Darkshines Seven

by Russell Mardell

  You are my executioner. You will kill for me. Or I will kill you.

  ‘I won’t do it! I won’t kill anyone!’

  But you’ve done it before. You killed a man at Bleeker Hill. That poor man that was trying to take care of you. You killed him. What’s one more to you?

  ‘I didn’t kill anyone! You did. You made me do that.’

  Killer.

  ‘You can’t make me do anything any more.’

  I own you girl. I can make you do whatever I want. It’s your life Mia or the life of a stranger. What do you say, killer? What do you say?

  ‘I won’t!’

  You will.

  ‘You can kill me before I will do that.’

  I will kill you last. First I will kill these wretched people that you found. This brother and sister. What do they mean to you? You can watch. This woman and the boy she calls her own. They will go too. What about that young man that you took a liking for? He is close by. I know he is. I will kill him too. And of course there’s that dog. I will kill him. I will kill all of them. All of them will die before I kill you Mia. You have altered their fate. You can save them if you want. You kill or I kill. Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

  Will.

  Kill. Kill.

  Darkshines. Thinwater. Singer.

  Mia.

  The three blasts came again, this time they were louder still, coming from somewhere close to Mia. She tried to scream and felt the sea flood her mouth, her eyes, and her mind. Her feet touched the seabed and then it suddenly broke under her and she was falling through it. An empty blackness took her in and then pushed her on. Somewhere at the edge of her vision was a soft orange light and she was swimming toward it.

  Mia tumbled forward and crashed down onto Albie’s bedroom floor. A second later Sam landed on top of her. The young boy was wheezing and coughing and spluttering and once again Mia was struggling to make herself heard. The noise she had thought was canon fire came once more and now she could hear it for what it was – someone was knocking three times on the front door.

  ‘Please…please…’ she repeated over and over in her own voice. ‘Please help me.’ Mia heard Blarney bark and then felt the cold wetness of his nose prod her arm, testing her out. She turned on her side, hugged her dog tighter than she had ever done before and then broke into floods of tears.

  6

  Tommy Bergan left the clapped-out old car in the wood and walked the rest of the way. He didn’t look back to see if Silence was still watching him because he knew it didn’t really matter. If Jacob Silence wanted to see you, he would find you somehow. If he couldn’t see you with his eyes he would violate you with his mind. There was no way of escaping that man’s reach if he wanted you. That was what everyone had told him. All the Party Plod he had worked alongside, all those men and boys he had been out on patrols with, they all had troubling stories to tell about Jacob Silence. Tommy had wondered, at the start, how much of those tales had been genuine. The Party knew all too well the power of a good scare story. Myth and threat can be much more powerful than the truth. But now he had met him, now he had spent a very uncomfortable car journey with the man, he knew that the truth of Jacob Silence was every bit as deadly as the stories. He wanted nothing more than to be rid of him. But even now that he was, he could still feel him. Silence had crawled in and out of Tommy during that car journey and spun his web around him. Being around Mia Hennessey suddenly seemed like a pleasure. Even with what he had to do.

  The rain was getting heavier, the balding, broken trees around him in the wood a barely ample umbrella. He could see the trees thinning out up ahead and the small cottage beyond. He moved out to the side, out of view of the cottage windows, his feet squelching across the ground, and ducked behind the largest tree he could find. A light passed across a window on the top floor of the cottage and then disappeared. He saw the truck and the car parked up alongside the house and just for a moment he wondered whether he could actually make a getaway. The old car that he had got here in was useless, but those two vehicles looked up to a long drive. He knew how to hotwire a car if they hadn’t been stupid enough to leave the keys in the ignition. He could get to the coast in a few hours if the tank was full. There were people at the coast prepared to get you out. That was what he had heard. He could do it, if he went now.

  He squatted down by the other side of the tree and tried to look along the clearing to see if there was a road leading in the other direction. If there was and he didn’t have to drive back through the wood he might just be able to do it. It had to be worth the risk. It had to be preferable to being trapped between two lunatics like he was now. He had more or less settled on the truck as his getaway vehicle, was just about to walk out from behind the tree and make his move, when a blinding white flash seemed to go off in his mind and course through his eyes, launching him face first into the tree trunk.

  For a split second all he could see was the face of Jacob Silence, and all he could hear was his cold, detached voice: ‘Make the girl trust you. Make the girl love you. Convince her to go to Storm Tail. Her and the boy. Their defeat is all that will save you, Tommy.’

  The gloomy hug of the wood came back to him slowly. He was lying flat on his back, staring up at branches like charred bones. The rain was tickling his face, dancing timidly on a breeze that whistled its threat around the dead trees, and those words in his mind danced with it. The image of that horrible hooded face seemed to be seared onto his eyes. Jacob Silence could have been miles away or standing over him. It didn’t matter. Tommy was now just a part of his web.

  His voice came again: ‘convince her to go to Storm Tail. Their defeat is all that will save you, Tommy.’ Tommy got to his feet and let the wishful fantasy of making a daring getaway float away. He trudged on towards the cottage and the shouting voices coming from the downstairs window directly in front of him.

  He hadn’t given much thought as to how he would be greeted. His mind was too full of Silence’s warnings and demands to have spared it much consideration, and now, standing there at the front door to the cottage, he suddenly felt exposed. Here he was, a Party stooge, doing house calls out in the middle of nowhere. He may as well have hung a sign over his head that said ‘Hi, I’m Tommy, best you don’t trust me,’ in flashing neon lights. The girl liked him, yeah, that lunatic girl who his bosses had dubbed a mass murderer, she liked him – had a crush on him apparently – well, lucky him, but he had no idea what to expect from her when he stepped into the cottage, and certainly not the others. They were sure to be armed, everyone was these days. Everyone except him, of course. Yeah, that’s forward thinking. Silence had been slow and deliberate when he spoke about Sam, leaving Tommy in no doubt that he should be wary of him. The guy with the stupid haircut had seemed harmless enough back in the florist shop, but outward appearances meant very little these days, Tommy knew that all too well. Whoever was in that cottage was a mystery to him. Chances were they weren’t going to offer him a cup of tea and ask him how his day had been. He half expected to be shot down as soon as he knocked.

  As it was, he was merely punched in the face by Sam, had his ankle bitten by Blarney, and then had his wrists bound together and tied to a radiator by Hector. In that moment everyone seemed far more interested in Mia than him.

  He even got a cup of tea after a while.

  7

  Mia was sat hunched over in Albie’s rocking chair in front of the hearth, her back to the others. Her left hand held her right, her index finger like a hot poker welded into the flesh. The pain down her right arm was an infernal throb. The tears that sprung from her eyes and dribbled down her cheeks weren’t born from the pain alone though. Fear was playing its own role in her defeat.

  Blarney was sat at Mia’s feet, staring across the living room at Tommy who was tied to the radiator by the front door. Albie and Hector were sat on a small sofa, the only other bit of furniture in the room, and in the kitchen Callie was busy preparing mugs of tea. Sam paced slowly between them all with the ma
chine gun, like a guard on sentry duty. When Mia spoke, it seemed to take them all by surprise. It was her voice, but it sounded dreamy, wistful, like it wasn’t really there at all.

  ‘His name is Milo Singer. He wants me to kill for him.’

  Wants? Do you mean to make me sound like a man who works on whims?

  ‘He needs me to kill for him. I have to kill for him.’

  ‘But who is he? What have…’

  Tell that bitch to be quiet!

  ‘Please, don’t speak, Albie. Please let me…I have to tell you…’

  That I will kill them if you don’t do as I demand? Yes, tell them that.

  ‘I have…he will kill…you have to listen…’ Mia suddenly straightened in the rocking chair and when she spoke again the dreamy edge had sharpened in her voice. At her feet Blarney whimpered and then skulked away to the sofa and Albie’s waiting embrace. ‘I slipped inside this her at Bleeker Hill. She shouldn’t have been there. But this girl came back. She made it too easy. She was innocent to what was happening there. She didn’t belong. They didn’t want her. They wanted her to live. She took me out of that place. For months I have guided her. Then you people changed her course. So now I change yours. She will kill for me. She will give me my vengeance and you will bear witness. You will all make sure she completes the task I have given her or I will destroy you. One by one. That Party stooge first. He’ll get it good…’ Mia turned in the rocking chair and winked at Tommy. ‘Like his father.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Tommy’s expression was moving between fear and amusement, and he didn’t know whether to scream or laugh at what he was seeing. ‘What do you want to tell me about my father?’

  Mia slipped off the rocking chair onto all fours and slowly moved across the living room floor to where Tommy was tied up. In the kitchen doorway Callie stood motionless, dumbstruck, two mugs of tea slowly cooling in her hands. As Mia pulled up in front of Tommy and moved her face into his, Blarney gave one low growl and shuffled down between Albie and Hector’s feet.

  ‘Do you know what Bleeker Hill is, Tommy?’

  ‘I’ve read the stories.’

  ‘Nothing to be scared of in stories.’

  Mia let her tongue out and licked around Tommy’s chin before moving in and forcing him into a long, one-way kiss. As Mia pulled away she bit down on Tommy’s bottom lip. ‘Bleeker Hill is judgment, Tommy. That’s what they do there. That’s what they have always done there. The living and the dead. A man with as many sins as your father should never have gone there. They wanted him so badly. He knew it. Deep down he knew it. He dreamed of it. He dreamed how he would die. Then they made me execute him. I was their vessel like Mia is now mine. They moved through me and I moved into him. It’s what they do at Bleeker Hill. They judge. They kill.’ For a moment Mia just stared blankly at Tommy’s face, she seemed to be staring through it, at the radiator behind him. Then, slowly, another small tear escaped from her right eye and slipped down her cheek, resting on her lips. ‘Tommy?’ It was Mia’s voice again. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’m beginning to ask myself the same question.’

  Sam stepped forward and shoved the machine gun barrel into Tommy’s face, roughly pushing Mia to one side as he did. ‘Oh, we’ll get to you Party man. Don’t you worry about that. But first things first. For once you’re not the most important person in the room.’

  ‘Samuel, stop that!’ Albie stood and crossed to Callie in the kitchen doorway, taking the mugs of tea from her. She handed one to Hector and put the other on the floor next to Tommy. ‘Untie him, Samuel.’

  ‘What? I’m not letting some Party Plod…’

  ‘Do as I say!’

  ‘Thank you…Albie?’ Tommy said, nodding to her. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And if he tries to run on us, shoot him.’ Albie returned to the sofa as Sam begrudgingly set about untying their prisoner. At her feet Blarney’s tail was gently flicking against the base of the sofa, not quite a wag, more a flutter of hope. ‘Mia?’

  Mia pushed herself back from Tommy, pain immediately breaking again in her right hand. She was starting to shake and shiver as if an icy blast was blowing through the old stone walls, finding only her. ‘Darkshines. That’s what he keeps saying to me. I have to go to Darkshines. I have to kill a man named Thinwater.’

  ‘Thinwater?’

  ‘Thinwater prison? I’ve heard of Thinwater prison,’ Hector said into his mug of tea. ‘I heard some friends talk about it.’

  ‘Audley Thinwater?’ Tommy asked. He was flexing his fists together trying to work the feeling back into his hands. ‘You mean Darkshines the nut house?’

  ‘I don’t know what I mean, Tommy. Go on.’

  ‘There used to be an old asylum back in the city called Darkshines. That’s where they put…the worst sort of people. It was changed to The Thinwater Home for the Criminally Insane.’

  ‘Catchy little title,’ Hector mumbled into the mug.

  ‘Audley Thinwater was a huge benefactor for The Party,’ Tommy continued. ‘They named that prison after him too. He’s a top table Party man.’

  ‘Why make me go to Darkshines?’

  Tommy smiled grimly. ‘He moved in.’

  ‘He lives there? In an old asylum?’

  ‘Where is there that’s any safer these days? It was built to keep the lunatics in, pretty sure it might also keep the lunatics out. And if there is one thing we are spoilt for these days, it’s lunatics. Wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Tommy…’ Another tear escaped Mia’s right eye and she wiped it quickly away with the palm of her left hand. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘For which part, Mia?’

  ‘You followed us here. Why?’

  ‘They wanted me dead. The Party. When they found out that you had got the better of me. A friend helped me escape. I had nowhere else to go. I thought…well, I had hoped that…’

  ‘You would be safer here with us? Yeah, sorry about that, Tommy,’ Hector said flatly.

  ‘You know, you never did answer my question, Tommy’ Mia said, fighting back another surge of pain from her hand.

  ‘What question?’

  ‘Back in the florist’s. Do you remember what I asked you?’

  ‘If I believed in ghosts?’ Tommy laughed solemnly to himself, his eyes cast down at his hands. ‘Yes, Mia, yes I do seem to remember that. Can’t imagine why.’

  ‘No. I asked if you believed me when I said that I didn’t kill them. Do you remember?’

  ‘I remember. I also remember something I said to you too.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Beliefs get you killed.’

  8

  Jacob Silence took an old silk scarf from the tanned pouch on his shoulder and wrapped it tightly around his mouth and nose. It was a flimsy shield against the stench of death in the bedroom. He eased his coat from his shoulders and draped it over the first bed. He felt tired and drained, as if the rain beating steadily against the large arched window on the other side of the bedroom was washing the remnants of his dwindling desire from him. He sighed heavily, and then the sigh became a yawn. He wandered to the window and gently rested his forehead against the glass.

  He saw Sam briefly, and fumbled the catch. The link was weak, far feebler than the connection with Mia, and even with Tommy. He wondered if it was the urgency he was feeling with regards to this young boy that was making it hard to get inside his mind. He slowed his breathing, closed his eyes, and tried to con himself that he was ambivalent to it all, that he didn’t really care about Sam. Perhaps that would make the link easier to forge. Sam came again, a little brighter, and then the image faded out and Silence was once more staring out at the rain lashed window, rummaging around for something to latch onto.

  He pushed back to Tommy and saw him moving across the living room of that small cottage. Mia was alongside him, the dog too. He was moving into a bedroom on the ground floor and being made to sit on a bed. There is the young man with the stupid hair, dear old Frosty bollocks, a
nd he has a rifle in Tommy’s face. There is another rifle snapped in two on the floor. Again and again this boy is having guns shoved at him. How tedious. How unoriginal. The woman, the older one, she is limping slightly, she has her own old wounds, and she is talking, ordering, taking control of the situation. Mia is standing at the other side of the room and…and Mia…she is little more than a blur in Silence’s vision. He broke the connection and searched again for Sam, once more slowing his breathing and trying to produce an air of calm detachment. Again Sam came, he was sitting on a bed in the cottage, a different one to Tommy, and Callie Frost was sitting next to him, they were staring into an old rucksack because the boy’s aunt, but who is not really his aunt, has told him to pack a bag with all the things he might want and need, and then…the image went without holding. Silence screamed in frustration towards his ghostly reflection in the window and swung a clenched fist through the glass.

  Raindrops flecked his skin, carried scattershot by a devious breeze. He could see the small cottage across the fields through the shattered hole in the glass. Darkness was slowly smothering it along with the woods, the land, and the sky. Silence turned from the window and took a seat between the two beds in the room. After a few minutes he turned to the skeletal body of the child in the bed to his left and gently held her hand. He looked to the corpse in the bed to the right and then held their hand too. Closing his eyes he opened his mind to new connections.

  He was shocked to see Sam almost instantly – an even younger version of that would-be assassin with the machine gun and the attitude. He saw Albie too. They were wandering through the great mansion, as Silence had just done, and now they were standing in this bedroom, years past, staring at two young children in their beds. Hoping that they were just asleep. Yet knowing that hope in this new world, this fallen country, was a stupid thing to believe in.

  Silence pushed on into Sam. The young boy was back in the cottage, sitting on his bed with Callie Frost alongside him, and Jacob Silence was right there with them.