by Alex North
“What are we being?” she said.
Sixty-five
“I’m sorry. I’m going now.”
I wasn’t even sure who I was apologizing to. Saunders, I supposed, for arriving on his doorstep and accusing him, frightening him, without any real evidence. But the apology also went deeper than that. It was to Jake. To Rebecca. To myself, even. In some way or other, I’d let all of us down.
I looked back at Karen. She was still holding the phone to her ear, but she shook her head at me again.
“Look,” Saunders said carefully. “It’s okay. Like I said, I know you’re upset. And I can’t imagine what you must be going through right now. But…”
He trailed off.
“I know,” I said.
“I’m happy to talk to the police. And I hope you find him. Your son. I hope this is all some kind of mistake.”
“Thank you.”
I nodded, and I was about to head back to the car when I heard a noise coming from somewhere in the house behind me. I stopped. Then turned back to Saunders. It was a distant hammering sound, and someone was shouting, but so indistinct that it was barely audible.
Saunders had heard it too. The expression on his face had changed while my back had been turned, and he no longer looked quite so ill or soft or harmless. It was as though the humanity had only ever been a disguise, and now it had fallen away and I was facing something entirely alien.
He closed the door quickly.
“Jake!”
I got up the step just in time to wedge my leg in. The door slammed agonizingly on the sides of my knee, but I ignored the pain and pushed against it, bracing one hand inside the jamb, and then my back against the wood, heaving as hard as I could. Saunders was grunting on the other side, pressing back against me. But I was bigger than him, and the sudden burst of adrenaline was adding to my weight. Jake was somewhere inside this house, and if I didn’t reach him, then Saunders was going to kill him. He couldn’t escape from this. He wouldn’t try. But if he managed to keep me out, he could still hurt my son.
“Jake!”
Suddenly the resistance was gone.
Saunders must have stepped away. The door shot open, and I barreled into the living room, half barging into him, half falling. He hit me half-heartedly in the side as I collided with him, and then he tumbled backward and we landed hard, me on top of him, his head tilted to one side against the floorboards, my right forearm across his jaw. My left hand was pinning his right arm to the floor at the elbow. His body shook upward, trying to fight me off, but I was heavier than him and I was suddenly sure that I could hold him.
But then he lurched up against me again and I felt his hand at my side, where he’d hit me so ineffectively, and I registered the pain there. Not overwhelming in itself, but sickening and awful. Deep, internal, wrong. I glanced down and saw the ball of his fist still pressed against me, and then the blood that was beginning to soak into the white robe he was wearing.
The knife he was holding was somewhere inside me, and when he flopped up against me, screaming in rage, my whole world shrieked with him.
Jake!
I wasn’t sure if I shouted it or simply thought it. Saunders was baring his teeth inches from my face, spitting and trying to bite me. I pressed down on him, my vision beginning to star at the edges. And then, when he lurched up again, the blade moved with him, and those stars exploded. If I let him up now, he would kill me and then kill Jake, so I pressed down harder on him, and the knife moved again, and that explosion of stars blurred into white light that gradually filled my vision. But I couldn’t let him up. I would hold him down as he killed me.
Jake.
The hammering and shouting was still coming from somewhere above me. I could make out the words now. My son was up there, and he was calling for me.
Jake.
The stars disappeared as the light overwhelmed me.
I’m sorry.
Sixty-six
Adrenaline had a way of waking you up.
Francis Carter, Amanda thought.
Or David Parker, or whatever he’s calling himself.
Back at the department, she’d worked her way through the school’s employees, looking for a male in his late twenties. There were four men working there, including the groundskeeper, and only one of them was an approximate age match. George Saunders was twenty-four years old, while Francis Carter would be twenty-seven by now, but when it came to buying a fake identity, the age only needed to be approximate.
Saunders had been spoken to after Neil Spencer went missing, and the interview hadn’t sounded any alarm bells. She had read the transcript. Saunders had been erudite and convincing. He had no alibi for the exact period of the abduction, but that wasn’t so surprising. No record. No warning signs at all. Nothing to pursue.
Except that a new search now revealed that the real George Saunders had died three years earlier.
Reality felt heightened as Amanda drove into the street. She parked at the top, outside a property that appeared to be derelict, a little way back from the target house, and then a van pulled in behind her, with two more approaching from the opposite direction and coming to a stop a short distance down the hill. All of them kept away from the eyeline of the house, so that if Saunders were to look out of his window right now, he would see nothing. That was important. The last thing they needed was for him to barricade himself in and for them to end up dealing with a hostage situation.
Not that it would come to that, she thought. If he was cornered, Saunders would simply kill Jake Kennedy.
Her phone had been buzzing the whole way. She took it out now. Four missed calls. The first three were all from an unknown number. The fourth was from the hospital. Which meant there was news about Pete.
Something fell away inside her. She remembered how determined she had been last night—that she would not lose Pete, that she would find Jake Kennedy. How stupid to think like that. But she put those feelings away for now, gathering herself together, because there was only one of those things she could do something about right now.
I’m not losing another child on my watch.
She got out of the car.
The street was silent. It felt almost wholly deserted here, an area of the city that was slowly dying in its sleep. She heard the side of the van behind her rumbling open, and then the scuff of shoes on the driveway. Down the hill, officers were congregating. The plan had been that she would go first, ostensibly alone, and try to get Francis to open the door and allow her inside the property. At that point, there would be a flurry of activity, and he would be taken down in seconds.
But then Amanda noticed a car parked outside, its driver’s door open. And as she walked down the street, she realized the door to George Saunders’s house was ajar as well, and she began running.
“Everybody move.”
Through the front garden, up the path, and then through the open door into what turned out to be a living room. There was a mess of bodies on the floor, blood everywhere, but it wasn’t immediately obvious who was hurt and who wasn’t.
“Help me, please.”
That was Karen Shaw. Amanda moved over. Shaw was kneeling on one of Francis Carter’s arms, trying to hold it still. Between them, Tom Kennedy was pressing onto Francis Carter. Carter himself was pinned in place, eyes shut tight, concentrating on moving even though the weight of the two of them together was enough to keep him in place.
From somewhere above them, Amanda could hear a hammering noise and shouting.
Daddy! Daddy!
Officers swarmed in past her, a dozen bodies overtaking the scene.
“Don’t move him,” Karen shouted. “He’s been stabbed.”
Amanda could see the spread of blood soaking into Carter’s bathrobe. Tom Kennedy was completely still. She couldn’t tell if he was alive or not—if she had lost him today as well …
Daddy! Daddy!
That, at least, she could still do something about.
She ran
to the stairs.
Part Six
Sixty-seven
Pete remembered hearing that your life flashed before your eyes when you died.
It was true, he realized now, but it also happened while you were alive. How fast things went, he thought. As a boy, he had marveled at the life spans of butterflies and mayflies, some of them alive for only days or even hours, and it had seemed unimaginable. But he understood now that it was true for everything—that it was only a matter of perspective. The years accumulated quicker and quicker, like friends linking arms in an ever-expanding circle, reeling faster and faster as midnight approached. And then, suddenly, it was done.
Unfurling backward.
Flashing before your eyes, as it did for him now.
He looked down at a child, sleeping peacefully in a room barely lit by the soft light from the hall. The little boy’s hair was swept back behind his ear, with one hand clutching the other in front of his face, completely still aside from the gentle rise and fall of the covers. Everything was calm. A child, warm and loved, was sleeping safely and without fear. An old book, its pages splayed open, lay on the floor by the bed.
Your daddy liked these books when he was younger.
And then here was a quiet country lane. It was summertime and the whole world was in bloom. He looked around, blinking. The hedges on either side of the road were lustrous and thick with life, while the trees reached together overhead, their leaves forming a canopy that colored the world in shades of lime and lemon. Butterflies flickered across the fields. How beautiful it was here. He had been too focused to notice that before—too busy looking without looking. He saw it so clearly now that he wondered how he could have been so distracted as to miss it then.
Here—a flash—was a scene so abhorrent that his mind refused to countenance it. He heard the nasal buzz of the flies that were darting mindlessly through the wine-stained air, and he saw an angry sun staring down at the children on the floor that were not children anymore, and then somehow, mercifully, time reversed more quickly. He stepped backward. A door swung shut. A padlock clicked.
Nobody should have to see hell even once.
There was no need to look inside it ever again.
Here was a beach. The sand beneath the backs of his legs was as soft and fine as silk, hot from the bright white sun that seemed to fill the sky above. In front of him, the sea was a froth of silver feathers. A woman was sitting so close to him that he could feel the tiny hairs on her bare upper arm tingling against his own skin. With her other hand she was holding out a camera, pointing it at them both. He did his best to smile, squinting against the light. He was so happy right then—he hadn’t realized it at the time, but he was. He loved her so much, but for some reason he had never known how to articulate that. He did now; it was so simple in hindsight. When the photograph was taken, he turned his head to look at the woman, and he gave himself permission to feel the words as well as speak them.
I love you.
She smiled at him.
Here was a house. It was squat and ugly and throbbing with hatred, much like the man he knew resided within, and while he didn’t want to go inside, he had no choice. He was small—a child again now—and this was his home. The front door rattled and the carpet breathed out dust beneath his feet. The air was thick and gray with resentment. In the living room, a bitter old man sat in an armchair by an open fire, his paunch pushing out so far against the dirty sweater that it rested on his thighs. There was a sneer on the man’s face. There was always that, whenever there was anything at all.
What a disappointment Pete was. It was clear to him how useless he was, how nothing he did was ever good enough.
But it wasn’t true.
You don’t know me, he thought.
You never did.
When he was a child, his father had been a language he was unable to speak, but he was fluent now. The man wanted him to be someone else, and that had been confusing. But he could read the whole book of his father now and he knew that none of it had ever been about him. His own book was separate, and always had been. He had only ever needed to be himself, and it had just taken time—too much time—to understand that.
Here was a child’s bedroom, windowless and small, only twice the width of the single bed.
He lay down, breathing in deeply the suddenly familiar smell of the sheets and pillow. The comfort blanket from his cot was tucked between the mattress and the wood. Instinctively, he reached out for it, curling a corner of the soft cloth in his hand, bringing it to his face, closing his eyes, and breathing in.
This was the end, he realized. The tangle of his life had been unpicked and set out before him, and he saw and understood it clearly now, all of it so obvious in hindsight.
He wished he could have it again.
Here was a door opening. An angle of light from the shabby hallway fell over Pete, and then a different man walked tentatively into the bedroom, moving slowly and carefully, limping slightly, as though he had been hurt and his body was tender in some way. The man approached the bed and, with difficulty, knelt down beside it.
After watching Pete sleeping for a time, unsure what he was going to do, the man finally came to a decision. He leaned across and embraced him as best he could.
And even though Pete was all but lost in deeper dreams by then, he sensed the embrace, or at least imagined he did, and for a moment he felt understood and forgiven. As though a cycle had been completed, or something found.
As though a missing piece of him had finally been returned.
Sixty-eight
“Are you all right, Daddy?”
“What?”
I shook my head. I was sitting by Jake’s bed, holding Power of Three open at the last page, staring into space. We had just finished the book, and then I had gotten distracted. Lost in thought.
“I’m fine,” I said.
From Jake’s expression, it was clear that he didn’t believe me—and he was right, of course: I was a long way from being fine. But I didn’t want to tell him about seeing my father for the last time at the hospital that day. In time, perhaps I would, but there was still so much he didn’t know, and I wasn’t sure I had the words yet to explain any of it, or to make him understand.
Nothing ever changed on that level.
“Just this book.” I closed it and ran my hand thoughtfully over the cover. “I haven’t read it since I was a kid, and I guess it brought back memories. Made me feel like I was your age again a bit.”
“I don’t believe you were ever my age.”
I laughed. “Hard to believe, isn’t it? Cuddle?”
Jake pulled the sheet away, then clambered out. I put the book down as he perched on my knee.
“Carefully.”
“Sorry, Daddy.”
“It’s okay. Just reminding you.”
It had been nearly two weeks since my injuries at the hands of George Saunders, a man I now knew had once been called Francis Carter. I still wasn’t sure how close I’d come to dying that day. I couldn’t even remember most of it. A lot of what happened that morning was a blur, as though the panic I had been experiencing had smeared it all away and stopped me from retaining it. The first day in the hospital was much the same; my life only swam back into focus slowly. I was left now with bandages across one side of my body, an inability to put my weight down properly on that foot, and a handful of impressions that were little more than memories of a dream. Jake shouting for me; the desperation I had felt; the need to reach him.
The fact that I had been ready to die for him.
He hugged me now, very gently. Even so, I had to do my best not to wince. I was grateful that he didn’t need me to carry him up and down the stairs in this house. After what had happened, I’d been worried he might be more scared than ever, and that the behavior might return, but the truth was that he’d dealt with the horrors of that day far better than I’d imagined. Perhaps better than I had.
I hugged him back as best I could. It wa
s all I could ever do. And then, after he’d clambered back in, I stood in the doorway, watching him for a moment. He looked so peaceful in bed, warm and safe, with the Packet of Special Things resting on the floor beside him. I hadn’t told him that I had looked inside it, or what I had found there, or the truth about the little girl. That was something else that—for the moment at least—I didn’t have the words for.
“Good night, mate. I love you.”
He yawned.
“Love you too, Daddy.”
The stairs were hard for me right now, so after I turned off the light I went into my own room for a while, waiting for him to go to sleep. I sat on the bed and opened my laptop, turning my attention to the most recent file and reading what was there.
Rebecca.
I know exactly what you’d think about that, because you were always so much more practical than me. You’d want me to get on with my life. You’d want me to be happy.
And so on. It took me a moment to understand what I’d written, because I hadn’t touched the document since that final night in the safe house, which seemed like a lifetime ago now. It was about Karen—how I felt guilty for having feelings for her. That also seemed very distant. She had come to see me in the hospital. She’d taken Jake to school for me and helped to look after him as I gradually recuperated. There was a growing closeness between us. What happened had brought us together, but it had also knocked us off a more predictable track, and that kiss hadn’t happened yet. But I could still feel it there waiting.
You’d want me to be happy.
Yes.
I deleted everything apart from Rebecca’s name.
My intention before had been to write about my life with Rebecca, the grief I felt over her death, and the way the loss of her had affected me. I still wanted to do that, because it felt like she would be an important part of whatever I did write. She didn’t end when her life did because, even without the existence of ghosts, that’s simply not the way things work. But I realized now that there was so much more, and that I wanted to write about all of it. The truth about everything that had happened. Mister Night. The boy in the floor. The butterflies. The little girl with the strange dress.