The torchlight failed to reveal anything.
The cold hand in the darkness touched him again.
Seb lurched for the door and fell into the corridor outside.
The door at his back slammed with enough force to pass a tremor through the entire building.
He sat up on the dirty floor and said, ‘Please . . .’
He could hear nothing but the echo of the door slamming. He put his hands to his ears to dull the noise inside. His ears popped and he thought he might be sick.
When the nausea passed, Seb got back onto his feet and stumbled from the top floor. Torchlight raking the floor and walls, he ran through the long shadows that stepped backwards and inside the doors that he passed. And he kept his eyes averted from the fresh movements on the ceilings of the bedrooms. He looked away from the jostling grey patches that made him think of dead, wet skin. Only in the middle room, opposite the stairs that descended to the ground floor, did the urgent sounds of exertion, those exhausted grunts, draw his attention. And in that room he saw another partial form adrift in the air, mostly indistinct save for the stub that protruded like a dead umbilicus from a hollow stomach.
Out through the hallway and the kitchens he fled, shouting to himself to drown out the din of his own mind, and of what groped about his feet in the darkness, muttering.
He found the grass outside and there he fell twice. Back upon his feet, he ran round the house’s walls and made it as far as the rose garden. Blind and wretched with fear, he found himself gripped with a need to find Joyce, to seek her protection and to settle Veronica’s terms to end the night. But soon, nothing could have persuaded him to venture any further down that gravel track, between the walled garden and the night-drenched roses.
Seb turned off the torch and thought of throwing it away into the darkness in case he was tempted to turn it on again before the sun rose. He would not look upon what now circled the rose beds. And he would not see what moved in such numbers, through the trees bordering the path.
A crowd was feeling its way towards the Tor. All of those who had gathered were close to the ground and talking in incomprehensible voices. He could go no further and they were coming closer. Soon, he would be amongst them.
We’ll have to go back, a woman’s voice announced from nearby. There is no light here.
27
Shed the Body’s Veil
The sun had been up for three hours when the two women found the writer in one of the large rooms at the front of the house. He was slumped in the threadbare easy chair that no one had used for more years than they cared to count.
His body was wrapped in an old, but beautifully preserved, fur coat. His wide eyes did not move as the women entered the room. All of the shutters were closed. A heavy pall of stale perfume hung in invisible drapes about the chair.
The two women exchanged glances, until the one with the long hair began to sniff and dab at her eyes. She then raised her face to the ceiling and muttered as if to something that existed beyond the room. Eventually, she picked up the little rucksack that had been dropped beside the chair and peered inside it. ‘Shall I fetch the spades?’ she asked her companion.
The one with the short helmet of hair returned her disdainful gaze to the seated figure. She opened the fur coat that the writer had been wrapped inside and placed her hand against the man’s chest. ‘No. He’s still breathing.’
She snapped her fingers angrily before his face but failed to illicit a response. ‘He’ll come back.’
‘Oh, thank goodness for that! Shall I put the kettle on?’ her companion asked.
‘Please do. We’ll pick up with him later to discuss terms.’
THE END
Part 3
THROUGH THE MIST
28
My Soul Rose Trembling
[SIX MONTHS AFTER I TYPED ‘THE END’]
‘We don’t like it,’ Wendy said. ‘I mean, is that supposed to be us? These . . . creatures? This Joyce? And this horrid Veronica? I don’t think I’ve ever read anything as disrespectful in all my life!’
But you do have yellow teeth, and you do smell, and you are mad, and you are blackmailing me and extorting money from me. So what’s your problem, Veronica? Oh, I’m sorry, I meant to say, Wendy. And one more thing, your haircut is crap. I still don’t know for sure, but I assume that you do it yourself with kitchen scissors, or maybe with a knife and fork. Or does Joyce – sorry, I mean, Nat – step up to the plate with a pair of garden shears and give you a trim? I used no artistic licence in my descriptions of your bloody head, besides changing the colour from a kind of ashy-dusty grey to blonde.