The House Guest by Mark Edwards(75)

He reached out to touch Ruth and she squirmed away, looking at him in disgust.

He grinned darkly at her and went on. ‘Then I discovered I had invited a serpent into our garden. And I couldn’t accept it. I thought I could force her to join us, even though that goes against everything we stand for. Every one of you here volunteered to become one of us. All of you came to us willingly.’

A murmur of assent. Someone said, ‘Hell, yeah.’

‘And I was going to put us all in danger by making Ruth join. I was foolish. I was weak. I was reminded that, after all, I am just a man. A man, bewitched by beauty.’

He turned in a circle, reaching out to the onlookers. ‘I am sorry for what I was going to do. I hope . . . I hope you can forgive me.’

It was quite a performance. And I half expected someone, anyone, to start laughing. But they were taken in by it. All of them. Only Eden looked perturbed by what was going on, as if she was pissed off that Gabriel had changed the script without telling her. Ruth looked around at the crowd like they were collectively insane.

And they were. A madness had fallen over this group, a madness that reinforced itself as they fed off each other. It was a kind of mass hysteria. Gabriel had said he had been bewitched by Ruth, but these people were the bewitched ones.

It was terrifying, and I could see that terror in Ruth’s eyes.

‘We forgive you,’ someone said. Another person repeated it. And then they were all saying it. We forgive you. We forgive you. And then, ‘There’s nothing to forgive.’

A new chant went up: Nothing to forgive. Nothing to forgive.

It took them two or three minutes to quieten down. Gabriel basked in it, mock-humble, like a preacher accepting donations from his flock. Then he put his hands up and they hushed.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you all. I am touched.’ He swallowed. My God, he was a fraud. Again, he reminded me of a politician, or a preacher. ‘But now we have business to attend to.’ He pointed at Ruth. ‘Not only did this woman reject us, but she brought a stranger to our door. A stranger who has threatened our very existence by spreading lies about us. A man who enlisted the help of a journalist in an attempt to expose us.’

Dozens of pairs of eyes turned towards me and the hiss went up again, the invisible serpent returning to the room.

‘Don’t worry, don’t worry,’ Gabriel said. ‘The journalist will be dealt with. We now know where she lives. But what do we do to people who betray and threaten us?’

‘We remove them,’ somebody said.

‘We kill them,’ said another.

‘Bring him forward,’ Gabriel said.

Brittany dragged me into the middle of the circle and held me firm before Gabriel. I was close enough to punch him. I would have tried it, if Brittany hadn’t been holding on to me. Though if I was going to die anyway . . .

Ruth was just a metre away. She stared at me. And I noticed that she didn’t look so scared anymore. At some point during Gabriel’s long speech, her demeanour had changed. Like she’d switched from playing one role to another. And I realised I’d seen this before. I’d witnessed her vomiting from nerves a minute before a play began. Then, when the curtain went up, she strode on to the stage full of confidence.

I held her gaze for a moment. She nodded at me. Then she turned her attention to Gabriel.

‘Do these people know who you really are?’ she asked, her voice soft but carrying as if she were onstage in front of an audience. ‘Do they know that you’re nothing more than a glorified stalker? Do they know how you sat in that room upstairs, jerking off in front of a dumb horror film like a sad little boy?’

Gabriel’s face turned pink.

‘Do they know how fucking crazy you are?’

‘You bitch!’

He lunged for her. He still had the cauterising pen in his hand, the tip glowing red-hot, and he aimed for her face.

I elbowed Brittany in the stomach, pulled free and threw myself into Gabriel’s path. The pen connected with my cheek.

I had never felt pain like it, and I think I must have cried out, but I was momentarily blinded by the agony, the burn, and I was only dimly aware of Eden grabbing hold of Ruth and pushing her to the ground, and Gabriel shouting, ‘Kill him’, presumably meaning me.

I saw Emilio raise his gun towards me.

Behind him, a blur of motion. It was Eden, pulling a Glock from her bag.

Shooting Emilio in the head.





Chapter 42

For a second, nobody moved. Blood had sprayed from Emilio’s head, coating Gabriel and Mona. Gabriel turned to Eden, his mouth hanging open, blood in his beard. At the same moment, the door to the room, which was about fifteen feet from where we stood, flew open and someone burst through it, holding aloft an assault rifle.

It was Callum.

‘Everybody down!’ he yelled.

Pandemonium broke out in the crowd. There was a surge away from the door, a scramble towards the windows at the back of the room. Somebody started screaming, and then it was a chorus of screams and yells as they pushed and shoved each other to get away from Callum. Somebody barged into me, sending me sprawling, but a pair of hands caught me. Ruth. When she pulled me up I saw the room had split into two groups. Most people were crowded around the windows. In the middle of the room: me, Ruth, Eden and Gabriel, with Emilio’s body on the floor at our feet.