Night By Night

by Jack Jordan

  She should leave, wait outside the front of the house until he returned, but night was falling, and the temperature with it. She would be a shivering mess by the time he came home. If he came home at all. And if his wife returned home first. . .

  She stood in the kitchen against the filthy counter with her eyes on the door leading further into the house. She wondered where the toilet would be in a house as old as this, debating if she could hold it for another hour or so. She couldn’t. She would use the toilet and then wait for him outside.

  The door opened with a long, drawn-out creak. The hallway was dark and smelt of damp and soot from a coal fire. She walked down the hall and opened the first door. The living-room. Shadows of furniture stood out in the darkness; she spotted the coal fire, lurking in the shadows of the brick chimneybreast. She passed the front door and looked up the stairs.

  She would be quick. They would never know she had been inside.

  ‘Hello?’ she called.

  Her voice rang up the staircase, echoed back at her.

  She climbed the stairs, flinching with each creak of the boards, and stood on the small, dark landing. She opened the first door and peered inside, her hand feeling the wall for the light switch. The bulb dangling from the centre of the ceiling flickered to life, revealing flashes of the room.

  She moved into it, her eyes never leaving the photos plastered to the walls. She stopped beneath the bulb.

  The victims stared back at her.

  He was working on the case.

  She looked at each one of them in turn, meeting their eyes, saying their names inside her head, remembering each of their families, the pain in their eyes. There was a gap in the line-up, as though someone was missing. She imagined Montgomery waiting to hang a photo of the killer in that spot, directly in the centre of the victims, of all the chaos he had caused.

  Someone on the force was just as passionate about justice as she was. Montgomery must have known what was going on inside the station and had been working on the case in secret. She closed her eyes and sighed with relief, a smile creeping across her cheeks. She wasn’t alone. Montgomery had been her last chance before the other police closed in. Now he could protect her, and convince others that there was something to her claims.

  When she opened her eyes again, her gaze fell on a photo that had fallen to the floor. Her eyes drifted to the gap in the line-up and back to the photo lying below it. She picked it up and inspected it.

  It was a photo of them all.

  Parts of the victims had been torn out and stuck together, the rips around each chosen feature like scars on the face. Adam’s hair. Finn’s eyes. Jamie’s smile. Zach’s nose. Phillip’s jaw and cheekbones, Johnny’s neck.

  She inspected the back of the photo and stuck it on the wall, pressing hard on the Blu Tack. She stepped back, looking at it, waiting to see what Montgomery saw.

  ‘No. . .’

  She stumbled back, shaking her head in disbelief. Her heart hammered against her ribs. Tears immediately formed and fell, dashing down her cheeks.

  The victims made up one person.

  The victims, when pieced together, looked like Jay.

  A door creaked open downstairs. She shot a look at the open doorway.

  The kitchen light was on.

  The key was still in the back door.

  ‘Hello?’

  FINN’S JOURNAL

  19th April 2018

  I have told you my story. Only he and I will know how it ends.

  My hair started to fall out by the handful a few days ago. My nails are torn and bitten to the quick, the skin around them gnawed and scabbed. I have some sort of stress rash all over my body. I don’t know who the man in the mirror is, nor do I want to know him, but it’s who my stalker has made me become.

  To the landlord’s joy, I’ve ended the lease on my flat, with the plan of leaving Rearwood at the end of the week. I don’t know where I’ll go, only that I need to get away from here. But deep down I realise that anything I do is fruitless. He’s coming for me. I can feel it, like an aching in my bones. I can’t stop myself from moving: tapping my foot, grinding my teeth, drumming my fingers against my knee. I never thought I would surrender, but I find that I’m waiting for him, accepting my death. I have nothing else to give. The fight inside me died a long time ago.

  But just because I’m giving in doesn’t mean I don’t want to be found. Don’t let him do this again. I promise you: waiting for death as it lurks around every corner, locking myself away until the end like a convict on death row, is the worst death imaginable.

  The buzzer’s just sounded. My time is up.

  If you’re reading this, please believe me. I’m not mad. This is all too real, and if it can happen to me, it can happen to you. I’m not special or unique, I’m normal – I’m just like you. As long as he is still out there, no one is safe.

  I should write something poignant for my last words, shouldn’t I? But then they would only be words on paper. Only he will know what I say before my death. I wonder what I will say.

  FORTY

  Rose stood frozen to the spot, her eyes never leaving the open door.

  ‘Who’s there?’ he asked. He was walking up the hall, heading towards the stairs.

  Hot urine soaked through her jeans.

  It couldn’t be him. She had got it wrong. She met Jay’s eyes as the other victims stared out at her, their smiles frozen onto their faces for eternity.

  Her first thought was to kill him. If Jay had been on his wall, it meant Montgomery had something to do with his death. But her brother had taken his own life – she had found him herself, saw his body floating in the bloody water with her own eyes.

  But she never did find out why.

  The stairs creaked.

  He was coming up.

  He had her cornered. She had to get out of there. She rushed to the window and raised it, stiff in its frame. The night air ripped into the room, raising the hairs on her arms and cooling the wet patch in the crotch of her jeans. The banister whined beneath his weight. He was almost at the top of the stairs.

  She placed one leg over the ledge and then the other. When she looked down her mind spun. It was a long way to fall.

  The sun had set and the grass was dark with dusk, hiding any uneven ground, any dips in the earth. Her heart was beating so hard and fast that she could taste it. Nervous sweat dripped into her eye.

  ‘Rose?’

  She whipped around.

  Montgomery was in the doorway. He looked from her to the wall and then back again. His eyes changed in an instant. She saw the real him in his eyes, the man with a secret, a sickness.

  And she was the only living person to know what he had done.

  He took a step towards her.

  She leapt from the ledge without a second thought.

  The force of the fall slammed through her, rattled every bone, jarred her brain against the sides of her skull. It felt as though all the vertebrae in her spine had locked together with the impact. Her mind took a second to reboot, but when it did, pain screamed up her calf from her ankle.

  She looked up at the window. Montgomery was staring down at her, his pale face lit by the moon, before he dashed out of sight.

  She scrambled to her feet and fell with a scream as the pain seared from her ankle to her hip. Biting her lip, she forced herself to stand again.

  She couldn’t head for the road, he would catch her in a second. Despite his limp, he would be faster than her now. If she wanted to get away without being seen, she had to hide until she had a chance to flee.

  She tried to walk. The pain in her ankle made her fall to her knees, her second scream echoing across the vast land. Hot tears landed on the grass. Her foot felt useless now, a limp, fleshy weight to carry behind her as she fled. She had a strange instinct to get rid of it, like a fox with its leg caught in a trap, chewing down to the bone until it was free.

  She spotted the barn through the shadows just as it began to rai
n, and crawled on her hands and knees, moving as fast as she could. Mud packed beneath her fingernails and the cold wind lashed her hair into her eyes. She bit down on her lip to silence her groans as pain echoed through her body, pulsed at the joint. She could barely see her hands through the tears.

  ‘Rose!’

  His deep voice echoed across the open space, carried with the wind and rain from the east. She reached the towering doors of the barn and squinted against the raindrops. She took hold of the handle and stood, shaking with the strain, before stumbling inside.

  The air inside the barn smelt of rotten wood and dung, but it was so dark that she couldn’t see an inch from her face. She ripped off her coat and discarded it in the shadows. It was only slowing her down. She swiped her hands through the air and knocked something cold. Metal clanged together again and again. She lowered her hands and felt a thick wooden stick resting against the wall, so she picked it up and felt it with her hands. It was heavy at the bottom, as though a weight was attached to the end. Splintered wood. Chipped metal.

  An axe.

  She used it like a walking stick, the metal head pressed into the barn floor, and edged forward with her spare hand searching the darkness. Mud and hay shifted beneath her feet, bunching around them, slowing her down. She stopped when she felt a ladder, rungs so soft with age that they were almost damp. Dropping the axe, she pulled herself up with her arms and her one good foot, the other dangling behind her and sending shooting pains up to her kneecap. A harsh gale curled around the barn, causing the wooden panels to shiver and creak. Rain thrashed against the roof, dripped through the cracks. She reached the top and felt hay. A hayloft.

  The door handle sounded through the darkness, twisted by a heavy hand. She dragged herself upwards with her elbows and crawled into the rotting hay, holding her breath as hay dust coated the inside of her mouth, stung her eyes. She arranged herself so she was facing the door and could watch his every move.

  The door creaked open. Lightning slashed through the barn, projecting his shadow across the dirty ground in a succession of flashes. She saw the glint of metal tools hanging from a suspended rack: metal hooks, saws, blades of different widths and lengths. It wasn’t a barn, it was a bloody abattoir. Something scurried amongst the hay with her, a mouse or a rat.

  ‘Rose,’ he said. His voice echoed in the vast barn, mimicking the shake of his voice. It sounded as though he was crying.

  ‘I’m sorry, I. . .’

  She watched him limp towards the wall and flick a switch. Strip lighting stuttered awake, suspended from wires attached to one of the beams. She shrank back into the hay and saw flashes of the space: the tools, workbenches, rotten hay parted where she had shuffled to the ladder. Old pigeons’ nests lay abandoned amongst the beams, the wood coated in their white faeces.

  ‘Something’s wrong with me, I know it. And. . . now you know it too.’

  He looked up at the hayloft, searching for her. Her heart leapt as his eyes scanned past her.

  ‘Your brother, he was. . .’ Montgomery was sobbing. He covered his face with his hands. ‘I loved him. I loved him so much.’

  She eyed the tools on the rack and wondered which one she would use to kill him. Her brother, her sweet baby brother. Furious tears burnt in her eyes and mixed with the hay dust on her cheeks. She should have known what was going on. She should have helped him.

  ‘I can’t describe it. I wanted all of him. Whatever he gave me, I wanted more, as if even devouring him whole wouldn’t be enough. I loved him too much. We were young; seventeen and twenty-one. We didn’t know any better, it was all so new.’

  Her fingernails dug into the rotting boards beneath her. She wanted to claw his eyes out of his skull, tear his tongue from his mouth with her bare hands.

  ‘He loved me too, Rose. He did.’ He walked out of sight and stood at the foot of the ladder, talking up to her. She had nowhere to run. Panic rose again, shoving down the fury.

  ‘He talked to me. He cried over your father, how he could never earn his love or respect, how terrified he was to tell him about us, about himself.’

  She watched the top of the ladder move against the loft with his weight. The rungs creaked beneath him. She shuffled backwards, further into the hay.

  ‘He talked about you. He loved you, but he couldn’t talk to you, you were never home. He came to me because he had no one else.’ He reached the top of the ladder and met her eyes. ‘He loved me, until our love got so strong that it terrified us both. I scared myself.’

  ‘Leave me alone. . .’ she said, shuffling back, her arms and legs tangling in knots of hay. The boards moved beneath her, soft as mud.

  ‘I couldn’t lose him. . . but I couldn’t replace him either.’ He rose, towering over her. ‘Whenever I saw men who looked just like him, my heart broke. But I was able to see parts of him in others: the same smile, the same eyes, the same laugh. I had to keep his memory alive, to keep the monster inside me satiated. I know what I am.’

  ‘Montgomery, please. . .’

  The loft wobbled beneath their weight. She heard a creak from one of the floorboards.

  ‘I’m sick, Rose. I can’t stop myself.’

  The structure whined like a sinking ship. She froze and looked down, felt it straining beneath her weight. She could hear the wood snapping away in splinters, cracking to the centre.

  ‘And now you know. . .’

  The boards crumbled beneath her, until her stomach rose to her throat with the fall and she plummeted to the ground. Sheets of hay fell with her as she landed with a bang.

  ‘And I can’t have that.’

  Everything went dark.

  JAY

  14th September 1999

  Jay stopped at the front door of his home and wiped his eyes until the skin beneath them felt grazed, raw when the breeze touched them. Monty had dropped him at the end of the street like he always did, so no one knew where Jay went or with whom, but for once he wished he had been dropped off right outside the house so they would ask questions. That way, he could tell them everything.

  Something stopped him from getting his keys out of his pocket. He knew what it was, but he didn’t feel strong enough to think it through, let alone step inside and say the words: Help me.

  In order to tell them what was going on, how Monty was taking over, controlling everything he did, he would first have to tell them his secret, the secret they already knew but which none of them dared to address. It was like a fifth person living in the house with them, sitting at the table during dinner, standing between them whenever they spoke, its shadow cast over him, keeping him in the dark.

  He had tried to tell them so many times: he loved a man who frightened him, who refused to let him go anywhere without him, scolding him for doing or saying the wrong thing when they were reunited. When he met Monty, Jay had felt free for the first time ever, but now his life was even more confined than it had been before. He couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe, without worrying whether Monty would disapprove and what would happen to him if he did, and when he returned home, he stepped into a different kind of prison, but stifling all the same. From the second he woke up to the last beat of consciousness before he drifted off to sleep, there was a weight on his chest, crushing his lungs, his heart.

  Life whispered behind the door. He heard the thud of Rose’s feet racing up the stairs, shouting to Mum over her shoulder. Mum would be in the kitchen cooking dinner, and Dad would be sitting in front of the telly with his feet up and the top button of his jeans undone. He liked listening to this, the unforced normality. The moment he stepped inside, everything changed. The air stifled with a buzzing tension. His very existence caused a silence that made him want to claw at his own skin.

  He took the keys from his pocket and unlocked the door. The smell of dinner hit him instantly. Music was playing upstairs; Rose would be getting ready to go out again. He walked along the hall and stepped into the dining room, the living room in view through an arch, the kitchen throu
gh another.

  ‘Hiya, lovey,’ his mum said from the stove.

  ‘Hi.’

  His father turned immediately and his whole body seemed to harden. He nodded in Jay’s direction before glancing back at the TV.

  He stepped into the kitchen and stared at his mother’s back as she stirred something in the pan. He could do it, he just had to find the words.

  Help me.

  ‘Hungry?’ she said and turned to look at him.

  Jay nodded. The words were clogged in his throat.

  ‘Have you had a good day?’

  He scares me, Mum. I don’t know what to do.

  ‘Yeah,’ he forced.

  ‘Good. Stew and mash for tea.’ She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead before turning her back again to face the stove.

  The moment had passed. He turned back into the dining room with tears pricking his eyes and glanced briefly in his father’s direction. He was laughing at something on the TV. He had to feel Jay standing there, but he wouldn’t look his way.

  Jay stepped back into the hall and climbed the stairs, stopping before Rose’s door, and knocked too timidly to be heard over the beat. He knocked again with more weight.

  ‘Yeah?’ he heard her shout.

  He opened the door and saw her slip into her dressing gown, catching a glimpse of her breasts in the mirror. He blushed as she turned, tying the gown shut, and smiled.

  ‘Hey, bud.’ She turned back to her wardrobe and moved clothes along the rail. ‘Hay fever playing up again? Your face is all red.’

  He nodded quickly.

  All he had to do was say it: Help me. Two words, and this would all be over. She would help him, he knew that – she loved him, perhaps more than anyone else in the house. But the thought of her hating him for who he was, for the secret that kept him prisoner, was too painful to bear.

  ‘You all right?’ she asked.

  ‘I. . .’