Nobody True (34 page)

And Moker was standing outside on the doorstep.

His scarf no longer hid his face; it was draped around his shoulders, the ends dangling past his waist. He still wore the hat and he held a sharp-pointed knitting needle in one hand.

This must be his method, I realized, for I’ve witnessed it before, in the underground car park. He stuns his intended victim by showing them his ghastly face, paralysing them with fear for a moment or two, giving him just enough time to plunge the knitting needle up into their heart, his other hand covering their mouth to stifle whatever screams might come.

There was darkness behind him, but light from the hall revealed the shocking visage, the deep crater that should have been a face. Swiftly, he moved his hands, one to strike, the other to smother, but Andrea took a step backwards in horror, and before Moker could move forward, she turned and ran through the doorway to the lounge.

I tried to stand in his way, willed myself to be solid, but it was hopeless. He walked right through me and for an instant my soul was filled with a complete blackness. I shuddered.

Then Moker paused, looked back for a second as though he had been made aware of my presence. The moment was all too quickly gone and he turned his grotesque head to seek out his quarry. Andrea tried to shut the lounge door behind her, but Moker held up a hand and pushed back, so viciously that Andrea was sent reeling backwards. When he lumbered after her into the lounge, she was on one knee, struggling to rise, her breath taken in short panic-stricken gasps.

I rushed past Moker, with only a shoulder passing through him, and tried to lift Andrea, always forgetting I could not influence anything in my old world.

“Get out, Andrea!” I yelled at her. “Get out of the house! Don’t let him get near you!”

It was worse than useless—it was a waste of time. I wheeled around and threw myself at Moker again. Once more the total blackness. And once more he stopped, the sharp point of the steel knitting needle pointing upwards. He looked this way and that, his large dark eyes confused. He had felt me, just for a moment. He’d experienced something that was close to my own experience, a sensation of fusion with something else; something alien.

It was quickly gone, because I staggered out on the other side of him, but the delay was enough for Andrea to get to her feet again. She ran round to the back of the sofa, keeping it between herself and the monster who stalked her, forcing herself to look away from him to search for anything that would help her, anything she could use as a weapon.

I did the same, scanning the long room for any object she could use to defend herself. I saw the heavy poker leaning against the side of the stark white fireplace towards the other end of the room. Nothing more warming to the soul than a real fire with real flames, I’d always insisted, and was now glad that I had.

“The poker, Andrea! Get the poker!” Maybe I expected that by shouting at her, the thought itself might be put inside her head. And perhaps it had worked, because she made a sudden dash towards the poker.

She screamed as she ran, and maybe it was partly to rouse our neighbours and not only because of fear. I had never regretted living in a detached house before, but I did on this night. Nobody was near enough to hear.

Moker lumbered after her like a zombie on speed, aware she had no place to go and making peculiar snorting noises. Although there were patio doors at the far end of the room, which led out to our largish but unspectacular garden, they were always kept locked, the key hidden in the drawer of the long sideboard that stood opposite the fireplace. Keys were only in the lock when the doors were in use on summer days or evenings, and the chances now of Andrea getting to the drawer, retrieving the key, and unlocking the doors before Moker got to her were zero.

Thank God she was going for the poker. Only she wasn’t. Instead she ran past the fireplace and made for a Grecian bust mounted on a plinth.

I realized what she was going for and cried out, “No, you’ll never make it, he’s too close!” (Stupidly, I just couldn’t get out of the habit of acting like a normal human being.) Naturally she didn’t hear.

Earlier in the day, Andrea had obviously been on the phone, taking it from its charger, usually kept on an elegant stand in the hall, and had wandered over to the lounge’s big door-windows to look out at the garden while she talked, something she invariably did when she knew the conversation was going to be lengthy, and I saw the receiver precariously balanced on the top edge of the plinth. It was that she was headed for, not the statue, but there was no way she would have time to call the police. Maybe she intended to dodge around Moker, keeping her distance while she dialled.

Moker’s clumsy stride quickened and yet again I plunged into him, anything to slow him down. The blackness swallowed me up, but this time there were vague images filtering through, images of dead people as far as I could tell, dead people whose corpses were badly damaged, great gashes in their flesh, limbs almost severed. This time, despite those awful visions that were trying to resolve themselves, I tried to stay inside the killer rather than pay a fleeting visit; my purpose was to slow his advance with the distraction, give Andrea the chance to escape the corner she’d backed into.

The ruse worked only for a couple of seconds. Moker seemed to shrug me off and went for Andrea again. She threw the phone at him and it struck his head. It must have hurt a little, because he stalled, one beefy hand going to his forehead.

Quickly taking advantage, Andrea ducked under his free outstretched arm and headed back down the room. Unfortunately, Moker made a surprisingly fluid move and tried to grab her shoulder. He overbalanced though, and fell to the floor. But as he did so, that outstretched hand snagged Andrea’s ankle.

She screamed as Moker hauled her back to him, his own body shifting forward as though he intended to smother her with his weight. Andrea squirmed and wriggled, kicked out with her other bare foot, but all was futile against his superior strength and tonnage. He crawled over her legs, pinning both of them to the floor, his left hand gripping the loose folds of the coffee-coloured cardigan that used to belong to me. Now she was whimpering as he snatched at her hair and pulled her head back, bending her spine the wrong way.

He was making those awful gurgling-snuffling sounds as he stretched her, either through excitement or rage, God knows which. Probably both. I thought her back would break as he continued to pull at her, and I frantically but futilely beat his head, my fists merely sinking through long but sparse hair and skull.

“Oh, please, God, help me, help me. Let me make him stop!”

I was pleading to no effect and I knew it. There was nothing else I could do. Occupying his body wouldn’t stop him, even if it confused him for a second or two. His body pinned her lower body to the floor as, one hand cupping her chin, he drew her back further, and further.

The sharpened needle in his other hand was poised to strike.

And that was when yet another shock made me wail in despair.

In all the panic and confusion I’d almost forgotten about her, and now here she was, her little face white with terror.

Primrose stood there by the sofa in her pretty yellow ankle-length nightie, bare toes sunk into the thick carpet, her wide eyes bewildered and afraid. Her lungs pumped against her chest as she struggled to breathe (it’s just as hard for an asthmatic to expel air as it is for them to draw air in), the first signs of an all-out asthma attack. In one tiny and delicate hand she held Snowy by its paw, its white feet dragging on the carpet.

Her words were broken into separate parts because of her breathlessness.

“Leave… Mummy… alone!” she cried out.

Andrea painfully managed to squeeze out a warning, her back still arched, her head restrained by the hand under her chin. “Run, darling, run away!”

That coarse guttural snuffling came from the hole in Moker’s face as he held Andrea there on the floor.

He became still as he stared at the daughter I had believed was mine.

I rushed past the monster and foolishly tried to gather up Primrose in my arms. It was like clutching at empty air and in my desperate confusion it was as if she were the immaterial one, not me. I groaned in frustration and yelled at her to get out of the house, run next door, wake the neighbours, anything but stay here at the mercy of the lunatic who threatened her mother.

A partly stifled sob came from Prim, an abrupt sound caught in her struggle to draw breath. I glanced at the free hand by her side, hoping to see she had brought her inhaler with her. She hadn’t, but right now, that wasn’t the priority.

“Run, Prim, run away!” Andrea screeched more forcefully this time, but our little girl was frozen with fright.

Tears welled in her tawny-brown eyes (even in that predicament I realized they were more like Guinane’s than mine or her mother’s) and her chest rose and fell in judders. She wouldn’t move, she couldn’t move.

I turned to face Moker, putting myself between him and Primrose as though I could protect her. The killer was still staring at her—looking through me!—a curious cast in those black eyes of his. I think it was the glint of anticipation.

Andrea, whose eyes were bulging as they were forced to look down her cheeks at Prim because of the angle of her head, gave out a piercing scream, one so high-pitched and shrill that it must have passed far beyond the walls of the house.

Moker was distracted only for a second. His merciless eyes flicked down at Andrea and he pulled her head back a little further out of pure sadism I’m sure and I feared her neck would snap. In the blink of an eye he had changed his grip and sank his fingers into her hair, then he pushed down fast and hard, smashing her face against the floor. Even though the floor was thickly carpeted, the smacking sound was explosive, and blood instantly burst outwards, spattering the beige carpet around her head with bright red blots. Andrea made no sound, but lay there motionless, perhaps even dead.

“Oh dear God, don’t let this happen,” I prayed.

And when Moker slid the needle into a pocket, then shambled to his feet and started towards Prim, I said it again, this time aloud even if only I could hear the words.

“Oh dear God, please don’t let this happen!”

Moker came closer, Andrea’s unmoving body recumbent behind him, her arms and legs splayed.

“Don’t you touch her!” I yelled into Moker’s absent face. “I’ll kill you if you touch her!”

All to no avail, of course, even as it would have been if he could hear my threat.

I whirled and dropped to my knees in front of Prim. “Primrose, you must get out of the house. You must run away right now.”

I spoke fiercely but firmly, and hoped the sheer power behind my words and very concentrated thoughts would somehow get through to her. Her round eyes were looking upwards at the approaching monster, her lower lip trembling as a strained wheezing came from between her lips.

My own eyes, blurred with tears of frustration, desperation—sheer hopelessness—must have been as wide and terrified as hers. I threw my arms around her small thin body as if to shield her, but big hands reached through me and wrapped themselves around her narrow shoulders. Snowy dropped to the floor.

“Mummy,” Primrose whimpered quietly, and two large teardrops spilled over and began their irregular descent of her cheeks. “Daddy…”

The killer’s hands moved over her shoulders and their fingers curled around her throat.

38

Moker had picked up Primrose by the neck, his arms outstretched at shoulder level. But as she dangled there, her tiny feet kicking empty air, the face that had been pallid before beginning to turn red, the carpet started to undulate.

I was raining impotent blows on Moker, having tried to enter him again, but horrifically I began to experience part of his own sick pleasure, and that was too much for me to bear. Now I continued to beat at him because there was nothing left that I could do—I just couldn’t stand by and watch him kill my Primrose!

It was Moker, himself, who first became aware of the thick beige carpet rippling from one end of the room to the other as if a wind was caught beneath it. Pressure on Prim’s throat must have eased momentarily because she drew in a strangulated breath as he looked down and around him. Following his gaze, I also glanced down and was astounded at what I saw.

The carpet appeared to be flowing as each and every individual woollen fibre of its pile stood erect. We seemed to be at its centre and the movement, which could be seen as a growing shadow, had a rippling effect like the gently spreading wave circle when a stone is dropped into a still pond.

It was an expensive carpet, plush and wall-to-wall. It wasn’t shag-pile by any means, but it was deep-pile, so that feet would sink into it almost as if into fine sand, a luxury Andrea and I had treated ourselves to after a year of walking on exposed but stained and highly varnished floorboards.

But now there was something wrong with it. Now it seemed to have come alive. Now the carpet had turned nasty.

Although preoccupied right then, Moker had nevertheless become distracted by the phenomenon, because the radiating carpet strands had nearly unbalanced him and, still astonished, I realized the fibres must be as hard as nails. Andrea’s unconscious body, which lay in the other half of the room close to the fireplace, suddenly stirred as a thousand or so stiffened fibres straightened under her body, lifting her slightly. She tried to raise her head, blood from her busted nose spoiling the carpet, but the effort was too much and she slumped down again, a short muffled cry escaping as fibres pricked her cheek.