Mark of the Beast. Brian Ball
sensed the presence of a figure in a shop doorway. He looked round and saw the heavy, stooped figure of the drunk. Alan couldn’t see his face in the gloom, but he could make out the way the shoulders hunched forward and the head pointed towards he car. Fortunately Janice didn’t see him. It had been an odd kind of evening. Alan was glad it was over.
CHAPTER FIVE
RUANE waited for sleep. If he was lucky, it would come soon. He reached for the bottle and remembered it was empty. No whisky; tonight, no sleep. If it was another bad night, the old landlady would throw him out. Already she was suspicious.
She hadn’t believed he was an out-of-work brickie. One look at his hands had been enough. He looked down at them. Useless soft hands—large enough, but with no skill. Trembling now because the nerve-endings needed the deadening effect of alcohol.
Ruane shook his head:
“You’re the fool, Ruane,” he said aloud.
He put his hands behind his head. Soon he would have to come to terms with absolute destitution and learn its harsh lessons. Where to get a handout. Where to sleep. He thought of the Midlands parish he had once served; the sick teenagers had found a couple of meths drinkers and set light to them. Ruane traced a crack in the limed ceiling and wished for oblivion.
He was still watching when a thin wavering band of moonlight began to grow so that the flowers on the peeling wallpaper became great white cauliflowers. Ruane pushed aside the two thin blankets and stumbled to the window.
The terraced house was set high on the north side of the small coal and wool town. Ruane could see clear across the nineteenth-century tenements to the mills; beyond them, the winding gear of the old colliery. At either side of the town, the yellow lights picked out the path of suburban development, house after house neatly set in a small and well-fenced plot.
His hands shook on the cold window-frame. No skills in his hands, no will to find a job, no wish to live, no especial urge to die. He knew his shambling gait frightened young children.
Ruane stood for more than an hour by the window. It gave him an odd satisfaction to feel the night’s cold seeping into his bones. He almost fell asleep.
The flaring pain, when it hit him, sent him reeling back into the bedroom, arms out-flung and legs buckling, head bright with agony. He knew he yelled, but not what he called out.
Sound echoed inside his skull. One sound, a great malicious yell, something from the far side of the grave, a triumphant, bawling, mocking, slavering sound. By the time its echoes ceased in Ruane’s large head, he heard other sounds.
“What do you think you’re at! In my house, at dead of night—waking the neighbours—drunk and raving like Barney’s pig? You’re drunk! So give it up, or you’ll be out on the street!”
Ruane opened his eyes and made out the woman’s scrawny shape against the unshaded lamp. She said it all again. And again.
He heard. Drunk? Surely not? He counted the drinks again—four. Five. Maybe another. Say six. Then two pints of beer. That wasn’t enough to be drunk on. It didn’t begin to bend the mind’s shadows back.
Ruane got to his feet. The woman yelled at him again. He pushed past her. He had been standing at the window when the pain jolted him back like a great blast of gunfire.
“The window frame,” he mumbled. “It swung and hit me.”
He knew it hadn’t.
The pain had come from outside, a vicious and grotesque force that burst upon him because he was standing just here.... It came from....
Ruane looked out over the sleeping town. Street lights. Late cars, beams flashing. A church tower. Not high, not impressive, he noted with a professional detachment. Mills. In the moonlight, stark and still, the winding gear of the former colliery. The workers’ houses. Other houses. Boxes, row upon row. Small trees in the gardens, large fences round each box. There, thought Ruane. There....
This time the pain was unbearable. It ground his brain into mind-blasting agony. The nervous system collapsed.
Twenty minutes later, Ruane came to his senses. He could still hear the grotesque, swelling, vicious noise inside his head. There was a message, uncontrolled and vindictive, but not particularly for him, Ruane. It was for anyone who could recognize the challenge.
“God help me,” whispered Ruane.
He slowly made the sign of the Cross.
* * * *
When they reached the house, Alan Charnock made the usual nightcap, a pot of milky drinking chocolate. It was his chore. Janice would look through a magazine or watch the tail end of the telly programmes. He turned on the electric fire beside the bed and draped Janice’s black nightdress before it. She appreciated small, thoughtful gestures like that. Hot chocolate, a little chat and then sleep. Janice was likely too upset for anything else. The curtains hadn’t been drawn.
He glanced out at the moonlit garden. The close cut grass shimmered in parallel bands. Alan had already begun to pull on the curtain cord when he saw the slim white shape in the glaring moonlight.
“Jan!” he said aloud.
She couldn’t hear, of course, not through the double-glazing. Alan’s immediate reaction was to open the window and call down to her. He stopped the movement of his hands towards the window-catch.
Maybe Janice had some perfectly good reason for standing there in the chill of the evening. But naked?
Her long blonde hair was halfway down her back. Her hands lay at her sides, her body quite upright. There was no motion in her body. She might have been a statue placed there a hundred years ago. Alan had the curious impression she had no intention of moving.
Only two or three minutes passed like this. For Alan Charnock, it seemed longer. Dimly he felt anger but it was a raging calm in his mind, not an anger that was likely to result in action. Resentment followed. The neighbours would see, of course, and there would be talk.
Even a mild sensation could imperil his career; a wayward wife was the last thing you wanted if you had only the vague promise of a partnership. Wives with wakeful infants would look across the backs of the gardens and see Janice. Kinky would be the verdict. Kinky Jan Charnock, her with the handsome husband. There was rarely anything of interest to discuss over the morning coffee.
Alan had worked himself up into a quiet rage and was about to open the window and hiss sharply to Janice when he detected another shape in the garden. It writhed in the sharp moonlight, a squat and flattened shape.
“It’s a dog,” he thought, recognizing the thing. “It’s the Baines-Ogdens’ dog.”
Alan could laugh at the momentary trickle of fear. The dog, not much more than a pup, some sort of wire-haired terrier, had got into their garden and was begging for food. It had seen Jan. And, dog-like, it was crawling on its belly to show it knew it shouldn’t be there.
Janice didn’t move. The dog moved near and now Alan saw that its eyes looked ahead with a curiously blank expression, unblinking and huge. It’s belly left a trail on the striped carpet of lawn.
Alan remembered that Janice detested dogs. Cats she revered, large Persians for preference. Dogs were noisy, they stank, they clawed and fawned; so why should Janice wait....
Her right hand moved slightly. Something gleamed. Metal. The dog rolled over, belly up. Alan heard himself saying, “I don’t think you ought to, Jan,” when she turned to look up at him.
She was smiling. Just like the smile in the dingy hall. It unnerved him. Fingers trembling, he opened the window and saw that the dog had not moved.
“Jan, hadn’t you better come in? It’s cold, love.” He wanted to say that it wasn’t his fault that she was interrupted, but he couldn’t say it, for it admitted far too much of what he might be able to guess about her reason for standing so long, naked, blade ready, the animal crawling towards her in stark terror. Oh no.