The Reckoning on Cane Hill: A Novel by Steve Mosby Page B

settee.
    Then I did what I’d known I was going to have to but had been dreading all the same. I walked across the dark lounge unfolding the piece of paper that Paul Carlisle had given me and held it up beside the television.
    There was enough light from the screen to see it clearly. I looked from one image to the other, attempting to mentally erase the scarring on the face of the woman in the hospital. Comparing. Back and forth. Over and over.
    It was her.
    A little older. A little more gaunt.
    But definitely her.
    I sat back down, then pressed play on the video clip, and listened half-heartedly while I turned the tablet to split screen and opened a blank document in the right-hand panel.
    Provisional timeline
3 August 2013 Charlie Matheson’s car crash
28 July 2015 Charlie Matheson (?) reappears
    For now, that was all there was to include. Two dates that bookmarked whatever had happened. They were like the dates on a headstone, except they delineated not a life, but a death.
    Perhaps.
    ‘It’s dark where I’ve been,’ the woman was saying. ‘I remember that much about it. Everything’s very dark when you’re dead.’
    I looked up at the screen. The expression on her face seemed much sadder than I’d recognised at the time.
    What happened to you?
    My thoughts were interrupted by Sasha calling from the top of the stairs.
    ‘I’m not waiting for ever, you know.’
    ‘Coming.’
    I saved the document, then logged out and turned everything off. The woman on the screen disappeared, replaced by darkness.
    Enough , I thought.
    That was more than enough for tonight.

Part Two
    And She told Them that true goodness must always shy from the light. A Man may be good at heart, but many do good in search of reward, and that is selfish and not true goodness. True goodness would face the trials of Hell itself without asking for notice. It is neither bright nor loud and it draws no attention to itself. And She told Them that God therefore seeks out good that wishes not to be sought, and rewards it quietly in kind .
    Extract from the Cane Hill bible

Eileen
    No such thing as monsters
    John Mercer’s makeshift office was in the attic at the top of the house. He always worked with the door closed, but Eileen could often hear him typing from the bottom of the stairs. A soft sound. It passed from his fingertips on the computer keyboard, down the legs of the desk, then through the floorboards below.
    She stood there now, looking up at the ceiling above, listening to the gentle patter of letters falling like rain on to a tin roof.
    The sound made her nervous. But then again, the silences were worse – long stretches of time when she could imagine her husband sitting there reading through his documents, lost in thoughts it would be far better for him to leave behind. She’d gone in there once, when John had been out on some errand, and stared with a kind of vacant horror at the wall charts and noticeboards, all covered with scribbled dates and references. The maps dotted with pins and lines of coloured string. The printouts and photographs taped to the bare plaster, some of them so appalling that Eileen had looked away quickly before the reds and blacks could coalesce into an identifiable image.
    She knew what they were, and it frightened her to picture John sitting there staring at them, or through them. Eyes were the windows to the soul, they said, and God knew she’d staredinto many that showed no hint of soul at all. But John’s eyes she’d always thought were more like doorways, and that if he looked at certain horrors for long enough, some aspect of them would take advantage of that and go inside. He was old now. Old and fragile, and not strong enough to bear such things. Eileen lived with the constant fear that her husband, former Detective John Mercer, might break once again.
    So as unnerving as the typing was, she supposed it was better than the alternative. And since she could find the alternative anywhere else in the