Kristin (3 page)

Six

He couldn’t remember asking her to stay.
Three weeks later she was still there and the arrangement seemed permanent. He
took her shopping, bought her anything that was still obtainable: clothes,
make-up, perfume — things she’d never had and knew nothing of.

The world crisis eased.
Fearful of pre-emptive strikes, the eastern antagonists had backed down. But
peace maintained by the promise of aggression is always fragile and humanity
continued to hold its breath, awaiting resolution, or oblivion.

The morning of the eighth of February would
be one
that
Thom would never forget. It was the beginning.

He picked up a loaf of
wholemeal bread, some dates, a few toiletries, plus a bottle of bourbon and
handed Tariq Akhtar a fifty pound note.

On his doorstep he inserted
the brass key into the lock, turned it a double-click counterclockwise and
pushed open the door. Something had altered. Irrevocably. It was cold and
still, like something lay dead inside. Thom called out her name but she didn’t
answer. He climbed the stairs: when he reached the top and crossed the landing
he would find her in the lounge, sprawled upon the red leather sofa she adored,
or perched at the kitchen table drinking coffee, to which she’d become addicted.
But she was in neither place and the silence hung in the air like a lead
curtain. The rush of blood pressure filled his ears.

Then it started ... the
most disturbing sound he'd ever heard.

He followed it to the
bedroom and put his ear to the closed door. Guttural croaking, like an
iniquitous prayer, came from inside. ‘ ...
Kristin
?’ he choked.

The mantra continued.

‘Kristin!’ He rapped on the
door and the murmuring stopped.

Thom rested his hand on the
handle and pulled it away fast;
it was freezing.
Quickly, he levered the handle
downwards and threw the door open.

She was sitting on the edge
of the bed, eyes bloodshot, skin as white as a spectre, her complexion waxen.

‘ ... I heard something ...
a noise ... a voice?’ he stuttered.

She stared inanely at him,
her left eyelid drooping, and he wondered if she’d suffered a stroke, like his
mother? The symptoms were identical.

‘Kristin!’ he shouted,
shaking her shoulders. ‘Are you all right?’

Her mouth gaped lopsidedly,
unnaturally dark spittle leaking from the corner.

‘Kristin!’ His eyes darted
around the room. They froze upon sparkling, metallic beads that ran down the
window wall. The beads gained in mass as they neared the floor, forming a
rivulet that flowed over the skirting board and onto the carpet, where they’d
solidified.

Standing before the wall he
reached forwards and touched the lump; it was as cold as ice. Behind him,
Kristin moaned.

Something was missing.
The crucifix.
The silver crucifix his mother had given him the day his father died
. A
chill blew through his soul. He screwed up his face; it would have taken a
blowtorch to reduce the heirloom to this, but there were no burns on the
wallpaper. There was no sign of heat at all.

He pulled his jumper sleeve
over his hand and prized the silver from the
 
wall. It left no mark. ‘Kristin ...
 
what happened ... what happened to
this?’ he shouted.

Her head dropped. Her whole
body shook.

‘Did you hear me? Kristin
...
Kristin
!’

‘Melting, running, dying,’
she mumbled, her lips thinning aggressively. Something jerked her head up by
her hair and she gasped with shock, her cast monochromatic, her black eyes
enlarging disproportionately.

He backed away and dropped
the molten cross.

‘ ...
Yoooou
!’ seethed a voice born of hell. She
brought her hands to her face, emitted a primal scream and flew backwards onto
the bed as if
  
caught by a
violent, unexpected blow to her head.

Darkness fell. Whatever possessed her had
gone.
But he
could not stay with her that night.
He made his bed on the lounge floor,
next to the double radiator. Swaddled in a reeking, moth-eaten sleeping bag he
downed two food-spattered cans of strong beer he’d found at the back of the
fridge, lay back on a cushion and lit a cigarette.

His hands still shook. He
would never understand what had happened in the bedroom. It defied
understanding. All he knew was that for a few, terrifying
 
moments she’d become something that
didn’t belong in this world, something from another, abhorrent reality,
something anathema to him, that sickened him to the core of his being. Fatigue
overcame him.

In the early hours of the
morning, as the sun cast its first milky rays upon his face he dreamt again,
but not of war or destruction. Banging, clawing, like something desperately
trying to escape captivity invaded his subconscious mind. At first it was
incidental, irritating, like a mouse scratching at a floorboard, but quickly
grew to a frenzied, mammalian crescendo. Then it stopped. He groaned, rolled
onto his side and his imaginings faded.

Some hours later he blinked awake. The sun
was higher in the sky and its warm radiance filled the room. The television
boomed from the lounge.

Thom entered the room and
sat at the table at far end of the room, staring at the back of her head. She
didn’t move.

In a special feature the
Archbishop of Canterbury, Aldous Waldegrave, was in mid-conversation with the
BBC current affairs presenter, Douglas Jennings. ‘ ... So what you’re saying,
Archbishop, is that man is not in control of his own destiny, that this is
ultimately decided by God?’

‘Yes, indeed.’

‘ … But the terrible
weapons of destruction that endanger the world have been built by the hand of
man, to destroy man.’

‘That is so, but remember
that God is inside each of us.’

Jennings, a lifelong atheist,
shifted in his chair. ‘ ... Well then maybe
God
is responsible for the weapons that
threaten his own creation, Archbishop?’

‘You misunderstand. I’m
saying that God resides within all of us, within every man, woman and child on
this Earth,
even
within non-believers such as yourself
, and he will not allow a holocaust to
annihilate his creation.’

Kristin’s back stiffened.

‘ ... But we must all help
God, we must look into our hearts, our souls and do what is right.’

‘Fucking heretic!’ grunted
the dry, inhuman voice.

Thom stood abruptly. He
crossed the room, passing slowly around her until he saw a face drained of all
colour.

‘ ... So inside Kim Hae
Kyong,’ Jennings persisted, ‘Within the hearts of
 
the terrorists in the Middle East, inside people such as these,
you believe there is goodness, you believe there is God?’

‘Yes, God is present, he is
always present.’

Thom recoiled as her eyes
skinned over, whitening like a cooked fish.

‘ ... And it is my firm
belief that our Lord Jesus Christ will be our redeemer, as he was two thousand
years ago.’

Kristin howled like a
banshee as a web of black veins appeared on her temples. She staggered to the
window clutching her head and stared down onto the street below, her eyes
charged with loathing. He followed her, stiff and pale as a wraith.

From behind the beech tree
on the corner a figure shuffled into view, dressed in black. He knew the old
woman — a nun from St Magdalene’s Convent.

Kristin began to cry
through her rage. Tears coursed down her blanched cheeks from swollen eyes. She
gripped the sharp, bare wood of the sill like a vice, her blood blackening as
it spotted the blue carpet.

Suddenly, the nun groped at
her left arm, her legs buckled and she crumbled to the hard stone.

In the road, Thom cradled the head of the
stricken woman in his arms. ‘CALL AN AMBULANCE ... QUICKLY!’ he pleaded, but
Kristin stood impassively on the other side of the glass, and there was nobody
else to hear him. ‘Can I do anything to help?’ he asked the nun. She focused on
his face and her eyes stared wide with shock that transformed into pleasure
she’d never know before.

‘ ... You have already
helped me,’ she smiled weakly. ‘Thank you my saviour ... my Lord.’

Her smile endured when she
slipped away from the troubled world around her moments later.

An ambulance arrived, called for by a Polish
student from a basement flat a few doors away. Then a police car. A medic leapt
from the ambulance and crouched, feeling for a pulse.

‘ ... You’re too late, I’m
afraid,’ Thom said.

‘Can you tell me what
happened, sir?’ the police officer asked.

He shook his head.

‘Did you see the incident?’

‘From up there.’

The officer fixed his eyes
on the window.

‘ ... Did the young lady
see the incident, sir?’

He hesitated. ‘Yeah ... she
saw it.’

The medic pulled a trolley
from the vehicle and the officer helped him lift the nun’s body onto it before
pulling out a notebook.

‘Can you tell me what you
saw, sir?’

‘I think it was a heart
attack. She went down suddenly.’

‘Cardiac arrest,’ the medic
confirmed. ‘Usually fatal at this age.’ He covered her over with a grey blanket
and secured thick, leather straps to hold her body in place. Then they slid the
trolley into the ambulance.

The police officer walked
forwards in silence and stopped beneath the
 
window. He met Kristin’s gaze and stood motionless.

A white light dazzled from
behind the window pane. Something seemed to force the officer’s head to one
side and he struggled to keep his balance. His face distorted. Without uttering
another word he returned to his car and drove away. The ambulance followed,
then the student, and Thom was alone in the street.

He climbed the stairs and
looked into the lounge. She hadn’t moved. He spoke her name but she didn’t
respond. He moved closer, tried again, but
 
she stood in silence, possessed.

Thom retreated to the
bedroom, closed the door and sat on the bed, burying his face in his hands.
He’d never seen any one having a heart attack before, had never seen anybody
die, never imagined he would hold somebody in his arms as they died:
It had to be
sheer coincidence that the nun had suffered the attack where and when she did.
There wasn
’
t
any other explanation.
“
My saviour ... my Lord
?” His head spun.

He looked straight ahead
and seized.

Long gashes disfigured the
Indian hardwood door. There were traces of dried blood within the grotesque
grooves. On the carpet lay a small, shiny object, flecked with remnants of a
black coating. He picked it up and placed it in the palm of his hand. One end
was ragged, bloody.
It was a fingernail
.

Thom left the bedroom and
opened the lounge door. She was lying in a crumpled heap beneath the window.
Her flesh looked bloodless. Quickly, he felt her wrists — her pulse was
strong. He carried her to the bedroom, lay her on the bed and picked up the
bedside phone to call for a doctor, but she started to come round, extending
her tongue like a lizard. He poured her a scotch, lifting her head to help her
drink and she coughed her way through it, regaining consciousness. Something
made him glance at her fingers — the nails were all intact, manicured
with glossy black polish, and he cursed his doubt, his growing insanity:
But the little
fingernail of her right hand bore no polish.

At four-thirty, as she slept, the telephone
rang.

‘Hello, Mr Sharman?’

‘Yes.’

‘My name is Carl Weston,
I’m the director of Blackheath Royal Infirmary.’

‘
Yes
?’

‘It’s concerning Mother
Superior Mary Clayton. I understand you were the first one on the scene?’

‘I’ve known only one other
case of this type in over forty years of practice but it
can
happen, and it’s always a shock when
it does.’

He listened intently.

‘The mother superior’s body
was placed in a casket pending post-mortem — routine under the
circumstances of her death. Well, the thing is that as
 
the mortician was leaving the morgue he
heard a sound. He traced it to the mother superior’s casket and opened it and,
well, Mr Sharman, her heart had apparently restarted and despite the length of
time her brain was without oxygen, more than two hours, there was no evidence
of cerebral damage. In this regard we believe medical history has been made.