The Calling

CHAPTER 20

At 8.47 p.m., Stephanie Dalton picks up her elder son, Dan, from an evening drama class off the Chiswick High Road.

Dan’s fifteen and wants to be an actor.

Steph and Marcus would like for him to be anything but, but what kind of career should they actually be hoping for these days? It’s not like being a bank manager is any safer.

Steph grew up wanting to teach but fell into modelling at twenty-one, enjoyed a moderately successful career (catalogues, mostly) made some money, got tired of it all, then left and had the kids. Then Dan and Mia grew up a bit and Steph became bored hanging round the house all day.

She started a domestic cleaning company, called it Zita after the patron saint of cleaning — and of people who lost their keys, apparently. Although she didn’t mention that bit on the website.

After Zita took off, she started a company called Handy woman, supplying women-only handyman services to women-only clients and the elderly. Handywoman had a rockier start than Zita, but it’s grown into a franchise. All over the country, mothers and daughters, best friends, young mothers, drive around in little white Citroen vans, fixing taps and dry walls and power points. Steph’s proud of that.

The downturn has hit them pretty hard, but they’re riding it out. Things will turn round.

And Dan wants to be an actor. He’s already got the looks, in a still-growing, lanky way. He’s got the floppy fringe for it, and a certain way of wearing a shirt. And since he’s been taking the lessons there’s a new confidence in his voice, in his walk. She doesn’t know if it’s real or if it’s an act. But she supposes that’s the point.

Dan emerges from the shabby doorway and she flashes her headlights. He waves, huddled in his coat, and jogs across the road.

She reaches over to pop the passenger door. Dan slides in, bringing the night’s cold and wet with him. Sits with his Crumpler messenger bag on his lap.

Steph sees the look on his face. He’s not that good an actor, not yet.

She says, ‘So what’s wrong?’

‘Nothing.’

She wants to reach out and brush the floppy fringe from his eyes. But she knows it’ll embarrass him. ‘Well, it’s not nothing,’ she says, ‘I can see it’s not nothing.’

‘It’s just, we’ve got these agents coming round,’ he says. ‘Like actual agents? We get to, like, quiz them about the business.’

The business, she thinks, simultaneously cringing and burning with love.

‘And then after that,’ he says, ‘or before, or something. We’re putting on this, like, performance? Like the best in the class. And I got chosen to play Rosenkrantz?’

‘Oh my God,’ she says. ‘That’s amazing!’

He beams at her. He looks pure and beautiful — somewhere in the sunlit grasslands between child and adult.

‘Don’t call Dad,’ he says, ‘I want to tell him when we get home.’

She pats his knee. ‘Tell him yourself. He’ll be so proud. He’ll burst!’

Dan hugs his messenger bag.

‘What should we have for tea?’ Steph says, pulling away. ‘Your choice. We’re celebrating.’

‘Don’t jinx it,’ he says.

‘I’m not jinxing it. We’re just celebrating this bit. Some good news. Everybody likes good news.’

‘What about KFC?’

‘We had KFC on your birthday.’

‘Yeah, ages ago.’

‘Six weeks.’

‘Yeah. Ages.’

Not far behind them, Henry and Patrick watch from a stolen Toyota Corolla.

They watch Steph pull away, indicate, turn onto Chiswick High Street.

‘Hurry up,’ Henry says. ‘You’ll lose them.’

‘We know where they live,’ says Patrick. ‘We’ve got a key. We can’t lose them.’

‘That’s not the point. I like the hunt.’

Patrick indicates, pulls away.

Henry says, ‘The kid. The one with the floppy hair. What’s his name again?’

‘Daniel,’ says Patrick. ‘Wants to be an actor.’

‘That’s right,’ says Henry. He sometimes gets them mixed up — all the second-players on the watch list. He says, ‘I’m going to cut his fucking head off. That’ll make him famous.’

He grins at Patrick, sidelong and ravenous.

Patrick’s arms flash with goosebumps. Its proper name is horripilation. Patrick knows that because he once looked it up in an old dictionary. The dictionary lay in what had once been Elaine’s bedroom, but was now Henry’s. It was next to the Bible, both of them water-stained and damp-smelling. They were inscribed inside with long-faded blue ink, given as a spelling prize when Elaine was a young girl.

So he knows that’s what Henry gives him at times like this: horripilation.

And that’s what looking in the dictionary gave him, too.

He thought of it, passing through time, sitting in the room already old the day Henry was born, older still the day Patrick was born. Sitting in the room through all those years and all those hands.

Only Patrick, the killer’s son, used it to look up the proper word for gooseflesh before throwing the book into the garbage. The book’s owner, once a clever child, lay beneath a compost heap in the garden, a half-rotted old lady.

Marcus Dalton is an architect, currently thanking God he didn’t take the decision to strike out by himself when he was thirty-five. He’s kept the reasonably boring but reasonably safe job with a large firm based in Covent Garden.

Right now he’s at home, playing on the Wii with Mia. She’s eleven and she’s kicking his ass at Super Mario Cart.

Marcus delights in getting his ass kicked. It makes him proud of her.

He’s seen competitive parents at the sidelines of primary school football matches wrapped in parkas and scarves and muddy wellingtons; grown men and women with craziness in their eyes for loss of possession or an uncalled foul during a game played by eight-year-olds.

Marcus hates that, and hates them, and hates himself for not enjoying his kids’ sporting activities. He’d rather spend time with them in less active ways. Being beaten on the Wii excuses him from congratulating or commiserating from the edge of a divoty soccer field where he sorely does not want to be.

In the kitchen, Gabriella the Gorgeous is making popcorn. Gabriella’s tiny, Italian American, ravishing. In the early days, the nickname took some of the heat from her swanning round the house in micro-shorts and crop tops.

But Gabriella’s part of the family now. Any incipient lust Marcus might passingly have felt has long since dissipated, exorcized by damp towels left on bathroom floors, Gabriella playing twee lo-fi rock at ear-bleeding volume, Gabriella never putting the milk back in the sodding fridge.

She comes in carrying a big Pyrex bowl of hot microwave popcorn, plonks it down on the sofa next to her.

She says, ‘We had another phone call tonight.’

Marcus concentrates on the screen. On the second lap of Coconut Mall he keeps driving his avatar the wrong way up the escalator. ‘Not him again?’

‘I don’t know. I guess. It was a girl this time though.’

‘What did she say?’

‘Kind of threat-type things.’

‘What kind of threat-type things?’

‘I don’t really know. She sounded drunk or something. I think she was maybe crying.’

Mia says, ‘Was it your boyfriend again?’

‘Yes,’ says Gabriella.

‘He’s crazy,’ Mia says.

‘He is.’

‘Crazy in lurve,’ says Mia.

Marcus bites down on his irritation. He gives Gabriella a look: Let’s talk about this later.

Mia says, ‘What time’s Mum coming home?’

‘She’s on her way,’ Marcus tells her. ‘She’s bringing KFC.’

‘Yuck.’

‘Daniel chose.’

‘Daniel always chooses.’

She sticks out her tongue and makes a gagging noise. Marcus gently cuffs the back of her head and says, ‘Behave.’

‘I am behaving. I just don’t want KFC. It’s all greasy and there’s all these veins. I want to be a vegetarian.’

‘We could go and cook you an omelette?’

‘Let’s finish this level,’ Mia says.

‘Fine. What do you want in your omelette?’

‘Just cheese.’

‘There’s some nice bacon.’

‘ Meh. Just cheese.’

‘Salad?’

‘Have we got them little tomatoes?’

‘ Those little tomatoes. I think so.’

‘Then I’ll have some salad. Did I tell you I like beetroot?’

‘Since when?’

‘I had some at Fiona’s house. It was really nice. Not slimy. Have we got any?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Can we get some next time we go to the shops?’

‘Absolutely.’

They finish the level. Mia wins. Her Mii is called Giant Wonder Mia.

Gabriella asks if they want help in the kitchen. Marcus tells her no; this is a little bit of father-daughter time.

Marcus and Mia step into the kitchen together. She’s still young enough to hold his hand as they go.

The kitchen is big and bright. The windows are black mirrors. They spend a lot of time in here.

Mia takes some eggs from the box, cracks them into a Pyrex dish. Marcus goes hunting for the frying pan. He doesn’t find it in the drawer. It’s in the dishwasher, residually warm from this morning’s cycle.

He spritzes it with sunflower oil, puts it on the hob.

Mia grabs a fork and mixes the eggs. The trick is to fold them, not beat them. She sprinkles in a little salt, a good dash of pepper. She likes pepper.

She hears the key in the lock. The front door opens. It’s a sound as familiar to her as the sound of her own heartbeat; Mia was born in this house, in a birthing pool in the dining room.

She’s never lived anywhere else. It’s a big house, a bit messy. But she loves it and never wants to leave. She’s eleven years old, and home is heaven.

Gabriella shovels popcorn into her mouth and watches an episode of The Biggest Loser recorded on Sky Plus.

Gabriella never puts on weight; it doesn’t matter what she eats. Partly because of this, The Biggest Loser is one of her favourite shows. She enjoys watching it while snacking on popcorn or ice cream or, once, a six-pack of doughnuts. The crystals of sugar at the edge of her lips, her fingers sticky with it, while shame-faced, dirigible-sized husbands, wives and daughters took to the scales like prisoners about to be executed.

But Steph disapproves of The Biggest Loser. Steph disapproves of all reality shows. She doesn’t mind if Gabriella watches them, as long as the kids aren’t around.

Gabriella thinks this is bullshit, but she doesn’t have Sky Plus in her room — despite the dropping of some fairly heavy hints on deaf ears.

Steph takes a detour to the KFC drive-through, tries to pay with an expired debit card: she forgot to replace it with the new one that arrived about three weeks ago. So has to hunt round her receipt-stuffed purse to find cash.

They drive the rest of the way in silence, Dan’s shoulders tense with the scale of his mortification, the greasy bucket in its plastic carrier bag balanced on his narrow lap.

Steph doesn’t notice the car driving two or three places behind them.

She’s experienced moments of urban terror: she’s been burgled more than once — most recently less than a year ago. (She thought for a while that her house keys had been stolen. In fact, they turned up on her kitchen table as if placed there by a poltergeist.)

And she’s had a few dodgy phone calls. The most recent sequence of them, she was relieved and strangely chagrined to learn, were from a lovelorn kid called Will who nursed a obsessional crush on Gabriella the Gorgeous.

Steph was distressed, and slightly vexed by young Will’s lovelorn want of imagination. But a few difficult phone calls — first to the boy himself, and several to the police — soon put things right.

She’s passed him on the high street several times since then. He says hello and drops his eyes and moves on. Steph feels sorry for him now, sorry for the embarrassment his uncontrolled love caused him. Letting teenagers fall in love is like letting them drive sports cars. There’s far too much power in the engine.

She parks across the road, relieved to see the house, the lights on. She regrets her spontaneous offer of fried chicken because it smells and because it’s terrible for you and because she loves the chips, dusted with salt and dipped in glutinous, just-warm-enough chicken gravy. And she knows she’ll overcompensate tomorrow, have a tiny breakfast, a salad for lunch. And then, around 3.30, she’ll get cranky and overcompensate again with a fat slice of carrot cake. She’ll be revisited by guilt and she’ll eat nothing for dinner except perhaps some noodles. She’ll go to bed with a headache.

She slots the key in the lock, and turns it. She opens the door a crack.

She turns her head, to hurry Dan along. Even in the rain, he’s dawdling. ‘Hurry up,’ she says, ‘it’s getting cold.’

Two men are walking just behind Dan’s shoulder.

Steph doesn’t know them. But at once, she knows them completely. One of them is young and handsome and scared. The other is compact and strutting, with hair in a neat parting.

Nazi hair, she thinks. That’s what they called kids with hair like that when she was at school.

Both men are wearing backpacks.

Dan turns to follow her appalled gaze. The smaller man swings something. It’s an aluminium baseball bat. He swings it low and vicious, at her son’s knee.

Dan has long, skinny legs and big feet — Steph’s legs. Sometimes at night they still hurt with the growing.

Steph hears bone crack and thinks of ice cubes in glasses.

She draws in her breath but before she can scream the younger of the men rushes forward and shoves the hot, greasy bucket of chicken into her face.

She chokes and panics, stifled by a gorge of fried skin and flesh and hot fat.

The young man punches her in the stomach. Steph falls, gagging, to the ground. The young man starts kicking her.

Patrick turns from the woman and goes to the kid, Dan. He’s howling about his broken leg like a fucking baby. Patrick glances nervously left and right. But no lights come on. Nobody comes to their window. Nobody shouts. Nobody interferes.

Nobody ever does.

Patrick hits the boy with a homemade cosh, a hiking sock filled with AA batteries. It wrecks the teeth in the kid’s head. The kid coughs and cries and spits fragments of tooth all over the concrete path.

The kid grabs at his mouth and makes a weird muffled noise, like somebody trying to say something urgent through a thin partition wall.

Henry drags the woman into the house by her hair. He gets chicken all over his fingers.

Marcus sets down the omelette pan and says to his daughter, ‘Stay here.’

She stares at him with wide eyes as he hurries away. She listens to the omelette burning on the stove. She can’t believe her dad — so orderly, so safety-conscious — has forgotten it. And this thought makes her feel weak and afraid and very small. In its way it’s worse than the horrible noises — the bangs and the crashes and most of all the terrible, terrible screams — that are coming from the other side of the house.

Mia needs to feel big. So she walks to the cooker and turns it off. Then she moves the pan off the hob.

She puts the hot pan into the damp sink. It sizzles, shockingly, like a serpent. She recoils from it.

A man in dark clothes drags Steph through the open door. Steph’s face is smeared in some kind of matter.

Gabriella thinks at first that it must be vomit, that Steph’s eaten her KFC and it’s made her unwell and this man must have brought her home.

But only for a moment.

The man sees Gabriella and grins a wolf’s grin, chop-licking, ear to ear. He kicks Steph in the ribs, then steps forward, raising a baseball bat.

Gabriella steps away. She stumbles over a shoe, one of Mia’s Converse.

The man swings a bat. It connects with the side of Gabriella’s head. She hears it. She falls.

The man stamps on her stomach three times, like he’s putting out a camp fire.

Marcus runs into the hallway.

Steph lies with her eyes open. She’s making strange movements with her right hand.

Dan is fighting with a young man in the front garden. The young man is hitting him again and again in the face.

Marcus makes a move to intervene, then notices the man in the living room. He’s stamping on Gabriella’s belly. He’s only a door away from the kitchen.

Marcus calls out, ‘ Mia, run! ’

Then he races into the living room and punches the man in the back of the head.

He grabs the man’s shoulders and throws him into the wall.

The man drops his baseball bat.

Gabriella drags herself to the far side of the room. She’s making a sound. Marcus hopes he never hears a sound like it again.

He casts around, looking for something to kill the man with. That’s his only thought.

His eyes settle on the TV power lead. He steps forward, meaning to grab it.

The younger man steps into the living room and stabs Marcus in the back with a hunting knife.

Mia stands frozen. She can feel the heat of the cooker on the back of her neck.

Because she’s eleven years old, her life so far has been full of horror: the horror of lying in bed at night and worrying about Mum and Dad dying in a plane crash or getting divorced.

The horror of the wardrobe door. And the thing under the bed. And worst of all, the teddy bear Grandma bought her for her fourth birthday. It’s perched on the edge of Mia’s bed and glares at her through glassy, malevolent eyes. When Mum and Dad have gone to bed Mia covers Bad Bear with a fleecy blanket, making him just a vague lumpy shape. It freaks her out to think of his amber eyes blazing in rage. But it’s better than having him glower at you all night. (She’d wet the bed a few times, and made up some stories about drinking too much water before going to sleep. But really, it was Bad Bear.)

One day, Mia told her the au pair (in those days, a Spanish girl called Camilla) that she was too big for bears now. Perhaps it was time for a Poor Child to have him (the world, she knew at five years old, was full of Poor Children).

Camilla was touched by this gesture. And so was Steph. So Steph and Mia sat in Mia’s room, on the edge of the bed, holding hands.

Steph said, ‘Camilla told me you’re too grown up for Cuddle Bear.’ (Cuddle Bear was what Mia’s mum and dad thought Bad Bear was called.)

Mia nodded and bit her lower lip. She could feel her eyes welling, because she was sure Mum was going to say no, that Bad Bear was a gift from Grandma, who had now passed.

Steph misread her daughter’s welling eyes. She stroked her brow and her soft hair with a firm palm. ‘Where would you like Cuddle Bear to go?’

Mia shrugged: I dunno.

‘Well,’ said Steph. ‘I know they always want toys at the children’s hospital.’

Mia endured a little shiver of terror at that thought: at how Bad Bear would delight in all those beds, all those sleeping children! But (and she feels a throb of guilt about this, even six years and half a life later) she nodded and said yes. And that was that. Bad Bear went to hospital.

No fear since has been anywhere near as bad.

Except for now. She stands in the kitchen and terrifying noises come from the hallway. The noise of men shouting and things falling over and what sounds like a horrible laugh, a screeching hysterical laugh. But it’s not a laugh.

Mia pisses herself. The warmth runs down her legs and over her bare feet and pools on the tiles.

Dad calls out for the second time, ‘ Mia, run! ’

Mia remains frozen for a moment. Then something snaps inside her and she runs.

After stabbing Marcus, Patrick hurries to the front garden to drag Daniel inside.

Daniel’s semi-conscious. Patrick dumps him near his mother.

He sees that look, the look that Henry told him about.

Henry was right. It looks like adoration.

Patrick hates Daniel for it. He stamps on Daniel’s shattered knee.

After Patrick has incapacitated the husband, Henry turns to the au pair.

Although under normal circumstances he’d like to fuck her, Henry’s not interested in her tonight. She’s more of a pet than part of the family.

So he drags her by the hair to the middle of the room and cuts her throat in front of Marcus. There’s a satisfying jet of arterial blood.

She twitches comically and Henry laughs. He catches Marcus’s eye, the way two strange men will catch each other’s eye on the seafront when a pretty girl walks past.

Marcus jellyfishes on the floor. He’s muttering something about God.

Henry laughs, enjoying himself. He slips on the old brass knuckles and punches Marcus in the face — woom woom woom.

Marcus’s nose explodes across his face. Henry thinks he’s dead. But he’s not.

‘Pleath,’ Marcus says, through his shattered mouth. ‘Pleath. Pleath. Pleath.’

Henry loves that.

‘Pleath what?’ he says.

But then he remembers why he came here.

He says, ‘Patrick?’

Patrick steps into the room. He’s treading blood everywhere.

He’s hangdog and surly, slope-shouldered.

Henry finds him disgusting, physically repulsive. He’d like to smash his stupid fucking sulky face in with the brass knuckles, woom woom woom, and that would be that. He’d leave him here, face smashed, brains plopping into his lap like Play-Doh.

Henry says, ‘Where’s the little girl?’

‘Who? Mia?’

‘Yes,’ says Henry, with exaggerated patience. ‘Mia.’

‘I thought you had her.’

‘Does it look like I’ve got her?’

Patrick doesn’t answer.

‘So go and get her,’ Henry says.

‘What about the mother and son?’

Henry shrugs off his backpack, unzips it, takes out the new hatchet. ‘I’ll sort them out.’

Patrick sets off to find Mia. He steps over the au pair — her foot is still doing a farcical little twitch, as if she’s pretending to be asleep but unable to resist dancing to a favourite song heard on a distant radio.

For some reason this makes Patrick sad. That twitching foot, a single brown freckle on the sole.

Patrick heads to the kitchen. It’s a big house with a big kitchen, but he knows his way around. He’s been in here before.

Somebody’s been making an omelette; there’s a jug smeared with egg, a fork still sticking out of it. There’s the black pan, a serious cook’s pan, cooling and greasy in the butler sink.

Patrick’s senses are heightened. He can feel heat radiating from the stove.

Nobody’s in here.

He looks down. There’s a puddle of piss on the floor.

The cupboard under the sink is open.

Patrick kneels. He opens the cupboard door. Sees cleaning equipment. Sponges. A roll of bin bags.

No Mia.

He opens the next cupboard. And the next.

He opens the pantry.

No Mia.

He clambers onto the kitchen bench, looks in the high kitchen cupboards. That would be a good place to hide. That’s where Patrick would think about hiding if he were Mia’s age. (Except Patrick hadn’t hidden at all, had he?)

Mia’s not in the kitchen.

He pads down the hallway. He checks the cupboard under the stairs. A Dyson, a cobwebby Swiffer floor mop, a whole bunch of crap. He shines his little torch into the spidery corner.

No Mia.

He stands at the bottom of the stairs and shines his torch up and into the darkness.

If he were Mia, would he hide up there?

In the darkness? With Henry downstairs?

No.

Patrick heads to the garden.

Mia didn’t want to go upstairs. It was dark. She knew she’d be trapped. So she sneaked out, into the garden.

It’s a pretty big garden, high-walled on three sides. The walls are too high for her to climb.

An old potting shed abuts the back of the house. A long time ago, it was an outside lavatory or something. It’s spidery and horrible. The old bricks are crumbly at the corners.

Mia’s barefoot. She straddles the corner of the outhouse, digs her fingertips and toes into the crumbling mortar between the bricks. She tests it for depth, then lifts herself. Her fingers tremble with the strain.

Her feet scrabble. She rips a toenail. But Dad calls her a monkey because she’s good at climbing.

She’s halfway up the wall of the outhouse when a man walks into the kitchen.

Mia freezes on the wall like a gecko.

The only moving thing is her heart. It feels conspicuous, a sick, wet, whim! wham! in her thin chest.

She watches the man, who has a strangely gentle and worried face, like a boy soldier. Then he opens a cupboard and looks inside. He sweeps all the stuff inside across the floor.

Mia knows the man is looking for her. It’s difficult not to watch, the way it’s difficult not to watch scary movies sometimes, because sometimes looking away is worse.

The man peers through the window. She watches his eyes scan the garden.

His eyes sweep over her.

She realizes that the kitchen light is on, which is why the kitchen looks as bright as a fish tank. The man is probably staring at his own reflection.

But that’s difficult to accept. So when the man turns and storms out of the kitchen, she thinks it’s a trap. She stays there, clinging to the wall, too scared to move.

He’s gone for a long time.

Mia begins to climb again.

She grazes her fingers and her toes, and once her leg slips; she barks her shin to the knee. But she makes it. She heaves and struggles and pulls herself onto the roof of the old outhouse.

Then the young man comes back to the kitchen. He opens the door and steps into the garden.

Mia freezes on the roof of the outhouse. She squats there like a cat. She is higher than the man’s head. If he doesn’t look up, it’s possible that he won’t see her.

He pokes around the garden, probing the corners with the beam of a torch. When he turns in her direction, she sees that his face is different: it’s scrunched up as if he’s been crying. There’s black stuff all over one side of his face, in the vague shape of a human hand. Except Mia knows it’s not really black stuff, it’s red stuff.

She gasps — and the man looks up.

He and Mia stare at one another, perfectly still.

Then Mia scrambles over the remaining few feet of wall between her and next-door’s garden. She drops to the other side of the wall.

Her ankle twists and it hurts. She should be screaming, but she doesn’t even think about screaming. She just sprints, hardly registers the damaged ankle.

She doesn’t look back until she’s crossed the wide garden, waded into the rose bushes where thorns scratch her.

There he is, scrambling onto the garden wall. He jumps down, a lot better than she had. He doesn’t look like he’s hurt his ankle at all.

He lowers into a crouch and scampers towards her.

Mia tries to climb but there’s nothing to grab; the ivy the Robertsons used to cultivate before they moved away is too tangled and loose, it just spools away in her hands. She gets tangled and panicky. She risks one more look, just one more look over her shoulder.

There he is, the sad-faced young man with the red handprint over his face. He’s just looking at her.

She doesn’t know how long he’s been there.

She’s scared to see the young man is scared, too, because that means there’s something even worse in her house — and whatever it is, it’s in there with her parents. Mia wants to cry. Her knees are knocking together.

The man is breathing funny. He looks away, at the empty house the Robertsons used to live in, which is now for sale.

He says, ‘Come on.’

‘No,’ says Mia, although her voice is small.

The man says, ‘Listen. We don’t have time. We don’t. My dad’s in that house and he’s sent me out to get you.’

Mia begins to cry. She says, ‘What does he want?’

‘To make you his little girl.’

‘I don’t want to be his little girl.’

‘Then come with me.’

‘Who are you?’

‘Patrick.’ He thrusts out his hand. ‘This way.’

When Mia doesn’t take the hand, he simply strides to the kitchen door of the empty house and tries it. It’s locked of course. So he takes off his hoodie and wraps it round his fist.

He puts his fist through the window, brushes loose glass from the frame. Then he wriggles like a worm through the broken window. He appears at the kitchen door and opens it. And still, Mia doesn’t scream.

She thinks she shouldn’t go with this man, but she hurries on bare feet to the Robertsons’ kitchen door. She and the man hurry through the monstrous, echoing darkness of the empty house. The ghosts of all the families who lived here before watch from the black corners.

They come to the front door. Patrick opens it. They sneak out, back into the cold night.

And then they’re running.

Henry finishes smearing the word on the wall. He calls out, ‘Patrick?’

There’s no answer.

Then he hears a noise.

It’s a pane of glass shattering. And Henry knows. Just like that.

He looks at the mess in the room. The mess on his clothes and in his hair.

He jogs to the kitchen. The door is open. No glass is broken.

He thinks of the empty house next door.

He returns to the living room and hurries to pack. It takes too long. His things are wet and his hands are busy with rage.

Then he slings on the backpack and rushes out the front door.

He sprints for the car.

They run silently. Patrick has told her to be quiet as a mouse, not to make a noise, because if they do, his dad will know where they are.

Patrick is faster than Mia, whose feet are bare and tender on the hard pavement.

Now he turns, hopping up and down on the spot.

Hurry up! Come on! Please!

She tries. But there’s a green bottle of lager in the gutter and Mia steps on a shard of glass.

She doesn’t make much of a noise, and Patrick is proud of her.

But these are quiet streets.

Henry hears a child cry out.

A girl.

He runs faster. He pumps his arms. In his hand is a carpet knife.

Patrick runs to Mia. His tears have thinned the blood on the side of his face.

‘I know it hurts,’ he whispers. ‘I know it does. But please.’

She limps to him, fast as she can.

Patrick kneels. He and Mia are face-to-face. ‘Please let me carry you.’

She hesitates, balancing on one foot. But when she sees the way his eyes glance fearfully over her shoulder, she says, ‘Okay.’

Patrick scoops Mia into his arms, the cold skin and warm core of her. She’s all rods and knobs, heavier than she looks.

He runs.

The car isn’t far.

Henry turns a corner at speed and sees them.

There’s Patrick, hobbling along with the girl in his arms.

Her foot is blood black.

Henry laughs, but it doesn’t sound like a laugh.

He runs faster still.

Patrick reaches the car and sets Mia down.

‘Wait just for one minute. Watch the road for me.’

She leans against the car, watching the long straight avenue.

Patrick searches in his pockets for the keys. His hand is shaking.

Mia whimpers, deep in the back of her throat.

‘What?’ Patrick says. He’s trying to get the key into the lock.

‘He’s coming.’

Patrick looks up to see Henry sprinting down the road. Lunatic, blood smeared. He’s got a carpet knife in his hand.

Patrick knows he won’t get the car started in time.

‘Mia,’ he says. ‘Run now. Scream. Make as much noise as you can.’

Mia sees the look in his eyes. Then she bolts.

As she runs, she screams.

What she screams, again and again, is Please.

Patrick waits, keys in hand, as Henry descends upon him.

He isn’t scared.

He’s thinking of his bike. A BMX.

Henry doesn’t slow. He just keeps coming and coming.

Patrick braces himself.

Henry punches his shoulder into Patrick’s solar plexus. Patrick smashes into the bonnet of the car.

Henry grabs his throat, stretches him out. Rips and lacerates with the carpet knife.

As Patrick slips from the bonnet of the car, Henry runs in pursuit of the screaming child, knife in hand.

She’s only little. She won’t have gone far.

And Henry is very, very fast.