Page 37

Are you losing your mind, Joseph? Apologizing to a corpse? Why not go the whole hog – sprinkle the path between here and that hole you just dug with rose petals. You think any of this matters?
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I know it matters.’
Joseph holds his breath and slides his hands around the tarp. Then, tightening his grip, grimacing in revulsion at what he’s doing – knowing that he needs to do it now, all in one go, because he might not find the courage for a second attempt – he hauls the dead man over the lip of the boot. He tries to lower him slowly, but gravity and inertia defeat him. The dead man slips from his fingers and thumps to the ground, emitting a moan like a kicked bagpipe.
Appalled, Joseph leaps backwards. It takes him a full minute to recover. The cadaver still has airways, he realizes – and by now they’re probably filled with decomposition gases.
‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘Hardly dignified. But that’s the worst part over, I think.’
Gripping the dead man’s ankles through the tarp, he drags him across the stony ground towards the trench. A minute later, he’s pulled him inside it. Joseph sits on the lip of the grave, panting for breath. Sweat rolls down his cheeks, his armpits and his back. He’s dirty, dusty, itchy as hell. His muscles burn. His feet ache.
‘You want me to say a few words?’ he asks.
The dead man doesn’t answer. This time, not even a moan.
Joseph nods, claps soil from his hands, pulls himself to his feet. ‘Then let me say this. If you have a God, I hope you’re reunited with Him. If you don’t, I hope you’ve found peace. If you’re looking down on this’ – he pauses, shaken by the very thought – ‘then I know I don’t deserve your forgiveness, so I won’t even ask. I hope things look better from up there than they do down here. I’ll spend the rest of my life atoning for what’s happened. I’ll make sure Max does the same.’
Picking up his spade, he peers into the grave, clears his throat. ‘Here lies Angus Roth. I hope he rests in peace.’
Joseph begins to shovel in soil. He doesn’t stop until the job is finished. Afterwards, there’s a huge pile of leftover dirt. He spends a good hour distributing it as far and as wide as he can. If someone walks through here tomorrow, they’ll doubtless spot the disturbance. But a week from now, a month – hopefully by then the ground will have recovered. Enough of the summer remains for weeds to grow, for heather and gorse to spread.
Tossing the spade and pickaxe into the car, Joseph climbsbehind the wheel. His body feels heavy, his arms leaden. Starting the engine, he checks the dashboard clock: two eleven a.m.
He drives back to Saddle Bank faster than he drove to Black Down. Partly because he’s no longer as worried about being stopped; partly because he wants to escape this place and for ever erase it from his memory. Along the way he spots a couple of industrial bins outside a retail park and dumps the bag of bloodied clothing, the mop, the dish scrubber and washing-up bowl.
Shortly after three, he pulls on to his mother’s driveway and hits the switch for the electric garage door. As it starts to winch open, light spills out.
He frowns, trying to remember if he flicked off the fluorescent strip before he left, but as the door raises higher, it reveals something in the middle of the garage that wasn’t there before. The winder motor continues to churn. The door continues to raise.
Joseph realizes he’s looking at a hooded human figure, sitting cross-legged on the garage floor.
His hands tighten on the wheel. As he watches, the figure begins to lift back the hood.
Joseph presses himself into his seat, fearful beyond all rationality that he’s about to come face to face with a presence that defies everything he’s come to believe about the world; something older than the stars; something that has stalked humanity across millennia.
But what he sees is worse. He sees his son.
Joseph shivers, knows this is going to be bad. The headlights are shining right into the garage, so he knows Max can’t see him; and yet the boy stares directly ahead.
His first thought – from the depths of his lizard brain – is to throw the car into reverse and put as much distance between himself and what’s happening here as he can.
Shame envelops him an instant later. Because this is his son; because this is the flawed and wonderful human he created with Claire thirteen years before she passed; because this is the best thing he has ever done, perhaps the only good thing.
Joseph kills the engine, then the headlights. He opens the car door and climbs out. Tentatively, he steps closer. ‘Max?’
No lights shine from the homes either side of this one, nor from those across the street. He wonders how many eyes are watching this exchange behind darkened windows. Just one suspicious resident could be enough to sink them.
Max’s shoulders lift and fall. Perhaps it’s a trick of the light, but the boy’s cheeks glisten as if wet. Joseph closes the remaining distance and steps into the garage. He hits the door release and waits for the clanking, grinding motor to seal the pair of them inside.
The silence that follows is terrible.
He crouches in front of Max. This close, the tear tracks on his son’s cheeks are far more obvious. ‘Hey,’ he says.
Slowly, the boy emerges from whichever horrors he’s just been contemplating. ‘I didn’t …’ he manages to croak, before his voice fails him. He shudders for breath, rocks forward. ‘I don’t know how … Why are you even here?’ A high-pitched keening issues from his throat – the most awful sound Joseph has ever heard.
‘Max, what is it? What’s happened?Talkto me.’
Only now does Joseph see something he hadn’t noticed before, or perhaps had managed to block out: his son’s hands are gloved in blood. In one of them is the pocket knife Joseph spotted yesterday in the boy’s desk drawer.