie knew it too, had sensed it in dark dreams of her own. What the hell was it? Is it truly dead now? Was it destroyed in the fire? Gene didn’t seem to notice it all. Perhaps it was just some sort of delusion. Perhaps it wasn’t real.

He tried to believe that, but couldn’t. He knew what he had seen. Like the Test Card Girl herself, that rotting, maggot-infested horror had been some manifestation from deep down within him, the product of some foul sewer of the subconscious where all the darkest parts of his psyche lurked and brooded. Did the Devil in the Dark represent some part of him that wanted to hurt Annie? Is that what it all meant? Had he transferred that subconscious violence onto the form of Patsy O’Riordan, seen in him the embodiment of that barbaric, murderous fraction of himself?