Feelings of Fear Read Free

breast. He knelt astride her, lowered his head, and with an audible crunch he sank his teeth into her neck, severing her carotid artery.
    The first spurt went right over his shoulder, spattering his coat. The second hit his cheek and soaked his collar. But he opened his mouth wide, and he caught the next spurt directly on his tongue, and swallowed, and went on swallowing, with a choking, cackling sound, while the girl’s heart obligingly pumped her blood directly down his throat.
    *      *      *
    Whether he was driven by rage for his lost possessions, or by disgust for the world in which he now found himself, or by sheer greed, he went on an orgy of blood-feeding that night. He slid into a suburban bedroom and drank a young wife dry while her husband slept beside her. He found a young homeless boy under a railway arch and left him white-faced and lifeless in his cardboard bash, staring up at the sodium-tainted sky. He hated the color of that sky, and he longed for the days when nights had been black instead of orange.
    By the end of the night, he had left nine people dead. He was so gorged with blood that his stomach was swollen, and he had to stop in the doorway of Boots and vomit some of it up, adding to the splatter of regurgitated curry that was already there.
    He returned to his empty house. He would have liked to have stayed up longer, walking around the rooms, but the sun was already edging its way over the garden fence, and the frost was glittering like caster sugar. He raised the cellar trap and disappeared below. He slept, and he dreamed …
    He dreamed of battles, and the screaming of mutilated men. He dreamed of mountains, and forests as dark as nightmares. He thought he was back in his castle, but his castle was collapsing all around him. Chunks of stone fell from the battlements. Towers collapsed. Whole curtain-walls came roaring down, like landslides.
    The earth shook, but he was so bloated with blood that he barely stirred. He whispered only one word,
“Lucy …”
    It took the best part of the day to demolish the house. The wrecking-ball swung and clumped and reduced the walls to rubble and toppled the tall Edwardian chimneys. By four o’clock the demolition crew were working by floodlight. A bulldozer ripped up the overgrown garden and roughly levelled the hardcore, and then a road-roller crushed the site completely flat.
    During the next week, trucks trundled over the site, tipping tonnes of sand to form a sub-base, followed by even more tonnes of hydraulic cement concrete. This was followed by a thick layer of bituminous road pavement, and finally a top wearing course of hot asphalt.
    Deep beneath the ground, he continued to sleep, unaware of hisentombment. But he had digested most of his feast, and his sleep was twitchier now, and his eyes started to flicker.
    The new link road between Leeds and Roundhay was finished in the middle of January, a week ahead of schedule. In the same week, his property was sold at auction in Dewsbury, and fetched well over £780,000. A Victorian portrait of a white-faced woman in a white dress was particularly admired, and later featured on the BBC’s
Antiques Road Show.
Among other interesting items was a Chippendale secretaire. The new owner was an antiques dealer called Abrahams. When he looked through the drawers, he found scores of unopened letters, some from France, many from Romania and Poland, and some local. Some were dated as far back as 1926. Among the more recent correspondence were seven letters from the county council warning the occupier of a compulsory purchase order, so that a new road could be built to ease traffic congestion and eliminate an accident black spot.
    He lay in his casket, wide awake now and ragingly hungry – unable to move, unable to rise, unable to die. He had screamed, but there was no point at all in screaming. All he could do was to wait in claustrophobic darkness for the traffic and