He saw the expression on Michael Quinn’s face as he said it. Hateful as it was, it wasn’t as bad as the glance the police had exchanged amongst themselves at this news.
And behind every one of those questions, he buckled under the weight of the one they didn’t ask. Did you have anything to do with this?
He had dialled Ellie’s number and made everyone including the police listen to the electronic squeal that resulted. He was rather disappointed by the police’s lack of interest in it, though; they seemed simply to shrug and put it down to the mobile being switched off or some network problem. Even Steve had, gently, agreed with this and tried to unwind Danny on this subject of the strangeness of the interference.
Truthfully Danny couldn’t provide any concrete reason for the squeal being some Rosetta Stone clue to all of this, but every time it rang out, he seemed to feel the blood chilling in his veins. Maybe it was just because it sounded so much like someone crying out in pain, although again he seemed to be the only one who heard it like that.
“We’ll put their descriptions on the national database,” the officer had told him, as reassuringly as he could manage.
When the police had asked for permission to go through the house and have a look around, he had said yes, of course, and then had been faced with a dilemma as to whether to sit and wait for them to finish or to follow them around as they went - he’d been paralyzed as to which would seem…well, the more natural, and then he’d flinched inwardly to even find himself thinking in those terms.
They wanted a recent picture of Ellie and Luke. He hadn’t immediately responded with - what for? He’d simply nodded and went to the cupboard in the spare bedroom and lifted one of the Winnie the Pooh albums Ellie sat and patiently filled with pictures at a rate of what seemed like every other day. He’d once remarked to her that if the photos of Luke had been stacked in chronological order his entire life could have been played out as a flawless flickbook.
It was the little things like this that hit you. How in the world were you meant to be equipped to decide which photo to use for something like this? And at the back of his mind the thought popped in, unbidden - I’d better pick one where she looks good or she’ll kill me. Almost as soon as he thought it the tears squeezed his eyes and he was forced to sit there, holding the albums, wondering if walking down with red-crusted eyes would turn down the intensity of the offcers’ stares a few watts when they asked them those questions.
Fuck.
And the whole time he was upstairs getting the photos with the officer having a look around, he could hear the low voice of Michael Quinn, talking to the second officer in the living room. His Ma and Da were outside smoking - he could detect the whiff of it in the air through the open window of the spare bedroom as it wafted upward from the front porch. His Ma was getting worse as time wore on, and seeing the police had made the whole thing horrifically official.
Michael Quinn was talking about him. He knew he was. Had he pressed his ear to the floorboards, perhaps he could have made out what he was saying. He wasn’t tempted to do so in the slightest.
The worst was yet to come, though.
“You want a what?” he said dumbly.
The officer had the decency to look pained, knowing how difficult this would be for anyone to hear. “We like to have a DNA sample of every person reported as missing.”
He didn’t ask. Unfortunately the officer assumed his silence was as good as asking.
“For any…forensics…we might need to do. Might,” he added. “It’s just a precaution.”
Danny nodded slowly. The photo had been painful. This was an order of magnitude worse. He looked around, his mind a numb blank. “Um,” he stuttered, “I d-d-don’t know what…”
“A toothbrush is usually good.”
He went and retrieved Ellie’s. It was pink and girly and though he didn’t touch the bristles, he knew if he had done they would have still been slightly damp, having only seen use that morning. He handed it to the officer and watched him place it in a plastic bag and seal it off.
“Can I get it back?” he heard himself say. The officer looked at him. “If she…well it’s her only one and…she…” he paused, and collected himself, “…she likes to brush.”
“I’m sure we can arrange that, yeah.”
Or you could just get another one. He saw it in the officer’s eyes, even if it didn’t reach his mouth.
I don’t WANT to buy a new one, he thought.
“What about the…”
It hit him then. Luke was too young for a toothbrush. Too young for a toothbrush and he was out there, somewhere, and Danny hadn’t a clue if he was safe. His stomach lurched. He took a moment to bring himself back under control. After a moment’s thought he emerged from the bedroom with something clutched between his fingers. It was a dummy. It was Luke’s favourite. Danny had lingered over choosing it, favouring for a second selecting one of Luke’s lesser-used dummies, and then had thought what if they can’t get what they need because it’s not used enough?
“Perfect!” said the officer reflexively as he took it, and though Danny knew what he meant he felt like smashing his face in.
The police had departed with platitudes and promises, which he understood the logic of but which didn’t reassure him one iota. Give it a few days, they said. Seems like the wee fella has his mother with him, after all. We’re sure they’ll turn up soon. Give it a few days and if needs be, we’ll go down the media appeal route.
Would you be okay with that, Danny? Going on television?
Danny had nodded someone else’s head and said that it would be okay through someone else’s lips.
Her ones had gone not long thereafter, to his immense relief. His parents and Steve had gone, at his insistence - Steve practically with a crowbar dislodging him from the doorframe. Having them stay over would have been odd, and he’d had enough of odd.
He paused at the top of the stairs, at the entrance to the bathroom, and his head turned to glance in at his bedroom. At the cot within.
He sat in there, a memory, sitting on the edge of he and Ellie’s bed, his arm crooked over the side of the cot holding a bottle of milk in place for Luke to guzzle. The surface of the mattress was low enough that after a while of leaning your arm in, resting it painfully against the wood of the cot, you started to lose all feeling in your fingers and ended up hoping that little kicking and punching sleep-suited bundle closed his eyes before permanent nerve damage set in.
But here came Ellie, with a small towel. She wrapped it up on itself and motioned for Danny to lift his arm, which he did for a second, allowing her to slip the towel on the cot where he was leaning his arm. She winked at him and tapped the side of her head and flashed him that smile of hers before climbing over and past him and getting into bed.
Danny walked into the bedroom, once again forcing the phantoms to leave. He sat on the bed and listened to the silence of the house around him, and he cried. He cried until there was nothing left to come, and at some point the phantoms came back, and this time he did nothing to send them away until he was surrounded by them, surrounded by Ellies and Lukes, all of them insubstantial.
***
Sleep escaped him. It didn’t come as a shock, despite the chronic tiredness he’d been feeling since this all started; it wasn’t a desire to sleep, but merely a desire to have the world go away as it did during sleep. Truth be told, he was afraid to sleep, in case this somehow signalled that he wasn’t taking this as seriously as he should be.
At 2:14am, he descended the stairs and headed purposefully for the kitchen. A thought had occurred to him and he knew it had to be obeyed. And so he found himself pouring out the bottles of milk he had made earlier, upon arriving at the house from work that afternoon. Ellie never kept bottles overnight. She made a fresh batch every morning.
The formula milk poured into the sink, glug-glugging its way down the plughole. He rubbed at his eyes as he waited for the kettle to boil, knowing they would be r
ed and puffy, knowing he must look a fuckin’ mess. He had deliberately avoided looking in mirrors for the last few hours. When the kettle boiled, when the steriliser dinged, he lined the bottles up in a neat little row and he took the scoop from the tin. His vision was blurring.
He spilled the powder. Missed the bottleneck entirely and it tumbled onto the draining board, instantly congealing as it touched the wet surface. He set the scoop down and realised that it too was now not sterile. Not safe.
He was a bad father.
Luke had not been planned and he had thought it was enough to do “the decent thing” and stick by Ellie and make sure the wee fella had a Da who stayed around and didn’t fuck off.
But it wasn’t, was it? He was half-arsed. He paid lip service to it all.
The words rose unbidden in his mind. He’d known they would at some point when all of this had begun. In a way he was surprised it had taken this long.
I’m not cut out for this. I need my freedom back. And you’ve come to represent everything that’s holding me back in my life. I’ve tried to be a husband. Tried to be a father. I’ve pretended until I can’t pretend any more and it’s not fair. Not fair on you, on Danny. Not fair on me.
Don’t look for me.
Words written on tattered notepaper. Words that supposedly did not exist. And the flames had that destroyed them.
He was no better. No better than him. She’d seen through it, seen his façade for what it was, and she’d decided she’d had enough of it. She’d gone and taken his son with-
Thu-Crakkk
He started violently at the noise, thinking for a second that someone was shooting at him, but the noise hadn’t come from a bullet; as he turned, he saw the window at the far end of the kitchen was now sporting a heavy chip. As he moved toward it, another object arced into view, and this time he saw it; a rock, hurled from the alley. It impacted against the window and another incredibly loud report sounded, causing the chip to grow in size and little spiderweb filaments to begin to bloom between them.
Laughter. He heard it, faint but clear, high-pitched.
Coming from the alley.
His hand curled around the hilt of the largest of the kitchen knives jutting from the wooden block, the big one that was far too large to be used for anything practical except instilling a distinct feeling of badassery upon anyone who wielded it, and by fuckin’ Christ he was wielding it now. He unlocked the back door and strode out into the yard. His yard.
“Right you wee bastards…” he said, loudly enough so that they’d hear.
Knife in one hand, he unlocked the alleyway door. Darkness poured in, sucking the light out of the world, enveloping him. How long since he’d stepped out here, with Ellie safe in the kitchen?
They thought they ruled the night, the wee fucks. When he was a kid it was a few kids hanging round the offie, asking anyone going on would they get a carryout and slabberin a wee bit if they refused. It had been rascally, but it hadn’t seemed threatening.
Now they hung about in packs of fifteen or more, and they went deathly silent when you passed.
The alleyway was still littered with bins; many of the residents didn’t bother bringing them back in after collection until the day or so after. He could see the big metal gates, looking like a castle portcullis, at the far end of the alley. It looked huge, imposing, but he knew it wouldn’t stop the more determined breed of little fuckwit.
His hand tightened around the knife. He was amazed how empowered he felt. Danny had been in one fight in his entire life, when he was nine years old, and he had staggered home afterward and threw up from the sheer stress of it. But now…maybe it was the fact that his stomach had no churning left in it.
“I know you’re in here! Ya fuckin’ wee cunts!” he yelled.
There was no reply, but he saw flickers of movement further on down. Something knocked against one of the bins; he saw its silhouette rock from side to side.
He sprang forward, leaping, some ancient part of his brain crying charge! and the rest of him, for a wonder, following its lead. The Danny who had cowered down this same alley only a few nights ago was gone. The knife blade flashed in the dark.
A shadow loomed ahead of him.
Something stood up-
Danny reacted instinctively, shouting something suitably fear-inspiring and incoherent, diving forward, throwing his free hand out and getting a solid grip of the shape’s throat, applying his entire weight to knock the fucker over onto its back so they both hit the alley floor with a solid thump-
Lights went on in Regent Street’s back windows, reacting from Danny‘s screamed challenge, throwing the alleyway’s former blackness into a relief of patches of semi-illumination. One such pool of light was thrown across the landing area where he and his quarry had fallen-
Teeth.
Eyes.
Hands scrabbling at his throat, hands with sharp ends-
“Jesus-!”
He threw himself backward instinctively, landing on his arse in a patch of shadow, moving backwards with his arms and legs until his back was up against wood. The knife clattered somewhere, lost amidst the shadows.
And it came for him. It came on arms too long, on legs too short, scuttling like an insect across the alleyway surface, moving too quickly to be illuminated properly. His back wouldn’t go any further into the wood and now here was the terror, here was the fear he had marvelled at not feeling before, multiplied tenfold…
A shriek rang out, assaulting his ears, a shriek that even in his dumbstruck horror he found somehow familiar, as it closed the final few feet to where he-
The wood at his back collapsed inward as the alleyway door was opened. Unprepared, he tumbled arse over shite, ending up in an undignified heap.
“Close the door! Close the fuckin’ door!”
A hand reached down to him. As he clasped it, he saw it was old, liver-spotted. He looked up into the face of his saviour.
“Hello love,” said Bee, and smiled a semi-toothless smile down at him. “Cup o’ tea?”
***
Bee’s tea was so substantial you could have dammed fjords with it. He felt like upending his cup, letting it sloooop it and eating it with a knife and fork. How
Teeth - eyes - claws -
The shriek…
many fuckin’ teabags had she used anyway?
A shiver went through him that seemed to start at his bones and shake his entire body. All doubts about the composition of what sat before him fled and he knocked back a long draught, feeling the hot substance within hit the back of his throat and begin to burn its way down, bringing back some much-needed sensation to his in-shock nervous system, even if it was in the form of possibly permanent tannin-induced nerve damage.
Bee sat at the other end of the tiny table in her kitchen. She had her own cup but had not yet touched the liquid within; she was too busy studying the young man before her with eyes that, now he saw them up close, were as keen as they were old.
“How’re ya feeling, son?”
He was about to answer when another mini-flashback to that fucking thing shot through him and brought his teeth together with a clack. He closed his eyes for a second and forced himself to take a breath and exhale. “Alright,” he managed. “Thanks for the tea.”
She waved a hand. “Ach don’t be daft. Least I could do. I wasn’t sleepin and I heard you go out after I heard your window crack,” and there was that stare again. “You must be worried sick, I’m guessin.”
He nodded, still trying to process what had happened out there. In the harsh artificial light of an old woman’s kitchen, with its floral tea towels and a bag of cat food propped up in the corner, it suddenly seemed absurd in the extreme. He tried to conjure up what had happened in a more controlled way, to slow down the memory and study it, but every time his mind approached what had just happened it seemed to spasm in terror and a flush of the terror that had swept through him out there went right through him once more.
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