Falls the Shadow (7 page)

He extended a grey hand towards her. Benny took it gratefully then pitched forward into a delirious, psychedelic darkness.

‘How are you feeling?’ Sandra was asking. ‘Any better?’

Justin Cranleigh was feeling better now than he had done for weeks. The pain of his madness had gone. The agonizing, endless headaches; the disjointed thoughts; the voices whispering on the edge of his consciousness. All gone, replaced by a clear head, sharp senses and peace. When he replied his voice was full of energy and confidence.

‘Much better,’ he said, pulling Sandra tighter into a hug and kissing her neck. ‘It’s your influence. You have healing hands. And lips. And thighs. Now we know what to do if I have a relapse.’

He froze, keeping Sandra’s body locked in the embrace, content to feel the shape of her body through her dressing‐
gown. They hadn’t done anything as close as this for almost two years, and Cranleigh wanted to savour every second. He moved to kiss her again but was disturbed by a nagging doubt at the back of his mind.

‘How about you?’ he asked. ‘How are your eyes?’

‘They’re getting better,’ Sandra said, her hand movements slowing to a limp halt. ‘They’ve been fogged up really badly, but they’re clearing again.’

‘Can you see me?’

‘Well enough,’ she replied, placing a hand on the side of his face.

‘I’ve been thinking.’ Cranleigh tried to sound nonchalant. ‘Neither of us are suffering from anything genetic, nothing hereditary, so why don’t we try for a baby?’

The answer came from her hands.

They said
Yes
.

She smiled at him, lips curling, eyes hollow and dormant. Slowly, she began to shuck off her dressing‐
gown, baring her shoulders.

She hadn’t changed in two years. Cranleigh could remember every inch of her body from the last time they’d made love, just before he’d begun the downward spiral into madness. The shape of her body, the texture of her skin, the things they’d said together – alone, in the dark. Everything was the same. She was still beautiful.

There was a small, metal crucifix hanging round her neck by a chain. The shape of the cross lay flat on her chest. An icon – Christ dying for his sins. It was
looking
at him.

What are you smiling for?

‘Ignore me,’ said the icon. ‘I’m just hanging around.’

‘Would you like me to take it off?’ Sandra’s voice seemed distant in contrast to the icon’s clarity. Her hands reached for the chain.

Cranleigh’s nerve went. He stepped away in alarm.

‘I’m just going out for a breath of fresh air,’ he said evenly. ‘I may be some time. Don’t start without me.’ Sandra nodded dreamily and whispered something sensual. Cranleigh flashed a manic grin at her before darting to the door.

It’s a crazy thing, he was telling himself, just a pre‐
coital glitch. It’s been a long time, you’re panicking. Spend five minutes wandering around, getting a grip on yourself. Then back here and get a grip on herself. Okay?

It wasn’t okay. He was going mad again. Irrational desire to rush out of the room when you could be writhing on the bed with the girl of your dreams and some of your nightmares!
That
was mad.

Once outside, out of Sandra’s view, he slumped against the wall and began to shake. He was sweating, breathing heavily. Needed to relax, calm down. Five minutes in the corridor and he’d be feeling better than ever.

The stranger appeared out of the darkness. A short, dark‐
haired man with a lined, intense face. Devious eyes sparkled in deep sockets beneath a pair of bushy, black eyebrows. Dressed in a cream‐
coloured suit that almost shone. Careering down the passageway, without any care for silence or caution, he was the most conspicuous housebreaker Cranleigh had ever seen.

Feeling strength and sanity rushing back to him, he stepped into the path of the intruder. The man ground to a halt, shooting him an unnerving smile.

‘Hello.’ He had a distinct Scots accent. ‘Delighted to meet you at last, you must be…?’

‘Who are you?’ Cranleigh snapped. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Don’t you know?’ the Scottish voice continued smoothly, rattling off sentences at incredible speed. A consummate bluffer, this one. ‘I arrived this evening, I’m a guest here and…’ he trailed off, confronted by the scepticism in Cranleigh’s eyes. ‘I’m the Doctor. Don’t ask for an explanation. You wouldn’t believe it.’

‘Cranleigh?’ Another voice – smooth and familiar – came from the passageway behind him. ‘What’s going on? Who is this?’

Cranleigh turned slightly, keeping a wary eye on the intruder.

Harry Truman stood further down the passage, wearing an immaculate dinner‐
jacket – the closest thing he had to a uniform. He was laden with expensive video equipment and Cranleigh immediately guessed what he’d been doing. Trust
him
to come out unscathed and sane as a house brick! Not that he could show much with his features hidden by that ugly, leering mask.

‘Harry, I’ve just…’ Cranleigh began, before his sanity collapsed.

The relapse came without warning. Suddenly his head was screaming at him. An insect buzzing filled his ears and his vision broke up, fracturing into a thousand – no, infinite – pieces. The mask leered at him, laughing. Giggling and shrieking and howling like a thing possessed. Laughing at him. At his madness. The mask. Truman.

Cranleigh screamed. He launched himself at the man in the dinner‐
jacket, determined to wrench the mask from Truman’s face. Put it on the floor and stamp on it. Crush it the same way that Truman had crushed him. Truman was everything. Truman’s mask was everything. His enemy, at the centre of his world. The Doctor slipped from his memory.

In the long run there was only Truman.

Cranleigh smashed against Truman, sending both reeling. Truman was a larger, stronger man and Cranleigh simply hadn’t the strength to knock him over entirely. But he was tottering, cradling his video camera like a baby. Seeing his enemy defenceless and off‐
balance, Cranleigh leapt again, lunging at Truman’s mask, trying to dig his fingers into the eye sockets, wrench it away, see the real face of the real enemy.

Behind them, the Doctor slipped away, back towards the stairs. Cranleigh neither knew nor cared.

Ace had seen a small part of the house but she could tell that it was bloody weird. She’d been scouring the passageways for Bernice, mapping out a floor plan in her head. It would come in useful when she explored some of the lower levels. The problem was…

The problem was that, though she knew she was branching out and exploring new ground, it looked as if she was going round in circles. She’d head off down a corridor which she knew led to a blank in her mental map, only to find herself in a part of the building which she had explored before. She’d wander into a room already searched, which should be on the other side of the house. Finding herself back at the stairwell, she decided to walk in an unbroken straight line until she reached the house wall. She ended up back at the stairs.

Well weird. No wonder Benny was lost.

Most of the rooms she’d seen were decorated. Bedrooms, a living room, a study, a cramped bathroom. Proof that this was someone’s home. Ace didn’t worry about it. So long as she was careful she wouldn’t get caught. And she was careful.

This latest room was new to her. It was a nursery. A tiny room crushed into a corner of the house. The room was darkening – evening gloom filtering through a stained‐
glass window that was set high in one wall. The window was covered in a screen of cobwebs, but was still beautiful, its colours undiminished by time. Evidently the room hadn’t been used for years; the furniture was buried under a fine layer of dust; the air was musty and still; complex cobweb patterns accumulated in the corners. There probably hadn’t been any children in this house for a long time. Despite this, the room was preserved – furniture, toys, books, a cot and everything – probably the same as it had been for decades. A mobile hung from the ceiling, its movement clogged by web. A pile of threadbare dolls and teddy bears sat in the cot, glaring at Ace with glass eyeballs. An elegant rocking‐
horse gathered dust in a corner, beside a derelict doll’s house. A chart was nailed to the wall – A for apple, B for baby. Kid’s stuff. Someone trying to hang onto their past.

Ace had hated being a kid, but felt a sudden pang of nostalgia for a less complicated time, for something she’d lost. Then she felt a shiver of apprehension, as if something terrible and tragic had once happened in this room. Something that couldn’t bear being disturbed.

The silence was broken by a light giggle. The sound of a young girl playing. It was too perfect, too stilted to be natural. It was like an old, worn tape‐
recording. Disembodied laughter. Ace wheeled slowly, casting around for the sound.

The window. It was coming from the window, which was now looking much cleaner than it had done before. The cobwebs were gone, melted away, and the glass was… moving.

The colours of the glass were swirling in a lazy, whirlpool motion, bleeding into each other, forming shapes. Figures, landscapes, profiles. The giggling grew louder as the colours began to swirl faster. The effect was hypnotic, Ace watched warily. Suddenly the colour drained out of the window entirely. The glass darkened, deepened, emptied. The window became black. Ace’s features reflected starkly on the dark surface.

Ace watched it closely before realizing that nothing more was going to happen. Not yet. Not while she was there. She slipped back into the passage, making a note of the nursery’s position on her mental map. She’d be back.

There were sculptures in the cellar. Two vaguely man‐
shaped figures standing upright in the darkness. Both statues were half‐
finished, their shells broken with cavities or missing limbs or parts of the head.

The lights buzzed around the sculptures, refining their creations. They were making good progress. Bernice had proved an amusing diversion, but it hadn’t slowed the sculpting. The structures would be finished within an hour.

As they worked, they communed. The occupants of the house, the time travellers, all offered ample variety – but there was a need for flavouring. A disruptive element. A random particle.
Yes
.

Suddenly Jane Page was lying face down on the ground, her hair filthy with mud and her head groaning with pain. For a moment she didn’t want to move. She wanted to lie still and die. Not an auspicious place to go, but better than in bed.

Eventually the pain subsided and she staggered to her feet. She was surprised by how stiff she felt – as if she hadn’t moved for years – and though the headache had gone, there was now an incomprehensible song playing in her head.

Maybe when she fell over she’d hit her head and tuned herself in to a pirate radio station. She did her best to ignore it, wiping the mud from her hair and wondering how the hell she had managed to fall over in the first place.

She couldn’t remember. It was all blank, which was not good. She’d got into a fight in Liechtenstein six weeks earlier, been beaten up pretty badly. She’d passed the medical afterwards, but what if this was something longterm? What if she had memory loss for the rest of her life? Her career was screwed!

That reminded her. From the look of things, this was the woods around the enemy’s house. This path she was on, she remembered, eventually joined up with a lane leading to his front door.

She pulled open her trench‐
coat and reached inside, fingers brushing against the reassuring square shape tucked under her shoulder. Good. Should be an easy one. Guy was a cripple, wasn’t he? She pulled the shape from its holster in readiness. It was the right weight in her hand. She tightened her coat against the rain and set off, humming an accompaniment to the song in her head. It had begun to repeat itself.

The man in grey was shambling up the hill to the woods. From a distance, he would have seemed almost invisible in the deepening darkness. If they were concentrating, watchers might pick out a patch of artificial grey moving against the hillside, but little more than that.

In a darkened room at the back of the house someone was watching the grey man. They stared through cold binocular lenses. Their vision wasn’t perfect, but they could see far closer, in greater detail, than would be apparent to the naked eye.

The watcher’s vigil was interrupted by a voice from the doorway, the creamy tones of Harry Truman. He’d burst into the room without knocking, something he only did rarely. The watcher turned slowly.

‘What was it like?’ his voice was soft.

‘Boring. Lots of empty white spaces,’ Truman replied. He tapped at the camera he was cuddling. ‘I doubt the tape’s going to be very exciting, sir.’

‘I’ll watch it anyway.’ The watcher absorbed the brief account. ‘Leave it on the table.

‘He’s back,’ Truman’s employer continued evenly. ‘The man in grey. I’ve just seen him up on the hill. I wonder what he wants?’

Truman looked up sharply, as sharp as his mask could convey.

‘I should have told you earlier,’ he said, voice fluctuating and full of unease, ‘Cranleigh caught a burglar. Then let him go again,’ he added lamely.

‘When and where?’ the watcher asked calmly.

‘The cellar, five minutes ago. He could be out of the house by now.’

‘But he might still be inside,’ the watcher responded, gliding forward to examine the video equipment. ‘Did he seem violent?’

‘He looked as if he’d fall over in a breeze. He’s very conspicuous too. Cranleigh and I’ll go after him.’

‘Cranleigh?’ the watcher frowned. ‘Okay, but be on your guard. He might not look dangerous, but… you know. And keep an eye on Cranleigh.’

Truman withdrew. The watcher scrabbled at the video, punching impatiently at the eject button. The cassette hatch swung open smoothly, revealing a melted mess of plastic where the tape should have been. The watcher placed a tentative finger on the shapeless lump, then pulled it back hastily. The remains of the tape were cool but fluid, and a perfect fingerprint was now impressed onto its side.

The grey man had reached into the woman’s mind and closed off those areas of her memory causing her distress. When she woke, she would forget. The memories would return slowly. They would disturb but not panic her. He decided against taking her into the house, preferring to leave her, sheltered from the rain, by the conservatory door. Certain she was safe, he withdrew to his vantage point on the hill.