Touching the Dark

by Jane A. Adams

  Jack just shrugged. “When I touch them or take something it makes them shake and gives them a fever. I don’t know why Tally, but I guess it’s a good thing.”

  “Oh?”

  “Think about it, it just goes down as natural causes. A mini epidemic.”

  “And what if someone starts doing tests?”

  “Then they’ll find it isn’t,” Jack said airily. “They’ll think of an explanation I suppose. No one’s going to think it’s me, are they. I’m dead.”

  Tally was silent, thinking about the implications. “Do you have to kill them?” she asked. “I mean, do they always die?”

  Jack thought about it for a moment. “I think so,” he said. “But mostly they’re old or have something wrong with them so I suppose I just help things along. I don’t touch the drunks any more or the druggies. Their minds are all screwed up when they’re high. It got me scared, Tally, like is it possible to get addicted by touching them that way? I felt so bad when I touched them and once there was this old lady. She didn’t know where she was or who she was any more and there was just this small part of her inside like it was pleading to get out and didn’t know the way.” He swallowed nervously. That was an experience Jack did not want to repeat. It had felt like drowning, all the memories decaying and pulled apart like a paper doily that someone had left in the rain. It had scared him badly and after that he had been more careful in his selection of minds.

  Tally was still looking thoughtfully at him and Jack came across and sat beside her on the bed.

  “What?” he said. He knew that look.

  “I was just thinking,” she said. “I mean, can you do it when someone isn’t sick or anything?”

  “I couldn’t. When I tried it first they were too strong, but I don’t know. Maybe now I could. I’m better at it now.”

  He smiled, “Who do you have in mind, Tally.”

  “Our father,” Tally said.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  The newspaper Alec had left was open on the floor beside her and the e-fit of Jack’s face stared back. Tally wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands and picked it up. It wasn’t even a good likeness, she thought, though she could see that it was meant to be Jack, the dark curls he had acquired after Miles had died. The deep set, intense blue eyes that had been her father’s legacy. The slightly feminine mouth that reminded her of Adam, though without the smile always chasing at the corners. Tally thought of Jack, her Jack, real Jack, Jack of childhood...and recognised not a feature. Not an inkling. Not a memory of what had been.

  She wiped her eyes again and skimmed the article. The report of the incident outside Ingham Comp. The child’s brother mistaken for this mysterious attacker of a blind volunteer at the advice centre. Naomi wasn’t mentioned by name, just the fact that she worked there and had been retired from the police after she lost her sight. He had followed her, the article reprised, attacked her in her own home and only the quick thinking of her taxi driver saved her from worse.

  Saved her from what? Tally thought. What would Jack have done? Tally realized that she no longer knew. Was Jack her Jack anymore? Her big brother. Or was he something else? Someone else, caught up along the way in her need to believe? Her eyes tracked back to the top of the page and the by-line proudly displayed beneath the headline.

  “Simon,” she whispered. Simon wrote this stuff. Angrily, she struggled to her feet and found the phone. His home number clicked onto answer phone, so she found his mobile.

  “How can you do this to me Simon! How can you! This persecution of me and Jack! I hate you Simon Emmet! I hate you and I don’t give a fuck any more what Jack does to you.”

  *

  “Tally.” Simon stared at the dead phone. He stared helplessly at Naomi. “She hung up on me.”

  “You seem to be having that effect on people today.”

  “Hey look, I said I was sorry. I’m doing my job, Nomi. I kept your name out of it.”

  “And how long will it take for someone to realize there’s only one blind ex-cop working at the advice centre?”

  “I know, but...”

  “It wasn’t so bad when it happened, Simon, Your colleague just mentioned an assault on a blind woman. No names, no identity. I’ve had enough of all this! When Helen’s body was found everyone wanted to rake up the past. I don’t think I could cope with it again.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said again, but his thoughts were no longer with Naomi. “Look, I’m going to go and see her. I’ve got to Nomi. She sounded so...”

  “Bloody furious, is my guess,” Naomi told him. “Get lost, Simon, before I say more than I mean to! And if you’re fool enough to go to Tally’s, I’m not going to be fool enough to try and stop you.”

  *

  When Tally was sixteen she fell in love properly for the first time. If she had thought that Miles had been her first passion then she soon realized that this had been mere infatuation. Adam was IT and Tally had never been so happy. The only cloud on the horizon was Jack; he had grown so much stronger now, so different and so much more independent than the Jack that the child Tally had known that at times she hardly recognised him. And he had achieved a degree of autonomy that neither of them had ever really envisaged even in their wildest fantasies.

  Jack was able to operate completely separately. He often disappeared for days at a time, doing whatever it was he did – Tally rarely questioned him. Once or twice when she had been out with friends she had run into him. Always at the centre of a crowd, laughing, joking, charming those around him, and it had become an unspoken rule that Tally did not acknowledge him at such times. Where Jack went death and sorrow had a habit of following and Tally had long decided that Jack was not a safe person to know if she wanted to keep the police and grieving families from her door. Often she had been frightened by how close she had been to the scenes of what Jack called his takings. The same pub, the same nightclub, the same street where the body would be found. Tally was certain that one day someone would notice the connection. And sometimes she would dream and in the dream she became Jack and she would feel the hands, her hands tightening around a throat, or her mouth, Jack’s mouth, kissing another, the taste of drink and lipstick strong on her tongue, the slow scent of arousal, cloying in her nostrils, the feel of flesh melting against her own and thoughts draining into a mind so hungry it could never be filled.

  “I share them with you,” Jack told her when she spoke to him of her dreams. “See these things as gifts, Tally, precious things.”

  Once she had been in control of Jack, had called him into being and fought for him and cherished him. Now, it was no longer a question of Tally letting go; it had long been a question of Tally escaping.

  Not that she wanted to most of the time. Jack was still her closest friend and dearest ally, but in her heart of hearts she was forced to admit that she was frightened of him. Afraid of what he could do and of the carnage that he left behind.

  But Jack was clever too. There was nothing to make the police think they had a one-man crime wave in their midst or that they had to deal with murder. Only on a few occasions did Jack play for effect and leave a strangled, maimed or carved up mystery. Car crashes were useful. Too much drink. The odd ecstasy tab contaminated with something far less benign and neither did Jack trouble to cause all of these. So many accidents about to happen, he told Tally. All you have to do is wait and they come along just about on cue.

  And each time, Jack grew stronger, changed in some subtle way. Gained knowledge of the human condition that by rights he should have taken lifetimes to acquire...which, in a way, was exactly what he did.

  Tally was well aware that Jack worked best with the cover of secrecy and so, from the beginning of their relationship, she had been careful to keep Adam well in the public domain. Jack would be jealous, she argued, and when Jack was jealous, bad things happened.

  Adam was as unlike Miles as it was possible to be. Quiet and studious, though well capable of having fun. Open with his feelings and pro
ud to be seen with her. He laughed easily and when he did his rather nondescript grey eyes gleamed and became beautiful. And, as importantly, Tally got along with his friends. Her skill with the camera took her to places that she would never otherwise have gained entry and when Graham’s band got its first gig Tally was there to record the moment. When Phil Bryce, the eldest of Adam’s group, ran his first half-marathon, Tally was there at the finish line. Her pictures appeared in the college magazine and were plastered on the walls. For the first time in her life she was accepted; an insider and not made outcast by virtue of her difference.

  When Adam first entered her life Tally’s nights were full of nightmares. Jack was stalking him. Jack was reaching out for him with the tentacles of hatred that Tally imagined issued from his very soul. Jack, who had once breathed the scent of Angels and made the lilies bloom was now fallen and maligned. But as time passed and the days grew into weeks Tally began to relax. Jack seemed so absorbed in his own world that Tally started to believe he had no interest in Adam at all and did not mind that someone else was taking over her life.

  “I still love you, Jack,” she told him one evening as he lay beside her.

  “Of course you do. I know that.” He smiled at her and reached out to stroke back a strand of hair. His hand was warm on her face and he lay his palm against her cheek, his thumb gently stroking over her lips. Tally rolled over onto her back and gazed up at the sky. They had wandered together into the fields behind their mother’s house and lay down in the long grass as they had long ago when both were children and life seemed to stretch forever into the distance. Summer was here early, June days warmer than expected, though the forecast threatened rain before the week was through. Tally had finished her exams and, although Tally had found herself a summer job, she would be working the early shift and have her day returned to her by two. Adam would be leaving for university in the autumn, but they had a long season yet to enjoy and nothing was going to spoil it.

  “You love him too, don’t you?”

  Tally, her limbs heavy with the sun and the brightness of the sky turned her head reluctantly to look at Jack. “Do you mind?”

  “I mind. But I want you to be happy.”

  “I am happy,” she smiled. “You’d like him Jack. I wish you two could meet.”

  “And how would you explain me, Tally. The friend who lives nowhere, has no family, no past.”

  “You have a past.”

  “I had a past. Any claim I had to my own past was snatched away long ago.”

  Tally shuddered. “Don’t, Jack. I don’t like to think about it.”

  “And you think I do? I look around me and I see other people wasting what they have. Abusing themselves, polluting their bodies and my brain reels from the injustice of it.”

  Tally turned over again and leaned on her elbow regarding him with concern. “Jack, people do things, make mistakes, act like complete wankers but you can’t make judgements about them on the strength of that. There’s more. Always more to it and the stupid things you do when you’re growing up are just that, part of growing up. You’d probably have done the same.”

  “Would I?”

  “I don’t know, probably.”

  Jack shook his head. “Sad that I never got the chance to find out, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t, Jack. I hate it when you’re like this.” She sat up and gathered her arms around her knees drawing away from him.

  “Don’t, Jack,” he mimicked. “You don’t think I have a right to be bitter. You think I should be satisfied with this...this half existence. Not alive, not dead. Not anything unless I take what I need from other people.”

  Tally’s anger flared suddenly. “I didn’t ask to bring you back. You asked me, Jack. Help me, you said and I did. I’m sorry if I didn’t do it right, but fuck it Jack, I was nine years old. What did you think I could do?”

  She got up and walked a little away from him. The day seemed to have darkened. The light blue sky patched with indigo and the green of the fields fragmented by tears. Tally loved days like these, the calmness of the sky, so solidly and reliably blue and the golden yellow haze of distant hills. The deep green of the rim of trees that blocked the horizon on one side and Jack. Her gentle brother who had kissed her and, blushing beneath his freckles, told her how much he loved her.

  “You’re not Jack,” she said, her voice thick with unshed tears. “You’re just someone who takes from other people. Takes lives and dreams and all the things that they might become if you left them alone. My Jack would never do that. You’ve turned into something else.” She turned around and glared at him, unable to keep the thought to herself any longer. “You’re cruel and you’re twisted and I hate you, Jack. I hate what you’ve become.”

  He was on his feet and his hands were on her arms, gripping tight enough to hurt. “And who taught me what to do, Tally? You had a part in this and don’t you try to deny it. If I’m guilty, then so are you. First our father and then Miles, and it was you that got yourself into that mess. No one made you Tally, not me, not any one. I was just the one who cleaned up after you.”

  She pulled away from him but he wasn’t about to let her go. “You belong to me and I belong to you. Two heads, one soul, remember?”

  “We were kids. That’s all, just kids.”

  “And that makes a difference? We’re still here and we’re still bound, for better or for worse. For always, Tally.” His mouth twisted into a sarcastic smile. “’Til death and more.”

  He let her go and she stumbled away from him knowing that what he said was true.

  “Go and play your games,” Jack shouted after her as she ran. “Go and fuck your Adam and pretend that you’re in love and when you’ve finished, you’ll still need me I’m your guardian angel, girl. Archangel Jack.”

  *

  She knew it must be Simon the moment she heard footsteps on the stairs. Someone must have buzzed him through the outer door. She held out against the impulse for a heartbeat, then opened the door.

  “Why did you do it? Why?” Her fists beat against his chest. He caught them, pulled her close trapping her hands between their bodies.

  “I did nothing, Tally. Tally, love I didn’t even mention your name or anything to do with you.”

  “I know, but Jack...” She wailed like a child, collapsing against him, allowing his to hold her, then to kiss her hair, then her face. Hungrily, she devoured his kisses, the need to be close, this close to someone, almost anyone, suddenly overwhelming. Simon lifted her, carried her through to the bedroom, lay down beside her and held her close. This Tally was new to him. This woman who prided herself on her own self-control. On being in command, falling apart, clinging to him as though she never wanted to let go. And when he made love to her, mutual need sweeping away the last of their reason, it was Simon who took the lead, Tally that followed, weeping softly, her tears falling against his naked skin.

  Afterwards they slept and as Simon drifted, feeling Tally’s heart beat close against his own, he felt that the world could be no more perfect than it was now.

  It was well after midnight when Simon woke and groped for his watch to check the time. Tally rolled over, murmuring something in her sleep.

  Simon froze. The feeling that someone else was in the room. A shadow momentarily blocking the faint light that came through the bedroom door from the room beyond. The blinds had been left open and city light, night time yellow, filtered in.

  Simon sat up. “Jack.”

  The shadow in the doorway resolved itself briefly into a figure. A man, tall and muscular, though lightly built for all that, with dark curling hair. Simon leapt from the bed, snatching his jeans from the floor, clutching them in his hands as he leapt towards the door. But the figure had vanished and Simon, grabbing hold of what little sense he had left, struggled into his jeans before storming into the main room and hitting the light.

  There was no one there.

  Dreaming, Simon muttered to himself. Then he froze. The door to T
ally’s flat stood open wide and, receding rapidly, Simon could hear, the sound of booted feet upon the stairs.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  “She threw me out. I’ve been walking for hours. Didn’t know what time you got up. I’ve been standing in the street waiting for your lights to come on. I’m sorry Naomi.”

  He sounded so pathetic that she could do nothing but forgive him and stand aside to let him in, Napoleon acting as excited escort.

  “When did she throw you out?” Alec asked. He was finishing breakfast.

  “I don’t know. About one I suppose. We had a row. About Jack.”

  “Some row,” Naomi commented. “You left here about seven as I recall.”

  “Yeah. Well, the row was after.”

  “Ah,” Alec said. “After. Simon, don’t you think you’re...”

  “Behaving like an idiot again? Yeah. I know. Jack was there, Alec. I woke up and saw him. By the time I’d grabbed my jeans, he’d already gone.”

  “At Tally’s” Alec was immediately interested. Naomi hid her smile and decided not to make a joke of Simon chasing Jack naked.

  “I woke up,” Simon repeated. “I felt he was there, you know how it is when something rattles you. Then I saw him, standing in the bedroom doorway. Watching us. I sat up, he took off and by the time I’d struggled out of bed...”

  “And taken action to protect your modestly,” Naomi found that she couldn’t resist.”

  “It’s not funny, Nomi. How would you like it?”

  “No, I’m sorry, Simon, I know it isn’t. At least he took off.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “How did he get in,” Alec questioned.

  “Same way as he left. By the door. He must have a key, though Tally said not.”

  “And what else did she say?”

  “I don’t know. We started to argue then. I wanted to know what he was doing there. Wanted to call the police. She wouldn’t let me. She took my mobile and chucked it down the stairwell and when I tried to use her landline she refused. We fought. I didn’t want to hurt her Alec and if we’d struggled...”