by WR Armstrong
“My daughter,” the woman said, “Have you seen my daughter?”
“You’re referring to Kayla, of course.” The name rang a bell, although the reason why eluded me. “What does Kayla look like?”
“Blue eyes, fair hair: people often say she looks like me.”
“How old is she?”
“Five.”
It sounded like the child with the doll, the one who’d come under attack from the birds. I was suddenly distracted by David who stood on the other side of the lawn, calling for me to come quickly.
“I have to go,” I told the woman, “but I’ll be back, I promise.”
I rushed to see what the problem was, arriving just in time to witness two burly greasers scrapping on the patio, surrounded by a group of onlookers.
I went to intervene but Irish beat me to it, separating the protagonists as if they were squabbling children. He read them the riot act, threatening to bang their heads together if they refused to behave. The men, formidable individuals themselves, agreed to settle their differences in a more civilised manner. The crowd dispersed. The party got back into full swing.
Irish’s swift intervention elevated him to hero status in the eyes of his fellow revellers. David was correct about him being a reassuring presence whenever trouble arose.
I returned to the gazebo to rejoin the blonde, but she was gone. Back at the cottage I made inquiries, hoping to discover her identity. No one was able to help.
The party ended in the early hours. The last of the revellers crashed out, or went home. I have no recollection of falling asleep, although I do remember dreaming about the mystery blonde and her daughter, Kayla. In the dream Kayla cradled the blanket as she had during the bird attacks. On this occasion however, birds weren’t the problem: the problem lay in the presence of a disfigured man lurking in the shadows, one who carried an axe, and whose sole intention was murder. For a reason unknown to me, I associated the axe with my mother.
The CD player woke me. It was morning and Whitesnake was playing at full volume: Coverdale singing his heart out about Rose. I struggled to open my eyes, and was surprised to see Michelle shared the bed with me. No intimacy had taken place between us as we were fully clothed. But we had slept together; it was a start.
The music was intolerably loud. Michelle stirred, yet did not wake. I scanned the bedroom half expecting to see others crashed out on the floor, but we were alone.
The sound of the music suddenly got louder. Seemed the party was starting up again. And then, without warning, it stopped and the cottage fell silent. Curious to know what was going on, ignoring the blinding headache I’d woken to, I headed downstairs.
The place looked like a bomb had hit it. I glanced at my watch. It was six-thirty a.m. In the front room revellers who’d elected to stay overnight stirred restlessly, also disturbed by the music. David, standing on the other side of the room by the CD player, remonstrated with a biker, trying to persuade the man to refrain from playing music at such an ungodly hour. The biker, big and brawny, appraised David as if deciding whether to commit murder or not. In the end, possibly deciding the young shopkeeper wasn’t worth the trouble, he wandered outside swigging beer from a bottle.
“Are you okay, David,” I asked.
“Thought I’d had my chips for a minute there,” he said, looking tired and dishevelled. His hair hung loose so it brushed his shoulders, his specs were askew and his shirt was ripped.
“It was some party,” he said before collapsing onto a nearby chair.
I wasn’t really listening, being more concerned by the devastation the party had caused, rather than by the measure of its success. Overnight the place had become a rubbish dump. Empty bottles, drinks cans, pizza boxes and various other fast food cartons were strewn all over the place. Moreover, the air stank of cigarettes and marijuana. I turned as the sound of violent retching reached me from the downstairs bathroom.
“Someone over did it,” David remarked, sitting up and straightening his specs.
A bleary eyed teenage girl emerged from the room wearing a pink tee shirt and a pair of white lace knickers. To David she said, “Nice party,” before crawling into a double sleeping bag occupied by a man I assumed to be her boyfriend.
Ignoring the thumping headache I’d woken with, I checked the place for damage and breakages. There were few to speak of surprisingly, a couple of glasses, an ashtray, but little else. A quick check for burn marks revealed just the one, fairly minor, on a worn old rug by the hearth. David came to my aid with the job of clearing up. I enquired where Jenny was.
“Nipped home,” he said, “exam papers to mark for Monday. She’ll be back to lend a hand later.”
He pulled on a pair of marigolds and ran hot water into the Belfast sink. “Michelle looked on the verge of a nervous breakdown towards the end of the night,” he said, squirting washing up liquid into the bowl. “She was worried about the gatecrashers; afraid they’d ransack the place. By the way, did you discover what happened to your mystery lady, the one you saw by the gazebo?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You sound disappointed. Any idea who she was?”
“Just another gatecrasher, I guess.”
But she was more than that. Even then I sensed that our destinies were inextricably entwined.
I left David to the washing up and wandered around the house hoping to find her, more determined than ever to discover her identity. Eventually, I was forced to admit defeat and returned to the kitchen, where I helped David dry plates and cutlery. Michelle popped her head around the door. I threw her a cloth. “Work surfaces need a wipe.”
She pulled a face. “Do I really have to?”
Around us the revellers finally began to stir, rising from the floor like the living dead, some heading off without so much as a bye or leave, others taking the time to congratulate me on a great party. A man sporting tattoos and long unruly hair wandered into the kitchen complaining that he’d mislaid his girlfriend.
“Her name is Mary-Louise,” he said, “Anyone here seen her?”
“What’s she look like,” I asked.
“Petite with short brown hair: she looks like a little pixy. She was wearing blue jeans and a pink blouse.”
“Maybe she got bored and went home,” David suggested.
“She crashed out with me on the floor over there,” he said, pointing back through the doorway into the living room. “She was too drunk to talk let alone walk home on her own. Besides, why would she just get up and leave, without saying anything. It wasn’t as if we’d had an argument.”
“Have you checked outside?” Michelle asked.
“I’ve looked high and low for her,” he answered.
“What about the attic?” David queried. “Have you tried there?”
“It’s locked due to the party,” I said but nevertheless wonder if the equipment stored in there remained insured. Given the state of my finances, it was doubtful.
“Has she done this sort of thing before?” It was David again.
Mary-Louise’s boyfriend shook his head. He looked angry and upset. “We’re getting married next year. She wouldn’t just slip off without telling me. Especially out here in the middle of nowhere.”
“You told us she was drunk,” I said.
“What of it?”
“People can behave out of character when they’re drunk.”
“Who are you, Sigmund Fraud?”
“I think what John means,” said Michelle, trying to help me out, “is if she had a lot to drink, she may have got disorientated, wandered off and got lost.”
He scratched his head, considering, before reluctantly agreeing it was possible.
“Have you searched the grounds beyond the cottage?” Michelle asked.
“No.”
“Why don’t we take a look around then, see if we can’t find her?”
Before he could object she led him away by the arm.
“Go with them,” I told David.
; “Okay, what will you do?”
“I’ll stay here and hold the fort; make sure the place isn’t wrecked again.”
But that wasn’t the real reason I chose not to accompany them. I didn’t feel the need to. I somehow knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that Mary-Louise wasn’t out there; that in reality she was somewhere inside the cottage, hidden...
“Where the hell are you?” I whispered to the deserted kitchen.
The search party returned within the hour, unsuccessful, just as I knew it would be. Mary-Louise’s boyfriend, who gave his name as Sid, looked worried sick, and announced he was going to call the police.
“She’s only been missing a couple of hours or so,” I pointed out.
He glared at me. “So fucking what? She’s still missing.”
Michelle came to my rescue again, advising him to contact Mary-Louise’s parents first to see if she’d made it home.
“She hasn’t got parents,” he said. “She’s an orphan. She’s lived with me since she was seventeen. I need a phone, mine’s bust. Where’s the blasted phone in this place?”
I leant him my mobile.
“Thanks,” he said. He dialled the emergency services number, asked for the police and reported Mary-Louise as a missing person. As I suspected, the cops told him he was being premature. They advised him to wait for at least twenty-four hours, and then call back if there was still no sign of her.
“Fucking assholes,” he said, thrusting the phone at me in disgust. “Cops are worse than useless!”
Michelle tried her best to reassure him. David meanwhile, continued tidying up, which in the end took most of the morning. And as they were doing that, I decided to grab some fresh air: maybe smoke a cigarette. I knew I shouldn’t, that it was bad for my health, and that my health was already questionable, but what the hell. On the way out of the house I bumped into the girl who’d been taken sick in the bathroom earlier. By now she was now dressed and looking more respectable, though she still looked green around the gills. She took me to one side.
“I need to talk to you,” she said.
“Why, what’s the problem?”
“I overheard the conversation you were having with Sid. This is really freaky. My boyfriend had a dream last night, in which a party goer was abducted.”
It took a moment for the implication of her words to sink in. “What’s your boyfriend’s name?”
“Sandy. Sandy Mercer.”
“Where is he?”
She led me over to the window and nodded towards the track that led in the direction of the derelict farmhouse. “I think the dream upset him. He said he wanted to be alone for a while.”
I decided to take a walk, find Sandy and talk to him, see what I could find out. After scouting around for a few minutes I spotted him sitting on a wall near a disused stable block.
“Mind if I join you?” I asked.
He shrugged. “It’s a free country.”
I sat down and came straight to the point.
“Your girlfriend told me about your dream.”
“Did she now: and what exactly did she say?” He fished around in his coat pocket, retrieving a crumpled pack of cigarettes and offered me one. For once in my life I declined.
“I don’t know if it was a dream,” he said, slipping a cigarette into his mouth and lighting it with a zippo. “I wasn’t really with it when I crashed out. At some stage during the night I think I woke up.”
“Think?”
“You know how it is, you’re off your head, you crash out, and then you wake up but you can’t be sure if you really have woken, or if you’re dreaming because you’re still so out of it. In the morning, the line is even more blurred. As far as I’m concerned, this has to be a dream because if it isn’t...” He let the sentence trail off and stared into space.
“What did you see, Sandy?”
“A man: I saw a man, but he just didn’t look right.”
“How do you mean?”
“He was deformed in some way, like he had...”
“Out with it; Sandy.”
“It was as if he’d mutated into something else. He was like an experiment that had gone wrong. I’ll tell you another thing; he stank to high heaven. I can’t believe any living being could smell like he did. And how come I had a sense of smell anyway; I always thought it failed to exist in dreams? What the hell did I see?”
He was steamrollering ahead, in danger of losing me. “Okay,” I said. “I get the gist, but for the sake of ease, my ease, let’s just say it was a man. He took somebody, yeah?”
“Yes.”
“Then what did he do?”
“I don’t know. But whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t anything pleasant. My personal opinion is he slaughtered whoever it was he took.”
“Listen Sandy,” I said carefully, “Is it possible you had something last night that may’ve caused you to hallucinate?”
He shook his head adamantly and drew nervously on his cigarette.
At this point I mentioned the disappearance of Mary-Louise. His reaction was as I expected: stunned disbelief.
“Sandy, this is important. Try to give me an acceptable description of what the man in your dream looked like? I’ll tell you for why; if the cops are brought into this they’ll be asking questions of everyone who attended last night’s party. It may be that you really did see the abductor, but if you were out of it, as you say you were, you might’ve failed to comprehend exactly what it was you saw.”
“Yeah: right. Maybe somebody slipped me a Mickey Finn,” he said almost hopefully. “And it temporarily addled my brain.”
“Maybe so,” I agreed, reassuringly. “But if it actually happened, then the memory will be in there somewhere.” I tapped a finger against my temple.“You’ve just got to find a way of sourcing it. Know what I mean?”
He seemed to buy into the idea, squeezed his eyes shut and concentrated. “It’s no good, it was too dark,” he said eventually. “And it happened too quickly.”
“Can you remember anything, anything at all?” I pressed.
He concentrated harder. Suddenly he clicked his fingers together and said, “The guy wore some kind of cloak, made him look like he had wings: Count Dracula and all that crap.”
And then, as an afterthought, he added, “I-I couldn’t see his face. As I said, it was too dark. But I’ll tell you what: something makes me think I wouldn’t have wanted to.”
He lapsed into thought and began to look extremely uneasy.
“What is it?” I asked.
He looked me straight in the eye and said, “Forget the normal man crap. Whether I dreamt it or hallucinated, or otherwise, the thing I saw was seriously weird.”
I stood up. “Thanks for talking to me. I’ll see you around.” I left him alone to finish his cigarette.
Back at the cottage I relayed what I’d learned to Michelle, David, and to Jenny, who’d arrived in my absence in order to run David home.
“Should we mention anything to the boyfriend of the missing girl?” she asked.
We agreed unanimously that it would be a bad idea. An uncomfortable silence followed. I got the distinct impression everyone sensed something awful had happened, but refused to openly admit it. By lunch time the revellers had departed leaving Michelle and I alone. We braved the cold weather and walked for a while. We headed off in the direction of the old mill to the west of High Bank. As we walked we chatted. I apologised yet again for organizing a party on the first evening of her stay, without so much as mentioning it.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said forgivingly, but it did, I could tell. She was still miffed. Yet when I chanced to slip an arm around her waist she didn’t resist. In fact she relaxed her weight against me. I gave her waist a gentle squeeze and then she smiled, not at me, but at Lennon, who had bounded ahead of us as if in pursuit of invisible cats. We arrived at the old mill. Michelle and I sat down on a rough stone wall and watched the ducks paddle around the lake. They resembled fairground ducks in
a shooting gallery. Lennon tracked them along the bank, barking playfully, until they disappeared into the rushes just before the weir. Trees swayed gently in time with the afternoon breeze, whilst above us a bird soared high in the sky appearing to touch the clouds. I wondered fleetingly if it belonged to those that hung around High Bank. After a while we headed back to the cottage. On the way Michelle informed me that she would be returning to London later that afternoon.
“That’s a pity.” I said, meaning it. She glanced up at me and smiled. We walked the rest of the way in virtual silence. Somewhere along the way we lost sight of Lennon. The next time we saw him he was on the patch of land between the cottage and the old chapel, digging frantically. I commanded him to stop but he ignored me. I shrugged and left him to it, and led Michelle inside the house. While I stoked up the potbelly Michelle disappeared upstairs saying she had to pack up her belongings. Once the fire was going, I called out to her to see if she was hungry, but failed to receive a reply. I tried again without success. Why the hell wasn’t she answering? With thoughts of the missing Mary-Louise running through my head, I hurriedly left the room heading for the stairs.
Any concerns I had for Michelle’s safety were quickly dispelled however. She had decided to surprise me by making herself comfortable on the bed in the master bedroom—my bedroom rather than the guest room—wearing nothing but a friendly smile. I quickly undressed and joined her.
Our lovemaking felt good, as always. It might have felt better still was I not so preoccupied with the disappearance of Mary-Louise. Sandy was convinced her kidnapper intended to kill her. I hoped that for all our sakes it really was just a bad dream or hallucination he’d experienced, rather than the real thing, otherwise we were all in trouble, and no one more so than poor Mary-Louise herself. I pondered my own dream. Was it possible Sandy and I had dreamt about the same man, (man or fiend?) If so, what did it mean?
That evening Michelle caught the train back to London as planned. I missed her badly, yet found myself thinking more about the mysterious blonde. Doing so made me feel guilty, as if I was being unfaithful. I was obsessed, it seemed. The blonde had come to haunt me. Why had she attended the party, I repeatedly wondered, alone and knowing no one? Had she really mislaid her daughter? And who the hell was she anyway?