Read Online Wake by Elizabeth Knox - Free Book Online

checked both ways before turning. There was no traffic near him, only—far off—a slender female figure running. Even from a distance it was clear how good her gait was. She looked like she could go on forever.
    William did a U-turn. He was impatient, so instead of just reversing his course, he took the first left to follow the line of the hills, for the spa was on the slope just back from the flat of the town. As it turned out, the road he’d hoped was a shortcut first failed to warn him with a No Exit sign, then came to a dead end.
    William slowed to turn—and thought he heard a gunshot. He let his window down. The air that wafted in carried the scent of burning petrol, metal, and rubber. From a garden up the slope came the bright chiming of an alarmed thrush.
    William kept his window open and began to creep slowly back down the hill. He found himself on a street with newer houses, big places with monolithic cladding and double-height entrance ways.
    A figure was lying by a neatly trimmed box hedge. William pulled in, got out, hurried to the man, and turned him over. The fork jammed in the man’s eye socket sagged, then slid out. It landed with a clink beside William’s Berluti boot. The man’s right hand was gloved with blood—he must have tried for some time to remove the fork, before lapsing into unconsciousness. William could see no sign of the eye, and the pit of the socket looked deep and dug at. He opened the top of the man’s robe and put his ear to his chest.
    Silence.
    William began compressions. After ten he paused and grasped the man’s jaw so that he could blow into his mouth. He saw that the man’s lips were bloody too. His lips, and his teeth. William hesitated, his face only inches from the smeared mouth, his gaze flicking from the teeth to the hollowed-out eye socket. He drew back, then got up, and stood looking down—momentarily mesmerised.
    There was something about the quiet of the street—all the immediate streets—that didn’t seem normal. It was the furtive silence of secret, solitary acts.
    William put his hand in his pocket before he remembered that his phone was plugged into the car stereo. He went back to the Mercedes, swiped the lock on his phone and saw that it said ‘No service’.
    He’d have to leave the body in order to get help.
    He decided to try the house opposite, since the nearest was probably the man’s own, where there was either no one home, or the perpetrator was lying in wait with another fork.
    There were sunflowers in pots by the front door. In another few weeks they would reach the trellis on the wall. For now their robust ugliness looked wrong in a pot. ‘ Triffids ,’ said William’s droll inner voice, and he had a vague sense that it was telling him something important—while remaining above-it-all, as usual.
    No one came to the door when he knocked. But while he waited he thought he heard sounds from the rear of the house.
    A path took him around to a back patio—where he saw blood, lots of it, in thick swipes, and drag marks, and puddles, and splatters.
    His body slammed into a state of cold, heightened vigilance, and his inner voice buttoned its chilly lips.
    There was blood in the swimming pool too, and two floating forms, an adult and a child. William ran to rescue the child. He pulled off his boots and jacket and dived into the reddened water. He seized the small body, waded to the edge of the pool, lay her on the non-slip tiles, got out himself, and began mouth-to-mouth. After several breaths the child revived, and promptly sank her little milk teeth into his lower lip.
    William prised gently at her jaw until it opened. He freed his lacerated lip, spat, and wiped his mouth.
    The girl seemed determined to get away. Before William was able to react, she had flipped over onto her stomach and slipped into the water—like some aquatic creature making its escape. William lunged,