Decay Inevitable

A door. A red door. It might have been a blue or a green door, but it had been overtaken by the red of warmth. What lay behind it understood the secret of need, the science of comfort. He touched the door and suddenly he was inside the house, sitting on the edge of a bed. He was unhappy now because the interior of the house had proved to be chillier than he expected. No warm welcome. No lack of tension to relax the tight band of pain that circled his head. His hands itched. He stared down at them, at the raw welts scoring the pads of flesh on a parallel with his life lines. If he put his hands together, miming an open book, the weals made a V-shape across them. Their pain was fresh and bright. Closer inspection revealed a pattern in the welts, a series of raised obliques, as though a length of hemp had bitten into his flesh.

There was a knock at the door.

Will stood up. He didn’t want to look to his side. Someone lay there, unmoving. A body, losing heat. But that couldn’t be right. This was a house of warmth and promise. He went to the window and peeked through the curtains. There were people outside.

Sally, there’s someone watching us... Would you mind opening the front door, please, sir?

The voice came to him heavy and full of interference, as though he were a child again, listening to a message from a friend through a Ski yoghurt pot at the end of a piece of string. He went to the door and opened it on a tired policeman in a wet uniform. For a moment he didn’t recognise the man for his scrubbed look and the extra few pounds he was carrying on his jowls and his waistline. But in the moment he recognised him, he recognised too how he had been tricked. Death didn’t work to a timetable. He remembered how de Fleche had put that. Death was sinuous and sly. Death was a Moebius strip, or Ouroboros, the serpent that eats its own tail. This was Sean’s beginning, and Will’s true end.

Sorry to bother you, sir. We’ve had word of a prowler in the area. Have you seen anything? Heard anything?

De Fleche spoke through him as he was about to give the architect to Sean, making a mockery of any belief Will had that he was in control.

I was asleep. Your torches woke me up.

Sean seemed satisfied with that. Will raged against the seal that de Fleche had squeezed between him and the outside. Is there anyone else in the flat that might have heard anything?

Luce, my girlfriend, she’s asleep too. You’d have had to drive your car through the wall to wake her up.

And then the policeman was apologising and backing off, hurrying back through the rain with his partner to a car that was warm.

When they were alone again, de Fleche let the leash out a little and Will struggled against it, battling to be free. The book was just pages and glue but it had more spine than he. It was yesterday’s book. Catriona didn’t exist any more, the book meant nothing.

“I don’t want to be in your pocket,” he said, sounding like a petulant child at a birthday party who had failed at every game.

“Too late,” de Fleche said. “You killed her. How does that make you feel? You and women are a potent combination, aren’t you? Lethal. How many’s that now? You should have some stickers done, slap them on the side of your cockpit. Authorised kills. Will, the Red Baron. The Strangler. Sleep-Stealer. Kids’ll have trouble going to bed knowing you’re on the hoof.”

“You killed her,” Will said.

“Oh go on, don’t be so modest. You passed my test, squadron leader. Ladykiller. You’re in the army now. Go out there and make mayhem. Make lots of what you are. It’s New Year’s Day for you, for all of us. Year Dot. Year Zero. Let’s have a fresh start.”

The door opened and he found himself in another street in a part of the world he didn’t know. There were others there like him, thin men with clothes that hung on their bodies in dire need of a wash. They sweated, these men, and he sweated too, despite the cold. One of them came up to him, scratching the back of his head and looking around him maniacally as if they were in the middle of a column of biting gnats. His hair was a greasy cap stuck to his scalp and his chin had not felt a blade for a week or so. He wouldn’t look at Will, and when he parted his lips to talk, a fist-sized glut of flying beetles buzzed out of his mouth. He didn’t notice them. They might as well have been exhaled smoke; he certainly looked nervous enough to need a cigarette.

“Are you hungry?” the man said. “I’m hungry. Are you hungry? Because, like, I am hungry. Am I hungry? Too right. Too right. How about you? You hungry?”