by Will Carver
I save it until last because the attempt is more likely to happen at night. If Yule is the year’s midnight, Mabon is seen as the sunset. So I believe Celeste will wait until dusk.
When we arrive at the venue of Totty’s final breath, it yields the same results as every other location. I had hoped she would come back to the place that I failed.
Then it hits me.
She will return to the place that she failed.
Brooke’s apartment.
The pin that was not pushed into the map. It does not form any kind of pattern, it was merely missing. The key to solving this case was not to look at the things we can see, but that which we cannot.
Paulson and I jump back into my car and head for Brooke’s flat. I call Alison en route and explain to her. She tells me that she is right by that location and will see me when I arrive.
I finally get that one piece of luck I have been waiting for all along, the spark of inspiration.
My phone flashes the name Murphy and I have to pick it up.
‘Jan.’ He speaks urgently before I even have a chance to answer.
‘What have you got, Murph?’ I leave all animosity out of this exchange.
‘Two calls have come in. One from a man saying the woman from the newspaper is inside his flat and wants to kill him. Another from a neighbour who says she can hear screaming.’
‘Fuck. What’s the address?’ I ask, sitting upright in my seat, Paulson’s bloodshot eyes peering back at me, his mouth open and ready to ask a question.
Murphy tells me that he is already on his way there.
And the animosity returns. He wants the credit for this one.
But the address is so close to where Paulson and I are that we should get there first. We’re heading in that direction anyway.
It is the same street as Brooke’s apartment.
Celeste is returning to her Litha foundering.
For one joyful, minuscule moment of time I forget about Audrey, my mother, the disappearance of The Two and my yo-yoing popularity within the force. The only thing I am concerned with is saving the man that put in the call and ending Celeste’s reign of terror. I hang up without saying anything else and tell Paulson to push his foot through the floor, we can stop this.
I call Higgs and tell him to get himself and some men over to Brooke’s address still; she has more to explain, they need to bring her in for questioning. Then I redial Alison with the details of the new address.
‘Wait outside,’ I instruct. ‘We are a couple of minutes away.’
She does not wait outside.
Celeste
I HEAR SOMETHING, and that is unusual because no sound gets in or out of this room when the door is closed.
Then I notice it is open.
The door has been left open.
I lift my head off the bed slightly to expose my other ear to any noise coming from outside my cell. He is whispering something; I can make out the faint murmur and assume he is deep in prayer so place my ear back to the mattress.
Now I am awake it registers that my shackles seem loose too. The material is still tied around my wrists and ankles but it is not as taut as it has been. Perhaps the one known as V is allowing me one last night of comfort before I join his list of victims.
Slowly, carefully, I pull down my right arm, hoping the loop has become loose enough to free a hand, but as I pull down my arm keeps on coming, and with it the fabric around my wrists. I move my other arm to my side.
My hands are free.
My feet are no longer tied to the bedstead either so I bend my legs, bringing my knees up, gripping around them with my arms and curl into a ball; the feeling of movement is better than anything I have experienced: like a blind person regaining sight.
I’m aware that the bed sheets are rustling as I move but, at this moment, I don’t care. I can fight back. I am liberated. I feel my strength return and flip myself onto my knees to praise the Earth, to praise my own fortitude.
For I am right and he is wrong.
He is the blindness and now I see.
The slender, solid figure of the man only I know as V appears in the now fully open doorway, the lights behind him illuminating him like the demon I saw on the heath.
He says nothing.
He just stands there like a ghoulish harbinger of death and torment. For some reason, I start to snarl at him, pushing myself into an offensive pose. My monster ready to take on his.
I scream at him, ‘Come on. Come on.’ Growling like a Dobermann. Over his shoulder I see the front door to the flat juddering as a woman bashes her clenched hand against it, calling his name, asking whether he or everything is all right. He doesn’t even flinch. He steps inside the room, following the handful of jewellery he flung across the floor, and the hairs on my neck prick up. The light catches the side of his face for a split second and I see him almost smiling.
Then he stops and pulls out the knife.
This is the end, I tell myself.
Only one of us will walk out of this room.
The rapping against his front door ceases as his neighbour retreats to her apartment and alerts the already-aware authorities. And he leaves. He backs out the room, the knife still in his right hand, and moves over to unlock his front door with his left, leaving it accessible to anyone who wishes to witness the climax of his infernal scheme.
He tiptoes ghoulishly past the door opening without even looking back in at me. I am stunned into silence. He wishes to take a final drink. A solemn toast of gratitude for what he is about to receive in return for his work as evil’s delivering angel.
There is nothing I can do.
The door is open but I am unable to penetrate the protective circle he has encased me within. I lay back against the mattress which has been my home for two months, tucking my knees against my chest. Grateful for this minute amount of freedom.
The triangle of light turns to green.
Then red.
Then black, as a figure steps into the doorway and casts a shadow along the floor.
It must be time.
But the silhouette is not the one who now calls himself V.
It is a woman.
She peers into the room, glancing at the trinkets taken from each victim which are spread across the floorboards. She smells the unmistakable aroma of drying paint. And she steps into the shadow of my prison, the amber light now pouring back inside.
I notice that she sees the ruffled covers on the bed and creeps silently towards where I lay.
Her face is close enough to pick out features yet she does not acknowledge mine.
It is not Gail.
She will not return. The police have instructed her to remain in her flat for safety.
The woman I do not know touches the bed sheets and glances up at the pattern which keeps me detained in a circle of prevention.
She is not here as a witness.
This is not a rescue operation.
She stands next to the bed and looks right through me.
V
BY THE TIME January David arrives, I should be gone. With my son.
That is my choice.
Standing in the doorway, I will have one last moment to back out; to kill Celeste instead. To get back with my wife. But Gail has made me realise that I haven’t gone through all this to get my wife back, to be in a family I have already been a part of. It is to start a new family with my boy. To be at peace.
I run through the list of people that I have taken on my quest to be reunited; the lonely, desperate people at the end of the line. Those with incurable diseases or debilitating illness. Those who have lost faith in almost everything. Those who will try anything not to feel the way that I do every day.
Those people like me.
My God abandoned me when I needed him most; my wife left, taking my only strength and happiness with her. I sought the answers through the natural highs of exercise and the beauty of alcoholic numbness. Loneliness can make people do things that norm
ally they would not.
They become somebody else.
I became V.
The soul of Sammael Abbadon seemed a small price for the chance to regain the greatest of lost happinesses.
I think of the first tin that I buried, the night before Samhain last year. I remember each one I concealed thereafter, completing the set tasks each time with this ritual, and the one so obviously hidden beneath the loosest of floorboards in this cell ready for the detectives to unearth and draw their conclusions. Another box filled with earth and silver and a picture of me. They will believe that I was Celeste’s ultimate prize.
I know what I must do.
This is not suicide; it is renaissance.
I knock back the last mouthful of red wine I expect will ever pass my lips and place the glass gently on the work surface I usually reserve for stretching my calf muscles out after running.
I feel I have done everything asked of me. It is Celeste who will be blamed for these deaths; I will be rewarded.
Gail is expected to arrive at the moment my mission concludes. I have planned it that way. But she is not my witness.
I smile as I take a step towards the room where my son never slept, and remember the day he was born. I slow my breathing down, counting in my head: inhale, one and two and exhale, and one and two. I think back to what I felt on the night before I took Lily Kane’s suffering, when I convinced myself that someone out there was listening to my woe. When I told myself that I could sense a presence on that crossroads and they spoke to me, letting me know that everything would be all right, that if I took in the Lord on that night, righteousness would prevail.
The height of my own desperation when I believed I was talking with a God.
The night I gave in to temptation and was delivered unto evil; a force that promised me salvation in exchange for something I should have held more dearly.
I draw the knife once more as I edge closer to the room that holds Celeste, my enemy, my patsy. She will believe this is meant for her, that I mean her harm, that she is the punctuation mark to this fabled spree. But I could never kill Celeste. She does not fit the profile. To me, she is already dead.
The people I have donated to the Lord are ones I feel were worthy. I stalked the sick and dying in hospitals, the lonely and confused at focus groups, and those, like me, fickle with faith if it provides the answers they long to hear. It is easier to take someone who is near death through sickness or age or has contemplated their own demise or has nowhere left to turn. Celeste is content and rounded and benevolent. I could not take that away.
Sammael Abbadon could not take that away.
So I must die.
My choice, after I obeyed the tasks set out by the Lord I thought was listening to me, after I sought out and took the last breath of seven hopeless strangers, was to take the life of Celeste and rekindle relations with my estranged wife or to end my own existence on this plane and be joined for ever with the son I never had time to know.
I will think of only his face as I swiftly arc the pointed weapon down through my own stomach. At first, I won’t even feel the pain; I will drop to my knees with a thud before the ice-cold blade turns to white heat and the tendons in my arms tense frantically, trying to make me release my grip.
We will be together soon.
I shut my eyes for the final steps and speak inside my head.
Lord, I make her the monster. I falsify her actions and make them more heinous so that there is no question of her guilt. People must see her and believe in an instant that she is capable of these atrocities. That she planned them, they were premeditated and they were all for her own gratification. They must see this innocent woman and view her as a ghoul. Her culpability will be unquestionable. When my wife reads about this, she will know where I have travelled.
I will be with my son and my wife will remember me as a good man.
In doing so, Celeste will become the anguished person she so desperately wanted to save. She will become Lily or Talitha. She will end up as Graham or Annabel.
Or me.
I open my eyes at the doorway, prepared to complete my task. But things are not set out as they are meant to be. This is not right.
Celeste is not in her bed.
She is not contained within her circle.
She stands opposite me, trembling.
‘How did you get out?’ I ask pointedly. My eyes are unblinking. My hand, unflinching. The blade dances from red to green.
She does not answer.
‘How did you escape the trap, Celeste?’ I ask again, making a subtle advance inside the cell.
‘I’m not who you think I am.’ She finally speaks. ‘I am not Celeste.’
She is trying to trick me.
I point my knife at her from across the room.
‘You have mistaken me, sir.’ She whimpers, holding her hands up, her palms in my direction, as if this will save her.
‘Shut up, Celeste. Shut up.’ I spit as I say these words, the revulsion forcing its way out through my mouth.
‘My name is Alison Aeslin.’ She begins to cry.
I take the dagger into both hands and lift it high above my head.
And Celeste screams.
January
PAULSON PULLS THE car up to the kerb around two hundred metres from the building where we found Brooke Derry, and I jump out before the car has even come to a complete stop.
Alison is not waiting outside for me as I requested.
I have already leapt up the first six steps before Paulson has reached his arm over to release the catch on his seatbelt.
I can hear someone screaming a few flights above me.
A female.
So close.
I turn the corner and a woman in a short black dress with no shoes hangs out of her doorway at the end of the corridor. She is visibly shaken, drawing in breaths between tears.
‘Ma’am,’ I say as I approach the door before hers, the door which leads to a trapped Alison Aeslin, slowing my approach cautiously so not to cause her alarm.
‘I heard him cry out but that was ages ago.’ Her voice is shrill and piercing as she tries to hold back her anguish. Paulson is working his way up now, cursing yet another flight of stairs.
‘Please go back into your flat, ma’am.’ I urge her back inside with a flick of my wrist. ‘It’s safer in there.’
I take a step back from the door of the address that Murphy gave me – he is still on his way – and plant my feet to set myself.
My back is almost up against the wall opposite but I have enough room, so take a step forward with my left foot, raise my right knee to my chest then thrust my foot forwards at the door.
Alison screams.
Then I hear a man shouting back at her.
I hear a crack and wonder whether it is the wood from the frame or a bone in my leg. Paulson only has one set of steps left; I can hear him panting. Murphy is still in his car on the way here. I push my foot into the floor, applying pressure on the heel and the ball to check for any damage; a shooting pain went through my shin as I connected with the wood but everything seems to be in place.
‘Saaaaam,’ the woman whimpers to the side of me, still ignoring my order; her distress is a little off-putting.
‘Get the fuck inside now,’ I shout down to her manically, more to relieve frustration than anything else, maybe to shock her into shutting up.
I check the door to see how much I have loosened it but as I fiddle with the lock it opens. It was unlocked. Paulson finally rounds the corner as I push the opening wide enough to fit through. I wave a finger in his direction and mouth get her inside. He passes behind me and deals with the hysterical neighbour.
And I move in.
I see the wall ahead of me change colour from green to red and my mind flits to the eyes of the boy in my vision. They were showing me where the killer was, what he saw.
The room is light enough for me to see that there is nobody in here with me, it is clear. The next
room is on the left and the door opens inwards. A triangle of light that mirrors the back wall points me inside.
I hear a man’s voice speak sedately, ‘Come forth from the abyss and grant me the indulgences of which we speak. By all the Gods of the Pit, I command that these things shall come to pass.’
And Alison’s sweet voice whimpers, ‘I don’t know who Celeste is.’
I move around the corner.
He has a knife held above his head.
V
HER TRICKS WON’T work.
That Wiccan claptrap she spouts has no effect.
Celeste stands in front of me, her eyes glazed with false tears of anguish and hardship, telling me that her name is Alison. Lying to me. Lying to herself.
I hear Gail calling out to me.
Why are you staying away?
You need to witness this.
Nobody in this room can die without a witness.
There is a crash against the front door as though somebody is kicking at it or ramming their shoulder into it. I have unlocked the door. Turn the handle. Come in and observe.
Celeste screams at the sound of the encroaching visitor, thinking she has the upper hand, that she is going to be saved. I tell her, once more, that her cries for freedom are futile. That she is already dead.
The latch clicks the door open and I know that my spectator has entered, they will soon see what I want them to see. They will find Celeste to be the monster they had imagined her to be.
I stand opposite her and lift my dagger aloft.
‘By all the Gods of the Pit, I command that these things shall come to pass.’
I arch my back slightly to gain more leverage with the downward thrust of the blade but before I am able to complete my ritual and return to my family, January David grabs my wrists and pulls me backwards onto the floor.