Darkness Demands

  "Dad. In the car!" The man shouted at Stan as if he was a runaway dog. "Come on. Cynthia's in a heck of a state." He opened the passenger door for Stan, then jabbed a finger at the seat.

  "Just a moment, Stan. I'll give you a hand." John gently helped the old man to his feet.

  "Why do you do it, Dad?" Robert boomed. "Why do you try and run away?"

  "I was looking for Harry. We're going fishing."

  "God help us. Harry died years ago. It's OK." He snapped this at John. "I'll take him now."

  Robert grabbed the old man, and then with barely a pretence of gentleness shoved him into the passenger seat.

  "Harry wanted to go fishing."

  "I bet he did," Robert snarled. "Put your legs in so I don't slam the door on them."

  John's patience evaporated. "Take it easy with him. He can't move that quickly."

  Robert rounded on John. "What do you know what he can or can't do?"

  "Stan's exhausted. Show a bit of consideration, can't you?"

  Robert tapped his nose. "You, Newton! Keep this out!"

  With that he climbed into the passenger seat. Then he raised his hand. It was to draw the seatbelt across Stan's chest, but the old man raised his hands in fear as if to protect his face from a blow. Robert Gregory saw what the man had done and hurriedly pulled Stan's arms down, then fastened the seatbelt.

  John felt as if he'd been slapped himself. He looked from Stan to the ugly brute of a son-in-law.

  So, that's it, Gregory, John told himself as the truth crept home. That's why the old man thinks you're Adolf Hitler. You bastard, Gregory. You miserable, abusive bullying bastard.

  CHAPTER 27

  1

  Robert Gregory crushed the gas pedal to the floor, sending the car roaring down the old Roman road. Anger seared him. He managed to keep the rage bottled until he was well out of sight of the Water Mill, then he released it in a rush.

  "I don't believe it. I don't fucking believe it. You must lead a charmed, fucking life!"

  "I was looking for Harry," Stan Price said, frightened. "I wanted to go fishing."

  "Harry's fucking dead. And so should fucking you!"

  Unable to stop himself now, he leaned toward Stan, then snapped his elbow back into the old man's chicken bone chest.

  "Uh!"

  The flow of traffic at the main road stopped him from driving further. He shook his head marveling at the unbroken stream of trucks and cars. "How do you do it? How do you walk through this without so much as turning a hair?"

  Stan rubbed his sore chest. "Baby Bones."

  "Yeah, I'll Baby Bones you, you old dog."

  He raised his elbow again. Instead of flinching the old man began to laugh.

  Surprised, Robert didn't follow through. "Jesus Christ, what on Earth does a pile of skin and bone like you find so funny?"

  Stan reached down into the storage compartment in the door and pulled out two sheets of paper. On each one were a few lines of Gothic-looking handwriting.

  Robert Gregory snapped angrily. "What have you got there?"

  Stan laughed until his eyes watered. "You-you've been getting them, too… you've been getting them, too!"

  Robert Gregory snatched the letters. "I meant to throw these out. Some stupid brats have been playing a prank."

  "You've ignored them?"

  "Of course I bloody well have."

  The old man laughed again. A loud braying laugh, so raw with emotion that it unsettled Robert.

  "He's ignored them." Stan shook his head. Tears of laughter rolled down his cheeks. "He's ignored them!"

  At last a break appeared in the traffic. As Robert Gregory pointed the car's nose homeward he hissed through clenched teeth. "Go on, laugh. Because I haven't finished with you yet."

  2

  Thirty minutes after Robert Gregory drove Stan Price away John Newton still smoldered with anger. He makes my blood boil… an old phrase but an apt one. John paced the lawn, his blood running hot in his veins. John kicked the head off a dandelion. So help me, I should have grabbed Robert by the shirt collar and chucked him into the pond.

  There was no doubt in his mind that Robert Gregory ill-treated the old man. To what extent, however, he couldn't say. Stan had certainly expected to be slapped when Robert had raised his hand to get a hold of the seatbelt buckle just over Stan's shoulder.

  Now John remembered with a biting clarity that Stan had claimed someone was trying to kill him. John had written that off as a delusion cooked up by dementia. Now he wasn't one hundred percent sure. But what could he do about it? He'd need a damn sight more proof if he was to telephone the police. Should he talk to Stan's daughter, Cynthia Gregory? But she was so timid she'd probably back up any cock and bull story Robert Gregory came out with.

  John walked toward the orchard. From the shade of the trees Sam watched him. He paused to rub the dog's head. "It's a cruel world," John murmured. "Sometimes you find yourself standing by, watching shit happen and knowing you can't do a damn thing about it." The dog licked his hand. John smiled. "Well, if you get a chance, boy, you tear a bloody big lump out of Gregory's ass."

  For a while John did a few pointless chores to take his mind off what had happened: he made coffee, scratched out weeds from between the cracks in paving slabs, worked more grease into the sluice gate clogs up at the pond. The thing hadn't been opened in years. Now it had become a personal quest to free the mechanism. Pick the bones out of that one, Freud, he told himself, wiping the grease from his hands.

  He then went to weed the flowerbed. Hell's teeth. He should be writing. He knew that. But Stan's visit had unsettled him. Especially the ugly scene with Gregory yelling at the old man like he was a dog. Now he didn't think he could settle to do anything productive-or meaningful. That was until he saw the briefcase.

  Gregory's stormy arrival had wiped the briefcase from his memory.

  Now it sat there under the holly bush. Cobweb smeared, cracked- oozing with questions.

  He paused with a bunch of bindweed in each hand. So what was in there?

  A pile of baby bones…

  Despite himself he smiled as his runaway imagination slipped in the macabre answer.

  No. Unlikely. More likely it contained the letters that schoolmaster Kelly received in this very house seventy years ago.

  No sooner had he thought this then his curiosity ignited again. He wanted to open up that case, pull out the letters, then run upstairs to compare them with the ones that had arrived over the last couple of weeks.

  Would the demands be the same? Would they be phrased the same? And more importantly-God dammitt, the hairs rose on his neck-would the handwriting be the same? He dropped the weeds, then sat down on the bench with the briefcase on his knee.

  KELLY stenciled on the leather blazed at him. The thing might have been broadcasting OPEN ME! FIND OUT WHAT'S INSIDE!

  He fumbled with the lock that secured a hefty leather strap over the case before noticing a key tied by chord to the handle. The key had oxidized to a dull orange. Immediately the rust came off onto his fingers as he forced his now shaking fingers to grip the key, push it into the keyhole and turn it.

  C'mon, c'mon, c'mon…

  The key went in. No problem.

  It would not turn. Big problem.

  Damn it.

  He wanted it open now. He wanted to see what the case contained.

  There were answers in here. He wanted to get them together with the questions whirling round his head.

  Getting sweaty in the hot sun, he twisted the key in the lock. His fingertips tingled under the pressure. Kelly's briefcase didn't aim to yield its treasures easily. Grunting, John turned the key as hard as he could. Movement.

  Damn.

  The key wasn't turning in the lock. It was the metal barrel of the key that was twisting under the pressure.

  "Christ, John, you don't know your own strength… c'mon, apply a little science to the problem here."

  He blew into the lock, then examined w
hat he could see of the mechanism. After seventy years in the garage or wherever the metal parts had rusted tight as glue. Experimentally, as if prying apart the jaws of a crocodile, he attempted to pull open the briefcase, hoping the leather strap that held it shut would simply snap. Five minutes of sweating and cursing proved that the strap still held good and strong.

  Now it really was time to apply a modicum of intellect rather than a truckload of brute force. He carried the bag to the tool-shed, where he laid it on the workbench. After that, he aerosolled oil into the lock. For a moment the oil pooled, glistening, in the lock, then as if thirstily sucked from within it vanished into the lock. Now he'd have to stomp down his impatience for a while as he hunched over the bag, staring at it, willing the oil to run into the lock mechanism-lubricating, dissolving old grease, working into little levers and springs so he could unlock it. But this was going to take time.

  After spraying the lock again with oil he went indoors.

  Now he felt fired up. He'd start work on Without Trace. What's more he sensed an urgency now. It was more than just writing a new book. The Skelbrooke disappearances had knitted themselves into his life now. This was personal involvement. The more he learned, the more he could deal with what faced him.

  As he walked into the house the dog for no accountable reason threw up his head and gave a long howl that somehow wrenched at his heart. The howl echoed across the valley to the cemetery on the hill where the sounds faded and died amongst the gravestones.

  3

  "Miranda's not here!"

  Paul rocked back on his heels. He hadn't expected that kind of reaction simply for knocking on the Bloom family's front door. But there was Miranda's mother, white-faced, with two staring eyes that looked like balls of black glass set in her head. Jesus, he'd never seen such an expression on someone's face before.

  It made his skin crawl.

  "I'm sorry to have disturbed you, Mrs. Bloom," he continued politely. "But Miranda wasn't in school this morning so I thought I'd call to find out how…" His voice began to falter as those ball-like eyes stared at him as if he'd just disemboweled himself on her doorstep. "I wondered if she's… that she might have been ill or she'd…" He shrugged, finding it difficult to finish the sentence under a stare that rolled wildness, madness and terror all into one.

  What the hell's going on here?

  He'd only met Mrs. Bloom a couple of times but she'd always been friendly, even a little flirtatious. She had the same dark Spanish looks as Miranda, with neat short hair that was an attractive feathery black. Now she stood there at mid-day in a white bathrobe, her hair spiky, unpleasantly oily looking, and shooting those eyeball-rolling looks first at him, then along the street. She looked as if she expected Death himself to dance round the corner swishing his scythe this way and that.

  "Mrs. Bloom?"

  "Yes… what?"

  Her eyeballs rolled from him to the street. Again that look of distraction.

  "Mrs. Bloom, I wondered if I could speak to Miranda?"

  "No."

  "Is she out?"

  She rolled the eyeballs at him-they flared with absolute dread- then she looked away, this time over the rooftops as if she couldn't bear to look him in the eye.

  "She's not here. She's gone."

  "She's gone?"

  "Yes. Didn't you hear me! She's left home." The woman took a deep breath. "So don't bother coming back because you won't find her here."

  Paul was thunderstruck. "Did Miranda say where she was going?"

  "Of course not! She's just packed her things and gone."

  "Mrs. Bloom, I'm sorry. I don't know what to say. If she-"

  "Now go. Please go away." Her face twisted as she struggled not to cry. "Can't you see how upset I am?"

  A split second later Paul found himself staring at a closed door. From inside came the sound of the woman sobbing. For a moment he stood there stunned. He looked up at the windows hoping to see Miranda's face, but the drapes were drawn, giving it the appearance of a house in mourning.

  At last he walked away. Part of his world had been taken from him. For now shock numbed him, but he'd start hurting soon enough.

  CHAPTER 28

  1

  The cursor pulsed on the screen in front of him. In that disconnected state he entered after working for a while he wrote, lost in the words that appeared on-screen. He was no longer conscious of the world around him. The hot sun on the blind. The dog asleep beneath the desk. A wasp buzzing against the windowpane.

  Every now and again a sense came strongly to him that the laws of time had melted. As his fingers hit the keys he could picture Herbert Kelly typing in this room seventy years ago. Both he and Kelly had the same thing on their minds. Letters that arrived at the dead of night. Kelly must have asked himself the same questions that John Newton asked now. Where did the letters come from? How were they delivered? Who wrote them?

  Did Kelly wrestle with the concept that no human being was their author?

  He must have done. And Herbert Kelly must have paused typing, too, to stare at the wall lost in thought. No doubt as the same sun struck the blinds, as a wasp murmured against the window pane and as another dog in another decade dozed by his master's feet.

  John wrote, conscious that he'd become a near echo of Herbert Kelly. Both were the same age when the letters arrived. Both must have reacted the same way initially. Surprise, even amusement, followed by a degree of outrage that an intruder had crept onto their property. Then outrage giving way to unease and fear. Probably Kelly had gone the same route as John, hunting out others who'd received anonymous letters with demands for trivial gifts, yet uttering threats for non-compliance.

  John had been sitting at the desk two hours now, devouring books on British myths and legends, then typing with machine gun speed, filling the screen with black print.

  Someone once said that 'the past is another country.' That may be, but humanity had arrived at this country of the present, still carrying baggage from 'the old country' of long ago. And that old country of the past was awash with superstition. No one could escape it. It governed lives as much as the laws of government today. Similarly, to break any of those laws of superstition, either deliberately or accidentally, could land you in a whole heap of trouble. He ran through a list he'd written.

  It's bad luck to point at the sun. Bad luck, also, to walk counterclockwise around a church. And bad luck for all the following, too: not to bow to a new moon; to put shoes on a table; to open an umbrella indoors; to bring elder branches into the house, and most definitely it's bad luck to cut the fingernails of a child under the age of twelve months (the child would become a thief). Omens of death included seeing a butterfly at night, seeing a cricket leaving the house. Or if sunlight fell on a mourner at a funeral it meant that person's imminent death. On the other hand, you might encourage good luck to come your way by stirring your pans clockwise or nailing a horseshoe to your door.

  Even hardheaded lawyers couldn't shrug off the idea that the sun and the moon had supernatural powers over people. The Lunatic Act of 1842 coolly defined a lunatic as 'a person afflicted with a period of fatuity (fancy lawyer-speak for idiocy or lunacy) in the period following the full moon.' In short lawyers were even prepared to accept that seeing a full moon might drive you nuts.

  Smart people not only learnt to recognize bad omens, but also learnt measures to protect themselves from evil. Horseshoes were a favorite. If you were really smart you could tap into the occult powers. A girl curious to know the identity of the guy she'd marry would peel an apple then throw the peel back over her shoulder. If it formed a letter, then that was the initial of the man she'd get hitched to. And just because the calendar had scrolled on a few years that didn't drain superstition of its potency.

  John recalled a physics teacher at school; a practical man to the very marrow of his bones. Once he'd talked about leukemia treatment he'd received as a child. The teacher had finished off by saying, 'I'm healthy enough now, touch wood
.' And he'd actually looked for a piece of wood to touch. That had meant him walking a dozen paces to press his finger against a doorframe.

  Someone piped up, 'Are you superstitious, sir?'

  The teacher replied, 'No, of course not.'

  'Then why did you touch the wood, sir?'

  'Because I'd be a fool if I didn't.'

  Which just about summed up modern humanity's attitude to superstition, John told himself. Deep down we feel we must protect ourselves from some entity that has the power to inflict bad luck. So we still throw salt over our shoulder into the eye of the Devil, or we touch wood, or we avoid walking under ladders. Superstition in its many forms continues to leak into our lives. John scanned the list on the computer screen again.

  If you suffer from warts rub the wart with a potato, then put the potato in a dry place. As the potato shrivels the wart shrivels with it.

  To cure an alcoholic give him a drink from a cup made of ivy wood.

  To bring good luck to a new home bury a cockerel in the foundations.

  To protect your home from evil plant hedges of holly.

  On impulse he went to the window.

  "Just look at that, Sam," he murmured, "in every garden a holly bush. But we'll be all right, won't we, boy? Touch wood."

  2

  By mid-day the sun had taken the shadows. Temperatures climbed remorselessly now, drying the soil into scales. John fed the dog, then returned to the briefcase in the shed. The key wouldn't turn in the lock. He sprayed more oil through the keyhole. Damn. The contents could have been sitting in a valley on Mars for all he could get his hands on them.

  He realized he could cut the leather strap, but that would be like desecrating one of Herbert Kelly's cherished possessions. He could imagine the young schoolmaster of more than seventy years ago, setting the white Panama hat on his head, kissing his wife and daughters, then walking to the village school, whistling as he went while proudly swinging the briefcase.