The Hunter Inside

by David McGowan

  ‘Linda, sweetheart, calm down,’ he coaxed, freeing himself from her vice-like grip and looking into her exhausted, tear streaked and puffy face.

  The gloomy light from the hallway wall lamp cast only a dim glow, and he suddenly realised that she looked closer to his age than she did her own. She was only 33, but the stress and pain of the last twelve months etched itself in lines that would always hold testimony to how completely her life had been torn apart.

  ‘Daddy, it’s almost 2AM. Where were you?’

  He could see the quizzical, almost betrayed expression on her face as she asked him, and a teardrop hung from the end of her nose, large and ready to drip.

  2AM. She said 2AM. That couldn’t be right. He had left the diner at 10PM. Within five minutes the car had broken down, but it hadn’t taken him four hours to walk home.

  ‘2AM? It can’t be. I…’ he trailed off. His head was fuzzy, cloudy. He was damn tired after the damn car and the damn cold and the damn storm and the damn dark walk home. But it hadn’t taken him more than an hour and a half, surely?

  That made it midnight, at the latest. He could walk to Miller’s Diner and back in four hours.

  At Linda’s inquisitive glare he felt nervous. Her tears had stopped, and in the dimly lit hallway it was like looking at Betsy years ago. Betsy before they were married. Before he had taken her to bed. Betsy before all the years they spent together. Before the cancer.

  Barrett Holroyd was unnerved. His eyelids fluttered several times and tears welled up in his eyes. He hoped she couldn’t see those tears. She might think he was feeling sorry for himself, when he was actually pitying her. But she wouldn’t want him to pity her, he knew that.

  ‘But Linda, it can’t be,’ he said as he stepped past her and went into the kitchen. The clock on the wall did indeed say 2AM, but it couldn’t be. There was no way in the world.

  ‘So, where were you?’ She had followed him into the kitchen, and her voice had taken on what he could only perceive as an accusatory tone. A Betsy tone.

  ‘I was, I was at Miller’s Diner. Where else would I be?’ He asked the question in a ponderous tone as he attempted to reconstruct his journey home inside his mind, from the car breaking down to the walk through the cold, dark night down Sangrew Hill, and falling down on his bony old butt (which hurt like a bitch – he expected a big black bruise by the end of tomorrow), and standing looking up at the cloudy sky and the few visible stars just a hundred yards from the house.

  Couldn’t have taken him too long to get himself those five miles, yet the clock on the wall still said 2AM, and the digital clock on the front of the refrigerator said the same.

  He looked at his watch, only to see that the silver Rotary hands had stopped moving at exactly midnight. On the dot. To the second. He tapped the glass with his fingernail, in full knowledge of the fact that it was not going to start the hands moving again, before flopping down heavily and disconsolately on one of the low budget kitchen chairs that they had watched dwindle from four to two in eight months.

  That’s the trouble with getting the cheapest car on the lot, he mused. Always breaks down sooner or later. The house was full of ‘the cheapest’. The cheapest TV, which crackled like bacon on a platter, the cheapest armchairs, which creaked like the doors of a haunted house, the cheapest beds, with springs that reacted like a jack-in-the-box mechanism whenever you tried to get comfortable, the cheapest clothes, which made them look a decade out of fashion.

  But then, what should he care about fashion?

  Linda stood in front of him, hands on hips, waiting for an answer or an excuse as to why he was so late.

  Just like all men, she thought, trying to think of a lie. But not just any old lie – a real whopper. She wondered why men were consumed with being sneaky and doing things that were not right. Maybe he was trying to get one over her, make her look stupid, same as Ross had done.

  But she wasn’t giving any ground. Him doing…whatever he had been doing until 2AM had to involve Louise Miller, and she wanted to hear him say it. She wasn’t just going to sweep it under the carpet like she had with Ross and hope he did the right thing; because men didn’t ever do the right thing when they had the choice.

  Her father looked as guilty as hell in a hand basket.

  ‘I was at Miller’s. I left at 10PM and the Bonalo mobile broke down.’ He tried to muster a smile. ‘So I had to walk home.’ He felt as though he had piranhas dangling from the end of each of his fingers as the cold continued to gnaw into him. He breathed on his hands in an attempt to purge the ice that had formed inside his skin.

  ‘But Daddy, it’s 2AM.’ Her voice rose an octave on ‘2AM’, and Barrett’s whole body went rigid as his dead wife’s voice came out of his daughter’s mouth. ‘You’re not telling me it took you four hours to walk five miles, because you’d probably have frozen to death out there by now.’

  She motioned towards the window. Outside, the trees jostled one another to get a better look at what was rapidly escalating into a confrontation, while the wind pressed its face up to the thin glass panels, goading them with a whining, crazy, high-pitched voice. It was the voice of nature and the Earth around them, shaking the doors and rattling the windows in their frames, mocking their weaknesses and their ramshackle home.

  ‘Well,’ he paused. ‘I ain’t tellin you it took four hours no. I don’t really know.’ He rubbed a hand across his cheeks. Starting to warm up a little now, but still cold. Damn cold.

  Linda turned away from him and plunged her hands into a sink that was full of dishes. She scrubbed at a blackened pot, her shoulders shaking as she began to weep again, this time more quietly.

  She couldn’t even cook a decent meal without burning the pots. Barrett Holroyd thought it was no wonder he spent all his time at Miller’s.

  She scrubbed feverishly at the pot, trying to dislodge the blackened remnants of the casserole she had cremated earlier. Her mother cooked better than anyone she knew. In fact, the recipe for the casserole had come from her grandmother to her mother, and eventually to her, but she couldn’t do anything. Not a damn thing.

  She threw down the pot, splashing water and soap bubbles all over herself, and whirled around to face her father.

  ‘Don’t you lie to me, Daddy. I know exactly what you’ve been doing, and who you been doing it with.’ Her eyes blazed fierce with grief and anger and her tears spilled freely down her cheeks as she leaned against the sink to stop her legs from buckling beneath her.

  ‘What are you talking about, Linda? I haven’t been with anybody. I was alone. I walked home alone.’

  He knew exactly who she thought he’d been with, and his face coloured with embarrassment as the image of Louise Miller bending in front of him to reveal her black lacy bra returned to his mind. He turned away from Linda in an attempt to cover his blushes and hide his guilt and walked into the lounge.

  Linda followed him from the kitchen, dishcloth in hand. ‘Don’t you lie to me,’ she repeated, almost shouting across the four feet of thin, threadbare carpet that lay between them.

  ‘Shhh, Linda, you’re gonna wake the boy,’ Barrett whispered in admonishment. She was either on the verge of hysterics or two steps over the state line to Cloud Cuckoo Land. At this rate she was apt to end up in the John Clifton Centre. Her journey towards Madness, Cloud Cuckoosville had been a long one as she had spent a year making it, heading through the state capital, Hysteria. Her mother’s death at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, when everybody else was celebrating, had added a nitro booster to the vehicle in which she’d been travelling.

  ‘If it wasn’t for Tucker I’d, I’d…’ she trailed off, uncertain how to finish the sentence she’d begun.

  What would she do? Barrett wondered. Buy a Harley and travel the country, smoking weed and drinking beer and listening to heavy rock music? Probably not. Definitely not, in fact. She wasn’t made for that kind of life; grease and grime and unprotected sex with strangers in the back of VW’s was more like
ly to turn her stomach. Family, that was what was important to her. She with the redundant surname, absent husband and bastard son. She with the dead, cancer destroyed mother and the purposeless father. She who couldn’t even afford to have a telephone, and before too long might well be sleeping under the stars.

  They were both silent. The TV was muted, a commercial for a flash Mercedes Benz mocking them from behind the shop window. Linda stepped towards it and turned it off. There was no point using up more electricity and making more bills for the poorest family in Camberway. She flopped down into the sofa. It was as threadbare as the carpet on which it stood. It had been third or fourth hand when they had gotten it from Bob Grady’s furniture store, and as far as chattels went, well, it didn’t go very far.

  It had been a fortnight after they moved into the house. She didn’t know why they’d even bothered; Ross didn’t want to marry her, kept on feeding her a crock of shit about marriage being a piece of paper and how he didn’t need their names to be on a piece of paper when her name was carved on his heart and all. And she had bought it. Like a dog who runs for a stick his master hasn’t actually thrown. So she looked foolish and embarrassed, the same way the dog did when the stick failed to drop from the sky. Sure, he’d married her eventually, but it hadn’t stopped him running out on them. And a year had passed and she still felt foolish and embarrassed, still had her head cocked to one side, wondering what her master had done with the stick, waiting for it to appear from the sky.

  ‘I’m sick of sitting on crates Linda,’ Ross had said. ‘We’ve gotta get a sofa, or I swear I’m gonna have the lines off those crates permanently etched in my butt cheeks.’

  She had giggled then. She hadn’t actually minded the crates so much. Tucker had positively loved them, goo-gooing and gaa-gaaing and trying to climb on top of them until he fell off and cried and she cried. So they had gone to Bob Grady’s store. She should have known then, when he had chosen the old fleabag of a sofa she now sat on, ten years later. Should have known then, when he had opted for that over a leather one that was stylish and newer looking.

  ‘I’ll give you the big leather one for 200 dollars,’ Bob Grady had said. ‘That other one I was going to dump if I couldn’t get rid of it. That’s 150. I need the room see, coz George and Vera Flockheim, well, they got to go out of town, up to Tarleby, on account of George’s old man being on his last, and they asked me to store up some of their furniture for them.’

  Ross had said no. Just like that. Straight out of nowhere. Hadn’t even asked her what she thought. All because he wanted to save fifty bucks to go out drinking the strong stuff at the moonshiner’s tavern, aka Carl Sweeney’s bar, The Bawdy Bear.

  That was where he’d spent most of his time when he was around. Warm with the fire at the Bear, and the whiskey inside him, while she sat on an old, worn-out sofa. Always hungry and always cold, and always more worried about Ross and Tucker than she was about herself. Things were not much different now, except that Ross was gone and her father had taken his place. Still another mouth to feed and another life for her to worry about.

  A small gas powered heater stood in the corner of the lounge. It gave off more fumes than it did heat, but electric ones cost too much to run. Her father, Tucker and herself had permanent nausea and headaches throughout the winter because of the heater, and they all spent most of the winter shivering cold – also due to the heater.

  Ross was a Phil Collins fan. She couldn’t stand him – thought he had a voice like he was singing through a kazoo instead of a microphone, but now, as the iced February wind howled all around the house and rain started to tap against the window once more, she was reminded of one of Ross’s long play records.

  The roof is leaking

  And the wind is howling.

  The kids are crying

  Coz the sheets are so cold.

  Woke this morning

  Found my hands were frozen.

  I tried to fix the fire

  But you know

  The damn thing’s too old.

  Barrett Holroyd snored lightly, his head lolling to the side and a trickle of saliva edging its way over his lip.

  ‘Daddy?’ she asked. She wasn’t finished yet. Her questions remained unanswered. Her father didn’t wake. He didn’t even flinch in fact. He was all worn out and so was she.

  Tucker could be hard work. Just getting him to rise in the morning and swap his warm bed for the cold of the winter wasn’t easy. Pulling on her brave daytime face and struggling along like everything was dandy-o exhausted her. When she went to bed at the end of every day she was ready to collapse. But the moment she closed her eyes, her mother’s image floated up out of the dark, and she couldn’t sleep. She spent night after night, restless, thinking about her Mom’s gaunt face.

  But what she didn’t realise, on this cold and wet February night, was that she had already drifted off.

  *

  Kimberley Carter’s image faded rapidly from Luke Bonalo’s puppy-love-struck mind as the humming sound grew around him.

  It was low enough for him to think it was inside his head at first. He realised in the first minute of the hum just how tired he was. He was almost tired enough to go to sleep inside the Chevy, even though he was pretty sure he would freeze solid.

  When he got as tired as this he sometimes suffered from migraines; head splitting pain and a sensitivity to light and sound that made his head feel like it would split wide open with the noise of birdsong.

  He had suffered from migraines since his mother’s death when he was five years old. Or, more precisely, his mother’s murder. He remembered seeing something in the cold, dark stare of his father that had made him, a small lonely and broken child, wonder if it had been his Daddy who had made his Mommy go away.

  He hadn’t known then – he was only a child after all – that many people, including Old Jim Hoolihan, the Chief of Police, had harboured the same feeling.

  But his had not been a feeling of suspicion, it had been a feeling of fear that had made him afraid to sleep. He’d gotten migraines ever since. No-one had ever been charged with strangling his mother and dumping her body in the forest that bordered Camberway to his right.

  The buzzing sound grew louder, and he realised that it wasn’t inside his head, after all. That was a relief – it meant that he wasn’t going to be struck down by a migraine at least.

  He listened to that buzzing sound, leaning as close to the car’s windshield as he could, and peering off to the left and into the darkness. He could see nothing, but the buzzing was now more like a vibration that rippled through the air around him. A vibration that made everything not quite right.

  Panic began to inch its way up his throat and he clapped his hands over his ears, fighting a sudden urge to scream as he felt the blood pounding through his temples.

  Oooo, Luke’s afraid of the boogeyman, a voice said from the back seat of the car. He whirled around in his seat. It was Jim’s voice and it was an old childhood tease, and his incredulity was etched onto his face for all to see.

  Except there was no-one there to see it. The back seat was empty, and he wondered if he was about to suffer a brain haemorrhage, such was the pressure of the vibration inside his skull. He turned to face forwards, and froze completely as he totally forgot that he had ever even met Kimberly Carter.

  Not forty feet away from him, a disc-shaped object hummed slowly across the valley. It was below the position where he sat, and it cruised along smoothly through the freezing winter air, hanging over the sleeping valley below.

  Luke Bonalo was paralysed where he sat. He didn’t realise this, as his attention was completely focused on what he thought he would never see. It was definitely not something made by the military. He didn’t know how, but he knew that for sure.

  Shit, it’s huge, he thought. It continued through the air, emitting the humming sound that seemed to fill up every millimetre of the atmosphere around him. Apart from that deep, bone splitting hum, it made no other sound
. If it was army, it would surely have some sort of jet that would make a sound entirely recognizable. But it wasn’t. He knew it wasn’t.

  Holy, holy shit. That thing’s got to be half a mile long.

  In fact, it was slightly less than half a mile long through its centre. It was perfectly round – more perfect, he thought, than any man or machine made circle ever drawn, and it was a deep silver colour synonymous with the classic description of a UFO.

  It glided through the air, passing directly below where Luke sat, blocking out his view of Turton and Camberway below, such was its massive size. The top of the craft contained what looked like millions of lights which changed through a spectrum of greens, blues, reds and yellows that were brilliant in their intensity and cast thin beams away into the night sky. They reached away into infinity as far as his eyes could see, through the atmosphere and away into space.

  The centre of the craft was now in a direct line with him. Somewhere deep in the back of his mind he could hear the other car screaming away, its tyres spinning on wet leaves as its occupiers attempted to

  …get the fuck out of here…

  The thought suddenly came to him as the tail-end of the craft passed his vantage point. Simultaneously, his paralysis was broken and he kept his eyes on the craft as it positively oozed through the air, while fumbling for the key in the ignition.

  This wasn’t no weather balloon. It wasn’t a top secret military aircraft either. Luke knew that. This was them.

  They were here.

  He got the engine started, groping blindly as he watched the craft, thinking that you could fit the whole population of Camberway and Turton inside it at the same time.

  In his haste to get moving, he put the car into drive and almost tramped down on the accelerator without thinking about the drop below. He forgot in an instant how close he had come to death, as the craft disappeared behind the copse of trees where…

  …where his father dumped his mother’s body.

  All at once he knew for sure, without a doubt, that his father, Art Bonalo, was a murderer. They had told him, he knew that, and he suddenly wanted to follow them. Follow them for as long as he could.