The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

Dermot finds his way to a seat and parks himself there. His hands glide and slide smoothly over one another, as if perpetually washing themselves. His lips are slightly parted and behind the thick glasses his pale, almost colourless eyes are fixed on some far distant vanishing point beyond the bus’ ceiling.

After a moment, the man next to him grunts and gets up. Dermot blinks, snapped rudely out of his reverie, then gets up to let the man past. He thinks the man’s going to ding the bell to get off but he doesn’t, just goes and finds another seat. Another, Dermot-less seat.

Dermot doesn’t care.

He sidles up closer to the window and watches Salford glide past him in the thickening dusk, street lamps glinting dully in the gathering grey of impending night.

But he gazes beyond what is there to be seen.

And licks his lips as the bus rides on.

“Special Needs…” slurs Shires, outside the door. “Special Needs…”

Abbie stops tapping her pencil on the desktop and looks up at Carnegie.

They’re alone in the little office, the little dusty old office that never has a proper clean and has phones and a fax machine and a desktop computer that were last updated in 1991. Well, maybe a little more recently in the computer’s case, but only that.

They’re the dirty little secret. They’re the office in the police station that nobody wants to admit is there, nobody wants to acknowledge exists.

That nobody wants to admit there is a need for.

“Special Needs… Special fucking Needs…”

Shires is pressing himself up against the door’s big frosted glass pane with its reinforcing wire mesh. Seen through it, he’s blurred but she can make out enough. His arms are up, bent at the elbows and bent sharply in at the wrists, fingers splayed, a parody of some kid with cerebral palsy. He’s making that stupid, that fucking annoying voice, by sticking his tongue down between his bottom lip and his teeth and gums. It’s supposed to make him sound like a spastic.

They have to call their little office something, have to give it some kind of a name, and so they call it Special Projects. Shires and the other lads and lasses in the station who know about it call it Special Needs.

It passes for humour around here.

But it’s fear, nothing more. It’s not the drab little out-of-date office, caught perpetually in its early nineties time warp, that they’re scared of. It’s what it represents.

It’s what they have to fight.

And how they have to fight it.

That’s the theory, anyway. Abbie knows all about the theory. She knows all about what goes on in here, in theory. She’s read all the reports, the rule books, the case files. She knows the score. In theory.

But this is the first time she’s done it for real.

Carnegie, though, he’s different. He’s a big guy, solid looking. In his forties, she thinks. Late thirties, maybe, and feeling the strain. Dirty blond hair, washed out watery looking blue eyes and features that all look too closely gathered together in the middle of his face. Black jacket, long black coat, black trousers and shoes. White shirt. No tie. The washed out watery looking blue eyes are rolled up towards the ceiling and each new breath is blown out through his lips. Hard. A little harder each time, it seems, Shires lets out his stupid call.

“Special fucking Neeeeeeeeds…”

Shires slaps and bats a splayed bent hand weakly against the frosted, wire-meshed glass, pressing his face up close against it.

Carnegie grabs the door handle, twists and slams his shoulder back into it. The door opens outwards and the impact knocks Shires flying back into the corridor, arms flailing. There’s a heavy crash as he lands.

Carnegie pulls the door shut again. He turns to face Abbie and shrugs.

“Argh! Carnegie you fucking cunt!” Shires’ voice is muffled.

Abbie is biting her lips hard so as not to laugh. She has to stop herself doing that because if she starts she doesn’t know if she’ll stop.

Moaning, groaning and mumbling indistinct threats of revenge, Shires stumbles away down the corridor and out of earshot.

Carnegie spreads his hands in a what-can-you-do gesture.

Abbie can’t restrain herself anymore and bursts out laughing.

Carnegie starts laughing too.

On the frosted glass pane behind him, around head height, there’s a splash of red on the outside of the door.

They’re laughing.

And then the phone rings and they stop.

They just look at the phone, Abbie sitting at her desk, Carnegie standing by the door, and they watch it and listen to it ring and ring and ring.

Dermot stands patiently before the desk. The desk sergeant is trying to keep his eyes off him, but they keep straying back and every time they meet Dermot feels the thrill of contact, the hatred and the loathing and the contempt like the charge that jolts down a live wire when a connection gets made.

The desk sergeant motions with his eyes to one of the seats in the reception area. The subtext of which is get the fuck away from me.

Dermot doesn’t care. He’d rather sit down anyway.