Cutting Down

Herley was awakened by the sounds of his wife getting out of bed. Afraid of seeing her nude body, he kept his eyes closed and listened intently as she padded about the room. There came a silky electrostatic crackling as she removed her nightdress—at which point he squeezed his eyes even more tightly shut—then a rustling of heavier material which told him she had donned a dressing gown. He relaxed and allowed the morning sun to penetrate his lashes with bright oily needles of light.

“What would you like for breakfast?” June Herley said.

He still avoided looking at her. “I’ll have the usual—coffee and a cigarette.” That isn’t enough, he added mentally. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

She paused at the bedroom door. “That isn’t enough. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.”

“All right then—coffee and two cigarettes.”

“Oh, you!” She went out on to the landing and he heard her wallowing progress all the way down the stairs and into the kitchen. Herley did not get up immediately. He cupped his hands behind his head and once again tried to fathom the mystery of what had happened to the girl he had married. It had taken a mere eight years for her to change from a slim vivacious creature into a hopeless, sagging hulk. In that time the flat cones of her breasts had become vast sloping udders, and the formerly boyish buttocks and thighs had turned into puckered sacks of fat which at the slightest knock developed multi-hued bruises which could persist for weeks. For the most part her face was that of a stranger, but there were times when he could discern the features of that other June, the one he had loved, impassively drowning beneath billows of pale tissue.

It was, he sometimes thought, the mental changes which frightened, sickened, baffled and enraged him the most. The other June would have endured any privation to escape from the tallowy prison of flesh, but the woman with whom he now shared his home blandly accepted her condition, aiding and abetting the tyrant of her stomach. Her latest self-deception—which was why she had begun to fuss about breakfast—was a diet which consisted entirely of protein and fat, to be eaten in any quantity desired as long as not the slightest amount of carbohydrate was consumed. Herley had no idea whether or not the system would work for other people, but he knew it had no chance in June’s case. She used it as a justification for eating large greasy meals three or four times a day in his presence, and in between times—in his absence—filling up on sweetstuffs.

The aroma of frying ham filtering upwards from the kitchen was a reminder to Herley that his wife had yet to admit her new form of dishonesty. He got up and strode swiftly to the landing and down the stairs, moving silently in his bare feet, and opened the kitchen door. June was leaning over the opened pedal-bin and eating chocolate ice cream from a plastic tub. On seeing him she gave a startled whimper and dropped the tub into the bin.

“It was almost empty,” she said. “I was only…”

“It’s all right—you’re not committing any crime,” he said, smiling. “My God, what sort of a life would it be if you couldn’t enjoy your food?”

“I thought you…” June gazed at him, relieved but uncertain. “You must hate me for being like this.”

“Nonsense!” Herley put his arms around his wife and drew her to him, appalled as always by the looseness of her flesh, the feeling that she was wrapped in a grotesque and ill-fitting garment. In his mid-thirties, he was tall and lean, with a bone structure and sparse musculature which could be seen with da Vincian clarity beneath taut dry skin. Watching the gradual invasion of June’s body by adipose tissue had filled him with such a dread of a similar fate that he lived on a strictly fat-free diet and often took only one meal a day. In addition he exercised strenuously at least three times a week, determined to burn off every single oily molecule that might have insinuated itself into his system.

“I’ll have my coffee as soon as it’s ready,” he said when he judged he had endured the bodily contact long enough. “I have to leave in thirty minutes.”

“But this is your day off.”

“Special story. I’ve got an interview lined up with Hamish Corcoran.”

“Why couldn’t it have been on a working day?”

“I was lucky to get him at all—he’s practically a recluse since he quit the hospital.”

“I know, poor man,” June said reflectively. “They say the shock of what happened to his wife drove him out of his mind.”

“They say lots of things that aren’t worth listening to.” Herley had no interest in the biochemist’s personal life, only in a fascinating aspect of his work about which he had heard for the first time a few nights earlier.

“Don’t be so callous,” June scolded. “I suppose if you came home and found that some psycho had butchered me you’d just shrug it off and go out looking for another woman.”

“Not until after the funeral.” Herley laughed aloud at his wife’s expression. “Don’t be silly, dear—you know I’d never put anybody in your place. Marriage is a once and for all thing with me.”

“I should hope so.”

Herley completed his morning toilet, taking pleasure in stropping his open-bladed razor and shaving his flat-planed face to a shiny pinkness. He had a cup of black coffee for breakfast and left June still seated in the kitchen, the slabs of her hips overflowing her chair. She was lingering at the table with obvious intent, in spite of already having consumed enough calories to last the day. There’s no point in getting angry about it, Herley thought. Especially not today…

He walked the mile to Aldersley station at a brisk pace, determined not to miss the early train to London. Hamish Corcoran had lived in Aldersley during his term at the hospital, but on retiring he had moved to a village near Reading, some sixty miles away on the far side of London, and reaching him was going to take a substantial part of the day. The journey was likely to be tiresome, but Herley had a feeling it was going to be worth his while. As a sub-editor on the Aldersley Post he liked to supplement his income by turning in an occasional feature article written in his own time. Normally he would not have considered travelling more than a few miles on research—his leisure hours were too precious—but this was not a normal occasion, and the rewards promised to be greater than money.

As he had feared, the train and bus connections were bad, and it was nearly midday by the time he located the avenue of mature beeches and sun-splashed lawns in which Corcoran lived. Corcoran’s was a classical turn-of-the-century, double-fronted house which was all but hidden from the road by banks of shrubbery. Herley felt a twinge of envy as he walked up the gravel drive—it appeared that becoming too eccentric to continue in employment, as Corcoran was reputed to have done, had not seriously affected his standard of living.

He rang the bell and waited, half-expecting the door to be opened by a housekeeper, but the grey-haired man who appeared was undoubtedly the owner. Hamish Corcoran was about sixty, round-shouldered and slight of build, with a narrow face in which gleamed humorous blue eyes and very white dentures. In spite of the summertime warmth he was wearing a heavy cardigan and a small woollen scarf, beneath which could be seen a starched collar and a blue bow tie.

“Hello, Mr Corcoran,” Herley said. “I phoned you yesterday. I’m Brian Herley, from the Post.”

Corcoran gave him a fluorescent smile. “Come in, my boy, come in! It’s very flattering that your editor should want to publish something about my work.”

Herley decided against mentioning that nobody in the editorial office knew of his visit. “Well, the Post has always been interested in the research work at Aldersley, and we think the public should know more about its achievements.”

“Quite right! Now, if you’re anything like all the other gentlemen of the Press I’ve met you’re not averse to a drop of malt. Is that right?”

“It is a rather thirsty sort of a day.” Herley followed the older man into a cool brown room at the rear of the house and was installed in a leather armchair. He examined the room, while Corcoran was pouring drinks at a sideboard, and saw that the shelves which lined the walls were occupied by a jumble of books, official-looking reports and odd items of electronic equipment whose function was not apparent. Corcoran handed him a generous measure of whisky in a heavy crystal tumbler and sat down at the other side of a carved desk.

“And how are things in Aldersley?” Corcoran said, sipping his drink.

“Oh, much the same as ever.”

“In other words, not worth talking about—especially after you’ve come such a long way to interview me.” Corcoran took another sip of whisky and it dawned on Herley that the little man was quite drunk.

“I’ve got lots of time, Mr Corcoran. Perhaps you could give me a general rundown, in layman’s terms, on this whole business of slow muscles and fast muscles. I must confess I’ve never really understood what it was all about.”

Corcoran looked gratified and immediately plunged into a moderately technical discourse on his work on nerve chemistry, speaking with the eager fluency of one who has for a long time been deprived of an audience. Herley pretended to be interested, even making written notes from time to time, waiting for the opportunity to discuss the real reason for his visit. He already knew that the research unit at Aldersley General had been involved in discoveries concerning the basic structure of muscle tissue. Experiments had shown that “fast” muscles such as those of the leg could be changed into “slow” muscles—like those of the abdomen—simply by severing the main nerves and reconnecting them to the wrong set, in a process analagous to reversing the leads from a battery.

The implication had been that the type of muscle was determined, not by a genetic blueprint, but by some factor in the incoming nerve impulses. Hamish Corcoran had come up with a theory that the phenomenon was caused by a trophic chemical which trickled from nerve to muscle. He had already begun work on identifying and isolating the chemical involved when the tragedy of his wife’s death had interrupted his researches. Soon afterwards he had been persuaded to retire. The rumour which had circulated in Aldersley was that he had gone mad, but no details had ever become public, thanks to a vigorous covering-up job by a hospital which had no wish to see its reputation endangered.

“I was quite wrong about the chemical nature of the nerve influence,” Corcoran was saying. “It has since been established that electrical stimulus is the big factor—slow muscles receive a fairly continuous low-frequency signal, fast muscles receive brief bursts at a much higher frequency—but the fascinating thing about the science game is the way in which one’s mistakes can be so valuable. You can set off for China, so to speak, and discover America. In my case, America was a drug which offered complete and effortless control of obesity.”

The final statement alerted Herley like a plunge into cold water.

“That’s rather interesting,” he said. “Control of obesity, eh? I would have thought there was a huge commercial potential there.”

“You would have thought wrong, my boy.”

“Oh? Do you mean it wasn’t possible to manufacture the drug?”

“Nothing of the sort! I was able to produce a pilot batch with very little difficulty.” Corcoran glanced towards a bookshelf on his right, then noticed that his glass was empty. He stood up and went to the sideboard, for the third time during the interview, to pour himself a fresh drink. Herley took the opportunity to scan the shelf which had drawn the older man’s gaze and his attention was caught by a small red box. It was heavily ornamented and cheap-looking, the sort of thing that was turned out in quantity for the foreign souvenir market, and seemed more than a little out of place in its surroundings.

That’s where the pills are, Herley thought, savagely triumphant. Until that moment he had suffered from lingering doubts about the information he had received from a drunken laboratory technician a few nights earlier. He had been talking to the technician in a bar, half-heartedly following up a lead about administrative malpractice in the hospital, when the tip of the story about Corcoran’s secret wonder-drug had surfaced through a sea of irrelevancies. It had cost Herley quite a bit of money to obtain what little information he had, and he also had been forced to acknowledge the possibility that—as sometimes happens to newsmen—he had been skilfully conned. Until the moment when Corcoran had glanced at the red box…

“Why aren’t you drinking, young man?” Corcoran said with mock peevishness, returning to his desk. His voice was still crisp and clear, but triangles of crimson had appeared on his cheeks and his gait was noticeably unsteady.

Herley took a miniature sip of his original drink, barely wetting his lips. “One is enough for me on an empty stomach.”

“Ah, yes.” Corcoran ran his gaze over Herley’s lean frame. “You don’t eat much, do you?”

“Not a lot. I like to control my weight.”

Corcoran nodded. “Very wise. Much better than letting your weight control you.”

“There’s no chance of that.” Herley laughed comfortably.

“It’s no laughing matter, my boy,” Corcoran said. “I’m speaking quite literally—when the adipose tissue in a person’s body achieves a certain threshold mass it can, quite literally, begin to govern that person’s actions. It can take over that person’s entire life.”

For the first time in the interview Herley detected a trace of irrationality in his host’s words, the first confirmation of the old rumours of eccentricity. Corcoran seemed to be talking fancifully, at the very least, and yet something in what he was saying was generating a strange disturbance in Herley’s mind. How many times had he asked himself why it was that June, once so meticulous about her appearance, now allowed herself to be dominated by her appetite?

“Some people are a bit short on will-power,” he said. “They get into the habit of over-eating.”

“Do you really believe that’s all there is to it? Doesn’t that strike you as being very strange?”

“Well, I …”

“Consider the case of a young woman who has become grossly overweight,” Corcoran cut in, speaking very quickly and with an azure intensity in his eyes. “I chose the example of a woman because women traditionally place greater value on physical acceptability. Consider the case of a young woman who is say fifty percent or more above her proper weight. She is ugly, pathetic, Ill. She is either socially ostracised or elects to cut herself off from social contact. Her chances of sexual fulfilment are almost zero, her life expectancy is greatly reduced, and the years she can anticipate promise nothing but sickness and self-disgust and unhappiness. Do you get the picture?”

“Yes.” Herley moved uneasily in his chair.

“Now we come to the truly significant aspect of the case, and it is this. That woman knows that her suffering is unnecessary, that she can escape from her torment, that she can transform her physical appearance. She can become slim, healthy, attractive, energetic. She can avail herself of all that life has to offer. There’s very little to it—all she has to do is eat a normal diet. It’s a ridiculously trivial price to pay, the greatest bargain of all time—like being offered a million pounds for your cast-off socks—but what happens?” Corcoran paused to take a drink and the glass chittered momentarily against his teeth.

“Actually, I’ve seen what happens,” Herley said, wondering where the discourse was leading. “She goes right on eating more than her body needs.”

Corcoran shook his head. “That’s the orthodox and simplistic view, my boy. She goes on eating more than she, as the original person, needs—but, in fact, she is eating exactly the right amount to suit the needs of the adipose organ.”

Herley’s uneasiness increased. “I’m sorry. I’m afraid I don’t quite …”

“I’m talking about fat,” Corcoran said fervently. “What do you know about fat?”

“Well…what is there to know about it? Isn’t it just like lard?”

“A common misconception. Human body fat is actually a very complex substance which acts like a very large organ. Most people think of the adipose organ as having a poor blood supply, probably because it’s pale and bleeds little during surgery, but in fact it has a very extensive blood supply in very small capillaries, and the density of those capillaries is greater than in muscle, second only to liver. More important, the adipose organ also has a subtle network of nerves which are locked into the central nervous system and capable of reacting with it.”

Corcoran took another drink, eyeing Herley over the rim of the glass. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“No.” Herley gave an uncertain laugh. “Not really.”

Corcoran leaned forward, red pennants flaring on his cheeks “I’m telling you that the adipose organ has a life of its own. behaves like any other successful parasite—selfishly, looking oui for its own interests. It controls its own environment as best il can, which means that it controls its host. That’s why obese people have the compulsion to go on over-eating, to go on being fat—no adipose organ willingly allows itself to be killed!”

Herley stared back at the older man with real anxiety in hisj heart. He had always had a phobia about insanity, and now he was experiencing a powerful urge to flee.

“That’s a very…interesting theory,” he said, draining hisj glass to banish the sudden dryness of his mouth.

“It’s more than a theory,” Corcoran replied. “And it explains why a person who tries to slim down finds it harder and harder to keep to a diet—when the adipose organ feels threatened it fights more strongly for its life. A person who loses some adipose tissue almost always puts it back on again. It’s only in the very rare cases where the determined slimmer manages to starve the adipose organ down below its threshold mass for autonomous consciousness that he successfully normalises his weight. Then dieting suddenly becomes easy, and he tends to remain slim for life.”

Herley did his best to appear unruffled. “This is really fascinating, but I don’t see how it tallies with what you said earlier. Surely, if it were possible to produce a drug that would effectively … ah … kill this … ah … adipose organ it would have tremendous commercial potential.”

“The drug can be manufactured,” Corcoran said, again glancing to the right. “I told you I had produced a pilot batch, in the form of a targeted liposome. For a human adult, four 1 c.c. doses at daily intervals is enough to guarantee permanent normalisation of body weight.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“Why, the adipose organ itself,” Corcoran said with an indulgent smile. “It fights very effectively against a slow death—so how do you imagine it would react to the prospect of a sudden death? Without understanding what was happening inside his own body and nervous system the patient would feel a powerful aversion to the use of the drug and would go to any lengths to avoid it. I think that takes care of your commercial potential.”

This is getting crazier and crazier, Herley thought.

“What if you disguised the drug?” he said. “Or what if it was administered by force?”

“I don’t think the adipose organ would be deceived, especially after the first dose—and there is such a thing as the medical ethic.”

Herley stared at Corcoran’s flushed countenance, wondering what to do next. It was easy to see why Aldersley General had decided to part company with Corcoran on the quiet. Although a brilliant pioneer in his field, the man was obviously deranged. Had it not been for the independent evidence from the laboratory technician, Herley would have had severe doubts about the efficiency of Corcoran’s radical new drug. Now the substance seemed less attainable and therefore more desirable than ever.

“If that’s the case,” Herley said tentatively, “I don’t suppose you’d ever be interested in selling the pilot batch?”

“Sell it!” Corcoran gave a wheezing laugh. “Not for a million pounds, my boy. Not for a billion.”

“I have to admire your principles, sir—I’m afraid I’d be tempted by a few hundred,” Herley said with a rueful grimace, getting to his feet and dropping his notebook into his pocket.

“It’s been a pleasure talking to you, but I have to get back to Aldersley now.”

“It’s been more of a pleasure for me—I get very bored living in this big house all by myself since my …” Corcoran stood up and shook Herley’s hand across his desk. “Don’t forget to let me have a copy.”

“A copy? Oh, yes. I’ll send you half-a-dozen when the article is printed.” Herley paused and looked beyond Corcoran towards the garden which lay outside the room’s bay window. “That’s a handsome shrub, isn’t it? The one with the grey leaves.”

Corcoran turned to look through the window. “Ah, yes. My Olearia scilloniensis. It does very well in this soil.”

Herley, moving with panicky speed, side-stepped to the bookshelves on his left, snatched the red box from its resting place and slipped it inside his jacket, holding it between his arm and ribcage. He was back in his original position when Corcoran left the window and came to usher him out of his room. Corcoran steadied himself by touching his desk as he passed it.

“Thanks again,” Herley said, trying to sound casual in spite of the hammering of his heart. “Don’t bother coming to the front door with me—I can see myself out.”

“I’m sure you can, but there’s just one thing before you go.”

Herley drew his lips into a stiff smile. “What’s that, Mr Corcoran?”

“I want my belongings back.” Corcoran extended one hand. “The box you took from the shelf-1 want it back. Now!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Herley said, trying to sound both surprised and offended. “If you’re suggesting …”

He broke off, genuinely surprised this time, as Corcoran lunged forward and tried to plunge his hands inside his jacket. Herley blocked the move, striving to push Corcoran away from him and being thwarted by the little man’s unexpected strength and tenacity. The two men revolved in an absurd shuffling dance, then Herley’s superior power manifested itself with an abrupt breaking of Corcoran’s hold. Corcoran was forcibly propelled backwards for the distance of one pace and was jolted to a halt by the edge of the marble fireplace, which caught him at the base of the skull. His eyes turned upwards on the instant, blind crescents of white, and blood spurted from his nose. He dropped into the hearth amid an appalling clatter of fire irons, and lay very, very still.

“You did that yourself,” Herley accused, backing away, mumbling through the fingers he had pressed to his lips. “That’s what you get for drinking too much. That’s…”

He stopped speaking and, driven by a pounding sense of urgency, looked around the room for evidence of his visit. The whisky tumbler he had used was still sitting on the arm of the leather chair. He picked it up in trembling fingers, dried and polished it with his handkerchief and placed it among others on the sideboard, then went to the desk. Among the papers scattered on its surface he found a large business diary which was open at the current date. He examined the relevant page, making sure there was no note of his appointment, then hurried out of the room without looking at the obscene object in the hearth.

Herley felt an obscure and dull surprise on discovering that the world outside the house was exactly as he had left it—warm and green, placidly summery, unconcerned. Even the patterns of sunlight and leafy shadow looked the same, as though the terrible event in Corcoran’s study had taken place in another continuum where time did not exist.

Grateful for the screening effect of the trees and tall shrubs, Herley tightened his grip on the red box and started out for home.

“It’s wonderful,” June breathed, unable to divert her gaze from the small bottle which Herley had set on the kitchen table. “It seems too good to be true.”

“But it is true—I guarantee it.” Herley picked up the hypodermic syringe he had found in the red box and examined its tip. He had made important decisions on the journey back from Reading. His wife already knew where he had been during the day, so there was nothing for it but to wait until the news of Corcoran’s “accidental” death came out and utter appropriate words. If the body was found quickly: Good God! It must have happened to the poor man soon after I left him—but I don’t think there’s any point in my getting mixed up in an inquest, do you? If, as was quite possible, there was a lengthy delay before the corpse came to light: Fancy that! I wonder if it could have happened around the time I went to see him…

In either case, to prevent June talking about it and perhaps forging links in other people’s minds, he was going to lie about where and how he had obtained the drug.

“Just think, darling,” he said enthusiastically. “Four little shots is all it will take. No dieting, no boring counting of calories, no trouble. I promise you, you’re going to be your old self again.”

June glanced down at her squab-like breasts and the massive curvature of her stomach which the loosest fitting dress was unable to disguise. “It would be wonderful to wear nice clothes again.”

“We’ll get you a wardrobe full of them. Dresses, undies, swimsuits—the lot.”

She gave a delighted laugh. “Do you really think I could go on the beach again?”

“You’re going, dear—in a black bikini.”

“Mmm! I can’t wait.”

“Neither can I.” Herley opened the small bottle, inverted it and filled the hypodermic with colourless fluid. He had been disappointed to discover that the drug was not in tablet form, which he could have slipped unannounced into June’s food, but there was nothing he could do to alter the situation. It was fortunate, he realised, that he knew how to use a needle.

“I don’t think we need bother about sterilising swabs and all that stuff,” he said. “Give me your arm, dear.”

June’s eyes locked with his and her expression became oddly wary. “Now?”

“What do you mean now? Of course it’s now. Give me your arm.”

“But it’s so soon. I need time to think.”

“About what?” Herley demanded. “You don’t think I’m planning to poison you, I hope.”

“I … I don’t even know where that stuff came from.”

“It’s from one of the best Harley Street clinics, June. It’s something brand new, and it cost me a fortune.”

June’s lips had begun to look bloodless. “Well, why doesn’t the doctor give me the injections himself?”

“For an extra hundred guineas? Talk sense!”

“I am talking sense—giving injections is a skilled job.”

“You saw me giving dozens of them to your mother.”

“Yes,” June said heatedly. “And my mother died.”

Herley gaped at her, unable to accept what he had heard. “June! Is that remark supposed to contain any kind of logic? It was because your mother was dying that she was on morphine.”

“I don’t care.” June turned her back on him and walked towards the refrigerator, the great slabs of her hips working beneath the flowered material of her dress. “I’m not going to be rushed into anything.”

Herley looked from her to the syringe in his hand and blood thundered in his ears. He hit her with the left side of his body, throwing her against the refrigerator and pinning her there while his left arm clamped around her neck. She heaved against him convulsively, once, then froze into immobility as the needle ran deep into the hanging flesh of her upper right arm. Herley was reminded of some wild creature which was genetically conditioned to yield at the moment of being taken by a predator, but the pang of guilt he felt served only to increase his anger. He drove a roughly estimated cubic centimetre of the fluid into his wife’s bloodstream, withdrew the needle and stepped back, his breath coming in a series of low growls which he was unable to suppress.

June clamped her left hand over the bright red lentil which had appeared on her arm, and turned to face him. “Did I deserve that, Brian?” she said sadly and gently. “Do I really deserve that sort of treatment?”

“Don’t try your old Saint June act on me,” he snapped. “It used to work, but things are going to be different from now on.”

A fine rain began to fall in mid-evening, denying Herley the solace of working in the garden. He sat near the window in the front room, pretending to read a book and covertly watching June as she whiled away the hours before bed. She maintained a wounded silence, staring at the dried flower arrangement which screened the unused fireplace. At intervals of fifteen minutes she went foraging in the kitchen, and on her returns made no attempt to hide the fact that she was chewing. Once she brought back an economy-size container of salted peanuts and steadily munched her way through them, filling the whole room with the choking smell of peanut oil and saliva.

Herley endured the performance without comment, his mood a strange blend of boredom and terror. Slipping away from Corcoran’s house could have been, he saw in retrospect, a serious blunder. It might have been better to telephone the police immediately and present them with a perfectly credible, unimpeachable story about Corcoran getting drunk and falling backwards against the mantlepiece. That way he could have kept the drug, hiding it in his pocket, and emerged from the affair free and clear. As it was, he was going to have some difficult explaining to do should the authorities manage to connect him with Corcoran’s death.

Why couldn’t the little swine have been reasonable! Herley repeated the question to himself many times during the dismal suburban evening and always arrived at the same answer. Anybody who was crazy enough to regard subcutaneous fat, simple disgusting blubber, as having sentience and a pseudo-life of its own was hardly likely to listen to reason in any other respect. The very idea was enough to give Herley a cold, crawling sensation along his spine, adding a hint of Karloffian horror to the evening’s natural gloom.

As the rain continued the air in the house steadily grew cooler and more humid, beginning to smell of toadstools, and Herley wished he had lit the fire hours earlier. He also found himself longing, uncharacteristically, for an alcoholic drink—regardless of the empty calories it would have represented—but there was nothing in the house. He contented himself by smoking cigarette after cigarette.

At 11.30 he stood up and said, “I think that’s enough hilarity for one evening—are you going to bed?”

“Bed?” June looked up at him, seemingly without understanding. “Bed?”

“Yes, the thing we sleep on.” My God, he thought, what if I’ve given her the wrong drug? Maybe I jumped to the wrong conclusion about what Corcoran kept in the box.

“I’ll be up shortly,” June said. “I’m just thinking about…everything.”

“Look, I’m sorry about what happened earlier. I did it for us, you understand. It’s a medical fact that overweight people develop an unreasoning fear of anything which threatens to…” Herley abruptly stopped speaking as he realised he had garnered his medical “fact” from some of Hamish Corcoran’s wilder ramblings. He stared down at his wife, wondering if it could be only an effect of his disturbed mental state that she seemed more gross than ever, her head—in his foreshortened view—tiny in comparison to the settled alpine slopes of her body.

“Don’t forget to lock up,” he said, turning away to hide his repugnance.

When he got to bed a few minutes later the coolness of the sheets was relaxing and he realised with some surprise that he would have no trouble in falling asleep. He turned off his bedside lamp, plunging the room into almost total darkness, and allowed his thoughts to drift. The day had undoubtedly been the worst of his life, but if he kept his head there was absolutely nothing the police could pin on him. And as regards the trouble over the injections, June’s attitude was bound to change by morning when she found there were no ill effects. Everything was going to be all right, after all …

Herley awoke very briefly a short time later when his wife came to bed. He listened to the sound of her undressing in the darkness, the familiar sighs and grunts punctuated by the crackle of static. When she lay down beside him he placed a companionable hand on her shoulder, taking the risk of the gesture being interpreted sexually, and within seconds was sinking down through layers of sleep, grateful for the surcease of thought.

The dream was immediately recognisable as such because in it his mother was still alive. Herley was two years old and his father was away on a business trip, so Herley was allowed to share his mother’s bed. She was reading until the small hours of the morning and, as always when her husband was away, was eating from a dish of home-made fudge, occasionally handing a fragment to the infant Herley. She was a big woman, and as he lay close her back seemed as high as a wall—a warm, comforting, living wall which would protect him forever against all the uncertainties and threats of the outside world. Herley smiled and burrowed in closer, but something had begun to go wrong. The wall was shifting, bearing down on him. His mother was rolling over, engulfing him with her flesh, and it was impossible for him to cry out because the yielding substance of her was blocking his nose and mouth, and she was going to suffocate him without even realising what was happening…

Mother!

Herley awoke to darkness and the terrifying discovery that he really was suffocating.

Something warm, heavy and slimy was pressing down over his face, and he could feel the moist weight of it on his chest. He clawed the object away from his mouth, but was only partially successful in dislodging it because it seemed to have an affinity for his skin, clinging with the tenacity of warm pitch. His fingers penetrated its surface and slid away again on a slurry of warm fluids.

Whimpering with panic, Herley heaved himself up off the pillow and groped for the switch of the bedside light. He turned it on. From the corner of one eye he glimpsed what had once been his wife lying beside him, her naked body bloody and strangely deflated, the skin burst into crimson tatters. The horror of the sight remained peripheral, however, because his own body was submerged in a pale, glistening mass of tissue, the surface of which was a network of fine blood vessels.

He screamed as he tried to tear the loathsome substance away. It ripped into quivering blubbery strips, but refused to be separated from him, clinging, sucking, tonguing him in dreadful intimacy.

Herley stopped screaming, entering a new realm of terror, as he discovered that the slug-like mass was somehow penetrating his skin, invading the sanctum of his body.

He got to his feet, dragging the glutinous burden with him, and in a lurching, caroming run reached the adjoining bathroom. Almost of their own accord, his fingers located and opened the bone-handled razor, and he began to cut.

Heedless of the fact that he was also inflicting dreadful wounds on himself, he went on cutting and cutting and cutting…

Detective-Sergeant Bill Myers came out of the bathroom, paused on the landing to light a cigarette, and rejoined his senior officer in the front bedroom. “I’ve been in this business a hell of a long time,” he said, “but those two are enough to make me spew. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“I have,” Inspector Barraclough replied sombrely, nodding at the lifeless figure on the bed. “This is the way we found Hamish Corcoran’s wife a couple of years ago, but we managed to keep the details out of the papers—you know how it is with false confessions and copycat murders these days. It looks as though we’ll be able to close the file on that case, thank God.”

“You think this man Herley was a psycho?”

Barraclough nodded. “He’s obviously been lying low for a couple of years, but we’ve established that he went to Corcoran’s house yesterday. Killing Corcoran must have triggered him off somehow—so he came home and did this.”

“It’s his wife I feel sorry for.” Myers moved closer to the bed and forced himself to examine what lay there, his eyes mirroring unprofessional sympathy. “Skinny little thing, wasn’t she?”