In the dim light, Caleb glanced at his watch. Eleven thirty. Knowing that Jack would soon begin to dream, he prepared to abandon himself to the lure of sleep. Even as it tugged at his mind, he felt the stirring of a residual fear, urging him to resist.
His eyes flickered open for a moment but darkness breathed over them, drawing them down. The strands of reason stretched one by one and snapped as he hovered a while on the edge of consciousness, before drifting across the border into the deep of dreams.
Nothing moved in the room. The chill cloak of darkness made everything one and the same. Caleb held himself still, waiting. His hands hurt from gripping the arms of the chair and every nerve in his body strained for release.
He listened, trying to shut out the pounding of his heart and the crackling white noise of nameless fears. Until, above the sound of his own terrible thoughts, he heard again a muffled footstep on the stairs. Silence again for a moment, followed by more footsteps, coming closer. He caught his breath as they stopped right outside the door. Where was Cyril, he wondered. Why wasn't he barking?
His flesh crawled as he waited for the sound of the door handle turning. Instead, the footsteps began to recede. He exhaled slowly, peering into the darkness where he imagined the door should be. He turned on the lamp. Dim light pushed feebly at the shadows, barely strong enough to reveal the open door, the empty bed.
He choked back a cry and rushed out onto the landing. There was still time, he told himself. His breath misted in the chill, salty air. There were damp footprints on the stairs. Following them down, he felt the fear clawing at his back, wrapping him in its clammy embrace.
The wet prints marched along the hall through the kitchen, to the open back door. A shroud of mist hung over the garden. Caleb hesitated, his arms braced against the doorframe. His son was out there. "Jack," he whispered, despairingly. "Please Jack, come home."
Hearing the dog bark out there, he forced himself to move, out across the crisp grass that crunched underfoot. He went through the gate at the bottom of the garden, then turned and saw the house rising up out of the moon-yellowed mist.
He felt a terrible loneliness and could barely keep himself from rushing back towards it. But he caught the sound of a soft voice calling to him.
He hauled himself up over the ditch and ran on through the fields that sloped down into tangled woodland. He could no longer hear Cyril as he beat his way through trees and undergrowth, slipping and sliding on the soft earth, until finally he stumbled out onto the muddy banks of Pennard Pwll.
He followed the stream as it meandered out of the valley into the bay. Above the rustling of the water, he could hear his son calling to him.
Impatient, he stepped into the stream, wading across the gushing, knee-high water. He stumbled over a rock, fell and picked himself up again. "Jack!" he cried, as he struggled up on to a sandbank.
Some distance ahead and to his left he saw the three witch-hat peaks that gave the bay its name clawing the night sky through the mist. Having got his bearings, Caleb raced across the sand towards the sea, energized by the blood pumping through his veins.
The jaundiced mist billowed around him as he splashed into the wavelets lapping the shore.
He waded out deeper, ignoring the current that tugged insistently at his legs. He beat at the mist with his arms, trying to open up a space through which he might spy his son.
The sea was perishing, forcing him to snatch shallow, ragged breaths. One moment it was swirling around his waist, the next it was surging up to his chest. The mist seemed to be thinning out and he caught glimpses of the moon up over Cefn Bryn. A wave swamped him, leaving him treading water. The current began to drag him away from the shore.
"Jack, please," he called frantically, as he tried to keep his head above the surface.
Another wave washed over him and when he came up he could see clearly out into the bay. The sea sank its bitter teeth into his flesh. He was swimming hard now, just to stay afloat. He was growing weaker but still he searched for his son, chopping through the moon-silvered water, all the time following the sound of a voice, his own voice, but distant and younger, calling to him from out of a long-forgotten nightmare.
More water poured into his mouth as he went under again, still fighting. He rose in time to hear a distant church bell strike the hour. At one, there was still hope. At two, it began to fade. He heard the thirteenth strike as a muted sound beneath the surface, a strange echo of the pressure of the sea filling his lungs.
It seems like dawn, or maybe dusk. He has difficulty now, telling the time of day. It seems to be always twilight. But still he waits for them, anticipating the moment, imagining a different outcome this time.
But when they appear in the garden, the desperate longing he feels is as overwhelming as it always was. Jack looks bigger, more filled out. He must be ten, at least. Colour reddens Polly's cheeks again, and the small lines around her eyes signify acceptance more than sorrow. He wonders what that means.
He places a hand on the garden wall and as he does so, the house recedes a little, as if wary of him. He calls out their names and for one second, Jack looks up and stares directly at him. "Jack," Caleb cries out again, waving to him. "I'm here." For another moment, Jack continues to look his way, shielding his eyes from the sun. But then he turns and as Caleb looks down in despair, he sees no shadow on the garden wall, only sunlight falling right through the place where he stands.
JOEL LANE
Still Water
IT seemed funny at the time, but in retrospect it wasn't funny at all.
A gang of jewel thieves who'd gone missing in Stoke had turned up in the Black Country, hiding in a street with no name. It was the late 1970s, and there were quite a few anomalies in the local street map: remnants of lost districts that didn't belong to anywhere, and the council hadn't given them postcodes or kept track of who lived there.
In this case, it was a string of old railwaymen's houses in the poorest part of Aldridge, uninhabited for thirty years at least. A pearl necklace that had been stolen in Derby turned up in a Walsall pawnshop; we traced it to a prostitute who'd got it from some men living out there. She said it was a derelict house.
At that time, I'd been in the force for a year. I was working from the Green Lane station in Walsall. There wasn't much going on except drunkenness and domestic violence. This was my first taste of organized crime. We planned a nocturnal raid on the ruined cottages, with at least four arrests anticipated. According to the prostitute, the gang was like a family. They shared everything. Some of what she told us didn't end up on the interview record. My superior, DI McCann, had a sense of decency that was unusual for a policeman.
Four cars full of police officers descended on the nameless street shortly before dawn.
The houses were built on either side of a railway bridge that had been condemned in the 1950s, but never demolished. They backed onto a patch of wasteland where old canals had leaked into the soil, giving the landscape a fertile variety of plant-growth and a pervasive smell of stagnant water. It made me think of unwashed skin.
We'd been told to go to the third house. It looked just like the others, uninhabited and impossible to inhabit. Black lichen and moss caked the crumbling brick walls; the windows were boarded up, the front door covered with rotting planks. Some tree-dwelling bird called to us mournfully in the night.
Behind the house, the marshy ground and thick brambles made an approach difficult. The rear windows were unprotected, though no light was visible through them. What first appeared to be thick curtain was revealed by our torches as a black mould covering the inside of the glass. It was hard to believe that we'd come to the right place.