After a few minutes, it came to me.
Melanie Palmer.
It was a place to start.
Chapter 21
Victimization
For the first and only time in my life, a London telephone directory proved itself useful.
There was only one Melanie Palmer in West London, and she was listed. The address was somewhere in Hammersmith. I called the number, but there was no reply and no machine. I had no time to waste, and no other plan. I made my way over there.
It hadn’t stopped raining all day. Hammersmith was a chaotic tangle of roadworks and flooded pavements. My battered A-Z took me to a quiet backstreet of terraced houses, discoloured pillars framing bay windows with taped panes, dead plants in dogshit-covered tubs. Here people made an effort to live decent lives, and were slowly losing the battle.
I found her door, number 75, but there was no light in the hall and no reply. I stepped back in the small concreted front garden and stared up at the lifeless bedroom windows.
‘She’s gone,’ said a young woman who was pulling a bicycle into the hall of the house next door. ‘You’re looking for Melanie Palmer?’
‘That’s right, yes.’
‘Were you a friend of hers?’
‘Not really, no. More a friend of a friend.’
‘I’m afraid she had an accident. She’s not here anymore.’ The woman leaned her bicycle in the narrow hallway and came out to the step. I could tell she was looking for someone to talk to. ‘I wasn’t here when it happened. I’d gone to my sister’s for the weekend. She did something in the kitchen. I think there was a fire.’
‘When was this?’ I asked. ‘Is she all right?’
‘It must have been a few weeks ago now. As far as I know she’s recuperating, but they couldn’t save her eyes. She got some kind of kitchen chemical in them. We’d never been all that friendly with her, to tell the truth. She’d been a bit funny for a while.’
‘How do you mean—funny?’
‘Acting strangely. Very difficult. Complaining about the noise when we weren’t making any, things like that. And she’d started talking to herself.’
‘Do you remember anything of what she said?’
The neighbour looked at me to see if I was being serious. ‘Not really,’ she replied. ‘She had conversations, like she was talking to someone. She’d stand outside this window arguing away nineteen to the dozen. I didn’t like to let her know I could see. It was embarrassing.’
‘You don’t know where she is now, do you?’
‘I think she was taken to her mother’s house on the coast. I have the number, you know, in case of emergencies.’
‘Do you think I could have it?’
‘I shouldn’t really give it out. I understand she’s taking things very badly.’
I looked back up at the darkened rooms where Spanky must have appeared to Melanie Palmer night after night, urging her to give up her free will and admit him into her body, whispering poisonous threats in her ears, creeping up on her in the gloom and frightening her out of her wits until she could stand it no longer and had run down into the kitchen . . .
He hadn’t wanted her after that. He’d pushed her too far. Caused her to become emotionally and physically scarred. So he’d moved on. Back to his other prime candidate. Me. He’d even brazenly told me about it.
The neighbour wrote down the number on a piece of envelope and handed it to me shamefacedly, as if breaking a promise. The streets of falling rain seemed warm compared to the chill seeping into my bones.
I arrived back at my apartment, and was just inserting my key into the lock when I smelled it. Brandy, snuff and musk. Coming from inside.
Although there was no sign of disturbance, I knew he’d been here. The faint perfume of his spoor clung to the furniture and door handles like gossamer. The foil-wrapped book under the bed had not been touched, but other things had been shifted slightly—just enough to inform me of his visit. He’d been checking up on me, trying to work out my next move. Would I simply give in as he hoped, or prepare to face him as an opponent? Surely he knew me well enough to sense which way I would jump. What then, would he expect of me?
I checked my watch. Nearly twenty-four hours had elapsed since his last appearance. I knew that locks couldn’t keep him out, but ensuring that all the doors and windows were shut in the apartment made me feel more comfortable.
I thought of Melanie Palmer, conducting desperate public arguments with Spanky while the neighbours assumed she was going mad and quietly closed their doors on her. Was it to be my turn next? As carefully as I considered the situation, there seemed to be nothing I could do to protect myself. I could only continue from moment to moment, knowing that I would have to face up to the problem once Spanky made his intentions known.
The main thing was not to panic.
I pushed the approaching confrontation to the back of my mind, where it crouched in half-darkness, a bill I could not pay and a betrayal I could not accept.
I thought about Sarah. My recent supervision of Thanet’s proposed Bayswater office was starting to occupy me late into the evenings. The longer hours were reducing our time together, and left me tired when I spent the night with her. It was hardly surprising that our relationship was a strange one. We shared so little of each other. We ate and slept together, discussed work and movies, but I never knew what she was thinking. Her eyes would break contact with mine, as though she was afraid they would reveal something personal, an act of self-betrayal. Perhaps we had both expected to fall in love, and were surprised when we hadn’t. She maintained her independence on every level, no doubt as a matter of future convenience. I doubted she would expect me to rely on her in a crisis.
That was a shame, because right now I needed all the backup I could get.
Less than an hour before the deadline was up, I dug the piece of envelope from my jacket pocket and rang Ann Palmer, Melanie’s mother. I had delayed making the call because I had no idea what I could say without upsetting her. When an older woman’s guarded voice answered, I knew I had reached Melanie’s mother.
‘Mrs Palmer,’ I began, ‘I was sorry to hear about your daughter’s accident.’
‘Who are you?’ she countered. ‘If you’re a friend of Melanie’s, you’ll know she’s too ill to speak to anyone on the telephone.’
I hated to lie, but there seemed no other way of getting at the truth. I identified myself as a friend, a neighbour who had just returned from a vacation overseas. I had been worried after calling at the house and receiving no reply. I said I’d heard that Melanie had suffered some kind of accident. She demanded to know my name, so I was forced to make one up. I used the identity of Spanky’s host, William Beaumont. I asked if there was anything I could do to help.
‘My daughter hasn’t been well for some while, Mr Beaumont, and now she is blind, and has undergone a nervous collapse.’ She stated the facts without emotion, as if trying to become accustomed to them. I asked what had happened exactly. There was a sigh on the other end of the line.
‘She was distraught, and she got something in her eyes, some kind of oven cleaner, and it caught alight. It burned and burned. I don’t know how . . .’ She was close to tears. Ann knew that her daughter had done this to herself. The accusation remained unspoken. I don’t know how she could do such a thing.
‘She was under a lot of strain. She wasn’t used to being alone, and didn’t enjoy it. Marriages don’t seem to last long these days. Perhaps if her husband had been there, none of this would have happened.’
I asked again if there was anything I could do to help.
‘I think it’s best that she’s allowed to recover in her own way, though it’s kind of you to offer. They say time heals, but it won’t bring back her sight, will it, Mr Beaumont? She’s only twenty years old.’
The image of a girl with a bandaged face, staring sightlessly out to sea, stayed in my head. I couldn’t wait in the apartment any longer. Spanky would have to come for m
e. I threw on my raincoat and caught a bus back to the store.
The shopfront spotlights were still blazing behind a curtain of rain. Max had gone home, furious with me for not calling in. For the next hour I worked with Lottie, who sat worrying a nail in her teeth as she logged updated inventory to the computer system, and filled me in on the new workload assignments.
When I next looked up, the display showroom was in darkness, and only the rear offices were illuminated; Max abhorred wasted electricity. Somewhere in the caliginous new-nylon atmosphere of the sitting-room layouts I heard a sound, a whisper of movement that suggested someone shifting position while reading a book. And I knew he was there. Beneath the smell of factory carpet-fibre and armchair leather was the daemon’s thickening odour.
Leaving Lottie at the computer, I walked away from the pool of light with my heartbeat rising. Slowly, I moved into the gloom, and saw the faint outline of the penumbral figure that sat immobile, glittering like blackened quartz. Before me was the couch where I knew he waited. To my left stood a tall chromium lamp, its switch dangling from a length of coiled flex. I reached out my hand and clicked it on.
The blackness in the centre of the sofa vanished a split-second after light filled the showroom. An indentation showed in the cushions. The smell that usually lingered had mutated into an acrid odour, like perfume tossed on an ageing corpse. The faintest of sounds ruffled the still, dead air, sounding like a word.
. . . Martyn.
Chapter 22
Declaration
Twenty-seven and a half hours after he had made his demand, I was still waiting for Spanky to reappear in my apartment.
Not wanting to confront him in the office while Lottie was working there, I had hurriedly returned home. I cautiously entered the building, then roamed the apartment on tenterhooks, unable to eat or settle to any task that required concentration.
I tried to watch television, but the programmes seemed vacuous and detached from life. I was convinced he would appear, and prayed that he would not. But Spanky had always followed through on his promises. He had spent a considerable period of time preparing me as his next host. I felt certain he would be determined to claim on his investment.
And yet the evening dragged on without a visit from my daemonic entity. By 11.15 p.m. I had half-convinced myself that he wouldn’t show.
When he did appear I was totally unprepared, coming out of the kitchen with a glass of milk. As I rounded the counter he was standing in front of me in black leather jeans and a studded chrome belt, bare-chested and tensed. I jumped so badly that the glass slipped from my hand and smashed on the floor.
‘Good evening, Martyn. You look like you just saw a ghost.’
‘What did you do to Melanie Palmer?’ I asked, ignoring the shattered glass and moving away to the tall windows. I wanted to be within sight of the street, where someone might at least catch a glimpse of me if there was trouble.
‘I thought you might check into that.’ He smiled, pleased to have guessed correctly. ‘Melanie’s husband had left her. I was trying to help her come to terms with her feelings of rejection, but she was too unstable to take my advice.’
‘So she blinded herself.’
‘You have been doing your homework, haven’t you? I hold a mirror up to people, Martyn. I show them their true selves. She didn’t like what she saw.’
‘She was barely out of her teens. What could she have seen to make her do something like that, for Christ’s sake?’
Spanky turned to face me, glaring. ‘She was an infatuated little girl who had married too early, and was losing her hold on life. I made my proposal, but she was too headstrong to accept it. There was nothing I could do for her. I told you at the time.’
‘So you’re telling me she didn’t—’
‘Martyn, I’m here to talk about you,’ he said softly. ‘Do we have a deal or not?’
‘If you’re asking whether I’m willing to surrender the control of my physical self,’ I said angrily, ‘the answer is no.’
Spanky was shaking his head and pacing the floor as if he could barely believe that someone had questioned the generosity of his offer.
‘Well, now we have a problem, Martyn. Obviously, I can’t leave the debt unsettled, and I can’t extend beyond tonight’s deadline. How do you propose to pay me?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘So if you test-drove a car and kept it for a week, and at the end of that week refused to pay for it or give it back, you’d think that was acceptable behaviour?’
‘You tricked me.’
‘And a car dealer wouldn’t enhance the features of the car he was trying to sell you, I suppose.’
‘This isn’t the same as a fucking car, and you know it. You’re screwing around with people’s lives. Christ, you blinded Darryl to get me a promotion.’
‘The thought didn’t seem to bother you when the results were in your favour.’
‘I didn’t realize—I didn’t think about the consequences.’
‘Of course not. Why do you think I picked you? But now your liberal sense of guilt has kicked in. Excuse my heart if it doesn’t bleed for you, Martyn. You’ve got everything you wanted with a minimum of personal effort, remember? Ever hear the saying, Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it? Well, you’ve got yours, and I’ve got nothing for it.’
‘Then take back what you gave me.’
‘I can’t take back knowledge. You’re not the same man you used to be.’
‘You never meant to help me at all,’ I replied angrily. ‘All the things you did, the improvements you made, were to pave the way for when you took possession, weren’t they? You wanted everything to be set up in readiness.’
Spanky rolled his eyes to the ceiling. ‘Why are humans always so ungrateful?’ he asked. ‘Martyn, I could have taken you that night on the hill, when I entered your senses. But part of you was still resistant. I wanted you to choose to accept my control unconditionally. I genuinely like you. Now you’re turning down the chance for an extraordinary future. Think of the life we could lead as one person.’
‘Without my free will, there would be no life.’
He looked away at the windows, his face tightening. ‘I won’t release you from your debt.’
‘And I can’t pay it.’ I sounded strong, but the nerves in my legs were trembling.
He thought for a moment. ‘Remember the first time we met? When I cupped your hands together and asked you to look inside them?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do it again now.’
I didn’t want to. The ceiling lights had suddenly begun to dim, and the corners of the room were already fading into darkness. Reluctantly, I found myself raising my hands and bringing the palms together.
‘Now—open them.’
I couldn’t tell if he was willing me to do so, or if I really wanted to, but slowly I separated the fingers.
And a fistful of fat, gleaming brown spiders exploded from within, hundreds of them wetly smothering my arms, falling onto my chest and stomach in tangles of mandibles and egg-sacs and long jointed legs.
I shouted and leapt back in horror, frenziedly shaking out my hands as they skittered in every direction across the floor, vanishing under the furniture. But moments later the first ones were already fading. By the time my cries had ceased they were nowhere to be seen, and the lights had risen once more. It was just one of his hallucinations, but I still wanted to check underneath the sofa.
‘You know you’ll give in eventually,’ he said, casually studying the base of a ceramic bowl I had purchased for the coffee table. ‘It’s all a question of realities. Is this a bowl, for example, or a nest of poisonous cobras?’
‘I’d know the snakes weren’t real. You told me yourself you’re an illusionist.’
‘But I’d catch you with your guard down eventually.’ He replaced the bowl and walked toward me, pointing at my chest. ‘I can make you think that there’s a scorpion inside your heart, a transparen
t, tiny scorpion nestled in your aorta that stings you every time you try to move. You raise your arm, it stings. You try to breathe, it stings. The muscle twitches and it stings, it stings, it stings. You can’t always disbelieve the things you can’t see.’
‘You’re wasting your time. I won’t give you what you want.’
‘You will, Martyn. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you’re a worthy adversary for me. Remember, I know you as well as I know myself. But you know nothing at all about me.’
‘I want you to leave now.’ I moved toward the door, intending to open it, but could not stop myself from searching the floor for spiders.
‘It’s a pity we’re to be enemies.’ He seemed resigned to the fact, as though he had long considered it the only possible outcome.
‘Unless you can find another way for me to pay,’ I said.
‘There is only one way to pay me. In blood and in full.’ He stood in the door, a seething black outline against the pale hall lights. ‘You’ll reimburse me for my efforts, Martyn, I promise you that. And your naïveté will be your downfall.’
‘I wouldn’t bet on it. I’m not as gullible as I used to be.’
‘Oh, really?’ I could see the outline of his too-white teeth as he smiled. ‘Then tell me, Martyn. Where do you think your parents are right now?’
I felt as if I had stepped into a falling lift. ‘They’re in Portugal,’ I said dully.
‘In Portugal,’ he repeated. ‘Interesting. Did you ever consider that those postcards and calls might be simple deceptions, created to make you believe that your parents were in good health?’
I tried to speak, but found myself silenced. My throat felt sore and parched, my mouth too dry to form the words.
‘Well, you needn’t worry on that score,’ Spanky continued airily. ‘I’m just teasing. The postcards were all real and your sister now looks good enough to eat. But you see how easy it is for me to tamper with your sense of wellbeing, don’t you? Your family have had a wonderful time, but now they’re about to come home. Their house is nearly ready to move back into. It would be a shame if their holiday came to an abrupt and unpleasant end.’
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