by Alex North
It allowed me to drift, at least after a time.
* * *
Glass smashing.
My mother screaming.
A man shouting.
“Daddy.”
I jerked awake from the nightmare, disorientated, aware only that Jake was calling me and so I needed to do something.
“Hang on,” I shouted.
A shadow at the end of the bed moved, and my heart leaped. I sat up quickly.
Jesus Christ.
“Jake, is that you?”
The small shadow moved around from the foot of the bed to my side. For a moment I wasn’t convinced it was him at all, but then he was close enough that I could recognize the shape of his hair. I couldn’t see his face, though. It was occluded entirely by the darkness in the room.
“What are you doing, mate?” My heart was still racing, both from what was happening now and from the residue of the nightmare it had woken me from. “It’s not time to get up yet. Absolutely nowhere near.”
“Can I sleep in here with you tonight?”
“What?” He never had before. In fact, Rebecca and I had always held firm on the few occasions he’d suggested it, assuming that relenting even once would be the beginning of a slippery slope. “We don’t do that, Jake. You know that.”
“Please.”
I realized that his voice was deliberately quiet, as though there were someone in another room he didn’t want to hear.
“What’s the matter?” I said.
“I heard a noise.”
“A noise?”
“There’s a monster outside my window.”
I sat there in silence, remembering the rhyme he’d told me at bedtime. But that had been about the door. And anyway, there was no way anybody could be outside his window. We were one floor up.
“You were dreaming, mate.”
He shook his head in the darkness.
“It woke me up. I went across to the window and it was louder there. I wanted to open the curtains but I was too scared.”
You would have seen the dark field across the road, I thought. That’s all.
But he sounded so serious that I couldn’t say that to him.
“All right.” I slipped out of bed. “Well, let’s go and check, then.”
“Don’t, Daddy.”
“I’m not scared of monsters, Jake.”
He followed me into the hall, where I switched on the light at the top of the stairs. Stepping into his room, though, I left the light off, and then approached the window.
“What if there’s something there?”
“There isn’t,” I said.
“But what if?”
“Then I’ll deal with it.”
“Will you punch it in the face?”
“Absolutely. But there’s nothing there.”
And yet I didn’t feel as confident as I sounded. The closed curtains seemed ominous. I listened for a moment, but there was nothing to hear. And it was impossible for anybody to be out there.
I pulled the curtains open.
Nothing. Just an oblique angle of the path and garden, the empty road beyond, and then the dark, shadowy expanse of the field stretching away into the distance. A dim reflection of my face was staring back into the room. But there was nothing else out there. The whole world seemed to be sleeping peacefully in exactly the way that I wasn’t.
“See?” I did my best to sound patient. “Nobody there.”
“But there was.”
I closed the curtains and knelt down.
“Jake, sometimes dreams can seem very real. But they’re not. How can anybody have been outside your window when we’re all that way above the ground?”
“They could have climbed the drainpipe.”
I started to answer, but then pictured the outside of the house. The drainpipe was just to the side of his window. A ridiculous idea occurred to me. If you lock and chain a door to keep a monster out, what choice does it have but to climb up and get in some other way?
Stupidity.
“There was nobody out there, Jake.”
“Can I sleep with you tonight, Daddy? Please?”
I sighed to myself. Obviously he wasn’t going to sleep alone in here now, and it was either too late or too early to argue. I couldn’t decide which. It was easier right now just to give in.
“All right. But just for tonight. No fidgeting, though.”
“Thank you, Daddy.” He picked up his Packet of Special Things and followed me back through. “I promise I won’t fidget.”
“So you say. But what about stealing all the covers?”
“I won’t do that either.”
I turned the hall light off and then we clambered into bed, Jake on what should have been Rebecca’s side.
“Daddy?” he said. “Were you having a nightmare before?”
Glass smashing.
My mother screaming.
A man shouting.
“Yes,” I said. “I suppose so.”
“What was it about?”
The dream itself had faded a little now, but it had been a memory as much as a nightmare. Me as a child, walking toward the doorway to the small kitchen of the house I had grown up in. In the dream, it was late, and a noise from downstairs had woken me. I had stayed in bed with the covers pulled over my head and the dread thick in my heart, trying to pretend that everything was okay, even though I knew it wasn’t. Eventually I had tiptoed quietly down the stairs, not wanting to see whatever was happening, but drawn to it all the same, feeling small and terrified and powerless.
I remembered approaching the bright kitchen along the dark hall, hearing the noises coming from in there. My mother’s voice was angry but quiet, as though she thought I was still asleep and she was trying to keep me safe from this, but the man’s voice was loud and uncaring. All their words overlapped. I couldn’t make out what either of them was saying, only that it was ugly, and that it was building toward a crescendo—accelerating toward something awful.
The kitchen doorway.
I reached it just in time to see the man’s red face contorted in rage and hatred as he threw the glass at my mother as hard as he could. To see her flinch away, far too late, and to hear her scream.
The last time I’d ever seen my father.
It was such a long time ago, but the memory still surfaced every now and then. Still clawed its way up out of the dirt.
“Grown-up stuff,” I told Jake. “Maybe I’ll tell you one day, but it was just a dream. And it’s fine. It all had a happy ending.”
“What happened in the end?”
“Well, you did, eventually.”
“Me?”
“Yeah.” I ruffled his hair. “And then you went to sleep.”
I closed my eyes, and the two of us lay there in silence for so long that I assumed he’d dropped back off to sleep. At one point, I stretched my arm out to one side and rested my hand gently on top of the covers over him, as though to reassure myself he was still there. The two of us together. My small, wounded family.
“Whispering,” Jake said quietly.
“What?”
“Whispering.”
His voice sounded so far away that I thought he was already dreaming.
“It was whispering at my window.”
Twelve
You have to hurry.
In the dream, Jane Carter was whispering down the phone to Pete. Her voice was quiet and urgent, as though what she was saying were the most frightening thing in the world.
But she was doing it anyway. Finally.
Pete had sat at his office desk, his heart thumping in his chest. He had spoken to Frank Carter’s wife numerous times during the investigation. He had appeared outside her place of work, or arranged to find himself walking alongside her on busy pavements, always careful not to be seen with her anyplace her husband might hear of. It had been as though he had been making covert attempts to turn a spy, which he supposed wasn’t far from the truth.
Jane had
provided alibis for her husband. She had defended him. But it had been obvious to Pete from his first encounter with her that she was terrified of Frank—he thought with good reason—and he had worked hard to convert her: to convince her it was safe for her to talk to him. To take back what she had said and tell the truth about her husband. Talk to me, Jane. I’ll make sure that Frank can’t hurt you and your son anymore.
And now it seemed like she was going to. Such fear had been beaten into Jane Carter over the years that even now, phoning him without the bastard in the house, she could still only bring herself to whisper. Courage is not the absence of fear, Pete knew. Courage requires fear. And so, even as the adrenaline hit—even as he felt the case beginning to close ahead of him—he also recognized the bravery of this call.
I’ll let you in, she whispered, but you have to hurry. I’ve no idea how long he’ll be.
In reality, Frank Carter would never return to the house. Within an hour it would be crawling with police and CSIs, and an alert would be out to locate Carter and the van he was driving. But at the time, Pete hurried. The journey to her house only took ten minutes, but they were the longest of his life. Even with backup on standby, he felt alone and scared when he arrived, like someone in a fairy tale where a monster was absent but might return at any moment.
Inside, he watched Jane Carter’s trembling hands as she unlocked the door to the extension with the key she’d stolen. The whole house was silent, and he felt a shadow looming over them.
The lock came undone.
Step back now, please, both of you.
Jane Carter stood in the middle of the kitchen, her son hiding behind her legs, as Pete pushed open the door with one gloved hand.
No.
At once, there was the hot smell of rotting meat. He shone his flashlight inside—and then came the pictures, appearing to him one by one in swift succession, the sights and sensations illuminated as if by camera flashes.
No.
Not yet.
For the moment, he lifted his hand, moving the flashlight over the walls instead. They were painted white, but Carter had decorated them, drawing crude green blades of grass at the bases and childlike butterflies fluttering above. Close to the ceiling, there was the skewed yellow approximation of a sun. A face had been sketched on it, the dead black eyes staring down at the floor below.
Pete followed its gaze, finally lowering the beam.
It became difficult to breathe.
He had been searching for these children for three months, and while he had always anticipated an outcome like this, he had never entirely given up hope. But here they were, lying in this rank, warm darkness. The four bodies looked real and unreal at the same time. Lifelike dolls that had been broken and now lay still, their clothes intact except for their T-shirts, which had been pulled up to cover their faces.
* * *
Perhaps the worst thing about that particular nightmare was that it had become familiar enough over the years not to disturb his sleep. It was the alarm that woke him the next morning.
He lay there for a few seconds, trying to keep calm. Attempting to ignore the memory was like shoving at mist, but he reminded himself that it was only recent events that had roused these nightmares, and that they would fade in time. He turned off the alarm.
Gym, he thought.
Paperwork. Admin.
Routine.
He showered, dressed, packed the bag for his workout, and by the time he headed downstairs to make coffee and a light breakfast, the dream had receded and his thoughts were more under control. There had been a brief interruption to his life—that was all. It was completely understandable that turning the soil over had released some pungent ghosts from the earth, but they would fade soon. The urge to drink would weaken again. Life would return to normal.
It was only when he took his breakfast through to the living room that he saw the red light on his cell blinking. He’d missed a call; there was voice mail to listen to. He dialed the number and listened to the message, chewing his food slowly.
Forcing himself to swallow it. His throat was tight.
After two months, Frank Carter had agreed to see him.
Thirteen
“Just stand against the wall for me,” I said. “A little to the right. No, “my right. A little more. That’s it. Now give me a smile.”
It was Jake’s first day at his new school, and I was far more nervous about the prospect than he was. How many times could you check a drawer to make sure clothes were ready? Were there names on everything? Where had I put his book bag and water bottle? There was so much to consider, and I wanted everything to be perfect for him.
“Can I move yet, Dad?”
“Hang on.”
I held up my phone in front of me as Jake stood against the only blank wall in his bedroom, dressed in his new school uniform: gray trousers, white shirt, and blue jumper—all of it fresh and clean, of course, with name tags on absolutely everything. His smile was shy and sweet. He looked so grown up in his uniform, but also still so small and vulnerable.
I tapped the screen a couple of times.
“Done.”
“Can I see?”
“Of course you can.”
I knelt down and he leaned on my shoulder as I showed him the photographs I’d taken.
“I look okay.”
He sounded surprised.
“You look perfect,” I told him.
And he did. I tried to enjoy the moment, even though it was tinged with sadness, because Rebecca should have been here too. Like most parents, she and I had taken pictures on Jake’s first days in a new year at school, but I’d changed my phone recently, and it was only earlier this week that I’d realized what that meant. All my photographs were gone—lost forever. To add insult to injury, I did have Rebecca’s phone, but while the photos would be on there, the phone was locked with her fingerprint. I’d stared at her old handset in frustration for a full minute, facing down the hard truth of the situation. Rebecca was gone, which meant that those memories were gone as well.
I had tried to tell myself that it didn’t matter. That it was just another harsh joke grief had played on me—and a minor one in the grand scheme of things. But it had hurt. It felt like another failing on my part.
We’ll get so many more.
“Come on, mate.”
Before we left, I uploaded copies to the ether.
* * *
Rose Terrace Primary School was a low, sprawling building, secluded from the street behind iron railings. The main part was old and pretty: a single story with numerous peaked roofs. BOYS and GIRLS were carved into the black stone above separate entrances, although much newer signs indicated that that Victorian separation was now used to delineate different year groups instead. I’d been shown around before enrolling Jake. Inside, there was a hall with a polished wooden floor, which acted as a central hub for the surrounding classrooms. Between the doors, the walls were covered with small handprints in different-colored paint, pressed there by a selection of former pupils, with the dates they’d attended written underneath.
Jake and I stood at the railings.
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
It was hard to blame him for being doubtful. The playground beyond the railings was teeming with children, along with parents clustered together in groups. It was the first day of a new year, but everybody here—kids and parents alike—already knew each other from previous years, and Jake and I were going to be walking in as strangers to everyone except each other. His old school had been larger and more anonymous. Everyone here seemed so tightly knit that it was impossible to imagine we wouldn’t always feel like outsiders. God, I hoped that he fit in.
I gave his hand a light squeeze and led him toward the gate.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s be brave.”
“I’m okay, Daddy.”
“I’m talking about me.”
A joke, but only half of one
. There were five minutes before the doors were due to open, and I knew I should make an effort to talk to some of the other parents and begin to form bonds of my own. Instead, once in the playground, I leaned against the railing and waited.
Jake stood beside me, chewing his lip slightly. I watched the other children running around, and wished he’d go and make an effort to play.
Just let him be him, I told myself.
That should be good enough, shouldn’t it?
Eventually, the door opened, and Jake’s new teacher stood outside smiling. The children began lining up, book bags swinging. Because it was the first day of term for everyone here, most of those bags would be empty for now, but Jake’s wasn’t. As usual, he’d insisted on bringing his Packet of Special Things with him.
I passed him the bag and his water bottle.
“You’ll look after that, won’t you?”
“Yes.”
God, I hoped so. The thought of it getting lost was probably as intolerable for me as it would be for him. But it was my son’s equivalent of a comfort blanket, and there was no way he could have left home without it.
He was already moving over to the line of children.
“I love you, Jake,” I said quietly.
“Love you too, Daddy.”
I stood there, watching until he was inside, hoping he’d turn back and wave. He didn’t. It was a good sign, I supposed, that lack of clinging. It showed that he wasn’t intimidated by the day ahead of him and didn’t need the reassurance.
I wished I could say the same about myself.
Please, please, please be okay.
“New boy, eh?”
“Sorry?”
I turned to find a woman was standing next to me. Even though the day was already warm, she was wearing a long dark coat with her hands pushed into the pockets, as though braced for a winter breeze. Her hair was dyed black, shoulder length, and she had a slightly amused expression on her face.
New boy.
“Oh,” I said. “You mean Jake? That’s my son, yes.”
