by Chris Ward
Nothing lives in Matt’s Toyland; only the endlessly patrolling, wraith-like form of his mute little sister. And somehow, in her silent innocence she becomes something sinister. A monster.
He gets nightmares now. Although he doesn’t like to think about them, he has little choice for they won’t disappear from his mind like (––––––––––) will. They sit there and linger on his shoulder as he struggles with his stupid English assignments.
He closes his workbook. On the inside cover, the last thing he sees is a mass of scribbled pen marks in a rough circle, obscuring what had been written beneath. I fancy Carrie Becker; wiped out when she started to hang with Mark Delland, the cool kid whose parents worked in Exeter and who came to school wearing a designer label school uniform. With his weird family and his spacker sister (at least that was how the nastier school kids referred to Bethany behind his back, and occasionally to his face) Matt couldn’t compete with that.
Might as well just wipe out that dream. Like all the others.
He feels suddenly tired. He still has homework to do, and it’s only four o’clock, but Dad won’t have tea ready until at least seven (Mother never cooks it anymore, Mother never (––––––––––)
Might as well have a nap.
He lies down, the book tossed to the floor below his bed. The window from his room looks out of the front of the house, and he can see the top of the church tower and beyond it the edge of Dartmoor, a huge mound of granite crags and peaty earth that rises over the village like a giant green wave. The geography of Tamerton amazes him at times, the way the village is set into such a hollow that you can stand at the edge of the moors and look across to the woods rising up the side of the valley on the other side, and not even realise the village is there. Hidden out of sight like a lost treasure (or something forgotten, unwanted, his mind spits back at him).
Except for the church tower that is. Rising up out of the trees like the last standing spire of a buried city, it is the only sign that the village is there. Matt often wonders whether if the church were to fall, would the tide of the moors just continue on its jolly way and swallow up the whole village for good? Just absorb it as food like the green blobs in Fifties B–Movies? He thinks perhaps it might. Nothing worth saving, not even Carrie Becker, now she’s with that slimy posh toff Delland.
He gets up, pulls the curtains closed on the trees, the church tower and the distant rise of the moors, and goes back to his bed. He lies down, facing away from the door, staring at the red theatre curtain pulled across the world until his eyes drop and he sleeps.
#
He wakes to the sound of what at first he thinks is a wind rushing past his ears, as though he has fallen from a plane without a parachute. The room smells of something dead, something rotten, a smell he associates with that of a fox’s crushed corpse he walked past on the way to school the other week. Kicked to the side of the road to rot in peace, it had been dead some length of time judging by the discoloured meat of the ripped open torso, and the hordes of maggots that writhed inside the animal’s body cavity like worker ants. Normally he caught the bus, but that day he had been late. The smell had made his stomach beat at the root of his throat, and he had crossed the road to get away but he had needed to run almost fifty yards before he left it completely behind him.
The smell of death and sickness. And something else, something physical. Something . . . touching him.
Hands. Hands on his forehead. He can feel one of them running across his temple, fingers crinkled and dry like old cloth. The other is somewhere near his shoulder, rubbing over his clothes, but the fingers are reaching for his neck, for the soft skin there.
And he knows where the smell comes from.
A terror grips him. A terror that far exceeds that of watching the Daleks from behind the sofa, of going to bed thinking Freddy Krueger would be in his dreams. The terror far exceeds walking past the graveyard at night, in the fog, and even eclipses that fear of his sister that is growing with each passing day.
And he hears the wind revert to a whisper; knows the wind is gone, was never there. He listens, tries to pick the words out of the thundering of his heart and the juddering breathing that betrays his attempts to pretend he still sleeps.
‘My sweet boy . . . oh, my sweet boy . . . how so very much I love you, more than life, more than words, more than Heaven . . .’
She’s got out. He has to open his eyes. Has to.
Somewhere beyond the inconceivable terror that has him in its grip and is squeezing, squeezing, is the sound of running feet, the sound of a man’s desperate shouts, a name he recognises as his own and a voice he should recognise, but can’t . . . can’t . . . he can’t think past this, can’t think past this, can’t envisage anything beyond the absolute terror he feels . . . but against his will and his reasoning, slowly his eyes open –
‘I love you Matty . . . I love you more than life, more than this world, more than anything . . . more than life . . .’
Her face leans over him and at first he feels like a brick has struck him in the face, smashing through all the glass walls and the mental blocks and the ignorance and the denial – a hammer that has crashed through his world and his belief to show him the vile, hideous visage of the wretch that once he had called Mother, as she – it it IT – leans over him, breathing dirty, putrid breath into his face while her ugly, misshapen mouth forms words of love around a black tongue and green, rotting teeth, and her pale lusterless eyes cry yellow tears of pus down on to his face. He screams his sadness and his revile, but his words seem sucked from the air as though swallowed by this . . . this creature like raindrops falling into a lake, and he struggles to escape her grip but finds his body dead with pins and needles. He coughs, and spots of blood fleck the filthy gown that she wears.
Somewhere below him, behind him, all around him he hears the sounds of shouting, of someone hollering his name in a choking, tearful voice. Matt tries to shout back but she is on top of him and her weight suffocates him despite the frailty he can sense in her limbs. Her fingers continue to stroke his face, and he feels his eyes grow heavy until eventually they drop closed as though she is coaxing the life out of him, taking part of him into her, absorbing his life like a sponge absorbing a stain. He cries hot tears, for himself, for her, for them both.
‘Oh, my beautiful boy . . .’
He hears a crack like thunder, and tries to roll his head to look as movement comes in the corner of his eye in an explosion of grey and black. Only when the huge, looming figure of his father appears from nowhere does Matt start to respond, but by now he is too weak to do anything except loll his head back on the bed, his eyes wanting to roll, his consciousness wanting to flee. His first and only thought is that he is the intended victim of a murder as he sees the heavy lug hammer in his father’s hands.
Matt wants to cry, wants to shed fat, hot tears as he looks up at his father, but cannot; his own eyes are too weak, too drained to comprehend the effort, and instead he just stares up blearily like a street drunk at a police officer. His father’s face overflows with love, but also with the terrible, bitter sadness Matt sees on TV in the eyes of refugees, burns victims, the families of murdered children – Why me? What have I done to deserve this? Is there no justice in the world? – and for a second he sees the terribly unfair indecision in his father’s eyes as he looks first at his son and then at the pitiful, wasted creature that had once been his perfect, angelic wife.
Then his father’s face cracks like a TV screen into shards of misery and the lug hammer swings.
Reflex shuts Matt’s eyes so he only hears the sound of the blow landing, but it is something he will never, ever forget. For one thing, nothing strikes him. He saw, and he recognised both the look in his father’s eyes, caught in Catch 22 with an endless, impossible choice to make but no time to make it, and the sudden miserable assurance that whichever answer he chose would be wrong.
Matt knows it could have easily been him.
He sees nothing, but the sound will haunt him until the day he dies. Like the hollow sound of a coconut being split by something big, something heavy, followed by a winded groan, and then the weight on top of him shifts as the body slides to the floor, lands with another thud, lies still.
Matt hears a cry, a horrible shrieking sound and he cannot open his eyes; he holds them shut until he thinks his pupils might burst inside his head, filling his vision with a hot, oily substance, as he hears first one, then another blow land before the hammer clatters away to the corner of the room.
‘Do not open your eyes!’ a voice roars, and Matt screams but obeys, because he can hear the violence of the toiling storm inside his father’s head, knows his father has slipped over the edge, will leave this room a broken man and will never recover. A wound has opened in his mind, one that can never be treated or will ever heal.
Behind his father’s voice Matt can hear the choked sobs, the sound of his father’s misery as he lifts the corpse of the woman he loved and still loves despite her ravaged mind and body, and carries her out of the room.
For Matt, the conflict resolves itself differently. He does not know what his father has done; he does not know his father has saved his life, saved that part of his soul the woman had not had time to take from him, although his father worries that he may have got there too late, hesitated too long, and that his son, also, may be scarred.
He is right: Matthew will be scarred. Matt knows, deep down, beyond (––––––––––) that his mother was more than sick, that she wasn’t suffering from cancer or leukemia or spina bifida, but from something that ran far deeper than he can ever understand. Something that has left her just a shell of the beautiful, elegant woman he remembers, turned her into something different, something dark, something bad. But this knowledge is deep; this knowledge is far below the deepest ocean floor of his mind. All Matt can understand is what the facts tell him, the facts as he sees them.
That his father has just murdered his mother.
All Matt can remember are her words, love you, love you, love you more than Heaven . . . nothing else matters. The rest is irrelevant.
His eyes are still closed when his father comes back in. Matt hears his name and then his father takes him in a hug, whispering over and over, ‘I love you Matthew, thank the world you’re safe . . .’
It doesn’t matter. His father’s tears do not matter. His father’s loving words do not matter . Nothing matters except what Matt sees when he opens his eyes.
Over his father’s shoulder, Matthew can see the lug hammer where it lies on the floor. One corner of it has what looks like a shadow, a shadow that has leaked on to the floor and spread itself out in a small corona around the hammer’s head. It seems to glimmer under the bedroom light.
Matt wouldn’t mind if it were shadow, but it is not. It is blood from where the hammer smashed open his mother’s skull.
A door closes in Matthew’s mind, locked tight even as he sways in his father’s arms. A door that leads to forgiveness.
Part Three
Angels
1
Rachel killed the engine. The lights stayed on, illuminating the road ahead for about thirty yards before the wall of fog rose to block her way. She waited, listening to the rapid thudding of her heart, the only sound besides the low, muffled howling of the wind outside and a steady drumming that she took a moment to place as the sound of her shaking fingers tapping on the hard plastic of the steering wheel. There was no sign of the woman.
Rachel felt too shaken to cry, too frightened even to scream.
She’s lying out there, she thought. Dead.
The thought rocked back and forth through her head like marbles bouncing off one another. I’ve killed someone. Someone is dead now because of me.
Then a face appeared at the nearside window, almost touching the glass.
Rachel screamed.
At first it looked skeletal, demonic, like Death come to take the dead woman’s soul. Rachel tried to reach for the lock button, to keep the face outside, but as her fingers darted up the door swung away from her, opened from the outside. Rachel screamed again, but as her eyes took in the woman standing on the road outside, she realised the steamed up windows and her shock had obscured her view. This was no demon. Just a woman, that was all.
And from her expression, a very angry one.
‘You stupid fucking bitch, what were you trying to do, kill me?’
Rachel shook her head, speechless. At least the woman didn’t seem hurt. Rachel didn’t know whether to be thankful or not.
‘I was just trying to cross the fucking road, you crazy –’
Rachel finally managed to pluck some words out of the air. ‘Hey, I’m . . . I’m sorry, but give me a break, won’t you? You came out of nowhere.’
The woman glared at her. ‘Well of course I did! Can’t you see all this fucking fog?’
Rachel shook her head in exasperation. Words floated into her mouth then vanished before she could catch them. ‘I . . . I . . .’
The woman leaned against the car’s doorframe. ‘Well you’re lucky you hit that rock instead of me! You could have killed me, you know. Would you like murder on your conscience? Would you?’
Rachel felt like crying. She said nothing, just sat in silence while the woman berated her. She went on and on until she seemed to run out of things to say, at which point she turned her nose up at Rachel and stepped away from the car.
‘Well, I guess I ought to try and make something of my evening, despite your best attempts at ruining it. I’ll just have to hope there are no more crazy drivers out there like you or I’m in for a long night, aren’t I?’ She planted her hands on her hips and huffed. ‘Goodbye.’
Rachel stared as the woman turned and stalked off. She felt tired and upset but equally as confused, unable to bring into reality what had just happened. Where was she? Was the car damaged? Was she hurt? And how far was she from Tamerton and Matthew?
And who on earth was that woman?
Despite the woman’s anger, her face had been beautiful, almost abnormally so, as though she had stepped out of a television studio’s makeup department right on to the moor. Rachel had felt a sense of something wonderful, something magical about her, but couldn’t place exactly what. Perhaps she would never know, perhaps it was beyond her to understand.
Perhaps it had never happened. The long journey had left her tired, seeing things.
She twisted the key in the ignition, waited for the engine to turn over, but instead the car just wheezed, refusing to start. She tried a couple more times, but the engine just groaned and strained, coughing and spluttering like a smoker on a sports field. Whatever she’d hit, it had left her stranded.
The woman had left the door open, letting in a cool, moist breeze. Rachel swung her legs out on to the ground and made to get out of the car, resigned to a long walk. But as her weight shifted from the seat on to her legs, her left ankle buckled, twisting underneath her. She cried out in pain and slumped forward on to the road.
She gritted her teeth, hands reaching for her ankle as pain bloomed across the bridge of her foot and up her calf. She must have sprained it in the accident, but the shock had hidden the pain. She glanced back into the shadowy footwell of the car, saw the glint of metal where the accelerator pedal had been pushed through.
She had managed to do some serious damage. How fast had she been traveling? She had not thought more than twenty, twenty–five, but perhaps in these conditions the fog had proved deceptive.
Stranded in the middle of nowhere with a broken–down car. At night. Rachel had a problem.
‘Help me!’ She shouted into the fog. ‘Help me, I’m hurt!’ Perhaps the woman would hear her cries and turn back. Rachel glanced up and down the road. What had the last sign said? How many miles to Tamerton was it?
She had no choice. She would have to walk.
Using the door of the car for balance, she hauled herself up. She took one tentative s
tep, then another. Pain lanced up through her leg, but with each step it became more bearable. The accelerator pedal must have jarred it. Now she had come to terms with her ordeal, and realised that whatever she had struck had already been dead, the pain had free reign to do what it liked.
She rounded the front of her car. She had hit what looked like a gatepost, a round boulder of granite mirrored by another similar piece about twenty feet further on, together marking a lane entrance, little more than a potholed dirt track leading downhill away from the main road. She had struck it head on, the impact smashing in the front of the chassis and buckling the bonnet. Her limited knowledge of cars extended far enough to know her car was an insurance write off.
Feeling a mixture of anger and despair, Rachel squinted into the fog and the darkness, hoping to see the lights of the town. Nothing glowed ahead of her, but off to the right, in the direction the dirt track led, she could see a faint light some distance away. A building of some kind, she hoped, a farmhouse or secluded cottage. Images conjured in her mind of more Hammer horrors, and also poor old Hansel and Gretel, finding their cottage of candy. She shivered, glanced back at her wrecked car, and made up her mind.
She had no choice. Making sure she kept the distant light in sight, she started off down the lane.
###
Bethany’s Diary, May 19th, 1998
She tells me secrets. Too many secrets. I don’t like hiding anymore, but she says she’ll leave me if I break my silence. Says she’ll have no choice. What can I do? I love my mother, but I can’t handle this.
I can’t get away much anymore, Dad watches me like a hawk, now his drinking has eased. Uncle Red speaks to me a lot, and although I know how much older than me he is, I find him somewhat . . . intriguing. I feel something I haven’t much felt before. It’s different with the boys I see in the village. They stare at me like a freak, shout obscenities and abusive remarks. Last Tuesday, as I made my way back from the village store with some more Lamberts for father and some bread, one of them, one of the Calver boys, grabbed me and told me he wanted to . . . wanted to . . .