The Eighth Day (Jason Ford Series) Read online

  The Eighth Day - Kindle Version 1.0

  (c) Guy N Smith 2011

  First Edition Published by Black Hill Books, December 2011

  ISBN : 978-1-907846-724

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise distributed without the publisher's prior consent in any form whatsoever. Mechanisms are employed to make each Ebook unique and traceable back to the original purchaser.

  For more information visit Guy's website at :www.guynsmith.com

  Get a FREE short story Ebook by registering your Ebook using the link below.

  EBook Registration

  Contents

  Title

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  BOOK ONE - THE LIVING

  1.

  She always painted on Sundays. Without exception. Undeterred even on those occasions when it rained, she took advantage of the wooden graffiti daubed shelters in the Recreation Park overlooking the lake with its flotsam of empty drink cans and chip papers.

  Mostly she painted ducks, mallard resplendent in their blue and bottle green plumage, the drab khaki females and the hybrids, sometimes creating colouring to suit her moods and fancy.

  Kate Leonard had an affinity with ducks in the way some girls clung to their teddy bears: she collected porcelain models of them, even her paint box had a teal motif. She bought books about them, went on day trips to bird sanctuaries to view migrant species which never visited the suburban park close to her flat. She wasn’t a vegetarian but she never ate duck meat. That would have been akin to cannibalism.

  Kate was 23, tall and big boned, but her figure seldom failed to attract the attention of passing members of the male sex. Her aloofness was perhaps an added attraction of which she was not aware: subconsciously she shunned company, lately even that of her live-in boyfriend. He had long ago resigned himself to being apart from her on Sundays. Now it was as if she resented his presence on weekday evenings, too.

  She had achieved a grade A in both A level art and art history, gone on to university and got a degree with honours. She still had high hopes of making her mark in graphic design but the recession and the need to pay her rent had resulted in her taking a temporary job at the bank. That had been eighteen months ago and suddenly banking had an ominous permanency about it. Today it was Sunday again and she was depressed in spite of the warm, spring sunshine. She wore her stretched jeans and a grey sweatshirt. She never wore a skirt except at work, she didn’t feel right in one. Her blonde hair was tied back in a ponytail so that it did not wisp over her face and annoy her. This was one of those days when she would easily be irritated by the slightest distraction. A sketchpad was tucked under her arm; she would draw until mid afternoon, then she would return home and paint until bedtime. Hopefully, Paul would have gone to the local football match on the park pitch and this evening he would go to the pub with his mates. She dismissed him from her thoughts because she had other things to think about. The things that depressed her.

  Thinking about her parents always depressed her. Mostly she only thought about them at Christmas and Easter and Easter was next weekend, a silly, pointless festival that impinged upon the privacy of an atheist. You were expected to send cards to relatives; you didn’t want to but you did, all the same.

  Her parents had split up when Kate was twelve. She felt sorry for her mother, not because of the parting but because of everything she had had to endure up until then. Kate felt nothing for her father, never had, except a loathing. And she had enough to hate him for, only nurturing hatred was a waste of mental energy. Sod him, he had given her scars that would never heal no matter how much she tried to forget. Funny, she hadn’t fully realised until she was fifteen, repulsive as his attentions had been in the early years. She thought that they were what every child had to endure, that it was all part of the process of growing up. Until she had read an article on child abuse and had realised.

  It had been a terrible shock. At one stage she had contemplated doing away with herself because nobody could possibly be normal after that. It was ducks that had saved her. Before she had started drawing and painting them, she used to come down here most afternoons after school and feed them waste bread. And if there was no stale bread to be begged from the baker’s shop in the high street, she would go without her sandwiches and give them to the ducks instead. If she went and died then the ducks would go hungry because nobody else bothered to feed them.

  It was the ducks that had pulled her through in the early days of that awful awareness.

  She would never forget how it had all started. And for Christ’s sake it had gone on for years! Her father had begun coming into her bedroom at nights, said he had to talk to her about the ‘facts of life’; a lot of parents referred to it as ‘the birds and the bees’ but Kate was too intelligent to have it all dressed up like that. That had made her feel grown up.

  He explained all about babies, how they were made. By the third or fourth lesson he said it was necessary that they looked at their respective ‘parts’ because it was easier than just talking about them. Kate was embarrassed but he made it sound just like a lesson at the pre-school group she attended on Tuesdays and Thursdays and that wasn’t so bad. And when he had touched her ‘there’ it had given her a pleasant sensation.

  It was about the sixth lesson that he persuaded her to touch his ‘there’, guided her trembling and unwilling hand on to where he wanted it. She had been frightened to rub him so he had had helped her. His orgasm had gone all over her fingers but he had held her so tightly that she had been unable to snatch her hand away. He had explained in a reassuring way that it was necessary for her to see the ‘stuff that made babies’. A warning, though, on no account must she ever do anything like that with anybody else, not until she was sixteen at least. Nor must she tell anybody. She promised not to: she would have been too embarrassed anyway.

  It was about three months before he actually put his ‘there’ inside her. Well, some of it, anyway. He didn’t go any further when she cried out in pain. He explained that there was nothing to fear, she couldn’t possibly have a baby until she had menstruated, and she would know when that was, all right.

  By the time she was ten they were going the whole way most nights. Then things began to go wrong between her parents and her father stopped coming to her bedroom every night. And when the urge was too great for her, she satisfied herself in the way that he had taught her.

  Until her father left home and after that she didn’t want to do it any more. And when she found out the truth, she swore she would never go with a man again nor do anything herself. The fucking bastard.

  Kate didn’t break that vow until she met Paul Roden and then only partially. She couldn’t have given herself to him the way she might otherwise have done. She d
idn’t even know if she really loved him. In her mind she attempted to segregate her feelings for him from sex. Sex was something she did to please him, she would have been more than happy not to do it. Once she had tried to talk to him about it but she hadn’t managed to put it over very well. He’d got the wrong idea; they’d had a row, almost split up. Perhaps it would have been better if they had. With hindsight, it was a mistake to let him move into the flat with her. Right now she was thinking of ways in which she might get rid of him.

  All she wanted was to be on her own. One day she might move out into the country, buy a little place of her own and keep ducks. She knew it was a pipe dream, but it helped when she was on a downer. Like today.

  There were some children playing by the swings on the opposite side of the lake, their harsh squealing and shouting grated on her nerves. Shut up, you little bastards! They were probably from the same block of council flats where she lived and that made them all the more objectionable. She hated kids, related them to that first night her father had explained how his semen had made her. Ugh! She hadn’t had the guts to kill herself that time but she still wished that she had never been conceived.

  There was a tree stump down by the water’s edge, the remnants of a mighty horse chestnut which the council had had to fell because it was dangerous, a casualty of the 1988 hurricane that had devastated the country. The small consolation was that it made both a seat and a drawing board if you were supple enough to curl up on it. Kate always used it on fine days.

  She settled herself down. She never planned her sketches in advance, that would have spoiled the surprise element. She just let her pencil have its way, went with it. Once you got started, the picture unfolded. She began to sketch in the distant waterline.

  Plop!

  The stone splashed in the water, started up an alarmed quacking, a flapping of wingbeats on the surface. A party of maybe twenty mallard, mostly drakes, and some hybrids made for safety. One took to the wing, dropped back down again. On the opposite shore a boy was picking up another pebble. His mates were laughing, urging him on.

  “Stop it!”Kate yelled, her voice suddenly shrill with anger, vibrant with her recent thoughts.

  The answer came back almost instantaneously, coarse and aggressive. “Piss off, cow!”.

  Kate stood up, balanced herself on the chainsawed bole. The other’s arm went back, the second missile fell well short of the ducks. They huddled, a low guttural quacking but they weren’t unduly alarmed now. They had been thrown at many times before, they could gauge distance better than their molesters. Soon the latter would go away, find an easier target for their throwing.

  “I said stop it!” Kate’s scream bordered on hysteria, momentarily her vision fogged. When it cleared she saw that all three boys were searching for stones, an intended futile barrage in defiance of one who protested.

  “Fuck off, bitch!”.

  Kate stepped down from her pedestal, her trainers squelched in the wet grass. Haughty, angry, she took a direct course for the edge of the lake, followed its oval shape with her slitted eyes. The most direct course which would bring her round to the other side in a direct confrontation with the scum who had dared to throw at her beloved birds. She felt her pulses quicken, her heartbeat stepped up a gear. She found herself hurrying.

  Arrogantly, the trio stood their ground. They were not frightened of a woman.

  She wouldn’t come right the way over here anyway.

  It was soon apparent that she would. They looked at one another, read unease in their companions. They dropped their stones, hurled abuse instead. And ran.

  Kate watched them go, followed them with her gaze until they were lost from her sight. She stood there, waited for her anger to subside. It took time, and then her depression filtered slowly back.

  The ducks were swimming about unconcernedly now, heading shorewards, their thoughts on scraps of soggy bread which they might have overlooked yesterday. Kate knew that it wasn’t going to be easy to get back into the mood for sketching. She began to retrace her steps.

  Back on the tree stump she sat cross-legged, surveying the expanse of the park. There was no other human being in sight, there wasn’t likely to be until afternoon when the other residents of the flats strolled in an attempt to walk off their Sunday roasts. They came here because it was the only expanse of greenery amidst their concrete surrounds, for no other reason. They fed the ducks to amuse their kids, and when those kids were old enough they would come here to throw at the ducks. A vicious cycle.

  There were maybe thirty acres, ten of water, the rest well-trodden grass interspersed with scrub trees. Next month the foliage would grow and blot out the hideous tower blocks all round. That was when the park became countryside. Well, almost.

  Kate was tense. She tried to tell herself that it was always like this around Easter when she got to thinking about her father. She had not visited her mother for two years now, did not even know if she would be welcome. A Christmas card was no guarantee of hospitality. Perhaps it would help if she went to see her mother. She knew it was something which, ultimately, she would postpone. Until Christmas, or the following Easter. Because her mother was a link with her father, a childhood she wanted to forget and that was an impossibility.

  Those kids were gone but their malevolence remained, lingered like a bad smell. A kind of latent hostility. It was all in her own mind; of course, it couldn’t be anything else. More than just an unpleasantness. An evil. Because they were evil, they would have harmed her if they had been older, bigger. She sensed their juvenile lust, vibes that hung heavy in the still, pleasantly warm, atmosphere. We’d like to fuck you.

  It goose pimpled her back, spread on up to the nape of her neck. The feeling wouldn’t go away, like they were still around. Which was silly because they were gone. All the same, it gave Kate an uneasy sensation.

  Just like she wasn’t alone in the deserted park.

  She picked up her pencil, tried to shrug off her unease. She glanced around, kidded herself that she was deciding upon a background scene: the foreground would be ducks, naturally. Everywhere was so peaceful, a blackbird warbled from a hawthorn bush, some starlings were squabbling over a stale crust. Rooks cawed in the distant tall beeches.

  The ducks were floating out in the middle of the lake again, just like they, too, were uneasy. Because that stupid boy had thrown at them. No, they would have forgotten that by now, greed always overcame their fears.

  Something was wrong. Kate shuddered. But she was going to stop here and sketch just the same. It was all in the mind, a conglomeration of her childhood phobias. She blamed Paul; he was preying on her inhibitions. It wasn’t his fault in particular; the male species were all the same, they only thought of one thing. Like ducks in the mating season. She made up her mind that she and her boyfriend were going to part company. Soon. That made her feel better.

  Shit! She groped for her eraser, she had bodged the far shoreline, made it all shaky. Because her hand had trembled. That was because of anger, not fear, she almost convinced herself.

  The rhododendrons behind her rustled, made her start and turn around. There was nobody there.

  Nobody that she could see, anyway.

  Just a mass of dark green leaves streaked white with bird droppings where the starlings roosted at night. Maybe some of them were having a lie-in, she had heard them shifting on their perches.

  Her hand steadied, she sketched more evenly. All the same, today was not going to be one of her better days. She wouldn’t rest now until she was on her own. She didn’t need anybody around her.

  The morning wore on, the sun was warm, maybe there would be another of those freak Easter heatwaves. She wouldn’t be going to visit her mother, she decided, she would spend the time right here. Drawing mallard.

  Well, mallard hybrids, anyway. There weren’t many pure bred mallard left; they were recognisable by their bright orange beaks, all the ducks here had brown beaks, the result of interbreeding. But there was nothing t
o stop her painting them orange in her pictures. Cheating, but she made her own rules, Paul wouldn’t even be around to criticise her work. The thought gave her a feeling of bitter pleasure. She would enjoy telling him.

  The bushes rustled again, but she didn’t even turn her head, she wasn’t going to pander to her nervousness any more.

  Then, suddenly, a man was standing over her.

  Kate didn’t scream, she didn’t even drop her pad and pencil. Her heart thudded; she breathed fast, just sat there staring up at the stranger who had leaped nimbly upon the stump alongside her.

  He was small and slim, no more than five-four at the most, was dressed in Levi’s and a grubby white T-shirt like most of the men on the council estate wore. A homemade balaclava hid his features, fashioned crudely from some dark material, slits for his eyes, a hole to breathe through. That in itself was frightening enough but it was the hobby knife held threateningly in his outstretched hand, which scared her most. That was the point at which she almost screamed her mouth opened in readiness.

  “Don’t!” His voice was flat, muffled by the hood, maybe intended to disguise an identifiable dialect. Kate closed her mouth, swallowed. She laid down her pad and pencil. There was no point in asking him what he wanted, guys who crept up on young women were only after one thing. Like the ducks in spring.

  “Take off your clothes, please.” His politeness sent that icy chill back up her spine, this time it spread right into her scalp.

  “I don’t have any choice, do I?” She eyed the knife again, thought about making a dash for freedom. But the park exit was too far from here, he would surely catch her and if she screamed, even if somebody heard her, they would ignore it. A week or two ago somebody had been mugged in a crowded shopping precinct in town and nobody had gone to the victim’s aid. You just wasted your breath screaming.

  “I won’t hurt you. I promise.” He sounded almost apologetic.

  Like fuck, you won’t. They’ll find my mutilated body in a shallow grave in the trees back there, covered over with leaves.