Ghost Virus

by Graham Masterton

  She left the lights on and quietly climbed the stairs. On the landing, she paused to make sure that Mike was still snoring. He had drunk three cans of Peroni before they had gone to bed, and who knows how much he had drunk in the pub with his friends after work.

  She eased open the bedroom door and crept inside. As quietly as she could, she laid the three knives down on the bedside table, next to the digital clock, and then she went across to the fitted wardrobe. Mike’s ties were hanging on the back of the door, and she picked out two of them. One was his favourite: the Tooting & Mitcham Darts Club tie. The other was the flowery tie she had bought him for his birthday, which he had never worn. He had said that he didn’t want to look like a screaming gay.

  She sat down on the bed next to him, so close that she could smell the stale alcohol on his breath. He stirred, and snorted, but still he didn’t open his eyes. She eased up his right arm until his hairy wrist was resting against one of the rails of the brass headboard. Then, quickly and deftly, she looped the darts club tie around it and fastened it in a constrictor knot. His armpit smelled so foetid that she had to hold her breath while she tightened it.

  After she had secured his right wrist, she went around the bed and tied up his left wrist. Then she folded down the pale green polycotton bedspread as far as his knees and wedged it deep underneath the mattress on both sides of the bed, so that he wouldn’t be able to kick.

  When she was ready, she stood looking down at him. He was still snoring, but somewhere in his subconscious he must have been aware that his movement had become restricted, because his breathing became shallower and quicker, and he started to twist his body from side to side. Sophie guessed that, as drunk as he was, it wouldn’t be long before he woke up.

  She picked up one of the two smaller knives from the bedside table. It was a paring knife, with a blade only about three inches long, but very sharp. She sat down close to him and positioned the point above his right eyelid, until it was almost touching it.

  Look at you, helpless now. Why did I ever think that I loved you, you selfish uncaring pig? I gave you everything – my devotion, my body, my money – and how did you treat me in return? Like some kind of slave. I don’t think you even recognised that I was a real person, with my own feelings and my own ambitions. God, you’re ugly. Ugly in spirit, ugly in appearance. Just ugly.

  She gripped the handle of the paring knife as tightly as she could and stabbed him through his eyelid. Blood and optic fluid burst out onto his cheek, and he opened his other eye in shock.

  ‘Aaah!’ he screamed out. He tried to reach down to pull the knife out, but all he succeeded in doing was tugging the constrictor knot even tighter. ‘Aaaah! My eye! My fucking eye! What’s happening? Sophie, my eye! Something’s stuck in my eye! Jesus Christ, Sophie! Sophie, what’s happening? I can’t move my arms! Sophie, help me! What’s going on? Sophie, there’s something stuck in my eye and I can’t fucking open it! It hurts, Sophie! Jesus!’

  Sophie said nothing but sat beside him watching him struggle. She left the knife-blade sticking in his eyelid, so that he couldn’t open it, and even if he had been able to, she had pushed the point right into the optic nerve at the back of his eye, and blinded him.

  Although he was pinned by the tightly tucked-in bedspread, he tried to hump himself up and down and wrench his arms free, staring at Sophie with his bulging left eye, but all she did was stare back at him calmly as if she were thinking about something else altogether, like what she was going to wear to the shop today.

  ‘Sophie!’ he screamed. ‘Sophie, what have you done to me? Get this thing out of my eye! Please, Sophie! Get this fucking thing out of my eye! Sophie!’

  Eventually Sophie stood up and walked around to the other side of the bed. She sat down again, and picked up the second small knife. She reached across and gripped Mike’s right ear, digging her sharply pointed thumbnail into the lobe, so that he couldn’t move his head. Then she held the knife over his left eye, as close as she had held the first one. Mike roared and struggled, but she gripped his ear even tighter.

  ‘Don’t do it, Soph! Please, I’m begging you! Don’t do it!’

  He screwed his eyelid shut, but not because he wanted to. It was an involuntary response, to protect his eye. Sophie took a deep breath and stabbed him so hard that she felt the point of the knife jar against the bone of his eye-socket. Again, optic fluid bulged out from under his lashes and dribbled in glutinous blood-streaked teardrops down his cheek.

  Mike screamed again, although it was more of a howl of utter despair. Sophie said nothing, but let go of his ear and sat watching him as he shook his head from side to side, with knife-handles sticking out of each eye.

  ‘Soph, for the love of God! Call an ambulance! Call an ambulance!’

  Sophie didn’t answer him, but picked up the carving knife and stood up. She didn’t really feel like Sophie at all. She knew that she was Sophie, but would Sophie have done anything like this – and would Sophie have enjoyed it so much? Because stabbing Mike in the eyes had made her feel excited, and strong, and triumphant. At last she was getting her own back for every time that he had insulted her, or slapped her, or simply ignored her when she had asked him a question. And blinding him – this was more than winning an argument. Now he would never be able to treat her with such contempt, ever again.

  He stopped begging her to call for an ambulance, because he had obviously realised that she wasn’t going to do it. Instead, he started to cry, and his crying was high-pitched and pathetic.

  ‘Oh, shut up!’ Sophie snapped at him. ‘You’re not a child!’

  That was exactly what he had said to her, the last time he had slapped her.

  She leaned over and laid her hand flat on his stomach. He jerked, as if her hand were red-hot.

  ‘What are you doing? What are you doing to me, Soph? For Christ’s sake, what are you doing?’

  He wasn’t fat, but his stomach bulged slightly because he drank so much. It was covered with a fan of black hair which she had once thought was sexy, but which she now found vaguely repulsive. She bent her wrist downwards so that the carving knife was pointing two inches below his breast-bone. She wondered how deeply she would need to cut, but then she thought: You know how deeply. You’ve done this before. An inch is enough.

  He started crying again, but then she pierced his skin with a soft popping sound and started to cut into the fatty tissue and the muscle underneath. As she slowly sliced downwards, his crying rose into a hideous warbling shriek, like a parody of some tragic Wagnerian opera.

  ‘No! Soph! No, Sophie! Aaaahhh! Stop! No!’

  But Sophie carried on cutting through the layers of his abdominal wall until his small intestines came swelling out, and then his large intestines. She cut as far down as his pubic hair, and then stopped, and laid the knife back on the bedside table. She was aware that Mike was still pleading with her, but she closed her ears to it. She didn’t care if he was in pain. However much he pleaded, what she was doing to him was irrevocable.

  She plunged both of her hands into the warm slippery coils of his small intestines. It was difficult to hold onto them, because they were as soft and flaccid as freshly boiled cannelloni, and her carving knife had nicked them in places, so the sour stench that rose out of them made her retch. But she dragged them out, pulling them across the side of the bed until they were hanging down onto the carpet.

  She stood up. She remained calm, but her stomach kept clenching and unclenching with nausea. She went across the landing to the bathroom, tugged on the light, and turned on the taps in the basin to wash the blood off her hands. As she did so, she stared at her reflection in the mirror and thought: You look extraordinary. You’re almost beautiful. But you don’t look like me. Who are you?

  She was still staring at herself when she became aware that Mike was still whimpering and pleading for her to save him. She could hardly believe it. She had blinded him and disembowelled him – shouldn’t he be dead by now?

 
; She dried her hands and went back into the bedroom.

  ‘Soph,’ Mike croaked at her, and she could actually see his lungs inflating and deflating like two pink balloons. ‘I love you, Soph. Help me.’

  ‘Help you?’ said Sophie, in disbelief. ‘Help you?’

  She picked up the sticky-handled carving knife again and went around to the opposite side of the bed. She knelt on the mattress and screamed into his face, ‘Help you! After the way you’ve treated me? Help you?’

  She stabbed him in his open mouth. The carving knife split his tongue in half and the blade became jammed in between his lower front teeth, so that she was unable to pull it out.

  She climbed off the bed and stood back, panting.

  If all the arrogant uncaring men in the world knew that this would be their punishment for mistreating the women in their lives, wouldn’t life be different?

  She went to the window and drew the curtains. It was still dark outside, and it had started to rain.

  On the bed, Mike gave one last cackle as his lungs collapsed.

  6

  Jerry was eating a chicken-and-mushroom slice at his desk in the corner of the CID room when Jamila came in. Today she was wearing a black trouser-suit and a purple silk headscarf.

  ‘Ah, there you are,’ she said. ‘Is there something wrong with your phone?’

  ‘Yes, it’s called “switching it off for five minutes so I don’t have to answer it with my mouth full”.’

  ‘You should eat a proper breakfast before you come to work.’

  ‘I would, if I had somebody to cook it for me.’

  ‘You’re wearing a wedding ring. I thought you were married.’

  ‘I was. It was something to do with the hours I had to work, and the fact that she took a fancy to the manager of our local Waitrose. With him, she could have regular sex and a ten per cent discount on her weekly shop. How could I compete with that?’

  ‘Do you have children?’

  ‘One. A little girl. Alice. She’s two-and-a-half. I’m allowed to see her once a fortnight.’

  ‘Life can be very hard to bear sometimes.’

  ‘Are you speaking from experience?’

  Jamila didn’t answer that, but said, ‘The pathologist just called me, from St George’s. He says he has something unusual to show me.’

  ‘Oh, yes? Like what?’

  ‘He said we should go the hospital and see for ourselves. He couldn’t describe it over the phone.’

  ‘What about Saunders?’

  ‘He’s stuck up at the Yard this morning. Some kind of policy meeting. But he’ll be down here later.’

  Jerry looked at his half-eaten pastry.

  ‘Take it with you,’ said Jamila. ‘I’ll drive. I wouldn’t want you to go hungry.’

  ‘No, you’re all right,’ Jerry told her. He opened his desk drawer and dropped the chicken-and-mushroom slice on top of a report on local vandalism.

  *

  Dr Fuller impatiently checked his wristwatch when they arrived, although he said nothing.

  ‘Traffic,’ Jerry explained. ‘Burst water-main on Longley Road.’

  ‘I have three dead drug-addicts waiting for me,’ said Dr Fuller. ‘It would be nice to get them all wrapped up before lunch.’

  He was a big, untidy man, Dr Fuller, with a wild comb-over covering a scalp that was freckled from thrice-yearly Mediterranean cruises and half-glasses that looked as they were going to drop off the end of his snubby nose at any second. His lab coat was done up with all the wrong buttons and his trousers were an inch too short, so that Jerry could see that he wasn’t wearing any socks.

  He had a slight cast in his pale blue eyes so that Jerry couldn’t be sure if he was looking at him or Jamila.

  ‘DS Patel said you had something strange to show us.’

  ‘Well, it’s something I’ve never come across before, let me put it that way, and I’ve been carrying out post-mortems for thirty-three years.’

  Dr Fuller led them along the corridor with his shoes squeaking. The mortuary was as chilly as a church, with high clerestory windows. A young lab assistant was washing a metal dish in the sink, making a loud clattering noise and singing to herself. Three autopsy tables were lined up along one side of the room, and a fourth was standing in the centre. Its stainless-steel covers were folded down on either side and its downdraught ventilation system switched on, so that anybody who leaned over it wouldn’t be breathing in formalin.

  Samira was flat on her stomach with her arms by her sides. Both her head and her buttocks were covered with neatly folded green cloths. Jerry and Jamila approached the autopsy table and stood looking down at her, although neither of them could see anything unusual. It was a plump young Pakistani woman’s bare back, with a sprinkling of moles and some bruising around her shoulders where blood had pooled after her death, but that seemed to be all.

  ‘So... what’s so strange?’ asked Jerry.

  ‘You’re not looking closely enough,’ said Dr Fuller. ‘Here... use this. This might help.’

  He handed Jerry a large white magnifying glass with an LED light. Jerry switched it on and examined Samira’s back through the lens. The light illuminated a forest of fibres, so fine that they were almost invisible. Each was less than a centimetre long, but they were protruding from almost every pore.

  Jerry passed the magnifying glass to Jamila.

  ‘What the hell are all those hairs?’ he asked Dr Fuller. ‘Was she growing herself a winter coat or what?’

  ‘They don’t... they don’t look like hairs to me,’ said Jamila. ‘At least not the natural hairs that this poor girl would have grown. Look at the hair on her head, it’s jet black.’

  ‘It’s not her natural hair,’ said Dr Fuller. ‘And she’s not growing it. It has no roots.’

  Peering through the magnifying glass, Jamila carefully pinched one of the fibres between finger and thumb and pulled it out. ‘It comes out quite easily,’ she said. ‘Not much resistance at all.’

  ‘So what is it?’ asked Jerry. ‘If she’s not growing it, how did it get into her pores? Even pushing one hair into one pore would be hard enough, and there are hundreds of them – thousands, even. Gordon Bennett – it takes me about half an hour to thread a needle.’

  ‘I’ve carried out a preliminary analysis,’ said Dr Fuller. ‘Of course the forensic unit will be able to do a much more comprehensive check. But it’s not hair at all. Not human hair. It’s a mixture of wool and polyester.’

  ‘What?’

  Dr Fuller poked his half-glasses more firmly onto the bridge of his nose. ‘No doubt about it. It’s the sort of fibre that clothes are made out of. Somehow it seems to have penetrated her skin. Her back, mainly, but her arms, too, and her sides, and her breasts and her stomach.’

  ‘Do you have any idea how that might have happened?’ asked Jamila.

  ‘Absolutely none, I’m afraid,’ said Dr Fuller. ‘I’ve come across quite a few cases in which people have exhibited allergies to certain fabrics, such as nylon or pure wool. They’ve had rashes and spots and sometimes they’ve become very ill. But I’ve never seen anybody who appears to have been invaded by a fabric before, not like this unfortunate girl.’

  ‘What’s your next step?’ asked Jamila.

  ‘I’ll take further samples including a section of skin with the fibres embedded and send them up to Lambeth Road to see what they make of it. The cause of death was almost certainly cardiac arrest brought on by shock, but that’s hardly surprising when you consider what was done to her face. I’ll be setting up some further tests, though, to see if these fibres didn’t contribute in some way to her demise. Perhaps they caused some chemical reaction that dramatically lowered her blood pressure.’

  ‘They’re just wool and polyester; how could they do that?’

  ‘They contain elements of a synthetic disperse dye, too. That’s a man-made dye frequently used to colour clothing, especially clothing with a polyester content.’

  ‘The fibre
s are dyed? What colour?’

  ‘Some variety of grey, as far as I can make out. Pigeon grey, dove grey. Something like that.’

  *

  Jerry and Jamila left St George’s and drove back to the station. They were both silent for most of the way, but as they turned into Mitcham Road, both of them spoke at once.

  ‘I hate bloody inexplicable mysteries,’ said Jerry.

  ‘How can a fabric attack a woman?’ said Jamila. ‘It makes no sense at all.’

  As they went up in the lift to the CID room, Jerry said, ‘It was grey. And that coat was grey, the one that went missing.’

  ‘The one that you thought went missing.’

  ‘I know it went missing. I distinctly saw it when we first entered the house, and by the time we left it had gone. And it was grey.’

  ‘That’s not even a coincidence.’

  ‘Well, perhaps it isn’t. But I’d still like to know where that coat went.’

  ‘In that case, why don’t you go around to the Wazirs and ask them if they know where it is. Then maybe you’ll stop nagging me about it.’

  ‘I just have a feeling about it. I don’t know why. It could be that her mother or her brother got rid of it because it was evidence that it was one of them who poured acid in her face. Maybe one of them was wearing it when they attacked her, and some of the acid splashed onto it.’

  ‘You really are clutching at straws, Jerry.’

  ‘I know. But I have OCD when it comes to circumstantial evidence. We had a case in Tower Hamlets last summer and there was only one shoe in this missing woman’s bedroom and we couldn’t find the other shoe anywhere. I looked everywhere for that bloody shoe, and in the end I found it. It was jammed underneath the passenger seat of her husband’s car. He’d knocked her out, dragged her out of the house, and driven all the way down to Leigh-on-Sea so that he could hire a boat and chuck her into the estuary.’

  ‘Go on, then, if it’s bothering you that much. But DI Saunders has arranged a media conference for twelve noon and you need to be back in time for that.’