by Tim Lebbon
“I wonder if she’s scared,” Alison said. “If she’s still thinking in there, if she’s dreaming. I wonder if she’s scared? I mean, if she dies she goes to Heaven. That’s what she believes.”
“Of course she will, but it doesn’t matter. She’ll come around. She will.” Adam breathed into his wife’s hair and kissed her scalp. A door snicked shut behind him. He did not even bother turning around to look.
He knew that Howards was right, purely because his senses told him so.
He was being watched.
Maggie’s call came three days later. An influential London gallery wanted to display his paintings. And more than that, they were keen to commission some work for the vestibule of their new wing. They had offered twenty-five thousand for the commission. Maggie had already accepted. They wanted to meet Adam immediately to talk the projects through.
Alison’s mother had not woken up, other than for a few brief moments during the second night. No one had been there with her, but a nurse had heard her calling in the dark, shouting what appeared to be a plea: Don’t do it again, don’t please don’t! By the time the nurse reached the room Molly was unconscious once more.
“You have to go,” Alison said. “You simply have to. No two ways about it.” She was washing a salad while Adam carved some ham. Jamie was playing in their living room, building empires in Lego and then cheerfully aiding their descent.
Adam felt awful. There was nothing he wanted more than to travel to London, meet with the gallery, smile and shake hands—and to see himself living the rest of his life as what he had always dreamed of becoming: an artist. It was so far-fetched, so outlandish. But he was a lucky man now. The faces at distant windows told him so. He was lucky, and he was being watched.
Deny them, Howards had said. If you don’t… your family will be gone.
He could still say no. Maggie had accepted, but there was no contract, and she really should have consulted him before even commencing a deal of such magnitude. He could say no thank you, I’m staying here with my family because they need me, and besides, I’m scared of saying yes, I’m scared of all the good luck. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, you know.
There was still money left from the interview. They didn’t really need the cash.
And he could always go back to work—they’d been asking for him, after all.
“I’m doing some of the best work of my life,” he said, not sure even as he spoke whether he had intended to say it at all. “It’s a golden opportunity. I really can’t turn it down.”
“I know,” Alison replied. She was slicing a cucumber into very precise, very regular slices. It was something her mother always did. “I don’t want you to turn it down. You have to go, there’s no argument.”
Adam popped a chunk of ham into his mouth and chewed. “Yes, there is,” he said around the succulent mouthful. “The argument is, your mum is ill. She’s doing very poorly. You’re upset and you need me here. And there’s no one else who baby-sits Jamie for us on such a regular schedule. I could ask my parents down from Scotland… but, well, you know.”
“Not baby types.”
“Exactly.”
Alison came to him and wrapped her arms around his waist. She nuzzled his ear. When she did that, it made him so glad he had married someone the same height as him. “I know how much you’ve been aching for this for years,” she said. “You remember that time on holiday in Cornwall… the time we think we conceived Jamie in the sauna… remember what you said to me? We’ll have a big posh car, a huge house with a garden all the way around and a long gravel driveway, a study full of books; you can be my muse and I’ll work by day in the rooftop studio, and in the evenings I’ll play with my children.”
“What a memory for words you have,” Adam said. He could remember. It used to be the only thing he ever thought of.
“Go,” his beautiful wife said. “I’ll be fine. Really. Go and make our fortune. Or if you don’t, bring a cuddly toy for Jamie and a bottle of something strong for me.”
Good fortune, he thought. That’s what I have. Good fortune.
Deny them, Howards had said. But Howards was a crank. Surely he was.
“Fuck it,” he whispered.
“What?”
“I’ll go. And I promise I’ll be back within two days. And thanks, honey.”
Later that night they tried to make love, but Alison began to cry, and then the tears worsened because she could not forget about her mother, not even for a moment. Adam held her instead, turning away so that his erection did not nudge against her, thinking she may find it horrible that he was still turned on when she was crying, talking about her injured mother, using his shoulder as a pain-sink.
When she eventually fell asleep he went to look in on Jamie. His son was snoring quietly in the corner of his bed, blankets thrown off, curled into a ball of cuteness. Adam bent over and kissed his forehead. Then he went to visit the bathroom.
Something moved back from the frosted glass window as he turned on the light. It may have been nothing—as substantial as a puff of smoke, there for less than a blink of an eye—but he closed the curtains anyway. And held his breath as he used the toilet. Listening.
In the morning Alison felt better, and Jamie performed so as to draw her attention to him. He threw his breakfast to the floor, chose a time when he was diaperless to take a leak and caused general mayhem throughout the house. And all this before nine o’clock.
Adam took a stroll outside for a cigarette and looked up at the bathroom window. There was no way up there, very little to climb, nothing to hold on to even if someone could reach the window. But then, Amaranth did not consist of someones, but somethings. He shivered, took a drag on the cigarette, looked at the garden through a haze of smoke.
He was being watched. Through the conifers bordering the garden and a small public park peered two faces, pale against the evergreens.
Adam caught his breath and let it out slowly from his nose in a puff of smoke. He narrowed his eyes. No, they did not seem to be watching him—seemed not to have even noticed him, in fact—but rather they were looking at the house. They were discussing something, one of them leaning sideways to whisper to the other. A man and a woman, Adam saw now, truly flesh and blood, nothing transparent about them, nothing demonic.
Maybe they were staking the place out? Wondering when and how to break in, waiting for him to leave so that they could come inside and strip the house, not realizing that Alison and Jamie—
But I’m a lucky man.
Surely Amaranth would never permit that to happen to him.
Adam threw the cigarette away and sprinted across the garden. The grass was still damp with dew—he heard the hiss of the cigarette being extinguished— and it threw up fine pearls of water as he ran. Each footfall matched a heartbeat. He emerged from shadow into sunlight and realized just how hot it already was.
It may have been that their vision was obscured by the trees, but the couple did not see him until he was almost upon them. They wanted to flee, he could see that, but knowing he had noticed them rooted them to the spot. That was surely not the way of thieves.
“What do you want?” Adam shouted as he reached the screen of trees. He stood well back from the fence and spoke to them between the trunks, a hot sense of being family protector flooding his veins. He felt pumped up, ready for anything. He felt strong.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” the woman said, hands raised to her face as if holding in her embarrassment.
“Well, what are you doing? Why are you staring at my house? I should call the police, perhaps?”
“Oh Christ, no,” the man said, “don’t do that! We’re sorry, it’s just that… well, we love your house. We’ve been walking through the park on our way to work… we’ve moved into the new estate down the road… and we can’t help having a look now and then. Just to see… well, whether you’ve put it on the market.”
“You love my house. It’s just a two-bed semi.”
The woman nodded. “But it’s so perfect. The garden, the trees, the location. We’ve got a child on the way, we need a garden. We’d buy it the minute you decided to sell!”
“Not a good way to present ourselves as potential house-buyers, I suppose,” the man said, mock-grim faced.
Adam shook his head. “Especially so keen. I could double the price,” he smiled. They seemed genuine. They were genuine, he could tell that, and wherever the certainty came from he trusted it. In fact, far from being angry or suspicious, he suddenly felt sorry for them.
“Boy or girl?” he asked.
“I’m sorry?”
“Are you having a boy or a girl?”
“Oh,” the woman said, still holding her face, “we haven’t a clue. We want it to be a surprise. We just think ourselves lucky we can have children.”
“Yes, they’re precious,” Adam said. He could hear Jamie faintly, giggling as Alison wiped breakfast from his mouth, hands and face.
“Sorry to have troubled you,” the man said. “Really, this is very embarrassing. I hope we haven’t upset you, scared you? Here,” he fished in his pocket for his wallet and brought out a business card. He offered it through the fence.
Adam stepped forward and took the card. He looked at both of them—just long enough to make them avert their eyes—and thought of his looming trip to London, what it might bring if things went well. He pictured his fantasized country house with the rooftop art studio and the big car and the gym.
“It just so happens,” he said, “your dream may come sooner than you think.”
“Really?” the woman asked. She was cute. She had big eyes and a trim, athletic figure. Adam suddenly knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she would screw him if he asked. Not because she wanted his house, or thought it may help her in the future. Just because he was who he was.
He shrugged, pocketed the card and bid them farewell. As he turned and walked across the lawn to the back door, he could sense them simmering behind him. They wanted to ask more. They wanted to find out what he had meant by his last comment.
Let them stew. That way, perhaps they would be even more eager if and when the time came.
Saying goodbye at the train station was harder than he had imagined. It was the first trip he had been on without his family since the disastrous plane journey several weeks ago, and that final hug on the platform felt laden with dread. For Adam it was a distant fear, however, as if experienced for someone else in another life, not a disquiet he could truly attribute to himself. However hard he tried, he could not worry. Things were going too well for that.
Amaranth would look after him.
On the way to the station he had seen the things three times: once, a face staring from the back of a bus several cars in front; once, a shape hurrying across the road behind them, seen briefly and fleetingly in the rearview mirror; and finally in the station itself, a misplaced shadow hiding behind the high-level TV monitors that displayed departure and arrival times. Each time he had thought to show Alison, tell her why everything would be all right, that these beings were here to watch over him and bless him—
demon, angel, fairy, god
—but then he thought of her mother lying in a coma. How could he tell her that now? How could he tell her that everything was fine?
So the final hug, the final sweet kiss, and he could hardly look at her face without crying.
“I’ll be fine,” he said.
“Last time you told me that, ten hours later you were bobbing about in the Atlantic.”
“The train’s fully equipped with life-jackets and non-flammables.”
“Fool.” She hugged him again and Jamie snickered from his stroller.
Adam bent down and gave his son a kiss on the nose. He giggled, twisting Adam’s heart around his childish finger one more time.
“And you, you little rascal. When your daddy comes home, he’s going to be a living, breathing, working artist.”
“Don’t get too optimistic and you won’t be disappointed,” Alison whispered in his ear.
“I won’t be disappointed,” he whispered back. “I know it.”
He boarded the train and waved as it drifted from the station. His wife and son waved back.
The journey was quiet but exciting, not because anything happened, but because Adam felt as though he was approaching some fantastic junction in his life.
One road led the way he had been heading for years, and it was littered with stalled dreams and burned-out ambition. The other road—the new road, offered to him since the plane crash and all the strangeness that had followed it—was alight with exciting possibilities and new vistas. He had been given a chance at another life, a newer, better life. It was something most people never had.
He would take that road. This trip was simply the first step to get there.
Howards had been offered the same chance, had taken it, and look at him now! Rich, well-traveled, mad perhaps, but harmless with it. Lonely. No family or friends. Look at him now…
But he would not think of that.
The train arrived at Paddington and Adam stepped out onto the platform.
Someone screamed: “Look out!”
He turned and his eyes widened, hands raised as if they would hold back the luggage cart careening toward him. It would break his legs at the very least, cast him aside and crumple him between the train and the concrete platform—
Something shimmered in the air beside the panic-stricken driver, like heat haze but more defined, more solid.
A second and the cart would hit him. He was frozen there, not only by the impending impact and the pain that would instantly follow, but also by what he saw.
The driver, yanked to the side.
The ambiguous shape thrusting its hand through the metallic chassis and straight into the vehicle’s electric engine.
The cart, jerking suddenly at an impossible right angle to crunch into the side of the train carriage mere inches from Adam’s hip.
He gasped, finding it difficult to draw a breath, winded by shock.
The driver had been flung from the cart and now rolled on the platform, clutching his arm and leaving dark, glistening spots of blood on the concrete. People ran to his aid, some of them diverting to Adam to check whether he had been caught in the impact.
“No, no, I’m fine,” he told them, waving them away. “The driver… he’s bleeding, he’ll need help. I’m fine, really.”
The thing had vanished from the cart. High overhead pigeons took flight, their wings sounding like a pack of cards being thumbed. Game of luck, Adam thought, but he did not look up. He did not want to see the shapes hanging from the girders above him.
He walked quickly away, unwilling to become involved in any discussion or dispute about the accident. He was fine. That was all that mattered. He just wanted to forget about it.
“I saw,” a voice croaked behind him as he descended the escalator to the tube station. And then the smell hit him. A grotesque merging of all bad stenches, a white-smell of desperation and decay and hopelessness. There was alcohol mixed in with urine, bad food blended with shit, fresh blood almost driven under by the rancid tang of rot. Adam gagged and bile rose into his mouth, but he grimaced and swallowed it back down.
Then he turned around.
He had seen people like her many times before, but mostly on television. He did not truly believe that a person like this existed because she was so different from the norm, so unkempt, so wild, so unreal. Had she been a dog she would have been caught and put to sleep ages ago. And she knew it. In her eyes, the street person displayed a full knowledge of what had happened to her. And worse than that—they foretold of what would happen. There was no hope in her future. No rescue. No stroke of luck to save her.
“I saw,” she said again, breathing sickness at his face. “I saw you when you were meant to be run over. I saw your eyes when it didn’t happen. I saw that you were looking at one of… them.” She spat the final word, as
if expelling a lump of dog turd from her mouth.
Adam reached the foot of the escalator and strode away. His legs felt weak, his vision wavered, his skin tingled with goose bumps. Howards talking about the things he had seen could have been fluke or coincidence. Now, here was someone else saying the same things. Here, for Adam, was confirmation.
He knew the street person was following him; he could hear the shuffle of her disintegrating shoes. A hand fell on his shoulder. The sleeve of her old coat ended frayed and torn and bloodied, as if something had bitten it and dragged her by the arm.
“I said, I saw. You want to talk about it? You want me to tell you what you’re doing? You lucky fuck.”
Adam turned around and tried to stare the woman down, but he could not. She had nothing to lose, and so she held no fear. “Just leave me alone,” he said instead. “I don’t know what you’re on about. I’ll call the police if you don’t leave me alone.”
The woman smiled, a black-toothed grimace that split her face in two and squeezed a vile, pinkish pus from cracks in her lips. “You know what they did to me? Huh? You want to hear? I’ll tell you that first, and then I’ll let you know what they’ll do to you.”
Adam turned and fled. There was nothing else to do. People moved out of his way, but none of them seemed willing to help. As confused and doubtful as he was about Amaranth, he still thought: Where are you now? But maybe they were still watching. Maybe this was all part of their sport.
“They took me from my family,” the woman continued. “I was fucking my husband when they came, we were conceiving, it was the time my son was conceived. They said they saved me, but I never knew what from. And they took me away, showed me what was to become of me. And you know what?”
“Leave me alone!” Adam did not mean to shout, but he was unable to prevent the note of panic in his voice. Still, none of his fellow travelers came to his aid. Most looked away. Some watched, fascinated. But none of them intervened.
