In a few long strides he was at the front door. Jesus this place was a fuckin’ mess. Now that he was closer to the windows, he could see that every one of them had the blinds pulled shut and such a layer of dirt and dust lying on the outside of them that it looked as if they hadn’t been opened since the days when you could have skated across the tundra from Belfast to Scotland.
The door itself - he had a brief flash to the door of the Quinn’s, and rapping on It only two nights previously - was similarly old and battered, lacking even in house number, its frosted glass panels offering no clue to what lay within. The only adornment of any note was - Danny’s eyes narrowed - of all things, a horseshoe, nailed to the centre of the door as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Seeing it, Danny felt a twist in his stomach as he realised he was essentially here with no means to defend himself, should this Dermot character turn out to be a fuckin’ loony-bin…
A shadow moved within. Danny’s hands balled into fists. He might not be armed, but by fuck he was itching to hit something.
“Dermot Scully?” he called, when the shadow showed no signs of moving toward to open the door. “It’s Danny. Danny Morrigan. I’m Ellie’s partner. Ellie Quinn, your niece?”
Nothing.
“Ellie Quinn your missing niece?”
Nothing.
“I’ve got something I need your help with,” Danny said, shifting tack slightly. He pulled out the Dictaphone that Doc had given him back at Queen’s. Thumbing the volume dial up to maximum, he hit PLAY, and the whispering hissing voice played out.
That got results.
The door opened and he found himself looking at a man who he judged to be not a kick in the arse off sixty. He was barely over five feet tall, and hunched over with it, to make him seem even smaller. What little hair remained on his head was white and wispy. His skin was weatherbeaten and the colour of old footballs, and he was dressed in clothes that, judging from the odour emanating from them, he had slept in for quite some nights running.
He glanced furtively up at the six-footer on his doorstep, his gimlet eyes shining with what Danny judged to be a keen intelligence despite his supposed fragile mental state, but there was barely concealed panic beneath that exterior now.
“Are you mad!” he hissed. “Don’t play that! Not here! Not ever here!”
“I’m coming in,” Danny said. He hadn’t meant to say that; he’d meant to ask could he come in, but somehow he wasn’t in the mood for asking anymore. He moved forward, and found the door slammed in his face. Danny’s face darkened with a terrible swiftness.
“Listen to me you oul bastard. I’ve had a really bad fuckin’ day, so you open this fuckin’ door right now,” he growled.
“I can’t,” the answer came. “I’m sorry but I can’t. Go away or I’ll call the police.”
Danny felt rage descend on him. He slid the Dictaphone back into his pocket and advanced until his forehead was pressed up against the frosted glass. He could see the warped outline of Dermot Scully within, in his front hallway, watching him. He wanted to put his shoulder to the door separating him, but he forced himself to hang on to some semblance of reason.
“Do you know what it says? The message on this?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know why my girlfriend and son have vanished? Why no-one can remember my son?”
“Yes.”
Danny closed his eyes and felt a shiver go through his entire body, a shiver that was partially relief and partially forcing back a tide of sweltering emotion that threatened to unbalance him completely. He felt as though he were clinging desperately to sanity, and his fingers were slipping by the moment, but he wouldn’t give in, not now, not when an answer was finally within reach.
“Open this door,” he said, quietly and insistently and with an undercurrent of murder, “open this door and give me some answers or so fuckin’ help me by the time the police get here, there’ll be nothin left of you.”
The door opened a few seconds later. Danny had to fight the urge to leap across the threshold and wrap his hands around that scrawny little neck, but some semblance of the civilised man inside him bade him to ignore that. So he stepped inside and watched as Dermot Scully slammed the door behind him and threw across at least five different locks at five different heights. This house was a fortress, it seemed. What was he so paranoid about keeping out?
Or keeping in…
“Where are they?” he asked, his voice close to cracking. His hands were trembling, he knew. He didn’t care.
Scully didn’t reply, merely walked into his living room and sat down on an ancient armchair. Dust flew up. Danny followed him, sensing on some level the filth of the place around him but pushing it to the side. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except answers.
“You’re Danny Morrigan…?” Scully said, regarding Danny with something approaching awe. He reached for a tumbler filled with water with hands that were shaking also, and dropped at least four tablets inside it. They fizzed angrily.
“I asked where they are,” Danny said warningly. “Don’t fuck me about. If you know-”
“Answer the fuckin’ question!”
Danny blinked. He wouldn’t have believed Scully had it in him, but there had been a flash of something there in that anger; something beyond the nervous, cowed exterior the man had projected thus far. “Yes, that’s me.”
“Look at you, all grown up. Last time I seen you…” he trailed off, unable to finish the thought. “You look like your Da, you know that?”
Scully was talking in a croak, his throat sounding as if had dried up completely. He knocked the tablet mixture back and immediately hunched over as if it had only caused him more pain.
“How do you know my Da? What’s he got to do with all this?”
Scully laughed hollowly. “That’s right. He wasn’t around to tell ye, was he. All part of the arrangement. Sorry, I’d forgotten.”
If it were possible, Danny felt his mind lose another fingerhold on the precipice of reason. “What the fuck are you on about?” he snapped. “What’s any of this have to do with Ellie? With Luke? With this?” and he fished out the Dictaphone again and hit PLAY-
“NOOOO!” Scully screamed.
The older man dove headlong at him, rugby-tackling Danny off his feet, knocking the digital recorder from his grasp so that it bounced into the hallway and beyond both of their grasping hands. The message within hissed out in its entirety. Danny, the shock of the sudden attack wearing off, threw Scully off him easily, leaping to his feet and grabbing the older man by the filthy collar of his shirt, bringing his face into bear with the leathery features of the crazy old bastard.
“What are-”
“YOU LET THEM IN! GET OUT!” Scully screamed. “GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT!!!”
The house around them began to creak. Danny glanced to the corner of the room where one such creeeeeeauuuchhhh had emitted. He’d been in better houses than this that had been infested with all sorts, so no doubt there were rats and mice all over the joint, but this didn’t sound like a noise made a rodent’s tiny little feet.
It sounded again. Not just from the corner, but from upstairs, moving across the landing, moving towards the top of the stairwell.
Scully ripped himself free from his grasp, taking some of his shirt with him. He scrambled out of Danny’s attempts to re-grab him and made for the kitchen. Danny lurched after him but Scully was faster than his age suggested and with a final twist, he had opened a door in the back of the kitchen; a door with a staircase leading downward beyond. Danny had a brief overpowering whiff of stale air and an incredible undercurrent of something defying classification, something foul, and then Scully was gone and the door slammed shut behind him and clunk, clunk, thunk from the other side signified multiple locks had just been slammed across.
“OPEN THIS FUCKIN’ DOOR!” Danny bellowed, wrapping his hands around the handle and pulling for all he was worth. It didn’t budge an inch.
He heaved again - and then he stopped.
Some thing was coming down the stairs.
He could hear it breathing, could hear it moving, and he knew in that moment that it was of the same type of thing as that he’d glimpsed last night in the alleyway. It was coming down unevenly, as if the regularity of the stairs were too much for it to process, a thump…thump…thumpthumpthump that reached into his very soul and dragged fingernails across it, filling him with the sort of certain dread that Horrible Things Were About To Happen he hadn’t felt since childhood.
Or since last night…
And now it had finished its descent and was in the hallway. He couldn’t go back through the living room. His eyes settled on the back door, locked with bolts. He drew them back.
It was in the living room now.
He pushed at the back door. It refused to open.
Eeeeeeee? the shriek was so familiar now, almost lulling, but dripping with malicious intent. He had seconds before it was in the kitchen behind him and he knew with an awful certainty that when he sensed it was in the room he would be compelled to look behind him and when he did so, he would be lost completely.
Danny lifted his leg and battered it with his foot and it buckled a little. He did it again, panic giving him the strength if not the finesse, and the door bent and broke free of its moorings, pitching outward at a crooked angle, affording him a crack of escape.
He took it, gathering himself up into a ball and leading with his shoulder, punting through the rest of the door and out into Dermot Scully’s back yard. Another overgrown jungle of grass and weeds rippled in the afternoon winds and he heard it, again, as it discovered its quarry had escaped-
Something moved in the grass under his feet. A tug at his ankle almost destabilised him, came close to knocking him on his ass even as he made for the waist-high hedge. He screamed, in terror and in challenge and in determination, and made a leap for the hedge and was over it and back into the city once more.
He kept running, sprinting past a few confused people, until the lack of any feelings of pursuit caused him to risk slowing and casting that glance he’d so dreaded back in the kitchen. Nothing was stalking him, and he had time to reach for the bus stop pole beside him and double over, expelling and sucking in air in huge gulps, feeling his entire body spasm with exertion and waves of sheer fear.
A ssssssh-pliss beside him caused him to stand up and start, bringing up his hands as if to defend himself. He found himself looking only at the face of an disaffected bus driver. Not that there was any other type.
“You goin somewhere, or what?” the driver asked.
Danny swallowed and got on board. Right now there was only one place to go, and one person to see.
The Refusal Of The Call
“What d’you mean, gone?”
His Ma blinked at him with eyes that had obviously been full of tears not long previously. Danny could see Steve scowl at him for the harshness of his questioning, but right now he couldn’t care about that. “He’s gone,” Linda Morrigan repeated. “I thought he’d just gone out this morning, but I’ve been trying his mobile…and I went back to the house, and his stuff is…”
She broke down and walked away from him and into his kitchen to cry. Danny watched her go, knowing and feeling that at one level he should be following her, comforting her. Her husband vanishing must after all have been bringing back all-too-painful memories, particularly at a time like this. But how could he comfort her? How the fuck could he do that right now, in the middle of all this?
“Lad, you need to-”
“Shut up,” he snarled at Steve, and moved past him into the kitchen. His Ma was turned away from him, her shoulders moving up and down. He remembered seeing her like this so many times when he’d been a kid after his Da had gone and not knowing what to do, knowing that a hug was only as likely to make things worse as better.
“Mummy,” he said, deliberately regressing the term to an earlier age to try and snap her out of it. It seemed to work. The shoulders slowed in their rhythm and she glanced back at him, wiping her nose, her eyes full of heartbreak.
“Is there somethin’ you’re not telling me,” he said, being careful not even to phrase it like a question, to keep any trace of accusation out of his voice.
She blinked, confused, as if not able to comprehend the question. “You what? About what?”
“About him. About why he left us.”
“Oh, Danny…” she said, and dissolved into tears once more.
“Jesus Christ, lad, what the fuck are you playin at?” Steve demanded from behind him. “Can you not see your Ma’s in bits?”
Danny turned to his friend and his eyes flashed dangerously. “Butt out,” he snapped.
“No I fuckin’ won’t,” Steve shot back, “look, Ellie’s missing, Jesus we’re all worried. But all this today about fuckin’ chasing down ‘phone messages and fuckin’ babies that never exist-”
That was as far as he got.
Danny stared down at his friend as Steve, on his arse, lifted his fingers almost in slow-motion to his nose. When he brought them away, they were covered in blood. He did it again, as if the second time would have a different outcome from the first. It didn’t. Only then did Steve seem to register what had happened, and by the time that had happened, Linda Morrigan had rushed from the kitchen and was standing between the two young men, her own breakdown forgotten for the moment in the face of a larger crisis.
“We’re going,” she said firmly, clamping her hand on Steve’s arm. “We’re going. He needs time.”
Steve, on his feet now, seemed to be cycling through anger to humiliation to sympathy to before going back to anger again. He and Danny locked eyes for a long moment.
“Don’t you ever tell me my son never existed,” Danny told him.
Steve thought about replying, and then seemed to shrug it off. He turned his attention to Mrs Morrigan instead. “You’re right Mrs M,” he said. “Let’s get the fuck outta here, eh?”
He waited outside. Danny didn’t even watch him go. His mother’s hand forcibly turned him around so that she could look at him, could reach up and place her hand on his cheek and stare into his eyes with deeply concerned ones of her own.
“It’ll all turn out right, son,” she said. “I promise.”
He meant to throw it back at her, to come up with some smart comment about how in the name of Jesus she could possibly know that, but it never made it past the formative stage in his brain; instead, he fragmented into tears, almost toppling forward into his mother’s arms and heaving out huge anguished sobs against her as she held him. Just held him.
Danny felt himself entertain for the first time the notion that somehow he was the one being affected by the madness, that everyone else was correct and that little…little…
The name slipped between his fingers, pouring through them like grains of sand. He grabbed desperately and couldn’t, couldn’t get a hold-
He pushed away from his mother, eyes wide, as if she were the one responsible for all of this. “LUKE!” he screamed at her. “LUKE! HIS NAME IS LUKE!”
Not willing to risk hearing any more, he ushered Steve and his mother from the house and slammed the door closed behind her. This done, them gone, he slid slowly down his front door, his back to the retreating figures of the two people closest to him that he had left.
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