you tubby little grurd.' I peel the parcel tape off the envelope and unpick the staples. I look up from dropping the last one with a ting like a tiny bell in the waste bin, but the other sound wasn't Colin's return, it was Rufus shifting his big feet. I slip the pages upside down out of the envelope and feel my grin rising to greet them as I turn them the other way up.
Let stalk about Ubby in Howwylud. Hiss firts flim – hiss debboo – scalled 'The Bets Messy Din'...
Perhaps I'm still wearing a kind of grin as I search the pages for even a single sentence that I remember writing. For as long as it takes me to race through the manuscript it seems my stiffened lips won't let me speak, and then I manage to force out a few basic words. 'He's been here. He's got in.'
Why isn't Rufus bothering to examine the pages? He looks as though just their presence has robbed him of speech. He widens his eyes and turns up his hands to indicate his smile, which I assume is meant to be apologetic. 'How could he have?' I demand.
Does Rufus take this for a game? He might be playing charades, the way he's jerking his hands at his smile, which seems less apologetic than impatient. His lips part, but at first simply to let his pale tongue lick them. Eventually he says 'I did my best. I'm sorry, Simon.'
However clear his words are, I find them indistinguishable from nonsense. 'What did you do?'
'I tried to stop it but I couldn't.'
He keeps lifting his hands as if he's attempting to support his expression. He isn't just smiling – he's miming a smile. The thought settles over my mind like blackened cobweb, darkness rendered substantial. 'You don't mean that,' I plead. 'You're joking.'
He shakes his head but fails to dislodge his smile. 'It's me.'
I grip the corners of the desk. I might be capable of hurling it at him, but I'm hanging onto it in the hope that it at least can be relied upon to stay solid. 'What sense does that make?'
'More than some of the things you've been going through, I should imagine.' He actually sounds self- righteous. 'You've been seeing him, haven't you?' he says with more than a hint of jealousy. 'He's been playing his tricks, or something he stirred up has.'
'Have you?' I retort in too similar a tone. 'Have you been seeing him?'
'Ever since I started looking into him after you brought him up in your thesis. I thought if I got you to research him that would distract him, lure him away. I should have known it would just make him or whatever it is stronger.'
He's apologising again. It's one more bewilderment to add to the mass that's swarming in my skull. I manage to disentangle a question that seems to have a point, at any rate until I voice it. 'Are you saying you found out things about him you didn't tell me?'
'Just a book with a couple of pages on him.' As if this justifies any secretiveness he adds 'It was about surrealism. In French.'
I can barely hear my own question. 'What did you do with it?'
'Wrote in it and sent it on its way. Don't ask me what I wrote, it made no sense to me.' Even more defensively he says 'I know I should have destroyed it but you can't, can you? You have to pass him on to other people. Anyway, we don't matter any more. There'll be no stopping him now.'
'Why not?'
'You've put him on the net. It's his ideal medium, the one he's been waiting for, or whatever he represents has. Everyone can get to him and he can get to everyone.'
'So you're telling me it was his fault,' I say savagely, 'what you did.'
'Depends what you have in mind.'
How can Rufus continue to smile? I grip the desk so fiercely that the corners feel close to piercing my hands. 'You said you couldn't stop posting that crap.'
'No, that isn't what I said.'
I do my best to fend off a sense that the past is changing – that the change is creeping up on me. 'What did you say, then?'
'That I couldn't stop you. I should have known it was no use. Everything's true on the net, and it lets anyone use a mask who wants to. It's the medium he kept talking about.'
In the midst of my massive confusion I feel it would help if Rufus accepted at least some blame. 'If you believe he's so bad for the world, why didn't you stop everyone watching his film tonight?'
'I tried, if you remember. If I'd made more of a scene they'd have wanted to know why.' He grins with some emotion as he adds 'Anyway, what for? You've made him bigger than his films. You're the authority on what he does to people. Nobody living has seen as much of him as you.'
He's blaming me again, and I sense jealousy as well. I don't know what may come of forcing him to admit to it, but I'm opening my mouth to try when words spill out almost faster than I think them. 'Mark has.'
'How can he have, Simon?' Rufus sounds as if he's attempting to calm a mental patient. 'I shouldn't think that's possible,' he says.
'He keeps watching a film of Tubby on stage. He watches it over and over.'
'Well, never mind. Soon it won't matter.'
'Won't matter?' I say through a grin that makes my jaws throb.
'No, because he'll be everywhere, or what's used him for a mask will. You've seen to that.'
His smile is no longer bothering to look apologetic. It's rising in triumph, although its inversion flickers over it. 'You have, you clown,' I yell and shove myself away from the desk. As if only my grip has been holding an image stable, the room instantly turns as black as the inside of my skull.
For altogether too long I can't tell if the room is absolutely dark – if it's flickering faintly or just my vision is. Has the sky gone out too? I'm straining to make out any detail of the room when I hear an object slither swiftly downwards to land on the carpet. It sounds flabby and plump. I stumble away from it, and at once I'm unable to judge where I am. I can hear it crawling across the floor with a noise like the dragging of a balloon full or less than full of liquid. I have to turn my back on it to locate the window, which is so dim that I might be peering at a patch of wall. When the faint rectangle stirs with a feeble pulse of light no more protracted than a heartbeat I swing around to glare at the room.
I can see very little. I'm not even sure that the dwarfish shape crouching a few feet away is the computer. All the electricity must have failed, since the computer shut down when the light did. I don't know whether the object on the floor has crawled out of the room or is biding its time close to me. I'm just able to distinguish Rufus between me and the door, but his presence isn't reassuring. It isn't just that he's standing utterly still; the silhouette of his head seems oddly lacking. 'Rufus?' I say louder than I intend.
I don't care for his response, if that's what it is. A whitish crescent seems to glimmer above his chin, but it's scarcely paler than the rest of the dim surface within the outline of his head. I edge past the desk and sidle well clear of him as I flee into the corridor.
Although it's even darker out here, I pull the door shut. Whatever was in the office besides Rufus, I hope it's trapped. I've no idea where Colin has gone, but it's Mark I have to go to, and Natalie as well. I can barely see my way; the passage looks unstable with dimness or with my nervous vision, while the doors are indistinguishable from the walls. I only just avoid colliding with the wall at the bend. I risk putting on speed towards the lift – I still feel too close to the office and its unwelcome contents – until my right foot kicks the skirting-board. I've blundered into another turn in the corridor.
There's only one between the lift and the office, and it's behind me. Have I wandered beyond the lift in the dark? I twist around to find an object looming very close to me. Surely it's just a wall, but that's disconcerting enough. Can I orient myself by the numbers on the doors? I shuffle away from the corner in the direction I was already taking and run my hand over the wall, which feels furry and chill. The fur must be the texture of the wallpaper, not mould, but I have to force myself to keep touching it. Then my fingertips encounter the smooth surface of a door, and at once I'm afraid it will jerk open, though I can't put a name to anything I dread it may release. When it doesn't budge I grope in search of the number. My fingers trace a six and another followed by more, or are they zeros? In either case there are too many; I seem to feel them multiply as if they're hatching from the door. I snatch my hand away and stagger backwards in the dark.
I expect to bump into another wall, but I'm left swaying in the midst of blackness. The lack of any sense of where I am leaves me unable to breathe. The dark and my skull are throbbing by the time I notice a point of light far down the corridor. It reminds me of a spyhole, which must be why I feel watched. What else can I do except
