Mind the Gap

Mind the Gap - By Christopher Golden

Chapter One

little birds

Even before she saw the house, Jazz knew that something was wrong. She could smell it in the air,ifting shadows of the trees lining the street, hear it in the expectant silence. She could feel it

in her bones.

Dread gave her pause, and for a moment she stood and listened to the stillness. She wanted to run,

but she told her-self not to be hasty, that her mother had long since hardwired her for paranoia and so her

instincts should be trusted.

She hurried along a narrow, overgrown alleyway that emerged into a lane behind the row of terraced

town houses. Not many people came this way, out beyond the gardens, and she was confident that she

could move closer to home without being seen.

But seen by whom?

Her mother's voice rang through her head: Always assume there's someone after you until you

prove there isn't. Maybe everyone had that cautionary voice in the back of their mind; their conscience,

their Jiminy Cricket. For Jazz, it always sounded like her mother.

She walked along the path, carefully and slowly, avoiding piles of dog shit and the glistening shards of

used needles. Every thirty seconds she paused and listened. The dreadful si-lence had passed and the

sounds of normalcy seemed to fill the air again. Mothers shouted at misbehaving children, ba-bies hollered,

doors slammed, dogs barked, and TVs blared inanely into the spaces between. She let out a breath she

hadn't been aware of holding. Maybe the heat and grime of the city had gotten to her more than usual

today.

Trust your instincts, her mother would say.

"Yeah, right." Jazz crept along until she reached her home's back gate, then paused to take stock

once more. The normal sounds and smells were still there, but, beyond the gate, the weighted silence

remained. The windows were dark and the air felt thick, the way it did before a storm. It was as if her

house was surrounded by a bubble of stillness, and that in itself was disquieting. Perhaps she's just

asleep, Jazz thought. But, more unnerved than ever, she knew she should take no chances.

She backed along the alley for a dozen steps and waited outside her neighbor's gate. She peered

through a knothole in the wood, scoping the garden. The house seemed to be silent and abandoned, but not

in the same ominous fashion as her own. Birds still sang in this garden. She knew that Mr. Barker lived

alone, that he went to work early and re-turned late every day. So unless his cleaners were in, his house

would be deserted.

"Good," Jazz whispered. "It'll turn out to be nothing, but..." But at least it'll relieve the boredom.. To

and from school, day in, day out, few real friends, and her mother constantly on edge even though the



Uncles made sure they never had any financial worries. No worries at all, the Uncles always said___

Yeah, it'd turn out to be nothing, but better to be careful. If she ever told her mother she'd had some

kind of dreadful intuition, even in the slightest, and had ignored it, the woman would be furious. Her mother

trusted no one, and even though Jazz couldn't help but follow her in those beliefs, still she sometimes hated

it. She wanted a life. She wanted friends.

She opened Mr. Barker's gate. The wall between their gardens was too high to see over, and from

the back of his garden she could see only two upstairs windows in her house —her own bedroom window

and the bathroom next to it. She looked up for a few seconds, then brashly walked the length of the garden

to Barker's back door.

Nobody shouted, nobody came after her. The neigh-borhood noise continued. But to her left, over the

wall, that deathly silence persisted.

Something is wrong, she thought.

Mr. Barker's back door was sensibly locked. Jazz closed her eyes and turned the handle a couple of

times, gauging the pressure and resistance. She nodded in satisfaction; she should be able to pick it.

Taking a small pocketknife from her jeans, she opened the finest blade, slipped it into the lock, and

felt around.

A bird called close by, startling her. She glanced up at the wall and saw a robin sitting on its top,

barely ten feet away. Its head jerked this way and that, and it sang again.

Above the robin, past the wall, a shape was leaning from Jazz's bedroom window.

She froze. It was difficult to make out any details, silhou-etted as the shape was against the sky, but

when it turned, she saw the outline of a ponytail, the sharp corner of a shirt collar.

It was the Uncle who told her to call him Mort.

She never bothered with their names. To her they were just the Uncles, the name her mother had

been using ever since Jazz could remember. They came to visit regularly, sometimes in pairs or threes,

sometimes on their own. They would ask her mother how things were, whether she needed anything or if

she'd "had any thoughts." They never ac-cepted a drink or the offer of food, but they always left behind an

envelope containing a sheaf of used ten- and twenty-pound notes.

They told Jazz that she never had to worry about any-thing, which only worried her more. When they

left, her mother would slide the envelope into a drawer as though it was dirty.

But what was this one doing in her bedroom? Whatever his purpose, Jazz didn't like it. They had

never, ever come into her room when she was at home, and her mother as-sured her that they did not

snoop around when she was out. They were perfect gentlemen. Like gangsters, Jazz had said once, and

we're their molls. Her mother had smiled but did not respond.

The Uncle turned his head, scanning the gardens and alleyway.

He'll see me. If the robin calls again and he looks down to lo-cate it, he'll see me pressed here

against Mr. Barker's back door.

The bird hopped along the head of the wall, pausing to peck at an insect or two. Jazz worked

at the lock without looking, waiting for the feel of the tumblers snicking into place. One... two... three... two

to go, and the last two were always the hardest.

The Uncle moved to withdraw back into the room, and Jazz let go of her breath in a sigh of relief.

The robin chirped, singing along with the chaotic London buzz of traffic and shouts.

The Uncle leaned from the window again just as Jazz felt the lock disengage. She turned the handle

and pushed her way in behind the opening door, never looking away from the shadow of the man at her

bedroom window.

He didn't see me, she thought. She left the door open; he'd be more likely to see the movement of it

closing than to notice it was open.

The robin fluttered away.

Jazz did not wait to question what was happening, or why. She hurried through Mr. Barker's house,

careful not to knock into any furniture, cautious as she opened or closed doors. She didn't want to make the

slightest sound.

In his living room, she moved to the front window. The wooden Venetian blinds were closed, but,

pressing her face to the wall, she could see past their edge. Out in the street, she saw just what she had

feared.

Two large black cars were parked outside her house. Beamers.

Jazz's heart was thumping, her skin tingling. Something's happened. Rarely had more than three

Uncles visited at once; and now there were two cars here, parked prominently in the street with windows

still open and engines running, as if daring anyone to approach. They're a law unto themselves, her mother



sometimes said.

Her mum had rarely said anything outright against the Uncles, but she never needed to. Her unease

was there on her face for her daughter to see. But Jazz could not just sit here and spy on her own house,

wondering what had gone wrong.

She and her mum had talked many times about fleeing the house if trouble ever came to the door.

They'd made plans, created a virtual map in their minds, and once or twice they'd pursued the escape route,

just to make sure it could really work.

All Jazz had to do now was reverse it.



****

She found Mr. Barker's attic hatch in one of his back bed-rooms. This was a cold, sterile room with

white walls, bare timber floors, and only an old rattan chair as furniture. She lifted the chair instead of

dragging it, positioning it beneath the hatch, then stood carefully on its arms and pushed the hatch open. It

tipped to the side and thumped onto the tim-ber joists.

Jazz cringed and held her breath. It had been a soft im-pact, muffled in the attic. Unlikely it would

travel through to her house; these places were solid.

Got to be more careful than that.

Fingers gripping the edge of the square hole in the ceil-ing, she pushed off the chair, trying to get her

elbows over the lip of the hatch. The chair rocked, tipping onto two legs and then back again with another

soft thud. She let her torso and legs dangle there for a while, preparing to haul herself up and in. Jazz was

fitter than most girls her age —others were more interested in boys, drinking, and sex than in keeping

themselves fit and healthy —but she also knew that she could easily hurt herself. One torn muscle and...

And what? I won't be able to run? She couldn't shake the sense of foreboding. The sun shone

outside, a beautiful summer afternoon. But gray winter seemed to be closing in.

She lifted herself up into the darkness, sitting on the hatch's edge and resting for a moment.

Listening. Looking for light from elsewhere. She still had no idea what had hap-pened. If the Uncles were

waiting for her to come home, perhaps they'd also be checking her house. And that could mean the attic

too.

When her eyes had become accustomed to the darkness, she set off on hands and knees. Mr.

Barker's attic had floor-boards, so the going was relatively easy. The old bachelor didn't have much stuff to

store, it seemed; there were a cou-ple of taped-up boxes tucked into one corner and an open box of books

slowly swelling with damp. Mustiness perme-ated the attic, and she wondered why he'd shoved the box up

here. She hadn't seen a bookcase anywhere downstairs. There were rumors that Mr. Barker's wife had left

him ten years ago, so perhaps these books held too many ghosts for him to live with.

At the wall dividing Barker's property from hers, Jazz crawled into the narrowing gap between floor

and sloping roof. Right at the eaves, just where her mother said it would be, was a gap where a dozen

blocks had been removed. Lazy builders, she'd said when Jazz had asked. But Jazz found it easy to

imagine her mother up here with a chisel and ham-mer, while she was in school and Mr. Barker was at

work.

She wriggled through the hole into her own attic. There were no floorboards here, and she had to

move carefully from joist to joist. One slip and her foot or knee would break through the plasterboard ceiling

into the house below. She guessed she was right above her bedroom.

A wooden beam creaked beneath her and she froze, cursing her clumsiness. She should have

listened first, tried to figure out whether the Uncle was still in there. Too late now. She lowered her head,

turned so that her ear pressed against the itching fiber-wool insulation, and held her breath.

Voices. Two men were talking, but she could barely hear their mumbled tones. She was pretty sure

their voices did not come from directly below. Her room, she thought, was empty —for now.

There were two hatches that led down from the attic into the town house. One was above the

landing, visible to anyone in the upstairs corridor or anyone looking up the stairs from below. And then there

was the second, just to her right, which her mother had installed in Jazz's bedroom. Emergency escape,

she'd said, smiling, when Jazz had asked what she was doing.

Everything you told me was right, Jazz thought. She felt tears threatening but couldn't go to that

place yet. Not here, and not now.

She crawled to the hatch, feeling her way through the darkness. When she touched its bare wood

and felt the han-dle, she paused for a minute, listening. She could still hear muffled voices, but they seemed

to come from farther away than her bedroom.

Jazz closed her eyes and concentrated. Sometimes she could sense whether someone else was

close. Most people called it a sixth sense, though usually it was a combination of the other five. With her,



sometimes, it was different.

She frowned, opened her eyes, and grasped the handle.

Maybe there was an Uncle standing directly below her. Maybe not. There was only one way to find

out.

Jazz lifted the hatch quickly and squinted against the sudden light. She leaned over the hole and found

her room empty.

Good start, she thought. Everything her mother had said to her, everything she had been taught,

shouted at her to flee. But there was something going on here that she had to understand before she could

bring herself to run.

Jazz lowered herself from the hatch into her room, land-ing lightly on the tips of her toes, knees

bending to absorb the impact. She remained in that pose, looking around her room and listening for

movement from outside.

Her drawers had been opened, her bookcase upset, and clothes were strewn across the floor. The

cover of her jour-nal lay loose and torn on her bed like a gutted bird.

Mum! she thought. And for the first time, the fear came in hard. The Uncles had always protected

and helped them, even if her mother had little respect for them. But now they seemed dangerous. It was as

if their surface veneer had been stripped away and her perception of them was becoming clear at last.

She glanced back up at the ceiling hatch, close enough to her desk that it would be easy to jump up

and disappear again.

The voices startled her. There were two of them,*seeming to come from directly outside her door.

She slid beside her bed and lay there listening, expecting Mort to enter her room at any second. He would

not see her straightaway, but he would see the open hatch. And then they'd have her.

"We could be waiting here forever," one voice said. Mort.

"We won't. She'll be home soon." This other voice was female.

The only time a woman had ever accompanied the Uncles was the day after their house had been

broken into years before. Jazz had been young, but she could still re-member some details about that day.

The woman had tried to soothe and comfort her mother, while all around them the Uncles had been busy

packing their belongings. By early evening they were in a brand-new house: this one. And the woman

—whose voice was cold and uncaring, even then— had called herself Josephine Blackwood.

"What if she isn't? What do we do then?"

"We stay calm and proceed," the woman said. The same voice; the same coldness. "She's just one

girl."

"She's more than that," Mort said.

"Shush! Never in public! Never outside!"

The Uncle sighed. "So, is she definitely... ?" He trailed off, as though there was something he did not

want to say.

"Of course," the woman said. "I saw to it myself."

The two fell silent again, their presence suddenly filling the house. Jazz lay there, turning over what

they had said. I saw to it myself, the woman had said. Saw to what?

"I'm going downstairs," the man said at last. "No need to guard this door anymore, at least."

"All right. Let's go down."

Jazz listened to the man and woman slowly descending the stairs.

No need to guard this door anymore...

There were more voices from down there, subdued and indistinguishable.

Is she definitely... ?

"Mum," Jazz whispered, and the world seemed to sway.

She closed her eyes and breathed deeply several times, then stood and crept from her room. She

moved fluidly, drifting rather than walking, feeling the air part around her and guide her along. She knew

where every creaking floor-board was, and she didn't make a sound.

Her mother's bedroom door was closed, and there was a smear of blood on the handle.

It was small —half the size of the nail on her little fin-ger—but she saw it instantly. Her heart

thumped harder as she turned and glanced downstairs. There was no one at the bottom of the staircase

looking up, but she could still hear their voices elsewhere in the house.

What have you done to my mother? she thought, touching the handle, opening the door, stepping

inside, and seeing what they had done. And also smelling and tasting it, be-cause so much blood could not

be avoided.

Her legs began to give way. She grasped the handle and locked her elbow so she did not fall. Then



she closed her eyes.

But some things can never be unseen.

Her mother lay half on the bed, her upper body hanging down so that her head rested on the floor. A

line had been slit across her throat, a dark grin gaping.

I saw to it myself, the woman had said.

Jazz felt strangely numb. Her heart hammered in her chest, but her mind was quiet, logical, already

plotting out the next few minutes. Back to her room, the phone, the po-lice, up into the attic to await their

arrival, listen to the Uncles and that Blackwood woman panicking as the sirens approached...

And then she saw the writing on the floor. At first she thought it was a spray of blood, but now she

could see the words there, and she imagined the determination her mother must have had to write them

while blood spewed from her throat.

Jazz hide forever.

She bit back a cry, steeled herself against the tears.

Her mother stared at her with glazed eyes.

Jazz looked at the words again, then glanced at the stair-case to her left and started backing away.

As she reached her own door, she realized that she'd left her mother's bedroom door open. They'd

notice, know she'd been here.

She darted back across the landing and closed the door. Her last sight of her mother was bloodied

and smudged with tears.

The words on the floor shouted at her even when the door was closed.

Jazz hide forever.

She had always listened to her mother.

Lifting herself back through the ceiling hatch in her bedroom, Jazz wondered what kind of life those

words had doomed her to.



****

They were sitting together in the park, watching as ducks drifted back and forth on the pond,

squabbling over thrown bread and scolding the moorhens.

"Pity there aren't any swans," her mother said.

"I love swans," Jazz said. "So graceful and beautiful."

"They may look gentle, but they're hard as nails." Her mother shuffled closer to her on their picnic

blanket. The re-mains of their lunch lay beside them on paper plates, already attracting unwanted attention

from wasps and flies. "If there were swans here, we'd have a full hierarchy. Swans would be the rulers of

the pond, ducks below them, moorhens below them. Then there'd be the scroungers, the little birds, like that

wren over there." She pointed to a tiny bird hopping from branch to branch in a bush that grew out over the

water.

"So what are we?" Jazz asked. Even then she was a per-ceptive girl, and she knew that this

conversation was edging toward something.

"We're the little birds," her mother said. She smiled, but it was sad.

"I think you're a swan," Jazz said, flooded by a sudden feeling of complete love.

Her mother shrugged. "Maybe you," she said. "One day, maybe you."

The wren dropped to the grass and hopped across to the edge of the pond. It started worrying at a

lump of bread that the other birds seemed to have missed, but the movement brought it to the attention of

the mallards. A duck splashed from the water and came at the wren, wings raised and head down, bill

snapping. The wren turned and hopped away slowly, almost as though it was trying to maintain its dignity.

The duck took the bread.

"Wise thing," her mother said. "If you're on the run, you never run unless you know they're right

behind you."

"Why?"

"You never call attention to yourself." Her mother lay back on the blanket, looking around the park as

though waiting for someone.



****

Never run unless you know they're right behind you.

Jazz was afraid that if she did start running, she'd brain herself on a lamppost. She was doing her

best not to cry — that would draw attention—but the pressure and heat be-hind her face was immense.

For a minute or two, she had considered calling the po-lice from Mr. Barker's house and waiting until

they arrived. But she had known that if she paused any longer, she would never move again. So she had

left the way she arrived, walk-ing the length of Barker's garden, hurrying along the alley-way, emerging out



onto the street, and putting more distance between her and her mother with every step she took.

She hated blinking, because whenever her eyes closed she saw the blood and that twisted, splayed

body that had once been her mother.

That woman slit her throat. Cut her and left her to bleed to death! And they had been waiting for

Jazz to come home.

To do the same to her?

She walked past a coffee shop and glanced in the win-dow. A man and woman sat turned to face

the street. The woman was sipping from a cup, but the man stared straight out at Jazz. He wore a smart

dark suit and sunglasses, and his lips twitched into what might have been a smile.

Jazz hurried on, turning into the next side road she came to, rushing through a lane between gardens

and emerging onto another street. She passed an old woman walking her dog. The dog watched her go by.

It took Jazz ten minutes to realize she had no idea where she was going. Where could she hide? And

how could she just leave her mother?

She emerged onto a busy shopping street. It was noisy and bustling and smelled of exhaust fumes

and fast food. A cab pulled up just along the street and a tall, elegant woman stepped out. She brushed an

errant strand of hair from her eyes, paid the cabbie, and walked away with her mobile phone glued to her

ear.

And Jazz's mother was dead.

She was dead, murdered, and now Jazz was more alone than she had ever been before.

They'll be on the streets, she thought, and the idea bore her mother's voice. Once they know

you're not coming home, they'll be on the streets looking for you.

She stepped into the doorway of a music shop and scanned the sidewalk and the road. No big black

Beamers, but that meant nothing. Maybe they'd be on foot. Maybe, like her mother had been telling her for

the last couple of years, they had so many fingers in so many pies that none of them knew the true extent

of their reach.

She wiped her eyes and looked both ways. A dozen peo-ple turned their heads away just as she

looked at them. A dozen more looked up. In a crowd such as this, there was al-ways someone watching

her.

"Oh shit, oh f*ck. What the hell am I going to do?" she whispered.

A black BMW cruised around the corner. Jazz pressed back into the door but it was locked, the

damn shop was* shut, and then the BMW passed and continued along the street.

She hurried back out onto the pavement, resisting the temptation to keep her head down. She had to

watch, had to know what was going on.

A tall man emerged from a fast-food joint, carrying something that looked like steaming road kill in a

napkin. He was dressed in a sharp black suit, and as she paused six steps from him, he adjusted a lump

beneath his jacket.

Gun, Jazz thought.

He looked up, glanced around at her, and smiled. "Too hot to eat," he said, raising the food toward

her.

She ran. The man called after her, and even though he sounded friendly and alarmed, she could not

afford to stop, not now that she'd started running, because she was drawing attention to herself. And if and

when she did stop, she'd col-lapse into a heap, and the white-hot grief would start tearing her up.

The grief, and the loneliness.

She ducked into a Tube station, grateful for the shadows closing around her. The smell of the

Underground seemed to welcome her in.