A Memory of Demons

by Ambrose, David

  He raised a hand to his eyes, and felt a slight restriction on the movement. He realized he was fully clothed, even down to his shoes. He felt his body, his arms and legs, his head, and concluded he was uninjured, in one piece.

  Was he blind? Why was there no light? Literally none.

  Where was he? Not in bed, not his own bed: not any kind of bed. He was not in anything but on something. He felt around and traced the shape of some kind of couch, covered in what felt like polished leather. His groping hand found a floor just a few inches lower. It was uncarpeted and felt like it was made of concrete.

  The silence was total, like a hermetic seal wrapped around him – so tight and so total that for a moment he feared that he might have gone deaf as well as blind. But he heard himself calling out anxiously, ‘Is anybody there?’

  There was no response. Only the sound of his own breathing. When he held his breath, all he could hear was his own heartbeat.

  He struggled to recall the last thing that had happened. He had taken Julia to her appointment with Brendan Hunt – it was going to be her last, or near to last. He remembered arriving and talking briefly with Hunt, and Hunt saying that if he would wait a few minutes, there was something he wanted to tell him.

  Had Hunt come back? Tom struggled to remember, rewinding the scene in his mind and replaying it from the beginning. Yes, Hunt had come back. He remembered the door opening. He had looked up – and seen something odd.

  What was it?

  He played the scene again. It became more clear with repetition. Hunt had been holding some kind of gadget; he remembered a length of chrome, or something like it, and a stubby grey handle. He didn’t know what it was, though for some reason he’d vaguely recognized it. He’d started to get to his feet . . . and then he’d passed out.

  But no, he hadn’t passed out, it was something else. He remembered that he’d thought he must have had a stroke or a heart attack. Everything had gone into slow motion. His legs had given way. He had struggled to sit up, to pull himself together and get to his feet, but his limbs would not respond. He felt like a man underwater – drowning.

  The hypodermic. The rest of it came back now – Brendan Hunt had jabbed a needle into him. That was all he remembered. It made no sense. Why would Hunt do that? Why had he, Tom, let him?

  Suddenly he remembered what the gadget was that he had seen in Hunt’s hand. It was a stun gun. A friend of his had bought one after being mugged. Hunt had touched him on the shoulder with it, and that was when he’d become disoriented, unable to coordinate his movements. After that had come the needle, then blackness – the blackness he was still in.

  He swung his legs off the couch and felt for the floor with his feet. Nothing stopped him: he was not tied down. Still seated, he stretched his arms, partly because he suddenly felt the stiffness that came from lying too long in an uncomfortable position, and partly to feel for obstacles around him. He found nothing, so he tried to stand up. He felt strangely unsteady, the aftereffects of the drug pumped into him, perhaps – along with the surprising difficulty of keeping his balance with no visual reference to guide him – but after a moment he was all right. He had his bearings: at least he knew which way was up and which was down.

  Holding his hands out in front of him, he began exploring the darkness, moving cautiously, knowing he was in an alien place where every step could bring him up against something hard or send him over a precipice. But as he edged his way forward the floor remained firm beneath his feet.

  His left hand, waving around, connected with something. He stopped, turned towards it, and brought his right hand over – something hard, part metallic but part cushioned in a way that made him think, after several moments of exploring it, of a dentist’s chair. Could it be? Surely not.

  But why not? Anything was possible in that sightless vacuum.

  He moved on. After a few steps his shins encountered a low wall. It was made of brick or concrete blocks on the side towards him, but smooth metal on the other. He moved along cautiously until he reached a corner, then turned and followed the wall until it turned again. It was some kind of shallow basin, square and large enough to be a child’s play pool. So far as he could determine, it was empty, but the metallic lining sloped down from all sides to what felt like a drainage point in the centre.

  A few steps back, and he found himself against another wall – brick by the feel of it, but older, rougher brickwork. Inevitably, he thought again of his nightmare; but this wall, though made of brick, was not crumbling. He felt his way along and came to a kind of door, made of steel he thought, and solid: there was no hollow echo or suggestion of a shift when he pushed at it, then hammered on it with all his strength. Nor was there a handle. He could not find a lock or even a keyhole. Perhaps it was just a panel, not a door. Or perhaps it could be opened only from the other side, like a prison cell.

  He was being held prisoner. There was no question in his mind of that. Just as he knew he was being held by Brendan Hunt.

  But why? Could Hunt believe that he, Tom, was the killer, as he’d accused himself of being? Had he decided to lock him up out of harm’s way until . . .

  Until what? Why would a sane man do this? The question echoed in Tom’s head. He felt a strange fluttering sensation in his chest, as though his heart had missed a beat; then the cold prickling of gooseflesh on his skin. Was he saying that Brendan Hunt was insane?

  He couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t even be sure that what he was remembering had actually happened. Perhaps it was just a fantasy produced by his dysfunctional brain, and there was some other explanation for his being here.

  He was moving faster now, less carefully, blundering over and around things that he no longer even tried to identify. His hands swept the walls in search of any crack or crevice that might offer a way out. He did not even realize he had hit a switch until an electronic clunk above his head brought two strips of harsh white light flickering into life. He breathed in the light through every pore of his body. The relief was indescribable. But moments later he would have welcomed back the darkness.

  It was more than a cellar – it was a dungeon, though there were no chains or shackles, no racks or wheels or instruments of torture – except, now that he looked at it more closely, what he had taken in the darkness for a dentist’s chair. It was indeed something very similar, though with straps to hold its occupant in place by force. And behind it was a rocking horse with an obscene penile attachment to the saddle. He must have knocked against it in his blundering around, because it was still moving gently back and forth, as though below some unseen rider.

  He turned and saw what he’d taken for a child’s play pool. It took on an infinitely more sinister and suggestive aspect in the cold glare of the overhead light. Its lining was zinc or stainless steel, inclining, as he had thought, to a central drainage point. A hosepipe attached to a tap on the wall was coiled at one corner. Something about it made him think of mortuaries and pathology labs.

  Built into the wall on his left was what looked like a small furnace. A steel pipe that could be a smokeduct had been plumbed to the wall, with a couple of narrower pipes alongside it, and several electrical cables had been stapled to the wall above it. The work was neat, but looked somehow amateurish. Perhaps, he thought, because it was the kind of work you had to do yourself, because you could never tell anyone else why you wanted it doing. He closed his eyes in denial of his thoughts, and in defiance of the revulsion that threatened to overwhelm him.

  He started to call Julia’s name. As he did so, he turned – and for the first time saw a staircase in one corner: a set of open wooden steps, leading to a trapdoor in the ceiling.

  He was immediately across the room and struggling with the catch on the trapdoor, but it was locked on the other side. Absurd of him to expect anything different. He beat at it till his fists hurt, then crossed back to the steel panel he’d hammered at in the dark. Now more than ever it looked like a door, but with no lock or handle on his side. He
kicked and hammered on it some more, until he was forced to give up or risk hurting himself badly.

  Despite his efforts to suppress them, pictures began forming in his head. About why this room existed. About what had happened here. He closed his eyes, but the pictures only became sharper. He would go mad if he did not get out of this place. If he did not get an answer to the question into which his nightmare imaginings had poured their poison.

  What had happened to his daughter? What did Hunt want with her? What had he done to her?

  He heard a lock being slipped across the room, where the wooden steps were. The trapdoor was opening and the lower half of a man came into view.

  Then a hand with a gun in it: at least, a sort of gun.

  ‘It’s a little like the thing I used on you before,’ Brendan Hunt said, following Tom’s gaze, ‘except this works at a distance. And I need to keep a distance between us now.’

  A red spot suddenly appeared on Tom’s chest. ‘It’s laser guided,’ Hunt said. ‘Can’t miss.’

  Tom raised his eyes to meet the other man’s. ‘Where’s Julia?’

  ‘She is unharmed, not far from here.’

  ‘I want to see her.’

  ‘Soon enough.’

  Tom started forwards, but stopped when Hunt lifted the gun and the red spot hit his chest again.

  ‘Stay where you are.’

  Reluctantly, telling himself he had no choice but to play for time, Tom obeyed.

  ‘Melanie Hagan,’ he said. ‘That was you?’

  Hunt nodded his head, almost imperceptibly.

  ‘But . . . Why?’

  A ghost of the Brendan Hunt he had known crossed the features of the man Tom was looking at. It was almost a smile – but not of amusement so much as of despair at the shallowness of human understanding.

  ‘You’re too smart to expect a simple answer, Tom, and we don’t have time for a complex one.’

  ‘I want to see my daughter.’

  ‘You will. Now go stand in the centre of the floor and stay there.’

  He gestured with the stun gun. Its little red spot now appeared in the centre of the floor. Only when Tom had gone to stand there did Hunt come down the last step into the basement, using his free hand to swing the trapdoor shut above his head.

  ‘You see that desk over there?’ Hunt said, using the red spot to identify a metal desk against the wall with drawers down both sides. ‘I want you to take something out. I don’t know which drawer it’s in. You’d better try them all.’

  ‘What am I looking for?’

  ‘A tele-command – it’s in one of those drawers.’

  One by one Tom pulled them open and pushed them shut. ‘There’s nothing here,’ he said.

  Hunt did not seem surprised, just reached into his jacket with his free hand and produced a small object from an inside pocket. ‘Foolish of me,’ he said, not disguising the fact that he was play-acting. ‘Here it was all the time – catch!’

  Tom’s hands sprang automatically to catch the object that Hunt tossed to him.

  ‘Press A2 13Z,’ Hunt said.

  Tom did nothing. ‘You’re trying to get my fingerprints on everything,’ he said. ‘That’s what you’re doing, isn’t it?’

  Hunt gave another faint smile that made him resemble the man Tom had once known. ‘Very astute of you, Tom. That is exactly what I’m doing.’

  ‘You mean,’ Tom started to say, though the thought was in place before, in his shocked state, he could find the words to express it, ‘you mean . . . you want to make out that this place is mine?’

  ‘This place is yours. The whole house. The house of your dreams,Tom. You will be found with an ID in your pocket for Adam St Leonard, its owner. It will be obvious that you’ve had this alter ego for some years. Those who know you best will find it impossible to believe, but the evidence will be overwhelming.’

  ‘This is madness. You can’t get away with something like this.’

  ‘Oh, I think I can.’

  ‘What are you doing here, anyway? You’re not even wearing gloves. You’re getting your own prints everywhere. How will you explain that?’

  The same ambiguous smile hovered around Hunt’s mouth as he delivered the reply he had so carefully prepared. ‘You kidnapped me and brought me here – by threatening harm to your own daughter if I didn’t obey. That is what I will tell the world when I get out of here.’

  ‘You’re insane. You’re totally insane.’

  ‘What an inspired diagnosis, Tom. Tell me, where did you complete your psychiatric internship?’ Hunt’s smile vanished as quickly as it had appeared. ‘We’re wasting time,’ he said, glancing at his watch like a school teacher telling his class to pick up the pace. ‘We haven’t all night. Enter that code I gave you.’

  ‘Do it yourself,’ Tom snapped, and tossed the telecommand contemptuously on the desk.

  Hunt looked at him like an adult whose patience is being tested by a fractious child, and who knows that any moment he is going to have to be stern.

  ‘Tom, even if I do it, your fingerprints will still end up on those buttons. That’s easy to arrange. And you will have died without the comfort of knowing that your daughter has gone painlessly before you.’

  Once again Tom felt that strange implosion in his chest, as though he had been hollowed out and left breathless by what confronted him.

  ‘What have you done with her, you madman?’

  ‘Nothing yet. What I finally do is up to you, Tom. Her death is in your hands.’

  ‘You aren’t making any sense, you crazy fucking—’

  ‘I’m trying to tell you that you’re dead, Tom. Already dead. You’re a ghost. Can’t you understand that?’

  He spoke with a force, with a light of mad conviction in his eyes, that silenced Tom.

  ‘I killed you, Tom. That night you dream about. You were in the house that night, this house – and you found the body. I saw you running away, and I went after you. But before I could do anything you were hit by some drunk in a truck who didn’t stop. I went over to see if you were dead, but you weren’t. So I killed you. I stopped you breathing. You had no pulse.’

  He paused, his eyes boring into Tom’s as though trying to physically burn his message directly into the tissue of his brain.

  ‘I couldn’t take the risk of your leading people back here.’

  Again he paused to let his words sink in. And maybe to savour the satisfaction it gave him to speak them.

  ‘You have to understand, Tom, that you have no right to be alive. Which means that your daughter had no right to be born.’

  There was a twitching at the corners of his mouth, a tightening and relaxing of the lips, repeated several times. It took a moment for Tom to realize that it was a kind of smile.

  ‘It is the work of a God sorely in need of entertainment, don’t you think? How dull His world would be without us.’

  Tom had no thoughts to offer in response to the madness of the man who stood before him. ‘You poor sick fuck!’ was all he said. The words came from him like a sigh. Like a dying breath. Like a dead man’s final curse. They made no impact on Brendan Hunt.

  ‘There’s no more to discuss, Tom, we’re wasting time. Are you going to enter that code or not?’

  Tom’s eyes went to the tele-command lying where he had thrown it on the desk. He reached for it.

  ‘What was it again?’

  Hunt repeated the code. Tom pushed the buttons with numbed, unfeeling fingertips. The steel door in the wall swung open, away from them. Beyond it Tom saw a black Mercedes in a garage. The car was not a recent model, twenty years old at least.

  ‘It belongs to you,’ he heard Hunt saying, ‘under your alias of Adam St Leonard. Your fingerprints are already all over it. It’s the car you always use when you come here, as you have, from time to time, for many years. You keep it in a garage, also rented under the name of Adam St Leonard, in which your own car will be found. Your double life will become a legend, Tom. I myself am alread
y planning an article and possibly a book about you. Now go open the trunk.’

  Moving like a zombie, conscious of the fact that playing for time was still the only chance he had, Tom stepped through the door into the darkened garage. He saw, beyond the car, another and larger steel door, as solid-looking as a bank vault. He recalled that he had seen this door from the outside, touched it even, only yesterday, when he had found this place. It was the door that had replaced the old wooden one in his nightmare.

  ‘Open the trunk – and bring what’s in it back with you.’

  As he moved towards the car, Tom glanced right and left in search of something, anything, that might serve as a weapon. There was nothing. He reached the Mercedes and flipped open the trunk.

  It was what he had feared, but had refused to imagine. His limbs turned to lead, he could not breathe. Julia lay unconscious, or dead, it was impossible to tell which. He reached out; she was warm to the touch. He bent down and put his face to hers; she was breathing. With a smothered sob of relief he gathered her into his arms.

  ‘She’s asleep,Tom. And if we do this right, she won’t ever regain consciousness. It’s up to you.’

  Tom turned to face Hunt where he stood framed in the doorway, and started towards him. There was nothing else for him to do, no escape, no hiding place. Yet do something he must. He swore it before God – in Whom he did not believe, therefore who was his absolute last chance.

  ‘What are you planning to do?’ he asked.

  Hunt contemplated him a moment, then spoke more like a prosecuting counsel than a man imparting information.

  ‘You suffered a psychotic breakdown in my office this morning. Your daughter had said something, in my hearing, something that made you face up to your double life. The increasingly flimsy barrier you had kept in place until now finally gave way. You came back here because the part of you that is Tom Freeman, and only Tom Freeman, had to see this for himself. And because the other part of you, Adam St Leonard, has always known it must end like this. You will murder the child who has been your accuser – your own daughter – then take your own life.’