Spider - Michael Morley [2]
Nancy got out of bed and switched the lights on.
‘These nightmares of yours, they’re scaring me to death. Jack, you’ve really got to go and see someone.’
Most days Jack looked as though he was living the dream, owning and running a small boutique hotel in a Tuscan village that time had barely altered and crime had hardly touched. But some nights – well, some nights he just couldn’t keep up the pretence. And this sure as hell was one of them.
Jack squinted into the ugly brightness of the bedroom lights, sweat soaked his bare chest and ran down his back.
‘Did you hear me? Jack?’
The visions had gone but now his head was filled with sounds: women screaming in pain, their desperate cries for help echoing out from the dark pits of his memory, and finally the unmistakable sound of razor-sharp steel slicing into human flesh.
Jack let out a hot, slow breath. ‘I hear you, Nancy. Just give me a minute.’
It had been three years since his burnout, and despite a change of continents and lifestyles, the past and all its horrors were still haunting him.
Maybe his wife was right. Maybe he finally had to see someone.
2
Georgetown, South Carolina
Sometimes, late at night, when he’s teetering on the edge of sleep, his mind soft with secret thoughts and emotions, Spider is able to turn the clock back and return to his favourite time.
The first time.
Right now, with so many exciting things happening to him, he’s keen to go back, eager to revisit the moments that have made him what he is.
Lying on his bed, his special bed, the room is dark and his eyes lightly closed. Soon months, years and decades flash by, until it is twenty years ago.
He’s in sunny Georgetown, down on the Harbor-walk at the waterfront. A young woman strolls past, happy and carefree. She’s slim bodied, dark-haired, respectable and simply dressed in a pink T-shirt, stylishly faded jeans and trainers. It’s her week off work and she’s chilling out, oblivious to the world, oblivious to the man she’s just magnetised to her.
Spider watches her dine, alone.
Watches her go to her apartment above the baker’s shop, alone.
And for days he watches her living there, alone.
Alone – and vulnerable. Just as he hoped.
Sarah Kearney never sees him, Spider’s very careful about that, so careful he’s almost invisible. But he’s around. Always there. There, brushing by her in supermarkets, as she grocery shops for one. There, as she queues in the cinema for her solitary seat at the latest romcom. There, as she browses in the bookshop, and finally buys the cookery book, with its special recipes just for one.
The memories are delicious. Spider savours every second of his mental feast. My, oh my, remembering the old ones, especially the first one, is almost as good as planning the new ones, the next one.
But Sarah had been sweet. As sweet as Sugar.
Spider’s heart races as he recalls how he followed her in his old Chevy as she caught a bus out to Landsford, a 400-acre state park off US-21 out towards Richburg. He had been his usual invisible self as she’d sauntered around the nineteenth century canals, sat a while near an old lock-keeper’s cottage and finally headed out of the crowds to a solitary spot near the Catawba River.
Twenty years later he could still remember every word they’d spoken.
You never forget your first kill. Not a single second of it.
The air had been fresh with pine and grass, the sun hot and high, and Sugar, well Sugar had been sitting sweetly on a carpet of white flowers, cherishing one of the massive spiky blooms in the cup of her hand.
Pretty as a picture.
And then he’d shown himself. Confident and calm, polite and unthreatening. Just like he’d planned. Just like he’d dreamed.
‘They’re beautiful,’ he said, walking confidently towards her. ‘What are they?’
For a second