But the darkness was still there, behind my eyes. It filled the space around me, so big and so vast that it became to all intents and purposes the landscape in which I stood. And I remembered that I’d stood here before, in this selfsame black-on-black void: conversing with the genius loci, which had named itself and then asked me — pleaded with me — to stay. not leave this place.
Which I’d read as a threat instead of what it was: the lost boy asking not to be left alone in the dark.
The lightless immensity gathered itself and began to shrink: receded from me by concentrating its terrible essence into a smaller and smaller space. Soon it was almost invisible: a distant point of anti-light, impossibly small, painfully vivid. Then it winked out altogether, like the dot in the centre of the screen when you turn off an old CRT television set. What it left behind in the place where it had been was an absence, almost equally dark but empty of being, drained of purpose.
A metallic clatter from somewhere nearby made my eyes snap open. The knife had fallen from my shoulder, and Coldwood, still on the phone, was staring at it with a bemused look on his face.
I put my finger in through the hole in the neck of my paletot, searching for the wound. It had gone. My skin was completely unbroken.
The demon — my kinsman, my brother’s only son — had withdrawn itself from me, and this was the mark of its disfavour. A moment later, the rising sun peered out from behind Boateng Tower and — finding no substantial opposition — threw its radiant weight around the suddenly clear sky.
Bethlehem. That’s where we’re all heading for. The rough beasts and the messiahs and the poor bloody infantry, all slouching along together to the place where we’ll finally be counted.
24
Anita started to deteriorate almost as soon as Mark’s spirit left us.
I’d seen this before. It wasn’t physical decay: it was a more subtle and inexorable surrender, a failure of the motive force, the driving will-power that allows something as tenuous and fragile as a ghost to bludgeon something as solid as a body into submission. Her farewell to her son and her reconciliation with Matt had shifted some crucial point of balance within her, and her hold over her borrowed flesh was faltering moment by moment. She was slowing to a final halt.
We sat with her amidst the rubble of the walkway, keeping her company while she died for the second time. She told us about the first time: about how Kenny had found her and Roman in flagrante, in the climactic phase of a hastily snatched knee-trembler in the flat’s poky kitchen.
She’d been doing the ironing before the sex got under way, and it was the iron that Kenny used to kill her. She was still turning, trying to disengage herself from Roman’s embrace when it hit her, and that was the last she knew. But Kenny carried on hitting her for a long time after she was dead. She knew that because . . . well, because she’d seen the results. Later.
She woke in the ground: a burning splinter of consciousness filled with fear and urgency, not knowing why it had no eyes to see with and no hands to claw its way free from the undefined place where it was caught.
She did the zombie thing, but the zombie thing didn’t work. Her own body was mostly pulp, bones broken in so many places her insides were like the kids’ game of PickUp Sticks.
But Roman’s body was right next to her, and Roman had been killed with a single stab wound to the neck. She didn’t know why Kenny had dropped the iron and used a knife: maybe it was a kitchen knife that Roman had picked up to defend himself and Kenny had turned against him. It didn’t matter, anyway. Roman’s spirit had gone on to its eternal reward, and his flesh was lying there with a TO LET, UNFURNISHED sign figuratively pinned to his chest.
Anita moved in, and sat up. Kenny had buried them in his allotment, and he hadn’t troubled to bury them deep because he was the only one who ever went there. She carefully replaced the soil so there was no sign of what had happened, and went off to settle accounts with her bastard husband.
But she wasn’t sure how exactly she should go about it. She didn’t feel she could go to the police because she had no way of proving who she was. She didn’t even know whether the born-again could give evidence in court, or whether she’d be allowed to walk free again once she’d brought herself to the authorities’ notice. Was taking Roman’s body actually a crime? Would she be dispossessed and kicked out into nothingness? She couldn’t let that happen.
And she’d spent longer underground than she thought she had: almost a full year, in fact, which was why there was no change in the weather to warn her. When she got back to the Salisbury, it was to find Mark already dead. The shock and pain of it almost made her release her hold on life right then and there, but she held on by main force, determined to stay in the world long enough to see that Kenny got his come-uppance.
So while Kenny stalked Matt, she stalked Kenny. And when Kenny finally baited his sick, over-elaborate little trap, she was watching from a little way off. She saw Matt keep the rendezvous. She saw him walk away. She saw Kenny cut his own arms, his own face, squeezing out enough blood so that he could write Matt’s name on his windshield. He was crazed, she said, revelling in it. There was no doubt at all that the wound-demon was inside him by this time, influencing his thoughts and actions. It wasn’t responsible for Kenny’s hatred of Matt: that had always been there, for as long as he’d known that Matt was Mark’s father. But it was certainly the demon that made Kenny’s revenge take the shape it did.
Anita watched the parked car for more than an hour. When she was certain that Kenny had passed out from blood loss, she moved in and finished the job with Roman’s Swiss army penknife. It had just come to her, as she stared down at him, that she was never going to have a better chance: that her zombie body was too slow and uncoordinated for her to fight him when he was awake and alert. The temptation had grown in her, and suddenly she’d had the knife in her hand and she was working it backwards and forwards in Kenny’s neck. The wound-demon again, maybe, although God knows she had reason enough on her own account to want Kenny dead. ‘Cutting that bastard’s throat was the best thing I ever did,’ she said, through lips that were now a cyanotic blue. ‘I just wish — I’d done it back when we were all — kids. I wish–’
She shook her head, unable to put the waste and the wistfulness into words.
‘The penknife,’ Coldwood said, ever the consummate cop. ‘The one you used to finish Seddon off. Is there any chance you–’
‘It was in my jacket,’ Anita said. ‘The pocket of my jacket. And the jacket was covered in blood. I couldn’t bear the feel of it on my skin. I took it off and I — I threw it away. I don’t know where.’
‘I do,’ I said to Coldwood. ‘There’s a car park underneath that underpass. I looked over the edge when you first called me to the crime scene, and I saw a jacket there behind some wheelie bins. You probably can’t see it at all from the ground, so it may still be there.’
Coldwood went away to make another phone call, and Anita lapsed into silence. Then another thought occurred to her, and she cast her gaze around until she saw me.
‘Fix,’ she mumbled. ‘I’m sorry I hurt you. I knew — I knew by then what Mark had turned into, and I thought you’d come to send him away. I was so scared, when I first saw you — I wasn’t thinking straight. I wasn’t — myself.’ Her eyes rolled weakly as she saw the ironic sense of the words.
‘Nobody on the Salisbury was, by that time,’ I reminded her. ‘It’s okay, Anita. In a bizarre way you actually helped me. It was while I was in hospital that I saw Mark for the first time, and started fitting the pieces together.’