‘I’ll leave you to your work,’ Black said. ‘You’ve clearly got a lot to do.’ He stood up and offered his hand across the desk.
For one horrifying moment Cindy was struck by the idea that Black could see her monitor screen. The incoming emails all seemed to have the same subject header: TO THE KILLER.
Cindy took Black’s hand. His grip was hard and uncompromising.
‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ she said earnestly. She glanced over to the fax machine, wondering if she could read its message from where she now stood. The contents of the page remained at a maddening angle that was impossible for her to see. ‘I’m really sorry.’
Black nodded. ‘A car will pick you up from here on Friday morning.’ He started towards the door and then stopped abruptly. Turning around, fixing her with a grim glower, he said, ‘It’s a shame Melissa didn’t get to know you better. I’ll bet the two of you would have been famous friends.’
‘Famous,’ Cindy agreed.
Black slammed the door closed behind himself.
Cindy counted to ten after he had gone. She counted the numbers slowly and with lengthy pauses between them. As soon as she reached ten, Cindy decided that Black would not be returning. But she still locked her office door to be on the safe side. Turning to her PC she saw the machine had received 4,036 messages. Each one bore the same subject header: TO THE KILLER.
22
Deleting the messages was no good. As fast as Cindy could delete them a fresh batch of messages would arrive. Each bore the same subject header: TO THE KILLER. She examined one, trying to see who had sent it, but there was no helpful clue there. The sender’s email address was a blank and she knew that could mean it was part of a virus or that the email had been sent from an account where the user was deliberately keeping their identity a secret, or that some other unexplained forces were operating. That latter option wasn’t one she normally liked to consider but, since taking a position with Raven and Skull, she had come to accept that there were occasions when the only justification that could be offered was the glib phrase: unexplained forces.
Admittedly, as head of CNS she had subordinates who could possibly have found out where the email had come from. But if any of her staff saw the subject header of those emails, Cindy knew the rumours would begin circulating faster than any email in history and she was not going to lay herself and Richard open to that sort of scandal.
The message of each email was identical: a single six letter word repeated over and over and over again. killer, killer, killer, killer, killer, killer, killer, killer, killer, killer, killer, killer, killer, killer, killer, killer, killer, killer, killer, killer, kill… When the fax machine whirred into life, Cindy snatched her gaze away from the mesmerising lines of text.
She went over to the tray and saw she had received two faxes, both daubed with the identical slanted message: KILLER. She plucked the sheets of paper from the tray and took them to her personal shredder. Feeding through the pages slowly, then shaking the box beneath the shredder’s jaws so that the segments of freshly made confetti were forced to mingle together, she watched the next page being spat out of the fax machine bearing exactly the same message.
Cindy stooped to the side of the fax machine and wrenched the machine’s telephone connection from its socket. The fax machine whistled discordantly. It sounded as though it was in pain. The noise made her shift from one foot to the other, waiting for it to end. Cindy tore the half-printed sheet of paper from the fax’s feed and then stuffed that page into the shredder’s whirling, ever-hungry jaws.
The tip of her middle finger touched against the steel blades. Too late, she snatched her bitten hand away from the teeth. A pinprick of blood stood red against the pale flesh. She watched it swell to the size of a full stop, then a pea, then the droplet was falling to the floor and being replaced by another.
‘Shit! Shit! Shit!’
The shredder continued to munch its way through the page.
Cindy glanced back at the computer monitor and saw that her email inbox now contained 13,306 messages. She didn’t bother to check if they all bore the same subject header. Instead, she dropped to her knees and wrenched the computer’s CPU free from its space beneath her desk. Unplugging the kettle lead from the back, tearing at all the other tendrils of cables that slithered from the unit, she lifted the metal box high in the air, and then smashed it to the floor. Satisfied by the hefty metallic thud, Cindy lifted the box and dropped it again.
Then again.
And again.
There was the sound of something loose scratching on the inside of the unit. Cindy smiled with grim satisfaction and pulled herself from the floor. The stillness of the office was broken by the shrill buzz of her intercom.
Cindy pressed the intercom’s button.
‘What do you want, Margaret?’
‘I heard some noises coming from your office. I wanted to make sure you were OK.’
Cindy glanced at her hand. The tip of her finger continued dripping blood. ‘I’ve cut my finger on the shredder,’ she admitted. ‘But it’s nothing serious. Can you get in here?’
‘On my way.’
As Cindy walked over to the door, unlocking it in readiness for Margaret, she heard the muffled ring of her mobile phone. The five shrill beeps it emitted suggested it was receiving a text message. Glancing at the sealed, padded package, Cindy acted without hesitation. She picked up the envelope, dropped it to the floor and then stamped on it with all the force she could manage. The heel of her shoe went through the bag and she heard it smash through the body of the mobile phone.
The phone continued to beep.
Cindy raised her foot and stamped again.
And again.
‘Is everything OK?’ Margaret asked as she stepped into the room.
Panting, exhausted from the effort, Cindy stepped away from the envelope. The telephone had stopped ringing and she could see part of its shattered mechanism now peeped through a tear that penetrated both sides of the envelope.
‘I think everything’s OK,’ Cindy lied. The words came out in a strained rush. She knew if she tried to say them again, she was going to burst into a flood of hysterical giggles. ‘But I need my mobile taking down to hardware.’ She picked up the envelope from the floor and placed it in Margaret’s hands. ‘I’ll also need a replacement PC fitting,’ Cindy said, nodding towards the misshapen box in the centre of the room. ‘That one seems to have a problem. I think it might be hardware related, although I expect the lab rats will blame it on the software.’
Margaret glanced at the broken box and then turned to study Cindy. Her face was as inscrutable as Roger Black’s had been, although her features lacked the hard edge of brutality and potential violence. ‘Have you tried pressing Control, Alt and Delete?’
Cindy wanted to laugh. She bit back that response for fear it would come out as a spiralling manic cackle. ‘I’m just going for a coffee,’ she said. The words sounded strangled. ‘I’ll be back in a minute or two. See if they can get the replacement stuff hurried along.’
Margaret nodded. She held a notepad and scribbled on it as Cindy rushed out of the office. ‘Do you want me to get in touch with Human Resources too?’ she asked. ‘See if they have a psychiatrist on standby?’
Cindy didn’t bother responding. She figured she was probably beyond the help of a psychiatrist.
23
The canteen was deserted. The rows of empty tables and forgotten coffee cups reminded Cindy of documentaries she had watched concerning the fate of the Mary Celeste. Cindy walked to the main serving area and, seeing no one there, sighed heavily and then looked around for a coffee machine. She didn’t particularly care for the dusty taste of powdery, processed machine coffee. But she was desperate for a drink. She fumbled through her purse and found change for the machine.
An LED display sat above the coin slot. She watched the words on the unit spread their constant message of coffee-related advertising. ‘ENJOY A REFRESHING ESPRESSO. T
HIS MACHINE ACCEPTS 10P, 20P, 50P AND £1 COINS. WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DRINK, KILLER?’
Cindy stepped back from the machine in shock.
The words disappeared from the LED screen.
‘Did you just want a coffee?’
The polite enquiry was called from the canteen’s main serving area. Cindy didn’t shriek when she heard the voice but she came close to releasing the sound. Trying to steady her nerves, needing to get a drink so she could sit down and work out what was happening, she staggered back to the counter and said, ‘Yes. Coffee. Strong and black, please.’
‘Do you need a breakfast?’
‘No.’
‘We’ve got full English.’
‘No, thank you.’
‘I can do you a sausage sandwich–’
‘No, thank you.’
‘Or a bacon sandwich–’
‘Just the coffee, please.’
‘Or you could throw me down the stairs a couple more times.’
Cindy finally glanced at the woman’s face. She didn’t normally bother to look at the serving staff who worked in the canteen. They were usually the grinning dregs of society, making minimum wage and seeming offensively cheerful despite their lowly employment status. Dressed in a rumpled white uniform that was meant to imply cleanliness, the kitchen staff invariably wore paper hats to keep their cheap haircuts from contaminating the food.
The woman serving Cindy wore a hat. Her head had been lowered when she’d first caught Cindy’s attention and that was why Cindy hadn’t seen her face. She had only seen the top of her paper hat. But now, now that the woman had raised her head and tilted it at an awkward angle that suggested her neck was no longer doing its job properly, Cindy recognised the woman.
‘Melissa?’
‘Do you just want coffee? Or would you like to throw me down the steps at this place? We’re on the fourteenth floor so, if we get to the fire escape stairs, I’d bounce down and down and down and...’
Cindy took a step back, away from the counter.
The woman stared at her with eyes that were flat and devoid of expression. Her flesh had an unhealthy pallor that was too pale to consider. It was as though the blood had stopped flowing through the veins beneath the skin. She held up one hand with fingers that were bent to obscene and frightening angles.
‘Of course, you’d get knackered from the strain of having to drag me back up here. But, if it meant you could get your filthy little hands on my possessions, I don’t think that would trouble you too much, would it?’
‘Melissa?’ Cindy murmured.
She took another step back.
‘What do you want, Cindy? Coffee? My house? My money? My husband?’
Something touched Cindy from behind. She whirled to see who was standing there, dropping her purse to the floor in the same movement. The clatter of coins was deafening in the stillness of the canteen. Cindy saw that Roger Black had been standing behind her. Unable to suppress the sound, she wailed in dismay.
‘Cindy?’
She pushed past him and hurried out of the canteen. Running blindly, she didn’t stop until she’d reached the lift doors. A swarthy dark-haired figure stood outside the lift. He placed his foot against the side of the open door. Cindy recognised Shaun from Customer Services but she couldn’t bring herself to say anything to him to acknowledge that recognition.
‘You want to go down on me?’ he asked. His leering grin made it obvious that he was attempting lewd innuendo.
Cindy stared past him and saw that there was a woman waiting inside the lift already. She took a step back when she recognised her. No longer wearing the uniform of a canteen worker, now dressed like one of Raven and Skull’s maintenance staff in a plaid shirt, jeans and a hard hat, Melissa stood inside the lift doors and extended a beckoning finger. There was no nail on the finger. There was only a bloody bed of raw flesh where the nail should have been.
‘Come on in, Cindy,’ Melissa urged. ‘Go down with us.’ She laughed, a sound that came out horribly strained through mangled vocal cords.
‘Are you getting in?’ Shaun asked.
Cindy stared at him in amazement, shocked that anyone could contemplate riding in the lift with Melissa’s ghost. Shaking her head, using the movement to propel herself into action, she hurried away from the lifts to a door marked EMERGENCY STAIRS.
‘Crazy bitch,’ Shaun muttered. His voice was loud enough for Cindy to hear the words. A part of her figured he might be right in that assessment of her faculties, although she thought he was equally crazy for taking the lift with Melissa. Pushing through the doorway to the EMERGENCY STAIRS, Cindy took a moment to savour the silence before considering the enormous task that now lay ahead of her.
The stairs were utilitarian concrete with fixtures of stainless steel rails.
The crisp echo that followed every sound told Cindy that, if she stumbled, the stairs would be hard and unforgiving. She stared down at the angular route they took, winding round and down and round and down until they continued beyond the range of her vision. If a person fell down those steps, she thought, their body would continue until the corpse landed in hell.
From somewhere in the main building there was a muffled explosion.
Cindy flinched.
The movement made her lurch towards the first step of the staircase and she gripped the banister with desperate ferocity. Her cut finger blazed in protest. A stiffer shard of pain came from the snap of her fingernail. The sudden sting was so shrill she yelped.
A siren began to wail. The noise was migraine loud and accompanied by the hiss of sprinkler water cascading around her ears.
‘What the hell happened?’ she wondered.
Behind her, from the main building, Cindy could hear similar questions and exclamations being called. Someone burst into the emergency stairwell and rushed past her. A second figure followed the first. Both sets of footsteps clattered against the concrete steps as they hurried down the winding descent. Neither of them paid any heed to Cindy as she clutched the banister and tried to summon the courage to continue her journey downward.
‘It sounded like a bomb,’ one of them called.
‘I think it was the lift,’ the other shouted back. ‘I was standing by the doors and a shit load of debris just blew through them.’
‘Fuck! Was anyone inside?’
Cindy could have answered that question. Instead, gripping tightly onto the banister, she started to descend the stairs one slow and terrifying step at a time.
24
Two hours later Cindy had reached the bottom of the stairs. It was an agonising journey that left her shaking from exertion. Her fingers ached from gripping the banister, her legs trembled from the effort of taking her down each step in a slow, desperately safe descent. Her thoughts were a constant tug-of-war between the urge to rush down the stairs and get out of the building and the insistence that, unless she was ultra-careful, she would lose her footing, stumble and fall to her death.
Most of Raven and Skull’s staff had rushed past her at some point during her journey. They were chattering excitedly about the tragedy of the lift breaking. Cindy heard various theories being proposed, and heard the aftermath experts telling anyone who would listen that lifts could never just plummet to a catastrophic end. But for everything that she heard, the reality remained as uncertain as the faltering rise and fall of the distant ambulance sirens.
‘Shaun from Customer Services,’ someone shouted.
In the hollow acoustics of the stairwell it sounded like the voice was coming up from hell.
‘Shaun from Customer Services was in the lift. He’s dead.’
‘Was anyone else in there with him?’
Cindy listened intently for the response. Her fingers gripped more tightly onto the banister.
‘Someone says they saw a woman in there with him.’
‘A woman? Who?’
‘Yes,’ Cindy thought. She didn’t dare ask the question herself but she listened desperately for the r
esponse. ‘Who?’
‘Dunno. I guess it’ll be difficult for them to make a positive ID. That was a really bad fall.’
Cindy closed her eyes and dared to hope. She wasn’t sure if a ghost could die, but she clung to the idea that Melissa’s ghost might have come to its end at the bottom of the lift shaft. Melissa’s ghost had been in the lift, beckoning for Cindy to join her. Now the lift was destroyed at the bottom of its shaft. Cindy knew nothing about ghosts but she clung to the hope that Melissa’s ghost would be discovered dead in the remains of the lift alongside Shaun.
By the time she reached the ground floor her body ached as though she had been beaten. The remnants of a crowd remained in the bustling foyer and a string of red and white warning tape cordoned off the lift doors.
An ambulance stood outside the office’s main doors. It was parked on the pavement at a jaunty angle, whilst a pair of paramedics leant against its side, chatting idly. A fire engine, its livery a virulent orange that made the rest of the day seem more grey, was parked by the side of the ambulance.
‘You look like shit,’ one of the paramedics told Cindy. ‘Are you OK?’
She swallowed and nodded. The movement hurt. ‘I just had difficulty getting down the stairs.’
‘I found it easy getting down the stairs,’ the paramedic’s assistant told her.
Cindy glanced at the woman.
Melissa.
Now wearing a paramedic’s uniform, tilting her head to one side so that it lolled at a grotesque angle, Melissa said, ‘I found it easy to get down the stairs the first time and then, the second and third times, it got even easier those last two times because you were so kind as to carry me up.’
Cindy fled to the car park. She jumped into the Ford Focus and, for one horrible moment, she feared she didn’t have her keys with her. She remembered dropping her purse in the canteen and panic made her think that she had also dropped her keys. The idea of having to make the miserable journey back up the stairwell, to see if someone had found her keys and handed them to lost property, was enough to make tears well on her lower lids.
Raven and Skull Page 10
