The dark confides, p.20
The Dark Confides, page 20
The sixth episode ended and she paused the credits and said, ‘It’s your turn to do the tea.’
‘I did them last time.’
‘But I drank more than you last night and if I move I’ll throw up.’
‘Throw up, I don’t care. I’m not getting up for at least another six episodes.’
She nudged him, and again, and again until he finally stood. He pulled the blanket off her and she yelped and shrank back into the couch, clasping herself and drawing up her knees.
‘I hate you,’ she said.
He laughed and threw the blanket back over her and fled to the kitchen before she could kick him. The kettle was boiling and she was settling back into the couch when three heavy bangs on the front door made with a fist rattled the window. She sat up, staring at the curtains.
‘Jon. Jon, there’s someone at the door.’
He didn’t answer. The kettle too loud. She was about to call him again when she gave up and set down the remote on the coffee table beside the baby monitor and shuffled in her backless slippers to the front door, the blanket caped about her shoulders. She opened the door to no one, just the frozen snow. She leaned out and looked both ways along, her breath smouldering in the cold air. Christmas lights and wreaths, frosted up cars, dull amber street lamps. She waited a moment, listening, and then shut the door and went back to the living room. The kettle had finished boiling and she called out to Jon at the same time three more heavy raps on the door made her yelp and spin around. She looked at the front door out in the hall. She didn’t move, just stood there, her heart throbbing.
‘Jon. Jon, come here.’
The kitchen door opened behind her.
‘Jon, go see who’s at the door. Someone keeps—’
Two men strode in from the kitchen and seized her. She made no sound in her enfeebling shock. They wrapped duct tape around her entire head until she was deaf, dumb and blind and then one of the men hoisted her over his shoulder and her slippers fell off. They took her back through the kitchen and out the backdoor. Soon the TV went to standby and the room fell into complete darkness.
A TV game show was playing loud through the walls. Out in the corridors men were chanting football songs, a bottle smashed, doors slammed. Night had overlapped day, falling around Bale so gradually that he hadn’t noticed it malignly sharing the hotel room with him until he sat there eyeless and enclosed in its enveloping pall. At this, his dark predicament, the audience laughed and cheered.
He hadn’t taken off his coat or his boots. His backpack sat on the straight-backed wooden chair by the window. Headlights peeked into the room through gaps in the drawn curtains and his shadow slid across the walls. The headlights went away and his shadow blended back into the dark from which it had broken off.
For the first time in an hour he moved. His thoughts everywhere and nowhere. A stony stupor. The unctuous confidence of Søren’s words made him clench his eyes shut so tightly the muscles of his face hurt. Wren’s pleas spread like ice through the cracks of his brain. He didn’t realise how hard he was grinding his teeth until he heard them squeak in his head. Carney’s wife came to him, dropping down out of a black sky. He saw her suspended and swaying there in the birdless void by an umbilical running from her neck into the nothingness, an indivisible cord tethering her to ultimate hell, yet when she looked at him, he saw she was not Carney’s wife after all but Grace. Always Grace. The studio audience next door went ooh and aah.
He rose quickly and did breathing exercises Elms had taught him, trying break from a lassitude that served only to summon ghosts, but his thoughts were strewn everywhere. The dead weight of lifetimes hammering him down. He was hearing Grace laugh, taking a slap off his father, feeling the warmth of his mother’s hand, seeing the glistening pink wall of the UCO’s belly before he sunk the knife, smelling his wife’s perfume as she got ready for work, helplessly struggling as nurses pinned him to a hospital bed tweezing glass from his foot, crying under a lychgate in the rain, watching himself from overhead look back over his shoulder at his sleeping wife and quietly slip out the house into another day, another life.
He punched himself in the side of the head and his ear rang out a high-pitched sonic squeal. He took the box of antidepressants from the backpack and swallowed one with a cup of water he filled in the bathroom sink. The water was hard, metallic. Then he swallowed another. When his phone rang on the bed, throwing an edgeless pool of livid light against the ceiling, he turned slowly towards it. He switched on the lights embedded in the wooden headboard and the light pushed back his horror only as much as light could. It was Margot. He exhaled. The audience applauded.
‘I didn’t think I’d hear from you again,’ he said.
‘Yeah well, things change. I’ve spoken to Waters and Erskin. It’s over, we’re safe. Come on in and we’ll sort this out.’
‘I spoke to Sutch and he said the opposite.’
‘You spoke to Sutch?’
‘In person, at his home. He said he couldn’t find Waters and Erskin. He said they can’t be located and made it perfectly clear that we’re alone. You were right.’
‘No, I wasn’t. I’ve done what he should have done. I got in touch with them and explained everything. They’re going to meet us tonight at the safe house.’
But he wasn’t listening, not really. ‘It’s Anton. He’s behind everything.’
‘Anton? How do you know?’
‘Told me so himself.’
‘Where is he?’
‘I don’t know. I think he’s leaving. His bags were packed.’
‘Leaving for where?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Where are you?’
Car doors shutting outside in the car park, a man’s voice, a woman laughing.
‘Sean, where are you?’
‘Wren’s gone.’
‘What?’
‘We were supposed to meet at the airport. She never showed. Then I got a … I got a phone call.’
‘We’ll find her, Sean, together. We’re gonna find her. You can’t do this alone. You have to come in. Are you being followed?’
‘She’s pregnant, Margot. It’s mine.’
She took a shuddering breath. ‘Get to the safe house. Now.’
She hung up.
A beam of sodium light from the car park slashed his face down the middle. The hotel hummed mysteriously. He sensed a deep vibration as if something unimaginably massive and horribly conscious was moving about down there in the unmapped dark of the world. When he finally began loading his things into the backpack, the game show host said through the walls, ‘Let’s see what you could have won.’
In the living room of that now lightless home in Leeds, hours after the backdoor had closed and the TV had gone to standby, the hopeless mewling of a newborn came untended and incorporeal from the baby monitor on the coffee table. The baby had woken from dark to dark and from him rose the loneliest sound in the universe. He lay on his back in his cot in the cramped back room, a room populated with Pixar creatures and cultures, arching his spine, straining, fists knotted, face scrunched and burning red and wet with disregarded tears. He looked up at the colourful beasts hanging overhead that revolved gently on a breeze from a window open somewhere in the house. He reached for them but they were always too far away. His flushed skin chilled in whitening terror when explosions and deep airborne concussions began rending apart the sky through the uncurtained window. New Year’s Eve revellers unable to wait until midnight or maybe just scally kids. The headache light of fireworks filled the room with flickering sheets of pink and green and white. He jumped and gasped in abandoned agony at every gaudy detonation. He saw Mummy and Daddy and Nanny smiling there beside him, but why weren’t they coddling him? Why weren’t they stopping this fear? His questions moved about him like the scary creepy-crawlies from the garden that came in through the windows attracted by the light of his dreams.
Litter blew about the fractured pavement outside the safe house. That ugly portico of shuttered shops that stood set back below overhanging apartments. Black-painted columns keeping the apartments from toppling into the paved walkways as if them being up was somehow preferable to them being down. Imitation colonnaded antiquity clashing with the dire cultural void of modernity.
Bale got out and stood beside his car in the lamplit night. A hooded teenage boy wearing a skull-faced neck warmer up to his nose rode past slouched on a mountain bike, staring at him. He watched the boy until he’d ridden out of sight. A silent ambulance sped by with its blue strobes revolving and was followed by two police cars. He turned back to the shops. In the window above the burned-out butcher’s shop stood the figure of a man. The figure saw him or maybe sensed it was being watched and moved back from the window.
Bale crossed the pavement into the shade of the portico, its shadow pouring down him as if he were being wiped from existence. At the dented metal door, he turned and looked around the run-down parade. The sick amber rinse of the street lamps colouring that corner of the world with the dim clarity of a nightmare. He turned back and hit the intercom buzzer and the steel door immediately unlocked, startling him. He opened the door and stepped inside.
Nothing had changed. Silence, old cigarette smoke and rot, a manky worn carpet. He gripped the handrail and slowly ascended the creaky staircase, stopping on the stairhead outside the only door. He was wrong. Something had changed. The shadeless bulb at the top of the stairs had been replaced with a helical energy-saving bulb. There was one more change. Above the bulb, splayed against the high ceiling, was a large handprint. But maybe he’d just missed that last time. He raised his hand to knock and paused, the last two years suddenly compressing down into a single block of insanity. Like an unexploded bomb lodged in the pith of his brain. A bleak urge to throw himself down the stairs overcame him and he clenched his fists and teeth and blew out a tight stream of air through pursed lips.
He tapped on the door. Margot opened up and stepped back into the room. He walked in and she shut the door and stood against it. The room hadn’t changed either, just as dingy and unwelcoming as he remembered it. He turned and looked at her. She was pale and weary, her makeup-free eyes inflamed and wet, swollen. He’d never seen her this way. He’d seen her stressed and upset, angry, even afraid, but not this. This was something else.
‘Where’s Waters and Erskin?’ He crossed the room to the window and parted the blinds, looked out to see what the figure had seen.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.
‘It’s not your fault.’ He was still looking out the window. The reaper on the bike rode by again, looking up at him, flashing his gaping skeleton rictus. ‘The name Scanlon mean anything to you?’
‘Sean, I’m so sorry,’ she said.
‘I told you, it’s not your fault. No one could have—’
He froze. His eyes focused on the front end of an old Aston Martin protruding from the dark of an alley across the street, a silver Range Rover parked beside it. Unseeable from where he’d been standing outside not five minutes ago. He turned and looked at her, his eyes bulging.
‘Margot, what have you done?’
She grasped her own biceps and winced as if she were swallowing a scalpel blade. A door opened and four men emerged carrying handguns. Two of the men were from the industrial estate when he’d killed the UCO on Wednesday night. Behind the men lurked Søren. The man who’d fused the lids to the drums with an acetylene torch rushed Bale and slammed his fist into his stomach. Bale folded over his arm, groaning and sinking to his knees. Two men grabbed an arm each, stood him up, holding him in place, while Søren pulled up a chair at the table and sat where Waters had sat two years ago. He touched his hair with the palm of his hand and lit up a cigarette.
In the room the men had come from, Bale saw a woman hogtied facedown on the floorboards, silver duct tape wound about her entire head. Another man was sitting behind her on a metal folding chair, one leg kicked out straight, watching him.
‘They got Lucy.’ Margot was crying. ‘They said they’d let her go if I called you. I’m so sorry, Sean. I’m so sorry.’
‘Shut that cunt up,’ Søren said.
One of the men gripped her elbow and walked her into the room. Bale watched Margot drop to her knees beside her daughter, gasping as she coddled her. He’d never seen the motherly Margot and the sudden change was shocking and heartbreaking. The man sitting in the room slowly retracted his outstretched leg and rose, drawing a long, thin serrated knife from his jacket.
Bale called out to Margot but she didn’t reply. She was kneeling beside her daughter and holding her face in her hands, kissing her, stroking her hair, saying how the baby was going to be fine, he’s waiting for her, he’s waiting. The knifeman sat on his heels behind Lucy and Bale called out again, shouting Margot’s name over and over. The knifeman pulled back Lucy’s head and sawed through her throat.
Margot screamed backward and tried attacking the knifeman, but the other man in the room pulled her back and restrained her. Bale was shouting and kicking when one of the men holding him buried his first in his belly again. His legs buckled, hot urine darkened his jeans.
Margot wailed and stamped her feet like an irritable child and then passed out. Sometimes the dark is a friend. The knifeman looked in at Søren. Søren nodded and the knifeman tipped back her lolled head and jugulated her while she hung unconscious.
Bale struggled, wheezing and moaning, guts cramping with agony. He got nowhere. They had him tight. Like sleep paralysis. The man holding Margot walked her forward, her feet dragging on the floorboards, and lay her down across the body of her daughter. Then he exited the room and shut the door, leaving the knifeman in there to do freely whatever it was he would do with two cooling corpses.
The men sat Bale down at the table opposite Søren and stood back against the walls, one against the front door. Bale leaned over and spewed. He sat there slumped and aching, raging at his impotence. Then he spewed again. Søren watched him and then took out a phone and dialled a number, held the phone to his ear.
‘We got him.’ He listened and then set the phone on the tabletop and pushed it across to Bale. ‘Pick it up.’
Bale wiped puke from his mouth on the back of his arm. ‘I’m going to kill you.’
‘Pick up the phone.’
Bale finally looked at the phone.
‘Pick it up.’
He picked it up, held it to his ear, listened. As if the phone were a conch, breaking waves journeyed down the line with seashell resonance. Then a man’s voice overlaid the waves.
‘Am I speaking to the worm Alcott?’
‘Who is this?’
‘Am I speaking to the worm Alcott?’
‘Who the fuck is this?’
‘Who do you think you’re talking to?’
‘I think I’m talking to a traitor.’
The man laughed. ‘A traitor to whom? Traitors?’
‘Where is she?’
‘Nowhere.’
‘Nowhere isn’t an answer.’
‘It’s the only answer there is. There is no other.’
‘What did you do to her?’
‘Okay.’ The man inhaled and let it out. ‘I’ll ask you three times. Understand this. Three times. Do you want to know?’
‘Yes.’
A hacking cough rasped down the line and he spat and said again, ‘Do you want to know?’
‘Yes.’
‘Put Søren on.’
Alcott held on to the phone, listening to those alien waves, purple and tsunamic in his mind. Then he tossed the phone across the tabletop, where it skidded off into Søren’s lap. Søren picked it up and took Alcott to pieces with his eyes while he checked it for scuffs. He held the phone to his ear.
‘I’m here. Maybe. That’d be my guess.’ Søren read the time on a gold wristwatch, said okay, and hung up. He groaned as he held on to his thighs to raise himself up and then he stood there, looking down at Alcott, slowly shaking his head while he mutely judged him. Finally he turned away and made a vague hand gesture at the men and they closed in on Alcott. Dark fell down him as a sack was pulled over his head and a cord cinched tight about his neck. Gravity departed as he was lifted by the eight hands of Søren’s arachnid retinue. He heard fireworks exploding and ship horns blowing on the docks. Another year was over. A new year had begun.
Chapter Eight
MONDAY, 1 JANUARY
He was taken from the safe house to a spacious car—he guessed the Range Rover he’d seen parked alongside Søren’s Aston Martin in the alley—and driven for almost two hours. He couldn’t understand how they could keep the night so quiet. It couldn’t be owing to the sack over his head. They must be trained in the art of deep silence. Thoughts like this occupied him and he was unusually calm. A deep, still, lightless calm like the calm of waters crossing the ocean floor. No thoughts to think, only a panoptic blackness and the breathlessness of infinity. The silence was broken when Blood on the Tracks began playing low on the stereo, an album he hadn’t heard in years. He thought of his ex-wife and their first nights together as teenagers. He didn’t know why. Maybe because she’d hated Dylan. He smiled inside the hood at the memory of her doing bad impressions of his singing.
He was led out into the open across a cold and windy field of crunching snow and hard earth until eventually he reached cleared tarmac. The rumble of nearing jet engines. He guessed he was on a runway, maybe a private airstrip. His wrists cuffed, he walked up a hollow staircase into some kind of private jet, an empty smell of air-conditioned nothingness like the inside of a space station. He sat beside the window with his hands in his lap, able to feel the fuselage with his elbow, an armrest with his other. He could hear the shape of the cabin.
The plane took off. No one spoke but he knew people were there. He could hear ice rattling in glasses, bottles and cans being opened and drunk, movement along the aisle, maybe toilet visits. No pilot voice came through speakers. An occasional beep and a very faint blur of light through the sack’s meshing, but nothing else. Maybe a whispered voice or maybe he imagined that. Minimal turbulence. Two hours passed before he heard another electronic beep and shuffling movement and seatbelts clunking shut. His bowels hurt from the gut-punches he’d taken, a deep, disgusting agony.
