by Robert Young
His nose is also right about the other thing that enticed him in - a running tap. It is cold only and is fixed to the wall at the rear of the space but after squealing at being disturbed it gives up a spattering flow of cold water that runs clear after a minute or so.
This will be enough for now and Roth tosses the holdall onto a workbench and settles into the armchair. He soaks up the space and lets his eyes adjust to the darkness that daylight will barely puncture. Some workshop or other. There are rusting metal items on walls and the area he has opted to settle into is an old office space. There are chipped and patchy enamel signs on the walls for products that can no longer be bought, nor scarcely remembered. There is a large old electric kettle that reminds Roth of his grandparent's kitchen.
He will have time to sit here in the darkness and think about that night and the spark that ignited this. Those dark, flitting shapes that lurk in his memory will gain shape and form and will taunt Roth from an unknowable distance, taunt him with all the answers they hold and withhold.
Chapter 34
My bag and belongings may be lost to the night but I still had the wallet in my pocket and if I had that, I had a chance.
As I lay in the top corner of a sloping field looking up at the bright broad track of the Milky Way and the flowing lights of a main road in the distance I started to make decisions.
I had time to make some progress now that I knew that I could use the days again, at least for a short time. I must take advantage of being able to move in daylight. Try to make plans, get money, a base.
I had given so little thought to those that I had left behind - had fled - because I had no idea what I would say to them. Nor what I might do. I was terrified of what was happening to me and could not face hurting people or dragging them in.
Whilst fearing that I was in the grip of some advancing madness I had neither words nor courage enough to pick up a telephone or look across the table at my mother, at my friends and try to describe this. Knowing what I did now, what could I tell them?
Not the truth. I still wrestled with what that actually was but the things that I had seen and done could no longer be denied. The only thing I could control now was what to do next.
It occurred to me that I might simply take my own life, to end this and in so doing, save the lives of others. I pondered on that for some time, occasionally rational and clear, other times more of desperation and that dreadful sagging feeling in the seat of my soul. That I was lost and beyond any redemption and that I should not inflict this misery on others but simply stop the suffering.
To do so silently and without a word seemed easiest but I knew what torment that would inflict on people I cared about who would have to carry that burden with them for years. All the not knowing, the lack of closure and the terrible things their subconscious would visit upon them.
They needed to be told something, even if I had not yet ruled it out. Perhaps I could make it look like an accident. Wander into a busy road at night. Drink a lot and then stumble in front of a train.
At points I weaved from trying hard to focus on the swiftest and least painful way to end it, but under the circumstances I was not sure what might work. Frost and Stanford had told me that I would be more powerful and that I would withstand far more than I could imagine. Walking into traffic might just mean that I suffered through a long agonising recovery from the types of injuries that might kill a normal person.
I presumed that I could bleed out but I struggled with the notion of taking a blade to my veins. The idea of lying in the sunshine after a long break from feeding terrified me. How long would burning to death take? How would it feel and how much must I endure of that terminal furnace?
The thought scared me profoundly but not so much as the repellent idea of killing again. The sound and feel of the dying man in that empty old trailer was at the edge of my thoughts all the time. Whenever I stopped moving, or thinking, or acting it would seep back in. The look in his blazing eyes, the pinching fingers digging my flesh, the shiver as he faded.
Also Stanford's words haunted me. The more scared they were the better, he had said. Not just taking life, but inflicting as much cruelty and suffering as could be. It was a repugnant, nauseating thought.
But something nagged at me beyond all that. Stanford and Frost had been horrifying, appalling creatures but there were questions I had not asked when the chance was there. They had been able to tell me about the things that I could and must do. They had explained why I needed to feed in the way they had described, how my senses and my strength and speed would all be vastly enhanced and amplified each time I fed. But they had not told me who it was had told them.
They had made me, I knew. That night before I woke up in the hospital they had made me and left me to wake up smouldering in the early sunshine. But where had they come from and who were they?
I could not ask them now. I had left them crushed and battered in a field and if that had not done for them, the sunshine soon would.
So I figured I would try to find out. Do some research, do some hunting of my own. I would draw more of my money from the bank, take a room in a hotel somewhere. I could get myself a disposable mobile phone, set up email accounts, maybe even get a laptop.
I'd have little else to do and time would be against me as the need to feed drew in again, as the adrenaline slipped through me like sand in an egg-timer.
This countdown was bringing a decision ever closer. Perhaps I was postponing it for now, finding myself an adequate diversion but there were truths that I could not hide from; soon enough I would be a hostage to that burning furious hunger again and would have to kill a human being to satisfy it. Could I do that again? Was I capable? More to the point, even if I had it in me to take another life, the real question was why?
Why should I? Frost and Stanford had left as many unanswered questions as they had answers and there had been just as many that I had simply not asked or thought of.
They had not sprung from nowhere, some spontaneous abomination made of flesh and malice, and if they had made me, then someone had in turn been responsible for their creation.
That meant that there could be more of these, these things, out there, preying on the weak and innocent, toying with lives and tossing them away. Was there any way to find them? Could they be defeated the same way as Frost and Stanford?
I would tug on this thread and see how it unravelled and maybe it would help me to find some peace before the end.
*
The hotel is not expensive, but neither is it cheap. It is simple, comfortable and anonymous, all of which suit my purpose.
It is early when I walk up to reception without a booking and though unusual, they have a vacant room which does not require a cleaner or a late check in.
It has been long days since my wash in that cold lake and since then I have been chased by angry farmers, crossed country, and fought a furious battle with formidable opponents. It is fair to say that my unusual luggage of several shopping bags is not the first thing that the receptionist notices but I'd found a public lavatory with a sink and a running cold tap that had allowed me to rinse away the worst of the grime and dried blood. But I am not clean.
I make full use of the shower and all of the toiletries to scrub at scour at myself long after any sign of the grime and filth have been erased from my skin and hair and finger nails. I have to request that they send me a toothbrush and take away my laundry. It is extra I am told, as though my unusual check-in time suggests that I am unfamiliar with the workings and etiquette of a mid-priced hotel.
I have time to use to figure everything out for myself now. I have some days left of walking in the sunshine before it takes me. Indeed, what I need to figure out next is whether I decide to give myself to it and to understand how this might end.
Because otherwise, I have been condemned by Stanford and Frost to darkness of one kind or another. Creeping through a permanent night, stalking whatever creatures I
may in order to eke a miserable subsistence, or otherwise to become all that they were, or once were; a cold, barren shell of the man I had been, pitiless and without remorse.
I am repulsed by the idea after the nauseating encounter in that dank trailer in an empty field. The pleading eyes of a terrified man who had nothing to live for, begging me silently that he might live all the same. But I had been a captive of the frenzied hunger that was driving me. What Stanford and Frost were telling me was not to let it become so desperate and so open to chance. To own it before it owned me.
It was better to be deliberate, to be calculated and careful in killing, careful to heighten the torment and the fear of any victim I might feed on in order that they surrender that precious adrenaline more readily.
And in a perverse way, it was better. If such a kill could last me weeks, then I would need to kill less frequently. Such clumsy, fumbled and chaotic moments like that first kill were fraught with risk and might not always end up in my favour. But a controlled and well-executed execution might ultimately be for the better. The lesser of several evils.
I caught myself then. A moment of clarity.
Here I was rationalising murder; It was no big deal, just a little bit here and there, nothing I couldn't handle. No harm.
Who was I kidding? It was nothing I could handle and it was a big deal. All harm.
My desperation to refuse the reality and duck the inevitable was no surprise but to find myself even considering such a thing I had not expected of myself. Such is the drive for self-preservation I suppose. Kill or be killed.
Or at least, kill and kill and kill or be killed.
I tried to clear my head and turn thoughts back to the task I had set myself. I wanted to find out something about Stanford and Frost, try to pin something down on these two, to track them. I knew that they would have used other names, they had said as much. But they would have left other traces of themselves and their behaviour; lives ruined, crimes unsolved, or simply other men left smouldering in the early morning sun on a pavement somewhere or a mysterious submission to hospital to some scorched amnesiac elsewhere. It could not just be me.
In fact it wasn't was it? There was the other one. The one who had killed Issy in her own bed. The one that I had seen before.
In London. That night.
I remembered.
It came in a flood, not that the detail was clear. Stumbling off the bus and through streets I had walked a hundred times before, noticing the tensed and menacing man falling into step behind me, telling myself I was paranoid just a moment before the blow came. Then the flurry of movement all around us in the dark. The gripping hands, the hot sharp nick of a knife blade or a nail at the base of my throat. The unfathomable power and the indescribable presence of malice unrestrained.
Then they had swapped and I had been passed between them as the other man tried to fight them, his strength and anger and terror futile and impotent. A tiny fly in a giant web.
They had made us both and left us there and that man who had meant to beat me and rob me had come back later on to find me but had found Issy instead. Followed me right to her.
Perhaps it was not just Stanford and Frost that I needed to track down, but another target as well now. Perhaps killing might not be unbearable after all.
Chapter 35
When the lights change, the people walk in every direction. It did not used to be like this. It is years since he has been here; a part of London that he never comes to, considering himself a Londoner as he does.
The big open X-crossing at Oxford Circus is apparently inspired by street crossings in Tokyo. Roth doesn't know why they would decide to do that only here in all of London, only once. All he knows is that there are lots of people.
Which is what he has come for.
He drifts across the X into the middle, pulled with the crowd of people laden with bags and wide of eye. He slows at the centre, feels the swirl and eddy of the flow and gets caught again, swept by a new tide, washed up on a new island.
This island, concrete and railings and lights on poles, is different from the others because this one has a man. And the man has a microphone, and a speaker. He has a bible.
He tells the people that they are saved. They are saved if only they give themselves over to the God that loves them all and that loves them so much that he gave to them his son, his only son, that they might be washed clean of their sins. That they must repent.
Roth watches the man for a moment, intent and fascinated by the focus and fervour that drives his ceaseless talking. He is utterly convinced by the words that he says, completely believes in their sincerity and seems simultaneously bewildered and frustrated that more people do not stop to listen and to be saved. More people like Roth who has stopped directly in front of him.
The lights switch back again to favour traffic and the cars move back into the space the people have vacated. But Roth has not vacated the space. Roth stays where he is in front of the preacher with the microphone and the loudspeaker and the fervent beliefs.
Roth has found what he did not know what he was looking for.
The man now has an audience of one but still he addresses all the other people who pay him no mind, addresses the open space around him, as though this little tarmac and concrete traffic island were a stage or a pulpit.
Roth takes a step closer and as the preacher raises the tone and pitch and volume of his delivery, Roth leans in and places a finger on the open book. He pushes down and looks at the page.
The preacher pulls the book back away from Roth only a little, only enough that his finger drops away into space, hangs there.
Roth looks at the man, bemused. The preacher man is still talking. His delivery is excitable, edgy, and it cracks a little when he says the word 'saviour'.
Stepping away, Roth moves around the side of the preacher and he leans down to the little portable amplifier that is projecting the sharp vowels and consonants across this busy afternoon. As the beepbeepbeep of the traffic lights punctuate his words and the people flood again into the open space of the crossing, Roth leans down and he plucks the microphone plug from the socket and the sudden silence seems more shocking than the rising shout of the preacher who protests too late.
There is a sense of slowing down, that the rushing current of humanity swirling around this grey basin is settling to a calm, easy swell. Eyes turn to the two of them, to the island on the edge of this tide of people who slow and look and sense that something worth watching is about to be served up again by London. There is something to see.
Roth straightens up and waits, placid and cool. The preacher turns to him, reading the scene, scanning the implacable face staring back at him.
'Are you lost son?' he asks Roth and in the gathering silence he catches the attention of more of the crowd.
The tone of the question, Roth knows, is not challenging. It is not intended to suggest that Roth should move on. His enquiry is meant to be more profound than that, spiritual. Are you lost?
Roth cracks a smile. It unnerves the preacher. It should.
'What are you looking for my friend? What is it that you need?' It is a job now, a task to fulfil, a test for him.
Roth drifts closer to the preacher now, smoothly and in a way that those who see it will relate later to their friends that it looked odd, looked otherworldly and ethereal and like floating. But then, before there is any time for them to register and consider it, he is inches from the Preacher man that they were all trying to ignore, finding it easy to disregard. Now they cannot look away, even when the lights change and the cars start to rev their engines and blare their horns. Because there is only one thing to see now, there is nothing else happening. In the West End today, this is the only show in town.
Roth's hands are on the man's shoulders now, their eyes locked. For the very first time, the preacher looks as though he is not so sure anymore that his faith will be enough
'God loves you son,' he s
ays.
Roth's hands squeeze the man's shoulders, pull him closer and then slide up around the back of the preachers head, slipping through his soft hair.
'Well let's see what he makes of this.'
The first scream from the crowd seems loudest, before it is lost amid the others.
For a moment the panic just bubbles through the crowd, nobody quite sure what just happened, not sure what they saw.
And then it explodes, bursting in pockets across the crowded crossing space until every single person is shouting, screaming or running.
Some attempt to flee. Those closest fear that the large, crop-haired man should turn his attention on them next when he is done with the preacher. Others scramble to see what it is they have missed and mobile phones emerge from pockets, their camera lenses trained on the hunched figure of Roth as he tears with his fingers at the preacher's throat.
Several voices call out in fury and pity and they beseech Roth to stop and to leave the man alone. It will not matter now, for the preacher is beyond helping. What Roth is doing to him might be described as desecration.
As the panic tightens its grip, the chaos and the noise begins to peak. People fall or are knocked to the ground and parents clasp their children tight in the maelstrom that swirls around Roth and the limp, dead preacher.
There are entrances to the tube station at the four corners of the junction and the stairs descending into them quickly become clogged as the crowds surge down, clashing with the exiting passengers emerging confused into the noise and crush above. Someone stumbles, slips down a step or two, going over backward. The weight pressing down forces more people to lose their footing. Someone else trips over a fallen leg, a missed step and suddenly everything unravels and bodies are tumbling, pushing, screaming. There is no order, no sense or reason as people seek to escape, to grasp a breath, to get clear.
It is in the air now and the scent of fear fills nostrils all around. As the ticket hall backs up and fills with more people there is more trouble as people try turning back to head away through the barriers, scared by the screams and the terror of the people falling and crawling down the steps toward them.
