Only Darkness (8 page)

It wasn’t until afterwards, in the sudden, shocking silence after she was gone, that he realized they’d been playing a far more dangerous game. He couldn’t go back. He was left like the survivor of a shipwreck washed up on some remote and rocky island, and there was no way back, and no way forward.

Midnight. Debbie jerked awake. Her heart was hammering as though she’d had a shock. Breaking glass … a dream? When Debbie was small, she used to have a recurring nightmare. She was chased through her familiar house by giants, giants that moved slowly but relentlessly, their faces distorted and flattened. She ran, her legs heavy and slow, towards the deep wells and shafts she had to climb down to escape, but at the bottom of each there was something sinister and dangerous – sometimes a large screw turning like a giant engine, sometimes fast-flowing but dark and silent water; sometimes a black gliding shape that drifted soundlessly past. As she lay in bed now, she realized she had been dreaming. A giant had been chasing her.

She looked at the green digits on the clock radio and groaned. She’d been so tired she’d gone to bed at ten, tried reading, but her eyes had started to close so she’d turned the light off and drifted to sleep. Now she was wide awake. She turned over and tried to pull her pillow round to support her head. That wasn’t right. She tried another position and an itch in the small of her back disturbed her. She turned on to her back and stared at the ceiling.

The window was a black rectangle in the darkness. She watched it. Was there something moving out there beyond the sill? She thought she could see shadows. She could hear a faint scraping noise, outside. A kind of crunching, like footsteps on gravel, slow stealthy footsteps like someone trying to make no sound at all.
Don’t be stupid, it’s just your imagination!
She hadn’t closed the curtain. Slowly, she sat up, pulling the quilt around her against the cold. God, it
was freezing. Wrapped in the quilt, she got out of bed and, pressed to the wall, peered out of the window. Blackness. There was something wrong, something odd, something out of place. She couldn’t tell what it was at first, then she realized that the streetlight that shone over the fence into her back garden wasn’t lit. The small back yard was a pool of night. She couldn’t hear the sound any more. She strained her ears, listening. Nothing. She opened her bedroom door very quietly. Still nothing. She realized she didn’t want to go downstairs, into the dark, and she didn’t want to turn the lights on and let anyone know that she was there.

She went back to bed, and lay there in the silence as the shadows moved outside her window, and the rectangle gradually lightened, and she fell asleep.

When Debbie left the house the next morning, rushing because she had overslept, she saw Jill, her neighbour, talking to Mr Fenton whose house backed on to the gennel from the other side. ‘Morning, Debbie,’ Jill called. Debbie waved.

Mr Fenton hurried over. ‘Bloody vandals, excuse my French, love,’ he said. Mr Fenton took a grandfatherly interest in Debbie. ‘Look at that light,’ he said in disgust. Debbie looked up at the streetlight. It had been smashed, the glass scattered over the ground. ‘I heard it breaking,’ he said, ‘but I just thought it was kids breaking bottles again. I came out this morning to clear up, and there it was.’ He shook his head. Debbie didn’t have time to get into a long conversation, particularly not one that was going to be about what Mr Fenton had and hadn’t fought the war for, so she explained she was in a hurry and left him with Jill. She thought he had a point, though.

The early light of a winter morning is starting to lift the shadows. The shapes are becoming clearer as the darkness recedes. The loft keeps the night for longer. It is not easy, planning a hunt. It takes time, dedication, strength. For a moment, he feels cold, lost, and he moves over to his railway, studying the tracks, the tunnels, the maze – his hunting ground. While the shadows are still there, he remembers. He remembers the dark places, the muffled breaths, tight, laboured. He remembers the waiting, the knowing … Her eyes will shine in
the dark place, shiny tracks on her face. He remembers gleamings in the moonlight, soft breath, going, gone …

He crosses the loft to where the overalls hang, carefully placed on the row of hooks on the wall. Four of them. And a new one, on the next hook. The cold feeling is mixed with a tension now, an excitement, a stirring in his groin. He wraps his arms round one of the overalls, burying his face in it, breathing in the smell that has gone sour and tainted, like the rest. He remembers, rubbing his stiffness against the stains.

She didn’t tell Detective Sergeant McCarthy about her broken night, of course, when she went to the police station that afternoon. The day hadn’t started well. She had missed her train and arrived in the college just in time to go straight into her first class. She felt jangled and disorientated. She wanted to say to the students, ‘I’m too tired to do this now. Can we do it later?’ At coffee break, there was a note on her desk, asking her to phone DS McCarthy at Moreham police station. He wanted to see her as soon as possible, and he was free that lunchtime. She wasn’t hungry, anyway.

She was bracing herself for another inquisition about the article, but he didn’t mention it at first, and she thought maybe she would get away with it. Instead, he asked her about the Thursday-evening encounter, going over and over the details, clearly trying to work out what she had seen, what she had imagined, what she had not been able to see. He was a tall man with fair hair and unfriendly blue eyes, and she found him intimidating. He was trying to push her into giving him definite answers to his questions, and there was very little she could be sure about. She hadn’t seen the woman she often saw on the opposite platform; no, she didn’t see her every week, but she’d been there for the past three or four weeks.

She didn’t know if the woman used the train every Thursday. She’d usually been there last term, but Debbie hadn’t been at the station in the evenings over the summer – there were no classes. Evening classes had started again at the end of September. She’d certainly seen the woman since then, and she’d certainly been at the station for the past few weeks
– three? Four? She couldn’t be sure. Yes, she waited on the platform; no, the rain wouldn’t make any difference, the platform was sheltered; no, she couldn’t be certain she wasn’t waiting on the ramp or the bridge, she hadn’t looked;
yes,
she had seen a man; no, she couldn’t identify him. Over and over it they went, until at last he said, ‘Thank you, Miss Sykes, you’ve been very helpful.’ Meaning, ‘You haven’t given me much I can work on here.’

He did talk about the article then, about how it was unwise, how she shouldn’t have talked to anybody, about the undesirability of having a high profile when a killer such as this was on the streets, about being careful and about telling them at once if she had any reason to think anyone was watching her. Debbie felt an impotent anger at having to explain and excuse her own actions. She hadn’t done anything!

She left, feeling wrung out and exhausted.

Debbie stayed at her desk until after five, then packed some work into her briefcase to finish at home. It weighed a ton, and as she came to the stairs, she pushed the button for the lift, in case it was already there. She heard a distant clang, and decided not to wait, but headed down the stairs to the basement exit.

She heard the lift clunk to a halt as she hurried down the stairs. She should have waited for it. Then she heard it moving on down towards the basement. Someone must have called it from below. She looked at her watch – five-thirty. She might just make it in time for the next train. She heard the lift doors open below her as she hurried down the last flight of stairs.

It was dark. Someone had turned the lights off, and she didn’t know where the switches were. The open lift doors illuminated the bottom of the stairwell, but the corridor to the exit was in blackness. She felt uneasy in the darkness, and hurried round the corner to the doors. As she reached them, she had a sudden sense of someone behind her, close. She spun round but there was no one there, just the dim shadows. The clang of the lift doors made her jump, and she heard the lift hum into life.

She pushed through the doors and into the alley, where
the light of the streetlamp calmed her nerves. Her talk with DS McCarthy had turned her into a wreck. Debbie took a deep breath, looked round her at the groups of people walking down the alley, the lights from the shop windows, open late now for Christmas, and telling herself firmly that everything was normal, she walked briskly to the station.

It was Thursday again, her long day. Debbie had a class from nine till twelve-fifteen, a tutorial group from one-thirty till three and her evening class at six. At the beginning of the term, Peter Davis had tried to put a nine o’clock class on her timetable for Friday morning, but Louise had put her foot down and after some heated discussion he had agreed that Debbie could have her half-day in lieu on Friday morning
for the moment.
‘“For the moment”, my arse,’ Louise said. ‘He’s not pulling a stunt like that and he knows it. Just let me know if you have any hassle.’ College rumour had it that Peter Davis used to count his testicles after a meeting with Louise. Debbie was glad to have her on the same side.

She was tired. Term had run for thirteen weeks without a break, and there was still a week to go before the Christmas break. The students were starting to get tired as well, which made them less responsive, more inclined to complain, miss classes, leave work undone. She decided that she’d take her evening class on the ghost tour. She’d check with Sheila, the IT receptionist, that the room would be open so she could take her students on to the long staircase. It would be particularly spooky at night. They’d enjoy that. Then next week, the last class of the term, they could have a kind of Christmas party, and watch a film – did she have a good ghost story in her video collection? She must remember to book a video.

So much to do. She had half an hour before her class started so she could get some marking done. Had she got all her handouts ready for her first class? Her mind felt woolly and unfocused, and the vague depression that had started two days ago was still with her. As she walked along the corridor to her class, she felt that now familiar sense of menace, so strongly that she turned round sharply to see who was behind her, but there were only a few students on their
way to classes, and one of the caretakers at the far end of the corridor, checking the fire escape door.

Her lethargy lasted through her morning class, and on into the afternoon. She was trying to get her tutorial group to start thinking about their university entrance. The students, who still had one more year at college, couldn’t see the urgency, but Debbie knew from past experience that if they didn’t get started now, there would be a terrible rush next September. ‘You may not care,’ she said, ‘but I’m going to be the one picking up the pieces and I can tell you now that I’m not picking up the pieces for anyone who hasn’t put in the time this year.’

They were neither impressed nor convinced.

Her energy came back a bit by the time her evening class started. The idea of the ghost tour had been a good one. Even the most disaffected, the eye-raisers, the lip-curlers, became enthusiastic about this assignment. ‘Writing horror,’ Debbie told them, ‘isn’t just about writing a lot of gore. I know’ – she held up a hand to silence some objections – ‘some writers write excellent gore. What I’m saying is you don’t have to, and if you aren’t a very experienced writer, it’s difficult to write convincingly. Let the readers’ imagination work. Let them frighten themselves.’ She read them an extract from Shirley Jackson’s novel,
The Haunting of Hill House,
the passage where two women huddle in a locked room listening to something not human pounding on the doors in a deserted corridor, and feeling for entry to the room where the women are trapped: …
The little sticky sounds moved on around the door frame and then, as though a fury caught whatever was outside, the crashing came again and Theodora saw the wood of the door tremble and shake, and the door move against its hinges
… They listened with the intentness of real interest until Debbie finished reading.

‘That’s crap, that,’ volunteered Shawn. ‘You want to see that bit from
Scream
when –’

‘Not films,’ Yvonne said. ‘I think that was great, that, Debbie, it was really …’

‘What
did
come through the door?’ That was Nargus.

‘What do you think?’ Debbie was enjoying herself. There was a confused mixture of voices as each one tried to think of
something horrible enough, and disagreed with each other’s suggestions. ‘So you see,’ Debbie said, ‘everyone thinks something different was on the other side of the door. Shirley Jackson never tells you, because what you can imagine is much worse than anything else. She just describes what happens and you do the rest.’

‘That’s crap, that …’ But Shawn’s voice lacked conviction now, and Debbie felt she’d got them into the right mood for the ghost tour. She took them to the locations she’d got stories for, trailed part of the way by one of the caretakers, one she didn’t know, who concealed his interest by studying fire hoses and testing the doors of empty rooms. When they got to the highlight, the long staircase, she led them through the IT suite to the old fire door, and pushed the bar down to open it. The door opened on to a landing halfway up the staircase. The spiral stairs ran up into shadows and down into shadows, illuminated by a single light. She took them up to the top, and showed them how the doors, one on each landing, were firmly nailed shut. Then she took them down to the bottom, to show them the door leading out on to the lane that ran behind the building. She put her briefcase on the floor and turned the handle of the outside door to demonstrate that it was bolted and that no one could get in. Then she told them the story.

‘… coming up the steps behind him.’ Debbie finished to a satisfactory silence. Then there was a hubbub of questions, interest, appreciation. They went back to the classroom, and she set up the assignment. ‘For next week, please, a first draft of a ghost story, set in a place you know well. I want you to convince me, and I want you to frighten me. OK?’