display might do if seen from outside. Moving quickly onto the little square landing at the head of the stairway, Harvey pulled the door almost closed behind him.
Stepping forwards, he immediately banged his head on the first of a series of low beams that ran down at about ear height. Ducking and peering before him, he concentrated on making his way down the damp and splintered steps. What if they couldn't support his weight? What if the Odds found him in the morning, dead in the cellar? Or what if they never came down here? What if they shut up the house and Mrs Odd moved to St Ia's and he was never found? What then? Harvey wasn't sure what then, so he just tested each step with his toe while hanging on very tightly to an equally uncertain wooden rail that ran down the wall on his left side. The rail wobbled slightly in his hand and he had a nightmarish vision of the house simply waiting to collapse under the weight of abuse that it had suffered over the years: the Odd years. Perhaps his violation was the last straw, perhaps the house itself would take its revenge. Like in The Haunting (graphic novel edition). It seemed to take an age to turn the corner on the stairway and to find his way down into the cellar proper. And he was almost at the bottom and on the cellar floor itself before he dared to raise his eyes from the steps and survey its contents. There was not a lot down there. Clearly it had never been much used. But this was not the thought that came first to Harvey. What was down there was quite enough. In front of him there stood one large cardboard box. Like the others upstairs, it had clearly been sealed but the masking tape had been shredded from its top. This should have caught Harvey's attention but it was mostly fixed on what was beside the box. At first he thought it was a mannequin, some ageing tailor's dummy abandoned on the floor. It was the great circle of darkness around it that told him he was wrong. She was lying on her back, her mouth and eyes open, and at her throat was a long, curved opening.
Harvey took all this in very slowly. Moving uncertainly, as if wearing rollerskates, he stepped forward into the black pool around her and squatted down beside Mrs Odd. Laying down the kitchen knife, he put one hand on the slimy surface of the floor and reached out to feel her neck. There was no pulse and he knew in some distant place inside that it was ridiculous to think there might be. For a moment he just stayed there next to her, looking at the purpled mouth of the wound and wondering where he had seen something like it. Into his mind came the thought of a sex show he once attended in Amsterdam: the opening in her neck was like some pornographic display put on for his titillation; as if she was posing like this for him. And then he was unexpectedly and violently sick.
The sound of his vomiting filled the damp silence of the cellar and came back to him in a muffled echo. It was the sound that roused him and made him stand. For a moment he stood erect, drool running down his chin, feeling as a physical sensation the rising of the panic that was coming, hearing it like the sound of an approaching train. In the moments before its arrival he looked around again, not at the body but at the cardboard box. It was with only a vague, distant aftershock, that he saw, tucked inside the open flap, a mint-condition Superman One. It was still wrapped in its plastic casing. He moved carefully around the thing that lay on the ground, and picked up the comic. He remembered this cover, he remembered buying it, remembered the day of the swap, when he had haggled this away for a strip of plastic. The comic looked perfect, untouched. He examined the wrapper carefully and as he did so noticed that where he touched it his fingers left vivid crimson smears on the clear plastic. And that is when the panic arrived.
Dropping this thing he had thought about every day of his adult life as if it was rubbish, as if it meant nothing at all, he ran for it. Where