They’d peered into the dark of the posterior windscreen. In the car’s rear seat the woman had been on her back, her skirt either torn off or else scrunched up into invisibility. Kneeling between her pitifully thin legs, raping her at the same time as he was punching her about the head, had been a stout and almost babyish-looking man in his late thirties, short black curly hair already greying at the temples. Flushed and, if it were not for the ghost-seam, full of colour, his plump cheeks had wobbled faintly with each thrust that he made into her, each blow he landed on her face or shoulders. Despite the ferocity with which he’d hit her and despite the snarled instructions to just shut up and do as he’d told her, judging from the man’s expression, he’d not even seemed to be possessed by uncontrollable rage, or, indeed, by anything. His features had been blank and dead, almost disinterested, as if the whole sordid nightmare was something on television; was a porn-loop he’d already seen too many times to muster any real enthusiasm. As the horror-stricken children watched, the man had smashed one ring-decked fist into the woman’s forehead just above her eye. Even in black and white, the blood erupting from the wound had looked appalling. It had run across her face, across her split lips that were opening and closing around noises she was too afraid to make.
There’d been three figures in the car. There’d been a second man, wearing a broad-brimmed hat, who had been sitting in the right front seat behind the steering wheel, facing away from everybody and apparently entirely unconcerned by what was happening behind him.
Possibly encouraged by the hand-in-hand flight up to Martin’s Yard they’d shared together, Michael Warren had reached out and clutched Bill’s mitt, looking for reassurance. Standing rooted to the spot by the vile moment he was witnessing, Bill had until then utterly forgotten Michael’s presence and had cursed himself for letting a small child see this abomination. He’d taken a step or two away, still holding Michael’s hand, and they had ended up a few feet to the car’s right, further down the gentle tarmac slant of the enclosure. Inadvertently, this had meant they could see the hat-clad figure sitting in the front seat both more clearly and in profile … or at least, he’d been in profile until he had turned and smiled at Bill and Michael.
Although every other object in Bill’s field of vision was a different tone of grey, he’d realised that the man’s eyes were in colour. One was green. The other one was red. So that was what his future self had meant, about the devil being in the driving seat.
The thirty-second spirit, who’d been hundreds of feet high, sporting three heads and sat astride a dragon on the last occasion Bill had seen him, had leaned casually through the side-window of the Escort to address the boys. He hadn’t wound the window down or broken it in any way. He’d just leaned through it. By now, the remainder of the gang had gathered behind Bill and Michael to see what was happening, but when the fiend spoke it had been quite clear that his words were meant only for young Michael Warren.
“Ah, my little friend. I knew you wouldn’t have forgotten our agreement. I had faith in you, you see? I knew that you’d remember I’d arranged a job for you, up in this brash new century, as payment for that lovely trip I took you on. Specifically, if you recall, I wanted someone killed, their breastbone smashed to flakes of chalk, their heart and lungs crushed into an undifferentiated pulp. Do you think you could do that for me, or have you perhaps a hankering to see again what happens when you make me cross? Hm? Wiz that it? All of my different heads as big as tower-blocks and all screaming at you, when your little deathmonger, your little hag who stinks of afterbirth wizn’t around to save you? Wiz that what you want?”
The traffic-light eyes glittered. Small blue flames had drooled incontinently from the corners of the fiend’s lips as it spoke. There in the rear of the unmoving car, the fat man in the white shirt and grey windcheater had turned the by-now bloody girl onto her hands and knees, he and his victim wholly unaware that something mentioned in the Bible sat there in the front seat watching them, appreciatively, and with some amusement.
Looking back, the Dead Dead Gang’s reaction had resembled some posthumous sequel to The Goonies or an episode of Scooby-Do: they’d screamed in perfect unison and then they’d run away, with Bill still holding Michael Warren’s hand, both of them shrieking as he’d dragged the infant out of the garage enclosure into lower Bath Street. The whole mob of them had been halfway up Scarletwell Street before they’d ceased howling and had stopped to draw a breath, or at least figuratively speaking. Everyone had been aghast, and no one had known what to do. Phyllis had looked more worried and upset than Bill had ever seen her, in an even worse state than that time she’d come to visit Bill down in the cells, when he was in there for that stabbing.
“What are we all gunna do? We can’t just let that poor girl ’ave that done to ’er and not do nothin’. Ayr Bill, can’t you think o’ summat?”
Bill, still trembling from the run-in with the demon, had been absolutely blank, unable to come up with anything, as if he’d used all of his cunning on the business out at Martin’s Yard.
“Well, I don’t know! We could go and find some of the bigger and uglier rough sleepers what are round ’ere, see if they knew what to do, except that they all want to kill us because you keep pissing ’em about!”
Phyllis had gone quiet and had stared into empty space for a few moments before she’d replied.
“What abayt Freddy Allen? We’ve not ’urt ’im, we’ve just messed abayt with ’im, and ’e’s a good sort underneath. ’E’d ’elp us if we asked ’im.”
Bill had shook his head in violent disagreement, briefly growing extra noggins like a hydra as he did so.
“What good could ’e do? ’E’s no more use than we are. Anyway, where are we gunna find ’im, even if ’e ’as forgiven us for nickin’ ’is ’at earlier, when we wiz up there in the twenty-fives?”
Phyllis had thought about it for a moment.
“What abayt the Jolly Smokers? Most o’ the rough sleepers goo there of an evenin’, and if Freddy wizn’t there, there’d be somebody ’oo knew where ’e wiz.”
Bill had goggled at her in disbelief, the other children looking on in anxious silence.
“Are you fuckin’ mad? The Jolly Smokers, that’s where Mick Malone the ratter and all them go! Tommy Mangle-the-Cat and Christ knows who else! If us lot set foot in there, they’ll pull our heads off and then stick ’em on the beer pumps!”
Phyllis had just looked at him, a queer and thoughtful look stealing across her pointy little face.
“Yiss. Yiss, I can see that, what yer sayin’. If I wiz to go up there, that’s what they’d do to me, yer can be sure. But what if just you wiz to go up there and ask for Freddy Allen? After all, it wiz you what reminded me abayt what Mr. Doddridge said, ’ow we should just go where we please, and rest assured as that was the place we were meant to go.”
In retrospect, Bill saw now that this had been when his big ideas had taken a quite definite turn for the worse. Disastrously, he’d made a feeble effort to use logic as a means of extricating himself from the bear-pit of responsibility he’d accidentally dug.
“No. No, what Doddridge said, that was just Michael ’ere who ’e meant, ’ow we should feel free to take ’im anywhere because it would just be part of ’is education. If we’re takin’ Michael somewhere, that means that it’s all been planned by management, and that we’ll all most probably come out all right. If it’s just me, all on me own, then it’s quite likely that I could get slaughtered without it affecting any ’igher plan. No way. No, I’m not doin’ that.”