The Fog - James Herbert [12]
She stumbled through the open door and stopped short at the sight confronting her.
Her mistress lay sprawled on the floor in a pool of blood, only a few tendons in her neck holding her head to her body. It lay parallel to her left shoulder, grinning up at her. The Colonel lay spreadeagled on the huge dining table, long nails through the palms of his hands and the flesh of his ankles to pin him there. A man stood over him, an axe dripping with blood in his hands.
As the maid watched, dumb-struck, unable to move with the horror of it, the man raised the axe above his head and brought it down with all his strength. It severed a hand and splintered the wood beneath. The man struggled to free the weapon from the table and raised it again. By the time he’d cut off the other hand, the Colonel was unconscious. By the time he’d hacked off both feet, the Colonel was dead.
The maid finally began to scream when the man with the axe turned his head and looked at her.
4
‘Hello, John.’
John Holman looked at the girl and smiled ‘Hello, Casey.’
‘How do you feel?’
‘Okay.’
He was sitting on the steps of the hospital, unwilling to wait inside. He found hospitals depressing.
‘They said you’d need at least another couple of weeks.’ She sat next to him on the steps.
‘No, I’m all right now. Any longer in there and I’d have gone mad again.’
She flinched at the words remembering how he had been the first time she’d visited.
The news of the eruption had stunned the country, spreading alarm, causing dismay among geologists, panic in the neighbouring towns and villages. She hadn’t even known Holman was in that area, for he was very secretive about his job; she wasn’t even sure of his department. All she knew was that he had an ‘assignment’ for the weekend, that no, he couldn’t tell her where he was going, and no, she definitely could not go with him. Had she known he had been in the village that suffered the earthquake, she – she refused to think about it. It had been bad enough when she had rung his office the following day to find out why he hadn’t called her on his return and had learnt of his involvement. The department knew he’d been in the area and as they hadn’t heard from him since, assumed he either couldn’t get back because the roads leading to the disaster were completely blocked by rescue and medical services and the hordes of curious sightseers – the usual ghoulish element that flocked to any disaster – or he had stayed to help. They didn’t reveal to her that they were concerned that perhaps he was being held by the military on their Salisbury Plain base and they were now anxiously expecting the Ministry of Defence to come roaring down their necks. She was asked to ring back later when no doubt they would have some news and was advised not to make the trip down to Wiltshire because of the mounting traffic and the impossibility of finding him anyway.
The rest of the day had been spent in a fear-ridden daze. She rang her employer, an exclusive antique dealer in one of the side streets off Bond Street, and told him she felt too ill to come in. A fussy little man, who considered women necessary only for business purposes, he brusquely hoped she would be well enough to do her job tomorrow. For the rest of the day she wandered listlessly around the house, afraid to go out in case the phone rang. She barely ate and listened to the radio only to find out more news of the earthquake.
Casey had known Holman for nearly a year now and was becoming more and more aware that if he ever left her, she would be lost. Her dependence on him was now stronger even than her dependence on her father had been. When her mother had divorced her father eight years ago, she had turned to him to provide the comfort and guidance every child needs from a mother, and he had coped extraordinarily well.