Silencing the Dead by Will Harker (ready to read books .TXT) 📗

out of the chapel when a wash of blood spilled off my brow and into my eyes. Using the cuff of my coat, I cleared my vision, and on seeing that slick, red mess, felt a cold fury unfurl in my chest. Back at the altar, I ripped away the sacred cloth and tore off a strip of material, winding it hastily around my head. Almost at once, I could feel the throb of blood pulsing through the layers.

Outside again, the night air made my senses reel. I doubled over, grabbed my knees, sucked down a huge breath, and looked up. I was certain I must have lost Cloade. But there, at the corner of the street, I saw my toothless informer. He was pointing excitedly towards an alleyway that ran between an off-licence and a chip shop. Fighting back the urge to hurl my guts onto the pavement, I set off in his direction.

“Running like the devil’s after him!” my new friend cackled. “So you better catch him before you bleed to death.”

Wheeling into the alley, I glimpsed Cloade as he disappeared through a distant gap in the wall. Men and women appeared to be lounging either side of this spot, the glow of their cigarettes igniting like fireflies in the dark. A few had noticed the raggedy preacher as he passed them and now stood hooting after him. Meanwhile, my footfalls echoed from wall to wall while the fury prickled under my skin.

I’d reached the gap in the wall—the rear entrance, I now realised, to a pub’s crowded patio area. Over the heads of the drinkers and smokers, I saw Cloade shoulder his way through a back door and into the heaving bar. I tried to follow but one of the men who’d been hurling catcalls after him suddenly seemed to have a change of heart. The terrified scarecrow in the charity shop suit was clearly the victim here and needed both his and his friends’ protection. When I tried to pass, he snatched hold of my collar.

“Hold up, son! Hey, I said, hold up!”

“Take your fucking hands off me,” I grunted.

Not the most diplomatic of responses, it led to Cloade’s champion and three of his mates attempting to pin me to the wall. I’d probably lost a quarter of a pint of blood by this stage, but I’d been throwing harder and soberer men than these off fairgrounds since I was fifteen years old. I didn’t even need to dig into that bag of bare-knuckle tricks my father had taught me. The back of my head shunted into the champion’s nose and he slid to the cobbles. My left elbow found a yielding cheek. My right, a soft stomach and a ladder of ribs. Turning around, I was confronted with three men on the ground and one still upright, a stray house brick in his fist. He appeared to conduct a short debate with himself, glancing between me and the brick before finally throwing it down the alley and claiming that he ‘wasn’t looking for any trouble.’

Following Cloade’s example, I shouldered my way across the patio. Not that much shouldering was now required. Practically everyone made a path for me and even the bouncer held open the back door.

“He’s legged it through the front and into the street,” he said. “Could tell he was weirdo, just by looking at him. You a copper or something?”

“Or something,” I agreed.

Just as the cold had set my senses reeling, now the heat of the bar sprang a sickly sweat at the nape of my neck. Customers gawped and glared at me from their tables, a carousel of expressions that blurred into a single hideous leer. By the time I reached the exit, the back of my shirt was drenched and the blood was in my eyes again.

I cannoned into the street, cuffed my face, and gulped down the icy air as thirstily as any drinker at the bar. Luckily, it seemed I wasn’t the only one suffering a disadvantage. The pub let out onto a cobbled hill that ran steeply down towards the riverside. Staggering on his way, pinballing almost from pavement to pavement, the preacher appeared to be running out of steam. I watched for a second as his hands clutched for the support of lampposts and parked cars. And then I saw the broken glasses with their thick lenses in the gutter at my feet and understood that Cloade was running blind.

I took off again. Antique shops and chintzy tearooms flashed by, the kind of picture-postcard attractions that tourists delighted in. Now closed for the day, I wondered what their clientele might have thought had they looked up from their Darjeeling to witness a blood-soaked madman hurtling past. As it was, there was no one to see as I began to make up the distance that separated me from Cloade.

A blast of car horns, a screech of brakes. The preacher stumbled into the busy road that intersected the bottom of the hill. I followed, dancing around swerving bonnets, glimpsing my Halloween mask of a face in the mirror of windscreens. Then the safety of the far pavement, where the oaths of motorists were drowned out by the roar of the river.

Cloade’s head whipped around when I called his name. At first, I wondered if he was going to climb up onto the low concrete parapet and hurl himself into the torrent beyond. Swollen by the recent rains, the black ribbon of the river churned and eddied, whitecaps chasing each into the vanishing dark. But then I saw him drag the paper bag from his pocket, and pulling back his arm, prepare to launch it over the wall.

My rage overwhelmed me. All the grief and horror and frustration of the past twenty-four hours tearing out my heart and into the iron grip that closed around the preacher’s elbow. I wrenched his arm with such force I was certain I must have dislocated it. The whole limb seemed to slacken