Behind him something moved swiftly toward him, reached out . , .

  Brady swung round in terror, his heart almost stopping, his arm raising the poker to strike. Strong hands grabbed his wrist, prevented him from attacking. He found himself staring into a face . . .

  A wild face, a face more terrified than his, a face whose every shadow told of despair, and grief, and anger . . .

  A woman's face. The face from his coma dreams, the face that had regarded him in sleep.

  She was here, in the house. And Brady knew, as he relaxed and let his arm fall to his side, that she had been waiting for him.

  8

  As Brady crossed the study and pulled back the curtains, the woman said, 'My name is Ellen Bancroft.' Harsh, bright light illuminated the untidy chaos of the room, books pulled from shelves, papers scattered; the drawers of the desk had been pulled completely out and upturned on the floor. Brady surveyed the obvious evidence of this thorough and messy search, and shook his head angrily.

  'You do this?'

  The woman looked surprised, and stepped away from the door, shaking her head. 'No I didn't. But I have a feeling I know who did.' Her accent was strongly American; east coast, Brady thought for no particular reason. She seemed slightly angry, staring at Brady as he picked up several books and slotted them back on the shelves. 'I'm sorry I broke into your house. But the door was open.'

  Brady glanced at her, then relaxed and smiled. 'It seems that my house has functioned like Victoria Station for the last three months. Anybody and everybody has been to have a look.'

  'This is only the second time I've been here. I was waiting for you.'

  Strange though that statement should have been, Brady merely nodded. 'I know,' he said. 'When I came home just now I thought there was a tramp camping out in here, or a kid . . .'

  'The fire on the carpet,' Ellen said, and smiled thinly. 'But did you look closely at that burn patch? Is that really how you'd expect a carpet to look after a fire's been built on it?'

  Brady walked back towards her, sighing as he glanced around, mentally calculating how much time it would take to straighten this most important of rooms out. This is where he had worked, where Alison had worked. This was the room where they had escaped from the kids and sat and talked privately; in this room, brief though their acquaintance had been with it, they had found a peace of mind together; it was not only their library, it was their parental den, and they would have made such plans together from this dark, cluttered haven . . .

  'Yes,' he said, 'I had noticed. Ellen Bancroft you said?' He extended his hand. Ellen shook hands quickly, almost nervously, as Brady said, 'You know my name, I expect . . .'

  'Dan Brady. I've known of you for some months.'

  Brady almost said, 'I'm aware of that.' The woman looked older than his coma-dream image, and darker skinned; it was either the dusky hue of jewishness or of many summers tanning in the sort of sun that Alison would have loved, and Brady himself avoided like the plague. She was slimly built, and her hands were quite tiny. Brady found her very attractive. Her dark hair was long and parted simply in the middle. She wore it half covering her face, partly falling across eyes that were deep brown and strangely intense.

  He led the way back to the lounge. 'Do you know what happened to me? To my family?'

  It seemed to Brady that the girl shivered. Glancing round, he saw that her complexion had paled noticeably. 'I know what happened,' she said. 'I'm very sorry for you. It's going to take a lot of living with.'

  'Well I know that,'' said Brady almost irritably. He knew that he was being hostile, when he should have been intrigued. The girl had watched him in hospital, had been waiting for him here, and had been responsible, he was sure, for the continuing strange smells that both he and the hospital staff had noticed . . . she smelled now, very faintly, of a mixture of garlic and burning.

  ' Sit down,' he said, and stooped to dig at the burned logs in the fire. 'That's unusual.'

  'What is?'

  'The logs. For a moment I thought they were just covered with ash, but they are ash. Burned totally, but still kept their shape . . .' He smashed the dead fire through into the grate, and piled logs high again in the fire place. 'Nothing like a wood fire,' he said. 'Smelly, but exceptionally cosy.' He kept his back to her all the while. Ellen just sat and watched him, and he was aware of her scrutiny, and the fact that she was on edge.

  When at last he had the fire going he walked to the drinks cabinet, and found that Bill Suchock had stocked it up for him. 'What can I offer you? Scotch?'

  'Nothing. Thank you. And I suggest that you don't drink anything either. Nothing alcoholic.'

  Brady was puzzled by that, and stared at the girl's intense expression. 'Are you serious?'

  'Deadly serious. Alcohol weakens your natural defences. Eat food, eat all the time, and drink coffee if you must; but keep away from spirits. I really mean it . . . Dan.'

  Perturbed by the girl, and what she was saying, Brady placed the gin bottle down, stared at it, then slugged and closed the cabinet. 'My natural defences,' he said, and walking to the fire he prodded the logs with the poker, moving them about so the flames could take more easily. He liked the warm glow that came from the wood; outside, the day was grey and miserable, and a stiff wind blew the empty branches of the trees.

  Who the hell was this woman? An American; attractive, if slightly dishevelled; smelly; intense. A woman who had been pursuing him since his coma. A woman who talked to him urgently about natural defences, and who was herself bristling with unease, holding her fingers - he noticed as he glanced at her - in strange ways, and whose gaze was a restless, darting thing, her dark eyes never still, always peering over her shoulders, and through the french windows to the cold garden outside.

  Brady finally sat down and smiled at Ellen Bancroft. He didn't quite know what to say to her, so he began obviously. 'New York?'

  'I'm from Boston,' she said.

  'You've come from Boston to find me?'

  Ellen laughed. 'No. I was working in England up until October last. I lived here with my husband and son.' A shadow on her face as she said the last words. And instantly Brady knew! And felt icily cold inside.

  He said nothing about it, riot wanting to hear the woman confirm his suspicions. 'You visited me in hospital. You even came into my room. You were dressed as a nurse. . .'

  Ellen looked startled. 'How could you know that? You were in a coma. You never even opened your eyes . . .'

  'Mysteries, mysteries,' said Brady, regarding her keenly. 'But I knew you came, I remembered your face when I woke up. Whenever you came to the room there was a funny smell, like burning . . . like the smell in this room now. You succeeded in puzzling the hospital staff totally. You made them regard me as something of a sinister freak . . .' he wasn't in deadly earnest about that, trying a smile as he spoke. But Ellen's response was severe, almost angry, 'At least you are a live sinister freak. I had to keep you alive, Dan ... I have to talk to you . . .'

  'About what? You have to talk about what?'

  'About what happened here ... in December. About what you know, what you saw. About how you survived . . . like I survived . . .'

  The wood in the fire crackled loudly, the flames roaring with a sudden updraught of air. The room seemed to close around Brady, and he reached out to touch Ellen's hand. She hesitated just briefly before turning her hand over so that she could clutch Brady's fingers in hers. They grew close, then, Brady feeling security from the anguished American, and Ellen seeming to relax, to be less obsessed with the shadows in the room.

  Letting go of her hand, Brady said, 'You lost your family?'

  'My husband. My son. In early October.'

  'Do you want to talk about it?' As he said the words, Brady felt terror - raw terror. Images from that evil night in December were powerful, saddening, sickening, and he wasn't at all sure if he could cope with hearing an account from someone else of the same attack, of the same horror . . .

  But Ellen said, 'It's essential I talk about it to you, Dan. And essential you tell me what you remember . . . everything. You may not be aware of it, but you are in deadly danger. Even now, even at this moment, I'm aware of it closing in. This house is not defended well enough. Something is already present within it, I can feel it. But it seems to be weakened at the moment . . .' she stopped talking, perhaps aware of the wildly confused look in Brady's face. He was staring at her with all the expression of a child confronted with calculus: baffled bemusement. She had said he was in danger, deadly danger. But danger from what? He asked her as much.

  Ellen shook her head. 'What do you think? They intended to kill you. They failed. They have left something behind that cannot rest until it finishes the job it began . . .'

  Hands on his throat. . . the silence of his attacker, unseen, unheard, just present by its powerful, killing grip upon him . . . and at the last, just a glimpse of it, something more foul than anything he had ever encountered, the product of an evolution that had gone badly, hideously wrong ... a creature born of darkness, kept alive by fear . . .

  Ellen had seen the sudden pallor in Brady's face, and she reached out to touch his hand gently. Brady smiled thinly. 'By rights I should have been dead, that much is clear to me.'

  'And we have to find out how you survived,' she said.

  'And you? How did you survive?'

  Ellen drew her coat around her, as if chilled, despite the warmth from the fire. Her dark eyes flashed bright with memory. Her hands shook as she huddled inside her clothes, and leaned deep into the settee, staring at the burning logs. 'I survived because of the weakness of one of them. That much I know almost for sure. And with you, with your strength, I shall be able to confirm that belief. But one of them was weak, and his weakness caused me to be spared ... at least in one way . . .'

  *

  ... the day before had been bright, sunny, and wonderfully hot. Ellen had walked the mile to work in her lightest clothes: it was shirt-sleeves weather, and for late September, and in England, she thought that was pretty good.

  And as if to catch her out in her gluttony of satisfaction, autumn had dawned the next day with the greyest, dullest sky imaginable; the heavens had opened, and the countryside around the Ennean Institute of Paranormal Research had been bathed in a monotonous, drenching rain. It had rained from early morning until the early evening. Ellen had fled home on public transport and had arrived at her apartment soaked to the skin, dishevelled, and very, very cold.

  Her son, Justin, was home from school, sulking in his room, and pretending to do his homework. The rain beat against the windows, poured through guttering, and seemed to fall from a sky that grew darker, more ominous, by the minute. On evenings like this she felt like doing nothing; it was not that she felt cold, nor that she disliked rain in itself, but this English autumn weather was so morbid, so miserable, it drained the spark of fun from her, sapped the spirit level, reduced her - and her son, and husband Michael - to morose, unsociable spectres.

  She changed her clothes, and sat down at her dressing table to comb through her damp hair. 'Make coffee,' she shouted to Justin, and heard his grumpy reply, indicating his feelings to the negative.

  'Coffee!' she yelled, and waited, listening for his feet, stomping heavily down the corridor to the kitchen. 'Strong!'

  It was as she became finally satisfied with her hair again, and sat staring in the mirror at her reflection, vaguely distressed with the effect England was having on her tan, on her skin and on her every physical feature, that the hair on her neck prickled, and she swung round on her stool, staring wide-eyed round the bedroom.

  The rain clattered against the window like pebbles thrown from the gardens outside. The bedroom was warm, lit only by the light from her dressing table, and was otherwise shadowy and grey. For a second she had distinctly felt that someone had entered the room.

  With the blood pounding in her temples she waited. Part of her was definitely responding to something inside the room. She couldn't see it, hear it or smell it, but somehow she was registering its presence, and it was scaring the life out of her.

  She rose to her feet, self-consciously tugging down her white slip, and walked towards the window. The touch on her leg, when it came, freaked her totally. She screamed, twisted, and backed away, fetching up hard against the wall.

  She brushed at her thigh and tried to calm down, but she was panic-stricken, and terrified. The touch had been that of a hand, a large, heavy hand, its fingers digging briefly into the flesh of her leg. She could still feel the pressure of the thumb, the sharp edges of nails. A tickling sensation -the briefest memory - told her of hairs on the wrist.

  If Justin had heard her scream, he had decided to ignore it. It was not the first time in recent weeks that he would have heard sounds of distress from his mother's room, and having been told that 'everything was all right' twice before, he had no doubt decided to let the woman get on with things.

  But Ellen was so shaken she would have loved for Justin to come running in at that moment, and fling his arms around her.

  She stood by the window, listening to the rain, to the sound of cups clattering in the kitchen. There was a sudden, tentative pressure on her stomach and she closed her eyes, bit her lip, and tried to stifle the cry of anguish that she felt surfacing. After a second she began to slap at her stomach, trying to drown that ghostly pressure with the pain of her own violence. The pressure increased, the sensation of a hand on the sensitive skin of her belly, its fingers spreading so that one of them touched her navel, making her wince and cry with despair; another finger touched the base of her stomach, moved through her pubic hair; the hand slid downwards, touching her intimately, tentatively, making her body recoil and twist as sensations of arousal mixed with the shocked reverberation of horror. Her muscles spasmed; her skin crawled; it was terrifying, invisible assault.

  At last the pressure went away. She ran from the bedroom, into the bathroom, leaned across the sink and was violently sick. She stripped naked and washed herself repeatedly, all the time terrified that those spectral fingers would touch her again. Justin heard the sound of her vomiting and timorously called through the bathroom door, 'Are you all right?'

  'Just make that coffee,' she called back.

  She washed her face, dried her body, dressed in slacks and a heavy jumper. Her hands shook violently as she sipped her coffee, staring at her silent son, but after half an hour or so she felt calm enough to smile, relaxed enough to start preparing a light supper.

  Michael arrived home an hour later. He was tired; that was to be expected, this having been an important day for him at his firm. He kissed Ellen, dumped his bag and his coat, then flopped down in an armchair.

  'Spaghetti and meatballs,' Ellen announced from the lounge doorway. She leaned against the jamb and stared at her exhausted husband, wondering whether or not to tell him of what had happened. She had told him on each of the previous occasions and he had seemed sceptical, if slightly concerned for Ellen's mental well-being.

  But what else could he have said to a woman who complained of ghostly "touching"? The apartment was in a new block, quite unlikely to be haunted. And although he had been experiencing nightmares, and restless sleep for the past two weeks, he had attributed that to tension over his work for the oil company. He was under a lot of pressure, and was almost reluctant to admit to the headaches, the pressure in his chest, the periods of disorientation.

  He would have to admit it tonight. He looked quite ill, quite frighteningly pale.

  'I'm not hungry,' he said. 'Sorry. I should have rung.'

  'What's the matter, Michael?'

  He shrugged, glanced up to her and smiled, and that smile was a wan, uncertain thing. Ellen immediately came over to him, knelt by the chair and kissed him. 'Tension,' he said. 'I feel very shaky. Flu maybe; a virus.'

  'Is it the same as before?' She felt a coldness on her skin, a deep chill; it was shock, like the shock of being told a favourite friend is dead. She was calm, thinking clearly, yet every muscle in her body was reacting to what she could see, what she could hear.

  Michael Bancroft was a broad-shouldered, strongly-built man, dark of complexion, handsome, strong-eyed. He was like a child, now, a huddled, despondent child. He banged at his chest with his fist, as if the ache, the tension, would go away.

  'A little worse, perhaps. God, Ellen. . .' he struggled to frame the words in his mouth, his eyes filling with tears. 'God, tell me I'm too young to have a heart attack. I'm thirty-eight years old. Surely . . . surely that's too young?'

  'Much too young,' she said reassuringly, and leaned forward to kiss his cheek. 'It's tension, Michael. It's something - even if it's not tension - that you can do something about . . .'

  We've got to get out of here. We've got to leave, before it's too late. They 're closing in. How do I convince him that we must leave? Oh Christ, it's getting closer, I know it, I know it . . .

  Michael must have seen the look of anguish on Ellen's face. He wiped a broad, muscular hand across his eyes, sniffed and smiled. Then he reached out and hugged her, kissing her cold ear. 'What is it? You look upset.'

  Ellen drew back, touched Michael's face with her hands; looking at him, seeing the concern in his face, the quick way which he dismissed his own problems and focussed on what he intuited was a difficulty with her, she couldn't help feeling a warm rush of affection; she loved him so much. Their marriage was rough, rocky, the inevitable consequence of people from two different cultures marrying and settling in the homeland of one of them. But God, how she loved Michael, how she fed from his strength.

  'Michael ... I don't know how to say this, how to convince you, but. . . we must leave. We must leave. We're in danger, I know we're in danger. I can feel it. What's happening to you, and the awful things that have been happening to me . . .'