The writer clamped his eyes shut, screwing up the lids until white stars danced in the blackness. He raised both hands to his head and sucked in a deep breath.
‘No,’ he rasped.
When he opened his eyes again the corpse was gone. Nothing remained in the bath but the water. No bloated body. No deceased look-alike. Just water.
Blake swallowed hard and reached out a hand tentatively towards the surface of the water, staring intently at it as if he expected the apparition to appear again.
He heard soft chuckling and snapped his head around.
It was coming from the bedroom.
The writer felt peculiarly vulnerable and he found his breath coming in low, irregular gasps. He edged towards the bathroom door gripped by a hand of fear which tightened its hold as he drew closer.
Again he heard chuckling.
By this time, his fear had gradually become anger and he stepped into the room without hesitation.
It was empty.
He walked across to the bed. Checked the wardrobes. Passed through into the other part of the room which served as a sitting room.
Empty.
Blake looked around him, wiping perspiration from his face. He was alone in the apartment. He headed back towards the bathroom but, as he reached the door he slowed his pace, his eyes scanning the bath anxiously.
There was no corpse floating there.
The writer licked his lips, finding that his mouth was dry and chalky. He crossed to the sink and spun the tap swallowing large gulps of cold water, then he turned towards the steaming tub once more.
The water looked inviting enough but it was a long time before he would step into it.
Oxford
‘There was so much blood. It was everywhere. All over the floor and the bed.
There was even some on the wall. It wasn’t at all like you see on films or the television. When I shot her in the face her head just seemed to cave in and then the blood started spurting everywhere. I suppose that’s how it got on the wall over the bed, it was like a fountain, especially from her neck. I suppose that’s where the pellets hit her jugular vein. That is the big vein isn’t it?
The jugular? You see when you fire a shotgun at someone from close range there isn’t time for the shot to spread. A shotgun cartridge is full of thousands of little lead pellets but, when you fire from close range, well, it all comes out in one lump. And I was standing very close to her. I had the barrel about an inch from her face.
‘There was some thick, sticky looking stuff on the pillow. It was sort of greyish pink. I think it must have been her brain. I’d seen sheeps’ brains in butchers’ shops and it looked a bit like that so I suppose it must have been her brain. Anyway, when I went to move the body this sticky stuff got on my hands. It felt like … like porridge. I left her on the bed in the end.
‘The baby had woken up, I suppose it was the noise of the gun. It was crying, not loudly, just the way it does when it wants feeding. F
went into the nursery and picked him up but he wouldn’t stop crying. Perhaps
he was frightened of the blood and the smell. That’s another thing they never tell you on the TV. Blood smells. It smells like copper. When there’s lots of it.
‘Well, I just dropped the baby on its head. It didn’t move after that so I thought it was dead. I picked it up again and took it back to the bedroom and put it on the bed beside my wife.
‘I’d left the hacksaw under the bed earlier so I … I only had to decide which one to start with. I cut up the baby first. The left arm to start with.
I cut it off just below the shoulder but as I started cutting it screamed. I think the bang on the head only stunned it. The arm was almost off when it started to scream but it didn’t move again after that. I cut off its right leg at the hip. It was easy, I suppose it’s because the bones are still soft with babies. It wasn’t even a year old you see. There was more blood, more than I’d expected. Especially when I cut the head off. It’s funny isn’t it? You wouldn’t think a body that small could hold that much blood.
‘I left the pieces on the bed then I started on my wife. It was harder cutting her leg off, sawing through the bone was like cutting wood but the noise was different, a kind of squeaking and all this brown stuff dribbled out of the bone. Was that the marrow? I suppose it was. Well, it took me nearly an hour to cut them both up and I was sweating when I’d finished. Butchers must be really fit, I mean, they cut up meat every day don’t they? I was tired when I’d finished and I noticed that there was some … mess … well excrement.
You know … faeces on the bed. I didn’t know that happened when someone died.
That they sh— that they messed themselves.
i cut one of my wife’s breasts off. I don’t know why. Just to see what it was like I suppose. I expected it to puncture like a balloon, you would wouldn’t you? But it didn’t. I just cut most of it away and left it with the other pieces. So much blood though. So much blood. Funny really.’
Kelly Hunt reached forward and switched off the tape recorder.
She had heard that particular tape half a dozen times in the last week. This had been the first time she’d managed to sit through it without feeling sick. She pressed the ‘rewind’ button and the recorder squealed as the spools spun in reverse. She stopped it, pressed ‘play”.
‘… So much blood. Funny really.’
She heard her own voice.
‘And the dream is always the same?’
‘Always. It never varies. Every detail’s the same.’
She switched it off again and ran a hand through her shoulder length brown hair.
Beside the tape recorder on the desk in front of her there was a manilla file and Kelly flicked it open. It contained details of the voice which she’d been hearing on the recording, facts and figures which made that voice a human being. To be precise, Maurice Grant, aged thirty-two. An unemployed lathe operator by trade. Married for ten years to a woman four years younger than himself named Julie. They had a ten-month-old baby, Mark.
Kelly had been working with Grant, or rather studying him, for the last seven days. The recording was one of many which she and her colleagues had made.
She scanned the rest of the file which contained further personal details about Grant.
He’d been unemployed for the last six months and, during that time, relations both with Julie and their baby had become somewhat strained. Kelly tapped the file with the end of her pencil. And now the dreams. Grant always described them as dreams — never nightmares — though God alone knew that what he experienced during sleep was the stuff of nightmares. His detached attitude was unnerving. The tape recordings were made while Grant slept. By a combination of drugs, he could be unconscious and yet able to speak and to relay what he saw in his dreams. Dreams had been studied and monitored in the past, Kelly was well aware of that, but never before had the subject actually, been able to speak whilst in that dream state, to describe the events as dispassionately as if he had been a mere observer.
In order to achieve this state, Grant was given a shot of Tubarine, a muscle relaxant usually used in medicine with a general anaesthetic, which would induce sleep. Prior to that, he would receive 45mg of methylphenidate orally.
The drug was a derivative of amphetamine, designed to stimulate the brain. By this combination, Grant could be forced to dream. His observations would then be recorded as he saw them in his mind’s eye.
Kelly knew, from what she had read in the file, that Grant and his wife had rowed constantly during the months leading up to his arrival at the Institute.
Their marriage was virtually in ruins and Grant sometimes spoke of her with ill-disguised anger. An attitude mirrored, subconsciously, in his dreams.