Black London 05 - Soul Trade

not,” Carrie said. “It hasn’t been all right since we came here.” She sniffed deeply, then looked Pete in the eye. “You have a spare cigarette?”
    “Sorry, no,” Pete said. She wondered if there was such a thing as quitter’s guilt.
    “Out here,” Carried said, pushing open the back door. It opened onto an alley barely wide enough for the bins sittingagainst the brick wall. Carrie lit the butt of a fag from a chipped ceramic dish on the ground and wrapped her arms around herself. “My husband’d knock my teeth in if he caught me smoking.”
    “I have a theory about what’s going on, if you don’t mind,” Pete said. Carrie Leroy didn’t stop her, so she rolled it out.
    “Diana isn’t the child you remember. She started acting strange not long after youall moved to Overton, and things just got worse. She doesn’t act like a child. And when people started disappearing, you suspected things were off the rails, but it wasn’t until Jeremy Crotherton poked around that you really knew.”
    Carrie looked at her askance, one penciled-in eyebrow up. “Those people were just hikers,” she said. “Stupid gits. But you’re right … Diana…” She sucked the last lifeout of the fag, then scraped it out against the back wall of her house.
    “You have no idea what it’s like,” Carrie said. She wasn’t shaking now, just cold and flat as an expanse of roadway. “To have your child snatched away from you. But you get used to it, you go on, even when your marriage falls apart and your daughter sits staring out the window day after day even though she can’t see.” Shecoughed, deep and rattling, a sound that spoke to damp cellars and too many cigarettes. “You move to the country because your husband worships at the altar of Dexter bloody Killigan, as if that man knows everything. You stay trapped in this shitebox with a husband who can’t stand you, and then one morning your child looks up at you and her eyes focus and she says “‘Mummy, I’m hungry.’”
    Pete chewedher lip, wishing it was a fag. “You know it’s not Diana.”
    “’Course I do,” Carrie snorted. “I saw her MRIs. I know there’s nothing in her brain except dust. Whatever’s walking and talking through her skin, it’s not my Diana.”
    “Can I ask you why you didn’t leave?” Pete said. “Or call someone like Jack and me? Hell, you could even have talked to Crotherton when he showed up.”
    “I don’t know whothat is,” Carrie said, her voice thick with weariness. “And I can’t leave or call for help because she knows. She and the other two see everything . They watch us even when they can’t see us. It’s like we’re prisoners. Prisoners of those things that took our children.” Her whole body quivered, and Pete put a hand on Carrie’s shoulder to steady her. No prickle of the Black there either. Just a tangleof wrath and sadness that threatened to explode into Pete’s mind. She let go after a quick squeeze.
    “The only reason they don’t know I’m talking to you now is that they’re resting,” Carrie whispered. “They like saying those horrible things to people, but it takes the fight out of them. It’s the only time we get any peace.”
    Pete looked back at the lit kitchen door. “Where are they?”
    “DexterKilligan keeps them at his place,” Carrie said. “He took it the worst. Wanted his girl back so bad he can’t see what’s become of them. They don’t like to be apart, and he does whatever they want. Acts like all of this is fucking business as usual.”
    Pete remembered the stricken face, cheeks sunken and eyes impossibly dark, of Dexter Killigan beside Bridget’s hospital bed. “It’ll be all right,”she lied. “Jack and I are here to help you.”
    Carrie sucked in a deep breath and shook her head. “No one can help me now, Miss Caldecott.”
    “Carol Anne!” Mr. Leroy bellowed from the kitchen. “Where’d you get to? I need a refill!”
    “Coming, dearie!” Carrie shouted. “Just running the bin bag outside!” She looked at Pete, eyes wide and animal. “We’d better get back before they realize what we’redoing. My husband’s too stupid, the Dumbershalls are too terrified, and that chavvy bastard Philip Smythe is too greedy to realize what we’ve really gotten involved in.”
    It was quite a scam Philip Smythe had going, Pete thought. Convince the other parents that his own kid had similar abilities. Watch the cash roll in with absolutely no regard for