December (34 page)

      
Dave Reilly reeled back, like he'd been hit. Like somebody had
walked over his grave in Doc Martens and kicked his headstone over.

      
'I'm sorry.' Prof moved unsteadily towards the door. 'I've had
enough.'

      
'Take it out of that.' Dave had stuck a ten-pound note on the
counter. 'Sorry for the fuss.' He held open a door for Prof.

      
'Come back any time,' the guy behind the counter said. 'I'll get
you a bigger audience.'

      
Prof shook Dave off. 'No, leave me alone, there's a good boy.'

      
'I'm putting you in a taxi.'

      
'Florence fucking Nightingale, now, are we?'

      
As it happened, there was a minicab right outside, on the
double yellows under a streetlamp. Take him home.' Dave was producing more money,
a twenty and another ten. 'He lives off the Edgware Road. Don't stop at any
clubs.'

      
Prof started to get in the back. 'What about you?'

      
'Bedsit. Walking distance. I've got a key.'

      
Half inside the minicab. Prof struggled out again. 'Sod you, David,'
he said. 'Finish it.'

      
'I'll call you.' Dave turned and walked away, his white scarf
a ribbon of light.

      
'Bloody well finish it!'
Prof roared. 'Why d'you feel responsible?'

      
Dave stopped. He turned back.

      
'Time zones. It happened around eleven p.m., New York time,
right? Is that a four-hour gap, or five hours, in winter?'
      
'You relived it? After it happened?
Shit, I can't think straight, what ... ?'

      
'No. Wrong way round. I
pre
-lived
it. It hadn't happened yet. Work it out. I'd have had at least four hours to
warn him.'

      
'Look, I ain't got all night,' the cab-driver said irritably.

      
'This is a load of balls,' Prof said, 'this is ... fantasy
land.'

      
'I could've reached him through Yoko. Yoko was very open to
this kind of stuff at the time, and there was a woman I knew, a psychic, who
was living in New York. I could've ...'

      
Prof clung to the flaking door of the' cab like it was a log
keeping him afloat in his sea of bad dreams.

      
'David, you told anybody John Lennon was gonna be shot, they'd
have thought you were a nutter and you know it. I'm going to sleep on this one,
son. Correction, try to sleep.'

      
'You'll be sleeping on the fucking pavement if you don't get in.'
The cabbie revved his engine.

      
'And that's it, you see,' Dave said sadly. 'That's the
"Dakota Blues".'

XIV

Keys

Tom Storey was swaying
almost rhythmically above her. His eyes bulged and glittered in a face the
colour of boiled ham. The knife hung limply from his right hand. His jacket was
undone revealing the bottom of his tie - a ludicrous thing ending half-way down
his chest.

      
Silly little details you noticed when you were terrified out
of your senses.

      
Could be rather fun,
don't you think? I do love surprises, confrontations, human friction ...

      
Oh, Martin, Martin, poor Martin, your stupid schemes, all your
little psychological games ... what have you brought down on us?

      
I'm really quite
intrigued, you know ... what will Storey be like?

      
Meryl rolled her head on the floor in a fever of terror. Above
Tom Storey's left shoulder there came a swift, brown blur and she was drawn again
to the deep, dead eyes of the dreadful entity from the kitchen, the man with a
hole in his face. He was mouthing something at her over Storey's shoulder,
seemed to have no teeth, just another puckered hole.
      
Please God, please Lady Bluefoot ...
      
When she tried to pray, her mind
wouldn't form a prayer, only presented her with a trite image of her
spiritualist church, a simpering medium in butterfly glasses with a message
from the Other Side about the important letter in Aunt Daisy's linen cupboard, and
father is so happy now in the heavenly garden, and the Lady Bluefoot...

      
is another world.

      
She tried to turn her head away. She could feel her eyes
widening. Her throat closed a couple of times when she tried to speak.

      
And then the entity crumbled into a brown dust which settled
upon the air and then clouded like a swarm of midges drawn to the candles. It
made her want to cough, but her throat was locked.

      
Tom Storey hadn't dissolved. Storey, looming over her, was an
apparition of flesh and blood and sweat.

      
Meryl's foot caught against one of the table legs. In
desperation, she kicked off her shoe and used the foot to push herself
backwards across the polished floorboards, away from the table.

      
Away from
that
table. She could smell the blood in a foetid haze above her, could see in her mind
the ruins of Sir Wilfrid's neck, slashed tubes protruding.

      
'Here.'

      
A big, red hand.

      
Tom Storey offering to help her up. In his other hand the knife.

      
She shrank back, trembling, snaking away on her bottom across
the polished floor, feeling her tight black dress beginning to come apart.

      
Managing, at last, to croak. 'What have you done?'

      
At which, to her horror, Tom Storey giggled. 'Stone me. What
have
I
done? Jeez.'

      
'Look,' she whispered. 'I ... I didn't ... didn't see anything.'

      
Thinking,
I'm the only
witness. He's got to kill me.
      
'Don't give me that shit, lady,
it's in your eyes. You seen everyfink.'

      
'Please. Please don't. .

      
'The old man,' Tom said, watching her squirm. 'You even seen
the old man, yeah? You seen him just now, right?'
      
'Please ... I didn't see anything.'

      
Glancing quickly sideways to where the door was hanging open
behind her. There was a good six yards between them now. If she could only
reach the door ...

      
Tom Storey was staring around the room in bewilderment. He
beat the palm of his left hand against his forehead.

      
Meryl had managed to slide another couple of feet before he
looked at her again. Not much use; he knew what she was doing. He didn't come
after her, but he was only a few strides away, only a pounce away.

      
'I don't believe you,' he said. 'You seen the old man, dincher?'

      
He half-turned. The knife dropped from his fingers.

      
'Fuck you, lady,' he said. 'Fuck the lot of you.'

      
Before the knife hit the floor, Meryl was up and stumbling for
the doorway, her back to Tom Storey and the bodies at the dinner-table, knowing
that when she started running she'd keep on running out of the main door,
through the grounds and into the trees where he would never find her.

      
In the doorway hands seized her from behind.

Simon St John turned over
in bed, and his companion slid softly to the carpet.

      
For some time, his conscious mind blinking on and off, he'd
been half-aware of a shifting of weight, a part of him wanting to lose it,
needing the freedom to move.

      
He'd been in and out of sleep, his throat vaguely sore,
perhaps a cold coming on; each time he moved towards wakefulness it seemed more
constricting than sleep and he burrowed back into the dark.

      
Sleeping with the Bible.

      
Sometimes with his arm around it; sometimes on his chest,
across his legs, over his groin. Because it stopped dreams,
those
dreams.

      
But not necessarily
all
dreams, and tonight, in his half-fever, he'd dreamt repeatedly of Isabel Pugh,
whose life was lightless and whose company he'd spurned because he'd heard that
tone of voice before from other lonely women in other parishes.

      
In penance, he was pulling Isabel in her wheelchair to the top
of the south-west tower, which had been rebuilt to match the one where the studio
used to be. Gripping the chair, he was struggling backwards up the spiral
staircase, sixty of them, he knew, but when he reached fifty and could see the
sky above him he would immediately find himself at the bottom again, and Isabel
was looking back over her shoulder at him, anxious and impatient.
Come on, Simon, he's expecting us.

      
God knew he was doing his best, but it took all his strength
and demanded more. His arms hurt and his stomach hurt and the cumbersome chair
was barely wide enough for the spiral - the metal scraping along the stone,
with a horrible rending sound, causing red sparks to fly up, or was it flecks
of blood from Isabel's arms, torn on the rough stones projecting from the wall?

      
Twice Simon awoke in the middle of all this and struggled back
into the dream because he knew that if he let go of it, the wheelchair would
crash and tumble down the spiral stairs, a helter-skelter of death.

      
Turning once more to his task, pain in his throat, turning
over in bed, something sliding to the floor, and they were coming out, at the
top of the tower, into the night, hands from above helping him with his burden.

'I'll get you a drink.'
      
'I don't
want
a drink.'
      
'
I'll
get it. Where... ?'
      
'It'll calm you. Brandy, I think.
Top shelf.'
      
'Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.'
      
'Stop it, Meryl.'

      
She just couldn't stop shivering. Enclosed in the plushest of
the chairs, pushed close to the built-up drawing-room fire, and she couldn't
feel any of her limbs, as if they'd all shivered away.

      
'Come on, take a sip, the old remedies are the best, as you're
always saying yourself.' Even the brandy felt cold. It lodged in her throat;
she started to cough, doubled up.

      
'I can't understand it. This is not her at all. This is just
not Meryl. I'm really terribly sorry, this ...'

      
'No,
I'm
sorry. This
is all my fault. We should never have come. Tom has a... condition.'

      
'Well, whatever it is, it can hardly be contagious, Shelley.'

      
Through watering eyes, Meryl saw Shelley Storey shimmering in
the haze around the fire. 'Oh, it can,' Shelley said. 'Believe me.'

      
The whole world's gone completely mad,' Martin said. His polo
shirt was as white as when she'd ironed it. Not a bloodstain on him.
      
Martin.

      
Martin in his drawing-room with his books and his panelled walls
and his long curtains and the mellowness, the soft, buttery lamplight. She thought,
Tom Storey's killed me, too, we're all here in spirit.

      
A piece of ectoplasm floated towards her. She stared at it.
      
'Take it,' Shelley said. 'It's a
clean one.'
      
Meryl accepted the tissue from
Shelley to wipe her eyes.
      
Shelley, too, was unstained, and
her cream high-necked dress was untorn.

      
'You're all here," Meryl said in wonder.

      
'Except Sir Wilfrid and his lady,' said Martin. 'But let's not
talk about him, cantankerous old sod.'

      
Sir Wilfrid
. Meryl
sat up. 'Martin, but he's ... he's ... Where is he?'

      
Someone laughed. 'He made an excuse and left.' It was Stephen
Case, his pony-tail coming apart a little, but both his eyes tightly in his
head. I think he thought Tom was going to murder him.'

      
'To hell with Tulley.' Martin came over and knelt by Meryl's
chair. 'It's
you
we're worried about.
How do you feel?'