Watching You(98)

William gestures to one side, towards Molly’s smashed whiteboard. The silhouetted mountaineers are in pieces; Post-it notes are scattered across the floor.

Then William leans over and studies the laptops more closely. The far window comes into view behind him. Sam sees something red through the blood running down into his eye. Through a smudge in the glass, where a sweaty hand cleared a peephole a quarter of a century earlier, a pair of eyes appear. The clock clicks again and the pain in his shoulders becomes more intense. But Sam refuses to scream.

William straightens up; the window disappears.

‘I realised that Molly was doing something that wasn’t exactly by the book. So I programmed a little virus into the loop, mostly to cause a bit of trouble. The impact was considerably greater than I had anticipated.’

William stands up and walks closer.

‘You’re going to break soon, Sam,’ he says, and smiles a proper William smile. ‘I want to watch it close up. I want to see the expression on your face when you realise not only that you’re dying, but that the seven perfectly innocent girls I’ve got to know so well in the course of the past few years will die too. Their shrill voices carried me to you. But now I’ve arrived. I don’t need them any more.’

He stops at precisely the right distance and awaits the next tick of the clock.

At precisely the right distance.

Sam takes a deep breath, the deepest he has ever taken in his life. Then he yells with everything he has left: ‘Now!’

The sounds are surprisingly muted. The world falls into slow motion.

He sees the first bullet pump through William’s left foot, a second and third miss, the fourth shatters his right foot, a fifth disappears deep inside William’s body. When the sixth bullet flies up through the wooden floor he is no longer standing in the same place.

William howls and throws himself towards the sleeping bag. He grabs hold of Molly’s blonde hair and pulls out a shot-up shop dummy. Then he yanks open the front door and disappears into the night.

A drenched figure slips in through the door to the jetty just as the clock clicks again. Sam’s arms are pulled even further apart; pain now controls his being. Molly frees him from the contraption with a few slashes to the leather straps. As she cuts his legs loose she shouts: ‘Did I get him?’

‘Wounded,’ Sam says, rolling his shoulders. Everything seems to be in the right place. He grabs his Glock and rushes after the trail of blood into the pitch-blackness.

The rain is howling; there are no leaves left on the trees. Even so, he can clearly hear the rustling song of the aspen trees. He can hear it even though he’s running, even though he’s running like he’s never run before, through the meadow grass that reaches up to his chest. The rustle of the aspen leaves is so oppressive, it feels like someone’s trying to get through from another time.

The night feels viscous. Sam can feel how slowly he is moving. As if time isn’t quite real.

The hair is no longer golden yellow, but it does slow down ahead of him. As the chalk-white head turns round, Sam knows he will never stop being astonished.

He throws himself at William. William falls. They lie in a heap. It feels almost like they’re embracing.

It’s as if all the blood has left William’s face, and through the growing pallor the scar tissue is becoming visible, almost pulsing across his face. Sam rolls off William and sees a far too large bloodstain spreading across the crotch of his light-coloured trousers, below the bulletproof vest, and down the trouser-legs.

‘Right in the cock, Sam,’ William hisses. ‘Just like before.’

‘Where’s the third house?’ Sam yells.

‘It’s full of death, Sam. Don’t forget the cogs.’

‘Where is it?’

William’s breathing is rattling. The rain pours mercilessly on his whitening face.

‘I watched over them,’ William rattles. ‘I was the connection. It took its toll. I thought Anton would get rid of it, but that wasn’t enough. My knuckle marks were in the door.’

‘But you don’t want them to die,’ Sam cries. ‘You don’t want that, William. Nothing is their fault. You’ve got to know them. You don’t want to kill them. Not deep down.’

William smiles weakly. Then he hisses: ‘It’s not a house, Sam. It’s the start of everything. Where I got my only friend.’

Sam hears Molly race towards them with her gun raised. When she sees William she lowers it and says hoarsely: ‘Too much blood. It was the wrong ammunition.’

William points at his crotch as it grows redder and redder, and whispers: ‘It’s you, Sam. You’ve never stopped whipping me.’

Then he dies.

William stares into his eyes. Sam has never seen such a black look in his whole life. Then there’s movement. It’s extremely slow. Sam sees it almost frame by frame. The long, blond hair lifts and is tossed back. The crooked, misshapen features emerge from below the hair, and out of that crookedness two rows of bared teeth emerge. They part. They approach Sam’s upper arm. He never feels the teeth penetrate his skin and then his flesh. He never hears the teeth meet, deep in his arm. He doesn’t hear it and he doesn’t feel it. And the pain radiating from his bicep doesn’t gain momentum before he sees the piece of flesh fall from William’s mouth, followed by a steady stream of blood. With distorted slowness the piece of flesh drifts down towards the dry grit of the football pitch. With a roar, Sam lifts the damp towel and goes on whipping. His vision goes dark, and he keeps whipping, lashing out over and over again until the blood runs freely.