Nobody True

Even though I was there to witness what happened next, I still could not believe it.

Moker sat back in the rear passenger seat and closed his eyes, the dead body slumped against the car’s opposite corner. I waited, mystified, caught up in what was taking place. Was this an extra way of getting his kicks, sitting with the person he’d just killed, enjoying the corpse’s company as it grew colder? That he was a deviant of the lowest kind, there was no doubt, but this loitering with the victim beat all common sense. Certainly there wasn’t much danger of being caught in the car park—anyone who did come along would be unable to see into the back of the car because of this level’s inadequate lighting—but why take the risk anyway? And if he was going to cut the body up, he’d hardly do it in his own vehicle. Even with the blood beginning to congeal there would still be a terrible mess. I didn’t understand and could only watch him as his breathing became deeper, the sound it made more disturbing. Soon he was sleeping and the rough-knitted muffler he’d rewrapped around his face billowed slightly with every escaping breath.

And then it occurred. At first I thought I might be imagining it, but the more intensely I gazed at Moker, the more certain I became that his image was wavering.

Something was leaving him.

I admit it, I was even more frightened than before and, because of it, I hunkered down almost into the footwell under the windscreen. I shouldn’t have—I shouldn’t have had—any physical discomforts in my condition, but I became cold. Very, very cold. And although I was hunched down, I could still see over the top of the front passenger seat, could still see some peculiar kind of transformation in Moker. I cowered down further, lest he discover me somehow, and watched as his head and shoulders became blurred, as though something thin and vapoury was smothering them, while a kind of nebulous mist—no, no, a kind of weak ectoplasm—was emerging from him so his image was indistinct behind it. And as this diaphanous cloud rose into the air, I saw that it was now taking on some sort of form. And the form was of Moker himself, but without the scarf and hat, without the grimy raincoat he always seemed to wear, without any clothes at all.

Although the image was unclear and ever-forming, I could make out the pits and scars to his body (I wondered if the old wounds had been self-inflicted), the malformed bones and surprising plumpness of his chest, and I wondered how a person could exist with such afflictions and could come to terms with such hideous defects. The substance was rising upwards, breaking free of the man himself, rising like a ghost from the grave, and Moker’s body was sliding sideways as if its lifeforce was deserting it. Finally, Moker’s empty body slumped against the rear seat’s corner. As Moker’s real eyes were closed, so too were the eyes of his fluctuating self-image, but I remained hidden all the same.

The substance—ectoplasm, animus, essence, I didn’t know what to call it—continued to build until I thought it might disappear through the roof of the car, but as the bare head—it had traces of wispy hair—touched the ceiling, the whole thing began to float sideways, towards the corpse in the other corner. This emanation was both fascinating and horrible, unusual and frightening, even though I’d left my own body many times in similar fashion in my past life (although I was sure that my spirit had never been visible like this, otherwise somebody would have mentioned it!). The ghosts at the séance parlour hadn’t scared me as much, because there was nothing threatening about them. This was different, there was something malign about the phenomenon I was witnessing, and I felt non-existent hairs on the back of my neck prickle, goosebumps rise on my arms. If I hadn’t been dead, I’d have run for my life.

This is when it happened. This is when I saw something I never thought possible. Of course I’d read the books and watched the films about demonic possession, but only hokey or over-imaginative writers and film-makers were responsible for such scenarios, while this was a real man, albeit an abnormal one, whose soul was stealing another person’s body. Death had emptied the woman’s body of its soul and now a different soul was taking its place, filling the vacuum. As I watched, the vaporous issue from Moker was entering the corpse on the back seat, creeping into it, smoothly but bit by bit, nothing hurried, no sudden possession, just a steady ingress, the hazy but discernible “mist” gradually sinking into the body until the nebulous features of Moker had completely disappeared.

After a few moments—but very long moments—the corpse’s eyes snapped open wide and looked into mine.

30

When the corpse spoke, its voice was strange, forced as if remembering the process. It was female, but there was an underlying hoarseness to the tone.

“I… know… you,” she said.

I jerked back so fiercely that I went through the dashboard and landed in a heap beneath the car’s engine. Stunned, I remained there for a few beats, at least out of sight of the Hillman’s two back-seat occupants; then, rather than stand and be in view again, I rolled out and crawled around the Celica that was parked next to Moker’s car, keeping low, afraid of being noticed, coming to rest behind the Celica’s furthest front tyre.

How was it possible for this woman to see me? Wait—the spirits at the séance had. In fact, most had been frightened of me. But… but… this woman’s eyes had fully opened and had looked right at me. Did it mean she wasn’t really dead? But that long, sharpened knitting needle straight through the heart—who could survive that? But then Moker’s spirit had left him and entered his victim’s body, so did that now mean he was dead? Think, I urged myself, think it through. Hadn’t I once had the power to leave my own body without being dead? I was almost an expert of the out-of-body experience, but had this man Moker developed his own ability to a level where he could use a body once its true tenant had left?

I peered over the Celica’s bonnet, squinting to see into the shadows of the Hillman. It was very dark, but there was movement in there. I kept low, nervous of being caught again. I heard rather than saw the rear door open and I ducked down out of sight. Cautiously I raised my head again, moving along the Celica’s bodywork so that I could watch through its windows without too much exposure.

The woman was standing by the Hillman’s open door. I could only see from the chin down to her waist, but I could tell she was unsteady. She raised a hand to lean on the grey metal roof, the other hand gripping the door handle. Her chest was heaving as if breathing was a strain. Was it Moker forcing the lungs to inhale? Was he inside the woman, forcing the dead body to function again? Unbelievable though it was, I suddenly had no doubts. After all, everything I had gone through recently was incredible, so what was so hard about this? The woman’s spirit had vacated her dead body and Moker’s own spirit had moved in to fill the vacuum, had taken possession. I was witness to it.

I kept out of sight, moving away from the Celica to get behind a concrete pillar, only standing up when the pillar was between the two vehicles and me. I risked a quick look.

The resurrected woman slowly and awkwardly turned her whole body to look around the car park. I flinched back out of sight once more, wondering if she was searching for me. Waiting for perhaps half a minute, I carefully peeked around the pillar again. She was moving her arms, trying to flex her stubborn fingers, only succeeding in straightening and clawing them stiffly. She began to walk, quite unstably to begin with, a hand brushing along the Hillman’s roof for support, but her stride becoming just a little more adept with each step. I moved around the concealing pillar to keep out of sight, but still I peered around its corner.

Her right hand was now on the Hillman’s bonnet, and her footsteps were still somewhat awkward, but I couldn’t be sure if that was because of her zombie-like state, or because of the high-heeled shoes she was wearing. Her confidence seemed to grow though with each further step, and soon she had left the security the old car and was walking along unaided, the dragging along the concrete floor rather than clattering as they had when the woman was alive. At one point, her left knee gave out and she went down, her hands slapping against the ground and saving herself from falling all the way. She knelt there on one knee, her shoulders sinking and rising as though she were catching her breath, the knuckles of her hands pressed firmly against the concrete. She stayed that way for one, two minutes?—I couldn’t be sure—then forced herself to rise again. That is, Moker forced her to rise again.

It was a graceless effort, like Bambi finding his feet for the first time, but with considerable effort she made it. The woman—this zombie of a woman—stood in the emptiness of the darkened car park regaining her breath, seemingly gathering more strength.

I began to understand that when the body dies, not everything fails at once; it takes a little while if only seconds for organs to cease functioning, and longer for muscles and tissues to atrophy, so was it possible for an alien entity to take over and make them work again? Probably, like me a week or so ago, you’d think no way; yet here I was witness to the miracle(?). It seemed possession was not confined to devils and demons. I understood now that when Jesus Christ had brought Lazarus back to life, He’d actually recalled Lazarus’ soul, ordering it to return to its host. Who would have thought that the host body could also be appropriated by someone else’s soul?

Before continuing, the dead woman looked about her once more as if looking for something. I had no doubt that “something” was me, so I remained hidden, frightened, incredulous—but inquisitive. She appeared to give up her search, although I’m sure she wasn’t satisfied. She started moving again, the first few steps clumsy, ungainly, and also slow (although not as slow as those zombies in old and hackneyed horror flicks), heading towards the EXIT door that Moker had been watching for a couple of hours that night.

What the hell was she—he—doing? Wasn’t mutilation the next item on the killer’s agenda? According to the newspapers, that was the whole agenda. It was then I wondered if Moker, using the OBE, had entered all his dead victims this way. And if so, what was the point, what kind of kick did Moker get from it? I decided to follow. Oh, believe me, I didn’t want to, I wanted to flee, get somewhere sane—like my own home. But the truth is, by now I was really curious.

I waited for the door to swing closed before leaving my hiding place—I don’t know why I was quite so wary of being seen; after all, wasn’t I untouchable? What could Moker do to me?—and went to the yellow-painted door. I listened before passing through it and heard shuffling footsteps ascending the stone steps that led to ground level. When they had faded enough for me to feel confident, I pressed through—no, I didn’t even have to press this time—I just glided through the door.

The footsteps could be heard clearly now, although they were growing quieter, fading into the distance. Cautiously, very cautiously, I mounted the first few steps, then listened again. The foot-shuffle was barely audible, so I climbed further, looking upwards over the iron rail as I went. Occasionally, I’d see the woman’s hand grab at the rail as if to pull herself along, not all of the fingers coordinated, two of them poking out, straight and stiff, and I deliberately kept back, making sure there was at least one landing between us. At last I heard a door swing open at the top. She, he—I still had to get used to the idea that it was Moker I was following, not this poor woman—had stepped out into Queensway, a street that was always busy, with shops open day and night.

What game was Moker playing? I couldn’t understand his motive. Had he done this with all his victims? Had the killer taken over each victim after death had occurred? Why had he appropriated their bodies? When I’d eavesdropped on the two detectives’ conversation outside my house, I’d heard them say that all the previous victims of the serial killer had acted in some bizarre ways around the time of their death: was I about to find out why and how? I shuddered. Just how deranged was this man? What was his purpose? To ridicule his victims? Was his mind so warped by his own deformity that he wanted to destroy the reputation of these innocent people, not content merely to destroy their bodies? Or was it simply for sexual self-gratification, committing acts that he could not do as himself (whether it was because of his facial deformity, or because something else was physically wrong with him I had no idea).

Skimming up to the top floor, my mind reeling with concerns and questions, I paused at the door to the street—just to try and bring my thoughts under control—before passing through.

There was plenty of light in Queensway, from shops, overhead lamps and slow-moving traffic, and plenty of people too. I didn’t know the time.* As always it was what you might call a “metropolitan” crowd, bustling or strolling the pavements, all types of people, some noisy and demonstrative, others engaged in their own private thoughts. The woman I followed weaved in and out of the throng, awkwardly at first, as if drunk, but beginning to pick up coordination as she went. I kept to the gutter to avoid people, occasionally stepping aside for those pedestrians who joined me there for speed. Oneway traffic slowly passed me by from behind, but naturally was never a threat; metalwork and wing mirrors went straight through my left side.

*It was peculiar how everything I would normally expect to be there (as far as I, myself, was concerned) indeed was, from my wristwatch to the handkerchief and keys in my pocket, even though I had no use for any of them. I could only assume that in the out-of-body state I saw everything as it was supposed to be, as if these inconsequential accessories that were personal and familiar to me afforded some small comfort. I’d have felt both embarrassed and intimidated if I were naked, even though I could not be seen, so my own mind gave me clothes, those I had been wearing on the night of my death. The other things were necessary for credibility. I’m sure I could easily have changed what I was wearing if I had set my mind to it, but what would be the point?

Up ahead, the woman stopped and seemed to be accosting a man who was probably just past middle age, an American tourist by the look of his loud outfit and the camcorder hanging by a strap around his neck. I caught up in time to hear him say: “No thank you, dear. I’m happily married.”

She rudely brushed past him and he turned around to watch her incursion back into the crowd. With a bemused shake of his head, he resumed his own journey.

Next, she stopped a black guy, a big man, smartly dressed, somewhere in his late thirties. I was too far behind to catch her words—maybe they were softly spoken, the hubbub around us easily drowning them. The tall guy looked her up and down, then laughed aloud. He didn’t say anything, but just pushed by, shaking his head and continuing to laugh.

“Crazy bitch,” I heard him say as he passed close to me.

Other people were turning to stare and I assume they thought she was drunk because of the unsteady way she progressed along the pavement, bumping into some pedestrians, swearing loudly at others so that they quickly dodged out of her path. Just before she reached a brightly lit newsagent’s selling Arabian journals and magazines, three sallow-complexioned gentlemen came out, voices raised high in their own language, laughing together and generally in a cheerful mood. The woman strode up to them and once again said something I couldn’t quite catch. I caught just enough, though, to understand that she was propositioning all three.

At first they gawped at her in surprise, obviously taking in her smart business clothes and appearance, before looking at each other. Two of them burst out laughing, a cackling sound that somehow managed to be insulting to the woman, but the third studied her face and body with interest. He murmured something to the other two, which initiated some nodding of heads, their laughter dissolving into wide lascivious grins. The first one took the woman’s arm and said something softly into her ear. I presumed it was in English, because she instantly hung onto one of his companions’ arms as if about to totter. She found herself supported by the two, one on either side. They led her away, a happy foursome, two of them jabbering excitedly, the Arab who’d replied to her proposition more reserved, although plainly eager. I kept to the gutter, almost abreast of them, dodging pedestrians who stepped off the kerb to avoid the group, a sick feeling in my stomach.

Was this why Moker had taken over the woman’s body, to indulge in sex with strangers, to debase her, soil her? But why? What was the point? To live vicariously through her for a short while? I was sure my first thoughts were right as I recalled the television and newspaper pictures of the previous victims, all of whom were smart and successful career people.

Moker wanted to be them, if only for a short while. And he wanted to enjoy what was probably impossible for him, because of his awful facial disfigurement, through them. He had possessed the fresh corpses for a while—did the bodies finally lose all strength and motion, was their after-death condition a very temporary situation?—only to degrade them, shame them, perhaps even to enjoy them. Only when he was satisfied—physically as well as mentally?—did he leave their bodies in some lonely place where he could return to mutilate them without interruption.

The four people I was following, three Arabs and one dead woman, suddenly changed direction and, using a busy zebra crossing close to a big corner store, crossed the road. I trailed behind.

The men were dressed smartly, two of them in light summer suits despite the obvious autumn chill; the third one, the serious one, had on an expensive-looking leather jacket. All wore good-quality shirts and ties and their shoes were highly polished. They might have been brothers, so similar were their features, although one of the suited men was a little overweight, his paunch overhanging his belt. His hair was sparser too, a light-brown shiny pate beneath carefully groomed hairs, which caught reflections from the lights spilling from the shops and the big store. On the other side of the road, they diverted into a sidestreet, and I noticed they had stopped talking now. Nobody was laughing anymore, either.

The woman’s legs suddenly gave way and she almost fell to her knees, but the men gripped her tightly, hauling her up again and supporting her, their faces now grim, angry even. The one in the leather jacket snapped at her and I heard her burble something incoherent. She plodded along between two of them, her motion still unsteady, but not as bad as a moment ago.

Few pedestrians walked this sidestreet, although traffic still made its way towards Queensway where it was as busy as ever. This area of Bayswater was always vibrant, whatever the hour (except for the very early hours of the morning), but the further we moved away from the main thoroughfare, the fewer people we saw. The three men had quickened their step now, almost dragging the woman along. They crossed a narrow sidestreet and one of the men gesticulated, pointing towards the darkness at the end of it, but the one in the leather jacket shook his head and growled something in their language.

I was quite close to them, guessing their intent, but unable to do a thing about it. They soon reached another narrow sidestreet and this time Leather Jacket nodded and indicated with his head. He probably knew the area well.

How could this be happening? I repeatedly asked myself. The woman was dead, her heart had been stopped by a long sharp knitting needle. How was it possible for her to walk and talk, how could Moker manipulate her so? I could only reason that once the soul, the spirit, the vital spark of life itself, whatever, left the human body, it still took some time for it to run down completely. It was as if a dead battery had been replaced by a working one. Absolutely crazy, yet here was I, witness to that craziness.

There were no moving vehicles in this little street, only parked ones, and the further we went, the blacker it got. Several of the overhead lamps were out of order, and this was why there were so many inky shadows.

The group reached a junction and one end of it was a cul-de-sac, unlit shops on one side, darkened commercial buildings on the other. The woman was dragged in this direction and she did not resist, the slowness and awkwardness of her pace the only reason for leading her. When they reached a recess that was the entrance to one of the commercial buildings, they pushed her into its pitch-black shadow.

She tripped over the wide stone step and once again they hauled her to her feet, this time roughly. I moved in closer, knowing what was going to happen, wanting to help the woman—her, not Moker, the man inside her; he knew what he wanted—desperately thinking of what I might do. If I’d been flesh and blood I’d have waded right in, three of them or not. But I was just… nothing! I couldn’t scream at them, I couldn’t touch them. Dear God, I couldn’t even frighten them.

The leader of the pack wasted no time. His hand went straight up the woman’s tight skirt, the triangular split at the side helping his wrist hitch up the material. I was used to the bad light by now—either my eyes had grown accustomed to it, or in my out-of-body state I could see more clearly than before—and I saw the other two men—the other two animals—pulling at her jacket. One paused for a moment to unzip his flies and release his aroused penis, a squat fat thing that should have been an embarrassment, and then Leather Jacket followed suit, the fingers of his right hand still busy beneath the skirt. The woman was laughing, an eerie hollow sound in the darkness, her head back against the metal door behind her. She twisted her face from side to side, her eyes half-closed, pupils hidden by the drooping upper lids.

Leather Jacket, his member standing proud from his trousers, yanked at her panties and tights, and they came down to her knees. His right hand disappeared again and her upper body fell forward, then shot back against the door, the back of her skull smacking against the metal. Still she laughed, an insane roar that seemed hardly human, and the two other men ripped open her jacket to crush her breasts under feverish hands.

By now their leader had hitched up the skirt to her waist and was attempting to thrust himself inside her, his knees bent, one hand on her hip, the other guiding his swollen penis. His two companions were becoming frantic, pulling at her blouse to expose her breasts. The bloody wad of material that had helped stem the flow of blood from her dead heart fell to the ground.

I heard Leather Jacket, who had found his way into her, exclaim something in Arabic, probably a curse, as he wondered why he was suddenly becoming wet. He pulled away from her without withdrawing completely and touched the dark running stain that was soiling his white shirt. I’m not sure if he could see the blood in the poor light, or if he smelt it, but he seemed to know immediately what it was. The blood had not yet had time to cool or begin to congeal in her veins and now it flowed copiously, overwhelming the needle’s round blunted end, running down her front, between her spread legs, soaking her panties and torn tights, spattering onto the stone step beneath her.

Leather Jacket pulled away completely, his penis catching the blood flow. He made a sharp disgusted sound and instantly struck out, slapping the woman’s face hard. A moaning kind of laugh came from her and the two Arabs on either side quit their rough, fumbling fondling and stared at her. Then they looked towards their leader and angry words were exchanged between them all.

I could just make out their expressions in the darkness and they were ugly, maybe as ugly as their souls. One studied his hands and saw that they were darkly stained with what could only be blood. He struck out at her, and now his bloodied fist was clenched, the blow a hard punch. She tottered against the Arab on the other side and he angrily pushed her away, back into his companion, who punched her again, catching her upper arm. Whether she—Moker—felt any pain, I’ve no idea, but her low laughter became sharper, which seemed to annoy the Arabs even more. They started to flail her body with their fists, the leader, his penis still in evidence and still hard, stepping back to kick her. The first kick hit her knee, which buckled, the other two assailants whacking her as she went down. When they discovered that their nice light summer suits had become bloodied, they really lost it. They began pounding her, kicking her as she sank into a corner of the recess.

I tried to intervene, tried to grab the leader, whose vicious kicks were aimed at her head and shoulders, but my efforts were in vain—as I knew they would be. I won’t tell you the names I called them but they were very politically incorrect. I think I was more disgusted with them than they were with this gibbering bleeding woman. Okay, I knew the woman was dead and that it was the deviant Moker who was taking the hammering (did he feel any pain? Not by the sound of her sniggering and delighted shrieks) but somehow respect for the woman before she’d become this thing remained with me. If only she would stop taunting them their violence might stop. Unfortunately, inside her Moker was enjoying himself too much.

She cowered on the doorstep, but only under the pressure of their attack, not because she was afraid. The deranged sniggering that came from her revealed that.

Finally, she was flat out on the concrete, lying half on her side, knees held together by the bunched panties and hose, but ankles and feet spread wide. Her skirt had dropped enough to cover her pubic hair; blood continued to dribble but not pump from her wound. The three men kept kicking her prone body.

They stopped only, it seemed, when they had exhausted themselves. They muttered to one another as they stared down at the woman, who was still moving and still mocking them, although her sniggers had become quieter and punctuated by short silences.

Leather Jacket barked at the other two and, after looking at him in surprise, they grinned. The leader and one of his companions were already exposed and it seemed that their violence had strengthened their erections even more. The third paunchy man unzipped himself and the other two laughed and pointed when they saw that he was flaccid. He grumbled something, I don’t know what, and prodded the woman sharply with the toe of his shoe. The only reaction he got was another snigger.

I already felt sickened by their treatment of the woman—they must have assumed she was either drunk, drugged or a nutter; she certainly didn’t look like a hooker—but what happened next forced me to reel away in utter disgust.

Standing over the fallen woman, Leather Jacket began to pleasure himself using his hand. The other two moved in closer and followed suit.

I went to the other side of the narrow cul-de-sac, shaking my head and cursing these men for their vileness, refusing to watch, but reluctant to leave the woman. But even when I didn’t look I could hear the grunts and moans of the Arabs as they masturbated over her.

Their noises quickly reached a crescendo as first one, then another, reached climax. They didn’t even bother to curb their cries. I tried not to listen to their sighs and their mutterings in Arabic, only turning back when they started laughing again. They were gesticulating at the third man’s limp organ as he frantically worked at it. He swore at the other two—at least, it sounded like a curse—and they laughed all the more. The flustered Arab gave up and took his hand away, leaving his flabby penis dangling.

He appeared to have a bright idea, for he suddenly chuckled. Saying something to his companions, he took hold of his penis again, this time in both hands, and made straining noises. The other two urged him on enthusiastically. It took him less than a minute to start urinating and he aimed the stream directly at the woman on the step, drenching her exposed thighs, her jacket, her face and hair.

I was shocked by the degradation, the sordidness, and I backed further into the shadows, filled with rage and despair.

I wanted to kill.

31

Her three abusers had gone, but I lingered. Soul-destroying though the whole squalid business was, I remained curious. And angry. What was Moker’s intention now that the once presentable woman—she’d been an executive type, I thought—lay defiled and bedraggled in a pool of piss inside the recessed doorway? He had humiliated her, brought this presumably respectable woman down to gutter level, and it occurred to me that this was part of his purpose, to possess his victims (there was no doubt in my mind that he had put his previous victims through similar humiliation), degrade them, and make them carry out acts they would never have considered in their normal lives. I guessed it was all part of his revenge on society, a society that probably had always turned away from him. I had no idea of his background or history, but I was willing to bet his early life had been in various institutions, perhaps even in hospitals where they had tried to fix his face (if its present condition was after surgery, what must it have been like before?). His childhood must have been torment, his young adulthood torture. Had he always been a loner, or was it only when he became a man that he was an outcast? Did he have a family and had he been rejected by them? I knew so little about Moker.

But don’t imagine I was beginning to feel sorry for the guy; I couldn’t, not with that pathetic bundle lying in the doorway opposite. Moker was evil. His very presence somehow exuded malevolence and I had felt that from the first moment I’d discovered him. Hell, even his aura was nasty. He was evil and he had to be stopped. No matter that he was grotesquely deformed, either from birth, or through some horrendous and freakish accident: he was a killer without mercy.

He had to be stopped, but I didn’t know how.

I stayed in deep shadow, watching the dead body, thoughts, doubts, tumbling through my mind. The three men had been laughing and clapping each other’s shoulders as they departed the scene, and I loathed them for what they had done. But I loathed Moker more.

Just when I felt I’d waited long enough and was about to approach the recumbent body, something stirred. At first, I thought it was the woman herself—I was sure she had moved—but as I peered closer, I realized I was mistaken. Once again I backed away, retreating into deeper shadow. Without doubt, I was afraid of the monster who had possessed his victim. As before in the underground car park, a nebulous shape, a configuration that was transparent, was slowly evolving into something recognizable, and even in the darkness, and despite its limpid nature, I could tell it was Moker leaving the body.

The gauzy form thickened, took on more solidity, and began to arrange itself into something more human—except, of course, for the face. The body of flesh and bone beneath him was completely motionless, a lifeless corpse once more, as Moker continued to rise. There was no awkwardness to him now; his emergence was even graceful. I shrunk further back, almost passing through the glass of the shop door behind me. As I realized this I took another step backwards so that I was now on the other side of the glass, and inside the shop itself. There was the usual uncomfortable feeling for a nanosecond, a kind of claustrophobic thing followed by a sense of being at one with the glass, absorbed by its molecules, nothing overwhelming, just a natural transition spoilt only by the fear I had for the thing that was out there in the street.

The vision that was Moker stood upright in a fluid movement, and glanced back down at his victim. Although in shadow, he was clearly visible to me, not quite in solid form, but giving off a slight glow in the darkness. I wondered if I would look the same to him. In fact, his reappearance in this form caused me to wonder about his ability to float out-of-body. Was it the same ability that I possessed? It had to be—it could be nothing else. But he had left his physical self so quickly and effortlessly. Perhaps it was the very nature of the man himself that made it possible, the curse of loneliness giving time for the perfection of the pursuit of leaving his own body.

And what better incentive to leave his own wretched form than his own physical imperfection? What better motive than living as someone else for a little while, someone fit, attractive, wealthy—respected? (And in his twisted mind, who better to shame and humiliate—his victims the very type he had always envied, later wanting to destroy their faces and bodies to satisfy his own vengeful hatred of them? He despised them for the qualities that he, himself, had never possessed and so his final retribution on them was to render them in his own likeness by way of a chopper.)

How Moker had discovered he could leave his own body at will, there was no way of knowing, but there was no doubt he had developed the gift to a fine degree. And again, how he had learned to enter deceased bodies and possess them, there was also no way of knowing. But he did work in an environment of corpses, in a mortuary.

My conclusion was that Moker had put in the hours. To me, the OBE was an occasional habit; to Moker, it was both a release and a means of revenge. He’d obviously become adept at it.

His dimly luminous shape remained immobile as he continued to look down at his poor victim. Then he shifted and looked about him. For a tense moment I thought he might discover me hiding in the shop but, although his eyes lingered for a long second on the shop’s doorway, his attention moved on.

After a while, he himself moved on and, for a reckless moment, I wanted to chase after him. I wanted to destroy him. I wanted to prevent him from doing this same thing ever again. But he terrified me and I held back. Besides, I didn’t know if I could make contact with him in our state of being. That was my excuse anyway.

I did have another idea though.

Moker had long departed before I ventured out of the shop. Before crossing the street to the doorway where the urine-sodden woman was sprawled, I checked to my right, making sure the killer wasn’t about to reappear. I waited nervously, ready to flee. The street was empty. I crossed over.

I examined the dead woman, checking that she hadn’t, by some miracle, started breathing again. No, she really was dead.

I wondered if her killer’s plan was to return in his car using his physical form then mutilate the body here, where it was dark and quiet, with little chance of being disturbed. Maybe that was how he always did it: kill, possess, leave the dead victim somewhere isolated, return and chop it; or maybe he would load the corpse into his car and take it elsewhere to mutilate. Whatever, I knew the nightmare wasn’t over, that he’d be coming back to finish the job, and that I didn’t have much time.

I wondered if I could pull it off.

After studying her for a few moments—her lip was cut, her cheekbones black with dirt from the undersoles of the three Arabs’ shoes when they’d kicked her, her previously smart business suit drenched with blood and piss—I squatted down next to her (I suppose in some way I was trying to get the feel of her). I squeezed into the gap (yeah, no need to squeeze in my form, but I did anyway) behind her on the step and, taking a deep pointless breath, I melted into her.

And it worked, I seemed to fit.

But only seconds after I was enveloped by her flesh, the fading memories rushed at me. I experienced her life, just flashes, only moments in time, but it seemed to cover everything, from birth to death. I guess even after death, a residue of precious life remains in the brain and even in the flesh of the body. Like those old radios and televisions whose energy faded rather than stopped immediately when switched off, so this was an ebbing of power rather than a complete cut-off. Now, it seemed to me as I immersed myself into this cooling corpse, energies—at least, her memories—lingered in the substance of her form.

My own mind sapped up the remains of the woman’s lifetime experiences. It wasn’t focused enough to be overwhelming, but it was startling.

Images, sensations, thoughts: they poured through me.

A huge bright red ball with yellow spots, bigger than me, the observer, it seemed; absolute joy—a man, somewhere in his early thirties, I thought, although he seemed very old, giggling as he pushed me on a swing; it was a long time ago and this was my father and I was his little daughter (there was no question, no mystery, it was just as it was), and wonderful happiness spread through me, but it quickly left, a harsh sadness taking its place as the man was gone—a woman now, an unhappy strict woman, pleasant face, yet a severity to her eyes; mother, the dead woman’s mother, and there was love, but it was not the same as before; the woman was older, grey-haired, and she was angry, raising her voice, at me, and dislike weighed heavily on the love; but it seemed that in death, my death, forgiveness was granted and I ached with longing—still pining, the regret of having lost my father so many years ago—

Although I was experiencing the remnants of the dead woman’s memories, my own feelings continued to intrude, for my own mind was ensconced in this host of flesh and stilled blood, and I wondered if Primrose would mourn me for years to come. An image of my father came to me too, but he was like a stranger.

—a slim pink doll, a Barbie or a Wendy (the resolution was not clear enough)—a puppy dog, me calling its name: Rumbo—a boy, a surge of love here—the sea, a wonderful calm sea that was green then blue—a jolt, an accident of some kind, an arm in pain, soon gone—guilt, guilt, guilt, more sorrow, visions of a man, an indistinct person, a woman behind him, and I knew that he was my lover and the woman was his wife, deep, deep grief, a terrible wrench of emotions, the affair soon over—the sea again, beautifully warm and calm—

I soaked up tiny segments of the victim’s life just before they faded, before they finally left the storehouse of flesh, bone and tissue.

—the mother again, love still present, but also a stronger dislike—bad times, black times, it all came to me, some moments witnessed as through a kaleidoscope, while others were individual and sharply defined, some fleeting, others lasting mere seconds that felt like long periods—thoughts, energies, flowed through, but fading, fading all the time, dwindling, waning, as if growing weary themselves—now an office, a workplace; computer screens, faces, mixed emotions, snap visions that somehow were complete—an apartment, simply but tastefully furnished, a warmth for that place, and now a black-and-white cat called Tibbles—people, friends—leaving the office—

And then it all changed: darkness entered, slowly at first until it was almost absolute; it brought with it fear…

—and terror, heart-freezing terror—a lonely walk down into shadows, a sense of danger—the car, very near the car—shambling footsteps from behind—all these last sounds and images felt with a resurgence of power—pain, terrible pain and screaming fear!—the darkness strong, peaking before starting to drain away—fading, wasting away—until there was only light…

Inside her, I reeled under the pressure of it all, some of her terror left with me. I willed myself to be calm, aware that if those last sensations had gone on any longer I would have fled the cold flesh that now bound me. I felt myself trembling, even though that wasn’t possible. Her death had been horrible and the suffering had continued even after the heart had stopped.

I steadied myself. I was in a void; nothing else of the woman was left. The body was without any trace of its previous owner.

It was time for me to subjugate it. I prayed for it to be possible.

I settled my mind and it was surprisingly easy to do. Despite everything I’d been witness to that night, despite my fear and anxiety, I soothed my own consciousness by repeating the exercise I had used to travel outside my own body.

Deep, deep breaths (pretend breaths now, obviously), long, long exhalations. Addressing each part of my non-physical form, starting with the absent toes and moving up my non-existent legs, then invisible groin, working my way through my impalpable belly, chest, shoulders, arms right to my indiscernible head, willing them all to relax. Then, instead of commanding myself to move out of my physical form (usually by concentrating on one specific spot near the ceiling of whatever room I was in—mostly the bedroom—and willing my inner self to go there), I forced myself to become part of the vessel I now inhabited. That in life I’d been much bigger than the unfortunate woman seemed to make no difference—I still had to “fill out” her human shape. I felt myself flow into her, strangely expanding rather than shrinking, sensing myself into her muscles and bones and organs. Occasionally, a fragment of her memory would return, but always too weak to linger.

My fingers slipped into hers. My stomach and chest moulded themselves to the inner side of her skin. Bit by bit I took over her shape, feeling my way in, and suffering no discomfort as I did so. Earlier, it had taken Moker practically no time at all to possess his victim, but he’d had more practice than I. Briefly I wondered if this was how demons possessed certain afflicted human beings (I’d never believed in demonic possession before, but these days I’m more susceptible to all manner of possibilities).

Once I felt myself totally absorbed, I endeavoured to move her right hand. I slipped out of her.

Drawing my own hand back again and sliding into her fingers as though they were the digits of a glove, I took more deep breaths and concentrated even harder, thinking of myself as at one with her.

Her hand shifted just a little.

Eventually, taking over the dead woman’s body proved relatively easy (although controlling it was much more difficult). It was a matter of “thinking” myself into what was in essence a vacated property, a kind of Zen thing, if you like. As I mentioned before, it was a matter of being “at one with her”, not quite taking over the lifeless flesh and blood, but becoming part of it; not wearing it, but being it. Because I’d had practice at projecting my inner self to other places outside my “shell”, it wasn’t that difficult for me to project myself into the other person’s body. Difficult to explain, and not that easy to do; but if you already had the knack, it helped.

Now being inside, “fitting” the new body, was all well and good, but getting it to obey my will was something else. I got used to moving the right hand first, then the arm up to the elbow. Getting a reaction from the rest of the body was a little harder, but perseverance paid off. Remember, I was still very shaken, so it took a lot of effort just to calm myself; controlling somebody else’s body needed full concentration. It came though, the ability to govern came gradually at first, and then with a rush. The trick was not to try too hard but to relax and just sink into it.

Sitting up wasn’t so bad, although the alien body felt heavy and cumbersome, but rising to my feet was almost impossible. You see, living inside your own body, adapting to its growth over the years, you’re not aware of its weight so much, but occupying somebody else’s is like trying on a suit of armour—armour that’s made out of lead. You have to get used to it, and even then motion is awkward. Moker had obviously become skilled at it with practice, but even when he had possessed the woman’s corpse, movement had been a little stiff and graceless.

First problem, though, was vision. Everything was blurred through the victim’s eyes and I remembered she had worn glasses, which were now missing, obviously knocked off dining the vicious attack by the scummy threesome. I used both clumsy hands to feel around the concrete step and, although the fingertips were numb, I felt something move. It took a little while to pick up the glasses—it was like wearing thick gloves without individual fingers—and I dropped them more than once. Eventually, I got them over the nose and managed to fumble the side arms through the hair and over the ears. One of the lenses had cracked, but vision improved, not as much as I had hoped, but enough to enable me to find my way around.

I was a mere novice, but I was determined to succeed. I had a plan.

Using the brick wall of the recessed doorway for support and balance, I slowly hauled myself up, rising to my (her) knees first, raising one leg so shin and thigh were at right angles to each other, then, digging my (her) fingers into the indentations between bricks for extra support, I used all my willpower and the woman’s waning strength to stand. (Fortunately for me, she had lost her shoes in the fracas with the three men, so I didn’t have to worry about high heels.) I made it, but instantly fell back against the metal door where I stayed for several minutes, legs spread and firmly rooted to the wide doorstep, the rest of me (her) trembling. With a whole lot of effort, I managed to adjust the woman’s clothing, dragging up panties and hose, buttoning (almost impossible, this, but I persevered) the jacket.

I felt dizzy, as though I was too high off the ground, the feeling you get when you ride a bike or climb onto a horse for the first time. And when I pushed myself away from the door and tried to walk, my legs felt like long stilts.

I fell off the step and had to go through the whole process of rising once again. It was almost but not quite like learning to walk for the first time (I suppose an amputee who has been given prosthetic legs must go through a similar procedure) and, believe me, it wasn’t easy. I stumbled and fell twice more before I reached the street junction.

However, although my gait was clumsy and somewhat perilous, my arms waving in the air for balance, I soon began to get used to walking. By the time I reached the main thoroughfare of Queensway, I resembled only a hopeless drunk.

The journey through the London streets was horrendous. Luckily it was late night, and once I’d moved out of the Queensway area, the sidestreets became darker again and virtually deserted. The few people who did pass me by must have thought I was either drunk or drugged by the way I lurched along and used walls where I could for support. Heads turned, a few people crossed over to the other side of the street before they reached me. A group of young guys laughed at me, yelling insults and suggestions of what we all might do together, but they soon lost interest and went on their way when I ignored them.

One person, an elderly, scruffily dressed man, approached me and asked if I was all right and if he could assist me in any way. I don’t know whether it was my blood-drenched clothes, my battered face, the stench of urine coming from me, or the way I babbled and gurgled as I attempted to reply, that deterred him. Possibly—probably—it was all of these things. He backed off and I stumbled onwards.

It was quite a hike and I wasn’t sure I was going to make it. When the body dies it doesn’t take muscles long to start atrophying, so I was becoming weaker by the minute. The fact that blood had stopped coursing through the arteries was neither here nor there—I wasn’t alive, so I didn’t need it—but the fact that it was settling into my lower legs and feet made it feel as if I were wearing lead boots. Also, the increasing coldness was rendering the corpse ever more stiff. By the time I reached the police station I was moving like Frankenstein’s monster.

All through the journey I had been trying to speak, something that brought me extra stares from infrequent (fortunately) passers-by. To them, not only was I drunk and dishevelled, but I was crazy also.

The idea was to be able to talk coherently when I got to my destination: I had a tale to tell and a name to name. This was an extra hurdle though, and far more difficult than making the body walk. It took a while to produce any noise at all, and then it was only a raspy whispering which sounded something like “Unurrrrgahh”. Not very good, but the best I could do to start with.

I kept trying to pronounce certain words, simple ones at first—“cat, sat, mat”, that kind of thing, but all that came out was: “ca, sa, ma”. I persisted though, struggling to walk, striving to talk. And although in my out-of-body state I had lost all sense of physical feeling (passing through walls and the like were mental sensations), I felt a distinct chill enveloping me. It was like wearing a heavy suit that had been left outside on a frigid winter’s night. How long before rigor mortis started to take over? I wondered. Usually it started about forty-five minutes to an hour after death, I seemed to remember from somewhere.

I plodded on, sliding a hand along walls for balance, hanging on to lamp posts along the way, summoning up extra willpower to cross roads where there was nothing to grab hold of should my knees buckle, unable to avoid traffic (mercifully, there was very little), so forcing myself to stand stock-still while cars and the occasional bus manoeuvred around me instead. Abuse was hurled at me, horns were tooted, but I was oblivious. I only had one thing in mind and that was to reach my goal before flesh and bone gave up.

Having lived in the city all my life, I knew where to find the local police station and my mind was sharp enough to recognize roads and streets. How long I’d been travelling, I had no idea: it could have been an hour or only half an hour. Whatever, the effort was draining my resolve.

I saw a big flyover up ahead and it gave me hope, because it meant I was close. For a short while my rambling gait—somewhere between Liam Gallagher’s swagger and Ozzy Osbourne’s shuffle—actually quickened, but it couldn’t last long. Against my will, I slowed down and one foot began to drag. And then I saw the building I was looking for in the distance and the sight of it gave me fresh determination. I stepped off the kerb, almost tripping in my sudden haste, but managed to recover before falling; it was a particularly ungainly moment, my arms bending in all sorts of ways. Someone whistled at me, then laughed, but no one came to my aid, and perhaps that was a good thing.

Still attracting curious stares (there were a few more people on this main road) I stomped ungracefully towards my goal. Reaching the other side, I had difficulty in raising a foot to mount the pavement. My toenail scraped the kerbstone to find the higher level and I leaned forward so that my weight was on that leg, then dragged my other foot after the first. It didn’t work out so well—I lost my balance and toppled over onto the pavement. Luckily, I didn’t go all the way down, ending up sitting on the ground, one hand against the stone, my legs spread sideways, knees bent. I remained in that position for a minute or two, trying to regain my composure and psyching myself for the effort it would now take to get me on my feet again.

That was when I caught sight of the last thing in the world that I wanted to see.

Coming towards me on the opposite side of the road was Moker’s old beat-up Hillman, its sidelights shining like warning beacons. I knew whose shadowy figure was behind the wheel and I groaned. With the groan I swore out loud and at least the word was fairly coherent (to my own ears at least).

Moker obviously hadn’t seen me, for the vehicle was coming straight ahead without slowing. Now instinct should have made me hide my face, maybe roll myself into an inconspicuous ball, but making somebody else’s body react sharply was not so easy. For some reason I ended up on all fours like a dog, my head raised and facing towards the approaching car.

Moker hit the brakes as soon as he saw me and in that instant I realized that he’d been cruising the neighbourhood searching for me. He must have collected his car from the car park (no doubt using the quiet side EXIT/ENTRANCE to reach it) and returned to the secluded cul-de-sac where he had left the woman’s battered corpse to find it gone. What a shock that must have been for him.

So he’d come looking for his prize, perhaps wondering if the Arabs had carried it off—or perhaps even suspecting another spirit had somehow stolen his right. And now his search had proved successful. He’d spotted me. And I was helpless.

32

I struggled to get to my feet again (okay, it was the dead woman’s feet, but to keep on mentioning that gets tedious) but could only fumble around on the pavement, my legs becoming stubbornly obstinate. The Hillman, which had not been travelling very fast in the first place, slid to a halt. Masked by hat and scarf, Moker looked out the side window at me.

I scrambled around in panic, but my legs refused to obey me. Each time I attempted to bend a knee the leg declined to fold. Moker was looking about, no doubt making sure the coast was clear for him to bundle me into the boot of the car, when an Audi arrived behind him. The irritated driver tooted his horn and yelled at the obstacle in his way, and Moker looked back at him; either surprise or anger might have been on his face if he’d had a face. He unwound his side window, not a speedy process in the old Hillman, and indicated for the other driver to go around him, but fortunately for me, the guy was the obstreperous kind and saw no reason why he should have to go out of his way to avoid another vehicle that was wrongly parked in the middle of the road (it was a very wide road, but that wasn’t the point). He continued to thump his horn and swear at Moker.

Moker had obviously decided that it would be easier to move than engage in a haranguing match, because he drove on, pulling into the kerb on his side of the road. I took the opportunity to try to get up again, but without much joy: my legs kept collapsing each time I tried to kneel. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Moker starting the first move of a three-point turn and I groaned in frustration.

Suddenly, I was gripped under the arms by strong hands and hauled to my unsteady feet. A big woman with butch, short blonde hair and no make-up came around from behind me, one hand hanging onto my arm to prevent me from falling again. She wore a dark jacket with dark slacks, the collar of a pale-blue shirt spread over the neck and lapels of the jacket, its long tips pointing towards the nipples of wide and ample breasts.

“You all right, dear?” I heard her ask in a surprisingly high voice given the masculinity of her build. Her only adornments, I saw, were a pair of large, round and dangly earrings.

“Muh… ma… yeh-es,” I managed to reply.

Although her face began to waver in front of me, my vision beginning to fail, I still caught the look of disgust she gave me when she noticed my state and smelled the blood and urine (and other stuff!) on my clothes. She began to back away, not through fear, I guessed, but from revulsion. I was aware that I was not a pretty sight, nor very well perfumed, but I held up a pleading hand to her anyway. She continued to back off and I couldn’t blame her: I wasn’t the finest figure to come face to face with, especially at that hour (well, any hour, really).

“Hel… hel… me…” I muttered, but it was no good; she turned on her heel (sensible brogues, actually) and walked away from me.

More beeping of horns sounded and I slowly craned my neck to look back at Moker. Seemed he’d become a nuisance to other drivers, for he was sideways across the road, blocking the paths of two more vehicles, one of them a late-night bus. They were causing quite a racket, although the noise suddenly dwindled in my borrowed ears. Oh shit, now my hearing was going.

I began to walk, following the big woman who’d just become a blur in the distance by now. She soon passed the front entrance of the police station I was aiming for, and I thought it a pity that she hadn’t popped inside to report a battered madwoman on the loose.

I moved one foot in front of the other, one in front of the other, one in front of the other, concentrating hard as I tried to say the words.

“Un… an… funt… of… udder…” Practising all the way, forcing my stiff legs to move. “Un… in… funt… o… udder… one… in… front… of… udder…”

I repeated it all the way until it began to sound like a chant. A red bus passed me, the bus Moker had held up, then a car, and I knew it would not be long before he came alongside me like some kerb-crawling creep. I tried to hasten my step, but almost tumbled over with the extra effort. Take it easy, I told myself, think hard, one foot in front of the other, but don’t rush it. Not far to go… oh God, so why did it seem such a long way away?

“One… in… front… of… udder…” Bloody hell!

Soon there though. Not that far. Where was Moker? I wasn’t going to look. To look meant stopping and forcing my head round. Would take too long. Besides, eyes becoming too blurred. Halos around streetlamps. Cold, bloody cold inside this refrigerated carcass. Almost there, I think.

I was speaking as I went, keeping up the practice because if I couldn’t talk coherently once inside the police station, then this whole mission was pointless.

Uh-oh. Car coming up from behind. I knew who it was without looking but, as it would only take a sideways glance, I looked anyway. I thought I could hear the sinews and bones of my neck grinding against each other.

There was Moker, wide-set bulging eyes gazing out at me from the open side window. I couldn’t be sure if it was surprise or panic in those frightening eyes. Maybe a mixture of both. I swerved aside, because I realized that if I could see his eyes so clearly, then I was too close to him. A big hand came out of the window to grab at me, but I’d just about put enough distance between us.

What must he be thinking? That he hadn’t entirely finished the woman off? But surely the beating from the Arabs should have completed the job? Or could he penetrate the hide of flesh and see me beneath it? He had, after all, seemed to sense my presence before.

No time for me to ponder such things. He was drawing the crawling car to a halt. Beginning to open the driver’s door…

But I was there, I was outside the entrance to the police station. Oh no, steps to climb! Two sets of steps to climb!

I called on every last ounce of willpower I had left. Had to make it, had to climb. One—step, two—step… Was he behind me? Oh God, he had to be. It would only take a moment to leave the car and run across the pavement, catch hold of me before I’d even climbed the third step.

“Fee—feb…” I said aloud, expecting to feel rough hands on me, hands that would drag me away, back into the Hillman, the back seat or the boot.

“Four—feb…”

Why couldn’t I feel his touch? Why was he taking so long?

“Fife—feb…”

More steps, at the bend, keep going, one step, two step, three, four, keep climbing, pull on the rail, lift one leg after the other… God, so heavy, filled with quick-drying cement… but keep on, not far, not so far—

I was there, I was at the top! I swayed in surprise. The double doors were in front of me, although the light shining from inside was getting dimmer. I knew that it was not the fault of the lights themselves, but because the eyes I was using were gradually closing down. I noticed a shadow inside, a man with a huge elongated black head and I suddenly understood why Moker hadn’t left his car to come after me: it was a policeman wearing a helmet, standing on the other side of the glass, and he was pulling one side of the door open for me. He must have watched my stumbling ascent of the stairs and my pursuer had noticed him at the last minute. Moker had probably driven off before I’d even reached the last step.

The policeman—God bless his pointed head!—was waving me through and inspecting me more closely. I was aware of him snapping his head and shoulders back sharply, no doubt because of my unpleasant odour.

His voice was muffled because of my growing deafness, but I heard him call out “Visitor for you, Sarge!”

I fell against him, and I think his reaction was to push me away, but a sense of duty prevailed. A strong hand gripped my arm and I heard him say as if from another room: “Christ, what happened to you?”

I was too busy preparing the words I was about to speak to answer his question. Regaining my balance, I lumbered away from him towards the front desk counter where I could just make out the top half of that night’s duty officer.

I collapsed against the counter and said, “Fumbod… murded… moo…”

33

I didn’t have much left to give.

The body was growing heavier and colder. The knees were buckling. The sight was fading. I heard only white sound in the ears, and then nothing. The chin was sagging, the eyelids drooping, starting to close. There was precious little time left and so I summoned all the will I had, which wasn’t much.

I said to the duty officer: “I wish… to… rep… report a murded—a murder. Mine. The… killer… is called… Al… Alec… Moker. He murded—murdered… the others… too…”

Then the woman’s body gave out.

34

I’d left her lying on the floor of the police station’s long, brightly lit reception area, surrounded by uniformed men and women, one of whom—the duty officer himself—was trying to resuscitate the corpse with mouth-to-mouth and heart massaging. No point in hanging around as far as I was concerned: I’d given them the murderer’s name, and I only hoped they’d understand what I’d said. Bit of a waste, otherwise.

Leaving the body was far easier than entering it. I just kind of pulled myself from it, picturing myself somewhere near the room’s ceiling, the way I used to when going out of body. Instantly, I was away from the still woman, looking down at the scene from a corner. I didn’t linger. The woman was well and truly dead and there was no way they were going to bring her back.

I pictured Moker’s rotten dingy flat and in a flash I was through the police station’s wall and gliding across town towards Shepherd’s Bush. In no time at all, it seemed, I was there, floating down the basement steps and passing through the paint-chipped front-door.

The place was empty, but something told me I would not have to wait long. And I was right. I’d already scouted the grubby rooms again, looking for I don’t know what, just curious, I guess, as to how this monster lived. Most of the food in the dirty kitchen was in tins, the rest in packages. A well-worn food blender stood on the small counter by the sink. There were no photographs anywhere, which may have been reasonable as far as Moker was concerned—would he really want to look at mug shots of himself?—but there also were none of family or friends (friends? Was it likely? Maybe it was a little cruel of me to think so, but I thought he could only be an outcast, a pariah). There was a calendar on the kitchen wall, and a date was ringed on that month’s page. Although I’d lost track of the days, I was fairly certain that it was today’s date that had been marked—it seemed about right—and I wondered whether, if I had the power to turn back the leaves of the flip-over calendar, I’d find other murder dates indicated. I felt sure I would. The interesting thing was that no other date in that month was ringed, which seemed to me to be further evidence that Moker was not the one who had recently killed me.

Scuffling footsteps outside on the steps, and I knew the beast had returned to its unwholesome lair. I sank back into the darkest shadow I could find.

A key scraped into the lock, the door swung open with a tired creak, and the slouched black shape that was Moker entered. Disgusting snufflings came from behind the thick woollen mask as if he’d had to walk or run some distance from his car and was out of breath. He slammed the door shut behind him and leaned back against it, his chest heaving as he fought to calm himself. Had I managed to panic him? When he saw his victim lumbering into the police station had he realized somebody else had taken over her body? I was sure he had caught sight of me in the car park when he was in the out-of-body state and before entering his dead victim; yet he hadn’t seen me when I was first inside this flat, although he had seemed to sense my presence. So did that mean he could only see me when he, himself, was out of body? Maybe I’d soon find out.

Slowly the serial killer unwound his scarf and dropped it to the floor. His trilby hat followed and, once again, his true horror was exposed to me, the hole in his face deep but, at least, shaded. If anything, the aura around him had increased both in foulness of colour and malevolence. A strange mewing sound came from him as if he were trying to express himself and it grew in volume as he advanced towards me, swinging his arms in front of him, hands grabbing at the air.

I cringed away from him, confused by his attack, now unsure whether he could see me or not. But he stopped short, his head turning towards the opposite corner. He went for it, arms flailing, and gave out a hollow and ill-formed kind of roar when his fingertips felt nothing but the air itself. Nevertheless, I dodged around the table with its untidy heap of newspapers and cuttings, keeping it between us.

Moker shuffled through to the kitchen area, turning on its light as he entered. A few seconds later he was out again, turning a sharp right and bursting into the bedroom. The light came on and I could hear him raging and throwing objects about. That he was searching for me, I had no doubt, and I only felt slight relief in the knowledge that he could sense me but still not see me. Storming out of the bedroom, he came to an unsteady halt on the opposite side of the table, his grotesque head continuing to point this way and that. A couple of times he stared so forcibly towards me that I was sure I was visible, but on each occasion his attention was quickly diverted elsewhere.

The grim aura around him seemed to bristle with small shards of angry brightness, like sparks from bare cable. His chest rose and fell, and his sore, husky breathing was distressed, as if he were about to sob; drool and spittle glistened at the ravaged edges of his facial malformation. Finally, his body movement—the twitching of his arms, the heaving of his upper body, the restlessness of his head—ceased and he stared down at the littered tabletop.

A step forward brought him to the edge of the table, and he leaned over it to begin searching through the newspapers, knocking some of them onto the floor with violent sweeps of his arms, rummaging through the remainder for something specific. He soon found what he was looking for.

It was the news story of my murder, naming me as another suspected victim of the current serial killer. He stared at the black-and-white picture of me; then at the smaller one featuring Andrea and Oliver, with Primrose in the background. The first finger of his hand found the thick, pencilled underlining. Even though the type was upside down to me, I knew exactly what was underlined. Obviously, the newspaper didn’t give my complete address, just the general location: south Woodford.

Moker went to the tall cupboard set against a wall, his breathing still hoarse, his chest still exerting itself. The cupboard had an old-fashioned swivel catch that he flicked upright with a finger and the door all but burst open, a jumble of papers and detritus tumbling out in a mini-landslide. He dug his beefy hands into the pile that remained inside and dragged out two large telephone directories that were at the bottom of the heap. I saw that one was a London listings while the other one was a Yellow Pages. Both were in well-thumbed condition, and I wondered why Moker would have them. There was no telephone in the flat, and even if there were, Moker would have been unable to use it. He couldn’t talk, he could only make noises.

He brought the London book back to the table and set it down, swinging the angle-poise lamp over it and switching on the light. If I’d been my normal self, I’m sure I would have broken out in a sweat when he began thumbing through the pages, because I knew what he was looking for. Moker had probably stolen the directories from a neighbour’s doorstep, a common enough occurrence in blocks of flats where British Telecom just dumped the listings outside people’s homes, but it didn’t explain why he needed them. It had to be that he used them only for looking up addresses, as he was now.

I watched in dismay as he reached the Ts and I wanted to tear the book from his hands, and rip it to shreds with my own. He ceased leafing through and began running down the names. His finger slowed, moved more deliberately, came to a stop. I saw my own name under his fingertip.

That was when we both heard a car screech to a halt on the road outside. Then another car, coming to a swift halt, tyres squealing. Doors slamming. Heavy hurrying footsteps…

35

I had to admit it, Moker was no slouch when it came to running away. Oh, his movement was clumsy, his stride more lumbering than graceful, but his getaway was fast. We’d both heard the footsteps outside growing louder on the pavement, and even as they reached the stairway leading down to the basement flat, Moker was pulling on his scarf and hat, winding the former around his ruined face like a mask and snapping the hat’s brim down to shade his eyes. The heavy raincoat came next, shrugging it on, none of these procedures taking more than a few seconds.

There were moving shadows outside the grimy window as he tore a page from the telephone book and folded it. He was shoving the page into his raincoat pocket as he made for the door leading into the small kitchen. Heavy banging on the front door now, voices announcing, “Police—open up!”

I clenched my fist and hissed, “Yes!” as I saw more legs descending the outside steps, but when I looked towards Moker he’d gone. I went after him, running myself even though I could have just glided along, and was in time to see him disappear out the kitchen’s back door. More banging on the front door, the lock being rattled. The voice again: “Open up! Police!”

If only I could let them in, I thought to myself, hovering between front room and kitchen. If only… Silly to think about impossibilities. I had to make up my mind what to do next: follow Moker, or wait for the police to break the door down? Back at the police station, they’d obviously taken the “dying” woman’s last words seriously. I/she had given them the name of her attacker/killer, her appearance giving the words credibility. When they discovered the leaking wound to her heart, the knitting needle still in place, they would have been bound to investigate. A swift computer check of the electoral roll would have soon provided Alec Moker’s address. That had been my plan and it seemed to have worked. At least I’d caught their attention.

But now Moker was fleeing and for the moment I’d lost sight of him. I sped through the grubby kitchen and out the back door where there was a small concrete yard full of junk—a rust-stained fridge, cardboard boxes, a piece of rolled-up lino, just the normal throw-aways that mount up when communal flat dwellers find it too much bother to dispose of their bits and pieces legitimately. Moker was just disappearing over a five-foot-high wall at the end of the yard.

I knew where he was going and it filled me with horror.

I followed him over the wall to find myself in a secluded church garden, a small and neatly kept oasis with trees, shrubbery, flowerbeds and a trivial amount of flat lawn. It was surrounded on all sides by tall buildings, old houses probably converted into flats, and the rear edifice of the church itself, its spire looming over all, a mocking finger that pointed heavenwards—mocking to me, that is. Moker was galloping along a narrow flagstone path with that peculiar gait of his, ducking into the passage between church wall and thick shrubbery. When I reached it I saw a single tall gate at the far end which Moker was just shuffling through. I cursed the gate for not being locked.

A streetlamp lit up his slouched figure as he turned to his right. Then he was gone and I moved swiftly to catch up. Through the shadowed passageway I went and I was soon out into the light of a broad but quiet road that must have run parallel to the one in which Moker’s flat was situated. Vehicles were parked along either side and I noticed the old Hillman among them: Moker was standing beside it, fumbling in his raincoat pocket for the keys. Presumably he always parked some distance from his home for reasons of his own, or there had been no empty spaces nearer to his flat. Tonight it had been Moker’s good fortune that parking in central London was always a problem.

He found his car keys and unlocked the Hillman’s door, although it took him a couple of attempts to guide the key in. His nervous excitement—excitement of the unpleasant kind—was evident in his aura, for under a nearby street light the weird halo was still sparkling, but now short explosions of greyish light flew from it. There were also new colours in the aura, which, until now, had remained malevolently dark apart from the earlier angry eruptions. Mauve and deep blue were the main hues present, although red blushed through them all at irregular intervals. None of these shades was vivid though, all were somehow muddied, impure, foul-looking.

By the time I had reached him he was sitting inside the car with the page torn from the telephone directory held before him at an angle so that it caught the light from outside (presumably the Hillman either had no interior light, or it was broken—or Moker wasn’t risking being spotted). I peered through the side window and saw his finger moving down the Ts again.

He was looking up my address once more.

I could have hitched a ride with him, but I wanted to reach my house first. I had no idea of how I would warn Andrea that an unexpected—and very unwelcome—guest was on the way; my only thought was to be there before he arrived.

It seemed that Moker had always sensed my presence, but it was only when he, too, was in the out-of-body state that he could see me. It may have been for a brief moment, but Moker had known my face earlier, and later, back at his flat, he had checked it out with the newspaper photograph. Now he was on the way to my home; his mission…? To extract some distorted idea of revenge? To punish me for telling the police the identity of the woman’s attacker which, hopefully, and without too much brainwork, would connect him to the other serial murders? Or because I was the only one who knew of his special powers? It didn’t matter which—he was a sick madman and he was going after my family.

I willed myself through the empty streets and roads, taking long, low leaps so that I was almost flying, pushing myself off the ground with my hands each time I sank, just as I had in dreams. The chill inside me had nothing to do with temperature; it was because of the fear that gripped my soul. I wanted to scream in frustration, wanted to confront Moker before he reached my house, but all I could do was propel myself along and pray that Andrea wasn’t home, that she’d taken Primrose to a friend or relative just to be away from the newshounds and even well-wishers who might mistake interference for sympathy. Yet somehow I knew she would not leave home if only for Prim’s sake; our daughter would need familiar things around her, for when life is upheaved by tragedy, a small comfort can be taken from the familiar, from the things you know and feel comfortable with—things that are still there. Prim would need time to adapt and, more importantly, to accept, and taking her away would not help. No, Andrea would not leave our home with Primrose; not for a while, anyway. I just hoped my wife had locked all doors and windows before she went to bed tonight.

My journey seemed to be taking forever, although I knew I was making good progress. There was hardly any traffic around—not that it would have bothered me—and the pavements were deserted save for some lonely nightworker or two or revelled-out revellers. I had no idea at all of the time, but I could see that most of the houses and all of the shops and offices were in darkness.

I remembered the number of times I’d chastized Andrea for leaving a window, upstairs or downstairs, slightly ajar, or the back door locked but unbolted, and I prayed that my absence would spur her to take proper precautions. She must be feeling vulnerable without me and that thought only emphasized how useless I would be to her now.

At last—at long, long last—I was gliding up the road leading home. And despite the late hour, the lights were still on.

I paused at the gate. Oliver’s silver BMW was parked at the kerbside and I didn’t know whether to feel elated or angry. At least Andrea and Prim were not alone. But why should Oliver be here at this hour?

Maybe Moker would do me a favour and murder him.

I quickly pushed such worthless thoughts from my mind. Even if Oliver had killed me, pretending it was the work of another, he would be able to protect my wife and daughter. And it was my daughter I cared about most.

I passed through the gate and went up the path to the front door. I took a deep and unnecessary breath before moving through it.

I could hear their voices coming from the lounge—Oliver’s and Andrea’s—speaking low so all I could hear from where I waited in the hall were murmurings. The lounge door was open and, foolishly, I was tempted to linger outside and eavesdrop, as if I might be seen should I enter the room. I rebuked myself before slipping through the doorway.

They were together on the sofa. My best friend and my wife. Close, inclined towards each other, knees almost touching, Oliver with a casual arm over the back of the sofa, Andrea leaning sideways towards him, her hand on his knee. She was gazing into his face, but his eyes were cast downwards, focused on the small space between them.

Andrea wore one of my old high-necked FCUK coffee-coloured cardigans, unzipped over a black exercise vest and charcoal grey sweatpants. Her feet were bare on the plush carpet.* Oliver was dressed as if having only just returned from the office: light twill trousers, loose beige jacket over a burgundy sweatshirt. His brown ankle boots were suede.

*Even at the time I wondered why I noticed such irrelevant details and realized that since I’d left the dead woman’s body everything had become more clearly defined, my already enhanced perceptions now heightened to an incredible degree. I guess death and danger will do that whatever your state of existence.

Anger boiled inside me, but I had the sudden urge to see Primrose, check on her, make sure she was safe and sound. I left the room and took to the stairs, climbing them as if I were a normal human being rather than a lost spectre.

The door to her bedroom was partially open—we never closed Prim’s bedroom door at night in case she should call out, stirred by some threatening dream. We also listened for wheezy breaths, a sign that one of her asthma attacks was about to start. I slid through the gap and foolishly tiptoed towards her narrow bunk bed as if I still had the power to disturb.

Her flower-patterned duvet was down almost to her waist, a sign of restless sleep or that the room was too warm. One little arm was bent so that her hand, and particularly her thumb, was near to her face; the other arm stretched down her side, the hand on top of a ruffled sheet. Her hair was curled around her cheek, almost hiding her profile. How I longed to lie down beside her and cuddle her.

A soft nightlight—a happy pink elephant lit up from inside—threw its comforting but limited glow into the room and, as if by habit, I checked the small gaily painted cabinet that stood next to the bed. Beneath the Winnie the Pooh lamp was her puffer. I remembered when the family doctor had first prescribed the Ventolin inhaler for Prim’s asthma, and how it broke my heart to watch her place it within easy reach on the bedside cabinet every night, as comforting to her—no, more so—as the white teddy bear, Snowy. You know, all children are precious, but your own are beyond value. To watch them suffer illness from time to time is a torment that most parents have to endure, but to know that the illness could be life-threatening, well, that’s sheer torture. Even the fact that asthma was a common malady among children these days—at least three other kids in her class were afflicted by it—made it no more tolerable.

I bent down to kiss her cheek, wishing I could draw back her curls with my fingers and, although I made no physical contact, she stirred in her sleep. Her head turned and her eyelids flickered for a moment, but never opened. The movement surprised me and I pulled back a few inches so that I could observe her. The restlessness did not last long; she soon returned to deep slumber, her narrow chest rising and sinking evenly. Her movement though had disturbed the blankets and the top half of a coloured photograph still in its frame was uncovered.

I closed my eyes to hold back the tears. Even though in the photo only my head and shoulders and the top of Prim’s head were in view, I knew which one it was. Andrea had taken the shot at least four years ago when I was pushing my daughter on a playground swing. I was laughing as I held the swing’s seat in which Prim was locked, ready to give it another almighty push so that she would sail “high into sky”, as she put it. Although most of her face remained concealed, I knew that she was laughing happily, only a tiny bit of fear—no, it was more excited apprehension—in her eyes, a long strand of hair—red in the sunshine—loose down her face, almost bisecting it. My increased sadness was both because I would never live such wonderful moments again and because Prim felt the need to have my picture in bed with her, like the inhaler, close at hand.

But then rage began to override my emotions. Oliver was to blame for my death; Oliver was the one who had lost my daughter her daddy; Oliver was the “friend” who’d stolen my wife. I stood up, blinded by tears that brimmed unshed in my incorporeal eyes, raging at the duplicity of it all. Oliver. We’d shared so many good times together, hard times too, building up the business, bouncing off each other with creative ideas, sharing either celebratory or consolatory drinks depending on whether accounts were won or lost. At times we’d been like brothers—no, probably closer than brothers, because there was no sibling rivalry between us—and we complemented each other as a team, he the garrulous but smooth and convincing talker who could charm clients as easily as he could charm women, and I, the quiet but plain-speaking one who was just a little shy in front of both clients and women. A great team with no jealousy between us, not a common thing where copywriter and art director are concerned, when invariably the politics of protectionism (towards ideas as well as status) raises its ugly head. Or so I had believed.

All those years, those good exciting years, he must have envied me for winning Andrea as my wife, even though he, himself, had ruined their previous relationship. Envied me so much that he had plotted to take her back for himself. All those years of deceit…

These black thoughts swept through me as I stood at my daughter’s bedside, the melancholy of a few moments ago overwhelmed by a boiling hatred against someone who had taken not only my wife, but my life also. With one last look at Prim, feeling a love for her that softened only the edges of my anger, I stole back out onto the landing. I heard Andrea’s voice as I came down the stairs.

“What do you expect of me, Oliver?” she was saying. “Jim has been dead for no more than a week and you think I can just dismiss him from my life?”

“I’m not suggesting you should, or even could, do that.” Oliver was talking in low, reasonable tones, the way he used to persuade clients our ad or campaign was great even if they themselves were not quite swept away by it. “But I want to end the deceit, Andrea. I want us to be together all the time.”

Oh, he wanted to end the deceit. Well that would be easy enough with me out of the way.

Andrea again, rising frustration in her voice. “You don’t understand how much I loved him, how I miss him now!”

Loved me? That was hard to get my head around. How could she betray me if she loved me so much?

“You loved us both, I accept that, Andrea. But be honest with yourself—you love me more. You always have.”

“You never made it easy for me. You would never leave me alone.”

“Jim and I had a thriving business partnership. I couldn’t just clear out, it wouldn’t have been fair to him.”

“Did you hear what you just said? You were screwing his wife and you thought it would be unfair to split up your business partnership? I can’t believe you ever saw things that way.”

Nor could I. Oliver wanted it all ways. He wanted my wife and he also wanted the success and revenue that our partnership brought him. Unbelievable.

“I couldn’t leave you, Andrea. I tried, I tried to forget about you and all we had together, but it wasn’t possible. I loved you too much then and I love you too much now!”

“Keep your voice down. I don’t want Prim to wake up. She’s been through enough already.”

Oliver spoke in a whisper, but by then I was close enough to hear. I was just outside the door.

“It’s because of Prim that we have to be together again,” he said.

His words were followed by a silence. I waited.

“It isn’t right for you to bring that up. Not now, not when I’m going through so much pain.” Andrea’s voice was quiet, but it wasn’t a whisper. I heard the sofa creak, as if one of them had changed position.

Oliver’s voice again, still in a whisper, but an edge of… what? Regret? Humility? Neither was really his style, yet there was a new tone to his words. Could have been sadness. “I know it’s too soon, but I do have a right. You know that.”

Another silence, longer this time and, still rooted to the spot outside the door, I imagined Andrea searching his face. Perhaps she, too, wondered what he was implying.

After a while, she said, equally as quietly: “It was the cruellest thing we did to Jim.”

Pointlessly, I held my breath. What could be more cruel than cheating on me all these years?

“It would have destroyed him if he’d known,” Oliver replied.

I began to feel that dreadful inner chill again. Where the hell were they going with this? What did Oliver mean? Surely nothing could hurt me more than their betrayal?

“You’re talking nonsense, Oliver. Even we don’t know for sure.”

“Stop kidding yourself. We checked out the dates a million times. Jim was overseas on a photographic job when she was conceived. The timing works out perfectly, but Jim just thought you’d given birth a little prematurely.”

What? What was he saying?

“We still can’t be certain.” It was a defensive protest.

“We’ve always known. Look at her hair—it’s the same shade of brown as mine. She’s even got my freckles around the side of her nose. Mine have faded over time, but a few are still there.”

It was true: Oliver had a small spattering of light freckles on his face, so light, in fact, that they were almost unnoticeable.

“But it’s her eyes that give her away. Oh, they’re like yours, but they’re more like mine. Each passing year she gets to resemble me more and more.”

“Stop it. I won’t listen! Now’s not the time.”

“The time has never been right, has it, Andrea? It was never the right time to tell Jim the truth.”

“I would never have left him. I would never have let it ruin our marriage.”

“Eventually you would have had no choice. And then Jim would have despised you.”

I heard Andrea sob. I half-collapsed against the wall, my shoulder sinking into it.

“Please don’t say any more.” Andrea’s sob escaped her.

“You—we—both have to face what has always been there between us, and it goes beyond mere love. It means responsibility, Andrea. Primrose is my daughter, and now I want to be a proper father to her.”

I was stunned. No, I was shocked, shattered. Completely. Nothing had ever hit me so hard. Not even when I discovered Andrea had been unfaithful to me all these years, or when I discovered my best friend was suspected of killing me. Even finding my own dead and mutilated body had not hit me in quite this way. Nothing that had gone before—in my whole life—had ever touched me like this. It wrenched the heart from me.

I sagged against the hall wall, broken, bent by the deepest despair I’d ever known. Next door, their conversation continued, but I was too numbed to take it in any more, my mind filling with images of my little Primrose, the one person in this world who gave me unconditional love, the light that countered all darkness, my daughter whom I loved above all others, above life itself. I sank to my knees and gave out a long moaning wail that no one could hear. If my tears had been a reality, they would have dampened the wall I rested my cheek against; if my strength had been real, I would have seriously harmed, if not killed, the man sitting beside my wife and speaking of the worst betrayal of all.

I don’t know how much time went by before their words began to register with me again, but eventually, they infiltrated the great fog of confusion and pain that had engulfed me.

Andrea was speaking. “Why do the police think you murdered Jim? Why you, Oliver?”

“Because I was the last person to see him alive. That person is usually the prime suspect in murder investigations especially when the police can cook up a motive. The Press certainly had a field day when I was taken in for questioning.”

“But why didn’t you tell the police?”

“What, that I came straight here after my argument with Jim at the hotel? That I was here making love to you?”

“That you were screwing me while my husband lay dead in a hotel room?”

“Making love, Andrea. Please don’t use that kind of language about what we have. And we were making love, the two of us, together. It’s always been mutual, hasn’t it?”

A brief silence followed before Oliver spoke again. “Besides, being here doesn’t mean I couldn’t have committed the crime beforehand, or I couldn’t have gone back to the hotel and killed him. I didn’t stay long, remember? You were worried Prim might wake up and find us both down here. Now I wish I had stayed, but the point is, I didn’t want to involve you in any scandal.”

“My husband was hacked to pieces and you were concerned about tarnishing my reputation?”

I heard a short humourless laugh from Andrea.

“Something like that,” said Oliver. “I don’t want to use you as an alibi either, especially as it might not help my case anyway. In fact, it might make it worse for me. I love you, Andrea. Surely you understand my reasons.”

The faint sound of weeping.

“And you love me.” It was a simple statement from Oliver. “You always have. You never stopped loving me, but you didn’t want to hurt Jim.”

“No, I didn’t want to hurt him, but I kept on seeing you.” She sounded bitter and cynical.

“Even when you married him nothing really changed between us.”

“I tried, I tried to forget about you. You were such a bastard to me and Jim was so caring.”

“I did my best to forget about us too, Andrea. I honestly wanted to stop loving you. Unfortunately, I couldn’t pretend for very long. I gave in to my true feelings. And eventually, so did you.”

“I couldn’t help myself. I missed you so much, despite your cruelty. I thought my love for you would fade in time, but it never did. I could only cope with my life by seeing you again. I should have been happy with Jim, and then Primrose, but it was never complete. Part of me was missing.”

“Then don’t let guilt spoil everything now.”

“Now that we’re both free? You honestly believe I can put my feelings to one side just because he’s gone? It isn’t possible. He was a good man, a loving husband and a wonderful father. He deserved more than that.”

“You have the right to be happy again, Andrea.” Ollie’s sincere client voice again.

“I would have been happy with Jim. I was happy with him.”

“But a moment ago you said something was missing from your life…”

“Because I still loved you? That was the missing ingredient I could have managed, Oliver. I’d have got by if only you’d kept away from me.”

“All those wonderful times we had together. You can’t ignore them, you can’t pretend they didn’t happen.”

“In hotel rooms, your car? In your flat? Sneaking around, telling lies. I despise them.”

“You gave yourself to me completely. You wanted me as much as I—”

“No!”

“—as much as I wanted you. We’re still in love with each other, don’t you see that?”

For a while there was no response. Then: “How can you be so callous? How can you say these things knowing my husband—your best friend—was brutally murdered only days ago?”

“Because I’m speaking honestly and you have to listen to me. Okay, we can give it a while, that’s probably for the best anyway. But I’m not going to let you get away from me again. We don’t have to live a lie anymore, we—me, you, Primrose—can become a real family.”

“I had a real family.”

“Please believe me, I don’t want to sound harsh. But you’ll have to face the truth some time. If I thought you didn’t want me, I’d get out of your life for good. But we both know how it really is, don’t we?”

Smooth-talking, convincing Oliver. How I detested the bastard.

There was some hesitation before Andrea said, “No. I do love you, Oliver, but you have to understand…”

“I do. Honestly, I do understand. I’m aware of how difficult it is for you. It’s the same for me, you know.”

“How could it be? You were only his so-called friend.”

“I still loved him.”

“You betrayed him!”

“We both did. And there’s nothing either of us can do to change that. Look, you need time to grieve, and I’m prepared to wait if that’s how it has to be. I won’t give up, though. I’ll be there for you whenever you need me. Is that okay with you? I’ll stay away for a while, but sooner or later—it really depends on you—I’ll come back.”

I heard more muffled weeping.

“You should go now,” Andrea said between sniffles. “You should go home.”

“I have to go to the agency.”

“This time of night?”

“Sydney’s working overnight to get the books ready for audit and examination. Blake & Turnbrow have the right to check them before the merger can progress.”

“You’re going through with it—the merger, the buyout?—even though Jim was against it?”

“It’s the right move.”

“Doesn’t it give you another motive for murder? The police are aware that Jim was fighting it.”

“I’m prepared to risk that. My idea has always been to build up a small but lucrative agency, gain some blue-chip or at least prestigious accounts, then sell for a large amount and perhaps get out of the business altogether. Big agencies have always liked swallowing up the smaller fry, especially if their creativity is exceptional, as ours is.”

“Was. You’ve lost Jim.”

“I always had the best ideas. Jim was just the art man.”

In the hall, I couldn’t feel any more devastated than I already felt, but a seething anger was pushing its way through once again.

Andrea came back at him. “You know that’s not true. You were a team—Jim always came up with wonderful campaign ideas.”

“Okay, we both know that, but Blake & Turnbrow don’t. Sydney and I have had numerous meetings with their people that Jim knew nothing about, and others, that pressure of work prevented him from joining. The art director is always the last in the chain as far as preparing for presentations is concerned. I think the other agency assumes I’m the driving force behind our creativity.”

“If Jim had only realized how devious you really are…”

“That was one of his faults, wasn’t it? He always trusted people, always thought the best of them. You see, Jim had two main faults. The first was that he was gullible; the second that he wouldn’t admit it, especially not to himself.”

“And this is meant to make me love you more?”

“It’s all for you, Andrea. You and Primrose.”

If I’d had any doubts about Guinane having killed me (see that? I couldn’t bring myself to call him Oliver or Ollie anymore) they had all gone by now. How had I ever believed in him? How had I ever thought I truly knew him? I mean, here was a scumbag who’d wanted to wreck my business life, who had planned to steal my wife, and now, perhaps worse of all (yeah, worse to me than screwing my wife, because she had played a voluntary part in that), he wanted to claim my daughter as his own, so what would be so hard about murdering me? Oh yeah, he did it all right. Tonight my ex-partner had revealed things about himself that I would never even have guessed at a week ago. God, give me the means, give me the means to hit back, to avenge myself. Vengeance might be Thine, but hey, throw me a crumb, let me help out just a little bit.

I forced myself to listen on.

“Why tell me all this now? What’s your point, Oliver? You can’t make me feel any lower than I do already, so why make me finally see exactly what you are?”

He sounded anxious, yet there was still that arrogance in his voice. “Because I want honesty between us after all these years of deceit. I want you to know how much I’m prepared to do for you.”

“For yourself, you mean.”

“No, so we can have a good future together. You, me and Prim. I’ve had enough of the rat race, darling, I want out. With the money I’ll make from the merger I can leave advertising behind me. We’ll have time for ourselves, Andrea. No more deadlines for me, no more distractions, no more stress. And of course, eventually my inheritance will come my way and it should be quite substantial.”

“I’m not impressed, Oliver. But thank you for helping me make up my mind. It’s over. I want you out—now!”

“You’ve tried to end it before. More than once.”

“It’s different this time. Jim’s death has made me see what a bitch I am. And what a two-faced swine you are.”

“You’ll feel differently when the grief is over and you can think clearly again.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever be over it.”

“It wasn’t our fault, Andrea. Not yours, not mine. His death was an act of fate and had nothing to do with us. You’ll see that eventually.”

“I’m beginning to wonder about that. The police suspect you, Oliver, and I’m wondering just what lengths you’d go to to get what you want.”

“Don’t lay his murder on me, Andrea. At times this week I’ve felt his death was meant to be, that with Jim gone everything can be as it should.”

“You know what? At last I’m seeing you in your true light, and it isn’t very pleasant. Go and see Sydney at the agency, cook up more of your greedy little get-rich-quick schemes. Just leave me—and Primrose—alone from now on.”

Another creak of the sofa and I guessed Guinane was rising to his feet.

“Okay, I’m going,” I heard him say. “I know you’ll change your mind about us. Sooner or later, you’ll see things clearly.”

“Just go, Oliver. It’s over, don’t you understand? We’re finished.”

Footsteps crossing the carpeted floor. Guinane appeared in the doorway, no more than two feet away from me. I wanted to throw myself at him as he paused there and turned to look back at Andrea.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said.

Her voice was cold. “Please don’t.”

He watched her from the doorway for a moment, but from the expression on his face I don’t think Andrea returned his look.

Finally, he said, “I’m there when you need me.”

With that he whirled around and made for the front door.

I still wanted to hurl myself at him. I wanted to kill him.

And then I remembered.

Suddenly, I wanted him to stay.

Because Moker was on his way.

36

About ten minutes later there was a knock on the door.

37

I don’t know why Moker didn’t ring the bell; perhaps he thought using the knocker above the letterbox was more portentous, more scary, who knows?

I’d gone into our long lounge—it extended to the back of the house since a dividing wall had been taken out—and watched Andrea on the sofa as she wept quietly.

She looked dreadful. Her dark hair was unkempt, her face sallow, sickly-looking. The rims of her eyes were red and looked very sore, while the skin around them was puffy. She seemed frail, as if she had neither eaten nor slept well for a week, and she was hunched forward on the edge of the sofa, elbows on knees, twisting a sodden handkerchief in her hands.

“I’m so sorry, Jim,” I heard her say in a voice that was weak, full of sadness and regret.

For a moment, I wanted to go to her and hold her tight, comfort her with forgiving words, but the thought of her duplicity prevented me (not that it would have been possible anyway). At last aware of all those years of deception and adultery, I raged inwardly, and my pity was limited. Had our whole marriage been a sham? If—I would have screamed my thoughts had I had a voice that could be heard—if Primrose was Oliver’s daughter, then his and Andrea’s affair must have revived itself shortly after we got together, even before we married, so what was wrong with me, how had I failed her? I loved Andrea as much as any man could possibly love a woman, yet it wasn’t enough for her. Dark images of the two of them sneaking around, making love in the daytime, when I was always on photo or film shoots, at night when Andrea had made some excuse of having a girls’ night out, staying with one of her closest friends because it was so late—all those thoughts rushed through my head. Guinane and Andrea naked, together, Guinane touching my wife’s body, entering her. Fucking her. The thought, like the word, was brutal. Brutal and ugly.

But it was the shock of learning the truth about Primrose that subjugated all else. That had finally busted me.

I loved her so much and the thought that she was not truly my daughter broke my heart, my will—my soul. This child whom I’d adored since first she had slid oh-so-easily from Andrea’s womb, all sticky and bloody, but the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen. How nervous I’d been because it was all so new to me, I’d never had someone who would depend on me so much, and how gratifying fatherhood had come to be.

If I were still alive and Guinane suddenly announced to the world that he was Prim’s true father and even took blood tests to prove it, I would fight tooth and nail to keep her as mine. I would never love her any less, to me she would always be my daughter, and I was sure that to her I’d always be her daddy.

I could only look down at the wretched figure of Andrea as she quietly wept and curse her for what she had done to me.

Andrea’s bowed head came up and she looked towards the open lounge doorway.

“Oliver…?” she whispered.

Her sad, tear-stained face took on some kind of firmness, a hard glint narrowing her dampened eyes.

“No,” I heard her say in a voice that was angry as much as remorseful. “I told you, it’s over.”

Three sharp knocks again.

Andrea rose from the sofa and took weary but determined strides across the carpet. She passed right through me and I suddenly felt a mental anguish that was almost a match for my own. It was as if a cloud full of misery, regret, with anger gnawing at its edges, had enveloped me. Only fear—fear for her—sent me after her.

I raced around her as she reached the lounge door and held up my hands as if to block her way.

“No!” I screamed into her face. “Don’t open the door, please don’t open the door.”

Once again, her distress engulfed me, but this time I was ready for it and let it slip through without burdening myself. I went with her, screeching in her ear all the way to the thick oak front door to our house.

“Don’t let him in! For God’s sake, don’t open the door!”

Then it all became like a slow-motion dream: She’s hesitating, as though she’s heard me, but she couldn’t have, because she’s taking another slow, oh so slow, step closer to the door, and she’s lifting an arm, her hand reaching for the latch, and I’m screaming at her—don’t do it, Andrea, please don’t let him in!—and her wrist is twisting as she says Oliver’s name, and now my wife, my widow, is pulling the door open, stepping back to allow it to swing wide…

And Moker was standing outside on the doorstep.

His scarf no longer hid his face; it was draped around his shoulders, the ends dangling past his waist. He still wore the hat and he held a sharp-pointed knitting needle in one hand.

This must be his method, I realized, for I’ve witnessed it before, in the underground car park. He stuns his intended victim by showing them his ghastly face, paralysing them with fear for a moment or two, giving him just enough time to plunge the knitting needle up into their heart, his other hand covering their mouth to stifle whatever screams might come.

There was darkness behind him, but light from the hall revealed the shocking visage, the deep crater that should have been a face. Swiftly, he moved his hands, one to strike, the other to smother, but Andrea took a step backwards in horror, and before Moker could move forward, she turned and ran through the doorway to the lounge.

I tried to stand in his way, willed myself to be solid, but it was hopeless. He walked right through me and for an instant my soul was filled with a complete blackness. I shuddered.

Then Moker paused, looked back for a second as though he had been made aware of my presence. The moment was all too quickly gone and he turned his grotesque head to seek out his quarry. Andrea tried to shut the lounge door behind her, but Moker held up a hand and pushed back, so viciously that Andrea was sent reeling backwards. When he lumbered after her into the lounge, she was on one knee, struggling to rise, her breath taken in short panic-stricken gasps.

I rushed past Moker, with only a shoulder passing through him, and tried to lift Andrea, always forgetting I could not influence anything in my old world.

“Get out, Andrea!” I yelled at her. “Get out of the house! Don’t let him get near you!”

It was worse than useless—it was a waste of time. I wheeled around and threw myself at Moker again. Once more the total blackness. And once more he stopped, the sharp point of the steel knitting needle pointing upwards. He looked this way and that, his large dark eyes confused. He had felt me, just for a moment. He’d experienced something that was close to my own experience, a sensation of fusion with something else; something alien.

It was quickly gone, because I staggered out on the other side of him, but the delay was enough for Andrea to get to her feet again. She ran round to the back of the sofa, keeping it between herself and the monster who stalked her, forcing herself to look away from him to search for anything that would help her, anything she could use as a weapon.

I did the same, scanning the long room for any object she could use to defend herself. I saw the heavy poker leaning against the side of the stark white fireplace towards the other end of the room. Nothing more warming to the soul than a real fire with real flames, I’d always insisted, and was now glad that I had.

“The poker, Andrea! Get the poker!” Maybe I expected that by shouting at her, the thought itself might be put inside her head. And perhaps it had worked, because she made a sudden dash towards the poker.

She screamed as she ran, and maybe it was partly to rouse our neighbours and not only because of fear. I had never regretted living in a detached house before, but I did on this night. Nobody was near enough to hear.

Moker lumbered after her like a zombie on speed, aware she had no place to go and making peculiar snorting noises. Although there were patio doors at the far end of the room, which led out to our largish but unspectacular garden, they were always kept locked, the key hidden in the drawer of the long sideboard that stood opposite the fireplace. Keys were only in the lock when the doors were in use on summer days or evenings, and the chances now of Andrea getting to the drawer, retrieving the key, and unlocking the doors before Moker got to her were zero.

Thank God she was going for the poker. Only she wasn’t. Instead she ran past the fireplace and made for a Grecian bust mounted on a plinth.

I realized what she was going for and cried out, “No, you’ll never make it, he’s too close!” (Stupidly, I just couldn’t get out of the habit of acting like a normal human being.) Naturally she didn’t hear.

Earlier in the day, Andrea had obviously been on the phone, taking it from its charger, usually kept on an elegant stand in the hall, and had wandered over to the lounge’s big door-windows to look out at the garden while she talked, something she invariably did when she knew the conversation was going to be lengthy, and I saw the receiver precariously balanced on the top edge of the plinth. It was that she was headed for, not the statue, but there was no way she would have time to call the police. Maybe she intended to dodge around Moker, keeping her distance while she dialled.

Moker’s clumsy stride quickened and yet again I plunged into him, anything to slow him down. The blackness swallowed me up, but this time there were vague images filtering through, images of dead people as far as I could tell, dead people whose corpses were badly damaged, great gashes in their flesh, limbs almost severed. This time, despite those awful visions that were trying to resolve themselves, I tried to stay inside the killer rather than pay a fleeting visit; my purpose was to slow his advance with the distraction, give Andrea the chance to escape the corner she’d backed into.

The ruse worked only for a couple of seconds. Moker seemed to shrug me off and went for Andrea again. She threw the phone at him and it struck his head. It must have hurt a little, because he stalled, one beefy hand going to his forehead.

Quickly taking advantage, Andrea ducked under his free outstretched arm and headed back down the room. Unfortunately, Moker made a surprisingly fluid move and tried to grab her shoulder. He overbalanced though, and fell to the floor. But as he did so, that outstretched hand snagged Andrea’s ankle.

She screamed as Moker hauled her back to him, his own body shifting forward as though he intended to smother her with his weight. Andrea squirmed and wriggled, kicked out with her other bare foot, but all was futile against his superior strength and tonnage. He crawled over her legs, pinning both of them to the floor, his left hand gripping the loose folds of the coffee-coloured cardigan that used to belong to me. Now she was whimpering as he snatched at her hair and pulled her head back, bending her spine the wrong way.

He was making those awful gurgling-snuffling sounds as he stretched her, either through excitement or rage, God knows which. Probably both. I thought her back would break as he continued to pull at her, and I frantically but futilely beat his head, my fists merely sinking through long but sparse hair and skull.

“Oh, please, God, help me, help me. Let me make him stop!”

I was pleading to no effect and I knew it. There was nothing else I could do. Occupying his body wouldn’t stop him, even if it confused him for a second or two. His body pinned her lower body to the floor as, one hand cupping her chin, he drew her back further, and further.

The sharpened needle in his other hand was poised to strike.

And that was when yet another shock made me wail in despair.

In all the panic and confusion I’d almost forgotten about her, and now here she was, her little face white with terror.

Primrose stood there by the sofa in her pretty yellow ankle-length nightie, bare toes sunk into the thick carpet, her wide eyes bewildered and afraid. Her lungs pumped against her chest as she struggled to breathe (it’s just as hard for an asthmatic to expel air as it is for them to draw air in), the first signs of an all-out asthma attack. In one tiny and delicate hand she held Snowy by its paw, its white feet dragging on the carpet.

Her words were broken into separate parts because of her breathlessness.

“Leave… Mummy… alone!” she cried out.

Andrea painfully managed to squeeze out a warning, her back still arched, her head restrained by the hand under her chin. “Run, darling, run away!”

That coarse guttural snuffling came from the hole in Moker’s face as he held Andrea there on the floor.

He became still as he stared at the daughter I had believed was mine.

I rushed past the monster and foolishly tried to gather up Primrose in my arms. It was like clutching at empty air and in my desperate confusion it was as if she were the immaterial one, not me. I groaned in frustration and yelled at her to get out of the house, run next door, wake the neighbours, anything but stay here at the mercy of the lunatic who threatened her mother.

A partly stifled sob came from Prim, an abrupt sound caught in her struggle to draw breath. I glanced at the free hand by her side, hoping to see she had brought her inhaler with her. She hadn’t, but right now, that wasn’t the priority.

“Run, Prim, run away!” Andrea screeched more forcefully this time, but our little girl was frozen with fright.

Tears welled in her tawny-brown eyes (even in that predicament I realized they were more like Guinane’s than mine or her mother’s) and her chest rose and fell in judders. She wouldn’t move, she couldn’t move.

I turned to face Moker, putting myself between him and Primrose as though I could protect her. The killer was still staring at her—looking through me!—a curious cast in those black eyes of his. I think it was the glint of anticipation.

Andrea, whose eyes were bulging as they were forced to look down her cheeks at Prim because of the angle of her head, gave out a piercing scream, one so high-pitched and shrill that it must have passed far beyond the walls of the house.

Moker was distracted only for a second. His merciless eyes flicked down at Andrea and he pulled her head back a little further out of pure sadism I’m sure and I feared her neck would snap. In the blink of an eye he had changed his grip and sank his fingers into her hair, then he pushed down fast and hard, smashing her face against the floor. Even though the floor was thickly carpeted, the smacking sound was explosive, and blood instantly burst outwards, spattering the beige carpet around her head with bright red blots. Andrea made no sound, but lay there motionless, perhaps even dead.

“Oh dear God, don’t let this happen,” I prayed.

And when Moker slid the needle into a pocket, then shambled to his feet and started towards Prim, I said it again, this time aloud even if only I could hear the words.

“Oh dear God, please don’t let this happen!”

Moker came closer, Andrea’s unmoving body recumbent behind him, her arms and legs splayed.

“Don’t you touch her!” I yelled into Moker’s absent face. “I’ll kill you if you touch her!”

All to no avail, of course, even as it would have been if he could hear my threat.

I whirled and dropped to my knees in front of Prim. “Primrose, you must get out of the house. You must run away right now.”

I spoke fiercely but firmly, and hoped the sheer power behind my words and very concentrated thoughts would somehow get through to her. Her round eyes were looking upwards at the approaching monster, her lower lip trembling as a strained wheezing came from between her lips.

My own eyes, blurred with tears of frustration, desperation—sheer hopelessness—must have been as wide and terrified as hers. I threw my arms around her small thin body as if to shield her, but big hands reached through me and wrapped themselves around her narrow shoulders. Snowy dropped to the floor.

“Mummy,” Primrose whimpered quietly, and two large teardrops spilled over and began their irregular descent of her cheeks. “Daddy…”

The killer’s hands moved over her shoulders and their fingers curled around her throat.

38

Moker had picked up Primrose by the neck, his arms outstretched at shoulder level. But as she dangled there, her tiny feet kicking empty air, the face that had been pallid before beginning to turn red, the carpet started to undulate.

I was raining impotent blows on Moker, having tried to enter him again, but horrifically I began to experience part of his own sick pleasure, and that was too much for me to bear. Now I continued to beat at him because there was nothing left that I could do—I just couldn’t stand by and watch him kill my Primrose!

It was Moker, himself, who first became aware of the thick beige carpet rippling from one end of the room to the other as if a wind was caught beneath it. Pressure on Prim’s throat must have eased momentarily because she drew in a strangulated breath as he looked down and around him. Following his gaze, I also glanced down and was astounded at what I saw.

The carpet appeared to be flowing as each and every individual woollen fibre of its pile stood erect. We seemed to be at its centre and the movement, which could be seen as a growing shadow, had a rippling effect like the gently spreading wave circle when a stone is dropped into a still pond.

It was an expensive carpet, plush and wall-to-wall. It wasn’t shag-pile by any means, but it was deep-pile, so that feet would sink into it almost as if into fine sand, a luxury Andrea and I had treated ourselves to after a year of walking on exposed but stained and highly varnished floorboards.

But now there was something wrong with it. Now it seemed to have come alive. Now the carpet had turned nasty.

Although preoccupied right then, Moker had nevertheless become distracted by the phenomenon, because the radiating carpet strands had nearly unbalanced him and, still astonished, I realized the fibres must be as hard as nails. Andrea’s unconscious body, which lay in the other half of the room close to the fireplace, suddenly stirred as a thousand or so stiffened fibres straightened under her body, lifting her slightly. She tried to raise her head, blood from her busted nose spoiling the carpet, but the effort was too much and she slumped down again, a short muffled cry escaping as fibres pricked her cheek.

Moker was still fascinated by the carpet’s movement, a kind of shiny wildness in those black eyes of his, his victim held aloft but forgotten for the moment. The distraction had also briefly diverted me.

The closed curtains began to wave as if caught in a breeze, even though the windows behind them were shut. A delicate figurine that sat near the centre of the long sideboard suddenly streaked across the room to smash against the white-brick fire surround. Moker stared at the myriad pieces as if expecting the little statue to put itself together again. There were hefty, tall, white-marble candlestick holders on each end of the sideboard and one began to wobble on the flat surface. The agitation caused a rumbling sound before the ornament slowly rose into the air, the candle it held tilting, then falling back onto the sideboard. The marble holder hovered at about head height as we watched and then, without warning, it shot down the room towards us.

Out of instinct, I ducked, but Moker’s reactions were not so fast. The heavy object struck full in his disfigured face. A rough, snuffling cry escaped him and he dropped Primrose onto the bristling carpet. I fell to my knees beside her and quickly examined her face. The redness had gone from it, but a bluish tinge had crept into her new pallor, another serious warning that an asthma attack was under way. The rise and fall of her chest was shallow, but I was pleased to see at least breath vapour leaking from behind her lips, which meant she was breathing. Wait a minute! Breath vapour? What was that all about?

No sooner had I asked myself the question than I felt the chill.

In my state of spirit, the room’s temperature should have been of no consequence. Yet I had become cold, a deep frigidity seeping through my non-existent bones, filling my interior, chilling my blood, cooling organs that I no longer possessed, freezing me! I felt the hairs on my forearms prickle—God, I felt the hair on my head stiffen! And when I looked across the room at Moker, who was leaning against a wall holding his forehead, I saw frost in his sparse lank strands of hair and billows of steam escaping the hole in his face.

It seemed that he, too, was now aware of the room’s iciness, because he slowly straightened, taking his hand away from his head (I was disappointed to see that the missile had not broken the skin—there was no blood—although he was marked and likely to have a very nasty bruise there), and this time he scanned the whole room. Now I thought there was a glint of fear in those killer eyes.

Andrea was still not moving at all. Was she unconscious or dead? Small amounts of white frost speckled her hair also, hair that seemed full of static.

What the hell was going on?

A colour photograph—Andrea, Prim and myself, Prim just three years old and smiling deliciously, taken when on holiday in Naples, not in Italy but on the Gulf of Mexico—heavily weighted by its silver frame, flew off the mantelpiece and thudded into Moker’s back, so he swung around again.

An elegant but empty vase that sat solo on a tall stand beside the front window hurled itself across the room and smashed against Moker’s kneecap, inducing a grunt of pain from him.

The recessed ceiling lights suddenly oscillated between bright and low, then back again, as if some unseen hand was manipulating their dimmer control, the change becoming quicker as the sequence continued to repeat itself. But this weak strobing effect had nothing to do with their control switch, because the independent glows from two lamps at either end of the room, one floor-standing, the other, smaller, lamp on the sideboard, were following the ceiling lights’ behaviour.

A large black-framed painting—a limited edition Rothko print, three unequal slabs of colour piled one on top of the other—dropped to the floor with a crash, landing upright, the glass cracking from top to bottom with only a few jagged shards breaking free, before the whole thing toppled face-forward onto the petrified (literally) carpet.

Moker looked around him as if stupefied and clouds of vapour billowed from his funnelled face.

Once again I became conscious of the coldness: it was as if a huge icy hand had gripped me inside, its fingers now curling round my heart. Even though I didn’t exist in the physical sense, I felt my limbs stiffen, my back and neck freeze up. The door to the lounge slammed shut, the sound like a shot from a cannon, making me jump; it flew open again and there was no one outside in the hall to have pulled it. The door slammed shut once more, the sound shattering, its crash causing the remaining paintings around the room to fall. This time the door rebounded off its frame, then casually swung open. One of the paintings covered by non-reflective glass had landed face-up about a yard away from me and I noticed the glass surface was completely frosted over, the picture beneath a vague pattern of faded pastel colours. Further along the lounge the fireplace implements clattered into the hearth and seemed to vibrate there, as though trying to levitate. A straight-backed chair near the coffee table toppled over as the silent whirlwind ruffled curtains and either moved books and magazines or riffled their pages. The lights, which for a while had remained constantly low, dimmed even further and it was as if the night outside had broken in.

More objects—CDs rattling in their rack, other framed photographs, a long-handled pewter candle snuffer, small but valued ornaments collected over the years, those same disturbed books and magazines—all swept across the room to hurl themselves at the bewildered and, I hoped, frightened killer, who could only gape at the maelstrom as the missiles bounced off him.

It was then that the shapes began to emerge from the darkness.

Blurred phantasms at first, that was all. Elements that did not quite hang together filtering through the dusk. Discarnate conformations, shades that as yet had no definition. All in motion, weaving as if in some exotic but ethereal dance as they assembled themselves.

Ghosts.

A kind of snorting gasp came from Moker, and his black eyes were fixed on the flittering haze that was closer to me than him. Even without a face, his body language alone revealed his alarm: he trembled violently as he cowered against a wall and the hands he held high to shield himself from further projectiles shook as if he were several stages into Parkinson’s disease. His heavy eyebrows were crusted with ice crystals and hanging strands of his hair looked brittle enough to snap. I thanked God that the lunatic had forgotten about Primrose.

The swirling mists rolled like fog in his direction, configurations within constantly resolving themselves only to fade again and lose distinction from the mass. But I was sure that I recognized one chimera among the many as the grey mutable shroud purled past me, a ghost that had haunted me long ago, as well as more recently. It was my father and I sensed beyond doubt that he was here with these other ghosts to help me. How was that possible? I had no answer right then, because I didn’t even know how I was possible.

When the now boiling mass crowded in on Moker he tried to beat them off with his hands, but because they had no genuine substance, his efforts were worthless. The mists hardly stirred under his frenzied swipes, although they continued to create shadowy forms within, all of them ambiguous, no single entity dominating the others. There seemed to be a horde of them as they enveloped Moker.

Although they appeared to fall on him with vigour, ultimately they were no more effective than Moker himself was in warding them off. Sure, they tugged at his long raincoat, stabbed spectral fingers at his face, but they had no power to inflict injury,* save for hurling various inanimate bits and pieces at him and even then, that stuff appeared to have no real force behind it. No, it was sheer terror that drove Moker to his knees.

*Remember this: GHOSTS CANNOT PHYSICALLY HARM LIVING PEOPLE. Okay, they can cause insensate objects to fly across rooms but those same objects will not even scratch their target; ghosts can make heavy furniture move, cause teacups and windows to rattle even will some things to levitate, BUT THEY CANNOT PHYSICALLY HARM ANY LIVING PERSON. Of course, they can scare you to death, induce heart failure, even send you insane with fear by their haunting, BUT THEY CANNOT PHYSICALLY HARM YOU. Try not to forget it.

For a short while the unearthly manifestations grew stronger, although none became solid as they engulfed the serial killer. Gratified, perhaps cruelly so, I sought out individual faces and diaphanous but clearer figures among the spectral host, none of which I recognized, save for the one who had been my absent father in the physical world. He was apart from the others as though he were overseer to the attack. Right now, he was observing me. His was the only image that did not falter and, although he wasn’t smiling—the situation was too desperate for that—his expression was benign.

I could only wonder what he had brought with him to my house this night. Cohorts? Angels? Soldiers of God? I had no idea and there was a time when I would never even have considered such things. I just felt thankful that they were on my side. At the séance, the spirits had been separate, individual entities, but tonight they were integrated, unified, as if their collective purpose enhanced their power. I knew very little about the supernatural, or paranormal, but I reasoned that the fading house lights and the deep chill in the atmosphere were because the spirits were drawing energy from the “real” world, this one, the world in which humans live and breathe; they were tapping intangible forces that existed unperceived around us, perhaps also feeding off the psychic energy of the people present in the room. These thoughts passed through my mind swiftly as I looked into the face of my dead father, and maybe it was he who had put them there.

A guttural yelp from Moker grabbed me back and I saw him cringing on his knees, one shoulder pressed against the wall as if he were trying to push himself through the plaster, while the ghosts vainly flayed, their blows having no true physical impact. Yet he cowered there, blubbering and flinching as though he actually felt their relentless punishment and I guess it was his own terror and the expectancy of their blows that fixed him there. I knew that soon he would wise up to it.

And he did.

His whole body was quaking when he tentatively raised his disfigured head, and I couldn’t tell if it was because of the room’s Arctic temperature (his black raincoat had a light dusting of frost over it and, when he moved, the stiffened material crackled) or because he was so afraid. Cautiously, he craned his neck to face his incorporeal bullies.

I felt rather than saw Primrose stir beside me and when I looked down she raised an arm from the floor and restlessly threw it across her chest. She was not quite unconscious, but was close to it. Prim lay on her back, the carpet rigid and unyielding beneath her, her eyelids twitching as if she had left one nightmare for another, her breathing was shallow, laboured, short harsh wheezing gasps coming from lips that were becoming discoloured. The underside of the bare arm she had moved to her chest was stippled with scores of tiny red indents as if it had rested on a bed of blunt close-set nails, and I worried about her other arm and exposed legs. But my prime concern was for her breathing. A major asthma attack could kill, and if she didn’t use her Ventolin inhaler soon, this might easily develop into one. She might even need an epinephrine injection.

Panicking, I whirled around to see if Andrea had recovered yet. Through the agitated mist-shapes, I saw that her inert body lay in exactly the same position as the last time I checked; the only difference was that blood beneath her face had soaked a little more of the carpet (the carpet itself bristled like the raised hackles of a dog, the vibration continuing to create ripples around the room). I prayed she wasn’t dead, both for her sake and for Prim’s.

Moker caught my eye again. He was pushing himself to his feet, his back and hands flat against the wall behind, ignoring the entities that flailed him without effect. They seemed more frantic now, as if their impotence had enraged them. Moker swept an arm through them like a man might wave a cloud of midges away from his face.

The fog paled even more and the overhead lights and the room’s lamps brightened a fraction. The ghosts were losing sway, their own failure somehow diminishing their strength and, as if understanding their weakness, Moker took a step forward, his arms swinging before him so that the closer parts of the mist licked and curled upon themselves. The vision that was my father rejoined the nebulous throng and the serial killer turned in my direction.

But it was Primrose he was interested in.

On my knees, I sagged forward, as if in supplication. I was in deep despair.

The ghosts hadn’t quite finished with Moker though.

The shapes that had become almost indiscernible in what was now a haze began to draw together to form a compact whole. Their shade intensified to a deeper hue, and they grew more substantial, more concentrated, so that once again they gained Moker’s respect. He had already started to move towards Primrose when he paused to watch. His eyes gleamed as though mesmerized.

I was more concerned about Prim’s condition. I was almost overwhelmed by despair when I saw how fast she had deteriorated—her breathing sounded torturous as her small lungs fought to draw in air and the bluish tinge was more apparent. Without much hope I swung towards Andrea again, but now I couldn’t ignore what was happening near the centre of the room.

There was hardly anything left of the floating haze, because much of it had been gathered by the black storm that was forming. This Delphian formation was revolving like a miniature tornado, moving faster and faster so that soon it was spinning.

Moker gaped at it (and with that great black excavation beneath his staring eyes, it really was a gape). The lights dimmed once more as if the brightness was being sucked into the blackness, and the chill inside me intensified, even though there was no “inside me”; I felt like a block of ice, coldest at the centre. Moker’s shivering became extreme, a kind of repetitive juddering, each jolt like a sudden seizure. I checked Primrose, afraid now that she might freeze to death, but there were no ice particles in her curly hair, nor were there goosebumps on her bare arms and legs. I wondered if her semi-consciousness was a factor, her psychic energy untapped and, if so, I hoped it would be the same for Andrea, who appeared totally unconscious (please don’t let her be dead, Lord).

The strange fusion of ghosts was about five feet in height, its sides too irregular to measure (widest part roughly three feet, thinnest about two) and looked almost solid as it hovered a few inches above the floor, its spin increasing by the moment. Objects that had flown across the room only minutes ago seemed attracted to its gyration, although they only shifted or twitched where they lay. The carpet, however, went berserk, sections of it lifting (particularly the area directly under the maelstrom) as though a wind had found its way into the house’s airbricks and beneath the floorboards to rise with some pressure through the thin cracks between boards. One corner tore itself off the tack rail and curled towards the centre storm, flapping there like a loose tongue. The carpet’s pile weaved circles like iron filings attracted to a playful magnet, too far away for them to take the leap, but close enough to encourage them to try. Dust specks that no vacuum cleaner could capture rose in circles, tiny whirlpools themselves, competing with the mother one.

And still Moker was gripped by the main phenomenon: transfixed, confused, fearful…

… Until this primary maelstrom became thinner and sleeker, resolving itself into a curious matt black pillar that was perfectly rounded, quivering with what I could only guess was pure energy. It thrummed as if it were machinery of some kind and the loose things in the lounge became even more agitated. Abruptly, without warning, it shot across the gap between itself and Moker and plunged into the dark pit of his face.

I suppose it was as close to a scream as Moker could raise, and the eruption swelled throughout the room, a frightened screech that had no proper form; it was a prolonged and raw ululation, an animal cry that echoed off the walls. He collapsed onto his hands and knees and howled—a minor sound compared to the attempted scream—as they came in contact with the carpet’s hardened fibres. Now he whimpered, a high-pitched agonized mewling as though the blackness inside was poisoning his system, or had clamped onto vital organs and was squeezing the life from them.

I thought that the battle was nearly over. I thought that Moker would flee from the house, run from his tormentors, and forget about Primrose and Andrea. There was still the problem of Prim’s asthma attack, but at least there would be a reprieve, more time for Andrea to wake up—if she could wake up—and bring the life-saving nebulizing inhaler to our little girl. I thought there was a chance.

But I was wrong. Oh boy, I was so wrong.

The lights began to brighten again. The carpet pile lost its vibrancy and relaxed to its normal state, leaving millions of dust motes swarming in the air like pygmy midges. Fallen stuff became immobile once more. Only a few inconsequential wisps of the haze remained to drift lazily in the air. The room was almost calm…

… Until Moker gave one shocking, protracted belch and expelled the blackness he had swallowed only moments before.

It had lost its sleek form and billowed out like smoke from an industrial chimney, its curling edges dissipating into the atmosphere. More of it was disgorged as Moker began to retch like a dog that had swallowed too much greasy fat with its meat, and each time he heaved, less and less of the smoky substance spilled. His body shuddered with every expulsion and soon only weak grey trails emerged from the void in his face to join the other fuller drifts. The frost in the serial killer’s hair and raincoat lost its whiteness as it rapidly melted, and I felt the deep coldness within me soften its grip. Somehow I understood that the ghosts had used up all the energy they had been able to filch, their united manifestation losing strength, gradually fading.

Moker, still on his hands and knees, but no longer retching, slowly raised his head. And looked towards Primrose.

Her chest quivered each time she tried to gasp a breath and there was only whiteness like thin slivers of snow between her half-closed eyelids. Her little fists were clenched tight and each time she tried to draw air her chin trembled. She was so pale, her skin looked bleached, making the tell-tale blue tinge even more evident. Soon she might be at the stage where only pure oxygen could save her.

The room was hushed when Moker started to crawl towards us.

For a horrifying moment, I thought Prim had stopped breathing altogether, but she had only paused to regather her strength, her body continuing to work even without conscious imputation. And with her next strained rasping inhalation, the room exploded into life again.

Noises came from everywhere at once—from the walls, the ceiling, the floor—as if the ghosts, unable to possess Moker, had appropriated the house itself. Behind the curtains the windows rattled, the curtains themselves fluttered, and all the fallen objects—the marble candlestick, the ornaments, framed photographs—became agitated once more, dancing where they lay, some rising inches into the air, while others, smaller items such as figurines, an ashtray, the pewter candle snuffer, flew at Moker, who continued to crawl on hands and knees, but this time they fell limply against his head and shoulders. Glass that had cracked in picture frames now shattered completely, shards sprinkling the carpet whose fibres stirred but now failed to come erect. The big-screen TV in the corner behind me switched itself on with a startling blare of voices and a burst of confusing colour, immediately switching itself off again. An avalanche of soot gushed out of the fireplace, its dirt clouds rising and spreading around that end of the room, mingling with the revived mists in which vague shapes struggled to reform. I heard a moaning grow into a muted wailing that told me the ghosts were failing to regain their strength.

They rolled over him, chimney dirt recruited so that he appeared to be moving through a wind-tossed smoke; yet they still had no power against him, they could only pester, harass, but not hinder him.

And Moker knew it. He hardly noticed what was happening around him, not even the glass splinters that flew from the broken picture glass to glance off his head and the heavy raincoat he wore. The serial killer had only one objective, and she lay struggling for air beside me.

For a short while, the havoc and the wailing increased.

Moker ignored it all.

And maybe because he ignored it—after all, they had invaded his body only to be defeated by the black vileness of his unclean soul (I learned this later), so he already knew their influence was limited—the dwindling of their power quickened.

He drew closer and, seen through the troubled dust and fog that tried to smother him, he resembled some fabulous but repulsive beast of prey, a nightmare creature that deserved a whole page to itself in the Complete Book of Monsters and Demons. Things continued to fall uselessly against him, the dreadful wailing of souls in despair went on, the room was dense with churning clouds, but Moker came on unconcerned.

As if sensing the approach of something evil, something terribly threatening, Prim’s eyes flickered open wide and instantly filled with horror when she saw Moker looming over her. (I realized then that she had not been rendered semi-conscious by the asthma attack, but that she had fallen into a faint when Moker had tried to choke her.) Her mouth opened wide too, but she could not catch her breath to scream.

Frantically, she tried to push herself away from the horror, using elbows and heels of her bare feet, but Moker easily grabbed her ankle and pulled her back to him.

The wailing around us rose to a plaintive howling, but the voices were distant, as if the assembled ghosts had been drawn back unwillingly to their proper place, where humans were only a memory. A new kind of chill flooded through me, one that numbed and debilitated, caused by final despair.

Primrose was shaking with terror, but she gamely kicked out at him, tried to scrabble out from the shadow of his intimidating bulk. Saliva drooled from the gristle-edged opening of his face, tiny bubbles interrupting the long silky stream that pooled on her nightie to dampen her tremulous chest beneath the thin material. He rested one big hand on her slight shoulder to pin her to the floor, then reached inside his raincoat pocket with his other hand and drew out the long sharpened knitting needle.

The mists were thin, depleted, but I could still hear those anguished cries though now they were far, far away as if the ghosts were gone but the portal between worlds was not quite closed. Soot still infested the air and a few tenuous ribbons of vapour floated lazily, but these were just meaningless remnants of what had gone on before.

Moker held the long grey needle at an angle against Prim’s slender body, just below her left ribcage, its point pressing upwards into her nightie, indenting the light material without piercing. Primrose had closed her eyes against the bad dream.

Out of sheer reaction, I threw myself between them, hoping I could deflect the weapon, I guess, but knowing it was hopeless. I fell through them both to sprawl on the floor beside them.

I crouched on my knees, my face low, almost touching Prim’s as if I could whisper comforting words, perhaps something like it would only hurt for a moment and then she would sleep to wake and find herself in a better place, a wonderful place.

Moker’s grip on the long thin needle tightened. His thumb closed over the flat, button end. His knuckle whitened.

He began to push.

I screamed.

And Andrea brought the poker down brutally hard on Moker’s bowed head.

39

The sound that the heavy iron poker made as it caved in the monster’s skull was sickening—but sickeningly good. Sweet and right. Pleasing. Justified. It was the noise a chocolate egg filled with goodies might make when dropped from a great height onto concrete, a kind of heavy, dull cracking thud.

Movement, noise—all quickly faded to nothing.

He seemed paralysed. He bent over Prim, whose eyes stayed closed, her breathing still shallow, strained, the needle poised beneath her ribs. Not a single utterance came from the yawning pit that substituted for Moker’s nose and mouth—no gurgling, no snuffling, neither inhalation nor exhalation. His eyes protruded more than ever; they had become sightless, lacklustre, without shine. Blood began to bubble from the new chasm in his head where the iron poker remained embedded. He was either dead, or as good as. He himself didn’t seem to know which.

There was a total stillness to the room…

… Until his head jerked as Andrea wrenched the poker free again.

Now blood spurted from the deep wound like a miniature red fountain when the pressure was released. It started to flood over his head, spilling down onto his forehead, masking one eye, trickling into the pit below it.

Andrea struck again, same place, same force (I remembered reading somewhere that on occasions women can produce supernormal strength to protect their child; one woman had lifted a car on her own when her toddler was trapped beneath it), and a faint sigh filtered through from another dimension.

Once more, the poker was pulled free, and still Moker’s body stayed upright, and once more the poker was brought down with a force that drove its blunted end down through his forehead.

This time, Moker toppled over sideways and the poker remained in Andrea’s hand, wrenched free from the smashed egg of his skull. She threw it down so hard it bounced on the carpet.

Even as the dead man sprawled beside Prim, one of his dirty sneakered feet trapping her ankles, Andrea was down on the floor reaching for her daughter with both hands. But she swooned suddenly, one of her hands flattening against the floor to steady herself; full-consciousness was not quite ready for her yet. She closed her eyes, opened them again, took a deep breath through her mouth, frowned at the taste of blood. She leaned over Prim again and lifted her by the shoulders, then held her tight against her own body. Prim’s face buried itself into Andrea’s neck.

I moved closer to them both, an arm passing around Andrea’s shoulders, a hand stroking my little girl’s back. (Yes, I still thought of Primrose as my little girl. Seven years couldn’t be wiped away like chalk from a slate.)

“Her inhaler, Andrea!” I yelled. “Fetch her inhaler, quick as you can!”

Andrea’s nose was a pulpy mess, blood pouring from it, running copiously over her lips, spilling down her chin, onto her black exercise vest and cardigan, a huge amount of it, which suggested her nose was broken. When she opened her mouth to call Prim’s name I saw that three front teeth were chipped and her gums were bloody. Prim failed to respond and Andrea held her away so that she could examine her face.

Small spittles of blood sprayed on Prim’s cheeks as Andrea gasped, then hugged her tight again. A sudden tortuous intake of breath told us both that Primrose was still alive and, without further ado, Andrea lifted her from the floor and rushed from the lounge with her daughter in her arms, fragments of picture glass crackling under her bare feet. She ignored the pain they must have caused, but she wobbled when she reached the lounge door. She took another breath and began climbing the hall stairs.

I followed and within seconds we were in Prim’s small bedroom, so bright and innocently cheerful in daylight, but now menaced by shadows for which the feeble night-light was no match. Andrea quickly remedied that by flicking on the main light switch with her elbow. She hurriedly set Prim on the narrow bed with its cheerful flowery quilt and held her there in a sitting position while a free hand snatched the blue puffer from the bedside cabinet. Maybe it was the lifting and being carried that revived Primrose—or perhaps some inner sense told her she was safe in her mother’s arms—but her eyelids fluttered open and her lips moved between strained gasps for air as she tried to form words. By the time Andrea held the puffer up to her face, her eyes were wider—and looking directly at me.

“Daddy?” I heard her whisper.

Andrea appeared not to have noticed. She held the inhaler in front of Prim’s mouth, index finger on the depressor at the top.

“Open, Baby, open your mouth,” she implored, a tremor in her voice.

Prim’s eyes went to her mother’s and she did as she was told.

Fine droplets of mist sprayed into her mouth and she gulped in air.

“Again, darling, again,” her mother urged.

The procedure was repeated several times and gradually Prim’s shoulders ceased their shudders and the rise and fall of her chest began to take on a steady rhythm. Andrea’s tension seemed to ebb away, even though she must still have been very frightened by all that had happened. I think she was putting on a brave face for our daughter’s sake.

As Prim’s breathing calmed, she looked once again over her mother’s shoulder. Disappointment showed in her eyes.

I stared back at her with what I hoped was a loving smile, just in case she might see me again.

She didn’t. Her sweet pale face scrunched up in puzzlement. “I saw Daddy, Mummy,” she said when her breathing allowed.

Andrea held her close, but not close enough to restrict her breathing. “Hush, Prim,” she said softly, soothingly. “Everything’s all right now. The bad man has gone away. He can’t hurt you anymore.” Her voice sounded as if she had a serious head cold.

“But, Mummy—”

“I’m sure Daddy was watching over us. I think he was there protecting us.”

Was she merely saying this to comfort Prim, or did Andrea believe her own words? There was no way of knowing, but maybe it was the latter. I like to think so.

It gave me comfort.

As I left them there on the bed, clutching each other, Andrea gently rocking Prim to and fro and making soothing nasal sounds, holding a dozen or so blood-soaked tissues to her nose, a fierce emotion was edging my love for them—yes, my love for them both—aside. The emotion was bitterness. And… anger.

I had lost so much on the night of my death and now I’d discovered I’d lost even more: I’d lost something that I’d never truly possessed anyway. The final reality was harsh, overwhelming.

And it was Guinane who had caused everything bad that had happened to me. By coveting my wife and stealing my daughter. By betraying me as a friend and business partner. By murdering me. And by murdering me he had caused the monster to visit my home, to threaten and terrorize the two people who had meant more to me than life itself.

Guinane was to blame for everything.

I entered the lounge. It was quiet and perfectly still, but resembled a battleground after the battle. The floor was littered with broken or bent debris, with fragments of glass, with scattered CDs, with overturned furniture. Even the television screen was filled with a great white, burned-out blemish.

Amongst it all lay the battered corpse of Alec Moker. His body was without aura.

The room was bright with light and the ghosts had returned.

They were pallid. Almost insignificant. Still weakened. My father was among them, perhaps more visible than the rest because there was contact between us. He smiled at me as those around him waned.

I wondered if they had found the strength—as feeble as it was—to come back because their adversary was dead but they needed to witness the outcome for themselves. None was dancing on his body I noticed.

I stopped on the other side of Moker’s corpse and my father smiled at me. The warmth I felt from him, the unbounded love, was akin to my feelings for Primrose.

As he joined his companions in their fading, I looked down at the crumpled bulk that had been Moker.

Fluid from his damaged head was spreading over the beige carpet, sinking into the flattened pile so that it would never be completely beige again. There was no movement at all from him, no death spasms, no voiding of liquids other than the blood itself. Maybe he smelled of death and excrement, I couldn’t tell. There was no twitching of fingers, no sudden lurches of feet. Oh yeah, the wicked witch was dead all right.

Yet with death, there came something else. The final and irrevocable act of all those who had lived in this world: the soul’s departure from its host.

That time had come for Alec Moker.

As I took a step towards the corpse, something about it began to change.

At first, I thought the body was stirring, and my metaphorical heart skipped a metaphorical beat. It couldn’t be. Moker was well and truly dead. Nobody could have survived that kind of punishment to their skull, not even a creature like him. Yet he was moving.

No. I was wrong. Something was emerging.

The body remained still. But something was rising from it. Moker’s soul was taking its leave.

Moker’s black soul, it was like the darkest shadow among other shadows.

The vanishing ghosts opposite drew back, my father’s among them. Their fading images were fearful and some seemed to shrink before the rising darkness. Their alarm was contagious and I took a step backwards myself, reluctant to be close to the thing on the floor. The atmosphere became full of weight, full of foreboding, and there was a pre-thunderstorm charge in the air. I heard faint whisperings from the ghosts as they gradually fled the scene and I sensed their revulsion of this malign animus that was the very essence of Moker himself.

It was a sickly thing, foul and murky, like the stagnant waters of a deep, forgotten well. It appeared to rage within itself; yet it cowered also, as if it knew its own malevolence was beyond redemption and its fate was beyond all contrition. For the first time I understood what was meant by “a lost soul”.

The sludgy darkness continued to rise from the dead body, the vague shapes beyond it almost gone, only their low whispering remaining. It began to take on a form. Moker’s form. Filling out, shaping first a head, and then the shoulders, but always obscure, muddied, unclean. I backed further away as it loomed, until I was almost at the door. I could have been preparing to flee; at that moment, I wasn’t sure.

Features slowly emerged—the big hands, the eyes that no longer gleamed, the ears. Finally, the gaping hole in the face. It seemed that even in death Moker was not without his affliction.

There was no longer any harm to it: somehow the malevolence had been absorbed. And even as the notion came to me, that this thing was to be pitied, the squalid replicate began to break up, falling away in tenuous pieces, dispersing and dissolving like the mist before it, and I watched until there was none of it left. Watched until Moker’s unrepentant soul had become nothing.

Only myself and the dead body were left in the room. The ghosts had departed, Moker’s damned soul had ceased to exist. All was quiet and calm. I prayed that my home would evermore be so.

There was no noise from upstairs, but I assumed that once Prim was reasonably reassured, Andrea would call the police from our bedroom phone. I felt sure she would not venture downstairs until they arrived, and my plan had to be carried out before that happened.

I went over to the still—the empty—body on the carpet. The blood formed a deeply rich halo around its head. Abhorrent though it was to me, I forced myself to my knees, then lay over it. There was no resistance: I sank into Moker’s corpse as easily as immersing myself in water. But nothing had prepared me for the horrendous and debased sensations that swept through me. I saw the victims Moker had claimed, observed their injuries even as the attack was taking place, experienced the exquisite lust and perverted joy that the killer had felt, as well as the thrill of danger that went with the slaying, the sexual gratification that always followed the murders. Yet underlying all this depraved glory was an abject misery, an agony of suffering that had been Moker’s constant companion, a vile wretchedness that had been with him all his life. In this remembrance of recent events, the sick exultation outweighed the bitterness, but I knew the latter had always prevailed and that only for short passages of time it was vanquished.

Within this formation of flesh and bone, I cried out, the awfulness and the sordid pleasure almost too much to bear; but I needed this body, needed Moker’s corpse, for my own purposes, my own revenge. Retribution was my guiding force now.

I brought my own thoughts to the fore, maintaining images of Prim in my mind, in an effort to override Moker’s memories. But, in truth, it was only thoughts of retaliation that quelled the riot of loathsome impressions. With all the resolve I possessed, I pushed the atrocities and the glory they aroused aside and I concentrated on ruling this newfound vessel. I willed myself into every part of the body, its structure, the arteries, flesh, subjugating them so that they would become mine, if only for a brief time.

Slowly, ever so slowly, I moved the fingers of one hand. Then the hand itself. Then the other hand. An arm. It was working: for a little while Moker’s body could be mine. I heard footsteps thudding across the floor overhead and guessed that Andrea was in our bedroom and heading for the phone. I wondered how long it would take the police to get here.

I had to move faster. I had to get Moker’s body onto its feet. I pushed the shoulders up off the floor, then drew up a knee. It took great effort, but I managed to lumber to my/Moker’s feet. I stood there unsteadily, swaying as I got used to the alien body. Taking a tentative step forward, I almost fell, just managing to correct myself before I overbalanced. Another step and it was not too bad. If I concentrated hard, I could make it. The problem then would be whether I was capable of driving a car. Another step. Fine. It was working. I was getting close to the open doorway.

But I remembered something and I turned back, awkwardly retracing my steps. Carefully, I bent down and retrieved the knitting needle from the floor.

40

I left the front door open behind me. Frankly, it was too much trouble to turn around and pull it closed; I’d entered Moker’s body only moments before and it would take time to get acquainted. I paused to use one of the long scarf’s dangling ends to wipe away the blood covering one of Moker’s eyes and when I took the next step forward it was all I could do to prevent myself from falling off the doorstep.

I coped, but movement was stiff, awkward, just as it had been with the woman’s body before. In life, Moker had had a curious style to his walking and in death it was even more strange and ungainly. The feet shuffled more than ever and the body swayed from side to side like the proverbial drunken sailor. A zombie would have had more grace.

As I made my lumbering way down the drive, which was partially lit by lights from the hall behind me and the street lights ahead, I felt the cold night air bite. I should have been almost oblivious of the cold, but instead it struck deep into the hole in my face—and the newly created vent in the top of my head—chilling the flesh inside and touching me, the body’s new controller.* With some difficulty, I wound both dangling ends of the long scarf around my lower face, shielding the gaping hole from the chill.

*I had wondered if the damage to the brain (all those greyish lumps flowing with the blood!) would upset the body’s mechanism—the chemical signals sent through the system, the sinews that worked the bones—but it seemed that the mind, and thus the will, could manage without all of the physical driving force, the body’s engine, if you like. A metaphysical engine had now taken over Moker’s corpse, and while alien to its host, I hoped it would have the power to help me finish my task.

I staggered, stumbled my way to the kerb outside my property, nearly falling twice before I reached it. There was Moker’s ancient Hillman, parked almost directly in front of the house. Even though my state of mind was somewhat dazzled by the adjustment it was having to make—controlling another person’s reflexes and movement, as well as tamping down the remaining dregs of Moker’s memory—I was aware enough to search for the car keys in the raincoat’s deep pockets. The fingers were numb, barely able to feel anything at all, but I could tell there were no keys present in either one. Then probably, with luck…

Yes! I’d reached the old car and peered through the nearside window to see that the keys were in the ignition. Blood trickled into my eye again and I clumsily wiped it with one of the scarf ends. Next bit might be tricky. Driving a car while using someone else’s body wouldn’t be easy, but at least the roads should be virtually deserted at this time of night—or this time of the morning. What time was it? I wondered. One, two o’clock? It didn’t matter and trying to read the tiny digits on a wristwatch—if Moker wore such a thing—seemed like too much effort. It was unimportant.

That was when it struck me. The first memory. Like a bolt of lightning out of the blue, so vivid it seemed more like a hallucination.

Prim’s horrified little face, beneath me, me hovering over it, and then it was Andrea, fighting me, spittle shooting at my face, then Prim again, her chest quivering as she struggled for air, me holding something, the knitting needle, grey, deadly sharp—

I collapsed to the pavement and it was gone, the vision abruptly checked, the scene washed from my mind. My hand scrabbled at the Hillman’s bodywork, fingernails grating against painted metal as I sought to pull myself up. On my knees, one hand pressed against the window’s sill. Sliding against the side of the car as I straightened my knees, hands applying pressure to lift myself, then my whole body leaning there as I tried to recover the strength I’d just lost. It must have taken a minute or two for me to compose myself, to regain the determination to dominate this freakish vessel.

It took a couple of attempts to grip the door handle firmly enough to open the door, but finally I managed. I clambered into the driver’s high seat and settled myself. I stared in dismay at the controls. Of course, I’d forgotten. The gear-shift was on the steering wheel column. Only once had I driven with a gear stick like this, and that had been a long time ago in America. Still, once you can ride a bike…

Still perturbed by the memory flash, I bent low, a shaky hand reaching for the key in the ignition. The engine failed when I turned the key and I pumped the accelerator pedal with a heavy foot as I tried again. Luckily, the engine caught—the Hillman had had a couple of good runs that night, so the engine hadn’t cooled completely—and I slumped back in the seat. Difficult bit, now. Driving the bloody thing.

Left foot on the clutch, I lifted the gearshift beneath the steering wheel into first, then eased up the clutch pedal while pressing the accelerator. The engine roared and the car jolted. The engine stalled. Oh shit, this wasn’t going to be easy. Just before I performed the whole routine again, I remembered the handbrake. I hadn’t released it. I did so slowly, because it wasn’t only the car I was trying to get used to, but Moker’s body as well. After switching on the engine once more, I danced clumsily with the floor pedals. On reflection, I think it was only because the Hillman was still familiar to Moker’s body that I managed to drive the old heap that night. I found that the less I thought about what I was doing, the more those borrowed hands and feet were able to take over. In a way, it was like driving on autopilot and I was grateful for that. I guess from time to time we all do things automatically, and to a certain extent, this was what was happening now.

The first manoeuvre was to turn the car around so that it was facing the right direction. I swung the wheel and pushed down on the accelerator—

—the underground car park, the smart woman wearing glasses turning towards me, surprised then horrified, opening her mouth to scream, a wonderful feeling of exultation rushing through me as I pushed the long thin needle upwards, beneath her breast, into the heart—

The Hillman smashed into the side of a vehicle parked on the other side of the avenue. Oh, sweet…! Had to reverse, pull the car back. Had it made a terrible noise? I didn’t care if my neighbours were roused from their comfortable slumber—so long as I got away first. Okay. Calm down, take it steady. Reverse. Where the fuck was reverse? Oh yeah, down, had to push the lever down. Whoops. That was second gear. I remembered. No, had to pull the lever out first, then down. That was reverse.

Following my recollection of column gearshifts and also relying on this body’s own instincts, I reversed the car back across the road until the rear wheels hit the kerb, swinging the steering wheel to my right as I did so. A light came on in a bedroom window opposite.

Gears grinding, I shifted to first, and put my right foot down hard. The Hillman shot forward and its wing scraped along the side of another vehicle parked at the opposite kerb, taking off a wing mirror as it went—

—a dark, lonely street, wet with rain, a man coming towards me, unwrapping my scarf, waiting for him to draw near before revealing all, the man hesitating, footsteps slowing, the first hint of concern on his handsome face, then the look of utter terror taking over as the scarf fell loose, turning to run, but not quickly enough, first a big hand spinning him back round, then the needle striking upwards, piercing material, skin, flesh, finding the heart, and pure glorious joy—

Uhhh! The memory was almost painful, the shock of it making me jerk the steering wheel so that the Hillman scraped along another car parked on the left-hand side of the road. God, can’t I control them? Can’t I hold back the memories and the perverted pleasure that came with them? Had to get a grip, had to push extraneous thoughts aside. But could I? After all, this was not my body and whatever recollection it held could not be tamed by me, the usurper. Had to make myself immune to them. I still had control over my own mind, didn’t I? Sure I did.

The roads were pretty empty, as was the main thoroughfare when I turned into it. I’d have to drive carefully, concentrating all the way, do my best not to get distracted—Oh God!—

—a cemetery, an old one with Gothic tombs and large angels, weather-worn slabs everywhere, and there was the woman, alone laying flowers on the grave of some departed loved one, and here was I, moving among the stained crosses and angels with spread wings and mausoleums with boarded doors, stalking the woman, who was turned out, attractive, long dark hair, getting closer to her, unwinding the two ends of the scarf, ready to pounce, bringing the murder tool from my pocket as she turns her head and sees me, and pure delight at the terror on her face, those beautifully startled eyes that already know she’s dead, then the exquisite delight as the needle sinks in, through the satin material of her blouse, just under the lower ribs, pushing—no, sliding, for very little effort is required—the long needle through the flesh, piercing then slipping right inside her heart, her scream muffled by a big hand, and she falls across the grave of the one she is there to grieve for, then the touching, the lifting of clothes, pulling down fine panties, pushing inside her with trembling, excited fingers…

The scene was so strong, so very lucid, filling my mind so that the car swerved across the road, mounted a pavement and almost crashed into a lamp post. I shook my head, trying to clear it of pictures, nasty, depraved images, and they swiftly faded so that only the road was before me now.

Guiding the car back on to it, I tried to control my own mind, to shield it from the other’s thoughts, and for a short while I was successful. I steered the old Hillman in as straight a line as possible along the broad, lonely road, my way lit by amber street lights, the shadowed windows of shops and houses on either side like eyes witnessing my progress. Flashing blue lights appeared in the distance, police cars or ambulances having turned into the main road from a junction, and I took no chances, pulling over to the kerbside, the rubber of the left-hand wheels squealing against the stone. I pulled up behind a white van.

I’d been wise to do so, for two police cars, sirens wailing, followed closely by an unmarked vehicle, shot past on the other side of the road. Heading for my place? I wondered. Surely not. They couldn’t have reacted so fast to a phone call from Andrea, could they? Police response to call-outs these days was unreliable to say the least, but maybe it was a quiet night for them. Maybe they were speeding to some other call, there was no way of knowing and I wasn’t about to go back and check.

Something else nagged me as I sat stiffly in the driver’s seat staring at the back of the van in front, blood drying around one of my eyes. Then it hit me. Just as well I’d pulled over before the police cars reached me—I’d forgotten to turn on the Hillman’s headlights. I leaned forward to do so, my hand—Moker’s hand—scrabbling around the dashboard, searching for the appropriate switch. I found a likely suspect, pressed and—

—a pitch black alleyway, somewhere in the city, a figure leaning back in a doorway, someone waiting there, waiting for someone, waiting for me, the short hatchet—a hatchet, not a butcher’s chopper—in my hand, taken from the oversized raincoat where a large, deep pocket had been sewn in to accommodate it, lifting it high as the body waited, already dead—and empty—standing there as stiff as a board, freakishly held up by the wall and legs that were locked in rigor mortis, lifting the hatchet, the thrill of bringing it down hard on the dead man’s head, continuing the chopping and the cutting as the body toppled and fell to the ground, and going down with it, smashing and slicing, cutting into the cold carcass, destroying it beyond recognition, leaving behind on the wet floor of the alleyway a mound of chopped meat and naked bloody bones—

Had I occupied my own body, I know I would have thrown up right there in the car so repugnant was the memory sustained within the tissues and cooling flesh of this monster, but even so, my own mind reeled with shock and it was not entirely due to these invasive visions alone; no, it was the glorification that went with them, the overflowing happiness as the hatchet had struck again and again, the lazy spurts and dribbling of thickening blood, the disassembling of the human structure—the complete destruction.

This time something lingered after the vision had dissolved to black, not a continuation but the isolated memory of Moker’s final act of desecration. No wonder the police had not seriously connected my murder with the other serial killings, because there was one more gross defilement that had not been evident in my case.

Moker always left his victims in quiet, concealed locations, places that he could return to as himself, inside his own body, to carry out the mutilations without being disturbed; lonely sites where he could squat over the demolished body and defecate into the bloody pit left by the removed heart.

It was just as well there was so little traffic about at that time of night, or else my erratic driving would probably have caused a serious accident. As it was, I struck parked vehicles along the way, knocked over a bollard on a pedestrian island and for a time, when my concentration was at its weakest, travelled for almost a mile on the wrong side of the road. It was the memories somehow detained by Moker’s entity, his being, released at irregular and uncontrolled intervals, finally shed only after they had been recalled one last time.

—working with cadavers in the morgue, washing them, cleansing them, so they were fit for burial, the private obscene moments with them—

—faces of men in expensive suits, wearing silk ties and crisp shirts, surgeons who hid their natural repugnance with professional aloofness (although not all succeeding too well) as they peered into the hole of my face, the shaking of their head because there was nothing they could do to rebuild, there was not enough there for reconstruction, the operations to re-form at least a workable orifice, the pain suffered, the hope denied—

—looking at myself in a mirror, but me as someone young, in jeans and baggy jumper, the anguish, the despair, the bitterness—the anger! The smashing of mirror, any mirrors, anything at all that reflected my image!—

—the maiming of small animals—

—the stares from people, the screams of children, the undisguised or ill-concealed disgust of women, of girls, boys—

—the misery, the emptiness—

—then glorious flight, freedom from this marked body, invisibility, the dreams that were not dreams but true escapes, the journeys away from myself that were a discovery that changed everything—

Here I was, Jim True—or the spirit of Jim True—inhabiting another person’s shell, remembering that person’s life, the pain, the wretched misery, the surprising and new joy, while driving towards my own destiny, or what I perceived to be my destiny.

—walking the streets, people glancing at me and freezing in their tracks or quickly looking away again, searching for a place, a particular house, finding it, knocking on the door, the wild-haired woman with the pinched features and ashen skin standing at the open door, looking out, seeing me, the mother who had abandoned me, screaming now at the sight of me, the disfigurement her only recognition, slamming the door, shrieking at me to go away, go away!—

Had to shut the thoughts out, had to fix my focus on the road ahead, concentrate on steering the car, hardly bothering with the gears once it was in third, the effort of using the stiff column shift too much.

—catching a bee in an empty jam jar, filling it with water through a small hole drilled into the lid—

So many memories, rushing to expunge themselves, no chronological order to them anymore, a boy one moment, a man the next, but one common thread through all the ages, one consistent theme: rejection…

Fortunately, most of my journey was by way of broad main roads, the minor ones unnecessary, otherwise driving would have been even more difficult, with less leeway for swerving and avoiding parked vehicles. I ignored traffic lights, reluctant to shift through the gears, and again my luck held, no other traffic crossed in front of me.

—fitting the mask, the white surgical mask, concealing the affliction even though the disguise was further cause for curiosity or ridicule. Keeping the ugliness to myself. For street wear, even in the summer months, the long scarf, wrapped tightly around the head so only my eyes showed, often the surgical mask beneath this, then the hat, which cast shade over my eyes because even these were unsightly, too black, too protruding—

I’d driven this route many, many times but although it was familiar to me, I had to fight hard to remember which turns to make (so heavy was the Hillman that changing down for corners was unnecessary as long as I maintained reasonable speed).

—children, a classroom, a playground, full of them, gawking in fear, whispering to friends as they pointed, some of them sniggering, later to laugh outright, call me names—

—rejection—

—loneliness, time spent in dim rooms, bitterness the only companion—

Steady as a car flashed me from behind. Slowly I lifted one of those big hands, the other remaining gripped on the steering wheel, touched the scarf to make sure it was still in place, still hiding the deformity, as the impatient driver put his foot down and sped around the lazy Hillman, glaring across his passenger at me as he passed. He gave a derisive little toot of his horn, rear lights disappearing into the distance.

—the dreams, many of them horrible, depressing, but others that were wonderful and the realization that these generally were more than just dreams, that they were flights from the body, journeys of the spirit which took me to familiar places, but where I could not be seen, where my grotesqueness was hidden by invisibility, where even to myself there was nothing at all—learning that these flights were not restricted to night-times alone, that they could be controlled, sleep, itself, the only invariable, the essential requirement, and that could be learned, could be governed just as the journeys themselves could be governed—

—so many places travelled to, so many homes visited, so many activities spied upon, so many bedrooms—

—and always the glorious sense of freedom—

—the impossibility of rejection—

—and always the misery of returning to life as it truly was, the loneliness, heartache, the resentment—

—but eventually, the miracle of dominating the dead, of using corpses for my own gratification and for revenge—

—the first experiment, the first freshly deceased body, witnessing its lingering soul finally leaving its vessel, for a certain psychic ability had always been with me, perhaps nature’s compensation for the physical affliction, watching the soul lift itself from the corpse, like steam from a pot, but perhaps less clear, leaving a vacancy behind, or so it had occurred to me at the time, and on a whim, escaping from my own body in the otherwise deserted mortuary, letting it sleep in a chair in the empty little office attached to the tiled room where the cadavers were kept, lying down in the cold shell of flesh and organs that were already corrupting, raising a dead arm stiffly, awkwardly, rigor mortis in its earliest stages, elevating that reluctant arm, then the other one, then, although with more difficulty, the legs, one at a time, finally sitting up and looking around, viewing the last fleeting memories that were stored both in the brain and body itself like faded tape—

—repeating the experiment, over and over again, until it was time to take it to its logical—logical to me, that is—conclusion, the procurement of other, fresher, bodies, to live, if only for a very short time, as that person had, no, as whatever that person was capable of—

Oh God, it was unbearable. The sickness here, the evil within. I almost collapsed against the steering wheel, only the knowledge that I was drawing near to my destination preventing me from doing so. What other memories of this man Moker did I have to suffer? I didn’t think I could take much more, not if they were like those already remembered.

But there was one last memory to be recalled before it was erased forever and perhaps, in its way, it was the most disturbing of all because it was the very beginning of his hatred of normal people.

—chaos, images rushing through with no order and proper recognition—

—until everything slowed, everything resolved itself into one final and perfectly clear recollection—

—darkness becoming lighter, redness then too much brightness, shapes moving around me, feeling myself lifted, a separation, a snapping of something that had connected me to existence itself, the terrible, the awful, feeling of isolation, the sadness of losing something even though I didn’t know what, then the sounds around me, noises that sounded like intakes of air, familiar because it had seemed always to be with me, except this was sharp, unpleasant, not cosy and reassuring anymore, and those shapes, bright, white, leaning towards me, another blurred form coming into my feeble clouded vision, and there was something familiar about this, something nice and warming—

Another flashback, one already experienced, interposing itself for only a moment, a snapshot of the woman whose home I had searched for and found, the mother who had screamed—go away, go away!—before slamming the door in my undisguised face.

—rejection—

—absolute rejection—

And then, no more, the last memory unfinished.

I pulled the car over in a violent swerve, no longer able to bear the weight of these memories that were not mine but belonged to someone who had known only misery throughout his life.

Despite everything I knew about his deeds, despite the evil that was as much part of his nature as love is of most others’—despite that, I laid my head on those large hands that rested against the steering wheel and wept. I wept for Alec Moker.

41

The irony wasn’t lost on me as I wiped tears from those bulbous eyes with the sleeve of the raincoat: I was weeping for Moker with his own tears.

Rationally, it seemed foolish to feel pity for someone as wicked and as perverted as Moker, a necrophile who had murdered and mutilated four people—who had tried to kill my own wife and my little Primrose, for Christ’s sake!—but that was what I felt for him. His whole life had been despicable, from birth to manhood, he’d suffered shame and humiliation, hopelessness and loneliness; and perhaps worst of all for Moker—rejection. Total rejection. Rejection even by his own mother. Wouldn’t that be enough to warp any person’s soul, that the physical disfiguration that was its cause? Yet I could not wipe the picture of Moker kneeling above Primrose, the sharpened knitting needle ready to sink into her small heart, from my mind. It still shocked me, still filled me with a burning anger: but pity for him loitered behind the anger. Who could live a life such as his and remain normal? Mentally normal, I mean. Who would not develop a distorted view of life itself under those circumstances? But maybe Andrea had been right when she had called me gullible, because there are many in the world who suffer even worse afflictions than this killer, victims of constant pain, people with terrible abnormalities, paraplegics, men, women and children who need machines to help them breathe—the list is endless—most of whom strive to live as normal lives as possible, without overt bitterness, without rancour, without resentment of others. Why the hell should I feel sorry for a monster like Moker? I shouldn’t. Yet somehow, I did.

When the weeping had stopped and my eyes were dried, a realization occurred to me. I had “remembered” through Moker the killing of four people. Four people. I hadn’t been among them. Not that I needed it, but this was final proof that Oliver Guinane was my murderer. Bitter resentment and insanity were Moker’s excuse, but what was Guinane’s? Envy and greed? Yeah, envy and greed. He envied me my wife—and child. He wanted to make a huge pile of money out of something I didn’t support. Pretty basic, really.

But why he had chopped off my genitals was a mystery.

I looked out the side window up at the gtp sign, our agency’s logo, neon-lit over the glass front doors. Guinane True Presswell. That name was going to vanish when the so-called “merger” went through. Some accounts might move, but many of our existing clients would be content to come under the wing of such an internationally successful advertising agency as Blake & Turnbrow. Oh, a certain amount of new presentations would have to take place, a lot of client lunches would have to be undertaken, as well as corporate days out, but no doubt the freshness and glamour of it all would win most reluctant clients over. It was the nature of the game.

Although these thoughts ran through my mind now that Moker’s memories mercifully appeared to be spent, they were trivial, totally unimportant as, in the grand scheme of things, all such matters are. At that moment, I focused on one thing alone.

Clumsily pushing down the handle, I opened the car door and lumbered out. With effort, I peered up at the building. The top office lights were on, the low stone balustrade of the mock balcony on the fifth floor silhouetted by them. Sydney’s office, and next door, the one I shared with Guinane. And Guinane’s silver BMW was parked right outside our building, just behind Sydney’s Merc.

It took me several attempts to get my finger—Moker’s finger—to press the lift button for the fifth floor. For some reason, conducting small tasks with somebody else’s body proved more difficult than making the bigger moves—it hadn’t been easy to pick up the killer’s deadly knitting needle from the floor in my home and slide it into one of the raincoat’s deep pockets, as it hadn’t been easy buttoning the dead woman’s jacket earlier that night. Walking, getting in and out of cars, even driving was relatively easy compared to opening doors and pressing lift buttons.

Fortunately, the plate-glass doors of the agency were unlocked, so one side only needed a shove for me to gain access.

The street outside, dampened by a light drizzle, was deserted, which was unsurprising at this late or early hour, whichever way you cared to look at it. My feeling, and it was only a guess, was that it was around one or two o’clock in the morning. The small lift came, its door slid open. Feeling weaker by the moment, I shuffled inside, awkwardly thumped the fifth-floor button and leaned back against the rear wall, hands resting on the waist-high interior steel rail, allowing them to take some of my weight. I wasn’t sure how long I could use this body before its system finally ran down completely, but the woman’s corpse earlier had got me from Bayswater to Paddington, so I should have some time left. Of course, I hadn’t walked from my house to the agency in the centre of London, but the sheer effort of concentrating on driving, hindered by the constant sudden replays of Moker’s memories, had somehow wearied me, let alone the body I had borrowed. My knees were not far from buckling and my upper body felt too heavy, as if I were carrying weights in the raincoat’s pockets. It was even hard to keep my head up; the neck felt too decrepit to bear such a load. Had to cope though, had to use whatever was left to carry out my little task.

The lift came to a halt, although I didn’t feel it and only realized I was on the fifth floor when the doors slid open. The mini-reception area (the main one was on the ground floor) and corridor were unlit, only a faint glow radiating from an office further along. Walking woodenly from the small lift, I waited in the reception area for a while, listening for any sounds, anything at all. The three partners’ office suite was at the far end of the corridor and nobody there would have heard the lift arriving. At least, I didn’t think so, but at this time of night (or morning) the rest of the building was silent, so the sound might have travelled. I hoped it hadn’t: it was important to catch Guinane by surprise. I’d use the knitting needle to kill him.

So quiet. So very quiet. I’d worked enough late nights in my time to be used to the loneliness that comes to offices when most employees have packed up and gone home for the night, switching off lights and leaving behind a sepulchral kind of quietness. You might get a lot more work done without the usual interruptions, but eventually the eeriness starts to get to you and you wonder if you’re the only person left on the planet. That’s when you give someone a call—wife, girlfriend, business associate, it doesn’t matter who, just so that you hear another voice.

On this night, the agency was filled with that quiet eeriness—more so than ever, you might say—but who could I call? What would I say? It’s me, babe, but not as you know me. If only I’d had a proper mouth to say the words. Andrea didn’t need to be freaked out anymore tonight. Besides, I didn’t regard her as my wife now; he’d destroyed that. And it seemed I could no longer regard Prim as my daughter either. That was the really hard part.

I shuffled onwards, occasionally reaching out a hand to the wall to steady myself, knocking askew one of the several framed advertising awards the agency had won, most by Guinane and me, a couple by one of our talented junior art director/copywriter teams. Our Walk of Vanity, we called it, but all the awards seemed absolutely worthless to me now. Although I didn’t need to breathe air anymore, I was conscious of the involuntary snuffling sounds coming from the cavity of Moker’s face, half-raspy, half-sibilant, and I did my best to control them. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a controllable thing and I could only hope the sound was loud to me alone.

Halfway down the corridor, the murmur of voices came to me. I stopped to listen.

Was it only one voice I could hear? I took a few more steps, Moker’s grubby sneakers scuffing the carpet. It sounded like one voice, a kind of monotonous low-key drone that now and again was interrupted by…? A groan? Somebody groaning? Had Guinane hurt Sydney Presswell? Was Sydney next on his hit list? With both partners gone, Guinane stood to make a lot more money and, if he had it in him to murder me, then Sydney would be no problem.

I edged further along the corridor, this time forcing myself not to hurry, afraid I’d be heard and so lose the element of surprise, which I would need if I were to get close enough to Guinane to push the needle into his chest. It’s funny how in zombie movies, the zombie is always endowed with superhuman strength, whereas in reality (if we can talk reality here) the undead’s muscles and sinews would have atrophied and lost most of their power. In Moker’s debilitated—debilitated by death—body, I was weak and becoming weaker by the moment. Soon, the body would collapse—just as earlier, in the police station, the woman had finally expired—and would be useless to me. I could not afford to let Guinane see me coming; I had to strike before he had a chance to defend himself. Carefully, I placed one tool in front of the other, waited a beat, did the same thing again, making my way down the carpeted corridor a snail’s pace, keeping as quiet as I possibly could.

The voice—and the groans—became louder as I approached the end offices. Soon I was able to make out the words being spoken.

42

Sydney Presswell’s office was empty, although the lights were on. As Moker, I was standing at the darkened corridor’s junction with another, shorter, corridor, and opposite, but a little to the right, was the open doorway into Sydney’s place of work, where company files and records were kept and where the agency’s financial accounts were balanced so diligently. It wasn’t unusual for our bookkeeper to be working late, although I could never quite understand his fascination for figures and balance sheets; mercifully I didn’t have to, nor did Guinane—Sydney relieved us of such stultifying but essential tedium and we were glad to let him. Oh yeah, that’s how stupid we both were.

The voices came from the large office next door, to the left of the junction, which Guinane and I, as copywriter and art director, shared so that we could work on ideas together. The door to this was ajar so I couldn’t see much of the interior, the opening no more than a foot or so wide. Although the angle also meant that I could not easily be seen, I stepped back and pressed against the corridor’s wall so that the corner of the junction concealed me completely. Trying to keep those guttural noises I was making down to a minimum, I listened.