Chapter Fifty-Three.

The smell hit Coleridge as he headed down the stairs. A stink so vile he could have quite happily thrown up right there, before he even got to the heavy work. Seeing the dead wasn't heavy work like road construction or moving houses. It was heavy work on the heart and the soul. It wore you down after a while.

Coleridge had seen enough these last few days to see him through the next couple of months, he figured. But it wasn't over yet. There was a way to go. This was maybe the best of it, because tonight would be worse. He knew without a doubt that Sawyer wasn't the guy he'd spoken to on the phone, because Sawyer had been dead at the time. So some hard sick bastard was planning on visiting Beth's house. The kind of man who'd never been caught, even though he'd chopped off people's heads and carried them away.

Whatever Sawyer had done, it wouldn't be over. Not until the sun went down and Coleridge saw the face of the real killer.

But for now, maybe his accomplice. Sick enough. Maybe Sawyer killed a few. Maybe the other guy killed the rest.

He wasn't worried about Sawyer.

But then he was.

There were no windows in the basement. It should have had a pentagram on the floor, or a statue of Kali, or burning black tallow made from the fat of babies. But the only lighting was by fluorescents, and in the stark glare Coleridge saw why everyone was hushed, like at a funeral, until someone drinks enough to start a fight or laughs uncontrollably. Coleridge didn't feel like laughing, but he did feel like starting a fight.

He didn't want to look at the walls, so he looked at the center of the room. It was the easiest place to look at.

A double bed with off-white sheets. They'd most likely started out white, but now they were covered with bodily fluids. Looked kind of yellow in places, the odd patch of dark red, almost black, that he figured was blood. There was some shit there, and a thick spread of piss about where you'd expect someone to be if they were lying in the middle of the bed.

The bed wasn't grand, like those upstairs. Just functional. It was pretty plain. Coleridge approached it carefully. He half expected there to be trapdoors, like some kind of storybook villain might have had. That'd make it easier to take, in a way, if he could rationalize what he was seeing in terms of make-believe.

But it was right there. All around him.

To one side of the bed was an empty bag with a tube leading from it. The tube dangled on the floor now, but Coleridge thought it was a drip and that it had been attached to whoever had been on the bed.

Mooney hung back. Coleridge had questions, but for now, he just needed to look. To take it in. To come to some kind of agreement with his mind over what he was seeing. He had to look, he had to think about it. What he saw down here might not make a difference when dark fell, but it might, and he couldn't afford to miss it.

The people down here were already dead. Beth wasn't.

He turned away from the bed and took a circuit of the walls. He didn't know where to start, so he just began at the spot that was closest.

Set in alcoves, in spaces that looked to have been purposefully built, maybe by Sawyer, there were rows upon rows of heads. The heads weren't in liquid, like some kind of preservative. They weren't even in jars, as he'd half expected to find. They were stuck on spikes, driven with enough force in some cases for the spike to come out of the top of the skull. They weren't in any kind of order. It was easy to tell that some were older than others, because they were decomposed.

The oldest had a few strands of hair attached. There were some in there that had dried flesh. Others were putrescent, decomposing matter running out of the alcove, dripping past the head's beneath, pooling on the floor. Some had eyes, some had oily globules on their cheeks where the eyes had gone first.

It was obvious that this wasn't about a few mediums in Norfolk.

Coleridge counted the alcoves. Tried to. In columns of six, right around the room. Not all were filled, but a lot. Maybe three quarters, four fifths, something like that. Someone better at math would count this up. The papers would probably run a spread, a list of all the dead. All that could be identified, anyway. Plenty were just bone and teeth. People who'd gone missing over the years. Maybe ten years. Twenty. Thirty? Coleridge just didn't know. This was a long term thing. Freeman might be able to figure out how old the oldest skull was. It wasn't Coleridge's field of expertise.

Fuck. This wasn't anyone's field of expertise.

He tried to get some kind of figure in his head, but he couldn't work it out. He couldn't do it. His mind didn't want to do it. It was more terrible than he could ever have imagined, but his cop's mind was taking over, reasoning things out so that he didn't have to think about it straight on. His mind sidled up to the sight, and went sideways, giving him an out. Think about reasons. Think about possibility. Find questions first then worry about finding the answers.

He had two questions straight away, and like a pair of crutches they held him up. Held him so he could keep on.

He turned to Mooney. Mooney didn't look like he was willing to muck about anymore. You couldn't, not here. Get the funniest guy in the world down here and he'd just make you cry.

"Where are the hearts?" he asked.

Mooney shook his head.

"My first question, too. Don't know is the only answer we've got at the moment. Seeing this, I'm not sure I want to know."

Coleridge agreed, but whether he wanted to know or not, he thought he'd have to know. It might not matter, but there was a lot riding on this. It wasn't done. He knew it. The other cops knew it, too.

Beth knew it better than anyone.

"Second questiona"is this some kind of torture chamber?" he pointed at the bed, his thick finger shaking in a way he didn't like. He put his hand back by his side. "Did he bring people here? Make them look at this lot? Then kill them?"

"There's the punchline, Coleridge. He didn't put anyone there. Just himself."

"What?"

"That's his bed. See the drip?"

"His?"

Mooney nodded. "Spot on. Know what it is?"

"No. You find out?"

Mooney nodded again. Taking a little pleasure from figuring something out, but not much. You couldn't take much pleasure from this. Not even from a job well done. All you could take from this was nightmares.

"Sedative and a drip."

Coleridge shook his head, he didn't understand.

"There's the kicker. The yellow stuff on the bed? Pus. Bed sores. An autopsy'll give us a better idea, but the best we can figure for now is that Sawyer was sedated on this bed, in among this lot, for weeks. It takes weeks to develop bed sores like he had. He was practically decomposing. Maybe four weeks? What do you reckon?" Mooney looked at Coleridge, his heavy eyes showed he knew the answer well enough. It didn't require any input from Coleridge.

"I don't get it. Mooney, what the fuck is going on? Can you tell me that? Please. What the fuck?"

"Nobody gets it. Sawyer's probably been under for weeks, probably since the killing started. But then there's this. You looked? Looked properly?"

Coleridge stared at Mooney for a second, then forced his legs to carry him back to the walls, the alcoves. All the heads.

He walked 'round the walls. Looked at each face. Finally he got to one he recognized.

"Dean?"

"No way Sawyer could've killed him. He was comatose, on that bed. No doubt about it. Couldn't fake the way his body looked. His body was eating itself. If he hadn't died in a hospital, he probably would've died down here anyway. Fuck, Coleridge. I've seen his body. Remember we found that girl's body? Been in an attic for a year? Looked worse than hers when he was still alive."

"But this...this has been going on for years."

"We had a pathologist in here. Said the way the basement is sealed, cool...he reckoned the oldest head could be thirty-odd years old. Maybe forty. Get thisa"the oldest heads in here? The one's that are just bones? He said he'd have to get a specialist to look at them. He wouldn't even guess at how old they are."

"Sawyer's been doing this for that long? Nobody's ever cottoned on? Fuck. How do you get away with it?"

But Mooney was shaking his head again.

"It just keeps getting better. You'll love this."

"I don't think I will."

"No, maybe not. But still...Sawyer's down here, got all these heads, fancy house and all...been at it a while, right? Maybe making some money out of these people he's killed?"

"Maybe."

"It doesn't add up. Because we found Sawyer's driving license. Positive ID. No doubt. We checked, double checked, fuck, we quadruple checked. Nobody wants to fuck this up. He was thirty-four years old."

Coleridge stared at Mooney, waiting for a joke. A grin. Something.

But Mooney just stared right back. Nodded. "If these are all his," he said, "then he must have been killing since he was about four years old. If the bones are older than that..."

Coleridge could feel his head swimming. He was either getting hungry, or getting ready to puke. He didn't fancy anything on offer in the basement, and he was damned if he'd throw up like some rookie.

"Come on. Let's get the fuck out of here. I've seen all I want to see."

"You want to see the body?"

"Yeah, I do," he said, although it wasn't strictly true. "But for now, I'm hungry."

Chapter Fifty-Four.

Traffic moved again on the M1 after nearly two hours. The whole time Peter had a signal. He tried Beth's number every half an hour, counting down the minutes like a ritual just to keep from going mad.

She didn't pick up. When the traffic started moving again, he kept to his routine.

Dial the number, wait, nothing. He hung up and drove on.

From the M1 to the A1, down toward Peterborough.

He pulled in twice for the toilet. After lunch, he didn't use the phone again. There was no point.

No point in doing anything but driving.

Peter Willis had no spiritual beliefs. He didn't see ghosts or experience prescience. That had always been Beth's domain. She had her spirits and once she'd had her beliefs.

And yet, as he drove hard from the north to the south, through the middle of the country, he was sure something other was urging him on. He could feel Beth's need. He'd always been connected to her in some deeper sense than man and wife. They'd met young, fallen hard. Their only child, Miles, had come along and everything had seemed right. Their lives had been perfect.

While he'd never attended Beth's church, he'd never ridiculed her. When she said she wanted to become a medium, he'd supported her fully. Just because he was an atheist, he didn't begrudge other people their beliefs. Over time she had proven to him, beyond a doubt, that there were things he could never understand. And yet he'd still held back.

But he couldn't hold back any longer.

When he hit the A47, just out of Peterborough, he had a vision.

A small hand joined his on the steering wheel.

Suddenly cold, he jumped and let out a cry. He looked 'round, and even though it was the middle of the day, he saw blackness at the edge of his vision. Like a shadow in the passenger seat.

He turned back to the road, afraid to take his eyes off the pavement. When he looked ahead, he could see the outline of a small boy in the seat next to him. He turned and looked again, but there was nothing there. And yet the feeling that some cold hand was laying over his persisted.

The hand squeezed his, hard, and then it was gone. He realized he had goose bumps. The air in the car was suddenly frigid. He turned the heater up and put his foot down harder on the accelerator. There were no police in sight and it was a long way to the east coast yet.

That hand was familiar. The feeling of the hand, the memory of it...he cried, but he wiped his eyes and drove on.

12:37 PM. Time ticking down.

He didn't know it, but at the same time, Beth sat with her foot in a bucket of ice water and saw him, clear as day.

Saw him through Miles' eyes.

Chapter Fifty-Five.

Three hours before Peter's vision of Miles, give or take, ice cubes thudded dully against a plastic tub, the water rocking as Beth put it down on the carpet in her bedroom. Some of the water splashed over the side, but she wasn't worried about a wet carpet.

She could hear the policemen in the kitchen, spoons rattling as sugar was stirred into tea, whispered conversations. She couldn't make out the words, but she could imagine them talking about her, telling each other all the weird things she'd done while they were watching over her. Fainted dead away in the night, they'd say. Talked to someone that wasn't there earlier. Did you see the ice, falling out of the freezer? She's a weird one, alright.

The truth was, she used to be. She needed to get that back. Miles had died, and though she remained gifted, if you could call it that, she didn't have her strength of faith behind her anymore.

There was a time when she never would have dreamed of using Tarot cards or getting out the crystal ball she used to impress her more impressionable customers. That was just flim-flam, crowd pleasers.

She used to be a hell of a lot weirder.

Some mediums, the real deal, were able to turn it on and off. They could invite spirits in, open themselves to spirits when it suited them. They were a one-way conduit. They'd give a reading, maybe they'd be spot on, give evidence like they were taught, so the churchgoers would know that it was their loved one that came through. That it was a message for them. If a spirit wanted to come through enough for a real message, it was usually important to the person receiving the message.

Sometimes even she'd thought the mediums she'd seen weren't up to much. Far too much bullshit for her liking. She could see the dead while they were talking, even if they couldn't.

There was a time when she'd have given messages to strangers on the street, because the dead were so damned forceful with her. She couldn't turn it off. She couldn't not see them. She couldn't not give people what the dead wanted to give.

They might not be able to speak, but they'd show her pictures. Sometimes she'd misinterpret them, but not often. She was truly gifted. She knew that.

But then Miles had died and all that had changed. She'd withdrawn. Tried to turn it off. Turned away from faith and used her gift for her own purposes. Bastardized it. Bought whiskey and cigarettes with the money she made from telling penny fortunes to desperate people. She'd stopped giving people the messages that spirits demanded. She'd used it for her own gain.

She'd used the dead so she could make money, and there was no easy way to look at that. She didn't think about it often. It was what she needed that was important. Not what they needed.