Phobia

by Dean Crawford

  DI Harper cut the line off and left Honor sitting comatose in front of the television, staring at an image of her own face where she had paused the transmission, now being broadcast in detail to a few million fellow watchers. For some reason she had the sense that she was being exposed as a villain, rather than a detective stoically hunting a grim assassin. The media would now pin the burden of success upon her shoulders, charging her alone with the task of apprehending a man whose name they did not yet know.

  She sighed and leaned back on her sofa, closed her eyes. Breathe slowly, in through the nose, out through the bloody mouth. She knew that she had to keep a lid on her wayward thoughts, lest her mind be cast adrift from its moorings and drift helplessly into the turbulent storms beyond her darkened sanctuary.

  Focus.

  She opened her eyes and focused on her laptop, then opened the Face Fear page. The forum was administrated by a UK user, whom Honor had been able to identify from their own profile page. The site had some one thousand, seven hundred followers and a lively timeline. She had been able to identify several members who lived close by, their profile pages revealing photographs of summer barbeques that betrayed their precise location based on the Shard poking up into the sky in the distance and other key reference points. The time of day, the date and the angle of the sun in the sky was all that one needed. Honor had then been able to identify their friends, where those friends lived, where they worked, everything.

  She had not used a special gadget to perform this work – there was little need. The average Facebook user had little concept of how easy it was to expose personal information from their pages, even when that information was not explicitly stated. Tiny details could be gleaned from photo albums; locations identified, personal habits and preferences noted, even travel plans. Big companies like Facebook were expert data gatherers, with algorithms based not just upon what a person typed on their profile or what pages they visited, but upon what images they posted and the kind of information they shared.

  Honor surfed the page for a while, uncovering a litany of phobias that she was surprised even existed. She had heard of the most common ones, such as arachnophobia, hydrophobia and so on, but nomophobia got her attention: the fear of being out of range of one’s mobile phone service, or out of credit. Anemophobia was a fear of the wind; Spectrophobia was a fear of seeing one’s self in the mirror, which Honor could attest to suffering most days, especially when enduring a hangover. Linonophobia was a fear of string. That made Honor think for a moment, about the nature of fear itself. By a fair margin, a piece of string was not the most hazardous object in the universe, and a fear of falling onto a piece of string and somehow being throttled to death by it seemed a stretch.

  ‘Death by string,’ she murmured, and giggled as she shot Bailey a serious expression. ‘The string did it, y’onour.’

  Bailey blinked, then continued licking his fur.

  Ablutophobia: a fear of bathing; chorophobia: a fear of situations involving dancing. Her father should suffer from that, but apparently was unaware of it and had often afflicted her with his own personal form of thing–shaking that had embarrassed her in front of family and friends as a child. Allodoxaphobia: a fear of opinions…

  ‘DC Hansen, take note,’ she chortled as she sipped her wine.

  Optophobia: the fear of opening one’s eyes, common knowledge to anybody on a Monday morning. The list went on, Honor scrolling down through some of the weirdest fears that she had ever encountered, until one stopped her in her tracks and made her lean closer to the screen. Thanatophobia: a fear of death, or the process of dying, named after the Greek figure of death, Thanatos.

  Honor saw the face of Amber Carson, frozen in time a split–second before her life had come to an end; terrified, buried alive beneath tons of wet concrete. The killer had purposefully placed that camera inside the coffin, had purposefully wished to watch the moment of her death, presumably in real time. Honor suspected that the killer had intended for something similar to happen to Sebastian Dukas, but he had fought back too soon, forcing the killer to throttle him to death, to watch his moment of death in real time but not in the way the killer had intended.

  ‘Snuff videos.’

  The memory of a spate of “snuff” videos that had entered mainstream consciousness a few years before jolted uncomfortably. The videos were of people dying, whether by choice or not, and had appeared in various dark and sordid forums for years before service providers were able to crack down on them. Honor was aware that they still appeared from time to time on the so–called Dark Web, a sort of mirror–image of the Internet, which she had no idea how to access. The IT guys would know, for that was also where lurked the paedophiles in their miserable hordes, sharing their disgusting images with each other.

  Honor leaned back on the sofa again, sipped some more of her wine. Fear of death itself. An obsession with death. Obsession was not far removed from fear in many ways, the sufferer unable to deflect their thoughts and attention away from what they perceived as a threat. Sufferers could therefore become afflicted with an obsession, or it could become a part of their killing strategy, something that they wished to observe or somehow take part in, of course without implicating themselves directly in the death itself.

  ‘He is obsessed,’ she said to Bailey.

  Her gaze drifted to the image on the wall, the ghostly shape of a baby’s head, gold pixels against the dark cradle of life, like stars shimmering in an infinite cosmos. There had been life there, once, cruelly snatched away, a life that did not yet know that it was life. Honor looked away again, pain pinching the corners of her eyes as she focused on the screen for a few moments and kept reading to divert her maudlin thoughts.

  Thanatophobia, it was believed, was rooted in the human denial of death itself. Human beings had developed some level of self–awareness and understanding of mortality one hundred and fifty thousand years ago, so the piece said, and had thus been dealing with the concept ever since. It could not be said whether any other animals understood that their lives would come to an end, and even intelligent animals like elephants seemed unable to understand why elderly members of the herd would eventually keel over and never move again. They did show undeniable evidence of grief, however, suggesting that they eventually recognised the moment where a well– known member of the herd was never again coming with them.

  The point of the piece, she learned, was that no living human had ever died. People were brought back from a state of death, but near–death experiences not–withstanding, they were not conscious during their actual deaths. Hence, death was something that people could not deal with in the normal emotional way as, by definition, they were unable to do so, so they lived their lives in a permanent state of denial, whether they knew it or not: death always happens to the other guy.

  Honor kept reading down, and then she read something that further caught her attention. Suddenly, she knew what the killer was thinking. Honor grabbed her mobile phone and started dialling.

  He sat in the living room and stared at the mirror, watching himself while he waited for the time to leave. It was something that he had learned to do as a child, when he had first wondered about himself and his place in the universe, had first asked: why am I here?

  He had been about seven, maybe eight years old at the time, young to be thinking such things. It had been at about the same age that he had first realised that he would, one day, die. The awareness, the revelation, had both intrigued and bothered him ever since. What would it feel like to be dead? How could one exist, and yet then simply not exist?

  He had rationalised this for himself. The universe was nearly fourteen billion years old, and he had not existed for the vast majority of that time. Thus, being dead had not bothered him. He had not existed, and not existing was the very definition of being dead, or at least, not yet alive. Therefore, no problem. Except that, now, he was alive. He could no longer not exist, for he had once existed. Descartes, in a roundabout way – I lived; the
refore, I was. To his young mind the question was of immense importance, but most seemed to avoid it. His own father’s words had been typically dismissive.

  ‘You’ll know when you get there,’ he had uttered with an uninterested shrug of his shoulders, as usual not even looking at his son.

  But, if he had once existed, then how could he no longer exist afterward? He had devoured books on the occult, and on experiences of the “afterlife”, of near–death encounters and other esoteric and impossible–to–prove witness accounts of heaven, hell and the something in–between called purgatory. For years, he had been obsessed with it all, and at the end, eventually, he had been forced to draw his own conclusions. That moment had been a finality with implications both moral and existential.

  ‘We live only once.’

  He reaffirmed his own faith as he watched himself in the mirror. There was no afterlife, no deities, nothing after what mankind knew and understood as life. Life was precious because it only occurred once for the individual, a vanishingly brief flicker of awareness amid the immense antiquity of an endless, lonely universe. He had realised that, as a baby, neither he nor any other human being had any recollections. Those came later, at the age of two years or so, when he could recall events, faces, simple memories in his mind that suggested he had become aware of his surroundings. Before that, he had been alive but clueless about it. Others still, in old age, lost their awareness, their sense of self, through Alzheimer’s and other illnesses that robbed them of their entire being. They were alive, but their true selves were present no longer. Thus, existence itself was a product of the mind, of squabbling neurons and writhing electrical currents, and when the brain was too young to form the connections necessary for self–awareness, or so old that it decayed and those once–firm connections were loosened, life itself came to an end and the sense of self was lost. One could be dead or alive, and it wouldn’t matter, because they wouldn’t know either way.

  Nothing matters.

  He looked at himself again. He looked younger than his years, no grey hairs marring his head, his skin smooth and untainted by the ravages of hardship or afflictions. He had led a healthy life and he was considered of high intelligence, having once almost got into MENSA, falling short by only a handful of IQ points. At no point had he ever been suspected of being a psychopath.

  The word irked him, although he knew that in some ways it applied. It was a word that was bandied about, applied to anybody who broke free of society’s so–called “norms” and forged a path of their own. He saw himself more as a pioneer, somebody who was willing to break those bonds, to traverse the taboo and the forbidden just to see what was out there. Had others, more famous, not sallied forth on equally perilous but valiant journeys? Copernicus, Columbus, Armstrong? All had faced the unknown, confronted it, explored it, and in some cases lost their lives in the pursuit of satisfying their insatiable curiosity.

  He sat a little straighter, his confidence buoyed. There was no right or wrong, only what mankind made for itself. There were no consequences, no price to pay other than at the hands of the law, which he feared little. There was nothing in life that could keep him from the crucible of his mind, for there alone he ruled as God, the conqueror of his own existence, and as it was the only existence he would ever have, he intended to use it as he saw fit.

  He stood up, his eyes bright with the glow of enlightenment or the radical glitter of fanaticism, depending on how cynical the observer. Dark jeans met brown leather boots, and he slipped on a leather jacket to complete the look he preferred. He was ready to quell the darkness inside, reaching out to consume him. He no longer feared it, the wolf within, although he could admit to himself that he also did not understand it. All he knew was that it must be assuaged, fed, satisfied, before it would return to slumber in some deep conduit of his brain where it would not bother him, at least for a while.

  The police would eventually identify him. He stood out in a crowd: tall, handsome, well–built and in good shape for someone his age, a result of never smoking and never being much of a drinker. His timing would have to be perfect. If the Ripper could melt away into London’s history as the greatest and most brutal serial killer of all time, so could he. His only remorse was that he could not be like the Ripper in every way, but sadism had its limits. He was squeamish around blood, always had been, and he disliked direct confrontations. The idea of carving victims up, dead or alive, appalled him. No, his method was different, even more cruel in many ways, for his victims lived right up until the end: they did not die while unconscious, from shock or massive blood loss, they remained entirely compos mentis until the very, very last second.

  He turned and walked to his laptop computer, the screen displaying the Face Fear forum that he so often frequented, using a fake profile. He sat down in front of it, and hovered the mouse over the profile of Jayden Nixx.

  He had watched Jayden for almost a year, and in that time, he had gathered a considerable amount of data about her. He knew where she lived, where her family lived, her mobile and home phone numbers, where she worked and with whom. He knew her favourite haunts in the city, how she travelled and, most importantly, where she was travelling tonight.

  The Hoop and Grapes pub was located in Whitechapel, beneath a block of modern offices, just off Aldgate. It had an outside terrace, although with the rapidly deteriorating weather he knew that all drinkers would be inside. Jayden, he knew, did not smoke, so she would remain inside the pub for the evening.

  He had picked up on the planned gathering by simply ensuring he was often in the right place at the right time to overhear conversations. He had in fact spoken to Jayden once or twice in passing, as she had come to recognise him, although they had never been formally introduced. The knowledge that she knew her killer excited him, although he knew not why. He knew only that it intoxicated him, knowing that her death was close, that she was being hunted, and that only he knew it.

  Jayden would be leaving her house about now. The time to leave was close, and he would need to be extremely careful in how he conducted himself, as he could not really afford to be seen close to Jayden. The police would check CCTV footage of the pub in the wake of her death, and if he was seen in close proximity to her, they would seek to identify him. No, tonight he must stay in the shadows and his visit must be brief. The advantage was that he knew the layout of the pub very well, and he was already planning his strike as he walked out of the living room and headed for the front door.

  He was halfway there when he heard a thump from downstairs, in the cellar. He sighed, turned, and unlocked the basement doors before heading down. He hit the light to reveal the spare rooms, and turned right. Another dull thump.

  He walked to the doors, selected another key, unlocked and opened them.

  The darkness was absolute, the heat in the room thick and heavy. A single, bare light bulb cast a sickly light, the room’s sole street–level window sealed shut and covered with a veil of black cloth.

  The stench hit him, as it always did, the commingled odours of decay, of rotting skin and flesh, of a human body both alive and in a state of semi–death. He stepped inside and looked down at the bed, sagging beneath the emaciated bones of a body that quivered with the last desperate threads of life fluttering weakly within.

  The limbs were grey and laced with purple veins, the skin almost translucent. He could see the rib cage poking through the chest, the skin seeming to hang from the body like limp sails from a ghost ship’s yards. He let his gaze travel to the skull, shocks of ragged white hair clinging in patches to blotchy skin, eyes dull within sunken pits ringed with bruised sclera. Yellowed teeth peeked between thin lips pulled back in a rictus of near–death. The figure emitted a feeble, high–pitched whistling cry of misery, ragged breath coming in short, soft gasps.

  He leaned down, and gently patted the back of one bony hand, its wrist bound with chains just as were the ankles and neck.

  ‘Soon,’ he promised, looking into the man’s eyes wit
h a smile. ‘Soon, Father.’

  12

  Dread. She felt it every time she closed her eyes. She couldn’t sleep for it haunting her every thought.

  Honor instead sat in silence on her sofa and watched the city, the twinkling lights blurred and distorted by rain splattering in squalls on her window. She was sitting in darkness, the way she liked to sometimes when she needed to think. Bailey knew the drill and was curled up asleep on the other end of the sofa, dreaming, his paws occasionally twitching as he swiped at birds in some imaginary forest.

  She knew. She knew what he was thinking, and she was sure that by now he would be at work again, stalking somebody out there in the city.

  She had called the station and spoken to Danny, who was still in the office trawling through CCTV footage from All Bar One, the location of Sebastian Dukas’s last night. He still hadn’t seen anything, and the lack of evidence was hugely frustrating for the team. Nobody in the footage from the Crosse Keys stood out either, literally nobody, and yet somehow Amber had been incapacitated with GHB before her death. They could only assume for now that the drugging had occurred at her home, but somehow the pieces didn’t quite fit well enough for that.

  ‘I’m running footage now of her heading back to Hackney,’ Danny said on the phone. ‘She looks fine, maybe a little tipsy but nothing too bad. She’s alone, the whole way so far.’

  That information also bothered Honor, knowing that Amber was neither followed nor being watched in the pub. The evidence suggested that she was targeted randomly, but then her manner of death of course had been anything but random.

  ‘What about Samir?’ she asked. ‘Is he getting anywhere?’

  ‘He left a couple of hours ago to get showered and eat,’ Danny replied. ‘He’s been trawling through the phobia forums, trying to find a link between the victims beyond their presence on the site. He says he’s coming back in to look over some more footage and go over the witness reports at St Magnus the Martyr Church. Something’s got to pop on this guy, he can’t just vanish into thin air.’