Silent Playgrounds (32 page)

Suddenly, Lucy was awake. Something was different. Something was wrong. She listened. Michael was making funny snuffling noises in his sleep. She listened again.
Creak, creak
… very faint, very quiet. Lucy knew what that sound was. She’d heard it before. She sat up. It was all right. Suzanne was downstairs. She listened again.
Pad, pad,
quiet as quiet, along the corridor outside their room. She looked at the door. It was shut tight. She looked at the handle, waiting for it to start turning, waiting for the monster to come through the door. Maybe he didn’t know they were there.
Tamby!
Tamby had been in the park.
Like a mouse,
Tamby would say. And Mr McCarthy. He’d said,
Tell me.
But Mr McCarthy wasn’t here. And Tamby wasn’t here. Her eyes felt wet and stinging. She’d find Suzanne. Or her daddy. She’d find her daddy. She looked at Michael who was sleeping. She needed to look after Michael as well.

She climbed quietly out of bed and tiptoed across to the door.
Like a mouse, like a mouse.
She turned the handle carefully. It made a small
click
in the quiet. Lucy
froze. Listened. All quiet. She pulled the door open a little way and slipped out onto the landing. It was dark, but she didn’t turn the light on. The light would bring the monsters. Where was her daddy? It was too quiet. He wasn’t playing his music downstairs. She crept across the landing to the bedroom door. She pushed it open. She could see the bed in the moonlight from the window. It was empty.

Lucy pulled the door shut. Her daddy had gone to the pub. Suzanne was downstairs. She listened again. She couldn’t hear anything. The stairs were dark, and the rooms were dark, she could tell. She started to go down the stairs, but then she looked down into the shadows below her. And she knew,
knew
that the monster was waiting down there, and Suzanne wasn’t there, she knew that as well. She and Michael were alone in the house with the monster and soon it would come upstairs and there was no one to help them at all.
For Christ’s sake, Luce
…
Like a mouse… Be careful… Tell me.
Her chest began to feel tight.

She backed up the stairs and to her bedroom door. The monster might be coming up the stairs now. She could hear Michael waking up, feeling the monster in the house as well. He made a whimpering, just-woken-up noise. ‘Be quiet!’ she whispered as fiercely as she could, and she felt him go stiff and silent. She didn’t know what to do!
Tamby!
She didn’t know if she said it in her head or out loud, but then she heard it. ‘Lucy! Lucy!’ Not a call like in the park, but a whisper, a whisper that seemed to say,
Quick! Now!
She took Michael’s hand and they stood at the bedroom door
listening. He was shivering. The voice came again, ‘Lucy!’ And it came from the attic stairs.

The attic! The attic with its darkness and its dusty smell and the strange noises on the ceiling. Her chest was tight. She couldn’t
think!
She wanted her mum. She wanted Suzanne. Mr McCarthy had told her, ‘Be careful, don’t be alone’, but her daddy had left her alone. She wanted Mr McCarthy. She could go to Tamby, go up the dark attic stairs and Tamby would keep her safe.
Be careful, little Luce,
he’d said. The whispered call again, ‘Lucy! Quick!’ She peered through the darkness, and there on the attic stairs, like a sign, was her peacock feather. Tamby!

She pulled Michael’s hand and he came with her out of the bedroom and she ran with him up the twisting staircase. The room was full of
junk.
Her daddy said,
Throw it out!
But her mum put it all in the attic and now it made strange shapes in the darkness, and Michael whimpered as he tripped and nearly fell. She had to look after Michael. She was the oldest. ‘Tamby?’ she whispered. Where was he? She could see a light across the room, a light coming from a hole in the wall, the
roof space
where the smell of dust came from. There were spiders in the roof space, and dark and dirt.

‘Lucy!’ And he was there, on the other side of the light, on the other side of the roof space, a dark shape like the cut-outs they made at school. If she and Michael could get through, they would be safe. She pushed Michael through the little door in the wall, a
secret door,
and then they were crawling over flat boards and over a little wall, and there was another secret door in front
of them. Lucy pushed Michael. She thought the monster would be coming up the stairs now, coming to the secret door, coming into the roof space behind them, and it would pull her into the darkness and she would never escape.
Tamby!

Michael disappeared, blocking the light for a moment and leaving Lucy in the dark, then she was tumbling through the little door herself and there was light from a bedside lamp and she looked round. She was in Sophie’s room in the
student house.
There was a secret door into the student house. She looked round to find Tamby because she had been so afraid that the monsters had got him, that he was
dead
for always like Emma and like Sophie. And she saw Michael lying on the floor, and she saw feet in muddy trainers and then she knew, as she looked into his face, as her chest got too tight for her to call out or scream, that the monsters had got her too.

Suzanne woke suddenly from blankness. Her head was swimming and she felt cold and shivery. She tried to focus her mind. She’d fallen asleep. The pills had knocked her out as she sat in the chair. Her mind felt confused and blurred. She was in her study. Something had woken her. She had a vague image in her mind of a voice calling somewhere in the distance:
Lucy, Lucy!
It must have been a dream. She heard voices in her dreams all the time. It had come from – where? She had heard it close by somewhere, calling. Dreams. Her head spun and she let herself slump back into the chair. Michael and Lucy were playing, that was it. They were
in a field, a dark field, and they were playing a tiptoeing, hiding game, and someone was calling them in one of those muted calls, almost a whisper,
Lucy! Lucy!

She could hear a creaking noise, a soft thump, and then she was awake again, fighting against the dizziness. She needed to wake up, get back to Jane’s.

A car engine started up outside her window, revving loudly for a few seconds, and then there was a screech of gravel as it pulled away. She heard another screech as it turned at the end of the road. The noise woke her a bit more. She wondered if it had disturbed the children. Michael sometimes got upset if he woke up in a strange place. She checked her watch. It was gone ten-thirty. Jane was looking out for them. It was all right. Jane knew where she was. She would have called her if Michael had woken up.

She stood up, swaying slightly, and carefully negotiated the stairs. It was like being drunk, only not so pleasant – more stupefying than euphoric. It was dark on the upstairs landing. She picked her way down the next flight of stairs, feeling her hands contaminated from contact with the walls, wiping them on her jeans.

Jane’s house was dark. She had expected to have to negotiate an encounter with Joel, but the downstairs lights were off and the rooms were empty. They must have gone to bed. She went through to the kitchen and got herself a glass of water. She was tempted just to pull her clothes off and fall into the bed Jane had made up in the front room, but she needed to check on the children. She didn’t want to carry the smell of smoke into the bedroom with her. She could have a shower – it
would only take a minute. She went quietly along to the bathroom. The silence of the house closed around her. It must be the pills making her feel detached and distant, but the house felt empty, deserted.

Her shower woke her up. She listened again as she dried herself and pulled on her dressing gown. The silence worried her now. She could hear the sound of cars on the main road, but inside the house there was nothing, and the house felt dead. She went back along the corridor, the low wattage bulbs on the landing casting a dim light, towards the room where Lucy and Michael were sleeping.

The night light was off. The beds were mounded silhouettes in the darkness, the bedding humped up where each child was sleeping, the pillows … She looked again, trying to see through the darkness. The pillows looked empty, hollowed as though the sleeper had left. She moved into the room, waiting to see the forms of the sleeping children gradually come clear in front of her. But as her eyes became more accustomed to the dark, she could see that the mounded bedding was pushed back from the mattress, the pillows hollowed where the head of each sleeping child had been. But they weren’t there any more.

The children were gone.

The phone lines were busy. It was the first hot night of the summer and people were out enjoying it. It was almost closing time, the first drunk and disorderlies were in the cells, a pub fight had resulted in a stabbing, cars were disappearing from their parking places or
sometimes just losing their vital organs. One indignant caller reported the loss of his wallet, his radio and his front offside wheel. A celebration down by the canal basin had resulted in a near drowning, and now there were vandals or something in one of the parks. ‘It was a car,’ the caller insisted, ‘going through the gates of Bingham Park.’ The operator took the details, wondering what kind of priority a bit of illicit driving in the park would have. Probably looking for somewhere quiet to park up for a shag, he reflected. ‘And I managed to get the details,’ the caller went on. ‘Or most of them.’ The operator took down part of a number and a description: metallic. Red. A Corsa or a Punto. He told the caller they’d deal with it, and passed the information through. Someone would have to go and look. But there were a lot of things with higher priority than a bit of fun in Bingham Park. The phones were ringing again. It was going to be a long night.

McCarthy was driving towards Carleton Road. His mind was focused on one thing: keeping Lucy safe. How much Joel Severini knew or didn’t know, the extent of his involvement, all of these were things that needed addressing, but were pushed to the back of his mind by the pressing need to ensure Lucy’s safety. His radio crackled his call sign, and he pulled over and responded. Five minutes later he was outside 12, Carleton Road, where the cars, blue lights flashing, were already pulling up.

Lucy could smell the floor underneath her, damp and sour. She struggled her legs against the stuff that was
holding them, but she couldn’t get them free. It was dark. She could feel Michael lying next to her, but he wasn’t moving. She listened. It was still, but there was a dripping sound, and sounds in the distance like cars on the road. It was cold. She was shivering and she couldn’t stop. She felt sick.

It had all been black. He’d covered up her eyes and her mouth and she couldn’t
breathe,
and he’d carried her and he’d carried Michael and he’d put her down somewhere hard where it smelt of petrol. Then she knew they were in a car, and he was driving them off, and she’d started to cry, but quietly, because he mustn’t know.

She rolled over. There was light coming through a window behind her, but not very much light. She couldn’t see anything in the dark, and there was a smell of dust, like the attic, like the roof, and a smell like old burning, like Suzanne’s house after the fire. There was a
draught
blowing against her face. And there was the
drip, drip, drip
like a tap.

Her eyes wanted to cry, but she pushed her hands into them, angry. She was the oldest. She wasn’t going to cry. ‘Michael,’ she whispered. Michael would be frightened and she had to look after him. She was the oldest. He was making noises, breathing in snorts and grunts that would have been funny if they’d been at home, in bed, but it wasn’t funny here. ‘Michael,’ she whispered again, and pushed him with her feet. She felt him move and flop back. The Ash Man had given them sweets. Michael knew better than to take sweets from strangers, but the Ash Man had said ‘Eat them!’
in such an awful voice that Michael had eaten them. They were bright red, and the red had run down Michael’s chin and dripped onto his jersey along with the tears that he was crying, but quietly, because the Ash Man had got hold of Michael’s face and said, ‘Shut
up
!’ in a whisper that was more frightening than a shout when Michael had cried.

Lucy knew what to do when he had given her the red sweets. It was what she did when Mum gave her those special pills for
vitamins.
She pushed her tongue into the high place inside her cheek. She had hidden the sweets and then she spat them out when he wasn’t looking. But Michael hadn’t known to do that.

She heard someone moving in the darkness. He was there! He hadn’t gone. She had to lie still, she had to be quiet. He mustn’t know she hadn’t eaten the sweets. He was talking now, muttering to himself like Mum sometimes did when she was working on a painting, but he sounded angry. She tried to hear what he was saying. ‘… and get rid … keep together … won’t listen, won’t do it
right.’
He seemed to be arguing with himself, and that made Lucy frightened.

It was hard to hear properly, because sometimes Michael’s breathing was very loud and then sometimes it was so quiet it was like it wasn’t there. Lucy pushed her fists into her eyes again.
Tamby?
she said, in her mind. But Tamby wasn’t there any more.
You keep out of the way, little Luce,
he’d said, and she’d tried, she’d really tried. She was trying now, trying to be brave, but the tears just kept coming and coming and she didn’t know what to do any more. The monsters had got
Sophie, and they’d got Emma, and they’d got Tamby, and now they’d got her and Michael.

Stuck in a trap.
Like a mouse.