The Killer by R. J. Ellory

Author:R. J. Ellory [Ellory, R. J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC031000, FIC000000
ISBN: 9781468306552
Google: VdEn6sVdq0IC
Publisher: Overlook
Published: 2012-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Prologue

At first, somehow, it’s as if she is waking from some terrible, terrible dream.

Yes, like a dream, a nightmare, a series of hellish visions that have assaulted every sense and feeling, every thought and emotion, and left her in rags, in tatters, in pieces, as if she is a fragile thing of no real consequence, as if she has been dropped from some appreciable height, and—even now—is lying in scattered disarray on the ground.

It is like this.

She feels such pain, and it is not only the pain in her heart and mind, but in her hands, her chest, her throat, her head.

Oh, the pain in her head is immeasurable, and it is as if every ounce of blood she possesses is trying to escape through the top of her skull, an effort to relieve the dreadful, dreadful pressure that she feels.

For some seconds she cannot even think of her name.

She does not know where she is, or why, or how she came to be here, and as she tries to turn she understands that she is on her back, and that the floor above her is actually the ceiling, and then she is aware of the light burning bright in the center of that ceiling, and she tries to close her eyes against the light, but even lowering her lids takes more strength than she possesses, but she does manage it, or—rather—gravity and natural reflex close them as she neither possesses the will nor the ability to consciously control any part of her physical self.

I am dead.

This is limbo.

This is purgatory.

I have been hit by a car perhaps.

I have been hit by a car and my body is dead and now I am waiting here, and I can hear my own voice inside my mind, but there is so much pain, and someone is going to come soon and I will be told my name and my circumstances, and it will all be explained, and I will feel better—

Oh God, please let me feel better—

A handful of minutes pass, but she is not aware of the passage of time in any real and practical sense. Her perceptions are twisted off-kilter, and whatever was up is down, and whatever was left is right, and north is south and east is west, and she still cannot even find her own name within all of this, and this—perhaps more than anything—troubles her most.

What kind of person cannot remember their own name?

A crazy person?

Have I gone mad?

Have I lost it completely, and I am in some kind of hospital or asylum or something, and they have given me drugs and that’s why I feel like this?

But somehow she knows she is not in a hospital. There is something about all of this that seems . . . seems familiar, like an old song unheard for decades, like a pair of shoes forgotten and found once again, shoes that have somehow preserved the shape of your feet in their being, or like recognizing the face

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