Soon enough I grasped that I was smarter, stronger, and more visionary than any of them. By the age of nine I did not know exactly what I was yet, but I sensed that I might be some sort of different species – a super-creature, if you will – who could manipulate, conquer, or slay every monster in his path.
I knew this about myself for certain after the storms started in my head.
They started when I was ten. My foster-father, whom we called ‘Minister Bob’, was whipping one of the little, little monsters, and I could not stand to hear it. The crying made me feel weak and I could not abide that sensation. So I left the house and climbed the back fence and wandered through some of the worst streets in London until I found quiet and comfort in the familiar poverty of an abandoned building.
Two monsters were inside already. They were older than me, in their teens, and they were members of a street gang. They were high on something, I could tell that about them right away; and they said I’d wandered onto their turf.
I tried to use my speed to get away, but one of them threw a rock that clipped my jaw. It dazed me and I fell, and they laughed and got angrier. They threw more stones that cracked my ribs and broke blood vessels in my thigh.
Then I felt a hard blow above my left ear, followed by a Technicolor explosion that crackled through my brain like lightning bolts ripping through a summer sky.
Chapter 4
PETER KNIGHT FELT HELPLESS as he glanced back and forth, from the Olympic symbol crossed out in blood to the head of his mother’s fiancé.
Inspector Pottersfield stepped up beside Knight. In a thin voice, she said, ‘Tell me about Marshall.’
Choking back his grief, Knight said, ‘Denton was a great, great man, Elaine. Ran a big hedge fund, made loads of money, but gave most of it away. He was also an absolutely critical member of the London Organising Committee. A lot of people think that without Marshall’s efforts, we never would have beaten Paris in our bid for the Games. He was also a nice guy, very modest about his achievements. And he made my mother very happy.’
‘I didn’t think that was possible,’ Pottersfield remarked.
‘Neither did I. Neither did Amanda. But he did,’ Knight said. ‘Until just now, I didn’t think Denton Marshall had an enemy in the world.’
Pottersfield gestured at the bloody Olympic symbol. ‘Maybe it has more to do with the Olympics than who he was in the rest of his life.’
Knight stared at Sir Denton Marshall’s head and returned his gaze to the corpse before saying, ‘Maybe. Or maybe this is just designed to throw us off track. Cutting off someone’s head can easily be construed as an act of rage, which is almost always personal at some level.’
‘You’re saying this could be revenge of some kind?’ Pottersfield replied.
Knight shrugged. ‘Or a political statement. Or the work of a deranged mind. Or a combination of the three. I don’t know.’
‘Can you account for your mother’s whereabouts last evening between eleven and twelve-thirty?’ Pottersfield asked suddenly.
Knight looked at her as if she was an idiot. ‘Amanda loved Denton.’
‘Spurned love can be a powerful motive to rage,’ Pottersfield observed.
‘There was no spurning,’ Knight snapped. ‘I would have known. Besides, you’ve seen my mother. She’s five foot five and weighs just under eight stone. Denton weighed nearly sixteen. There’s no way she’d have had the physical or emotional strength to cut off his head. And she had no reason to.’
‘So you’re saying you do know where she was?’ Pottersfield asked.
‘I’ll find out and get back to you about it. But first I have to tell her.’
‘I’ll do that if you think it might help.’
‘No, I’ll do it,’ Knight said, studying Marshall’s head one last time and then focusing on the way his mouth seemed twisted as if he’d been trying to spit something out.
Knight fished in his pocket for a pen-sized torch, stepped around the Olympic symbol and directed the beam into the gap between Marshall’s lips. He saw a glint of something, and reached back into his pocket for a pair of forceps that he always kept there in case he wanted to pick something up without touching it.
Refusing to look at his mother’s dead fiancé’s eyes, he began to probe between Marshall’s lips with the forceps.
‘Peter, stop that,’ Pottersfield ordered. ‘You’re—’
But Knight was already turning to show her a tarnished bronze coin that he’d plucked from Marshall’s mouth.
‘New theory,’ he said. ‘It’s about money.’
Chapter 5
WHEN I RETURNED to consciousness several days after the stoning, I was in hospital with a fractured skull and the nauseating feeling that I had been rewired somehow, made more alien than ever before.
I remembered everything about the attack and everything about my attackers. But when the police came to ask me what had happened, I told them I had no idea. I said I had memories of entering the building, but nothing more; and their questions soon stopped.
I healed slowly. A crablike scar formed on my scalp. My hair grew back, hiding it, and I began to nurture a dark fantasy that became my first obsession.
Two weeks later, I returned home to the little monsters and Minister Bob. Even they could tell I’d changed. I was no longer a wild child. I smiled and acted happy. I studied and developed my body.
Minister Bob thought that I’d found God.
But I admit to you that I did it all by embracing hatred. I stroked that crablike scar on my head, and focused my oldest emotional ally on things that I wanted to have and to happen. Armed with a dark heart, I went after them all, trying to show the entire world how different I really was. And though I acted the changed boy, the happy, achieving friend in public, I never forgot the stoning or the storms it had spawned in my head.
When I was fourteen, I began looking secretly for the monsters who’d broken my skull. I found them eventually, selling small twists of methamphetamine on a street corner not far from where I lived with Minister Bob and the little monsters.
I kept tabs on the pair until I turned sixteen and felt big and strong enough to act.
Minister Bob had been a steelworker before he found Jesus. On the sixth anniversary of my stoning, I took one of his heavy hammers and a pair of his old work overalls, and I slipped out at night when I was supposed to be studying.
Wearing the overalls and carrying the hammer in a satchel harvested from a rubbish bin, I found the two monsters who’d stoned me. Six years of their drug use and six years of my evolution had wiped me from their memory banks.
I lured them to an empty lot with the promise of money, and then I beat their brains to bloody pulp.
Chapter 6
SHORTLY AFTER INSPECTOR Pottersfield ordered Marshall’s remains bagged, Knight left the garden and the mansion consumed by far worse dread than he’d felt on entering.
He ducked beneath the police tape, avoided the newspaper jackals, and headed out of Lyall Mews, trying to decide how in God’s name he was going to tell his mother about Denton. But Knight knew that he had to, and quickly, before Amanda heard it from someone else. He absolutely did not want her to be alone when she learned that the best thing that had ever happened to her was—