The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

DERMOT Simon Bestwick

The bus turns left off Langworthy Road and onto the approach to the A6. Just before it goes under the overpass, past the old Jewish cemetery at the top of Brindleheath Road and on past Pendleton Church, it stops and Dermot gets on.

He gets a few funny looks, does Dermot, as he climbs aboard, but then he always does. It’s hard for people to put their fingers on it. Maybe it’s the way his bald head looks a bit too big. Or the fishy largeness of his eyes behind the jar-thick spectacles. The nervous quiver of his pale lips, perhaps.

Or perhaps it’s just how pale he is. How smooth. His skin — his face, his hands — are baby smooth and baby soft. Like they’ve never known work, and hardly ever known light.

All that and he’s in a suit, too. Quite an old suit, and it’s not a perfect fit — maybe a size too large — but it’s neat and clean and well maintained. Pressed. Smooth.

And of course, there’s the briefcase.

It’s old fashioned, like something out of the seventies, made out of plain brown leather. He doesn’t carry it by the handle. He hugs it close against his chest. Like a child.

Dermot finds his way to a seat and parks himself there. His hands glide and slide smoothly over one another, as if perpetually washing themselves. His lips are slightly parted and behind the thick glasses his pale, almost colourless eyes are fixed on some far distant vanishing point beyond the bus’ ceiling.

After a moment, the man next to him grunts and gets up. Dermot blinks, snapped rudely out of his reverie, then gets up to let the man past. He thinks the man’s going to ding the bell to get off but he doesn’t, just goes and finds another seat. Another, Dermot-less seat.

Dermot doesn’t care.

He sidles up closer to the window and watches Salford glide past him in the thickening dusk, street lamps glinting dully in the gathering grey of impending night.

But he gazes beyond what is there to be seen.

And licks his lips as the bus rides on.

“Special Needs…” slurs Shires, outside the door. “Special Needs…”

Abbie stops tapping her pencil on the desktop and looks up at Carnegie.

They’re alone in the little office, the little dusty old office that never has a proper clean and has phones and a fax machine and a desktop computer that were last updated in 1991. Well, maybe a little more recently in the computer’s case, but only that.

They’re the dirty little secret. They’re the office in the police station that nobody wants to admit is there, nobody wants to acknowledge exists.

That nobody wants to admit there is a need for.

“Special Needs… Special fucking Needs…”

Shires is pressing himself up against the door’s big frosted glass pane with its reinforcing wire mesh. Seen through it, he’s blurred but she can make out enough. His arms are up, bent at the elbows and bent sharply in at the wrists, fingers splayed, a parody of some kid with cerebral palsy. He’s making that stupid, that fucking annoying voice, by sticking his tongue down between his bottom lip and his teeth and gums. It’s supposed to make him sound like a spastic.

They have to call their little office something, have to give it some kind of a name, and so they call it Special Projects. Shires and the other lads and lasses in the station who know about it call it Special Needs.

It passes for humour around here.

But it’s fear, nothing more. It’s not the drab little out-of-date office, caught perpetually in its early nineties time warp, that they’re scared of. It’s what it represents.

It’s what they have to fight.

And how they have to fight it.

That’s the theory, anyway. Abbie knows all about the theory. She knows all about what goes on in here, in theory. She’s read all the reports, the rule books, the case files. She knows the score. In theory.

But this is the first time she’s done it for real.

Carnegie, though, he’s different. He’s a big guy, solid looking. In his forties, she thinks. Late thirties, maybe, and feeling the strain. Dirty blond hair, washed out watery looking blue eyes and features that all look too closely gathered together in the middle of his face. Black jacket, long black coat, black trousers and shoes. White shirt. No tie. The washed out watery looking blue eyes are rolled up towards the ceiling and each new breath is blown out through his lips. Hard. A little harder each time, it seems, Shires lets out his stupid call.

“Special fucking Neeeeeeeeds…”

Shires slaps and bats a splayed bent hand weakly against the frosted, wire-meshed glass, pressing his face up close against it.

Carnegie grabs the door handle, twists and slams his shoulder back into it. The door opens outwards and the impact knocks Shires flying back into the corridor, arms flailing. There’s a heavy crash as he lands.

Carnegie pulls the door shut again. He turns to face Abbie and shrugs.

“Argh! Carnegie you fucking cunt!” Shires’ voice is muffled.

Abbie is biting her lips hard so as not to laugh. She has to stop herself doing that because if she starts she doesn’t know if she’ll stop.

Moaning, groaning and mumbling indistinct threats of revenge, Shires stumbles away down the corridor and out of earshot.

Carnegie spreads his hands in a what-can-you-do gesture.

Abbie can’t restrain herself anymore and bursts out laughing.

Carnegie starts laughing too.

On the frosted glass pane behind him, around head height, there’s a splash of red on the outside of the door.

They’re laughing.

And then the phone rings and they stop.

They just look at the phone, Abbie sitting at her desk, Carnegie standing by the door, and they watch it and listen to it ring and ring and ring.

Dermot stands patiently before the desk. The desk sergeant is trying to keep his eyes off him, but they keep straying back and every time they meet Dermot feels the thrill of contact, the hatred and the loathing and the contempt like the charge that jolts down a live wire when a connection gets made.

The desk sergeant motions with his eyes to one of the seats in the reception area. The subtext of which is get the fuck away from me.

Dermot doesn’t care. He’d rather sit down anyway.

He goes to the chair and he sits and waits. His hands flow over and over one another in their endless washing motions. He hugs the briefcase tightly to his chest. Like a baby.

He licks his lips.

And he waits.

The phone rings.

“Gonna answer it?” Carnegie asks.

“No,” Abbie says.

“Answer it,” says Carnegie.

She looks up at him. The phone rings. She wants to say you answer it. The phone rings. Or maybe you answer it, sir. The phone rings. Maybe, even, you answer it sir. Please. The phone rings. But she doesn’t. The phone rings. Because he is her superior officer. The phone rings. And this is her first time. The phone rings. This is her test. The phone rings. This is her rite of passage. The phone rings. And if she fails it, she’s out. The phone rings—

She picks it up and answers it. “Special—” she nearly says Special Needs, stops herself just in time; turning tragedy into farce would just add insult to injury. “Special Projects.”

“He’s here,” the desk sergeant says.

Send him up, she almost tells him, but she stops herself again, once more just in time. They won’t sully their hands with Dermot. They’ll kid themselves they’re not involved; leave it to the tainted bastards in Special Needs to do the job.

“I’ll be right down,” she says.

There’s a loud, definite click as the desk sergeant puts down the phone. He feels Dermot’s eyes on him and looks his way. “They’re coming down for you,” he says, managing, just about, not to grit his teeth. Now stop fucking looking at me or I’ll break your filthy fucking neck, no matter what you are to them. That’s what the subtext is.

Dermot just smiles, a mild, milky smile, and the desk sergeant looks away.

Dermot knows they hate him, but he doesn’t care. In fact, he rather likes it.

Because they need him. He knows they need him and they know they need him too.

They have to give him what he wants.

No-one in the reception area is looking at him. The lift door chimes and opens. A woman approaches. Girl, really. Trouser suit. Blonde hair. Pretty, rather. If she was his type… but she isn’t. Pity really.

But then, if she was his type, this wouldn’t be all the sweeter. Because it’s all the sweeter for the power, and what he can make them do.

She comes over to Dermot. She smiles and tries to look civil, but Dermot notices she doesn’t offer to shake hands. There are limits even for the people in Special Projects.

“Sir?”

He nods. He bets it hurt her to call him that.

“Detective Constable Stone. If you’ll just come with me?”

Without waiting for a reply, she turns and walks away. The desk sergeant steals a glance at her small, taut behind, rolling beneath the clinging fabric of her trousers, then recoils, blushing, as Dermot catches his eye and smirks.

The desk sergeant’s face is red. His knuckles, of the fists clenched on the desktop, are white.

Dermot follows the girl into the lift. No-one else looks at him, her, at them. No-one else wants to admit they’re linked or connected in any way, shape or form.

But they are.

“Have you read my file?” he asks her as the lift ascends.

Abbie starts, nearly jumping, gets it under control. She’s stolen a couple of quick glances at him, but that’s all. She was hoping he’d stay quiet, stay silent, till she’d got him to the office. Hoped Carnegie would do all the talking with him. She’d just have to make the tea. Not get involved. Not be complicit. Tell herself she wasn’t responsible.

Don’t talk to me, you bastard, she thinks.

But he does. He has.

And they have to co-operate with him. Have to go softly-softly. Have to give him what he wants.

Even my complicity? Even my soul?

You’re kidding yourself if you think you haven’t given that already, she tells herself. You’re already part of this. Carry on.

He’s looking at her, eyebrows raised, waiting politely for her answer. “Yes,” she says.

He nods. “Then you know all about me,” he says. It’s a statement, not a question, this time. His voice is wavery and weak, with a faint Irish accent. It goes with his pale face and bland features and colourless eyes. With his soft, smooth, hairless hands that have never known honest work.

“Yes,” she says. She doesn’t want to reply but she has to. “Yes, I know all about you.” She tries to keep her voice neutral but can’t, not quite. She wishes she could, especially when she sees the look on his face.

He likes this. Making us dance to his tune. He likes this. Almost as much as the other part.

She isn’t going to think about the other part. That will come later. She has to get through this one stage at a time, step by step. If she thought about the other part she’d never be able to get this done. And she has to.

The lift chimes, and she’d never have believed that simple sound could fill her with such relief.

“We’re here,” she says, and steps out of the lift.

Dermot follows her down the same plain, dusty corridor he’s come down how many dozens, how many hundreds, of times before? He doesn’t know how many. Even he’s lost count. Neither she — the pretty little Detective Constable Stone — nor whichever senior officer awaits him in the room — will know.

Will it be Ryan, or McDonald? No — Carnegie, he thinks. It will be Carnegie’s turn now. Carnegie won’t know how many times Dermot’s come down this corridor and into this room. To perform his thankless task. To receive his grudging reward. But he could find out if he wanted. It will be in a file somewhere. In this country, everything has to go on file.

DC Stone opens the door that Dermot knows so well, the one with the frosted glass pane reinforced with its wire mesh. Odd. There’s a smear of blood on it, slowly drying.

Inside, at the desk, is Carnegie.

I was right, thinks Dermot. I always am.

Carnegie smokes.

He doesn’t offer one to Dermot. Or to Abbie, for that matter. Not that she cares. She has her own packet of Silk Cut. Carnegie favours Sovereign, a much stronger brand. High tar. There’s an ashtray on the tabletop. Fuck the smoking ban.

“We know there’s at least one in the city,” he says. “We need you to tell us where it is.”

Dermot pointedly wafts a hand in front of his face. Carnegie glowers and bashes out his half-smoked cigarette.

“What about my fee?” Dermot asks.

“Fee?” Carnegie spits the word out with loathing.

“My reward, then. For doing my bit. For being such a good boy. For saving so many lives.”

Carnegie’s eyes are slits. His hands are clenched, the knuckles white. His mouth looks like a half-healed scar. Then he breathes out and his face goes slack.

“Your reward’s waiting downstairs,” he says. “When you deliver your side of the bargain. You know what we want. Where is it?”

Dermot smiles, nods, licks his lips. It’s the last that Abbie finds the worst. The anticipation in it.

He closes his eyes. Prayers his hands together. Smiles. Parts his lips oh-so-slightly and spit-bubbles go pop-pop-pop.

He opens his eyes and his hands drop. His eyes are bright.

He speaks, rapidly. Abbie’s already scribbling, transcribing it in shorthand. Then he’s done and she’s picking up the phone.

Sirens wail in the night, and three police vans tear up Oldham Road into an area of bleak, functional looking sixties era council housing and old mills and factories either abandoned or converted to new purposes. Most of the district’s one big industrial estate.

At one point along the roadside, a rank of three shops. The buildings are abandoned, boarded up and covered in geological layers of flyposters. The vans screech to a halt outside them. Armed police officers pile out. Some carry shotguns, other submachine guns.

Doors are kicked in and boots thunder up the stairs.

What they’re looking for is on the topmost floor.

All the upstairs rooms of the three shops have been knocked together, creating a huge open space.

Things lie on the floor. Five of them. Still asleep. Waiting to wake up. They are vast. They have long talons. Longer jaws. And worse.

Guns are aimed.

Yellow eyes open. Something wakes, leaps up, howling, screeching, clawed hands aloft.

A dozen guns fire simultaneously. The flat, thundery blasts of shotguns, the staccato splitting cracks of submachine guns. The rearing thing is danced back across the room and collapses to the bare, rotted floorboards, writhing, spurting, and then is still.

Then the guns aim down, at the other things, and they fire again.

They don’t stop until nothing is left alive on the floors or walls of that upstairs room.

The phone rings.

Dermot watches Carnegie pick it up. The big man nods and grunts. DC Stone is watching all of this, her eyes darting back and forth from one of them to the other.

Carnegie replaces the handset.

“They found them. There were five of them. Just like you said. They got them all.” He doesn’t want to say the next bit, but Dermot has his eyebrows raised and is demanding it, tacitly. Just like he always does. And so Carnegie says it. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” says Dermot. “Now—” he strives to keep his voice level; to show excitement would be unseemly “—there’s the small matter of my reward.”

“Yes,” says Carnegie thickly, not looking up at him, looking down at the surface of his desk instead. “Detective Constable Stone?”

“Sir?” says Stone at last.

Carnegie still doesn’t look up from the top of his desk. “Take him down to the cells. It’s cell number thirteen.”

“Ah,” says Dermot. “How apt.”

Carnegie doesn’t look up or reply.

Stone’s face is ashen. She’s even shaking slightly. “If you’ll just come with me,” she says.

All the way downstairs in the lift, Abbie’s thinking this can’t be real, thinking this has to be a dream, thinking please let me wake up before—

But it is, it isn’t, she can’t.

The lift doors open in the basement and she heads out, Dermot following in her wake. He’s trotting after her, she realises with disgust. Trying to hide his excitement and failing. Miserably.

But who’s more disgusting, him or her?

The custody sergeant doesn’t look up from his paper at either of them as they pass. Determinedly. He knew they were coming. And he knew, just as well, that he wasn’t going to, didn’t want to see them.

Abbie leads Dermot down past the row of cells. They’re all empty tonight. That’s been arranged.

There’s a slap of paper, the sound of boots on a tiled floor. She glances round to see the custody sergeant walking out fast. Getting out before the sounds start. Well, there’ll be nothing else in here demanding his attention tonight.

She puts the key in the lock and opens the cell door. Light from the corridor spills into the darkness.

“Mummy?” The voice is tiny, thin and blurred. “Daddy?”

Dermot stands at the threshold, not going in yet.

“Go on then,” she says. He doesn’t move.

“Mummy?”

This time she prods his shoulder. “Go on.”

Dermot’s head snaps round and for a second Abbie is afraid. But he’s only smiling. Smiling and holding her with his eyes. Till she drops her gaze.

Then he’s moving, tired of the game, and into the cell. Abbie pulls the door shut behind him, but not fast enough to evade a glimpse of the child’s face, bewildered and afraid, or shut out the beginnings of her cry.

Dermot hears Stone’s footsteps recede down the corridor. He puts the briefcase down on the floor and loosens his tie.

The little girl has backed up against the far wall.

Dermot opens the briefcase and takes his tools out one by one. He puts them on the floor beside the case. And then he starts to undress.

In the pub, afterward, Carnegie is on his third double Scotch and Abbie’s forsaken her usual white wine spritzer for a vodka tonic. She’s on her third. There’s been less and less tonic in each one.

“You did good today,” he says. Thick and slurred, but drunkenly sincere.

“Doesn’t feel like it.”

“It’s got to be done,” he says. “They need us. Otherwise…”

She knows. Knows what would happen without Dermot to tell them where the latest batch of creatures are incubating, ready to wake to murderous life. Knows you do your time in Special Projects — a year, two, maybe three — and then the world’s your oyster, a fast track to any job you want, or if you don’t want one anymore, early retirement on a fat pension. There’s a reason for that. A price you pay.

She downs her vodka, digs out her mobile, rings for a cab. She feels bad, a little, about leaving Carnegie to drink alone, but sharing the bar with him just makes her remember what she’s now part of.

“What time do you need me in tomorrow?”

“Don’t bother. Come in in the afternoon.” His watery blue eyes are bloodshot. “You passed the test, Abbie. You’re in. I’ll handle the cleanup.”

Normally, she’d object to being treated like the little woman. But this time around, she doesn’t mind.

She weaves out the door to the waiting cab.

Alone now, Carnegie downs the last of his whisky. Without being asked, the barman brings him another.

Carnegie bolts half of it in one, feels it burn its way down. Tomorrow, he’ll go to cell thirteen, like so many times before. Dermot will be lying there, naked and pallid as a grub, clothes bagged up in a Tesco plastic carrier, tools already wiped spotless and back in the briefcase.

Carnegie will wake him up and take him to the showers. Get the blood off. When he’s clean and dressed, he’ll drive Dermot home. But first he’ll have to go back into the thirteenth cell, and before they come to hose it down, he’ll have to gather the bones.