Beyond Here Lies Nothing

model of the estate. He wasn’t quite ready to accept that. Such an admission would indicate a state of mind that he wasn’t prepared to face.

In fact, admitting that those sounds were real would be akin to embracing madness.

Downstairs, he sat on the sofa and began to read the rest of the notebook.

Apart from the Pollack twins, there was a third child in the flat. A baby.¹⁰

Jack Pollack died when he was thirteen. He was found hanging from a rafter in the squat where he lived.

Daisy Pollack turned to prostitution when she was fourteen, then drugs. She was dead in a gutter by the time she was fifteen.

Nobody knows what happened to the baby.¹¹ There is no record of the twins having another sibling — itself a surviving twin who’s brother was stillborn, if local gossips are to be believed.¹² After the events in the Needle, when it seems that some kind of spirit came through and wrecked the flat, the family disappeared — they seem to have vanished off the face of the earth, up until the car crash that killed the parents. All the stories and rumours told on the estate make specific mention of the twins and what happened to them, but not once have I been told about a baby.

But there was a baby. I’ve seen it. The baby came to me in a waking dream. It crawled across the ceiling of my room and spoke to me, telling me that nothing ever ends and nothing ever begins, and saying that Captain Clickety will return.

The baby is already here. It’s found its way out of the woods and has come to finish the story. The story is that of the baby… should I tell him?

¹⁰Should I tell him? I have no idea. But I must make a decision soon.

¹¹Whose baby was it? Were the Pollacks its real parents? Did Mike take it in out of duty or pity, or for some other reason?

¹²And why not? They’ve been right about everything else so far.

CHAPTER TWENTY

SHE KNEW THAT she was dreaming, even though she was asleep, so when she woke up she was at first puzzled by her surroundings. The room was dim, with just a desk lamp to light it, and instead of trees and moonlight glinting between dried leaves, there were solid walls, a desk — upon which she’d been sleeping, with her head resting on her hands — and a variety of medical apparatus.

“Wha…?” She could barely speak. Her mind was fogged. She didn’t even know what day it was, let along what time. She could see the night sky through the tiny basement window.

“Wanda,” she said, remembering her name. Miss Wandaful, said a soft voice inside her head. She smiled, rubbed her short hair with her hand, then reached around and scratched the back of her neck.

She’d been working late, as usual. These days there was little to go home for, and the police station offered a solace that her tiny one-bedroom flat no longer seemed to supply. Not since Katherine had moved out, anyway.

She closed her eyes. Thought about Katherine’s naked body; her smile; her dark, shining eyes; the way she’d loved to sleep with the covers pulled up over her head.

She missed having Katherine around. The truth was, she missed having anyone around. Before Katherine had arrived on the scene, Wanda had grown accustomed to being alone. She’d stopped being lonely and learned to enjoy her own company. Then Katherine had moved into the flat, hitting her life like a storm, and everything changed. She was still — even now, eight months after the relationship had ended — waiting for things to return to normal.

Then again, if DS Craig Royle decided to step up and take Katherine’s place, she wouldn’t need anything to go back to normal. They could go ahead and change again, and she’d be happy to wake up with him every morning instead.

It had been Royle she’d dreamt about. They’d been standing at the centre of a grove of oak trees, moonlight dappling their naked bodies. His erection had prodded her in the thigh and she’d reached out for it, grasping him. He’d either hissed or taken a sharp intake of breath, and his cock had pulsed gently in her palm, thickening.

Then she’d woken up, head down on her desk, the lamplight making her wince when she opened her eyes.

She stood and stretched, feeling the tiredness thread through her muscles. She carried out a few calf and hamstring stretches, the ones she used to cool down after a long run. Then she reached behind her head, grasping for the centre of her back, one hand after the other. Muscles relaxed, she turned to look for her bag. She didn’t really have a spot where it belonged, so she tended to drop it in a different place every day. This meant that each time she left the lab, she went though the same performance of trying to find the damn thing.

“Where the hell are you…?” She peered under the desk, along the work benches, on the floor by the sink, but the rucksack wasn’t there. She’d jogged into work this morning and forgotten to leave her gear out to air. She remembered bunching up her lycra leggings and T-shirt and shoving them into the bag, with the intention of taking them back out later, when she got the chance.

“Christ, my fucking memory!” Frustrated, she stalked around the office, trying to locate the bag. Because of the distraction, it took her a little time to realise that there was something different about the room.

She stopped and stared at the gurney. It was empty.

“No way,” she said, turning to inspect the rest of the room. There were too many dark corners. She wished she’d switched on the main lights, but now she was clear across the other side of the room, far away from the switch. Reaching the lights would involve walking across the floor, in full view of whatever was hiding in there with her.

“Don’t be stupid. There’s nothing here.”

Her words were answered by a short, sharp tapping sound, like the tip of a broomstick hitting the tiled floor.

“Fuck.”

The sound came again, and this time she could make out where it was coming from. Behind her.

Slowly, she turned around. The lamp seemed to dim, but she knew it was just her mind creating the effect. There was nothing wrong with the lamp; the bulb was new, she’d changed it herself a couple of weeks ago. Fear was causing the illusion of increased dimness. It wasn’t real.

This time the tapping sound went on for a couple of seconds — tap-tap-tap-tap-tap- tap — and she was reminded of the sound Long John Silver’s wooden leg had made on the ship’s deck in an audio version of Treasure Island she’d listened to as a kid. She used to love that tape. It was scary and exciting at the same time. But this situation, right now, was simply scary.

“Who’s there?” The answer was another rapid succession of tapping sounds on the floor.

Wanda began to back away. She held out her hands in front of her, warding off whatever might come tap- tapping out of the shadows. The sound followed her, advancing towards her across the room, and soon she began to make out the form of her pursuer.

The scarecrow was hopping along on the tip of its wooden stake, moving in short, quick jerking motions. Its upper body twitched forward with each separate hopping motion, the hat wobbling but not falling from the wooden head. The black and white photo of little Connie Millstone was stuck firmly back in place, her drawn-on eyes staring out from the flattened sheet.

Wanda continued to move away from the scarecrow, raising her hands, opening her fingers, trying to ward off what was becoming increasingly inevitable. Where was her bag? Her phone was in there… she glanced over at the desk, where the landline was located. Too far away; she’d never make it, even if she ran. She might reach the phone, but there wouldn’t be enough time to actually make a call and get someone down here to help.