Dark Father

by Cooper, James

  He walked out to the truck and was relieved to see that they were all waiting for him. He opened the door and slid behind the wheel. No one spoke. He started the engine and looked through the windshield at the outlying fields; the mist played in the long grass. He accelerated away. Sent a cloud of birds darting for cover through the trees.

  * * *

  Maggie had spent the last ten minutes running through her options. Though she loved Jimmy and hated to see him hurt, this frenzied journey across the English heartland was perhaps a commitment too far. She had nothing invested in Jimmy’s kid and had no interest in chasing down his crazy wife, either. She had come this far simply because Jimmy had needed her. She could see it in his one good eye, how driven he was by his desire to reclaim his son. Now, though, she’d had time to consider her position, and had become increasingly nervous about Jimmy’s state of mind. The strange connection he had forged with his damaged eye unsettled her and she had watched him flit in and out of some troubled form of consciousness as she drove. Her gut instinct, as she peered through the trees at the distant farmhouse, was to leave Jimmy and his family to whatever horror show they had created for themselves, throw the Land Rover into gear, and accelerate away.

  There was a blur of movement through the trees and she squinted her eyes, trying to see through the mist.

  “Shit.”

  A blue truck was travelling at speed down the rutted track leading away from the farmhouse.

  Maggie looked at her watch. Fifteen minutes had elapsed since Jimmy had run across the open fields. She tried to imagine what the hell had happened over there, but it was too easy to visualize a dozen different things going wrong.

  “Shit,” she muttered again, resenting the fact that she was being sucked further into Jimmy’s deranged vision of the world.

  She turned off the engine, opened the door, and ran for the trees. A pale figure, advancing in the early morning light.

  CHAPTER 11: HAFT

  The rain was easing up, the day softening with a spread of quick white cloud, the wind blowing hard from the east. Frank drove slowly, his heart still racing, replaying the last ten minutes in his head. Finding Jake again had been akin to some form of redemption, a release from months of pain and regret; a cleansing. Jake’s absence had all but stolen his last breath, robbing him of depth, emptying him. Now, there was hope. He could breathe again. There was the promise of a future, where before there had only been despair.

  He looked over his shoulder at the boy on the backseat. His eyes remained closed, his breathing shallow. Frank began to wonder at the strange journey they had taken to find each other, the loneliness they had been forced to endure.

  He thought of Cindy and her confusion upon seeing Jake again after such a long time apart. Had she grown so accustomed to being the parent of a missing child that she’d reject her own son? He hardly imagined that would be the case. Cindy had always been so practical, so levelheaded. She would never deny the evidence of her own eyes. And yet, she had seemingly seen someone else on the backseat of the car, someone other than Jake.

  He listened to the waves crashing against the plates of his skull. The headache was intensifying, driving a spike deep into his forehead, the interior of the car darkening with every painful throb.

  He gritted his teeth and tried to breathe evenly. Could he have made a mistake? Picked up the wrong boy? He had grown so desperate recently, it had become a battle just climbing out of bed. Everything seemed dim, poorly lit, as though the world moved according to a failing current, his own perception quivering and cold.

  Had his judgement become so distorted that he had allowed himself to be blindsided by love for his son? He felt another dart of pain, at his temple this time, and the balance of his vision shifted; something alluring gleamed in the dark fog that was engulfing his brain.

  He glanced in the rearview mirror at the boy; Jake was lying on the backseat, as he’d expected, his perfect face a more innocent version of Frank’s own. It was his son alright; Cindy had been in denial, that was all. Thrown off kilter by the sudden reappearance of the child she had given up hope of ever holding again.

  Frank continued to stare at Jake in the mirror, close to tears. His family had been in pieces, but it no longer mattered. They had come back to him. He had heard whispers in the black space behind his eyes and the darkness had brought them home.

  * * *

  Frank opened the gates at the side of his house and drove the car to the rear of the property, parking as close to the back door as he could. He climbed out of the car, closed the side gates, and opened the trunk to check on Cindy. She was staring up at him, still groggy; the right side of her face, and a large carpeted area of the trunk, was dark with blood. Eventually both would need cleaning up.

  “Frank…” she mumbled. “What…”

  “Don’t speak just yet, Cindy. It isn’t time,” he said. He closed the trunk, muffling her garbled response. It sounded like she was calling to him from the bottom of a well.

  He unlocked the back door of the house and returned to the car. He peered through the glass at Jake, wondering if he’d recovered yet from the fall. The boy still had his eyes closed. He looked like a frail bird rescued from an endangered nest.

  Frank opened the rear door and lifted Jake into his arms. The child stirred, each new breath sounding like a whispered syllable that Frank found himself straining to decode. The boy might be trying to tell him something. He’d already missed too much of Jake’s development in the last ten months and vowed never to let the boy out of his sight again.

  He leaned in close to his son’s face, marvelling at the puff of warm air that emanated from the boy’s mouth and gently rose across the swell of Frank’s cheek into his ear.

  “…My head…” Jake said. “…it hurts…” He tried to raise a hand to his temple, but Frank held it down against his side.

  “Stay still,” he said. “I’ll give you something to take the pain away.” He moved through the kitchen and into the living room. A clock on the mantelpiece timed how long everything took. He bent down and laid the boy on the sofa, placing a kiss on his brow.

  “Try not to touch your head, Jake. Okay?”

  The boy was still groggy. Frank doubted his words had made any kind of impression at all. He moved across to the bay windows and closed the curtains, shutting out the dull light. He then turned on the table lamp and quietly left the room.

  It had occurred to him that Jake’s delicate condition might present a problem. If he messed with the wound or, God forbid, fell over again, the boy could aggravate what was already a fairly serious head injury. He smiled, latching onto a solution. He suspected what he had in mind might prove useful with Cindy, too.

  He walked through the adjoining garage door at the rear of the house and began turning over some of the junk he stored on the shelves. Finally he found what he was looking for: fifteen-inch cable ties, bought when they had first moved into the house to bind the electrical cables in the roof to several of the low-lying beams. He pulled a handful from the shelf and ran his fingers along the ratchet mechanism at the end of the tie. Perfect.

  He returned to the living room and saw that Jake was struggling to sit up.

  “Where am I…?”

  Frank ran across to him and pressed him back against the sofa. The suddenness of the movement clearly caused Jake some discomfort, and he groaned in pain.

  “You shouldn’t move,” Frank said. “Not yet. You’re not ready for it.”

  Jake squinted his eyes and peered at Frank in the orange lamplight.

  “Who are you?” he said, failing to recognize the man’s face.

  Frank looked at him and laughed. “You crazy frog! You forgotten your own daddy already?” He pulled Jake’s hands together behind him and slipped one of the cable ties around his wrists. He pulled the loop tight. He did exactly the same with the boy’s feet. “We don’t want any more accidents, Jakey, do we?”

  The boy frowned and looked down at his b
ound feet. His face grew even paler; an image of blossoming horror passed before his eyes.

  “Who are you, mister? What do you want?”

  Frank ruffled his hair. “Silly. I’m your daddy, Jake. And all I want is for the family to be back together again. For everyone to be safe. Like before.”

  The boy backed up against the arm of the sofa, wincing at the pain in his head.

  “My name’s not Jake, mister. It’s Philip. I don’t know no Jake.”

  “You’re just a bit confused, son. That’s all. You’ve been away a long time. It’s understandable. But you’ll get better again, I promise.”

  “My name’s Philip Rymer,” the boy said. “I’m ten years old. Please, mister. Just let me go. My dad’s gonna be wondering where I am.”

  “Your daddy knows where you are, Jakey. You’re right where you should be. This is where you belong, after all.”

  Frank went into the kitchen and returned with a glass of water and some asprin. He tipped two of the pills into his hand and held them up to Jake’s mouth.

  “For your headache,” he said.

  The boy took them and allowed Frank to pour a little of the water into his mouth to wash them down. The boy looked terrified; Frank could understand perfectly. The child had been through ten months of appalling trauma. It was little wonder that he was so confused.

  “Can I get you anything else?” Frank asked.

  Jake shook his head, tried manipulating his hands. “I don’t like these,” he said. “They hurt my wrists.”

  “They’re for your own protection, sweetheart. I don’t want you messing with that head injury. You’re rattled enough as it is.”

  The boy emitted a low moan, his eyes darting round the room, then settling on Frank with a kind of concentrated dread.

  “I won’t touch my head, mister,” he said, trying hard to suppress his tears. “I won’t move a muscle unless you say so.”

  “Oh Jake! I’m not doing it out of meanness. It’s for your own good.”

  Frank reached his hand out to touch Jake’s face and the boy recoiled, turning his head away with a stifled sob.

  “My name’s Philip Rymer,” he repeated softly. “Not Jake. You’re mistaking me for someone else, mister.”

  For a moment Frank’s vision clouded over as though the black space behind his eyes had begun to drift, revealing something terrible in the light behind.

  “Jake?”

  The boy said nothing. His face was ashen, still marred by pale streaks of blood that Frank had tried vainly to scrub from his cheeks. He trembled as the man stared at him, failing to understand his tears.

  Frank leaned forward and tried to smile. He looked hard at the boy. Through the mist of tears, he watched Jake smile back. His son. That beautiful face. Flickering in and out of focus, as the buried memories resurfaced deep inside his head.

  * * *

  “It’s okay, Jake,” Frank said. “You’ve been gone a long time. You just need help remembering.”

  He moved over to the sideboard and opened one of the cabinet doors. He removed a thick, oversized book from the shelf entitled “Our Family,” which was stuffed with photographs.

  “This might help,” he said. He carried the album back to Jake and settled down beside the sofa. Rather than start at the beginning of the book, he began to flick through it at speed, rooting out a particular sequence of photos that he knew would trigger a response in his son. He finally found the page he wanted and held the images in front of Jake’s face.

  “Remember this?” he said, smiling. “We hired a cottage by the lake and spent the week walking through the hills. You absolutely loved it. Remember? It was so peaceful. Mommy said it was the best holiday she’d ever had.”

  A thought suddenly occurred to him and he rested the book on his lap.

  “Perhaps we should go there again,” he said. “The three of us. Pick up where we left off. What do you think?”

  The boy was looking at the pictures, trying to draw reassurance from the smiling images, reminding himself that the man who had bound his hands and feet had a family of his own. He said nothing.

  “Remember that?” Frank said, pointing to a picture of himself and a young boy smiling in front of a large hill. “You were determined to climb that bugger without any help from me, and, by God, you did. Remember how proud you were when you reached the top?”

  The boy stared at the photograph. The child in the picture had blond hair similar to his own, but he was at least four years younger than him. Possibly more.

  “That’s not me, mister,” the boy said. “Look at the picture. We don’t even really look the same, apart from the hair. You’ve got me mixed up with someone else.”

  Frank stared at the boy. He calmly placed the open book on the floor. When he spoke, his voice was flat, at least an octave lower than before.

  “When I’m talking, Jake, it’s important that you listen like a good boy. If you don’t, you might get a visit from Dark Daddy, and you wouldn’t want that now, would you?”

  The boy, suddenly frozen to the spot, slowly shook his head.

  “Dark Daddy isn’t very nice, Jakey. Remember?”

  * * *

  When the man started talking about Dark Daddy, Philip Rymer felt his blood go cold. He didn’t know why. There was just something in the man’s tone, the timbre of his voice, the subtle change in the way his eyes narrowed and began idly surveying the room. The situation for the boy was harrowing enough, but the unpredictable nature of the man who had bound him made Philip realize he was in real trouble here. The man seemed to think he was his lost son, a little boy named Jake. And though the man hadn’t directly harmed him, he was under no illusion that this situation could easily change. Whoever Dark Daddy was, Philip had no desire to meet him, and he decided there and then that he would do whatever it took to keep the man as calm as possible, no matter how disconnected from reality he might seem. Even if it meant playing the man’s twisted little game. He could do that. He could do whatever the situation demanded. Eventually his own father would send someone to bring him home, and when they found him, there would be a new game to play.

  God help Dark Daddy then.

  * * *

  Frank left the room and returned two minutes later carrying a roll of gray duct tape. He tilted his head and looked at Jake for a moment. His son stared back.

  “Sorry about this, tyke, but I don’t have much choice.” He ripped a length of duct tape from the roll and bit it free.

  The boy began to squirm. “I’ll be a good boy,” he insisted. “I promise. Please, Daddy!”

  Frank stopped and held his breath. The room was silent, bar the interminable ticking of the clock. Had the boy just called him daddy? He had been too caught up in the moment to fully take it in.

  “What did you call me?” Frank whispered.

  “I called you daddy,” Jake said. “I don’t want my daddy to hurt me.”

  He reached out and wrapped his arms around the boy’s body. “I’ll not hurt you,” he said. “I’ll never let anyone hurt you again.”

  He pushed the boy against the arm of the sofa and placed the strip of duct tape across the child’s mouth.

  “I love you, Jake,” he said.

  * * *

  Frank carried two more of the cable ties and the duct tape out to the car and opened the trunk. Cindy was inside, gasping for breath. She looked momentarily shocked to see him. Her eyes were narrow slits, as though even the weak light filtering through the clouds was too much after the dark confines of the car; there was a nasty gash at her left temple and a large bump on the side of her head. The trunk’s carpet was plummy with blood.

  “Frank…?”

  He looked down at her and smiled. “Don’t worry, Cindy,” he said, struggling to secure the cable ties to her hands and feet. “Everything’s fine. You just need a little time to adjust.”

  She tried to pull herself up and banged her head against the trunk. She shifted awkwardly and managed to spin ont
o her knees, suddenly filling the space between them.

  “You sick fuck!” she said, spitting into his face. “Stop this shit while you still can, Frank. You’re making a terrible mistake…”

  He closed his eyes, feeling as though his head was spinning back on itself, replaying the scene they had enacted earlier in the day. He opened his eyes again and punched Cindy square in the face, knocking her unconscious, feeling a desperate emptiness in his heart. He caught her body and laid it back down gently in the trunk of the car. He ripped off a strip of duct tape and placed it across his wife’s mouth, trying not to think of how many times he’d cradled her face in his hands and kissed her on the lips, or how often she had willingly done so to him.

  He returned to the house and quickly carried Jake to the car. When the boy saw the woman in the trunk, he began to buck and twist in Frank’s arms, threatening to slip from his grasp.

  “Settle down,” he gasped. “It’s just for a short time. You’ll be perfectly safe, look. Mommy’s with you.”

  He hefted the child into the trunk and positioned the two bodies so that they overlapped slightly in the enclosed space, the boy’s legs resting across Cindy’s hips. He also reached into the back of the car and released the single folding rear seat to allow more air to travel freely into the trunk.

  He wiped his brow, his breath coming in long, painful draughts, as he stared at his newly recovered family.

  “I thought we’d go back to the cottage by the lake,” he explained, holding fast to the memories that had been awakened by the photo album. “It’s where we were all happiest.”