It was past midnight when I went through to the room next door and threw myself onto the bed, an almost empty miniature of gin clutched in one hand. I supported myself on an elbow and drank the last dregs (shit, I hated gin) and let the tiny bottle drop to the floor as I flopped onto my back. Oliver, Oliver, why did you have to do it? Why now at this crucial time? The bank was probably one of the most significant accounts we’d ever take on and, once we became committed, we couldn’t be seen to blow it. Okay, it might not seriously knock us back in the industry, but it could damage our reputation as a winning hot shop a little. As for the so-called “merger” with Blake & Turnbrow, we needed to talk about it coolly and rationally without internecine disputes even before negotiations had begun.
Man, I was tired. Sick and tired, I guess. I’d never liked arguments and this one was a dinger. Ollie and I used to be tight, but now the relationship appeared to be over. For good? Who could say?
Closing my eyes I felt the room shift around me; by no means a seismic shift, but a smooth displacement that had more to do with exhaustion than the alcohol I’d consumed. I opened my eyes again and stared at the ceiling. Orange light came through the windows from the street below, this occasionally brightened by a whiter light, traffic approaching from a side street opposite, so that shadows moved around the darkened room like playful ghosts, growing then waning as headlights outside moved on.
I wasn’t drunk—I’m sure I wasn’t drunk—but anxiety, mental weariness and booze were never a good mix. For a moment I was disorientated, but the room soon settled itself again. The hum of late-night traffic that filtered through the windows’ double glazing was almost soothing. We would get through this, I told myself, and things eventually would go back to the way they were. Compromise was all that was needed here, and Sydney was good at smoothing over difficulties and offering solutions to disputes. I’d give him a call in the morning, get him over here, let him sort things out. Sydney had always been the perfect middleman, the soother of awkward situations. Hopefully, he would back down once he saw how anti-“merger” I really was and, in turn, he would help dissuade Oliver from such a drastic course.
My eyes closed again and this time they remained closed. Within seconds I was gone.
It was as easy and as quick as that. One moment I was drowsy, sinking into sleep, the next I was out of body, hovering near the ceiling, gazing down at myself.
Sometimes—in fact, most times—I had to work at it, consciously putting myself into a state of relaxation, imagining myself outside of my own physical form, seeing myself lying below in my imagination only, until the image became sharper, clearer, and suddenly I would actually be there, some other place, watching myself, no longer confined to the shell of my physical body. Usually, a great sense of freedom accompanied egression, a feeling of limitless space around my spirit form, a knowledge that I could fly to any destination I chose without constraint; but tonight I was confused, my mind not as liberated as my spirit. It was as if a thick yet invisible harness held me to my body, the bondage of reality perhaps. It could have been that my body, the part of me that was permanently chained to the physical world, sensed more than my spiritual self did and so was reluctant to release me, somehow afraid of the parting.
This state did not last long though, because a moment or two later my body dwindled below me as I zoomed away, through the ceiling, then the ceiling of the room above, swifter and swifter until I was out into the night sky.
It’s difficult to describe the feeling accurately, because it involves so much that is unknowable to most people. To begin with there is an incredible sense of wellbeing, for there are no physical torments such as pain, weariness, hunger or hangover anymore and, although there is some initial apprehension, this quickly vanishes with familiarity and you begin to enjoy the sensation. Most of the time you’re not in control of your destination but sometimes, if your mind is clear and compliant enough, you can direct yourself, you can choose a place and suddenly you will zoom off to it. Same thing if you envisage a particular person. It’s a bit like those rare times when you realize you are dreaming and so for a while can direct your own actions in the dream. Usually this interesting state doesn’t last long, because a little consciousness soon encourages full consciousness, and you find yourself awake again, annoyed you hadn’t made more of the experience.
On this night though, I was unable to govern my journey and found myself inside a kind of kaleidoscope of images, none of which appeared relevant to me. I seemed to travel back in time, because I saw myself as a little boy, skateboarding down a hill, picking up speed, shouting with both glee and fear as I increased speed, and then I watched myself sailing through the air, because the skateboard had hit some obstruction in its path (I wasn’t sure, but I thought it was my mother’s handbag lying in the roadway, and that was ridiculous, because why should her handbag be lying there?) and the board I had been standing on clattered over and over on the hard concrete while I glided smoothly through the air, screaming because I knew I was going to hit solid ground before too long. But instead of smashing into concrete, I found myself lying on cheap lino flooring, gazing up at a ring of faces that stared down at me, one of which was my mother’s, embarrassment as well as anxiety written across her plump features, and I remembered I’d just swallowed a steaming hot potato, a potato whose fire singed the inside walls of my chest, and then I was in another place, in a room filled with oldish-looking furniture, and I was watching a little boy, an even younger me, playing with a plastic Skywalker and Darth Vader on a rug in front of an electric fire, only two of its bars working, and I was desperately trying to ignore a row that was going on between a man and a woman who shared the room with me, and I could see that the woman was my mother, only she was much younger than she was today and she was almost pretty, despite the roundness of her face, and she was shouting at the man who, for some reason, had no face, his image masked beneath one of those pixel cover-ups, you know, little squares of different hues technically superimposed on screens so that the person being filmed cannot be identified, and he was silent as my mother screeched into his face, only occasionally uttering some kind of weak protest, and the more I stared at him the more the pixels disintegrated, square by square, while he was turning to me and saying ‘Jimmy’, until—
—until I was off again, flying over rooftops, winging through darkness, skimming through shadowed canyons, until, until…
… until I found myself descending worn stone steps that led down from the street, then passing through a battered, paint-chipped door. I was inside a dingy, dank room, its only light source an angle-poise lamp on a table covered with newspaper clippings, the dusty naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling switched off.
A figure was seated there, back to me, long-bladed scissors in one hand, snipping away at a newspaper. The cuttings already taken from other newspapers were set out neatly, without one piece overlapping another, the lines in between precise in their parallels. (I could tell it was a man by the size of his hands and the heavy set of his hunched shoulders.) I was puzzled by the sounds he made, a kind of wet snuffling. Every so often he would reach for a soiled, wrinkled rag lying on the desk and bring it to his face as if to wipe away mucus. Perhaps he had a heavy cold.
I was suddenly very afraid.
Why I had been drawn to this place I couldn’t tell, yet somehow I knew there had to be a reason. Certainly, I didn’t want to be here in this sombre room. Through an open doorway I could just make out a narrow cot bed against a wall, its sheets rumpled, unmade. In there the window’s grubby curtains were closed tight, as if to discourage snoopers, even though the flat itself was below street level. Well-thumbed magazines lay untidily on an old sofa, barely leaving a place to sit. There was no cheer here, no welcome; the place seemed filled with threat.
Snip-snip-snip.
The metallic cutting sound was eerily loud in the room’s stillness and, if I’d had a heartbeat, I’m sure I would have heard that too.
I drew nearer, but not willingly. It was a compulsion, an undeniable curiosity, that drove me.
Even though I was of no physical substance, I was afraid as I peered over the man’s shoulder to read the large print of newspaper headlines.
POLICE ADMIT SERIAL KILLER AT LARGE.
MURDER VICTIM MUTILATED.
WHY THESE VICTIMS? POLICE BAFFLED.
HUNT FOR MUTILATOR CONTINUES.
I straightened in shock. These murders had been happening for the past six weeks and the newspapers were full of lurid stories; even the broadsheets seemed to have lost their sense of decorum in their gory descriptions of the crimes. According to these stories all the victims were chosen at random, there was no connection between them. Also, the killings appeared to be motiveless, the unfortunate victims had no known enemies and apparently
