Black Flowers

by Steve Mosby

  As he opens the door, he hears the burst of cold night air rattle the windows upstairs. Instinctively, he recognises the man in the black suit, standing on his doorstep.

  ‘Robert,’ he says.

  It is him, and yet he’s still taken aback by how much Wiseman has changed since they last met. In his mind, Robert is slick and professional, a cool handler of crowds, very self-assured – everything, in fact, that he himself will never be. The man on his doorstep now might almost have been a different person altogether. His suit is shabby and tatty, far too big for him, and he has lost so much weight that his skull gleams through his skin. His hair is also much longer than he ever wore it in the past: unbrushed and greasy-looking, so the length feels more due to lack of care or interest than to any kind of design.

  Of course, he knows from casual conversations that Robert has dropped off the radar since Vanessa’s disappearance. The rumours were that he was unreliable, his behaviour increasingly erratic. Professionally, he is damaged goods. Looking at him now, pale and gaunt and sickly, it is obvious that he is personally damaged too. His hollow eyes have a glint of insanity to them.

  Robert nods at him and then stands expectantly, hands clasped before him. It looks like one hand is trying to pull off the fingers of the other.

  Of course, he thinks.

  He wants to come in.

  The night breeze rustles the leaves over by the stone steps, and the sound makes him even more uneasy than this skeleton of a man on his doorstep. He feels the presence of ghosts. Thinking of the warm, softly lit life he has upstairs behind him, he realises he does not want this man in his home. That in fact he will do anything to keep him out.

  ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘No.’

  The bluntness of the response brings a pained expression to Robert’s face. ‘I understand.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Robert. About everything that happened.’

  ‘Thank you. You were right, though, all along. Everything that happened is my own fault. I understand that now, and I’m going to try to make amends for it.’

  ‘You don’t look well.’

  Robert nods, as though it’s of absolutely no consequence, then stares down at the ground for a moment. There is a carrier bag at his feet. Then he looks up again.

  ‘Vanessa came back.’

  ‘Oh?’

  That surprises him; he would have expected to have heard.

  ‘She came back as a flower.’

  The words settle. For a moment, he has no idea what to say.

  ‘Have you told the police?’

  Robert smiles sadly. ‘I can’t do that.’

  ‘Perhaps you should.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ The smile slips away. ‘But you could have done, as well, couldn’t you? When you heard what happened to Vanessa. Although … you probably didn’t know everything. And it’s not your responsibility, is it? Not your story. I understand that.’

  He shifts slightly. It isn’t an accusation, but it feels like one. Because, yes, he had thought of telling the police what he knows. The reason he has not done … well, he thinks again of his wife and child upstairs. Regardless of whether it is his story or not, it is a dangerous one. He has distanced himself from Robert out of cowardice, perhaps, but not entirely for his own benefit. One can be cowardly on behalf of others. And from the very beginning, he’s felt an instinctive desire to keep this story at arm’s length to protect those he loves.

  Robert says, ‘If I did go to the police, would they believe me?’

  ‘I don’t know. They might.’

  ‘Maybe if I had somebody to corroborate meeting her?’

  In the cold night air, he convinces himself to stand firm. He puts images of Laura and Neil at the forefront of his mind. And eventually, Robert looks away.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he says. ‘I’m going to write about it. I’ve got an idea for a new book. A sequel, I suppose. It’s about a man who writes a story. Part of it’s already real, and the part that isn’t comes true. I’m going to call it Black Flowers and I’m going to research it properly too. I’ve figured out how to find Charlotte again. I think she goes home on her birthday every year. I’m going to find out.’

  ‘Is that a good idea?’

  ‘It’s an idea, isn’t it? That’s all we have.’ Robert smiles to himself, then picks up the carrier bag. ‘Before I go, I’ve got something for you. I want you to take it. In case anything happens to me.’

  ‘I don’t want it.’

  ‘Please. For old times.’

  There is something in his face then: that same expression of sadness, but stretched longer, back through time. And, for a moment, he sees his old friend there. The guilt threatens to bloom, turning his life inside out. He wants to help him. He knows he probably should. He presses it all down again, but something still makes him take the carrier bag from someone who had once been his best friend in the world.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Robert steps back onto the flagstone path. It takes him outside the stretch of light from the door, leaving merely the pale impression of a skull in the night. He says:

  ‘In another life, Christopher.’

  And before he can reply, his old friend is gone.

  After he has closed and locked the door, he looks inside the carrier bag. There is only one item in there: a copy of The Black Flower. It is a paperback: well thumbed, spine bent, a handful of pages turned over at the corners. As he begins to flick through, the book falls open very naturally near the centre, where he finds a black flower pressed carefully between the pages.

  He stares at it for a while. The emotions he feels are impossible to describe, because he knows exactly what he is looking at. She came back as a flower. What he wants to do most of all is throw the book away, but he knows that he won’t do that – that what his old friend has just given him amounts to a sacred pact. He is its caretaker now, this dangerous story. So instead, he closes the book gently and looks at the front door with its glass square of black night above.

  A chain.

  He will get around to installing a chain.

  At the top of the stairs, he pauses before entering the living room. What should he say to Laura? Instinctively, he wants to keep this from her. Although he will have to tell her it was Robert at the door, he doesn’t want to involve her any more than he has to. The book and the flower make that difficult.

  ‘Dad?’

  Neil – calling from the darkness down the corridor. He hesitates for a moment, and then turns from the living room and walks down that way instead.

  In Neil’s bedroom, he doesn’t turn on the main light, but walks across and flicks on the more gentle feathered lamp. It reveals his son, sitting upright in bed, looking frightened. He feels the familiar burst of love for the boy, and knows that, whatever guilt he feels over abandoning his old friend, it is worth it to keep his family safe.

  ‘Hey there,’ he says softly. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I heard a noise.’

  ‘It was nothing, I promise.’

  ‘I’m scared.’

  He can see that. Neil often is scared at night, when the house is dark and the silence is heavy. Perhaps he should be growing out of it by now – but then again, does anyone ever grow out of that?

  He sits down on the chair beside the bed.

  ‘You’re safe,’ he says. ‘There’s nothing to be scared of. Mum and I would never let anything happen to you.’

  Neil doesn’t look convinced by that. Although still afraid of the dark, he is already smart enough to have begun doubting that kind of reassurance. He amends it in his head now, purely for his own benefit. I will do everything I can to keep you safe. Whatever it takes.

  ‘Would you like me to read to you for a bit?’ he says.

  Neil nods.

  ‘Well, okay then.’

  He slips the carrier bag underneath his son’s bed, almost without thinking about it. He will figure out what to do wi
th it later. For now, he crosses one leg over the other, and leans back in the chair, considering. They have a book on the go, but he doesn’t feel like picking it up.

  It is hard to think of anything except Robert. His old friend has filtered down into his subconscious, and he knows that, whatever happens, he will write about him someday. It is inevitable. He will write about the real life story his friend stole, the piece of fiction he made from it, and the effect that had on everyone. Not yet, but someday. When it feels safe to.

  And in the meantime … well.

  There are only the two of them here.

  Christopher leans in closer, almost conspiratorially.

  ‘This is not the story of a little girl who vanishes,’ he begins. ‘This is the story of a little girl who comes back.’

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  I don’t remember a huge amount about what happened at the farm right at the end, and that’s probably a good thing. Afterwards, in the hospital, the police kept asking me how I’d found the place, and all I could tell them was that I’d followed my father’s map – the cross he’d drawn in the road atlas – but at that point I still had no idea at all how he’d found it. It was only later, from what other people discovered, that it began to make some kind of sense.

  The old man, Cartwright, suffered a second heart attack and died in the hospital, but poor Lorraine Haggerty, along with the three children born on the farm, had been able to tell the police a certain amount. Cartwright had been obsessed with the idea of transformation. We are all made of stardust – that was what he used to say. Nothing ever really dies. In his mind, he and his macabre family had been involved in a grand experiment on Ellis Farm. They received visitors there, and those visitors stayed for a while before being sent home again, changed into something else. In his mind, his victims remained alive, just different. In much the same way that wine was different from the grapes it was made from. Or champagne, as Robert Wiseman might have said.

  At some point, Cartwright had happened across Wiseman’s novel. The title alone would have drawn him in, never mind the synopsis, and obviously, when he read it, he would have recognised the story of his missing daughter all too clearly in its pages.

  But there had been more to it than that. One thing I do remember, all too clearly, is the office I saw inside the house – where the pages of The Black Flower had been plastered over every available wall. Cartwright came to see the author as a kindred spirit. Because Wiseman, in his own way, had done precisely the same thing as he did: taken people’s lives and transformed them into something new. And something that, in his case, would truly live for ever. Stories don’t die. Books might, physically, but not stories. They take root in people’s minds and bloom there. They wait to be told and to grow, like seeds.

  The old man had become obsessed by the book. As he saw it, Wiseman had turned his life into a story. Ultimately, he’d returned the favour. He’d taken the fictional parts of Wiseman’s story and made them real.

  Which was how my father had found the farm. He hadn’t.

  Robert Wiseman had based the description of the farm in his book on Ellis Farm, which had been owned by his parents when he was a child. He’d mentioned it in the interview with Barbara Phillips. His mother and father were long dead, of course, and the farm had changed hands several times since. Its fortunes had fallen and then failed altogether. But at some point after the publication of The Black Flower, the man described in its pages had bought it and moved there. He’d read the description in the book, and he’d wanted to continue his work in that exact same environment.

  He’d made Wiseman’s story come true. From the layout of the house, it seemed likely that a small bedroom in which Robert Wiseman had laid dreaming in as a little boy had, years later, become a shrine to his words.

  The man who had handled the sale was Andrew Haggerty, who had been an estate agent in Thornton at the time, and who now no longer had to wonder what it was he’d done to be targeted. The answer was nothing. He’d just crossed paths with the wrong person and perhaps that’s all it ever really comes down to. Even now, the police were still attempting to track Cartwright’s previous residences, to see exactly where he’d been performing his experiments and for how long. How many were there? How many victims? How long had this been going on, and for how many generations? Right now, there was no clear answer to any of those questions.

  My father, planning to write about his old friend, had simply wanted to see the real-life location he’d based the farm in his bestseller on. A little background colour. From the question marks on the calendar, he hadn’t even been sure he would call in at all. Except Wiseman had stolen so much of his story from other people’s lives that I guess my father was curious to see one part he hadn’t. And so he’d gone there.

  I might never know what happened: how much he’d seen, and what kind of reception or conversation had taken place. But whatever it was, it had been enough for them to start following him. All the way to the promenade in Whitkirk. All the way to the viaduct afterwards. And then all the way to me, through the story I’d written and sent.

  Thinking it was harmless – just a story, after all.

  Imagining it was safe.

  ‘You’re safe,’ I say.

  It’s not really true, of course, but it doesn’t matter. The way I see it, if you repeat something enough times, it might as well be.

  My son, lying in his cot, isn’t massively convinced by the sentiment. He’s not actively crying, but his arms and legs are going, and he’s nowhere near being settled. Obviously, at five months old, he doesn’t remotely understand the words or what they mean, but it’s not the content, it’s just the sound of my voice, the silence being filled.

  I rest one hand very gently on his stomach. In my other, I’m holding the sheaf of papers, which I can just about read by the small lamp on my father’s old desk. That’s the one bit of furniture in the room Ally and I haven’t got round to replacing yet, though we will. But Chris is only just big enough for his own cot and his own room, and there’s no rush. At least the rest of it is perfect. The new carpet is nailed down at the skirting boards. The shelves of my father’s books have been transferred to the back of the living room instead. The walls are freshly papered. The camera for the video monitor sits at the end of the crib, glowing orange.

  I clear my throat, and then keep my voice as gentle as possible as I read from the printed papers in my hand. This is the one single piece of my father’s planned book that he’d managed to complete. A solitary file I found on his laptop. He was still researching his subject matter, but he’d written what I think he intended to be the beginning: Wiseman turning up with the book and the flower, and the short section afterwards that I’m reading from now. It’s rough, of course. I’m not sure it would even have made it into his second draft, never mind the final one. But still. When I read them, they make me feel a little closer to him.

  ‘You’re safe,’ I tell my son. ‘There’s nothing to be scared of. Mum and I would never let anything happen to you.’

  After my son has gone to sleep, I head back through to the front room.

  I take it slowly. I’m mostly back to normal, but my stomach is still tight, and sometimes it hurts if I straighten up too quickly after scrunching. Ally is sitting on the settee and watching a very quiet television programme, but she glances up and gives me a smile as I open the door. She looks exhausted. We probably both do.

  ‘Well done,’ she says.

  ‘Thanks.’

  I sit down. The video monitor is on the coffee table in front of us. Our son is sleeping peacefully in grainy black and white on the screen, both hands pressed to his mouth.

  We watch the television for a bit. I’m not even sure what’s on, but it doesn’t really matter. The peace and calm is what’s important. After a while, I move my little finger over the back of her hand.

  Maybe one day I’ll write about all of this myself. I’ll look at the section Dad wrote and re-work it a little. I�
�ll look at The Black Flower, and think about what Wiseman would have said in his sequel if he’d been given the chance. And the story I sent by email too. They’re all part of the same story, after all, and so I’ll tell my version of it, one that stems from all of them. I can’t see it yet, not properly, but at least I have an idea for an opening line.

  Sometimes, I’ll write.

  Sometimes it happens like this.

  Copyright

  AN ORION EBOOK

  Copyright © 2011 Steve Mosby

  First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Orion Books

  This ebook first published in 2011 by Orion Books

  The moral right of Steve Mosby to be identified as the author

  of this work has been asserted in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

  retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior

  permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of

  binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition,

  including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to

  actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978 1 4091 0785 9

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