Doctor Who_ Warlock - Andrew Cartmel [55]
She had absurdly large ears which were normally kept hidden, but when her hair was scraped back they were revealed jutting from her head. They made her look like some exotic, beautiful creature. Once after watching a documentary on rain forest parks Creed told her she looked like a tropical bat, as indeed she did, and Anna had fumed with rage for days.
Her body had been small and flawless. He never tired of watching her: walking naked through the cold apartment in the winter with Bert clumsily pursuing her, grunting and worshipfully snuffling at her feet. Standing on the edge of the bathtub, gently drying herself, rubbing her body with great thoroughness, the fluffy white towel a blazing snow white against her warm brown skin. Her every movement was a marvel of articulation. She was a perfect sum of perfect parts, seamlessly fitted together.
Lying in bed beside her he’d watch her sleep, eyes squeezed shut over strange beautiful cheekbones.
When they made love she had breathed in short staccato gasps like an animal. His hands remembered the smoothness of her skin.
Creed wrenched his mind away from those memories. He couldn’t go on feeling these emotions. It had to change. He made himself think of the bad things.
He threw in everything he had. He remembered in detail every argument, every flaw, every piece of selfishness, bad temper and pettiness. The way her voice would break with insincerity. The arguments that dragged on in endless circles. Anna’s shrillness, her childish moods, the sulking, her lack of respect for him. She hadn’t been anything so special. She had criticized and nagged and complained endlessly.
Sitting there on a staircase that led nowhere, Creed soon hated her with a passion like a blowtorch.
Hours later he was still sitting on the stairs in a shaft of morning light that was rendered haunted by his exhaustion. He was tired and his mind was drifting; drifting away from the hatred and rage into more pleasant thoughts. Creed found himself lost in a reverie of his lips on a cheekbone, of grazing the firm perfect curve as he moved up to gently kiss an eye. She had startling grey eyes, like pebbles seen under moving water. The kind that were so beautiful you reached into the water and touched them. But if you brought those pebbles out of the water they would lose that remarkable colour as soon as they dried.
That’s the way Anna’s eyes had looked when they unzipped the body bag and she’d stared blankly up at him and then they asked him to identify her. And he discovered that he could still speak, that he owned a voice in this strange new world he’d entered. The world without Anna.
They’d zipped the bag back up and he’d turned and walked out of the room thinking, this doesn’t feel so bad; I can handle this. It isn’t so bad.
It isn’t as bad as I expected. I can handle it.
He’d walked carefully, like a man carrying something he didn’t want to spill.
Now he stared at the peeling paint on the bannister knowing he had to get over Anna and knowing he would never get over her.
* * *
Chapter 13
The girl called Maxine’s face was so close that Ace could hardly focus on it.
A bank of brilliant white lights shone above Maxine’s head, making a few stray strands of hair glow like a halo. Ace stared up at the ceiling of the building and concentrated on it. The lights were fixed in frames mounted on wooden beams that ran under the corrugated metal of the roof. On one of the beams a tiny brown bird fluttered and resettled itself, peering down at her.
Ace wondered how the bird had got into the building. She wondered how she could get out.
Learn, Ace thought. Information is ammunition. The tin sheets of the roof looked vulnerable at the joins. There were brown patches of corrosion around the bolts that joined them. Presumably somewhere out of sight there was a hole at least big enough to let the bird in. If she could get up to the ceiling beams, using a rope or a ladder, she knew she could find that hole or create a new one. If she could force two of the metal sheets apart she could