Darkside

Tonight he was on with Lynne and Jen. He liked Lynne, who was giggly and sweet, but wasn’t so keen on Jen, who smelled of cigarettes and teased him about his girlfriend. Girlfriend, she always said. How’s the girlfriend, Gary? Why don’t you bring your girlfriend to the Christmas do? We’d all love to meet your girlfriend.

Jen could go screw herself. He doubted anyone else ever did.

Right now she was bitching about a woman she’d seen in a pub wearing yellow stilettos. Gary thought yellow stilettos sounded hideous, but he was still on the wearer’s side.

The radio was tuned quietly to Lantern – the local station – which played old chart stuff and made him drum his fingers and think of school discos.

Mrs Eaves’s alarm beeped and Gary picked up his torch. Turning lights on at night could be disastrous. Residents who had only been in bed for an hour would stir like grizzlies coming out of hibernation and start to dress themselves in wobbly anticipation of another day growing older in the garden room. Torches took care of that.

There were fourteen bedrooms on the first floor and Gary knew that Violet Eaves could be in any one of them apart from her own, Gorse. All the rooms had twee names like Gorse and Heather, which were supposed to be Exmoor-centric. Whoever had chosen them had started grandly but must have quickly realized that gorse and heather were the only really recognizable flora the moors had to offer, and had been forced into crap names like Sedge and Blackthorn and – feeblest of all – Moss. Gary reckoned it was Mr Cooke’s wife who’d done it. She was always putting her finger in the Sunset Lodge pie.

The old house was a maze of turns and steps and nooks and ramps. Two rooms here, three there, up two steps, round a corner to three more rooms. The beam of his little torch danced about like a firefly as he trod quietly along the corridors.

No sign of her. Gary stood still on the wide landing. He’d have to check the bedrooms; it would not be the first time Violet had tried to climb in with someone else.

‘Violet!’ he hissed, even though when she sleepwalked she never responded to sound. ‘Pain in the arse!’ he muttered, but he didn’t really mean it. When she was awake, Violet was one of his favourites. Even at the age of ninety-two Violet had a sparkle. She would hold his hand and call him ‘such a good-looking bay’, then wink at him, because she’d been blind since she was seventy-five. It was an old joke but a good one. Then she would touch the rings that were stuck for ever on her gnarled fingers, and count off her husbands.

‘Eddie – never spent a penny on anyone but herself. Charlie – her was a good one, that’s why her died, of course! Only the good die young. Another Eddie, same as the first – never go out with an Eddie, young man, you’ll have nothing but worry and debts! And that one’s Matthew. Mattie, I used to call her, and her used to call me Viola, like in the Shakespeare, see? I was seventy-two when we got married and her was seventy. My toyboy. Always save the best till last, that’s what we used to say to each other. Always save the best till last.’

She’d pat his hand and look into the past, which was somewhere over his left shoulder.

Then she’d cock her head and say, ‘Is that the biscuits?’

Standing here in the dark with his torch making a bright disc on the carpet, Gary smiled. Violet just looked confused if you shouted ‘HELLO!’ straight into her face, but she could hear a biscuit tin opening at a thousand yards.

He heard what sounded like a scrape of furniture and hissed down the corridor: ‘Violet?’ and set off again. He hadn’t gone ten paces when he heard – from the open staffroom door below – the faint beep of Violet’s alarm going off for the second time.

Miracle. She’d found her way home.

He turned back, went down two stairs and turned a corner, then up two more to Gorse.

He’d expected to find Violet standing by her bed, but she’d already got back into it.

Gary stood in the doorway. ‘All right, Viola?’ he said very softly. He didn’t want to wake her, but if she had woken herself, he wanted her to know he was there. There was no answer. Asleep. Good.

Out of habit he flicked the torch over her sleeping form, and frowned. There was the minimal lump in the bed that was Violet’s diminutive body, but he could not see her head. Like everyone in this place, Violet’s hair was naturally white, but once a month the stylist came and gave all the heads a good blue rinse. He should be able to see her head.

Gary moved closer to the bed, angling the torch. Nothing but the white pillow.

‘Violet?’ he asked carefully, suppressing the silly panic that told him Violet’s head had somehow fallen off.

He leaned over the old woman and almost laughed in relief. She was sleeping with her head under the pillow – that was all!

Gently he lifted the pillow.

Underneath it was Violet – her eyes closed, her toothless mouth puckered neatly, and a flower of blood blossoming on her forehead.

Blood.

Gary Liss stared in confusion at the blood and the pillow and the old lady. Whatever order he looked at them, they made no sense.

I have to call Paul. He’ll know what to do.

That was the only thought Gary’s numb brain could come up with. Paul was the smart one. Paul would take care of this. Because he sure as hell couldn’t work it out.

Somewhere down the long tunnel of his dulled senses, Gary Liss heard the alarm across the doorway beep one last time. He started to turn, started to open his mouth, started to think.

But before he could complete any one of those actions, everything went black.

* * *

There were footprints in the snow behind him leading all the way back to Sunset Lodge, but the killer knew they would not give him away.

He used the same snow to rinse his hands of blood.

The night was cloudy, without a moon, and the village slept like Bethlehem – in blissful ignorance of how it would be changed by morning.

He was about to step out of the alleyway when he caught sight of a movement at the end of the road, or, at least, under the dull orange reach of the farthest streetlamp.

Out of the blackness at the edge of the known world came a single foxhound. Its nose swept the snow ahead of it, its brown velvet ears swung as its head turned this way and that in response to the scents of the village. The hound’s lean body glimmered under the light and, even from here, the killer could see the shining hide slip easily back and forth across the dog’s ribs.

From the depths of a deep-sea dream, the rest of the pack came out of the darkness and into the light. Silent as wraiths, smooth as syrup, tails swaying, snouts seeking, the three dozen big hounds moved between the houses at a languid jog, as if by night the village belonged to them.

Behind the pack the huntsman took shape. Bob Coffin, with his short, bowed legs, his flat cap and his old brown Barbour, creased and crinkled. He held a whip but didn’t look as if he planned to use it. He didn’t have to: the hounds trotted ahead of him in perfect harmony and total silence. Even when a small dog yapped from somewhere behind them, they ignored it and moved on.

The killer stayed where he was in the shadows, hypnotized by their approach. The sight was strange, yet strangely calming. He felt himself suddenly unable to move, and disinterested in doing so, even if it meant he was seen. The hounds possessing the darkened village in the fallen snow were compelling to watch.

The first dog drew level and raised its head towards him. Their eyes met briefly, then it dropped its nose to the snow once more – as it had been trained to do on pain of death: the hound that puts its head in the air to look for the fox has no place in the hunt. The killer watched the Blacklands pack move past him in a liquid jigsaw of brown, black and white, with only the sound of eager breathing moving the air around him.

Then Bob Coffin went past him too.

The huntsman glanced briefly at the killer and touched his cap in a market-day hello, never breaking his brisk, rolling stride.

The killer watched the hounds pass under the streetlights and wink out in the darkness beyond as if they had