Bloody Horowitz (22 page)

But it never slowed down or stopped. For the first time in his life, Jeremy got into trouble at school. MP3 players weren't allowed, but Jeremy couldn't resist plugging himself in between lessons, out in the yard, and he found himself dreaming about the music during lessons, ignoring whatever the teachers said. He wore it to and from school and kept it on in his room when he was doing his homework. He still went around to Mr. Demszky's from time to time—the garden was beginning to look delightful—and he worked all the harder with the music enveloping him, transporting him into its own world. Beyoncé, Oasis, Kings of Leon, the new tracks kept arriving and Jeremy kept on listening. At night, in bed, he still read books, but he did so to the rhythms of Leona Lewis or Estelle, and his parents became familiar with the
tish-tata-tish-tata-tish
sounds that came from their son every morning at the breakfast table.

They became a little concerned. Like many other teenagers, Jeremy had begun to communicate less and less . . . but until now he never had been like other teenagers. He had been special. What had happened? All he did was listen to that wretched music. Irene Browne was the first to mention it. They didn't talk to each other as a family anymore, she said. She even began to think that meeting their neighbor might not have been such a good thing after all. He seemed to have snatched something of her son away, and she suggested to her husband that maybe it would be a good idea to remove the MP3 player, to give Jeremy a rest. But before either of the Brownes could act, something else happened that completely took their minds off modern music and earbuds. Jeremy became ill.

It was hard to tell when it began. Maybe it had been about two weeks after Mr. Demszky had moved in, but on the other hand it could have actually started before he arrived. It appeared, first, to be a sort of virus. Jeremy was tired all the time. He was finding it hard to get up and, in the evening, he went back to bed as soon as he could. He still had an appetite but he didn't enjoy his food, eating it mechanically, without any sense of taste. His eyes seemed to have lost some of their color. He moved more slowly and gave up his rugby training, saying that he didn't feel like it. A strange rash appeared on the side of his neck. He began to wheeze.

At first, the Brownes weren't too worried. All teenagers, after all, like to stay in bed. But as his movements became increasingly listless, as he became quieter and more withdrawn, they decided to take him down to see Dr. Sheila McAllister at the local clinic for a quick checkup. Jeremy didn't argue. He had to wait at the clinic for an hour and a half before he was seen, but the time passed quickly enough, listening to music through his MP3 player, nodding his head in time to the track.

Finally, he was examined. Dr. McAllister asked him if he was sleeping. Yes, certainly. Jeremy had no trouble getting to sleep. It was waking up that was the problem. Was he eating properly? His mother assured the doctor that Jeremy ate three proper meals, including breakfast, and that he always had plenty of fruits and vegetables, five portions a day, just as the government recommended. The doctor took a blood sample. It did seem possible that Jeremy was anemic. Or maybe there was something wrong with his thyroid gland. It was all very strange, but she was sure there was nothing serious to worry about. Generally speaking, Jeremy was in very good shape. This could all be down to a bout of flu. She told the Brownes to come back in two weeks if there was no change.

Jeremy thanked her and slipped his earbuds back in. Robbie Williams took him out of the clinic and back onto the street.

His situation did get worse . . . much worse. Over the next few days, Jeremy became more and more listless. He took several days off school. Physically, he seemed to be shriveling up. His cheeks, once so healthy and full of color, were now sunken and pale. His eyes had lost their focus. Both his parents had stopped work to be with him, but he barely talked to them. Sometimes it was as if he was far away. He lay in his room for hours at a time, listening to the MP3 player, staring at the ceiling while he got thinner and thinner. He was still eating, but the food had no effect. His lips had begun to shrivel. His hair was turning gray.

More doctors and specialists began to appear. Blood and urine samples were taken. It was thought he might have a serious viral infection. The Brownes were asked if he had been offered drugs. Jeremy was taken to the hospital, where he was scanned from head to foot. Various illnesses—diabetes, thyrotoxicosis, tuberculosis and brucellosis—were all suggested. Jeremy was tested for all of them. He was found to have none. For the first time, the dreadful word
progeria
was uttered. Progeria, a genetic disorder, was also known as the aging disease. It was very rare. There was no known cure. But Jeremy didn't hear any of it. He had gone rather deaf and he didn't care anyway. Long after his parents had gone, he lay in his bed in the children's ward, only partly aware of his surroundings, listening to his MP3 player, which lay on the pillow beside him, the thick white wires snaking up to earbuds that seemed to be burrowing farther and farther into his head.
Tish-tata-tish-tata-tish-tata-tish
. . . the soft beat of the percussion whispered across the ward as the duty nurse walked quietly by.

Briefly, he was sent back home again. There was nothing the hospital could do for him, and so it had been decided to send him to a special neurological clinic on the South Coast. Scampi the dog had already been taken away to live with relatives in Yorkshire. On Jeremy's last night on Elmsworth Avenue, Mr. Demszky came to visit, bringing with him a box of Hungarian chocolates with pictures of folk dancers on the lid. It was only October and not yet cold, but he was wearing a black cashmere overcoat that reached all the way to the ground. His face was partially hidden by an old-fashioned floppy hat.

“How is Jeremy?” he asked, still standing on the doorstep. For once, Mrs. Browne had not invited him in.

“He's not well,” she said. The worry of the last weeks had changed her. She was short-tempered. She didn't want to see her neighbor and she didn't care if he knew it.

“There is no improvement?”

“No, Mr. Demszky—and if you don't mind, I'd like to get back to him. We're leaving for Brighton tomorrow.”

“I brought these . . .” He lifted the box.

“Jeremy isn't eating chocolates, thank you very much. We'll let you know if there's any news.”

She closed the door in his face.

Mothers can be irrational sometimes. It was only then that Mrs. Browne remembered that Jeremy had fallen ill shortly after he had met Mr. Demszky. And at the same moment, she found herself thinking about the MP3 player. Jeremy had always liked music, but since he had been given that machine, he had become obsessed with it, listening to it twenty hours a day—at school, doing his homework, in the bath. Once, she'd actually torn it away to stop him from listening to it during meals. Jeremy had screamed at her. She had never seen him like that before. She thought of the ugly slab of glass and plastic that was probably playing even now. It was almost as if . . .

It was almost as if it was sucking the life out of him.

A private ambulance came for Jeremy the next morning. He was able to walk out to it—but only just. His parents had to support him, one on each side. He was mumbling to himself, his eyes barely focused. He had lost a lot of his hair and his skin was gray and wrinkled. Some of his teeth had come loose. If any of the other residents of Elmsworth Avenue had been watching, they would have been shocked. He looked like a very old man.

He did not have the MP3 player with him. At the last moment, acting on a whim, Mrs. Browne had pried it out of his hand and she had left it in his room, on the table beside his bed. Jeremy had tried to complain, but the words barely came. He allowed himself to be led downstairs. Minutes later they were on their way to the North Circular Road, which would take them around London on their way to the south.

Half an hour later, Jákob Demszky entered the house.

By now he knew that the Brownes kept a spare key in the pot beside the front door, but even if it hadn't been there, he would have found it simple to break in. He opened the door and went straight over to the stairs. He had only been in the house a few times but he had no trouble finding his way to Jeremy's room, as if he was being guided there by something inside. And indeed there it was, sitting where Mrs. Browne had left it. Mr. Demszky chuckled to himself, a strangely unpleasant sound. He reached out with a trembling hand and for a moment his fingers hovered over the MP3 player like a large bird about to land. Then he snatched it up and left.

He walked back to number 66 and went straight to his study, one of the rooms that Jeremy had never visited. Had the boy gone in there, he might have been surprised by some of the ornaments on display: the human skull on its pedestal; the black candles, squat and half melted; the golden cross that stood upside down on the mantelpiece. It might then have occurred to him to go onto the Internet and look up the English for
boszorkánys
—or indeed for
tépõfarkas
or
gonoszul
. But alas, it was far too late. Jeremy's eyesight had gone. It had failed him long ago.

Mr. Demszky set down the MP3 player and put on a pair of spectacles that were actually inch-thick magnifying glasses. They would have turned even a period at the end of a sentence into the size of a button. Squinting through them with his round, watery eyes, he produced a tiny screwdriver and ran it over the MP3 player until he found four equally tiny screws in the base. Taking enormous care, he unscrewed them and the secret panel that Jeremy had never noticed fell off in his hands. The inside of the MP3 player was exposed. There were no batteries . . . just a mass of circuits and a single switch turned to the left. Using the screwdriver, Mr. Demszky slid the switch over to the right, into reverse, then screwed the panel back into place.

With a contented smile, he picked up the earbuds and pressed them in. It gave him extra pleasure knowing that, until very recently, they had been in Jeremy's ears. Somehow it helped to connect the two of them. Mr. Demszky did not like modern music. He turned on the MP3 player, rested his white hair against the back of his chair and began to listen to a symphonic poem by the Austrian composer Antonin Dvořák. The music was dark and majestic. It flowed into him like a moonlit river and gratefully he absorbed it.

Maybe it was a trick of the light. Perhaps not. A few minutes later, his skin had regained some of its color and his hair was a little less white.

Arthur and Elizabeth Reed had never expected to have children. It was something they had decided, almost from the moment they had gotten married, and thirty years later they had no regrets. It wasn't that they disliked children. It was just that they preferred a quiet life, spending what little money they had on themselves or their friends.

When they met, Arthur was running the village post office, which also sold sweets, stationery and other useful items to the inhabitants of Instow in Devonshire. He was a small, round-faced man who always seemed to be smiling and who knew all of his customers by name. He lived in a very ordinary house at the end of a terrace, but with wonderful views of the sand dunes that rose up and down in yellow waves with a flat blue sea on the other side.

One of his customers was Elizabeth Williams, a cheerful, attractive woman who worked in the local bakery just a few yards down the road. Nobody was really surprised when the two of them announced their engagement. It seemed that the whole of Instow turned out for their wedding. The bakers gave them a cake with pink and white icing, three tiers high. They took a week off for their honeymoon, which they spent in Greece, and when they came back, Mrs. Reed, as she was now, sold her apartment and moved into her husband's house.

Thirty years is a very long time to describe in a few sentences, but for the Reeds, time seemed to slip past without even being noticed. They had been in their late twenties when they met, but suddenly they were in their late fifties. Arthur's black hair had turned gray. He had to wear glasses to read. He found that he was forgetting where he had put things. And Elizabeth, after a series of minor illnesses, had become rather frail. When she went out walking, she carried a stick and could be seen waving it vengefully, as if determined that the miles would not defeat her.

In a strange way, age suited them. In fact, newcomers to the village could hardly imagine that they had ever been young. And they were still completely happy in each other's company, laughing at each other's jokes or enjoying long silences. They had just about enough money. Their house was cozy and just the right size. All in all, they had no complaints about the cards that life had dealt them. They were looking forward to a long and comfortable retirement.

But, as it happened, Elizabeth Reed had a younger sister named Janice. The two of them hadn't seen each other for many years, mainly because Janice lived in Manchester, which was a long way away, and since her marriage they had become increasingly uncommunicative. From a note scribbled in a Christmas card, Elizabeth learned that Janice had a son. Another brief letter informed her that Janice had divorced. After that . . . nothing. Elizabeth wrote several times but got no reply. She even wondered if her sister was still alive.

So she was very surprised to receive, one day, a telephone call from a man called Mr. Norris who explained that he was an attorney representing Janice. He wondered if the two of them could possibly meet. Elizabeth didn't want to travel up to Manchester, but Mr. Norris assured her that he could easily come to Instow, and so it was arranged.

The attorney came down the following Wednesday afternoon. He was a thin, tired-looking man in a suit that seemed to have gotten quite badly crumpled on the train—or perhaps it had been like that when he put it on. He carried a battered leather briefcase that hung open to reveal a handful of legal documents, a newspaper and a half-eaten Kit Kat.