by Gary McMahon
“We’ll find her.” Thomson moved around the table and came up behind me. I could smell his aftershave: some cheap, generic brand bought from a chemist or a market stall. It failed to hide the odor of dried sweat. I pictured him working late at the station every night, putting in the hours, toiling until the cases were solved, his hair getting thinner and thinner, an ulcer growing in his stomach. He was a good man, a good cop. He would do everything to get back my daughter.
“Please…” I turned to face him. We were standing so close I could see the pores in his skin, the blackheads in the channels at the side of his nose. “Just get her back for me.” I was powerless; I felt like the world’s biggest loser. There was nothing I could do. These men—these officers of a law in which I had little faith, a law I had shown contempt for when I’d helped murder a man—were my only hope.
“Trust me,” said Thomson. And I tried, I really did. I tried my hardest.
The officer he’d sent to check on Prudence Shingley came back into the kitchen.
“Sir…”
“Don’t tell me you’ve found her already?”
The officer looked worried. He glanced from Thomson to me and then back again. “Sort of, sir…it’s complicated.”
“Just tell me, son. We don’t have time to mess about.”
“I recognized the name. Shingley. He wrote that book, didn’t he? The one about Little Miss Moffat…I read a lot of true crime.” He gave a nervous smile, and then dropped it immediately.
“Little Miss Moffat and the Radiant Children, yes. That’s right. You’ll make detective in a year at this rate.” Thomson could do nothing to keep the impatience out of his voice.
“Sorry, sir. But because I remembered the name, I ran a check on him and…well. This is where it gets weird.”
“Just tell me, for Christ’s sake!”
The officer looked at me again. There was a strange look in his eyes, one I couldn’t quite place. It might have been fear, or it might not have been. I’m still not sure.
“Well?” Thomson took a step toward the officer; the young man flinched, as if he were about to be struck.
“Well, sir. Prudence Shingley was his daughter.”
“We fucking know that, son. Are you trying to ruin your career before it’s even started?” He took another step forward.
The officer said the next part quickly, breathlessly: “He had two daughters, Prudence and Hope. Hope Shingley is living in Los Angeles, America, with her husband and child.”
The officer paused and took a deep breath before he continued. “The other one, Prudence…she’s dead.”
Thomson stiffened. “What?”
“Prudence Shingley hanged herself six months ago. Her body was found in a squat several miles from here, on Ashdown Road. No foul play suspected. Drug paraphernalia was found near the corpse, and there were toxins in her bloodstream. She killed herself. There was even a suicide note…I can’t remember exactly, but it said something about her father, how she missed him, how she didn’t want to go on without him.”
“Fuck,” said Thomson.
“Sorry, sir.” The officer walked out of the room.
I felt as if the floor had turned to water; an ocean had opened up beneath and around me, ready to carry me away. Perhaps I’d drift for weeks, or I might reach land before long—an isolated island; a deserted little land mass where I could forget about all this.
TWENTY
Numb
Grief is a tangible thing. Like a weight inside your chest, it hangs there, dragging you down. No matter how hard you try, you are unable to shake it off. It beds itself deep inside you, under your skin, burrowing into the very meat of you, and settles there.
In the space of a day, I’d lost my ex-wife and my daughter. There was nothing I could do to put this right, nothing I could say, and nowhere I could go. I was forced to put my faith in other people, which was something I’d never been able to do. Other people let you down; they always fail you, most of the time without even realizing it.
But there was nothing I could do. Nobody I could hurt. Everything I loved had been taken from me.
I spent all the following day walking the streets, calling her name. I saw her ghost on every corner; her shadow crossed my path at each busy intersection. She was nowhere and she was everywhere. She was deep inside me, but she wasn’t anywhere that I could reach. I glimpsed her holding hands with a skinny, naked black man whose head had been caved in. The man was smiling. He knew me and I knew him: our paths were crossed forever.
They turned a corner and I followed, but then I lost them in the crowds. There was blood on the pavement. His blood. Her blood. My blood. All of our blood, staining the concrete.
I wanted her back. My daughter, my baby…my Jess…
I’d have given anything just to have her back in my arms.
The world spun slowly beneath my feet; the blood dried on the pavement; the dead black man’s smile hung in the air, taunting me and blowing little air kisses. Somewhere in the distance, children sang.
I kept looking for that which I had so carelessly lost.
Late in the day, I found myself at Carole’s flat. I went around the back, along an alleyway, and climbed the fire-escape stair. I smashed a window and went inside. I didn’t care who had heard; I didn’t give a fuck if the police came along to arrest me. They’d been here already and found nothing. The place had been cleared out. I didn’t even know if Carole was still alive, or if Benjamin Kyle had got rid of her. She’d taken a risk in coming to see me, and I’d ignored her advice. Perhaps if I’d listened, and if I had acted immediately, I’d still have Jess with me.
I walked through the empty rooms of Carole’s flat, looking for something, anything: a clue. There was nothing. There were clothes scattered in the bedroom, other signs of someone packing in a hurry. I saw old bloodstains on the bedsheets, bloody tissues in the bathroom wastepaper basket. I sat down on the bed and waited for someone to arrive so I could hurt them. Nobody did. I waited there as long as I could, pretending that Carole would walk through the door with Jess, and everything would be okay.
When I left, my heart was as empty as those rooms. The same echoes of past habitation left with me, lodged inside my cavernous, hollowed-out chest. Without Jess, I wasn’t entirely whole.
I knew there was more tragedy to come. All I had to do—all I ever had to do—was stand and wait for it to find me. I sensed the dark movement around me; just one of myriad dark movements, all working in unison. The machinery of night was moving up a gear. If I didn’t act, I would be crushed by the darkness.
TWENTY-ONE
A Kind of Magic
Night: dark hours, long, lonely shadows.
I couldn’t sleep again. I was exhausted, but unable to rest. My body ached as if I’d been training for hours, and my mind was fuzzy and distant. I couldn’t think clearly. Nothing seemed real to me.
I was lying on my bed thinking about nothing, not even Jess. The world seemed far away, like a dream I’d once had. I had an itch below my right eye, but I was too tired to even move my arms; they were flat on the bed at my side. I willed the itch away. After a few minutes, it got the message and faded.
Mind over matter. My mind didn’t matter. Nothing did, not anymore.
After what seemed like hours, I was finally able to move. I slid sideways off the bed and went down on my knees. I grabbed at the carpet with numb fingers, looking for something in the weave of the material. Not caring that my behavior was rather strange, I stood and walked to the window. The streetlights shone down on the empty road and footpath. I saw two police constables conversing on the street corner. I’d been told that extra patrols were in the area, just in case Jess was nearby. They were now clutching at straws. She’d been missing for almost twenty hours.
When I’d returned home from my frantic search earlier in the evening, there had been a couple of reporters waiting for me. I ignored them, pushing them out of the way as I made for the door. I’d wanted to hit
them, but I held back. It wasn’t their fault; they were simply the vultures feeding off the corpse of my life.
I turned away from the window and left the room. The lights were off all over the house, but I didn’t bother switching them on. The darkness felt more comfortable.
I went downstairs and poured myself a whiskey. I’d been hitting it hard since I got home. The bottle was almost empty. But no matter how much I drank, I remained sober.
There were fist-sized holes in the kitchen wall, near the wall-mounted boiler. I remembered hitting the wall earlier, over and over again, my mind a blank, my fists just extensions of the loss I was experiencing. I glanced at my hands; the knuckles were raw, with a few tiny cuts. I felt no pain. I was beyond that now.
I heard a small soft movement behind me. When I turned around, the cat was entering the room.
“Magic…where have you been?” I was oddly unmoved by the reappearance of the cat. A cat I’d already seen die. His fur was dirty and bedraggled, as if he, too, had been searching for Jess. “Come here, boy.”
The cat stopped in the middle of the kitchen floor and looked at me. His eyes were large and unblinking. He tilted his head to one side, opened his mouth wide, and then meowed. The sound was strange and high-pitched; it sounded like a baby crying rather than a cat.
“Come here, boy.” I got down on my haunches and held out a hand. I rubbed my first finger and thumb together so they made a faint rasping noise. The cat just stared at me. He wasn’t interested. He did an odd little movement, and then hitched up onto his back paws, standing upright, like a little person. I could see the open wound in his belly. The sides were splayed apart; the hole was empty.
The cat meowed again, dropped back down onto all fours, and then started moving toward the kitchen door.
I stood upright and followed him, opened the door to let him out. The cat stopped, turned around to face me, and sat down on the ground. He licked his paws, cleaning off some of the grime. The wind sloughed through the long grass near the fence, sounding like whispering. Somewhere far off, a car alarm blared. Music drifted in and out of audibility, probably coming through the open window of a passing car. I stood in the doorway and felt the cool breeze on my face.
Then, voices: children, moving past the house on the front street. I walked outside, went along the side of the house, and stood watching them.
There was a group of five or six children, with an adult leading them. The children were dressed up in costumes—a witch, a bedsheet ghost, one that might have been Harry Potter… At first I failed to register what I was seeing, and thought that I might be hallucinating. I looked at the glass I still gripped in my hand and wondered if I was drunk after all.
Then the realization hit me. It was Halloween night. These kids were trick-or-treaters. I almost laughed, but the grim humor was overshadowed by a sense of impending doom.
The children giggled as they passed by, the adult speaking to them quietly and pointing to those few houses on my street with decorations in the windows—a way for the people inside to advertise that they were participating in the events.
Halloween night. It had crept up on me, arrived without my even knowing. If Jess were here, she would probably want to join those kids. I’d have bought her a costume from the supermarket. She’d have laughed and sung, pretending to be scared and then pretending to be scary.
I felt the sharp pull of loss all over again. It anchored me to the moment, made me aware of my emotions all over again. I tried to hang on to the pain, to reclaim it as my own and force it back inside me. The pain was all I had now; there was nothing else that could save me. I dropped the whiskey glass on the grass and turned away, going back to the house. The cat was sitting in the doorway, blocking my way.
“Move, damn cat. Dead cat. Out of my fucking way…”
The cat didn’t budge. It just sat there, staring at me. I took an involuntary step backward. Jesus, was I afraid of a cat? But this was no ordinary cat. It had been disembowelled, had bled pumpkin seeds, and was still moving around. I wasn’t even sure if it was alive or dead. Perhaps it was a little bit of both.
“What do you want from me? What do I need to do?”
The cat, of course, said nothing. Only the cat in my dream had been capable of speech.
From behind me, carried on the breeze, I heard those children again. But, no; it wasn’t the same kids. This was a different bunch, and they were singing. I turned around and stared at the Moffat house. Silhouetted against the dark building, I could see a small group of children standing in the garden. They were holding hands, all spread out in a neat line, and they were looking my way. Even as I stood and stared, they began to glow, giving off a subtle radiance, like dying embers.
And I knew who they were, those children. Of course I did.
They were the Radiant Children.
I knew right then that I had to go inside that house. I’d been putting it off long enough; now it was time to face it. The police had already searched the house, but I knew deep down that they had missed something, or that things had been hiding from them. I wasn’t sure how they’d done it, or where they were hiding, but somehow they’d remained out of sight. I didn’t know if I’d find Jess in there, but I was certain that I’d find something.
Tonight: on Halloween.
That time when the skin between worlds is thinnest and when all the dark things like to come out and play.
I approached the fence, losing sight of the children behind a tall, ragged bush as I made my way over there. When they came back into view, they looked different. Their heads seemed bloated, as if they’d increased in size, and they were no longer looking at me. They’d all turned around—still holding hands—to stare at the house. It took me a minute or so to process what was wrong with their heads. They’d been replaced by huge, ripe pumpkins. But the pumpkins were featureless; no one had carved them a face.
I started to climb the fence. I could easily have walked down to my front gate, along the road a yard or two, and entered the plot of land on which the house stood by the usual means. But I knew that if I did that, if I paused to go in through the gate, I’d have time enough to change my mind and return inside my own house instead.
It was a bit of a struggle because of the overgrown grass, the untended bushes, and the rest of that creeping vine Jess and I had discovered, but eventually I made it over. The children had vanished. I headed toward the spot where they’d been standing, but the area was clear. When I reached the exact spot, I stood and mimicked their position, staring at the Moffat place. It looked different somehow, but I didn’t understand why. There was nothing fundamentally changed, but the angles of the brickwork and the pitch of the roof seemed somehow alien, as if they shouldn’t exist in normal physics.
I knew it was just a bad feeling, but I couldn’t shake it. I was convincing myself that those angles were wrong, alien. They should not be possible.
The windows looked tilted in their frames, the door didn’t quite fit, and even the walls were canted, giving an illusion of impossibility, of geometry that had no place in this world.
“Stop it,” I whispered. “Just stop. She needs you. Jess needs you.”
There was a sound in the grass behind me, and I felt something brush up against my leg. When I looked down, the cat was there. He’d followed me.
It was then I realized who, or what, Magic was. Didn’t all witches in folklore have a cat? A familiar who served as their companion?
This was Katherine Moffat’s cat.
“You bastard,” I said, kicking out at the animal. It moved away slowly, calmly, and with supreme confidence. I could almost fool myself that it was smiling.
The cat started walking toward the house, and I followed. I watched its slinky back, its long, slow strides. I passed the Radiant Children again, but closer this time. Their outlines were vague, like projected images, and they were chanting some kind of nursery rhyme in soft, low voices. I smiled when I recognized which one it was. I’d sung it
to Jess, many times, when she was a baby. The children had changed the words slightly, but the tune remained the same.
“Little Miss Moffat,
Sat on a tuffet,
Eating her curds and whey;
Along came a spider,
Who sat down beside her,
And frightened Miss Moffat away.”
The children were no longer holding hands. Instead, each one of them was holding a copy of Robert Shingley’s book with the title facing outward: Little Miss Moffatt and the Radiant Children. I knew right then that when I’d found the cardboard box in the cellar, it had been their way of trying to warn me. The books with blank pages had been a message; I just had not possessed the wit to decipher it.
Part of me felt like laughing, but the rest of me—the dominant part—was too frightened to try. Instead, I fell back on my mantra, counting to ten in Japanese, speaking out loud so that it calmed me more:
“Ichi.”
I kept following the cat, moving across the unkempt grass, stepping over the dead flower beds.
“Ni.”
The cat ignored me; it just kept moving toward the side of the house.
“San.”
The cat paused for a moment, but I was too far away to grab it by the neck and strangle the bastard.
“Shi.”
It started moving again, keeping a respectful distance between us.
“Go.”
When I glanced up at the sky, the moon seemed far away, part of another universe. The stars were tiny, like pinpricks in black canvas.
