Page 2 of The Bodies
ONE
Joseph Carver wakes in darkness, to a hand shaking his shoulder.
As always, the first moments of consciousness belong to the before and not the now . As always, he bites down on the name forming on his lips before he spills it. Joseph feels his heart plummet into depthless chasms before adjusting for its boomerang return.
That all this occurs in the space of heartbeats, far quicker than it once did, amazes him, appals him – love and loss and sheer brute willpower pulling in different directions until the ragged strata of his waking mind grow taut.
Finally, he takes a breath.
‘ Joe .’
He frowns, concentrates.
Cool air on his face from the fan. Erin’s hand, still shaking him. He smells her perfume, her night breath. ‘Mm,’ he says. ‘Uh-huh.’
‘ There’s someone downstairs .’
A gap in the curtains admits a lick of moonlight, revealing the bedroom’s vague contours. His first question: ‘Where’s Max?’
‘He’s staying at a friend’s tonight,’ she hisses. ‘Remember? And his car isn’t here.’
Hearing that, Joseph drags himself upright. He’d closed those curtains tight before coming to bed. Erin must have parted them, peered down at the driveway, checked.
‘But he’s not insured,’ he says. Nor will his son’s Honda even qualify for insurance until it passes its MOT. Still, that’s hardly a thought for right now. Joseph reaches out to the fan, switches it off, waits for its blades to fall silent.
He hears something, then, or thinks he does, even if he can’t describe it. Maybe he just senses it. A wrongness about the house. A feeling that something chaotic has crept in while he’s been sleeping. Something ruinous and wicked.
His chest tightens. Instantly, he’s wide awake. Because he knows that overcoming the threat, however it manifests, is his task; and because the role of protector is one for which he’s uniquely unsuited – a role he’s failed before, with spectacularly painful results.
In a blink he’s spun back five years. To the before and not the now . To a different bedroom; a different night; a different wife. To a nightmare that had begun much the same way. Back then, he’d believed that home was a safe place, unassailable. He doesn’t believe that now.
A clinking from somewhere deep inside the house, a creaking. A shushing, as if of wind. Hard to explain why those sounds seem so insidious, but they do.
‘Where’s your phone?’ Erin whispers.
‘Downstairs, I think. Yours?’
‘Charging, in the kitchen.’
‘Shit.’
Joseph swings his legs out of bed. He places his feet on the carpet, carefully so they don’t thud.
Adrenalin lightens his stomach, shortens his breath.
Naked except for his underwear, he pads to his wardrobe.
Opening the door, he reaches in. Erin doesn’t know what he keeps in here, behind the shirts and the suits, the ties and winter scarves, the bereavement box still too traumatic to open.
A man haunted by past failures is wise to plan ahead.
Just last winter a doorstep seller – some coin-eyed addict who flashed a homemade ID – wedged his foot inside the front door until Joseph handed over twenty pounds for three squeegees and a pack of J cloths.
Erin wasn’t home, but Max and Tilly were in the living room, watching TV.
If the guy had tried to force his way inside, Joseph couldn’t have stopped him.
His adversary had been stronger, fitter, far more aggressive.
Joseph, by contrast, had never fought anyone in his life; he wasn’t even sure he knew how.
Failing his family once had been devastating enough. To have failed a second time would have been worse than inexcusable – an utter dereliction of his duty – and he’d just come perilously close.
Immediately afterwards, he started investigating home defence options. His research led him to a YouTube channel dedicated to the subject. The host – a ripped and balding American around Joseph’s age – exploded a lot of myths and talked a lot of sense.
No point buying a full-sized baseball bat if you didn’t have room to swing it. No point buying a machete if you couldn’t imagine cutting flesh. Calling the police was always a priority, particularly if you couldn’t escape. But planning for a confrontation was vital.
Americans, of course, could arm themselves pretty much how they pleased.
Even when using deadly force, they faced little danger of prosecution.
Here, the law seemed to favour the intruder.
Keeping any kind of weapon for self-defence classed a homeowner’s actions as premeditated.
The only legal products, Joseph discovered, were rape alarms and criminal identifier aerosols that dyed an assailant’s skin.
The YouTube host’s advice for his British viewers was characteristically blunt – Better to be tried by twelve than carried by six. The axiom lent itself readily to adaptation for Joseph’s purposes: Better to face jail than bury another loved one .
Packages started arriving at the house soon after.
Joseph didn’t stop buying until every room was stocked with something he could use in an emergency.
Whether a screwdriver tucked beneath a sofa cushion, or a ball hammer hidden inside the cloakroom cabinet, each new purchase helped him feel marginally more prepared, marginally more capable of shouldering the awesome weight of responsibility for the safety of those he loves.
Here in the bedroom, hidden in his wardrobe, he keeps his two most lethal purchases, bought after a week of nightmares where he repeatedly watched his wife, his son and his stepdaughter being cut down around him: a five-shot pistol crossbow and a midnight-black tactical tomahawk with a carbon steel axeblade and spike; stored beside them, a set of police-issue cuffs and a torch that produces a 4,000-lumen beam designed to blind and disorientate any attacker.
Now, though, when it matters, Joseph realizes that the confidence his preparations gave him was false and fleeting – because he isn’t a buffed and combat-ready YouTube host. He’s a guy who’ll get a screwdriver torn from his fingers and buried in his head; a guy who can’t recall how to assemble his crossbow or load arrows into the speedloader – and certainly won’t manage those feats in the dark.
Joseph touches the tomahawk’s polymer handle. When he wraps his fingers around the grip, he feels instantly sick. He retrieves the weapon regardless, along with the torch. Then he moves to the bedroom door.
Downstairs, he hears the yawn of a hinge; a thud. He no longer merely feels sick; there’s a very real risk he might pass out.
‘What’re you doing?’ Erin whispers, from the bed.
‘Getting my phone.’ Joseph remembers, now, where he left it before following Erin to bed: on the arm of the sofa, stacked between the TV remote and his paperback. ‘Stay here. If something bad happens, lean out of the window, start screaming. Then barricade this door until help arrives.’
‘What about Tilly?’
Christ , he thinks. It’s not even a good plan.
‘I won’t let anyone get up here with you.’
Silence, for a moment. Then: ‘Joe?’
‘What?’
‘Is that a fucking axe ?’
Erin’s incredulity sends his heart-rate skyrocketing.
Because if his own wife doesn’t believe in him, how the hell can he?
Joseph closes the door on her and takes four quick steps along the hall to Tilly’s room.
He ducks his head inside, hears his stepdaughter’s breathing, knows from its rhythm that she’s asleep.
At the top of the stairs he pauses in a narrow triangle of moonlight. He wants to grab the bannisters, steady himself, but in one hand he holds the torch, still unlit, and in the other he grips the tomahawk.
The ridiculous tomahawk , he thinks. A weapon more suited to an SAS operative than a middle-aged guy with two kids.
He clenches his teeth and descends, sinking into purest black.
The ground floor is an alien place, bereft of oxygen or light. Joseph feels like he’s arrived at the bottom of an ocean trench.
The pressure down here is enormous. His ears pop; his jaw aches. He hears movement in the kitchen, the scrape of something across the floor. There’s no tell-tale glow around the doorframe. Whoever’s inside is operating in perfect darkness.
The tragedy of five years ago had struck in the depths of winter, not late summer, but it had arrived just as unexpectedly – a few minutes of insanity stealing his late wife’s life and robbing Max of his mother.
In his head, he hears his last conversation with Claire, terrifyingly similar to the one he just had with Erin:
‘ Joe, wake up. I heard noises. I think someone’s downstairs. ’
‘ Just the heating, probably. ’
He’d gone back to sleep, hadn’t even heard her leave their room to investigate. He’d woken next to her scream; followed, moments later, by a terrible low-pitched moan. Even then he’d lain there in confusion for a handful of seconds before leaping up.
The burglar Claire had disturbed clubbed her three times with a metal bar before fleeing. Only one of those blows had proved fatal. A handful of seconds might have made all the difference.
Claire’s antennae for danger – always more finely tuned than his – had been surpassed only by her instinct to protect their son. He should have trusted her, should have known she’d wouldn’t ignore a suspicious noise.
He should have gone in her place.
Sweat rolls cold from Joseph’s armpits. It makes him shiver despite the night’s heat. He thinks about shouting a warning, scaring off whoever’s there. Odds-on they’ll flee, but what if they don’t? He’ll have alerted them to his presence, squandering the advantage of surprise.
His first plan is a superior one: retrieve his phone, get back upstairs, call the police, guard the landing.
Joseph swims forward through the gloom. He remembers leaving the living-room door ajar.
It might be dark, down here in the hall, but he knows this house, can navigate it without fear of striking furniture or other obstacles – until his toe catches one of Erin’s ballet flats and sends it spinning across the wooden floor to the wall, where it ricochets off a bookcase.
The sound is an artillery strike. An orchestra’s percussion section. But what Joseph hears from the kitchen, moments later, is even worse – the unmistakeable scrape-slide of a knife being drawn from its block.
And then silence.
He thinks of the YouTube guy, of how he talked so confidently about situations exactly like this. Of how he’s probably never come close to facing one. Certainly not two.
Hearing commotion in the hall, Joseph’s intruder could have fled but hasn’t, has instead chosen to draw a knife.
Erin is upstairs. Tilly, too. Joseph can think of few people less qualified to protect them than himself.
He wants to creep back upstairs to his wife and stepdaughter and wait for help.
But help isn’t coming, not yet. Even if he grabs his phone and manages to call the police, they’ll take time to arrive – if they show up at all.
A confrontation, now, feels inevitable. Perhaps he should try to seize the initiative.
He can’t control his breathing. His body feels as insubstantial as air. Joseph kicks open the kitchen door, advances over the threshold.
He raises the torch in his fist and thumbs the power switch, throwing out a cone of light so brilliant he’s almost blinded but not quite, because he does see the knife that flashes through the air towards him, and when he jerks backwards even as his momentum carries him forward, it’s not enough to avoid the blade, which slices him clean across the abdomen – and then he’s skidding on his heels, crashing on to his tailbone with a jolt that rattles his teeth.
The torch flies from his hand. It clatters across the floor, throwing carnival shadows around the kitchen.
When it comes to a rest, Joseph is pinioned by its light.
Four thousand lumens is three times brighter than a car’s full beam.
It fills his head, washes away colour, reduces his world to monochrome.
He squints, peers down at himself, can’t figure out why there’s no blood.
And then, across his abdomen bleached white by the torchlight, a black line appears, finer than a papercut.
It opens like a mouth, as if to speak, but instead of words it gushes black ink.
Illusion or not, Joseph can’t help thinking that this really is the truth of what’s inside him.
And then the pain hits.