Afterlight (14 page)

Jordan shot me a quick, closed look that could have meant anything.

‘Old head on a stick?’ I continued, on a real roll now. ‘Butt of all jokes? The boobless
wonder who moonlights as a reserve player on the boys’ senior basketball team? I’m
“the human firelighter”, remember? Everyone’s mate, nobody’s bestie. Storkie, the
undateable life form.’

I tried not to sound bitter, but I must have, because Jordan now gave me a sharp,
sideways glance before ducking into the orange room.

‘If you believe a word of what you just said, then you really
are
stupid,’ he muttered,
approaching the warped impression in the floorboards at the foot of the bed that
had been there for as long as we’d owned the pub. ‘This is how it begins,’ he then
mumbled, and I wasn’t sure if he was talking to himself, or to me.

‘What begins? Lessons in bad taste?’ I replied with a sigh, reluctantly trailing
Jordan into the room. I’d never liked this one, and it wasn’t just that I clashed
horribly with everything in it. Entering it always seemed to make my head hurt. If
it ever needed cleaning or tweaking, I’d
put it off until Gran rolled her eyes and
did it, or got someone else to.

I hadn’t been in the room for months, but it struck me suddenly that the warping
in the floorboards had gotten a lot worse; it had the profile of a small hillock
now, as if the floor was somehow elastic and something pointed was pressing up sharply
from underneath. As far as I knew, there was nothing but empty air under that floor.
The Sports Bar, with its bank of TV screens fixed 24/7 on the races or the match
of the day, ran beneath it.

‘Weird, huh?’ I said, looking down at the small mound at our feet. I could feel my
heartbeat pounding in my temples the way it always did in here.

Jordan poked at it with his creeper-shod foot then sucked in a deep breath as if
he’d cut himself.

Something about the repetitive way he kept pressing at the flesh of each arm reminded
me of someone playing the keys of a piano.

With a chill flash of insight, I wondered why it had taken me so long to actually
see
what he was doing. Blinking, I remembered the lockers erupting at school; the
hail of physical objects that had defied the laws of gravity and barely seemed to
touch him as he’d pressed and pressed on his arms.

‘You’re hitting them in some kind of order,’ I whispered,
backing away from him at
the realisation. ‘Those words and pictures. Aren’t you?’

Jordan raised his gaze to mine in misery, then his grey eyes flicked past me, locking
onto something—something in the room with us—and he snarled, ‘
Sunto!
’

12

‘Stay away!’ Jordan snapped. ‘
Je suis un mastin.
’

The language he was speaking had a guttural accent, and I can’t properly describe
what happened next.

It’s like…something attached itself to the skin of my
face
.

I brushed it off with a shriek, this thing I couldn’t see. It had the feel of cobwebs,
but worse. Sentient cobwebs? Spider silk, but with purpose.

Then there was a momentary pressure on my chest, as if someone had laid a heavy stone
on me, or maybe the spider silk was somehow burrowing under my skin and heading for
my lungs, because for a second I couldn’t breathe.

‘
Jor-dan
,’ I choked out, clawing at the air in his direction. ‘Help.’

‘
Tradiment!
’ Jordan roared, extending his right arm in a sweeping motion that ended
at the empty armchair across the room. The plastic bag we’d retrieved from the Maximus
Lounge fell to the floor with a rustle.

The pressure just worsened. I shook my head, tears pouring down my face as I struggled
for air and Jordan thundered again, still indicating the chair, ‘
Sunto!
’

The pressure abruptly lifted. But the room now seemed shrouded in shadow, as if the
late afternoon sun was fighting its way through some sort of otherworldly filter,
or something filmy yet dense was passing before my eyes.

Then I could breathe again, and the lurid brightness of the room was as it always
was. Maybe I’d imagined everything.

Jordan glared at the empty chair for a moment, arms crossed over his chest. Then
he calmly turned his back on the empty, vinyl-covered seat and pulled me close, resting
his chin on my hair as I gulped and shuddered on his shoulder, hands covering my
tear-stained face.

‘You’re safe now,’ he rumbled, a hand at the base of my spine, I felt it burning
there. ‘I’m here.’

‘What does it mean? You know, all that
mass-tan
stuff?’ I stumbled over the word,
still gasping.

Jordan’s mouth twisted. ‘It’s one of Daughtry’s sayings.
It’s a declaration that’s
supposed to
contain and compel
. “Mastin” is what he calls people like us. It’s Norman
French. It means gate keepers, guardians, the ones who stand between
them
and
the
great unwary
—as he likes to call most people. Mastin, he says, have the ability to
move between this world and
Sheol
.’

He laughed, and I could hear the scepticism in it.

‘Sheol?’ I croaked, looking up at him.

‘The underworld,’ Jordan replied in a sepulchral whisper. ‘The place things like
Eve come from and go to. Though I consider myself more of a low-level watch dog,’
he added in a more normal voice, ‘prepared to turn a blind eye. Knowledge is a dangerous
thing, and I want to sleep at night. Daughtry wants to train me up, teach me what
he knows, but I always turn him down.’

Jordan’s chuckle was now rueful, like it was some kind of longstanding bone of contention
between him and this Daughtry guy.

‘One world with
these
things in it?’ He indicated the chair in the corner with a
tilt of his head. ‘Is more than I can stand. I don’t need another one. I hope I never
see Sheol. If it even exists.’

I ground the heels of my hands into my eyes. ‘
That
wasn’t Eve, was it?’

It had felt different, and I couldn’t explain, how I’d known immediately.

Jordan ruffled the ends of my ponytail, trying to keep his voice light. ‘No,’ he
replied. ‘It wasn’t.’

‘Then let’s get out of here,’ I begged, pulling him out of the room I vowed to never
willingly enter again.

Behind me, I heard Jordan hook up the fallen plastic bag before saying, almost apologetically,
‘For us, the extracts act as a kind of protective amulet or armour when worn on the
skin. If I touch certain symbols, read them in a certain order, I can keep most of
it—
them
—out. It has something to do with channelling the memory of intense pain.
Daughtry said you weave it about you like a net they can’t reach through. Set them
from you, set them back, he always says, with natural magic and pain and they will
have to abide by your decision
not
to act on their behalf. Your pain will always
more than equal theirs because yours exists in the realm of living memory. That is,
unless your guard is down—the way mine was, with you.’

‘Hey,
hey
,’ I said, glancing sharply at him as we stopped short outside my closed
bedroom door. ‘You can’t be blaming
me
for Eve? She’s a freaking force of nature.
And that “net” of yours didn’t keep that
thing
from trying for
me
.’

My hands rose to the base of my throat involuntarily at the memory of fleshless,
weightless fingers.

Jordan dropped the plastic bag and grasped my hands,
reeling me in closer to his
body. ‘What can I say?’ His smile was crooked. ‘They’re opportunistic.’

‘Opportunistic?’ I wailed, pulling free. ‘I wish you hadn’t told me. It was better
not knowing.’

‘See what I mean about knowledge?’ Jordan replied. ‘But, anyway, he’s benign. He
just doesn’t like the poker machines you’ve installed in the Sports Bar. The noise…
bothers him. And the floor is his way of telling you that. That, and he’s not going
anywhere any time soon. He likes it here. He died decades ago, right in that very
room. But he loved the place so much, he never left.’

I froze in the act of reaching for the door handle. ‘He’s
dead
, Jordan. He’s not
supposed to have opinions.’

‘The floor’s only going to get worse unless you do something,’ Jordan added helpfully.
‘Just saying.’

I glared at him. ‘I can change the fit out of the Sports Bar about as much as I can
change my bra size,’ I snapped before my brain caught up with my mouth. ‘And you
bloody well know it. Gran hates the things, but we only just put them in and it’s
our livelihood we’re talking about and
we have to survive somehow
.’

Now I was channelling my own grandmother. Things couldn’t get any better.

Jordan’s eyes glinted down into mine in amusement as he leant against my bedroom
door, his rangy leather-clad torso framed by my rampaging glitter sticker collection.
I
swore to myself I would remove every stupid, shiny thing before the week was through,
even if it meant breaking every one of my fingernails.

The heaviness in my chest returned as Jordan continued to hold my gaze.

‘Marshmallows like you don’t stand a chance,’ he grinned suddenly and it was like
a bolt of electricity hearing him refer to me the same way Mum used to.

‘So it’s lucky you’ve got me.’

It was so far away from the truth, I looked away, hurt.

‘You can go now,’ I said, staring at my feet. ‘I’ll let you know what I find—if and
when.’

Jordan lifted my chin so that I was forced to look into his eyes.

‘You’re doing it again,’ he chided, ‘and I meant what I said as a compliment. Eve
really must have been something when she was alive. She must have been some kind
of nuclear-powered bitch who specialised in getting her own way. It still comes through,
you know, that
can’t-take-no
part of her. To me, they’re like…bars on a light spectrum,
some are so faded and pale they’re easy to ignore. Press the symbols and they’re
gone, dismissed. But she’s fierce, Eve, white-hot. Sometimes, when she’s showing
me something she thinks I need to see, I forget she isn’t a real person anymore.
Someone as soft-hearted as you
needs
a watchdog. That’s all I’m saying.’

‘Can I go now?’ I pleaded.

Jordan shocked me by shaking his head.

‘She
did
use you to get to me,’ he insisted quietly. ‘There’s always background noise
around me, things I see out of the side of my eye that shouldn’t be there, odours
that persist when they shouldn’t, things I know before I should even know about them
at all. As soon as I was forced to look at you, really look, I could see her, too.
That’s what she wanted. But I resisted for as long as I could…’

‘Yeah,’ I said, miserable, ‘because I’m so resistible, I get it.
I get it
.’

Feeling betrayed, I yanked on the door handle, placing my body in the widening gap.
‘I’m here now, I’m “safe”,’ I said, face burning, ‘so take your misguided sense of
chivalry, Jordan, and go. I’m perfectly capable of finding Carter Kelly on my own.
I work better solo. I have
form
.’

I tried to shut the door in his face, a half-sob caught high in my throat, but Jordan’s
right hand shot out and held me in place.

‘
My guard was down
,’ he growled, ‘because every disembodied spirit from here to
Kingdom Come seems to know you’re my weak spot, Sophie Teague. I was never going
to do anything about it because what would have been the point? My last girlfriend,
let’s see, two schools back, tried to stage an intervention that involved several
extended family members, a lay priest, a large wooden club and rolls and
rolls of
cling film. I declined to press charges in the end. But there you have it, now you
know.’

My mouth was doing that falling-open thing again, until I realised, and shut it with
an audible snap of teeth.

‘I
want
to be here,’ Jordan said. ‘I didn’t at first, you’ve got me there, but now
I do. I’d resigned myself, don’t you see? I didn’t see a way to be
like this
’—he
gestured roughly at himself—‘and still be with somebody else. But now I’m officially
un-resigning.
You didn’t run away
. That’s what Eve saw in you, too. I’m not normal
but neither are you! If I had to be stuck working errands for a pushy dead woman,
you’d be the one I’d want on my side. You’ve proven yourself over and over. You’re
gold. You’ve been
unreal
, I don’t think you realise how much.’

He pulled me into him and I could feel my bedroom door swing open behind me the same
way something inside my head seemed to be shifting to let the light in.

‘Since you came to Ivy Street you’re the first person I look for, every morning,
did you know that?’ His voice was strangely urgent. ‘Even if it’s just a glimpse
of your bright hair, drifting past. And I always told myself I’d talk to you one
day, but then the side of me that believes in sense and logic would talk me right
back out of it, because how would it be fair to inflict
me
on someone? It’s never
going to go away. The weirdness. Not ever. Not until I die. Daughtry says so. You
don’t choose this, you’re born with
it and you just learn to…cope. The more you see
them,
the more you see them
, Soph. It’s not a “gift”. It’s the worst kind of curse.’

Jordan made a hiccupping sound that I realised was forlorn laughter.

‘When I can’t cope’—he looked down and flexed his partially inked right arm—‘I just
get more of these. Soon I’m going to run out of space.’

It was maybe the most Jordan Haig had ever said to me, or anyone, in a single go,
in his entire life.

But when I still didn’t reply, mainly because I couldn’t find any words, he muttered,
‘I noticed you the minute you walked into our form room. You were so tall and pale
that the sun seemed to be shining
through
you. But you were too busy looking for
crumbs of kindness from all those try-hard morons to even make eye-contact and then
the pattern was set. It was me and Hendo and Seamus versus everyone else. It’s like
we’re ring-fenced by electricity. Everyone treats us like we’re freaks.’