He was still yards away from the police station when his foot faltered on the accelerator. The car shuddered and tried to jerk forward, but that was no use. The nearer he came to the police station, the weaker his instinct became. Was it being suppressed by his nervousness? Whatever the reason, he could guide nobody except himself.
As soon as he turned the car the urgency seized him. It was agonizing now. It rushed him out of the center of Chester, into streets of small houses and shops that looked dusty as furniture shoved out of sight in an attic. They were deserted except for a man in an ankle-length overcoat, who limped by like a sack with a head.
Miles stamped on the brake as the car passed the mouth of an alley. Snatching the keys, he slammed the door and ran into the alley, between two shops whose posters looked ancient and faded like Victorian photographs. The walls of the alley were chunks of spiky darkness above which cramped windows peered, but he didn’t need to see to know where he was going.
He was shocked to find how slowly he had to run, how out of condition he was. His lungs seemed to be filling with lumps of rust, his throat was scraped raw. He was less running than staggering forward. Amid the uproar of his senses, it took him a while to feel that he was too late.
He halted as best he could. His feet slithered on the uneven flagstones, his hands clawed at the walls. As soon as he began to listen he wished he had not. Ahead in the dark, there was a faint incessant shriek that seemed to be trying to emerge from more than one mouth. He knew there was only one victim.
Before long he made out a dark object farther down the alley. In fact it was two objects, one of which lay on the flagstones while the other rose to its feet, a dull gleam in its hand. A moment later the figure with the gleam was fleeing, its footsteps flapping like wings between the close walls.
The shrieking had stopped. The dark object lay still. Miles forced himself forward, to see what he’d failed to prevent. As soon as he’d glimpsed it he staggered away, choking back a scream.
He’d achieved nothing except to delay writing out the rest of the horrors. They were breeding faster in his skull, which felt as though it were cracking. He drove home blindly. The hedgerows and the night had merged into a dark mass that spilled toward the road, smudging its edges. Perhaps he might crash—but he wasn’t allowed that relief, for the nightmares were herding him back to his desk.
The scratching of his pen, and a low half-articulate moaning which he recognized sometimes as his voice, kept him company. Next day the snap of the letter box made him drop his pen; otherwise he might not have been able to force himself away from the desk.
The package contained the first issue of Ghastly. “Hope you like it,” the editor gushed. “It’s already been banned in some areas, which has helped sales no end. You’ll see we announce your stories as coming attractions, and we look forward to publishing them.” On the cover the girl was still writhing, but the contents were far worse. Miles had read only a paragraph when he tore the glossy pages into shreds.
How could anyone enjoy reading that? The pebbledashed houses of Neston gleamed innocently back at him. Who knew what his neighbors read behind their locked doors? Perhaps in time some of them would gloat over his pornographic horrors, reassuring themselves that this was only horror fiction, not pornography at alclass="underline" just as he’d reassured himself that they were only stories now, nothing to do with reality—certainly nothing to do with him, the pseudonym said so—
The Neston houses gazed back at him, self-confident and bland: they looked as convinced of their innocence as he was trying to feel—and all at once he knew where the nightmares were coming from.
He couldn’t see how that would help him. Before he’d begun to suffer from his writer’s block, there had been occasions when a story had surged up from his unconscious and demanded to be written. Those stories had been products of his own mind, yet he couldn’t shake them off except by writing—but now he was suffering nightmares on behalf of the world.
No wonder they were so terrible, and that they were growing worse. If material repressed into the unconscious was bound to erupt in some less manageable form, how much more powerful that must be when the unconscious was collective! Precisely because people were unable to come to terms with the crimes, repudiated them as utterly inhuman or simply unimaginable, the horrors would reappear in a worse form and possess whoever they pleased. He remembered thinking that the patterns of life in the tower blocks had something to do with the West Derby murder. They had, of course. Everything had.
And now the repressions were focused on him. There was no reason why they should ever leave him; on the contrary, they seemed likely to grow more numerous and more peremptory. Was he releasing them by writing them out, or was the writing another form of repudiation?
One was still left in his brain. It felt like a boil in his skull. Suddenly he knew that he wasn’t equal to writing it out, whatever else might happen. Had his imagination burned out at last? He would be content never to write another word. It occurred to him that the book he’d discussed with Hugo was just another form of rejection: knowing you were reading about real people reassured you they were other than yourself.
He slumped at his desk. He was a burden of flesh that felt encrusted with grit. Nothing moved except the festering nightmare in his head. Unless he got rid of it somehow, it felt as though it would never go away. He’d failed twice to intervene in reality, but need he fail again? If he succeeded, was it possible that might change things for good?
He was at the front door when the phone rang. Was it Susie? If she knew what was filling his head, she would never want to speak to him again. He left the phone ringing in the dark house and fled to his car.
The pain in his skull urged him through the dimming fields and villages to Birkenhead, where it seemed to abandon him. Not that it had faded—his mind felt like an abscessed tooth—but it was no longer able to guide him. Was something anxious to prevent him from reaching his goal?
The bare streets of warehouses and factories and terraces went on for miles, brick-red slabs pierced far too seldom by windows. At the peak hour the town center grew black with swarms of people, the Mersey Tunnel drew in endless sluggish segments of cars. He drove jerkily, staring at faces.
Eventually he left the car in Hamilton Square, overlooked by insurance offices caged by railings, and trudged toward the docks. Except for his footsteps, the streets were deserted. Perhaps the agony would be cured before he arrived wherever he was going. He was beyond caring what that implied.
It was dark now. At the ends of rows of houses whose doors opened onto cracked pavement he saw docked ships, glaring metal mansions. Beneath the iron mesh of swing bridges, a scum of neon light floated on the oily water. Sunken rails snagged his feet. In pubs on street corners he heard tribes of dockers, a sullen wordless roar that sounded like a warning. Out here the moan of a ship on the Irish Sea was the only voice he heard.
When at last he halted, he had no idea where he was. The pavement on which he was walking was eaten away by rubbly ground; he could smell collapsed buildings. A roofless house stood like a rotten tooth, lit by a single streetlamp harsh as lightning. Streets still led from the opposite pavement, and despite the ache—which had aborted nearly all his thoughts—he knew that the street directly opposite was where he must go.
There was silence. Everything was yet to happen. The lull seemed to give him a brief chance to think. Suppose he managed to prevent it? Repressing the ideas of the crimes only made them erupt in a worse form—how much worse might it be to repress the crimes themselves?