“He was, I swear. He was just like him. Shut your eyes and he… Alan!”
“Hmm?”
“I'm saying if you shut your eyes he could've been Elvis.”
“Aye,” admitted Alan, who already had one eye closed as he attempted to negotiate a key into the hotel room door lock, “but open them and he could've been a baby hippo. Did you see the size of him?”
“Well he was big towards the end, Elvis, wasn't he?”
“Not that big, Barbara. Graceland isn't that big.”
With a triumphant yelp Alan finally slid the key into the lock and wrestled his way into the room. The rattle and clunk of barely-functional air-conditioning filled the corridor, before Barbara stumbled in and closed the door behind them.
As holiday rentals went, it wasn't the best, but it was cheap and near the beach, and there was a different sound-a-like show on every night of the week. It had been Tom Jones yesterday. Alan was partial to a bit of Tom Jones, but had been disappointed that Elvis tonight had turned out to be the same fella in a different wig.
He hoped the guy didn't score the hat trick tomorrow. It was Shirley Bassey night. He shuddered at the mental image.
All thoughts of tomorrow were pushed aside when Barbara stepped in close. The lights were out, but the moonlight through the window sparkled in the eyes that had hypnotised him almost two decades ago. The face around them may have aged, but the eyes hadn't changed at all.
Barbara's arms slipped around his waist and he pulled her in against him. “You're drunk, Mrs Roger,” he told her.
“You bake that tack,” Barbara replied, throwing in a comedy hiccup for good measure. “Well tiny bit, maybe. You want to go to bed?”
Alan gave an exaggerated yawn. “Good call. I'm pooped.”
Barbara slapped him playfully on the shoulder. “Funny guy. I'm not letting you off that easy. Go get into bed. I need to pee.”
With a peck on Alan's lips, Barbara dashed for the bathroom and hurriedly closed the door behind her.
Alan slumped down on the bed and began trying to solve the enigma that was his shoelaces. He had to pull a bit, he knew, but right now he was somewhat vague on exactly which bit that was.
“There's a cockroach in here,” called Barbara, her voice muffled by the door. “Big bugger, too.”
“Tell it to look the other way.”
“I'm going to hit it with my shoe.”
“Or that,” said Alan, flopping backwards on the bed. “Either works.”
The effort of trying to figure out his shoelaces – not to mention the eight pints of cheap Spanish lager - had taken its toll. The ceiling, with its wonky fan and grinding air-con began to spin around him.
Alan draped his arm across his face, covering his eyes. The world bobbed and lurched and spun out of control, and his mouth filled with the sour tang of pre-vomit saliva.
“Hurry up, Barbara,” he urged, swallowing back his nausea. “I might need in there.”
But before his wife could even answer, Alan began to snore.
* * *
Alan awoke with a start, a headache, and absolutely no idea where he was. It took a full thirty seconds for the racket of the air-con to bring everything flooding back. He patted the bed on either side of him. Cool and empty.
“Barbara?”
He tried to sit up, but made it as far as his elbows before the world started to spin again. The bedside clock was displaying… numbers. Yeah, he was almost positive they were number. It took him a few attempts to figure out the finer details.
3:17am.
Elvis had left the building – with some difficulty, as the door was quite narrow – at 11pm. They'd come straight back to the apartment after that, so that was… what? He tried to calculate the time, but settled in the end for ‘ages’.
“Barbara?”
Silence.
With a groan of effort, Alan sat all the way upright. He perched on the end of the bed, gripping the mattress, waiting for the sensation of sea-sickness to wash all the way over him.
“Oh Jesus,” he muttered, kneading the bridge of his nose. The Spanish booze may have been cheap, but the price he was paying now seemed disproportionately high.
It took a couple of attempts to get to his feet, but he was mobile immediately, stumbling through the gloom with one arm held out before him and no real means of applying the brakes.
The bathroom door rose up to stop him. He bumped against it, spent a few panicked seconds wondering what the Hell it was, then knocked gently.
“Barb?” he said. “You still in there?”
He pressed an ear to the wood. There was no sound from within the bathroom. He turned and glanced around, in case he'd unwittingly shuffled past his wife on his way across the room, but she was nowhere to be seen.
“You there, Barbara?” he said again, louder this time. He tried the handle. It turned, but the bathroom door remained closed. “Locked,” Alan muttered. He knocked again. “I say it's locked, Barb. You've locked the door.”
He listened again, more intently this time, concern cutting through the hangover haze. For a moment he thought he heard… something. A gasp, maybe. The squeak of skin on cracked tiles. Had she fallen? What if she’d fallen and couldn’t get up?
“Shit.”
Alan sized up the door. Like everything else in the room it looked flimsy and tired. He lined himself up. One good kick and it would…
But what if Barbara was on the other side? What if she had fallen, was lying there now, right behind the door?
“Shit, shit,
shit
!”
Tugging at his thinning hair, Alan paced back and forth. “Barbara!” he tried again, not expecting an answer but trying anyway. “Barbara, I don't know what to do!”
And then, in a flash, he did. His eyes fell on the bathroom lock. A groove the width of a coin had been cut into a circle of moveable metal. Alan dug in his pocket and pulled out a handful of Euros and cents.
There was no fumbling this time. He slid a coin into the groove. It turned,
clunked
. He pushed down the handle and eased the door ajar.
“Barbara?” he said, and his voice came out as a thin whisper in the gloom.
He nudged the door open further, expecting resistance but meeting none. Glass splintered
beneath his shoe as he stepped inside. The cord for the light gave a
clunk
as he yanked on it, but the room remained in darkness.
The shower curtain was pulled over, blocking the view of the limescale-stained bathtub. Alan hesitated, his fingers still tight on the door handle. The bathroom was filled with the faint rasp of unsteady breathing. He closed his mouth, tightened his lungs, but the breathing continued, hissing in and out, in and out, in and out.
“Barbara? You alright?”
The broken bulb
crunched
as he stepped further into the room. The sound triggered an explosion of movement and noise.
With a
crash
the flimsy rail ripped away from the wall as a figure erupted through the curtain, all hands and fingers and gnashing yellow teeth.
Alan stumbled, slipped, fell and his wife was suddenly on him, fingers clawing and ripping as she screamed and screamed and
screamed
.
“B-Barbara?” Alan yelped, then her fingers crawled like spiders through his hair and his head was yanked back and
– BANG! –
pain fractured across the back of his skull.
He twisted, kicked, tried to shove her away, but her arms were everywhere and the pain in his head made his limbs go heavy and the floor turn to sand beneath him.
His head smashed back again, again, again, the smooth edge of the toilet bowl shatteringly solid against the base of his head.
“S-stop!” he hissed, the word slurring between his lips. He lashed out, finally shoving her off him. Barbara tumbled sideways, caught the shower curtain and brought it and what was left of the rail down on top of her.
She squealed and screeched like a trapped animal, thrashing against the crinkly white plastic, struggling to get free.
Alan rolled onto his belly. He tried to stand, but the ground was too soft and his limbs were too numb and the pain in his head roared at him to
stay the fuck down
. He crawled forwards, the glass ripping at his forearms, slicking the tiles with his blood.
The bedroom floor was easier. His splayed fingertips gripped the carpet and he dragged himself out of the bathroom and into the faint glow of the moonlight. The bedroom door loomed up ahead. He crawled for it, inch by painful inch.
But then she was on him again, pinning him from the back, her knees sharp and sudden in his ribs and spine. She caught his hair and yanked sharply. He howled as a strip of scalp ripped free in her hand.
She caught him again, twisting his head sideways until her face was all he could see. Her lips looked black as they drew back over her teeth. In the shimmering glow of the moonlight he saw her eyes, and for the first time since they’d met he didn't recognize them.
Her free hand moved. Alan caught a glimpse of metal there, a few jagged slivers of glass still attached. He heard the ripping of his throat before the pain hit in a rush of angry crimson.
As he gargled his dying breath Alan felt his wife's thumbs press against his eyeballs. The last thing he heard was her triumphant shriek as she shoved them back in their sockets with a
schlop.
It wasn't until Martin Marshall was back in his flat, two-thirds of the way through a shower, a shit and a shave, that his hands started to shake. It started as a quivering at first; a light tremble that rose quickly to a full-scale shudder.
He didn't remember lying down on the bathroom floor, or curling up in a ball with the knees of his tartan pajamas pulled right up to his chest. He didn't remember crying, either. Crying like he hadn't done in years, not since Gary Tavish had kicked him in the goolies and nicked his playpiece back in Primary Five.
But he remembered Lacey Crane. He knew he would always remember Lacey Crane, no matter how hard he tried to forget.
Christ, if he closed his eyes, he could still see her. Two halves, each one scooped clean of everything that should’ve been inside. Just two pale-skinned hollows with not a spot of blood or a trace of innards to be found.
He'd taken Hoon over to the sheets and the paper suits had lifted first one, then the other. Hoon had stared for a while, as if trying to figure out what he was looking at. Then he'd turned to Marshall, clapped him on the shoulder, and told him to call it a night. It was, Marshall reckoned, the first act of compassion he'd ever seen the DCI make, and he could almost have kissed the ugly big bastard for it.
Marshall got up off the floor and brushed himself down. He decided not to shave, in case he found a way to split his wrists with the safety blade. It was that sort of night.
He caught sight of himself in the mirror, all red-eyed and pasty-faced. “Aye, looking good Martin,” he muttered, before returning to the living room, where he'd left every one of the lights blazing.
As he flopped down onto the couch, he knew something was different. Something had subtly changed in the room. He couldn't see what it was, but he could feel it niggling away at him. Something different. Something wrong.
The coffee table? No, it was as he'd left it, the mug, half-full of cold tea, still nestled in a bed of biscuit crumbs.
The couch? No, still stacked with washing waiting to be ironed. It'd be waiting a long time if past evidence was anything to go by.
The TV was off, the lights were on. It looked just as he'd left it before going through to the bathroom. And yet…
His eyes fell on the curtains. Closed. Did he draw them when he came in? He couldn't remember. The flat was on the fourth floor, so sometimes he didn't bother shutting them, but tonight…? He couldn't remember.
He stood up. His eyes went to the door as he contemplated doing a runner, but he forced his gaze back to the window. He was a Detective Inspector in the all-new amalgamated
Police Scotland
. Running away from his own curtains wasn’t something he could allow himself to entertain, no matter how tempting it may be.
He crept towards the window and the floorboards gave a sudden creak. Marshall gasped.
Bastards
. They hadn’t creaked before, had they? They’d picked a fine bloody night to start.
The curtains were thick and heavy, designed to keep out the cold and the sound of the city below. Marshall steeled himself, then gave one a quick kick. He found himself making a sound – a sort of angry yelp designed to drive off invaders, but which came out sounding like a strangled sob.
The curtain billowed briefly back and forth, then settled to a stop. Marshall drew them both carefully back and peeked in behind. He jumped back in fright at the sight of the wild-eyed figure hiding there, before realising it was his own reflection in the glass.
“Christ Almighty,” he whispered, the relief coming out as a half-laugh. He let the curtains fall back. Just before they closed, a shape plunged from the top of the window to the bottom.
Marshall blinked.
Had that happened? It had looked like… no. Surely not.
He swished the curtains apart and stepped in closer to the glass, trying to look down at the distant ground below. Whatever had fallen had landed too close to the building for him to see it.
The latch
squeaked
in protest as he turned it and pushed the window outwards. It opened to about forty-five degrees before the safety locks caught hold and prevented it going any wider.
Marshall leaned out. He had only glimpsed it for a second, but the thing that had fallen had looked like a man. The window looked out over the back of the flats, where there was nothing in the way of street lighting. He stared into the shadowy blackness that hugged the ground and tried to make out what—
A sound like thunder shattered the window above his head, spraying him with shards of broken glass. Marshall fell back into the flat, hands held in front of his face, blood already seeping down the back of his neck.
He looked up at the window, the frame now twisted out of shape. A man’s arm and head dangled limply through the smashed pane, eyes open, skull caved in on one side. Two bare legs hung down at an impossible angle behind them, like the force of the impact had snapped the poor bastard all the way in half.
As Marshall watched, gravity grabbed at the corpse. The legs pulled down, showing a glimpse of bare arse. The head vanished upwards through the mangled frame. The arm went last, flopping to and fro as if waving goodbye, then the whole bloody mess slipped off the window and tumbled out of sight.