Dark Waters

by G. R. Halliday

  ‘Look!’ She held up a plastic Tupperware box between her little hands.

  ‘What is it?’ Monica asked, joining her on the floor.

  ‘It’s a nature box.’ The box was filled with an assortment of dried leaves, twigs, pebbles and what looked like a desiccated woodlouse. ‘Me and Granny gathered it today, when we were at the park. Granny said these leaves must have been from autumn because they’re all dry. If you rub them between your hands they crumble and then make your skin go all soft.’ The kid ground one of the leaves between her chubby hands and leaned to rub it on Monica’s face. ‘Doesn’t it feel soft?’

  Monica closed her eyes, smiling unconsciously as she felt Lucy’s soft skin on her face. And she remembered the way the skin had been rubbed raw on the woman’s wrists. There should be an ID on her soon. Monica grabbed Lucy’s arm and made to bite it. The kid shrieked with excitement and jumped up laughing. Her pure happiness was such a contrast to MacGregor’s house, to Monica’s chill fear of her sleepwalking. She wrapped both arms tight around her mum’s head, and Monica felt her hot breath in her ear as she squeezed that small body close. Hugged her tight. She stood up, still holding Lucy. Maybe she could hold her daughter like this for ever, maybe she could keep her safe?

  Later when Lucy was asleep Monica went downstairs. Her mum was curled on the sofa, reading by the glow of the corner lamp. Monica took the armchair (Dad’s chair, to go with Dad’s books, Dad’s record collection and Dad’s cupboard, still locked even five years after his death at the opposite side of the living room) and folded her long legs up underneath her. Then reached to her side to flick through his books on the shelf, almost exclusively about World War Two and true crime.

  ‘Did Dad like his work?’ Monica asked. ‘Being around criminals all the time? Having to be in control of them.’

  Her mum raised her chin slightly but didn’t look up from her tablet. ‘Oh, he never really spoke to me about his work,’ she said finally. ‘He kept all that separate from me. He was always such a joker about everything, I don’t think he wanted me to worry about any of it.’

  Monica nodded slowly, and the uncomfortable memory of standing in the corridor at MacGregor’s house came back to her. The image of her father on the other side of the door.

  ‘Lucy had another one of her stories the other day,’ Monica said, trying to inject some lightness into her voice. ‘About you and Dad.’

  Angela Kennedy nodded again but didn’t reply. She was still staring intently at her tablet. And Monica felt the stillness in the room, in the house. A stillness primed with something, something like a memory of the past. Refusing eye contact as if she could hardly hear Monica was such an alien posture for her mum, whose body language was normally so open. When they spoke about John Kennedy, it was as if they were each talking about a different man.

  ‘She said that you had a cat when you first got married,’ Monica went on, suddenly unable to stop herself. ‘That you had to get rid—’

  Monica’s phone started ringing in the pocket of her coat, hanging on the back of the door in the kitchen. She swore under her breath, unfolded from the chair and crossed to the linoleum floor. Picked the phone out of her raggedy pocket.

  ‘DI Monica Kennedy? Am I speaking to you?’ It took her a moment to recognise the unusual accent.

  ‘It’s me.’

  ‘I’m at the morgue. There’s someone here who wants to speak with you.’

  Dolohov was waiting down the stairs, holding the door open as if Monica was a new visitor who might easily miss the large black letters outside: MORTUARY.

  ‘Is it another one?’

  He looked puzzled by what she’d said, watching her face as he ran the words through his internal translator from English to Russian. Finally his face went blank and he nodded his head in a curt formal gesture. She imagined him doing the same when he was a teenager in the USSR. Somehow even in her state of exhaustion Monica knew it meant there was someone, alive, behind Dolohov in the morgue.

  He turned and pushed the door open. The man was standing with his back to Monica looking down at what remained of a body. She stepped into the room and cleared her throat. The man turned to her.

  ‘This is Mark Gall, you remember?’ Dolohov said.

  Monica took the man in. He was wearing the same shapeless anorak as when they’d spoken in the Raigmore Motel bar the week before, but his face looked different. Haggard with heavy lines of grief on his cheeks, bags under his eyes. Monica glanced beyond him to where the body was exposed on the pull-out refrigeration drawer.

  ‘How have you been?’

  ‘I’ve not been able to sleep,’ he said, staring down at the tiled floor. ‘Started to imagine my brother was following me.’

  ‘It’s difficult.’ She tried to muster up some genuine empathy. ‘This kind of loss can stir up all kinds of emotions.’ All the time wondering just what she was doing here. Surely Gall even being in the morgue was breaching some regulation as the body hadn’t yet been released to the family.

  ‘It’s not that,’ Gall said firmly, his red-rimmed eyes boring into Monica’s. ‘I couldn’t stop thinking about seeing him here.’ He gestured towards the body. ‘Something was different about him.’

  Monica nodded him on, curious now despite her tiredness.

  ‘We used to call him Skeletor when we were kids, he was so thin.’

  She nodded again.

  ‘I realised what was bothering me. I wanted to see him again, just to make sure. It didn’t make any sense because he never ate. Hated food, he said. But his body was bigger, heavier than he’d ever been when I’d seen him alive.’

  CHAPTER 60

  For a long time Annabelle stared at the words scraped there on the concrete: THEYR EATING ME

  ‘It has to be a joke,’ she said under her breath. ‘A nasty little joke.’ But it made some sort of sense. Was this why they were keeping her?

  The muffled sound of the top door echoed from the head of the tunnel. Swinging open against the cement wall. Marcus was coming.

  Annabelle jerked in panic on the chair and tried pushing the carpet square back against the wall again. She needed to cover the smear of blood and the writing because the idea of them being there together, reading those words together, seemed utterly terrifying. The square peeled away, and Annabelle felt her heart in her throat as she heard the door being pushed closed, bolted and locked. Then the sound of Marcus’s footsteps approaching down the tunnel. In desperation she pushed the square of carpet back against the wall then bumped the chair to the side, its back pinning the carpet to the wall as a temporary fix.

  She heard the bolt draw back in the door beside her. Almost without thinking Annabelle grabbed the crutches, pushed herself off the chair and collapsed in a heap on the ground. A moment later the door swung open and Marcus stepped into the room.

  ‘What are you doing?’ He stared warily down at her.

  ‘I was practising and I fell.’ She realised she was speaking in a child’s voice. ‘I wanted to show you how well I could do.’ She felt the tears running down her cheeks; there was absolutely no need to force them.

  ‘Stop being stupid,’ he said roughly. He crouched though, like a weary parent. She put her arms around his neck and felt her hatred for him rise. His horrible clothes, his cheap deodorant. She desperately wanted to stab him, to hurt him. Somehow those feelings mingled with something resembling love. She pressed her face into his neck, craving something. The feeling of warm skin, of being connected to another human being. It made no sense. The tears that had never seemed to matter to her mum and dad could make Marcus want to help her.

  He lifted her and sat her on the edge of the bed then knelt down so his dark eyes were level with hers. ‘Now, you’ve not to be stupid any more, OK?’

  Annabelle nodded her head quickly. Doing everything she could to keep her eyes from going past his shoulder to that spot on the wall. He cleared his throat, dropped his eyes.

  ‘What you spoke about yesterday? I ne
ed to show you something.’

  Annabelle stood in the tunnel and stared down to where it seemed to drop off into dark infinity. It had the sucking, claustrophobic feeling of a deserted station on the London Underground late at night. The sense that all that tunnelled darkness must contain something when the trains weren’t there, that it couldn’t possibly be just a long black emptiness.

  ‘Almost there.’ Marcus was trying to open a door beside her. ‘Why is it always the last key?’

  Annabelle turned to him, realised she’d been in some kind of trance. They’d walked further down the tunnel than she’d been before. Her arms were aching from the crutches but she’d barely noticed the pain as her mind wouldn’t stop returning to those words on the wall.

  ‘What is it?’ Marcus had spun around and was looking at her. As if he could somehow hear her thoughts. The door behind him was open now and Annabelle could see it led into another corridor.

  This passage was so tight they had to walk in single file, and had no lights. Marcus went ahead, then after every few paces he stopped to shine the torch back for Annabelle to follow. She moved slowly, fear rising with every step as she wondered just where he might be taking her.

  ‘What happened to Scott? I haven’t heard him for days.’ It was out of her mouth before she could stop herself.

  Marcus stopped at a door at the end of the tunnel. ‘Oh, I think he left. This place wasn’t for him.’ He turned the light back at Annabelle so she couldn’t see his face. She took another shaky few steps forward. ‘He had a lot of dreams. Bad ones. It’s not surprising when you think of sleeping above all those tunnels. I suppose it could give anyone nightmares.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  But Marcus didn’t reply. Instead he turned and pushed the door open onto another space. He stepped through the door and clicked the torch off. Annabelle was swallowed by the dark. She could feel it up her nose, in her throat.

  ‘Marcus!’ she cried out. A moment later lights clicked on, and she took an awkward step forward. The narrow tunnel had opened into a huge natural cavern. Dimly lit by a row of electric lights at least fifty feet above her on the ceiling.

  ‘I’m over here.’ Marcus was standing by the wall. He was staring intently at her, his face cast in shadow. ‘Did you ever feel like you didn’t belong with your family?’ he asked abruptly. ‘Like you came from somewhere else?’

  Annabelle tried to form the words that would show she understood, would show she’d felt exactly the same way. He wasn’t alone, they could escape together. But before her addled brain could make her mouth utter those important sounds he started speaking again.

  ‘What you said yesterday … I wanted to show you. So you’d understand. The main tunnel out there. It goes down under the mountain for more than a mile. Then there are lots of smaller tunnels leading off it. Miles and miles of them.’ His voice was lower than usual, suddenly emotionless like a bored tour guide. ‘It’s like a fairy tale, really. A story to frighten children with.’ His eyes never left her face as he spoke. ‘Hard to believe it’s true … They found this chamber back in the 1950s when they were first tunnelling here. Named it St Magnus’s Chamber, after the cathedral in Orkney.’

  Annabelle glanced around the cavern. She noticed for the first time that at the far end there was a pool of black water. It was fed by a trickling waterfall high on the back wall.

  ‘You never asked about how we came to be living somewhere like this. I know it’s strange, but this is the biggest privately owned dam in the Highlands. One of the first to be built too. But there was no such thing as health and safety in those days.’ Marcus gave a little laugh, as if he were recalling his own memory rather than someone else’s. ‘The men would go down the tunnels to blast through the rock wearing tweed suits. No head protection or anything for their ears. The tunnels held up with wooden struts. It was all about speed then, how many feet of rock you could get through in one day. Some days they’d be working double, triple shifts. The lads more asleep than awake,’ he went on.

  Annabelle nodded, trying hard to pay attention to what Marcus was saying as images spun in her brain. ‘It must have been … frightening.’

  ‘Sometimes the rock was as hard as diamond – they’d be lucky to make a few feet in a shift. Other times it was as soft as wet sand and they’d be working through faster than you could shift the stuff, wondering all the time if the tunnel was going to collapse on them. Grandad Slate was working down in the tunnels. The rest of the boys, they didn’t take to him. He had a sense of the mountain, you see. He could tell when something was going to happen and so he’d steer clear of trouble. Make sure he was out the way when a strut gave out or a timer fuse blew early. The other boys on the job thought it meant he was bringing bad luck.’

  Annabelle watched Marcus’s eyes, which had taken on a glazed quality, like the Doctor’s. She could feel the crutches digging into her arms and wanted to shift but was suddenly terrified of making a sound.

  Marcus seemed to stare through her. ‘Men can be superstitious deep underground. They started all kinds of stories about Grandad – how he slept on his own down in the deeper exploratory tunnels, how he could see in the dark. Then one of the men who worked with Grandad took a funny turn. Thought that one of the tunnellers was trying to send thoughts into his head. Next day he brought a shotgun underground. Blew the entrance tunnel shut first with dynamite to seal them in. Then he started killing everyone. The only way to escape was by going deeper. The madman killed everyone he could, then he blew his brains out. Just out there near your room. Grandad was injured in the first blast. A piece of rock hit his head. But he was strong. Him and five others made it down into the lower tunnels. At first they stuck together. They thought the owners would be trying to dig them out. But they were narrow those tunnels. They’d gone down in a rush and found themselves all squashed in like sardines in a tin. Grandad Slate was a thin man though, like the Doctor, and careful how he stepped. At first they were all friends, but then the torches started to go out, and all there was was silence and miles and miles of mountains up above them. Crushing them down.’

  Marcus glanced up as he said this, and for a moment Annabelle could feel all that weight of terrifying rock above them, as if it might crash down on them at any moment.

  He went on: ‘They started to say it was Grandad’s fault. He’d brought them all bad luck, and they wondered how he was even still alive with his head part bashed in. Some of them began to lose their minds then. But not him. He found the weakest ones first. Separated from the group. He used them for food while he felt his way around in all those black spaces. He said they tasted better if he scared them first. Can you imagine?’

  Marcus tutted and gave his strange little laugh. ‘He explored every inch of the tunnels with his hands and using his sense of smell. It was six months before he found his way out. In the end he came up right over there.’ Marcus gestured towards the pool of dark water.

  Annabelle’s heart beat in her chest as though she expected Grandad Slate to come slithering right out of the water there and then.

  ‘And you know, he said that eating those people had been what kept him alive with that hole in his head. And it had made him better. Made him so much stronger. He never needed the light on to see at night after that; he said his hearing was so good he could tell someone’s weight from their footstep. Tell if it was a male or female, how old someone was from their smell. When he went to the hospital to repair the hole in his skull they said it was a miracle he was still alive. He definitely wouldn’t live past another five years. They fixed a piece of metal over the hole and screwed it in place. But Grandad knew better than them at the hospital. It was him who trained the Doctor. Taught him to do surgeries. He used to drain the fluid off Grandad’s head when he took one of his turns. Grandad only died last year, aged one hundred and three.’

  The handles of the crutches were excruciating and her injured leg was throbbing, but she still couldn’t bring herself to move, to break
whatever spell seemed to have settled over Marcus.

  ‘Of course the owners weren’t pleased about him wriggling out with his story of how they’d been trapped and left for dead. That’s why he was given the house up there. He said he’d be the caretaker and he’d never tell the story of what really happened.’ He continued to stare at Annabelle. ‘When Grandad was around he was always careful. One person a year maybe. Someone he picked up in Inverness, or someone walking alone. The kind of person no one would miss. It was just to keep him strong. He needed it, with that hole in his head. It’s been different since Granny Slate and the Doctor have been in charge. The Doctor’s wanted to use more of his training. More of what Grandad taught him.’ Marcus shook his head. ‘Now do you understand? About whether I want to be here or if I’m afraid of the Doctor?’

  For a long time Annabelle didn’t reply. There was no sound in that dark cavern save for the distant trickling of the waterfall. ‘I think I want to go home, Marcus,’ she finally managed to say. ‘I want to go home.’

  Marcus blinked at her as if coming out of a trance. ‘Yes. Well, you’ll be tired after the walk, won’t you?’ He stepped towards Annabelle and dusted himself off. ‘I’ll take you home. The Doctor will be along tomorrow. He’ll want to check on how your leg’s healing.’

  CHAPTER 61

  It was pitch-dark when Monica opened her eyes, still more asleep than awake. The fabric on her cheek felt unfamiliar and for a nightmarish half-second she was in a house that was a lot like Francis MacGregor’s. She was strapped to that bed but somehow overhead was open to the stars. She blinked, frantically tried to move her hand and felt her arm pinned behind her against the sofa, the sweat across her back. She took a deep breath and tried to slow her pulse. You’re in your mum’s living room. You came back from the morgue. You double-checked the doors and windows. Lucy and Mum are both safely in bed. Monica took another deep breath, went to look at the time on her phone, but stopped when she heard the sound.