The Darkness Inside: Writer's Cut (37 page)

Holly’s wide eyes flicked between us, but she kept the gun pointed at me. “I… of course, yes, of course.”

“Does Holly know you were planning on replacing her?” I said. “That she was getting too old for your fantasy? You like young ones, don’t you Goddard? And you were looking for a young girl to take her place.”

I saw her gaze move towards him again.

“That’s crap,” he said. “Don’t listen to him, Lucy.”

“There are pictures of the possible replacements on your bookshelf, tucked into your books on brainwashing. If you want to see for yourself, Holly, go and take a look. I won’t do anything.”

“It’s a trick, Lucy.”

“No trick. You never cared about her, of course you didn’t.” Beads of sweat were making my eyes itch. “You just wanted her to match the fantasy in your head, all this ‘Lucy’ shit. That’s what you care about, not her. How long before you found yourself an excuse to kill her?”

“No, no. I just wanted…”

“Maybe you’d pretend to yourself that I’d forced your hand and that you had to get rid of her? But deep down, you just want a reason to be finished with Holly. You’re already looking for a new Lucy. And living out here, killing Holly and ditching her body wouldn’t be hard. You were going to start again. You don’t want her any more.”

“That’s not… no, it’s all a lie! Lucy!” Goddard’s voice grew increasingly shrill.

Holly’s upper lip trembled and a tear trickled down her cheek. “You don’t want me? What did I do wrong?”

“He never wanted you, Holly. He just wants the fantasy you represented. Now he’s going to get that from someone else.”

A second tear, and a third. Holly lowered the gun a notch and turned fully to look at Goddard like a child facing an angry parent. “I did everything I was told like a good girl. Why?”

“It’s not your fault, Holly,” I said. “It never was. Everything, it’s all his fault. You never did wrong. He did.”

Goddard was weighing the change in her mood and her previously servile attitude. He must have known he was losing her, that things were slipping out of his control. One moment as he paused to make a decision, preserved in utter stillness, and then he lunged at her, arms outstretched, grabbing for the pistol.

He never made it.

My first bullet caught him in the shoulder, set him spinning as he stumbled. The second blew out the back of his head. A spray of red over the camera equipment and the wall behind him. He crashed to the floor in a bloody heap, so much dead meat.

Holly screamed, a wordless cry of grief and rage. Her watery eyes watched him fall, wide with horror and loss, her doubts and anger at him utterly overwhelmed as she realized he was gone. She was still howling, tears pouring down her face, as she snapped the revolver back up in front of her, features twisted by fury and a clear wish to see me dead in revenge. She was too far away for me to reach her.

Her finger tightened on the trigger and I acted on instinct. Another kick from the gun, and a hole blossomed in Holly’s chest as the bullet punched clean through her heart.
 

She dropped without firing a shot.
 

The scream was still on her face, and her eyes were wide, staring at me from where she slumped on the floor. The same innocent eyes that had looked out at me from her photograph all those years ago, back in a different world, a different life.

56.

I stood there for a minute or so, unmoving, the smell of gunfire, sharp and acrid, wafting past me as I stared at her corpse and tried to come to terms with what I’d done. Break them down, build them up. Teach them they were worthless and then give them little rewards. They’d adore you. Stockholm Syndrome, reprogramming, call it what you like.

Something Holly had said before she died came back to me.
“You should be in prison, or dead. That gangster was supposed to kill you.”

Holly had been the one who called Heller and told him to deal with me. Goddard told the truth when he said he hadn’t been responsible. He’d wanted to get rid of me, and that’s why he’d hired Harvey and his brother. But he didn’t think of blackmailing his old criminal buddy. Which was why when Heller described the call he received, it hadn’t sounded like he’d had a nasty conversation with a former friend. It had sounded like a threat from a stranger, out of the blue. Heller hadn’t known who Holly was, but she’d known who he was and everything about him from the old days. She must have read Goddard’s notes, seen that he was a thug and a killer, and figured she could use him.

She’d done it to protect Goddard. He’d had that level of control over her. She’d wanted to keep her master safe from me.
 

She’d killed for him.

The son of a bitch remade Holly just as he remade Cody, to serve him. And both of them had loved him because of it.

Died for him because of it.

If I hadn’t staked out the post office, if she hadn’t seen me looking for them, would she still have acted this way? Would Tucker still be alive? Or Kris? Every action, every choice, had a thousand consequences pinwheeling from them.

I got to work on the scene. Fired a few rounds from Holly’s gun, a couple more from mine, a random spray to make it impossible to be certain who’d shot what into whom if and when the scene was discovered. I left Victor’s Berretta by Goddard’s hand. As far as the world would be concerned, the two of them fought when Holly found out his plans. These things happened. I left the window open, relying on wind and weather to help obscure any stray trace evidence, then headed downstairs.

I used duct tape and a plastic bag to seal over the broken windowpane to make it look like it had happened accidentally and they’d repaired it as best they could. I took the broken glass with me to be dumped in the woods well away from the house.

Outside, the wind had picked up a little, but there were still no sounds apart from the trees rasping against each other. No car engines. No police sirens. No indication that anyone knew what had just happened.

Holly Tynon had died seven years ago. Everything she was, the core of her personality, had been broken down and rebuilt by Goddard to fulfill a role in his own personal fantasy life. The girl I’d shot was a living ghost whose life was constant abuse and torture and whose personality was a construct of the monster who’d kept her as his slave.

At least, that’s what I told myself.

I hadn’t just killed the nineteen-year-old girl I’d come all this way to save, to restore to her family. To make up for my past mistakes. To repair everything I’d done wrong in the name of doing right.

After all was done, I still didn’t know who Goddard himself was and what had started him off, and I probably never would. I guessed he’d begun by abusing his sister, or at least fantasizing about it. It was the only way to explain his obsession with her years later. Maybe their parents found out, maybe they were separated, or maybe she died. It had taken him a while to have the confidence to find a surrogate that he could grow in her image, to do with as he wanted. First he’d practiced his technique on Cody and Kris, secure in his circle of friends. Only once he could distance himself from the abductions had he sent Cody, his shadow, out to find him a new Lucy.
 

Exactly why he’d chosen Holly, and exactly what had happened to the other girls Cody abducted for him beyond them “not being worthy”, I didn’t know. Someone would be out walking, or they’d be digging the foundations to a new highway, and they’d find another pathetic bundle of child’s bones and rags, and another name would be crossed off the list.

Maybe Cody could have been saved if he’d been willing to confide in someone when he was arrested, or even later in prison, some time before the end. He hadn’t been born the way he was, but made that way. I didn’t believe in God, but I did believe in redemption.

With all I’d done, I had to.

As I drove away from Allensburg, most of what I had was supposition. But that was the way it went in these cases. You never knew all the details, and even if you found out the reasons behind them, you could never understand. Men like Goddard were an alien species, and all anyone else could do was look on in horror. We could catch, but never cure or comprehend.

When I got back to Boston, I wiped down the Acura and left it in a mall parking lot, feeling suddenly empty.

I had nowhere left to go.

I had nothing to do.

I thought for a while, staring at the world from behind a glass wall, a partition that existed only in my mind, a line that separated me from them, the light from the dark. Then I took the long walk down to the harbor and called Teresa.

“How’s Rob doing?” I asked her.

“
Alex
?”

“I wanted to see him at the hospital, but I couldn’t. How is he? How are you?”

“He’s awake, and they say he’s getting better. Alex, Alex, what happened? What did you do?” Her voice choked like she was fighting tears.

“Nothing. I didn’t do anything. Someone tried to frame me for killing Tucker. Someone else wanted me dead and went after Rob. I’m sorry, Teresa. I’m sorry.”

Sobbing from the other end of the line.

“When you see Rob, tell him I’m sorry. I’ll come see him if I can, if that’s all right. But I never thought it would go as far as it did. I’m sorry.”

She sniffed hard, pulled herself together. “You can see him. He’d like that. I’d like that.”

“Thanks, Teresa. I will. Now I have to go.”

“Take care, Alex.”

I hung up, then made a quick call to my lawyer, explained to him where I was and what I was doing. He wasn’t happy, but he sounded confident about our chances of beating anything to do with Tucker. He didn’t ask me anything about Heller, or Kris, or Heller’s dead henchmen and the deaths at the abandoned refinery. All that murder and pain and grief, all that blood and fear, all of it was in the past. No one knew I’d been involved in any of it.

But I did.

I leaned on the railings, waiting by the water’s edge for the cops to finally catch up with me.

My life had been just an elaborate dream, painted on glass. But that dream was now irrevocably broken and through the cracks I could see the darkness inside.
 

The trouble was, when I looked at it now, I no longer knew which side of the glass I was on.

Afterword

If you’ve read the new version of
The Touch Of Ghosts
, you may know that I explain the reasons behind the notion of a “writer’s cut” of these books there. If you haven’t, you’re missing out on a
stone-cold classic
and you’re
insane
. And I in no way have any kind of motive for telling you so. No, no, the potted version is that the original Penguin version of that book (and of the sequel to this one, next on my list for a similar treatment), was a very different beast to what I’d originally wanted from the story. So, having the chance to go back and rework it into something better, something closer to the original, it seemed like a worthwhile thing to do.

Of the three former Penguin books I’m re-editing in this way,
The Darkness Inside
is the only one which went into and came out of the original editing process in more or less the same shape at both ends. Yes, there was a fair amount of work done on it, but the heart of the story remained the same. I suspect — and certainly hope — that this was because its core conceit was a good one. When the weeks and months roll by after a child is snatched and isn’t found, and especially on the (thankfully) rare occasions when there’s a spate of such crimes where the corpses of some of the victims are discovered, or when a confessed murderer is caught, we naturally assume that those taken are dead too, waiting to be found perhaps long after the event, perhaps never.

But what if you make that assumption and you’re wrong?

Good premise, and the story does a fair job of sticking to it, I think. There’s a sharp change of gear not long after Cody dies, but that was largely deliberate; a character can only wallow in self-reflection for so long before shit, to paraphrase
Bad Boys II
, needs to get real. I’ve given it a thorough polishing, and there have been a few larger amendments where whole scenes have been excised, but nothing on the scale of the previous book.

No, the main problem with
The Darkness Inside
was that no one much ever got to read it. While I always had a good relationship with my editor at Penguin, this book was the centerpiece of a chain of clusterfucks that saw it limp out of the door, unwanted and unloved, a very long time after it should have done, all through no fault of mine. (I won’t go into the whole sorry story here — griping like this is what the internet’s for, after all — but to give you some idea, I finished the first draft on deadline in November 2004, and the whole editing process was complete by the end of the following spring. The book didn’t appear until April 2007. Chief delay was the
15 months
it took to get a cover.)

Now of course, no one will read it again, but at least that’s because of the difficulty of finding an audience when self-publishing, not because it simply isn’t out there to be read.

It’s been interesting, to me at least, to see how much my writing style had developed between
The Touch Of Ghosts
and this book. How I was stumbling towards what eventually became the voice used in the novels I’ve written as Sean Cregan, though not without falling over a few times, and how much I’d already moved away from the wordier “first I got up and then I had a piece of toast” style of the earlier story. The writing process had been very different too, not least because the girlfriend I was living with upped and left me about a quarter of the way through and I took a long time to recover. (By the time the book actually came out, I’d met someone else, broken up, got back together, moved in and was a couple of weeks shy of the birth of my first child, which goes to show what a weird swathe of life the original version straddled.) Maybe I came back grimmer, more clipped. Who knows?