The master of horror returns with detective Bill Hodges and the diabolical killer Brady Hartsfield. His malign powers, it turns out, are not yet defeated. Here is a taster to make you instantly afraid

‘He’s not done with you yet.’

Holly repeats it in a soft voice. She puts her half-eaten veggie burger down on its paper plate. Hodges has already demolished his, talking between bites. He doesn’t mention waking with pain; in this version he discovered the message because he got up to net-surf when he couldn’t sleep.

‘That’s what it said, all right.’

‘From Z-Boy.’

‘Yeah. Sounds like some superhero’s sidekick, doesn’t it? “Follow the adventures of Z-Man and Z-Boy, as they keep the streets of Gotham City safe from crime!”’

‘That’s Batman and Robin. They’re the ones who patrol Gotham City.’

‘I know that, I was reading Batman comics before you were born. I was just saying.’

She picks up her veggie burger, extracts a shred of lettuce, puts it down again. ‘When is the last time you visited Brady Hartsfield?’

Right to the heart of the matter, Hodges thinks admiringly. That’s my Holly.

‘I went to see him just after the business with the Saubers family, and once more later on. Midsummer, that would have been. Then you and Jerome cornered me and said I had to stop. So I did.’

‘We did it for your own good.’

‘I know that, Holly. Now eat your sandwich.’

She takes a bite, dabs mayo from the corner of her mouth, and asks him how Hartsfield seemed on his last visit.

‘The same … mostly. Just sitting there, looking out at the parking garage. I talk, I ask him questions, he says nothing. He gives Academy Award brain damage, no doubt about that. But there have been stories about him. That he has some kind of mind-power. That he can turn the water on and off in his bathroom, and does it sometimes to scare the staff. I’d call it bullshit, but when Becky Helmington was the head nurse, she said she’d actually seen stuff on a couple of occasions – rattling blinds, the TV going on by itself, the bottles on his IV stand swinging back and forth. And she’s what I’d call a credible witness. I know it’s hard to believe—’

‘Not so hard. Telekinesis, sometimes called psychokinesis, is a documented phenomenon. You never saw anything like that yourself during any of your visits?’

‘Well … ’ He pauses, remembering. ‘Something did happen on my second-to-last visit. There was a picture on the table beside his bed – him and his mother with their arms around each other and their cheeks pressed together. On vacation somewhere. There was a bigger version in the house on Elm Street. You probably remember it.’

‘Of course I do. I remember everything we saw in that house, including some of the cheesecake photos of her he had on his computer.’ She crosses her arms over her small bosom and makes a moue of distaste. ‘That was a very unnatural relationship.’

‘Tell me about it. I don’t know if he ever actually had sex with her—’

‘Oough!’

‘—but I think he probably wanted to, and at the very least she enabled his fantasies. Anyway, I grabbed the picture and talked some smack about her, trying to get a rise out of him, trying to get him to respond. Because he’s in there, Holly, and I mean all present and accounted for. I was sure of it then and I’m sure of it now. He just sits there, but inside he’s the same human wasp that killed those people at City Center and tried to kill a whole lot more at Mingo Auditorium.’

‘And he used Debbie’s Blue Umbrella to talk with you, don’t forget that.’

‘After last night I’m not likely to.’

‘Tell me the rest of what happened that time.’

‘For just a second he stopped looking out his window at the parking garage across the way. His eyes … they rolled in their sockets, and he looked at me. Every hair on the nape of my neck stood up at attention, and the air felt … I don’t know … electric.’ He forces himself to say the rest. It’s like pushing a big rock up a steep hill. ‘I arrested some bad doers when I was on the cops, some very bad doers – one was a mother who killed her three-year-old for insurance that didn’t amount to a hill of beans – but I never felt the presence of evil in any of them once they were caught. It’s like evil’s some kind of vulture that flies away once these mokes are locked up. But I felt it that day, Holly. I really did. I felt it in Brady Hartsfield.’

‘I believe you,’ she says in a voice so small it’s barely a whisper.