The Ninth Nightmare Read Free Page A

woman repeated.
    â€˜Just let me take a look,’ said Katie. ‘I promise I’ll try not to hurt you.’
    The woman shook her head as if she couldn’t understand what language she was speaking in. Katie pinched the blood-soaked sheet between finger and thumb and tugged at it. It felt cold, and wet, and sticky.
    â€˜No,’ the woman whispered.
    â€˜I’m so sorry, but I have to. If I can’t stop the bleeding, you may not make it.’
    The woman didn’t argue any more. She just lay on the pillow, staring unblinkingly at Katie with her green filmy eyes, like somebody who wants to remember a friend they are never likely to see again.
    Katie pulled the sheet right off her, and folded it back. At first she couldn’t understand what she was looking at. But even when she realized what the red-haired woman’s assailant had done to her, she could still barely believe it, and she stood by the side of the bed, utterly stunned, unable to think what she could possibly do next.
    â€˜I tried to stop him,’ the woman murmured. Her eyes closed and for a moment Katie thought that she might have died, but when she leaned over her, she could see that she was still breathing, with a sticky catch in her throat. Katie couldn’t imagine how she had survived at all, let alone managed to speak.
    She waited for almost five minutes, biting the joint of her left thumb as if to reassure herself that she was still real, and that she hadn’t lost her mind, and occasionally letting out a breathy little unh , like a sob. After a while she couldn’t hear the woman breathing any longer, but she couldn’t summon up the nerve to feel her pulse to make sure that she was dead.
    She turned around and walked stiffly across to the laundry-room door. The light was still shining inside it, and she prayed that it was still her hotel bathroom. She looked back at the woman lying on the bed. She didn’t know who she was or what she had suffered, but she felt as if she had let her down, even though she had been powerless to save her. Her only consolation was that nobody could have saved her.
    She opened the door. Inside, the bathroom was so bright and shiny that she raised her hand to shield her eyes. She closed the door behind her and locked it. She washed her hands in the basin and rinsed the swirl of blood down the drain. She kept her eyes lowered so that she wouldn’t have to look at her reflection in the mirror, in case her reflection was doing something else. Once she had dried her hands she climbed into the empty bathtub and sat there, hugging her knees, her eyes tight shut, rocking backward and forward and waiting for morning, if it ever came.

TWO
    Room 309
    I t was less than a half mile to the Griffin House Hotel but John and his passenger had now been sitting at the same intersection for nearly ten minutes, next to a scabby plane tree on which somebody had thumb-tacked a flyer for a missing black-and-white cat.
    â€˜Maybe you want to walk,’ John suggested, looking at the woman in his rear-view mirror. ‘I can bring your bags along as soon as this traffic gets moving.’
    â€˜In these shoes?’ the woman retorted.
    John hadn’t noticed the woman’s shoes when he had picked her up at the airport, but judging by the rest of what she was wearing, he had a pretty good idea what they must be like. Although it was a gloomy October afternoon, with winter just around the corner, her eyes were hidden behind enormous beetle-like sunglasses with sparkly diamanté frames. She wore a short leopard-print jacket with a high furry collar, on top of a tight purple satin dress with a cleavage that probably would have sent back multiple echoes if you had shouted down it. She smelled very strongly of Boss Intense. Since he had started driving taxis, John had become something of a connoisseur of women’s perfumes, especially industrial-strength women’s perfumes like this