by Rob Parker
Darting out of the door, he ran straight into the low hedge that framed the porch, and dumped himself onto the grass, knocking the air clean out him. He lay there, on the wet turf, feeling his T-shirt begin to soak, and rolled over. He stared at the stars. He searched for the dimmest one he could find, as his breathing returned to normal—then wished as hard as he could to be on it. Far away from here. Eons from whatever was happening on Blackstoke tonight.
As he sat upright, Jacob started to feel more exposed, just sitting there in the front garden, out in the cold night, and began to think leaving his hiding place under the bed had been a really bad choice—even if the house was a bloodbath.
He begged that the blood wasn’t his mum’s. Please, mum. Please don’t let that be you.
He stood, and tentatively walked down the path to the concrete roadway, careful not to make any noise—which was easy considering he still didn’t have any shoes on. The dark and the quiet was so strange, so off-putting. He found himself walking past a silver car that had been parked in the middle of the road, and went to the exact middle of the cul-de-sac’s turning circle.
Something about that central position appealed to his sense of balance, his perception of calm. He was on autopilot but didn’t know it, his young mind clambering to reject what he had seen in the kitchen, and what it might have meant for his parents and protectors.
Once he’d reached the centre. He took in the darkness and tried to make order of it. Each house was a black mass, crouched in wait, troll-like. The street itself took a hazy shape in lines of the deepest purple, thanks to light from the moon and sky above. The quiet was fixed in vacuum, as if every resident and the very remnants of their existence—the echoes of their lives—had been sucked clean away from this place.
Blackstoke was a ghost town.
A sound burst out, and Jacob was surprised to realise it had come from him. As if the need to fill the void had suddenly become too great, he found himself bellowing: ‘Hello!’
He dragged that last vowel out as long as he could, letting his voice die on it, then listened to it resonate off into the estate.
No answer.
So he tried again. ‘Hello!’
As he let the word play out, and enjoyed the catharsis the scream offered, he brought his head down as his lungs expelled the shout, and on opening his eyes, saw the shadow of a person.
He strained to see, but felt hope take flight within him.
‘Hello, yes! Over here!’ he shouted.
The person was standing on the edge of Grace Milligan’s garden. It was so hard to make out the definite edges of the silhouette, but he definitely saw it move—given away by the shifting of the softest reflection on the top of the person’s bald head.
Bald.
Jacob wracked his brain to think of who he knew who was hairless up top, and, on finding no obvious answer, considered every resident on Broadoak. The old man with the leccy fence obsession, he was thinning, but he wasn’t like this. Maybe it was the politician over the road? Maybe he wore a wig, and he’d come out to see what was happening and plain forgot to pop it on. The thought forced a delirious smile from Jacob.
‘Who’s that?’ he asked though the grin, and the person suddenly started running.
Sprinting.
Straight at Jacob.
‘Who are you?’ he shouted, the grin long gone. ‘Who are you?’
The figure made astonishing speed, making the fifty yards or so in long loping strides, and Jacob felt a surge of panic. This was all, horribly, wrong. This wasn’t someone he knew. This person wanted nothing more than to hurt him.
‘No!’ he shouted, as the person appeared just yards from him, and Jacob felt the threat and presence of something akin to a predatory beast. He screamed, as the man entered the small circle of light from the candle, and revealed height, long outstretched arms and bared teeth. An animal snarl erupted from his jaws, when another light shone directly in the man’s eyes. Powerful, strong and blinding.
‘Get back’’ came another pubescent voice. ‘Back, back!’
Jacob in his panic couldn’t work it out, but he was sure those saviour’s words came from two separate sources. The words sounded the same, but overlapped.
A burst of torchlight, which put Jacob’s flittering candle to shame, and a dot of darting green both shone at the man, who covered his eyes with a loud howl.
‘Back!’ said one of the voices. ‘Get back!’
‘Jacob, here,’ said the other.
Jacob ran to the voices and saw the twins. The Adams boys, one with a heavy-duty torch, the other with a green laser pointer. He wanted to hug them both.
Moving behind them, the man tried to follow, and Jacob got a good look at him as he struggled. Completely hairless, which went for eyebrows and beard too, and in a filthy grey jogging suit. There was something weird about the way he looked and carried himself, belying a horrible life journey that was beyond Jacob’s comprehension. The man reared back suddenly, less phased by the bright lights, and dove forward like a wolf—and stopped abruptly. He paused mid-movement, staring, his jaw hanging, the hate in his black eyes bleeding to confusion.
The man screamed, but it wasn’t off murderous rage—it was borne of a lack of comprehension.
He looked from one boy to the other, confusion writ large in every bent feature.
‘Go!’ commanded one of the boys.
‘Away, back, away!’ hollered the other.
Jacob worked it out when the man took a confused backward step. Twins. This man had never seen identical twins before, and it seemed to terrify him. He took two steps back, then three, then started to scamper away, turning back to look every few strides. They followed him with the torchlight until he took one last look, at the entrance to the dog walking trail, before disappearing into the brush.
The boys doused their lights in unison, and Jacob grabbed the twins, holding them both tight with a shaky arm round each neck.
‘Thank you,’ he whispered. ‘Thank you.’
50
Dewey was heavy, but the three were unified in their resolution that the great wolfhound had to go down into the tunnel with them. Peter offered to carry him on his shoulders, not quite aware that the dog was getting on for eighty kilograms in weight. Christian had gone down the ladder first, shining the torch into the black depths, and Grace followed Peter and Dewey closely, so that the big dog could see her, and hear her coo calmness to the shaking animal.
Peter’s shoulders heaved, and felt like they might just break, but he wouldn’t relent—they were almost there. He was finding new depths to his endurance, new places he could push to. Alice’s life, he was sure, was on the line. As was Olivia’s. And Dewey’s presence was their best bet at combatting these creatures.
They inched for what felt like an age, one step at a time, and such was the tightness of Peter’s grip, with the dog’s front quarters on one shoulder and its hindquarters on the other, he was pressed tight to the ladder rungs and the wall itself. The brickwork was musty, aged with mould, and the steps were crusted with rust. He didn’t give light to the nagging idea that he, at a hundred and ninety pounds with a dog almost the same on his back, might be too heavy for this particular route—they were already way too far down the air vent to turn back.
Mercifully, his concentration was broken not by a missed footing or a crumpling shoulder ligament, but a hushed exclamation from Christian below.
‘I’m at the bottom.’
Within a moment, Peter’s soles hit solid brick, and he let Dewey hop down, feeling the muscle tension dissipate in one glorious moment of release. The dog’s claws clicked across the floor, as he got to sniffing around straight away.
‘Wait, Dewey,’ said Grace. ‘Lead.’
Dewey returned to the bottom of the ladder for a congratulatory pat from his owner, as she too hit floor and clipped the red rope lead back onto his collar.
The bottom of the vent opened out directly into a tunnel, with two simple dire
ctions to pick. Left and right. Both was as dark as the other, with a wide curving roof drooping down into walls ten feet apart. Peter took one step, before slipping, landing square on his arse.
‘Careful,’ said Christian, helping him up. ‘The rain water from the opening above has made this part really slippy.’ Once on his feet again, the seat of his once-cream chinos now sodden a dark green, he shone his torch left, then right.
‘Any ideas?’ he said. ’Dewey?’
Grace unzipped her jacket pocket, and pulled out one of Olivia’s babygrows, and offered it up to Dewey’s nose. He nudged it with his snout, turning it over in her palm as if he was trying to fold it, then pulled to the right-hand section of tunnel.
‘Makes sense,’ Peter said, as they followed the dog.
‘I think this way leads us back under our houses.’
‘And deeper into the heart of the estate,’ added Christian.
‘Let’s go,’ said Grace, starting to jog. Within seconds they were all running into the murk, torches swinging.
‘Mrs Adams. Mrs Adams. Please wake up. Joyce. Please.’
Joyce’s head hurt. A whirling black migraine punctured by words she just about recognised. A name she could latch onto. Her own.
‘Please Joyce, it’s me, Alice.’
She pulled herself out, and opened her eyes. ‘Yes, I’m here.’
‘Thank you, thank you.’
What Joyce saw made no sense. The room she was in was dark, but an amber tint washed bare brick walls, beyond the cage wall. At least, she thought it was a cage. Thin coils of wire lashed to metal, densely packed. Three sides of it. Behind her was brick again. And in the structure with her, was the eldest West child, Alice.
‘Where are we?’ asked Joyce, sitting up, the world spinning again before it settled.
‘I don’t know,’ replied the teenager, who Joyce now saw was mucky, with dried blood matting one side of her hair to her head. ‘I’ve been here hours now.’
‘Jesus. What happened to you?’
‘I think the same as you,’ Alice said, pointing to Joyce’s own head. The woman put her hand in her hair, and was alarmed to find her palm sticky with blood. ‘Hit on the head and put here.’
Put here.
Joyce remembered.
The face in the darkness, a jump-cut nightmare.
‘Who put us here?’ she asked.
Alice’s eyes abruptly filled. ‘Those men.’
Joyce suddenly remembered. The commotion outside, the candle-lit man in her house. ‘Who are they, Alice?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, now whispering. ‘But I think they live here.’
‘And where’s here?’
‘I don’t know that either.’
‘We can’t have gone far.’ Joyce checked her wristwatch, which she was pleased to find intact. Small mercies. It read 6.06pm. ‘We really can’t have gone far. Last time I checked it was about half five.’
Alice shuffled back and sat against the wall where the caging and brick met, and it gave Joyce pause to actually look at their prison. Yes, strong wire had been strung between three-foot posts, with more across the top. The more she looked at it the more she thought the tension of the wire looked quite springy, and the frames they hung upon were about six feet high and three feet wide rectangles of steel. Each frame was held together with more wiring. She touched the wire and it gave considerably, but not enough to let her through—and when she looked to the other side of the structure, she saw something she’d missed. Each frame had a short pole jutting out from each corner, suggesting this wasn’t their primary purpose.
Joyce stepped back. Amazement and realisation washed over her.
‘This cage is made from old hospital beds,’ she said. ‘What the hell are they doing here?’
As the questions flowed from her, a clank from the darkness down the corridor paused them both, and the light shifted.
‘It’s them,’ said Alice, backing into the rear corner of the cell. Joyce joined her and placed an arm around her shoulders, pulling the girl into her. She didn’t want to cower, but felt unable not to, as heavy footsteps approached. Joyce found herself squinting at the source of the light, though it was blocked by an approaching form, getting larger with every step towards them. Its shape was hard to pinpoint, with thick legs topped by an impossible breadth, and it was only when she clocked the dangling, swinging tail of hair behind the figure’s back that she realised that this was a large person carrying someone over their shoulder—someone who, from the shape of it, looked like another woman.
Alice caught on quicker. ‘Mum? Mum!’ The girl scrabbled out of Joyce’s embrace, and pulled herself to the cell’s makeshift wall. ‘Mum, are you okay?’
The large man used a giant hand to unwind the wiring of the corner post of the structure, and opened a small gap, through which he deposited Pam West. Joyce and Alice were there to catch her.
The giant eyed them bleakly, and unleashed a volley of harsh clicks with his tongue, interspersed with a snarls and huffs of breath. It seemed like to Joyce like the crudest of languages, as they cradled Pam and lay her in the centre of the cell, her head propped up on Alice’s crossed legs.
‘Mum, I’m here, it’s me Alice,’ said the girl, openly weeping.
‘Pam, it’s Joyce, are you okay?’
They huddled around her, listening as the giant retreated back down the tunnel, before Pam finally spoke in a low murmur. ‘They smell even worse up close, don’t they?’
The three women embraced, as humour dissolved to tears.
51
Pipes coursed along the left-hand slope of the tunnel roof. Two large and one small, unbroken since Grace first noticed them moments earlier. Intermittent bulbs hung, dead. Dewey had been cautious but steadfast. He wanted to go this way down the tunnel, and never once paused or wavered.
‘Any ideas?’ she asked as they marched.
‘Not a clue,’ said Christian. ‘But we’ve walked what, a few hundred yards?’
‘I think so. What are you thinking Peter?’
‘I think it must be something to do with an old industry, but I can’t think what,’ he said, then pointed at the floor. ‘If it was for mining or something, there’d be tracks in the floor for the mining cars, but there’s nothing like that at all. It’s just smooth concrete—which suggests it can’t be that old.’
‘There’s not much damage down here either,’ Grace mused. ‘It’s all a bit gross, but it’s not even in disrepair or anything.’
‘Almost as if it has been maintained,’ said Christian.
A couple of seconds passed. ‘That money, that Fletcher had, it was for the Neighbourhood Watch wasn’t it?’ Peter said.
‘Yeah,’ said Christian.
‘He was scamming us, wasn’t he?’
‘Looks that way.’
They walked in a line, a redemptive wave, on their way to bring the missing children home, when Grace stopped.
‘Look, there,’ she whispered. ‘Right hand wall.’
They slowed and focused their torches on the emerging shape. It started as a black stripe, which broadened on approach, and eventually revealed itself to be a doorway.
‘Shit me,’ said Christian. Strangely, Dewey was disinterested, and remained poised forward in the archetypal hunting dog pose, as if, like his ancestors, he’d spotted a distant wolf on the emerald fields of historic Ireland.
‘Dew,’ Grace said, pointing at the door, but he would not be dissuaded. He wanted to go ahead. Canine instinct butted hard against human curiosity, as the three torch beams settled on the doorway. It was open, the darkness of its shape caused by shadow, and their beams were merely sucked into darkness. As they approached, Grace’s stomach roiling, the memories of the last time she flashed a light into a dark doorway all too vivid, scarring and recent, shapes began to emerge within. Lines began to form in the dark, and they all peered in at the same time, torches lighting the room harshly.
It wasn’t the biggest room, but
it was full. Wall to wall metal stretchers resting on trolleys. Some were rusted, some had lost their cushioning to reveal bare metal slats, some retained a little pole and hook at one end where a drip could be hung for administering medication. As their beams cast over the beds, Grace could see that a few of them were marked by dark stains, and she looked away to the walls instead to save her stomach. Cabinets lined the sides. Steel boxes, with little label cards on the front panel of each door.
‘What the fuck is this place?’ asked Christian, gravely.
‘It looks like a… hospital store room,’ said Grace.
‘Seriously, why would this be down here?’
‘I just don’t know.’
‘But it’s been like this for some time,’ added Peter. ‘Let’s keep moving.’
As they got to walking again, Dewey happy to be going in what he considered to be the right direction, Grace couldn’t stop her thoughts from bounding this way and that. ‘Let’s face it. There was something here long before the Blackstoke estate,’ she said, to herself as much as anybody else.
‘And they didn’t tell us a damn thing about it,’ said Christian, anger in his voice.
‘Either that or they forgot about it,’ said Peter.
Grace didn’t like any of those possibilities.
What was this place?
52
The women had swapped their individual stories as to how they had ended up in the cage made of old bed frames, but Pam hadn’t told either Alice nor Joyce what had befallen Fletcher Adams in the kitchen at Iron Rise.
She reasoned this was a time for positivity and pooling information, not telling one of the women that her husband was dead—even if the husband in question was a misogynistic twat. Whether Joyce would appreciate being left in the dark on this was up for debate, and a bridge that Pam would have to cross eventually. The bottom line, however, was the same for all. Someone had crept up on each one of them, and bashed them on the head—but not so much that they’d been left maimed or killed. Then, they’d been brought here and imprisoned.
