The Tapestry (12 page)

    He was able to hear her clearly enough above the banging music but for some reason didn’t think she would be able to hear him when he answered so he shouted
,

   
‘that would be great if you let me pay you for it later’. He was half drunk by now and really wasn’t expecting a positive response but he got it when she grabbed his arm and brought his head down to hers so that she could whisper in his ear,

   
‘promise you’ll be with me later to pay me’.

    And now he was keeping that promise, by god was he ever gonna keep that promise. They left the club and got in the nearest taxi and the best thing was
that she was staying at a cheap hotel in the city centre for a couple of days as she was on a training course from work. She did tell him all about it but she may as well have read the ftse index to him for all the notice he took. He was just glad he had somewhere to go with her and he didn't even have to pay for the room.
Could this night get any better?

    When
they got up to the room she told him to make use of the mini bar while she went to shower and freshen up for him. Pinky still could not believe his luck, but wasn’t going to waste his time questioning it. He looked around the room for the mini bar and there it was on the other side of the bed. The room consisted mainly of a bed, t.v and wardrobes by the door with the coathangers that you couldn’t actually take off the rail, and a naff sofa at the side. As he opened the minibar to see what delights were inside, he wondered if anyone actually used those sofas.

    He poured himself a jd and coke
and undressed while he waited for her to finish with her shower. He lay there naked on the bed, and as he waited, he pictured her in there. Lathering herself up and he could see the water trickling all over her gorgeous body that she was about to give to him. He followed the trails of water from her head, and along her neck, over her slender shoulders as it made its journey over her ample bosom and then following the curve underneath, to race down the flat beautiful stomach, the steam from the shower brushing past her body like a fog in 1940’s London as the little drop of water carried on it’s journey just past the most heavenly of places down her upper thigh and over her sweet little knee onto the top of the work boot
that had no place being there.

    He shook his head as if trying to shake the image away,
what the hell was that all about?
He asked himself, but before he could form an answer of any kind he felt a familiar but not so familiar feeling. His foreskin was slowly moving up and down the shaft of his penis and yet there was nobody else in the room with him, and he wasn’t doing it himself for once.

    He tried to move, tried to stop it somehow but it was as if he were pinned to the bed by some invisible force and it was not letting go. As he lay there just watc
hing helplessly the ghostly sexual favour speeded up and he could do nothing but just watch in absolute terror as he was being spirit raped and the strange disembodied sexual act got to a speed that was really beginning to hurt him. And then
Gavin
walked out of the bathroom but he had no idea at this time that it was Gavin. He begged her to help him; he couldn’t understand why she was just stood at the bottom of the bed watching him. That was until he managed to lift his head up and see the thing that had come out of the bathroom.

    ‘Oh my god you’re dead’ he cried. ‘Help me
please, somebody help me’

    ‘Yes I am’ was all Gavin said.

Pinky could do nothing but lay there while the speed and the ferocity of this ghostly wank got too much to bear. And then he heard a wet slushy ripping noise as his foreskin was torn from it‘s base and slapped against the wall opposite the bed. He watched the bloody mess roll down the wall and flop onto the cabinet before he passed out.

    Gavin then
set to work on breaking every single bone in Pinkies’ body rather meticulously before he turned the body inside out and folded it up into a nice bloody little package for the chambermaids to find in the morning before he left.

                                         
 
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

    The knocking had seeped through his dream into reality. Obviously it was what had woken him up at this ungodly hour, Sebastian, (or Mr Bishop as his pupils called him, although to a close few he was just Seb and he preferred that much better, much less formal or poncy.) pulled the sheets over and dragged himself out of bed, glancing at the glaring led alarm on his nightstand which was silently announcing the time to be 03:14 am.

    Seb
was forty years young but never really admitted that he was a year over the age of thirty five. He was a high school religious studies teacher and groaned something about,

   
‘It’s a good job it’s bloody weekend’ as he ambled down the stairs, still with one arm stuck in the sleeve of his dressing gown as he hadn’t quite woken up yet, therefore not quite able to co-ordinate the usual tasks of getting up and dressing oneself yet. His brain was still in denial that it had been ripped from the world of the soft core beauty that he had just been about to get his hands on
. Isn’t that always the way
he thought to himself
.

   
Knock, knock, knock. The hammering on the door was becoming more incessant and somehow more desperate. As Seb got to the bottom of the stairs he wrapped the belt around his dressing gown as he caught a glimpse of himself in the hallway mirror to his right. He still had a full head of dark wavy hair although at the moment it was plastered to one side of his head, and the bags under his eyes told a tale in themselves, basically that he should still be in bed. He was usually complimented on his chiselled looks but he didn’t feel quite so “chiselled” right now. He was now feeling like he didn’t want to actually open the door. Nobody comes knocking in those hours of the morning
, unless it’s terribly bad news
he thought. Whatever it was, once he had opened that door, there was no going back.

   His daughter Sophia now lived in London and was on her way to becoming a successful photographer. Or at least that was her dream, she had moved down to London only a few months ago and Seb didn’t really want her to go but he also knew he couldn’t hold her back just to keep her near him.
He had to let her go and was getting used to the idea that she was now eighteen and needed to make her own choices.

    He had paid for her to study at a media college in London as all she had ever wanted to be was a photographer and you got the best of everything in London. Yes
, she was a big girl and wise enough to look after her self, but that didn’t stop him worrying about her every night. Her mother had left when she was fourteen with one of their “mutual friends” and Sophia had decided that she wanted to stay with her Dad. She had never really forgiven her mother for this betrayal and although Seb did try to persuade her that “what’s done is done” and “you should try to understand your mother, for both your sakes” he had always been secretly glad that Sophia had not gone with her mother. That would have been the worst betrayal in his mind.

    Now he was worried that behind that door could be a police officer, come to tell him that something awful had happened to his daughter
, his heart began to beat a samba as he tried to make out the shape behind the distorted glass in the panels of the door.

    ‘Seb, I can see you there, it’s me Clara, please open the door. I need to talk to you now... please’ he jolted away from the door with a little shock from the voice. He certainly hadn’t been expecting Clara to come calling at this time of the night or morning
, or whatever it was.

    Once he r
ealised who it was and it wasn’t the police with bad tidings, he immediately opened the door and ushered his friend inside.

    ‘Whatever’s the matter
? You look terrible.’ all thoughts of his own worries now forgotten.

 
  ‘Brandy first, talk later... Please?’

He led her into the lounge area and turned on the wall
lamps, he never liked to have the main lights on when it was still dark outside. She sat on one of the two white leather sofas, the one in front of the large bay window which overlooked the beautifully manicured lawn bordered by rose bushes and begonias, although the long dark drapes were drawn to the garden right now.

    ‘I’m sorry to wake you at this hour, but I couldn’t think who to talk to, and I really need to talk to somebody, I thought I was going mad at first, but then... well
, then I realised I wasn’t. And I think that may be worse... worse for all of us’. Her voice trembled when she said this and Seb could see she was more than a little scared. She was holding a disc in her hand and slowly rotating it over and over in her palm as she spoke.

    ‘It’s ok, whatever it is I’m sure it cant be that bad, let me get you a drink and we’ll talk ok, I’ll be back in a minute
’

    She watched him disappear into the kitchen and then her eyes led her back to the talisman. It was a heavy weight in her hands, in more ways than one. She silently cursed the cancer that had taken her Stanley, her soul
mate from her too soon.
Wherever you are Stanley, please come and help me through this. I shouldn’t burden Seb with this but I have no other choice. Please find your way to me my love, I know you can do it, wherever you are... come and find me.

    Clara’s husband Stanley had been Seb’s mentor at St Michaels before his illness had gotten the better of him. He had also become a good friend and when he passed, it was around the same time that Sophia's mother Donna had left so they had been there for each other ever since
. So Clara turning up on his doorstep at three thirty in the morning in such a state of disarray was slightly disconcerting to him. She was now what he considered to be his best friend.

    He returned from the kitchen with two glasses of brandy and coke and placed them down on the large glass topped coffee table between the two sofas
.

    That was the
beginning of a very long night that evolved into day. They sat and talked about what had happened, they talked about the hellish sounds that had preceded the whole of the nights’ events, how Clara had known that those sounds were from the astral plane and not of this world. If Seb had been able to connect the two then he would have remembered earlier in the day when he was buying groceries from the little corner store at the end of his road. He thought he
heard
something, or
felt
something that was not quite right. In fact if he
really
thought about it, he would have noticed that it wasn’t just him, but everyone around him that seemed to look at each other, questioning each other with scared little rabbit eyes. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up at the time as did the hairs on his arms, but he didn’t know why and neither did anyone else. But if he could really look back and remember then he would realise that he and the other patrons of the store were all stood stock still for at least a minute. Just looking at each other with those scared rabbits eyes before they carried on about their business of buying the essentials they had forgotten to buy in their weekly big shop, as if nothing had happened at all.

    They spoke of the tapestry and of the dragons, it was when Clara began to talk of the dragons actually
coming out
of the tapestry and talking to her that he thought she may have had a little too much brandy before she came to see him. She told him of the dog monkey and the family of pigs with the alternative spit roast. She told him how this was a vision that the dragons had allowed her to see, through the pearls of wisdom that they protected under their massive jaws. It was as if the pearls had projected the scenes into her mind and made them real for her at that moment. It was a prediction of things that were to be, if she didn't “become”. And she still had no idea of what or how to become. She just knew that she needed Seb’s help more that ever.

    ‘I know how it sounds, don't think I didn't question myself a hundred times over before I came to see you
’ she said when she saw the questioning look on Sebs face.
And who could blame him really?
she thought.

    If Seb didn’t know Clara to be the level headed woman that she was, and if he hadn’t known her for as long as he had then he may have just shrugged off her story as nonsense, but he
did
know her, and he knew that she wasn’t the sort of person to easily be made a fool of, or to let herself be taken for a fool so he knew there was a lot more to this story.

    T
he fact that she made her living telling fortunes until a few years ago didn’t make her any less credible to him. She had never given him a reading or read his palm, or whatever it was that psychics, or mediums did, as he had never asked. They had spoken of it many times, and while it did intrigue him and may have been a fun evenings entertainment one night. He had never pushed her into it as he knew what had happened with the young girl and what it had done to Clara at the time, and this is probably what made her even
more
credible to him.