Mark Chadbourn - World's end

Ruth paused in her search and dredged her memory for a translation. "`The sleep of reason brings forth monsters.' It's the title of-"

" a painting by Goya. Yes, I remember."

Ruth leaned on the canvases and mused, "It's strange, isn't it? We go about our lives thinking the world is normal and then we stumble across all these people who obviously have a completely different view of reality, indulging in their paranoid fantasies."

"Are you including the vicar in that?"

Ruth laughed. "The UFO guy and Kraicow and obviously Gibbons, all feeding each other. And obviously Mrs. Gibbons had no idea what was going on in her husband's head."

Church moved on to another collection of canvases, older, judging by the thick layer of dust that lay on the top. "Well, paranoia's like a fire. It quickly gets out of control and suddenly the norm looks weird and the weird becomes perfectly acceptable."

"You'd know, would you?" Ruth Jibed. Church didn't respond.

Their search continued for fifteen minutes more, becoming increasingly aimless as the futility of the task overcame them. Church, for his part, was afraid to stop; he didn't want to return to his empty flat with its bleak memories. Their hunt for meaning in their experience had released a whole host of emotions with which he hadn't had time to come to terms.

Ruth let the final canvas drop back with a clatter. "We should call it a day," she said. Church noted a hint of gloom in her voice. After a second she added morosely, "I don't think we're getting anywhere and I'm afraid if we don't sort out what happened I'm never going to get back to who I was. That morning was so destabilising I feel like every support for my life has been kicked away." She wandered over to the window and hauled up the blind to look out over the city.

"I know exactly what you mean," Church said, remembering the morning after Marianne's terrible death with an awful intensity. "Sometimes you never get straight again." He checked the final canvas, a surreal landscape with hints of Dali. "Nothing here. I don't know what Kraicow was talking about. Serves us right for listening to the views of a mental patient. So what do we do next?"

There was no reply. Church turned slowly. Ruth was standing at the window with her back to him, so immobile she could have been a statue. "Did you hear me?"

Still no answer. He could tell from her frozen body something was wrong. A hum of anxiety rose at the back of his head, growing louder as he moved towards her. Before he had crossed the floor, her voice came up small, still and frightened. "He was right."

Church felt his heart begin to pound; somewhere, doors were opening.

When he came up behind her, he could see what it was that had caught her attention. On the window ledge was a small sculpture in clay, rough and unfinished, but detailed in the upper part. It was a figure with a face so hideous in its deformity and evil they could barely bring themselves to look at it.

And it was the perfect representation of the devil they had recalled during Delano's therapy session. Kraicow had seen it too.

It existed.

For the rest of the night they sat in Ruth's lounge, talking in the quiet, clipped tones of people who had suffered the massive shock of a sudden bereavement. The discovery of the desperately crafted statue left them with nowhere to turn. Suddenly the shadows were alive, and life had taken on the perspective of a bottle-glass window.

"What the hell's going on?" Ruth looked deep into the dregs of her wine. She had drunk too much too quickly, but however much she told herself it was an immature reaction, she couldn't face up to the immensity of what the statue meant and what they had truly seen that night. For someone immersed on a daily basis in the logic and reason of the law, it was both too hard to believe and impossible to deny; the conflict made her feel queasy.

Church rubbed his tired eyes, at once deflated and lost. "We can't walk away from it-"

"I know that." There was an edge to her voice. "I never thought one moment could change your life so fundamentally." She walked over to the window and looked out at the lights of the city in the pre-dawn dark. "We're so alone now-nobody knows what we know. It's a joke! How can we tell anybody? We'll end up getting treated like Kraicow."

"And what do we know? That there's some kind of supernatural creature out there that looks like a man one moment and something too hideous to look at the next?"

"We know," she said dismally, "that nothing is how we imagined it. That if something like that can exist, anything is possible. What are the rules now, Church? What's going on?"

Church paused; he had no idea how to answer her question. He drained the remainder of his wine, then played with the glass thoughtfully. "At least we've got each other," he said finally.

Ruth looked round suddenly, a faint smile sweeping away the darkness in her face. "That's right. You and me against the world, kid."

Church mused for a moment. "Kraicow must know more. He'd seen something, the same as Gibbons."

"Then," Ruth said pointedly, "we should pay him another visit."

Unable to sleep, they arrived at Kraicow's house at first light and sat outside in Church's old Nissan Bluebird until a reasonable hour, dozing fitfully. His niece answered the door, her recognition giving way instantly to anger.

"Did you two have something to do with it?" she barked. Church and Ruth were taken aback by her fury, their speechlessness answering the woman's question. "He's gone," she snapped.

Church's puzzlement showed on his face; Kraicow had seemed too weak to move. "Where-"

"I don't know where, that's the problem!" Anxiously, she looked past them into the empty street. "They came for him in the night. I had the fright of my life when I opened the door."

"Who was it?" Church asked.

"I don't know! They didn't tell me!" She back-pedalled, suddenly aware they might judge her for not questioning the men further. "They were coppers," she said unconvincingly. "Looked like a bloody funeral party, all dressed in smart suits and ties. I don't know what the old man's done. He never tells me anything."

Church and Ruth looked at each other uneasily. "Do you know where they took him?" Ruth said.

The woman shook her head. "They said they'd let me know. They told me it was in his best interests!" she protested pathetically before slamming the door.

"What was that all about?" Ruth asked once they were comfortably in heavy traffic heading back into town.

"Could be the murder squad. They might have linked Kraicow to Maurice Gibbons."

"Could be." Her voice suggested she didn't believe it. "Seems more like the kind of thing Special Branch would do. Or the security services."

"What would they want with Kraicow?" The question hung uncomfortably in the air for a moment until Church added, "Let's not get paranoid about this."

"If this whole episode isn't a case for paranoia, I don't know what is. We haven't got any more leads now. Where do we go from here?"

They crawled forward through the traffic for another fifteen minutes before Church found an answer. "There's a lot of weird stuff going on around the country just like this. I mean, not people turning into devils, but things that shouldn't be happening." Church explained to her at length about the massive upsurge in supposed paranormal events he had read about on the net. "I don't know …" He shrugged. "It may be nothing. All the nuts coming out of the woodwork at once. But it seems to me too much of a coincidence."

Ruth sighed heavily and stared out of the passenger window at the dismal street scene; no one seemed happy, their shoulders bowed beneath an invisible weight as they headed to the tube for another dreary day at work. It depressed her even more. "I can't get my head round this at all."