“See, Frank? We all love sandwiches, don’t we? It’ll be like a picnic beneath the stars. We can watch the snow and the lake while we eat.”
She turned her back slightly, drawing attention to the cable ties securing her wrists. She heard Frank slide over to the sofa and take out his penknife again. She watched the boy carefully, focusing on his intelligent eyes. She braced herself; felt her body grow tense.
“After this, maybe we could play a board game. We always enjoyed Snakes and Ladders, didn’t we, Cind?”
He slid the penknife under the cable ties securing her wrists and pulled the blade through the plastic.
As the last fiber of the tie parted, Cindy heaved herself from the sofa and launched herself at Frank. He reeled backwards, surprised by the speed with which Cindy had moved, and in a wild instant she was upon him. She knocked the penknife from his hand and flung herself against his chest, her hands clamping themselves around his throat. She was breathing hard and could hear someone screaming at the other end of the room, and it sounded like Jake—her Jake—wailing as his parents ripped into each other, desperate to gain a meaningful, murderous purchase on anything that might yield to the fist. She leaned back and head-butted Frank across the bridge of the nose and felt his hot blood explode across her face. She was inches away from him, could see the blood vessels pop in the whites of his eyes. She could feel the veins in his neck vibrating beneath her hands as she squeezed the breath from his throat. She could feel his mouth, so close to her own, working furiously to suck in air.
He rolled, more in desperation than calculated strategy, and threw her against the side of the hearth. She reached out a hand to support herself, and knocked over the candle Frank had earlier positioned on the fireplace. It rolled across the carpet and settled at the base of the sofa. The flame licked at the fabric, quickly developed a taste for it, and effortlessly spread along the hem.
Having worked himself free of Cindy’s weight, Frank emitted a great bellow of rage and turned to face his assailant. Cindy was still picking herself up from the hearth, her face dripping with Frank’s blood. She turned to face her husband, realized she was done for, and felt the full impact of his right fist a fraction of a second after seeing it curl through the air. She collapsed onto the floor, her nose broken, her own blood now freely mixing with Frank’s.
The boy had watched all this unfold with mounting horror. He realized very quickly that Cindy’s position of strength had been compromised as soon as she’d been thrown towards the hearth. He’d looked on uncertainly as the candle flame had rolled towards him. He was still bound hand and foot and had no idea how best to intercede. He had witnessed the end of Cindy’s offensive with something akin to desperation, sensing that it represented the death of hope. For all of them, probably, but especially for Cindy, who had chanced her arm and been found wanting just as she’d had Frank on the ropes.
He looked over at the man who called him Jake and felt for a minute or more as though he had been drawn from his body and was watching everything from above, like God. Frank was inhaling huge lungfuls of air, and he could see himself poised on the burning sofa, still not sure what to do.
Jump! he screamed at the inert boy. Help the woman!
The boy down below wasn’t listening. He seemed to have been paralyzed by the explosion of violence. He remained cowering on the sofa, clearly terrified of the man edging closer to him, wheezing and rubbing his throat.
Get the hell out of there! Just do whatever it takes. You can still crawl, can’t you?
He looked down at himself and felt a sweet nausea rise in his throat. The man was picking him up and carrying him out of the room. Frank laid him in the hallway, and the boy closed his eyes and prayed to be left alone.
You pathetic little shit! the boy screamed at himself. Get up and help the woman. What good will your prayers be if the whole place burns to the ground?
He looked down and saw Frank returning to the room. He was carrying what looked like a large, soiled rug. The bottom edge of the sofa was burning well by now and the boy could see the flames licking along the fabric-covered wood. If the fire reached the foam cushions, even he knew the chances of all three of them getting out of the cottage before it went up in smoke would be slim.
He hovered above the man and screamed at him to move faster, but Frank seemed more concerned with his own injuries. He was still struggling to breathe properly and blood from his damaged nose was pouring down his face. He made his way to the burning sofa and threw the rug over the flames, pressing his body against the wood to deny the fire any more oxygen. When it had been fully extinguished, he dropped to the ground and spent another minute or two stimulating the muscles in his throat.
The boy opened his eyes and found himself lying in the cold hallway. He looked up, expecting to see movement, but saw only a dark ceiling. There was a shuffling noise to his right and a bright eye filled with blood stared down at him. It was Frank. A twisted smile was spread across his face.
The boy said nothing as he was picked up and carried away. It was set to be a long night. The cottage drew itself in as it continued to be pounded by the snow.
* * *
At the first house Haft had visited he had found a divorced mother wrestling with her teenage daughter, the pair of them arguing about curfew times and the inappropriate color of the girl’s hair. A battered blue Volvo was parked at the curb outside. Haft had excused himself and mentally erased the woman’s name and address from his list.
The second house looked a little more promising. He sat in his car some distance away, waiting for dusk to settle. The property looked dark and unoccupied. There were no vehicles parked on the drive or within twenty yards of the house. Haft already knew that when he broke in, he would find nobody home.
As the sky darkened and the streetlights began to flicker on, he climbed out of the car and walked towards the wrought iron gate. Forget the front door; too conspicuous. He moved towards the side of the house and walked over the gravel that led to the rear of the property. He peered quickly into the kitchen window, confirming that the place was empty, and moved along the outer wall to the dining room patio doors. Barely pausing to consider the procedure, he drew a Gerber folding knife from his jacket, flicked it open, and forced the four-inch steel blade into the track beneath the patio door. With a grunt of effort he angled the knife and raised the door from the groove in which it had been set. It was that simple. He returned the folded knife to his jacket, lifted the patio door from its track, and set it against the wall. The whole enterprise had taken a little under ten seconds.
Haft stepped through the gaping hole in the wall and began a careful search of the house. The dining room offered up very little of note, but as soon as he walked into the lounge he saw a photo album lying open on the floor. Several pictures had been removed from their mounting and lay scattered on the carpet, as though they had been discarded in a hurry.
Haft knelt down and picked through each one, trying to glean as much as he could from each image. They were all family shots; a man, a woman and a boy, happily embracing in front of a cottage by a glistening lake. The child had long blond hair, like Philip Rymer, and Haft felt a heightening of the senses as a possible scenario fell into place. He stared at the man in the picture; he looked relaxed, calm; utterly happy. Haft turned the photo over and began to smile. People were so predictable; always so keen to codify their memories; desperate to hold on to the past.
On the back of the photo, in a neat, feminine hand, were the words Frank, Cindy & Jake. Lakeview Cottage, Colliford Lake. 1988.
Haft didn’t know the cottage, but he was certainly familiar with the lake. He had dumped the body of his first partner there nearly twenty years ago. He remembered how difficult it had been cleaning out the rowing boat afterwards; the hull had been awash with blood.
He pocketed the photograph and looked again at some of the others. That same idealized family portrait stared back and Haft wondered whether he had stumbled onto th
e wrong track. His instincts suggested otherwise, but he had miscalculated before. Only rarely, but it had been known to happen, and he was keen to avoid making a mistake with the boy.
He put the pieces together as he knew them and arrived at the same conclusion. The odds seemed to suggest that if he tracked down this family, he’d locate Rymer’s boy. He wasn’t sure why this might be so, but he knew that if you worked the percentages long enough, the chances were you’d eventually come out on top.
He flicked through the photo album and found a picture of the same man standing in front of a black Volvo. He was wearing a racing cap and squinting his eyes against the sun. His smile looked more than a little forced. Haft raised the picture and looked hard at the car; the registration was B852 DGR.
Sometimes, Haft thought, when all the signs pointed in the same direction, you were more than likely being guided along the correct path. Only a fool ignored a blessing like that.
Haft was many things, but he was not a fool. He rose to his full, imposing height, considered his next move, and set off in pursuit of the boy.
CHAPTER 18: THE THROWING OF SOIL
Mack was lying in his bed late at night struggling to get to sleep. He had removed his mask several hours ago and was now gently running his hand along the scar tissue where his philtrum used to be. The hardened skin felt smooth, like a weathered stone. He tried to picture what his mouth had looked like before the injury, but the image he recalled was hazy. He wanted to remember more, but much of the past was like a watermark: a faint impression stamped into a blank page, only visible in a certain light.
He felt restless tonight; more so than ever before. His relationship with his daddy had begun to change and he couldn’t quite understand why. Sometimes Mack could spend several hours in the recreation room on his own and his daddy was nowhere to be seen. He would seat himself by the bay window, watching the entrance to the facility, willing his father to return. He thought he’d feel more anxious, less secure without Daddy to watch over him, but his absence had begun to feel increasingly tolerable, as though Dr. Faber had been right all along: he didn’t need Daddy to validate his every move. He could exist without him. He found himself constantly returning to the idea that he might be healthier if he simply let Daddy go and lived quietly in the darkness instead.
When he did see Daddy again, moving nonchalantly around the facility as though he’d never been away from the place, the shock reminded Mack that he was only partially free. One minute Mack would be alone, the next Daddy would be everywhere, passing smoothly from one face to the next. It was as disconcerting as Daddy’s absence had been when Mack had first seen him pass beneath the arch at the end of the drive. It left him feeling confused, as though he were wandering around in a heavy fog from which Daddy could emerge at any time.
He sat up in bed and pushed aside the damp sheets. It was a chilly night but Mack felt hot, his thoughts feverish and loose. He moved across the room to the chair by the window and lowered himself into the seat. He stared out into the migrant night, here for a few hours but soon gone, passed on to a distant time zone, its movement slow and decisive. In one of the embankments close to the window he could see a large mound of earth the gardener must have excavated during the day. There were a number of dark holes in the flower beds and Mack wondered what the night might plant there; anything seemed possible, he thought, and his mind ran heavy with disturbing images that brought him out in an icy sweat.
He stared at the holes and realized they looked oddly familiar. His breathing grew ragged and he began to blink rapidly as the watermark of the past slowly surfaced, enabling him to feel his way into buried memories that a part of him thought he’d long forgot…
Daddy was digging a hole in the back garden. Me and Mommy were standing to the side, watching. I was holding Mommy’s hand, squeezing tight; she was squeezing back. It was getting dark; I could hear the chirping of the crickets in the long grass of the paddock behind the house. I had been crying and my eyes were red and sore. I wanted the whole thing to be over so I didn’t have to look at Daddy; his face was covered with blood and sweat. He grunted each time the spade sank into the soft brown earth.
Next to Daddy was a large box. Inside the box was my cat. Dark Daddy had killed it because the cat had scratched Real Daddy across the face. Dark Daddy had appeared fast, like he’d been hovering close to the surface, biding his time, desperate to assume control. He had picked up the cat and thrown it across the room. The cat’s neck had been broken and Dark Daddy had spat at it and called it some bad names. Then he was gone, almost as fast as he’d arrived, and Real Daddy was back, staring at the dead cat. He looked sad and I think he was angry, though I could never really be sure. Sometimes when he was mad, he smiled like he was happy. I never really knew what any of it meant.
I could smell the dead cat and the peat of the freshly turned earth and thought I might be sick. I realized Daddy had stopped digging and was staring at me, the scratches on his face still bleeding. He was watching me closely, like he wanted to say something, but he just stood and stared, all on his own, as me and Mommy held each other’s hands.
He set the spade to one side and lifted the cat from the box. He gently placed it in the hole.
“You want to say anything?” he said.
I felt uncomfortable and shook my head.
“Perhaps a prayer,” Mommy suggested, and we all quietly recited the Lord’s Prayer, which was the only one I knew.
Daddy came over to me and said, “Hold out your hands, buddy.”
I cupped my hands together and held them out. Daddy poured a handful of fresh soil into them.
“You throw it into the grave to say good-bye,” he said.
I nodded, stepped forward, and threw the soil into the hole. I saw it land on top of the cat.
I saw Daddy look at Mommy, but I didn’t know what that look meant either. Mommy choked back a sob and eventually she had to look away.
Daddy filled in the hole and then reached down for my hand. It was mucky and I tried to pull away, but he grabbed it and held it tight. Silently, we all walked back to the house.
Mack stared out into the darkness and then closed his eyes. The memory was gone, but for a moment it had been alive, breathing inside him as though the incident had occurred hours ago instead of years. The definition of the memory was fading fast, retreating into that dark fog that resided in Mack’s distorted right hemisphere, becoming less distinct as the seconds and the minutes passed by. But the heat of the recollection still coursed through him and he ached with longing as he remembered fragments of the burial: the smell of the dead cat; his mother’s tears; the tenderness with which his father had poured soil into his upturned hands.
He released a long, slow breath and considered where this sudden clarity had come from. He thought of Dark Daddy and felt on the verge of some turbulent rediscovery. His heart quickened, responding to the possibilities. Everything lay before him, he thought, just as everything lay in the past; where the life he had forgotten could be casually weighed in the palm of a child’s trembling hand.
SESSION #F001/629
Tuesday 20th September, 16:45PM
Attending Physicians: Dr. Kincaid, Dr. Faber.
Faber: How are you today, Mack? We’ve not seen much of you around the facility. We were starting to get a little worried.
Mack: I’m okay, Doctor. I’ve just been thinking a lot. It’s hard to do that in the recreation room. There are too many people.
Kincaid: Have you been thinking about anything in particular?
[Pause]
Mack: I’ve been remembering stuff that happened a long time ago. Things I thought I’d forgot.
Kincaid: What kind of things?
Mack: Mostly about Daddy. And Mommy. And when I was young.
[Kincaid and Faber exchange a look.]
Faber: Can you tell us about what you remembered, Mack?
Mack: It goes out of focus after a while. I’m not very good at holding on to it. I
try to but the pieces fall apart in my head.
Faber: Just do your best. What did you remember today?
Mack: We all went on a bike ride. Me, Mommy and Daddy. We were going to have a picnic in the woods. I couldn’t keep up very well and Daddy kept getting cross. I remember he was smiling a lot.
[Pause]
Kincaid: Why do you think he was smiling?
Mack: Because he knew Dark Daddy was coming. Everything always changed after that.
Kincaid: How did it change?
Mack: I don’t know. It just did. I was always so afraid. Mommy was, too.
Faber: So what happened?
Mack: I didn’t want him to come and spoil the picnic so I pedalled faster. Mommy was saying nice things to me, telling me stories to help me keep up. But I got so tired I passed out and fell off the bike. Dark Daddy came and threw all three bikes into a ditch. Then he carried me home.
Faber: You’ve remembered scenes from your childhood before, Mack. You’ve told us stories just like this.
[Pause]
Mack: I’m not sure…
[Pause]
Faber: What?
Mack: I’m not sure those stories actually happened.
Faber: Perhaps the same’s happening here. Maybe you’re just trying to rationalize your fears. Find a way to account for what’s happened to you.
Mack: No. These memories are real. I remember living them. For a short time they’re as bright as the lamp in this room.
[Faber and Kincaid lean towards each other and engage in a brief consultation.]
Faber: I think what’s happening, Mack, represents astonishing progress. There are tiny ridges on the cerebral cortex of the brain called gyri that are responsible for retaining long-term memories. They’re also linked to the complex process that allows us to recall faces. The reactivation of this part of your brain is a major breakthrough. It’ll help you begin to see your father for what he really is, Mack.
Dark Father Page 20
