Halton Cray (Shadows of the World Book 1) (9 page)

Ten

‘And
from the shaft rose smoke like the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and
the air were darkened with the smoke from the shaft.’

– Revelations 9:2

I opened my curtains to
find the sky like steel, matching my mood. The jeep sat outside. I’d had a text
from Adrian saying I could have it all day since he’d be working late at the
theatre. This lifted my spirits; I could drive to New Cromley and avoid getting
wet.

I drank my coffee down thirstily despite the heat while
mulling over the lift home last night. Mark had resumed being the happy man I
first met, chatting and giving me plenty of eye contact. It wasn’t hard to see
why I had liked him in the first place. Then he had the nerve to tell me what
an impression I’d made on him by not begging for another chance after the way
he treated me.

He pulled up at the end of my driveway and I
climbed straight out while thanking him for the lift.

‘Hey,’ he said, muting the engine before walking
round to the pavement. He stopped in front of me. ‘A few of us are joining a
charity walk this weekend. It’s three miles but for a good cause. Do you fancy
coming along? Could be a laugh.’

‘That’s a nice offer, but–’

‘We could get to know each other again,’ he added.

‘I’m just going to say no thanks.’

I felt completely stupid and ungrateful because
I’d probably end up staying in all weekend, moaning later that I never get
invitations like this. But I no longer liked him in that way. I realised I should
have never accepted a lift; I began to feel as though I had teased him.

‘You could do a lot worse than me, Alex,’ he said in
frustration.

‘No doubt, but that’s not really a good enough reason
for me to date someone. Thank you for the lift, Mark. Take care of yourself.’ I
walked across my driveway. Despite his audacity, I felt awful for letting him
drive me home in the first place.

That night I had the strangest dream. I was
starving hungry and a shadow came towards me that I felt was Thom, though I
couldn’t see his face. He offered me exactly twelve pomegranate seeds to eat. I
hesitated to take them and at the same time felt compelled to. It made me
realise how much I looked forward to work at the Cray on Saturday.

On that said day I overslept and had to rush to
get there by bus. It was foggier than ever I’d seen it. A thick white vapour
practically poured over the threshold. I noted the time; I was ten minutes
late. I hurried round the desk hoping I’d gotten away with it. The moment I sat
on the chair, Mrs Evans appeared, as if the seat was a button that projected
her forth. Her eyes fell on me briefly as she took her cigarettes out of her
bag and made her way to the door unsuspecting. She paused at the desk and
pondered a moment.

‘Alex, you know that Stacey has called in sick?
Has she said anything to you about not coming in?’ Her tone was anxious as she
drummed her fingernails on the half-empty cigarette box.

I shook my head.

‘And nothing I suppose about whether – well, I
mean
when
– she might come back? Nothing’s upset her?’

‘I haven’t spoken to her. Is she ill?’

‘She says she has flu’ – she pulled a face – ‘as
if the common cold isn’t so common anymore. Perhaps it doesn’t exist. There’s
only common flu.’

‘Maybe it’s best she gets rid of those germs
before coming back?’

‘As long as she does come back! I don’t want any
more sudden leavers.’

She looked away vexed before trotting outside for
her smoke. I wondered if Stacey was pulling a sickie, and if Mrs Evans
suspected that. Although her concern seemed more for whether or not she would
come back at all. Despite being unhappy with Stacey for telling Mark where I
worked, I sent her a text asking how she was. I would probably get into trouble
if Mrs Evans caught me texting at the desk, so I kept an eye on her outside.
She stood at the doorway blowing her smoke into the fog. A man lingered out
there on the pathway. I could just about make him out as he stood looking up at
the house. He wasn’t tall, but what he lacked in height he made up for in
width. From this angle, his large rounded belly stuck out, resembling a
pregnancy bump of the third trimester. The long dark coat he wore made it all
the more prominent. This fell to his ankles and clearly wouldn’t do up around
his middle. In place of a neck, he had a large double chin, which perhaps
would’ve fallen into several layers if it weren’t so thick. His complexion was
of a dark yellow, almost sickly colouring. Something rang strange about him and
the mirthless look upon his face. Mrs Evans moved towards him, holding her
cigarette down at her side as if trying to hide it.

‘Do you need any help?’ she asked in her telephone
voice. ‘You look lost.’

‘I’m looking for Halton Cray,’ said the stranger
in an incredibly flat tone, and with an American accent. An accent I’d never
heard in real life before, but only in movies and TV shows like
Friends
.

‘You’re in it,’ Mrs Evans replied, wide-eyed, in a
manner that this was obvious.

His head tilted forward as she spoke, his bug-like
eyes drawing up to look at her. It changed my view of his face. I saw the very
large sockets carved in his skull beneath a stretched inflamed skin that orbed
them. His eyes were a deep dirty brown colour, the kind of colour you only find
on autumn days in gutters and muddy rivers.

‘There’s some maps of the grounds just inside if
you need any directions,’ Mrs Evans added.

I expected her to continue the conversation –
perhaps ask him where he was from or something – but she didn’t. She took one
last long drag of her cigarette before putting it out under her foot and
collecting the butt in her hand. The man turned away without answering her, and
like a walking corpse in a zombie film, he disappeared into the fog. Mrs Evans
slipped back inside the main door.

‘Oh, I don’t like the look of him!’ she whispered
across the desk to me, turning quickly to ascertain he wasn’t behind her. ‘He’s
got the look of a serial killer! The blood in my veins’ – she stretched out her
wrists to show me – ‘turned positively ice cold, and I felt a shiver down my
spine sharp as knives. I’ve got a sixth sense for that sort, like that–’ She
cut off, and after a pause continued. ‘It looked like there was no one living
in there!’ She tapped her temple. ‘You know, the lights are on but no one’s
home. But not in a stupid way, more a menacing way.’

I didn’t respond to this but gazed back at her a
little perplexed. She’d never spoken to me quite like this before, and seemed
to have mistaken me for Stacey. I saw her eyes widen as she realised how she’d
come across – as if ignorant that I knew what she was.

‘But I don’t like to judge,’ she added, softening
her tone. ‘It’s just such a ghastly looking scene out there today, like a
horror tale. I wasn’t being nasty. He was just very strange, you know.’

In fairness to her, on this occasion, I didn’t
like the look of him myself and would not have chosen to talk to him at all.

She soon directed me to work in the shop, which
was disappointing. The post was just arriving and I still wanted to make that
extra effort with Thom. Being in the shop would give me fewer opportunities; he
never came in there.

When I took my break and made my way to the staffroom,
I noticed through the window and across the courtyard one of the outer doors
swing violently open, like it might come off its hinges. It gave me déjà vu. I
was both surprised and happy when Thom appeared there, crossing the small alley
and entering through the door opposite. This door then suffered the same blow.
He was now on my side of the building. Instinctively my eyes followed him
through the glass as he whirled the corner like a tempest, and headed along the
next corridor in my direction. Two female visitors near me also took note of
him. He wasn’t walking fast yet he moved with a determination to get somewhere.
Jacketless, he wore a pale pinstriped shirt with the sleeves rolled up. I
wondered how he could stand the November cold. His head was down with those
dark orbs of his fixed to the floor, and his mop of cola-black hair grazing his
forehead, just touching his eyebrows. His eyes shot up, abruptly landing on
mine. They fiercely held me in a gaze. I caught sight of the women as they shuddered
and moved slightly to one side, towards a floor length curtain. He turned into
the De Morgan Gallery and the women hurried back the way they came.

‘What’s the matter with him?’ I mumbled, about to
launch myself in there to find out.

‘Alex?’ Mrs Evans’s voice stopped me. She called
from behind having opened the staffroom door. ‘It’s your break now, I think.’

I followed her back in. I was still curious and
eager to make an effort with him, but I resolved that now wasn’t perhaps the
best time. In the staffroom, Frances and Geoffrey were musing over the local
paper.

‘Oh that’s just awful!’ Frances exclaimed, lifting
her head as I walked in. She proceeded to catch me up on what they’d been
reading. ‘Morning, Alex. Oh, that storm did some damage the other night! A poor
man was killed over in St. Martins Woods.’

I took a seat next to her. ‘What happened?’

‘Lightning struck a tree and one of its boughs
fell on him. It hit him on the head and killed him.’

‘That’s not what killed him!’ Mrs Evans broke in,
licking her lips as she took up the paper and held it close to her face.
‘Listen to this: “Though it’s confirmed that lightning struck the tree, which
severed a branch and fractured the man’s skull, a preliminary post-mortem
examination proved inconclusive that the man, who is yet to be identified, died
as a result. The man, thought to be in his mid-thirties, suffered extreme blood
loss leading to hypovolemic shock, which is typically seen with high-voltage
injuries. However, it’s confirmed that the man did not receive a direct strike
and may have died moments before sustaining the skull fracture. Further tests
are being carried out but his death is not thought to be suspicious.”

‘Well, what do you make of that?’ she said, laying
the paper out on the table. ‘Bled to death by lightning!’

Geoffrey shook his head, giving the slightest of
sighs. ‘Not quite, Doreen. An electrical charge of some magnitude is capable of
burning the blood vessels so that they leak excessive amounts of plasma. That
is what they might be referring to when they say
blood loss
. They may
just be referring to blood volume.’

‘But it says the lightning didn’t strike him!’ She
pointed to the newspaper. ‘It’s all very suspicious if you ask me.’

Geoffrey shook his head slowly and finished his
tea, before getting up and making his way to the door.

‘He must be a local man,’ Frances remarked, ‘if he
was in those woods during that storm.’ She took her empty teacup to the sink to
rinse it. ‘Someone will come forward to identify him, surely.’

I glanced over the article myself remembering how
I’d sat at my bedroom window that night. Mrs Evans continued surmising how he’d
died, and not getting much response from Frances, or me, she took up the
newspaper again to peruse the next page.

The shop got busier and I was glad Mrs Evans
noticed how overrun it had been. Though a little reluctantly, she promised me
the front desk for the rest of the afternoon.

It looked cold out but I was in need of fresh air.
So despite the fog I went for a walk at lunch. Crossing the bridge and weir to
the rear of the stables, I wandered across to Spring Meadow where the ghostly
trees were dripping in dew. Their leafless branches hung over the pond and
rockery like limp demonic fingers. They webbed my view of the mausoleum, which
interred the last Sir Halton Cray, his wife, their sons and ancestors. It looked
like any other large stone crypt you’d find in a necropolis, only it was in the
middle of a damp meadow, misty and secluded. Crows, those harbingers of death, circled
it, laughing as they do psychotically, clinging to the decay within its walls
for some unknown purpose. A scene for some ‘building to’ moment was set for a
horror movie not yet complete. And there stood that sallow-skinned stranger
just across the pond from where I walked; an equal distance between the
mausoleum and me.

I stopped to observe what he was doing. The
mud-eyed and bloated creature stood slightly obscured from the house by an
obliging tree. Perhaps only his stomach gave him away from the other side, from
the house he was clearly watching. Even as I walked on a few paces, breaking
cornflake autumn leaves under my feet, he didn’t move at all, as if he had
frozen there behind the trunk, compelled to stare forward at Halton Cray like
Narcissus when presented with a mirror. I could make out the back of him well
enough while he stood there still as a painting. A chill ran through my veins
as I looked over to him. Perhaps it was just the feeling I had that he could
still see me. That he watched me despite facing the opposite direction. Perhaps
it was my mind dabbling with fear, since this man seemed to excite some of it
in me. Or, perhaps it was the dew dripping off the tree, settling in his short
dark hair, glistening so it appeared like eyes staring at me. I would even go
so far to say that just for a second I saw a pair of eyes blink at the back of
his head. Then I saw them move under his hair along the side of his head and
disappear round to his face. At this point I pinched myself to see if I was
dreaming.

I wasn’t.

Quickly, I headed back the way I came, entering
the house by the alley to the courtyard. I didn’t dare look back for fear the
American was watching or following me.

Geoffrey and Frances were just inside the
southwest corridor. I felt safer now inside and in the company of people. They
chatted about plans for Christmas. Both looked up as I came in short of breath.