The Man Who Built the World
Date: 2012-09-15 18:30:00+00:00
Keywords: Mystery
Description: Matthew Cassidy is a man on the verge of self-destruction. His career is in tatters and his marriage is hanging by a thread under the threat of a latent violence he is struggling to control. His wife Rachel is on the verge of leaving him even before a phone call from his estranged father pulls him back into a world of violence and mystery that he left behind on a bloody winter's night sixteen years before. Matt must return to the quiet little country town of Tamerton, where he grew up in a world of questions but few answers. The town has changed but the mysteries remain, and Matt must question
Publisher: AMMFA Publishing

The Man

Who Built the World

by

Chris Ward

Visit Chris Ward’s Amazon Page

Novels

The Tube Riders

The Tube Riders : Exile

(Part Two of the Tube Riders Trilogy – due summer 2013)

Head of Words (due spring 2013)

Collections

Ms Ito’s Bird & Other Stories

Short Stories

Benny’s Harem*

Forever My Baby*

Going Underground*

Joyriders*

Ms Ito’s Bird*

Saving the Day*

The Ageless*

The Cold Pools*

(*found in the collection, Ms Ito’s Bird & Other Stories)

Castles Made of Sand

Death Depends

Forks

The Tree

Writing as Michael S. Hunter

(The Beat Down! action/comedy novella series)

Beat Down 1 - Clones

Beat Down 2 - The Heist

Beat Down 3 - Badassaur! (due January 2013)

About the Author

A proud and noble Cornishman (and to a lesser extent British), Chris Ward ran off to live and work in Japan back in 2004.  There he got married, got a decent job, and got a cat.  He remains pure to his Cornish/British roots while enjoying the inspiration of living in a foreign country.

In addition to The Man Who Built the World, he is the author of the novels The Tube Riders and Head of Words (forthcoming) as well as the Beat Down! action/comedy novella series under the name Michael S. Hunter.

“Like” Chris on Facebook at Chris Ward (fiction writer) or follow on Twitter @ChrisWardWriter.

Join the mailing list for new releases
http://eepurl.com/qceDj

Chris also has a blog about his writing and his life –
http://amillionmilesfromanywhere.blogspot.jp/

“The Man Who Built the World” Copyright © Chris Ward 2012

The right of Chris Ward to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the Author.

Cover design by Su Halfwerk @ www.novelprevue.com

This story is a work of fiction and is a product of the Author’s imagination. All resemblances to actual locations or to persons living or dead are entirely coincidental.

For Sharon

Because you liked this one

Herein are recounted
the events of

November 15th to November 17th

1999

Part One

Men

1

‘Matt?’

Rachel’s groggy voice drifted up the stairs from the kitchen. ‘Matt?’ Then louder: ‘Matt!’

He groaned, rolled over in bed and pulled the pillow over his face.

Rachel didn’t wait for an answer. ‘I think you’d better come down here.’ He heard a grunt of annoyance then something hard and plastic slammed down, the noise muffled through the floor. A curse, then her heavy, tired feet on the stairs.

No escape this time. He rolled over to face her as she appeared in the doorway, her eyes bleary like cloudy water and her hair unkempt as though she’d just been outside in the November wind. Her dressing gown hung open to her waist, the swell of her breasts pressing into the space but the nipples just hidden by the silk. Her belly was admirably flat considering the kids. He would have found her alluring if it weren’t for the marching band playing Land of Hope and Glory against the inside wall of his skull.

‘I’ve got a call for you. I take it you didn’t hear the phone?’

‘Can you get them to call back? Rachel, I’m –’

‘I don’t give a shit if you’re hungover. You’re always hungover.’ Her face hardened momentarily then softened a little. ‘I think you’d better take this one.’

She stepped forward and began to pull the bedclothes away. Feeling a sudden surge of anger, Matt leaned over and wrenched them back out of her hands. She dropped the sheets and stepped back, her eyes lowered, afraid.

‘All right, I’m coming. Get off my fucking case will you?’

Rachel didn’t look at him, just pulled her dressing gown tight and knotted the belt around her waist. ‘It’s your father, Matthew.’

Matt thought he had misheard. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I haven’t spoken to him in years. Years, Rachel. How would he even know our number?’

‘You heard me. I have to get the kids ready for school now.’ Still not looking at him, she turned back towards the door. ‘I’ll tell him you’re on your way,’ she added, her voice losing its mettle. She reached up and touched a blemish on her cheek, the fading remnants of a bruise. Then, as though becoming suddenly aware of what she had done, she jerked her hand away. ‘And I’ll mix you an aspirin.’

Matt rubbed his face, rolled his eyes and shook his head. ‘Yeah, okay, thanks. Look . . . I’m sorry.’ He climbed out of bed naked and reached for a T–shirt and boxer shorts that were slung over a chair near to the window.

Her voice floated back to him from the hall. ‘Okay, whatever.’ He heard the tired thud of her feet as she descended the stairs.

Matt pulled on the clothes. He rubbed his eyes again, feeling no better. With a sigh he stumbled out into the hallway.

‘Hi, Daddy.’

He almost tripped over Luke, their son, as the five–year–old came out of his bedroom, a school satchel hung over his shoulder, a blue woolly hat pulled over his head. Matt steered the boy around him, feeling unsteady on his legs. Luke looked up at his father, nervous brown eyes peering out of a soft, putty face.

‘Are you and Mummy mad at each other, Daddy?’

Matt sighed. Not this again. ‘No, Luke, it’s just the morning, everyone gets a little touchy in the morning. It’s nothing, don’t worry about it.’

‘But you sounded really mad.’

Matt patted Luke’s head, distressingly aware of the way the boy flinched away from his touch.

‘Everyone gets a little mad sometimes, Luke,’ he said, trying hard to hide the impatience he felt. ‘It doesn’t mean we don’t love each other, or you and Sarah.’

God, the words sound so fucking hollow.

He turned away towards the stairs. Luke followed him down, humming a tune from a kid’s TV show. Through the open door of the living room, Matt saw Sarah inside, cross-legged in front of the TV, watching cartoons.

‘Go and sit with your sister for a bit,’ he said, steering the boy through the doorway with one hand, while holding the stair banister for support with the other.

Rachel was waiting in the kitchen, holding the cordless telephone. As Matt entered, she lifted it to her lips and said, ‘He’s here now,’ into the earpiece. She handed it to Matt and walked out without another word.

Matt sighed. The stupid cow didn’t have the faintest idea how hard this would be. Fourteen years was a long goddamn time, and a word of support wouldn’t have hurt. He stared down at the receiver in his hand as if he had just found a dead animal there. He wanted to drop it, turn and walk away, forget about it.

What do I say to him? And what could he possibly want to say to me?

He took a deep breath and lifted the receiver to his ear. ‘Hello?’

‘Matthew?’

That deep–throated growl, like the boom of distant thunder, was unmistakable.

‘Dad.’

‘How are you . . . son?’

He felt as though the cold air had filtered in through the windows and wrapped itself around him like a protective blanket, pressing in against his skin, smothering him. He felt it squeezing into his mouth and down into his lungs, icy fingers tightening around his neck.

It was difficult to keep the sarcasm out of his tone. ‘I’m okay, couldn’t be better. Life’s grand and all that. What do you want, Dad?’

###

Bethany’s Diary, October 10th, 1984

Hello diary, it’s nice to meet you. My name is Bethany, and I’m your new owner. I’m sure we’ll have lots of fun getting to know each other, won’t we? I’m a little girl and I am seven years old. I have copper coloured hair, the same colour as a shiny 2p, and brown eyes. I live in a big, big house with my dad and my brother. My Daddy loves me, Matty loves me, and Uncle Red loves me. But Mummy doesn’t love me. Mummy can’t love me. Otherwise she wouldn’t have flown away to the stars, to the stars, to the stars . . .

2

Rachel got back about half past nine, after dropping the children off at school and stopping off at the Esso on the way back to fill the car up and pick up some bread. The house was quiet when she entered and at first she thought Matt had gone back to bed. He had taken to rising late over the last few months, which suited Rachel fine when she considered the moods he had been in. Only when she sneaked into her bedroom to get her slippers and found it empty, did she remember who had been on the phone.

His father.

She found Matt in his study, a cramped, cluttered space converted from a small third bedroom between the bathroom and the kids’ room. He had his feet up on his desk and was slumped back in his recliner. A half full glass of whiskey hung precariously from his fingers, and his head lolled back against the chair’s neck rest. At first she thought he was sleeping. The computer and radio were both turned off, but a window was open to let in a fresh, chilling breeze. She shivered, unsure how he could stand it.

‘Matt?’

She walked around the front of his desk. Her nose wrinkled as she smelt the whiskey, and she looked down at the glass he held and scowled, noticing he had mixed it with soda so he could stand it so early in the morning. Takes the bite off the first drink, he had told her once, when they had been fellow happy drunks at university. Especially if you have a hangover. Once the first one’s down, you’re away. She remembered the way he would have grinned after saying that, fiery, mischievous. One of many things about him she had fallen in love with. How long had it been since he had last smiled like that?

His eyes were closed, but she realized he wasn’t asleep at all. He was moving, almost reverberating, and a hollow clicking sound was coming from deep inside his chest.

She recognised the sound immediately. She knew it well herself. She had often choked down her own tears. It was easy with practice; you just had to clench your chest tight and squint your eyes a little. Don’t give him the satisfaction of seeing you cry. Don’t let him think he’s won.

‘Matthew?’

He opened his eyes. They were still bleary from sleep, but had regained the familiar drunken sheen that she saw so often these days, telling her the drink wasn’t the first even at this early hour. She sighed and closed her eyes briefly, tired and upset.

‘What did your father want?’

‘Nothing much,’ he slurred, and closed his eyes again.

‘He rings you up for the first time in fourteen years, and he wants "nothing much"? Come on, Matt, you can do better than that.’

‘Don’t nag me.’

‘I’m not nagging you. I just want to know why you’re getting hammered again at nine-thirty in the morning.’ She shook her head and ran a hand through her hair. ‘You usually wait until lunchtime at least.’

His eyes jerked open and he fixed her with a long stare. Rachel wondered if she had pushed him too far. He had only struck her once, and it hadn’t been that hard, only enough to leave a small bruise

(it was the surprise that caused you to slip and fall, was it? Come on Rachel, be honest, he really went for you)

but so much latent energy had emerged with that strike, enough to terrify her, open a chasm between them that would take months, maybe years to close. Assuming, of course, either of them had enough strength left to try.

‘Please Matt, it was obviously important.’

As if to emphasize the point, the glass slipped from his hand. It didn’t shatter, just bumped on the carpet, spilling its contents across the beige pile. The spots of golden whiskey, where they landed and began to sink in, looked like urine.

Matt made no attempt to pick up the glass, and Rachel didn’t dare get any closer.

‘You really want to know?’

‘I’m your wife, Matthew, of course I do.’

He looked away from her, out of the window. The second floor view reached over the rooftops of the street opposite, down the angling hillside of their town, towards a church at the bottom, its spire reaching proud and ancient up into the sky. It was a nice day outside, cold but with a bright sun. She would love to be out there now, walking in the park, breathing in the fresh, unthreatening air. Despite the open window, the air in here was stale, dangerous.

When he looked back at her his eyes shone with tears. ‘Oh, he just rung me up to say hi, to have a chat, you know the usual. Us being best buddies and all. Oh, and yeah, to let me know my sister is dead. Dead.’

Rachel stared, incredulous. ‘Um, excuse me? Your what?’

They had been married ten years, most of them happily, often blissfully so. But in all that time, he had never, ever mentioned a sister. He had claimed to be an only child. He had told her that his mother was dead and he was estranged from his father, and wouldn’t go any deeper. She had accepted his secrets, partly because she loved him and partly because everyone had things they didn’t like to talk about, even her. It was a trust thing, and she had trusted him with her life, and her heart.

But why lie about a sister? What possible harm could it do?

‘My sister. Bethany. Dear sweet loving Daddy rang me up to tell me Bethany is dead. Now wasn’t that nice of him?’

He looked up at her, and his tearful eyes became suddenly desperate, pleading. For all the years of hurt he had caused her this was one moment he couldn’t deal with alone. Rachel felt a terrible sense of guilt, as though it had been her who had shut him out, rather than the other way around.

‘Oh, Matthew,’ she said, and went forward to put her arms around him. He hugged her back hard, his hands gripping her waist and his head pressing against her stomach. She felt him shake as sobs wracked his body, and, overcome by the situation, she found herself crying too.

‘Bethany’s dead,’ he murmured once more, his voice muffled by the pullover she wore, his desperate words all but lost. ‘At last . . . Bethany’s dead.’

Rachel was a little shaken by this, but she said nothing and helped him to bed to let him sleep a while. He needed time, not just to get the alcohol out of his system, but to let the news sink in. When he woke he might just deal with it a little better.

And Rachel needed time too.

Bethany.

Did he really have a sister? Or more exactly, had he really had a sister?

Part of her wanted to hate him for lying to her all these years, and for the easy, flippant way he had given up the information after he found out about her death. But that relentlessly loyal part that still loved him fiercely had raised its head again, and all she could feel was pity, sadness, and a companionable loss. Technically, this Bethany was Rachel’s sister–in–law. They were family.

Rachel left him to sleep and went out for a walk. She circled the block a couple of times, then walked down to the High Street and glanced into a few shop windows. She didn’t have much money to buy anything, and found herself looking at job advertisements in the window of the Post Office, aware that if Matthew’s books didn’t start to sell better soon she would have no choice. While Matt’s books had been selling well they had enjoyed a degree of comfort, but now, with his sales slumping and with a complete absence of any fight to spur him on, the future looked bleak. She could see herself behind the checkouts that she had once felt a little snobbish towards as she stood there in line, her basket full of the kind of products most people only bought for special occasions, and she realised just how close to a precipice everything stood. Success, wealth, happiness, love, it could all plummet in an instant.

Who was Bethany? Could he really have had a mystery sister? Part of her felt betrayed. Another part felt desperately sorry for him and yet another part wondered just what had happened to him all those years ago to make him hide a sister from her.

Perhaps he would tell her, now the floodgates had opened. She could only hope.

She resisted the urge to drop round to see Liz, her best friend, who lived a couple of streets away, because she knew the revelation would slip out, and right now there was little to tell that wouldn’t bring up more questions she couldn’t yet answer. Instead she headed back to the house, made herself a sandwich for lunch and stared blankly at Australian soap operas for an hour or more while she waited for him to get up.

#

At about half past two she heard him stomping along the upstairs landing, heard him groan and could imagine him rubbing a hand through his tousled hair, wiping sleep from his eyes. She got up and went into the kitchen, filled the kettle and switched it on.

Matthew appeared in the doorway a moment later. He was still wearing the same clothes from that morning.

‘I’ve just put the kettle on. I’ll make you a coffee.’

‘Thanks.’ He grimaced. ‘My head hurts.’

‘Are you all right?’ She made no move towards him. They sometimes still had sex, but there was rarely any tenderness. Otherwise they hardly touched each other anymore. There didn’t seem to be a reason why they should.

‘What do you think? It’s like a bad nightmare. Fuck.’

‘Sorry. I was only asking.’ The kettle clicked off. She turned around and made two mugs of coffee, unable to shake a nervous feeling that grew from him standing behind her and out of sight. Her grip instinctively tightened on the kettle, and she hated herself for thinking that the boiling water would make a useful weapon.

She turned around and handed him one of the cups.

‘No, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have snapped. It’s just that this is a bit of a shock. Christ, my head hurts.’

She reached behind her into their medicine drawer and tossed a packet of Ibuprofen towards him. It slipped through the clumsy fingers of his free hand and fell to the floor. He groaned, put the mug down on the corner of a dresser by the door, and picked up the packet.

‘Here.’ Rachel handed him a glass of water.

Matt pushed two capsules out of the foil packing and gulped them down. He wiped his mouth and handed the empty glass back. ‘Thanks.’

‘Do you want to talk about it?’ Rachel asked. ‘This is a bit of a shock to me too, you know.’

Matt grimaced again, closed his eyes and shook his head. ‘Yes I know, I should have told you –’

‘How long have we been married, Matthew? How long?’

‘Rachel –’

‘How fucking long?’

‘I get your point, okay? Bethany was just . . . just part of a life I wanted to leave behind. Things happened . . . bad things. Things I wanted to forget about, things I ran away from a long time ago. Until my father rang, those things, that time . . . didn’t exist anymore.’

‘But she was your sister!’

‘Huh, you could hardly call her that.’

‘What the hell does that mean?’

He scowled. ‘Fuck. I don’t know. She was sick. She had something wrong with her. Something I can’t explain.’ He scoffed. ‘We weren’t close, let’s put it that way. And it doesn’t really matter now, does it?’

‘Why wouldn’t it?’

‘I don’t know. Look, it’s complicated. Bethany just wasn’t right.’ He looked exasperated, struggling to find the right words. ‘She just wasn’t all there. Just used to sit in her room all day, staring out of the window like some sort of goddamn statue. She didn’t speak, didn’t react to anyone, anything. My father tried all sorts, but nothing could snap her out of it.’ He scratched his head. ‘She was much younger than me, too. She was just a kid when I left. If you want the truth, she scared the hell out of me.’

Rachel ignored this last comment. ‘She was, um, handicapped?’

‘I don’t know. Look, I told you. It’s complicated.’

‘It doesn’t seem you were particularly close to any of your family.’

He put the coffee back on the dresser, hard enough to make some spill over. ‘Just because my family doesn’t ring me every five fucking minutes, Jesus Christ –’

Rachel held up a hand. ‘Matthew, please. I’d just like to know. I’m your wife, remember? How – how did she die?’

Matt’s eyes blazed. ‘He didn’t say, all right? Just because you’re my fucking wife doesn’t mean I have to tell you every goddamn thing about me, Rachel. I don’t like talking about it, and I don’t want to talk about it. Okay?’

Rachel shook her head, lowering her eyes to hide her tears. ‘No Matthew, it’s not okay. But right now I have to go pick the kids up from school and nursery.’ She fumbled in her pocket for the car keys, found the right one, held it in her hand with the point sticking out through her fingers, the rest of the key ring clutched in her palm.

I can’t believe I’m holding it like a weapon.

‘I’ll see you later, Matthew.’ She started past him, the hall so like a walk to freedom she found herself resisting the urge to make a bolt for it. She didn’t think he would ever hit her again, but once she had never thought he would hit her ever.

‘I have to go to the funeral this weekend.’

Rachel stopped dead. She turned to face him. ‘You’re going home?’

‘I guess I have to. I’ll stay in the village, or at Father’s if I have no other choice. I’ll take the Vectra as it’s a long haul, and the Ford’s getting a bit old for that sort of distance.’

‘Oh . . . okay.’ She paused. ‘Do you want us to come with you?’

His reply was instantaneous. ‘No. I guess there’s no point really, is there? It’d just upset the kids, and it’s only a funeral, after all.’

‘It’s your sister’s funeral. I’d say that’s quite important.’

He held her gaze until she looked away. ‘I’ll be better on my own. It’ll only be for a day or so. I’ll probably be back by Sunday evening, or Monday at the latest.’

‘Whatever.’

She turned to go, and felt a hand close over her arm, a rough hand. She froze. Suddenly the key between her fingers seemed so useless, so ineffectual.

‘I’ve dealt with this on my own so far,’ he growled, leaning close. ‘I’ll finish it on my own. Stay out of it.’

Rachel held his gaze, tried hard not to shudder. Tears rose in her eyes, and she wondered how she had ever come to fear the man she had once loved enough to have died for.

‘I’ll be late for the kids.’ She pushed his arm away, and he didn’t resist. She went out the door, not looking back.

#

As he heard the front door slam, Matt turned and flung the half full coffee mug across the kitchen. The mug smashed against the far wall, splashing coffee over the lino and the worktops. He slammed his fist into the door, once, twice, three times, the sound reverberating through the empty house.

‘Fuck it, fuck it, FUCK IT!’ he roared, striking the door with his sore hand one last time.

His curse wasn’t aimed at Rachel. He still loved her; he just wanted to escape this whole sorry mess. He had a book almost finished, one he thought might make them the sort of money he had always dreamed about and break him into the bestseller lists. They could pay off the mortgage and the cars, get the kids some decent Christmas presents for the first time in a couple of years.

Over his career he had a built up a small following, but his last couple of novels had been poorly received and had undersold, and now his fanbase was dwindling. All he needed was a couple of decent reviews and his career might go to a new level, but the new book had sat untouched on his computer’s hard-drive for over a month, and he could feel it slipping away. He generally churned out two new novels every year, and the advance he made from each one kept his family in a state of relative comfort, but if he failed to produce the goods the royalties of his back catalogue wouldn’t see them through another year. He no longer wrote for himself as he had in the beginning. He wrote now to feed his family. He wrote out of necessity.

The fun of writing had gone. His books had became increasingly staler, the same characters and storylines rehashed over and over again, while writer’s block came more frequently now, sometimes lasting months at a time. And when he couldn’t write he had difficulty occupying his time, keeping his restlessness at bay. Restlessness and frustration made him drink. It became a vicious circle: writer’s block made him drink, and drink made it even harder to face that shred of storyline and give it life.

And now this. Bethany. A name he never thought he would hear again.

He would go to the funeral. He would pay his respects. He would speak to his father, even after fourteen years of silence – assuming his father would speak to him, of course – and he would be civil, as civil as he could. And then he would leave.

There would be no one to call him when his father died. He would never have to know. It would be over, finished.

He would return to Rachel next week, and try to save his marriage. He would try to stop drinking, and talk to the children he felt he barely knew.

But would they even be here when he got back?

He would never hurt her again, not ever. That had been a mistake, a stupid drunken mistake.

Hadn’t it?

He squeezed his eyes shut, his mind reeling from the memory.

Had he not felt a certain sense of pleasure as he struck her nagging face, sent her sprawling to the floor clutching at her cheek, all her whining and pestering knocked out of her with one swing of his fist? Did that sense of power not make him feel better, as though he had control over her?

As though he had suddenly become a real man?

He felt a sense of deja vu, and shook his head, hating himself. No.

He was nothing like his father. They were totally separate people.

But were they? Were they really? They had the same blood, after all.

And hadn’t he proved just how alike they were on that long ago night out in the snow?

The night he had left his family behind?

(the thick, gnarly branch crashing down until it snapped)

(NO!)

He ignored his headache and went over to the sink, reaching into the murky water and pulling out a cloth. He had better clean up the mess.

Otherwise it will just provoke another argument, and when you argue now, after that night, you feel a latent, smoldering power, the strength to crush words with your fists, opinions with your strong, wiry fingers. You do, don’t you? Admit it.

On his hands and knees he scrubbed at the lino, using Dettox to remove the stains. He had stuffed the broken fragments of the cup down past the empty cans and cereal packets to the bottom of the bin. Luckily it was an old cup, not one of Rachel’s favorites.

No.

I hate it. We’re nothing alike. I’m nothing like him.

And yet he couldn’t deny that tingle of pleasure he had felt as Rachel fell to the floor. It was always there; like a switch at the back of his brain, waiting to be turned on. A switch he had only just found, and like a new toy, ached to play with.

###

Bethany’s Diary, October 24th, 1984

Hello Diary, hello friend. Went out into the woods today, boo boo boo! Spooks and spooks, but they left me alone. I think they like me. I wanted to find Mummy. I see her watching me through the window at night, and I know she’s out there in the woods somewhere. Daddy tells me not to go, tells me to stay indoors, but one day I’ll wait until she comes then follow her back when she leaves, and find out where she lives now she’s gone away from us. Daddy said she went to the stars, but she must have come back down, just to say goodbye. That’s what I think, anyway.

She has such beautiful eyes. I think she brought back two of the stars with her.

3

She let Luke sleep in on Saturday, but Sarah got up to say goodbye to her dad. She clutched at Rachel’s hand, wearing mittens to fight off the cold as Matt slung his cases into the back of the Vectra, wearing a thick coat himself and a scowl from yet another hangover. As he slammed down the boot and turned around, Sarah suddenly rushed forward across the driveway to wrap her arms around him. She hugged him fiercely, and for a moment Rachel recognised in his eyes a flash of love for his daughter that seemed so rare from Matt these days. Rachel had told her that Daddy was going on a business trip. She had no reason to tell her otherwise.

Matt kissed his daughter goodbye then gave Rachel a tentative kiss on the cheek. Rachel had to close her eyes and concentrate hard just to stop herself from flinching. She felt relieved when he climbed into the car.

As Matt adjusted the seat and strapped himself in, Rachel wrapped her arms protectively around Sarah’s chest, hugging the little girl to her. At three, Sarah still seemed oblivious to the tangible miasma that had been so prevalent in the house over the last few months, something Luke had clearly picked up. She sighed. Luke worried her. Although only at the start of his second year at school, his teachers had told her about a change in him over the past few months, and Rachel would bet it had something to do with herself and Matt. She knew young children were as astute as most adults, often more so when the something concerned their parents. She didn’t want his schoolwork to suffer because of them.

The engine spluttered into life as the front window wound down. ‘I’ll see you either Sunday or Monday, then,’ Matt said, leaning out of the car.

Rachel just nodded.

‘Bye, Daddy.’

He smiled. ‘See ya, sweetie.’

Sarah flapped both her mittens as the car pulled out of the drive. The horn honked once in response, then the Vectra turned out of their cul–de–sac and quickly disappeared from sight. The engine sound lingered a few seconds longer, before disappearing into the distant rumble of the traffic on the highway just outside of town.

Rachel hugged Sarah tighter to her.

‘Take care, Matt,’ she whispered. ‘See you soon.’ Then as an afterthought, she added: ‘I hope.’

She reached down and lifted Sarah up into her arms. The girl breathed icy breath into her face and smiled.

‘Come on, honey, let’s get you warmed up,’ Rachel said, grinning back.

‘Okay, Momma,’ her daughter replied, and touched a mitten to her mother’s nose, red from the cold.

4

Matt’s hangover made the drive worse than it should have been, but he stopped after an hour at a Road Chef for a coffee and a bacon roll, and afterwards it wasn’t so bad. His heart still ached, but his head felt a little better.

It was a long drive from their home in Lancashire right down to south Devon, about three hundred miles as the crow flew but with a handful more for the maze of country lanes at the other end. He followed the motorway down through Manchester and Birmingham, sat in traffic for an hour on the M4 just outside Bristol, and by five o’clock the roads had become familiar. He began to recognize the villages he passed through, the farms, the rolling moors and the patches of woodland. Fourteen years had elapsed, but everything still looked the same. Nothing changed in places like this; here the world was frozen, locked in time. Peer through the car window and you looked back into the past, to a world where the same seasons turn over and over in a never-ending cycle.

Only the people age.

And, as Matt thought of them, his own trepidation grew.

Fourteen years. Long years now that he looked at it; fourteen long years without even a phone call until Rachel’s shout had broken through the painful silence of his hangover on Tuesday. Linking him back to his father, his sister, his home, so long forgotten but now dragged up like a bloated corpse from the sea.

He liked to think he hadn’t missed them, but maybe deep down he had. He had tried to forget about them, had stored them away at the back of his mind beyond his family and his books and everyday life until the memories had started to fade to just an outline, a pen groove left on paper after the ink had evaporated in the sun.

The rusty sign that had once grudgingly announced Tamerton to the outside world had been replaced by a shiny blue one, along with the words Welcome to: and four silhouetted deer facing each other from the corners. But it might as well have been that same battered sign he used to throw pieces of gravel at on the way home from school. It still sat in the ditch beside the road, still half obscured by the hedgerow, hawthorn and bramble branches tearing at its surface as though to pull it down out of sight. The village didn’t want to be seen, didn’t want to be announced. It never had. There was no reason why generations of underlying feeling should change for a new sign.

He noticed the approach road had a new layer of tarmac, the cracks and potholes that had caught him out on his bicycle so many times leveled out at last. The hedges were still overgrown, and the cottage of old Mr. Williamson, the first house on this side of the village, was still painted that smoky yellow hue that had always reminded Matt of sickness, the colour of your face moments before you threw up.

But the grassy space where Mr. Williamson’s old, broken-down Skoda had stood on bricks for as long as Matt could remember had been cleared away to make way for a new conservatory, and now a shiny new Honda stood in the drive.

The village seemed much as he remembered. The same tight, cobbled streets, the same overhanging Victorian-style eaves of many of the two-storey houses. The pub was still there, as was the village store, though he had noticed a small Co–op just a few miles back over the moor. The village green still backed on to the church and the small primary school where he had spent the first years of his education was still nestled amongst the trees on the far side of Tamerton.

He pulled into one of three available parking spaces outside the only Bed & Breakfast. Although unsure whether it would be open in November or not, he couldn’t bear the thought of staying with his father. Not alone, not in that big old house. Even as a child, with voices and footsteps echoing through the corridors, it had seemed permanently deserted. The thought of seeing his father again still filled him with a sense of dread, and even now, as a grown man he couldn’t banish some of the memories of that place. Faced with its looming presence, he felt like a timid child again.

He went in through an ill–fitting door which he had difficulty closing, and approached an old woman behind a reception desk who was reading a Daphne De Maurier novel. Sensing his presence, she looked up at him through thin, silver-rimmed spectacles.

‘Have you got any singles available?’ he asked her. ‘Until tomorrow, possibly Monday.’

She closed the book: Jamaica Inn. Apt, he thought.

‘Yes, yes . . . I think so. Hang on a moment.’ Her finger traced over a booking log book. She flicked over a couple of pages. ‘Oops, yes, here we are. That’s fine. Mr. –?’

‘Cassidy. Matthew Cassidy.’

The woman began to fill in a new entry in the log book, then her pen froze, his name seared off by a jarring stroke which cut the entry box in two like a spade through wet soil.

‘Matthew . . .’

She looked up at him, and he felt a pang of recognition. The woman had aged a lot in the years he had been away, but behind the folds of skin and the liver spots that mottled her face there was no doubt.

‘Mrs. Carter?’ His Year Six primary school teacher. ‘Is that you?’

‘Matthew Cassidy!’ As though to see him more clearly, she sucked her chin back into the jowls of her neck, reminding him of a farmyard hen. ‘Well, haven’t you grown up! You’re the image of your father.’

‘Why are you –’

‘Oh, I retired some years back, poor heart and all that. When old Mr. Bellray died, this place went on the market cheap, I think to keep it with local people. My Arthur and I – God rest his soul – thought it would provide a nice little income to keep us going.’ She lifted her glasses and rubbed her eyes. ‘It gets a little tough on my own, but in the summer I get in a couple of staff. Are you back for –’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m so sorry for your loss, Matthew. It’s tragic, terribly tragic. Such a beautiful girl. So . . . angelic. To go in such a way –’

Matt was keen to avoid this conversation. How much she knew about his past he didn’t know, but he did know that in small towns people liked to talk. He wanted to keep his involvement in the place as minimal as possible.

‘Do you have the keys to my room, Mrs. Carter? I’ve had a long drive, and I’d like to get settled in.’

‘Oh, yes, yes of course.’ She fumbled in a drawer beneath the desk. ‘Room six, top of the stairs. It looks out towards the hill. It’s a nice room, and we’re not all that busy.’

‘I’ll get my cases.’

He left her standing behind the desk, still prattling on to his back. So, she had set the tone for his visit. Forgotten faces returning to haunt him. Mrs. Carter was nice enough, but within an hour, the whole village would know that, after fourteen years, Matthew Cassidy was back.

###

Bethany’s Diary, November 15th 1984

Christmas is coming, whoopee!! I can’t wait for the ground to be layered with snow. Daddy hates it because it makes his car difficult to drive, but I don’t think the car minds much. It looks quite warm and snug beneath that fluffy white blanket. I like to play out in the snow, though no one ever plays with me, because I always play at night. It’s nicer then, because it gets all shiny under the moon and the trees give it neat patterns. I’m hoping that next time Mummy comes she’ll leave some tracks . . .

5

There was no such familiar face in the village store, and Matt bought himself a bottle of Bell’s Malt in gleeful anonymity. He had been desperate for a drink all day, and as he sat at the window of his room and looked out across the churchyard to the fields and forest beyond, to the lane, partly obscured by unchecked foliage, that led up the hill and through the trees to his father’s house, he took a first swig from the bottle. He felt its scolding warmth illuminate him and begin to dissolve his fears like nothing else ever had. A little more and he might feel ready to face his father.

Through the top of the trees beyond the church he thought he could just see the uppermost peak of his father’s roof, thought it was difficult to tell for certain in the fading light. Perhaps a few years ago the whole upper floor would have been visible, but the trees had grown up a little since then. No one would have cut them; his father had never respected prying eyes.

Tomorrow, his sister would be buried. The last link to that place, besides his father. He would have to wait to find out where the funeral would be, though. Matthew would prefer to see her in the churchyard he could see now, in the centre of the village, amongst real people, but suspected his father would want otherwise.

At the back of their house a path led down into the woods. It had always seemed overgrown, even though his father had regularly cut the undergrowth back to clear a way through, especially in the springtime when brambles and bracken sprouted almost overnight. The path led down to a stream at the valley’s bottom, to a little crossing made of heaped stones, like a child’s dam. It then rose up through the trees and the undergrowth on the other side, almost to the summit of the hill, where it opened out into a clearing.

Matt had been there countless times during his childhood, exploring, storming his enemy’s stronghold, hunting invisible aliens. Picking his way through the overgrown entrance into the tumbledown building itself, between the cross beams of the collapsed roof, up on to the raised preacher’s platform at the back, to stand victorious. The old ruined chapel at the back of the clearing had been the site of so many of his childhood fantasies and adventures; for a long time a placed he had loved, as a boy’s base camp, as a place for solitude, and for refuge.

Until they had buried his mother there.

Matt swigged from the bottle until he thought he would choke.

6

By seven o’clock a light drizzle had begun to fall, and its presence helped to sober Matt up as he made his way across from the Bed & Breakfast towards the lane leading up to his father’s house. He cut across the village green and through the churchyard, stepping among the lichen-covered gravestones of his ancestors, their names lost now to time. He soon regretted it as the soggy ground quickly soaked his shoes, but at least the whiskey gave him an otherness that helped him forget the discomfort.

Two five-foot granite gateposts marked the entrance to his father’s lane, a gravel trail leading blindly up into the dark. Once, two imposing stone gargoyles had guarded the entrance, horrible squat things like mutated cats with short, hooked horns and contorted, mocking smiles. One had been stolen, for reasons unknown, when Matt had been ten or eleven, and never recovered. The other had been knocked from its perch when a drunk driver had careened into the right-side gatepost a couple of years later. The gatepost had been re–erected but no one had ever bothered to replace the gargoyle, and it had stayed face down in the undergrowth at the foot of the hedge where it had fallen. He could see it now, in the glow cast by a street lamp behind him, carpeted with moss and partially buried under years of decomposing vegetation. At some point someone had come along and kicked it further along the road, and it now lay a good ten feet from the lane entrance, just short of where a black Nissan car had been parked tight in against the hedge.

Matt frowned. There were no houses close by, and he wondered if his father had a visitor. He didn’t want to intrude (not an excuse not an excuse) and for a moment thought about turning back. The pub was just a street away. But no, his father’s house was fronted by a wide courtyard, so any guests would park there. The car must belong to someone inside the church. Grudgingly, he turned back towards the dark lane entrance.

As he began the steep climb towards his father’s house, he found, even now, after so many years, that he could skip between the puddles and the potholes like an old pro, his instincts leading him where the obscured moonlight could not. Just as he had done so many thousands of times as a child, he felt he could run this lane blind, even if now his poor physical condition might resent it.

Trees loomed on both sides and the forest he had once taken for granted became a thing of menace to his acute writer’s mind. Every rustle of undergrowth potentially yielded a man, or a dog, or something perhaps worse, something that he could only identify at the back of his mind as a foreboding, unwelcome presence. His father had scheduled the funeral for tomorrow, and by Monday Matt wanted to be gone, back to Lancashire, the kids and Rachel. Monday at the very latest. If he could stay sober, he wanted to be gone by tomorrow night.

You can’t just leave like that, you know you can’t.

The thought hit him like a hard slap across the face, and for a moment he stumbled, catching his footing just in time to avoid tumbling towards the puddles hidden in the dark at his feet. Just a thought, just a stupid, irrational thought, but it had snagged him like the barb of a fisherman’s hook. His very presence back in Tamerton had opened up a whole can of long forgotten emotions that would take time to sort, time he didn’t have.

Time he didn’t want to give.

He should have stayed away. They didn’t need him, hadn’t for fourteen years. His sister wouldn’t know he had come; she was dead, after all.

And what sort of reception could he expect from his father? Ian Cassidy had made the call to him – only Heaven knew how he had found Matt’s number – but how much of that had been as a duty? How much did he really want to see his son?

Welcome home son. Welcome home, little me.

‘No!’ Matt snarled through gritted teeth, and wished he had brought the bottle with him.

The lane reached the brow of the hill, opening out on to a wide gravel courtyard. Opposite, through the sheeting rain which glittered beneath two large spotlights on either side of a wide porch, stood the house.

Home.

No! Not home. Home is Lancashire. Home is with my family. This is the past. And what’s in the past is gone, might as well have never been. I don’t need you.

Why did you have to call?

It rose like something out of Dracula, four storeys high, dating originally, Matt thought, from sometime around the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries but restored numerous times since then. From its recessed entrances to the balustrade that ran all the way around the steeply pointed roof, it displayed many of the Gothic features that so typified that period, even down to some of the smaller windows which were made from a number of decorated panels fitted together. Many of these had long since been replaced, but especially around the back of the house Matt remembered how some of the windows had been constantly grimy from the dirt and bird mess caught in the elaborate designs.

On the right-hand side of the building was a two storey annex which housed the garage and a clutch of storerooms overhead. Not that they had ever needed storage space; only the three of them had lived there permanently, though sometimes his uncle had overnighted and a maid had stayed over to clean and launder from Tuesday to Thursday. Matt doubted he had even seen all of the rooms, and often wondered how his family had ended up living in such a monstrous place.

By his teens he had known the house had been in his family for generations, his father’s income generated from land rents and the occasional sale of a patch of ground for development. There was a title somewhere in his family; Lord or Baron, maybe, though his father had never used it. He had a vague memory of overhearing his grandfather being referred to with a title, but both grandparents on his father’s side had died during his early childhood; their graves were in the churchyard in the village. Those on his mother’s side had always been strangely absent. She had never spoken of them, and he had rarely asked; perhaps she had had her own family rift to deal with. If she were alive now he thought she might understand how he felt.

Looking up at that huge building, he realised his father was sitting on a goldmine. With lands covering several miles of forests, moors and farmland, his father’s worth was immeasurable. Even had Bethany still been alive Matt would have stood in line to inherit enough to put aside ideas of working for the rest of his days, and probably those of his family. Even if his father had written him out of the will he still had rights. He would have gotten a substantial portion at least.

I don’t want it. I want to forget this place, it’s all I’ve ever wanted. There’s too much blood here, too much darkness.

A couple of lights shone from ground floor windows, but curtains were closed against the night. Something – a dim light – suddenly flashed in one of the upper rooms, and Matthew jumped. Gone as quickly, probably an internal hall light being switched off, yet it still spooked him, sending a shiver down his whiskey–numbed spine.

The moon cleared momentarily, exposing a sleeping hulk parked on the gravel outside the garage, similar to the old open–backed truck his father had owned before, but a newer model. He heard the sound of a dog barking a long way off, and he turned on his heels, looking nervously back across the courtyard as he made his way across to the house.

He didn’t give himself time to bottle out, stepping into the deep shadow beneath the arched recess and thumping hard on the heavy oak door.

Sometimes they come back. Well, Dad, here I am.

‘Dad? Dad!’

No answer. He reached out for the huge, brass door handle.

BOOM!

Matt instinctively dropped to his knees as a gunshot echoed out across the courtyard, sending sleeping birds skyward in a cacophony of shrieks and terrified calls. The dog began to bark again.

‘Fuck this,’ Matt muttered, picking himself up, and starting back across the courtyard. I should never have come.

Fear gripped him and he began to run back across the courtyard, feet splashing through puddles left in the gravel by car tyres. By the time a second gunshot sounded from somewhere deep in amongst the trees, Matt had lost all sense of reason and had begun sprinting for the head of the lane as fast as he could. He didn’t care that he would have been safer under the cover of his father’s porch, he just wanted to be away from that place.

He turned down between the trees, breathing hard, his shoes and the lower part of his trousers soaked. Ahead of him he could see the lane entrance, illuminated by the churchyard street lamp. It looked so far away.

And then a figure stepped out of the trees, directly in front of him.

Matt cried out and tried to turn, but lost his footing on the loose gravel and instead sprawled forward, his face striking the rough ground and his hands landing in a puddle that slopped muddy water back over him. He shook his head, dazed from the fall, and started to rise, only to find the huge, bulky figure looming over him. Something was thrust towards Matt’s face, something long and metallic. He flinched.

A bright light blinded him. He lifted a hand to cover his eyes and a second later the torchlight flicked off.

‘Huh. Well, I never . . .’

The torchlight flicked on again, this time a little to the right so that it cast a glow bright enough to illuminate them both. Matt lifted his head, saw first a pair of old, worn hiking boots, then dirty rainproof trousers and finally a long shotgun in the stranger’s other hand. He froze for a second, tried to raise his hands, then saw two dead pheasants hanging from the man’s belt.

Lines scored the man’s stoic, hardened face, and the hair beneath the cap had undoubtedly greyed. But the eyes, a deep brown, still shone with a mixture of darkness and light which terrified Matt even more because he recognised them.

A hand reached out to pull him up. ‘A little wet, aren’t you?’

Mat brushed himself down, although it made no difference. Soaked head to foot, his cheek and hands throbbed with a sore warmth.

He had prepared perhaps a hundred different introductions. None of them came.

‘I –’

‘Don’t worry, we’ll get you cleaned up. Just thought I’d get us something a little fresh for dinner, and I’ve always been rather fond of hunting by torchlight. You were staying for dinner, weren’t you?’

The torchlight flicked off. In the darkness the man’s expression was unreadable. Then he gave a short chuckle. ‘How are you, son?’

‘A little wet, Dad. And I think I’ve busted my lip.’

The man laughed, a thick, hearty sound like a roaring fire. ‘Let’s get inside, out of the rain. We’ll soon get you cleaned up.’

Matt let himself be steered back towards the house. His father held his shoulder with one hand, supporting Matt until the courtyard came into view and the ground leveled out.

Matt’s sense of foreboding grew as they approached the house. In the upper floor window, the rogue light flashed on then off again.

7

‘Of course he’s coming back, Luke.’ Rachel frowned, running a hand through her son’s hair. She forced a smile. ‘Don’t be so silly. Is that what’s been bothering you?’

Luke looked away from her, his face puckering up in the way that children’s sometimes do, as though he had done something wrong and been found out.

‘It’s okay, sweetie, I’ll understand.’

‘All you and Daddy do is shouting.’ Luke began to pick at his fingernails, face red, tears imminent. ‘Like the other night –’

Oh God. He hadn’t heard them, surely? She had been certain the children had been in bed, asleep.

The night Matt hit her.

The door had been closed; they couldn’t have seen.

‘Luke, honey –’

‘Mummy, do you and Daddy still love each other?’

Their house’s previous owners – an elderly couple Rachel had only met once, on the day they had come for a viewing – had built the kitchen as an extension, and had knocked through the wall of the old kitchen to increase the size of the lounge, to cope with a horde of grandchildren, she had assumed. The old couple had left the old door attached, the old back door.

Matt and Rachel had never got around to replacing it, just stripped it down and given it a lick of paint.

The keyhole was still there.

‘Mummy, have you sent Daddy away?’

‘Luke, honey . . .’ She wrapped her arms around him, pulling him tight to her. ‘Daddy’s just gone to have a think for a while . . .’

She felt her son crying quietly into her arms, hiding his sobs, even at such a young age embarrassed to cry in front of her. She stroked his hair, and after a moment realised she was crying too.

###

Bethany’s Diary, November 28th, 1984

It snowed bad today, diary. Woohoo! I went out, made a snowman, gave him coals for eyes, a carrot for a nose and everything, just like in my fairystory books. He looked so nice. But then Matty came and kicked him down, stamped Ralph – that was his name, Ralph – all over the ground, until only his eyes were left, looking up at me, really sad. I think he wanted to speak but the gravel I got for his mouth was all over the snow, so he could only go ‘jobba jobba jobba!!’ which I couldn’t understand.

Mummy came again tonight. I pretended to be asleep, but watched her from under the covers. She sat by my window, watching me back. She smiled, and it was beautiful. Mummy is soooo beautiful, like a princess in the picture book Daddy gave me. Then she got up real quick, and disappeared, and by the time I got to the window, she had gone.

I was about to go back to bed, to sleep and dream of Mummy watching over me, when I saw a man standing down in the snow. It was Daddy. He had his cap on, and was holding his gun. He must have been out looking for foxes. They get the chickens sometimes.

8

When Matt came down the stairs into the kitchen, he found his father standing at the big twin stove, stirring some unidentifiable broth with a wooden ladle. He still wore the same clothes as before, even the waterproof trousers, though he had removed the boots and stood them in a corner, mud–caked, dripping on to a mat.

His father glanced back at him. ‘Feel better?’

Matt nodded. ‘Yeah, thanks.’

He did. The shower had warmed him, taken the bite out of the chill and the edge off his whiskey head. He had also had the opportunity to pick the grit out of his hands, elbows and cheeks. They still stung, but the wounds weren’t deep. They would heal in a couple of days.

‘You look pretty well, considering. Should have been a bit more careful in the dark. Could have really hurt yourself. The clothes fit all right?’

Matt looked down at himself. He wore a pair of jeans and a faded Reel Deal fishing T–shirt, clothes he hadn’t seen for fourteen years.

‘I can’t believe you kept all my old clothes.’

His father continued to stir. ‘There’s plenty of room. No reason to throw anything away. And I guess I never knew whether someday you might return.’ He stopped stirring, but didn’t turn round. ‘You can’t have grown that much since you were seventeen.’

‘Not much, I suppose.’

His father took a large, foot–long pepper grinder from amongst a clutter of utensils and began to grind into the broth. ‘So tell me. How have you been?’

‘Okay. Getting on with life.’

‘A woman answered the phone. Are you –’

‘Rachel. Her name’s Rachel. We’ve been married for ten years.’

‘Oh. Do you have –’

‘Two. One of each. Luke’s five, Sarah three. They’re great.’ Matt’s heart seemed to sigh. He wished he could tell them that. And Rachel, for that matter.

He remembered that familiar surge of power, that almost orgasmic feeling of strength, of dominance . . . could see his hand lifting to strike –

NO! Get out of my fucking head!

His father continued his metronomic stirring, churning the broth around and around. An aroma of cooking meats and spices had filled the kitchen. Matt took a seat on the opposite side of the room to his father, near to a radiator, one that hadn’t been there before, he remembered. The cold still lingered, despite the dry clothes.

‘I’m sure they’re little angels. Just like their mother.’

‘What?’

His father sighed. ‘Don’t get defensive. I just meant that she sounded lovely on the phone. It sounds like you’ve done well for yourself.’

‘I have.’ I have. Rachel, I love you. ‘Do you want to see them?’

Matt saw his father start. ‘Oh, yes, of course. There’s nothing I want more.’

‘I meant I have a photograph.’ Matt slipped his hand into his pocket and pulled out his wallet.

‘Oh.’ Ian Cassidy sounded disappointed.

Matt pulled out the tiny pocket–sized photo of Rachel and the kids and took it over to his father. He had taken it himself a couple of years ago, on a family trip to Alton Towers. Rachel stood with a baby Sarah in her arms, while Luke, three, hung from her arm, a big grin on his face. The last time they had been out together, so far as Matt could remember. It had been a good day. He had got soaked on the boating lake when he had tried to show off in the little rower and fallen in.

Ian took the photo, stared at it for a while. He didn’t turn round. ‘They’re lovely, Matthew,’ he said at last. He handed the photo back without looking up.

Matthew sat back down. His father stirred on in silence for a few minutes, seemingly devoting all his concentration to the cooking pot, but Matt knew the stew was the last thing on his father’s mind. Like himself, Ian was struggling with a sudden wave of nostalgia, and Matt was glad his father didn’t turn round. He didn’t want Ian to see the dampness in his own eyes.

‘And your career?’ Ian said at last, to break the silence. ‘You write books, don’t you?’

‘Yes . . . how did you –’

His father shrugged. He glanced back at Matthew and smiled. ‘I don’t spend all my time in this crumbling old castle, you know. I do go out, go to bookshops sometimes. There can’t be that many Matthew Cassidys in this world, can there? Not so many with dark hair and eyes like yours. I recognised your pen picture immediately.’

He sprinkled some more herbs into the pan. ‘I enjoyed The Last Tears of Summer greatly. I thought Bessie Parker was a fine lead character. Very powerful, the way she handled losing her child.’

Matt was surprised at his father’s knowledge of his books, but he shrugged. ‘Thanks . . . I always thought she was a little cardboard. Her character lacked the strength throughout that I gave her near the end. I thought . . . I guess practice makes perfect.’

‘I suppose sometimes certain circumstances bring great things out of people.’

‘I guess so.’

His father covered over the pan and put the ladle down. He took a chair nearby and sat facing Matt across the room.

‘Another twenty minutes, that’s all. Need to tender up the pheasant meat a little. Tough old bird, but nice if you catch young ‘uns. Bit late in the season, but nothing a little boiling and some coriander won’t fix.’

They sat in an awkward silence for a few minutes. Matthew picked at a fingernail, while his father seemed more interested in checking his watch than making conversation. Finally, Ian said, ‘It’s good to see you again, son. I guess it’s been a while, eh? I suppose a lot of things have happened to you, but you haven’t changed all that much.’

‘Not that much.’ Oh, I have. I’ve changed a great deal, haven’t I?

‘Bethany would have liked to have seen you again.’

Matt felt a sudden surge of anger rising up from his stomach. ‘I doubt Bethany would have known who I was.’

‘I’m sure, in her way she would have, son. In her way.’

Matt looked away. ‘Whatever.’

‘I know a lot passed between us, but for her sake –’

‘I don’t want to go over this right now. Just leave it where it is. In the goddamn past!’

His father flinched as if stung, and his face seemed to wither, as though someone had attached a tube to him and drained out his remaining years. He looked back again, eyes sparkling beneath the kitchen lights.

‘I’d better get out of these clothes,’ he said, standing up. ‘Mind the stew for a minute, will you?’ Without waiting for an answer he stood up and went out through a door that led into a porch.

Matt stirred the stew, churned the chunks of meat and vegetables over and over, watching the excess water boiling off. He gazed down into the thick brown depths, wondering if they might clear and offer him a way out of this mess.

His father returned, wearing faded black jeans and an old green pullover, one Matt remembered from his childhood.

‘Let me take that,’ he said, moving in close to Matt, and for a moment their arms touched. Matt looked up into his father’s wizened face and almost managed to smile. Not quite, for his father drew back, nose wrinkling suddenly, eyes narrowing.

‘Started drinking, have we?’

Matt held his father’s gaze. ‘It helps, sometimes.’

His father scoffed. ‘A lot of things are supposed to help, son. Very few of them do.’

‘What would you know?’

‘More than you think, son. More than you think. I’ve tried most of them myself, from time to time. To help me get through . . . things. In the end, it’s all in your head. You can’t hide it. Either it goes away of its own accord, or it doesn’t.’

‘I don’t drink much.’

His father said nothing, just set about ladling the stew out into bowls. ‘Get some bread from the pantry, son. There’s a fresh loaf out there.’

Matt went through a small door beside the stove, into a large walk–in larder. Food of all kinds adorned the shelves, from sides of smoked beef and pork to Heinz Baked Beans and Tesco’s tinned curries. Enough food to last one man a whole summer. He took a loaf of bread out of a small cupboard and carried it back through to the kitchen.

His father had put the lid back on the leftover stew and turned off the stove. Matt followed him up a set of stairs into a dining room which looked out on to the back garden of the house. Although now shrouded in darkness, Matt could still discern the patchwork of lawns and shrubbery on three or four different levels where he had played so contentedly as a small boy. Hundreds of times he had fought his way up through the outposts and stockades, a lone Indian renegade fighting against the might of the cowboy army, in an attempt to conquer the huge looming castle at the top of the lawn.

Happy, happy days. So contented, unaware of so much.

Beyond the furthest lawn, too dark to see but he could sense it out there, waiting, was the path that led to the chapel, and his mother.

They took seats on opposite sides of the dining table. Matt ripped the bread in two, and handed half to his father. For a while they ate in silence.

‘You still make a good stew, Dad,’ Matt said after a few minutes, speaking around a hunk of soggy bread.

‘Well, I thought you’d want proper food. No doubt you live off fast food and all that other crap city folk eat these days.’

‘Well, I don’t eat stew too often, no.’

‘Pheasant’s much nicer than chicken. Chicken’s far too dry. You have to soak it for hours, and it still comes out like rubber.’

‘I guess.’

They lapsed into silence again. Matt was starving and finished some time before his father, who seemed to deliberate on every bite. Matt looked around the room, at the old paintings of anonymous strangers on the walls, the chandeliers hung above them, the tall dresser near the door which displayed a set of crockery he didn’t think they had ever used. Not while he had lived here, at any rate.

So much time passed, so little changed.

‘Shall we go through to the lounge for a while?’ his father asked, finishing up the last of his stew. When Matt nodded, Ian said, ‘Okay, you go on. I’ll just take these to the kitchen.’ He piled up the empty bowls and carried them out.

Matt went through into the living room, a cavernous room with bookshelves along two walls and a wide hearth on the other. The grate was empty, he saw, and wondered why the house seemed so warm. Then he spotted another radiator sticking out from behind the sofa nearest the front wall. Matt smiled. His father must have had a system installed. So, some things changed after all.

He took a seat, and sat with hands on lap, patiently waiting for his father, feeling more like a visitor than he had ever thought he could.

A book lay next to him on the sofa, open about midway through and lain out cover up to keep the place. Matt stared in surprise.

Bodies of Life. A novel about a serial killer who murdered beautiful people because of taunts about his appearance at school. Matt’s first book. He had tried to make the central character, Sharman O’Hearn, a victim, tried to make his readers understand why his character had killed so many people out of sheer jealousy, which he considered the fault at the heart of so much of humanity. He had always thought he had done a good job, and for once had been pleased with himself.

The copy was a first edition. To the best of Matt’s knowledge, only about three hundred were ever printed. He must have about half of them himself, which made this book rare indeed.

‘I bought it some years back,’ his father said from the doorway, making Matt jump. ‘I’m afraid I’ve only just started to read it. Took me a while to get around to it. I started it Tuesday, in fact.’

The day of the phone call.

Matt turned the book over in his hands, and the front cover fell back. His hands froze, and he gulped in horror, almost dropping the book. He felt like someone had injected his blood with ice.

Written on the inside front cover, in Matt’s own hand:

To Ian,
best wishes,

Matt Cassidy.

‘It’s – it’s – it’s signed,’ he stammered. He looked accusingly at his father. ‘Where did you get this?’

His father smiled sadly. ‘I’m sorry. I just wanted to see you again.’

Matt shivered. Someone had walked across his grave, their boots leaving deep imprints. Suddenly the walls had eyes, and the hum of the central heating was the whispering of ghosts, beneath him, behind him, all around him.

His father rubbed at one eye. From the distance between them across the sizable room, Matt was unable to tell if his father had wiped away a tear or not.

‘I doubt you remember. I had a beard at the time, kind of unkempt, and was wearing a hat. The queue must have been enormous. I expect we all looked the same after an hour or two of scribbling in books. Blackwells. Top of the High Street, Exeter. January, 1994.’

Matt remembered. Not his father, of course, but he remembered Exeter. Over two hundred people had turned up, by far the largest crowd he had ever seen. Book signings had been a relatively new experience for him, in fact he had only been part way through his first tour, and the number of people waiting in the cold to talk to Matt Cassidy: novelist had terrified him. Had he known his appeal would quickly dwindle with the publication of subsequent novels, he would have savored it more. As it was, on seeing the crowd, all he had thought to do was scribble his name down as fast as possible and get the hell out of there.

Or to the pub, he seemed to remember now.

‘I used “Ian” because I reckoned “Dad” was a bit of a giveaway,’ his father continued, flashing a wry smile. ‘I didn’t want to disrupt anything for you. We’ve not spoken in so long for a reason.’

Matt looked up at Ian Cassidy, his father, and frowned. For the first time since this whole sorry mess began, he didn’t feel anger, or fear, or hatred. Only a deep, bitter sadness.

His father went to a corner, flipped open a dresser cabinet. He pulled out two glasses and a bottle of Glenfiddich. ‘Drink?’

‘Yeah, thanks.’

He poured two generous measures, set them down on a coffee table and took a chair across from Matt: the old battered leather swing–back Matt remembered from childhood. Still, he saw, his father’s favorite. It groaned as his father sat down.

Matt clutched at his drink a little too eagerly, scooping it up and taking a deep swallow, feeling the burn of the liquid as it coursed down his throat.

His father frowned.

‘No hurry, son. Got plenty of bottles where that came from. Can drink all night, if that’s what you want.’

Matt’s eyes narrowed. ‘Don’t lecture me, Dad.’

His father scoffed and sipped his drink. ‘Not much chance of that. I seem to remember lecturing you before. Don’t you? Didn’t get me very far, did it?’

(Until you’re still, I’ll hit you until you’re still)

(NO!)

(the branch crashing down until it snapped)

(until it snapped)

Matt looked away, down into the golden depths of his glass.

‘I’m not asking you to apologize, son. I don’t think I deserve it. I didn’t prove much of a role model for you.’

‘Leave it in the past, Dad. I’m here for Bethany’s funeral. That’s all.’

Ian Cassidy sighed. ‘I know. But sometimes I wish –’

‘You’ll always be my father, Dad, whether I like it or not.’ He finished his whiskey. ‘And I’ll always be your son.’

Ian Cassidy chuckled. ‘I guess so.’

‘So let’s not get too sentimental.’ Matt tilted his glass, wondering if there were enough drips left for one final sip. His face had attained the comforting warmth of closeness to an open flame. He smiled vacantly, feeling the buzz growing in his head. ‘I could do with a refill, after all.’

His father ignored the veiled question. ‘You want to see her?’

Matt froze. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Bethany. Would you like to see her? See what she looks like now?’

‘She’s here?’ A shiver rippled through him as though someone had left an outside door ajar and a winter draft had crept in. He felt drunk. The world swirled around him. His father’s face seemed to blur, loose distinction.

Ian nodded, smiling. ‘She’ll always be here, Matthew. Part of her will never leave. Sometimes I don’t like to think of her as dead. I like to think of her as just being upstairs, sleeping, perhaps.’

Matt was lost for words. Surely they didn’t have the body here, upstairs? That sort of thing was illegal, wasn’t it? It happened in his books, just as it had in Conan Doyle’s, Poe’s, even in Dickens’. It was allowed to happen in books. His head spun.

‘You don’t have to, I just thought, it’s been so long, you might want to know what your little sister looks like now, refresh your memories a little.’ He paused, then said: ‘You were gone a long time, after all.’

Matt felt tired, but forced a reply, forced himself to sit up in the chair. ‘Well, okay.’

He hadn’t told Rachel how Bethany had died. Couldn’t. He could only remember his sister as the shy, reclusive little girl who’d inhabited the rooms near to his, at the back of the house, overlooking the garden and the woods beyond. She had terrified him as a child, the pale, ghostly little thing he would sometimes find wandering about the house at night, or watching him from the window as he returned from school, her eyes like pools of Heaven waiting to absorb him. Pretty, angelic, as Mrs. Carter had said, though of course he had assumed that she meant now. However, even as a child Bethany had been something born of the woods and the hills, something natural, pure. With hair the copper brown of the tree boughs and skin the colour of pearls, she should have been beautiful. But somehow her disability made her hideous.

Matt shivered again, remembering.

Bethany had been mute.

Even now Matt had to remind himself how that statement wasn’t manifestly true. She could have talked – there was nothing wrong with her vocal chords according to doctors – she just didn’t. Wouldn’t. Not a sound. As though she had never really been there at all, just the soul of a girl trapped between two different worlds.

She had been wraithlike, insubstantial; flesh and bone and yet so vacant at the same time, as though behind those haunting eyes lay nothing, just a blank, desolate wasteland where her mind should have been.

For years she had sat alone in her room, doing, saying nothing.

Which only made Matt wonder even more why she had killed herself. As though the components of her scattered mind had united at last for one final moment of catastrophe. It didn’t make sense.

‘Follow me,’ his father said, standing up.

9

‘You look like you haven’t slept for weeks, Rachel.’

‘You think?’ She rubbed her eyes, concerned by her own appearance. Maybe her mother was right. She could hear the children playing in the lounge with their grandfather, a game of cat and mouse around the sofas. She didn’t think she had seen them this happy in months.

Her mother sipped her coffee. ‘Rachel, dear, if you don’t mind me saying so . . . you look –’

‘Yes, Mum . . .’

‘– like death warmed up.’

‘I know . . .’

‘I expect they must be a handful at their age.’

‘Mum –’

‘But that’s not everything is it?’

Rachel stared hard at her mother. The wizened old lady, her once lustrous hair now ash grey and straw-textured, face lined like crumpled paper, knew her better than anyone. Had known her longest, after all.

‘It’s Matthew, isn’t it?’

‘Mum, we . . . argue. A lot. I don’t know, it’s just . . . it seems like we just can’t speak anymore without –’

‘Will it pass? All marriages go through rough patches. It’s a fact of life.’

‘I know, Mum. I don’t know –’

‘Do you still love him?’ The older woman’s eyes seemed to penetrate her.

‘Yes, of course –’

‘There’s your answer then.’

‘Sure.’ It’s not always that simple. There are the children to think about. Hitting me is one thing –

‘And does he love you?’

‘I – I think so.’

Her mother huffed. ‘Well, have you asked him?’

Rachel shook her head, resigned. ‘I can’t . . . he’s been difficult to talk to recently.’

Her mother leaned across and put a hand over her daughter’s. Rachel suddenly felt a terrible urge to weep, as though the loss she had felt at watching Matt leave wanted to come pouring out in a flood.

‘I worry about you Rachel. I worry about you so, so much. You’re my only daughter. I don’t want to see you getting hurt like this.’

Tears formed in Rachel’s eyes. ‘I don’t know what to do, Mum.’

Her mother smiled. ‘You have to do what you think is best. Follow your heart, honey. Your brain doesn’t know a damn thing.’

Rachel chuckled through her tears. ‘I’ll try, Mum. I’ll try.’

###

Bethany’s Diary, December 10th, 1984

I heard Daddy crying in his sleep last night so I got up and went into his bedroom. I wanted to calm him but he tossed and turned in the covers like something dying. I got afraid, and wanted to cry, but didn’t. He was shouting out Mummy’s name. He looked so sad. I whispered, ‘Don’t cry, Daddy, it’ll be okay,’ but I don’t think he could hear me.

I think he knows why Mummy left, and it makes him so sad.

10

Matt was upstairs. The rain had stopped. All Matt could hear was the clacking of autumn branches outside, the gentle rustling of the last autumn leaves. The wind soughed quietly like the tired yawning of a gospel choir. Moonlight streamed in through the window, and as he clicked on a light near the door, the bed on which Bethany lay suddenly lit up in a complex patchwork of white and yellow shades, a duel between the lamp and the moon, a crisscrossing of light shards that made it difficult at first to determine her features.

His father was waiting outside in the corridor. The door stood ajar behind him. Matt stepped forward, into the pool of light, and gazed down on the sleeping form of his sister for the first time in fourteen years.

Dead form. Dead form, damn you.

‘Oh, good God . . .’

Tears began to form and trickle down his cheeks. He saw a window had been left open, retaining the room’s chill, and it froze him, bit at his skin like tiny insects, invisible.

Bethany wore what Matt could only describe as a ball gown, blood red and crafted, as best as he could tell, from velvet. It hung to her ankles; only her bare feet protruded below the hem. The neck was cut high, hiding her bosom, while the arms ended just below the shoulder, revealing the familiar sun–shy, porcelain skin.

She lay on her side, one hand cupping her face, the other at her waist. Her eyes were closed, and her hair, shoulder-length, looked recently brushed.

He knelt down beside her.

She had to be sleeping. His little sister could not surely be dead. He stared hard at her face, almost willing frosty breath to rise from her lips like a tender, dying smoke signal. Bethany, his little sister.

Except she wasn’t little anymore.

He had to remind himself who she was. She looked like a fairytale princess, hauled from the stories of his infancy to be displayed before him. If he kissed her would she wake?

‘Sleeping beauty,’ he muttered, the words falling from him lips before he could stop himself.

Mrs. Carter had not exaggerated. Fourteen years ago this had been Bethany, his little sister; his mute, reclusive, introverted sister. A girl whose very presence in the same room had terrified him, even as a teenager.

The Bethany that lay before him was a grown woman, and a truly beautiful one.

She couldn’t be dead. It wasn’t possible.

Matt knelt down beside her and gazed into her face. Tentatively, he reached out a hand towards her, his fingers shaking as they closed over hers, as cold as china.

‘Bethany?’ he whispered.

Her eyes opened. Coal black and deadly, they bored into his own.

Matt screamed and let go of her hand even as her fingers reached out for his, clawing. He fell backwards, his body striking the wooden floor and his head catching the edge of a bedside cabinet. He felt consciousness slipping away. Through stunned, starry eyes he saw Bethany start to rise, mouth opening as she inched towards him to form twisted words for the first time. He screamed as much as he were able, a hollow, croaking sound that scraped along the sides of his throat like a wire cloth.

And then his father came bursting through the door, racing across the room to strike her with something heavy, something blunt (something that made a sound like a rolling pin hitting dough), once, twice, over and over . . .

(oh God not that hammer not that hammer oh God oh God)

Matt woke sweating, sitting bolt upright in bed. Somewhere beyond his room he could hear movement along the corridor, and then the sound of knocking, muffled, distant.

Mugginess cleared as Mrs. Carter’s shouts came from beyond the door, and breathless, he called back, yes, he was fine, just a nightmare. A couple more reassurances, and he heard her stomp back to bed, grumbling something about an early start tomorrow.

He felt the dampness of the sheets beneath him. Had he really cried out in his sleep?

He switched on the bedside light and squinted as the sudden brightness pierced right through his eyes and into the depths of his whiskey hangover. The clock read 4:30am.

He rolled out of bed, stumbled across the room to a sink in the corner. He vomited up a thick yellow paste, and turned the tap on full to wash away the remains of last night’s whiskey. Then, with the tap still roaring, he leaned over, took the head of the faucet into his mouth like the barrel of a gun, and gulped down the icy water until it choked him.

Afterwards, he felt a little better. The half full bottle next to his bed had begun to whisper his name, as it always did now, no matter how he felt, but he ignored it, going instead to the window and ripping back the curtains to expose the night.

Outside, a light rain fell steadily on the village green and the churchyard. The lane beyond was dark, empty; no lights from his father’s house were visible through the trees. Up and down the high street in both directions, shops, houses, the pub, all were dark, silent.

He needed a walk to clear his head. Mrs. Carter got nervous easily, she had told him, and so locked up at around eleven. In order that they could come and go as they pleased, she issued all her guests with a copy of the front door key, and a gentle reminder that they please lock the door behind them.

Matt went downstairs and let himself out into the dark, closing the door silently behind him. The rain had eased to a light drizzle. Although the night made him jittery, especially in Tamerton, he preferred it to the lingering dream memories that clung to the walls of his bedroom. He could still see Bethany’s face, rising up towards him with those hideous devil eyes. He shuddered, and pulled the thin wind cheater he wore tighter around him.

Going upstairs in the house, seeing his sister as a grown woman in her old bedroom, seeing her wearing the blood red ball gown, it had never happened. He had dreamt it. His nervousness and his father’s whiskey had combined to create that monster. Just his imagination, and in his line of work he knew as much about that as anyone.

But what had happened? The line that separated reality and nightmare had blurred, and each had encroached upon the other, like two coloured liquids merging through a porous membrane. Everything became difficult to define.

He had seen Bethany, and she had been beautiful. Sleeping.

Hadn’t he?

‘Damn it,’ he muttered, shaking his head. He couldn’t remember clearly because he had been too drunk.

He did remember his father asking if he wanted to see his sister, as an adult. Perhaps he had seen her. The image had been as clear as the church that rose before him, and he knew it was her. He could tell from the shape of her face. She had aged, for sure. But she hadn’t changed much, the only difference was that the dark seed of beauty she had possessed had now bloomed into a violently colourful flower.

He had seen her body; that was it. It had to be. It had been resting upstairs ready for burial, allowed to be at home for one final night. Spooky, but then everything about that place was, always had been. Memories and drink had brought her back in his dreams, even when his consciousness remembered nothing.

Nightmares.

Damn it, why do I have to drink so much?

A sudden movement caught his eye, in the darkness across the village green. Someone moving in the dark, no: scurrying. Clutching something to their (her?) chest. He paused at the gate, watching. Then, before his mind could catch up with the decision, he began to follow.

The drizzle had stopped, and as Matt pursued the figure up the gently inclining street towards the cattle grate that marked the entrance to the moor some half a mile distant, it was replaced by thick fog. Matt found it difficult to keep the figure in sight. He did his best, getting as close as he could without being seen, whether it meant crouching behind parked cars or backing into the damp, dewy hedge, becoming more and more certain with each step that something wasn’t right. He couldn’t quite place it, but until he could, he would follow silently, trusting his whim.

The wind had died and the air smelt of wet foliage, a thick, juicy smell like damp linen. Cold wrapped itself around him, caressing his face and hands with its chill, as the last houses of the village gave way to a gradually ascending country lane, hemmed in on both sides by tall, wild hedgerows. As the figure hurried off into the darkness ahead, the writer’s inquisitiveness that had carried Matt this far suddenly died, replaced by a nagging fear. He stumbled to a halt, unsure whether to continue.

Then he heard the sound.

Shattering the silence like a hammer through glass: a baby’s piercing cry.

Matt froze, but only for a second. He now understood what the figure was carrying. He started to follow again, increasing his step to catch up.

The hedgerows on both sides of the road began to drop in height, until finally they fell away completely where the road was split by the old cattle grate. He had always seen this as the true boundary of Tamerton, for Dartmoor stretched away beyond. From the top of the hill you could see the moorland rolling away impressively into the distance on a clear day, though now of course it was shrouded in dark and fog. Dartmoor as a concept had always enthralled and daunted him in equal measures, its vastness, its rugged beauty, and the tales that came associated with it. As a boy he had always wanted to set a novel here, but after things had happened he had dropped the idea. Now, as he thought of the endless miles of open moorland, he felt a fresh surge of creativity unlike any he had felt in months. Maybe a novel about Dartmoor could revive his fortunes.

Up ahead, he heard the figure clattering across the grate, and he hastened to follow, breaking into a run along the last stretch of road. But as the cattle grate appeared out of the fog in front of him he felt a sudden lethargy, and he pulled up short, breathing hard, feeling lightheaded. The grate lay just feet away, a barrier between himself and what lay further, out there in the darkness.

And memories began to float back, manifest themselves out of the fog.

Oh, heavens, not more ghosts.

Fear gnawed at him like a dog’s teeth on a bone, breaking his resolve, taking the first involuntary steps back and away from that place on his behalf. How many years had it been since he had thought of them?

Out there, maybe a mile distant, where the moorland curved down into a natural hollow, a scraggy tree-lined ravine with a shallow, meandering stream at its bottom, stood a cottage. Two floors; an old farmhouse, perhaps, and the scourge of every schoolboy in his year and countless years either side.

Meredith.

Elaina and Liana Meredith. Sisters.

Exotically elusive, they had lived in quiet solitude in that cottage out across the moor for as long as Matt or anyone he knew could remember. Over the years their lives had gradually become part of local folklore, the two weird sisters, regarded by many to be witches, believed apparently ageless. Stories grew fat quickly in the pubs and living rooms of small communities like Tamerton, but no one Matt had ever spoken to knew them well enough to either confirm or refute any of the spectacular theories he had heard. The skeptical side of him imagined their lives were insipidly inane; two forty–something spinster sisters working as HR managers in a cold office block somewhere in Plymouth. But his whimsical side, the side that had once spawned the ideas for more books than he could ever hope to write, still remembered the tales that abounded in the playground at lunchtimes, of sacrifices and black magic, of two beautiful sirens whose lilting song drew unknowing men up on to the lonely moors to their deaths.

There had been a hundred stories passed back and forth while he grew up from primary and middle school into secondary, but by his early teens there was only one thing that preoccupied the minds of himself and the other boys his age about the two mysterious Meredith sisters.

What they did at night.

At school, on Friday afternoons in the winter, they used to draw lots. The shortest straw had to take the challenge. Go up there that night, camera in hand, and get a photo of some action.

Few made it past the cattle grate. Even fewer got as far as the cottage, got to photograph anything. Some did, though, their blurred, poorly lit treasures displaying a corner of wall, a door, an amorphous shape as likely a sheep as a woman. Boys returned with fanciful tales of their bravery and what they had seen, but the lack of any hard evidence only added to the mystery, making the challenge more appealing. During his school years everyone with any guts eventually got landed with the dare, and although most returned with little to tell, they all returned somehow fulfilled, as though by taking the challenge of the Meredith sisters each schoolboy had somehow crossed a threshold into manhood.

Matt remembered the night it had been his turn only too well.

I don’t want to be here anymore.

A burning sense of shame and humiliation swamped his senses. He started back down the road, at first walking backwards, then turning to bolt, arms pumping as he fled back in the direction of the village. It was too late at night, too dark, to go chasing ghosts. Some things really were best left alone.

#

He hadn’t seen the woman standing at the foot of a scrawny, wind-battered tree, just to the left of the cattle grate, shrouded by the mists. He hadn’t seen her standing there, clutching a bundle in her arms, a bundle that occasionally squirmed irritably. He hadn’t seen the smile on her ageless face.

He hadn’t seen her.

But Liana Meredith had seen him.

11

Rachel lay awake, one hand cupping her face, listening to the tick of the clock as the minutes and then hours slipped past. Her eyes and cheeks were red, sore from her tears. They had come all of a sudden in a torrent and she had been unable to hold them back.

She thought of the kids, tucked up in bed, asleep down the corridor, and listened to her own steady breathing as she waited in vain for sleep.

Her fingers lifted to brush her face, touch the fading mark of the bruise. She felt a small numbing pain, so small as to be barely noticeable, and yet at the same time it meant so much.

To her, and for the children.

###

Bethany’s Diary, December 21st, 1984

Helped Daddy put up the tree in the lounge today. Daddy and Uncle Red got it from out in the woods, chopped it down themselves – chop chop!! – and carried it in from the garden. It towers over all of us, and I spent ages covering it with tinsel and jingly balls and little angels and fairies, including one big one for the very top which Uncle Red had to fetch a ladder for. It looks beautiful. I wish Mummy could have been here to see it, all sparkly and glittery, but Mummy is staying out in the cold this year. I wanted to ask Daddy why, but he just looked so sad as he stared up at the tree.

I wanted to ask Matty instead, but he just stared at me with horrible eyes. I looked around behind me at the fire burning in the grate, and couldn’t help but wonder why Matty hates me so. Daddy loves me, but Matty hates me. Only Daddy and Uncle Red seem to love me, now Mummy’s gone. She can’t really give me love when she looks so cold peering in through the glass.

Maybe she might surprise us all, and come back for Christmas. Who knows, diary? Who knows??

12

Matt thought the late night walk would have cleared his hangover. But no, there it was, thudding away at the inside of his skull as he awoke, like a heavy metal band warming up for a farewell tour. He gripped his temples with his fingertips, and squeezed as though he might squash the pain out through his eyes.

‘Fucking . . . hell.’

Even now he couldn’t remember how many glasses of whiskey he had shared with his father. The whole evening was little more than a blur, but no matter, he had to push it out of his mind.

His sister was getting buried later today.

He climbed out of bed, took a brief shower, and threw on some fresh clothes. He hung the damp ones from yesterday over a radiator, despite a small, hand–written note pinned to the back of the door that warned him otherwise. He slipped on his shoes and stumbled downstairs to catch the tail end of breakfast.

Mrs. Carter had cleared away the breakfast things for the other guests, but with a little persuasion agreed to cook Matt a small fry-up, them being old friends and all that. He gobbled down the bacon and eggs greedily, ignored the tomato juice on his chin and spooned down the beans and mushrooms. Nothing helped the hangover, but at least he satiated his hunger.

As he sat back at the table, sipping on a strong coffee, he remembered vaguely that his father had gone over the funeral arrangements last night. Yes, the service would be held in the church in Tamerton, with a small private goodbye up at the old chapel, and a reception back at the house. Matt’s assistance wasn’t required in anything; he came as a guest alone. Which, of course, suited him fine.

Matt thanked Mrs. Carter and went outside. He needed a little fresh air, thought it might help his head. The service was due to begin at one, which gave Matt a few hours to kill. He paused only briefly, remembering that the pub wouldn’t open until eleven, and then turned on to the road that headed up the hill toward the moor.

The fog had partially lifted, some of it burned off by the dim, hidden sun. It was still chilly, though, and Matt had to stuff his cold–stiffened fingers into the pockets of his jacket for warmth. Only the graze on his right hand gave off any heat, in the form of a tingling, numbing pain.

He could cope with the imposing atmosphere during daylight, even the sudden flood of nerves and trepidation as he crossed over the cattle grate on to the moor. He didn’t want to go close, just close enough. Late at night, with his head muggy from sleep and too much whiskey, he couldn’t be sure what his eyes had seen. Dreams were beginning to cross over an invisible line into consciousness with alarming regularity.

That’s what a place like this does to you.

The road, in poor condition and barely wider than a single lane, led across the moor towards Princeton, where Dartmoor Prison stood, and then on to Plymouth, but Matt turned off after some hundred yards and headed downhill across the spongy grass, sheep and wild ponies ambling lazily out of range as he got near. A couple of derelict buildings rose up ahead of him and to either side, the remains of a long abandoned military base. Dating back to the Second World War, the low, arch–roofed buildings had been silos for ammunition and storage buildings for an airbase a couple of miles further out across the moor. They had all stood disused and empty for some fifty years or more, but Matt could still remember the time a kid from school had found a live grenade out in a small hollow formed by an overhanging rock. The army had come out and cordoned the area off for a couple of days while they carried out an extensive search for any other antiquated war artifacts. He remembered being disappointed when no atom bombs or artillery shells were found buried just under the grass, and for weeks afterwards Matt and other kids from the school had carried out their own searches of the moor. He must have been ten or eleven, before everything started to go wrong.

He followed the remains of a path between the two old ammunition stores, heading for another building, one that completed a triangle as it looked out from the crest of the hill towards a wide, sparsely forested valley, and the rise of the next moorland crest a mile or so distant. An old communications tower, it rose sixty feet out of the damp moor, little more than a shell now, everything of value either taken by the departing military or looted decades ago. The stairs to the upper levels still remained, but windows, doors, shelving, even tiles off the floor had all been broken or removed. It smelt of damp and that chalky mustiness that Matt always associated with the rotting, crumbling concrete of old, ruined buildings, and of manure, strong and pungent, made fresher by the rain. From the state of the ground floor Matt knew that the sheep and moorland ponies used the building to shelter from the rain, and was vaguely impressed that they had only crapped along one wall, leaving the other clear to sleep against. Signs of intelligence among sheep were rare, but that was definitely one, he reasoned.

He climbed the stairs to the third floor, more aware now than he had ever been as a kid just how unstable the concrete framework looked. He had to pick his way over a few fallen girders and a scattering of roof tiles, but from the yawning maw of the south-facing window he had a near perfect view of the valley below. The fog was clear enough for his vision to reach the next ridge of moorland, topped by a small granite tor – Merry Tor, he thought, though couldn’t be sure. Hardly appropriate. The moorland vanished into fog a little further on, but he could imagine seeing the metallic grey spread of Plymouth far to the south. Once, on a clear summer’s day long ago, at sixteen years old, a far more athletic Matt had climbed up on to what remained of the tower’s roof and seen the glittering blue of Plymouth Sound and the English Channel. He had planned to come back another day with his binoculars, look for ships out there on the waters, but if he remembered rightly the rest of that summer had been wet and he had gone before the next one came around. He felt a sudden pang of nostalgia for his childhood but pushed it away.

He glanced up at what remained of the roof. He would never make it up through those girders now, but even with the heavy dampness of the air the view of the immediate valley was unhindered and breathtaking. An old clay quarry lay abandoned to the right, a clutch of farm buildings to the distant left, and in the middle was a sparse forest dissected by a thin river that tumbled down a succession of craggy waterfalls. The water gurgled and sloshed over the rocks before finally vanishing into the trees where this valley met the foot of the next. On its way to meet the Tamar, he assumed, though had never found out for sure.

And there, in the centre of his vision, about two hundred yards further down the slope from the old military buildings, he saw something that chilled him like the fog that dribbled down his back.

The cottage of the Meredith sisters.

Matt shuddered as he looked upon it, only the roof and upper floor visible over the valley’s lip, because the house had been built into a deliberately carved hollow and then had trees planted around it which had now grown up to form a screen. On the far side of the valley a thin gravel lane snaked down to end in a courtyard which seemed built for the Meredith sisters alone. No other houses existed for miles; they lived in perfect seclusion.

A thin trail of smoke drifted up from a chimney at the north end of the house, telling Matt all he needed to know. They were still there. In the years since he had left, the Meredith sisters, or one of them at least, had stayed.

Knowing they were still around made him distinctly uneasy, but at least it confirmed what had happened last night. He hadn’t just been chasing ghosts.

Or had he?

No one in the village would openly speak of them. Drunks slumped in a corner of the pub or couples locked inside their warm living rooms with a fire blazing would only speak of them in whispers. As though they were nothing but ghosts.

Matt didn’t know what they were, but they weren’t ghosts.

Hadn’t been when he had seen them.

He closed his mind, shutting out the humiliation of the memory.

His curiosity satisfied, he started to turn away. He had a couple of hours left before the funeral, and the pub would be open by the time he got back down to the village.

Movement across the valley caught his eye, and he squinted to see clearly through the stray wisps of fog.

A big black car was making its way down the gravel trail towards the cottage.

Over the distance it was difficult to tell, but it certainly bore a striking resemblance to the car he had seen at the foot of his father’s lane. He watched as it pulled into the courtyard and stopped. Matt strained his neck, leaning precariously out on to the window ledge, but the screen of trees obscured his view of the figure as it got out and went into house.

Was that one of them? He couldn’t be sure. If so, why had the car been parked where it had? Who had they been visiting last night?

But if it wasn’t their car, who was visiting them? No one had ever visited them when he had lived here, but he had been gone a long time, after all.

He waited for a long time, but no one came back out. The car might not have even been the one he had seen. The world was full of black cars, and he couldn’t even tell the model from this distance. A little presumptuous, not to mention nosey. Just . . . a feeling, that was all.

Time ticked on. Matt had been getting that familiar pang in his stomach for several minutes, the one pining for a drink, something to calm him. He felt edgy, nervous; the Meredith sisters and their mysteries would have to wait. He climbed back down through the old communication tower, and after one last look towards the cottage, vanished now besides a thin wisp of smoke rising into the grey sky like an Indian signal, started off towards the village.

And as he did so, he suddenly remembered the blinking light he had seen upstairs at his father’s house. A feeling of uneasiness found him, and wouldn’t go away.

13

Rachel had thought long and hard about her decision.

Matt’s forced absence had given her a little breathing space, enough to structure everything in her mind, to begin to understand the calamitous situation into which their marriage had fallen. She had had a chance to look at their lives from an exterior perspective, view the changing emotional structure of their marriage and track its degradation. She saw the love turn bad like a rotting apple, saw the arguments increase, the coherent conversations become rarer. She saw their income fall as Matt’s books struggled to sell, saw his drinking increase, her own anxieties grow, constant rows and then that fateful night when he had hit her. The bruise had all but gone but the memory of the occasion remained fresh in her mind, especially the look on Matt’s face. That terrifying power, the dominance in his eyes, and the way the smirk at the side of his mouth told her just how much he had enjoyed it.

But most terrifyingly of all, she thought, as she stroked Sarah’s soft mousy hair while her daughter slept, her new viewpoint came from far too close at hand. From the eyes of her own children.

She had already packed their cases. As she threw a last couple of tops into her own, she knew the time approached.

Time to go.

Earlier, a quick phone call to her mother had found her a place to stay. Indefinitely, if she chose, though she wanted to be out of her parents’ way as soon as she could. She didn’t want to impose, not with the kids as well, no matter how many times her mother insisted they were welcome.

She didn’t want to go, but reason had swayed her. Follow your heart, her mother had told her earlier, which had got Rachel thinking. Was she? Did her heart have any bearing in this decision?

The kids. The kids mattered most of all. No matter what might happen to her, she could not put the kids at risk.

Matt had gone home to see his father. Rachel knew only that they hadn’t spoken for fourteen years. Matt had never divulged the circumstances that surrounded his running away at seventeen, and although she had asked many times he had always refused to talk about it. He hadn’t killed anyone, (at least as far as she gathered), no one was after him and he hadn’t stolen any money. A family feud, she assumed. Matt could be incredibly stubborn and clearly held a grudge, but anything that separated you from your family for fourteen years had to be serious, more than a simple falling out.

He hadn’t been emotionally well for a long time, and his sister’s sudden death would have done nothing to help him. His emotional state was bad now, so she dreaded to think what it would be like upon his return. She feared his return, though hated herself for thinking that, and didn’t want the kids around just in case. She knew how much he loved them, how he could never hurt them. But she had once thought that about herself.

Perhaps, after a few days they might be able to talk, on neutral ground, resolve a few things. Their leaving might just be the shock that would pull him out of his self–imposed quagmire, get him thinking clearly. In time they might resolve their problems and become a family again. A proper family, like they had used to be.

She flipped down the lid of the case and zipped it up. She was leaving a lot behind. Most of her life, in fact. A tear rolled down her cheek, and she brushed it away, annoyed that she felt like this when Matt hardly deserved her sympathy.

She turned towards the hallway and shouted. ‘Are you ready, kids? Sarah? Luke?’

Two distant voices murmured their assent.

Rachel hauled her case up off the bed and made her way downstairs. The kids waited in the hall, already kitted out in their cold weather gear. She couldn’t help but smile; they looked like two miniature Arctic explorers in their hats, gloves and raincoats. Rachel put down her case, dropped to her knees and beckoned the children forward, taking one in each arm.

She hugged them tightly to her, burying her face in two tiny shoulders. ‘Oh, my babies . . .’ she murmured, fighting back the tears.

‘Where are we going, Mummy?’ Luke asked.

She drew back to look at them. Sarah wore a frown and Luke’s eyes looked watery, as though he might cry at any moment. She touched one hand to each of their faces.

‘We’re just going to stay with Grandma for a few days,’ she said softly, trying to convince but, she thought, failing.

‘Why?’ Luke asked, and Sarah nodded her agreement.

‘Just for a little holiday,’ Rachel said. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll be home again soon.’ Please, please, let us come home again soon.

‘Where’s Daddy?’ Sarah asked.

‘He’s not coming, is he?’

‘Daddy’s . . . gone away for a little while,’ Rachel said, aware of the tears forming in her eyes, the cracks in her voice.

‘Why?’

‘Luke . . .’ Rachel tried to answer, but words failed her. Her vision had blurred, and to hide her tears she hugged the children tightly again, only too aware of the sobs that shook her body.

‘I want Daddy to come back,’ Luke said, his own little voice starting to tremble.

She swallowed down her sobs, forced herself to draw back again, look at the children. Luke looked away, ashamed of the tears that rolled down his cheeks. Little Sarah just watched her mother, mouth puckered and wearing a frown so deep Rachel thought it might soon cover her eyes.

‘Everything’s going to be all right,’ she said, forcing conviction into the words, forcing them to mean something. ‘I promise you. Everything will be fine.’

Sarah just smiled weakly, nodding. ‘Okay, Mummy.’

Luke looked back at her, his eyes so intent it seemed he had forgotten about the residue of tears that dampened his cheeks. He lifted one small gloved hand towards his mother’s face. Rachel froze, breath catching in her throat as his woolly fingers touched the spot on her cheek where until yesterday a bruise had been.

Then, as though breaking out of a trance, Luke snapped his hand away and dropped his eyes towards the floor. ‘Love you, Mummy,’ he muttered to his shoes.

Rachel rubbed his head tenderly and stood up. ‘Come on, best get going,’ she said. ‘Grandma’s cooking us a nice roast.’

‘Yum,’ Sarah said, taking hold of her mother’s free hand. ‘I like roast.’

Rachel looked down at them one last time before she went to open the door. She choked back tears. If she started to cry again now she thought she might cry forever.

###

Bethany’s Diary, January 1st, 1985

It’s New Years Day today, diary. It’s snowing real hard outside, almost came up to my knees last night so I didn’t go far into the woods, only a little way down the path. Haven’t seen Mummy since before Christmas anyway, so perhaps it’s too cold for her too.

She never did come back. Daddy was there, Matty was there, and Uncle Red was there, but Mummy stayed out in the cold. I didn’t even see her. I thought she might have sneaked over for a look at the tree, but if she did, I never saw her.

We had cookies tonight. Daddy made them, and Uncle Red brought them up to my room, some chocolate ones and some cherry ones. Uncle Red stayed to talk to me a while, sitting on the edge of the bed. He talked about Mummy, about how I must miss her so. I couldn’t think of anything to say and eventually he got tired of talking to me and went away. At least Uncle Red likes me more than Matty does. Matty won’t even speak to me.

I like Uncle Red. I’m not sure if he’s actually my uncle, but he seems nice just the same.

14

He slumped against the back of the corner bench, trying to stay upright as the world revolved around him in thousands of interlinked circles. Oh God, why now?

He hadn’t meant to, had only wanted a couple for his nerves. Just to steady himself before going to the church for the funeral service. Hell, he had only had a couple of hours to kill, but although he had still felt hungover as he walked in through the door, he couldn’t have a soft drink, he just couldn’t. Soft drinks did nothing; they couldn’t help him.

The latest in a succession of double whiskeys watched him from the table. Matt eyed it suspiciously, sure it was sliding from side to side to confuse him. The pint of Stella that loomed over it like a big brother seemed much more stable. He reached out a hand and swung it from the table, spilling a few drops as he jerked it towards his mouth.

It tasted better than the whiskey but so weak in comparison, like driving a Fiesta when you had the money for a Porsche. He had never been a great fan of beer. He rarely drank to be social anymore, only to reach a state where the world seemed to make sense. To reach the heady drunken equilibrium he craved, beer took so much effort. A few glasses of a decent whiskey, or any spirit for that matter, and he was good to go.

He didn’t remember a great deal about the pub – the Tamerton Arms – having been too young to frequent it before he left. Even so, it looked like it had changed hands or at least had a refit, for the dingy, smoke-stained interior he remembered had been replaced with shiny surfaces and new carpets, deep blue, almost black walls, pine tables, new chairs and benches. A large television hung from one corner, a hand–written poster beside it advertising upcoming Premiership games. The gambling machines were modern, rather than the old space invaders and pinball machines Matt would have expected. The windows looked newly double–glazed. The usual memorabilia that adorned country pubs remained: framed photographs of darts and pool teams from twenty years ago, a small trophy cabinet set into the wall behind the bar, the odd landscape painting, a few framed newspaper articles and numerous old beer mats pinned to the walls, but otherwise the pub possessed a sheen of modernity which, although Matt was sure it wouldn’t please the locals, made it feel at least remotely welcoming to strangers.

Such as he felt he was.

A group of people stood by the bar, four or five men, a couple of women. Most of them were older than him, in their late thirties and early forties. He thought he recognised one or two, but his vision wouldn’t focus long enough to allow his mind to remember their names. They had recognised him though; even through cloudy eyes he caught the occasional sideways glance, and the odd snippet of derogatory conversation not intended for his ears.

Bethany. They were here for Bethany’s funeral.

He noted the suits and smart dresses, a couple of veils presently pulled up, and wondered why he had not thought to bring one himself. In jeans and a black pullover he was hardly showing respect, but frankly he didn’t care. His father, and indeed Bethany, were lucky he had come at all. If he hadn’t been so keen to get away from Rachel and the kids for a while he might not have come, but it was an excuse to distance himself from the family he was gradually screwing up, just as drinking was an excuse to distance himself from work and reality.

A large, broad-shouldered man, seated on a stool at the bar slightly apart from the others, watched him impassively, not even bothering to hide his interest. Matt felt sure he should recognize the man but his memory failed him and he turned away in disinterest, back to the whiskey which he finished in a single swallow. He gagged as it burned his throat, and supped on the pint to wash it down. A couple of people had turned round to stare at him.

‘What?’ he said, spreading his arms, palms out. ‘What’s so interesting?’

There were a couple of muted responses, but most of the people turned away. Only the man sitting alone continued to watch him with those same steady eyes.

Matt scoffed at him and sipped a little more of his pint. He turned away and looked out of the window for a while, pinpointing objects in the distance and trying to focus on them. He laughed as first a tree then a kid on a bike dissolved into a swirling mess like a watercolour painting left out in the rain.

He knew he had to sober up, but the part of his mind that loved drinking so much had taken over, controlling him now like an automated robot. So what if he was drunk? He liked drinking. He could get drunk if he wanted. It wasn’t as though he had been close to his sister, after all. And like he had thought before, she was lucky he had even shown up.

‘You’re fucking lucky,’ he murmured as he finished the pint.

For a while he sat and stared forward into space, feeling himself drift away so comfortingly, as he often did. He had rebuilt that wall around him, managed again to block out his fears and the harshness of reality. He felt safe in here. Safe from harm.

But as always happened, after a while the chinks began to appear, those spots of light that pierced the comfortable darkness and hurt his eyes so much. He pushed himself up and stumbled over to the bar. He needed another drink, something to repair the cracks before they got too big and started to let the world back in.

A tall, young barman approached him with apprehension written on his face. Matt recognised the sort: the kid was loath to serve him and knew he shouldn’t, but his fear of Matt starting any trouble would compel him to pour the whiskey anyhow. Matt only had to ask.

‘Same again,’ he slurred. ‘Double. Forget the pint.’

The other man sat just to his right, a small group of people beyond him. He heard someone mention his name.

‘What?’ Matt sneered. ‘What’s the fucking problem?’

A couple of people turned towards him. A man of about his father’s age started to say something, but one of the women put a hand on his arm, pushing forward.

‘You should be ashamed of yourself, getting drunk like that,’ she said, her voice hooting like the call of an owl. Through blurred vision Matt thought he recognised her as Paula Jenkins, a local busybody who used to teach piano out of her house across from the churchyard, as well as leading the church choir. He didn’t recognise the man, but Colin Jenkins had run off with some supermarket checkout skank when Matt was about thirteen, so this was probably the replacement.

‘On the day of the poor girl’s funeral. It’s disgraceful!’ the man chimed in.

Matt felt a building rage inside him. ‘Fuck off,’ he slurred. Across the bar, the young barman had paused halfway through pouring Matt’s drink. ‘What would you know?’

‘Have some more respect, for Heaven’s sake,’ the man continued, patting the woman’s arm reassuringly.

‘Oh, just take a jump,’ Matt growled, standing up. Matt wasn’t physically imposing but he still had half a head on Paula’s protector. The man backed away. ‘Not like it’s your sister, is it?’ Matt shouted at him. ‘Not like they’re about to bury your fucking sister! You old –’

‘Now listen here –’ one of the others began. In between them, the sitting man had pushed his glass away.

‘You really think she’d give a shit about you?’ Matt snarled. ‘She didn’t even care about her own family, let alone a bunch of nosey old pricks like you.’

He swayed from side to side, putting one hand on the bar to keep his balance. The ground seemed far too close, but for the moment his anger held him upright.

‘Bethany was just a freak,’ he slurred. ‘She couldn’t even speak. Didn’t do anything, like you think she’d care for all this –’

The broad-shouldered man rose to his feet, towering over Matt. Sober, Matt knew he would recognize him, but names and faces remained jumbled in his mind.

‘Get out of here and sober up, Matthew,’ the man said.

‘Fuck off, you –’

Pain exploded in Matt’s cheek and he crumbled to the floor like a statue made of crepe paper, only aware as he rolled and looked up that the man had punched him. Pain jabbed him through the numb veil of his drunkenness and he gingerly touched one side of his face, wondering if anything was broken.

He heard commotion behind him; felt his eyes roll as his hold on consciousness drifted. He heard someone muttering about taking him home, then, as heavy hands grabbed his shoulders, the world faded into blackness, and not for the first time, he was grateful.

15

Matt’s face struck a hard plastic surface and he jarred awake. His cheek burned with a searing pain, and he rolled on to his back, helped by strong hands pulling at his shoulders. He peered up through a spinning haze, saw only a sterile whiteness everywhere, and reached up to rip away a hanging curtain that draped half over him like a death shroud. It left a dampness across his face, and he wiped one hand across his eyes and looked up, only to find the huge, looming figure of a man standing with one leg on either side of Matt’s body, holding something Matt didn’t recognize in his hand. It was gun-sized but made out of white plastic. Matt thought of Star Trek and ray guns, and incredibly, began to laugh.

Icy water doused him, and he cried out, lifting his hands to divert the flow. The man simply moved the shower nozzle to the side, until it once again pointed straight into Matt’s face.

‘Okay, okay, get that off me!’

The water slowed to a thin trickle then stopped altogether. Matt writhed on the floor, feeling sick and wet and utterly pathetic.

‘The funeral starts in an hour,’ the man said. ‘If you’re not there, I’ll come looking for you. When I find you I’ll give you a real hiding, one you’ll never forget, and one you’ve really deserved for a long time. Don’t tempt me to start it now.’

‘Okay, okay . . .’

‘Similarly,’ he continued, ‘If you show your father up . . .’

‘All right, I get the picture.’

Matt climbed to his feet, one hand wiping water out of his eyes. A hand gripped his hair and he found himself shoved backwards into the shower. His feet slipped, the man let go and Matt slammed against the side of the plastic cubicle and slid down to the floor. He clutched at his side where a metal hand rail had struck him. He waited for the water, but it stayed off.

‘Don’t get fucking cocky with me,’ the man said. ‘I’m not your father. You don’t push me around. You’ve got a nerve coming back here after what you did –’

‘Dad invited me –’

‘I don’t give a bag of chicken shit. We were well rid of you. At least we found out what you were really like.’

‘Like father like son, eh?’

Matt heard rather than saw the man step forward, and he waited for the strike. None came. Standing over him, he could sense the man’s tension, sense him holding back, wanting desperately to hit out, to smash Matt up like an old wooden bed frame.

‘Like I said, the funeral begins in an hour.’

Drunk or not, Matt remembered him now. Why he hadn’t picked up that stern, gruff voice before he just blamed on the whiskey.

‘Good to see you again, Uncle,’ Matt said, voice dripping with sarcasm.

‘Don’t “uncle” me, Matthew,’ he said. ‘Sober up, for your own worthless sake and show some damn respect. I’ll see you in an hour.’

Uncle Red began to walk away. Matt looked up at the man’s back, the huge arms and wide shoulders. He suddenly felt a little foolish, adopting such an aggressive attitude when threatened by this bull of a man. Whatever affection they had once shared had clearly died the night Matt had walked away from Tamerton with the intention never to return.

Red stopped in the doorway and turned back. A couple of huge strides brought him back close to Matt, and his taut, lined face peered down. His eyes revealed not a hint of compassion, just a complete, utter contempt.

‘One more thing. I don’t ever want to hear you speak ill of Bethany again. Your sister was worth more than you’ll ever know. To your father, and to me. If I hear you speak like you did of her again . . . I will destroy you. Do you understand me?’

Matt felt the resilience drain from his voice. ‘We used to be friends –’

‘You left it all behind. You shattered it all.’ He glared at Matt for a moment before continuing. ‘Bethany, for all her frailties was twice the person you’ve clearly become.’ He sighed. ‘I often wondered what became of you, whether you made yourself into a man or not. Huh. It seems you’ve managed to make yourself into a sniveling wreck. So much for the big, wide world, eh? You’re pathetic.’

Matt started to rise, but Red’s hand dropped on to his shoulder, holding him down, and Matt felt the iron strength in the man’s arms.

‘Remember what I’ve said. I’ve marked you. Do not cross me, Matt. I have nothing to lose that hasn’t already been taken.’

A warning flashed in Matt’s mind like a neon sign: do not mess with this man.

Red glared at Matt a moment longer, then stood up and went out without waiting for an answer.

Matt’s throat felt dry; his body trembled and he tried to tell himself it was because of the cold water. He had known Red his whole life. He was the closest thing his father had to a brother, and he had been around a lot even when Matt’s mother had still been alive, staying in one of the many spare bedrooms of their house for days on end. After his mother died Red had practically moved in, living and working with his father, helping out in the house and with the maintenance of the grounds. He wasn’t married, and didn’t have any immediate family Matt knew of. He had a small cottage tucked away down a little lane a short way out of the village, but Matt had never been to it. Red had been around Matt’s family almost daily, but his own life was one of much rumour and speculation.

Red was a carpenter by trade. He sold homemade furniture; his craftsmanship was exquisite and widely desired. He had never owned a car, and rumour claimed he felled the trees himself and hauled them back to his house by hand, which went some way to explaining his legendary strength. As a boy Matt remembered Uncle Red as a fiercely warm man with big hands and tender words, but as a teenager he had heard stories about foolhardy men who’d taken Red’s strength on in the bar, and what had happened to them. Uncle Red wasn’t a man to cross.

Red wasn’t actually his name. Matt didn’t know his real one, but Red was a nickname, taken, Matt assumed, from the copper-coloured hair that grew in thick curls down over his ears and around the base of his neck. Matt still couldn’t believe how he hadn’t recognised the man he had once called Uncle. Red had barely aged in fourteen years; his hair was just a little shorter, his face just a little more grizzled. He looked harder and stronger if anything, unlike Matt’s father who had once been the only man in the village close to Red’s size. Now Ian Cassidy looked faded, a shadowy specter of the man he had once been.

As he climbed to his feet, Matt felt wearier than ever, and just wanted to get through the funeral and get out of Tamerton. Red scared him, though he hated to admit it. He didn’t like to think what Red might be capable of. The man was an enigma, certainly, but to a young, pre–adolescent Matt, he had always been a harmless one.

Once upon a time, they had got on fine.

Matt closed his eyes, squeezing the pain from his mind. Physical and . . . more.

(He sees his father’s face, those desperate, pleading eyes, mud–flecked but also speckled with blood, a wide cut beneath his eye, his lip split open and a gash on the left side of his face. No, please, no more.

And then his own face, as though seen from without – lips pulled back in a snarl, vicious, evil eyes that couldn’t surely be his own –

And the weapon, the length of wood, a tree branch recently fallen, still with some leaves that hung like crash survivors on tiny shoots.

Pulled back over his head.

No more.

(Down)

(Down)

(Down –)

Moans, the sound of a broken man crying for forgiveness –

No more.

Anger and violence and hatred boiling in his head –

(Again)

And power: wonderful, lustrous power –

(Again)

Strength, oh what strength, power, oh what power

(Again)

No . . . more . . .

(Down –) until the sounds die, until the cries fade to moans, and the branch lies in two battered pieces at his feet.

With the speed of air escaping through a torn tire, his anger is sucked away. Bloodied with another’s blood, crying the tears of a child, he backs off into his own tragedy, defeated.

Through his father’s bloody gaze he sees himself running away).

###

Bethany’s Diary, February 15th, 1985

Tonight I followed her footprints in the snow. I knew she’d come back sooner or later, come back to visit me, and she did. She loves me, Mummy loves me.

They were big footprints, as though Mummy was wearing shoes. I didn’t realize Mummy needed shoes where she went, but I guess even angels get cold feet.

They led down through the wood towards the stream, frozen over by the cold, and up the hill on the other side. I had to cross by some stepping stones and very nearly fell in, they were so icy. I followed the path up to the old chapel, where Daddy tells me never to go. I don’t know why, it looks just like an old ruin to me.

I’ve only ever seen it once before, when I followed Matty up one day last summer. I found him sitting by a stone rising from the ground, just outside. He looked like he was praying, but when I got closer I realised he was crying. I reached out and touched his shoulder but instead of being comforted like I’d hoped, he went mad. He screamed at me and ran away into the woods. I don’t know why I scare him so much but ever since then he’s never looked at me the same.

I couldn’t find my way back and wandered around there for hours. I wondered what Matty had been crying about, and looked at the rock sticking out of the ground, to see if there were any words written on it that might explain to me, but it was blank. I think Matty must have been in trouble at school or something, I don’t know. Perhaps he just goes out there to be alone.

Daddy found me later, and took me home. He looked terribly worried, his eyes red as though he had been crying, and he scooped me into his arms and hugged me and scolded me at the same time, told me never to go there again. He told me he loved me and that he didn’t want anything to happen to me.

We went back to the house, and he made me some tea. Matty wouldn’t speak to me, even when I went into his bedroom and sat at the end of his bed. He looked like he had been crying again too, and just turned away and stared out of the window. I felt real sad, I think Daddy gave him a hiding.

Anyway, where were we? Oh yes, I followed Mummy’s footprints up to the chapel, trying to find where Mummy went. They stopped by the piece of stone sticking out of the ground, and someone was sat in front of it. I started to cry out ‘Mummy!’ but then realised it wasn’t her at all. It was Daddy instead. He was sitting up against it, his gun in his hands, staring out into the forest. It was a good job I recognised him in the dark before I shouted out, because he might have shot at me by mistake.

I didn’t know what he was doing there, so I watched him for a while from the trees. Once or twice, he stood up, cocked his gun, and made as if to shoot something, but stopped at the last moment, and pulled his gun away. I don’t know what he was aiming at, probably foxes or badgers. Don’t know why he would want to shoot them all the way out here. And in the middle of the night, too.

After a while, I started to get cold. My eyes had adjusted to the dark, and I saw Daddy had a thick coat on, but I only wore my pajamas so got really cold really quick. It didn’t look as though Daddy was going to leave, so I left him there and went back and curled up into bed.

From the look of the new footprints underneath my bedroom window, it seemed that Mummy had been. I was so sad to have missed her.

16

Red came in through the back door and found Ian in the lounge, sipping a brandy. Red motioned with his hand and Ian nodded.

‘Here,’ he said, handing Red a glass.

Red took a seat near the window. He glanced over his shoulder at the drizzly Sunday morning outside, and sighed. ‘Ian, I –’

He recounted his meeting with Matthew.

Afterwards, Ian just shook his head and pointed towards Red’s glass.

‘Don’t you think you’re being just a little hypocritical?’ Ian sipped a little of his own drink. He didn’t blame Matt at all; on tough days like these oblivion often seemed the best answer.

‘Ian, the boy had drunk a barrelful. He could hardly stand. In fact, he didn’t for long.’

‘I can’t believe you hit him. I know how you feel about him, but he’s still my son.’

Red grimaced and looked away.

‘For Heaven’s sake, Red. I told you, just let it go! It’s been almost fifteen years –’

‘He’s a big boy now, Ian. He can take it. Shit, I doubt he’ll feel it over the hangover.’

‘He’s my son!’

Red stood up, flushed. ‘After the way he left you he doesn’t deserve your sympathy. And anyway, when he started bad–mouthing Bethany, I . . . I lost my temper a little. I’m sorry.’

‘I know how you felt about her. But she’s gone, and he’s entitled to his opinion. They were never close. You know that.’

‘You’re far too forgiving, Ian. He out and out insulted her. That boy deserves everything that comes to him, and whatever you say, I’m glad I hit him.’ He ground his right fist into his other palm. ‘I wanted to do it again.’

Ian sighed, shook his head. ‘He’s not changed in all this time. He still sees everything only as he wants to see it, the same way he did when he left here.’

‘You mean, after he beat you into a bloody ruin and left you to the crows?’

Ian’s eyes closed. His face tensed for a moment. ‘He’s still my son, Red. Whatever he did.’

‘You know how much that cost us, Ian.’ He shook his head. ‘You know just how much damage he caused. He ruined both our lives.’

‘I know, Red. I’m . . . sorry.’

Red downed the last of his drink. He walked towards Ian, hands apart, like a beggar pleading for change.

‘Just for once can’t you feel something for what he did? Why can’t you hate him?’ He lifted a hand, looked about to throw his glass down, then forced himself to stop and place it calmly down on the top of Ian’s liquor cabinet. ‘And yet you brought him back here. You still brought him back here.’

For a moment Ian said nothing, just stared back, eyes defeated, heart cracking beneath so many accusations. Matthew was just part of a bigger picture. He had hurt a lot of people, but his hate and the damage he had caused had been as a result of larger revolutions of the wheel of which he was just a part. Ian knew some things were unavoidable, and perhaps what Matthew had done that day with a piece of wood in his hands was one of those things.

He looked at Red, standing in the centre of the room, huge, barrel chest heaving, thick, tree–like arms tensed against his checked shirt. He met the gaze of his oldest and closest friend and held it.

‘He’s my son,’ he said at last.

17

A large proportion of the village had arrived at the church for the funeral, decked out in black suits and dresses, hats and veils, filing into the pews and taking their seats ready for the service to begin. Some held each other’s hands, some wiped noses and eyes with tissues, and some even cried real tears.

God, Matt thought bitterly from his place near the back. They really know how to put on a show. In a town like this, a funeral is one hell of an event.

He wondered just how many of the assorted elderly, middle–aged couples and groups of bored-looking children present had actually known his sister. For that matter had actually ever seen her. She had hardly paraded about town when he had lived with her, in fact barely coming out of her room.

Only at night, God, why only at night?

He shivered, swallowed a cough, felt bile climbing a stepladder into his throat. After Red had gone, Matt had thrown up several times, the vomit hot and sticky, the remains of the whiskey burning him until he felt like he had swallowed a firebrand.

After five more minutes with his head down the toilet, he had got back into the shower and washed the puke off his face. Only then, as he stumbled out of the bathroom, did he realize that Red had brought him back to his room at the Bed & Breakfast. Matt had looked at his unmade bed longingly, desperately wanting to crawl under the covers and hide there until the whole sorry affair was done, and his sister was finally buried. Only Red’s threat, echoing in his mind, had compelled him to pull on some dry clothes, slap himself hard across the face, and get over to the church in time for the service.

He looked around him. People were still filing in. Christ, Bethany had been popular. It was as though the moment he had left she had become the life and soul of the whole fucking town.

His father sat alongside Uncle Red at the front. He occasionally glanced back, his face unreadable over this distance, but Matt felt sure it was a look of disappointment. He had declined his father’s polite invitation to join them, instead opting for the back row, leaving a couple of empty rows between himself and the rest of the mourners. It didn’t bother him how conspicuous he looked. He had received enough stares already to tell him most of the village knew about his little altercation with Red earlier in the pub. In small towns, gossip traveled faster than most commercial airlines.

As the last mourners took their seats, the vicar began his sermon. Matt watched with disinterest as first his father, then Uncle Red got up to say a few brief words of mourning from the pulpit, then engaged the rest of the congregation in a couple of hymns. It was the usual fare; he had been to the funeral of Rachel’s grandmother, and although he hated to say it, he had felt more emotional then than he did now, at his own sister’s. Having a crying wife leaning on his shoulder the whole time had helped, but even so.

Bethany had been eight years old when he left, a living, breathing wraith, the silence that so restricted her the very thing that terrified him so much. Who ever knew what went on behind those eyes? Who knew what she saw, what she thought of everything? He had spent many a night lying awake in horror as he listened to her feet softly padding up and down the landing outside. What she did and where she went was a mystery, but he could be certain that something functioned behind those terrifying, all–seeing eyes.

If he were honest, he hadn’t been sad to leave at all. Grateful, in fact. At last he could sleep properly, though even now, years later, that ghostly little girl occasionally haunted his dreams.

He sighed, bored, and scratched idly at the tatty varnish on the back of the pew in front of him, wanting to get on with it.

The sooner the service finished, the sooner they could get up to the old chapel and see Bethany off at last. It was only a dirt trail, over thick surface roots and slippery humus earth, hardly accessible for the sixty or seventy mourners he estimated to be present. At least half were what Matt classed as “doddery”: septuagenarians and better, incapable of making their seats without assistance. No, after this ceremony was over they would slowly hobble up towards his father’s house for the reception, and later this afternoon there would be a small, private ceremony up at the old chapel, for Bethany to be laid to rest.

Just himself, his father, and Red. Matt could hardly wait.

He assumed the gravediggers must be up there now, preparing the grave for Bethany’s body.

He shivered. It chilled his heart to think of it, so close to his mother.

A woman Matt recognised as Mrs. Baxter, Bethany’s old sign–language teacher, now stooped and graying rather than the straight–backed prude he remembered, had stood up and begun to say a few words. She had failed completely, Matt remembered, in her attempt to help Bethany to communicate. In three years all she had achieved was to get Bethany to sign right back at her, duplicate her teacher’s actions as though she were looking into a mirror at a much younger version of herself.

Bethany, yes, despite her unfortunate disability, had so much going for her, Mrs. Baxter was saying. And such beauty, such precious beauty.

Matt dug at a spot along the edge of his jaw. Come on get it over with. I want to be out of here.

If he didn’t get too drunk at the reception afterwards, he would be gone by tonight. He had managed to drive while intoxicated before, though of course he never told Rachel. It was easy really, if you could keep your vision and the majority of your balance, and although he was reluctant, tonight he would make an exception. The problem was the half bottle of whiskey on his bedside table that would tease him and tempt him as he tried to pack away his things. He could already see himself sitting down, picking it up, feeling the comforting burn of the liquid as it coursed down his throat.

When it came down to it, he would probably find himself leaving it until morning before driving back. It was easier to focus in the mornings, anyhow.

Once upon a time, he had done the majority of his work in the mornings. They had always brought the best out of him: the most inventive characters, the cleverest storylines, the most inspired plot twists. Not anymore. In reality, Matt felt like he had run out of best bits about four years ago, and it depressed him to think that his editor probably felt the same.

People had begun to stand up and file out. He had been so lost in a private reverie that he barely noticed until they were walking past him, the children with their heads lowered, the elderly leaning on each other for support. A couple of older ladies flashed him regretful smiles, one even patted him on the shoulder. After the amount he had drunk that morning, he must look terrible. They had obviously mistaken sickness for sadness. Oh well, let them think what they like.

Matt made his way out with the other mourners and waited in the churchyard for his father. Many of the mourners were gathered around in small groups, talking in hushed tones. No one made a move to come over and talk to him so Matt wandered off, following a gravel path around the side of the church, then out across the grass and through the gravestones towards the far side of the churchyard. A grey sky watched him, but so far had kept its own tears to itself.

Father’s for a bit, then we’ll put Beth in the ground. Then I’m gone, and thank fuck for that.

God, he needed a drink.

He heard a door thud closed from around the front of the church. The last of the mourners must be out, so Matt started to head back to find his father, stepping between the graves, careful not to tread on any of the mounds of earth.

He looked up as he reached the front corner of the church, and stopped in surprise. A distant figure, standing quite still beneath the eaves of a two storey house across the road from the churchyard, was watching him.

He stopped, squinting his eyes to see clearly, still feeling the last effects of the whiskey.

A woman. He knew instinctively that she didn’t live there, that she wasn’t just watching the proceedings from afar, too busy to attend the funeral herself. No, she was standing there to keep out of sight. Keep out of sight while she watched him.

It was one of them, he knew. The Meredith sisters. Which one, he couldn’t tell from this distance, didn’t even know if it was the same one from last night. He had only ever seen them clearly once, and although from up close he had noticed the slight difference in the curve of their chins, the angle of their cheekbones, the terrible hardness in the eyes of one, and the soft compassion in the eyes of the other, from a distance they were identical.

Why she was watching him, he didn’t know. Did she even remember him?

Unnerved, he stepped backwards, away from her, but a piece of cracked paving stone caught his foot, and he stumbled. Normally he would have righted himself easily enough, but the whiskey had left his balance unsteady and he fell to the ground, his knees and fingers sinking into grassy earth, damp and mushy after so much rain. He cursed and pushed himself back to his feet, looking for the Meredith woman.

She was gone.

He cursed again, and headed back around the church to join his father, eyes searching every face for one of them, hiding there, eyes casting him with their judgment.

###

Bethany’s Diary, February 28th, 1985

It’s been such nasty weather. Tonight I sneaked out, for the first time in ages sure I wouldn’t catch cold, and went down into the forest, following the path. I wanted to know what Daddy was doing that night. For some reason I keep thinking about it, as though it’s important. I don’t know. I went up to the old church place. I looked for Daddy, but Daddy wasn’t there this time, not with his gun, I was glad. I looked at the stone sticking out of the earth, and wondered what it was. I sat against it for a while and thought about it. It reminded me a little of the ones down in the village. I’ve seen them out of the car window when Daddy’s been driving me places. They’re gravestones, but they have writing on them, not like this one. And I don’t know who would be buried up here anyway.

I don’t know of anyone who’s dead.

18

In the kitchen, lounge and study, groups of people hung around talking in hushed tones, drinking wine and eating buffet food Matthew’s father had ordered from a restaurant in the village and lain out on the big dining table. The gentle tones of a Marvin Gaye compilation played in the background. It was apparently one of Bethany’s favorites, though Matt could never remember her listening to anything, least of all music. Painted over everything like a coat of mildew was the smell of age; of old buildings, old people – now that most of the children had been dispersed back to the village – and old memories.

Just what did these people remember of Bethany? Clearly so much more than he did. Eight years old when he left, she was now a twenty–two-year-old woman lying cold and lifeless in a coffin. More than half her life had passed since he had last seen her. Matt knew there was a possibility she had even begun to talk, perhaps go to school and youth clubs, have sleepovers with her friends. Maybe she had even got herself a job. It didn’t seem likely though, and his father would surely have said.

She had taken her own life with sleeping pills. Swallowed an entire packet, his father had told him, and then lain down to rest for the last time. Even now, after it had had time to sink in, it sounded ridiculous. It was far too clinical for a girl who had always seemed away from her mind, drifting somewhere else perhaps, among the trees in the forest.

Earlier, Mrs. Carter had approached him to whisper a few brief condolences, but she seemed the only person unaware of his newfound hated–celebrity status, for most of the others present treated him like a leper, eyeing him warily and turning away whenever he came near. It made him angry. Anyone would think this whole sorry mess was his fault.

He had struggled too, with so much drink on offer. Uncle Red had pulled him aside and warned him again to keep his drinking beast locked away, and although Matthew had been loath to listen to him, he had tried hard just in case Red had been serious about his threats.

For a while he had done okay.

Eventually the bars of his resolve had cracked and the beast had broken free. Inside his jacket he had stashed a quart of brandy stolen from his father’s cabinet. As he slipped up the stairs towards the upper levels of the house, feigning the desire for a little privacy, he felt it pressing against his chest like a pacemaker. Just the thing for a little quiet introspection.

He made his way up to the third floor. The second level seemed to be where his father lived now, having moved down from the fourth in the years since Matt left. From the foot of the staircase leading up to the third he could smell dust, feel it fall around his shoulders like a veil, its dryness almost choking him. The upper floors felt untouched for years, and he made his way up there for that very reason. Once, he and Bethany had lived on the third floor, amongst a jumble of unused bedrooms and function rooms, most stinking of dust and disuse even in those days.

The house had always spooked him, even before his sister did. Four of them until his mother’s death, then four again at times when Uncle Red stayed, could not bring life to a house which contained at least twelve bedrooms, though Matt wasn’t sure exactly how many because he had always preferred his explorations to take place outside the house. Bethany had ruled in here, despite rarely leaving her rooms – except at night; Jesus, why always at night? – with her very presence alone.

So many rooms remained untouched.

He slipped in through the door of what had once been his bedroom, already pulling the brandy out of his coat.

He stared. Disbelieving.

It hadn’t changed in the years since he had been away. His bed, though made up and cleaned, still had the same bedclothes, the same green patchwork design he had made his favorite as a child. His books still lined the shelves, albeit with a sheen of dust, his posters, now fading, still faced him along the walls. Gary Numan, The Clash, The Damned, Blondie – boy, he had had a real thing for Debbie Harry – ABC, one of The Ramones with the blonde one from ABBA poking out from behind (after Debbie, Anita had ruled his fantasies, but that was as far as it went – Matt thought their music had sucked), Taxi Driver, Star Wars, one of Ursula Andress in Dr No.

He gulped from the bottle as memories swamped him. So many days sat in here alone, reading books, listening to the records still stacked in one corner, writing love letters to girls at school on the desk by the window. He even remembered a couple of times when he had sneaked a girl in and smiled coyly, though his vision rapidly soured as he remembered how Rebecca Crowley, the sixth–former who　had promised him oblivion in exchange for two Stranglers records, had freaked out and ran when she’d looked up from her “business” to find Bethany standing in the doorway.

Matthew’s mood abruptly darkened. What was he doing back here? He had no place here now. His life existed on a whole different plane, in a whole different world to this. This was nothing but a bad dream.

He went to the window and peered out. His father’s truck sat in the driveway, now accompanied by a clutch of other vehicles. And by the top of the drive, parked tight under the trees, in a way that could either have been to allow others to pass or to conceal it, was a big black car. Matt frowned, remembering the car from yesterday, and the one he had seen driving down the lane to the Meredith sisters’ cottage. The same one? He couldn’t tell because the rain had begun to fall, getting heavier as the minutes passed. Matt groaned. Trust his father to pick a day like this for a fucking funeral.

A creaking sound came from above him, and his thoughts on the mysterious black car were pushed aside. He looked up reflexively, as though the ceiling might suddenly collapse, wondering who on earth might be up there.

Then it came again.

No, not a creaking sound. More of a whine, muffled by the floor, but something organic, rather than, say, the movement of a piece of furniture.

His mind, juiced up again, took a moment to place it.

A baby’s cry.

It came again. Matt rose and went to the door, peering each way along the deserted corridor, half expecting to find his little sister standing there watching him the way she once had, with those desperately blank eyes. He heard nothing, but moved towards the end staircase, a thin spiral leading up to the fourth floor and the attic beyond. He climbed, the turns in the stairwell far tighter than he remembered, and emerged on to a thin corridor, doors off to either side. A few grimy prints lined the walls, and a once-red carpet that faded in and out where the sun reached it through the windows coughed up little plumes of dust as he moved forward.

He had almost never come up here, especially not after his mother’s death. His parents had resided on this level; it held far too many dark memories for him. Shivering, he moved along the corridor, looking for the door which would roughly equate to the room above his own.

He took a sip from the brandy for courage, and tried to rationalize. Some kid from the congregation downstairs must have come up here, got lost, and was now crying for his mother. Matt might even turn out to be a hero, which would make a change.

He found the door ajar, pushed it wide, and stepped into what he first thought was an empty room, the furniture that lay inside covered over by dusty sheets.

A woman stood by the window, tall, slim, with hair that fell almost to her waist. Matt felt a sudden lurch in his stomach, as though reality had detached itself from him, the world drifting away in one direction as he followed another, like two identical film stills being moved in and out of line.

‘Hey!’

She turned around, and Matt’s stomach lurched again, her features like a blurred painting. He didn’t wear glasses but his eyes wouldn’t work. He squinted, trying to focus on her face to identify her, but failed.

‘Who are you? Do I know you?’

He thought she smiled, but couldn’t be sure. Oh, my head.

‘I do know you . . . Bethany?’

The word had just popped into his head. The woman seemed to look surprised. He thought she tried to say something, and for a second her features bloomed into clarity, giving him a moment to see her clearly. She was beautiful, like an angel. Like they said.

Then the woman’s features blurred again, breaking up like a reflection in choppy water. Matt felt the muscles in his legs tremble. He stumbled forwards a few steps, glancing around for something to hold on to, but the room swayed and revolved around him. He moaned and staggered backwards, almost losing his balance.

The woman raised an arm. The other was holding on to a small bundle that bulged and wriggled as though alive.

Matt bumped back against the wall behind the door. His feet slipped out from under him and he slumped to the floor. He heard the brandy bottle smash on the wooden boards beside him, and the sharp, petroleum scent of alcohol filled his senses.

He looked up to find the woman standing over him, peering down, her own eyes squinting as though attempting to recognize him. She reached out a hand, and fingers soft as silk cupped his face.

Images swirled in his mind; reality and dream seemed to fuse like two coloured liquids being poured together. He peered up into her face, begging her features to focus, so he could look on her clearly again

(Bethany? Is that really you?)

just for one second, but her face remained as blurred as a bad photograph. The brandy swirled in his head but something else was acting on him too, some unseen force preventing him seeing her, as though she were a ghost and by seeing her he was defying two hundred years of physics experiments and thousands of laws and theories. Science wouldn’t let him see her, no matter what his own novels might say and he screamed and battered at its walls, crying out for mercy, for justice, and for one last look at her. He felt tears roll down his cheeks, and knew the face just inches from his own must be maternal, and compassionate, as though he were a child returned home.

And so he was.

‘Beth –’

The world spun. One instant the woman was there, the next she had gone, out of the door or wherever, he didn’t know, she simply had gone, and Matthew found unconsciousness reeling him in. He cried out her name once, and then everything faded.

19

She didn’t look back, didn’t want to see his face, the broken look about him that stank so much of Gabrielle that she almost wrinkled her nose.

Dear sweet Matthew, once such a beautiful child. Once so innocent, so pure, so full of love. She would have recognised him after fifty years out of any crowd, anywhere in the world, had his aura not turned so bad. So corrupted by anger. The essence of his soul had penetrated through her body and into her beating heart, and she could feel the intense hatred that had so gripped him.

But hatred towards what?

Things had happened, she knew. Things perhaps even now irreparable.

She fled through the house, through a thin door at the end of the third floor corridor and down a flight of stairs, now disused, but originally designed to give servants access to the kitchens and basement. Hugging the small bundle to her, she tried to understand.

There were things she knew, things others knew. Like a scattered jigsaw, with all the pieces together it might just fit. But for her, the chances were the pieces would fit differently to how they would fit for Matt. Or Ian. Or once, Bethany. They all saw it in different ways, and with only a partial comprehension she couldn’t expect them to understand.

The baby, wrapped in her arms, began to cry softly, and she ran a finger over its doughy forehead as she reached the bottom of the stairs and stepped through into a basement. Immediately the tears ceased, the baby’s eyes closed and its breathing assumed the low contentedness of happy sleep.

She moved between pillars of stacked furniture, old tools and piles of sacking, until she found her way to a stairway that opened up on to the garden along the house’s left flank, out of sight of the dining and living rooms where people still milled about purposelessly. Outside, the air was sweet with the smell of fresh rain. She loved days like this, despite a little chill in the air. The closeness of the air, like a thousand fingers touching her.

Although the rain had briefly stopped, the woman pulled the open part of the shawl protectively over the child’s head. ‘Sweet, sweet baby,’ she whispered, as she watched the child’s sleeping face. So beautiful, so innocent. A single warm tear dripped on to the baby’s cheek. It didn’t react, and the woman reached down and traced a small circle with her finger, the tear quickly drying on the baby’s skin.

Liana Meredith felt guilty, and also worried that Elaina would know she had been to the house again. Her sister would have felt the pull of Liana’s magic; she had panicked when Matthew had discovered her and used a trick to hide her identity from him. It was cruel to let him think he had seen his sister, but when he had said Bethany’s name Liana had simply played on it, put a little indecision in his mind, turned him away from the truth as best as possible. She felt terrible about it now, hoped it wouldn’t cause him too much distress. She knew if her sister found out she would laugh and call Liana pathetic. Pathetic for caring.

‘Home soon, my sweet one,’ Liana said to the baby, and looked up across the empty garden, seeing the path around to the front, and her chance to slip away unnoticed.

20

Her father had taken the kids to the park with a kite and a football, and her mother was in the living room, watching the Eastenders omnibus. Rachel sat alone in the kitchen with a mug of coffee. Her hands shook as she gripped the mug, trying to hold back the tears that threatened to overwhelm her. To cry was to let him win, and there was no reason why she should do that. Matt had caused this. It was Matt’s fault she had left him, not her own.

The drunkenness, the arguments, the abuse and latent threat of more violence. His fault.

Wasn’t it?

And couldn’t he change?

Her mother said that people didn’t change. People were what they were. They could pretend, but deep down they stayed the same. Always.

Rachel shook her head. Matthew wasn’t a drunk and a wife beater. Her mother’s words: people can pretend, but deep down, they stay the same.

Her own mother’s words.

She had met Matt in the third year at University College London. He had little background; his mother was dead, his father he didn’t speak to anymore. At UCL they had shared a house, and she had grown to like and then later to love him; to love the kind, well-spoken and sensitive man Matt had always been. With the exception of his deepest past, they had shared intimate secrets, Matt telling her of his dreams to rise from nothing to become a name people would remember, to be something when he had always been a no one. He had worked slum job after slum job; his college money came from his own back pocket.

He had succeeded to an extent. His first book had sold in excess of fifty thousand copies in its first year on the market, making several bestseller lists. He had never quite topped them, but even now, at thirty-one, still young for a writer, he had time as his ally, and the literary world might yet fall at his feet.

Except that a darkness, a pain, existed in his heart, a wound he had never managed to heal throughout their university years and ten years of marriage. Something that had gradually risen out of his nightmares to haunt him, slowly encroaching on his rationality, until his very personality was in danger of being stripped away.

His past, she knew, it all existed in his past.

And now, after fourteen years, he had turned and gone back to something he had longed to leave behind. For years, he had fought against it like a wild hooked fish, but now his strength was done and the memories had reeled him in.

Weak, a collapsed shadow of the man she had grown to love, irrational, perhaps on the verge of a breakdown, and yet he had still gone back to face whatever nightmares had made him this way.

And she had let him go.

The one time he might have needed her the most.

Rachel pushed the coffee away and rose to her feet. Car keys jingled in her hand.

‘I’m leaving,’ she said, from the living room doorway. She raised a hand as her mother started to stand up, a look of shock on her face.

‘Rachel, where –’

‘After Matt. I have to go find him.’ Tears welled in her eyes. ‘I love him, Mum. I love him so much. I’ve got to go get him back.’

‘But he’s hurt you so bad.’ Her mother meant the arguments. Rachel could never mention that Matt had hit her.

‘I know, Mum. But that’s not him. You say people don’t change –’

‘They don’t! Look at your grandfather, still an old fool despite all those gameshows he watches day in, day out.’ She flapped an exasperated hand toward the TV.

‘That’s what I mean, mum. This isn’t Matthew. Matthew’s kind, and loving, and . . . and wonderful.’ She wiped a hand across her eyes. ‘That’s the Matthew I want back, Mum.’

Her mother stood up and came over to Rachel, pulling her into a hug. She smelt of olive soap and hair spray. Rachel had to grit her teeth to stop herself from bursting into tears all over again.

‘Then you go, honey. You do what you have to do to get him back.’ She kissed Rachel’s cheek. ‘Don’t you worry about the kids. Me and your dad will keep them quiet. You do what you have to do.’

‘Thanks, Mum.’

‘But be careful, for God’s sake. Especially in that heap of junk you call a car.’

‘I will.’

They went out the front. Rachel paused as she opened the car door. ‘I’ll see you soon, Mum. Say bye to the kids for me. I can’t wait for them, I just can’t. If I see them I might not be able to go. I –’

‘They’ll be fine. You know kids, they’re like elastic, always bouncing back. Be careful honey. We’ll be right here waiting for you.’

Rachel lifted a hand to wave goodbye, and then climbed into the car. As she ignited the engine and turned out on to the road, she didn’t look back. She had a long journey ahead of her. Longer than she could ever imagine.

###

Bethany’s Diary, March 7th, 1985

I heard gun shots in the woods last night. I think Uncle Red and Daddy were out shooting stuff. I don’t know why because there’s plenty of food downstairs.

Mummy’s not been back for ages, even though now the snow’s gone no one can follow her tracks.

Where are you Mummy? I miss you.

21

Matt opened his eyes. His head was pounding. Had he fainted? He squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed his temples, wishing he could clearly remember what had happened. Something about a woman; had she attacked him, or him her? Had he even seen her at all?

He looked down at the smashed brandy bottle, and couldn’t be sure. A lot of things didn’t seem to make much sense. Who had that woman been? Not Bethany, surely? Bethany was dead.

Wasn’t she?

He scrambled to his feet as someone called his name. Uncle Red’s gruff voice.

He slipped out through the door, unsteady on his feet, unable to do anything about the brandy, but no matter, he would clean it up later. He doubted anyone ever came up here.

Except, of course, the woman.

Hadn’t this been one of his mother’s rooms?

Questions burned in his head as he made his way back down the stairs, into the living room, managing to avoid Uncle Red whose calls echoed from the end of the first floor corridor. His father stood waiting for him beside the drinks cabinet. A few other guests still lingered, some tearful, most inebriated. An older couple were making their way down into the kitchen and towards the front door.

‘Where have you been?’

‘Sorry, Dad,’ Matt said, only too aware of the slur of his words. ‘Got lost in memories, I suppose.’ Well, it was half true.

‘We need to get up to the chapel. Get this all over with.’

Matt nodded his assent, but his mind whirled. Twice, he had seen her. Twice, he had seen a woman with a baby. And then there was the woman he had seen watching him at the church. Were they all the same woman?

He thought it was the Meredith sisters, but now he wasn’t so sure. He didn’t know what his sister looked like now, after all. Could Bethany actually be alive and living with the Meredith sisters?

Was a game being played here? Who were the players? Who knew what was going on, and who didn’t?

And who was the child?

‘Red!’ His father shouted up the stairs. ‘He’s down here.’

Perhaps Bethany was alive. So who were they about to bury?

His mind reeled. His father, standing next to him, seemed to be oblivious to Matt, his neck arched to peer up the stairs as he waited for Red to reappear.

‘Dad?’ Matt didn’t give himself a chance to think about what he said, just let the words out as they came into his mouth. ‘Dad? Did Bethany have a kid?’

His father’s face snapped towards him. ‘What?’

‘A kid. A baby.’

Ian’s mouth dropped open to speak, but at that moment Matt heard the sound of Red’s heavy footfalls on the first floor landing. Matt tried to read his father’s eyes as Ian looked away, but failed, his own vision lacking clarity.

As he heard Red descending the stairs, Matt said, ‘I’m sorry, I have to get outside for a bit. I need some air. Call me when you’re ready to go.’

‘You’re drunk again, aren’t you?’ His father sighed without looking back. ‘Red told me about this morning.’

‘Dad, I –’

‘Just control yourself a little while longer and then you can drink yourself to oblivion for all I care.’

Something about the disappointment in his father’s voice struck a chord with Matt. He started to say something, thinking again about Bethany, but changed his mind. Instead he simply shrugged and turned away.

He stumbled down into the kitchen and out on to the courtyard. He leaned against the side of his father’s truck, breathing in the leafy, sweet–tasting country air, feeling it fill his lungs with its chilled freshness. The cold numbed the skin of his face and he began to feel almost sober. He looked out across the courtyard to see the old couple just starting down the lane towards the village. His gaze drifted across the canopy of trees on the far side of the courtyard. He found himself frowning. It only took a second to realise why.

The black car had gone.

Owned by a couple of mourners? Perhaps. Yet it had been parked at the bottom of his father’s lane the night before. Matt had felt sure no one had been in the house with them, but in a house so big you could never tell.

The blinking light in the upstairs window.

It belonged to a cleaner. Must do, although the house didn’t look like a cleaner had been within a mile of these halls and corridors for some time. It couldn’t belong to a cleaner.

Uncle Red then. But Uncle Red was indoors with his father.

Matt had no choice but to believe what his mind told him not to.

Who are you?

He had not been alone in that room, either tonight or last night. Whomever he had seen, be it Bethany or one of the Meredith sisters, had been there for sure. In some form or other he had seen them.

Because they had just driven away.

It couldn’t be Bethany. Bethany was dead, drugged herself to death with sleeping pills, according to his father. And the Meredith sisters would surely be old by now, not young and lustrous as the woman he had seen had been.

So, what the fuck?

Matt’s head spun. Reality and imagery merged again, forming a blur of memories in his mind like a drenched chalk drawing on flagstones, even as from the doorway, he heard his father calling his name.

Matt stumbled back towards the house. His father leaned on the doorframe, and shook his head in apparent resignation as Matt approached.

‘We should go,’ Ian said.

Matt, dazed, let his father and Red lead him out across the back lawn. They headed for the thin, partially overgrown path at the back of the garden, a footpath leading down through the woods to a shallow stream where as a child he had fished and built dams. His father had laid the stepping stones you used to cross it, big rocks he had found further upstream and carried down to make the path. In truth, you could cross it easily enough if you were willing to get your feet wet.

From the river the path rose again, winding steeply up through the shady, less densely foliaged woods on the opposite side of the valley until it ended in a flat clearing near the crest of the hill, in which the ruined chapel stood. And where, fifteen years before, his mother had been buried.

‘Come on, keep up,’ Red called over his shoulder, as Matt stumbled along behind them, wet grass and brambles whipping at his jeans and making his footing unstable. Red and his father both wore strong hiking boots, but Matt had not changed out of his funeral wear.

The lush woodland dripped water on to his clothes even after the rain had stopped, and Matt cursed often as he slipped, in some areas the path little more than mud. The undergrowth hadn’t been cut back in a long time – obviously his father rarely came here anymore, and the occasional branch whipped back across his face after his father and Red had passed. Matt scowled, wishing he had bothered to bring a coat like his father or Red. Red wore a thick trench coat and Ian an old battered jacket with a satchel slung over his back. Something jostled around inside it, a prayer book perhaps, from which he might mutter a few last rites.

They waited long enough to help him over the stream, swollen from the autumn rains. His father’s stepping stones were slick with algae and spray, but somehow Matt managed to avoid falling in to the churning waters.

The path rose up through steep woodland, towering stacks of sycamore and oak, thin boughs of ash and elm, all surrounded by an undergrowth of bramble, ivy and fern. Beautiful to look at, an untouched area of forest, but as they approached the top of the hill Matt could barely think about anything around him, only what lay ahead.

They emerged into the clearing and it rose before them, a tiny chapel, just a single stone room with the last of an often-replaced roof of wooden boards now collapsed inwards, and a small outhouse where as a child Matt had always believed the priest would keep his horse, or his donkey.

And there, in the centre of the clearing, some fifteen feet from the chapel’s boarded up doorway, his mother’s grave.

Matt froze, a terrible boiling sadness frothing up in his throat. He felt tears choking him, and he looked up at his father, horrifying memories flooding back as clear as the night they had happened. Unable to meet his father’s despairing gaze, he stared past at the empty clearing at the grave of his mother, the blank headstone, the grass and weeds now starting to grow up around it.

And wondered suddenly why the clearing stood so empty.

No gravediggers, no coffin, no grave.

Matthew’s throat seemed to constrict. He reached up a hand, thinking he would die of strangulation if he couldn’t force out a few small breaths.

‘Dad,’ he coughed. ‘Oh my god, where –’

Matt slumped to his knees, hands squelching into the soft earth. Mud spray flecked the front of his coat.

He felt himself pushed down from above, felt the ground reaching up for him. His eyes raced across the empty clearing, filling with tears. The earth bubbled and he thought it might swallow him.

The rain began again.

###

Bethany’s Diary, March 10th, 1985

We had a blizzard last night. Mummy never came, so the snow must have been too heavy for her. Today Daddy and Matty went out in the snow. Neither has come back yet, and now it’s getting dark. I haven’t seen Uncle Red today either.

I’m scared. I had the window open earlier. I heard shouting, far away. It sounded like Matty’s voice. Matty shouting. He didn’t sound too happy.

Interlude One

10th March 1985

‘Can’t stand this no more. Can’t stand this. Gotta get away. From here. Anywhere.’

Slumped in the corner of the bedroom, fingers raking against a torn poster of The Clash which now hung askew, the words of the seventeen–year–old Matt Cassidy float up through the air, striking the ceiling and shattering, breaking down into nothing before they can find their way up through the floorboards of the room above. Slumped, shoulder against the edge of Mick Jones’s guitar, fingers raking absently against Joe Strummer’s face, his words are heard by no one except himself and the bitter disagreeing silence of his bedroom.

‘I need . . . to . . . leave . . .’

Trickles of words, like the last flow of a stream before drought sets in, meaningless except to those desperate, despairing beasts yet to die, words as pointless as a killer’s gentle apology, as fresh air on the moon. A tap, dripping, fading to silence as the last drips slip off into the basin to vanish against the bleached white of the porcelain, to become meaningless, nothing.

He waits for an answer; none comes.

‘You killed my mother.’

The silence remains.

‘You killed her. You took her.’

Cry, cry sweet baby, it won’t hurt you for long –

His fingers rake, and the poster rips from the last BlueTac, slipping to the floor.

Just another minute, he will soon be gone –

Tears fill his eyes, hot like vomit, stinging like acid.

‘Mother . . .’

He can see the blows raining down.

It is time to leave.

Matt climbs to his feet, unsteady, walks to the wardrobe, and pulls out a rucksack and starts to stuff it with clothes. He clears essential items off his dresser: razor, shaving foam, toothbrush, soap, deodorant. Takes his wallet, his keys (though will I ever need these again?) his watch, a couple of keepsakes – a signed Stranglers tape and a little stone in the shape of a heart that he found on the beach at Falmouth on a primary school trip. It all goes into the rucksack, shoved to the bottom to make way for a blanket he strips off his bed. Who knows where he might be sleeping tonight?

Matt pulls a coat around his shoulders, stuffs gloves into the pockets – the spring is late, snow still blankets the world outside and the air has a sharp bite like hungry piranhas – pulls a woolen hat over his head. He slips shoes over his feet.

And goes.

There is no sign of Bethany; he hopes she is stowed away in her room, doing . . . whatever. He can’t fight off a surge of guilt for leaving her, but even now he can barely see his sister as anything other than the pearl-white wraith which haunts the corridors and his dreams. In an act of defiance, he faces upwards along the corridor that leads towards her room, and spits. For a second he watches the spit spread out across the carpet like the body juices of a crushed bug, then he turns away and heads down the stairs.

There is no sign of his father in the lounge or dining room, and Matt goes out the back door into the garden. He heads for the break in the hedgerow where the path begins, leaving footprints in the snow behind him. He knows his passage is as obvious as a freight truck dripping black paint on a white highway, but he has no choice. He wants to see his mother’s grave one last time, but wants to get away soon. He hasn’t time to cover his tracks, but the snow is still falling; within an hour it might cover them for him.

He reaches the edge of the lawn, the maw of the path gaping in front of him, white-tipped branches and grasses pointing the way downhill towards the river. He stops, his feet halting without request, and turns back, to look on the house one last time and remember its external beauty with its cloak of snowfall, perhaps to mask the pain that throbs from inside.

He sees Bethany standing at the top of the lawn.

She still wears her bedclothes, and her face is as white as the snow, tilted to one side as though she watches him like a curiosity, an anomaly, something unexplainable and incomprehensible within the mind that ticks behind her unreadable expression. A lock of hair beside her ear dances like a sprite in the breeze.

He watches her in return, feeling his blood run cold, wondering what she will do. Will she run after him, will she turn and walk away, will she simply disappear into nothing, become part of the snowflakes that fall around her?

She lifts a tiny hand, the sleeve of her sweatshirt slipping away to reveal milky white skin. She smiles.

And she waves. Two movements of her hand, once left, once right. The hand drops. She smiles again. It seems to split her face from side to side and is so bright it is as though the sun is trapped inside her head and is trying to squeeze out through her mouth.

‘Bethany –’ Matt starts to call to her, but she turns and walks stiffly back into the house, her feet marching like those of a clockwork soldier. He looks down at the point where she stood, but already her footsteps have covered over, as though she was never there. Feeling some kind of complex emotion that resides in the eternal void between euphoria and despair, Matt turns and starts down the path.

He only gets a few yards before he stops, and turns back to see if she is there, behind him. Of course, the path behind him is empty.

It takes longer than normal to negotiate his way down the steep path to the river. Under the trees, much of the path is free from snow, but wherever a break in the foliage occurs the path becomes blanketed, hiding roots and outreaching stones and rabbit holes, any of which might send him sprawling. He picks his way, kicking aside the snow, and soon the river appears before him, its thin width frozen solid.

Climbing the other side seems far easier but as he makes his way up through foliage made thicker by the snow, his nerves begin to rattle and Matt feels his heartbeat start to race. As though something terrible is set to happen some time soon.

It is a feeling he finds irrational, but one he cannot shake. He has no reason to fear his mother’s grave, no reason for trepidation to grow inside him almost to bursting, as though he is a human pressure cooker. No reason at all.

But when he reaches the clearing, he understands.

His father stands a short distance away, leaning over the grave of Matthew’s mother. His head is down, his eyes on the blank stone that rises up from the snow like a tiny rectangular pedestal. As Matt watches, his father reaches down and begins to scrape the snow away.

Matt feels the pressure building inside him. He wonders why he is afraid, then suddenly realises how he has been mistaken, that his fear has evaporated with his steamy breath, and taking its place is something that terrifies him as much as it seems to energise, to galvanise him towards action.

‘Why are you here?’ Matt’s voice echoes from one end of the clearing to the other.

His father stands up and turns towards him. The seconds seem to stretch like elastic as Ian Cassidy’s eyes look across the clearing at his son. For a moment they hover on the rucksack slung on Matthew’s back, then he looks away, back down towards the partially uncovered gravestone.

‘And you?’ Ian asks.

‘I’m leaving. I came to say goodbye.’ As if to clarify, he points at the grave. ‘To Mother.’ He takes a few steps forward towards his father. ‘Get out of my way.’

His father does not move. Ian can see the anger pulsing in his son’s eyes. So much anger, and all because Matthew does not – cannot – understand.

‘Where exactly do you plan to go?’

‘Wherever I choose. Away from here.’

‘And you would have left saying nothing to me?’

Matt scowls. ‘I have nothing to say to you. Why don’t you understand?’ He shakes his head, disbelief in his eyes. ‘I hate you. You killed my mother.’

Ian Cassidy’s eyes flood with pain as though a sluice gate in his mind has opened. He wants to tell his son the truth, make him understand. Matthew only remembers his mother as she was in the good days, before the corruption and sickness turned Gabrielle bad. Turned her evil, depraved.

But Ian knows Matt will never understand. Nor, he suspects, will Bethany, should she ever choose to listen. Bethany, he worries for. Her mother had already begun to change by the time Bethany was born, and Ian knows Gabrielle exists strongly in their daughter. Matt, though, was born pure. His only corruption is from the hatred breeding in his own mind.

Ian shakes his head, wondering who to blame. Matt doesn’t lie. Gabrielle died at Ian’s own hands; but to save her, and to save them. And now Ian suffers. Like Lady Macbeth before him, he will never cleanse his hands of his lover’s blood. Good blood, or bad, blood is blood.

He saved her from her own damnation, even if it meant losing her himself. But, had she not refused to go back to where she came from, to leave Ian forever, choosing instead to stay with him and live her life in Tamerton, she would never have turned bad, corrupted by the baseness of the mortal world that the purity of her mind could not control.

They had never known it would affect her so, but they had known the risk.

You couldn’t combine two worlds and expect there to be no consequences, but they had been willing to try.

For love.

So in love, Gabrielle and Ian had not let life nor death nor anything else separate them.

She could have left, Ian tries to tell himself. At any time. Even when the sickness began, and later when she had to . . . had to . . . His eyes squeeze shut against the terrible memories. ‘Even then she could have gone. It was her choice to stay. I did what I had to. To save her.’

He opens his eyes and looks up, surprised to realise he has been speaking aloud. He turns around to look for his son, only vaguely aware that somewhere someone is screaming, and a whooshing sound is racing through the air towards him, a sound like a brush through shallow water.

Something heavy strikes him, and Ian Cassidy feels his knees buckle, his balance go, and he drops forward, the snow cushioning him, but only from hitting the ground, not from the great blunt thing which strikes him from behind, over and over again.

It is Matt who is screaming. Ian struggles in the snow, trying to roll on to his front, to fight off the blows. A couple more blows land on his back and shoulders before he achieves it, only to have one strike him across the side of the face, knocking the fight out of him. One arm rises weakly to deflect a blow from the branch Matt holds, but Ian’s last strength fails him and he starts to drift away as the screams get louder and the blows continue to rain down.

In his mind he sees the face of his son, Matthew, his eyes blazing like a forest fire, one that will obliterate everything in its path. Ian can see nothing behind those eyes, behind the stark anger and hostility which so terrifies him, and he starts to wonder how much of Gabrielle’s corrupted soul had manifested itself before his son was born.

Matt batters and batters his father and then suddenly, with a splintering of wood the branch breaks. He feels incensed enough to fall upon his father and finish it with his bare hands, but something holds him back. Breathing hard, sweat forming on his brow despite the snow and the cold, he takes a step back, stunned. The branch, where it has fallen, leaves red stains on the snow.

He looks down on the bloodied mess which had been his father. Ian’s face is almost unrecognisable, his nose crushed, his lips swollen and his eyes closed. One hand lies upon his chest, where it fell after its last effort to fend off the blows.

His father looks dead. No sound comes from his body; not even breathing is audible beneath the howling of the wind. His cries and pleas stopped some time before; Matt is unsure when, is unsure exactly how much time has elapsed since his anger clouded his senses and took control. Already snowflakes are beginning to cover Ian Cassidy, the snow a waiting grave.

Matt Cassidy feels a sudden, very real fear. He takes a step forward, intent on checking his father’s pulse, looking for breathing. He wants the man to die, but equally, he doesn’t want to spend his life in prison.

Ian Cassidy stirs. Not much, only a twitch of his chest, a clenching of his fingers and a groan somewhere deep in his throat. It could easily be a dying breath, but that doesn’t matter, it is enough to trigger flight in Matt, and he turns and bolts, sprinting towards the far end of the clearing, where the trail continues up through the wood towards the moors, the highway, and freedom.

As he reaches the edge of the clearing, he stops, takes one last regretful look back, at his mother’s half buried gravestone, and his father’s broken body. A mix of emotions rise in him, wretched sadness and boiling anger, but he chokes them down, turns and disappears into the trees, rucksack bouncing up and down as he runs as fast as he can away from that place.

Ian Cassidy watches through bloody, swollen eyes until his son is out of sight. His own tears choke him, for a few brief seconds causing the red curtain to part from his eyes, then his strength fails him and he slumps back into the snow. He tries again to rise, to no avail. He closes his eyes and lets his mind slip away, taking with it the pain and the anguish, leaving him to the mercy of fate. He doesn’t care if he dies; with Matt gone Bethany alone waits for him in this world, and he is unsure if she even knows his identity. Maybe, maybe not.

#

A light flickers beyond the protective walls of his eyelids, and he tries to force them open. Nothing moves, at least not of his accord, for a moment later soft fingers touch his eyes and face and light floods in, immediately blinding him. He cries out in pain, a howl like a weak, dying animal, and the fingers flinch away, plunging him once more into a darkness only punctuated by that peculiar half–light.

‘Ian. Can you hear me?’

The voice is soft, lilting; a woman’s voice with a dreamy, awayness in the tone, as though he is hearing her underwater. He recognises the voice, or thinks he recognises the voice, but the name or indeed any details surrounding the owner escape him.

‘Ian. We have brought you back.’

Like a harp melody, soft strings strummed by delicate fingers. A different voice this time, but somehow, still the same.

‘You are healed of your external wounds but your inner turmoil is beyond our reach.’

He tries to lift his head, feels a relaxing of tension at the back of his neck before his strength fails, sinking him back into soft cushions. Everywhere hurts – or does it? Everywhere aches. Two different things.

‘You must rest or death may still find you.’

The timbre of the women’s words, the way they are spoken without pause makes him feel like a cat stroked head to tail in one motion. He yearns to find the strength to open his eyes.

The women?

No –

‘We have healed you. We have used much of our strength to save you. You are indebted to us now and one day will repay us.’

Ian groans, feels muscles spasm as he tries to push himself up. At last he manages to force his eyes open, only to see a dim, grainy version of his own bedroom, the wall to the left shrouded in shadow, the door to the right – ajar, filled with the silhouettes of two figures – takes some effort to move his head far enough to see. He strains his eyes as they adjust, makes out two women, shoulder to toe in white robes, like priestesses – identical, the same, sisters –

‘No . . .’

‘We could have left you to die but instead we chose to save you. We will return to you one day to claim what belongs to us.’

His eyes lift to their faces just as they begin to turn away. Ageless faces flanked by long black hair, eyes like stoked fires, features carved from stone. Humourless, their expressions blank apart from their eyes; if he had not seen them move he could believe them statues.

Elaina and Liana Meredith. Of all the people in the world to come to his aid . . . Ian Cassidy thinks he might rather have died out there in the snow than spend the rest of his life indebted to them.

‘Goodbye Ian,’ they chime in chorus, and leave.

As the door closes Ian lies back in the dark, feeling the curves and twists of his body moving as he shifts on the bed, feeling the aches in the bones he knows were broken, the tenderness of torn skin now made whole. And his face, one hand lifts to find only a coating of dried blood. Swellings beneath his eyes have sunk, his split lip is just bruised and the nose he felt smash across his cheeks is repaired.

He always knew they had a link far closer to Gabrielle’s world than his own, and now he knows. He wonders briefly if, once, they had been like her.

Angels.

Now he owes them for his life. And what form his repayment might take, only perhaps Heaven knows. Maybe not even Heaven.

He hears the sound of hurried footsteps on the stairs outside, and Red, his closest friend, bursts in. The light almost blinds Ian, who cries out, and the door is subsequently closed with a grunt of apology.

‘They wouldn’t let me come up! Are you – are you okay?’

Ian nods, or thinks he does. Red comes closer to the bed.

‘Oh my god, Ian. I can’t believe –’ he punches the closest cupboard door, and it shudders beneath the impact. ‘I’m sorry, but I went after him. I wanted to – I wanted to . . .’ Red’s eyes are unreadable in the darkness, but Ian can sense such bleakness he fears being sucked forward into those black, empty voids. ‘I took my gun –’

A stillness forms inside Ian, fragile, set to break at any moment, like a frozen lake in his stomach. ‘Did . . . did you –’

‘No! Of course he was long gone.’ Red rubs his eyes hard, as though his fingers can cleanse them of the images he sees there. ‘I’m sorry, Ian. I would’ve . . . if I’d found him I would’ve . . .’ A choking sound begins deep in Red’s chest: sobbing.

‘Matt . . . he . . . had his reasons.’

‘No! He had none! He . . . had none.’ On the edge of Ian’s bed, Red begins to cry, perhaps somehow sensing a dark premonition for the future.

‘It’s over now. He’s gone.’

‘It will never be over! Never!’

Red’s words echo in Ian’s mind long after the man he regards more highly than any brother has gone. After the door has closed on him, and he is allowed to rest, to contemplate the day for the first time, he can only try to understand what has happened.

To find out what he has gained, what he has lost, and what he owes.

Red’s words linger like war dust, hung, like a funeral veil, in the air.

Part Two

Ghosts

1

Rachel thumped the wheel in dismay and shouted in exasperation at the cars in front, while behind her, no doubt others shouted at her own. She wound down the window to let the steam clear from the windscreen. Leaning out, she saw the queue stretching ahead seemingly forever, Junction 14 off the M5 into Birmingham still two miles ahead.

The radio told her a lorry had rolled, blocking all three lanes. Every so often emergency vehicles whizzed by on the hard shoulder, police, ambulances and fire engines, hurrying to deconstruct the sorry metallic mess which, somewhere beyond the next rise, was blocking the centre of the motorway.

According to the radio, she needed to leave at Junction 17 to avoid delays. Unfortunately, since she had already passed Junction 17, the information was useless. At least the road past Birmingham was clear. Or so the radio said, but then radios said a lot of things. She’d just have to hope.

Tamerton, Matt’s home town – she’d found it on a map in his study, about twenty miles north of Plymouth, nestled on the southern edge of Dartmoor – lay about four hours ahead. She would be there by nightfall with a little luck.

She hoped she wasn’t too late.

2

Red took a step forward. A hand fell on Ian’s arm. He looked back towards the clearing’s edge, back towards Matt.

‘Hey, what’s wrong with you now?’

‘Matt?’

‘He’s bloody drunk again, that’s what,’ Red scoffed, starting to turn away.

Ian went forward, took hold of his son’s shoulders and helped him to his feet. He held Matt’s arm while the young man steadied himself.

‘Matt, what’s wrong?’

Matt’s eyes had glazed. He looked past his father, out across the clearing, at his mother’s grave, at the ground, untouched, around it.

‘She’s not dead, is she? This is all a lie.’

‘What?’ Ian stared at his son, incredulous.

Matt turned to look at him, face still blank, expressionless. ‘Bethany’s not dead, Dad.’

‘Of course she is!’

‘Matthew, what in God’s name are you talking about?’ Red shouted.

‘Shut up,’ Matt spat back. Red tensed, but didn’t move. Matt continued, his voice terrifyingly monotone. ‘I know she’s not dead. I’ve seen her. I thought I saw her last night. Upstairs in the house. I thought I saw her body, that you showed it to me. But I know that first time was a dream, because . . . because . . .’ He stopped, unable to bring himself to mention the hammering sound he remembered so vividly.

‘Ian, this is ridiculous!’ Red snarled. ‘Have some damn respect, Matthew!’

Matt pressed his hands against the side of his head and frowned, as though to drown out the static that confused him. ‘The second time, I know it was her. I didn’t see her face, but . . . I know it was her.’

Ian stared at his son, his eyes glistening. ‘She is here, Matthew. You’re right, we’re not burying her. I’m sorry if I misled you. But she is dead. I found her body. I called in the ambulance, waited with her for them to arrive. I can remember how she lay, on her bed, dressed in her bedclothes as though she were sleeping, that any moment she might wake. I couldn’t believe she was dead, even when I saw the empty pill jar by her bedside. But when I touched her, I felt the coldness of her skin.’ He paused and wiped a hand across his eyes. ‘Don’t disrespect her, Matt. Don’t disrespect me. Your sister is dead. I felt for her pulse, I tried to revive her, I held her cold body in my arms for half an hour as I waited for the ambulance. I know how dead she was.’

He touched Matthew’s face, gently turning it towards his own. A single tear trickled down Ian’s cheek. ‘Don’t ever talk to me like that again. You have no idea what I went through.’

‘Dad, I –’

Back across the clearing, Red had squatted down, his own face turned towards the ground, one hand on his brow and his eyes hidden from them.

Ian Cassidy stared long and hard at his son. ‘Matthew . . . you want to see your sister, then she’s here.’ He pulled something out of the satchel he wore slung over his shoulder.

Ian held out what looked a little like a vase with a lid. Grey in colour, made from China Clay, with decorative markings around its sides, images of the sun, the moon, the earth, revolving around each other in a triangular orbit.

An urn.

‘We had Bethany cremated last Thursday. We’ve come up here to scatter the ashes. Burials are a thing of the past, I think. It’s more dignified this way, than thinking of them, down there, in the earth.’ He frowned. ‘I thought you realised.’

Matt didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t think straight. Too drunk again, too fucking drunk. It’s supposed to be easier in here than out in the real world. Things are supposed to make sense in here.

‘Matthew?’

‘Huh?’

Ian sighed. ‘Last night, we talked, we drank whiskey, you fell asleep in the chair, I walked you home at about two. I told you about this, about everything.’ He shook his head in resignation. ‘I guess you were too drunk to remember.’

‘No.’

‘Matthew, don’t play this stupid game!’ Ian stood up and walked away from him, back across the clearing towards Red, who had now risen to his feet, his own eyes moist.

‘I saw her again, just now,’ Matt said.

Red scoffed again, hands gnarled as tree stumps planted on wide hips.

Ian’s eyes hardened.

‘Upstairs,’ Matt said. He pointed at the urn. ‘I don’t know who you’ve got in there, but it’s not my sister.’

‘I’m getting tired of this,’ Red growled. ‘You were drunk, you were seeing things. You’re still drunk now. You’re a fucking mess.’

Matt ignored him. ‘And a baby, she had a baby with her. Where did she get a baby?’

Matt glanced across at Red as the big man began to move. Something in his eyes was different, something had snapped. The big man strode forward, this time roughly shoving Ian’s arm aside, and struck Matt across the face with a backhand cuff. Matt grunted and fell to the floor, clutching his cheek. Ian stepped across as Red grabbed the front of Matt’s shirt and raised a fist to strike him again.

‘You insolent little –’

‘Red, that’s enough!’

Ian hooked his arm across the top of Red’s chest, and jerked the bigger man backwards. Red’s grip on Matt slipped and he fell backwards on to the damp ground. He glared at Ian with a mix of indignation and astonishment.

‘I don’t want people fighting here.’ Ian’s voice had a sonorous boom, the last defiant words of a dying king to his enemy. ‘Not here. Not anymore.’

Matt stumbled to his feet, legs unsteady but he leaned against the wall of the chapel to balance himself. He eyed his father warily, but his gaze finished on Red. ‘You know, don’t you? You know what I’m talking about!’

‘All I know is that Bethany is here.’ Ian held up the urn.

Matt stared down at the urn, then up into his father’s eyes. Images bloomed in his mind of that day, that day years ago when he had bludgeoned his father and left him for dead. The same anger began to rise, the same inherent violence, and he tensed, feeling the pressure building up within him, wanting to burst forth.

‘You’re a fucking joke,’ he muttered, and snatched the urn from his father’s grasp. ‘This is nothing . . . but dust.’

He threw the urn across the clearing.

Ian looked stunned. Red, still lying on the ground, didn’t have time to react.

The urn struck the edge of his mother’s gravestone and shattered. Ashes scattered everywhere, some blowing up in the wind, the remainder greying the wet grass.

All three men were still for a moment. Ian looked across at the shattered remnants of his daughter’s urn with a look of horror on his face. Red stared upwards at Matthew. Matt himself looked stunned, perhaps realising for the first time the severity of what he had done.

‘I’m sorry . . .’

Ian turned to stare at him. He just shook his head.

Matt looked down at Red. The big man’s eyes were bloodshot, and his fists had tightened around clumps of grass. Matt backed off as Red started to rise, his eyes filling with fear like the sun breaking through an overcast sky.

‘Matt, don’t –’ Ian started to say, but Matt had already backed away to the edge of the clearing, just feet away from the top of the path. Red pushed himself to his knees, just as Matt turned and bolted into the trees.

Red started to go after him, but Ian grabbed Red around the chest, holding him back. He could feel the pounding of Red’s heart, the tension of his muscles, the outrage in his eyes.

‘Red, as my oldest friend, for everything we’ve been through together, let him go,’ he pleaded. He didn’t want to fight, despite the strength he still carried in his body. Ian’s intensity had gone as he saw his daughter’s ashes violated, while Red’s anger had bloomed in the same instant.

Red’s body relaxed. ‘For you, Ian, and for her. But if I see him again you’d better be there to keep me off.’

‘Come on, we have to say goodbye to her. It’s only right.’ Ian started to turn away.

Red didn’t move. Ian stopped, looked up at his friend’s face.

Red shook his head. He stared at Ian, and his mouth dropped open, the words that came out weak, disjointed.

‘How did he know?’ he murmured. ‘How did he know about my baby?’

3

Liana was glad for the warmth of the car as she drove back up towards the moor. She knew she shouldn’t take it with her, that it was safer to walk as she had less chance of being discovered, but, as her sister often reminded her, she didn’t have much control of subtlety. And she hated walking, especially in the fog and at night.

Last night she had come out in the car, parked it at the bottom of Ian’s drive, and slipped inside to look for Gabrielle. She had waited hours, nervous of Ian and Matthew downstairs, and hoping that her son’s presence back in the house might bring Gabrielle out of hiding. No such luck. She had waited a couple of hours for Ian to go to bed after Matthew had left, then sneaked out, only to find her sister must have come past, found the car and seen fit to steal it, to teach Liana a lesson. She wanted to believe Elaina had done it for that reason, but Liana knew her sister’s main motivation would have been her knowing that Liana hated the moors at night; even after so many years she still got spooked. Being a real bitch was just a part of Elaina’s nature.

So tonight Liana had parked it up on the edge of the courtyard, hoping no one would notice it in amongst the crush of mourners’ cars. At least Elaina hadn’t come and taken it this time.

It interested Liana that Matthew was back. She had always had a soft spot for him. As a teenager he had had such a sweet smile, and had been so well-mannered. It was a shame that life had twisted him so. She hoped it had nothing to do with Gabrielle. Such a horrible way to end; she wouldn’t wish it on anyone, but at least now Gabrielle was safe from further harm.

It was also interesting that Gabrielle hadn’t appeared to see her son. Or even her daughter’s funeral, though Liana strongly suspected Bethany was with her mother now, and probably a lot happier. Perhaps it had something to do with the other one. His presence had grown stronger, and Liana could feel the danger in him. The circumstances and shortcomings of living in this world were different for men and women, of course, but hopefully the time was close when they could be sent back. Then, Liana hoped, a lot of suffering would end.

A light was on in the living room as she pulled into the small turning circle at the bottom of their drive. No doubt Elaina was waiting inside for her, ready to tear strips off her for going up the house and taking little Jack with her. Elaina knew Liana would use her trickery to keep the baby quiet, turn faces away if necessary, but even so, one slip up could cost them.

Elaina didn’t understand that Liana only wanted the best for all of them. Liana didn’t expect her sister to understand, after all, it wasn’t in her nature, and that was the whole point of everything.

4

‘We came up here to scatter Bethany’s ashes,’ Ian said, picking pieces of the broken urn up off the ground and putting them into the bag. ‘What’s done now is done. We have to say a short prayer for her, say goodbye.’

‘I can’t believe what he did –’

‘There’s no point in questioning it. Matt has issues with Bethany’s death. You and I have had more time to come to terms with it. We owe it to her to show our last respects, whether Matt wants to or not. If you loved her –’

Red’s eyes filled with sorrow. He almost staggered, putting a hand on Ian’s shoulder to support himself.

‘Of course I loved her. How could you possibly doubt that?’

Ian nodded slowly, understanding. ‘Then let’s say a prayer for her, put her to rest. She would have wanted this. To be with her mother.’

Red nodded. His eyes suddenly steeled, as hard as Arctic winter. Ian knew he couldn’t let go of his anger, that it held him still, enslaved him.

‘But what about him? Where the hell does he think he’s going? Christ, Ian, I told you not to invite him back. He’s tried to ruin our lives before.’

‘That’s not fair, Red.’

‘You don’t think so? He left you for dead, Ian. Your own son.’

Ian shook his head. ‘He idolised his mother, and rightly so. Even when she began to . . . get sick, he only ever saw her beauty, her kindness. As far as he’s concerned, I took that away from him.’

‘Then tell him! Tell him what happened! Tell him why you did it!’

Ian sighed. ‘He would only accuse me of lying. Such a fanciful story would be wasted on Matthew’s reasoning.’

‘I thought you said he wrote books? Surely he’s inclined to believe anything? The truth can’t be more fanciful than whatever he writes about.’

Ian didn’t answer. He picked up a handful of ashes from the ground and scattered them evenly over the earth directly in front of the grave.

Red came to kneel beside him. Ian closed his eyes and began to recite a short prayer, hands pressed together. Beside him, he heard Red sniff.

‘I miss you,’ Red whispered, barely keeping the sorrow from his voice. ‘I miss you so much. One day . . . one day I’ll come and find you.’

Ian placed one hand on his friend’s shoulder, hesitantly at first, then with more authority. It had been a difficult thing for him to get used to, Red and Bethany. His closest friend and his daughter.

Lovers.

At first the idea had seemed absurd. His mute daughter and his enigmatic friend. But after a time he had became accustomed to the idea, began to realise that if anyone could take care of her, his best friend could. Bethany had not been like other children. Locked within her world of silence she had become a stranger to them all, barring perhaps Red, who had found a way to communicate with her in the absence of words.

Love.

For the first time in years he had seen her smile, seen her leave the house, wander the garden picking flowers, sitting on the grass and cupping insects in her hands, marveling at the world outside her four barren walls, and he had hoped, he had so desperately hoped, she might finally break her silence.

Looking down at the sobbing figure of his friend, Ian realised he had done wrong by her. He had done wrong by both of them. Whatever he had done, he had failed, and what had happened to Gabrielle, his dear, sweet wife, was only the ice on the lake’s surface. But he had only done what he had to; to protect them, and to save them.

Matthew had failed to recognise it and had taken off, while Bethany had withdrawn further into the imaginary world that surrounded her, until she reached womanhood. He had dreamed that his daughter might open up, might finally talk to him, hoped Red could bring words from her silent lungs.

Red had made her happy. Although their relationship had barely extended beyond the house grounds, Ian knew she had been happy. He had seen it in her face, and thought it only a matter of time before she started to speak.

It was losing the baby that had broken her.

She had written his name down on paper – the only word she had ever written for anyone else.

Jack.

Ian shivered, remembering Matt’s words. How had Matthew known about him?

The Meredith sisters had come to deliver the child. They had delivered many children in the village over the years, saved several difficult births with ways no doctor or midwife ever could. But not this time; they emerged with words of terrible sorrow and regret, while through the door into the bedroom, Bethany’s silence was far worse than the tears or screams of any hysterical mother whose child had been stillborn. As though Bethany accepted it, accepted the child’s fate as belonging to her own.

The sisters. They had saved Ian’s life once, of course, with something more than medicine. Magic? He didn’t like to think about it, but Matthew had left him closer to death than he would ever let his son know. Matt had beaten him beyond saving. Ian should have died, but they had come to him and brought him back from the edge.

But Jack’s tiny life had been beyond even them. Perhaps Gabrielle . . . once. He shook his head. It was not worth thinking about it now.

He still owed the sisters. He had their terrible life debt hanging over his head like a bleak thunder cloud forever waiting to burst. Sometimes, he wished they had left him to die, but he knew, for Bethany’s sake alone, they had brought him back.

Their motivation existed in complexities he would never understand now Gabrielle was gone.

He looked up at Gabrielle’s grave, the blank headstone that told no one who she was, kept her existence a secret, the way it had to be. He frowned. Something Matthew had said stuck out in his mind. Something that wasn’t quite right.

A woman upstairs, holding a child.

Who had Matthew seen? Who had he seen with the child?

Who was the child?

. . . oh . . .

(No)

Ian could almost feel those blows raining down again as realization hit him so hard he almost pitched forward into the gravestone. The truth was more terrifying than he could ever have imagined.

Matthew hadn’t seen Bethany at all. Not a ghost, not a dream, not the real her. Of course not. Bethany was dead.

Ian pulled his hand off Red’s shoulder so quickly the other man gasped in surprise. Recovering his composure Ian jumped to his feet, a rough swipe of his arm brushing away tears as alarm flashed across his face.

‘You okay?’

‘An eye for an eye,’ Ian muttered, staring at Gabrielle’s grave. ‘A favour for a favour.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I think we need to find my son.’

Red snorted. ‘Well that’s easy, he’ll be slumped next to your liquor cabinet. Why?’

‘I need to know who he saw.’

‘He was just drunk.’

‘Red, he knows about Jack, about your baby. He said he saw a woman with a baby, a woman he thinks was Bethany. Now, I haven’t said anything to him, have you?’

‘Of course not! But that doesn’t mean someone else hasn’t.’

Ian shook his head. ‘Like who? Who has he come into contact with? Who could have told him?’

Red frowned. ‘I don’t know, someone in the pub? Someone at the B&B?’

‘You told me yourself he was sat alone in the pub. And it’s hardly breakfast table conversation, is it?’

Red shook his head.

Ian frowned. ‘What if he really did see someone upstairs with a baby? There were no women with babies at the house earlier that I remember.’

Red’s hands bunched into fists, his anger directed at a new, as yet unidentified foe. ‘Are you saying what I think you’re saying?’

Ian nodded. ‘Yes. That we seriously need to find my son. We’ll take it from there. But first, we need to know who he saw.’

###

Bethany’s Diary, June 15th, 1990

A terrible thing happened last night. Dad came into my room, and started to hunt through my things as I lay in bed. He shouted at me, and I could smell alcohol on his breath. I was too scared to move. He went straight over to my dressing table, and I knew he was looking for something. When I saw what it was, though, I wanted to scream at him, tell him to stop, but I couldn’t. I just sat still, the bedclothes wrapped over my knees, and watched.

He found them. He found my diaries.

In the secret place under the floorboard in the corner, tucked under the hot water pipes that keep them warm in winter. He must have known they were there, must have found them already, for he went straight to the dresser, hauled it back, and pulled up the loose board underneath.

I shook my head at him to stop, but he ignored me. He scooped them all up in his arms and marched out of my room.

I waited for him to go and then followed him down into the kitchen. An empty bottle stood on the table, and I knew he was drunk. He would never do it otherwise, I know he wouldn’t. Well, he took them all down into the kitchen, opened up the stove and tossed them in, then stood there for some time, watching them burn. I watched him from the doorway, and don’t think he saw me, otherwise he looked crazy enough that he might throw me in there too. After a while, I went back up to my room.

I cried under the sheets for a while, sad that so many books – there must have been ten or twelve – had been stolen and burnt. I don’t know what got into Dad, but from now on I’ll have to be careful.

So many memories taken from me.

After a while I plucked up the courage to sneak over to the hole in the floor, lift the board, look in, look around. There, at the back, I found one book he had missed, the oldest one, dating back five or six years.

From now on I’ll find another place to hide them, another place where no one will find them. I know a few places; I’ll decide tomorrow.

Terribly sad, I flicked over the pages of the book, worn and with corners all dog–eared, reading my awful handwriting – at least it’s got better since then! The book dates back to when Mummy first died, 1984. Of course, I didn’t realise at the time, and it seems strange reading about how I used to see her at the window, watching me, how I’d follow her footprints in the snow. Funny how I thought she was still alive, and living out there, when all the time, according to Dad, she’s been buried in the ground.

Even stranger, though, that I keep seeing her.

Watching me through my window, waiting for me out in the snow. She seems so real even now I know that’s not really her, that’s just something else. Perhaps she’s not really dead, or only a little bit dead, and a bit of her has been left behind. Whatever, I know she wants me to go with her, go out to her in the snow and be with her forever.

After tonight I don’t think Dad can really love me, so one day, maybe, I will.

I just don’t know how yet.

5

Matt stumbled several times, falling over completely twice, the second time landing face down in the shallow waters of the stream, the icy water like a sharp wake up call at boot camp.

He pushed himself to his feet. He was soaked through, and his fingers found a cut had opened above his left eye. He must have struck his face on the smooth pebbles at the bottom of the stream, but his face felt so numb he couldn’t tell for sure, the only certainty being the blood that stained his vision red.

He wiped it away with a damp sleeve and stumbled on up towards the house. He glanced behind him for signs of pursuit, expecting any moment to feel Red’s rough hands on his shoulders pulling him backwards, a huge fist slamming into his face.

What cruel trick were they playing on him? Their innocent ignorance, their stubborn denial of his claims. Sick, unfair.

They knew. And Matt knew they knew. About the girl. About the baby.

The way Red had struck him, he may as well have held up a neon sign admitting his guilt. And his father, what could he possibly gain from all this?

Matt barely considered that his own conclusions might be wrong. He wasn’t seeing things, surely? He had lost a lot of his sanity over the last few hours, but even blind drunk he wasn’t that crazy.

He cried out with relief when the house finally loomed up before him, rising up from beyond the garden, a grey, antiquarian monolith filled with secrets. The ascent out of the valley had exhausted him and the sight of any building would have been welcome, even one which held the shadows of his little sister’s face in every window.

Still unsure of what he was looking for, Matt headed into the house.

An eerie silence filled the rooms and corridors, and he stood still a while, listening for the sound of movement upstairs.

He heard nothing but a thick, almost tangible silence.

She must be here somewhere, he thought. Where else would she go? She lives here after all.

He climbed the stairs to the second floor, moving past his own rooms and heading for Bethany’s. He winced when a floorboard creaked just outside the door and froze, grimacing. But nothing, no sound of movement came from inside. Where was she?

He reached the door and tried the handle. It was locked, but age had made these thick pine doors brittle. To hell with being quiet, he thought, stepped back and aimed a kick squarely below the lock. His aim was poor, and his foot struck the lower edge of the door handle, but it was enough to cause a sharp cracking sound, and after a second kick the door burst inwards, banging against the wall behind.

Matthew stepped inside, bracing himself for confrontation.

Empty. Not even old furniture, the kind you always saw in horror movies, covered over with sheets. The bed had gone, her cupboards, dresser, bookshelves, always so distressingly empty of books. As though Bethany’s life was a slate now wiped clean.

Something about the starkness of her room horrified Matt. They had tried to erase her presence, as though he had never had a sister at all.

He remembered his own room, untouched after all these years.

He walked across to the window and peered out at the back garden of the house. There was no sign of his father or Red, but it would only be a matter of time before they came after him. He looked towards the break in the back hedge where the path began, and thought he noticed a movement in the undergrowth, a shifting of foliage that was too irregular to have been caused by wind. He stepped back quickly, not wanting to be seen, and drunkenly stumbled a few extra steps. Something creaked underfoot, making him gasp.

He looked down and saw a loose board. He tapped it with his foot, saw how it wasn’t even fixed down. He remembered the layout of her room well enough, and knew her dresser would have once covered this area, keeping this loose board away from uncertain feet and prying eyes. He dropped to his knees. His fingers found a grip and he lifted the board up.

He discovered a small space beneath, cross beams from the ceiling below and the hot water pipes leaving a cubby hole a couple of feet wide. Bethany had never had many possessions, never shown more than a passing interest in any presents they gave her. What she did have had been piled into a box in another corner, a random assortment of what had become junk. But this, this tiny under floor space, struck him as odd. Space for a few keepsakes, perhaps.

He heard a sound from downstairs, someone shouting his name.

Panic filled him. Damn it, they were in the house. He had let himself get preoccupied again.

He stood up, kicked the board back into place, and turned back toward the door. There had to be some way out, some way past them. A back staircase, a fire escape?

None that he remembered. He could always hide. But where?

The house was full of closets and walk–in cupboards, cubby holes and cluttered storerooms. There were perhaps twenty rooms he had only been in once or twice in his whole childhood. He could hide just about anywhere.

He slipped out into the corridor, aware that Bethany’s room would be among the first places they would look. A stairwell rose to his right, up towards his parents’ old rooms. A chill wind seemed to ghost through his bones at the thought of being up there again, near to where his mother - before what happened - had spent a large part of her life.

He didn’t like to think about her. It hurt too much.

In fact, for the last ten years he had hardly thought about her at all. He had cut her memory and those of the rest of his childhood off like a log on a chopping block. He no longer needed those memories; they could do nothing but hurt him.

Matt took the stairs two at a time, hurrying to get some distance between himself and them, but at the same time terrified his unsteady feet would bring him clattering back to earth where he would open his eyes to find Red standing over him. The stairwell was separate from the main staircase that rose through the centre of the house, a small spiral that connected only the third and fourth floors. Each floor had two smaller stairwells, alternating up and down at either end of the house, while the main staircase connecting all the floors rose up through the middle like a central nervous system.

He heard footsteps somewhere below him, echoing through the empty hallways. His father had never been one for clutter. Even carpets and drapes were rare, but since Matt had left, from what he could see the barrenness of the place had begun to inch its way down from the top floors, as though his mother’s death had left behind a lingering sickness, slowly sucking the house dry of colour and life until one day soon nothing would be left but a skeleton, dead and empty.

Suddenly Matt doubted his choice. Up seemed worse than down – at least there was life downstairs; up brought only painful memories.

‘Mother,’ he whispered, moving quietly down the corridor.

A shroud of silence seemed to descend around him, as though he had walked through a curtain into the world of the dead. The air turned suddenly stale, empty, as though its goodness had all been breathed in, leaving nothing for Matt as the corridor’s dry miasma scratched at his throat.

He reached the door to the room his parents had once shared. A coating of dust covered the upper side of the handle, and his fingers lingered, unsure.

Go on.

He gripped and twisted, winced at the creak the door made, and was sure the shouts from downstairs adopted a sudden urgency. Not allowing himself to think, he slipped inside.

He hadn’t been in this room for twenty years or more. When she had still been alive he had not come here often, afraid, no – wary of her, of the elegant, beautiful woman from whom he had descended. As enigmatic as his mute sister but lacking the same sinister sheen, he had stayed away unless she came to him. Of course, in her last few years, after she became sick, those times had been few and far between.

Cancer, he assumed, looking back now. At least it gave a label to something no longer able to be labeled. Time had blurred the memories he still retained of her, to the extent where he remembered her as a persona rather than as a defined image; even in her last years he hadn’t been able to see her clearly, as though she had not wanted to be seen. He could remember only her grace, the way she moved, the soft lilt in her voice, and sometimes, that was enough. His mother had substance, she had aura, she existed as clearly as he needed, her beauty welcoming him to erase the darkness of her last years from his mind.

If truth were out, Matt might believe she would soon have died anyway. That didn’t excuse him, though. Nothing would ever excuse what he had done.

For years, like Bethany, his mother, Gabrielle Cassidy, had stayed hidden away in her room, seeing no one. His father and Red had cared for her, but the exact nature of events remained jumbled in Matthew’s memory. They had kept her away from him and Bethany, too ill for visitors, always too ill, they said, too ill even to see her own children. Throughout the six or seven months before her death he had built up a new persona for her, one he didn’t like, one he feared, and even when he heard her crying out at night, he had pulled the pillow over his face and cried himself to sleep.

Cancer was a safe bet, but some sort of dilapidating brain or nervous disorder seemed far more likely, looking back now. His father had never told him, but did it really matter? Matt liked the idea of cancer. A disease she could die gracefully from, standing tall against the pain and the fear, showing bravery in the face of impending death.

Matt could cope with that. Dying as graceful in death as she had been in life. What he couldn’t cope with were the memories of a bent, withered wreck, face aged fifteen years beyond her natural years, rolling eyes mad and clawing hands reaching out for him, desperate to touch her son one last time –

He slammed a fist hard into the wall, ignoring the pain that lanced up through his elbow to his shoulder.

This room brought it back.

This empty, soulless room brought it all back.

The memories, the terrible dreams.

Only a bed remained, and a cupboard in one corner. A dusty sheet had once hung over it, but a corner had dropped away, exposing the pine front. The bed was a single, metal-framed thing that looked fresh out of a prison or a mental asylum. It was covered by a moth–eaten, stained mattress.

Far worse were the scratches on the walls.

Thin nail marks, some reaching from near the ceiling to the floor, cutting through the white paint like a chisel through wood. Some had scored deep enough to reach through the undercoats to the stone beneath. And everywhere were copper–brown stains like dried slug trails, stains he turned away from as horror welled in his mind.

She had been kept locked in here, he knew, for the last months, before. Locked away like a rabid dog, shut up in a blank room like a cow waiting for slaughter.

He had been here before. Not in consciousness, he knew, but he had woken from many confusing dreams with a lingering image of this room, this blankness, and a shivering, chattering wreck hunched down in a corner.

Something in him broke. Some last thread of sanity tore from the cloth of his understanding, falling away into darkness and terrible dreams, like a child tumbling into the blackness of a mine shaft, hands clawing for a hold that wasn’t there, cries reaching out to no one, soon to be lost.

He slid rather than fell to the floor, like a droplet of water rolling down the side of a glass. His knees came up into his chest and his arms hugged them close, at once so thin and fragile, so weak and so incapable of protecting him, these same arms and hands with which he had possessed the immeasurable strength to batter his own father to within a few moments of his death.

Hot tears rolled down his cheeks. His eyes stayed wide open but his vision was blurred, and beyond the veil he cast over himself he could see her, slumped there, squatted like an old peddler by the window, or lying leprous across sheets his father could never keep clean. The skin of her face was cracked and broken, her eyes still bright but like little shiny stones at the bottom of a muddy pond. Desperate eyes, wanting, wanting more, wanting escape.

In his mind he saw that night again.

The crippled, hunched wreck that had once been his mother coming for him in the darkness, her clawed hands reaching for him, wanting him, and her eyes, long vanished of the love he had once treasured, full now only with hunger, with need. The woman he could only see as elegance, as grace made flesh, as divine beauty made human, replaced by this twisted, nightmarish creature, shuffling towards him, croaking his name. And then his father appeared from nowhere, Ian’s own eyes filled with the tragic, concerted authority of a man who would do without wanting a part in the doing, who would fight against his friends to save his lover, who would strike his own deranged and crippled wife dead with the blow of a hammer in order to save his son.

In that moment Matt knew it had nothing to do with cancer. Her sickness had spread deeper than her skin and bones, her organs and her flesh, into her mind, her soul, into the irreparable parts that no medicine could reach.

As he saw her lingering memory shuffling forward towards him, he closed his eyes, trying to remember her as she had once been, and failed. He could see only the shivering, withered beast who would have drank his soul if not for his father’s swinging hammer.

6

Ian and Red, searching the house for Matthew, passed by the door, themselves unable to enter. They heard nothing, and chose to believe the last place he would hide was there, in his mother’s cage, the room his parents had once shared, before his mother went bad, and the only way to protect her and others was to keep her locked away.

They had not been in there for years. Ian had closed that door after Gabrielle’s death and sworn never to open it. He wanted never again to look upon what their love had made him do to her.

He had kept her caged like an animal because he loved her, and because she loved him. All because she wouldn’t leave.

Red glanced across at Ian as they moved past the door, heading for the last stairwell, the one that led up to the attic, and his expression said everything. I know why you couldn’t tell him. How could you ever make your son understand something like that?

But the unspoken answer that drifted from one to the other through the stale air of the upper corridors was that they both knew there was so much more. So much that even they couldn’t face.

Hammered by the day’s events, the fight gone from them both, they leaned against each other as they urged their weary bodies through the rooms and corridors, looking for Matt’s hiding place. Matt held the key to a question they had not known existed before today, but as they closed one door after another they began to realise that the door that led to the answer they wanted might not be locked after all.

They might have the answer for themselves.

And it sickened them.

All it took was a little rational thinking.

Not dead.

The answer had just taken time to come.

Red’s baby was not dead.

And they dreaded what that meant.

7

Elaina sat in a leather–bound armchair, close to the large open fire that was set into the far wall of their living room. She was trying to read a book as the shadows flickered across its pages but was not doing very well, her mind on other things. Just as she was thinking about tossing the junk thing into the fire she heard the sound of feet crunching on the gravel outside.

Her ears pricked up: her sister was back.

With a scowl she rose from the creaking old chair and was at the door even before her sister’s knock came.

Liana, identical to her sister besides her eyes, as bright as the sun compared to Elaina’s, which were as dark as a moonless night, gratefully came in from the cold and the silvery rain which had begun to sheet down across the moors.

Elaina shook her head and sighed, but seeing the wriggling bundle under her sister’s coat, it was a sigh of relief.

‘Don’t bother to lie to me. I know where you’ve been. And I’ve told you, stop going back there.’

Liana just shrugged and shook rain from her coat.

She won’t be there, and you know you can’t see her alone.’

‘I thought, if I took the child –’

‘You’re a stupid, impetuous fool, Liana. Your heart isn’t good, it’s soft! By going back there you risk them finding him!’ Elaina growled at her sister. ‘Don’t you understand what that means? They think he’s dead! Heaven knows what they might do if they find out.’

‘I’m sorry –’

‘Give him back to me!’

Elaina snatched the bundle out of her sister’s arms, a bundle which immediately began to cry.

‘Hush, hush,’ Liana cooed. She reached forward to touch the baby, but her sister snatched him away.

‘You’re a fool, Liana.’

Liana said nothing. She pushed past her sister, pulled off her coat and shook rain on to the tiled floor of the lobby. The carpet began where a wall had once separated the hallway from the lounge, removed to give them more space some years before. She made sure she kept the water away from there; she liked that carpet, even though her sister hated the faded crimson. But then her sister hated most things, unless they dealt in mischief.

Elaina and Liana were twin sisters, identical yet so utterly different. Two separate people, yet still one.

Two halves of the same soul, one good, one bad. They were like Siamese twins whose physical selves had been separated at birth but whose souls remained forever linked, so completely that if one died, the other would die, too.

One soul pure, the other rotten. Opposites, yet equal. Different, yet the same.

‘I went to look for her again. Since Bethany died we’ve –’

‘I know! I’m not stupid, am I? Not like you.’

‘– not seen her.’

Elaina just scowled.

‘You don’t think . . . you don’t think Bethany –’

Elaina shook her head. ‘No. Bethany was too old. Her innocence was gone.’

‘But she couldn’t speak –’

‘Oh just shut up, will you? I wish you couldn’t speak. You’ve caused me enough headaches for today.’

Liana sighed and went through into the kitchen. She rolled up her sleeves and immediately began to pick through the dishes piled up in the sink. Her sister never did anything around the house.

‘You know the son has come back, don’t you? Matthew.’

Elaina’s voice was sharp. ‘Matthew? Are you sure?’

‘He came back for the funeral. I saw him today. Twice.’

‘Did he see you?’

Liana wished, not for the first time in her long, long life, that she could convincingly lie. Unfortunately Elaina knew her as well as she knew herself and would detect any fallacies before they had even fallen from her lips. At times she resented their bond. She accepted it in the way a cat might look at the sky and wish it could fly; it was an interesting pipe dream but one that could never be realised. Having her sister anticipate and usually criticize her every move was a frustration, but that was just the way it was.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The first time, I’m not sure. I think so. It was from a distance. The second, yes. He stumbled in on me. In Bethany’s room.’

Elaina groaned. The noise was rich, like thick treacle chocolate, stirring in a vat. Liana’s voice had a shrill, mousy quality. At times she sounded like a frightened child.

‘But don’t worry, I don’t think he recognised me.’

Elaina glared at her. ‘What did you do? I felt the pull of your magic.’

Liana gave her a bashful smile. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t think properly, I just did the first thing I could think of.’

‘Liana . . .’

Liana sighed. ‘He thought I was Bethany. I just let him think he was right.’

Elaina planted hands on hips. ‘Oh, you stupid fool. Now you’ll have him running around chasing his dead sister. That’s just bloody great.’

‘I’m sorry! He was drunk, so he’ll probably think he dreamt it.’

‘Well you’d better hope so,’ Elaina scowled. She pointed at the baby. ‘From now on, Liana, I’ll look after him. Keep him away from your moronic meddling.’

The baby. The child of Bethany and Red. The baby Ian and Red thought was dead, but which had instead been taken away at birth by these two soul–sharing women. Liana still cried silently at night when she remembered the illusion they had created to take the baby away. Even Elaina felt a twinge of regret.

They had made a beautiful, healthy boy look dead to their eyes. Ian had rushed from the room, unable to stand it, tears glistening in his eyes. Red, sobbing, had stroked the baby’s tiny face, his big hands the size of the child’s body. He had wept, looked across at Bethany’s sleeping form, and looked back at the baby. A dead baby. His stillborn son.

Liana knew they had done more than steal his child. They had taken part of his soul away too.

That day she had promised herself never to do something that cruel again, whether it might end up saving them all or not. Red and Ian had no idea just how important little baby Jack was. To them, to the sisters, to Gabrielle, and now to Bethany.

‘He won’t remember,’ Liana said. ‘I’m sure of it.’

‘Even his obscured memory might be enough, you stupid fool. Who knows what he might cause if he starts shooting his mouth off? You’re an idiot!’

‘I’m sorry –’

‘Oh shut up! I’m sick of hearing it.’

Liana bit her lower lip and continued to wash the dishes. She hated her sister sometimes, for her total lack of compassion, but knew she might as well hate herself. And she knew her sister was right, but even so, it just didn’t make believing her words any easier.

At least she would still get the baby. Elaina would soon tire of him, leaving Liana to step back in and take over. Elaina could never hold any sort of compassion for long.

‘Matthew’s sick, you know,’ Liana said.

A moment passed, then Elaina’s voice floated back from the living room. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’

‘He’s got too much of his mother in him, I think. He hurts. The seeds planted the night he tried to kill his father have grown. Until recently they’ve been dormant, but in the last few weeks they’ve begun to bloom.’

Elaina shifted in her chair. ‘Speak English, for God’s sake. What on earth are you blabbing about?’

‘Violence and corruption. It’s like a force he struggles to control. I could feel it inside him, emanating out. It was hot, it almost burnt me.’ She pulled the plug from the sink, watched the water and the bubbles drain away. ‘He drinks heavily as a means to escape it, to try and control it, but it just makes him worse.’

‘So what makes him any different to the rest of the human race?’

Liana went through into the living room and sat down on the couch opposite her sister. She swung her legs up under her and rubbed her hands. She hated the cold.

‘He doesn’t want to be the way he is, but he has so much anger inside him. He blames his father for everything that happened.’

‘And why not? It was because of Ian that all this started in the first place. He should have left Gabrielle alone. It was all his fault.’

‘You know as well as I do that Gabrielle found him. It had nothing to do with Ian.’ Liana’s eyes drifted, and she smiled, a long, wistful smile. ‘If you had been Ian could you have left a beautiful woman alone in the forest? Could you? They found love, Elaina. Don’t you understand?’

‘Pah! You and your love of romance. It’s all a waste of time if you ask me.’

‘Well, you would say that.’

‘And you would say that.’

They stared at each other for a while, having reached some sort of stalemate. As always, Liana could never understand the heartlessness of her sister, any more than Elaina could understand the unbreakable compassion that Liana felt for everything. They could only understand that each, as opposites, felt compelled to feel those things, and that their painstakingly achieved agreements would eventually bring them to a definitive and usually correct answer.

‘Just go tell him to try some Feng Shui or something,’ Elaina said at last, with a bitter smirk.

‘Don’t you see? His anger might be part of it. It might have unsettled her.’

‘Well why don’t you go find him, give him a good seeing to, bring a smile back to his face and then it’ll all be okay again? How’s that for an answer to all the riddles of the universe, eh?’

‘Oh . . . you!’ Liana scowled as much of a scowl as she could.

They were silent for a while. Then suddenly Elaina stood up, held the baby out from her and muttered several expletives under her breath. She startled Liana, who had drifted off into a daydream.

‘Come and take your baby, if you want him so much,’ Elaina growled. ‘Let him do this to you.’ She indicated a damp patch on her skirt then rushed out of the room.

Liana smiled, hugging the baby tightly in her arms. ‘Don’t like her, do you, my sweet one,’ she cooed softly. ‘I don’t blame you, she’s a real misery guts. But you showed her, didn’t you?’

The baby, just a few weeks old, gave her a little smile, and Liana felt a tear well up in her eye. She would absolutely die for a child of her own.

‘Well, while I’ve got you, I’m going to look after you,’ she said quietly, rubbing the child’s nose with her little finger. ‘But now I’d best get you changed.’

She stood up and carried the baby through into the kitchen.

8

Ian and Red faced each other across the table. Two mugs of coffee stood between them, wisps of steam drifting up into the air.

A couple of months ago, the precarious world they lived in had slipped out of control. At the time neither had understood, both had been blinded to something that had turned both their lives upside down. Now they understood, could see the answers through the mist. Matt’s floundering, demented intervention had been the soft, revealing light through the fog.

They both knew what they had to do. After they had finished their coffee they would get up and head out to Ian’s truck. They had a journey to make, a short one by distance, maybe, but in terms of the journey of their lives perhaps the longest one of all.

They were almost ready. They knew the importance of time; both could sense that little remained before whatever needed to happen, happened. But they were weary, so, so weary. Their bones felt heavy, their skin felt dragged down by gravity, sucked into the soil of the earth, and they stood alone, just soul and flesh, burdened by the knowledge of their past and aware that a culmination of everything might be close at hand.

But they had time to rest briefly before they got up to go. Enough time for a coffee, and a few minutes of quiet reflection.

For a few final minutes together as friends.

Red smiled and shook his head. ‘It’s funny really, thinking about it. All these years, and I never told you.’

‘What’s that?’ Ian’s response was muted, his eyes had glazed. He was thinking about Gabrielle, Bethany and Matthew. All dead or out of reach, all lost.

Red didn’t look Ian in the eye. ‘I never told you about why I didn’t ever marry.’

Ian looked up, lifted one eyebrow. ‘I assumed you never found the right girl, Red. Huh.’ He grunted a short laugh, the deep-throated sound of a cornered dog, but one ready to submit rather than fight. ‘Not everyone gets married, Red. It’s a myth of childhood. Children see their parents and think that’s how it is. They don’t see the full picture until they’re adults themselves.’

‘I guess it was difficult for you, wasn’t it? Me and Bethany together.’

Ian smiled, took a sip of coffee. ‘You’re right. I struggled with that for a long time.’

‘I could tell.’

Ian shrugged. ‘But I figured, after a time, what with her mother dead and her brother deserting her – us – and also her disability, she deserved to find some semblance of happiness. I thought, you, if anyone, would do good by her.’

‘I tried my best.’

‘I often wondered how you communicated, how you managed to speak with her when no others could.’

Red shrugged. ‘I guess we had our ways.’

‘Yeah, and you can hold that. I don’t want to know about that.’

Red shook his head, gave a weary smile. ‘I don’t mean like that. I mean, I guess I could just tell what she was thinking. I knew what was going through her head when she looked at me. I guess you’d call it intuition.’

‘Well, whatever.’

‘I hoped the kid might bring her out of herself. I asked her so many times why she refused to speak, but nothing. Not a thing.’

‘It was to do with her mother,’ Ian said. ‘So much to do with her.’

‘Gabrielle,’ Red barely whispered the word, just rolled it over his tongue like he might a lit match; respectfully, careful not to press too hard lest the flames scold him.

Ian looked up, eyes narrowing. He stared hard at his friend. ‘Red? It was her, wasn’t it? That’s why you never married.’

Under the dim glow of a lamp at the far end of the table, it was impossible for Ian to see if Red’s cheeks darkened with colour, but such a mixture of shame and regret poured from his eyes that had it been wine it might have filled a glass.

Almost imperceptibly, he nodded.

‘Forever I’ve known you, Ian. Forever we’ve been around each other, as far back as I can remember. As children playing together down in the woods, as young men in the fields, now old men sat at a table sifting through memories as though sifting sand for gold. In all that time I’ve loved you like a brother. I would have given you my entire world at any time, had you asked. Everything of mine could have been yours.’

He rubbed his eyes with a thick, weather-beaten finger that resembled a gnarled piece of wood. ‘And I wanted nothing in return. Not drink from your table, a book off your shelves, nothing. Except that one thing you would never have given me.’

Ian nodded. ‘I get it now. Gabrielle.’

‘I was there the day you brought her back,’ Red continued. ‘Remember? The day you came out of the forest with her in your arms, wrapped in your coat to cover her nakedness. I’d been into Plymouth, bought a few things I’d brought round to show you. Some blues records, some new clothes . . .’ He paused, shook his head, expression thick with resignation. ‘And there you were, coming out of the forest with the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.’ Red drained the rest of his coffee then held up the mug. ‘Jesus, I could do with something stronger.’

‘It’ll get us nowhere, you know that.’

Red nodded. ‘Yeah I know. This is just so damn hard to talk about.’

‘Well I guess some things have come out over the last few hours none of us really wanted to be thinking about right now.’

‘Huh. Might as well keep going then.’

Their search for Matthew had tailed off. The house was huge; he could be hiding in any one of a number of nooks and crannies and it might take hours to find him. They had climbed up as far as the attic, looked into a random selection of rooms, but could not even be sure he had come back here. Matt had been rambling when he had run off, still drunk, and shaken up by what he had seen. He might have gone home already, though Ian didn’t think so. He could sense his son’s presence, the same way he could sometimes sense his daughter’s, and even Gabrielle’s, even though they were both dead.

No, their main concern had been what Matthew had seen, but over the course of a few prayers said to Bethany’s memory and the walk back up to the house, the answers had come of their own accord. Vague, absurd answers, but answers all the same.

Or at least fewer questions than before.

‘Gabrielle,’ Red whispered. ‘I guess it doesn’t matter to tell you now. That woman bewitched me. If I hadn’t seen the way those golden eyes stared up into yours, telling me so much, I would have killed you and taken her from you.’

Ian just watched his friend, saw the terrible agony in Red’s eyes, the sheer heartache the words caused. He had never thought anyone could hurt as much as he had over Gabrielle’s memory, but perhaps – just perhaps – he was wrong.

‘I would have done anything to have been you that day . . .’ Red stared into his empty mug. ‘But I guess everything happens for a reason.’

‘Maybe it does, maybe not,’ Ian said. He watched Red. There was more, he knew it.

‘And then Bethany, of course. I watched her all those years, watched her growing up into the beauty she became . . .’

Ian felt a sudden unease grow inside him, a black, shivery feeling that accompanied his friend’s words like a shadow at the shoulder of a haunted man.

‘. . . watched as she became more like Gabrielle every day. Never as beautiful, never in a million years, but close, so close . . .’

Ian felt his fingers grip the edge of the table, his knuckles whitening.

‘So beautiful, so . . . glorious. So much like her mother that as Gabrielle’s memory began to fade, I could barely tell them apart –’

Ian came slowly to his feet. He planted both hands on the table top and leaned forward toward Red, eyes sharp, piercing. ‘What are you telling me Red? What are you trying to say? I don’t like what you’re implying with this –’

Red looked up, shocked, broken from his monologue like a man snapped from a trance. He appeared lost, as though barely aware he had been speaking at all.

‘Ian, I – I didn’t mean . . . I never touched Bethany until we became together, she was twenty – I –’ He looked into Ian’s eyes as if searching for the incriminations that waited there.

‘I trusted you my whole life, Red. On the strength of our friendship I’ll believe you had no contact with my daughter until she became an adult like you and me. If you’re suggesting anything more, I swear I’ll . . .’ He trailed off, but his threat was far from hollow.

Red stood, hands coming up defensively. Suddenly the huge hulking strength that had so terrified Matthew seemed nothing but a memory.

‘No, Ian, no. Look at me. Could I have done something like that? She was a child, Ian. Bethany was a child! I loved her mother, and the image of her that your daughter became, but back then she was just a child!’

Ian forced himself to relax a little. He took a deep breath, trying to diffuse his anger.

‘I think the last few months have taken their merits on us,’ Red said, eyes pleading. ‘The last two days have all but broken us. I think we need another drink.’

Ian nodded and gave his friend a wry smile. ‘Maybe something stronger.’

Red went to the cabinet and returned with two glasses of whiskey. They jumped on the table when he put them down; his hands were shaking so much.

Ian watched him with a steady gaze. ‘I think you’d better explain what you meant by that,’ he said, downing half his drink. ‘Exactly what you meant.’

‘Ian, I –’

‘I know you’re my best friend, Red, but Bethany was my daughter. My flesh and blood.’ He stared at his friend, and for the first time, perhaps in his life, he wondered if he really knew the other man. Were they just strangers after all, or was it like Red told it, just the weight of the last few days hanging like a heavy thunder cloud over their heads, clouding their judgment and their reason?

Red rubbed his eyes, shook his head. ‘After Gabrielle . . . died, I guess I turned my love towards Bethany – but not as you think – I loved her like a daughter, as though she were my own. But as she grew up, as she became a woman, I don’t deny that my feelings changed, my love changed. I began to love her as a woman, and because of what she reminded me of, because she reminded me so much of Gabrielle, your Gabrielle –’

‘You loved my daughter because you wanted her mother?’

Red shrugged. ‘I guess so.’ His words seemed to echo across the room.

Ian sighed. ‘Gabrielle was mute when I first found her, if you remember?’

Red shook his head. Ian smiled fondly, gazing down into the dark varnish of the tabletop, mind drifting back through the years. ‘All she did was smile and touch things, the flowers, the grass, even the bugs that crawled through the dirt. As though she’d never seen living things before.’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘For weeks she said nothing, just listened to my words with her head cocked as though everything I said was like sweet music. I began to despair of ever hearing her voice, but then one day she just began to talk. Just like that.’ Ian sighed. ‘For years I thought the same thing might happen to Bethany. Prayed for it, every day.’

‘But nothing.’

‘Not a single word.’ Ian expelled a sharp breath, and suddenly tensed. Red narrowed his eyes, noticing.

‘What?’

‘I think what happened to Gabrielle had something to do with speech. When she spoke it let the world in. It let us in, and it allowed her to experience everything that was corrupt in our lives, and it caused her to suffer because of it. Our lives and our world helped to taint her, to turn her bad. I think that’s why Bethany never spoke. She was afraid of the same thing happening.’

‘That’s crazy.’

‘Is it? Is it really? You saw what happened to Gabrielle.’

Red rubbed his eyes. Ian took another drink.

‘And I think somehow Gabrielle found a way to communicate this to Bethany.’

Red’s face turned hard. ‘What are you talking about?’

Ian looked at up at his friend. Tears shone in his eyes. ‘Because one day I found out something about Bethany, found out something special. And I couldn’t handle it. It tore me apart, until I in turn . . . I in turn . . .’

‘Ian, what did you do? Oh God, what did you do?’

Ian choked back tears. His face had turned dark red, his eyes watery. ‘I found out how she communicated.’

‘What?’

He grimaced. ‘Bethany could communicate. She communicated all right. But only with herself.’ He shook his head violently, as though the memories jostling inside could scold his brain. ‘She wrote . . . she wrote a lot. In notebooks . . . in – in journals.’

‘What, like diaries?’

Ian nodded sadly. ‘I don’t know where she got the books from, or the pens. Maybe she stole them from one of the tutors I used to take her to. I don’t know. But I found them one day, while cleaning out her room when she was out in the garden. In a cavity under a loose floorboard. A whole stack of them, going right back to just after Gabrielle’s death.’

Red exhaled slowly. ‘Oh my good god.’

‘I never told you. Never told anyone. Whenever she was outside or I’d taken her down to the village, I would sneak up into her room, and one by one I read through them all. Oh, Red, the things she wrote about! There was life in her all right, locked away behind the visage of a mute little girl.’

‘Like what?’

‘Things, just things. About the world, about us. But a lot about her mother. About Gabrielle.’

He stood up, went to the cabinet and refilled his glass. ‘I began to suffer nightmares, really bad ones, the images I got in my head staying even after I woke. I got sick, and it began to drive me mad. One night, you were away . . . I got drunk. I got drunk as hell. The next morning I could I barely remember what had happened.’

‘Yes?’

‘You see, they weren’t just memories of her mother. Bethany claimed to still see her, to see her mother watching her, wanting her back. God, they scared me. For a little girl, her writing was so damn vivid. But you know what? The worst thing was that I found myself believing them, that I actually believed she could still see Gabrielle, and I became jealous. Jealous of my own daughter because she could see her mother and I could not.’ He frowned and gritted his teeth to hold back tears. ‘Jealously. Ha! I could have done so much for her, knowing that she really did exist behind those blank eyes, that my little girl was actually in there. But I didn’t. You know what I did? You know what I did instead of helping my little girl?’

‘I don’t think I want to know.’

Ian ignored him and carried on. ‘After I’d put away a bottle of whiskey to wash away the pain, I went up into her room, and I took them. I took them all and I went downstairs and I burnt them, every last one. Put them in the grate. Whether she knew what I did with them I don’t know, but the smell of burning paper filled the house for days, and I felt so cruel and evil I wanted to kill myself right then. But I couldn’t, I had to stay, had to try and make it up for her. But that night, that night –’

Red said nothing, just watched Ian as he continued to talk, pouring out a confession that seemed to corrode him with its very bitterness.

‘I knew, afterwards, that there was no chance she would ever speak. At least not to me. By doing that I had dug a hole between us, one I’d never fill. You have no idea how bad that made me feel. That I’d alienated my own daughter completely, and it was all my fault. All my fault.’ He shook his head. ‘First I took away her mother. Then I drove her brother away. And then . . . and then –’ He downed the drink, coughed once, twice. ‘I took away her father. I destroyed all image of a man who loved her. Until you came along, Red, she had no one.’

‘That’s not true, Ian. She must have known –’

‘You’re so wrong, Red. So wrong. I ruined her life, just as I ruined her brother’s. Just in different ways. Just by being flawed. By not being good enough to cope, by not being good enough to handle what life put in front of me.’

Red looked like he wanted to say something but couldn’t. For a few moments Ian let his despair drown him, drag him down into a place where Red couldn’t reach him. Where no one could reach him.

A couple of minutes passed. They sat in silent contemplation, Ian with his head lowered, Red with his fingers rolling slowly around his whiskey glass.

The balance between them had shifted. Red had stood on the brink, but had dragged himself back. It was Ian’s turn to linger there, on the verge of breakdown and self destruction. He thought back to all the things he had done wrong in his life, and wondered if anything was as bad as destroying his daughter’s voice. He didn’t think so.

But perhaps life had gifted Ian one last chance to make amends. It had found him a drowning body screaming amongst the mire of his life, that only he and Red together had the strength to pull free.

Ian looked up. Red was looking towards the window. Darkness had fallen outside; the outside light of the house cast a glow across the courtyard, pushing the night back from the window. Red looked back, and an unspoken agreement passed between them.

Time to go.

Red stood up. ‘Come on, Ian,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a visit to make. Whatever happened in the past has gone now. We’ve got something to do, now, here.’

Ian nodded. He felt as weary as Atlas holding up the world. ‘Okay,’ he said, but his voice was hollow, his fight gone.

###

Bethany’s Diary, June 20th, 1990

A funny thing happened today. Well, didn’t really happen, more something that was. Something I found.

I came out of my room, and lying on the floor outside of my door, was a notepad, not dissimilar to those I’d used for my diaries before. Some sort of apology from my dad perhaps, I think. I was touched, a little I guess, but the whole episode is still so fresh in my mind that I can’t begin to consider forgiveness, not just yet. Maybe in a few more days, perhaps weeks, even. I don’t think he really understands just what he’s taken away.

My memories were in those books. My past, my memories of Mother. He threw my diaries in the fire, and might as well have thrown Mother in with them. It is just too much to contemplate right now.

I was young then, I didn’t understand much about anything. I have memories of her face when I was really young, leaning over where I lay, eyes like pools of gold watching me. Mother. But since then, very little.

I don’t remember her getting sick, don’t remember how she died. Not until she told me.

I think at first she was as scared as I was to speak, but once we both realised it would be okay, it got easier. Those first words were the hardest, but once I got used to it, it wasn’t so hard. Not so hard at all, and we talked as if we’d never been apart.

9

Her face filled his vision from periphery to periphery, a blurred mess of grey cracks and crannies, claw marks and dried spots of blood. Which, he realised from somewhere, wasn’t actually her face at all, but the wall against which he had slumped, the wall against which, many years ago, her scabbed and blistered fingers had scrabbled in a desperate attempt to escape from the bedroom that had become her prison.

No, he wasn’t looking at her, because Mother was sitting over on the bed.

He heard a whimpering sound emitting from a source within the room, filling it with a cold trickling presence like running water, which then evaporated to fill the air like a fine mist. It came from his own throat, tight and parched from sleep and drink, cracked like the walls.

‘Mummy . . .’

He heard her shuffling on the bed, heard her twisted feet stretching towards the floor, searching for purchase. Could hear the creaks as her bent and deformed back stretched itself to lift her off the bed.

The clacking of crab claws as she hobbled her way across the wooden floor spoke to him in some dark Morse Code.

Thud! Ccckkk . . . Thud! Ccckkk . . . Thud!

She limped towards him, one leg dragging across the floor. Once he thought it caught on a nail, heard what he thought was a cry of pain (though that might have come from him) and then the thud, ccckkk continued.

And still he didn’t look up.

In the shiny gloss of the untouched paint near the base of the wall, he saw the movement of shadows, growing larger as she approached him.

He could hear her breathing, a wheezing rasp like wind through a sieve. The rattle of old bones, as though her dried, brittle skin were just a cloth thrown over them.

‘No no rag and bone,’ he muttered.

Thud ccckkk flicker flicker –

‘No no rag and bone.’

‘Come here, Matty.’ Her voice was like the sound of tatty newspaper, caught on a fence and flapping about in the wind. ‘Come give Mummy hugs.’

‘Mummy?’ His eyes filled with tears as his head swung up. He turned towards the window, refusing to look at the shape hunched to his left, an amorphous smudge at the edge of his vision.

‘Come give Mummy hugs, Matty.’

He saw the shape of his own reflection, a black silhouette sat in a black room against a black background, saw the shapes of the things around him, the walls, the door the bed, the – what the hell is that? – all outlined in black. The lines wavered as though alive, a writhing nest of snakes made from shadow, shifting in and out of focus.

And then he sees a shadow deeper than night beside him, hunched and irregular, not man-shaped, not woman-shaped not shaped –
he sees his own mouth form slurred words

(come give Mummy hugs, Matty)

hears tissue paper rustling in his throat
feels arms fall around his shoulders

(no no rag and bone)

cold like dead tree bark
but can no longer see
can’t see
can’t
see –

‘Come to Mummy, Matty –’

From out there in the darkness, out beyond the window and the amorphous shapes and the blurred eyes and the twisted limbs like crippled desert trees, out there in the darkness where the rain sheets and the wind roars, the crashing, rolling, cacophony of the fighting, colliding tree branches form words and call his name –

‘Matty –’

He pushes himself up on to legs turned to wood, waits for his puppeteer to lend a God–like hand, then when none comes he lurches forward, legs suddenly jellified, unsteady, arms useless to protect him as he stumbles a few more feet then begins a deadly tumble forward towards the black wall of glass. He sees the shape clearly for the first time in the second before he crashes through the window, and its cruel face seems to be taunting him, egging him on further as he falls over the window ledge into the darkness beyond, the ground and darkness rushing up to meet him, the violent chatter of smashing glass cutting through the night.

He cries out one more time as voices in the darkness begin to wail all around him and then he lands in something soft but solid, his father’s fruit bushes, grown up in the years he’s been gone, cushioning but agonising, and even as he feels hurt surge through him, he finds his feet and turns, searching for the voice that summoned him.

There, at the edge of the forest. Waiting, beckoning. Just shadows in the mottled darkness beneath the trees, but he knows the voice has come from what waits there. There is nowhere else. The thing in his mother’s bedroom is gone, if indeed it were ever there. Now that thing waits for him, somewhere out there among the night, the low hung veil of mist and the watching trees.

And it calls him.

Like a derailed train, Matthew lurches off across the garden, stumbling away blindly into the night.

###

Bethany’s Diary, October 28th, 1990

I’m sorry I’ve been neglecting you. I just live in fear that he’ll find you, you see? And now I’ve got mother to talk to, I don’t need this anymore. It doesn’t seem as important.

Mother has helped me, and I understand now. At least, I understand a lot of things.

We talk for hours sometimes, out in the forest. I go out mainly at night, for father spends a lot of his time drunk with Uncle Red in the kitchen. Mostly we talk about nothing, about the woods, about the trees. But sometimes we talk about things that matter to us, about people, about ourselves.

Mother is so sad. She misses Father so much, but cannot go to him no matter how much she might want to. I asked her why not, because I can see her, but she just shook her head, caught in a deep sadness, I thought. Only certain people can see her, she said. She still talks to me like a small child, and although it makes me angry sometimes, I let her for the time being simply because I love her, and sometimes I don’t feel anyone else besides her loves me.

One thing she did say to me, though, which makes me sad, but also makes me wonder about a lot of stuff too, was that I must never talk to anyone else. Not ever. Otherwise she would go away, and I’d never see her again.

Mother stays away from the house, if she can. She used to come right up to my window, but I think now she has got used to being dead, she doesn’t like to. At first she got confused, and came looking for someone, anyone, who might help her, but now she seems at ease with herself, and talks to me because she wants to, rather than because she needs to. She has found other people to talk to, but she won’t tell me who they are. It doesn’t matter, she says. I think she just wants me to know that she comes to me through choice because she loves me, not just because she is lonely.

Sometimes when I think of her words I start to cry.

I understand a lot of things now. Mother got sick and died, and although her death was because of Father, she doesn’t want me to blame him. It was not his fault, she says, he doesn’t deserve your blame, your anger. I would have died soon anyway, he probably saved me from so much pain. Don’t hate him.

So I try not to. He got enough hate from Matty. He got all of Matty’s hate.

Father and Uncle Red don’t think I know about that. They think I don’t know that it was Matty who beat Father, and that was why Matty ran away. They don’t think I know about those spooky sisters either, the ones from up on the moors who made Father better. Personally I think Mother is talking about them when she mentions her other friends, though she never says. It’s just that whenever I think of them, I think of Mother, too, as though they’re somehow connected. As though there’s an invisible piece of string that ties them all together. I think perhaps it’s tied to me too, because I can see her, but I don’t know. It scares me, thinking of us all tied together, like flies caught in a spider’s web. I don’t want anything to do with them because they frighten me, but I think that one day I might have no choice.

Dad and Uncle Red just try and brush it all away, forget about it. They think I know so little, think I’m so ignorant just because I’m young.

I’m not blind, for heaven’s sake.

10

As the truck rumbled across the courtyard, Red glanced at the side view mirror, seeing once more the house he had often considered home. More so perhaps than his own cottage on the village’s outskirts, he had spent the majority of his meaningful time there. In that Gothic mansion, amongst those dark corridors, was the room where he had lain with Bethany the first time.

The only time.

Afterwards she had seemed distant, as though it were too much to understand for one so seemingly innocent and unawares. He had reassured her, and had understood from her expression that it would be only a matter of time before she adjusted to her adulthood, closed the door on adolescence forever and came to be with him.

It had been enough to get her with child, of course, and he had assumed the baby would make things okay for her, for them.

But it was never to be.

His heart felt broken open as he looked up at those windows in the side view, wondering which one had been Bethany’s room.

Only the second time in his life he had felt true pleasure.

The other –

He frowned, noticing some kind of irregular glint of light high up on the building, a window on the fourth floor. Part shadow, part knives of sharp colour, reflecting from the large exterior wall lights.

A smashed window.

Huh, so there you are, Matthew, he thought, but said nothing to Ian. Oh well.

The window swung out of sight as the truck began the bumpy trek down towards the village. Red looked ahead of him, memories and thoughts of Matthew leaving his mind. He had to focus on what was coming. He dropped his eyes from the mirror, from the last fading lights of the house he wondered if he would ever see again.

Ian, beside him, saw nothing, his eyes fixed on the road and his concentration on their destination. Red didn’t care to tell him; whatever had just happened back at the house to break that window was no longer his concern. He didn’t care if it had something to do with Matthew or not. His future, and at least part of his own concentration, also rested on what lay ahead.

They would look for Matt again later if necessary, but what mattered now was Red’s baby. Ian might be thinking more of his son than of his stillborn grandson, but to Red, Jack was the only thing that mattered. He didn’t care if Matt’s broken body lay at the foot of that four–floor drop. He didn’t care at all whether Matt lived or died, for in Red’s mind Matthew had caused all this.

But before you go, thanks, for the clue.

Those fucking evil witches must have laid some sort of bewitchment over Ian and himself. Red had seen the body of his stillborn son, and the image had seared itself into his mind, one he would never forget. That poor, tiny little thing. The sisters had taken Jack away to a coroner, allowed Ian and Red to stay with Bethany, whose face had become blank once more, and never again showed any hint of emotion.

Bethany had refused to see her baby again. The sisters had seen to his cremation, and Red himself had scattered his son’s ashes in the churchyard. Only a plaque on the churchyard wall held his memory now, the short inscription:

Jack

Your brief light
will always shine
in our hearts

The sisters, it all came back to them. In a moment that should have been joyous those two witches had cast their dark spells and destroyed Red’s life forever. In their hour of darkness, Red, Ian and Bethany had let the Meredith sisters into their lives and trusted them.

It made perfect sense.

You’ve got him, haven’t you? You’ve got Jack. Bethany’s baby.

My baby.

Why, was anyone’s guess.

Red glanced across at Ian. Even in the darkness of the truck’s cab, with Ian’s face just dark contours and his eyes glittering sporadically as they caught the reflections of puddles ahead on the lane, Red could see the stoic set to his face. Ian had a chance to take something back, take something back for himself when all these years he had done nothing but give.

Red felt a sudden pang of hatred toward his friend, a violent lurch in his heart that pained as much as angered him, as though he had committed a sudden betrayal by allowing these thoughts to enter his head. Because it was not Matt, but Ian who had caused all this, wasn’t it? He had killed Gabrielle. In turn Matt had struck down Ian, and the Meredith sisters had used what dark, secret abilities they possessed to return Ian to health.

They had healed him, but he had owed them in return. Hadn’t Ian always said how he owed them a life debt, that somehow, someday, he had to repay them?

Some part of him would one day become theirs.

A grandson.

Red’s fingers tightened around the barrel of the shotgun that rested on his lap. He had made sure the safety catch was on, but even so the barrel faced out towards the car window. He didn’t want to set it off by accident.

Didn’t want to waste any shots.

Ian, ever the diplomat, had suggested they talk first with the Meredith sisters, and only get heavy if that got them nowhere, but Red had other ideas. He had let Ian think he was playing along, but the first chance he got those bitches would get a bloody hole right through their pretty little skulls. Talk properly first. Then we’ll talk how Ian wants to talk.

He didn’t want them bewitching him like before. He didn’t want their black magic cast over him. He would blow the fucking whores away before they had a chance to look him in the eye. And then he would take back his son.

#

Ian kept his eyes on the road, not really because he needed to, having driven these roads a thousand times, but because he wanted to avoid the smoldering eyes of the man beside him. He could hear a spongy, sticky sound as Red’s sweating fingers peeled on and off of the shotgun barrel, nervously twitching, waiting for his chance to go trigger crazy.

Whatever state Matt now found himself in, Ian doubted he could feel the same degree of anger that now poured from Red like blood from an arterial wound. Red seethed, and Ian knew he would have to think fast to prevent real bloodshed from happening very soon.

Whether they were right or not about the Meredith sisters taking Jack, Red had gone beyond reasoning. Red had a mean streak, an explosive temper, and Ian suspected he really would shoot first, talk later. Anyone could talk strong words. Ian didn’t want to test Red’s by putting himself in the firing line. He began to doubt just how stable Red’s state of mind was at present; after the last few weeks Red could be forgiven for slipping over the edge, for slightly losing his mind.

As long as no one else got hurt because of it.

Ian himself didn’t like to think about the night of Jack’s birth. He had seen what Red had seen, too. The image was etched on his mind. If indeed the sisters had somehow hidden the baby’s death from them, it was a terrible thing.

Ian shook his head. He just didn’t want to see any more bloodshed. His family’s name wallowed in enough blood already.

There had to be more. There was always more. Bethany had been half Gabrielle after all. Surely she would have said something, would have known what the sisters were planning? She couldn’t have stayed silent while someone took her baby away.

Always more.

Red and Ian had always believed that Jack’s death had toppled Bethany, finished her off, sent her looking for the pills that took her away from them. Ian knew Red didn’t just consider his baby stolen, but his wife murdered.

Ian understood a lot of things. More with each passing second. There was a reason for Bethany’s suicide, a reason for Red’s murderous rage. But what about the sisters? Why would they steal Red’s baby?

Those words again, drifting hauntingly: always more.

He knew the village rumours about them. Not merely sisters, but lovers, also. If it hadn’t been for Gabrielle, there was no doubt he would have lusted after them the same as the rest of the men from the village. Many a brave suitor had walked up to those doors and begged for a single drink, a single dinner date. Incestuous lesbian lovers, so the rumour went, unable to have children of their own because of their chosen sexual orientation.

Perhaps there was the answer. A child, stolen to satisfy there own maternal needs. But Ian didn’t think so. The country was liberal now, two consenting adults with decent incomes had as fair a chance of adoption as any, sexuality notwithstanding. They had no reason to steal a baby from a village so close to where they lived, a village where they were both feared and mocked in equal measure. No.

More.

He knew they had been linked to his dead wife, to Gabrielle. Seventeen years after her death their life together had a dream–like hazy quality. Of their eighteen years together before he (don’t think it don’t think it don’t think it) the first eleven had been perfect, almost idyllic. Gabrielle had suffered the odd bout of depression, but had generally seemed happy, contented. Ian still remembered that Gabrielle and usually omitted the remainder from his mind.

He opened his thoughts, let her memory in.

In the months up to Bethany’s birth she had begun to get sick a lot, suffer stronger bouts of depression. They had blamed it on morning sickness, and treated it with aspirin and prescription medication. Ian had worried, but only after the birth did Gabrielle begin her slide.

As though Bethany had flicked a switch somewhere inside her mother, Gabrielle’s condition had gradually worsened. She was always sick, always depressed, and as the years passed there was no let up from it. She would show occasional flashes of her past self, the odd glorious day when she would get up from her bed, play with the children, walk in the garden, and smile, smile that wonderful, lustrous smile.

But it didn’t last.

The last couple of years were hell on earth. Gabrielle began to change, and the Gabrielle Ian knew had disappeared. During those years Ian’s life became a living nightmare. By the end, she was no longer the woman he had married at all.

He squeezed his eyes shut for a second, forgetting about the road. Those memories could stay away. He didn’t want those back. His wife . . . his wife –

He liked to believe her sickness had been earthly, and that she was just that, a woman, lost and cold that he had found lying in the woods one day. A woman who had lost her way, and had stumbled into love with him.

That she hadn’t fallen from the sky at all.

She had never told him, but he knew there had been a bond between her and the Meredith sisters. There were days when she had gone out and come back hours later, her explanation vague, and rather than suspecting an affair, he had known she had been with them, though Gabrielle never, ever admitted to it. Gabrielle had had some friends in the village, but the sisters were set apart, filling in a piece of her mysterious life that even Ian couldn’t know about. The fear of ever losing her had made him stop short of demanding to know.

In the end he had lost her anyway. But whether he liked it or not, a deep, mysterious acquaintance with his wife meant the sisters weren’t quite as normal as he would like to hope. Something deeper resonated out from them, too.

Despite the shotgun resting on his friend’s knees, and the finger that itched to start pulling the trigger, Ian couldn’t help but feel afraid for Red. Very afraid. Someone might die tonight, and whomever held the gun would have little bearing.

11

‘I think he’s sick.’

Elaina looked up from her book. ‘What?’

‘Jack. I think he’s sick.’

Elaina slammed the book shut, the sound enough to make her sister jump. ‘I’ve told you not to fucking call him that. He’s not called Jack, or Jacky, or any fucking thing, he’s just a baby, and we’ll soon be rid of him.’

‘But that’s his name.’

‘Shut up, you stupid fool. That’s the name they gave him, but he’s not theirs anymore. He’s ours, for now.’

Liana said nothing. She looked down at the baby nestled in her lap. She would die for one of her own. Just to hold something, and call it yours, all yours. She sighed. It would never happen, but at least while she had little Jack she could pretend.

‘I think I’ll mix him something,’ she said. ‘He looks too pale.’

‘He’s a baby. They’re all pale. They’re like little lumps of dough waiting to be baked into bread.’

Liana scowled at the back of her sister’s head from her place on the couch. She was such a bitch, sometimes. Usually it came naturally, but often Elaina adopted her attitude for the sheer hell of it. Just to see the look on her sister’s face.

‘You’re not just a lump of dough, are you?’ Liana whispered, rubbing the baby’s nose with one finger. ‘You’re a special little thing, aren’t you?’

The baby, its doughy face molding into a smile, cooed back at her.

‘Oh, will you just shut up,’ Elaina scowled. ‘Go and put him down somewhere, let him sleep. Stop playing with him like a fucking spot that won’t heal!’

Liana became suddenly mad. ‘Will you just stop it? All you do all day long is berate me, berate him! It was your idea, remember? To take him?’

Elaina glared at her. ‘Can’t I just get a little peace and quiet? For once?’

‘I’ll give you peace and quiet if you stop getting at me!’

The baby began to cry.

Elaina stood up. ‘Now look what you’ve done. I’ve had enough of this. I’m going out for a walk. Get a bit of fresh air. It’s so bloody stale in here. When I get back I want him put to bed, and I don’t want to hear another sound for the rest of the evening, okay?’

Liana returned her sister’s glare. ‘Just go out. I could do with some peace and quiet myself.’

Elaina narrowed her eyes, her mouth set in stone, then with a flourish she turned and strode to the door. She pulled her coat from its hook in one fluid motion and then she was gone, out into the cold and the fog that hung over their hollow like a funeral veil.

After her sister had gone, Liana ran a finger over Jack’s soft, spongy forehead, breathed a few words and watched as he dropped soundly asleep. Not really magic, just a little trick, just something to make him sleep a little better. She wouldn’t want to use what magic she had on one so young, didn’t want it messing with his mind.

She shouldn’t use it at all; it wasn’t hers to use. Whatever she used for good, gave more to her sister for bad, keeping the balance. If her sister used her magic for bad things, Liana gained more to use for good.

But if Liana used too much, Elaina could get sick, and vice versa. The equivalent of a spoonful could give her sister a cold, a stomachache. Say, enough to make a shallow, egocentric man fall in love with the plainest, least inspiring of girls. Liana saw no wrong in it sometimes; often the purest, longest lasting love was found in the least likely of places. Even when she had no right to meddle. Elaina was the same but opposite; could turn a loving man into an abusive, irrational husband, a caring wife into an adulterous bitch. She saw no wrong in what she did, though of course Liana hated her for it, the same way Elaina hated Liana’s uses for their magic. But to use too much, to turn the minds or the destinies of too many in too short a space of time, could spell death for the other twin.

And death for one meant death for the other.

Opposites, yet equal. Different, yet the same.

They both knew it. Therefore they were naturally conservative with it, despite Elaina’s constant threats of lightning bolts and earth tremors to swallow Liana up. She couldn’t do it, of course. All she could do, all either of them could do, was heavily influence, make people believe, make people see what the sisters wanted them to see. Turn their minds towards the vague, turn them away from the obvious. Easy, really. And harmless, in small amounts.

Like the metal scales in their kitchen, a constant balance had to be maintained between them. The use of small amounts of their magic could be corrected, but a large use could tip the scales over. Like a roof supported by two single walls, if one wall fell, the roof fell. So they were careful.

Because neither particularly wanted to die.

Though in what way were they really alive? They existed here as something else, something not quite human but also in a way inextricably linked to everything it was to be human, everything that existed with humanity as its core. They came from another place, unsure how, or why, only that they were, and that through them a link to that other place, the place beyond mortality, was forged. And therefore a passageway existed.

They felt sure they weren’t alone. Just as Man hopes he is not alone among the stars, the sisters thought perhaps only in this part of the world, yet they knew of no others like them, others with the same complexities.

They were a link, a doorway, nothing more. A way into the past, the future. But for whom?

In time, others had come, stumbling, unintended, among them Gabrielle, who became a Cassidy. Some they could send back if they found them in time, before the impurities of mortality had set in. Once decay had seeded, there could be no return.

Except – except –

Liana glanced down at the baby in her arms, and her heart lurched.

By restoring purity.

Elaina felt sure if they put their magic together it would work. Liana was not so sure. And she didn’t want to see the baby go.

Didn’t want to see the baby die.

‘There is no good without evil,’ Liana whispered softly to the baby, whose quiet breathing didn’t change. ‘Because what is good without evil? Even something as pure and infinitely beautiful as Gabrielle had her dark side. She sucked the life out of the earth, the trees, the people, in order to preserve herself. Not her fault, of course, she could do nothing to prevent it. The world made her do it.’

The baby didn’t respond.

‘Her son’s anger came from her, I suppose you’d say,’ Liana continued. ‘She sucked the love out of him, as she did with many others. But in the end it wasn’t enough, not enough to save her, not enough . . .’

Liana realised that tears were rolling down her cheeks like milky waves across a sandy shore. ‘Huh. I guess you don’t really know what I’m talking about, do you? You’re just a baby.’ She stroked the child’s forehead.

‘Your grandmother, that’s who. Gabrielle Cassidy. The loveliest woman in the world.’ Liana chuckled. ‘Heaven knows why she came to your grandfather. He’s never been an oil painting. But then, I guess perhaps Heaven does know. Huh. It’s a shame it won’t say, isn’t it?’

She sat in silence for a few minutes, watching Jack’s sleeping form. So sweet, so innocent. Like a tiny package of purity, molded into human form.

It was easy enough to send Gabrielle back, if they conducted a sacrifice.

Liana had felt ill when Elaina first mentioned her plan. It couldn’t work, it was just plain stupid. To sacrifice a child to send someone back, it was sickening, heinous. There was no choice, Elaina had said.

Liana knew what had happened to Gabrielle, knew how lost her soul had become. Now, existing as nothing more than essence, she slowly drew life out of the world around her in order to maintain her own soul.

The community around them had fallen out of balance. Soon, people might begin to die as Gabrielle’s soul began to degrade.

It was always the way with women, according to Elaina. When it happened to men, it was different. Women lost themselves, falling apart like dolls tossed into a fire, molding, twisting into wretched, leprous shadows of their former selves. Wasting away like starving children until their skin and their bones became nothing but dust.

Men, caught up in the corruption of their souls, struck out, destroyed. They took out their anger on the world around them, their homes, their families, especially those close to them, their own loved ones. They rotted inside the mind, degenerating like a battered engine put mistakenly into a brand new car, choking on its clogged components until it burst from the inside out.

Liana sighed. It was tragic, so tragic to see them fall apart. And always, almost always they started out so beautiful. Like Gabrielle had been.

An angel.

Liana guessed that she and Elaina could just die, which would close the doorway, prevent any others mistakenly stumbling through. Gabrielle had been the first in twenty years or more, and the first to go bad that Liana could remember since a young man about 80 years ago, who had called himself Michael Samuels. Michael had been a beautiful, loving boy until he reached his late teens, at which point he had abruptly started to change, the purity of his mind dissolved by mortal feelings like hate and lust and greed. He had murdered four young children over the space of a few horrifying days, children he took from their beds and strangled, leaving their bodies in the forest. Finally, unable to stop himself, he had tried to take one too many and been surprised by alert villagers. He had tried to escape across the moors, but a mob had quickly formed and ran him down within a couple of miles.

Liana closed her eyes, a single tear caught in the tangle of her lashes. She could still see his limp body swaying in the breeze from the bough of the oak where they had strung him up, his head twisted at a hideous angle but a cloth mask thankfully hiding his face.

Although the townsfolk had burnt his body, spat on his ashes and poured them away into the drains, Michael’s soul had remained for years, wandering the village and the forest, lost, unable to leave, too corrupt to return. Tamerton, then even smaller than it was now, had suffered for the ills done against him. Older people started to die of lesser illnesses, curable even in those days. Colds, flu and whooping cough all claimed lives. The fit and strong began to drop their heads, stoop as they walked, cough, sneeze, as though fighting off hands that tried to grasp them and steal the strength from their bodies.

Only when the first innocent baby died did the sickness come to an end. Liana and Elaina searched long and hard for him but Samuels had gone, and the townsfolk, thinking themselves free at last of a curse left by his soured memory, soon began to forget.

Yes, Liana and her sister could just give it up, take their own lives to close the doorway between this world and . . . beyond. They didn’t want to die, but if necessary they could, if it meant the people of Tamerton would be safe. But it wouldn’t solve anything.

It would only serve to trap Gabrielle here.

There were more people in the village now, but no one new had moved to Tamerton in years. Houses stood long empty, abandoned vehicles grew rust like mould. The roads had begun to wear thin, cracks had appeared in the tarmac, hedgerows had collapsed, rotting gates hung neglected from their hinges. No one came to repair anything; no one came at all. Sneaking a peek in through the window of the pub on a Friday night, Liana found no one laughing; few people even smiled. A funeral became an event; coffee mornings and darts matches and Women’s Institute gatherings and craft fairs were abandoned or cancelled.

Soon people would start to get sick. Gabrielle’s lost soul would unwillingly absorb their life, their vitality, their goodness, searching to regain her own lost purity and escape back to her old life. The mortality given her on entrance was gone, only a one-way ticket home remained. But the price of mortality made the cost of getting home high for the people of Tamerton.

Yet Gabrielle had been dead seventeen years. People were miserable, but no one Liana could think of had yet died as a result of her. There should be no reason why Gabrielle could not survive out in the forest for just as long again, give her and her sister a chance to find another way, a chance to give Jack a go at life.

Liana shook her head, so, so sad. Because it wasn’t just Gabrielle, was it? She alone could not ravage an entire community.

There was another.

A man.

Seventeen years ago, a chain of events had begun, and one way or another, it was about to come full circle. Elaina was afraid. She remembered Michael Samuels only too well. The man was close to the edge, Elaina believed. And that meant danger. Never before had two been in the same situation at the same time. Elaina intended for Jack to die to save both.

‘It’s time to go to bed,’ Liana whispered, finger lingering on the child’s forehead. Her eyes rested too long on the baby’s still form, and she wondered if she could ever let her sister carry out her plan, despite what might happen if they failed.

She stood up and went through to a back room, the baby held in her arms, so delicately it could be a fragile egg she felt sure would break at the slightest gust of wind. A crib was set up near the back of the room, between a shelf of dusty books and what appeared a piano by outline, a faded blue sheet slung over it. Neither played. Elaina had once made someone sell her the monstrous thing for next to nothing. She had wanted to see the look on the man’s face as a treasured family heirloom fell out of generations of his family’s possession for a few meagre pounds. The delight Elaina had felt had disgusted Liana, but ever since the piano had stood covered up in their spare room, a testament to her sister’s wickedness. Liana had wanted it gone, but her sister had never allowed it. In the end Liana had made do with an old sheet, but she still scowled when she looked at it, even now, years later.

She stepped past a couple of tables, one upturned upon the other, and laid the baby down. She lowered a tea towel-sized blanket over his chest, smiling at the decoration of bears and toy giraffes. She had bought it from a market stall in Plymouth a month ago, and surprisingly Elaina had not wanted to take it away. It symbolised Liana’s silliness, Elaina had told her with a smirk.

‘You sleep tight, my little angel,’ Liana whispered, then immediately became sad at the associations the word brought.

She smiled once more at Jack, then turned and left the room.

12

She had already stopped three times for directions, but when Rachel saw the first of the signs indicating Tamerton, next junction off the A27, six miles, rather than belated relief she felt only a sense of dread.

To Rachel, it seemed every man and his dog and his dog’s whole family of goddamn Pound Buddies had come out in their cars today to keep her away from Tamerton. After finally breaking through Birmingham, she had got stuck for over an hour just past Bristol at the Avon Bridge, and by the time roadside signs just shy of Exeter flashed up their warnings of possible delays to the north of Liskeard she was ready to give up and turn back. If it hadn’t been for the line that seemed to be reeling her in, that three hundred mile stretch of invisible elastic that was inexorably drawing her further south, she thought she might have.

The kids were waiting back at her parents’ house, probably wondering now where their mother had gone, would she be back later, would she still tuck them in and make their sandwiches for school tomorrow?

The idea tempted her. To go back to her children, to sweep them up into her arms and tell them everything would be fine, it would be all right. But would it? Could she possibly tell them that, when in her own mind she couldn’t even believe it? Kids were perceptive, they picked up on a lot of things adults thought they had got away with. She remembered her own parents’ messy break up. She had known for months about her father’s affair, about her mother throwing him out of the house. Away on business was the line they fed a nine-year-old Rachel. Yeah, right. Children heard, saw, more than they ever should.

Luke had seen. She no longer doubted it.

But while Luke might be scared of his father, Rachel wasn’t, not anymore. Matt hadn’t hit her. Matt was kind, loving, considerate. Matt would never have lifted a finger towards her. Whatever dark secrets that existed in his past had made him this way, and she felt confident she could turn him back. He wasn’t a wife beater, and Rachel would prove it.

Somehow.

She turned off the A–road, sorry to see the street lights at the intersection quickly disappear in her mirrors as she descended down into country lanes, high hedgerows and the craggy, bone–fingers of overhanging trees. For a few miles they enveloped her, the hedgerows wrapping her up in their awkwardness, twisting her one way then the other then back on herself. The road opened out at last as she reached a steep corner leading over a forge, the waters high after the heavy rain. As the wheels of her car sloshed through the water, rather than the rust it might cause she wondered, what if, what if I get stuck here in this? Who’s going to find me out here?

The lights of the occasional farm outhouse or isolated cottage gave her scant comfort as the car ground its way up a long hill, and Rachel wished she had had more opportunity to drive on this type of road during the couple of camping holidays they had taken in France before they got married. These days, she had so little need to leave the city she didn’t think she had ever driven anywhere without street lights before.

Halfway up the hill she found drifts of fog floating past her, gradually thickening. ‘Oh, bloody hell,’ she muttered, as the road leveled out and the car headed straight into a wall of mist. Some people hated driving in cities, but Rachel didn’t feel comfortable unless she was boxed in by angry motorists on either side. At least she would have someone to curse at then; out here there was simply, nothing.

The hedgerows gave way to low grass verges that suggested something vaster beyond, but rather than the shadowy pasture fields she had expected to catch a glimpse of in the darkness, the fog left just a white blindness on either side, giving the illusion of space which could easily give way to dark houses and hedgerows set back a short way from the road. But somehow, she didn’t think so. As she drove across a cattle grate, the shrieking metal of the loose rollers startling her, she understood.

Moorland.

Images of old Christopher Lee films raced through her head, Village of the Damned, The Wicker Man, their low–budget, shock-tactic frights flickering across the old black and white TV in her room at university, herself with the duvet pulled up over her eyes, Matt beside her, lain back on the pillows, chuckling softly. Good times, she remembered, but now those films served only to conjure images of heathen people and crazy rituals, witches, warlocks, evil sorcerers and black magicians, burning children or worse – outsiders – on funeral pyres erected in moorland hollows, their Pagan idolatry hanging from the trees: crosses, corn dolls, evil eyes. It was enough to make Rachel shiver and scan the edge of the fog nervously as the car trundled along, its speed diminishing with every minute that passed as the fog grew thicker.

Then on her left a sign flashed past, Tamerton, two miles, giving Rachel hope, but not enough to quell her unease. Matt was up ahead in the fog, and with him, only Heaven could say what.

‘I’ve had enough of this,’ she muttered quietly to herself, checking again the rearview mirror, not for cars behind her – hell, she wouldn’t miss their lights in this utter blankness – but for the person she felt certain would appear in her backseat at any moment. She had heard the myths, the urban legends about the vanishing hitchhikers, the madman banging the head of your dead husband on the roof of your car as you sat trapped inside by the edge of the road; they were enough to put the fear of God into her, make Rachel itch to turn the wheel, pull the car sharply around and head back the way she had come.

She was actually seriously considering it when a woman ran out in front of the car.

Rachel’s eyes squeezed shut even before she hit the brakes. The car skidded on the damp road, the tyres squealed and Rachel cried out in terror, losing sight of the figure for a moment as it loomed large in her headlights and then vanished again.

Then came a dull thump and the car ground to a halt.

Rachel made herself take a couple of deep breaths before she opened her eyes. She felt sure she wasn’t hurt, although her head had struck the steering wheel hard enough to cause a small cut to open above her eye. The warmth that spread there felt strangely comforting.

No, she made herself take a couple of calming breaths before she opened her eyes.

Only then did she begin to scream.

###

Bethany’s Diary, May 3rd, 1998

Hello diary. How are you doing?

It’s been a long time, I know. I guess I just gave up on you, had nothing left to say. With Mother nearby I’ve had someone to talk to, someone to voice all my fears to. But I’m getting older, now . . . I don’t know.

She’s started telling me things now she thinks I’m old enough to understand, things she’s always kept hidden, and I’ve needed someone else to talk to, because sometimes I just don’t understand unless I can put it all down in front of me.

Thank you for helping me, even if you do nothing other than listen.

The days tend to drift into one. I still do work that they give me down at the special place Father takes me to. I read and I look at magazines sometimes, too. But it’s all meaningless. I’m not like other people. None of this really matters to me, because I can’t talk about it. Can’t talk about any of it. If I can’t talk about it, it can’t really exist, can it? Something can’t exist unless someone else knows it’s there.

Do you know what I mean? Mother tells me this, at least. That’s how I see her, yet sometimes, it’s so hard. Before, it never mattered, I had nothing to say. But now . . .

While I stay silent I can be with my mother. If I talk, I lose her forever. And what’s more . . . oh, God. I can’t stand it.

I can’t stand it. I didn’t think I needed you, now I have her. Thought I’d found someone to talk to, someone who could talk back. But it just makes it harder, more confusing. I get just one opinion, and mother’s words frighten me at times. I can’t just accept them as gospel, but there’s no one else to talk to.

She told me I’d get sick if I ever spoke to anyone, but only recently has she told me why. She said I’d go the same way as her. Even now she won’t talk much about it, only babbles on about decay and weakness, how my silence protects me, saves me from the disease that so overwhelmed and eventually destroyed her. Sometimes I think she’s gone mad. If I didn’t know she were only a ghost or a soul or whatever, I’d definitely think it. It’s only because a ghost can’t go mad, surely? It’s not alive! I don’t know.

I can’t lose her, for all of her strange talk. Dad gets angry at me a lot, begs me to talk. He seems to know what floods of words rest on the tip of my tongue. He goes crazy sometimes, throws stuff around, but I think he drinks too heavily. I smell it on him a lot.

Only Uncle seems to like me. He sits on the end of my bed sometimes, and just talks to me. Talks about the world, about the stars, the planets, about foreign countries, strange peoples and cultures. He tells me stories, talks about bizarre animals, and sometimes even talks about the people I look at in the magazines Dad buys for me. He never wants anything back, never wants me to speak. He accepts me as I am.

I like Red. He’s so very kind to me.

13

Just a shadow, but a shadow with horns and blazing eyes and dripping teeth, and he thought he understood now.

Not his mother. Well, not all.

Out in the woods he could hear her voice, calling him. Soft, shrill, delicate like silver lilies coated with frost, like cookies sprinkled with icing sugar. Shrill, but rich like honey and cinnamon and toffee treacle and rooms full of cakes and so warm, like the childhood assurance of a sucked and torn comfort blanket, like a lover never disagreeing, never commenting always loving, always, always loving.

Her shell, a residue, a creature borne of the darkness she had become, had been trapped in that room like a beast in a circus sideshow. Her soul drifted out here, lost to him, but still, here. He could sense her, and he fought his way through the suffocating undergrowth, the clawed hands that raked at him and grasped for his feet, in a desperate struggle to reach her.

Like a fish on a hook, wound slowly, unknowingly in.

Just as it had wanted him before, it wanted him again. Why? His soul could free it. Could it?

He ran on, the darkness irrelevant for the tears left him blind anyway.

Rachel, oh my darling Rachel, how have I done this to you, how have I hurt you so bad? My children, Luke, Sarah, so beautiful, why do I alienate you from me?

I alienate myself. I am the corruption. The corruption is me, not around me.

A rock tripped him, and he rolled over and over through soggy bracken, the sharp ends of a few dead stalks snagging his clothes and scraping at his skin and his hot, feverish face. He cried out in pain, but more as a reflex than for the actual hurt he felt; his body had numbed to it, his senses and his nerves were packed inside his brain like hostages trapped inside a building.

Somewhere down below he heard the river, and moments later he burst out of the trees, almost sprawled headlong but just managing to remain upright, leaping the small, busy stream in a single bound. He stumbled onwards as the ground began to rise, fingers grasping at the wet, sticky undergrowth, feeling like a desperate fugitive with a dog pack on his tail. He breathed hard, sucking in the scents of damp vegetation and the warm peaty odour of decomposing matter; around him the world seemed to sway and circle his head as though he were lying on the ground drunk rather than climbing with desperate necessity. The sounds of the forest – bird calls, the rustle of foliage in the wind and the roar of the river had vanished behind a howling in his ears like a great wind, but more, like a thousand voices raised together, all of them lost somewhere terrible, all of them screaming.

He grabbed at his ears as though to tear them from his head, screamed his own rage up at the towering, swaying trees, but to no avail. The voices filled him, ripped him apart from within, sucked out his life, consumed him.

And then he stumbled out into what he would once have recognised as a clearing, had his eyes not been blinded by images of dark shadowy creatures, his ears not filled with their torturous wails.

He stumbled a few feet further, his whole body weary from the climb, then sprawled forward on to the damp earth. His face struck ground as soft as a sponge, and a moment later he came up choking, spitting bits of grass and mud from his mouth. Around him the world seemed to shimmer, and it took a moment to recognise it as driving rain.

‘Rachel . . .’ he called to no one, desperately crying out for help, but to the one he thought the least likely to hear, the least likely to aid him. ‘Help me!’

His arms buckled under him and he slumped forward, the ground coming up to embrace him like an eager, long forgotten lover. Watery mud rose up to fill his mouth and he found himself biting down on it, choking, feeling matted grass pressing into his eyes, blinding him.

‘Help me . . .’

His sobs were real, his agony immense. Tears flooded from him as his age disintegrated, his body fled back from its tormented adulthood through adolescence and beyond the catastrophic anger of his youth, back to his young childhood and his infancy; gradually he lost the ability to walk, to talk, to crawl and then even to think . . . and as he reached up to embrace the dark tunnel that had appeared before him, he looked up to see her standing there, just metres away, ephemeral, translucent, but still – there – his mother oh Mother oh Mother oh Mother –

And beside her another: a girl, her beauty almost equal, but younger, closer to his own age and with features that almost matched his own. Haunted like his, tormented, yet at peace, at ease. He craved for her, he craved for them, and as he reached out for them a sound fell from his throat, harsh, breaking through the screaming in his ears and shattering the swirling glass that wavered before his eyes.

A baby’s cry.

Interlude Two

14th May 1984

‘Tears can shatter clouds like rain can shatter clouds, tears are rain, tears are human rain, human rain . . .’

Matt strokes his chin with one finger. He reads the line back to himself once more in his head, eyes lingering over the words that dance drunkenly across the crumpled page in his own erratic handwriting.

Maybe this one might do. Maybe this one would be okay.

Matt hates the stupid English assignments Mr. Birkswill set them. Write a short narrative piece about an emotional state of your choice. Okaaaay . . .

Sadness.

Why sadness? The first one to come into his head. The first emotion he felt when he sat down to think about it.

His dad is out. Bethany is, as far as he knows, in her room. His mother is

(––––––––––)

Who? (––––––––––) Where?

. . . upstairs. He thinks.

The word mother seems to turn a lock in his mind and he immediately stops thinking about her. That shut off seems to happen more and more often now, and he starts to forget about her up there. Upstairs.

Mother has not gone anywhere. Nothing has happened to her. She’s just taking a nap, that’s all. A nice, long nap. She’ll feel better soon.

Soon.

He turns his thoughts to his father. Matt is worried. For months now, ever since (––––––––––) his father has been so despondent, so depressed. As though nothing will ever get better. (––––––––––) won’t ever recover.

It will. It always does. Whatever it is, it will get better.

Matt’s problem is that he has the same feelings. Most of the time the tangible despair that seems to surround him leaves him feeling weak and depressed, other times it manifests itself as a violent anger, as though he were a battered remote-controlled toy beneath the controls of a vindictive kid. Like last week, for instance, when he got in a scrap with Simon Camwell in the playground and ended up with a scuffed cheek and bruised eye. A fight over nothing: Sy had looked at Matt sideways and Matt had flipped. Sy Camwell had a reputation for being solid, but all thoughts of personal safety had fled as Matt waded in. He had done okay, getting a couple of punches in before Sy had, inevitably, pounded him to the floor. After his anger had dissolved into regret and dismay, Matt had silently thanked the teacher on break duty for stepping in while he still had half a face left. Old Birkswill; Matt could almost forgive him for the stupid homework.

Matt often hears his father now as he tramps around the house, slamming doors, kicking chairs and other obstructions out of his path like someone kicking Coca Cola cans about in the park. He throws bags into the back of the car rather than puts them; he shouts for Matt to hurry rather than simply calling. His father seems on the verge of some sort of breakdown, but Matt cannot ascertain why. He knows his (––––––––––) mother (––––––––––) is (––––––––––) sick, but she’ll (––––––––––) get better; she’ll be (––––––––––) out of that (––––––––––) out of that

(–––––room–––––)

She’ll come downstairs soon.

Perhaps the problem is Bethany. Matt’s kid sister is now six years old, and his father’s worry increases as time passes. She’s grown too old for her silence to be passed off as late development; now that physical shortcomings have been ruled out there is no answer left other than some form of mental deficiency. But Matt can’t look at her and believe for one moment that Bethany has any sort of handicap. He only has to glance at her eyes, see the intelligence there and he knows that she is fully aware and comprehending, that there is no more wrong with her ability to speak than there is with his own. And frankly, he finds that a little terrifying.

The kids in the village scream and shout like a flock of angry birds as they walk to school in the morning, and Matt wishes just for once Bethany would do the same. She doesn’t even act like them, not to mention her apparently self–imposed silence. As he watches her wandering the corridors, a feeling running down his back like the touch of a cold, dead hand, he can only think of a tiny, moving porcelain doll, patrolling the house like a sentry on the border of Toyland. Except in the Toyland Matt sees there aren’t any bright green bouncing balls and wobbling policemen and bears wearing pinafores; no cars that talk, pixies that bake cherry fruit cakes, not even any dark forests filled with nasty golliwogs. No, the Toyland Matt sees is grey and lifeless; the houses are half collapsed, the paint stripped off, the windows smashed and the doors kicked in, the roads are cracked and traveled only by rolling tumbleweeds (yes, in Matt’s mind Toyland has tumbleweeds), the pond where children once played and threw pieces of marzipan flapjack to the ducks has dried up to a sticky, lifeless marsh; the trees are all dead and their brittle branches are the grey of plaster casts: when the wind blows their branches snap away and fall to shatter on the barren, cracked earth.

Nothing lives in Matt’s Toyland; only the endlessly patrolling, wraith-like form of his mute little sister. And somehow, in her silent innocence she becomes something sinister. A monster.

He gets nightmares now. Although he doesn’t like to think about them, he has little choice for they won’t disappear from his mind like (––––––––––) will. They sit there and linger on his shoulder as he struggles with his stupid English assignments.

He closes his workbook. On the inside cover, the last thing he sees is a mass of scribbled pen marks in a rough circle, obscuring what had been written beneath. I fancy Carrie Becker; wiped out when she started to hang with Mark Delland, the cool kid whose parents worked in Exeter and who came to school wearing a designer label school uniform. With his weird family and his spacker sister (at least that was how the nastier school kids referred to Bethany behind his back, and occasionally to his face) Matt couldn’t compete with that.

Might as well just wipe out that dream. Like all the others.

He feels suddenly tired. He still has homework to do, and it’s only four o’clock, but Dad won’t have tea ready until at least seven (Mother never cooks it anymore, Mother never (––––––––––)

Might as well have a nap.

He lies down, the book tossed to the floor below his bed. The window from his room looks out of the front of the house, and he can see the top of the church tower and beyond it the edge of Dartmoor, a huge mound of granite crags and peaty earth that rises over the village like a giant green wave. The geography of Tamerton amazes him at times, the way the village is set into such a hollow that you can stand at the edge of the moors and look across to the woods rising up the side of the valley on the other side, and not even realise the village is there. Hidden out of sight like a lost treasure (or something forgotten, unwanted, his mind spits back at him).

Except for the church tower that is. Rising up out of the trees like the last standing spire of a buried city, it is the only sign that the village is there. Matt often wonders whether if the church were to fall, would the tide of the moors just continue on its jolly way and swallow up the whole village for good? Just absorb it as food like the green blobs in Fifties B–Movies? He thinks perhaps it might. Nothing worth saving, not even Carrie Becker, now she’s with that slimy posh toff Delland.

He gets up, pulls the curtains closed on the trees, the church tower and the distant rise of the moors, and goes back to his bed. He lies down, facing away from the door, staring at the red theatre curtain pulled across the world until his eyes drop and he sleeps.

#

He wakes to the sound of what at first he thinks is a wind rushing past his ears, as though he has fallen from a plane without a parachute. The room smells of something dead, something rotten, a smell he associates with that of a fox’s crushed corpse he walked past on the way to school the other week. Kicked to the side of the road to rot in peace, it had been dead some length of time judging by the discoloured meat of the ripped open torso, and the hordes of maggots that writhed inside the animal’s body cavity like worker ants. Normally he caught the bus, but that day he had been late. The smell had made his stomach beat at the root of his throat, and he had crossed the road to get away but he had needed to run almost fifty yards before he left it completely behind him.

The smell of death and sickness. And something else, something physical. Something . . . touching him.

Hands. Hands on his forehead. He can feel one of them running across his temple, fingers crinkled and dry like old cloth. The other is somewhere near his shoulder, rubbing over his clothes, but the fingers are reaching for his neck, for the soft skin there.

And he knows where the smell comes from.

A terror grips him. A terror that far exceeds that of watching the Daleks from behind the sofa, of going to bed thinking Freddy Krueger would be in his dreams. The terror far exceeds walking past the graveyard at night, in the fog, and even eclipses that fear of his sister that is growing with each passing day.

And he hears the wind revert to a whisper; knows the wind is gone, was never there. He listens, tries to pick the words out of the thundering of his heart and the juddering breathing that betrays his attempts to pretend he still sleeps.

‘My sweet boy . . . oh, my sweet boy . . . how so very much I love you, more than life, more than words, more than Heaven . . .’

She’s got out. He has to open his eyes. Has to.

Somewhere beyond the inconceivable terror that has him in its grip and is squeezing, squeezing, is the sound of running feet, the sound of a man’s desperate shouts, a name he recognises as his own and a voice he should recognise, but can’t . . . can’t . . . he can’t think past this, can’t think past this, can’t envisage anything beyond the absolute terror he feels . . . but against his will and his reasoning, slowly his eyes open –

‘I love you Matty . . . I love you more than life, more than this world, more than anything . . . more than life . . .’

Her face leans over him and at first he feels like a brick has struck him in the face, smashing through all the glass walls and the mental blocks and the ignorance and the denial – a hammer that has crashed through his world and his belief to show him the vile, hideous visage of the wretch that once he had called Mother, as she – it it IT – leans over him, breathing dirty, putrid breath into his face while her ugly, misshapen mouth forms words of love around a black tongue and green, rotting teeth, and her pale lusterless eyes cry yellow tears of pus down on to his face. He screams his sadness and his revile, but his words seem sucked from the air as though swallowed by this . . . this creature like raindrops falling into a lake, and he struggles to escape her grip but finds his body dead with pins and needles. He coughs, and spots of blood fleck the filthy gown that she wears.

Somewhere below him, behind him, all around him he hears the sounds of shouting, of someone hollering his name in a choking, tearful voice. Matt tries to shout back but she is on top of him and her weight suffocates him despite the frailty he can sense in her limbs. Her fingers continue to stroke his face, and he feels his eyes grow heavy until eventually they drop closed as though she is coaxing the life out of him, taking part of him into her, absorbing his life like a sponge absorbing a stain. He cries hot tears, for himself, for her, for them both.

‘Oh, my beautiful boy . . .’

He hears a crack like thunder, and tries to roll his head to look as movement comes in the corner of his eye in an explosion of grey and black. Only when the huge, looming figure of his father appears from nowhere does Matt start to respond, but by now he is too weak to do anything except loll his head back on the bed, his eyes wanting to roll, his consciousness wanting to flee. His first and only thought is that he is the intended victim of a murder as he sees the heavy lug hammer in his father’s hands.

Matt wants to cry, wants to shed fat, hot tears as he looks up at his father, but cannot; his own eyes are too weak, too drained to comprehend the effort, and instead he just stares up blearily like a street drunk at a police officer. His father’s face overflows with love, but also with the terrible, bitter sadness Matt sees on TV in the eyes of refugees, burns victims, the families of murdered children – Why me? What have I done to deserve this? Is there no justice in the world? – and for a second he sees the terribly unfair indecision in his father’s eyes as he looks first at his son and then at the pitiful, wasted creature that had once been his perfect, angelic wife.

Then his father’s face cracks like a TV screen into shards of misery and the lug hammer swings.

Reflex shuts Matt’s eyes so he only hears the sound of the blow landing, but it is something he will never, ever forget. For one thing, nothing strikes him. He saw, and he recognised both the look in his father’s eyes, caught in Catch 22 with an endless, impossible choice to make but no time to make it, and the sudden miserable assurance that whichever answer he chose would be wrong.

Matt knows it could have easily been him.

He sees nothing, but the sound will haunt him until the day he dies. Like the hollow sound of a coconut being split by something big, something heavy, followed by a winded groan, and then the weight on top of him shifts as the body slides to the floor, lands with another thud, lies still.

Matt hears a cry, a horrible shrieking sound and he cannot open his eyes; he holds them shut until he thinks his pupils might burst inside his head, filling his vision with a hot, oily substance, as he hears first one, then another blow land before the hammer clatters away to the corner of the room.

‘Do not open your eyes!’ a voice roars, and Matt screams but obeys, because he can hear the violence of the toiling storm inside his father’s head, knows his father has slipped over the edge, will leave this room a broken man and will never recover. A wound has opened in his mind, one that can never be treated or will ever heal.

Behind his father’s voice Matt can hear the choked sobs, the sound of his father’s misery as he lifts the corpse of the woman he loved and still loves despite her ravaged mind and body, and carries her out of the room.

For Matt, the conflict resolves itself differently. He does not know what his father has done; he does not know his father has saved his life, saved that part of his soul the woman had not had time to take from him, although his father worries that he may have got there too late, hesitated too long, and that his son, also, may be scarred.

He is right: Matthew will be scarred. Matt knows, deep down, beyond (––––––––––) that his mother was more than sick, that she wasn’t suffering from cancer or leukemia or spina bifida, but from something that ran far deeper than he can ever understand. Something that has left her just a shell of the beautiful, elegant woman he remembers, turned her into something different, something dark, something bad. But this knowledge is deep; this knowledge is far below the deepest ocean floor of his mind. All Matt can understand is what the facts tell him, the facts as he sees them.

That his father has just murdered his mother.

All Matt can remember are her words, love you, love you, love you more than Heaven . . . nothing else matters. The rest is irrelevant.

His eyes are still closed when his father comes back in. Matt hears his name and then his father takes him in a hug, whispering over and over, ‘I love you Matthew, thank the world you’re safe . . .’

It doesn’t matter. His father’s tears do not matter. His father’s loving words do not matter . Nothing matters except what Matt sees when he opens his eyes.

Over his father’s shoulder, Matthew can see the lug hammer where it lies on the floor. One corner of it has what looks like a shadow, a shadow that has leaked on to the floor and spread itself out in a small corona around the hammer’s head. It seems to glimmer under the bedroom light.

Matt wouldn’t mind if it were shadow, but it is not. It is blood from where the hammer smashed open his mother’s skull.

A door closes in Matthew’s mind, locked tight even as he sways in his father’s arms. A door that leads to forgiveness.

Part Three

Angels

1

Rachel killed the engine. The lights stayed on, illuminating the road ahead for about thirty yards before the wall of fog rose to block her way. She waited, listening to the rapid thudding of her heart, the only sound besides the low, muffled howling of the wind outside and a steady drumming that she took a moment to place as the sound of her shaking fingers tapping on the hard plastic of the steering wheel. There was no sign of the woman.

Rachel felt too shaken to cry, too frightened even to scream.

She’s lying out there, she thought. Dead.

The thought rocked back and forth through her head like marbles bouncing off one another. I’ve killed someone. Someone is dead now because of me.

Then a face appeared at the nearside window, almost touching the glass.

Rachel screamed.

At first it looked skeletal, demonic, like Death come to take the dead woman’s soul. Rachel tried to reach for the lock button, to keep the face outside, but as her fingers darted up the door swung away from her, opened from the outside. Rachel screamed again, but as her eyes took in the woman standing on the road outside, she realised the steamed up windows and her shock had obscured her view. This was no demon. Just a woman, that was all.

And from her expression, a very angry one.

‘You stupid fucking bitch, what were you trying to do, kill me?’

Rachel shook her head, speechless. At least the woman didn’t seem hurt. Rachel didn’t know whether to be thankful or not.

‘I was just trying to cross the fucking road, you crazy –’

Rachel finally managed to pluck some words out of the air. ‘Hey, I’m . . . I’m sorry, but give me a break, won’t you? You came out of nowhere.’

The woman glared at her. ‘Well of course I did! Can’t you see all this fucking fog?’

Rachel shook her head in exasperation. Words floated into her mouth then vanished before she could catch them. ‘I . . . I . . .’

The woman leaned against the car’s doorframe. ‘Well you’re lucky you hit that rock instead of me! You could have killed me, you know. Would you like murder on your conscience? Would you?’

Rachel felt like crying. She said nothing, just sat in silence while the woman berated her. She went on and on until she seemed to run out of things to say, at which point she turned her nose up at Rachel and stepped away from the car.

‘Well, I guess I ought to try and make something of my evening, despite your best attempts at ruining it. I’ll just have to hope there are no more crazy drivers out there like you or I’m in for a long night, aren’t I?’ She planted her hands on her hips and huffed. ‘Goodbye.’

Rachel stared as the woman turned and stalked off. She felt tired and upset but equally as confused, unable to bring into reality what had just happened. Where was she? Was the car damaged? Was she hurt? And how far was she from Tamerton and Matthew?

And who on earth was that woman?

Despite the woman’s anger, her face had been beautiful, almost abnormally so, as though she had stepped out of a television studio’s makeup department right on to the moor. Rachel had felt a sense of something wonderful, something magical about her, but couldn’t place exactly what. Perhaps she would never know, perhaps it was beyond her to understand.

Perhaps it had never happened. The long journey had left her tired, seeing things.

She twisted the key in the ignition, waited for the engine to turn over, but instead the car just wheezed, refusing to start. She tried a couple more times, but the engine just groaned and strained, coughing and spluttering like a smoker on a sports field. Whatever she’d hit, it had left her stranded.

The woman had left the door open, letting in a cool, moist breeze. Rachel swung her legs out on to the ground and made to get out of the car, resigned to a long walk. But as her weight shifted from the seat on to her legs, her left ankle buckled, twisting underneath her. She cried out in pain and slumped forward on to the road.

She gritted her teeth, hands reaching for her ankle as pain bloomed across the bridge of her foot and up her calf. She must have sprained it in the accident, but the shock had hidden the pain. She glanced back into the shadowy footwell of the car, saw the glint of metal where the accelerator pedal had been pushed through.

She had managed to do some serious damage. How fast had she been traveling? She had not thought more than twenty, twenty–five, but perhaps in these conditions the fog had proved deceptive.

Stranded in the middle of nowhere with a broken–down car. At night. Rachel had a problem.

‘Help me!’ She shouted into the fog. ‘Help me, I’m hurt!’ Perhaps the woman would hear her cries and turn back. Rachel glanced up and down the road. What had the last sign said? How many miles to Tamerton was it?

She had no choice. She would have to walk.

Using the door of the car for balance, she hauled herself up. She took one tentative step, then another. Pain lanced up through her leg, but with each step it became more bearable. The accelerator pedal must have jarred it. Now she had come to terms with her ordeal, and realised that whatever she had struck had already been dead, the pain had free reign to do what it liked.

She rounded the front of her car. She had hit what looked like a gatepost, a round boulder of granite mirrored by another similar piece about twenty feet further on, together marking a lane entrance, little more than a potholed dirt track leading downhill away from the main road. She had struck it head on, the impact smashing in the front of the chassis and buckling the bonnet. Her limited knowledge of cars extended far enough to know her car was an insurance write off.

Feeling a mixture of anger and despair, Rachel squinted into the fog and the darkness, hoping to see the lights of the town. Nothing glowed ahead of her, but off to the right, in the direction the dirt track led, she could see a faint light some distance away. A building of some kind, she hoped, a farmhouse or secluded cottage. Images conjured in her mind of more Hammer horrors, and also poor old Hansel and Gretel, finding their cottage of candy. She shivered, glanced back at her wrecked car, and made up her mind.

She had no choice. Making sure she kept the distant light in sight, she started off down the lane.

###

Bethany’s Diary, May 19th, 1998

She tells me secrets. Too many secrets. I don’t like hiding anymore, but she says she’ll leave me if I break my silence. Says she’ll have no choice. What can I do? I love my mother, but I can’t handle this.

I can’t get away much anymore, Dad watches me like a hawk, now his drinking has eased. Uncle Red speaks to me a lot, and although I know how much older than me he is, I find him somewhat . . . intriguing. I feel something I haven’t much felt before. It’s different with the boys I see in the village. They stare at me like a freak, shout obscenities and abusive remarks. Last Tuesday, as I made my way back from the village store with some more Lamberts for father and some bread, one of them, one of the Calver boys, grabbed me and told me he wanted to . . . wanted to . . .

He said, ‘I’ll get you to talk girl, I’ll make you talk. Give me five minutes. And if you won’t . . . If you won’t I’ll find a use for your silence, I’m telling you.’

Then he grabbed my hand and before I could flinch away he pushed it against his groin. I felt a hardness there, unnatural, desperate, and I saw the carnal desire in his eyes. He wanted me so badly. Perhaps to prove something to his friends, perhaps because I symbolize taboo, something they cannot have, and therefore they want more than ever.

Whatever the answer, he frightened me, and it took all of my nerve to avoid just what he had said and cry out for father, but I resisted and pulled my hand away. Needless to say, I ran then, but not before raking his face with my nails. I ran back to the house, dropped my things down on the table and went up to my room. I locked myself in then cried into my pillow for what felt like hours. I felt shocked, dirty and humiliated.

This is how they see me, the boys from the village. They all want me for the same reason, and because of that I cannot find anything attractive in any of them.

But Uncle Red is different. He wants nothing from me, just to sit and talk, to be my . . . my friend. I know he is not my real uncle, and I’m afraid I let myself get carried away. Yesterday, as he sat on the end of my bed, talking to me about China, about when he visited as a young man, about the places he had seen, the cities, the people, Shanghai, the Great Wall . . . I reached forward and touched his face. At first he flinched, then he frowned, but he didn’t move away. He watched me as I leaned in and kissed him softly on the cheek.

I don’t know what I meant to achieve, but I pulled away then, feeling uncertain; for the first time in my life had I talked I would have had nothing to say, full of the buzz of emotion that ran through me like tiny mice in my veins.

And then he reached up and touched my face with his hand. I froze, felt warmth emanate from my skin, embarrassment, nervousness, and he pulled me forward and kissed my lips. At first I felt like a rabbit caught in headlights, then I managed to relax and open my mouth a little. His mouth felt warm, sweet, and I loved it. I put a hand on his neck and pulled him closer.

We kissed for a few seconds but it felt like only an instant later when he pulled away from me, gave me a smile and went to stand up. He promised to come and see me again soon, then put a finger to his lips, kissed it and placed it on mine. My heart seemed to burst out of my chest and I had to stop myself from pulling him back down to me.

He left me then, closed the door softly behind him, and I heard his boots retreat down the hall. Once, I heard his stride break and he stopped for a second before continuing again. He had thought about coming back, I knew, had thought about coming back to me right then. I know he wants me, only his apprehension holds him back.

Soon, though. I’m twenty-two years old, I’m no child. Whatever they might think of me, I’m still a woman. And I still need the same things that other women need.

For the rest of the evening I buzzed with happiness. I have never wanted to speak to someone so much as I did then. But Mother’s words rang heavy on my mind, and I resisted. I know what happened to her. I know about the corruption that ruined her soul, how it broke and deformed her body, made her desperate, pitiful, eventually causing her death.

(I know Dad killed her. She told me. But she told me too how it wasn’t his fault, how it had all been hers, all hers, that he had done what he had done because he had no choice, had only done it to protect Matthew and myself. She loves him still, so much, enough to keep her here I think, and she doesn’t want me to hate him the way Matthew did.)

I couldn’t tell Dad about Uncle, and I don’t know anyone else. I wanted to tell Mother though, so I went out into the forest looking for her. I wandered around for hours, calling her to me, calling her name, but she never appeared.

I had the terrible thought that I might have made her lost to me by kissing Red, but she has never, ever said anything about that. And I could sense her out there somewhere, close perhaps, but hiding. I have a bond with her, I can feel her, feel her when she is nearby, when she is watching me.

And she was nearby, but for some reason of her own she stayed hidden to me.

I don’t know why. Jealousy? Because I have found something she no longer has?

2

Fingers as damp as the soil pulled boards away from the chapel entrance. He found the top few to be nailed tight, but closer to the ground the boards were rotten and some were loose, already pried away by some past fingers and then replaced as though to hide a secret entrance. They extended just high enough for someone to crawl through on hands and knees, someone small, a girl perhaps.

Bethany.

Darkness had crept up on him, the sky above a grey, amorphous shape that because of the thick fog seemed to begin at a point just above the tops of the trees.

Thank God for the light then.

No: thank them.

A pale, creamy glow encircled him, made him look like a child born inside a halo. He didn’t dare look behind him; had seen them for too long already for his mind to comprehend without embracing madness. But even without looking he could feel them inside him, their minds mixing with his, sending images zipping through him even as they urged him forward, towards what they wanted him to find.

He pulled back the last of the boards, exposing the entrance. No need to crawl, he could walk through now, into this dark, tumbledown space.

Go on.

He stumbled on, feeling them breathe inside him, images flashing through his head like a private slide show, except that he knew they saw them too. They worked the projector, they flashed up the images they wanted him to see, and in some way he could not understand, he knew the words, the notes to these images, lay in here somewhere.

Come on. Time is short. We don’t have long.

He felt them behind him, radiant. He didn’t dare look; whatever they were, he had seen enough. He knew they could not be real, they could not possibly exist as they did; surely they were no more than a figment of his fragile imagination. Yet somehow they defied all the logic his mind had built for him over the years, in the years since –

--( she came for him )–

– she died at his father’s hands, all the logic and the secular belongings which told him that this–could–not–be–possible.

Yet, it was. And whether he were alive or dead or lost in the limbo between the two, nothing could deny that he was here, in some shape or form, and he had no option but to oblige and adhere to what they asked of him.

The chapel was nothing like he had ever imagined. There were no pews, for one thing, no altar, font, pulpit, nothing he thought of when he imagined religious buildings. Only an empty room with a partially collapsed ceiling that looked as though God had once got angry and punched one giant divine fist down through the roof, leaving a splintered hole through which a slim birch tree now grew, its canopy of branches helping to keep out the rain. To his left he saw nothing but a damp, crumbly wall, to his right the same, except there was a window space in this one, boarded up as the entrance had been.

And up ahead, a raised platform of cobbled stones, a stage from which sermons would have taken place before an enraptured (or enraged) congregation. Up there, where they wanted him to go. Up towards the front. Where the priest would have stood.

Little more than a primitive cattle shed, the chapel had rested, buried by weeds, on his father’s land for perhaps as long as the land had been owned, long before his father’s house and gardens, since the present trees were young and amidst the towering boughs of their long-rotted parents. The Norman church stood down in the village, so maybe this chapel pre-dated it, escaping destruction by the Norman armies for reasons unknown. Maybe it had been too small, too insignificant to bother with. He would probably never know.

His father clearly revered the place, hence his mother’s grave and the scattering of his sister’s ashes here.

His father had wanted seclusion. A private place, away from prying eyes, where his wife, and now daughter, could rest without threat from the suspicious people of the village. The people who had whispered in corners about his sick wife and mute daughter had in their small town bigotry labeled the Cassidy women as freaks and outcasts even before their deaths, and would condemn their place in the town cemetery alongside their neighbours to an eternity of sideways glances and snarky remarks. Ian wouldn’t have wanted that. So here, amidst the forest and with the crumbling walls of their private chapel for company, he had hidden them.

Matthew crawled towards the back, ducking under vines and the prickly branches of the birch that tried to claw him every time the wind gusted. He pushed brambles aside and pulled nettles out of the cobblestone floor without noticing the stings, working his way towards the back wall, following their directions, going where they wanted him to go.

He was almost there.

He climbed around a fallen concrete lintel and up onto the raised platform, crawling over the wet stone towards a place which now seemed to shine out of the darkness, mirroring the light which still shone over his shoulders, brighter than ever. He could see the place at the foot of the back wall, tucked into the left corner from where the light seemed to radiate, a grainy, punctured glow that looked as though someone had hidden a spotlight behind thin concrete blocks which prevented it from blinding him with its brightness. He knew in the sane part of his mind that no light could come from there, that they were nothing but thousand–year–old stones packed on top of one another, but he knew it was no more unlikely than the light that still glowed from behind him, and the voices that talked in his head. All wrong, all impossible, but somehow, all there.

He lurched suddenly as a horrific image flashed in his mind like a neon sign and then was gone, and he slipped to the ground, bruising his leg on hard, uneven stone. Something about his mother, about why she got ill. A collage of images all interlinked with each other that if true made him sick to the stomach. This was what they wanted him to find. In a way he could barely understand, he had discovered the ability to connect with them, and they cannoned their knowledge into his thoughts, bombarding him with images of their past, of a past he had been part of before running away.

A past corrupted, that they now wanted put right.

‘That’s why you’re here,’ he whispered, crawling towards the light at the foot of the wall. ‘Whatever you are, that’s what you want.’ Again, images flashed in his mind, the anger they caused making him cry out and slam a fist against the damp stone.

Brief, flitting images. Pieces of a puzzle, random, scattered pieces. And he knew now, that the complete picture was here. Ahead of him. Beyond the flag stones of the wall.

His fingers reached out, guided by the light from behind and the voices that rose to a cacophony in his mind. It did not surprise Matt to find the stones to be loose.

He tore away part of his T–shirt to use to grip the damp, moss-covered stones, and with a grunt, he pulled. The first resisted for a second, the stone and the moss around it swollen by the water, then slid free. The others followed easily, and Matt tossed them away behind him. With his heart beating nearly hard enough to bruise his chest, he peered into the ten-inch space at the foot of the wall.

A keep-safe compartment, a hiding place for a small steel biscuit tin, tucked away near the back. His fingers caught it and he pulled it out.

Trepidation rose in him, thoughts of Pandora’s Box and the evil secrets within, but the voices implored him to open it, open it. In here it lay, what they had brought him here for.

The answer to the puzzle.

The answer to everything.

He swallowed down his fear, took hold of the lid and pried it off.

For a moment the light seemed to vanish as though they had flinched back from whatever the tin held, and it was like peering into darkness, nothing revealed inside except a black, endless void. Then the light returned – though tentative, he felt – and he saw what the tin held clearly for the first time.

Notebooks.

Frowning, he pulled out the little pile of books, seven in total, most of them thin, no more than twenty or thirty pages. The true understanding of what they were took a moment to register, then as the voices screamed in his head he realised he had already known, long before he came here, long before his mind had failed him and two spirits (ghosts angels demons wraiths whatever) had led him to this collapsed and overgrown place. Back home as a child, he had known.

She’d had a voice after all. Of course she had. It was just a little different to his own.

Feeling a trepidation he had never felt before, he held the first book up into the light and read the neat inscription on the front, written in pencil and in a young girl’s handwriting.

Bethany’s Diary.

In here lay the answers to his entire life. The keys to his past, the keys to Bethany’s death and the understanding of everything he had seen and felt since he had come back here, an explanation for the horrible images that even now left a bloodstained residue on his mind.

He could almost feel the power emanating from the books.

The light at his shoulder flickered but held strong. The diaries held answers for them too, answers which he had no choice but to reveal; there was no option to throw these away and run, run out of this place as he had before, to leave it all behind him.

He had run a million miles into oblivion to escape his past, but after fourteen years he had come right back around.

The voices reached fever pitch. Time, whatever that meant, was short.

He flicked open the first book, slightly damp, dog–eared and yellowed around the edges. The light behind suddenly bloomed to illuminate the handwriting on the page, single-spaced, pencil-written, a little difficult to read but unmistakably that of a child. Bethany’s beginnings. He glanced quickly back at the other books. A couple of the more recent ones had dates written on the front, now in pen, now in a neat, elegant script. They led right up to the month of her death.

Without giving himself a chance to question the ethics of reading his sister’s diaries (after all, she seemed to be giving her blessing), Matthew began to read.

He read fast, flicking over the pages almost too quick for the words as they rushed to lay themselves out ahead of him, aware at last of what the images in his mind meant, accompanying the books like a film with subtitles. He finished one book then carried straight on to the next, and gradually the small pile diminished.

He paid no heed to the damage being done to his own sanity as the secrets of his family were revealed, how they left his semblance of a new life in tatters; everything was lost to him and could never be found until he had the answers, until he had fulfilled this part of his destiny that God and whomever else had long ago drawn up. He rocked back on his haunches, a book held open in one hand and with the two beings (that really were really were – really were – there) hovering just over his shoulder, he let his family’s secrets pour from the pages up into his eyes.

Beyond the crumbling walls of the little chapel, the wind had got up and the rain had started to hammer down, battering the ground like bullets fired by Heaven’s artillery in the beginning of a war against Earth. The trees shook back and forth, their branches creaking and whining like frightened animals lost in the dark, while up on the moors an injured woman whom Matt would have recognized hobbled towards a cottage nestled into a hollow near to a raging, overflowing river. Inside the cottage . . . well, Matthew and also the wet, hurt woman would know soon enough.

But outside was lost to him. Inside the chapel were only Matthew and the voices in his head.

And the books.

3

‘Drive faster, Ian.’

‘I can’t drive any faster, come on, you can see the fog –’

‘Drive faster.’

Red’s voice growled like the engine, and despite himself Ian pressed down the accelerator a little more than he wanted to. Red had assumed a whole new persona since they had decided what to do, and it had begun to slip out of control. Red wanted revenge; he wanted blood, and Ian was beginning to wonder if Red cared about whose he spilt first.

He had never seen his friend like this. Red, normally so calm, was on the verge of losing control, like a gas main set to blow.

Red lived on the edge of the village, his whole life unmarried, in a house left to him by his aunt, who had raised him after his parents, as far as Ian knew, had died when he was very young. A farming accident, Red had always told him, though details had remained vague, and Ian had often wondered if there was more. Perhaps he had been abandoned, or adopted, and couldn’t face the truth. Whatever the real reason, it had made Red attach himself to the Cassidys as though they were a surrogate family, striving to be part of something he had never had for himself.

On more than one occasion he had proved himself as worthy as any brother. He had been the strength Ian needed in the aftermath of Gabrielle’s death and Matthew’s departure, the person who had kept Ian sane during those dark days. When Ian had been at his lowest ebb, Red had been everything. He had been a rock Ian had leant on, a walking cane, a safety belt. Red’s friendship had been the one thing that had stopped Ian following his wife by his own hand. Red’s friendship had kept him alive.

So why did he feel such a sudden antagonism towards his friend? From nowhere Ian felt a surge of anger and hatred, and an assurance that what Red intended to do was wholly wrong. Yet he didn’t understand his feelings. If the Meredith sisters had stolen Red and Bethany’s baby, then surely they deserved everything coming to them, and worse?

He shook his head. He kept his eyes on the road, but his ears heard only the growl of the engine, the pattering of the rain outside, and the tap–tap–tapping of Red’s fingers on the gun barrel.

The road rose up through the fog and soon the moors appeared ahead of them. They rumbled over the cattle grate and the road flattened out. Generally, under a full moon and a particularly starry night, it was possible to see as far as the old control tower, but the fog blanket had lowered visibility to no more than a few yards. They couldn’t even make out any lights in the distance. It was as though by leaving the village behind they had condemned themselves to a cloudy limbo, and Ian wondered bitterly if they would ever see anything around them besides the cracked road and the undulating waves of soggy moorland, all of it vanishing into nothing just twenty yards from their vehicle.

‘Switch off the headlights,’ Red said.

‘What?’ Ian glanced across in the darkness, but his friend still stared straight ahead.

‘Switch off the main lights and use your fog lights only. Then turn off the road.’ He pointed to the right. Head that way, swing round the tower and approach the house from the back. That way we’ll surprise them.’

‘You’re joking, aren’t you? It’s been raining for days, the moor’ll be waterlogged. We’ll sink, not to mention the havoc it’ll cause to my suspension.’

‘This thing was built for off–road.’ Ian felt Red’s eyes turn on him in the darkness of the truck’s cab. ‘And we don’t want them to have a chance to get away. You do want to find my baby, don’t you?’

Ian glanced across, but quickly looked back. The madness he saw in Red’s eyes, in this moment directed purely at him, terrified Ian more than he could put into words. The sound of the engine and the pouring rain seemed to fade into the background, and the tapping of Red’s fingers on the gun barrel seemed so desperately loud.

‘We’ll get him back, Red. If they’ve got him, we’ll get him back for you. For Bethany.’

An uncomfortable silence followed before Red, apparently satisfied, turned back to face the road. Ian let his breath out slowly, a breath he had not realised had caught in his throat.

Ian switched on the front fogs and did as Red instructed. Without his main beams he could only see clearly for about five yards, so he slipped the vehicle into first and they continued their journey at a crawl. Ian scowled as he wove the truck in and out of dips and between chunks of exposed rock, the vehicle jerking them around like a funhouse ride. Occasionally they came across a sheep or goat sleeping under the protective overhang of a rocky outcrop, and the animal would dart out and away at the sight of the car, causing Ian to brake sharply. In his mind he cursed his friend’s decision.

‘Head around the back of the house. I don’t ever remember seeing any windows looking out this way.’ Again Red pointed off to the right. ‘Stop about a hundred yards back from the house. They shouldn’t hear us over the wind, but we don’t want to take that chance. Surprise is our best chance against those fucking witches.’

They drove on in silence for a few minutes before Ian brought the car to a stop behind a stand of short trees, their branches bent over like claws from years of relentless wind buffeting. During the day or even without the fog, the truck might be easily seen, but in this weather it was practically invisible.

They climbed out and went around to the front of the truck. Ian flicked on a small flashlight and held its beam low to the ground, too difficult to be seen from a distance but enough to light their way. Although Red scowled, he said nothing; it would be dangerous to try to negotiate the bumps and dips of the moorland completely blind.

A slope began ahead of them, a soggy green carpet that arced down towards the distant sound of rushing water. Though the ground disappeared into fog within a few metres, they could see a light glowing dimly not far ahead.

‘Let’s do this,’ Red muttered, and stepped out into the beam of the flashlight. After an unnoticeable moment of hesitation, Ian followed, an overwhelming sense of foreboding holding him heavy to the ground.

###

Bethany’s Diary, November 25th, 1998

Dad knows about us. Although we haven’t yet . . . done anything, we have been seeing each other for some time, sitting together as we always did, only now sometimes we touch, we kiss, we lie close to each other on my bed. And now Dad knows.

He went mad at first, and with only Red to explain he didn’t want to understand. They had a fight, then Dad went out and he didn’t come back until late. When he did he was very drunk, and he came into my room and . . . and began to cry.

He said he understood. He said he didn’t like it, but if it made me happy, he would try to accept it. I managed to smile but then he began to cry again, and so I cried with him. Then he begged me to speak, took my hands in his and implored me; I wanted so badly to speak to him, to comfort him, to tell him that, yes, at last I did feel happy, and I almost did, actually opening my mouth to speak only for Mother’s warnings to come rushing in along with the images of her last days, and my mouth clammed up tight. Dad cried for some minutes, but in the end he took my hands, kissed each of them and went off to bed.

I haven’t seen much of him in the few days since. Red came over to see me yesterday and they spent a little time together. They resolved most of their issues I think. Dad still doesn’t like it, but I know he’ll come to accept it sooner or later. He must. He has no choice, because it will happen with his blessing or not, and I know he is desperate that I not be lost like Matthew and my mother.

Talking of whom, she still keeps her distance from me, still has a condescending air about her. She is difficult to find, and rarely comes to the house anymore. I have to search for her, but she won’t talk to me, just turns her head away and refuses to respond to my questions. She is sad. She doesn’t like what is happening between myself and Red either, but she won’t tell me why. I think she has the same opinion as my father. He is too old. He is too close to our family. She doesn’t like it at all, and sometimes she threatens to leave me completely.

Well, I don’t care. She can do what she wants. What I feel . . . love? I read about it, wonder about it all the time. I hope I do. I want to. Desperately.

4

He threw the last of the books aside. Sickness, hatred and revulsion pumped through his stomach like sparks from a broken electric cable shoved underneath his skin. His cheeks felt hot despite the cold and his fingers clenched and unclenched, his knuckles whitening as utter rage boiled in him and he felt a desperate need to explode, to smash, to destroy.

He turned away from the books, unable to look at them any longer, back towards the light.

Back towards them.

He looked at them directly for the first time, ephemeral, translucent, but bathed in a white glow as though someone had whitewashed invisibility. His mother beautiful beyond words, memories of her deformed physical form during her last weeks pushed from his mind like water washing chalk off a blackboard, and his sister, younger – though much older than he remembered – and with a look of lost innocence about her, but still a close comparison. They stared at him from within the light, shimmering as though gusted by the wind.

Ghosts.

No, not that. Angels. Angels.

Their lips did not move when they spoke, and the words had no physical form, they were just images projected into his head.

Now you know the truth. Help us.

We are trapped here until it is over. We are so sad, so lost. So lonely.

He gritted his teeth, stared them down and reminded himself that he was actually here, facing these two magnificent beings, impossible, unbelievable storybook images of his own past.

‘I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘I’ll finish this.’

Within their shimmering faces they seemed to smile.

We both love you, Matthew.

Anger held the tears back from his eyes.

‘I’ll help you,’ he said. ‘If I can. If I have the strength to do it.’ The face appeared in his mind, the hated, depraved face of the man whose blood he wished already wet his fingers. He looked down at his hands and for a moment he imagined the water dripping from vines overhead to be dark red.

We love you. Son.

Brother.

Tears came, a dam breached, a torrent unable to cease until the walls of the valley crashed in around it. ‘I miss you. I miss you so much!’

Through the tears he saw his mother extend a hand forward, shimmering like an image behind a waterfall, reaching for him. It dropped on to his shoulder, and although he felt nothing physical, a warm glow surged through him, warming every part of him, from his face, chapped from the rain and the cold, right down to his toes, nestled in their damp shoes. And in through his bones, to his heart.

‘I’m so alone!’

His mother’s head shook, lost focus. You have family. Children.

‘I have lost them.’

They are beautiful.

He smiled, unable to stop himself, a rainbow bursting through the rain of his face. ‘Yes, they are beautiful. More beautiful than . . .’ He looked up at his mother. ‘Than anything.’

You love your wife.

‘Yes, more than life.’

She comes for you. She follows you here. She loves you too. More than . . . his mother hesitated, then she too offered a flickering smile in return. Than life.

But she is in danger. His sister’s voice in his head. You must hurry, there is not much time.

Matt froze, stared at them, wishing for one second that they would solidify, stop blurring before his eyes, slipping in and out of focus. He felt drunk, desperately drunk.

‘What?’

She comes for you. You must go for her. We are all . . . linked.

Go, Matthew. His mother’s eyes implored him. Go, my beautiful son.

The thought of Rachel in danger cajoled him into motion. He moved past them, dropping his gaze so as not to get too close, the radiance of their glow enough to hurt his eyes in short glances, too bright for him to look at for long.

He reached the chapel’s doorway and slipped through the gap in the boards, out into the clearing where the rain now poured. He already knew where to go; the image had slipped into his mind and nestled there quietly, a map waiting to lead him. He started into a run, heedless of his own safely across the slippery ground. His faith would guide him.

Matthew.

The sharpness of the voice in his mind made him turn. From the edge of the clearing he couldn’t make them out, but their glow still radiated from the chapel, and he knew they were inside. They were staying behind. He was on his own now.

‘Yes?’

Be careful. Danger exists in many forms. Take care, Matthew.

‘I will.’

We love you, Matthew. Goodbye.

He raised a brief hand, then started to turn away.

And he loves you too.

He stopped, halfway into a run.

Don’t hate him. He doesn’t deserve your hate. He wanted to save you when I could only take you away.

Matthew felt a cold shiver shudder through him and closed his eyes for a second, a tear dribbling out to mingle with the streams of rain that ran down his face like the fingers of a tiny Lilliputian estuary. A tear of anger, a tear of hatred, a tear of guilt. He began to run, into the blackness and the looming boughs of the forest. He didn’t turn back.

5

Elaina leaned out of the hedge and glanced up the road at the taillights of a truck disappearing into the fog, heading up to the moor. Although she had not got a clear look, she was quite sure the vehicle belonged to Ian Cassidy. He had been driving like a maniac: it was lucky she had heard the thing coming in time to leap into the hedge otherwise he would have pasted her across the road.

‘You fucking bastard,’ she muttered, lifting her middle finger to salute the truck as its engine faded into the distance. ‘You got my fucking clothes wet.’

She wondered where he was going in this weather, and at such speed. It wasn’t like he had any family to visit, after all. She smirked wickedly. He only had that dopey friend and a son who hated his guts. All the rest were dead.

What was it tonight? Attack of the psycho drivers? That stupid fucking woman up on the moor had almost run her down as well, but at least she had busted her car in the process. Served her right. Elaina didn’t feel the least bit guilty about leaving her up there. If the woman had been badly hurt, Elaina’s sour heart would have relented long enough to give the woman a hand, call an ambulance even. But there had not been a scratch on her. She was fine, the only problem she had was a nice long walk. Huh. It would do her good, give her a chance to think about her driving.

Elaina continued down towards the village, hatching plots in her head for something fun to do in order to kill off her Sunday evening. Her sister was no fun anymore; she didn’t like to play around now the baby was in the house, and rarely even offered decent conversation. She was always ‘cooing’ and ‘ahhing’ over that damn child. Not that they had they ever got on particularly well, of course; in fact they could barely stand each other, but they couldn’t cope with being apart. The only time they really connected was at night, when two became one, as Liana called it, though to Elaina it was simply plain fucking. But the child had even put paid to that. Elaina understood now what most married couples felt like.

Ah, a married couple, that would do it. She could use her charms and her magic to seduce someone, deprave someone who thought themselves free from infidelity, bring someone pure to their knees. A couple would be interesting, but the guilt would be shared, so that was no good. The aftereffects were less destructive. If a couple shared in something it wouldn’t tear them apart the way cheating would. No, she’d find someone on their own, seduce them, leave a few clues, cause a few shockwaves. So what if she used a little magic to do it, no doubt Liana would use hers to amuse the fucking baby as soon as Elaina was safely out of sight.

Hmm. Choices. The village didn’t offer much, to be fair, but she hadn’t wanted to take the car and go further away. It was too much effort for something so rarely rewarding. No, the village would do. But who?

She fancied a man tonight. Either would do, but sometimes she just liked a man, someone innocent, loving, faithful to his wife. She would weave a little spell, plant a few fantasies and then let him go, let him screw her like he could never screw his wife, let him live out the sort of things only the darkest of nights and a stolen flick through some internet pornography had ever let him think about behind his self-assumed veneer of morality. It was great that way. She felt a tingle of pleasure race up through her stomach at the thought.

Of course, it wasn’t just the sex that made it so much fun. It was the consequences. Not for her of course, for a little magic made her vanish from their minds like water through a sieve. Only the deed remained, but sometimes guilt could be a wonderful thing. Elaina had lost count of the marriages she had broken over the years. She had even had a couple of suicide cases. Now that impressed her. She knew she was good, but just how good had come as a real surprise.

The deceitfulness of her actions didn’t even concern her. Fuck it, why not? After all, hadn’t her mindless sister created love out of nothing for plenty of boring morons, kept countless hapless losers from jumping off bridges? It all evened out in the end.

Love and war. Good and bad.

Liana and Elaina.

She headed down past the church, holding her clothes tight against her to ward off the rain. She was soaked. She needed to find a nice warm bed soon.

She headed towards the pub, thinking to look in through the windows, see who was inside, and more importantly, who wasn’t. The village had a couple of possibilities. Sam Hagar was a fine looking young man. Dull as winter weather but well-muscled from hauling bales each summer. Mmm, she could really bite into a piece of that. And old Mrs. Carter’s son, Billy, he wasn’t too bad. A few years older than Sam, almost thirty, but still in his prime. Had a couple of kids, too. Well, that put him top of the list. What if they saw? What if they saw what their father was doing to the woman who had stopped by to shelter from the rain? What might they possibly see him doing to her in their own mother’s bed?

Elaina chuckled. The thought was enough to make her lick her lips. Of course it depended if he were in. His wife played ladies darts, but what night was that? Elaina couldn’t do everything. She could influence people, but she couldn’t control a whole village. Christ, that sort of power would half kill her sister.

Not that she cared about that, but if her sister got sick, so did she. She had to be careful.

As though the thought had triggered some switch inside her, Elaina suddenly lurched forward, stumbling in the road, only avoiding hitting the ground by grabbing hold of the low wall at the front of Mrs. Peckham’s Local Craft Shop. She swallowed back the urge to vomit, rolling her head as her mind swam, turned over and over like a boat in rough waters. Her body felt like a pair of jeans turned inside out and hung out to dry, her skin felt taut and her legs shook, unsteady.

Liana had used her magic. A lot of it.

Elaina dropped to her knees, waiting a few minutes for the feeling to pass. Whatever Liana had done, she had done it in one sudden burst, and if she were still using it now it was as a residue, a background power current like a battery slowly wearing down. Elaina cursed her sister. If she were playing with that fucking baby there would be hell to pay.

Her head cleared, the rain actually helping her. As normal, after her sister had used the magic Elaina felt an added strength inside her, a tenseness, a bow pulled taut to the point of breaking. She would have some fun tonight. She fucking deserved it.

But she was seriously pissed now. When she got back, her sister would get a right talking to about that damn baby.

The rain had got heavier. Elaina had to find shelter soon, or no amount of influencing would get a man into bed with a woman in her state. She looked half drowned.

She headed on towards the pub, wondering who would be about on a Sunday night. Most of the local people were stupid, inbred farmers, sharing out a brain cell between them, more often than not losing it into that disgusting ale they drank.

The closer she got, the surer she became that it wasn’t darts night tonight. Wasn’t that Tuesday? It looked increasingly likely that Billy Carter was off tonight’s menu. Sam, then it would have to be, though she would damn well make sure he took a bath first, muscles and thick shoulders or not.

She felt a little disappointed. Billy Carter had rather leapt to the top of her hit-list, and with a few extra points to play with, courtesy of her stupid sister, she could have some real fun, but with his wife around too much planning was involved. Perhaps the pub might yield her an attractive outsider.

Lost in her thoughts, at first she didn’t see the figure striding purposefully up the road, about a hundred yards ahead of her.

Well, well. Who do we have here?

As she recognised the tall, lithe figure, Elaina wanted to cry out with joy. Of all the people to find wandering about on a dark lonely night, well, Matthew Cassidy was the last she would have thought of.

Matt Cassidy. He would do nicely.

Rather attractive, she had always thought. And hadn’t she heard somewhere that he had a wife, children? Liana had met him already, though unintentionally. Elaina had only seen him from a distance. Liana had told her what she had sensed in him, the uncertainty, the hopelessness of his life, of his purpose. He had fled from a marriage on the verge of breakdown and come back here after all this time to find a father he had left a bloodied ruin in the snow, and a sister he had barely known dead and burnt. Perhaps he had come back to find himself, rediscover the illuminations of his soul, repair a few bridges.

Well, whatever repair work he had done, it was high time it got burnt right down again.

Elaina moved closer under the shadow of the houses, careful to keep far enough back that if he turned he wouldn’t recognise her, and fell into step behind him, making sure she kept him in sight. She was intrigued to know where he was going, but tingled with anticipation at the thought of what awaited her there.

###

Bethany’s Diary, January 7th, 1999

I’m carrying his child. I can feel little him or her growing inside me, living within me, a part of me yet, but someday soon to be a part of this world. Pure, innocent, a tiny little angel ready to make its way as so many millions of others have done before. I feel so proud. Of little him or her, of us.

I only wish others felt the same. Dad seems to be indifferent. He’s not happy, but not angry either. I think our whole relationship is still proving difficult for him to handle. Maybe when the time comes and our child is born, he will accept us. I think he will. He is not an unreasonable man.

Mother is another matter. I have barely seen her in recent months. She hasn’t spoken to me properly since the night Red and I first . . . lay together, giving only occasional grunts and shrugs in answer to my questions. There is something about our love that she cannot stand, and it drives me wild with anger to suffer her judgment like this. I have asked her to be honest and tell me what she hates about us so much, but she just turns away, shaking her head.

I have thought about it a lot though, and I think I know what it is. If I’m right, and I intend to ask her, then I don’t know how I can face her and then face Dad again. I think she loves him – not Father, but Red. I think she has secretly harboured this love for some time, perhaps even years, and it is her jealously that makes her shun me. I want to ask him, but can’t, so her word will have to suffice.

If I find it to be true, I’m not sure my own love for her will hold. It is betrayal, pure and simple. Why can’t she leave it alone? After all, she is dead.

6

The slope of the hollow dropped away in front of them towards the Merediths’ cottage, a solitary outside light casting a hazy amber glow over the front of the house, lending them just enough light to see by as they slipped down the embankment at the building’s rear. Red led the way as they crept around toward the front, the shotgun held in both hands like a quarterstaff, fingers clenched tight over the cold metal. Ian followed just behind, the flashlight now stuffed away in the pocket of his rain jacket.

Red reached the corner of the house and peered out into a small courtyard. A black Nissan stood parked in the rain, outside a closed garage that made an L–shape to the house. Red glanced up at the house. The three upper floor windows were dark, but a glow hung in the air outside one of the two downstairs.

‘Well, looks like the whorehouse is full.’ Red started out towards the front door, motioning for Ian to follow. He dropped low to his haunches, a soldier creeping up on the enemy.

‘How do you plan to do this?’ Ian whispered, dropping down behind him.

‘Easy. We knock.’

Ian shook his head, but continued to follow. He glanced up at the dark downstairs window as they passed, hoping to get some idea of the house’s layout, but a curtain blocked his way.

When Red reached the front door, he stood up to his full height, and glanced over at Ian. ‘Keep an eye out,’ he said. ‘In case one of them is outside. Let me do the rest.’

Ian felt a terrible sense of foreboding, not just for his friend but for everyone. Bad things floated in the air tonight.

Red lifted one big hand and knocked on the front door, keeping the strength to a minimum so not to alarm anyone inside. Ian moved a couple of steps closer.

They heard a voice from inside telling them to hold on, won’t be a minute, then a figure appeared behind the frosted glass and they heard the door handle click.

The door swung open, and everything happened very fast.

7

Liana was dozing in her chair when the knock came. Elaina had been gone for almost an hour, off, no doubt, on another of her mischievous errands. Only a minute earlier Liana had checked on Jack, made sure he was sleeping soundly, and switched off the light in his makeshift nursery. She had gone back to watch television, found nothing on except soap omnibuses and Bargain Hunt reruns, so settled for a little nap instead. She felt exhausted. She often did these days when Elaina was in another of her moods.

The knock broke her reverie, and at first she thought it was her sister returning, having forgotten her key, but Liana knew her sister would never lock the door, oh no, far too sensible. Must be a visitor, but who would ever call by to see them? They didn’t have friends, only a handful of casual acquaintances and a lot of people who kept their distance. She thought salesmen, perhaps, or Jehovah’s Witnesses; she could just send them on their way or perhaps even invite them in for a coffee if she fancied a chat. She would have a look at them first.

So it came as rather a surprise for Liana to open the door and, instead of a short, middle–aged man wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase, to find a hulking, bear of a man standing there, holding a shotgun in his hands.

She barely had time to register the man’s identity as the butt of the gun jerked up and struck her across the side of the forehead. She cried out in pain as the blow shot sparks across her eyes, and her legs crumpled beneath her like cardboard. The floor loomed up to meet her, but her hands wouldn’t work to break her fall, wouldn’t respond. She landed in a heap, her head striking back against the wall. Somehow she stayed conscious, helped by the sudden agony she felt as the big man took hold of her hair and dragged her backwards into the house.

She knew him. Among many other things he was Ian Cassidy’s friend and Bethany Cassidy’s former lover. Red.

Jack’s father.

Panic enveloped her; fear for what the man might do to her, especially if he found the child. She reached out with her mind, pulling all the magic she could muster. To hell with Elaina, her sister would just have to manage. She pulled it out of the air and sent it streaming through to the baby’s room, allowing it to cloak him, to remove his existence from their gullible eyes. That would keep him safe until she could understand the situation a little better.

It would keep the baby safe. A good enough reason. Wasn’t it? It didn’t matter that she wanted to keep Jack for herself, never give him back, never give him to anyone. That had nothing to do with anything.

Of course not.

‘You better start to talk to me you fucking bitch,’ Red screamed at her, hauling her through into the lounge with one powerful hand. ‘Where’s that whore of a sister of yours?’

Tears of pain and terror welled in Liana’s eyes. ‘She’s – she’s out –’

‘Good.’ Red pulled her backwards until her shoulders pressed against the seat of the sofa. He pulled her hair taut, stretching her head back. He bent down to his knees and glared into her face. Liana cried out as her neck jarred.  She could almost feel the discs in her vertebrae grinding together like whetstones. She smelt alcohol on his breath.

Red dropped the gun down beside him. He kept hold of Liana’s hair with one hand, and gripped her chin with the other, squeezing hard until the pressure forced her mouth open.

‘Now then, you bitch. I have just one question. Where’s my baby?’

Liana stared at him, eyes wide, the whites showing as bright as fresh paint. Blood dribbled down the side of her face from a cut that had opened up on her forehead. She worked her mouth as though to speak, and his grip relaxed a little.

‘I – I –’

Red started to stand up and his hand dropped from her jaw. For a moment she thought he would release her completely, then his hand whipped back, slapping her hard across the left side of her face.

The blow resounded with a sharp thwack, like a loose plastic covering cracking in the wind. Liana was too stunned to cry out. She felt her senses leave her, and the room blurred and spun. Then fingers closed on her jaw again and the world drifted back into focus.

His eyes gleamed with a violent madness. ‘Don’t try to tell me lies, you fucking witch. I know he’s not dead. You have him. I’ll be asking you just exactly why when I have him back. Now, for the last time, where is he?’

Again, Liana’s mouth moved, but the words, jumbled up inside, wouldn’t come out straight. ‘He – he – I –’

‘Okay, I see.’

Red straightened again, but this time his hand balled into a fist. ‘I asked you nicely. I asked you one simple question and wanted one simple answer. Now, if you won’t cooperate, we’ll have to try a little persuasion –’

His arm tensed. Liana’s eyes closed.

‘Red, for God’s sake, stop it!’

Liana opened her eyes. The blow had never landed. She looked up, eyes widening in surprise.

For the first time she noticed Ian Cassidy in the room with them. He must have come in with Red.

Ian had hold of Red by the wrist and was holding his arm back. His friend no longer looked at Liana but up at Ian, and Liana could feel the sudden traitorous hatred that emanated from every inch of Red’s body.

She knew why they had come; the baby lay sleeping in the other room, protected from their sight by a little of her magic. But she also knew they had come here together, as allies against a common enemy.

In Red’s eyes, Ian had just switched sides.

Red’s words lasted forever. ‘What – are – you – doing?’

Ian stared him down. As Liana watched the two big men, she couldn’t pick who she thought might win if their sudden confrontation escalated into a fight. She assessed her own chances: not good. Although Red’s shotgun lay within her reach, she could never get into a position to fire it before it was kicked out of her hand. Not that she could shoot one of the men anyway, murder was as impossible an option to Liana as flying to the moon with only her arms as wings. If Elaina were here, things might be different. Where was she?

Ian met his friend’s fiery gaze, refusing to back down, despite the unhealthy level of anger in Red’s face. He had crossed the line by protecting her, Liana knew, and in doing so he had pushed Red over his own edge. Now insanity glowed in the big man’s eyes.

Ian had risked his own safety, but Red no longer held the gun. Neither had any advantage that Liana could see. It was stalemate.

Ian’s words were level, even. ‘I don’t care what she’s done. I’m not going to watch you beat her to a pulp.’

‘She deserves everything she gets, and more.’

‘That’s not for us to decide. Let her answer before you assault her.’

Red hesitated for a moment before turning back to Liana. Ian slowly let go of Red’s arm, and Red shook it free of the last of Ian’s grip as though it was dirty, shameful. He glared at Liana and knelt down. His fingers closed once more over her hair, but his grip was palpably lighter. The assurance in his eyes had gone too, replaced, she thought, by something else.

Humiliation.

‘Talk,’ he said. ‘No lies.’ His other hand dropped to the gun, the movement made obvious as though to let her understand.

‘He’s with my sister,’ she said. Well, there was one.

‘And where, exactly, is she?’

Liana shook her head a little, the movement restricted by the grip on her hair. ‘I don’t know. She went out a little while ago and hasn’t come back.’ At least that was true.

‘And why has she got my baby with her?’

‘I don’t know. He wasn’t sleeping too well. She thought the air would do him good.’

Red nodded. ‘Thank you, though I don’t believe any of it. Ian, search the house.’

Ian shook his head. ‘And leave you alone with her? You search the house, I’ll keep an eye on her.’ Red narrowed his eyes suspiciously, so Ian added: ‘Take the gun with you if you like. We won’t go anywhere.’

Red scowled at him a moment, then shoved Liana’s head away and picked up the gun. ‘Very well.’ He gave Ian a long, hard parting stare, then walked out of the room.

Liana breathed out softly.

‘Don’t try anything,’ Ian said. ‘I might not want to see him hurt you, but that doesn’t change the fact that you’ve stolen his child. That’s my grandson too, remember? Just sit still and stay quiet.’

Liana reached out with her mind to check her magic, ensure it was strong enough to hold for a while longer. It was, but she had nothing left, no more to give. She could do nothing but wait to see what they would do, or hope that her sister came back soon. She leaned her head back against the edge of the sofa, and began to cry softly into the velvet material that smelt sweetly of dust and perfume.

From the end of a hallway that led out from the lounge and down to a lower kitchen, they heard a muffled grunt of frustration, then the thud thud of Red’s feet ascending the stairs to the upper floor.

Ian sat down on the edge of the sofa. He looked at the woman, felt a sudden nostalgic sympathy towards her as though being near her somehow brought him closer to Gabrielle. ‘I’m sorry he hit you. It’s not . . . like him. You know, to hit a woman.’

Liana said nothing. ‘I won’t ask you to understand.’

‘It has something to do with my wife, doesn’t it?’

She stared at him wide eyed. ‘Y–yes,’ she stammered finally. ‘I don’t expect you to understand.’

Somehow Ian had known it all along. He nodded. ‘It’s still wrong,’ he said. ‘To steal someone’s child. For any reason.’

Liana sniffed, and nodded. ‘I know that too.’

They heard a muffled crash from the room directly above them, followed quickly by another. They glanced at each other, then upwards at the ceiling. It sounded as though Red had vented his frustration on some furniture. Liana unconsciously rubbed at her face, her left cheek red and sore.

‘Don’t antagonise him more than you have,’ Ian said, voice deliberately low as Red’s feet began their descent. ‘Don’t lie to him either. He’s not acting rationally, and to be honest, you can hardly blame him. I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to protect you.’

Liana nodded as Red walked into the room.

‘Having a nice little chat, are we?’ Red cocked the gun, then took a seat facing the door, the gun resting on his lap. Liana and Ian sat off to his right, on the first of two sofas at diagonal angles to the fire which crackled low in the grate.

‘What now, Red?’

Red eyed Ian with the same suspicion as before, but didn’t let his words describe the way he felt.

‘He’s not here. If he’s with the other one as she says, we have two choices. We could go look for her, or –’ he stood up suddenly and pointed the gun directly at Liana’s head. ‘Where did she go?’

‘I told you, I don’t know!’

Red held the gun steady for a moment. Maybe he could sense she didn’t know from the tremble of her lips, or the terror in her eyes. She was too frightened to move, too frightened even to cry. He nodded and sat back down again.

‘Or we sit here and wait.’ He absently rubbed one finger up and down the barrel of the gun. ‘To me, that sounds the best option. She has to come back sooner or later, right?’

Ian nodded. ‘We wait here then.’

‘I’ve got forever. And if that’s how long it takes –’

Ian shifted in his seat.

‘Hey!’ Red lifted the gun, aiming it lazily in the direction of the couch. ‘Don’t get up. Stay right there, both of you.’

The gleam of madness had returned to his eyes. Liana saw a dribble of sweat drip down over Ian’s nose.

Red crossed one leg over the other and leaned back in the chair. ‘And while we’ve got a little time on our hands, how’s about you tell me just why exactly you thought it necessary to steal my baby?’ He looked at Liana. ‘Come on, be honest here. Please be honest. Otherwise I might just blow your fucking head off and be done with it.’

Liana’s mouth worked silently. Her mouth felt dry, parched, and the thudding of her heart seemed to be pressing against the sides of her throat.

‘What’s the matter? Nothing to say? Well, you’d best think of something, eh?’ He brought the gun up, pointing it at her stomach. Liana’s breath caught, and tears slid from her eyes to roll down her pallid, porcelain face.

Red chuckled, his laugh bleak and fractured like the batteries still whirring inside a broken remote control car, the little motors still spinning even when the thing itself was finished. The laugh of a desperate man. The laugh of a man who had nothing left to lose.

‘Come on then, I’m waiting.’

8

Rachel seemed to stumble every five or six metres, tripping on potholes and splashing muddy water up her legs. The light didn’t get any closer and the rain just got worse and worse. Her hair had slicked to her face like sticky seaweed, and if she hadn’t felt so wet and grim she would have sat down and given up all together.

The lane angled down towards a distant river, the roar of churning water marking its steep passage down a rocky slope towards the Tamer estuary. Plymouth couldn’t be far off, she thought, ten miles perhaps, as the crow flew.

She would much rather be there. A real city, full of real people, and cars, and noise, and all the other things Rachel loved about cities but hated about the countryside. Street lighting, cash machines and McDonalds drive–thru restaurants. A murky, soggy moor in the middle of nowhere just couldn’t compete.

‘I’ll get Matt and get out of here,’ she muttered to herself, hobbling towards the distant light. ‘If I ever get there.’ She paused for a second to rest her aching foot, and peered up into the grey darkness. ‘Goddamn it, how can it be misty as hell and rain at the same time? Jesus Christ.’

Her thoughts turned to Matt, really to help her forget the pain in her ankle and her wrecked car, now some hundred yards behind her. How would he react to her coming here? Would he want to see her? She shook her head, not wanting to think about it too much. They had not parted on good terms. The rift that had been growing between them for several months had been widened by his sister’s sudden death, when the tragedy should have pulled them together. Their parting had been that of two people who didn’t expect to see each other again, no matter what Rachel had felt at the time. It hadn’t been see you soon. It had been goodbye.

She started off again, walking towards the distant light, wondering if she was actually dead and this was the tunnel people talked about. The light at the end, arms reaching for her, pulling her through to some euphoric paradise on the other side, leaving all the rain and the misery behind.

Well, it’s a bloody long tunnel, she thought.

The lane continued down towards the sound of rushing water. The light seemed to move off to her right as an embankment rose to that side, huge and dark and smelling of peaty earth, and she realised the lane was curving around into some sort of carved-out area, like an old quarry, or an open-cast mine. The light came from in there.

She slowed her already snail-like pace even further as the light dropped out of sight behind the rise of the embankment, enveloping her in darkness.

‘Now it gets fun,’ she whispered to herself, unable to shake a sense of foreboding, the feeling that something unpleasant waited just around the corner. What choice do I have?

The sound of the river had reached fever pitch. Looking downhill into the blackness, Rachel was convinced she could see something glittering there. The river reflecting the light. There was only one light she had seen since she got here.

She moved closer to the tall embankment, now sheared off and held back by wire netting to allow for the lane. It gave her comfort, something to use for a guide. If she lost her way she might wander out here all night. The air had got colder with the onset of heavy rain; a night caught out here would give her hypothermia.

With one hand on the wall of the embankment, she moved forward, trying to ignore the thick, muddy water dribbling down the steep slope and through her fingers. She envisaged worms there, bugs –

She squeezed her eyes shut to block the thought from her mind, and when she opened them again a few seconds later a house stood in front of her.

Even close up, the outside light that had guided her here was hazy and indistinct through the fog, but she could see another light on in a downstairs window. Relief filled her. A black Nissan car sat in the driveway out the front of a garage, while a set of outbuildings nestled into the hollow to her right. Beyond the garage a little garden stretched away, and she didn’t doubt it led right down to the river.

She hobbled across the driveway towards the front door, which she could see from her vantage point stood slightly ajar.

The appeal of shelter or rest or at least a phone call to get help overrode the feeling of dread that filled her as she put one hand on the door and pushed it inwards. She didn’t care anymore, she just wanted to get out of the rain.

She tried to raise her voice to shout for help, to make someone inside aware of her presence, but found the damp air had left her nothing but a bubbly croak, as though a slippery thing like a wet fish or a slug were wriggling at the back of her throat. She took her chances, and limped forward into the room.

###

Bethany’s Diary, Sept 10th, 1999

My child is almost due. I can feel it kicking sometimes, wanting to get out. Oh, if only I wanted it too.

Mother – I want to hate her, but much as I want to, I can’t. She is right, right about everything despite the years of lies – came back to me after leaving me months alone. She’d been ill, she said, didn’t want to come near me for fear of what might happen. She lied, I think. She just couldn’t face me, didn’t know what to say.

Yesterday she came back. She needed to speak with me, she said, needed to speak with me desperately, and today I went out to find her in the forest. We met up in the chapel, behind her grave.

We talked, and now she has gone, and the thought of having my child sickens me. We left on bad terms, Mother and I, but I do not hate her for her words. I am thankful that she told me, thankful that at last the truth is out, even if it is a truth that blackens my heart to the bottom of my soul.

She could have lived. She might have been weak, have struggled at times, may have had to steal a little soul from people now and then, but never enough to hurt them. Never enough to sadden them, cause them pain. She could have dealt with her mortal corruption had it not reached another level, a place from which there was no return, were her body and soul not violated and cheated. Her body didn’t fail her because of people’s words, and for this knowledge more than anything else, I ache to hate her.

I could have spoken. I could have used my voice, been part of the world around me. I may have become ill more often than a normal child, may have been weak at times, but I could have lived as those around me lived.

I could have had a normal life.

I stayed silent at first because of instinct, because I was different from this world I lived in and because until I could learn to trust it I could never let myself become part of it. Later, I kept my silence through fear of what I might become should I break it, and my mother never told me otherwise.

You see, she couldn’t tell me. The shame hung too heavy on her shoulders.

I can speak now, speak if I want, and in quiet corners I do, practicing the words aloud for the first time, rolling them over my tongue. It is so different from the way I speak to Mother with my mind; the words feel big and fat and sometimes cumbersome, but other times elegant and graceful, as though I speak pure silk. A wonderful thing, is language . . .

Yes, I can talk now, should I choose. Only now I find I have nothing to say.

Soon now, soon. A couple of weeks more, maybe less. After my child is gone I will follow Mother. If I do not, I fear I will follow the same route into suffering that she followed before her merciful death. For my corruption is the same as hers.

Betrayal by our own kind.

9

The first second spent waiting in the murky darkness of the room seemed to last about an hour, the second a week, the third a month. Matt had no idea how he coped with the infinite passage of time as he waited in that place, only that somehow he did, crouched in the dark; that somehow the endless seconds passed. Unsure what he would do when the time came, which he knew it would, sooner or later, he could have had forever and his mind would have had no less chance to decide. He wanted the time gone, the moment come. He would let instinct guide him, aided by the ally of surprise, the only weapon he had left.

He would know what to do, just as he had known to come here, known that of all the places in the village he could have chosen this was the one, this tiny cottage standing on the outskirts of the village, tucked away down a short lane that almost hid it from view.

He hadn’t even seen it from the road, for of course no lights were on. Nobody was home yet. But they would be. Sooner or later they would come. And when they did, they would find him.

Waiting.

He concentrated. On making the time pass. On drawing his adversary closer. He concentrated, closing his eyes to focus.

10

Liana hadn’t told them everything. Only about Gabrielle.

‘You talk rubbish, bitch,’ Red said, again waving the gun in Liana’s direction. ‘My baby has no power to do anything. You’re sick. You’re fucking sick.’ He glared at her, daring her to reply.

It was Ian that did. ‘Come on, Red! You’ve accepted just as I have that Gabrielle wasn’t quite . . . the same as us. That she was . . . different.’

‘Shut up, Ian!’ The gun waved again, making Ian freeze where he sat, on the verge of rising to his feet. Red’s eyes gleamed with something different: passion. ‘I don’t doubt that for a second! Gabrielle was . . . was special.’

‘And she was my wife.’

‘Come on, Ian. Don’t tell me you didn’t know what she was the first time you looked on her. She was perfect!’ Red’s face had turned light pink, the hard, leathery skin appearing soft beneath the ceiling light.

Ian rose to his feet, anger blooming in his face as Red continued to speak.

‘I would have killed you for her. If she were here now I would gun you down for her if I thought for a moment she would love me . . .’ Tears streamed down Red’s face.

‘Red –’

‘SIT DOWN!’

Red swung the gun up, cocked it, and pointed it at Ian. ‘Or I’ll swear you’ll not speak again!’

Ian lifted his hands and backed slowly away. He lowered himself back on to the couch. Liana looked across at him, lips trembling with terror.

Red took his own seat again. ‘Jealousy. That’s it, isn’t it?’ he said, turning to Liana. ‘You and that sister of yours are just two pathetic old spinsters who can’t have a baby for themselves, so you thought you’d steal mine.’

Liana sighed. ‘That’s not true. You have to understand, we want to do what’s for the best. But we have duties beyond what you can understand. We have a duty to Gabrielle, and now to Bethany.’

‘Leave her out of this.’

Liana shook her head. ‘I can’t. Not now.’

‘Just shut up or I’ll blow your fucking face off!’

Liana fell silent, eyes lowering to the floor, too afraid of his gaze to watch him any longer. She reached out with her mind to check on Jack. He was still safe for now, but for how long? She couldn’t keep him hidden forever, she didn’t have the strength, and she couldn’t do anything else at the same time, it was too much for her. Where was Elaina?

#

They sat in silence for several minutes. Ian closed his eyes, meditated a little, tried to take himself away from here, back to a time when he had innocently roamed the forest as a young man, shooting at birds and rabbits with his air rifle, fishing in the river, picking berries, digging up roots, enjoying the earth and the woodland as though he and it were one, until the day he found a woman sleeping naked in a clearing, under a canopy of trees. Bathed in mottled sunlight, piles of fallen autumn leaves crisp and brown around her, a soft smile on her face. Her skin as white as pearls. Flawless. The curves and contours of her body smoother than the polished stones on a shingle beach.

Gabrielle.

I thought you’d fallen from the sky.

His angel.

You did.

His very own fallen angel. An angel who changed the life of the young Ian Cassidy forever.

The sound of the wind rushing in through an open doorway broke Ian’s reverie, and he looked up, aware of another presence, and the infinite distance of seconds. The fire flickered in the grate. Beside him Liana looked up, her mouth falling open but no words coming out, as though the entrance of the wind had left no space for any other sound.

A woman lurched into the room, hair slicked to her face, clothes soaked, a small dribble of blood on her forehead, with one foot held tentatively up from the floor. He had seen deer and foxes, even the odd rabbit walk that way. A limp; her ankle was sprained or even broken.

Ian saw an injured woman.

Liana saw a stranger, a woman who was definitely not her sister.

All Red saw was her empty arms.

‘Where’s my baby?’ He roared, and the gun had come up before he had made it to his feet, long before Ian or Liana had time to register the situation, before the woman in the doorway had even had time to glance up from her saturated body to look in his direction.

‘No!’ Liana and Ian screamed in unison.

Recognition flashed into Ian’s mind at the same moment the gun went off.

Even with the howling of the wind the sound was impossibly loud. In the confines of the living room Ian felt sure his eardrums had burst, and so the sound made by the bullet as it struck Rachel in the chest just above her stomach and the subsequent sound of her body slamming back against the wall, were both lost. Ian didn’t even hear Rachel scream.

But as the sound faded, leaving his ears with a ringing sound like distant bells and the room filled with a smoky, cobalt smell, he heard Liana scream, horrified at the sight of the circle of blood that stained her beige wallpaper and the spots on her carpet and sofa, and of the stranger who had slumped face-down across the floor. And somewhere, he heard another sound, not screaming exactly, but similar.

Crying.

It came from a room just off the hallway. Red heard it too.

Liana stared in dumb shock at the bloodied woman. In the back of her mind she felt a dim awareness that the spell over the baby had been lost.

‘You fucking bitch.’

Red’s eyes blazed demonic. The butt of the gun swung around in an arc and struck her a vicious blow across the face. She made a grunting noise that sounded more like a cough, and collapsed backwards into Ian’s arms.

‘He was here all the time. You devils.’

Red stalked out of the room. Liana moaned, struggling to stay conscious. Blood ran from a fresh wound across her cheek.

Ian wanted to cry out in anger. Not for any one person in particular, but for them all, for everyone in that room with the possible exception of himself. For Red, driven to madness, Liana, whom he knew had probably done what she had done for what she, at least, thought a good reason, whether it was right or not.

And of course for the woman who lay on the floor between himself and the space that still stank of Red’s presence. He now recognised her, despite the rain, the blood.

Matthew had shown him a picture only yesterday, after all.

Of his wife and children. Of his beautiful family.

‘Hello Rachel,’ Ian whispered, feeling more useless than he had ever felt before.

Red came back into the room, holding a bundle in his arms. Tears flowed freely down his cheeks. Despite the burning hatred that had followed the moment Rachel’s blood had first splattered on the spotless wall of the lounge, Ian couldn’t help but feel a deep sorrow for his friend. A terrible, tragic, sorrow.

‘He was here all the time. She – she – bewitched us.’ He lifted the gun in one hand, leveled it at Liana’s writhing body. ‘Die, you evil, evil woman –’

Ian moved quicker than he could ever have imagined at such a moment, pushing his own body across in front of Liana’s to shield her. He lifted a hand, the effort so, so hard, his strength and resolve all but gone.

‘No, Red.’ He wanted to say more, to give his friend a reason, but nothing came. His simple humanity refused to let Liana Meredith be gunned down like a dog in the street.

The gun stayed leveled. Ian could see down the dark tubes of its twin barrels. He waited.

The gun dropped. ‘For the past, Ian. For the past. Otherwise you’d already be dead.’ He glanced down at the bundle in his arms. Ian heard a faint cooing sound. The boy was his grandson. His heart wanted to burst.

‘I’ll be going now,’ Red told him. ‘And I’m taking my son.’

Ian opened his mouth to speak, but Red had already fled out into the rain. The front door slammed shut. Liana moaned beside him, and he propped her up on the sofa, glancing at the growing swelling beneath her eye, and the blood that ran down her face. Her injuries were bad, but she would have to wait.

He crawled across the floor to Rachel. Trying so hard to be delicate, but in the same moment desperate to discover the extent of her injuries, he rolled her on to her back. She flopped over as though dead, and he glanced down at her front, the clothes there dark with blood. He looked up at her face, expecting to see the vacancy of death in her eyes.

‘Help me,’ she whispered.

Alive. God only knew how, but somehow the bullet must have missed her main arteries, the major organs. Without doubt she was hurt badly, but even a serious wound was better than the killing blow he had expected. His shotgun (his shotgun) was high caliber and could rip a rabbit open from eighty yards. At close range, any torso shot should have left an exit wound the size of a saucer. It should have been fatal.

She had lost a lot of blood, and he ripped open her shirt to assess the severity of her wound. Blood oozed rather than pumped from the ragged opening just below her right breast, confirming the shot had missed an artery. She had been about as lucky as anyone could have hoped. Ian turned back to Liana.

‘Get an ambulance. Quick!’

She stared back at him groggily for a moment.

‘Hurry up, or she will die!’

Liana finally seemed to register the words. Her left eye had almost closed, her cheek was turning black and puffy, the bruising mottled like the last dregs of black paint on a dry roller. She had probably fractured a cheekbone, or even her eye socket.

She struggled to her feet, swayed long enough for Ian to think she would topple over, then managed to get her balance and disappeared out into the hall. A moment later he heard her speaking to someone, calling help, but the words themselves eluded him. All Ian could focus on was the blood oozing from his daughter–in–law’s chest.

‘One hell of a way to meet each other for the first time,’ he muttered to her, then wryly added, ‘I’m Ian Cassidy. Matthew’s father.’

Neither understanding nor recognition registered in her eyes, only that same desperate pleading. He doubted she could sense anything but the pain, and knew that it would soon leave her, replaced by shock caused by blood loss, then unconsciousness and possible coma. Unless the ambulance arrived within a matter of minutes, she would die.

The nearest hospitals were in Plymouth, and with the weather conditions outside their only hope was that there was an ambulance stationed somewhere nearby, out on the moor.

‘We have got to stop the bleeding.’

Liana came back into the room, carrying a bundle of rags and a white plastic container with a red cross on the front. ‘I’m not sure what we’ve got in here, but something might help.’

‘Thanks.’ He took a piece of cloth from her and pressed it over the wound, noticing how Liana’s eyes, or at least the one he could see, still wavered.

‘He hit you hard, eh?’

She looked at him, her eyes dazed. ‘Huh? Oh. Yeah. I can’t feel half my face. I guess it’s nothing though, is it? Not with this.’ She flapped a hand in Rachel’s general direction.

‘No. She will probably die. She’s lost a lot of blood.’

Liana sniffed. ‘That’s sad.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s all my fault. All of this.’

Ian shook his head, resisting the urge to agree with her. ‘I think blame for anything runs a lot deeper than any of us knows. Sometimes things just . . . happen.’

Liana shook her head. ‘You don’t need to try and be understanding. Everything’s a mess, all because of my sister and me.’

‘No. Whatever you did, you only did because you thought it was right. We all do things we think are for the best sometimes, even when they turn out not to be.’ He pressed his hand harder against the wound. He could feel Rachel’s heartbeat. Weak, but better than nothing. Thinking of Gabrielle, he said, ‘Believe me, I know.’

Liana knelt down beside him. ‘You should go after him,’ she said. ‘Who knows what he might do to that child?’

‘He loves the baby. He won’t hurt it.’

Liana reached out, touched Ian’s cheek with her fingertips. ‘Did you think yesterday that he could shoot a woman like this? Like he’s just done? You can’t let him take the baby.’ She turned his face towards her own. ‘Please. Don’t give Red the chance to hurt him!’

‘That’s his baby. He loves it.’

‘Maybe, but there are things about Red that you don’t know. Please!’

Ian looked away, down at Rachel, her eyes now closed, her breathing shallow and laboured, coming in gasps as though air leaked in through a hole somewhere in her chest. Ian frowned; the bullet might have grazed a lung. He hoped it hadn’t been punctured, that made a bad situation worse.

‘Do you know who this is?’ he asked Liana.

She shook her head.

‘This is Rachel Cassidy. My daughter–in–law.’ Then, as though to clarify: ‘Matthew’s wife. I’ve never met her before tonight, though you could hardly call this an ideal first meeting. He showed me a photograph of her last night.’

Liana nodded.

‘She must have come here to find Matthew.’ He shook his head and sighed. ‘It’s all falling apart, you know? My wife and daughter are dead, my wife by my own hand, my daughter by suicide. My son is somewhere up in my house or nearby on the verge of breakdown. Who knows where? We couldn’t find him. Perhaps I’ll find his body tomorrow morning, who can tell?’

He took one of Liana’s hands in his own, stroked her soft skin. ‘My best friend has gone mad with a gun, shot down my daughter–in–law and run off with my grandson. It’s all falling apart around me, and there seems nothing I can do.’ He sighed. ‘I feel like the man who built the world and then, in a moment of madness, tore it all apart again.’

Liana coughed a bitter laugh. ‘I don’t think you’re God.’

‘Maybe not, but I expect He feels the same when He looks down at what He’s made and sees all the hate and the death and the famine. Sees it all falling apart, and realises there’s nothing He can do.’

Liana smiled, but her eyes remained sad. She reached across and put her hands over Ian’s.

‘There is something you can do, Ian. You can go after him.’

He turned to her. ‘And then what?’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. He might gun you down, just like her.’

‘Well, that’s reassuring.’

‘Or you might reason with him, save him from himself. Or save the baby. What I do know is that this woman is as likely to die with you here as without. You can’t do anything here I can’t do in your place. And if she dies, and Red disappears with your grandson, you won’t have anything.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘You have nothing to lose by going after him.’

Ian shrugged. ‘I guess you’re right. Here, put your hands over the wound.’

He stood up and let Liana take his place. ‘He will have taken my truck. Can I use your car?’

‘The key’s on the hook by the door.’ She nodded towards the hall. ‘Be careful Ian. But be swift, also.’

He nodded, moving for the door. ‘Take care of her. Do what you can.’

Then he walked out of the room.

#

Liana heard the door slam, and a few seconds later the sound of her car starting up. The engine roared, and she heard gravel spraying up as it accelerated away up the lane.

She took a deep breath, looked down at the woman beside her, little more than a girl, and wished Elaina was here to help her. Together they might have attempted to heal her wounds, but the best Liana could do alone was ease a few bruises. She closed her eyes and prayed for the ambulance, prayed for help to come.

###

Bethany’s Diary, September 15th, 1999

My child is come, and already gone. As soon as I have the strength, I will follow.

They came, the sisters, to deliver him, brought him out of me, silent in his own life as I have always been in mine, and after looking on him just once I handed him over and implored them to take him, take him away from here, from this corruption and this betrayal, from the evil of mortal men and fallen angels alike. Take him to my mother, use him to free her, whatever they had to do.

I know of them too. Mother knew a little, but there by my bedside, they confided in me. They are of her otherworldly plane, too, but not like her. Rooted in both, together they are the doorway, two sides of the same stone, two halves of the same apple, once succulent green, the other poisonous red. To send her home they have to end her corruption, end her suffering, make her pure again, for she cannot return to her place of purity taking with her the corruption wrought on her by this world. While they live she can leave, should they die she will be trapped here to rot within her own soul.

They think his innocence might save her. I hope so; one so innocent and so beautiful doesn’t belong in a place like this, so dark, so hateful. I would willingly let him go with them, if it could end her pain.

I whispered my first mortal words, to them of all people, and bid them call him stillborn, use whatever trickery they had to deceive my father and especially Red, to get my baby past them, get him away. I can’t have him living amongst these people, I can’t.

They asked me why, and though I thought they already knew, I told them, in hushed, brief tones, what Mother told me only five days ago. I expected surprise, but they just looked at each other, nodded, and one said to the other, ‘It has begun at last.’ I didn’t ask them what they meant. Even though I think I know, I do not really care.

Mother has gone. She won’t return to me until the time I come to follow her, to follow her in the paths set for me since birth. I can go there, you see, I am pure blood. Matthew, my brother, too much mortal lies in him, he is half-human.

And of him, I cannot bear to look at him, even when he came to comfort me, to whisper sweet nothings into my closed ears and smile into my down-turned eyes. All I can see is the images in my head of what he did to her, both as a wretched act, and, because of the consequences, what he caused her to become.

I see him following her into the woods, watching her through the trees as she wandered down through the undergrowth towards the river, eyes drinking in the scents and the sights around her, oblivious to what sickness followed on her trail.

And I see him down there, on the riverbank, taking her, holding her down with one arm, a hand over her mouth, forcing himself upon her, ignoring the tears in her eyes as he effectively destroyed her, set her eventual death in motion.

When it was over, all he could do was pull her shaking body close, whisper how wonderful she was, how beautiful, how serene.

It happened nine months before I was born.

I don’t care what his motives were. I don’t care whether he loved her or not, whether he did it because he loved her beyond what he could control. You can love and still cause pain, it is not always beautiful. He raped my mother. And then, of course, he came for me.

He knew about me. Must have. Can’t have looked at me without seeing traces of himself in my face, the memory of his body joined with my mother’s racing through his mind. He must have been able to judge the length of time, the days and months that passed as my mother grew big, as his child developed inside her.

I always knew that to call him Uncle was a lie. I just never knew how big.

Hello, Daddy.

Mother could have lived with what she suffered by living amongst us. Like an infection, mortality and humanity would have made her sick, and probably often. But she would have lived.

But Red’s rape of her set in motion a sickness she would never recover from, an incurable virus. She could not fight something so base, so degenerate, and it left her purity permanently soured.

Eventually it killed her. After first tearing apart both her body and mind.

I can’t forgive him. He raped my mother, then like an insidious lizard slid into my dreams and my mind and my bed, and has done the same to me. My own father. Even if the coming years did not promise me the same fate as befell my mother, I could not stay here, not with him. It sickens me.

I have to go, I hear someone coming. I think it might be Father.

But which one?

11

All the pictures in his mind, all the words fresh in his thoughts, still lingered like the putrid aftertaste of a rotten meal, growing and growing like a child of his own, readying itself for birth. A sick, deformed child, born of hatred and anger, of resentment and a need to exact revenge. It would come bursting out of him ready to fight, leaving behind a torn and bloodied hole from which he might never recover.

Memory chains. Shattered by hammers of betrayal which left the links bent and misshapen beyond repair.

He clenched his fists, his own hands as hammers.

Soon.

Then, from out of nowhere, a voice cut into his thoughts, followed by a glaring light that blinded him from the inside out. At first he thought his mother had returned, but the voice, the timbre of the mind voice inside him was different. Someone else was inside him. Who?

You are in so much pain, Matthew. Let go.

He had to. He could not resist the lure of the voice. As though drawn by magnetism he fell from his hiding place, a walk-in closet behind a sofa that faced the little cottage’s front door. He slumped forward against the back of the sofa, arms tensing to hold him upright as his legs turned to liquid beneath him. The light stayed, all around him even with his eyes jammed shut, and he screamed for it to stop until he realised that he did, in fact, find it soothing.

Let go of your anger, your hatred. Let go of everything.

Yes. He must let go.

Relax.

Making his legs move at last, he stumbled around the side of the sofa and slumped down into its soft cushions, head lolling backwards against the armrest. One hand reached out for the sofa’s edge to pull him back, the other flopped uselessly against his chest. One side resisting, the other giving in.

He felt a weight on the sofa near his waist. He looked up through the glare, forcing his eyes to focus.

‘I like this,’ he muttered, sounding drunk and feeling stupid, but unable to help himself.

‘You have so much anger in you, Matthew.’ The voice was real this time, outside his head. ‘You are owed, Matthew. Owed a little love and respect.’

He felt a hand slipping up under his damp, muddy shirt. He shivered. Someone else’s hand, not his own.

‘Who . . . are . . . you?’

The woman, for now he could see her, ringed by what looked like a halo, smiled. ‘I am everything you deserve, Matthew. I am love.’

To that last vestige of his mind which still gripped sanity, the words sounded stupid, absurd, but to the rest of him, the vast majority that had succumbed, the words sounded perfect. He closed his eyes and concentrated on the delicate fingers making their way up the contours of his body.

‘Everything I deserve . . .’

He knew her from somewhere. A face from his past, from long ago, from an event he had remembered with unmistakable clarity in the years since childhood up until a few moments ago. He grasped for it, his hands delving into murky water for the memory, knowing it to be there, somewhere, buried, obscured.

Where are you?

He felt a loosening about his waist, cold fingers on the skin of his navel. He moaned, unable to help himself as a hand slipped down into his trousers. He felt his penis growing hard against his will.

‘Don’t fight it, Matthew. You deserve this, you deserve me . . .’

(A memory comes of childhood, of a schoolyard dare, of himself marching up across the moors on a cold winter’s night, determined to prove himself to his friends, make himself the toast of the playground. He can still see the house as it appeared as though from out of the ground, illuminated by a solitary outside light on a cloudless, starry night.)

He felt his trousers being slid down towards his ankles, felt his penis pop out into the cold air of the room. Fingers under his shirt caressed one nipple then the other, running between them through the matted hair of his chest, while other fingers closed around his penis, squeezing it lightly, feeling it reach full hardness, throbbing as his lust rose. Slowly, the fingers began to work up and down.

(He remembers climbing down to that house, creeping back and forth in the darkness, peering into the downstairs window, looking for a way in. Heading round the back, finding a window left open, climbing through into the kitchen. Into the witches’ den, he remembers thinking, wondering why the place looked so much like any other quaint country cottage. Where were the cauldron, the bottles of potions, the frog’s legs in jars?)

He arched his back, moaning, eyes closed, as the fingers gave way to a soft, moist sensation, and he felt her tongue flicking over him. He cried out, feeling desire fill his body like hot water into a bath, wanting her, wanting her, needing her.

(Walking through the house, wondering why it all looked so mundane, so normal. A couple of bland landscapes on the wall, a television in the corner, a matching pair of leather sofas. Shelves of books, a vase of flowers in the window. All is silent, except for above him, the sound of low voices, of moaning, a creaking sound. He headed for the stairs . . . )

She pushed him backwards, making room for herself on the sofa. One of his hands searched for her body, her breasts, warm, full, the other, for the soft crevasse between her legs. Almost absently he realised she was already naked, her firm, lithe figure pressed against his, her lips hard against his, her legs parting as he searched for her, found her with his hand and guided himself inside her, into the warmth, the comfort, the pleasure of her body.

‘You are mine, and I am yours. We are one . . .’

(Climbing the stairs, as nervous as hell but so, so very intrigued. He heard the sounds come closer, associating them at last with scenes from the sort of late night films he had sometimes flicked on to during nights when his father was out. For a child of thirteen, the shy, taboo sounds of lovemaking. From behind a door at the top of the hall. Despite the thudding of his heart in his chest, and his absolute terror at the thought of discovery, he couldn’t resist.)

Her hips thrust down on him, again and again, and he cried out with pleasure, his own lips flicking over her neck and breasts as she arched her back, groaning hard. Oblivion threatened him, lost in this place where pleasure tried to drown him, and he forced his eyes open, staring up in the darkness at her figure, at her face, her own eyes closed, remembering her from his dreams.

(Pushing the door to the upstairs bedroom, watching it swing inwards without a sound. He had only intended to move it a crack, but from the moment his eyes fell on the two bodies writhing within a tangle of sheets on the bed in front of him, he lost sense of himself. Two women. Two beautiful, perfect women. The sight of them blew his mind. But there was more. Not just two women, two fabled lesbians: they were identical. So similar it was as though one of them was having sex with a mirror. One woman, but born twice, and caught up in the throes of sexual ecstasy with herself. He felt himself growing hard down in his pants, the first sexual urge he had ever really felt, and he pressed his legs together, shivering at the pleasure he felt as his penis was squeezed between his thighs.)

He could hear nothing but her moans, her cries as her thrusts got harder and harder, faster and faster, and he thrust his own hips upwards to meet hers, jolting them together, desperate to fuck this woman until they became nothing more than one single, writhing beast, lost in its own ecstasy.

(He no longer remembers how long he had watched, only that he had stood frozen in that doorway watching as they kissed and touched each other, hands moving over each other’s breasts, between each other’s legs, over each other’s skin. Somewhere inside he knew they were sisters, that their coupling couldn’t in any way be remotely natural, but he was transfixed. Only when he felt a sudden rush in his groin, a hot stickiness down in his pants, did he feel anything other than a deep, unnatural desire.)

‘Come on, Matthew, come on . . .’ she moaned, her body moist with sweat, fingernails driving into the skin of his shoulders. Instead of hurting him as he would have expected, the cuts her nails opened only seemed to add more to him, make him harder, make his lust stronger. He felt an incredible power growing within him, carnal, volcanic.

(Their moaning seemed to reach a pinnacle at about the same time as the young Matthew’s own, and their writhing wound down, their lust satiated. For the first few seconds afterwards they simply held each other, comforting each other just like normal sisters. Then – the moment he would never forget – they turned towards the door. He still stood there, transfixed, a cooling fire in his belly, sweat on his forehead, his armpits, around his groin. One of them smiled, the other looked shocked. ‘Would you like to join us?’ the smiling one asked, lifting a finger and indicating him forward. ‘Come on, don’t be shy. It obviously does something for you.’ Her hand rolled over and her finger pointed down towards his groin. He looked down, seeing that silvery wet patch for the first time. He heard the woman’s laugh, his own cry of despair, and then his feet were turning him, propelling him out of that place in shame as her laugh echoed in the room behind him.)

And now, looking up into the ecstasy of her face, he sees her again, Elaina Meredith, her body as perfect as the day he watched her lie with her sister. Only his own has changed, and suddenly he knows this is wrong, that something about her is wrong, is twisted, is out of control, is taking over him. And he sees images of Rachel in his mind, and his children, Luke and Sarah, his beautiful children; knows this is wrong even as orgasm rises up inside.

‘No –’ he starts to moan, his words slurred, his mind drunken, and he feels her nails digging into his shoulders, holding him down, feels a strength there beyond strength, beyond . . . him. Cries out, broken: ‘No . . .’

His body jolts and his come bursts out of him, filling her; at the same time she arches her back and screams her own ecstasy with one final downward thrust. Her nails rake his chest and she grins down at him, triumphant.

And then her smile and her eyes are gone, the ecstasy on her face blown apart, and Matthew becomes aware of a roaring all around him, like waves, like an avalanche, like the groan of an iceberg rolling over in a boiling sea. Elaina’s face is gone, destroyed, and what is left of her showers down on him like a bitter sweet blood rain.

Matthew screams too as light fills the room, regular, normal light, and shadows rush away from him like a spring tide drawing back from a beach.

A big hand lands on Elaina’s bloody shoulder and pulls her body off him. He feels his penis, still hard, slide out of her body as what remains of her falls to the floor to land with a hollow, resonant thud.

Matthew lifts one hand and wipes gore out of his eyes, still unable to comprehend what is happening, what is real and what is not. He feels party to some fucked-up dream the like of which he wouldn’t even find in one of his own novels.

His penis begins to shrink rapidly, flinching back in terror as he looks up into the crazy eyes of the man who comes to stand over him.

Matt feels like Death is staring him in the face, and maybe it is.

Red, his face set like a monolith, eyes hollow and as empty as a dark cavern, lifts the shotgun to Matthew’s face, sighs and shakes his head once, as though to say, look how pathetic you are, and pulls the trigger.

###

Bethany’s Diary, November 12th, 1999

I’ll be going now. I’ve taken fourteen of them, Microcodamol, something I got behind the counter at the post office with a note I wrote myself and signed with my father’s name. For migraines, funnily enough. My headache is almost over.

Mother, I’m coming. Father, goodbye for now.

I have to go. I want to be back in the house before they take me away. I don’t want them to find me out here in the woods. Call it dignity, I guess.

Goodbye, diary. You’ve been kind to me.

12

The initial pain was like being punched in the face from the inside out, as though the fist came from inside her own brain. Hard, like something bursting out of her, a fish breaking the surface of a winter lake. Liana fell backwards, away from Rachel’s still form, clutching at her face with clawed fingers, wanting to tear out the agony that had invaded her body.

The pain grew like a spreading fire, moving down her neck and across her chest, seeping through her tissues and her organs and drilling into her bones. She rolled across the floor as pain surged through her, fingers tearing at her hair, her face, trying to gain a grip of her senses and understand what was happening.

When the pain finally subsided, leaving behind a numb, tingling sensation as though her entire body had been oxygen starved, she understood.

Elaina was dead.

Liana had often wondered how she would feel if, or when, this moment ever came. She had never thought it would be like this. She had tried to imagine how losing part of herself might feel. Would her legs go, her arms, would she just feel light-headed, like waking up with dehydration after a night of too much wine? Most of all, would it hurt?

Oh, it hurt all right. It hurt real bad. But she would never have imagined this.

She felt thin. Not of waist or hips, in the conventional sense, but thin, of substance, of her very being. She tried to crawl back across the floor towards Rachel, some part of her still aware that she needed to cover the other woman’s wound, stem the flow of blood until the ambulance arrived. Her hands had become translucent, and with each movement she seemed to sink down into the floor, as though her substance were too thin to support itself on any surface. She looked down, thinking of those cartoons where the cat or the dog would peel off their skin like a coat, leaving them a naked mess of veins and muscle tissue. But she had lost no layers as such, merely thinned out, as though every other particle of her being had been sucked into a void.

As her last strength took her to Rachel’s side she understood where that void was.

It wanted to take her home; she was finished here. The doorway that together herself and Elaina made the frame of, had collapsed. Only while she hung to life would it remain open.

She tried to think clearly, tried to structure in her mind the implications of shutting down that gateway. Gabrielle’s soul would be trapped here, unable to leave, and what would that mean? And what about his soul, now his sickness had revealed itself? How many people might die? How long would it last?

Finally Liana thought she understood the truth.

That she really didn’t know.

There were some things beyond the knowledge and comprehension of any of them, of herself, of her sister, of Ian, Red, poor dying Rachel, Matthew even. They were all just pieces of the same jigsaw, assembled by some overbearing presence that held power over them all.

The man who built the world.

Only when it happened would they know. And in this case Liana knew she would never find out, she would be dead and gone before the implications of her death could be understood. As her vision began to waver she realised her time for understanding was drawing to a close. The only question for her was what to do now.

Here and now. The only time that mattered to Liana. Yesterday was gone, tomorrow would never come, not in the sense she had begun to understand. The sun would never again rise up over the moors for her, peering in through the bedroom window like a nosey neighbour, its lazy fingers caressing the folds of the unmade bed upon which she and her sister slept. Maybe in another place, another world, Liana would start again.

She felt herself drift. What could she do with her last moments to make any sort of difference to the carnage which had finished her?

She thought about giving in, just closing her eyes, and letting death wash over her. But she was the good side of the doorway, the light, the love, the tenderness. Elaina was the dark, the hatred, the anger. And Elaina was dead.

She looked down at Rachel, who suddenly choked, spraying bloody spittle across the carpet, and wondered. Maybe.

Liana’s translucent fingers reached out to touch a form that felt unnaturally soft, like a sponge, its own life ebbing slowly away. As though kneading dough, Liana let her fingers sink into Rachel’s skin, pulling the dying woman close to her own failing body. Liana could feel Rachel’s weak pulse reverberating throughout her body, could feel the woman’s life fading. Not much time left. For either of us.

This time she did close her eyes, but not to rest. Even as she felt her own life flooding out of her, she focused her mind, and concentrated.

13

Click.

No sound had ever sounded sweeter. Matt peered up through a dull haze, the warm afterglow of copulation oozing through his body, and tried to focus his eyes on the man standing over him.

‘Fucking thing.’

Red stepped away from Matt, who felt as though he watched the other man through binoculars, the image slipping in and out of focus as his mind adjusted the lens. In one step Red went from monstrous, overpowering, to man–sized, to human again.

She had seduced him finally, after all these years. Elaina Meredith. Matt didn’t know what sickened him more, the sex or seeing her head explode as she came to orgasm atop him. All he could see in his mind were images of Rachel and the children, interspersed with a flickering image of her, his seducer, Elaina’s naked body over his, her breasts and stomach slick with sweat, her eyes squeezed shut and her face contorted into a grimace of pleasure.

What have I done?

He opened his eyes, unaware that he had even closed them. Red had come back into focus.

The butt of the gun slammed down into Matt’s stomach, bending him double. He cried out in agony, his naked body rolling from the couch on to the floor.

‘You sick bastard. You’re all in this together. You and those witches. I should have fucking known, I should have fucking done for you while I had the chance . . .’

The gun swung down across Matt’s shoulders, and he tried to roll out of the way, but it caught him a glancing blow across his upper back. Again he cried out in pain.

‘You knew about him . . . you knew about him!’ Red’s foot struck Matt’s chest. ‘You knew about my baby!’

‘I didn’t know . . . anything . . . I didn’t . . . huh?’

Matt couldn’t talk anymore. His eyes fell on the space where Elaina’s broken body should have been.

Elaina’s body had gone. In the space she should have been was just . . . nothing, as though she had vanished into the air. Matt stared, disbelieving. But no, perhaps she hadn’t vanished completely after all. Was that still a residue of her, a glowing, ephemeral essence, which still seemed to drift in her place, or just the stars wavering in his vision?

Another kick ripped his thoughts out of him.

Oh my god, where’s my focus, where’s my fucking mind?

‘You’re done, Matthew. You’re done.’

The butt of the shotgun slammed down again, striking Matt across the back. He heard a rubbery squelching sound and imagined his muscles being compressed like a sponge, followed by a sharp crack and a jolt of pain up his left side. He tried to crawl away, but another kick to the ribs forced him into a roll across the floor that brought him up in a crouch with the room’s end wall at his back. He felt a hot stickiness on his shoulders, and knew he was hurt badly there. His back screamed at him, a choking pain around his left kidney so strong he felt faint. Glancing down, he saw the front of his naked body was slick with a composite of sweat and blood, his stomach a horrifying assortment of cuts and grazes.

He looked up. Red, for the first time, seemed to have noticed Elaina’s disappearance. He stared down at the empty space on the floor that began by Matt’s feet, the gun held loosely by the barrel in his right hand, the other rubbing his head.

‘Not even blood,’ he said, head shaking from side to side. ‘Witches. I always knew. I always fucking knew.’

Suddenly Red slumped to his knees as though punched in the stomach. He cried out, and the gun clattered to the floor. Matt eyed it, tensed himself to make a grab for it, but it was no use, his back screamed at him and he leaned back, feeling the pain swim through his body. Was he bleeding inside? Had Red’s blows done something worse than bruise his skin? He felt too numb to know how hard he had been hit.

Red rolled backwards across the floor, face contorted in agony, hands clutching at his stomach. ‘You fucking . . . bitch, no, no, no!’

Matt, his own insides churning, tried to understand. Bethany’s words came back to him, haunting, echoing whispers in the dark caverns of his mind.

She is an angel.

He felt a cramping pain knife through him, saw a light suddenly grow behind him, and the beginning wind of what felt like forming whispers in his memory.

I can go where she goes. I am pure blood.

He stared at Red as words began to take shape in his mind, as bodies began to take shape in the light.

Mortal corruption. Men handle it in different ways. Women corrode. Men . . . destroy.

He shook his head in disbelief, understanding.

‘You’re one of them. You’re one of them, like my mother!’

‘This isn’t over, Cassidy!’ Red screamed, his gravelly voice pained, stricken.

Matthew. He is one of us. You must save him too.

He saw them now, taking shape out of the blinding light that lit up the world behind Red’s writhing body. His mother, and beside her: his sister.

Gabrielle and Bethany. Angels.

We have to go soon. The door is closing.

His mother seemed to glance down to where Elaina had fallen, her form wavering like an unsteady projection.

Hurry, Matthew, save him.

‘What . . . what the hell do you want me to do?’

Red screamed violently, clutching first at his stomach and then his throat, clawing himself, leaving bloody scratches on his skin.

The cord that holds him here is faltering. You must save him. His mortality means it is not strong enough to pull him back. You must give him back to us, otherwise it will tear his soul in two.

‘What the hell do you mean?’

Save him. Please.

What did they mean, save him? How?

Movement caught his eye. He looked towards the door, saw it flung open, a figure, at first silhouetted, rushing in. Holding something in his arms.

‘Red!’ Ian Cassidy’s eyes fell on the writhing figure of his fallen friend, then rose to his bloodied, naked son. ‘Matthew, oh my god.’ In his arms he held a tiny, moving bundle.

‘Dad!’

‘Matthew, what happened? What’s going on? I found the baby on the passenger seat of the truck. The engine was still running! How did you get here –’

Matthew hadn’t realised his father could see them, but as he watched Ian seemed to move in slow motion, turning back toward the end of the room, where the two women stood in the blinding brightness of what Matt could only describe as the light of Heaven itself.

‘Oh . . . my. My Gabrielle, and . . . and . . . my Bethany.’

There is not much time. Save him. The doorway is closing.

The words had been meant for Ian, Matthew knew, but they both heard. Ian turned toward his former friend, lying almost rigid on the floor between himself and Matthew. Red’s back was horribly arched, his eyes bulging, one hand reaching out, the fingers straining for something only he could see.

Realisation dawned in Ian’s eyes. ‘I don’t believe it. All these years, I never realised.’ Ian looked back toward the two women. ‘He’s one of you, isn’t he?’

You must save him.

Ian ignored her, face wistful. ‘Why, Gabrielle? Why did you come to me? Of all people?’

The wavering form of Matthew’s mother seemed to smile.

Because I watched you. From up there. I loved you. So pure of heart. I will watch you still. I will watch you always, my angel.

Ian’s eyes filled with tears. He fell to his knees, his face cracking up. ‘Don’t leave me!’

I’ll always be with you.

‘I miss you so much!’ His eyes slipped from hers for a second. ‘And you, my Bethany . . .’

Matthew was sure her eyes filled with tears, but in the glittering light they looked like diamonds cascading down her face.

I love you. My Daddy.

‘Huh . . . I love you too, my beautiful, beautiful girl.’

My baby. Please give him to me. He will be safe with us, always. He will grow up to be a wonderful man. Like you are. Please, Father.

Ian looked from his daughter to the bundle in his hands. His eyes lingered a moment, then slowly he rose to his feet.

‘Here. If you can, take him.’ He held the bundle out.

The room seemed to explode with light, causing Matt to squeeze his eyes shut against it, one weak hand rising to shield him. When he opened them his father no longer held the baby. He squinted, the light hurting his eyes.

There it was, in her arms. One of them now.

He is beautiful. He will always be beautiful now.

Red screamed, rolling over, face pressed into the floor, hands gripping chunks of his matted hair.

Please save him. There is little time. He killed one of them, and now the doorway is closing. We must go back, and we cannot leave him here.

Matt stared, still dumbstruck, but something in Ian’s face changed. He nodded, almost unnoticeably, with understanding.

Ian turned away from them, walked calmly across the floor to where Red lay, face contorted out of shape, too stretched, too elongated, as though a thousand invisible hands were pulling him apart.

Ian pulled Red into a sitting position and crouched down beside him. He pulled his friend into a hug, their faces close.

‘None of this was ever your fault,’ he said. ‘Just like her, you were given no choice. There were good days, Red. More than the bad, many, many more. I’ll always remember those days, I swear to you.’

Red let out a low moan. At first Matt couldn’t hear, then Red’s words came again, almost too faint to be audible, but containing all the meaning of the world: ‘I’m sorry.’

Ian reached into an inner pocket of his jacket, pulled out something too small for Matt to identify. He took the gun up off the floor. Flipped it open, slid the bullet inside.

‘What are you doing?’ Matt’s words were barely a whisper. Beyond his father’s shoulder, the two women watched impassively from within their wavering glow.

Ian hoisted Red into a sitting position and pulled his face close. He lifted the gun.

‘Forgive me . . . forgive me . . .’

The words came from Red. His eyes lingered on Ian for a second, then lifted, peering into the glow.

Matt could do nothing but watch as his father pushed the barrel of the gun into Red’s mouth.

‘Goodbye, Red. My friend, my dearest friend.’ He leaned close, their foreheads touching.

Matt shut his eyes as the gun went off. Nothing could have made him watch.

When he opened them, the room was filled with a blinding light, brighter than any he had seen before, brighter than anything he could ever hope to stare into and keep his eyes, as though the sun had fallen from the heavens to nestle in the little cottage’s living room. He cried out, wanting to close his eyes but unable to close them, unable even to squint against the brightness.

He saw their forms, three now, just blurs within the light, like streetlights beyond a window in the rain. And another, darker form, on one knee in the centre of the room, like a knight waiting for permission to rise. One of the figures stepped forward and reached out, and tender fingertips lifted the figure’s head towards her own. She crouched to meet him, and briefly the lips of light met the lips of man and the heavens and the mortal world were united as one.

I will see you soon.

Then the world exploded as darkness and light combined; somewhere a door slammed shut, while in another world, another door was flung open.

Epilogue

Memories

November 18th, 1999

At first: darkness. Then, an echo from somewhere out there, the sound of a name, a familiar sound, a word he recognised.

‘Matthew? Matthew, wake up! Won’t you please?’

‘Rachel?’ Like gravel on his tongue, speech. As though it had been a while since the last time.

He opened his eyes and waited for them to adjust to the glare. Rachel, his wife, his beautiful wife, leaned over him, the hospital lights behind her, framing her head like a halo.

‘Are the children here?’

She smiled, her eyes glittering with tears of joy, relief. He gathered he had been asleep for some time.

‘They’re here, Matt. They’re outside in the hallway, waiting for you. Shall I bring them in?’

Without waiting for his instruction she started to move back, but his hand closed over hers. ‘Wait . . .’

He paused, closing his eyes. Even breathing took an effort. Later she would tell him about the puncture to his left lung; a rib broken by Red’s boot had become razor sharp. He would find out about the fractured collar bone, and the hemorrhaging around his stomach which could have killed him, but for now it was time for joy, for relief, for the comfort of each other’s arms and the slowly healing ruins of their love.

‘I hurt a lot, Rachel,’ he muttered.

She nodded. ‘I know, Matt, I know. But you came through the operation. You’re going to be fine.’

‘But nowhere more than here.’ He lifted his other hand, let it drop over his heart. ‘In here, I hurt like . . . like all the pain in the world is in me. And especially . . . for what I did to you.’

Rachel grimaced, shook her head. ‘Matt . . . you don’t have to, just get better. Just concentrate on that.’

His hand closed over hers again. ‘Rachel. I hurt you. I hurt you badly. Mentally and . . .’

Involuntarily, one hand went to her cheek.

‘But, you have to understand, I was hurting myself . . . inside me, everything was hurting.’ He sighed, looked away.

‘Matt –’

‘But I’m healed now. Things have changed. I don’t hate myself anymore. I don’t hate . . . my past. And more than anything, I know I love you. I love you more than the world can imagine. I’ll change, our lives will change. It won’t be easy, with the drinking, and everything that came with it, but we’ll pull through, I promise.’

She smiled, and the radiance lit up her face. Her eyes beamed, so bright they could sink ships, Matt thought.

‘Matt, the painkillers are starting to talk through you again. Get some more rest, eh?’

‘Okay.’ He squeezed her hand.

‘The kids want to see you, but I’ll put them off for an hour or so, take them downstairs to play some video games or something. Let you get a little rest.’

‘Thanks.’ He smiled. ‘Tell them I love them.’

Rachel leaned forward and kissed his forehead. She smelled the sickly aroma of disinfectant, wanting to get him home and washed clean of hospitals for good. She remembered when she had first got into the car, led out of the house by his father, Ian, to see Matt wrapped in towels in the front seat, blood all over his face. She had screamed, felt a terrible, passionate love for him and anger at what someone had done to her husband, that someone had hurt him like this, before she had had a chance to mend the bridge that crossed the chasm between them.

She had wanted to feel a murderous desire for revenge, a unparalleled hatred for his attacker, but only a desperate love for him had surfaced, a desire to see him healed, returned to her arms. Soon now, he would be. Everything would be okay.

She remembered little herself. Only her smashed up car, a lot of rain and darkness; then everything jumped forward to a strange room, a cold floor in an empty house somewhere out on the moor. She had waited, feeling light-headed, faint, but somehow better, somehow restored.

And soon enough the car had come, carrying her husband. There, she had met his father for the first time, though his face had seemed somehow familiar, a memory from a long forgotten dream.

‘I will,’ she said, starting to turn away.

‘When this is over,’ he said from behind her, ‘When I’m out of here and we’re back home, I’d like to talk to you.’

‘Yeah? About what?’

‘About my mother, and my father. About my sister, too. My past. I want to tell you about them. Would that be okay?’

She smiled, felt her eyes fill with tears. ‘Matthew, that would be fine. That would be just fine.’

June 4th, 2000

For Ian Cassidy, the pain would never completely fade. There had been too much death, too much damaged and destroyed. But it would ease, with time. Everything did in the end.

But things were resolved now, had come to a conclusion that satisfied him, made him comfortable as he sat in his chair, sipping a glass of whiskey and mulling things over as one of Matthew’s books lay open on the arm of the chair beside him, a single lamp glowing over his shoulder.

Not dead, he reminded himself. They’ve gone home, that’s all. It’s better for them there, happier, safer. They can never be hurt again.

And he hadn’t lost everything, of course. In some ways he had gained, he thought, as he glanced up at the mantelpiece, at the postcard from Italy he had received last week from Matthew and his family. And most importantly, within the densely packed scrawl on the reverse was the promise of an imminent visit, this time with the children, so he could meet his grandchildren for the first time.

Oh yes, things were different now. But not all for the worse. Some doors had closed, of course, but others had opened, doors leading to the future.

He let his eyes drop. It was late, she would be waiting for him.

‘I’ll be seeing you soon,’ he whispered, setting the glass down on the coffee table beside him. ‘We’ll walk beneath the stars, just as we did back then.’

As lovely in his dreams as ever, sometimes, more so. And untainted, unharmed. Perfect as the vision he had first seen, all those years ago, lying beneath the trees.

And he knew that sometimes, a dream was a little too light to call it. Matt would never understand, Rachel even less so, assuming Matt could ever convince her of anything. But Ian understood, or at least had drawn his own conclusions. He had gone back into the Merediths’ cottage expecting to find a body, but instead had found a dazed young woman wandering about the house, unsure of her own mind let alone anything else.

And Liana gone.

He had seen something in Rachel’s eyes, something he recognised.

Liana’s residue, used to bind and heal his daughter-in-law’s broken body, had left the door a fraction ajar, and sometimes, just sometimes, Gabrielle came to take a peek. In his dreams they walked together, laughed, talked, sometimes made love, and he knew she wasn’t only part of his memory. A little sliver of her was in there too.

He leaned back, feeling the ease of the chair. He thought of the future, of the time when he would get to see his son and his family again, of the good times they would have together.

It would be good. After so many years, they had a chance to be close again.

But he couldn’t keep that one mind’s eye closed. The one eye that stayed focused on her, on Gabrielle, his angel, and that one day to come in the future, when he would go to join her, the day when they would become one.

HERE ENDS

The Man Who Built the World

Acknowledgments

The Man Who Built the World was written way back in the winter of 2003, when I was a spritely 24 years old. Although it has undergone a dozen edits since then, the story is essentially the same one that I wrote in the little bedroom of my shared house in Bristol on a 17-inch computer monitor that was the size and weight of a small car (don’t things change so quickly?). My life was a lot different then to how it is now. I was still broke, of course, but was struggling with the fallout of finishing university and the lack of direction that came with it. The Man Who Built the World was written on the many long nights when I was too poor to leave the house and so a special thanks goes to some of my housemates and friends of around that time, who put up with my stresses and frustrations on the few times I remember coming out of my bedroom. In no particular order: Graham, Jim, Jane, Fabian, Sharon, and Andy, this is for your help in one way or another, whether it was by supplying booze, food, a calming influence or just plain friendship.

As always, love to my family for believing in me even when I talk a good game without the results to match; one day I’ll be paying the bills for all of you, but even if I’m not, I’ll tell you I will. To my wife, Shoko, for putting up with me, and my cat, Miffy, for allowing me to put up with you. Our 5 a.m. walks are some of the most interesting of my life.

Thanks also to my proofreaders for this one, Vasant and Robyn, who helped to tighten the text and fill in the potholes. Thanks also to Jenny Twist, for pushing me to give it one more shine. Your help was much appreciated.

And a special thank you to everyone who has read anything I’ve ever written and been happy at the end that they took the time to do so. I write for myself first, but you people come a close second. Without you, these words are just marks on a screen.

CW

September 2012