A fire had begun in the smashed engine, he could smell it. He was not so much a beast that he feared fire. Respected it yes: but not feared. Fire was a tool, he’d used it many times: to burn out enemies, to cremate them in their beds.
Now he stepped back from the car as the flame found the petrol and fire erupted into the air. Heat balled towards him, and he smelt the hair on the front of his body crisp, but he was too entranced by the spectacle not to look. The fire followed the blood of the beast, consuming Gissing, and licking along the rivers of petrol like an eager dog after a trail of piss. Raw-head watched, and learned a new and lethal lesson.
In the chaos of his study Coot was unsuccessfully fighting off sleep. He’d spent a good deal of the evening at the Altar, some of it with Declan. Tonight there’d be no praying, just sketching. Now he had a copy of the Altar carving on his desk in front of him, and he’d spent an hour just staring at it. The exercise had been fruitless. Either the carving was too ambiguous, or his imagination lacked breadth. Whichever, he could make very little sense of the image. It pictured a burial certainly, but that was about all he was able to work out. Maybe the body was a little bigger than that of the mourners, but nothing exceptional. He thought of Zeal’s pub, “The Tall Man,” and smiled. It might well have pleased some Medieval wit to picture the burial of a brewer under the Altar cloth.
In the hall, the sick clock struck twelve-fifteen, which meant it was almost one. Coot got up from his desk, stretched, and switched off the lamp. He was surprised by the brilliance of the moonlight streaming through the crack in the curtain. It was a full, harvest moon, and the light, though cold, was luxuriant.
He put the guard in front of the fire, and stepped into the darkened hallway, closing the door behind him. The clock ticked loudly. Somewhere over towards Goudhurst, he heard the sound of an ambulance siren.
What’s happening? he wondered, and opened the front door to see what he could see. There were car headlights on the hill, and the distant throb of blue police lights, more rhythmical than the ticking at his back. Accident on the north road. Early for ice, and surely not cold enough. He watched the lights, set on the hill like jewels on the back of a whale, winking away. It was quite chilly, come to think of it. No weather to be standing in the—
He frowned; something caught his eye, a movement in the far corner of the churchyard, underneath the trees. The moonlight etched the scene in monochrome. Black yews, grey stones, a white chrysanthemum strewing its petals on a grave. And black in the shadow of the yews, but outlined clearly against the slab of a marble tomb beyond, a giant.
Coot stepped out of the house in slippered feet.
The giant was not alone. Somebody was kneeling in front of it, a smaller, more human shape, its face raised and clear in the light. It was Declan. Even from a distance it was clear that he was smiling up at his master.
Coot wanted to get closer; a better look at the nightmare. As he took his third step his foot crunched on a piece of gravel.
The giant seemed to shift in the shadows. Was it turning to look at him? Coot chewed on his heart. No, let it be deaf; please God, let it not see me, make me invisible.
The prayer was apparently answered. The giant made no sign of having seen his approach. Taking courage Coot advanced across the pavement of gravestones, dodging from tomb to tomb for cover, barely daring to breathe. He was within a few feet of the tableau now and he could see the way the creature’s head was bowed towards Declan; he could hear the sound like sandpaper on stone it was making at the back of its throat. But there was more to the scene.
Declan’s vestments were torn and dirtied, his thin chest bare. Moonlight caught his sternum, his ribs. His state, and his position, were unequivocal. This was adoration—pure and simple. The Coot heard the splashing; he stepped closer and saw that the giant was directing a glistening rope of its urine onto Declan’s upturned face. It splashed into his slackly opened mouth, it ran over his torso. The gleam of joy didn’t leave Declan’s eyes for a moment as he received this baptism, indeed he turned his head from side to side in his eagerness to be totally defiled.
The smell of the creature’s discharge wafted across to Coot. It was acidic, vile. How could Declan bear to have a drop of it on him, much less bathe in it? Coot wanted to cry out, stop the depravity, but even in the shadow of the yew the shape of the beast was terrifying. It was too tall and too broad to be human.
This was surely the Beast of the Wild Woods Declan had been trying to describe; this was the childdevourer. Had Declan guessed, when he eulogized about the monster, what power it would have over his imagination? Had he known all along that if the beast were to come sniffing for him he’d kneel in front of it, call it Lord (before Christ, before Civilization, he’d said), let it discharge its bladder on to him, and smile?
Yes. Oh yes.
And so let him have his moment. Don’t risk your neck for him, Coot thought, he’s where he wants to be. Very slowly he backed off towards the Vestry, his eyes still fixed on the degradation in front of him. The baptism dribbled to a halt, but Declan’s hands, cupped in front of him, still held a quantity of fluid. He put the heels of his hands to his mouth, and drank.
Coot gagged, unable to prevent himself. For an instant he closed his eyes to shut out the sight, and opened them again to see that the shadowy head had turned towards him and was looking at him with eyes that burned in the blackness.
“Christ Almighty.”
It saw him. For certain this time, it saw him. It roared, and its head changed shape in the shadow, its mouth opened so horribly wide.
“Sweet Jesus.”
Already it was charging towards him, antelope-lithe, leaving its acolyte slumped beneath the tree. Coot turned and ran, ran as he hadn’t in many a long year, hurdling the graves as he fled. It was just a few yards: the door, some kind of safety. Not for long maybe, but time to think, to find a weapon. Run, you old bastard. Christ the race, Christ the prize. Four yards.
Run.
The door was open.
Almost there; a yard to go—
He crossed the threshold and swung round to slam the door on his pursuer. But no! Rawhead had shot his hand through the door, a hand three times the size of a human hand. It was snatching at the empty air, trying to find Coot, the roars relentless.
Coot threw his full weight against the oak door. The door stile, edged with iron, bit into Rawhead’s forearm. The roar became a howl: venom and agony mingled in a din that was heard from one end of Zeal to the other.
It stained the night up as far as the north road, where the remains of Gissing and his driver were being scraped up and parcelled in plastic. It echoed round the icy walls of the Chapel of Rest where Denny and Gwen Nicholson were already beginning to degenerate. It was heard too in the bedrooms of Zeal, where living couples lay side by side, maybe an arm numbed under the other’s body; where the old lay awake working out the geography of the ceiling; where children dreamt of the womb, and babies mourned it. It was heard again and again as Rawhead raged at the door.
The howl made Coot’s head swim. His mouth babbled prayers, but the much needed support from on high showed no sign of coming. He felt his strength ebbing away. The giant was steadily gaining access, pressing the door open inch by inch. Coot’s feet slid on the too-well polished floor, his muscles were fluttering as they faltered. This was a contest he had no chance of winning, not if he tried to match his strength to that of the beast, sinew for sinew. If he was to see tomorrow morning, he needed some strategy.
Coot pressed harder against the wood, his eyes darting around the hallway looking for a weapon. It mustn’t get in: it mustn’t have mastery over him. A bitter smell was in his nostrils. For a moment he saw himself naked and kneeling in front of the giant, with its piss beating on his skull. Hard on the heels of that picture, came another flurry of depravities. It was all he could do not to let in, let the obscenities get a permanent hold. Its mind was working its way into his, a thick wedge of filth pressing its
way through his memories, encouraging buried thoughts to the surface. Wouldn’t it ask for worship, just like any God? And wouldn’t its demands be plain, and real? Not ambiguous, like those of the Lord he’d served up ‘til now. That was a fine thought: to give himself up to this certainty that beat on the other side of of the door, and lie open in front of it, and let it ravage him.
Rawhead. Its name was a pulse in his ear—Raw Head.
In desperation, knowing his fragile mental defenses were within an ace of collapsing, his eyes alighted on the clothes stand to the left of the door.
Raw. Head. Raw. Head. The name was an imperative. Raw. Head. Raw. Head. It evoked a skinned head, its defenses peeled back, a thing close to bursting, no telling if it was pain or pleasure. But easy to find out—
It almost had possession of him, he knew it: it was now or never. He took one arm from the door and stretched towards the rack for a walking stick. There was one amongst them he wanted in particular. He called it his cross country stick, a yard and a half of stripped ash, well used and resilient. His fingers coaxed it towards him.
Rawhead had taken advantage of the lack of force behind the door; its leathery arm was working its way in, indifferent to the way the door jamb scored the skin. The hand, its fingers strong as steel, had caught the folds of Coot’s jacket.
Coot raised the ash stick and brought it down on Rawhead’s elbow, where the bone was vulnerably close to the surface. The weapon splintered on impact, but it did its job. On the other side of the door the howl began again, and Rawhead’s arm was rapidly withdrawn. As the fingers slid out Coot slammed the door and bolted it. There was a short hiatus, seconds only, before the attack began again, this time a two-fisted beating on the door. The hinges began to buckle; the wood groaned. It would be a short time, a very short time, before it gained access. It was strong; and now it was furious too.
Coot crossed the hall and picked up the phone. Police, he said, and began to dial. How long before it put two and two together, gave up on the door, and moved to the windows? They were leaded, but that wouldn’t keep it out for long. He had minutes at the most, probably seconds, depending on its brain power.
His mind, loosed from Rawhead’s grasp, was a chorus of fragmented prayers and demands. If I die, he found himself thinking, will I be rewarded in Heaven for dying more brutally than any country vicar might reasonably expect? Is there compensation in paradise for being disembowelled in the front hall of your own Vestry?
There was only one officer left on duty at the Police Station: the rest were up on the north road, clearing up after Gissing’s party. The poor man could make very little sense of Reverend Coot’s pleas, but there was no mistaking the sound of splintering wood that accompanied the babbles, nor the howling in the background.
The officer put the phone down and radioed for help. The patrol on the north road took twenty, maybe twenty-five seconds to answer. In that time Rawhead had smashed the central panel of the Vestry door, and was now demolishing the rest. Not that the patrol knew that. After the sights they’d faced up there, the chauffeur’s charred body, Gissing’s missing manhood, they had become insolent with experience, like hour-old war veterans. It took the officer at the Station a good minute to convince them of the urgency in Coot’s voice. In that time Rawhead had gained access.
In the hotel Ron Milton watched the parade of lights blinking on the hill, heard the sirens, and Rawhead’s howls, and was besieged by doubts. Was this really the country village he had intended to settle himself and his family in? He looked down at Maggie, who had been woken by the noise but was now asleep again, her bottle of sleeping tablets almost empty on the bedside cabinet. He felt, though she would have laughed at him for it, protective towards her: he wanted to be her hero.
She was the one who took the self-defense night classes however, while he grew overweight on expense account lunches. It made him inexplicably sad to watch her sleep, knowing he had so little power over life and death.
Rawhead stood in the hall of the Vestry in a confetti of shattered wood. His torso was pinpricked with splinters, and dozens of tiny wounds bled down his heaving bulk. His sour sweat permeated the hall like incense.
He sniffed the air for the man, but he was nowhere near. Rawhead bared his teeth in frustration, expelling a thin whistle of air from the back of his throat, and loped down the hall towards the study. There was warmth there, his nerves could feel it at twenty yards, and there was comfort too. He overturned the desk and shattered two of the chairs, partly to make more room for himself, mostly out of sheer destructiveness, then threw away the fire guard and sat down. Warmth surrounded him: healing, living warmth. He luxuriated in the sensation as it embraced his face, his lean belly, his limbs. He felt it heat his blood too, and so stir memories of other fires, fires he’d set in fields of burgeoning wheat.
And he recalled another fire, the memory of which his mind tried to dodge and duck, but he couldn’t avoid thinking about it: the humiliation of that night would be with him forever. They’d picked their season so carefully: high summer, and no rain in two months. The undergrowth of the Wild Woods was tinder dry, even the living tree caught the flame easily. He had been flushed out of his fortress with streaming eyes, confused and fearful, to be met with spikes and nets on every side, and that... thing they had, that sight that could subdue him.
Of course they weren’t courageous enough to kill him; they were too superstitious for that. Besides, didn’t they recognize his authority, even as they wounded him, their terror a homage to it? So they buried him alive: and that was worse than death. Wasn’t that the very worst: Because he could live an age, ages, and never die, not even locked in the earth. Just left to wait a hundred years, and suffer, and another hundred and another, while the generations walked the ground above his head and lived and died and forgot him. Perhaps the women didn’t forget him: he could smell them even through the earth, when they came close to his grave, and though they might not have known it they felt anxious, they persuaded their men to abandon the place altogether, so he was left absolutely alone, with not even a gleaner for company. Loneliness was their revenge on him, he thought, for the times he and his brothers had taken women into the woods, spread them out, spiked and loosed them again, bleeding but fertile. They would die having the children of those rapes; no woman’s anatomy could survive the thrashing of a hybrid, its teeth, its anguish. That was the only revenge he and his brothers ever had on the big-bellied sex.
Rawhead stroked himself and looked up at the gilded reproduction of “The Light of the World” that hung above Coot’s mantelpiece. The image woke no tremors of fear or remorse in him: it was a picture of a sexless martyr, doe-eyed and woebegone. No challenge there. The true power, the only power that could defeat him, was apparently gone: lost beyond recall, its place usurped by a virgin shepherd. He ejaculated, silently, his thin semen hissing on the hearth. The world was his to rule unchallenged. He would have warmth, and food in abundance. Babies even. Yes, babymeat, that was the best. Just dropped mites, still blind from the womb.
He stretched, sighing in anticipation of that delicacy, his brain awash with atrocities.
From his refuge in the crypt Coot heard the police cars squealing to a halt outside the Vestry, then the sound of feet on the gravel path. He judged there to be at least half a dozen. It would be enough, surely.
Cautiously he moved through the darkness towards the stairs.
Something touched him: he almost yelled, biting his tongue a moment before the cry escaped.
“Don’t go now,” a voice said from behind him. It was Declan, and he was speaking altogether too loudly for comfort. The thing was above them, somewhere, it would hear them if he wasn’t careful. Oh God, it mustn’t hear.
“It’s up above us,” said Coot in a whisper.
“I know.”
The voice seemed to come from his bowels not from his throat; it was bubbled through filth.
“Let’s have him come down here shall we? He wants you
, you know. He wants me to—”
“What’s happened to you?”
Declan’s face was just visible in the dark. It grinned; lunatic.
“I think he might want to baptize you too. How’d you like that? Like that would you? He pissed on me: you see him? And that wasn’t all. Oh no, he wants more than that. He wants everything. Hear me? Everything.”
Declan grabbed hold of Coot, a bear hug that stank of the creature’s urine.
“Come with me?” he leered in Coot’s face.
“I put my trust in God.”
Declan laughed. Not a hollow laugh; there was genuine compassion in it for this lost soul.
“He is God,” he said. “He was here before this fucking shithouse was built, you know that.”
“So were dogs.”
“Uh?”
“Doesn’t mean I’d let them cock their legs on me.”
“Clever old fucker aren’t you?” said Declan, the smile inverted. “He’ll show you. You’ll change.”
“No, Declan. Let go of me—”
The embrace was too strong.
“Come on up the stairs, fuckface. Mustn’t keep God waiting.”
He pulled Coot up the stairs, arms still locked round him. Words, all logical argument, eluded Coot: was there nothing he could say to make the man see his degradation? They made an ungainly entrance into the Church, and Coot automatically looked towards the altar, hoping for some reassurance, but he got none. The altar had been desecrated. The cloths had been torn and smeared with excrement, the cross and candlesticks were in the middle of a fire of prayerbooks that burned healthily on the altar steps. Smuts floated around the Church, the air was grimy with smoke.
“You did this?”
Declan grunted.