What time had the booking been made for? It might have been seven, but he wasn’t certain. Richard Jameson had been abducted at some point in the early hours of morning - he was positive it had been close to midnight before Jennifer had approached him. So they had been given the opportunity to work on him for, at most, eighteen hours. Had they used it all? Could they have brainwashed Alex in less time than that? Would they have time to kidnap Alex in the morning and release him the evening of the same day?
He had no way of being sure, but he needed to find one fast. If Alex was at the restaurant, then Richard could intercept him there, assuming that the creature used the same scenario twice. He thought it might, for it must know that some rescue attempt would occur. That would be all the more tempting to it, for he could sense it enjoyed these little mind games. He could almost hear it whispering I will call you to account. The game was very much afoot. Perhaps there was to be a brief lull as it turned its attention to Alex for a while, but the banquet had yet to begin.
So it was likely that De Marco’s would see the birth of a new Greg Summers. Would it be that evening, or did he have a day to prepare?
Glancing up at the clock on the wall, Richard realised that he had to make a decision soon. It was nearly quarter past seven.
Quarter past seven. Georgina was often late for their little meetings, but the window was long enough to let his imagination destroy the evening ahead of him. What on earth were they going to talk about? Up until now their encounters had been almost purely physical, nothing more socially challenging than the discussion of future times and places. Now he was expected to fill an entire evening with small talk.
What if they had nothing in common? What if they decided that they despised one another and never wanted to meet again? A large part of him thought that this might be the best result the evening could produce. It would put an end to the three months of lying and deception that had gone hand in hand with his infidelity.
There was another, powerful, part of him that did not wish this affair, this exciting and passionate diversion from his daily routine, to die.
Lost in his thoughts, he jumped a little when the waiter spoke to him.
“Sir? A telephone call for you.”
“Ah. Thanks, where can I take it?”
“If you’ll follow me sir.”
A telephone call? His first thought was panicked and irrational. Was it Jennifer? Had she somehow discovered not only the fact of his affair, but also the details of his alias and meeting place? But no, his wife was away for a couple of days, spanned time with her cousin in Cardiff. Following the waiter to the desk by the door, he picked up the receiver that lay there.
“Hello?” Nothing. Whoever it was had hung up. How very odd.
A little bemused, he returned to his seat.
Richard hung up the receiver, breathing hard. Alex was at the restaurant. He should have waited to hear his voice, he supposed. Johnson wasn’t an uncommon surname, after all. He could not discount the possibility that a different Johnson might be dining at De Marco’s that evening.
No, he was sure. The man who had been weaving through the restaurant to answer the telephone was Alex Carlisle. He could imagine the lean, angular frame of his friend picking a path through the maze of tables and diners, his face pinching with confusion when he discovered his caller had hung up. He wondered if the new Greg Summers sat at the same table that he had, felt the same guilt at betraying the wife he thought loved and cherished him? It was likely.
Well, he thought as he chose a jacket from the closet, the least I can do is check. He might be able to engage the creature in some way, maybe take advantage of an opportunity to rescue Alex.
As he left, he wondered whether the creature was still sitting at the centre of some complex maze, waiting for him. If so, Richard had just found the way in.
Georgina entered. As Greg watched her approach his table, her exquisite muscled legs rippling in the short black dress she wore, he was struck by an absurd image. For a moment, just that and nothing more, he had an image of he and George talking to Jennifer. There was a second man there, short and dark-haired, who he seemed to know. Then the picture was gone and Georgina sat down.
“Hiya babe, sorry I’m late. Needed to get changed.” She said this wryly, as though it were a secret joke they shared. Baffled, but determined not to show it, he smiled and handed her a menu. Her mouth shaped one of her fascinating pouts as she took it from him. “Thanks. Hope I haven’t spoiled my appetite snacking.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
DEVOURING
What, he wonders, is left of him now? It is a strange curiosity. He cannot say for certain where it springs from. There are few pieces of him left to chose from. Regarding this last notion, he considers the possibility that he is crazy. It is not a new thought. Indeed, it has occurred to him many times over the last weeks of his life. Back then he had meant an ordinary day-to-day madness, the madness of imagined things, the craziness of the unknown. Now he asks whether he might be clinically insane.
Before being placed in the tank he had managed to maintain a solid grasp of his sanity. Though at times distressed and upset, at times frightened and disturbed, he had never been insane. Now his body has been eaten away to almost nothing, and he resembles little more than a meaty stick man from a child’s drawing. He thinks that his sanity is no longer secure. How else could the human mind cope with the sheer size?
He is larger now than he has ever been. The sane part of him acknowledges that his brain is gone, that his thoughts are blooming within the substance of the fluid itself. As his organs dissolve, their functions are taken on by the strange toxin in which he floats. Now his mind, his living soul, exists only in liquid.
If his mind is the fluid, then he is now the very thing that devours his own flesh. Though the liquid has no nerves to gather such information, his imagination allows him to feel his whole being wrapped around the husk of his physical self. Like a venomous rogue soul, he sucks scraps of meat and gristle from legs he once walked upon. It is his mind which slips about his ribcage, picking clean the lungs and heart. His liquid self claws open the spinal cord and sups at the fluids it finds there. Like an existential cannibal, he feasts.
Suddenly he is shrinking. As though being pulled inside out, he reduces in on himself. The tank drains, his mind flows away through delicate tubes to be devoured by her. Smaller and smaller. It is hard to concentrate, difficult to feel. He becomes half his size, a quarter, an eighth.
A pinprick
Microscopic.
Nothing at all.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
VIGILANCE
As the streetlights coruscated past his rental car at illegal speeds, Richard whispered an unthinking prayer that he would catch them in time. They could not be going to the Ramkin Hotel that night - the staff would recognise Alex - so he would lose them if he did not make De Marco’s while they ate. After that there were hundreds of hotels they could move on to. Running a red light without even noticing, curling a corner fast enough to ride up on two wheels, he knew he was rushing for no reason. He had plenty of time. They would not long have sat when he left the apartment. It would take him only forty-five minutes to get there at safe speed, but he couldn’t risk missing them. This was the one part of the pattern that he knew was duplicated from his own experience as the Summers persona. It was his only opportunity to reclaim some initiative, for if he lost this chance he would be forced to wait for the creature to go on the offensive again. That would only happen when Alex was lost.
He knew the story of the evening, how it ended. Nausea exploded through him at the thought of that thing, in the guise of Georgina, touching and pleasuring him. Bondage. Penetration. Most vivid in his imagination, fellatio. Alex would be spared that. If nothing else were accomplished, it would not taste his friend.
Swerving, he narrowly avoided smashing into a vacant looking young woman who had stepped onto the road. Do you have a death wish? Swearing unde
r his breath, he slowed a little. Not enough to bring him under fifty, but sufficient to frustrate his need for haste.
It took him another ten minutes to reach the vicinity of the restaurant, a record that shocked him. With a total journey time of only twenty minutes, he should have been dead or in a police cell.
Parking the car around the corner from De Marco’s, he jogged up the street. From that moment he was operating in unfamiliar territory. He knew well enough what was happening within the restaurant itself, but did not know how complex the creature’s plan might be. There was the woman he still thought of as Jennifer to fear, for she could be watching the evening as it unfurled, providing backup against the possibility of his intervention. It was unrealistic to believe that they were somehow afraid of him, but there lurked the suspicion that Alex was the bait in some trap.
As he approached De Marco’s his fears seemed unrealised. The street was empty. Despite the shadows cast by the handful of parked cars, as well as the occasional moving one, there were few places to conceal a secretive watcher. It was a double-edged blessing, for he too had nowhere to secrete himself. He had an idea about that, and was relieved to find that his memories of the two previous visits were accurate. Across the road from the restaurant glowed the reassuring lights of a twenty-four hour café.
Crossing the road before he came in sight of the large windows of De Marco’s, he pulled up the collar of his jacket and sunk his head to look at tarmac. To the casual viewer he hoped to look like any other pedestrian shutting away the cold and the night. It was a necessary concealment, for if he was correct, if Summers no. 7 had chosen the same table as Summers no. 6, then the creature was sitting right next to the window he was forced to walk past. Not daring to risk a glance finding out if this were true, he hurried to the door of the café. Just an ordinary passer-by, he thought. Why then did he feel so bloody conspicuous? He had been holding his breath, and he released it in a small, explosive gasp. The cold caught hold of it, turning it to a wispy cloud of vapour.
Now he was faced with a second problem. If the woman was watching for him then there was an excellent chance that she too would see this café as a convenient place to await his arrival. It was too late to turn back now, he had already paused at the doorway a second too long, a moment beyond what a watcher might consider natural.
As he pushed open the door to the small diner his stomach responded immediately to the smell of chips and other fried delicacies.
Jennifer stood directly before him, and his feet turned to lead as they regarded each other.
“You alright mate? You’ve got a face like a slapped arse.” A waitress. Just a waitress. Her hair resembled Jennifer’s a little, but her face was totally dissimilar. Richard released a thankful sigh. The imagination was a powerful trickster.
“Fine,” he said, forcing a smile. “For a moment I thought you were somebody else. Somebody dead.”
She took a step back from him. “You tripping?”
“I’m not, no. Sorry. Tired.” She nodded, deciding that he was not dangerous, then turned to wipe down a table. Richard sauntered over to the service counter, where another grim-faced waitress watched him.
“Help ya?”
“Plate of your greasiest, least palatable cholesterol please.” It seemed the eccentricity of the situation was getting to him. Perhaps Richard was making his presence felt.
“You taking the piss?”
“Sausage. Chips. Beans. Mug of tea.”
“Shoulda said.”
Smiling at her, Richard turned and chose the window table that had just been wiped down.
He had been right to show caution earlier. Over the road, sitting directly opposite him, was Alex Carlisle. Across from his friend sat the creature, Georgina. She looked beautiful, Richard was forced to admit that, but he knew too well the rot that crept beneath her polished finished. His gorge rose, and the fried food seemed a less tempting idea.
The thought dissolved as he became captivated by the couple he watched. Déjà vu was inadequate to describe it; he actually was seeing something that had happened to him before. Alex was his stand in, but the expression of helplessness was familiar. The creature was going through that same clever act of drunkenness, probably relating the details of which music it preferred, which wild activities it had performed. Alex, Greg now, was left feeling old and out of touch. The situation played precisely as it had before.
How many times prior to that? Had the five previous victims from London been engaged in this scenario? What about other cities, other hunting grounds? Perhaps they had all resembled his own experience this closely, creating one repetitive cycle of suffering.
That reminded him of the most important question. Why was he different? What had happened to make him warrant special attention, and why was the creature so thrilled at this difficulty that it had given him extra time to run? It was baffling, and he was going to watch very closely for anything that might give him a clue to the answer.
His food and drink were dumped in front of him, and he looked up to see that same wary look on the waitress’s face. She held his glance for long enough to let him know he was being watched should he want to cause trouble, then turned away.
“Thank you kindly,” he told her departing back. He had returned his gaze to the window before she could respond.
Now came a moment he wanted very much to observe. In the background of the scene he watched a waiter approaching with the lobsters they had ordered. Alex had just made some comment, at which Georgina gave a sycophant’s giggle, then the waiter’s approach made him turn. He looked briefly at the bright red creature, the scalded lobster. Any moment now…
Alex smiled, and shifted backwards to receive the meal.
Nothing else happened. No fit, no flashback.
Richard had confirmed why he was different. The fits were not part of the pattern. They were the anomaly that had led him to resist better and harder than the creature was used to. That was why he had been offered extra rope from which to dangle. He was being studied like a too intelligent lab rat.
Perhaps that explained the abrupt, last minute decision to take Alex. Was it possible that a time limit was being adhered to? Perhaps it needed to make some sort of regular sacrifice. It had to keep Richard alive long enough to discover why the normal methods it employed had failed, so another had replaced the gap created in the schedule. Was that what he was dealing with? Some sort of religious cult?
Why not? It was no more absurd than the any other theory he could piece together. A follower of some nightmare god, like Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones. Whether such an entity existed was, perhaps, a moot point as long as the creature believed enough to make the actual sacrifices. It certainly belonged in a Lovecraftian tale.
Who the hell was Lovecraft?
H.P. Lovecraft, writer of supernatural horror and creator of the Cthulu mythos, had written during the first decades of the twentieth century, dying prematurely in 1937. There was a collection of his works sitting in his apartment.
Both the collection and the knowledge belonged to Richard Jameson. Perhaps he was winning after all. Terrible, fierce joy filled his heart, and he allowed himself to feel hope that Jameson was coming home.
Over the next hour and a half his rapture had plenty of time to fade. The couple across the road were in no obvious hurry to embark on the carnal pleasures ahead of them. More and more, Richard felt he was being held there as part of some terrible trap.
Several times while he watched, the door to the café had swung open behind him. On every occasion he started in his seat, eyes swinging round to confront the threat. Each time it proved to be nothing more sinister than a drunken passer-by stopping for coffee before moving on. The waitresses were getting ever more annoyed with each refill he ordered. They were keen to be rid of their uneasy customer.
At last, his prey called an end to the evening. At the very instant Alex raised his long arm to call for the bill, Richard was up and heading for the street. He made
it as far as the door before one of the waitresses darted in front of him.
“Don’t suppose you want to pay for any of that?”
“Shit, sorry. Of course…”
“Except we deal with your sort all the time, see. No point running off, we’re ready for it.” She placed a firm hand on his elbow, guiding him to the counter.
“I wasn’t running off, I just forgot…”
“That you was sitting in a café eating our food and drinking our coffee? Heard it.”
He could hear the seconds tick them towards the oblivion land of too-late. “Look, if you’ll just tell me what I owe?”
“Yeah, fine.” The second waitress reached for a calculator. With agonising hesitancy, she began to tap figures into the little machine. When she had to start again for the second time his patience vaporised. Pulling his wallet from his pocket, he counted five twenty-pound notes rapidly onto the table.
“Should cover it, don’t you think?” They stared at him, not quite hearing what he was saying. His bill could not be more than ten pounds. He remembered her earlier comment. “Don’t just stand there with a face like a slapped arse, do you want it or not? Or do you want to work out the exact amount? I’ll be happy to pay the exact amount, if you prefer?” She shook her head, and he raced for the door.
Looking across the road, he saw that they were still inside the restaurant. Sprinting down the street, he rounded the corner to reach his car. Breathing heavily, wondering if he should leave a note to himself advising that he exercise more, he got in and nudged the engine to life.
Turning into the street, he was just in time to see Alex close the door of a taxi behind him.