David Raker 04 - Never Coming Back

by Weaver, Tim

  All I was focused on was the house.

  Haven.

  I’d brought a rucksack with me, so I unzipped it, got out a torch and flicked it on. The beam arrowed ahead of me, between the buildings and into the curve of the street. Beyond the edges of the moonlight, beyond the bend, the house was hidden from view.

  As I started walking, I felt cobbles move under my feet, shifting and sliding like I was on a bed of tennis balls. It didn’t help that it was slick with rainwater. Off to my left, I passed the first of the houses, segregated slightly from the rest. I directed the light inside. Not all the homes had been the same design: this one had two floors, its second now fallen away, along with the roof. The only thing left was a staircase, stopping midway, as if waiting to be completed. As the wind rose and fell, drawn through the open windows, the holes in its walls, I heard a soft whine, like an echo from a different time.

  Then it started to rain again.

  It was soft at first, a gentle drumbeat against what was left of the houses, but as the clouds were drawn together, and the moonlight began to die away, it got harder.

  All I had now was the torch.

  Caught in the beam, rain became needles dropping out of the sky. I directed the torch right, to where the houses on that side, built on the edge of the sea, began to emerge from the dark. It was hard to see them as homes now, as places people might once have chosen to live in. Illuminated by the torch, they were gnarled and rotten, decomposing, the village a graveyard of bodies, and of memories, and of secrets. As the road dropped away, feeding into the curve, the buildings seemed to close in, their size and shape disguised by the oil-black of the night, shadows encasing them so that all I could see were the holes in their front: doors and windows open, apertures drawing you in. But nothing beyond that.

  Nothing but darkness.

  Midway down the street, the toe of my boot hit a dislodged cobble and I stumbled forward, dropping the torch and reaching out to the nearest wall. With a rhythmic clatter, the torch continued rolling away, hitting a ridge where a pavement had once stood, before stopping dead. When I looked back, trying to find the loose cobble, I couldn’t see it; not because of how black it was, but because there wasn’t a cobble. I’d tripped myself.

  I was burned out.

  As I stood there, hand against the wall, I could suddenly feel it everywhere, in my muscles, in my bones, thumping behind my eyes. Even adrenalin couldn’t carry you after forty hours. I reclaimed the torch from the ground and took a moment.

  I shouldn’t have come here.

  I should have waited until morning.

  I should have slept.

  When I took my hand away from the building, I felt a residue cling to my fingers; gluey, like an adhesive. It was sea salt, years of it having blasted the remains of the buildings. But in my exhaustion, among the ghosts of this place, it felt like something worse: an unpleasant, rotting corruption. A reflection of the man who might once have lived here.

  Dum. Dum.

  A noise.

  A memory flickered in my head of standing in the harbour mistress’s house and hearing the same sound the last time I was here. I lifted the light away from the cobbles, up to my eyeline, trying to see what lay beyond the curve. But it was like shining it into a wall. At a certain point, about thirty feet on, nothing came back. Edging further, I kept to the left, passing what remained of the chapel, its walls destroyed by the landslide, a wave of hardened mud forming a new floor – about six feet off the ground – inside the church. More houses. The shop and pub on the opposite side.

  And then I was around the bend.

  Dum. Dum.

  For a moment, the wind dropped away and all that was left was the rain, tapping against the bricks and mortar, its noise like a lament from the heavens. Haven was about two hundred feet further along, on the right, the harbour obscured behind that. I swung the torch from side to side, trying to see what was down there. Everything suddenly seemed still: no wind, no moan as it moved through the village seeking out its injuries, its blemishes, the holes ripped from it by the storm. I took another step, an unthinking hesitation in my stride, one I didn’t recognize until it arrived. Then I understood: something wasn’t right.

  I dropped the torch down to my side.

  And that was when I saw him.

  He came up the steps from a boat moored, out of sight, at the harbour. There was a thin flashlight clenched between his teeth, and he was wearing an army-green apron.

  In his arms was the body of a woman.

  Goosebumps scattered across my skin as her face, eyes still open, caught the dull glow from the light. The rest of her seemed to be wrapped in some kind of tarpaulin. The man paused briefly, a momentary glitch in his stride, as if sensing he was being watched.

  I flicked the torch off.

  And Cornell looked up the street towards me.

  60

  He paused there. Even submerged in the dark, in the doorway of an empty, lightless house, there was a moment where it seemed like he was looking right at me. He had a calm, measured expression on his face, despite holding a body, despite the blood down his apron, inky-black in the soft light of his torch. He tilted his head slightly to one side, a bird-like movement that I recalled with such clarity it seemed impossible that it was five years since I’d seen him in the flesh; then he rocked forward, readjusting the body in his arms. As he moved, the shadows reset themselves, filling his eye sockets until they were just black discs, then carving down across his tanned, hairless face in short, sharp angles. Even so, something about him registered with me; a recollection, a feeling I’d seen him before somewhere. Not just in Vegas half a decade ago.

  Somewhere else.

  I retreated further until my back was pressed against the wall of a house and damp was soaking through my jacket, on to my shirt. It was freezing cold. The chill air. The wind. The rain. Ahead of me, Cornell tilted his head the other way, as if trying to force himself to see further, and then he turned – torch still in his mouth – and headed inside.

  Moving quickly, I shrugged off the rucksack and propped it against the house. I’d brought the torch, a penknife, my phone, some rope and a foot pump for the dinghy. I also had a wetsuit. I laid the torch down next to me, removed the penknife and left the rest where it was. There was no signal here, so the phone was worthless; I’d brought it for after, once I got back up to the coastal road. The rope was for the bodies – or what was left of them. Prouse had talked about them being in Haven, but also in the water. He’d been confused, but I hadn’t taken any chances. That was what the wetsuit was for.

  But it was a plan conceived before Cornell.

  Before I knew he was here.

  I flicked the blade out of the penknife. It was three inches long, about half an inch wide. It would put a delay in his step, but nothing more. There was no light around me, none close to Haven either. I looked up, to the cliff edge three hundred feet above. Dark cloud was stitched together like a quilt. I’d have to approach him slowly, and I’d have to approach blind. Using the torch would give him my position.

  Sliding the penknife into my back pocket with my left hand, I used my right to guide me down the road, towards the harbour. I didn’t move as fast as I could have done, wary of hitting an uneven spread of cobbles, of making a noise, but as I worked my fingers along the walls of the buildings, the stone seemed to fall away, like the structures were just ash.

  Fifty feet from the front of the house, I stopped.

  Dum. Dum.

  The same noise again, even clearer.

  The rain was heavier now, running under my boots in streams, between cobbles, into the pockmarks pounded out of the earth by the waves. I could hear it slopping past, but I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see anything. All I had was what I could hear and what I could feel. When the wind came, it was biting, and an uncontrolled shiver passed through me. I was soaked to the bone, shirt and jacket like a second skin. I edged forward, careful where I was putting my feet, the hous
es on my right disappearing from my grasp, rising up on to a higher portion of the plateau. But the road down kinked to the left. I couldn’t use the buildings for support any more, so I’d have to go it alone. Unsupported. Unguided. As I got closer to the house, the wind came again, even colder than before, a gentle, childlike murmur following in its wake.

  Movement.

  A brief glimmer of a torch inside the house.

  If he was still moving around in there, he hadn’t seen me. I moved faster down the road, letting the soles of my boots skim across the cobbles, trying to ensure I had time to stop myself when I hit uneven patches. As I approached, the light came again and again, drifting left to right inside what had once been the living room. When I was twenty feet away, I could see the plateau drop off, and I remembered that Haven was built on a bed of rock about six feet lower than the rest of the village. As the light spilled out again, I recalled more of the house: a garden running from the front, all the way around the side to the back, penned in by a crumbling stone wall; the collapsed extension on the back, falling away to the sea; the direction of the house, different from the others, its windows facing off to where the trawlers must once have docked. Now there was only Cornell’s boat, or the boat Cornell had borrowed: a mini trawler, thirty feet long, with a ten-foot deckhouse and a high-powered lamp bolted to the front of the cockpit.

  Inside, the light came again: left to right, left to right. Is he digging in there? Moving even closer to the wall, I tried to see in through one of the empty spaces that had once been a window – but all I could see was the ridge that had once been the second floor, and huge wall punctures, some going all the way through, some only as far as rotting cavity walls.

  Dum. Dum.

  It was coming from somewhere at the side of the house.

  Perching myself on the wall, I swung my legs over and dropped on to the lawn. It squelched beneath my feet, the soles of my shoes sinking into the mud. The other houses, six feet above, were spared this: half an inch of water that never left, soaking into the house and the garden, and then coming again, daily, as waves broke – over and over – against the rubble of the house. I stood, feet sinking further, and gripped the penknife.

  He was still shifting around in there. Still working on something.

  Light swinging, left to right, left to right.

  At the edge of the door, I paused, my back to the wall of the house. I could smell the damp now, rolling out of the house like an ocean swell. Then, slowly, I leaned in.

  Looked around the door frame and into the house.

  The inside was just as I remembered: debris – dust, glass, plaster, brick – scattered across the floor; the interior partitions that had once divided the living room, kitchen and back bedroom all gone; hard mud from the landslide matted against the walls, an old fire grille half-submerged in it, like a statue rising from its plinth; the skeletons of the counter and the appliances, rusted through, in the kitchen; then the door through to the extension.

  Hanging from the rafters, under a roof that was mostly a memory, was a length of rope. It hadn’t been there last time, which meant Cornell had added it tonight. At the end of the rope was the torch he’d had in his mouth, secured with a knot. He’d set it rocking gently, its soft glow rhythmically painting the walls, so it would look like movement.

  It was a trap.

  61

  A second later, there was the soft suck of footsteps across the garden – and then it felt like he broke my jaw. The punch was so hard, I left the ground, clipping the side of the house and landing on the wet grass like I’d fallen from the sky. All my breath, every last drop of air, seemed to burst out of me and, after that, there was only pain: it tremored across my face, taking my breath away for a second time. As my senses restarted, I could smell rust on myself and realized he was using an old anchor chain, had it wrapped around his fist to protect his hand, to increase the damage, to ensure I couldn’t respond.

  The torch cast light out of the house like a strobe, passing through its spaces in a series of blinks. He came at me: there, gone, there, gone, from light to dark on repeat. I retreated, attempting to get some distance between us, brain firing, trying to figure out how to fight back – but then my back hit the edge of the property. I turned and looked up. A six-foot vertical rock face rose out of the drowned garden to street level.

  Shit.

  His fist clamped on to my shoulder, trying to suppress me, to keep me in place. The light from the house blinked in our direction again, and it momentarily freeze-framed him: fist above his head – chains wound tightly, all the way up to his elbow – eyes dark and controlled, expression blank, unreadable. Then the punch came. I shifted to the side and felt metal brush the side of my face, and as his momentum carried him through, I smashed the meat of my boot into his knee. A soft crack. He made a short, sharp sound – an animalistic growl – and staggered back across the lawn, reaching down for it.

  Scrambling to my feet, I charged him.

  I hit him every bit as hard as he’d hit me, my shoulder smashing into his chest, my weight carrying us through the front door of the house and inside. His head clipped the torch on the rope and the lighting changed instantly: fast flashes, our shadows flickering on what remained of the walls. We landed on the floorboards, dust spitting up, water fanning out around us. As he tried to move, tried to come at me again, he cried out, the second time even more feral than the first, and I saw his lower leg was limp.

  I’d broken his knee.

  Getting to my feet, I loosened the knot on the rope, removed the torch, and pulled the line down from the rafters. He’d shifted across the floor on his backside, soundlessly, his pain internalized. But then, as I moved over to him, something in his face stopped me. There was a weird kind of calm to him suddenly, a light being switched off, even though his leg was damaged. A tilt of his head. Then that half-smile broke across his face again.

  ‘What are you smiling at?’

  He didn’t say anything, just stared at me.

  I walked around him, keeping my distance until his back was to me, then quickly grabbed him under the arms. He didn’t react. Didn’t struggle. Didn’t put up a fight at all. Alarm fluttered in my chest. I looked over his shoulder, trying to see if he had anything hidden, anything that would still give him an edge. There was nothing in the pockets of his jeans, nothing in the front of the apron. I cast my eyes out to the rest of the room, into its dark corners, then back over my shoulders to the extension. Cornell had just given up.

  Why?

  What had I missed?

  I began hauling him across the room, through the stagnant water, to where one of the counters still stood, its exterior eaten away by mould. Inside it, there were two lengths of rusting iron, originally there to support the counter top. I propped him against it.

  When I went back for the rope, he said something.

  ‘What did you say?’

  His head was forward, against his chest. No response.

  ‘What did you say?’

  My eyes lingered on him, then I grabbed the rope and began looping it around him, securing him to the iron support and pinning his arms to his side. His head was still against his chest and he was almost silent now, like he’d gone into some kind of trance. I felt a brief moment of vulnerability, but pushed it away, concentrating on the binds. By the time I was done, there was nowhere for him to go. No way for him to escape.

  And yet, somehow, I still didn’t feel safe.

  It was hard to tell whether he was conscious or not. I dropped to my haunches about five feet from him and leaned to the right, trying to get a clear view of his face.

  His eyes were closed.

  ‘Cornell?’

  He didn’t respond. Didn’t even move.

  Dum. Dum.

  I grabbed the torch off the floor and shone it beyond him, to the open doorway into the extension. Flicking a look at him, silent and still, I got to my feet and inched past. As I walked, debris scattered against the toes o
f my boots, and water moved in a V-shaped wake, out under the counters, into the rotten skirting boards.

  Dum. Dum.

  When I got to the door, I directed the torch inside. It was exactly as I remembered it: a space – probably once a storage room – that finished about thirty feet from where I was standing, the rest of it torn away by the power of the storm. As I inched forward, waves lashed against the rocks five or six feet below and water began to slosh in. It ran past me, through my legs, and washed out into the kitchen.

  Dum. Dum.

  That same ceaseless pulse.

  I shifted away from the edge, felt the extension sway with my weight, and slowly returned to the house. As I stepped back into the kitchen, I heard a gentle sound, like a tap running, and saw a puddle of water slowly pouring out into the room from under a skirting board. The wall panel above it had two holes at the top and bottom, and had started to bend and soften over time. After five seconds the water flow started slowing, then it stopped altogether.

  I looked back at Cornell.

  Head still bowed. Silent. Still.

  Then I remembered the body he’d been carrying.

  Heading out, I moved around to the side of the house, a biting wind rolling off the water. My wet clothes felt like sheets of ice, and my jaw was starting to ache even when I breathed. I rolled it a couple of times. It wasn’t broken, but it was painful and I could feel blood and fragments of teeth rinsing around. I spat them out on to the lawn – barely even that, just a square of standing water – and cut through the darkness with the torch.

  She was dumped, face down, against the house.

  About eight feet beyond her, the garden dropped away to the sea, the boundary wall – a crumbling memory – going with it. Every time the waves boomed on to the rocks, fresh seawater fed across the lawn, seeking out the holes in the house. That explained the water coming in under the skirting board: next to where the body had been left there was a fist-sized hole, water running into it like it was being drawn into a drain.