Russell Hoban - Linger Awhile

31 January 2004. Maybe three toads in the soup were one too many. When J Two snogged Artie he started hallucinating so badly that he almost had Irv and me convinced that a huge hopping thing was coming through the wall. She’s some piece of work, that girl. And strong. After putting the frighteners on the three of us she grabbed her wet clothes, got dressed, and headed for the door. Irv and I tried to stop her but she scattered us like tenpins and hopped it. Now I know how Frankenstein felt. And at least his creation had a bolt through the neck so that anybody could see that he wasn’t the usual thing. J Two was pretty , for God’s sake.

Obviously the thing to do would have been to go after her and bring her back before she did any harm. Right, but Irv wasn’t up to that kind of thing, Artie was hiding under the bed, and I was no match for her. I couldn’t very well ring up the police and tell them to be on the lookout for a sexy woman in wet clothes with a hallucinogenic tongue. Would she be out for blood already? If not, she soon would be.

What had I intended when I brought her out of the soup? I wanted to teach Istvan a lesson. How? What kind of lesson? I don’t know, I hadn’t thought that far ahead. And, as Artie has said, once you see that a thing is possible you want to make it happen. I ought to have learnt by now that I tend to act without considering the consequences. Now the consequences were loose in Soho, out there in the dark. I wondered how soon we’d read about J Two in the papers.

31 January 2004. Connecting the dots will usually give you some kind of picture but you can’t always be sure what’s a dot; maybe it’s a mouse turd. Last night a man came into the station looking around wildly and complaining of being followed by ‘some huge hopping thing’. He was Walter Dixon, thirty-two, a freelance writer. ‘What do you write?’ I asked him.

‘Science fiction,’ he said. Casually dressed but respectable, didn’t strike me as an addict of any kind but you never know with writers. I sat him down, got him a coffee, and said, ‘Please begin at the beginning.’

‘OK,’ he said, ‘but keep your eye on the walls because it could be hopping through at any moment.’ He kept turning his head like a blind man listening for something.

‘You’re pretty safe here,’ I said. ‘We’ve got armed officers for just such emergencies and if it hops through a wall we’ll book it. When did you first become aware of it?’

‘Around half-eight in Cecil Court.’

‘What were you doing in Cecil Court?’

‘I’d just had a salt beef sandwich and a couple of beers at Gaby’s Deli in Charing Cross Road and I was standing in front of Watkins Books looking at their window …’

‘Yes, go on.’

‘ The Illusion of Reality by Sredni Bufo was the featured book. No, I’ve got the name wrong.’

‘Never mind. You were standing in front of Watkins and?’

‘Hang on — I don’t feel its presence any more, I think it’s gone. I don’t know what came over me. Look, I don’t want to be wasting your time so I really should be going.’

‘Don’t go just yet,’ I said. ‘It’s been my experience that these huge hopping things don’t usually turn up without a reason. Two beers wouldn’t do it. Was there anything before the hopping thing?’

‘Ah! The woman …’

‘What woman?’

‘Standing next to me. Suddenly she crumpled and I caught her just before she hit the ground. I said, “Gotcha” and she held on to me. She gave me a great big wet slobbery kiss. My God, she tasted awful, then she was nuzzling my neck. Her mouth was very wet and she began to bite me but I fought her off.’

‘Then what?’

‘Then she wasn’t there but the hopping thing came after me — didn’t attack me, just kept hopping behind me with a squelching sound each time it hit the ground.’

‘Can you describe the woman?’

‘Quite pretty, blonde, about five foot six. Her clothes were damp and smelly.’

‘What was she wearing?’

‘Some kind of western outfit. Cowboy boots.’

‘Do you mind if I take a swab from your mouth and your neck?’ I said.

‘What for?’ he said.

‘You never know,’ I said. Afterward I took his address and phone number and gave him my card. ‘Let me know if you remember anything else,’ I said. ‘Any time of the day or night.’ I sent the samples off to the lab and that was it for Monday evening. When I got home I took my shoes off, put my feet up, drank some whisky, and listened to Alison Krauss and the Cox family. I fell asleep in my chair and dreamt that Rose Harland was waiting for me on the far-side bank of Jordan. ‘I’ll be waiting, drawing pictures in the sand,’ she sang, ‘and when I see you coming I will rise up with a shout. And come running through the shallow waters, reaching for your hand.’ I could still see her face as I woke up, then it faded and I went to bed. As I was drifting off to sleep I heard myself say, ‘Definitely not a mouse turd.’

1 February 2004. Scotland Yard e-mailed me a photo sent by Ralph Darling of Witheridge in Devon. He’d written to say that his sister Rachael had gone to London last November in a depressed state of mind and he hadn’t heard from her since. He was worried about her and he wanted to know if there was any news of her. A living face in a photograph looks quite different to a dead one but when I had the Devon photo side by side with ours I was pretty sure it was a match. So that was her name, Rachael Darling. I rang up Ralph Darling and he came in to identify the body of his sister.

He was a very large man in corduroy trousers and a reefer jacket. I’m six feet tall and he was half a head taller and broad. He had big hands, rough and red, and he smelled of cows. ‘It never goes away,’ he said. ‘I’ve got an organic dairy farm outside Witheridge.’

Rachael was in the mortuary at St Hubert’s Hospital. I took her brother there and sat him down in the little waiting room while I went through to talk to Morton Taylor, the technician. Taylor consulted his clipboard and wheeled a trolley over to the banks of refrigerated body trays. He raised the trolley bed up to No. 12 and slid Rachael Darling’s tray on to it. Then he transferred her to another trolley with a blue floral-print skirt, put a pillow under her head and a blanket over her, and wheeled her into the chapel of rest where the lighting is subdued so the paleness of death won’t be too startling and the atmosphere seems hushed by virtue of a large wooden cross on a stand. I always expect a recording of non-denominational organ music, ‘Tales from the Vienna Woods’ or whatever and I’m always thankful for its absence.

At this point I brought Ralph Darling in. He came over to the bier, looked down at her, sobbed and covered his face with his hands. After a few moments he took his hands away. ‘That’s her,’ he said, and clenched his fists. ‘She looks so pale, like a ghost. How’d she die?’

‘We can’t know for certain,’ I said.

‘I think you do know. Don’t play games with me.’

‘All right, but you won’t like it.’

‘Go on, Inspector.’

‘All the blood was drained out of her body,’ I said.

He was becoming very angry, I thought he was going to hit me and he was about two stone heavier than I was. ‘How?’ he said. ‘Who did it?’

I pointed to the wound in her neck.

‘What?’ he said. ‘Is this some kind of horrible joke?

Are you telling me there are vampires in London?’

‘I’ve told you all I know,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

He stood there shaking his head for a while. ‘Could I have a look at her flat?’ he said.