Ghost Virus

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Did he tell you where he’d got his tip-off from?’ asked Jerry.

  DI Saunders shook his head. ‘No, he didn’t. But I reckon it was someone at Springfield. Some nurse or some porter must have heard our suspects babbling all that bollocks about being more than one person at once, and thought they were high on some kind of acid. But these bloody coats – they change everything.’

  Jerry and Jamila followed DI Saunders into his office and he switched on all the lights. He hung his dinner-jacket over the back of his chair and unclipped his bow-tie and then he said, ‘All right, Jerry. Fill me in. And don’t leave anything out. This could make or break my career. And yours. And yours, DS Patel. We all want to get ourselves out of Much-Tooting-on-the-Marsh and back to the Yard, don’t we? We certainly don’t want to end up in Springfield with the rest of the bloody nutjobs.’

  Jerry sat down and described everything that had happened from the moment he had first seen the duffle coats flying across the road from Tooting Bec Common. DI Saunders listened with his head bowed, saying nothing, but Jerry could tell by his expression that he was growing increasingly unhappy with every word he spoke.

  When Jerry had finished, DI Saunders leaned back in his chair, tapping his pen on his desk like a metronome.

  ‘They’re not going to believe us,’ he said. ‘Nobody is going to believe us. They’re going to say that charity-shop jackets don’t make perfectly respectable young women cut the guts out of their boyfriends, and nine-year-old girls slit their parents’ throats. They’re going to think we’re deluded for saying those same dead parents can be brought back to life by a sweater and a frock. And they’re going to recommend that all of us need sacking from the force and locking up for frightening the shit out of the public with stories about duffle coats that can run around with nobody in them, pulling accountants to pieces, limb from limb.’

  ‘I know,’ said Jamila. ‘But the worst part about it is that it’s all true.’

  Jerry thought for a while, and then said, ‘What that Daily Mail reporter said to you about a new mind-bending drug... maybe we should drop him a hint that he might be right. I mean, even we don’t know for sure, do we? Our suspects could have been affected by some substance that turns them into homicidal maniacs. I don’t know... maybe we could call it Scary Spice.’

  ‘Ha ha,’ said DI Saunders, sardonically. ‘And what about the duffle coats? They’re the greatest danger to the public, as far as I can see. How do we explain them?’

  ‘I don’t think we need to explain that they don’t have anybody in them,’ said Jerry. ‘And again, I don’t think we’d be lying, exactly. They bloody well feel as if they’ve got somebody in them, so what’s the difference? All we have to do is warn the public to look out for a gang wearing black duffle coats, and to stay well clear of them if they see them, because they’re dangerous, and call 999.’

  Jamila said, ‘I think that makes sense, sir. We do need to put out a warning, urgently, but if we tell the public that they need to watch out for coats running around on their own, most of them are going to think it’s a practical joke. I know I would. You’ve seen all the spoof stories that pop up on Twitter and Facebook. There’s a serious risk that if a sceptical member of the public sees those coats, they’ll approach them and try to show them up for being a prank, and get themselves killed.’

  ‘I have a very bad feeling about this, no matter what we do,’ said DI Saunders. ‘But, yes, Jerry, I think that we’ll tell the media that we suspect some powerful new drug may be responsible, at least for now. What worries me is that somebody might see these duffle coats and take a video of them, and show that they’re flying rather than walking, and that their hoods are empty.’

  ‘Even if they do, many people will believe that it is just a spoof,’ said Jamila. ‘You can Photoshop your videos in almost any way you like these days.’

  ‘All right,’ said DI Saunders, looking at his watch. ‘Let’s meet up again in the morning with the borough press officer, and we can formulate the best way of presenting this to the media. He may even want to involve the director of public affairs. How’s progress otherwise?’

  ‘Very slow, I have to admit,’ said Jamila. ‘In fact almost none at all. We’ve put out an appeal for any retailers or wholesalers who might have found that their duffle coats are missing, but it’s far too early to expect a response yet. I may be able to question Mindy tomorrow, and it’s possible that she can give me some clues. If only I could find some key to what is causing these clothes to behave so aggressively – whether it’s spiritual or whether it’s scientific.’

  DI Saunders said, ‘Maybe you’re right, Jamila, and it is a prank. Maybe it’s God, taking the piss out of us poor mortals, and laughing His celestial arse off.’

  39

  It had stopped raining, so when they left Bill and Sarah’s house, Ron and Nuying decided to walk back to their flat on Bickley Street.

  ‘Urrgh, I didn’t like that spaghetti Bolognese, did you?’ said Nuying, as they walked hand-in-hand down Church Lane. ‘It tasted of nothing but tomato paste.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ said Ron. ‘Sarah’s never pretended that she’s Nigella. She served up a roast chicken once but she’d forgotten to take out the plastic bag with the giblets inside it.’

  ‘Tomorrow I will make you Szechuan chicken to make up for it,’ said Nuying.

  They reached Amen Corner and started to walk along the main Mitcham Road. It was nearly two in the morning now, and the road was deserted, although most of the shop fronts were still lit up, and their lights were reflected in the shiny wet pavements. Somewhere they could hear a dog plaintively barking.

  Ron and Nuying had been together for a year as of the previous Saturday, which was why Bill and Sarah had invited them around for an anniversary celebration. Ron was a manager for Budget Car Hire in Battersea – twenty-nine years old, tall and lanky with large ears and a cow’s-lick of mousy hair. His three-year marriage to his first girlfriend Kayley had ended in divorce when she had slept with his best friend Pete, and so he had looked for a new partner online, and found Nuying. She was twenty-five, petite but plump, the daughter of a Chinese restaurant owner in Croydon. Both she and Ron were awkward and shy, but they both enjoyed cycling, and Ed Sheeran songs, and watching TV, and in the evening they would sit for hours together – not talking but just pleased that they had somebody to sit with.

  ‘It was nice of them to give us those table-mats, though,’ said Ron.

  ‘Yes,’ said Nuying. ‘All we need now is a table.’

  ‘Don’t you worry. I’ve beaten all my repair targets this year and I’ll get a good bonus at Christmas.’

  They had nearly reached Bickley Street when they heard a loud crack, and then another, and then the explosive sound of a shop window being shattered. Only twenty metres in front of them, like a furious ice-storm, thousands of fragments of glass burst out across the pavement. At the same time, the shop’s burglar alarm began to ring.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ said Ron. ‘What the hell was that?’

  Nuying tugged at his hand and said, ‘We should run! We should run! Maybe it’s a gas main!’

  ‘That wasn’t a gas main,’ Ron told her. ‘That was more like somebody smashing out the window with a hammer.’

  Nuying tugged at his hand again, harder. ‘We should still run!’

  Ron took a few steps back, but then stopped and took out his iPhone. He tapped out 999, and he was answered almost instantly.

  ‘Emergency, which service?’

  ‘Police, I think. Maybe the fire brigade too. There’s a shop window on Mitcham Road that’s blown right out all over the pavement. It could be a gas explosion, something like that. Or maybe somebody’s broken it out on purpose. I’m not sure which.’

  Before the operator could ask him any more questions, a dark figure clambered out of the front of the shop. It was strangely fluid, more like a large black animal than a man. It was followed by another, and another, all of different colours, a
nd then so many more that Ron couldn’t count them. A whole crowd of them were standing outside the shop now, on top of all the thousands of sparkling fragments of glass, except that they didn’t seem to be treading on them. They seemed instead to be hovering above them, and jostling silently against each other.

  Ron took another step back. Nuying whimpered and held onto his arm. She thought that the figures looked like all the washing that her grandmother used to hang out in her back yard, when she was a little girl in Hong Kong. When the wind had blown and the black and white mandarin shirts had all flapped their arms they had terrified her, and these figures terrified her now. She pulled at Ron’s arm so hard that dropped his iPhone onto the pavement.

  ‘Sir? Can you hear me?’ said the emergency operator.

  Ron bent down and scrabbled to pick up his phone. ‘Yes – sorry,’ he said. ‘I was just—’ but before he could say any more, the figures started to rush towards them, making almost the same sharp flapping sound that had terrified Nuying so much when she was small.

  As they came nearer, Ron could see that the figures weren’t people at all. They were shirts and jackets and coats and dresses. They had nobody in them, no heads and no arms and no legs, but they still came flooding forward with their empty sleeves flailing in the air, and they showed no sign that they were going to slow down or stop.

  Ron grabbed Nuying’s hand and together they started to run back the way they had come. Neither of them spoke: they were both panicking and they both knew that they would need every last gasp of breath to get away. They could hear the flapping coming closer and closer up behind them, but they didn’t dare to turn around.

  They reached the corner of the next street, Rookstone Road, and Ron pulled Nuying sharply to the right. The pavement here was much narrower, with parked cars all the way along it, so that the clothes wouldn’t be able to chase after them in such a wide-spread pack. Then – if they could make it to the end of the road and take another right, and then a left, and then another right, they would find themselves in Bickley Street, and have a chance of reaching their own front door.

  As she ran, Nuying hit the wing-mirror of a parked Toyota, and tripped, and staggered, and nearly fell forward. Ron pulled her upright and they kept on running, but they had lost precious seconds. They were less than a third of the way down the road when a long khaki trench-coat billowed up behind Ron with a soft thunderous sound and dropped onto his shoulders. It was only a coat, but it felt as heavy as if a man were wearing it, and Ron was slammed face-first onto the concrete.

  Nuying screamed, ‘Ron! Ron! Get up!’ and she snatched at one of the trench-coat’s epaulettes and tried to wrench it off him, but as she did so a writhing bottle-green dress wound its sleeves around and around her head, so that she could neither see nor breathe. The sleeves of a dark grey sweater tugged at her ankles, and she fell sideways, cracking her skull against the kerb.

  Now the pack of clothes began to attack the two of them with blind ferocity. The trench-coat struck Ron’s face against the pavement again and again, until his nose was smashed flat and his forehead was split apart and both of his eyeballs were knocked out onto his cheeks. At the same time, three jackets levered off his shoes and dragged down his trousers, and then entwined their sleeves around his legs and started to twist them around in the same way that Philip Wakefield’s legs had been twisted. As his femurs were rotated, his hip-joints crackled like a freshly lit fire.

  A hunchbacked grey anorak and three thick sweaters crawled crabwise over to Nuying. They rolled her over so that they could drag off her overcoat and then rip the buttons off her dress. Then they wrenched off her bra and dragged down her Spanx. Two of the sweaters wound their sleeves around her thighs and opened up her legs until she was almost doing the splits, and then the anorak forced its sleeve up inside her, right up to its elbow. It pulled and pulled at her womb, its back humping up and down with effort, and at last, in a welter of blood, it tore it right out of her. It waved it around as if it were a scalp that it had taken as a trophy, and then dropped it into the gutter.

  It took nearly an hour for the clothes to finish dismembering Ron and Nuying. They clustered over their bodies and ripped them apart layer by layer – skin, fat, muscle, tendons and connective tissue. They heaved out their intestines and unravelled them all the way along the pavement like long slippery hosepipes. Finally they broke open their ribcages and pulled out their lungs and their hearts.

  There was no sound except for the squelching of flesh and the snapping of bones.

  Eventually, the clothes gathered close together, almost all of them heavily bloodstained, and sat amongst the human devastation that they had created. Anybody who had seen them from a distance and who didn’t realise that they were nothing but empty clothes would have thought that they were religious penitents, meditating perhaps, or praying for forgiveness.

  After a while lightning flickered in the distance and thunder began to rumble. As the wind grew stronger, the clothes rose from the pavement in twos and threes and started to blow away. They rounded the corner at the end of Rookstone Road like a flock of migrating birds, and then they were gone.

  40

  Jerry was woken by his bedside phone ringing. He was on early worm today and for a moment he thought it was his alarm going off, because he invariably overslept if he didn’t set it.

  ‘Yes, what is it?’ he grunted. He squinted at his digital clock and couldn’t believe that it was only 4:09.

  It was Jamila. She didn’t have to ask if she had woken him up. She sounded very calm, and Jerry had already learned to take this as an indication that something was badly wrong.

  ‘Two more people have been torn to pieces, Jerry. From what I can gather they were killed like that Streatham Common murder, only much worse.’

  ‘Oh, shit,’ said Jerry, sitting up. ‘Where?’

  ‘We found them in one of the side-streets off the main Mitcham Road, Rookstone Road.’

  ‘I know it, yes. Rookstone Road. There’s a really good curry-house on the corner, the Krishna something.’

  ‘One of the victims called 999. We couldn’t send a car in time to save them, but hopefully we got there before any members of the public could see them, so I suppose we can be thankful for that.’

  ‘Who are the victims? Do we know?’

  ‘DC Malik is in attendance, along with DC Young. He sent me a video from his phone. If you want I’ll forward it to you. But I promise you that you’ll only want dry toast for breakfast, if that.’

  ‘That bad, is it?’

  ‘Let me put it this way – if the victims’ wallet and purse hadn’t been left behind, you wouldn’t have been able to tell if they were human beings, let alone male or female, or who they are. But – hold on, Malik gave me their names if I can read my own writing. They’re a white male Ronald Firbank and a Chinese female Liu Nuying. Ronald Firbank is a deputy manager at Budget Car Rentals in Battersea and Ms Liu is a manicurist at Body Beautiful in the High Street.’

  ‘So, no witnesses yet?’

  ‘No, and no obvious footprints, either, according to Malik, although the CSEs may be able to find some. Ronald Firbank called 999 at 2:33 a.m. to report that a shop window along the Mitcham Road had been broken. He thought that it might have been caused by a gas explosion, or else somebody had smashed it deliberately. Unfortunately that was all he said. The emergency operator said that immediately afterwards it sounded like he had dropped his phone, and then he was cut off.’

  ‘OK,’ said Jerry. He had climbed out of bed now and he was opening up his chest of drawers. He picked out a pair of jockey shorts with horseshoes on them. Ever since he had won £200 on the Oaks while he was wearing them, he had always believed they were lucky. He thought he might need them today, more than ever.

  ‘Malik said that there’s minimal damage inside the shop, except for some coat-rails knocked over,’ Jamila went on. ‘There’s no evidence of a gas explosion, or any other kind of explosion. The whole front display
window has been knocked out, but it’s fallen outwards across the pavement, so the obvious conclusion is that it was smashed by somebody inside the shop. But listen to this. It’s a charity shop, mainly selling second-hand clothing.’

  ‘Oh, don’t tell me.’

  ‘WellBrain it’s called, supporting research into brain injuries. It’s almost opposite Little Helpers, where Sophie Marshall worked.’

  ‘This just gets worse, doesn’t it? Is any of the clothing missing?’

  ‘Malik hasn’t been able to contact the shop manager yet, but almost all of the coat-rails are empty and there are dozens of hangers scattered around on the floor, so he reckons that quite a lot of clothes have been lifted.’

  Jerry was sitting on the side of the bed, pulling up one trouser-leg. ‘Lifted?’ he said. ‘Or done a runner?’

  ‘We can’t know for sure, Jerry, not yet. There’s no sign of any abandoned clothing anywhere in the immediate vicinity – not so far, anyway. It’s possible that the shop didn’t have very much stock to start with, or maybe it was all lifted.’

  ‘Or maybe the clothes managed to break out of the shop on their own and kill two innocent passers-by who just happened to get in their way.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jamila.

  ‘What’s your opinion, skip? I mean, serious?’

  Jamila still sounded utterly calm. ‘I wouldn’t have woken you up if I didn’t think this was relevant to our investigation, would I? I’ll meet you down at Rookstone Road in half an hour.’

  *

  The thunderstorm had passed over by the time Jerry reached Mitcham Road and parked, and it was beginning to grow light. The police had cordoned off the entire westbound lane, and a queue of early rush-hour traffic stretched back for over a mile.