‘Fuck me,’ he breathed.
It was a skull, but not the skull of any creature a sane man had seen and lived, he was sure of that. It resembled a boar in its elongated jaw and curving tusks, but the eye sockets faced directly forward, like a human’s, and it was much bigger than either man or beast. Hanging below it was something that looked like a long trumpet or horn made of bone that flared out to a normal-sized boar skull at the wider end. Below that hung a knife with a curved, black blade. Surrounding all of this, scrawled on the wall in paint, chalk, mud, blood and pigments more obscene than that, were hundreds of crescent moons.
The whole place looked like someone had made a shrine of an abattoir.
Behind him, the door closed and he found the exit blocked by a huge man dressed in stained overalls, chewing something nosily and glaring at him with amber eyes.
‘Right now, it’s going to occur to you to run,’ said Everett as David stood open-mouthed. ‘That’s a perfectly natural reaction, and nothing to be ashamed of. But just ask yourself where you’re running to. Home? Fair enough. The hospital where your daughter is being treated, perhaps, to make sure that she’s safe?’ As he was saying this, Ardwyn had opened the chest freezer and taken out a small parcel wrapped in ordinary white butcher’s paper. She handed it to David, and he accepted it with trembling hands.
‘What is it?’ he whispered.
‘It is the flesh of our god,’ she said simply. ‘It will heal your child, just as it has healed your neighbours. Just as it has already healed you, in fact.’
He stared at her, then at the parcel in his hands. Then he realised. ‘The barbecue!’
She nodded. ‘You’ve felt different ever since, haven’t you? Healthier. Stronger. You don’t get fatigued as much as you used to. Possibly you’ve had some niggling medical conditions that have cleared up mysteriously.’
‘Your sex drive has increased,’ added Everett. ‘How’s the wife finding that?’ He closed the chest freezer.
‘Deny what you saw at the dinner table just now all you like,’ said Ardwyn. ‘You can’t deny the evidence of your own body. Tell me that you believe this.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I believe it. I’ve got no choice, have I?’
Everett had taken the black sickle from the wall and was testing its edge with his thumb. Now he looked up at David, his gaze narrow, considering. ‘No,’ he said curtly. ‘Too easy. Gar?’
David’s arms were grabbed from behind by the huge man, and he dropped the parcel. He’d been half-expecting something like this, and slammed his head backwards, hoping to catch the big bastard in the nose, but his attacker was simply too tall and David only hit his shoulder. It felt like headbutting a sofa. Still, it made the guy twist his head to one side and David flailed backwards with one outstretched thumb like a desperate hitch-hiker, and got luckier – his thumb went somewhere soft and wet and the giant bellowed and threw him away. David skidded and spun, looking wildly for the door. The big bastard was staggering away, hands clutched to his face.
‘David?’ said Everett. He was pointing a gun at him. An actual pistol.
It was so utterly surreal that all David could do was gape. ‘Wait, please—’
There was the ear-splitting crack of a giant firework going off and the sensation of being punched hard in his left thigh. The leg collapsed, pitching him to the concrete floor. In the frozen moment before his shocked nerve endings could start screaming, he stared at the ragged hole in his jeans and the blood welling there, then reached around to the back where there was a bigger hole and his fingers came away crimson and dripping.
Shot, he thought. I’m shot. He shot me. It was incomprehensible.
Then the pain hit, and he howled. His whole leg was on fire.
‘Well, look at that,’ said Everett, coming to stand over him. ‘Straight through.’
‘You could have killed him,’ said Ardwyn, with just a hint of reproach in her voice.
‘Oh poppycock. If I’d wanted to kill him I’d have put one right here,’ and he tapped David in the middle of his forehead with a finger. ‘You understand that, don’t you?’ he said to David directly. ‘If we wanted you dead, you’d be dead. I doubt if you’re even still bleeding. Have a look for yourself.’
‘What,’ David gasped, ‘the fuck?’
‘Fine. Let me show you.’ He took the black sickle and for one terrified moment David thought that Everett was going to cut his throat, but instead he used it to slash open the jeans around the bullet wound – a wound which was no longer bleeding. There was still a hole, oozing slightly, but not bleeding as freely as it should have. Even the pain was nowhere near as bad as it had been a moment ago. As he watched, the hole in his leg closed over into a puckered scar.
Ardwyn and Everett helped him to his feet, and he stood, tottering slightly. His leg was prickly with pins and needles, but otherwise undamaged.
‘Now then,’ she said. ‘What did that? What healed you?’
‘I don’t know,’ he stammered.
Everett cocked the hammer of his pistol. ‘Do you need another lesson, chum?’
‘No!’
‘The first flesh healed you,’ she continued, and placed the wrapped parcel of meat back in his hands. ‘The blessing of Moccus, He Who Eats the Moon. What other explanation is there?’
He had thought that such a confession might be difficult – he was a rational, logical human being, after all, who respected other people’s beliefs without having to share them and absolutely didn’t believe in magic or miracle cures – but he found that it was actually the easiest thing in the
