So many memories, rushing to expunge themselves, no chronological order to them anymore, a boy one moment, a man the next, but one common thread through all the ages, one consistent theme: rejection…
Fortunately, most of my journey was by way of broad main roads, the minor ones unnecessary, otherwise driving would have been even more difficult, with less leeway for swerving and avoiding parked vehicles. I ignored traffic lights, reluctant to shift through the gears, and again my luck held, no other traffic crossed in front of me.
—fitting the mask, the white surgical mask, concealing the affliction even though the disguise was further cause for curiosity or ridicule. Keeping the ugliness to myself. For street wear, even in the summer months, the long scarf, wrapped tightly around the head so only my eyes showed, often the surgical mask beneath this, then the hat, which cast shade over my eyes because even these were unsightly, too black, too protruding—
I’d driven this route many, many times but although it was familiar to me, I had to fight hard to remember which turns to make (so heavy was the Hillman that changing down for corners was unnecessary as long as I maintained reasonable speed).
—children, a classroom, a playground, full of them, gawking in fear, whispering to friends as they pointed, some of them sniggering, later to laugh outright, call me names—
—rejection—
—loneliness, time spent in dim rooms, bitterness the only companion—
Steady as a car flashed me from behind. Slowly I lifted one of those big hands, the other remaining gripped on the steering wheel, touched the scarf to make sure it was still in place, still hiding the deformity, as the impatient driver put his foot down and sped around the lazy Hillman, glaring across his passenger at me as he passed. He gave a derisive little toot of his horn, rear lights disappearing into the distance.
—the dreams, many of them horrible, depressing, but others that were wonderful and the realization that these generally were more than just dreams, that they were flights from the body, journeys of the spirit which took me to familiar places, but where I could not be seen, where my grotesqueness was hidden by invisibility, where even to myself there was nothing at all—learning that these flights were not restricted to night-times alone, that they could be controlled, sleep, itself, the only invariable, the essential requirement, and that could be learned, could be governed just as the journeys themselves could be governed—
—so many places travelled to, so many homes visited, so many activities spied upon, so many bedrooms—
—and always the glorious sense of freedom—
—the impossibility of rejection—
—and always the misery of returning to life as it truly was, the loneliness, heartache, the resentment—
—but eventually, the miracle of dominating the dead, of using corpses for my own gratification and for revenge—
—the first experiment, the first freshly deceased body, witnessing its lingering soul finally leaving its vessel, for a certain psychic ability had always been with me, perhaps nature’s compensation for the physical affliction, watching the soul lift itself from the corpse, like steam from a pot, but perhaps less clear, leaving a vacancy behind, or so it had occurred to me at the time, and on a whim, escaping from my own body in the otherwise deserted mortuary, letting it sleep in a chair in the empty little office attached to the tiled room where the cadavers were kept, lying down in the cold shell of flesh and organs that were already corrupting, raising a dead arm stiffly, awkwardly, rigor mortis in its earliest stages, elevating that reluctant arm, then the other one, then, although with more difficulty, the legs, one at a time, finally sitting up and looking around, viewing the last fleeting memories that were stored both in the brain and body itself like faded tape—
—repeating the experiment, over and over again, until it was time to take it to its logical—logical to me, that is—conclusion, the procurement of other, fresher, bodies, to live, if only for a very short time, as that person had, no, as whatever that person was capable of—
Oh God, it was unbearable. The sickness here, the evil within. I almost collapsed against the steering wheel, only the knowledge that I was drawing near to my destination preventing me from doing so. What other memories of this man Moker did I have to suffer? I didn’t think I could take much more, not if they were like those already remembered.
But there was one last memory to be recalled before it was erased forever and perhaps, in its way, it was the most disturbing of all because it was the very beginning of his hatred of normal people.
—chaos, images rushing through with no order and proper recognition—
—until everything slowed, everything resolved itself into one final and perfectly clear recollection—
—darkness becoming lighter, redness then too much brightness, shapes moving around me, feeling myself lifted, a separation, a snapping of something that had connected me to existence itself, the terrible, the awful, feeling of isolation, the sadness of losing something even though I didn’t know what, then the sounds around me, noises that sounded like intakes of air, familiar because it had seemed always to be with me, except this was sharp, unpleasant, not cosy and reassuring anymore, and those shapes, bright, white, leaning towards me, another blurred form coming into my feeble clouded vision, and there was something familiar about this, something nice and warming—
Another flashback, one already experienced, interposing itself for only a moment, a snapshot of the woman whose home I had searched for and found, the mother who had screamed—go away, go away!—before slamming the door in my undisguised face.
—rejection—
—absolute rejection—
And then, no more, the last memory unfinished.
I pulled the car over in a violent swerve, no longer able to bear the weight of these memories that were not mine but belonged to someone who had known only misery throughout his life.
Despite everything I knew about his deeds, despite the evil that was as much part of his nature as love is of most others’—despite that, I laid my head on those large hands that rested against the steering wheel and wept. I wept for Alec Moker.
41
The irony wasn’t lost on me as I wiped tears from those bulbous eyes with the sleeve of the raincoat: I was weeping for Moker with his own tears.
Rationally, it seemed foolish to feel pity for someone as wicked and as perverted as Moker, a necrophile who had murdered and mutilated four people—who had tried to kill my own wife and my little Primrose, for Christ’s sake!—but that was what I felt for him. His whole life had been despicable, from birth to manhood, he’d suffered shame and humiliation, hopelessness and loneliness; and perhaps worst of all for Moker—rejection. Total rejection. Rejection even by his own mother. Wouldn’t that be enough to warp any person’s soul, that the physical disfiguration that was its cause? Yet I could not wipe the picture of Moker kneeling above Primrose, the sharpened knitting needle ready to sink into her small heart, from my mind. It still shocked me, still filled me with a burning anger: but pity for him loitered behind the anger. Who could live a life such as his and remain normal? Mentally normal, I mean. Who would not develop a distorted view of life itself under those circumstances? But maybe Andrea had been right when she had called me gullible, because there are many in the world who suffer even worse afflictions than this killer, victims of constant pain, people with terrible abnormalities, paraplegics, men, women and children who need machines to help them breathe—the list is endless—most of whom strive to live as normal lives as possible, without overt bitterness, without rancour, without resentment of others. Why the hell should I feel sorry for a monster like Moker? I shouldn’t. Yet somehow, I did.
When the weeping had stopped and my eyes were dried, a realization occurred to me. I had “remembered” through Moker the killing of four people. Four people. I hadn’t been among them. Not that I needed it, but this was final proof that Oliver Guinane was my murderer. Bitter resentment and insanity were Moker’s excuse, but what was Guinane’s? Envy and greed? Yeah, envy and greed. He envied me my wife—and child. He wanted to make a huge pile of money out of something I didn’t support. Pretty basic, really.
But why he had chopped off my genitals was a mystery.
I looked out the side window up at the gtp sign, our agency’s logo, neon-lit over the glass front doors. Guinane True Presswell. That name was going to vanish when the so-called “merger” went through. Some accounts might move, but many of our existing clients would be content to come under the wing of such an internationally
