But this time she had a knife. She grabbed it from her pocket, dragged the stool from the dressing table across the room and leaped up onto it. She started to saw at the rope. But the rope was like diamond. This was a new nightmare. Her fingers kept slipping off it. The blade kept flying away from it.
‘No!’ he said. His voice! He could say things! ‘Lisa, no! Don’t touch it! You can’t cut it, girl. You can’t undo it. Don’t you get too close.’
She stopped, helpless, staring at his face, loving him. And he looked back at her, and it was the best thing. It was the best thing. But she was still helpless.
He looked quickly upwards, over his shoulder. His voice was a gasp, limited by the rope, but not as limited as it should have been, and that was terrible, that implication that this was usual for him now. ‘I can’t stay long or they’ll notice.’
‘You don’t deserve to be in there!’ She hadn’t wanted this to be about her and him, but she couldn’t control a single thing she might do or say now.
‘I had a bad life, love. We kept it from you.’
She wanted to ask him — ridiculously — she realized, if what she was doing now was okay. Or if she had betrayed him as well as the family. But there was no time for that. ‘Dad, I’ve been given. . they call it the Sight?’
He made a strangled cry, took another moment to breathe. ‘No, not my girl. That means you can see all the things I have to look at every day. This is another punishment they’re doing to me!’ It was terrible to hear him so fearful. A dad shouldn’t be afraid.
‘This is about. . There’s kids, Dad, okay? She kills kids. She worked for Rob. Do you know of a Mora Losley?’
He made the sound again. ‘Mora Losley? Bloody Rob! Bloody Rob! He took everything! Took you! He’s up here now!’ Alf was suddenly gleeful, swinging back and forth, though the effort made his voice crack up. ‘In his own Hell!’
‘Dad, how can we. . get her?’ She’d nearly said ‘nick’, but that would have sounded wrong.
He seemed to gaze up into something that Ross couldn’t see. As if he was looking over things, and into things, reading distant signs. ‘What haven’t you seen? What haven’t you seen? Oh, you’ve done stuff. You’ve done such a lot.’ She tried not to feel pride at hearing that. ‘But. . Oh, there. The empty boxes.’
‘What, from his office?’
‘Yeah. I was shown him from up here, when he was alive and I wasn’t. They showed me what he was up to, as he took over my old life. I don’t know how much it’ll help, but it’s something. Sometimes he drove out to his lock-up-’
‘His lock-up?! We haven’t found that. Where-?’
‘And sometimes, when he could get away with it, he. .’ He looked quickly around, as if something was approaching. ‘Can’t stay,’ he said. And he turned, looking scared like a child, and twisted out of the way before something could see him. And the ceiling vomited shut, and he was gone.
Ross’ legs collapsed under her. She fell to the floor and stayed where she lay, looking up. She could see his face still against the white. She felt the horror of it washing over her. She started to sob. She felt she should remain here, that she should always be here to talk to him, to offer him some tiny comfort.
Her Tarot card reading had turned out to be true. She had found an ongoing hope through someone who had been a sacrifice. She had found something that could help. And she had found something for all seasons that she could return to. That she would return to. She could tell him about her revenge and that would make it better for him. And his being here was horrifying, but it would also make her life better. They still had each other. Slightly. Horrifyingly.
She stood up, and she left the room, and she walked faster and faster down the stairs of her childhood, with her phone already in her hand, making the call to Quill, and she got all the way to her car and drove off without once looking back.
TWENTY-SIX
It was early morning when Kevin Sefton parked in a space which only someone with a permit was entitled to occupy, put his job logbook in the car window, to keep the traffic wardens at bay, and stepped out into the tidy streets where he had grown up. An old lady walking her dog looked him up and down, noting the way he was dressed, then his face. She’d soon be on the phone to the Neighbourhood Watch, he thought.
He walked along the wide pavements, down the tree-lined avenues leading to the main road. He saw school kids walking past, and he stopped himself thinking about his own childhood. He was either about to escape who he was or about to fall victim to it. Dwelling on it wouldn’t help either way.
He went to the deserted bus stop, and looked straight down the road. He tried to focus every aspect of the Sight into the distance, where the low sun glinted off pools of water in the potholes. He could hear it now: the distant sound of an engine that was different to those of the cars and lorries passing by. It slowly came into view, for just him. The number 7 to Russell Square, running on its Sunday timetable, with those silhouettes inside it, the darkness pulsing from within it.
He suddenly had doubts. Was he now committing suicide? He steeled himself, having never deliberately walked into anything worse than this. But he knew he could do it. The kids who’d spat at him, at a place just like this, would never have imagined that. They didn’t understand what they were creating when they made him.
This was his sacrifice.
He stuck out his hand. The bus slowed and came to a stop right in front of him. It waited, its engine idling. It was full of darkness. He knew, absolutely, in that instant, what waited inside for him. But, in a moment it would move off again if he didn’t act now.
He made himself put one foot in front of the other. He stepped onto the platform at the rear. He couldn’t see inside, and it was cold in there. Of course it was. He was about to enter a ghost. He took a deep breath and stepped forward into the darkness.
It was like being squeezed into something awful inside his own head. It reminded him, for a moment, of the horror they’d all been suspended over in the attic. And then he was through that, and into-
It rushed at him. Oh God, oh God, he’d stepped straight into Hell! He’d deliberately stepped into Hell! Because he hadn’t believed in it! Every inch of the bus was full of them, and it was more of a bus than any real bus could be; it was his school bus and every other sort of bus that had ever transported things that fought. They were on him, a mass of children, bigger than him, and yet he was still an adult. They put their fingers into his eyes and mouth, and down his trousers and up his arse, and they told him all that was wrong with him, pushed it into him like shoving wads of wet paper into his ears and brain until he knew it. They made him eat the whole bus, pushing it down into his throat until his body bulged and his muscles locked and cramped around it, until he curled himself up round it. And all the while the laughter directed at him was like white noise, them above him and pissing down on him like continual British rain.
This was going to go on, he realized, forever. And he’d deliberately sought it out! He put his hands up to shield his head, and then they started on his hands instead. Tiny nails scrabbling into every pore. Was he only trying to punish himself?
No, absolutely not. I’m not doing this to myself. You’re doing this to me.
He felt a slight give in the pressure around him. He conjured up another thought of what he could compare this to: the act of being born. The ultimate violence. The ultimate passage from comfort to horror. It hadn’t been the pain that he’d needed to go through; he had to face the fear. Understanding that now made him realize he could hear a real engine noise under the horror that was controlling his body. If he fought his way backwards, and he could, then he could reach the rear platform, and let go of the rail and just escape. The choice was clear.