The Kimota Anthology (6 page)

His car shot out of the queue of traffic, halfway across the road, and then stopped dead. It didn’t stall or judder to a halt. The power simply disappeared in the blink of an eye.

In that split second, as his mind raced, John caught sight of something in the rear view mirror. Eyes framed in the glass, staring and wide, surrounded by sacks of wrinkled skin. He smelled something like stale tobacco smoke and heard that rustling whisper once again.

Then the shadow of the lorry fell across the bonnet.

“Are you going to be okay?” Donna gave Gill a comforting hug.

Gill dried her eyes and forced a smile. “I’ll be fine. I just need some time to get on top of this. It was such a shock...”

“It’s bound to be a shock. Lord, if the police had told me Mike had been in an accident like that I would have gone to pieces. You’ve just got to focus on what the doctor said, Gill. He’s going to be okay.”

“He might not be able to walk...”

“He might not be able to walk, but he might be able to. Nobody knows yet. There’s no point in worrying about what might not happen. And you know John. If there’s a slim chance of fighting his way through, he’ll do it.”

Gill nodded. Donna always had been a comfort, ever since school when she became adept at soothing hearts broken during those passionate teenage romances. She couldn’t get her own life together however much she tried, but she was a carer for others.

“Are you going to be okay looking after Christopher until John’s home? I could always stay over to help.”

“Thanks, Donna, I’ll be fine. Mum and dad are coming tomorrow for a while. I just hope he doesn’t have any more relapses with, you know, what’s been wrong with him.” An image of a wizened face and a hunched, spindly body flashed across her mind. She passed a hand over her eyes and blacked it out. “Things have been so bad since we moved in here. Sometimes I think there’s a jinx on us. All these problems with our relationship, and then Christopher, and now this. I feel there’s something sucking the life right out of us.”

“You musn’t say those kinds of things, honey. It’ll only make it worse. You’ve got to concentrate on the good.”

Donna didn’t understand - how could she? - but Gill put on a brave face. “I’m going to give Christopher his afternoon nap now. Do you want to come up with me? Then we can have a cup of tea in peace.” She poked a finger into Christopher’s tummy and made him chuckle.

They harmonised on Rock-a-Bye Baby as they climbed the stairs and then Donna took the teddy bear while Gill opened the door to Christopher’s new room. She paused in the doorway and then looked back at Donna with a puzzled expression. “Where’s his cot?”

She found it in the nursery in its old place under the light. “John must have moved it back here this morning. I wish he’d talked it over with me. He’s always doing things without consulting me.”

Donna saw the concerned look on Gill’s face and attributed it to thoughts of her husband in hospital, drugged up on painkillers, unable to raise even a smile.

“And I told him to take that thing with him and dump it. Why doesn’t he listen to me?”

Over the cot, hanging from the light, was the old dummy.

Gill laid Christopher down and tucked the blankets around him. “Oh well, no point in thinking about that now. Let’s get that tea.”

Gill selected a get well card for John from the newsagents on the edge of the estate. It seemed like such an insubstantial, pathetic thing, but she wanted to feel like she was doing something and at least it would show she had been thinking of him when she visited that evening.

Christopher squirmed in his cuddlepack as Gill went up to the till to pay for the card, but he calmed down when the newsagent, a ruddy-cheeked woman with tight brown curls, began to coo over him.

“Are you settling in all right, love?” she asked between the baby talk.

Gill said they were. She couldn’t bring herself to tell her about John’s accident, the gruesome details that would have to be recounted, the gossip and constant checks on his health that would ensue.

“Because you’ve been there a few months now, haven’t you. Makes a nice change.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, people don’t seem to stay there long. A few months. A year at the most. When I was younger, kids used to move into a house and stay there all their life. Now they’re always on the go, always trying to get bigger and better places. Their lives suffer, but they can’t see it at the time. That’s why we don’t have communities these days, you see. No one stays around long enough to know their neighbour’s first name.”

Gill agreed with her, but there was something in what she said that sent tremors running through her mind. “Did an old man ever live in our house?” The words sounded innocent, but to Gill the question hung in the air like a threat.

The newsagent wrinkled her nose and thought. “There’ve been so many and I haven’t really known them all. I think there was, just after it was built, but I can’t think of his name for the life of me.”

“What happened to him? Did he die?”

“I don’t know, love. He...”

“Yes, he died.” The voice was cold and hard. Gill turned round and faced a woman who had been flicking through the magazines when she came in. She had bitter, dark eyes and a face that had grown comfortable in a sour expression. “What do you want to know about him for?”

“I just wondered...”

“Nobody mentions his name any more, the ones who remember him.” She looked at the newsagent. “You know who he was. I came in to tell you when the police came for him.”

The newsagent turned slowly red. “Oh,” she said quietly.

The woman turned back to Gill. “He was a pervert. An old, sick bastard.” She caught at her breath and composed herself. “He used to get the children to go to his house for toffees and cakes and to watch his TV. Then one of them went missing, a boy, a little boy. Never did any harm to anyone. And two more, twins, a boy and a girl, the cutest little pair, just six years old.” Tears came up into her eyes and she blinked them away. “We knew it was him. The police got him before we could. They took him off in a van and we never saw him again. The bastard died before he got to court.” She heaved in a lungful of calming air. “It was nearly 25 years ago now. They never found them, the kids. They never found my Tommy...” Her voice trailed away along with the bitterness and she suddenly looked as if she had been beaten about the face.

“I’m sorry,” Gill said weakly. She hugged her arms around Christopher and hurried out into the cold, fading light.

Gill had to know more, although her rational mind was screaming at her to leave it alone. For hours she scoured the estate, talking to anyone old enough to remember that dreadful time. No one could recall the man’s name, or if they did, they wouldn’t speak it aloud; but no one had forgotten what he did. He had moved into the house when it was first built, a sour, irascible man who never spoke to his neighbours. He smelled of cigarettes and sweat; they all remembered that. No one found out where he had come from, what his job had been, if he had had a wife, or what he did in the curtained house all day. He was a blank slate, and eventually he slipped into the background so people barely noticed him on the occasions when he trawled along the streets. Even when the first child disappeared, no one thought of him. When the twins went, neighbours suddenly made a connection. “You’re just blaming him because he doesn’t fit in. There’s no evidence at all,” the police said, until they were chided into investigating and discovered a lock of one of the twins’ hair. The old man never admitted it, gave no clue as to what had happened. They found him dead of a heart attack in the cells one morning. The police had already torn up the garden and checked the floors of the house for disturbance; there was no sign of the missing children, nothing to put their parents’ memories to rest. “But who was he?” Gill pleaded. “What motivated him?” No one could give her an answer.

As twilight drew in, Gill became lost to her brooding. She tried to convince herself the old man was merely a terrible part of her home’s history, lost to time and best forgotten. The frightened child at her core refused to accept it. She wondered about the nature of evil and its longevity until her head was swimming.

The visit with John had been harrowing, but ultimately hopeful. The doctors were a little brighter about their prognosis; after an intensive and grueling period of physiotherapy they expected him to walk again. But it almost killed her, watching him lie in that hospital bed, in constant pain, disorientated through the drugs. It awakened feelings that had been buried so deeply Gill thought they would never see the light of day again. She loved him and she would die if she lost him. Before she left, she had wheeled the portable payphone into his room and insisted the nurses leave it there in case he wanted to talk to her at any time of the night or day.

The house was silent apart from Christopher’s regular breathing on the baby monitor. Donna had babysat during visiting hours and Christopher had been as good as gold. Through the open curtains, Gill could see huge flakes of snow drifting down through the blackness to lay a white film over The Green. Inside it was warm and cosey - she had turned the central heating up a notch - but she couldn’t relax without John there. The TV was an irritation. She couldn’t bear to put on any music. She guessed she wouldn’t be able to sleep that night.

It was quiet, so deathly, unnervingly quiet.

She closed her eyes to listen to the sound of nothing.

The morphine was a snow-white highway that led John away from the real world. Occasionally he would surface from the cocooning warmth, but the harsh light from the corridor outside his room and the thousand razor cuts of shattered bone and torn muscle forced him back under. In the white world of his dreams he saw faces and thought thoughts and everything made perfect sense. He knew why and he knew who.

Sometimes when he found himself back in his broken body it was still difficult to tell if he was hallucinating or not. The quality of light didn’t seem quite right; sounds were distorted. And once he thought there was someone standing in the room on the periphery of his vision. It could have been a black smear on the wall, or a shadow, but he thought he saw it move. An enormous spider, dark and angular.

The pain churned in his gut, and as he slipped back into semi-consciousness, he had the sudden, alarming feeling that there was something he had to do. Someone he had to warn.

And then he thought of his son, Christopher, and his blood ran cold.

Gill pulled herself sluggishly into waking from dreams of snow. She was shivering. The curtains were still open and the world outside was white, crisp and unmarked by footprint or tyre track. As she rubbed her arms to warm her, the fuzziness in her head cleared enough for her to realise that it shouldn’t be cold; they had been leaving the central heating on all night since Christopher’s problems had begun.

Her immediate thought was for her son. The baby monitor was still broadcasting the sound of his breathing, although it seemed a little slower which she attributed to a deep sleep. Satisfied he was okay, she walked over and felt the radiator, her muscles aching from the uncomfortable position in which she had been slumped on the sofa. It was stone cold.

She swore under her breath and went to the kitchen to investigate. The pilot light in the boiler had gone out, the first time it had ever done so, and although she followed the instructions to the letter, she couldn’t get it to re-ignite. Finally, her tiredness turned to irritation and she gave up; she would have another attempt in the morning when she was refreshed.

Wandering into the dining room, she realised how hard John’s accident had hit her. Her head was thick like she was walking through oil, and an almost dreamlike quality pervaded everything, in the sparkling of the lights or the muffled sound her feet made as she shuffled across the floor. She slumped into a chair, her eyes wandering to the clock without registering the time - 3.30am - as a powerful feeling of regret for all the lost hours of argument swept over her.

She sat there for what could have been ten minutes or an hour wrestling with her complex emotions when her gaze randomly fell on something glistening. It was above her, on the ceiling. She stared at it blankly for a while, watching it curiously without even thinking what it was. Suddenly her mind snapped to awareness.

It was an icicle. There was another one nearby, and another, each about three inches long, the light from the standard lamp sparkling off their frozen surfaces. Icicles. Her mind jumped and stumbled. In the dining room? It was cold, but not that cold. On the ceiling. Coming down from above.

Her mind stumbled once more before the terrifying realisation dawned on her, and then she was up and running, through the house, up the stairs, along the landing. She paused for the briefest instant outside Christopher’s room before she steeled herself and swung open the door.

The blast of cold air hit her like a howling wind across the arctic wastes. Her skin went numb, her teeth chattering instantly. The room was sparkling, the walls and ceiling and floor alive with glittering pinpricks of light. It took Gill a second to realise that everywhere was covered in a sheet of ice. Every square inch of Christopher’s room had been frozen, and in some areas the ice was almost half an inch thick.

Christopher’s cot stood in the centre, its wooden bars shiny with a sheath of hoar frost. Over it, the ice-covered dummy spun slowly, glittering in the rays of the landing light.

“Christopher!” Gill shrieked as she propelled herself across the threshold. She stopped almost instantly. It was like being in a meat freezer; the cold sapped the energy from her limbs. Despite her violent shivering, her only thought was that Christopher was dead, frozen rigid in his sleep.

It was only then that she saw it - for it was certainly not a him. It was sitting against the wall staring at the cot, its long, thin arms supporting it as it leaned forward slightly. When Gill broke the silence, its huge, white eyes flicked in her direction and then, slowly, it started to laugh. The noise was high-pitched and reedy and it set her teeth on edge. Those spindly arms folded around its knees, and then it rocked backwards and forwards, the laugh slowly subsiding into a perverted giggle. She could feel the waves of black emotion radiating out from the thing hunched on the floor - the loathing, the malice, the perverse glee in suffering.