The Bones of You (6 page)

I rinsed out the mugs and put them away, glad that at least I was growing tired. There was still enough time to grab some sleep before I had to be at work for another shift, my last of the week.

I switched off the kitchen light and stared at the darkness, wondering if it was a friend or a foe. I was never afraid of the dark as a child: I’d always liked it, felt safe within its folds and creases. But this darkness wasn’t mine; it was someone else’s, and its nature was difficult to judge.

After a while, I left the darkness to its own devices and headed back upstairs to my bedroom. My footsteps were unfamiliar on these stairs, and I had to keep reminding myself that they were mine. I still wasn’t used to the house, nor was it yet accustomed to me.

Moving up the staircase, I had the strange sensation that I was being followed—or perhaps simply watched. I felt eyes upon my back, staring hard. I imagined the gaze as a near-physical force that helped to propel me upward. When I reached the landing, I stopped and just stood there, waiting to see if the sensation would go away. It didn’t. I felt as if there were someone standing behind me, perhaps a couple of steps down, watching my back.

Slowly, I turned and looked back down the stairs. The staircase was empty, of course, but the darkness at the bottom seemed busy, as if things were moving around, twitching in the small space; things that were far too small, or much too quick, for me to see.

I made my way to my bedroom and shut the door behind me. I stood and listened for a few seconds, to check that there were no footsteps following me across the landing to stop outside the room. Silence. I shook my head and turned away from the door, walked across to my bed. The room was dark. The nearest streetlight was something like a hundred yards along the street outside, so I didn’t get much light in the evening. I climbed slowly into bed, pulling the sheets up over my body, seeking out their protection.

I turned onto my belly and stuck my hands under the pillow—it was a habit from childhood; I’d always slept that way when I was feeling vulnerable.

I opened my hands and spread out my fingers under the pillow, wriggling them around to get comfortable. When something touched my hand, I was too shocked to register the contact: small, cold fingers slowly closed around my right palm. I reacted violently by pulling my hands out from under the pillow.

I pushed myself into a press-up position, then tucked my knees under my lower body and knelt on the mattress. After a moment’s hesitation, I grabbed the pillow and hurled it across the room. There was nothing underneath. No hands. No arms snaking up from the gap at the bottom of the cheap pine headboard.

I was alone in my bed. Of course I was. Anything else would be silly.

I left the pillow off the bed and forced myself to lie back down, this time on my back. As I lay there and stared at the ceiling, wondering how long it would be before the sun came up, I tried not to imagine someone lying directly beneath me, separated from me by the mattress and the bed frame. Lying on their back and staring up at the bottom of my bed, smiling.

FIVE

Signs of Being Eaten

The following day at work, I gave Evans a wide berth and basically kept my own counsel. I saw Carole only briefly, during my lunch break, and she said that she was looking forward to dinner that evening before rushing off to the back office on some admin errand.

Part of me wished that I hadn’t invited her, but another part of me—probably the part that hadn’t had sex for almost a year—was glad that she was coming around. I didn’t know why I felt the need to deprive myself of female company; it wasn’t as if that was part of the court agreement, and it wouldn’t affect the time I had with Jess. If anything, it might be good for Jess if I had another woman around the house, someone to talk to, to give me advice and make sure I didn’t get too self-absorbed.

Perhaps I was simply trying to punish myself.

When my shift was over, I made my way out of the warehouse and across the car park. I walked fast, not wanting to become involved in any gossip with coworkers finishing at the same time, or, worse still, receive an invite to the pub for an after-shift pint.

I made it to my car safely. Starting the engine, I sat and stared at the dismal car park, with its dull gray surface, the tired industrial buildings, and the vehicles parked there. It felt like a metaphor for my life, but I didn’t understand the exact nature of what it was telling me.

I pressed the CD button on the stereo, and Otis Redding started singing to me. My mood became less brittle, the edges softening. Good music nearly always helps; it’s like medicine for the soul.

I drove to a supermarket on the way home, a large store that stocked a lot of stuff the smaller shops near my house didn’t seem to order in. I had no idea what I was going to make for dinner, but I did feel that it was necessary to make a bit of an effort. I hadn’t treated Carole as well as I should have. She’d done nothing to deserve the way I’d been ignoring her, or the fact that I’d failed to even give her a call after our last date. The only thing she was guilty of was liking me and wanting to deepen our relationship…but in my eyes, that was tantamount to a criminal offense.

The supermarket wasn’t too busy, so I managed to get around quickly. I decided I’d fall back on the old single man’s standby and cook steaks. Not exactly adventurous, but in this economy they were still out of the ordinary enough to be classed as a treat. I bought a couple of potatoes for baking and some coleslaw from the salad counter. Then I selected three bottles of decent white wine—they were on a three-for-two offer, and I thought we might get through at least two of them.

As I walked back along the meat aisle, I was distracted by the sight of a row of cuts of pork. As some kind of marketing campaign, a severed pig’s head had been positioned at the front of the display. I couldn’t tell if the head was real or a plastic fake. Its beady eyes seemed to watch me as I walked past, and when I turned my attention away from it, the head looked like it belonged not to a pig, but a child. I looked again, and the illusion died.

I was tired. Last night’s weird episode in bed had left me unable to sleep properly, and I’d woken up again not long afterward. It was the first time in a very long time that I’d got to watch the sun come up. The association wasn’t a good one. Most of the regrettable acts in my life have been rubber-stamped by the onset of a sleepless dawn.

I paid for my provisions and went back to my car. The air was cold again—this autumn cold snap was lasting longer than anyone had expected. As I put my carrier bags in the trunk of the car, I heard a distant firework from somewhere on one of the housing estates at the top of the valley in which the supermarket was located. They were always setting off fireworks there, whatever the time of year, but the sound made me realize that Halloween was approaching. After that, it would be Bonfire Night, the old celebration when fireworks were actually meant to be set off to commemorate the burning to death of a political activist. I didn’t think many of the current generation of kids knew who Guy Fawkes was. His role in the event seemed to have been forgotten.

But unlike Bonfire Night, Halloween was a growth industry these days: there was a whole Americanization of the day happening, to the extent that it was even called a holiday. When I was a child, it was a low-key affair: carved turnips with candles inside, a few desultory groups of kids in bad ghost costumes roaming the streets and knocking on doors to recite a poem for money—
the sky is blue, the grass is green, have you got a penny for Halloween
.

It was all different now: decorations in windows, pumpkins on sale in all the shops, expensive costumes, and the call of
trick or treat
drifting through the towns and villages of the country.

I drove back home with these thoughts in my head, remembering that everything changed; nothing could ever stay the same. The nature of existence was that things evolved, people moved on, took on all kinds of influences. The idea of this depressed me. I was the kind of guy who liked things the way they were: if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.

When I got home, somebody had stuffed a bunch of takeaway flyers through my letterbox. I kicked them across the floor and took my bags through to the kitchen. Despite the big push by supermarkets, I didn’t think the people in this neighborhood would make too much of a fuss out of Halloween.

When I returned to pick up the flyers and shut the front door, I saw my favorite goth girl—Pru—was once again standing in the street outside the house next door.

“Hey.” She said it without even looking at me.

“You’re here early. I wasn’t expecting your habitual vigil until much later.”

She gave a wan smile. I didn’t really know what that word meant until I saw her expression: it fit the description perfectly. “Yeah…well. I was feeling a bit low. Thought you might be able to cheer me up.”

Today she was wearing something a little more colorful. Topping off her black trousers and long black coat, there was a bright red scarf. It was thin, pulled tight around her neck, and made her look like someone had cut her throat.

“Is it your usual cup of tea, madam?”

“Yes, please.” She left off staring at the house next door and walked along the footpath, pushing open my gate with one of her booted feet. She approached the door and stood before me, her pale face looking even paler than the last time we’d met.

“How are things?”

She shrugged. “Not good. They must be worse than I thought if I’m coming here, to see a total stranger, for a bit of human compassion.”

Oh, she was good. I was really starting to like her.

“Hey,” I said. “What about me? How bad is my life if the only company I can stand is some teenage misery-addict who only wears black and thinks I’m a prick?”

She laughed, and it sounded good. It sounded nice and natural. I wasn’t sure why the two of us were drawn together in this way, or what the hell we expected to get from this odd relationship, but it was starting to feel comfortable.

I wondered if I was showing the girl this level of kindness because of my own fragile relationship with Jess, or if I simply liked her. And what did she want from me? I hoped it wasn’t something that I was unable to give; the last thing I wanted was more complications in my life. But this didn’t feel anything like a teenage crush: I didn’t even think she saw me that way, as a source of attraction. This thing—whatever it was—felt platonic, asexual. She was a pretty girl, but not my type; from what little I could tell, I wasn’t exactly her idea of Prince Charming, either. I didn’t have enough black in my wardrobe, for a start.

I thought then of Carole, and of the undeniable attraction I felt toward her. She and I had a fire between us. The flames were small, but they were growing. There was nothing like that here, between me and this mixed-up girl. Perhaps what drew us together was a shared sense of pain; the fact that we each recognized in the other some form of emotional trauma.

What the hell was it anyway that conditioned human beings to think about relationships primarily in terms of sex? Was I so desperate for the suggestion of physical attention that I’d begun to see everyone as either a prospective lover or someone to avoid in case they wanted to have sex with me?

There it was again: that tendency of mine toward self-absorption.

This abstinence thing wasn’t quite working out how I’d hoped.

“I’ll put the kettle on,” I said and turned away, expecting Pru to follow me inside without being asked. This scenario was turning into a habit, and I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about that.

I made the tea before speaking directly to her, just let her get settled at the kitchen table.

“Here,” I said, setting down a mug before her. “Done just how you like it, with a kilo of sugar.”

I watched as she sipped her drink, and then sat down and stared at her, watching her pale face, her stubby black fingernails, as she handled the mug of tea.

“Tell me some more about your father.”

She put down the cup, smiled weakly, and then blinked a few times. “He was…strange. Looking back now, I can see that he was an obsessive. He dragged me and my sister across the country, moving house twice a year so that he could write about whatever serial killer he was interested in. His books didn’t sell a lot, but they did well enough to pay the bills and to give him a certain reputation in his field. He was on TV a few times, a talking head on documentaries about killers. I have them recorded. I watch them when I’m feeling bleak.”

“Sounds like you had quite the unconventional upbringing.”

“Yeah, you could say that.” She drummed her fingertips against the table, then stopped, realizing that it was an annoying habit. “My mum died when I was very young. My sister and I were all the old man had left, and he didn’t even know how to love us. His work…his work consumed him.”

“So what happened next door?” I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to know, but it would distract Pru and give her something else to talk about. I didn’t want her to cry. I really couldn’t have handled the tears.

“Katherine Moffat?”

I nodded.

“She lived with her boyfriend, a guy called Benjamin Kyle. She was into black magic, kinky sex, all kinds of weird shit. According to my dad’s book, Kyle was pretty normal when they first met, but she pulled him down, got him involved in all kinds of freaky stuff. She controlled him using sex. She was a striking woman: over six feet tall, dark hair, quite beautiful by all accounts. He was suckered in; he did whatever she asked of him. Before long, they were luring kids into the house and killing them in the cellar. Part of some ritual, some black magic rite: blood and sex and screams.”