“Yes, the thing we sleep on.” My God, he thought, what if I’ve given her the wrong drug? Maybe I jumped to the wrong conclusion about what Corcoran kept in the box.
“I’ll be up shortly,” June said. “I’m just thinking about…everything.”
“Look, I’m sorry about what happened earlier. I did it for us, you understand. It’s a medical fact that overweight people develop an unreasoning fear of anything which threatens to…” Herley abruptly stopped speaking as he realised he had garnered his medical “fact” from some of Hamish Corcoran’s wilder ramblings. He stared down at his wife, wondering if it could be only an effect of his disturbed mental state that she seemed more gross than ever, her head—in his foreshortened view—tiny in comparison to the settled alpine slopes of her body.
“Don’t forget to lock up,” he said, turning away to hide his repugnance.
When he got to bed a few minutes later the coolness of the sheets was relaxing and he realised with some surprise that he would have no trouble in falling asleep. He turned off his bedside lamp, plunging the room into almost total darkness, and allowed his thoughts to drift. The day had undoubtedly been the worst of his life, but if he kept his head there was absolutely nothing the police could pin on him. And as regards the trouble over the injections, June’s attitude was bound to change by morning when she found there were no ill effects. Everything was going to be all right, after all …
Herley awoke very briefly a short time later when his wife came to bed. He listened to the sound of her undressing in the darkness, the familiar sighs and grunts punctuated by the crackle of static. When she lay down beside him he placed a companionable hand on her shoulder, taking the risk of the gesture being interpreted sexually, and within seconds was sinking down through layers of sleep, grateful for the surcease of thought.
The dream was immediately recognisable as such because in it his mother was still alive. Herley was two years old and his father was away on a business trip, so Herley was allowed to share his mother’s bed. She was reading until the small hours of the morning and, as always when her husband was away, was eating from a dish of home-made fudge, occasionally handing a fragment to the infant Herley. She was a big woman, and as he lay close her back seemed as high as a wall—a warm, comforting, living wall which would protect him forever against all the uncertainties and threats of the outside world. Herley smiled and burrowed in closer, but something had begun to go wrong. The wall was shifting, bearing down on him. His mother was rolling over, engulfing him with her flesh, and it was impossible for him to cry out because the yielding substance of her was blocking his nose and mouth, and she was going to suffocate him without even realising what was happening…
Mother!
Herley awoke to darkness and the terrifying discovery that he really was suffocating.
Something warm, heavy and slimy was pressing down over his face, and he could feel the moist weight of it on his chest. He clawed the object away from his mouth, but was only partially successful in dislodging it because it seemed to have an affinity for his skin, clinging with the tenacity of warm pitch. His fingers penetrated its surface and slid away again on a slurry of warm fluids.
Whimpering with panic, Herley heaved himself up off the pillow and groped for the switch of the bedside light. He turned it on. From the corner of one eye he glimpsed what had once been his wife lying beside him, her naked body bloody and strangely deflated, the skin burst into crimson tatters. The horror of the sight remained peripheral, however, because his own body was submerged in a pale, glistening mass of tissue, the surface of which was a network of fine blood vessels.
He screamed as he tried to tear the loathsome substance away. It ripped into quivering blubbery strips, but refused to be separated from him, clinging, sucking, tonguing him in dreadful intimacy.
Herley stopped screaming, entering a new realm of terror, as he discovered that the slug-like mass was somehow penetrating his skin, invading the sanctum of his body.
He got to his feet, dragging the glutinous burden with him, and in a lurching, caroming run reached the adjoining bathroom. Almost of their own accord, his fingers located and opened the bone-handled razor, and he began to cut.
Heedless of the fact that he was also inflicting dreadful wounds on himself, he went on cutting and cutting and cutting…
Detective-Sergeant Bill Myers came out of the bathroom, paused on the landing to light a cigarette, and rejoined his senior officer in the front bedroom. “I’ve been in this business a hell of a long time,” he said, “but those two are enough to make me spew. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“I have,” Inspector Barraclough replied sombrely, nodding at the lifeless figure on the bed. “This is the way we found Hamish Corcoran’s wife a couple of years ago, but we managed to keep the details out of the papers—you know how it is with false confessions and copycat murders these days. It looks as though we’ll be able to close the file on that case, thank God.”
“You think this man Herley was a psycho?”
Barraclough nodded. “He’s obviously been lying low for a couple of years, but we’ve established that he went to Corcoran’s house yesterday. Killing Corcoran must have triggered him off somehow—so he came home and did this.”
“It’s his wife I feel sorry for.” Myers moved closer to the bed and forced himself to examine what lay there, his eyes mirroring unprofessional sympathy. “Skinny little thing, wasn’t she?”