A Different Kingdom(107)

No. It had been a savage place. He was well out of it.

He returned to Clare in the bed. She was hot, moist with sweat. He threw back the sheet and she nuzzled against him. A buxom lass, comfortable to lie with, touchingly trusting. He was content with her, now he was no Adonis himself. She would never have to catch breakfast on the hoof, fight off goblins or clean wounds.

He smiled into the dark, thinking back. Piglet on a spit. Or that first day ...

Call me Cat.

That's a stupid name.

You're a stupid boy.

He had missed that challenge, the sharpness. Perhaps he was too old to enjoy it nowadays.

Too old? He was not yet thirty.

An old sound out in the street, a sound he had never thought to hear again. The howl of a wolf.

'Jesus!' he said softly.

He disengaged himself from Clare's soft clutch and peered out of the window. Somehow it was darker than it had been.

The street lamps were dead.

He saw a flickering of shadows along the side of the street.

Far off there was the faint hum of nocturnal traffic, but the surrounding streets seemed as silent as the moon.

'Shit ... ' He backed away from the window, then turned and shook the sleeping girl on the bed.

'Clare, wake up! Wake up, Clare!'

She slept on, oblivious. He grabbed her shoulders, his fingers bruising her flesh, and half lifted her from the mattress. Her head lolled bonelessly to one side.

'Clare!'

He dropped her. No good. No good.

The time had finally crept round on him. He knew it was going to finish here tonight. All those loose ends were going to be tied up.

How? With his death?

They were coming for him, this very minute. It was not Clare's battle, so they had put her out of the picture.

Or so he hoped.

He was shaking. Where was that old stubbornness, that dogged courage? What would Ringbone think of him? Or Cat, for that matter?

They were coming for him. The big bad wolf. The bogey man. They were real. He had seen the stories walking woods at night.

God help me.

He pulled on his clothes with furious haste while his mind ran through the contents of the flat. Weapons. He needed something to fight with. Perspiration popped out over him as his clothes soaked up the heat in the room. He fiddled with the clinking keys in his pocket.

The kitchen. He pulled out the drawers, his eyes constantly darting to the windows. Christ! The door. Had he locked the door? He must have! He sprinted to it, skidding as he halted and banging it with his shoulder. The chain was on. Good.

Even as he stood there checking it, the hair rose on the back of his neck. In the little gap below the door the light from the landing had suddenly flicked out.

They were in the building.

He tried the switches in the flat. Nothing. So he would be fighting in darkness.

His mind had bifurcated. One part of him was calmly searching for weapons, gauging their strategy, sizing up the defensibility of the flat. The other was quietly but insistently denying that any of this was happening. Wolves do not prowl city streets. The Devil does not ride a horse.

The phone. He would phone the police, get people around him.

Dead, of course. The wood part of him had known it would be. There would be no help for him from the outside. It was his fight alone. The reason they had bewitched Clare.

Momentarily he wished Cat were here at his shoulder, to fight with him. She would have put some heart into him.

In the quiet he could clearly hear the thump and swish of his own heart. His hands were trembling around the grip of the big kitchen knife.

I've grown timid, he thought. I've been too far from the edge of things for so long.

In the wood he had lived with fear every moment until it had ceased to be fear and had been merely another bodily function. Fear had been an asset, then. It had concentrated the mind wonderfully.

Now his mind was clouded by it. It blurred his thinking. He wrenched a broomstick free of its head and began tying another of the kitchen knives to it with the tail end of a washing line. No crosses or holy water here. Nothing to keep out the beasts. It took faith to bar the door to them, and his home in Ireland had been strong with untold generations of it. But here there was no history, no strength of character. This building and the rest in the street were concrete shells, hardly touched by the lives within them. The things from the wood would need no invitation to cross this threshold.

Something scratched at the door, like a dog seeking entry, except that the scratching was at head height. There was a low growl on the other side, deep enough to hum through Michael's skull, and something began sniffing at the lock.

Other feet were padding on the landing, and he could hear the tick and scrape of the claws.

A heavy blow banged on the door. The floorboards creaked. There were scrapes and thumps. He thought he could hear breathing, coming in pants. And then the smell sifted into the flat, a rank, rotting smell of old meat, uncured hides, the stink of leaf mould and marsh.