Holiday of the Dead (24 page)

He felt even more certain in this opinion when he came into work on the Tuesday after the bank holiday. It wasn’t so much the mess – he was used to that. It was more the nature of the thing he found on the lamp post.

And what it was doing.

It was a breezy morning, and the sun was still low in the sky, and when later questioned on the subject, Kevin put the phenomenon he witnessed down to the action of the wind and the play of the bright light dazzling his eyes, though he didn’t mention the effect of the contents of the bag he had found under a bench giving the incident a certain hazy, dream-like quality.

At first he took it for an old-fashioned, upright vacuum cleaner bag, still attached to its hose pipe, which appeared to be waving like an elephant’s trunk in the breeze. Approaching closer, Kevin realized that there were in fact not one but two bags, and that they were wet; pinky-grey and organic in texture.

The thing swaying and pulsating on the lamp post was a pair of human lungs, complete with wind pipe, though lacking the rest of the human body.

Kevin noticed sooty black striations visible through the organ’s mucous membranes, reminding him of pictures of lungs displayed on packets of cigarettes and rolling tobacco.

“
I would say these lungs belonged to a heavy smoker.”

“
Great Heavens, Holmes! How did you–”

“
Simple deduction, Watson. These blackened, tarry deposits here point to a …”

Kevin snapped out of his detective day dream, registering the thing that his mind had been trying to shut out: the lungs appeared to be breathing, expanding and contracting like a pair of spongy bellows.

Kevin’s gorge was rising, and he felt a sudden urge to dash to the gardeners’ mess hut, vomit in the toilet and enlist the help of one of his colleagues. After all, he couldn’t just leave it up there on display for all the children and pensioners and other decent citizens who would soon be descending on the park on this bright May morning. It was an eyesore! Not to mention a health hazard. But as he strode rapidly in the direction of the mess hut, his stomach churning with each step, he remembered that he was alone in the park. His colleagues were nowhere to be found, probably off attending to other garbage-infested recreational facilities (either that or skiving off), and the council had not hired any seasonal staff due to cutbacks.

However, he didn’t have to worry about the lungs hanging about up there. It turned out that they were able to extricate themselves from the lamp post without his help. Fortunately for his sanity, he wasn’t there to see the wind pipe winding its way down the post like a snake, the wheezing lungs flopping about like balloons full of water. After he had sat down in the hut for a few minutes to regain his composure, he returned to find that the thing had crawled under a privet hedge. At least, that was all he could gather from the agitation of its lower leaves and branches.

That way, he was able to put the whole dreadful experience down to the wind, the sun in his eyes, etc.

He carried on insisting on this explanation for a few days, before it became impossible for anyone to deceive themselves about what was happening around them. He might have found it harder to rationalize it in this way had he been in the park the day before.

“The medical profession called it Death Immunity Syndrome – shortened to the acronym DIS. The red-top papers had a field day, bemoaning the new phenomenon of the “undeserving living”: the way that the “beneficiaries” of “infinite life expectancy” (another media buzz word) seemed to be alcoholics and drug addicts.
Why should drugged-up scroungers and criminals live forever, while decent law abiding tax payers die?
was the kind of headline that was to become typical in the months to come.”

–Professor Charles Marcuse,
We Belong Undead: ‘The Change’ and Social Change, Oxford University Press
, 2013.

WPCSO Jane Harvey was not without misgivings as she approached the group of shabby figures gathered around the bench on the edge of the park. Her colleague, PCSO Simon Craven was calling to her from a few yards behind her, where he was hanging back, his face tense and apprehensive,
like a ferret,
she thought.

She glanced back. She couldn’t hear what he was saying over the cacophony of fifty seven different varieties of adolescent pop, R’n’B and dubstep pounding from the whirligig frenzy of the funfair. But she got the gist of it from the way his arms were gesturing her to
come back, come back
!

“We can handle it!” she called back impatiently. “Are you coming with me or not?”

Not far away, parked on the corner of the road adjoining the park, was a squad car containing two uniformed officers from the police proper. She knew that they were watching, eager to see the “hobby cops” fail. PCSO Craven’s attitude was:
They’re the professionals; they’ve got the equipment and training, let them deal with it!
Jane could see where he was coming from, but she didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of seeing her bottle it.

Anyway, it wasn’t as though she was going to confront an armed robber or something, she was just going to chat to a few drunks getting bladdered on the May bank holiday. In Iraq or Afghanistan, they’d call it the battle for hearts and minds. Not that this was a battle. It was just that it was going to get dark soon, and someone needed to ask them nicely to move on, before there was any trouble between them and the teens and casuals who frequented the fair.

Better to approach them now, while there were just a handful of them scattered around the plinth where the bench stood. It was difficult to see exactly how many of them there were in the shadow of the elm that spread its darkening leaves over that corner. Was it the dying sunlight that made them appear so menacing, as they swayed to and fro lifting their cans in what looked like a mock salute to her?

Jane noticed that the lurid labels on the cans: Ultrabrew, LHC.
The new legal highs in a can
, she had heard her colleagues mutter. How had the brewery got away with it? They still hadn’t disclosed all the ingredients.
They’ve obviously got the government by the balls
, she thought.

A man stumbled out from the shadow of the elm, grinning at her with teeth like corroded tomb stones from beneath a leather cowboy hat.

“Simon!” she called, glancing behind him. As she thought, the weasel-faced PCSO had vanished. She stood her ground, and within a few lurching strides, the ridges of the man’s battered face were within inches of her own. She heaved slightly at the sour, hoppy reek of booze on his breath, and then breathed out with relief, as she glanced down at the brown bottle in swinging from his hand. He wasn’t drinking Ultrabrew.

“’S aright, swee’heart,” the man slurred. Then he flung a long arm back towards the group she had been about to approach. “I’m no with them. Ye should stay awa’ fae them! Wha’s a nice wee lass like ye doin’ on duty on Mayday Monday anyway? Ye a for’ner, or summin?”

He pressed his splintered face closer to hers in support of his interrogative, and grunted, “Hmm?”

“No, I’m not a foreigner,” she replied. “I was born in this town,” she added. “Lived here my whole life.”

“Prob’ly goin’ tae die in this town …” he muttered, and drifted off for a moment, then came back to himself abruptly. “Listen, hen, take ma advice …” He clapped his hand down on her shoulder in a rough but good-natured way. “Go home. Now! Choose life. Choose a sickie. ’S Mayday Monday for fuck’s sake, a friggin’ holiday–a
holy day
! Might be the last one an’ all …”

“Ah well,” she replied evenly, wishing he’d go away, “a change is as good as a rest.”

“A change is good as arrest! You gonna arrest me?” he demanded.

“No, I–”

“Well, listen tae this then! Back in the day, the workers never work’t Mondays. Follow Saint Monday, like me!” And he began to croon softly, “Saint Monday brings more ills aboot, for when the money’s spent! The children’s’ clothes go up the spoot, which causes discontent! For when at last he staggers hame, he knows not what tae say! A fool is mair a man than he, upon a fuddlin’ day! Tha’s what I’m sayin’ … It’s no’ healthy for a young lassie stayin’ around here, not with
them
aboot. It’s that muck they drink – sends ’em fuckin’ loopy … That and them solar flares we’ve been havin’! Did ye see the northern lights? I did. Point is, it’s messin’ with oor radar – human race’s, that is. Me, I drink decent muck! Gets me mortal, but no’ like yon muck they’re chuckin’ doon their throats.”

He broke off again, lifting the dark bottle to his cracked lips, then tossing it aside with disgust when he realized that it was empty. It smashed on the path beside them, and the noise seemed to jolt the drunk into sudden sobriety.

He gripped her shoulder.

“Let go of me,” she said slowly, injecting steel into her voice.

“Keep away fae them,” he hissed, nearly forcing her off balance as he let go of her, and lurched away with a sudden, frightened urgency.

She shot a defiant glance at the squad car.
Thanks for the backup guys
. She headed for the shadow of the elm.

As she moved closer to the dark figures under the tree, the first thing she noticed was how quiet it was. This came as something of a relief after the previous encounter. Though she wouldn’t have liked to admit it to her “superiors” in the squad car, the drunken Scotsman’s ramblings and unpredictable behaviour had left her just a little shaken. There was something almost soothing about the way the elm’s leafy, over-hanging branches seemed to muffle the shrieking hubbub of the funfair.

Less soothing were the things wriggling in the dark leaf mould near the bench.
Worms
, Jane told herself,
five of them
.

“Excuse me,” she began. She tried to catch the eye of a young, shaven-headed man in a black, hooded tracksuit top and shapeless, grey jogging bottoms, but it’s difficult to make eye contact with someone whose eyes appear to have shrunken inside his head, and whose pupils have been reduced to sub-atomic particles. She felt excruciatingly self-conscious in her high-viz jacket. She stood out like a sore thumb. A sore, fluorescent yellow thumb.

“There’s been a complaint,” she continued, “about some anti-social behaviour.”

She heard suppressed, asthmatic mirth from the bench.

It appeared to come from another man sat sideways, facing away from Jane, bending over a woman whose head was thrown back over the top of the bench, jaw slack, mouth wide. Something about the attitude of the two figures unnerved her deeply, and she began to wish that she had not tried to approach the group alone. Still, there were only three of them, and she could always radio for back-up from the squad car.

The woman on the bench let out what Jane thought was a faint whimper.

Jane didn’t want to get any closer.

“You alright, love?” she asked in a tentative murmur.

The shorn, salt-and-pepper stubbled head of the man on the bench turned slowly towards her; eyes grey shadows, mouth smiling dimly.

“She’s aright, officer,” he said. His voice was a rumbling growl, punctured by rusty barbed wire. “She’s had an overdose, that’s all. We all ’ave. Smack on top of alcopop’s smacked my bitch up!”

Faint, smirking laughter played around her from the shadows.

 “Wanna join the party, officer?” he offered in his cracked, dusty tones.

She saw that one of his hands was stroking the woman’s matted hair with a retracted Stanley knife; the other held what was left of her hand, which finished just before the knuckles like a sick joke without a punch line.

“Look, she needs medical attention,” said the WPCSO, fighting to keep the steel in her voice. “It’s alright. I’m a trained first-aider.”

“No need,” said the voice like a dry well, a bottomless pitch. “She won’t die. She can’t die. None of us can. That’s the thing we found with them new alcopops, see? None of us can die. Not one little bit of us.”

He snarled the last thing with a terrified vehemence, perhaps realizing the implications at last.

Then she glanced back at the five worms knuckling their way through the leaf mould that blackened the stubby fingernails, and her own hand groped for her radio.

“Lady fingers, anyone?” continued the builder’s rubble voice, and sniggering, qualified the offer: “but you’ll ’ave to catch ’em first!”

The woman suddenly giggled stupidly. “You’re welcome to ’em, love–I didn’t need ’em anyway!”

Then Jane realized two things First that another three or four had joined the group, circling her to cut off her exit, with more lurking in the shadows of the elm, Stanley knives, machetes and screw drivers in hand; second that the dense, over-hanging foliage that muffled the fairground noise would also muffle her screams.

“’Right, bruv!” the stubble-headed man grinned at one of the new arrivals. “Good to see you’ve skinned up – pass the joint around, will yer?”

Jane’s head jerked around involuntarily at the mention of illicit substances. But it wasn’t that sort of joint, or that kind of skinning up. The new comer, the stubble-headed man had been addressing, was hopping on one leg, offering his other around for the others to gnaw.