The Dark Read online

  Just like tonight, for her it had started with a phone call. She’d made the same long drive, although she remembered nothing of it. At the hospital she’d found her father waiting, rudderless and dazed; Miranda had more or less had to take over, talking to the medical staff and then repeating their words for her father, who wasn’t listening. She was, she realized, playing a part in a sad and sorry spectacle. The great Doctor Hood, major figure of international science, one-time Nobel co-nominee, the Northern Hemisphere’s leading authority on dark matter, rendered almost childlike by personal disaster.

  He’d discovered his wife at the bottom of the stairs, where she’d been lying for some time. But it wasn’t a simple matter of a fall. For a week or more, she’d been suffering from persistent headaches and had been sleeping for as many as twenty hours out of the twenty-four. The best guess was that she’d woken alone in the house and been unsteady or disoriented. Further investigation showed an unsuspected brain tumor that had already grown to inoperable size.

  Over the next few weeks, they moved her from ward to ward and tried different combinations of drugs to reduce the cerebral swelling and raise her from the coma she’d fallen into. It had worked for a few days, and for a while they’d had her back, lucid and aware even though her thinking had been a little strange. But then she’d relapsed and died. It had been a rapid decline, but at the time, it had seemed to take forever.

  Now this. With her mother gone, her father was falling apart. It didn’t seem fair. So much that she’d always taken for granted was no longer there. Much of the pain she felt was that of a lifetime’s support system being kicked away. When she tried to explain it to Dan, his idea of sympathy was to match her troubles with competing ones of his own.

  She’d been pressed into membership of a melancholy club where the options were limited. One either died young, or eventually one joined it.

  Like it or not, she was the grownup now.

  SHE WAS FIRST downstairs the next morning. The day was a bright one. After loading the dishwasher and switching it on, she went into the basement and did the same with the laundry.

  He hadn’t quite been letting himself go. Most of his clothes were clean, and had been hung to dry on fold-out racks. Miranda suspected that they’d probably stay there until he came to wear them, skipping the need for an iron to press them with or a closet to put them in.

  The mail arrived, and she went back up to get it. Her father appeared then, bleary and tousled, in a paisley bathrobe knotted over mismatched pajamas. He followed her into the kitchen.

  “This place is a mess,” she told him.

  “I know.”

  “Then why don’t you do something about it? Where’s Mrs. Llewellyn?”

  He settled back into the place where he’d been sitting the night before.

  “I let her go,” he said.

  “Why?” Miranda said. “You’ve had her for years.”

  “She kept offering to stay late and cook me a meal. And I don’t think that feeding was all she had in mind. You know what I mean? I’m not up for that.”

  “If I mark up the Yellow Pages for you, will you promise to sort out a replacement?”

  “Yes, miss.”

  “I’m serious, Dad. It’s such a big place. You don’t want it turning into a sty. Once it gets past a certain point, you’ll be like one of these old guys the council sends a hit squad to fumigate.”

  “Thanks very much.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “When I’m done with the observations I’m making, then I’ll get a housekeeper in. I don’t want someone fussing around and messing up the data.”

  Miranda set coffee in front of him while he looked through the day’s letters. He glanced at each and then laid them aside without opening any.

  She waited until he’d gone for a shower before letting herself out of the house and heading over to the university.

  THE PHYSICS BLOCK was way out at the back end of the campus, the last major building before the playing fields and the sports center. It had won architectural prizes in the seventies and was hideous beyond belief.

  Duncan Dalby was neither as senior nor as well-qualified as Miranda’s father, but even Doctor Hood would have to agree that Dalby was a better choice for department head. He might have been a mediocre scientist, but he was a born administrator.

  Informed of her presence, Dalby came out of a budget meeting to see her.

  “Do you have any influence with your father?” he said.

  “Why?” she said.

  “Because, to be frank with you, he’s giving me problems I can’t handle.”

  “So you’re asking me, can I tell him what to do? You’re talking about the infamous Doctor Hood.”

  “Thanks to whom we’ve got a physics department that’s on a par with the best in Europe. But for how long? Someone needs to make him aware of what will happen if his behavior doesn’t change. I can’t get through to him. I was hoping that you might. The only times he ever makes an appearance, it’s to help himself to equipment that he dloesn’t account for. He’s done no teaching. He’s got five postgraduate students who’ve been getting no supervision. Our participation in the Dark Matter Project has fallen through and I can’t pin him down to discuss it.”

  The Dark Matter Project was an EU-funded venture to build a specialized particle detector at the Bern underground laboratory in Switzerland. Alan Hood had been one of its most active lobbyists, and had been an obvious choice to chair the project’s governing committee.

  “Look,” Dalby said, “I know he’s had a tough time. But it’s been nearly a year.”

  “He isn’t losing his mind,” Miranda said. “He’s coping.”

  “Not professionally, he isn’t.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” she said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Five people were waiting for her in the building’s smart but drafty foyer. Three young men, two young women. They were all older than the average undergraduate, but not by much. Their spokesman looked as if he was at least part Chinese.

  “Are you Miranda Hood?” he said.

  She was wary. “Yes?”

  “Can we speak to you?” he said. “We’re your father’s research students.” They all went over to the Union bar. The lunchtime rush hadn’t started yet and they had their pick of the circular tables. One of the researchers brought teas and coffees from a machine on the counter, where you fed it a plastic sachet and it peed you a drink.

  The part-Chinese boy’s name was Peter Lee. He told her, “We’re all just marking time with our own research. Duncan Dalby wants us to inventory everything in the labs for a full picture of what’s gone missing.”

  “We daren’t tell him exactly what’s involved,” added a young woman named Kelly. “There’s a thermal imager alone gone missing that’s worth fifty thousand. Have you any idea what he’s doing with it all?”

  “If I were a scientist,” Miranda said, “I might be able to tell you. As it is …

  She was hesitating because her natural instinct was to defend her father, but she couldn’t come up with any account of his activities that didn’t put him in a bad light. Poor old Doctor Hood. Poor old man. Those whom the gods would destroy, they first soften up with a whiff of the occult.

  She was still hesitating when the time alarm on her phone went off.

  “Oh, shit,” she said as something dawned on her.

  Peter Lee made a polite face. “Something wrong?”

  “Can you excuse me for a second?”

  She left them talking amongst themselves and moved to an empty table, where she took out her organizer and ran through her schedule for the rest of that day. Miranda made her living as a private singing teacher, mostly coaching teenaged sopranos through the ABRSM grades. She wasn’t going to make it back in time to take any of her lessons, it was as simple as that. She’d have to be on the road within the hour, and that clearly wasn’t going to happen.

  By the time she’d finished ma
king calls and leaving messages, the bar was filling up. Of the physics department party, only Peter Lee was left.

  “Sorry,” Miranda said as she rejoined him, and he shrugged and smiled as if to say, not that it didn’t matter, more that it did and he’d be lying if he pretended otherwise.

  Miranda said, “What’s the chance of getting a list of the missing gear?”

  “Tricky,” he said. “Nobody knows exactly what’s gone. We’ve spent many an hour trying to work out what he might be using it for. Why?”

  She was thinking of the cardboard cartons up in the attic. She’d peeked into some of them, and they hadn’t even been unpacked. “Maybe we can get some of it back to where it came from.”

  “The gear’s not really the main issue for us. It’s more about the academic ground we’re losing.”

  “But it’s a place to start.”

  SHE WALKED OUTSIDE for a while, wondering what best to do. She was hardly up to this. She felt like a person charged with stopping a rock slide, armed only with a couple of sticks and a handkerchief.

  When she finally got back to the house, the day was all but over and there was a note waiting for her on the door.

  Experiment in progress, it read. Enter via back door.

  In no mood to be messed around, she used her key and walked straight in.

  The first thing that she noticed was a deep bass wub-wub-wub sound permeating the entire building and pitched so deep that she mainly felt it through the soles of her feet and in the pit of her stomach. The neighbors were probably watching their furniture walking around on its own and asking themselves what the hell was happening. As Miranda moved toward the foot of the stairs, there was another flash, just like the one she’d experienced the night before, but this time from a different camera. This one had a motor drive. It was aimed at the spot where her mother had fallen.

  The throbbing noise stopped abruptly. She could hear him heading down. She didn’t wait, but went up the stairs to meet him.

  “Didn’t you see the note?” he called out.

  “Yes,” she shot back, “I saw the note. You want to carry on like Professor Branestawm, fine. Just don’t expect me to pretend this is normal and play along with you.”

  They met up on the middle landing, where there now stood a loudspeaker that wouldn’t have been out of place at a Grateful Dead concert.

  “What do you mean?” he said.

  She looked at the speaker, and wondered how he’d managed to get it up the stairs without help. Her mental picture of his struggle didn’t help his case.

  “I’m not going to humor you in this,” she said. “You are seriously making an idiot of yourself while your students’ careers are going down the toilet.”

  “What have they got to do with anything?”

  “Given the consideration you’ve shown them, nothing! That’s my point!”

  “Who’ve you been talking to?”

  She took a deep breath and steadied herself and then she said, “I can imagine what it’s like for you. It almost made sense when you explained it to me last night. But to everyone else, you’re coming over as a … a …”

  “A nutcase?” he suggested.

  It was as good a word as any, and more polite than most of the ones she’d been thinking of.

  “They’re making plans, Dad,” she said. “Everything you spent your life putting together, you’re losing it all.”

  To her irritation, right at that moment her phone timer went off again. Or did it? As she pulled her phone out, her father searched around and produced an identical one of his own.

  “It’s mine,” he said, killing the beeper. “I have to be somewhere.” He slid past her without touching her and started to make his way down the stairs.

  “That’s right,” she called after him in exasperation. “Walk away.”

  From down at the rack in the hallway, shrugging into his big overcoat, he looked back up at her and said, “Walk with me, then.”

  WHAT HAD ONCE been a densely settled part of town was now a wasteland. Some of the old pubs had been left standing, only to turn rough and then die in their isolation. Now they stood amidst blown litter and weeds, bereft, boarded and vandalized.

  Hood said, “Your grandfather used to look at the houses and say he could remember when all this was fields. I wonder what he’d say now.”

  Miranda walked on with her head down, and didn’t respond.

  Without changing his tone, her father said, “I do know what you’re thinking. The simple fact of it is that I can’t deal with anything if I don’t deal with this.”

  “Can’t you deal with it outside office hours?”

  “If it’s any consolation, I find it all as ridiculous as you do. I’d love just to nail it and get back to normal.”

  Not quite everything had been razed. A post box here, an old church up ahead. Miranda was taking her father’s words on board when she realized that not only was the old church not deserted, but it was their destination.

  Some cars stood on the street. Bodies were getting out of them and one or two elderly-looking people were already going into the building. One of them waved, briefly.

  Her father raised a hand in acknowledgment.

  Miranda’s heart sank.

  On the pavement outside the door, as her father was making his way in, she stood and looked up at the hand-lettered board above the entranceway.

  It had been nailed over the original church sign. It was in Gothic script, painted by a nonprofessional with only an approximate idea of what Gothic script ought to look like.

  It read LANE ENDS SPRITULIST CHURCH and underneath, in smaller letters, Healing, Open Evenings and Sunday Services.

  Someone behind her said, “Don’t be shy!” and a batty-looking woman just inside the doorway called out, “You must be Miranda! Come in! Come in!”

  And before she knew it, she’d been swept inside.

  The building was in bad shape but it was still recognizably a church, albeit a peeling and crumbling one. The congregation numbered about thirty, and Miranda was the youngest amongst them. Everyone was in a group at the end of the nave, chatting enthusiastically. The woman who’d greeted her by name made something of a fuss of her and offered to take her coat, urging her to have a seat by one of the pillars with a radiator.

  “They’re the most popular spots,” she explained. “They always go first.” The woman was wearing a blue cardigan and had a lazy eye. Miranda had to make an effort not to glance back over her shoulder to see who she was talking to.

  Her father was a few yards away, in the middle of the group. It was obvious that he was some kind of a regular here. As soon as she could, Miranda disengaged herself and moved to his side.

  “I’m not staying,” she said in a low voice when she had his attention. “I’ll see you back at the house.”

  “Don’t leave now,” he said. “You might learn something.”

  “Dad …” she said, but was unable to continue as an excited murmur rose up at the appearance of a late arrival. He was standing in the doorway, and a couple of senior members of the congregation broke away to greet him. He was one of the worst-dressed men that Miranda had ever seen.

  “That’ll be Doctor Arthur Anderson,” her father murmured to her. “He’s come over from Leeds.”

  Anderson was a shrunken-looking homunculus in a brown-checked suit that looked as if it had once been put through the wash with him inside it. The points of his waistcoat were curling up even more than the tips of his shirt collar. With this costume and his wispy mustache and a chin that almost vanished into his neck, he’d have passed for Ratty in a low-rent theatrical production of The Wind in the Willows. He was declining a cup of tea, rubbing his hands together, expressing a wish to be getting on with it.

  “Doctor of what?” Miranda said.

  Her father mimed clicking a mouse. It was an old family joke. Click “Print” to download your diploma.

  Miranda realized with an even further sinking heart t
hat she’d left it too late to escape, because the street doors had been closed and everyone was moving to the pews to be seated. As predicted, the seats around the radiators filled up first.

  Her father ushered her to a side bench. From here they could observe while sitting some way apart from the others.

  “It’s a clairvoyance evening,” he said as the babble was quietening down. “They have them every now and again to raise funds.”

  She was still eyeing the exit as the service began, but one of the elderly men had set a chair beside it. Someone started to sing an unaccompanied hymn and after a bar or so, thirty reedy voices all joined in. It wasn’t any tune that she knew.

  Then Doctor Arthur Anderson, the man in the flood-salvage suit, took the floor and began to speak. He didn’t use the pulpit, and he didn’t use notes. This was clearly a speech that he’d made many times on similar occasions.

  He said, “The spirits are all around us, they say. Well, it’s true. And I know that because when the moment’s right and the will is there, I can see them as plainly as I can see you. And people say to me, Arthur, they say, you’ve described them to me just as they were in life, but how does that work? How come Uncle Bert’s still got his glass eye on the other side? How come Mum’s still in her favorite cardigan, did that pass over, too? Because I thought we gave it to Oxfam. And what I say to them is this. I don’t know. Because I don’t. I just see what I see.”

  He paused for a moment and looked aside at the floor, as if to gather his thoughts, and then he went on. “Do I see the spirits? I believe I do, but I don’t know that I do. It’s a much-abused word, is spirit. We can’t hear it without thinking of ghosts and spooks. The whole point of a spirit is, it isn’t a thing. It’s the essence of something without the form it comes in. But that’s a bit deep for most of us, which is why we can’t think of God the Father without making him into an old man. And in the same way, we can’t think of the dead without making them into the people we knew. So what I think happens is, the spirits decide, I think I’ll go and talk to old Arthur. And what Arthur’s going to see will be something that looks like the form that spirit left behind, because poor Arthur’s only human and his mind needs something to fasten onto.”