they call Shakespeare Garden and only then realized that I was heading in the wrong direction if I wanted to get back to our TriBeCa hotel. Jealousy, the green-eyed god had possessed me, confused me, sent me crazy.
I turned round, set off walking back across the deserted Ramble and past the boathouse, where party music still pounded out its heavy beat, then down the east side of the lake until I reached a huge bronze statue of an angel surrounded by cherubs, set in a frozen pond. She stared down with blind eyes, wings outspread – the Angel of the Waters.
She stands for cleanliness. Her cherubs are called Purity, Health, Peace and Temperance. She provides an ideal place for a night stalker to lurk.
He sprang out in his hunter’s hat from behind her billowing bronze skirt. He’d prowled through the park after me, kept to the shadows, never made a sound. And now he confronted me, again with a knife and with a cruel smile. He didn’t speak. He raised the knife and came towards me.
Terror shot through me as I turned and ran. There was a stone arcade ahead, with wide steps to either side. It felt as though my attacker was herding and pushing me wide of the arcade towards Bow Bridge, so I resisted and ran straight for the sheltering arches, stopping to catch my breath only when I believed I was out of sight. Leaning back against the cold stone and closing my eyes, I waited.
Ten, fifteen, twenty seconds passed. I heard nothing – no footsteps down the tiled arcade, no heavy breathing. After half a minute I ventured out from behind the pillar. Wham! He was there in front of me, eyes gleaming, close enough to touch. I gasped and fled down the row of arches. Again he seemed happy to let me go until I came out the other end of the arcade. Wham again! My stalker was there to meet me. He was behind me, to either side, a dozen versions of him materializing and vanishing at will.
He wasn’t real. He sprang from the darkest corners of my psychic sensibility, my nightmare manifestation of a dark angel. There was no point running another step. I dropped to my knees.
The ground opens up beneath me. I’m Alice falling down the rabbit hole, tumbling out of this world. There are tree roots like tentacles trying to grasp me, underground tunnels leading nowhere, angels following me, blocking out the light .
I fall for ever. Deep under the earth the dead inhabit crumbling caves, endless tunnels. They cannot be counted. Bones pile upon bones, they crumble to yellow dust.
And there are terrible, agonized creatures there with gaping, slavering jaws, flesh burned black and eyes that glint like dying coals. They writhe and fall into the phosphorescent fires of hell.
Among the hopeless dead are groaning, suffocating ghosts – men naked to the waist and carrying pickaxes, who were caught in a tidal wave of slurry when tunnels they were building collapsed. Their eyes are wide with fear. I am with them in the dark, struggling for breath .
I slumped on to the snowy ground, fall unconscious. When I came round, a guy in a peaked cap with a star badge on his jacket raised me and supported me towards the nearest bench.
‘Relax. I’m Central Park Police,’ he told me.
7
I guess he saved my life. Without him passing by on his regular night patrol, I might have died from hypothermia.
He was detached and professional, assured me I was hallucinating when phrases like ‘dark angel’ and ‘spirit world’ fell from my lips. He said it made no sense that I was being chased by multiple ghosts but that he would look out for the guy I tried to describe: short, stocky, mixed-race, wearing a black jacket and a hunter’s cap.
He asked me where I’d been and why I left the party alone.
‘Do you need to get checked out by a doctor?’ he asked when he considered I’d come round enough to talk sense to him.
‘No, I’m not injured.’
‘The guy didn’t touch you?’
‘No.’
‘He stalked you but didn’t follow through with any physical
I turned round, set off walking back across the deserted Ramble and past the boathouse, where party music still pounded out its heavy beat, then down the east side of the lake until I reached a huge bronze statue of an angel surrounded by cherubs, set in a frozen pond. She stared down with blind eyes, wings outspread – the Angel of the Waters.
She stands for cleanliness. Her cherubs are called Purity, Health, Peace and Temperance. She provides an ideal place for a night stalker to lurk.
He sprang out in his hunter’s hat from behind her billowing bronze skirt. He’d prowled through the park after me, kept to the shadows, never made a sound. And now he confronted me, again with a knife and with a cruel smile. He didn’t speak. He raised the knife and came towards me.
Terror shot through me as I turned and ran. There was a stone arcade ahead, with wide steps to either side. It felt as though my attacker was herding and pushing me wide of the arcade towards Bow Bridge, so I resisted and ran straight for the sheltering arches, stopping to catch my breath only when I believed I was out of sight. Leaning back against the cold stone and closing my eyes, I waited.
Ten, fifteen, twenty seconds passed. I heard nothing – no footsteps down the tiled arcade, no heavy breathing. After half a minute I ventured out from behind the pillar. Wham! He was there in front of me, eyes gleaming, close enough to touch. I gasped and fled down the row of arches. Again he seemed happy to let me go until I came out the other end of the arcade. Wham again! My stalker was there to meet me. He was behind me, to either side, a dozen versions of him materializing and vanishing at will.
He wasn’t real. He sprang from the darkest corners of my psychic sensibility, my nightmare manifestation of a dark angel. There was no point running another step. I dropped to my knees.
The ground opens up beneath me. I’m Alice falling down the rabbit hole, tumbling out of this world. There are tree roots like tentacles trying to grasp me, underground tunnels leading nowhere, angels following me, blocking out the light .
I fall for ever. Deep under the earth the dead inhabit crumbling caves, endless tunnels. They cannot be counted. Bones pile upon bones, they crumble to yellow dust.
And there are terrible, agonized creatures there with gaping, slavering jaws, flesh burned black and eyes that glint like dying coals. They writhe and fall into the phosphorescent fires of hell.
Among the hopeless dead are groaning, suffocating ghosts – men naked to the waist and carrying pickaxes, who were caught in a tidal wave of slurry when tunnels they were building collapsed. Their eyes are wide with fear. I am with them in the dark, struggling for breath .
I slumped on to the snowy ground, fall unconscious. When I came round, a guy in a peaked cap with a star badge on his jacket raised me and supported me towards the nearest bench.
‘Relax. I’m Central Park Police,’ he told me.
7
I guess he saved my life. Without him passing by on his regular night patrol, I might have died from hypothermia.
He was detached and professional, assured me I was hallucinating when phrases like ‘dark angel’ and ‘spirit world’ fell from my lips. He said it made no sense that I was being chased by multiple ghosts but that he would look out for the guy I tried to describe: short, stocky, mixed-race, wearing a black jacket and a hunter’s cap.
He asked me where I’d been and why I left the party alone.
‘Do you need to get checked out by a doctor?’ he asked when he considered I’d come round enough to talk sense to him.
‘No, I’m not injured.’
‘The guy didn’t touch you?’
‘No.’
‘He stalked you but didn’t follow through with any physical
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