Beast In The Ring

BEAST IN THE RING

Chapter One:

He had hanged himself with an ugly red nylon rope using a large knot jammed under his chin that forced his head up at a crazy angle and shoved his gaze to the heavens. He hadn't even had the decency to give himself a slip-knot, preferring to kick and struggle as he strangled. His hands hung out from the sides of his body as though he were trying to grab hold of the world he had left so violently. He had killed himself in his best suit, the light one, and it showed the urine stains of the dead and the wet of the recent rain.

"This is going to make a mess or everything," Ellie commented, straining up on tip toes to stare into his face. She studied him intently, then knelt down and dipped under his feet to straighten the other side. I thought it a peculiar thing to do, to move under the corpse like that. "I never thought he would be so stupid as to kill himself." She looked at me with almost a grin on her face. "Now what the hell do we do?"

I shrugged. I moved around him in a wide circle and stared up at his eyes in a vain attempt to read something into them. I couldn't see any magical message - his face was blank and his eyes hidden.

"What?" She asked.

"I was trying to imagine how he felt after he tied it. It must have hurt like hell as it choked the breath from him."

"I don't see how he did it," she said. "I don't see a ladder or box for him to launch himself from."  He was at least four feet from the ground.

"Oh Christ, don't tell me there was someone else involved."

I studied the mud beneath his body and couldn't see any footprints or the scuff marks of someone kicking their life away.

She grimaced and walked in front of him now, clearly fascinated. "It was pretty dramatic to do it here, wasn't it?"

"It was a pretty dramatic thing to do at all if you think about it."

I looked across the clearing towards the road and the empty car park in front of it. Give it a few hours and the vehicles would start to arrive with the early morning walkers but for now at four in the morning we had the place to ourselves.

"This is, of course, exactly what he intended when he killed himself here," I said, looking up at him once more. "He could have topped himself anywhere but he had to do it here in the woods on this very spot where our group meets. It is the ultimate act of desecration doing it so close to our holy ground."

"Yes, that is typical Howard," Ellie said. "He wanted to say a big "Fuck you!" to us all. The rain was soaking her clothes and I watched her blouse sticking to her skin with interest.

"I think he did the big "Fuck You" to himself as well: this is not exactly a user friendly act, is it?"

She smiled wrily. She liked my sarcastic humour.

"A stupid thing to do!" she said angrily. "I don't know if we will ever be able to rededicate the ground now. He has broken the Circle."

I thought before I answered. "I think that was broken last night when we were screwing in the grass."

She hesitated, nodded. "Probably."

She walked off into the bracken and I watched her curiously to see what she was doing. She hunted the ground until she picked up a branch that she hauled out of the undergrowth and half carried, half dragged back to the edge of the picnic area where Howard hung. She experimented in balancing it, jerked it high and then poked him hard until he swung.

"What did you do that for?" I asked, appalled. She shrugged and threw it aside.

"We'd better make sure nobody finds us here," she said. "This would be a bad thing to explain, you and me here at this time of the morning with a corpse between us and trying to explain what we were getting up to last night. I wouldn't find this funny at all if it got into the papers tomorrow."

................