Sam Leith - The Coincidence Engine

And finally the wind calmed and the thing was made, the metal miracle. Water running in beads down its flanks under the heavy sky. To the west, the cloud broke and in the distance the sky was bright, like through a tunnel. There was a double rainbow. And on the other side, the sky was a sheet of black. A terrible promise.

The rotors of the engines were idling in the last of the wind. And sitting high in the air, strapped safely in the cockpit, was the pilot – mouth opening and closing, eyes wide, staring into the enormous sky. It works. I saw it.

Its author, Red Queen reflected, sounded about as well adjusted as that guy who eats flies in the Dracula movie. But the thing about the plane had caught their attention.

And there had been a hurricane. This they knew. Hurricane Jody had moved through the Gulf of Mexico for three days in the first week of August, feeding on the warm air rolling off the coast in the unending heatwave. It refused to blow itself out and refused to come ashore.

Occasionally, like a big dog twitching its tail, it brushed against the land. In the early morning of the 24th, a kiss-curl of the fatal weather system – it looked like a wisp of cloud on the satellite image – had flattened four miles of the Florida Keys.

The contents of two recently evacuated trailer parks had been lifted sideways, chewed to splinters in the hurricane’s mouth, and sprayed seaward like refuse from an industrial woodchipper. A film crew from Fox News went with them.

The hurricane’s retreat had taken a near-perfect hemispherical bite out of the coastline. Thousands of tons of yellow sand were pulled into the sea. Small boats sailed inland through the air and anchored among defoliated palm trees.

The hurricane had retreated, circled at sea, ambled south and west.

It came ashore again sixty-one hours later, on a stretch of coastline where the civic contingency planners had not expected it. The centre of the storm had started moving north-west at twenty knots. Its leading edge sucked a renowned Louisiana gambler bodily through the window of a riverboat casino, never to be seen again, and a steel roulette ball punched four inches into the tree stump to which the boat was moored. The storm’s left flank had sideswiped a single loop of the coastal highway, gridlocked with late-departing refugees, killing forty-eight motorists and 122 pedestrians.

Then, abruptly, it changed direction again and headed back out to sea, brooded.

And then, on the night of August 10th, it had headed inland again, and it did not stop at the coast. It had made landfall east of Mobile and headed up and over the delta with savage speed.

It was still just light in Glisson Road when Mary Hollis arrived home.

The bag in her hand, from the Marks & Spencer at the station, contained a fish pie, a small bag of prepared carrot batons and a half-bottle of red wine with a pink twist-off cap. Summer was on the way out. She felt a faint winter chill through her blouse.

She put the bag down and fished in her handbag for her keys. As she did so, a movement – barely more than a disturbance of the air – registered in her peripheral vision. She glanced briefly up the street towards the road that led to the station. Nothing there.

Silly woman, she said to herself aloud. Silly old bag. Only since she retired last year, though, had she started to notice herself looking over her shoulder when she turned the corner from Hills Road, or feeling nervous if she had to pass a man on the same side of the street. During all the years she worked up at the college, she had regarded the undergraduates as overgrown teenagers – unruly nephews and slatternly nieces, as exasperating and unthreatening as badly trained Labradors.

‘All right, Mrs H?’ bellowed in a cockney accent by a public schoolboy. ‘Where’s your gentleman caller, eh?’

‘Mind your own business.’

Now, already, they had started looking bigger and more strange. If she was out at night and she heard young men walking behind her, she’d dawdle at a bus stop, or pause on the main road under a street light, to let them pass before she turned off. Sometimes, when they looked drunk, she’d make an excuse to drop into a shop.

She was sixty-five, and she realised that she had started thinking of herself as an old woman. She had started thinking about what she looked like to others. Not the little vanities of make-up or hair – but the way her profile was changing. She felt as if she was growing smaller, taking shorter steps – as if she was gradually feeding herself to her fear.

She found her keys in the bottom of her bag, turned the heavy deadlock and rattled the sticky little brass one into the Yale. The hall was dark and smelled of polish. She picked up her supper, and turned on the light.

She tasted copper in her mouth, and felt her face go cold.

The drawer had been pulled out of the hall table and her letters were spilled over the floor. The rug had been pulled up and was rucked up at the other end by the foot of the stairs. Every one of her framed photographs had been knocked from the walls and there were big jagged pieces of broken glass across the floorboards, a different colour where the rug had been.

She felt her skin prickle. She made herself breathe, took a step and reached for the telephone on the hall table. It was an old brown plastic push-button BT model. She’d never owned a mobile phone.

It was when she fumbled the receiver that she realised her hand was shaking. It clattered heavily onto the table. She picked it up and brought it to her ear. There was no dialling tone.

Ahead of her, the darkness leading through to the kitchen seemed to breathe. She wanted to ask whether there was someone still there, but she didn’t want to know the answer and her mouth was too dry to speak.

The door behind her was still open, and the street outside felt suddenly more cold and strange. She took a step away, not wanting to turn her back on the other end of the hall, and pushed her spine against the door jamb. She turned her head to look out. In the dusk just across the street there was an elderly man. He was dishevelled. Above his grey beard there was a kindly, perplexed face. He was standing still, watching her. Then something seemed to startle him. He turned his head sharply, as if looking over his shoulder.

She stepped back out of the house and called to him, or tried to. As she raised her hand, though, he turned and dipped his head, walking back up towards the main road.

‘Sir!’ she yelped. ‘Sir! Excuse me!’

His pace seemed to quicken and then, just as he was coming up to a street light, something she could not account for happened. He seemed, simply, to vanish. There was a shimmer, and where a second ago she had been watching him there was now no more than a heat haze – a smear in the air.

A man’s shadow on the pavement shortened as it approached the street light, then lengthened on the far side, at the pace you might walk on a brisk spring evening, and then disappeared.

By the time the police arrived, it was full dark and Mary was two doors down with Mrs Smart at number 62.

Angela Smart had left an open pan of pasta boiling in the kitchen and opened the door to a tremulous knock. She found the old woman standing there. She wore a shapeless greatcoat and hat, and was clutching a plastic bag from Marks & Spencer up against her chest. She seemed agitated.

‘Mary?’ she had said. She knew Mrs Hollis from the occasional Neighbourhood Watch meeting, and to say hello to in the Co-op, sort of thing. She had long had her pegged as a meddlesome ratbag of the first water. ‘Is everything OK?’

‘I’m terribly sorry to trouble you. I think I’ve – I’ve been burgled. May I use your telephone to call the police?’