by Harper Fox
“Well, let’s not split hairs.” Lee tucked his arm through Gideon’s. He bumped his brow once off his shoulder and led him through into the living room, where a handful of fire was cheering the beginnings of a cloudy twilight. “Are you hungry? Or have all your villagers been plying you with cake?”
“Mrs Waite offered me her killer sponge, but I declined. I’m starving, actually—especially if that’s your chicken casserole I can smell.”
“With roast potatoes and carrots. It’ll be ten minutes or so. Go and get changed, and I’ll fetch you a drink.”
The flat was pristine. They’d been living in chaos for months. Lee must have got out of bed and spent untold hours in tidying away their books and papers, dusting shelves and hoovering dog hairs and baby crumbs out of the sofa and carpets. The bed was neatly made and turned back to air—just in case of lingering silver-eyed demons, Gideon thought with pained amusement, stripping out of his uniform. The bathroom had been cleared of Tamsyn’s toys, the whole flotilla and menagerie it had taken to amuse her during a five-minute wash. He showered and picked out a favourite outfit of Lee’s, the shirt and trousers he’d worn to their anniversary dinner in July. If love and goodwill could fix this hole in their lives, the job would get done.
Eventually, somehow. In the little dining room they seldom used, Lee was lighting candles at the table. Beneath his smile he looked tired enough to die. He pressed a soft kiss to Gideon’s cheek, and they went through the pantomime of pulling out chairs for one another until the game broke into laughter and they both sat down.
The casserole was good. They’d each perfected a few simple recipes, and this was Lee’s speciality, although more often of late they’d eaten ready meals on the sofa, the baby propped between them and trying to hijack each forkful as it passed. Zeke had said they were spoiling her, not teaching her proper table manners, but they’d have got around to it in time. And eating like this—just the two of them sharing the table, napkins and nice silverware—wasn’t any worse or better than the alternative, just different. They’d have found the balance eventually, between doing everything with their kid and separating out the strands of their own adult lives. These things took practice, the trial-and-error stages most parents could take for granted. They both ate conscientiously, doing justice to the meal and the strength it brought. “That was gorgeous, love,” Gideon said, giving them both permission to stop. “Thank you.”
“My pleasure. How did your interviews go?”
The other menu option had been bitter herbs washed down with tears. Gideon was fairly certain of that, just as he knew Lee had chosen daily small talk over another anguished wrangle about their child. “Routine. No surprises. Even Darren and Bill Prowse seem to have been where they claim they were when John was killed, and everyone else can account for themselves too. Nobody saw or heard anything out of the ordinary at all.”
“What about Bligh and Dev Bowe?”
“Oh, no.” Gideon shook his head in comic reproof. “The village bobby doesn’t get to do those interviews. CID deals with immediate family.”
“CID doesn’t know them from Adam.”
“Well, that can be a good thing—no preconceptions. I’ll probably be allowed to have a chat with them once they’ve been eliminated.”
Lee’s eyebrows went up. “What—as suspects?”
“Yep. First port of call in a murder enquiry, the loving relatives. Let’s face it—if ever Zeke was found murdered, I’d be the likeliest perp, wouldn’t I?”
“After me.”
They both smiled. Their bitching about Zeke was mostly groundless now, a habit. “I hope he’s all right,” Gideon said unguardedly, his pre-dinner beer suddenly going to his head. “I’ll give him a call. He was nearly as upset as we were, and maybe Elowen would phone or text him even if she felt she couldn’t contact us. You know, just to say how Tamsyn was doing.”
“Gid...”
“Look, I accept that rushing off to France is the wrong thing to do. That doesn’t mean we can’t keep in touch. Or...” He paused, a new fear twisting in him. “Is even that too painful for you?”
“For me?” Lee got up. He took Gideon’s hand and drew him upright. “Come with me. I have to tell you...” He swallowed hard and caught his breath. “No. I have to show you something. Please.”
Gideon followed him into the living room. The sky to the northwest was still bright, red-gold light shafting through strange heavy cloud sculptures. The fire gleamed brightly, somehow necessary despite the evening’s warmth. “You even cleaned the hearth,” he said uneasily. “The whole place looks great. You didn’t have to do it, though—not as an apology.”
“I know I didn’t have to. Sometimes if you’re tired and unhappy, a clean house helps.” Lee had retained Gideon’s hand in his own. “You read that so easily, didn’t you—why I did it?”
“I suppose so, yeah. But it’s obvious, isn’t it?”
“Maybe. Where did I put the TV remote?”
“On the edge of the bookcase. How am I supposed to find it there?”
“Think about it, Gid.”
The bookcase was behind him. All he had in his mind was an image of Lee turning round and setting the remote down on the shelf. “Oh. Did you, er... Did you send me that?”
“No. You picked it up all by yourself because you weren’t thinking about it. You do it half a dozen times a day. You read me all the time, and I want you to do it now, because I can’t be on my own in here with this—this feeling—anymore.”
“What feeling? About Tamsyn?”
Lee nodded, his eyes darkening with frustration. Gideon ran a thumb over his cheekbone. “How do I share that with you, though?” he asked. “I... I am thinking about it now, and I’m not picking up anything at all. Maybe I’ve developed a bit of married-man’s telepathy, but—”
“Oh, you’ve got no idea. You heard old man Fisher. You saw Morris Hawke. And before you tell me that I was channelling those things through to you, you saw and talked to Gwylim Kitto all on your own—not to mention that the bloody Beast of Bodmin came and scratched on your door to ask for help before I’d even met you.”
“What?”
“Don’t you see that yet? You thought it was chasing you. And in a way it was, but not to hurt you—to get you out onto the moors where you belong and do what you’re best at. Helping people. Finding lost souls.”
Gideon stood silently, feeling the mesh and the press of Lee’s fingers between his, the grip tightening and releasing in a slow rhythm. He remembered sanding down the front door of the old parish house before it had gone on the market, because horror-movie claw marks scored from top to bottom weren’t much of a selling point. He remembered making love to Lee on the inside of that door—their first exchange, while beyond it, incomprehensible forces of moorland night snuffled and scratched and strained the barricade. What had Lee said to him? We have to seal the gate... “Please tell me,” he said at last, “you don’t believe some fairytale monster ripped John Bowe apart as a calling card for me.”
“I don’t know. But you’re important in all this—so much more than you ever let yourself know. You’re the good shepherd—the guardian. Let me go for a second while I close the curtains.”
“Oh, no.”
“What?”
“We don’t have to... shut the place up, do we? Start taking down the paintings?”
Lee smiled, a bright unexpected flash. “Oh. No, not at all. That was Hawke, and he more than met his match in you. I just don’t want our neighbours to see us rolling around on the rug.”
Gideon stared in astonishment. Good though the casserole had been, Lee would have had to serve it with a Viagra cocktail to get any action tonight. While he was still wondering how to break the news, Lee came and stood in front of him. He undid the buttons of the old plaid shirt. There was nothing intrinsically sexy in the action: he could have been getting ready for a bath or for bed. But when he was done, he looked up and met Gideon’s eyes. In the newly darkened
room, the firelight could have full sway. Lorna Kemp had done well when she’d swapped out the unpronounceable Tyack for Tiger. In the flickering shadows, Gideon could almost see his stripes. “You’re so bloody beautiful,” he whispered, undoing the last button, the one deliberately left fastened for him. “God give me strength to make the most of you.”
“You always do. The most of me, the best. I want you to come inside of me.”
“Oh.” Gideon’s performance anxiety evaporated like snow on a hotplate. Lee’s occasional blunt statements of his needs and desires had instantaneous, intoxicating effect. “I’ll go get the lube, shall I?”
“No, big man. For once I don’t mean it like that. Just come here.”
They went down on the hearthside rug awkwardly, almost shy with one another in the intensity of Lee’s new meaning. Gideon rolled under, closing his eyes in the gentle storm of kisses Lee was unleashing on his brow, his throat, finally on his open mouth, tongue pushing urgently. Lee grunted and lifted his hips, the signal clear for Gideon to slide a hand down and unzip and unbutton them both. “I love you,” Gideon managed between kisses, tugging his cock and Lee’s out of their clothing. “And I’ll go along with whatever new project you’ve got in hand, but... you are gonna get yourself screwed tonight, son, if you carry on like this.”
“Don’t mean to tease you.” Lee reached down and captured both of them in a warm grip, holding them length-to-length together. “I need you hot, though, so you can...”
“Can what?”
He laid his brow softly to Gideon’s. “So you can let go all your notions of what you think you can and can’t do and just... come in.”
Gideon had no idea what he meant. He didn’t really care. It was enough to lie here under his weight and heat and let the world drop away. He saw a beach in his mind’s eye, a silver sea and a broad stretch of sand. He was floating over the cliffs, which should have alarmed him but didn’t. The air was sunny and full of the scent of gorse. “What are you playing at, lover?” he asked lazily, writhing his hips up against Lee’s grasp, instinctively curling a hand around the back of his skull. “Where are we now?”
“My borderlands. The edge. I need you to come inland.”
There was a holed stone on top of the cliff, like a displaced Mên-an-Tol but much larger. When Gideon drifted closer—effortlessly, as if drawn down through the air whilst at the same time comfortably inhabiting his body by the fireside—he broke into laughter. The stone was a hybrid megalith and Stargate. “Do we go through there?”
“Well, it works as a symbol, doesn’t it? Our heritage and our wasted youth. I bet you watched it too.”
“If the pastor wasn’t home. Even Zeke used to creep in sometimes.”
“All right, then. Come on.”
He didn’t have to do anything. He let the stone, with its hieroglyphs and ancient air of sanctity, leap up and swallow him. And then he was inside Lee’s mind.
No. Nothing so dramatic as that. He was still aware of himself and his other half. He could see, clearly as if they were his own, all the lights and the landscapes of Lee’s interior. He drew breath after exhilarated breath and it wasn’t enough. He wanted to immerse himself in this dazzling country, drown in it. “Easy,” Lee said, releasing his hold and crushing their bodies together so Gideon would feel the demands of his flesh in the fireside world. “We’re not meant to see this much of one another, not in this life. And this is just the edge.”
“I love your edge. Why shouldn’t I see it?”
“Because our nice thick, opaque skulls are there for a reason. We have to understand one another from the outside. But just this once I need you to look further. Come inside.”
They were back in the flat. Gideon jolted under the impact of arrival. It was weirder to occupy the next room and this one at the same time than it had been to fly over Lee’s beach. They were standing in the nursery, hand in hand. Tamsyn was safe in her cradle, sound asleep. And surrounding her—head and foot of the crib, window side and door side—sat four strange immobile versions of Isolde. Each of them was facing outwards, and, grotesquely, each one wore a paper mask with the crudely drawn face of a lamb. “What is this?” Gideon said hollowly. “That’s our dog. Why are there four of her?”
“I’m not sure. Possibly it’s a directional thing. I didn’t have a religious upbringing, but you remember the prayer your father taught you—Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, bless this bed I lie upon...”
“I remember. Four corners to my bed, four angels round my head. One to watch, one to pray, and two to bear my soul aw-... No!” Gideon leapt for the surface, pulling Lee with him. The nursery folded up into a paper dream beneath them and they soft-landed back beside the hearth. “No, not that. What did it mean?”
“I don’t know yet.” Lee was holding Gideon’s face between his hands, his grasp a warm chalice of life. “Breathe. I’m sorry I did that to you.”
“My God, are these the things you see?”
“You’ve known that from the beginning.”
“Yes, but you never showed me... Why was the dog wearing a mask? Why—”
“Gid, finish what you’re doing. Please.”
He’d almost lost track. But his half-forgotten body gave a hungry surge, and Lee cried out in relief as he rolled on top. “I saw inside you. I was right there.”
“Yes. Nobody else on earth, love.”
“I wanted to stay.”
“We can’t. We can’t.” Lee arched his back, closed his thighs hard around Gideon’s. “We have to make do with... this.”
With seeing each other, working each other out, from the outside. It would take a lifetime. And that was what Gideon had signed up for with this man. He settled for it—grabbed for it joyously, hauling Lee into his arms. Clamped together, shoving hip to hip in the restrictive tangle of their clothes, they rode out the next thirty seconds in a hush broken only by muffled grunts and Lee’s half-suffocated gasp for air. Gideon held out for the buck and heave of the body underneath him, the clench of Lee’s fingertips into his arms. For the wet rush against his belly, irresistible trigger for his own hard coming: he pinned Lee down, pressed hot kisses to the side of his neck and growled out his name.
They drove each other to breathless silence. Beached and delivered at last on the far side of the act, Gideon fell back onto the rug. He made a cushion of his shoulder and welcomed Lee there. “God almighty. Why was that...”
“So hot?” Lee wrapped an arm around him and lay panting, aftershocks still rippling through. “Because you did it. I asked you to come inside, and you... you did.”
“It was no effort.”
“Not to you. A thousand men would’ve turned away—not from the beach and the Stargate, but... that nursery. The dog and the masks. Do you see why I had to show you?”
“Yes. I get that it would be wrong to try and bring Tamsyn home just now, that there’s some great danger. But I can’t read it any more than you can. Why was the dog wearing the mask of a lamb?”
“I don’t know yet.” Lee drew back Gideon’s shirt and anxiously examined his shoulder. “I bruised you a bit.”
“Only very discreetly. No love-bites above the uniform collar...”
“As per regulations. A lamb’s mask on the dog... Could be simple wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing symbolism, but Isolde would never hurt her.”
“No. She was guarding her, from all four sides, or telling us that we had to. Seems like a lot of this depends on working out who or what this dangerous lamb might be.”
“And I’m not being an awful lot of help.” Lee raised his head, inhaling deeply. “Smells like somebody’s roasting one at the moment. Did I leave the cooker on?”
Stiffly Gideon sat up. “Don’t think so. That smells like woodsmoke—a bonfire, maybe.”
“Hang on. I’ll go and have a look.”
Gideon watched as he went to open the curtains. It had been a long, tough day, and now they had survived more than twenty four hours without their daughter. He wasn
’t feeling any better for crossing the barricade. He wondered if he could steer himself and Lee off to bed while the tide of aftermath sleepiness was still upon them. That would get a few more hours beneath their belts, and surely tomorrow would be easier.
“It is a bonfire,” Lee said, standing on his toes to look out across the hill. “Either they’re burning down Carnysen farm, or...”
“Or some idiots have decided to go ahead with the Guldize celebrations anyway.” Gideon scrambled to his feet. “I can’t have poor Dev and Bligh bothered by that kind of thing tonight.” He could have used a few hours’ sleep to revisit Lee’s beach and cliffs. Who else would have such a beautiful borderland around his mind? The modified Mên-an-Tol had been for Gideon’s benefit, a construct to overcome his disbelief, but everything else was just Lee, the windswept liminal freedom Gideon had experienced from their first hours together. He’d learned something from his brief visit, though—it didn’t occur to him to try and leave Lee at home. The kind of love that tried to swaddle up grief in over-protection would do him no good, and why would Gideon deprive himself of such a comrade? “Come on. Are we presentable?”
“Just barely. Change of pants might be good. Is it okay for me to tag along?”
“Tag, my arse. This isn’t a police matter—just a neighbourly visit. I bet you a fiver Bill Prowse and his mates are involved somehow, and if so there’ll be fisticuffs. So I’m sending you in first.”
Lee smiled, palpably pleased at the thought of violence. “I can’t wait.”
Chapter Seven
A neighbourly visit was one thing, but Gideon would never be anything less than the arm of the law to the people of Dark. He’d driven Lee’s old Escort up here, not the patrol truck, but even so, heads started turning as soon as he pulled up in the Carnysen farmyard and got out. Lee came round the bonnet to stand beside him. “Looks pretty orderly, for one of Bill’s riots.”
“Does, doesn’t it? I don’t think I even see him here.”
“Must be swingers’ night in the Camborne layby.”
