Nightmare, with Angel

by Stephen Gallagher

Genres: Occult & Supernatural; Horror; Noir

Synopsis

After rescuing Marianne Cadogan from an incoming tide on a lonely and forgotten part of Britain's coast, ex-con Ryan O'Donnell is cornered into helping her escape a supposedly abusive father to reach the safety of her mother. Too late, he finds himself compromised, the subject of a trans-European manhunt while he struggles to deliver the child and prove his motives pure/ The deeper in he gets, the more trapped he will become.

Release date: April 11, 2019

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 479

Sample

MARIANNE, QUEEN of the beach.

Marianne and her best friend, Rudi the dog.

But it would have to be said that right at this moment, Marianne hardly felt like the queen of anywhere. She was soaked and she was cold and she could see, with dismaying certainty, that their time on the sandbank was about to run out. The tide was rising, and the tide was rough. It was a bitter day, sky dark as a bruise and with banks of cloud pressing low; there had been rain in the afternoon, and the threat of rain again. This, on any day, would have been enough to drive most people away from the shore.

Everyone except for Marianne, and her best friend Rudi the dog.

“Come on, Rudi,” she said. “Rudi? Please, come on.”

She was trying to encourage the dog to stand, but he wouldn’t. Couldn’t. He was looking game and he was beating his tail, but his back legs seemed to have completely given way. He’d moved no more than fifteen yards in the past hour and that had been with coaxing, with pleading, with pulling …

“Rudi,” she said with her arm around him and trying to lift, desperate now.

And Rudi beat his tail even harder, and looked up at her with his big mongrel’s grin, all teeth and tongue and hope in his eyes; but his ears were down flat to his head and this showed that he understood something of their danger, even if he didn’t understand much.

Still crouched by him, she looked over her shoulder.

It was a rocky beach no more. Now it had become an array of headlands and islands, with rapidly deepening shallows in between. Their own piece of ground, no more than a sandbar in the shape of a narrowing crescent, didn’t even rank amongst the highest of them. Pretty soon it would be gone completely, the waves closing over.

It was a stupid, stupid way to die.

“Come on, Rudi,” she said again, and this time she got a grip on his collar. She wasn’t big enough to carry him. She wasn’t even big enough to drag him by his lead to anywhere that he really didn’t want to go, but somehow she was going to have to try.

“Come on,” she said. “Don’t be scared, I won’t let go.” He was neither helping her nor fighting her, but it was taking all of her strength to pull him toward the water’s edge. He was leaving a track in the sand as he slid, all legs and claws and tail. His face was disappearing into a big roll of skin and fur as the collar rode up his neck. But he didn’t look funny.

And as soon at the water touched his front paws he fought shy and scrambled back, wriggling like a demon to break her grip. She couldn’t hold on and she fell to her knees, hard. Rudi yelped a few times as he rolled over, and then righted himself looking ruffled and hurt.

“You rotten bugger, Rudi,” Marianne said with tearful force, reaching deep inside her for the worst expletive that she dared.

Marianne was ten years old. Rudi was … well, she didn’t know for sure, but perhaps even a year or so older. They hadn’t been able to tell them his age, when she’d gone along with her father to pick him out. All they’d said at the animal shelter was that he was gentle and he was house-trained, and that everyone who’d been along in the past couple of weeks had passed him over for the younger dogs or puppies. And two weeks was as long as the shelter ever kept any animal; after that, those unclaimed or unwanted took a last walk down the pens to the small room with the steel table, and then left via the back door in a black plastic trash bag. Her father hadn’t argued with her choice. Whatever she wanted. His mind had been on other things.

That had been four years ago, almost.

Marianne took a deep breath of cold salt air, and let it out. Then she got to her feet.

Rudi watched her, as she took another look all around. Hands clenched into pale fists, she walked the length of the sandbar. A dozen strides covered it and at the end she stopped, trying to gauge the depth of the water now. There was always a chance that she could do it alone.

She looked back at Rudi.

He beat his tail hopefully again, and then looked down in surprise as the rising tide suddenly washed up and over the end of the bar, swilling around him; would he rise, she thought quickly? But no, he was scrambling to slightly higher ground with his front legs while his rear end dragged behind him like a sleeping thing.

She was starting to panic, now.

She knew that she couldn’t abandon him. And even if she’d felt able to do it and to live with herself afterwards, the time for that decision had already slipped on by. The waters between here and the mainland were running too deep, and too fast. The bay was a treacherous place, and was famous for it. For its great size and emptiness, for its tides, for its quicksands; there were numerous tales of travellers who’d set out to walk across its seven-mile width at low tide and who’d never been seen again, and almost none of the stories were legends.

The wash of seawater subsided, and air bubbled out of the sand at a thousand tiny points like a newly-discovered gas field. Rudi was above it, looking back as if betrayed. He’d gone lame running after his ball and it had happened all of a sudden, scaring her badly. He’d peed at the same time, all over himself.

Well, at least the swell had taken care of that.

He wasn’t old. Twelve wasn’t old.

Marianne faced the shore and filled her lungs, and shouted as loudly as she could.

“Help!” she called. “Anybody, please, help!”

A couple of gulls turned over the low cliffs. The cliffs were of sheer dirt, undercut and overhanging with tree roots showing where the sea had undermined. At the base of the cliffs there were shelves of rock which cut up the sea into a high spray as it came dashing in. Nobody was going to be scrambling around there.

She turned to look down the shore, in the direction of the wider sands and the distant town, and she took another deep breath and called out again. This time she tried too hard and the words seemed to catch in her throat, coming out at last like a fishhook pulling free. She wiped her eyes on her sleeve. Her words seemed to have been lost into the wind and the vastness beyond, returning not even an echo. Down the shore, miles and miles away, she could see a distant speck on the move against the clouds; a helicopter, probably, heading out toward one of the offshore oil platforms.

But it was too far away. Nothing like that ever came by here. Nothing ever happened down this part of the shoreline at all. It was this that had made it into one of her favourite places; but if she somehow got out of this, she was thinking, she would never come onto the beach again.

Not ever.

Rudi was whining now. She went back down the sandbar, and crouched by him and put her arm around him again. He was shivering against her.

“It’s all right,” she said. “We’ll be all right. Somebody’s going to come soon. Any minute now.”

Any minute now.

As words of comfort went, they were pretty thin. But there had to be a way out of this for them.

There had to be.

Didn’t there?

Their island had grown perceptibly smaller in the past few minutes. The sea’s rise was less tentative now, more a steady surge. Her mind was a blank. Soon the waters would swirl in like a living thing, arising finally to claim this piece of territory as its own, and then—that was the part she couldn’t handle. It was an entire colour outside of her spectrum, a big dark hole in the jigsaw.

“Any minute now, Rudi,” she said, holding him tight. “Just you wait.”

The day was closing down and the sea was closing in and no-one, no-one knew she was here …

And nobody, whispered a voice in the most secret part of her soul, nobody cares.

She was hit by a sudden shock as the cold sea swamped all around her and instead of being crouched on the wet sand she was knee-deep in icy water that receded as quickly as it had come; in an instant she was up on her feet and so, just for a moment, was Rudi, and as she grabbed for his lead and hauled on it he managed to stagger a few steps before his undercarriage went again and he sank without much grace onto what remained of the untouched sand.

Now both of them were shivering, and her clothes were dripping as well. The cliffs were more than a hundred yards away, and seemed to be receding even further in her perception. The swiftly-vanishing beach seemed to run on for miles, and with no-one in sight. Behind her was the open sea, and the empty sky. She wondered if she might swim for it. But every time the sea moved in or out, the rocks under the surface seemed to set cross-currents boiling like a cauldron.

Marianne hugged the dog harder.

She couldn’t believe that something wasn’t going to happen. She tried to think of a prayer, but the only prayers that came to mind were the ones that they chanted wearily in school assembly every morning and which were about as meaningful to her as a fire drill. There was no form of words that could express the fear that she was feeling now. It was a terror so great that it was almost an ecstasy which threatened to lift her out of her body altogether.

“Oh, God,” she said miserably, and then she threw back her head and yelled.

“Some … body … please! Somebody … help … me!”

It roared in her own ears, so that she almost deafened herself; and she could feel Rudi flinch and tense himself as if to bark, although he didn’t join in.

And then someone called back to her.

AT FIRST she couldn’t believe it, but then she looked toward the beach.

It was a man, and he was over on the dry sand about a couple of hundred feet away. She wasn’t sure what he’d said, but it was probably just a “Hey!” He was standing there and looking at her and seemed to have appeared from nowhere, almost as if he’d been sent in answer to her call … except that any divine effect was undercut, rather, by the fact that he was in wellington boots and a big ex-army greatcoat, with a khaki knapsack slung over one shoulder and his free hand holding a black plastic trashbag.

The bag was half-full. From the sound that it made when he let it fall, it seemed to be half-full of old tin cans.

“What are you doing?” he called out.

“I’m stuck,” she said, confessing the obvious.

“How did you manage this?”

“My dog can’t walk. There’s something wrong with his legs.”

He looked over the sandbar, as if measuring it up in his mind, and then he looked out at the incoming tide. The sea was the colour of newly-pressed iron, constantly on the move. He said, “You’ll both drown if you don’t get off there.”

“I know, but I couldn’t just leave him.”

“Don’t move,” the man said. “Stay back from the sides. You get a big wave, you’ll be gone.”

He looked around, as if to make one last check that he had no other option than the obvious one. And then he shrugged off the knapsack and his coat together, bundled them and threw both up the beach behind him, and started forward.

He churned up the shallows like a speedboat, and then within a dozen strides he suddenly pitched forward and was in up to his waist. This slowed him, but didn’t stop him. He forged onward and then, when his footing went, surged on and struck out in an overarm crawl. Marianne watched as he crashed his way through the water toward her like a barely co-ordinated seal. And then within a few moments he was rising again, staggering up out of the waves and onto the sandbar.

His face was pinched and white with the cold of the sea, his eyes wide and the speech driven from him by the shock of it. As he reached Marianne he stopped and crouched down, half-collapsing, before her. The water streamed from him as if he was some old piece of treasure newly dredged-up from the deep.

She knew him.

Well, she didn’t actually know him … but she’d seen him before, a distant and lonely figure picking his way along the beach with one of his big plastic sacks, more often at low tide than when the sea was running high. He had a funny little place some way inland, between the river and the railway tracks; some of the boys from her school would occasionally go down there and pelt his roof with stones from the embankment and then run away. Nobody that she knew of had ever seen him close-to.

Nobody, that was, until now.

He was gasping hard, struggling to recover. His dark hair was cut close, like a brush, and there was grey in it. He didn’t look as if he’d shaved in a couple of days and there was grey in his stubble, as well. He had the look of someone who spent a lot of his time out of doors. There was a small, plain gold ring in the lobe of his pierced left ear. She couldn’t guess his age. All adults looked about the same to her, and they all looked old.

“You’re mad,” he said as soon as he’d the breath to say anything at all. “Can’t you read the warning signs?”

“I know it’s dangerous,” she said, and she looked down at Rudi. “I was trying to get him to move.”

“You visiting?”

“I live around here.”

“How far’s your house?”

“You’ve probably seen it. It’s the big one, out on the point.”

“Right,” he said, taking a breath as if it was time to buckle down and get practical. He looked at Rudi, and Rudi looked back at him uncertainly.

The man said, “Can he stand up?”

“Only for a second. Then he sits down again.”

“How old is he?”

“Nobody knows. He’s from the dogs’ home.”

There was something that she couldn’t make out in the man’s expression as he reached out and put his hand to the side of the old dog’s head. He scratched behind its ear, and Rudi leaned his face into the man’s palm with a sense of momentary bliss and gratitude. The hand was big and broad and battered, covered in tiny healing cuts as if he’d been digging through sand for razor blades.

And then he said, “Come on,” and with his hand on Marianne’s arm he started to rise.

She had to rise with him. She said, “Rudi’s got to come with us.”

“I know,” the man said. “Where’s his lead?”

“He’s lying on it.”

The man bent to tug the lead out from under the dog, and Marianne took another glance back at her narrowing island. Some way out on the water, coasting like a raft on the waves, a wooden fish box was going by. It looked as if it had been only recently lost, its corners battered but the black stencilling on its side still readable. A lot of stuff came in like that. Marianne had walked along the beach a thousand times and had never seen anything of value there at all, just weeds and dead shellfish and capped plastic bottles that, if they hadn’t fetched up where they did, would probably have cruised the oceans of the world for the next hundred years.

“Come on, boy,” the man was saying. “Let’s see you stand. Come on. Hup. Hup. Hup.”

He was pushing the dog none too gently and the dog was trying to rise; and then, shakily and to Marianne’s surprise, he succeeded. His tail was between his back legs and those same legs were trembling like the limbs of a newborn calf, but he was standing again.

Rudi’s lead was a long one, more than five feet of well-stretched leather. Old and tame though he was, he couldn’t be trusted around sheep and there could be plenty of those in the fields above the cliffs. The man clamped the leather between his teeth just below the loop of the handle, and then he bent and swept up Marianne into his arms.

“He’ll drown,” Marianne protested as they moved back toward the water.

“Not if he can help it,” the man said through his clenched teeth, and with his head he gave a jerk on the lead. “No dog’s that stupid.”

Rudi stumbled, and started to follow.

“That’s it,” the man said. “Good boy.”

They were already at the water’s edge now, and here he paused to hoist Marianne higher and then took the leather out of his mouth for a moment, to adjust his bite on the lead. And while it was out, he said, “I’m warning you now, it’s going to be cold. But don’t mess around because there are all kinds of undercurrents to cope with as well. I know it doesn’t look far, but it’s far enough to be dangerous. All right?”

She nodded.

So then the man turned his head to one side, spat, and then clamped his teeth onto the lead again and waded on out.

He must have taken a pretty good grip because Rudi was dragged after them, with a yelp. Marianne was being held against the front of the man’s shirt and he smelled of nothing but the cold, cold sea. They plunged on and in and now he lifted her up high to keep her out of the water, holding her clear of himself; and already she could feel that his arms were quivering under the strain of holding her aloft as he waded out and descended to waist-depth. She tried to turn her head to see how Rudi was doing, but this seemed to threaten the man’s balance; whether in warning or just to keep his grasp on her, he squeezed a little harder and Marianne said, “That hurts.”

“Sorry,” he grunted, but he didn’t let off the pressure. He was taking a slightly different line toward the shore, presumably to avoid the crossflow that had almost trapped him on his way over. It was happening, she was thinking excitedly; it was as if all of the clockwork of the world was turning, breaking up the alignment of those elements that had come together to form her danger. The beach would be the beach again, the tide would be the tide, and the biggest of her worries would be how to explain the lateness of her return and the condition of her clothes to Mrs Healey.

Just a few more strides to go, she was thinking.

And then, without warning, she was suddenly plunged into the water and dragged straight down and under.

The shock of the cold was unbelievable. Literally unbelievable. It closed over her like the slammed pages of a book. She was battered and tumbled by the cross-currents and when she opened her eyes she could see nothing but darkness and bubbles. She kicked and threshed, and her fingers briefly touched sand that was sliding by underneath her at frightening speed; she gulped down salt and then gulped down more and tried to grab at something, and then for a moment she broke the surface. She was tumbling over like a log and in that moment she knew that this was it, she was gone, she was going to drown; the current was sucking her out like a pip and her last sight, if she was lucky, would be of the fast-receding lights of home.

Then a rough hand grabbed a piece of her coat collar and her hair together, and she was dragged up in an explosion of spray and held there, dangling like a puppet as the man ploughed his way back onward into the shallows. She could feel the submerged beach catching under her feet and she tried to get a footing, but he was marching her too fast and all that she could do was to bob around and kick at the water. But then he started to weaken and stagger, and he dropped her so that she was able to get her balance. Her weight seemed to return all at once, doubled, and with only the first couple of steps she almost stumbled and fell to her knees.

His hand was under her arm now, guiding her back up.

She looked around, disoriented. The landscape seemed to have changed completely in the few seconds since they’d gone under, and she realised that in that brief time they’d been swept some distance from the point at which they’d entered. To Marianne, it seemed like miles. A hundred yards, at least.

“Watch where you’re stepping,” the man said. “There’s a hidden channel right about here.”

She looked, and saw it. A thread of fast-moving darkness under the shallows, another booby trap in the watery minefield that only hours before had been nothing more threatening than a handy space in which to throw a ball.

She looked around suddenly.

“Where’s Rudi?” she said.

But the man said, “Just watch where you’re going,” and he jumped her roughly over the hidden stream with a jerk on her arm.

She tried to speak, but she’d already used up what little breath she had available. Finally, as they sloshed their way up onto the sand, she was able to say, “Where is he?”

“I don’t know,” the man said, not looking at her.

She stopped. “You let him go?”

“He’ll probably get ashore somewhere further along.”

She pulled away. “No …!”

“It was him or you. What was I supposed to do?”

He carried on walking up the beach toward his coat and his knapsack. They’d separated as he’d thrown them and the bag was already in the shallows, rocking with its own half-buoyancy under the to-and-fro action of the tide. The coat lay a couple of yards further on, like a tumbled scarecrow.

Marianne didn’t follow him. She stood ankle-deep in the water and turned to face the open, and she called her dog’s name. She looked for him, already in her mind seeing his bobbing head arrowing across the water. And for one heartstopping moment she thought that she saw him for real; but it was just the black plastic bag, already some distance away and bobbing out to sea. It looked like a deflated balloon, and as it went it was spilling aluminium cans that floated in its wake like airliner debris.

There was nothing. Nothing but the big, wide and empty bay. Nothing above it but the grey cloudy sky, with one pale streak of yellow late-afternoon sun breaking through somewhere close to the horizon.

The man was behind her now. He didn’t touch her again.

He said, “He was swimming. I could see that much.”

She turned and looked at him. He was quietly-spoken, just a little hoarse. He went on, “I wouldn’t lie to you about something like that. He was doing pretty well. Considering.”

The shore breeze cut into her through her wet clothes. Her teeth were chattering.

“He is a good swimmer,” she said hopefully.

The man looked out. “Well, there you are,” he said. “Can he find his own way home?”

She nodded.

“Well,” the man said, “then I’d wait for him there. If he can make it, that’s where he’ll head for. But listen,” he said then, and there was a certain gentleness in his voice that called up in her those fears that it was no doubt meant to calm. “I’ve got to say this to you. He’s not a young dog, and when their legs start to go like that, well … sometimes it’s better to say goodbye before things can start to get worse. Do you understand what I mean?”

“I’ve heard of dogs older,” she said sullenly.

He didn’t argue the point. Didn’t seem to take offence, either.

“Come on,” he said. And she felt the heavy weight of his coat descend upon her suddenly as he placed it around her shoulders.

So then Marianne turned from the sea and, with the tears running down her face and laying salt over salt water, she walked with the man toward the end of the cliffs. Beyond the cliffs lay the reclaimed flatlands. Across the flatlands ran the track that would take them from here to her home.

SOME OF it was land proper, and some of it was land over which the sea had never fully relinquished a claim. The boundary between the two was marked by a flat-topped, man-made dyke which the pathway mostly followed. The dyke enclosed a wide acreage of low, green pastureland; outside of it were the drowned flats that ran out all the way back to the bay.

They followed the line of a fence; sheep fencing with a single strand of barbed wire along its top, and showing evidence of the sea’s occasional inland forays in the form of rags and weeds that hung on the wire like fleeces. Beyond it lay a weird tracery of salt pools, great strange shapes chopped out of the turf as neatly as by any pastry cutter. The earth here was smooth and spongy, the grass as plain as baize. As they climbed up onto the dyke, they passed one of the signs that the man had mentioned. It was cast in iron like the signs that they’d used years ago on the railways, and its lettering had been picked out in white; it read

DANGER

DEEP AND VARYING CHANNELS

and it leaned on its pole. At the foot of the pole lay a few pieces of driftwood, dried-out and bleached like prehistoric bones.

Marianne had to hold the coat up around her, to keep it off the ground as she walked. She was thinking about Rudi. She’d convinced herself that he would be all right. She was even wondering if he might somehow get to the house ahead of them and be waiting there … all logic said no, but it was a scene that she couldn’t help replaying in her mind. If he wasn’t there, he’d join them soon. And if it didn’t happen right away, it would happen later.

She didn’t care what anybody might say. She knew it would happen.

Her life had to be a charmed one. Hadn’t she just experienced the proof of that?

At the end of the path, overhung by trees, stood the remains of an old copper smelting tower. Just the tower, nothing else; a twenty-five foot stone stack with a hearth at its base and nothing to explain who might have used it, or when, or why they should have thought to site it here in the middle of nowhere.

Beyond the tower, a lane began. And here there was another sign, only this one was hand-made and it read, Private Property. Behind this stood three cottages at the end of the lane, the start of civilisation proper. Marianne and the man who had pulled her from the sea took a chance on the notice, and sat on the garden wall of the cottages to empty the water out of their boots. If anyone saw them, no-one came out.

The man said, “The big house on the point. Is that by the road over the old salt marsh?”

Marianne said, “You can walk on the sea wall when the road’s gone under.”

He scratched his head, and then rubbed briskly at his hair. It came up like a brush again, as before. “I’d better walk the rest of the way with you,” he said.

“There’s no need.”

He looked at the ground, and at himself. “If I could leave you to it, I would. But look at us both.”

“I’m not so bad,” Marianne said, but she could suddenly see herself through Mrs Healey’s eyes. She wondered how she might explain alone the mess that she was in. She’d be blamed for it, of that she was certain; the dangerous part somehow wouldn’t be taken quite as seriously as it should because she was, after all, still in one piece, whereas the stupidity part could be used against her for ever.

“You’ll need someone to back you up,” the man said, and she realised that he knew how she was thinking.

“All right,” she said.

And so the two of them walked up the lane together.

The lane was overhung by trees, the path scattered with red berries that had fallen from the branches. It took them up by the big old rock quarry where the sheep were often penned in bad weather. A couple of old railway trucks off their wheels served as shelter for the animals; iron-bound, plank-sided, the iron rusted to brown and the painted woodwork dirtied-down to more or less the same colour. A couple of sheep bolted from by the gate as Marianne and her rescuer passed.

She said to him, “You live near the railway, don’t you?”

“I’ve lived in all kinds of places,” he said.

“But that’s where you live now.”

He didn’t actually say yes. He just kind of inclined his head, as if to concede the point. He seemed to be avoiding looking at her.

She waited a moment, and then said, “Some of the boys call you Grizzly Adams.”

He looked up at the sky, as if checking for rain.

“Whatever they call me,” he said, “I can bet I’ve been called worse.”

He didn’t quite smile to himself as he said it; it looked like a smile, but it wasn’t one.

All dogs are good swimmers, Marianne was thinking. And on the occasions when he’d wandered off from the house on his own, Rudi had always found his way back again.

The lane turned some way ahead of them, and beyond it the land dropped away once more to the level of the salt marshes. They’d effectively cut across a headland and were about to come back down onto the coastline.

The man said, “Where’s the path from here?”

“I’ll show you,” Marianne said. And she checked the lane behind them, in case—just in case—somebody or even some dog might happen to be following.

But the lane was empty.

THEY REACHED the house going over by the sea wall, because the tide was in and the regular causeway was under water. The distance was about the same. There had been three dwellings out on the point, but one was now a ruin and another was halfway to it and only her own stood, isolated as a beacon, where the early-evening sky and the land seemed to meet.

Her father’s car wasn’t in the place where he usually parked it on the rough ground outside. But there were lights in some of the lower rooms.

The man said, “Is your mother there?”

“Only Mrs Healey,” Marianne said. “She’ll probably have seen us coming by now.”

Mrs Healey was their housekeeper, and she came over most days of the week from the village. She shopped and cleaned and took care of the evening meal. Sometimes when Marianne needed clothes, she’d go with her into town. These visits, it had to be said, were never the high spots of Marianne’s year. She’d always been vague about the exact nature of their arrangement, but in practice it seemed to be that Mrs Healey was always around when her father wasn’t … which meant that Mrs Healey was around for a lot of the time.

The house was tall and dark and gloomy; she thought of it sometimes as a real House of Usher like the one in the story. The FOR SALE sign nailed up by one of the bedroom windows had become so weathered and flaking that it seemed like a permanent part of the place. Mostly Marianne gave its appear