Читать книгу Furnace - Muriel Gray, Muriel Gray - Страница 14

She’d taken the call calmly, although there was a suppressed fury in her voice that seldom surfaced, a fury the man on the other end of the line recognized and silently prayed would be contained. But there was no time for displays of personal anger. There was work to be done.

A 10A scalpel blade had always been her favourite. Straight edge and not too short. She turned it over in her hand for a moment, feeling its weight, the coolness of the handle, and then positioned it delicately between thumb and forefinger ready to cut. As the blade pierced the skin, the subtle drag on the metal parting those tiny cells told her how sharp this instrument was. She sighed.

The waste. The infernal waste. The potency was not inexhaustible, and to remove a part now for such an unnecessary task was shambolic in the extreme. She used her left hand to steady the rest of the tiny corpse as she made the second incision. Too much. The blade had gone too far. She put the scalpel down carefully and picked up the engraved copper rule. It confirmed her mistake. The second incision was a fraction over seven inches. No matter. The two short cuts that would complete the skinny rectangle would redress the inaccuracy.

Seven inches by seven sixteenths exactly. It would dry smaller, but it had to be cut precisely. She picked up the scalpel and held it alongside the rule, running the blade down the straight edge, and with a steady hand made the final two cuts. This was where the 10A held its own.

A curved blade was useless at prising the skin from the flesh, but with the accuracy of such a straight point she could easily slice away the precious shell from its red fruit without tearing.

At last she allowed herself a smile. It was perfect. It would need washing and drying of course, but she had already prepared the solution. In only a few hours it would be completely ready.

The thud of a ball hitting the back yard wall near her window made her look up and stay still like a thing hunted. She waited on her side of the closed Venetian blinds, senses keen and on standby for action. The children’s voices were full of laughter and sunshine.

‘Oh my God. The window. You nearly hit the window.’

‘Get the ball, you jerk.’

‘Get it yourself.’

She waited. They were laughing, those young high-pitched yelps, growing faint as they receded to some distant part of the yard where their game was in progress, and mentally she ticked off the faces she knew matched the voices, counting how many there were, listening for the tiny dangers of playful curiosity or insubordination.

Then, certain it was safe, she put down her tools and lifted the strip of skin to the light. The light shone through its pinkness and she smoothed it between her fingers, assessing how much time it would take to dry. They didn’t have long. Maybe these few hours were not enough.

She took a deep breath at that alarming thought, then walked to the high table and began the ritual. She pulled the skin over the stone, pinning it at either end with the copper pins, and lit the candles. It was a time to concentrate, not to concern herself about the tasks of others, and so she closed her eyes and pressed a thumb to her forehead.

As she practised the words inside her head before they were spoken and could never be corrected or retracted, a fly circled the room clumsily and came to rest on its target.

Once there, with the only person in the room who would shoo it away deep in meditation, it crawled freely over the remains of a terry towelling babysuit stiffened with blood, and made ready to feast on the shining new rectangular strip of exposed flesh.

It took only five minutes to walk back to the truck, during which time he worked hard to get that sad mixed-up man’s face out of his mind.

She was still there, parked at a tortuous angle outside the store and his heart leapt at the thought of the simple pleasure of climbing into his own private space, the place that smelled of him, that housed the detritus of his driving life, and starting her up. But as he came closer, Josh remembered the consistency of what had been under those wheels, and his pace slowed to a crawl. Would they have cleaned it up? Would anyone have been under there since they slid beneath the trailer and scooped out what was left of Amy Nevin? The saliva dried in his mouth. He approached the trailer from the back and walked slowly along its flank towards the cab.

There was nothing to see. The wheels were just wheels.

A darker patch of asphalt under the whole cab was the only sinister suggestion that maybe someone had taken a hose to it, and it made him look towards the store. There were people in the window of Campbell’s Food Mart peering out at him.

He could see their heads and shoulders turned towards him, watching silently over a display of cans and giant bags of nachos as if waiting for something to happen, and for a moment he thought of going in, asking them what they saw. But the face of Amy Nevin’s father came back. That twisted, weeping, mad face. He wanted no more of this. Either everyone here was blind and insane or he was, and right now he didn’t care to work out which.

Driving would help him think. It always did. With eyes boring into him, he unlocked the cab, climbed in and sat down heavily in his seat, which bounced in happy response. There was a brief moment of paralysis as Josh started the engine and waited for it to warm up. He listened to the familiar throaty throbbing, feeling it vibrate up his spine, and for a fraction of a second he thought he might never drive again. There had been plenty of fur and feathers beneath those wheels, but never soft white skin and tiny bones. He’d never even clipped anyone, despite cretins stepping out of car doors into his path and kids playing chicken on city streets. He stared at the gas pedal as though it had grown teeth, then took a breath, dug deep into what was left of his tattered resolve, and won.

Josh Spiller wanted out of Furnace.

The street was not sufficiently wide to turn in, so Josh drove ahead looking for a side street that would take him back the way he’d come. The opportunity came at the end of the block where a sign told him that the interstate was seventeen miles away down the route to his right. It was a different route from the one he’d come in by, and longer, but it was heading south so he would make up the mileage when he rejoined the interstate. And from here it looked like a better road.

There was little pleasure in driving, but as he increased his speed past the last of those heavenly suburban houses, and a small sign said Leaving Furnace, the vice around his heart loosened a notch.

The road was heading back down the mountains again, but this time it did so in a more generous and less winding fashion. Lacy budding forest still formed an impenetrable cloak on either side, but only a few miles out of the town normal Appalachian life started to appear. Here and there the odd tatty cabin poked a roof or porch from the trees, and an unpleasant-looking general store even boasted a roadside location with the comforting sight of abandoned rusty cars growing from the sumachs in the rough field behind.

Josh was numb now. He was back on automatic and he drove without thinking, letting the moving landscape roll in front of him. Five miles on and a huge clearing to his left revealed a long low restaurant called Mister Jim’s. It looked modern and clean, but more importantly the parking lot was big enough to take Jezebel. Josh started to brake and pull in.