Dark Summer, page 13
It was only when the sound of someone hammering on the side door filtered through to me that I came back to reality. I drifted through the house, feeling like I was moving through a nightmare. The stone passage was cold on my bare feet. The side door looked strange, as though it was from another time, another place. I opened it. Clem stood outside, his fist raised to knock again, clad in his usual attire of stained coveralls and a grim expression.
“Jesus, lad,” he grumbled, “you look like you’ve seen the business end of a threshing machine.”
“Do you need something?”
His beard twitched and he craned his neck to peer down the hall behind me. “So…is it…that haemophile…” He coughed. “Is he here?”
I rubbed my aching head. “No.” He nodded, appearing to relax. “He wouldn’t hurt you,” I said, “even if he was.”
“I know that.” He looked uncomfortable, glancing at anything but me. “Just want this to stay between us. That’s all.”
“Want what to stay between us?” He shifted on his feet, glowering out over the hillside. When he still didn’t speak, words rattled out of me instead. “I’m sorry I lied…”
He looked confused. “About what?”
“About him.”
“Ain’t none of my business, son,” he said. “No reason for you to tell me who yer shackin’ up with.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Some people would consider it polite to let them know there’s a vampire living just up the road.”
“Ain’t no such thing.”
I smiled despite myself. “So have you come to hand in your notice or what?”
“You’re too clever by half and yet dumb as shit sometimes, boy,” he grumbled. “I came to see if you were all right.”
I clutched the doorframe. “Why?”
“Shit’s hit the fan,” he said. “It’s on the radio. Everywhere. Now, personally, I don’t consider this—whatever it is—anyone else’s business. But the hoo-hah? You’d think the world was ending. And you’re in the bloody middle of it all again.”
“I guess I must have been a prized wanker in a previous life.”
“And some of this one too. Got too much of your dad in you some days, though not so much recently, thank God.” I eyed him carefully. He twisted his fingers. “Just promise me one thing.”
“What’s that.”
“Promise me you’re not with this…this haemophile just for his…you know.”
“His what?”
“You know what I mean.”
I sighed, stared at the grass around his feet. “I’m not a Blood addict, Clem—though at this moment I’m not sure that wouldn’t be easier to deal with.”
“Don’t joke,” he said, examining my face. “And do us both a favor and stop the drinking. You hear?”
I sighed. “Clem, I appreciate your concern, but—”
“Concern my arse,” he snapped. “This is experience speaking, laddie. Years of it. Years of watching people destroy themselves over nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing is worth drinking yourself to death over, lad. Nothing. Understand?” I stared at the sky rather than meet his gaze. “You’ll get through this. The tide’ll turn again. It always does.”
“Thanks, Clem. I…” I stumbled and managed a tight smile. “Thanks.”
“Thank me by keeping it together,” he said, prodding me in the chest. “I’m too old to run this business on my own, you hear me?”
“I hear you.”
“Yer all I’ve got left of him. I won’t live through all that again.” He blinked, like he’d surprised himself by saying it out loud. He looked awkward but when I didn’t respond, his round frame appeared to relax. He craned his neck to examine the house. “Fixed this place up nice, they did.”
“They left this morning because of the news. They refuse to finish.”
“Ah, there’s not much left to do. Some new slates on the west wing is it. I could do that for ya, while it’s dry.”
“You could?”
“Aye,” he said gruffly, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Used to do all sorts of odd jobs around here. And they’ve left the slate.” He nodded to the pallets sitting by one of the outbuildings. “Still got my old ladders in one of these garages somewhere.”
“That would be great.”
“That’s sorted then,” he said with a nod, turning back down the track.
“You know the front door works now, right?” I called as he walked away.
“Too old to change habits now, lad.”
Then he was gone. My head still pounded and my mouth still tasted sour, but my thoughts began to calm, like a sea leveling after a storm.
Terje would be back. Maybe I could persuade him go away with me for a while, escape to somewhere even more remote—Scandinavia, maybe Norway. He could show me where he came from, show me the mountains he’d grown up in. Maybe then we could finally work it out. Both Hati Nenge’s and Jay’s words still echoed in my head, but now I believed that if we were away from it all, then we’d be able to work it all out.
I loved him. I wanted to make him understand that that was enough for me. Forever.
I shelved the thought that ‘forever’ held a very different meaning for him and went upstairs.
I showered and brushed the hangover taste from my mouth, dressed in a clean T-shirt and jeans, brushed my wet hair back and shaved the scruff from my jaw. I went to the kitchen, drank cold water from the tap and raided the fridge then grilled bacon and black pudding, fried mushrooms and potato cakes and heated up some leftover haggis. I made a pot of strong coffee, filled the toaster with doorstep slices of bread and consumed it all with relish.
Whatever else had happened, whatever people might now think, the truth was out. Novák couldn’t use us anymore. Neither could the Brassingtons. The world might be up in arms, but Clem was right. The next thing to be outraged about would soon fill social media and the news sites. People would eventually forget our faces, forget our names. The struggle for stability was far from over and was likely to get bloodier before it got better. But there really wasn’t anything more we could do about it.
Surely, now Terje would feel the same way.
After I’d loaded the plates and pans into the dishwasher, I checked how many hours were left until sunset then did a circuit of the house, tidying, putting away clothes and boots, books and dirty glasses and cups that had started to build up on every surface. I changed the sheets on the bed, cleared the broken glass from the fireplace, cleaned out the decanter and packed it and the spare glasses away in a cupboard.
I made more coffee and sat in the drawing room, not putting on the television or looking at my phone.
It was as I was draining the cup that I heard a ringing. I frowned. My mobile was in my pocket and didn’t receive calls in the house. It was the landline…the landline I’d had installed when I’d replaced the broadband and trusted the number to just one person…just one.
I hurried to the hall and picked up the handset.
“Meg?”
“Alec?” Her voice was shaking.
“Meg? What’s wrong?”
“Help me, Alec. Please.”
My veins filled with ice. “Where are you?”
“Please…” Her breathing was labored. “It’s all gone wrong…”
“Meg?”
The call cut. I swore, checked the call history, but she’d rung from a withheld number. Panic spiked up my back. I tried to decide whether to ring the police, realized I didn’t know what I’d say and wondered if they’d even help me if I did. For all I knew, they were on their way to arrest me already.
I took a steadying breath, looked up another number in my mobile contacts list and dialed, using the landline.
“Hello?”
“David?”
A pause. “Who is this?”
I braced myself. “It’s Alec.”
A heavy silence.
“Look… I know you don’t want to speak to me.”
“You’ve got that right.”
“Just listen…”
“Listen? After all this? Never. Never again, Alec MacCarthy.”
“David, it’s Meg.”
“You stay away from her, you hear me?” he snarled. “You’ve done enough.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like you don’t know.”
“David, what’s happened? Do you know where she is?”
“Like I’d tell you.”
I fought impatience. “Look, arsehole… She’s in trouble.”
“Bloody right she’s in trouble. Been MIA for over a week. Gone right off the bloody rails. Quit her job and left her husband, all because of you.”
“What?”
“She’s still in love with you, you moron.” David’s voice was tight with pain. “Loves you more than I ever did.”
“That’s not true.”
“Goodbye, Alec. Don’t call me again.”
“David, wait. Meg’s just this second called me. She sounded scared.”
A pause. “What did she say?”
“Nothing. She just asked me to help her, then the call cut off. Do you know what’s going on?”
“I told you—”
“She’s not in love with me,” I snapped. “She wouldn’t throw everything away over me.”
“That just shows how little you know about your ability to screw with people.”
“I didn’t—” I cut off the protest. “Just think a moment, David. This is not Meg. She doesn’t do stuff like this. Something else is happening here, something bad.”
“Like what?” he asked, sounding nervous now.
“You tell me. What’s she been doing lately? Talking about?”
“Just her marriage falling apart.”
“There must be something else, something out of the ordinary.”
A noisy sigh. “She’d been going up to Glasgow…a lot.”
“Glasgow?” Something twisted in my belly. “Why?”
“She was seeing someone. Brian found out.”
I shook my head. It just didn’t square with the Meg I remembered. “Did she actually admit to seeing someone?”
Another pause. “No.”
“What did she say she was doing?”
“She wouldn’t tell me or Brian… Just that it was important.”
“Jesus Christ, David,” I swore, hurrying to my laptop and booting it up. “And now she’s disappeared? And you didn’t try to find her?”
“Fuck you, Alec. You haven’t seen her lately. She’s been secretive, moody, frightened—textbook adultery behavior.”
“Bollocks,” I said, loading an old phone-tracing website and logging in. I sent up a quick prayer of thanks when I saw that Meg hadn’t disconnected from the shared account we’d set up after uni. Neither had David. His phone location pulsed over London, but Meg’s wasn’t pinging. “Shit.”
“What is it?” Urgency now sharpened David’s words.
“Her phone isn’t registering on GPS. Hasn’t for days. When she texted me the other day, it was from a different number.”
“Shit.”
“You didn’t look for her yourself?”
“I thought she was crashing and burning,” David argued. “No one can help you during that. You gotta hit rock bottom first. I learned that the hard way.”
“You didn’t even check to make sure she was safe?”
“Don’t you dare judge me. You who lied to the entire world—”
“Not me. Novák.”
“But you didn’t think to set the record straight, did you? Not even with us? After everything that happened, you wouldn’t even return our calls? Maybe if Meg had known you were holed up with your immortal fuck buddy instead of drinking yourself to death like your dad, she wouldn’t—”
“Her phone last pinged a week ago,” I cut him off.
“Where?” I swore. “Where, Alec?”
“The old distillery.”
Silence. “Why the fuck would she go there?”
“I don’t know.”
“You have to get to Glasgow, Alec. The drive’ll take me more than six hours.”
“Don’t come up,” I said, shrugging into my jacket and searching for my car keys.
“Like hell…”
“You’re angry,” I said, as levelly as I could. “And she must have called me for a reason.”
“She’s my bloody sister.”
“David, please,” I begged. “If this is my fault, let me fix it.”
“I can’t just sit here.”
“If you want to do something, call the police. Tell them your sister has been acting erratically and has now been missing for over a week.”
“I already called them,” he grated, “two days ago. They didn’t take it seriously after Brian told them she’d left him for someone else. They’ll take it even less seriously now that she’s called you.”
I swore again.
“Just get there, MacCarthy,” he said. “And, I swear, if anything’s happened to her—”
I cut the call.
Chapter Ten
I tried Meg’s mobile over and over as I raced along the twisting country roads. It went straight to voicemail every time. The dense air split and burst into heavy, warm rain just as I reached the main road. I drove recklessly fast, skidding around the bends, overtaking other cars in a flash of spray. My chest was tight. My stomach had filled with concrete.
The last time I’d raced to Glasgow, along this very road, desperate to get to the derelict distillery before sunset was a clear memory. That time I’d been running from danger. This time it felt like I was running toward it. The loaded shotgun on the back seat didn’t make me feel any more prepared.
I cursed Terje for keeping so much from me, for leaving me to face this alone. I cursed Novák for helping with one hand and taking away with the other. I cursed Hati Nenge for making me realize that, in their world, none of this mattered. They did what they did to protect themselves, to protect each other from a world that didn’t accept them and probably never would.
Traffic slowed me then, three hours later, I crawled into the outskirts of the city. The rain washed over the windscreen and hammered on the roof. It was dark, despite it still being over an hour until sunset. Soon I was pulling up outside an exhaust-stained building with smashed windows and peeling fly posters pasted to the padlocked doors.
I retrieved the shotgun and crept around the back, up the stairs to the entrance to my old flat. The keypad was stiff but still opened to its code. I cracked the door and stood still, listening. All was silent. I nudged the door open with my gun. It creaked as it swung inward. I stood still. Nothing moved or made a sound.
When I crept in, the air smelled musty and damp. The shapes of the familiar, well-worn furniture gradually became visible in the gloom. Everything was as I’d left it that fateful winter night almost three years ago.
I made for the hall, my gun ready, straining my ears for any sound. I whispered Meg’s name, but the flat appeared deserted, the rumpled bed linen and moldering shower curtain all undisturbed. I returned to the living area and stepped to the windows overlooking the distillery floor. The towering stills were just visible in the light bleeding in from the high windows. The shadows were silent and still between them.
It was then I noticed that the door to the storage basement stood open. I frowned, trying to remember if it had been open the last time I’d been there. I thought it had been locked for years…but I couldn’t remember for sure. The prevailing memories I had from my last time here were not about the building.
I unbolted the door that led out onto a rickety iron stairway that spiraled down to the warehouse floor. The rusted iron creaked and cracked, and I winced with each noise, echoing loudly in the silence. I reached the bottom and held my breath, but there was no other sound. The air was musty, thick with the fug of rotten malt. I switched on my phone torch, scanned the floor and froze. The thick dust around the basement door had been disturbed. The padlock lay broken among the scuffed marks. I crept over and put my ear to the opening. All was quiet, but the silence had a different quality, like the air was holding its breath.
I pushed the door open. A low light lit the concrete stairwell. I put my phone away, my heart thumping against my ribs. I opened my mouth to call out but stopped myself, something in the air setting my skin crawling. I moved slowly so as not to make any sound, taking the stairs one at a time until I’d reached the bottom. The light was on in the storeroom. I crept to the window in the door and peered in.
The space was low-ceilinged but wide, with storage cells on either side. The cell at the far end was shut and bolted. I cracked the door and, finally, I heard something—a low keening, like someone in pain.
I padded forward, pressing my ear to the door of the bolted chamber. Another low, pained moan reached me through the wood.
“Meg?”
There was a moment of silence then her voice, barely recognizable, reached me through the wood. “Alec?”
I scrambled with the bolt, heaving at it with all my might, swearing when it wouldn’t budge. It was heavy, stronger than anything that I’d ever seen when the distillery had been in use.
“Alec, please,” came Meg’s voice behind the door. “Get out of here. It isn’t safe.”
“Who did this to you, Meg?” I said, still tugging at the bolt.
“Alec, get out of here! Now!”
“You called me.”
“She made me,” she said, her voice high and cracking.
“She?” Finally, the bolt thunked back and I pulled open the door. Meg stood in the cramped space, her clothes rumpled and stained, her body rigid, her sloe-black eyes wide and bright with fear. Her dark skin was sallow. We stared at each other for a long, confused moment before I stepped forward.
“Don’t,” she warned, moving back. “Alec, please, don’t come any closer.”
“What happened?”
“Alec, please,” she begged, wrapping her arms around herself, screwing her eyes shut and backing into the wall like she could crush herself through it. “I can…smell it.”
“Smell what?” I murmured, though when she forced her black eyes open again, shining with desperate hunger, I knew.
