Mack: It’s a little scary, but I just concentrate and count to ten in my head. Daddy always comes back in the end.
[Pause]
Kincaid: What if one day he couldn’t find his way back?
Mack: [Looking anxious] That would never happen. Daddy would never leave me all alone. He told me.
Kincaid: Can you remember what he said?
Mack: Course I can. He told me if I ever got lost, I could always close my eyes and call out to him. He said he loved me so much he would always hear me and come running, no matter where he was or what he was doing.
Kincaid: What if he was too far away? How would you feel if one day you called out to him and your daddy didn’t appear?
[Pause]
Mack: Mommy sometimes said she wished Daddy would leave and never come back.
Faber: Why do you think she’d say such a thing?
Mack: Because she was afraid.
Faber: What was she afraid of?
[Pause]
Mack: She didn’t want Dark Daddy to hurt me. She was scared of the silence. When I was bad, Daddy would go very quiet and sit like a statue in his chair. He used to smile at the walls, waiting for Dark Daddy to arrive. I would run upstairs and hide in my room.
Faber: Then what would happen?
Mack: Sometimes Mommy made Daddy happy again; but most times I would hear them yelling at each other downstairs. I’d hide under the bed and pray that Dark Daddy would forget all about me. I would listen to his footsteps on the stairs and sometimes pee on my leg in my pajamas. It was warm at first and then wet and cold. When my bedroom door opened, I would see Dark Daddy’s boots coming towards me. He would wait and wait and then bend down to look under the bed. If he was still smiling I knew I was in trouble. That’s when I would usually start to scream.
[Pause. Mack is wringing his hands and absently touching the mask on his face.]
Faber: Let’s try and move the conversation towards something a little less distressing, shall we? Did your mommy and daddy ever read to you when you were a child, Mack?
Mack: Course they did. They read to me every night. It helped me find the safe places when it got dark.
Faber: What was your favorite book?
Mack: Me and Daddy liked the one with the Jubjub bird.
Kincaid: Is that from the “Jabberwocky” poem?
Mack: [Frowning] I don’t know. Daddy used to read it to me. There was a story about a girl in a looking glass. Then this strange adventure that never really made any sense.
Kincaid: Why do you think you liked it?
Mack: I’m not sure. It was like looking through a dirty window at a strange new world. I almost understood it, but everything was just out of focus. The slithy toves and the Bandersnatch used to frighten me, even though I had no idea what they were. Daddy would make funny voices and laugh at how some of the words seemed to be turned inside out.
Kincaid: Can you remember how it ends, Mack?
[Pause]
Mack: Course I can. The boy chops off the head of the monster and takes it back to his daddy. It’s the best ending a story can have.
CHAPTER 13: THE LAST KISS
Jimmy Hopewell had been travelling in darkness for most of the night, but when he regained consciousness, he realized instantly that his darkest hour was upon him. His vision was blurry and it felt like someone was driving nails into the back of his head, but he could see enough of his surroundings to feel the balance of reality start to tip. He could feel the rope cutting into his chest and throat, holding him upright, sending waves of pain through every nerve ending in his body. He tried to move his hands, but they were held fast behind the beam to which he had been tied. It was like waking up to find his wife’s most chilling fantasy seamlessly intertwined with his own worst nightmare. He could hear a noise, like an inflatable toy leaking air, and he wondered if what he was listening to was his own consciousness, quietly ebbing away.
He moved his head gingerly to the left. Through the open barn door he saw the mist trailing across the cobbles in the yard. He could smell stale cat piss and the dusty smell of weathered straw.
He turned his head and looked up into the dim light of the paraffin lamp. Sally Redfern, one of the many women he had fucked behind Kate’s back, was standing before him. She was holding a blowtorch. A small blue flame was hissing from its mouth. He watched it with hypnotic dread.
He looked at the blood smeared across Sally’s face and remembered.
The darkest hour dragged on.
* * *
Maggie ran. She lowered her head so as to better navigate the field and sprinted through the mist towards the house. Her mind was racing as she spooled through half a hundred possibilities that might logically account for the blue truck speeding away down the track. None of them rang true. She glanced at her watch and saw that nearly twenty minutes had elapsed since Jimmy had left. Even as she sprinted across the softening landscape, she knew that something had gone horribly wrong.
She headed for the farmhouse, feeling a tightening sensation in her gut. From the corner of her eye she glimpsed the flicker of an orange light emanating from one of the barns. She wasn’t used to running and her lungs were aching; there was a painful cramp spreading down her left-hand side.
She veered towards the barn showing the faint light and tried to recover her breath. As she moved from the field into the cobblestone yard, she thought she could hear a woman’s voice. It sounded hard and uncompromising; the voice of a woman in control.
Maggie crept along the side of the barn and peered through a small aperture in the rotting wood. What she saw inside the barn momentarily stopped her in her tracks. She felt her body go limp and feared that it might simply collapse onto the cobbles. She leaned against the barn for support and pressed her face to the hole, unable to take her eye from the bound figure of Jimmy and the woman holding the blowtorch. It was a scene from some insane potboiler; she could barely bring herself to countenance what her eye beheld.
She started to consider how best the problem could be resolved, when the woman in the barn told Jimmy she still loved him. Maggie froze. She peered through the rotting wood. Listened as the wheel of the conversation turned.
* * *
“Good to have you with us again, Jimmy,” Sally said, allowing the flame of the blowtorch to illuminate her bloody face. “How’s the head?”
Jimmy focused on the voice rather than the blowtorch. He was afraid that if he looked Sally directly in the eye, he might see a disturbing turbulence at work, the burning agitation of a woman lost to her own madness. He knew that if he stared at her long enough, he would see the kind of gleaming insanity that he had always sensed she was eager to inhabit. Even worse, he thought, there might be nothing in those eyes at all, just a chilling emptiness. Like looking at a dark reflection of his own damaged eye.
“I’ve suffered worse,” he said, feeling the rope digging into his hands.
“So I can see. Kate did quite a job on you, didn’t she? Left you half-blind and bleeding out on your own kitchen floor. Who’d have thought she had it in her?”
Jimmy looked up at her. “Seems everyone’s full of surprises tonight,” he said.
Sally chuckled. “It’s funny how things turned out, Jimmy. After you dropped me, I used to dream of having you all alone one last time just so I could gaze into your eyes again. And now here you are, having fallen into my lap, and half of what I loved most about you is gone.”
She broke into laughter and the blowtorch quivered in her hand. “Guess it’s still too soon for you to see the funny side,” she said. “Not that you don’t deserve everything you got, you cheating shit. Kate should have finished the job while she had the chance.”
Her laughter trailed off and Jimmy saw the line of her mouth tighten, the bloodless lips turn white.
“It was a long time ago, Sally. I thought you and I were on the same page. Just fun, remember?”
“Oh, I’m sure you had a whale of a time fucking your wife’
s best friend in every room of the house. You treat women like dirt, Jimmy. You always have.”
He said nothing, recognizing the folly of reminding Sally of her own betrayal of Kate. With the balance of power shifted so dramatically, even Jimmy could see that now would not be a good time to point it out.
Sally moved a foot closer, blocking out the lamplight, and the blue eye of the blowtorch danced ever closer to Jimmy’s face.
“Can you turn that thing off,” Jimmy said. “It’s making me nervous.”
Sally held up the blowtorch and looked at it, as if noticing it for the first time. “So it should, Jimmy,” she said. “This little baby operates at nearly two thousand degrees Celsius. Hot enough to melt your one good eyeball to mush.”
Jimmy fell still. She suddenly had his full attention; he watched the glamor of the flame like a child, lost in its destructive potential.
“What do you want?” he said softly.
“I want you to remember, Jimmy. I want you to trawl through that cesspit of a memory of yours and remember just how good we were together. Better than Kate, better than any of them. Just me and you, locked in each other’s arms forever.”
Jimmy closed his eyes, remembering. It had never been like that; not once. Theirs had been a relationship as raw and brutal as any he’d experienced. They had fucked like animals, in the dirt. They had scratched and bitten each other; they had inflicted pain as a substitute for love. There had never been a moment’s tenderness between them. Not a single, meaningful kiss.
“Your memory must be better than mine,” he suggested. “I have a slightly different view of how things were.”
“Enlighten me.”
Jimmy paused, weighing the risk. “For a time we both wanted the same thing. Then we moved apart. It happens all the time.”
“To you maybe, not to me. What we had was something special, Jimmy. You said so yourself.”
Jimmy squinted up at her, feeling increasingly dazed. Could it be possible that Sally was confusing him with someone else.
“You told me you loved me,” she said. “Do you remember? You said you dreamed of being with me instead of Kate.”
This time Jimmy frowned. He had never said any such thing. They had fallen into a brief, rather tawdry affair that had ended badly. Love had never entered into it, for either of them. If anything, he suspected he was fucking Sally just to work out some kind of repressed hostility towards Kate. It had never really been about Sally. It had just been a way of expressing his growing resentment towards his wife.
“I still love you, Jimmy,” Sally said. “I always have. You know that, don’t you?”
He knew nothing of the sort. He looked closely at Sally’s face in the wash of light hissing from the blowtorch and saw the muscles beneath the skin sagging with exhaustion, a complex loneliness coiled within the eyes. She looked like a woman who had lifted herself beyond her reality and invited the cold flukes of insanity to claim her. Her memory and self-awareness had been drilled out of her, leaving behind a perforated heart and a dark shaft of unsettling ghosts.
“If you love me,” Jimmy said softly, “let me go.”
Sally looked suddenly troubled; a cloud of doubt seemed to pass before her eyes.
“No, Jimmy. I’m not stupid. I know you’re not to be trusted. You never were. If I let you go, I’d be forced to use this”—she held up the blowtorch—“and then where would we be? No. All I want from you is one thing. One tiny little thing. Then this whole thing will be over in a jiff.”
He didn’t like the sound of that last part; given the shattered lens through which Sally seemed to view her inverted world, it sounded vaguely apocalyptic. As though she planned to eliminate them both. Looking at her in the pale light of the barn, there wasn’t a doubt in Jimmy’s mind that she was capable of burning down the whole damn place with the two of them locked in an eternal embrace inside.
“What’s the tiny little thing?” Jimmy asked, almost holding his breath despite himself.
Sally leaned in close. “I want one last kiss,” she said. “One last kiss before we finally say good-bye.”
* * *
Maggie listened to the twisted exchange between Jimmy and his ex-lover with a horrified fascination, compelled by the similarities to her own relationship with the man. She tried to figure out the distance Sally had travelled, from what she must have been like when the affair began to what she had subsequently become, and could easily imagine herself taking a similar route. She watched it all unfold with a growing sense of inevitability and a cold, numbing dread. She looked around the yard for a weapon, knowing instinctively that if Jimmy was to survive this ordeal, she would have to think fast; but all she could see was a large, framed tapestry leaning up against the barn wall, its glass front cracked.
She moved across the cobbles as quickly as stealth would allow and hefted the frame in her hands. It was covered in dirt and the glass panel was smeared with rainwater, but she thought it would serve her purpose well. It felt heavy and formidable. There was a large word stitched into the fabric in colored thread. It looked like the word LIMERANCE, but Maggie barely gave it a second thought. It could be utter gibberish for all she cared; all she hoped was that the weight of the frame and the element of surprise would be enough to knock the mad bitch with the blowtorch off her stride.
She ran back towards the barn door just as she heard Jimmy emit a deafening scream. She broke into a sprint, struggling to balance the frame as she willed her legs to move faster. She arrived at the door and found it difficult to assimilate the sight before her. The woman had placed the blowtorch to one side and was leaning over Jimmy’s face. It looked for a moment like they were kissing. But Jimmy was screaming and twisting his head. Blood was pouring down the front of his clothes. The veins in his neck were as taut as the cords of rope that bound him to the wooden beam.
The woman wrenched at something on Jimmy’s face and then pulled back, triumphant. She had ripped off a measure of Jimmy’s bottom lip with her teeth. She stood up and spat the slug of flesh onto the ground. It looked like an excised tumor, trailing infection; it lay fresh and bloody on the straw.
Jimmy was howling, thrashing his head from side to side, and his lower lip looked like it had been mauled by a rabid dog. Which, to some extent, Maggie thought hysterically, it had.
She ran into the barn, swung the frame with as much force as she could muster, and drove it into the side of the woman’s head. There was a sound like the heavy settlement of a hammer falling on rock. Then the woman staggered, tried to recover her balance, and crumpled to the ground. By the refined light of the blowtorch, she twitched once and lay still.
Maggie felt an acute sense of relief and threw the picture frame across the barn. Whatever LIMERANCE meant, she thought wildly, it had done the fucking job. She felt a charge course through her as she looked down and considered what she’d accomplished. She vaguely wondered if the woman lying in the straw was dead.
She moved over to Jimmy and placed a hand against his chest. He was still shaking, trying to dislodge the rope, but the knots the woman had made were unforgiving. The bottom half of his face was absurdly red and he was still whimpering and writhing in pain.
“Don’t move,” Maggie said. “The more you fight the tighter it gets. Just sit still.”
Jimmy tried to talk, but his ruined lip made speech impractical. He uttered a sequence of nonsense syllables that Maggie was unable to decode, and she pushed him back against the beam.
“You want to help?”
Jimmy nodded through the blood.
“Then shut up. I need to think.”
She looked around and picked up the blowtorch.
“Pull your hands as far away from the beam as you can,” she said. “This might get hot.”
Jimmy’s eyes widened in alarm and he began to protest. He uttered more gibberish, each syllable flowing together to form a stream-of-consciousness tirade, and pulled himself as far away from the beam as the rope allowed. He looked
spent, quivering with shock. His mouth was a mess and Maggie flinched at the sight of it. His face was a red mask of concentration and anticipated pain.
She moved behind him and trained the blowtorch on the taut bindings of the rope. Before Jimmy even had a chance to register his distress, the flame was through, burning into the fibers of the restraint and returning to him the use of his hands. It was only a matter of seconds before the rest of the rope was unknotted and lying in a coiled heap on the ground.
He reached out a hand.
“Let me have it,” he said slowly. The soft tissue of his damaged lip puckered like untreated leather. The statement was almost incoherent, but Maggie knew, just by looking in Jimmy’s one good eye, exactly what he was planning to do.
She shook her head and withdrew the hissing blowtorch. “Not a good idea,” she said. “Let’s just go. We’ve done enough.”
Jimmy stared at her. His eye looked clear and bright.
He pulled the blowtorch from her hand. Glanced down. Smiled at the thin covering of straw beneath his feet.
* * *
They ran across the field, negotiated the rough path through the woodland, and clambered back into the Land Rover.
When he peered through the trees at the farmhouse, Jimmy remembered Sally’s kiss. His mouth burned with the memory of it, the brief contact between them like touching white-hot fire to his lips.
He started the car and stole one last look through the trees.
The barn was engulfed in flame.
* * *
Jasper McCray, shouldering the kind of responsibility he thought had long since passed, sat in the service station and watched Billy Hopewell eat a bacon sandwich. It was dribbling brown sauce, much of which was oozing down Billy’s chin, but the boy had about as much interest in the mess he was making as he did Jasper’s careful appraisal of him. It had been a long time since Jasper had watched a child eat with such obvious relish and it made him smile. The kid had only one thought in his head. Whatever else he had seen that morning, and in Jasper’s opinion he bore the misfortune of having witnessed far too much, had been crammed into some darkened corner of the brain. Jasper prayed that Billy had the good sense to leave these memories undisturbed, but knew that, whatever the boy consciously tried to do, over time they would come back to haunt him as life exerted its heartbreaking influence upon him.
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