‘What about your wife?’ the officer called after him. Maggie was sitting in one of the side-offices, dumb with sedation, Debbie asleep beside her. There was nothing he could do for them. They were as safe here as anywhere. He must get to Coot, before he died.
He’d know, whatever Reverends know; and he’d understand the pain better than these monkeys. Dead sons were the crux of the Church after all.
As he got into the car it seemed for a moment he smelt his son: the boy who would have carried his name (Ian Ronald Milton he’d been christened), the boy who was his sperm made flesh, who he’d had circumcised like himself. The quiet child who’d looked out of the car at him with such resignation in his eyes. This time the tears didn’t begin. This time there was just an anger that was almost wonderful.
It was half past eleven at night. Rawhead Rex lay under the moon in one of the harvested fields to the south-west of the Nicholson Farm. The stubble was darkening now, and there was a tantalising smell of rotting vegetable matter off the earth. Beside him lay his dinner, Ian Ronald Milton, face up on the field, his midriff torn open. Occasionally the beast would lean up on one elbow and paddle its fingers in the cooling soup of the boy-child’s body, fishing for a delicacy.
Here, under the full moon, bathing in silver, stretching his limbs and eating the flesh of human kind, he felt irresistible. His fingers drew a kidney off the plate beside him and he swallowed it whole.
Sweet.
Coot was awake, despite the sedation. He knew he was dying, and the time was too precious to doze through. He didn’t know the name of the face that was interrogating him in the yellow gloom of his room, but the voice was so politely insistent he had to listen, even though it interrupted his peace-making with
God. Besides, they had questions in common: and they all circled, those questions, on the beast that had reduced him to this pulp.
‘It took my son,’ the man said. ‘What do you know about the thing? Please tell me. I’ll believe whatever you tell me – ‘ Now there was desperation – ‘Just explain – ‘
Time and again, as he’d lain on that hot pillow, confused thoughts had raced through Coot’s mind. Declan’s baptism; the embrace of the beast; the altar; his hair rising and his flesh too. Maybe there was something he could tell the father at his bedside.
‘. . . in the church . . .’
Ron leaned closer to Coot; he smelt of earth already.
‘. . . the altar . . . it’s afraid … the altar . . .’
‘You mean the cross? It’s afraid of the cross?’
‘No. . .not-‘
‘Not-‘
The body creaked once, and stopped. Ron watched death come over the face: the saliva dry on Coot’s lips, the iris of his remaining eye contract. He watched a long while before he rang for the nurse, then quietly made his escape.
There was somebody in the Church. The door, which had been padlocked by the police, was ajar, the lock smashed. Ron pushed it open a few inches and slid inside. There were no lights on in the Church, the only illumination was a bonfire on the altar steps. It was being tended by a young man Ron had seen on and off in the village. He looked up from his fire-watching, but kept feeding the flames the guts of books.
‘What can I do for you?’ he asked, without interest.
‘I came to – ‘ Ron hesitated. What to tell this man: the truth? No, there was something wrong here.
‘I asked you a frigging question,’ said the man. ‘What do you want?’
As he walked down the aisle towards the fire Ron began to see the questioner in more detail. There were stains, like mud, on his clothes, and his eyes had sunk in their orbits as if his brain had sucked them in.
‘You’ve got no right to be in here – ‘
‘I thought anyone could come into a church,’ said Ron, staring at the burning pages as they blackened.