by Tim Lebbon
His dad rocked him back and forth and whispered into his ear, but Jack could barely hear what he was saying. Instead he tried to do what he had once been told, name the parts of his fear in an attempt to identify them and set them open to view, to consideration, to understanding.
Something, outside in the dark. Dad, he saw it and shot it. The sounds, they’ve gone, no more picking, no more prodding at our house. Monsters, there are none of course. But if there are… Dad scared them off.
“Gray,” his mother said, and Jack looked up sharply.
“They weren’t monsters, were they, Dad?” His father did not say a word. He was shaking.
“Gray,” his mum said again, standing and wrapping them both in her arms. “We should try the police again.”
“You know the phone’s dodgy, Janey.”
“You shot at someone. We should try the police.”
“Someone? But you saw, you—”
“Someone,” Jack’s mum whispered softly. “Robbers, I expect, come to steal our Jackie’s things.” She ruffled his hair, but Jack could not find a smile to give her.
“I heard them picking at the putty,” he said. “Robbers would just smash the window. Least, they do in The Bill. And there’s nothing else making a noise, like the fox in the woods. I always hear the fox before I go to sleep, but I haven’t heard it tonight. Dad!”
His father turned and stared at him, his face unreadable.
“Did you shoot someone, Dad?”
His father shook his head. He began to smile as he pulled Jack’s face into his neck, but the expression was grotesque, like one of those old gargoyles Jack had seen on churches when they were in France last year. “Of course not, Jack. I fired into the air.”
But he had not fired into the air, Jack knew. He had leaned out and aimed down. Jack could not help imagining something squirming on the ground even now, its blood running into the gravel alongside the house, screams of pain impossible because it had no jaw left to open—
“Come on,” his dad said, “our room for now, son.”
“Didn’t you try the mobile?” Jack asked suddenly, but the look on his mother’s face made him wish he hadn’t.
“That’s not working at all.”
“I expect the batteries have run out,” he said wisely.
“I expect.”
His father carried him across the creaking landing and into their bedroom, a place of comfort. He dropped him gently onto the bed, and as he stood the telephone on the bedside table rang.
“I’ll get it!” Jack shouted, leaping across the bed.
“Son—”
He answered in the polite manner he had been taught: “Hello, Jack Haines, how may I help you?” It’s the middle of the night, he thought. Who rings in the middle of the night? What am I going to hear? Do I really want to hear it, whatever it is?
“Hey, Jackie,” a voice said, masked with crackles and pauses and strange, electronic groans. “Jackie… the town… dangerous… get to Tewton… Jackie? Jackie? Ja… ?”
“Mandy,” he said, talking both to her and his parents. “It’s Mandy!”
His mother took the receiver from his hand. “Mandy? You there?” She held it to her ear for a few seconds, then glanced at Jack. “No one there,” she said. “Line’s dead. It did that earlier.” She turned to his dad and offered the receiver, but he moved to the window and shaded his eyes so he could see out.
“She said we should go to Tewton,” Jack said, trying to recall her exact words, afraid that if he did he would also remember the strange way she had spoken. Mandy never called him Jackie. “She said it was safe there.”
“It’s safe here,” his dad said without turning around. He was holding the shotgun again and Jack wanted to believe him, wanted to feel secure.
His mum stood and moved to the window. “What’s that?” Jack heard her mutter.
“Fire.”
“A fire?”
His father turned and tried to smile, but it seemed to hurt. “A bonfire,” he said, “over on the other side of the valley.”
“At night? A bonfire in the middle of the night?” Jack asked.
His parents said nothing. His mother came back to the bed and held him, and his father remained at the window.
“It was Mandy,” Jack said.
His mother shrugged. “I didn’t hear anyone.”
He tried to move away from her, but she held him tight, and he thought it was for her own comfort as much as his. He didn’t like how his mum and dad sometimes talked about Mandy. He liked even less the way they often seemed to forget about her. He was old enough to know some stuff had happened—he could remember the shouting, the screaming on the last day Mandy had been with them—but he was not really old enough to realize exactly what.
It was so quiet that Jack could hear his father’s throat clicking as he breathed.
They stayed that way until morning.
“There are secrets in the night,” Mandy once told him. She was sitting next to his bed, looking after him because he’d been lost in the woods. He usually liked it when Mandy talked to him, told him things, but today even she could not cheer him up. She and his parents were hardly speaking, and when they did it was to exchange nothing but nastiness.
“What do you mean?”
She smiled. “You know, Jack. Secrets. You lie awake sometimes, listening for them. Don’t you? I know I do.”
“I just like listening,” he said, but he guessed she was right. He guessed there was more going on than most people knew, and he wanted to find out what.
“If you find a secret, sometimes it’s best to keep it to yourself. Not to tell Mum and Dad.”
Jack was subtly shocked at her words. Why keep something from Mum and Dad? Wasn’t that lying? But Mandy answered for him.
“Sometimes, grown-ups don’t understand their kid’s secret. And I’ll tell you one now.”
He sat up in bed, all wide-eyed and snotty-nosed. He wondered why Mandy was crying.
“I’m leaving home. At the weekend. Going to live in Tewton. But Jack, please, don’t tell Mum and Dad until I’m gone.”
Jack blinked as tears stung his eyes. Mandy hugged him and kissed his cheeks.
He didn’t want his sister to go. But he listened to what she said, and he did not tell their parents the secret.
Three days later, Mandy left home.
In the morning Jack went to fetch the milk, but the milkman hadn’t been there. His father appeared behind him in the doorway, scowling out at the sunlight and the dew steaming slowly from the ground, hands resting lightly on his son’s shoulders.
Something had been playing on Jack’s mind all night, ever since it happened. An image had seeded there, grown and expanded and, in the silence of his parents’ bedroom where none of them had slept, it had blossomed into an all-too-plausible truth. Now, with morning providing an air of normality—though it remained quieter than usual, and stiller—he was certain of what he would find. He did not want to find it, that was for sure, yet he had to see.
He darted away from the back door and was already at the corner of the house before his dad called after him. The shout almost stopped him in his tracks because there was an unbridled panic there, a desperation… but then he was looking around the side of the cottage at something he had least expected.
There was no body, no blood, no disturbed flower bed where someone had thrashed around in pain. He crunched along the gravel path, his father with him now, standing guard above and behind.
“You didn’t shoot anyone,” Jack said, and the sense of relief was vast.
Then he saw the rosebush.
The petals had been stripped, and they lay scattered on the ground alongside other things. There were bits of clothing there, and grimy white shards of harder stuff, and clumps of something else. There was also a watch.
“Dad, whose watch is that?” Jack could not figure out what he was seeing. If that was bone, where was the blood? Why was there a watch lying in their
garden, its face shattered, hands frozen at some cataclysmic hour? And those dried things, tattered and ragged around the edges, like shriveled steak…
“Gray!” his mother called from the back door. “Where are you? Gray! There’s someone coming down the hill.”
“Come on,” Jack’s dad said, grabbing his arm and pulling him to the back door.
Jack twisted around to stare up the hillside, trying to see who his mother was talking about, wondering whether it was the Judes from Berry Hill Farm. He liked Mr. Jude—he had a huge Mexican mustache and he did a great impression of a bandito.
“We should stay in the house,” his mum said as they reached the back door. “There’s nothing on the radio.”
If there’s nothing on the radio, what is there to be worried about? Jack wondered.
“Nothing at all?” his dad said quietly.
His mother shook her head, and suddenly she looked older and grayer than Jack had ever noticed. It shocked him, frightened him. Death was something he sometimes thought about on the darkest of nights, but his mother’s death… its possibility was unbearable, and it made him feel black and unreal and sick inside.
“I thought there may be some news…”
And then Jack realized what his mum had really meant… no radio, no radio at all… and he saw three people clambering over a fence higher up the hill.
“Look!” he shouted. “Is that Mr. Jude?”
His father darted into the cottage and emerged seconds later with the shotgun—locked and held ready in both hands—and a pair of binoculars hanging around his neck. He handed his mother the shotgun and she held it as if it were a living snake. Then he lifted the binoculars to his eyes and froze, standing there for a full thirty seconds while Jack squinted and tried to see what his dad was seeing. He pretended he had a bionic eye, but it didn’t do any good.
His dad lowered the glasses, and slowly and carefully took the gun from his wife.
“Oh no,” she said. “Oh no, Gray, no, no, no…”
“They did warn us,” he murmured.
“But why the Judes? Why not us as well?” his mum whispered.
Jack’s father looked down at him, and suddenly Jack was very afraid. “What, Dad?”
“We’ll be leaving now, son,” he said. “Go down to the car with your mum, there’s a good boy.”
“Can I take my books?”
“No, we can’t take anything. We have to go now because Mr. Jude’s coming.”
“But I like Mr. Jude!” A tear had spilled down his dad’s cheek. That was terrible, that was a leak in the dam holding back chaos and true terror because while his dad was here—firm and strong and unflinching— there was always someone to protect him.
His father knelt in front of him. “Listen, Jackie. Mr. Jude and his family have a… a disease. If we’re still here when they arrive, they may try to hurt us, or we may catch the disease. I don’t know which, if either. So we have to go—”
“Why don’t we just not let them in? We can give them tablets and water through the window and…” He trailed off, feeling cold and unreal.
“Because they’re not the only ones who have the disease. Lots of other people will have it too by now. We may have to wait a long time for help.”
Jack turned and glanced up the hill at the three people coming down. They didn’t look ill. They looked odd, it was true. They looked different. But not ill. They were moving too quickly for that.
“Okay.” Jack nodded wisely, and he wondered who else had been infected. He guessed it may have had something to do with what was on the telly yesterday, the thing his mum and dad had been all quiet and tense and pale about. An explosion, he remembered, an accident in a place so far away he didn’t even recognize the name. “Mandy said we should go to Tewton. She said it was safe there.”
“We will.” His father nodded, but Jack knew it was not because Mandy had said so. His parents rarely listened to her anymore.
“That big bonfire’s still burning,” Jack said, looking out across the valley for the first time. A plume of smoke hung in the sky like a frozen tornado, spreading out at the top and dispersing in high air currents. And then he saw it was not a bonfire, not really. It was the white farm on the opposite hillside; the whole white farm, burning. He’d never met the people who lived there, but he had often seen the farmer in his fields, chugging silently across the landscape in his tractor.
Jack knew where the word bonfire came from, and he could not help wondering whether today this was literally that.
His dad said nothing but looked down at Jack, seeing that he knew what it really was, already reaching out to pick up his son and carry him to their car.
“Dad, I’m scared!”
“I’ve got you, Jackie. Come on, Janey. Grab the keys. The shotgun cartridges are on the worktop.”
“Dad, what’s happening?”
“It’s okay.”
“Dad…”
As they reached the car, they could hear the Jude family swishing their feet through the sheen of bluebells covering the hillside. There were no voices, no talking or laughing. No inane bandito impressions this morning from Mr. Jude.
His parents locked the car doors from the inside and faced forward.
Jack took a final look back at their cottage. The car left the gravel driveway, and just before the hedge cut off the house from view, he saw Mr. Jude walk around the corner. From this distance, it looked like he was in black and white.
Jack kept staring from the back window so he did not have to look at his parents. Their silence scared him, and his mum’s hair was all messed up.
Trees passed overhead, hedges flashed by on both sides, and seeing where they had been instead of where they were going presented so much more for his consideration.
Like the fox, standing next to a tree where the woods edged down to the road. Its coat was muddied; its eyes stared straight ahead. It did not turn to watch them pass. Jack thought it may have been his fox—the creature he had listened to each night for what seemed like ages—and as he mourned its voice he heard its cry, faint and weak, like a baby being dragged from its mother’s breast and slaughtered.
They had left the back door open. His mum had dashed inside to grab the shotgun cartridges, his dad already had the car keys in his pocket, they’d left the back door open and he was sure—he was certain— that his mum had put some toast under the grille before they ran away. Maybe Mr. Jude was eating it now, Jack thought, but at the same time he realized that this was most unlikely. Mr. Jude was sick, and from what Jack had seen of him as he peered around the corner of their cottage, toast was the last thing on his mind.
Living, perhaps, was the first thing. Surviving. Pulling through.
Jack wondered whether the rest of Mr. Jude’s family looked as bad.
The sense of invasion, of having his own space trespassed upon, was immense. They had left the back door open, and anyone or anything could wander into their house and root through their belongings. Not only the books and cupboards and food and fridge and dirty washing, but the private stuff. Jack had a lot of private stuff in his room, like letters from Mandy that he kept under a loose corner of carpet, his diary shoved into the tear in his mattress along with the page of a magazine he had found in the woods, a weathered flash of pink displaying what a woman really had between her legs.
But that sense of loss was tempered by a thought Jack was suddenly proud of, an idea that burst through the fears and the doubts and the awful possibilities this strange morning presented: that he actually had his whole life with him now. They may have left their home open to whatever chose to abuse it, but home was really with his family, wherever they may be. He was with them now.
All except Mandy.
He named his fears:
Loss, his parents disappearing into memory. Loneliness, the threat of being unloved and unloving. Death… that great black death… stealing away the ones he loved.
Stealing him away.
For once,
the naming did not comfort him as much as usual. If anything it made him muse upon things more, and Mandy was on his mind and why she had run away, and what had happened to start all the bad stuff between the people he loved the most.
Jack had come home from school early that day, driven by the head teacher because he was feeling sick. He was only eight years old. The teacher really should have seen him into the house, but instead she dropped him at the gate and drove on.
As he entered the front door he was not purposely quiet, but he made sure he did not make any unnecessary noise, either. He liked to frighten Mandy—jump out on her or creep up from behind and smack her bum—because he loved the startled look on her face when he did so. And to be truthful, he loved the playful fight they would always have afterward even more.
He slipped off his shoes in the hallway, glanced in the fridge to see if there were any goodies, ate half a jam tart… and then he heard the sound from the living room.
His father had only ever smacked him three times, the last time more than a year before. What Jack remembered more than the pain was the loud noise as his dad’s hand connected with him. It was a sound that signified a brief failure in their relationship; it meant an early trip to bed, no supper and a dreadful look on his mother’s face that he hated even more, a sort of dried-up mix of shame and guilt.
Jack despised that sound. He heard it now, not only once, not even three times. Again, and again, and again—smacking. And even worse than that, the little cries that came between each smack. And it was Mandy, he knew that it was Mandy being hit over and over.
Their mum and dad were at work. So who was hitting Mandy?
Jack rushed to the living room door and flung it open.
His sister was kneeling on the floor in front of the settee. She had no clothes on and her face was pressed into the cushions, and the man from the bakery was kneeling behind her, grasping her bum, and he looked like he was hurting too. Jack saw the man’s willy—at least he thought that’s what it was, except this was as big as one of the French bread sticks he sold—sliding in and out of his sister, and it was all wet and shiny like she was bleeding, but it wasn’t red.
