24

He stretched out in his tiny sitting room. Among his notebooks was his small Panasonic, and he listened to himself conduct the postmortem, delighted at the way Irene interrupted him. He rewound parts of it to hear her voice again.

He made himself some toast, and he smeared blackberry jam on the slices of wholewheat. This was bread he ordinarily liked. He had bought it at the whole-food store, where they baked it themselves. But he was too tired to eat. It was a pity he didn’t have a telephone. He wished he could talk to her.

Alf exploded, black snakes running out of his nose.

He could not close his eyes without seeing Alf’s body twisting against the straps. The doctors had been inept to let that happen. Surely they could have done better than that. Langton’s attitude toward doctors and police were that they did not do a very good job. Langton was right. They did a terrible job.

There was a step on the stair. There, just now.

He was too tired to be frightened. He dragged himself to the bedroom, and fell across the bed. Must get up, he told himself. Must turn out the lights. There was a little electric meter behind the kitchen door. If he didn’t feed it fifty-pence coins all the electricity would run out.

It would run out, he told himself, and then what would happen? He would put some money into the slot, turn the little handle, and then he would have electricity again. The hot water would be lukewarm, but that only meant he wouldn’t take a bath right away. But the curtains were open and this meant the morning light would stream in on him from the east. This would be a problem.

Don’t get up. There were no problems, he reassured himself. There was only sleep.

This time in the dream it was night. The water trembled beneath his feet. He walked across the surface of the lake, and the moonlight shuddered on the water. But the lake was too wide now. It was a sea. It was so vast that he could barely see her. She was a tiny dab of light far, far away.

He did not want to call her this time. There was something wrong, but he did not know that. She called him, her voice like a strand of spiderweb in the dark.

Davis. Come to me.

No, thought Davis, and he stopped walking, and the water sagged under him like a cloth, but supported him, rising and falling.

Something wrong. No, I don’t want to see you anymore. I can’t see you anymore, I have to turn back.

I have to leave. There’s something—

Wrong.

He woke. He lay across the bed, shivering. It was over, and he was thankful for that. The dream had been more threatening than ever before. There had been something tainted about it from the beginning, some presence in the dream that had ground against him.

Then he knew what it was.

It was that noise, the same sound that he had heard outside the lab. A low wheezing sound, a sound like very bad lungs working against a great weight. Rising and falling, the grinding noise, this ancient asthmatic wheeze, dragging air in, and pushing it out.

It was a part of the dream, thought Davis. He was still asleep. He sat up. He touched his lips with his fingers. I’m still asleep. He bit a knuckle, just hard enough, and put a hand out to the wall.

Awake.

He was awake, and there was still that noise, and the noise was growing louder. It was still not loud—it was not the sort of noise that would ever be very loud. It was insistent, like the hiss of a step, of someone dragging across the floor. And yet, not like a hiss, either, and it was growing more and more clear.

It was coming closer. Because there really was a sound; there was no question about that now. The sound was real, and he was awake. He wanted to ask: Who’s there? He wanted to speak, but to speak would be to admit that something was wrong, and to keep silent would be to say that there wasn’t anything wrong at all, just something that didn’t make sense.

In the next room. And then not in the next room. In the hall. Something just outside the door, and yet the bedroom door was open. This proved that there was nothing there. If there was something there he would see it by now, because that insistent, relentless step was just there.

Right there.

Now.

The head hunched into the doorway. The light from the kitchen was bright, and gleamed on the ebony leather of its skin, and the clotted textile of its rags. One hand was outstretched, the gilding of the light spilling along it.

Davis could not make a sound. He fought to draw a breath, but he made only a choking noise, and he backed away, crawling backward, and fell off the bed, dragging the bedding with him.

He crawled to his feet, unable to see anything but that lurching figure. He pulled himself along the wall, and the figure followed him. The arm stretched toward him, nearly touching him.

There was another sound, not only the rise and fall of the steps, but an animal, savage cry.

No!

My own voice, thought Davis, and the cry would not stop.

Over and over calling out against what he saw.

The dark fingers touched Davis’s lips, and the ancient face was before him, closing on Davis, the sad features, the eyes closed, but not closed he saw, opening, coming closer, nearly on him, the cold breath stale with the flavor of the leathered lungs.

Davis smashed the window with his elbow, and leaped, slicing the backs of his thighs on the glass, smashing through the rest of the window with his head, rolling down the slate roof, still calling that none of this was real. He slipped down the cold slate.

He fell.

And hung on. The drain edge cut into his fingers, but it supported his weight. He gasped, struggling to swing himself back onto the slope of the roof. He knew he could do it. There was the slate, and here was his body, and all he had to do was swing himself up.

The figure stood there at the window, watching.

The drain groaned, and fell away, and he held onto it as it dangled downward, weakening, and yet still suspending him. A trickle of water spattered his face. Then, without a sound, the drain broke free, and he fell.

This time, nothing stopped him.

It took a long time. He had time to remember the black spear-fences that lanced upward everywhere in York. He remembered brick walls with their sharp, unyielding straight edges. But mostly he remembered to steady himself as he fell, wheeling his arms, taking a deep breath as though to scream, wondering with a shock worse than anything he had ever experienced, how long it took to die.