She put on the light and looked around. There was a stool in the bathroom, but it was too heavy to wield effectively as a club. There was the shower curtain rod, but that was a puny length of aluminium. She was so desperate, she thought about smashing the mirror above the sink and improvising a towel handle around a jagged shard of glass. Doing so would arm her with a primitive dagger.
Her eyes descended to the sink. There was a hairpin resting there. It was an antique one she had bought the previous year in a flea market. Juliet picked it up, unlatching the sharp silver needle that would secure it to her hair. It was steel and it was about four inches long. She could conceal it. It was not ideal, but it was better than being totally unarmed.
She stared at the bathroom door. She knew that Max was on the other side of it. She knew he would try to get in eventually, but the apartment was totally silent out there. She was quite surprised he had not rushed at the door and tried to batter it down with his shoulder. Then she remembered that one of his shoulders would be very sore from the puncture wounds inflicted by the paring knife.
She moved towards the door and listened intently. There was still nothing. She got down on her hands and knees and lowered her bruised face to the floor. She tried to look under it. As she did so, she caught the flit of a shadow cast just for a fraction of a second by something moving out there.
She stood. She would use this brief period of respite to examine her hurt eye. She approached the bathroom’s full-length mirror to do so. She leaned in towards the mirror, a few inches from the glass to get a really good look.
The white of her eye was bloodied by a network of broken blood vessels. There was blood in a purple swelling underneath the eye and the lid too was swollen and bruising quite badly. She thought that she looked like someone who hadn’t worn their seatbelt in an auto collision.
Or, she thought grimly, she looked like the victim of a particularly savage incidence of domestic violence. Either way, the bloodied and battered face staring back at her now was one she had seen on countless occasions in the ER. She had never in her worst nightmares imagined she might see it reflected back at her from a mirror.
She was examining a bloody cloud around her iris when the mirror glass exploded outwards in front of her face and Max’s lunging arm reached through the jagged hole he had punched through it and grabbed her around the neck.
She screamed. Shock and outrage forced a shrill moan out of her that emptied her lungs and assaulted the air and reminded her she was still alive. She wrestled desperately. She so desperately wanted to survive this. But he was stronger than she was and his grip on her was the iron grip of insanity and she could not shake free of it and after a few seconds of frantic struggle, he was able to haul her through the shattered glass.
He flung her to the ground. She landed as limply as a rag doll on some rusted old water pipes. She could smell the rust. There was light, but it was feeble. She seemed to be in some sort of tunnel, or passageway, she thought, but guided by the strong and savage instinct for survival she fumbled open the antique pin and plunged it into the meat of Max’s thigh before fleeing into the gloom beyond him.
Juliet knew that he would follow. She was at a disadvantage: he knew the way around the hellish place he had dragged her into. He would navigate the passageways skilfully, where she merely fled in the full-pelt rush of total panic. This was his world.
Rats scurried and fled as her feet beat their desperate tattoo on the floor. Pipes rattled. Light came and went in dim yellow swatches from the rooms she ran parallel with. She sought only escape. She was fit and quick and she could run for ever and, if necessary, she thought that she would do exactly that.
She never saw the wall she hit. The denser darkness of the brick obstruction might have registered had both of her eyes been functioning properly, had her pursuer not drugged her, had she possessed even a modicum of composure in her attempt to get away.
She had hit the wall with a sickening impact and sank to her knees as her legs buckled under her. She could hear him approaching. She could hear the whisper of his feet growing louder as they covered what she knew to him must be familiar ground. She could see him, blurry at the edges, faceless in the darkness, hulking and indistinct and, as Juliet Devereau finally lost the fight to retain her consciousness, looking exactly like the bogeyman she had feared as a child.
Forty-two
JULIET HAD LOST consciousness for an instant. She opened her eyes again. She realised that his progress in pursuit of her was not as implacable as she had supposed. Her flight had been random rather than planned. It had been that way out of necessity. She did not know her way around the vile labyrinth it was evident to her Max had cruelly used. He was walking in her direction, though. The whisper of his feet was a murmur now as he got closer to where she lay.
She struggled to get up. It was dark ahead and she rose shakily and put out her hands to guard against obstacles, feeling small and futile and impossibly trapped. She fought her way through some broken window panes and saw a light coming from above. A tunnel led to the light. It was human instinct to seek light in darkness and Juliet felt the tug of that illuminated place. It might provide a refuge for her. It could be no lonelier or desolate than the dark passageway in which she stood.
At first, she assumed the room in which she found herself that of some reclusive and elderly woman. Ancient dresses mouldered on hangers heavy with beads, swagged with detail picked out in brocade and black lace. An open jewellery box glimmered with heavy silver rings and bracelets and a rope of pearls coiled beside it like an opalescent snake. There was the musty smell of perfume long grown stale. There was a collection of crystal in a heavy display case full of faceted windows, still with the ornate key in the lock. There were ormolu clocks and veined marble vases and a book of pressed flowers, water-stained, smelling subtly of age and decay.
And then she saw the photographs. The boy between the parents in them had not changed so radically over the years that she did not recognise him. The room belonged to Max, she realised, with dawning horror. Just when she thought she might have crawled to safety, she was in Max’s room. And it was a morbid shrine to his dead mother.
She tried to find her way out, frantically opening closets, pulling at the locked door, desperate for release from this horrible confinement and the threat it posed. There had to be a way out, didn’t there? There had to be. Perhaps there would be a spare key. There was a bureau. She opened its drawers. Lying in one of them was a newspaper clipping. It was yellow and faded and its banner headline screamed: Husband kills wife. Then shoots self.
She found the keys to her own front door in the bureau. She took them. Then, sensing she was no longer alone in the room, she turned around. Max was there. He was standing right in front of her. He was staring at her, but he seemed miles away, somewhere else entirely. But he was very close. She could smell the harsh odour of his breath.
He said, ‘I saw the whole thing. I was six years old.’
‘You told me. You told me on the way back from your grandfather’s funeral.’
He smiled. The smile was horrible, a grim contortion, a ghastly parody of good humour. ‘When you were still responding sympathetically,’ he said. ‘Before the unfortunate change in you occurred.’
‘You killed August. It was why you asked those questions. You killed him and it made you feel like God.’
‘It was his time,’ Max said, with a sigh. ‘And I did it for you.’
He was blocking her way. She could only get out the way she had come in. It was a dreadful, defeating prospect, but she thought it was better than whatever he had planned for her. While she was alive there was hope, however slender that hope might be.
Max said, ‘My father caught my mother cheating on him. I blamed him at the time. I sided with my mother. I’ve continued to blame him, down through the years. But that was before I discovered what women were capable of.’ The look in his eyes clarified. Juliet was their focus now. ‘That was before I met you,
’ he said, his face twisting into a snarl, raising his hands to attack.
She grabbed the lamp she had been planning to use since she first turned and saw him there. It was an old-fashioned oil lamp with a heavy brass base. It stood on an ornamental pillar to her right, against the wall. It was the same height as her shoulder and easy to reach for and swing. She smashed it hard into his temple and felt the judder of impact go through her arm before dropping it and running past him for the passages.
Staircases led this way and that, up as well as down. But the routes to the eighth-floor had all been blocked off. Heavy coils of barbed wire ferocious with steel thorns obstructed the way.
She ran with her arms outstretched, like someone in a sleeping nightmare, becoming familiar with the routes as she was forced to double-back like someone trapped in the bewildering turns of a maze.
He was pursuing her. He was not running. He did not need to, she realised with dismay. He could dictate her route and confine and cut her off in a dead-end as cramped and inescapable as a tomb. Still she ran. If there was no hope, there was at least defiance. She would not surrender herself to him. She would never do that so long as there was a single breath remaining in her body.
Forty-three
JULIET’S CAPACITY FOR violence astounded Max and he found her cruelty breathtaking. She was a doctor. She had sworn an oath to heal to the best of her ability. She was supposed to be compassionate by nature, wasn’t she? It was a vocation, after all, not simply a career path. She wasn’t a plastic surgeon or one of those society doctors out to wring what profit they could from a patient list of wealthy hypochondriacs. She worked in ER. She saved the poor and the ramshackle and the accident prone and the hapless victims of crime. Yet look what she had done to him.
His shoulder throbbed from where she had twice stabbed him. Each time his heart beat the puncture wounds there hurt like hammer blows. She had slashed at his forearm in the way a drunken butcher might. The blade had actually cut to the bone and he was only grateful it was muscle she had sliced through and not an artery.
She had tried to drive the carving knife through his chest on the bed, luring him with a leer of seduction he had thankfully seen through. And then she had tried to kill him yet again, tried to fracture his skull with the lamp August had bought as a present for his daughter and son-in-law.
The last blow had hurt him the most. Not because of the physical pain inflicted, but because of the timing of it. He had just confided in her his most painful secret in the hope that it would create some intimacy between them. But it had done no good. She was too callous and uncaring even to notice the precious, private nature of what he had revealed to her. She was one of those women, he had discovered too late, who cares only for themselves.
When he had still cherished dreams of their intimacy he had planned to ask Juliet to wear one of his mother’s dresses. He had hoped that she might do it as a birthday treat for him or when they had been together for a while. It would have been a nice anniversary gesture.
She could have dabbed on a splash of his mother’s perfume. She could have pulled on a pair of her Sunday gloves and carried her best handbag. She could have worn her shoes; the two women were around the same size, as far as he could remember. She could have had her hair done the way his mother did it, not to be morbid or ghoulish, just as a one-off treat for the man she loved.
That would not happen now, he thought bitterly, the throbbing of his stabbed shoulder a painful reminder of just how duplicitous Juliet had turned out to be. The possibility of her doing things to please him willingly had not just gone. It had never been there, had it? The Juliet he had hoped for had been just his romantic projection. Life was not a puppet theatre, you could not determine how people behaved. It had transpired that Juliet was vicious, manipulative, disloyal and insincere.
She would still wear his mother’s clothes, though. He was determined about that. She would do it when she was dead. He would have to clean her up, apply a little make-up and dress her hair himself. But he would enjoy that. It was something, he thought as he closed in on her in the passageways, that he could look forward to. It would be a pleasant and absorbing diversion that would take his mind completely off his pain.
Shafts of light crisscrossed the section of passageway Juliet had found herself in. She no longer had to walk with her hands in front of her face. Holes had been bored at head-height in the right-hand wall of the passageway. It was from these that the light she could see by was cast. The illumination was steady and strong. She looked through one of the holes. It offered a perfect view of her own living room.
Realisation fully hit her then, with a sensation that felt like her stomach was being physically scraped out of her. Her skin crawled and she was wracked with a convulsive shivering. She walked to the next of the peepholes. It offered a more or less complete view of her ruined bathroom.
She ran. She did so out of blind instinct. She knew that he was stalking her, ever closer through this claustrophobic nightmare world he had put together. She had no choice but to run; going nowhere like a rodent in a maze or on a wheel in a cage.
She tripped and when she put her hands out to shield her already battered face, something gave slightly in front of her and she saw a rectangle of light outlining a panel. She pushed through it. She blundered into her own recently reclaimed wine cellar. She had hardly recognised this fact, when a huge weight tumbled stiffly down on top of her, tipped by the concealed door she was coming through,.
She screamed with shock at first. But then again with sheer horror as she realised what had fallen on her. It was Jack. She had known in her heart he was dead since seeing the half-unpacked grocery bag in the kitchen on arriving home. Whimpering she heaved his stiffening weight off her. There was no time for grief. But she was sick and shaking as she looked at the man she loved. His flesh was cold and his face was ghastly in the grinning rictus of death. In her terror and pain she screamed again. She gave in to despair and the sound was shrill and loud and it reverberated through the labyrinth from which she had emerged. She knew that he would hear it and know its source and swiftly locate her, now. Dully, almost stubbornly, her brain insisted that she needed a weapon to fight him with. She supposed it was the instinct for survival. She sighed at its exasperating strength.
She saw the nail gun. It had slipped from its shelf, brought down by Jack’s shoulder or one of his dead, flailing arms. It was lying beside her on the floor, bright and new and lethal.
She struggled to open the barricaded closet door until finally she managed to shove the fridge aside. Picking up the nail gun, she emerged into the kitchen. It was empty, and so was her living room. She emerged into the hallway and her door was still locked. After everything she had seen in the meantime, it no longer seemed surprising that he had contrived a way to lock her door from the outside. The entire apartment had been contrived. It was a cage and a trap and a stage. He had made it into those things.
She moved through her bedroom and into her bathroom. She looked at the broken pipes in the passageway beyond the shattered mirror. Shards of glass littered what she could see of the floor of that gloomy space. There was blood spattered and congealed there from their earlier struggle. A faucet dripped monotonously behind her.
I will have to alert the building’s maintenance man to that, she thought, almost giggling at the notion. She was close to tripping into hysteria. She could not allow herself that refuge. She had to go back into the labyrinth. She had no other prospect of escape. She hefted the makeshift weapon in her hand. She did not feel much of a warrior.
She stepped into the passageway and he hit her in the gloom with a blow to the face that sent her crashing to the floor. She lay there in blood and leaking water and dust amid the broken metal pipes.
She lay there in shadow. Max was illuminated, as he sank to his haunches over her, by the light that bathed him from the bathroom. He had wrapped the hand he had hit her with in barbed wire, and the blood dripped from it onto the floor besi
de her. She supposed he was beyond feeling physical pain. She was not. He had gouged her cheek with the blow and the flesh there felt as though it was on fire.
He unwrapped the barbed wire from his fist. He leaned further over her. He said, ‘You kissed me, and I thought, you could pull me out of these walls. I was never going to hurt you. That was never my intention. I swear to you it wasn’t. But you betrayed me.’
He reached out for her. He moved his hands towards her neck. She lifted her arm and pressed the nail gun she had taken from the wine closet hard into his chest and triggered it with three explosive whumps.
He stood. He looked at the object Juliet held in her hand. His expression was incredulous. It did not change when he looked down at his chest and saw the three nail heads from the driven metal deeply puncturing him there. Blood blossomed from the wounds, across his chest, drenching his shirt in a sudden flood. He staggered then, and sank to the floor on his back.
Juliet was first and foremost a doctor. Instinct, raw and desperate, governed her response to the dying man on the floor beside her. She pumped his chest. She gave him mouth to mouth, willing her victim to live. Only when his gore had drenched them both and all hope was extinguished did she stop toiling over Max. Only when the life had clearly gone from him did she pause in her efforts and then, finally, stop.
She got to her feet. Tiny fragments of glass had become embedded in the skin of her knees. Blood was congealing in her hair and drying tightly across her face. She could only see out of one eye and it was likely that the earlier impact of her collision with the wall had broken her nose. The side of her face throbbed from the gash inflicted by the swiping barbed wire punch. Her clothes were rags, her senses pulverised by the drugs her central nervous system was struggling to resist.
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