“I think it would be good for you to get out of the house today, Sally.”
“We could go to the park,” she suggested. “Scare the animals. Give them names.”
“Perhaps if I ignore her,” Simon thought. “Perhaps she'll get bored and go away of her own accord.”
He hung the frying pan on the wall and dried his hands, before returning to the laundry, deciding to separate the pile into bright colours, dark colours and whites. Good. That was the next five minutes accounted for.
Her clothes were all mixed in with his. Most of her items went into the bright colours pile. She had put her tie-dyed dress into the basket, which made things a little bit more complicated. He'd have to separate the bright colours into two piles. He took his time, concentrating only on what he was doing, ignoring the smell of a pizza slice warming in the microwave and the sound of beeping when it was done.
The black pile he created comprised of fleecy jumpers, combat trousers and t-shirts, all largely the same colour, but different to his eye, because they were his clothes, most of which he had bought at army and navy stores a couple of years ago. He also extracted several pairs of black socks, a woolly hat and a pair of fingerless gloves from the mound of dirty clothes that had grown around the laundry basket like a tumour.
He was getting there.
Slowly.
Slowly was good.
Behind him, the girl dropped her magazine onto the floor where it landed with a slap. She made a farting sound with her mouth and switched the kettle on.
“Coffee?” she asked.
“No.”
“Tea?”
“No, Sally. No tea.”
“Hot chocolate?”
He straightened up, but still didn't look at her. “Go to college, Sal,” he said.
The girl sighed again. “Will you stop calling me that? I hate it.”
The white pile was always their smallest collection of clothing, but now, with the addition of a single bedsheet and a couple of pillowcases, he had enough for a full load. As he filled the machine, her bras reminded him that she wasn't a girl any more. Like him, she had grown up quickly. She was just bored, playing silly, but it was irritating nonetheless. He needed her out of his (thoughts) space, because despite the locks on the doors and all the security glass, he had a key; he was the crack in the windscreen.
“You were quiet last night. Maybe we can hang out today; have some fun. Remember that? Fun?”
“Maybe when you get back,” Simon said.
“But I can-“
He faced her at last and his expression cut her off mid-sentence. She dropped her pizza.
“Go away,” he said and she actually ran, taking the stairs quickly but one at a time. Stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp.
Perhaps she was still a kid after all, masquerading as an adult, as was he.
He heard her door slam shut.
Good.
Slam all the doors. The further away the better.
Chapter Three
At six in the evening, Simon woke slumped over the kitchen counter. His first thought was of Sarah and he groaned as he allowed the memories to spiral up.
He had frightened and upset her, but she should have known better than to press him, particularly after he’d been out all night. What did she think he'd been doing? Clubbing?
He had called her Sally half a dozen times. Yes, Sally. No, Sally. He had explained that he'd only call her that when something was wrong, but she had remained oblivious to his signals.
Maybe he needed to let her in on how much danger surrounded them. While he had no wish to make her afraid to leave the house, he did need her to be more alert.
Observing these thoughts, he analysed them and let them go. His anger with her behaviour was really anger with himself. She trusted him to make everything all right and he knew he was failing her. While her ignorance was the main danger to her, it was the thing he wanted to preserve most. Her ignorance was innocence.
He paced the kitchen, getting the feeling back in his legs, knowing that by the time she came home he would be calm and that they would attempt to make cornflake cakes and everything would be cool again for a while.
He reached for the remaining slice of pizza, which had sickened him earlier, and took half of it down in one bite. It was cold and wet and tasted of nothing, certainly nothing good, but his need was great and he shoved the remainder into his mouth. So it was that Sarah came home and found him chewing furiously. As he made room to speak to her, she made for the stairs. Sensible girl … woman ... whatever ...
“Sarah," he spluttered.
She observed him carefully. He was never what she would consider relaxed. Early one morning, she had pushed his door open to see if he was home and he had been lying on his mattress on the floor, on his back, fully-clothed, staring at the ceiling.
"Go," he had said. He hadn't even turned to look at her. At the time, she had wondered if that was how he always slept, waiting for morning, trainers on, alert, ready for action, but since then she had seen him in all manners, sleeping at the counter, on the kitchen floor, on the stair. He always woke before she reached him.
Often, he smelled as though he had been to bars and she wondered if he had been clubbing without her, though she never smelled alcohol on his breath - had never seen him drink in fact, except for one three-day marathon session after mum died. Aside from that, he had never been so out of it that he hadn't been able to open at least one eye before she got close enough to check he was still breathing.
Go upstairs.
Go to bed.
Go away.
He was clearly feeling better now. Colour had returned to his cheeks. He was eating.
"I’m sorry about earlier,” Simon managed to say, losing a green pepper in the process.
“I’m sorry too,” Sarah said. “I should have thought.”
“I think we both could have handled that better. Next time we will. We learn and move on, yeah?”
Sarah tried to smile although she was close to crying, because she couldn't deny that there would be a next time. And a next time after that. And after that. She looked away in the hope that Simon wouldn't see how despondent his words had made her.
“You’ve been out more often the last month,” she observed.
Simon stopped chewing, aware that his eyes were drilling holes into her but unable to stop. She had never brought up the subject of his night-time missions. He had spoken of them often, but because she refused to engage with the subject he had no idea how much she had understood and how much she had discarded.
"I didn't realise you were out last night," she said, "I didn't hear you leave - so when I saw you this morning, I didn't realise you were ... you know … here but not here."
Simon nodded, surprised by his reticence. He finally had her full attention and she actively wanted to know more about what was going on, but more than ever he felt that the life he had been given to live should not infect hers. He liked the fact that she didn't embrace the danger. The point of his existence was to protect her. He worked so she didn't have to.
"Last night,” Sarah said. “Was it a bad one?"
"There are no good ones."
"Do you ... every time you go out, do you ... is there always ..."
"Almost always," Simon said.
Her eyes were trembling. "But it wasn't always like that, right? In the beginning, sometimes you would go and you didn't always ..."
Simon shook his head.
"So why is it changing now?" she asked.
"That's a good question," he said, stalling. After months of attempting to have this conversation and failing, he now found himself utterly unprepared. “There’s a sense of urgency that wasn’t there before,” Simon admitted.
Sarah didn't move.
“I feel as though It's looking for something,” Simon continued. “I think that soon It will find it and when It does it will leave us alone.”
"Really?" She sounded desperate.
r /> "Yes," Simon said. Although the Creature was not currently watching his thoughts, he could not entirely shut down the Simon-automaton he had created as his coping mechanism.
"I hope it happens soon," Sarah said.
Simon noted that she had come as close to the subject as she could bear. She wouldn't refer to the Creature itself. He wished that he could lay her thoughts out and see them as clearly as the Creature could see his.
The sitting area was illuminated solely by a small, grey, porcelain table lamp that had belonged to their mother. While they had been talking, it had grown darker outside and Simon was glad of the cover. Normally, he was an exceptional liar. The trick, he discovered, was to practice and to believe the lie, to make it real by living it, to find the element of truth and exaggerate it so that the lie existed in its shadow. It was a dangerous exercise, which kept him on a knife edge between an intolerable reality and a psychotic nightmare, but it was the only way to go on day after day, night after night. He couldn't keep up the pretence with Sarah though. He loved her too much. Her presence illuminated the holes in his stories.
He avoided her gaze by going to the window to close the blinds. The trees appeared to be have stepped together to protect them from the outside world. The house held its breath. The only noise was the buzz of electricity somewhere above and the refrigerator, humming to itself in an attempt not to hear the next part of their conversation.
In a hushed voice, accentuating the near-silence, Sarah asked: “How do you do it?”
“Do what?”
She took an audible breath. “Kill them.”
The motor of the refrigerator clunked off.
She had made the question sound almost casual and somehow it did not seem out of place among the plates and bowls and the broken food mixer and the coffee machine and the egg timer. It didn’t seem like such a frightening question at all, until he tried to answer.
He opened his mouth to talk about the deliveries. It would be good to get it out. Perhaps sharing the horror of it would put a brake on the flashbacks and stop his eyes glazing over in the cereal aisle in Tesco or while licking the back of an envelope in the post office queue, or staring at the patterns made by paint peeling from the ceiling over the bath. He needed to share some of this information, to release the pressure, but not with her.
The woman he had delivered the night before may only have been two years older than Sarah. They had roughly the same figure; both studying; both smart. He had ripped her from the world she knew and cast her, gasping, to a fate unknown. How could he tell Sarah what he had done?
If the woman was still alive, perhaps it was worse than having died. Perhaps she was underwater, in the grip of the thing that had demanded her, stripped of flesh and mind. Or perhaps she had been lucky, torn into pieces and consumed. At least that way it would be over.
Or perhaps nothing happened down there. Maybe she was taken and returned to her life, her mind broken, but physically in tact.
Imagine it and it was possible.
It was not difficult to distance himself from the consequences of his actions while the Creature was with him. The whispers and Its guidance were seductive. Afterwards, however, when the Creature left his mind, he always had to face Sarah. No matter how deep he buried his memories, seeing her would make them creep back up.
“I don’t need protecting any more,” Sarah told him. “I want to help you. You need looking after.”
Simon put his hands over his eyes. His fingers were ice cold. “Let’s talk about this another time.”
“You treat me like a kid,” she said, “but I see what’s going on. I’ve got questions and I deserve answers.”
“I've tried to tell you,” he said.
“You tell me that it's dangerous and that the danger could come at any moment and that I have to know where all the knives are and if I see anything inside the house I've got to run and I've got keep my mobile phone on me at all times and you're going to go out sometimes and I have to avoid you, except its hard to tell when that is, so if I can't avoid you I mustn't ask any questions; I just have to do as I'm told and it will all be ok. This is bullshit, Simon. We never talk about mum or dad. What happened to them. Or you. Or what's going to happen to us. Or anything that really matters.”
“What really matters is that you have friends. College. Prospects. You have a life.”
“What about you?”
“What about me?” The confusion in his voice frightened her.
“You're my brother. I can help you.”
“Yes, you can help,” Simon said.
“Tell me how?”
“You can forget about trying to save me. I can look after myself.”
“And I can look after myself too, Simon, but maybe together we can beat whatever it is that has us living like this.”
Simon was shaking his head before she had finished. Beat it? Beat what? It was nothing and nowhere, and yet it could be inside him at any moment. It was a compulsion and a thing in the water. Beat that?
'Living like this'. Living like what? In a house, with food and drink and heating, television, a bed to sleep in. It was home. What was wrong with that?
“I'm sick of being afraid,” she said. “I want to know everything. Not just the bits that you want to tell me. Because as it is, it sounds crazy.”
He was forced to admit that he didn't want her up to speed after all. He wanted things as they were, without questions, with their lives gently overlapping when his mind was clear. She had played along until now, fitting into the lie that had suited him. In her way, she had been protecting him since this had begun.
“Okay,” he said. “I'll fill in the gaps. But I can't do this now.”
“Then when?”
“I'm going out,” he said. “I need to clear my head.” The house felt unsafe. She was too close to the danger, too close to him. He had to get away and unfurl the things in his mind so that he could repack them, more neatly and tightly, strap them down so that they couldn't fly when she reached for them.
“You'll be gone all evening,” she said.
“I'll be back tonight,” Simon said.
Chapter Four
Obeying an emotional need to return to the edge and look down into the waves, but with a clear mind, not invaded by the entity, Simon knew what kind of thoughts would emerge. It would be bleak, but he needed to face what he had done before talking to Sarah, even in the knowledge that it was a matter of time before he would be doing the same to somebody else.
Without ethereal guidance, he searched for the greater part of an hour before he recognised the turning into the wood. It didn’t look like a turning at all now. There was a small dirt step, rather than a slope and it led to something more like a gap between tree trunks that someone might have used to shelter from the rain than a path. Upon entering the channel, however, it veered to the right, then to the left and then plunged on into darkness.
As his eyes adjusted, he felt his way ahead, one arm outstretched so that his hand encountered branches before they struck or snagged him. He resisted the urge to switch on his flashlight and crept on.
The air was clear and sharp. Creatures stirred amid the trees, watching him with eyes much more accustomed to this than his. He snapped their twigs and tripped over fallen branches, blundering into their domain until the trail came to an end, signalled by a change in the texture of the ground, from dirt that slid underfoot to a carpet of weeds and sucking mud. His heart picked up its pace as he recalled stopping the car, and the girl’s skinny arms in his fists, her body almost twisting from him as he marched her into the wood.
He had made her play Twenty Questions.
What had he been thinking?
He stomped through the undergrowth, mindful now of the pain he had caused her, fingers on pressure points that made her whimper, snapping her finger back into place.
People would be wondering what had happened to her. She wasn't a carefully sel
ected vagrant. The Creature had decided that it wanted her and that was that. Its reasons were unknown. She'd be missed, on both sides of the Channel. A lover might have begun calling local hospitals by now. If she had parents, perhaps they would dwell on the memory that they hadn’t wanted her to go to England and they’d argue about whose responsibility it had been to prevent her leaving. Hours, days, weeks from now, they would be facing the prospect of being invited to identify her body, her clothes in a clear plastic bag; passionless talk of dental records.
She wasn’t necessarily dead though. He thought again of the wave that had snatched her, like a tsunami, freezing momentarily to absorb her legs before withdrawing the way it had come, dragging her with it, wrapping itself around her torso like a black, foamy tongue.
Dead would probably have been better.
Eventually the authorities would catch up with him. He had never been especially careful and now he had returned to the scene of his last delivery, a reckless thing to do, but he couldn't help himself.
Ultimately, he reckoned, he'd either be captured or shot dead. Either way, he wouldn't be able to work for the Creature anymore, which would be a great relief, but both eventualities meant leaving Sarah alone and he'd promised her that he'd never abandon her. He had no doubt that she'd visit him in prison every week, if it came to that, even though he'd order her not to come. She'd try to smuggle something in for him; get caught; try again.
He had to stay sane and strong for Sarah, but, in lieu of any authority or proper punishment, he berated himself a while longer, as the trees thinned out and more moonlight filtered through the leaves. Ahead, waves broke against the cliff.
He knew how this was going to end. He'd stand at the very lip of the cliff and observe the waves below, contemplating jumping, fantasising about hitting the rocks, but in the end he'd turn to face his ominous journey back to the car, back home and back to his life, such as it was, where Sarah would be surprised to see him and no less keen on answers than she had been earlier that evening.
He thought about what he would say to her.
Perhaps jumping wasn't such a bad option after all.
Dad had handed him the keys to the family special deliveries franchise and mum had looked at the floor. He didn't think it would do her any good to know that. It only made it more difficult to sleep.