When she turned the corner, she saw even more of them. Three or four were gathered outside the master bedroom, their heads close together as if they were furtively discussing what they were going to do next.
Jaws stopped outside the door of the first bedroom, where Grace and Portia were sleeping.
He leaned close to Ada’s right ear and whispered, ‘What we need more than anything else, love, is breath. Even when it’s second-hand.’
‘What?’
‘You wait till you’ve been breathing your last breath a thousand times over, day in and day out. You’ll start to feel like somebody’s trying to smother you with a stinky old pillow and won’t take it away. You ain’t got to that stage yet, but give it a month or two and you’ll be gasping, I promise you.’
‘Why can’t we just go outside, and breathe some fresh air there?’
‘Because we can’t, love. We can walk through all these indoor walls when we’re having a weary, but the outside walls – no. They’re as solid to us as they are to them what hasn’t been chanted. Believe me, I’ve tried enough times.’
‘So what are we going to do now?’ Ada whispered.
‘Here, I’ll show you. Thomas, mate – are you joining us?’
Thomas shook his head and pointed down the corridor towards the master bedroom. ‘She is the one whose breath I wish to savour.’
‘Her?’ said Ada. ‘That’s the wife of Rob Russell’s older brother.’
‘I don’t care whose brother he is. I want to go back and tell him how much I relished the taste of her.’ With that, his tongue darted out and licked his scabby lips.
‘Why? What’s he ever done to you?’
‘He told me when he first set eyes on me that I was a disgrace in the eyes of God. A walking blasphemy, that’s what he called me. Why do you think I chanted him?’
‘You chanted him, too?’ asked Ada. ‘You’ve trapped him, the same as me?’
‘He deserved it. Nobody should take the name of the Lord our God in vain. Nobody should denigrate somebody who gave his own mother solace. And above all, nobody should question the integrity of a man whose devotion to the Almighty has kept him imprisoned in the moment of his sacrifice for century after wearisome century, and for countless wearisome centuries to come.’
Thomas was whispering as he spoke, but intensely, almost hatefully, and he pronounced ‘quessstion’ with an extra snake-like hiss.
‘Martin, that’s his name, isn’t it?’ asked Ada. ‘I don’t know what he looks like, but none of the men I saw in the priest’s hole looked as if they could have been him.’
‘He was having himself a weary, I expect,’ said Jaws.
‘Martin?’ whispered Thomas. ‘I never asked his name. One never speaks the names of demons or those possessed by demons – not when one is chanting them. He is among us now, yes, and thanks to me the world at large is purged of his presence for all eternity. For that, I think I deserve to be lauded, don’t you?’
Ada didn’t know what to say. When Thomas had first approached her, she had thought that he was sympathetic and friendly, and that he might be able to help her to find a way to escape from this nightmare. Now she began to see that his four-century confinement in Allhallows Hall had unhinged him, and made him vengeful – even if he hadn’t already been deranged on the day when he was first trapped here.
Without saying another word, Thomas grinned and turned and went off along the corridor to join the other whispering men outside the master bedroom.
Jaws gave a dismissive grunt. ‘Don’t let the holy father get to you, darling. He’s a dirty beast, so what do you expect? All dirty beasts are funny in the head. They have to be. All that walking on water and feeding the five thousand and raising the dead. You’ve got to have a fucking screw loose to believe in all that cobblers.’
He pressed his hand between her shoulders again and said, ‘Come on. Let’s snag ourselves some of that breath.’
Ada still couldn’t believe that she would be able to pass through the bedroom wall as if it had no substance at all, and when Jaws pushed her towards it, she turned her face to one side and tried to shy away. But with that same sharp, effervescent tingle, she found herself standing in the gloom of Grace and Portia’s bedroom. It was lit only by the red numbers on the digital clock that Portia had borrowed from the kitchen, although both she and Jaws seemed to have a faint luminosity of their own.
It was 3:11, and then 3:12. Both Grace and Portia were deeply asleep, back to back, with the quilt drawn up under their arms. Portia’s mouth was open and she was softly snoring.
‘Here, love,’ whispered Jaws, ‘this is what you do.’
He made his way around the end of the bed and carefully laid himself down next to Portia. He made no impression on the covers at all, as if he weighed nothing, but he was able to fold back the corner of the quilt to give himself unobstructed access to Portia’s face. He stared at her for a moment, so close that the tips of their noses were almost touching, and then he opened his mouth and pressed his lips against hers.
She murmured and jerked her head, but Jaws kept their lips stuck together. Every time she breathed out, he breathed in. They passed the same breath between them over and over, until his eyelids began to droop with the sensation that she was giving him, and gradually they starved the oxygen out of the air that they were sharing.
At last he sat up. She found
