В мрачном английском замке на севере страны жестокий убийца оставляет позади следы своего злого шарта. Призрак-убийца извлекает душу жертвы в собственное тело, чтобы продолжить кровавые игры. В мире, где мертвых поднимается с могилы, чудовищный убийца приходит за новым жертвоприношением....
Because by that time I had something else eating at me. Worse even than Myriam.’
‘Palance,’ I guessed.
‘Yeah,’ Covington whispered. ‘Lionel.’ He emptied the bottle in one final, three-glug swallow.
‘Who is he, Covington?’
‘He’s my son.’
In the dead silence that followed this flat assertion I did the maths and failed to make it come out even close. Covington read the calculation and the outcome in my face and made a sweeping gesture with his hand to head off any objection.
‘I didn’t father him as Aaron Silver,’ he said.
‘You see, Castor, once we’d got the mechanics of possession all worked out, the only problems we had left were the legal ones. We had a lot of property that we had to pass on from one generation to the next – from one body to the next – and we wanted to do it in ways that didn’t look odd to someone looking in from outside.
‘So Seb Driscoll – the guy you met as Todd – he had a brilliant idea. We have kids. Doesn’t have to be a church wedding, semi-in-the-suburbs kind of deal: we just knock some woman up every now and then, so we’ve got biological children of our own.
Covington stood up, slowly and carefully: from the look on his face and the slight jerkiness in his movements, the booze was starting to kick in.
‘So what went wrong?’ I asked.
‘Nothing.’ His voice dripped with bitterness. ‘Except . . . human nature, maybe. You could forgive me for thinking I didn’t have any by this time, couldn’t you? After all the things I’d done. All the mayhem, the killings, down through the years. Life is cheap, right? But not your own. And your kids are a little bit of your own life, growing in someone else.
