It's bad enough at first but then it gets worse even as they keep me because they found more, they found two more and that was while I was here for Christ's sake while they held me while things were still happening more stuff came in while they were questioning me and they looked at me with disbelief horror disgust and I was going What? What is it? Now what? What am I supposed to have done now? And they told me about Azul, in Jersey, and before that I think it was before that they showed me the forensic photographs of all of them: Bissett skewered on the railings, grotesque and spread and limp; the blood-smeared vibrator used on the retired judge, Jamieson; the drained shapeless white body of Persimmon, tied to his grid above a pool of blood, then nothing when there should have been something; then what was left of Sir Rufus Carter, blackened bones, distorted and bent, the black skull's jaw hinged down in a blind scream but the flesh all gone very much a dental-records job and it was all black, the nails, the wood and the bones too but it's their mouths their jaws I remember, their silent screams, hanging slack or jammed open and it gets worse because they show me the fucking video they show me the video they think I made or that I think they think I made but I didn't; they make me watch it and it's horrific; there's a man and he's dressed in black or dark blue and he has a gorilla mask on and he keeps sucking on this little bottle he's carrying which must be helium because it gives him that baby voice disguising his own voice and he has this fat little guy strapped to a chrome seat, his mouth taped, one arm tied down onto the arm of the chair, shirt rolled up and the little guy's shrieking as hard as he can but it sounds quiet because the noise is having to come down his nose while the man in the gorilla mask looks from the camera to the guy in the seat and holds up this huge fucking syringe like something from a nightmare from an old movie from a horror film and I can feel my heart beating wildly because that's what this is. This is a horror movie a fucking horror movie this lunatic is making his own horror film and you can't even tell yourself Hell it's only a story aren't the special effects good it isn't real because that's exactly what it is and the gorilla man is explaining in that hideous high-pitched baby's voice what he has in this bottle and in this syringe and I throw up halfway through but they pause the video for me.
After it's over we cut to another scene and there's somebody who might be the little guy again and he's still strapped to a chair but this time it's a tall hospital chair with wheels and a little fold-away table in front of him and the straps holding his torso would be easy to undo but his hands are limp. There's some sort of board behind his head and a towel or something round his forehead holding his head upright but the eyes Christ the eyes there's nothing there and McDunn says Persistent Vegetative State they call it apparently; Persistent Vegetative State and it looks it man it looks it.
And then of course there are the other two. First it's Azul and his girlfriend. She's traumatised and dehydrated but otherwise unharmed but he's got soul brother's limbs where his own ought to be; necrosis like frostbite, blood-death at the extremities but the extremities start at shoulder and groin; he's alive but if you were him you'd rather not be. Arms salesman; okay the Avenger the Equaliser the Total Fucking Nutter went for the legs too but still, and the editor spiked, and the rapist — lenient judge raped and the pornographer poisoned and stroked and the man who was so callous about the bloodshed in the Iran/Iraq war forced to watch his penned animals die like cattle like soldiers like cattle and then bled to death in his own private fountains of blood and the businessman who put profits before safety and not only helped kill a thousand people but then tried to get out of paying the survivors and dependants any compensation gets his own gas explosion — blevey is the technical term apparently — and fuck me whoever he is (assuming he is a he), he's got a sense of humour or at least irony why he's produced what's almost a snuff video effectively a snuff video if you mean brain-death anyway it's the closest anyone will admit to ever having seen or found one even the Obscene Pubs Squad who've been looking for years but although everybody assumes they exist nobody's ever seen one until old gorilla man comes along and just makes his own, specifically to warn off any other porn merchants thinking of dealing in snuff! It's hilarious, it's really ironic and you explain all this to McDunn and you laugh because it actually isn't the fault of the police you're not sleeping it's the nightmares where you're stalked by a gorilla with the voice of a baby and a huge syringe and he wants to fuck you with it, isn't that hilarious? You can't sleep you're actually providing your own sleep deprivation and you say hey, next thing you know I really will be falling down the stairs! but he doesn't seem to get the joke and then it's back to the cell and then the interview room with the barred, opaqued windows so you can't see out and they switch on the tape-machine recording everything as usual and it's getting more bizarre; they get me to do a Michael Caine voice! They ask me to impersonate Michael fucking Caine, can you believe that? And then there's this technician or something here and they ask me to breathe in helium from a mask and make me repeat some of the things gorilla man said on the video so I feel like I'm becoming him they're trying to make me him; I don't think I sound the same as the guy on the brain-snuff video but fuck knows what they think there are too many to know what the fuck they think; loads of them, officers from all over the fucking place with different accents, London, Midlands, Welsh, Scottish, elsewhere, God knows, it's not just Flavell and McDunn though I still see them now and again especially McDunn who looks at me kind of weird most of the time like he can't really believe it was me did all these things and I get this bizarre feeling that he thinks I'm kind of pathetic I mean that in a grudging, still-determined-to-bust-the-fucker way he actually has more respect for gorilla man than he does for me because I've just gone to pieces under the questions and the things they put in my head with those photographs and that video (ha which means gorilla man has already put stuff into my head, already has fucked my brains, filling my head with the idea of that, the vision, the meme of that) and I thought I was some tough cookie but I was wrong I'm just a dunked digestive baby I'm soft I'm flopping I'm disintegrating and that's why unless I'm the best fucking actor he's ever seen McDunn can't accept I was capable of the things gorilla man did, yet so much of the evidence, especially the dates and times that sort of stuff, points at me not to mention that piece of TV-crit I did that reads like a hit-list now.
And it just goes on keeps going on another night another nightmare and then back to the interview room again and the tape machine again and more questions about Stromefirry-nofirry and Jersey and flights and that's when they tell me about the other one that's when they say oh by the way your best friend Andy is dead blown up in the hotel when it burned down; probably beaten to death first head stoved in but of course you probably know all that because you did that too, didn't you?
I lied about something. Earlier. I told it the way it felt, not as it actually was. Or the way it feels and actually is. Whatever.
'Andy; Yvonne."
'Hi," she says, shaking his hand.
'And that's William out there," I tell Andy. "With the big sword."
Andy turns and watches William. William; masked, clad in white, grasping his sabre and suddenly lunging forward, one leg darting ahead. His opponent jumps back and tries to fend off the blows with his own sabre but he's off-balance and William presses forward, swinging the sabre in a hacking, sweeping motion, whacking the edge of the heavy curved blade into the side of his opponent's torso.