The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [78]
There should have been a scream. Writhing; panic; something. Davey simply faltered for a moment, and pawed rather ineffectually at the shaft of wood lodged in his skull. Quire hooked a leg behind Davey’s knee and barged him over. The youth toppled back, half in and half out of the water. The moonlight fell full on his face then, and Quire could see the ruin he had wrought. No blood, though.
He saw, too, the remaining eye staring up at him, and that filled him with resurgent terror, for it was an empty, animal eye, devoid of human intelligence, or sentiment, or awareness. He felt no kinship of any kind with whatever lay behind it.
Already Davey was trying to rise, hampered only by the slippery mud and unstable banks of the ditch, not by his broken bones or destroyed eye.
“God damn you,” Quire cried, shaking.
He did not know why he shook, whether it was from fear or anger. He did not care; he only cared that Davey should stay down, that this should end. For the first time, he could see the youth’s hands clearly, and they were a mass of little dark scrawlings, far too small for Quire to make them out in the darkness. It was as if some fine-handed scribe had taken a quill to the boy’s skin. Not tattoos, as best he could tell, but what else they might be he had no idea.
As Davey rolled on to his front, the better to push himself to his feet, Quire put a foot into the back of his right knee and took hold of his ankle. He might have baulked at what came next, had he thought about it. But there was no time, no thought; there was only life and death, and the cold, old Quire who knew precisely what it took to stay on the right side of the divide.
He stamped down with his foot, twisted with his arms, spun himself and put his whole body weight into the task of breaking out Davey’s knee joint. He felt it go, heard it crackle and tear, but he didn’t release Davey’s leg. He lay across it, and kept pushing, kept trying to turn the ankle further, until he was certain that limb could not bear the gravedigger’s weight. And never would again, most likely.
Even that, even the destruction of his knee, brought no wail of protest from Davey. Even though his foot projected at an absurd angle, his lower leg limp and twisted and loose, even with all that, he simply tried to rise, tried to reach Quire.
“God damn you,” gasped Quire. “God damn you.”
He had to lean back against the far bank of the ditch then, for he was trembling so violently that he thought he might fall. As it was, he only vomited, heaving his guts up into the dark water at his feet, while Davey slipped slowly down the opposite bank, still staring at him with that single, unblinking eye.
Quire turned away and pulled himself laboriously up into the field. He got unsteadily to his feet and staggered away, quite numb. He did not know if anyone—or anything—else would come after him. If they did, he had nothing left with which to oppose them. All he knew was that he needed to put as much ground as he could between himself and the gravedigger, still stirring feebly in the drainage ditch. Get himself away from this foul farm and out from under the light of this leering moon.
Beneath the powerful mid-morning sun, Davey Muir’s hand clawed weakly at the soft earth. His fingers dug in, gouging out little ruts, piling up the grass between them. He had left a scrabbled trail of mud through the field, where he had hauled himself from the ditch, dragged his broken body another few dozen yards.
Blegg stood looking down at him. The lower half of Davey’s left leg was rotated a good quarter-circle further than it should have been, the knee joint ruptured. A stick protruded a few inches from the ruined socket of his right eye. He made no sound. Just reached, and took a feeble handful of soil and grass, pulled it towards him. Reached, and held, and pulled.
“Go back to the farm,” Blegg said without looking round to the man standing disconsolately behind him. “Get a fire started.”
The man did not move at once. He stared in dumb