Sins Like Scarlet

Mark Morris and Rio Youers

It began its miserable purple existence nine and a half years ago, a growth in the inner layer of his colon, which—untreated—metastasized into his lymphatic system, internal chest wall, and liver. It was doubtless other places by now. His bones. Maybe his lungs. He’d skipped his last two rounds of chemo, because it was cruel, cold, and pointless: a shot of ugly that left him whimpering at hell’s door. The doctors hadn’t been hopeful before his few treatments began and told him now that his life expectancy was down to months. He believed them. No reason not to. The blood in the toilet bowl, and in his saliva, delivered a similar prognosis. And his body—once firm and powerful—was now a rawboned rack of hurt. But what the doctors didn’t know was that there was an older pain, a deeper pain, that he had suffered for many years. He’d lain in machines that had scanned his body, but as far as he knew there was nothing for the soul. Should such a machine exist, the doctors would find his malady: a shadow, worse than any cancer, and shaped like grief.

Allan Strand closed his eyes and fumbled for the hip flask in his pocket. Antique silver, dulled and dented with use, filled with liquid morphine. He unscrewed the cap with buckled fingers and raised the flask to his lips. A single swallow, raspy throat clenching like a fist. Allan groaned and his thin body trembled. He didn’t feel relief so much as numbness—the physical pain encased in ice that would melt all too soon. And that deeper, emotional pain . . . still there, but the morphine had lifted hands for him to hide behind.

He smeared blood from his lips and screwed the cap back on the hip flask.

“Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.”

He opened his eyes. The boy was gone.

HE HADN’T SPOKEN to Holly for twenty-five years. Their marriage—once, like him, firm and powerful—had withered to nothing following the murder of their only son. There had been eleven subsequent months of togetherness, each as fragile as eggshells. No lovemaking. No comfort or assurances. They finally separated in the winter of 1987, whereupon Allan’s wings had stretched far and wide. He flew his crippled coop to begin a new life in Canada. He’d hoped thirty-five hundred miles would nullify his woes and responsibilities. He was wrong. His pain had spread its wings, too. Some things refused to be left behind.

“Hello.”

Holly, it’s Allan. . .

He breathed his sickness into the mouthpiece and rubbed a tear from his eye with the heel of his free hand. Her voice awoke memories, both dark and light. So easy to envision the girl he had fallen in love with. Nineteen years old. Green eyes and a line of freckles across her nose, as distinctive as the markings on a cat. The bow in her hair had come untied, and Allan had pulled it free and handed it to her before she lost it. That was how they’d met. She’d taken the ribbon from his hand and twelve years later they stood beside the too-small coffin of their one child with a valley of emptiness between them. Allan would never have believed that silence could be so deep.

“Hello . . . ?”

Holly . . . I have something to tell you.

He opened his sandpaper mouth, not sure that he could speak at all. To utter a single word—even one as innocuous as hello—demanded vast courage. He gripped the phone tighter. His throat clicked. He considered hanging up, and in the end didn’t have to; Holly beat him to it. The empty line was a different kind of morphine. Old pain slipped sweetly away—temporarily, at least.

There was a copy of yesterday’s Daily Mirror on the table in front of him. He’d found a convenience store downtown that sold a few British tabloids. They were always a day or two late, but for Allan—who was unfamiliar with the Internet—it was the best way to keep up with the news back home. The paper was open on page seven, where a black-and-white picture and two-column story wavered like smoke, and which he’d inhaled, inducing waves of nausea and despair. It had prompted him to call Holly, even if he hadn’t mustered the courage to talk to her. Now he inhaled the story again, the headline: MEADINGHAM MONSTER DIES IN BROADMOOR, and the picture of a thin man with close-set features and a small, dark mouth. The caption beneath read: Desmond Grayson—termed the “Meadingham Monster” after killing twelve children in the 1980s—suffered a fatal heart attack in his Broadmoor Hospital room on Thursday. He was sixty-two. The killer’s eyes regarded Allan impassively, as if his sins were unformed, and the blood on his hands could so easily be washed away.

The image unsettled Allan. It always had, and he had seen it thousands of times. It had been splashed across the news throughout Grayson’s trial, so synonymous with evil that it had attained cult status. Allan had even seen it printed on posters and T-shirts. Desmond Grayson may have been a diminutive, psychologically frail individual . . . but the media had made him famous.

His victims were aged between six and eleven. He lured them by asking for directions or pretending to look for something he’d dropped, and the moment the children lowered their guards, he grabbed them. He took them to his house, where he raped, tortured, and killed them. Then he dumped their bodies in secluded locations in and around Meadingham. It was a wave of terror that lasted six years, ending on a frosty night just after Christmas of 1989, when Grayson was pulled over for speeding. One of the two officers who spoke to him was sufficiently alerted by his odd behavior to ask him to open his trunk. The bloodstains they found on the upholstery prompted them to take Grayson in for questioning, and twenty-four hours later he had confessed to all twelve murders.

Allan remembered Holly’s shock when she first saw Grayson. She had expected a person both imposing and demonic—the stuff of horror movies. But in reality he was well groomed and courteous, and he sat throughout the trial with his hands folded primly in his lap, his voice—on the occasions he spoke—soft and controlled. Holly regarded the child killer with as much disbelief in her heart as hate. How can someone so normal-looking commit such ungodly crimes? she had asked. But it wasn’t Grayson’s appearance that unsettled Allan, so much as the emptiness in his eyes. Did he really feel nothing? Was he indifferent to all the blood he had spilled . . . to the small, broken bodies piled behind him?

Thomas—their son—was seven years old. His body was discovered in a dilapidated barn two miles outside Meadingham. Although he had not been raped, he had been stabbed thirty-eight times. His body had been covered in abrasions and bruises. His right arm and neck had been broken. The officer in charge of the murder inquiry, Detective Inspector Lomax, had informed them that it was the broken neck that had killed their son, and that the knife wounds had been inflicted postmortem. The thinking was that Thomas had died from falling down Grayson’s basement steps, thus denying the killer his sadistic pleasure. Lomax’s tone had been one almost of satisfaction, as if the little boy had bravely and resourcefully outwitted his abductor, but for Allan and Holly, it was the end of everything.

Their togetherness fractured, along with their happiness. Holly’s kind and loving heart shattered, and she strayed all too often into a vortex of depression and delirium. She once drove to London with the intention of attacking Grayson as he was ushered from the Old Bailey. Unable to get close, she hurled abuse and pushed ineffectually at the crowd, and in a frenzy she attacked the young PC who tried to restrain her, gouging his cleanly shaven cheek. In the end it took four policemen to wrestle her into a Black Maria, after which she was detained in a cell overnight and issued with a caution, despite the extenuating circumstances. Shortly afterward, she downed a cocktail of lorazepam and vodka and spent the night in Meadingham General having her stomach pumped. Allan wanted to care, but he didn’t . . . couldn’t. The distance between them had grown too vast, and he had problems of his own—this new and terrible illness: a cancer of the soul that struck long before the disease touched his body.

Running a hand down his sunken face, Allan closed the newspaper. He reached for the phone again, dialed the first three numbers, then hung up. Pain rolled through his stomach. His right leg twitched. He coughed—sprayed blood against his bunched fist—and fumbled for his morphine. The hip flask’s curves and dents were so familiar that he took comfort from simply holding it. Alas, not enough; he had a callus on his lower lip where he’d so often pressed the collar.

When the pain subsided, he picked up the phone again, dialed Holly’s number, then cut the call before the connection could be made. He wept for a long time, albeit silently, the tears rolling down his face and dripping off his chin. Then he tried calling her again . . . still couldn’t. Perhaps it would be easier to catch a flight to England and talk to her in person.

His tears had made an impressive puddle on the table. He used the newspaper to mop them up, then turned to page seven and scrawled black X’s on the monster’s impassive eyes.

TWO DAYS LATER he made the call, not to Holly, but to British Airways reservations. He was going back to England. He was going home.

There was peace in his decision, yet no reprieve from the pain. If anything, the shadow on his soul only grew. He battled through the hours, his fragile body twisted out of shape, cold with sweat. Exhausted, he collapsed on his bed and fell asleep. It was like falling into a box of broken glass. He awoke with a start to the insipid gloom of evening, a half-packed suitcase on the bed next to him, and his dead son, Thomas, standing in the corner.

Seeing him was nothing new. Allan often spotted him in the shadows, or in the corner of his eye, but his visits had become more frequent since the cancer took hold. His son was as fair and beautiful as he had been in life, but disturbingly, uncharacteristically, the little boy was always silent, his staring eyes shining like cold moonlight reflecting off glass. Allan had tried speaking to him, even reaching out to him, but had never received even the merest flicker of a response.

There was only one way to make him disappear.

Allan’s hip flask—never far away—was on the bedside table. The dying man snatched it up with a spavined, bird’s-claw hand and unscrewed the cap. He pressed the collar to the hard spot on his lip and took a full hit as Thomas stared at him.

He closed his eyes . . . waited.

“Though they are red like crimson, they shall be like wool.”

THERE WAS A time when Allan had been afraid of flying. Back when life meant something, when it seemed too precious to risk. Now the thought of crashing in flames, of being snuffed out as easily as a bug on a windshield, was almost too much to hope for. It was odd how he clung so tenaciously to the grinding misery of his existence, even while constantly wishing that Fate would intervene and absolve him of all responsibility. He had contemplated suicide, of course, but it was precisely that warped sense of responsibility that kept him here. He simply couldn’t allow himself the blessed release of ending it all, not when so much remained unfinished. Allan found a bizarre sense of pride in the idea that, whatever he’d been reduced to, he still retained a shred of . . . what? Decency? Humanity?

He barked a laugh, which quickly became a series of rasping coughs that felt as though every tube and passage from his esophagus to his bowel was being dredged with meat hooks. Cupping one hand over his mouth, he used the other to scrabble in his trouser and jacket pockets, hoping to unearth an old tissue or screwed-up handkerchief. He knew that to the hale and hearty his sickness was an affront, a crime against life’s optimism and vitality. Knew too that the mucus-clotted blood spattering his palm was the incriminating evidence that would excite a level of attention he could do without. Oh, there would be a ripple of concern shown by his fellow passengers and the air crew, but mostly there would be revulsion, alarm, fear. Post-9/11, a man coughing up blood in an airplane was not merely ill, he was infected. Over the past year, Allan had grown weary of telling people that he wasn’t contagious; even wearier of their dewy-eyed pity when they found out what was really wrong with him—especially when that pity barely masked their relief that the cancer was devouring him, and not them.

He was still rooting through his pockets when he spotted the sick bag between his knees, poking out from the pouch affixed to the back of the seat in front. He snatched it out as the young man beside him—whose bronzed skin and sun-bleached hair gave him the illusion of immortality—asked, “You all right, mate?”

Allan barely nodded before half turning away, his scrawny body shielding his actions from the man’s curious gaze. He smeared blood from his palm on the stiff paper, then folded it over and dabbed telltale flecks of red from his lips before scrunching the bag into a ball. His bones felt full of ground glass as he pushed himself to his feet, but he managed to scurry down the aisle toward the back of the plane without attracting undue attention. Indeed, the majority of his fellow passengers were too distracted by trivialities—computer games, in-flight movies, banal interviews with soap stars in gossip magazines—to even afford him a second glance. In recent weeks, as mortality had homed in on him, its great black wings beating ever closer, Allan had felt increasingly like an alien observing the pointless actions of another species from afar. He resented and reviled the way so many people passed the time without effect, wiling away their precious lives in increments. But although he felt an urge to rail against their wastefulness, he was aware too of the great tragedy of human existence, which was that death made a mockery of achievement, and that the more a person accumulated in life, the more he or she was set to lose when their once seemingly endless days were scattered like dust.

Relieved to find one of the four toilet cubicles unoccupied, he pushed open the door and slipped inside. Locking the door behind him was like sealing himself into his very own fortress of solitude, in which he was gloriously immune from all interference and contact. The soft roar of the airplane engines lulled him. Indeed, it was comforting to think of himself as a minute, insignificant speck high above the planet, his pain-racked body both perfectly still and hurtling through the sky at hundreds of miles an hour. Still clutching the ball of blood-smeared paper, he lowered the toilet seat and sank slowly down on to it, his joints grinding with hurt as his knees and hips bent at right angles. He closed his eyes and allowed his mind to detach itself from its surroundings. At first it was like tumbling slowly and luxuriously into sleep, and then he became aware that his mind was drifting back through his memories, like a balloon snatched from a child’s hand by a capricious wind. Somewhat randomly, the balloon became snagged on the spiny branch of a specific memory in which Allan was fourteen or fifteen. It was a blustery autumn day, and Allan, a keen footballer, had decided to try his luck at the after-school team trials.

There was a girl he liked. Melody? Melanie? His memory of her was vague. She was nothing but a smudged recollection of dark hair, a pretty face. Allan thought she might have been in the year below his.

He wanted to impress this girl—that he remembered. And she must have liked him too, because she was prepared to stand huddled in the cold at the side of the pitch on his behalf, hair blowing in the wind, watching the largely disorganized efforts of twenty-two teenage boys with muddy boots and red-raw legs.

Her presence inspired Allan that day. It lent him the energy, dominance, and determination that he too often lacked. He was a decent footballer, but his dad, who’d been a better one, always maintained that his son was too lazy to achieve his full potential.

Allan wasn’t lazy this day, though. For these ninety minutes, he was glorious. He bossed the game from midfield. He ran rings around boys who were generally considered stronger and faster and more skillful than he. Although his memories of Melody/Melanie were a blur, he recalled with utter clarity that his team won 6–2 that day, and that he scored two of the goals. He scored one of them from the halfway line. Looking up as the ball was passed wide to him, he saw that the opposing keeper had advanced to the edge of his penalty area. Striking the ball sweetly, he watched it loop over the hapless keeper’s head, bounce on the edge of the six-yard box, and nestle in the back of the net.

Although he didn’t know it then, this proved to be the pinnacle of his football career. He made the team, but once there he didn’t particularly shine. The other boys in the squad—cool, athletic, cliquey—didn’t actively dislike him, but neither did they welcome him into their ranks with open arms. In the end he either stopped getting picked or drifted away of his own accord—he couldn’t remember which. As for Melody/Melanie . . . he had no idea what happened to her. Despite his heroics, he didn’t think they had ever dated, though he couldn’t remember why. He wondered where she was now, how her life had panned out. Was she happy? Was she still alive? He hoped so.

When he opened his eyes, he was shocked to find tears running down his cheeks. He felt a sense of loss so profound it was like a twist of hot pain at the base of his ribs. When someone tapped lightly on the door, he raised his head slowly, his neck seeming to creak like a rusty hinge.

A woman’s voice. “Hello? Are you all right in there?”

Allan cleared his throat, but his voice was still a rasp. “Fine.”

“Only you’ve been in there for quite a while.”

“Sorry. I’ll be out in a minute.”

He pushed the balled-up sick bag into the slot for used paper towels, and then slowly washed his hands, watching as the water in the circular steel basin turned briefly pink before running clear again. He rinsed out his mouth and splashed his face, dabbing at his eyes and wet cheeks with a clean paper towel. He dried his hands and then, as an afterthought, slipped a number of folded paper towels into the inside pocket of his jacket, next to his hip flask. Finally, he flushed the toilet, unlocked the cubicle door, and pulled it open. Two stewardesses stood in the kitchen area sipping water from paper cups. One of them smirked as she glanced at him, as though trying to conceal a laugh, her eyes as blue and glassy as a doll’s in her immaculately made-up face.

“Sorry,” Allan muttered. “I wasn’t feeling too well.”

The girl’s candy red lips curved in a smile. “That’s quite all right, sir. We’ll be serving dinner soon. I didn’t want you to miss it.”

Allan gave a curt nod and turned toward the rows of identical seats, above which the backs of heads roosted like variously hued wigs. He looked down the central aisle, and his scrawny body clenched like a fist.

Thomas was standing beside his empty seat.

Allan could see him quite clearly. His son was no illusion, no accumulation of shadows given wispy form. He was as solid as his surroundings, a small boy in a striped T-shirt and blue shorts, his blond hair reflecting the shine of the reading lights overhead.

He stared blankly at his father, his eyes glazed, his mouth set in a stubborn line. Allan began to tremble. His hand groped in his jacket pocket even as his mind groped for the mantra in his head.

“Though your sins are like scarlet . . .”

His fingers closed around the cold steel of the flask.

“ . . . they shall be as white as snow.”

He tugged out the flask, fumbling with the cap.

“Though they are red like crimson . . .”

The cap, dislodged, tumbled from his fingers and bounced beneath the seat of a dozing fat woman in a flowery dress, a broken-spined paperback open in her lap.

“ . . . they shall be like wool.”

As he raised the flask to his calloused lips, trying to hold it steady, he sensed a presence behind him, and heard the gentle clearing of a throat. A soft voice, reasonable, almost apologetic, murmured, “Excuse me, sir, is that alcohol? Because I’m afraid—”

Allan’s fear and pain and misery seemed to coalesce, and to transform as they did so into a red flare of anger. Momentarily defying his infirmity, he swung around to confront the air stewardess who had smirked at him seconds before.

“It’s morphine, you stupid woman. I have terminal cancer. I’ve been given special permission to bring this on board. You should have been informed.”

He hissed out the words, keeping his voice low, but such was his fury that he was peripherally aware of several heads in the nearest rows of seats swiveling to regard him. The stewardess took a step back, her cheeks reddening, her previously immobile face twisting into a moue of dismayed apology.

“Of course, sir, we were told. My mistake, I . . . I . . .”

“So you don’t mind if I make a vain attempt to ease my pain?”

“No, of course not. Please . . . go ahead.”

His eyes still fixed on the girl, partly out of anger, though mostly to avoid looking at Thomas, Allan once again raised the flask to his lips. He swallowed, grimaced, felt the morphine shuddering through him, numbing as it went. Without another word to the stewardess he turned and looked along the aisle.

Thomas had gone. But for how long this time? His visits were becoming more frequent.

“Excuse me.”

Allan looked to his left. The fat woman was now awake, and looking at him with something like trepidation. She held the cap of his flask between two chubby fingers and a thumb.

“Is this yours?”

Allan took the cap and screwed it back on. The gritty sound it made was like the rasp of his lungs in the silence of night.

“Thank you,” he said.

THIS ANCIENT REALM, Allan thought. This Albion.

On the surface, England was drab and crumbling. Gray stone, gray clouds. But beneath its skin he sensed a strangeness, a wildness. He felt it as a vibration in the air, pulsing up from the earth itself and tingling in his veins. It was the deep-rooted energy of battles raged and blood spilled. It was witchcraft and paganism, sacrifice and sorcery, dark secrets and forbidden lore. This haunted island was full of ghosts, and Allan felt more attuned to them than he ever had before. They were all around him—in the way people talked, in the smell of the railway carriage, in the undulating fields and woodland that scrolled past the rain-streaked windows.

Allan felt like a husk after his flight—desiccated, cadaverous, so lacking in substance that if it wasn’t for the pain holding him together, he thought he might evaporate. He sat in the window seat of a train rattling toward Meadingham, beside a bearded man in a Queens of the Stone Age T-shirt, whose iPod leaked music that sounded like the frantic scratching of a trapped insect. Across from him, a delicately beautiful girl with strawberry-colored hair scowled at a copy of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, as if every word offended her.

A dark shape in a field snagged Allan’s attention. When his eyes jerked instinctively toward the window, it felt as if nerves were being tweaked in the sockets of his skull, causing him to bite back a hiss of pain. He couldn’t even make sudden movements now without it hurting. He thought again of the carefree boy who had scored a goal from the halfway line and felt a profound sadness wash over him. He was like a stranger, someone who knew the future but couldn’t change it. He fought an urge to cry for that boy, for what he would become, and focused instead on the dark shape in the field. Dusk seeped across the land, so the shape was mostly in silhouette, but he could see that it was a boy, standing there alone, out in the cold.

I’m sorry, he thought and reached for his flask, but even as he did so he realized his mistake.

It wasn’t a boy at all, it was a standing stone. Yet as the train sped by and the stone receded into the distance, Allan couldn’t shake the notion that it really was a boy—one who was fractured and alone, and rapidly filling with darkness.

HE FOUND A moment of blessed calm after alighting from the train—ten seconds, no more, where the world stopped revolving. Nobody else on the platform. Not a bird in the sky or a leaf skittering along the tracks. Even the train had shuddered out of earshot. Everything was suspended between then and now. He was alone, and it was divine. He breathed air that was only his and cast his gaze on things only he could see. The platform clock was frozen at 13:36, and maybe it would never tick again. His pain, too, had disappeared—a thing of the past, like every other shadow. Allan looked along the platform, at the slightly crooked sign—MEADINGHAM—affixed to the railings.

Home, he thought, and the first half of his life whirled through his mind like dead flowers in the wind. He looked at the tracks stretching into the distance and felt like taking to them himself . . . riding this static, painless moment until the rails faded from beneath his feet. He took a single step toward the edge of the platform, then the world found its motion: all chatter and agitation, impatience and pain. An automated voice announced over the Tannoy that the next train on platform one was the 13:47 to Liverpool. People spilled around Allan too suddenly. He was bumped and barged without apology, almost knocked to the ground by a youth playing with his smartphone. The pain returned, too, as wide and fast as the 13:47 to Liverpool. It journeyed through Allan to all destinations, a rattling thing. He felt the reassuring shape of the flask in his pocket and hastened from the platform, rolling his luggage behind him.

Three taxis idled outside the station. Allan chose the nearest and slumped across the backseat. He breathed hard and smeared pink spittle from his lips. The driver tossed his luggage into the trunk and slammed it closed. Allan thought of Grayson’s victims. Faces in the darkness. Thomas stood at the curb and looked at him. His face was pale and beautiful.

Unscrew. Swallow. Gasp.

“ . . . shall be like wool.”

Gone.

The driver pushed his belly behind the wheel and wheezed. His bloodshot eyes flicked into the rearview mirror.

“Where you going, mate?”

Allan put the flask away—patted his pocket as if it were his heart. He wiped his mouth and sighed. He had planned to go straight to his old house, where Holly still lived. They’d had discussions, prior to their separation, about moving. A new home, a new beginning, without the weight of memories. But it was these memories that Holly clung to—strands of their former, happy life bunched in her fists, and the reason why she lived there to this day. Twenty-six years since Thomas’s death, and Allan wondered if she had changed his bedroom at all. Were his little gray socks still balled up in the top drawer? The same box of toys in the corner? The same posters—Back to the Future and Bananaman—stuck to the walls with the same little blobs of Blu-Tack? Allan shook his head. This is going to be more difficult than I ever feared, he thought.

“The meter’s running, mate,” the taxi driver said. His eyes, reflected in the mirror, were narrow pink slits. Perhaps he’d noticed, only now, just how sick Allan was.

“Colvin Road,” Allan croaked, and wondered if his own eyes were black X’s. The taxi pulled away from the station with a jerk, and Allan heard his luggage shift in the trunk—thud against the upholstery. He turned from the mirror and viewed this ancient realm through the rain-blurred window.

HOW COULD HE hope to confront Holly without first confronting himself? Allan had spent the first eighteen years of his life on Colvin Road, in a semidetached council house with cold walls and blind windows. He got out of the taxi, wincing at the pain, and looked at the place he had called home for so long. The windows had been double glazed and its pebble-dash façade covered with a skin of clean brickwork. There was more color in the garden, too—chrysanthemums and peonies that never would have survived in Allan’s era. He felt, again, the importance of nurture, and the darkness that can seep in without it.

How dark are you now?

He considered the cancer running through his body, like a thousand children flying a thousand black kites. He closed his eyes and felt the shadow on his soul. It had claws, but no hands. It had teeth, but no mouth. Sometimes he felt it shift inside him, like an eel in dirty water.

The memories were here. Some had never been forgotten, while others were like echoes in a void. He felt again his mother’s strong arms, could see the nicotine stains between her fingers and hear the rhythmic tone of her voice. His father, a wiry man with flaming red hair and brown, broken teeth, his hands so work sore he could strike a match off his knuckles. His sisters, Mary and Gail, teaching him to lie and smoke and cheat. Three pets buried in the garden. Eighteen summers. Eighteen birthdays.

How dark are you now?

The rain hitting his bedroom window. The smell of Airfix glue. The damp-stains on the walls. The leering faces in the patterns of the brown-and-yellow curtains. Allan connected each memory to the next, like stars in a constellation, in the hope of determining some shape, however vague.

He recalled a boy and his father. The boy in tears, holding in his palm a watch with a broken strap. Such a small thing, and so easily repaired.

I broke it, Daddy, he said, a dimple set deep in his chin and his little hands shaking. I’m sorry. . .

Rage like a bullet. The father roared, and his hand came down, connecting with the side of the boy’s face. The sound was thunder. The boy staggered backward and fell . . . fell forever, it seemed, and still with the watch clasped in his hand.

“How dark?” Allan wheezed.

The house he had grown up in had changed—several cosmetic improvements—but it was nothing compared to his old school, which had fallen in the opposite direction. Its redbrick walls were cracked and sagging, smeared with vulgar graffiti. The doorways were cluttered with empty beer cans, flattened cigarette butts, spent condoms. Yellowed sheets of newspaper gathered in the corners, blown there by the wind, glued to the brick by damp and piss. The windows were boarded over with plywood, each tattooed with obscenities. Allan crossed the litter-strewn playground, weeds forcing their way through fissures in the cement, and found a gap between the boards. He peered into a dusky classroom—couldn’t see much, except a bead of light across the floor, and his dead son standing in the corner. Thomas had never attended Meadingham Secondary; had been killed before he was old enough . . . but here he was anyway.

Allan reeled from the gap in the boards, hand to pocket. He took a shot of morphine and repeated his mantra until the pain had been masked.

Back across the playground, bent against the drizzling rain, wondering what had happened to this place. He’d heard that many schools across England had closed down because of funding cuts, but Meadingham Secondary wasn’t just closed—it was infected. No more children. No vigor, or future. It hunched in the rain with its wounds revealed, a pitiful husk.

Allan stopped at the edge of the football field. Just a muddy expanse now. No goalposts or corner flags. It was here, over forty years ago, that he had played the game of his life. Here where, for ninety vibrant minutes, he had been everything he wanted to be: admired, applauded, a healthy teenage boy with the arc of his life ahead of him. He searched for that child now, but saw only a mist of rain. Melody/Melanie was there, though, standing a short distance away. Her dark hair flew in the autumn wind.

“Hello,” he managed.

She turned his way but looked right through him.

“Where are you now?” Allan wiped drips from his nose. His cracked lips trembled in something like a smile. “What did you become? Are you happy?”

All at once he saw a different destiny: a life with this pretty girl, who grew into a strong and beautiful woman. His ever-loving wife and the mother of his children. Four wonderful boys with broad shoulders and names that began with the same letter. He saw it all in a moment—a flash. This destiny. This could-have-been. And Allan could smile without it hurting. He could exist without the hip flask in his pocket. There was no cancer in this alternate life. No shadows.

He walked back toward the school, wondering if the butterfly fluttered its wings in such a fashion. Could one decision—or indecision—cause the ripples to spread in a completely different way? Or was he destined, no matter what, to tread the path he now walked? Was fate so unyielding?

Allan’s legs trembled with all the walking, and the rats in his stomach whipped their ropy tails. He sat down on a wall, fished one of the airline’s paper towels from his inside jacket pocket, and spat a wad of blood into it. He thought about balling it up and tossing it into a doorway with the old newspapers and crushed beer cans—adding his cancer to its own—but instead folded the towel and pushed it into another pocket. He wiped rain from his eyes and looked toward the football field. No sign of the girl now. No reminder of that possible destiny. He was alone.

Late afternoon, and the daylight—if you could call it that—was quickly fading. Allan thought of Holly. Only three miles separated them now, although the emotional distance was beyond measure. He had come here hoping to build a bridge but was afraid his soul might be lacking the raw materials.

Still, in the time he had left . . . he had to try.

He recalled her voice on the phone, one word—hello—that had set his mind spinning. He hadn’t been able to speak to her. Everything inside him had clenched. Would it be any different in person? Would he stutter and walk away, carrying his burden, a coward until the end?

Would she slam the door in his face, or fall into his arms?

Would her hair smell the same?

How dark are you now?

Was her soul filled with the light he needed?

HE COULDN’T FIND a pay phone anywhere; the classic red telephone box, which adorned every street when he lived here, appeared to have become a thing of the past. Allan ended up dragging his luggage into a pub, ordering half a bitter (one thing that, blessedly, hadn’t changed at all), and having the barman call a taxi on his mobile phone.

The taxi driver was an elderly man who’d lived in Meadingham all his life. He pointed out the many changes as they drove through the town: the Wetherspoon’s bar where Woolworths used to be; the multistory car park built on the spot of the old library; a shimmering office block that had replaced several small stores. So many changes—too many for Allan to keep up with. He sat in the back and watched the ghosts whisper along High Street and grunted in agreement every time the driver remarked that the country was going to the dogs.

They followed Cattlestock Lane out of town, the gray buildings and bleak streets giving way to rolling hills and farmland. The driver stopped talking and turned on the radio. The Beatles sang “Yesterday.” The windshield wipers left streaks on the glass.

The barn appeared from behind a clutch of black trees on the left side of the road. With its collapsed roof and blistered boards, it looked exactly—hauntingly—as it had when Thomas’s body was discovered there twenty-six years ago. Allan thought it was mental residue—a trick of the memory, attached to his pain. Maybe a sip of morphine would make it disappear. He pulled the flask from his pocket and asked the driver to stop.

“The barn,” he croaked, unscrewing the cap.

“What about it?”

“You . . . you see it?”

“Yeah.”

Allan sipped anyway. He wiped his eyes and blinked and sipped again. The barn wavered in his vision. He stifled a cough. The morphine touched him with many hands, and each felt like ice.

“It’s been there for years,” the driver said.

“Yes.”

“I always get a chill when I drive past it. You know that Meadingham Monster, right?”

“Yes.”

“They found one of his victims there. Little boy. Seven years old.”

A slight shift in the scene, and this was mental residue: the barn cordoned off with barrier tape, policemen with dogs searching the area for evidence while television and newspaper reporters squabbled for the best positions. A white van was parked in the field beside the barn, with Thomas’s shattered body inside, wrapped in a sheet.

“Tell me something,” Allan said, sliding the flask back into his pocket. He blinked and the white van disappeared. “How can everything else around here change so much, when that hideous old barn looks exactly the same?”

“God only knows,” the driver said. He shrugged, then looked over his shoulder at Allan. “Seems to me that, sometimes . . . it’s the bad things that stick around.”

THE OLD HOUSE hadn’t changed much, either. The front door and windows had been painted, and there was a newer car in the driveway, but other than that, Allan could have been stepping into 1987. He paid the taxi driver and wheeled his luggage down the garden path to the front door.

A thousand doubts crept in. An ocean of fear and anxiety. He knocked on the door (an enfeebled tap of the knuckles) before he could change his mind. The sweat and rain trickled down his face as he waited. His heart had been pounding hard all afternoon, but now it grew wings and flew furiously around his body, banging off every surface like a fly in a bottle.

He saw her soft silhouette through the frosted window set in the front door and suddenly wished he were back in Toronto, calling her on the telephone—this would surely have been easier over the phone. He clutched the flask in his pocket and wiped his eyes, then the door opened and she was there. The breath creaked from his withered lungs, and for what seemed like an age he couldn’t draw another. The first thing he noticed—before he saw how terribly she had aged, and that the coldness in her eyes was still there—was that the bow in her hair had come untied. A wild coincidence, almost certainly, but for one second he was twenty years old again, and the future was theirs to write.

She didn’t recognize him, of course. He was stooped and skeletal, the illness had drawn all the character from his face, and he had claws instead of hands. She looked at him questioningly, and it was only when he reached out with one of those claws and pulled the ribbon from her hair that she realized who he was.

Her mouth dropped open. Her cold green eyes fluttered.

“Hello, Holly,” he said.

FOR A MOMENT she said nothing. Just stared at him like he was something new, something that disquieted her. She was skinny and haggard, her flesh the color of the gray skies under which she lived, her once-laughing mouth set in a thin, straight line from which a myriad of tiny wrinkles radiated outward. Her hair, once so lustrous, was now gray and brittle. Allan wondered whether she too was ill. She certainly didn’t look healthy.

They might have stood there all day, a tableau of bitterness—of dashed hopes and lost lives—if he hadn’t raised his hand and offered her the ribbon.

She looked at it but didn’t take it. Instead she asked, “What do you want?”

Allan tried to smile but could only grimace. “I’ve come to see you.”

“What for?”

“It’s been a long time, Holly. Too long.” The arm holding the ribbon ached and he lowered it. He blinked rain from his eyes. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

“So tell me and have done with it.”

He felt battered not only by the rain but by the vehemence of her words. Weakly, he said, “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

“Why should I?”

He hesitated, then played his trump card. It felt oddly triumphant to do so. “I’m dying, Holly.”

He hadn’t expected compassion, and he didn’t get it. Holly flinched ever so slightly, as if he had raised a hand to her, and then her face hardened again. “What’s that got to do with me?”

“I just . . . well, I wanted to see you before I . . . I just wanted to make amends.”

The sound she made startled him. A harsh bark that it took him a moment to realize was a laugh. Then she said, “Isn’t it a bit late for that?”

He was shivering now. The rain seemed to be getting inside him, worming into his skin. “I hope not. Won’t you at least let me try?”

She remained silent, her face as hard as ever.

“Please, Holly. I haven’t much time. I flew halfway around the world for this.”

“I didn’t invite you here.”

“I know that, but . . .” All at once the strength went out of him. He felt like a sponge, his clothes and flesh saturated, too heavy to support him any longer. The handle of his suitcase slipped from his numb fingers and clattered to the path. The wet ribbon dropped from his other hand like a dead bird. Allan felt his vision narrowing, the world receding from him, but he didn’t realize he’d stumbled until his shoulder crashed against the wall beside the door. He cried out as jagged forks of pain tore through him, and then he felt himself gripped by hands like twisted wire, felt his body supported as he stumbled over the threshold, out of the rain, into the house.

The pain from the blow to his shoulder was raging, gathering pace inside him, echoing and radiating from its point of origin into his bones and his soft tissues. He groped for his flask but couldn’t get his hand to work properly.

“What are you doing?”

“Pocket,” he gasped, and even that was like coughing out nails. “Flask.”

“You mean this?”

He squinted. Through the grayness he saw the flask being offered to him. He took it, and with Holly’s help twisted off the cap and tilted it toward his mouth. The callus on his bottom lip burned when he pressed the metal edge against it, but after a moment the pain faded and he began to revive.

Holly helped him along a corridor, through a door, and into the welcoming softness of an armchair. “Here,” she said and dumped a towel on his head. He dried his hair and face, then wrapped the towel around himself and sat shivering. Holly knelt on the floor, her back to him, twisting the knob on a gas fire. The “real-effect” flames flared, then settled. He felt heat lapping toward him, though it couldn’t penetrate the cold at his core.

Holly turned and stood, scowling at him. Her eyes jerked to the flask and she asked, “What is that? It doesn’t smell like brandy.”

“Oramorph—liquid morphine.” He shrugged. “It’s for the pain.”

“And what happens when it runs out?”

He felt a spike of alarm at the prospect. It was a reminder that he needed to organize a continuing supply while he was over here, and sooner rather than later. Perhaps Holly would help him. He had the necessary documentation.

“It won’t,” he said. “I won’t let it.”

“How often do you take it?”

“As often as I need to.”

She eyed the flask with suspicion, as if it contained something dangerous—salmonella or anthrax—that she was afraid he might release into the atmosphere.

Allan clutched it tighter. He lowered his eyes.

“Do you want tea?” She asked the question aggressively, as if it were a challenge she defied him to refuse.

“Please.”

“Anything to eat?”

“No. Thank you.”

While she was away he looked around the room, his head turning slowly from within the folds of the towel, like a tortoise waking from hibernation. The carpet was a warm coral color, the upholstery, cushions, and curtains emblazoned with bright floral patterns. It should have been a cheerful room, and yet it seemed to Allan that there was something desperate about it. In the corner was a sideboard on which were propped two framed photographs of Thomas, both of which Allan recognized. One was of him standing on a Cornish beach, squinting into the sun, wearing a yellow-and-black T-shirt and red swimming trunks. The other was of him blowing out the candles on a cake with a big number 5 on it. There were no photographs of Allan.

Holly returned with the tea. He’d half expected a tray with a pot and china cups, but instead she shoved a mug unceremoniously into his hand. The tea was pale, insipid. He sipped, grimaced.

“Not to your liking?”

He shook his head, then winced; even this small movement caused him pain now. “No, it’s fine. It’s my throat and stomach. Ulcers. Tumors. I don’t know.”

She regarded him dispassionately. “Where have you got it? The cancer.”

“It started in my colon. A long time ago. I had no idea, of course, and it just ran wild. I think it’s everywhere now. I stopped the chemo . . . the treatments.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Because they can’t help me. They only prolong the pain.” Allan sipped his tea and held up the flask. “This is my only relief.”

Her eyes flickered briefly to the sideboard, the photographs of Thomas. “Well, it’s no more than you deserve.”

He sighed. “You’re probably right.”

Then she put her mug down, hard, on the small table by her side. He expected to see anger on her face, but instead her eyes teared up, and suddenly she looked ashamed. “No,” she said, “that’s a horrible thing to say. You don’t deserve it. It’s just . . . I’ve hated you for so many years. You abandoned me, Allan. When I needed you most, you . . . abandoned me.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Why did you go?”

“Because I was hurting, too. Because I couldn’t reach you. You were lost to me.”

“I was grieving.”

“I know. And so was I. But we weren’t grieving together. What should have halved our burden only . . . doubled it.”

“So you ran away.”

“I didn’t run; I just left. I thought it would be best for both of us.”

“You were wrong. I needed you, Allan. I was reaching out for you. Couldn’t you see?”

“No, I couldn’t.” Her claim astonished him. “You had a wall around you that I couldn’t penetrate. I tried, but . . .”

“You didn’t try hard enough.”

The bitterness was back in her voice. Allan wondered whether it was justified, whether he hadn’t tried hard enough. It was possible, he supposed. Maybe he had failed to recognize and respond to Holly’s need because to have comforted her, to have shared and absorbed her grief, would have felt like a betrayal, like lying to them both. There was so much that Holly still didn’t know. And if there was ever going to be honesty between them again, then she had to know, however hard that might be.

“Haven’t you got anything to say?” she said.

Despite her anger, despite her antipathy toward him, he could see that her need had never really gone away, that she was reaching out to him even now. It was as if the years of distance between them suddenly meant nothing at all, as if time was a flimsy curtain that could simply be swept aside.

Allan nodded, then finished his tea and placed the empty mug on the table beside the armchair. He kept hold of the hip flask, though—clutched it tighter than ever. “This is so difficult. You won’t like what I have to say.” He wiped his trembling mouth. “But it’s the reason I’m here.”

“Just say it.”

He’d rehearsed this moment, but now that he was here, in front of her, he didn’t know where to start. He gasped and stammered . . . used the towel to mop his damp brow. Eventually, he managed, “My sin . . . it’s . . .”

Red like crimson.

“ . . . It’s buried deep inside me. A part of me now. I can’t eradicate it, but maybe I can soften its edges . . . go to my maker with just a shred of peace . . . and maybe I can eliminate some of your pain, too.”

“Your sin?” Holly narrowed her eyes.

“The Monster,” Allan said. “Grayson—”

“Dead,” Holly snarled. Her green eyes blazed. “The fucker’s dead.”

“Yes, I read it in the newspaper.” He ran the towel across his brow again. He smelled rain and sweat in the fabric. “I saw it as a sign . . . to come here, to see you . . . before it was too late.”

“It’s not right, though, is it?” Holly snapped, as if she hadn’t heard him. “A heart attack. He deserved to suffer for killing Thomas . . . for what he did to all those children.”

Allan was silent for a moment, then he said, “You don’t have to worry about Grayson anymore. Because the thing about Thomas . . . what I wanted to tell you is . . . he didn’t suffer.”

She scowled. “What do you mean?”

“He was never scared. Never alone. Not like you thought. Grayson didn’t kill him, Holly.”

Her eyes widened, as if the lid were being pulled back on something she didn’t want to see. Something terrible. “What are you talking about, Allan?”

He was shaking again. Tears gathered in his eyes. “That day. The day Thomas died. It was a Saturday. You were in town. Buying a new frock.”

“With Verity,” she said, her voice breathless, as though she needed to cement the facts into place. “I was with Verity, and you were at home, repairing something—”

“The radiator,” he said. “We had air trapped in the bathroom radiator. It was banging and shuddering like there was something trying to get out. I was bleeding the system—”

“And Thomas was out playing with his friends.”

“No.”

She stared at him, eyes wide with panic. “No? What do you mean, no?”

He took a deep breath. It hurt; fish hooks and barbed wire. “Thomas wasn’t out playing with his friends. I told the police he was, but he wasn’t. He was in the house all morning. Part of the time he was watching me—helping me, as he called it. Then he got bored and went downstairs to watch TV. I was struggling with the valve, the radiator was leaking, and my temper was fraying at the edges. I heard a crash from downstairs, and Thomas let out a squeal. I was furious and worried at the same time. I yelled his name but didn’t get a reply, so I packed a few towels around the leak and rushed onto the landing.”

Allan’s throat crackled. He gasped and took a quick shot of morphine. The pain, this time, was harder to displace. It lodged somewhere in his heart. A cold and jagged thing.

“Thomas came up the stairs. He was crying . . . holding something in his hand. He held it out, and I saw that it was my grandfather’s watch.”

Allan stopped again. He screwed the cap on the flask as the boy bloomed in his mind. Beautiful Thomas, wearing his striped T-shirt and blue shorts. He had tears in his eyes . . . a dimple set deep in his chin.

I broke it, Daddy.

“The strap was broken. That was all. He’d been playing a game—James Bond, or something—and had fallen off a chair. It was the original strap, and very delicate. It didn’t take much to break it.”

I’m sorry. . .

“I could have had it repaired, but at that moment, with my patience so thin, that didn’t seem to matter.”

Allan paused again. It was the longest speech he’d made in some time and he felt exhausted, breathless. He wasn’t cold now. His insides, all the way from his gullet to his belly, were hot, pulsing, inflamed. With shaking hands he unscrewed the flask’s cap and took yet another hit of morphine. Holly sat perfectly still, staring at him.

“Then what happened?” she rasped.

He swallowed, winced. “I saw red. I lashed out. It was supposed to be a clip around the ear, like my dad used to give me, but I was just so angry . . .” He wheezed for air. A tear rolled down his withered cheek. “I caught the side of his face—harder than I expected. He fell. Thomas fell. He went backward down the stairs. He hit his head and I heard his neck crack. He was like a broken doll, tumbling over and over . . .”

His voice faded. He sat, huddled and shrunken.

Holly said nothing for a long time. Her eyes were small green stones set in her marble face. Her thin chest barely moved. This silence was nothing that Allan had expected, and he sat through it with pain all around. He recalled stepping off the train earlier that day, and that brief moment of nothingness. He longed for it again—to be trapped in a world where everything had stopped.

Holly opened her mouth, then closed it again. She looked at him. Her eyes flooded with venom. She looked away.

“You killed him,” she said at last, her voice cold and yet filled with a kind of wonder. “You killed our son.”

It was Allan’s turn to open his mouth . . . close it again.

Holly stood up, wobbled a little—had to clutch the back of the armchair to keep from losing her balance. She teetered unsurely to the window, then back again, as if she didn’t really know what she was doing.

“I’ve had to live with this for twenty-six years,” Allan continued. “It’s done nothing but grow inside me. A shadow. A darkness. But you, Holly . . . your shadow can be lifted. You don’t have to think about Grayson anymore. You no longer have to torture yourself with thoughts of Thomas alone and terrified. Because he never met Grayson. He was never locked in the trunk of Grayson’s car, never exposed to his evil. It’s a shock, yes, but please try to see the positive in this.”

Holly’s mouth dropped open. She gaped at him. “The positive? How can there possibly be a positive?”

“Thomas didn’t suffer,” Allan replied. “He wasn’t . . . corrupted in the way you thought he was.”

Her eyes flickered wildly; she looked as though she was having difficulty assimilating his words. When she spoke, her voice was distant, detached.

“But you allowed me to think he was. I’ve been in hell for the last quarter of a century, Allan. No mother should endure what I’ve had to. And you left me there. You went away and . . . left me there.”

“I had no choice. You see that, don’t you? If I’d told the police the truth, I would have been sent to prison for killing my own son. And Thomas would still be dead. It wouldn’t have made any difference—”

“It would have made ALL the difference!” Suddenly she was screeching, spitting at him. Her body was rigid, her hands curled into claws. Allan thought she was going to fly at him, tear at him. Then she froze.

“The wounds. On Thomas’s body. The knife wounds.”

“I had no choice, Holly.”

“You did that?”

“I had to make the police believe he was another of Grayson’s victims.” Allan wiped his face with a trembling hand, his voice wheedling, begging her to understand. “No words can explain what I was going through. I just told myself that he was already dead . . . that he couldn’t feel anything.”

“And you dumped his body?” she asked. “In the barn?”

“Yes.”

“That horrid place?”

“Yes.”

She turned away from him and wobbled again, then lowered her face into her hands. Her narrow back trembled, shoulders like ridges of ice.

“This isn’t happening,” she hissed, trying to readjust to these new revelations, to get the facts straight in her head. “It can’t be real.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“But he confessed.” She looked at him again, but Allan doubted she really saw anything but the fog of her own anguish. “Grayson confessed to Thomas’s murder—to all the murders.”

“That was . . .” He had been about to say “a stroke of luck,” but stopped himself at the last moment, wondering whether it might sound more callous than he’d intended. He stammered again, his mind struggling for the right words—if such words even existed.

She stepped closer. Her eyes were still wild, her body taut with painful emotion.

“I was surprised,” he said finally, “when Grayson confessed. I figured it was some sick sense of pride—that he was only too happy to claim as many victims as possible. Or maybe he had simply lost count. Maybe the children he killed meant nothing to him. Who knows what goes through a killer’s mind?”

“You do.”

“No . . . I’m not the same as Grayson.” He considered his sins, and how they had haunted him over the years. They had metastasized inside him, spreading from his heart and soul, into his mind, into his body. Maybe they had caused the cancer, a seed of darkness and loathing, allowed to grow. He then considered Grayson, who had brutalized—terrorized—all those children. He had an ocean of blood on his hands, a mountain of darkness in his soul. Yet his eyes were always so impassive . . . unaffected.

“We’re nothing alike,” Allan gasped. “I’m a man who made a terrible mistake. He’s just an evil bastard.”

Holly raised a hand as if to slap him, but instead she pointed a trembling finger at his face. Allan flinched. The pain was unreal.

“Don’t you dare sit there and pass judgment on others.” She spoke through gritted teeth. Her haggard skin blazed. “You killed our son. You violated his body. You put me through years of hell. And then you come back here and expect me to . . . to be grateful to you for finally telling the truth.”

“I expect no such thing.” Allan licked his papery lips. “You deserve to know what happened. That’s why I’m here . . . to remove your shadow, and to partly remove mine.”

“Clearing your conscience before you die?” She leaned closer. Her eyes were in flames. “It doesn’t work like that. You’re going straight to hell.”

“I’m already there.” He coughed and sprayed blood against the back of one hand.

“You’re the most cowardly man I’ve ever met.” Her voice bubbled with rage. “At least Grayson confessed to his crimes. You’re the real monster.”

“Don’t say that.”

“You sicken me.”

He wiped the back of his hand on the towel, leaving a bright red smear.

“What I said before, about you deserving it . . .” She looked at him avidly, hatefully. “I’ve never meant anything more in my life.”

“Your anger is equaled only by my guilt.” Allan looked past Holly, toward the corner, where the photographs of their son adorned the sideboard. “I see Thomas everywhere I go. Just standing there. Staring at me. A constant reminder of what I did.”

“And that?” She pointed at the morphine. “That makes it all so much easier, I assume.”

“It’s all I have,” Allan said. “It’s the only thing that eases the pain and makes Thomas go away.”

“I hate you.”

“I know.”

Suddenly she darted forward, snatched the flask from his hands. He tried to react, to stop her, but his limbs were so unresponsive he might as well have tried to snatch a fly from midair.

“No, Holly,” he pleaded. “I need it.”

“I needed my son,” she said. “I needed my life. But you took them from me.”

Her rage erupted, as he knew it would. She screamed—a long and terrible sound, which seemed to pour not only from her mouth, but from her eyes, her flared nostrils, her fingertips. She lunged at Allan, lifting the flask above her head and bringing it down with savage force. He saw only a flash of silver before the base slammed against his forehead. His frail skin split and blood spattered the towel. She hit him again, cracking his cheekbone. He half lifted one arm, but it was no defense at all. A third blow broke his nose. He felt it pop. His head flopped to one side. She struck him again, and a crimson world opened below him. He started to fall, but not before the flask came down yet again, splitting his upper lip and knocking out two of his teeth. He spat one of them out. Swallowed the other. His eyes flicked to the back of the room. Thomas was there, watching without expression.

HE OPENED HIS eyes.

You’re going straight to hell, Holly had said, and he’d replied that he was already there. But he was wrong. So wrong. He’d been nowhere near hell at that point.

Now, however . . .

The rope binding him to the radiator was too thick to break, and the knot too tight for his weak fingers to loosen. It was tied around his ankle. The coarse fibers chafed his skin. He looked around the room for something that might help, but there was no help here.

Thomas’s bedroom was—as he had expected—exactly the same. The curtains. The bedding. The posters tacked to the walls. Allan saw his son everywhere. Five years old, curled up on the bed. Six years old, racing his Matchbox cars across the carpet. Three years old, proudly dressing himself in the morning, his shoes the wrong way around. The memories were as unbreakable as the rope that bound him. Allan tried to scream but managed only a feeble hiss. He clawed at his eyes with blunt, trembling fingers. The shadow inside him roared.

Holly stood in the doorway. Her eyes were green ice, filled with hate. The ribbon in her hair was mottled with his blood.

“Does it hurt?” she asked.

He nodded and wept. “Terribly.”

“You’ll be wanting this, then?” She held out the hip flask. More dents in it now, and smeared with his blood.

He made a low, longing sound in his throat and started to crawl toward her. Such slow and painful progress, with every wasted muscle screaming, every brittle bone like straw. His ragged mouth hung open, dripping red.

“Almost there,” she said.

The rope around his ankle pulled taut. He could crawl no farther. He whimpered, then reached out, hand trembling. Holly held the flask only inches away. He stretched his fingers.

“Please, Holly . . . please.”

She swirled the contents. He heard the glorious morphine lapping against the inside of the flask.

“Not much left,” she said.

“I’ll take what there is.” The rope—stretched so tight—cut into his ankle. His fingertips grazed the flask’s worn surface. “I need it.”

“So do I,” Holly said. She smiled wickedly, unscrewed the cap, and emptied the flask’s contents onto the floor. Allan collapsed and made pathetic lunging motions with his upper body. The morphine seeped into the carpet.

Gone.

“It’s my pain relief now,” Holly said. Still smiling, she stepped out of the room and closed the door behind her.

Allan retreated to the wall, crawling through the memories. He tried again to loosen the rope around his ankle. His fingertips bled with the effort.

Thomas watched him from the corner. He appeared more solid than before. More permanent. Allan turned away from him, to where three-year-old Thomas tied his laces. Away again, and five-year-old Thomas murmured in his sleep, gathered the sheets a little closer.

Allan sobbed. He wiped the blood from his face and looked at the window. The rain had stopped. The clouds had cleared. A rich sunset bled into nothingness.

Wonderful, endless nothingness.

Like scarlet, Allan thought.