Reginald Hill - Death

Or a Hoover if you couldn't wait that long.

This was the gallows humour with which she diverted herself as she went about the task of vacuuming her room. What else could she do? Sing a hymn? Speak a prayer? No, Serge would have found the absurdity of the situation hilarious and she would not let him down by relapsing into maudlin solemnity.

In fact, come to think of it, Serge would have found the whole business of keeping his ashes in a jar on her bedroom shelf ridiculous. 'Abso-fucking-lutely typical!' she could hear him cry. 'I always said you were made for the stage. You're a true-born drama queen!' Well, the accident had ended her career plans. Not much future even in this age of teleprompts for an actress whose mind went blank not just of her lines but of language itself whenever she walked onstage. But, oh! how small a price this seemed to be to pay for causing the death of her closest kin, her dearest friend, the better half of herself. And the Furies had thought so too, pursuing her to the frontiers of madness – no, beyond – in their quest for retribution. She should have been warned. The records of history and of literature are unanimous. Only the detail varies of the horrors that invariably attend all man's attempts to raise the dead. That period of her life seemed to her now like a journey through a Gothic landscape by night whose veil of dark was torn aside from time to time by brief jags of lightning to show sights that made the returning blackness welcome. That journey was over, thank God, but the past was not another country which you could simply leave behind. Travel as far and as fast as you could, there were parts of it you dragged with you. Only Hat offered her any hope of freedom. With him she found complete if temporary oblivion. In him she regained all she had lost and more. The half of herself that died with Sergius had been the irreplaceable closeness of kin, but in Hat's embrace she found a new completeness of kith which promised to make her whole again.

But the Kindly Ones know their stuff. Guilt, horror, self-loathing, these are coals of the selfsame fire. Heap them high and they can get no hotter. There is a deep which has no lower; a worst where pangs wring no wilder. So what's a frustrated Fury to do?

Aeons past they had learned their answer.

You don't pour water on a drowning man, you show him dry land.

Waking in Hat's arms, for a moment she could look ahead to a green and pleasant landscape whose rolling hills were bathed in golden sunshine. And then a band of white-hot metal snapped around her skull and her head was twisted round till she saw once more what it was she trailed behind her.

She was a murderer; worse, a serial killer, one of those monsters they paraded before you on tele-documentaries, inviting you to marvel how ordinary they seemed, to speculate what warped gene, what ruined childhood had brought them to this monstrosity.

She had killed nine people – no, not that many – the first two, the AA man and the boy with the bazouki, she had only assisted at their deaths, which she had taken as signs that she was on the right track – a track which had led her beyond all mathematical equivocation to seven indisputable murders, by knife, by poison, by gunshot, by electrocution…

Deluded (it was a delusion. Wasn't it? She knew that now. Didn't she?) into believing that through an alphabetically signposted trail of blood she could come once more to her dead brother, and talk with him, and give him back something of that lost life her wilful selfish stupidity had stolen from him, she had done these dreadful things. And not unwillingly, not under constraint, but eventually with eagerness, with glee even, revelling in her sense of power, of invulnerability, until the trail led her to her last victim, her boss at the library, Dick Dee, a man she liked and admired.

That was torment enough to give her pause. And when she saw the imagined signs pointing clearly towards the man she was coming to love, to Hat Bowler, she began to wake as it were from a dream, only to find herself pinned by black memory in a nightmare.

Was atonement possible? Or – God forbid – relapse?

She did-not know. Nothing, she knew nothing… sometimes even the horrors seemed so far beyond her comprehension that she almost believed they had indeed been a dream… she needed help, she knew that… but who was there to talk to? Only Hat, and that was unthinkable.

So forget the future, she had no future, she had exchanged it for the past. Hardly a fair swap, screamed the Furies. We want change! But it would have to do. We creep under what comfort we can find in a whirlwind.

Getting rid of Sergius's ashes wasn't a step forward, but it was a step in that marking of time which kept her in the present.

Ashes to ashes… dust to the dustbin. That was the obvious way to dispose of them. But she found herself unable to do it.

Instead, holding the bag tight against her breast, she crossed the narrow road and pushed open the squeaky gate into the churchyard. Ahead loomed the tower, black on dark grey against the wintry sky. This was an old burial place. Here a marbled angel folded her grieving wings, there a granite obelisk pointed an accusing finger at the sky, but for the most part the memorials were modest headstones, many so flaky and lichened their messages to the living were almost impossible to trace with finger or with eye. Few were of such recent vintage that family members still kept them tidy or laid anniversary flowers. A cold wind whispered through the long grass and a hunting cat miaowed an almost silent protest at her for interrupting his patient vigil, then sinewed away.

Distantly she could perceive the glow of the populous city and hear the chitter of its traffic, but these lights and sounds had nothing to do with her. She stood like a ghost in a ghostly world whose insubstantiality was her proper medium now. Some memory might remain in this other place of that other place, but the laws of physics by which mortals walk and drive and fly over the earth and by which the earth itself and all the planets and all the stars swing round each other in their crazy reel, were the dreams of an amoeba. She felt as if she could float up through the looming tower and with one small step be on the invisible moon.

You stupid bitch! she said to herself in an attempt at a rescuing anger. Getting rid of Serge's ashes is meant to be a move away from all this crazy crap!

And with a series of movements like an orgasmic spasm, she shook the dust out of the Hoover bag.

The wind caught it and for a moment she could see the fine powder twisting and coiling in the air as if trying to hold together and reconstitute itself in some living form.

Then it was gone.

She turned away, eager to be out of this place.

And shrieked as she saw a figure standing beside an ancient headstone which leaned to one side as if something had just pushed it over to open a passage from the grave.

‘I’m sorry,' said a voice. 'I didn't mean to startle you, but I was worried… are you all right?'

Not Serge! A woman. She was relieved. And disappointed? God, would it never stop?

'Yes, I'm fine. Why shouldn't I be? And who the hell ire you?'

Speaking abruptly was the easiest way to control her voice.

'Mrs Rogers… I think we're neighbours… it is Ms Pomona, isn't it?'

'Yes. My neighbour, you say?'

Her eyes, accustomed now to the dark, could make out the woman's features. Mid to late thirties perhaps, a round face, not unattractive without being remarkable, her expression a mixture of embarrassment and concern.

'Yes. Just since last week though. We haven't met but I saw you going into your flat a couple of times. I was just walking down the lane now and I saw you… I'm sorry… none of my business… sorry if I startled you.'