Black Flowers (38 page)
I don’t remember a huge amount about what happened at the farm right at the end, and that’s probably a good thing. Afterwards, in the hospital, the police kept asking me how I’d found the place, and all I could tell them was that I’d followed my father’s map – the cross he’d drawn in the road atlas – but at that point I still had no idea at all how he’d found it. It was only later, from what other people discovered, that it began to make some kind of sense.
The old man, Cartwright, suffered a second heart attack and died in the hospital, but poor Lorraine Haggerty, along with the three children born on the farm, had been able to tell the police a certain amount. Cartwright had been obsessed with the idea of transformation.
We are all made of stardust
– that was what he used to say.
Nothing ever really dies
. In his mind, he and his macabre family had been involved in a grand experiment on Ellis Farm. They received visitors there, and those visitors stayed for a while before being sent home again, changed into something else. In his mind, his victims remained alive, just different. In much the same way that wine was different from the grapes it was made from. Or champagne, as Robert Wiseman might have said.
At some point, Cartwright had happened across Wiseman’s novel. The title alone would have drawn him in, never mind the synopsis, and obviously, when he read it, he would have
recognised the story of his missing daughter all too clearly in its pages.
But there had been more to it than that. One thing I do remember, all too clearly, is the office I saw inside the house – where the pages of
The Black Flower
had been plastered over every available wall. Cartwright came to see the author as a kindred spirit. Because Wiseman, in his own way, had done precisely the same thing as he did: taken people’s lives and transformed them into something new. And something that, in his case, would truly live for ever. Stories don’t die. Books might, physically, but not stories. They take root in people’s minds and bloom there. They wait to be told and to grow, like seeds.
The old man had become obsessed by the book. As he saw it, Wiseman had turned his life into a story. Ultimately, he’d returned the favour. He’d taken the fictional parts of Wiseman’s story and made them real.
Which was how my father had found the farm. He hadn’t.
Robert Wiseman had based the description of the farm in his book on Ellis Farm, which had been owned by his parents when he was a child. He’d mentioned it in the interview with Barbara Phillips. His mother and father were long dead, of course, and the farm had changed hands several times since. Its fortunes had fallen and then failed altogether. But at some point after the publication of
The Black Flower
, the man described in its pages had bought it and moved there. He’d read the description in the book, and he’d wanted to continue his work in that exact same environment.
He’d made Wiseman’s story come true. From the layout of the house, it seemed likely that a small bedroom in which Robert Wiseman had laid dreaming in as a little boy had, years later, become a shrine to his words.
The man who had handled the sale was Andrew Haggerty, who had been an estate agent in Thornton at the time, and who now no longer had to wonder what it was he’d done to be
targeted. The answer was nothing. He’d just crossed paths with the wrong person and perhaps that’s all it ever really comes down to. Even now, the police were still attempting to track Cartwright’s previous residences, to see exactly where he’d been performing his experiments and for how long. How many were there? How many victims? How long had this been going on, and for how many generations? Right now, there was no clear answer to any of those questions.
My father, planning to write about his old friend, had simply wanted to see the real-life location he’d based the farm in his bestseller on. A little background colour. From the question marks on the calendar, he hadn’t even been sure he would call in at all. Except Wiseman had stolen so much of his story from other people’s lives that I guess my father was curious to see one part he hadn’t. And so he’d gone there.
I might never know what happened: how much he’d seen, and what kind of reception or conversation had taken place. But whatever it was, it had been enough for them to start following him. All the way to the promenade in Whitkirk. All the way to the viaduct afterwards. And then all the way to me, through the story I’d written and sent.
Thinking it was harmless – just a story, after all.
Imagining it was safe.
‘You’re safe,’ I say.
It’s not really true, of course, but it doesn’t matter. The way I see it, if you repeat something enough times, it might as well be.
My son, lying in his cot, isn’t massively convinced by the sentiment. He’s not actively crying, but his arms and legs are going, and he’s nowhere near being settled. Obviously, at five months old, he doesn’t remotely understand the words or what they mean, but it’s not the content, it’s just the sound of my voice, the silence being filled.
I rest one hand very gently on his stomach. In my other, I’m holding the sheaf of papers, which I can just about read by
the small lamp on my father’s old desk. That’s the one bit of furniture in the room Ally and I haven’t got round to replacing yet, though we will. But Chris is only just big enough for his own cot and his own room, and there’s no rush. At least the rest of it is perfect. The new carpet is nailed down at the skirting boards. The shelves of my father’s books have been transferred to the back of the living room instead. The walls are freshly papered. The camera for the video monitor sits at the end of the crib, glowing orange.
I clear my throat, and then keep my voice as gentle as possible as I read from the printed papers in my hand. This is the one single piece of my father’s planned book that he’d managed to complete. A solitary file I found on his laptop. He was still researching his subject matter, but he’d written what I think he intended to be the beginning: Wiseman turning up with the book and the flower, and the short section afterwards that I’m reading from now. It’s rough, of course. I’m not sure it would even have made it into his second draft, never mind the final one. But still. When I read them, they make me feel a little closer to him.
‘You’re safe,’ I tell my son. ‘There’s nothing to be scared of. Mum and I would never let anything happen to you.’
After my son has gone to sleep, I head back through to the front room.
I take it slowly. I’m mostly back to normal, but my stomach is still tight, and sometimes it hurts if I straighten up too quickly after scrunching. Ally is sitting on the settee and watching a very quiet television programme, but she glances up and gives me a smile as I open the door. She looks exhausted. We probably both do.
‘Well done,’ she says.
‘Thanks.’
I sit down. The video monitor is on the coffee table in front of
us. Our son is sleeping peacefully in grainy black and white on the screen, both hands pressed to his mouth.
We watch the television for a bit. I’m not even sure what’s on, but it doesn’t really matter. The peace and calm is what’s important. After a while, I move my little finger over the back of her hand.
Maybe one day I’ll write about all of this myself. I’ll look at the section Dad wrote and re-work it a little. I’ll look at
The Black Flower
, and think about what Wiseman would have said in his sequel if he’d been given the chance. And the story I sent by email too. They’re all part of the same story, after all, and so I’ll tell
my
version of it, one that stems from all of them. I can’t see it yet, not properly, but at least I have an idea for an opening line.
Sometimes
, I’ll write.
Sometimes it happens like this
.
AN ORION EBOOK
Copyright © 2011 Steve Mosby
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Orion Books
This ebook first published in 2011 by Orion Books
The moral right of Steve Mosby to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior
permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of
binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition,
including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to
actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 1 4091 0785 9
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