The Nothing Man

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  Jim walked past the house, continuing on down the lane, scanning for a parked car hidden in the hedgerow with a Dublin registration plate and two bored figures sat inside, or any movement at all elsewhere in the dark. He saw neither.

  Satisfied, he started to double back.

  He had never really believed that Eve would be under any kind of police protection. She thought she was looking for an old man who hadn’t felt the urge to kill in nearly two decades, and the Gardaí would assume that an offender who’d got away with what he’d done for this long would want to keep it that way. Jim had been counting on it.

  He reached the gates.

  Now that his eyes were better adjusted to the dark, he could see that they had changed. Eighteen years ago they’d been cast-iron railings, hanging lopsided, paint peeling off. To open them, all you’d needed to do was reach through and lift the latch. Now they were solid wood, at least two feet taller and firmly locked. And electronic: the buttons on a small keypad glowed green in the dark.

  He couldn’t climb over them. Not these days. He was going to have to force his way through the perimeter hedge.

  Now was as good a time as any to suit up.

  Gloves first. Two sets. White Latex ones, the kind they might use at a hospital. He had chosen these over the standard blue type the Gardaí used, for obvious reasons. He pulled them on and up his arm as far as they would go, which was a couple of inches past the cuffs of his jacket. Then, over them, the black leather set. The double layer restricted his movement somewhat, but it prevented hair-shedding and protected him from fingernails.

  He took the same approach to the head. First: a rubber skull cap. He wasn’t entirely sure what it was supposed to be used for; he thought maybe women’s hairdressing. He pulled it down over his forehead and tucked his own hair up underneath it. The black knit mask went on afterwards. He rolled it down, over his face and neck, tucking the hem of it into the collar of his jacket. He adjusted it until it felt comfortable and only revealed his eyes.

  He touched a hand to his chest to check for the reassuring bulk of the gun and then went looking for the thinnest section of the hedge.

  He pushed his way through it.

  It was easier than he’d thought it was going to be: he only had to make a big enough hole to climb through. He landed hard on the ground on the other side, sending a shooting pain through his hip and guaranteeing him a bruise there tomorrow, but he was in. He was on Eve’s property.

  From here on in, patience was his greatest asset.

  He crouched down with his back against the hedge and held his breath while scanning the area. No sounds. No movement. When he was confident he was the only one out there in the night, he began advancing towards the house.

  Up close, he saw that he’d been right: there seemed to be only one light on inside and it was the fixture on the ceiling in the hall.

  Combined with the silence, that told him Eve was at home but already in bed.

  He walked all the way around the house once, checking each window for signs of life and the walls for an alarm-bell box. He found neither. No motion-activated security light surprised him, and there were no barking or scratching dogs.

  Just as he’d hoped.

  Jim went to the back door. He fixed the elasticated band of the torch around his head, crouched down until he was at eye-level with the lock and reached up to turn the light on. When a bright spotlight fell on the lock, it was as if eighteen years fell away.

  Four people had been asleep in their beds inside this house – or so he had thought.

  One of them, it turned out, was awake.

  And she would prove to be no victim.

  The house in Bally’s Lane had had a conservatory door that wouldn’t lock. The girl in Covent Court habitually forgot that closing her front door wasn’t the same as locking it. Fermoy was a building site with people coming and going all the time. But this house and the one in Westpark had required a homemade bump-key to get Jim past their backdoor locks.

  Tonight he had a new toy.

  Jim reached a hand into his pocket and carefully withdrew the pick-gun. It looked like a silver electric toothbrush with a long, thin needle instead of a brush head. He’d taped a picking needle to its handle with masking tape, which he pulled off now.

  He’d bought it a few years back just because he thought it’d be a handy thing to have around. Tonight, it would be the most important part of his kit.

  Moving quickly and quietly, Jim slid the picking needle into the lock on the back door, then pushed the pick-gun’s needle in after it. There was a knack to this – he had to move them around until he got the tension just right – and the gun made a mechanical clicking noise, but it was so much better than his old bump key. Within seconds, the door was unlocked.

  Jim switched off the head torch and held his breath, listening.

  Nothing.

  He stowed the pick-gun and needle, depressed the handle of the back door and slowly pushed it open. It happened silently, with no creak or whine from the hinges.

  He stepped inside, into the darkness of the kitchen.

  The air was still. The light in the hall was just detectable through the gap between the kitchen door and its frame. As his eyes adjusted to the dim, he could see that very little had changed. There appeared to be fewer items of furniture in here now, fewer things, but the layout was the same.

  Jim crossed the kitchen, opened the door and stepped into the hall. The front door faced him now, at the other end of it. He could see that since he’d been here last, a second dead bolt had been added to it along with a safety chain.

  Two doors led off the hall, one on either side. Both were standing slightly ajar. The living room was to the left, the study to the right.

  Jim took three steps forward and turned to look up the stairs.

  He had been standing in this very spot on that night eighteen years ago when it happened.

  The moment that had changed everything.

  When he’d looked up these stairs back then, he’d seen a ghostly little figure standing at the top, looking down at the broken body lying splayed across the bottom steps.

  ‘Dad ...?’ she’d said.

  Quietly. Uncertainly. As if she were confused about what was happening in the house.

  About what had just happened, moments before.

  Jim had been confused, too. He had come downstairs, leaving – he thought – the man a floor above, secured and waiting, and the other little girl hiding in a bathroom whose door he’d easily be able to kick open when it came time. But then he’d heard a noise and returned to the hallway just in time to see it happen.

  A little figure on the landing, running with arms outstretched.

  An adult body tumbling down the stairs.

  Coming to rest at the end of it.

  Silence.

  It was the man. The blue rope Jim had bound him with was still tying his wrists and ankles, but he had somehow slipped the one that had tied him to the radiator. The arrangement of his limbs seemed utterly incompatible with life but just to be sure, Jim bent down to put an ear close to the man’s lips, to listen for the sounds of his breath or even to feel the weak tickle of it.

  There was nothing. He was dead.

  Jim looked up, to the girl at the top of the stairs. Her eyes were on the man’s body.

  ‘Dad ..?’

  Then her gaze lifted and she looked right at him.

  At Jim.

  Who realised then that he wasn’t wearing his mask.

  It was sitting on the table in the kitchen. He’d taken it off when he came downstairs. The light in the hall was enough to illuminate her face for him and since he was standing practically underneath it, it was surely more than enough to illuminate his face for her.

  Eve Black had seen him, the real him, clear as day.

  But she’d never told anyone that because he’d seen what she’d done.

  She had written in her stupid book that she had a list of questions f
or the Nothing Man. Maybe tonight he’d let her ask them, but only if he could ask her his question first.

  He only had one.

  Tell me why, Eve. Why did you kill your father?

  He checked the living room first, using only the light that spilled into from the hall when he pushed open the door. The curtains were drawn. The TV remotes were lined up neatly on the coffee table, next to a half-drunk cup of stone-cold tea. He pulled off one leather glove and touched a hand to the back of the television, but couldn’t feel any heat through the Latex. No one had been in this room for hours.

  Eve had written that she was sleeping in the study. He paused outside the door to replace his glove, to collect himself, to prepare.

  But something was missing.

  Eighteen years ago, this moment – just before he revealed himself – would’ve felt like the peak. Adrenalin would’ve been surging through his veins, filling him with strength and power. The anticipation would have been palpable. The promise of the night would have felt endless, the hours ripe with infinite possibilities. He would have been excited.

  But Jim didn’t feel that way tonight. He was strangely detached, as if he were a spectator at his own crime scene. Maybe things would change when he saw her, when it started for real.

  He pulled out the gun. He pushed open the study door.

  And knew immediately that there was no one in there.

  The light from the hall illuminated the empty bed but it was more than that. He could feel it. The air was too still, too dead. He stepped inside anyway, to double-check. An old, hairy blanket was thrown on the bed. He repeated his glove removal and heat check. Cold. No one had been sleeping in here tonight.

  Jim went back out into the hall and paused to listen for the tinkle of urination or the rush of water from a tap. There was nothing. No humming appliances. No settling of the house. No creak of a mattress spring.

  He decided then that Eve Black had lied.

  Again.

  She hadn’t taken to sleeping in the study. She was upstairs, in one of the bedrooms. He could see why she might not want to admit it. Both options were bleak: sleep in the room where her mother died or in the one where her younger sister did.

  Jim started up the stairs, ascending with excruciating slowness, careful to test each step with an increasing amount of weight before trusting it to hold him without creaking.

  Halfway up, something changed. The air. It suddenly held a presence, like a muted television in an otherwise empty room.

  She was here. In one of the bedrooms.

  He could feel it.

  When Jim reached the landing, he saw both bedroom doors were slightly ajar, offering only darkness in the spaces beyond.

  The third door, the bathroom, was standing wide open. He made a cursory check of it. Empty. The cistern was silent and the sink was dry. He went back out on to the landing and moved to the next closest door.

  Her door.

  The bedroom Eve had once shared with her sister.

  He didn’t even have to go inside. Standing on the threshold, he could already hear her. Breathing, steady and regular.

  She was in there and she was fast asleep.

  Jim pushed open the door. He watched as the light from the landing raced across the carpeted floor and rushed up on to the bed.

  She was a shapeless mound beneath the sheets, one bare foot sticking out and over the side.

  For a little while, he just watched her.

  As he did he felt it like a wave in the distance: the feeling.

  Gathering.

  Building.

  Coming this way.

  He stepped into the room. Moved deeper into the dark. He went to the side of Eve’s bed and stood above her sleeping form. She was on her side, head resting on a bare arm.

  Still asleep, breaths deep and regular.

  It was time, after all this time.

  Finally.

  He closed his eyes and listened to Eve breathe and braced himself for the impact of the wave as it reached its peak and broke and roared and crashed against him, through him.

  Washing away Jim Doyle.

  Leaving only the Nothing Man.

  He pointed his gun with one hand and reached up on switched on the head torch with the other.

  And saw that Eve Black was wide awake, looking up at him.

  He shoved the butt of the gun into the side of her neck and whispered, ‘Let’s play a game.’

  Eve squinted in the beam of the torch but otherwise barely reacted.

  He pushed the gun in further, harder, as far as it would go into the soft flesh just under Eve’s jaw.

  She released a painful moan, but didn’t move or squirm.

  She’s resigned, he realised.

  She knew this day would come and now it’s here and she knows she can’t do anything about it.

  ‘Jim,’ she said.

  He put his mouth to her ear and whispered through the fabric of the mask. ‘I’m not going to tie you up. I’m just going to kill you.’

  When he directed the beam of the torch back to her face, he saw that her eyes were wide and her breathing had become shallow and rapid.

  Good.

  ‘Do what you want,’ she said. She sounded breathy, panicky. ‘But please talk to me first. Tell me why. Why did you do it? After all this time, I deserve an answer. And what difference does it make if this is the end anyway?’

  Jim considered this.

  He was in total control. He should take advantage of it. Press the gun against Eve’s flesh and pull the trigger. He’d be out of the house in less than a minute. Back at his car in two. Home in ten. He’d have disposed of his clothes and covered his tracks before anyone even discovered that the Nothing Man’s most famous survivor was dead.

  But he had a question he wanted answered too. And Eve had a point: here, at the end, what difference did it make?

  He sat down on the edge of the bed, keeping the gun pressed into Eve’s neck and the beam of light from the head torch focused on her face. With his other hand he cupped her chin and roughly pulled her face towards him.

  He leaned close until his mouth was mere inches from hers.

  She said something that could have been a desperate, ‘No,’ and shut her eyes tightly against the blinding glare of the light.

  He whispered, ‘You first.’

  Then in his normal voice – there was no need for performance now, here, in these last few minutes – he said, ‘You answer my question and then I’ll answer yours.’ He sat back, moving the light away from Eve’s face, but staying close enough to keep the gun in place. ‘Why did you do it?’

  Eve opened her eyes, blinked at him.

  ‘Do what?’ she whispered.

  ‘You know what. If you’re going to lie I’ll just end this now.’

  But she still seemed confused.

  ‘I saw you,’ he said. ‘I saw what you did.’

  A beat passed, then Eve’s face changed.

  She started shaking her head and saying, ‘No. No. No, I can’t. Please.’

  He moved the nuzzle of the gun to her temple and his free hand to her neck. Spread his fingers around it. Squeezed as hard as he could.

  Eve cried out.

  He gripped the skin until she was gasping and had started to struggle and thrash.

  ‘Tell me,’ he spat.

  He released her and waited while she gulped down air.

  ‘Last chance, Eve.’

  She was crying now, hard, the tears on her cheeks glistening in the beam of the torchlight.

  She whispered something but he didn’t catch it.

  He told her to repeat it.

  She said, ‘I thought it was you.’

  Her voice had become raspy.

  ‘I was trying to save my family,’ she said. ‘I pushed my father down the stairs because I thought he was you.’

  But of course.

  He felt foolish for not realising it sooner. When she’d suddenly come running out of that bathroom
all those years ago with two hands stretched out in front of her, and charged up against the man standing at the top of the stairs, she’d thought it was Jim she was pushing down it.

  But then she’d seen the body in the light of the hall, and Jim standing there looking up at her, and realised her mistake.

  Her terrible mistake.

  But now he saw that he’d made one, too.

  He should’ve charged upstairs and killed her, right there and then. No hesitation. She’d seen his face and he had been planning on doing it anyway before he left the house. But he’d just seen her kill her own father. A twelve-year-old girl had murdered her daddy in front of him and he had no idea why. Was it because the girl was bad? Or because the daddy had been? What had been going on in this house?

  Jim didn’t know. He was suddenly missing most of the information. His control ran away.

  And then he did, turning and running through the kitchen, out the back door and into the night.

  But he wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.

  The gun was at Eve’s neck. Jim put his left hand to his mouth and pulled off the leather glove with his teeth. Slowly. Keeping his eyes on Eve’s the whole time. Then he did the same thing to the Latex glove underneath.

  ‘What about my questions?’ she asked.

  He ignored her.

  ‘Just tell me why,’ she said. ‘Why us? Why didn’t you just lock us up like the O’Sullivan children?’ Her voice cracked. ‘Why did you destroy my family? For what purpose? And why did you leave me alive? Why Anna? Why a little girl, you sick fuck?’

  Jim made a ssshhh noise. He pushed back the blankets with his bare hand and lowered his jaw so the torch shone directly on the smooth, pale skin of Eve’s neck and, below it, the curved promise of her breasts.

  He touched his bare hand to her skin. Pressed it against it.