The Devil's star

43

Monday Night. Rolex.

Tick, tick, tick.

Harry sat listening to the second hand with his eyes closed while he counted. He mused that the time would have to be pretty accurate since the ticking was coming from a gold Rolex watch.

Tick, tick, tick.

If he had counted correctly he had been sitting in the lift for a quarter of an hour now. Fifteen minutes. Nine hundred seconds since he had pressed the stop button between the ground floor and the basement and announced that now they were safe and would have to wait. For nine hundred seconds they had sat as quiet as mice, listening. For footsteps. Voices. Doors being opened and closed. While Harry, his eyes closed, had counted the nine hundred ticks from the Rolex watch on the wrist of the blood-covered arm on the lift floor, and still attached to his handcuffs.

Tick, tick, tick.

Harry opened his eyes. He unlocked the handcuffs and wondered how he was going to get into the boot of the car now that he had swallowed the key.

‘Oleg,’ he whispered and gently shook the sleeping boy’s shoulder. ‘I need you to help me.’

Oleg got to his feet.

‘What’s the point?’ Sven asked, looking up at Oleg who was standing on Harry’s shoulders and detaching the strip lighting from the roof of the lift.

‘Take it,’ Harry said.

Sven reached up to Oleg and took one of the two tubes.

‘Firstly, so that my eyes get used to the dark before I go out into the basement,’ Harry said. ‘Secondly, so that we don’t stand here in the light blinking when the lift door opens.’

‘Waaler? In the basement?’ Sven’s voice was full of disbelief. ‘Come on, no-one can survive that.’

He pointed with the light tube to the already pale, wax-like arm on the floor.

‘Imagine how much blood he lost. And the shock.’

‘I’m trying to anticipate every eventuality,’ Harry said.

Then it went dark.

Tick, tick, tick.

Harry stepped out of the lift, moved quickly to the side and crouched down. He heard the door close softly behind him. He waited until he heard the lift start. The arrangement had been that they should stop the lift between the basement and the ground floor where they would be safe.

Harry listened with bated breath. So far, no sign of ghosts. He stood up. Faint light shone through a door window at the other end of the basement. He made out the shapes of garden furniture, old chests of drawers and the tips of skis behind the wire netting. Harry groped his way along the wall. He found a door and opened it. There was the sweet smell of refuse. He had come to the right place. He trod on torn rubbish bags, eggshells and empty milk cartons as he fumbled his way through the sticky heat generated by the decomposing waste. The gun was over by the wall. One of the bits of tape was still attached. He made sure that it was still loaded before he went out again.

He moved in a crouch towards the door where the light was coming from.

It was only when he was close up that he saw the dark outline against the window. It was a face. Harry automatically dropped onto his haunches before he realised that the person could not see him in the dark. He held the gun in front of him with both hands as he crept two steps forward. The face was pressed up tight against the glass so that all the features were distorted. Harry had the face in the sights of his gun. It was Tom. His wide-open eyes stared beyond him and into the dark.

Harry’s heart thumped so hard he could not keep the sights on the gun still.

He waited. The seconds came and went. Nothing happened.

Then he lowered his gun and straightened up.

He went to the window and looked into Tom’s glazed eyes. They were covered over with a bluish-white film. Harry turned round and tried to penetrate the dark. Whatever Tom had been staring at, it was gone now.

Harry stood still, feeling the dogged, insistent throb of his pulse. Tick, tick, tick, it went. He didn’t quite know what it meant. Except that he was alive, because the man on the other side of the door was dead. And that he could unlock the door, put a hand against that man’s skin and feel the body heat leaving him, feel the skin changing texture, losing the substance of life and becoming packaging.

Harry rested his forehead against Tom Waaler’s. The cold glass of the window burned like ice against his skin.