by Mark Roberts
‘She’s crap at spelling, Natasha. I’m going to make sure she doesn’t come across as too clever. A lot of men like that quality in a woman.’
25
11.31 pm
The bedroom was Wren’s but the walls belonged to Captain Cyclone.
The wall facing Wren’s bed was taken up with a picture of Captain Cyclone in his human incarnation – Captain Benjamin Black, hero of the SAS but not the superhero Captain Cyclone whose powers dwarfed the greatest gifts afforded to mankind. Tall, impossibly handsome and with a body made up from walls of muscle, Captain Benjamin Black’s eyes followed their creator when he moved around the room.
Wren watched the rain roll down his window and the sheer darkness behind the glass, the kind of weather that Captain Cyclone loved. He looked at his mobile phone, the one he’d held in the palm of his hand since Edgar McKee had dropped him off at home after they’d finished work early, and wished that Edgar would call him or send a text.
He looked at the hands of his bedside clock, bright green in the darkness, and saw that it was getting too late to call Edgar even if he had been allowed. Which he wasn’t. Edgar had been quite firm when he suggested in the van they swap numbers.
I’ll call you, Wren. Don’t call me unless it’s an emergency. I’ll reveal the reason when the time is right.
Edgar had said it so firmly but with such kindness that the memory of the whole day filled Wren with a warmth he hadn’t felt for many years.
Wren tried to put the journey from the abattoir back home to Gateacre into some sequence but he was totally unfamiliar with most streets and suburbs in the part of South Liverpool that they’d travelled through together.
I can tell we’re going to be great mates, Wren. I’ve only known you a matter of hours and I feel like you’re my mate already. I like you. I like you a lot.
Edgar had said that just after he’d pointed out a house on a dual carriageway that John Lennon from The Beatles had grown up in when he was a little boy.
Wren had stifled the words I’ve never had a mate before in my whole life because it made him feel bad about himself and he didn’t want Edgar to think that nobody else liked him.
He looked into the dim light of a lamp in the corner of his room and picked out the picture he had painted on the wall to his left. Captain Cyclone in his full glory, sweeping through a city full of corruption and lies, devastating the homes and offices of the bad guys, crushing them with his power yet at the same time sucking the innocent and good up into the eye of the cyclone that was his body, where they were safe and protected from the storm.
I’ll drive you home to Gateacre after I’ve gone on my message. Is that OK with you, Wren?
It was more than OK. No one apart from Dad ever asked him if things were OK with him. No one apart from Mum before she died asked him if he was OK. No one apart from Mum or Dad or Edgar, that is.
At a set of traffic lights, there was a church across the junction with a poster on the wall that read:
AN HONEST WITNESS DOES NOT DECEIVE BUT A FALSE WITNESS POURS OUT LIES. PROVERBS 14:5
A good proverb. The sort of thing Captain Cyclone would say at the end of one of his adventures overwhelming murderers and thieves and lowlife scum from the Big City.
He could barely see the wall around his window but he didn’t need light to know what was going on behind the veil of darkness because he had painted it himself and knew every square centimetre of the image.
Captain Benjamin Black led thousands of innocent men, women and children back into the ruins of the Big City, with a wren flying over the exodus, and with a simple command coming from the superhero’s lips.
Rebuild!
Wren moved into the corner of his room and tilted his lamp so that the light was aimed at the triumphant march back into the redeemed city. He placed the light on his small desk, which he hadn’t needed since the day he was kicked out of school for something someone else had done. He opened the desk drawer where he kept his paints and brushes. He selected a broad and a thin brush, a tube of white and a tube of black.
A change was needed to the wall around the window.
Wren took out the step ladder from the side of his pine wardrobe and, setting it up, stepped up from the floor, two, three steps to the top. Brushes in one hand and a tube of paint in the other, he stretched out his arms and moved them in a figure of eight.
This is how Edgar makes me feel, thought Wren. The loneliness that had dogged him for as many years as he could remember was gone.
‘My name is Wren. And I can fly!’
26
11.59 pm
Under the dim light of her bedside lamp, Norma Maguire had fallen asleep to the sound of Chopin’s Nocturnes whispering from the bedside radio. An empty glass and a bottle of Talisker lay next to each other.
Behind the large black mask that covered her eyes, nose and cheeks, Norma lived through a recurring dream.
In her dream, she walked on a beach, light dancing in the sky above her head and casting every shade of gold on the sand beneath her bare feet. Seagulls called on the wind and circled between the blue sky and the white clouds.
Crosby Beach.
Beneath the transparent white dress that exposed her skin to the light, her feet were elegant, and her legs moved effortlessly.
She turned on the pillow, her face now away from the light.
On the beach, there were rock pools and crabs crawled from the edge of the sea between the pebbles and shells that littered the sand. Dragonflies hovered at her eyeline, flying ahead of her like messengers announcing her arrival to the forces of nature in which she walked; dragonflies, their bodies made iridescent by the sun, the fragile structure of their wings made visible in the morning light.
Somewhere in the house, two clocks ticked out of time with each other, creating a continuous sound that echoed from the high ceilings and the wide walls of the cavernous rooms.
But what was that sound in the sand? What vibration rose from the beach?
Darkness emerged from the sand. A curve of black iron. The shape of a skull. The beginning of a face. The head of a giant man rising from the earth. Throat. Shoulders. Arms. The figure of the man was silent, his face expressionless but his whole being endowed with colossal power.
Another figure and another figure and another and another and another. Rising from the sand, rising from the water, their dark bodies made green by the elements, spaced at different places in relation to the sea and the sand, their silent faces all looking in the same direction, at the horizon and beyond.
She made to run towards the water, towards the nearest Iron Man…
Asleep, Norma made a noise from the depths of her dream, between a cry of despair and a sob of terror.
… but found she was frozen to the sand, now sitting in her wheelchair, as the iron giants of Crosby Beach turned a half circle, some less, some more, but all in her direction. They stared at her in random judgement with sightless eyes, accusing her with dumb mouths.
In the water and on the sand, the Iron Men’s arms rose from their ribs and their legs moved as they stepped towards the horizon. With each step, they sank deeper into the water of the Irish Sea.
She watched, dumbstruck and paralysed, as the Iron Men disappeared step by step under the waves for ever while she was rooted in her wheelchair on the sand.
She turned from her side on to her back, felt the tug of consciousness.
Soft, quiet classical music drifted into her head.
Norma sat up slowly, pulled her eye mask down and looked directly into the landing outside her bedroom. There was nothing and no one there.
She looked at the empty pillow next to hers, pictured Fran sleeping lightly, eyes closed, blonde hair spread across the pillowslip. It was a vivid picture, so powerful in her imagination that it was almost real.
Norma reached out but all she touched was the pillowslip and the air above it.
‘Goodnight, Fran. Sleep tight.’
A bran
ch from a tree in the garden bent in and tapped on the bedroom window like a caller asking for admission to the house.
‘Fran? Can you hear me, Fran? Don’t go to him, Fran.’ Tears rolled down her face. ‘Stay with me. I love you, Fran…’
The Past
1979
As she crept down the stairs, moonlight shone through the stained-glass skylight, picking out a path in the darkness for her in amber and red.
With each step, the grandfather clock in the hall hummed and she imagined that in the mechanics inside it there was a real heart, racing at a dozen beats per second like the injured mouse she had found in the garden that morning.
Tiptoeing through the hall in the direction of the kitchen, she felt the vibration of the mouse’s heartbeat in her hands, where she had held it for a long, long time.
Other than the hum and tick-tock of the grandfather clock, the house was plunged into the silence of the dead of night.
In the kitchen, she pondered the silence and realised that her baby brother – not a baby now but eighteen months old, though in her heart he would always be her baby brother – was indeed a very smart cookie.
A very smart cookie? Her infant teacher Miss Slack’s favourite term of praise for children who answered questions correctly, sat up nicely and listened well.
Baby brother had learned a big lesson from his big sister: the total pointlessness of crying.
It was not rewarded with kindness and attention from either mother or father and, very often, provoked the opposite response. Anger.
In her hands she carried a wet nappy. She placed it in the drum of the washing machine, already half full of washing for Mrs Doyle to see to in the morning.
She blew a sigh of relief. No one would notice what she had done for her baby brother just now.
She opened the fridge and was grateful for the outpouring of light from within the chilly box.
She looked up in the general direction of her baby brother’s bedroom and recalled the recent memory of her visit to him.
He had stood at the side of his cot, holding on to the wooden rail, his face and head illuminated by a strand of moonlight that shot through a gap in the curtains.
‘Hungry?’
He had looked at her in a way that needed no language, not that he had that much anyway. She knew. He was starving.
In the kitchen, she poured milk into his drinking cup and screwed on the lipped top of the vessel.
She found biscuits in a tin and hid them in the pockets of her dressing gown.
When she had been with him five minutes earlier, she had lifted him from his cot and felt that he was suddenly much heavier than his normal weight. His nappy was flooded.
She had laid him on the floor, reminding him with a finger over her own lips and a whispered hush of the need for complete silence.
She had unbuckled the safety pins on either side of his nappy, removing the soaked white garment from his body.
In a drawer, she took a clean, dry nappy and wrapped it round his hips and the space between his legs.
Hush now… hussshhhh…
He was lighter when she lifted him from the floor and placed him back inside his cot. His eyes had tracked her as she moved silently across the floor.
‘I’ll be back,’ she whispered to his unflinching gaze. ‘I promise you, I’ll be back.’
As she reached the top of the stairs with provisions, in a bedroom some doors away her father snored and the sudden sound almost made her scream with fright.
‘For fuck’s sake…’ Her mother’s voice sounded in the pit of night.
She hurried along the landing, fearful that her mother might leave the parental bedroom and seek a quieter space to sleep, catching her on the hop, out of bed and stealing food for her baby.
The sheets and blankets rustled in her parents’ room and she guessed that her mother had hibernated in their bed, burying her head and ears under the warmth of the materials that comforted them in the cold grip of winter.
She avoided the places on the carpet beneath which the floorboards creaked like demons posted by her mother and father to alert them to the place, time and progress of their children.
His breathing was heavy. Her baby. Her baby brother. Her baby.
The light sharpened as she entered his room, when a night cloud sailed away from the beaming moon.
His hands, his fingers opened and closed, opened and closed, over the wooden frame of his cot. He opened his mouth and the noise of staunched tears made the silence between the walls more dense than it had ever felt to her.
She handed him the cup of milk and watched him drink from the lip as if his life depended on it.
He swayed in the cot and caught on to it with his left hand, stopping himself from falling on to his bottom.
She threw an arm around him and held on to him as tightly as she could, as if the world was… that feeling when she woke up suddenly in the dark… on the verge of collapse.
He stayed on his feet and she let go degree by painful degree.
Whatever was going on, the moon danced in his eyes, and she smiled at him and he smiled back.
His hands, his fingers opened and closed, opened and closed, over the wooden frame of his cot.
She took a biscuit from the pocket of her dressing gown, placed it in his hand and he devoured it before she had time to pick out the next one.
On the landing outside, there was a click. A switch on a wall.
She handed him the next biscuit, thought that she had imagined the noise outside her baby’s room.
She heard the creak of the door at her back and saw the deepening band of light fall into her baby’s room from the landing outside.
‘Well, well, well, what’s going on around here?’
Day Two
Thursday, 2nd December 2021
Oneirophobia
Fear of dreams
27
3.03 am
Eve Clay sat at the table in her dining room, haunted by a dream that had propelled her from a troubled sleep. The only light in the room came from the screen of her laptop. She muted the sound and watched a clear and gentle tide washing over a gathering of colourful pebbles lodged in clean sand.
Words appeared on the screen.
Pebbles On The Beach.
Her body shivered in the cold of the early hours and the fresh memory of a vivid dream.
She climbed over the metal railings, a precarious barrier between the promenade at Otterspool and the River Mersey below. Tall arc lamps threw light on to the mud and, as she negotiated the concrete steps down to the riverbed, the sky was full of red light and dark contours of menacing clouds.
She opened the fake profile she had posted, masquerading as twenty-something Natasha Jones.
Clay recognised the weight of Thomas’ footsteps as he walked down the stairs, and saw that two of the three men she had winked at had winked back at her.
She wrote, Hi, Alan, how yah doing? And then, Hi, Stu, how’s it going? as her dream came crashing inside her head.
She walked across the mud towards the dead woman with the sky shifting and the wind howling at her back, her protective suit sticking against her clothes. The waters of the River Mersey disappeared like giant bathwater down a plughole nearby, a vortex in the mud. Clay turned and the line of supporting officers on the promenade weren’t there. The light continued pouring above the railings and when she turned to continue her journey to the dead woman, she froze.
‘Eve? Are you all right?’ asked Thomas from the bottom of the stairs.
‘I’m fine. Thank you.’
She heard him moving from the hall in her direction and said, ‘In here, the dining room.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Do me a favour, Thomas. Keep the light off.’
‘Can’t sleep?’ he asked.
‘Bad dreams,’ she replied.
The dead woman pulled herself up from the mud, pushing down into the sludge with both hands, her facial skin
missing but the muscles on her cheeks twitching into life. With each step Clay took towards her, the woman grew taller and stronger under the shimmering sky.
Thomas pulled a chair up and sat beside her at the table. Clay looked over the laptop and through the French windows at a pair of cat’s eyes glinting back at her as it slunk across the top of the wall at the bottom of their garden. She felt the weight and warmth of Thomas’ arm as it rested on her shoulder.
‘What’s this?’ he asked, with a smile in his voice.
‘What do you think it is?’
‘Are you trying to tell me something?’
‘Don’t worry, it’s work-related. The Ghoul…’
‘Him?’
‘He’s pulling his victims from internet dating sites. One in particular. Pebbles On The Beach. We’ve all set fake profiles, we’re all projecting ourselves out there as pretty blondes in our mid twenties. Look.’ She pointed at her profile picture. ‘This is me. Natasha Jones. Read all about me. Tell me what you think.’
Thomas spent a minute reading through the fiction Eve had projected about herself and said, ‘It’s nothing like you.’
‘Exactly. We pulled the profiles of the victims and noticed similarities.’
‘Natasha Jones comes across as a bit of a pushover. When did you last toast a marshmallow on an open fire?’
‘I’ve had a good look across the site,’ said Eve. ‘In spite of the clichés, the men and women on it seem genuine, solid, dependable types. They come across as worn out by the world. All they want is love and commitment.’
The luxury of her own personal situation hit Clay and she looked closely at her husband in the green light of the screen, saw that he was thinking.
‘Go on, ask the question that’s on your mind,’ said Clay.
‘So, when you say you’ve all put up fake profiles, that means everyone?’
‘It’s a mass phishing trip to get the killer to give himself away.’
‘So, what’s Karl Stone called?’