Dead Bad Things (31 page)

  Benson tensed for a moment, as if he was considering rushing her, but then he relaxed again and held out his hands, the palms facing forward. "OK, OK. I'm leaving. I'll call you later, when you've had a chance to calm down."

  "Don't bother. Just go. Don't come back. Don't ever come back."

  Benson walked backwards and she followed him, using the threat of the handgun to force him out into the hall and to the front door. He fumbled behind his back and opened the door, then stumbled out onto the front steps, almost falling down them. "We really should talk about this some more."

  Sarah shook her head. She forced a smile. "Piss off, Benson, you scar-faced prick." Then, moving purposefully, she slammed the door in his face and slid the bolt into the frame.

  She gripped the handle of the gun, wishing that she had some bullets. If Benson had called her bluff, he would probably have overpowered her in less than a minute. She fell against the wall and slumped to her knees, dry-heaving, tears burning her eyes.

  Then, when she had herself under control, she walked around the house and checked that all the doors and windows were locked. When she looked out at the street from an upper window, she saw Benson standing on the corner watching the house. He stayed there for an hour, not moving as much as a few feet from the same spot, and then he walked away when finally it started to rain.

  When Sarah went to bed she was unable to sleep. She kept the gun under her pillow, just in case. Even though it was unloaded, its presence made her feel safe. She was desperate for help but there was nobody she could turn to, not one person in the world she could trust – apart from DI Tebbit, who was currently lying comatose in a hospital bed at Leeds General Infirmary.

  There was no one else. He was the only one. The only person she could go to.

  It seemed like the ultimate irony that the only man who could help her was so close to death that he was barely even present in the world. He was as much a phantom as the man who had falsely brought her up as his daughter; just another phantom in the vast ghost-house of her life.

 

 

 

 

 
 
 

Trevor was crying. He tried to hide it from the boy – the boy who wasn't Michael, but who was trying so very hard to be him. He closed his eyes and whispered his brother's name: a chant, a litany, a prayer meant to summon his essence.

  "Michael, Michael, oh, Michael…"

  But the incantation wasn't working. The boy's body was different; it was bonier, less supple than Michael's had ever been. The meat was too loose on his bones and his skin smelled like vanilla. Michael had never smelled of vanilla. He had stunk of terror, and Trevor was finally acknowledging the fact that Michael's terror was the thing that had aroused him more than anything. Not his unquestioning love, despite what his older brother did to him, or his silent acquiescence. No, it was his fear, always his fear.

  In that moment Trevor hated himself more than he had ever thought possible. He hated Michael, too, for being so beautiful and so afraid and so willing to let himself be used. He hated the world. And most of all, he hated Thomas Usher, the man who had finally forced him to face his own grinning demons.

  The boy lay beneath him, loose and unflinching. His arms were positioned straight down by his sides on the bed and his face was turned to the side, away from Trevor. The boy's legs were splayed apart on the mattress, and Trevor was slotted between his skinny thighs. He was turgid; he could not get hard. The ability to perform the act he most desired had deserted him.

  He had lost it all. Michael had taken it with him when he died.

  "I'm sorry, Michael… but I'm not sorry. Not really."

  The boy shivered.

  "You never really loved me. Not the way I loved you."

  The boy whimpered softly, trying to bite back the sound but unable to stop it from issuing between his clenched teeth.

  "I love you and I hate you and I want you and I need you and I
never want to want you again
…" Trevor felt his sense of reality sliding away, like the rotten flesh from a corpse. Madness began to leak through the cracks in his skull. He had always been aware that insanity lay on the other side of a thin crust of scar tissue, but it was only now that he realised how close it really was. So near that he could almost reach out and touch it.

  Perhaps madness was the answer. If he were insane, the appearance of the Pilgrim in his bedroom mirror might make perfect sense. And what was madness anyway but a different way of seeing things? It was just a small shift in perspective, allowing you to view reality from another angle, like looking into a room through a window you had never noticed before – a canted window with a twisted frame and stained glass. Or a dark mirror containing a beckoning, hairless figure.

  He shifted his weight, pinning the boy down. He tried to make it work, he tried so very hard, but in the end all he could manage was a limp shudder and an empty moan. That was it: all he had.

  Trevor got up off the bed and stared down at the boy. He was only half naked. Trevor pulled up his trousers and kept his eyes on the boy's pale belly. He imagined sinking his fingers into that soft flesh, piercing through the thin layer of tissue, and grasping whatever he found there. Ripping it out and throwing it on the floor, then stamping on it.

  "Useless," he said, not knowing if he meant himself or the boy on the bed. "Fucking pathetic." He kept staring at the boy, wondering what he should do. He was paying for this – a lot of money – so he demanded satisfaction of some kind, any kind. He just wanted to feel better than he did right now.

  "What next?" The voice was soft, a gentle burring sound. It was more like several voices in one, all saying the same thing at exactly the same time.

  Trevor turned around in the small cell and looked through the bars. The boy from the other cell – the one who had been staring at him – was standing there on the other side, his face a blank mask.

  "Who are you?" Trevor shifted closer to the bed. His leg brushed against the boy's dangling arm. Finally, and much too late, he became aroused.

  "Who are We?" The other boy did not move. He kept staring at Trevor through the gaps in the bars. "Who. Are. We."

  "I didn't do anything. I couldn't." Trevor was scared but he didn't know why. This pale, calm, utterly empty boy terrified him. "I couldn't. I'm not able, not anymore."

  "Who is Michael?" The boy pushed his face forward, closer to the bars.

  "Somebody I loved." Trevor realised that he was crying. He raised his left hand to his face and wiped away the tears, rubbing his wet fingertips together. "Somebody I loved more than I could ever love myself." And wasn't that the truth, the real and only truth? Only now, confronted by something slightly unreal, could he admit to himself how he really felt. How he had always felt. About Michael. About himself. His brother had contained all the good, even Trevor's share; and he had wanted to possess that goodness so much that all he could think to do was rape it.

  "Where is the lost one?" The boy took a step forward and the bars of the cell buckled slightly, as if some invisible force were pushing them inward.

  "I… I don't know what you mean." Trevor's hands were shaking.

  "Oh, but you do. It's written all over your design, like a map to a place We have never seen before. You need to show Us how to get there, to him."

  Trevor's legs were shaking. His joints failed and he dropped to his knees, as if worshipping the boy. "Please. I don't know what you're talking about."

  "The lost one," said the boy. And the bars of the cell began to bend, curving like bows. Then, as Trevor watched, they twisted and sagged and created an opening large enough for the boy to step through.

  "Leave me alone. I haven't done anything." Before the arrival of the Pilgrim, the sight of the bars turning to rubber and the boy approaching him might have destroyed Trevor's sanity. But now, after everything else that he had experienced, he simply accepted what was happening.

  The Pilgrim. Was that it? Did the boy mean the Pilgrim?

  "I know where he is." Trevor shuffled backwards on his knees. The boy on the bed remained motionless, staring at the wall. Perhaps he had retreated inside himself, or had passed out from the shock of the events going on around him.

  "Take Us there." The boy tried to smile. His lips twitched like scraps of meat. His eyes were flat, like old coins. His hair was in disarray and matted with dried blood, and now that he was close Trevor could see that there were small, round wounds in his skull.

  "I will. I'll take you to the Pilgrim." Trevor was practically begging for mercy. He would have told this weird boy anything to be spared. Despite the boy's slight build and tender years, he had about him an aura of raw power. Jagged energy bristled in the air, like the electricity gathering before a storm.

  "What the fuck's going on?" Sammy Newsome – poor, dumb Sammy Newsome, the terrible mother hen – had returned to the Roost. "Fuckin hell!"

  The boy turned around in a single swift motion, as if he barely needed to flex a muscle. He moved like water, or like air. Instantly.

  Sammy was standing by the desk with the monitors. His mouth was open and his hair was hanging loose from his ponytail. His wobbly cheeks were pink. His eyes were wide. His friend Don stood slightly behind him, holding a baseball bat and breathing heavily.

  "Run," said Trevor, but nobody heard. It was too late for running anyway.

  "Get back in your cell." Sammy was grinning but he looked unsure. This wasn't mean to happen: the boys never disobeyed him.

  Don stepped out from behind Sammy's bulk. He hefted the bat. "Do as he says."

  The small boy lifted his hand. It moved perhaps three or four inches, nothing more.

  Don stopped dead in his tracks. The right side of his face bowed inward, as if some massive pressure had struck him there. One eye popped from the socket and hung down his cheek. He opened his lips but before he had the chance to scream his mouth caved in, the teeth shattering in a fine spray of powdered porcelain that clouded before his wide, disbelieving eyes.

  Sammy, noticing what was happening to his friend, began to scream. The boys in the cells joined in, a deafening chorus of horror.

  The pale boy, still standing in the same spot, twitched his hand again. This time the movement was more pronounced, as if he were swatting at an annoying fly.

  Don's head imploded instantly. One second it was still recognisably a head, if a little battered, the next it was a fist of crushed flesh and bone bobbling on his tattooed neck. His body slumped to the floor, his legs kicking meaninglessly against the stone.

  "
Noooooo….
" Sammy tried to run. It was the last thing he ever did of his own volition.

  Trevor wanted to look away, he really did, but he was unable to turn his head or close his eyes. He had to watch: there was no choice now but to see how this all played out.

  Sammy's legs went first, his trouser legs seeming to knot and tremble as the flesh beneath tore from the bone. He fell forward, onto his face, and then turned onto his back as he bucked in agony. He was still screaming. His elbows shattered and his forearms went jack-knifing across the room. Then his ankles and kneecaps did the same. One foot remained where it was, detached from the limb; the other one shot off and hit the wall with an audible wet thump.

  Trevor realised that he was screaming too. He had joined in the song.

  Sammy's body was changing shape as his bones jinked and popped out of joint. It looked like he was being kicked by unseen feet; his flesh dented and rippled. His face had become concave. Trevor was reminded of an old WWI photograph he'd once seen in a magazine, of a man who'd taken a shell full in the face. The front of his head had vaporised, leaving behind a sort of bowl of healed flesh.

  Sammy's Newsome's face had done the same, as if a huge boulder had been dropped from a great height and mashed his features into an awful half-moon.

  There was no blood yet, just evidence of massive trauma. The man's large body was taking so much abuse that his skin began to tear. At first the wounds were dry, but then his insides started to leak out, and a pool of thick red fluid pooled around him. His flailing body transformed the bloodstain into the shape of wings, like a child making a snow angel on the ground after a heavy snowfall.

  He had stopped making a noise. His mouth was fused shut, the lips pummelled so hard that there was no longer an orifice to scream through.

  Trevor vomited down the front of his gold jacket, but he barely even noticed. The first thing he was aware of was the smell, but that was soon covered up by the stench of Sammy Newsome voiding his bowels on the cold basement floor.

  The rest of it didn't go on too long. Soon there was nothing but a mound of compressed flesh and bone on the floor, next to a headless corpse. Trevor watched as all of these human remains slowly curled up, like slugs coated with salt, and before long all that remained was a series of dark stains on the grey floor of the tawdry basement room.

  The boys were no longer screaming. They all cowered in their cells, too afraid to even move in case they drew attention to themselves.

  "What did you do?" Trevor could barely believe he was asking the question. He didn't want to know. He didn't care, just as long as it didn't happen to him.

  The boy turned to face him. His face was smooth, pale, and he wasn't even perspiring after all that mental exertion. Because it had indeed been a mental force he'd set upon the two men, rather than anything of physical origin.