Something Delivered

The thing that came to Karl Jenkins in his sleep that morning did not have the texture of a dream.

It arrived with the coherence of an event. He was in his car, parked at the kerb across from the front of Luke Smith's house, and three hours of stillness had settled into his shoulders by the time the upstairs lamp came on. He was not aware of having driven there. He was not aware, in any part of himself that was capable of asking the question, of being anywhere other than at the kerb across from the front of Luke Smith's house. The car around him had the small specific facts of his own car. The cold breeze through the open window had the small specific weight of cold breezes through that particular open window. There was no margin in the experience for the doubt that ought to have been available to a sleeping man.

What he watched through the upstairs window of the house had the same specificity. He would not afterwards be able to describe the order of the events with any confidence, because the order of the events was not the kind of order a witness reconstructs from memory — it was the kind of order a witness has done to him, in the position of a thing being shown a film he has not chosen to attend. The woman at the window was Gladys Cramer. The man who came up behind her was, by the weight of certainty Karl had no source for, Luke Smith. What was done to her in the upstairs bedroom of the Smith house was done with the surreal precise calm of an act being performed for an audience of one, and the audience of one was Detective Karl Jenkins, parked at the kerb in his own car, unable to speak, unable to move, unable to look away.

The thing that locked his eyes at the end was not the body that came down out of the window. It was the face that looked back at him afterwards from the lit upstairs frame. The eyes in that face were not eyes. The smile in that face was not a smile of the kind muscle and bone are constructed to produce. And the voice that spoke his name then did not arrive at his ears through the air between the kerb and the upstairs window, because the air between the kerb and the upstairs window was not the medium the voice was using. The voice was using the inside of his head.

Bye, Karl.

The two words landed in him with the small clean finality of a thing that had been composed for him in advance, by something that knew his name, and had been waiting for the moment of delivery.

He came up out of the bed at 3:17 a.m. with a strangled half-sound in his throat that did not entirely escape it, and his hands clutching at the sheet beneath him for purchase against a fall that was not, in any physical sense, taking place. The sheet was wet. His shirt was wet. The hair at the back of his neck was wet. The bedroom around him was the bedroom of his own flat. Jargus was awake on the mattress beside him with his ears forward and his cold nose already pressed into the inside of Karl's wrist. The clock on the bedside table held the small red certainty of its three digits in the dark, and Karl looked at the digits for several seconds before he understood that they were a real clock and not the next composition of the thing he had just been delivered out of.

The nausea came up before he had finished registering the room. He did not make it to the bin. He made it to the edge of the mattress. What came up was less than what his body wanted to bring up, because there had been very little in his stomach to start with, and what was happening in him was not the kind of nausea that food was the cause of. His diaphragm convulsed against itself in a series of dry hard contractions that went on for longer than they had any business going on for, and Jargus moved with him through them, the dog's flank pressed against the small of his back as a single warm anchored point in a room that had otherwise stopped being entirely reliable.

When the heaving had finished with him he sat at the edge of the bed with his head in his hands and the cold sweat drying on the back of his neck, and he did not look at the floor. He looked at the dark of the open bathroom doorway across the room instead, because the dark of the open bathroom doorway was a thing he was certain of in a way that the floor — and the room around the floor, and the rest of his own flat around the room — was not.

The voice that had said his name was still in his head. It had not gone out with the dream the way the dream itself was meant to go out. It had stayed where it had been delivered, and it would, Karl understood with the small dispassionate clarity of a man who had been a detective for too long to be wrong about the difference, still be there in the morning when the sun came up and he had to put on a shirt that was not soaked through and walk back into the institution that had refused him an unmarked car the previous afternoon and pretend, in front of his sergeant and his partner and his colleagues, that the night had not happened.

Jargus shifted his weight closer. Karl reached, without looking, for the warm fur at the centre of the dog's chest, and held on.