The secret of anatomy, p.20
The Secret of Anatomy, page 20
With the gunman’s death, the light began rapidly to fade. David, feeling shell-shocked and almost exhausted enough to drop, stumbled past the gunman’s body and across the debris-strewn floor of the restaurant. He grabbed his Bogart from the coat-rack as he passed and dragged it on as he began to walk away, his feet spattering the drowned streets, pushing between people stunned with grief and confusion and terror. No one tried to stop him, to take his arm and ask what had happened in there. No one even looked at him; he moved through the crowds and away as if he were invisible. And though he was conscious, it was on a primary level only. His mind worked like a machine, efficiently and unfeelingly, doing just enough to get him home, but denying him emotions or autonomous thought. It was comforting in a way to be so detached, to have his opinions and his feelings taken away from him. It was like sleeping without dreams and yet being conscious at the same time.
Back in his room at the B&B, an hour or so later, the full horror of what he had experienced began to punch through his defences. He sank on to his bed, curled foetally around the bottle, and braced himself as well as he was able for what he felt sure would be a long and terrible night.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Teddy was holding his hand and letting him watch a film in his head. It was a scary film, but it was also exciting. Danny felt as if he were floating above a big room where people were eating food. Most of Danny’s attention was focused on a man sitting on his own near the back of the room, eating a plate of spaghetti and meat. Danny could smell the food and it made him hungry. He could hear people talking, the clunk and clatter of pots and pans and knives and forks. Like in a real film, Danny kept jumping from this place to another one, cutting between two scenes that he felt would very soon join together and become one. The first place was cosy and warm, but this second place was dark and frightening. It was like one of those films where you see something through a monster’s eyes. You crash and jolt through the undergrowth and you hear its heavy breath, and then you come into a clearing and you see who you’re going to kill and you speed up as you rush towards them. And the people who you’re going to kill, usually a couple kissing, hear you and turn slowly, and when they see you they start to scream. They try to run but they’re much too slow, and you, the monster, catch up with them and their screaming mouth fills the screen and then everything goes red …
This was a bit like that, but Danny wasn’t in a monster’s head, not really. The head he was inside belonged to a man. Danny knew, or somehow sensed, that the man wasn’t normal however. Perhaps it was Teddy who told him, though Danny couldn’t remember Teddy actually saying anything. The thing was, Danny knew that this man had odd ideas about how things worked, and that these ideas had been somehow mucked about with, made to grow into something that was terrifying and dangerous. Being in the man’s head was like being at the bottom of a horrible pit. Danny heard sounds—crashing, screaming, awful sounds—echoing all around him in the darkness, and he kept thinking he could see things out of the corners of his eyes that made him want to scream himself.
So Danny kept jumping between the two places. One minute he was in the warm cosy room watching the blond-haired man eating his spaghetti, and the next he was inside the other man’s head, looking out through the man’s eyes, moving through rainy streets he didn’t recognise and hearing the man’s soft breathing and seeing his breath coming out in little white clouds.
And soon, just as Danny knew they would, the two scenes came together like two bits of a jigsaw that look completely different until you try them and find they’re a perfect fit. Through the scary man’s eyes, Danny saw a big lit-up window with a picture of a fat man carrying pizzas painted on it, and he knew that this was the place where the blond-haired man was eating his spaghetti.
Still inside the scary man’s head, Danny went up to the window and looked through it. The glass was smeary with rain, but Danny could see the blond-haired man sitting at a table on a little balcony near the back. As if he knew he was being watched, the blond-haired man lifted a hand up in front of his face in an attempt to hide himself from view. Danny became aware that people were laughing at him—or rather, at the scary man—and the dark insect-thoughts in his head became even more crawly, like ants whose nest is disturbed.
It was at this moment that Danny knew something really bad was going to happen. All of a sudden he wanted to be away from here, wanted to fly away from this place and be back at home in his nice warm bed. But Teddy wouldn’t let him. He could only watch helplessly as the man walked away from the restaurant and down a dark alley nearby where rain was battering on the lids of metal dustbins and dripping from a light over a door that looked as if it was never used. The man walked up to the fourth dustbin along, trampling on black bin bags that made Danny think of dead seals. One of the bags burst open and stuff came out like guts—shredded paper, chicken bones, rotting vegetables, slimy cans. The man opened the bin and looked inside. He reached in and pulled something out that was long and thin and wrapped in newspaper. Danny saw the man’s stubby hands pulling the newspaper away, saw the gleam of metal underneath. Danny felt very scared and, despite himself, also a bit excited when he realised it was a real live gun.
The man picked up the gun and then went back down the alley and on to the street, walking like a robot. Danny travelled with the man as he walked back towards the restaurant, the rain still beating down. He was only a few feet from the restaurant door when it opened and a man in a big coat came out, his fat body filling the doorway like a barrier.
Without even thinking about it the man raised his gun and shot the fat man. The fat man threw up his arms and blew backwards as if he were pretending the wind was too strong for him. Danny wanted to squirm and scream and run away, but he was held fast and struck dumb, forced to watch the terrible things happening in front of him. He’d seen the Terminator shoot people, and policemen on telly, and cowboys, but this was different. This wasn’t all slick and exciting and glamorous, it was ugly and empty and horrible.
The restaurant was hot and bright after the rain. The smell of meat and oil made Danny feel sick. Danny saw faces surrounding him, staring at him, faces with open mouths and big eyes. A woman was screaming. The man with the gun turned calmly round and shot her. She blew backwards like the fat man and hit the large front window, which smashed. Her body fell out into the street, and the rain and the cold blew in. People started to scream and scramble over each other like starving dogs who’d been thrown a piece of meat. Danny wanted to shout at the man to stop, or at the very least to close his eyes, but he couldn’t.
There was blood everywhere and soon there were overturned tables and broken crockery and spilled food and handbags and lots of other things as well. A girl in an orange dress sort of fell towards the man as if she was going to try and wrestle the gun away from him. He turned and shot her too. The noise was tremendous. Her head was almost ripped from her shoulders as her throat exploded. Danny cowered in the stinking pit of the man’s mind, listening to the man’s twisted thoughts slithering and scuttling around him in the darkness.
Now the scary man turned slowly and looked at the blond-haired man. The blond-haired man just sat there with a stunned expression on his face. The scary man began to walk towards the blond-haired man, raising the gun. Danny’s senses were packed with smells and sights and sounds, all of them terrible.
The scary man pointed his gun straight at the blond-haired man’s face and began to pull the trigger. Danny wanted to shout at the blond-haired man to move out of the way. He couldn’t understand why the man was just sitting there. And then Danny saw a brilliant blue-white light travelling up the blond-haired man’s body, surrounding him like a block of ice. The light grew brighter and brighter, and suddenly it was filling the scary man’s head, rushing into his mind through his eyes.
All the scuttling things in the pit were killed instantly, like spiders set on fire. The scary man’s mind became clean and empty and pure. Danny felt himself lifted up by the light, carried away as if on a cloud. Distantly he heard another bang and then he felt himself spinning, rushing through the blue-white brightness, as his final link with the scary man was snapped like an elastic band. His whole vision, all his senses, filled with a terrific whiteness that was like light and noise, both at the same time.
And then at last the brightness and the noise faded away. When it was gone completely he opened eyes that felt as if they had been glued closed and found himself sitting on his bed, his back against the wall, holding Teddy by the hand. His lips felt glued closed too. He stuck his tongue against the back of them, forcing them apart. His eyes were sore, like when he was in the swimming baths for too long and he opened them underwater. His arms and legs tingled like pins and needles.
Teddy’s rage was sudden and powerful. It rushed through Danny like a black thunderbolt, filling him with such pain that he couldn’t even scream. He felt himself being lifted up, but not like before, not like when the white light had done it. This time he felt as if hooks were plunging into his body, wrenching him into the air. He kicked with his legs, thrashed about, but it made no difference. He saw the bed below him and knew he was rising up to the ceiling of his room. He was in agony, such agony that he felt himself starting to faint. He opened his mouth but still no sound came out. And then he felt himself clutched as if in some enormous invisible claw, pulled back and hurled forward.
The wall rushing towards him was the last thing that Danny ever saw. The impact of the little boy’s body with the wall was of such ferocity that he was instantly killed. The body slid to the floor, leaving a sizeable smear of itself behind. But despite the fact that it had no life left in it, the body was then picked up and thrown at the wall again and again and again, until parts of it were strewn around the room, until it was no longer recognisable as a human being. The force that Danny had called Teddy played with the boy’s body as a cat might play with a shrew, played with it until there was almost nothing left to play with. And then, its anger exhausted, it moved on, searching for another host, another tender mind to infiltrate. It already knew where it would find one.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Sunday morning was bright but bitterly cold. David welcomed the brittle silver dawn like a long-lost friend. There had been moments during the night when he felt that time had stopped, as though the events that had taken place earlier that evening had been so terrible that they had shocked the great motors of the universe into immobility.
He had been sick twice during the early hours, and each time his nostrils had filled with the stink of blood and garlic and meat as if he had carried some of the horror back with him, as if it had infected him in some way. Though he felt enervated by his ordeal, he had not slept. He had remained curled up like a foetus on his bed, the bottle clutched to his midriff, afraid to close his eyes because every time he did so he saw the fat man flailing backwards, the woman erupting with blood and performing her terrible back-flip through the window, the young girl in the orange dress stumbling forwards and then being blown back by the force of the blast as her throat and jaw exploded.
The dawn, thankfully, dissipated these images a little. At least, it encouraged David to get up from his bed and peel off his Bogart which, he now discovered, was still damp from last night’s rain. He went over to the window and watched a pale sun striving to haul itself above the spiky grey horizon of the city. The sun extended talons which tore the darkness softly apart like old denim, revealing the pallid skin of daylight beneath.
The light acted as a gentle probe, coaxing at David’s mind, thawing the shock from around it. Sluggishly at first, his thoughts reawakened; he began to ask himself questions about last night, tried to find reasons, to make some sense out of the senselessness of it all.
Had he really been the gunman’s target or had the gunman marched unhesitantly towards him and pointed the gun at his face because he had simply sat there, offering himself as a target, whilst all around him people had been diving for cover? David didn’t know, and he guessed there was no way of finding out, not immediately anyway. An idea that he suspected had been in his head for a long time, frozen and dormant within the glacier of his shock, now wriggled free of the ice and surfaced with its arms waving. Did the gunman have something to do with Marshall, with David’s investigation? Was Marshall really prepared to stop at nothing to get the bottle back, and if so, then what should David’s next move be? The obvious thing to do would be to dump the bottle into the nearest dustbin, go home and forget about the whole thing. And yet even after all this, David knew he couldn’t do that.
He pushed the heels of his hands into his aching sockets and spread his fingers over the front of his skull as if to prevent it splitting with the weight of his thoughts. He still didn’t know what to think about all the really weird stuff that had been happening. The instinctive part of him believed fervently that he had seen exactly what he thought he had, whereas the logical part insisted it was all dreams and delusions, the mental aberrations of an over-wrought mind. Could hallucinations really be so vivid, seem so real? And if the bottle’s power hadn’t deflected the gunman away from David last night, then what had? The easiest thing, he decided, was to keep his mind as empty as possible, just to plod on with the day-to-day stuff and try not to think about anything else. The only thing that was certain in all of this was that he couldn’t stop now, he had to go on. Though he was terrified and confused, he was also more curious than ever.
Later, having had another long soak in the bath, and having skipped breakfast which he couldn’t face, he walked to his car. The streets were drying out quickly. In the dips and hollows between paving slabs, the water was hardening to ice. The cold gnawed at the tips of David’s ears, made the shaving cut on his chin throb coldly. The instant he got into the car and shut the door the windows steamed up.
The engine gave a hypothermic splutter when he turned the ignition key but refused to awaken until he’d pulled out the choke. He checked his watch; it was nine twenty-five. David estimated it would take him between an hour and ninety minutes to reach Solden. He wanted to catch Kerslake in the best of moods, to time it so that he’d neither be so early that he’d get the man out of bed, nor so late that he’d interrupt his Sunday lunch. He turned on the heater to clear the windows and pulled away from the kerb. Realising that it was almost time for the news, he turned on the radio.
The shooting was the lead story. Despite having braced himself for it, David felt his stomach turning over, largely because he found it hard to equate the newsreader’s calm voice and clinical phraseology with the terrible chaos of last night.
“At least three people were shot dead in a restaurant in Central London last night by a gunman who then turned his gun on himself,” the newsreader said. “The gunman, who has not yet been identified, walked into the Casa Romana restaurant on James Street at around ten p.m. and apparently began firing at random. The dead have not yet been named, but are thought to include a teenage girl.”
The newsreader paused and David tensed, expecting him to add, “Police are anxious to trace a blond-haired man who was seen walking away from the scene in a trance-like state …” But he didn’t. Instead he said, “Prime Minister, John Major, has said that Britain will make no concessions to—”
David turned the radio off.
He drove in silence for a while and then put some music on, Nigel Kennedy playing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Considering the day and the hour, the roads were surprisingly busy, particularly with lorries thundering towards Felixstowe. The East Anglian countryside was pretty but uninspiring, or perhaps it was simply that David was in no mood to appreciate it. The flat landscape provided no protection from the sun, which had scaled a grey hillside of cloud and was now glowering down at him, throwing sheets of cold white light across his windscreen and making his sleep-starved eyes hurt. He was so busy fumbling in the glove compartment for his sunglasses that he almost missed the turn-off for Solden.
He veered into the left-hand lane without indicating or checking his mirror. He raised a hand in shaken and embarrassed apology as the car behind him blared its horn. As he pulled off, slowing down, the car accelerated past him, a black Mini whose young bespectacled driver mouthed what was quite definitely not an endearment. David grimaced, and again acknowledged his mistake with a raised hand. He felt very tired and depressed.
Flat endless fields spread themselves on either side of him, divided by hedges from which sprouted the occasional gesticulating tree. He climbed a gentle incline, at the top of which was a junction whose left fork was signposted: Solden 1. Just before he entered Solden itself, a small field of sheep furnished him with a memory of Jane, aged four, pointing out of the car window during a family day out to the seaside and shouting, “Look, Daddy, cloud-dogs!” He was smiling painfully as he drove into the village, where a metal sign greeted him with the words: Solden Welcomes Careful Drivers.
The village was pretty, picturesque, prompting such phrases as “olde-worlde” and “rustic charm” to pop immediately into the mind. Normally David found such places restful, imbued with a sense of gentle history. The surroundings would make him imagine fondly that the people who lived here enjoyed long, happy, uncomplicated lives. Today, though, he felt almost contemptuous of the rambling architecture, much of which was smothered with Virginia creeper, the immaculate gardens, the village green complete with duck pond, the tiny post office which was really just someone’s front room, the tea-shop (or rather tea-shoppe) called Quaintways.
He couldn’t help thinking that the whole place was a sham, that the people who lived here were simply burying their heads in the sand. Didn’t they realise what an awful place the world really was? How could the inhabitants of places such as Solden live with themselves when elsewhere people were being shot dead for no reason?
