Werewolves of London by Dean Carter

Author:Dean Carter [Carter, Dean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Carcosa
Published: 2015-01-26T05:00:00+00:00

42.

Evans slept more during the after dinner soap operas than she did during the night. She was up until 2am reviewing case notes and surfing endless web pages for reasons she herself couldn’t explain, finding herself alone and adrift, with no sense of direction. She slumped into bed, dry-mouthed with whisky on her breath and tossed and turned until 4.15am when her body sloughed from the mattress like dying flesh and stalked zombie-like to the shower in an attempt to rinse away the deathly buzzing in her head. Emerging from the bathroom some twenty minutes later she felt like she was approaching a near-human state. No point going back to bed. Just wasting the morning hours growing more and more exhausted from trying, actually concentrating and trying hard to sleep. Let sleep come to me, she thought. Let it come crawling and begging. I’ll let it in when I’m ready. On my terms. Sure. Good luck with that.

But why couldn’t she sleep? She went into the living room and opened the curtains. Still dark. Her father had been an insomniac. She would often get up in the middle of the night to use the toilet and hear him coughing in the living room. She would go in and find him sitting in his favourite chair, reading a book or watching the TV on mute. Sometimes, in the summer he would sit out in the front garden in a deckchair just watching the sky brighten and the odd car pass in the street. He would have terrified burglars or drunks arriving home late from nights out. Hereditary then. Why couldn’t the old bugger have had narcolepsy?

She tightened the belt on her dressing gown and collapsed into the armchair still feeling like shit. She couldn’t read anything now, it would just make her headache worse. She could maybe switch on the TV but that would have been as good a use of time as torturing herself in bed. She got up and went to the window again seeing her reflection but refusing to be surprised by the sight. The eyes were sunken hollows, her hair a directionless mess and her skin an almost translucent covering for the blue veins on her arms and the back of her hands. A deathly road map. She regarded herself with something like contempt.

She opened the front door and stepped outside in her slippers, wondering as she did so what the hell she was doing. The sun was taking its sweet time while the moon, a whore, dallied somewhere out of sight with lesser celestial objects. Her head swam, then the dull buzzing returned. She needed sleep, she craved it, but it wasn’t coming, at least not for the moment. But why the hell had she gone outside? She opened the garage, took out her father’s old, dusty deckchair and placed it on the front lawn close to the house. What am I doing? She sat, and barely had time to form a coherent thought before sleep suddenly rushed up without warning and smothered her.

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