Already Dead

8

Ben Cooper’s Toyota surged through pools of standing water, spray cascading over his bonnet, headlights probing through the rain at a darkened landscape.

For weeks now, he’d been driving around in the rain, with no idea where he was going, or where he’d been. He’d done this many times. Always driving at night, and always surprised when first light came that he was still so near home. It was as if he couldn’t escape this area. He was drawn like a moth to a flame, a creature seeking warmth from the sun, but finding only lethal fire.

There was a film he saw once … well, there was always a film. In this one, people couldn’t escape from a motel. They kept driving away through a tunnel and finding themselves back in the same place, going through the same actions, the same conversations, living the same day over and over. They had no escape.

Sometimes his life seemed to have been written a long time ago by a team of scriptwriters in the back room of a movie studio off Hollywood Boulevard. They’d recorded in advance all the incidents, triumphs and tragedies that would happen to him over the years and showed them on screen. Now and then, the script slipped into cliché. Tragedy, then disaster and another tragedy, until a character was pushed too close to the edge.

But perhaps he’d just watched too many films. There had been so many DVDs from Blockbuster, or late night B movies on TV, too many surreptitious downloads from his favourite torrent site. There would always be an echo of a parallel celluloid world where the same thing had happened a stranger he didn’t know and hadn’t really cared about. Some odd, uncomfortable parallel, a shadow flickering behind him in a permanent flashback.

Now he could no longer watch films. There were enough horror stories playing out on the screen inside his head, so many screams reverberating in his memories. Too many real terrors were out there, stalking in the dark.

Some nights, he would drive up to Glossop and head towards the Snake Pass. There was something cathartic about driving up and up further over the pass, swinging the car round the narrow bends, getting closer and closer to the steep drop off the southern edge, taking the inclines as fast as he could. He loved to watch the cat’s eyes flicker past in front of his bonnet, the warning signs flash by on the edge of his vision, a narrow pool of light from his dipped headlights showing a few yards of road ahead, then a great ocean of blackness beyond. It was exhilarating not to know exactly what lay ahead of him in the darkness as he raced towards it. Stone walls flying by, glimpses of chevrons on the tightest bends the only indication of which way he should twist the wheel. He was overwhelmed by the sense of the hills out there watching him from the darkness.

At that time of night there was almost no other traffic on the Snake. He could put his foot down time and again as he reached a bend, letting the car slide across the centre line, heading further and further uphill until he was at the highest point of the pass and beginning to descend again, his wheels turning faster and faster as gravity took the weight of the car and the descent took him back down towards the valley. He would hurtle past the Snake Inn and the lights of a distant farm, slipping under the moors and racing down, down, down. Within a few minutes he’d be heading towards Ladybower, into the spreading arms of the great reservoir, seeing water stretching out dark and glittering to his right. And finally he’d coast towards the traffic lights marking the viaduct and the end of the Snake.

Each time, as he slowed and turned towards Bamford, all that he wanted was to go back and do it over again.

Tonight was different. Cooper had been driving on a straight stretch of road, with rain bouncing off the tarmac in front of him, windscreen wipers beating so hypnotically that he was driving on autopilot.

But he’d found himself on the wrong side of the moors. The realisation brought him to a juddering halt, his car swerving across the road as his foot hit the brake.

On the skyline stood the blackened remains of the Light House pub. Its lights were extinguished now — probably for good, unless the auctioneers, Pilkington and Son, found a buyer with more money than sense. Surely the only option would be to demolish the remaining walls and clear the site.

The old Light House had been a famous landmark, visible for miles, familiar to thousands of visitors to this part of Derbyshire. But any plan to erect a new building in such a prominent position in the middle of a national park? He wouldn’t put much money on its chances. More likely, the site would gradually deteriorate and revert to the moorland. The outline of its foundations would disappear under a mass of heather and bracken until it was just one more enigmatic scattering of stones, like so many others in the Peak District.

He wondered if the cellar would be left intact when they demolished the walls. It had hardly been touched by the fire. Perhaps they would just seal it up to make it safe — a few truckloads of rubble tipped into the stairwell below the bar, a slab or two of concrete to cover the delivery hatch. Then it would become a cave, a grave, a dark hole in the ground where people had once lived and breathed. The cellar of the Light House would become indistinguishable from the abandoned mine workings scattered around it on Oxlow Moor.

He’d tried so hard to avoid reminders, to keep a firm control over the little things that could creep under his guard unexpectedly. But there he was, stumbling insensibly into a trap of his own making, acting without thought until he found himself plummeting into the darkness of memory.

He recalled pulling himself up to the delivery hatch in that cellar and peering outside, seeing the white Japanese pickup standing in the pub car park. As happened so often, it was a small detail that had let everyone down. That white pickup had been seen on the first day. It had been noticed by some of the firefighters tackling the moorland blaze that had left Oxlow Moor looking like a post-apocalyptic landscape. But the vehicle hadn’t been identified, its owner never traced. If only he’d known that it belonged to Eliot Wharton. Things could have been so different. He ought to have put more effort into tracing the pickup. Someone ought to have. But they’d had other priorities.

And that was why Liz Petty had died. She’d only been doing her job, working as a scenes of crime officer, examining Room One at the Light House. It was known as the Bakewell Room, the place where a couple of tourists had died two years previously. Liz had been searching for bloodstains, sweeping for trace evidence. She’d died because he didn’t get her out of the pub quickly enough when the fire started. If only he’d been upstairs with her, instead of in the cellar, or had made sure that someone was on watch outside.

That was the way fate swung between life and death. If only, if only…