Читать книгу Department 19 - 3 Book Collection - Will Hill, Will Hill - Страница 37

Larissa Kinley knew it was early before she opened her eyes; it was too dark in her bedroom, too quiet. She forced her gummy eyelids open and saw that she was right. The digital alarm clock on her bedside table read 5:06 in glowing green letters. She sat up in bed and stretched her arms above her head, yawning widely. It was the eighth night in a row that she had found herself awake when she should be asleep, watching the green numbers tick over until she could legitimately get up and go in the shower. She hadn’t told her parents about what she was beginning to think qualified as insomnia; she knew that they would nod, half-heartedly sympathise, and then go back to whatever they were doing.

Larissa rolled out of bed and walked over to her bedroom window. She was about to open it, to let some fresh air into the room in the hope that it would tire her out, when she looked down into the small garden at the back of their little semi-detached house, and clapped her hand over her mouth so she didn’t scream.

The old man was standing in her garden, looking up at her with a gentle smile on his face, his grey overcoat wrapped around him, his hands casually in his pockets. His eyes were bright in the soft orange light of the streetlight that stood beyond the garden fence and horribly, revoltingly friendly.

She took a step backwards and tripped over one of the leather boots she had dropped at the end of her bed the night before. Her arms wheeled as she tried to keep her balance, but it was futile. She fell to the floor, hard, her teeth clicking shut on her tongue and sending a dagger of agony through her head. Tasting blood in her mouth, she scrambled to her knees and crawled back to the window. She inched her head above the windowsill and looked down into the garden.

The man was gone.

There was no more sleep for Larissa that night. She lay on her bed, playing the events of the previous two days over and over in her head, looking for a way to put the pieces together. She was still trying when she heard her brother’s bedroom door thump open, and she got up and raced across the landing, shoving him out of the way and closing the bathroom door behind her. Liam hammered half-heartedly on the door, but they both knew how this game went, and he quickly gave up and went back to his room.

Standing in front of the mirror, Larissa poked her tongue out and looked at the tiny cut her teeth had made. She sucked the blood away, watched it instantly well up again, then brushed her teeth, carefully, and stepped into the shower. She emerged twenty minutes later with her mind no clearer; every time she managed to push the old man out of her head and think about something else – her coursework, the funfair she and her friends were going to that evening – he would suddenly appear, smiling his soft smile, staring at her with those wide, friendly eyes.

Her parents were already sat at the table when she made her way downstairs to breakfast, her wet hair wrapped in a towel and piled on her head. Her dad was reading the business section of The Times and slowly demolishing half a grapefruit, while her mother nibbled unconvincingly at a piece of toast and stared into thin air. Neither of them said anything as she sat down and poured herself a bowl of cornflakes and a glass of orange juice. She again considered telling them about the old man, but decided against it.

She knew Liam felt it too, although he refused to talk about it with her. Their father had stopped going to Liam’s football matches at the start of the summer, without ever offering an explanation or an apology, as though he had simply forgotten that it was something he used to do. Larissa knew it had hurt her brother more deeply than he would ever admit, particularly to his big sister, but he had never questioned his dad about it. It was obvious that something bigger than football was going on: a dark cloud of depression had descended on him at the start of the year and showed no signs of lifting. She was sure that telling them about the old man would bring nothing more than tired suggestions that she had had a nightmare, that there was nothing to worry about.

Even if she told them it was the third day in a row she had seen him.

Larissa ate her cereal in silence, said goodbye to her parents as they left for work, then went upstairs. As she passed her brother’s room she saw him sitting at his desk in his school uniform, instant messaging with someone, probably one of the large number of seemingly identical adolescent boys who were his friends. They were polite and more than a little shy when she answered the door to them in the evenings, but she nearly always caught their eyes crawling over her chest, and it made her shudder.

“Morning, Liam,” she said.

He grunted, which Larissa knew was the best she was likely to get from him.

In her room, Larissa pushed the pages of her coursework around her desk for the next couple of hours, her mind on anything but Jane Austen. She made herself some lunch, downloaded some music, lay on her bed, paced around her bedroom, and generally killed time until it was time to go to the fair. Her father was getting out of his car when she stepped out of the house, and he waved a half-hearted greeting at her. She returned it with an equal lack of enthusiasm, and he stopped her as she passed him.

“Are you OK?” he asked, peering at her from sleepy, hooded eyes.

“I’m fine, Dad,” she snapped. “What about you? Are you OK?”

Her father looked at her, then dropped his gaze.

“That’s what I thought,” she said, and walked down the driveway and out on to the street, the heels of her boots clicking furiously along the pavement.

The funfair was an annual event, beloved by the town’s teenagers and children alike. The kids loved the dodgems, the small roller coaster, the Barrel Roll and the Chair-O-Planes; the teenagers loved the neon lights, the dark corners where they could kiss, the games and the arcades. It was, in truth, little more than a collection of sideshows with two or three half-decent rides, but the strips of lights mingled with the scents of candyfloss and roasting nuts and the tinny soundtrack to create something that was slightly magical.

All this was lost on Larissa’s friend Amber, who was enthusiastically kissing a boy from their history class, her back pressed against the wall of the coconut shy, her hands holding his firmly at his sides so he didn’t get any ideas about putting them anywhere else. The rest of the girls had wandered off to smoke a spliff behind the dodgems, and Larissa found herself alone. She waited a few minutes for Amber to disentangle herself from the boy, who had greasy hair and acne, but Amber seemed in no hurry to do so, even though he was the third boy she had kissed in the little over an hour they had been at the fair. Eventually Larissa wandered away.

She walked down the funfair’s main street and out into the darkness of the park, following the fence that separated the fields from the main road. Cars sped past her, their headlights blazing, snatches of music floating from open windows, and she was overcome with a sense of sorrow and loss. Her hands shook as she dragged a pack of Marlboro Lights from her pocket, pulled one from the box, and applied the small yellow flame of her lighter to the tip.

“Those things will kill you.”

Larissa jumped, her heart lurching in her chest, at the sound of the old man’s voice. She knew it was him even as she was turning towards the source of the words; the voice was extraordinary, unlike any other she had ever heard. It rolled and swooned, as deep as a double bass and as smooth as honey, full of whispered promises and dark secrets. She turned towards the fence and saw the old man on the other side of it, standing on the pavement with his hands in his pockets. For the first time since she had seen him two days ago, standing quietly on the corner of her road as she walked home from college, he was not smiling. Instead he was looking at her with an expression of great sadness.

The fence between them was more than six feet high, green metal topped with wicked spikes, and it emboldened her. She took a step towards the old man.

“Why are you following me?” she asked, her voice sharp. “What the hell were you doing in my garden this morning?”

The old man’s smile returned.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You look like someone I used to know.”

She opened her mouth to ask who, but before she could form the words, the old man moved. He stepped into the air, as casually as most people would climb a staircase, and floated up and over the fence. His coat billowed out behind him, the sleeves riding up, and Larissa caught sight of a narrow black V tattooed on the inside of his left forearm, before he landed gently in front of her. She opened her mouth to scream, but he closed the distance between them impossibly quickly and clamped a hand over her mouth.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, his breath hot in her ear. “I truly am.”

Then he buried his face in her neck. She felt pain, so sharp it was almost sweet, and then she was gone.

It was still dark when Larissa awoke. She was lying on the grass beneath an oak tree, and she was cold and damp with dew. Her head felt heavy and she struggled to her feet. She walked through the quiet stalls and rides of the funfair, kicking through piles of litter and abandoned food, heading towards the park gates.

She remembered nothing about the previous night, nothing after she left her father standing in their drive. Where were Amber and the rest of the girls? How could they just leave without her – hadn’t any of them bothered to look for her when they left? In the back of her head a deep, gentle voice told her that everything was going to be all right, but she didn’t think it was.

She didn’t think that was even close to the truth.

The house was dark as she turned into the drive, shivering, her arms wrapped tightly around her. She hoped that her parents were worried out of their minds, but she knew they would probably not have even noticed that she hadn’t come home.

She crept up the stairs, not because she cared if she woke anyone up, but because she didn’t want to be asked questions that she had no answers to. She would get some real sleep in a proper bed, then phone Amber and find out what had happened. Larissa undressed, lay down on her bed, pulling her duvet around her like a cocoon, and was asleep in less than a minute.

An hour later she awoke and buried her face in her pillow so she didn’t scream. Her head was splitting in two, a huge thunderbolt of agony running through her forehead, as though someone had buried an axe in it. She rolled over, the pillow clamped to her face, her eyes wide with pain and terror, and then the hunger hit her, and she doubled up into a foetal ball. It was like nothing she had ever felt before, a pain so huge it felt as though it must have come from somewhere outside the universe, an enormous, howling emptiness that filled her entire body. She screamed into the pillow, her body convulsing, thrashing back and forth as though she was having a seizure. She screamed and screamed, and after what felt like an infinity of time, but was probably no more than a minute, the hunger subsided.

Larissa pushed the pillow away from her face. She felt as weak as an infant, and saliva was running down her cheeks and chin in sticky rivulets. Pushing the duvet away, she rolled over and flopped out of bed, and didn’t hit her bedroom floor.

She floated a foot above the carpet.

Incomprehension flooded through her, and she was overcome by a terror so profound she felt her eyes begin to roll back in her head, as unconsciousness fought to claim her. She thrust her hands down and felt rough material under her fingers, and her vision cleared. The floor was still there; at least that was something. She twisted in the air, tears of panic springing involuntarily into the corners of her eyes and spilling down her cheeks, and she spun slowly, rotating so she was looking down at the floor. Then suddenly, whatever was holding her in the air was gone, and she thudded face down on to the ground.

Larissa pushed herself to her feet, weeping openly, and stumbled out of her bedroom and into the bathroom. She had barely closed the door behind when the hunger struck again, driving her to her knees. The vacuum in her stomach and chest reared open, spilling waves of agony through her body, and she shoved her fist into her mouth and screamed around it, a muffled shriek that tore at her throat. She flopped to the bathroom floor and writhed on the cold tiles, her body spasming, her mind emptied by the enormity of the pain. She twitched, and convulsed, and waited, desperately, pleadingly, for it to pass.

Eventually it did. She gripped the washbasin and pulled herself up in front of the mirror. It took her a few seconds to recognise the reflection in the mirror as her own; her skin was pale and beaded with sweat, her body was visibly trembling, and when she looked closely at her eyes she jammed the fist back into her mouth and screamed again.

Dark red was spreading from the corners of her eyes, as though blood was being dripped slowly into them. The crimson was slowly diffusing through the white of her eyeballs and darkening her irises to a shiny black. Her vision was clear, and as she watched her eyes change, she wished it wasn’t; the red in her eyes seemed to be almost alive, swirling and spinning like an oil slick, darkening and pulsing in lazy motions that turned her stomach.

The hunger hit again, a sledgehammer of agony and emptiness, and she bit down on the fist in her mouth, involuntarily, spilling blood into her mouth. And instantly, the hunger was gone, replaced by a pleasure so enormous it was heavenly. Her blood ran down her throat, and she felt her knees weaken as a feeling beyond anything she had ever felt overwhelmed her; she felt as though she could push down walls, run for a hundred miles, leap and fly like a bird.

She felt like there was nothing she couldn’t do.

Then the feeling was gone, and she slumped back to her knees. She hungrily sucked more blood from her hand, but the pleasure did not return. But although she didn’t know what had happened to her, although the part of her that was still recognisably Larissa was frightened beyond measure, she realised she now knew one thing, knew it with great certainty.

Blood had taken the pain away. And if her own no longer worked, she would need some from somebody else.

Larissa staggered to her feet, and stumbled out of the bathroom. Then she crossed the landing, and turned the handle on the door to her brother’s bedroom. He had thrown the covers off during the night, and his skin was pale, bathed in a shaft of moonlight that was creeping in between the curtains above his bed. She could see the veins in his neck pulsing steadily, and the hunger screamed and thrashed in her head, driving rational thought almost entirely out her, bellowing for her to feed, screeching and cursing in her reeling mind. She took a step towards him without even meaning to, then stopped.

It was Liam lying there; her annoying, infuriating, beautiful, funny little brother, who had never hurt her on purpose, never hurt anyone as far as she knew. She summoned up the last of her dwindling strength, and ran from his room, slamming the door shut behind her. She heard him rise from his slumber, grumbling something inarticulate, then she was gone, sprinting down the stairs and through the front door, the street outside still dark, and she was running, away from the people she loved, away from the only home she had ever known.