Darke

by Matt Hilton

  She reached for the door handle, a large circular brass knob green with verdigris. It moved half an inch to either side, but that was the extent. Kerry didn’t hear the latch disengaging, only a faint squeal of rusty metal. She was about to give up on it, but gave the knob a brisk shove. The door moved inward a finger’s width. Setting her shoulder to the door, she gripped the handle with both hands and leaned her weight against the wood. The door shifted another few inches. It was unlocked. She could throw her weight against it and force the door wide, but the noise might bring unwanted attention. She planted her feet, and controlling its swing by gripping the handle, she bore her weight against the door again, and it moved another hand’s breadth before jamming against something inside. Kerry stepped away, studying the gap, and then took a lingering check around to ensure she hadn’t been observed. The rain continued to drum down, but it was the only sound, there wasn’t even a hint of the wildlife that must live in the woods and the building blocked the thrumming sound she’d heard earlier.

  She was reasonably sure she’d made it this far unobserved, but wasn’t confident about going inside. Once within the building she’d be trapped, with nowhere to run.

  Why are you thinking of running away?

  The thought was hers, not the taunting of Swain she’d grown used to.

  You’ve been waiting to do this for years. Don’t turn back now, Kerry.

  Girl remained by her side. She was still and silent, but her presence helped Kerry force a little steel into her spine. Everything had led to this moment. If she ran away out of fear…well, how would she ever reconcile with that? Decision made, she pulled back her hood and forced her left shoulder into the gap between the door and the jamb. It was a squeeze, and her duffel coat wrenched around uncomfortably as she shoved forward. The door shifted another few inches, and she forced her head and left arm inside. Grabbing hold of the door handles inside and out, she lifted and pushed at the same time, walking the door open. The process was too noisy, detritus on the floor scraping and the door groaning. She halted to listen for a response. From within she could distinguish the mechanical thrum again, intervening walls and distance muffled it, but that was all. She pushed into what was once a reception vestibule, but was now the receptacle of a fallen ceiling. It was broken chunks of plaster that had jammed the door from opening all the way. The floor wasn’t completely blocked though, and a door about two metres away stood open, hanging awry on a broken hinge. She crept forward, and peered into a hallway dimly lit by holes in the roof two floors above. Water flowed freely down the walls, and dripped from numerous places overhead. The place stank of stagnant water, mildew and rats. Kerry wrapped a palm over her mouth and nostrils.

  As a copper, she’d had the displeasure of entering many horrible dwellings before, but this ranked up there among the worst of them. Her opinion wasn’t swayed when she moved into the hall and the floorboards sagged underfoot. Only a threadbare carpet supported her weight. She kept to the edge of the floor, where the joists were at their strongest, and moved to the foot of a set of stairs. They looked sketchy, some of them already having fallen away, and the bannister leaned outward in places. At a half landing a broken window let in rain, and even crawling vines and brambles from outside. She’d no intention of going up for a closer look. She turned to her right and glanced into the room she’d peered into from outside. Nothing there she wanted to see or touch, so she moved on. And spotted the unusual.

  A batch of electrical cables snaked along the floor, some bright orange, others black or white. Every few metres, they’d been cinched together with plastic ties. They were reasonably modern, and untouched by the filth surrounding them. She noted where the cables swept up the wall, and over the bannister of the half landing, continuing up and out of sight on the uppermost floor. The other end continued along the hall and through another door. It led into what was once a kitchen. The room was a wreck like every other she’d seen, but some of the junk and fallen plaster had been moved aside to allow clear passage. Empty bottles littered a counter, alongside fast food cartons and cereal boxes, most of them as scabrous as their surroundings, but some newer. The cables disappeared beneath another stained, but sturdy door in the near right corner of the kitchen. Kerry crept towards the door, listening, and the sound of a motor was now much louder. The door, she assumed, must allow access to a larder or other anti-chamber to the kitchen. She listened. All she could hear was the thrum of the generator.

  Somebody had recently brought power to the house again, after it had been off the grid for decades.

  She took out her phone. It was enough evidence to call in the local police to conduct a thorough search for the trespasser.

  But not enough to bring them running. It could be hours before some weary plod was sent to check things out. Kerry had to give them more.

  She tested the door, and this time the handle turned easily. She drew it towards her, and peeked inside. It wasn’t a larder: she found stairs going down. The cables were fitted snug to the edge of the stairs, so that they weren’t a trip hazard. It was pitch dark below, and she could smell faint diesel fumes. The generator rumbled. And there was another sound that sent a jolt the length of Kerry’s spine.

  A child emitted a thin scream of pain.

  Kerry lurched for the stairs, using the wan blue glow of her phone screen to light her way. She made it down three or four steps before the screen dimmed, and she stumbled, tripped on an uneven plank, and somersaulted into the darkness below.

  48

  Kerry woke from blackness into blackness. She had no concept of passing time, so couldn’t say if she’d been unconscious for seconds, minutes or for much longer. In fact she couldn’t say if she’d lost consciousness at all. She’d fell, tumbling and windmilling down the stairs, to slam with bruising force against an upright joist, that span her sideways and into open space. She had no recollection of the final impact, except she could feel it in every bone now. She wheezed in agony between her clenched teeth. Tried to move. Everything sloshed around her. She was soaked, wet to her ears, and her floundering sent another wave of scummy water over her. She reared up to sit, confused and blinded. The back of her skull throbbed with hot fire.

  Moths’ wings fluttered across her cheeks, her eyelids, and lastly her bottom lip. Her instinct was to rear away, until she recalled the last time she’d felt a similar sensation. It was Girl, offering her comfort in her time of need. She blinked, searching for her friend, but Girl was a shadow against darkness and her faint ethereal light was dimmed in that deep place.

  ‘I’m…I’m, OK…I think,’ Kerry croaked, and hoped she was right. She hadn’t tried standing yet, and dreaded that she’d broken something during the tumble down the stairs. If she’d snapped her spine, it was doubtful she’d have been able to sit, but she was no expert. Maybe her legs felt numb because she’d severed the nerves to them! The panic was fleeting, and answered the question for her. She scrambled over on to her knees, and was glad when her legs obeyed the command to stand. She rose up, aching, fighting the pain in her ribs that made it difficult to breathe. Both shoulders were sore, and her left elbow, and judging by the burning sensation in her left hand she’d tried to halt her fall by the strength of her fingers alone and wrenched them back. Her head! She pushed aside her sopping coat hood, touched the hot spot on her skull, and her fingers found matted, soaked hair. But then everything about her was soaked. There was a bump, but no gaping hole with her brain leaking out.

  She was ankle deep in water, surrounded by God knew what else.

  There was a dim glow.

  It was weak light streaming down the stairs from the kitchen above. She limped towards it. Saw where the stairs took a turn as they entered the basement, and formed a landing of sorts, alongside the joist that had spun her out and onto the flooded floor below. There was enough ambient light to spot her phone lying up against the skirting, wedged beneath the electrical cables. She reached for it, hissing in pain when the muscles between her ribs c
omplained. Hit the button to bring it to life.

  Its glow lit a tiny halo around her. The screen was cracked, but not broken. Miraculously, even in the bowels of the earth, she still had a signal. A weak one, but it was enough to make an emergency call. Which reminded her.

  She spun around, seeking the child who’d screamed in pain. Saw nobody, not even Girl. However she knew her guide hadn’t abandoned her. She could sense her nearby, beckoning her to follow. Before she took another step, Kerry brought up the flashlight app on her phone, and extended it at arm’s length.

  There was no sign of a child. Items of junk, old furniture, a filthy mattress part submerged in the water, and an ancient rusty bucket, but nothing to hint at life. Scummy water had found its way into the basement. It was stagnant, and frothy with contaminants. Whether it was from the boggy water table encroaching on the house, or from rain finding its way inside after the collapse of the chimney and roof, it didn’t matter, these days it wasn’t the ideal place to bring a prisoner. But somebody had cried out.

  ‘Hello?’ she whispered, conscious that her voice might carry further than intended. ‘Hello, is there somebody there? Courtney? Hayley?’

  The sloshing of the water and the grumble of the generator were her only replies.

  She moved forward, taking care where she placed her feet. Tripping again, and losing her only source of light, would be disastrous. Her phone had survived the fall down stairs but wouldn’t if dropped in the water. She scanned wider, and spotted where the electrical cables had been suspended well above the water line, strung along a beam near the ceiling. She followed them, and found another set of steps: this time they went up. Only a short distance though, to an anteroom of sorts, or a secondary basement.

  Kerry moved to the foot of the stairs, and studied the door blocking her path. It looked as if it had been replaced in recent years, a sturdier metal door with two large bolts on this side. The cables ran through a hole drilled in the jamb. She went up the steps with her breath caught in her throat, shone the light over the bolts. There was no padlock keeping them shut. She worked the lowest one open, eyelids pinching with each squeak. She paused to gather herself. The final bolt was all that stood between her and whoever was on the other side of the door. If the Fell Man was inside, it was all that stopped him from leaping on her. No, he couldn’t be in the room because who then must have set the bolts? She reached for the uppermost bolt and slid it open. The door swung towards her on its own weight. She grasped it, her abused fingers aching, and widened the gap.

  She leaned in, extending her phone to cast light into the room. The diesel fumes were strongest there, almost thick enough to taste. The sound of the generator was unmistakable now, but it wasn’t feeding lights within the room, and it wasn’t a prison — or it hadn’t been in ages. Once it might have been a coal shed, or some work place for servants or agricultural labourers, but that had been a long time ago before the Brandreths spiralled downwards into ruination. Since then it had been used for something more nefarious. Kerry immediately spotted a number of archaic televisions, and video cassette players, arranged on benches and shelves. Other shelves were stacked high with old Betamax and VHS videocassettes, dusty and cobwebbed, and stacks of mouldering magazines. Some had fallen from a shelf and lay scattered across the floor: pale boobs and rosy bums and more intimate parts on open display...and worse. Most of those images were of girls too young to consent to having been photographed. One thing she was certain of was that those magazines hadn’t been purchased through reputable retailers, but swapped on the vilest black market. She didn’t need to check any of the titles on the tape boxes to know what kind of films they contained. The room was the den of a particularly sick-minded sex-maniac, whose tastes went beyond the abhorrent.

  And yet they were historical artefacts. Not anything that had been viewed in recent times. The TV’s and video players were dead. The only concession to mechanical integrity was the generator that thundered away in one corner. It fed power via the cables to a different room, higher up in the crumbling ruin.

  So where had the girl’s cry originated?

  She swept around the light.

  Girl stood before one of the shelving racks, her back to Kerry.

  Unusually she didn’t flee the light, or from Kerry’s view. She wanted to be seen. She had her head dipped, as though in prayer. But that was not it. She stood mournfully observing a videotape cassette that lay gathering dust on a counter.

  And Kerry knew, and almost shrivelled up inside.

  That cry of anguish had been the disembodied voice of Girl leading her to the awful truth. A replay of whatever horrific images had been captured on that tape decades ago, when Girl was horribly abused here in the house before her murder.

  ‘Oh, dear God,’ Kerry moaned. If she could she would take Girl in her arms and hug the child with all her might.

  She couldn’t though, so did the next best thing.

  She hit 999 on her phone, identified herself to the control room operator, and requested immediate assistance. Before she finished describing the location of Brandreth House, Girl swept past her, towards another door that Kerry hadn’t noticed. She charged after the fleeing spirit, urging the operator to send back up now! With the best will in the world, she couldn’t expect the police to arrive in minutes. It could take half an hour for responding patrols to make it from the nearest manned station over the moor and find her. It was half an hour too long, but it was what it was.

  The door opened into a yard at the far side of the house from where she’d earlier crouched on the hillside. A panel van was parked close to the house. Beyond it, there was a track around the trees and the far side of the pond, a route the van had driven back and forth on many occasions. If she’d carried on driving up the hill past where she’d left her car, it must fork around the hill to the east, allowing access to the house via different roads. The latter, in bygone times, would have been the servants’ entrance, the one to the front reserved for the wealthy Brandreths and their feted guests.

  Kerry moved towards the van, whispering instructions to the operator, and she took a quick peek inside the back. The windows had been painted black, foiling her. So she opened the doors instead. The storage compartment had been fitted with a futon mattress. Thick quilting covered the walls and ceiling, to deaden sound from within. A steel ring and chains hung from a bracket fixed to the wall that separated the back from the cab. Deep ruts in a thin carpet showed where something heavy had recently been dragged from the back. She informed the operator what she’d found and also gave a brief description of the van, and its number plate.

  ‘I need back up now,’ she reiterated, ‘and make sure that whoever’s coming they know it’s about the missing girls.’

  She hung up, freeing her hands.

  She was about to slip away her phone, but her clothing was saturated, her duffel coat so dense with water that it almost weighed her down. She had no dry place to store her phone safely. She unbuttoned her coat, fought clear of it, and dropped it in a heap at the base of the house wall. As an afterthought she set her phone on a rock alongside it, then rearranged the hood over it to keep off most of the drizzle. All the while, she was aware of Girl urgently beckoning her from under the nearest fir trees. She jogged towards the normally elusive Girl, who waited in place long enough for Kerry to note where she pointed, then darted in that direction. Kerry charged after her, stooping as she ran to avoid the lower boughs. But within seconds she slowed, and moved forward with more caution.

  Somewhere ahead a sound repeated: the thwack of steel through dirt.

  Each chop of the blade was echoed a moment later by a grunt of exertion. Somebody was at work, and she didn’t believe it was an honest day’s labour. She crept closer, could hear the sound, but couldn’t see its source due to a fallen tree and tangle of brambles that had overwhelmed it. It was still raining, but under the canopy not falling too hard. The pattering droplets covered any sounds she made. Beyond her, Girl stood, and
it was perhaps the clearest image Kerry had seen her take. There was more than a hint of pinched lips and a pointing finger. Her stance was that of a viper poised to strike. Her image vibrated with poorly restrained rage.

  A thwack of steel in earth sounded once more. But it was different. There was no corresponding grunt of effort. Fallen twigs crunched under heavy boots. Kerry looked for somewhere to hide, but there was nowhere, without throwing herself headlong into the bramble thicket. But she hadn’t been discovered yet. Something was dragged across the damp mulch, and a heavy thud followed as it was dropped. Kerry had to look, but first she cast around for a weapon. All there was to hand was a branch about two feet long. She picked it up, tested its weight. Not heavy enough, but better than nothing. She edged around the bramble thicket, craning to see what her senses had already warned her was happening.

  A large figure stood no more than three metres away, his broad back to her as he bent to inspect what he’d dumped in the shallow trench he’d dug. It was a man judging by the size, and the breadth of his shoulders, but she couldn’t make out much else of him. He wore a heavy rubberised slicker coat, dark green, with the hood up, and the hem swung below his knees. It glistened under the drizzly twilight. His breath was a rasp from deep in his throat. It sounded like a dog growling, until she recognised spiteful laughter. He was a beast, and huge. As he reached for the spade he’d set aside, Kerry glanced at the branch she clutched, and realised how woefully outmatched she was.

  Retreat was the better part of valour. And it was the most sensible plan when it came to what was known in police speech as a “dynamic risk assessment”. She should back off, retrieve her phone, and observe him from a safe distance until reinforcements could arrive. Except the problem was plans only worked until affected by forces out of anyone’s control. Overhead, a rotten branch, burdened with the weight of fresh rain, suddenly gave up its fight with gravity. It clattered down through the canopy, and thumped to earth a mere two feet behind the huge man. Instinct caused him to glance at the source of the sound, just as Kerry took a step back towards cover. She halted mid-step, mouth hanging open, as he swung around to face her, hefting the spade in both hands. She held up her branch; it couldn’t help her.