HUSH Read online

  Time. No time to write any more. They have come for me. I go.

  **

  There were no further entries.

  The gloom hummed with the gentle breathing of the PC, its fan. Jacob had his hand on the screen. “Fifteen years ago,” he said, almost inaudibly. His fingers were trembling. What happened? No answer, only fear. The screen’s light daubed his face with powder-blue highlights, scraped out sickle shadows beneath his eyes.

  “The police,” Maria told him firmly.

  “‘Some day they will notice us...’”

  “Come on, let the police figure it, Jake,” she sounded a bit desperate.

  Jacob felt dazed. “Uh, yeah. Yeah. Police.”

  ... hidden amongst us, dressed in our skins ...

  “We go together, M,” he said. “We stay together.” He meant that he needed her now, and he knew that she knew. It didn’t matter.

  Maria looked undecided in the gloom, gnawing on her lip. “Okay,” she finally said. “Yes, yes. Just let’s go. “

  8. Way, Shape or Form

  “I’ll drive.” Jacob thought Maria would argue, but she seemed almost relieved to drop the keys into his hand. She looked pale, drawn.

  “You okay?” he asked, trying to grin. But his face creased the wrong way. He felt about as bad as he ever had about anything. His life has been tossed up into a hurricane, and spun around and around while he gasped and prayed not to fall. And now he had drawn Maria into the storm with him.

  “No,” she replied, but accompanied her answer with a pained smile that lightened her face a little.

  “Maria,” he said softly, but he could already sense her recoiling from his tenderness. He opened the car door for her, then hurried around to the driver’s side, risking a glance in through the back window to spy on her. He’d seen some crummy film once where the main tag was, if the girl reached over to open the driver’s door for her guy, they were each other’s forever.

  Jacob opened his own door. Maria was picking at her lower lip and staring blankly atnot throughthe windscreen.

  “That disk,” Jacob began.

  Maria shivered. “The police, Jake. Leave it for them. It’s their job, after all.”

  “But it was ... disturbed. I mean, terrible, horrible. Jesus. ‘Some day they will notice us’ what is that shit?”

  “Jake, will you just leave it!” She stared at him and he saw a sheen of pity clouding her gaze. He didn’t like it, not one bit. “You fall apart if you want, Jake, I’m getting out of it. Right now.”

  Jacob cursed and twisted the key sharply, stalling the car immediately. Trying to rest his foot gently on the clutch only made his ankle twitch spastically, as if the car was transmitting a minor shock to him. He started over again and the vehicle jerked forward with a crunch: he’d left it in gear.

  “Here, I’ll drive.” Maria already had the door open as Jacob jerked the key for the third time and nosed the car along the pavement. She slammed it shut and scowled at him, but he was concentrating too hard to be distracted.

  He aimed the car towards the big police HQ on the outskirts of town. It was rush hour and they were travelling with the flow, cars pressing all around like uninvited escorts. Somehow Jacob nursed the car through the throng, his instincts taking over in spite of his thoughts being miles and hours away.

  He watched the rear-view mirror, searching for the gleaming black Mercedes, even though he knew it couldn’t possibly be there. He saw a dark-coloured car and his hands tightened to claws on the steering wheel. After an instant of terror, then he identified it as a Mondeo. Even so he kept looking back, sure he could see three black figures behind the Mondeo’s windscreen, sunglasses glinting in the strobing bars of evening light.

  “You should have turned off back there.” Maria’s voice was flat, quiet-- qualities he recognised all too well. She was fuming, storing up her anger like a giant capacitor, ready to unleash it in a flash if he gave her half a chance. That was the crucial difference between them, the one that had finally infected the waters of their love beyond any hope of purification. If he was mad, he let it out. Maria kept her temper bottled up like some dangerous culture, a killer virus only ever to be employed in the direst of circumstances. Like now, when she was terrified.

  “Just nipping to my place,” he said as he swung into another side street.

  “What?” she almost shouted.

  “A few things I want to pick up, that’s all.”

  She shifted to glare at him. He didn’t turn. He locked his gaze onto the asphalt, though all he could think of were her beautiful eyeshow wide they were, how dark, how the dipping sun caught the moisture there and on her cheeks. He had hurt her again, hurt her and scared her and dragged her into all this ....

  He hated himself even more. Why couldn’t he start to heal like she had? Why couldn’t he let go?

  “M, really, I need some stuff. Some clothes. Money.” And my pictures of you, he thought.

  “Then we’ll go to the police, tell them what’s happening. Show them the disk. I’ll copy it while I’m home, just in case”

  Maria didn’t answer but resumed her pose of silent reproach, glaring straight ahead, jaw set, eyes hard. Jacob drove on.

  **

  “What is it?”

  Jacob had stopped the car at the end of his street, hidden behind the high park wall that dripped with banal graffiti: Dave 4 Clare 4 ever; I fucked Sally here; I see the end and it’s gloppy. He’d always wondered about that last one, had the unsettling notion that the handwriting mimicked his own.

  “Something’s wrong,” he murmured, unease prickling the hairs on the back of his neck.

  He eased the car forward, riding the clutch until he could see past the end of the wall. The street was alive with the usual gangs of children playing football, and larking about. Ragged trees stood stoically on either side, their trunks scored and ravaged by decades of love-struck kids, bad parking and dog piss. Smashed glass winked from the gutters, and several young women perched on a doorstep passing round a roll-up.

  There was a black Mercedes parked in front of his apartment block.

  “They’re here. They’re here, M... Waiting for me... They know where I live.”

  He could see someone lounging on the bonnet of the Mercedes, facing the opposite end of the street. His posture was very casual, exuding a faint boredom, his hair a silver-grey buzz cut, smooth suede buff close across the scalp. He was short but neatly made, evidently quite trim and rather fit. Wide through the shoulders, snake-hipped.

  Jacob felt a tingle of fear. The man was holding something he couldn’t quite make out, and was manipulating it with blasé twists of his wrist. At first Jacob thought it was a flick knife, catching the late rays of the sun as it described circles around the man’s hand. Then, peering closer, he had to think again. The Mercedes was in shadow. The tower block hid this intruder from the sun, yet his hand glowed with a queasy luminescence.

  At every flicker of the light, Jacob winced as if his eardrums were being pricked with tiny needles. Dogs up and down the street were barking in an agitated cacophony.

  Maria leaned forward in the passenger seat, stared at the Mercedes and the man for two minutes. She didn’t speak. At last, she turned slowly back to Jacob. He could almost see the threads of disbelief intertwining in her mind. “Police, Jake.”

  “M, let’s just see if“

  “Now, Jacob.”

  “Wait, what if“

  “I’m scared.” She didn’t raise her voice -- her tone remained the same -- but the force of her words hit him like a body blow. What the fuck was he dragging her into? What right did he have to expose her to this?

  “M, I’m so sorry. Oh, Christ...” He trailed off when he realised that mere words were inadequate.

  “Police, Jake.”

  He nodded. Went to knock the car into gear. Stopped. “No need.”

  A police Range Rover -- painted with that gaudy Battenberg design which stood out so clearly on wet grey motorways -- was cruising down the street from the other end. Jacob nodded and Maria followed his gaze. Her hand shot out and flattened against the dash, as if to secure herself against an impact. She choked back a surprised gasp.

  Silver Hair must have seen the Range Rover; something that big and colourful couldn’t escape notice. Jacob waited for him to dash to the front door, call his goons and make good his escape. But he remained where he was, spinning the glowing thing around his hand, head casually on one side, shoulders low.

  “Now what?” Maria spoke as if things weren’t over, and the inference dragged up a spray of old fears for Jacob, terrors that he couldn’t name or properly identify. It was as if he had written messages to himself long ago and now found he could no longer read his own writing.

  “Now,” he said. “We’ll see what these bastards have to say for themselves.”

  “No. Jake, why isn’t that guy running? What’s he up to?” Silver Hair had stopped his hand twirling and quenched the dancing brightness of the object with a complex gesture.

  The Range Rover double-parked next to the Mercedes and two policemen climbed out. The driver spun his baton in a poor imitation of Silver Hair’s dexterity, then slipped it into his belt. Jacob had a fleeting memory of Trev, smiling with relief a split-second before the guard’s nightstick pulverised his nose. The Rover’s passenger was huge, at least six-foot-six even without his cap, but as he approached Silver Hair, Jacob still felt a twinge of doubt. This seemed all wrong. None of the body language made sense. It didn’t feel right.

  Someone appeared at the entrance to the apartment block. It was one of the thugs from the guest house. He slipped his sunglasses on as he saw the policemen. He looked to Silver Hair, who, despite his curiously laid-back air, seemed to be in charge. Sil
ver Hair raised a palm to him: an “I’ll take care of this” gesture.

  The big policeman reached Silver Hair, who swung round easily. He appeared younger than his silvery thatch might suggest, though possessed of one of those curiously indeterminate faces that was difficult to date with much accuracy. Sharply handsome, thirtyish, fortyish, maybe. He raised his hand to the policeman. Jacob subconsciously waited for some shrill scream. A vibration of his eardrums too high to actually hear, but low enough to cause piercing discomfort. None came.

  “What the hell?” Maria’s hand slumped from the dash into her lap like a landed fish.

  Silver Hair shook the tall policeman’s hand with a flourish and greeted the driver with a nod, then waved airily back at the house. The man in the doorway strolled down the path, closely followed by two others. The last in line was the woman from the raid, the one who had filmed him at the demo. Perhaps the woman who had been tracking him for years, compiling a dossier of his movements and habits and contacts? He tried to remember the colour of her eyes behind those damn glasses. They made her face look as though it had been blacked out for confidentiality on a late-night TV exposé.

  “This is just not fucking happening,” Jacob hissed.

  “But they’re the police.” Maria gaped, stunned.

  “One of those guys might have killed Morris.”

  “But they’re the ...” Shock had stolen her vocabulary.

  Jacob went to start the car, but Maria grabbed his leg and squeezed. “Wait. Let’s see. We need to know what’s going on.”

  Silver Hair nodded at Jacob’s building, shrugged, flicked a cigarette into his mouth. Everything he did was like that shrug: langorous, underpowered, calm. The policeman he was talking to doffed his cap and ran a hand through his hair, shaking out a mist of sweat droplets. The three others, dressed in black and wearing dark scowls to match, slipped into the Mercedes. Silver Hair was the last to embark, exchanging a final few words with the policemen before he slammed the door. A puff of exhaust smoke marked their departure.

  “Follow them,” Maria said. “Let’s find out where they’re staying. Maybe they’ll even lead us to Trev and the others.”

  “What about my flat? I need to check what they’ve done!” Jacob exclaimed.

  Maria glared at him. “What do you own that’s valuable?”

  Jacob shrugged.

  “You value your life?” Maria pressed.

  He felt like shrugging again, but nodded instead.

  “If I were you, then, I wouldn’t worry too much about your flat. Doubtless these people you’ve got us mixed up with will be keeping an eye on it until you get back.”

  Jacob felt a surge of guilt as she talked of “us” being mixed up with these killers. He had dragged Maria into something deadly, and as the minutes went by, he realised there was less and less of a chance of her easily shaking free of it. She’d been trapped by his anger, caught by his misdirected, fucked-up rage.

  Once again, he realised why she had left him. And once again he found himself loving her all the more.

  “Yes. We’ll follow the bastards.”

  The Mercedes was already at the other end of the street, left indicator winking. The police Rover cruised past their car, and for a few prickly seconds they were exposed. But the men inside were talking, the driver’s attention pinned on the road, so Jacob was certain that they hadn’t been spotted.

  If there were others watching his house, then so be it.

  **

  Jacob had seen it done in the movies countless times. Keep a few cars back; drive casual; slip through gaps in the traffic. But now, forced to trail a car himself, he found it far more difficult than he ever could have imagined.

  Maria was little help. Every time it looked as though they had lost sight of the Mercedes she became agitated, squirming constantly on the car’s upholstery as if the stress was discharging mild electric shocks. Speed conspired against them, too. The Mercedes ate the road, while Maria’s old Metro took slow bites like a dozy heifer. Jacob kept knocking down a gear or two to try to coax more power from the old engine, but the grating reports from under the bonnet only earned him a stern reprimand from Maria. In the end, though, the car didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. He was still living with the certain guilt of Morris’s death, and the vicarious pain suffered by his fellow eco-warriors, whatever they may be at that moment: alive or dead.

  He never thought it would take so long. An hour after tagging onto the Mercedes, they were still shadowing it. They had left the town and headed off into the countryside, Jacob began to worry that they would be noticed. While the sparser traffic made the pursuit easier, so the chances of their being spotted increased a hundredfold.

  As the sun hit the hillsides, the Mercedes turned off the main road onto a narrower lane. Jacob held back and knocked off his headlights, trusting the fading light to keep them out of ditches. Maria sat upright, peering hard so that she would be able to tell as soon as the Mercedes left the lane.

  They needn’t have worried. Jacob put his foot down as they saw the bloody glow of brake-lights, and when they passed the gate a mansion loomed out of the darkness like a giant’s gravestone. Lights twinkled across its brooding façade, yet still it seemed strangely barren.

  Jacob drove further on along the lane, coasting to a slow halt before performing a nervous U-turn. He crept back up the road, letting the clutch pull them along rather than risking the throttle. Not far from the mansion another rough track opened into a ploughed field on the opposite side. Maria jumped out and hauled the gate open. Jacob grimaced as the old hinges squealed in protest.

  Minutes later they were safely ensconced behind a row of low conifers. Starlight glinted off the Mercedes in front of the mansion, though they couldn’t tell whether its occupants remained inside.

  “I’m sorry, M,” Jacob said quietly. He felt like one big apology.

  She reached across, and for a moment he thought she was going to take his hand. But she patted his shoulder, the gesture distant and impersonal enough to draw stinging tears to his eyes.

  “It’s all right Jake,” she said, but he knew from her tone that no, it really wasn’t. Not now. Not ever.

  9. Waves and Wounds

  He cannot tear his gaze from the dead man.

  Even though terror is bearing down inexorably upon them, still the body grips his attention. The corpse has fallen to the crawling ground, and has started to disintegrate. Darting shapesant-like things, big as scorpions, made of bloodnip at the exposed flesh. They burrow into the wound at the back of the cadaver’s neck and bear away gory morsels. The body’s cells seem possessed of a sudden repulsive energy, their binding properties reversed by this perverse domain until their very molecules rip apart in a cloudy red haze. In a matter of seconds the dead man has ceased to be an individual. Now, he is a swarm.

  He turns away from the sight as something brushes his arm. He spins around, but the movement is instantly transmuted into a dive by the unnatural geomotries of this place. He thrusts out his hands, certain that they will be seized by the swarm and undone in a bloody frenzy.

  Above him -- if one can use such a term in a place such as this -- “up” where darkness pirouettes endlessly, something is stirring.

  A hand catches his arm and jerks him upright. The woman with the knife passes her hand in front of his face, disturbing a shimmer of motes in the air and casting black rainbows across his vision.

  “He’s gone,” she signals. “It is coming... Priorities.”

  He nods, feeling as if his brain is a loose ball-bearing rebounding off the inner planes of his skull. He yearns for the luxury of a scream, a cathartic bellow of rage and madness, but if he opens his mouth all that seething life will flood in unchecked. Besides, he has no breath.

  Something appalling is almost upon them, something terrifyingly awesomely malevolent. Without a heart to beat faster or flowing blood to run cold, his body stiffens into a parody of terror: hands hooked as claws before his chest, eyes bulging.