A Cry From Beyond (7 page)

“Are you
okay, David,” I asked.

“Thought
I’d had my chips for a minute there,” he said, looking tired and
dishevelled. His hair hung loose so it brushed his shoulders, his
specs were askew and his shirt was ripped.

“It was
some party,” he said before collapsing onto a nearby
chair.

I wasn’t
really listening, being more concerned by the devastation the party
had caused, rather than by the measure of its success. Overnight
the place had become a rubbish dump. Empty bottles, drinks cans,
pizza boxes and various other fast food cartons were strewn all
over the place. Moreover, the air stank of cigarettes and
marijuana. I turned as the sound of violent retching reached me
from the downstairs bathroom.

“Someone
over did it,” David remarked, sitting up and straightening his
specs.

A bleary
eyed teenage girl emerged from the room wearing a pink tee shirt
and a pair of white lace knickers. To David she said, “Nice party,”
before crawling into a double sleeping bag occupied by a man I
assumed to be her boyfriend.

Ignoring
the thumping headache I’d woken with, I checked the place for
damage and breakages. There were few to speak of surprisingly, a
couple of glasses, an ashtray, but little else. A quick check for
burn marks revealed just the one, fairly minor, on a worn old rug
by the hearth. David came to my aid with the job of clearing up. I
enquired where Jenny was.

“Nipped
home,” he said, “exam papers to mark for Monday. She’ll be back to
lend a hand later.”

He pulled
on a pair of marigolds and ran hot water into the Belfast sink.
“Michelle looked on the verge of a nervous breakdown towards the
end of the night,” he said, squirting washing up liquid into the
bowl. “She was worried about the gatecrashers; afraid they’d
ransack the place. By the way, did you discover what happened to
your mystery lady, the one you saw by the gazebo?”

“No, I
didn’t.”

“You
sound disappointed. Any idea who she was?”

“Just
another gatecrasher, I guess.”

But she
was more than that. Even then I sensed that our destinies were
inextricably entwined.

I left
David to the washing up and wandered around the house hoping to
find her, more determined than ever to discover her identity.
Eventually, I was forced to admit defeat and returned to the
kitchen, where I helped David dry plates and cutlery. Michelle
popped her head around the door. I threw her a cloth. “Work
surfaces need a wipe.”

She
pulled a face. “Do I really have to?”

Around us
the revellers finally began to stir, rising from the floor like the
living dead, some heading off without so much as a bye or leave,
others taking the time to congratulate me on a great party. A man
sporting tattoos and long unruly hair wandered into the kitchen
complaining that he’d mislaid his girlfriend.

“Her name
is Mary-Louise,” he said, “Anyone here seen her?”

“What’s
she look like,” I asked.

“Petite
with short brown hair: she looks like a little pixy. She was
wearing blue jeans and a pink blouse.”

“Maybe
she got bored and went home,” David suggested.

“She
crashed out with me on the floor over there,” he said, pointing
back through the doorway into the living room. “She was too drunk
to talk let alone walk home on her own. Besides, why would she just
get up and leave, without saying anything. It wasn’t as if we’d had
an argument.”

“Have you
checked outside?” Michelle asked.

“I’ve
looked high and low for her,” he answered.

“What
about the attic?” David queried. “Have you tried there?”

“It’s
locked due to the party,” I said but nevertheless wonder if the
equipment stored in there remained insured. Given the state of my
finances, it was doubtful.

“Has she
done this sort of thing before?” It was David again.

Mary-Louise’s boyfriend shook his head. He looked angry and
upset. “We’re getting married next year. She wouldn’t just slip off
without telling me. Especially out here in the middle of
nowhere.”

“You told
us she was drunk,” I said.

“What of
it?”

“People
can behave out of character when they’re drunk.”

“Who are
you, Sigmund Fraud?”

“I think
what John means,” said Michelle, trying to help me out, “is if she
had a lot to drink, she may have got disorientated, wandered off
and got lost.”

He
scratched his head, considering, before reluctantly agreeing it was
possible.

“Have you
searched the grounds beyond the cottage?” Michelle
asked.

“No.”

“Why
don’t we take a look around then, see if we can’t find
her?”

Before he
could object she led him away by the arm.

“Go with
them,” I told David.

“Okay,
what will you do?”

“I’ll
stay here and hold the fort; make sure the place isn’t wrecked
again.”

But that
wasn’t the real reason I chose not to accompany them. I didn’t feel
the need to. I somehow knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that
Mary-Louise wasn’t out there; that in reality she was somewhere
inside the cottage, hidden...

“Where
the hell are you?” I whispered to the deserted kitchen.

The
search party returned within the hour, unsuccessful, just as I knew
it would be. Mary-Louise’s boyfriend, who gave his name as Sid,
looked worried sick, and announced he was going to call the
police.

“She’s
only been missing a couple of hours or so,” I pointed
out.

He glared
at me. “So fucking what? She’s still missing.”

Michelle
came to my rescue again, advising him to contact Mary-Louise’s
parents first to see if she’d made it home.

“She
hasn’t got parents,” he said. “She’s an orphan. She’s lived with me
since she was seventeen. I need a phone, mine’s bust. Where’s the
blasted phone in this place?”

I leant
him my mobile.

“Thanks,”
he said. He dialled the emergency services number, asked for the
police and reported Mary-Louise as a missing person. As I
suspected, the cops told him he was being premature. They advised
him to wait for at least twenty-four hours, and then call back if
there was still no sign of her.

“Fucking
assholes,” he said, thrusting the phone at me in disgust. “Cops are
worse than useless!”

Michelle
tried her best to reassure him. David meanwhile, continued tidying
up, which in the end took most of the morning. And as they were
doing that, I decided to grab some fresh air: maybe smoke a
cigarette. I knew I shouldn’t, that it was bad for my health, and
that my health was already questionable, but what the hell. On the
way out of the house I bumped into the girl who’d been taken sick
in the bathroom earlier. By now she was now dressed and looking
more respectable, though she still looked green around the gills.
She took me to one side.

“I need
to talk to you,” she said.

“Why,
what’s the problem?”

“I
overheard the conversation you were having with Sid. This is really
freaky. My boyfriend had a dream last night, in which a party goer
was abducted.”

It took a
moment for the implication of her words to sink in. “What’s your
boyfriend’s name?”

“Sandy.
Sandy Mercer.”

“Where is
he?”

She led
me over to the window and nodded towards the track that led in the
direction of the derelict farmhouse. “I think the dream upset him.
He said he wanted to be alone for a while.”

I decided
to take a walk, find Sandy and talk to him, see what I could find
out. After scouting around for a few minutes I spotted him sitting
on a wall near a disused stable block.

“Mind if
I join you?” I asked.

He
shrugged. “It’s a free country.”

I sat
down and came straight to the point.

“Your
girlfriend told me about your dream.”

“Did she
now: and what exactly did she say?” He fished around in his coat
pocket, retrieving a crumpled pack of cigarettes and offered me
one. For once in my life I declined.

“I don’t
know if it was a dream,” he said, slipping a cigarette into his
mouth and lighting it with a zippo. “I wasn’t really with it when I
crashed out. At some stage during the night I think I woke
up.”

“Think?”

“You know
how it is, you’re off your head, you crash out, and then you wake
up but you can’t be sure if you really have woken, or if you’re
dreaming because you’re still so out of it. In the morning, the
line is even more blurred. As far as I’m concerned, this has to be
a dream because if it isn’t...” He let the sentence trail off and
stared into space.

“What did
you see, Sandy?”

“A man: I
saw a man, but he just didn’t look right.”

“How do
you mean?”

“He was
deformed in some way, like he had...”

“Out with
it; Sandy.”

“It was
as if he’d mutated into something else. He was like an experiment
that had gone wrong. I’ll tell you another thing; he stank to high
heaven. I can’t believe any living being could smell like he did.
And how come I had a sense of smell anyway; I always thought it
failed to exist in dreams? What the hell did I see?”

He was
steamrollering ahead, in danger of losing me. “Okay,” I said. “I
get the gist, but for the sake of ease, my ease, let’s just say it
was a man. He took somebody, yeah?”

“Yes.”

“Then
what did he do?”

“I don’t
know. But whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t anything pleasant.
My personal opinion is he slaughtered whoever it was he
took.”

“Listen
Sandy,” I said carefully, “Is it possible you had something last
night that may’ve caused you to hallucinate?”

He shook
his head adamantly and drew nervously on his cigarette.

At this
point I mentioned the disappearance of Mary-Louise. His reaction
was as I expected: stunned disbelief.

“Sandy,
this is important. Try to give me an acceptable description of what
the man in your dream looked like? I’ll tell you for why; if the
cops are brought into this they’ll be asking questions of everyone
who attended last night’s party. It may be that you really did see
the abductor, but if you were out of it, as you say you were, you
might’ve failed to comprehend exactly what it was you
saw.”

“Yeah:
right. Maybe somebody slipped me a Mickey Finn,” he said almost
hopefully. “And it temporarily addled my brain.”

“Maybe
so,” I agreed, reassuringly. “But if it actually happened, then the
memory will be in there somewhere.” I tapped a finger against my
temple.“You’ve just got to find a way of sourcing it. Know what I
mean?”

He seemed
to buy into the idea, squeezed his eyes shut and concentrated.
“It’s no good, it was too dark,” he said eventually. “And it
happened too quickly.”

“Can you
remember anything, anything at all?” I pressed.

He
concentrated harder. Suddenly he clicked his fingers together and
said, “The guy wore some kind of cloak, made him look like he had
wings: Count Dracula and all that crap.”

And then,
as an afterthought, he added, “I-I couldn’t see his face. As I
said, it was too dark. But I’ll tell you what: something makes me
think I wouldn’t have wanted to.”

He lapsed
into thought and began to look extremely uneasy.

“What is
it?” I asked.

He looked
me straight in the eye and said, “Forget the normal man crap.
Whether I dreamt it or hallucinated, or otherwise, the thing I saw
was seriously weird.”

I stood
up. “Thanks for talking to me. I’ll see you around.” I left him
alone to finish his cigarette.

Back at
the cottage I relayed what I’d learned to Michelle, David, and to
Jenny, who’d arrived in my absence in order to run David
home.

“Should
we mention anything to the boyfriend of the missing girl?” she
asked.

We agreed
unanimously that it would be a bad idea. An uncomfortable silence
followed. I got the distinct impression everyone sensed something
awful had happened, but refused to openly admit it. By lunch time
the revellers had departed leaving Michelle and I alone. We braved
the cold weather and walked for a while. We headed off in the
direction of the old mill to the west of High Bank. As we walked we
chatted. I apologised yet again for organizing a party on the first
evening of her stay, without so much as mentioning it.

“It
doesn’t matter,” she said forgivingly, but it did, I could tell.
She was still miffed. Yet when I chanced to slip an arm around her
waist she didn’t resist. In fact she relaxed her weight against me.
I gave her waist a gentle squeeze and then she smiled, not at me,
but at Lennon, who had bounded ahead of us as if in pursuit of
invisible cats. We arrived at the old mill. Michelle and I sat down
on a rough stone wall and watched the ducks paddle around the lake.
They resembled fairground ducks in a shooting gallery. Lennon
tracked them along the bank, barking playfully, until they
disappeared into the rushes just before the weir. Trees swayed
gently in time with the afternoon breeze, whilst above us a bird
soared high in the sky appearing to touch the clouds. I wondered
fleetingly if it belonged to those that hung around High Bank.
After a while we headed back to the cottage. On the way Michelle
informed me that she would be returning to London later that
afternoon.