He is dreaming, he knows that. He can understand the unreality of it all, the broken images, the distorted scenery, the blurriness of his surroundings.
It feels real though. The anxious, nausea-inducing feeling in the pit of his dream form stomach is real.
He’s entering the house again. The silence overpowering him once more. There is something else though, a different quality to it. The presence of people within, silent, hushed.
DC Graham Harris is outside on the pavement. Blood surrounding him as it exits his body. The thought is just there, in his head, all at once.
He doesn’t remember leaving him there.
It’s as if he is trying to walk through water, something pulling him back from entering the room ahead.
The door opens, independently, as he floats through it in his dream state. At first, the scene is different from what he remembers, and he feels confusion. There are words on the wall, dripping red onto the floor below it. He can’t make out what they say, no matter how many times he tries to read them.
A second later, the scene shifts. The man is there, as he was in reality. Standing over an unoccupied chair, holding a shotgun towards the empty space.
He doesn’t want to see this again. He wants to wake up, turn back and run away.
Instead, he watches as the empty chair is replaced with one in which a young man is sitting down, his head lowered against his chest so he can’t make out who it is.
He knows, of course, who sits there.
He hears Jess’s voice. His friend of two decades. Best friend. One he shared his life with. One who shared her life with him.
He hears Sarah’s voice, his wife, the other half of him. Take her away and he becomes less than whole.
Jess’s voice overpowers Sarah’s. She screams, but he doesn’t move. He watches as the man holding the shotgun begins to shake with the exertion. He’s mouthing words at him, but he doesn’t know what they mean.
He remembers a name. Alan Bimpson. Only that wasn’t real. Thornhill. That was what he was really called. Alpha. A killer.
The boy in the chair has become younger. He remembers his name, who he is, but tries to forget it.
He remembers holding him hours after he’d been born. Watching him grow into a toddler. Into a schoolboy.
Into a teenager.
An eye for an eye . . .’
He doesn’t want to hear this. He knows what comes next.
‘I want you to see this.’
He looks down at his legs, willing them to move, but they won’t comply. He bunches his fists, banging them against his thighs.
He turns his hands over, staring at them as they leave trails through the air as he moves them. They shake, he can’t keep them still.
He’s scared. He’s shaking, and he can’t move his legs. He can’t run away, he can’t hide. He buries his head in the crook of his arm. He doesn’t want to watch. Not again.
Peter looks at him. He can’t see this, but knows the boy’s eyes are on him.
‘Why can’t you save me?’
He raises his head, slowly, afraid of what he’ll see. This didn’t happen. Not in reality.
The man finishes, his white T-shirt now drenched in splashes of blood. He stands back and admires his creation.
And he begins to laugh, quietly at first. Then louder, a crescendo of laughter erupting from him. He whispers, his voice slurred.
‘You can’t save them.’
There is another noise, a banging sound.
Bang.
The man turns, the laughter subsides, changing to a sadistic grin.
Bang.
He looks down at the shotgun in his hand, and moves purposefully towards Murphy.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
* * *
Murphy woke slowly, not like they do on TV or in movies. There wasn’t a sudden moment when he sat up in bed, breathing heavily. There was just a moment when he was asleep, then over a period of a few seconds, he realised he was awake. The images of his dream beginning to slip away, joining the long line of similar dreams which had preceded it.
‘You okay?’
Murphy turned to Sarah’s side of the bed, as he propped herself up on one elbow.
‘Did I wake you again?’
Sarah didn’t reply, swiping a hand over her eyes. ‘Don’t worry about it. Same dream?’
‘Yeah,’ Murphy said, whispering into the darkened room. ‘It’s been nearly two years, you’d think they’d go by now.’
‘You should go back to that CBT guy . . .’
‘I don’t think a dream is enough for that.’
‘They’re not as frequent as they used to be,’ Sarah said, sitting up in bed and turning on the light on her bedside table. ‘But they’re still coming.’
‘It’s a small price to pay. Considering what Jess has to go through. I could have done something . . .’
‘No, you couldn’t . . .’
‘You don’t know that,’ Murphy said, sitting up and swinging his legs over to the floor. ‘I watched her son die in front of me. And I couldn’t help him.’
Murphy heard Sarah shift across behind him. Felt her arms come around his bare shoulders and hold him. Breath on his back as she sat there, her naked skin against his.
He closed his eyes and remembered that night. A man who had called himself Alan Bimpson, determined to rid the street of what he thought was destroying them. Teenage boys, left dead in a farmhouse, before he took to the streets of Liverpool, exterminating everyone who got in his way.
Ending in an ordinary house in West Derby, with the death of the last teenage boy. Peter. Jess’s son.
Murphy’s godson.
‘Let’s go back to sleep,’ Sarah said into his shoulder. ‘You need your rest.’
Murphy allowed himself to be pulled back into bed. Sarah hooked her arm across his chest, her head snuggled into him.
The repeat of a scene which had replayed itself frequently over the first year following Peter’s death. Less common in the following year. Almost two years since that night. Murphy could barely believe the time had gone so quickly. How he had carried on, become almost better.
He looked down towards the top of Sarah’s head, her blonde hair looking grey as his eyes became more accustomed to the darkness. He leant down and kissed her crown.
She was the reason he carried on. It was all for her.
* * *
Sarah lay in the darkness, listening as her husband’s breathing slowed and became more rhythmic. The gentle snore as he became comfortable, falling asleep within a few minutes.
She stared at the ceiling, the room around her settling back down. She thought of David’s nightmare. She’d allowed herself to believe that he was finally coming to terms with what happened in that house almost two years earlier. It had been a while since she’d been awoken by his quickening breathing, the small noises and movements as he came back to consciousness. Dreaming horrific images.
She hadn’t been fully asleep anyway. She’d been only dozing, her eyes closed and time slipping by, but on the edge of wakefulness for the hours they had been lying there.
Sarah considered slipping out of bed and going downstairs, maybe having a sly cigarette from the stash she kept for emergencies. She didn’t really want to lie awake, waiting for the light to start coming through the curtains, sweeping the darkness away. Lie there with only her thoughts for company.
There was a letter next to the place where she kept her cigarettes, hidden behind the false panel at the bottom of the display unit in the back room. Up until a few weeks previously, it had hidden only smoking paraphernalia, a few old photos and poems she had written back in high school. Stuff that she didn’t want him to see, if at all possible, but nothing she kept hidden with any malice.
Now there was the letter with its return address of HMP Manchester. She knew her husband well enough to anticipate his reaction if he found it. The hurt and recriminations it would cause. Sarah unable to say why she had kept it, or what she was going to do with it.
The man who had killed her husband’s parents was currently serving a minimum of thirty years in HMP Manchester. A man Sarah knew only too well.
She continued to lie in bed, listening to David’s breathing become softer, the occasional snore emanating from his side of the bed.
Sarah already knew what she was going to do with the letter and its contents. She would burn it, one day when David wasn’t around.
But not before she’d used the invitation inside it.
