Jago (38 page)

The woman’s eyes went empty while Ben was sticking it into her. After the first few blows, she had become compliant. Now she went along with Ben. It wasn’t even hurting her any more. This wasn’t about pain, this was about sacrifice. This wasn’t about Wendy, it was about Ben’s army. She turned herself over, presenting her arse to him, and she lifted her hair away from the back of her neck so he could put Jazz’s stiletto point between her hackles.

‘Fuck,’ Ben said, ‘fuck, fuck, fuck…’

With every thrust of his skinny, flame-etched hips, Ben grunted ‘fuck’, repeating it until the word lost any specific meaning. Wendy gritted her teeth and tried not to make a sound, but as Ben ground into her, blood slicking between their bodies, she let out an involuntary
baaa,
like a real ewe. It took Ben a long time to finish. This wasn’t for pleasure, this was for power.

Allison had Terry and Jazz hold Wendy’s arms, more to stop her collapsing than to prevent her from hurting Ben. Mike Toad she let off, and told to watch the door. The Agapemone wasn’t quite empty, but they shouldn’t be disturbed.

Finally, Ben pulled out of the ewe. He picked up the rag of her skirt and wiped himself, cleaning off her blood and slime. He had punctured her inside, and she was bleeding.

‘Terry,’ he said. ‘You can have a go now if you want.’

Terry looked at Wendy’s blank face and bruised body, and spat. He shook his head.

‘Don’t say you weren’t given the chance.’

Ben pulled up his cycle trousers and buttoned his fly. He was relaxed, tongue curled behind his teeth. It was Allison’s job to stay cool. Wendy didn’t try to cover herself.

‘Baa baa, shorn sheep, are you feeling cold?’ Allison sang.

Ben gave Jazz her stiletto back, and the girl crouched by Wendy, leotard stretching. She stuck the tip of her knife into the woman’s belly and scratched, just cutting the skin, prodding the flesh beneath. Wendy’s stomach muscles went tight under their upholstery, and she half sat, jaws clenched with hurt. Jazz had got through to her, woken her up again.

‘She should know what’s happening,’ the girl told Allison.

Pam’s sister was really into sacrifice, but was perhaps too show-offy. It might all be a pose, a studied, forced thing, not a natural instinct. She licked blood from her blade and pushed Wendy’s head back, cracking it against the floor. She dipped her forefingernail in the spreading smear of blood, and dabbed it in the hollow of her throat like a spot of perfume.

Mike Toad, determined, turned around and ran over. He launched a vicious kick into Wendy’s side, dislodging a shout from her.

‘There,’ the Toad said, ‘see… there. I can do it, see.’

He was hyped up, jumping with excitement. He kicked the woman again, in one thigh, and picked up his foot to stamp on her face. Allison pulled him away. ‘Don’t spoil her,’ she said, pushing him back towards the door.

Ben had wandered off, towards the balcony. He came back and pressed his teeth to Allison’s cheek, a lipless kiss.

‘Kill,’ he said.

Allison was proud she’d been chosen. This was the most difficult part of the ritual. Jazz offered her knife but Allison had her own methods. She rolled her jeansleg up to the knee and slipped the rubber band off her cheesewire. Her foot tingled as she unwound the weapon. It had been too large for cats. Perhaps she had always known its true purpose. Making fists around the corks, she thread cutting wire between her fore and long fingers, then snapped it tight. She had three feet of thin steel between her hands, edge as sharp and minutely serrated as a blade of pampas grass.

‘Lift her head,’ she told Terry.

He took hold of Wendy, and got his fingers tangled in her hair. She let out a quiet yelp.

‘Careful,’ she said, ‘you’re hurting her.’

Jazz brushed the clumsy man aside and took over, carefully bunching Wendy’s hair and holding it to one side. The ewe coughed, and dribbled blood.

‘Kill,’ Ben said, ‘quickly.’

Allison didn’t need to be told again. She put her knee on Wendy’s chest and slipped the wire under her neck. Jazz helped. She made a loop and noosed it loosely around the woman’s throat. Jazz let go, and Wendy’s head lolled, neck held off the floor by the wire. Allison gripped the corks like the handles of a chest-expander. She looked into Wendy’s face, wondering if this was an important moment for them all.

‘Goodbye, lambkin,’ she said.

Then she pulled. The wire bit into Wendy’s fat neck, and Allison felt her thrashing under her knee. Jazz and Terry had her arms again. Skin parted and wire sank in. Allison felt the noose slicking against corded muscles and held fast. Wendy’s eyes opened wide and her mouth puckered tight, tongue forcing her lips apart. Allison kept the noose taut until her upper arms ached.

‘Done,’ Jazz said.

Allison relaxed and Wendy’s head fell, slapping polished herringbone tiles. It was over for her. Allison picked the wire out of Wendy’s neck, and avoided the gush of a severed vein. Terry got blood over his jeans. His face was changing shape, hairline creeping down towards the midpoint of his ridge of eyebrow, chin jutting, nose receding. Allison looked at Wendy’s dead marble eyes. The woman was gone. Her part in the sacrifice was complete.

‘Eat,’ Ben said. ‘All of you, eat.’

This was the most important part, also the trickiest. No one knew where to start. Finally, Jazz began. She pinched Wendy’s ear, and put her stiletto to it. The blade sliced easily at first, but got stuck on gristle. She had to saw to get the morsel, the lobe and half the lower ear, free. Taking a deep breath, Jazz popped the lump into her mouth and began chewing. The raw meat obviously wasn’t appetizing, but she kept at it. After too little chewing, she swallowed it down, besting a choke, and grinned, blood between her teeth.

‘Delicious,’ she said, not meaning it.

Watching, Terry had been psyching himself up. His bum fluff was heavy and dark, stiff beard creeping up his cheeks. His pointed ears were slipping back and up. His lower jaw was sliding forwards, lips dislocated by swollen teeth. He held Wendy’s floppy arm like a joint of meat and salivated on it, making animal noises as he rocked his head. With an instantly stifled howl, he sank a mouthful of sharp teeth into the flesh of Wendy’s arm. He worried at it like a dog and tore a hunk free, gulping it down. He left a messy patch, edges ragged. The bulging tissue must be fat, Allison thought, the stretched rubbery stuff, muscle. Terry dropped the arm and scurried away, using his hands and feet like a toddler, into a corner. He had a strip of meat in his mouth, and chewed steadily.

‘Mike,’ Allison said, ‘over here.’

The Toad tiptoed across the gallery, clothes still wet from the soaking.

‘You bought into the game,’ she said. ‘Now you have to play.’

He looked from face to face.

‘Shit or get off the pot, funny man,’ Jazz said.

He didn’t want to touch the dead body but had no choice. Closing his eyes tight, Mike Toad picked up the ravaged arm and fastened his mouth over the wound Terry had made. He sucked noisily, and some blood trickled out. He let go and chewed. He had not bitten off much, just a strip of skin, really, but he’d bitten off something and got it into his stomach. Even if he spent the rest of the night puking, that counted for something. Excited at getting it over with, the Toad laughed and shook.

It was Allison’s turn. Used to raw meat, she still borrowed Jazz’s knife. She cut herself a steak from the thigh and kneaded with her fingers, squeezing out the juice.

‘Stop playing with your food,’ Mike said, smug confidence creeping back. ‘There are people in India starving.’

Allison bit off a corner of her steak. The meat had to be thoroughly chewed before she could get it down. Wendy didn’t taste like anything special. She gave half her portion to Ben, and he wolfed it hungrily.

‘What now?’ Jazz asked.

Ben took the stiletto from Allison and drew a line with it, from the red ring around Wendy’s neck to her bulging navel.

‘Wear,’ he said. ‘Fuck, kill, eat…
wear.’

Meticulously, with deft movements, Ben began to loosen the skin from Wendy’s upper body, lifting it free of red flesh. Allison was still chewing her meat. Now Wendy was dead, Ben looked thin, scarecrow-framed as if the fat woman had been keeping him going. He’d told Allison he could only stay if people believed in him. Ben laid Wendy’s ribs bare, pulling back the skin of her chest like the flaps of a jacket. Allison put her hand on Ben’s shoulder, feeling pride in his workmanship, pride in the beginnings of their army. Even with Wendy gone, she would believe in him.

‘T
ell vicar what you told me, JoAnne,’ Mrs Critchley ordered her red-nosed daughter, gloved hand twitching in readiness for a good smack around the ear. JoAnne had been crying recently but had stopped now, even if she did have to keep snuffling her nose into a tiny hankie. She obviously didn’t want to repeat whatever it was she’d told her mother.

Jack Boothe looked at his curate and mentally shrugged, knowing Tony would get the message. When the young man had arrived in the parish, Jack had joked at the Rotary with Johnny Collins that Tony was the image of Noot, the chinless church functionary in the television programme
All Gas and Gaiters.
Johnny had, a little unkindly, come back by suggesting that Boothe himself bore a resemblance to Noot’s wine-bibbing superior. Since then, Tony had wiped away the joke by proving himself unfashionably tireless as a soldier of the Church. Johnny was constantly plotting, only half in jest, to poach the young man to replace his own curate, who was more interested in rugby football than parish work.

A sliver of late-afternoon gold leaked through the window, lining Tony up against the wall as if he were caught in the reflection of a column of fire. The rest of the room was getting a bit dim. Before Boothe needed to say anything, Tony quietly turned on the lights.

‘There,’ Boothe said, ‘that’s better.’

Boothe hoped this silly meeting would be over with quickly. He wanted to watch Malcolm Muggeridge on BBC2. He was giving an interview about the Youth Problem. Boothe thought that would be amusing, probably relevant to this current nuisance.

Tony stood by the cocktail cabinet, gently tapping a decanter with a fingernail. The lad had all the bright ideas.

‘Sherry, Mrs Critchley?’

The woman looked at him, lips pursed. After a pause, she nodded. ‘Thank you, vicar.’

Tony had a glass ready.

‘Not from
him,’
Mrs Critchley said, biting down hard on the pronoun. ‘I’d as soon take poison.’

Boothe noticed JoAnne surreptitiously shooting a look at Tony, then quickly casting her eyes down. Tony filled a glass anyway, and held it near Mrs Critchley, tempting.

This was absurd. Boothe couldn’t believe that with man practically on the moon and the pill on prescription, mothers were still accusing clergymen of ‘ruining’ their daughters. The trick had been passing out of use when he’d been a curate, and that had been back when the people of Leeds were packing their men off to invade Normandy. He felt like telling Mrs Critchley to pull the other one.

The woman finally overcame her distaste and snatched the sherry out of Tony’s hand.

‘JoAnne,’ Mrs Critchley said, whining. ‘Tell vicar.’

The girl shook her head.

‘Not with
him
in the room,’ Mrs Critchley said, indicating Tony with her sharp eyes.

JoAnne still shook her head. Boothe was sure the girl was frightened and desperate because of her mother’s threats, not because of anything else that might, or might not, have happened to her.

The obvious had been ruled out. Boothe had talked in confidence with the girl’s doctor, a Rotarian. He confirmed that JoAnne, who’d been brought to see him a few days ago, was, although not precisely virgo intacta, certainly not due for a blessed event. And while her lack of strict virtue might be regrettable, it was not, in this day, really a concern for Jack Boothe. Besides, he doubted that Mrs Critchley, when she was Margie Cox in 1943 and our brave boys were about to go overseas, had been all that different.

‘JoAnne,’ Tony said, ‘what is it? You know you can talk to me.’

Tony was a willowy youth of twenty-six, with hair down to his dog collar and sideburns the bishop disapproved of. He’d been bringing in a younger set to the church. Working in the youth club and on the rec committee, he had had a remarkable success in his attempts to win back the children of the parish from the Rolling Stones or Manfred Mann or whoever might be this week’s instrument of the Devil. Johnny said the curate had ‘youth appeal’, whatever that was. Tony had been pulling in children like JoAnne Critchley, involving them in the works of the parish in a way Boothe had quite given up on. The lad might have funny ideas, including a love of high-church ceremony that tended alarmingly towards popery, but he’d learn. Boothe consistently sang his curate’s praises. When he came to retire, he hoped Tony would be available to take over the reins. The lad was such a bright spark, he’d surely be given a parish of his own within a few years.

‘Tell… them… JoAnne,’ Mrs Critchley said, drawing out each word. A regular churchgoer, she was just a little
too
devout, a touch more willing to wield the rod than to use the caress. A good woman, no doubt of that, but unconvincing. She wanted her daughter to atone for her own sins rather than make her separate peace with God.

JoAnne wasn’t a pretty girl, but would, in time, have a few years of being oddly attractive. She had large blue eyes behind National Health specs, a tiny freckled nose and a gap between her front teeth. She wore a short dress which alternated yellow, pink and orange like a three-flavoured ice lolly. She had been in the youth club a year or so. Johnny and Boothe called the organization Tony’s fan club, remarking on the number of dreamy girls the curate always had trailing around after him, sighing and swooning. They wrote his name in exercise books, embellished with coloured hearts. It was all rather sweet.

Tony knelt down by JoAnne and held her hand. The girl looked up, and a fragile smile erupted. Boothe saw the gap in her teeth. Mrs Critchley had one too.