Then the touch came again, and this time she distinctly felt fingers catching her nape, as though the bone of her spine had been pinched, so, so lightly, between somebody’s forefinger and thumb. It was absurd illusion, but too persuasive to be dismissed.
She sat down at her dressing table and felt tremors moving out through her body from her jittering stomach. Was this just the result of a bad fix? She’d never had any problems before: the H that Luther bought from his Stratford suppliers was always of the highest quality: Papa could afford it.
Go back and lie down, she told herself. Even if you can’t sleep, lie down. But the bed, as she stood and turned to walk back to it, receded from her, all the contents of the room withdrawing into a corner as though they were painted on linen and had been plucked away from her by some hidden hand.
Then the fingers seemed to be back on her neck again, more insistent this time, as if working their way into her. She reached around and rubbed the back of her neck vigorously, cursing Luther loudly for bringing her bad stuff. He was probably buying cut heroin instead of the pure, and pocketing the difference. Her anger cleansed her head for a few moments, or so it seemed, for nothing else happened. She walked steadily across to the bed, orientating herself by putting her hand on the flower-patterned wall as she went. Things began to right themselves; the room found its proper perspective again. Sighing with relief she lay down without pulling back the covers, and closed her eyes. Something danced on the inside of her lids. Shapes formed, dispersed and reformed. None of them made the least sense: they were splashes and sprawls, a lunatic’s graffiti. She watched them with her mind’s eye, mesmerized by their fluent transformations, scarcely aware in her fascination that the invisible fingers had found her neck again and were insinuating themselves into her substance with all the subtle efficiency of a good masseur.
And then sleep.
She didn’t hear the dogs begin to bark: Marty did. At first just a solitary barking, somewhere off to the southeast of the house, but the alarm call was almost immediately taken up by a volley of other voices.
He got up boozily from in front of the dead television and went back to the window.
A wind had got up. It had probably blown some dead branch down, which had disturbed the dogs. He’d noticed several dead elms that needed felling in the corner of the estate; probably one of those was the culprit. Still, he’d better look. He went through to the kitchen, and turned on the video screens, flicking from camera to camera along the perimeter fence. There was nothing to see. As he flipped to the cameras just east of the woods, however, the pictures disappeared. White noise replaced the sight of floodlit grass. Three cameras were out of action in all.
“Shit,” he said. If a tree were down, and that became a likelier option than ever if the cameras weren’t working, he’d have a clearing-up job on his hands. It was odd that the alarms hadn’t started, though. Any fall that had incapacitated three cameras must have breached the fence’s systems: yet no bells rang, no sirens wailed. He took his anorak off the hook beside the back door, picked up a flashlight, and went outside.
The fence lights glimmered at the periphery of his vision; scanning them quickly he could see none that were out. He set off toward the racket of dogs. It was a balmy night, despite the wind: the first confident warmth of spring. He was glad to be going on a walkabout, even if it was a fool’s errand. It might not even be a tree at all; simply an electrical fault. Nothing was infallible. The house fell away behind him, the lit windows diminished. Now, all around him, darkness. He was isolated for two hundred yards between the lights of the fence and those of the house, a strip of no-man’s-land over which he stumbled, flashlight inefficiently lighting the turf a few strides ahead of him. In the woods, the wind found an occasional voice; otherwise there was silence.