by Tim Lebbon
“Just you stay away from him, Nikki!” Dan said again, scared at the tone he was taking and knowing straight away that he had no authority here, not anymore. Something had changed, some fundamental rule of their father-daughter relationship had shifted since they had last spoken. But still he had to try. “He’s dangerous,” he said. “He …” Killed Jazz, he wanted to say. He killed Jazz. But remonstrating with Nikki was no way of breaking that news.
Dan left his wife and daughter shouting at each other as he picked up the cordless telephone and dialled 999.
For a second there was a ringing tone. He’d only dialled the emergency services once before, the time he’d discovered Megan after the attack, and he’d been in such a state that he could never recall anything about it… didn’t know whether
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there was a dialling tone beforehand, the sound of ringing, what the person had said on the other end. So now when the ringing tone stopped to be replaced by a soft shush of static, it took him a few seconds to realize that something was wrong.
Megan and Nikki were still shouting. Nikki screamed but did not care, she could still feel the cold impact of Brand on her cheeks and chin so all was well with the world. Megan tried to stare past Nikki’s strange expression-part anger, most mockery-to see whether Brand was still in there. Dan shook his head, hung up and dialled again. This time there was no tone whatsoever. Not even static. Nothing.
“Phone’s dead,” he said quietly, but both his wife and daughter heard him. “My mobile isn’t working, must be the blizzard. I heard a tone just now. Briefly. Maybe a line’s down somewhere.” And if I keep on with this, he thought, I’ll convince myself it’s true. Then I can move onto ghosts, hollow earth and UFOs.
“It’s him,” Megan said. “He’s stopped the phones working.”
“Cut the lines?” Dan said, almost smiling at the TV-show melodrama of it all.
“No. Stopped them working.” Megan glared at Dan-at the blood and mud on his face and hands and the leaves stuck to his wet clothing-realizing what a fine disguise it could be. She glanced back at her daughter and saw the calm mockery in her eyes once again. Maybe he was watching through Nikki, maybe not. It was more disturbing to think that he was not … then that
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awful, adult expression was Nikki’s all alone.
“He can’t do that,” Dan said, still trying to convince himself of normality, disbelieving even though all the evidence was laid out before him. “Not the mobile, it’s the storm, maybe he cut the line-“
Megan felt the rage rising again and quietly begged God to ease it. Either He was not listening or He felt the rage was fine, needed, because her limbs turned hot and the skin of her face stretched as she grimaced and began screaming at her husband and daughter. Neither of them really knew the truth … or in Nikki’s case perhaps she did, and again that made it all worse. “He’s capable of anything! He can do anything, he will do anything, to rip us apart from each other. It’s God’s love he hates, and like it or not that’s what we have between us. The love of God! And for the love of God, I’ll do anything to stop him!”
“He’s just a guy, Mum.”
Megan spun on her daughter-for a second Dan thought she really was going to strike out this time-and shouted. “He’s just a guy who’s killed your boyfriend!”
Silence. Dan was watching Nikki, and so was Megan. The girl stared over her mother’s shoulder at a space on the wall next to the front door.
Killed her boyfriend … she shouldn’t believe it because it was unbelievable, but believe it she did. She should be shocked, stunned, distraught, terrified, but she was none of these. As she moved her gaze to the frosted glass and watched the strange shadows of snow falling beyond, she
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felt only content. Jazz … dead … maybe, maybe not. But if he was then there was always Brand, there was always Brand, and as she thought of him she felt the heat in her groin again, and her stomach muscles contracted and her eyes closed as she imagined his fingers running down her sides and across her hips.
“Nikki,” Dan said. He wondered just what he was going to say to his daughter when she finally turned to look at him. But she didn’t. Instead she turned and walked back upstairs. “Nikki, we have to stay together. We have to talk about this.” We have to call the police, he thought, how the hell can we call the police?
“I’m fine, Dad.” Seconds later she disappeared around the landing and her bedroom door clicked shut.
Megan and Dan glanced at each other, both lost within their own lies.
“God help us,” Megan said.
“I hope He will,” Dan replied, not believing but needing Megan to keep believing. However much it confused her, right now it was the only thing keeping her herself. “But for him to help us, we have to help ourselves, yes? I have to call the police. I’m going across to the Wilkinsons’ to use their phone.”
“Dan-“
“Megan, listen to me. I asked Brady to call the police. He can’t have done so, otherwise they’d be here by now. If Brand can kill Jazz he could have killed Brady. I just don’t know. But if he’s still around, I’d rather have the police here to deal with him than …” Than me, he was going
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to say. But that sounded so cowardly.
Was he? Was he a coward?
“I’ll go and talk to Nikki,” Megan said. “Tell her how much God loves her.”
For a few seconds Dan had the horrible idea that his family was in more danger from within than without. He really shouldn’t be leaving Megan, not now, not while she was so changeable. And Nikki …
But coward or not, brave or not-good husband and father, or not-he had to get in touch with the police. Maybe they’d have found the Freelander by now.
Going outside terrified him more than staying put. The fear made him feel brave. However wrong, that was the way things were.
“I’ll be ten minutes,” he said. Then he went to the cloakroom to wrap up warm and try to find the old baseball bat.
Megan mounted the stairs, wondering if she’d ever see her husband alive again. God willing, she thought.
God willing.
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The Book of Lies
Life is a lie. You strive, you struggle, you agonize and seek and despair and laugh and cry … and in the end you die. Nothing will stop that. Spend fifty years eating what you want, drinking too much, fucking at random and living a criminal life of neglect and overindulgence; or live a hundred on a mountain top, eating lentils and meditating for eight hours each and every day. Either way, you’re dead. Your body turns to mush and your soul … well, what I know of souls is just too difficult. Actions speak louder than words. And actions that hurt can scream.
However much you run and hide and conspire and plan, I could open your neck, hold your carotid artery between my fingertips, and with one click of my fingers you’re dead. The end. Fuck you very much, goodnight.
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Life is such a lie.
Death, now …
It’s easy to mislead. It’s easier still to shock with the randomness of death, bring it home to dozens by killing only one, because even though death is something most people consider every day-however indirectly-and watch on the television, read of in books, talk about over their fifth beer whilst ordering another and lighting up just one last cigarette, most people rarely have to look it in the face and truly experience its unbearable depths. For most, death creeps up from behind.
You trust far too much. The sun will rise and the snow will fall, and there will be no obstruction in the road when you corner at fifty. You trust your daughter to love you and your wife to live through the freaky time she’s been having … you trust forgiveness because it is borne of love …
… you trust that you will never die. Because things like that just don’t happen to you …
And you trust your neighbors to be alive when you go to ask an important favor of them.
Shock is an ally, and life
is a lie. Death is the only truth.
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Chapter Fifteen
There are three sharp raps at the door. It startles them, because the storm has been raging for almost two hours. Several inches of snow have already fallen. The last thing they expect tonight is visitors.
“I’ll go,” Frank Wilkinson says, groaning as he pushes himself up from the chair. His knee joints pop audibly and he rubs some warmth into them before standing upright. Myra is intent on the Australian soap they’re watching and she does not bother to acknowledge.
Frank walks through into their large hallway, wincing with every step. He’d been through a good many winters-seventy-six of them, in fact-but the last few years seemed to have been getting worse. Not so much weather-wise-this year was a freak in a period when milder winters
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encouraged the doom-sayers to scream of global warming and melting ice caps-but joint-wise. Too much football during his youth, Myra said. Old age, he countered. Either way, he always knew for days before when there was a storm approaching.
Curious. Today, his bones had only begun to ache as he watched the first snowflakes swirling down.
As he reaches the front door the visitor knocks again, harder this time, more insistent. Frank pauses. It’s snowing like hell out there-worse than the blizzard of ‘62, for sure-and they hadn’t been expecting anyone. They’d paid the milkman yesterday, the paper-boy called for his money on a Monday, and the half-lamb they’d ordered from the local butcher wasn’t due until next week. In a blizzard like this, a surprise visitor could only mean someone in trouble. Dan from across the meadow, perhaps. Maybe his daughter is in trouble or his wife has fallen and hurt herself. “That you Dan?” Frank calls.
“Yeah.” The voice is muffled, but it sounds calm enough.
Frank throws back the door bolts and unhasps the chain. Damn thing, Myra had insisted on having it fitted when they’d double-glazed the house six years ago, and he had never used it. Always slung it when he locked up at night, but never when answering the door. It just seemed so… mistrustful.
As Frank unlatches the door and it blows open into his face, his first thought is: It wouldn’t have done any good. He gasps in surprise, and then
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again in pain as his broken nose gushes blood. He slumps to the floor, kneels forward as blood splashes down his shirt and trousers and stains Myra’s new damn hall carpet … and as Dan pulls the door almost shut, Frank realizes that it must have been caught by the wind. Their surprise visitor from over the way has grabbed the door and hauled it back, seeing what happened and trying to prevent any more injury …
And then it crashes open again, catching Frank on top of his skull this time because he’s kneeling forward watching the blood pool on the Welcome mat. He lets out a sound between a cough and a scream and the door hits him again, again, pulled closed and slammed open with incredible force six more times.
The seventh time, a hand curls around the jamb to hold Frank’s head steady as the edge of the door crushes his temple.
Frank falls sideways to the floor. He can still see, although his sight is fading, and he notices how bad the snow really is, and how dark the shadow standing at their doorway appears set against it. The visitor-it’s not Dan, certainly not Dan, he can see that now-steps over his prone body and closes the door, and now all Frank can see is the blue flower-patterned wallpaper of their hallway fading as his sight retreats into the darkness.
Frank reads a lot. He prefers reading to watching television, he finds it more stimulating and it’s good to keep his mind active as he gets on in years. He doesn’t want to be one of those old people who …
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He read somewhere that hearing is the final sense to go before death.
As he struggles to move, to shout a warning to Myra, to slide himself across the floor to protect her from this monster that has come in from the snow, the last thing he hears is his wife screaming, and something hard impacting on something soft.
Dan recalled a film he’d seen a few years back, John carpenter’s The Thing. The guys in the Antarctic station had guide ropes between buildings so that they could find their way in blizzards, and he’d thought it was a bit over-the-top. The buildings were only thirty feet apart, after all.
Now he understood.
He was lost. Not badly lost, not never-going-home lost. Not even as lost as he’d been in the woods only an hour before. But when he looked back he could see no sign of his home, his garden, the dead apple tree; and when he looked forward, there was no indication at all that the Wilkinsons’ house stood anywhere out there in the whiteout.
Dan hunched his shoulders and struggled on, wishing he’d found time to pull on another sweatshirt under the ski-jacket he’d grabbed from the cloakroom. He’d been cold before, but since he’d sampled warmth in the house he was now more freezing than ever. One of his mother’s expressions came to mind: colder than a witch’s tit. The snow was a solid wall, an all-encompassing blanket surrounding and hemming him in, and every step he took seemed to
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move him to the place he’d just been. Nothing changed. An occasional uneven bit of ground beneath his foot marked where the meadow dipped or rose, but that was all. He could see no houses, no trees, no signs that he was anywhere he knew.
It had been like this earlier. And then he’d heard those pounding footsteps.
He turned around, spinning a full circle in case someone was running at him but succeeding only in disorientating himself more. At least up to now he’d been going in roughly the right direction. Now he was completely confused. But he had to go on, he had to call the police. He had to…
Megan had lost it. Nikki was acting weird, and if what Megan had said was true then Brand had got to their daughter, just as he’d promised. Got to her and done God knows what. Dan had come home to protect them, returning from his trip to the police … and having failed in something so simple, he’d let their unusual behavior drive him back out into the blizzard. Brand may well be out here, he knew that, stalking the snowscape. And he’d left his family alone, and if Brand found their house and made his way inside …
Jeremy was dead. Brand had killed him. Dead!
“Jesus fucking Christ, what am I doing!” Dan turned and started running back the way he’d come, or as close to that direction as he could make out. He tucked the baseball bat under his arm, ready to swing it out and use the momentum to smash it into Brand’s face if he appeared from the snow, he’d have no hesitation now, no second thoughts, and if it broke his skull and
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they found him frozen to the ground after the thaw, his blood hardened into a crispy sheen on the grass, then Dan would admit to it and explain, point them in the direction of his crashed Freelander and what lay beneath it—
And then the house appeared before him, the Wilkinsons’ house, and the front door swung open just as Dan came to a standstill in front of it.
Brand was there. Come in, have a cup of tea, it’ll only take a moment of your time. The thought shocked Dan, almost made him smile, but then he made out the detail.
Snow flurried in around Brand and turned yellow in the light filtering from within. Frank Wilkinson’s body lay crumpled on the floor behind him, blood splashed across the light tan carpet. Brand held a fist-sized petrified wood sculpture by his side. Its yellowed surface was stained red, and it seemed to be growing grey hair.
“Oh,” said Brand, raising his eyebrows in mock-surprise. “I was just leaving.” He dropped the sculpture.
Dan reacted quickly, letting the bat’s weight swing it down and twisting his arm to bring it up at Brand’s jaw from below. It hit him just as Dan had intended, the loud thunk muffled by the snow.
Brand barely flinched. He snatched the bat from Dan’s hands and held it straight out by his side. “Like hitting people with wooden sporting implements, don’t you Dan?” Then he twitched his wrist and the bat struck Dan hard, high up on his left arm.
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It was surprise more than pain that made Dan cry out. The impact was heavy enough to send him staggering, and the two seconds it took for him to regain his balance gave Brand the chance to swing the bat again, aimed higher this time, aiming to connect with Dan’s skull. He ducked instinctively, and instead of connecting squarely with his head the bat glanced off. He slumped on all fours and rolled sideways in the snow. There was no pain in his head, no signs that the baseball bat had done anything more than part his hair, but then as he stood he felt the warm flow of blood past his ear and down his neck. Realization made him woozy… he swayed, having the presence of mind to move backward, not forward, and the bat swept by inches from his nose.
Dan fell again. He landed heavily on his behind. He saw the tall shadow advance from the doorway, Brand moving in to deliver the coup de grace now that he was helpless on the ground.
Beat him last time, Dan thought. One blow to the head and he was quiet. Taught him a lesson. Can’t let it change like this … can’t let the bastard beat me like this …
“You’re a stupid man, leaving your family unprotected,” Brand said, raising the bat in both hands above his head. “Anything could happen to them.”
“What have you done to my daughter?” Dan spat, the act of talking driving a sharp pain through his temple and down into his jaw. That side of his head now felt all wrong, too big, not
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his anymore, and he wondered just how much damage had been done.
Brand paused for a moment, bat held high, snowflakes falling around him but appearing to avoid his hair, coat and face entirely. “Compared to what I’m going to do. … Nothing at all.” Then he swung straight down at Dan’s head.