They came out onto what looked like a narrow limestone track, which was actually a soakaway at the bottom of the ditch. Staying in low gear, she began to follow its irregular line. After about a hundred yards she was able to transfer across to a dirt road, which led in turn to a lane. The lane took them under the ring road and then around and back onto it.
Once they were on hard tarmac again, Holly permitted herself to breathe. But not too much. There was the rest of the night still to be managed.
And then – perhaps even more of a challenge – the rest of their lives thereafter.
She hadn’t seen it happen. She hadn’t even been in the house. She’d come home to find Frank lying awkwardly at the bottom of the stairs and Lizzie sitting with her head in her hands at the top of them. It might have passed for an accident, but for the letter-opener stuck in Frank’s neck.
He wasn’t supposed to be in the house. The restraining order was meant to take care of that. He wasn’t even supposed to come within a hundred yards of his daughter, regardless of where she might be.
So, technically speaking, by being in the boot of the car he was in breach of the order right now.
Holly’s first thought had been to pick up the phone and call the police. Her second had been that perhaps she could first wipe off the handle and put her own prints onto it and take all the blame. Then a sudden rage had risen within her. She’d looked down on his twisted body and felt no horror, no awe. No anguish or dismay. Just cheated. Frank had contrived to poison their existence while he was around; was there to be no end to it even with him gone?
She’d made the decision right then. They would not enter that process. If they moved quickly enough, they could put him right out of their lives and make a clean beginning. It would be a credible move; Frank could make an enemy in the time it took him to buy a newspaper, and any suspicion would be dispersed among the many. She’d looked at Lizzie and told her exactly what she had in mind.
We can’t, Lizzie had said.
So Holly had sat her down and for ten solid minutes had laid out the choices for her, making sure that she understood how much depended on the next few hours. What was done was done, she’d said to her, and there’s no changing it now. Don’t feel you’re to blame. It isn’t a matter of right or wrong. Your father made all the choices that caused this to happen.
It had worked. Kind of.
They couldn’t use Frank’s car. Being in the motor trade he’d use whatever vehicle was going spare on the lot, and of late he’d been favouring a red coupé that was hardly practical for the job in hand. So Holly had backed her Toyota into the garage on the side of the house, lined the boot with a plastic decorating sheet, and together they’d dragged Frank through the connecting door and manhandled his body into it. Handling him was less of a problem than Holly had expected. In the unpleasantness stakes, Frank dead was hard-pressed to match up to Frank in life.
Once he was safely stowed and covered in a couple of old towels, they’d driven out to collect Jack from school and then set off for the coast. Fish and chips on the pier, Jack. It’s a surprise treat. We just have to make a call somewhere, first. Somewhere quiet. You’ll stay in the car.
And then the accident, and the plan forced off-course.
But back on it, now.
From the ring road, they got onto the motorway. The traffic was heavier here, and it slowed when the carriageway narrowed to a single lane. For a long time there was no visible reason for it, and then suddenly they came upon a surfacing crew laying down new tarmac under bright worklights; a colossal rolling tar factory that belched and stank like a dragon as it excreted a lane-wide ribbon of hot road, men with shovels and brushes working furiously in its wake, supervisors in hard hats chatting by their vehicles.
“Look, Jack,” Lizzie said. “Big trucks.”
“Big, big trucks!” Jack said with awe, and turned in his seat to watch through the back window as they left the staged drama behind.
“You like the big trucks, don’t you, Jack?” Holly said as the lanes cleared and the Toyota picked up speed again, but Jack didn’t answer.
Holly couldn’t put a finger on it, but the Toyota didn’t feel quite right after the accident. She could only hope that it wouldn’t let them down, and that the outside of the car wasn’t messed up too much. A police stop was something that she didn’t dare risk.
The next time she checked on Jack, he was asleep. His mouth was open and his head was rocking with the rhythm of the car. He slept the way he did everything else . . . wholeheartedly, and with a 100 per cent commitment.
For a moment, Holly experienced a sensation in her heart that was like a power surge. This was her family. Everything that mattered to her was here, in this car.
And then she remembered that Frank was in the car with them, too. Good old Frank. Consistent as ever. Bringing a little touch of dread into every family outing.
They left the motorway, took a back road, and drove through a couple of darkened villages. There was a place that she had in mind. Out to the north and west was a great bay whose inland fields and marshes were almost unknown beyond the region. At low tide, saltings and sand-flats extended the land almost to the horizon. Much of what was now solid ground had once been part of the sea. In places the sea was claiming it back, pushing the coastline inland so that fields and even some roads were being lost forever. Hide something well enough in the part that was disappearing, and . . .
Well, she’d have to hope. It was the best she could come up with.
Somewhere along here there was a causeway road that had once led to a farm, long-abandoned. People had trekked out to it for a picnic spot when there was something to see, but then the shell had become unsafe and it had all been pulled down. Now there was just rubble and the lines of a couple of walls, and that only visible at a low spring tide.
They crawled along, following the causeway with the Toyota’s dipped beams. It didn’t so much end as deteriorate steadily for the last couple of hundred yards. The concrete sections of the road had become tilted and skewed as the ground beneath them had given up any pretence of permanence. The sections had drifted, and in places they’d separated completely.
She had to stop the car and get out to locate the cesspit. When she turned back, Lizzie was out of the car and standing beside it.
She was looking around and she said, “Have I been here before?”
“Once,” Holly said. “Before Jack was born. I brought you out here to show it to you, because it was a place my mother and father used to bring me. But it had all changed.”
Lizzie tried to speak, but then she just nodded. And then her control went altogether, and her body was suddenly convulsed with an air-sucking sob that was shocking both in its violence, and in its unexpectedness.
Holly moved to her quickly and put her arms around her, holding her tightly until the worst of it passed. There in the darkness, out on the causeway, with the moon rising and this thing of such enormity to be dealt with. It would be no easy night, and no easy ride from here. Holly was only just beginning to appreciate how hard her daughter’s journey would be.
“I can’t do this,” Lizzie whispered.
“Yes we can,” Holly told her.
They got him out of the car into the pool and he floated, just under the surface, a hand drifting up into the pale shaft of dirtwater light from the Toyota’s beams. The first stone sank him and then they added others, as many as they could lift. A sudden gout of bubbles gave them a fright. Holly was convinced that it caused her heart to stop beating for a moment.
They stood watching for a while to be sure of their work, and Holly sneaked a glance at Lizzie. Her face was in shadow and impossible to read.
“We should say a prayer,” Lizzie said.
“Say one in the car,” Holly said. “We need to get back and clean up the stairs.”
Back on the motorway she watched for police cars, but she saw none. She did become aware of some lights that seemed to pace her for a whil
e, but when she slowed a little the vehicle drew closer, and she was able to see that it lacked the telltale profile of roof bar and blue lights.
They had unmarked ones, of course. There was always that risk.
After a while, the headlamps in her mirror began to irritate her. She slowed even more to let the car pass, but it didn’t. So then she picked up speed and tried to leave it behind; two minutes later and as many miles on, it was still there.
It surely meant nothing, but now it was making her nervous. Lizzie seemed to pick up on this. She saw Holly’s frequent glances in the mirror and turned herself around in her seat, straining at her belt to look out of the back window.
“It’s the same car,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“The one that pushed us off the road.”
“It can’t be,” Holly said.
Lizzie clearly wasn’t certain enough to argue the point.
“Well, it’s similar,” she said.
Holly increased her speed even further, up and over the limit, and the wheel began to vibrate in her hands as if the Toyota was beginning to shake itself apart. It couldn’t be the same car. She couldn’t imagine who’d want to follow her, or why.
It seemed to be working. They were leaving the other car behind, but then she saw something out of the corner of her eye. She looked down. The oil light was on, the brightest thing on the dash, and the one thing she knew about a car’s oil light was that on a screaming engine it signalled imminent disaster.
She slowed, but it didn’t go out. Other warning lights started to flicker on around it. So Holly quickly put the car out of gear and indicated to move off the motorway and onto the hard shoulder.
They coasted to a halt. The engine was already silent by the time they reached a stop. It had died somewhere during the deceleration, she couldn’t be sure when. As they sat there, the cooling engine block ticked and clanked like coins dropping into a bucket.
In the back, Jack was stirring.
“Fish and chips on the pier,” he said suddenly.
“I’m sorry, Jack,” Holly said. “It’s got too late. Another time.”
The other car was pulling in behind them, hazard lights flashing. Right then a big bus passed them at speed in the inside lane, and its slipstream rocked the Toyota on its wheels.
“Who is it, then?” Lizzie said, peering back as the other car came to a halt about fifty or sixty yards back.
“I don’t know,” Holly said. “Nobody.”
Jack said, “Is it daddy?”
Holly looked at Lizzie, and Lizzie looked at her. There was a risk that Jack might have picked up on something then, but all his attention was on the road behind them. The following driver was getting out. Just as the car was an anonymous shape behind the glare of its own headlights, the driver’s figure was a slip of shadow against the liquid stream of passing traffic.
“No, Jack,” Holly said, an inexplicable anxiety rising up within her. “It can’t be your daddy.” She glanced down at the dash. All of the warning lights were on now, but that meant nothing. Everything always came on when the engine stalled.
“It is,” Jack said.
Holly could tell him it wasn’t. But she couldn’t tell him why.
She heard Lizzie draw in a deep and shuddering breath, and let it out again. She found her daughter’s hand in the dark and squeezed it once.
Traffic flew by, and the driver kept on coming. He was silhouetted against the flashing hazard lights of his own vehicle, pulsing like an amber heart.
Maybe he was your regular Good Samaritan, coming to offer them a hand.
Or maybe he was one of any number of things, as yet unrecognized and uncatalogued.
“He’s been in the rain,” said Jack.
Forget the oil pressure. Forget the ruinous cost of a thrown piston or a seized-up engine. Suddenly it was far more important to get herself and the children away from this spot.
But all the Toyota’s power seemed to have gone. The engine turned over like an exhausted fighter trying to rise after a long count. She tried turning off the lights, and as their beams died, the sound of the starter immediately improved.
It barked, it caught. All the warning lights on the dash went out, including the oil. She crashed the gears, checked her mirror once, and pulled out. Right now her only concern was to get moving again.
Jack was turned around in his seat, straining to see.
“Who is it, if it isn’t daddy?” he said.
“It’s nobody,” Holly said. “Face forward.”
“He’s running after us.”
“Jack,” she said sharply, “how many times have I got to tell you?”
She was expecting him to give her an argument. But something in her tone seemed to make him decide, and he complied without another word.
Nothing that she was supposed to hear, anyway.
“It was daddy,” she heard him mutter.
She knew it wasn’t, but the thought was planted now and it spooked her. The sooner this was over with, the better. She wondered how they’d recall this night. Would it be etched in their minds so they’d relive it, moment by moment, or would it move to the distance of a remembered nightmare?
Jack must never know the truth. For him, the story would have to be that his daddy had gone away. He’d keep on looking forward to his father’s return, but in time he’d grow and the hope would fade and become part of the background noise of his life.
For Lizzie it was going to be a lot trickier. But at least she was safe from her father now. Whatever problems she might have in dealing with the deed and its memory, that was the thing to keep in mind.
Over a wooded hill, down into a valley, heading for home. Out there in the darkness were the lights of all those small towns that didn’t rate exits of their own, but were linked by the road that the motorway had replaced.
That following car was back in her mirror. Or perhaps it was some different car, it was impossible to say. All she could see was those anonymous lights. This time they were staying well back.
Here came the roadworks again. Same stretch, opposite direction. Again, one lane was coned off and the carriageway lights were out. A few moments after they’d crossed into this darker territory, the driver behind her switched on his beams. They were the pop-up kind. She saw them swivel into view like laser eyes.
Just like on Frank’s coupé.
Jack said, “Can we have the radio?”
“Not right now,” Holly said.
“It was working before.”
“I’m trying to concentrate.”
He was closing the distance between them. Holly knew she couldn’t go any faster.
She looked down and saw that her ignition lights were flickering and that, once again, her oil warning light was full on.
They passed what remained of a demolished bridge, with new concrete piers ready to take its wider replacement. Beyond the bridge site, just off the road, stood a mass of caravans and portable buildings. It was a construction village, a shantytown of churned up mud and giant machines. A temporary sliproad had been bulldozed into the embankment to give access to works traffic.
Holly waited until it was almost too late. Then she swerved across the lanes and into the sliproad.
Something thumped against the car, and in the mirror she saw one of the cones go tumbling in her wake. The car behind her was swerving to avoid it. It made him overshoot the turnoff, so he couldn’t follow her. Now he’d be stuck. The traffic wouldn’t allow him to stop and back up again. He’d be heading in the same direction for miles and miles.
Good Samaritan? Good riddance.
All the lights in this temporary settlement were on, yet nothing moved. Jack was craning, eagerly looking around the various site office buildings as they entered the main area. But Holly got in first.
“Yes, Jack,” she said. “They have big trucks here.”
It was almost as bright as day, and completely deserted. The yard was floodlit and ev
ery portakabin office had its lights on. Holly could see through all the uncurtained windows that every one of the offices was empty.
She slowed, and stopped, and looked around.
A few vans, a couple of big diggers. Some concrete bridge sections waiting to be trucked out and assembled elsewhere. The site had the look of a frontier fort, obviously not intended to be here for ever; but it was hard to believe that the scars it would leave on the land could ever easily heal.
They would, of course. The big machines would simply put it all back when they’d finished. It wouldn’t quite be nature, but everybody would be going by too fast to notice.
She got out. There was the sound of a generator, banging away somewhere in the background.
“Hello?” she called out, and then glanced back at the car.
Jack and Lizzie were watching her through the side-windows. Pale children, out on the road past their bedtimes. They looked hollow-eyed and tired. Jack with his little round face, Lizzie like a stick-version of the teenager she’d soon be.
Holly gave them a brief smile, and then moved out to look for someone. She didn’t want to get too far from the car. She didn’t want to let them out of her sight.
She called again, and this time someone came out from behind one of the buildings.
He stood there, and she had to walk over to him. He looked like a toothless old shepherd in a flat cloth cap, knuckly hands hanging down by his sides. He could have been any age, from a well-preserved seventy down to a badly done-by fifty. Too old to be one of the road gang, he looked as if he’d been on road gangs all his life.
She said, “Is anyone in charge around here?”
“Never, love,” the man said. “They all do what they sodding well like.”
“Well . . . what do you do?”
“I’m just the brewman.”
Holly looked around her at some of the heavy plant that stood under the lights, looking as if it had all been airdropped in to remodel the face of Mars.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16 Page 25