Her pace quickened. She shook her head. She reached a room and ducked inside.
‘Wait!’ he called after her but the door slammed in his face. He stood there for a moment, indecisive. Then he grabbed the handle and pushed it open.
The room was empty.
He flicked on the light. He was in a bedroom. Clothes were strewn over the bed and hanging from the back of a chair. ‘Casey?’ he called. But there was no one there. He was standing with his back to the only door. The window was closed and there was nowhere for anybody to hide. Yet he’d seen her come in here.
He was about to turn and leave when he heard a small peal of laughter. ‘Damn it! This isn’t a game. Where are you?’
‘In the walls…in the air…I’m everywhere.’
He heard the voice, close to his ear, but couldn’t tell where it was coming from. ‘Okay. Please yourself. You play if you want to, but don’t waste my time.’
A small draught tickled the back of his neck. He spun round, raising the gun, waving it in front of him. There was nothing there behind him, but the door was now closed. ‘What the hell…’ He grabbed hold of the handle and yanked it down, at the same time pulling at the door, but it refused to budge. The laughter again, feminine, excitable. Under the bed, stupid! He hadn’t checked under the bed! He got down onto his hands and knees, and lifted the counterpane. A suitcase and a pair of hiking boots. Nothing more. Damn! He was convinced…
The blow came from nowhere, from out of the air. Something smashed down on the back of his neck, sending him sprawling onto his face. Dust from the carpet stuck to his lips. He wiped them with the back of his hand and rolled over onto his back. The pain in his neck was excruciating, sending hot spikes of agony up into his skull. He groaned and stared up at the ceiling.
‘You shouldn’t have come here.’
A male voice this time, but whether he’d actually heard it or whether it sounded only in his head he couldn’t tell. He used the bed to pull himself into a sitting position and looked about the room once more. It was still empty, but there was something different. The air seemed charged, pregnant with menace. The blow to the back of his neck had made him drop the gun. It lay on the carpet a yard away. He reached for it but it spun away from him as if it had been kicked out of his reach. And then it rose into the air, spinning slowly end over end. Finally it stopped, the barrel pointing at the bridge of his nose, and gradually the trigger was pulled back. He could see it move, as if an invisible finger was depressing it.
He threw himself backwards a split-second before the gun fired. His head cracked against the floor but the bullet missed him and punched a hole in the small pine cupboard by the side of the bed. He kicked out and caught the gun with the toe of his boot, sending it flying through the air. It hit the wall and clattered to the floor.
Harrison sprang to his feet, ignoring the pain in his head, and ran to the door. He yanked at it again and this time it opened, the sudden release making him stagger backwards. He regained his balance and ran from the room and along the landing to the stairs. There was only one thought in his head now. He had to get back to the helicopter and get the hell off this island. Casey Faraday and anyone else in this stinking place could look out for themselves.
‘Wait!’
He was halfway down the stairs. He stopped and turned to look back at the landing. Casey Faraday was standing at the top of the stairs. She was naked.
‘What is this?’ Harrison said, furious now. In some way her nakedness only fuelled his anger. ‘Cover yourself up,’ he said, his strict Baptist upbringing resurfacing. ‘Now!’
Casey started to descend the stairs but, although he could see her drawing closer, he could not see her legs moving. It was as if she was gliding down towards him. And she seemed to be bathed in a shimmering light that was throwing her in and out of focus.
He rubbed at his eyes, trying to see her clearly, but even as he watched her she was starting to change.
Her breasts were sinking back into her chest, the small bush of pubic hair dissolving. The features of her face were smoothing out, becoming bland, anodyne, and the hair was starting to fall from her scalp, leaving a shiny bald dome in its place. Her eyes had rolled back into her head until only the whites were showing, but the gaze was fixed upon him.
He shuffled backwards, finding the next stair, stepping down. He wanted to turn away from her, wanted to run, but the white orbs in the expressionless face held him, and sapped his will.
It was no longer Casey Faraday descending the stairs towards him, but a featureless, sexless creature, white, impossibly thin. Even the ears had disappeared, leaving only smooth skin behind.
He misjudged his next step. His foot caught the edge of the riser and twisted painfully. He cried out and started to fall, but long, thin arms embraced him and held him. The mouth in the blank face was lipless and white, but it opened in a red shriek and buried itself in his neck. Skin and muscle tore, blood poured out of his severed artery and splashed down the leather of his jacket.
I’m going to die, he thought. And ten seconds later he did.
CHAPTER TEN
Jane Talbot squinted slightly in the bright lights of the office. Cold, hard and brittle; those were the words she used to describe the chrome and white décor and the antiseptic, almost futuristic look of the desk, the chairs and other office furniture. It was also the epithet she used to describe her boss, Simon Crozier. She sat on a white leather and chrome chair, designed for elegance rather than comfort, facing Crozier across a glass-topped desk. The desk was another design conceit — smoked glass supported by a chrome-plated tubular steel frame, and Crozier kept the desk clutter to a minimum. There were two white telephones, a small laptop computer and a black leather file, positioned at right angles to the edge of the desk, and nothing more. The glass was polished to within an inch of its life and nothing, not even a thumbprint or a flake of dandruff marred its pristine surface.
How different, she thought, to the desk in her office at home with its clunky, antediluvian computer that hissed and wheezed and made hard work of all but the most simple word processing tasks; the piles of unkempt, dog-eared paperwork that never seemed to reduce in size no matter how many hours she put in trying to clear them; the cracked plastic telephone with the answer phone that refused to record messages; and Amy’s headless teddy bear, that was renting space on the desktop while it waited for emergency surgery. There was nothing pristine about the surface of her desk, marked as it was with sticky rings from a succession of coffee cups, and the dark brown burns from neglected cigarettes that had tumbled from the permanently overflowing ashtray.
Simon Crozier leaned back in his plush leather chair and stared at her over the top of his half rims. ‘I’m sorry to drag you in on your day off, Jane. I hope you had nothing important planned.’
‘It’s okay. Gemma’s at school and David’s at home today, so he can take care of Amy,’ she said with a smile, but actually it wasn’t okay — it wasn’t okay at all. David had purposely taken the day off so they could be together. They’d arranged to drop Amy off with Jane’s mother and then come up to town.
The plan was to go to the Tate Gallery to see the Turner exhibition, and then to go on to Clerkenwell for something to eat at one of their favorite restaurants. Jane’s mother had agreed to pick up Gemma from school and have the girls overnight, to give them some much needed time together. It was so long since it had been just the two of them for any length of time that tiny cracks were beginning to show in the marriage. Nothing too serious, not divorce material yet, but given time and left unchecked, the cracks would turn into fissures and then into bloody great canyons that would be impossible to bridge. She’d seen it happen to other couples, friends of theirs whose romance had turned sour and whose marriages had become battlegrounds on which to mount a daily fight to the death. She didn’t want things to get to that pitch, so she’d planned a quiet day together, to help heal the cracks, and to soothe the real, or imagined, grievances and slights that two busy working people with hectic lives and two delightful but demanding daughters, allow to mar an otherwise solid marriage.