Only Darkness

by Danuta Reah

  He leant towards her, his arms on the table. ‘And what happened?’

  ‘Nothing happened. He got cancer. Lung cancer. He’d had a cough for a while. But he wouldn’t do anything about it. We could tell, me and Mum, that he wasn’t well, but he just didn’t seem bothered. By the time they found it he was too far gone.’ She sighed. It had been an awful death.

  ‘You were his only daughter?’

  ‘His only child.’ Debbie smiled. ‘He wasn’t a practising Catholic by the time he met Mum. That was something else he felt guilty about.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s not something I really understand.’

  ‘No. It’s not something I know much about.’ That was the first personal comment he’d volunteered.

  She told him something about the stories her father used to tell about the priests and nuns, and her Aunt Caitlin’s house in County Cork with its holy pictures and statues.

  ‘You didn’t get all that?’ he asked.

  Debbie shook her head. ‘Like I said, he’d given up Catholicism by the time he met Mum. She wouldn’t have had any truck with it anyway. It was something that happened when he was a teenager. His sister, she was only a baby, she died. She was only about three months old, and she hadn’t been baptized. She’d been ill. My grandmother, apparently she believed that the baby wouldn’t go to heaven because it hadn’t been baptized, and she was just destroyed. My father said that he realized then he didn’t believe a word of it any more.’

  He went on watching her after she’d finished, unnervingly silent until she saw that he hadn’t been paying attention, was thinking about something else. His face looked tense, distant. He shook his head. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I just thought of something.’ He checked his watch. ‘I’ve got to go.’ She felt a stab of disappointment. His glass was empty. He waited while she finished her drink. ‘Are you on the train?’ Debbie nodded. ‘I’ll walk down as far as the bridge with you. I’m going that way. When’s your next train?’

  A bit fazed by the sudden change, Debbie scrabbled in her bag and checked her timetable. ‘It’s in ten minutes.’

  It was nearly seven as they left the pub, and the town centre was quiet. A cold wind was blowing now, buffeting against the buildings, pulling Debbie’s hair out of its pins and combs and whipping it against her face. They didn’t talk as they walked towards the river. The station lights came into view, and they stopped at the crossing. ‘I go this way,’ he said. He looked over towards the station. There were people going in. It looked quite busy. ‘Will you be OK from here?’

  ‘Yes, fine.’ Debbie checked her watch. ‘I’m early.’ She had nearly seven minutes before the train arrived, assuming it was running on time. She looked at him. The wind had blown his hair about and he’d turned his collar up against the cold. His face was half in shadow. She shivered.

  ‘You’re frozen,’ he said. ‘There’s no warmth in that.’ He touched the collar of her mac. ‘Here.’ He unwound the scarf he was wearing from under his coat and wrapped it round her neck. His good humour seemed to be back. He caught hold of one of the tendrils of her hair that had escaped from its confinement and tucked it behind her ear. They looked at each other in silence for a moment, then he said, ‘You’d better get that train.’ He waited as she crossed the road, then turned and walked away towards the river. She could hear her train on the line. She hurried to the station entrance, and an hour later she was standing in her kitchen, feeling unaccountably depressed.

  She ought to eat something. The two beers she’d had with Rob had gone to her head. She wandered round the kitchen, opening cupboards. Buttercup yarped insistently at her feet. ‘I’ve fed you,’ Debbie told the little cat, and, picking her up, took her to the cat dish. Buttercup spurned the food with a burying motion, and hurried back to the kitchen after Debbie, mewing.

  Some pasta, some wizened mushrooms, some eggs and some onions were the results of Debbie’s trawl. A mushroom omelette, then. She put some oil to heat in the frying pan, and stirred the eggs in a dish. She washed the mushrooms and chopped them, deciding to fry them in butter as she deserved a treat. The mushrooms were cooking, and she was just pouring the eggs into the pan when the phone rang. Shit. She was tempted to leave it, but she couldn’t stand a ringing phone. She was always convinced it was something serious on the other end. As soon as she picked it up, it stopped. She banged it down in frustration, and it started again. She picked it up and again it stopped. She waited a moment, then just as she was about to pick up the receiver to try 1471, the phone rang a third time. She grabbed it and waited. A voice she recognized well at the other end said, ‘Debbie?’

  ‘Mum!’ She was relieved. ‘Are you having phone trouble again?’ Gina Sykes had been supplied with a series of jinxed phones by an increasingly apologetic and baffled phone company. The most recent one had behaved itself until, apparently, now.

  ‘No. Should I have? After all the trouble I’ve had …’ And she rattled off into the long story about inefficient operators and astronomical phone bills. Then she said, ‘Now, love, I’m phoning about that article in the Standard. Why didn’t you tell me about it? It’s a bit much when I’m terrified for my daughter nearly a week too late.’

  Debbie sighed. She’d been hoping, rather unrealistically, that her mother wouldn’t see the article, as she rarely read the local paper. She explained what had happened, and, feeling a bit guilty for not having said anything to her mother about the whole business in the first place, she told her about the interview with the police, and a slightly edited account of Rob Neave’s opinion.

  ‘Well, you pay heed to that,’ Gina advised her. ‘It’s what your dad would have said as well. Listen, Debbie, I’m going up to the grave on Saturday, taking some flowers. Do you want to come too?’

  Of course! It was her father’s birthday on Saturday. Debbie, who never remembered birthdays – sometimes including her own – had always relied on her mother to remind her, so she could send her father a card and a present. Now it seemed she needed to be reminded about anniversaries. She felt guilty. ‘Of course I will,’ she said, trying to remember if she’d made any arrangements for the weekend. ‘Shall I try and make it over on Friday night? If I’m not too busy. I could stay Saturday as well.’ Though her mother was only a few stops up the line, Debbie didn’t see as much of her as either of them would like. Debbie’s work schedule got in the way, and Gina’s job, though part time, occupied irregular hours.

  After some more desultory conversation, Debbie rang off, and stood by the phone, looking at the photo on the table, her and her father displaying that trophy so proudly. Had her mother been trying to get through or not? Or was there someone else trying to phone her? A smell of burning brought her back, and she rushed to the kitchen to be confronted by pans full of burnt eggs and blackened mushrooms. She scraped the eggs on to a saucer and offered them to Buttercup, who crouched down intently to eat them. She dumped both pans in a sink full of water, angrily ripped a crust off the end of the loaf and ate it dry. It was stale.

  Midnight, and again, Neave couldn’t sleep. He drank some beer, listened to some music, read for a while, but he couldn’t get his head to be still. It was all there, just waiting. The smallest thing brought it back. Angie.

  The children’s home where he’d spent most of his childhood had been run by people with very traditional views – no political correctness there. Boys were encouraged to boys’ activities and girls to girls’. He hadn’t minded this, except for the book with the pictures in. ‘What are you reading that for?’ Marlisse used to say. ‘You don’t want to read that. You’re a boy,’ and she’d substitute a sports book or an adventure book that she considered more suitable.

  But the book with the pictures fascinated him and he went back to it again and again. All the pictures were mysterious, with watery, twisting colours that suggested unseen things lurking in the shadows on the page. The pictures were all supposed to be of fairies and elves – which is why Marlisse thought it wasn’t a boy’s book – but these w
eren’t pretty little children with big eyes and gauzy wings. Some of them were twisted, ugly and strange, and some of them were wild and dangerous. There was one picture that he couldn’t get out of his mind. In the background of this picture, a figure was half concealed behind some flowers. She had red-gold hair and an expression of glee on a face that had a wild, pinched beauty. He had been in love with her – whatever she was. They had had adventures together where he’d saved her from dungeons, and enemy soldiers, and high mountains and dark caves. She had been a companion in some of the loneliest times. He hadn’t thought about the picture for years, and had certainly never expected to see it again, until she’d run lightly down the stairs in that dressing gown and looked at him with surprise.

  He could see Berryman watching her as she knelt in front of the fire. He’d watched her as well. She’d known, and had casually moved the towel that she was using to dry her hair to obscure Berryman’s view. But she had known he could still see her from his position by the mantelpiece, and had sparkled her eyes briefly in his direction. She was playing a dangerous game, and he liked that.

  He waited until the end of that shift. It was nearly seven before he left the station. He turned down Berryman’s suggestion of a drink. He had two days free now, and he and Berryman had plans for them, involving a couple of women they’d met the week before and invited over to his flat Saturday night; but first he decided to go back. He wasn’t quite sure what he was going to say – More questions? Forgot to ask …? He’d wing it when the time came. He parked outside the shabby terrace. It was getting dark now. He tried out one or two phrases – Sorry to disturb you again, could you just go over … but it wasn’t how he expected.

  He knocked at the door. He could hear music coming from the downstairs room, which stopped as he knocked the second time. She opened the door and looked at him, then she smiled and invited him in. She took him into the room they’d been in earlier and she made some kind of gesture, of welcome, he wasn’t sure. She was dressed now, wearing something that seemed to consist of scarves and swirls, a confusion of shadow colours. Her hair, now it was dry, curled on to her shoulders a vivid red-gold. He couldn’t stop looking at her.

  The violin was out of its case, propped up next to the music stand. ‘I was just practising,’ she said. ‘I’ve nearly finished. You don’t mind waiting?’ She picked up the instrument again, smiled briefly at him, and then became intent as she played. He watched the way her body bent and danced with the music, as though she was part of it. She was unselfconscious. He had given himself the right to watch her last time, this time she had given him the right. When she finished the piece she was playing, he asked her about the music. He’d never heard anything like it before. She picked up the violin again and played him pieces as she was talking about them. Then she showed him how to draw the bow across the strings and after a couple of tortured cat sounds, he produced a high, clear note.

  His interest aroused her enthusiasm. She pulled out some books of songs that he had forgotten he knew, and made him sing, harmonizing her clear soprano with his tenor, but he didn’t have the technique to do that for long, and they ended up laughing and breathless. Then they talked, sitting in front of the fire. He was good at getting information out of people, he could question them gently, expertly until they told him far more than they intended, but this time he let her draw him out, talked about things he’d rarely talked about before, until she knew as much about him as he knew about her. There was no rush, no hurry.

  It must have been three in the morning before they were talked out, and she lay down on the bed. She looked tired. The shadows under her eyes were violet. She reached out her arms in invitation, and he stretched himself out beside her, running his fingers down her face and across her mouth.

  Afterwards she asked him, ‘Did you come back for anything special?’

  ‘This,’ he said, with absolute honesty, holding her tightly, feeling her shaking as she laughed. Dangerous games.

  They hardly left her room that weekend. She was alone in the house – her fellow lodgers had all gone away. When Sunday evening and work loomed, he had to go. It wasn’t like it usually was, the insincere promises – Bye, give you a ring, see you later. It was as if he had a barbed hook in his flesh, except it didn’t hurt, unless he tried to pull away.

  It wasn’t until afterwards, in the sudden, shocking silence after she was gone, that he realized they’d been playing a far more dangerous game. He couldn’t go back. He was left like the survivor of a shipwreck washed up on some remote and rocky island, and there was no way back, and no way forward.

  6

  Midnight. Debbie jerked awake. Her heart was hammering as though she’d had a shock. Breaking glass … a dream? When Debbie was small, she used to have a recurring nightmare. She was chased through her familiar house by giants, giants that moved slowly but relentlessly, their faces distorted and flattened. She ran, her legs heavy and slow, towards the deep wells and shafts she had to climb down to escape, but at the bottom of each there was something sinister and dangerous – sometimes a large screw turning like a giant engine, sometimes fast-flowing but dark and silent water; sometimes a black gliding shape that drifted soundlessly past. As she lay in bed now, she realized she had been dreaming. A giant had been chasing her.

  She looked at the green digits on the clock radio and groaned. She’d been so tired she’d gone to bed at ten, tried reading, but her eyes had started to close so she’d turned the light off and drifted to sleep. Now she was wide awake. She turned over and tried to pull her pillow round to support her head. That wasn’t right. She tried another position and an itch in the small of her back disturbed her. She turned on to her back and stared at the ceiling.

  The window was a black rectangle in the darkness. She watched it. Was there something moving out there beyond the sill? She thought she could see shadows. She could hear a faint scraping noise, outside. A kind of crunching, like footsteps on gravel, slow stealthy footsteps like someone trying to make no sound at all. Don’t be stupid, it’s just your imagination! She hadn’t closed the curtain. Slowly, she sat up, pulling the quilt around her against the cold. God, it was freezing. Wrapped in the quilt, she got out of bed and, pressed to the wall, peered out of the window. Blackness. There was something wrong, something odd, something out of place. She couldn’t tell what it was at first, then she realized that the streetlight that shone over the fence into her back garden wasn’t lit. The small back yard was a pool of night. She couldn’t hear the sound any more. She strained her ears, listening. Nothing. She opened her bedroom door very quietly. Still nothing. She realized she didn’t want to go downstairs, into the dark, and she didn’t want to turn the lights on and let anyone know that she was there.

  She went back to bed, and lay there in the silence as the shadows moved outside her window, and the rectangle gradually lightened, and she fell asleep.

  When Debbie left the house the next morning, rushing because she had overslept, she saw Jill, her neighbour, talking to Mr Fenton whose house backed on to the gennel from the other side. ‘Morning, Debbie,’ Jill called. Debbie waved.

  Mr Fenton hurried over. ‘Bloody vandals, excuse my French, love,’ he said. Mr Fenton took a grandfatherly interest in Debbie. ‘Look at that light,’ he said in disgust. Debbie looked up at the streetlight. It had been smashed, the glass scattered over the ground. ‘I heard it breaking,’ he said, ‘but I just thought it was kids breaking bottles again. I came out this morning to clear up, and there it was.’ He shook his head. Debbie didn’t have time to get into a long conversation, particularly not one that was going to be about what Mr Fenton had and hadn’t fought the war for, so she explained she was in a hurry and left him with Jill. She thought he had a point, though.

  The early light of a winter morning is starting to lift the shadows. The shapes are becoming clearer as the darkness recedes. The loft keeps the night for longer. It is not easy, planning a hunt. It takes time, dedication, strength. For a moment, he fee
ls cold, lost, and he moves over to his railway, studying the tracks, the tunnels, the maze – his hunting ground. While the shadows are still there, he remembers. He remembers the dark places, the muffled breaths, tight, laboured. He remembers the waiting, the knowing … Her eyes will shine in the dark place, shiny tracks on her face. He remembers gleamings in the moonlight, soft breath, going, gone …

  He crosses the loft to where the overalls hang, carefully placed on the row of hooks on the wall. Four of them. And a new one, on the next hook. The cold feeling is mixed with a tension now, an excitement, a stirring in his groin. He wraps his arms round one of the overalls, burying his face in it, breathing in the smell that has gone sour and tainted, like the rest. He remembers, rubbing his stiffness against the stains.

  She didn’t tell Detective Sergeant McCarthy about her broken night, of course, when she went to the police station that afternoon. The day hadn’t started well. She had missed her train and arrived in the college just in time to go straight into her first class. She felt jangled and disorientated. She wanted to say to the students, ‘I’m too tired to do this now. Can we do it later?’ At coffee break, there was a note on her desk, asking her to phone DS McCarthy at Moreham police station. He wanted to see her as soon as possible, and he was free that lunchtime. She wasn’t hungry, anyway.

  She was bracing herself for another inquisition about the article, but he didn’t mention it at first, and she thought maybe she would get away with it. Instead, he asked her about the Thursday-evening encounter, going over and over the details, clearly trying to work out what she had seen, what she had imagined, what she had not been able to see. He was a tall man with fair hair and unfriendly blue eyes, and she found him intimidating. He was trying to push her into giving him definite answers to his questions, and there was very little she could be sure about. She hadn’t seen the woman she often saw on the opposite platform; no, she didn’t see her every week, but she’d been there for the past three or four weeks.