Page 45 of Breaking the Dark

It takes four long hours for Arthur’s dad to leave his house on Thursday, four long hours, while Polly stands under an umbrella in the rain. He does not leave until after lunch in the end, just as the rain finally dries up. She watches him from across the street: a tired-looking man, sixty or so, in worn-out jeans, a green fisherman’s sweater, a scarf, a waxed jacket, and a flat cap. He has a scraggly beard, and there are reading glasses perched on top of his cap. Builder’s boots. Gnarly hands. He’s handsome-ish. A GILF even. He does not look like a nonce or a weirdo. He slings a bag around his torso and finally he heads off to the allotment that Arthur told her about a few days ago after some gentle probing.

She waits another moment or two before going to the door of the house. The key is stiff at first—she only had it cut just yesterday, copied from Arthur’s, which she’d pocketed during their lunch and then returned to him at the end of the day pretending he’d left it on the table. But the lock yields a moment later and she is in.

The cat appears from nowhere and stares at her, harshly.

“Hello, Mr. Smith,” she says, crouching slightly to greet him. But he backs away, his hackles rising, and issues a piercing hiss. “Okay then,” she says, straightening up. “Whatever.”

She heads upstairs.

Halfway up, the cat blocks her path.

“Shoo, cat.”

He hisses at her again.

She stares into his eyes and for a moment her head spins and her stomach rolls. Melon pip pupils. Golden irises. But as she stares, she sees that the irises swirl, kaleidoscopic, like oil on water. She blinks, hard, once, twice. When she opens her eyes, the cat has turned away from her. She exhales and steps onto the landing. Quickly, she goes into the bedroom, unloads her bag, the sample pots and jars she brought with her, the tiny spoons and scoops and baggies, and the selection of objects she brought with which she will attempt to unlock the fridge in the wardrobe.

She peers from the front window just to check that Arthur’s father hasn’t forgotten something and returned. The coast clear, she turns back to the room, opening Ophelia’s pots and jars, taking scrapings and samples, sealing them into plastic sandwich bags. She rubs a little cream onto her nose, feels a tingle, a heat.

Then she turns to the fridge in the wardrobe. It’s a small padlock, one that opens with a tiny key, like the one she had on her High School Musical diary as a teenager. She’s even brought the key with her, in the vain hope that it might be the same one, but of course it doesn’t come close. She takes out hairpins and tiny screwdrivers and keeps fiddling until she can feel a clammy sweat breaking out all over her body.

“Shit,” she hisses to herself, rocking back on her heels.

She catches her breath and then starts again, this time with tiny pliers. There’s a small crunch inside the lock mechanism and then a click and the hook goes flaccid. She pops it out, lifts back the flap and grabs the handle, the door creaks open, and…She gasps, almost slamming it shut again.

What? she thinks. What the hell is she looking at? Rows of tiny glass bottles, all labeled and filled with what looks like…blood?

She pulls one off the shelf and looks at the label. Gobbledegook. Letters, numbers, symbols, nothing that means anything. She puts it back and picks up another one. The same. On the next shelf down are more vials and test tubes, these filled with clear viscous liquids. In the door are larger bottles, what look like recycled water bottles with the labels peeled off, filled with the same dark, blood-colored substance as the smaller containers. She turns one around to properly read the six-digit inscription on the sticker. They are dates, ascending chronologically. Most are from this year. Whatever is in these bottles, and it really does look a lot like blood, is fresh. But whose is it? And why? Is Arthur’s father diabetic or something? Surely Arthur would have mentioned it if that were the case. And is that what people do, when they have diabetes? Do they collect blood? In empty water bottles?

She thinks of the drug dealers in their thickly curtained chalet next to Arthur’s in the park, their dark talk of missing people and strange noises. She thinks of how closed off Arthur’s family are from the world. She thinks of the old-penny smell of the cream in Ophelia’s pots, that tangy, metallic undertone. She goes to the mirror on the chest of drawers and looks at her nose, sees the blemishes gone, the tiny blackheads now invisible, airbrushed out. She leans in closer, turns her face this way and that. Whichever way she looks, the patch of skin remains perfect, flawless.

She inhales sharply and feels a giant pulse of adrenaline surge through her at the sound of a key in the door downstairs. She looks out of the window and sees that it is raining again. How long has it been raining ? Long enough for Arthur’s father to have abandoned his trip?

“Shit,” she whispers.

The fridge is still open, her collection of bags and instruments still spread all over the floor. The front door slams shut, and the cat mewls loudly, and she hears a man’s voice saying “What’s up with you, buddy? Something rattle your cage?”

It’s an American accent, deep and solid.

“Something up there?” he asks the cat. “What’s up there?”

“Shit,” Polly hisses under her breath, falling to her knees to collect all her stuff together, hurling it into her rucksack. She shuts the fridge, but not before plucking just one small vial of blood from the very back and tossing it into her bag too. She snaps the padlock shut and quietly closes the wardrobe door. And then she rolls herself under the bed and holds her breath, listening to the creak of someone standing on the landing outside the room, the deep breathing, the squeak of the bedroom door, and then a sigh.

“Nope,” she hears him say as he lowers himself onto the bed, inches from her face. “Nobody up here, Mr. Smith.”

The cat yowls and the man tsk-tsks him. “Enough now. Leave me be.”

She hears the man sorting through a bunch of keys, then getting up heavily, his breathing crackly and hard. “Okey dokey,” he mumbles to himself. “Okey dokey.”

She sees him open the wardrobe and lean down into it, hears the click of the padlock, the clink of the glass vials as they bump up against each other, and then she sees him pluck one of the big bottles from the door of the fridge.

“Just a drop now,” he says to himself. “Just to take the edges off. The cold got into me. Right into my bones. Just a drop.”

Polly hears the twist of the plastic lid, then a sound that turns her gut, of liquid glugging. Smacked lips. “Mm-mm.” The lid fastening back onto the bottle, the bottle going back into the fridge, the door closing, the padlock snapping closed.

She controls the urge to throw up, holding tight against the convulsions building throughout her body.

SEVENTEEN

---