Clovenhoof (49 page)

The rumbling was growing and Evelyn could now feel it reverberating through her legs. She looked up to see if there was a monorail passing overhead but she already knew there wasn’t.

“What is that?” said Molly.

The ground shook. The Wolf of Gubbio hid its head between its paws.

And then something happened that made Evelyn’s brain throb. She could only comprehend it in terms of that cinematic trick where the camera panned in and zoomed out at the same time so that everything stayed exactly where it was and simultaneously moved away from everything else. The distant spires of the city, the tower blocks and temples, without moving, sped away from one another, creating huge open spaces between them that (and this was the bit Evelyn struggled with)
had always been there
.

“Problem solved,” said Molly.

There followed another sound, smaller and more distant but clear nonetheless. The sound of twelve sets of pearly gates slamming open.

Joan grinned with child-like joy, reminding Evelyn just how young the Frenchwoman was.

“I seem to recall,” she said, her eyes alight, “that we have a festival to organise.”

Spartacus Wilson slept uneasily beneath a thin quilt.

The only light in the room came from luminous stars, moons and spaceships stuck to his bedroom ceiling. A copy of Commando comic lay open on his bed where he had dropped it. From downstairs came the sounds of a reality television programme and the raised voices of his mum and her boyfriend. The voices filtered into his sleeping mind and his nightmares, in which Mrs Sokolowski was preparing to eat him for her breaktime snack.

Spartacus moaned.

Herbert Dewsbury’s hand crawled from beneath the bed and scampered up to the boy’s pillow. It tucked a strand of hair behind the boy’s ear and gently stroked his forehead until the boy quietened and settled into happier dreams. The hand snuggled into the hollow of Spartacus’s neck and, as much as a hand could, it too slept.

Ben stepped into the Boldmere Oak. It felt odd to be back on the streets again, back in public. At his core, he had the unshakeable feeling that this was somehow wrong, some sort of mistake, that he was walking through a dream or that the police would swoop down on him at any moment to correct their mistake and whisk him off to prison once more.

He had left the courthouse that evening a free man and returned home to his flat. He had wandered around his home, touching things that he had left behind all those weeks ago. The half-painted soldiers from Antiochus’s Indian campaign. The now dried and crusted plates waiting to be washed in the sink. He had gone to Clovenhoof’s flat and Nerys’s to tell them that he was back but he got no response from either flat apart from a frenetic yapping from Twinkle behind Nerys’s door.

Put out that his friends were not only too self-interested to come see him in court but also had the cheek to be out when he called, he put on his coat, went out onto the street and walked to the pub.

The place was crowded and Ben had to weave his way to the bar, hoping that no one would recognise him, ask him awkward questions or try to start something with him. He got to the bar and found that the barman, Lennox, had already poured him a pint of cider and black.

“On the house,” said Lennox. “I think you deserve it.”

“Thank you,” said Ben, mildly uncomfortable with the generous gesture.

“So, it turned out to be a model corpse all along.”

Ben smiled politely.

“I did try to tell them. It’s amazing that it took Herbert returning from France to show his face in court to convince them I’m not a murderer. My neighbour, Mrs Astrakhan, was apparently so traumatised by the event that she’s run off to her sister’s in Shropshire, vowing never to return.”

Ben paused. Yes, it did seem amazing, implausible, even impossible. The whole business seemed incredible but that was the truth of the matter. Perhaps he would stick to miniature models from now on.

“Now the pint is free,” said Lennox, “but if you’d do me a favour.”

“Sure.”

Lennox pointed across the room to a chair by the window.

“Your friend there has been sleeping off the booze all evening. Can you see that she gets home safely?”

Ben looked, saw and then walked over. Nerys was slumped in a chair. A trio of wine glasses stood on the table in front of her. He sat down across from her and poked her on the shoulder until she stirred.

“Probably not the best place to sleep,” he said.

Nerys looked at him blearily.

“Ben?”

He spread his arms.

“Ta-dah. Sprung from jail by the slow-moving cogs of justice.”

She sat upright and touched her fingertips to her cheeks. They were wet.

“Crying in my sleep,” she said. “I had the strangest dream.”

“A sad dream?” said Ben.

“No.” She gazed at the table, trying and failing to remember. “Not at all.”

Dave came through from the hotel bedroom to the balcony overlooking the sea.

“You’ll get cold,” he said wrapping his arms around Blenda’s shoulders from behind.

She leaned back against him.

“I’m fine,” she said and then, “I’m very happy.”

Dave looked at a far off light in the darkness, wondering if it was a boat.

“Back to grimy Sutton tomorrow,” he said.

She shrugged.

“A nice full English and a leisurely drive. It’ll be nice.” She chuckled to herself. “Might skip the black pudding. Still can’t face the stuff.”

“Do you think about him a lot?” said Dave.

She tilted her head back and pecked him on the cheek.

“Nope. Maybe we’ll just skip breakfast and have a nice long lie in.”

“Sounds good. Peace, quiet and a long lie in.”

She turned to face him, staying within his embrace.

“I didn’t say it was going to be a quiet lie in.”

Clovenhoof went up to the bar.

“Lambrini?” said Lennox.

“The same,” said Clovenhoof. “How’s your grandma?”

Lennox laughed.

“False alarm. She’ll bury us all yet.”

Clovenhoof saw Ben and Nerys by the window.

“And the usual for those two reprobates.”

“No problem, boss.”

Lennox put the drinks on a tray and Clovenhoof was surprised to discover he actually had the money in his pocket to pay for them. When the barman passed him his change, Clovenhoof pointed to his head.

“The horns. Can you still...?”

Lennox grinned.

“Still there. Still ugly.”

Clovenhoof carried the drinks across to his friends.

“At last he appears,” said Ben, gladly taking his next drink.

“Where have you been?”

“Here and there,” said Clovenhoof. “Mostly there. And how are you?”

“Fine,” said Nerys. “Why?”

“No lasting effects from the electric shock?”

“Electric shock?”

“At Pitspawn’s?”

“Who?”

“Nothing,” said Clovenhoof, sitting down. “Nothing.”

Nerys stared at the palm of her hands and then prodded at one as though expecting to see something.

“It was a dream.”

“What was?” said Clovenhoof innocently.

Nerys looked at him for the longest time.

“Nothing,” she said and reached for the wine.

Darren Pottersmore (formerly known as Pitspawn) sat upright in bed, reading from his mum’s copy of the King James Bible. The naked bulb hanging in the middle of the room filled the room with stark, unloving light.

The room had been stripped almost bare. Darren had boxed and bagged up his entire collection of occult books. He had torn down his posters and pentagram. He had binned the statues, jewellery and candles. Even the satanic chair covers his mum had knitted for him had been removed and binned.

The only reminder of his lamentable time as a Satanist was the black paint on his walls. Darren, hours from ever finding sleep, had already made plans to go out the following morning and buy some tins of cleansing white emulsion. And maybe some crucifixes.

They tottered home drunkenly, arm in arm.

On one side of Clovenhoof, Nerys was explaining the importance of female empowerment and how women through the ages had expressed that through clothing. On the other side of him, Ben laboured under the false impression that his friends were interested in his opinion of the effectiveness of the Greeks as a fighting force.

“Take Joan of Arc,” said Nerys.

“Take her where?” said Clovenhoof.

“She wasn’t Greek,” said Ben.

“Tiny slip of thing,” said Nerys, “but put her in a suit of armour and the English were quaking in their boots.”

“No women allowed in the army,” said Ben. “Weren’t allowed out of the house in fact.”

“And here’s our house,” said Clovenhoof, fumbling in his pocket for his keys.

“All I’m saying... all I’m saying is that this...” She poked at her breasts although she might have been aiming for her spangly low-cut top. “This is my armour. See?”

Clovenhoof turned the key and fell in.

“Rubbish armour,” burbled Ben. “Doesn’t cover anything.”

“I was being meta... metaphysical,” she said, struggling to get her foot on the bottom step of the stairs. Ben put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her upstairs ahead of him.

Clovenhoof lay on the floor and briefly debated spending the night there. Ultimately deciding against it, he climbed to his feet and leaned against the door of flat 1a, which promptly swung open, spilling him into Mrs Astrakhan’s living room.

The lights were on but he dimly recalled Ben saying that Mrs Astrakhan had gone, left forever.

“Helloo,” he called in a drunken singsong voice.

There was a sound from further within the flat, the movement of furniture. Clovenhoof navigated his way round Mrs Astrakhan’s three piece suite and into the master bedroom. There was an old-fashioned boxy suitcase open on the bed. The Archangel Michael, wearing a modest linen suit, was unpacking pants and transferring them to a chest of drawers.

“You’re not Mrs Astrakhan,” said Clovenhoof.

Michael gave him a stony look of miserable self-pity. There was something
diminished
about him, less magnificent and more... human.

“Don’t utter a word,” warned Michael.

Clovenhoof looked round.

“You? Here?”

“I go where He sends me,” Michael sniffed, returning to his unpacking.

“But here? Permanently?”

“I
don’t
want to talk about it.”

Clovenhoof nodded and then, without warning, the laughter burst from within him.

“Jeremy!”

“Michael,” snorted Clovenhoof, doubling up in hysterics. “Neighbour!”

“Not by choice!”

Clovenhoof howled.

“Have you no sympathy?” whined the earthbound angel.

Clovenhoof shook his head and collapsed into a fit of giggles.

Saint Peter found himself sitting in another seat. It wasn’t a throne but it was a tall chair and positioned at the head of a long table in a dim, redly lit room. There was smell in the air, something faint and not quite identifiable but certainly not very pleasant.

The chairs along the length of the table were filled with, well not people but... individuals. Peter was surprised to see he recognised most of them. Azazel looked at him with penetrating eyes, a needle-sharp quill poised in his hand. Berith had the hindquarters of some small animal stuffed in his huge mouth. He gave Peter a friendly wave. Directly to Peter’s left, the demon Belphegor sat in his puttering steam-powered wheelchair. To his right, the fallen angel Mulciber presented Peter with a stack of parchment over two feet in height.

“What’s this?” said Peter.

“We have a very long agenda to get through today, your lordship.”

Peter stared at Mulciber blankly.

The former angel gave the former saint a not unkindly smile.

“They say it’s better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven, eh?”

Peter tentatively reached for the first sheet of parchment and began to read.

The End

Million Dollar Dress by Heide Goody

In this modern-day Cinderella story, cutting edge technology gives Justine the body of a supermodel at the flick of a switch. She uses her new-found confidence and sex appeal to snare her ideal man. But hot on her heels are the police and the inventor. Can she avoid jail and humiliation? Can she keep hold of her ideal man once he discovers her secret? Most importantly of all, has she
really
found what she’s looking for?