Festival of Fear (15 page)

Still the stranger said nothing, and remained with his head bent over the gray, soapy water.

‘If you're not interested, just say the word and I'll go.'

At last the young man stood up straight, his shoulders bony under his coat. Peter couldn't see his face properly because the mirror was all steamed up.

‘Well?' said Peter. He was growing anxious and impatient, and he was right on the edge of turning around and leaving.

‘You ask far too many questions,' said the boy, in a dry, whispery voice.

‘What? What do you mean?'

‘Exactly that. You never stop doubting yourself. You never stop doubting other people. You don't have any faith.'

‘Faith? What does faith have to do with it?'

‘Faith has everything to do with it,' the young man replied. He lifted his right hand, which was very thin and very long-fingered, and unfolded it. To Peter's horror, he had curved gray fingernails that were almost three inches long.

He reached up to the mirror, and used the nail of his index finger to scratch the glass. With a gritty scraping noise that set Peter's teeth on edge, he scrawled NO FAITH, NO FUTURE. Then he turned around.

To Peter's shock, he wasn't a young man at all. His face was leathery and deeply-wrinkled, and his eyes were as black and glittery as beetles. His mouth was almost lipless, as if somebody had made a deep horizontal cut with a very sharp knife.

Peter took one step back, and then another.

‘Where are you going, Peter?' the man asked him, in the same whispery voice. ‘You can't run away from your own lack of faith.'

‘Who are you?' said Peter.

‘They used to call me the Scrawler, in the East End, during the Blitz, when they were hiding in the tube stations. I used to scratch their worst nightmares on the tunnel walls. HALLO, SIDNEY, EVER WONDERED WHAT YOUR WIFE'S UP TO? That used to put the wind up them!'

‘Get away from me. I don't know what the hell you're talking about, and I don't want to know, either.'

‘You can't get away from me, Peter. Once I've sniffed you out, there's no getting away from me. I've been living in London for longer than you can even imagine, mate. I've been scrawling and scratching my way through the East End slums, and the sex clubs of Soho, and Holborn, and Notting Hill, and Brixton. I have a very keen nose for fear, Peter. I can smell it on people, like body odor. Toffs, drunks, newspaper reporters, bank clerks.' He closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep, appreciative breath.

‘Who the hell are you? Leave me alone.'

The Scrawler's eyes popped open again. ‘How can I leave you alone when you won't leave
me
alone? You're always doubting yourself, that's your trouble. You're always afraid that you're going to be alone. You thought it was your mind that carved all of those questions, didn't you? Or maybe some holy miracle. But it wasn't you and it wasn't a miracle. It was me.'

‘Get away from me, will you?'

‘Every city holds the same terrors, Peter. And what's the greatest terror of all? The terror of not being loved. The terror of living amongst millions and millions of people and having nobody.

‘That's who I am, mate, and that's
what
I am. I'm nothing more than the terror of loneliness, come to life. And if you ask me where I come from, and how I came to be wandering the streets sniffing out people's insecurity, then all I can say is, I've always been here. You look at Rowlandson's etchings, my friend. You look at
Punch
engravings of the London mob. You look at photographs of Piccadilly in the nineteen twenties. That fellow by the gin-house door; that fellow sitting on the top deck of the open omnibus; that face in the crowd on Waterloo Bridge. That's me, Peter, looking for people like you.'

‘You're mad. You're just mad. Get away from me.'

‘I can't do that, Peter. So long as you doubt yourself, mate, I will follow you everywhere, wherever you go, and I will never, ever, ever give you peace.'

Peter stared at the Scrawler for a very long time, his chest rising and falling like a man who's been running. He
did
have faith. He
did
believe in himself. But what did he really believe in? And why did he always feel that he never fitted in? At work, he suspected that his colleagues didn't like him, and that they talked about him behind his back. And he couldn't even walk along the street without thinking that people were staring at him, and thinking what a misfit he was. He had never been able to believe that Gemma had really loved him and really wanted to marry him, and maybe that was why he had never been able to trust her.

But if he could get rid of his doubt – if he could stop asking himself so many questions – if he could
kill
his lack of faith—

He lifted his umbrella and struck the Scrawler on the shoulder. The Scrawler instantly snatched the umbrella and hurled it across to the other side of the toilet. Peter struck him with his fist, but he felt as if he had nothing beneath that flapping raincoat but a cage of bare bones. Without a word, the Scrawler opened out the index fingernails of both hands and slashed Peter across his face, first one cheek, then the other. The nails cut right through to his tongue, leaving his cheeks wide open, like extra mouths. Blood sprayed everywhere, all over the basins, halfway up the walls.

Peter tried to seize the Scrawler's neck. He was too shocked to speak, and in any case he couldn't feel his tongue, but he let out a fierce and bloody
hhhuurrrhhhhhhh
! and hit the Scrawler's head against the mirror, cracking it in half.

‘Now you've fucking done it,' the Scrawler breathed into his ear. He locked his left arm around Peter's neck and pushed the hard, sharp nail of his right up against Peter's groin. He grunted, and pushed even harder, and his nail pierced Peter's black funeral trousers, punctured his shirt tail and his underpants, and then plunged deep into subcutaneous fat, puncturing his body cavity with an audible exhalation of gases. Peter felt the fingernail slide inside him, right inside, and it was the most indecent invasion of his body that he could have imagined, a single long fingernail cutting through intestines and muscle and connective tissue.

He didn't utter a sound as the Scrawler slowly dragged his hand further and further up, so that its fingernail cut into his stomach, right up to his breastbone. His shirt front was suddenly soaked with blood. The Scrawler stepped back, breathing harsh and hard. Peter swayed and coughed and then sank slowly to the wet tiled floor, pressing his forehead against it like a religious penitent.

Right in front of his eyes, he saw the words HOW ARE YOU FEELING TODAY, PETER? They were cut deep into the ceramic, and they were slowly filling up with blood.

A month later, on a cold, brilliant day, Robin Marshall was called to the inquest at West London Coroner's Court, so that he could give evidence about Peter's apparent state of mind on the day that he died.

He stood in the witness box with the mid-morning sun shining on his blond hair. ‘I had the impression that Peter was confused.'

‘Confused about what?' asked the coroner.

‘He had just attended his fiancée's funeral. I think he had very mixed feelings about her.'

‘In what way?'

‘He felt guilty that he may not have loved her as much as he ought to have done.'

‘Can you elaborate?'

Robin looked serious. ‘I think he felt uncertain about his sexual orientation, apart from other things.'

‘I see. Anything else?'

‘Even though he said that his fiancée hadn't really – well, excited him – he was still very jealous if he thought that she was seeing other men.'

‘Did he think that she
was
seeing other men?'

Robin nodded. ‘He said that it was making him very depressed. And of course he was very depressed about her death, too; and still in shock, if you ask me.'

Richard Morton, a thirty-five-year-old computer salesman from Milton Keynes, gave evidence that he had talked to Peter on the telephone just after Gemma's accident, and that Peter had seemed to believe that he and Gemma had been having an affair. ‘He was beside himself with rage. I simply couldn't understand why.'

Dr George Protter, Peter's GP, said that Peter had been reasonably healthy, although he had suffered from several mild allergies, and had once consulted him after an anxiety attack at work. ‘As far as the matter of his late fiancée seeing other men is concerned, this was more than likely a figment of his imagination. She was a patient of my colleague Dr Carpenter, and three weeks before she died he had diagnosed a lump in her left breast. Under the circumstances it would hardly have been surprising if she had acted toward the deceased in a preoccupied manner. As Dr Carpenter will testify at
her
inquest next week, the evening before she fell beneath the train at West Kensington Station he had been to make a house call to tell her that she would have to have exploratory surgery.'

Dr Vikram Pathanda, the senior pathologist at Hammersmith Hospital, then described how Peter had died. ‘There were two deep diagonal wounds, one to each cheek, that went right through to the mouth cavity. There was a deep penetrative wound to the lower abdomen, followed by an invasive section of the abdomen, in an upward direction, right up to the sternum. The injuries were such that death would have occurred within two or three minutes.

‘The wounds were caused by a specially sharpened, quarter-inch stonemason's chisel which was found at the trauma scene. There is no question at all in my mind that they were self-inflicted.'

The coroner took off his glasses. ‘Thank you, Dr Pathanda. And now, I think, we could all adjourn for a spot of lunch.'

Robin Marshall sat on the top deck of the number fifteen bus, one hand raised to shield his eyes from the late-afternoon sun. Next to him, a black boy in enormous cargo pants was listening to rap on his stereo and joining in the beat with an occasional, ‘
unh-a-unh-a.
'

The bus stopped outside Paddington Station. As it did so, another bus drew alongside. Robin looked at a handsome young Asian sitting near the front of the bus. Then he looked down at the side, where there was a large advertisement for Pepsi Cola.

Somebody had scratched letters in the side of the bus – high, jagged letters that went right through the paint and exposed the bare aluminum. They said, HOW ARE YOU FEELING TODAY, ROBIN?

Sepsis

‘
W
hat have you got there?' she asked him, her eyes shining.

‘Nothing – it's a surprise,' he said, keeping the lapels of his overcoat drawn tightly together.

‘What
is
it?' she demanded. ‘I can't bear surprises!'

‘It's something I bought specially for you, because I love you so much.'

‘Show me!'

She tried to circle around him and peer down the front of his coat, but he backed away from her. ‘Before I show you, you're going to have to make me a promise. You must promise to love this just as much as you love me.'

‘How can I, when I don't know what it is?'

‘Because it's all of my love for you, all of it, all wrapped up in one little bundle.'

‘Show me!'

‘Come on,' he coaxed her. ‘If you don't promise, I'll take it back, and you'll never find out what it was.'

‘
Show
me!'

‘Promise first!'

She took a deep breath. ‘All-right-whatever-is-in-your-coat-I-promise-to-love-it-just-as-much-as-I-love-you.'

‘Cross your heart and hope to die?'

‘Cross my heart and hope to die.'

Gently, he reached inside his coat and lifted out a tiny tortoiseshell kitten, with big green eyes. It gave a diminutive mew, and clung on to his lapel with its brambly little claws.

‘Oh, it's a
darling
!' she said. ‘Oh, it's absolutely
perfect
!'

‘What did I tell you? All of my love, all wrapped up in one little bundle. What are you going to call her?'

She took the kitten and cupped her in her hands, stroking the top of her head with her finger. ‘I don't know yet. But something romantic. Something really, really romantic.'

She made a mewing noise, and the kitten mewed back. She did it again, and again the kitten copied her.

‘There! I'll call her Echo.'

‘
Echo
? What's that? Sounds more like a newspaper than a cat.'

‘No, silly, it's Greek mythology.'

‘If you say so.'

‘Echo was a beautiful, beautiful nymph, the most beautiful nymph that ever was.'

‘Oh, yeah? So what happened to her?'

‘Everybody loved Echo but Zeus' grumpy old wife Hera got mad at her because she kept Hera talking while Zeus had hanky-panky with another goddess. Hera cursed her so that she could never speak her own words ever again – only the last words that were spoken to her by somebody else.'

He shook his head in admiration. ‘Do you know something, I think I love your brain as much as your body. Well,
almost
as much. Unfortunately . . . your brain doesn't have breasts.'

She threw a cushion at him.

His name was David Stavanger and her name was Melanie Angela Thomas. They were both twenty-four years old, although David was a Capricorn and Melanie was an Aries. Their star charts said that they should always be quarreling, but nobody who knew them had ever seen two people so much in love with each other. They lived and breathed each other, sharing everything from wine to whispers, and when they were together they radiated an almost palpable aura.

Some evenings they did nothing but gaze at each other in awed silence, as if neither of them could believe that God had brought them another human being so desirable. And they
were
desirable, both of them. David was six foot ten inches tall with cropped blond hair and a strong, straight-nosed Nordic face that he had inherited from his grandfather. He was broad-shouldered, fit, and one of the most impressive wide receivers that the Green Bay Packers had fielded for over a decade. Melanie was small and slim, with glossy brunette hair that almost reached the small of her back. She had the dreamy, heavy-lidded beauty of a girl in a Pre-Raphaelite painting, as if she passed her time wandering through fields of poppies in poppy-colored velvet. She had graduated with a first-class English degree from the University of Wisconsin in Green Bay and now she was working as a contributing editor for
MidWest
magazine.