Mark of the Beast. Brian Ball

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СКАЧАТЬ a professional detachment. Mills. In the moonlight, stark and still, the winding gear of the former colliery. The workers’ houses. Other houses. Boxes, row upon row. Small trees in the gardens, large fences round each box. There, thought Ruane. There....

      This time the pain was unbearable. It ground his brain into mind-blasting agony. The nervous system collapsed.

      Twenty minutes later, Ruane came to his senses. He could still hear the grotesque, swelling, vicious noise inside his head. There was a message, uncontrolled and vindictive, but not particularly for him, Ruane. It was for anyone who could recognize the challenge.

      “God help me,” whispered Ruane.

      He slowly made the sign of the Cross.

      * * * *

      When they reached the house, Alan Charnock made the usual nightcap, a pot of milky drinking chocolate. It was his chore. Janice would look through a magazine or watch the tail end of the telly programmes. He turned on the electric fire beside the bed and draped Janice’s black nightdress before it. She appreciated small, thoughtful gestures like that. Hot chocolate, a little chat and then sleep. Janice was likely too upset for anything else. The curtains hadn’t been drawn.

      He glanced out at the moonlit garden. The close cut grass shimmered in parallel bands. Alan had already begun to pull on the curtain cord when he saw the slim white shape in the glaring moonlight.

      “Jan!” he said aloud.

      She couldn’t hear, of course, not through the double-glazing. Alan’s immediate reaction was to open the window and call down to her. He stopped the movement of his hands towards the window-catch.

      Maybe Janice had some perfectly good reason for standing there in the chill of the evening. But naked?

      Her long blonde hair was halfway down her back. Her hands lay at her sides, her body quite upright. There was no motion in her body. She might have been a statue placed there a hundred years ago. Alan had the curious impression she had no intention of moving.

      Only two or three minutes passed like this. For Alan Charnock, it seemed longer. Dimly he felt anger but it was a raging calm in his mind, not an anger that was likely to result in action. Resentment followed. The neighbours would see, of course, and there would be talk.

      Even a mild sensation could imperil his career; a wayward wife was the last thing you wanted if you had only the vague promise of a partnership. Wives with wakeful infants would look across the backs of the gardens and see Janice. Kinky would be the verdict. Kinky Jan Charnock, her with the handsome husband. There was rarely anything of interest to discuss over the morning coffee.

      Alan had worked himself up into a quiet rage and was about to open the window and hiss sharply to Janice when he detected another shape in the garden. It writhed in the sharp moonlight, a squat and flattened shape.

      “It’s a dog,” he thought, recognizing the thing. “It’s the Baines-Ogdens’ dog.”

      Alan could laugh at the momentary trickle of fear. The dog, not much more than a pup, some sort of wire-haired terrier, had got into their garden and was begging for food. It had seen Jan. And, dog-like, it was crawling on its belly to show it knew it shouldn’t be there.

      Janice didn’t move. The dog moved near and now Alan saw that its eyes looked ahead with a curiously blank expression, unblinking and huge. It’s belly left a trail on the striped carpet of lawn.

      Alan remembered that Janice detested dogs. Cats she revered, large Persians for preference. Dogs were noisy, they stank, they clawed and fawned; so why should Janice wait....

      Her right hand moved slightly. Something gleamed. Metal. The dog rolled over, belly up. Alan heard himself saying, “I don’t think you ought to, Jan,” when she turned to look up at him.

      She was smiling. Just like the smile in the dingy hall. It unnerved him. Fingers trembling, he opened the window and saw that the dog had not moved.

      “Jan, hadn’t you better come in? It’s cold, love.” He wanted to say that it wasn’t his fault that she was interrupted, but he couldn’t say it, for it admitted far too much of what he might be able to guess about her reason for standing so long, naked, blade ready, the animal crawling towards her in stark terror. Oh no. Say nothing, because nothing had happened. Nothing could have happened.

      The bloody dog was after a cat. Janice had called it. Frightened, it had tried to make its peace by belly-crawling to her.

      She moved out of his vision like a wraith. The dog rolled over onto its side and lay quietly for a minute.

      Then it put its head back, howled once and raced for the gap in the hawthorns at the back of the house. Alan Charnock walked downstairs quietly and took the drinks tray into the lounge.

      Janice was waiting.

      “Christ,” whispered her husband. He slopped most of the hot chocolate onto the tray. Janice didn’t seem to notice.

      She was half-lying, half-sitting, on the most expensive piece of furniture the Charnock’s possessed, a ten-foot divan-settee. Its dusky pink fibres shone with a delicate lustre in the dimly-lit room. Janice’s skin reflected the faint glow.

      “I’ve spilled the chocolate,” he said.

      It didn’t look like Janice. Janice never posed.

      His heart smashed inside his chest like a steam-hammer.

      He had seen images like this on posters for films, on the covers of lurid paperback novels. They were large-bosomed, lewd, bold-eyed women, who anyway posed like that only for the delectation of a minority of men who couldn’t take their pleasures normally and within the confines of a happy marriage.

      Janice sleeked her blonde hair back.

      “Come here.”

      “Janice, we’ll be seen! The curtains—”

      “Here.”

      The mugs clattered.

      “Jan, don’t you want the chocolate?”

      She told him what to do with the chocolate—graphically.

      He had never heard her use such words before. Not once. “Pardon?”

      “Come here!”

      “I thought you were mad at me.”

      “Me, sweetie?” It didn’t seem possible that his wife could be so erotic.

      “Jan, we don’t, not here—not on the settee!” As her hand reached his neck, he experienced such a blast of furious lust that he could not control his breathing. Janice had never looked like this or talked like this before. He struggled wildly for balance on the smooth artificial fur.

      “For God’s sake, let me breathe! Jan, we’ll be seen! The Bentleys—the neighbours—they can see in—Jan!”

      She bit his ear.

      “Jan, don’t bite! Jan, the curtains!”

      She enveloped him СКАЧАТЬ