pose of an alarmed cat – stiffened shoulders, taut limbs, staring hypnotised at the message.
The young woman sitting at the table in front turned round and asked if I was okay.
‘Yes, thank you,’ I rasped and she returned to her
drink.
But I wasn’t.
Inside, my head was thawing out of its sudden panicked freeze. How could the sender know what I’d been writing? Was someone watching me?
I looked around the coffee shop. There were only five tables. A couple in their sixties sat beside me reading the newspapers. The guy behind the counter was serving a customer with takeaway coffees.
I got up and went to the window. The rain had turned heavy and forced most people inside. There was a young guy smoking in the doorway of the deli opposite. I watched as he was joined by a woman. They walked off arm in arm towards the church.
I bit my lip and made towards to my table but one glance at the screen stopped me dead in my tracks.
The message box was full of script. I crept closer to read it:
‘He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t He wasn’t’
What the hell … ?
I moved my cursor to the top of the Word document and saved what I’d written. Then, I slammed the lid shut and slumped into the chair.
What was this? What was going on? No one could see what I was doing, let alone read what I had written.
I swallowed down my trepidation and opened the lid again. My Word document was still there. I minimised the screen.
There were no messages.
Whoever was doing this had enough nous to make sure they were covering their tracks. But for what reason? To scare me? Or to make me look nuts and paranoid.
Nuts and paranoid. Now, there was a thing. It was a phrase I’d used before. To describe my mum. She’d had an episode about ten years ago when she was sure she was being followed, and contacted by ‘beings’. In one of our long, hand-wringing sessions before she got sectioned, I’d lost patience with trying to follow her convoluted forays into reasoning and had told her to ‘pack it in’, that she was being ‘nuts and paranoid’.
She was all right again in a month or so, but it took a while for us to rebuild our relationship. And after that I always sensed that she was holding stuff back from me, unwilling to fall into the trap that had got her banged up in the clinic.
And now, here I was, aping her behaviour.
But I wasn’t mad. I wasn’t making it up. I had seen it with my own eyes. That was no hallucination.
And I wasn’t being paranoid. Someone was out there contacting me. Or frightening me. Both actually.
Rationally it had to be some remote hacker who had got into my computer system and planted some ghost in the machine that was able to monitor my computer.
The main thing to do was not to play into their hands again. To stay level-headed. What was it they said in the war? Keep Calm and Carry On.
I shut my laptop down properly and made a point of adding some hardcore debugging software to my shopping list.
I would sort this out, but for now, I was done in. I decided to call it a day and paid for my coffee.
Though for the first time, behind my forced rationale,
a tiny but very real seed of fear had been planted in my hitherto cogent mind.
Chapter Twelve
There are things in the darkness with me, moving around: skittering claws on stone, scurrying in the straw and filth.
Why won’t he let me go back to the others?
I promised to do what he desires.
Something crunches and stops outside the door.
A step. A breath, coming heavy from sick lungs.
A pause, then a scrape of metal on the old wooden door.
Another step. A shove, a scrape.
Please God, don’t let him come upon me again. I cannot bear to feel his hot stink upon my face, his claw-like fingers on my breasts. And the cruel reek of the bone pipe he used on old Mother Clarke, to bleed her, find her mark.
I am so afear’d he will turn it on me. No, it cannot be. I cannot endure …