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.
Moker was still fascinated by the carpet’s movement, a kind of shiny wildness in those black eyes of his, his victim held aloft but forgotten for the moment. The distraction had also briefly diverted me.
The closed curtains began to wave as if caught in a breeze, even though the windows behind them were shut. A delicate figurine that sat near the centre of the long sideboard suddenly streaked across the room to smash against the white-brick fire surround. Moker stared at the myriad pieces as if expecting the little statue to put itself together again. There were hefty, tall, white-marble candlestick holders on each end of the sideboard and one began to wobble on the flat surface. The agitation caused a rumbling sound before the ornament slowly rose into the air, the candle it held tilting, then falling back onto the sideboard. The marble holder hovered at about head height as we watched and then, without warning, it shot down the room towards us.
Out of instinct, I ducked, but Moker’s reactions were not so fast. The heavy object struck full in his disfigured face. A rough, snuffling cry escaped him and he dropped Primrose onto the bristling carpet. I fell to my knees beside her and quickly examined her face. The redness had gone from it, but a bluish tinge had crept into her new pallor, another serious warning that an asthma attack was under way. T
he rise and fall of her chest was shallow, but I was pleased to see at least breath vapour leaking from behind her lips, which meant she was breathing. Wait a minute! Breath vapour? What was that all about?
No sooner had I asked myself the question than I felt the chill.
In my state of spirit, the room’s temperature should have been of no consequence. Yet I had become cold, a deep frigidity seeping through my non-existent bones, filling my interior, chilling my blood, cooling organs that I no longer possessed, freezing me! I felt the hairs on my forearms prickle – God, I felt the hair on my head stiffen! And when I looked across the room at Moker, who was leaning against a wall holding his forehead, I saw frost in his sparse lank strands of hair and billows of steam escaping the hole in his face.
It seemed that he, too, was now aware of the room’s iciness, because he slowly straightened, taking his hand away from his head (I was disappointed to see that the missile had not broken the skin – there was no blood – although he was marked and likely to have a very nasty bruise there), and this time he scanned the whole room. Now I thought there was a glint of fear in those killer eyes.
Andrea was still not moving at all. Was she unconscious or dead? Small amounts of white frost speckled her hair also, hair that seemed full of static.
What the hell was going on?
A colour photograph – Andrea, Prim and myself, Prim just three years old and smiling deliciously, taken when on holiday in Naples, not in Italy but on the Gulf of Mexico – heavily weighted by its silver frame, flew off the mantelpiece and thudded into Moker’s back, so that he swung around again.
An elegant but empty vase that sat solo on a tall stand beside the front window hurled itself across the room and smashed against Moker’s kneecap, inducing a grunt of pain from him.
The recessed ceiling lights suddenly oscillated between bright and low, then back again, as if some unseen hand was manipulating their dimmer control, the change becoming quicker as the sequence continued to repeat itself. But this weak strobing effect had nothing to do with their control switch, because the independent glows from two lamps at either end of the room, one floor-standing, the other, smaller, lamp on the sideboard, were following the ceiling lights’ behaviour.
A large black-framed painting – a limited edition Rothko print, three unequal slabs of colour piled one on top of the other – dropped to the floor with a crash, landing upright, the glass cracking from top to bottom with only a few jagged shards breaking free, before the whole thing toppled face-forward onto the petrified (literally) carpet.
Moker looked around him as if stupefied and clouds of vapour billowed from his funnelled face.
Once again I became conscious of the coldness: it was as if a huge icy hand had gripped me inside, its fingers now curling round my heart. Even though I didn’t exist in the physical sense, I felt my limbs stiffen, my back and neck freeze up. The door to the lounge slammed shut, the sound like a shot from a cannon, making me jump; it flew open again and there was no one outside in the hall to have pulled it. The door slammed shut once more, the sound shattering, its crash causing the remaining paintings around the room to fall. This time the door rebounded off its frame, then casually swung open. One of the paintings covered by non-reflective glass had landed face-up about a yard away from me and I noticed the glass surface was completely frosted over, the picture beneath a vague pattern of faded pastel colours. Further along the lounge the fireplace implements clattered into the hearth and seemed to vibrate there, as though trying to levitate. A straight-backed chair near the coffee table toppled over as the silent whirlwind ruffled curtains and either moved books and magazines or riffled their pages. The lights, which for a while had remained constantly low, dimmed even further and it was as if the night outside had broken in.
More objects – CDs rattling in their rack, other framed photographs, a long-handled pewter candle snuffer, small but valued ornaments collected over the years, those same disturbed books and magazines – all swept across the room to hurl themselves at the bewildered and, I hoped, frightened killer, who could only gape at the maelstrom as the missiles bounced off him.
It was then that the shapes began to emerge from the darkness.
Blurred phantasms at first, that was all. Elements that did not quite hang together filtering through the dusk. Discarnate conformations, shades that as yet had no definition. All in motion, weaving as if in some exotic but ethereal dance as they assembled themselves.
Ghosts.
A kind of snorting gasp came from Moker, and his black eyes were fixed on the flittering haze that was closer to me than him. Even without a face, his body language alone revealed his alarm: he trembled violently as he cowered against a wall and the hands he held high to shield himself from further projectiles shook as if he were several stages into Parkinson’s disease. His heavy eyebrows were crusted with ice crystals and hanging strands of his hair looked brittle enough to snap. I thanked God that the lunatic had forgotten about Primrose.
The swirling mists rolled like fog in his direction, configurations within constantly resolving themselves only to fade again and lose distinction from the mass. But I was sure that I recognized one chimera among the many as the grey mutable shroud purled past me, a ghost that had haunted me long ago, as well as more recently. It was my father and I sensed beyond doubt that he was here with these other ghosts to help me. How was that possible? I had no answer right then, because I didn’t even know how I was possible.
When the now boiling mass crowded in on Moker he tried to beat them off with his hands, but because they had no genuine substance, his efforts were worthless. The mists hardly stirred under his frenzied swipes, although they continued to create shadowy forms within, all of them ambiguous, no single entity dominating the others. There seemed to be a horde of them as they enveloped Moker.
Although they appeared to fall on him with vigour, ultimately they were no more effective than Moker himself was in warding them off. Sure, they tugged at his long raincoat, stabbed spectral fingers at his face, but they had no power to inflict injury,15 save for hurling various inanimate bits and pieces at him and even then, that stuff appeared to have no real force behind it. No, it was sheer terror that drove Moker to his knees.
For a short while the unearthly manifestations grew stronger, although none became solid as they engulfed the serial killer. Gratified, perhaps cruelly so, I sought out individual faces and diaphanous but clearer figures among the spectral host, none of which I recognized, save for the one who had been my absent father in the physical world. He was apart from the others as though he were overseer to the attack. Right now, he was observing me. His was the only image that did not falter and, although he wasn’t smiling – the situation was too desperate for that – his expression was benign.
I could only wonder what he had brought with him to my house this night. Cohorts? Angels? Soldiers of God? I had no idea and there was a time when I would never even have considered such things. I just felt thankful that they were on my side. At the séance, the spirits had been separate, individual entities, but tonight they were integrated, unified, as if their collective purpose enhanced their power. I knew very little about the supernatural, or paranormal, but I reasoned that the fading house lights and the deep chill in the atmosphere were because the spirits were drawing energy from the ‘real’ world, this one, the world in which humans live and breathe; they were tapping intangible forces that existed unperceived around us, perhaps also feeding off the psychic energy of the people present in the room. These thoughts passed through my mind swiftly as I looked into the face of my dead father, and maybe it was he who had put them there.
A guttural yelp from Moker grabbed me back and I saw him cringing on his knees, one shoulder pressed against the wall as if he were trying to push himself through the plaster, while the ghosts vainly flayed, their blows having no true physical impact. Yet he cowered there, blubbering and flinching as though he actually felt their relentless punishment and I g
uess it was his own terror and the expectancy of their blows that fixed him there. I knew that soon he would wise up to it.
And he did.
His whole body was quaking when he tentatively raised his disfigured head, and I couldn’t tell if it was because of the room’s Arctic temperature (his black raincoat had a light dusting of frost over it and, when he moved, the stiffened material crackled) or because he was so afraid. Cautiously, he craned his neck to face his incorporeal bullies.
I felt rather than saw Primrose stir beside me and when I looked down she raised an arm from the floor and restlessly threw it across her chest. She was not quite unconscious, but was close to it. Prim lay on her back, the carpet rigid and unyielding beneath her, her eyelids twitching as if she had left one nightmare for another; her breathing was shallow, laboured, short harsh wheezing gasps coming from lips that were becoming discoloured. The underside of the bare arm she had moved to her chest was stippled with scores of tiny red indents as if it had rested on a bed of blunt close-set nails, and I worried about her other arm and exposed legs. But my prime concern was for her breathing. A major asthma attack could kill, and if she didn’t use her Ventolin inhaler soon, this might easily develop into one. She might even need an epinephrine injection.
Panicking, I whirled around to see if Andrea had recovered yet. Through the agitated mist-shapes, I saw that her inert body lay in exactly the same position as the last time I checked; the only difference was that blood beneath her face had soaked a little more of the carpet (the carpet itself bristled like the raised hackles of a dog, the vibration continuing to create ripples around the room). I prayed she wasn’t dead, both for her sake and for Prim’s.
Moker caught my eye again. He was pushing himself to his feet, his back and hands flat against the wall behind, ignoring the entities that flailed him without effect. They seemed more frantic now, as if their impotence had enraged them. Moker swept an arm through them like a man might wave a cloud of midges away from his face.