The Marks of Cain

24

The smell of congealed eels hung in the air. Mist was sidling into the room stealthy and needy. David sat in the silence and the chill, wondering at José’s words. Then he welcomed the return of his wits. He needed to speak to Amy. To tell her all of this.

‘Amy!’

His voice echoed. He tried again.

‘Amy?’

Where was she? He hadn’t seen her for an hour. It was hard to believe she was outside in the rain.

He called again. His voice bounced off the mouldering woodwork, and down the empty corridor. Nothing.

A swift search told him there was no one on the ground floor: all he could hear was the incessant skitter of rat tails, as the vermin fled his approach through each unsavoury chamber.

How about the room they shared? He and Amy? Where they had talked through the night?

He had to take the stairs; he had to go up the stairs. The pounding of his feet matched the pounding of his pulse as he called Amy’s name again – nothing, the hallway was empty.

He pushed the door and as he did his mind filled: the imagined scene of his parents, dying in their car, came suddenly and vividly into mental view. His mother’s head crushed, blood drooling politely from her slackened mouth…

Maybe the same had happened to Amy. Everyone close to him was taken away: everyone.

David scanned the room he and Amy had shared. Empty. It was bereft even of rats, or ravens cackling at the window. The bunks were still shifted together; the old picture of a Jesuit saint was still askew on the peeling wall. Slumlike dampness seeped from the ceiling.

There was one bedroom left, Fermina and José’s room. No doubt the door was locked and barred against the world.

Maybe she was in there?

David gathered his valour and stepped down the hallway and called through the door, Amy – Amy – but the returning silence was claustrophobic.

This was intolerable. He yearned to escape, to find the truth and find Amy – and then run away, get out of this awful house, this monument to oppression; the pains and terrors of the Cagots – branded, excluded, humiliated – seemed to have soaked into the bricks and mortar. David wanted to find her, and then fly.

He poised a fist to knock on the door. He would kick the door in, if necessary.

But his knock was stayed by a voice – right behind him.

‘David?’

He swivelled. It was Amy.

‘Where have you been?!’

‘Downstairs -’ Amy shook her head ‘- the cellar…to check -’

‘What?’

‘For passages. The chemins des Cagots. You remember? Eloise said there were passages, built by the Cagots – I thought if we were in trouble, we could use them…but I only found vaults -’

He put two hands on her shoulders.

‘José told me, told me all of it – everything. He’s locked in there – with Fermina -’

He tilted a frown, leftwards, indicating the door.

‘But why?’

He began to explain.

And he stopped almost at once. Their conversation was slashed in half by a horrible and unmistakable sound.

A gunshot. And then another gunshot.

Inside the Garovillos’ room.

They ran to the door and shoved against the rusted locks. The wood and metal resisted for a minute, then two minutes. But the planks were wormed, and the hinges were ancient, the doorway began to splinter, and then it swung open. They were inside.

David gazed across, and he felt his heart shrivel in bitter disgust. Amy had a hand to her face, shrouding her tears.

Two corpses were sitting in two chairs.

José and his wife.

Fermina Garovillo had been shot at close range through the temple, the side of her head was simply missing; the obscene wound was echoed and amplified by a splattered patch of blood on the wall nearby. José had shot his wife first, it seemed – and then turned the gun on himself. And his wound was worse: the entire top of his cranium, taken clean away. Burn marks on his thin white lips showed how he had done it, put the gun between his teeth, pulled the trigger – blasting away his own brains.

More blood on the ceiling and the wall behind confirmed the suicide. David took one quick look at the grey jellylike stuff balanced on top of the chair – and he felt the rising bile of nausea.

But why?

Why had they done it?

An answer, the answer, came immediately. The menacing slurch of tyres, outside.

David went straight to the window and scanned the scene, his muscles tense with alarm. And there. There it was. The reason for José and Fermina’s suicide, maybe. A red car, driving slowly between the dripping trees. Miguel was surely inside the car. David recalled old José’s words. One day he will kill me.

Amy joined David at the window. She cursed and shivered, simultaneously.

But there was faint hope. The red car slowed to a stop, then it started up once more, going the wrong way. David realized, with a tiny jolt of optimism, that Miguel must still be looking for them. The Wolf didn’t quite know where it was, he was driving up and down. For how long he’d been doing this, who knew. However he had discovered their exile in Campan – torturing Eloise maybe? – he hadn’t pinned down the precise location of the refuge.

But it wouldn’t take him long. Eventually he would see the concealed turning. Miguel would drive past the bushes, and look in the right direction. And then discover the house. And then come and kill them. Epa. Epa. Epa.

‘The gun!’ said Amy.

‘What?’

‘There must be a gun.’

She was right. David scanned swiftly around the room for José’s gun. The old man must have had a gun to shoot himself and his wife. And there – a glimpse of black metal in the greyish light. David reached between José’s lifeless legs and picked up the pistol. It was still warm. He figured there must be bullets left inside. There had only been two gunshots.

He lifted the gun and held it, pointing the muzzle at the ceiling.

For a second the madness of it all gyred in David’s mind: a year ago he was a lethargic media lawyer. Bored, safe, and incoherently sad. Commuting on the District Line tube, going home to a microwave chicken curry, maybe a pint with a friend. Maybe meaningless sex with someone he didn’t love, if he was lucky. Now he was terrified, and angry, and hunted – and yet the paradox was there again: he felt more alive than ever.

He wanted to live now: he wanted to live so much. To find out the deeper reasons for his parents’ murder, and to take revenge for their deaths. But the first thing was to escape.

‘The back garden,’ said Amy, her tears visibly repressed. She was being strong, she looked angry. ‘Through the garden, the ravine? We can go that way?’

They hurried out of the door and along the hall; the damp old planks thudded and creaked as they took themselves downstairs, to the rear of the house – from there the garden and the gate led to the forests; but Amy pulled him back.

‘Listen!’

He listened; she was right. Voices. Out there in the garden, maybe over the wall – in the woods.

‘We can’t risk it,’ she hissed. ‘The road?’

‘Miguel’s car.’

They sighed with frustration – and fear. David felt the rage inside. ‘We’re stuck. Dammit we’re just stuck. He’s got us trapped!’

‘No. The cellar!’ She grabbed his arm. ‘I am sure there are passages down there. C’mon, we have to find them.’

She turned, and they ran down the musty hallway – and turned right. There was an old cellar door under the stairs. David reached for the handle.

The subtle growling of a car engine was distinct. Somewhere out there in the rain and the ruins the car was coming very close, prowling past the old cottages of the Cagots, taking the turning that led to the hideout. The voices outside, in the woods at the rear, were still audible. Closing in.

The door to the cellar opened on a dingy set of descending stairs, plunging into the dark dark underworld of the Cagot refuge.

They had no choice. David followed Amy down the steps, into the blackness. He turned and shut the door firmly behind them, immersing them in even deeper darkness. It felt like drowning at night.

‘Amy -’

‘Yes!’

‘You’re OK?

‘Here’s the floor…I think.’

David took out his phone and switched it on and used the light of the screen to see; the feeble glimmer illuminated the echoing black cellar. He surveyed the gloom.

‘Wait.’

Amy had a finger to her lips. They stood still, and mute. Frightened. Male voices were discernible. Inside the house.

‘The vaults!’

David squinted. Now that his eyes were adjusting, he could see the true size of the cellar. It was enormous – high ceilinged and enormous, stretching into the dark, a real medieval dungeon. Somewhere for storing a lot of food, maybe, when the Cagots had to hide out.

Giving off the main vaulted cellarspace was a series of massive wood-and-metal doors, leading, it seemed, to more dark, clammy chambers. Three of the doors were open, two closed.

‘We need to search – the spaces -’

They peered into the first vault. It was so cold and sticky in this secondary cellar, their breath hung in the air, the spectres of words. David flashed the phone-light around. The goose’s foot was carved on the lintel. The mark of Cain. David turned his light quickly this way and that, but the space was empty. A narrow stone bench ran along the side, empty. The smell was faintly rancid.

More noises scuffled upstairs. Then the thump of boots on stairs. The men were searching the upper floors of the house. They would find José and Fermina. That might delay them. David tried not to speculate on Miguel’s reaction. He would come upon the grisly sight of his self-murdered parents: he would be more angered than ever before.

And then the terrorist would realize, he would descend. And find the cellar door.

Trying to quell his panic, David paced to the next vault. The second one was like the first, empty, long and obscurely pungent. His anxiety was like a drumbeat. Accelerating.

He stepped further inside, ensuring there was no concealed exit. There wasn’t. The third vault was the same: it had no other doors. Now Miguel’s dark voice could be heard – in the hallway above. Shouting. Soon he would see the cellar entrance.

They had come to the fourth and penultimate vault. It was sealed. The metal door was tall and mossed over with decay.

‘Try it!’ Amy whispered. ‘We have to -’

‘Hold the light -’

Amy took the phone and poised it – as he tugged, fiercely, at the cold metal handle. He tugged harder, and then again, even harder. The door began to slide, very slowly. It wheezed and complained, slowly yielding to his desperate struggles. The metal grated resentfully against the stone – and then it seemed to explode: it fell open and a swamping deluge of brown and rancid fluid came after, a wave of thick and malodorous soup that was so fierce it knocked them both to the cellar floor.

They were slipping now, slipping and gasping in the slimy water; and David could see, knocking and bobbing in the subsiding floods: yoghurty flaps of flesh, and grimacing human heads, and fibrous, amputated arms; the heads were half decayed, the hair on one face was like rusty brown wire; a protruding arm bone was sticking out of leathery strings of muscle -

‘Amy?’

She was struggling to stand up, slipping in the juices of the corpses. He stared at her, suffused with horror. They were covered with brown-green, waxy slime. And then David succumbed to his gag reflex: he briefly puked into the pooling fluids, and puked again. Amy was coughing, violently, as she stood up; then she seemed to steel herself, and she closed her eyes, and she opened her eyes, and she pointed to the ceiling.

The voices above were sharper, nearer, angrier, the men were nearly done searching the house. She hissed:

‘The last door – what choice -’

Skidding through the puddles, they approached the final door.

The insanity of the scene did not prevent the danger approaching. Together, they pulled at the door handle, the metal slipping in their greasy hands. The obvious fear was written on Amy’s face – what if this was another flood, of fluids and bones? – but it wasn’t. The door opened quite easily. It opened onto a dry and lofty space, and at the end of the vault gaped…a passageway. Clung with spiderwebs, long and dismal, and stretching into further blackness.

‘The chemin!’

Amy was already inside, beckoning David to follow. He paused to shut the chamber door behind them. Quietly yet emphatically. It wouldn’t stop anyone. It wouldn’t stop the Wolf. It might delay their pursuers a few vital minutes.

‘OK.’

The passageway was too low to walk properly: they had to crouch, and scuttle, desperately, like hapless large insects.

But they were escaping at last. The footfalls and voices grew faint. But when the men found the cellar door?

‘Which way now?’

David switched the phone-light left and then right, the pitiful torchbeam revealed more passages branching off. The roof of the nearest passage was pierced by a worm, wriggling and pink. He could feel the clammy fluids on his jeans, he was covered with decaying human bodies, smeared with a scum of ancient human fat. The gag reflex tugged at his throat, once again.

‘This one,’ Amy said, her voice half-choked. ‘Pointing left. It must – surely – it must – go to the woods -’

‘Now!’

They made their way, in frightened silence, until a soft thunder halted their progress, joined by a tinkling: water was dripping through the soil above, dripping down the muddy walls.

‘The Adour?’ she said. ‘We’re going in a different direction.’

‘It’s too late now.’ He grabbed Amy’s wet hand. ‘Quick -’

A few metres further, the dirty passageway began to broaden, and gain height until it was almost possible to walk. Until it was almost possible to run.

They ran. The passage curved to the left and the right and then it stopped at some stairs of impacted soil. At the top of the stairs was a trap door.

‘It could open anywhere,’ said Amy. ‘Someone’s house. The boulangerie.’

‘We’re gonna surprise them -’

David climbed the earthen steps and shoved a shoulder violently upwards; the doorflap began to yield, a slant of light striped his face, and the trap door slapped open, with a bang. He looked across – as four faces stared back at him, grinning.

What?

But it wasn’t four faces. It was four rag dolls: Campan mounaques. The family of rag dolls installed in the front pew of the church.

The dolls smiled forever. Smiling at David’s soiled face as he hoisted himself out of the trap door, then leaned down and hauled Amy to the surface. She gazed about.

‘The church – of course.’

David nodded. ‘We better get out of these – clothes – now, get out of them now – let’s use these -’

He pointed at the rag dolls. Within a minute they had stripped themselves, extracted money and possessions, and jumped into the ordinary clothes of the rag dolls, the baggy jeans and jumpers; David kicked away his clothes, trying not to imagine what kind of…things…what kind of fetid silt…had touched his skin.

‘OK?’ he said.

Amy was using her discarded jumper to wipe her head. She shivered.

‘Jesus. David. What…was…that stuff? In the cellar?’

‘Body liquor.’

‘What?’

‘If you store bodies in an airtight space, for centuries, they decay…in a certain way. But -’

‘They turn to liquid?’

‘Eventually.’ He glanced around the church, trying to work out what to do next. Amy pressed him: ‘Explain!’

‘The corpses slowly become adipocere – corpse wax. A sort of cheesy wax. Grave wax. Then over centuries they turn again, into…a…’ He was trying not to think about it. ‘A sort of soup. With flesh. I’m sorry. But that’s what we found -’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Human biochemistry.’

She was trembling.

‘Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.’

Her eyes were shut, absorbing the ghastliness. He decided not to tell her his darkest fears. One of the reasons you might store human bodies so diligently and carefully was if you feared they carried severe disease. Infectious disease.

‘OK,’ she said, opening her eyes. ‘I’m OK. But José…’ She inhaled deeply, to calm herself. ‘Poor José.’ Then she said: ‘What now?’

‘We get the fuck out of Campan.’

He crept to the main door, and creaked it open. They stealthily walked the path through the overgrown churchyard to the main iron gate. And gazed. There was not a person or a car to be seen; the only sign of humanity was one solitary old woman hurrying under an umbrella, way down the grey and lonely main street.

‘Run for it -’

They sprinted out of the churchyard, hurling themselves down the humble main street of Campan, beyond the last dilapidated villa, running into the countryside. And still running.

After twenty minutes Amy called a halt, she had her hands on her knees. Gasping and gulping. Almost puking. David stopped, exhausted, and looked around, they had reached a junction, where traffic slashed past, burning down the main road.

But now Amy was running on.

‘We can hitch! We need to hitch a lift -’

‘Where?’

‘Biarritz. Somewhere busy, with lots of people, where we can get lost. This road goes to Biarritz.’

He followed her, as she ran to the road, with her thumb out, hoping for a lift. David was desperate: who the hell would stop for them? Dressed like scarecrows, faces frightened, half smeared with some unspeakable effluent.

Five minutes later a French apple truck stopped; the driver leaned over, pushed the door open. They climbed in, profusely thanking the man. He glanced at their clothes, he sniffed the air, and then he shrugged. And drove.

They were escaping. Down the thundering autoroute to Biarritz. David sat back, his arms aching, his mind spiralling, waiting for the sense of relief. But then he heard a beep. A message. He patted his scarecrow jeans: his phone! He’d forgotten that he’d turned his phone on, to use the light: he’d been keeping the phone off all this time, just in case Miguel was tracing his own number, too.

As he took the phone from his pocket, he felt the wild incongruity, a clash of modernity, and madness. He had been drenched with the vile distillation of many dead bodies, and yet his phone was bleeping.

The flashing number was British. He clicked.

And then he had one of the strangest phone calls of his life. From a journalist in England. A journalist called Simon Quinn. The phone call lasted an hour; by the time it was done they were in the depths of the Gascon hills, near Cambo-les-Bains.

David shut the call down. And then he rang a random number: and as soon as it answered he opened the window, and he threw the damp and mudded phone into the long grass of the verge, with a fierce relief. If anyone was tracing his calls, they would trace them to Cambo-les-Bains.

Amy was asleep in the seat next to him. The truck driver was furiously puffing a cigarette, oblivious.

He sat back, pensive. The phone call from the journalist. What did it all mean? Murders in Britain? Scientists? Genetics?

Deformity?