The Hollow Places (3 page)

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.

"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.

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
selected 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.

And he was
afraid of the forgotten things that might clamber up if he allowed
Sarah to ask questions. He had to be empty to do what he did. The
past was gone. The future was unknown. He could only survive in the
present.

He stopped
mid-step, eyes wide, before dropping to the ground and crouching,
holding his breath.

Torchlight
hovered in the mid-distance. He had been moving towards it as
though it was the north star. Now, he flattened himself against the
ground and the light washed in his direction. Head to one side,
eyes open, he saw it sweep past him, then back. Lungs burning, he
drew a very slow breath, knowing that he wouldn't be able to
breathe out again without giving a signalling plume of vapour. He
remained perfectly still on the damp earth as the light settled
beside him. He closed his eyes for a moment, working to regain
control of his desire to see more clearly and his desire to run.
His heartbeat thumped in his ears.