He follows him for ten minutes, twenty, thirty. He follows him down roads and up streets, past bus stops and train stations, over hills and through parks. He follows him for miles and dares not get too close, dares not reveal himself.
This man may have the answers that Roth craves but he may also be the reason for Roth's loss of consciousness that night, the blank memory and the strange turns his days since have taken.
He wants to know what has happened to him, though he has the germ of an idea, but it is a reality that he is scared to face, even as he senses what it is.
For now he will watch and he will learn. Soon his patience will be rewarded as the aimless wandering seems to gain purpose and the man seems finally to be going somewhere. His pace picks up, his head is down and then he stops and he stands still in the shaded rear garden of a Victorian house.
Roth finds shadows and walls to conceal himself but his view is clear and unobstructed.
The man is standing in the garden and he is completely still and completely focused on the ground floor window in front of him.
When the light goes on it seems to strike him like a blow and he drops to the grass and darts to the cover of the garden fence where there is darkness.
Still he stares at that window and though Roth's own vantage point is not ideal he too can see something moving beyond the glass and the net curtain.
He can see how fixed the man is on this window and the movement behind it that Roth decides that he can chance moving from his hiding place to a better position.
When he can see better, Roth stops and stares too.
Chapter 11
I did not mean to come here and I don't really know why I have or what on earth might happen.
Mostly though I want some gravity. Something to bring me back down to where I should be because my head is spinning a little after tonight. The sudden return of my appetite was welcome but it has given way to a nagging, aching feeling that it wasn't enough, wasn't right.
The fight, or whatever it was, has thrown me completely. I cannot explain or understand any of it; my sudden aptitude for violence, my unhesitating aggression, the speed and the power and the way it felt. The strange arithmetic of one beats three and the sight of those lads making a hasty exit, those lads who had probably never before made a hasty exit like that.
Walking and thinking and trying to clear my head I could not escape the feeling that the more I tried to put this puzzle together, the more pieces I found and it just got bigger and weirder and more jumbled.
When I spotted the park and the pond I knew I was not far from Issy's flat and resolved then to head there, though to call on her or just connect with some familiar surroundings, feel a sense of comfort and familiarity, however fleeting, I didn't know.
Standing in the dark garden I knew that I could not ring the doorbell. I had been out of touch for a long time and the hour was late. I would not achieve anything good showing up like this. My search for reassurance and company would visit only confusion and fear on her and though I might conjure mental images of an open door, a close embrace, a grateful welcome, none of that would happen.
And then the bedroom light was on and I was scrambling for shadows. I saw through the window that she had turned on her bedside lamp and tossed back the covers. She wore white cotton knickers and nothing else.
She left the room rubbing her eyes and returned two minutes later holding a glass of water which she sipped at and set down. Then she scooped the mobile phone from the side by the lamp and began to thumb at the screen.
As I watch her sitting on the bed tapping at her phone I cannot help but wonder if something has changed. Has she lost a little weight, toned up? Perhaps a new haircut, or maybe it is the soft light and the lack of makeup that make her seem so alluring. That I have not seen her for some time may account for the feeling of course and the fact that she is nearly naked and every bit as curvaceous and smooth-skinned as I remember.
This is not helping.
When the light goes out and she dives back beneath the duvet and into sleep I extract myself from the cover of shadows and melt into the night again. There is plenty of night left, but I think I have seen enough of it.
Except that I haven't of course and five minutes’ walk up the road just gives me the time to start thinking again. About speaking to somebody I know and breaking out of this increasingly smaller bubble that I have been trapped in for weeks. About seeing a look of recognition in someone's eyes when they look at mine, about the sensation of touch and the sharp absence of affection.
There are ways that Issy can fix this for me, none of them fair to ask of her, particularly not this way, at this hour, but I have endured and I have suffered and I feel now that I deserve some respite from it. She is closest. And her rejection I suppose, should it come, will hurt the least.
I try my damndest to not think too long and hard about how selfish this is and how it feels not just self-indulgent, but reckless and fraught with risk. I have never done this kind of thing before but this is a night of firsts and I am edgy and brittle and taut from the violence. Somehow, not losing that fight has made me taste a fear that I might only expect at having taken a beating.
Issy had been warm and fun and not uncomfortable with affection. Perhaps more so through the prism of my recall than in reality, but this is not something to concern myself with now because I am getting closer to her flat and sweeping aside all the reasons not to as I go, not with rational thinking or logic, but with none.
If I just do this, if I don't think about it, then I cannot be diverted by conscience, only by Issy. This she may do, is in fact very likely to, but such is out of my hands. I can rehearse the words to say to her, I can revise in my mind all the reasons why I should be comforted and not refused, and they are all convincing and undeniable because I want them to be.
So I push on back toward her and whatever fate has in store for me. An open door or a slammed one. I can imagine any and all outcomes but my mind fixes on the one where she stays mostly naked and not just because that is the freshest image of her in my head.
This though is a jarring welcome and not one I was prepared for; because not only is her front door not closed, it has quite clearly been forced.
There is cracked wood where white paint should be in the doorframe and the frosted glass pane has spiderwebbed at shoulder height.
When I step into the hall there is too much silence, like the night is holding its breath. I am too, and my skin is prickling across my scalp and down and over each ridge of my spine.
The sharpness is back as well, from the streetfight, all hyper-aware and over stimulated and I cannot simply hear and see more keenly but again have that feeling of sensing the space and movement around me. Something is happening in here that I must get to, something urgent and frantic and it is not just the smell in the air, nor the scuffling, tumbling sound, nor the shift of pale shadows in my monochrome vision but something else in the air that is palpable and repellent.
Moving quickly in slow motion, swift on the balls of my feet I am through her hallway and past the bathroom door with barely a sound and the bedroom door does not creak when I pull it slowly open.
I do not recognise the sound of my own voice though because I do not form a word and the sound that I make comes from a place that I did not know about. Whether it is directed at the man on the bed is also not something I could claim to know, but there is one thing undeniable about him. That he does not belong here.
Issy's eyes are open though she has yet to see me. They are bloodshot from where his hands have clasped her throat which is flushed and swollen from the pressure. I am acutely aware of the colour and tone of the veins and arteries that are pushing up through the skin and the scarlet delta in her eyes and just for a flash my mouth waters.
But it must be the fear and the shock that does it because before I am assailed by him physically, the sight of the man pinning her to the floor is so shockingly familiar t
o me that it almost drops me to my knees. Then he is on me.
Chapter 12
Roth heard the approach from beyond the front door, heard it all along the hallway and into the room and he knew from the sound of the footsteps and even from the strange noise he made of fear and despair that the man had returned. But Roth could not be diverted.
He was in the grip of the fever just as surely as the woman in his hands.
She was soft, firm, warm and the scent from her skin and the dark hot blood beneath it filled his nostrils and throbbed and pulsed against his fingers. When she looked at him he saw terror and surrender and though she fought him, though her nails raked into his flesh as she clutched and pushed and clawed at him, the both of them knew with no room for uncertainty that her end had come. She may fight it, but it would not be stopped and Roth had only to decide how he would take her.
Feeling her throat twist and tense, seeing the skin darken and the blood vessels swell and lift as if offering themselves to him, Roth knew that he could not finish this the way he wanted to. The man in the room, the man from the street and from the garden and from that night was here and that desperate animal sound he had made served warning that he would not stand by and watch any longer. The shock would fade and that same power that must have been unleashed on those three youths would be what followed.
So Roth did two things fast. More quickly than the man seemed to realise Roth had plunged down to her neck, tearing through the distended artery and he had clamped his mouth down over the sudden surging rupture and gulped and sucked on the hot, bitter sweetness just long enough.
The widening eyes, the open mouth, the sluggish reactions all told Roth that this man, for all the poise and fury he had displayed earlier on, had none of Roth's speed and strength.
He barrelled into him chest-high with a solid shoulder and then hoisted him by the throat back up and off his feet. Dazed and barely registering what had happened the man grabbed at Roth but was too slow, was much too slow, and Roth slammed him back against the wall again to shock the air from his lungs. He released his throat and the man found his feet again but only for a moment, only for the moment it took for Roth to make fists and to hammer them into ribs and cheeks and solar plexus.
Roth wondered a while longer at the slumped figure at his feet as he fought for breath and covered his head, how he had managed to take down those three estate lads in the street, but scarcely manage more than a whimper here in this dark room.
He should have offered more fight than that, should have been an opponent for him. But he'd been slow and clumsy and almost sleepwalking through the fight, moving at barely half the pace of Roth, a tenth of the strength. Even the girl had shown more of that with the naked fear unleashing all that adrenaline into her blood.
Roth went back to her body on the bed and ran his hands over her warm, wet skin, dark and slick. His mouth returned to her ragged throat and his Adams apple bobbed as he swallowed. Her fingers grasped at his scalp and though their strength was diminished and their fight fading, she resisted all the same.
Chapter 13
I am not aware of him leaving, but only that he has left and that I am alone again. I do not see or hear his exit because I am engulfed by the pain in my ribs and my head as his flurry of blows pepper me and I cannot block out the fear that he will not stop and that I will not survive this savagery.
I am unable to process what I saw him do to her but that image plays on loop in my pounding head and cannot be denied or misinterpreted. They were no more than feet away from me, and my vision was as clear as it had been earlier on with the fight. He had bitten her and he had drunk from her and then he had come for me.
And when he came he had looked into my eyes with a flash of recognition that was mutual and I could not shake a strange sensation. The sense that not only was this man unleashing a rage and fury upon me that was in some way personal, but that it stemmed not from a reaction to being disturbed, but more by the impression of a predator protecting a kill. Like a lion chasing off a hyena.
When the pain begins to clear and the fear subsides my focus shifts back to the room and the faint thin sound of Issy breathing. It is a shallow scratchy sound and I go to it, repulsed and compelled at once by the sight of her body and the wound in the neck and the other bite marks in the soft flesh of her breasts, her arms, her stomach.
There is a flicker in her eyes and she has seen me and after the confusion comes a tear to each eye and her arms rise slowly to beckon me. I can see that there is nothing now that I can do for her except offer comfort and so for the first time in weeks, but the last time, I hold Issy and listen to her heart slow.
She still has some strength in her fingers as they run into my hair and pull at my head. She knows something that I do not yet know and as my tears streak her cheeks, as my stomach boils with a sense of hunger and ravening thirst, my own lips find the wound in her neck and I cannot but yield to what must happen.
Afterward I will reel with the horror and I will want to believe that it wasn't what it was. But in those fresh new moments I feel the pain in my ribs and head from the beating vanish in an instant. I feel full and complete and alive and I notice something return to me, the absence of which I had barely even registered before; I can feel my pulse.
Chapter 14
Roth flies out of the flat, out of the door. He soars into the night, leaving contrails streaming in his wake as the darkness surges against his skin, powerless, like everything, to resist him.
He covers distance in a blur of motion, a haze of haste, and the only clarity is his own which is absolute. Roth is utterly aware, totally focused, defined and sharp. He is touching omnipotence and the pace at which he is operating is matched only by the slow-motion of the world around him, at the other end of the scale, glacial and fluid.
The blackness on the eastern horizon is fading to a deep blue but the dawn will not catch Roth. Nothing will. He is elusion and swiftness, he is invisible. He is the darkness in motion tonight.
This first burst will dissipate and he will slow down and let exhaustion take him but he will be sustained for days now, the hunger replaced by a different appetite.
He will want to see new things, touch new experience and he will have every ability to indulge whatever he feels and do what he wants.
Until it returns and must be sated.
Act 2.
Flux
Chapter 15
The moment. I recall studying the concept of the moment at some point during a class at University. The general thrust was that there was no such thing. The moment was an immeasurable, unfathomable unit. Everything we experience is in a state of being just about to happen, or having just happened. It is either future or it is past but the present cannot be caught or captured. Will not be known.
I remember struggling with that concept. How long does a moment last? A second, a millisecond? How small can you shave down units of time to get to what you mean by the present? A second is a long time when it only took about 30 of them to make the whole universe. A tenth of a second can be enough to ruin a race driver's day.
When everything is in a constant state of coming into being and passing away, coming into being, passing away, how do you define the present, the now? The truth is - or it was in that classroom - that you cannot. It does not exist. You cannot pin it down or grasp it. It may not be seized.
Such existential musings made me anxious at eighteen, and gave over to fleeting pangs of a sort of fear because if the moment did not exist, if there was no present, then surely nothing existed?
But these are just the toys in the playground of academia, ideas to toss around. They don't really serve any purpose and out here in the cold and dark my fear took real form and shape.
The moments seem real enough to me now. The moment between swallowing something hot and freshly cooked, and knowing it will come back again. The moments when you catch the scent of blood in the air and cannot ignor
e it or turn away. The moment I saw the light in her eyes blink out.
The many, many moments that I cannot forget.
I held her a while as her skin cooled. A part of me was simply too shocked to do anything else but a part of me also wanted her to know that I was sorry in ways that I would never have the words for and that although I had not been there for her when it mattered, she would not be alone now.
I know of course, that there is only the present. The future is simply an infinite range of possibilities, only one of which comes into being and the past exists now in memory and recording and who knows if they are real or merely the collective acceptance of an illusion, like a magic trick? The moment is all there is and the present is the only thing that exists. It does not mean that the past did not happen and that the future would not, it meant only that I must exist in the moment, that I must seize it.
When the dawn cracked the sky I snapped out of it and I raced home, finding that I could move faster and with more grace and agility than I thought possible. I clung to the shadows and I hid from the greying sky and when I finally got back to my front door, half expecting to find it too smashed open and splintered, I dived beneath the covers and I slept deeply and without dreams.
Rested, I packed a bag and ventured out. I drew cash from the first machine I passed and headed into town for a mainline station. From London Bridge I knew I could strike out for the Kent countryside and the emptiness and solitude I hoped to find there.
The train I caught was late but it was not empty. The office-to-pub crowd were heading home, all warm and fuzzy from the wine and beer and for the most part I was left alone. But those trains aren't like the tube with its unofficial no-talking policy. People have conversations and they talk to strangers and they smile and are friendly. It is jarring for a tube user.