His mouth throbbed.
He ran a tongue along his gums, where his teeth had once been. All that was there now were tiny threads of flesh, spilling out of the cavities. They’d taken them without asking, like they were taking everything else.
Click.
The noise again. The same noise, every night, all night, coming from the corner of the room. He slowly sat up, and looked into the darkness.
He’d got up and examined the corner of the room in the daylight, when the sun poured in from the top window. There was nothing there. Just the cupboard and the space behind it, a narrow two- or three-foot gap. In the dead of the night, when the silence was oppressive, it was easy to see things and hear things that weren’t there. Darkness messed with you like that. But he’d seen it for himself: there was nothing there.
Click.
He continued looking into the shadows — facing them down. Then, pulling the blanket around him, he got to his feet and took a step towards the corner of the room.
He stopped.
Out of the darkness and into the moonlight came a cockroach, its legs pattering against the floor, its body clicking as it moved. He watched it come to the bed then turn slightly, heading deeper into the room towards the door they always kept closed. It stopped for a moment, half-under the door, its antennae twitching, its legs shaking beneath it. And then it disappeared into the light on the other side.
A cockroach.
He smiled, slumped back on to the bed. Breathed a sigh of relief. Deep down, he knew no one could be watching him from the corner of the room. Not for all this time. Not all night. No one would do that, would even want to do that. The mind could play tricks on you. It could make you doubt yourself; it bent reality and reason and, at your weakest, you started to question what you knew to be true.
It had only ever been a cockroach.
He brought his arms out from under the blanket and wiped the sweat from his face. Wind came in through the top window. He lay there, letting the cool air fall against his skin. And, as he closed his eyes, he could — very distantly — hear the sea.
‘Cockroach.’
His eyes flicked open.
What the fuck was that?
‘I see you, cockroach.’
He scrambled back across the bed, towards the wall. Brought his knees up to his chest. From the darkness came a second cockroach, forming out of the shadows, following the path of the first one. It started to arc left, towards the light on the other side of the door.
‘Don’t run, cockroach.’
A hand came out of the night and smashed down on top of the insect. Its shell exploded under the force of the blow, clear blood spraying out either side. Then the fingers twitched and moved, turning over to show the remains of the cockroach, flattened and in pieces, coated on the skin of the hand.
Slowly, the hand started to become an arm, and the arm a body, until a man emerged from the gloom, a plastic mask on his face.
It was the mask of a devil.
A smell came with the man as he looked up from the depths of the night, blinking inside the eyeholes. The mouth slit was wide and long, moulded into a permanent leer, and inside it the man smiled, his tongue emerging from between his lips.
‘Oh God.’ A trembling voice from the bed.
The man in the mask moved his tongue along the hard edges of the mouth slit. It was big and bloated, red and glistening, like a corpse floating in a black ocean.
And, at the very tip, it was cut unevenly down the middle.
The devil had a forked tongue.
From the bed, he felt his heart stop, his chest shrink, his body give way beneath him.
The man in the mask blinked again, inhaled through two tiny pinpricks in the mask’s nose, and slowly rose to his feet.
‘I wonder what you taste like…cockroach.’
PART TWO
14
The address that Cary had given me for the Calvary Project was a block of flats called Eagle Heights, about a quarter of a mile east of Brixton Road. On the way over, my phone started ringing, but by the time I’d scooped it up off the back seat I’d missed the call. I slotted the phone in the hands-free and went to my voice messages. It was Cary.
‘Uh, I’ve thought about…’ He paused, sounding different now: less officious than the last time we’d talked. ‘Just give me a call when you get the chance. I’m in this morning until ten, and then after lunch I’m here until four.’
I looked at the clock: 8.43. I tried calling him, but the sergeant said he wasn’t around. Stuck in traffic ten minutes later, I tried again, and the same desk sergeant said he still wasn’t around. I left a message just as Eagle Heights emerged from behind a bank of oak trees.
It was featureless and grey. The concrete walls were marked all the way down, as if the building was rotting from the inside. It was twenty-five storeys high, and flanked by two even bigger blocks of flats on the other side of a ringed fence. At the front entrance, there was a board with Eagle Heights written on it. Someone had spray-painted Welcome to hell underneath.
I parked my BMW next to a battered Golf, its wheels up on blocks and its windows smashed in. Across from me, a bunch of kids who were supposed to be in school were kicking a ball about on a patch of muddy grass. I got out of the car, removed my phone and my pocket knife, and headed for the entrance.
Inside, there were mailboxes on my left, most with nothing in. I checked the slot for number 227: empty. To my right, stairs wound up and around. As I started to climb, a huge metal cage came into view, an air-conditioning unit inside. The higher I climbed, the worse the place started to smell.
The door to the second floor hung off its hinges and the glass had cracked. I pulled it open. Background noise came through from the flats: the buzz of a TV, a woman shouting, the dull thud of a baseline. There were fifteen doors on either side, all painted the same shade of muddy brown. Flat 227 was right at the end.
I knocked twice and waited.
A council notice was nailed to the door. It was almost four years old, and warned people not to enter due to health and safety violations. Some of the sticker had peeled away and the bits that remained were faded.
I knocked again, harder this time.
Further down the corridor, two flats along on the opposite side, I heard the sound of a door opening. Someone peered through the crack, their eyes darting backwards and forwards.
‘Who you lookin’ for?’
It was a man’s voice.
‘The guy who lives here,’ I said. ‘You know him?’
‘Nah.’
‘You seen him around?’
‘What are you, a copper?’
‘No.’
‘Social services?’
‘No.’
I knocked again on the door.
‘You ain’t gonna find nothin’, mate.’
‘How come?’
‘There ain’t no one there.’
I looked at him. ‘Since when?’
‘Since for ever.’
‘No one lives here?’
‘Nope.’
‘You sure?’
‘Am I sure? You can read English, can’t you?’
‘Only if the words aren’t more than three letters.’ I glanced at the council notice. ‘So, the council cleared out the last tenants?’
‘Last tenants? I been in this shithole twenty years. Ain’t no one lived in that flat since the floor gave in. Hole the size of Tower Bridge in there.’ He opened the door a little more. It was a white guy. Unshaven. Old. ‘No one gives a shit about us here, so ain’t no one been round to fix it. Must’ve been five years since it went.’