Lonely House Read online

  Lonely House

  This one’s for Neil, who is the missing word

  Also by James Collins

  Other People’s Dreams

  Into the Fire

  You Wish

  Jason and the Sargonauts

  The Judas Inheritance

  Symi 85600

  Carry on up the Kali Strata

  Village View

  symidream.com/james

  facebook.com/LonelyHouseNovel

  JAMES

  COLLINS

  Lonely House

  First published in Great Britain in 2015

  Copyright © James Collins 2015

  The right of James Collins to be identified as the Author of the Work has been

  asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored

  in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without

  the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated

  in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and

  without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are ficticious and any resemblance

  to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cover photography © Neil Gosling 2015

  Typeset by Nigel Edwards

  Printed by CreateSpace, an Amazon.com company.

  ISBN 978-1512277746

  Available from Amazon.com, CreateSpace.com, and other retail outlets.

  Available on Kindle and other devices.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  No book writes itself. I would like to thank Nigel Edwards for his editing and layout work on this book. And Neil Gosling and Jenine Woodhall for their proof reading.

  JAMES COLLINS

  Symi, Greece

  May 2015

  One

  THERE’S THIS BULLISH LOOKING, twenty-something guy lying on his back breathing deeply. He’s trying to calm his breathing, closing his eyes, opening his mouth, taking in a long deep breath. He’s hoping he’s not been spotted. He’s opening his eyes again, letting the breath out slowly. He looks down his tense body to his dirty hands where:

  He’s holding a shotgun, double-barrelled, cracked open. He swallows hard and dry as he takes a cartridge from a small bag and slips it into the second barrel, quietly and carefully. Very, very carefully. It’s in. But now he has to close the gun without making a sound, and that’s not possible. It snaps together with a click and he hardly dares breathe. He screws up his eyes, waiting, expecting. His heartbeat thumps around in his head and his lungs stay fixed.

  Nothing stirs. Nothing out there heard him. He gains confidence, lets his breath out silently as he slowly rolls on to his stomach. His chest presses heavily against the ground, his crotch against the damp soil, the heavy wood and steel of the gun against his side. Inching forward, painfully cautious, he prepares to lift his head over the mound of earth that shelters him; prepares himself to look out from his hiding place.

  He moves with the controlled stealth of a trained soldier, but he has never been in the army. He wears their boots and their trousers. He has their crew-cut and their look, but he could never take their discipline. Authority other than his own is not for him. He has on a hunting jacket that is too small for him. If you looked inside you would see that the name tag, sewn in by a loving wife, does not bear his name. He has no wife. He has no real name, just a left-over handle from his brief appearance in a school playground years before:

  Drover.

  His face is shadowed with dark stubble, his eyebrows brood thickly above his green eyes. No matter how he tries to make his eyes hard and piercing, black and threatening, they remain large and warm, deep. They always betray him.

  But they are also fast, and they dart quickly now as he lifts his head.

  Within seconds they have flicked around the glade, taken in the tall trees, the gathered thickness of thin trunks bunching ever closer to the distance, the speckled light on the mossy floor, the dead leaves, the fallen boughs. The silence.

  And then he hides again and calculates. He is alert, waiting.

  Sweat trickles annoyingly down his face and a cheeky fly investigates. He flicks it away, and, in a sudden moment of forgetfulness, tutts.

  Drover braces himself.

  Out there in the woods, something heard.

  It’s dark. You haven’t worked it out yet but it’s a pretty ordinary garage you’re standing in and straining to look at.

  Smell it: engine oil, damp cardboard, petrol, and something else that could be that sweet smell of decay you hear about. A dead something, somewhere.

  Those thin shafts of silver light making an uneven line like anorexic football posts in the darkness? That’s an outline of sunlight around metal up-and-over doors you would expect in any domestic garage. The doors come complete with remote control mechanism and powerful motor. A standard package, about twenty years ago. That lump of shadow entombed in the centre of this breeze-block mausoleum is the car; by the looks of the dark mass it creates, it’s big and bulky.

  As your eyes adjust, you can make out a small, green light, low down over there in a corner. There’s a humming sound too. Hear it? It sounds like a motor of some sort. Well, that block of grey that’s just coming out of the gloom against that wall is a chest freezer, and the green light tells you it’s switched on and running. Now, as the suspicion of daylight that struggles into the garage starts to reveal more, as your pupils open wider, you can just figure out that those over there are shelves, metal ones, and that’s where someone keeps their tools. There’s quite an array of implements just hanging there, lying there, gathering dust and rust in unemployed uselessness. Saws, knives, an axe or two; long blades, sharp teeth.

  Are you sure that’s rust on the blades? Are you sure they are unemployed?

  Hear that? Steps overhead. You can hear what goes on upstairs from this garage. Someone built an extension over the top of it and uses it as what the Americans would call a ‘den.’ The man who owns this house uses it for storage. At the moment he’s just leaving the den and walking towards the stairs.

  Heavy tread, isn’t it? Must be a big guy. Hear that? Coughing, wheezing? He doesn’t sound well, so it’s a good bet that he is also quite old. That would explain why he’s not used his tools for a while.

  Perhaps.

  The sound changes; softer footsteps, but still heavy.

  The tread is on the carpeted stairs now, coming downstairs, still cumbersome; you might call it ungainly.

  There’s a dull thud of shoe on carpet as one uneven thump of weighty leg is heaved in front of the other. Slowly. Pause for breath. So slowly. This guy doesn’t move fast.

  Now he is plodding closer, through the kitchen.

  Pulse quickens. You know that being caught in here is a bad thing. And there is no way out.

  Through the door you hear the flick of a switch.

  Shield your eyes or expect a sudden…

  Flicker and hum of light as the strip light is switched on from outside the room. The back wall houses a single door. See it now? It opens to the kitchen where there is a light switch for the garage. There’s one inside it too. This guy likes to cover all eventualities. Either that or he is worried about who might be waiting for him in the dark.

  The door handle is one of those che
ap, thin, aluminium ones you can pick up at any B&Q for a few pounds. This guy is something of a miser, it seems. You can see the car now; an old Nisan of some sort. A Bluebird, is it? Or rather, was it? It’s rusting shamelessly. It has been around the clock and back again at least a few times. It’s not interesting enough to be vintage, too ordinary to be classic, but big enough to take up most of the floor space. The old guy probably once gave it a name, ‘Doris’, or something.

  The door handle moves, the door opens quickly to take any intruders by surprise. You see someone silhouetted there, filling the frame, looking around the garage as if he expected someone else to be in here. He can’t see you because you are only looking in to his life, but all the same, his presence unnerves you.

  He is old, and he is weighty. He has an enormous, unwieldy frame with wide shoulders and a big gut hanging below a barrel chest. He is tall, too, and looks strong, but his breathing is really bad, rasping.

  He’s got a bag in his hands, a sports bag that he has never used for sports. He lumbers over to the chest freezer, coughs up something sticky and lands it on the floor with a splat. He rattles the chain that is secured tight around the freezer, checking that it is still there. Who would have moved it? There’s only him in this place.

  He reaches into the deep pocket of his old, unwashed jeans, fingers through a handkerchief caked with dry lumps and soft stickiness, and finds a small key. He fits the key into a large padlock that doesn’t want to let him in and grapples with it until the lock gives up. It opens.

  When it comes to a fight, this man always wins.

  The chain slides to the ground like some kind of mechanical snake breathing its last; its heavy padlock-head hits the concrete floor with a dull thud of submission.

  The freezer lid creaks open as he lifts it with ease. He’s not as slow as you thought; he’s got some power there.

  He balances the bag across one corner and looks in, scratches his head, counts, shrugs, and then:

  Takes a wad of one hundred pound notes from the freezer and drops it into the sports bag. It is followed by another. Then two wads at once. And then two more.

  He knows what’s coming later and needs to make room in the freezer.

  Drover is looking down the barrel of a gun. Déjà vous.

  But this time it is him who is holding the gun. He sees the forest ahead, the trees backing off into the distance. Shapes and shadows create misleading targets. A bush cowers this way, a dead trunk makes a prone body, a slight breeze moves a dying leaf and the barrel flashes to it, the aim stays good.

  But only for a moment. His hand starts to quiver again, just like it did during the failed attempt earlier that day. His stomach growls out, hollow, shrinking, sore, and he fears the sound could wake the dead. Worse, it could alert the living. He tries to swallow, hoping that saliva might pacify his hunger and quieten his gut. But no. It rumbles on as his hand trembles with weakness and the gun becomes heavier.

  The sweat of concentration mixes on his face with a tear of frustration, both meeting like White and Blue Niles to wind through his fertile stubble and into the corner of his mouth where they form a salty delta. He blinks away the tear that threatens to blur his vision and sees from the corner of his eye that his large, plump and innocent target has come back.

  Drover’s finger tightens. One eye closes, the other squints. He’s not sure how to do this. He is looking along the barrels to the end and slips the safety catch off. His breathing is under control, his hunger isn’t. His forearm weakens further.

  His victim walks calmly into range. It is unaware of his presence as it gently chews the undergrowth a mere twenty feet away, its large deer-head bowed towards Drover as if in awe of him. It’s like the animal knows it is going to die and has offered up its head for a clean kill.

  But actually it has no idea Drover is applying more pressure to the trigger, squeezing silently, not daring to breathe or move .

  The deer looks up sharply. Drover hears a noise, feels a presence heading his way fast. He feels his heart leap.

  The big, hulk-wreck of a man zips up the now full sports bag and leaves the garage. He enters his kitchen. It is homely, tidy, packed with large cupboards. It’s old but clean in a strangely unused kind of way. The Aga gleams, the utensils shine, the draining board holds a lone glass. The kitchen is functional, and, to him, totally uninteresting. He shuts the garage door behind him.

  A voice starts to sing. In his mind? In the room?

  “Yes, you have a secret to hide.”

  It’s in a pocket, and it is accompanied by a soft vibration which becomes more impatient as he, William, lumbers towards the front of the house. He trudges, out of time with Gertrude Lawrence, who sings, quietly muffled by the old man’s denim.

  “I agree you’ve a darker side,”

  The kitchen door leads to a long corridor. He passes the stairs running up on his left, and ignores the singing in his pocket.

  “But I can’t let this feeling go to waste.”

  He sees the sunlight shine through the frosted glass of the front door, and ignores it. He pauses to cough, swallows the glob of phlegm, and raises an eyebrow.

  “You’re such an acquired taste.”

  The phone is not taking no for an answer. He pulls it from his pocket as he moves into his front room.

  The room is large, filled with sofas and tables, cupboards and hiding places. Forgotten books and piles of magazines sit on top of cabinets and clutter up a small desk. Dusty LPs, not heard in many years, lie on the closed lid of a radiogram that once played Kathleen Ferrier and Janet Baker. The only sound now is the clock whose tick and tock relentlessly mark out the slow passage of William’s time. Flowery curtains, hung by some well-meaning woman years before, frame a long picture window that opens onto the area in front of the house.

  A small, semi-circular area of dead ground, grass growing through gravel, planters now home to weeds, and a border of tall trees circling the property, only giving way to the rough, bumpy track that acts as a driveway. It cuts through the forest in a straight line before turning sharply to the left, as if keen to be away from the lonely house.

  “Yes, you have a secret…”

  He looks at the caller ID and cuts the ballad off in mid phrase.

  Looking around, he considers the ancient clock, but no, he doesn’t want to mess with that. The antique vases are too delicate. There are lots of them but they are too small. Small mementoes of too long a life. There’s too much of value in this house, too much for any one thing to matter, though he is looking for something specific. Another storage place.

  He spies the glass fronted bookcase. Very impressive, he thinks, very nice. Where did he acquire this? And when? He shambles towards it. It has three sections. The centre part has double doors behind which is his collection of rare books. The left houses his collection of lore and the right his collection of Bibles. But beneath these three glass doors are three ornate cupboards. The left houses the family albums, the right is full of the silver, but the centre one was emptied only a few days ago. He remembers now. He was planning to do this then, but then someone came to call. That’s right. Someone came needing his help and it put the task out of his mind.

  But the task is upon him now he remembers as he shuffles around the tables to the bookcase.

  Knees cracking, joints protesting, he lowers his bulk to the carpet and kneels down. Using the back of a chair he holds himself there, and, with the other long-nailed hand, opens the cupboard door. No lock, but then what’s the point? If anyone wants it they will get it; there’s always a way in.

  And there is always a way out, he says to himself. But he knows this. He has had a way out for a long time, a way out of the house, the forest, the life, the family.

  But, not yet. He’s not ready to take that way out yet. It is not in his nature to give i
n, not to the family, not to himself. Not to anyone.

  Or any thing.

  Not yet.

  He shoves the sports bag into the cupboard and closes the door. It’ll do for now. It has made a little more room in the freezer, but he will need even more room before long.

  The landline phone starts ringing.

  He growls about that. Why won’t they leave him alone and take it as a no? If he won’t answer his mobile he’s not going to answer the landline. He didn’t want the mobile in the first place.

  ‘You might have an accident, dad,’ he’d said. ‘You might need to call for help one day.’

  Him? Hardly.

  He knows he is on his way. He knows they are coming. He knows what day it is and he’s sorted it all out with the girl. It’s done. Agreed. So he’s not going to have that same conversation over and over again with her parents. He feels anger rising inside him, and rightly so. Bloody relatives. Bloody scroungers.

  All in good time.

  Time. The clock is ticking. Winding down.

  He sees the phone wire running along the skirting board, and, still on his knees, heaves himself along to the junction box. Grey, old, a rusty screw at its centre, a wire entering one side and the phone cable running out from the other. No modem, no small square plug-in, nothing new, nothing digital, not here. Just old William and his desire to be left alone.