by Will Carver
She had time.
For twenty minutes, Faith Brady had just lay on her back in the scalding hot water, staring upwards as the light from the candles faded out towards the ceiling. She’d locked the door behind her because she didn’t want to be disturbed. She wanted that time. That nothingness.
It wasn’t long before the limited light started clouding, her vision slowly disabling itself. The vacancy and emptiness she had been craving started to wash over her naked body like the mist of uncertainty now rolling over the undulating fields of Hinton Hollow.
This was what she wanted.
To simply not feel.
The vodka she had been drinking had helped to dull her world a little and the multitude of tablets she had pulled from the mirrored bathroom cabinet had slowed things down considerably.
Faith Brady had the little time she needed. She thought about the innocent little boy whose life she had thrown away, and she cried for the son she could no longer bear to look at. Then she vowed to herself that she would not let Michael down in the same way she had Jacob.
Faith cut both of her wrists vertically and then managed to slice horizontally across the top of her right thigh before she dropped the razor to the bottom of the bath.
NECK/TIE
This world, I’ve been here from the start. I’ve seen it destroyed several times. I’ve witnessed it frozen and I see now that it is melting. Never did I play such an active role until the arrival of man.
HERE IS SOMETHING TRUE
It was easy until you came along.
I had very little to do.
I had time to rest.
I could be lazy.
But you people won’t let me.
And humans are getting worse.
They don’t know who they are any more. They are an avatar. A dream. An aspiration.
A l i e.
A THEORY
Everyone is now two people.
The physical person. And the online persona.
The trouble is that nobody is fully their physical self nor their online alter ego.
A SECOND THEORY
Everyone is now half a person.
They are projecting a set of traits and unrealistic standards – see: happy family photos and humble bragging about achievements. See also: face-tuning and filters. They are, at once, beautiful with flawless skin, eating healthily and cooking from scratch, with a family and dog they adore, but also lonely and ugly and shouting at their kids while they order fried chicken to be delivered to the house.
And they don’t know which is the real them.
They are neglecting themselves and putting more effort into creating the person they wish to be rather than becoming that person. They are so focused on projecting this image to others that they forget about the real person they are. And they suffer because of that. They all suffer.
I think it is this that will contribute to another ending. I cannot see the humans coming back from this. Soon, they will have to start over.
Then I can rest again. But, for now, the pandemic of vulnerability gives me something that is very simple to tap into.
Another way that Evil can present itself is jealousy.
Annie Harding had seen online some pictures of her husband’s secretary, and another of the only females holding her own in a male-dominated sales team. And she’d heard about the florist. Nobody was that nice to everybody.
But Liv Dunham had done nothing wrong other than excite a close-knit community about her impending nuptials. She was marrying her childhood sweetheart. She was beloved by parents and her pupils alike. She was pretty in a homely way. The same way that Annie had been. Before the doubt started kicking in.
Before her confidence was stripped.
Before I found her. And played with her low self-esteem.
On that second day in Hinton Hollow, Annie Harding’s husband returned home late from work again. The top button of his shirt was undone and the tie he had been wearing when he left that morning was either in the car or somewhere in his laptop case. He wasn’t sure.
The food she had prepared was on a plate in the kitchen covered in cling film. She had waited long enough.
‘I just want to have a shower, wash the day off me,’ he’d said.
Wash a woman off you. Scrub the sin.
Annie didn’t confront him. She let it bubble inside. Faking her real life.
‘Well, why don’t you get yourself clean and I’ll heat up your food.’
‘Thanks, babe. I am starving.’
From all that fucking, no doubt.
Annie smiled. Her husband came close and kissed her forehead while she tried to subtly detect the scent of another woman on him.
When the bathroom door closed and she heard the sound of the shower running, Annie put the plate of food into the microwave, programmed it for five minutes, and hit the start button. Then she took the keys to her husband’s car and went outside to look for his tie.
She had five minutes to find it.
It only took one.
It was on the floor in the passenger footwell. He’d said it was too constrictive after an entire day so it would make sense that he would take it off in the car and throw it to one side.
But I didn’t want it to make sense. I wanted it to provoke. I wanted to bring out the real Annie. So I pushed her. A little harder than the day before.
It wasn’t long until I was on the passenger seat and Annie was driving, telling herself that she was tired of being pushed around, that she was probably the laughing stock of the village, that she was sick to death of putting on a happy front and pretending that everything was fine when it wasn’t.
Why does everybody else get to be happy? Why do they get to be in love?
Mr Harding came into the lounge with a towel wrapped around his waist to find that the front door was wide open and his car – and wife – were gone. The microwave pinged and startled him. Three minutes after that, a rock was flying through a lounge window.
Annie didn’t wait for the police like before, she jumped back into the car and sped home where her husband was sitting on the sofa, still in his towel, scraping mashed potato off the plate with his knife while shovelling chicken and green beans into his mouth with a fork.
He was hungry. He hadn’t lied about that.
He’d been honest about the tie, too. The dark-blue one with the light-blue diamond pattern. The one his wife had tied around a rock, swung around in a circle a few times before releasing. The one that was still tied to a rock that was lying on Liv Dunham’s living-room carpet.
THRESHOLD
May Tambor was right next to the phone when her future daughter-in-law called.
She liked her. She always had. But she loved the sound of her own husband’s voice more. There was a click of machinery before his affable tone permeated the cold air of her hallway.
May wouldn’t answer the phone now.
She wouldn’t interrupt him.
Liv was not the only one who believed that there was something wrong with Oz’s disappearance. It was not something normal, something usual, something you could explain away with wedding cliché and cold-feet rhetoric. The whole town of Hinton Hollow could feel it.
The air had changed noticeably since the Brady shooting yesterday. Everywhere seemed colder. Inside as well as out. As though the death of the Brady child ushered in a new season. A mood that threatened to bite all those in the town who refused to acknowledge it.
Hinton Hollow was exposed. A town whose secrets were no longer safe.
Outsiders were no longer welcome.
Even the convivial widow, Mrs Tambor, was different. Her home occupied a chill where her demeanour was normally enough to warm the modest space of the semi-detached house. Dust had settled on the furniture of the usually house-proud mother. The smell from the kitchen was not freshly brewed coffee or newly bought, decorative citrus fruit, or a sponge cake she would only eat a quarter of.
The curtains in the lounge were partly d
rawn, as always, leaving the room in a semi-darkness that echoed the depression creeping across Hinton Hollow as another moonless night threatened.
May Tambor was right next to the phone when her husband stopped talking and the tape began to whirr and clank before a beeping sound invited Liv to speak.
The beige carpet that led up the stairs behind May Tambor was clean and vacuumed to within an inch of its life. Ahead of her, by the front door, it was a mess. The filthiest part of the house. This was the threshold to the altered town of Hinton Hollow. Where bad things happened. Where children were killed in front of their families. Where strangers lurked in new shadows that were not there the week before.
Liv signed off. Her false spirit not fooling anyone. It was nice of her to try, though.
But May Tambor paid no attention to her son’s fiancée. Her gaze remained fixed on the hallway ceiling. She was lying on her back, a single bullet hole in her forehead. The larger exit wound fixing her head into position on the wooden floorboards. The walls near the entrance sprayed with dots of crimson.
The bullet that passed through her skull would match the one lodged in the chest of the young Brady child and, unless somebody started listening to Liv Dunham, it would also match the bullet that was intended to killed Oz Tambor three days later.
GETTING STARTED
So, you see, young Jacob Brady was not the first victim.
And Faith Brady was not the first mother to die.
I could have mentioned this on day one, but it wasn’t important then.
The community of Hinton Hollow thought that everything changed that day in the park – the moment Michael Brady’s mother told the man with the gun to shoot her youngest son through the chest.
They thought it began with Jacob.
It looked like it had started there.
It hadn’t.
They had regarded the broken florist window as an anomaly. There were whispers – see also: g o s s i p, rumour, deflection – about Annie Harding and her marriage, of course. Some folk had seen Dorothy Reilly wheezing around town with her trolley but they only speculated about the pains she must feel in her chest and the fact that her knees must ache. Some of the older kids had balked at the sight of her ankle fat hanging over her shoes.
But she didn’t seem any different. No weirder than the day before.
Luckily, only a handful of other borderline sociopaths witnessed Darren’s breakdown at the slaughterhouse. Though RD had noticed he was off colour at lunch the next day.
I was only getting started with them.
I wanted time with Liv Dunham. Because all of Hinton Hollow was invested in her wedding to Oz Tambor. If I could change them, if I could alter their course for the worse, I could affect everybody.
If I could play with Liv for a while, make her anxious, cause her to fear, to question, if I could raise her paranoia, I could ruin her.
It would be easy to show her that Oz was not in Wales dutifully obtaining a passport. I could tell her that he was in the boot of a car in the woods. But that was never the plan.
If she found him now, Liv would not react the same as she would finding him at the end of the week with a bullet in his face.
BOLD, RED CAPITAL LETTERS
Reynolds looked at the clock on the wall behind the front desk and sighed.
Half past eleven.
Bring on the mentals. The freaks. The waste-of-police-times.
Sure, it was a weekday, and this was Hinton Hollow, but the bars in neighbouring towns had just emptied and there were always people in them. There were always people who drank too much. And there were always people who would want to fight. Or climb something too high and unsafe. Or there were couples who wanted to fuck in the street, somewhere dangerous that they might be seen, or better yet, get caught. There were idiots who drove home from the pub because they lived close. If you live that close, just fucking walk home.
All this before you got to the drugs, the broken windows, the burglaries and the sixteen-year-old who should not have been out drinking in a bar and who was now on her knees somewhere with a nightclub bouncer’s dick stuffed in her mouth.
Constable Reynolds would receive a call at midnight from a woman in her thirties who thought she could hear someone in her garden. It would turn out to be her husband, soused in Merlot, searching for the back-door key they kept in a fake rock.
But his first call had been from Liv Dunham.
‘Hinton Hollow Police,’ he offered. ‘Constable Reynolds.’
A woman, probably late twenties judging from her voice, warbled her name in several different variations. She said she had already called before. Her voice sounded familiar, she was a teacher at the primary school, a known figure by many, but there were 5,118 people in Hinton Hollow and, no matter how close the people were, you couldn’t know them all. Unless you were Mrs Beaufort.
Reynolds had taken his fair share of crank calls in the last day, since the park shooting – everyone had already forgotten about Annie throwing the rock through the window of the florist. Local people thinking they could help in some way, some of them stating that they had seen things that they certainly had not – creating false memories from the images they had seen on social media and the local news – others offering insight into the unfortunate Brady family. Not all of the information had been friendly or conciliatory: they never went to church. So he was prepared for the more eccentric callers that evening. The drinkers and the lonely.
Those affected by the change that I had manufactured.
‘Where is your husband right now, Ms Dunham?’
Reynolds lowered his voice. His instant thought was that this was a domestic-abuse call: the wife had finally had enough of the beatings or the names or the false accusations but the husband was still in the house.
This was nothing to do with the Brady shooting.
After a short, stilted, misinformed few moments, Reynolds deduced that the caller was not in any immediate danger. Certainly not from another party, though her state of mind suggested that she was not in complete balance with herself.
‘Oz. Oscar Tambor. He’s missing.’
‘And you say you are due to get married in a couple of days?’ He tried to remove the condescension from his voice but it was difficult. This happens. Weddings. They can be stressful and it was usually the groom that bolted. They came back. They usually came back.
He knew how she would react.
‘Four days. What has that got to do with anything?’
They always said that. Telling themselves that nothing was wrong though they knew it was probably over. Call the florist. Cancel the band. Pawn the engagement ring.
Detective Sergeant Pace, the unofficial lead in the Brady shooting case, entered the front of the station and mouthed the word Anything? to Reynolds. Reynolds held his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone, rolled his eyes and shook his head. He then nodded towards the detective as if asking, Anything your end? Pace puffed out his cheeks.
Don’t even ask.
It’s spiralling.
Reynolds was silent while the caller droned on, trying to fool herself into believing she has not been jilted. Pace leaned an elbow on the front desk and waited.
‘I’m sorry, Ms Dunham, but there’s nothing the police can do for you at this point in time.’
She hurled some coarse words in his direction, but he was more than used to that kind of colourful language. He attempted to explain that her fiancée was not technically missing yet. He was over eighteen. If he were a child, the police and all the power at their disposal would have been combing the area.
He knew she wouldn’t sit still on this. Everyone who called thought that their problem was the highest priority. As they should. It was. To them. She was worried that the Brady shooter may have gunned down her husband-to-be. People get crazy when a crime such as that is so close to their own front door. But there had been no more reported incidents of gunfire, and resources were tied up in that case.
Pace looked at his watch then at the clock on the wall facing Reynolds’ back.
Liv Dunham swore at Reynolds one last time before hanging up on him.
‘The crazies are out in full force today,’ he said, half to himself, half to Pace. ‘So, anything more on the shooter?’
‘All we know is that they are a chicken shit who shot a fucking kid and they’re still out there.’
Reynolds felt uncomfortable at Pace’s pithy evaluation of the case. He was an intimidating figure at the best of times – he was not overly tall, it was more his presence – but in this mood it was best to steer clear of the darkness that surrounded him.
Detective Sergeant Pace was his own worst enemy.
Detective Sergeant Pace would be punished.
Both of them felt me with them in that room, in that moment.
That was when Inspector Anderson walked in behind Reynolds. Both men stood almost to attention, Reynolds more than Pace.
‘Pace.’ The inspector’s voice was low, authoritative. ‘You’re needed over at the Brady house.’
Pace said nothing.
‘Mr Brady placed an emergency call. His fucking wife is dead now. Drag him in.’ Then he walked back out of the door he had just entered.
Reynolds turned back to Pace but he was already striding out of the front door.
Nothing that exciting ever happened in Hinton Hollow. He shook his head in disbelief.
He waited ten minutes until another crazy called him.
‘I think there’s someone in my garden.’
HANDLE WITH CARE
The police had been incredibly patient with Little Henry Wallace but their composure was eroding with every shake of his head.
‘Are you running away from somebody?’
A shake of the head.
‘Did anybody try to hurt you?’
A shake of the head.
‘Are you scared of what your mum or dad will think when they find out that you’ve gone?’
