Nightsiders (11 page)

“Remember when we were courting?” Sarah’s voice was soft and quiet, as if she were afraid to break the memory. “When we went for long drives in that old banger you used to own?”

Robert smiled in the darkness. “Yes, of course. How could I ever forget?”

“We used to come to places like this and park up, have a bit of a kiss and a cuddle.”

“Oh, Mum. Please.” Connor’s voice held the faintest trace of laughter.

Molly chuckled softly.

“They were good times,” said Sarah, ignoring her children’s rebukes. “
Real
times.”

“What do you mean,
real
?” Robert slowed down, tipping his head to watch her.

“None of this feels real. It’s like a story I remember from childhood, when a family was banished to the woods and started killing strangers so they could steal their money and their goods. All that before: us, when we were first together, the kids being born, all the strains and struggles we had with our careers. All that was real. This…it’s just a dark fantasy or a fairy tale, part of somebody else’s twisted dream.”

Robert wished with all his heart he could feel the same way, but the truth was he felt the exact opposite. None of his memories felt real; only this, only now, seemed real in any way. He anticipated the smell of blood, the taste of death, and it promised more reality than anything he had ever experienced—or thought he had experienced. Everything else was mere background material…

“I know,” he said, lying again; always, always lying. He wondered if any of them had ever told the truth, even once. Everyone in the world was lying, they all constructed their own experiences, picking and choosing from barely recalled memories, rewriting history, reducing the facts to slim pickings through which they rummaged like coyotes in the belly of a corpse. Why should he be any different? Why should he be any better?

This situation was like the logical extension of that theory, the living end.

Something moved through the air to his right, and when he turned to see, he caught sight of the two crows from the tree as they flew in a jagged line toward the house on Oval Lane. If he allowed his mind to wander, and gave vent to his imagination, he could pretend the birds were in fact Nathan and Monica Corbeau, and they were heading back to defend the ground they had stolen.

More lies. More fiction.

The access lane came into view, and they all slowed their movements, desperate to make their approach a stealthy one. Robert unconsciously ducked his body, bending both legs at the knee, and his family copied the posture.

“This is it,” he whispered. “Are we ready?”

They nodded, unwilling to speak.

“You wait here, at the entrance, and I’ll go up there first to make sure everything’s okay. Keep an eye out; I’ll signal when you can follow me up.” His lips were dry and his eyes prickled.

“Why don’t we all go up there together?” Sarah was reluctant to break up the team. Robert knew she viewed their unity as their main strength.

“Just in case we’re expected,” he answered, shrugging and backing away. “That way they’ll think I’ve come alone.”

He moved slowly up the incline, being careful not to make too much noise as he trod on the loose stones, gravel and chippings. The trees and bushes on either side of him whispered softly in the slight breeze, and he heard small animals shifting though the undergrowth. The darkness was more intense here, as if clustered, and he began to doubt they could win this war. The moon was a smudge in the sky, and very few stars were visible in the surrounding blackness.

Robert was almost at the top of the access road. He shifted his grip on the knife, his palm slick with sweat. There came a sound from up ahead: a shifting of stones, a low hissing or panting that sounded somehow familiar. When the dog appeared, he was taken completely by surprise. It was big—probably a mastiff, or a derivation thereof—and it moved with silent speed. Its firm, muscled body hit him so hard it knocked the breath from his lungs. He went down like a bag of rocks, and the knife flew from his hand, skittering across the stones.

The dog had given him a glancing blow, bouncing off him as he fell, but it was up on its feet and heading once more toward him, this time slower, and with grim intent. A low growl sounded in the dog’s throat, and Robert suspected he was done for. The animal lunged, snapping its teeth, as Robert reached for the knife. He snatched back his hand, terrified of losing a few fingers, and reconsidered the direct approach.

“Easy boy,” he said, through gritted teeth. There was a pain in his side; it was huge and heavy, like broken bones rattling in a bag. “Get back!”

The dog leapt at him, and he had no time to act, only to react. No time to hope or to pray (despite his admitted disbelief in God) and no time to contemplate. The dog’s jaws latched onto his shoulder, its teeth going in deep, and he struggled to hold back a scream. The dog’s head moved from side to side, working at the meat, and he felt muscle tearing away from bone.

He had rolled closer to the knife, and as the dog concentrated on tearing off a piece of him, he reached out…reached out…farther, farther. Suddenly, his fingers fell upon the blade, and he scrabbled across the gravel to snatch it up. He found he was holding the knife the wrong way, by the sharp end, and he had to pause to switch his grip. The dog kept gnawing at his shoulder. Hot blood sprayed the side of his neck and his face.

Swiftly, and without thought, he brought the knife round in a wide arc and shoved it under the dog’s belly, feeling the blade sink in and tearing his arm across, to open up its stomach. He felt the contents of the stomach sac erupt onto his hand and run down his arm; stringy intestines wrapped around his forearm, trapping it against the side of the wound. There were also soft fibers in there, not dissimilar to the padding Corbeau’s wife had been pulling from the cushions when he’d seen her earlier. It was as if the dog was part flesh and part puppet: a construct. The dog struggled madly, and for a moment he thought he would black out from the pain, but then it relaxed its grip, the jaws opening slightly, and he was able to kick the body away and crawl a few yards across the stony ground.

He threw up on the ground, but vomiting was the only thing that kept him conscious. After lying back for precious seconds, sharp stones pressing into the rear of his skull, he sat back up and looked around. He could see the house from here, and the upstairs lights were blazing. The lower floor was in darkness. Silhouettes moved stiffly across the upstairs glass, as if he were watching a stylized dance of mummers or Japanese shadow puppets.

After he had regained his breath, Robert stood and staggered back a short way down the access road. He clasped his shoulder to stem the flow of blood, but the intense pain told him some serious damage had been done. The area was going numb; the pain was receding. That, too, felt like trouble.

He peered down and caught sight of Sarah’s outline.
“Come on!”
He tried to whisper loudly, aware if his family could hear him, there was a good chance other ears might also pick up on his signal. His only hope was that loud music was playing inside the house, or the Corbeaus were so confident that they had become blasé.
“Come up!”

Sarah twitched; then she gathered the children together and jogged up the rise. Her face paled when she saw him, covered in blood, with guts knotted around his arm, and holding on to the knife with a force that made his hand shake. “I’m fine,” he whispered. “A dog attacked me.”

“I didn’t even know they had a dog,” said Sarah, moving toward him to examine his shoulder. She took his hand away, inspected the mess, and then placed his hand back on the wound. “It’s bad,” she said, visibly straining to hold back her emotion.

“Dad?” Connor stepped forward, moving in front of his sister.

Good lad
.

“It’ll be fine. Just need a bit of patching up.” He smiled, but it hurt his face and his shoulder.

Sarah took off her sweater, then the T-shirt she was wearing underneath. She tore the shirt into bandagelike strips and put back on the sweater. “Best I can do,” she said. It took her several minutes to apply the homemade dressing to his shoulder, but when she had finished, the worst of the bleeding had stopped. Blood still seeped through the white material, forming dark red patches, but it was a slow process: seepage rather than a heavy flow.

Robert led the way as they moved across the drive, stepping carefully so as not to make too much of a sound. Soon they stood before the house…
their
house; the one that had been taken from them. The darkened lower windows were all shut, but upstairs they were all open, and the sounds of music and laughter drifted out into the night. Robert held Sarah’s hand; Sarah held Molly’s hand; Molly held on to the hand of her brother. And they stood there, in the open, watching the house and waiting; waiting for the signal they needed to pounce.

4:20
A.M.

The lights had been out for just over ten minutes, and Robert was convinced the time had come. They were sitting at the edge of the drive, shielded by the trees, and had been watching things closely. The figures had remained on the upper floors, flitting from room to room. Music went on and off. Once, briefly, they had heard sounds of rather energetic sex—screaming and moaning and the calling of names—but it had only occurred the once. Robert had no idea who had been fucking whom, and he did not particularly want to know.

“I think it’s time,” said Sarah, preempting him. “I think we should make our move.”

Robert stared at his family in the darkness, and to him they resembled a group of primitive hunters, weapons in hand, and hunger in their bellies. There was not a tear to be seen, nor had any one of them professed a change of heart: each was committed to the task at hand, and their determination was visible like war paint on their faces.

“Are you sure about this? All of you?”

They nodded, one by one, grimly.

“Then let’s go.”

They moved out of hiding one at a time, with Robert once again in the lead. He crossed the drive and went around the back of the house, looking for a way inside. The garage, behind the main building, was open, its up-and-over door sticking out like a metal tongue. The Cortina had been parked half inside, with its front wheels resting on the external gravel. Robert walked over to the car and bent down by the front nearside tire. He stabbed the tip of the knife into the tire, pushing his weight against it, and then removed it, smiling at the sound of air hissing out of the slit. He repeated this process on the other three tires, and then returned to his waiting family. “Just in case,” he muttered.

The only windows left open were those on the top floor, and he could trace a manageable access route up an external drainpipe and through the bathroom window. It would be tough going, particularly in the dark and when trying to be silent, but he could do it if he kept his focus.

“I’m going up,” he said, directing his gaze to the window in question.

Sarah followed his eye line, nodded, and turned to the children. “We’ll wait here while your dad climbs up, and once he’s inside he can go downstairs and open the back door. Then we’re in. Then we sort this thing out.” She looked back at Robert, and in the gloom, with her dirt-streaked face, he barely even recognized her.

“Stay quiet. If I’m not down in ten minutes, something’s gone wrong.” He did not know what to suggest if that did happen, so he simply let the sentence trail off into the night.

Sarah stepped toward him and kissed him on the side of the mouth. She did not say anything; she did not need to. Her gesture had said more than words ever could; he knew that now more than ever. Words were not real, they could be molded and manipulated and had more than one meaning, but gestures were made of more solid stuff, and between two people who knew each other intimately their meanings could be easily read.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

He broke away and made for the drainage pipe. It was the old-fashioned kind, made of cast iron, and bolted firmly to the wall. He tested it with his hands, and it did not shift an inch when he tugged on it. He raised his hand and grabbed the pipe above his head, and then hauled himself up, his feet scrabbling quietly on the wall. Soon he had a good grip, and he began to make his way up the face of the building, hand over hand, foot over foot. He did not look down. He
could
not look down in case he caught sight of the ones he was leaving behind, down there in the dark.

His wounded shoulder ached, but he bit down and tried to ignore the pain. Robert had long believed in the concept of mind over matter, and here was the perfect opportunity to put that belief to the test. Gritting his teeth against the incessant burning at a spot deep within the meat of his shoulder, he climbed. He climbed for his life, or what was left of it. It felt like he was leaving reality behind.

Only when he reached the window did he pause to take a breather. It was a short climb, but in his condition it had been hard going. He hung there, like some giant mutant simian, and fought to regain control of his body. After a short while he felt ready to continue, and hoisted himself onto the outside lip of the window ledge. The ledge consisted of roughly an inch of rotten timber, and he was barely able to get his toes on its crumbling surface. He moved quickly, aware that the ledge could break away at any minute, and even if he did not fall, he would certainly draw attention to his clumsy attempt at entry.