Kill Who You Want

Chapter Thirteen

Plot reminder: Once the police visit his house enquiring about the theft of the knife, Nathan feels he must act quickly if he is to save his brother. After having earlier followed the unpopular teacher Maureen Booth to her home and studying break-in possibilities, he is last seen heading out into the snow-filled evening...

~~~~~

Inspired by a recent Channel Four documentary on the tragedy-ridden life of Mary Shelley, Maureen had a couple of days earlier hunted down her old university copy of Frankenstein from one of her many groaning bookcases. She possessed over a thousand titles, she had once roughly estimated. Though not nearly scientific or meticulous enough to have ever got round to ordering them alphabetically, there was a vague sense of chronology to her arrangement at least. It hadn't taken her long to find it in the end: it had been there right after Defoe and Swift but before Austen and the Bronte sisters.

Stretching herself onto the settee, she draped her favourite blanket over herself, opened the seminal work of gothic horror.

...by the dim and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the window shutters, I beheld the wretch -- the miserable monster whom I had created...

The bathroom window, she suddenly thought. She'd opened it a crack to let in some air. That chicken curry sandwich she'd had for lunch... But had she remembered to close it again?

Sighing, irritated by her own overblown anxiety, she shook the blanket back off, lifted herself onto her still aching feet. Though at 48 she had by now more or less resigned herself to a childless existence, the hope still very much remained that she might find some deserving companion with whom to share her free time, her thoughts, her bed... Someone her intellectual equal. Someone cultured and erudite, but at the same time introspective, on occasion even aloof. A mystery which only she would ever be able to resolve. In a place like Ravesby, Byronic heroes were a little thin on the ground however.

As she'd thought, the bathroom window was firmly latched. After double-checking all other windows and both back and front doors, she once more settled herself down with Shelley's masterpiece.

...Oh! no mortal could support the horror of that countenance. A mummy again embued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch...

There was a noise.

Not just some psychotic imaginary one, but an actual real life scratching at the door.

Her yet-to-be-found Byronic hero would in such a situation retain an admirable calm. Arm himself with a cricket bat or something equally lethal and swingable. Boldly head off to investigate.

Alone and unprotected, she had to settle for the Complete Works of Shakespeare - the weightiest tome she possessesed - and position herself behind the living room door in a kind of half-cower but at the same time with arms raised above her head ready to strike.

As she waited there for whatever it was that might pass, a once rote-learn quote thrust itself into her consciousness.

Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.

Wasn't that Mary Shelley too?

But then there it was again. A faint but definite scratching sound.

Someone was trying to jimmy open the door...

Hyperventilating now, she glanced desperately around, tried to remember where she'd left her phone. Maybe if she could get an emergency call out... Maybe, if they were quick... Maybe, just maybe...

There it was, on the TV stand.

It was as she was sidestepping over to grab it, the Complete Works of Shakespeare still raised above head, that she heard it.