Emotionally Weird(97)

‘Aren’t you all Martha’s students?’ he puzzled. ‘Is this some kind of college prank?’ He caught sight of Chick – clearly not a prankster of any kind – and looked alarmed. At that moment Hank/Buddy escaped Terri’s stranglehold and leapt towards Jay Sewell to greet him. Terri leapt as well, in an attempt to hang onto the dog, resulting in both dog and girl lunging into Jay at the same time. Which is exactly how accidents happen.

I suppose the laws of physics could explain what occurred next – pivots and fulcrums, et cetera; the way that there was more of Jay’s body above the banister than below it; the ratio of the Hank/Buddy/Terri combination to the singular Jay Sewell – but however you explain it, the effect was that Jay went cartwheeling over the banister rail and plummeted down into the stairwell – so quickly that not even a single cry escaped his lips. We all stared at each other in dumb amazement, all except for Proteus in my arms, who had fallen asleep with his head on my shoulder.

I rushed to look over the banister. Jay was spreadeagled on the floor below, blood pooling around his head and freckling the terrazzo. His eyes were open, giving him an air of, if anything, surprise.

‘Dead as a doorknob,’ Chick muttered to himself.

‘I think that’s as dead as a door nail ,’ Andrea murmured, gazing at the blood-glazed tiles. In the profound silence that had befallen us – broken only by a faithful whine on the part of Hank/Buddy – I could hear Martha in the kitchen chatting blithely on about cashmere sweaters and the ‘cultural oasis’ that was Edinburgh. Any second now she was going to come out into the hall and discover her previously healthy husband as deceased (which is a longer form of dead) as an item of door furniture.

‘If you’re ever going to succeed at magic,’ I whispered to Andrea, ‘then now would be a good time to begin.’

Proteus woke up with a start and began to cry, breaking the trance that we’d been plunged into. I rifled desperately through my pockets for his dummy but all I could find was a torn piece of paper, the stray page of The Expanding Prism of J in which J plunges over the banisters and dies.

A sudden horrendous scream rent the suburban air, indicating that Martha had discovered her spouse’s unexpected demise.

‘Give me your lighter,’ I whispered urgently to Chick. He raised an eyebrow at me as if this was no time to take up smoking (although if not now, then when?) and passed me his lighter – a lurid affair displaying a naked female on its casing. I grabbed it off him and set the flame to the piece of paper in my hand. (Well, it was worth a try.) The Expanding Prism of J flared up with a malevolent hiss in a greeny-blue flame – perhaps cyan, who knows? – and turned into a thin charcoal skin that floated up and hovered over the stairwell before disintegrating into a little shower of carbonized fragments like black snow.

‘Fucking hell,’ Chick said, looking down at the hall, ‘where’s he gone?’ For there was indeed no sign of a blood-boltered Jay, no screaming Martha, no sign of life or death. It was as if we had suffered a mass hallucination.

‘This is so freaky,’ Andrea said quietly.

‘Let’s get the fuck out of here now,’ Chick said, a sentiment we all agreed with heartily, and we ran out of the house and piled into the car anyhow so that for a brief and surreal moment Hank/Buddy was sitting behind the Cortina’s steering-wheel. Chick and the dog finally sorted themselves out and as we pulled away from Birnham with Chick in the driver’s seat we saw the Sewells’ car rounding the corner and drawing to a halt outside their home. I was glad to see that Jay was not only driving the car but was also in possession of a fully intact skull. Martha caught sight of us and her features contorted in a little grimace of recognition. She didn’t espy Terri or her erstwhile dog, as they were lying on the floor of the car.

‘So he was dead,’ Andrea puzzled, ‘and now he’s . . . not dead?’

‘Apparently,’ I said.

‘Now that’s magic realism,’ I say to Nora.

Terri asked Chick to drop her off at the bus station. I presumed she was going somewhere like Balniddrie to lie low for a while – it was obvious the Sewells would realize who had abducted their dog.

‘You don’t need to wait to see me off,’ she said to me and made a move to kiss me then thought better of it. Hank (as he would now be for ever more, I supposed) licked the back of her hand while he sat waiting patiently by her side.

‘We’re outlaws now,’ Terri said dreamily; ‘we have to go where desperadoes go.’

‘Where’s that?’ Chick asked. ‘Glasgow?’ and Terri said, ‘No, but it rhymes with that.’