Darkshines Seven

by Russell Mardell

  Silence got to his feet and the tanned pouch slipped off him and landed on the driveway. He took a few paces and then stumbled back to the ground. He tossed the flask away and clamped his head between his hands as if he were trying to hold it onto his neck. The images were already there. The memory was playing and there was no stopping it.

  Audley Thinwater, that great big, bloated man with those impossibly strong arms. He is watching as Party Plod tie Silence down to a gurney, and then there are fingers on his hands. Hands on his neck. Searing pain is coming through his fingernails. Straps are holding his feet and his toes are being clamped in something. Darkness. He is shutting his eyes because he is afraid. The pain in his feet. His fingers. The laughter from the next cell. Milo Singer enjoying his screams.

  Once more Silence got up and this time his feet held him upright. He walked slowly over to the flask, picked it back up and then began to trudge away from the mansion. The memory had started to dim, but the traces would remain. Images and faces were tattooed inside his mind, now coloured in by a righteous anger. By the time he was crossing the old kissing gate that led through to the field next to the wood, it was only the traces that were left; the wreckage of an old storm.

  Moving in front of the wood, he found himself trying to recount how long it had been before his old friend had found him again. How many years of being used by The Party had it taken before Raizbeck had risen high enough to stop it? He couldn’t remember but he knew it didn’t really matter. He would work for his friend for as long as he was needed. He would give his life for Jack Raizbeck because his friend had ended the longest nightmare he had ever had. Raizbeck had never asked what The Party had made Silence do in the time between him surrendering to them at Darkshines and his own ascension to power. He could have found out. Raizbeck could have found out anything should he want to. But somehow Silence knew he never had. Maybe he simply didn’t want to know. Maybe he was just sparing his friend.

  He left muddy footprints across the floor of the living room in the cottage, then up the stairs. In Sam’s room he took off his soaking wet coat and dumped it carelessly on the bed. He looked around the walls at the same posters Callie had been pretending to be interested in just a short time ago. They meant even less to Silence than they had to her. He opened drawers and looked in the one cupboard in the room. He found some clothes and books and some neglected toys. There was a wooden fort at the back of the cupboard, the drawbridge broken and one turret missing. He found some board games and a stuffed gorilla, a stack of comics and an old scrapbook. On the cover there was a glued-on page from one of the comics showing a cartoon drawing of a tough looking man with ludicrously bulging biceps and a lantern jaw, firing a machine gun held in beefy, sledgehammer hands.

  Silence opened the scrapbook and slowly thumbed through rough pages of clumsily stuck on photos and drawings and newspaper clippings. The young assassin was in a fair few. An older woman with the same straw-coloured hair was in most – the killer’s mother, without any doubt. He read a newspaper clipping underneath a grainy black and white photo of Sam holding up a trophy, and a headline that read: SCHOOLBOY WINS UNDER 7 REGIONAL SHORT-STORY COMPETITION. He saw photos of Sam with a hamster, and then an older Sam with a dog, photos of his mother singing in a pub, and then a photo strip of them pulling faces in a photo booth. Silence tossed the scrapbook across the room. The catch to Sam was strong again, but he had something else to do first.

  Gripping the flask between his hands, he pushed as hard as he could at Jack Raizbeck. Within seconds he was right there in the cab of Raizbeck’s truck. Silence had half expected to see the truck trundling back to Bleeker Hill with those terrified strangers and what remained of the City 17 patrol, and it was with a twinge of pride that Silence saw that instead of that, his boss had taken his advice. Silence could see the road ahead even through the gloom and the rain. His boss was heading to Storm Tail cove. And what a perfect place for an ambush that was too. Raizbeck was dozing in the passenger seat with Everett next to him at the wheel. The other two remaining members of the patrol were asleep in the back. Silence pushed again and was outside the library, looking down at the bullet riddled corpses of the stragglers who had not long since been eating soup in the back of that truck. The handless Davis was to one side of them. Pretty damn dead.

  ‘Storm Tail cove.’

  Raizbeck jerked awake and stared at the windscreen of the truck and then across at Everett. ‘What?’

  ‘What, what? I didn’t say anything, boss,’ Everett replied and then yawned. ‘You having a dream?’

  ‘Good luck my old friend,’ Silence said to himself and then stood from Sam’s bed and slipped a hand into a pocket of his trousers. ‘She’ll be dead before she tastes the salt-water air. They all will be.’

  12

  Whilst Jacob Silence was leaving his mark in the cottage and prying through Sam’s life, Milo Singer was once again enjoying having a captive audience at his disposal. Literally. Mia was sat with her back against the side of the truck nearest the cab, her legs stuck out before her, her feet tapping together. As Singer spoke Mia’s right index finger turned around in the air like a broken baton. Hector and Tommy were sat back from her, almost to the rear doors, neither of them willing to hold her gaze for more than a few seconds. Blarney paced restlessly between both men as if deciding who warranted his company, he would find a spot to lie down on the rolled up carpets and then moments later he was on the move again.

  ‘Seems the mutt doesn’t care for either of you. I can see his point of view.’ The voice was quieter than it had been in the cottage. The words came with the calm confidence reserved only for those in total control of their own little worlds. ‘They say the mutt can sense things about people. Hidden things. The heavens alone know what dirty little secrets you two wretches are holding back. Look at you both. So pitiful. I can see why dear Jacob would wrap himself around someone like you Thomas. He likes to prey on the weak. And you are so very weak aren’t you, Thomas? Tell me, does he come into your mind? Have you felt him? Can he talk to you? Tell me. Tell me what that feels like.’

  Tommy looked to Mia, her crooked smile and playful eyes were teasing and taunting him. Her head cocked to the side and her eyebrows arched. Waiting. ‘It’s horrible,’ Tommy replied and then looked back to the floor of the truck.

  ‘Yes. Quite the magician. Quite the party trick.’ Singer laughed to himself. ‘If you will forgive the pun. Audley, the pig, would sometimes make him do it. Make him demonstrate the weapon. The fat piggy would come down to us in the bowels of that place and he would have people with him. Suits. Money counting weasels. Sometimes they would torture him until he put on his little show for them. Sometimes they didn’t need to. He held out for quite a while did dear Jacob Silence. The things they did to us…quite horrific even by today’s standards. There are places on the body…if you know where to push and probe…really…quite, quite horrific.’

  ‘You held out. You didn’t let them break you.’ Tommy said, half a query, half a snivelling compliment.

  ‘He was always weaker than me. They knew it. I knew it. We all knew it. Once they sucked the fight out of dear old Jacob, they soon lost interest in me. How many madmen does one force of power really need?’

  ‘Why didn’t they kill you?’

  ‘They did. They sent me to Bleeker Hill.’

  The truck had picked up a pothole riddled country lane and for a moment the four of them swayed and bounced lightly where they sat. Blarney stood once more, turned around in endless circles and then slumped down again, his snout resting across his paws.

  ‘This bony bell-end had a knife to my sister’s throat!’ The penny had not so much dropped for Hector, as clattered, rolled and then thudded against the wall. ‘This Silence bloke, this head fiddler, he’s that nutjob that almost killed us in the library?’

  Singer broke into a loud and raucous laugh, Mia’s head turned up to the roof of the truck, her throat bulging and stretching. ‘Oh, you simple little so
ul, Hector. Flailing around in the dark. What half-wits and losers my little Mia saddled herself with! What a ludicrous joy!’

  ‘He wants Mia. The Party want Mia,’ Tommy said to his lap.

  ‘Yeah, that much I gathered, dickhead,’ Hector snapped. ‘He tried to make me shoot her. Her and the kid.’

  Singer’s laughter ceased as quickly as it had started. Greedy, devious little eyes were now fixed upon Hector. ‘Really? And why would he want that?’ Mia was suddenly on all fours, crawling slowly towards the back of the truck. Blarney was up on his paws again, backing off, moving into Hector’s chest and then sitting delicately on his lap. Mia’s lips were pulling back into a sneer. Blood was trickling slowly between her teeth and she seemed to be savouring the taste. Her head quickly jerked to the right, and the question came again for Tommy. ‘Why would he want to do that, Thomas?’

  Tommy pushed himself flat against the side of the truck. ‘He…he…he has to capture Mia, but the boy…’

  ‘The boy…yes…tell me about the boy…’

  ‘It’s the boy he seems really interested in…he’s…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I think he’s frightened of him.’

  Mia tilted her head and smiled. She blew Tommy a small kiss.

  ‘He will come to Darkshines for them, I know he will.’ Tommy was raising shaking hands up before him. ‘He won’t stop. He will come for them.’

  ‘Oh, I do hope so, Thomas. I do so hope he will…’

  13

  As Silence paced slowly around Sam’s bedroom he felt the old arrogance creep back over him. From his pocket he took a small book of matches, ripped one clear and then ran it across the strike. He held the burning match under the curtains and waited for the flames to take.

  Sweeping up his coat from the bed and slipping it back over him, he stopped in the doorway and listened to the growing anger in the crackle of flames behind him. He didn’t need to see the flaming hem of the curtain tear free and land on the old scrapbook. He could feel it. Closing his eyes, he pushed at Sam and the catch was immediate, the connection forceful.

  He is driving that carpet truck through narrow lanes and he can barely see over the wheel. Now the boy is turning in his seat and not watching the road. The aunt, who is not his aunt, is shouting at him and grabbing for the wheel but it is too late. The truck is swerving into a ditch by the side of the road, it is shattering an old wooden fence and beginning to tilt over. The boy can see his past burning and he can feel it too and the boy is screaming. The side of the truck is slamming into the ground and beginning to slide down a rain-sodden grassy incline. It is getting faster, and then it is turning over, and over and then everyone is screaming.

  Silence opened his eyes and wandered out of the burning bedroom.

  THE BUTTERFLY

  1

  The corridor was narrower than she remembered it. The doors that ran at irregular intervals down the left hand side seemed to be in different positions than they were when she had last been there. When she had really been there. The small yellow squares of light were still on the floor and those shadows and shapes once more etched the light, throwing ugly shapes onto the wall like a macabre puppet show. Mia could smell cigar smoke, and the sharp odour of disinfectant. She could smell the damp decay in the building and something else too – since arriving at Bleeker Hill she had learned what death smelt like, and below the cigar smoke, the disinfectant and the decay, that horrific, smothering stench was laid out along the corridor like a carpet.

  But then there was the butterfly, and when she saw the butterfly all seemed to be well. It was a stunning creature, its wings alive with a deep, rich colour and impressive patterning. The butterfly made everything else seem irrelevant, just for a moment. Mia followed it down the corridor just as she had followed it all the way out of the forest, across the snow smothered grounds and now deep down below into the dark heart of Bleeker Hill. It would flutter in front of her and then up above her head, sometimes it would settle on the walls, and whenever it did Mia would stop and wait for it to move off again. It was leading her somewhere, she thought. This beautiful, colourful creature. This light in darkness.

  She stood in the first doorway as the butterfly fluttered forward and went inside, dancing around a light bulb that was squeezing out its last. The man in the white blood splattered coat greeted her with a smile and beckoned her in. The naked man on the table, his skin a creamy white with hints of blue and lines of red, rolled his head to the side to see her. Two blasted holes where his eyes had once been looked past her, and then turned back to the ceiling, and the butterfly that was now sat on the light cord.

  ‘This isn’t Sullivan. What happened to Sullivan?’ Mia asked the man in white and got nothing more than a finger to the lips and a light shushing sound as a reply. ‘I want to find Sullivan. Don’t you understand? He saved me and now I must save him.’

  ‘But saving people is what we do here, Mia. Did you not know that? You want to save one man, but we are trying to save a whole country.’

  The man in white applied a tight fitting metal object to the head of the man on the table and then started to fiddle with a small bank of dials and switches on a large machine sat on top of a trolley, just behind the table.

  ‘You are killing a man to save a country?’

  ‘No, my dear child. We are killing many men to save a country. We are creating. We have the power to not just change this country, to save this country, but to alter the very face of the earth. With great change comes great sacrifice. This man, these people, these components of The Wash, shall be remembered when this country rises again. We are so close. The Wash is so close to succeeding. Soon the great horrors that this country bestowed upon itself will not even be a memory. Soon we will all be able to start again, free of the scars of our history.’

  ‘Where is Sullivan?’

  The man in white turned a large dial on the machine and the man on the table jerked and jittered, his body arching forward as his head pushed back. A second later two wild jets of reddish goo shot from the empty eye sockets of the man on the table and splattered down the other man’s white coat.

  The butterfly was on the move again and Mia Hennessey was right behind.

  The positions of the doors had changed again. The next one was much further along than it had been and the very last one in the corridor was now set in the ceiling. Mia followed the butterfly into the next room. A man was sitting up on another table, staring at the doorway, looking at Mia and yet not really seeing her. The man was naked but for a small pair of shorts. His body was alive with scars and bruises and ugly, protruding bones. His hair was shaved along one side, and a small thin wire seemed to be coming from the back of his neck.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked the doorway behind Mia.

  ‘I don’t know. Who are you? What is your name?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘How long have you been at Bleeker Hill?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘What have they done to you? Can you remember what The Party have done to you?’

  ‘The Party loves you.’

  ‘No. It is called The Wash. They are emptying your mind. Do you understand?’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Do you know a man named Sullivan?’

  ‘Am I Sullivan?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I could be though, couldn’t I?’

  ‘No. Please…’

  ‘Who am I?’

  The man tilted forward and fell face first to the floor with a thud. On his back Mia saw a small dark tattoo, a number – 1419A and then she saw the butterfly in front of her face again and then she was back in the corridor, moving on. The doorways had changed once more and the next one was now in the floor directly in front of her – a yawning trapdoor on the gallows. Mia followed the butterfly down, jumping through the grubby light before landing on a soft surface that seemed to crunch and then shift under her feet. The light dimmed around her and then Mia was tumbling forward
. Cold hands, and stiff, bony legs were finding her groping hands. In front of her the dying light erupted and then flames were sprouting through an old furnace by her face. She was lying on a floor of bodies and the floor was giving way and swallowing her up.

  Mia was screaming and somewhere close by, yet many miles from her hold, someone was hearing her and trying to make her understand their reply.

  Across the room her father stood on fire, watching her fall.

  The butterfly was nowhere to be seen.

  2

  There was a butterfly just above her, fluttering back and forth in what seemed a drunken, scattershot path known only to itself. It looked like a Red Admiral. Was that what it was? She watched it flutter up to the top of the tent, resting on the light coloured canvas, and then it beat its wings just once more before stopping still. Callie continued to stare at it, ignoring the hands on her body, the fingers pressing against her muscles and bones. Even the smiling face of the man, beaming down at her with that great goofy gob full of pleasantness, didn’t distract her from that motionless butterfly. Had it been that long ago that she and Hector had been out at their friend’s house in the country and their friend had shown them how to catch a butterfly? (How they had hated him because of his privileged upbringing and yet how quickly they had always taken up his offer of a sleep over in his family’s great big, posh house) Had it been so long ago? It must have been because they were so young then. Children. Hector, always the bigger animal lover of the two (were butterflies animals? Are insects animals?) had been the one that wanted to go out and look for butterflies and she had tagged along because there was nothing else to do out there in the country in that big old creaking house that they so much wanted to be theirs, even though neither of them liked it. Her stupid brother wanting to go looking for butterflies! What a childish adventure. But he was a child. They both were. That must surely have been a long time ago. A different world.