Soul Seeker

This first world edition published 2010

in Great Britain and in 2011 in the USA by

SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

Copyright © 2010 by Keith McCarthy.

All rights reserved.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

McCarthy, Keith, 1960-

ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-6987-6 (cased)

ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-318-2 (trade paper)

ISBN-13: 978-1-7801-0008-1 (e-book)

Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

This ebook produced by

Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

D
ominic Trelawney coughed, the noise viscid, low and somehow threatening, as if he had swallowed a swamp monster. He was still not used to the sound and to the sensation of pain and burning deep in his chest; had never become even slightly inured to that strangely salty taste that his copious phlegm had developed. He had lived in Stroud with its wonderful valleys, its entrancing views of pastureland and its strangely irritating and odd inhabitants, for a long time. He had trained sixty years ago as a carpenter and joiner, then moved into the building trade, eventually running his own company employing six permanently, another ten on a pro rata basis; he had not made a fortune, but he had made a reputation for reliability and craftsmanship. The problems with his chest had started fifteen years before and had done nothing but progress ever since; at first the medics had thought it was bronchitis, but then the pain had started to bite, to eat him indeed; the breathlessness had increased and his weight had evaporated.

Cancer
, they had said. A rare kind of cancer, one that is associated with asbestos, they had said. They had given it a long, fancy name that meant nothing to him, and he had come to understand that he was going to die of a thing that he could not name, because there is no proper treatment, they had said. He tried to tell himself that he did not care, but it seemed an insult to be killed by something he could not name, that was mysterious and shadowy to him. It made him feel diminished, unmanly.

His chest hurt and he felt more ill every day; every morning he awoke and in that moment of awareness, there was first an instant of normality, followed at once by the realization of his situation, of his destiny, that he had no future, only a past. He had lost Aggie, his wife of thirty-nine years two years before and his dependence on alcohol, until then contained and supported, broke free; it had shown itself to be a ravenous beast, one that had all but slain him; only the support of the few friends that remained and, until a few months ago, a voluntary group for those with a drinking problem had saved him, he was sure.

He did not have long to live, he knew, and his only reason for seeking help had been a plea from Daphne, his only child; now that she had died in a road traffic collision a year before, he saw no reason for continuing to try to abstain. Abstinence seemed to him to be a poor way to see out his life. He wanted the pain to end, although he had never articulated the thought to himself.

When the knock came on the front door of his small cottage at ten thirty-seven in the evening, just before he was going to bed, it was the first intimation that he was going to get his wish; it was also the time that he truly appreciated that one should be careful what one wishes for.

ONE

T
he world flooded in upon her, but gently and therefore deceitfully, because for a few moments she did not realize that this was not a nice world.

Not nice at all.

She was in darkness. She felt stiff, heavy-limbed, groggy; too groggy to appreciate that she had been drugged.

It was a cool darkness, but only slowly did she appreciate how very cold it was.

And then she suddenly realized that she was naked and, with that, came the terror; this did not creep up on her, but came all at once, a huge, chilling flood in which she all but drowned, a shock wave of sudden wakefulness.

Complete blackness. No vague outlines, no faint shafts of light, no variation in the density of the darkness around her. She could have been in a cupboard, could have been in an aircraft hangar. She was on a hard surface, she realized, and she had been there a long time, because she was numb. It was not cold, though; not metal. Perhaps polished wood? And she could not move her arms or legs; although she could see absolutely nothing, she came to appreciate that her wrists and ankles were held tight by some sort of clamps; they chaffed her skin. In her efforts, she craned her neck but . . .

Around my neck, too?
The terror increased.
What is this?

And her head. It did not feel right. Her scalp felt cold, too.

Just a moment passed before she realized that she must have had her hair shaved and this, more than all else that she had discovered before, terrified her, made her almost lose control of her bladder.

She thought about calling out, but something stopped her. Something more powerful than fear of the dark – fear of the one who had done this to her. He was out there, in the darkness. He was watching her, would be listening . . .

She had always enjoyed horror films – the
Saw
series,
Hostel
, the
Cube
films – but now it seemed as if she were being punished for this predilection, because now she was in one. She shivered and, despite the cold, it was because of fear and nothing else. She was naked and her legs were held open; he could be waiting there in the nothingness, looking at her, thinking about her.

She screamed suddenly. She didn't want to, but it was not she who decided. It was a word that she only heard when it echoed from walls that she could not see, but that she could hear were cold and hard and maybe even damp . . .
‘Pleease!'

And her reward was nothing; no response and no change in the cold black. There was a silent yet piercing tone in her ears as the complete lack of sound got louder and louder by the second, until it seemed to split her skull, curdle her brain, stoke her fear.

Her heart was thumping . . . no, pounding . . . no,
bursting.

She began to squirm, at first gently but then with increasing violence, and as she did so, she discovered something new. Her head was shaved – she missed the movement of her shoulder-length hair – but it was more than that. Someone had put something on her scalp, a sort of metal stiff net, she guessed. This was bizarre, a further dollop of inexplicability, and one that increased her fear exponentially. Nothing had resulted from her efforts, other than pain as she chafed her skin. Around her neck there was more room but that meant only that she bruised her neck as she moved with increasing violence to free herself; after a few minutes – she didn't know how many (how could she?) – she gave up, breathless, aware that with every gasp she was perhaps pleasing some pervert looking at her through night-vision goggles.

For a moment she lay still, but that sound in her ears continued; no, it took advantage. It was an accomplice of whoever had done this thing to her, one that screamed in her ears, that taunted her and left her more frightened still . . .

A light came on, one that shone excruciatingly down into her eyes, the light that blinds, the light of the gods, that disables, not enables. The click disturbed the scream in her ears, made it vanish yet grow louder in her memories. Instinctively, she turned her head. To the left. Towards a camera lens.

It was a big camera lens – the type that sports photographers use, that are hideously expensive and that produce a big cheer from the crowd when the ball smacks into them – and the light only produced arcs of reflection against dark, perfectly smooth convexity. It was perfectly inhuman, perfectly cruel.

She twisted her head away, to the right, where she expected relief.

She found another camera lens; it was identical.

Two eyes that watched her without eyelids, without emotion, almost without interest, at least without human interest.

She looked down at herself, saw electrodes on her arms and legs, on her abdomen – even, she saw with nausea, up between her legs.

She had nowhere else to go but back up into the light.

Which was when she saw more than the light, when she saw the wooden struts rising above her on either side of her head. They were a deep, dark red that seemed highly polished, beautiful and running up a groove on each inner surface was a rope; she had been brought up in a Victorian house and they reminded her of a sash window.

But it was a very tall, very narrow sash window, one that rose into the bright light above her . . .