Part 23 (1/2)

The voice which answered sounded thin and distant, farther away than the miles which separated her from the city, almost a whisper.

”Jane? This is Cathy. I'm afraid...”

Jane heard her own voice, too loud, too high, too fast.

”This man. The magazine. He's done things. Awful things. To my web page. About me. My picture. Al has to change it back again!”

There was a long silence and then Cathy's voice, more faint than ever. ”There's been an accident. This morning. On his way to the shop. A car hit him. He was on the pavement, but the roads are so icy. They say the car skidded onto the pavement. He's dead.”

Cathy's voice finally broke, and she continued, ”The car drove off. He killed my Al and just left him there. I'm sorry, I can't talk any more. I'll call back later.”

”Don't! Don't go!”

Jane put down the dead phone and tried to process what Cathy had told her. Al was gone. He couldn't protect her from what Nemo was doing. No one could help her. And then she realized that it must have been Nemo who had murdered Al, that he had been driving the car which had killed him, that he meant to kill her next. She had to stop him. Jane clicked open her email to reply to his last message. She would use his artwork, whatever it was, whenever he wanted, if only he would leave her alone.

”Leave me alone! Leave me alone!” she was barely conscious of the sound of her pleading as she crouched in front of the monitor and realized that his emails had disappeared. The last received message was dated three days earlier.

Jane's fingers scrabbled through the messages for his contributions and his attached drawings, but there was nothing from Nemo except an innocuous message delivered almost a week earlier asking whether she had reached a decision over his drawings. Despite the cold, Jane felt hot and dizzy. She had a separate folder for the e-zine, but when she checked all her other folders and doc.u.ments, she could find no other messages from Nemo.

And then she was in the bathroom, staring at her hands, pink and strange, writhing around each other in the tiny sink. She lifted them and watched, fascinated, as the water dripped from her fingertips. She tried to remember what had happened, why she was in the bathroom was.h.i.+ng her hands. The room was darkening. If it was still morning, why was the world outside the window turning from the hard white of the day to the grey blue of evening? Jane stood listening to the silence and wondered where the day had gone, what had happened between her searching for Nemo's messages and this moment she had fallen into.

She hurried back to her study. There was a new message from her publisher, asking why she hadn't replied to his last two emails. There was nothing from Nemo, but she knew that he had taken control of her PC, changing and erasing. She opened her bio and felt the floor tilt under her. Her photograph had been deleted and in its place was a black frame with just her name and RIP. Her thoughts seemed to scatter. She thought of that day in York, when she had tripped on the cobbled road and the contents of her dropped handbag had spilled and rolled all around her. Mike had been with her to save her from falling, his strong arm around her waist. Mike, who had deserted her and left her at the mercy of a murderer. Jane pushed the PC off the table, smas.h.i.+ng it on the stone floor.

She had to get away before Nemo got to the cottage. When she stepped into the kitchen, she realized that she was too late. The kitchen table was covered with felt tip drawings of a naked woman, hacked and battered. They were crude and childish, but not of Jane. She stared at the slashed face in the drawings. It was always the same woman, but Jane's hair was short and dark, and the woman in the drawings had long fair hair and blue eyes, not her dark ones. She picked up one of the drawings, holding it trembling like a fan in her hand.

The woman in the drawings looked, not like her, but her replacement in Mike's heart...like Samantha.

Jane picked up one of her felt tips. The drawings had been made with the pens she used to mark copy, but she kept them in a drawer. Nemo must have had time to search the cottage. And then she heard his breathing and realized that it was too late for anyone to help her.

Jane yanked a knife from the block beside her and slashed at the sound in front of her and then swung round in panic when she realized that his breathing was behind her, soft and gentle as the falling snow brus.h.i.+ng against the window. She had no idea how Nemo could make himself invisible, but Jane knew that she had to get out of the cottage. She bolted from the room, pus.h.i.+ng over the table, racing down the hall, swinging the knife in an arc in front of her, clawing open the front door, running, his steady breathing in her ear.

Outside the cottage the freezing air filled her lungs with ice, and her feet burned with the cold, but Jane kept running toward the main road. It was almost dark now, the icy wind cutting through her robe, the snow thicker than ever. She might lose Nemo in this swirling white world if only she could keep running, but his steady breathing was still in her ears.

And then her head suddenly cleared. He was following her footprints in the snow. She wanted to sing Good King Wenceslas. The tune filled her head, almost drowning out the sound of Nemo behind her. But she was cleverer than he was. Let him follow her footprints-she would run in circles! He could run and run and never realize that she had tricked him! She began circling the field in front of the cottage as the night grew darker and colder.

She seemed to have run for hours and hours. It was becoming harder to breathe now, but the exertion had made her deliciously warm, warmer than she had been for days. She pulled off her cotton robe and threw it, a whirling white bird, into the snow; white lost in white.

”Follow that, Nemo!”

As her voice disappeared in the wind, Jane realized that her breath too had left her. She sat down and then fell back onto the soft ground, tired beyond tired, wanting to sleep, lulled by the cold. She felt safe and warm. She thought of Mike, who had looked into her eyes and promised to love her until death do us part, who had deserted her, and now she had left both Mike and Nemo behind her. Now she was done. She was alone where no one could hurt her.

As her mind slowed, Jane remembered what the name 'Nemo' meant. It was Latin for no man, for no one. That's who he was, who everyone was. Satisfied, she drifted into sleep, feeling nothing but the cold soft kisses of the falling snow on her upturned face.

Martin hated these editorial meetings. He knew that Louise had already decided on what she would include in the evening newsflash and he had far better things to do with his time, but at least the meeting was winding up at last.

Louise glanced down at the file in front of her and then looked across the table at him. ”Did you find out any more about that dead woman on the moors?”

”The police are writing it off as an accident. She died of hypothermia; that kind of thing happens all the time if you go for a stroll naked in a blizzard. Seems her husband had dumped her for another woman a few months ago and she'd been living alone ever since. Her doctor was treating her for depression, but being snowed in alone for all that time must have pushed her over the edge.”

Louise looked mildly interested. ”Didn't she get in touch with anyone?”

”She couldn't. No phone. The landlines are still down, and there's no mobile signal from out there. She had a PC, but there was no Internet connection either. She was totally isolated. Seems she spent most of her time making drawings of her ex-husband's new woman. Pretty nasty ones, the police said.”

”Too tacky for a closer; too depressing,” Louise said and stood up. ”We'll go with the rescued coach tour. Forget the dead woman.”

And the meeting was over.

About Richard Hill.

Richard Hill considers himself as not primarily a horror writer, but just a writer. He has written for radio, TV, and for theatres like The Hampstead Theatre in London and The Everyman Theatre in Liverpool; in fact, he would write for anyone who would give him money for words. He has an MA in Victorian Literature from the University of Liverpool.

Since Richard was first old enough to make annoying noises, he has played in bands in and around Liverpool. Afterwards, he headed up to the Editorial Office at the University of Liverpool, producing all their magazines and prospectuses, and taught Creative Writing there as well in their English Department. He is currently co-writing a novel with fellow author Louise King about two serial killers.

Richard had a stroke five years ago. It still amazes him that his body hasn't yet realized that if it does succeed in killing him, he'll take it with him. Richard had to learn to walk and talk again, butknock on Formicahe's good now, although now he's used to one-handed typing-which sounds more Zen than it is.

/profile.php?id=643779752.

UBIRR.

by Conrad Williams.

Under the sheet of beaten tin the sky had turned into, Manser labored to keep up with his fiancee. She had picked her way through the group to be with Rick, their tour guide. Manser watched the couple move across the uneven terrain like a pair of goats, putting daylight between them. He would not allow her to get away however, and lose herself among these outcrops with that overgrown blond t.o.s.s.e.r.

”Is hot, yes? Too hot for the Englander?” Dirk grinned at him through the mosquito veil attached to his hat. He was from a small town near Bremen, apparently, and did something in synthetics. Why don't you t.w.a.t off, you Teutonic t.u.r.dster? Everything he wore was brand new. Manser pictured him with a shopping list the day before his arrival in Darwin, buying gear from a shop called 'Action Man,' or 'Survival b.a.s.t.a.r.ds R Us.' Now he had lost sight of Tabitha. Where was she?

(I'm Tabby, she had said to Rick when they were registering for the outing at the tour company's offices downtown. She did not like anyone calling her Tabby. What, like a cat? Rick asked and she had laughed like a kookaburra.) Dirk persisted. ”Are you enjoying the trek? But you sweat such a lot.”

”We're all sweating, Dirk. It's b.l.o.o.d.y sweltering. It must be forty degrees today. And ma.s.sive humidity.”

”Yes, but you don't help yourself. You wear heavy fabric. Your body can't breathe.”

Dirk looked like an advert. He wore a skin-thin vest strategically peppered with holes. Its sheen reminded Manser of wet otters. His sandals looked as though they had been designed by NASA. He sported a watch possessing more functions than a top-end microwave cooker.

Manser growled, ”I'm fine.”

”You are overheating, Englander. You have the beetroot head.” Dirk laughed, an ugly, sputtering sound. Some of the others within earshot-Trevor and Rob from Manchester, Frederique from Quebec-added their guffaws too.

Manser, stoked for an argument, nevertheless managed to check himself. Scowling, he strode clear, trying to ignore some of the muttered words that floated his way. Was 'unsociable' one of them?

The sun clung to his back like a burden, scratching and gnawing at his neck, roasting his calves. The weather had not let up in the three days since they had landed in Darwin, at the top end of Australia. The humidity had shocked him too, although he suspected that the news stories that had followed them around since their holiday began were also conspiring to make him feel uncomfortable. He recalled some of them now. Awful stories, stories that you didn't want cluttering up the romantic sunsets and leisurely, flirty breakfasts. An Aborigine had set fire to herself on the steps of the Sydney Opera House in protest against the long-standing treatment of her people. An Australian company were behind an ecologically disastrous spill of cyanide in Romania. And there had been another victim of the serial killer who was sweeping the country like a bushfire.

This last topic had invaded the party he was currently touring with.

”'Sweet Tooth,' they call him,” Frederique said, adjusting the straps of her backpack.

Trevor was nodding. His broad Lancas.h.i.+re accent sounded at odds with the grisly detail it now described: ”He's filed his teeth and he chooses the most succulent cuts from his victims. The fatty sweetbreads and suchlike. Dee-licious.”