The voice which answered sounded thin and distant, farther away than the miles which separated her from the city, almost a whisper.
"Jane? This is Cathy. I"m afraid..."
Jane heard her own voice, too loud, too high, too fast.
"This man. The magazine. He"s done things. Awful things. To my web page. About me. My picture. Al has to change it back again!"
There was a long silence and then Cathy"s voice, more faint than ever. "There"s been an accident. This morning. On his way to the shop. A car hit him. He was on the pavement, but the roads are so icy. They say the car skidded onto the pavement. He"s dead."
Cathy"s voice finally broke, and she continued, "The car drove off. He killed my Al and just left him there. I"m sorry, I can"t talk any more. I"ll call back later."
"Don"t! Don"t go!"
Jane put down the dead phone and tried to process what Cathy had told her. Al was gone. He couldn"t protect her from what Nemo was doing. No one could help her. And then she realized that it must have been Nemo who had murdered Al, that he had been driving the car which had killed him, that he meant to kill her next. She had to stop him. Jane clicked open her email to reply to his last message. She would use his artwork, whatever it was, whenever he wanted, if only he would leave her alone.
"Leave me alone! Leave me alone!" she was barely conscious of the sound of her pleading as she crouched in front of the monitor and realized that his emails had disappeared. The last received message was dated three days earlier.
Jane"s fingers scrabbled through the messages for his contributions and his attached drawings, but there was nothing from Nemo except an innocuous message delivered almost a week earlier asking whether she had reached a decision over his drawings. Despite the cold, Jane felt hot and dizzy. She had a separate folder for the e-zine, but when she checked all her other folders and doc.u.ments, she could find no other messages from Nemo.
And then she was in the bathroom, staring at her hands, pink and strange, writhing around each other in the tiny sink. She lifted them and watched, fascinated, as the water dripped from her fingertips. She tried to remember what had happened, why she was in the bathroom washing her hands. The room was darkening. If it was still morning, why was the world outside the window turning from the hard white of the day to the grey blue of evening? Jane stood listening to the silence and wondered where the day had gone, what had happened between her searching for Nemo"s messages and this moment she had fallen into.
She hurried back to her study. There was a new message from her publisher, asking why she hadn"t replied to his last two emails. There was nothing from Nemo, but she knew that he had taken control of her PC, changing and erasing. She opened her bio and felt the floor tilt under her. Her photograph had been deleted and in its place was a black frame with just her name and RIP. Her thoughts seemed to scatter. She thought of that day in York, when she had tripped on the cobbled road and the contents of her dropped handbag had spilled and rolled all around her. Mike had been with her to save her from falling, his strong arm around her waist. Mike, who had deserted her and left her at the mercy of a murderer. Jane pushed the PC off the table, smashing it on the stone floor.
She had to get away before Nemo got to the cottage. When she stepped into the kitchen, she realized that she was too late. The kitchen table was covered with felt tip drawings of a naked woman, hacked and battered. They were crude and childish, but not of Jane. She stared at the slashed face in the drawings. It was always the same woman, but Jane"s hair was short and dark, and the woman in the drawings had long fair hair and blue eyes, not her dark ones. She picked up one of the drawings, holding it trembling like a fan in her hand.
The woman in the drawings looked, not like her, but her replacement in Mike"s heart...like Samantha.
Jane picked up one of her felt tips. The drawings had been made with the pens she used to mark copy, but she kept them in a drawer. Nemo must have had time to search the cottage. And then she heard his breathing and realized that it was too late for anyone to help her.
Jane yanked a knife from the block beside her and slashed at the sound in front of her and then swung round in panic when she realized that his breathing was behind her, soft and gentle as the falling snow brushing against the window. She had no idea how Nemo could make himself invisible, but Jane knew that she had to get out of the cottage. She bolted from the room, pushing over the table, racing down the hall, swinging the knife in an arc in front of her, clawing open the front door, running, his steady breathing in her ear.
Outside the cottage the freezing air filled her lungs with ice, and her feet burned with the cold, but Jane kept running toward the main road. It was almost dark now, the icy wind cutting through her robe, the snow thicker than ever. She might lose Nemo in this swirling white world if only she could keep running, but his steady breathing was still in her ears.
And then her head suddenly cleared. He was following her footprints in the snow. She wanted to sing Good King Wenceslas. The tune filled her head, almost drowning out the sound of Nemo behind her. But she was cleverer than he was. Let him follow her footprints-she would run in circles! He could run and run and never realize that she had tricked him! She began circling the field in front of the cottage as the night grew darker and colder.
She seemed to have run for hours and hours. It was becoming harder to breathe now, but the exertion had made her deliciously warm, warmer than she had been for days. She pulled off her cotton robe and threw it, a whirling white bird, into the snow; white lost in white.
"Follow that, Nemo!"
As her voice disappeared in the wind, Jane realized that her breath too had left her. She sat down and then fell back onto the soft ground, tired beyond tired, wanting to sleep, lulled by the cold. She felt safe and warm. She thought of Mike, who had looked into her eyes and promised to love her until death do us part, who had deserted her, and now she had left both Mike and Nemo behind her. Now she was done. She was alone where no one could hurt her.
As her mind slowed, Jane remembered what the name "Nemo" meant. It was Latin for no man, for no one. That"s who he was, who everyone was. Satisfied, she drifted into sleep, feeling nothing but the cold soft kisses of the falling snow on her upturned face.
Martin hated these editorial meetings. He knew that Louise had already decided on what she would include in the evening newsflash and he had far better things to do with his time, but at least the meeting was winding up at last.
Louise glanced down at the file in front of her and then looked across the table at him. "Did you find out any more about that dead woman on the moors?"
"The police are writing it off as an accident. She died of hypothermia; that kind of thing happens all the time if you go for a stroll naked in a blizzard. Seems her husband had dumped her for another woman a few months ago and she"d been living alone ever since. Her doctor was treating her for depression, but being snowed in alone for all that time must have pushed her over the edge."
Louise looked mildly interested. "Didn"t she get in touch with anyone?"
"She couldn"t. No phone. The landlines are still down, and there"s no mobile signal from out there. She had a PC, but there was no Internet connection either. She was totally isolated. Seems she spent most of her time making drawings of her ex-husband"s new woman. Pretty nasty ones, the police said."
"Too tacky for a closer; too depressing," Louise said and stood up. "We"ll go with the rescued coach tour. Forget the dead woman."
And the meeting was over.
About Richard Hill.
Richard Hill considers himself as not primarily a horror writer, but just a writer. He has written for radio, TV, and for theatres like The Hampstead Theatre in London and The Everyman Theatre in Liverpool; in fact, he would write for anyone who would give him money for words. He has an MA in Victorian Literature from the University of Liverpool.
Since Richard was first old enough to make annoying noises, he has played in bands in and around Liverpool. Afterwards, he headed up to the Editorial Office at the University of Liverpool, producing all their magazines and prospectuses, and taught Creative Writing there as well in their English Department. He is currently co-writing a novel with fellow author Louise King about two serial killers.
Richard had a stroke five years ago. It still amazes him that his body hasn"t yet realized that if it does succeed in killing him, he"ll take it with him. Richard had to learn to walk and talk again, butknock on Formicahe"s good now, although now he"s used to one-handed typing-which sounds more Zen than it is.
Conrad Williams.
Under the sheet of beaten tin the sky had turned into, Manser labored to keep up with his fiancee. She had picked her way through the group to be with Rick, their tour guide. Manser watched the couple move across the uneven terrain like a pair of goats, putting daylight between them. He would not allow her to get away however, and lose herself among these outcrops with that overgrown blond t.o.s.s.e.r.
"Is hot, yes? Too hot for the Englander?" Dirk grinned at him through the mosquito veil attached to his hat. He was from a small town near Bremen, apparently, and did something in synthetics. Why don"t you t.w.a.t off, you Teutonic t.u.r.dster? Everything he wore was brand new. Manser pictured him with a shopping list the day before his arrival in Darwin, buying gear from a shop called "Action Man," or "Survival b.a.s.t.a.r.ds R Us." Now he had lost sight of Tabitha. Where was she?
(I"m Tabby, she had said to Rick when they were registering for the outing at the tour company"s offices downtown. She did not like anyone calling her Tabby. What, like a cat? Rick asked and she had laughed like a kookaburra.) Dirk persisted. "Are you enjoying the trek? But you sweat such a lot."
"We"re all sweating, Dirk. It"s b.l.o.o.d.y sweltering. It must be forty degrees today. And ma.s.sive humidity."
"Yes, but you don"t help yourself. You wear heavy fabric. Your body can"t breathe."
Dirk looked like an advert. He wore a skin-thin vest strategically peppered with holes. Its sheen reminded Manser of wet otters. His sandals looked as though they had been designed by NASA. He sported a watch possessing more functions than a top-end microwave cooker.
Manser growled, "I"m fine."
"You are overheating, Englander. You have the beetroot head." Dirk laughed, an ugly, sputtering sound. Some of the others within earshot-Trevor and Rob from Manchester, Frederique from Quebec-added their guffaws too.
Manser, stoked for an argument, nevertheless managed to check himself. Scowling, he strode clear, trying to ignore some of the muttered words that floated his way. Was "unsociable" one of them?
The sun clung to his back like a burden, scratching and gnawing at his neck, roasting his calves. The weather had not let up in the three days since they had landed in Darwin, at the top end of Australia. The humidity had shocked him too, although he suspected that the news stories that had followed them around since their holiday began were also conspiring to make him feel uncomfortable. He recalled some of them now. Awful stories, stories that you didn"t want cluttering up the romantic sunsets and leisurely, flirty breakfasts. An Aborigine had set fire to herself on the steps of the Sydney Opera House in protest against the long-standing treatment of her people. An Australian company were behind an ecologically disastrous spill of cyanide in Romania. And there had been another victim of the serial killer who was sweeping the country like a bushfire.
This last topic had invaded the party he was currently touring with.
""Sweet Tooth," they call him," Frederique said, adjusting the straps of her backpack.
Trevor was nodding. His broad Lancashire accent sounded at odds with the grisly detail it now described: "He"s filed his teeth and he chooses the most succulent cuts from his victims. The fatty sweetbreads and suchlike. Dee-licious."
Frederique laughed, a touch nervily.
"The police reckon the girl"s self-immolation the other day, and this murder, are linked," said Rob. "You know, t.i.t for tat. They reckon this Sweet Tooth wants to even the score for two hundred years of European atrocity."
Manser could almost understand why, listening to them prate like this. Not for the first time he wished he and Tabitha had organized a tour for themselves only. Sartre was bang on the money.
The path through the rocks took him by shady places where aboriginal art seeped from its natural canvas as though forming itself gradually from the sandstone"s color and texture. Manser studied the different layers; the conflicting cells of ochre. Here, by his feet, were the grindstones where the colors had been pulverized and mixed. The playfulness of the art, its simplicity and joy called to him from across the millennia. Some of the fragments had been here for 20,000 years. Maybe even longer.
Let them wander off together, he thought. Some guide he turned out to be. What if I wanted to know what these fish were? What if I wanted to know the significance of the gold sections in that turtle? Who could tell me?
Truth was, Manser already knew. The fish were barramundi and, along with the turtles (whose gold sections were a hint as to where to find the plumpest, tastiest sections of the animal), were an ancient menu, a message that food was nearby: the East Alligator river was but a few kilometers away. To Tabitha he had read pa.s.sages from the guide book on the days leading up to their flight to Australia. On inspecting the color plates that accompanied the text, she"d remarked on how plain and uninspiring the aboriginal art was. Her att.i.tude changed quickly enough when she saw how enthusiastic Rick became when talking about the paintings.
"And the colors are so vivid!" she had gushed, while Rick pointed out the etiolated balanda, the white men standing around with their hands in their pockets, the way the indigenes had viewed the Europeans as they supervised the slavery they imposed.
Thunder caromed around the Kakadu skies. The wet season had not yet started; it was a good month overdue. Anvils of cloud were poised to shape the acres of dull sky that bore down on the Northern Territory. Manser could feel its weight. His sweat was a constant, like the flies, or the nagging that Tabitha inspired in his gut.
Let it go, he thought, but it was a mere cosmetic, a reflex nod to human convention that came and went in a trice. Such charitable notions occurred to reasonable men. He might once have acknowledged it. At the cusp of the new Millennium, for example, jostled on Westminster Bridge as Big Ben and a curtain of fireworks heralded the 21st century"s birth. He had felt such a wealth of goodwill he could have cried. Every time he looked at Tabitha, he swelled with yearning. He had gone so far as to yell at a party of bewildered j.a.panese tourists that this is my fiancee! He had kissed her for a long time as color and light spattered the sky, only just stopping short of asking her to have children with him as soon as possible because he recognized the measure of his emotion.
He recognized it again. It had limits, this loveplay, and there wasn"t much give to it.
A billabong fell pathetically away across the plain, dwindling almost as he watched. Three buffalo stood motionless at the water"s edge, hunched by what might be despair. Manser caught sight of Rick and Tabitha picking their way through the rocks to the next portion of aboriginal art and saw how he might intercept them before they could lose themselves. He pushed himself hard against the heat. Each time he raised his arm to steady himself, what seemed to be the annual rainfall of the East Midlands fell from his flesh. A slick formed on his face that could not be wiped clear.
Manser attempted to affect nonchalance as he breasted the final rise ahead of the guide, whose affronted expression took the wind from Manser"s sails. Deep down, he had not really suspected the Australian of wanting to do the dirty with his fiancee, but the look of him now suggested otherwise.
Manser pressed the back of his hand against his forehead. "Bit chilly isn"t it?"
"You don"t really feel the heat after a while living up here," Rick said. "Keep up your fluid and salt intake and it"s a piece of p.i.s.s."
"How are you bearing up, Tabby?" Manser asked as Tabitha sidled up to them.
She arched her eyebrows, but couldn"t object. She said, "A rock is a rock is a rock, love. You climb it or you don"t." She turned to Rick, placed a hand on his arm. "That said," she continued, "we tried to climb Mam Tor, a pretty undemanding hill in Derbyshire, back home. We had to give up. Stuart couldn"t hack it."
"I might have been able to, darling," Manser detested the edge that had crept into his voice, "had I not undergone a hernia operation three weeks earlier."
Rick snorted. "You don"t have to make excuses, mate. What"s it to me?"
Regardless, Manser could tell he had been judged.
Rick said to Tabitha, "Another five minutes and we could scoot up to the top there."
Manser answered before she could agree. "I don"t think so. What about this rock art?"
Rick said, "There are plaques telling the stories of each one." He tipped his Drizabone back on his head.
"We paid for a guided tour," Manser protested. Dirk, Trevor and Rob were strolling up. Their presence, and the silence shared between them upon observing this stand-off, bolstered him. "So we should be getting a guided tour."
"Too easy," beamed Rick. "Let"s just hang on for the stragglers."
Manser reined in his tongue, cheated by Rick"s obeisance. Spoiling for an argument, he had been trumped by Rick"s apparent dismissal of what would have been seen as a flashpoint back home. He shuffled impotently in the grit, flashing glances at Rick, who stood easily in the heat, and Tabitha, who would not acknowledge Manser"s attention.
Presently, Claudia, an obese nurse from Interlaken and the septuagenarian twins, Rudolf and Ivan from Dusseldorf, sloped into the clearing, amid a riot of aspiration. Manser believed they should not have undertaken such a demanding trip, but Rick had proffered no words of advice regarding its difficulty.
"Some of you daring types without hats..." began Rick, and all heads turned to Manser, the only person not attired thus, "...might want to consider walking in shade for a while. The sun is currently at its zenith and people of a fair complexion, and those who aren"t blessed with the full complement of hair, are at risk of serious burns."
Cringing, Manser moved into the shade of a ghost gum. His hand fell upon the smooth, muscled bark and he coaxed it as he might a knot of pain in his forehead. He gave six inches away to the guide, who probably also weighed a good stone or two heavier. But it was good weight, distributed evenly across a lean, supple torso. Rick was constantly fingering the slabs of hard contoured flesh beneath his singlet. Tabitha prominently displayed the signs of her wish to do likewise beneath her own halter top, despite the heat. Manser"s clothes battened down burgeoning wedges of fat.
They moved on. The rock rose above them, a giant fist warning off the sky, which was growing ever more leaden, rippling with potential.
"Here"s a fish with a difference," Rick said. A faint representation of a barramundi clung to the underside of a ceiling of rock. There was something not quite right with its shape. "It"s a simple lesson in common sense. One day, a fisherman from the tribe caught a fish from the river, turned his back for a moment and when he went to pick up the fish, it had gone, jumped into the water and away. What does this picture tell us, do you think?"
Manser was so irritated by the guide"s patronizing tone that he gave in to a second of boorishness. "That"s supposed to be a fish? It looks like a rugby ball. A punctured rugby ball."
Rick ignored him, but the heat from Tabitha"s eyes momentarily eclipsed that of the sun. He felt foolish. n.o.body had laughed. It seemed that every avenue of decision had been blocked off or redirected. He was being manipulated somehow. He was the co-director of a coming textiles business. He had been profiled in the financial pages of The Independent. Yet his control had been breached.
"It"s a fish with its head snapped off," said Rick evenly. "You"re not going to get many headless fish escaping. Though sometimes, on this tour, you get a few headless chickens doing a runner."
Now the laughter came, and Manser could not help but suspect much of it was at his expense.
Enough. Manser dismissed Rick and his adoring audience with a flick of his hand.
"Meet you at the top," he snarled.
"But what about your guided tour?" Rick sang mockingly.
He didn"t look around as he struck off, knowing by now the kind of expressions that would be following him. Worse than the bemused, almost pitying looks sported by Rick and his entourage, Tabitha would a.s.sume a disgusted mien. He could imagine her leaning against Rick, saying softly: Why am I with him? And the comeback, from a man who would be at pains to remember Tabitha"s name in a week"s time, even as her fingernail scars healed on his back: Too right, babe. The guy"s a drongo. Or whatever word these lackadaisical w.a.n.kers came up with to describe a man like Manser. A placid man, that was all. A stone, who usually let worries roll off him. The heat-it must be the heat-had altered something. Turned the stone to sponge, eked out a scintilla of fury that dwelled deep inside.
Back in the ferocious spotlight, away from the shade afforded by the sandstone ledges, Manser ceased to struggle against the relentless beat of the sun. He recognized a kinship there. The heat that pressed against him collided with and equalized the measure of fire within. He felt energized by the balance. He knew himself capable of anything. His awkward shape, the skewed spread of his weight, counted for nought. Here, as he bounded up the side of the rock, he wished he had persuaded Tabitha to make the visit without a guide. He knew enough about rock art from what he had studied in the guide books or gleaned from the Internet in preparation for their holiday. For instance, he recognized the depiction of Namarangini, the spirit man, the rain conjurer. He wouldn"t have stooped to sarcastic asides or hubristic tones to ginger his narrative (how did that story go now?) as Rick had done. Rick. Manser spat on the rock, as much from the distaste the name afforded as to clear his airway. The phlegm sizzled and dwindled to a speck as the rock drank him in. Rick clearly modeled himself on the basest of Australian role models, some kind of backwater ocker by way of Crocodile Dundee and Les Patterson. All that was missing was the mullet haircut, the stubbie of Victoria Bitter and a meat pie.
Fingers of steam grew from the areas that took the first spattering of rain. The drops were big and warm; tropical rain. On the track that chicaned up the side of the rock, Manser paused and looked down to the lower plateau. He knew them from the beads of light that reflected off the plutonite lenses of Dirk"s Oakley"s. They were plodding up the incline, following slavishly the tourist path, marked out by yellow metal arrows nailed to the sandstone.
Tabitha waved something at him. A bottle of water, was it? And what was Rick doing waving at him? Beckoning him? Even at this distance, Manser was being babied. He did not need water, thank you very- "I don"t need water, thank you very much!" There must be pints inside; look at the stuff pouring off him! A palm swept across the forehead drew enough moisture to irrigate an herb garden, for G.o.d"s sake.
Manser climbed. His body was serving him well, pistoning and balancing him like a machine. What did Rick have, he thought, beyond a knowledge of bush tucker? He knew how to handle a frill-necked lizard while the rubber-necked tourists took snaps. He knew that the sap from a milkwood tree would relieve stings and bites. He knew the facts and figures that surrounded a queen in her termite mound.
"Oh yeah?" he yelled down at Rick. "Well so do I, mate!"
Rick"s eyes had not left Tabitha"s when he told the group how a female Aborigine could make herself temporarily infertile by standing over a smouldering ironwood branch, "so the smoke enters her." Manser had never before heard the word "enters" uttered with such relish.
The man had nothing. Dragging travelers around in a 4WD on 3-day tours. Visiting areas of breathtaking beauty, swimming in secluded pools; his own boss.
The b.a.s.t.a.r.d. He had everything.
The sun had been smothered. Lightning played around the innards of c.u.mulonimbus. Rain slanted into him. In a moment, the going had become treacherous. He saw Rick move away from the group, gathering pace as he arrowed toward Manser.
"Oh, no you don"t!" he bellowed. "I don"t need rescuing!" He scrambled up the rock, swearing when he saw that Tabitha had decided to lend her skills to the chase. The others huddled in their cagoules, faces upturned. From here they resembled pale decorations studded into a dry, unappetizing cake.