The Nightmare Place

by Mosby, Steve

  Jane heard him heading quickly around the bed. She’d landed on her side, facing underneath it. Two cats stared back at her, directly beneath the middle. And centimetres from her face, between her and them, there was a claw hammer.

  She could have wept. With her hands tied together behind her, there was no way she could reach it. So it was like a taunt, and she started crying again. A second later, she felt herself twisted on to her back and saw the man looming over her, impossibly large, filling the world.

  ‘Come on. I know you’re scared, but it will be okay. Honestly it will.’

  Jane kicked up at him. Bracing her back against the floor, she summoned a surprising amount of force, landing both feet into a gut that was softer than she’d been imagining. The man grunted, and half fell over on top of her. She was screaming through the gag, but it just came out muffled and nasal.

  ‘Don’t,’ he was saying. ‘Please.’

  But she kept twisting and kicking with her legs. Now that he had hold of her, though, she didn’t have the distance to generate any kind of strength to the blows. Just like back at her flat, he hoisted her up with ease, and put her back on the bed, propping her up in a seated position on the pillows against the headboard.

  ‘There. Is that comfortable?’

  She shook her head quickly.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He ran one hand through his hair. ‘It’s the best I can do right now.’

  The overhead light glinted in the beads of sweat on his forehead. While he’d been downstairs, he’d taken off the sunglasses, and she could see how wet and flushed his cheeks were. His eyes were too small for his face, and were ringed with red, as though he hadn’t slept properly, or had been crying.

  He started to say something, but then, in another room, a phone began ringing. His head jerked to one side, in the direction of the noise, but all he did was listen. After about twenty seconds, it went quiet. The man moved to the corner of the room by the window, and very carefully lifted the edge of the curtain to look outside. Jane saw his gaze moving here and there, and then he replaced the curtain and stared off to one side for a few moments, blinking rapidly.

  ‘Right. Right.’

  He stepped back around the bed and walked over to the set of drawers beside the door. On top of them, there was a kitchen knife. As he picked it up, the blade caught the overhead light and glinted. He turned back to the bed, the expression on his face incredibly sad.

  Behind the gag, Jane felt herself beginning to hyperventilate. It was impossible to get enough air in through her nose, and her chest was heaving. Breath whistled in and out, in and out. Don’t be sick, don’t be sick. But at the same time, what did it matter? Perhaps it would be preferable to die like that, choking on her own vomit.

  The man sat down on the bed, by her feet. Instinctively, she pulled her knees up, retreating as far as she could. But he didn’t seem to notice. His concentration was focused on the knife in his hands. He kept turning it over and over. Jane couldn’t keep her eyes off it. The reflection of the light flashed and faded, flashed and faded.

  ‘They took you away from me,’ the man said.

  She shook her head, not understanding.

  ‘From the helpline,’ he said. ‘I needed to talk to you last night, and you weren’t there.’

  How does he know that?

  Perhaps he could have worked out she wasn’t available by calling often enough, but that wasn’t what he was saying. They took you away from me. That meant he knew the helpline had let her go. But how could he know that? And how on earth had he found out where she lived?

  ‘You weren’t there.’

  Finally, he turned to look at her. She forced herself to look back. His eyes were so tiny and pink that it was impossible to work out what might be going on behind them. They didn’t even seem to have any whites to them.

  ‘That’s all I want. Someone to listen. I want you to listen to me now.’

  He was crying, Jane realised. Just a little.

  ‘I want to tell you about the monster,’ he said.

  Twenty-Seven

  For three days after the security light incident in Sharon’s garden, he was consumed by panic.

  All his illusions about their relationship had been shattered, and the reality laid bare. There had never been anything between them outside of his head. She had a boyfriend, and had even secured her house against men like him. But although the familiar feeling of self-disgust was stronger than ever, it was still drowned out by the panic. Because Sharon’s boyfriend must have seen him very clearly from the kitchen window, and would surely have called the police. He spent seventy-two hours sick with worry, anticipating a knock at the door.

  When the knock finally came, it was almost a relief.

  Before that, though, there was what felt like infinite time for both worry and self-recrimination. Why had he carried on with what he was doing when he had known he was being stupid? In his head, he wound events back, like cotton on a spool, but the real world was beyond him; his actions couldn’t be undone. With clenched fists pressed into his eyes, he prayed for time to reverse, but of course he remained firmly in the present. It almost felt like the universe was mocking him. It had kept leaving its doors ajar, yes, and he had walked through each of them, feeling that sense of inevitability. But when he was safely inside, it had swung one of them shut behind him, trapping him.

  He still went to work, and while it was possible that he’d get away with what he’d done, he anticipated a phone call at any moment. The jobs took longer. He would find himself holding a drill, shaking, unable to keep his hands steady. At home in the evenings, he watched the local news, expecting to see an item about himself, perhaps with an artist’s impression of his ragged features. He watched to the end, because he knew it wouldn’t be a lead item: he wasn’t that important, and he never had been. It was fitting in many ways that his life would be destroyed by something so pathetic and ineffective. Something so ultimately pitiful.

  He bought all the local newspapers as well, tearing through the pages, searching for anything. By the third day, he was almost daring to believe he might have escaped – that either it hadn’t been reported or it wasn’t being investigated – but deep down he knew that was delusional thinking. It was the exact same complacency and self-deceit that had led him to Sharon’s garden in the first place. In reality, he had never been that lucky.

  And then, on the third evening, he found the report.

  It was on the fourth page of the newspaper, and only a small sidebar, but it was there.

  WESTFIELD WOMAN ATTACKED IN HOME

  Police are today appealing for information about a serious assault on a Westfield woman in her Cragg Road home. The assault occurred on 4 May at approximately 2 a.m., after the woman, 25, returned home from a night out with colleagues at Eyecatchers Beauty.

  ‘This was a heinous and wholly unprovoked attack on a defenceless young woman in her own home,’ Detective Superintendent David Barlow told press. ‘We are determined to catch the assailant, and we urge members of the public who may have seen anything, or have any information at all, to come forward now.’

  DS Barlow said that the police were pursuing several lines of inquiry, and that there was no reason for the public at large to be concerned, but stressed, ‘We advise any member of the public travelling late at night to be safe and stay vigilant.’

  He read it again immediately, the panic looming larger now. From the details given, the woman referred to in the article had to be Sharon – and yet the story was confusing. The night was correct, and the time was about right. But he’d only been in the garden … hadn’t he?

  It was suddenly difficult to remember, and he pressed his fists into his eyes again, moaning softly. He couldn’t have done that to her. However much he had sometimes hated her, he would never have done anything to hurt her. Anyway, the man had scared him off – the boyfriend – so it was impossible that he’d gone into her house …

  And then he stopped rubbing his eyes,
and slowly moved his hands away, staring down at the article. Remembering the man’s shape in the kitchen window, staring out at him from the darkness.

  He’d assumed it was a boyfriend.

  That had been his first mistake – or his second, if you counted going to Sharon’s house that night. His next came an hour later, when there was a knock at the door, and he opened it expecting to find the police on his doorstep.

  Adam tells all this to Jane as best he can, although he knows he’s panicking, and that the words are coming out jumbled, the story out of order.

  It’s not like talking to her on the phone, when he was upset but still calm enough to think clearly. Now he can see how frightened she is: still watching him wide-eyed, still convinced he’s going to kill her. His heart goes out to her. He puts the knife down for now, but it doesn’t seem to help. The important thing is, though, that he’s unburdening himself. A problem shared. How much time does he have left to do so? He keeps checking carefully out of the side of the curtains, and every time he does, the street seems even more full of police vehicles.

  ‘But you see, it wasn’t the police knocking at the door that evening,’ he tells Jane. ‘It was the monster who found me.’

  How to describe the monster, though?

  A physical description will hardly do. The man is large and strong, but wouldn’t necessarily stand out in a crowd. In many ways, he is entirely average, and when Adam thinks about him, his mind supplies the kind of photofit he expected to see on the television: sketchy details that add up to a face and a body, but which don’t seem entirely real. He thinks he knows why. When someone has a distinctive feature, you tend to focus on it, and fail to absorb the rest of their appearance. What is distinctive about the monster is not his physical features, but what lies behind them.

  How do you use words to conjure up the purest forms of hatred and aggression? How do you convey absolute emptiness? A photograph of a void is blank by definition. Even when the monster holds still, he has violence beating off him like heat from a fever. The first time he saw him standing there, Adam could already feel the sheer force of the monster’s presence. It wasn’t a man that was on his doorstep, but something elemental and unstoppable, something that despised everything in its path.

  None of which is possible to explain.

  ‘Sometimes when I see women,’ he tries, ‘I think they look like the beautiful girls at school, all grown up. And that’s the only way I can really describe the monster. He’s like one of the tough boys, the ones who used to bully me, all grown up as well. When I used to be afraid of them at school – the dread I’d feel – that’s exactly what he is. That fear. Standing there like a real person.’

  But not standing there for long that first evening. The monster stared at him for a few seconds, tilting his head slightly, as though perusing a lower species, then walked past him and inside. The strength emanating from him wavered like a magnet: Adam moved to one side to let him pass, then felt himself pulled along after him.

  There was no point asking who he was – Adam already knew. Equally, there was no point denying he had been seen in the garden that night.

  How did you find me?

  The monster didn’t answer. He didn’t say anything, in fact – just stalked from room to room, looking around the cottage. His face remained impassive throughout, his eyes dead. Don’t get too close to me, his body language commanded. Despite the fact that this was his home, Adam obeyed.

  What do you want?

  No answer. The monster walked upstairs, his body seeming to expand and fill the stairwell. Adam followed nervously, and it was only as they reached the landing that he realised he’d left the door to his key room open.

  But the monster looked into his bedroom first, so he had a chance. It was another moment he’d look back on later, wishing that he could turn back time and do things differently. While the monster was in his room, Adam reached out to secure the lock on his key room. All he needed to do was press the link down. And then take control of the situation, of course – order this man, this thing, to leave his property. But instead, he stood there with his hand on the padlock, staring at the man’s back, and he didn’t dare. The sense of threat coming off the monster was simply too great.

  Things might have been so different if he had.

  He tries to tell Jane all of this, along with what happened afterwards. The monster stood in the middle of his key room, gaze darting here and there over the wall, then looked at Adam as though he was suddenly a little more interesting.

  Tell me about this.

  And again, Adam did as he was told.

  He tries to explain it all, but he’s crying, and Jane still looks so frightened, and the phone keeps ringing, and he can hear the police outside now, without even looking. There are loud-hailers and shouted instructions, the blare of sirens, bangs on the doors and windows. He doesn’t have much time left. Maybe he has none at all.

  In the end, though, despite the tears, he feels a degree of lightness inside: a sensation he hasn’t felt since before the monster’s first visit, and even for many years before that – perhaps as long as he can remember. But there is sadness there too, of course. If only you could reach back and do everything differently. If only you could make the smashed glass whole again. If only.

  Adam’s hand is trembling as he picks up the knife again.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he tells Jane. His voice is clogged, and he forces himself to swallow down as much of the loneliness and fear as possible. ‘I’m so sorry for what I’m going to do to you.’

  For a moment, it feels like he won’t actually be able to. Courage is required here, and he’s always been lacking in that. So he searches for his mother and father in his head, and after a few seconds, he finds them. You have to go in hard, his father says bluntly, and it hurts less. His mother is there too, of course. Shy boys, she tells him.

  Shy boys get no toys.

  Twenty-Eight

  My bedroom.

  Mine.

  Except it didn’t feel like it any more. I stood in the doorway, and for a few moments I was unable to process the state of the room in front of me.

  Adam Johnson’s body was half on the bed. He appeared to have collapsed – dropped like a stone, rather than slumped – and had landed awkwardly, so that his head was turned to the side, one fat cheek pressed intimately against the bottom of the bed. His knees and hands were out of sight on the floor. If it wasn’t for all the blood, it would have looked as though he’d been kneeling there praying and had just fallen asleep.

  From this angle, the wound to the side of his neck was clearly visible, wet and red in the light. The covers at the base of the bed were crimson, soaked through as thoroughly as tissue paper. The fabric glistened. A spray of blood had also landed on the wall, and there was a great deal on the floor, pooled over the bare boards and already clotting in the thin gaps between. On the bed, Johnson’s hair and beard were bedraggled with it. I could see enough of his face to make out a single eye, which was open, and pointed sightlessly off to one side of me.

  I moved as far into the bedroom as I could. There was a hush to the air here, like distant traffic heard from an open window, but it was more of a sensation than a sound. Just behind Johnson’s body, a kitchen knife lay half submerged in the blood. Was it one of mine? I couldn’t tell. Presumably he would have brought a weapon with him, but who knew?

  I stepped back.

  My head was a mess. The day had been intense – a wave of incident and adrenalin – and right now, a hundred thoughts and questions and threads of understanding were mingling together. The most immediate was a visceral reaction to how incongruous the whole scene was. It’s always a shock to see a body, of course, but the effect was enhanced here because this was my bedroom. The feeling of unreality was hard to deal with. Despite all the police work going on, the officers in the house around me, there was still a sense that this could not really be happening. That I might shortly wake to find myself lying in the bed
rather than staring down at it.

  It’s going to be a fucker to clean up, too.

  The thought came unbidden, and the flippancy of it was almost welcome. But far from enough to settle me.

  Would I even want to sleep in here again anyway?

  It was bad enough knowing that Johnson had broken in and spent time in here – that he’d taken my things and spied on me. But he’d ended his life in here too. The whole house felt soiled by his presence in a way that would be hard, maybe impossible, to clean by conventional means. Everyone believes in ghosts a little in the middle of the night. How was it going to feel to wake up in the pitch-black and imagine him standing there at the foot of my bed? How was I going to deal with that?

  I took a deep breath, then let it out slowly.

  All those details would take care of themselves. Of course they would. Right now, the important thing to remember was that this was over. Adam Johnson wasn’t going to hurt anybody else, not the way he had in the past. The relief the knowledge brought was palpable, and it was that thought that I needed to focus on.

  I crouched down and peered under the bed, seeing Hazel and Willow in their usual place. There was a large carrier in the spare room, and they were both small enough to fit in it together. They always seemed to prefer that, in fact.

  ‘Going to be a pain getting you out from there, isn’t it?’

  They just blinked at me.

  ‘Have to do it, though.’

  But as I stood up, something else occurred to me, and I paused in the doorway, turning back to reassess the scene behind me. Because actually, something about it wasn’t incongruous, after all. It reminded me a little of what I’d found in the bedroom at Sally Vickers’ house: the closed curtains; the blood on the bed; the body on the floor. It wasn’t the same, but it was similar.

  I remembered how it had been to see her – how in some strange way it had felt different from other crime scenes I’d visited. Standing here now, at the end of the case, it was impossible to escape the idea that an echo had escaped from this moment right now, travelled back, and reached me then. An echo that had told me: this means something important to you.