by Mark Morris
Before I could speak, Clover said coldly, ‘I hope you got your blood money, Benny, for trying to turn Alex in. I hope it was worth it.’
He slid her a glance, and for a moment I felt sure she’d been mistaken when she’d told me that Benny would never harm her.
Then he sighed and looked down at his glass. In a softer voice he said, ‘Tell you the truth, I was just glad to get out of that place in one piece. Once those things turned up, money was the last thing on my mind.’
‘How did you get out?’ I asked him.
Benny shook his head. ‘You tell me. One minute I was surrounded by those things, the next – nothing. I guess I must have blacked out. When I came to I was alone. I tried to tell myself I was going mad, that I’d imagined the whole thing.’ He barked a laugh. ‘Believe me, that felt like the preferable option.’
‘You were so insignificant they didn’t even bother to kill you,’ Clover said spitefully.
Benny shrugged off the jibe. ‘I’ll take that any day of the week if it means I get to carry on breathing.’ He spread his hands. ‘Look, I fucking admit it. I got into something I couldn’t handle. Does that make you feel better?’
‘A bit,’ Clover said, and scowled at him. ‘How could you, Benny? Betraying your friends? That’s beneath even you. That’s really low.’
His head snapped up and for a moment I thought he was actually going to snarl at her like a dog. But I detected a suggestion of shame in his expression too.
‘Don’t give me that! You know who I am, what I am. I was offered a fucking big payday to hand him over – and he’s no friend of mine, I don’t owe him a fucking thing. It’s no skin off my nose what happens to him.’
‘What a charmer you are,’ Clover said.
‘What do you want me to say? Grow up, girl. I’ve got nothing against the boy – at least I didn’t until he pulled that weird voodoo shit in my house – but I’m a businessman.’
‘You’re a crook.’
I thought that might sting a reaction out of him, but he just laughed.
‘We all know that, don’t we? That’s not even an insult. In fact, it’s justification for what I did. But, you know, the money wasn’t the only reason I handed him over. I also did it for you.’
Clover recoiled. ‘Oh, pur-leeze!’
‘Think what you like. But I’m telling the truth. When that… thing came to my house, when he brought it here, I wanted him out of it. Gone. I wanted him to fuck off and never come back. But when you went with him it nearly broke my heart.’
‘Yeah, right. I’d believe you if I thought you had a heart to break.’
‘Like I say, believe what you like. I don’t care. But when I got that phone call, asking me to deliver Alex to that crypt… well, it wasn’t a hard decision to make.’
He went silent, as if simply mentioning the crypt had brought the full horror of what we’d encountered there rushing back into his mind. Clover stared at him with grim satisfaction.
‘Except you got a bit more than you bargained for, didn’t you?’
He took another gulp of his drink. He had a haunted look in his eyes. He tried to tough it out with a smile, but it flickered and didn’t catch. At last in a low rumble he said, ‘What were those things, Alex? I mean, what the fuck…’
He shook his head, his words drying up.
He wasn’t quite broken, but it was clear he’d never view the world in the same way again.
Quietly I said, ‘Believe it or not, Benny, they were the Wolves of London.’
A flash of anger. ‘Don’t take the piss, boy.’
‘I’m not. That’s not what I’m here for.’
‘So why are you here?’ All at once on his guard, his eyes danced quickly from me, to Clover, then back again. ‘Revenge? Is that it?’
Clover gave a snort of disgust. ‘Don’t judge us by your standards, Benny.’
‘So what then?’
‘Believe it or not,’ I said, ‘I’m here because I want your help.’
He stared at me for five, ten seconds.
At last he said, ‘You’re bullshitting me, right?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m just trying to find my daughter, and I want you to use your connections to help me do it. It’s a business proposition, that’s all. Whatever the Wolves of London offered to pay you to hand me over, I’ll pay you more to keep you on my side. I’m not asking you to put yourself at risk for me. You can do what I’m asking from the comfort of your armchair. All I want is for you to put the word out, set up an information network. I just want people to keep their ears to the ground, and if anyone hears anything, anything at all, I want to know about it.’
‘And that’s it?’
‘That’s it.’
‘And what if I don’t help you find her? What if she’s never found?’
‘At least I’ll know people are looking, keeping their ears and eyes open, and that’s the important thing.’
Benny looked thoughtful. ‘So where’s this money coming from?’
‘Inheritance,’ I said. ‘It’s not something you have to worry about.’
He shrugged. ‘Fair enough.’
‘So are you in?’ asked Clover.
‘I’m prepared to discuss terms.’
‘One more thing,’ I said. ‘If the Wolves contact you, I want to know about it. Whatever they might offer you to do the dirty on me, I’ll give you more. Okay?’
Benny nodded. ‘Sounds reasonable.’
‘I would like to say that by making you this offer we’re giving you a chance to redeem yourself,’ Clover said, ‘but we all know that’s idealistic bullshit. If you really do care about me, though, you’ll help Alex as much as you can. No more throwing him to the Wolves, okay?’
Benny slid his lizard-like gaze in her direction. ‘I’ve said the offer’s a reasonable one. What more do you want from me? Blood?’
‘A handshake’ll do,’ I said, standing up and extending my hand across the glass table. ‘To seal the agreement.’
For a moment I thought Benny was going to leave me standing there like a lemon, but then he rose to his feet and offered his hand in return. The moment our palms touched it was as though an electrical connection had been made – or perhaps broken. There was a sense of… shifting. As though I’d inadvertently stumbled. Or as if the walls of the building were re-aligning themselves around me.
And all of a sudden I was somewhere else.
It wasn’t far away, though. I came to in another room in the house. I recognised it immediately. It was the conservatory. I felt as though I’d fallen asleep without realising it, then had sleepwalked in here and jerked awake.
Except suddenly it was night. So what had happened? Had I fallen asleep or passed out? Had I been unconscious for hours? Perhaps Benny had put something in my drink? And where was Clover?
Even as I asked myself this last question I realised there were two other people in the room. With relief I saw that the closest, sitting in an armchair to my left, illuminated by the rosy glow of a table lamp with a red shade, was Clover. She was wearing a long white nightshirt, which she’d pulled down over her bare legs, having tucked her feet underneath her. In the lamplight her glossy hair seemed to be the deep maroon colour it had been when I’d first met her.
Looking beyond her, I focused on the person she was talking to, who was standing with his back to the glass wall of the conservatory that overlooked the garden – not that a single detail of the outside world could be seen through the glass. The panes were nothing but a series of black screens imprinted with a faint reflection of the room.
The second person raised a mug to his mouth and took a sip. I froze. I’d assumed it would be Benny, but it wasn’t.
It was me.
Suddenly I knew not only where I was, but when. This was the night when Frank had first appeared, when his darkness had enveloped Benny’s house before eventually breaking in and smothering us. He’d done it not to harm us, but to drive us out before our real enemies, the Da
rk Man and his cohorts, showed up. I’d saved Frank’s life and he’d returned the favour – though, of course, I hadn’t known that until later.
But what was I doing back here now? Had I somehow slipped through a gap in time as easily as I might slip on a wet pavement? But I didn’t have the heart with me. I hadn’t yet been back to the house to retrieve it from its hiding place. Could it be that I didn’t need it now, that I had absorbed enough of its power to operate without it? Or perhaps it was influencing me from afar?
Clover was talking, telling the other me about her family, about how Benny had helped her buy Incognito so she could set herself up in business. Neither past Clover nor past me seemed aware that I was there. I was clearly a ghostly observer, invisible and undetectable.
‘He thought it would be a nice little starter business for me,’ Clover was saying.
I heard myself ask, ‘And has it been?’
Curled in the armchair she shrugged. ‘I was doing all right – until all this stuff with McCallum and the heart. I wish I’d never got involved now.’
Over by the window I saw myself give a stiff smile. ‘Crime doesn’t pay.’
‘Benny doesn’t seem to have done too badly out of it,’ Clover said, wafting a hand, her brow furrowed in a frown.
I saw myself glance around the room, shrug, pull a laconic face. ‘Suppose so. Unless you count the fifteen, twenty years he’s spent in prison. Not sure I’d consider that a worthy trade-off. Even for this little lot.’
Hang on. Had I really said that? Maybe, at the time, I’d been thinking it, but I’m pretty sure the words hadn’t left my mouth.
Baffled, I saw Clover stretch, yawn. ‘Horses for courses. I’m sure Benny’s prison experiences were a lot different to yours.’
The other me snorted. ‘I’m sure they were. When I was in Pentonville he ran that place like it was his own personal hotel. He even had the governor and the screws in his back pocket.’
‘Screws,’ she said with a mischievous smirk. ‘You still speak the lingo then, Alex? Once a lag always a lag? Is that it?’
The me that was standing by the window laughed, and she laughed along with me. The me that was standing apart and undetected, however, was feeling uneasy. Wasn’t it before now that the conversation had been interrupted by the darkness that Frank carried within him? Hadn’t Clover’s eyes widened just after her remark about Benny having done okay out of crime, and hadn’t I turned to see blackness squirming across the outside of the glass like a mass of writhing black snakes made of smoke or oil?
I was certain I had. So where was Frank? Why wasn’t he here? My sense of unease grew as I watched the past versions of Clover and me obliviously conducting a conversation I was sure we’d never had. She asked the other me about my background, and I then proceeded to tell her more than I’d told her previously about Kate and Lyn. Standing apart, I listened, incredulous (it was like watching a deleted scene from my own life), and as the conversation wore on, continuing for another five minutes, then ten, then fifteen, and still Frank failed to appear, my unease slowly blossomed into fear, and then into a heart-clenching sense of dread so awful that I found I could no longer take in what Clover and the other me were saying.
I wanted to scream at them, tell them to run, but all I could do was observe. The fact that they continued to chat blithely away, with no inkling that anything was wrong, was agonising. Even the fact that one of these two people was me, and that I knew this was not what had happened, made no difference to how I was feeling. The terror I felt was like being tied to a railway track with a train advancing through the darkness.
I heard a sound behind me – a fumbling at the door, a scuff of movement. My heart leaped. The fact that I was nothing but an invisible observer seemed at that moment irrelevant. I swung round. Benny was standing in the doorway. He was wearing a black, silky dressing gown, black leather slippers on his bare feet. He looked past me, at Clover in the armchair, at the other me still standing by the glass wall of the conservatory.
‘What’s this then?’ he growled. ‘Mothers’ meeting?’
The other me raised an apologetic hand. ‘Sorry, Benny, my fault. I couldn’t sleep, came down to make myself a cuppa. I didn’t mean to disturb anyone.’
Benny sniffed. He looked sceptical. ‘That right?’ He nodded at Clover. ‘What about you, Monroe? You suffering from insomnia too?’
Before Clover could answer the other me said, ‘That’s my fault again. She heard me moving about and woke up.’
Benny shot the other me a sharp look. I expected him to say he’d been speaking to Clover, not me. But instead he said, ‘Not sure how I feel about people sneaking round my house in the middle of the night.’
‘Oh, come on, Benny,’ said Clover. ‘You’re not serious? You honestly expect us to stay in our rooms during the hours of darkness?’
Benny moved into the room, all but brushing against me as he passed by. I didn’t know why, but I was starting to get a very bad vibe about this situation; you might even have called it presentiment. But surely Benny wasn’t the danger here? He was volatile, unpredictable even, but he wouldn’t seriously do anything to endanger either of us, would he? Not at this point anyway.
He approached Clover, came to a halt beside her chair. Watching him I tensed, but Clover seemed relaxed in his presence.
‘When people are in my house, I expect them to observe my rules,’ he said quietly.
Clover gave him a quizzical look. ‘I wasn’t aware that there were any rules.’
‘There are now,’ Benny said, whereupon his hand shot out with incredible speed and grabbed her throat.
The other me by the window sprang forward, but almost immediately came to an abrupt halt, a look of horror on his face. It wasn’t because Benny had barked, ‘I wouldn’t do that, Alex.’ No, it was because Benny was changing.
The hand he’d used to grab Clover was transforming into a black, ropey tentacle. It was winding round and round her throat, stretching her neck, forcing her chin higher. Her face was already puffing up, turning red; her eyes were bulging. Awful choking sounds were coming from her mouth; her swollen tongue twitched.
‘Let her go!’ the other me roared, and suddenly the obsidian heart was in his (my) hand. He (I) brandished it like a grenade.
The shape-shifter in the guise of Benny merely smiled.
‘Well done, Alex. You’ve saved me the bother of asking you to take that out of your pocket. Now look behind you.’
I could see something coming out of the darkness on the other side of the glass. Not Frank, but a huge, spider-like shape: the Dark Man’s mechanical conveyance.
The other me ignored the shape-shifter’s words. He refused to turn to see what was creeping up behind him.
‘Let her go now or I’ll fucking use this!’ he (I) shouted.
The shape-shifter sniggered. ‘I don’t think you will. Because first, you don’t really know how to. And second, I’ll kill her the instant you try anything. How confident are you that the heart will stop me before I end her life?’
Clover’s face was turning purple. Her eyes were flickering. The other me cast an agonised glance from the shape-shifter to Clover, torn by indecision.
The shape-shifter smiled. It was a warm smile. Friendly. It looked completely alien on Benny’s face. It transformed his features into a grotesque mask.
‘Sensible boy,’ the shape-shifter said. ‘Now, as I was saying, if you turn and look behind you, you’ll see—’
And that was when Clover struck.
I thought she was on the verge of unconsciousness. Maybe she was. Maybe her action was instinctive, a final desperate attempt to survive before blackness claimed her.
The sequence of events happened quickly. It took everyone by surprise, including the shape-shifter. One moment Clover’s hands were hanging limply by her side, the next she’d grabbed the red-shaded table lamp from beside her and had thrust it like a glowing red sword directly into the shape-shifter’s face.
The red lampshade crumpled, the bulb beneath it exploded. There was a bang and a white flash and the shape-shifter let out a roar of pain or rage.
Almost simultaneously, as the shape-shifter lurched backwards, there was a crack sound, like a whiplash, and suddenly Clover’s head separated from her body. It seemed to leap upwards from her shoulders as though on a spring, to spin through the air, trailing a flowing ripple of hair and a scatter of droplets that looked black in the sudden murk. I saw her headless body slump to one side, saw the other me’s face expand with horror, eyes and mouth opening wide.
Was it me or the other me who screamed? Or did we scream together? All I know is that the jolting shock pulled me out of the moment. This time there was a sense not of shifting, but of being wrenched, physically and spiritually, from an intolerable situation. I felt momentarily like a bungee jumper who, having reached the end of his elasticated rope, is snapped back up into the air again.
The world rushed by. Dark became light. I was disorientated. Was I shouting or was someone shouting at me? I struggled, felt a weight on me, holding me down.
My body was stinging all over. When I moved, something crunched.
Then I heard Clover’s voice: ‘Hold still, Alex. Stop wriggling. You’ll make it worse.’
I was so overjoyed to hear her, to know she was alive, that I obeyed without question. I stopped struggling. I opened my eyes.
There were two faces above me. In between them was part of a white ceiling. The faces belonged to Benny and Clover. Benny was scowling; Clover looked scared.
‘Back with us, are you?’ Benny said.
I blinked up at him. ‘What happened?’
