The car drew to a halt in the first tentative spray of rain from the murky night sky. Hauling the handbrake up, Sweetman sighed shakily and glanced down at the small box on the passenger seat as if it were a ticking bomb.

It might as well be, he considered, but he reached across and lifted it to his chest in spite of this. Whether it was real, or only a product of his exhausted imagination, he felt a trickle of heat leaching out of the thing, through his coat and into his shrinking flesh. Fighting the urge to drop it, he clambered out of the car and, squinting to keep the rain out of his eyes, scuttled for the porch across the street.

Eventually, after a battle with the recalcitrant lock, he slipped inside and, gasping with relief, slammed the door behind him. The hall was in darkness, and he shoved his shoulders up against the door while he groped for the light switch with his free hand.

The mock crystal chandelier flashed into life above his head, and only now did he begin to unwind. Taking two tentative steps forward, he slipped his burden out of the crook of his elbow and deposited it on the hall table.

"What's got into you?" he muttered, then shook his head violently, as if he were trying to dislodge an insect from his ear. Stretching out one hand, he flipped the latch on the box and prised back the lid. His eyes narrowed as the light infested the contents and struck a gleam from each and every surface; he tried to keep his composure, but there was something wholly unnatural about the silent sparkle from within the box, and he snapped the lid back down once more with a sharp exhalation on his lips.

Moving through into the kitchen, trying to work some life back into legs that seemed tight with apprehension, Sweetman pulled a bottle from beneath the sink and wrenched off the cap. There were clean glasses on the drainer, but he ignored them and poured an indulgent draught of cheap, fiery vodka down his throat in one spasmodic swallow.

Coughing, wiping hot tears from his eyes with the back of his hand, he fought down a gag reflex, and dropped the bottle onto the table with a bang.

This was echoed, almost simultaneously, by a muffled crack from somewhere above his head. Sweetman, who had been about to reach for the cold water tap, froze like a hunted rabbit with his fingers curled around the edge of the sink. A trickle of vodka ran down his lip with indecent slowness, and he moved only to lick it away.

After an age, he very gently unhooked his hands from the freezing steel and turned around as though he were on wheels. Whatever the noise from upstairs had been, it hadn't come again so far. Sweetman took one step across the tiles, then two more, his ears straining for any further noise, no matter how slight. His breath seemed to rasp in his throat, and he tried to slow it a little.

As he slipped out of the kitchen and paced back through the narrow hall, his heart squeezed tight up against his sternum, he reached out for the switch at the bottom of the stairs and pressed it. Nothing happened; the steps ahead of him ascended into curdled shadows and there was no light to relieve them.

For no reason that he could identify, Sweetman glanced across at the hall table once more before clamping his hand to the banister and starting to climb. The first step complained beneath his foot and, cursing beneath his breath, he shifted his weight to the side of the tread to silence it.

By the time he reached the top of the stairs, the darkness was so profound that he waved a hand into it, desperately seeking anything he could find to show him the way. After a few strained seconds, realising that he should make some sort of move or remain standing at the top of the stairs in a fearful trance for the rest of the night, he stumbled to his bedroom armed with nothing more than a mental map of the upstairs landing.

The door handle was as cold as stone. He drew his hand back by instinct, but then reached out again and twisted it, pushing the door inward. A moment's exploration told him that the bedroom light was also dead, and he stepped out into what little light was filtering through the net curtains. As he did so, his breath filled out and condensed in the icy air of the room.

The French window behind the curtains was open, and the building rain danced and splashed in through the gap to apply a gorgeous sparkle to the fine lace on the curtains. No, not just open, Sweetman corrected himself. Even from where he stood, he could see that the bolt had been smashed in and now hung limp from one last remaining screw.

Some small part of his dissonant mind was insisting that he should turn and run, that the intruder was very likely still in the house. The greater part of Sweetman's conscious mind, however, was suddenly and intently focused on the object that lay upon his pillow, clearly and unequivocally outlined against the fresh white cotton.

Stepping forward, he reached out and plucked the rose from the pillow, folding the stem loosely into his palm and bringing the lush bloom up before his face. The petals were a rich, velvet black in the shadows, but something told him that this flower was such a deep shade of garnet red that it wouldn't look much brighter even in full and undiminished sunlight.

The rose was now so close to his face that he couldn't help but draw its scent into his nostrils. It was both sweet and vibrant at once, with a gentle undercurrent of musk, but there was...something else. He sniffed again, and there it was. Beneath all the beauty of the bloom, there was a faint but unmistakeable aroma of ichor, dust and decadence, as if the rose had sprung into being in a sepulchre.

Sweetman's hand clenched convulsively around the stem as the telephone rang behind him, and when he uncurled his fingers it was to see that several thorns had punctured the flesh of his palm, leaving gleaming pinpoints of blood behind. It wasn't until the third toll of the phone that he reacted, drawing out of a sluggish reverie and turning to pick it up. The hand holding the rose dropped as he did so, and the flower hung forgotten at his side.

"Hello?" he croaked, and then coughed slightly. "Commander? Yes, this isn't a good time, I've just..." he hesitated, listened to the growling voice at the far end of the line, and turned to stare blindly out of the window as he did so. "Yes, sir, I've found her. I just got back from...what? Yes, sir. We've managed to recover the...hello? Commander?"

The line had clicked and fallen silent, quite without warning. For one moment, Sweetman wondered whether the connection had been severed at the far end, but then, realising that there was no dial tone, no sound at all, he shuddered reflexively and, still gripping the receiver, turned his head down to look at the phone. He swore that his neck muscles creaked as he did so.

There was a long, shining steel blade resting on the cut-off button, as naturally and serenely as if it had every right to be there. It was at this point that Sweetman became divorced from reality and started to drift with the rip-tide of sweet, comforting insanity. He didn't even react when a river of pale condensation came pouring over his shoulder, marking out the exhalation of the man standing behind him.

"Oscar," said the voice behind the breath, and it was infinitely gentle in its expression. Sweetman sagged, dropping the receiver, but didn't try to turn around. Instead, he spoke out into the darkness, his eyes still fixed to the foul, rain-washed world beyond the open window.

"They told me you were dead," he said, vaguely, moving nothing but his lips.

"I am," replied the voice, still soft, suffused with sorrow. A hand gripped his shoulder now, turning him around. Sweetman no longer had any volition of his own, and was content to be led. Cool, gloved fingers gripped his chin and turned his face up, and when his unblinking gaze closed with the deathly glitter in two slanted eye sockets, he smiled. He couldn't think why, but he smiled anyway.

"When devils will the blackest sins put on," said the shade, "they do suggest at first with heavenly shows, as I do now."

A hand shifted, and then struck. The words faded and blurred into mush in his ears, and the last thing that Oscar Sweetman heard was a regretful sigh.

It wasn't until the man's frantic gasps had died away entirely that V left the room, closing the door behind him with no more than the slightest of clicks. He drifted across the landing, at perfect ease in the shadows, and descended the stairs with his cloak sweeping out languorous sine waves behind him. In the bedroom, the phone began to ring once more; he ignored it.

The box lay on the hall table, just where Sweetman had left it. For a while, V circled the table, one hand outstretched, not touching the lid but, all the same, missing it by the merest of margins. The mask tilted, as if there lay behind the sterile white plastic all the sins and curiosities of the world. Finally, coming to rest, V opened the box and reached in, plucking at the contents with finger and thumb.

One small vial from several was lifted up to eye level, and V directed a dispassionate stare both at and through the glutinous scarlet fluid inside it. There was a thin meniscus of pale golden plasma above the blood where the corpuscles had begun to settle, but no more than that. In every other way, the small tube communicated a promise far out of scale for its size.

Turning the frail glass vial between his fingers, he studied the label pasted onto the side. On it, in smudged black ink, someone had scrawled a hasty 'V'.

The world turned beneath his feet while, outside, he heard the rain gather pace like a cavalry charge and begin to hammer the streets beneath it without mercy, the subtle splash becoming a furious hiss and crash of water on concrete. For an eternity of moments, V gazed upon the future while his breath slipped in and out of the mask and his heartbeat slowed to a systolic thump beneath his ribs.

"What fates impose," he whispered, "that men must needs abide; it boots not to resist both wind and tide."

The words curled out into the empty hall, whirling around into each corner of the room, and could not be unsaid. If, for one fraction of a second, his fingers tightened upon the vial, he scarcely noticed it. At last, moving with sad and stately grace, V replaced the tube and closed the lid of the box.

The front door swung back easily and silently, exposing a dead landscape shot with leaping currents of rainwater and shrouded in the curves of mist to which this gave birth. With the glow of the hall at his back, stood halfway between light and shadow, V paused and half-turned, looking back over his shoulder as if to print the sight upon his mind for the rest of eternity.

Then, wrapping his cloak about him, he stepped out and disappeared into the shrieking storm.

The End