Beyond Here Lies Nothing

“What else?” Royle wanted a drink. He was craving whisky.

“This is where it gets really weird.” She reached out and touched the pole that formed the central support for the figure. “This is made of solid oak. The head’s the same.”

Royle moved closer and stared at the pole. The bark had been stripped away; the nude wood looked like it had been smoothed down badly with a low-grade emery cloth. He examined the length of the body, resting his gaze upon the smooth, burnished head. Someone had removed its hat. The wooden head was virtually featureless; only the grain of the wood was visible.

He was reminded of Pinocchio, and of a show that used to be on television when he was a kid: Pipkins. It had scared him so much that he wet the bed. From what he could recall, the kids’ programme was set in an old toy shop where the stuffed toys and puppets were alive: raggedy old Hartley Hare, with his dead eyes and loose stitches; Pig, Topov, and the rest of the gang. Horrible, all of them — grinning dishevelled demons. Dusty, falling apart at the seams… the awkward puppets had populated his nightmares for years afterwards.

Wanda’s voice cut into his thoughts: “There are no oak trees within a twenty mile radius of the Concrete Grove estate.”

He nodded, backtracking from his shabby, flyblown memories. “Okay. I’ll admit that is a bit weird. Why use oak particularly and why go to so much trouble in the first place? It doesn’t make sense. It isn’t logical.”

“Oh, it gets better than that.” She turned and lifted a scalpel from a steel dish on a nearby trolley. Bending forward, she opened the scarecrow’s jacket and used the blade to make a long slit down the front of its charity shop shirt — the two halves of which were stitched together using some kind of thick, fluffy thread. “That’s some kind of natural fibre. Maybe hemp. Again, we’ve sent a sample to the lab for proper identification.”

Royle didn’t speak. He was captivated. He watched as the scarecrow’s innards were exposed.

“What we have here is a mixture of stuff, all kinds of rubbish. Burnt leaves, pieces of paper… all sorts of crap.”

Royle noticed for the first time that Wanda was wearing surgical gloves. He stared at her hands, pale and bloodless beneath the tight rubber layer, and watched as she raked around inside the belly of the scarecrow. A sudden terror filled him: what if she withdrew her hand and was clutching human organs, or, even worse, Connie Millstone’s hand?

“There are a lot of receipts in here — from local shops, petrol stations, that kind of thing. All used as stuffing. What makes them special is that they’re all dated to the exact same time and date.” She stopped and looked up at him. Sweat was beaded on her forehead. Her eyes were shining, eager. She loved her work. “Can you guess when that was?” Her teeth glistened beneath the lights.

Royle nodded. “The day Connie Millstone went missing.”

Wanda nodded. “Bingo. There are also a lot of dried leaves: oak, maple, rowan, rosewood. Each one a species that isn’t present in this area. You have Charlie to thank for that information, by the way. He’s the nature buff. I emailed him some digital images and he looked at them on the beach in Mexico. Isn’t technology wonderful?” She winked. “Rather than stuff this thing with any old kind of rubbish, someone was extremely specific about what they used.” She lifted her hand. Leaves spilled between the fingers. “These things have a special significance to someone, but I’ll be shagged if it means anything to me.”

“So there’s some kind of meaning here. A message. Perhaps even some kind of ritual, perhaps?”

“You tell me. You’re the detective man.”

“Have you sent samples of everything to the main lab?”

“Yes.” She backed away from the gurney, slipping off the rubber gloves. They made a smacking sound as she peeled them from her fingers. “They’re doing every kind of analysis they can think of: chemical, fingerprinting, DNA, the whole deal. We’ve done some of the basic stuff here, of course, but we couldn’t find a thing. No fingerprints, no apparent residue. Nothing. We need to look deeper. They have a lot more sophisticated equipment in the city than our shitty little budget allows for.”

“Sorry. I wasn’t having a dig. Just being thorough. Like you always are.”

She smiled. “I know. It just pisses me off that we can’t get any decent kit in here. Charlie and I have all the skills but none of the resources. If I wasn’t so stupid, I’d fuck off and work in the city. The big lab, where my skill set would be appreciated.” She leaned back against the sink, opening the pedal bin with her foot and dropping the gloves inside. She wasn’t wearing any shoes, just the paper slippers used in hospitals. And morgues.

“I appreciate you. Don’t know what I’d do without you sometimes.”

“Fuck off, copper,” she said, but she was smiling again. The bags under her eyes were huge and dark, like bruises. She was putting on weight. Her bleached hair looked as dry as straw. The teeth she’d recently spent a lot of money on having repaired and capped looked fake, plastic. The job was taking its toll, showing up like minor injuries or subtle deformities on her body.

Mine, too, thought Royle. This fucking job, it’s killing us all.

He looked again at the scarecrow. He could have sworn that the head had not been turned that way, facing in his direction, the last time he looked, but it was difficult to be certain. There were no eyes, so it couldn’t be looking at him; no mouth, so it was unable to grin. But he felt like it was doing both of those things. The smooth, bare wooden head that lacked even the merest hint of a face was watching.

And it was laughing.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

ERIK SAT ON a dining chair and stared at the cat box. He’d found it in the lock-up garage and used it to transport the… the what? That was the big question, wasn’t it? Just what the hell did he have in there anyway? What the fuck kind of creature had those kids found and brought to him?

When Hacky had gone outside and left Erik alone in front of the glass reptile tank, he’d taken a while to summon his courage. Erik was a brave man, sometimes insanely courageous when forced into a tight situation. He feared nobody. There had been times in his long and eventful life when he’d stood and fought opponents twice his size, or had a go when he’d been outnumbered and backed into a corner. He never ran; never turned his back on a fight. It simply wasn’t in his nature to back down and walk away. But in that lock-up garage, crouching there in the shadows and staring into the glass tank, he’d never felt so much like running.

Erik was miles outside of his comfort zone on this one; his fighting distance had narrowed to almost nothing. He had no frame of reference whatsoever for the thing that had been waiting inside that tank. It was alien, from outside his realm of knowledge. He had no idea how he should even react to its existence.

There was a sound from the cat box; a low, trembling exhalation. He tried to tell himself that it was an animal noise — a mewling or a snuffling, something like that. But it wasn’t. He knew it wasn’t. The sound was… well, it was much too human to be labelled in such a way. The sound, he admitted to himself, was a voice.

“Hungry.”

It had been saying the same thing since he’d brought it back here, over and over again.

“Hungry.”

Erik stood and walked across the room. He waited at the low coffee table upon which he’d placed the battered cat box. Something moved again inside. He heard the sound of tiny nails — fingernails — scratching against the plastic walls of the box.

“Monty?” Even as he said the name of his friend, he had trouble connecting it to the thing in the cat box. He didn’t want to admit this, even to himself, but he knew what was inside that box. “Is it you, mate?” This couldn’t be real; none of it was happening.

But it was happening. He was here, enduring it. This was not a dream. It was reality — or at least what passed for it in these uncertain days.

He waited to hear the same response he’d been getting for the past half an hour.

“Hungry.”

He dipped into a low crouch, his hamstrings complaining as he lowered himself towards the floor. He peered at the slats in the box, glimpsing slow movement between them.