Darker

by Simon Clark

  Michael shouted, ‘Now! Get back into the car. Everyone get into the car!’

  Richard looked at the police station. It seemed indestructibly safe. Inside, down-to-earth coppers were brewing tea.

  ‘Don’t even think about it,’ Michael hissed. ‘You’d be dead in less than a minute. The car! Get everyone into your car!’

  With a judder the yellow Fiat gave a final squeal and lay still, like a slaughtered animal.

  Three seconds later a ticket dispenser shri–iked as the metal post it was bolted to was hammered flat to the ground.

  Someone’s firing at us, thought Richard in near panic as something rattled on the tarmac all around them. No … money. Hell’s bells, it’s money!

  Coins from the burst machine rained down, tinkling on the car park and rolling in circles.

  ‘It’s your last chance!’ the man shouted. ‘The car!’

  Richard picked up Amy who’d rooted to the tarmac and ran. Even though instinct told him to run to the police station, even though a line of concrete bollards exploded one after another, he found himself trusting the stranger.

  ‘Get in the back,’ he shouted to Joey and Christine.

  The keys were in his hands but his fingers felt like frozen sausages; he fumbled at them uselessly.

  At last he found the door key, stabbed it into the lock.

  It wouldn’t turn.

  It had jammed.

  Thirty yards away. A Welcome To Pontefract sign slapped down to the ground with a crack. Blue sparks flew from the impact.

  Joey squealed. ‘Richard, for Godsakes hurry, man!’

  ‘The key’s jammed; I can’t —’

  Hell, he suddenly realized. Wrong way, you idiot. You’re forcing the key the wrong bloody way!

  Michael said simply, ‘Richard. You’ve got ten seconds to save our lives.’

  ‘Inside!’

  The car doors swung open as one, then slammed as one.

  This time Richard slammed the key into the ignition square on. Started the engine. Engaged gear. And powered the car across the car park.

  Within seconds Richard was screaming the car out of Pontefract. Out past the racecourse. Beneath the railway bridge. Then he fired the car up the slip road to join the motorway.

  In the back his family were statues. Not speaking. Not moving. No expression. Only their eyes expressed the shock they felt.

  The stranger looked back through the rear window. Then he turned to Richard and said in a low voice. ‘Faster. I think it’s gaining on us.’

  Chapter 21

  Dead Beat

  … a few hours later he would be dead.

  Beside Richard, sat the stranger in the bloodstained shirt. He sat still; his expression revealed nothing of what he felt or might be thinking.

  From the back seat Joey shouted the same question over and over: ‘What happened? Who did that? What happened? Listen to me, you bastard! Who did that? I said —’

  Amy was crying.

  ‘… police,’ Christine insisted. ‘Richard. You’ve got to find a phone. Call the police.’

  ‘I don’t know who you are, or what you’ve done,’ Joey screamed. ‘But you can’t involve us. For Christsakes what happened back there? That car exploded. The whole fucking car park was exploding. Why did —’

  No, the car didn’t explode, Richard told himself. It imploded. It squashed flat beneath an enormous weight.

  An invisible weight.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Michael said in a low voice. ‘I didn’t mean —’

  ‘I bet you’re fucking sorry.’ Spit flew from Joey’s lips. ‘Yes, I bet you’re fucking sorry. Dropping us in the shit. Are we going to die for this? Are we?’

  ‘I didn’t want this to happen, I —’

  … his life could have been saved. If the true nature of his condition had been known …

  Richard drove the car along the motorway at over a hundred. Joey’s savage shouting, Amy’s crying, Christine persistently asking to telephone the police, the occasional softly-spoken word from the stranger in his bloodstained shirt; they all managed to seem distant and painfully close at the same time.

  Richard passed a petrol tanker on the inside lane of the motorway. He was driving suicidally fast but what he’d experienced just sixteen minutes ago had scared him; brutally scared him. In a detached way that was bizarre he found himself thinking When was the last time I was so frightened?

  … in minutes he was dead. Why he died, a mystery …

  Who was it that died? Richard asked himself. It was as if his mind had split itself into a number of distinct compartments. One handled the driving. Thruuppp. Now he used the hard shoulder of the motorway to overtake (or was that undertake?) a phalanx of bastardly slow vehicles hogging the other lanes. Breathing came hard. He felt incredibly breathless and had to inhale hard.

  And another compartment of his mind listened to the radio that had somehow been left on amid all this bastard mayhem. Someone had died, said the girl on the radio. Who was it? To Richard it seemed absurdly important. So much so, he wanted to turn up the radio and scream to the others to keep quiet. The feeling that he would suffocate intensified.

  … he was just twenty-eight years old, said the girl on the radio. But the world of rock music would never be the same again …

  Twenty-eight years old? Male? Jim Morrison, perhaps. No, wasn’t Morrison older than that when his heart stopped in that too-hot bathwater in his Paris apartment? Maybe Brian Jones …

  ‘Look,’ screamed Joey; his spit tingled on the back of Richard’s bare neck. ‘You fucking know who did this to you! What did they use? A fucking cannon or something —’

  The stranger replied, ‘If I can explain. What happened was —’

  ‘Mum … Mum …’ sobbed Amy, burying her face in Christine’s lap. ‘I want to go home. I don’t like this. I don’t —’

  ‘Richard! Look out!’

  Christine’s voice cut through the wall of sound. Richard’s head snapped forward. They were heading straight for the back wheels of a truck parked on the hard shoulder.

  Richard’s jaws clamped together. At this speed the car would ram beneath the truck. While the truck’s tailgate would slice the top off the car, their upper bodies and heads with it.

  Tyres screeched. Horns sounded. Richard hauled the steering wheel right, flicking the car so far across its tyres scythed the grass of the central reservation.

  ‘Stop the car, Richard,’ begged Christine.

  ‘You can’t stop,’ the stranger insisted in a low voice. ‘Keep driving.’

  ‘Mum. I-I-I want to go-oh home …’

  … while the man has died, his music lives on …

  ‘Who’s fucking chasing you? Who’s fucking doing it?’

  The car straightened and independent chunks of his mind still worked on their own problems. Who was the musician who died? Elvis Presley? Buddy Holly?

  And what had frightened him as much as this in the past?

  Suddenly Richard remembered the night he stood in the garden. It was dark. Snow lay thick on the lawn. But he was dripping wet. Why?

  For the life of him he couldn’t remember. He only knew he was so wet his clothes dripped. He must have been ten years old. He was shaking. Not with cold. With fear.

  Something terrible had happened. The answer lay in the house he stood watching. The curtains were open. Lights blazed inside. A Christmas tree stood in the window with clusters of green and red lights that winked on and off. And he desperately wanted to walk up to the door. And when someone opened it, ask a question. The question was enormously important. He couldn’t leave the garden until he asked it. But he was too terrified to do it. So he stood there ankle-deep in snow, with water dripping from his nose; his clothes felt as wet as mashed potato against his skin.

  Horns sounded. The needle rested on one hundred and twenty.

  Any second now the car would somersault away over the fields. Then smash to bastard scrap.

  He could see it co
ming. Another compartment of his mind clicked in, feeding images of bloody lumps scattered in the dirt. Bloody lumps of meat that had once been his wife, his four-year-old daughter …

  … we leave you with the music of the man who died on that fateful day in 1970.

  1970. Richard hunted his memory. Which rock star died in 1970?

  Jimi Hendrix …

  As soon as the name flashed across his brain, the sound of feedback wailed into the car as ‘Foxy Lady’ tore from the speakers.

  It was enough to blow through the accumulation of crap that shock had blocked the channels of his head with.

  ‘All I want to know is,’ Joey screamed, ‘Who are these people? What are they going to do to us? Can’t you —’

  ‘Joey.’ Richard spoke in a calm but forceful way. ‘Shut up.’

  ‘But for fuck’s sake, I’m —’

  ‘Shut it, Joey. You’re frightening Amy.’

  Joey shut it, looking stunned.

  Then Richard said to the stranger. ‘At the first opportunity, I’m going to stop the car and telephone the police.’

  The stranger looked straight at Richard. ‘It might be too late for that.’

  ‘Believe me. That’s what I’m doing. Next telephone box I see, I’m phoning the police.’ As he spoke Richard took his foot off the pedal and slowed the car as it ran down the slip road from the motorway.

  The stranger spoke almost gently, ‘Please. I know you’ve just had what must be the shock of your life —’

  ‘Now that’s an understatement.’

  ‘But please just give me ten minutes to tell you what’s happening.’

  Richard shook his head. ‘We’re not interested in what’s happening. We just want to go home.’

  ‘Believe me when I tell you this: I don’t want to merely satisfy your curiosity. I want to tell you something that might stop you – and your family – from getting hurt.’

  Chapter 22

  Huntress

  How will I find him?

  For Rosemary Snow this seemed the biggest problem, bigger even than how shall I kill him?

  Her eyes weren’t used to the bright sun. And as she limped away from the hospital her eyes were nearly screwed shut. The light reflected from the windscreens of passing cars so brilliantly they each seemed to contain a chunk of the sun itself. So every few yards she would have to stop and wipe her streaming eyes.

  She managed to walk better than she thought possible after being unconscious for so long. Maybe this pure hatred for the stranger powered her legs. Certainly it screened out most of the pain.

  Purposefully she pushed on. The town, unfamiliar to her, bustled busily by, not noticing the girl with the long dark hair, grey track suit and sandals.

  Rosemary had been unable to find her own clothes, so she’d walked along the hospital corridors in a hospital dressing gown until she came across the physio department. There she’d found a locker full of the same grey track suits which she guessed were the uniforms of the hospital physios. There, she’d also come across rows of cubicles. Beyond those she’d heard the splash of water and voices that echoed from tiled walls. That must have been the physio pool where patients were exercising seized joints and ligaments.

  On impulse she had walked along the line of cubicles. Then, with no one in sight, she’d opened a door. Inside was a tweedy skirt, blouse and flat shoes. The kind an elderly woman might wear. Rosemary saw a handbag hanging from the peg. She’d opened it. Inside was a face-powder compact, handkerchiefs and a purse.

  She needed money. She realized that.

  Her hand went to take the purse out of the handbag.

  Then, shaking her head, she left the cubicle, the purse untouched.

  Sounds came louder from the pool room, as if a door had been opened.

  Rosemary limped back the way she had come.

  As she passed the last cubicle she paused, then pushed open the door. Hanging from the peg was a man’s business suit. Heart beating fast she went through the pockets. Nothing.

  Then she saw a pair of black brogues beneath the bench. She lifted a shoe and shook it. It chinked. Inside were car keys and loose change. Quickly she scooped a handful of coins and pocketed them. Then she tried the next shoe. Inside that one, a wallet. Bank notes had been stuffed in so tightly the press-stud catch popped open as she held it in her hand.

  Oh, God, please, let that be a sign from you, she thought guiltily as she opened it. She pulled all the cash from the wallet, a great, thick wad that felt absurdly heavy in her trembling hand.

  She found she couldn’t take all of it, so divided it roughly in half.

  Outside voices sounded suddenly loud. Male laughter; a comment about a girl in a swimsuit.

  She’d frozen expecting the door of the cubicle to bang open.

  Instead the voices passed by. Quickly she stuffed half the money back into the wallet and replaced it in the shoe. Then, gripping the other half of the banknotes in her fist, she walked as calmly as she could out of the cubicle and followed the exit signs.

  As she headed into the town centre she still felt guilty about taking the money. She’d never stolen before in her life. As she walked she reasoned with herself that she had no choice. That she could never return home. That with this ruined face her life was as good as over. That the only thing that mattered was the death of the man that had done this to her. She knew, also, that an innocent family was in danger and that only she could warn them.

  She had thought of going to the police but they’d only send her back to the hospital or back home. In any event they’d get word to her mother and stepfather. The idea of her stepsister grinning at her ruined face filled her with fury.

  By the time she’d reached the town centre she had a raging thirst. She bought three cans of Lilt and drank them one after another.

  That helped. Her mind sharpened. She knew she had to find the stranger and now her mind turned to how actually to accomplish that.

  First she needed to make the necessary preparations. She counted the money. Two hundred and fifteen pounds in notes and another eight pounds in change.

  She bought sunglasses, a dark green sweatshirt with a hood, a change of underwear, a pair of cheap trainers, a hand towel, soap, shampoo, a comb, a holdall. Then she bought the biggest carving knife she could find.

  Chapter 23

  Fire and Ice

  The stranger said: ‘Here should do fine. Stop the car.’

  ‘Are you sure it’s safe?’ asked Richard.

  ‘It’s safe. For the time being.’

  Richard pulled off a country road into a lay-by and stopped. Thirty yards ahead stood a roadside fast-food caravan. Painted in red letters on the end of the caravan: HANK’S YANKEE DINER. Chalked on a blackboard below that: Full English Breakfast Our Speciality.

  For a moment they sat without talking. Amy had stopped crying. Richard swung open the door. It only let more hot air in but he breathed it deeply. It had the dusty smell of the sunbaked wheat field over the road. Stiffly, he hauled himself out and rubbed his neck.

  The sun pressed down on him like hot metal. Cars ambled by. In the field behind Hank’s Yankee Diner cows stood motionless apart from their swinging tails.

  Michael, who had been cleaning what remained of the blood from his face with a tissue, climbed out the car. ‘We might as well grab a drink. We’ve got time.’

  Richard glared at the man who was responsible for this hell. Why did he seem so calm again? Richard felt he’d never be able to get his breath back again. He breathed in deeply. The shakes started in his legs.

  Michael opened the back door. ‘We’re stopping here for a few minutes.’ Joey and Christine climbed out blinking into the sunlight. Richard saw they were still dazed by what had happened. Amy, her eyes red and sore-looking, clung tightly to her mother’s hand.

  Like refugees from a war zone they walked in the direction of the diner. There was no one else about. Only a bored girl chewing gum and reading a magazine in the doorway of
the caravan.

  A warm breeze briefly stirred two Stars and Stripes flags hanging from twenty-foot poles at each end of the caravan. Beyond the caravan itself was a free-standing canopy about twenty by twenty. Again the canopy itself was a huge Stars and Stripes flag supported by scaffolding poles. Beneath that the red and blue shade looked welcome relief from the sun.

  As they sat at a plastic table Amy spotted a play area with swings and a slide. ‘Mum! Look! Can I go and play?’

  Richard looked at her, surprised by her rapid recovery.

  ‘Go on, then,’ Christine said. ‘Not too long, though, you might get sunburn.’

  Richard slumped into the chair. Above him the Stars and Stripes canopy rippled slightly in the waft of air.

  As he sat there, shell-shocked, he gazed without seeing at a bowl of sugar lumps. Then he remembered why he’d been standing in the snow, dripping wet, all those years ago.

  He blinked and shook his head. For some reason his mind had hidden the memory from him since the day it happened.

  Ten years old. He and his friend Daniel Masson had been playing on the frozen lake near Barking Dog Farm. That wasn’t its real name, of course. They didn’t know the real name. Only that whenever they passed it a dog would run along the farmyard wall barking loud enough to wake the dead.

  Richard remembered as clearly as if it had been yesterday.

  There had been Danny Masson on the frozen lake, laughing and lobbing snowballs. He couldn’t run fast because polio had left him with a wonky foot.

  There had been a cracking sound.

  And Danny had disappeared.

  Richard ran across the ice as near as he dared to the hole.

  He saw nothing but black water with big blades of ice stuck at angles this way and that.

  He’d called Danny’s name and sheer brutal terror had run through him from head to toe like lightning bolts. Tears had rolled down his face.

  His friend was dead.

  Then he felt a concussion through the soles of his boots. He looked down. Incredibly, a face, as indistinct as a ghost’s, filtered through the ice beneath his feet. He could even see wide, staring eyes through that thick skin of ice.