Sinema: The Northumberland Massacre (28 page)

As Janet finished dressing, Carol stormed over to the bedside table with a small black digital phone in its charging cradle. “Bitch,” she muttered under her breath as she picked up the handset and dialled 999.

The crows do a nice line in withering
irony
.

Janet and Carol fought their way out into the blizzard, Janet setting the pace at a precarious jog, all but oblivious of the treacherous conditions. The storm showed no signs of abating and snow had piled up into great drifts against the darkened buildings and scattered cars. The black sky was a torrent of gusting snow. The village had a desolate, menacing feel, like the stone and bricks were conspiring against them.

The deep drifts made for slow progress as the two women battled their way towards the Herring household. With no other living soul in sight, nor a single beacon of light to temper the darkness, a deep sense of foreboding filled both women with a deepening dread.

As they arrived, with Janet leading, they found the front door open and several inches of snow gathering in the hallway.

“God no, please,” Janet begged in hushed tones, wiping dripping stands of hair out of her eyes. Her scarf and coat were encrusted with snow.

As Janet stepped across the threshold, Carol, shivering, both from the freezing temperatures and from tattered nerves, grabbed her shoulder. Whispering anxiously, she said, “What if he’s still in there?”

Janet turned and glared at her. With manic certainty, she uttered, “Then we kill him.”

The sheer ferocity in her voice and the intensity in her eyes caused Carol to take a step back. Hesitantly, she said, “Okay.”

Janet walked in first, but her courage faltered several steps inside the gloomy hall. The trembling returned with a vengeance at the thought of what she might find. Her emotions were reeling between Steve and Larry and neither her head, nor her heart could make any sense of it. Amongst the emotional tug of war, lay the haunting image of her daughter, staring accusingly at her with the same dead eyes as Steve.

With a mixture of fear and impatience, Carol said, “Well, go if you’re going.”

Without turning to her, Janet replied harshly, “Don’t rush me, okay?” Then, slowly, she stepped forward.

The hallway and living room were both in darkness, but the kitchen ahead of them, its door open a crack, was well lit with overhead spots. Glancing briefly in the living room, she continued forward to the kitchen. Carol followed, her grim, dripping features apprehensive. Her chattering teeth were impossibly loud in the uneasy silence.

Janet placed a trembling hand on the door and, holding her breath, she pushed it inwards.

The air already filling her lungs was joined by another sharp intake of breath, accompanied by a torturous croak. Larry was sitting at the patio table, facing the door, with a disposable syringe poking out of each eye and a neat slice across his Adam’s apple. Blood had trickled from the corners of his eyes and poured down his chest from the neck. His
Dark Side of the Moon
t-shirt was drenched all the way through the prism motif to the crotch of his jeans.

Sitting in the second chair, was Janet’s nine year old daughter, Kerris. She was dressed in her favourite woolly jumper that her Nan had knitted for her last Christmas. Her head had dropped forward, her long, wavy chestnut hair obscuring her face. The blood that had seeped down her chest, with shocking similarity to her father’s, was as appalling as it was unmistakable.

Hyperventilating, Janet stumbled forward, uttering, “Larry? Kerris? Baby?” She clattered painfully into one of the chairs as the room started to waver and pitch around her. Bile rose up in her throat, forcing her to gag noisily.

Carol walked in behind her and gasped at the horrific sight of the doctor’s and young girl’s murdered bodies, sitting as if waiting for dinner to be served. “Jesus Christ! What the hell is going on here?” She backed up, slamming hard against the doorframe. The impact caused her to cry out involuntarily, screeching, “No, please!” Realising it was just the doorframe and not the murderer, she drew in a shaky breath.

Wrenching her eyes away from studying every minute detail of Janet’s dead family, Carol glanced around the room. But one urge took over, as it often did in times of crises. Spying the refrigerator, she headed straight for it as Janet stood, sagging in front of her dead husband, her trembling hands gripping the edge of the patio table in an extreme effort to stay upright on her rubbery legs.

“
My baby
…” Janet’s voice sounded pathetic and isolated. She didn’t even realise that the voice was her own. She was transfixed with the top of her daughter’s head, willing her to move; just a twitch … anything.

“I need a drink,” Carol muttered, gulping down the taste of bile in her own throat. Opening the refrigerator, she plucked out a nearly empty bottle of chardonnay. The cold bottle trembled in her hand as she studied it for a moment, her thoughts suddenly consumed by the small amount of wine sloshing in the bottom. Yanking the cork out, she raised it to her lips.

Suddenly, Janet appeared at her side and viciously swiped the bottle out of Carol’s weak grip. “You drink enough.” Her words were matter-of-fact and her eyes were fixed on a point beyond the confines of the kitchen. Without pausing, she up-ended the contents into her dry mouth, gulping down every last drop.

“You bitch. I need a drink!” Carol spat and pushed her love rival back with a hard shove. It was born more from frustration and fear, than real anger.

Janet opened her mouth to reply, but her features turned first to confusion, and then contorted with pain. The bottle dropped out of her hands and smashed on the tiled floor.

Still irate, but frowning, Carol said, “What’s the matter?”

Wheezing and clawing at her skin, Janet suddenly began to convulse. Her legs buckled and she fell to the floor, twitching and foaming at the mouth. Her pallid, clammy skin rapidly turned blue.

Terrified, Carol backed away to the periphery of the room. “Janet? What’s wrong?

After several more seconds of thrashing, abruptly she stopped and her head lolled, lifeless to one side with her tongue protruding, purple and bloated.

Carol stood, staring at the unmoving woman in an ungraceful heap with her skirt hitched up to her waist and her intimate parts on show beneath the leather trim. “No … this can’t be happening …” Her voice trailed off and she dropped to her knees in front of Janet. Spittle and foam had gathered in the corners of her mouth and on her chin, and her eyes had rolled back into her head, leaving gleaming white orbs staring madly towards the bodies of her husband and daughter.

Clasping her head in her hands, Carol bent forward, as if to pray to the East. With her head on the floor, close to Janet’s, a low moan emanated from her rigid lips. Gradually, the pitching wail grew to a blackboard-scraping, raging squeal.

They’re only red from all the tears that I should’ve shed,

They’re only red from all the women that I could’ve wed,

So when you look into these eyes I hope you realise,

They could never be blue.

Tired, cold and aching, Whitman trudged slowly along the darkened corridor to his room. He opened the door with a trembling hand and all but fell into the room.

After locking the door behind him, he struggled out of his wet clothes and dropped like a dead weight onto his bed, oblivious of the ingrained blood on his hands and face. Shivering, he pulled the flap of the sleeping bag over his naked body and half-heartedly tugged at the zip. Without even the strength to shift his body to allow the zip to close, he abandoned it and hugged the two sides together instead.

The shivers took him for several long minutes as his aching body adjusted to the warmth and comfort of the bed. It had been a very long night, but had, for the most part, been successful. He just had a few stragglers to sort out in the morning, plus a sweep through to ensure no fingerprints or incriminating evidence was left. Then, his little adventure and experiment would be finished. He could then go back to his life with Jumanji and
Movie Maniac
. A growing desperation to return to the life he once knew took hold of him. Emotionally, he felt threadbare and nearing the bottom of his well.

He wondered absently, as sleep gently embraced him, calming his shattered nerves, how much poontang Perry had been getting while he had been away, and whether Ju would remember him after all these months. Ju, of course, would be delighted to see him, but Perry, on the other hand, well, that would be the end of his reign of power. Poor Perry; at least he’ll have got his end away a few times while he’d been in charge.
My gift, to you
…

As the darkness closed around him, the images of his scrawny friend and his fat, panting Labrador faded and were replaced by a parade of Haydon residents, led by a half rotting, badly stitched together, Mandy Foster, resembling Tim Burton’s
Corpse Bride
. Tess Runckle followed, her head lolling at an obscene angle. Every other face passed by, including Sally Bryce, looking like Sissy Spacek at the end of the prom in
Carrie
and carrying Anthony’s head, Moe with the hilt of a hunting knife protruding from his mouth like a swollen tongue, Steve Belmont with gaping, cartoon-style holes in his chest that offered glimpses of the next person in line. They all had different injuries, but they all bore one identical characteristic – the empty, black sockets for eyes.

Finally, the cold, dead face of Lisa appeared before him, her eyeless sockets empty chasms. Her grey lips pulled back to bare a set of yellow impossibly over-sized fangs. The black hollows of her eyes suddenly became inflamed. An intense fire burned within them, captivating him as the sneer grew into a gaping roar.

CHAPTER 12

22
^nd
December.
The morning after the night before.

Having awakened from a tormented, hysteria-induced sleep, curled up on the stone floor next to the bodies of his wife and child, Bryce stiffly forced himself to his feet. He had no recollection of drifting off to sleep and the idea of it appalled him. He felt both ashamed and grief-stricken, but as his senses returned to him, they were over-shadowed with a rising fury.

Before sleep had wrapped its icy fingers around him, he had sobbed for several hours, lost in the depths of despair. Nothing else mattered, but now even after just a small amount of disturbed rest, this new potent emotion took centre stage and demanded feeding. His stomach grumbled for attention too, but that only fuelled his anger. How could his body even think about food at a time like this when … He forced the thought out of his mind and returned to the situation at hand. But first, he rummaged through his jacket for a crumpled pack of
Camels
. With a trembling hand, he lit up one bent cigarette and drew some tiny shred of comfort from it.

Using the now weak beam of the torch, Bryce located the shotgun. After a cursory inspection, he ejected the spent cartridges and reloaded. He paused to glance towards the far wall where his small wine rack lay with several shattered bottles lying in pieces in a pool of red wine. In the gloom it looked just like more blood to Bryce, and no matter how hard he tried, making sure not to look in their direction, he couldn’t quite get the image of his wife and son out of his mind. Fresh, stinging tears streamed down his smeared face, but he ignored them and continued to scrutinise the rest of the cellar. He spied a hatchet on his cluttered workbench and, hanging on a hook beside the bench, his tool belt. He clipped the belt round his waist and slipped the hatchet into one of the spare loops.

It destroyed him all over again and just about wrenched the guts from his stomach to do it, but he glanced back through the gloom towards Sally and Anthony one final time. His eyes were hot and bleary as he stared at the dark shapes that were once his family. Thankfully, the poor light obscured all but vague outlines.

After a moment, he wiped his eyes with his sleeve and turned towards the stairs. He was not surprised to find the door jammed. In the back of his mind, he had the vague recollection of a crashing clatter as he fell through the doorway, which he had been fairly sure wasn’t just his bulk thundering down the stairs.

Several attempts at connecting his shoulder to the door resulted in a slight cracking of wood and a bruised shoulder. Frustrated, he raised both barrels of the Browning and stepped down a couple of steps.