The Outcast Hours Read online

  Nazeem closed his eyes, felt the room swirling around them, and opened them right away.

  “What is this?” he gasped.

  The man laughed. It was a simple laugh, not menacing or evil, not even hungry with malice. It was the laugh of someone who had very sincerely just experienced joy.

  “I created a new language,” the man said. Nazeem noticed his eyes were sickly yellow, like the skin of a jaundiced child. “I have lived in this room for a year and every day of that year I’ve murdered in here. I’ve brought in children and men and women and the elderly. I’ve brought them in from the streets where they slept and no one even noticed or cared. And I’ve killed all of them. And with their blood I’ve written new words. Words that have never existed before. I am an author and this is my book.”

  “The room,” Nazeem managed, as he staggered and landed on his hands and knees. “The room is the book?” The black words smudged under his touch.

  “Yes,” said the man. He began unfolding his limbs, starting to rise. “I’ve killed so many in here, that now all it knows is death. And all it causes is death. All it creates is death.”

  Nazeem was lying on the floor now, foam bubbling across his lips, limbs twitching.

  The man stood up, watching Nazeem with hungry satisfaction. Then he turned to the only other occupant of the room still standing as well.

  “Are you feeling the death of this room calling to you too?” the man asked Bilal.

  Bilal had been utterly still, not sure of his own ability to move until just then. He took a deep breath, then another one.

  “Actually, I feel fine,” he said.

  The man cocked his head and stared at Bilal.

  “With blood I have written these words. They are words I conjured from my imagination, new words that have never existed. They are words of hate and anger, murder and pain. Since they’ve taken effect, every man or woman who has come here has either killed themselves, or anyone else they have seen. So you cannot be fine.” This last was spat out in contempt.

  “But I am fine,” said Bilal. “I promise.”

  The man charged, running at Bilal with a howl, blood-inked text smearing under his feet. His hands were curled like claws, but Bilal had time to see that they were not claws, just hands. He leapt to the side and the man thundered past him, slipping and sliding as he tried to come to a stop. The man hit the wall, bounced off it, and spun towards Bilal again, this time managing to scrape at Bilal’s face with his nails. Bilal yelped in surprise and shoved at the man, who fell backwards, tripping over Nazeem’s prone form and sprawling on the ground.

  “What are you,” shrieked the man.

  Bilal was standing over him now, looking down. The man had scratched at Bilal’s left eye, managing a deep gash at the corner. From inside the wound a single curl of flame rose out, tasting the air with a smokeless red tongue. Bilal reached up, and the flame receded, skin sealing itself over it.

  “I don’t know,” said Bilal. “But I know your cursed room works on the children of Adam, and I am not one of those.”

  He kicked out, connecting with the man’s chin. There was the crunch of a jaw breaking, and the man fell back, unconscious.

  Bilal knelt down and felt for Nazeem’s pulse, grateful to feel it fluttering still. Then he heaved his mentor onto his shoulder and retreated to the entrance. Turning to survey the room, he said a prayer loudly for all those that had died there to find safe passage to Allah and forgiveness for their sins. Then Bilal spat. A glob of lava hit the floor and the room erupted in flames. They unrolled across the floor and walls, carpeting over the words with fire. The man was consumed by them so fast, he didn’t even wake to scream in pain.

  Bilal retreated back to the elevator and punched the button for the ground floor, the flames staying obediently in the apartment behind him.

  Outside, the police had been joined by other sightseers, all looking up at the flames billowing out of the apartment windows, then staring in astonishment at Bilal and his burden as they emerged through the lobby. Bilal ignored them, laying Nazeem down on the stretcher inside the ambulance. He emptied a bottle of water over his face, then sat back in relief as the older man came up with a gasp.

  “What happened?” Nazeem said, once he had collected enough breaths to speak again.

  “The man killed himself. Set himself on fire. So I quickly got you out before we all died with him,” Bilal said.

  They stayed a bit longer, talking with the police, both Nazeem and Bilal saying they were unable to remember what they saw up there, only one of them being truthful. Then the radio crackled again.

  “Why don’t you rest in the back for a while. I can take over,” offered Bilal. Nazeem considered him for a few seconds, then assented. As the ambulance sped back into the maw of the city, the emerging talons of sunrise bloodied the sky.

  (The rise in the otherwise flat stretch of lowlands is not pronounced enough to be called a hill by most people, but the woman who lives there is herself so small that when she uses the term, no one quibbles. They even find themselves repeating it. ‘How long have you lived by the wee hill?’ they say.

  The woman is small enough that people double-take to see her. It’s not dwarfism. It’s that she looks as if she is both smaller than and faded from an original, as if someone photocopied a more usual-looking woman at 70% scale and opacity. Her voice sounds similarly reduced.

  ‘I was quite the dancer once,’ she says in the post office queue, abruptly, and no one knows how to take it. ‘I was bigger another time,’ she claims when she is in the bus stop, and the look of memory that takes her over is unsettling. ‘But not in this.’ She jiggles her arms.

  ‘That’s a lot for your tea,’ says the butcher, and the woman laughs in a tired way. That evening a tiny figure bundled under scarves comes off the bus and walks the short distance to the woman’s house. People notice, as they do in any town of such size. The guest is another woman, hidden in her clothes.

  The unlikely quantity of meat turns out to be a new norm. ‘She’s shrinking,’ the butcher claims, ‘no matter how much she’s eating. She came in, I could barely see her over the counter.’

  Sometimes when they glimpse her in the streets it seems to some locals that he’s right, that she’s smaller than she was, and even harder to focus on than before. Others beg for an end to such foolishness.

  ‘She talks to herself now,’ the publican says. ‘That I will say. I heard her when I went past her house. Asking things in a whispery voice, and answering herself in one even whisperier.’)

  Blind Eye

  Frances Hardinge

  “Twenty pounds an hour?” The man on the other end of the line covered his phone, but not well enough. “Bloody rip-off,” Erin heard him mutter in the background.

  “Jesus wept, Nathan!” hissed a female voice in answer. “Just tell her yes, okay? What else are we going to do? We can’t exactly call an agency, can we?”

  “But we’ll be gone hours! That could cost—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” There was a crackle and click, and the female voice became clearer. “Pepper Donovan gave us your number. She says you’re… trustworthy. Is that right?”

  Erin knew what ‘trustworthy’ meant here. No questions asked, no talk afterwards.

  “Yes,” she said quickly. “It’s like doctors. Confidentiality.”

  “Right, then. We’re at the Harmony Inn in west Willbrook, just off the ring road. And you can have an extra thirty quid if you make it here in half an hour. We’ll talk properly when you get here.”

  Erin didn’t like heading out to meet people she knew nothing about, but the mention of Pepper was reassuring. Pepper was a bouncer, and a regular customer who would probably be annoyed if Erin went missing. If these people knew Pepper, they probably wouldn’t want to annoy her.

  As a rule, Erin liked to find out as much as possible before accepting a job. However, personal rules were like guy ropes. Whenever one of them snapped, it put more strain on t
he others. This evening, a week after an expensive MOT, her remaining rules were looking dangerously optional.

  In the hotel’s pocket-sized lobby, next to the empty reception desk, a man, a woman and a small girl stood waiting for Erin. They all had a defeated, exhausted air, as if there had been a raging argument that nobody had won.

  The child had a narrow, wan face and hair the colour of dishwater. Unlike her companions, she did not look up as Erin entered.

  “You the babysitter?” asked the woman. “Oh, thank bloody God. I’m Kim. This is Mia.” She held the girl’s hand high, as though she were apprehending a criminal rather than making an introduction.

  Kim and her male companion were both dark-haired and in their thirties, with the same jowly, sullen look. Brother and sister, Erin guessed, not a couple. Both looked sick, purple shadows lurking beneath their eyes. Neither bore any obvious family resemblance to Mia.

  Erin had a secret dread that one day she would be called out to guard a kidnap victim, and that fear now flitted across her mind. She dismissed it, however. Abductors would have spirited their stolen child into a hotel room quickly, instead of waiting around in a brightly-lit lobby in full view of the car park.

  “Here.” Nathan slapped a room key into Erin’s hand. “There’s food and tea in the room. And you’ve got my number.” He started doing up his anorak.

  “Wait—anything I need to know before you go?” asked Erin, startled. “Anything medical? Diet? Any rules I should know about?”

  Nathan handed her a pill bottle.

  “She doesn’t sleep,” he said.

  Erin’s hackles rose. She didn’t like dosing kids, particularly with sleeping pills. Even prescribed melatonin made her uncomfortable.

  “I might see if I can get her to sleep without them, first,” she said, in what she hoped was a non-confrontational tone. “I have a few tricks that sometimes work. What have you tried?”

  “No,” said the man. “You don’t understand. She mustn’t sleep. You can’t let her sleep. Not even for a moment.”

  “What?” Erin looked down at the bottle, and spotted the word ‘caffeine’. “Why?”

  “It’s medical,” Kim replied sharply. “She mustn’t sleep while we’re away. Health reasons. Look, we need to go right now. Is this going to be a problem?”

  “No,” said Erin, and tried to sound like she meant it. “We’ll manage.”

  Of course it was a problem. Caffeine pills weren’t safe for kids, let alone six-year-olds. If Erin walked away, however, Mia might be left with someone else—someone willing to chuck pills down her throat.

  Erin had always wondered what she would do if she found herself in charge of a child suffering real abuse or neglect. She hoped that she was not about to find out.

  She had known, of course, that her new customers would be dubious. These days they always were.

  Erin had never been a morning person, or even an afternoon person. Day’s tedious glare made her sleepy, and she only seemed to wake up properly after dark. So when her smattering of temp jobs didn’t meet her rising rent costs, a friend suggested that she become a childminder and work evenings. For the first year or two, her babysitting was underpaid but mostly unchallenging.

  When everything changed, it was the fault of Pepper Donovan’s daughter Lily. She was ten years old, with a craven, ingenious, furious hunger for attention. When she didn’t get it, she set fires. Being dumped with a babysitter counted as being ignored.

  In the dead of night, after she had been put to bed, Lily climbed out of the window and set fire to some rubbish in a corner of the garage. Erin smelt smoke and rushed into the garage to put out the fire. That was when she discovered the four damaged cash machines stacked against the wall, wires trailing from where they had been ripped from their bases.

  She should have called the police, but instead she phoned Pepper to report the fire.

  “You went into the garage?” Pepper’s voice suddenly became tense.

  “Yes.”

  Above her, Erin could see Lily leaning over the bannister in her sequinned top, white-faced and shocked by the success of her arson. Lily was smart, hard-eyed and frenetic. Erin imagined her kicked from care home to care home, her crazy fire fizzling under a cold, steady drizzle of rejection and neglect.

  “Yes, but it’s OK,” Erin heard herself say. “No harm done. I don’t think we need to… bother anybody with this.”

  Pepper had a lot of friends. Word got round that there was a babysitter who was ‘trustworthy’, and who would babysit all night at short notice.

  There was the burglar who kept getting arrested because of his ‘trademark’ of baking a cake in any house he robbed, and whose twelve-year-old son seemed relieved to have actual help with his homework. A white-van-man needed somebody to look after his twins whenever he was out stealing charity bags of clothes from doorsteps, or raiding allotment sheds for their tools. And there were a lot of other parents with strange schedules and suspiciously nice cars…

  Gradually, the normal agency work was squeezed out by Erin’s new customers. Erin could not have explained quite how it happened. The work for her respectable clients was less well paid, of course, but it also started to seem less important, less rewarding.

  Erin had already read up on child-minding and taken first aid courses. Now she took self-defence classes and Aikido lessons. She changed her dress style to something less cosy, a ‘mafioso PA on casual Friday’ look.

  How bad would a crime need to be before she reported it? She didn’t know, and felt uneasy every time she compromised a little further. I’m doing this for the kids, not the parents, she told herself. I’ve got my foot in the door. I can make a difference. It was Vichy logic, but she clung to the hope that she could be a lifeline for the children.

  She remembered her own childhood, and what it was like when people gave up on you. That broken, defeated look when they made their final goodbye, as if you were abandoning them, not the other way round. And the cars, all the cars, when they dropped you off for the last time, their smells of pine and mud and dogs and feet rolled into one. All the same car, blurrily pulling away from you, and melting back into the world.

  Reporting the parents and passing the kids to social services felt like giving up.

  As soon as they entered the hotel room, Mia ran off and locked herself in the bathroom.

  “Mia?” called Erin, after allowing her a few minutes. “Are you OK in there?”

  Silence.

  “I’m sorry we didn’t get introduced properly. I’m Erin. I’m going to watch TV, okay? Come and join me if you feel like it.”

  She didn’t waste time hammering on the door. Who could blame Mia, dumped in a dingy hotel room with some black-clad stranger?

  Erin channel-surfed until she found cartoons. Sure enough, a little later she heard the bathroom door open. Without looking round, Erin shifted along the sofa to make room. When Mia perched on the very far end of the sofa, Erin put her crisp packet on the cushion between them, within reach of both. She didn’t usually resort to TV and snacks from the very start, but the runaway adults hadn’t given her much to work with.

  Mia was silent, but Erin could respect silence. A different type of adult would have crouched in front of Mia, bringing their huge hot face level with hers, and talked to her in a loud, cheery voice. They would have wanted to ‘bring her out of her shell’. As if it were that easy. As if shells were always bad.

  “You don’t have to make me like you, you know.” Mia’s voice was small but waspish.

  “OK,” said Erin calmly, taking another crisp. “What do you do to people you don’t like? Do you stick forks in their feet?”

  Crunch, crunch, crunch.

  “Yeah,” said Mia, with quiet bravado, and snuffled a laugh. She reached over and took the remote, flipped a couple of channels then stopped on a blue-tinted, moonlit scene.

  “Oh.” Erin recognised the show. “Maybe not that one—it’ll give you nightmares.”

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sp; “I watch it at home.” Mia shrugged. “He’s a werewolf,” she added helpfully, pointing at the screen.

  “Nathan and Kim let you watch Bloodrise?” asked Erin, aghast.

  “They’re only there in the day,” Mia answered promptly. “At night I watch what I like.”

  It could easily be a lie. Kids often tested Erin’s gullibility to see what they could get away with. I’m allowed to stay up till midnight! Mum always gives me three biscuits. Dad said I could use his drill.

  “What, you’re alone in the house at night? Every night?”

  Small nod. Crisp packet rustle. Crunch.

  Erin pursed her lips, and let out her breath slowly. Could it be true? Mia’s offhand manner was oddly convincing. Then again, if Nathan and Kim usually left Mia alone at night, why would they pay over the odds for a babysitter now?

  She was still troubled by the idea of forcibly depriving a young child of sleep, but perhaps there were good reasons. Medical, Kim had said. Wasn’t there some weird kind of narcolepsy where people stopped breathing? Or perhaps Mia was suffering from concussion? Erin nursed a guilty hope that Nathan and Kim would return before she had to make hard decisions.

  “Are you OK with TV, or do you want to play something?”

  Mia had brought her favourite board game with her, and won the first six games by refusing to explain the rules to Erin. After sandwiches, they spent the next two hours playing the games that Erin had brought in her backpack. Mia forgot to be wary, and became excitable and aggressively competitive. As they played, Erin threw in more questions about Mia’s home life, and was quietly appalled by the answers.

  Mia didn’t know where her home was, but it sounded like it was on an island. She said that from her bedroom window she could see Scotland ‘over the sea’. She didn’t go to school or know any other children. People came during the day—mostly Nathan and Kim—then ‘went away on the boat’. Mia could play outside if someone was with her, but at night she was left alone in the house, the doors locked.