Finally I went through to the hall and picked up the phone.
‘Who are you calling?’ Carol asked.
‘The police.’
I watched her bottom lip tremble and a silent tear trickled down her cheek. I dropped the phone and put my arms around her.
‘It’s too early to call them.’ Brusquely she pushed me away and called our son’s name, then ran up the stairs still calling.
Losing a child is devastating, and nothing can prepare you for the tumult of emotions you experience. Perhaps the most destructive of these is guilt, and it was guilt that made me go back up
to his room and stare hard at the gaily-painted wall. I should have listened to him when we’d found him cowering in the corner earlier, and not been so quick to attribute his terror to a mundane nightmare.
A man had come and grabbed him, had tried to pull him with him. As preposterous as it sounded, I was starting to believe him. Having failed the first time, the ugly man had discovered Jack alone in our bed and spirited him away from us.
Carol stood in the doorway, a look of total desolation on her face. ‘What are you doing?’ she said.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I really don’t know.’ I replied, then curled my fingers into a fist and smashed it into the face of an elf that was grinning at me from behind a tree.
The sound of the doorbell interrupted any more displays of impotent violence. As one we rushed down the stairs, hope rising like a guttering candle flame caught in a draught.
I yanked open the door. ‘Oh, it’s you, George,’ I said to our neighbour who stood on the doorstep, a worried frown creasing the lines on his forehead even deeper.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Sorry to trouble you…’ He hesitated when he saw our faces. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s Jack,’ Carol said, her voice close to hysteria. ‘He’s missing. You haven’t seen him, have you?’
George shifted from foot to foot, obviously uncomfortable. ‘Sorry, Carol.’
A cold wind was kicking up the newly fallen leaves and sweeping them into drifts along the line of the fence. It also registered that George was still in his pyjamas, albeit covered by a thick woollen dressing gown. ‘You’ll catch your death out there. Come in.’
‘I don’t wish to intrude,’ he said.
‘We could use the company,’ I said. ‘I’ve never felt so bloody useless in my life.’
‘I can imagine,’ George said, closing the door behind him. I could not help glancing down at his feet. Despite being a head taller than me, the feet, enclosed in snow-crusted carpet slippers, were a couple of sizes bigger than my own. ‘He was so looking forward to Halloween,’ George was saying.
‘Come through to the kitchen,’ I said. ‘It’s a good deal warmer in there.’
‘When did the lad go missing?’ George said as he followed me along the passage.
‘About half an hour ago.’
‘What do the police say?’
‘We haven’t rung them yet,’ Carol said. ‘Mark was just going to ring….’ The last part of the sentence ended in a sob and she was crying again. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Sorry...so stupid. Tears won’t bring him back. I want to tear this place apart. I want to find my son, and all I seem to be able to do, with any sort of success, is to cry.’
George settled himself down on one of the kitchen chairs. ‘It’s a reaction, a defence mechanism, is all,’ he said gently. ‘I know that when Mary passed away, I sobbed for weeks, and at the most inopportune moments.’
‘Jack’s not dead!’ Carol said fiercely.
‘George didn’t mean...’
‘No, sorry,’ George said. ‘Carol’s right. It was a stupid, stupid analogy.’ He sighed. ‘I’m getting old. The mouth opens before the brain engages. I’m sorry, Carol. Of course I didn’t mean to suggest that anything so awful has happened to the nipper.’
We sat down at the table and told him everything that had happened since we arrived home from Carol’s parents. We had got to the part where Jack was scared when we heard a cry.
Carol jumped from her seat. ‘That was Jack!’
I grabbed her hand. ‘Shh. Listen!’
It came again, so quiet it was practically inaudible, but it was definitely there - a soft, breathy crying. But where was it coming from? George was also on his feet now. He walked across to the door at the end of the kitchen that led to the cellar. The cellar! Neither of us had even thought to check down there. I had explored the place briefly just after we moved it, but it was nothing but a dank and gloomy room, a haven for spiders and the detritus left by former occupants. Clearing it out was a job I had definitely put on the back burner. Instead I had locked the door and put the key on a hook by the door. Now the key had gone.
‘Do you use the cellar?’ George said, twisting the door handle.
‘No,’ I said, and tried the handle myself. The door was still locked.
Carol was looking at me imploringly. ‘I can still hear him.’
I put my weight against the door and it gave slightly. Not locked, just stuck in its frame. I took a step back and kicked it with the sole of my foot. With a creak of protesting hinges the door swung slowly inwards. A musty smell wafted up from below, but there was now silence. The crying had stopped and the stillness was almost palpable. I reached in and felt for the light switch, shuddering as something with many legs scuttled over my fingers, but I flipped the switch and the short wooden staircase was bathed in a sickly light.
I still couldn’t believe that Jack was down here; there was no way he could have reached the key. But the key was certainly no longer hanging from its hook, and I was positive I had locked the door firmly the last time I had been down there. Then I saw the large wet footprints on the stairs, prints that matched those in the snow earlier.
I called into the gloom. ‘Jack? Jack, are you down there?’
‘Go down,’ Carol urged.
I took a few tentative steps down the staircase and called again. Frustrated by my reluctance to go all the way down Carol barged past me, calling Jack’s name. I felt George’s hand on my shoulder, encouraging me. I couldn’t explain my reluctance to go down into that dusty, spider- ridden room, not even to myself, but still something was holding me back. I heard the sound of something heavy being dragged across the floor. Screwing up my courage I went to join Carol.
There wasn’t much light. The single bulb that hung from an old twisted length of brown flex was covered in dust and festooned with webs. Carol was over by the far side, dragging an old fifties’ style wardrobe away from the wall. Apart from the squeal of old wood sliding over the concrete floor there were other sounds. A kind of high pitched keening noise, possibly children’s voices, but muffled and distorted. There were a few cardboard boxes in one corner which I knew from my last exploration contained nothing but rolls of old wall paper and tins of paint left over from past redecorations. In the centre of the room was a small table containing an ancient typewriter with missing keys. Spider webs hung from the ceiling, some occupied, others vacated and coated with grey dust, but there was nowhere in the grimy concrete-floored box of a room for a small boy to hide.
‘Why are you moving that?’ I said when Carol finally pulled the wardrobe out into the room.
Carol said nothing, but I could tell she would explore every possibility, no matter how slight. The wardrobe doors were hanging open and there was nothing inside except for a few old coat hangers and a black plastic rubbish bag containing a motley collection of moth-eaten old clothes. She was sweating from her exertions, and she wiped her brow with her hand, leaving dusty streaks across her forehead. She was looking about her, a look of confusion on her face.
‘He’s not down here, Carol,’ I said. ‘There’s nowhere he could be.’
‘But I heard him,’ she said insistently.
‘We all heard something,’ I said softly.
‘Mark,’ she said. ‘Look at this.’ She stood to let me take her place.
I shone the torch over
the wall. A wooden door led from the cellar to the back garden. We always kept it locked, but now it was unbolted and moving slightly in the wind from outside. This was what the intruder had been doing in the cottage. There were two small handprints on the dusty surface. I ran my finger over them lightly.
Carol pulled away from me. ‘He’s in the back garden isn’t he?’ she said tightly.
I looked to George for support, but he wasn’t there.
Carol was already halfway up the stairs when I realised what she was doing. I followed her and as I reached the hallway I saw her wrench open the back door and run round to the side of the house, where the cellar wall intruded into the garden.
The garden was torn by a spiralling wind that whipped the October leaves into a solid mass that blinded and hindered us. I caught up with Carol as she was beating at the wall with her fists. It was impossible to see everything clearly but we could both see that the wooden door to the cellar was open. That was when we heard the shouting.
Through the spinning leaf flurries and the curling wind we could just about make out the figures.
‘It’s Jack.’ Carol shouted, and it was. Small, crouched over as though in fear, he was holding the carved pumpkin head from our house. The candle inside was stuttering and flickering but somehow stayed alight. Surrounding him were about a dozen other small children, all dressed in nightclothes, and all carrying pumpkins, although many were old and shrivelled, the black eyes and grinning mouths devoid of any light. They were all following the figure of a man.
He too was dressed in pyjamas, with a dressing gown over them, and he was taller than I think he should have been. It was George and he was leading the children away from the house and into the wood. It might have been the darkness and the scuttling leaves, but there seemed to be hundreds of tiny shapes amongst the trees, eyes glowing brightly like the pumpkin head eyes.
Carol and I ran after Jack but the wind was like a wall that held us back, blasting leaves into our faces, sending our feet into deep piles of them. By the time we reached the trees they were forlorn and empty. The leaves beneath them were fresh and untouched. They were piled high, in places up to our waists; there were too many for just one season. We never saw our son again.
DANCERS
John Crowe looked around his cell for the last time. The place that had been his home for the past four years looked squalid and incredibly tawdry now as the prospect of freedom loomed.
Three bunks, three lives; three men sharing a space no more than twelve feet square. Dougal’s letters from home that he kept pinned to the wall above his bed were yellowing, and with no new ones to replace them, they shouted out the man’s desperate loneliness. McGovern’s Freddie Mercury shrine was looking tired and dog-eared, a testament to the fact the McGovern had long ago given up on life. Crowe’s own bunk, his sleeping area, was curiously anonymous. He had deliberately made it so. He didn’t want to give the screws or the other inmates the slightest clue about what went on inside his mind.
He had spent the four years of his sentence isolated inside his own head and not once, not even for the briefest second, even when things had been so bleak he had contemplated suicide, did he feel the urge to open up and bare himself to somebody else. It was safer that way.
At eleven thirty he would gather up his parcel of personal effects, say goodbye to the governor, get himself signed out by the releasing officer and then make the short walk across the courtyard to the main gates. In the years he had been here he had seen them open many times, but this time it would be special because they were opening for him.
He expected Diana, his daughter, to be there to meet him, and hoped she hadn’t brought that idiot of a husband with her. But at least she appeared to have a happy marriage, which was more than he could say for himself. Within two months of him going down Carol, his wife, shacked up with Tony Austin, the solicitor who had handled his case, and two years later she asked for a divorce. He granted her request with some relief as the marriage had never been sound, but now he was wondering how he was going to face up to life outside completely on his own.
That would be an entirely new experience for him. Carol and he had been childhood sweethearts and were married a few days shy of his eighteenth birthday; Carol three months pregnant with Diana, and two sets of parents breathing fire and making the wedding an obligation rather that a joyous occasion.
He shook his head to shoo the memory away. This was his new beginning, his fresh start, and he didn’t want sour memories spoiling it. He closed the door to the cell for the last time and turned to the warder who stood at his shoulder. ‘Right,’ he said to the screw. ‘Time to go, I think.’
The prison gate shut with a whisper behind him and he took his first lungful of free air in four years. Across the street Diana was getting out of the car. ‘Dad!’ she called.
He was relieved to see there was nobody else in the car. He met her halfway across the street and they embraced, stopping the trickle of traffic and eliciting several angry horn blasts, but they were oblivious to the noise.
‘You’ve had your hair cut since I last saw you.’
She ran her hand through her auburn crop self-consciously.
‘It suits you short.’
She looked at him askance. She knew he hated short hair on women.
‘No, really, I mean it. It looks good. Brings out your eyes.’
‘That’s enough. Come on,’ Diana said. ‘Let’s get you home.’
He settled himself in the passenger seat of her Volvo. ‘Nice car,’ he said. ‘What happened to the Peugeot?’
‘Hugo sold it. Said it wasn’t a safe family car.’
How could she have married a man with a name like Hugo? And if that wasn’t enough they’d christened their first born, Sebastian. ‘Very sensible,’ Crowe said with heavy sarcasm.
‘Dad, don’t start. Hugo and Seb are looking forward to seeing you. Don’t spoil it.’
‘Point taken. Look, Di, could you take me straight to the workshop? You’ve brought the keys, haven’t you?’
Diana started the engine and stared straight ahead.
‘You did bring them?’
‘I thought we’d go home first. There’s...’ She hesitated.
‘There’s what? Go on – spit it out.’
‘Well I invited a few people over, just to welcome you home.’
He sagged into his seat. ‘Oh God, Diana, why? A coming out party’s just about the last thing I need.’
‘It’s not a party,’ Diana said indignantly. ‘It’s just a few friends.’
He slammed his hand on the dashboard so hard it made her jump and her foot slipped from the clutch. The car lurched and stalled. ‘Dad! For God’s sake grow up. It’s not as if you’ve got to make a speech or anything. It’s just the people who’ve missed you since you went inside. Dave and Julie, Phil and Helen. Derek and Tom from the pub.’
‘If they’d missed me that much, they would have taken the trouble to come and visit me, wouldn't they? And did they? Did they hell!’
Diana shook her head. ‘I didn’t realise you’d grown so bitter.’
‘Will she be there?
‘Mum? Do I look stupid? Of course she won’t be there.’
He was staring back at the prison, taking one last long look at the place. As he looked the wall rippled as a shock wave passed through it, and then the bricks began to bulge outwards as if made of rubber. The brickwork stretched, ballooning, splitting, and a black shape pushed out from inside the wall, forming on the pavement outside the prison into an uneven cloud of shadow. It took the human form of a man, but was ill defined around the edges, as if incomplete.
Crowe gasped and spun round in his seat. ‘Drive!’ he said to his daughter.
Diana turned to him, confused by the panic in his voice. She followed his gaze but saw nothing but the prison wall, solid, iron-grey brickwork, intimidating and unbreachable.
Her father sat in the passenger seat, his face bleached white, a thin film of pe
rspiration covering his skin, a look of terror in his eyes. ‘Dad!’
He rounded on her ‘I said, drive!’ He reached across her and twisted the key in the ignition.
She batted his hand away. ‘Calm down! I can do it.’
The car started and she pulled away from the kerb, glancing at her father who had turned again in his seat and was staring back at the prison.
They reached the outskirts of town. For the past thirty miles they had driven in virtual silence. Diana tried hard to make conversation, but her father was reticent, and close-mouthed, confining his answers to monosyllables.
‘I’m not sure I can take much more of this,’ she said, crunching the gears into second as she pulled away from traffic lights.
‘Much more of what?’ Crowe said, although he knew exactly what she was talking about. Since leaving the prison he had closed in on himself again. It was a trick he developed first when he was on remand awaiting his trial. He found it a calming exercise, and just at that moment he badly needed calming.
He knew he had seen the black shape emerging from the grey brick wall of the prison. Things couldn’t pass through solid matter, and the walls were solid matter, impenetrable. Equally, logically, he couldn’t have seen the shadows because they only existed inside the prison walls. And he really thought, hoped, he had seen the last of them.
‘I can’t take much more of this silence,’ Diana said. ‘Look, I’m sorry I invited them. We’ll get home and I’ll get rid of them.’
Crowe sighed, forcing the darkness from his mind. ‘I’m sorry, Di. I’m behaving atrociously.’ He reached across and squeezed her hand. ‘I just need some time to adjust, that’s all. I’ve been surrounded by people, twenty-four hours a day for the past four years. The last thing I need is to get out of that place and be surrounded by more. Understand?’
Falling Into Heaven Page 18