Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [48]
I stood in the bathroom for a moment, looking at my reflection in the mirror. It was darker in there, and I was glad. I didn’t want to see just how much, or how little, I had changed.
The living room. Bookcases along one side, cookery and gardening books jumbled up with my cheap paperbacks and forensic texts. Another wall, almost entirely window, a source of great pride to us. We could have afforded to live a few floors up, but we chose to stay on 72 because we had enough to rent an apartment on the edge here. I’d liked the idea that Angela would be able to see something beyond New Richmond, and on a good day you could see clear to the mountains. Tonight you could barely see the clouds outside, because the window, along with most of the walls and the carpet, was covered in a dried brown smear that was the blood of my wife and daughter.
I didn’t go into the bedroom. I let my back slide down the wall and sat, arms tight round my knees.
I’d come back at nine, late for dinner as always. But also as always, even in those last, bad days, Henna had held it for me, and the kitchen had smelled of something good. I’d been so Rapt as I blundered into the apartment that for a moment I’d seen the smell as a color, a kind of deep warm red. I was also drunk, and I was only going to be staying ten minutes, though Henna didn’t know that yet. The Vinaldi gig was breaking at long last, and I was going back out just as soon as I’d fulfilled my duty as husband and father in the thoughtless and perfunctory way I had.
The apartment was quiet as I entered, which surprised me. Angela’s favorite program was on at nine, some toon featuring a dyslexic cat. Even in my wired and whirling stupor the silence gave me pause, and I walked into the living room with a frown on my aching face.
I thought at first that more of the Rapt had just kicked in, and that the red smell from the kitchen had seeped into the room, blotting out everything else. Then I realized it hadn’t, and screamed so loudly that no sound came out at all.
Angela and half of Henna were in the living room. Angela had been dismantled, each limb removed from her body, then broken into smaller parts. Her face had been peeled off in one piece, and was stuck to the television screen in her drying blood. I couldn’t see her head at first. My wife’s torso was sitting upright in the chair she always sat in, her insides spilling out of the torn lower end. Her lower half was on the bed in the bedroom, legs spread wide. Her head was in the wastebasket, with the rest of Angela’s. I couldn’t find Angela’s eyes.
I saw these things, and then came to just under two weeks later. Someone found me in a disused warehouse area on 12. I was wearing the same clothes and didn’t immediately recognize the person who found me, though I knew her very well. In that period I had developed from a medium-strength Rapt junkie into someone whose body could not survive without it I wasn’t a suspect in the murders, but my job was long gone. It didn’t matter. I barely remembered I’d had one. Five years later I still have no idea what happened during that time, and I don’t want to know; just like I don’t want to think about the fact that I must have turned and walked out of my apartment that night, abandoning the bodies of the two people I loved most in the world.
Somewhere in New Richmond there would be photographs, I knew, Polaroids taken by the killer to prove the job was done so he could collect his fee. I believed I had just spoken to the man who’d paid for those photographs to be taken, a man whom no one in the police department was interested in taking down. The real bodies were long gone and destroyed, leaving only stains on the floor and the chair, and presumably the bed.
But everything else was still there, including the blood on the windows and the dried smear I could still see on the screen of the