Dark & Dangerous: A Collection of Paranormal Treats

by Julie Kenner

She hadn’t expected it, what they did. Perhaps she should have done. Wild dogs fought in a pack—

  Just as it happened, Connor nodded at her, a brusque careless nod. She knew it was his signal to her to run away.

  Then the men from the house bounded right past her, pushing her aside. She tried to snatch at them. The knife man cut back at her, a high blow and only with his elbow, but it caught her shoulder and spun her. As she toppled into the left-hand bank of roses, she saw the pack land on Connor—two at the front of him, and one grappling at his arms. She screamed his name as she ripped herself from the talons of the roses, tearing her skin, tearing out her hair, fighting back to him. She heard the first thick blow crack down, saw the flash of the knife.

  They had their priorities fixed now. Connor first.

  He had given her the chance to get away. Perhaps at the cost of his life. She would never take it.

  In that instant, her hands raised, unarmed, she started forward, and a shadow slanted across her. It had nothing to do with trees or cloud, or the figures struggling below the wall. It was the shadow of a tall man swiveling and pivoting, high in the air—

  Vivien lifted her head.

  The statue of Patrick Aspen reeled on its plinth. Its arms swung upward, stiff and jointless, like those of some mechanical doll or robot, its head veered on its neck. The foot that had skewed kicked stiffly free of the base.

  The four fighters had dropped apart. They stood, gaping up at the statue, even the now red-knifed man, even Connor who sagged between them.

  Time stopped. One moment stuck for an hour in stasis. Then another moment began—

  The statue of Patrick Aspen Sinclair plunged headlong from the plinth. It dropped like a weightless thing of white paper. But where it struck their bodies, and the path below, it detonated into ten million fragments, flinders, splinters, shards, into dust clouds like steam and cannon smoke, into a noise like the end of the world.

  Vivien crouched, hearing the noise, which would never be over.

  But the noise was over. There was no noise at all. A kind of blank. And then she heard the gradual spattering of a thin hail—the final debris falling, settling.

  The world had not ended. Only been adjusted.

  Connor was now the only man standing. The other three were down, immobilized, two apparently struck by chunks of marble, and unconscious. Connor and Vivien were unique in that, beyond the injuries they had already received, nothing from the falling statue, impossibly, miraculously, had hit either of them. Not a scratch. Not even any grit in the eye.

  She heard Connor’s voice from far off, and marveled she could ever have mistaken any other voice for his, ever…. He was talking into his mobile, asking coolly for the police. She ceased to listen to the words, listening only to his voice. And then she looked down at the path, and saw that something had rolled there, to her feet.

  It was the head of the statue. Also impossibly, it, too, had mostly survived the impact. It lay there on the ground, one cheek blunted a little, staring up at her with such composed yet bitter sadness. Even when Connor took her in his arms, she stared on into its face, until her own tears blinded her.

  Chapter 11

  The hammock swung gently.

  Vivien lay back on the cushions, looking up through half-closed eyes at a sky of deep August blue.

  Somewhere there was the distant noise of a harvester in the fields, over the walls of the garden. From the old orchard, bees buzzed back and forth, and she could smell flowers…. No roses. Not here. She was glad of that. It might take her some while, she thought, to like their perfume again.

  Her mind turned back, flipping over its pages like a well-thumbed book. She let it. It was no good always running away from the past.

  In the most bewildered way, Vivien hadn’t wanted the necessary police to arrive at Addie’s flat that July night. Eventually she saw she was irrationally trying to protect Connor from having to deal with them. Because, if they had previously suspected him of murder (she would have sworn, suspected him wrongly), surely this must be for him a grisly ordeal.

  But Connor was only straightforward with the police, and they with him. It seemed they, too, must have concluded all former suspicions were unfounded.

  When the turmoil of cars, uniforms, flaring lights, rounding up and questions were over, Connor and Vivien, on police advice, sought the casualty department of the nearest hospital. It was Thursday night, and “custom,” as an orderly put it, slight; they didn’t have to wait too long. Their injuries were minor. Even the knife slash along Connor’s upper arm, though colorful, needed only two stitches. The doctor seemed as much concerned at Vivien’s rosebush scratches. Filled with tetanus boosters, they left the hospital around 1:00 a.m.

  A non-Cwick cab took them to Vivien’s flat.

  On edge, and high with adrenaline, they sat most of the night in her little front room, eating toast and drinking tea. Near sunrise they went to bed, crammed close together on the narrow mattress, not making love but burrowing into each other, despite the heat, like animals in winter.

  When Vivien woke at 3:00 p.m. the following afternoon, she lay a long while, looking at Connor’s sleeping face. Returning with mugs of coffee, she stroked his hair and kissed his mouth. One, then two coffee-matching black eyes unclosed, and two strong tanned arms—one bandaged—took hold of her.

  “An unreasonable argument, an attack by villains, a ride in a police car to an A and E department, plus a night with absolutely no sex. Wow, Vivien. Don’t ever say I don’t know how to show you a good time.”

  “The only trouble is, however can we surpass such a wonderful date? Nothing could possibly equal it…could it?”

  “Let’s see…”

  “Oh, you’re so bruised, Connor—”

  “Then, kiss it better.”

  Surely by then there were scarcely any restraints on them. They had talked it all through. Almost all. Vivien thought that finally she knew the majority of the facts, everything that was of an ordinary human origin. Most important, she didn’t now believe that Connor had murdered Kate Mortimer. Though she had yet to hear Connor’s version of events, the profile of psychopath didn’t fit him. The evidence was against it now.

  Even so, the plot was quite unnerving. A group of unscrupulous developers had been buying up part of Coronet Square, and Adelaide Preece, by refusing to shift and holding out for a better deal, had got in the way of their scheme.

  The would-be purchasers had then conceived the idea of frightening Addie, an old and traditional method among their kind. But Addie was far too unaware to notice or reflect on any unusual pressure. And by the time the developers put their backup plan of coercion into effect, Addie was in France, and Vivien had been installed instead.

  Armed with duplicate keys, three hired thugs let themselves into the flat above, which was already sold and empty. Cutting down through joists and ceiling, removing and replacing a piece from the plasterwork with a hinged facsimile, they had soon gained a way into the lower apartment. Connor had suggested Adelaide was so unobservant, this “building work” might well have gone on when she was off the premises.

  The ceiling entry was an ingenious route. It enabled any of the men, whenever they wanted, to enter the lower flat by a rope, later pulled up with help from a companion above. Generally their excursions went undetected—except for the penultimate time, when one of them had evidently kicked the wall in transit, leaving a scuff mark.

  The gang would arrive in the flat quietly, normally at night. Their mandate, as the police confirmed, was to stay within certain boundaries, stealing the occasional garment—unnoticed at first by Vivien, since the stolen clothes were Addie’s own—removing food from the fridge and wine from the larder racks, also unnoted.

  It seemed, too, that in avoiding Addie so scrupulously, they had never seen her and so did not grasp that Vivien, when she moved in, was someone else. But when Vivien—Addie, as they thought her—had visitors, of whom one way and another there had been quite
a few, the villains cautiously lay low.

  They had presently, noting the absence now of a car, put the card of an invented cab company under the phone for her. People sometimes forgot they had accumulated such items, and the appearance of the card wasn’t meant to alarm. They hoped she would use it, and so end up in a car with two of them. No doubt threats would then have been offered, though again, probably not going too far. But when the driver arrived to take Vivien (Adelaide) off for this jaunt, Connor had been in the flat. Dismissed, the “taxi driver” had had to go.

  The decapitated roses were also their work. And they had kindly finished the wine from bottle and glasses.

  “But you frustrated them constantly, Vivien,” Connor had said. “You didn’t notice so many of the would-be worrying clues they were leaving for you. Not because you’re a blockhead like Adelaide, but because the territory wasn’t your own. So then, they needed to rev it all up.”

  Vivien said, “Was the business of switching on all the lights part of that?”

  “No. That wasn’t. I’m afraid it was Cinnamon. She’s been—how shall I put this?—seeing Lewis. When she saw he’d developed much more interest in you—as well as going off to dinner with his wife, Angela, and then to meet one of the wine waitresses from the premier—Cinnamon, who is scared of Angela actually, decided to try a little freak-out of her own on you. She used the spare keys she’d previously got from Addie for Scavengers use—and then, being Cinnamon, forgot to tell me about. She confessed all this to me the next afternoon. That was why I came over directly to Adelaide’s flat, to explain about the lights. And there you were with Lewis, exactly as Cinnamon had sniveled you would be.”

  “You believed her?”

  “No. I just—It was being there again. I was okay there with you, my darling. But that next day, the kitchen with all that steam…”

  “So why did you come back later, just in time to save me so dramatically?”

  “I’m an actor, remember. No, I’d regained my sanity. After which I’d called you. At Adelaide’s, at Camden. I couldn’t get any answer, and then, calling Adelaide’s one last time, the line went. No fault. No excuse. I knew it had been cut.”

  “And you were right.”

  That last night, offended by Vivien’s (Adelaide’s) lack of response to terrorization, the versatile villains had opted to step up the campaign. They saw to the phone and the lights. The crowning touch had been the resin gum applied to the front door and keyhole.

  “I got to the door and saw the resin—they hadn’t made a neat job of it. I didn’t waste any more time. The way in over the back gardens is comparatively easy. Remember, I’d lived there. Then I heard your scream. You have wonderful lungs, Vivien, fortunately. I never sprinted so fast in my life.”

  The villains had gone too far, further than they had been told to go. They had panicked. And so the only option left, out there in the wild garden, was to beat Connor up and “soften” Vivien to a state where neither she, nor Connor, would seek police help.

  “They wanted the tenant—you, they thought—out, and the flat free. Otherwise they wouldn’t get paid. Being brainless, they never thought any of it through.”

  During the following days, extra information filtered through from a helpful police superintendent. Vivien, it seemed, was not the only victim of this particular gang. The police thought it unlikely either she or Connor would need to be involved any further.

  Almost every question was being answered. But not quite all.

  Certain things stayed stubbornly unsolved.

  Who had left the first rose in the conservatory—and how? No one, amid all the plethora of wrongdoing, would admit to that. As for the opened book thrown down on the table, the villains—who anyway stridently denied touching anything that might be valuable, such as an expensively bound book—seemed unlikely to have knowledge of the text or its aptness.

  Pieces of the puzzle remained undone.

  Pieces of both puzzles—the supernatural, if so it was, and the past.

  Four days after the events at Addie’s, Connor went back and rescued Vivien’s stuff for her. By then there was an unobtrusive police presence in Coronet Square, and Connor had called Addie, “rampaging through Barcelona, trampling the Gaudis.” He had told her, it seemed, in answer to her complaints, that she was lucky Vivien wasn’t going to sue.

  That night, too, he told Vivien he was through with Scavengers. “Lousy friends like Lewis betray their friends. It isn’t just lousy lovers that do it. He can deal with the movie company as well, the ones who want the statue of poor old shattered Patrick. I hope they make him sweat.”

  It seemed there was a chance of a film role for Connor. It was to be shot in Italy. “I’d like it. Providing it won’t get in the way of us.”

  He had left acting alone two years ago, for a reason, Connor said. He would tell her. But not here, not in London.

  At the thought of confronting the last piece of the real enigma, something made Vivien draw back, half-afraid.

  But then he started to tell her about his house in Gloucester. “It’s where I live when I’m out of London.” A small, four-square stone building, with two acres of garden, a stream and apple orchard, situated among fields, and about one and a half miles outside Fairford. He added very seriously, “The church at Fairford has some of the oldest authentic fifteenth-century glass in England. The first window concerns the temptation of Eve. It involves apples—”

  Lunch had been sumptuous. Connor had cooked it. After the strawberries and cream, he vanished into the house to make coffee, and Vivien lay back in the hammock, slowly swinging, watching distant blue sky and green gnarled apple boughs heavy with red fruit.

  This was a dream house. And she was safe, safe with her lover, who loved her….

  The light clink of coffee mugs brought her back.

  “You were asleep. You look beautiful when you sleep. But then you wake up and you’re even more beautiful. Clever Vivien.” He kissed her. “Your mouth is beautiful. And this…and this…and these…”

  But then he drew away. It was almost as if someone invisible had pushed him. He sat down on the wooden seat by the tray of coffee, staring at her. Silent.

  Vivien’s heart knocked against her breast.

  “What is it?”

  “I think, if you don’t mind—I think I’d better tell you now. I mean, about Kate.”

  Vivien sat up—difficult in the swaying hammock. She said nothing. The strawberries seemed to turn to coils of iron in her stomach. What would he say? Until now—nothing. What had he done? She had almost been able to forget.

  “I’m sorry. It’s the wrong time, probably. Would there ever be a good one? But I need to do this. I need you to know. Oh, Vivien, I loved Kate, but she’s gone. I don’t want her in the garden here with us, or in the bed with us. I have to put her to rest.”

  Vivien found air, from somewhere.

  “Go on.”

  “Kate and I—we met four years ago. What I have to say is that she was wonderful. That’s all I want to say directly about Kate.

  “Right after we got together, there was a lot of luck, suddenly a lot of work, and quite a bit of money. I—We hadn’t expected it. I bought the flat in London—Adelaide’s flat now—because it was pretty central, and opulent in a way neither of us had ever known. We should have been happy. We were. Then things changed.

  “The first thing was the statue. Suddenly a solicitor landed me with it, due to some arrangement my deserting wastrel skunk of a father made. Perhaps he meant well. I just think he’d never found a buyer. But Kate and I liked the statue. To start with. We used to sit in the garden in the evening, reading or learning lines. Kate used to speak to Patrick. Yeah. I remember that.

  “But then she started to talk about him a lot. She knew the whole thing, plenty of people do—Nevins, Emily, all that. She kept saying, ‘Wouldn’t it make a fantastic period drama, Connor, you could play Patrick, I could play Emily.’ I used to say, ‘Just be careful who you
’re going to cast as Nevins.’ She even found a book—Shakespeare—with a picture of Emily in it.

  “That July, I got the lead role in The Crucible—the role—John Proctor. It was quite an important production, in Leeds. Kate wanted Abigail. She auditioned for it, thought she’d done well. Then they decided she was too old for the part. She was only twenty-six. On a stage that wouldn’t have mattered—but they’d made up their minds. We talked it over. Kate was terrific about it. She said I must go ahead. She’d come down at weekends. We’d make a holiday of it. And she’d be there for the first night.”

  Connor paused. His face had no expression.

  “A girl called Alex took the part of Abigail Williams. She was young enough, apparently, about seventeen, eighteen. But also she was an astonishingly good actress. She wasn’t better than Kate—and certainly not so polished or skilled. Alex didn’t know enough yet, but she had a kind of quality…a letting go. She’d come out on stage, even in rehearsal, in jeans, with her hair tied back in an elastic band—and she was…gone. Abigail was there instead. Alex had some special gift not all of us get.

  “Vivien, I liked this girl, and I admired her ability. She was easy to work with, and ready to learn. And yes, she was attractive. But there was nothing else between us, except what’s in the play. I need you to believe that, Vivien. Kate never did.”

  Vivien sat, still as he. She felt cold under the sun. She said nothing, nor did he prompt her.

  “Maybe if I’d been on my own, I might have been interested. But I wasn’t. And it was Kate I was in love with. Oh, I really was. I’d go crazy every Friday night, knowing she’d be there on Saturday. I used to hate saying goodbye on Monday morning. I kept saying to her, ‘Come and stay for longer.’ At first she said she couldn’t. Then she wouldn’t. Then, when she did come, it was different. She’d started to try to trap me—that’s how she described it afterwards. To catch me out. I didn’t notice how she kept on and on about Patrick and Emily and Nevins. Kate thought Alex and I were having sex. We weren’t.