by J G Alva
“No, Rachel, I-“
“Because I won’t. I can’t. He hurt me, Pat…There was one thing I expected from him, one thing…and he couldn’t even give me that: to be faithful. I’d given up on everything else. But if we had that at least…”
She wiped angrily at her left eye. A tear? Perhaps.
But if it was, it was molten, and angry.
He didn’t know why he was here. To provide some insight into Bob’s character…but Rachel didn’t want to know him anymore, so she couldn’t offer up anything of any merit. And quite frankly he didn’t know what she could offer up; even if his character had changed, even if he had been going out at night at odd hours for long periods, would any of that really mean anything?
This was a mess.
Rachel hunkered down on the floor as the dogs happily licked her face. Rachel was hurting, and so was Bob; it was just a shame they couldn’t heal each other.
“How’s my little babies?” Rachel cooed, in a sing-song voice. “How’s my beautiful little babies? Do you want to go for walkies? Yes? You want to go for walkies?”
Both dogs started barking enthusiastically.
The sound was compressed inside that small kitchen, and pounded into Pat’s ears like hammers.
Rachel straightened up and gave him a look.
It was his cue to leave, he thought.
“I’m sorry,” she said loudly, above the barking…but she wasn’t really sorry. “They get like this about now. I’ve got to take them out. You’ll have to go. I hope Bob’s okay…but I don’t really care about him anymore. I can’t. I’ve got to look after myself now. Hang on, let me grab the dogs while you go out the door…otherwise they’ll just rush out into the street. Goodbye, Pat. Take care.”
◆◆◆
Outside, on the pavement, the sun was visible over the tops of the buildings and warmed him where it fell across his face.
He walked to the car, trying to think what to do next. Before leaving Bridewell Station to investigate his colleagues – why did he feel so guilty about this, he must be getting soft in his old age, or melancholy – Pat had given them errands, but he knew he ought to be getting back. Bob was doing further research into cults in general, and Darren was looking into Matheson and the house and other details, but the question still hung in the air, and would continue to do so, until he knew they weren’t compromised: could anything they did toward the investigation be trusted?
Pat realised then that Kent hadn’t called. He looked at his watch. It had been over an hour.
He called Kent, listening as the phone rang, and rang, and rang…and then went to voicemail.
He left a message, and then got into his car.
He started the engine, but hesitated before putting the car in gear.
He was only half a mile from Alfred Alger’s house.
◆◆◆
He had to park around the corner from the house, in the shadow of a line of tall conifers; the streets were full of parked cars on both sides. The world was peaceful and quiet as he walked to the front door: there was the sound of birds tweeting, but not much else. The majority of the population of Bristol were yet to rise. It was the calm before the storm.
Knocking on the front door, he was more right than he knew.
He waited, but nobody answered.
He knocked again, and then looked through the front bay window.
It was very dim inside, but he could see an overturned lamp, and a scattered array of books on the floor.
Oh lordy.
Pat didn’t have a gun, hadn’t worn one since his days in the Tactical Firearms Group. He hadn’t expected to encounter anything he couldn’t handle; now he felt foolish. Still, he couldn’t turn away. Stepping back from the door, he took out his phone and called Sally.
“Pat?”
“Sally, I’m at the site of a possible break-in. If I give you the details…”
After she made a note of the address, she promised to send support.
Pat walked down the path beside the house but stopped at the edge of the building. The conifers were shaking, disturbed by some animal, no doubt. Cautiously, he made his way to the back door, to find the point at which the intruders had gained entry.
He stepped inside, making sure to avoid the broken glass.
He caught the faintest whiff of something animalistic. He knew the smell: blood, sweat, and the lingering gases released by a corpse. Someone was dead.
Damn it all.
He found the body in the kitchen. A young boy. Presumably a Cult member.
He ventured further into the house.
He found the three bodies in the study. He had the sense that there had been someone else, that he had just missed them; displaced air or the electrical charge of a body still active. Sweat or hormones released by a living body, instead of a dead one.
One of the dead men was Kent. Oddly enough, Pat wasn’t surprised; it was almost as if, as soon as he had entered the house, he had come to expect this. A machete stuck out of his shoulder. His clothes were covered in blood. His eyes had already begun to look like glass.
Another body, the one behind the desk, was Alfred Alger. A knife stuck out of his ribs. His face was chilling…as if he had screamed at the point of death, and the muscles had set like that.
The other body must be another Cult member.
Kent had come to Alger’s house to find out the truth, and it would seem that Alger’s death advocated his innocence. After all, if he was working with the Cult then he wouldn’t be dead, would he?
Unless of course the Cult was killing off its own members now.
Pat felt a deep and uneasy fear stir within him. The stanchions of his world were being shaken. It was unthinkable that a mere cult had caused so much devastation, had sought – and reached – so highly into the bastions of the law.
The other implication did nothing to lessen his fear: that if Alger was innocent, then the traitor had to be someone in his team.
Their reach continued to extend.
It was almost supernatural, he thought. Good people, normal people, who had turned, who had been corrupted by spells and witchcraft.
Bob.
Or Darren.
But which one?
◆◆◆
Toby woke to the sounds of arguing.
It was so normal, so prosaic, so regular, that he almost rolled over and went back to sleep…
Until he realised he couldn’t possibly be listening to his parents arguing.
His mother was dead, had been for years.
He sat up in bed, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, and looked around.
This wasn’t his room.
The sun was up, but Toby had no idea what time it was. Although the patterned peach coloured curtains were closed, they were thin, and most of the light got into the room. He was in a single bed in a corner by the window. A small trestle table stood by the bed, directly underneath the window, and on it was a glass of orange juice and two aspirin on a saucer. The room smelled of disinfectant and oranges. A pile of clothes lay neatly folded on a chair by the door; they didn’t look like his: jeans and a knitted purple sweater. A tiny cubicle next to the wardrobe turned out to be an en suite bathroom.
Where was he? And who was arguing?
He pulled back the curtains to see the suspension bridge, a park, and a road running down the hill; a young couple with a baby were loading a Range Rover; some disagreement meant that the husband/father was piling items into the boot with quick angry movements.
Toby felt sorry for the baby. Ignorance was bliss…but all too soon his world would start to come down on him. He wished him better success with his life that Toby had managed with his own.
So he was in Clifton…but he still didn’t know where, not really, and he still couldn’t remember how he had gotten there. He knew where he had been: in the company of Bellafont and the Church of the New Artisans. But there was a large swathe of missing time between then and now. He did not know how long,
but only that he had been in the countryside, in a motorhome, sleeping on the most uncomfortable –
All of a sudden it came back to him: the attack on the house, running, bows and arrows…
His father being stabbed.
His arms erupted in goosebumps, and it felt like somebody had cleaved his skull with an axe for a moment. The feeling passed, but in its place was the irrepressible memory of his father dying.
Was it true?
Had it happened?
Before he had come to a conclusion either way, he felt something on his cheek and, reaching up, realised he was crying.
It was true then. Some part of him knew it, even if he didn’t want to believe it.
In that strange bedroom, surrounded by sunlight and the faint smell of oranges, Toby cried for his dead father.
◆◆◆
When he finally could, Toby got up and sat on the edge of the bed.
He knew he should get dressed and go downstairs – if only to find out where he was – but not being able to remember how he had arrived at this place was making him nervous. If he opened the door, almost anybody could be behind it.
The last thing he could properly remember was taking Bellafont’s Star Shot, a foul elixir that was supposed to open doors of the mind, as well as exposing his consciousness to a higher power. Supposedly, the Eye could see into him, could see the truth of who he was. Toby had been sceptical to say the least. The Cult to him had been fascinating…especially Bellafont. The man was incredibly charismatic, and when he fixed those strange staring eyes on you, it was almost impossible to do anything but agree with him. But even though he had been with them for almost four weeks, he had never truly felt like part of the group. There always seemed to be a barrier separating him from the other members; he couldn’t be sure what it was, but it made him feel like an interloper, despite Bellafont’s attentions. It had seemed that Bellafont had been as fascinated with him as he was with Bellafont…although he wasn’t sure what fascination he held. Bellafont was certainly something to be admired: a brilliant writer, if nothing else…but also a man with an unusual way of looking at the world. He saw both more – and in a strange way, less – of the reality that chained them all, and that made him something of a poet.
Still…
Through it all there had always been the sense that some part of Toby might wake up, that he was living in a dream that had to end…and once it did, he would leave. It was a strange and arresting dream, but that’s all it was, a dream. It couldn’t continue indefinitely.
Anyway. He couldn’t sit here all day thinking about it, so he got up, dressed himself in the clothes provided, and opened the door.
He was faced with a cramped landing, and a narrow, steep set of steps going down.
He stared at them nervously. Part of the landing crossed over the stairs, and he’d probably have to duck his head. Where was this place? It didn’t belong to anyone he knew, of that he was sure.
He remembered being in a car then. Somebody’s car. The murmur of conversation, more felt than heard. Faces leaning in toward him, as if he were a baby in a crib. Concerned faces, but strangely unidentifiable. As if the features had purposely been blurred.
Had he reacted badly to the Star Shot? Had he been taken to a hospital to recover?
There was the faint sound of voices drifting up from the bottom of the stairs, so Toby followed them, ducking his head under the landing, steadying himself against the walls (as there was no bannister or railing).
A narrow hall led left and right. On the left, the front door, and potential freedom; he could go to it right now, open it, and escape, and nobody would be any the wiser. But although he knew where he was geographically, he didn’t know where he was, not really. The voices were coming from the right, so he headed in that direction instead.
There were two ladies at work inside a bright kitchen. The one at the sink, washing up, he recognised: Aimee Graham. He immediately felt better. Waking up in a house filled with absolute strangers would be unnerving to say the least.
“Good morning, young man,” the older woman said.
She was in her seventies, he guessed. Short cut white hair framed a kindle, wrinkled face. She was wearing a pristine white apron.
“Toby?” Aimee said, wiping her hands on a tea towel. “How are you feeling?”
His throat was dry, and clicked as he tried to speak.
He coughed.
“Where am I?” He asked.
“This is my house,” the old woman said, smiling. “My name’s Dorothy. But everyone calls me Dot. Are you hungry?”
He stared at the old woman. He had a sudden sense that she was not who she said she was, a burst of paranoia that he could neither control nor outwit. His heart started to gallop in his chest.
Oh no.
“Aimee?” Toby said. There was a quiver in his voice.
This felt like a precursor to a panic attack…and he hadn’t had one in almost a year.
Aimee came toward him and directed him to a wooden chair. He sat gratefully. This felt better. His heart slowed. He clutched tightly to Aimee’s hand. His eye found the newspaper on the table, and the date: Monday, 19th June.
What?
“What happened?” He asked.
“Toby, it’s alright,” Aimee said, drawing up a chair with her free hand to sit next to him.
“Where am I? How did I get here?”
“You need to take things slowly,” Aimee said, holding both his hands now. “You’ve been through a lot.”
“Where are my clothes?”
“First off, I want you to have something to drink,” Aimee said, and then through a series of hand gestures, she directed Dot into action: the old woman took a glass from the cupboard, and filled it with water at the sink. “Then I want you to see if you can eat anything. Okay? You’re probably feeling a bit woozy because you haven’t eaten anything for almost twenty four hours. As soon as you-“
“Is my father really dead?”
Something flickered behind Aimee’s eyes, a confirmation almost as good as seeing the body itself.
Toby squeezed his eyes shut tight, perhaps to see if he could blot out this reality, perhaps to see if he could enter another.
But when he opened his eyes, the world was just the same, and his father was not in it.
◆◆◆
“What do you remember?” Aimee asked.
The old woman – Dot – had gone off to busy herself elsewhere, and they were alone in the kitchen. Toby felt he could finally relax.
“Not much,” Toby admitted. “But I remember him getting stabbed. It was in a hall somewhere.” He strained, but nothing else was coming. He shook his head. “Who did it? Who killed him?”
Aimee looked sad when she said, “it was the Cult.”
A bolt of alarm shot up Toby’s spine.
He didn’t believe it. He couldn’t.
“They wouldn’t do that,” he protested.
“They did.”
“No. No.” He was shaking his head, almost as if he couldn’t stop. “They wouldn’t do that. They’re not violent-“
“It was them.”
“No, Aimee-“
“There were three of them,” she said, holding tightly to his hands. “They came to the house in Long Ashton. We got away from them that time. But they followed us to Alfred Alger’s house in Mark.”
“But…why?” Toby said, and then immediately it came to him. “Because of me?”
Aimee didn’t reply, but she didn’t have to: her eyes said it all.
“What was I doing at the house in the first place?” He asked. He could feel himself getting angry.
“Toby-“
“My father,” he said, closing his eyes. Too much…it was too much. “He couldn’t have his only son joining a cult. It was too embarrassing for him.”
“No, Toby.”
“How to explain that your son is a religious nut at a society dinner?”
“Toby, he was worried
about you.”
“He wouldn’t let me be,” he said. “He just couldn’t. He had to control me. He has to control everything.”
“That’s not true-“
“You know it’s true,” Toby said. “You know him…knew him. Don’t pretend he wasn’t an egomaniac. A…control freak.”
Aimee sighed.
“It’s alright to be angry,” she said. “It’s a natural reaction to the situation-“
“Go fuck yourself.”
Aimee released his hands then, and sat back in her chair. She looked away from him. She was hurt, and he immediately felt awful.
But he thought he probably deserved to feel awful. He had killed his own father, after all. An argument could be made that it wasn’t his fault. If he broached the subject with Aimee, he had no doubt that she would say that very thing. But he had known his father would come for him, had known that joining the Cult was like a slap in his father’s face. Maybe it had been his revenge on him, for how he had treated his mother. If that was the case, then he couldn’t have foreseen that it would be so effective. Still, it was all his fault…and he couldn’t really blame it on a pique or an adolescent phase. He was too smart for that, too self-aware to delude himself into thinking that he hadn’t known what he was doing. He had known, alright…and his father had paid the price for that.
And so, in effect, had he.
He looked at Aimee. She seemed to be giving him a moment, and was purposely avoiding his eyes.
He said, “I…”
She raised her eyebrows, but nothing else would come out of him. He felt too angry to apologise, and too wretched to control his anger.
“You’re hungry,” Aimee said, in her business voice. She had categorised him as a business task, at least for the moment; she would get it done, but it wasn’t necessarily going to be pleasant. She rose from her seat. She went to the counter. “I’ll make you some toast.”
There was a knock at the front door then.
Both Aimee and Toby stared at it, until Dot came into the hall from one of the front rooms and answered it.