The Long Dark Road

by P. R. Black

  ‘Brainstorm, I would say. Honestly. He’s upright, solid, dependable, boring… all the major reasons for marrying him. A good man. I think he’s lost his mind. He wanted me to go home, and get out of Ferngate… then again, that’s true of just about everyone I’ve met in this miserable town.’

  ‘It’s good advice, Georgia.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll be out of here before long.’

  ‘Mind if I ask what on earth you were doing out here?’

  ‘Retracing my daughter’s steps, I suppose. If I never have an answer about what happened, at least I’ll have experienced the place. Got a feel for it. It’s as close as I can get to her. Does that make sense?’

  ‘I suppose. You will go home today, won’t you, Georgia?’

  ‘That an editorial leader speaking?’

  ‘No. Just me.’

  ‘I’ve got one or two loose ends to tie up first.’

  ‘Try not to get yourself into any more scrapes while you’re at it. Speaking of which – what’s wrong with your face? Did he do that to you?’

  ‘None of your business.’

  ‘I’m just a private citizen voicing my concerns, Georgia. Nothing more.’

  ‘Sure you are. Since you’re speaking as a private citizen, would you kindly mind fucking off and leaving me alone? If you’re not busy, that is. In case you’re not getting the message – don’t let me catch you following me again.’

  ‘But you didn’t catch me following you.’ She grinned. ‘In a way, I hope I never see your face again, Georgia. There’s something about you that freaks me out.’

  ‘Everyone says that. Funny.’ Georgia returned to her car. She waited for Adrienne to start up; she flashed her lights, dazzling Georgia, as she turned out.

  ‘Bitch,’ Georgia muttered. But she waved, anyway.

  Then she prepared herself for one more walk up the long dark road.

  40

  When they get to that stage, they’re good for anything. Everything becomes crystal clear to them. There’s only one thing they require. Give it to them now and again, and you’re golden. They love you for it. It’s perfect.

  His diary

  Georgia took the steep, sheltered road, not deviating through a gap in the dry-stone wall the grounds as she had before. It meant she’d be absurdly easy to spot if anyone should be driving up it – but, counter-intuitively, she’d be well hidden from anyone who was looking for her anywhere else on the estate. It would be the last place someone with a gun would be looking.

  Georgia was making good progress, congratulating herself on a good plan carried out well. Then a sudden noise startled her.

  She gasped aloud. She clutched at the stone walls, uselessly. There was no escape hatch here, no hidden doors. A tiger pit might have sufficed, given the circumstances.

  There was a car coming behind her – she knew which one it was, too. And it was coming at pace, fast enough to obliterate her.

  For a split second it crossed Georgia’s mind to meet the vehicle in the centre of the path, arms raised – the only way she could possibly stop it.

  But this was her last chance. She ran forward. There, maybe twenty yards up ahead and to the right, the stone wall was broken by another fence.

  The crunched stone and the revving engine grew closer. Perhaps a tank might come over the brow of the hill, any moment – or something even more frightful, with foglamp eyes and a front grille studded with spikes.

  Running full tilt, Georgia reached the gate and yanked on the latch.

  It moved perhaps an inch or two, before a padlock rattled on the other side.

  The Land Rover was almost there, judging by the sound. There was no chance she could even climb – so she made herself small, crouching into the bottom right-hand corner, just where the gate gave a little. She squeezed in tight to the wall, tucking herself in as much as she could. Where the slope levelled out, it would mean the vehicle could accelerate – there was a chance, just a small chance, that it might go past her.

  It did; a blur of dark green. She didn’t take in the driver’s face, but she did take in that of the dog, behind chicken wire in the back of the vehicle.

  Georgia expected screeching brakes; then she’d have to face the angry red tail-lights. So sorry – she heard herself say it, a dress rehearsal of sorts – I thought I’d come up here for a break in the weather. It looked like such a nice path.

  And he wouldn’t believe her.

  But the Land Rover didn’t stop. It carried on towards the cottage at the top of the road. It came to an abrupt stop.

  Georgia stayed where she was, tight against the fence.

  The door to the Land Rover opened, and she thought: Oh no. The dog. She heard it bark.

  ‘Shut up,’ Mulrine snarled, closing the door.

  Georgia saw the dog’s head bobbling up and down in the back window. Almost certainly, it had seen her. But Mulrine was distracted, and strode up to the door of the cottage in some anger. He hammered at the green-painted door, then stood back, fists clenched.

  The door opened. Georgia couldn’t see the figure who stood there.

  ‘Yeah?’ High-pitched and polite. The sound of a well-educated son.

  ‘Want to talk to me about the Polish lass?’

  ‘What Polish lass?’

  ‘Don’t get smart with me!’ Mulrine bellowed. ‘The one in the papers! The one I saw you knocking around with after Chessington’s party last year! She turned up dead up the road. On the farmhouse I was planning on buying! Did you get her involved in that shit?’

  The reply was so infuriatingly laconic, she expected Mulrine to take a swing at the person who uttered it. ‘Calm yourself, old man,’ the son said. ‘That was a girl who got herself into a lot of trouble. Not all of it was my doing. You put that shit in your veins, it’s only going to go one way. Unless you’re made of the right stuff. She wasn’t.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Mulrine snarled. ‘Get out of the way.’

  ‘Don’t be cutting up rough, now… hey…’ Mulrine barged past, but the son’s voice remained an insolent purr. ‘Don’t make a spectacle of yourself.’

  ‘I swear to God…’ Mulrine began. Then the door slammed shut, cutting off his voice.

  Georgia crept closer, bent almost double, trying to ignore the sight of Saoirse the dog barking and snarling at her, fit to chew at the window. She ducked under a side window and then stopped at a back gate, unlatching it. She could get in through there and hide at the back of the house – which was where she had wanted to be anyway. Sat on her haunches beneath the window, she could hear the conversation going on inside. The window was old-fashioned, single-paned.

  Jed Mulrine’s son said: ‘Told you already, that’s all going to get taken care of.’

  ‘You’d better. Chessington had to talk nice to that bastard down the police station. You can expect the knock on your door any day.’

  ‘You worry too much. It’s sorted. No one’s coming in here without a warrant. And if anyone gets a warrant, I’ll know. It’s all in hand.’

  ‘It had better be,’ Mulrine growled. ‘This is your last warning. Take care of it. Right? I don’t want to think about it ever again after this! I will not protect you any more. Sort it out.’

  ‘I will. Be like taking out the rubbish, old man. Don’t you worry. Clean as a whistle.’

  There was a pause. Georgia was sure she had been spotted; or perhaps Mulrine had spotted that Saoirse was going nuts in the car, and become suspicious. She panicked, and prepared to run for the gate leading to the back of the cottage. But then Mulrine said: ‘I’ve had enough of this. The lies. The panic. It’s filthy, shameful. I’ll never get it out of my mind.’

  ‘She was asking for it. You know that. She found out too much. You’d have been caught in the flak.’

  ‘You didn’t have to speak to her.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Tooth Fairy. Who do you think? The mother.’

  ‘Her?’ A snort. ‘She’s made a fool
of herself from one end of this town to the other. Small wonder they haven’t carted her off to a rubber room. No one will take her seriously again. A screaming banshee. She’s turned into the village idiot. She’s of no consequence. No one’s listening to her. Not the cops… not Chessington… not the papers… nobody. Come on. Don’t be moody, old man. Sit down, grab a cuppa. Maybe something stronger?’

  ‘No.’ Mulrine hesitated. ‘Once you sort this out, I’m thinking about torching this place. Maybe getting some of the boys to put a bulldozer on it. These walls shouldn’t stand any more. When I see the outline of it on the horizon, I want to be sick.’

  ‘Chessington will be upset if you knock this place down. Good thing he doesn’t know so much about it, mind. Happy to leave you to your own devices… and me to mine. Probably sting us for rent if he found out, the old bastard.’

  ‘I’ve got to go. Remember what I said. Sort it out. Or I will.’

  ‘You getting brave? Oh come on, old man. I can see you boxing the fruit-pickers’ ears all right, but this isn’t in your league. Let’s not be a kidder.’

  ‘Just sort it out. Or by Christ, I’ll do something awful. Bank on it, boy.’

  ‘Don’t have a coronary.’

  Quick footsteps near the door. This time Georgia sprang. She was through the gate quickly enough – but the new, silvery latch wouldn’t fall over completely in time. She shrank back against the grey stone wall, looking out into a small, tidy back court, square patches of greenery hemmed in by old granite blocks.

  Mulrine said nothing as he strode out the door. When he pulled open the driver’s side door of the Land Rover, he yelled, ‘Come on, daft girl, sit! Sit down in your seat!’ Soon the Land Rover started up, turned in the driveway, then headed back down the way it had come.

  Georgia hardly dared breathe. She hadn’t heard the front door close.

  Then she heard a long, slow, ‘Hmmm…’ Then footsteps approached the gate.

  Georgia didn’t move. She held her breath.

  A matter of inches away, a hand reached out, flipped the latch closed properly, then tested the gate for good measure. The hand lingered for a second or two, fingernails tapping against the chrome-plated surface, and Georgia thought this is it, surely he knows what’s happened, surely he’ll come out, and then God knows what.

  But the figure around the corner turned on his heels and strode off towards the door. Still, there was no sound of the front door closing. A lock was snicked, with the front door tugged once, twice, just to be sure. Footsteps returned – heavier-sounding, clad in boots – and then the alarm disengaged in the car. The front door opened.

  It had been one of those big 4x4s that should have been on show, driven by men with mohawks and thick bacon necks. A glorified toy, the kind of thing that no one over the age of thirty should seriously admit to admiring, whether they did or not. Black paint, but silver suspension cages and gleaming alloys, the cab appearing far too high for someone Georgia’s height to climb up to. She heard a driver’s side door slam shut. And she might have had her suspicions confirmed, there and then, had she only been brave enough to stick her head out of the undergrowth far enough to get a look at the driver. But Georgia was not quite brave enough for that, not yet. The 4x4 started with a surly growl, and the broken slate on the pathway scattered as the wheels spun. The 4x4 moved down the track, heading away towards the main road and the circuit route back into town – or somewhere else.

  It came so very close. The tip of Georgia’s nose touched soil, was tickled by grass; brambles caught in her hair. Something moved across her cheek with multiple tickly legs, but Georgia did not flinch, did not give in to disgust.

  The sound of the 4x4’s engine was swallowed up by the trees at the far end of the pathway. All was silent.

  She waited a painfully long time. She did not trust this development; saw subterfuge everywhere. She imagined the person behind the wheel of the 4x4 parked up at the false junction on the main road just up ahead, invisible behind the treeline, waiting for Georgia to make her move.

  When she realised that the person in the 4x4 might in fact be heading to the petrol station for milk or to post a letter or some other short errand, Georgia quickly got to her feet and headed towards the ruined cottage.

  Now here’s what happened, she thought. This is how it went. Princess Stephanie falls in love with a handsome prince, and he gives her the magical gift of Cornfed. The princess is a clever girl but she has a sweet tooth, and Cornfed can be so very, very sweet for people. So she falls under the handsome prince’s spell. She meets some fallen pixies on the way who help her find Cornfed, and soon she needs more and more of it. Meanwhile, back in the magical kingdom, the handsome prince is drawing a lot of attention – and then there’s poor Buttons, who only wants to marry Princess Stephanie, but of course he’s too goddamned lame for her.

  So one night, a wicked witch decides to place a curse on princess Stephanie. She pretends to be the handsome prince, and tells Princess Stephanie there’s a place he can meet her with the extra special Cornfed she’s been wanting so badly. So Princess Stephanie does what the note tells her. She leaves her phone in her flat, and walks to rendezvous with the handsome prince in the middle of a terrible storm.

  Except a goblin knew about Colette the wicked witch’s plan. He’d been watching Princess Stephanie for a long time, and he’d wanted her for his own. And so he sees the message Colette the witch left for Princess Stephanie. And even though Colette the wicked witch planned to keep Princess Stephanie out of the way, she got more than she bargained for, when Princess Stephanie bumped into the goblin. The goblin knew a secret route back to his secret castle in the woods, and maybe something happened here to Princess Stephanie. Whatever happened, he surely took her away again before the knights could come and look for her.

  But this was Georgia’s version of the story. One she knew would be laughed out of the door by whatever policeman she told it to. Or perhaps she’d be told that the place had been searched; everyone had been spoken to and accounted for. Nothing to see here.

  She peered in at the room with the yellow curtains, ultra cautious, standing on her tiptoes before the window. It looked into a cramped galley-style kitchen, clean, with a searing bright sunbeam cast across a marble effect worktop. The place might have been a holiday rental, with doily patterned filigree on the curtains and on a tablecloth at the back. Pale blue and white china stood in a crockery rack against the far wall. Beside that, a fully stocked wine rack.

  Georgia crept around to the second window, with closed dark curtains. She looked in through a crack in the window. Gasped, and flinched. Bit her hand. She started forward, hands clasped to her face, drawing breath in great, frenzied gulps. She peered in through the crack in the window. Saw the same image. Had it confirmed.

  There was a skeleton lying on a bed.

  No, a cadaver, with sallow skin, appallingly bulbous eyes beneath tight-closed lids, hardly any lips at all. It wore some black pyjamas with limestone diamond patterning. The hair was longer, spilling over the wishbone shoulder blades, but still the same shade of black Georgia remembered. The corpse must have been preserved somehow, but clearly a corpse.

  She was never sure if she screamed, then, or rattled the window. What she did know, was that the corpse on the bed’s eyes flew open, and the mouth jerked open. Then the brown eyes blinked, stared, and saw.

  Then it screamed, the voice carrying clearly through the window:

  ‘Mum!’

  41

  One more adventure, I suppose.

  Final diary entry

  Georgia might have fainted; or might have been sent into some strange fugue; or perhaps been possessed. She saw Stephanie fall off the bed a shovelful of bones and tissue-paper skin, yellow as old wax, piled up on the floor. The hair completely covered her daughter’s face, and soon a knife blade of her face reappeared. Pockmarked, blistered around the mouth, the tongue yellowed behind rotten brown teeth. Stephanie sat up, hands finding purcha
se on the carpet, and Georgia clawing at the window, trying to find purchase, looking for the clasp. But it was modern double-glazing. Georgia battered the window.

  ‘Stephanie! You see me? I’m coming! Hold on… Get back…’

  Georgia scrambled over the pathway, picking up shards of grey slate. She found one with the appropriate heft and edging to it, then bellowed at Stephanie: ‘Cover your face! I’m coming in!’ She was half-sobbing, half-hysterical with laughter. ‘My darlin’, I’m coming for you!’

  She heaved the piece of slate over her head. It had a good edge on it, and she threw with all her strength. The window splintered, but did not break. It took several more to completely break through the window, and Georgia tore off her jacket, twisting it around her arm and punching out more shards. Then one razor-edged shard sliced down, with the lethal speed of a guillotine and the nasty angled cut to match. Luckily Georgia’s hands were clear; and then there was a gap for her to get through. She used her jacket and then her training top as a barrier over the stray shards at the bottom of the frame, and then slid in, head-first. There was a nasty snag on her training top, once, but that was all. Georgia took the weight of the fall on her hands, then allowed her legs to fall in after her.

  Stephanie was face down on the floor, palms flat on an ancient floral-patterned carpet. Georgia had seen people in this pose before, dumped at A&E when she was a trainee, and even once in a toilet at a shopping centre, where she had attended the discovery of a body. A drug addict at the end of their journey.

  Georgia had seen it before, but her mind still strobed with unreadable patterns and tessellations, trying to work out that Stephanie was here, right now. And then she had the girl in her arms, feeling the slimy skin of her lips against her neck, the head lolling uselessly. Then she had pulled the girl up to her feet, as light as lifting a six-year-old, the rank hair against her cheek, filling her nostrils, and she did not care as she screamed, ‘My baby, you’re here! I’m here! I’ve got you! My precious girl!’