by Tim Lebbon
She should leave, open the door and flee, but to where? Out in the open she was just as vulnerable as in here. At least she knew her own house, felt confident here, if not comfortable. And he was invading her territory. The bastard was in her house.
Hardly believing what she was doing, Megan grabbed the large carving knife from the knife block and went out into the hallway.
A cloud of rooks darkened the landing window and she wondered which ones were his.
“Help me Jesus,” she whispered, “be with me, guide me, touch me, help me, help me …” She mounted the staircase. Whoever or whatever was upstairs must have heard her because the noises ceased. She was pleased in a way, but it also meant that she could no longer locate their source. She thought it had been on the landing initially, but then it had sounded more like
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wardrobe doors being nudged, or the partition between the bathroom and Nikki’s bedroom being scratched and scraped.
“Leave me alone!” Megan shouted, surprised at the venom in her voice. Surprised also at how confident she sounded. “Leave me the hell alone!” Silence was the answer. “I’ve got a knife, I’ll use it.” She sensed eyes upon her, though there was no one in sight. She was almost on the landing now, trying to avoid creaking boards she knew so well. The bedroom doors were all open as usual, but there were no shadows crowding them, no eyes peering out. Still, that crawling sensation prickled her neck and arms, the certainty that she was being observed. “Help me,” she whispered again, and the shape ran from Nikki’s room.
She screamed and threw the knife, realizing as she did so that the thing was small and black, not the tall man she’d been expecting. The blade flew wide of the shape. It darted directly at her, halted and reversed direction before Megan had time to finish her scream.
The cat scurried about on the landing for a moment, confused and shocked, and then it stood just inside the bathroom door. And stared.
She’d never liked cats. They always seemed to mock, she thought, licking their paws and grumbling and sauntering around, never once dropping their gaze because they knew things you didn’t. She’d never seen this one … and it not only knew things, it knew her, she could see that by the way it stared, looking her up and down, a
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very human gesture. It had seen her before. Mocked her before.
“Try your best, my love in God will protect me,” she hissed. The cat stared, the slits of its eyes narrowed, even though the light levels remained the same. It blinked once, turned and walked into the bathroom.
Megan picked up the knife, followed it in and closed the door.
She couldn’t decide whether or not the cat was scared. She was. She hated cats and she was terrified, so it should be coming at her, slinking around her legs and purring and laughing in its purrs. But it was hunkered down behind the washing basket instead, watching. For an insane moment she was suddenly sure it was the cat from the church, but that one had been a different color, and it was dead …
“Whether it’s you or not, you won’t be there for long,” she said, fear giving her voice a gravely edge. Those eyes … they terrified her. Totally dominant and confident. They never wavered even as she stepped forward, grabbed the washing basket handle and dragged it across the floor. “You hear me, you fucking weirdo? I’m not scared of you. And look what I have here.” She turned the knife in her hand.
The cat laughed at her. It was a hiss, a baring of teeth, but there was no fear or violence there. It was a laugh. Wherever he was hidden and whatever he was doing, he was laughing at her now.
Megan lashed out with the knife and stumbled back in surprise as it opened the cat from neck
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to rump. Blood spattered onto the white porcelain wc pan and fur clung to the blade like a line of tiny spiders.
The blood splash dripped and dribbled into the shape of one of Brand’s scars.
The cat changed. Its eyes went wide with pain, their color shifted, and its hissing laugh changed to one of shock and rage. It tried to run but its legs would not function. It slithered in its own leaking mess, paws scrabbling for purchase on the slippery floor, teeth bared again as it hissed and snarled.
Megan glanced at the bloodstain again, but it had run past that shape now, smudged into something more chaotic. “Oh sweet God,” she said, appealing for help and cursing at the same time. She had never killed anything in her life, not like this. Spiders and flies and ants, yes, but never something this big. And never so cruelly. A grey shape bulged from the rent in the cat’s side, and the more it struggled the more the thing slipped out and caught on its slick fur. The dying creature keened like a baby in pain.
Megan took refuge in the only place she could: blame. “You bastard!” she shouted, sweating and swearing, “You fucking, freaky bastard, look what you made me do, look at it, look at the poor thing-“
She stepped forward and lashed out again, closing her eyes this time as the knife stuck home. It jarred in her hand and grated against something, and she let go and stepped away, eyes still closed, listening to the final few jerky movements of the animal as it died on her bathroom
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floor. When all was silent she looked. The cat was dead. The knife was jammed into the back of its neck.
“It was his, it was his,” Megan whispered. She had seen eyes like that before. After the attack, back in the city, people had watched her, friends and relatives regarding her differently. Everyone was fascinated and they disguised morbid curiosity as concern. Walking along the street she had sometimes seen someone on the other side acting strangely, or the swish of hair on a turning head from the corner of her eye as she passed a shop. She had become used to eyes flitting from her as she looked at people, and even more used to the blatant stares. She knew the difference between a casual glance and a determined gaze. Even on a cat.
The shakes were settling in now. Five minutes ago she had been drinking tea, convincing herself that all was right with the world, that any fears she may have were unfounded, constructed from Brand and how he’d unsettled her. Now she was standing in her bathroom over the corpse of a butchered cat.
She noticed for the first time that it wore a collar. She did not read its name-tag.
“It was his,” she said again, backing from the room. The way it had been looking at her! The snarl that was a laugh! Wherever he was he was blind to her now, but she was certain he’d still be smiling. Hiding in a ditch or a dirty room, knowing what she had done and aware of what she must be feeling. And smiling. “It was his.”
Megan went downstairs and turned on the
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kettle. She would make another cup of tea. She would sit and drink and stare from the window, looking through the steam from her mug, and convince herself that things were fine.
As the kettle boiled she held onto the worktop, fingers pressed down on its surface until her nails went white and her knuckles felt ready to burst. There was an ant hurrying across the floor just in front of the Rayburn. It did not seem to be coming towards her, or moving away. It was aimless. Of course it was. May be his, she thought, but the fear was bounced back at her and subsumed beneath the lies she needed to create to drown the truth. Aimless and its own thing, nobody else’s. For God’s sake, how could anyone use an ant?
Or a spider or a bird … or a cat.
Megan laughed and shook her head at her own stupidity, and on the way to the fridge she made sure she trod the ant into a quarry tile. She had to hold onto something.
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Chapter Nine
Of course, there had been nothing in the woods. That was a crazy thought. Nothing but the buried fear of failure stalking him as he stalked something else, something-or someone-long gone. Because he had beaten Brand and scared him away. He would never see him again. And that was that.
By lunchtime in work, Dan had convinced himself that this was the truth. He was not very good at thinking around problems like this-his thoughts were scattered, without o
rder or definition-but that morning, poring over figures he could not see and letters that remained unread, he succeeded in realizing the truth. It was a pleasant truth, a comfortable one, because he had scared the guy away. He had protected his family … if there had ever really been a threat
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from Brand in the first place. He was a wanderer. A loser. And now he had lost, he’d wandered away out of their lives.
Smiling, actually a little embarrassed at his fleeing the woods last night, Dan reached for the phone to see how Megan was faring at home. It rang just as he touched it and, enjoying the idea of fate grinning down, he snapped it up.
“Honey!” he said.
There was a pause, a whisper of breath-or perhaps a restrained giggle-and then a voice. “Well yes, as I’ve already said, I’m sure that’s what it tastes like … Honey.”
Dan felt a chill prickle his skin and his shoulders actually slumped as failure once again attacked his thoughts. He was scared, angry and shocked all at once. What could he do?
What should he do?
“Just you stay …” he said, but he got no further. Brand laughed, loud and hard and hearty, and Dan imagined him leaning back in whatever chair he occupied, holding his stomach with both hands, the phone hooked beneath his chin.
Dan went to hang up but could not. If he did that he’d spend all day wondering what Brand had phoned to say, and if it was something bad … something worse than empty threats … Dan may regret it. What if he’d called to say, I’m with your wife now, and I’m about to fuck her with a rolling pin and slit her throat? He’d let his wife and himself down once, and he swore that it would never happen again. So he waited and listened as the laughter subsided.
Brand laughed until he was hoarse, his breath
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catching when laughter turned to tears, voice screeching, the plastic telephone receiver shaking in Dan’s hand as the speaker within vibrated, on and on. And then he stopped. Instantly, without a sigh or a groan. And his voice was as dark and dank as ever.
“Broke my fucking skull,” he said. “All I wanted was a moment of your time, and instead you broke my skull.”
“If you come anywhere near my family, I’ll kill you,” Dan said. It should have sounded melodramatic, but coming from him it was merely pathetic and weak. Not even worthy of a laugh.
“I don’t plan to come near your family,” the voice said, all innocent and smooth. “I plan to come in them. I’ll shoot between your daughter’s lovely lips, and maybe I’ll honor Megan with a good hard fuck. Or perhaps not, considering your wife’s track record with pussies.”
“I’ll call the police,” Dan said, voice raised. He thought of shouting louder in the hope that someone in another office would hear, take the hint and make the call. Maybe they could trace this. Maybe they could find out where this sick fuck was calling from and-
“I’m not calling from anywhere,” Brand said. “I’m going to make the next few days very, very long for you. Time flies when you’re having fun … but when you’re watching everything you’ve lived for destroyed, my oh my, how it must stand still. When everything is happening and you begin to wish you’d given me a measly lift, just think: while for you it’s a collection of the longest moments of your life, for me it’s not even the
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blink of an eye. It’s a moment between moments. A blank between thoughts. A moment of my time. And it’s something you’ll wish you never had.”
The threat out in the open changed everything: the way Dan thought of himself and his family; his sense of justice; his worry over work; his ideas of what was fair and what was not. Everything.
“What do you want?” he managed to whisper.
“Nothing.”
“What can I give you? To go away, what can I give you?”
“Giving time is past. I’m taking.”
“Please … please …” Dan knew he sounded even more pathetic and out of control, but he was scared, so ball-shrinkingly, bowel-looseningly scared that he could think of nothing else to say.
“Bye!” Brand said, cheerful and jaunty. “See you around!”
“Don’t hang up!” But Dan was already talking to nothing, casting his voice along lines that no longer heard, listening to the dull, empty hum of a broken connection. He wondered where Brand had been calling from and what lay between them. There was a link, a solid physical link which, given time, he could follow: leaving the phone on his desk, unearthing the cable, crawling hand over hand, passing over and under roads and fields and houses, until he emerged from a wall and saw Brand sitting there with the phone resting on a table beside him, mouthpiece still hot and wet from his laughter. Brand, his
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dark eyes hidden by his fall of black hair, his scarred eye closed as he leaned back and knotted his hands behind his head, smiling at the ceiling and relishing the moment.
And given the chance, Dan would kill him.
He put the phone back onto its cradle and rested his head in his hands, rubbing at his temples as if he could massage out the fear and press in a solution. But a solution to what? A total headcase making stupid threats? No, there was more than that. And for the first time Dan wondered whether he was the only one who’d seen Brand since that snowbound night.
“Oh shit!” He snatched up the phone and tapped in his home number, suddenly certain that he’d be speaking to Brand again in a matter of seconds. He’d speak to Megan and hear Brand laughing down the phone, hear his wife screaming past Brand’s hand as the bastard screwed her on the hall floor, leaving the phone off the hook so that Dan could hear everything, see everything in his mind’s eye. And this time, Megan would be more out of his reach than ever.
He almost hung up and went to drive home, but the ringing stopped and there was a gasped breath from the other end.
Again, he almost hung up; he did not want to know. He squeezed his eyes shut and winced at the terrible, selfish thought. He did not want to know if anything was wrong. “Megan,” he said quietly.
“Hi Hon,” she said.
“Megan!” He gushed it rather than spoke it this time, slumping back into his chair.
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“I’m feeling a lot better now, if that’s what you’ve called to ask,” she said. “I’ve had a bath, prayed a little, and God and aspirin have settled my stomach.”
Dan heard the smile in her voice but he could not bring himself to answer with a quip. “Good, I’m glad, don’t want you being sick again. Everything okay?”
“Fine, yes, I’ve told you. I’m going to spend the afternoon reading. I’m drinking lots of tea.”
Lots of tea. Strange thing for her to say, but then sometimes his wife did come out with peculiarities, especially after she’d been praying. Dan had not prayed since he was a kid at Sunday school. He thought seriously about it now.
He needed guidance and help, not just with how to deal with Brand and whatever threat he posed, but how to handle it with his family as well. If he told Megan the truth now, he’d end up having to explain why he’d beaten the bastard around the head in Bar None. Justin or Brady hadn’t said anything to Megan yet, but when they next saw her they’d surely mention it, whether he asked them to keep it quiet or not. He’d not heard from either of them since that night. He knew just how shocked they must be.
“Good,” he said. “Fancy a cuppa myself.”
“Will you be late home tonight?”
“Maybe.” Why? he wanted to say, but there was no reason to ask and he hated Brand for planting suspicion. Suspicion at his own wife.
“Oh. I just need to know when to get dinner for. Thought as I was home I may as well do it.” It was a lie. His wife was lying to him. He didn’t
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know how he knew-face to face he could never untangle the truths from untruths, even though he knew they were always mixed in-but he knew. Perhaps simply hearing her voice, having nothing physical to distract him, meant he could filter the lies that much easier.
/> “Nice,” he said. “That would be nice. What are we having?”
“I’ll think of something.”
“Sure you feel all right?”
“Super. Looking forward to a quiet night in … get a video on the way home, perhaps?”
“Right. See you later.”
“Love you.” And she hung up. She never hung up first. She always waited for Dan to put the phone down, she joked that it gave her the chance to offer a parting shot when he couldn’t hear, a secret I love you, or perhaps a tosser if he’d said something to annoy her.
She was in a rush. Had to get dinner ready. No need to wait.
It was two o’clock. For the next hour Dan sat at his desk, waiting for the phone to ring, dreading it, and wondering just what the fuck he was going to do about Brand’s threat.
At three o’clock he rang Brady and asked him over to his house. Then he made his excuses to his boss and went home.
The front door was locked. Dan jiggled the handle and it took him back to life in the city, after Megan was attacked and she took to hiding in the dark, bolts thrown and blinds drawn. Out here they’d become accustomed to leaving the
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front door unlocked when they were at home. It was a foolish sense of safety, he knew, because bad things were just as likely to happen in a sheltered hamlet as they were in a big city. The fact that the surroundings looked pleasant merely hid the danger more.
He rang the bell three times and listened to it echo away behind the heavy front door.
“Just say you’ve popped by for a social call,” Dan said over his shoulder.
“You should be in work. Why would I do that?”
