Sepulchre (10 page)

fifteen (no teachers damaged - the parents hated them for that) kicked off from chokin' and crushed rib-cages.

That day was the turning point for Theodore Albert Monk, 'pissin'-out day', the day he discovered every person had a power, anyone - big, small, fat or skinny - could decide for someone else when their Pay-Off Time (POT) had arrived. You didn't need to be Einstein or Charles Atlas (or even Charlie fuckin' Brown) to choose their day for 'em. Point a stubby finger and raise a meaty thumb like a cocked gun and that was it. Bingo. Not right there and then, of course; but that was decision time, that was as good as. After that you waited for the right moment. Could take days, weeks, maybe months. Thing was, it always came. You gottem when they and nobody else expected it. When you were safe.

He'd shown it to insects first, his power, graduating to animals - mice, frogs (slice 'em, dice 'em), Grandma Kaley's old crosseyed cat (weed-killer in its milk bowl), a stray mutt (lured by half a salami sandwich into a rusted freezer left to rot on the town's rubbish dump - he'd opened it up two weeks later and the stink had made him throw up). Then on to the big time.

Four of 'em he'd wasted (he enjoyed the macho sound of wasted), two boys, two chicks. And nobody the wiser.

When he'd moved on to Philly, there'd been two more three if you counted the spic. In LA almost - almost - one (the hooker had fought like a wildcat when, on the spur of the moment maybe just to get hisself excited - he'd decided to cancel her subscription, and the stiletto-heeled shoe she'd been treading him with for his pleasure had nearly taken out his left eye, hurting him so bad that he'd had to leave her there moaning and hollering in a way he'd thought nobody could with a snapped neck and a belly-f of bruises).

Things had gotten a mite tricky after that. The Pigs had a description, they knew who they were looking for. Hooker had seen him around before, that was the piss-puller, seen him hanging loose with Glass-Eye Spangler (an inch to the left with that stiletto heel and they'd have been calling him Glass-Eye, too). And good 'ol boy Spangler knew his drinking buddy's name, where he was from. Turned out there was a small matter of an unsolved crime and a missing delinquent back there in Coatesville. Nah, not the two boys, two chicks - one drowning, one car burning (the lighted rag stuck into the gas filler had blown the tank right under the backseat which the boy and girl were using for a make-out pad at the time), and one rape with strangling as the dessert (or maybe the main course, it was hard to remember now), not those. There was the little mystery of Mama and Uncle Mort, brother and sister, found locked together in bed (joined at the loins, that is) with bed bugs buddying up with maggots on what must have been one sweltering, rotten feast-week, and Rosie Monk's sixteenyear-old, the one they figured was semi-imbecile because he never talked much and lumbered around like . . . like . . . say it . . . like one of them fuckin' orangy-tans and just about as smart (this was in the days before Mr Snaith), had lit out, making him Number One suspect, since no one in his right brain would even think about kidnapping the big fucker (oh yeah, Theodore Albert aka Ape had filled his fat with muscle in the two years after POT power), after bludgeoning Mama and that groin-groping bastid Uncle Mort with his battered old Jim Fugosi baseball bat in the bed where they'd grunted and heaved and made the springs sing along.

So the Pigs were on his tail again, years after the event, hot for his ass. And maybe now those cops were finally figuring the big galoot had something to do with those other unexplained homicides, and if not, why not? Neatened up things to hang them on Monk too. Yeah, let's go for it, let's nail the mother-killer, the uncle-pounder, let's hand him the check for them all. They recalled nobody'd liked the fat creep anyway.

Escape. To Vegas. Some stuff on the way, most of it a blur now. Teaming up with Slimeball and Rivas in the glitz city, rolling drunks and mugging hookers for their purses nights, dealing crack days. Fine until the pimps ganged up (a pimp posse no less), sorely aggrieved that their take margin was down because three stooges from outa town hadn't yet learned their place in subsociety. This very point was explained to Monk one night by a big buck who had razor blades glued to the insides of the fingers of one hand so that when he slapped palm or backhand, made no difference, the blade edges stuck out from either side - neat red lines would criss-cross your cheeks until the cuts got closer and closer to eventually become one huge open wound, while five other hoods crushed Slimeball and Rivas' fingers and toes before chopping off an ear from each and making the boys chew on it (each other's ear, that is). They were saving him for something else, because he was the muscle and he had badly altered one of the girls' features two months ago, turning her into an asset loss, no good to no muthuh.

But what the razor-toting buck hadn't counted on - he had a crazy grin to match his crazy eyes - was that pain hardly meant a pig's ass to Monk (it took extreme and prolonged agony to give Monk any pleasure, even in those days), so the slicing steel could have been chopping cheese for all he cared. Monk did what he had come to know best. POT - Pay-Off-Time - had arrived for the nigguh and introduced itself in the form of Monk's hawked phlegm in his eyes (ol' Uncle Mort, in between feeling him up, had taught young Theodore Albert how to do that to dogs straight out of the pick-up windows) and a grinding of the black's privates by Monk's raised knee. The buck's own razor-blade fingers were used to sever his own jugular.

This last upset had proved too much for the rest of the vigilante squad who, pissed enough already by the cash loss, decided that what they'd had in mind for the ape-walking creep (their girls' description had pin-pointed Monk nicely) wasn't quite special enough. This bozo required something more permanent.

They came for him with open switch-blades and surgeon's hatchets (that season's in-weapon) and Monk would have been chopped ape if he hadn't used the still-gurgling black man as a battering ram.

Oh yeah, he'd gotten away, but had been damaged in the getting (but not as damaged as the two dead he'd left behind). A knife stuck firmly in his shoulder-blade had proved uncomfortable as well as a bad feature for walking the streets. Fortunately, a shithead who knew him on a supplier/client basis and whom he ran into several blocks away obliged him by tugging the knife free after much jiggling and muttering 'man-oh-man' and some giggling. Jiggle and giggle. The junkie had paid for the enjoyment with a windpipe so badly flattened that he talked like Popeye for the rest of his short years.

Once again, Monk was on the hoof, and this time both Pigs and Mob were after him. He robbed a drugstore for some travelling money (no gun necessary for a crude dude like Monk), leaving the druggist seriously splattered among his pills and potions.

The old flaky Dodge he stole only took him as far as the outskirts of town before coughing oil and chunking to a permanent demise.

Shoulder all fiery and already beginning to fester in the heat, ragged oozy cheeks like fast-food counters for flies, Monk legged his way down US95 (maybe he had Boulder City in mind he wasn't thinking straight by then), a fat thumb hoisted (all fingers fisted, no POT sign this) every time he heard an engine motoring up from behind. But who would stop for a hiker with a dark bubbly stain on his back and tomato-ketchup spread across his face? Right. No fucker. Nobody normal.

Except one car did stop.

The black car, its windows all tinted dark and mysterious, glided to a soundless halt beside him, the movement as easy as a vulture landing on a carcass.

Monk shifted his bulk so that he was facing the silent car (no grace in his movement, none at all), pain and fatigue stooping him by now (he'd left the dead Dodge at least five miles behind), his clothes and pony-tailed hair powdered with dust, his face, with its scarlet-rose cheeks, puckered up into a shit-eating grimace. For a few moments, he wondered if the occupants were Big Guys who kept Small Guys down (to keep the law in your pocket you had to maintain a certain law yourself) and he waited for a snub-nose to poke through a lowered window like some black viper sliding from its hole.

But a window didn't sink down. And no gun was pointed towards him when the rear passenger door was opened wide.

He squinted to see into the big gloomy interior and could only just make out the dark shape sitting in there among the shadows.

Then a voice said in a persuasive way: 'Need a lift, Theo?'

(That was the first and only time Kline had called him by his first name.)

12 Neath

'Not far, Liam,' said Cora, leaning forward slightly in her seat. 'Look for the gates, just ahead on your left.'

Kline, beside her, opened his eyes and for a moment that seemed no less than infinite, he and Halloran stared at each other in the rearview mirror. It was Halloran who averted his gaze and he was surprised at the effort it took to do so.

Thick undergrowth and trees crowded either side of the road, the greenery even more dense beyond, the few gaps here and there almost subterranean in their gloom; these were woodlands of perpetual dusk. The high, old-stone wall that appeared on the left came as a surprise: it looked firmly rooted as though having grown with the trees, a natural part of the forest itself, organic life smothering much of the rough stone and filling cracks. Twisted branches from trees on the other side loomed over, some reaching down like gnarled tentacles ready to snatch unwary ramblers.

He noticed the opening in the near-distance, the forest withdrawing there, allowing the smallest of incursions into its territory. Halloran slowed the Mercedes, turning into the drive, the roadway here cracked and uneven. The rusted iron gates before them looked impregnable, like the forest itself. Letters worked into the wrought iron declared: NEATH.

'Wait for a moment,' Kline instructed him.

Halloran waited, and studied.

Tall weathered columns hinged the gates, stone animals mounted on each (griffins? he wondered. Too decayed to tell), their blank eyes glaring down at the car, their lichen-filled mouths wide with soundless snarls. The gates would be easy to scale, he noted, as would be the walls on either side. No barbed wire and, as far as he could tell, no electronic warning system. And all the cover between wall and road that any would-be intruder could desire. Security was going to be difficult.

Then he noticed, beyond the gates, the lodge-house.

A two-storey building, its stone as seasoned as the walls. Its windows were as black as the Devil's soul.

Halloran frowned when the thought sprang into his mind .

. . . as black as the Devil's soul.

A phrase remembered from early years in Ireland, only then it had been: The Divil's owhn soul. Father O'Connell, thrashing the living daylights out of him, had said it. Thrashing Liam because of the heinous wickedness he had led the two Scalley boys into (the younger one had confessed, fearful of the mortal jeopardy in which his soul had been placed because of Halloran's leadership). Thrashing him because of the sacrilege against St Joseph's, breaking into the church in the hush of night, leaving the dead cat the boys had found it crushed at the roadside - inside the holy tabernacle, the animal's innards dripping out onto the soft white silk lining the vessel's walls, its eyes still gleaming dully when Father O'Connell had reached in for the chalice the next morning. Beyond redemption was Liam's soul, the priest had told the boy with every sweep of his huge unpriestlike hand, beyond saving, his spirit as graceless and as black as the Divil's owhn soul. A creature spawned for Hell itself, and a rogue who would surely find his way there with no problem at all. His troublesome ways would . . .

Halloran blinked and the memory was gone; '.but the disquiet lingered. Why think of boyhood iniquity at that moment? There were worse sins to remember.

'The gates are locked?' The trace of Irish in his voice once more, the unexpected reverie tinting his speech.

'In a way,' replied Kline.

Halloran glanced over his shoulder and the psychic smiled.

'Wait,' Kline repeated.

Halloran turned back and looked through the bars of the gate. There was no movement from the lodge, no one leaving there to come to the entrance. But then his eyes narrowed when he saw - when he thought he saw - a shadow shift within a shadow inside one of the lodge's upper windows. His sharpened focus detected no further movement.

'Open up, Monk,' Kline ordered his bodyguard.

With a low grunt, the heavy-set American pushed open the passenger door and hefted himself out. He ambled towards the gate and indolently raised a hand to push one side open, taking it all the way back, its base grating over the road's uneven surface, until foliage poked through the struts. He did the same with the other half, then stood to one side like an unkempt guardsman while Halloran drove on through. He closed the gates once more when the Mercedes drew to a halt inside the grounds.

Halloran had been irritated by a simple procedure which had been dramatised into a ritual. He could only assume that an electronic device in the gate's lock had been triggered by whoever was inside the lodge; yet when driving through, he hadn't noticed any such mechanism.

'I take it there's someone inside . . .' he nodded towards the lodge-house '. . . capable of stopping any uninvited visitors from coming through?'

Kline merely grinned.

Halloran was about to put the question again, more pointedly this time, when he heard the sound of a vehicle braking sharply on the road outside the grounds. He turned swiftly to see the other Shield car reverse back to the opening then turn in.

'Tell Monk to open the gate again,' he said.

'I'm afraid not.' Kline was shaking his head. 'You know the rules, Halloran.' There was a hint of glee in his voice, as though the psychic were enjoying the game now that he was safely home.

'Have it your way.' Halloran left the Mercedes and walked back to the gate, Monk grudgingly opening it a fraction to allow him out. The two Shield operatives waited for him beside the Granada.