A Step Into The Dark

by Vince Vogel

  “What happened to him?”

  “Some bloke came and took him. A friend of the family, he said.”

  “Who? Robert Kline?”

  “No, not him.”

  “Evil sod,” Ian Cross spat in the corner as he gently rocked in his chair.

  “No, this fella I’d never seen,” the old woman went on. “See, Carolyn wanted to keep them both, but they wouldn’t let her. That’s when she shouted at this fella that they was his babies. They was proof of what he’d done to her. The man got real angry, but also nervous. Finally, he said she could keep one.”

  “Was his name Tommy?” Alice put to her.

  “Yeah,” the old woman said like a lightbulb snapping on. “That was him. She run off with him after. I never spoke to Carolyn for fifteen years. Not till I found her locked away in that hospital. Such a sad life she had.” The woman’s eyes went deep into the pools of her melancholy. She could feel that sad life as well as she could feel her own.

  “So Tommy took the child?”

  “Yeah,” she uttered, waking up.

  “But where?”

  “A mate of his. Bloke he knew what wanted kids and he an’ his missus couldn’t ’ave them. That’s all I heard. Heard this Tommy tellin’ her that the baby would be okay. That this friend and his missus would look after him.”

  “And you never got the man’s name?”

  The old woman thought long and hard, her brows knitting together. The lightbulb shuddered behind the eyes but was unable to illuminate itself bright enough to find the name which scratched about in the darkness of her old head.

  “All I got is some old couple,” she finally pronounced. “But I ain’t got a name an’ I never saw them. Tommy just left the flat with the babe and that was the last I see o’ the boy.”

  93

  “Where did Tommy take the other boy, Carolyn?”

  It was hopeless. Carolyn Burke gazed into the space between her and Alice, the detective kneeling once again before her wheelchair. Jack stood watching at the door with the doctor.

  “I told her she’d get naught out of her,” the doctor whispered sideways. “She’s fully dosed up after earlier.”

  The sedatives cast her on an ocean and far away from the shoreline, indistinct voices called to her.

  “Who did Tommy give the boy to?”

  Her lips moved and bubbles formed. But no words. Nothing to placate the detectives.

  “Don’t you think you’ve wasted enough time with her?” the doctor stated to Alice and annoyed eyes turned sharply on him. “I mean,” he went on, a little softer due to her vexed expression, “she’ll be out of it till the morning. And even if she weren’t, I wouldn’t advise you to ask her anyway. You saw how worked up she gets when you mention the past.”

  They left. Marching out of the psychiatric hospital and driving back into the city. A swarm of pigeons screamed and dived about above the buildings in the last of the sun. Jack couldn’t help gazing up through the windscreen at them. Something appeared to have unsettled the birds. Some unseen, but still known tension thickening the air of London.

  The streets were relatively deserted compared to how they’d been on the previous summer evenings. People were scared. Hiding indoors. Many of the restaurants and pubs of central London were closed. There was a curfew on many of the most popular streets and police cordons admitting no one. The tourists were hiding in their hotels. The Prime Minister had made several appearances on television. She was currently busy in a back room of No.10 Downing Street, planning with her ministers, advisers and security staff.

  If only they could get them a name. Someone to add to the face of David Burke. They’d released a picture to the public. It had caused huge confusion. The maniac killer wasn’t David Burke, but it looked exactly like him, and because they didn’t have everything, all they could give the public was a face and half an explanation: that the man they wanted drew an uncanny resemblance to David Burke, hence the earlier mix up. The truth was far too complicated, and they hadn’t got it all yet, anyway.

  “Is he through here?” Alice asked when she and Jack came into the custody suite of Scotland Yard.

  “Yes, ma’am,” the custody officer replied, coming from behind his desk and walking with her to one of the cells.

  Having unlocked it, he opened the door for her and the two detectives went inside. At the far wall, David Burke sat on a wooden bench, elbows on his knees, sad face held in his palms.

  “Sorry about the ignobility of your surroundings,” Alice said to him. “But it’s the safest place for you.”

  “He won’t come for me,” David replied. “Otherwise he would have taken me with Cath and Mick. Is there any news on them?”

  “I’m sorry, no.”

  “What does he want?” He wasn’t really asking anyone in particular and the detectives weren’t armed with a satisfactory answer anyway.

  “Did he speak to you?” Alice asked him.

  “No. Didn’t say a word. But that’s not the weirdest part. He was already in the toilet cubicle when I went inside. Like he knew automatically which one I’d choose. I opened the door and there he was. I went to say sorry and walk out, but his face stunned me. It was like I was lookin’ into a mirror. The next I knew, he’d grabbed me and smashed me on the head. I remember sinkin’ to the floor and that was it.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Nothing. Look, your mate—George—he wouldn’t tell me nothin’. Said I was to wait for you lot. Well, now you’re here, so tell me: who in God’s name was that bloke?”

  The detectives closed the cell door behind them and sat on either side of David Burke on the bench.

  “This is gonna sound a bit farfetched,” Jack began.

  “Nothing would seem farfetched to me today. Nothing.”

  “Well, the man who took Catherine and Micheal is your brother. Your identical twin brother.”

  “No,” he muttered, eyes going as vacant as cats-eyes in the pitch black.

  But then something provoked a twitch at the edge of one eye. Jack gazed sideways at him and sensed that some realization was awakening in David Burke.

  “You knew?” Jack asked.

  “Not really,” Burke muttered without turning his glass eyes away from the dusty space between the door and the bunk. “I used to feel stuff sometimes. Like an unexplained sadness on a sunny day—you know? A bad feeling when I should have been feelin’ alright. I used to feel real sad and anxious sometimes for no reason. Mum took me to the doctors loads. Then I started havin’ these dreams.”

  “When was this?” Alice inquired.

  “From about nine.”

  “What type of dreams?”

  “Terrible ones.” He shuddered. “Like someone was hurtin’ me in a way that I didn’t get. Mum took me to a shrink and they thought I was bein’ abused. But when they checked me all over, they found nothin’ wrong. I spent years in kid psychiatrists. Mum was real paranoid that Tommy had done somethin’. They used to row about it a lot. I always used to think it was my fault they argued all the time. Because Mum always suspected that he’d done somethin’, but he never once touched me.”

  “And you think this abuse you dreamed about could have been happening to your brother?”

  “Yeah. Maybe. Years ago, I met some twins at a party. One of them worked with Cath and I got chatting to the pair. They started goin’ on about how they felt things and dreamed about things that the other had experienced. It was then that it hit me: what I went through could have been a twin.”

  “Did you confront your mum about it?”

  “Yeah. But she was already in the asylum by then. Didn’t seem to understand. Or at least pretended not to. I gave up in the end.”

  “I know this is asking a lot,” Alice said, “but during your time with Tommy, did you ever come across an old couple that he was friends with?”

  David thought about it, but then shook his head.

  “I don’t have a clue,” he admitted. “Is it impo
rtant?”

  “Tommy Lewis gave your brother to a couple, but that’s all we have at the moment. We need to find them and find out his name. Once we do, it’ll be easier to track him and find your family.”

  “They hurt him,” David said with worry in his eyes. “I know that. It must have been this couple. They treated him awfully. In those dreams, I was being hurt.” David Burke turned to Jack with a horrified look. “He’s really angry. I used to feel it sometimes. It made me have panic attacks. So much anger. Now he’s got Cath and Mick. What’s he gonna do?”

  “We aim to find out, David,” Jack assured him. “We aim to find out.”

  94

  He exchanged vehicles not long after hijacking the unmarked police van. Ordered the man to drive them into the country. Got him to stop by another van on a single laned road. “Look,” the driver had begun saying, turning around as he did, but his words turned to blood as they hit the windscreen.

  He left the van as it was, the two dead men leaning on the dashboard, marching his two hostages into the back of the other van. He ordered Catherine to wrap duct-tape around Micky’s wrists and ankles, barking at her and making her jump when he accused her of not doing it tight enough. She cried as she did it. Begged for mercy. “Please,” she sobbed in helplessness. He didn’t say a word to her. Just held the gun on them. She finished and he asked her to back up to him. He then taped her wrists, flipped her over and pushed her into the van with her son, bound her ankles, and covered both their mouths.

  For the next hour, they lay on their sides on the cold metal, the van driving on smooth roads before bumping along what they assumed to be a dirt track.

  They came to a stop, the click of the handbrake going on, and the two shuddered with absolute fear. The doors opened and they couldn’t help panicking as they gazed into the blinding light of the low sun. Micky was reminded of Saturday night; the flashlight beam burning into his eyes, the shadow standing within it.

  Arms reached out of the light and grabbed ahold of Micky. His mother screamed into the duct tape as he disappeared into the sightless sunshine. She could hear the sound of him being dragged over gravel. Then nothing. She sat up, gazed out the door. Her eyes adjusted and she could see a dirt yard, an old tractor standing in a knot of tangled vines, a pile of bricks next to a rusted pickup, a car with no windscreen and tall grass poking up out of it.

  The light was abruptly blocked by the shadow. For some reason, she kicked out with her bound feet, knowing already that it was futile—survival instinct carrying on regardless. He caught the feet easily and yanked her violently out. She landed with a thump on the hard dirt ground, the dust catching her eyes and making her cough. Her head struck the ground as she was dragged by the feet, more dust kicking up in her face. The back of her shirt tore open when she slid across cold concrete. They stopped and he slung the legs down hard.

  She sat up, groaning at her bruised body, and saw Micky sitting against a wall about four meters away. She glanced around the place. Bare concrete, block walls and a few cobweb-coated farming machines.

  He ripped Catherine’s gag off.

  “Why, David?” she sobbed.

  He crouched before her with an odd look on his face. He looked like her husband, but the expression she saw on his face wasn’t that of David.

  “Who are you?”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” he said in a voice that sounded similar to her husband’s, but lacked the same life and warmth. “At least you’re beginning to realize I’m not David.”

  “Who, then?”

  He grinned at her like a tiger.

  “Mr. Monster,” he said sharply.

  “Why us?”

  “Because you’re his. It’s as simple as that. I wish to create a schism in my brother.”

  “Your brother?” she repeated in a hollow and bewildered voice.

  “Yes. Isn’t it obvious?” He pointed to his face.

  “He never mentioned you.”

  “He never knew I existed. Though he certainly will now.”

  “I don’t understand,” Catherine Burke gasped.

  “Then I’ll explain. Your husband was born an identical twin. Our mother kept him and I was sent to live with monsters who treated me like I was one. I grew up feeling very lonely and angry. Alone in a hateful world that seemed to despise me. The whole of society hating me from birth. David had Mother. He found you. But what have I had? The world wanted to teach me a lesson and I’ve been asking my whole life why. So I did some digging. I found our father. Do you know who he is?” She shook her head. “A serial rapist and a murderer. He raped our mother and she ran away to a place where other dirty men had sex with her all day while we grew in her stomach. She would have been better off dead like those other girls. The ones I burned. Then, when it all got too much, she went home and had us in some grubby flat with our filthy grandmother watching at the side.”

  Catherine watched him with a mixture of fear and curiosity. She never really knew much about David’s youth; now she was getting more than the man himself knew.

  “My mother spent six months while pregnant being abused by men in some disgusting den,” he went on. “She would have been better off dead for what that did to her—turned her mad with misery. A person can’t be abused like that and come out the other side a straight person. You get bent, like a piece of metal in a mangler. There’s no coming back. We all break in our various ways. Mum broke into pieces and fell into what she is now. I broke a different way. I didn’t fall to pieces, but I’m broken all the same.”

  “What do you want?”

  “All I want from this world,” he said as though answering a different question, a febrile look to his face, “is feeling. I want to feel what other people do before all feeling is lost from the world. We’re getting like that. Losing our feeling. Like we’ve been hollowed out, our guts scooped out and tossed onto the floor for the dogs. You can sense it everywhere. See it in the angry looks. The defeat that oozes out of the concrete. See by the way people look at each other, contempt gleaming in their poisonous eyes. The world’s slipping off the edge into numbness… And when that happens, there’ll be more like me… Mad men commanding armies towards the destruction of the world…”

  He cut off and looked at her as though he’d only just realized she was with him, his face going pale like some fever had attacked him suddenly. He’d been somewhere else. Imagined himself in a dictator’s uniform, overseeing huge columns of troops and mechanical war machines. Saw the flames in the distance. He could have been that. If they hadn’t pressed him into himself. Hadn’t sullied him at a young age. The flames of the battleground dissolved and were replaced by a brick wall and a window. He knew both well. In the window, his mother washed up while looking with hawk eyes at him. He was wet and naked. Shivering at the end of the garden whilst holding himself tightly, the frost burning the soles of his feet, his breath looking solid enough to pluck from the air. He’d pissed the bed again and this was the punishment. “Let the frost dry him,” she’d called out as she dragged him outside. His own eyes gazed imploringly back at her beady ones. Even at age seven, he could tell that the old woman hated him. Hated the affection that her husband lavished on the boy. Attention that she thought she should get late on a Saturday night. She’d always suspected such a thing of her spouse. Suspected that the medical reasons for his impotence were a lie. It’s why they’d never had babes of their own. “A woman should have her own,” the boy had overheard her say to her husband on more than one occasion. “It’s like a cuckoo, otherwise. The kid feels wrong.” In secret, she’d taken him to the priest, but the holy man had refused her request for an exorcism. “Send someone from Rome,” she’d beseeched. However, the white-haired old man in the robe had still performed something as archaic as an exorcism: he’d blamed the problem on the boy’s race. “Perhaps it’s because the boy is colored,” the priest had said. “Us and them shouldn’t mix. There’s no hope of loving one another. We can bind hands as neighbors,
but we cannot be taking each other into our families. It’s not right and not what I believe God would favor.” Then there was the old man—father—who kept popping his head into his bedroom late at night to see if he was ‘Okay’. “You look pale,” the old man with the rosy cheeks would say, sitting gently on the bed. “A fever.” A wet hand across a child’s forehead. It was true. He was pale and burning up, feeling feverish as the old man leaned in. He checked other things for signs of illness. Places that only years later he realized had nothing to do with any known childhood ailment.

  Catherine stared at him. He was looking into the blank space. Cast away as he often was when he was allowed to think. It was one of the reasons he’d started all of this: he needed a hobby to get his mind off things.

  “I didn’t want to be like this,” he mumbled, and it felt to Catherine as though he were saying it more for his own benefit. “It turned out to be all I had,” he went on in a hollow voice, the anger and bravado gone. “Initially, I just wanted to find out where I came from. I knew I wasn’t theirs. In the end, the old man told me one night when we were in bed. It wasn’t long before they both died. I was fourteen and he’d taken me away to his sister’s in Bournemouth. Romance by the seaside, you could say. The old girl—the aunt—was next to useless, so he was able to express himself freely in her house. One night we were lying in bed watching the moon through the skylight when he told me my mother’s name. I asked and he just went ahead and told me.”

  “It must have been terrible.”

  He looked up sharply, the pupils contracting. Again, it was as if the speech were for his own benefit. That he was used to not having an audience and had spoken aloud these things many times while on his own.