looked tired the last time I saw you. I’ll explain to Hugo, and I’ll see if I can’t talk up the article you’re going to write when you come back.”
She chatted reassuringly for a while, then left him staring at the phone. He was realizing how much he’d counted on selling the article. Apart from royalties, which never amounted to as much as he expected, when had he last had the reassurance of a check? He couldn’t go on holiday, for he would feel he hadn’t earned it; if he spent the time worrying about the extravagance, that would be no holiday at all.
But wasn’t he being unfair to himself? Weren’t there stories he could sell?
He turned the idea over gingerly in his mind, as though something might crawl out from beneath—but really, he could see no arguments against it. Writing out the nightmares had drained them of power; they were just stories now. As he dialed Hugo’s number, to ask him for the address of the magazine, he was already thinking up a pseudonym for himself.
For a fortnight he walked around Anglesey. Everything was hallucinatorily intense: beyond cracks in the island’s grassy coastline, the sea glittered as though crystallizing and shattering; across the sea, Welsh hills and mist appeared to be creating each other. Beaches were composed of rocks like brown crusty loaves decorated with shells. Anemones unfurled deep in glassy pools. When night fell he lay on a slab of rock and watched the stars begin to swarm.
As he strolled he was improving the chapters in his mind, now that the first version had clarified his themes. He wrote the article in three days, and was sure it was publishable. Not only was it the fullest description yet of the murder, but he’d managed to explain the way the neighbors had behaved: they’d needed to dramatize their repudiation of all that had been done in the house, they’d used him as a scapegoat to cast out, to proclaim that it had nothing to do with them.
When he’d sent the manuscript to Susie he felt pleasantly tired. The houses of Neston grew silver in the evening, the horizon was turning to ash. Once the room was so dark that he couldn’t read, he went to bed. As he drifted toward sleep he heard next door’s drain bubbling to itself.
But what was causing bubbles to form in the grayish substance that resembled fluid less than flesh? They were slower and thicker than tar, and took longer to form. Their source was rushing upward to confront him face to face. The surface was quivering, ready to erupt, when he awoke.
He felt hot and grimy, and somehow ashamed. The dream had been a distortion of the last thing he’d heard, that was all; surely it wouldn’t prevent him from sleeping. A moment later he was clinging to it desperately; its dreaminess was comforting, and it was preferable by far to the ideas that were crowding into his mind. He knew now why he felt grimy.
He couldn’t lose himself in sleep; the nightmares were embedded there, minute, precise, and appalling. When he switched on the light it seemed to isolate him. Night had bricked up all the windows. He couldn’t bear to be alone with the nightmares—but there was only one way to be rid of them.
The following night he woke, having fallen asleep at his desk. His last line met his eyes: “Hours later he sat back on his haunches, still chewing doggedly…” When he gulped the lukewarm tea it tasted rusty as blood. His surroundings seemed remote, and he could regain them only by purging his mind. His task wasn’t even half finished. His eyes felt like dusty pebbles. The pen jerked in his hand, spattering the page.
Next morning Susie rang, wrenching him awake at his desk. “Your article is tremendous. I’m sure we’ll do well with it. Now I wonder if you can let me have a chapter breakdown of the rest of the book to show Hugo?”
Miles was fully awake now, and appalled by what had happened in his mind while he had been sleeping. “No,” he muttered.
“Are there any problems you’d like to tell me about?”
If only he could! But he couldn’t tell her that while he had been asleep, having nearly discharged his task, a new crowd of nightmares had gathered in his mind and were clamoring to be written. Perhaps now they would never end.
“Come and see me if it would help,” Susie said.
How could he, when his mind was screaming to be purged? But if he didn’t force himself to leave his desk, perhaps he never would. “All right,” he said dully. “I’ll come down tomorrow.”
When tomorrow came it meant only that he could switch off his desk lamp; he was nowhere near finishing. He barely managed to find a seat on the train, which was crowded with football fans. Opened beer cans spat; the air grew heady with the smell of beer. The train emerged roaring from a tunnel, but Miles was still in his own, which was far darker and more oppressive. Around him they were chanting football songs, which sounded distant as a waveband buried in static. He wrote under cover of his briefcase, so that nobody would glimpse what he was writing.
Though he still hadn’t finished when he reached London, he no longer cared. The chatter of the wheels, the incessant chanting, the pounding of blood and nightmares in his skull had numbed him. He sat for a while in Euston. The white tiles glared like ice, a huge voice loomed above him.
As soon as she saw him Susie demanded, “Have you seen a doctor?”
Even a psychiatrist couldn’t help him. “I’ll be all right,” he said, hiding behind a bright false smile.
“I’ve thought of some possibilities for your book,” she said over lunch. “What about that house in Edinburgh where almost the same murder was committed twice, fifty years apart? The man who did the second always said he hadn’t known about the first…”
She obviously hoped to revive him with ideas—but the nightmare which was replaying itself, endless as a loop of film, would let nothing else into his skull. The victim had managed to tear one hand free and was trying to protect herself.
“And isn’t there the lady in Sutton who collects bricks from the scenes of crimes? She was meaning to use them to build a miniature Black Museum. She ought to be worth tracing,” Susie said as the man seized the flailing hand by its wrist. “And then if you want to extend the scope of the book there’s the mother of the Meathook Murder victims, who still gets letters pretending to be from her children.”
The man had captured the wrist now. Slowly and deliberately, with a grin that looked pale as a crack in clay, he—Miles was barely able to swallow; his head, and every sound in the restaurant, was pounding. “They sound like good ideas,” he mumbled, to shut Susie up.
Back at her office, a royalty fee had arrived. She wrote him a check at once, as though that might cure him. As he slipped it into his briefcase, she caught sight of the notebooks in which he’d written on the train. “Are they something I can look at?” she said.
His surge of guilt was so intense that it was panic. “No, it’s nothing, it’s just something, no,” he stammered.
Hours later he was walking. Men loitered behind boys playing pinball; the machines flashed like fireworks, splashing the men’s masks. Addicts were gathering outside the all-night chemist’s on Piccadilly; in the subterranean Gents’, a starved youth washed blood from a syringe. Off Regent Street, Soho glared like an amusement arcade. On Oxford Street figures in expensive dresses, their bald heads gleaming, gestured broken-wristed in windows.
He had no idea why he was walking. Was he hoping the crowds would distract him? Was that why he peered at their faces, more and more desperately? Nobody looked at all reassuring. Women were perfect as corpses, men seemed to glow with concealed aggression; some were dragons, their mouths full of smoke.
He’d walked past the girl before he reacted. Gasping, he struggled through a knot of people on the corner of Dean Street and dashed across, against the lights. In the moments before she realized that he’d dodged ahead of her and was staring, he saw her bright quick eyes, the delicate web of veins beneath them, the freckles that peppered the bridge of her nose, the pulsing of blood in her neck. She was so intensely present to him that it was appalling.
Then she stepped aside, annoyed by him, whatever he was. He reached out, but couldn’t quite seize her arm. He had to stop her somehow. “Don’t,” he cried.
At that, she fled. He’d started after her when two policemen blocked his path. Perhaps they hadn’t noticed him, perhaps they wouldn’t grab him—but it was too late; she was lost in the Oxford Street crowd. He turned and ran, fleeing the police, fleeing back to his hotel.
As soon as he reached his room he began writing. His head felt stuffed with hot ash. He was scribbling so fast that he hardly knew what he was saying. How much time did he have? His hand was cramped and shaking, his writing was surrounded by a spittle of ink.
