Black Flowers

by Steve Mosby

  When he does sleep, he dreams of black flowers.

  He is in the crawl space beneath a house. It is high enough for him to kneel up in. There is an awful, pale globe in the darkness before him: the slack features illuminated by cut diamonds of sunlight from the lattice surrounding them. The whole space feels strangely fertile. It smells of worms going about their business in the soil. It sounds like crickets, and the click of grass untangling from itself as it grows. The girl’s head rests in the slowly turning soil, buried up to the neck. Something on the scalp is squirming.

  This is Jane after she stopped talking. When she could no longer play. All around her, night-black petals flick open and closed, audible as blinks in the darkness.

  Chapter Eleven

  Audible as blinks in the darkness.

  It was one of Cartwright’s favourite lines from the book, because it showed that Robert Wiseman had really understood. Even though they’d never met in the flesh, they had been connected: two separate waves resonating on a similar frequency. Cartwright had felt a kinship with him ever since finding the book, which had happened quite by accident. He’d been searching for clothes in a charity shop, spotted an almost-new hardback on the shelves and been drawn to it by the title. After he read it, he’d realised that Wiseman had taken his life and turned it into a different form. When people read The Black Flower, Cartwright came alive in their minds.

  The notion had fascinated him immediately. He had always understood life was a constant ebb and flow of matter but he’d only ever considered it on a physical level. And he had always loved the fantasy world within books. But Wiseman had shown him that books constituted a whole other realm of existence, as the forms life took were transformed into ideas. This new world was like a vibrant tapestry that hung above our own. He pictured souls rising from the real world like mist, and ideas tumbling down from above, landing with a thud that sent seeds rolling away on the breeze. In the chains of cause and effect, every second link was made of dreams.

  So Wiseman had written him and, in return, he had written Wiseman. In his own way – just as with the story he’d found on Dawson’s laptop. He’d sensed the connection that the new story had to real life, caught a hint of the soul that had risen below, and now the idea had landed back again with a whump. Cartwright had blown gently on the pollen. Started it spreading, and allowed it to bloom.

  He stood up. There was another passage that came later on in Wiseman’s book. He found it and read it to himself now.

  Sullivan watches as the man pitches something white and flopping into the hole at the roots, then begins to shovel dirt back on top.

  He liked that.

  Yes, Wiseman had understood all right. Even back then.

  Outside the farmhouse, he could hear the tuck-tuck of the chickens, and the occasional flap and crash as they reached the limits of their wire cages and scattered back in surprise. In the distance, the sun was threatening to rise; a yellow corona beginning to warm the horizon through the trees. Out on the fields, rays of light would soon flatten over the grass, and then the world would catch fire. In the meantime, the whole farm was coming alive in the softening dark. It was stirring in its sleep. Stretching and blinking like … petals.

  ‘Gather the family,’ Cartwright told the boy on the porch.

  The boy scampered away to do just that.

  None of them had out-loud names. That was one of the improvements he’d made on his father’s teachings, after he realised that names effectively tied people and objects down. It was unavoidable for some things, of course; Cartwright couldn’t take back his own, and needed it anyway for his dealings with the outside world, but none of the others knew it. Wherever possible, items were not itemised. The world on the farm was liquid rather than solid.

  Cartwright walked carefully down the porch steps, and then round the back of the house. He was faced with a field of unkempt grass, patchy in places, like the unshaven skin of an adolescent boy. To the right, there was a pale concrete bunker; ahead of him, a row of apple trees at the edge of the wood. The bunker was lit up inside, and a skewed rectangle of light stretched out over the ground beyond like a carpet, the yellow fraying to pale.

  He stood for a while, breathing in the air, listening without listening to the screams coming from the bunker. Without warning, the pain flared across him again. And then a second time: his organs blaring their alarm call at the intruders slowly strangling them. For a moment or two he couldn’t breathe, and stars appeared above the small field like fairy dust. His heart galloped slightly, then halted, then galloped again, as though it was lost.

  Cartwright waited.

  Gradually, the pain subsided. His chest unclenched. As it did, he sensed his family congregating around him in the dirt. A bare handful of shadows and shapes in the darkness. There weren’t many; there never had been. But he could see enough to know that one was missing.

  ‘Where is she?’

  The boy shrugged. ‘I can’t find her.’

  Cartwright stared at him, and the boy flinched.

  ‘I can’t,’ he said again.

  ‘You checked under the house?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Cartwright looked back down the field, then sighed in annoyance. She would be somewhere in the farm buildings, he thought, pretending not to hear her brother’s calls. Talking to her dolls. He would make sure she got the belt when she showed her face. He’d bury another of her dolls as well, just outside the fence where she couldn’t reach it.

  In the meantime, this couldn’t wait. The sun would rise soon, and that was the hour to do it. When one day became another.

  Cartwright whistled to indicate they were ready.

  A moment later, the light on the lawn was broken by a fractured dance of black shapes. Then the light flicked off altogether and the door slammed shut. His eldest boy carried the woman down the field in darkness. She was trying to scream, but the tape binding her head muffled the sound. She was also trying to fight, but even if she hadn’t been weakened by the month of captivity, she wouldn’t have stood a chance against his son.

  The woman inside the bunker was screaming again. Obscenities, mostly. Well, that would change. The window on the far side was barred, but open to the elements, so she would be able to see what happened next. He imagined, if she was like the others, she’d shut up pretty damn quick. Certainly, the profanities would cease. They all became mice after a while, hoping against sense that that way they would not be noticed.

  A breeze picked up behind the house.

  Cartwright looked to either side to make sure his family were watching. They were. They were staring down the field with the usual dull expressions or looks of excitement.

  He turned back.

  His son had reached the trees at the bottom of the garden now. The hole had already been prepared; the spade was still leaning against one of the trunks to the side, next to a mound of churned earth and bones.

  Five minutes later, as the sun came up and one day transformed into another, after the new woman’s screams had dissolved into horrified silence, after the camera flash, Cartwright watched his son pitch something white and flopping into the hole at the roots, and then begin to shovel the dirt back on top.

  Chapter Twelve

  The next morning, I left my father’s notes and the printouts I’d taken from the Internet locked in the office, and set out on foot. Outside my building, I kept checking behind me, still nervous of being followed or watched, but it was Sunday morning and the campus was dead. Just a few students meandering around, and nobody paying me any attention.

  I pulled my coat around me, tired from a miserable night’s half sleep on the common-room chairs, and shivered slightly as I walked.

  South of the centre, I crossed the bridge over the river, but stopped for a moment halfway over and leaned on the flaking green paint of the old balustrade. Twenty metres below, the water was thick and ripe, lapping against the mossy stone blocks along the bank. In the distance, the sky was lined w
ith sleek glass towers and enormous cranes.

  This area had all been industrial once: an old grey spread of factories and workshops. They had grown out of the trade and commerce brought by the river, and then fallen into disrepair. Bursts of money had been injected since, dabs of colour dropped onto the landscape, and redevelopments had bloomed – briefly. There were prestigious blocks of flats lining the far banks of the river, tapering up to penthouse apartments, their clean sides mirroring a fracture of clouds, but many of them were empty inside. A large number of developments had stalled, leaving empty apartments dotting the buildings. At ground level, trendy bars and boutiques opened and closed with painful regularity. This whole side of the city was faltering and half finished, ready at any moment to collapse back into disrepair.

  Given what I’d read about him online, it felt sadly appropriate that Andrew Haggerty had ended up living here.

  Across the bridge, I walked down a faux-cobbled street, then emerged into a central square with a gently trickling fountain at the centre. Haggerty’s block was on the corner: five storeys of flats built above a green shuttered bistro and a newsagents. The front door was on a keycard system, but there was an intercom beside it. I buzzed for the flat number my father had written down, and waited.

  A few moments later there was a crackle.

  ‘Hello?’

  It was a woman’s voice, which surprised me.

  ‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for Andrew Haggerty?’

  ‘Okay. Hang on just a moment.’

  Another crackle, then silence.

  Then a man’s voice. ‘Hello. Who is this, please?’

  ‘Hi, Mr Haggerty. My name’s Neil Dawson. I think you might have spoken to my father a couple of weeks ago. Christopher?’

  Silence again.

  ‘Mr Haggerty?’

  ‘Wait there,’ he said. ‘I’ll be down in five minutes.’

  He was down sooner than that.

  Andrew Haggerty was tall and bald, with small glasses and a salt-and-pepper goatee. As he emerged from the building, wearing dark-blue suit trousers and still pulling on a thin black coat, he looked harried and troubled. Older than his years. I’d done the maths and knew that he was only forty-five, but the last decade had clearly affected him. It was as though what had happened ten years ago had stretched time suddenly wide, and then it had contracted more slowly afterwards, leaving him baggy.

  I felt a certain kinship with him. At the same time, it created a wrench of panic that I had to fight down.

  This is not how you’re going to end up.

  No matter what.

  ‘Come on.’ He indicated with his head. ‘Let’s go this way.’

  He led me round the corner of the building, down another short street, and into a new square. This one was smaller, with benches and bushes around the outside, and a bronze sculpture in the middle of three men playing bowls, one of them crouched down and peering beneath his hand into the distance. They were so uncannily lifelike that I half expected them to move.

  ‘Here.’

  Haggerty gestured at one of the benches with an open hand, and I wasn’t sure whether he was showing me it or suggesting we sit down. There was a gold plaque in the middle of the wooden beams at the back that read:

  In Loving Memory of Lorraine and Kent Haggerty

  ‘The council were looking for donations. It wasn’t much, but at least it’s something.’ His head was tilted to one side, staring at it. Then he smiled sadly. ‘Come on. Let’s sit down.’

  We did. I leaned forward slightly, rubbing my hands together aimlessly. The plaque felt like a hot button behind me, something it would have been wrong to rest my back against.

  ‘I’m really sorry.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He nodded. ‘But it was a long time ago now.’

  From the way he said that, I didn’t quite believe it. Certainly, I couldn’t imagine ever getting to the point when I’d be able to say something like that myself.

  ‘Are you re-married now?’ I said.

  ‘No, no.’ He half laughed. ‘Or not quite anyway. I’m living with someone, but we’re not married. Maybe one day.’

  ‘I’m sorry to interrupt.’

  ‘No, she’s very understanding. That kind of goes with the territory of a relationship with me.’ Another half laugh. ‘But obviously, all of this upsets her a bit. That’s why I’ve come out here. She knows it’s important to me, and she doesn’t say anything about it, but … well, it’s nothing she needs to hear, is it?’

  ‘No, I guess not.’

  Again, there was an edge to his voice that suggested more than the words themselves did. It was nothing she needed to hear. But it’s something I still need to say.

  ‘My father wanted to talk to you about Lorraine and Kent,’ I said. ‘About what happened to them.’

  ‘Yes. How is he getting on with his book?’

  I paused.

  ‘My father died.’

  ‘Oh God. I’m so sorry.’ Haggerty looked at me with horror, then shook his head, thrown. ‘What happened? Was it—’

  ‘An accident,’ I said quickly. For the moment, it felt like the safest answer to give. ‘It happened last week – and it had nothing to do with the project he was working on. Actually, until yesterday, I didn’t even know he was working on anything at all.’

  Haggerty still looked shocked.

  ‘And that’s why you’re here?’

  I nodded. ‘This is for my peace of mind. I hadn’t seen him for a few weeks and I felt very guilty about that. I suppose I just wanted to find out what he was working on. What he was doing.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Haggerty said again. ‘Sincerely. He seemed like a lovely man.’

  ‘Thank you. He was.’

  ‘And I understand what you mean. When you lose someone, you ask yourself all those questions, don’t you? Sometimes it helps and sometimes it doesn’t.’

  ‘You did meet my father?’

  ‘A couple of times. He was working on a new book; that was why he wanted to talk to me. He hadn’t decided whether it would be fiction or non-fiction. He was very polite, you know. Very respectful.’

  I nodded. Fiction or non-fiction. With my father, of course, those boundaries had always been blurred. Except that, in the past, he’d only ever seemed to write about himself, whereas it seemed this time he’d also been mining the lives of others for inspiration.

  ‘Part of his research was about your family. Is that right?’

  From the news articles I’d found online, I knew a certain amount about what had happened to his wife and son. When it came to the basic facts, that meant I probably knew almost as much as he did.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It was about Lorri and Kent. The family I used to have.’

  Ten years ago, Andrew Haggerty had been a successful estate agent in a town called Thornton, which was a little further inland from Huntington and Whitkirk, but still close enough to be on the same page of the map. Andrew’s wife Lorraine was a stay-at-home mum; their son, Kent, was four years old. They were a happy, ordinary loving family, until one Tuesday, after working late, Andrew returned home to find his wife and child weren’t there any more.

  The car was gone too – which was something – but there was no reason for them to be out so late, and Lorraine hadn’t left him a note to say where she’d gone, which was very much unlike her. Andrew laboriously called round the various friends and family members who he thought might know where she was, but none of them did.

  Finally, he called the police.

  ‘They didn’t take me seriously at first,’ he said. ‘Can you believe that?’

  I could believe it all too easily. And it was a lesson, wasn’t it? The police hadn’t believed Haggerty’s wife and child were missing even without him telling them the wild story I would have to.

  Again, I fought down my emotions and tried to sound calm, natural. ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Because the car was gone too, you see? So I suppose it makes sense. They thou
ght we’d had an argument and she’d gone off. That she’d come back home when she was ready.’

  Haggerty shook his head.

  ‘It turned out she’d gone to the supermarket. Not at that time, obviously, at some point in the afternoon. That was where they found the car though. It was the only one left in the car park overnight.’

  I nodded.

  Security footage from inside the store had captured the last known images of Lorraine and Kent Haggerty alive, and stills from that footage had appeared alongside a number of the articles I’d found online. They showed a woman and a small boy, dark and blurred and indistinct. They didn’t look real. It was like they’d been scribbled on the film: shaded in with the side of a pencil.

  There were no cameras in the car park itself, but, over the days that followed, a few reports and witness statements were gathered. A handful of people remembered separate small parts of an overall picture: an old van parked nearby, browny-red, the colour of rust; a woman complaining about something to an old man; hearing a little boy crying; a larger man with wild hair. They were all just impressions, of course, and none of them had been conclusive enough in itself to cause concern to the witnesses at the time. Put together, though, they were sufficient for the police to launch a major enquiry.

  Which went nowhere.

  I remembered what the old man had told me on the phone.

  They haven’t found me yet. Never have. Never will.

  In terms of the known facts, that was where Andrew Haggerty’s story ended. Despite the efforts of everyone involved, a single car in an otherwise empty car park was the last trace of Lorraine and Kent Haggerty that was ever found.

  I had no idea whether that would have made it easier for him or not. On the one hand, he never had to face the horror of the bodies themselves but, however painful that would have been in the short-term, at least then there would have been a sense of closure for him. Even now, ten years on, when he must have known in his heart that Lorraine and Kent were dead, I could feel that absence of resolution. It wasn’t just his appearance; it was obvious from his behaviour. He had agreed to speak to my father, and he was speaking to me now. The experience had never finished for him. A line had never been drawn.