Then he was screaming again, except that he wasn't aware of making the sound in his throat. Through the slush in his ears he tried to focus on the voice, and realised it was Preetorius' scream he was hearing, not his own.
His tongue was released; and he was spontaneously sick. He staggered back, puking, from a mess of struggling figures in front of him: A person, or persons, unknown had stepped in, and prevented the completion of his spoiling. There was a body sprawled on the floor, face up. Not-Christian, eyes open, life shut. God: someone had killed for him. For him.
Gingerly, he put his hand up to his face to feel the damage. The flesh was deeply lacerated along his jawbone, from the middle of his chin to within an inch of his ear. It was bad, but Preetorius, ever organised, had left the best delights to the last, and had been interrupted before he'd slit Gavin's nostrils or taken off his lips. A scar along his jawbone wouldn't be pretty, but it wasn't disastrous.
Somebody was staggering out of the mкlйe towards him -Preetorius, tears on his face, eyes like golf-balls.
Beyond him Christian, his arms useless, was staggering towards the street. Preetorius wasn't following: why?
His mouth opened; an elastic filament of saliva, strung with pearls, depended from his lower lip.
'Help me,' he appealed, as though his life was in Gavin's power. One large hand was raised to squeeze a drop of mercy out of the air, but instead came the swoop of another arm, reaching over his shoulder and thrusting a weapon, a crude blade, into the black's mouth. He gargled it a moment, his throat trying to accommodate its edge, its width, before his attacker dragged the blade up and back, holding Preetorius' neck to steady him against the force of the stroke. The startled face divided, and heat bloomed from Preetorius' interior, warming Gavin in a cloud.
The weapon hit the alley floor, a dull clank. Gavin glanced at it. A short, wide-bladed sword. He looked back at the dead man.
Preetorius stood upright in front of him, supported now only by his executioner's arm. His gushing head fell forward, and the executioner took the bow as a sign, neatly dropping Preetorius' body at Gavin's feet. No longer eclipsed by the corpse, Gavin met his saviour face to face. It took him only a moment to place those crude features: the startled, lifeless eyes, the gash of a mouth, the jug-handle ears. It was Reynolds' statue. It grinned, its teeth too small for its head. Milk-teeth, still to be shed before the adult form. There was, however, some improvement in its appearance, he could see that even in the gloom. The brow seemed to have swelled; the face was altogether better proportioned. It remained a painted doll, but it was a doll with aspirations.
The statue gave a stiff bow, its joints unmistakably creaking, and the absurdity, the sheer absurdity of this situation welled up in Gavin. It bowed, damn it, it smiled, it murdered: and yet it couldn't possibly be alive, could it? Later, he would disbelieve, he promised himself. Later he'd find a thousand reasons not to accept the reality in front of him: blame his blood-starved brain, his confusion, his panic. One way or another he'd argue himself out of this fantastic vision, and it would be as though it had never happened.
If he could just live with it a few minutes longer.
The vision reached across and touched Gavin's jaw, lightly, running its crudely carved fingers along the lips of the wound Preetorius had made. A ring on its smallest finger caught the light: a ring identical to his own.
'We're going to have a scar,' it said.
Gavin knew its voice.
'Dear me: pity,' it said. It was speaking with his voice. 'Still, it could be worse.'
His voice. God, his, his, his.
Gavin shook his head.
Yes,' it said, understanding that he'd understood.
'Not me.'
'Yes.'
'Why?'
It transferred its touch from Gavin's jawbone to its own, marking out the place where the wound should be, and even as it made the gesture its surface opened, and it grew a scar on the spot. No blood welled up: it had no blood.
Yet wasn't that his own, even brow it was emulating, and the piercing eyes, weren't they becoming his, and the wonderful mouth?
The boy?' said Gavin, fitting the pieces together.
'Oh the boy ...' It threw its unfinished glance to Heaven. 'What a treasure he was. And how he snarled.'
'You washed in his blood?'
'I need it.' It knelt to the body of Preetorius and put its fingers in the split head. 'This blood's old, but it'll do. The boy was better.'
It daubed Preetorius' blood on its cheek, like war-paint. Gavin couldn't hide his disgust.
'Is he such a loss?' the effigy demanded.
The answer was no, of course. It was no loss at all that Preetorius was dead, no loss that some drugged, cocksucking kid had given up some blood and sleep because this painted miracle needed to feed its growth. There were worse things than this every day, somewhere; huge horrors. And yet -
'You can't condone me,' it prompted, 'its not in your nature is it? Soon it won't be in mine either. I'll reject my life as a tormentor of children, because I'll see through your eyes, share your humanity.
It stood up, its movements still lacking flexibility.
'Meanwhile, I must behave as I think fit.'
On its cheek, where Preetorius' blood had been smeared, the skin was already waxier, less like painted wood.
'I am a thing without a proper name,' it pronounced. 'I am a wound in the flank of the world. But I am also that perfect stranger you always prayed for as a child, to come and take you, call you beauty, lift you naked out of the street and through Heaven's window. Aren't I? Aren't I?'
How did it know the dreams of his childhood? How could it have guessed that particular emblem, of being hoisted out of a street full of plague into a house that was Heaven?
'Because I am yourself,' it said, in reply to the unspoken question, 'made perfectible.'
Gavin gestured towards the corpses.
'You can't be me. I'd never have done this.'
It seemed ungracious to condemn it for its intervention, but the point stood.
'Wouldn't you?' said the other. 'I think you would.'
Gavin heard Preetorius' voice in his ear. 'A crime of fashion.' Felt again the knife at his chin, the nausea, the helplessness. Of course he'd have done it, a dozen times over he'd have done it, and called it justice.
It didn't need to hear his accession, it was plain.
'I'll come and see you again,' said the painted face. 'Meanwhile - if I were you - ' it laughed,' - I'd be going.'
Gavin locked eyes with it a beat, probing it for doubt, then started towards the road.
'Not that way. This!'
It was pointing towards a door in the wall, almost hidden behind festering bags of refuse. That was how it had come so quickly, so quietly.
'Avoid the main streets, and keep yourself out of sight. I'll find you again, when I'm ready.'
Gavin needed no further encouragement to leave. Whatever the explanations of the night's events, the deeds were done. Now wasn't the time for questions.
He slipped through the doorway without looking behind him: but he could hear enough to turn his stomach. The thud of fluid on the ground, the pleasurable moan of the miscreant: the sounds were enough for him to be able to picture its toilet.
Nothing of the night before made any more sense the morning after. There was no sudden insight into the nature of the waking dream he'd dreamt. There was just a series of stark facts.
In the mirror, the fact of the cut on his jaw, gummed up and aching more badly than his rotted tooth.
In the newspapers, the reports of two bodies found in the Covent Garden area, known criminals viciously murdered in what the police described as a 'gangland slaughter'.