Darker Read online

  Darker

  SIMON CLARK

  For Alex and Helen Clark, my children, in recognition of their inspiration and patience

  Contents

  Part 1

  Chapter 1: Whatever Happened to Rosemary Snow?

  Chapter 2: Faster

  Chapter 3: And Yet Darker

  Part 2

  Chapter 4: Whatever Happened to Amy Young?

  Chapter 5: Darker and Darker

  Chapter 6: Car Wreck

  Chapter 7: Blood

  Chapter 8: Living Pains

  Chapter 9: Firing Rockets at the Sky

  Chapter 10: Hotter

  Chapter 11: Burning Snow

  Chapter 12: Dead of Night

  Chapter 13: Eyescape

  Chapter 14: Sunday

  Chapter 15: The Man in the Attic

  Chapter 16: Burnt in Blood

  Chapter 17: Monday

  Chapter 18: Appearance

  Chapter 19: Closer

  Chapter 20: The Day Hell Came to Town

  Chapter 21: Dead Beat

  Chapter 22: Huntress

  Chapter 23: Fire and Ice

  Chapter 24: Michael’s Story

  Chapter 25: Vision

  Chapter 26: Police

  Chapter 27: Cat and Mouse

  Chapter 28: Shadow Thoughts

  Chapter 29: Running on Empty

  Chapter 30: Faith

  Chapter 31: Symbiosis

  Chapter 32: Power Over Men

  Chapter 33: Desperate Measures

  Chapter 34: Wales

  Chapter 35: Monday Night

  Chapter 36: Nature of the Beast

  Chapter 37: Codex Alexander

  Chapter 38: Tuesday Morning

  Chapter 39: Cruising for a Bruising

  Chapter 40: Blood on Road

  Chapter 41: York

  Chapter 42: Carnage

  Chapter 43: Terror

  Chapter 44: Wreckage

  Chapter 45: On the Road to York

  Chapter 46: After the Storm

  Chapter 47: Saviour

  Chapter 48: The Road to Nowhere

  Chapter 49: Night Talk

  Chapter 50: Tuesday Night

  Chapter 51: Stranger

  Chapter 52: New Arrival

  Chapter 53: Isaac

  Chapter 54: Crunch Time

  Part 3

  Chapter 55: Ground Zero

  Chapter 56: Near Miss

  Chapter 57: Adrift

  Chapter 58: Visions and Nightmares

  Chapter 59: Snow

  Chapter 60: Square One

  Chapter 61: Glebe Cottage Once More

  Chapter 62: Plans for Amy

  Chapter 63: More Visions

  Chapter 64: Between a Rock and a Hard Place

  Chapter 65: Skin of Tooth

  Chapter 66: Darlington House

  Chapter 67: Resurrection

  Chapter 68: Leaving Michael

  Chapter 69: Making Plans for Richard

  Chapter 70: And Yet Faster

  Chapter 71: Joey Sings the Blues

  Chapter 72: Speed

  Chapter 73: Growing Darker

  Chapter 74: Assassins

  Chapter 75: The Hit

  Chapter 76: Preparations

  Chapter 77: Off Road

  Chapter 78: Nearly There

  Chapter 79: Static

  Chapter 80: It’s Here

  Chapter 81: Darker

  Chapter 82: Darkness Comes

  Chapter 83: Dark

  Chapter 84: Amy Says …

  Chapter 85: Puppy

  Chapter 86: Strange Fruit

  Chapter 87: Showdown

  Chapter 88: Power

  Chapter 89: Where Shadows Stalk Darker

  Chapter 90: Beastworld

  Chapter 91: Sunrise

  Chapter 92: Forever Darker

  A Note on the Author

  Part 1

  ‘Those who have once been intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, can never willingly abandon it.’

  Edmund Burke

  Chapter 1

  Whatever Happened to Rosemary Snow?

  Do you want power?

  More precisely, do you want power over people?

  Do you want the power to command someone to die for you?

  And for that power to be so absolute, so complete, that they not only die for you willingly, they go to their deaths so full of joy, so full of pride that they cry out your name with their final breath.

  Do you want that kind of power?

  Do you?

  Tuesday afternoon. A quiet country road. 57 hours left.

  Do you want power?

  When the stranger asked Rosemary the question she looked up at him, startled. It was as if he’d read her mind.

  Rosemary Snow: long black hair down to the small of her back; one small birthmark on her left cheek; a shy sixteen-year-old, still holding on to her virginity with a grip that would have been the envy of a professional wrestler.

  She sat on a roadside bench. The June sun, hot enough to melt road tar into sticky black pools, turned cars into ghosts in the rippling heat haze. The meat pie she was eating disgusted her, tasting like pulped cardboard and pepper. It had only been sheer brutal hunger that had driven her to buy it from the crappy service station down the road. Rosemary Snow would have sold her soul for a burger from a drive-thru McDonald’s.

  As she picked off scabs of burnt pastry to feed the sparrows hopping around her feet, the man pulled up in the BMW. The car was so perfectly white it looked as if it had been moulded from icing sugar. Without a shred of hesitation its driver wound down the window and began talking to her as if he’d known her all his life.

  And, in a way, Rosemary Snow felt as if he had.

  He was, she guessed, in his late thirties with the good looks of someone who might have been a pop star once: his brown hair had been brushed rather than combed; she’d describe his grin as boyish and relaxed. But it was his eyes that were the most striking feature. If you looked in a mirror, placed a finger on the edge of each eye and pulled gently down it would give the same effect as those downturned eyes that Rosemary found she couldn’t stop gazing into. They were gentle eyes that told her: This is a man who cares deeply about people in trouble.

  People just like Rosemary Snow.

  ‘The devil nicked your tongue?’ he asked cheerfully. ‘Come on, you can tell me.’

  The question had been: DO YOU WANT POWER?

  ‘Yes.’ Rosemary answered so decisively that it surprised her. ‘That’s exactly what I want.’

  That wasn’t the only thing she did to surprise herself. When the stranger asked her to get into the car she did just that.

  Tuesday night. The Manchester road. 49 hours left.

  ‘Why are you driving so fast?’ Rosemary asked.

  ‘Because I need to get where I’m going quickly. Does it frighten you?’

  ‘No.’

  Which was true. She knew he was in complete control of the white BMW as it flashed along the mountainside roads like a missile.

  The only question that Rosemary asked herself now was: Where is he taking me?

  Wednesday morning. A coastal road. 37 hours left.

  The only breaks in the driving were brief stops at service stations. Twice they stopped for him to sleep. Then he’d sleep in the reclined driver’s seat for precisely one hour.

  Sometimes she wondered with a feeling that she couldn’t decide was a thrill or panic whether he’d stop the car in a remote spot and order her to take off her clothes. Nothing she could do would prevent what might happen then.

  Chapter 2

  Faster

  Wednesday night. A forest road. 27 hours left.

  ‘Rosemary. Why did you run away from ho
me?’

  Before he’d asked the question she had been lulled into hypnotic half-sleep by the rhythmic sound of the tyres on the road. She sat up straight, blinking. A dozen reasons powerful enough to make any sane person quit their home at a full-blooded run streamed through her head.

  It had started after her parents’ divorce, when her mother took her to live in a bleak industrial town. Her new school smelled like a filthy public lavatory, and its pupils must surely have been recruited straight from hell.

  Rosemary wasn’t fat, short, or spotty; she didn’t break wind incontinently in the middle of prayers. But God in His infinite wisdom had seen fit to inflict upon her a birthmark on the left cheek. A shiny, fresh pink, like a scab picked off too soon, it was a letter Z shape. It wasn’t particularly big; she could hide it beneath make-up or even a cat’s-tail of her long black hair. But the demons at school grabbed at it like starving men at a chunk of bread.

  When she walked along school corridors she always heard the same sound.

  ZZZ–ZZZZ …

  After three years of this she couldn’t even look at a bee buzzing innocently around the garden without feeling a sickening clutch in her stomach.

  ZZZ–ZZZZ …

  ‘Watch out. Here comes Red Zed,’ they’d chant. ‘Red Zed, you wouldn’t BEE-lieve what we’re reading today. It’s Shakespeare. Have you heard of Shakespeare, Red Zed?’

  She’d look miserably down at the desk.

  ‘Read some Shakespeare for Red Zed. To BEE or not to BEE, that is the question.’ Another favourite was: ‘Guess what? Red Zed asked me to be her friend. I told her to buzz off.’

  Then her mother stabbed her in the back. With a year – a full 365 heart-rending days – before she could leave school, for good, her mother remarried. She didn’t mind her stepfather (he was remote and polite), it was his daughter, Jane. She attended the same school as Rosemary. Jane was streetwise and popular. And she led the other girls in the Bumble Bee chase.

  At least for three years Rosemary had been able to escape the endless ZZZ-ing at hometime.

  Now she went to bed with the same ‘ZZZ’ coming through the bedroom wall, followed by a chuckle that went on and on until it turned into hiccuping laughter that she could hear no matter how hard she pressed the pillow to her ear.

  Instead of past horrors, she told the man of her future plans as they drove through the night-time countryside, the car’s lights tearing a great hole out of the darkness.

  ‘I was on my way to stay with some friends.’

  ‘Stay permanently?’

  ‘Yes. They’ve got this great squat. It’s a converted railway carriage in the middle of a huge orchard.’ Rosemary talked enthusiastically about the countryside there, the barbecues they’d enjoy on summer evenings.

  ‘Sounds nice. But don’t the railway carriages get cold in winter?’

  ‘No. You see, Kirk put in this huge stove last year. It could heat a warehouse. That’s Kirk Bane; he’s brilliant with his hands; he can fix anything.’

  ‘What’s he like?’ asked the man suddenly as if he might know him.

  ‘He’s seventeen, blue eyes, blond hair, tall, slim, but really muscular. He does a lot of hard physical work – chopping wood, working on the squat, and he’s —’

  ‘The others. How many are there?’

  ‘Five.’

  ‘What do they call themselves?’

  ‘It’s silly, really. The Apple Clan. You know, living in an orchard they —’

  ‘Everyone gets on well together?’

  ‘Yes. Like one big family, really. They’ve been together so —’

  ‘Names?’

  ‘Kirk Bane, Vince Peel, Jamie Laing, Sarah Greaves and Trish Twinkle. Trish won’t tell us her real surname. But if you saw the way her eyes twinkle you’d … what’s wrong?’

  Suddenly, he braked, his eyes fixed on the rearview mirror as if he expected to see something come rolling across the horizon after them.

  Then his eyes widened suddenly. He had seen something. Startled, she looked back along the moonlit road. She saw nothing. Not even another car.

  But she sensed the man’s anxiety as he pressed hard down on the pedal. The BMW roared away into the night. Where to – God alone knew.

  Thursday afternoon. A mountain road. 8 hours left.

  The man drove slowly, as if looking for something in the hillside fields. As he did so, Rosemary talked about the Apple Clan. He told her about his family. He had a wife. Two teenage sons. ‘They’re motorbike mad. When they take off on their bikes I pace the garden, worried sick, until I see them come tearing back into the driveway.’ Also, he had a daughter. At weekends she did voluntary work at a refuge for abandoned dogs. ‘I’m always telling her she won’t get rich working for nothing.’

  Smiling, he looked at Rosemary. ‘There’s one thing I’ve never told anyone about my family.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘They don’t exist. I invented them.’ He held eye contact with her. ‘Like you invented Kirk Bane, Jamie and the rest of the Apple Clan.’

  She sat in stunned silence.

  He laughed softly. ‘Believe me, Rosemary, neither of us are mad. If people were more honest most would admit to day-dreams and private fantasies. But it’s the depth of your day-dreams that shows you’re really quite a special person, Rosemary Snow. Your powers of imagination are extraordinary.’ He fixed her with those downturned eyes again. ‘That’s why you’re perfect for what we’re going to do next.’

  Thursday evening. The Sheffield road. 6 hours left.

  The man glanced at the girl in the passenger seat.

  Rosemary Snow. Pretty, with long black hair, but very quiet, very serious. She’d had a tough life. And if he failed tonight it would be a short one.

  He hoped sincerely that if she did die it would be quick and painless.

  Deep down he doubted it. He’d seen it happen too many times before.

  Thursday night. A deserted country road. 90 minutes left.

  The car hit ninety. Moths exploded against the windscreen. Headlights ripped open the night. They drove along the road between acre upon acre of oilseed rape crops. Rosemary, nervously gripping the seatbelt across her chest, watched the hazy yellow sea of oil plants flow by.

  Crack! Another moth splashed across the glass. Her tongue, as dry as paper, stuck to the roof of her mouth.

  She looked at the man. His mouth must be as dry as mine, she thought, seeing his Adam’s apple working up and down in his throat like he was trying to swallow a stone. He was troubled by some huge problem that he did not share with her.

  She possessed enormous powers of imagination, he’d told her. Maybe right now he was imagining her naked.

  Thursday night. 67 minutes left.

  ‘You want power?’ He spoke with the intensity of a man about to slide the barrel of a gun between his lips. ‘Well, this is the place you get it.’

  He braked hard, sliding the car to a halt.

  ‘Get out of the car, Rosemary.’

  She obeyed, shivering as the cool night air closed around her like a dead man’s hand.

  He talked to her through the open window, those gentle down-turned eyes fixed on hers.

  ‘Rosemary. In a moment, I’ll ask you to climb the fence and walk into the middle of the field over there. First, I’m going to give you some instructions. They’ll sound strange but humour me, OK?’

  She nodded. The light from the full moon showed everything with almost supernatural clarity. Beyond the fence lay a field recently cropped of hay. Two-thirds of the way across the field stood a lone tree. Disease had killed the top half of it. Although the lower branches were thick with leaves the higher branches were completely bare. Rosemary couldn’t avoid the impression that those naked branches were like arms waving her away. If the tree could speak it would be crying, Danger! Get away from here! Danger!

  Fifty yards beyond the tree another fence separated the field from a farmhouse. In the eerie glow of the
moon she saw that the building had been abandoned. Around the boarded door climbed a mass of roses that nodded as pink as babies’ heads. Upstairs, the two windows that faced her were intact and reflected moonlight like two wide, staring eyes.

  Beyond the farmhouse, fields rose and fell in shadowy humps into the distance.

  No people, no cars disturbed the stillness. The only sound was the man’s low voice telling her what to do. And stressing the importance – the vital importance – of following his instructions to the letter.

  ‘Imagine you’re waiting for someone. He’s had a long, tiring journey. Make him welcome. He’s vitally important to you. Embrace him, love him like a long-lost brother. Keep thinking that and everything will be all right.’

  She saw him sitting there, looking like a ghost in the shadows of the car.

  ‘I’ll be right here if you need me, Rosemary.’

  Rosemary felt a stir of confusion. ‘But what do I do with him?’

  ‘Keep him calm. He may seem a little strange to begin with, but that’s because you’ll never have met anyone quite like him before. Just hold on to him. And like you can direct Kirk’s and the rest of the Clan’s actions through your imagination you can direct his as well. OK?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Oh,’ the man said as if remembering some insignificant detail. ‘If he does behave badly and tries to climb on top of you, you tell him to sit down and not move one inch until you tell him to move again. He’ll do it. Understand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Okey-dokey. Go to the middle of the field and wait for him.’

  As she climbed the fence, the man called softly, ‘Good luck, Rosemary Snow.’

  Thursday night. 52 minutes left.

  Silence. The kind of silence that hurts your ears.

  Rosemary looked across at the grotesque tree frozen in mid-warning gesture and she felt suddenly cold, like someone had dumped a handful of snow inside her sweatshirt.

  Rosemary gave a stuttering groan as if she’d woken from a deep sleep. Shivering, she thought: He’s hypnotized me. She felt like someone who’d been mesmerized by a stage hypnotist into stripping in front of an audience, then abruptly woken in front of a crowd that was roaring with laughter and pointing at her little tits.