The Outcast Hours

by Mahvesh Murad

  At one-thirty, there was still no sign of Nathan and Kim. Mia’s moods were now zigging and zagging, her hilarity fierce and high-pitched. Eventually she tipped into tantrum.

  “Noooo! You can’t put your piece there! I want you do that, so I can do this! I want Nathan and Kim!”

  “They’ll be back in a bit.”

  “But when? They’ve been hours.” The gale of distress ebbed, but only a little. “Is my mother coming here?”

  “Did Nathan and Kim say she would?” Erin asked, surprised.

  “No, but they’ve gone to talk to her. I wanted to go! I wanted to meet her!”

  ‘Mother’, not ‘mum’. ‘Meet’, not ‘see’. Hasn’t she even met her own mother?

  Mia threw herself on the carpet, and howled herself red-faced, with the inconsolable anguish of the very tired.

  This is ridiculous, thought Erin. This is cruel. I’m torturing this poor kid.

  What kind of abusive weirdos leave a little kid alone every night? I can’t believe I’ve been following their instructions blindly.

  “You should be in bed,” she muttered aloud.

  “Nooooo! Nonono! I need to stay awaaaake!” Mia thumped a cushion.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m not meant to sleep! Because if I do… everyone screams at me.” Mia gave a shuddering sob, her mouth rubbery and miserable. “You’re going to scream at me!”

  “No, I won’t,” said Erin firmly. “If you did something really wrong we’d have a talk about it, and maybe I’d tell Nathan and Kim when they got back, but I won’t ever scream at you. I promise.”

  In Mia’s wary gaze, Erin saw a tiny star of hope flare then die.

  “Yes, you will,” Mia mumbled sullenly into her cushion. “Everybody always screams.”

  Erin changed tack.

  “Why don’t we make a nest here on the sofa?” If Mia napped there, with the light on, Erin could watch over her and make sure she was OK. They buried themselves under cushions and blankets, and Mia calmed down. Her head sank to the cushion. Her eyelids drooped, then closed.

  And in that instant, the world broke open like an egg.

  No room. No hotel. No world. Such ideas were forgotten utterly. Even the words had no meaning.

  There was a wintry yellow light, which ached in Erin’s head and showed her nothing. The light got in her mouth, and was cold in her lungs, and then she couldn’t breathe any more.

  And she barely noticed because of the arches all around that went up and up and up into the shadows, till she couldn’t see them any more, but could still feel them rising and rising to a sky of bone, stretching her mind until she begged it to snap.

  Black things with dog-faces crawled around her, lashing their scorpion-words and trying to re-speak her into new shapes. And next to her pulsed the dark-light, a great and blinding mouth with teeth made for tearing horizons like crusts.

  It was the heart of everything. It was sublime in its tragic, incurable hunger. And it was screaming…

  There was a deafening smash.

  The bright hotel room seemed to rush out of the darkness and surround Erin, then spun around her as she tried to remember where she was. She was on her knees on the floor, and for a confused moment she thought something was physically hitting her in the chest. It was her heart, banging around like a bird in a net. In one of her fists, Erin saw a tugged-out handful of her own hair.

  Mia was still in the sofa nest, white-faced and aghast.

  “You promised!” she squeaked hoarsely. “You promised you wouldn’t scream at me! But you did! Just like everyone else!”

  The murmur of voices from other rooms had been replaced by yells and panicky gabbling. There were shouts outside as well. Erin staggered to the window, and saw that a van had careered into the car park and hit a tree. Lights were going on in the distant high rises. On the tarmac walkway near the hotel, a dying bat flexed and twitched.

  It didn’t just happen to me.

  “What…” Erin could barely speak, her throat raw. She was afraid that she might start coughing up gouts of unholy light.

  “I have bad dreams,” said Mia in a small voice.

  “What the hell!” Erin rasped into the phone.

  “You let her fall sleep, didn’t you!” Nathan exclaimed on the other end. “The one thing we asked—we told you—”

  “You didn’t tell me everything would go Event Horizon!” hissed Erin.

  “No, course I didn’t! ‘Here, look after this kid, she’s only half-human and her dreams drag everyone to hell.’ Just… make sure it doesn’t happen again!”

  “I’ve given Mia some strong tea, but she’s dead on her feet. How long has she been awake? I know you drove down from Scotland. She’s been up since the early hours, hasn’t she?”

  “Oh bloody hell,” muttered Nathan distractedly, “it’s coming up as ‘breaking news’ on the Post’s website. Chaos all over west Willbrook. They’re sending helicopters!”

  “Why did you bring her here?” Erin was starting to understand why Mia was housed somewhere far from other people, but the new mystery was why she had been so dangerously relocated.

  “Because Mia’s mother is local, and we need to talk to her. For the last three years she’s been paying us to look after Mia, but she’s not paying enough. The dreams get worse and worse. She won’t answer our emails, so we thought bringing her daughter back here might focus her mind.”

  “You took Mia from her home and drove her several hundred miles without her mother’s permission?” said Erin, aghast. “That’s kidnapping! I can’t be a part of that! I want to talk to Mia’s mother.”

  “You really don’t. Ever heard of Gail Delaney?”

  Nobody with a sensible, well-lived life would have known that name. Even Erin’s usual clients stayed well away from her. Delaney’s name was shrouded in a sour fug of rumours—murmurs of narcotics networks, human trafficking and mutilations. Her enemies had a habit of vanishing without a trace.

  “You’re joking,” whispered Erin.

  “If you contact her, she’ll know you know about her daughter. She keeps her kid a secret, so nobody can use Mia to get to her. Don’t go thinking that she’ll be grateful if she hears from you. She’s a psycho—and you don’t even want to know about Mia’s father. Just keep Mia safe. We’ll pick her up in a few hours, and Gail won’t ever know you were involved.”

  “I’ll keep her safe, but I can’t keep her here.” Erin’s shell-shocked brain was still struggling with the new revelations. “There’s an old people’s home just down the road! And a dual carriageway five minutes’ drive away! I need to take Mia somewhere where her dreams might not kill anybody.”

  “You were right, Mia, and I should have listened to you. OK, new game—‘Let’s Stay Awake.’”

  Loaded down with her own rucksack and some blankets, Erin hustled Mia out to the car. Once they were strapped in, she put on a CD of comedy songs with sing-a-long choruses. Erin sang as she drove with all the gusto she could manage. Mia remained hunched and despondent.

  “Come on, Mia! Join in! You can’t fall asleep if you’re singing.”

  Mia made some hollow-eyed attempts to mouth the lyrics, while Erin drove away from Willbrook. She had to steer up onto the pavement to get past two cars that had hit each other head on, and a few lanes were cordoned off by the emergency services, but further from Willbrook the lanes became clearer.

  Erin still felt queasy and unglued. There was a tingle in her joints, and a faint, nagging feeling that she had been dismantled and then reassembled slightly wrong. Her headlights hypnotised her. There they were, forcing little scoops of reality to exist. All around them lay the void.

  What was ‘seeing’, anyway? Energy bounced off things, and entered holes in the front of her head, and then her brain told her stories about what was in front of her. It didn’t mean the stories were true.

  The headlights abruptly sallowed, and everything tipped so that the road ahead was a helpless plummet into dar
kness. The steering wheel became a snake in her hands…

  …and then she was back in the world again, her heart jumping. She swerved desperately, just in time to avoid a looming hedge.

  “Mia!”

  Mia’s forehead had been resting against the window, her eyes half-closed. She jerked fully awake as Erin called out.

  “You shouted at me!” she wailed, her eyes glossy with tears.

  “I know—I’m sorry! Do you want to shout back at me?” Erin turned off the radio. “Let’s shout our favourite things, shall we? Favourite dinosaurs—go!”

  They yelled their favourite pizzas, vampire films, and animals beginning with S. It was too dark for ‘I Spy’ or ‘First One to See’, so they took turns to tell instalments of a story. But Mia grew sullen, and kept killing characters, so Erin was relieved when the estuary came into view. She turned onto a narrow tarmac lane along a slender promontory, and pulled up outside the stone hut that was the Ferry Museum.

  Mia stared at the unlit building and car park, and burst into angry tears.

  “I don’t want to be here! I want to go back!”

  “It’s just for a bit, till Nathan and Kim get here—”

  “They won’t! They said they’d come back to the hotel! And if they bring my mother there I won’t see her!”

  Erin had temped at the museum for a while, and as she suspected the door code had not been changed. Most of the building was taken up by the exhibition hall, the big skylights letting in the grey-ish, pre-dawn light to reveal the info boards and 18th century rowboat. Erin led a fretful Mia into the tiny staff kitchen beyond, where she risked turning on the light and boiling a kettle for coffee.

  “I hate you! I want to meet her! You’re all just scared I’ll tell her things! Like all the times they didn’t play with me, and things Kim called me, and when nobody came! I’ll tell her, and she’ll stab you all! And … and… eat your eyes!”

  “Eyes don’t have much nutritional value,” said Erin as calmly as she could. Clearly Mia knew enough to guess that her mother could be used as a threat. “She ought to eat them with some nice peas. Or Brussel sprouts.”

  I could leave, thought Erin. I’ve brought Mia somewhere safe and warm, far from any houses. If I go, she can get the sleep she needs, and it probably won’t hurt anyone.

  But I’d be abandoning a six-year-old in a strange building by a river. I can’t. I just can’t. She needs me.

  At 4.30 am Erin’s phone rang. It was Nathan, and he sounded surprisingly chipper.

  “Everything’s sorted. Where are you? OK, we’ll be there soon.”

  As the next hour crawled by, Erin feared that ‘soon’ would not be soon enough. Mia was groggy and wobbly, and her head kept drooping dangerously. Erin wanted to shake her, out of sheer, craven fear.

  “Mia, look at me! Mia, eyes open!”

  The eyelids sank again, and for a sickening instant everything tumbled back into the abyss. Then Mia’s dropped mug smashed, splashing her leg with hot coffee and waking her. Erin treated the scald, while trying not to throw up.

  At last a car pulled up outside, and Nathan and Kim got out. To Mia’s obvious disappointment they were alone. Both seemed in better humour.

  Kim paid Erin without complaint. Nathan asked for the caffeine pills, and Erin felt a guilty pang as she handed them over. Nothing was solved. Mia would still be prevented from sleeping. It just wouldn’t be Erin’s responsibility any more.

  Nathan opened the external door to leave, then hesitated, frowning.

  “A car’s stopped out on the main road,” he said. “It’s just turned its engine and lights off.”

  Kim scowled at Erin. “Did you tell anyone else you were here?”

  Erin shook her head.

  “Take Mia into the kitchen!” Kim hissed at Erin. “Turn that light off!”

  Erin obeyed. In the darkened kitchen, Mia’s breathing sounded frightened, so Erin crouched and put her arms around her. The door was open a little crack, giving Erin a view of the exhibition hall, and the tensed figures of Nathan and Kim.

  There was a crunch of gravel outside, and then a loud, sharp knock at the door. Everyone stayed motionless.

  “Stop messing around!” called a woman’s voice. “I know you’re in there! Your car’s outside.”

  “It’s her!” whispered Nathan, peering through the window. “Alone.” Kim gave a reluctant nod, and Nathan opened the door.

  The woman that entered was taller and more athletic-looking than Erin had expected. Despite the cold, she wore only combat trousers and a dark sleeveless top. Her dark hair was drawn back in a short plait. It looked girlish, in a way that her strong, hard face did not. Even in the dim light, Erin could see that the woman’s muscular arms and shoulders were criss-crossed by lines that were too dark for scars, and could only be tattoos. They looked like fractures in ceramic.

  “What can we do for you?” asked Nathan, failing to sound confident.

  “I want to see her.” Gail Delaney had a local accent, but it was tempered with something else Erin could not place. “If she’s going to be used to threaten me, I’d like to see if she’s worth it.”

  “She’s not here,” Kim said quickly, to Erin’s relief. A mother-daughter reunion suddenly seemed a chilling prospect. Mia made no attempt to burst from Erin’s arms and sprint to Gail. Perhaps her mental image of her mother did not match this hard-featured stranger.

  “Really?” asked Gail, and her tone of menace was unmistakable.

  “Don’t try to scare us,” Kim said bluntly. “You need us, and you know it. Anyone else you got to look after her would freak out in a day. They’d call an ambulance, or have a breakdown, or blub on the internet. We know everything. And we don’t care.

  “You told us Mia was half-human. You didn’t tell us what her dad was, but we joined the dots. We heard about the mess the police found on Strapper’s Hill eight years ago. Ritual stuff, severed fingers, the rest. And that was just before you and your boyfriend started making a name for yourselves, and kicking the hell out of anyone in your way.

  “So… we reckon you did some occult shit and summoned something to help your ‘business’ along. And you told it to be your boyfriend, and together you took everything you wanted. And then the magic wore off or whatever, and it buggered off to where it came from, leaving you pregnant. That’s about it, isn’t it?”

  Erin held on to Mia, wondering how much she understood.

  “No,” said Gail. “That wasn’t it at all.”

  Despite the queasy, grey light from the skylights, the darkness in the hall was becoming more oppressive. Gail’s eyes and her fracture-like tattoos grew blacker by the moment.

  “The summoning wore off very quickly,” Gail continued. “Within a couple of days. He didn’t really know what he was doing with that book. But I decided to stay. I liked his ambition… and something about his bones. I suppose I loved him. That’s probably why I ate him in the end. I did warn him I might, but I think it still surprised him. I regretted it afterwards, which is why I stayed on in this form, to find out what our offspring would be like.

  “I didn’t mind the pain of childbirth, but afterwards they handed me this… thing. A little, leaking wobble-headed cripple that couldn’t even stand or find its own food. It was too weak—a waste of good flesh and bones. I wanted to eat it too, to return its flesh to mine. And I knew that I would, sooner or later, when I wasn’t concentrating.

  “But that little blob was all that was left of him in the world. If I ate it, I thought I might regret that too. So instead I sent it away, and paid people to look after it.”

  “You’re…” Nathan looked flabbergasted.

  Gail smiled. The cracks in her skin darkened and deepened, and then broke open, with a dry splitting sound. Clots of shadow leapt out of the fractures, and landed around her on dozens of knife-pointed legs.

  The shadow-clots swarmed across the floor towards the siblings. They didn’t move like spiders, but the motion triggered the same
primal panic in Erin’s hindbrain.

  Nathan tried to smash at the shadows with a chair. Kim, perhaps remembering some childhood lesson, sprinted over and slammed her palm on the light switch, flooding the hall with light. It didn’t help.

  “Don’t look!” whispered Erin, shielding Mia’s eyes. Mia didn’t need to see Nathan’s skin spiralling off him like orange peel, or Kim being folded, and folded, and folded…

  At last there was silence in the exhibition hall. There was no blood. Brown-pink ribbons of something scattered the floor, and hung from the lamp and the display stands. They did not drip. Sometimes they twitched.

  A few moments later Gail walked into the kitchen. The shadows at her heels were the size of Great Danes now, but full of insectile angles. The black crevasses in her skin still gaped wide. Erin tensed, but Gail only had eyes for her daughter.

  Mia scrambled to her feet, eyes and mouth soup-plate wide. But she did not whimper or try to hide behind Erin. Instead, she reached out one small hand.

  “Mia, don’t—” began Erin, but Mia was already gently stroking the mandibles of the nearest shadow-thing. She looked at her mother, eyes bright with excited appeal, as if she had been presented with a puppy. Is it mine? Can I keep it?

  Gail let out a small, surprised ‘huff’ of a laugh. Her expression fogged, as if she were unsure whether to feel pained, pleased or confused.

  Perhaps this was the mother Mia had dreamed of after all. A mother who would stab her enemies and eat their eyes. A monstrous mother, who would make sense of Mia’s own monstrosity. In Mia’s eyes, Erin saw recognition and hope. She was no longer the only freak in a fragile world.

  “You should see this,” Erin said, trying to keep her voice level as she held up her phone.

  “Let me guess. You filmed everything, and I’m supposed to be scared.”

  “No. I’m not an idiot.” Erin swallowed hard. “It’s my CV. You’ve got a vacancy for a child-minder.”