Friday 28 August 2015
Anderson woke. The pain in his head was unbelievable. He had Nesbit nestling in beside him, the small hairy body of the Staffie curling into the small of his back, wriggling around, snuggling up into his neck and over his hair, along the back of his hands, trying to get his wet nose up the sleeves of his shirt, up the legs of his trousers. Nesbit was everywhere. His little claws daintily jagging him as the dog ran around. So many feet for such a little dog.
Colin reasoned he must have got up and made his way to the bathroom as he washed his face – that’s why he was wet, and now the water was running into his mouth and up his nose. He straightened himself up, expecting to see his own reflection.
He jolted at the high-pitched squeals that sounded off, sharp little pains in his hands as something small and pincery took nips of flesh and ran off with it. He opened his eyes to see the brackish, dirty water lapping towards him. Sleek black bodies ran away from him, over him, under him, trying to get in him. There were rats everywhere. His brain tried to recall where he was. Where had he been? He had been walking through the forest and there was the fire behind him and the smoke in front of him. The head burning at the soles of his feet and at the palms of his hands. That’s why he was lying in the water; he was floating in the loch away from the horrors that were ashore: the screaming, the pain and the blood.
The blood.
All the blood.
The blood he could taste at the side of his mouth, the blood congealing into a sticky mess in the hollow of his cheek, the blood swilling in the water. He couldn’t see it, but he could taste and smell it.
Somewhere in his deep subconscious he heard Claire’s voice saying, Get up Daddy, get up, but it is difficult to get up from floating when everything around you is water, nothing to stand on.
But he thought he should give it a try for Claire.
But then what had Claire done for him recently? Not once had she said, Are you OK, Dad? Not once.
The fabric of his shirt clamped down on to the skin of his back as he tried to raise his head. Blood poured down his face. Horrible, dark, stinking water. His vision cleared like a curtain, lifting on his own stage of horror. He saw the rats. Everywhere. They were surfing on the wave of water that was pouring in through the wall, jagged splinters of wood being flattened smooth and washed away by the torrent. Sharp edges of bright blue fabric flapping at him like flags waving goodbye. The carpet was awash with water one, two, three inches deep, four and five. More and more water gushed into the hole, tearing it wider.
He was in the basement with Laura. He turned round to make sure she was OK, but she was gone. The door was closed. The water was building up against it. There was something in a bag floating, the water lifting it, nudging it slightly. Something about the way it moved disturbed him. The ties on the plastic bag were not secured. He watched, transfixed, as the mouth of the bag floated open, the handles unwound from each other and a small nose was unveiled, sodden white wool, closed eyes. A small blue-pink tongue trapped between the teeth.
The dead dog.
Dead dog.
He tried to think past his confusion and the pain in his head. So somebody had attacked him and taken Lorna. That same person who had killed Sue all those years ago?
Right now, he needed to get out. The membrane’s filaments of fabric were splitting with the water pressure. He was in a sealed box with a tsunami coming in. It didn’t look like slowing down.
Something Wyngate had said, about the rain and the underground river …
He needed help. He searched his pockets for his phone. It might be wet; there might be no signal. Then he realized his phone was perfectly dry …
… upstairs on the table.
He had to get out and tell the team to get after Laura. It had all been about Laura. Lorna? Laura? He had to find a way out.
He crawled to the door, on his hands and knees, blinded by the blood. The dead dog floated past in its makeshift plastic coffin. Lorna’s dog.
His forearms were invisible in the muddy water, now six or seven inches deep. Every inch forward was a huge effort as the volume of water moved and sucked and pulled at him, like an animal drawing him deeper into its jaws. The rats swam around him, under him, over him, perfectly at home in their subterranean submarine world.
At the door, Anderson held on to the handle and tried to pull himself up. He collapsed and fell back under the water, his forehead jammed against the wood of the door. As he pulled his hand away, he instinctively raised it to protect his face. The palm came away covered in red jelly sauce. He was losing a lot of blood. He sat upright in the water, angling his back against the door. He was facing the gap in the membrane, bigger now the water was coming in by a column of rapids, tumbling over each other to get at him, tearing the wood as it went torrent upon torrent, gallon upon gallon. Bringing more rats.
If he didn’t get out of here he was going to die with the rats, drowned. Some people’s idea of hell. All this water would put out the fire in his soul. The rats might be on the side of the Gods. Come on Daddy. It was Claire who had dragged him away. Come on Daddy. The voice was becoming more insistent. He started crawling towards the hole in the foundation wall, his elbows collapsing, the water relentlessly punching him in the face. He fell on to his side and the rats jumped at his face in their persistent attack.
But he kept on going.
Jennifer was lying on the settee, Robbie in her arms, half asleep half awake. There was a knock at the door. She thought about not answering it. If it was Douglas, he’d use his key. If it was that bloody social worker she might swing for her, swing for her big time. All the forensic people had gone; they had been nice and polite but she was exhausted now. She thought it might be Colin coming back. She slid off the settee and crawled over the floor, aware of the dampness and the stickiness of the carpet that had lain there for God knows how many years, and how many occupants of the house before them. Before her. It stunk like a three-week-old nappy.
Hiding underneath the window, she put her fingertips on the sill and pulled herself up, hoping that whoever was at the front door would not see the top of her head and the unruly mop of dark hair. There was nobody there. The driveway was empty, the street was empty. The knocking was coming from the back door.
She got up and pulled her dressing gown around her again, annoyed now. Coming to the front door was something, but coming round the back door meant they were hiding something. It wasn’t easy to get to the back door of these houses. And she had a headache. She had painkillers but needed food to take them. So she was furious by the time she reached the door, yanking it open. It jammed. The rain made it swell. Most of the time nowadays, she left it unlocked. She pulled again and felt the door buckle around the handle – that was all she needed now, for the bloody door handle to come off in her hands.
‘Who is it?’ she shouted.
‘Jock.’
She turned on her phone. She wanted Douglas to deal with him, to hear the story. She pressed Douglas’s mobile number; she only had a tiny bit of charge left. It went to voicemail. She quickly scrolled down and pressed the flat number. A male voice answered, tired, woozy, sleepy. Jennifer held the phone out, saying nothing. Feeling like her guts were being strangled as she heard a voice, Douglas, sounding as though he was inches away from the phone. And horizontal. There was a phone beside the bed in that flat.
‘There’s nobody there,’ said the husky voice.
I am a nobody. Jennifer cut the call and sank to her knees behind the door.
‘Are you OK, hen?’
She was trying not to cry.
‘OK, I’ll leave you alone. I’ve brought you some doughnuts, to say sorry for giving you a fright yesterday.’ He sounded genuinely sorry and the shadow moved away.
As if sensing her pain, Robbie woke up and started shouting, screaming at the top of his voice, one long vowel that reached into the middle of her ears and scratched at the nerves. Maaaaaaaaaa …
‘Oh God,’ she said, trying to stand up, climbing up the door.
‘Is that wee one OK, the other wee laddie is still in the hospital?’
She looked at the back of the door, too tired. So what if he was a serial killer; he had doughnuts. It would be somebody to talk to, somebody to stop that bloody wean greeting all the time. She pulled the handle. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t get the door open.’
It bumped slightly from the outside; he had put his shoulder against it. So she would be found murdered on her dirty kitchen floor, lying on a pile of dirty nappies. Douglas wouldn’t come home for weeks and nobody would find her body. Robbie would be sold to a paedophile ring. The door opened and she was still on her knees, looking at a pair of baggy brown cords, old man’s thick cords.
‘The door got stuck,’ was all she said.
‘It’s swollen with the rain – has your man got a plane? I’ll take a bit off it for you.’ He was waggling the door back and forth, looking at the hinges and the frame, making tut-tutting noises. ‘Just a wee bit taken off the side of it, that’s all.’
The kitchen door was open. There was a rectangle of sunlight on the old lino, showing up the scuff marks and the dust balls rolling around in the draught.
‘The sun is shining,’ she said.
‘Aye, it’s still pissing down though.’
Anderson slowly made his way across the floor, his knee squelching in the sodden carpet, the water clutching and grabbing at his wrists and in between his fingers. He had lost a shoe somewhere. He seemed to be moving forwards for a long time, but was getting nowhere nearer the hole in the wall. Twice he fell over, crashing into the water, the freezing cold sucking, engulfing water. He couldn’t feel his hands or his feet, or his kneecaps, but he knew they were sore. The throbbing in the side of his head robbed him of his vision and his balance. He only had to go about ten, twelve, fifteen, twenty feet. The more he tried, the further away the gap in the wall seemed to get.
But, surely, he was crawling through the water, up to the plasterboard that was now gaping open. The water was still flowing through steadily, bringing rats.
And bones.
And the bones.
There was something there, deep in his mind. Leave that for later; he had to get out of here.
He crawled right up to the panel and put his hand through it, pulling away a few more bits of plaster and wall and loose bricks. This time the force of the flowing water was with him; he didn’t even care about the rats that swarmed over his hands and got caught in his shirtsleeves, struggling to get free. Their warm wet fur was smooth against his skin; slippery, strong bodies struggling to get free from him.
The light went out.
The water was getting into the wires. He grasped either side of the panelling and slid through the hole, twisting slightly. The ground on the far side was much lower; he tumbled into it, submerged. His mouth open to gallons of the scummy water as the rats ran round the walls, like bats, moving at lightning speed, squeaking and squawking at their newfound freedom from the underground dam. Anderson found his feet on the rocky muddy bottom of a drain, and managed to get himself upright. The roof was low, so it was easier to stay crouched down in the water as it swirled around his neck. The blood was still pouring down the side of his face; he dreaded to think how infected that injury was going to be.
Then he noticed the noise. The rushing water had gone, to be replaced by sound more familiar – quiet but more constant rainwater, more precise raindrops hitting something hard. Everything had calmed down.
He needed to do this. He needed to get out. He took a deep breath and a moment to think. He was in some kind of culvert somewhere underneath Altmore Road. A big brick tunnel. Old Victorian; his knees were wading through a sludge of God knows what. The tunnel narrowed and widened as the bricks became stones then earth that crumpled under his fingers into sodden lumps that splashed on the way down, hitting his head, slamming into the back of his neck. So he looked up. It was dark here. His eyes adjusted to the lack of light, but he could see something, a few rays of daylight coming from somewhere ahead. There was a sense of fresh air. So he went on another few feet, standing now in a depth that seemed to go on and on. He stepped forward, waist-deep in water, then he plummeted. Nothing underfoot. He was under his full length so he was six feet down. Still dropping. His arms and legs flailing to get hold of something solid. He touched something slimy and soft yet solid. Instinctively he pulled his hand away, bumping his elbow on a solid wall at the back of him in the recoil. He turned, finding the wall, and feeling around for outcrops of the old stones he could use to pull himself up. The surface of the water had only been a few inches above his head. He took a few deep breaths and tried to calm his heart.
He knew what he had felt, the thing that brushed against his hand. Body parts. Turning to look, he saw a white torso, wrapped in clear plastic. Tape wound round the body, too white to look human. But he knew it was.
He didn’t know who it was.
He had to get out.
It was logical that he was now walking along the bed of an old underground river, walking upstream. This was the old river fighting to regain its ancient course. He leaned back; his heel caught on a jutting ridge and he rested himself on it, ignoring the stones grinding into his shoulder blades, the rats running along the bricks on the opposite bank, darting dashes of silkiness in his vision, there and not there. Rats, cats, or visions created by his imagination, he didn’t care. They were there and he was glad.
One foot had no shoe.
So what? He had a gap to get across. He could tell by the stillness of the water. Here it was three feet deep, between him and the daylight was a dark pool. A drain?
He had no choice. He should be able to feel around with his free leg reaching for the other side. If he could just keep his balance. He reached out, his other heel slipping off the stone, and down he went, water flooding into his ears and the roaring and the screaming of his eardrums. A rat swam past, his body silvered with air bubbles, perfect little feet spread to propel him through the water. His cheeks chubby with air, giving him a grin. Little beady eyes, keen and intelligent, wondering what he was doing down here in this dark place.
Anderson stuck his hand down, fingers feeling around, down and down until his fingertips touched plastic. He grabbed. A crisp packet, salt and vinegar.