Panic (7 page)

All of those deeply buried emotions raced to the surface and delivered
a sucker punch as Rachel looked at the pool of blood on the floor: the smear that led to her parents' basement. A blow hard enough to knock the air clean out of her, leaving her gasping; her vision blurred by hot tears.

The blood belonged to her father. She knew it instinctively, and felt a small pang of fearful shame as she acknowledged to herself that she hoped she was wrong, and that whatever misfortune had happened in the kitchen, it had
befallen her mother instead.

The knots in her stomach told a different story.

The basement.

Her eyes fixed on the door, on the bloody hand print that adorned it like a Christmas
decoration from hell. The long, glistening smear of blood that led to it.

Someone had been hurt, and had dragged themselves into the basement. Rachel knew that she should be thinking about the
why
of it: the obvious implications of an injured person retreating into a dark prison, rather than seeking out help, but for now all she could think was that it was Daddy's blood, and that there was a slim chance that he might still be alive.

Hands trembling, she stepped carefully over the blood and reached for the handle of the basement door. The metal felt cool and familiar in her hands, and memories of all the times she had walked down the narrow stairs in the past, helping her mother with the laundry, flooded back into her mind, jarring her with their familiarity in th
e suddenly alien and hostile environment.

For a moment she held the handle and stood still, head cocked slightly, straining to hear something beyond the door, hoping that she might hear her father's voice perhaps, calling faintly for help. Terror built up inside her, the fear at what she might see upon opening the door waging a silent war against her belief that her father was down there, injured, maybe dying.

She threw the door open and found herself confronted by a black hole, as though the bright kitchen had opened a hungry mouth, ready to swallow her whole. The light from the kitchen illuminated a handful of bare concrete steps leading down, disappearing into impenetrable gloom.

And now she could hear something. Soft, wet sounds. Sounds that could only be her stricken father struggling in the darkness, the liquid of his life spilling out onto the cold, hard floor.

Rachel rushed forward blindly then, filled equally with fear and hope and desperation, clumsily and frantically traversing the steps into the basement, into the blackness.

It was the smell that hit her first. The basement air was musty and old, sour smelling. And filled with another scent, something that took her all the way back to that summer's day and the smashed
greenhouse, and the screaming: the cloying, coppery stench of blood.

Then, as her eyes adjusted to the dim light, and the
source of the strange wet sounds was revealed, Rachel felt something snapping in her mind, some important tether suddenly breaking.

Rachel's first instinct had been right: it was her father in the basement, lying prone on the concrete, but he was not alone. Crouched over his fallen, lifeless body was the family's beloved friendly little terrier, Sniffer, his snout drenched in gore.

Eating her father's face.

She had a moment to take in the insanity, to feel it penetrate her brain and put down roots. A second in which to see the dog lift its head in her direction, to notice that there was something wrong with its eyes, something that the gloom of the basement would not quite reveal.

A second to stumble backwards as Sniffer came for her, blood-soaked lips pulled back, snarling.

*

Michael hit the tarmac hard, putting his head down to the wind.
Travelling
.

He had been a decent runner in school, not quite with that extra burst of speed that the select few of his peers that ended up running for the county had, but they would have been able to see him in their rear view mirror. A few years of little real exercise hadn't quite eradicated that prowess, and as he pumped his legs, feet smashing painfully into the road, he felt a certain confidence.

The two horrors from the car park were following. He could hear the crashing feet and broken panting. For a moment he found himself questioning how they were able to target him so effectively – clearly they were blind, yet they were not aimless. Again he wondered if they were operating by smell, but the notion seemed ridiculous. These were human beings, not bloodhounds.

He risked a look back over his left shoulder, and almost yelled out when he saw how close they were. The fog permitted visibility of fifteen feet, twenty at most but Michael could see them clearly. Coming fast. And once again he noticed the strange, alien gait, the movement that seemed to belong more to the animal kingdom than the human world.

He doubled his efforts, but already his heart was sinking. The air pumping through his lungs felt as though it were getting hotter, each new breath seemed to be filled with razors that rattled around painfully in his chest. He wasn't going to be able to keep this up. They were going to catch him.

Michael made up his mind before he even realised there was an issue up for debate. The road offered him a clear path, a place to use his pace to its fullest, but it also made him a sitting duck, a target that could not be missed. What the road offered most was vulnerability.

He veered off the tarmac and into the woods.

As he crashed into the undergrowth, aware that he was making more noise but also hoping that the more difficult terrain would prove too much for his sightless pursuers, he was surprised to find his mind filled with thoughts of his estranged wife, of the way the marriage hadn't so much broken down as melted away. Each day a steady diminishing, until one day, when you found yourself looking, you discovered there was nothing left to see.

Things had been good with Elise, really good for a long time. She taught kids at the local primary school. She smiled whenever she saw him. She sang in the kitchen, little improvised verses that usually swerved into ridiculous territory and always made them both laugh.

Even now, his heart ached as he thought about the way that smile had slowly disappeared, to be replaced one day with curt pleasantries, and finally with a stiff goodbye. The way he had known deep down that she hadn’t wanted to say that terrible word, that she hoped day after day that the man she had met would return. The way, in the end, she felt she had to.

They had moved quickly in the beginning, getting a place together only a few months after they met, in clichéd fashion, following a chance meeting of their gaze across a smoky bar in the Cardiff City centre. Marriage followed within a couple of years and a year later than that, while the glow of the honeymoon period still emitted a failing sliver of light, Elise had announced to him that she was pregnant.

Michael felt it at the time, the dark realisation that having a baby was like papering over the cracks in shifting continents, but he always held out hope that one day something would click, some mysterious unseen machine would shift gears and the smile would return. Yet continents shift, and can not be stopped.

The baby, their daughter, Claire, arrived like the word of God. A miracle that renewed their faith and promised a bright future. She meant everything to him, his heart swelling until it felt like it might burst every time he looked at her. For a time, things felt good again, but still, deep down, Michael knew. Knew that both he and Elise had become actors, playing roles. Saying the right things, doing the right things. But the actions were hollow, and there was no echo of them in their eyes.

Eventually the script just...ran out, and there was nothing left to say, no way to improvise happiness.

Elise finally left, taking Claire with her, returning to her parents’ home in Aberystwyth. It was a hundred miles, the distance between them. A hundred miles and a lifetime.

Claire was six when Elise had left, eight and-a-half now, and her continued absence hurt like a tumour, growing with each passing day and eating into him. He saw her some weekends, bitter tears stinging his eyes every time he had to leave her with her mother, but the long, irregular hours he had to work, the main reason, he guessed, for his wife's muted rage toward him, quickly began to work their dark spell on his relationship with Claire, and he felt it too begin to ebb away.

He had to let her down all too often.

That was the reason he had moved to St. Davids, or at least it was the reason he gave when his superiors questioned his transfer request. It was nothing to do with...the other thing. He just needed to be closer to his daughter, and to work on a Force that wasn't so demanding of his time and energy.

The intervening years saw resentment toward Elise build, naturally. She had become little more than the woman who had taken his child away from him, and whenever he thought about her now, it was usually with anger. When he confronted her, each time he arrived to take Claire away for a weekend or a day trip, their discussions were cordial but functional, a fractured mirror of the final months of their union.

Crashing through the woods, chased by two blood-soaked figures from a fevered nightmare,
Michael was surprised to find that it was her face that preoccupied him. It was her, he realised suddenly, that he was running to. All the unmentioned tensions that had built up between them, all the uncommunicated issues, were now so much bullshit. Trivial nonsense that did not have to sit in his gut, boiling away in unnecessary anger. If he could only talk to her again, just one more time, he knew now that he could see that smile once more.

Behind him, it sounded like the roots and bushes were
slowing the two predators down; the volume of their crashing passage slowly receding. Michael slowed his pace a little, anxious that he should not stumble over some obstacle and end up dying of a twisted ankle, and pressed on further into the thickening forest.

*

The dog came fast, pouncing toward her, and Rachel had time to notice his teeth, suddenly sharp. Wicked-looking.
Were they always that sharp?

He had always had those teeth, those reminders that in another life Sniffer would have been part of a large pack, roaming plains and savagely bringing down larger animals to satisfy their thirst for blood.

Panicked, she took a step backwards, stumbling over the small toolbox that Dad always kept at the foot of the stairs, and hitting the ground, hard. The air rushed out of her, even as Sniffer, his anticipated target now a vacuum, crashed into the shelves lined against the wall, decorated with the junk of an average life.

Rachel saw the shelves begin to topple toward her, and knew instinctively that allowing them to land on her would mean her death. She rolled to one side as the shelves creaked and leaned, finally giving in to gravity's persuasion and crashing onto the floor inches from her left leg.

A noise, half squeal-half growl, told her that Sniffer had not been quite so lucky.

Rachel scrabbled away on all fours and leapt to her feet, coughing out the foul-tasting dust that had no doubt been accumulating on the shelves for years, if not decades.

She half expected to be hit in the back by the wild dog as she stood, but the impact never came. Snatching up the nearest object she could see, a socket wrench sitting atop the ancient washing machine, Rachel turned to face the dog that she had spent her teenage years cuddling and playing with, ready to kill it.

And saw immediately that there was no need.

The jumble of trash that had fallen from the shelves had brought with it a rusted pitchfork hanging from a makeshift hook on the wall. A pitchfork that was now embedded deep into Sniffer's shoulders.

For several seconds Rachel wa
tched open-mouthed as the tiny terrier struggled toward her on its belly, wheezing and growling weakly, desperately trying to free itself from the wreckage. Incredibly, the dog still seemed to be focused purely on reaching Rachel.

Sniffer's eyes never left her, two dark unending pools that, even in the half-light, she could see were ringed in dark blood, flowing freely from the dog's tear ducts. She was still staring into those fearful eyes when Sniffer finally wheezed for the last time and fell silent.

Dead silence in the basement.

She turned to the ruined remains of Jim Roberts then, still nursing a faint, forlorn hope that there might be some life left in him. Hope that fled when she saw the reality: her father's throat had been ripped away, and he had two deep gashes on his abdomen. Little remained of his
obliterated face, and the eyes that always seemed to twinkle when he looked at his beloved daughter were gone; eaten away by the family dog.

Rachel thought then of the hug that she had been waiting to receive when her train pulled into St. Davids station just an hour or two earlier, the one that she would now never receive, and of the twinkling delight in her father's eyes that summer all those years before when she cuddled him on the sofa in the bright morning sun
that poured through the window, strong hands squeezing her narrow shoulders, asking him to explain how the Olympics worked, and her eyes filled with tears.