The Eternity Project

45

EAST 79TH STREET, NEW YORK



Neville Jackson strode into his apartment block and headed straight for the stairwell, pursued by a deep sense of unease.

He wasn’t the kind of guy who scared easily. He’d worked the streets of Harlem in uniform for years, then been assigned to vice and then worked as a detective. He was a born-and-bred New Yorker and took shit from no man. But what he had seen in the last twenty-four hours had ripped the gusto from his body and cast it to the wind.

He had spent the last hour just down the block in St. Monica’s Church. First time in his life he’d walked inside the building and the first time in his life that he’d prayed. He wasn’t religious, he just knew that whatever they were facing was not of this earth and he couldn’t stand the haunting feeling that it was coming after all of them. Donovan. Glen. Him.

‘Jesus.’

His voice echoed up the stairwell as he jogged the steps two at a time, making his way up to the sixth floor, where he shared an apartment with his girlfriend, Jenna. They’d been together for three years. He’d never figured himself as the type to settle down, especially as they didn’t have enough money to start a family and could barely afford to live on the Upper East Side at all. But Jenna was all heart and he was making a little more money than she knew about, which was what haunted him as he walked toward their apartment door. The temptation to come clean was overwhelming, and he braced himself for whatever shit storm she would unleash when he’d finished explaining to her what had happened over the last two days. If his impromptu visit to the church had gained him anything, it was the knowledge that what they had done simply was not worth it. Crime did not pay.


It certainly wasn’t now. No fortune was worth this.

Jackson felt his cellphone vibrate in his jacket pocket. He slipped it out and saw the screen glowing with an incoming call. Donovan’s number. He fingered the answer button thoughtfully for a moment, then shook his head and shut the phone off. This was something that could not wait and he did not want to let Donovan have the chance to talk him out of it. Donovan was his boss, but Jenna was his life.

He slipped his key into the door and pushed it open.

The apartment, like most in New York, was compact. He walked down a short corridor, flanked by a bathroom and the bedroom, and then out into the living room.

‘Jenna?’

A small hand-written note was waiting for him on a coffee table in the middle of the room. He picked it up as he felt a breeze coming in from the nearby windows, heavy curtains drawn across them. Jenna had gone across the block to a friend’s place. Would be back in half an hour. Jackson shook his head and smiled. The fact that she could have left the note four hours ago obviously hadn’t crossed her mind when she’d set off for Harriet’s.

The breeze wafted cold air across him again and he looked up to see the curtains billowing in the breeze from the open window.

‘For Christ’s sake, Jenna, how many more times?’

Jackson tossed the note down and walked across to the window. Jenna had left them open a hundred times, preferring the fresh air, which was fine in summer but in the middle of November it was goddamned freezing.

Jackson reached up to pull the curtains aside, and even as he did so a tiny part of his brain registered that although the window was open, he could not hear the traffic down on the block seventy feet below.

His arms whipped the curtains aside and went numb as they did so. The window was firmly closed, sealed shut. Double-glazed panes blocked almost all noise but sirens from the city outside. His heart fluttered in his chest as he felt his guts sinking inside of him.

‘Jesus,’ he whispered. ‘Please, no.’

The hairs on Jackson’s neck stood on end as he felt the temperature in the apartment plummet, his breath condensing before him on the air. In the reflection of the room in the window before him, he saw the lights flicker and fade like distant lightning.

Jackson reached down for the pistol at his shoulder-holster but he knew that it was useless. There was only one possible way to save himself and that was to get out of the apartment. His legs quivered beneath him and he felt his stomach loosen.

In his reflection he saw the lampshade hanging from the ceiling begin swinging gently as though something had brushed past it toward him. The cold became bitter and sharp as though it was biting into his skin, and with a sudden and complete certainty he knew that the wraith was not just in the room with him, but was directly behind him.

As terror constricted his breathing and threatened to paralyze his limbs, Jackson whispered a final prayer and then whirled.

He dashed forwards and hurdled the coffee table in a single bound, charging for the entrance hall and the front door. He was halfway there when something plowed into his chest as though he had been hit by a car.

Jackson’s lungs convulsed as he was hurled backwards, his chin slamming into his breastbone as the impact threw him across the back of the couch to land hard on the floor. He rolled and hit the wall beneath the window, cracking the back of his head hard enough that stars danced in pulses of light before his eyes.

He staggered to his feet with his back to the window and raised his hands, looking uselessly across the apartment.

‘Please, I didn’t mean to do it!’ The room remained silent but bitterly cold. His eyes searched desperately left and right, seeking a glimpse of his tormentor. ‘I came here to put it right!’

His breath puffed in thick clouds before him as he hyperventilated, his heart pounding in his chest. Suddenly, the clouds of condensing vapor swirled before him and for a brief but horrific instant a terrifying visage glared back at him, a face both human and yet twisted with demonic rage, as though it had crawled from the darkest bowels of Hell itself.

Jackson let out a howl of terror and tried to run past the fearsome image. Something immensely powerful thumped into his guts and lifted him off the ground, his terrified scream cut short as the blow blasted the air from his lungs.

Jackson flew backwards and smashed through the glazed windows, shards of glass slicing through his body like scalpels as his head cracked against the window frame and shattered under the impact as he plowed through the window and out into the chill night air.

His body arced outward into the void amid a cloud of sparkling particles of glass and plummeted seventy feet down toward the brightly lit street below, before hitting the asphalt hard enough to shatter every single bone in his body and burst his skull like an exploding melon.

Cars tires screeched and several pedestrians screamed as the traffic crawled to a halt either side of the ruined corpse.