Darker

  ‘Right, just stand up, Amy, and I’ll lift you out. There … Oh, just a minute, I forgot to wipe the jam off your mouth. There, all done.’

  ‘Who’s making the noise?’

  ‘What noise?’

  ‘The banging noise upstairs.’

  ‘We are upstairs already.’

  ‘I heard someone going bump, bump, bump up there.’ She pointed up at the ceiling.

  Richard, towelling her hair, said, ‘That’s the attic. There’s no one in there.’

  ‘I heard it.’

  ‘Probably mice with big boots on.’

  ‘It’ll be The Boys.’

  ‘Those naughty Boys get everywhere, don’t they, Amy? Now let me do your arms.’

  ‘Boys!’ she shouted painfully into his left ear. ‘Boys! Stop making a noise and come down out of the attic.’

  He grinned. ‘Tell them we’ll stick their heads down the toilet.’

  ‘And flush it.’ She beamed. ‘Boys! Come down from that attic meed-meditly-meed —’

  ‘Immediately?’

  ‘Come down him-meedittly or we’ll flush your heads down the toilet!’

  ‘Trouble with The Boys again?’

  Richard looked back over his shoulder. ‘Christine? I’ll get Amy sorted if you want to finish your magazine.’

  Smiling, she ruffled his hair. ‘Thank you, darling hubby, but I best see to Amy’s hair. You like it blow drying, don’t you, sweetie?’

  ‘And can I have my new slide in?’

  ‘OK, we can take it out before bedtime.’ Christine took over from Richard to towel the back of Amy’s neck gently. ‘Now let’s see to you. Stone me, you’re growing into a big girl, aren’t you?’

  As Christine dried Amy she talked to her in that low husky voice that Richard found so appealing. Hearing it would often transport him back to before they were married, when he’d phone her. She lived then with her brother and father in a huge town house. Invariably brother Joey would answer. ‘Oh, it’s you, Dicky. You’ll be wanting Chrissie.’ Joey would laugh a sleazy laugh. ‘I’d go get her for you but she’s gone up to her bedroom with a man.’ Another sleazy laugh. ‘God knows what they’re doing up there but it sounds like a wrestling match.’ Joey would continue with what he obviously believed to be a hilarious routine (while Richard forced himself to remain polite while hungering ferociously to give the idiot a slap the next time he met him). Eventually Joey would call Christine and for what seemed an unbelievable length of time Richard would hear doors opening and shutting in some distant part of the house, then footsteps echoing on bare boards along corridors that in his imagination stretched away into infinity. The footsteps would echoingly approach the phone, Joey would chuckle and say to Christine something that Richard could never catch but which sounded pretty seedy. Then a pause. Then he’d hear Christine’s husky voice, coming low over the line. That, to Richard, was one of the most thrilling sounds in the world.

  Now, twelve years later, it still sounded pretty good. Just as he was convinced the sky is blue and the sun always rises tomorrow, he was convinced he’d done the right thing marrying this husky-voiced girl with soft dark hair down to her shoulders and dark, nut-brown eyes.

  As Christine helped Amy with her pyjamas she chatted light-heartedly. ‘What were those rascally Boys up to this time?’

  ‘They’re jumping about in the attic. Dad’s going to flush their heads down the toilet.’

  ‘If anyone’s going to get their head flushed it’s Dad for giving you ideas about such things.’ She turned and raised her eyebrow at him. ‘I remember when Mark was five your Dad put ideas into his head; that there really were people inside the television set. I walked into the living room one day to find him pushing a biscuit into the ventilation slots in the back of the television because he thought Laurel and Hardy might be hungry.’

  Richard grinned. ‘Guilty, your honour. But I was young and foolish then.’

  ‘And I don’t believe you’ve changed for a minute,’ she said, smiling. ‘Like putting pies, still in foil containers, into the microwave and nearly blowing us all up.’

  ‘Just an oversight.’

  ‘And the time we had the barbecue and you set fire to the hedge?’

  ‘Could happen to anyone.’

  ‘How come I fell in love with a one-man disaster area?’

  ‘That’s because I’ve got the body of a Greek god.’

  ‘Yes, the fat one with the trident.’

  He laughed. ‘Now don’t go mocking my body. It’s suffered enough today.’

  ‘The inoculations? Did you have to wait long at the surgery?’

  ‘Not long. Anyway, it was the nurse who did the injections. With a hypodermic that I swear was as long as my arm.’

  ‘Did you feel a prick?’

  ‘With my pants round my ankles? Yes. Actually I did.’

  ‘Idiot.’ She threw a towel over his head as she followed Amy out of the bathroom. ‘My God, I wish I’d been there to see your expression as she rammed it in.’

  ‘Sadist.’ Richard smiled, happy that his wife was in such good spirits.

  ‘Where does it hurt, Dad?’ asked Amy sympathetically.

  He pointed to his left buttock. ‘Just there, sweetheart.’

  Amy punched him on the bottom as hard as she could.

  ‘Ow! You little monkey, I’ll get you for —’

  ‘Ssh.’ Christine held her finger to her lips. ‘Did you hear it?’

  ‘Hear what?’

  ‘The Boys,’ sang Amy.

  ‘There.’ Christine’s dark eyes regarded the bedroom ceiling. ‘Can you hear it?’

  Richard listened. This time he had heard something. A sort of muffled clunking. Like something knocking against timber.

  ‘We haven’t got birds in the attic, have we?’

  ‘The Boys,’ added Amy her eyes bright. ‘We’ll flush their naughty heads.’

  Richard cocked his head to one side. ‘Well, I can’t hear anything now. It might be a seagull on the roof. They’re heavy brutes.’

  ‘Perhaps you should have a quick look,’ Christine suggested. ‘The last thing we want is bird poop all over the Christmas decorations.’

  ‘I can’t see that a bird’d get in there. There’s a window in the attic in the gable end wall but I know it’s shut.’

  ‘Shh. Listen.’ All three listened hard.

  Then it came. A loud rumble that vibrated the windows.

  ‘Well, that’s your answer,’ Richard said. ‘We’re in for a thunderstorm. I’ll just check the bikes are inside.’

  ‘Make it snappy, love, it’s looking as black as a gorilla’s whatsits out there.’

  ‘What a lovely turn of phrase you have, dear.’

  He hurried downstairs. In the living room Mark was watching a video where one robot was struggling to pull the head off a second robot.

  ‘Mark, do you want to show me the blood?’

  ‘Too late, Dad.’ He nodded at the window. Outside, rain had begun to fall with the force of a jet wash. Then came a crash of thunder that, Richard would have sworn, sounded like a gigantic hammer had fallen upon the house.

  Chapter 8

  Living Pains

  Moonlight. Meadows. Thistle leaf pricks her shin. Tree. Branches starkly naked; the abandoned house where two windows shine like the eyes of a ghost. And then comes the groan. Rolling across the night. It sounds like the dying song of some lost and long, long forgotten god.

  Here comes my Destroyer.

  Unconscious in the hospital bed Rosemary Snow dreamed the same dream. She had no way of knowing if she’d dreamed it a hundred times, a thousand times or a hundred thousand times. Always the same:

  The destruction of the farmhouse.

  The crushing of the tree.

  And then the agonising hunt, with her pursuer destroying all that lay in its path. The chase only ending as she leapt from the cutting into the coal truck. Then nothing.

  But although the events’ sequence was always i
dentical, the fabric of the dream had begun to alter. As if each time the image of what pursued her grew a little clearer. As if she watched something solid and identifiable emerging from a fog. Perhaps something she had known once, only forgotten.

  Now she began to see tantalizing details of the thing that had pursued her so mercilessly across the field.

  She saw —

  Christ!

  Pain. A ball of flame shot like a meteor through her body. It came again: something hot and stinging being forced between her legs. She sensed it moving up higher inside her stomach.

  A tiny part of her mind remained conscious but hid deep inside her brain like someone hiding inside a concrete bunker during a nuclear war. They feel the shock waves of exploding hydrogen bombs and scramble from corner to corner trying to find the safest place.

  Someone’s raping me, she thought. Some fat-bellied hospital porter sees me alone in the room late at night. He chuckles. ‘Oh, look what we got here, all warm and soft in the dark. As long as it’s got a pulse and don’t tell mamma I don’t mind.’

  The bolt of fire came again, ripping a burning path up between her legs, up through her stomach to crush her lungs. The conscious fragment of Rosemary Snow ran frantically inside her skull looking for somewhere to hide; somewhere where the pain wouldn’t find her and —

  —and bear down onto her like some fat bull of a man stuffing a whisky bottle inside her.

  Fucked by Jack Danniels and he never asked your name, Rosemary Snow.

  Now the sadist pushed a needle through her cheek as far as her teeth. He forced harder. The needle passed through her cheek and grated between her teeth to spear her tongue. She tried to scream but nothing above a murmur reached her lips.

  Fat Belly, the hospital porter, forces in the whisky bottle. This time it went all the way up, a burning lump of sheer pain that went up beneath the pubic bone, splitting her fallopian tubes like pasta, bursting her womb like a balloon; this time it didn’t stop: the ball of fire scraped its way through her blood vessels down through her arms, down to her fingertips; more needles penetrated her face; a hacksaw started to grate away across her left knee cap.

  ‘… hear me … Can you hear me? I’m a nurse. You’re in hospital. Can you hear …’

  So she wasn’t being tortured, realized the conscious fragment of her, balled away in the corner of her mind. What the pain meant was that she was slowly waking. Christ, she must have been mutilated by the fall into the coal truck. Now she lay like a broken doll in some nameless hospital: stitched, sutured, bandaged, kept alive on baby food and saline.

  She tried to open her eyes. With an effort they peeled open. She’d expected a brightly lit hospital ward and the nurse’s face.

  Instead it was gloomy. The ceilings were low and sloped down at either side of her. She saw a small window at the far end of the room. The impression was of dust, cobwebs and objects stacked carelessly here and there. On a table a pile of Christmas lights, beside those a box of Christmas decorations, plastic sacks: one had split; magazines poured out.

  She didn’t tell herself to turn her head, but constantly the image panned from left to right as if she was watching a film. Suddenly the image would go into a close-up of bare floorboards on which sat a green rucksack; then there was a dressing table; then an exercise bike, lying on its side.

  At last Rosemary realized she wasn’t actually looking through her own eyes. Maybe the old dream of the chase across the countryside had been replaced by a new one. Of her, or someone, sitting in what seemed to be an attic full of junk.

  In the distance she heard a muffled female voice calling, ‘Mark? Mark … Switch off the computer now. It’s time for bed.’

  Rosemary Snow dreamed she saw a hand glide like a grey fish from out of the gloom in front of her, just as if she was watching her own. She saw it open the rucksack. She saw it reach inside and pull out a handgun; a dull metallic gleam twinkled along the length of its barrel; another hand moved into view, pulled out a magazine of gleaming bullets from the butt of the gun, then snapped it back home.

  The image shifted again. This time she saw a dusty mirror fixed onto the dressing table. And this time she saw a face reflected back.

  It was the stranger’s face. That same stranger who had pulled up alongside her in the white BMW and told her to climb inside.

  Chapter 9

  Firing Rockets at the Sky

  ‘Dad, can we stick woodlice in the end?’

  Richard grinned. ‘It’s not referred to as the end, it’s the nose cone.’

  ‘Well, can we stick woodlice into the nose cone?’

  ‘Best not. Your mother’ll be along in a moment and she’s not keen on you torturing defenceless creatures.’

  ‘Woodlice can’t feel anything.’ Mark beamed his widest smile. ‘I’ve stood on tons and not heard a single one scream.’

  ‘Dad. Da-ad! Can I press the button?’

  ‘Good grief, not yet, Amy. If you press the button that rocket’ll fly up my left nostril at three hundred miles per hour.’

  Amy chuckled delightedly and pressed the button anyway.

  ‘Amy’s trying to fire it, Dad.’

  Richard grinned. ‘Don’t worry, son. I removed the battery from the control pad. Now, if you just stand back I’ll pop the rocket on to its launchpad and we’re ready for countdown.’

  ‘Ten-nine-eight-six-three-two —’

  ‘No. Not yet, Amy, sweetheart,’ Mark said in a near mimicry of his mother’s voice. ‘Dad’s not ready.’

  ‘Hurry up, hurry up! I want to fly it.’ Amy, dressed in a pink cotton dress and engine driver’s cap, jumped up and down excitedly with a grin so impossibly wide Richard would swear that one day the ends of her lips would meet up somewhere at the back of her head.

  Richard had brought them out here on to Sunnyfields first thing after breakfast. After the thunderstorm of the night before they’d woken to blue skies and a sun already hot enough to sizzle bare arms and necks.

  The rocket had been his idea. When he’d seen them in a local model shop a couple of months ago he’d been unable to resist buying the thing. Immediately it’d brought back childhood memories of him playing for hours and hours with those little balsa wood gliders. As a glider soared on the air currents he’d imagine himself into its cockpit so vividly that his stomach responded to the glider’s swoops and dives as if he was actually flying. He’d naturally thought his ten-year-old son would be equally captivated. Yes, OK, Mark did enjoy flying the rocket but it hadn’t captured the boy’s imagination as much as the pocket-money gliders had captivated a ten-year-old Richard Young.

  ‘Woodlice in the nose cone’d make it more interesting, Dad?’

  ‘Not today, my laddo, your mother’ll be here any minute.’ Richard concentrated on readying the rocket for its voyage into the hot summer sky above Sunnyfields, smiling as he worked, as he experienced once more a buzz of that old boyish enthusiasm.

  The rocket, standing waist-high with yellow nose cone and fins, resembled an elongated version of the cardboard tube you find in the middle of toilet rolls. At first, it had struck Richard that the rocket appeared too flimsy; pessimistically, he’d reckoned it would last a couple of flights before becoming terminally busted. He’d been surprised to find it ruggedly survived flight after flight.

  ‘I’m ready, Dad,’ Amy called.

  ‘Me, too,’ replied Richard as he finished slotting the rocket onto the dowelling tripod that constituted the launchpad. ‘Right, I’ll just pop the battery into the launch controller, like so, and Free Bird 2 is now ready for lift off.’

  ‘Stand back, everyone,’ yelled Mark, sprinting to a safe distance. Amy tried to follow him but as the launch controller was connected by a limited length of flex to the launch pad she ended up dragging the pad and rocket after her across the grass.

  ‘Whoa.’ Richard ran forward to straighten the rocket. ‘Right, ready to go again?’

  ‘Yep!’ she squealed with excitement.

 
‘Pity we haven’t got any woodlice astronauts,’ commented Mark.

  ‘Just think, Mark. Seven hundred years ago when we had bows and arrows, the Chinese were using rockets. They’d fix an iron spike on the end, point it at the enemy and —’

  Amy pressed the button. With a powerful whoosh the rocket blasted skyward in a blur of yellow, covering the thousand-foot-high journey in barely more than two seconds. A trail of white smoke streamed from its tail. As it almost disappeared from sight into the dazzling blue Richard heard the faint pop that told him the ejection charge had detonated; there was a puff of white smoke high above their heads and seconds later the rocket came swinging down to the earth a hundred yards away beneath its parachute.

  He watched Amy and Richard running hand in hand through the knee-deep grass towards the rocket’s landing site. Often the pair could argue like cat and dog but today they were enjoying one another’s company, with Amy every so often dashing up to Mark to make him kneel down so she could plant a wet kiss on the back of his neck.

  On an easy going take-us-as-you-find-us kind of day like this with everyone in a good mood Richard could almost enjoy looking out across Sunnyfields. Outwardly it was a pleasant stretch of countryside richly covered by plants with exotic names such as Venus’s Looking Glass, Scarlet Pimpernel, Red Dead Nettle, Groundsel, Fool’s Parsley and Shepherd’s Purse; sometimes you could even find Giant Puffballs which, although looking like bare skulls against the ground, tasted surprisingly good when roasted like a joint of beef.

  But in the house a filing cabinet contained reports labelled Sunnyfields – Topographic Surveys. Automatically he could reel off the findings of what lay beneath the rye grass and Cock’s Foot: detailed texts concerning the soil mechanics. The equivalent for a human being would amount to a detailed medical examination. And the diagnosis would be terminal.