Julie Gennaro left the car door open as he walked over to the dead men.
He hadn’t seen them coming. They had quite literally stepped out of nowhere, right in front of him. He was shaking; not just because he’d hit two pedestrians, but because of what he’d seen as they’d gone up over his bonnet: that face. Those teeth. The impossibly wide, predatory smile as the mouth opened wider and wider, then spiraling shut like the metal jaws of a garbage truck as the guy’s head came down, cannoning off the bonnet, before impact dragged the body away. It was like something dreamed up by a fever, a nightmare given flesh and set down in the middle of an East London street, and all Julie could do was stare at the bus driver’s face as he tried so desperately to stop. The true horror of it being that he knew he couldn’t.
It all happened so incredibly slowly, like some sort of jerky stop-motion film playing out, only it was real. Life-and-death real.
“Look at the mess. Poor bastard.”
“Christ, he’s lucky he didn’t make it,” another speaker, her voice almost reverential. “I mean…”
“Who would want to live looking like that?” One of the first responders finally said what they were all thinking. His voice—and callous disregard for human life—carried across the street, but no one was arguing with him. Death, in this case, was a small mercy.
“What about the other one? Can someone get him out from under there?”
Then, “Christ … he looks like … God … who? That old comedian?”
“Holy shit, they killed Crake and Clamp,” a kid said, and laughed.
Laughed.
Julie didn’t need to see another corpse. He was more interested in the man who had been running away from the deceased. He had a story to tell.
He stood in the middle of the road, one foot on either side of the white line, staring across the street at something.
Julie went across to him. “You okay, sir?”
He didn’t say anything.
Julie put a hand on his shoulder and asked again, “Are you all right?”
The man shook his head as though to say no, no he wasn’t all right, how could he be all right, he’d just stepped out of thin air, chased by a monster that lay dead beneath a double-decker bus, why the ridiculous question?
“Sir? Are you all right, sir? Sir? Are you okay? Can you hear me? Are you hurt?”
“I need to get out of here.”
“I don’t think so, sir. What’s your name?”
“Josh.”
“Okay, Josh, you’re a very lucky man, do you know that?” He shook his head again, denying any relationship with that particularly capricious lady. Julie didn’t think arguing the point would help, so instead he asked, “Do you want to tell me what just happened?”
“I don’t…” Julie couldn’t tell if he was saying he didn’t want to, or if he’d simply run out of words in the middle of saying he didn’t understand himself, which given the face Julie had seen—all of those teeth, the eyes pushed back and away into the temples, swiveling like some apex predator’s—was pretty fucking understandable, to be blunt.
“Stay with me, Josh. What happened? Why were they chasing you? Where were you all coming from? One minute the road was empty, the next I was trying not to kill you. Talk to me, Josh. I’m your friend here.”
“I don’t have any friends,” Josh said, still staring toward the café across the street.
Julie saw a good-looking guy in the doorway who was staring right back at them.
“You know that guy?”
As he asked, the man in the doorway drew his finger across his neck in one smooth motion, as though slitting his throat. Julie recognized him then. He’d seen him a lot over the last month or so with Gideon Lockwood in the Rothery. Wherever Gideon was, there he was, on his shoulder, in the thick of it. That made the threat all the more visceral. The Lockwoods didn’t piss about with words when actions would get the message across much more emphatically.
Josh nodded. “Seth,” he said.
“Let’s get you out of here, shall we? Then you can tell me what you’ve done to upset old man Lockwood. Come on,” Julie wrapped an arm around Josh’s shoulder and steered him toward the side of the road. The ambulance turned onto the street as they reached the pavement. The paramedics were out of it and moving spectators away before the engine had stopped ticking over. “Nothing to see here, folks,” one of them called, shooing people back, making some breathing space for the crew to get in and work. “How about you let us do our jobs. Come on, thanks, yeah, back, back.”
Seeing Julie’s uniform, another one of the paramedics came over to him. “Everything okay here?”
Julie nodded. “I’ve got this guy. He’s fine. Shock. He’s a lucky lad. Could have been a lot worse for him.”
“Hard to argue. I’ve seen the others,” the paramedic said, nodding toward the bus. “Want me to give him a once-over anyway?”
“Nah, it’s fine. You’ve got enough to deal with. I’m going to take him back to the station, ask him a few questions, see if I can work out what the fuck just happened here. Just waiting for backup to arrive.”
The paramedic nodded, and was already halfway back to the worst of the accident before Julie whispered into Josh’s ear, “I don’t know what the fuck’s going on, but I saw that thing. And either I’m losing my fucking mind, or some shit’s happening here I don’t understand. So we’re going to talk. You are going to tell me everything you know. Understand? And before you think about lying to me, I know that guy—I know what kind of bastard he is, and that you’re in trouble. Okay?” He didn’t wait for Josh to answer him. Thinking about it, he knew the victims, too. Or at least of them. He’d heard a kid say they’d killed Crake and Clamp and laugh. That was the second time he’d heard those names recently, Crake and Clamp. They’d been behind The Magic Circle robbery and now they were dead. There was no such thing as a coincidence in his line of work, meaningful or otherwise. The world just didn’t work that way. “Now, we’re going to go over there and get into my car, we’re going to close the door and drive away, and you’re going to start explaining. Don’t leave anything out. Don’t try and hide anything. I’ll know if you’re lying. This is what I do and I’m good at it. Do we understand each other, Josh?”
Josh didn’t say anything as Julie led him to the car, but he didn’t resist, either, and compliance was as good as acceptance as far as the policeman was concerned. Julie put his hand on his head and eased him down into the back seat, slamming the door on him before going around to the driver’s side. The child locks kept his passenger in place. He hadn’t taken the keys out of the ignition when he’d abandoned the car. Before Julie could get behind the wheel he heard someone ask, “What the fuck?” only to be answered by an equally perturbed, “He’s melting?”
“Fading.”
“Where the hell did he go?”
“Jesus, I’m losing my fucking mind. There was a corpse here two seconds ago.”
He didn’t wait to find out what they were talking about. He clambered into the driver’s seat, and with the sounds of fresh sirens rolling into the busy street, gunned the engine, putting the car into reverse.
He was two hundred yards from the scene before he said a word. When he did, it was only the one. “Spill.”
His passenger looked back at him through the rearview mirror.
There was something about him that Julie recognized. Some nagging familiarity. He’d seen him before somewhere. But where?
Julie looked him in the eye, waiting for him to say something, but he didn’t. And then it hit him; he hadn’t actually seen the man before, not in the flesh, but he’d been looking—or rather not looking—at his face on and off for the last week on lampposts all across the Rothery. “You’re him, aren’t you? That guy who went missing from the funeral last week?”
“I don’t think so,” Josh said.
“Oh, no, it is you.” He was sure of himself now. “I was out at your place twice. Once with my partner, responding to a burglary call in the middle of the night, the place had been tossed. A woman met us at the door. I thought she was the owner. She wasn’t. I realized that the second time I was there, when I sat with your mother and your sister and they told me how you’d called to say you wouldn’t be home that night, but then hadn’t come home at all and they were frightened you’d gone after the burglars yourself. Oh, believe me, I know you. I’ve been turning the estate over brick by brick looking for you and dreading telling your mother if I’d actually found you under one of them.” He shook his head. “Where the fuck have you been for the last week?”
Josh had no answer for that.
“Okay, well I guess I’m taking you home and you can explain it to your family,” Julie said, indicating right at the end of the street, and merging with the main flow of traffic that would eventually lead them back to the Rothery. “What the hell kind of trouble are you in, mate?”