The Sandman Read online

  The Sandman

  MILES GIBSON

  For Philippa

  “Some say that gleams of a remoter world visit the soul in sleep – that death is slumber.”

  Shelley

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preface to the 2013 Edition

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Copyright

  Preface to the 2013 Edition

  ‘Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all,’ Gore Vidal had said. ‘Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect.’ Thirty years ago, attempting my first novel, I was determined to accept that challenge. But where to begin?

  I don’t remember what attracted me to the genre of crime fiction. Beyond a boyhood love for Sherlock Holmes I hadn’t read many detective stories, thrillers or whodunits. I’d thought of them merely as puzzle books: the body in the library, the scattered clues, the red herrings and finally the motive that indelibly condemns the guilty party. I was never convinced by these conventions. The genre rarely confronted the random nature of crime, the banality of the perpetrator, the clumsy pantomime of violence. And then, quite by chance, I read a report in a copy of the Hindustan Times about a murderer arrested in India for killing seventy people with a hammer. When asked to explain his monstrous behaviour, he’d merely smiled and shrugged and said he’d enjoyed the experience. Exactly. He’d offered no apologies, concocted no excuses. He was an outsider, a man who’d given himself permission to commit unspeakable acts, to embrace forbidden sensations, to trespass in a foreign country from which he knew he’d never return.

  Here was my challenge. I’d write a portrait, a character study of just such an individual, an ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances; a quiet man in the daylight world, embarked after dark on his own perilous voyage of discovery. I’d inhabit the mind of a stranger, a midnight prowler, a murderer. It tickled my curiosity and satisfied my sense of mischief at the same time.

  So I wrote the book as a flight of imagination – no one could accuse me of writing lightly varnished autobiography – but the subject proved an unexpected problem for some reviewers.

  ‘The details of his killings are elegant – unsettlingly so,’ a critic complained in Cosmopolitan. ‘If it were written badly one wouldn’t mind so much.’

  ‘Not only confounds received notions of good taste but also poses a discomforting moral problem, in that it contrives to be funny about the doings of a mass murderer – unspeakable acts are reported with an unwavering reasonableness, essential to the comic impact,’ warned the Times Literary Supplement.

  I was startled by this reception. I hadn’t intended to shock the reader with a eulogy for a serial killer. I’d created a monster, perhaps, but like any proud parent I’d loved him enough to forgive his crimes and misdemeanours and felt comfortable enough in his company to regard the narrative as a lament for a lost soul, an erotic fantasy, a pitch-black comedy.

  Since the novel was first published, psychopaths and serial killers have become commonplace celebrities in the downward spiral of popular culture. The Sandman probably no longer presents a threat to the gentle sensibilities of Tulsa OK World readers who were warned at the time that: ‘The writing is sick! Sick!’

  Although still occasionally found among the mysteries and thrillers, I’m pleased to think of the novel as an exercise in postmodernism or absurdist fiction. And if we can’t agree on its intentions then perhaps, after all, I’ll settle for Michael Martone’s observation that: ‘Fiction … should resist and confuse categorization. Art for me is always about deranged arrangements, framing unframed deviations.’

  Miles Gibson

  December 2012

  Chapter One

  Tulip stood and stared at herself in the mirror. She was wearing a black satin dress, high-heeled mules and an absurd wig of thick treacle curls that fell, in glittering cascades, to her elbows. Beneath the wig her face seemed very small and flat. She had the eyes of a goldfish and a slightly crooked mouth. Her eyebrows were no more than tiny black brushstrokes and her lips a mere splash from a scarlet pen. She stared at herself and smiled. She was tired and bored. Her ankles ached from the cruel tilt of the mules. She cocked her head until a curtain of heavy curls obscured her view, parted the hair with her fingers, smiled again, thrust out her breasts, cradled her belly in plump white hands, flirted with herself in the glass. When she was satisfied with her reflection she turned her attentions upon the room.

  The room was small and hot and filled by a clumsy old-fashioned bed. Beside the bed a red telephone and a large armchair. Behind the armchair a locked door. There was a wash-basin in one corner of the room. On a shelf above the basin a bowl crammed with tablets of scented soap. A glass vase of wilting flowers on a low metal table. Rugs on the floor. A blind of candy-coloured slats against the window. A bookshelf against one wall and a battered wardrobe. A collection of dolls on the bookshelf. Beside the wardrobe a second door that led to the stairs and the street.

  Tulip walked to the bed and picked up a twisted pillow. She punched it several times with her fist and threw it aside. She glanced at her watch. It was a little past ten-thirty and she had opened for business at noon. It had been a long and difficult day and it wasn’t finished. She bent to the low metal table and plucked at one of the limp roses. The flower exploded between her fingers. She swore and searched for a cigarette, when the doorbell rang.

  She walked to the door and drew back a chain. When she opened the door she found a young man in a heavy winter coat, clutching a leather bag in his hands, standing among the shadows. For some moments she stood and stared at him in silence. And then, with a little movement of her head, she beckoned him into her room.

  “What shall I call you?” she asked as she turned to confront him.

  “My name is William.”

  “That’s nice. I’ll call you Billy.”

  The man said nothing. He looked around the room. He was wearing a pair of heavy spectacles and he screwed up his eyes as he tried to peer through the smeared glass.

  “Don’t look so scared, Billy. I’m not going to eat you,” chirruped Tulip. She began to laugh. She threw back her head and bared her teeth. But the man looked puzzled. When she saw that he was not amused she tried to compose herself, lit a cigarette, gave it several brief tugs and snorted smoke through her nose.

  “Why don’t you sit down, Billy, and take off your coat?”

  The young man took off his coat and folded it carefully across the bed. He sat down in the armchair and placed the leather bag at his feet. His hair was short and shone like silver where it caught the light. He turned suddenly towards the door behind him and squinted at the keyhole, jerking his head as if listening for some faraway sound.

  She took a step towards him, hesitated, glanced across his shoulder at the door. “That’s my own private room, Billy,” she said forcing another smile. “Would you like a drink?”

  He frowned. “Is it empty?” he whispered.

  “Yes, of course it’s empty,” she said with a laugh. “This is the room where I entertain. Don’t worry, Billy, we’re quite alone. Be brave and have a drink.”

  “Yes, thank you,” he said.

  “Scotch?”

  “Fine.”

  She turned to a cabinet beside the bed. He was young and frightened. He looked as if he might faint if she touched him. Old men made difficult customers – they were always trying to smell your shoes or peer at your bum through a keyhole. They were unpredictable. But the young men, ah, they were quickly satisfied. They had no imagination. She stifled a yawn as she p
oured the Scotch. “I haven’t seen you before,” she said.

  “No.”

  “Is this your first time?”

  The young man nodded, adjusting the spectacles on his nose.

  “That’s nice,” smiled Tulip. “Well, don’t look so unhappy. You’ll be fine. I’ve got clients who’ve been coming here for years and years. You’d be surprised. They’re just like old friends. They look after me and I take care of them. You understand?”

  The man nodded and sipped his Scotch. Tulip sat down on the edge of the bed and crossed her legs. A bracelet of silver beads sparkled on her ankle. She smiled and sucked at her cigarette. Through the shroud of smoke her eyes flickered across his face, his hands, his clothes, his shoes. Behind the greasy spectacles he had bright, green eyes. His hands were clean and dainty. She didn’t like his hair.

  “Some girls don’t care,” she complained. “They work the streets, steal your money while you’re pressed against the wall with your pants around your knees. They give the business a bad name. I like to make my clients feel special. That’s why I’ve gone to so much trouble here. It always pays to take a little extra trouble.” She gestured around the room with a fat, white hand.

  “I used to be a dancer,” she explained, “I’ve had classical training. But I have very weak ankles…”

  Without warning she opened the dress at her throat and peeled it away from her shoulders and breasts. There was a pause in the undressing while she searched for an ashtray, picked it up, dropped it, damn, picked it up and stabbed it several times with her cigarette. Then she prised her fingers into the wrinkled satin that had bunched around her belly and pushed the dress to her knees. It fell whispering to her feet and she stepped out of it with a little wave of her hand and a smile.

  She was wearing nothing but a pair of fine black stockings that cut wickedly into the tops of her thighs making the skin there seem excessively polished and fat. Her breasts were heavy and swung loosely when she moved. The nipples were small as buttons. She dipped her hand between her legs and tweaked at the hair between finger and thumb, twisting it into a long black curl. Then she lit another cigarette and perched on the arm of the chair, swinging her legs, rubbing a breast against the young man’s face.

  “There, Billy, isn’t that nice?” she inquired. She pulled at the cigarette, threw back her head and blew smoke towards the ceiling.

  Billy reached up and whispered into her ear, “I wonder if you would allow me to indulge in a little habit of mine?”

  Tulip frowned and stood up. “What is it?” she asked suspiciously. “I don’t want anything violent. And I don’t do anything – you know – dirty. This is a nice place.” She tugged in frustration at her cigarette and stared at his hair which had begun to glow with an unearthly light. It was bad enough having an old man peer at your bum through the keyhole without having a young one prancing around in bra and panties. She had hoped to attract a better class of customer.

  “Oh, no, it’s nothing unpleasant,” said Billy soothingly. “But I’d feel much happier if I could wear my gloves.”

  She frowned and shrugged. It wasn’t too bad. He might have wanted lipstick and a pair of high-heeled shoes.

  “They seem to lend me so much confidence. I suppose it’s the rubber. They have such a wonderful rubbery smell.”

  “Yeah, but what are you going to do with them?” she demanded darkly.

  “Wear them,” smiled Billy innocently. He drew a pair of gloves from the leather bag. A pair of rubber kitchen gloves.

  “What else have you got in that bag?”

  “Books,” said Billy as he teased on the gloves.

  “I read a book once,” she said and crushed out her cigarette. Then the young man smiled again and opened his arms, inviting Tulip to embrace him. She stepped forward and he cradled the back of her skull in a fat rubber hand.

  For a long time the man and the woman stood, wrapped together in a silent embrace. And then Tulip sank to her knees. The handle of a slender knife was stuck in her neck. A chrysanthemum of blood had blossomed brightly from her ear. The man staggered beneath the weight of the fallen woman, dragged her forward and allowed her to collapse in the chair.

  When he had recovered his breath he stepped back a few paces to admire the corpse. She was sprawled, as if asleep, her arms hanging loose and her legs slightly parted. The stockings were wrinkled and torn loose from their moorings. Her head rested against one shoulder. She stared back at the man with her cloudy goldfish eyes.

  He knelt down and tried to smooth the stockings against her knees but the gloves made him clumsy and he dragged down the stockings in exasperation, peeling them roughly from her toes. He stared up at the woman then and smiled blissfully. She wore the handle of the knife against her hair in the manner of a Japanese comb. The chrysanthemum had thickened and its petals were spreading against her neck. He stretched out and tenderly touched her face with his rubber fingertips. He closed her eyes and her mouth fell open. Her tongue was red as a pomegranate. He brushed the hair away from her breasts and arranged her hands in her lap. His touch was delicate and precise. She had lost her mules and he retrieved them, slipping them neatly onto her feet.

  When he was satisfied with her appearance he took his leather bag from beneath the armchair and pulled out a Polaroid camera. He took three photographs of the woman and laid the prints along the edge of the bed where they ripened into glossy bruises. He peered at them anxiously, impatient to examine the portraits.

  And then he thought he heard it. A scuffle, a muffled cough, a groan or a sigh. He didn’t know – he couldn’t say exactly what he heard – but he felt someone was watching him. He turned in horror towards the window and stared at the cracks in the metal blind, He swung towards the door and snarled. His hands were trembling. His face was yellow and glossy with sweat. There were eyes glinting from every shadow. High on the bookshelf the dolls’ mouths hung open in silent screams. He twisted on his heel and scooped the pictures from the bed. He threw the pictures, the camera and tumbler of Scotch into the leather bag, bundled his coat beneath his arm and ran from the room into the cold and dangerous night.

  Chapter Two

  He woke up shouting and clutching the sheets. The room was in darkness. He rolled sideways and groped for the light, screwing up his face against the glare. Sleep had tortured his hair into damp brown spikes. His pyjamas were clinging and wet. He stumbled from the bed and stood shivering against the wall. For some moments he could not move but waited, listening for the sound of footsteps in the rooms beyond the door.

  He wiped his face in his hands. He could hear nothing in the silence but the mad, clockwork chatter of his heart. He rubbed his hands against the wall and closed his eyes. In the darkness of his head he could see again the shape of the woman as she sank to her knees, the angle of the knife against her throat, the sudden rush of rubber and blood.

  He shuffled to the far wall and peered through a chink in the dusty curtains. He could see no one waiting for him, no one beckoned or waved from the street. He turned away from the window and stared at the door. He was stupid with shock. His memory of the past few days was blurred, day and night smudged together so that he walked sometimes at midnight and slept at noon. He tried to concentrate, cut through the confusion and assemble the facts. Now he remembered the woman’s name. Tulip. Her name was Tulip. He repeated the name several times, as if he was afraid he might lose it again. He remembered the heat of her skin and the curious glittering weight of her hair. What was she wearing? A dress, yes, a black dress and her legs were in stockings. There was a corset, a cobweb of pink rubber strands. No, that was another time. Another corpse. Dear God, so much blood.

  His eyes hurt and his tongue felt swollen. He was haunted. The corpses followed him everywhere. When he slept he sensed them beside his bed, grinding their teeth as they watched him dream. When he went walking in the street he saw the dead among the living, a jostling crowd of corpses, staring at him as he hurried past.

  H
e needed a cigarette. He tiptoed into the kitchen and found a crumpled pack of Camel. He smoothed the cigarette between finger and thumb but could not find his mouth. There were tears rolling from his eyes and dripping from the tip of his nose. He brushed at the tears with his fist and swore aloud. He must reach the telephone. He knew, at last, he must call the police. Yes, if there was time, if he could reach the phone before he was buried beneath the weight of the dead, he knew he’d be safe. He must surrender himself to the police.

  The smoke burned his throat and clouded his head. Beneath the window of his study a small table and on the table a telephone. He moved towards it. The journey seemed endless, the floor expanding, the walls shrinking away from him. The light from the ceiling bleached his face as he passed beneath it His shadow ballooned against the furniture, a black satin shroud sailing beside him. At last he reached the table and sank into the little chair beside the telephone. He stretched out his hand and then hesitated, his eyes drawn to a book almost hidden beneath the papers and half-forgotten letters. It was a cheap exercise book, grubby at the edges, the spine worn white, the pages filled black with tiny handwriting.

  For a long time he sat and stared at the diary, his hand stretched out but the fingers withered and curled. He wanted to read it. He wanted to try and make sense of it again. The diary explained everything. He held it gently in his hands. The forbidden journal. The book of the dead. He turned the cover and began to read.

  Chapter Three

  THE JOURNAL

  My name is William Mackerel Burton. I have killed eighteen men and women. It has been my life’s work.

  I am an artist. My work has been shown on television and acclaimed as a national scandal. The popular press has followed my career with feverish enthusiasm. My work has been reviewed in several languages. I am celebrated. A book has been published of my complete works. I have to confess, it is not a very good book – a lurid volume of bad photographs, rumours and gossip. A cheap paperback book of the dead. I bought a copy for my collection and discovered that many of the murders mentioned were quite unknown to me. They were counterfeits, clumsy copies in the style of the master. But I was flattered. I cannot complain. And this diary will, one day, correct their mistake.