Darker

  ‘Joey.’ She gave a grim smile. ‘I think you’ve known me long enough to realize you’re not going to have a chance in hell of talking me out of it. We are going.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Now.’

  ‘Jesus, Chrissie. You know what Michael said. If we get split up, that monster’s going to pick us off one by one.’

  ‘Why?’ She didn’t give him chance to answer. ‘Because Michael says so?’

  ‘You remember York. Those poor bastards; crushed to fuck they were—’ Joey’s eyes glistened. He took a savage gulp of beer. ‘Chrissie, love. I don’t want that happening to us.’

  ‘To you, you mean.’

  ‘OK,’ his voice came low and hoarse. ‘OK. I’m a tub of lard. I’ve got shite for brains. I know what you and Richard think. I know it from the look on your faces the moment I walk into your garden. Every time. Every time I walked through that bloody gate I saw it on your faces, “Jesus wept,” you were saying to yourselves. “Here comes Joey, sweaty armpits, shite for brains and personality to match.”’

  ‘Joey —’

  But he pressed on and she could see the sheer naked hurt in his eyes.

  ‘… “Let’s see how quick we can get rid of the stupid twat,’ you were thinking. But believe me, Chrissie. I thought a lot about you. I love your kids. I wanted to love mine, but when I see them they just look like pint-size copies of me. And I can see in them what people see in me. And it disgusts me.’

  ‘Joey,’ she said gently. ‘Look, don’t start talking about all this now; we have to —’

  ‘Why not now? There might not be a later. I might never get a chance to tell you what I’ve felt for year after fucking year. But always bottling it up.’

  ‘You’ll get a chance, Joey.’

  A fat tear bulged from his eye. ‘Will I?’ he croaked hoarsely. ‘So I’ll get a chance to sit down with you and tell you that I’ve dreamed about getting Sunnyfields developed, not for the money but just to prove to you that I’m not the family clown, that I’m not the big pork belly with shite for brains? That’s all I wanted. To prove to you and Richard that I could do something worthwhile for once, make the Biscuit Billy dream come true so that you’d say “Oh, we were wrong about Joey; he is an achiever.”’

  She guessed he’d been brooding about this for hours and now the words came tumbling out in that hoarse emotional voice. He looked straight ahead, brown eyes glistening, the beer bottle clutched in one hand. She listened to her brother pouring his heart out. It was the kind of speech a drunk might make, but she knew he wouldn’t be drunk after only three small beers. The wounds were deep, she realized. Stabs of guilt brought tears to her eyes. She remembered the times they’d avoided Joey or invented some excuse not to meet him socially.

  As he talked she sat beside him in the shade of the tree. Amy cycled round the pathways of the ornamental garden, and all Christine could hear was the bitter music of Joey’s outpourings.

  Eventually she wanted to tell him to shut up, that they needed to talk about getting away from Darlington House but she couldn’t bear the look of deep, deep hurt in his eyes if she’d tried to stop him talking.

  But the realization paced restlessly inside her head. It was saying, ‘Hurry, Christine. Take Amy away. It’s dangerous here. Get up and walk away, get up and walk away. Now, now, now …’

  Chapter 72

  Speed

  The car sat on the hard shoulder of the motorway, bonnet up. A breakdown truck reversed along the hard shoulder to hook up to it, orange lights flashing.

  Richard cruised by at seventy. Christ, he thought. If that should happen to us. We’d never make it to Darlington House before nine o’clock.

  Quickly he scanned the gauges, heart beating a little faster. All seemed fine. Temperature normal. Fuel tank still three-quarters full. But you didn’t know what screw was working loose somewhere in the guts of the engine, or if there was a nail on the road ahead.

  He pushed the sunglasses up the bridge of his nose and licked his lips.

  ‘Thirsty?’ Rosemary reached for the carrier bag between her feet.

  He shook his head as he overtook a milk tanker. ‘Nervous,’ he said, ‘very, very nervous. You OK?’

  She gave a faint smile and nodded. She ran her fingertips over where the crust of scabs had been. He guessed she still couldn’t believe that her face was in one piece and unscarred after all. What did make him uneasy was that after all she’d been through he was driving her to the heart of Michael’s lair.

  Poor kid had suffered enough. He couldn’t risk her getting hurt. After all, Michael wasn’t going to just sit back and let him take Amy away. He’d fight tooth and nail for her.

  Richard thought of making a stop at the next service station, then, when Rosemary got out of the car to stretch her legs, just driving away and leaving her there. She’d be damned annoyed; but she’d be safe.

  His eyes flicked up at a sign. NEXT SERVICES TEN MILES. Leave Rosemary there? Without a scrap of doubt, it would be for the best.

  In the garden at Darlington House Amy still rode the bike, shouting for the Boys to follow her. Joey’s bitter outpourings had at last run dry. He sat on the grass with the beer bottle in his hand. He looked tired, deflated, numb.

  Christine squeezed his arm reassuringly. Gently she said, ‘Joey. I want you to listen to me now. In about two minutes I’m going to ask Amy to ride the bike down to the lake at the bottom of the hill. Once I’m behind the boathouse I’ll be out of sight of the house.’

  Joey looked up at her with the hurt-puppy-dog eyes.

  ‘Joey, if you want to come with me I’ll meet you there at 4:15. It’s best we don’t go down to the lake together. It might make them suspicious.’

  She saw him look up at the house and she guessed he felt the unseen pair of eyes boring into him, too.

  ‘What about Richard?’ he asked.

  ‘I … I don’t know. There’s no way I can get a message to him. All I can hope for is that when he arrives here and finds I’m gone they’ll let him leave.’

  ‘You really think we’re prisoners here?’

  ‘I don’t want to stay here and find out.’

  ‘But this Beast; what if it follows us? We’ll be on foot and that thing’ll come tearing down on us like an express train.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to gamble that Michael’s been lying. OK, it did seem to hunt us, too. But then Michael’s always been with us. Perhaps it wants only him.’

  ‘But if he isn’t lying, it’ll —

  ‘Joey, please don’t try and talk me out of this. I’m going across to Amy now. She can ride her bike down to the boathouse with me. If you want to risk coming with me meet me there. Remember, a quarter past four.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘From what I can see there’s only a deer fence between the boathouse and that clump of trees. We’ll cut through there, then across the fields until we find a road.’

  He nodded heavily, his eyes looking as if they were covered with some slick film.

  She stood up. Something touched her as she looked down at his wounded expression. ‘Joey, I’m sorry we hurt you. We had no idea how you felt.’

  He looked up and gave a small shrug. ‘In this age of perfect communications we’re still failing to communicate with one another, aren’t we?’

  ‘Look, when this is over we’ll sit down together, have a real heart to heart.’

  ‘Thanks, Sis,’ he said gratefully. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t want to —’ He shut his mouth quickly, as if afraid of saying too much.

  ‘It’s four o’ clock. Give me a couple of minutes’ head start. Take the path by the tennis courts down to the lake.’

  He nodded again. She was going to walk away but something made her kiss the back of his neck impulsively then rub the top of his head with the palm of her hand. She’d do that when she had been Amy’s age and he was seven. She could even remember herself calling in that same voice Amy used, ‘Joey here. Kiss and rub of head.’
Then he’d give that broad delighted smile as she planted the smacking kiss on the back of his neck and rubbed the top of his head before she climbed the stairs to bed, leaving him to watch one of his favourite TV programmes, Star Trek or The Man From Uncle.

  As she went to find Amy, despite the heat, she shivered from head to toe and her eyes suddenly filled with tears.

  The speed crept up. Richard made a conscious effort to ease off on the accelerator. But again that voice nagged in the back of his mind.

  … up, hurry up, hurry up …

  What does Michael plan to do to Amy?

  … hurry up, hurry up. Not much time left. Still nearly two hundred miles of this Tarmac between you and your family. So much could go wrong. Nail on road; dirt in carburettor; hurry up, hurry up …

  The speedo reached ninety. He sat in the fast lane of the motorway now, overtaking lines of trucks and cars pulling caravans. Bridges whooshed by. Rosemary sat by his side, long hair flying in long rippling strands from the wind gushing through the open window.

  Leave her at the next service station, he told himself.

  The service station approached. He needed to indicate, then pull off into the slip road.

  But he kept on driving.

  … no time to stop … drive, drive, drive … the minutes are flying by. Faster, faster …

  But that wasn’t all of it. That fragile sixteen-year-old girl sitting beside him made him feel stronger. Perhaps that psychic ability hadn’t deserted her entirely and she sat there willing him to stay strong and focused.

  And right now he needed every shred of concentration and strength he could get his hands on.

  He had to get Amy away from Michael. His mind went back to what he’d read in the cottage. About Alexander the Great. How he controlled the Beast through a succession of teenage girls. Yes, they had the ability. But being in that symbiotic relationship with the Beast corroded them from the inside out. They aged quickly. They died young.

  Would that happen to his little Amy? The poor kid couldn’t win.

  If she failed to control the Beast she would be crushed by it.

  If she succeeded she might live a few more years controlling that bastard creature according to Michael’s instructions. But he imagined her aging fast: the Beast’s corrosive presence would dull her hair, teeth would drop out, abscesses would turn her gums into a cluster of yellow blisters; her internal organs would begin to fail one by one; her arms would become twisted, locked tight by muscle spasms. She’d end up lying in a mess of her own drool and diarrhoea, tumours budding along her spine. When she was too weak to control the Beast, what then?

  Tied up in a sack weighted with housebricks, then dropped kicking and whimpering into some stinking pond. Drowned like an unwanted puppy. Choking in the …

  ‘Richard …’

  He looked down at the speedo. The needle quivered against a hundred and ten. His hands gripped the steering wheel so tightly the veins bulged up blue through the skin.

  ‘Take it easy,’ she said gently, her voice nearly lost in the rush of air. ‘We’ll make it.’

  He managed a nod; his neck muscles achingly tight. He took his foot off the accelerator and allowed the car to slow to eighty. The roar of the tyres on the road became a soft rumble and what had been a grey blur flying under the nose of the car became road again.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I think I’d have managed to kill myself before now if it wasn’t for you.’

  ‘You don’t think I’m too much of a backseat driver, then?’

  ‘No.’ He managed to smile. ‘Not at all.’

  He only wished she could make the voice in his head go away. The one that endlessly repeated:

  … hurry up, you’re going too slow. Time’s running out. Hurry up, hurry up …

  Behind the boathouse Christine waited with Amy on the lakeside path. They were shielded from the house. All that stood between them and the cover of the trees was the iron deer fence. It would be easy enough to climb.

  ‘Can I take the bike with me?’ Amy asked.

  Christine shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart. It’s not ours to keep.’

  ‘Where’s Dad and that man with the white hair and the music thingy?’ She mimed playing the harmonica.

  ‘We’ll see Dad soon.’ She hoped she wasn’t telling her daughter a lie. ‘We’re just waiting for Uncle Joey then we’re going for a walk.’

  ‘Will Michael come?’

  ‘No, hon, he’s busy.’

  ‘Do you think he’ll let me stroke one of his reindeer?’ She pointed to where the small herd nibbled at bushes.

  ‘Perhaps. Come and stand by me, Amy.’

  ‘Why are we hiding behind this shed for?’

  ‘We’re not, we’re waiting for Uncle Joey. Whenever he decides to get himself down here.’

  She looked at her watch. 4:20. She had said she’d wait until 4:15 before leaving. But she knew she couldn’t just leave her brother here without giving him just a few more minutes. Although three years younger, she’d stuck up for him at school when he’d been bullied; and she’d sat with her arm round him on the settee when, as a child, he’d cried for his mother.

  The minute hand reached twenty-five past. ‘Come on, Joey,’ she urged. ‘Time to go.’

  She was looking at her watch again, trying to persuade herself to give him another two minutes, when she heard someone approach through the bushes. At last, she thought, with a surge of relief. It’d only take seconds to climb the fence and be away through the woods.

  ‘Come on, Amy. Leave the bike. It’s …’ Then she found the words wouldn’t come out of her mouth any more.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Michael smiled. ‘Devil nicked your tongue?’

  Chapter 73

  Growing Darker

  Christine stared in pure shock.

  She’d just not anticipated this.

  For a moment the world seemed to rush in at her. The insects in the lakeside flowers buzzed louder, the honking of swans hurt her ears and the sun became a furnace resting just above her eyes.

  She blinked.

  Amy spoke first. ‘Have you come to watch me ride my bike, Michael?’

  He smiled, the downturned eyes as gentle as a saint’s. ‘Of course I have, sweetie. Shall we ride it back up to the house?’

  Christine forced a smile but she felt puzzled. Why should Michael just happen to stroll all the way down here to the lake?

  ‘Beautiful day, isn’t it?’ Michael said conversationally. ‘You know, Christine, by tonight all our problems will be over. We’ve got everything in hand to rein the Beast back in.’

  ‘Good … I’m glad.’

  ‘So, why were you thinking of running away?’

  ‘I wasn’t, I —’

  ‘Joey told me everything, Christine.’

  ‘Joey?’

  ‘Yes, because he’s a caring brother. He didn’t want to see you hurt.’

  Fury snapped through her. ‘Joey told you? The idiot …’

  ‘Joey,’ Michael called back at the bushes. ‘Come out, come out, wherever you are,’ he sang. ‘Your sister would like a word with you.’

  At first there was no movement, then Joey pushed his way sheepishly through the bushes, his brown eyes as guilty as hell. He looked down at the ground.

  ‘Joey, what in damnation are you playing at?’

  ‘Chrissie, I thought —’

  ‘You thought? You never did think, that’s your damn’ trouble.’

  ‘What are you shouting at Uncle Joey for?’ Amy sounded worried. ‘What’s he done wrong?’

  Christine advanced on her brother, her voice dropped to a whisper, but she wanted to swing her fist against the bridge of his big nose as hard as she could. ‘Why on earth did you tell Michael? For crying out loud, what were you thinking?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Chrissie,’ he said in that small beaten voice. ‘I really am. I didn’t want you to risk getting hurt. Or Amy.’

  Michael nodded, face serious
. ‘He’s right, Christine. If you and Amy took off by yourselves, how far would you get? The Beast would track you down and …’ He brought the open palm of one hand down into the other.

  ‘How the hell can we believe you, Michael? We don’t know if this thing is pursuing us – or is it just hunting you?’

  ‘Remember Monday? What happened to the two policemen at the roadside diner? You’re infected now. If we split up, it will track you all down, one by one.’

  Christine shot a look at Amy. Her eyes were big, not really understanding the words, but she was frightened by the tone of the voices.

  ‘Amy, there’s nothing to worry about, darling,’ Michael said softly. ‘Why don’t you ride —’

  ‘Amy,’ Christine broke in, angry that Michael was always trying to be the one to tell her daughter what to do. ‘Amy, just ride up to that big tree and back.’

  Amy pedalled away, the Rosemary Snow doll bouncing in the basket on the handlebars.

  ‘Now what?’ Christine sounded cold.

  ‘I … I really think it best if … if we …’

  ‘Shut it, Joey, I’m asking Michael.’

  ‘Everything is in hand for tonight, Christine. All we need do is wait until nine. The Beast will come here. This time I know what to do to bring it back under control.’

  ‘How will you do that? What’s the process?’

  ‘It’s really quite complex, so I don’t think it’s necessary to —’

  ‘You can tell me anyway.’

  ‘You’re the boss, Christine. The details are contained in the Codex Alexander. I told you about the document yesterday. It gives instructions which are remarkably similar to the techniques used by psychiatrists in modern hypnosis.’

  As Michael explained the process. Christine nodded, her eyes on Amy riding the bike along the track, scattering the small herd of deer, the black hair of the Rosemary Snow doll flying out in the breeze.

  Michael explained the details, his hands making those graceful movements as he spoke.

  She didn’t believe him for a moment. She’d seen the same body language, the same look in her son’s eyes when Mark told her some cock-and-bull story about how some teacher or other had kept him late when she knew all along that he and his friends had been getting up to some mischief in town.