i f2cd308009a8236d by Guinevere Read Free Book Online Page B

worried, but she hadn’t actually panicked. This was no
    emergency, sure, but I was still impressed. And relieved. I nodded my head, and stumbled
    back upstairs. I remade my bed, crawled into it, and fell asleep almost instantly.

    Angus
    Turns out it wasn’t as difficult as I thought. I arrived around midnight outside the small
    terraced house. The garden out front was overgrown, the windows dirty with paint peeling
    in long untidy strips from the window sills. I sensed at once that there were three people
    inside, two upstairs sleeping in the same bedroom, one downstairs probably asleep on a
    sofa. I reached out and gently touched the mind of the closest slumberer. I’d always found it
    easier to feel minds when people slept, and the enamel of their thoughts had dissolved.
    Tonight was no exception. The sleeper downstairs was male, by the glimpse I got of his
    dreams, although it was hard to tell sometimes. Must be the thirty four year old son. I
    probed a bit deeper, and found something that surprised me. On balance, a fairly decent
    soul, but very afraid of his mother, and deeply resentful of her constricting hold over him.
    He hated her. Interesting.
    I reached out slightly further, and felt a very different mind, fuzzy and confused, and
    clinging to distant memories. She was terrified of her daughter, and did not want her here,
    but she was too scared to confront her.
    I reached even further and felt what must have been the mind of the man’s mother and
    the elderly woman’s daughter. Vile revolting cesspit of a mind. There was smugness there, a
    sense of controlling and harshness, and a memory of satisfaction at the horror in the eyes of
    her son as she stood on his kitten, and pleasure as she felt the breaking of tiny bones.
    I looked for a way into the house, and found it. Someone had left a window upstairs
    open just enough for me to unlatch it and climb silently onto the upstairs landing. I made my
    way into the small upstairs bedroom, and using the trail of my target’s mind, I placed a
    muffling hand over her mouth and snapped her neck just as she began to wake up. I paused.
    There was no break in the rhythm of the elderly woman’s snores. I lifted the woman’s body
    and carried her carefully to the head of the stairs, where I held her upright, her head
    hanging oddly from her shoulders. I launched her lifeless body down the stairs, and was out
    through the window, and in my car before the son woke up. His grandmother slept through
    everything.
    As I drove home I marvelled at how well it had all gone. The son would find his mother
    at the bottom of the stairs and assume that she had broken her neck in the fall. The police
    would hopefully make the same assumption. Neat and easy.
    I arrived back at the hotel at about three in the morning. I don’t sleep every day;
    sometimes I can go for weeks without sleeping at all, but tonight I felt worn-out. I fell asleep within seconds of my head hitting the pillow.

CHAPTER 4
Rebecca
    I dreamed that someone had poured flame over me, and that I was trying to run away
    from the unseen attacker, but I couldn’t seem to move my legs. I watched in horror as my
    feet melted into the ground, pulling me down. I struggled to pull free, but I was dog-tired,
    and my limbs became heavier with each convulsive tug. A shrill sound buzzed in my ears; I
    recognised the doorbell, but I couldn’t get up, so it went unanswered, and I surrendered
    again into the clutches of my nightmare.

    Angus
    Fergus phoned at eight in the morning to tell me that the house was ready for
    occupation, and that he’d even taken the liberty of furnishing it. Fergus loved stuff like that; the more organising something required the better. I told him that I’d met Rebecca Harding,
    and he wanted to know what she was like. I thought about that for a few seconds.
    “I’m not really sure, Fergus,” I tried to explain. “She seems to be quite rational and
    fairly normal, except for the fact that