‘Did you see who it was?’
‘There were candles, already lit in a circle. I think he was young, your age or a little older, smart clothes, very like you. I think he was in a blazer. I couldn’t see his face, but he told me his name.’
‘Spanky.’
‘He kept saying it over and over, like a nursery rhyme. He blindfolded me and began to take off my clothes. He was very gentle. I felt something on my arm, a tingling like tiny needles. Everything after that is so—I felt different, sleepy and warm, not really afraid anymore. Then he started touching me, very lightly at first, and he tied me—I stayed blindfolded for the rest, and then I started to get frightened again. I thought the night would never come to an end—’
‘It’s all right,’ I said, ‘don’t think about it anymore. Take a deep breath and try to stay calm. No one can hurt you now. I’ll make sure of that.’ Scrubbed clean of the fetishistic make-up, she looked like a child once again.
‘How did you know who it was? Why would somebody go to all that trouble, with the limousine and everything?’
I could give no answer that would reassure her.
‘And what if he comes back?’
‘He won’t, Laura. I won’t let him. But we have to decide what to do about you.’
‘I won’t see the police, Martyn, you can’t make me.’
‘You need to be examined by a doctor. You’ve been attacked, for Christ’s sake. Suppose he’s caused an internal injury. Look at the burns on your arms.’
She shook her head violently. ‘I’ll take care of it myself. I couldn’t stand all those people asking questions. The neighbours would find out sooner or later. You know what they’re like around here. I can’t believe this, just when we were all getting back to normal.’
‘All right, but you must see a doctor. Then you can decide about the police.’ On the one hand, I wanted her to go and make a report. On the other, I knew that it would do no good. No system of justice was built to deal with a phantom.
I went upstairs and filled a bin-liner with harnesses and sexual restraining equipment, emptying lubricants and nitrates into another bag. By mid-afternoon I had cleared away every trace of Spanky’s visit from the house. I knew that I was performing little more than a damage limitation exercise, but could think no further ahead than making sure that Laura stayed on an even keel for the rest of the day.
Just after five, our mother woke up. She raised herself on one elbow and squinted out of the window at the wet lawns of the crescent, disorientated by her memories of Portugal. She couldn’t understand why she had gone to bed in her clothes, or why she had failed to take the grips from her hair; Joyce was a creature of habit. The last thing she recalled was coming into the house and falling asleep.
I told her that there had been a small gas leak, and that I had arrived minutes later to find them a little groggy from the fumes. I had put them both to bed and called the emergency services, who had fixed the problem. Laura watched me lie with her eyes wide, surprised by my new-found glibness.
My father awoke and was immediately sick.
Joyce said knowingly, ‘That will be from the effects of the gas,’ and soon they were arguing about notifying the gas board. It was amazing how quickly they took the whole thing on board. I guess it didn’t cross their minds to wonder if their son was lying about such an important matter. Laura and I looked at each other wisely, and knew that we would never share our terrible knowledge. With my sister’s agreement, the true events of the previous night could remain buried.
Two hours later, I drove the three of them to a modern hotel, full of salesmen, at the edge of town and checked them in for the night, insisting that they should allow me to put them up until the gas and electricity could be properly restored. The thought of sleeping in clean hotel sheets clearly appealed to Laura and my mother, and only Gordon complained about the arrangement.
At least I knew where they were now. I could keep an eye on them more easily. I gave the hotel clerk a heavy tip and asked him to call me if there were any problems. Then I headed back to town, wondering how long it would take Laura to realize that her attacker knew where her bedroom was, and speculating on what I would find when I visited Sarah.
Chapter 27
Contagion
As I drove, I checked my money. Thirty quid in the wallet, a couple of credit cards. Spanky had regularly boosted my bank account when we were friends. I’d noticed several decent-sized amounts appearing in my statements. I felt sure that he would now attempt to deny me access to this instant finance. He was determining my every move, sending me to Twelvetrees, then back to Sarah, showing me that he could do whatever the hell he liked.
Sarah . . . I rang her home number from a telephone box at the end of the motorway, and after three rings got a reply.
‘You’ve got a god-damned fucking nerve calling here again.’ Her voice was an octave higher and tense with emotion.
‘What are you talking about?’ I asked, remembering all too well what Spanky had said he’d done.
‘The next time you turn up in the middle of the night to intimidate a woman, I swear I’ll stab you first and call the cops later.’
‘It wasn’t me,’ I replied evenly. ‘I haven’t seen you for days. I called you but there was no answer—’
‘Because I spent the night on the floor crying. Listen, shithead, I went to the police this morning. I told them everything. I gave them your address and telephone number. You’re a dead man.’ She sounded close to tears.
‘What did I do?’ I persisted.
‘What is this, you want me to think someone else tried to rape me? Someone else kicked me in the fucking stomach? Martyn, if you ever ever call this number again I’ll pay to have someone break your legs, do you understand? Jesus Christ. How could you have done it, I thought—’ She was sobbing hard now.
The receiver was dropped back into its cradle, and the line went dead.
Mortified, I returned to the battered Fiat and drove back to town, dreading to think of what else I might find. At the very least, Sarah’s outburst told me that she was alive and in one piece. I would have to make sure she stayed that way.
For once, the apartment was as I had left it. If the police had come by, they hadn’t left a calling card.
No sign of the daemon, either. Maybe even Spanky needed to take a break occasionally.
I sat in the centre of the sofa nursing a tumbler half-filled with J&B, wondering how Laura would recover from her ordeal. Clearly my parents remembered nothing, but the family would never be safe until Spanky was paid in full.
Surely he knew that I would never surrender willingly. Was he simply an agent of corruption, using me as an excuse to create chaos among the living? Once he had likened our meeting to being mugged. I had no idea then how apt the analogy would prove to be. I drained the scotch, sat back and attempted to take stock of the situation.
My parents were confused and frightened, but unhurt and temporarily safe. Laura was internalizing her fears in the face of her attack, but seemed okay. Sarah, in a similar situation, was more outgoing with her feelings. I wanted to see her, to try and explain things face to face, but how could I when she thought I meant to cause her physical harm?
Some form of positive action had to be taken to stop Spanky. I had to find a way to get one step ahead. Okay, I’d found out about the time limit, but there had to be something else. The alcohol was fuzzing my mind, so I deferred the construction of a plan until the morning.
I found the bedroom too disturbing to sleep in after the events of the past nights, and pulled my duvet across the couch instead. My eyelids felt as if they had weights attached to them, and I was barely able to crawl among the cushions before passing out.
I slept for just over an hour.
I awoke to find myself covered in a heavy, stinging sweat. The duvet was soaked through, and so were the cushions beneath it. My hair, plastered to my forehead, was dripping. As I tentatively raised myself the agony began, li
ghtning flashes of pain cracking across my stomach. Gasping with the effort, I stumbled from the sofa across the room.
Beneath my clawed hands, knives of fire were sawing in my gut. I tried to catalogue my symptoms in a rational fashion, but the pain drove all thought from my mind. On the toilet, my bowels opened and searing liquid rushed from me. Once, on a school trip to Athens, I had suffered from dysentery for three days and nights. I felt that miserable, lonely experience returning now, greatly magnified. I had barely eaten anything in the last twenty-four hours, and could not understand how so much liquid could be pouring from me.
I tried to halt the flow now, gripping my stinging sphincter tightly, but it was impossible. The moment I ceased to clench, the torrent began with renewed force. Shifting weakly to one side of the bowl, I looked back.
It was filled with dark blood.
Horrified, I clutched at my stomach as the pain redoubled, and fell sideways on to the floor, pooling the crimson liquid around me. He had put something in the whisky, I was sure. Wasn’t there a poison, something they gave to rats, that caused lesions and stopped the blood from coagulating?
Christ, I thought, I’m going to bleed to death before a doctor can get here. I tried to raise myself on to my elbows but the pain was so great I could move no further than two or three feet from the toilet. Behind me the steaming vermilion stream continued its flow, running along the grouting, tessellating over the pattern in the tiles to disappear under the door. I felt my power ebbing, my life-force draining away as surely as a vampire’s victim, Talos losing his molten steel, desiccating into death.
Through a mist of pain I remembered Spanky’s power. I am an illusionist, he had said, but what I show seems real. So very real, I thought, that I couldn’t tell if he had really poisoned the drink. I could feel the blood leaking from me, could touch my fingertips in the cuprous morass pouring from my body. How could it not be real? But I forced the thought forward.
Whether it was real or imagined made no difference. What was important was to convince myself that it was an illusion.
As the pain punched my breath from me, I began the singsong litany in my mind, just an illusion, just an illusion. Pretty desperate, Spanky, if that’s the best you can come up with.
But the blood was not staunching.
I tried again, then realized I was aiming at the wrong target. He was here with me, somewhere in the apartment. He had to be. I was sure that his hallucinatory powers could only be worked in close proximity to the victim. That was why he had disguised himself as his familiar when I went to the car.
Feeling the pain recede for a few beats, I pulled myself on to my knees and moved toward the door. I could feel him now, sense his strength growing just a few feet away.
And as I did so, the pain rolled away as quickly as it had appeared. I could not tell if he had allowed it to end, or if I had caused the illusion to collapse. I looked back to find the floor around the toilet dry and clean. I was still covered in sweat, and my heart was kicking beneath my ribs, but the horror of death was receding and I felt absurdly, overwhelmingly grateful for my release from its bony grip.
‘The pain never needs to end,’ said Spanky, leaning against the door-jamb with his hands in his pockets. He was dressed in black, like an executioner. ‘It can go on and on, intensifying all the time, your body filling with contagion. When you think it couldn’t get any worse, it doubles. Finally, you take your own life. But it’s no fun for me that way. Tell me, what happens when you don’t pay your electricity bill?’
I was standing upright now, though still hunched over in fear of the stomach cramps returning.
‘Answer me, Martyn. You don’t want the sickness to return.’
‘Lights—the lights go out.’
‘Ah, so you do understand the principles of payment. I suppose that’s a start. I just came by to tell you that I’ve thought of another way you can clear your debt.’
I made no reply.
‘Give me Laura. Kill her for me. She was good, but they’re even better when they’re dead.’
My body responded more slowly than I realized. By the time I was upon him he had blurred and shifted to the other side of the hall.
‘You can’t hurt me, Martyn. I’m not real, remember? You said so yourself.’
I snatched a full wine bottle from the kitchen rack and threw it as hard as I could at his head, but somehow it failed to connect and smashed against the wall like an explosion of blood. Suddenly anything that came into my hands was a weapon. I screamed and swung at him with a carving knife, a chair, an iron candlestick, smashing a metal stool into the wall and sending it clattering across the floor. He was moving too fast, challenging me, taunting me to keep his pace.
A lamp hit the coffee table in an explosion of glass. I hurled my PC printer, an absurd weapon composed of light grey plastic, at his darting form, only to watch as it shattered against the room divider, miles short of its target.
‘When you’ve quite finished,’ said Spanky, reappearing behind me, ‘remember this. The longer you take to surrender, the more painful I’ll make my entry into your body.’ His fist cracked hard against my head, staggering me.
And he was gone.
Something was burning in the corner of the room, and the telephone was ringing insistently. I remember hearing a violent hammering at the front door as the stomach cramps returned with a vengeance and my conscious mind kicked out.
I fell back on to the sofa, the pain receding into a dark miasmic fog that I was sure would never leave me in peace again.
I awoke in the morning to brightness and silence.
The face of the lounge clock was smashed, but it still seemed to be working: 7.43 a.m. I sat up, gingerly touching my tender head. My stomach felt better than it had the night before, which was something. My chest and arms were smothered in blue-black bruises. And the apartment. It looked as if a herd of buffalo had passed through the place.
There was an acrid stink of burned plastic. One wall was completely blackened, and the charred remains of a lamp lay at the source of the conflagration. The electrics had burned out. There was water everywhere, mainly from the shattered flower vases, but also from the overflowing bathroom sink, which was blocked with smashed toiletries.
I carefully stepped between dying roses and glittering shards of crystal. My bedroom wardrobe stood wide open. All the clothes Spanky had made for me were gone. Other things were missing; my watch and Joey’s ring, it was hard to tell what else. I didn’t really care. Belongings were no longer important. The only thing on my mind was to find a resolution, a way to rid myself of the daemon forever.
It was Saturday morning. Four more days to get through. I salvaged an old pair of jeans I’d been planning to throw out and dug a rumpled sweatshirt from the laundry basket. It occurred to me that I had managed to upset Spanky badly. I had stood up to him, and for once he had seen the power of my own will. It must have been a galling experience, considering he had helped me to develop it in the first place. I had thrown his chances of claiming my body into jeopardy. Time was running out fast for him, now that the willing victim was proving not so willing after all.
At the same time, I knew that it was dangerous to underestimate my adversary. I was still defining the limit of his powers; he could influence others, plant false memories, mind-read, shape-shift, yet in order to have any true strength he was forced to operate from within a human body.
I knew Spanky well enough to guess that he would soon go on another rampage. His growing desperation would force him into greater acts of violence. But who would his next target be? I needed to warn people: Sarah, Zack, Max, anyone who knew me would be considered fair game.
I doubted that the police Sarah had summoned would manage to arrest me. Spanky wouldn’t allow the authorities to get involved. He needed to have me available constantly now. Couldn’t risk me doing a bunk. What if I persuaded someone to lock me up for a while? Presumably his powers didn’t extend to passing himself between p
rison bars. He had the mind of a daemon, but the form of a man. No, it was too risky; a prison cell could easily become my own death-trap.
Four more days to survive. Ninety-six hours before one of us found himself without a body . . .
I discovered just how busy Spanky had been when I arrived at Thanet an hour later. Lottie was standing outside the showroom in tears. It was raining heavily, but heavy orange hosepipes still snaked into the building. The front windows were blackened and heat-cracked. Smouldering armchairs, sofas and half-burned beds were being carried out and stacked against a wall. The pavement was covered with slippery black soot.
‘You should see the state of the place,’ she said, wiping her eyes. ‘Everything’s ruined.’ A considerable crowd of gawpers were watching as firemen unsnapped their breathing apparatus and returned to the engines.
‘Does anyone know how it started?’ I asked.
‘That’s the worst thing,’ sniffed Lottie. ‘They think Max did it himself. I was at the back of the store, so I didn’t see what happened. One of the customers says he started shouting, just screaming at the wall. Then she saw him waving a burning rag over his head.’
‘Where is he now?’
She began to cry again.
‘Inside, Martyn. Max is still somewhere inside.’
Chapter 28
Malediction
The funeral was an absolute bloody nightmare.
In accordance with Jewish tradition, Max was buried quickly. He had been separated from his wife for almost two years, but Lottie told me that they had been planning to try again. I knew he had been with Esther every minute since they had lost their son. I heard there wasn’t much left of Max to bury, a fact to which Esther called attention before showing around a retouched 1950s photograph of him. Throughout the service she kept making little lurches, as though she was on medication. Worse was to follow.
They were lowering the casket into the hole when Esther threw herself at the rabbi and began to punch him, screaming and wailing. Some hastily assembled relatives pulled them apart and took her away to sit somewhere. The service continued, backed with distant howls of anguish. The shiva looked certain to be an emotional affair.
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