Adornments of the Storm Read online

  There was a picture on the wall above Mickey’s head. It was the kind of execrable poster art people with training but no talent liked to paint. A mad-eyed unicorn in a glade flamboyant with exotic plants standing by a static, solid-looking river the obstinate colour of toilet cleaner. A bird with massive tits was riding it and she had her hair pulled up into some kind of pointy topknot. There was reflected light everywhere but where it ought to be, mostly enhancing the undersides of her knockers.

  Mickey reached over and snagged a pastie. “All-day breakfast,” he said, his tone impressed. “Got beans in it?”

  “And black pud,” Dean said with a pride that suggested he might have sourced the ingredients himself.

  Rob poked through the remaining pile, eschewing anything remotely containing chicken. He was hungry but couldn’t face reformed beaks. Not tonight. He settled on a steak and onion slice.

  “So how long have you been working on that farm?” he asked.

  Mickey was compressing the sides of his pastie to get a better look at the contents. It belled open where he had bitten out a chunk and he fingered it with the professional curiosity of a gynaecologist. “This is fucking hollow,” he said. “There’s just a bit of sausage rattling about in the bottom.”

  “Just eat it, you cunt,” Dean said.

  Mickey shrugged, withdrew his finger and licked the juice off it.

  “About six weeks,” Mickey said.

  “What is?” said Dean.

  “I’ve been on the farm for about six weeks. Dean’s been helping me out for a fortnight since he lost his licence.”

  Rob was starting to feel tired. He remembered that he’d had very little sleep the previous night and was beginning to wonder how he might be able to get out of going to the farm tomorrow with these twin idiots. He should go home and sleep this off. They didn’t know where he lived. They’d probably forgotten all about it anyway.

  He put his can of lager down on the table and sat forward. He yawned.

  “I should make tracks,” he said through the tail end of the yawn.

  “It’s early,” said Mickey. “Have another beer. We’ll drink through and take you in with us.”

  Rob did an elaborate stretch and yawned again. “You’ve been very hospitable, gents, but I’d better get some kip. I’m knackered.”

  Dean said, “We’re goin’ to watch The Fast and Furious, ain’t we, Mickey?”

  “One of ’em,” Mickey said.

  Dean reached down and took a DVD from beneath the coffee table. When he sat up he was too close and his eyes were bloodshot and watery. Rob felt himself pressed against the arm of the sofa.

  “Get us some more beers from the fridge, Mickey,” Dean said.

  Mickey stood and edged out of the lounge. Rob saw him look back as he reached the door. He lifted a cupped hand and mimed drinking from a can. He nodded and Rob swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry.

  “I need to go,” he said with no authority in his voice. Fear had replaced boredom and it tweaked at his belly making him feel unmanned. Dean shook his head.

  “We’re watchin’ a video,” he said, and even in his agitated state, Rob was infuriated by the presumption and ignorance of the man.

  “It’s not a video, you prick,” he said. “It’s called a DVD.” He was shaking. He was getting flashbacks, too, of a night seven years ago, in a flat similar—no, exactly the fucking same—as this one. Except with no carpet. The same level of threat he had felt and a commensurate notching up of terror. He pushed himself up off the sofa and tried to step past Dean.

  There was the sound of the fridge opening: pppfffffock.

  And Mickey screaming.

  DEAN AND ROB bolted to the kitchen.

  Mickey was standing hunched on trembling legs, a hand plastered over his mouth. He was staring at the fridge. It was an old make and the ceramic paint was chipped and stained around the handles. Rob peered over Dean’s shoulder. He could see that Mickey had opened the large freezer compartment at the bottom by mistake and not the fridge. It was empty except for one object. Dry ice ghosted out across the lino and rose in tendrils around the object. It was a big glass jar.

  Mickey turned, his face bleached with shock. He peeled his hand away from his mouth.

  “It’s a fucky ned!” he said, and collapsed.

  ROB PUSHED PAST Dean and knelt by Mickey.

  Mickey’s complexion had gone from white to bluish. His eyes were shut, his mouth open. Rob put his ear to Mickey’s mouth but his hair fell over his face and blocked it up. Rob flicked the hair out of Mickey’s mouth and started pushing on his chest with his palms.

  “What you doing?” Dean said from the doorway. Rob looked up. “You doing that C3PO?”

  “CPR,” Rob said through clenched teeth. “It’s called CPR!” He raised his arms, fingers locked above his head and brought both fists down on Mickey’s sternum

  Mickey’s eyes flew open. “Stop it,” he yelped. “I fainted. I’ve got fuckin’ asthma.” He rolled onto his side and pushed himself up onto his knees. Rob helped him stand.

  The three of them stood in Dean’s tiny kitchen and looked at the jar sitting in the bottom of the freezer. Rob approached it and wiped a trembling palm over its curved surface. He cried out and toppled onto his backside, the buckles on his biker boots jangling like sleigh bells.

  “What is it?” said Dean.

  Rob was still staring into the freezer compartment.

  “It’s a fucking head,” he said.

  THEY GATHERED IN front of the freezer but none of them dared touch the jar. There was a head in it. It had been badly burnt. It was hairless and most of the flesh had melted away. Two livid, frosted eyes glared out at them. How hadn’t they melted, Rob wondered. They looked almost alive. The mouth and nose were gone. All that remained was a thin rind of jawbone studded with a few black nubs of teeth.

  “Is it a joke head?” Dean asked. “You know, like from a horror film?”

  “You mean a special effect?” Mickey said.

  Dean nodded, his mouth hanging open. “Yeah.”

  Rob withdrew to the doorway. “You’re telling us you don’t know why there’s a head in your freezer?”

  Dean shrugged. “Bloke who runs the farm give it to me.”

  Mickey looked at Dean with a perplexed expression. “Cookie? He gave you a fridge with a head in it?”

  “I was moanin’ I didn’t have any money and mine had packed up and he said he had an old one I could have. It was in his barn, right at the back under some bales of straw. Plugged into an extension lead. He brought it over with his boy a couple of days ago.”

  Rob said, “You didn’t look in it? Clean it?”

  Dean’s face remained blank.

  “I told Cookie I don’t use a freezer. Just fridge for milk and beer and a few pies. Cookie said I could have it anyway.”

  “You didn’t even look?”

  Dean shook his head.

  “Does this Cookie know how stupid you are?”

  Dean nodded.

  “Oh, he knows,” said Mickey, and punched Dean on the arm.

  “You’ve been set up,” Rob said. “They’ve topped someone and you’re hiding the evidence.”

  “What am I going to do?” moaned Dean.

  “You own up, don’t you, you fucking cripple,” Mickey said.

  THERE WAS A sound, then, from outside and below. Something in the plaza. All three men jumped. It was an electric humming, like a generator building a charge. There was a sudden flash of light and they jumped again and closed their eyes against it. When they opened their eyes the light remained, a horrible, fatty orange-yellow glare as though the entire plaza was on fire and the fuel was bodies.

  They pushed and jostled to the door and flung it open. They piled out onto the walkway and peered down into the square.

  “Oh, not again,” said Dean.

  THERE WAS A hole in the air above the plant pots in the middle of the plaza. Light flashed and strobed, blinding the three men on
the walkway. They turned away, their profiles lit up in hectic flashes. “What is it?” Rob screamed. Somehow the light was deafening, and he couldn’t hear himself think. He edged back into the flat.

  “What does it want?” Mickey wailed.

  Rob glanced into the kitchen. He staggered and put a hand out to steady himself against the flimsy architrave around the door.

  Inside the jar the head had begun to thaw.

  Its eyes rolled and glared at Rob.

  “I think they’ve come for the head,” he said. “Dean, get a bag.”

  Dean and Mickey came back into the hallway. They were backlit by lurid, cycling flashes of blazing yellow-orange light. Dean went into the kitchen and opened some drawers. He produced a couple of small rumpled plastic bags. They were stained from the takeaways they had contained.

  “Any good?” he asked.

  “If I was picking up dogshit,” Rob said. “I need a holdall, or a rucksack or something.”

  “Where you going?”

  “It’s for that, you idiot,” Rob shouted, pointing at the jar in the freezer.

  Outside something was pushing its way from the Gantry. Long wavering shadows whisked across the kitchen walls.

  “Hang on.” Dean went to his bedroom and pulled something from under his bed. He came back with a voluminous handbag the size of a small suitcase. It was burgundy and covered in jewels. “Bird left it here,” he said.

  Rob took it and looked inside. It smelt of celebrity body spray and tobacco. He stretched the top and measured it against the neck of the jar. He chewed on his bottom lip. “Should do,” he said.

  He reached into the freezer and pulled the jar towards the edge of the compartment. His breathing was coming fast and he was fighting panic. Just touching that cold, curved surface made him feel sick with fear. Condensation had fogged the inside of the jar, which was a mercy, because he could no longer see the head clearly. He slid it a third of the way over the edge of the compartment.

  “Hold the bag,” Rob said.

  Mickey and Dean squatted either side of him and took a side of the bag each in their fists. They pulled it wide and held it beneath the jar. Rob eased the jar further until it tilted. He put a hand beneath it and rocked it. The head nodded forward and bumped the glass. Rob cried out but managed to hold on. An eye was pressed against the glass and it was glaring at him with a murderous fury.

  Rob grunted and pulled the jar from the freezer. It dropped into the bag like a shell sliding into the chamber of a gun.

  “Sweet,” said Dean.

  Rob couldn’t close the bag because the jar was too tall. The top stuck out about six inches, but at least he could carry it. The bag had two big looping handles stitched to the sides.

  Rob hefted it. The handles stretched against the stitching but held. “Is there a back way out of here?”

  “Not like a back door or anything,” Dean said. “You could go out the window. It’s about a twelve-foot drop to the verge. I done it before when some gusset’s bloke pitched up—”

  Rob went into the lounge and pulled the curtains back across the window behind the TV. There was a sliding door opening onto a tiny concrete balcony. There was a spavined lawn chair out there and a plastic table covered in beer cans. A couple of pairs of thongs were drying over the rail. There was a satellite dish the size of a dustbin lid bolted to the wall. Rob thumbed up the latch and slid the door open. He carried the bag out onto the balcony and looked down. There was a sloping verge beneath edging a gravel path. Rob put a hand in his trouser pocket and pulled out a rubber band. He gathered his hair into a ponytail and fixed it with the band. He rolled his shoulders and bent his knees. He stood up too quickly and staggered against the low balcony rail. He was still pissed.

  “Come on,” he told himself, and squeezed his eyes shut.

  He recalled that night seven years ago, when his nemesis Neil Gollick had come for him. He’d been drunk then, too, and could remember very little of it except what he and Phil Trevena had reconstructed for years afterwards. Rob had worked hard to recover from that and now he could feel it all going back down the shitter. He lifted the bag and put it on the table, knocking beer cans to the concrete with a clatter.

  Rob stepped over the rail and turned to face into the flat. The wide steel toecaps of his biker boots balanced on a couple of inches of overlapping concrete. He leaned back and lowered his backside.

  “Throw the bag down to me,” he said. Dean and Mickey had come onto the balcony. One of them had closed the front door but Rob could still see flashes of light battering the kitchen, lighting up the hallway like a furnace.

  Something hit the front door and a vertical split appeared in the wood. It lit up like a fork of lightning, widening as something applied pressure to the door.

  “Follow me,” Rob said. He looked down, measured the drop and let go.

  He hit the edge of the verge and rolled down onto the gravel. As he got up, brushing his backside off and checking for sprains or grazes, the bag containing the head thudded to the earth beside him.

  Rob stuck his head out and looked up.

  “I meant wait for me to catch it. Fuck!”

  He threw himself backwards to prevent his head being taken off as Dean plunged to the ground. They stepped up onto the verge and Rob checked the bag. The jar was made of thick glass and the lid was held on with a big metal clip. It was undamaged. Rob picked it up and carried it further onto the green at the back of the flats.

  Dean followed him. They both looked up as Mickey cried out.

  He was hanging from the balcony rail. Something was in the flat, blundering around. Mickey had closed the balcony door behind him and what looked like thick white tentacles were rolling across the glass, drumming against it in an attempt to break through.

  “Let go,” Rob shouted.

  Mickey looked down. He closed his eyes and let go of the rail just as the balcony door shattered and blew outwards. Rob and Dean covered their heads as glass showered around them. Mickey squealed.

  Rob stumbled over to him and tried to help him up.

  “It’s me leg,” Mickey said. He pressed his lips together into a white line of pain. “It’s broke.”

  Rob eased Mickey back to the verge. He looked up as the pale tip of a tentacle nosed through the balcony rail. He put his hands on his head and looked around.

  Dean was gone. Rob could just make out a figure legging it across the green and into an alleyway between two blocks of flats.

  “I’ll carry you,” Rob said. “Come on.” He turned to put down the bag but as he did so a tentacle flashed down from the balcony, unrolling like a colossal party blower, encircled Mickey’s waist and yanked him off the ground. Mickey screamed.

  Rob reached out but he was too late. Mickey hung there for a split second, his expression imploring and terrified, and then he was gone, reeled back up, and disappeared over the balcony and into the flat.

  Rob was stunned. He watched as more tentacles began to explore the lip of the balcony. He could hear Mickey screaming as he was flung around. He picked up the bag in both hands and set off across the green. He wasn’t sure where he was heading but he wasn’t going to his mum’s. Not with this.

  “Fuck you, Gollick,” Rob muttered.

  He had made a decision.

  THE CAR PARK was still crowded with night-shift workers’ vehicles when Trevena drove into work so he pulled up behind a canary yellow Audi TT and blocked it in. It belonged to one of the consultants so would probably sit there all day, but just in case he wrote his mobile number on a scrap of paper and put it on the top of his dashboard facing out. She’d have to ring him if she wanted to move her car.

  He collected a few files from the boot and went around to the front of the Mental Health Unit. The doors hissed open and he walked into the foyer. He was early and the reception desk was unoccupied. He had wanted to be in first today to catch up with some paperwork and put his mind to the mysteries of Andrew Chapel and Rob Litchin. There was a c
onnection, definitely, but was it his to make?

  He stopped. “Rob?” he said.

  Rob sat forward in the rattan chair and brushed a palm frond away from his face. “Phil,” he said. “I’ve been here all night. I couldn’t go home.”

  Trevena walked over to the doors leading onto the unit.

  “Come on,” he said.

  Rob pushed himself to his feet and retrieved something that was lying under the chair. Trevena noticed that it was a huge burgundy handbag containing something bulky.

  “Stylish,” he said.

  “It’s not mine,” Rob said, looking guarded. He followed Trevena through into the corridor that led onto the wards. Trevena opened the counselling room door on his left and they went in. They sat beneath the window and Rob put the bag on the low table between them.

  “You’ve been here all night?”

  “Yeah. Couldn’t think where else to go. It’s safe here and I needed to see you. I couldn’t take this back to my mum’s,” he said, glancing towards the bag.

  Trevena sat back and crossed his arms. He could see the top of a jar protruding from the neck of the bag. He wondered what was in it. It looked heavy. Maybe Rob was distilling his own moonshine. He wouldn’t put it past him.

  “What can I do for you, Rob,” he said.

  “I want to show you this,” Rob said, and yanked the handles of the bag downwards revealing the jar and its contents.

  Trevena froze, his arms still crossed. Very slowly he sat forwards and looked at the jar. When he had been a student, many years ago, he had used his ID card to get into the medical museum in St Bartholomew’s hospital in London. He and his mate, Charlie, had spent a gruesome and fascinating hour peering into jars very much like this one. Things floating in preservatives; dead monsters, white and flaking, with Cyclops eyes and tubes for mouths, wounded, unloved flesh spawned from mother to bucket to labelled jar. There was no label on this one but if there had have been, Trevena knew what it would have said.