The Slaughter Man

by Cassandra Parkin

  She’s on a train, and she knows she’s dreaming because the seats are red velvet, and heavy gold-fringed curtains hang at the windows. When she tries to see out, everything’s dark, and she’s met only with her own reflection.

  “I can’t find the tickets.” Laurel is beside her, pale and anxious. She’s rummaging in an old-fashioned black doctor’s bag by her feet. The sight makes Willow uneasy, partly because she doesn’t recognise it, but mostly she’s not sure if she’s brought her own luggage with her. But surely her parents would have checked?

  “They said we could come by ourselves,” Laurel explains. “Don’t you remember?”

  She knows she’s dreaming, because she can almost feel her brain busily working to fill in the blanks, making the scene believable and coherent. An image comes to her mind: she and Laurel, standing on the platform and waiting for the train, frantically trying to phone their mother. First they couldn’t find their phones, and then they were almost out of battery. Then, mysteriously, Willow’s phone burst into life and she was able to bring up her frequently dialled numbers and call her mother. “Is that you, Willow?” her mother had said. “What do you want?” And when Willow, longing to speak but unable to summon a word, had simply held the phone and stared at it, her mother had grown impatient and said, “You’ll have to sort yourselves out, both of you. I don’t have time to talk right now. Since you’re both out of the house, I need to have sex with your father.”

  Oh God, Willow thinks. Did she really say that to me? That’s so gross.

  “Of course not,” Laurel says. “She wouldn’t say something like that to us.”

  Of course she didn’t say that, Willow tells herself. I’m dreaming. None of this is real. But the cringy feeling in her stomach won’t go away.

  “We’re not supposed to be here,” Laurel says. “They’re going to realise soon. Then we’ll be in trouble.”

  Willow has no idea who they might be. Their carriage is empty apart from the two of them.

  “No, not other passengers,” Laurel says. “The other ones. The ones who are looking for us. They don’t like that we’re not together.”

  But we are together, Willow thinks. We’re right here.

  “This is a dream, remember? In real life I’m dead and you’re still alive.” Willow swallows hard. “Oh shit, Willow, where are the tickets? The inspector’s coming down the train, I can hear him.”

  And now Willow can hear him too, and she knows who he’s going to be. He rustles as he comes, as if he’s shaking the feathers of his wings, and when he opens the connecting door between the two carriages, she knows he’ll be tall and spindly, with a man’s body but a crow’s head. Laurel is still rummaging in the bag at her feet.

  “Got it!” she shouts triumphantly. “I knew it was in here.” In Laurel’s hand is a gristly lump of something about the size of her fist, fat blood vessels large enough to put a finger in, its four chambers still contracting against Laurel’s fingers, its surface streaked with white and dripping with red. “This is mine. But where’s yours?”

  This is a dream, Willow thinks, so I can control what happens next. The train’s stopping now. It’s pulling in at a station. I’m going to get off and leave. He won’t catch me. She wills this with all the force she has in her, but if anything, the train gets faster, shuddering with speed as it tears through the darkness. The handle of the connecting door rattles.

  “You can’t get away from him by running.” In Laurel’s hands, her heart jumps and pulses as if it’s trying to escape. “He always catches up with you in the end.”

  But I’m going to bloody well try, Willow thinks. She races to the end of the carriage and flings open the door.

  Outside, the dark waits for her. She falls into its embrace.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  She comes back to consciousness with a stiff neck, a dry mouth, and the knowledge that she’s escaped her dream relatively unscathed. She knows where she is and why; she’s in her Uncle Joe’s car, going somewhere she’s never been before. She’s waking in the same place she went to sleep, nothing broken, nothing missing; and thank God, thank God, she hasn’t wet herself. A small victory. Her uncle’s talking, but not to her. He must be on the phone.

  “Willow’s fine,” he says into the air.

  Willow peeks out through a crack between her eyelids. The rain has slowed and the road seems emptier.

  “I’m sorry. I know I’m being daft.” Her mother, her voice made strange by the car speakers. Willow keeps her breathing carefully even. She doesn’t want them to know she’s awake.

  “No, you’re not. You love her, of course you’re worried. But we’re fine.”

  “I miss her so much. Willow, sweetie, I love you and I miss you, okay?”

  “She’s actually asleep right now.” She feels the car waver for a moment, as if her uncle has turned to look at her. “She looks about six.”

  I do not look six, Willow thinks to herself. She forces herself to keep her eyes closed and her face neutral.

  “And you’re sure you’re going to be all right? I know it’s difficult when she can’t tell you what’s going on but she’s quite good at letting you know in other ways, you just have to be alert—”

  “We’re getting on great, don’t worry.”

  “She won’t be able to tell you if she wants to stop or anything.”

  “It’s all right, I thought of that so I stopped anyway, about half an hour ago.” There’s a slight chuckle in Joe’s voice. “I’m on a strict schedule. A bit like having a new puppy.”

  “That’s good. Was she… I mean, was she all right?”

  “What, in the service station? She was great. Well, I mean, I ran into this mad security woman who thought I might be a kidnapper or a child trafficker or something, but Willow found a secret back door out and we ran away and escaped.”

  “You what?” Her mother’s laughter is something she thought she’d forgotten the sound of. “No, you didn’t, you’re making that up. Aren’t you?”

  “I tell you what… What would you prefer the answer to be? And then we’ll both agree it’s that one.”

  “You’re an idiot. I’ve missed you.” A pause. “So she’s not… I mean, she hasn’t said anything?”

  “Not yet.” Joe sounds as unconcerned as if he’s reporting on a parcel that hasn’t arrived.

  “She might be absolutely fine in some places, and not in others.” There’s some deep emotion in her mother’s voice, but she can’t quite decide what it is. “Some kids are complete chatterboxes at home, but they can’t talk at school or in shops or whatever. She was like that at first. She’d talk at home to us sometimes, but not anywhere else, and not when people came round…” Her mother’s voice is shaky. “Then she got worse and worse. The horrible thing is I can’t even remember exactly when she stopped talking – I wasn’t really paying attention, I just thought she was a bit quiet – and when I realised it must have already been a couple of days.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Joe says, very gently. “She’s like you, that’s all. You never want to talk about things that are upsetting you either.”

  “But it’s not the same thing, this is… I’m sorry, I’m being stupid, ringing you up and crying like this.”

  “It’s not stupid. But you don’t need to worry. I’ll look after her and she’ll get better and you’ll get better and you’ll find a way to have a good life again. Different, but good. I promise.”

  “I’ll settle for Willow having a good life. I don’t mind about me and Stephen. Just Willow. That’s all that matters.”

  “No it’s not. You all matter. That’s the whole point of this, remember? You and Stephen having some space to grieve without having to worry about Willow.”

  “It’s such a relief.” Her mother’s voice is suddenly very low and soft. Willow has to strain to hear her. “Being able to cry without worrying that I’m upsetting her. Not having to worry she’s going to notice. Not having to see Laurel’s face when I… Oh, shi
t, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  “Good God, will you stop apologising for yourself?”

  Willow keeps her eyes carefully closed. Breathes in and out. In and out. This isn’t news. She realised it weeks ago. She knows she’s making it worse for her parents, because how can she do anything else? How could anyone move on if, every day, they were forced to look at the living face of the child they laid in the ground, made strange by its presence on someone else’s body?

  “Sorry again for calling. You haven’t been gone three hours yet and I’m already hounding you. I promise not to ring again until tonight.”

  “Rose. This is me you’re talking to. Once a day was your idea, not mine. Call whenever you want to.”

  “No, I’ll wait until tonight.” A hesitation. “But, will you ring me, though? When you get there? So I know you’re there safely?”

  “No problem at all.”

  “I know it’s silly but I worry.”

  “Of course you do. But I’ll get us both home all right.”

  “Love to you both.”

  “And to you both. Bye for now.”

  A moment of stillness, and then the music begins playing again. To the sound of soft rock, Willow considers what she’s overheard. Every word her uncle said was true, but somehow he’s taken the near-disaster of the incident at the service station and turned it into a story her mother would want to hear. How strange. She breathes in, breathes out, then stirs and opens her eyes.

  “Hey.” Joe, concentrating fiercely on the road, nonetheless notices her return to consciousness. “Your mum called.”

  Willow tries to make her face look like someone who’s just woken up, and hasn’t at all been listening in while pretending to be asleep.

  “She sends her love,” Joe says, and pulls out to overtake a well-stuffed Renault Scenic where two children sit in the back like prisoners, staring straight ahead at screens hanging over the backs of the seats. For several moments, she’s beside the child in the car next to her. He turns his head towards her and gives her a tiny wave, as if they’re secret conspirators. She waves infinitesimally back.

  “Sleep all right?”

  Willow nods.

  “Want to stop again?”

  Seriously? It’s barely been an hour. She shakes her head. And you’re annoying that driver by passing him so slowly. He can’t get past the lorry until you’re out of the way.

  “Okay, well, let me know if you want to.”

  Concentrate on the road, she thinks. Joe tears along the centre lane for a while, then suddenly pulls back in behind a lorry. The man in the Renault roars past, giving their car the finger. She wonders if the children in the back can see him doing it.

  “I told your mum we’re fine,” Joe continues. Another gap opens up to his right and he swings the wheel so that the car leaps into it. It’s a constant surprise to her, how adults can be such dreadful drivers.

  “I didn’t say anything about earlier,” Joe continues. “I hope that’s okay. Only I had this very strong feeling she probably didn’t need to know about me being a Service Station Ladies Toilets Pervert.”

  As if that was the most embarrassing part, Willow thinks. Her knees still smell faintly of disinfectant. She can smell it when she moves.

  “I mean, I’m not asking you to lie to your mother or anything,” Joe adds. “I wouldn’t do that. But, you know… she’d only worry…”

  Joe’s attention is completely focused on her; they’re drifting between the middle and the inside lanes, way above the speed limit. That wouldn’t be her fault at all, not the way it would be if she were to cut herself or fill her mouth with pills, and she could go to join Laurel with a clear conscience, and she wouldn’t have to go to this strange house, or go to sleep in a strange room, and wake up tomorrow in the strangeness of another day with her sister…

  She pats Joe on the arm and points imperiously towards the road.

  “Shit! Sorry. Sorry.” A moment of floundering, and they’re safely in the inside lane and everyone who has watched them struggle flies past, turning to look in through the windows with accusing faces.

  “If you don’t mind,” Joe says carefully, “if you don’t mind… maybe let’s not tell your mum what a crappy driver I am either? Normally my other half does the motorway driving. Bloody business trips, eh? Still, if it wasn’t for that I don’t think your mum would have let me have you. I mean, she thinks I’m all right and everything, but…”

  Now his steering’s all right, but he’s pressing hard against the accelerator so the car leaps forward like a fish, taking them close enough to the lorry in front of them for her to read the lettering on the transit stickers. Bereft of words, she’s forced to improvise. In her bag is an outsized bag of Haribo sweets, put there by her mother when she thought Willow wasn’t looking. She opens the bag and offers one to her uncle.

  “Thanks,” he says. “We’ll be okay. I’ll look after you.”

  Just try not to crash before we get there, Willow thinks, then offers him another sweet in case he can read her thoughts and see what she thinks of his driving.

  When she next wakes, the rain’s slowed to a fine mizzle, and they’ve paused at a spaghetti tangle of roads she can’t begin to make sense of. To her surprise, Joe seems completely at ease, humming to himself as he turns into a thin single carriageway surrounded by trees.

  “You missed the bit where I cut up a man in a Lambo and I thought he was going to take me out,” he says, and she catches her breath in surprise and wonders if he really can read her thoughts. “But I’m all right now, I know these roads. Home in half an hour. We might see wild ponies if we’re lucky, they cross the road sometimes.”

  She’s too old and too urban to be excited about seeing a horse, wild or tame, but the thought of one of them lurching out from the trees and dashing into the road gives her something to focus on. She spends the rest of the journey watching the speedometer and wondering how it would feel to crash into the horse’s body, see it smash through the windscreen to crush them to death. Beware horses in road. Beware cattle in road. Beware pedestrians in road. Beware cyclists in road. Thanks to the trees, the visibility is poor. Slow, Slow, Slow, Slow, Slow.

  Then they’re approaching a cluster of houses (rumble strips, a giant-sized ‘30’ sign and the plaintive request, Please Drive Carefully Through Our Village) and a sudden left turn that feels like driving into a wall. Finally, they’re pulling into a space like a small farmyard without any animals, with an unkempt garden beyond it.

  Her Uncle Joe’s house is small and low and built of long, flat, ancient-looking stones that make her think of dry-stone walls. Against the wall, a thick worn flight of steps comes down from a door in the first floor, hugging the outside of the house and melting into the ground. Is that the way in? And why is it upstairs? She can’t even tell if this is the front of the house or the back. While she’s staring, Joe opens a door that hides in the shadows at the foot of the staircase.

  “Hey!” he calls cheerfully as he opens the door into a tiny slate floored lobby where a washing machine and tumble dryer sit crammed tight against the wall. “Just me, nothing to worry about…” And in the silence as they wait for an answer, Willow feels the hairs on the back of her neck rise up. It was supposed to be the two of them. What if someone replies?

  Then Joe sees her face, and laughs.

  “It’s all right,” he says. “I like to do that in case someone’s come in while I’ve been away.” He takes a note from the table, crumples it in his hand. “I leave a note for the burglars as well, so they don’t make a mess looking for the valuable stuff. Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. Come on in properly.”

  The kitchen should be the warm and cosy heart of the house – there’s a huge stove, a sturdy table and chairs, a green gingham sofa nestled beneath a window – but the air’s almost as chilly as it is outside. She’d thought she was sick of being in the car, but suddenly the stale comfort of engine-heated air seems quite appealing. She tries not to sh
iver.

  “It gets cold stupidly quickly if there’s no one in the house,” Joe says, and once again she’s struck by how observant he is, and how naked it makes her feel that even in the depths of her silence, she can still be read and interpreted. “It’ll warm up once the stove gets going. Okay, so through here’s the living room.”

  Another room that looks as if it should be cosy, a room made for twilight and cold evenings and stormy nights. The windows are set into the thickest walls she has ever seen, walls so deep you could climb into the windowsill and close the curtains and be perfectly comfortable there, as long as you were wearing at least fifteen layers of clothing, to keep out the chill that radiates off the rough creamy walls. Someone’s laid a soft black sheepskin rug into the window to the left of the front door, as if Joe likes to sit there sometimes to read. Or perhaps he prefers the wing chair next to the black wood burner. Everything is relentlessly, scrupulously, intimidatingly clean.

  “Through here to the stairs,” Joe says, opening another door at the other side of the living room (So many doors! she thinks. It must have been built before they invented corridors). The stairs are narrow and creaky and lined with pictures, ending with a thin chilly landing.

  “That’s the bathroom. It gets cold at night but there’s a heater if you need it, and there’ll be plenty of hot water once the Aga gets going.”

  But it’s freezing right now, Willow thinks despairingly. How can you live in a house this cold? She’s read books where characters find frost on the inside of their windows in the mornings, or wake to find ice on the surface of their water jug. But she’s never appreciated before what that says about the temperature of the rooms they were waking up in. She peeks into the bathroom, registers the ornate silver mirror that hangs on the wall. Flinches back from it before it can trap her. Makes a mental note to keep her gaze carefully downwards when she’s going in or out. Back on the landing, Joe opens another door.

  “This is my room.”

  A cream carpet, a double bed, one tidy bedside table with a lamp and a photograph frame, and – the first sign she’s seen that anyone truly lives here – one extremely untidy one, with a wild litter of books sprawled across the floor. She’s unsure how closely she’s supposed to look, how much interest she’s expected to take in the bedroom of an almost-stranger. She’s relieved when Joe pulls the latch closed again.