Death looked for the blonde girl, the one he had seen that time outside the cathedral. Since then, he had seen her again in the streets of the old city, and he had known her immediately: the fine-featured, angular face, the arched eyebrows, the smooth light hair. The slender, small-breasted body, clad soberly in black. He knew her, and he knew that she must die. While she lived there could be no rest for him.
He would have killed her already but she was too quick for him. He was stronger than she was, and driven by a conviction that was so aberrant and all-consuming that it was like the rising of a huge and blazing sun in the discoloured sky of an alien planet. She must die. They must all die.
The girl, however, was very fleet and as skittish as a young deer, bolting at the slightest thing, the most trivial cause for alarm. She flew like an insect before the storm of his obsession, always just ahead of it.
He had seen her for the second time on a street west of the canal, not far from the Sint-Michielskerk. Knowing her at once, he had followed her as discreetly as he could, cloaking his intentions in stealth, but there had been few other people on the streets at the time, no crowds in which to lose himself. He had followed her for perhaps a kilometre, his hand thrust deep into the pocket of his coat, fingering the knife, while she became more and more disturbed, quickening her pace, turning to glance back at him with a white and anxious face. Finally she had abruptly turned a corner, and then she must have taken to her heels and run from him full tilt down the narrow street, because when he reached the corner there was no sign of her. He had walked up the street a little way, and there was a puddle of dirty water which had collected in a dip in the square grey cobbles, and all around it the dry cobble-stones had been splashed with dark and wet, a ragged radius like arterial spray. He saw it in his mind’s eye: her boot hitting the puddle and the filthy water spraying across the cobbles. She had run. She knew he was coming for her, coming to end her, and she had run.
Why? he had asked himself as he stood there scanning the empty street. She was as unreasoning as the animal that flees from the hunter. She had had more than her time, she must know that. And she could not run for ever.
His withered lips tightened. Sooner or later he would catch her, and then the thin edge of the blade he had in his pocket would pass like a caress across that pale throat and let the life out of it in a drenching red rain.
Since that day, he had seen her twice more in the streets of Ghent. Death was closing in on her; he was narrowing down the possible number of places in which she could have gone to earth. He thought now that her appearance on the west side of the canal was a fluke; wherever she went back to was on the east side, somewhere in the old city. She knew that he was looking for her and was taking pains to avoid him, that was clear. Once he had seen her wandering along Voldersstraat, and although he had stayed well back, mingling with the strolling shoppers, his dark hood pulled down low over his face, she had become uneasy. She had begun to walk more briskly and then she had gone into a shop. He had waited for a long time, hanging around at the corner of the street, but she had not re-emerged. The other time she had turned and seemed to notice him, but she had not run. She had very deliberately crossed the road and walked back the way she had come, but with the width of the street between him and her, and when she was level with him she had darted a glance at him, at once fearful and challenging, showing him that she knew who he was.
She could have met Death there and then, known him intimately, bloodily, but the street was crowded. Inevitably someone would intervene, someone would call the police. The chances of getting away would be close to zero. He would have taken a single step towards the achievement of his goal, but unless he had his liberty to pursue and exterminate the others, that single step would be worse than useless. He could not risk that; in spite of the almost overwhelming need to act now, it was unthinkable that anything should prevent him from completing what he had come to see as a holy quest.
The Demons of Ghent themselves shall not stop me.
So instead he had simply lifted his head far enough that she could see his yellowed teeth bared in a savage parody of a smile under the dark hood, and then he had dropped his head again and walked on, listening for the sound of pattering feet as her nerve broke and she ran. He was confident now that he would see her again, and that he would find her hiding place. To run into her three times, that was more than chance. She was not visiting Ghent; she was living here. She was living east of the canal, in the old city. Sooner or later, Death would find her hiding place. He would follow her home, and when they were there, when he was closeted with her in her private space, he would watch the life run out of her in pulsing crimson waves.