I just about caught a blur of movement from off to my right-hand side, and I started to turn. His shoulder hit me midchest, knocking the breath right out of me and sending me backward in a drunken, flailing stagger. One step, two . . . I would probably have managed to get my balance back if there’d been anything under me on step three. Instead, my trailing foot stepped out into nothingness, and I tipped and fell without a sound off the edge of the landing.
I’m too introspective, maybe, to make a good man of action. Certainly on that short fall, I didn’t have enough time even to react to what was happening. I remember throwing out my arms as if there might be something conveniently placed for me to catch hold of. Only empty air rushed through my fingers, and I closed my eyes, bracing myself—metaphorically speaking—for a solid chunk of marble tiling to rush through my head.
But something writhed out of the shadows to one side of me like the business end of a lash, thwacking solidly against my chest and the side of my head and then snaking around me once, twice, three times. Along the line where it touched me, fire ate its way inward from my skin to my core, and I opened my mouth to scream.
The sickening jolt as I stopped falling turned the scream into a voiceless bullet of breath that shot through my clenched teeth and ricocheted away into the darkness. I dangled for a moment like the bob on the end of a pendulum telling borrowed time. Then the rope loosened and unraveled from around me, and I fell the remaining few feet to the ground.
I landed heavily on the cold tiles, unable for a moment even to suck breath back into my lungs. Someone ran past me, and I got a blurry view of his back as he sped through the open door.
By the time I could get back on my feet and stagger to the door, there was no sign of anybody out on Churchway. A sudden gust of cold wind blew newspaper pages and Styrofoam burger boxes along the pavement, and that was the only movement. After a few moments to get my breath back to normal, I went back inside and climbed the stairs back up to the attic. This time, though, I turned on the lights—so this time, I saw the short dogleg at the end of the corridor, off to the left, that I’d missed the first time around.
There was another door there, too, off the end of the dogleg, and so on the same line as the other left-hand rooms, but maybe slightly smaller. This was where my attacker had hidden—after pushing open another door on the main corridor so that I’d be that bit more likely to turn my back on him before I reached him. Clever guy. Clever and scared and just a bit desperate. Someone who had taken advantage of the archive being open after hours to slip back inside and . . . well, and what?
I tried the door. It opened like all the others, and there was a functional light switch just inside. It showed me a room no different from any of the ones I’d already seen. No shelves this time, but a big bundle of flat-packed storage boxes tied with string stood propped against one wall. On the floor there was a roll of brown parcel tape and a plastic supermarket bag that, on inspection, proved to be stuffed with a great many other plastic supermarket bags. No big revelations here. Maybe the guy had just retreated in front of me as I came up the stairs until he ran out of space to retreat into and came out fighting. They say you ought to be careful when you corner rats.
But there was a cupboard. I only saw it as I turned to leave, because it was a low, squat sort of cupboard, and it was completely hidden behind the door. I pulled on the handle: locked. I probably had the key that would open it sitting right there on Alice’s key ring, but my hands were shaking from my recent air-miss, and it could take me a long time to find it—with the risk that someone down below would see the light where no light should be and draw the wrong conclusion. All in all, it was probably better to wait.
I went downstairs, let myself out, and locked up. I was about to post Alice’s keys and ID card back through the mail slot, but I yielded to a wicked temptation and put them back in my pocket instead. You never knew.
I was intending to go home, but somehow I found myself heading south instead of north. Just down from Russell Square, I found a late-night bar that was still open, went in, and ordered a whisky sour.
I was bone weary, and I wasn’t thinking all that straight, but coming to the archive by night had succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. It wasn’t some freak accident that had tangled me up in the ropes of the builders’ pulley. It wasn’t the air that had held me and stopped me from falling. It was her. And in wrapping herself around me like that, she’d come in so close that I couldn’t possibly fail to get what I needed. I had her now, had her mapped out in my mind in many dimensions—a vivid sensory snapshot of her essence and her parameters that was untranslatable except into music and that I could no more forget than I could forget my own name.
I toasted myself in silence. They think it’s all over, said Ken Wolstenholme’s voice from deep within the dusty archive of my head.
Well, it is now.
Eleven
OVER THERE,” WHISPERED JOHN GITTINGS. “IN THE corner, behind the hedge.”
I looked where he was pointing and saw nothing. But then a second later, the leaves of the box hedge rustled again, although there wasn’t the slightest breath of wind. One of the keepers raised his rifle, and I pushed it right back down again.
“You don’t even know what you’d be hitting,” I muttered. “You’d look pretty bloody stupid if it was a peacock.”
John and I exchanged a glance as the keeper shipped his rifle again with obvious resentment. “Pincer movement?” John asked.
“Makes sense,” I said. “I’m going to go around the zebra house and use the back wall for cover. You come in along the line of the hedge on this side, but don’t get in too close. When I round that corner, we should see each other. I’ll give you the high sign, and we both start playing at once.”
John nodded tersely. I turned to the head keeper, a guy named Savage. He wasn’t carrying a rifle, and he seemed to be the only one of the zoo staff who didn’t want to play Buffalo Bill. “The music should drive him out toward you,” I said. “He won’t be able to stick to the hedge because he’ll be hurting too much. If we’re lucky, he’ll just break across the grass, and you can pop him at your leisure.”
“That seems easy enough,” Savage acknowledged.
“Yeah, it does, doesn’t it? Only if we hit the wrong key, he’ll turn around and tear our throats out.”
“He” was a loup-garou, and I was moonlighting. John’s call had come in at seven in the morning, when I was just surfacing from shallow sleep and another set of very nasty dreams. Pen had relayed the message, expecting me to say some pithier equivalent of “No, thank you”—and was amazed when I passed back the answer that I’d be there inside of an hour.
It’s a character flaw, I know. When I’m unhappy about something, I pick a fight, and that morning, I was in such a lousy mood, I’d have taken a swing at John “The Quietman” Ruiz. So all things considered, the other John’s invitation to come and help him corner a werewolf at Dunstable Zoo had come as something of a relief.
Were-something, anyway. They didn’t know exactly what they had, because all they’d seen were the savaged carcasses of five animals: three wallabies, a zebra, and most recently a lion. So we were talking about something vicious and fast that didn’t care what it killed, and now they thought they had it cornered in a stand of trees at the back of the site between the rhino enclosure and a high wall that backed onto the main A-road beyond. The keepers had closed in with tranquilizer guns, but they couldn’t flush the loup-garou, and they didn’t want to go in blind.
So here I was. It was therapy, really—a way of keeping busy without facing the things that were really bugging me. If it left me alive and in one piece, I’d be laughing.