Black Flowers

by Steve Mosby

Her hands shot out between the bars: small white fists that I gripped, and which unfolded and gripped me back.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘Oh my God, oh my God.’

  ‘It’s okay.’

  She wouldn’t let go of my hands. She couldn’t move her own out any further because they were bound at the wrist with thick black tape.

  ‘You’re bleeding,’ she said. ‘Oh God, you’re bleeding.’

  ‘It’s not mine,’ I said, even though it was, and I could tell there was far more of it now. I’d been shot and I was bleeding, and I was finding it harder and harder to stay standing. But I squeezed her hand. ‘I’m all right, I promise. Are you hurt?’

  ‘No. Not really – is it safe now? Are the police here?’

  Her voice was suddenly full of hope, and it made the energy I’d felt evaporate. This whole time, she wouldn’t have understood a thing about where she was or what had happened to her; she’d probably been convinced she was going to die, maybe even accepted it. And now here I was. Now, she thought, it was going to be over.

  ‘The police are on the way,’ I said.

  I had no idea whether that was true any more. I reached for my phone – gone. I remembered the tumble down the staircase. From back at the house, I heard another smash. Shouting.

  I took her hand again. ‘It won’t be long. In the meantime, we need to stay calm, keep quiet.’

  ‘Oh God.’

  ‘It’ll be all right.’

  ‘Can you get the door open from out there?’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  She let go of my hand, and I moved back carefully to the door. It was a pointless exercise though; there was no way of breaking the padlock with my bare hands. I wouldn’t have been able to do it with the garden fork, even if I’d thought to pick it up again. But what else was there?

  For a moment, I just stared at the lock stupidly.

  What the fuck was I going to do?

  And then I whipped my head round, distracted by a new noise: whump.

  Whump.

  Whump.

  Whump.

  And suddenly, the back garden was flooded with glaring light. I winced, blinking from the shock of it. The man at the house must have turned on the lights through the compound. He was preparing to come and search out whoever had killed the boy.

  And yet all I could do was stare at the sight in front of me.

  At the garden that had been revealed.

  Hannah remained crouched at the edge of the clearing, listening. There had been no other noises since the scream.

  She didn’t know what to do. It was as though she needed someone to take her hand and lead her. Any exhilaration was long gone: that had been a weird illusion, one she could no longer remember now that this was real and she was actually here. What she wanted to do, more than anything else, was be anywhere else in the world than this place.

  But right now, she didn’t even dare to move.

  Then:

  Whump.

  Whump.

  Whump.

  Whump.

  Somewhere close to the corrugated iron structure, a floodlight came on. It was pointing inwards, but enough light fell through the fence to illuminate the clearing and it revealed the hundreds of black flowers growing here. Hannah stared down at them in absolute, non-functioning horror. They had spread out here from the compound on the other side of the fence, like an army of ants eating their way steadily through the forest floor.

  In her mind, she imagined them chirruping as their petals flicked open and closed – and an image came to her. Not one from her father’s story, but an actual memory. A woman buried up to her neck in the ground below a house. The woman had once talked very calmly and told her it would all be okay and they would get out of there together, but now her eyes were rolling, her mouth wailing, and the words coming out of it no longer formed part of any sensible language whatsoever.

  Oh God.

  It was too much. The moment broke.

  Suddenly Hannah was upright and moving. Back through the trees. Back towards the path. Mind blank – she had no armour against this. She was just determined to get out of here as quickly as she could. To get as far away from this nightmare as would ever be possible again.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  At first, I thought my vision was starring over again.

  The whole back field here was open, and every square metre of ground had been dug up and filled in again, so that it was uneven: tufted with patches of grass between ridges of bare, churned earth. All of it glistened under the floodlights, but it wasn’t my vision creating the stars at all, I realised, it was the flowers.

  Hundreds of them. Black flowers covered the entire lawn, poking up from the ground, their petals fragmented and missing. They looked like baby birds, scrawny necks stretched out, mouths open wide to receive food. Blind and bedraggled and helpless.

  Oh God.

  It was an enormous mass grave, divided into obvious sections. This was where the old man and his family had buried their dead. Cultivated their crop.

  A door slammed somewhere back at the house.

  I glanced around me, feeling helpless. There weren’t any rocks on the ground here at all, never mind one large enough to smash the padlock with. Even if there had been, I doubted I’d have had the strength to lift it. There was nothing to defend myself with.

  I stumbled back to the window.

  Ally’s face was pressed up to the bars, pale and frightened.

  ‘I can’t open it.’

  ‘Neil—’

  ‘Give me your hands. Let me try to unpick that tape.’

  ‘There’s no point. My leg’s chained to this fucking thing.’

  ‘What thing?’

  ‘Some kind of steel table. It’s bolted down.’

  I pushed myself away from the wall and half fell along the side of the bunker, towards the end closest to the house. Checking the ground as I went. Looking for anything. Finding nothing.

  I had no idea what we were going to do.

  I’m sorry, Ally.

  Sooner or later he was going to come down here. Probably straightaway. I stopped at the corner: the only plan I could come up with was to wait here. The floodlight was blocked by the bunker at this corner. I could press myself into this sharp angle of shadow and try to attack him as he came round, before he had the chance to see me.

  It was a fucking laughable idea. I realised that as an arc of pain went through me. My hands were slippery with blood, and I pictured rainbows of fire, and my stomach full of curling migraine-light. Barbara’s words came back to me.

  And the policeman didn’t end up being tortured to death on a farm.

  A shadow began spreading down the garden. It seemed enormous, and it rippled over the ridges of earth. His footsteps sounded across: soil crunching beneath his boots, petals crushed silently.

  I readied myself. Breathed in slowly and deeply through my nose. For the moment, the stars had faded away again. Now was as good as it was going to get—

  Except then the shadow moved sideways a little across the black flowers of the lawn. And when he stepped into view it was several metres away from the corner of the bunker. Too big a distance for me to close, even if I could have kept myself upright without the wall for support. I’d never stood a chance.

  So I just leaned there, looking at him. Waiting.

  He was a huge man: surely the one I’d seen in the van below my flat that night. Half of him was illuminated by the floodlight at the top of the lawn; the other half was in shadow. The one eye I could see was looking directly at me.

  And he was holding a shotgun.

  We stared at each other for a few silent seconds before he began walking towards me. As he reached the corner of the bunker, I realised I couldn’t stand up any more. I fell down, ended up on my back. And then, a moment later, he loomed directly above me, blotting out the whole world.

  Walk quickly, but don’t run.

  Try not to run.

  Hannah emer
ged from the undergrowth, back onto the dirt track at the corner of the fence. It was much brighter out here now. There was a floodlight near the entrance, and it cast an angle of brightness over the field in front, a rough, crinkled shadow of mesh across it. But she only looked that way long enough to make sure nobody was coming out. They weren’t. She turned and headed immediately back up the path in the direction of the road.

  Walking quickly.

  Her heart was running, though.

  It’s okay, she thought. It was simple: if she could get back to her car and drive away then it would be all right. Because Neil Dawson was in there, sealed away within the compound, and her old family would take care of him and anything he knew. They’d dispose of his car too. All of it would just disappear. If anyone remembered the message he’d left, she could make up a story about phoning him and it being nothing. Nobody needed to know she was ever here. Nobody would ever have to know anything about this place.

  Most of all, she wouldn’t have to be here any more.

  She could do that.

  Hannah faltered, but forced herself to keep going. The darkness, the silence, felt like it was pressing tight up against her back, and it was fear that pushed her forward again. Ahead of her, to the right, she caught sight of the pylon: a malformed grid, darker black against the night sky. Already, she could hear it humming ominously.

  You can do anything.

  And again she faltered – this time right on the lip of the hill.

  She turned, glancing behind her.

  The light through the gate was still visible from here, just smaller and more insignificant, like someone had dropped a torch on its side. But even from this distance she could see the tiny nub of darkness on the field in front. The smallest of shadows.

  Someone was at the gate.

  Hannah stood there. You can’t go back. Every instinct in her body told her to turn around and keep going. And she could run now – the car was no more than a minute away. The fields around her were empty and dead. Nobody would know she was ever here.

  You can’t go back.

  But that was the voice of a terrified little girl. One who had been brutalised her entire life, beaten down and made to feel insignificant and always scared. Who had never known what safety was until its embers had been breathed carefully into life through years and years of love. And maybe Hannah was that girl, but she was also another one entirely, and all the shades inbetween.

  Hannah, you can do anything.

  And before she could think about it any more, she ran back down the hill. The night-time world juddered around her, a green-black haze with a spot of light dancing in front of her, growing larger and larger as she approached.

  When she reached the gate, the figure there stepped closer. Not touching it, but coming as far forward as possible to meet her.

  A little girl. She was mostly just a silhouette against the light, but Hannah could see enough. She had long dirty-blonde hair, pulled into rough bunches, and she was wearing an old-fashioned dress, and the expression on her face made Hannah pull up slightly. Her heart was thudding, but not from the run.

  She got as close to the fence as she dared and crouched down. Her jeans tightened around her thigh.

  ‘Hello,’ she said softly. ‘What’s your name?’

  The little girl didn’t reply, but lifted her head slightly.

  Hannah said, ‘Can you let me in?’

  For a moment, there was nothing. After a few seconds, the girl looked away to one side, then back – right at Hannah – and nodded. She whispered back, and her voice was so small and frightened that Hannah understood what a risk she was taking, even considering trusting this stranger. And yet there was something else there too. A sense of determination beyond her years.

  Fierce little thing.

  The little girl said. ‘Will you help me?’

  Hannah nodded.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I will.’

  After he’d opened the padlock and the door, the man dragged me into the bunker with one hand – just grabbed a handful of my jacket, hefted me inside, then threw me down in the opposite corner from Ally. The collision jolted me so badly that I blacked out.

  The next thing I knew I was coughing so violently I was nearly being sick, almost choking. Aside from the pain, I had no real idea where I was or what was happening. The white tiles beneath me were shockingly cold. When I opened my eyes, I saw my own hand pushing violently against the wall beside me, leaving smears of blood. There was a shadow over me, and it felt like my stomach was raging with fire.

  Ally was screaming. Shrieking.

  I rolled my head quickly to the side and saw her through the gloom in the cell. She was over by the window, one foot chained to the leg of a steel table, and she wasn’t screaming because she was being hurt. She was screaming at the man I realised was standing with one foot pressing down on my ruined stomach.

  ‘You bastard!’ She was spitting at him. ‘You fucking bastard!’

  He took his foot off me and moved towards her instead. Immediately, she fell silent: backed away as much as she could, her bound hands held up defensively in front of her.

  ‘Hey,’ I said.

  The man ignored me. His back was almost wider than the door he’d dragged me in through. Through the pain, I tried to think of something, anything, that would distract him.

  ‘Hey,’ I said louder. ‘Your father’s dead.’

  That stopped him moving.

  Very slowly, he turned around. In the darkness, I couldn’t see his face. He walked back and stood over me again.

  ‘I saw him in the hospital,’ I said. ‘He’s dead.’

  He crouched down above me. I caught the smell coming off him. It was awful – he reeked of woodland and freshly dug graves. The anger was beating from him: waves of heat.

  ‘I put a pillow over his fucking face.’

  It wasn’t hard to get the hatred into the lie, to make it sound convincing. Right now, I wished I’d done it. It would have been something, at least.

  He knelt down on my upper arms, pinning them to the floor. The weight of him was pulverising. My biceps felt like they’d just been crushed completely. The pain was impossible to bear, and my body screamed for it to stop, but I couldn’t do anything. Shit shit shit, I can’t cope, I can’t cope, get away NOW. All I could do was blink, again and again, and think that if he stayed over here with me then there was at least a chance help would arrive in time for Ally.

  The first punch was only a light jab, but it knocked my thoughts off-centre. It took a second to realise it had even happened. Ally began screaming – just plain screaming this time. The man drew his fist back properly.

  I looked to one side. Through the open door of the cell, just before he hit me again, the last thing I remember is seeing the flowers growing out there.

  Through the open door of his cell, Sullivan can see the flowers that grow in the garden out there. Even in the sunlight, they are pitch-black. They seem to colonise the land like mould, drawing his attention away from the apple trees beyond them. Without the flowers, and what they are, it would be a curiously idyllic scene – he can hear birds singing, for example, and they sound happy. They are oblivious to what’s happening to him in here, tied to this chair.

  The man hits him again. The chair rocks onto its back legs for a moment, and everything blurs.

  The view through the doorway gradually swims back into view, and he remembers where he is. He blinks away blood and hears a rasping sound, then a hock. The man has just spat onto the grimy white tiles of the bunker floor. Sullivan’s head lolls to one side and sees it there, then turns loosely back to the man, who is standing before him, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  They lock eyes – as best Sullivan can anyway.

  Behind his hand, the man starts giggling to himself.

  Sullivan isn’t even sure why. Perhaps he has seen the damage he’s inflicted, which Sullivan himself can only feel, numbly guess at. It’s so much that i
t doesn’t even matter any more. The man has hit him a lot – always in the face, because that is where true sadists concentrate their attentions. Our faces are important to us because they define our identity, which is why torturers disfigure them in particular. Partly because we fear it beforehand, and partly because others fear it afterwards. And yet perhaps that is at odds with what is occurring here. Because this man does not intend to let him live for others to see. And because Sullivan understands that there is more to a person than what he or she looks like to others.

  His head rolls again, his vision turning back towards the open door and the black flowers out there, incongruous in the sun. As the man begins beating him again – harder now, perhaps determined to get this over with – Sullivan’s mind is knocked free. The black flowers, he thinks. Once the seed is planted, it’s inevitable the flower will bloom. He thinks about Clark Poole and what he did to little Anna Hanson, and how everything, really, comes back to that. He wonders at how the structures that grow from such terrible ground can become so elaborate, so strange.

  And then he realises he can see her.

  He thinks it’s a dream at first. Or worse. His thoughts have become detached by the constant stream of blows and perhaps he is being visited by ghosts or an angel. Perhaps she will grip his hand in a moment and take him away with her.

  But no, he does see her. She is there.

  Anna Hanson. No, of course, not her. Charlotte. She is standing in the doorway of the bunker, blocking his view of the garden now. The man hasn’t seen her – he is still at work, exhausting himself. But as Sullivan’s head is knocked back and forth, he sees her. Every time he faces that way, she has moved a little closer to the shotgun the man has leaned against the wall by the door.

  Closer.

  Her expression is full of terror. Despite that, he would smile if he could. She is so brave doing this. It must be enormously hard, because he knows how badly she is scared of this man, and she knows what happened the last time she dared cross him.

  Closer.

  Nobody has any right to expect her to be brave again.

  But she is.

  Sullivan closes his eyes, almost losing consciousness altogether. The last thing he remembers seeing is the little girl picking up the shotgun and raising it quickly. Anna Hanson. Charlotte Webb. In his mind, there is no longer a difference. It no longer matters.