Page 18 of The Winter Sickness


  Chapter 58 – Crawley

  That damn roster seemed the cover-all lie of choice this winter. Yet Toby had discovered that Crawley had changed the habits of a lifetime. He’d perennially slept on Bob’s old sofa – Crawley’s mother had long-since kicked him out. Only now he was shacking up with a local girl – perhaps he really was settling down? Or was it all a part of the Mayor’s plan to make him a permanent part of the Sheriff’s Office?

  Toby didn’t know the street particularly, and was disheartened when Townshend turned out to have at least ten houses along its right side – its left side fell down a bank, and wasn’t suited for building on. Yet he was hardly started along the road when he saw the driftwood plaque, ‘Martha’s Place’. If it was a knocking shop, then it was certainly well-signposted.

  It was a large building of white clapboard filthy from the snow. And before Toby was half-way along the drive, a broad figure emerged from the doorway. The door’s summer insect-netting clattered in its flimsy frame.

  ‘What you doing here, Toby?’ asked Crawley.

  As Toby neared, he looked his enemy over – the porch he was leaning on hid any difficulty he might have had standing. Toby didn’t know what to say. It came out as,

  ‘Billy Meting. It was you who killed him.’

  ‘You weren’t there.’

  ‘You’re denying it then?’

  As Toby neared the house, the man came down the stairs to meet him on the driveway. He may have been carrying a possibly-fatal injury, yet he seemed only as stiff as if from lying uncomfortably. Crawley answered,

  ‘I’m saying it was my situation to manage, and I managed it.’

  ‘You killed him!’

  ‘Sometimes they get hurt. We can’t help that. You ought to know. How long’s the Sippitz boy been out cold now?’

  Toby wavered – Crawley had him on the back foot. He’d expected to find an injured man, yet he seemed as comfortable as old clockwork.

  Toby answered,

  ‘If Andrew Sippitz doesn’t wake, then I’ll atone for that.’

  ‘Will you really? And how will you do that?’

  God, what was Toby doing there? What had he hoped to achieve? He’d let the quest to track down Crawley obscure the fact that he had no plan of what to do when he found him. All he could blurt out was,

  ‘I’m bringing you in.’

  Crawley snickered,

  ‘No, you’re not. Get back to your desk and do your job.’

  ‘This is my job.’

  ‘No, Toby.’ (Crawley’s calmness was as unsettling to Toby now as his rage had been the night before.) ‘Your job is to keep this town together till the thaw. They don’t want me to do it? That’s fine, I can live with that for a couple of weeks. After that, I quit my sports coaching, become a trainee officer, live in town year-round to qualify. I’ll be Sheriff by next winter.’

  ‘No you won’t, not that soon.’

  Crawley answered, ‘Lloyd Thornton will be back as badge-wearer for the summer, maybe Tort, but I’ll be running things when the snow falls. And I think my first act will be letting you go. Imagine that, Toby: free to your life year-round in Carvel with your books and test tubes, chatting up the pretty girl students. I bet you’ve had your way there more than once.’

  ‘I’m not leaving you to run this place.’

  ‘You’re getting old for a Deputy, Tobes. You’ve got three years on me. I saw you laid up in that hospital bed, and the way you’ve been carrying your bad back since.’

  Toby hadn’t realised it had been so noticeable.

  ‘And that arm you’ve got right there this minute – what happened, another kid get the better of you?’

  Toby flushed, remembering the clamp-like bite.

  ‘Get back to your college, and let us get on with the real work.’

  And then Toby couldn’t help it, it all came out,

  ‘But it’s over, Crawley. The town’s finished. You’ll be running things? And who will you be running? There were thirteen of us this year, how many next – eight? Five?’

  But the man didn’t care, he just smiled,

  ‘Oh, I’ll manage better with five than you could with fifty. You’re quite finished? Then what the hell are you still doing here?’

  Toby didn’t move. ‘I can’t let you get away with it,’ he repeated.

  ‘So, what are you going to do about that now?’

  ‘Do yourself up, and come with me.’

  Crawley laughed.

  ‘I’m going to take you in.’

  ‘You want to try?’

  ‘Give it up, Crawley. You know there’s no way we’ll get away with this.’

  ‘Yes, there is. There’s every way.’

  ‘Come with me.’

  ‘We can do anything, Toby. They can’t touch us.’

  ‘You’re mad.’

  ‘I’m sane. I’m cool as a cucumber. I’m thinking clearer than you.’

  ‘Come with me, Crawley.’

  ‘And where are you going to take me, Toby? Our own cells? There’s not a man in town who’ll want to put me there.’

  ‘They will, when they know what you’ve done.’

  ‘And what then, in the spring? You’ll just let me go free again, after all that effort? Or will you march me right down to Gaidon and tell the town’s whole history?’

  ‘If I have to.’

  ‘Will you really? Tell your bit in it too?’

  ‘I’m not ashamed.’

  ‘And lose your job, lose Carvel?’

  Toby didn’t answer. But neither did he move.

  ‘Now come on, on your way, Toby.’

  Toby stood; as Crawley reasoned,

  ‘Don’t make me have to do this. You’ll never bring me in. I’m younger and stronger and I know your weak points.’

  Toby countered, ‘But we’re close enough for it to be a fight. Neither of us will come out of it easily...’ Whoomph.

  Crawley had tricked him – leaving Toby a question to answer while he set his stance to launch. The wind was knocked out of Toby with a shoulder to his stomach. His balance went then as he tried to sling a low punch back.

  Crawley’s first salvo had floundered on a misjudgement of his own though, and as Toby fell half-sideways so Crawley found himself on his hands and knees in the snow. Toby spun in time to glance a blow on Crawley’s cheek as the bigger man rose to launch again. A moment later Toby received a stronger blow in return to his own temple.

  That was the one. The bells were ringing, Toby’s senses were gone. He felt his whole body quivering. His thoughts slowed down, or sped up. Either way he was having quite a clear conversation with himself even as the punches reigned over him, sheer instinct somehow holding him on his feet.

  ‘This is honest,’ thought Toby. ‘For the first time it’s men, not kids, not old folk like Orell. A fair fight.’ His arms though were still strong, still blocking, even making the odd wild sortie of their own. One of his must have caught, for he heard Crawley snarl. Yet Toby’s vision was reddening, and his left eye was almost blind. Toby felt something behind his foot, and that was it, he was going down.

  From that position he’d have no way of getting himself back up. The fight was over, if it wasn’t already.

  Toby fell backwards, somehow missing the fence along the edge of the garden. As he hit the deck he simultaneously felt a hard boot to the ribs. Something cracked, and Toby knew he had another month of pain right there – even if he survived.

  Kick after kick went into his leg and arm and side...

  ...and then something amazing happened – the blows stopped falling.

  After a few disbelieving seconds Toby opened his good eye, half-expecting to see Crawley leering over him savouring the kill. But his tormentor was missing from view.

  Toby fell back in the snow, breathed hard, and relished the cold against the sides of his face.

  Chapter 59 – Down and Out

  A blurred figure appeared at Toby’s side, and he flinched. But it was no
t his tormentor. It was Crawley’s ladyfriend in a nightgown, who forced a glass of water to his sore lips while half-splashing it over his face. As she did so, so the water ran off him red and made the white snow pink. She started,

  ‘What did you want to go doing that for? You know what he’s like when he’s angry. Your eyebrow’s burst. The Doctor needs to stitch that or it won’t heal straight.’

  ‘I’m... still here.’

  ‘Don’t you worry. If he’d wanted to finish you, he would have.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Gone to the Mayor, he said. And I don’t blame him! You take him down the mountain, and you blow everything. Are you trying to get the whole lot of us locked up?’

  ‘Do you know what he did?’

  ‘Yes. And I know it’s nothing you fellows haven’t done before.’

  ‘We can’t keep doing it.’

  ‘And where have you been all this time then, Toby? It’s a bit late to start growing a conscience, isn’t it? Here, drink slower, take proper gulps. And hold this over your eye,’ she said, handing him a clean dishcloth.

  ‘I need to get there.’

  ‘You need no such thing. You get home, and you be careful.’

  But as Toby staggered up, thanking her for the water, and with a supporting hand on her shoulder, both knew exactly where he was going.

  Yet Crawley hadn’t gone to the Mayor.

  Toby was only half-way back to town, when he first noticed the drops of blood in the snow beneath his feet. A little further on there was a pool of it, thick and congealed, as if someone had coughed it up, or had fallen over with an open wound.

  ‘Had he been that bad?’ asked Toby to himself. Well, if he hadn’t been before, he was now.

  ‘Follow the trail,’ whispered Toby, not in the best of health himself. Yet he hadn’t gotten to the end of the road before he knew where he was headed. For he heard a woman call out an alarm, and then saw smoke between himself and the centre of the town. It was coming from the vicinity of the Orell house.

  Toby jolted into action, forgetting his injuries, which swiftly remembered themselves to him. Yet with his cut eye washed and his breath back, Toby could still move. He’d had a blow to the head, and his ears would be ringing for days; but his legs didn’t give as he jogged on down the slope. And Toby considered that he could have been going into this latest round of activity feeling very much worse.

  As Toby covered the short distance to the Orell house, he saw the mailbox, a power pylon, a telegraph pole, and then a neighbour’s bright front-door – all familiar sights from Toby’s previous visits to the street... and from Jake’s video tapes.

  Toby realised he was in the middle of Jake’s filming frame. He spun and looked up to find the camera window; but he couldn’t place it among the upper floors of the row of tall houses looking down over that whole side of town. He looked across the street and the lower rooftops, asking himself,

  ‘Has it occurred to any of you that you’re being spied on?’ and then, ‘I hope you’re getting all this, Jake.’

  Toby hadn’t long to think though, as he already had the smell of burning in his blood-stuffed nostrils.

  He’d only paused a moment – a necessary pause, one needed to scan for danger and to know what he’d do next. Yet as Toby came to see the Orell house at the head of its T-junction, he realised he was already too late.

  The scene was different now. The once unbreachable Orell front door had been taken off its hinges. Indeed, the whole doorframe had been torn out of the wooden wall, leaving a ragged hole as though The Hulk had just jumped out of a Marvel comic and gone straight through it. From the darkness beyond came wisps of smoke.

  Somehow Toby had always known his showdown with Crawley would take place outside. Hence his belief that the fight he had just survived might have been it for him. Now the thought of being indoors with him scared Toby, and brought fresh images of being bludgeoned to death in a darkened room. Yet what choice had he?

  For there were also noises, human noises.

  ‘Stop that!’ shouted Toby uselessly, and ran to enter the building. Yet before he got there, the image of Crawley emerged from the smoker’s lung that was the house’s interior. He came out into the wide street, stumbling where the slush had turned dirty in the gravel. If he’d covered his injuries before, then they were visible now. His black tunic was flapping open, and one whole side of his tan shirt was red.

  Either Toby had caught Crawley good in the fight, or someone else had had a go at him since, as he didn’t look much healthier than Toby felt. He’d also caught a blow to the face – the great red clown’s mouth he was sporting seemed to add to his scowl though, and Toby took nothing for granted. In Crawley’s features he saw spent fury, and something else, something unreadable, maybe something insane. Crawley said simply,

  ‘Get out of here, Toby. This isn’t your show.’

  Toby was being offered a way out, which threw him, not that he’d ever have taken it. He asked,

  ‘Where’s Orell?’

  ‘We had business. We’ve sorted it.’

  ‘What kind of business?’

  ‘You know what kind.’

  Twitching, swinging in Crawley’s hand was a nightstick. One blow of that around his already-raging temple, and Toby knew he was toast.

  However, Special Deputy Crawley of the Stove Sheriff’s Office did no more with the nightstick than let it hang there beside him. Before slowly turning from the smoking doorway and walking crookedly away.

  Just one more surreal image in a season filled with them.

  Chapter 60 – The Orell House

  Toby could not abandon his duties so lightly. Climbing through the smoking hole and over the remnants of the door, Toby saw another trashed family room. The Orells had no son of sickness age though, and so no furniture had been moved out of the way beforehand. Smashed tables and dragged chairs were strewn across the floor.

  Different scents were nagging Toby’s senses, and he clocked that the room stank of melting man-made fibres. Along the back wall was what had been the family’s couch, now smoking, smouldering and with occasion leaps of flame jumping out of its interior – Crawley had lit it on his way out. Had it been a ham-fisted attempt at covering his tracks, or just the wild impulse of a man bent on destruction?

  The fabric of the sofa, lit from the inside, was like a ghoulish lantern as the material charred and blackened. Toby wouldn’t have very long.

  Nearby items were already glowing red, their plastics melting. A thin mushroom of choking smoke was forming at the ceiling. Toby knew that any moment the flames would go up, and that this and the lowering visibility would make the room impassible.

  Toby scrambled through the clutter of the room, to see Old Man Orell lying along the floor of the connecting hallway. Or at least his body was, for its animating spark was extinguished, never to return. Even in the thickening smoke Toby could see the bright red mark across his forehead – it looked to Toby that Orell had suffered the nightstick blow across the temple that Toby has feared for himself.

  Toby wouldn’t leave him there to burn. Yet when he tried to move him, Orell wouldn’t go over his shoulder – he was too heavy and the space Toby had to work in was too confined. So it would have to be the rather less dignified exit of being dragged by his arms out of the house he’d died defending.

  ‘We don’t get to choose our endings,’ whispered Toby as he commenced the dragging. As they moved along the corridor and then through the smashed front room, Orell’s dignity was further compromised by his rubber boots making squealing noises on the wooden floor. Then by his legs catching a linoleum mat and the cord of a fallen standard lamp, and bringing each to the front door with him.

  Orell flumped over the front steps as Toby heaved him over them, to lay him in the garden trampled flat by braying Deputies the night before.

  Did Toby expect a moment’s recognition for going into a burning building, even if the occupant couldn’t be saved? Yet all Toby
heard before he’d got his breath back was,

  ‘What about his wife?’

  This was asked by a neighbour. Locals had seen the smoke, and had gathered across the road. Suddenly it clicked for Toby – it hadn’t been Mr Orell making the human noises he’d heard. Toby had wasted vital time on someone already dead.

  Toby judged he had minutes... seconds. He’d already seen a lot of the ground floor, and she hadn’t been there, so he aimed for the first. He bounded in and went for the enclosed staircase, in the act going straight over on the rumpled mat and tangled light-cord left by the front door.

  His body slapped the floor, he might even have caught his head. Either way it was spinning. For a moment he was lost in the warm darkness, the smoke like sticky hands reaching for his face. He had missed any other heavy objects, was stunned but felt no new pain.

  Toby tried to get his breath, and his throat rasped, like when he’d tried smoking as a thirteen-year-old and realised it wasn’t for him. In all other aspects the feeling was like that of passing out in the Sippitz household after being butted in the chest. His body felt so happy to be going into stand-by mode.

  There was a whooshing sound as the couch finally gave in to its urge to destroy itself in conflagration. The smoke seemed to thicken that moment, as if thrown over him by the bucketload. Toby breathed it in like ether, and pulled it over himself as a thick grey duvet, one made of chalk dust and loft insulation foam. For the second time that day, he felt he was checking out.

  As Toby’s eyes closed, so the dark swirling outside of them was replaced by the same inside. Patterns formed like those in a glass of settling stout. That had been his grandfather’s drink. He used to have it brought up the mountain in crates of tiny bottles, and drink it in a straight glass with Toby on his knee. Toby would watch the shapes in the glass shift and settle into ink-darkness and creamy white top. Only, the drink that now filled Toby’s mind had no top. Nor did the inky-darkness settle, instead forever swirling in the glass.

  Images formed out of the dark, like words appearing in a Magic 8-Ball, then vanishing again. Toby coughed – and remembered being a child in a room surrounded by men smoking. His father, and other men. Sheriff Mercer, young Lloyd Thornton, the fourth man in the photograph.

  But the images were fading, and the darkness getting deeper, and soon the drink would settle.