An Absence of Natural Light (10 page)

‘It would be dangerous to do otherwise, Tom. It would be self-deceiving. She's coming back. We both know it. And if she hasn't done so already, she'll seduce you into helping her. You'll only be a fling, but what a fling. She's the crash course in the kind of life you've only ever masturbated about. I wonder if her Chaos Magic can do anything about your knee.'

‘It's hurtful listening to you speak like this.'

‘I haven't said anything you haven't thought. You're going to have to make a choice, Tom. If she comes through that door it's at your invitation and at my expense. I know she's real. She laughed at me while you were sleeping. You didn't know that, did you? She's confident of the outcome here. She must have studied you. I get the feeling she thinks she knows you better than you know yourself. Maybe she does.'

‘She doesn't,' he said.

‘Then invite me back tonight. Implore me. Want me. Mean it. You'll do it, Tom, or I'll walk out of that restaurant door right now and I swear you'll never lay eyes on me again.'

‘You don't think it's dangerous?'

‘'Course it's fucking dangerous. But it doesn't matter where I am, does it? You invite her through that door and it makes me an affront to nature, just an anomaly really, an insult that the world can't tolerate. Wherever I am, whatever I'm doing, whoever I'm with doesn't matter. She comes, I'm gone. Or are you too naive to grasp that?'

‘No,' he said, ‘I'm not too naive to grasp that.' He paused. Then he said, ‘You know what it is that separates great players from those that are content just with being good?'

‘I hardly think this is the time to be discussing football.'

‘It's making the right decisions at the crucial moments. It's not just having the nerve to step up and say you'll take the penalty kick. It's waiting that eternity for the whistle to blow and then when it finally does, placing the kick where the keeper can't reach it, in the top corner, from a dead ball, in front of the billion people you know are watching you.'

‘And you could do that?'

‘I did that every single time, Rebecca.'

‘That's really comforting to know, Tom.'

‘Sarcasm and contempt won't put me off you, you know. My feelings for you run too deep.' He reached across the table and took both of her hands in his. ‘Will you come home with me now?'

‘Yes,' she said. She even managed a smile. ‘I'll come home with you, Mr Harper. I thought you'd never bloody ask.'

The party was in full swing when they returned to Absalom Court. There might have been only one arrival and a gate-crasher at that, but she was making her presence unquestionably felt. A haze of Gauloises smoke had seeped through the basement door into the sitting room.
Kind of Blue
was melodic and insistent and loud from below. Shalimar perfume sweetened air that would have been sour otherwise with burnt tobacco. It was heady and it smelled expensive in a chic, continental sort of way.

There was laughter, which was disconcerting. Rachel Gaunt had a husky, abrupt bark of a laugh. It was explosive and sardonic, the mirth of a capricious nature. It was amused, but cruelly so. Coming from someone long dead it was not something anyone could comfortably listen to. Wordlessly, they approached the basement door. And Rebecca heard the stiletto clack of the thing on the other side of it get louder, ascending the stone steps deliberately as it neared them.

They could have sensed the presence even had it been silent. There was a gravid, static charge this close to its lair. The air felt heated by some out-of-kilter force, as though some transition loomed, grave and unearthly. But it wasn't silent. There was the subtle insistence on the other side of the door of skin quietly writhing under satin.

Then it spoke.

‘Tom Harper, here in the flesh, as I live and breathe.' To Rebecca's ears, Rachel Gaunt's voice bore the velvet promise of slow and languorous coupling. She glanced at Tom, but his face betrayed nothing of what he was thinking. From its other side, the handle of the door was tested and teased. For now, it remained locked. For now it did, she thought.

‘I've been watching you,' said the voice. ‘You might be the best looking man I've seen since Terence Stamp was Billy Budd and that was in 'sixty-two. Have you seen that one, Tom? Ustinov directed. We could watch it together, you and I. You've the space for a screening room down here; it's the perfect spot, with the absence of natural light. I know how much you enjoy your films.'

Tom didn't respond. He bit his lip. Her voice had breeding and musicality when she spoke in sentences. She sounded clever and civilized.

‘Where are your manners, Tom? You hadn't struck me as uncouth. It's disappointing, this failure to observe the common courtesies. Aren't you going to invite me to join you?'

Again, he didn't respond to her. And when she spoke next, the tone of her voice was pitched differently; somewhere gleeful and lascivious where Rebecca suspected it truly belonged.

‘Don't be timid, Tom. Life's a gamble or it's nothing. Don't you want to live all the way up? Don't you crave that?' Laughter again, throaty and knowing. ‘All you have to lose is your innocence. You've a surplus of that. It's not before time, sweetheart. And I'm quite a ride.'

Fingernails were drawn down the other side of the door in a slow, reluctant squeal of lust and anticipation. The voice was closer now, lips almost kissing the wood, on the brink, on the very threshold as the dweller's voice descended to an intimate whisper. ‘You really haven't lived at all, Tom. You'll live like you've never imagined you would with me. You'll revel in sensations you've never dreamt about. I'll be your guide and mentor, your lover and companion. I'll take you in hand. You'll be emptied and dazed by me. And I don't make idle boasts.'

On her side of the door, all Rebecca could hear was Tom's breathing, shallow through arousal or terror or both. He might be as thrilled as he was fearful; she couldn't tell, all judgment dulled by her own consuming dread.

‘I can make you well again, Tom. Think about that. You'll be whole with me, complete. You'll play,' a chuckle, seductive with promise, ‘then you'll come home and we'll play together, just you and me, games we'll improvise intimately.'

Tom said nothing in reply.

‘Explore me, Tom, discover my deep mysteries.'

Tom closed his eyes.

‘I'm wearing my blue dress. I want you to tear it off me. More than anything, I long for that. I know you do, too. I'm impatient for it. I'm ripe for you.'

Still Tom said nothing. Rebecca wondered was he succumbing to the potent spell of Rachel's enchantment, to the lubricious allure of what she was offering him? He was only flesh and blood and had already confessed to having felt desire for her and she might yet prove irresistible.

There was a new scent, a fresh secretion to complement the sound of her. It was partly her perfume still but corrupted by something deep and sweetish that made the senses reel with longing and that Rebecca knew was the moist, abundant budding of her sex.

‘Come, Tom,' Rachel purred.

Rebecca saw Tom open his eyes and look at her, then, and the look was strong and unflinching with resolve. He took something from his pocket and it shone in the light and it was a ring. It was a fat circle of gold studded with precious stones. Bloodshot rubies alternated with the glittering green of emeralds. He held it in front of her eyes and in a voice she thought impossibly clear and calm said, ‘Will you wear my ring, Rebecca?'

‘I will,' she said. She held out her left hand to accept it.

On the other side of the door, the thing at the top of the basement steps grunted out a feral snarl.

He slipped the ring onto her finger. It was slightly loose, a size too big and then it tightened, white hot, and the flesh beneath it began to burn.

Rachel laughed.

Rebecca could smell the stench of her own searing flesh and her hand clawed up in agony, but she would not remove the ring. She stared through the black swoon of pain trying to claim her and her teeth ground and her knees buckled under her and she thought she might vomit, and then the metal cooled and the pain receded and was gone. It had provoked tears. She blinked through them, smiling now at Tom. He reached for her and she clenched his palm in hers.

There was a moan from the other side of the door, low and abject. The thing that had once been Rachel Gaunt scrabbled and gnarled at the wood. She groaned and beat at it and the door shuddered in its frame and the lock strained but she remained uninvited and the obstacle held and eventually the noises faded and stopped and there was silence. They waited with breath paused above the space she'd occupied. They waited while the silence held and then eventually a sort of stillness descended. She'd been rudely dragged back to whatever darkness she came from. Rebecca was sure she had gone.

‘We need to be certain,' Tom said.

But when they looked, there was nothing living in the basement now. The shards of a vinyl record lay shattered on the flagstones. A zinc ashtray still smouldered, heaped with lipsticked butts. The remains of a small cat, skeletal, the bones bleached and powdery, reclined in the long, still, slumber of death. That was all. These were her relics.

‘I'm not normally a fan of bling,' Rachel said, holding out her hand, examining the ring in daylight.

‘It was symbolic. It was a statement of intent and a sign of commitment and it worked, didn't it?'

‘What gave you the idea?'

‘I was buying a wristwatch in Bond Street and it just sort of came to me.'

‘For someone who's supposed to be stupid, you're actually quite bright.'

‘Who said I'm stupid?'

‘It's axiomatic, dear. You're a footballer.'

‘I'm an ex-footballer.'

‘I wonder if she really could have mended your injured knee.'

‘Immaterial. The passive smoking would have done for me.'

Tom looked at the headstone. They were at Rachel Gaunt's graveside. They had placed fresh flowers in a vase on the plot, but that wasn't the only change. The legend RIP now embellished the granite. It looked more burned than chipped into the stone, but was deep and emphatic. Tom thought he knew whose handiwork it was.

‘She checked out to try to get away from them,' he said.

‘From that cult, that Jericho Society, you mean?'

‘It was the only sure way she could think of. It must have seemed the best solution. She wouldn't have done it if she hadn't been certain of coming back.'

‘You sound almost sorry for her.'

‘I almost am.'

‘How tempted were you, Tom? How close did you actually come to giving in?'

‘I'm happy with the choice I made.'

‘That isn't really answering the question.'

‘I don't think I can answer the question, not without getting into a lot of trouble. But what I've just told you is completely true.'

‘It's about making the right choices at the crucial moments, yes?'

‘You were actually listening, when I said that?'

‘Did you really score with every penalty kick you ever took?'

‘Of course I didn't. Some of them I buggered up completely, but it wouldn't have been at all helpful to tell you that just then.'

‘Come on,' Rebecca said, taking his arm. ‘We need to be going. We've got a statement of intent and a sign of commitment to work on and frankly, Mr Harper, there's no time to lose.'

F.G. Cottam
was born and brought up in Southport, Lancashire. He read History at the University of Kent before moving to London to pursue a career in journalism. During the 1990s, he was prominent in the revolution of the men's magazine. He played a key part in the launch of
FHM
,
Total Sport
and
Men's Health
.

Now a father of two, Cottam lives in Kingston-upon-Thames. His fiction is thought up over daily runs along the towpath between the bridges of Kingston and Hampton Court.

Discover books by F.G. Cottam published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/fgcottam

A Shadow of the Sun
Slapton Sands
The Fire Fighter
The Lazarus Prophecy

This electronic edition published in 2015 by Bloomsbury Reader

Copyright © 2015 F.G. Cottam

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