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Back Cardinal Black Save as PDF
Chapters (44)
  1. Title Page
  2. One: Into the Storm
  3. One
  4. Two
  5. Three
  6. Four
  7. Five
  8. Six
  9. Seven
  10. Two: London Calling
  11. Eight
  12. Nine
  13. Ten
  14. Eleven
  15. Twelve
  16. Thirteen
  17. Fourteen
  18. Fifteen
  19. Three: The Malignant Seven
  20. Sixteen
  21. Seventeen
  22. Eighteen
  23. Nineteen
  24. Twenty
  25. Twenty-One
  26. Twenty-Two
  27. Twenty-Three
  28. Four: Squirrels and Cats
  29. Twenty-Four
  30. Twenty-Five
  31. Twenty-Six
  32. Twenty-Seven
  33. Twenty-Eight
  34. Twenty-Nine
  35. Thirty
  36. Thirty-One
  37. Thirty-Two
  38. Five: Revelation
  39. Thirty-Three
  40. Thirty-Four
  41. Thirty-Five
  42. Thirty-Six
  43. Thirty-Seven
  44. About the Author

‘Please,’ I said. I do remember I said that. My sight was blurred. There were tears in my eyes, because I knew something terrible had happened, and something terrible was yet to happen.

He leaned down and he kissed my forehead. And then he drew the razor up and down each side of my face, as if sharpening it on a strop … but carefully, so no cutting was made. He whispered in my ear. ‘Dance for me,’ he said. ‘And smile, little candle. Smile!’

I could not move. My feet were rooted to the boards. He closed the razor and slid it into a pocket of his breeches. Then he began to clap his hands in a rhythm, while his grin showed his teeth and those pale green eyes glittered in the light.

I don’t remember starting to dance. I just recall moving … swaying … beginning to sob … and he said ‘No, no, don’t cry! Here, my love,’ he said, ‘let me dance with you.’

And there I was in that room with him, a room where I had always felt so safe and secure, and before me he was clapping his hands and moving forward to rub his body against mine … and when I moved back he moved forward again … and the next time I moved away from him he let out the kind of half-scream, half-bellow that I had heard from his room. His face … contorted in some kind of unknown agony, horrible to behold. He grabbed my hair with both hands and he flung me onto the bed, and then … well … then he was upon me.

Don’t, said Matthew.

Do you say that because you wish me not to recall this thing? Or because you wish not to hear it? But it is central to my story, Matthew, and it must be told.

He was upon me. Worse than the pain was a crushing sensation. All the breath smashed out of me. I thought I was about to die, because I couldn’t breathe. The pain … I was being torn. Torn apart, it seemed. And yes, perhaps I was and I would never again be whole. His hands … rough flesh, sharp nails. His mouth on me … his green cat eyes, staring down into my face with what later I realized was the perverted joy of the hunt.

Rain beating against the window. Late October. Did I say that already? Raining steadily. That last night my Mum was alive. That last night.