Mark of the Beast. Brian Ball

it put its head back, howled once and raced for the gap in the hawthorns at the back of the house. Alan Charnock walked downstairs quietly and took the drinks tray into the lounge.

      Janice was waiting.

      “Christ,” whispered her husband. He slopped most of the hot chocolate onto the tray. Janice didn’t seem to notice.

      She was half-lying, half-sitting, on the most expensive piece of furniture the Charnock’s possessed, a ten-foot divan-settee. Its dusky pink fibres shone with a delicate lustre in the dimly-lit room. Janice’s skin reflected the faint glow.

      “I’ve spilled the chocolate,” he said.

      It didn’t look like Janice. Janice never posed.

      His heart smashed inside his chest like a steam-hammer.

      He had seen images like this on posters for films, on the covers of lurid paperback novels. They were large-bosomed, lewd, bold-eyed women, who anyway posed like that only for the delectation of a minority of men who couldn’t take their pleasures normally and within the confines of a happy marriage.

      Janice sleeked her blonde hair back.

      “Come here.”

      “Janice, we’ll be seen! The curtains—”

      “Here.”

      The mugs clattered.

      “Jan, don’t you want the chocolate?”

      She told him what to do with the chocolate—graphically.

      He had never heard her use such words before. Not once. “Pardon?”

      “Come here!”

      “I thought you were mad at me.”

      “Me, sweetie?” It didn’t seem possible that his wife could be so erotic.

      “Jan, we don’t, not here—not on the settee!” As her hand reached his neck, he experienced such a blast of furious lust that he could not control his breathing. Janice had never looked like this or talked like this before. He struggled wildly for balance on the smooth artificial fur.

      “For God’s sake, let me breathe! Jan, we’ll be seen! The Bentleys—the neighbours—they can see in—Jan!”

      She bit his ear.

      “Jan, don’t bite! Jan, the curtains!”

      She enveloped him with a shaking, surging movement, teeth snapping, eyes glazed in the pinkness of her pale face, fingers plucking at his hair....

      * * * *

      Two miles away, Ruane tried to answer the old woman’s fears. She wanted to know if he got moonstruck in drink. It was meant in the simple, country way: was he affected by the phases of the moon?

      “It’s the migraine, you must have heard of it,” he told her. “Headaches, that’s what it is, Mrs. Briggs.”

      She wanted to bring him tea, for she could sense his loneliness and fear. It was a bizarre coincidence that she should then ask if his headaches had anything to do with his work.

      “Dear God, I hope not,” he said, knowing he was wrong. “I hope to God it hasn’t.”

      When she was gone, he lay back on the hard mattress, and curiously, sleep was not long in coming. The shock had exhausted him, he guessed. It would serve where the booze had failed. He drifted into grim dreams, almost surfacing to wakefulness a number of times.

      There had been the unmistakable reek of evil over the town, an ancient and powerful evil. Imaginings, Ruane tried to tell himself when he was near waking. Half-drunken imaginings. Which anyway were not the concern of a priest the Church had dismissed. Let those whose duty it was to fight them take on the devils. He had his own to contend with.

      Ruane slept.