Black Flowers

by Steve Mosby

  I shouted as loud as I could, ‘Ally?’

  There was no response. I glanced into the kitchen – empty – then ran up the creaking staircase after Lorraine. Three rooms up here. At the back, above the kitchen, there was a stinking old bathroom, the white ceramic webbed with black cracks. The space directly above the front room was divided in two. The nearest room was full of bare mattresses, crisscrossing the floor. That was where Lorraine was—

  I stopped in the doorway and stared.

  ‘Lorraine,’ I said.

  She was standing in the middle of the room, cradling a baby in her arms. Rocking it. A younger child – a little boy – was squatting naked behind her legs, frightened, coiled like a spider. He was staring at me with eyes as brown and wide as copper coins.

  ‘Lorraine …’

  ‘Get back,’ she said. ‘Keep back.’

  ‘Take them somewhere safe. Get out of here. For God’s sake.’

  ‘Get back.’

  I did – stepped back into the hallway. There was only one more door along this side, and it was padlocked. Ally. I braced my back against the corridor and kicked the cross-beam on the door as hard as I could. The door banged open, loud as a gunshot, leaving a shredded panel caught on the lock, flames of pale wood.

  Dark inside. I stepped in, searching for a switch to one side.

  ‘Ally?’

  A single bare bulb illuminated the room.

  Nobody here. It was an office or a storeroom, maybe. There was a desk at one end, with filing cabinets to either side. To the left of the door, there were piles and piles of battered old paperback books, their covers dotted with charity-shop price stickers, their pages yellowed and curled, stained with damp. The room stank of mould. Everything else appeared to be a random jumble of items. There were sacks of clothes. Old handbags dumped in one corner. Broken pieces of furniture. Discarded mobile phones and cameras and keys.

  And the walls …

  I stepped closer to the nearest side.

  Pages. Every visible patch of wall was covered with them. Torn from books and glued to the wood, so that the tiny text on them was rippled and uneven. I read:

  Sullivan squats down in front of the little girl. His starched trouser leg forms a sharp contour up from his knee and over his thigh.

  … and realised what I was seeing.

  Not books, at all. Just one book. The entire room was covered with pages torn from copies of The Black Flower.

  In his hands, Pearson is holding a hammer wrapped in a white plastic bag. He clenches his jaw, then steps astride Poole and hits him four times square in the face.

  I shivered at the insanity on display. Robert Wiseman’s words all around me, everywhere I looked. The old man had turned the room into a shrine to the novel. Except not a shrine. It felt more like I was literally standing inside it.

  Still gripping the garden fork, I stepped between bags of old clothes, moving over to the desk at the far end of the room. Amongst the calendars and box files and loose papers that covered it, something at the front had caught my eye.

  An old, silver laptop.

  The sheen on the lid was gone in places, as though something corrosive had been spilled on it – but I knew that nothing had. It was age that had done it: years of the same fingers opening it in exactly the same way, and then closing it again hours later. A story of fingerprints had been worn into the cover, just as more elaborate stories had also been worn, out of sight, into its hard drive. My father’s computer.

  My heart felt like it was on fire.

  Right beside the laptop, there was a photograph album. A4 size. It had a white cover, decorated with swirling black tendrils: the outlines of stems and petals and leaves. I held onto the garden fork with one hand. My other was trembling as I reached out, flipped the cover back.

  The first page had two photographs glued onto it. They were both landscape shots, and both looked very old indeed: grainy and flecked, like something developed from a cheap camera. The top one showed a naked woman from above. She was lying on her back and she was dead, her skin so pale it was almost blue, her wrists tied so tightly in front of her that the binds forced her hands outwards, as though they were cupping an invisible heart. Her clothes lay beneath and around her – scissored awkwardly from her corpse.

  The photograph below that one had been taken closer to its subject. The thin stem of the flower ran sideways across the print, blossoming into a black spread of petals at the left-hand side of the album. It was an ugly, fragile thing: more like the X-ray of a flower than anything you’d expect to see growing. One of the petals was angled off sideways, and some were missing altogether: a black sun with broken rays.

  Don’t …

  But I turned the page anyway.

  It was a man this time, but otherwise the same: dead, naked and bound. The flower in the photograph below was all but indistinguishable from the previous one, except malformed in its own distinct way.

  I turned the page. A little boy I couldn’t look at.

  More.

  More and more.

  There were no dates or names, but it was obvious what this was. A catalogue. As far as I could tell from the quality of the prints, the images were stored chronologically. My hand shook as I flicked through, taking two, three pages at a time now, a fire in my heart burning harder with each fresh photograph – until I couldn’t take any more and flicked straight to the last page, the last set of photographs. A middle-aged woman, lying naked on the grass. It looked freshly added, and there was no second photograph below it.

  Not Ally.

  I glanced randomly at the pages pasted to the wall above the desk.

  Through the open door of his cell, Sullivan can see the flowers that grow in the garden out there.

  The garden.

  I turned around, headed quickly back through the open doorway. My pulse was pounding in my temples, and everything sounded like it was underwater. Back down the corridor. I glanced into the bedroom and Lorraine was still there, still comforting her children.

  I headed to the top of the stairs. The man coming up them had nearly reached the top by then, and he saw me first. I had time to register a bedraggled shock of wild, brown hair, a heavy black coat over the bulk of him and then – crack crack – the rifle he was holding. He fired it from the hip without aiming. Needles of stinging pain went through my stomach, burning like matches struck on the skin.

  The pain and the panic – a gun, a gun, a gun – drove me forward, straight down at him, pushing the garden fork out and driving my weight behind it. I saw a face contorted with hate, and heard – crack ting! – as the last shot ricocheted off the prongs, and then they struck him and my weight took us both down the stairs, him backwards, me on top. I lost track of the world. Everything tumbled around me. And then, suddenly, the handle of the fork was wrenched from my hands, and there was a noise like a spade turning turf.

  The staircase was above my head, and then my shoulder hit, and the small of my back too, and my heel thudded into the wall above me. I was twisted halfway down the stairs. From above me, the man rolled backwards, over on his shoulder, legs swinging up. The prongs of the garden fork were embedded in his stomach, pinning the shattered wooden stock of the rifle against him, but the handle of it swung down in an arc, and landed hard on the banister, bending slightly, propping him in place, one leg straight up against the wall. Blood was pouring out onto the steps above me.

  His leg slowly descended.

  I scrabbled up and out of the way, clutching my stomach and darting down the last few stairs. He slid after me a moment later, everything clattering, and landed on his side at my feet. A second later, I stepped back as he drew his legs slowly upwards into a foetal position.

  Oh God.

  ‘Oh God,’ I was saying. ‘Oh God, oh God.’

  Over and over.

  It wasn’t a man at all. From the body, that hadn’t been obvious; the coat was bulky, and he was thick-set and strong for his age. But he had the face of a t
eenager. Sixteen or seventeen years old at the most. He wasn’t the man I’d seen in the van behind my flat. And he wasn’t old enough to be the man seen when Lorraine and Kent Haggerty had gone missing. He couldn’t have been the father of the little girl I’d seen outside.

  A brother? A nephew?

  I thought about Lorraine Haggerty and the children upstairs.

  How fucking many of them are there?

  The idea brought a sliver of fear. The rabbits, I realised. That was where the rabbits had come from and it must have been one of the reasons why, despite the gate being open, Lorraine hadn’t tried to escape. This boy had been out there in the fields, hunting, watching. The older son had gone out looking for his father, and left this boy in charge of the farm in his absence.

  The front door was still open. From outside, I could hear something.

  A sound approaching.

  A car.

  No, I thought. A van.

  I glanced down at myself. The needles of pain in my stomach were scorching hot now, and the front of my T-shirt was soaked with blood. I wasn’t sure how much was mine. I didn’t want to look underneath, didn’t want to unpick the fabric from whatever wounds it had been pushed into, didn’t dare. You’re all right. The pain was insistent and sharp, but not incapacitating. I needed to get to hospital, but I wasn’t going to die yet.

  Stars flickered briefly in front of my eyes.

  No.

  You’re not going to die.

  I edged around the boy’s body and stepped out onto the decking. The world in front of me starred over again, the wall of trees sparkling in the darkness. Very slowly, the crystals in my vision dissolved away. When they did, the sound was much louder than before, and it was definitely some kind of vehicle. An engine gunning in the distance.

  Definitely inside the compound now.

  Okay.

  I was at the bottom of the steps, stumbling slightly as I hit the turf. I hadn’t made a conscious decision to move. It just seemed to have happened.

  The garden. I headed round the side of the house.

  Ally, I thought.

  I’m going to find you.

  Chapter Thirty

  This was not her farm.

  Standing at the corner of the fence, Hannah was certain about that. She had images – memories – in her head. And if her father’s story had been a lie, then those images must have come from reality. They didn’t match this place. Even with the memories distorted, surely she would recognise the terrible place she’d grown up in? If not from sight then from the clenching in her chest.

  But still.

  There was something wrong with this place.

  Standing in the field, she could hear the gentle putt-putt of a generator coming from somewhere on the other side of the fence, and it was obvious it was electrified. Not only could she see the links in the chicken wire, and the cable snaking off between the trees, but she could see dead birds lying on the ground.

  Which was an elaborate set-up for a normal farm.

  A short distance further down the trail from the corner of the fence, there was what looked like a gate. It was made of the same chicken wire, and presumably just as dangerous to the touch, but she could see a pole and hinges. It was sealed tight. A gate, probably operated by remote control. There was no sign of the red van that had driven down this way. She guessed it was already inside.

  And that Neil Dawson was as well.

  When the van had turned down the dirt track, without even indicating, it was lucky for Hannah she’d dropped far enough behind to sail past the entrance without drawing attention to herself. There was a car parked a little way back down the road, which she guessed was Neil Dawson’s, so she’d driven a short distance on, then turned around, driven back and parked up behind it.

  By the time she’d walked up to the dirt track, the van had disappeared and the field was dark and silent. She’d tried phoning Neil Dawson’s mobile and got no answer. It just rang and rang. Presumably he’d ignored her advice and gone down there. She’d deliberated a little – nervous – but what else could she do? And so she’d made her way down the edge of the treeline on foot, keeping a wary eye on the dark, apparently empty fields to the left.

  She glanced around again now, out across the pitch-black land. There was nothing to see. The land that way even sounded empty. Listening to it was like holding your ear to a seashell. And yet, despite gripping the baton, she felt exposed, endangered.

  Something was wrong.

  Hannah turned back to the fence.

  See if there’s another way in.

  That meant going into the wood. Holding the baton in her left hand, and using the trunks for balance with the right, she moved into the undergrowth there. Beneath her feet, the discarded branches cracked softly. She moved slowly, keeping away from the fence, trying to stay quiet. After a minute, she reached an old felled tree, propped up at an angle between the others. Someone had whacked it repeatedly at the base with an axe and sent it tumbling, but only halfway to the ground. It was still attached at the edge of the base by enormous, stretched tendons of wood, like a half-snapped stick. The chicken wire cut across the top of the stump. The tree had just been half chopped down to make way for the fence.

  She crouched and moved underneath. A little further on, she could see more trees laid out in huge piles in a break in the forest, properly felled this time, stacked like hay bales and tethered together with dirty rope.

  Hannah stepped into that clearing, smelling the old, wet wood. On the other side of the fence, there were trees still standing, but she thought she could see something else between them, a little further away. It was hard to make out in the darkness. Was it corrugated iron? Like the back of a factory, or perhaps a barn—

  Hannah heard glass smashing.

  She flinched, ducking down out of instinct. The noise was distant and muffled. It had come from somewhere inside the compound, and in the silence that followed, her heart thudded solidly and her skin began tingling.

  And then someone shrieked.

  It wasn’t in pain, but in rage. She stayed crouched down in the undergrowth, stunned by the horror of it. It was barely even a human sound, more like the howl of a wild animal. Shivers broke out all over her; her skin went cold. And she knew for sure.

  This wasn’t her farm … but somehow it was.

  She was back home.

  Round the back of the house, my vision starred over again. The pain in my stomach had seemed bearable only minutes ago, but it was flaring brighter and brighter now that I was properly moving. Every step I took made the world shimmer. Facing out across the land behind the farmhouse, I forced myself to stop and rest a hand against a rough wooden strut.

  Deep breaths, Neil.

  Long, slow, deep breaths.

  A few seconds later, the world began to resolve itself. The sparkling crystals of light in the air faded away.

  This was the end of the compound. Twenty metres ahead of me, there was a long row of apple trees, and I could just make out the chicken-wire fence between them and the black woods beyond. On the right, halfway between the house and the trees, there was what appeared to be a concrete bunker, pale as a skull.

  I stumbled down and across towards it, and had to put my hand out to stop myself as I reached it. Up close, I could see it was made of breeze blocks, each one pasted tightly in place. I leaned my shoulder against the wall and patted my way down the side, one foot crossing the other, barely able to stop myself tripping.

  ‘Ally?’

  I said it too quietly, but I was terrified of making any noise. From the far side of the house, I heard a car door slam: an abrasive, grating sound, reverberating through the underwater pulsing in my ears.

  I rounded the corner of the bunker, glancing back up the garden as I did. Just as someone screamed. It was a man’s voice. A cry of horror and loss and rage.

  And then something shattering.

  Come on, Neil.

  I forced myself down the side of the
bunker, the house out of sight now, the concrete blocks scraping against my shoulder. There was a door up here. A way in. I had no idea if Ally was in here, or even if she was still alive, but there was nowhere else to go anyway. I was holding my stomach with my left hand, and could feel blood seeping and sticking between my fingers. The centre of me was blazing hot, but everything else seemed to be growing cold and shivery.

  Nowhere else to go.

  Nowhere else I would get to anyway.

  The door was made of steel, flush with the wall of the bunker. There were rivets around the edge and solid cylindrical hinges bolted onto the concrete at the far side. A metal strip had been soldered on nearest to me, stretching over the edge of the breeze blocks and fastened to a protruding iron ring. The padlock there was enormous. The metal loop arching from the top was as thick as my finger.

  I reached out and pulled it. It barely moved.

  ‘Ally?’ I whispered.

  There was a window a little past the door. I moved towards it, again nearly falling. It wasn’t really a window: just a square cut out of the concrete with three black, metal bars running down. No glass. I peered through, trying to make out something – anything – inside. The walls and floor seemed to be covered with white tiles, lined inbetween with grime. It looked like a place you’d slaughter cattle.

  ‘Ally?’

  The bunker sounded cavernous inside, like putting your ear to a shell and hearing the sea. For a moment, my words echoed around and there was no reply. Then I heard a scraping noise.

  And a whisper:

  ‘Neil?’

  Even through the stars in my vision, the pain in my abdomen, relief flooded me. A burst of energy. For a moment, my skin even felt warm again. And I could see her too. She was right there, standing in the shadows beside the window.

  ‘Ally,’ I said. ‘It’s me.’