That time had come for Alec Moker.
As I took a step towards the corpse, something about it began to change.
At first, I thought the body was stirring, and my metaphorical heart skipped a metaphorical beat. It couldn’t be. Moker was well and truly dead. Nobody could have survived that kind of punishment to their skull, not even a creature like him. Yet he was moving.
No. I was wrong. Something was emerging.
The body remained still. But something was rising from it. Moker’s soul was taking its leave.
Moker’s black soul, it was like the darkest shadow among other shadows.
The vanishing ghosts opposite drew back, my father’s among them. Their fading images were fearful and some seemed to shrink before the rising darkness. Their alarm was contagious and I took a step backwards myself, reluctant to be close to the thing on the floor. The atmosphere became full of weight, full of foreboding, and there was a pre-thunderstorm charge in the air. I heard faint whisperings from the ghosts as they gradually fled the scene and I sensed their revulsion of this malign animus that was the very essence of Moker himself.
It was a sickly thing, foul and murky, like the stagnant waters of a deep, forgotten well. It appeared to rage within itself; yet it cowered also, as if it knew its own malevolence was beyond redemption and its fate was beyond all contrition. For the first time I understood what was meant by “a lost soul”.
The sludgy darkness continued to rise from the dead body, the vague shapes beyond it almost gone, only their low whispering remaining. It began to take on a form. Moker’s form. Filling out, shaping first a head, and then the shoulders, but always obscure, muddied, unclean. I backed further away as it loomed, until I was almost at the door. I could have been preparing to flee; at that moment, I wasn’t sure.
Features slowly emerged—the big hands, the eyes that no longer gleamed, the ears. Finally, the gaping hole in the face. It seemed that even in death Moker was not without his affliction.
There was no longer any harm to it: somehow the malevolence had been absorbed. And even as the notion came to me, that this thing was to be pitied, the squalid replicate began to break up, falling away in tenuous pieces, dispersing and dissolving like the mist before it, and I watched until there was none of it left. Watched until Moker’s unrepentant soul had become nothing.
Only myself and the dead body were left in the room. The ghosts had departed, Moker’s damned soul had ceased to exist. All was quiet and calm. I prayed that my home would evermore be so.
There was no noise from upstairs, but I assumed that once Prim was reasonably reassured, Andrea would call the police from our bedroom phone. I felt sure she would not venture downstairs until they arrived, and my plan had to be carried out before that happened.
I went over to the still—the empty—body on the carpet. The blood formed a deeply rich halo around its head. Abhorrent though it was to me, I forced myself to my knees, then lay over it. There was no resistance: I sank into Moker’s corpse as easily as immersing myself in water. But nothing had prepared me for the horrendous and debased sensations that swept through me. I saw the victims Moker had claimed, observed their injuries even as the attack was taking place, experienced the exquisite lust and perverted joy that the killer had felt, as well as the thrill of danger that went with the slaying, the sexual gratification that always followed the murders. Yet underlying all this depraved glory was an abject misery, an agony of suffering that had been Moker’s constant companion, a vile wretchedness that had been with him all his life. In this remembrance of recent events, the sick exultation outweighed the bitterness, but I knew the latter had always prevailed and that only for short passages of time it was vanquished.
Within this formation of flesh and bone, I cried out, the awfulness and the sordid pleasure almost too much to bear; but I needed this body, needed Moker’s corpse, for my own purposes, my own revenge. Retribution was my guiding force now.
I brought my own thoughts to the fore, maintaining images of Prim in my mind, in an effort to override Moker’s memories. But, in truth, it was only thoughts of retaliation that quelled the riot of loathsome impressions. With all the resolve I possessed, I pushed the atrocities and the glory they aroused aside and I concentrated on ruling this newfound vessel. I willed myself into every part of the body, its structure, the arteries, flesh, subjugating them so that they would become mine, if only for a brief time.
Slowly, ever so slowly, I moved the fingers of one hand. Then the hand itself. Then the other hand. An arm. It was working: for a little while Moker’s body could be mine. I heard footsteps thudding across the floor overhead and guessed that Andrea was in our bedroom and heading for the phone. I wondered how long it would take the police to get here.
I had to move faster. I had to get Moker’s body onto its feet. I pushed the shoulders up off the floor, then drew up a knee. It took great effort, but I managed to lumber to my/Moker’s feet. I stood there unsteadily, swaying as I got used to the alien body. Taking a tentative step forward, I almost fell, just managing to correct myself before I overbalanced. Another step and it was not too bad. If I concentrated hard, I could make it. The problem then would be whether I was capable of driving a car. Another step. Fine. It was working. I was getting close to the open doorway.
But I remembered something and I turned back, awkwardly retracing my steps. Carefully, I bent down and retrieved the knitting needle from the floor.
40
I left the front door open behind me. Frankly, it was too much trouble to turn around and pull it closed; I’d entered Moker’s body only moments before and it would take time to get acquainted. I paused to use one of the long scarf’s dangling ends to wipe away the blood covering one of Moker’s eyes and when I took the next step forward it was all I could do to prevent myself from falling off the doorstep.
I coped, but movement was stiff, awkward, just as it had been with the woman’s body before. In life, Moker had had a curious style to his walking and in death it was even more strange and ungainly. The feet shuffled more than ever and the body swayed from side to side like the proverbial drunken sailor. A zombie would have had more grace.
As I made my lumbering way down the drive, which was partially lit by lights from the hall behind me and the street lights ahead, I felt the cold night air bite. I should have been almost oblivious of the cold, but instead it struck deep into the hole in my face—and the newly created vent in the top of my head—chilling the flesh inside and touching me, the body’s new controller.* With some difficulty, I wound both dangling ends of the long scarf around my lower face, shielding the gaping hole from the chill.
*I had wondered if the damage to the brain (all those greyish lumps flowing with the blood!) would upset the body’s mechanism—the chemical signals sent through the system, the sinews that worked the bones—but it seemed that the mind, and thus the will, could manage without all of the physical driving force, the body’s engine, if you like. A metaphysical engine had now taken over Moker’s corpse, and while alien to its host, I hoped it would have the power to help me finish my task.
I staggered, stumbled my way to the kerb outside my property, nearly falling twice before I reached it. There was Moker’s ancient Hillman, parked almost directly in front of the house. Even though my state of mind was somewhat dazzled by the adjustment it was having to make—controlling another person’s reflexes and movement, as well as tamping down the remaining dregs of Moker’s memory—I was aware enough to search for the car keys in the raincoat’s deep pockets. The fingers were numb, barely able to feel anything at all, but I could tell there were no keys present in either one. Then probably, with luck…