Content, mindless for a while of the outside world, he pottered amongst his flora.
The dogs had fought over possession of Ronnie as though he were a plaything. They’d caught him breaching the wall and surrounded him before he could make his escape, grinning as they seized him, tore him and spat him out. He escaped only because Norton had approached, and distracted them from their fury for a moment.
His body was torn in several places after their attack. Confused, concentrating to try and keep his shape coherent, he had narrowly avoided being spotted by Norton.
Now he crept out of hiding. The fight had sapped him of energy, and the shroud gaped, so that the illusion of substance
was spoiled. His belly was torn open; his left leg all but severed. The stains had multiplied; mucus and dog-shit joining the blood. But the will, the will was all. He had come so close; this was not the time to relinquish his grip and let nature take its course. He existed in mutiny against nature, that was his state; and for the first time in his life (and death) he felt an elation. To be unnatural: to be in defiance of system and sanity, was that so bad? He was shitty, bloody, dead and resurrected in a piece of stained cloth; he was a nonsense. Yet lie was. No-one could deny him being, as long as he had the will to be. The thought was delicious: like finding a new sense in a blind, deaf world.
He saw Maguire in the greenhouse and watched him awhile. The enemy was totally absorbed in his hobby; he was even whistling the National Anthem as he tended his flowering charges. Ronnie moved closer to the glass, and closer, his voice an oh-so-gentle moan in the failing weave.
Maguire didn’t hear the sigh of cloth on the window, until Ronnie’s face pressed flat to the glass, the features smeared and misshapen. He dropped the Yeddo Spruce. It shattered on the floor, its branches broken.
Maguire tried to yell, but all he could squeeze from his vocal cords was a strangled yelp. He broke for the door, as the face, huge with greed for revenge, broke the glass. Maguire didn’t quite comprehend what happened next. The way the head and the body seemed to flow through the broken pane, defying physics, and reassembled in his sanctum, taking on the shape of a human being.
No, it wasn’t quite human. It had the look of a stroke-victim, its white mask and its white body sagged down the right side, and it dragged its torn leg after it as it lunged at him.
He opened the door and retreated into the garden. The thing followed, speaking now, arms extended towards him. ‘Maguire . . .’ It said his name in a voice so soft he might have imagined it.
But no, it spoke again.
‘Recognise me, Maguire?’ it said.
And of course he did, even with its stroke-stricken, billowing features it was clearly Ronnie Glass.
‘Glass,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said the ghost.
‘I don’t want – ‘ Maguire began, then faltered. What didn’t he
want? To speak with this horror, certainly. To know that it existed; that too. To die, most of all. ‘I don’t want to die.’ ‘You will,’ said the ghost.
Maguire felt the gust of the sheet as it flew in his face, or perhaps it was the wind that caught this insubstantial monster and threw it around him.
Whichever, the embrace stank of ether, and disinfectant, and death. Arms of Linen tightened around him, the gaping face was pressed on to his, as though the thing wanted to kiss him.
Instinctively Maguire reached round his attacker, and his hands found the rent the dogs had made in the shroud. His fingers gripped the open edge of the cloth, and he pulled. He was satisfied to hear the linen tearing along its weave, and the bear-hug fell away from him. The shroud bucked in his hand, the liquefied mouth wide in a silent scream.
Ronnie was feeling an agony he thought he’d left behind him with flesh and bone. But here it was again: pain, pain, pain.