Jenny didn’t stop reading until it was too late. She had been drawn into the words, skimming over the paragraphs too convoluted for her to understand.
The more I think about it, the more obvious it becomes. Why else start the fire there? What purpose could it serve? The room he was in was far too close to the main corridor, the risk of getting caught with them was too high for a cautious man. And he was a cautious man, despite his madness. He had managed to keep what he did quiet, had been able to keep five of them from telling for months.
He could only have done it for one reason. He would have known that the fire would burn that hot, that the chemicals would take, that the fumes would mean it took longer to bring under control. The extreme heat burned the body beyond recognition. I learned a bit about magic in my younger days, bait and switch. Keep the focus on one hand while the other does all the work out of sight. He knew. He bloody knew that they’d see a body in there and they’d be so busy sorting out the dead and being happy that he had burned up that none of them would give much thought to the idea that it might be someone else.
I know what he did. It’s so obvious now. He hid a body in the store. There’s a dead space behind the room that hasn’t been used for years. He was always in and out with that laundry cart, gathering cleaning stuff, refilling the shelves. It would have been no work at all to load a body into the cart around the back, where no one bothered to go. Put his car there, load the body in the cart, dump it in the dead space. Then when he was sure all the attention was on one hand, make the other hand do the work. Get the body out, leave it with the burning girls. If I’d been able to get back in there, I might even have seen him do it but by the time I got Martha and Lisa out, the flames were too strong, the smoke too black and choking. I still tried, though they held me back and stopped me going in. They should have let me. I might have died but at least I’d have seen the truth, I’d have known for sure what I’m now certain is the case. He didn’t die in there, he’s still out there somewhere, waiting to finish his twisted game.
Jenny flicked forwards a couple of pages, not hearing the creak of a footstep on the stairs behind her.
Human sacrifice. He was more insane than I thought. To tell them that, expecting them to be happy to help him, to want to be offered. I looked up what I could, getting more than a few odd looks at the library as I gathered up everything they had on cults. From what I can tell, combined with what he said, it must be done when the comet is nearest to earth. It’s hard to believe he can seriously think this shit could be true.
The Gods live on the Churymov comet. You’d think that he might ponder on those words, on the madness of them. But nope, he takes them as Gospel, as the Truth. He was going to sacrifice them to a comet, burn them in the flames, according to Lisa. But something stopped him, something made him change his mind. Maybe he had second thoughts, maybe there is still some hint of a conscience somewhere in that warped mind of his. I suspect that once I’d got hold of Martha and dragged her out, that was what did it. Would he have needed the body if she'd died like he planned? Would he still have tried to escape? Was he perhaps not as certain as he’d claimed? Is it even worth trying to understand the mind of someone like that?
I remember an aunt of mine, back when I was sixteen. June Riverson. She got hit by a car and the damage to her brain was fairly extensive. She was never the same afterwards. She only lived another year but in that time she changed completely. She was the only person I could compare him to. She spoke of God living in her bedroom, making her cut herself. But she wept when she talked about it, as if she knew she was wrong. My mother told me she had become like a river, she wanted to stop the water running but she had no control over it. I didn’t get it at the time but the more I thought about it after she died, the more it made sense.
I get the feeling he thinks he’s more in control than he is. I think he’s scared. I think being scared makes him more dangerous, like a wounded animal. I think he’d have got on with June, his Gods on the comet and hers sitting on the chair next to her bed. I remember seeing her talking to him, moving her face as if he was standing up and walking from left to right. I can’t remember what she was talking about but I remember thinking it was funny. I was sixteen. I don’t think I took anything seriously then, apart from myself.
He ran because he lost the nerve at the last minute. I think he’ll come back. The books say the comet will be back in ten years. They also say the offering has to be made before the victim turns twenty-five. But the books said no one has carried out such a heinous act in centuries, that the cult has pretty much died out, that we are far more civilised now that the primitive people who believed such things to be true.
They didn’t die out. He believed in it. He learned about them from somewhere, I’d put money on it being in his family. A father, probably, drilling it into him, passing the knowledge down the generations.
I’d seen it in the kids at the home, I’d seen the behaviour of the parents coming out in the kids. He’s like the worst of that in one person, all the bad things a person can be compacted together to make him evil. There’s no other way of looking at someone like him.
So what can I do? All I can do is watch them, do what I can to keep them safe, the two that are left. He’ll be hiding under a rock like the worm he is, biding his time. But-
Jenny stopped reading, the book dropping onto the bed as a hand fell on her shoulder, gripping tightly. She spun round, her mouth open in silent shock.
“What are you doing reading my book?” her Granddad asked.