Panic (5 page)

Michael felt relief wash through him. It had felt like things were slipping away from him, and moving beyond his comprehension. The sudden realisation that the reason he and Carl had been left hanging must be nothing less mundane than Glenda gossiping instead of doing her job was like finding a tether to reality. It was frustrating, but also deeply familiar.

He cursed himself for not having the number of the station in Haverfordwest stored on his phone, then let out a chuckle.

Carl arched an eyebrow.

"I gotta worry about you losing your marbles now, Mike?"

Michael grinned, shaking his head.

"Damn place has got us spooked is all, mate. Nothing more mysterious going on here than a woman who should have called one number probably calling a dozen others instead to let half the town know that something big is going down at Ralf's café. The only mystery here is that we haven't had a stream of gawpers heading out this way yet."

Carl looked confused for a moment, then brightened.

"You think? I mean, I was pretty definite, and she said she'd get right on it."

"What else could it be
, Carl? You said it yourself: this is straight off
Crimewatch
. Hell, this is straight out of Silence of the bloody Lambs or something. What possible reason would they have not to come here, or at least call us?"

Carl nodded slowly,
and blew out a long breath that seemed to have been held in for a very long time.

"You got the number for Haverfordwest on your phone?" Michael asked. "Probably better to call 'em direct than have Glenda try to explain this."

Carl shook his head.

"Nope. I can barely work the thing well enough to have my wife and kids' numbers on there."

"Directory enquiries it is then. I'm damn sure not calling
999
. I don't think they'd ever stop laughing."

Michael fished in his pocket and brought out the small silver phone that he carried everywhere, but rarely used. It was a good five years old. He tried a few months back, on a trip to Cardiff, to look into getting one of the smart phones that were everywhere now, but had in the end shied away from the idea. Just too confusing.

He flipped open the screen and began to hit the buttons, then stopped with a frown.

No signal.

The cold, gnawing sensation in his gut returned.

St. Davids was remote, but there was nowhere in the UK so remote that it didn't get mobile
phone reception. Not anymore.

"Uh, you got signal on your phone
, mate?" He asked Carl. "Mine's playing up."

Carl pulled out his phone, a distant ancestor even of Michael's, and stared at the screen, eyes narrowing.

"Got a little 'X' where the signal thing usually is." He looked at Michael. "That's odd right, both of us not having signal? We're not even on the same network are we? Does that matter?"

Michael grimaced. The tension in his stomach mounted, and he felt acidic burning rising up his throat. Stress. He knew the signs well.

"It's probably nothing," he said, though his tone was not as reassuring as he'd hoped. "Just means we'll have to go through Glenda, that's all. Let’s hope she remembers how to use the radio."

He turned back toward the car, only about thirty feet away yet almost obscured by the gathering fog.

Before he could take a step toward it, a noise stopped him dead. A noise that froze his muscles and turned his blood to ice.

Somewhere, somewhere very close, a man was screaming.

*

It was 10am by the time
Rachel reached her parent's house, the exertions of the walk and heaving the suitcase through the streets leaving an uncomfortable sheen of sweat under her coat that only made her colder as the freezing morning air hit it.

She had only seen a couple of people on the way, shuffling through the streets, huddled in heavy coats that looked warm and made her envious.
She thought it odd that the town was so quiet – ordinarily you could rely on bumping into small groups of people nattering on street corners, curious as to who was out and about that day – but the cold and the fog had apparently proven uninviting to all but the hardiest souls.

Rachel
was grateful for that. The worst part of having to walk home from the station was the thought that she would encounter familiar faces, most of whom would no doubt greet her with a big plastic smile and probing questions about just why she had returned. She had been spared that, at least, though she knew the escape was only temporary. The questions would come.

If anything the fog was getting heavier as morning meandered toward midday. Standing at the gate to her parent's driveway, Rachel couldn't remember ever seeing it so thick. From where she stood, the house wa
s a barely discernible mass; a suggestion of a presence. Something to do with global warming, she supposed. The news had been full of odd weather phenomena over the past year, and one way or another the explanation was always the same: we are driving too much and recycling too little.

Rachel couldn't argue with that, but it certainly seemed a little odd to suggest that global warming was suddenly responsible for a year of earthquakes, tornadoes and tsunamis, and even one day during which six inches of snow had fallen on the north of England despite June being only a few days around the corner. It was as if the planet had suddenly decided that it had had enough of mankind, and was doing its level best to make life hell for humans.

She pushed open the gate and stepped past her father's van. At least he had been true to his word and taken a day off work, even if he hadn't remembered to come and pick his only daughter up at the station. As she headed for the door, she paid no attention to the little post that her mother occasionally tied Sniffer to when she deemed his behaviour unacceptable.

Didn't see the cord hanging limply from it, the end frayed as though it had been chewed through.

Reaching the front door, Rachel rang the doorbell, figuring that it would be quicker than rooting through her handbag to find her keys, and relishing the look of surprise on the face of whoever answered, no doubt expecting to be greeted by the postman rather than her.

The bell chimed through the house and was met with silence. After a few seconds Rachel depressed the button again and frowned. This didn't seem right. A shiver ran through her again. Suddenly, something about the house
; the town; the impenetrable fog, just didn't seem right. She had the unnerving feeling that something was watching her and all of a sudden, standing with her back to the street, she felt exposed and vulnerable.

Why aren't they answering?

Her mother was quite likely to be out, making her morning rounds, her keen appetite for any and every morsel of gossip in the town as insatiable as ever, but if Dad was not at work – and he clearly wasn't – he would definitely be in the house. His role as the town's pre-eminent (only) baker was draining, and he often worked twelve-hour days. When he wasn't rolling out dough next to red-hot ovens, he was slumped on the couch, feet propped on the low coffee table, dozing his way through hours of
Sky Sports News
.

Feeling uneasy, Rachel quickly slung her handbag off her shoulder, unzipped it and located her keys. For a brief moment she
wondered if her key would work; if for some reason the locks had been changed, and almost laughed in relief when the key slid into the lock easily and the door swung open.

Inside, the house was silent and still.

Rachel stepped inside, shutting the door behind her softly. She realised, as the door closed with a
snick
that she had been unconsciously trying to make no noise, as though something might hear her approaching.

She stood for a moment, frozen, listening. Nothing. What on earth was making her so damn jumpy?

“You're being ridiculous, Rachel,” she suddenly said aloud. “Hello? Anyone home? Cold offspring here in need of a hot cuppa!”

There was no response. Rachel filled her lungs with air and hollered. “Mum? Dad?”

For some reason she could not quite identify, Rachel felt overpowering reluctance to venture further into the house. Fantastic scenarios played out in her mind, images of finding her parents murdered, or tied up and gagged in the bedroom, a masked intruder holding a blade to their throats. After a moment, she shook her head irritably.
This is St. Davids
, she told herself,
not London. That sort of thing does not happen here.

Still she found herself rooted to the spot. Lifting her phone from her pocket, she turned on the display and navigated to her text messages, hoping to spot one that she had missed. Something from her father, telling her that she'd have to let herself in.

There was nothing. Just a message received a couple of hours earlier from her brother Jason, informing her that he would arrive a little while after her, and that he was looking forward to seeing Mum's face when she heard that Rachel was jobless and homeless. Punctuated by a smiley face.
Bastard.

Just seeing the message brought a slight grin to her lips, and restored some semblance of normality to the morning. Suddenly
Rachel felt silly, and a little ashamed to find herself so unnerved by nothing. Her parents were probably at the store picking up a few last-minute items for her visit. They loved to stock up on her old favourites whenever she returned home for a weekend, invariably buying enough food to sustain a small army, as though they were somehow concerned that she forgot to eat when she returned to live her own life.

My old life, now
, Rachel thought sadly.

She shrugged off her coat, finding the house as cold as the streets had been. The heating had not been turned on. Maybe they had forgotten that she was coming
home today after all. She grinned, thinking of the look on their faces when they returned home to find her waiting for them. Mum, in particular, would be mortified at the oversight.

The house was small, and with a typically mundane layout: two front rooms – a small living room now dominated by her father's prized possession: a gigantic flat screen television.

Opposite that room, on the other side of the entrance hallway, an equally sized room that for a while her mother had tried in vain to turn into a dining room (until she finally gave up the losing battle against eating in front of the TV) but which was now little more than a storage room.

At the back of the house, a large kitchen. This was Mum's territory. Dad baked for a living, and wanted nothing to do with ovens or ingredients when he was at home, and that was just the way Mum liked it. The kitchen was her kingdom, and she ruled it with an iron fist. Spotlessly clean. A place for everything and everything in its place.

Rachel peeked into the living room as she passed, just in case Dad was to be found fast asleep on the sofa. Empty. The door to her right was open, but she only gave the dining room a cursory glance. As expected, it too was empty, unless you counted the boxes of ornaments and old electrical equipment that her parents stored there, unable or unwilling to consign them to history and the rubbish dump.

Access to the kitchen was through an open-plan archway at the end of the entrance hall, directly opposite the front door. Rachel stepped to it, her only thought now
: to get the kettle boiling and get some tea, a warm mug to clasp in her painfully frozen fingers. As she reached the arch, the reason for the temperature in the house became clear: the back door stood ajar.

Rachel's brow furrowed. Her parents were surely not out in town after all. No way would her mother leave the house and forget to lock up the door to her beloved kitchen.

The reason for the mysteriously empty house was suddenly clear, and ordinary enough to make Rachel's cheeks burn with embarrassment at her earlier feelings of panic: Dad was in the shed. Of course.

Rachel stepped past the island counter in the middle of the kitchen and leaned out of the back door, shivering as the temperature outside chilled her even further.

The garden was about thirty feet long and fairly narrow. The far left corner held a small shed.

“Dad!” Rachel yelled. “You want some tea? I'm boiling the kettle!”

No answer. The door to the shed was shut. He probably couldn't hear her.

Rachel turned around to grab the kettle.

And screamed.

The island in the middle of the kitchen had hidden it from her view, the thing which turned her world upside down. The thing that brought the panic back, a great wave of it making her heart hammer against her ribs.

The blood.

*

The scream hit Michael like an infection, winding round his intestines and squeezing, making his already frayed nerves howl.

The noise was terrible. High pit
ched, it sounded almost inhuman; an animal shriek. Michael clenched his fingers, digging his nails into his palm, struggling to resist the overwhelming urge to clap his hands over his ears and squeeze his eyes shut.