The door! Oh Jesus, the door! If she’d left it open. Too late.
The stranger came into the hall and his face crinkled into a kind of smile, which Maguire thought was about the worst thing he’d ever seen.
It wasn’t Wall.
Wall was flesh and blood: the visitor was a rag-doll. Wall was a grim man; this one smiled. Wall was life and law and order. This thing wasn’t.
It was Glass of course.
Maguire shook his head. The child, not seeing the thing wavering on the air behind her, misunderstood.
‘What did I do wrong?’ she asked.
Ronnie sailed past her up the stairs, more a shadow now than anything remotely manlike, shreds of cloth trailing behind him. Maguire had no time to resist, nor will left to do so. He opened his mouth to say something in defence of his life, and Ronnie thrust his remaining arm, wound into a rope of linen, down Maguire’s throat. Maguire choked on it, but Ronnie snaked on, past his protesting epiglottis, forging a rough way down his oesophagus into Maguire’s stomach. Maguire felt it there, a fullness that was like overeating, except that it squirmed in the middle of his body, raking his stomach wall and catching hold of the lining. It was all so quick, Maguire had no time to die of suffocation. In the event, he might have wished to go that way,
horrid as it would have been. Instead, he felt Ronnie’s hand convulse in his belly, digging deeper for a decent grip on his colon, on his duodenum. And when the hand had all it could hold, the fuckhead pulled out his arm.
The exit was swift, but for Maguire the moment would seemingly have no end. He doubled up as the disembowelling began, feeling his viscera surge up his throat, turning him inside out. His lights went out through his throat in a welter of fluids, coffee, blood, acid.
Ronnie pulled on the guts and hauled Maguire, his emptied torso collapsing on itself, towards the top of the stairs. Led by a length of his own entrails Maguire reached the top stair and pitched forward. Ronnie relinquished his hold and Maguire fell, head swathed in gut, to the bottom of the stairs, where his daughter still stood.
She seemed, by her expression, not the least alarmed; but then Ronnie knew children could deceive so easily.
The job completed, he began to totter down the stairs, uncoiling his arm, and shaking his head as he tried to recover a smidgen of human appearance. The effort worked. By the time he reached the child at the bottom of the stairs he was able to offer her something very like a human touch. She didn’t respond, and all he could do was leave and hope that in time she’d come to forget.
Once he’d gone Tracy went upstairs to find her mother. Raquel was unresponsive to her questions, as was the man on the carpet by the window. But there was something about him that fascinated her. A fat, red snake pressing out from his trousers. It made her laugh, it was such a silly little thing.
The girl was still laughing when Wall of the Yard appeared, late as usual. Though viewing the death-dances the house had jumped to he was, on the whole, glad he’d been a late arrival at that particular party.
In the confessional of St Mary Magdalene’s the shroud of Ronnie Glass was now corrupted beyond recognition. He had very little feeling left in him, just the desire, so strong he knew he couldn’t resist for very much longer, to let go of this wounded body. It had served him well; he had no complaints to make of it. But now he was out of breath. He could animate the inanimate no longer. He wanted to confess though, wanted to confess so very badly.
To tell the Father, to tell the Son, to tell the Holy Ghost what sins he’d performed, dreamt, longed for. There was only one thing for it: if Father Rooney wouldn’t come to him then he’d go to Father Rooney.
He opened the door of the Confessional. The church was almost empty. It was evening now, he guessed, and who had the time for the lighting of candles when there was food to be cooked, love to be bought, life to be had? Only a Greek florist, praying in the aisle for his sons to be acquitted, saw the shroud stagger from the Confessional towards the door of the Vestry. It looked like some damn-fool adolescent with a filthy sheet slung over his head. The florist hated that kind of Godless behaviour -look where it had got his children – he wanted to beat the kid around a bit, and teach him not to play silly beggars in the House of the Lord.