The Straw Men 3-Book Thriller Collection: The Straw Men, The Lonely Dead, Blood of Angels

But I knew by then that when I left the house, it would be for good. It was better to be sure. You want that scar tissue as tough as it can be.

I turned the outside lights on and went and had a look around the porch. None of the boards in the decking was loose, and I couldn’t see how there could be much of a crawl space underneath. There was a large wooden box around one side, but a tiring couple of minutes established it held nothing but firewood and spiders. I walked down the couple of steps to the yard, took a few paces back, and stared irritably up at the house.

Chimney, horizontal boards, windowpanes. The upper rooms. Their bedroom. The guest room.

I went back inside. As I passed my father’s study, something caught the corner of my eye. I stopped, took a pace back, and looked in, not certain what I had seen. I got it after a second or two: the VCR.

Like an idiot, I hadn’t actually looked inside either of the tape machines. I checked the one in the living room first. It was empty. Then I walked into the study, bent down and peered at the machine until I found the Eject button. I pressed it and there was an irritable whirring sound, but nothing happened. Then I realized this was because there was black duct tape across the slot.

As a warning not to put a tape in, or to prevent my father from doing so accidentally? Hardly – if the machine was screwed, he’d just replace it.

I tried pulling the tape off, but it was of a strength sufficient to bond planets together. I got my knife out of my jacket pocket. It has two blades. One is large and sharp and designed for cutting things. The other is a screwdriver. It’s surprising how often you need one right after the other. I flipped the sharp blade out and sliced through the centre of the tape.

There was something inside the slot. I cut and pulled at the remaining obstruction until the Eject button worked. The machine whirred aggressively, and popped its slot.

It ejected a videotape, a standard VHS. I took it out and stared at it for a long time.

As I was slowly straightening up, my father called from the stairs.

‘Ward? Is that you?’ he said.

After a moment of light-headed shock, my body tried to move quickly toward a safe place it evidently believed existed somewhere else. It wanted to be some other place altogether. It didn’t know where. Perhaps Alabama. It tried every direction at once, to be on the safe side.

I leapt backward, dropping the tape and coming close to sprawling full-length on the floor. I snatched the tape up from the ground and stuffed it in my pocket, doing so barely consciously, feeling caught and guilty and in danger. Footsteps made their way up the last few stairs, paused for a moment, and then headed toward the study door. I didn’t want to see who made them.

It hadn’t been my father, of course. Just a voice that wasn’t entirely dissimilar, coming out of nowhere in a quiet house. The person I saw on the landing was Harold Davids, looking old and nervous and bad-tempered.

‘Goodness,’ he said. ‘You scared the life out of me.’

I breathed out like a cough. ‘Tell me about it.’

Davids’s eyes drifted down to my hands, and I realized that I was still holding my knife. I flipped the blade back in, started to drop it in my pocket, realized the tape was there.

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked, trying to sound polite.

‘I got your message from this afternoon,’ he said, slowly raising his eyes back up to look at my face. ‘I called the hotel. You weren’t in your room, so I wondered if you might be here.’

‘I didn’t hear the doorbell.’

‘The front door was ajar,’ he said, somewhat testily. ‘I became concerned that someone might have heard the house was unoccupied, and broken in.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s just me.’

‘So I see. I shall consider the crisis over.’ He raised a good-humoured eyebrow, and my heartbeat slowly returned to normal.

Back in the hall he asked why I’d called. I said it was nothing, a minor point in the will’s legalese that I’d subsequently puzzled out for myself. He nodded distantly and wandered through into the sitting room.

‘Such a lovely room,’ he said, after a moment. ‘I shall miss it. I’ll stop by every now and then, if I may, for any residual mail.’

‘Great.’ I didn’t bear him any ill will, but I didn’t want to spend any more time in the house. I went back up to my father’s study to turn off the computer. I’d noticed earlier that he had a ffiz! drive, and on impulse I dumped a backup onto the disk in the machine.

By the time I’d turned it all off and gone back out, Davids was standing at the front door, looking brisk once again.

I walked with him down the path. He seemed in no hurry to get back to his business, and asked about my plans for the house. I told him I didn’t know whether I’d be keeping or selling it, and accepted the implied offer of his services in either event. We stood by his big black car for a further five minutes, talking about something or other. I think he might have been giving me restaurant recommendations. I wasn’t feeling hungry any more.

In the end he lowered himself into the driver’s seat and strapped in with the thoroughness of a man who had no intention of dying, ever. He took a last look up at the dark shape of the house, and then nodded gravely at me. I suspected that something between us had changed, and wondered whether Davids had filed for later consideration the question of what Don Hopkins’s son might be doing with a knife that was so clearly not ornamental.

I waited until he was safely round the corner, and then ran to my car and drove the other way.

Chapter 6 (#ulink_9c2e2195-a853-5747-af88-d47830f090b5)

A small amount of money and only a little flattery got me a VCR in my room. Either the hotel was better than I’d thought, or my stunt in the bar had convinced the management that I was a guest whose needs were worth meeting. I waited with increasing impatience while a monumentally stupid youth made a mess of a very simple cabling job, and then shooed him out.

I took the tape from my pocket, and carefully inspected it. There was no writing on it anywhere. From the amount of videotape on the spool, it looked like it would run to about fifteen or twenty minutes, half an hour at the most.

I waited until my room-service coffee arrived. I wanted my environment just so. Eventually it came, still fairly warm. Miraculously, there were no fries with it.

I put the tape in the machine.

Four seconds of data hash, the white noise of null information.

Then the sound of wind, and a view of a high mountain pasture. In the distance, a postcard view of snow-covered peaks across a range – seen too briefly to identify. The foreground was a gentle slope covered in snow, cut off by a stern-looking building: no obvious coffee shop, or ski-wear emporium. There was no one around, no cars in the small lot. Out of season. The camera panned to show another administrative-looking structure, and severe grey clouds above. This view was held for a few seconds, the sound of a sleeve flapping in the wind discernible in the background.

Cut to an interior. The camera was held low, as if covertly, and the scene only lasted a few seconds. I rewound, paused the clearest image. It wasn’t the world’s best VCR, and the frozen picture jumped a little, but I could make out the public area of what looked like a ski lodge, with a cathedral ceiling. A long desk ran along one side, presumably the reception, but currently deserted. There was a large painting on the wall behind it, the usual easy nonsense by some overpaid and under-talented fraud. I could see the left-hand side of a towering fireplace, constructed out of river rock. An ornamental fire generated well-behaved ambience in the bottom. Nut-brown leather armchairs were carefully arranged around low coffee tables, each featuring a heavily varnished wooden sculpture celebrating the sentimentally revered wildlife of the old West: an eagle, a bear, a Native American – none of whom survived the old West in any great numbers.

I flipped the tape off pause and, on second viewing, saw that someone had been about to enter the area just before the scene cut. There was a shadow along the wall of a corridor leading off the top of the space, the sound of footsteps on stone.

Then a final exterior, back out in the parking lot. A little time must have passed since the first shot – assuming it had even been taken on the same day. The wind had dropped and the sky was a clear and savage blue. A medium shot of the stern building, which I assumed must have been the one we were just inside. A number of figures stood in the snow in front of it. There were perhaps seven or eight of them, though it was difficult to tell because they were all dressed in dark clothing, and standing close together, as if in conversation. No faces were visible, and all I could hear was the wind – except for right at the end, when whoever was holding the camera said something, a short sentence. I listened to it three times. It remained inaudible.

Then, as one of the figures seemed to start to turn toward the camera, the screen cut back to white noise.

I paused the tape, stared at the screen as it jumped and fretted. I didn’t know what to make of what I’d seen. It wasn’t what I’d expected. From the quality of the image, it looked like the footage had been obtained using a digital camcorder. I hadn’t seen anything like that in the house. The video could have been shot pretty much anywhere in the mid- to Northern Rockies, Idaho, Utah, or Colorado: but it made sense for it to be somewhere in Montana, and probably nearby. I knew the kind of place it showed. Compounds for the rich, the country’s most beautiful areas carved into private homesites so the wealthy could slide down mountains without fear of bumping into anyone of average income. Some had gated security, most didn’t even need it. Put one foot over the border and you knew whether you were welcome. Anyone thinking of burglary would slink right back out, stung to their very core.

My parents probably knew people in the area who’d got themselves a home with ski-in, ski-out convenience. My father might even have sold it to them. So what?

I restarted the tape.

Real noise. Music, shouting, loud conversation. A face, blurred and very close up, laughing uproariously. It fell across the frame to reveal a bar in the throes of a boisterous good time. A long counter ran down one side of the room, ranks of bottles and a mirror behind. Men and women stood in droves around it, bellowing at each other, at the barmen, up at the ceiling. Most looked young, others were clearly in middle age. Everybody seemed to be smoking, and the murky yellow lighting was hazed with clouds. The walls were plastered with posters in rainbow colours or stark black-and-white. A jukebox was working overtime in the background, cranked up so loud it was distorting out both its speakers and the microphone and I couldn’t even tell what the song was.

It was obvious this scene was much older than the first on the tape. Not only did the video look like it had been converted from 8mm film, but the clothes the people were wearing – unless this had been some kind of laboriously authentic retro party – said this was an evening back in the early ’70s. Terrible colours, terrible jeans, terrible hair. A look that said being ‘tidy’ had been judged and found wanting. My reaction was probably about the same as their parents’ must have been: Who are these aliens? What do they want? And are they blind?

The camera swept and bobbed through the bar, with a verve that suggested the operator was either under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs or very drunk indeed. At one point the picture pitched forward alarmingly, as if he or she had nearly fallen over. This was followed by a loud and prolonged belch, which degenerated into a violent coughing fit, the camera meanwhile held down so that it showed a patch of beer-slicked floor. Then it whipped back upward, and careered off into the fray as if fixed to a bumper car. My eyebrows crawled slowly up my head in bemused embarrassment, as I tried to get my head round the idea that it might be my father operating the camera. A few people waved or hooted as it moved past them, but no one called out a name.

Then the camera swerved abruptly round a corner, revealing an extension to the main bar area with people standing and sitting all around the sides. In the middle was a pool table. Some guy was hunkered down on the other side to take a shot. He was large and had a big nose and his face was almost totally obscured with hair and moustache and sideburns. He looked like a bear with the mange. Behind him wobbled a blonde woman with long hair, leaning on a cue as if it was the only thing holding her up. She was trying very hard to focus on the game, a frown of concentration on her face, but it looked like the world was getting away from her. Her partner didn’t seem like he was having a much easier time of it, and was taking a very long while lining up for his shot. Closer to the camera, on the near side of the table, was another couple, both holding pool cues. They had their backs to the camera and an arm round each other. Both had long brown hair. The girl wore a big white blouse and a long skirt in dark purples shot with green; the man sported bell-bottoms in tatty denim and an afghan waistcoat that looked only recently tamed.

The blonde girl looked up from the table and caught sight of the camera. She let out a whoop, and pointed at it with great vigour but extreme vagueness, as if she was selecting between three different images and kept forgetting which one she’d settled for. The pool player glanced up, rolled his eyes, got back to his shot. The brown-haired couple turned round, and I realized that my earlier embarrassment had been misplaced.

It wasn’t my father running the camera. I could tell this because the brown-haired couple were my parents.