The Lie Tree (31 page)

Paul thought about this, then nodded slowly.

‘Bodies are heavy,’ he said, with the confidence of experience. ‘Until you move a few, you don’t realize how heavy. If he was put in the barrow and taken up to the cliff,
that would be a lot easier with two.’

‘Paul!’

Looking up, Faith found that most of the milling figures had vanished into the hut. Only a ginger-haired boy of about sixteen remained peering out through the door.

‘They’re ready for the next dog!’ he called to Paul. ‘Hurry up!’ He gave Faith a brief, inquisitive glance. ‘While you’re about it, be a gentleman and
bring your lady friend in from the cold!’

A ‘no’ would have been the easy and right answer, but it was not the one that Faith gave.

The hut was ill-lit and looked larger now that it was full of people. The closeness of bodies, male bodies, felt hostile and other. Their heavy boots made Faith feel fragile
and pointless. Most people were looking towards the centre of the room and did not notice her slipping in with Paul and the ginger-haired boy.

As she moved into the light, Paul peered at her, then frowned slightly. ‘What’s wrong with your eyes?’ he whispered.

‘Nothing,’ said Faith, looking away from him. Paul’s other friends had drawn closer as well, watching her with wary eagerness. Occasionally they darted impressed glances at
Paul. It was not surprising, she supposed. They had sent him out for a mere lock of the Reverend’s hair, and he had come back with the Reverend’s entire crazy daughter. Fortunately,
nobody else in the hut seemed to have any attention free for her.

Even from her position by the door, Faith could see that in the centre of the hut wooden boards had been set up edge to edge to make a rectangular pen, about six feet by eight.

‘Bessie!’ announced somebody on the far side of the pen. The bellowing on all sides sounded affectionate.

Next to the pen, a man was holding up a dog. It was a bright-eyed Jack Russell terrier, and Faith was startled by how small and ordinary it looked. Somehow she had been expecting some
wrinkle-faced, loose-jowled monstrosity, four feet at the shoulder.

‘How much does she weigh?’ shouted a man in the crowd, holding a watch in his hand.

‘Fourteen pounds!’ called her owner.

Men were handling bags that bulged and writhed, and emptying them into the pen. The crowd was counting to fourteen in unison, and now there were rats in the pit, skulking and scooting, finding
corners and trying to climb them, boiling and tumbling over each other in their attempts to get out. Calls of Bessie’s name rose to a roar of excitement.

‘Now!’ shouted the man with the watch, and Bessie’s owner dropped her into the pit.

How fast she was, that bristle-faced little dog! It was a game. She darted, and cornered a rat, and bit down on its soft middle, and shook it, and moved on. Pounce. Grab. Shake. Another brown
shape on the sawdust like a tiny sack of flour.

Faith’s eyes deadened, but she kept watching. It was the same as it had been on the dreadful night when she could not take her gaze off the body on the rug.

She wanted there to be more blood and screeching. She wanted each death to detonate before her like a little black firework. She wanted it to matter. There was bellowing all around her, but the
killing itself was soft and quiet and matter of fact. Life to death, life to death, with no more drama than turning over a counterpane.

‘Thirty seconds left!’ came the shout.

How sweet the terrier was! How businesslike! But Faith could only see its teeth now. It was only teeth.

‘Only teeth,’ she said, and laughed. The sound was lost in the cacophony around her. Everybody was shouting, calling. Bellowing meat, laughing meat. Meat with only a tiny, brief wink
of life. And what was life? Teeth. Teeth and a stomach and a blind, idiot impulse behind the eyes, telling the meat to kill and eat other meat.

And the bones fell to the ground, and other bones fell on top of them, and yet more bones, until there were whole hills and cliffs made of them. Death upon death upon death upon death. And
two-legged animals dug up the old bones and wondered at them. And then they died as well and lay there, like a rat in the sawdust, waiting to become old bones.

‘Fourteen dead! Time!’

Bessie was scooped up, and now men were leaning over the wooden barricades, poking the dead rats with sticks to see if there was a tremor of life.

Something was tugging at Faith’s sleeve. There was a voice in her ear.

‘Come away.’ It was Paul. Paul Clay.

‘No,’ said Faith. ‘I want to see this. This is funny. Let me watch.’ She felt light-headed. She thought of her vision, and the Megalosaurus biting and biting, and the
well-dressed headless corpses toppling to the ground.

Paul Clay was pulling on her arm now, and she let him lead her out of the hut, because how could it matter? She could still see it, she could still watch, it was happening in the darkness when
she closed her eyes.

It was freeing to know that nothing mattered. There was a sense of space, as though the sky had lifted away and she had found out that the land and sea were made of smoke. Only smoke. She was
smoke. Her body felt hot and light and airy.

‘Sit down,’ said Paul.

‘There is no need,’ said Faith. If she wanted, she could fly.

‘Just sit down,’ said Paul. And she did, because otherwise he would keep saying and saying it, and what did it matter? ‘If you need to be sick—’

‘Sick? I’m not sick!’

‘You’re pale as paper, and there’s something wrong with your eyes.’

‘I have my father’s eyes,’ said Faith. It was hard not to laugh. Paul Clay did not know how funny it was, and that made it all the funnier.

‘Why did you come here?’ Paul asked again, his voice edged with frustration and a hint of despair.

‘I need you to do something for me,’ Faith admitted. ‘Your father changed a photograph by gluing a little boy’s head on to a picture of you. Could
you
do
something like that?’

‘And make it look natural?’ Paul frowned, regarding her warily. ‘Only if the parties were the right size, and looking the same way.’

Faith fished out her notebook, and took out her precious only photograph of her father. She looked at it with a pang, then held it out towards Paul.

‘Cut out my father’s head,’ she said. ‘Glue it on to somebody in one of the excavation photos. Make it look as if my father is standing right there at the dig –
haunting them all.’

‘Why?’

‘I want to frighten a murderer.’

‘No,’ said Paul flatly.

‘Why not?’

‘Are you mad? The photographs might look like parlour games to you, but we need the money! My father pretends that we don’t, but we do. If we get a reputation for making prank
pictures with dead customer’s faces, who will come to us?’

‘You took a dare to cut off my father’s hair!’ snapped Faith. ‘Well, now I am daring you to cut out his face!’

‘Oh, why not dare me to jump off a cliff?’ Paul retorted. ‘There are dares
you
would not take.’

‘Are there?’ Faith rose to her feet again. ‘Dare me. Dare me to do anything. And if I do it, you must make the photograph.’

They locked gazes, and again Faith felt their conversation tipping towards a precipice of craziness and rashness, the way it always did.

‘Take a rat out of that, bare-handed,’ Paul said, pointing to a bag on the ground with a tightly tied neck. Before Faith’s eyes it stirred, three rounded shapes shifting and
wriggling within. As soon as the words were out, Paul looked frightened.

‘Wait!’ he said as Faith crouched beside the bag and slightly loosened the stout cord around the neck. She made eye contact with him again, and plunged one hand inside.

There was rough fur against her fingers, and a spasm of movement that made her flinch. A furtive tickle of whiskers, a tiny claw-graze. She snatched towards the motion, and closed her hand about
a rounded, hairy something. It was soft and frantic, twisting in her grip, while she fought every instinct and kept hold of it.

There was a sharp pain near the base of her thumb, as unseen teeth fixed themselves in her flesh. Faith’s arm jerked, but she kept her grip. She could not help smiling at Paul’s
expression of fascinated horror.

‘Stop it!’ Paul dropped to his knees beside her and dragged her hand out of the bag. The rat escaped her grip and fled into the darkened undergrowth. Its fellow inmates followed suit
as the bag fell open.

‘Why did you stop me?’ Faith was furious. ‘I had the rat! You cannot say I failed!’

‘Did it bite you?’ Paul turned over her hand. There were two deep red tooth-marks at the base of her thumb.

‘What does it matter?’ shouted Faith. ‘You wanted me to suffer, or you would not have given me the dare!’

‘I wanted to see you back down!’ exploded Paul. ‘Just once!’

‘Get me another bag of rats!’ demanded Faith.

‘No!’ Paul gripped his own hair, closed his eyes for a moment and let out a breath. ‘You win. You can have your photograph. Just . . . no more rats.’ He gave the empty
bag on the ground a despairing look. ‘We should go,’ he said, in something closer to his usual tone, ‘before the rat catcher comes back and finds his wares gone.’

He walked with her as far as the road, where she made him stop. She did not want him to see the opening to the Lie Tree’s cave network.

‘I never meant . . .’ he began, then trailed off and shook his head. ‘Wash the wound,’ he said instead. ‘People die from rat bites.’

Faith walked on, without looking back. She could not explain herself to him. The rat bite had hurt, but that had not bothered her. In a strange way the pain had been a relief, like talking to
this boy who hated her.

After Faith had been walking for five minutes or so, she heard the gravelly crunch of a footstep some distance behind. Her first thought was that Paul had followed her. When
she snatched a glance over her shoulder, she saw two figures, but neither of them was Paul. They were his friends, the two older boys she had seen at the hut door.

‘Slow down there!’ called the taller, ginger-haired boy. ‘Don’t be frightened!’

There was something about being told not to be frightened in that bare, moonlit scene that made Faith want to run. The boys would be faster though, for they had no skirts to tangle their
legs.

The pair caught up, so that they were walking on either side of her, at about two yards’ distance.

‘You shouldn’t be walking out here alone,’ said the ginger-haired boy. ‘Why don’t we come along with you, see you home? We’re friends of Paul. You’ll be
safe with us.’

It was a natural enough offer, and perhaps even charitably meant. The ginger-haired boy’s smile was broad, but there was a cold curiosity in his eyes. Faith knew he was not being kind even
before she caught him flicking a conspiratorial glance at his friend.

She tried walking more briskly, but they accelerated and kept up easily, and after a little while she slowed back to a normal pace.

‘We can’t leave you alone, miss,’ insisted the other boy, a tallow-haired youth with a broad nose and watchful eyes. ‘Chivalry don’t permit.’

‘We only want to talk to you,’ said the ginger-haired boy.

Faith slid one hand into her pocket and secretly levered open her father’s folding knife. She was one rat between two dogs, but she could bite.
They outnumber me
, she thought with
an odd calm,
and they are certainly bigger and stronger. But if I were to stab one of them, I think the other would be badly frightened.

‘You can tell us things,’ Ginger went on, ‘just like you would tell our friend Paul. We’re all friends here, aren’t we?’

Faith hesitated, then nodded, keeping her face blank and stupefied. Paul had told them she was ‘touched’, and that was a part she could play. If she seemed dopey, any sudden moves on
her part would take them by surprise.

‘We were all very sad to hear about your father,’ Ginger remarked, without bothering to drop his smile, ‘and we were wondering . . .’

‘. . . what he did with his share of the treasure,’ finished Tallow.

Ginger gave a small, reproving hiss, and Faith caught him giving the other boy a pointed look.

‘Ignore my friend,’ he said quickly. ‘Cartwheel went over his head yesterday, still a bit soft in the skull. We were just wondering . . . if the treasure was somewhere safe. Or
. . . if you need us to move it to a better place.’

‘They never gave him treasure,’ said Faith, in a dreamy, childlike voice. She turned to the ginger-haired boy and stared intensely at his left ear. ‘Is that why he was
angry?’

‘Your father was angry?’ Ginger looked unnerved but tantalized, and Faith realized that he would snap up any scrap she threw him.

‘I . . . I think so,’ she said. ‘I . . . can’t remember.’

‘So what happened to the treasure?’ asked Tallow, who appeared to have only a weak grasp on subtlety. ‘You been at the dig – the big hole in the ground. Did you see
anybody with coins? Maybe in a bag?’

‘No,’ murmured Faith. ‘Only the box.’ She saw both boys’ faces sharpen with painful interest. She was almost starting to enjoy herself. ‘I don’t know
anything about the box!’ she added for good measure, shaking her head vigorously. ‘I never saw it – I never saw anything! I never saw him give anyone the box.’

‘Who? Who was it that gave somebody the box?’ asked Ginger.

‘Mr Lambent?’ suggested Tallow in a none-too-quiet undertone.

Faith looked down at her own hem and did not deny it. She was watching her lie grow, nourished by nothing but hints and silences, and taking a new shape before her eyes. Silence itself could be
used as deftly and cruelly as a knife.

‘We already know about Mr Lambent’s box,’ Ginger assured her swiftly and unconvincingly. ‘You can tell us all about that. Who did he give it to?’ He watched her
face carefully. ‘Mr Clay? Mr Crock?’ There was a pause, and his eyes glittered with inspiration. ‘Or was it a lady? A lady with black hair?’

‘Do you mean Miss Hunter?’ asked Faith, taken by surprise. She could think of nobody else who would fit the description.