CHAPTER EIGHT

 

 

DARYL FELT ODDLY safe out on the streets. Despite the lawlessness, the fighting and looting and displays of aggression, he now possessed a self-assurance that had eluded him for most of his life. Were these simply more personality changes due to Mother’s grip slackening, or had something occurred at a more fundamental level?

On his back was a new rucksack, the straps tight across his shoulders and digging into his armpits. Inside the bag were his tools, along with the photograph of Sally Nutman. She was his guiding light, his sole aim in all this wonderful chaos. With the city erupting around him, no one would even hear her death rattle; the extinction of her life-force would be lost amid the flowering brutality of this strange new world, a world he felt curiously at home in.

Mother’s house was located in a suburb not far from the centre of Leeds. Daryl did not own a car, and he doubted that any taxis would be operating with so much going on, but it was a short walk, really. He’d traced the route many times in the past, and knew every shortcut along the way.

The best way was to follow the canal into the centre. It was usually a dangerous place to be after nightfall, but tonight everywhere was dangerous – indeed, the canal was probably safer than the streets and estates right now.

The moon was a faded orb masked by heaving clouds. Starlight was negligible. The pathways were illuminated by the cold light of street lamps, and Daryl picked his way past wrecked cars, overturned bins and piles of shattered glass and rubble. The occasional scream leapt at him from the darkness, garbled words echoed along lightless ginnels and alleyways. Daryl kept moving, trying to blend into the night. He’d always been an unnoticeable figure, and tonight that anonymity was a weapon almost as potent as the ones in his rucksack.

He’d left Mother in her room, staring into the giddy blackness and fearing the sight of her own private Reaper. Perhaps it would have Richard Nixon’s face, or maybe it would be dark and featureless, skulking in the shadows of her room. The latter thought pleased Daryl; because of Mother’s fear of the dark, it suited that darkness would claim her.

The canal towpath crunched underfoot, pebbles and broken glass scattered across its narrow width. The black waters ran slow and sombre, with not even a duck or waterfowl about to mar its glassy surface. It felt like the end of the world.

Daryl hurried along the towpath, his thoughts filled with images of blood and the sound of muted screaming. He had another erection – this was a banner night for his libido. He wondered if Sally Nutman would recognise him, if she had noted his scrutiny at some point over the last few months. Part of him hoped that just before she died, her eyes would blaze with recognition. The other half of him prayed that she would die in utter confusion, not knowing who he was or why he’d decided to use her in such a way.

The waters shone blackly at his side, reflecting his desires. The canal was like a mirror; the images it contained matched those he’d carried around in his head since he was a child. It felt as if the landscape around him was shifting, altering to accommodate his new shape. The sky had lifted, allowing him to breathe, the trees and bushes bordering the path pulled back from his approach, the path itself twisted and undulated to meet his falling feet.

After years of feeling apart, isolated, he at last felt that he had a place in the world. A dark place, filled with demons.

It was only fitting that his first victim be as beautiful as Sally Nutman. He’d adored her features from afar, cementing that face in his mind. The slanted cat-like eyes, the firm jawline, the long, graceful neck. It would not suffice to kill an ugly woman first; a beautiful act must be carried out on a special victim. He began to regret that this long-awaited act might soon be over. He’d spent so long fantasising about it, building the whole thing up inside his head, that he feared the actual kill might be an anticlimax.

But, no. It was stupid to think that way. Here he was, on the cusp of becoming, and all he could do was whine! He sensed the disapproval of his heroes, his masters; their long shadows followed him along the towpath, maintaining their distance but never slackening their pace.

He heard a splash as he walked beneath a low concrete footbridge. Graffiti adorned the abutments: crude drawings and obscene slogans meant to express a rage that could never otherwise be demonstrated. The splash came again, softer, as if moving away.

Daryl stopped and looked out at the water, trying to make out what was causing the sounds. His eyes fell upon a discarded shopping trolley tethered to the opposite bank by the knotted fronds of some riverside weed. Nearby, a child’s doll floated in a slow circle, pink and naked and deformed. Then, turning his head to face eastward, he finally saw what was making the noise.

A fat white corpse was struggling to climb out of the canal. Water-bloated and covered in black silt, the thing kept gaining a few inches before slipping back down the bank and into the water. Daryl could see it from behind, so was unobserved. He watched it for a while, enjoying its struggling motion. The body was naked, its flesh puffy and discoloured. The fat arms and stubby hands looked as if they were made of dough as they grasped at the mud on the sloped side of the canal.

Daryl edged along the path, watching. It was an amazing sight, when you thought about it, like something from a nightmare. He supposed that the corpse must belong to a drowning victim who’d suddenly risen from the murky depths, heading for shore to return home.

He paused, and wondered why he’d accepted all this so readily. Reanimated corpses. The living dead. Perhaps it took the truly insane to accept a truly insane situation?

The Michelin-man body rolled as it grabbed a handful off moss, its bulk turning in the water. The face was hideous: a mass of jellied flesh and fish-bite wounds. It had no eyes, which went some way to explaining why it found it so difficult to gain the canal bank. The nose was gone, too; all that remained was a clean but ragged hole through which Daryl glimpsed white bone.

The corpse opened its mouth as if trying to scream. Canal water slid from between its fattened lips, spilling down over its flabby breasts and corpulent belly. Its lower portion was obscured by the dark water, so Daryl could not make out if it was male or female. If he was honest, he’d rather not know anyway.

As he drew abreast of the corpse, a fortuitous accident occurred. Still caught in its slow roll, the body’s momentum carrying it round in an agonising circle which pivoted at the thing’s hand – which was still holding on to the side of the canal – the corpse began to slide towards a steel stanchion that stuck out from the bank.

Daryl watched in quiet awe as the stanchion pierced the side of the thing’s head, just above the ear, driving slowly into the sodden skull as if it were paper. The head split, the length of steel tearing it so that the waterlogged contents of the brain pan spilled out into the canal.

The corpse hung there, twisting in the undertow. The split had stretched around the front of the head, connecting with the mouth, so that it resembled a smile. Or a salacious leer.

Daryl laughed, and then continued on his way. For some reason the whole episode felt like a prelude to something bigger. Knowing how silly it seemed, he felt that the drowned corpse had been sent to him as a sign to show him something he would only understand later, once he was indoctrinated into the league of killers he longed to join.

He passed a burned-out concrete structure, an old storage shed used now for drug taking. Dirty syringes littered the doorway, and something stirred within. Daryl glanced into the darkness and saw a thin figure sitting against the wall. Its white limbs were skinny as pipe-cleaners and pin-cushioned with needles as it searched for a vein.

He hurried on, processing the information in a rush.

Habit. It all boiled down to habit.

These dead things – these hideous revived remains – fell into the same habits they’d suffered in life. The drug addict returned to the needle; the mother came back for her babe; the victim of a drowning once more attempted to climb back on to dry land. Life, he mused, was full of such cycles. The living re-enacted their daily routines, their lives becoming like a film clip stuck on a loop. So when they came back from the dead, what else was there but to resume that loop, to climb back into the rut and carry on carrying on?

It made perfect sense to Daryl. The dead tried to copy the living. It was all they knew, all they had within them: primitive urges, tribal acts, a repetition of events tattooed onto their memories by social custom and workaday existence. Strip away the thought process and all we are is habit, routine, learned experience. Like a mouse stuck on an exercise wheel, the dead just kept on running, with no destination in sight.

He crossed the railway line and then doubled back in a loop, the city rising before him. He could see the lights – far fewer than usual at this time of night – and the rooftops of the higher buildings scraped the sky like glass and concrete fingers. He focused on his destination; one of the new docks along this side of the canal, where developers had built apartment blocks and fitness complexes.

Allinson Dock was less than a mile away. He knew the spot by heart, had traced the route both in life and in his dreams too many times to even count. Further along the river, at Clarence Dock, he could make out the blocky structure of the Royal Armouries Museum, with its hexagonal glass and steel tower set amid a clutter of oblongs. The windows reflected the canal water, glittering like huge insectoid eyes. Daryl admired the illusion, enjoying the fantasy while it lasted.

He left the canal and cut across a short bushy verge, stepping over the town planners’ idea of an urban green zone. Empty beer cans, bottles and used condoms were scattered between the shrubs.

Heading uphill, he reached a smooth, flat road surface. The road led into the apartment complex where Sally and her husband lived; it terminated in a few parking spaces that flanked the entrance to the underground car park.

Daryl squatted in the bushes and waited, scoping out the site. He watched a dark figure as it scuttled on all-fours, heading for the canal. The figure – it looked like a woman crawling around in the mud – disappeared into the undergrowth, and there followed a single splash as she entered the water. Daryl held his breath; he heard nothing more of the curious figure.

Nearby, the burned remains of a car smouldered, the metal of the bodywork groaning and creaking as it cooled.

He stared at the apartment block, locating Sally’s seventh-floor windows with ease. He knew exactly where they were. All the windows were dark, but that did not prevent him from identifying the ones Sally hid behind, thinking that she was safe and secure.

He smiled. The darkness nestled around him, wrapping him in a comforting cloak.

Minutes passed, but Daryl did not keep track of how many. Eventually his legs began to ache from sitting in the same position, his rear end held inches from the ground and all his weight taken on the annoyingly weak muscles of calves that simply would not develop no matter how hard he tried to train them. He stood, stretching, sucking in the night. Sally’s windows remained black, silent, and blind to the terror he brought. The temperature dropped around him, the air becoming sharp.

After another few moments he moved on, cutting across the road and entering the landscaped area at the side of the building. A few night birds hopped between the branches of the low trees; something burrowed into the foliage at his feet. There might be rats this close to the canal, but it was probably something as harmless as a hedgehog.

“I’m coming,” he whispered. “I’m coming, dollface.” It was not the kind of casual language he ever used; the lines were taken from some film he’d seen. All of his best lines came from films, or books. Not that he ever spoke them to anyone other than his own face in the mirror, or perhaps Mother’s closed bedroom door...

The main doors operated on an expensive security system, involving a pass code and a CCTV monitor, but there was a man who lived on the ground floor, in apartment Number 03, who habitually neglected certain essentials of home security. He always left his bathroom window ajar. The man worked nights. Daryl knew this from his surveillance exercises; either unaware or uncaring of the dangers inherent in city living, the man never bothered to close the window when he left for his job. Daryl stepped softly along the side of the building, ducking below the eye-line of the windows.

Soon he reached the open window.

He reached up, slid his arm inside, and popped the catch. It was that easy: the fine line between entry and exclusion, life and death, was a scant few inches of air between sill and frame. It was almost absurd the risks some people took without ever acknowledging the possible consequences.

Daryl glanced along the length of the building, carefully inspecting the area for prying eyes. Then, satisfied that no one was around to witness him, he clambered up the wall, finding a foothold on the smart new cladding, and forced his thin body through the window.

Once inside the bathroom he returned the window to its former position, being careful to ensure that it looked exactly as it had before. Once he was satisfied, he walked across to the door and stepped out into a long narrow hallway. The front door was located at one end of this hallway; the living room was at the other.

Daryl didn’t bother to have a nose around the apartment. He simply walked to the front door, opened it, and let himself out. He moved swiftly to the fire stairs – the lift might not be working due to the power blackouts – and climbed to the seventh floor, where Sally was waiting for him.

He’d been inside before, sneaking in after another tenant before the main door could close. He’d received a funny look, but was not challenged, even though he had stayed there for two hours, exploring the interior of the building and waiting for Sally’s husband to return home from a day shift so he could study any idiosyncratic lifestyle patterns the man exhibited. Even then he was aware that the slightest piece of behavioural data might help him in the future, when finally the time came to put his plan into action.

He was breathing heavily when he reached the seventh floor, and his lungs ached slightly. At home he lifted weights to add strength – but not bulk – to his wiry physique. He had the body of a distance runner: lean, powerful limbs, a hard, skinny torso, but his lower legs – specifically his ever-puny calf muscles – remained weak and his stamina was terrible. His upper body strength, however, belied the narrow build he hid beneath his baggy clothing.

He was certain that Sally would admire his physique. He would leave her no choice in the matter.

He approached the door to her apartment and stood outside, running his hands across the surprisingly lightweight wooden door. She sat behind an inch of hollow, low-grade timber, awaiting his ministrations.

“Oh, baby. Baby, baby, baby.” He giggled, but made sure that he kept it low, under his breath.

Then, feeling an enormous surge of energy building from the soles of his feet and climbing the length of his body, flowering at the midriff, throat and face, he knocked six times in rapid succession upon the door – exactly the way he knew that Sally’s husband, that idiot copper, always knocked.

He repeated the jokey secret knock – again, just like the husband always did – and then stepped back to wait for Sally to open the door and let him in; a shy suitor nervously awaiting his reluctant paramour.