Not that Father Christmas’ll be coming to visit the likes of you, you know.

He groaned. He did the tongue thing again, pressure against His eardrums. Whoosh whoosh. Safe again, gone again. He could breathe as normal because normal is as normal does.

The reporters were gone, He saw. And wasn’t that nice? Wasn’t that a mark of the meant-to-bes? The story was still a sensational one, but now it could be covered from a distance. Profiles of all the principals, if you will. Because what, after all, needed to be said about a body in a bed? Here we are in front of St. Thomas’ Hospital on day number whateveritwas and the victim still lies within, so back to you in the studio for the weather report, which is far more interesting to the general public than this nonsense, so why don’t you give me a bloody new assignment please. Or words to that effect.

But for Him, it was endlessly fascinating. Events had conspired to illustrate over and over again that supremacy was more than a chance of birth. It was also a miracle of timing, embraced by the willingness to seize the moment. And He was the god of moments. In fact, it was He who made moments. This was the quality-one among many-that made Him different from everyone else.

Think you’re special? That it, little sod?

He used his tongue. Whoosh and whoosh. Release the pressure to check and-

You get away from him, Charlene. Jesus, it’s time he learned his lesson because special is as special God damn does and what the hell has ever been special about…I said step away. Who wants some of this? Bugger the both of you. Get out of my sight.

But in His sight was the future. It lay before Him in the streak of gold from the hospital lights. And in what the lights meant, which was broken. Broken. One of them was broken. One of them was destroyed. One of them was a shell that had cracked at first and now lay smashed in a hundred pieces. And He’d been the one to crush that egg beneath the heel of His shoe. He and no other. Look at me now. Look. At. Me. Now. He wanted to crow, but there was danger in this. And equal danger in remaining silent.

Attention? That it? You want attention? Develop some personality, and that’ll give you attention, if that’s what you want.

Lightly, He hit His fist against His forehead. He forced the air against His eardrums. Whoosh whoosh. If He didn’t take care, the maggot would eat away His brains.

At night in bed, He’d started plugging orifices against the invasion of the worm-cotton in ears and nostrils, plasters across His arsehole and at the end of His prong-but He still had to breathe and that was where He failed in His prophylactic measures. The worm got in with the air He took into His lungs. From His lungs, it crawled into His bloodstream where it swam like a deadly virus to His skull and munched and whispered and munched.

Perfect adversaries, He thought. You and I and who would’ve thought it when all of this started? The maggot chose to feast upon the weak, but He…Ah, He’d chosen an opponent worthy of the struggle for supremacy.

And that’s what you think you’ve been doing, little bugger?

Maggots ate. That was simply what maggots did. They operated solely on instinct and their instinct was to eat until they metamorphosed into flies. Blowflies, bluebottles, horseflies, houseflies. It didn’t matter. He merely had to wait out the period of eating, and then the maggot would leave Him in peace.

Except there was always the chance that this particular maggot was an aberration, wasn’t there, a creature that would never sprout wings in which case, He did have to rid Himself of it.

But that was not why He had begun. And that was not why He was here just now, across the street from the hospital, a shadow waiting to be dispersed by light. He was here because there was a coronation that needed to happen, and it would happen soon. He would see to that.

He crossed the street. This was chancy, but He was ready and willing to take that chance. To show Himself was to make a mark of preeminence upon a time and a place, and that was what He wanted to do: to begin the process of carving history from the stone of now.

He walked inside. He did not seek His adversary, nor did He even try to locate the room in which He knew he would be found. He could walk directly to it if He’d wanted to, but that was not His purpose in coming here.

At this hour of night breaking into morning, there were few enough people in the hospital corridors and those who were present did not even see Him. From this He knew that He was invisible to people in the way that gods were invisible. Moving among ordinary men and knowing that He could smite them at any moment illustrated irrefutably to Him what He was and would always be.

He breathed. He smiled. It was soundless in His skull.

Supremacy is as supremacy does.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

LYNLEY REMAINED WITH HER THROUGHOUT THE NIGHT and long into the day that followed. He used the time largely to disengage her face-so pale upon the pillow-from what she was now, from the body to which she had been reduced. In this, he tried to tell himself that it was not Helen he was looking upon. Helen was gone. In that instant in which everything had been transformed for them both, she had fled. The Helen of her had soared from the framework of bone, muscle, blood, and tissue, leaving behind not the soul, which defined her, but the substance, which described her. And that substance alone was not and could never be Helen.

But he couldn’t make a go of that because when he tried, what came to him were images, for he had known her simply far too long. She’d been eighteen years old and not his in any way but rather the chosen mate of his friend. Meet Helen Clyde, St. James had told him. I’m going to marry her, Tommy.

D’you think I’ll do for a wife? she had asked. I haven’t a single wifely talent. And she’d smiled a smile that had engaged his heart, but rather in friendship than in love.

Love had come later, years and years later, and in between the friendship and the love what had bloomed was tragedy, change, and sorrow, altering all three of them unrecognisably. Madcap Helen no more, St. James no longer the fervent batsman in front of the wicket, and himself knowing he’d been the cause. For which sin there was no forgiveness. One did not alter lives and simply walk away from the damage.

He’d been told once that things are at any given moment just as they are supposed to be. There are no mistakes in God’s world, he’d been told. But he could not believe that. Then or now.

He saw her in Corfu, a towel spread beneath her on the beach and her head thrown back so that the sun could strike her face. Let’s move to a sunny climate, she’d said. Or at least let’s disappear into the tropics for a year.

Or thirty or forty?

Yes. Brilliant. We’ll Lord Lucan it. With less cause, of course. What do you think?

That you’d miss London. The shoe sales if nothing else.

Hmm, there is that, she said. I am a lifelong victim of my feet. The perfect target for male designers with ankle fetishes, I’m the first to admit it. But have they no shoes in the tropics, Tommy?

Not the sort you’re used to, I’m afraid.

The silly stuff of her that made him smile, the very maddening Helen of her.

Can’t cook, can’t sew, can’t clean, can’t decorate. Honestly, Tommy, why do you want me?

But why did one person ever want another? Because I smile with you, because I laugh at your banter, which you and I both know very well is designed just for that…to make me laugh. And the why of that is that you understand and have done from the first: who I am, what I am, what haunts me most and how to banish it. That’s why, Helen.