The Worm King Page 26

  ‘The pox! The pox!’ The Bible waggled in the Mason’s face. People were leaving the changing room at a rapid rate of knots. The book was held open at Leviticus, where the Hat had glued (using chewed-up rice) the torn out figure of Hand-crank girl. The Mason made a grab in horror for his Bible, before realizing it was completely splattered in foam and withdrew smartly without touching it. He held the lantern at full stretch, looking for a way around this accursed, diseased old man and out of this awful cubicle.

  What had he done to incur wrath of this magnitude? It must’ve been something truly dreadful to offend God this badly. He scratched his cheek, almost wonderstruck at how shockingly his life had deteriorated. This insane old man, his Bible, that awful girl . . . ? This must be absolute rock-bottom: whatever happens from here, nothing could possibly be worse. But if these people stay, things were almost guaranteed to continue to deteriorate. There was only one solution: they must go. His cheek felt sticky. He licked his lips nervously, the taste foul beyond belief. He lowered the lantern, seeing his fingers dappled with faeces from the toilet wall.

  An hour later they gave the bus back to Jerry. Delivered it right to the door of the gymnasium and even threw some extra diesel in the tank. Lord Brown, and all his associates, plus a number of people who’d even been sitting near them, were ordered on no uncertain terms to leave Tamworth on the double, chop-chop.

  Pronto!

  At one minute past midnight the Masons hung the looter. They bound his hands then tied a lantern to one side of a power pole, and the rope to the other, which is a very poor way to hang a man but they’d never done it before. A crowd of seven watched silently; he cried and begged when they did it, so no one enjoyed it much. Halfway through he managed to twist his body and wrap his legs around the pole, where it seemed he might dangle, gurgling forever, until the newly-elected Mason’s deputy from the gym was told to crack his feet, with that tennis racket, and eventually the looter let go and just hung there, jerking, and twitching, in gradually fading spasms.

  It took twelve, long minutes for him to slowly strangle.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Vodka

  The Hyatt’s foyer was cold and unwelcoming with the depressive ambiance of discount morgue on a Monday morning. A concierge wearing a grim, steely face and grubby uniform lounged against his podium beside the reception counter, while a bellhop leant on a baggage trolley with nothing on it. Forsyth had passed the restaurant on his stroll here and it’d been closed. Most of the internal lights were switched off apart from every second or third overhead tube in the main hallways.

  No one manned the reception desk, so the bellhop straightened himself with enormous reluctance, swung up the edge of the counter and ducked beneath, disappearing through a cunningly disguised wood panel door behind the desk. Forsyth assumed this was to fetch someone to attend to him, but not feeling in great need of attendance, he opened the front door and stepped boldly into the breach.

  The veranda stretched left and right, ten meters in either direction. Only one man: four meters to the right, reclining in a chair pushed back at a precarious angle with his feet lazily propped against the rail. A spluttering lantern flickered on the deck beside him and his chair looked padded in some embroidered silky, gold fabric which was far too stylish for a veranda, even at the Hyatt, so clearly purloined from indoors. He gave Forsyth a nod: the combat fatigues seemed to warrant a second, bored, up-and-down glance before he returned to staring blankly into space.

  Out the front of the hotel a fog lurked and the very wispiest of breezes swirled, driving the mist around aimlessly at a snail’s pace in toxic, soupy drifts. The temperature had to be near zero. A more pronounced puff momentarily opened a break and he saw two lights: one at the front gate at least eighty meters distant, and a second coming from a shack on the front lawn. A moment later the fog closed and both vanished. He recalled seeing the shack when driving in with the Brigadier.

  Another eddy parted the fog and the shack reemerged. It might be worth ascertaining who dwelt there. The breeze eased back but the flicker of light remained, suggesting the fog could be clearing. If he moved now, it should be possible to stroll quietly in that direction without alerting the guards on the gate. The man on the golden chair may be more problematical.

  The longer he hesitated, the more suspicious it’d be when he did move. A diversionary plan was required. Without further ado, Forsyth began whistling a regimental marching ditty and strode down the steps, hands clasped confidently behind his back. He stopped two meters from the base of the steps. ‘Righto!’

  The chair scraped forward and the man leant over the rail to see what was going on. He watched, bemused, through half a dozen star jumps, a series of burpies and a frantic burst of triple-time on the spot. As expected, after sixty seconds he shook his head and dragged the chair back to its original pose. Only then did Forsyth ease up a smidge. Perfect.

  He executed a smooth 180 degree turn, at time and a half, until facing the shack; puffs of breath coming harder now, clearly visible against the cracks of light. A shadow crossed the corner of the shack and he immediately slowed, in order to focus. It’d been a squat, slinking shape, pressed low against the wall. Perhaps a person doubled over, or a child or an animal? The silhouette moved again, coming to a halt at the right-hand corner of the building. It definitely wasn’t a roo or dingo, more like a child. Out playing? He glanced around, taking in the darkness, and the cold and the fog, and realized no kid’s going to be out doing playsy’s in this shit.

  A car engine burst into life, not from the direction of the main road, but around the side of the hotel, perhaps two hundred meters. It revved angrily, over and over. Headlights swept around the corner and a late-model 4WD sped past the veranda, veering dangerously close and forcing Forsyth to take a step back before it ground to a halt on the asphalt, some sixty-odd meters from the hotels front door. It’d pulled up behind a small truck that until then hadn’t been visible. The engine was switched off, then the headlights. He waited for the driver to get out but no one emerged.

  The man in the golden chair leant forward, also checking out the 4WD. He didn’t seem overly perturbed and merely cupped his hands, blowing into them in a futile effort to warm up, while watching the vehicle and totally ignoring Forsyth. Without warning, he got up and left, withdrawing into the hotel. He didn’t take the lantern or chair so apparently neither were his in the first place, although it still seemed wasteful to leave them like that.

  All that palaver with the exercises hadn’t even been necessary then. At least it’d warmed him up. The shape beside the shack still hadn’t moved and did look distinctly like a person lying there doggo; maybe listening, or peeking surreptitiously through a gap in the walls.

  The knife taped to his right calf was giving him gyp and itchy as all hell. A flat, 4-inch Ukrainian spring-loaded flick-blade: the sort of weapon you’d normally only wear for the briefest of periods (one would hope) but his had been on for four days running, and the ingrown hairs were driving him insane. He had no tape to spare and never really felt safe enough at any point to remove it permanently, being largely an emergency tool. A standard issue, 9-inch combat knife was obviously still strapped to the left side of his belt, but the flick-knife had considerably better surgical precision for the more fiddly jobs, like peeling oranges and gutting etc, which is why you’d say “largely” emergency. He lifted his leg and scratched the offending calf. A lot to pay for a nicely peeled orange. Mind you, he’d probably shag the Brigadier’s Alsatian right now for even an averagely peeled orange, so price is a very relative beast, isn’t it?

  The 4WD stood barely within the hotels sphere of light. The man from the golden chair appeared to have gone for good, so Forsyth opted to modify Plan A, and have a preliminary chat with the driver who’d almost bowled him before checking out the shack. The mysterious shadow lying beside it hadn’t budged an inch.

  With a rolling gait, and hands behind his back, he casually strolled over then knoc
ked lightly on the driver’s side window. After squinting for longer than you’d think was polite, the driver wound down the window. He had a pinched, ratty face and dirty overalls so probably wasn’t part of the official Hyatt entouragé.

  ‘Hello there, is this a hotel car? I’m trying to get a lift into—’

  ‘Fuck off. It’s spoken’f. S’mister Snow’s car.’ The earthy aroma of vodka gushed forth and Forsyth could make out the profile of a bottle in his lap, tilted against the wheel. Vodka doesn’t have much odor so he must’ve whipped back a skinful for the cab to reek like that.

  ‘Alrighty.’ He smiled agreeably, touching a finger to his hat. ‘I’ll check with Mr Snow. Sorry to bother you.’ And just to let the chap know he hadn’t got it all his own way, finished up with, ‘Carry on there then.’

  ‘Right. You fucken check then.’ The driver wound up his window.

  That went well. He sauntered back to the veranda, hands clasped rearwards again because without doubt the man would be watching. The shape by the shack remained frozen, which makes your objective extremely difficult to analyze, as any sniper worth his or her salt will warn you, but now that he could see from a slightly sharper angle, it looked even more like a person. Just before reaching the veranda steps, he swerved away, towards the shack. Snow’s driver was hopefully more concerned with his vodka party-for-one to notice the late change in tack. The closer to the shack he got, the more certain he became it was a person, and the louder his footsteps seemed . . .

  Less than two meters away, the figure finally moved. He darted in for the attack. A child!

  ‘Let go ya cunt!’ the kiddie rasped, in a very un-childlike fashion, and a voice far too deep. It was an extremely short, stocky man; shivering like some mad thing, then a moment later he collapsed, completely limp.

  The woman inside the rusty, corrugated iron building took off the dwarf’s wet clothes and put a set of her daughter’s dry clothes on him, then one of her husband’s jerseys, followed by a blanket wrapped around toga-style for good measure. He was scarcely four foot tall with an oversized head like an upside-down pyramid, topped off with an unruly mop of wiry, jet black hair. In better days you may’ve said he had a certain rugged handsomeness, but with only one ear and coated head to foot in more dirt than Forsyth had ever seen on another human being, he was certainly no oil painting now. And the smell!! Good god, it was bad! Numerous angry, inflamed scratches and bites covered his head, neck and arms.

  She said it could be hypothermia and they ort to keep him awake. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Winston. What’s yours?’

  ‘Kate.’

  His smile might’ve been construed as lecherous, except for the bright-yellow knitted girl’s scarf, and hat with bunny ears, and the dirt, which made it just plain funny so everyone laughed. It seemed a long while since Forsyth had heard a group of people spontaneously laugh.

  ‘You got any nibbles?’ the wee man asked.

  The four refugees in the shack had arrived off a boat from New Zealand. They’d turned up on a long-range trawler out of New Plymouth, which took eighteen days to cross the Tasman then promptly sank after running aground inside Sydney heads on a reef that never used to be there, according to the skipper’s charts. Peter and Kate Nicholson introduced themselves as dairy farmers from central Waikato, along with their daughter Scarlett, who formally offered her hand to shake. Murray, also a farmer, was older, maybe in his sixties. He politely shook hands too.

  ‘I knew the bloke had the trawler. We lost track of all the others at Rushcutters Bay,’ explained Murray. ‘Haven’t seen hide nor hair of ‘em since. Not a one.’

  ‘How many of you came across?’

  ‘Twenty-three. She was a bloody shambles in Sydney, I’ll tell ya. When we found a cop that knew what was goin’ on, they pretty well whisked us here straight away.’

  ‘Been here ever since,’ added Kate. She lowered her voice and stole an anxious glance over her shoulder, at the door of the shack, as though someone were there. ‘I don’t think they’ve heard hardly anything from back home.’

  ‘We reckon that’s why they wanted a word with us,’ reasoned Murray. ‘We’re the only ones. I’ll tell ya, she’s all looking a bit grim, if you ask me.’

  ‘That’s right,’ agreed Kate, nodding. Scarlett laid a single bowl and tablespoon on a box-crate in the middle of the pressed dirt floor. Peter helped the dwarf prop himself up in front of the crate.

  ‘We had newspaper laid down till we found a snake under it, so we got rid of it altogether.’ She brushed at a flyaway strand of blonde fringe and shrugged, then smiled, crinkling her flawless olive skin and putting a distinct twinkle in those huge hazel eyes. In Australia you’d guess she was a surf lifesaver, or a model, but in New Zealand she’d ended up a dairy farmer’s wife helping out with milking at four-thirty every morning, seven days a week. Must be like being in the Foreign Legion.

  While Kate stirred half a cup of macaroni into boiling water on the primus stove, Murray gave the lowdown on developments in New Zealand. ‘The tidal waves you lot got here weren’t as bad over there, but the earthquakes were worse, and a whole stack of volcanoes went off around Auckland. Rangitoto in the Hauraki Gulf re-erupted after being dormant 600 years, and another one, right in the middle of Auckland itself. One bloke we spoke to said it was Mt. Eden, and someone else said Mt. Albert, so we never got the full story on that. We know some big ones by Rotorua and Lake Taupo went up. You could see the glow from the Taupo eruption way out where we were, in New Plymouth, so it must’ve bin a monster. The ash got so bad in the end we couldn’t a stayed any longer if we’d wanted’t.’

  Kate drained the water from the pot, saving it into a billy next to the primus, then tipped the steaming macaroni into the bowl on the crate. The dwarf grabbed it and began shoveling the food down with a vengeance, stopping every few seconds to blow in and out rapidly to cool his burnt mouth. In addition to being a tad grubby, table manners clearly weren’t his strong point either. ‘It’s hot,’ she said.

  ‘At least we could see a few feet in front of us there,’ Peter muttered.

  ‘You know the story,’ growled Murray. ‘When the only light you’ve got is comin’ from molten lava, it’s time to move.’ The four New Zealanders went quiet, the silence only broken by the dwarf repeatedly gobbling and blowing on the stodgy pasta.

  Scarlett stared at Forsyth, eyes wide. ‘It was really scary.’ He wondered how it would’ve been: sailing off in some rickety old boat on a wild, churning sea into a black horizon with your whole country erupting and blazing behind you, knowing there was no way of ever returning.

  ‘She was pretty touch and go,’ agreed Murray.

  ‘What’ve they said to you here?’

  ‘Nothin!’ he exclaimed. ‘Bloody nothing! A bloke spoke to us when we arrived, and I don’t think he even knew where New Zealand was. Thought it was part a bloody Tassie! Then this other bloke spoke to us, just yesterdey, and he was a lot more switched on. Minister of met-her-a-logical, something-a-rather, I don’t know, but he—’

  ‘Snow?’

  ‘Snow!’ Winston blurted, spitting partially-chewed macaroni.

  Murray was confused. ‘What? I dunno, she’s probably cold enough now, but—’

  ‘No. Was the man’s name Snow?’

  ‘Oh. Not sure. Funny thing is, you couldn’t remember his name either, could you Pete, after he left? Tall bloke with fair hair, and wear’in a suit and tie. Kept lookin at his watch all the time. It was one of them big Rolex things.’

  Snow all right.

  ‘I know that mongrel,’ scowled Winston, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, then licking the hand.

  The dwarf commenced to give a jumbled account of his whereabouts over the last six weeks. It was a somewhat disturbing story, leaving a conundrum. He seemed convinced a man with a harelip tried to kill him. This Harelip was involved with Snow, and some trench out the back of the hotel filled with bodies. The dwarf also knew the women As
trid, in the locked room, and thought Snow would’ve been responsible for taking the missing girls. On the other hand, it was obvious from his disclosures that through large chunks of this time the little scamp hadn’t even been close to sober. In the normal course of events, you’d heavily discount the lot of it, but an alarm bell rang about his friend Harelip. Forsyth recalled the man who’d poked his head out, when he was on the prowl for the sewing kit. That fellow with the deformed face.

  Yeth.

  ‘He’s drifted off,’ said Kate softly. She reached out to shake his shoulder.

  ‘No, he’ll be okay after that meal.’ He checked his watch, realizing he’d been outside over an hour . . . then by reckoning, the hotel lights should be back on in ten minutes. That’s if what Snow said about five hours on, five off, is correct. And there was no reason it should be. In fact, the one time probably guaranteed they won’t come on, is in ten minutes. ‘Let him sleep. I’m going to pop back to my room and grab the rest of my kit. I’ll let this man’s friends know he’s out here with you. They might want to—’

  A shot rang out: rifle; light caliber; dulled by the fog but perhaps a hundred meters distant. Forsyth cocked his head, listening for another to ascertain direction, and didn’t have to wait long. A second, then a third in quick succession. They were coming from around the back of the hotel. The dwarf woke with a jerk, waving an arm in front of his face to shield off the bullets before realizing where he was, and stopped. ‘Bastards were shooting at me yesterday too!’ He gamely attempted to struggle to his feet, little arms and legs flailing everywhere. ‘I’m going back there, see who’s doin it!’

  ‘No. I’ll go.’ Forsyth placed a hand on Winston’s shoulder, holding him down, and the little bloke collapsed back immediately.

  ‘They’ll just be shoot’in at . . . I don’t know, whatever it is they hunt over here for tucker. Koalas or sum’it won’t they?’ guessed Murray.