In the Flesh (28 page)

  Edgar Tait looked up from the struggle in front of him, and bared his teeth at Cleve. It was a display a shark might have envied.

  'He doubted me, Mr Smith . . .' the monster said,'. . . and came looking for his cell.'

  A mouth appeared from the patchwork on the sand and gave out a sharp cry, full of pain and terror.

  'Now he wants to be away from me,' Tait said, 'You sewed the doubt. He must suffer the consequences.' He pointed a trembling finger at Cleve, and in the act of pointing the limb transformed, flesh becoming bruised leather. 'You came where you were not wanted, and look at the agonies you've brought.'

Tait kicked the thing at his feet. It rolled over on to its back, vomiting.

  'He needs me,' Tait said. 'Don't you have the sense to see that? Without me, he's lost.'

  Cleve didn't reply to the hanged man, but instead addressed the beast on the sand.

  'Billy?' he said, calling the boy out of the flux.

  'Lost,' Tait said.

  'Billy . . .' Cleve repeated. 'Listen to me . . .'

  'He won't go back now,' Tait said. 'You're just dreaming this. But he's here, in the flesh.'

  'Billy,' Cleve persevered, 'Do you hear me. It's me; it's Cleve.'

  The boy seemed to pause in its gyrations for an instant, as if hearing the appeal. Cleve said Billy's name again, and again.

  It was one of the first skills the human child learned: to call itself something. If anything could reach the boy it was surely his own name.

  'Billy . . . Billy . . .' At the repeated word, the body rolled itself over.

Tait seemed to have become uneasy. The confidence he'd displayed was now silenced. His body was darkening, the head becoming bulbous. Cleve tried to keep his eyes off the subtle distortions in Edgar's anatomy and concentrate on winning back Billy. The repetition of the name was paying dividends; the beast was being subdued. Moment by moment there was more of the boy emerging. He looked pitiful; skin-and-bones on the black sand. But his face was almost reconstructed now, and his eyes were on Cleve.

  'Billy . . . ?'

  He nodded. His hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat; his limbs were in spasm.

  'You know where you are? Who you are?'

  At first it seemed as though comprehension escaped the boy. And then - by degrees - recognition formed in his eyes, and with it came a terror of the man standing over him.

  Cleve glanced up at Tait. In the few seconds since he had last looked all but a few human characteristics had been erased from his head and upper torso, revealing corruptions more profound than

those of his grandchild. Billy gazed up over his shoulder like a whipped dog.

  'YOU belong to me,' Tait pronounced, through features barely capable of speech. Billy saw the limbs descending to snatch at him, and rose from his prone position to escape them, but he was too tardy. Cleve saw the spiked hook of Tait's limb wrap itself around Billy's neck, and draw him close. Blood leapt from the slit windpipe, and with it the whine of escaping air.

  Cleve yelled.

  'With me,' Tait said, the words deteriorating into gibberish.

  Suddenly the narrow cul-de-sac was filling up with brightness, and the boy and Tait and the city were being bleached out. Cleve tried to hold on to them, but they were slipping from him; and in their place another concrete reality: a light, a face (faces) and a voice calling him out of one absurdity and into another.

  The doctor's hand was on his face. It felt clammy.

  'What on earth were you dreaming about?' he asked, the perfect idiot.

  Billy had gone.

Of all the mysteries that the Governor - and Devlin and the other officers who had stepped into cell B.

3. 20 that night - had to face, the total disappearance of William Tait from an unbreached cell was the most perplexing. Of the vision that had set Devlin giggling like a loon nothing was said; easier to believe in some collective delusion than that they'd seen some objective reality. When Cleve attempted to articulate the events of that night, and of the many nights previous to that, his monologue, interrupted often by his tears and silences, was met with feigned understanding and sideways glances. He told the story over several times, however, despite their condescension, and they, looking no doubt for a clue amongst his lunatic fables as to the reality of Billy Tait's Houdini act, attended every word. When they found nothing amongst his tales to advance their investigations, they began to lose their tempers with him. Consolation was replaced with threats. They demanded, voices louder each time they asked the question, where Billy had gone. Cleve answered the only way he knew how. 'To the city,' he told them, 'he's a murderer, you see.'

  'And his body?' the Governor said. 'Where do you suppose his body is?'

  Cleve didn't know, and said so. It wasn't until much later, four full days later in fact, that he was standing by the window watching the gardening detail bearing this spring's plantings cross between wings, that he remembered the lawn.

  He found Mayflower, who had been returned to B Wing in lieu of Devlin, and told the officer the thought that had come to him. 'He's in the grave,' he said. 'He's with his grandfather. Smoke and shadow.'

  They dug up the coffin by cover of night, an elaborate shield of poles and tarpaulins erected to keep proceedings from prying eyes, and lamps, bright as day but not so warm, trained on the labours of the men volunteered as an exhumation party. Cleve's answer to the riddle of Tait's disappearance had met with almost universal bafflement, but no explanation - however absurd - was being overlooked in a

mystery so intractable. Thus they gathered at the unmarked grave to turn earth that looked not to have been disturbed in five decades: the Governor, a selection of Home Office officials; a pathologist and Devlin. One of the doctors, believing that Cleve's morbid delusion would be best countered if he viewed the contents of the coffin, and saw his error with his own eyes, convinced the Governor that Cleve should also be numbered amongst the spectators.

  There was little in the confines of Edgar St Clair Tait's coffin that Cleve had not seen before. The corpse of the murderer - returned here (as smoke perhaps?) neither quite beast nor quite human, and preserved, as The Bishop had promised, as undecayed as the day of his execution - shared the coffin with Billy Tait, who lay, naked as a babe, in his grandfather's embrace. Edgar's corrupted limb was still wound around Billy's neck, and the walls of the coffin were dark with congealed blood. But Billy's face was not besmirched. He looks like a doll, one of the doctors observed. Cleve wanted to reply that no doll had such tear stains on its cheeks, nor such despair in its eyes, but the thought refused to become words.

  Cleve was released from Pentonville three weeks later after special application to the Parole Board, with only two-thirds of his sentence completed. He returned, within half a year, to the only profession that he had ever known. Any hope he might have had of release from his dreams was short-lived. The place was with him still: neither so focussed nor so easily traversed now that Billy - whose mind had opened that door - was gone, but still a potent terror, the lingering presence of which wearied Cleve.

  Sometimes the dreams would almost recede completely, only to return again with terrible potency. It took Cleve several months before he began to grasp the pattern of this vacillation. People brought the dream to him. If he spent time with somebody who had murderous intentions, the city came back. Nor were such people so rare. As he grew more sensitive to the lethal streak in those around him he found himself scarcely able to walk the street. They were everywhere, these embryonic killers; people wearing smart clothes and sunny expressions were striding the pavement and imagining, as they strode, the deaths of their employers and their spouses, of soap-opera stars and incompetent tailors. The world had murder on its mind, and he could no longer bear its thoughts.

  Only heroin offered some release from the burden of experience. He had never done much intravenous H, but it rapidly became heaven and earth to him. It was an expensive addiction however, and one which his increasingly truncated circle of professional contacts could scarcely hope to finance. It was a man called Grimm, a fellow addict so desperate to avoid reality he could get high on fermented milk, who suggested that Cleve might want to do some work to earn him a fee the equal of his appetite. It seemed like a wise idea. A meeting was arranged, and a proposal put. The fee for the job was so high it could not be refused by a man so in need of money. The job, of course, was murder.

  'There are no visitors here; only prospective citizens'. He had been told that once, though he no longer quite remembered by whom, and he believed in prophecies. If he didn't commit murder now, it would only be a matter of time until he did.

  But, though the details of the assassination which he undertook had a terrible familiarity to him, he had not anticipated the collision of circumstances by which he ended fleeing from the scene of his crime barefoot, and running so hard on pavement and tarmac that by the time the police cornered him and shot him down his feet were bloody, and ready at last to tread the streets of the city - just as he had in dreams.

  The room he'd killed in was waiting for him, and he lived there, hiding his head from any who appeared

in the street outside, for several months. (He assumed time passed here, by the beard he'd grown; though sleep came seldom, and day never.) After a while, however, he braved the cool wind and the butterflies and took himself off to the city perimeters, where the houses petered out and the desert took over. He went, not to see the dunes, but to listen to the voices that came always, rising and falling, like the howls of jackals or children.

  He stayed there a long while, and the wind conspired with the desert to bury him. But he was not disappointed with the fruit of his vigil. For one day (or year), he saw a man come to the place and drop a gun in the sand, then wander out into the desert, where, after a while, the makers of the voices came to meet him, loping and wild, dancing on their crutches. They surrounded him, laughing. He went with them, laughing. And though distance and the wind smudged the sight, Cleve was certain he saw the man picked up by one of the celebrants, and taken on to its shoulders as a boy, thence snatched into another's arms as a baby, until, at the limit of his senses, he heard the man bawl as he was delivered back into life. He went away content, knowing at last how sin (and he) had come into the world.

  THE END

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Table of Contents

The Forbidden

The Madonna

Babel's Children

In The Flesh