The doorbell rang. The shock of it made her squeal. She saw the figure of a man outlined against it by the night light. She looked at the clock on the wall. It was after three. Where had the hours gone? Rubbing the base of her spine where she had landed so awkwardly, she walked to the door and pulled the drape to one side so that she could see who was there. A man in his sixties stood in profile on the step. He wore a black hat, which he raised politely, revealing a bald cone misted by wisps of gray hair. She opened the door, relieved at the presence of another human being, even a stranger, but she still kept the security chain on.

‘Hello,’ said the man. ‘We’re looking for Karen Emory.’ He still had not turned toward her, so she could see only one side of his face.

‘She’s not here,’ said Karen, the words emerging before she even realized that she had spoken them. ‘I don’t know when she’ll be back. It’s late, so she probably won’t be home until morning.’

She didn’t know why she was lying, and was conscious of the weakness of the falsehoods she was uttering. The man looked unthreatening, but her survival instincts had been shocked into action by what she had seen in the basement, and he was making her skin crawl. She had been wrong to open the door to him, and now it was crucial that she lock it against him as soon as possible. She wanted to scream: she was trapped between this man and the entities in the basement. She willed Joel to return, even as she understood that this was his fault, that the man was here because of him and what was stored in the basement, because why else would such an individual be on their doorstep at three in the morning. Joel would know what to do. She’d take her chances with his anger if he’d only return to help her.

‘We can wait,’ said the man.

‘I’m sorry. That won’t be possible. Anyway, I have company.’ Lies were piling up on lies, and she sounded unconvincing even to her own ears. Then she thought about what the man on the doorstep had just said. We’re looking for Karen Emory. We can wait.

‘No,’ said the man. ‘We don’t think you have company at all. We think you’re alone.’

Now she looked around to see if there was anyone else outside, but there was only this odd, creepy man with his hat in his hand. And she had left the gun in the basement.

‘Go away,’ she said. ‘Go away, or I’ll call the police.’

Now his head turned, and she saw how ruined he was, how damaged, and she felt that this was as much a spiritual as a physical decay. She tried to close the door, but his foot was already jammed in the gap.

‘Nice earrings,’ said Herod. ‘Old, and too good for one such as you.’

He reached through the gap, his hand a white blur, and ripped out one of the earrings, tearing the lobe. Blood sprayed on her robe and she tried to scream, but his hand was on her throat, his nails digging into her skin. His shoulder struck the door with massive force, and the chain came away from the frame. She fought against him, scratching at him with her fingers, until he slammed her head against the wall.

Once: ‘Don’t…’

Twice: ‘… tell…’

The third time, she hardly felt it at all.

‘… lies!’

35

Karen did not lose consciousness, not entirely, so she was aware of being dragged by her hair across the floor and thrown in a corner. Her ruined earlobe burned with pain, and she felt blood dripping from the wound. She heard the door locking, and saw the drapes being partially drawn on the windows, but she felt nauseated, and she was having trouble with her vision because, when the man walked to the window, she thought that she saw two reflections in the glass. One was the intruder, and the other-

The other was Clarence Buttle. There was something about his gait and posture that had ingrained itself upon her memory, even had the reflected figure not been wearing the shabby dark jacket that Clarence had been wearing that night in her bedroom, with the red-and-black checked shirt beneath it tucked into baggy jeans that looked like they belonged more properly on a fatter person. Clarence’s jeans had been held up with a brown leather belt, its battered silver buckle shaped like a cowboy hat. That was how she remembered him, because that was how he looked in the photographs that were taken of him as his true nature was revealed by the police investigation.

But Clarence Buttle was dead. He had died in prison, taken by stomach cancer that had eaten away at his insides. The reflected Clarence certainly looked like someone who’d been eaten away, except it was his face that had been consumed, because the Clarence that she glimpsed in the glass before the drapes closed had holes where his eyes should have been, and his lips were gone, revealing black gums and the stumps of rotted teeth. But in those final seconds, his lipless mouth had moved, and she heard the words, and smelled the foulness of his insides polluting the room.

‘I’ve been a bad, bad boy,’ said the reflection, both Clarence and Not-Clarence, and Karen, struggling to hold back her bile, knew, deep down in the special hidden place where she kept all that was truly herself, that what she was seeing was the entity that had made Clarence Buttle what he was, the voice that had spoken to him of the pleasures of playing with little girls in old storm drains, the malign visitor that had put Karen Emory’s name into Clarence’s mind.

‘She’ll play with you, Clarence. She likes boys, and she likes dark places. And she won’t scream. She won’t scream no matter what you do to her, because she’s a good, good girl, and a good, good girl needs a bad, bad boy to bring out the best in her…’

The intruder was looking at her in amusement, and she knew that he had seen something of what she had glimpsed, because he was rotting too, inside and out, and she wondered if the entity brought the cancer with it, if that degree of spiritual and mental decay somehow had to find a physical expression. After all, evil was a kind of poison, an infection of the soul, and other poisons, if absorbed slowly over time, brought changes to the body: nicotine yellowed the skin and blackened the lungs; alcohol damaged the liver and the kidneys, and scoured the face; radiation made your hair fall out; lead, asbestos, heroin, they all affected the body, bringing it closer to its final ruination. Was it not possible that evil in its purest form, the quintessence of it, might do the same? Because the sickness had been in Clarence, just as it was in the man who now held her in his power.

‘What was his name?’ he asked, and she felt compelled to reply.

‘Clarence,’ she said. ‘His name was Clarence.’

‘Did he hurt you?’

She shook her head.

But he wanted to. Oh yes, Clarence had wanted to play, and Clarence played rough when it came to little girls.

Karen drew her knees up beneath her chin, and wrapped her arms around them. Although the reflection was no longer visible, she was afraid of what had created it. It was in here. She could feel it. She could feel it because there was a connection between her and Clarence Buttle. She was the one that escaped him. Worse, she was the one who got him caught, and he would never forgive her for that, never forgive her for leaving him to rot painfully in a prison hospital with nobody to visit him, no one to care about him, when all he’d wanted to do was play.

The intruder approached her, and she shrank from him.

‘My name is Herod,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to be afraid of me. I’m not going to hurt you again, not as long as you answer my questions honestly.’

But she was looking past him, her eyes flicking around the room, her nostrils twitching, alert for the approach of Not-Clarence, and his cancerous breath, and his filthy, probing fingers. The old man peered at her curiously.

‘But you’re not frightened of me, are you?’ he said. ‘Because you’ve seen him, and that’s quite the thing, quite the thing. Oh, you can call him Clarence, if you like, but he has lots of names. To me, he’s the Captain.’