by Rob Parker
Peter emerged from the under stairs cupboard, holding a bigger torch that looked like a battery with a cone of light firing from one end. In his other hand was a cricket bat. ‘Did you hear that?’ she asked him.
‘No, I was under there. What was it?’ He lifted the bat up, nerves frayed on the assumption that anything could and would happen any second.
‘Glass shattering. Somewhere in the street,’ she said, walking to the front door, but Peter put a hand across her path.
‘Let me,’ he said. And he kissed her. Pam was taken aback. It was a kiss with actual feeling. He meant it. She sank into the embrace for just a second, before releasing him into the void.
Watching him walk carefully into the centre of the cul-de-sac’s turning circle, she noticed Grace appear outside her house on the corner, with a torch of her own. She immediately looked further down the street.
‘The Lyons’ house?’ shouted Peter. Grace nodded in response, and her, Dewey and Peter started running to the grand black house—but not before Peter shouted ‘Love you Pam!’ over his shoulder.
‘Love you,’ she shouted back. Maybe there was hope for them after all. She wanted to tell him to be careful, not to take any unnecessary risks, but this was it. The chips were down. It was survival time, as only a few unfortunate souls got to truly experience. You fight this, or it kills you.
And she was going to live. Her family were going to live. She was determined of both.
She could do nothing to help Peter now. She had to protect Jacob first and foremost, so Pam ran back into the house, and shut the door quickly, locking it behind her.
It was dark. Way too dark for her liking, and she wanted to get the candles from the kitchen. But that would mean going in there were Fletcher was, laid bare and flayed on the kitchen island, like one of those old pictures of Victorian medical lectures, with the large operating table sat in the centre of an auditorium, so all and sundry could get a good look at all the blood and gubbins.
No. She needed to protect Jacob. That was her job—her immediate objective for survival for her and her family. And that was best served by acquiring light.
Big girl pants time, Pam.
So she couldn’t talk herself out of it, she marched straight into the kitchen for candles, which she knew to be in the drawer next to the sink—the sink that was embedded in the central island worktop. The worktop on which Fletcher Adams had been killed.
Big. Girl. Pants.
Head down, she walked to the unit, determined not to look at it. There was a smell—a medical, human smell, rusty, visceral.
Don’t look up.
She dipped low, in a crouch, to avoid the temptation of allowing her eyes to drift to the body, and in the dark found the candles with ease. She turned, and stood, buoyed by the small success and headed back to the hall—clicking the candles on as she went. Smart cookie, she’d bought battery operated candles which gave off an immediate soft glow without the need to fumble about with matches in the dark. Her planning had been perfect.
But when she clicked it on, she passed the integrated kitchen units, which included the cooker, and in its glass door, unintentionally, she saw the reflection of the worktop.
No. It couldn’t be.
Pam spun around to make sure her eyes weren’t playing tricks on her, but sure enough, the reflection in the cooker door hadn’t lied. She needn’t have worried about seeing anything untoward when she came in for the candles.
Fletcher’s body was gone.
47
Despite the things he’d seen, despite the horrors of those men in their weird outfits and their awful glares, and what they’d done to poor Fletcher Adams. Despite the darkness and the growing dread he felt spiralling through every fibre of his person, Christian clicked on the Maglite and sprinted up the stairs, two at a time. He prayed that Olivia had been returned. That the glass smashing was those bastards breaking back into the bedroom to return her to her crib.
The crib. The bedroom.
The dread spiralled in Christian as he realised. How foolish he had been, how blind. He’d been so frantic while searching earlier, his brain tumbling in all directions but the right one, he’d failed to make the link.
Ooh baba.
Olivia wasn’t a chance abduction. She had been watched. She had been chosen.
Please, Christian begged inwardly. Please let her be in the crib. Please let her be safe. I will never let her out of my sight again, I will never ever take having her for granted.
He got to the top of the stairs and raced down the hall, throwing the nursery door open, not caring if one of them was in here—he was ready to do anything it took to save his daughter.
The sight he found, as he pieced it together through the searching circle of light from the torch, was not comforting. The nursery had been ransacked. Toys tossed everywhere, things launched this way and that. Glass from the shattered window glinting in the torchlight.
Olivia wasn’t here, but only moments ago, someone else had been. And they’d smashed the window in escape—all while Christian had been downstairs, feeling sorry for himself.
He felt anger billow as he marched around the wreckage of the nursery they had so carefully and lovingly put together. Tears resurged down his cheeks.
The front door clunked downstairs, and someone shouted into the house. ‘Christian?’
It was Peter West. ‘I’m up here,’ he replied, hopelessly.
As he heard footsteps on the stairs, he crouched and sifted through some of the wreckage. Broken drawer bits, blankets strewn.
‘What’s happened?’ asked Grace, appearing at the nursery door. The massive dog was at her side.
‘The clothes. A lot of Olivia’s clothes are missing.’
‘That was them, in here?’ It was Peter again, joining them in the room, sliding in next to the massive dog that was taking up most of it.
‘It must have been,’ Christian replied.
‘Wait clothes, clothes,’ said Grace, with sudden animation. The mere energy in her voice gave him a surge of hope. ‘Do you have a laundry basket for Olivia?’
‘Yes, but it’s not here, it’s downstairs in the utility room.’
‘Is it clean?’
‘I was going to wash it tonight.’
‘Perfect, where is it?’
A moment later, Christian walked Grace and Dewey into the utility room and pointed to a white wicker basket that was stood next to the washing machine.
‘Dewey, get your head in there,’ Grace said, taking the lid off the basket and shuffling the contents as if it contained something of great canine worth. Dewey obediently put his whole head in, and snuffled, licked and shoved about with his great snout. ‘Get a good noseful, mate.’
Christian caught up, and that slight waft of hope returned. ‘Her scent.’
‘Dewey will take us right to her. Let’s take a couple of these babygrows and go and find her.’
No matter how long Pam stared at the kitchen island, marvelling at the sheer quantity of blood that was smeared and pooled all over it, the mutilated body of Fletcher Adams would just not reappear.
Fletcher was tall. Solidly built. Easily over fourteen stone in weight. How on earth could someone that big be moved so quickly, so easily, so quietly?
As soon as she thought about it, she knew the answer. That big one. He could do it. No problem. He manhandled Fletcher when he was alive and writhing, chucking him about like a ragdoll. It would be even easier with him dead and lifeless.
With a shudder, she was forced to acknowledge that those things had come back for the body, and taken it. And worse still, they had gotten in the house so quietly, so easily, that they could surely come back anytime.
Jacob. Family survival.
Protecting him was number one.
How could she keep them from coming in? The front door was locked, which left the back door. She had to go and lock it.
The quicker she did, the better. Don’t dally, just go.
She grabbed a knife from the kitchen drawer, and followed her synthetic candle light around the island unit. The back door was through the kitchen by the utility room. Of course. All this time. They’d been coming and going through the back door.
Treading as quietly as she could, she rounded the island, and caught sight of blood spatter on the white floor tiles. It wasn’t a smear you’d associate with a body being dragged. It was more of a trail of droplets—some small, some fatter. The body had been carried out. Pam could only imagine Fletcher’s mangled corpse placed over the crook of that giant’s arm like a coat on a warm winter night.
She shuddered with how small she felt.
But she was a mother. And that counted for a lot when it came to any physical discrepancies.
She tiptoed around the blood, keeping careful not to disturb any of it, although not really sure why. It just felt like the wrong thing to do, like standing on somebody’s grave at a cemetery.
The dark opening of the utility room yawned at her, and she strained to see if anything or anyone was in there. Nothing. But the blood pattern on the floor led neatly to the back door, which had been left open aimlessly. Her fear spiked, but she knew, if she could get that closed and locked, she was one step closer to safety.
But what if they’re just outside the door, waiting to pounce?
She forced herself to cast the thought as far away as she could, and ran on her toes to the door, throwing it shut and locking it tight.
Once the latch had caught, she couldn’t resist a look into the garden, but nothing was there. It was dark, granted, but the garden was doused in a soft blue moonlight which outlined just the bare grass and the fencing that boxed it in.
But amid the stink of Fletcher’s death, another smell emerged. Filthy, morbid, and somehow alive. The utility. She hadn’t checked the utility.
A massive impact on the side of her head cut dead the sudden regret, and she fell knowing she had let Jacob down.
48
Dewey pulled at the lead as if he was suddenly years younger, and Grace had to repeatedly command him back—not because she was slow, but because he was at risk of pulling her off her feet. Christian and Peter ran behind, as they followed the wolfhound and its nose into the night.
When they’d opened the front door to Christian’s house, and Grace had said ‘Go, go on boy, go!’, Dewey had led them back to the bottom of the cul-de-sac, past Christian’s car (the driver’s side door to which he finally shut while walking past), beyond the Adams and West homes, and down the dog walk track Grace and Peter had followed Dewey down, only last night—a point in time that felt like lifetimes ago now.
The fronds of ferns and nettles reached out to them on both sides like admiring fingers caressing their pumping calves, while their bouncing torchlight showed Dewey’s ragged grey hindquarters as he bounded along the trail.
Grace kept encouraging him, not as if she needed to, until they came out onto the grass of the fallow field, and Dewey stopped, as before, to take in the trees opposite. They loomed, portentous as ever, although now, because the threat within had been experienced, and had even claimed a few of them, the malice dripping from those trees felt much greater.
‘In there, Dew?’ Grace asked, as the three of them cast their torchlight along the trunks. There was nothing obviously amiss about the woodland, save for the fact that it was hardly inviting, and the wet bodies of the trees gradually rose to sparse wintery boughs and the heavens themselves high above. Dewey barked in response, a huge gush of steam escaping his mouth as he did so.
‘Okay, let’s go folks,’ she said, and led them across the field. It was heavily rutted, and the humans had to take their time—something Dewey was respectful of. As the trees drew closer, the atmosphere followed it, suddenly becoming close, tight and strange as they entered the woods. The air was thick with a wet, mulchy smell, like a bog, and Grace soon found her trainers sodden. The trees overhead cut out the deep indigo of the sky, and the only illumination was fully man-made. There was no obvious trail, so they followed the dog step for step, casting shafts of light this way and that. Grace, at the front of the human part of the group, shining her torch over Dewey’s bobbing head, saw their destination before anybody else.
‘What the hell is that?’ was all she could say, and within a couple of moments, they were there, surrounding this construction that was so out of place in its surroundings, even though its aged appearance suggested it had been there for many years.
Embedded in the ground, in the middle of the trees, was a tubular stone cylinder, four feet wide, and four feet high, made of brick. Dewey jumped up and placed his paws on top of the brickwork and peered down.
‘Jesus, what is it?’ asked Christian.
Tentatively, the three of them followed Dewey’s lead and peered over the ledge. A dark drop presented itself, and their torchlight showed no sign of the bottom. It did, however, show a rusted steel ladder leading all the way down.
‘My God,’ said Peter. ‘It’s an air vent.’
‘A vent?’ said Grace. ‘What for?’
Peter stepped back and looked at the structure, before eventually pacing around it. ‘I’ve seen these before. On railways. Old steam train systems used to have them, for allowing the steam up and out of the tunnels.’
‘Are you saying there’s a railway down there?’ asked Christian, the disbelief in his voice so obvious.
‘Not necessarily,’ Peter clarified, still unable to take his eyes away from the structure. ‘For railways they’d be three of four times bigger than this, to handle the amount of steam. But this is definitely for a similar purpose. It’s an air circulation vent. For tunnels.’
‘Are they down there?’ asked Christian, as all three people turned to look at Dewey, who hadn’t moved. He was still staring down the vent, into the black space, gazing with focus, a low grumble seeming to warn them of what he was thinking.
‘Down there, Dew?’ asked Grace, joining him.
Dewey barked twice, and Grace turned to the men and nodded.
49
Jacob had laid under the bed, alongside the boxes he still hadn’t opened yet, let alone got round to actually unpack, and waited for ten minutes after he last heard something. His mum was supposed to be there, protecting him from whatever that shouting downstairs was before. He felt alright though, because after the shouting, his mum had come to see him, told him to hide out under here. He was cool with that—he had his phone, preloaded up with games, so he’d have plenty to do. Couldn’t get on Roblox though, which was a serious bummer—needed wifi for that. But focussing on something else was a help. It diverted his thoughts from confusion, put them onto something more normal than whatever was happening in the street.
He still didn’t know why his mum was being so quiet though. He’d heard Christian, his dad, and the absolute babe from over the road leave the house together. Had even heard his mum and dad say goodbye. But then nothing. His mum shuffled about for a bit, then went quiet.
Should he shout for her? Make sure she was still there?
That’s what he’d done when he was a kid, suddenly woken in the middle of the night, and his instincts suggested it was the right thing to do. But something wasn’t right about that. Something was more serious now, as if all those times when he was little, he knew full well there was nothing to worry about, whereas tonight, the threat was very real. All of that was training for right now.
This, Jacob resolved, was a grown-up situation that required a grown-up course of action. So he pulled himself from beneath the bed, shuffling on his belly, and out into the centre of the room, where he stood, listened and took stock.
Nothing had changed during his commando manoeuvre. The house was still quiet.
He edged out of his room onto the landing, all his senses on the highest of alerts, receptive to the smallest sound.
But that coast appeared to be entirely clear.
He padded down the stairs in his socks, one careful step at a time, pausing h
alfway down to peek through the bannister at the darkened living room. He expected to see the shadowed form of his mum in one of the armchairs or on the sofa, but there was nothing and nobody there.
He wanted to shout for her, now more than ever before, but no, this was grown up time. Taking the quietest deep breath he could, he crept to the bottom of the stairs, and into the kitchen.
First thing he caught was the soft glow coming from the utility room, which caught him off guard, because he didn’t know they had a lamp in there. He thought, as he walked across, was that it could even be one of those little plug-in nightlight things with a sensor in, that switch on automatically when it was dark. He had one of those in his room growing up, and thought it was a good idea.
Then, he remembered why it was dark in the first place. Power cut. As in no power.
The mystery was solved when he saw the flickering battery-powered candle on the floor, but it was fact that it was on its side he didn’t like, its little fake flame dancing against the tile. He doubly didn’t like the fact that it was lying next to a lot of dark drops. Drops that looked eerily like blood when he picked the light up and shone it properly on the splatter.
‘Mum,’ he whispered hoarsely, his mouth suddenly sub-Saharan. ‘Mum!’
He stood and turned back into the kitchen to resume the search for his mother—when he saw the central room of the house now resembled an abattoir. There was just so much blood.
He felt the heave of nausea, the grip of his throat tighten as his mouth pumped full of saliva, and he started running. Anywhere, not here, go, front door, yes.
It was locked, so he had to unlatch it quickly, a quick flick of the lock lever on the inside and he was out the front of the house into the cool fresh air, gasping, his head spinning.
