“I hope there’s been nothing and never will be.” She shook her head at her own mangled grammar and gave it a wry smile that I dared to hope was meant for me as well, since she held out a hand. “Let’s put Toby out of his misery,” she said.
He still looked intent on his game, pacing the diagonals of the lawn now, but I wondered if he’d resolved to preoccupy himself so as to keep his mind off his parents. Lesley kept hold of my hand once I’d helped her up, and then put an arm around me as she opened the window. “Toby,” she called.
He swung around and took in the sight of us. “Is dad staying now?” he pleaded.
“We’re back together. Forget we ever weren’t,” Lesley said. “How do you think we should celebrate?”
A shine widened his eyes, which let me think he could still become an ordinary boy—one free of Christian Noble’s influence, at any rate. “Can we go to Disney World like Claudine and her mum did?” he said.
23 - Flights
“It’s like somebody’s put a lid on the world.”
“You’re right, Toby, a marble lid.”
He leaned close to the window of the airliner, and his shoulder rose as if he was shrugging off Lesley’s remark. “Only we came through it, and it’s got shapes in.”
I remembered how he’d told the priest at my father’s funeral about shapes in the clouds. I was about to steer the conversation to a safer subject when Lesley said “What shapes can you see?”
“You aren’t supposed to give them names. Things that change aren’t meant to have any.”
A woman standing in the aisle beside me while she flexed her legs sent him an admiring smile he didn’t notice. I was afraid that Lesley might be more troubled than impressed by Toby’s answer, but she said “What did you think the first time you were above the clouds, Dominic?”
I hoped this didn’t remind Toby of my experience at Safe To Sleep. “They looked like sculptures to me.”
“Sculptures in space,” Lesley said, an image I’d been trying to avoid. “I’m the uninspired member of the family. I’ve always thought they looked like snow that nobody has walked on.”
“Maybe someone does.” As I willed him not to go into any detail Toby said “We’re up near space now. Maybe you can see if you look.”
He lowered his head to peer through the window and then leaned back while Lesley ducked towards the view. “I don’t think I can quite,” she said.
I was about to intervene to prevent Toby admitting he had when the woman in the aisle broke off talking to her friend behind me. “Maybe you’ll be able to fly there when you’re older, little fellow,” she said.
“Some people can now.”
I was desperate to head off any further comment he might make, but the woman said “Who would they be?”
With a five-year-old’s disdain Toby said “Astronauts.”
“Those, of course, silly me. I just thought you looked as if you meant someone else.”
“You write about space travel, don’t you, Toby?” Lesley said and told the woman “That’s how he goes there, in his head.”
“So long as he doesn’t go out of it.”
Presumably this was a bid for wit, but it came too close to the truth, which I was nervous he might be prompted to tell. When he giggled I had to say “We’ve no reason to think he’s in any danger of the kind.”
“Pardon me, I’m sure.” As she returned to her seat several rows ahead the woman muttered “I didn’t mean anything bad.”
“I knew she didn’t,” Toby said and turned to gaze at both of us. “Didn’t you?”
“Of course we did,” Lesley said, and I agreed at once, though I was glad he didn’t look at me too long or hard. I was acutely aware of how he was leaving Safe To Sleep behind, not just my involvement but everything he’d experienced there and all that had led up to it, including Tina Noble’s interference with his infant mind. He was pretending to have lived the life Lesley wanted to believe he had, and I could only play along to save the one we’d recreated. It threatened to make our stay in Florida feel like a deception that had to be sustained for a week.
“There ought to be dinosaurs,” Toby said when we arrived at the hotel in Orlando, though the setting looked like a jungle to me, luxuriant with palm trees that dangled drops of moisture from the tips of leaves and as humid as the heat that had engulfed us the instant we’d stepped off the plane. Toby was so taken with our suite that he ran back and forth through the rooms before settling on the expansive tenth-floor balcony as his favourite place. Surely all this was spontaneous, and I could grant myself a holiday from nervousness. Having his own television in his room delighted him, and it took both his parents to persuade him to turn it off so that he could catch up on his sleep.
Lesley insisted on leaving the inner doors ajar, which made me feel I had a reason to be apprehensive. I lay listening for sounds from Toby’s room, and their absence wasn’t reassuring. Once Lesley was asleep I tiptoed to look at him. He was sleeping on his side with one small bare arm outstretched towards the television, I saw his eyelids flicker, which presumably meant he was dreaming, surely a positive sign. I crept back to bed, where Lesley mumbled “Error you” and slipped an arm around me without wakening further. Quite soon I managed to sleep, though I had to quell the notion that I might join Toby there, and as far as I knew I didn’t even dream.
Toby was up with the sun and eager to be on his way to all the magic. Just the same, he made time for the prodigiously vigorous shower and for the breakfast buffet, where he expressed the hope that his mother might start cooking bacon as crisply as Americans did. A bus brought us to the Magic Kingdom as they were opening the gates, and soon we were among the vintage buildings of Main Street. “It’s like going back before you were born,” Toby said, an observation I had no cause to find ominous.
I tried to think none of his comments were. “They aren’t real,” he remarked about the cartoonish spectral holograms that roamed the graveyard of the Haunted Mansion, and I told myself he wasn’t comparing them with the malformed shapes of the errant dead. “He’s escaped,” he said of the tattered windblown skeleton that greeted new arrivals on the pirate ride, and I assumed he meant the remains had strayed from the mansion—Disney’s, not Christian Noble’s. I was glad he kept quiet in Space Mountain, where the starry dark through which the roller coaster raced was uncomfortably reminiscent of another experience we’d shared. He laughed when everyone applauded the concert in the tiki cottage, though I’d found the performance —not just artificial birds that sang but idols and flowers too—somewhat disconcerting. I was troubled by the observation that he made in Small World, not least because I didn’t understand it, and was glad Lesley didn’t hear. As our boat sailed between the multitudes of puppets like an endless horde of clones, all of them piping their title song, he said to himself “That’s what they are too.”
We spent days in EPCOT and Sea World, and then our idyll was done. By the time we boarded our night flight home, Toby’s happy exhaustion had started to give way to the irritable kind. When we reached our seats he surprised us by saying “Mum, do you want to sit by the window? Or dad can.”
“It can be your treat both ways,” Lesley told him. “You’ll see cities all lit up.”
“I don’t want to now. I’ve seen them.”
“When have you, Toby? It was daytime all the way here.”
“Don’t care. I’ll want to sleep.”
As we heard him growing fractious Lesley relented. “Dominic, let me have the aisle and you can have the window.”
Toby’s head was sinking well before the plane eventually moved off. He raised it to watch a flight attendant adopt a crucified pose to indicate the nearest exit, but was nodding by the time she mimed the fall of the oxygen masks. When she advised everyone to read the safety instructions he fumbled the card out of the seat pocket and stared at the drawings as if they made up a comic that was too young for him. Before he returned the card to the pocket he peered at the image
of a passenger on the way to reverting to a foetal posture in preparation for an emergency. “They’re being like a baby,” he murmured to himself. “That’s not how you go.”
By the time the plane began to taxi he was fast asleep. I watched lit streets sink beneath us and wished I could show him, but didn’t want to waken him. Soon we were sailing over distant cities, clusters of tiny orange lights that put me in mind of constellations no longer vital enough to shine white. That wasn’t how the universe worked—the ghosts of stars didn’t fade that way—and so I managed to take comfort from the spectacle, a reminder that we were closer to the earth than to the space beyond the atmosphere. A glance showed me Toby with his chin on his chest and his fingers losing their grip on the edge of the seat, while Lesley was rereading the collected works of Mary Shelley for the course she would teach next term. I went back to watching the stately parade of minimised cities far down in the night, until at some point my mind went dark.
Toby wakened me. I felt a small hand grope at my shoulder, and his foot gave my knee a gentle kick. I blinked my eyes open to find the cabin lights were dimmed. When I turned my head, which felt burdened by slumber, I made out that both Toby and his mother were asleep. Lesley had stuffed her book into the seat pocket and was clasping her hands in her lap. Toby’s head was thrown back, and his legs were splayed wide. He’d raised his arms and stretched them out, resting them against the seat on either side of his head. Despite sitting up straight, he was doing his best to adopt the position I knew far too well.
I could only hope with all my soul that he hadn’t been in it for long— that he hadn’t gone too far to be rescued at once. I even wondered whether he’d been reaching for my help, consciously or otherwise. I was pitifully grateful to see that he wasn’t quite touching his mother, and I willed her not to waken before Toby did. Might changing his position retrieve him from his trance? I took hold of his hand to lower his arm and leaned over to whisper in his ear.
Gripping his hand felt like trying to grasp the dark. I could have fancied that he was as empty as the entrance to a void. I mustn’t recoil, and I gripped him harder. “Come back, son,” I whispered urgently. “There’s nothing you should see.”
Perhaps this brought the memory of the experience I’d had at Safe To Sleep too much to life. I felt as if I was keeping hold of a link to a darkness far wider than the sky. Whatever was stirring wakefully in it was too vast for my mind to encompass, and undoubtedly too dreadful, but attracting its attention would be a great deal worse. “Come away from that, Toby,” I urged, feeling grotesquely parental, reduced to using words that weren’t remotely equal to the situation. His hand stayed unresponsive, and I lurched forward to look at his face. His eyes were open, but only darkness was alive in them.
I remembered how Christian Noble had warned me against wakening him. I felt guilty and terrified, and then I recalled more of Noble’s words.
“My God, that bastard,” I muttered, hardly caring who heard. “He didn’t mean you didn’t matter. He meant it doesn’t matter where you are, because he can still use you.”
I imagined I felt Toby’s fingers stir, and gave his hands a fierce squeeze. “He won’t, though,” I vowed. “I won’t let him.”
My son’s vacated eyes were as blank as his face, and I was afraid the colossal presence in the boundless dark was about to gaze at me out of them. “Toby, come back to us,” I hissed and seized his arms to shake him, assuring myself furiously that Noble’s admonition had been one of his lies. “Come back before mummy can see how you are. I’ll find a way to stop the Nobles taking you from us, I promise.”
Perhaps some of this reached him, or else the shaking did. His fingers wriggled as if he was trying to grasp something solid, and then they found the edge of the seat and clung there. His mouth worked while his eyes widened and narrowed, which looked as though he had to rediscover how to focus them. “You’re on the plane, Toby,” I murmured. “You’re back with us.” I didn’t glance away from him until I saw him recognise me, and then I realised Lesley was aware of us. I was about to speak when I met her gaze, which made it plain that she’d overheard far too much. “You’ll be hearing from me, but not here,” she said.
24 - Overheard
“So now I can’t trust either of you,” Lesley said. She was sitting in the middle of the sofa in the front room. Her fists were planted on either side of her, ensuring that I couldn’t sit beside her. Though it was early afternoon Toby was in bed, having slept as little as we had on the rest of the flight home. Until she was certain he was asleep Lesley had said hardly a word to me, but I’d sensed she was saving up a host of them, which felt like a gathering storm. I might have let her speak uninterrupted if that wouldn’t have made me seem guiltier still. “You can trust me to do whatever’s best for our son,” I said.
“Such as teaching him to lie to his own mother.”
“He didn’t want to worry you, that’s all. Neither of us did.”
“You’re saying it was his plan, are you, Dominic? Have you any idea how pathetic that sounds?” She gave me a look too weary even to contain dislike. “Perhaps you’d care to sit down,” she said. “You won’t intimidate me by standing over me.”
“Lesley, I’m not trying to. I don’t know where you’d get that idea.” At once I thought I did, and tried to put Colleen Johns out of my mind so that I wouldn’t be tempted to mention her. Once I was seated in the armchair opposite Lesley I said “Is that better?”
“Nothing is, and I don’t know what can be.” As I searched for an answer she might find acceptable she said “Let’s see if you’re able to tell any truth at all. What really happened the day you brought Toby home from Safe To Sleep?”
“I told you, he wanted to come.”
“That isn’t even half an answer. And you wonder why I don’t trust you, or perhaps you don’t. What’s worse, you’ve made me feel like that about my own son.”
I couldn’t help recalling how my parents had behaved on learning I’d taken Christian Noble’s journal, but the thought of Colleen Johns provoked me to say “He’s still mine as well.”
“You’d like to split him, would you? I think you may have succeeded.” Before I could respond Lesley said “I want a proper answer. Did Phoebe Sweet really say he was cured?”
“It was never a cure in the first place. Christian Noble and his people were simply exploiting the children for their own purposes, the ones he’s always had.”
“Can’t you even tell the truth about that?” As I made to protest Lesley said “It’s only been a week since you promised we’d heard the last of him.”
“You had then. You’re saying you want the truth.”
“And all I’m hearing is the same obsession you’ve had since you were a child. I honestly believe some experience you had back then must have harmed your mind more than you’ll admit.”
“Not harmed, just showed me what needs to be done.” I was inspired or else desperate enough to say “And I’m not alone any longer.”
“I’d say you’re doing your best to make sure you are. Who are you talking about, may I ask?”
“Bobby Parkin’s investigated Safe To Sleep. Maybe you should talk to her.”
“Your friend who you told me was gay.” When I nodded Lesley said “Investigated what exactly?”
“She spent time there.” I was dismayed to think she might still be doing so. “And she participated in their ritual,” I said.
“Ritual.” Having dropped the word like an unwelcome burden, Lesley said “Who involved her in all that?”
“The Nobles, and I imagine Phoebe Sweet was there as well.”
“That’s not what I meant, and I think you know it. Whose idea was it for her to investigate?”
“As a matter of fact it was hers.”
“She just happened upon Safe To Sleep, did she? Nobody brought it to her attention.”
“I don’t mind telling you I did that, but—’
“So your obsession still means m
ore to you than Toby does. Perhaps I really should have a few words with your friend.”
“I wish you would if I can contact her. Only you have to understand she didn’t just participate, she’s been won over.”
Lesley made a sound too terse for even a mirthless laugh. “You mean she disagrees with you.”
“I mean the Nobles have infected her with their beliefs.”
“You’re saying she doesn’t share your view of what you call their ritual. Perhaps you ought to listen to her if it isn’t too late.”
“I don’t need to. I’ve been there myself.”
Lesley parted her lips some moments before she spoke. “You’ve been where?”
“At the ritual they want everybody to believe is a treatment. I don’t know whether Bobby was responsible, but they invited me to take part.”
“I think we’re coming to the truth at last.” Lesley’s pause suggested that she didn’t want it much. “When did you?” she said.
“Last week, and—”
“The day you took Toby away from Safe To Sleep?”
“I’m afraid it was then, but—”
“So he didn’t call you to collect him at all.”
“I don’t believe we ever said he did.”
Lesley looked as though she didn’t want to see me any longer. “Then you’ve taught him to be as devious as his father.”
“Lesley, he just wants to keep us all together. We both do.”
“And my views don’t matter, apparently.”
“They most certainly do, but they need to be based on the facts.”
“Do enlighten me. What don’t I know?”
“I didn’t really either till I saw for myself. The ritual—it’s as Bobby says, it used to have another name.”
“Bobby says that, does she? What name?”
“Don’t laugh, but some people would have called it astral projection.”
“I’m a long way from laughing, Dominic. Are you going to tell me what you saw?”
“You’ve seen some of it yourself. You’ve seen Toby in his trances.” When Lesley betrayed no response I had to say “Only this time he took me with him. He and the other children did. The Nobles have a chant that sends them off. I tried to fight it so I could protect him, but it caught me as well.”
Born To The Dark Page 25
