Black Flowers (35 page)

He was a huge man: surely the one I’d seen in the van below my flat that night. Half of him was illuminated by the floodlight at the top of the lawn; the other half was in shadow. The one eye I could see was looking directly at me.

And he was holding a shotgun.

We stared at each other for a few silent seconds before he began walking towards me. As he reached the corner of the bunker, I realised I couldn’t stand up any more. I fell down, ended up on my back. And then, a moment later, he loomed directly above me, blotting out the whole world.

Walk quickly, but don’t run
.

Try
not to run.

Hannah emerged from the undergrowth, back onto the dirt track at the corner of the fence. It was much brighter out here now. There was a floodlight near the entrance, and it cast an angle of brightness over the field in front, a rough, crinkled shadow of mesh across it. But she only looked that way long enough to make sure nobody was coming out. They weren’t. She turned and headed immediately back up the path in the direction of the road.

Walking quickly.

Her heart was running, though.

It’s okay
, she thought. It was simple: if she could get back to her car and drive away then it would be all right. Because Neil Dawson was in there, sealed away within the compound, and her old family would take care of him and anything he knew. They’d dispose of his car too. All of it would just disappear. If anyone remembered the message he’d left, she could make up a story about phoning him and it being nothing. Nobody needed to know she was ever here. Nobody would ever have to know anything about this place.

Most of all, she wouldn’t have to be
here
any more.

She could do that.

Hannah faltered, but forced herself to keep going. The darkness, the silence, felt like it was pressing tight up against her back, and it was fear that pushed her forward again. Ahead of her, to the right, she caught sight of the pylon: a malformed grid, darker black against the night sky. Already, she could hear it humming ominously.

You can do anything
.

And again she faltered – this time right on the lip of the hill.

She turned, glancing behind her.

The light through the gate was still visible from here, just smaller and more insignificant, like someone had dropped a torch on its side. But even from this distance she could see the tiny nub of darkness on the field in front. The smallest of shadows.

Someone was at the gate.

Hannah stood there.
You can’t go back
. Every instinct in her body told her to turn around and keep going. And she could run now – the car was no more than a minute away. The fields around her were empty and dead. Nobody would know she was ever here.

You can’t go back
.

But that was the voice of a terrified little girl. One who had been brutalised her entire life, beaten down and made to feel insignificant and always scared. Who had never known what
safety
was until its embers had been breathed carefully into life through years and years of love. And maybe Hannah was that girl, but she was also another one entirely, and all the shades inbetween.

Hannah, you can do anything
.

And before she could think about it any more, she ran back down the hill. The night-time world juddered around her, a green-black haze with a spot of light dancing in front of her, growing larger and larger as she approached.

When she reached the gate, the figure there stepped closer. Not touching it, but coming as far forward as possible to meet her.

A little girl. She was mostly just a silhouette against the light, but Hannah could see enough. She had long dirty-blonde hair, pulled into rough bunches, and she was wearing an old-fashioned dress, and the expression on her face made Hannah pull up slightly. Her heart was thudding, but not from the run.

She got as close to the fence as she dared and crouched down. Her jeans tightened around her thigh.

‘Hello,’ she said softly. ‘What’s your name?’

The little girl didn’t reply, but lifted her head slightly.

Hannah said, ‘Can you let me in?’

For a moment, there was nothing. After a few seconds, the girl looked away to one side, then back – right at Hannah – and nodded. She whispered back, and her voice was so small and frightened that Hannah understood what a risk she was taking, even considering trusting this stranger. And yet there was something else there too. A sense of determination beyond her years.

Fierce little thing
.

The little girl said. ‘Will you help me?’

Hannah nodded.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I will.’

After he’d opened the padlock and the door, the man dragged me into the bunker with one hand – just grabbed a handful of my jacket, hefted me inside, then threw me down in the opposite corner from Ally. The collision jolted me so badly that I blacked out.

The next thing I knew I was coughing so violently I was nearly being sick, almost choking. Aside from the pain, I had no real idea where I was or what was happening. The white tiles beneath me were shockingly cold. When I opened my eyes, I saw my own hand pushing violently against the wall beside me,
leaving smears of blood. There was a shadow over me, and it felt like my stomach was raging with fire.

Ally was screaming.
Shrieking
.

I rolled my head quickly to the side and saw her through the gloom in the cell. She was over by the window, one foot chained to the leg of a steel table, and she wasn’t screaming because she was being hurt. She was screaming at the man I realised was standing with one foot pressing down on my ruined stomach.

‘You
bastard!’
She was spitting at him. ‘You
fucking bastard!’

He took his foot off me and moved towards her instead. Immediately, she fell silent: backed away as much as she could, her bound hands held up defensively in front of her.

‘Hey,’ I said.

The man ignored me. His back was almost wider than the door he’d dragged me in through. Through the pain, I tried to think of something, anything, that would distract him.

‘Hey,’ I said louder. ‘Your father’s dead.’

That stopped him moving.

Very slowly, he turned around. In the darkness, I couldn’t see his face. He walked back and stood over me again.

‘I saw him in the hospital,’ I said. ‘He’s dead.’

He crouched down above me. I caught the smell coming off him. It was awful – he reeked of woodland and freshly dug graves. The anger was beating from him: waves of heat.

‘I put a pillow over his fucking face.’

It wasn’t hard to get the hatred into the lie, to make it sound convincing. Right now, I wished I’d done it. It would have been something, at least.

He knelt down on my upper arms, pinning them to the floor. The weight of him was pulverising. My biceps felt like they’d just been crushed completely. The pain was impossible to bear, and my body screamed for it to stop, but I couldn’t do anything.
Shit shit shit, I can’t cope, I can’t cope, get away NOW
. All I could do was blink, again and again, and think that if he stayed
over here with me then there was at least a chance help would arrive in time for Ally.

The first punch was only a light jab, but it knocked my thoughts off-centre. It took a second to realise it had even happened. Ally began screaming – just plain screaming this time. The man drew his fist back properly.

I looked to one side. Through the open door of the cell, just before he hit me again, the last thing I remember is seeing the flowers growing out there.

Through the open door of his cell, Sullivan can see the flowers that grow in the garden out there. Even in the sunlight, they are pitch-black. They seem to colonise the land like mould, drawing his attention away from the apple trees beyond them. Without the flowers, and what they are, it would be a curiously idyllic scene – he can hear birds singing, for example, and they sound happy. They are oblivious to what’s happening to him in here, tied to this chair.

The man hits him again. The chair rocks onto its back legs for a moment, and everything blurs.

The view through the doorway gradually swims back into view, and he remembers where he is. He blinks away blood and hears a rasping sound, then a hock. The man has just spat onto the grimy white tiles of the bunker floor. Sullivan’s head lolls to one side and sees it there, then turns loosely back to the man, who is standing before him, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

They lock eyes – as best Sullivan can anyway.

Behind his hand, the man starts giggling to himself.

Sullivan isn’t even sure why. Perhaps he has seen the damage he’s inflicted, which Sullivan himself can only feel, numbly guess at. It’s so much that it doesn’t even matter any more. The man has hit him a lot – always in the face, because that is where true sadists concentrate their attentions. Our faces are important to us because they define our identity, which is why torturers disfigure them in particular. Partly because we fear it beforehand, and partly because others fear it afterwards. And yet perhaps that is at odds with what is occurring
here. Because this man does not intend to let him live for others to see. And because Sullivan understands that there is more to a person than what he or she looks like to others.

His head rolls again, his vision turning back towards the open door and the black flowers out there, incongruous in the sun. As the man begins beating him again – harder now, perhaps determined to get this over with – Sullivan’s mind is knocked free. The black flowers, he thinks. Once the seed is planted, it’s inevitable the flower will bloom. He thinks about Clark Poole and what he did to little Anna Hanson, and how everything, really, comes back to that. He wonders at how the structures that grow from such terrible ground can become so elaborate, so strange.

And then he realises he can see her.

He thinks it’s a dream at first. Or worse. His thoughts have become detached by the constant stream of blows and perhaps he is being visited by ghosts or an angel. Perhaps she will grip his hand in a moment and take him away with her.

But no, he does see her. She is there.

Anna Hanson. No, of course, not her. Charlotte. She is standing in the doorway of the bunker, blocking his view of the garden now. The man hasn’t seen her – he is still at work, exhausting himself. But as Sullivan’s head is knocked back and forth, he sees her. Every time he faces that way, she has moved a little closer to the shotgun the man has leaned against the wall by the door.

Closer.

Her expression is full of terror. Despite that, he would smile if he could. She is so brave doing this. It must be enormously hard, because he knows how badly she is scared of this man, and she knows what happened the last time she dared cross him.

Closer.

Nobody has any right to expect her to be brave again.

But she is.

Sullivan closes his eyes, almost losing consciousness altogether. The last thing he remembers seeing is the little girl picking up the
shotgun and raising it quickly. Anna Hanson. Charlotte Webb. In his mind, there is no longer a difference. It no longer matters.

And then, before Sullivan can think anything else, the world explodes in crimson and black.

Hannah lowered the shotgun.

It had been a controlled shot. She’d aimed, tightened, squeezed. The stock had juddered against her shoulder, jarring her, but not badly. It was the noise that was worst. The explosive bang seemed to have sucked all the other sounds out of the world, and her ears were ringing emptily now it was gone.

As the ringing subsided, the screams returned.

Hannah glanced across at the woman on the other side of the bunker – little more than a girl, really. Dawson’s partner. She was crouched down by a steel table, hands tied, and appeared to be trying to clench herself into the smallest ball possible, while still peering over her arm at the sight across from her.

‘It’s okay,’ Hannah said.

It was still hard to hear her own words, and she wasn’t entirely sure whether she was shouting or whispering.

The man that must once have been her brother was lying in the far corner of the bunker now. His head was gone, along with most of his left shoulder. The force of the shot had blown the rest of his body clean over the man lying on the floor. Hannah presumed that was Neil Dawson. It was hard to tell – he was on his back, entirely still, and his face was a mask of blood.

Hannah stared down at Dawson for a couple of moments, then at her brother’s body. At the moment, she felt blank. But as bad as this was, it wasn’t so bad, she thought. There was an odd sense of things slotting into place out of sight, things she didn’t understand but felt right – as though it would always have come to this eventually, and that it had needed to.

She cracked the shotgun to one side, and the spent cartridge clicked backwards through the air. She knelt down beside
Dawson, made sure his airways were clear, and gently rolled him onto his side.