The Darkening Days of John Mann Read online

  'The road route might have been longer around but it would have been less dangerous.' Gunnar said cheerfully, as he elbowed aside an eye level barbed branch. Mann agreed and grimaced as a rivulet of rain found its way under his already sodden dog collar. The rain had soaked through his coat and shirt and reached his webbing undershirt, chaffing further his already sore skin. Gunnar seemed as impervious to the rain as he did to any other discomfort. Mann wondered if this was due to his military training or his disposition that seemingly found high adventure in the every day. They’d been keeping company for days now and he had not once seen Gunnar downhearted nor heard him complain. Despite the fact that they had all but sworn to kill each other at journey’s end, Mann had warmed to his companion, who might yet prove to be Chenko’s man and pose a sharp threat.

  Gunnar brought a hand up suddenly to Mann's chest, stopping him in his tracks, then raised his finger to his lips to silence Mann's imminent question. Gunnar pointed at something in the distance and Mann had to take two paces sideways to get a, still veiled, view of what Gunnar had seen. On the field’s far margin under overhanging trees, he could just make out the roof of a large wooden clapboard hut. It was hard to tell at this distance whether it stood empty or not but by mutual consent they pushed forward, slowly and warily driven by the desire to find shelter from the rain for a time.

  Their progress towards the hut was now slowed by the thick spiny arms of brambles, coiled like barbed wire, looping around the teasels and making their path impassable in places. Mann caught himself thinking what a good defence this all made against unwanted intruders and decided that the wild profusion here was perhaps deliberate and not a natural occurrence. This thought was confirmed when he noticed some bramble stalks cut close to the ground on a clearer path. A route had opened before them but it diverted them away from the hut, by following it they would almost certainly double back on themselves, probably return to where they'd begun.

  'Someone wants to be left alone.' He murmured to Gunnar.

  'It's a maze,' Gunnar replied, and motioned for Mann to follow him. Gunnar headed straight for what appeared to be a dense wall of thorns and spines but a clear path suddenly opened to their left in a blind turn that Mann hadn't noticed. The path before them was narrow and overtopped by a swag of brambles and they'd need to move forward at a crouch but it had obviously been crafted deliberately. When they reached the end of the tunnel through the wild growth they found themselves standing again in a wide expanse of chest high grasses, still dotted with teasels but passable now.

  Gunnar unsheathed his blade and signalled Mann to approach the front of the hut while he himself flanked it to the right. As Gunnar melted from sight into the tall grass, Mann moved forward slowly, studying the hut as he went. It was a good size, would serve easily as a barn. It had once been a forest green in colour but it now showed the silver-brown of aged wood where the green paint had weathered away, except for up under the eaves and around the wooden battening that held the structure firm. A window with a peeling white wooden frame gave no clues as to any life within. The glass appeared blackened on the inside. A pavilion he thought, a grand name but that's what this was. He could envisage the games of bat, ball and stump that had once been played on this wide, open field with trees at its boundaries.

  Ten yards shy of the hut Mann stepped out of the high vegetation and into an area where the grass had been cropped close, as it once must have always been. He didn’t even have time to wonder if it had been grazed by an animal or shorn by human hand when his foot snagged a thin wire, hidden along the tall grass margin, and somewhere nearby a collection of empty tins cans set up a ringing clatter that loudly announced his arrival. He was just cursing himself for his blundering step when another tin can alarm sounded from some distance away to his right and Gunnar appeared from out of the grasses with a curse on his lips too.

  ‘No food. No oil.’ Came a call from inside the hut.

  ‘We want neither.’ Mann called back.

  ‘Then leave my field.’ The voice replied. It was an old, cracked voice, and Mann couldn't peg it for a man's or a woman's. Gunnar had covered the broad path of shorn grass and arrived at his side. Mann felt assured that they hadn’t blundered into the Mullen’s lair but he remained wary.

  ‘We’d only ask directions.’ He called.

  ‘Behind you is the fast way out.’

  ‘Directions to the Far Common.’ Mann persisted. His words hung in the chill air for a moment before being whipped away on the wind. There was no reply from the hut and he and Gunnar exchanged a puzzled glance.

  ‘We will trade for information.’ Mann called.

  ‘Trade what?’ Gunnar whispered, ‘We have nothing but what we stand up in.’

  ‘Then we barter that.’ Replied Mann.

  ‘You may wish to walk naked down the lanes John, but I'll not.’ Hissed Gunnar. Mann held up his hand to silence him as, with a rasp of rusted hinge, the door of the hut swung inwards and an old woman stepped out into the light. She was thin and small, no larger than the boy David that they sought, and her heavy lidded eyes were sharp with suspicion.

  Gunnar took in her frail appearance ‘Perhaps Grandma will trade freely on the strength of threats alone.’ He said to Mann and as if in reply the old woman reached back inside the door of the hut and produced a scythe. The long, worn, gently curved wooden handle was as tall as she, the silver arced blade at its topmost end glinted with menace. She swung the scythe in a slow, graceful upward arc until the handle of the scythe came to an easy, natural rest upon her shoulder.

  ‘She is trouble.’ Gunnar hissed.

  'Some information,' Mann called to the old woman, 'and we'll be away.'

  ‘That information may be costly.’ She called in reply.

  Mann nodded cautiously to show he understood her and she inclined her head, stepping back over the threshold and into her hut, leaving the door wide open in invitation behind her.

  ‘Remember,’ Gunnar said to Mann in a low voice as they moved towards the hut, ‘I’ll not be the one leaving here without clothes.’

  As they drew closer Mann could not fail to notice a grim line of bird corpses tacked to the planking on the front of the hut. Some were little more than a frail collection of bleached bones held together only by the tacks that secured them in place. Others were mouldering lumps of flesh with damp feathers clinging to them. Only one looked like a fresh addition, a plump dove, still with its eyes. Gunnar took in a sharp breath and pointed at the dead birds, ‘This is Chinkery cunning, John.’

  Mann set his lips in a grim line as they reached the hut doorway and he removed his hat to enter the dark room beyond.

  Chapter Eight

  Russell laid down the letter and removed her reading glasses to rub at her tired eyes. The ornate script had been hard to decipher by the light of a flickering candle but she had finally distilled the essence of the letter’s content. When she had unfolded it a pressed flower had fallen out. She couldn’t name it but the writer identified it as Herb Robert, wanderer of the byways. It had flowered in profusion along the verges outside the Abbey that spring, the letter continued, a beautiful sight. Russell lifted the dried bloom to the shifting light. She was no expert but this flower was not old, it didn’t speak of a spring long past, it still held colour in its red stems and delicate pink flowers. The letter was addressed to Keen and signed from her Loving Brother Jakob. A chill ran down Russell's spine, she had heard the name Keen mentioned at the viaduct, vouchsafing Private Tate, a name known to John. Could she at last have caught a break, Russell wondered?

  Sitting in her office at the Facility some hours earlier, she had puzzled over a different letter, a letter of recommendation for the traitorous nurse Becky Sharp.

  Russell had given Vincent his orders. She had withheld detailed information about John, advising him only that Mann needed to be traced urgently, having been tracked and then lost again just days before.

  'Find out what you can about the radio messag
es that betrayed his whereabouts.' She had urged him. 'And Private, I can't impress upon you strongly enough the need for secrecy in regards to these enquiries.'

  'Yes Ma'am'. He'd replied and quickly left the room, and with him gone Russell set to revisiting the only facts she knew about John for a certainty.

  Firstly, as an adult he had made his way in the world as a preacher and secondly his escape from the Facility, years before, had been made possible by Becky Sharp. She had masqueraded as a nurse to get access to him and she had clearly not acted alone. After John and Sharp had given the military the slip in Brighton and disappeared, Russell had turned to the only evidence she held on the girl, a letter of recommendation from an Abbot that she'd arrived at the Facility with. A search for the Abbot, back then, had led nowhere, he clearly did not to exist, but even now with hindsight it struck Russell that there might be an element of truth in the letter. All good lies held a kernel of truth and Becky Sharp had proved herself an accomplished deceiver. And besides, there was also an obvious, if tenuous, link now between Sharp's Abbot and John as preacher and all Russell could do was hope to find links, however weak, that would form a chain of evidence strong enough to follow.

  She had, however, put the letter and all thought's of Sharp aside when Vincent had arrived back from his sortie into the Comms room rest area to banter with an old friend. There he had learned that the radio signals betraying Mann had been triangulated and found to emanate from within a given radius of the Facility. Russell had rushed to her wall map, still dotted with the many coloured pins she'd used to mark potential sightings of John down the years. She traced again the route across country it was thought he might have taken last week and it fell within the suggested signal parameters.

  Russell ordered Vincent to find a car while she tried to tamp down her excitement at the thought that a clue to John’s whereabouts might be found in a house along those roads. They would set out with the scant information they had managed to scare up, because the only other option was for her to sit and wait for Vincent to discover she had duped him.

  The moment that Vincent had pulled the car into the yard outside the farmhouse where she now sat her gut had told her they’d found the right place. The two previous houses they'd searched along the route had long been abandoned and yielded nothing. This one, however, just felt right on sight, and she could pinpoint no firmer reason than that. Stepping out of the car and seeing the freshly turned earth of a grave nearby had seemed to confirm her first instinct. As a scientist she knew that intuition should play no part in how she made sense of the world but as that world had moved further away from the laws that had always guided her life she had conceded to a less rational, more spiritual frame of reference in all things. If people fed on folklore and cloaked themselves in superstition then following their reasoning was really the only way to understand the world as it was reforming around her. If she was intent on becoming a shepherd she would have to start thinking like the flock.

  On their arrival at the farmhouse they had searched the outbuildings first and then the house itself from basement to rafters. They had found one room full of candle makings and dried healing herbs, a preacher's stock in trade, which might place John here, and another room held a radio set offering the possibility that the message betraying John could indeed have sprung from the house. And now, in this darkened study, Russell sat with a letter in her hand from a Brother at an Abbey to his sister who lived here. There was reason for hope in all this wasn't there?

  She heard Vincent enter the room behind her and she spun around in her chair to hear his news. He scraped at the mud on the palms of his hands. ‘The body in the grave did not fit your description of Mann.’ He said, and she thought she detected some distaste in his tone.

  'For a certainty?' She asked

  'He was dark skinned Ma'am.'

  Russell turned her focus back to the letter, 'There's a web of possible links here,' She said, almost to herself. 'John to this house, the means of his betrayal to this house, a woman he may know to this house, and a religious connection through her. This is too much to be chance surely?'

  'Perhaps I can help Ma'am.' Vincent offered but Russell only muttered to herself under her breath and paid him no heed. The young Private swallowed down his irritation, left the room and headed to the kitchen, returning moments later with a small, framed picture which he put down, none too gently, on the desk in front of Russell.

  'It caught my eye earlier.' He said as Russell snatched up the frame and studied the pencil sketch it held, a sketch of a large, brick built Abbey, with a stepped roof and a tall domed tower.

  Russell still seemed lost in her own thoughts. ‘Ah now, this might fit, and the place is distinctive,’ she said to herself, ‘it may not be too difficult to locate.’

  ‘Not difficult at all.’ Vincent broke into her thoughts and she looked at him with something approaching irritation. ‘I think I know where it stands.’ He said. 'So, perhaps if you share all you know instead of keeping me on a short leash we might make faster headway. Ma'am.'

  Chapter Nine

  ‘My brother’s hold my baby.’ Rosie Mullen said. ‘Please help us.’ She was keeping her voice low but the anguish in it was rising and struck a chord in Mann and Gunner both. ‘Please.’

  Gunnar turned to Mann and made to speak but Mann spoke first. ‘If we go in there we’ll get your baby but your brothers will not walk out.’ Mann saw the flash of surprise on Gunnar's face that he should have voiced this fact. He himself wondered when he had turned from avoiding violence to accepting that killing was a necessity. He’d never gone in search of violence, it had always sniffed him out, dogged his heels, chased him down. But there had been a change in him this last week. Since Amir had crossed him and he’d been forced to part from Keen he’d realized he was prepared to fight anyone who blocked the way leading back to her. God used to lay the path beneath his feet but now he seemed to be following his own road. That road led first to the taken boy David before it could lead anywhere else and in the middle of that road, standing like nine pins, were the Mullens. They needn’t have proved a problem if they’d just taken the car but they'd also taken David's mother's locket and they would rue that.

  Ma May had sketched a charcoal map to the Far Common and Mann and Gunnar had found the Mullen farmstead with ease. Under the cloak of darkness it should have been child’s work to locate Mann’s car and lift the locket hanging from the mirror inside. Mann had convinced Gunnar that the car itself, with its blue flash, made them too conspicuous on the road. Gunnar agreed but parlayed the sense of stealing any vehicle they found with fuel enough to put fast miles between them and any Mullen retribution. But all their talk had been wasted breath since the minute Mann had found his car behind the barn and discovered the locket was missing Rosie Mullen had rounded the building and caught them in the act. For a moment all had frozen in place, they expecting her cry of alarm, she expecting a hand on her throat, but none had played their part.

  At Mann’s dire warning now about her brothers, Rosie had paused only long enough to spit on the ground and drag the toe of her slipper through the spittle and mud.

  They would need to strike swiftly then. Rosie had talked through a plan of the house and the location of her brothers within.

  ‘The one with the scarred face?’ Mann had asked.

  ‘Will? Front parlour.’ Rosie had replied. Mann shot a look at Gunnar and he had nodded swiftly in response.

  Rosie had re-entered the house to ensure that all her brothers were accounted for and had then cut the light in the porch as a signal. Mann and Gunnar had parted in the hall at the bottom of the stairs, Gunnar for the upper floor where Todd and Donal were, and Mann for the parlour through the door to his right where the eldest brother, Will, slept.

  The room was large and brightly lit by a single overhead bulb. This surprised Mann and answered his question as to what was generating the low insistent thrumming sound at the heart of the house. He had closed the door be
hind him with a soft click of the latch and taken in the room with a sweep of his eyes. It was a trove of goods and finds, most likely ill gotten, all stacked about the place. His eyes fell on a white wooden cane and he marked its place for collection later. Next he located the crib in the corner of the room and in it the source of Rosie Mullen’s betrayal. He was surprised to see that the boy was not the babe in arms he had expected but a toddler of perhaps two years. Two years in age at least, if not in mind. Mann marked the sores around the boy’s mouth and the large shining eyes that lacked fear, surprise or enquiry, eyes that would never view the world with anything but innocent simplicity. The child would need Rosie’s protection in that world that would always make mock of him. Mann had no doubt now that the child’s father lived under this roof also and that the boy was held in this room as surety against Rosie’s reluctance to fetch, carry and more for her brothers.

  Mann’s nose protested against the mingled smell of rank sweat and sharp wine that pervaded the room, as he looked again for the source of it and saw Will Mullen asleep on a day bed buried beneath a pile of eiderdown. Mann felt his blood surge, his body heat rise and the webbing vest begin to burn with irritation against his skin. He’d need his temperature high to ensure his potency.