Every Missing Thing

by Martyn Ford

  Floorboards creaked as Sam clambered to his feet and took stock of the damage – his left arm was broken. His right arm in no better state, still dripping. He held it above his head, then crushed the packet of cigarettes. With his thumb, he snapped off a couple of filters and pressed them into the wound. Then he grabbed a greasy rag and some duct tape. Using his teeth, Sam worked quickly, holding his wrist out and wrapping it up, staggering through the pain.

  He checked the desk for a weapon, for anything, for—

  The knife. Reaching for it, Sam stumbled again, crashing on to his front across the clutter, sweeping items from the table.

  When he searched himself for strength, he found nothing but rapid nausea – an alien sense, something well beyond doom. He covered his mouth, gagged and tried to breathe. But the fractured stained glass on the floor was shifting in his peripheral vision – reds and yellows and blues swimming like living paint. Confronting the sight, staring it down, just made the colours boil and spit. And behind his eyelids, he discovered only horror – he saw himself back at the radiator, trapped in the cuffs. He looked again. An ambient throb to the world, to his skin. Darkness and he felt his memories recalled at once with total clarity. As clear as any present moment. As real as now.

  This new power worked both ways – he could roll the dial forwards as well as backwards. He could close his eyes and shift, like a phantom, an ethereal hologram of himself – returning to the set past or venturing into the equally immutable future.

  Max would have the gun by now.

  Looking again, Sam was on the desk, smashing the glass out of the narrow black window with the knife handle. He hoisted himself up and rested his stomach on the frame. Face down, he placed his hands on the bricks and shuffled through, falling head first on to the grass outside.

  Crawling prone, he winced on his elbows – his shoulder filled with gristle, his jaw and arm aching. Swollen, hot. He was quite sure his ulna was shattered. But his hand wasn’t wilting, which meant his radius was intact. Detached from his injuries now – the confusion seemed to come in waves, each growing taller and fiercer. Drugs. Fuck. Were there drugs?

  Sam was boxed in by a small courtyard. The only way out was through the building. Back inside.

  On his feet, he jogged down the side of the Marston family home, round to the courtyard patio. It was dark – late at night or early morning. And he could hear a sound, like an air-raid siren, coming from the woods. But the echo was all wrong – it was real, but not real now. Perhaps it was something bleeding back down the timeline – a warning from the future. A dread call from the chaos. He turned his eyes to the stars and saw a crackling howl – fast raindrops in headlights.

  Curious about the outcome, he ventured forwards and watched himself grab the patio door handle, slide it open on its runners and—

  ‘Let me out,’ a female voice yelled. Sam rolled around the wall and stood outside.

  Diane was muffled, locked somewhere. Hidden away safely while her noble brother dealt with the monster in the garage. But it was in the courtyard garden now, coming through the side entrance.

  Inside again. An open-plan living room. It was like a building site – ongoing renovations, fluttering plastic on some of the windows, holes in half the walls. Mostly, Sam was astonished by the sheer scale of the place – it was easily a mile in width, stretched to the impossible proportions of an early dream.

  There, a hundred feet tall, Max was in the kitchen, walking with purpose across the tiles. In one hand he held Sam’s pistol and in the other a red-stained towel, pressed into his neck. Flat on the ground, ducking behind the sofa, Sam peered over the arm. The fabric pattern thrummed on his fingertips – gravity pushing the shapes down an infinite fractal descent, somewhere he could easily fall if he were to slip.

  He went quick and quiet into the kitchen, staying low against the counter, held there by the swelling tides and storm waves now splashing at the black windows, throwing him left and right, up and down and in unthinkable directions. New dimensions defying the confines of mere vibration and language.

  Lost again in a memory. Gone and searching and the siren was a fire alarm. It made sense. Red bulbs were spinning somewhere on a wall. Confused, he touched a man’s chest and found the blaze – now just a small burn in cotton, a white blister beneath. A body. He centred himself into it. And the room was still. And the man was moving again through the hall, towards the garage staircase.

  Waiting there, facing away, something like Max Marston was armed – his tail curled like a windswept ribbon. If Sam approached slowly, he would turn and get a clear shot. And if Sam approached quickly, he would turn and get a poor shot.

  No further consideration needed, Sam took a breath and went sprinting, diving knife first towards the creature, which spun and made two cracking sounds. Sparks flew from his hip as they both fell down the narrow stairwell, thudding back into that red garage.

  The knife and gun bounced and skidded across the concrete. Crawling, Max arrived at the pipe organ, clambered up on to his knees and rested on the stool. Then, dazed, he leaned down for the blade.

  But it was gone.

  Strong and calm, Sam coiled the rat-tail once around his own hand and twice around Max’s neck. Panicked, struggling for air, Max drove back to his feet and, somehow, managed to grab Sam’s forearm, sending an electric shock of sharp pain through his entire body. Sam let go, slid to one knee.

  But, as Max turned, Sam rose again, seized him by his wet throat and pinned him against the organ – creating a long, lingering rendition of every note. Feeble fingers slipped off Sam’s face as he squeezed, showing teeth, holding eye contact, yelling now.

  ‘St . . .’ Max groaned. ‘St . . . st . . . op.’

  A revelation. For reasons he didn’t understand, Sam obeyed. He loosened his grip and placed his left hand gently on Max’s chest to feel his glowing heart. Both panting, both injured, they shared a peaceful moment – an unspoken truce. There was the most incredible sense of connection, as though their lives transcended time and petty disputes, and all there was, and would ever be, was this light, this love. This intimate, tranquil camaraderie. Two sentient beings here, now, forever.

  He cupped Max’s cheek and smiled.

  Without a doubt, it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

  ‘Goodbye, Max,’ he whispered.

  And then, with abattoir efficiency, Sam slammed the knife through his temple.

  Like dropped rags, Max slumped down, on to the organ’s keyboard – the dead weight producing a sudden jarring sound – a toddler’s symphony, echoing through the entire house.

  Cleansed now, rich and fine, Sam turned, stumbled and ascended the wooden steps, gliding up with the noise, lifted by the bold cathedral song. Upstairs, he passed through the gigantic open-plan kitchen and to a carpeted staircase, following the thud, thud, thud of another heart aboard this sinking ship.

  At the far end of the second-floor corridor, Sam found a closed door. The runner rug at his feet was perfectly black, a digital streak, devoid of all texture. His boots were silent. All he could feel was that yelling from behind the wood.

  ‘Let me out, Max, let me out, let me out, let me out.’

  But Max is dead, Sam thought.

  ‘What?’

  He touched his mouth. I stabbed him. Listen. We can hear his music.

  Diane carried on shouting as Sam knelt and breathed. He found some more clarity by squeezing his arm and looking at his long, shimmering hand – it was being sucked away. This madness had to stop. Who were these poor people? What possible justification could there be for all this carnage and senseless death? You can hear him. He’s trying to save your soul, Samuel. Listen to what he says. The answer will guide you.

  Just kill her.

  Sighing, Sam lifted the gun, pressed it against the door and fired two shots into the wood.

  Diane was spread out on the floor when he entered the room.

  ‘This is not a battle I can win,’ she
said. ‘I know that.’

  Without looking, he sent three more rounds into the tiles, but it kept talking. Accusing him. Nothing it said was unreasonable. Something that came crawling out of the earth – a foul perversion of all moral balance.

  Stepping over the rambling flesh, he found a medicine cupboard. Pulsing, swaying, singing pills – pass out, pass out – he squinted at the packet. The air-raid organ still coming from the walls. Found the letters b, e, n, z, orange and pushed three, four, into his red hand and threw them into his broken mouth.

  He turned and fell back down that red graphic, blue, black, bitter and harsh and calling out and sputtering, now it covered every piece of the house. The kitchen. There he bit the lid off a bottle of vodka and poured half of it down his open throat. It stung his cheek, some of it dribbling. The voice told him to pass out, he thought, as he tried again. He coughed and threw it away into the water. His skin buzzed as all his hearts thumped in the bricks of his body and neck and his flesh became the eternal, wordless void.

  Then, the ground gave way and he splashed into cold liquid. He swam to a piece of floating debris – a fragmented lump of wrecked ship. It was hard to get his leg on to it, but once he did he knew he was safe. Stranded out there, Sam spent more than a thousand years lost at sea – he went with the tides, passing around the globe. Relative to the spinning planet, he was totally still. All motion passed beneath him. And the clawing beasts, horned and tailed and fire-eyed, lurched from any shadow. But every single one scurried away in terror whenever he approached.

  Of all those endless centuries, alone on that hopeless craft, he could only remember a single dream. It was about a woman called Isabelle. She told him she could take him wherever he wanted to go. But, when he answered, his voice was silent – no matter how loud he screamed.

  Chapter 39

  Somewhere in the story, there was a lake. Sam could hear it. The first thing he saw was the silt and packed rocks, rippling beneath the clear, shallow water. A single blot of red, like ink from a dropper bottle, fell down – a quiet plop. It flowed deeper, turning to a long wisp of colour as it dissolved. An inverted mushroom cloud. Seeping from the duct-tape dressing on his forearm, which hung straight beneath him, he watched a clean track of blood read his palm – it spiralled round his index finger, then grouped on the tip for intermittent drip . . . drip . . . drips, like a leaking tap.

  He was lying on his front, on a jetty, on the lake – old timber as worn as driftwood. Rolling over, he looked up at the empty sky. It was dawn. With a great deal of effort, Sam clambered to his feet and stood at the edge. Below, a half-sunken boat, still tied, bumped every now and then against the vertical beam. And ahead, fog and trees around the borders, inversed in the fresh water – perfect mimics of themselves shimmering, as cold and grey as the morning above.

  Sam shivered and hugged himself. ‘Ah.’ He twitched.

  His left arm shook uncontrollably, like a crippled dog’s leg, buckled, locked in place against his chest. Vibrations aside, he realised he couldn’t move it. And his hip – he used his other thumb to pull his belt aside as—

  Fresh warmth pumped from a hole and poured quickly down his thigh, running through the heavy planks at his feet. He gagged and tightened the buckle another notch. When he flexed his jaw, he realised he was deaf in his left ear. It felt permanent. Some wounds he could remember, others were a mystery – hangover bumps best left forgotten. But, as always, if he traced the blame he found himself, hands sticky with regret.

  Bound for land, he limped along the jetty, swaying, stepping cautiously over missing slats. To his right, at the end of a wide mudflat, he saw a craggy cliff. A zigzag slope led down the rocks from the woodland above and a few sheets of corrugated iron and scaffold boards made a walkway to what looked like a cave. On the stone face, over the shaded entrance, soot stains from a campfire. The nook was impossible to access from the beach. Concealed. Discreet. A familiar thing.

  Sam frowned and took a few paces across the sand, framing the jetty, the shoreline and a bare tree in his vision. Pale, twisted branches had been cut away, the remaining limbs left to resemble a crucifix. Although now new twigs sprouted from the ends, and the whole thing leaned towards the water. He had seen this image before. A photograph used as a banner on North Serpent’s website. This all belonged to Diane Marston. No, it belonged to her next of kin.

  He pushed on through some mulch woodland and up a steep footpath. At the top, he passed his legs over a fence, tripped and fell into the grass. Whimpering, he felt the morning dew seep through his clothes. Damp, and on his knees, he vomited – his spine arching, coughing out nothing but hot saliva. It took him almost a minute to get upright again.

  Finally, following vague intuition through unpopulated countryside, he arrived at a house with a large garage on the front. The Marston family home was silent now and filled, wall to wall, with cold hell.

  It was, by some margin, the worst crime scene Sam had ever encountered. Max still slumped on the organ keyboard, his head bowed – around him, the concrete was painted, smeared, wet. And opposite, the rat seemed to claim Sam’s blood. At the radiator, he unlocked the handcuffs and put them in his pocket. Upstairs, Diane was sitting in her bed, wrapped in blankets, equally lifeless. The disparity between what he could recall and what he saw was irrelevant – they were dead and he was alive – it was not his job to ask how or why. Where would you even begin?

  On the living-room coffee table, he found his personal effects – all lined up. Like leaving a cell, he retrieved each item in turn. Mobile. Wallet. Pistol. A handful of change. Someone else’s car keys. In the bathroom, he cleaned himself and strapped his broken arm with a makeshift sling. There was a long raincoat over the back of a chair in the kitchen. He put it on, and let the left sleeve dangle empty.

  Outside again, on the driveway, Sam pressed the key fob and one of the cars – a blue saloon – blinked its lights at him. Before he started the engine, he used Max’s phone to make a call.

  ‘Nine-nine-nine emergency, which service do you require?’

  ‘Police,’ he said, and threw the mobile out of the car window. It bounced and landed face down on the shingle.

  Generally, Sam was a rational man. When it came to the conflict between heart and mind, he typically dealt with the latter. But today, as every part of him that made sense screamed, yelled, begged him to go to hospital, he listened only to the ache caged in his ribs. Go to Wrenwood Common. Go to Julius Jacob. Go to – God, anyone, please – the truth.

  The car was, thankfully, an automatic. But still he swerved, and lurched, and gripped the steering wheel like a lifeline at sea. He leaned against the door, his head on the glass, nestled and tense. And somehow, Sam managed to drive.

  As he did, he put his phone on loudspeaker and called Marilyn. He asked if Freddie was OK and she said he was fine – still sleeping. There were plenty of reasons to cry, but when she asked for his, he couldn’t answer. Instead, he heard himself apologising, saying bold, incredible things – the nostalgia and sorrow of a man on his deathbed.

  We see a petrol-station forecourt. A blue car arrives. The man climbs out, takes the pump and rests his head against the vehicle’s roof while he fills the tank. Then he steps away, tries to hang it back up, but can’t, so drops it on the ground. Fuel trickles out. He stumbles towards the door. Inside, store CCTV captures him shouldering shelf to shelf down an aisle, reaching into one for balance, sweeping crisps and nuts to the floor. At the fridge, he grabs a bottle of water, two energy drinks and slides them into his raincoat pocket.

  ‘Are you all right, mate?’ the clerk asks.

  The man waves a hand and heads for the exit.

  ‘Uh, you need to pay for that.’

  Tripping again, he pulls his wallet out and simply drops it on the floor. ‘Sorry.’

  The door beeps as he leaves.

  Driving now, Sam poured electrolytes and calories into himself – trying to draw another hour from this body. Despite the car’s he
ating, he could not get warm. After a long, swerving journey, he turned into the western lane of Wrenwood Common, beneath dark evergreen trees – tall and straight with their own shaded climates. The track was tarmacked but covered in potholes, twigs and seeds. Not a council priority, he supposed, serving just one house. And that house – a trembling mirage in this shock, surreal and soft. Hardly there at all.

  Pulling up, Sam switched the engine off and tilted sideways for his phone, to make his third call of the morning. He told Isabelle not to talk while he explained all the things he’d learned, all the things he’d killed, since he left her in that meadow. Could he still spin the dial and go back there? See the flowers. Smell the grass. Hear their deal. All his values for all of hers.

  ‘Wait for us,’ she said. ‘Please.’

  Looking through the car window, he sighed. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I just . . . I just can’t.’

  ‘Sam—’

  But he hung up, opened the door and fell out on to the road. Back to his feet, he limped towards the house. The garden was overgrown, and Sam, almost at the front step now, found acute fear in the empty silence. A strange, dreadful certainty that he was in the wrong place. And it was too late.

  The camera looks down on Julius in his security room, with his wall of monitors. He’s asleep at the desk – forehead on his elbow. But, a sound, something bumps him awake. Leaning into the central screen, he sees that, like him, Robin has closed her eyes. And he stands.

  She’s snug, peaceful in her bed. When Julius enters and places a small tray on the carpet, she doesn’t stir. He picks up a syringe and sits down on the mattress, by her side. And still, she sleeps. We see her rosy cheeks, flushed and warm, as he strokes a blonde curl from her face.