Deeply unconscious in the hospital bed, Rosemary Snow lay dreaming. She was oblivious to the stitches that had rejoined her left cheek to the rest of her face, or the dark bruises that mottled her skin as plentifully as the black spots on a Dalmatian dog.
Rosemary dreamed of the moon shining on a meadow and cold air against her skin. And the groan.
Now she stood in the field, staring at the farmhouse with its two upper windows shining in the moonlight; the pink roses around the door.
And always the groaning.
The dream repeated itself endlessly like a tape loop running round and round inside her head.
The weight settling onto the house, driving the roof down with a crash, blowing out the two windows in a gust of shattered glass.
Then came her Destroyer. She ran. It followed remorselessly, crushing plants, bushes, fences, road signs.
She ran and ran. But she knew it gained on her. Her legs ached, her stomach hurt, lungs burned. She couldn’t outrun it. It would crush her.
She jumped the fence. Her feet slipped from under her and she was caught by her lasso of hair by the fence post. To her right fence post after fence post snapped; the fence rails slammed earthward beneath the crushing weight. A clump of dandelion clocks exploded in a spray of misty white.
Here comes my Destroyer, she thought in a way that was eerily detached; the nearest fence post to her shattered into splinters. This is how it ends for Rosemary Snow.
Above her, the still summer’s night air was suddenly stirred; displaced air gusted into her face, then she sensed something rush down at her like the hammer of God.
She screamed.
Instinctively she crouched into a ball to protect herself. But a concrete bunker couldn’t save her now.
Then she realized something that astonished her: I can move. I can bloody move! The very destruction of the fence beside her had freed her hair.
She rolled sideways just as the grass she’d been sitting on was crushed to green paste.
In one second flat she was on her feet again and running and running, and chewing down massive lungfuls of air. Behind her the ground shook beneath the weight of something she could not see.
She glanced back as she ran through the oilseed crop. The thing followed like a speedboat cutting across a lake of yellow paint, throwing up yellow petals in a plume shaped like a gigantic V.
Somewhere in the darkness ahead the train gathered speed downhill; its horn cried across the nightscape like a soul damned to hell.
Run, Rosemary Snow! Run! Run!
Figures ran at her side. Kirk Bane and the rest. They willed her to outrun this thing – her Destroyer.
If you die, we die, they seemed to be shouting at her. Live, Rosemary Snow, live! You’ve work to do, Rosemary Snow.
The sound of wheels turning on track quickened.
Behind, the V-shaped yellow plume drew ever closer to her.
Where was the rail track? She couldn’t see it in the darkness. Only the rumble of steel wheels and cry of the horn.
Yellow flowers rained down onto her. Confetti at a funeral, she thought, dazed – your funeral, Rosemary Snow. Your funeral. That thing crushes you? Wow! Only gonna need a flat coffin, Rosemary. Flat as a paperback book. Don’t need a hole in the ground, just a slot as thin as a mailbox opening. Hell, you’d never be as thin as this even if you didn’t eat for a year, Rosemary Snow.
Red Zed, Red Zed, Red —
‘No! I’m … not … going … to … DIE.’ She screamed defiance at the sky. ‘He is! He is!’ And she pictured the face of the stranger who’d brought her here.
To her astonishment she found herself running alongside the cutting. Ten feet below rumbled the steel trucks piled high with coal. They moved faster than she herself was running. The train was too fast; the distance too great.
Behind her a telephone pole was snapped in half as easily as a boy breaking a pencil; cables cracked across her back like whips.
Rosemary Snow leaped from the banking like she was leaping into a swimming pool.
What followed the bolt of blue light searing through her brain was darkness. A darkness that grew darker, impossibly darker …
… and darker …
In the hospital bed, saline drip tube running from her arm like a transparent worm, she never stopped dreaming the same dream. And each time she dreamed it, the thing that followed her grew a little more distinct. As if the dream itself was enhancing some enormously attenuated image. Tantalizingly something was emerging from the darkness. Something that she knew she would one day see. And recognize.
Moonlight. An open meadow. A tree, its upper branches starkly naked. An abandoned house with two windows shining like wide, sightless eyes. The night air closes around her body like the ice hand of a dead man. And then the groan that rolls across the night-time countryside. It sounds like the dying song of some lost and long-forgotten god.
And here comes my Destroyer.
The dream had begun again.
Chapter 6
Car Wreck
When Richard Young saw his daughter on the far side of the road he froze. He saw; but he did not believe. And what he’d do next he, for the life of him, did not know.
Dressed in a white T-shirt, jeans and sandals she stood statue-still. Something fascinated her in the field at the side of the road; her eyes fixed on it, she stood apparently oblivious to the juggernauts roaring by, their slipstream blowing her shoulder-length hair this way and that as if she stood in a gale.
Richard asked himself: How the hell did she manage to cross the road without getting hit? He felt the strength run out of him, leaving him so absurdly weak he didn’t know if he could actually put one foot in front of another.
An appalling thought suddenly struck him. What if Amy turned and saw him? He could imagine a big smile lighting up her face, then putting her head down to run toward him, just as she did when he walked towards the house on returning from work.
He found himself staring at her, willing her to keep watching the bird or rabbit or whatever it was that fascinated her. He waited for a gap in the traffic.
Trucks, tankers, mail vans, cars, motorbikes roared by, until Richard told himself the bloody things must be welded together nose to tail in an unbroken line. For Christsakes, you bastards, I need to get across the road to my little girl so you morons don’t put your tyres across her back! Close to screaming at them, he inched forward on to the road itself.
Then Amy turned, saw her dad and smiled delightedly. In the next second she’d charge toward him oblivious to the traffic.
‘—king idiot!’ was all he heard shouted from some trucker’s window; but he paid no attention as he hit the far side of the road. Scooping Amy up into his arms, he held her so tight that later he was surprised he hadn’t cracked a couple of her ribs.
‘Dad. I want to show you something.’
‘Amy,’ he panted. ‘What the … what on earth are you doing here … you know you’re not allowed out of the garden by yourself.’
‘Dad, I want —’
Earlier he’d wanted to slap her. Now he gave her a heartfelt kiss on her forehead. ‘Jesus, Amy. Don’t ever do that to me again … OK?’
‘OK.’
He kissed her again and this time he felt his heart begin to subside to a more normal beat. Even so, his legs shook. Jesus, you don’t come much closer to losing your child than this.
‘Amy. You don’t know how close you came to giving your old dad heart failure. Come on, tea time. If we can get across this f … flipping road.’
‘Daa – aad, I want you to see something.’
‘Show me later. Come on, home time. What your mother’s going to say I don’t know.’
As he hunted for another gap in the traffic so he could carry Amy home she screamed in his ear and her body went so rigid it shook.
‘Jesus Christ, Amy. What’s wrong?’
At first he thought she was having some kind of fit; her face turned bright red and her
eyes glittered in a way that was nothing short of disturbing.
It was then he noticed she was pointing with her arm outstretched at something in the field.
‘OK, Amy. OK. We’ll see what it is, then home.’ Now he was over the shock, once more he was tempted to smack her for wandering away like this. And her behaving like a spoilt brat didn’t help matters. Even so, she’d not been like this before; it had felt as if her whole body had been electrocuted, leaving her rigid and quivering. He decided to humour her, let her show him a big daisy or beetle or whatever it was that had caught her attention, then get the hell home, and maybe let off some steam by giving her a good yelling-at.
‘What is it, Amy? What’re we supposed to be looking at?’
‘There! There! No. Not in the field. Down there.’
Between the broad roadside verge and the field ran a ditch a good six feet deep, maybe ten feet wide and with enough water to reach perhaps as far as a man’s knees. He looked into it. That was when he saw the white BMW.
‘Car!’ she shouted triumphantly. ‘It’s a car! Why’s it down there, Dad?’
‘Jesus,’ he breathed, his eyes taking in the scene. It didn’t take a genius to see what had happened. Although the road here was straight as a ruler, the car had left it a good hundred yards to the south, leaving two parallel marks in the short turf before crashing down into the ditch maybe fifty yards upstream. Richard saw the car must have been moving at a hell of a pace because it had continued along the ditch, channelled by the near-vertical banks. It had gouged up a mound of silt as black as old engine oil that all but covered the front half of the car.
Amy protested at being carried and he set her down on her feet. After first making sure he’d got a good tight grip of her hand, he crouched down to get a better look at the car itself. Its roof was perhaps a couple of feet below the top of the banking.
The white BMW looked new. In fact, he could even see that plastic sheets still covered the back seat. He look closer, his eyes widening in surprise. Through the rear window he could see that the back seat appeared to be covered by a layer of bank notes.
Amy chuckled. ‘Can we put our car down there, Dad? Dad, stop pulling me. What you pulling me back for?’
Richard didn’t want Amy to see any more, because he’d just noticed a reddish-brown handprint on the car’s roof. Blood. He’d no doubt about it. The doors were held shut by the mud banks of the ditch pressing at either side. The driver or a passenger had climbed through a door window and pressed down on the roof, and they’d been bleeding badly enough to leave a perfect handprint.
Richard looked along the ditch and then scanned the field beyond. It was possible whoever had escaped from the car lay injured, even dead nearby. Equally possibly there might be more injured or dead passengers in the car. He didn’t want Amy to see something that sure as hell wouldn’t be a pretty sight.
‘Can we climb down and look inside, Dad?’
‘No,’ he snapped, shocked by her ravenous curiosity; then added gently, ‘No, love. Mum and Mark are worried about you.’ This would cut no ice with Amy and he automatically tacked on a bribe. ‘And your tea’s ready. Mum’s baked a cake.’
Amy gazed down at the car, fascinated. ‘Can we come back and play here later?’
‘Not tonight, love.’ As he spoke he looked up and down the ditch again, expecting to see a figure lying face down in the water. He knew he should check inside the car but he couldn’t leave Amy up here beside the busy road. And he couldn’t take her down with him. He just didn’t know what he’d find in the car.
All he could do, he reasoned, was get Amy home, then telephone the rescue services. Quicker the better. If no one had seen the car plunge into the ditch chances were that it had happened last night when the road was quiet.
Heart pounding, he picked Amy up and waited for a gap in the traffic. Almost straight away he saw it approaching.
This time he stepped into the road and held up his hand, palm outwards. The police car pulled over to the side of the road. Heaving a sigh of relief, Richard, with Amy still in his arms, walked up to the car and told the policeman what he had found.
Chapter 7
Blood
‘Dad, there’s blood all over the path,’ Mark shouted as he climbed the stairs.
‘Blood? Where?’
‘On the path near the shrubbery. There’s splotches as big as this.’ Excited, Mark held up his palm to indicate the size. ‘And then there’s a big puddle of it by the lilac.’
‘Yuk, sounds gross.’
‘Do you think someone’s been shot?’ the boy asked hopefully.
‘Doubt it. I think we’d have heard the gunfire. Were there any feathers near it?’
‘No. It looks really cool; it’s all starting to go dark red and lumpy. Will you come and have a look at it with me?’
‘Sorry, no can do at the moment, Mark. Amy’s in the bath so I’m going to have to stay here and keep an eye on her.’
‘Mum could do that.’
‘Mum’s been working hard. She’s spent all day baking for your Uncle Joey’s garden party. So I reckon she’s entitled to put her feet up for a minute, don’t you?’
‘Aw, Dad. Come and see the blood. Amy’s four now, she’ll be all right for two … no, one minute.’
Richard looked down at his son’s expectant expression. The blood would no doubt belong to some poor bird that’d fallen victim to a cat or hawk but he had to admit he got a kick out of his son’s enthusiasm.
‘Okay, then,’ Richard said, smiling. ‘Amy can look after herself for a few seconds.’
‘Da-ad!’ came Amy’s shout from the bathroom right on cue. ‘Dad! Got soap in my eyes. It stings. IT STINGS!’
Richard smiled and shrugged at his son. ‘That’ll teach me to open my big mouth.’
‘Dad,’ Amy shrieked.
‘OK, Amy. I’m here.’ As he went in the bathroom he called back to Mark, ‘I’ll have a look at it with you later.’
Grumbling something about Amy stealing all the attention, Mark stomped off downstairs.
Richard soon managed to rinse the soap out of Amy’s eyes and it developed into a game with Amy squeezing the sponge on to her face, then blowing her cheeks out as she explosively released lungfuls of air and laughing so much she ended up with a mouthful of bathwater. After that Richard made bathfoam beards for both of them which they took turns at admiring in Amy’s Fisher Price play mirror.
‘Dad?’ said Amy through a huge white beard that would have done Santa Claus proud. ‘Do you think that mister got died in his car in the ditch?’
Richard smiled as he crouched beside the bath moulding a white bubble wig on his own head. ‘No, I don’t think the mister got died. I suppose he’s home now eating his supper.’
‘What about his nice white car?’
‘Mark watched the police tow truck pull it out this afternoon. I expect it’ll be all right after a wash.’
‘No one got died in it then?’
Richard looked at his daughter’s serious blue eyes above the foam beard. She’d obviously been thinking about the car and the fate of its occupants since she’d found it that afternoon. He told her that everyone in the car was fine, then shaped a couple of white devil’s horns on her head to take her mind off the car wreck. More than once he’d shuddered at the thought of what could have happened to Amy on the road that afternoon. And what if she had found a mutilated body lying torn and bloody on the bonnet of the car? Something like that could screw a child up for life. From what little the police had told him the whereabouts of the car’s driver was something of a mystery. They’d said that the driver hadn’t turned up to claim the car. Richard imagined the most likely explanation was that last night someone had had half a dozen beers too many and simply driven the thing off the road. Then probably tottered home to sleep it off to avoid ending up on a drunk driving charge. No doubt they’d read all about it in the Advertiser this week.
‘Dad, your beard’s dropped off.’
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They laughed as he scooped up the bubbles from the bath mat. ‘Don’t tell your mum about the mess, she’ll stick my head down the toilet.’
‘And flush it?’ Amy’s eyes were wide with wonder.
‘Yes, flush it.’ Richard said pretending to be terrified.
‘Mum! Mum!’ Amy shouted in glee. ‘Mum. Dad’s messing up your bathroom. Come and flush his head down the toilet.’
‘Oh, Amy! You’ve told on me.’
‘Gonna get you done, gonna get you done,’ she sang with a delighted grin showing through the beard.
Smiling broadly, Richard stood up. ‘Now you behave yourself while I get the towels from the airing cupboard. Promise.’
‘Promise.’
As Richard left the bathroom he happened to look up and noticed the hatchway lid to the attic had been moved. The lid was simply a white painted square of hardboard that rested on the timber frame of the hatchway. The board was so light it only needed a gust of wind or someone to slam a bedroom door to pop the thing off at an angle, leaving an unsightly gap. It really needed weighting with a chunk of timber but he’d got into the habit of simply standing on tiptoe and straightening the board with his fingertips.
‘Are you going in the attic, Dad?’ asked Mark from the bottom of the stairs.
‘No, I’m just straightening the board.’
‘It’s just that I need my rucksack from up there for when I go camping on Monday.’
‘It’s not in the attic, laddie. It’s where you left it last time. Wedged under your bed, no doubt with your dirty socks and underpants still festering away inside.’
Any hints that Mark was habitually untidy slipped as cleanly off him as a fried egg off a Teflon-coated pan.
‘Will you come and look at the blood, please, Dad?’ he asked hopefully.
‘Just give me a minute, kidda, I’m just getting your sister out of the bath.’
‘It’s all going black now and there’s this big meat fly crawling all over it.’
‘Scrumptious. Can’t wait to see it.’
Mark bounded eagerly downstairs again, no doubt on his way to stare in rapture at the blood once more and probably even give it a hefty stir with a stick. Smiling, Richard shook his head and went to find the towels. When he reached the bathroom the bathwater was already gurgling away down the plughole while Amy, holding on to the bath sides, slipped backwards and forwards on her knees.