by Bill Hussey
Through a Glass, Darkly
Bill Hussey
Dedicated with much love to my family – Mum & Dad, Carly, Georgia & Jon – because they believed…
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
FRIDAY 25th OCTOBER 2002
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
SATURDAY 26th OCTOBER 2002
Nine
Ten
SUNDAY 27th OCTOBER 2002
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
MONDAY 28th OCTOBER 2002
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
TUESDAY 29th OCTOBER 2002
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Thirty-three
Thirty-four
Thirty-five
Thirty-six
Thirty-seven
Thirty-eight
WEDNESDAY 30th OCTOBER 2002
Thirty-nine
Forty
Forty-one
Forty-two
Forty-three
Forty-four
Forty-five
Forty-six
Forty-seven
Forty-eight
Forty-nine
Fifty
Fifty-one
Fifty-two
Fifty-three
Fifty-four
Fifty-five
THURSDAY 31st OCTOBER 2002
Fifty-six
Fifty-seven
Fifty-eight
Epilogue
Copyright
Acknowledgments
I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my grandfathers – Len Sanford & John ‘Fats’ Hussey – for inspiring me to write stories. My thanks go to Graeme Hills for his constructive criticism, mathematical contributions and, most importantly, his friendship. I have also been blessed with the support of Trevor & Keeley Lewis-Bettison, Dave & Lillian Bettison and Kasun Perera. Ben Mason is my dedicated agent and I thank him for all his hard work on my behalf. Professor Jane Rogers and several of the staff and students on Sheffield Hallam’s MA in Writing have contributed to this book. Jane Mitchell and Dr Steve Baxter have both helped immensely with their knowledge of all things theological and medical. Finally, my heartfelt thanks go to Simon Petherick, Jonathan Wooding, Anthony Nott and all at Bloody Books for taking Through A Glass, Darkly out of the dreaming and making it real.
FRIDAY 25th OCTOBER 2002
If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder …
Deuteronomy 13:1
One
Jack Trent stared into the bathroom mirror.
He could not fight it. The dreaming reached out and pulled him through the glass. Alone, always alone, he tried to scream but his cries were smothered beneath layers of darkness. On the other side of the looking-glass, the shadows around him began to define themselves into shapes, solid and tangible: tree-shaded meadow grass, dank earth, dripping hollows. Jack waited until the vision had settled. Then he stepped onto the path that cut through the dream-forest and strode out into the night.
Knowing that the environment through which he moved existed only in his mind did not slow the jackhammer beat of his heart. The fact that the thorns scratching his skin were not real, that his skin itself was a fabrication, was immaterial. With every step through the dreaming his fear quickened.
A chaos of birds taking flight broke the stillness. The beat of their wings passed overhead, and Jack felt a selfish desperation to move with them. Quickly, without guilt, out of the forest, abandoning the boy to his fate. But heroes do not leave children to die alone. He walked on, his torch illuminating the trembling leaves that overran the path.
At last, he reached the clearing. He tapped the torch against his palm to steady its light and began to search. Mist cordoned the glade, banking in a wall around its perimeter. There were no stars or moon overhead, no rustle of night-time predators, no forest scent. Jack soon became used to the sensory vacuum, so that when a whiff of smouldering charcoal stung his nostrils, the leaden coarseness of it was somehow shocking. He paced out the entire area. Empty. He had been certain the boy would be here. The screams had rung out, calling to him between the boughs of the denuded oaks. He peered into the darkness. There was no shade to it, just a wall of uniform black. About to draw himself out of the dreaming, Jack paused. A dusky red light had crept over the crenellation of treetops and, by its glare, he saw them.
They were just out of the reach of his torchlight. Two figures, as silent and rigid as waxworks. The first, tall and whip-thin, was standing upright. A smaller shape knelt by its side, frozen in an act of praying or repelling. A cold touch skittered at the base of Jack’s spine. He took a step forward. As he did so, the figures retreated, their feet silent upon the carpet of dead leaves. Jack followed until he reached the opposing bank of trees. He glanced over his shoulder. Somehow, they had skirted around him. The moon burnt like a dying cigarette tip, throwing their long shadows at his feet.
About to retrace his steps, Jack stopped dead. A cry cut across the glade.
‘Jack. Oh God, please, Jack. I’ve seen his eyes. He’s shown me his eyes …’
There was something familiar about the voice. Jack started forward but, with the same horrible fluidity, the figures receded again into shadow. He stifled his fear and ran headlong after them, throwing the torch before him. Glass cracked and a yellow arc of light spilled across the ground. The torch rolled to a stop and flickered. It snatched the pair from obscurity in nervous stutters of light.
A man, or what appeared to be a man, stood huddled over the body of a young boy. Below the breast, the child’s insides had been hollowed out into a gleaming crucible. The man’s face rose up from inside the cavity, the taut white skin relieved here and there with smatters of red. Between his teeth hung bars of flesh, through which his tongue slavered, luxuriating in the taste of meat. He focused on Jack. Eyes, that were not eyes, pierced the distance between them. Then the stickman’s lips hitched into a smile. Wiping his knuckles across his mouth, the creature rose and, without a sound, slipped back into the forest. Jack watched the face shimmer between distant trees until, finally, it was lost.
The torch filament burned low and died. Encompassed by darkness, Jack waited and listened. Only his own thin breathing textured the silence. And then, a scraping, rustling, dragging sound reached his ears. Something was crawling towards him.
Jack put his fist through the mirror.
He gasped, as a newborn gasps its first unaided breath. A spray of blood flecked his face. The bathroom swam, and then everything became hard and rudely formed again. A hundred Jack Trents looked back at him from the shards of shattered mirror jewelling the washbasin.
Thank God … There were no dark tears on his cheeks.
He left the bathroom, padded to the kitchen and rinsed his hand. Four splinters, rusty with blood, provided some comfort. The pain they gave was real and immediate. Nothing more or less than exactly what it was: the tearing of flesh and nerve. He was grounded by it, but his thoughts soon snapped back to the vision. His first waking nightmare in twenty years. And so vivid, as if all the abstinence and training had itself be
en a dream and he was a child again, seeing shades of the future. A shadowland of possibility, his mother had called it. But it was not the possible he saw. It was the inevitable. The dreaming was back, and the dreaming was never wrong.
Jack touched the raw wound on each knuckle.
Her tan was fading fast. Dawn had hoped to come back golden and glamorous and, most of all, over him. Her friend, Samantha, had suggested a boozy holiday would help her come to terms with being dumped. A fortnight of watching Sammy down jug after jug of sangria, and flirt with boys to whom shaving was still a bi-weekly event, hadn’t done the trick. On gritty Majorcan beaches Dawn could not forget. In cafes, where everything was served with chips, and her elbows rubbed raw on plastic tablecloths, she could not forget. And in clubs, with their tacky floors and sticky teenagers, where she had felt her age, Jack Trent had been with her.
Now she was home. Face peeling, lips chapped and Jack fucking Trent still on her mind. She dabbed her nose with aftersun and started rehearsing the same old arguments. She didn’t need a man. Her career required her full attention. It was tough enough for a woman to make her mark in CID without having to contend with distracting relationships. And he was a creep. A creepy, freaky creep. He wasn’t even that attractive … was he? Okay, she had to admit that he was, in a peculiar sort of way. And he had been kind to her and to Jamie …
No. Remember how he ended it. Even if he wanted another chance, there was no way back now. If he had rejected her because of work complications, or another woman, or even because he didn’t like her tits, she would have come to terms with it. It would have been sad, because she had felt something for him, but given time she could have shrugged it off. Maybe even forgiven him. But that particular rejection she could not forgive.
She finished moisturising and applied thick black eyeliner and lots of mascara. It made her eyes look mean. Through the thin bathroom wall her neighbour’s stereo alarm sprang into life, belting out the first few bars of Stand By Your Man.
‘Jesus Christ … Come on, Peter Parker,’ she called, poking her head into Jamie’s Spider-Man shrine of a bedroom.
He was just about dressed for school but still playing video games. With a little badgering of the carrot and stick variety, he was ready to leave.
The street was slick with frost, the sky as grainy as a poor TV transmission. As they walked, Jamie chattered about the fortnight spent at his grandad’s. After thirteen years of parenting, Dawn had mastered the art of looking engrossed, and making interested noises, while her mind considered other matters. Usually bills, clothing budgets, work commitments, optimistic exercise schedules, but today Jack Trent dogged her thoughts. She remembered his voice on the phone, telling her why it had to finish. He had sounded so frightened … Bastard.
Jamie gave her a self-conscious wave as he joined the swarm of kids siphoning through the school gates. Her mind elsewhere, she held up her hand in a stiff salute.
It was a short walk from the school to the station.
She wondered how many of her colleagues had guessed the real reason for her leave. On the request form the lie had been a cousin’s sudden death (Dawn would not admit it but, like most well-balanced people, there was a corner of her brain given over to superstition. A cousin had been the target of the tragedy because she did not have a cousin that Fate might be tempted by). Everyone would have known that the excuse was so much BS, of course. Gossip in a police station was passed around quicker than a porn mag in a high school playground.
As she turned into the station forecourt, Jack was heaving a box from the back seat of his car. His washed-out blue eyes rested on her for a moment. She made a play of rummaging through her bag. When she looked up again, he was at the top of the concrete flight of stairs. She gave it a few minutes and followed. Entering the reception, she was irritated to see that he was only now sliding his security card through the automated lock. She glanced over the public notice boards, feigning interest in the latest posters for a drugs awareness drive spearheaded by DI ‘Fat’ Pat Mescher. The security door sighed into the jamb. She counted to a hundred, swiped her pass and entered the belly of the station.
He was waiting by the lifts. She thought about slipping back through to reception. Jesus, this was ridiculous.
‘Jack? Can I ruin your day?’
Dave Fellowes, duty sergeant, cannoned into Dawn.
‘Sorry, love. Jack, misper, here’s the file.’
The lift doors grumbled open.
‘Missing person? Surely that’s a matter for uniform.’
‘Sorry, buddy, I punch in the numbers and the wonders of technology strategically victimise. Maybe you abused an abacus in a former life. Here.’
Jack caught the file but dropped his box. Papers spilled inside the lift.
‘Christ, Dave! Are you the patron saint of arseholes?’
He wedged a foot in the door and attempted to retrieve his files. Without thinking, Dawn leaned into the compartment and pressed the door hold button. He looked up with whispered thanks.
‘Dawn?’ Fellowes smirked. ‘You’ve been assigned to assist Jack on this one. No DCs available, and you should be all rested and raring to go.’
He flashed a toothy smile and left them to scrabble around.
‘You don’t have to,’ Jack’s voice slipped into her like a warm scalpel. ‘I can sort somebody else …’
‘No DCs available, if you can believe that,’ she said. ‘Anyway, it’s been allocated.’
Dave Fellowes: the station’s Grand High Stirrer of Shit. He must have known that Jack Trent had got himself some skirt at last, and would have guessed that her leave had signalled a break-up. Pairing them off on a case was just the sort of sick joke that smarmy bastard would enjoy.
‘Can you help me?’ Jack asked. ‘I think this box has given up the ghost.’
Dawn kicked the remnants of the box into the foyer and elbowed a button on the panel. The lift gave an asthmatic wheeze and they were tugged upwards, cables and winches complaining all the way. On the sixth floor, eyes followed them down the corridor to Jack’s office. Once inside, she relaxed a little.
‘Chronicle’s already picked up the story. Brief article from today’s rag,’ she said, running her eye over the clipping stapled to the report sheet.
‘Dawn, I meant what I said. It’ll just take a call to get you re-assigned.’
Silence stood between them long enough for the muffled sounds of the station and the street outside to become distinct and jarring.
‘Hurt your hand?’ she asked.
‘It’s nothing,’ he mumbled.
Nothing. Fine. She told herself she didn’t care.
‘Simon Malahyde,’ she said, sifting the P61 misper form, ‘seventeen. Lives in a village called Crow Haven. Reported missing by his mother on Tuesday. Didn’t come home after a party. Uniform’s been over, got the routine stuff done. The mother’s insisting on seeing someone ‘higher up’, says she’s got new information suggesting the kid’s in danger. Must’ve been slow round here lately, why’s CID getting mispers all of a sudden?’
‘Lot of uniform’s in training. ‘Racism in the Force’, that sort of thing,’ Jack said.
‘Very noble,’ Dawn sighed, collapsing into an armchair. ‘But a racist is the kind of arsehole that doesn’t change its pimples, no matter how much training you throw at it.’
‘Well, suppose we better get cracking. Can you call this Mrs Malahyde? Tell her we’ll be over in an hour? See you in the car park in twenty?’
He left the room and she felt something inside ratchet loose and wind tight again.
Rain came in fitful bursts, roaring then pittering on the roof of Jack’s car, rebounding off the pavement and throwing up a thin mist. Figures ran through it, zigzagging between the shelter of shop awnings. As they crossed the Black Friar Bridge, Dawn looked down the course of the swollen river, burgundy-black in the shadow of the cathedral.
‘What does this lad do?’ Jack asked, as they left the ring road.
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Dawn flicked through the file. ‘Student. Theology. First year. Pretty bright: he went to university a year early. Money-wise he’s okay. Large annuity left to him by his father. Bank accounts haven’t been touched for over a week, though.’
She felt a familiar anxiety as they left the city and Jack accelerated through the hairpin country lanes. She wondered why his dread of machinery in all its forms, from a hesitance to use even a battery-powered tin opener, to a firm belief that he might one day hit the wrong button on his laptop and wipe the entire Police National Computer mainframe, did not extend to cars. Behind the wheel, he had a misplaced confidence. He was a terrible, and somewhat terrifying, driver. And today, due no doubt to the tightening coil between them, his driving was more erratic and fast-paced than ever. It was like being propelled about by a monosyllabic Warner Bros. cartoon character. She longed to break the tension with a careless question but pride held her tongue.
Twenty-seven miles out of the city, the car started to struggle up a steep rise. Hills are not a common feature of the fenland, so Dawn was surprised at both the height and the gradient of the ridge. Fringing the hill, and fanning out on either side, was a large forest. Dawn took out the AA Roadmap and traced the wood – Redgrave – with her finger. Flat and cramped on the page, huge and sprawling in her sights. As they crested the brow of the hill, they saw the village sitting in the hollow below. Cradled on one side by the rise, and on the other by the forest, the small community should have appeared comfortably snug. Instead, it looked cowed. They wound down into the village, past the school and war memorial, post office and pub.
‘Is this it?’ Jack indicated an opening in the bank of trees to their right.
‘I think so. Mrs Malahyde said the house was just off the Conduit Road.’
Jack turned the car into a driveway, hemmed and tunnelled by rows of wych elm. The trees stretched away until their turning leaves blurred and fused together, giving the impression of a yawning yellow throat. The rain had stopped. Silence now, save for the rumble of the engine and the crack of gravel beneath the tyres. Dawn watched Jack’s hands leave clammy traces on the steering wheel. A rill of blood seeped from beneath the bandage across his knuckles and trickled down his middle finger.