by Steve Harris
James could see why Black Rock’s author had chosen to fictionalize the dog though. It was impressive and scary, taller than a lurcher but with a thicker body and a more muscular build. It had an intelligent face - seemingly a combination of Labrador and something that might have been greyhound. Its movements were graceful and fluid. It looked as if it knew what the score was and that as far as James was concerned there was little point continuing.
James took two deep shuddering breaths and then said, ‘Cripes dog, you threw a scare into me!’
He wasn’t terribly surprised when the dog tilted its head up sideways as though it could hear and understand. This was impossible of course - James was fifteen feet away and sitting in a soundproofed car with the windows rolled up -but that was the impression he got.
Then Diamond Ambrose Anstey did the very thing that not three hours earlier James had read about him doing. He lowered his head, raised a paw and began to point. Directly at James.
He’s telling me to get the fuck out of here and he’s pointing the way, James thought and was instantly ashamed that he’d entertained this piece of fancy. Dogs - even intelligent dogs -were not renowned for their power of precognition.
‘Get out of the way, Diamond!’ James yelled.
The dog stayed where it was. Pointing the way out.
Perhaps - in spite of what the book had said - the dog actually belonged to the house and guarded it. Perhaps it was trying to let him know that if he insisted on continuing, he was going to have it to contend with when he got out of the car.
Now he’d reached this conclusion and he’d recovered from the shock of the animal’s appearance, the only problem that remained was that Diamond was blocking the way. He couldn’t treat the dog to a blast on the horn because that would merely announce his impending arrival to whoever was inside the house.
Still not entirely happy with the way the dog was pointing at him like he meant business, James waited a few seconds, then let his foot off the brake.
The Eldorado rolled slowly forwards.
Diamond Ambrose Anstey remained as motionless as a statue, eyes glittering white in the moving headlight beams.
‘Get out of the way, dog!’ James yelled as the car drew nearer.
When there was still ten feet between his bonnet and the dog, James saw Diamond’s posture change slightly - as though the animal had tensed his muscles.
He’s going now, he told himself. He’ll probably run back down the track and bark until he alerts his owner to the fact that someone is approaching. There goes the surprise entrance.
The car rolled steadily closer.
He isn’t going to move, James finally realized.
At the exact moment that James finished telling himself this, Diamond Ambrose Anstey did move.
But not the way James had expected.
Diamond came straight at the car.
James hit the brakes again.
The dog took two great ground-eating bounds and sprang on to the Eldorado’s bonnet. The deep crump! registered the impact of what couldn’t possibly be anything other than a live animal and the front of the car dipped under the weight.
Diamond stood on the front of the bonnet like an oversized hood ornament, head dipped as he peered across the expanse of metalwork to where James sat.
James was riveted to his seat, his eyes locked in the dark gleam of the dog’s. He knew with the utmost certainty that the dog intended to come in through the windscreen after him. And not only that, he suddenly believed that the dog could actually do it. This windscreen, which had once stopped half a house brick without taking damage, would shatter into a million pieces when Diamond hit it.
With this prediction came the astonishing realization that the animal had somehow known on which side of the car James would be sitting. Even though it was left-hand drive. The dog, who couldn’t have seen where he sat from the wrong side of the headlights hadn’t had to search for him. It had located him instantly. Even if this astonishing fact could be attributed to chance, what was happening to the car’s bonnet where the dog’s paws were in contact with it could not.
Frost was blooming there.
It was spreading rapidly in twinkling crystalline tracers as though the dog’s paws were freezing it.
Can’t be! James thought, but there wasn’t time to consider it because the dog was communicating with him in some peculiar fashion. There were no words and no images, just a deep, aching sensation of loneliness and despair. It only lasted a moment, but in that moment James knew how it must feel to be damned.
Then Diamond was crouching as if to pounce and James understood what the transference had been about. He was the one who was damned, not the dog. The dog was the one who was going to send him to Hell.
The following second seemed to James to last almost eternally.
Diamond drew back, his muscles tensed. James saw them bunch and stand out in rippling cables. Then the creature sprang forwards at him, all its paws leaving the car’s bonnet at the same instant. In the coating of frost left behind there were four unfrozen spots which perfectly outlined the shape of the dog’s paws and claws.
Diamond flew through the air towards the windscreen in a perfect, graceful arc, mouth closed, front legs outstretched, sad eyes gleaming.
James tried to bring his hands up to protect himself when the animal missile burst through the windscreen but his limbs moved in real-time and were only half-way up from the steering wheel at the crucial moment.
Just before the dog hit, James distantly noted that Diamond was penetrating the glass without damaging it - the screen was still whole and unbroken.
The dog’s full weight connected with him in the centre of his chest.
If there had been time, James would have screamed, but there were too many other things happening at once.
The creature was passing through him, in much the same way as it had done with the windscreen, but seemingly more slowly, as if it were sinking into him.
And it hurt. Where it made contact it froze like ice and burned like a welder’s torch. It seemed to be melting its way through his body. There was a moment when the dog’s head and front legs were inside his chest and its back and hindquarters were standing on his thighs and pushing. Then its back was entering him too. It felt like someone was pushing a blazing telegraph pole through his flesh. James had no breath, his heart had cramped to a tiny cube of ice and his mind had hidden itself away in a tiny corner of his head.
All he knew from then on was pain.
It seemed to go on for ever.
19 - A Message from God
Martin pulled the release for the engine bay and started to get out of the car.
Twenty-five minutes later, Martin was sitting in his Ferrari getting his proof. It was the proof he didn’t want - the proof that everything he’d experienced so far consisted
not of his fevered imaginings, but of reality. He really had held a telepathic conversation with a maniac author who called himself Peter Perfect and, so far, everything Peter Perfect had said was holding up to scrutiny. The man (or whatever he was, and the word god - with a small ‘g’ - kept creeping into Martin’s mind) had intimated that he’d arranged for Martin to go to Scarborough in order to keep him away from Bude until it was too late for him to save Essenjay. And now it looked as if this was indeed the case.
Because although the Ferrari now contained two gallons of petrol, it still wouldn’t start.
‘You’re just going to flatten the battery,’ the motel manager said from outside the open car window. ‘I don’t think it was lack of petrol that made it stop. I think something else is wrong with it. Did you check the H.T. system to see if it got wet? Probably picked up some rain-water. Open the back up and I’ll have a look. I’ve got a torch somewhere. I’ll get it.’
And his mental ice block chose this moment to light up.
Martin paused, his legs out in the driving rain and his body still in the car. Rain blew into his face, but he was barely aware of it; his attention had been forcefully grabbed by the three-dimensional mental movie-screen.
The honed edges of the crystal flickered like a slow-to-start fluorescent tube, except that the colour was a deep, fiery red.
Then it caught and for a few seconds, the ice block’s edges shone with a blinding red light. Martin could feel the frame of light etching itself into his brain. If the light went out and the ice block vanished now, he knew, he would still be able to see its outline. Very probably he would still be able to see it a month later. That shape would scar his mind.
Then the light vanished and a fresh image of his favourite haunted house appeared. The house didn’t fill the block this time though - he was seeing it from what seemed to be about a hundred yards away and from a viewpoint that had to be ten or fifteen feet in the air. He could see the hoggin drive that led down to Black Rock’s forecourt. A stunted hedge bordered the drive, ran in a straight line to either edge of the rock on which the house stood, and quit, as though it was too tired to curve any further around the rock.
Martin had not seen Black Rock from this angle before. Neither had he known there was a hedge along this aspect of it. But none of this new information came as a surprise to him. It exactly fitted the image he would have if he’d been asked to visualize the place from this angle.
He knew now why he and Janie had shared such similar mental pictures of Black Rock. It wasn’t because the book’s author was extremely skilled at drawing a picture, but because the place was real.
And now he’d realized this, he understood something else that had been bothering him. The reason the mysterious Peter Perfect had, at the bottom of each manuscript page, given his address as ‘Black Rock, Tintagel’ was because that really was his address. The only fictional thing about the book’s footers was the author’s name. Those pages had come from a man who had used his own home as his imaginary haunted house.
Which means that you don’t have to rush back to Bude after all. You have the guy’s address. All you have to do is ring the police.
Then he realized that he had nothing to tell them. What are you going to say? That there’s a man calling himself Peter Perfect living in a house called Black Rock in Tintagel and you want them to stop him harming the woman you love? We haven’t even got a threat, except a telepathic one, and even if it was written down, it wouldn’t constitute a threat. Your average policeman would simply believe that Peter Perfect is your rival in love.
‘Shit!’ he said aloud.
And the vision cleared.
‘You OK?’ the motel owner asked, coming back towards Martin with his torch. He was dressed in a yellow waterproof cape, sou’wester and rubber boots, and looked like a lost lifeboat man. His name was Harold, he’d said earlier, but Martin could call him Harry. But he was one of those slow and pedantic people who did everything so methodically and calmly that however grateful you were, you ended up wanting to strangle them. Out of spite, Martin called him Harold.
‘Of course I’m all right, Harold, he snapped. ‘What did you think? That I was soaked to the skin and pissed off with being stuck here in the middle of nowhere?’ He bit his lip before he could add, with only an arsehole like you for company.
‘You just looked a bit peaky,’ Harold said. ‘Glazed over.’
‘I’m fine,’ Martin said, getting out and standing up in the full force of the driving rain. ‘I’m just agitated about being stuck.’
‘We’ll get you going in a jiffy,’ Harold said. ‘Don’t worry.’
Martin followed him to the back of the Ferrari, hoping Harold knew more about car engines than he did.
This hope was dashed within two seconds.
‘Jesus H. Christ on a cross,’ Harold said mildly, peering into the depths of the engine. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this before. I can’t even see the distributor. It’s all belts and pulleys.’ He leaned in and searched with his torch. ‘Ah, here we go. Just as I thought. You’ve been hammering through deep puddles. Wires are all wet. Got a tissue?’
Martin hadn’t. ‘Haven’t you?’ he snapped.
Harold searched beneath his cape and found a handkerchief. He leaned beneath the shelter of the bonnet and began to fold it neatly. Martin found himself wanting to bellow at the man to hurry up, or to shake him until he woke himself up and started doing something, but he restrained himself.
Harold wasn’t happy with his work until five long minutes later.
During this time, the ice block in Martin’s brain lit up twice. The first time, the vision of Black Rock was a little further away and he could see the sea raging around the outcrop on which it stood; the second time, night had fallen. It was dark but, surprise, surprise, Martin could plainly perceive every detail. It was as if the house was lit by the light of the brightest full moon ever.
Well it would be, wouldn’t it? Martin thought bitterly. It’s a fucking haunted house, after all. What good would it be if you couldn’t see what was going to happen there?
What happened next, however, could have been seen in total darkness. The upstairs window of the house which had earlier let out a blinding flash of light, now emitted another.
At exactly the same time as good old Harold began to say, There you go. It’ll start now.’
He turned to look at Martin, squinted, then shone his torch directly into Martin’s face. ‘Are you sure you’re feeling OK?’ he asked.
Martin batted the torch away from his face. Td be a damned sight better if you wouldn’t keep blinding me like that,’ he snarled.
‘You can leave now,’ Harold said in a wounded tone. ‘Your car will start on the first turn of the key.’
‘No it won’t,’ Martin said. He understood it all now. He didn’t have the fain�
�test idea how it worked, but he knew what was happening.
Down in Cornwall, on a rock which was almost surrounded by the Atlantic, sat a real house called Black Rock. Inside that house, was someone who might or might not have been called Peter Perfect. Peter Perfect might be a writer, and a good one at that, but writing well was no longer his main talent. He’d progressed several steps beyond that. He no longer manipulated fictitious characters through his stories, he now manipulated reality itself. He might be doing it the way a novelist would - constructing a reality that suited his purposes - but his characters were real people and his world was the real world.
Which makes him… . what? A god? A ghost?
Martin didn’t know. But he did know that Peter Perfect was in Black Rock, and which room he was in. The upstairs room on the left-hand side of the house. The writer’s workroom. The one which emitted blasts of blinding white light each time Peter Perfect changed reality.
Martin had seen one of those lightning-like emissions the moment before directory enquiries had informed him that there really was a Mrs Algar living at the Scarborough address he’d been given and he’d just seen another. If those pulses came when Peter Perfect changed reality so that it contained, not only the usual things, but also those things that he desired, the latest one was going to have something to do with the car. If Peter Perfect could change reality and he really did want to keep Martin away, he wasn’t going to allow the car to start.
The car won’t start,’ Martin told Harold. ‘I’ll try it, but I don’t expect it to go.’
He climbed back into the Ferrari thinking, Why should he be frightened of me turning up? Why doesn’t he just roll back his cosmic word-processor - or whatever he uses to edit reality - to the point where I enter, and erase me; just delete me so that I never existed at all?
