Darkshines Seven

by Russell Mardell

  Thinwater had flushed red, his outstretched hand shaking with fury. Harris took the hint and turned to the door.

  ‘Give you a shout if we find anything, boss. Carry on doing what you are doing.’ With that Harris turned back into the doorway and seemed to crumple away into the shadows that swirled in the corridor beyond. A few seconds later he returned, the casual stride now a clumsy stumble, and he was weaving a drunken path towards his boss, before dropping to his knees in front of the desk. There was a knife sticking out of one side of his neck, and a scream struggling to escape his mouth. Rodent 1 tilted forward, spat blood onto his chin and then landed on the floor with a thud. Thinwater hadn’t even lowered his hand.

  The shadows in the doorway shifted and then seemed to bend and move forward into the room. At first Thinwater thought the figure standing there was made completely of darkness. The figure moved its arms upwards and removed a hood from its head and then the pale face that it had been hiding seemed to glow through the gloom.

  ‘You?’ Thinwater whispered, his arm still stuck out, his hand pointing to the door beyond.

  ‘I assume you remember my name?’ Jacob Silence asked, already knowing the answer.

  2

  Mia wasn’t surprised when she saw that the ambulance had gone, but the sudden, overwhelming feeling of loneliness was no more crushing for it. She stood with Blarney on the edge of the pavement, staring back at where Tommy and Albie and Sam, Hector and Callie had been just a few minutes previously, gazing into a puddle in the pothole-riddled road as if it were some sort of grubby crystal ball that would show her an image of these strangers she had saddled herself with, a picture that would reassure her or provide her with hope. Blarney moved to her side and nudged her with his nose. That was enough for a smile to break on her face. It always was.

  ‘Just us again, Blarney. What do you say to that?’

  Her faithful friend’s stare bore into her, those deep hazel eyes with the mischievous twinkle somehow light enough to see even in the darkness. Blarney turned around and then brushed his rump against her leg and began to swagger off back down the street, his snout to the ground, his stump of a tail pointed straight up to the sky above. In that moment she heard her father’s voice again, a distant whisper from somewhere deep inside her: “I always marvel at how adaptable dogs can be, how quickly they can accept new things and slot into a new routine. We could do with learning that trick. That idea of acceptance. Food and a bed and someone to love, and they can pretty much deal with anything. Things are better in a dog world, Mia.”

  She turned to her dog and followed his lead.

  For Mia, there was some small relief in the loneliness and it was to that glimmer that she held as she walked back to Darkshines asylum. She had survived long enough on her own, just her and her dog, and now she was back to where she started, and was that so bad? At least she didn’t have to feel the guilt any more. That was something. That was actually quite a lot, she considered. She had led that merry band of strangers into danger, had caused each and every one of them more than enough trouble already, and now she didn’t have that heavy weight hanging around her neck any more. She looked out for Blarney and he did the same for her. It was how it had been for a long time, it was what they did and what they understood. She didn’t have the space for guilt, so by that token, she couldn’t afford any space for friendship either. She had her dog and she didn’t need anyone else. In her own mind the argument sounded convincing.

  The night was sticky and close, the distant rumbling of thunder beating its path towards them from somewhere to the east. Mia pulled her jacket off and slung it over a shoulder and then wiped her left hand across her forehead. Her shirt was sticking to her, her bloodied, bruised and bandaged skin slick with a greasy sweat. As she followed her dog through the side roads back towards Darkshines, her thick boots started to feel leaden, her legs prickly and sore; the pavement was on fire, intent on burning her to ash, just as the deep night sky above looked to wrap itself around her and take her away.

  Singer…she said to herself. Singer?

  Blarney was leading her beyond the spot they had taken up earlier to spy on the building, out around the huge fence with its imposing metal bars topped with barbed wire, past the ugly gate into the south side of the grounds, and the ten foot high, thick, impenetrable wall that ran from either side of it, and towards a low rectangular brick building nestled amongst a small clutch of trees, just on the other side of the fence. Here he stopped and began pacing back and forth, his eyes fixated on a single spot by the base of the fence. Mia bent to Blarney and moved him into her, ruffling his fur as she peered across at what he seemed to want to show her. Here two of the bars of the fence, sawn through at the base, bent outwards about a quarter of the way up. There was just enough space underneath for Blarney to wriggle under, something he ably demonstrated before turning around on the other side of the fence, next to the building, and shuffling back out again on his belly. He danced back and forth, from hind legs to front paws and then clumsily barged past Mia as he wriggled down again and slid under the bars for a third time. From the other side of the fence he gave one small, gruff bark of encouragement, his tail quivering, and his eyes laughing.

  ‘Nice try, short-arse, but I can’t get under there.’ Mia looked up to the top of the fence, and then further along to where the bars ended and another thick wall began and would continue around to the next gate. Barbed wire ran in scattershot curls all the way along the top of the fence and broken shards of glass were embedded into the top of the wall. Blarney was now up on his hind legs, his front paws against the bars, his head raised up as if he were about to howl at the moon. He was looking at the barbed wire, and with a dog’s logic – particularly this fearless or foolhardy mutt – Mia could see that his simple gestures were telling her to climb over the fence, and get a damn move on. ‘Seriously?’ she asked him. Her dog warbled something and then his giant pink tongue was flopping out of the side of his mouth as his tail went nineteen to the dozen. It was all a big, fun adventure to him. ‘Why do I get the feeling you’re laughing at me?’

  In the absence of any better ideas being forthcoming, Mia planted both feet on the two bent out bars and raised herself up. She peered through the fence, out along the grounds and up to the great gothic building and the single light shining inside. Singer? Talk to me. The light hairs on her arms started tingling. A hundred eyes were on her and they were shining white dots in the darkness of the grounds, twinkling like stars in a sky that had leered so close it had finally fallen down. Mia scrunched her eyelids shut and shook away the thought. She turned away from the fence and then gazed nervously around the deserted street, left and then right, at the abandoned cars and into the broken buildings. The eyes had gone when she looked back, but the feel of their dirty, greedy, grope still ran through her.

  Someone was watching.

  Something was waiting.

  Mia steadied herself, pushed her rifle through the bars, dumping it on the ground next to Blarney, and then swung her jacket up until it caught on the barbed wire tangles, and then slowly she began to climb. Climbing. The girl is climbing the fence. Her jacket being chewed by the barbed wire. A tangle of metal teeth and shredded material. She is over the wire. The jacket not enough cover. Her trousers rip. She cuts a finger. She is holding out for one of the branches of a tree. The branch takes her over the wire but it is not a strong branch. A snap as loud as a gunshot. Dropping to the ground. The dog on her, pinning her down, licking her face. She hurts but she laughs.

  Laughing in the darkness.

  Laughter.

  Then…then…then…

  3

  She is gone.

  ‘She is gone but she was there. She is here. She is gone but she is here. He is not…he isn’t…I can see her…’

  ‘Huh?’

  Silence pushed the portly frame of Audley Thinwater before him, shoving him down the corridor outside his office at a pace his stumpy legs found hard to match. Silence
’s knife, still slathered in Harris’ blood, was resting gently amongst the folds of skin under Thinwater’s neck. At the end of the corridor their path split left and right, with the gaping hole of an empty lift shaft directly in front of them. Silence yanked Thinwater to a stop and shoved him back against the wall.

  ‘He doesn’t have her any more. He has gone from her. I can see her!’ Silence’s voice was barely beneath a shout but it carried a joyous lilt and he sounded like he would break into laughter at any minute. His crazy happiness was of no comfort to Thinwater, however.

  ‘What do you mean? I don’t…’

  ‘Shut up!’

  ‘Yes. Yes, sorry…Jacob, what do you want from me?’

  Silence turned away from Thinwater and peered down both sides of the corridor. The image of Mia scaling the fence had come to him in a flash. He hadn’t been pushing to her, had barely even given her much thought since slipping into the grounds of his old haunt, but she had found him somehow – that old connection, that fumbled catch, it was still alive. He could see her clearly now without any corruption. Milo Singer had gone from her.

  But gone where?

  ‘How many other guards?’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I don’t know. Somewhere.’ Silence turned the knife against the hanging folds of fat at Thinwater’s neck. ‘Dear God, Jacob, I swear I don’t know! They go around as they please. He…the one in the office…he ran the security team. He gave the orders. I have no hand in what they…’

  Silence took his free hand to his face and held the index finger to his lips.

  ‘Yes, yes…sorry…’

  He had got to the office without once questioning the direction. Everything had fallen back to him instantly, from the great gated entrances, to the maze-like grounds, and up through the staircases of the decaying building and gloomy rabbit warren corridors, but now, since the return of Mia Hennessey into his mind, he struggled to find his bearings for the first time since his return to Darkshines. He looked left and right once more and then sniffed at the air. The shadows seemed to be turning and drifting at the furthest edge of both corridors, a living thing nesting in unseen places, just at the edge of his vision. Silence took a step forward, stopped and then turned back, moving the knife from Thinwater’s chins. He gazed down at the chubby, frightened face beneath him, the tip of his hood brushing against his former torturer’s sweaty wisps of greying hair.

  ‘The Hole?’

  ‘The…the…no…but…why…’

  A great, bony hand shot out from one over-sized coat sleeve, clamped down across Thinwater’s face and started to squeeze. ‘Do not make me repeat myself to you. I am not here to be questioned. I am not your performing monkey any more, you sweaty little pig. The country has moved on whilst you have stood still in your grotty little hidey-hole. Do not make the mistake…ever…of thinking that we are the same people we were the last time we spoke. The Hole? Which way?’

  Thinwater mumbled something into the vice like grip of that skeletal hand. Beady little eyes, spiked with fear, began flicking to the left, twitching and jittering as sweat dripped into them.

  ‘That way?’ Silence nodded down the left hand corridor, and the head, almost completely swallowed up by his hand, nodded as forcefully as it could. ‘Good. Let’s go.’ Silence moved off into the left hand corridor but after a few steps he stopped and turned back when he realised that Thinwater hadn’t moved.

  ‘No.’ The word stumbled out of Thinwater’s tight little mouth without the stone-cold conviction he had been hoping for.

  ‘What did you say?’

  Thinwater shook his head and then stared down at his feet. ‘I want…want to…’

  ‘I don’t care what you want.’

  ‘I want…please…I want…’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what you want. Really, it doesn’t. That time is long gone.’

  ‘I want to know if you are here to kill me, Jacob!’

  Silence’s answer was a single punch, just below his ribs, that dropped Thinwater to his knees. A second, straight across the side of his face, sent him clattering into the wall, then those bony fingers were tugging at the wisps of hair and his bloodied face was drawn back and turned up to the ceiling.

  ‘Can’t you smell that death in the air, piggy?’ The hooded face craned down at him, but no more than a pointed, scarred chin was visible. ‘Rotting meat and decaying filth. All those lives this place has taken, can’t you hear the legacy you left? I can still hear the screams and smell the fear. You should have sent me to The Wash. It would have spared us both the agony.’

  ‘You…you…were too special…’ Blood was dribbling from his nose, gathering around his moustache. ‘You were the best we had. We needed you.’

  ‘But I didn’t need you.’

  ‘The Party needed you!’

  ‘Fuck The Party and fuck you, little man. You sat in judgment on us, now it’s time to return the favour. There are assassins within these walls. Can’t you feel them? Why can’t you feel them?’

  ‘Feel…feel who…what? Jacob, what do you want?’

  The knife was back at Thinwater’s throat as Silence slowly began to lift him to his feet. As he was gently maneuvered back towards the left hand corridor, whatever fight was left in Audley Thinwater escaped him in a long, resigned, rasping breath.

  ‘Bait,’ Jacob Silence whispered into his ear, and then pushed him on once more.

  4

  A quick kick on old, splintered wood and the door to the low building by the fence fell apart in two large pieces. Mia followed her rifle inside, Blarney bringing up the rear. It was a security hut of some basic description – old monitors once attached to security cameras lay broken and smashed on two large tables, a small bank of rusted switches sat around a bent microphone, keys hung on hooks, torches and uniforms were lying in a heap in one open cupboard – the whole scene lit sparingly by the security light further along the grounds, a dying moon in this impossibly deep night.

  As Blarney investigated the floor with a steady huff-huff-huff from his nose, Mia began rummaging through the spilt drawers of a long cabinet. She found some clothes, magazines, two dog-eared thrillers and a bag of sweets stuck to each other in one enormous sticky lump. On the table with the monitors a small plate of discarded sandwiches were green and curled. She had to lean close, her shirt over her nose, to notice that the streaks on the table she had assumed were dirt, were actually mounds of dead flies.

  ‘Charming little place,’ she said through her shirt. Blarney growled back. He was scrabbling at something in the corner of the room. ‘What you got, boy?’ A pistol suddenly skidded across the floor and stopped by her boots. It was an old six-shooter, one bullet down. Mia tucked it into the front of her trousers and then moved the rifle around to her back. ‘Thanks.’

  Still Blarney scrabbled, his head inside a narrow metal locker in the corner by the door, his question mark stump of a tail flicking left and right like a fan. His rump was in the air, his hind legs tensed as he started to tug at something hidden away in the darkness. There was another growl, a familiar throaty gargle, and then he was staggering back, spinning around, and something was clamped in his mouth and he was shaking it manically from side to side. Satisfied with his kill, he stopped and gazed up proudly at Mia with devilment in his eyes. A small, one eared, stuffed toy rabbit was sticking out of his mouth. The matted ginger beard now pushed up on either side, it looked like he was smiling. Blarney walked between Mia’s legs and swaggered out of the building.

  ‘Okay,’ Mia offered, and then followed him out.

  The car park spread out between the building and the start of the tangle of garden that surrounded the path up to the main building. There were just two cars in the grounds, one stripped of its wheels and doors, and the other, a filthy, mud splattered jeep parked under the shade of the high and wild bushes at the start of the garden. Moving around in a large semi-circle, walking in the shadows, Mia spared the jeep a quick gl
ance as she passed. It seemed intact, untouched, possibly still fit for purpose should she need it…the idea was fleeting and went in a flash. Suddenly the realisation that she had barely considered what she would do after she left this place hit her like a steel fist.

  If she left this place.

  Yeah, there is always that possibility, Mia.

  Darkshines felt like the end of something for her. It was fate that she was here, that much was unavoidable, but it was also the closing of a door that had remained ajar ever since she had found her way out of Bleeker Hill. This is the place she had been looking for during all those months on the road. This is what she needed. She had innocently assumed that the next chapter, should she be allowed to write it, would simply present itself to her. Now though, as she took her first step on the winding path that snaked up to that hideous gothic building, and whatever lay in wait for her, she started to feel more insignificant than she had ever felt in her life before. She and her dog were walking down a tunnel that was closing in around them. She imagined that if she were to look back down the path, to the car park and that small low building beyond it, she would see that the start of the path had closed itself off. Many ways in, but any ways out?

  The smell of the gardens was strong and sickly and cloying. The bushes and branches were untidy and unruly, creeping out across the path, brushing at her, reaching for her. The security light shone across the top of the path and the shadow shapes of branches looked grotesque. If a child had been asked to draw a haunted forest, Mia imagined it wouldn’t be so far removed from what she was seeing. Yet it was all deception, she knew that much. She was far enough away from childhood to see what was real and what was waiting to be coloured in by imagination. She could easily start imagining animals and creatures hiding in those thick tangles of foliage, she could dream up figures hiding there watching her, or monsters lurking ready to pounce, and in this place, at this time, they would all be there for her. Darkshines seemed to thrive on every horrific cliché, every nightmare you could conjure up would fit somewhere on these grounds if you let it. But none of it touched her past the skin on her arms. Mia knew true horror when she saw it, felt it, lived it.