5 The start of it all
Back home, when Danny had finished his homework, he sat and ate a chilli con soya while his mother drank red wine and Oma grumbled about the spiciness of the food.
Danny sat quietly. Calmly.
A sound came from the bottom of the stairs up to the flat. It was the clunk of the door.
“Hello?” Little Rick’s muffled voice came up the stair-well. “Can I come up?”
Val hurried across the landing and leaned over the railing, gesturing Rick up. “Shush,” she said softly. “Josh is asleep.”
Rick walked into the kitchen-diner, grinning. “Need to make the most of it,” he said. “I bet he doesn’t sleep much with the teething.”
He pulled up a chair and sat at the table.
Oma clicked her tongue disapprovingly. “She leaves the front door open like I tell her not to,” she muttered, poking at the rice with her fork.
“It’s okay,” said Val. “We’re not in London now. Things are a lot more laid back here at Hope Springs.”
“Hi, Danny,” said Rick. “Hi, Oma Schmidt.” Omaschmidt.
She clicked her tongue again, and Danny smirked, then stopped himself.
“Luke’s been printing posters for the Open Day,” Rick said. “They look good. There are going to be ads in the Crier and Echo, too. It’s about time we tried to pull the local community into Hope Springs. It’s all very well us doing our sustainable thing in isolation, but we need to send ripples out into the real world if we’re ever going to change anything.”
“It’d be nice if they didn’t just see us as cranks,” said Val, pouring herself some more red wine, and a fresh glass for Rick.
“What was it Schumacher said in Small is Beautiful? He didn’t mind being called a crank because cranks cause revolutions?” Rick raised his glass, chinked it with Val’s, and drank.
Danny watched, and wondered about the two of them.
His mother was even more suspicious of people than Danny was, and Oma was hostile to anyone who intruded on what she considered family territory. They must be a difficult family to penetrate.
Rick didn’t seem to notice, or to care. He called in quite often to talk with Danny or Val.
Maybe he was like this with everyone. Danny wasn’t sure. Maybe he just wanted to talk to someone other than David and his father’s partner Sharmila sometimes.
Rick said something that Danny didn’t catch. Danny looked down at his food.
He felt sick, he realised. Deep in the pit of his belly. Things were changing... something new starting. Ever since he had found that journal, things had felt different.
He thought of Cassie. Of how she had waited for him behind the hedge at the top of Swiss Lane. How she had stepped out, startling him.
But she could only have waited for him because he was already following. Stalking her.
He shut out the thought. He had to keep control.
He took another mouthful of the chilli, but somehow the flavour had vanished.
~
Later, in his room, he sat in the window seat.
It was dark outside. No moon or stars, no streetlights out here in Wishbourne. The flat was too far from the road to be penetrated by the headlights of any passing cars. Just darkness.
He stared into the glass of his window and a shadowy version of himself stared back. He studied the dark eyes, the pale features, all distorted in the old glass.
His father had stalked his victims. Eva and Chris, at least. Everyone accepted that the other three had “merely” been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had stalked Chris Waller several times before the night when it all happened.
Danny closed his eyes and saw Cassie. Ahead of him on the track, bag dangling, glancing back. She’d been leading him on. Wanting him to do something.
And he had followed her.
Was this how it had started?
His father’s journal had spoken of voices in his head. Voices that goaded him, leading him on. All kinds of voices, but the main one had belonged to someone he called Hodeken, some kind of personal demon. Hodeken had gone on and on at him, telling him what to do, taunting him when he did not do as he was told. It was Hodeken’s voice that Danny’s father had been trying to stop when he cut out his victims’ tongues.
Danny heard voices.
Inside his head, inside the barricades of his skull, he talked to himself all the time... his own voice bouncing around inside his head. Other people’s voices, too: his father, Val, Oma, Won’t and Tim taunting him. Cassie Lomax’s “Virgo, I reckon.” He remembered the intense urge to read more of his father’s journal: that had built up from within, a pressure driving him on, nagging at him – not so much a voice, but an urge that had been almost irresistible...
Was this what it had been like? Or was everybody like this? Was everyone a ball of anger and frustration, tightly controlled, just waiting to be let loose?
There had been a dream ... a dream of a nagging voice telling him to trust it, to open up. But no: that had just been a dream, nothing more. He was not going to end up like his father.
He looked at the window, staring right through his shadow self into the darkness. His pulse was steady, his breathing calm.
He met his own eyes again. Just what are you capable of, Daniel Smith?
His reflection didn’t answer, which he thought was probably just as well.