by Julie Kenner
The Fatal Man. In some movies, and in books, so very attractive. But heaven help the real-life woman who trusted such a creature.
Kate had done so.
Kate was dead.
Outside, in the hall, the telephone rang. On and on. How many times had it done that? About twenty.
Wearily, at last, Vivien got up and went to answer. She knew it wouldn’t be him.
Nor was it. When she lifted the receiver, no one spoke. There was no breathing—no sound at all.
Vivien cut the connection drearily and dialed 1471—but the caller had withheld his or her number.
This was all crazy.
She must get out now and stay out.
She walked back into the octagonal room, to the mess of her scattered clothes. She was so sick of packing, partly unpacking, repacking and lugging them about.
Away down the garden, a flock of birds rose clattering, as if frightened, from the lilacs.
From that spot too, around the corner of the path where the statue was, and hidden from her, came a single metallic clank.
Vivien froze.
She hung there, waiting for other noises—for the birds to come back. Neither happened.
It was nothing.
Face it, Vivien, she thought. You’re always wrong, aren’t you. Dead men don’t return to haunt you. It’s the live ones you love who turn out to be demons.
She walked straight out of the French doors and down the path, quickly, her fists clenched.
Warmth, and fast-ebbing day, caused her to relax. The mosaic shade of foliage dappled the path. She could smell the roses, the leaves of the lilac trees, the sooty electric backdrop of London. The unseen sun was nearly down. Shadows…Anything could lurk in those bushes, but nothing—listen, Vivien—nothing did.
She turned the corner.
The statue stood there, melancholy and glimmering white. Unreadable.
Of course it hadn’t moved. Only that one foot still with its toes slightly off the plinth. Otherwise it was unchanged.
But she hated the statue—beautiful Patrick Aspen Sinclair, who shot his wife because his heart was stone. And then shot himself.
That, at least, Connor had failed to do. No suicide for him. She thought this bitterly, but tears tore from her eyes. She must learn to hate Connor. When she tried it, her heart—not stone at all—broke.
She stood there on the path below the statue, forcing herself not to cry, and indoors she heard the phone begin to ring again. Somehow the idea of Cinnamon, also jealous and maybe off her head, flashed through Vivien’s brain—
Enough of all this! Vivien would pack and run. None of it was her concern, not even Addie’s wretched flat. Stingy Addie, with all her money, who wouldn’t pay anyone to look after the property and was “holding out” for a better offer on the place…
As Vivien marched in again through the windows, something caught the fading light.
It must have been ejected from her bag, unnoticed until now. It—they—lay there, shining up at her—a group of eyes….
She bent over them, staring back.
Buttons. All the buttons off her black shirt, the shirt she hadn’t been able to find.
The phone stopped ringing again, abruptly and with a sort of hiccup. No bird sang now in the garden. It was in that moment that Vivien heard, loud and clear, and unmistakably real, footsteps—pacing to and fro in the empty flat over her head.
Alone in the middle of the room, Vivien stood with her head tilted up, staring at the ceiling, blank between its cornices of plaster adornments, listening, listening.
What was up there?
Every flat in this building was supposed to be vacant. And next door the same—one of Addie’s reasons for wanting a flat-sitter.
The footsteps paced slowly, slowly, and with a faint dragging undertone…They didn’t sound quite…human.
Ridiculous. Of course they were human. Someone had got in and was illegally squatting in the apartment above—
How had they got in? There had been no signs of a break-in—did they too have keys? For someone at Scavengers had got hold of extra keys to Addie’s flat, and used them—cutting the heads from roses, cutting buttons off a shirt….
Vivien shook herself. She crossed to the French doors and shut them quietly, next locking them and shooting home the bolts. So far as she knew, there were no other windows or doors undone in the flat, but she must check.
Whoever was up there, and it was—they were—human—might also be desperate, and accordingly dangerous.
The sun had gone. The garden beyond the doors plunged all at once into a brownish afterglow that glared like bronze on the edges of things but gave no real light.
Vivien stepped back from the doors abruptly.
Something had changed out there—not the coming of dusk—What was it?
With no warning, down past the windows something hurtled—huge and black and shapeless.
Vivien choked off her own scream. She stood in the grip of shock, staring out into the half-light, straining to see.
Oh God. The thing was rising up, billowing, bouncing against the glass.
Vivien felt a disbelieving wave of relief—false relief—as she realized suddenly the thing which had landed just outside was a cluster of balloons. All in the darkest colors, almost black in twilight, they wobbled there, drifting to the windows, bouncing off, turning now, impelled by their own volatility, like a strange alien entity, bobbling off along the garden path into the trees.
Above her, there in the upstairs flat, Vivien heard the weirdest laugh. It was cracked and unctuously evil—the perfect product of some 1930s horror movie starring Boris Karloff. Laughable in most situations, here it, like the balloons, was a harbinger of fear. The intention to unnerve—in conjunction with previous events, to terrify—was apparent. Which surely indicated madness in the perpetrator.
Vivien swallowed. She wasn’t safe here, never had been.
Who was it that menaced her? She thought of Lewis—pushy, sulky and humiliated. Was he violent, too? What might he have done if Connor hadn’t shown up when he did? Vivien recalled her own thought of defending herself with the boiling kettle—it demonstrated how alarmed she had been in those moments.
But then, Cinnamon kept coming back into Vivien’s mind. Cinnamon fancied Connor, disliked Vivien. Was Cinnamon capable of using those spare keys to enter the flat and vandalize it just enough to make Vivien uncomfortable—roses, buttons, lights, balloons…and the laugh somehow carried that same childish and unstable taint.
After the laugh, silence lay heavy now in the apartment.
Vivien kept glancing up. But the ceiling couldn’t tell her anything. She couldn’t see through plaster, joists or floorboards.
They, whoever they were, were playing games now, making her wait for the next installment of fear.
Damn this flat. She was out of here.
Vivien grabbed her handbag. She would have to leave the rest. Retreat was the only sensible plan.
She moved quietly, crept out through the door, down the first hall, leaving the lights off though darkness was coming thick and fast. She thought it was the dark that made her awkward with the front door. Then it seemed to her that it was more than that.
The door would not open. Would not—
Vivien dispensed with quietness. She pulled and wrenched. Nothing would give. It had stuck again? No. Lewis had freed it up, and Connor had had no trouble coming in—they hadn’t even heard him—or leaving. Something had happened to the door since its last closure.
On impulse, Vivien put the key into the lock. Or tried to. The key would not go in.
The keyhole had in some way been blocked up.
She could smell now just the faintest whiff of acetone—some resin or glue.
True fear caught at Vivien and sank in its claws. Whoever was doing this, sane or mad, man or woman, they meant business.
Holding herself in a firm mental grasp, Vivien went over to the phone. She picked up the rec
eiver. She felt little astonishment, only a dull, deadly pang, when there was no dialing tone. She tried depressing the cradle a couple of times. Ritual only. She knew that, as in the best horror movies, the line had been cut. And—just like those helpless heroines of old—she had no mobile phone.
In desperation, Vivien turned then to switch on the lights in the hall. Only, she didn’t, because the switches clicked and no light appeared.
Ah, yes. What else? Phone out. Lights out. Trapped by immovable door.
Slowly, softly, Vivien put down her bag. She took off her shoes. Barefoot, she walked back into the octagonal room.
No sound.
Then, the sound.
The voice called, muffled and gentle, almost wheedling, down through the ceiling. “Are you there, girlie? Are you there? How do you like it now? Is it nice? Is it fun? Are you there?”
And the voice, though distorted and still melodramatically actorish—hamming—was a man’s.
Chapter 10
He had told her—either a slip or a boast. It was his fault Kate Mortimer died: “…because of me.”
Connor.
And he had been the one to bring her the extra keys, and he had been the one to shut the front door last. Maybe he had shut it in a much more permanent way than was usual….
Vivien stared at her thoughts.
It isn’t Connor.
But how can you be sure, Gray? He likes sleeping with you, fine. But now he’s told you the truth. Now you’re his enemy.
It isn’t Connor. It isn’t.
You were like this before. Wouldn’t believe the other guy dumped you till he rubbed your face in it.
Above the ceiling, a new sound. A scraping and scratching.
It was like squirrels or birds in the roof—but there was no roof above, only the other flat.
This was the noise she had heard here before, that second night, after her first dream of the statue, just before the single rose appeared in the conservatory.
Scratching, like stone fingers.
Impelled by some instinct beyond mere flight, she stood in the eight-sided room, staring up.
It was now so dark, really only the French doors showed, two tree-interrupted oblongs of dim dusk. But her eyes were now dark-adjusted. From the windows, the vaguest light reflected up onto the ceiling.
So she saw it.
The ceiling was moving.
Up among the ornate plasterwork, a section was unhinging and slipping down—a slab of plaster fruits and flowers unfolding, dangling—while a slot of blackness opened behind, a void, as if into some other appalling dimension.
As Vivien stared, something came crawling through.
It was pale, shimmering—like a snake. A rope.
In dreams, sometimes you can’t move. Awake, sometimes you can.
Vivien broke for the French doors, the keys still clutched in her hand. Somehow she shot back the bolts, too. Then she was outside, on the path, among dusk and shadows, where ghostly street lamps sent down the most insubstantial glow.
Vivien slammed the doors shut again, closing the flat. She locked them, her hands jumping from the judder of her heart. All the glass was bulletproof, Addie had said. The thing, too, would now have some difficulty breaking out.
She ran down the path, loose pebbles and flints stinging her bare soles. The garden walls were ten feet high, but she had climbed walls and trees as a kid—in jeans it shouldn’t be so difficult, particularly given the alternative—
But what was the alternative? Vivien didn’t know. What she clung to now was her blind faith that none of this was to do with Connor. No matter how the evidence looked.
He might be many things, perhaps, under great emotional duress, even a killer—but not like this. He wasn’t mean of spirit.
Something stirred in a shrub, reaching out for her. No—No, only the stranded balloons.
She flung herself round the lilacs, tripping, stumbling on a root.
Before her now, amid massed darkness and against the aperture of the faintly lit London sky, Patrick Aspen Sinclair waited, in his shell of whitest marble. As if for an agreed appointment.
Vivien stopped.
Her instinct, now primitive and raw, warned her of some other element.
Behind her, back down the path, someone was thumping and rattling at the French doors. She heard what sounded like a chair crashing into presumably ungiving glass.
That threat was still escapable. But there…here was something else. Some kind of wall—unseen, unfelt, unreal, yet entirely present—barred her way.
“Let me by, Patrick Aspen,” Vivien murmured. “You’ve got enough guilt to deal with. And I’m not Emily.”
The breathtaking face—Connor’s face—stared down at her, cold-eyed, indifferent yet harsh.
Another crash sounded—more liquid, louder—as if, after all, progress was being made on smashing the glass.
To wait was stupid. She ran forward, straight by the statue and through some psychic barrier beyond her ability to understand, aiming for the leap and scramble upwards.
And sheer blackness erupted from the leaves in front of her, burst, flowed and rushed down.
Not balloons. It was hot and solid, animate, growling like a feral dog. It had her, seized her, and she smelled the alcohol on its breath.
Vivien fought. She scratched with her nails, with the keys, and jabbed upward with her knee at her male assailant’s thighs and the vulnerable areas directly above and between them. But he was agile; he twisted, and twisted her and twisted her hair into a knot of shrieking pain.
Vivien screamed at the full pitch of her lungs.
“Shut up, you silly cow. Or I’ll give you something to shout about.” The cliché was horribly effective.
A man with a gruff London accent. A smell of stale tobacco smoke on his clothes. Not Connor. Not Connor. Something fell from him, out of a pocket, landed on the dimness of the path at her feet, and broke.
“Look now, you rotten little piece of muck. I haven’t got your dosh. Cost me over fifty quid, they did. You owe me for that.”
Jet-black sunglasses, in three pieces.
Vivien stopped struggling. She knew who this was. They had met before. The cabdriver, the one from Cwick Cabs whom she had turned away that night when Connor was there, gave Vivien’s hair another vicious tug. She asked herself dazedly if a lost fare was sufficient grounds for this much assault and battery—and decided it wasn’t.
“Well, darling,” he said. “Like it better now, do you? I tell you, you’ve been a very bad girl, Adelaide.”
“I’m not Adelaide,” she said. The clearness of her own voice was strange to her.
“No? Don’t give me that,” he said. “I’m gonna have to teach you a bit of a lesson—”
Footsteps—lightly pounding, like the pads of some enormous cat—evolved from nowhere.
She thought the second man must have got himself out of the flat, shattering the French doors despite their bulletproofness. One more lie, one more meanness of Addie’s. Now it would cost more than money….
With deathly rationality, Vivien thought, They’re going to hurt me, whatever I say or do. For something I haven’t done anyway—they think I’m Addie. Not much chance, then. I’ll make sure I hurt them back as much as I can—
Then came a cascade of noises, like some huge engine driven right up and over the garden wall. That was where the other one—the second assailant—came from then, where she had planned to escape.
The Cwick Cabs man, trying to keep a firm hold on her, was also turning round. Something, like a ton of bricks, slammed into them both.
Her attacker was slung right over, letting her go as he fell. He smashed down by his broken shades on the path. A leopard was on his back, the great paw rose—Not a leopard. A man.
The thug gave a disapproving grunt as he was dragged over and clubbed in the midsection. Still staggering, Vivien leaned against the trunk of a tree. They were fighting now—the two men—into and out of shadows,
roots, one noisy—her first attacker—and the other entirely silent.
It made no sense to her. The second man who had scaled the wall was tall and muscular and had very short black hair. That was all she could make out. Now was the time to get away. Something held her there.
From the depths of the dark, half a white face startlingly rose, as softly brilliant as a polished coin. A cloudy moon had topped the trees, the wall, and by its light Vivien saw Connor Sinclair, his hair tied back and clubbed like the mane of a fighting Roman gladiator, drive his fist home against the cabman’s jaw.
Then, the other two came round the corner of the path.
She didn’t know them. Both were big. One rubbed his arm ruefully, resentfully, perhaps having bruised it, either climbing down the ceiling rope or when destroying the French doors. He carried a chair leg off one of Addie’s chairs. The other toted an unsheathed Buck knife. In the slender moonlight, its short, meaty blade shone with sharpening—and use?
Connor had stood up. He was positioned directly beneath the statue. At any other time, the irony of the likeness between them would have melted her heart. Now it was somehow hideous. The statue was stone. It couldn’t be harmed. Connor, even now, didn’t glance at Vivien. She could see him evaluating the men, the chair leg, the lethal glistening knife. His hands were empty, and his cheek bled.
“All right,” said the knife man. “It’s stopped being a laugh now.”
Oddly, the other one with the bit of chair did laugh at this. And Vivien realized that the absurd horror-film cackle she had heard through the ceiling must be natural to him.
The knife man concluded, weightily as a judge, “None of yuse’ll do what you’re told, will ya? So we’ll have to make ya.”
Connor shrugged. “You’re welcome to try.”
Vivien’s eyes darted here, there. What could she do to assist—to protect him? She could see his danger. Only that. These two with their weapons, and the other one Connor had felled, who was even now surging up again. Yes, Connor could inflict some damage, but it was three to one. No, three against two. The only trouble was, she had never been trained to fight.
