Spider

45

Hotel Grand Plaza, Rome It was still the dead of night when Jack woke, dripping with sweat and struggling to breathe. The latest nightmare was the most personal and most intense he'd ever experienced.

He'd fallen asleep around midnight and thought he might get a decent rest. How wrong he had been.

Soon his sleep had tricked him back into the basement, where the white-coated ME was moving as mysteriously as usual, but everything else seemed somehow more intense. The blood was running faster from the pipes on the black walls, spilling on to the floor, and there in the puddles forming around his feet were strange shapes, like Rorschach's ink blots. In them, the faces of BRK's victims had appeared, one by one, and slowly morphed into each other, until finally Jack was left staring at the face of Cristina Barbuggiani. She was trying to mouth something to him but he couldn't hear her. For a second, her young fingers stretched out from the blood and implored him to grab her and save her. Then, in the instant that he touched her, her flesh melted and the hand became skeletonized and snapped off.

Jack wiped the sweat from his face and tried to remember what else he'd dreamt. He recalled a mixture of male and female voices shouting: 'IT'S YOUR FAULT!' He had hung on to the gurney for fear that his legs would give way beneath him as his head filled with voices.

'What they say is right. You're a failure, King, a burnout.'

'Think how many girls have died, because you've been unable to save them.'

'Think! Is it five, ten, fifteen, twenty or more?'

Jack had clung to the body on the steel gurney as the ME raised the bone saw. He had to save this one, there must be no more killing.

The blade came closer to the body on the gurney, its teeth seeking more innocent flesh and bone. Jack put his hand out towards the ME, trying to force the blade back, but as he did so, he stumbled. Falling into the pool of blood, he got a clear view of the face of the victim on the steel trolley.

It was that of his wife.