"Sorry, if you can't hear me properly," she said over voices in the background. "It's busy here this morning. Of all things there's been an outbreak of meningitis in Skelbrooke."
"Christ…"
"As if we didn't have enough to worry about. From what I can tell they're trying to identify it. If it's the bacterial C strain of meningitis then Elizabeth will have to be vaccinated. Apparently there's a couple of children from her school down with it."
"God what a mess." The cause of the meningitis outbreak? Hell. As if I didn't know. It's you Baby Bones, isn't it? You came down into the village at night to breathe your poison onto the faces of the children as they slept.
"John?" Val raised her voice over the voices nearby. "Did you hear what I said?"
"Sorry…"
"All hell is breaking loose here-they've just rushed in more cases. I'm sure one of them is Elizabeth's friend, Emma. Damn, this is just what we don't need. John?"
"Yes?"
"Will you keep a close eye on Elizabeth? This epidemic's going through Skelbrooke like wild fire."
"Of course I will."
"The symptoms are headache, nausea, pain in the joints. And if she complains about the light being too bright get her to the hospital right away. Oh, and there'll be a rash, too."
"Val, don't worry. I know what to look out for."
"I best get off the phone. People are queuing up to use it. Hell, it's like a war-zone down here."
"Val, take care of yourself. Look after Paul."
"I will, John. You take care of things at that end. I'll have to go, my money's running out. Love you."
Suddenly, he needed to tell her he was leaving. That it was the only way to take this curse off everyone's backs. "Val. Listen to me. I'm going away with Elizabeth for a couple of weeks. I can't…" He stopped, realizing he was talking to the dialing tone.
He looked across at Elizabeth, dreamily tickling the dog's stomach. She was in a world of her own, praying that Paul would wake from the coma soon.
John slipped the phone into his shirt pocket, then returned to the house to pack.
2
By nine thirty he was on the road to the hospital. Elizabeth sat by his side. The radio played bright pop songs. The guitars jangled his already worn nerves. He glanced at Elizabeth. Stone faced, she stared forward at the road unspooling before them.
Meanwhile, the car's air conditioning had already lost the battle against the heat.
His eyes flicked from the road to the mobile phone balanced on the dash, then to the clock. The seconds ticked steadily away toward midnight.
Zero hour.
Why wouldn't the airline ring back? Had the thing in the hill the power to reach into the ticketing computers and play merry hell with the program?
Ring phone. Ring.
But the phone refused to ring. They arrived at the hospital to find it as Val had described, a war-zone. Ambulances arrived, sirens whooping, lights flashing, with more victims of the meningitis outbreak sweeping Skelbrooke.
Avoiding the bustling medics and streams of gurneys, John took Elizabeth to intensive care. He handed Val her bag, kissed her. Then they went to see Paul. He lay inside the spider's web of tubes, wires, cables.
Monitors bleeped, screens traced out his vital signs like comet trails racing toward the inevitable.
Paul's breathing, mechanically driven, looked exaggerated. His bare chest rose so high the skin pulled tight revealing the bones beneath. There was still grayness about the face. For the first time John noticed bruising around Paul's eyes where he'd been battered against the tunnel walls. There was precious little skin on his elbows too. The millstream stones must have been abrasive as sandpaper. John felt such a surge of love for his son that it winded him. He had to make everything right for him. If only he'd managed to keep a grip on his wrist…
Once more Elizabeth shook her brother's shoulder. "Paul, wake up."
After about an hour or so John took Elizabeth home. As arranged, Val would stay with her son. When they reached the house they found a dead blackbird outside the front door. The heat had killed it, he figured. But in the underside of his mind he knew that a poison was leaking into the village wholesale.
Events were racing toward their inevitable conclusion. It was nearly mid-day. Just twelve hours to go until midnight.
3
When the mobile rang on the bench he reached out for it so quickly his cracked ribs shrieked in protest. He had to answer through gritted teeth.
At last. The airline. Two seats were available on a flight to Jamaica at three that afternoon. His heart beat faster. He was going to beat old Baby Bones yet. He booked, paying by credit card. The tickets would be waiting at the airport.
He walked back through the searing heat to the house. There were still loose ends to tie. He'd have to leave the dog at the boarding kennels, and though he'd packed for himself and Elizabeth he'd neglected to hunt out the passports. Forgetting a detail like that would really louse up his plans.
Once more his heart weighed stone-like inside his chest. He'd told Val he'd see her this afternoon. The deception sickened him. What's more, he'd have to telephone her from the airport. What he'd tell her he didn't know, but he'd think of something.
Just reaching up into the closet where they stored family documents came as a little slice of hell in its own right. The pain in his ribs sickened him. He could hardly breathe. But he gritted his teeth. Pulled down the old cookie tin, then rifled through it for the passports.
For one chilling moment he suddenly thought his had expired. But no. It was good for another six months. And there was his photograph. A younger John Newton, calm blue eyes, wavy hair, and not a care in the world back then.
Sitting on the bed, he spent five minutes checking the credit cards in his wallet, stuffing the passports into his holdall and generally ensuring he had everything he needed.
"Dad… Dad! Come here!"
The urgency in his daughter's voice jerked him to his feet. His ribs jagged so hard that a wave of darkness swamped his mind, sending him thumping down onto his knees.
What was wrong?
It's Baby Bones, all white faced and wormy eyed; he's come to claim Elizabeth for himself…
Shaking vertigo out of his head, he blundered out of the bedroom and ran downstairs.
"Quick!" Elizabeth gestured at the back door. "Dad, why are they here?"
"What's here, hon?" Face dripping with sweat, he ran out onto the patio.
Good God.
He stopped and stared. There covering, the back lawn, like a fall of strange fruit, were dozens of black feathery forms.
"Dad, why have they landed here?"
"Don't worry, hon. They're only crows."
"But there's loads of them. Why have they come down onto our lawn? Look! They're all over the roof, too."
In folklore, a flock of crows settling on your home is an omen of death. That an occupant of the house will die soon.
Just for a second his hand closed over the phone in his pocket. He sensed digital radio waves speeding toward the aerial, then coursing through circuitry to trigger the ring tone.
Paul's dead… the birds are here as messengers of old Master Death himself.
"Can't you scare them away, Dad? I don't like them."
Birds hopped about the grass… so many black feathered demons, their coal-bright eyes glaring at the house, their sick yellow beaks opening to fire echoing cries, like the sound of hungry babies wracked by famine. To his eyesight, distorted by heat, and blurred by exhaustion and pain, these night-black crows were holes in the fabric of reality. They revealed dark eternity beyond, where grim hearted phantoms stalked.
Oh, sweet Jesus… he felt his mind slipping. The pain unraveled his wits.
He felt Elizabeth's hand slip into his. She said in a low voice, "Something bad's going to happen, isn't it, Dad?"
4
The time was 12:30. They needed to leave by 1:15. It wasn't a long drive to Leeds airport.
A
s he laid the cold chicken on the bread he realized he needed to give Elizabeth some reason why they were leaving. He knew she'd resist. She wouldn't want to leave with Paul lying there in a coma. What could he do? His hands were tied. This was for the best. It had worked for Kelly: it would work for them.
The heat, and the pain from his fractured ribs, conspired to kick the crap out of him. He found himself constantly breathless now. He tried to avoid taking deep breaths because the pain was so bad. But then he needed to breathe. This was the mother of all no-win situations. He'd already gulped down the usual drugstore painkillers. But he might as well have swallowed sugar lumps for the good they'd done. It felt as if a wolf was chewing on his side.
He labored upstairs to the bedroom. There he found a pack of powerful painkillers that had been prescribed to Val for a tooth abscess. She'd told him with a goofy grin on her face that they were strong enough to anesthetize a hippo. That goofy grin hadn't left her face for hours. They were powerful medicine all right.
Now he swallowed the big white tablets with the help of a glass of water.
12:45. Half an hour before they left. He carried the holdall downstairs to the car. Elizabeth had finished her sandwich and was washing the plates. She looked flushed. Her eyes had narrowed as if she had the makings of a headache. He tried to recall the symptoms of meningitis.
Meanwhile, the bag had been heavy enough to trigger a whole symphony of jangling agonies in his side. Returning to the house, he sat down to allow the tablets a few minutes to kick in. Once he felt them working their magic, damping down the pain, he'd ask Elizabeth if she felt unwell. Now, those meningitis symptoms? Headache, pain in the joints, a rash… Sweet Jesus. He just needed these drugs to kill the pain… then he could function again.
Eleven hours to midnight near as damn it. In three hours they'd be airborne. Twenty minutes after that they'd be over the ocean.
"You won't be able to catch us then," he sang under his breath. "You won't be able to catch us, you son of a bitch."
CHAPTER 37
1
John Newton awoke to the sound of the clock chiming seven.
Seven?
He sat up on the sofa. His heart beat hard. Elizabeth sat on the millrace window watching him. He looked at his watch.
The shock was electric.
"It's seven o'clock!" The words tore through his throat in something between a gasp and a yell.
"I know," she said. "You slept all afternoon."
"Elizabeth, why didn't you wake me? We've missed…"
"Missed what, Dad?"
He shook his head in disbelief. Jesus Christ, the plane was long long gone. How could he have slept so deeply with all this… this shit happening? It must have been a combination of painkillers, exhaustion and all the crap he'd gone through over the last couple of days. It had knocked him cold.
Hell and Goddamn. What now?
He turned on his daughter again. Her eyes were wide. Scared looking. "Damn it, Lizzie. Why didn't you wake me?"
"I tried… you wouldn't wake up. Sometimes you stopped breathing." Her voice grew small. "I thought you'd died."
He paced the floor, shaking his head, clenching his fists, his jaw working but no words coming out. Dear God… why was he fighting this alone? Surely someone could help? But down in the village people were milling round like frightened sheep. Yes, they knew what was happening, God damn it. But they were too frightened to help in case that great menacing, dark-boned finger of fate pointed at them.
No way was he going to face this alone. He would find help. Or at least punch some slack fool jaws in the process.
With the blood roaring through his veins he said to Elizabeth. "Get in the car, we're going down to the village."
"Why?"
"Don't ask, please. There's someone I need to see."
But who?
Who indeed?
2
He drove as far as Skelbrooke's main street. The road ahead, according to a sign that straddled the white line, was closed.
"Wait here," he told Elizabeth, "I won't be long."
Parking the car at the side of the road, he headed toward the center of the village on foot. It was after seven now; people would be in the pub.
There's only five hours until zero hour, John Newton. Five hours until midnight. The letter demands you leave your daughter in the cemetery. What are you going to do, Newton? What y' gonna do?
He walked down the village street. The sun still rode high in the sky. The place looked deserted. A ghost town.
Then he saw the cause of the road closure. A truck stood in the middle of the street.
White powder had spilled from the back of it all across the blacktop creating an arctic-white scene. A lone workman attempted to clear the roadspill, working away with a long handled broom. But he made little headway. In fact, he seemed to make matters worse.
John walked by the dazzling white blanket of powder.
"I'll be damned," he said to himself, pausing. This was no accidental roadspill. This was deliberate. Walking into the road, grains of white crunched like snow beneath his soles. He reached down, touched the grains, then licked his finger.
Salt. The frightened people of Skelbrooke were using the oldest protection against evil in the book. Salt scattered all over the damned place. Salt for the Devil's eye.
The workman wasn't sweeping up. He was spreading it.
Ahead, he saw a girl that seemed familiar. Black hair, dark, Latino eyes. The face clicked in his memory. Miranda Bloom. She was back home? Why? Why, when her mother had sent her away in a panic after receiving the letters, why had Miranda returned?
Miranda had seen him. Straightaway, she ran across the salt covered street.
"Mr. Newton?"
He nodded and saw that she'd been crying.
"I heard about Paul's accident," she said. "How is he?"
"It's serious," he said, suspecting he was on the brink of finding out a truth he was frightened to know. "He's in a coma. The doctors say the next few hours will be crucial." He didn't sugar coat this bitter pill. "They don't know whether he'll live or not."
As if he were carrying some infection she fell back from him as he passed. Ahead stood The Swan Inn. Not a soul was in sight. But he knew the villagers would be in there. Sheltering together for some imagined protection. Waiting for this particular storm to pass.
Once more he walked across the blanket of salt. The workman watched him. Said nothing. And continued sweeping salt out in a gleaming wash across the blacktop.
He intended walking straight into the bar as he'd done before, then challenging those frightened sheep in human clothing to tell him everything they knew.
John Newton never reached the pub door.
An old man walked out of the building to meet him halfway across the street. They stood in the blazing sun, watching each other for a moment. The old man's white hair shone as bright as the salt beneath his feet.
"John Newton," he said. "You don't know me. I've lived all my life in this village. My name is Joseph Fitzgerald. I'm ninety-two years old."
John tilted his head to one side, his expression grim. He didn't speak but waited for the old man to say more.
Fitzgerald looked levelly at John. "I was a colleague of Mr. Kelly seventy years ago when he received his letter. Now I'm here to tell you your duty."
3
Chance echoed the image of two gunfighters facing each other along the street of a town from the Old West. The roadway, even if it was salt, not Texan dust, played its part.
Sun reflected from the white road narrowed the old man's eyes to slits.
"Mr. Newton. There's no easy way. But you must do it."
"Do what?"
Instead of answering, Fitzgerald said, "Seventy years ago Mr. Kelly at the Water Mill received a series of letters. People down here in the village received similar ones. They asked for trifles-chocolate, beer. Nothing much. Then Mr. Kelly received a demand from-"
"Baby Bones?"
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"From something that's had different names down the years. This last letter demanded he leave his daughter in the cemetery on a given night."
"I know," John said levelly. "I've read the copies Kelly made."
"Mr. Kelly fought it. He delayed taking Mary Kelly to the cemetery. He refused to accept responsibility for the consequences. There was an outbreak of influenza in the village. A lot of people died."
"Herbert Kelly was a strong man, Mr. Fitzgerald."
"He was obstinate. Dangerously obstinate."
"Heroic, I'd call him."
"I was a junior member of his teaching staff. I believed he thought highly of me, and people here figured I could persuade him of his responsibilities to his neighbors."
"I hope he ignored you." A dangerous anger was spilling through John now. He knew what was coming.
"He did ignore me. And as I returned home on my motorcycle I blacked out and the machine ran under a tractor. I paid the price for Mr. Kelly's obstinacy." He raised an arm. The sleeve slipped back to reveal a forearm with no hand, merely a shriveled stump. "Mr. Kelly was an intelligent man. He believed his intelligence would allow him to beat something that had been here five thousand years or more."
"And what is that something exactly?"
"No one can say. Anymore than you can detail the anatomy of God. But it can make demands of us periodically. And it can punish if we don't comply."
"Well, your filthy little monster isn't going to dictate shit to me!"
"Mr. Newton… John. I am sorry. I truly am. But the last letter's come to you. It has demanded your youngest child, hasn't it?"
"You know a lot, don't you?" John clenched his fists in fury.
"Believe me, John. I would willingly take her place. But It demands what it demands. There's no escaping it. You must do what is best for the village. You must…"
"No."