A Memory of Demons

by Ambrose, David

  Hunt paused as though to let the surreal nature of this statement sink in. His gaze held Tom’s unwaveringly as he went on.

  ‘You will also take my life – or think you have. You will have shot me at close quarters before putting the gun to your own head. It will be a serious wound, one that could very easily have killed me had it gone a fraction more this way or that. Fortunately I am a doctor, so it will not. Of course, you will already be dead when I am shot, but then I will put the gun back in your hand. The picture will be quite convincing, and entirely consistent with the story I shall tell the police.’

  Tom’s gaze went to the stun gun in his hand. ‘That gun?’

  Hunt slipped his free hand into his jacket and pulled out a small pistol. Tom was no expert on guns, but any fool could see that it was lethal.

  ‘Look at me,’ Hunt said, glancing down at his two hands filled with weapons. ‘I look like Jesse James.’

  ‘If only you were human, you might.’

  Hunt smirked faintly at the remark, then indicated with a nod of his head the grotesque object that still reminded Tom of a dentist’s chair – perhaps because he refused to let his mind dwell on what other uses it might have.

  ‘Put her in that,’ Hunt ordered.

  ‘What d’you mean?’ Tom said, without knowing quite what he intended by the question. It was a perfectly clear instruction, without ambiguity; yet the implications of putting his daughter in that thing were so unthinkable that he refused to understand the words.

  ‘You know what I mean,’ Hunt said. ‘Settle her comfortably in the chair, then start fastening her in place.’

  No choice. If there was a hell, then this was it. No nightmare Tom could wake from could be worse than this reality. He did as he was ordered.

  ‘You’ll find it large for her, but it was designed for occupants of Melanie’s age. Please fasten the straps. They’re quite simple.’

  It was true: they clipped neatly into place, one by one. He fastened four of them. As he reached for the fifth, he turned slightly so that he had Hunt in his sight-line but without looking at him. The pistol was back in Hunt’s pocket, only the stun gun was in his hand.

  Click. Another one, the fifth. Tom reached for the sixth, lower down, bending his knees and spine into the crouch from which he was going to spring with all the speed and power he possessed. From the corner of his eye he saw Hunt watching him, but did not think he knew how closely Tom was aware of him. His muscles were taut, his balance right, he must spring before Hunt realized he was about to move.

  Tom was halfway across the distance between them, moving faster and with more force than he thought possible. But even in the blur of his own speed, he saw the red spot on his chest, and two small objects coming towards him, with two hair-like wires snaking out behind them and connected to the stun gun in Hunt’s hand. He felt his body explode in a blinding flash of pain. He did not feel the impact of hitting the floor. He thought he was dead.

  But no, he was still there. In that living hell. Like before, only worse if that was possible. His body did not respond to his orders. He even had trouble formulating orders. His thoughts were scrambled and fragmented. He had lost all contact with himself. He thought he was going through physical convulsions, though he could not be sure.

  He saw Hunt looking down at him with more indifference than triumph, as though this had been inevitable. Tom realized that Hunt had been ready for his move long before he made it.

  That had been Tom’s last chance.

  And Julia’s.

  Both to Hunt and to himself, Tom was now just a bystander, no longer part of the equation. For him, even a simple movement was impossible. The world around him was as fragmented and disjointed as his thoughts. But he had the impression, quite suddenly, that some time had passed. He thought he might have blacked out, moments only, but something had changed.

  She was awake – Julia. Still strapped down, a prisoner, but awake and shouting something at Brendan Hunt. He could not hear what she was saying, only distorted echoes as though from a great distance. Her face was contorted with a fury that shocked him. He had never seen such rage in her before, nor such a strength behind it. This was not his child he was looking at, or any normal child.

  Something else was happening now. It took Tom’s addled brain some time to realize that Hunt had taken the pistol from his pocket and was putting it to his daughter’s head. She was laughing at him, a laughter that spat contempt and loathing. The sound of it down the long tunnel that connected Tom to the world was terrible. Strapped down and helpless, the child was defying the man who was about to kill her, challenging him to do his worst.

  It was Melanie Hagan Tom was looking at, not his daughter. Yet it was his daughter’s head Hunt was going to blow off.

  Tom tried to move, but he was still weak and helpless as a new-born foal. His head swam, he thought he was going to vomit. He fought for breath.

  The gun was pressed against Julia’s forehead. Tom could see a white ring in her flesh around its barrel. Still she laughed.

  Hunt pulled the trigger . . .

  Dear God . . .

  Nothing happened. A dry click.

  Hunt did something with the gun and pulled the trigger again.

  A dry click. The gun was jammed.

  Julia was laughing louder, a harsh, violent sound, with her head thrown back only to snap forward and spew forth a new torrent of abuse.

  Hunt was pulling the trigger time after time, growing paler and more frantic with each dull click.

  It could not go on.

  Yet it did.

  Tom realized he was being given one more last chance. He did not understand why he was being given it or how, only that he must not let it pass.

  Hunt was not ready for the weight that slammed into him. In his frustration with the misfiring gun, he had forgotten about Tom, and the attack sent him sprawling on the floor. Tom did not know where he himself had found the strength to move, let alone to pummel and kick, tear and slash at his opponent with his bare hands. His fingers curled like steel around Hunt’s wrist, forcing him to open his hand . . .

  There was an explosion, then another. The gun had fired twice. Tom was not hit, nor was Julia. The bullets had gone wide, but the noise seemed to have galvanized Hunt, given him back the advantage that had briefly been Tom’s.

  Another shot. Tom became aware of searing pain – aware, though he did not truly feel it. It was as though the pain was happening to someone else, to an unknown body that he was inhabiting and coldly registering its condition.

  The gun went off again, but its bullet merely spat up chips of concrete from the floor. Tom had his hand on it now. With his other, he delivered a massive punch to Hunt’s face. Cartilege crunched and blood flew Hunt staggered back, stumbled against the low wall around the shallow zinc basin, and fell into it.

  Tom had the gun now. Hunt pushed himself up on one elbow and put a hand to the shattered centre of his face, then looked in disbelief at the crimson mess that covered his fingers. He looked at Tom, and Tom saw in his eyes that he knew Tom was going to kill him. He knew that Tom would not permit him the mercy of the law. He would end his life now, without a second’s hesitation.

  ‘No!’

  It was a command, and it had come from Julia. Tom turned and saw her standing. The straps that had been holding her helpless were now unbuckled, hanging loose. She could not have unfastened them herself, yet there she was – this slim, small figure standing with a power and a presence about her that was not his child’s, not any child’s. This was something from elsewhere, an unknown, perhaps unknowable, force.

  ‘You’re too late,’ Tom shouted back at her. ‘I’m going to finish him off and get my daughter out of here!’

  ‘ I brought him here. He is in my power. I will deal with him.’

  The voice was no more Julia’s than the twisted lips and blazing eyes that burned into him as though he was as much the enemy as Hunt.

  ‘You are both in my powe
r. You have been all along.’

  Tom saw Hunt move again. He raised the gun to fire – and gave a cry of pain. The gun fell to the floor with a clatter. Tom opened and closed his hand. It was red and stinging. The gun had burned like a hot coal when he had tried to pull the trigger.

  Melanie’s furious gaze, superimposed like some collage in living flesh and blood on Julia’s face, remained on him. ‘I brought him here for us,’ she screamed. ‘For all of us. We need him here – to burn in hell!’

  Hunt was on his feet now, blood streaming down his neck and turning his shirt into a sodden mess. He was staring at the child as though confronting a horror that not even he had ever imagined. He took a step towards her, unsteadily, drawn it seemed against his will. Instinctively Tom moved to block him, to get between them and protect his daughter at whatever cost. But he was thrust aside. Not by Hunt: by some force he did not see. Or perhaps simply by the agonizing cramp in his side where he had been hit by the bullet moments earlier. He had felt nothing until now, but suddenly his body convulsed and wrapped itself around the pain as though to smother it. Irrationally, his head was filled with a strange odour. He wondered whether it was some by-product of his injury, an olfactory hallucination in a nervous system that senses the approach of death?

  He fought to stay upright, to beat back the pain, but its tentacles reached into every part of him. He fell on his knees, holding his side, then rolled over, helpless, foetal. And he saw something across the room.

  One of the pipes on the far wall had been torn open by a stray bullet. That smell was no hallucination: it was escaping gas. The room was going to fill with it, and they would all die if they did not get out. Tom tried to cry out a warning, but a searing stab of renewed pain snatched his breath from him. He looked towards Hunt to see if he had seen what Tom had seen, but Hunt’s gaze was elsewhere – and everywhere.

  His eyes were flickering left and right, wide with a terror he seemed not to comprehend. He was seeing things, Tom realized, that he himself could not: things which, from the way Hunt was cowering back from them, were closing in on him from all sides. He was trying to get away from them, but there was no escape.

  Hunt’s victims had come back for him. He was staring into a hell that he had made himself.

  Tom looked at Julia. She had not moved. Her gaze was fixed on Hunt, unflinching, murderous.

  As Tom watched, something else started to happen. With an incongruity that now barely startled him, he found a corner of his mind light up with a memory from childhood – that old trick of playing with a magnifying glass, focusing the sun’s rays onto a sheet of paper until it burst into flame. He remembered some of the boys he had known doing it with insects, and worse. Or just the backs of one another’s hands. The power of that focused light had been frightening.

  Now he found himself observing not the effect of focused light, but something else. He didn’t know what name to give to it, but Hunt was being burned by it. Burned like a victim at the stake. He could not move except to beat uselessly at the flames that were starting to engulf him. At first it was just his clothes, then his hands and face began to char and blister as though from some raging fire on the inside of his own body.

  Fire . . . gas . . . and fire . . . Tom remained rational enough to understand the danger of this combination. He had to get his daughter out of there before the place went up like a bomb. He had no reserves of strength, yet he drew on something, hauling himself to his feet through layers of pain, each one of which tried to beat him back. The ghastly spectacle of the burning man was forgotten. Tom was deaf to his screams. Julia was all he could – must – think of. He forced his body to turn and move towards where she stood.

  She was gone.

  He panicked for an instant, then he saw her. She was lying on the floor, crumpled, with her arms flung out. She was dead, or she had fainted; he had no time to find out which. Defying the screams of pain from his own body that drowned out even the howling of the burning man, he stooped and gathered her up in his arms. She did not move.

  Blind to everything but his determination, he carried her towards the stairs, praying only that the trapdoor would open and that there was not a hidden catch he wouldn’t find in time.

  Mercifully, it moved at the touch of his shoulder. Tom thanked Providence for the hydraulic hinge that let him slam it back without having to let go of Julia. With a last superhuman heave, he lifted her dead weight up and through the gap, then hauled himself out after her.

  Behind him, Hunt’s screams were no longer human. Without wanting to, knowing there were only seconds – if that – to spare, Tom took one last look back.

  Hunt’s clothes were burned off and his flesh was on fire, but he was still alive. And screaming. And beating at the flames that were devouring him.

  Tom reached for the trapdoor as the gas finally ignited. A pillar of flame shot up and hit the ceiling of the room he had climbed into, then curled back down again in search of whatever else was there to consume. Using his whole body as a lever, Tom slammed shut the trapdoor and imprisoned the inferno below.

  He stumbled to where Julia lay, still motionless. Mercifully, the escaping flames had not touched her. Neither of them was burned, though the kitchen he found himself in was filling with smoke as the smaller fires now started to spread. He gathered her once more into his arms and carried her out into what looked like a hall.

  She stirred. She was breathing. She was, thank God, alive.

  He could see windows, thick blinds over them so he could not tell if it was light or dark outside. And doors. All he had to do was find a way out, before the whole place went up.

  55

  It was the hospital Tom had woken up in ten years earlier, imprisoned in neck brace and plaster, to be delivered a death sentence unless he mended his ways. This time it was not a young doctor who sat on the end of his bed but Murray Schenk. And although Hunt’s bullet had shattered two of Tom’s ribs and punctured a lung, he was able to speak. Movement, however, was out of the question, too painful to attempt.

  ‘The good thing is,’ Tom was saying, ‘the best thing of all, is that Julia remembers nothing. It’s as if that whole part of her life has been wiped from her memory. Of course it wasn’t in fact her life at all, so maybe it isn’t so surprising.’

  Schenk nodded thoughtfully, taking the information in but obviously preoccupied. He had barely spoken a word since arriving ten minutes ago.

  ‘What’s on your mind?’ Tom asked.

  ‘They’ve found seven bodies,’ Schenk said dully. ‘“Remains” would be more exact. Buried under the floor.’

  ‘Oh, my God. I was afraid of something like that.’

  Schenk’s gaze flickered up to fix on Tom’s. ‘Why d’you say that?’

  ‘It’s consistent with what she said. “I’ve brought him here for us” she said. “For all of us. To burn in hell.” I told you that, didn’t I?’

  ‘Yeah, I believe you did.’ Schenk fell silent.

  ‘Will they be able to identify them?’

  ‘Oh, they’ve done that already.’

  ‘How?’ Tom’s voice reflected his surprise at the speed of this.

  ‘He’d kept certain things. Personal things – kind of trophies. A piece of jewellery, a pocket book, even a mobile phone. It’s a thing that killers often do. Sex killers. Serial sex killers.’

  ‘Dear God.’ Tom’s soft whisper carried all the force of his bewildered revulsion. ‘I was going to say it’s almost beyond belief. But it is beyond belief. No one could believe a thing like this. It has to be real.’

  Schenk nodded solemnly once again. ‘Tom, there’s more to it,’ he said, clearing his throat and shifting his position slightly. ‘Hunt had written up a note the night before all this happened – the fire and everything. They found it in his office. It seems he wrote it after you’d called him to come and pick you up out here – after you’d found the house.’

  The tone of Schenk’s voice warned Tom he was about to hear something
that he wasn’t ready for. ‘A note?’ he said warily. ‘What kind of a note?’

  ‘About you. He said he thought you might be on the verge of a . . . a psychotic break, I think he called it.’

  ‘Have you seen this note?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I have. It’s in his own handwriting. The gist of it is, he suspected you might have been living a double life.’

  The case against Tom took shape with mesmerizing speed. It was only a matter of hours before certain routine enquiries were set in motion as a result of Brendan Hunt’s carefully recorded misgivings. First, all Tom’s credit card and cellphone records were subpoenaed for as far back as possible. This allowed his movements to be checked against the last reported sightings of the seven girls whose remains had been found buried beneath the cellar of the house. In each case, Tom had been close enough when they disappeared to have been the one responsible. He lay immobilized in his hospital bed and listened in disbelief as the evidence piled up.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Brendan Hunt knew me all those years. We stayed in touch. We talked about Julia. We talked about a lot of things – what I was doing, where I was going, the projects I was planning. He knew my movements. He must have followed me around, snatching these girls so that he could ultimately frame me. Can’t you see that?’

  Murray Schenk, and the two detectives who had accompanied him on his second visit to Tom’s bedside, listened stony-faced.

  ‘What about the garage in Broadlands?’ one of them asked. ‘The place has been rented in your name for the past eight years.’

  ‘But didn’t anyone ever meet me? I mean, this man who was supposed to be me?’

  ‘Everything was done through banks and realty agents. They’ve traced the payments to a Bahamian account – also in your name.’

  ‘But somebody must have seen this man coming and going. Surely at least one person, one time.’

  ‘All anybody ever saw was a man in dark glasses with a moustache and a hat.’