Cold Skies: A Psychological Thriller

by Zoe Drake

  “Where?” Gareth asked, his eyes shifting focus.

  “The other door.”

  Gareth turned his head, and as a group of people moved aside at the other end of the ward, he saw his father approach. Unsmiling, but with that familiar timeless composure. Moving strangers out of his way with his invisible force field, a subtle energy in his eyes that said, “I’m Gareth’s Dad”.

  The family gave him a chorus of greetings when he reached the bed. Lily stood up again to face her husband.

  “Hello, ducks,” he said. “How are you?”

  “Let me get you a cup of tea,” she said with perfect clarity.

  The brothers chose that time to say their goodbyes – Dad wanted some time alone with mum, Gareth knew. They started moving back down the crowded ward towards the exit.

  Halfway there, Gareth looked back at his parents. His Dad sat by the bedside with the air of being a permanent fixture of the ward. His Mum had resumed her clapping, and Gareth watched her lips move, whispering the words in time to her own rhythm.

  “Yes, Jesus loves me,

  Yes, Jesus loves me,

  Yes, Jesus loves me,

  The Bible tells me so…”

  “Do you feel a bit tearful?” Caroline asked him in the car park.

  Gareth tried to shrug it off. “Nah, I’m okay. It was pretty sad at first when she… had to go in.”

  “Why is your mummy in the hospital?” asked Jenny, pulling at Gareth’s jeans.

  “Because she wants to get better, darling,” Caroline said briskly. “Hop in the car…”

  After tea and a conversation about Lily’s future, back at Paul’s house, they left to have dinner at the place that Colin had promised to take them earlier.

  “It’s only a pub-restaurant,” he said. “It’s nothing fancy.”

  “We’re not fancy people,” Gareth replied.

  The pub-restaurant was called the Coach and Horses, and the weather was changing to a fine sleet as they arrived. The group warmed themselves up in the bar, where they met up again with Ted Manning. Reunited as an extended family, they filed in to the spacious restaurant section at the back.

  Over dinner, Gareth watched Caroline getting on very well with his dad. Jokes about food came up with alarming frequency.

  “Gareth’s quite a good cook,” she said in his defense. “He told me he’s been cooking for fifteen years.”

  “Well, he should be nearly done by now,” Ted remarked drily.

  “Gareth.” Colin, sitting next to Gareth, tapped him lightly on the shoulder. “What was it that you saw? You know, before the accident?” he asked quietly.

  Gareth pushed his plate away, washed the meal down with a swig of Buxton Battle Axe pale ale, and considered his answer. “We’ve got it on film, so when it’s passed all the checks you’ll be able to see for yourself,” he said proudly. “If I could tell you what it was, I mean really explain it, then I’d have a million quid by now. All I’m saying is, it’s definitely something. There are so many people who say they’ve seen a flying saucer or a weird light in the sky, and they can’t be all liars, and now I’ve seen one too!”

  Another swig of beer. “Maybe one day it’ll get to the stage where we all take it for granted. I mean, nobody thought about gravity before the word ‘gravity’ was created, did they? If you asked, ‘Why do things go down instead of up when they fall’, people would say, ‘Well, I don’t know, it’s the way things are’. And electricity as well. When people first saw little bulbs of glass with lightning inside them they must have freaked out. So maybe in the future we’ll know that flying saucers are made out of this kind of light-energy, and we’ll say, ‘Oh look, there goes another one’. No big deal. Maybe we can use them, switch them on and off like light bulbs. Who knows?”

  “When you get your million quid, don’t forget us,” Diane said, laughing.

  “Unless we win the lottery first,” grunted Colin.

  “That’s more likely to happen,” said Gareth.

  In the end, all of them offered to pay to dinner, and the genial argument was finally settled by Gareth going halves with Colin.

  Back at Paul’s house, the evening was hijacked by Gareth and Ted settling down in front of the TV to watch the Manchester United match, and the conversation was overtaken by shouting and barking advice at the screen. Paul produced his coveted Macallan single malt and offered it around, and Gareth accepted a generously large glassful, which he sipped during the match’s excitement.

  “You’ll regret it,” warned Caroline.

  *

  Ten o’clock the next morning. Gareth sat at the kitchen table, his head bent over a bowl of cornflakes, watching the milk gradually soften the cereal into submission. Every so often there was a tiny crackle as one of the cornflakes slipped further down into the milk.

  “Enjoy the match last night?” called Paul cheerfully, from where he stood near the door, talking to Diane.

  “Yes, thanks,” Gareth muttered.

  “I done a puzzle,” Jenny said urgently, pulling at Gareth’s jeans.

  “Don’t smack Gareth around, darling, he’s feeling a bit fragile.” Caroline grinned at him from across the kitchen table.

  “Ready for a walk then?” Paul was already wearing his anorak. “A bit of fresh air?”

  “That sounds like a good idea,” Gareth muttered, leaving the cornflakes and pushing his chair back.

  The suburb where Paul and Valerie lived looked more like a village than part of Buxton. Farmland lay at the back of their house; hills and low grazing land, unbroken apart from a solitary cottage where the farmer’s son and his wife lived, according to Paul. They walked to the top of an avenue and down a steep hill, coming out onto a wide street and church standing opposite. A solitary bell tolled, but Gareth didn’t see anyone going inside the church. In fact, there was nobody else on the street at all.

  “There’s usually a fairly large congregation,” said Valerie. “They’re probably inside already. We go ourselves, about once a month or so.”

  Gareth took deep lungfuls of clean mountain air, letting nausea rise and then pass. There were a few pedestrians to be found on the road leading out of Buxton, a road that gently followed the curve of a river and ran into the foothills of High Peak. Gareth’s little group huddled together, looking at the grandeur of the British Isles, a landscape that had not yet disappeared under an industrial estate or a private housing scheme. Then they turned back, anxious for the warmth of a centrally heated living room.

  By the time they returned, Gareth’s head had cleared, and his appetite was stirring. The turkey dinner was almost ready. Valerie and Diane refused all help in the kitchen, so Gareth idly flicked through the Sunday supplements with the rest of the party.

  “Ready!” Valerie called.

  Making their way through a host of sumptuous smells, the guests sat down to a table stacked with ‘all the trimmings’, as Ted called it. Jenny sat in her cushion-stacked seat, playing with her cutlery. All around the table, there was a steady buzz of anticipation.

  “Do you want to carve the turkey?” Paul said to Gareth, without warning.

  “What? Well – I don’t know if it’s really my–”

  “Oh, go on. Show us what you can do, lad,” Ted boomed from the other end of the table.

  Gareth stood up, and Paul handed him a two-pronged steel fork and an improbably large carving knife. The turkey steamed in front of him, its browned skin oozing gravy. He made the first, hesitant cut, then sliced into the pale flesh of the breast. Putting the first slices of white meat onto a serving plate, he made a second cut, higher up near the backbone.

  To his surprise, a gap suddenly opened up in the skin, before he could cut any deeper.

  The flesh parted, like the opening of an eye.

  “What–”

  It looked like the rib cage had been forced open, but not by him. Forced open from the inside. Instead of wholesome meat, He saw a dark
, disturbing hollowness beneath the skin.

  There’s something wrong with the turkey, he thought, and felt a hot, burning taste at the back of his throat. An unpleasant chemical smell mingled with the food.

  I think I’d better–

  Too late.

  When he opened his eyes, Caroline’s face was the first thing he saw, right up close to his. The wetness that he felt seeping across his face was the water from a soaked tea towel. “He’s coming round,” she said.

  There was a strange echo to her voice. He felt her fingers widen his eyelids and realized she was looking at his pupils.

  He felt uncomfortable and cramped; it finally dawned on him that the back of his head was against the skirting board, and the rest of him was belly up on the dining room’s stripped pine floor. His shin felt rough, where it pressed against a table leg at an odd angle, and his right foot throbbed inside the walking boot. His own chair was nowhere to be seen. Had it fallen with him? Had they taken it away?

  “Oh God,” he muttered hoarsely.

  “Give him room. Give him some air–”

  “Easy now. Don’t try to get up–”

  “Best to stay where you are for a few minutes, love…”

  “Oh God, I’m so sorry…” Despite the protests, Gareth dragged himself into a sitting position, his back against the wall, and looked up at the anxious faces above him. “What happened?” he asked, his voice clogged with phlegm.

  “You fainted,” Caroline said flatly. “You nearly fell on the carving knife.”

  “You were only out for a few seconds,” Paul added.

  “What about the turkey?” Gareth asked.

  “The turkey?” Valerie repeated.

  “Is it all right?”

  “Yes, it’s – er, it’s fine. What do you mean? You didn’t knock it on the floor, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  Ted gave a loud guffaw from where he was still sitting. “Bloody typical. The boy keels over, then wonders if there’s any turkey left for him when he wakes up.”

  “I’m going to stand,” Gareth said firmly. “I’m all right.”

  Under the concerned looks of his family, he levered himself by pressing his hands against the wall, putting his weight on his left foot. With Caroline’s help, he eased himself into the chair that Colin put out for him.

  Jenny looked at him solemnly from her seat, then announced, “If we take Gareth to hospital, he can stay with his mummy, can’t he?”

  Gareth stared, then snorted with laughter. Everyone visibly relaxed, and the mood in the living room brightened.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have let you have that whisky last night. What about some Paracetamol?” asked Paul.

  “I feel fine,” Gareth declared. “Now, shall we actually eat this turkey?”

  After dinner, and further good-natured arguments over who would do the washing up, all of the family except Ted and Jenny occupied the kitchen. A half-finished area of tiling sparked an animated conversation with Valerie, Diane and Caroline about how the kitchen had been put together. Colin and Paul were looking out of the window at where the garage used to be. They had it pulled down, Paul said. They were going to have a larger one built. The site needed to be re-piled.

  Sipping from his mug of black coffee, Gareth hung around on the fringe of both conversations. Diane turned to him and said, “Sometimes I think I’ll never have my dream home, you know? Despite all the little alterations, I realize that I’ll never get it perfect, completely how I want it.”

  Gareth wandered through to the living room, where his dad was teaching Jenny an old nonsense-rhyme, and sat down in an armchair. After a few moments, Caroline came through and squatted down next to him.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked, her voice low.

  “Yes. Well…”

  “Be honest,” she said, her eyes staring into his.

  “I feel weird,” Gareth admitted. “Sometimes I feel like I’m not really here.”

  She sighed. “You’ve not recovered yet, have you? You’re not over it.”

  “Look, I didn’t come out of hospital too soon, if that’s what you mean. I’m fit and ready. It just takes a little time to get back into the swing of things, that’s all.”

  “Do you want to head back to Cambridge?”

  “Now? Oh God, no. Let’s relax, there’s no need to rush off in a panic.”

  Eventually, there was one more ritual that remained; the photographs. They put on their jackets and braved the late March winds, standing in the back garden against the background of rugged farmland.

  “Can you take one with this?” Gareth handed his battered Canon to Paul, and the young lawyer took a shot of Gareth, Caroline and Jenny in her mother’s arms, framed against the distant hillside.

  “Thanks.” That’s another one for the personal files, Gareth thought, taking the camera back from Paul.

  “Gareth,” Jenny said solemnly, through the thumb in her mouth.

  He looked down, smiling. “Yes, darling?”

  “Are you going back to the hospital?”

  He looked across at Caroline, who rolled her eyes. “No, darling, I definitely am not. Now, let’s get into the warm.”

  Jenny didn’t reply to him, but turned and waved at something or someone beyond the garden hedge. It looked, somehow, as if she were waving goodbye.

  As Caroline rushed Jenny rushed inside out of the wind, Gareth stood stiffly with both crutches under his left arm, and brought the camera up to his face. He turned, in the direction that Jenny had waved to.

  The Derbyshire landscape sprang into focus, veined with stark contrasts of shade and color. In his mind’s eye he imagined a horse. He pictured the breed and color, superimposing it onto the surface of the lens.

  He tracked the animal running, a horse with full, joyous use of its limbs and muscles, a horse that had no boundaries to restrict it.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Monday, February 5th

  As he’d expected, Gareth was the only person in the B&B dining room for breakfast the next morning.

  Feeling self-indulgent, Gareth piled bacon, mushrooms, sausage, grilled tomatoes and scrambled egg onto his plate from the self-service table, and also helped himself to the toast and little plastic pouches of marmalade. A twinge of sympathy made him exchange some idle chat with the man who brought in more packets of cereal and muesli – Mr. Chapman, the B&B owner. The tall, middle-aged man walked with a pronounced limp while carrying jars and bowls to and fro. A sports injury, Gareth thought, or an industrial accident – something that must have led him into the life of a small hotelier.

  After breakfast, he checked his bag of equipment once more. He was due to meet the client at 10:30 this morning; plenty of time to test the light.

  Coveney, in the daytime, had shed its veil of mystery and now presented a face like that of an elderly aunt concerned with appearances. Leaving the car behind – after all, he was in no hurry – Gareth walked in the brisk air along the main village street, exchanging greetings with the few pedestrians who were out this Monday morning. Houses coddled by ivy, mock-Tudor timbers and late 20th century security systems gave off the faint, familiar perfume of Cambridgeshire opulence. Gareth wasn’t jealous; he wasn’t under any illusions. His critical eye felt sometimes – to him – like an X-ray machine, knowing that he would always find harassment and insecurity behind what appeared to be the nicest facade.

  There was a church at the end of the lane. Coated with the decaying veneer of history, it stood on a small rise of land like a ship plowing through the waves. Surrounding it was a fully stocked graveyard, and a formidable Celtic stone cross poked above the wall of masonry. The crumbling tombstones stood, leaning at angles, discolored with age.

  His tour of the village complete – or as complete as he could be bothered to make it, anyway – he walked back to the B&B to find that someone had the same idea; turning up earlier than planned.

 
“Mr. Manning,” Mrs. Chapman said when Gareth entered the parlor. “You did say you were meeting a Mr. Littlewood here, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, that’s right. At 10:30.”

  “Well he’s already here in the dining room, with my husband.”

  Gareth entered the dining room, and two pairs of eyes swiveled in his direction. Two men sat at the table where Gareth had eaten breakfast, and they’d been bending their heads over a folder lying open. They both lurched to their feet. One of them was Mr. Chapman; the other was Brian Littlewood.

  Littlewood was tall, but not as tall as Gareth – it was difficult to tell because of the slight stoop that kept his neck tucked into his shoulders as if he were contemplating a shoulder charge. He was well-built, with a belly overhanging a wide leather belt and jeans with unnecessary turn-ups. His face, as he looked squarely at Gareth with a straight, almost challenging gaze, was round, holding a flabby nose and weak eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses. His florid cheeks made him look as if he were suffering from nettle rash. Perhaps he was growing a beard to hide his complexion – but the grizzled moustache and stubble only served to accentuate the mottling of his skin. Above his brow, Littlewood’s straight, greasy hair had been cut in a way that made Gareth feel highly uncomfortable. And the coat…

  Gareth didn’t want to think of it as an anorak. No way, he thought. Call it a windcheeta, a parka, a cagoule… anything but that. But it was too large for the man, and made of some unidentifiable light brown plastic, and held such an unbelievable layer of grime that it was probably only the stains holding the fabric together.

  “Hi,” the newcomer announced in a thin, nasal voice, with a noticeable Ozzie or New Zealand accent. “I’m Brian Littlewood, SIAP – Cambridgeshire branch. That’s the Society for the Investigation of Anomalous Phenomena.”

  “Gareth Manning.” The other man’s handshake was firm, as firm as the gaze that he kept trained upon Gareth’s face. They all sat down again at the same table. Among several badges on the lapel of Littlewood’s coat – not anorak, but coat – one badge caught Gareth’s attention. It was an image of a face, a pointed, almost triangular face with off-white skin and a tiny lipless mouth. Black eyes, with no pupils or irises, bulged out of the bald skull.