The Beast (4 page)

an?
Nan?
’
I raced through the kitchen, past the upturned table and the broken chairs, past the blood-spattered cabinets and the shattered glass.

‘Good grief !’ Ameena muttered, appearing at the back door just as I charged through into the living room.

‘Nan, where are you?’ I called. My voice was absorbed by the silence of the house. The living room was a mess, but not in the same league as the kitchen. The coffee table was in pieces and the TV was face down on the carpet, but there was no blood. No Nan, either.

I made for the stairs, then pulled myself together enough to collect one of the legs of the broken coffee table. It was a short piece of wood – about forty-five centimetres from top to bottom – but it was thick and it was heavy and I’d be able to do some damage with it if I had to.

‘Any sign of her?’ Ameena asked, joining me at the bottom of the stairs. She’d had the same idea as me, and now carried a knife she’d lifted from the wooden block in the kitchen. She held it with the blade flat against her wrist, half-concealed, but ready to strike.

‘Not yet,’ I said. I called up the stairs. ‘Nan? Nan, are you up there?’

A groan. A whimper. Faint, but there. I was halfway up the stairs when I heard it again, three-quarters of the way before I realised it had come from the living room.

I turned, bounded back down half a dozen steps, and that’s when I realised I had been wrong. There
was
blood in the living room. So much blood.

It started on the wall just by the kitchen door, a metre and a half off the ground, and streaked straight upwards – a thick smear of it in one continuous line across the ceiling.

The trail stopped almost exactly above the couch. The whimper came again and I took the last of the stairs in a single leap. Ameena was already pulling the couch aside. I saw the police uniform before I was halfway there.

She lay on her back, her hands on her belly, one eye wide open, one battered shut. Blood pumped through her fingers, ran down her arms, seeped into the carpet,
drip, drip, drip
. Half of her face was a swollen mess of purple and black. Her one open eye stared upwards, but not at the ceiling, at something beyond the ceiling that only she could see.

Her breathing came in shallow gasps, two or three a second, in-out, in-out, in-out.

‘What do we do?’ Ameena asked.

‘Call an ambulance.’

‘What? But... they’ll bring more cops. You’ll get—’

‘Call an ambulance!’ I shouted. ‘She’s dying!’

There was a moment’s hesitation, and for just a fraction of a second I thought she was going to refuse. But then she was clambering over the couch, reaching for the sideboard, picking up the phone.

I knelt down by the policewoman, wishing I knew how to help her. Her eye was bulging, the pupil fully dilated so there was no colour left, just a circle of black. I had been right last night – she was young. Late twenties at the most.

‘It’s dead.’

I looked up. Ameena was standing over us, the phone in her hand. ‘No dial tone. Weather, maybe?’

Maybe.

Maybe not.

I touched one of the policewoman’s hands, meaning to move it aside so I could see how badly she was hurt – as if the pints of blood painting the inside of the house weren’t enough of a clue.

The moment my fingers touched hers, though, she grabbed my hand and squeezed it tight, clinging to it as if it was the only thing anchoring her to life. I didn’t pull away, just held on to her and let her hold on to me. I wanted to ask her what had happened and where Nan was, but I knew I’d get no answer.

Instead I said the only thing I could think of. A lie. ‘It’s OK. You’re going to be OK.’

I watched a single tear form in her open eye. It trickled sideways, meandering across her temple and over her ear. By the time it dripped on to the carpet, her hand no longer gripped on to mine. I carefully rested it back on her stomach, closed over her eye, and stood up.

‘Someone else dead,’ I said, after a long silence, ‘because of me.’

I hated the matter-of-fact tone of my voice. Hated the fact I wasn’t shaking or crying or screaming about the woman’s death. The cold fact of it was, I’d seen worse.

‘You don’t know that, kiddo.’

But we both knew I was right.

It was happening again. Someone – or something – had come looking for me, and another innocent person had found themselves caught in the crossfire.

I took hold of the table leg again, tightening my grip until my knuckles shone white. I set my jaw, clenching my teeth together. Someone else dead. Because of me.

The stairs passed in a haze. I was at the top before I realised I’d moved. The lights were on up here, all four doors open. I looked in my bedroom, in my wardrobe, under my bed. Nothing there, so I moved on, no longer interested in a trip down Memory Lane. I needed to find Nan and I wanted to find whoever had killed the policewoman. Nothing else mattered.

Nan’s old room, empty. Bathroom, empty. No damage to either and no blood stains on the walls. I turned to the last door and that’s when I did hesitate, taking a second to compose myself before stepping inside Mum’s bedroom.

Her bed was unmade. It must’ve been that way since the morning she’d sent me to stay with Marion. The morning she’d been attacked by the Crowmaster, beaten so badly she was still in a coma. And all because of me.

Her dressing gown lay across the duvet. She’d worn it when she’d talked to me about going away – an all-night conversation in which I’d done nothing but whinge and complain. If she didn’t pull through, that would be the last proper talk we ever had. I pushed the thought from my mind. She’d pull through. She had to.

‘Any sign?’

I turned to find Ameena in the upstairs hallway, knife held ready. ‘Nothing,’ I said, and she lowered the blade to her side. ‘No one’s here.’

‘Great,’ she said, sighing. ‘What now?’

‘We go outside,’ I said. ‘We look for her. We find her. We’ve got to find her.’

Ameena’s hand was on my shoulder. ‘We will. She’ll be OK.’

OK
. Like the policewoman was OK.

‘But we’d better wrap up,’ Ameena continued. ‘Or we’ll freeze in that snow.’

‘We’ll grab coats from the cupboard downstairs,’ I said, turning from Mum’s room and striding along the landing. ‘There should be one about your—’

THUD
.

The sound came from the living room. It was a single low knock; the sound of something heavy hitting something solid.

Ameena had the knife raised in an instant, the other hand on my chest, holding me behind her. But I was beyond that now. For too long I’d relied on Ameena to protect me, when really it should’ve been the other way round.

I pushed her hand aside, more forcefully than I meant to, and crossed to the stairs. I may have been desperate to find Nan, but I wasn’t stupid, and didn’t rush straight down to the living room. After creeping down a couple of the stairs, I squatted down and looked through the gaps in the wooden banister.

Nothing moved in the room below. I tiptoed further down, feeling Ameena close behind me.

I should’ve been watching out for trouble, but as I reached the bottom of the stairs my eyes were fixed on only one spot. A patch of carpet, stained with blood. A patch that should’ve been covered by the policewoman’s body.

‘Where’d she go?’ I muttered, finally looking around. The living room appeared to be exactly as we’d left it, minus one fresh corpse.

‘Maybe she got better,’ Ameena suggested.

‘What, better than “dead”?’

‘Well, you can’t exactly get much worse.’

I stepped further into the room, ready to swing with the table leg. ‘Someone took her,’ I said. ‘Someone came in and took her.’

There was silence in the living room then, broken finally by Ameena asking the question that was bothering us both.

‘Why would someone do that?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘And
who
would do it?’

‘Whoever killed her,’ I said.

‘Nah. They’d have just taken her at the time, surely?’

I dug my fingernails into my palms. ‘Not if they were already carrying somebody else.’

It took a moment for what I was saying to sink in, then: ‘Oh.’

Nan. Had whoever took the policewoman’s body already taken Nan? Just the idea of it made my heart race and my legs spring into action. I ran through to the ruined kitchen and hurled myself through the back door, out into the swirling snowstorm.

‘Nan!’ I shouted, but the falling flakes seemed to absorb most of the sound. I staggered along the path and out through the open back gate, wading knee-deep through snow that was now only faintly tinged with pink. ‘Nan,
where are you
?’

‘Kyle, come back!’ Ameena’s shout was a whisper in the distance. I blundered on, along the back of my row of houses, shouting for Nan the whole way.

The cold gripped my legs up to the knees as I forced my way on. My hands were raised in front of me, shielding my eyes from the driving snow. My village gets its fair share of snow in the winter, but this was like nothing I’d ever seen before. It was too severe, too sudden to be natural. Something had to be causing it.
Great
. Another thing for me to worry about. Always one more thing.

I emerged from behind the houses into the street. The snow covered the few cars here like a thick white fur. Normally I’d be able to see my front garden, but the blizzard made it impossible to see more than a few metres in any direction.

The houses around me were in darkness, but the streetlights were on. For all the difference they made. It might have been early morning, but barely a glimmer of sunlight was making it through the snowstorm. I stood in the pool of light cast by one of the street lamps, making myself as visible as I could.

‘Nan!’ I cried. ‘I’m here! Where are you?’

A hand caught me roughly by the shoulder and spun me around. I found myself looking into Ameena’s scowling face. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ she demanded.

‘I was—’

‘Being an idiot?’

‘No! I was—’

‘On a suicide mission?’

‘What? No!’

‘Well, what then?’ she snapped. ‘Because, from what I can see, you’re freezing to death, standing in plain sight and making a racket that’s going to draw the attention of everyone in town.’ She stepped out of the pool of light, dragging me with her. ‘Not to mention the attention of whatever killed that cop.’

‘I have to find Nan,’ I told her.

‘I know. But here’s a suggestion – don’t get violently killed before you do. Stealth, kiddo. Stealth.’

I thought about the policewoman, and about the blood on the ceiling and walls. ‘OK,’ I said quietly. ‘Point made.’

‘Good,’ she said, giving me a gentle punch on the shoulder. ‘Now, come on, let’s go get warmed up then we’ll figure out what to do.’ She began trudging up the street towards my front garden, glancing at the houses on either side of the road as we walked. ‘It’s just a miracle no one heard you and came out to see what the ruckus was about.’

‘Yeah,’ I said, only half-listening. ‘A miracle.’

‘Didn’t even see a light come on,’ she continued. ‘Must all be deaf, the noise you were making.’

‘Deaf,’ I agreed, trudging along behind her. ‘Yeah.’

I stopped walking.

‘Wait,’ I said.

‘What?’

I looked across at the other side of the street, where I could just make out the darkened outlines of six houses.

‘Why’ve we stopped?’ Ameena was asking. I didn’t answer.

The houses on this side of the street were in darkness too. Now that we were closer, I could make out the lights we’d left on in my house, but they were the only ones on in the entire block.

There were a few vehicles parked along the street – a couple of cars, the van of the window-cleaner who lived at number five – but nothing moved in any direction along the road.

‘Listen,’ I said.

A pause, then, ‘Listen to what?’

‘To nothing,’ I said.

Another pause, then, ‘Are you winding me up? What you on about?’

‘It’s quiet,’ I whispered. ‘There’s not a sound.’

She listened, properly this time, without speaking.