Flesh and Blood (4 page)

I thought, at first, that I’d dreamed the blood-chilling scream that came from outside.

It shook me like a slap in the face. It was some distance away, and heavily muffled by the double glazing, but it was so sharp, so filled with terror, that it cut into my mind like a razor blade. It was a howling shriek of pain.

I flinched, and my eyes popped open. I blinked and squinted in the sudden rush of light from my lamp. Fumbling, I switched it off.

What the hell was that?

I lay absolutely still. There was silence, not even the occasional ticking of the heating.

Lying there, in the calm and the darkness, I wondered if I could have dreamed it. Surely, a sound like that…? Was it one of those vivid dreams you have to consciously shrug off, one of those nightmare impressions that leaves you doubting that you’re back in reality when you wake up? I wanted it to be a dream. After all, a scream in the dead of night was…

My sleep-fogged mind circled groggily around the idea of getting up to investigate. I twisted around on the mattress and looked over at the dim glow of my alarm clock. I’d put it over by the door, so that I couldn’t roll over and switch it off in the mornings.

2:12 a.m. My heart was thumping. How long I lay there for, I don’t know. Several minutes, at a guess. Not a single sound came from outside. With every passing moment, the urge to fling my duvet aside and rush to the window grew stronger. But, at the same time, the continuing silence fuelled my doubts.

Instinct told me that the scream was real. It had knocked me out of sleep. The only time such a thing had ever happened to me before was when a car windscreen had been broken down in the street below my bedroom, years ago. On the other hand, plain common sense said it was nothing but my own imagination.

What if…

Another murder? Like the body by the river? No, we were too far from the territory of any gangs for that to be the explanation. Elton Gardens was almost half a mile down the hill. The scream had
been distant, a lot further away than the Giffords’ house, or the Daltons’, but it had still woken me. It had been distinct. It couldn’t have come from anywhere near the river. It could only have come from the Priory.

I couldn’t let it go. I couldn’t hear something like that and not act. Someone had screamed for their life, someone…

…female. That was a female voice.

Emma! What if Emma was in danger?

I rubbed the last of the sleep from my eyes and quickly clambered to my feet. The room wasn’t cold, but still a shock after the warmth of my bed. I rushed over to the window and peered out nervously. There was a very faint glint of light visible from the street lamps on Maybrick Road, largely obscured by the trees on the Priory’s land. For the first time, it struck me that there was no street lighting in Priory Mews, none at all.

Call the police? More indecision clawed at me. No, if it
was
Emma who was in trouble, then even a slight delay could have terrible consequences. I had to act now! Fumbling in haste, I wrapped myself in my dressing gown and pulled on yesterday’s socks.

I turned and hurried down to Mum and Dad’s room. The door was slightly ajar. A brief glimpse inside told me that they hadn’t heard anything. They were dead to the world.

I said I would write this account as objectively as I could. That’s what a responsible journalist would do. So, in the interests of objectivity, I must record, here and now, that the decision to leave my room that night was a profound mistake.

If only I’d woken my parents, if only I’d listened to the silence and my own doubts, if only I hadn’t been in such a rush to do something heroic, then everything would have turned out differently. Leaving the house that night was the spark that lit the fuse. My suspicions would still have been aroused. I would still have asked questions, and investigated, and tried to find out where that scream had come from, but events would have unfolded in a very different way, and perhaps the worst of them might have been avoided.

The awful fact is, I wasn’t thinking straight. It may be that I was still half asleep, I don’t know. For whatever reason, it never even occurred to me that if it was indeed Emma who was in trouble, she had
a household of adults around her to help. That one simple, obvious thought would have kept me in my room. I would have been very concerned, certainly, sleepless and even scared, but I wouldn’t have been running for the front door.

However, the thought never entered my head. So that’s that.

I ran downstairs, jammed on my school shoes and put my coat on over my dressing gown.

Cold night air pinched at me as I stepped outside. Priory Mews was as motionless as the corpse in the park. There was no far-off rumble of traffic. No stars were visible in the sky, the clouds were hanging as low and thick as they had the previous day.

I stood a few metres from my front door, watching, listening. I hugged my arms in tightly, but couldn’t stop shivering. I tried to breathe as quietly as I could, straining my ears to pick up something, anything that might give me a clue about what to do now. My breath clouded around my face.

Gradually, my eyes were becoming accustomed to the dark. The outlines of my house, and of the Giffords’ and the Daltons’, were slowly filled in with grey-on-grey details. I could see the road surface
beneath my shoes.

Our neighbours’ homes were in complete darkness. Their sleep hadn’t been broken either.

Taking delicate steps, I walked around to the side of our house, on to the grassy area beside our garden gate, heading for the Priory. I had to move slowly, even on the grass, because I still wasn’t sure of the exact layout.

The large rear garden of Bierce Priory was surrounded by a very tall, black wrought-iron fence. At the side, a narrow padlocked gate led on to the steep hill overlooking the park, and the path down to the river.

I stepped stealthily along by the railings. They were too closely placed for anyone to squeeze through, and too high to climb without help.

I stood motionless again, shivering a little less as I acclimatized to the chill of the night. From there, I could just about make out the Priory’s looming shape. It rose up into the sky like jagged teeth.

I watched and waited but heard nothing, saw nothing. I began to doubt myself again. Perhaps there was nothing to hear other than the sped-up beating of my own heart, and the throb of blood
through my ears. Then … I did hear something.

A gasping sound. A sort of agonized panting. And a slight rustling, like feet tramping slowly through long grass.

I felt as if my heart would stop. I reached out and gripped the freezing cold-railings with both hands. The sounds were definitely coming from the grounds of the Priory. Somewhere over to the left. They seemed to be moving away from the building. Towards me.

I screwed up my face, willing my eyes to pick out something I could identify. The gasping sound was getting closer. It seemed almost like sobbing now, like pain and terror crushed down into exhaustion.

Movement!

I caught sight of a shape. Low, close to the ground, moving slowly towards the fence.

Was it someone crawling? I gripped the bars tighter, pulling my face close to them. I couldn’t make sense of the shape for a moment.

It was a dog. Quite a large one. Its head was bent, lolling forward.

I suddenly let my breath go. Just a dog, for God’s sake, probably out for a late-night sniff around the
garden.

But then, as I watched it, my heart seized up once more. As it moved closer I could see it was pulling itself along. Unsteadily, slowly, shaking with effort. At least one of its hind legs was dragging on the grass. The poor creature was obviously in dreadful pain.

I was about to speak. I was about to crouch down, and put out my hand through the bars. Suddenly, I almost let out a gasp of shock, as the dog was pulled back into the darkness.

In a flash, it was gone! It let out a brief, feeble yelp of fright, and then there was silence once more.

Terror froze me to the spot. I’d heard nothing else, I’d heard nobody approaching. I caught a brief glimpse of a figure, quite tall, scooping the dog up in its arms. My hands were gripping the railings so tightly that my fingers hurt. I couldn’t utter a sound. I wanted to shout out at whoever it was. I wanted to yell at them to stop, but my chest felt as if there was an immense weight pressing down on it, and I simply couldn’t form the words.

An intruder? Had someone got into the garden, over the fence, from the park?

A dozen possibilities ran through my head. Of all of them, the most likely seemed to be the relatively innocent one, that someone had been walking their dog through the park. It had run off, been injured by something, and slipped through the railings into the Priory’s grounds. Its owner had climbed over the fence to retrieve the animal.

Was that the source of the scream? Half asleep, had I mistaken the high-pitched sound of the dog’s cries for a woman’s scream?

For a moment, I was almost reassured. This seemed a logical explanation. If, that is, I set aside the oddity of someone taking their pet for a walk at two in the morning, and the creepiness of their snatching it up like that, not to mention the presence of some hazard in the park sufficient to badly injure a large dog in the first place. Yes, that was the logical explanation.

I’ll tell Emma in the morning
, I thought.
There was someone in your garden last night
. I’d tell her I saw it all from my window, and hope she wouldn’t realize how impossibly good my eyesight must have been. Had she been woken by that dreadful sound the poor dog made?
Yes, perhaps you should install some of those motion-sensitive security lights; you can’t be too careful.

Just as I was calming myself down with the full story, I caught another momentary glimpse of the tall figure.

It wasn’t heading away, back to the park. It was striding towards the Priory.

I could hear footsteps clearly now, swishing against the grass. Its outline was bulky, the limp form of the dog hanging out to either side. The figure faded into the darkness. Seconds later, I heard a clicking sound coming from the direction of the Priory. A key in a lock?

Not a dog walker, and not an intruder. Someone from the Priory itself.

Whoever it was hadn’t seen me. They can’t have, or they’d have said something, or done something. They wouldn’t just turn and walk back, not when they’d obviously crept up behind the dog so stealthily. No, they couldn’t have seen me.

My heart was running like a steam engine. Who the hell had that been? Had the scream been the dog, then? What was going on?

I couldn’t hold my breathing back any longer. Mist fogged around my face, the night air rasping at my throat and lungs. I was shivering even more
now, from cold and from horror.

At least they hadn’t seen me.

I felt my way back along the fence, holding on to the railings just to stop my hands trembling. I could feel the dampness of the grass soaking into the sides of my socks and the hems of my pyjamas.

I wanted to run. Back home, into my bed, under the covers, into oblivion.

I don’t know what made me look up at that moment. It might have been some confused effort to find clues as to what was going on with the dog. Perhaps it was a sixth sense, warning me. Whatever made me do it, I wish I hadn’t.

There was a single light on in the Priory. Way up, at one of the top-floor windows. It was faint, shadowy and yellowish, the illumination of a small table lamp or a wall light.

My blood turned cold and my stomach knotted.

There was a face at the window.

It was peculiar and distorted; a strange, twisted grimace that seemed to float in the shadows. It was narrow but its actual shape was indistinct, a horrible shifting mix of darkness and flesh. I was fully fifteen metres away, but I had an impression of age, of folds
and lines, pale sunken cheeks.

I was transfixed, because it was staring at me. Directly at me, with mad eyes that seemed to ask who I was, why I was there. For long seconds, the face stared into mine.

And then it grinned. Toothy and insane. It nodded at me, in greeting.

My nerve snapped. I ran.

I slammed the front door behind me, shaking with fright and gasping for breath. I kicked off my shoes, wrenched off my coat and ran back upstairs.

Mum and Dad were still asleep. Not even the bump of the door or the thudding of my feet on the stairs had disturbed them.

I retreated to my room, pulling the covers over me and shutting my eyes so tightly it made them sting. I tried to blank my mind and think of something nice, or think of anything but the dog, and the figure, and the face.

I tried to piece it all together, but my nerves were too jangled for rational analysis. How had the dog got hurt? Why had the figure grabbed it like that? Whose face had that been?

I thought back to what Mr Gifford next door had
said about the Greenhills. The face was too old to be Emma’s mother, it certainly wasn’t Emma herself, and it was definitely no kind of mask. It had moved, it was alive, I was sure of that. There was someone living there Mr Gifford hadn’t mentioned, that was all. Simple as that. Some elderly relative.

Who had seen me. The figure in the garden hadn’t, but the face upstairs had.

And who was the figure? Too tall for Emma. One of her parents?

What about the scream that started it all?

I lay in bed, trying to calm down. I struggled to rid myself of the slithering fear that something was coming up the stairs to get me. I couldn’t make sense of it all. At that moment, I didn’t want to.

Looking back, I guess even then I could have walked away. Ignored it, put it down to a mixture of misinterpretation and an overactive imagination fuelled by all the fiction I’d read and watched. I could have told myself it was none of my business, nothing to do with me, somebody else’s problem. People say that to themselves every day, don’t they? Turn a blind eye… Hide things away, even from themselves… The elephant in the room.

How I ever slept, I’ll never know. I must have blanked out a couple of hours later from complete exhaustion. The next thing I remember was waking up with daylight on my face.