Others

by James Herbert

  ‘Oh . . . dear . . . God . . .’ I whispered, the words releasing the small breath I had left.

  I held even more tightly to the doorhandle, at last forced to gulp in that bespoiled air.

  Despite the evidence, I suppose that I did not want to acknowledge that it was Henry’s poor body lying there like some unfortunate victim on the stone of a sacrificial altar, and the shock, disbelief, encouraged my beleaguered mind to play along with the game. No, this wasn’t Henry, not my acerbic, bigoted, caring, mother-dominated, movie-interlocutor, amusing, identity-denying, good friend Henry. No, this was a stranger, someone who had wandered in from the street below. For what reason – who knows? Whodunnit – who cares? Just so long as it wasn’t dear Henry. One way to make sure though, one way to eliminate Henry from the scene-of-crime. Take a look at the face. Walk around the desk, tilt your own head just to be sure, and observe the corpse’s features. Then you’ll see it isn’t – couldn’t be! – Henry. All you need is the courage.

  So said the voice in my head, the voice that was my saner, wiser, softly-commanding, self. And I would do as it bid me. Because I had no other choice. I had to know.

  Blood overflowed on to the floor, a slick stream that was soon forming another swelling pool on the office’s cheap lino floor, one border sliding towards another little crimson lake that I hadn’t noticed before, this one seeping around the desk itself. Spilling, it seemed, from the body’s head or throat. I forced myself – I had to force myself – towards the corner of the desk.

  And it was Henry, all right. The hooked nose was the giveaway. It was Henry, except his glasses were missing and his eyes were gone.

  Blood still flowed from those empty sockets, streaking his forehead and sparse hair red before falling to the floor to form the second radiating pool. Henry’s mouth was still gaping as if in death-screams and I fancied I could still hear them, as if their echoes continued to bounce off the walls, suffusing the air itself. Hadn’t anyone heard his cries? Had no one in the street below caught the sounds of his distress? I remembered the revelry outside, the bizarrely camp audience leaving the theatre, the almost carnival-like jollity, the voices from the next-door bar, music from restaurants and café, the footsteps and passing traffic – had they all conspired to smother the exclamation of mortal terror? Could life be so oblivious to the nearness of death?

  I thought I could see the tip of his bloodied tongue resting against his upper lip, but I didn’t want to look too closely. Dear God, dear Henry . . .

  A noise from the room next door. From my office.

  The door was ajar, enough light spilling in to throw a dim flush against the window – the glow I had observed from the street below.

  A scuffling. Something dragging across the floor in my sanctum.

  My first impulse was to flee and rejoin the rest of the world. But a whimper caused me to stay. At least, I thought it was a whimper.

  I knew I should be hurtling down the stairs from whatever lurked in the gloom of my office, and perhaps I would have had not the clump of ungainly footsteps come to me from the stairway. I heard my name called. Not Dis but Nick, so I knew it was Constance’s voice.

  I stayed where I was, unable to move. I wanted to warn the two women to keep away, or at least to let them know of the terrible shock that awaited them; and I wanted to throw open my office door and face whatever whimpered in there, murderer or no. But I remained perfectly still, too traumatized to make the decision.

  Louise came through first, Constance a few paces behind. Now I tried to shout the warning, but no sound came, I was voiceless. The two women stared first at me, and then at the bloody carcass on the desk.

  I thought they would scream at the sight and they didn’t. I thought at least one of them would faint away (as I nearly had) and neither one did that either. They just stared, their faces at first numbed with shock before creasing into rigid lines of revulsion. Before they, before I, could say a word, we all heard the muted sound from my darkened office.

  Perhaps it was because I was no longer alone, perhaps I thought I had to be brave in front of Constance, but I jolted to my senses and quickly looked around for a weapon of some kind, anything I could use to protect us all. All I could find was a hard, wooden, straight-backed chair, the uncomfortable one reserved only for Philo and the VAT man on his yearly visit. I raised it high over my shoulder and turned back to face my office door.

  ‘Nick, please, no!’ Constance reached out for me but, like myself a few moments ago, seemed unable to move any more than that.

  ‘Stay there,’ I commanded with all the false authority I could muster.

  I strode forward and kicked the door back with a foot, my bad leg almost collapsing under its burden – the chair plus me. Light flew in ahead of me and I stalled in the doorway, the chair quivering in my grip, my eye swiftly searching the shadows.

  Something moved behind my desk, something low but with no discernible form, shuffling towards a far corner where the shadows were thickest.

  For a moment, the whimpers stopped and I saw the white – greys – of two wide eyes watching me. My own one quickly adapted to the semi-darkness and I saw a skinny kid cowering there, a naked skinny kid, his shoulders and stick-arms trembling uncontrollably. He seemed to observe something in me that was terrifying, because now his whimpers graduated to screams.

  Jesus Lord, I wanted to get out of there. The boy’s screams were cutting through my head like aural daggers, reactivating my panic so that I wanted to back away – no, I wanted to turn and rush away, self-preservation my justification, cowardice my mentor – and only the figures of Constance and Louise Broomfield gathered behind me prevented me from so doing. Constance looked up at me questioningly, then back at the person huddled in the corner, his knees drawn up, naked arms over his head.

  Even in the gloom he didn’t look much, but I didn’t know what kind of weapon he might have concealed behind him or somewhere close by. It would have had to be something horrifically vicious to have inflicted that kind of damage to Henry . . . poor Henry. As was the way with me, anger helped me overcome the worst of the fear, and I snapped down the light-switch by the side of the door. I heard Louise gasp and felt Constance’s hand on my arm.

  He wasn’t entirely naked, only from the waist up, torn baggy combat fatigues covering his legs, scuffed trainers on his sockless feet, the skinny ankles that were revealed almost the colour of bleached bone. And he wasn’t really a kid, he was a youth, a teenager, his wavering arms occasionally exposing spiky blond hair, a young man’s pallid face, a cheap metal earring studded through his ear. His frightened eyes protruded so much I thought they might easily pop from their sockets. Like Henry’s. Although his had been ripped from their sockets . . .

  I was still more than nervous, despite my growing rage but I took a step forward.

  Wrong move. The intruder began gibbering and sobbing, sliding himself up the wall and towards the window. As he moved behind my desk he kicked out, sending it scudding a couple of feet across the floor, distracting my attention for a second or two. Before I could move around the desk to reach him, the youth had climbed on to the broad windowsill, clutching his trousers to his stomach with one hand (it seemed they were undone and threatening to drop) and pushing at the top of the lower window frame with the other. Fresh night air and noise from the street below rushed past his kneeling figure, invading like a hit squad sent in to break up a private party.

  ‘No, no, no, no!’ I yelled, staccato fashion, blindly rushing forward and half-sprawling over the desktop, knocking pens, pads and filing trays aside.

  ‘No!’ One last time as the boy scrambled through the black opening on to the window ledge outside.

  I think all three of us must have stared in disbelief, listening to the sound of muted voices and a heavy bass beat now mingled with the intruder’s – outtruder’s? – sobs and pitiful wails. Still half over the desk, I moved around it, heading for the window, praying I would not be too late to drag the boy
back. And even as I did so, I heard shouts and calls from the pavements below as the figure on the window ledge was spotted.

  My nerves were stretched to breaking point as I stood on tip-toe and stuck my head out the window, both my anger and my fear considerably diminished now that I knew the intruder, murderer, mutilator, was more afraid of me than I of him and that he was merely a skinny man-boy, with no weapon that I could detect. In fact, my emotions were somewhat mixed at that point: this creature had slaughtered my friend and yet what was he? A pathetic, scared-witless juvenile, is what he was, a miserable, shivering, punk perched on the end of my windowsill. One part of me wanted to push him off; the other part, which was just as sincere, wanted to calm him down and coax him back into the safety of my office. If he had shown aggression, then perhaps I might have acted differently; but I had spent a good deal of my life trying to convince others, especially but not exclusively children, that there was nothing to fear from me. I think that yet another part of me, the rational, logical side of my nature, told me this kid was too frail and sorry-looking to have inflicted the damage I’d just witnessed. I spoke soothingly as I reached a hand towards him.

  ‘Take it,’ I said to him, aware of the shouts and pointing fingers from below. ‘Come on, just take my hand and let me help you back inside. Nobody’s going to hurt you.’

  ‘Keep away!’ he shrieked. ‘Keep away!’

  Putting a knee on the outside sill, I pushed my shoulder through the open window. I kept my voice low and soft, surprised by my own coolness. ‘It’s all right. I promise, no one’s going to hurt you. Come back inside before you slip.’

  But he edged further away and there really was nowhere to go. He stood erect, face to the wall, fingers digging into the cracks of the old brickwork for purchase. His combats began to slide over his bare buttocks and down his scrawny legs, and as he reached for them with one hand, he looked my way once more, his eyes still bulging and wide, but opening even wider when they took in my shape, the hunch of my back, the fall of my jutting forehead, the black, shrivelled hole where my own eye used to be. Even though it was night, I saw every dark-stained tooth in his head as he opened his mouth to scream, this scream louder than any that had gone before, its horror more intense than I thought could ever be possible. His fingers scrabbled at the wall as he lost his balance.

  Then he was gone and I was looking at empty space.

  His scream was cut off as if stolen by the rushing air even before his body reached the pavement. Instead, the unified cry of the watching crowd in the street came back up to me and I closed my eye, unwilling to look over the edge, disinclined to witness the inevitable, the unavoidable, consequences of a fall from that height.

  But I couldn’t close my ears against the short wet crunch of shattered bones and crushed flesh as the kid hit the ground.

  25

  No more Henry. It’s the finality that gets to you. One day someone you know – even worse, someone you love – is there, the next they’ve vanished. That’s the hardship. Not sorrow or pity, just the sudden and irrevocable emptiness. It’s shocking and it’s wretched. Nevertheless, it’s something we all have to go/grow through at some stage in our lives, usually more than once. Unless you die young yourself, of course, which is the best way to avoid mourning others.

  Curiously, you still worry about them, your departed ones. Where have they gone to? Who’s looking after them? (If you’ve lost a child, that’s the concern that can easily destroy you.) If there are destinations called Heaven and Hell, which train did your friend/relation/loved-one (not always in combination, these) catch? And if you do fear the worst, can your prayers help them change track mid-journey?

  So how much better to believe that there is no life after death, that there can be no soul because there’s no place for it to go once the body has withered to dust. Sure, you’d still grieve for the one you’ve lost, but you wouldn’t have to worry about them any more, because that wouldn’t make sense. All you’d have to do is remember them and miss them. Wouldn’t that be easier?

  Why then, do most of us cling to the idea that there is more to follow, that death truly isn’t the end of the road? Because we can’t stand the idea of nothingness? Because we won’t tolerate the notion that all our life amounts to at the end of the day is a heap of dirt? Or does society itself realize that to live tolerably well together we must have higher resolutions that will be rewarded when the end comes? A kind of inbuilt subliminal stick and carrot. Can it be a misconception whose purpose is to encourage us to be civilized? Maybe. But maybe, also, everything around us speaks of regeneration, that things may appear to die, but they never quite cease to exist. Flesh corrupts to dust, which becomes particles, which becomes atoms, which become energy and energy is the magic that binds everything together, and energy is invisible . . . just like the soul. Unconvincing, of course, unless you want to be convinced, and for that, you have to believe. Which leads us back to why we should want to believe. After all, oblivion means peace – of a kind – so why not yearn for oblivion? Because ultimately it isn’t enough. We think we’re yearning for peace – peace of mind, tranquillity of heart – but really we’re yearning for something better (after all, if there is no mind and no heart, their peace is irrelevant). And by better we really mean something better than we have now, in this life. Despite times of great joy and even contentment, we know it’s not finite, that it cannot last. It’s a brief intermission between the bad parts. So we seek – perhaps even pray for – something better, which ultimately means something more than any of us really has, and oblivion isn’t more, it’s goddamn less. And who the hell wants something less, something that is actually nothing at all?

  Catch my drift?

  Anyway, here’s the point: all my life I’d known – okay, I’d believed – there was a better existence waiting for me somewhere, although I’d never been particularly religious, never attended church much (I’d always been saddened, sometimes angered, at the way great causes and religions had been tempered, often distorted, by mankind itself, how even the noblest of intentions invariably had been tainted by mind-pygmies and politicians with their vain hierarchies, petty doctrines, and absolutist dogma); yet in my thoughts, and not necessarily way at the back of my mind, there was always the perception that this life was not the main event. Perhaps it was only self-comfort, and frequently self-pity, but somehow I could only make sense of myself, of what I was, by believing my state was for some, hopefully higher, purpose. It was never any more than a subconscious directive, something beyond logic or understanding, an oblique edict that could never be mentally focused upon, yet which somehow gave me resolve. Even in my deepest despair there had always been the tiniest flicker of . . . of what? Not hope, nothing so naïve. Incentive is the closest I can get, or maybe aspiration. And for aspiration you could substitute higher resolution, which was mentioned earlier and which relates to mankind’s belief in something other than itself.

  But it’s only now that I understand that in all of us it’s really an intuitive desire for redemption, and that we all have the means of finding it. You’ll see.

  And so, as they say, back to the plot . . .

  I spent most of that night at the local police station, at first being interrogated by two (over-zealous) DCs, then by a hastily-appointed SIO – senior investigations officer. All constabularies nowadays adhere to a specially computerized package called HOLMES, an acronym for the deliberately laboured (to suit the said acronym) Home Office Large Major Enquiry System, which is based on designated roles and set procedures. It also helps the police to link up with any similar or simultaneous investigations taking place in any part of the country. Murder may seem commonplace these days, but every one is treated as a significant crime warranting a major incident room with an office manager, administrative officer, receiver, statement readers, action allocator, indexer and researcher, all set up usually in a suite of offices at the nearest copshop to the scene of the crime. Naturally, I was cautioned, but not arrested
, and because I was well-known to the station’s head of CID, Detective Chief Superintendent Oliver Macaroon (who left his bed to come and see me personally) I was given almost immediate access to my solicitor, Etta Kaesbach (who else would I choose?).

  The problem for me was that I had been spotted by a large crowd of witnesses in the street outside my offices as I stuck my unforgettable, easily-identifiable, head out the upstairs window while the youth edged along the ledge away from me, screaming in terror as he did so. Also, the poor kid had not died as soon as he hit the concrete, and had been rushed to hospital where, after forty minutes of frantic surgery, he had expired on the operating table. It seemed, however, that in the ambulance taking him to hospital, the paramedics had heard him moan over and over again, ‘Monster, monster, monster . . .’ I guess you can see how my interrogators put two and two together and came up with the unholy number of five. Nor was there any embarrassment or apology in their manner when they pointed out the ‘positive link’ to me.