The Hunter Inside (45 page)

But then, what
should he care about fashion?

Linda stood in
front of him, hands on hips, waiting for an answer or an excuse as to why he
was so late.

Just like all
men
, she thought,
trying to think of a lie
. But not just any old lie
– a real whopper. She wondered why men were consumed with being sneaky and
doing things that were not right. Maybe he was trying to get one over her, make
her look stupid, same as Ross had done.

But she wasn’t
giving any ground. Him doing…whatever he had been doing until 2AM had to
involve Louise Miller, and she wanted to hear him say it. She wasn’t just going
to sweep it under the carpet like she had with Ross and hope he did the right
thing; because men didn’t
ever
do the right thing when they had the
choice.

Her father
looked as guilty as hell in a hand basket.

‘I was at
Miller’s. I left at 10PM and the Bonalo mobile broke down.’ He tried to muster
a smile. ‘So I had to walk home.’ He felt as though he had piranhas dangling
from the end of each of his fingers as the cold continued to gnaw into him. He
breathed on his hands in an attempt to purge the ice that had formed inside his
skin.

‘But Daddy, it’s
2AM.’ Her voice rose an octave on ‘2AM’, and Barrett’s whole body went rigid as
his dead wife’s voice came out of his daughter’s mouth. ‘You’re not telling me
it took you four hours to walk five miles, because you’d probably have frozen
to death out there by now.’

She motioned
towards the window. Outside, the trees jostled one another to get a better look
at what was rapidly escalating into a confrontation, while the wind pressed its
face up to the thin glass panels, goading them with a whining, crazy,
high-pitched voice. It was the voice of nature and the Earth around them,
shaking the doors and rattling the windows in their frames, mocking their
weaknesses and their ramshackle home.

‘Well,’ he
paused. ‘I ain’t tellin you it took four hours no. I don’t really know.’ He
rubbed a hand across his cheeks. Starting to warm up a little now, but still
cold.
Damn
cold.

Linda turned
away from him and plunged her hands into a sink that was full of dishes. She
scrubbed at a blackened pot, her shoulders shaking as she began to weep again,
this time more quietly.

She couldn’t
even cook a decent meal without burning the pots. Barrett Holroyd thought it
was no wonder he spent all his time at Miller’s.

She scrubbed
feverishly at the pot, trying to dislodge the blackened remnants of the
casserole she had cremated earlier. Her mother cooked better than anyone she
knew. In fact, the recipe for the casserole had come from her grandmother to
her mother, and eventually to her, but she couldn’t do anything. Not a damn
thing.

She threw down
the pot, splashing water and soap bubbles all over herself, and whirled around
to face her father.

‘Don’t you lie
to me, Daddy. I know exactly what you’ve been doing, and who you been doing it
with
.’
Her eyes blazed fierce with grief and anger and her tears spilled freely down
her cheeks as she leaned against the sink to stop her legs from buckling
beneath her.

‘What are you
talking about, Linda? I haven’t been with anybody. I was alone. I walked home
alone.’

He knew exactly
who she thought he’d been with, and his face coloured with embarrassment as the
image of Louise Miller bending in front of him to reveal her black lacy bra
returned to his mind. He turned away from Linda in an attempt to cover his
blushes and hide his guilt and walked into the lounge.

Linda followed
him from the kitchen, dishcloth in hand. ‘Don’t you lie to me,’ she repeated,
almost shouting across the four feet of thin, threadbare carpet that lay
between them.

‘Shhh, Linda,
you’re gonna wake the boy,’ Barrett whispered in admonishment. She was either
on the verge of hysterics or two steps over the state line to Cloud Cuckoo
Land. At this rate she was apt to end up in the John Clifton Centre. Her
journey towards Madness, Cloud Cuckoosville had been a long one as she had
spent a year making it, heading through the state capital, Hysteria. Her
mother’s death at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, when everybody else
was celebrating, had added a nitro booster to the vehicle in which she’d been
travelling.

‘If it wasn’t
for Tucker I’d, I’d…’ she trailed off, uncertain how to finish the sentence
she’d begun.

What would she
do? Barrett wondered. Buy a Harley and travel the country, smoking weed and
drinking beer and listening to heavy rock music? Probably not. Definitely not,
in fact. She wasn’t made for that kind of life; grease and grime and
unprotected sex with strangers in the back of VW’s was more likely to turn her
stomach. Family, that was what was important to her. She with the redundant
surname, absent husband and bastard son. She with the dead, cancer destroyed
mother and the purposeless father. She who couldn’t even afford to have a
telephone, and before too long might well be sleeping under the stars.

They were both
silent. The TV was muted, a commercial for a flash Mercedes Benz mocking them
from behind the shop window. Linda stepped towards it and turned it off. There
was no point using up more electricity and making more bills for the poorest
family in Camberway. She flopped down into the sofa. It was as threadbare as
the carpet on which it stood. It had been third or fourth hand when they had
gotten it from Bob Grady’s furniture store, and as far as chattels went, well,
it didn’t go very far.

It had been a
fortnight after they moved into the house. She didn’t know why they’d even
bothered; Ross didn’t want to marry her, kept on feeding her a crock of shit
about marriage being a piece of paper and how he didn’t need their names to be
on a piece of paper when her name was carved on his heart and all. And she had
bought it. Like a dog who runs for a stick his master hasn’t actually thrown.
So she looked foolish and embarrassed, the same way the dog did when the stick
failed to drop from the sky. Sure, he’d married her eventually, but it hadn’t
stopped him running out on them. And a year had passed and she still felt
foolish and embarrassed, still had her head cocked to one side, wondering what
her master had done with the stick, waiting for it to appear from the sky.

‘I’m sick of
sitting on crates Linda,’ Ross had said. ‘We’ve gotta get a sofa, or I swear
I’m gonna have the lines off those crates permanently etched in my butt
cheeks.’

She had giggled
then. She hadn’t actually minded the crates so much. Tucker had positively
loved them, goo-gooing and gaa-gaaing and trying to climb on top of them until
he fell off and cried and she cried. So they had gone to Bob Grady’s store. She
should have known then, when he had chosen the old fleabag of a sofa she now
sat on, ten years later. Should have known then, when he had opted for that
over a leather one that was stylish and newer looking.

‘I’ll give you
the big leather one for 200 dollars,’ Bob Grady had said. ‘That other one I was
going to dump if I couldn’t get rid of it. That’s 150. I need the room see, coz
George and Vera Flockheim, well, they got to go out of town, up to Tarleby, on
account of George’s old man being on his last, and they asked me to store up
some of their furniture for them.’

Ross had said
no. Just like that. Straight out of nowhere. Hadn’t even asked her what she
thought. All because he wanted to save fifty bucks to go out drinking the
strong stuff at the moonshiner’s tavern, aka Carl Sweeney’s bar, The Bawdy
Bear.

That was where
he’d spent most of his time when he was around. Warm with the fire at the Bear,
and the whiskey inside him, while she sat on an old, worn-out sofa. Always
hungry and always cold, and always more worried about Ross and Tucker than she
was about herself. Things were not much different now, except that Ross was
gone and her father had taken his place. Still another mouth to feed and
another life for her to worry about.

A small gas
powered heater stood in the corner of the lounge. It gave off more fumes than
it did heat, but electric ones cost too much to run. Her father, Tucker and
herself had permanent nausea and headaches throughout the winter because of the
heater, and they all spent most of the winter shivering cold – also due to the
heater.

Ross was a Phil
Collins fan. She couldn’t stand him – thought he had a voice like he was
singing through a kazoo instead of a microphone, but now, as the iced February
wind howled all around the house and rain started to tap against the window
once more, she was reminded of one of Ross’s long play records.

The roof is
leaking

And the wind is
howling.

The kids are
crying

Coz the sheets
are so cold.

Woke this
morning

Found my hands
were frozen.

I tried to fix
the fire

But you know

The damn
thing’s too old.

Barrett Holroyd
snored lightly, his head lolling to the side and a trickle of saliva edging its
way over his lip.

‘Daddy?’ she
asked. She wasn’t finished yet. Her questions remained unanswered. Her father
didn’t wake. He didn’t even flinch in fact. He was all worn out and so was she.

Tucker could be
hard work. Just getting him to rise in the morning and swap his warm bed for
the cold of the winter wasn’t easy. Pulling on her brave daytime face and
struggling along like everything was dandy-o exhausted her. When she went to
bed at the end of every day she was ready to collapse. But the moment she
closed her eyes, her mother’s image floated up out of the dark, and she
couldn’t sleep. She spent night after night, restless, thinking about her Mom’s
gaunt face.

But what she
didn’t realise, on this cold and wet February night, was that she had already
drifted off.

*

Kimberley Carter’s
image faded rapidly from Luke Bonalo’s puppy-love-struck mind as the humming
sound grew around him.

It was low
enough for him to think it was inside his head at first. He realised in the
first minute of the hum just how tired he was. He was almost tired enough to go
to sleep inside the Chevy, even though he was pretty sure he would freeze
solid.

When he got as
tired as this he sometimes suffered from migraines; head splitting pain and a
sensitivity to light and sound that made his head feel like it would split wide
open with the noise of birdsong.

He had suffered
from migraines since his mother’s death when he was five years old. Or, more
precisely, his mother’s murder. He remembered seeing something in the cold,
dark stare of his father that had made him, a small lonely and broken child,
wonder if it had been his Daddy who had made his Mommy go away.

He hadn’t known
then – he was only a child after all – that many people, including Old Jim
Hoolihan, the Chief of Police, had harboured the same feeling.

But his had not been
a feeling of suspicion, it had been a feeling of fear that had made him afraid
to sleep. He’d gotten migraines ever since. No-one had ever been charged with
strangling his mother and dumping her body in the forest that bordered
Camberway to his right.

The buzzing
sound grew louder, and he realised that it wasn’t inside his head, after all.
That was a relief – it meant that he wasn’t going to be struck down by a migraine
at least.

He listened to
that buzzing sound, leaning as close to the car’s windshield as he could, and
peering off to the left and into the darkness. He could see nothing, but the
buzzing was now more like a vibration that rippled through the air around him.
A vibration that made everything not quite right.

Panic began to
inch its way up his throat and he clapped his hands over his ears, fighting a
sudden urge to scream as he felt the blood pounding through his temples.

Oooo, Luke’s
afraid of the boogeyman
, a voice said from the back seat of the car. He
whirled around in his seat. It was Jim’s voice and it was an old childhood
tease, and his incredulity was etched onto his face for all to see.

Except there was
no-one there to see it. The back seat was empty, and he wondered if he was
about to suffer a brain haemorrhage, such was the pressure of the vibration
inside his skull. He turned to face forwards, and froze completely as he totally
forgot that he had ever even met Kimberly Carter.

Not forty feet
away from him, a disc-shaped object hummed slowly across the valley. It was
below the position where he sat, and it cruised along smoothly through the
freezing winter air, hanging over the sleeping valley below.

Luke Bonalo was paralysed
where he sat. He didn’t realise this, as his attention was completely focused
on what he thought he would never see. It was definitely not something made by
the military. He didn’t know how, but he knew that for sure.

Shit, it’s
huge
, he thought. It continued through the air, emitting the humming sound
that seemed to fill up every millimetre of the atmosphere around him. Apart
from that deep, bone splitting hum, it made no other sound. If it was army, it
would surely have some sort of jet that would make a sound entirely
recognizable. But it wasn’t. He knew it wasn’t.

Holy, holy
shit. That thing’s got to be half a mile long.

In fact, it was
slightly less than half a mile long through its centre. It was perfectly round –
more perfect, he thought, than any man or machine made circle ever drawn, and
it was a deep silver colour synonymous with the classic description of a UFO.

It glided
through the air, passing directly below where Luke sat, blocking out his view
of Turton and Camberway below, such was its massive size. The top of the craft
contained what looked like millions of lights which changed through a spectrum
of greens, blues, reds and yellows that were brilliant in their intensity and
cast thin beams away into the night sky. They reached away into infinity as far
as his eyes could see, through the atmosphere and away into space.