The Darkness Inside: Writer's Cut

by John Rickards

  With a roof over my head sorted, I drove a few miles out of town on the main highway, north and south, and looked at the larger side roads feeding off it. Now and then, a gravel track wound up into the tree-blanketed mountains. A few had a signpost or a hand-scrawled board indicating the eventual destination of these trails — isolated houses, tiny settlements, old industrial property. Many were entirely unmarked. I saw thin streamers of white smoke rising from the woods somewhere up towards the ends of a couple.

  I wondered if Goddard was up there somewhere, looking back at me. Standing on his porch, or gazing through his kitchen window, out through the trees. Aware on some subconscious level that I was here hunting him. I wondered what he’d do to Holly if he knew I was here.

  By the time I drove past Harvey’s house for a second time, the day was heading for dusk. The rain hadn’t arrived yet but the clouds had sunk even lower and a thick blanket of grey lay heavily over the mountains, sealing off the valley like a vast dark curtain. The thinning brown and yellow forest leaves cast the place in sepia.

  Harvey’s pickup was in his driveway.

  I passed slowly, then pulled into the parking lot of a closed sporting goods store at the end of the block. I couldn’t confront him in his house, in full view of the neighbors, with his wife inside, on his home territory.

  I wanted to, sure, but I couldn’t.

  But a guy like Harvey had to go out. A bar, a pool hall, some kind of regular haunt. Maybe he went hunting up in the woods. I got as comfortable as I could in the Acura and waited for him to make a move.

  ‘Comfortable’ was relative; my neck ached and every joint was stiff by the time eight o’clock rolled around and Harvey finally strode out to his truck. He paused by the door, checked the street around him, then climbed inside and fired up the engine, apparently satisfied that he was safe.

  I slipped my car into gear and followed him across town to a decrepit bar, apparently nameless as the sole neon sign simply read: ‘BAR’. He parked up and disappeared inside without a second glance. I weighed up my options, but figured it was best to see if he was alone. I pulled my baseball cap down as far over my face as I could and glanced quickly through the door before stepping inside.

  Frosted glass windows, unpleasant brown carpet. A long counter broken in two by a single large pillar decorated with posters and flyers. The smell of spirits, stale breath, past nights out on the town. A jukebox playing Bruce Springsteen.

  Harvey had met up with three other guys like him. The quartet were heading out back towards the pool table. As far as I could tell, they were paying no attention to anyone else.

  I bought a Bud and buried myself in the anonymous gloom at a corner table. In the mirrored glass on the far wall, I watched the four playing pool. There was only one way in or out of this place, apart from a fire exit that had one of those seals that tripped an alarm when broken. Harvey would have to leave the way he came, and hopefully he’d leave alone. With this lighting and the way I was sitting, there was no chance he’d spot me unless he walked right up to me.

  I settled in to watch and was contemplating a second beer when a woman came over to my table, waved a cigarette and said, “Hi. I don’t suppose you’ve got a light, do you?”

  She was maybe five or six years younger than me, brunette, with a kind of desperate leanness about her. Not especially attractive, but not a buck-toothed harpy either.

  I made an attempt at a smile, but my heart just wasn’t in it, and my eyes constantly flicked to the mirror behind her. She probably thought I had a tic. “I thought we weren’t allowed to smoke in here.”

  “I like doing things I shouldn’t.” She made a more promising effort at a grin than I’d managed, but her eyes gave her away. “I’m Mary, by the way.”

  “Alex.”

  I didn’t offer her a seat, but she took one anyway. “What brings you to this shithole? Don’t think I’ve seen you around town before.”

  “Work.”

  “Yeah? What kind of work are you in?”

  “I’m a pet psychiatrist.” She looked blank. “Joke I saw in a film once. I’m a claims negotiator for an insurance company.”

  “That a joke too?”

  “Afraid not.”

  Mary’s eyes flicked down, around. Thinking, measuring. In the end, she seemed to decide that work was pretty much a conversational dead end. “How long are you in town for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You want another drink?”

  I considered telling her to get lost and leave me alone as she didn’t seem to be taking my subtler hints, but it’d only draw attention. I sighed. “Sure.”

  Another bottle of Bud duly arrived, along with a twin for Mary. “Where are you from then, Alex?”

  “Kansas City.”

  “Wow. You have come far. First time out east, away from the big city?” Mary smiled, shifted in her seat, brushed the neck of her bottle with her fingertips.

  “No,” I said, taking a swig of beer. “I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the northeast.”

  “Oh, a regular visitor?”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  We lapsed into silence for a moment before Mary launched into what I hoped would be a last-ditch bid to win my interest and telegraph her intentions. Though she couldn’t make those any plainer if she wrote them out in sharpie on the table in front of me “So, are you married? Wife back home in Kansas? Something like that?”

  The question made me smile, just for a second. “No, nothing like that. No wife, no kids, no dog.”

  “Were you ever married?” She took a mouthful of Bud. “I had a husband, but he died in a car crash five years back.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “I’m not. Son of a bitch was a mean drunk and a sober asshole.” Another swig from the bottle. “If it hadn’t been a Mack truck that got him, I would’ve done sooner or later. So, ever married?”

  In the back, Harvey was racking up the balls for another game while one of his friends went to the bar. I looked back at Mary. “Yeah, I had a wife once. Met in college, we were married a few years. Then she left me for someone else, some guy she met through work. Feller made eyes at her and off she went with hardly a second glance. I guess that’s how it goes, huh?”

  “I guess.” Mary smiled, and it looked genuine. “But I suppose that’s all in the past now.”

  “It is,” I said, and grasped the opportunity. “But not far enough in the past. I’m sorry, Mary. Maybe I’m reading it wrong, and you’re just being friendly. But maybe not. And you seem like a real nice woman. But I’m just not…”

  “I understand,” she said. “You seem like a nice guy, Alex. If you feel like buying me a drink anytime while you’re in town, I’d like that. We can leave it at that.”

  She got up from the table with a smile and walked away. I felt a little bad for my earlier hostility. But then I guessed it didn’t matter. I was just a part of her own ten-second destiny, her heartbeat dreamworld. Passed over and forgotten in no time at all.

  Maybe an hour later, Harvey said goodbye to his friends and left the bar, alone. I gave him ten yards’ head start, and followed.

  We were the only people out here in the dark, but he didn’t seem to register my steps crunching across the parking lot behind him until he reached the door of his truck, and by that point I was almost on him. He wrenched at the handle, trying to get inside, but I elbowed him in the gut, hard and fast, then kicked him into the now-closed door with a hollow thud as he doubled up.

  I whipped Victor’s Berretta out and pressed it against his temple. “Harvey Byrne, I presume,” I said. “You need to talk to me. Or you’re dead. Your choice.”

  “You’re him,” he said. The color had drained from his face, and the old scar on one cheek stood out, pink and glistening in the distant lamplight.

  “The guy you were hired to kill, yes. Now let’s talk about who hired you. Get in the truck.”

  He didn’t argue, and climbed inside.
I followed, keeping the gun trained on him.

  “Who hired you?” I said. “Why?”

  “Just some guy.” He hugged his stomach, wincing at the pain. “Just some guy. He called Andrew and said he’d heard we’d done that kind of thing before. We had a meeting and he told us about you.”

  “Had you done this kind of thing before?”

  He shrugged. “Once, by accident. We were only supposed to hurt this chick, scare her out of town. And then this guy a few months ago. We got paid to do that one.”

  “Who?”

  “Just some fag from out of town. But that was all.” He sniveled, whined. He sounds like a goddamn six-year-old who’d been caught stealing candy. Even twisted his face up like one. “It was all Andrew’s idea. He was the one said we could make a lot of money doing it.”

  “All Andrew, huh?”

  Harvey sniffed raggedly, eyes pinching at the pain in his gut. “He just told me what we were doing, and I just did it. It was never my thing. Always his. I just did what he told me.”

  “And with big brother dead, you came running back out here to hide and hoped it would all go away, huh? So who hired you for that last time?”

  “Some guy, called himself Mr Goddard. He was going to pay us six grand for you.”

  “But you and Andrew were going to stiff him for more money, and kill him if he didn’t do what you wanted.” When Harvey looked at me warily I said, “The friend of mine you tried to use as a hostage told me you’d been talking about it. Who was the guy?”

  “I told you,” he whined. “Goddard.”

  “Who was he, Harvey? Description, address, phone number. How were you supposed to tell him you’d finished the job? How did you contact him and where did you hand over the cash?”

  He looked at the gun in my hand. “I’ve got his phone number. And I know where he lives. Outside town.”

  “Where?”

  “An old house up one of the dirt trails on the highway north of here. Maybe a mile and a half, on the left. It had a couple of posts at the bottom, like there used to be a gate there. He was old, older than us. Brown hair.”

  I let his voice trail away into silence. “And he told you to kill me. Did he say why?”

  Harvey shook his head. “No. Just who you were and that you were in Boston. He told us to keep going when you were on TV for killing that guy.”

  “It was you and your brother who put my friend in hospital.” A statement, not a question. When Harvey stayed quiet, not even meeting my eyes, I added, “Why?”

  “Andrew thought he knew something more than he was telling. But all he knew was that you were still in the city. Andrew said we had to shut him up.”

  “And you just went along with that.”

  A nasal murmur that could be a ‘yes’.

  “And then you abducted a young girl to use as bait, and you went along with that as well. You never thought, ‘Well, shit. This can’t be what decent people do.’ Do you know Gabriel Heller?”

  Harvey looked blank. Shook his head. “Who?”

  “You never heard the name?”

  “No.”

  The cab of the truck fell silent again. Then Harvey said, very quietly, almost ashamed, “You killed my brother.”

  “No, I didn’t. I would have, though. Happily, for what he did.”

  “Does that mean you’re going to kill me too?”

  I saw Holly’s face staring out of the screen at me through tears of pain. Rob lying in a hospital bed with God only knew what chances of pulling through. The look in Teresa’s eyes the last time I’d seen her, and how much worse it must have been for her now. Sophie’s frightened gaze when I’d found her chained up inside the refinery. Kris gasping out his life in a pool of blood.

  Harvey’d had a hand in all these things. Protecting Goddard. Hunting me down. Targeting my friends. And until I’d shown up, he’d felt no remorse at all. Everything about pulling the trigger felt right. He’d earned it, he deserved it.

  But I couldn’t do it. Not in cold blood.

  “No,” I said to Harvey. “I’m not going to kill you. Not now.”

  He glanced at me, eyes wary.

  “You know who your employer is?” I said. “What he did? What you were helping protect?”

  “No. You owe him money or something?”

  “He likes to abduct little kids, fuck them and kill them, Harvey. He’s been getting away with it for years, and you’ve helped cover this up. He wanted me stopped because I was on his trail. You’re going to have to live with that.”

  Harvey swallowed hard and I saw from the look of surprise and revulsion on his face that he’d had no idea what Goddard was doing. What he was involved with. He didn’t say anything.

  “Get the hell away from me, Harvey. Don’t ever let me hear your name again.”

  I climbed out of the truck and left him sitting there.

  Back at the motel, I grabbed some sleep and woke just after dawn. Harvey had given me Goddard. Find him, and I’d find Holly. I left as soon as it was light and went looking for his house.

  It didn’t take long.

  54.

  The track was narrow and trees had closed in over it like a vaulted roof. The rocks and mud that made up the trail had well-worn tyre ruts in them. The air was close and thick, but cold, and the cloud barrier above looked so near I could touch it. Empty trees rattled all around me, but that was all I heard apart from my own heartbeat.

  When I saw the woods beginning to open out ahead into the hole cleared to accommodate Goddard’s home, I left the track and stalked quietly from tree to tree as I continued uphill.

  The house had to be sixty or seventy years old at least. Two stories, all clad in heavily weathered, sturdy wooden boards. Unpainted, dun-colored. A lean-to at one side of the building was occupied by a stack of firewood, while a similar extension at the back was home to a generator and a diesel tank. The house’s windows were dark and empty. No lights on. No smoke rising from the chimney. No car parked out front.

  I drew Victor’s gun and moved to the back of the building, keeping low as I crossed the empty space between the last of the trees and the rear wall. Risked a quick look through the glass set in the back door. A deserted kitchen. Pretty basic, old equipment, a single large table at its centre. All wood, same as the exterior. I saw a small collection of crockery waiting to be washed. Probably enough for more than one person.

  I tried the door, but it was locked. Hoping there really was no one home, I knocked out a pane of glass next to the catch for the window and opened the casement. The splintering noise sounded loud enough to be heard from town.

  Inside, the house smelled of woodsmoke and old cooking. The floorboards creaked almost imperceptibly beneath me as I headed through the kitchen and into the hallway beyond. There was a door under the stairs — closet space, or a basement entry — and rooms opening up either side of the front door. I headed to these first. In one, a bare bones set of furniture faced an old TV and VCR. Against the far wall were stacks and stacks of magazines and video tapes.

  Brutal Domination – Japanese bondage special! Bend Her, Break Her!

  The videos included a couple of commercial porno titles, but most were marked solely by date and a varying sequence of letters which I couldn’t decipher, but which I guessed indicated their content. I didn’t want to find out for sure.

  The room opposite was the boxy bedroom where the second piece of footage had been filmed. The bed was there, absolutely unmistakeable, and there were plenty of scuff marks on the floor where more furniture or equipment used in the filming had been dragged in and out.

  Back out into the hallway. To my surprise, the basement door was unlocked. A narrow flight of steps led down into a dirt-floored space lit by a sole naked bulb hanging from the centre of the ceiling. Hooks were driven into the beams; one had a pair of manacles hanging from it still. In the centre of the room was a low, large table, like a bed without a mattress. There were various fixture points built into it, and th
e whole thing looked like it could be lengthened or contracted like a workbench. Maybe I was wrong, but it looked a lot like a homemade rack. Its surface was pock-marked and covered in stains.

  I stopped myself trying to imagine their origins.

  In the far corner was another homemade contraption, about the size and shape of an isolation tank, or a coffin, with a pair of iron bolts securing its lid. Shelves packed with cardboard boxes ran down the wall next to this last contraption. Amongst the unpleasant-looking devices there I saw Goddard’s makeshift electric prod with a car battery next to it. I could see what looked like girl’s clothes in a couple of the boxes that are open. Hard to say whether they were long-term storage or something used more recently. Another one, tucked at the back and thick with dust, held what looked like old, very old, boy’s clothing. As I reached the foot of the stairs, I passed a piece of paper tacked to the wall.

  It was titled: ‘SLAVE CONTRACT’. At the bottom was a jerkily scrawled signature. It was too badly written for me to make out anything but the final ‘y’.

  The air down here smelled rancid. It got worse when I opened up the ‘coffin’ to make sure it was unoccupied. It was lined with dark brown carpet, which again was marked with old stains. The fibers were worn thin in places, and from the shape of the impressions left behind, it looked to me like this was where he keeps Holly. At the head end of the box, blonde hairs sparkled in the light from above.

  Feeling ill and angry in equal measure, I shut the lid again and went back to check the upper floor.

  The first door I came to on the landing led into a cramped room with a computer in one corner, along with the gear I guessed Goddard used transfer and edit his video footage. There were also a couple of shelves of books — normal paperbacks for the most part, but amongst them I found Psychological Torture in the Korean War, Mental Chains — the Willing Slave, Identity Breakdown and Nazi Brainwashing and a handful of similar academic titles. Tucked into one were a dozen or so photos of different girls, all of whom looked between twelve and thirteen. Recent photos, taken on modern equipment.