Fresh air. That’s what I need. Fisher yanked aside the curtains so he could reach the window catch. For one vertiginous moment he’d been ready to seize the TV then hurl it through the glass. What did it mean that he’d seen himself being crushed by an invisible force on the video tape? He must have fallen asleep. A nightmare …
‘No,’ he panted, as he hoisted the sash window. ‘I was awake. I know I was.’ He thrust out his head. Instantly cold air washed over it. The shocking suddenness of it was as acute as being dowsed by iced water. He sucked in the air with a stuttering moan. Oxygen poured down his throat into his lungs. A tingling supernova of a sensation. Fisher breathed deeply. His heart beat with wanton fury against this ribs. If it had exploded from his chest there and then he wouldn’t have discounted it. Not after he’d witnessed his own death on TV. But could he make sense of it? He’d left the camera running early that evening as he searched the building for Kym. The camera had dutifully recorded a view of his bass guitar, the amps, drums, keyboards. Yet the camera had appeared to move. Who had picked it up? How had they run to The Good Heart to find him? An invisible avalanche had appeared to mangle his face. Jesus Christ. How can anyone fake that? He remembered the details so clearly. The shocked expression as the camera lunged into close-up. He’d even glimpsed the sharp pointed shoes he’d been wearing …
This thought caught him like a stinging slap. Fisher turned from the window to look into the room. The pointed shoes in black leather sat against the far wall.
I wasn’t even wearing those shoes tonight, he told himself, as he looked down at his feet. I’m wearing sneakers!
The night was going to be a long one. The clock on the dash told Josanne it was coming up to 8.30. She gloomily regarded the world of mist and cold dark water. Great, she thought, just great. I’m going to have to sit this out until first light. To beat back that graveyard silence she nudged up the radio volume. Lou Reed intoned details of his perfect day.
For a moment Fisher didn’t even realize what he was doing. He wandered about the room in a daze. First going to the pointed leather shoes. He picked one up. Bent it in his hands. If I destroy the shoes … what I saw can’t happen to me.
Dear God. Insane thoughts. Rock and roll isn’t about the music, someone once wrote, it’s about the drugs. Hell, he’d not touched drugs in years. Drugs made bad guys rich. He refused to be part of that. So … he enjoyed a beer; occasionally wine … I’m rambling, he thought. He returned to the window for more of that cold, cold air. Even so, he gave the TV plenty of space between him and its dead screen. Right now it seemed perfectly logical for a pair of corpse arms to thrust out from the set, grab hold of him, then haul him into some TV never-never world that lies between the wavebands.
‘Oh, God. Give me air,’ he grunted. Once more he leaned forward, taking his weight on the sill, and pushing his head out into the night. The bushes whispered as a slight breeze stirred them. It pushed the fog away, too. Above him the silver disk of the moon showed fuzzily through strands of mist. Now he could see down the slope to where the water stretched away in a myriad glistening pools. The grey finger of concrete that was the runway stretched into the marsh.
Fisher tensed. That was the moment he saw the figure standing out there in the gloom.
‘Kym!’ Fisher ran out of the room. He shouted the words but didn’t know if anyone heard him. ‘It’s Kym.’ He ran to the kitchen. No one there. He grabbed one of the flashlights from where it had been left on the table. ‘Kym’s down on the old runway!’ Hell, was anyone else even in the building? No one answered his shouts. Never mind, he thought, I can bring her back myself. For some reason the figure had stood in the centre of that slab of concrete without moving while it had stared in the direction of the house.
‘Kym’s outside,’ he shouted down the corridor. ‘She must be hurt …’ Still no reply. Oh, blow them. He ran down the corridor to the entrance hall; from there he exited through the main doors. Outside, the moon revealed the gaunt forms of trees.
‘Fisher!’
He turned to see Fabian running up the drive. In one hand he held a flashlight that blazed into Fisher’s face. When he shielded his eyes against its glare he saw that for some reason Fabian carried a white electric guitar by the neck.
‘Hey, isn’t that Sterling’s guitar? What are you doing with it out here?’
The man panted as he thrust the guitar at Fisher. ‘Take this.’
‘What the hell for?’
‘I …’ He took a deep lungful of air to catch his breath. ‘I found it against a tree down there near the road.’
‘But what—?’
‘How the hell do I know how it got there? Take the bloody thing before I break it over your head!’
‘What the hell’s wrong with you?’
‘Josanne hasn’t come back yet.’ Fabian appeared agitated. He shot anxious glances along the driveway.
‘Fabian. No … wait. I’ve got to tell you something … that video camera I left running in the ballroom. It recorded … wait, Fabian! I’ve got tell you this!’
‘Tell me later. I’m waiting down at the road for Josanne!’
‘Fabian? Fabian! There’s another thing. It’s Kym. She’s on the old runway. Fabian! I’ve seen Kym. Aw, for Christ’sake …’ Fisher knew he was wasting his breath as Fabian ran along the driveway to the road. Fisher looked at the guitar. Its cream-coloured body glowed in the moonlight, a luminous glow as if the light seeped from its core. The chrome pickups gleamed. The steel strings were six parallel lines of silver radiance. Found against a tree? No one in their right mind would leave a musical instrument like this outside in the damp. Then did Fabian seem in his right mind? What had the guy seen to make him so jumpy?
Fisher cast his mind back twenty minutes to when he’d watched the video that appeared to show him being crushed to death. How his eyeballs had sunk into his head as if sucked inward by a vacuum. They’d left two craters. He’d watched in horror as the twin holes in his face filled with blood. He gritted his teeth. Had Fabian experienced a vision of himself? Or of Josanne? One which revealed a bloody death? He knew that Kym had witnessed herself in a nightmare being stabbed.
‘Kym?’ She might still be out there on the runway. What if she’s ill or injured? He glanced down at the guitar in his hand. It would take too long to return it to the house. If he met Sterling on the way it would mean trying to explain how his precious Gibson came to be outside in the first place. The thing would have to come with him. Kym was the number-one priority.
Keeping a grip on the guitar’s neck, Fisher ran to the house where the hawthorn clustered. He had to weave round the bushes while holding the flashlight high enough to see their slender branches that extended out across the path at head height. Each branch bristled thorns that were needle-sharp. He imagined the pain of such a thorn puncturing an eye. When he rounded the massive stone bulk of the house he saw the gentle slope running downward. A hundred yards away stood the old World War II bunker. A grim tomb of a place in the moonlight. Beyond it stretched the runway. A slab of flat concrete flanked by stagnant pools of water and mud, it ran away into the distance to dissolve eventually into invisibility in the mist. And there … he saw the figure just as he glimpsed it from his window. Kym stood as thin and as straight as a gate post in the centre of the runway. She was perhaps a hundred yards further away. More than once he thought about putting the guitar down. His arm ached carrying the instrument. Its body was carved from maple, the pickups, machine heads and bridge were all made of metal. Ten pounds of prime electric guitar. Leave it here, then pick it up on the way back. But who the hell would leave their friend’s guitar lying in wet grass? Damp would seep into the electrics. The neck might warp. That’s one sure way to destroy the thing. Fisher panted with exertion; his breath came in gusts that misted white in the cold air. In a moment he hooked the leather guitar strap over his shoulder. Now he carried it like a soldier carries a rifle across their back. That done he pushed himself to run faster. Ahead of him the runway stretched out; a ghostly pier of concrete that ran into the marsh. Within seconds, he had passed by the silent bunker. Down here the smell of stagnant water oozed into his nostrils. A flavour of the pond slime even left its mark on his tongue. Damp seeped through his clothes to touch his skin. Above him the moon burnt with a cold ghost light that imbued the shifting wraiths of fog with a weird half-life, as if the mist carried out manoevres governed by its own mysterious agenda. Humped forms shaped out of the luminous water vapour crept across the runway in front of him. They passed between himself and the figure standing just fifty yards ahead. The figure remained perfectly still. A watchful presence rather than a human being.
‘Kym!’ he called. ‘Kym? Are you all right?’ Fisher slowed his pace as the figure resolved itself from the murk. ‘Kym, I saw you from …’ His voice died in his throat. ‘Sorry … I thought you were someone I …’ Once more his words petered out.
No. It wasn’t Kym, the beautiful Czech girl. Instead, he saw a man. He was as tall and as thin as the woman Fisher had taken into his bed last night. Only this stranger was older. Forties probably. The man didn’t even appear to notice Fisher. From a thin face a pair of pale-blue eyes gazed up at the silhouette of The Tower in the moonlight. Not only did Fisher ask himself why the man chose to visit a remote quagmire at this time of night, but why on earth was the guy dressed like that? He stood there in the cold air dressed in a cream-coloured sweatshirt, sweatpants and his feet were clad in sandals; the kind a business executive would wear on a vacation at the beach. Come to think of it, even in the light of the flashlight, the man’s thin face wore a tan.
The flashlight didn’t distract the guy. He stared up at the outline of The Tower. His eyes roved over what details he could make out in the gloom: the tombstone–shaped windows; the bushes clustering about its base. Then, at last, he did notice Fisher. The man raised his hand so the glare didn’t strike him in the eyes.
‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to dazzle you.’ Fisher lowered the light. Out in the swamp a frog croaked; the pools of liquid mud sucked away the amphibian’s voice to replace it with silence.
The man’s blue eyes focused on Fisher. His expression suggested someone slowly rousing themselves from a trance.
‘You’re carrying a guitar.’ The man didn’t ask a question. It was a statement; a grim statement at that. ‘It has a white body.’
The guitar’s slung across my back. How can he see what colour it is? Of all the subjects to start a conversation out here at night it seemed a weird one. But it’s more weird to stand on a disused runway in near-freezing temperatures dressed in clothes a vacationer might wear to lounge by a pool on a summer’s day.
‘You’ve come to see this?’ Fisher turned back to nod at The Tower. The man flinched when he fastened that unblinking stare onto the white electric guitar. Then the man tore his gaze away from the instrument to direct it at The Tower. To do so required will power on his part. The body language of a man forced to look at the worst thing in a morgue.
Fisher nodded toward the mansion as he repeated, ‘You’ve come to see this?’
‘I guess you could say it’s what I’m looking at now.’
Odd answer. Fisher glanced back at the cream-coloured lounging suit. Inside the sandals, the man’s toes had turned grey with cold.
‘I might have startled you,’ Fisher began. ‘But I thought you were someone I knew.’
‘Uh?’
‘Are you OK?’
The man ran his tongue over his lips. They must have seemed dust dry to him. His eyes gleamed with mutant mix of wonder and absolute fear.
‘No. I’m not OK … not now that I’ve seen you. Or that pile of bloody rock up there.’
‘Have you parked nearby?’
‘Parked?’ He laughed. It was as cold-blooded as the frog’s croak of just moments ago. ‘No, I’m not parked nearby.’ He glanced down at himself. ‘I’m not dressed for this night jaunt, am I?’ He shook his head. ‘I didn’t expect it.’
‘Do you want to come up to the house? It’ll be warmer.’
‘No … not on your life. I’m not going back there.’
Hell, what now? Fisher guessed the guy had wandered away from some kind of hospital. He clearly wasn’t firing on all pistons, not appearing like this in lightweight clothes in these temperatures. Then Fisher realized it must appear odd that he himself was jogging round the grounds with only an electric guitar for company.
‘My name’s Blaxton.’ The man spoke faster now, as if he had information to impart only time was running out. ‘And you are?’
‘John Fisher.’
‘Well, John Fisher. Do you live in that viper’s nest?’
‘The Tower? Just for the time being.’
‘Alone?’
Blaxton’s questions were suspiciously intrusive. ‘Who wants to know?’ Fisher asked, adopting a defensive tone.
‘You want to know, John Fisher. You want to know everything – if you know what’s good for you.’
‘Hey, is that a threat?’
‘I repeat, are you living there alone?’
‘No. With friends. Not that it’s any—’
‘Fifteen years ago I stayed there for a week. I was there with friends, too. I was the only one to come out alive.’
Fisher stared at him. Red splotches flamed in the man’s cheeks. He spoke with fervour. The cloud of confusion had lifted from him. Fisher’s urge to walk away from the guy was shunted out by the instinct to hear what he had to say.
Fisher tried not to – this he didn’t need to hear; not after the events of the last forty-eight hours – but he did it anyway; he found himself uttering the fatal words: ‘Why? What happened?’