Dead Bad Things (34 page)

  "Come on," said Sarah. "Let's get you settled in and I'll pour us a drink."

  I nodded and followed her along the hallway and into the lounge.

  Sarah poured us both whiskies – large glasses, filled almost to the halfway point. It was a bit too early for that kind of drinking, but I took it anyway. I needed the help to bring my emotions under control. The visit to Tebbit's bedside had affected me more than I'd expected. I'd known the man for long enough to call him a close friend – perhaps my only friend – and it hurt to see him like that, unconscious in a single bed and connected to machines.

  I'd known for a long time that Tebbit was meant to die of his brain tumour. His wife's silent ghost had shown it to me, a bizarre kind of mime performed to let me know the manner of his demise. She was there in the room when I'd arrived, standing at his side and staring down at him. That's why I'd been standing against the wall when Sarah walked in, watching and waiting for Tebbit's beautiful guardian to allow me the space to approach him. Despite being in a coma, he'd known that his wife was there. I could tell by the way she was smiling, and the tenderness with which she touched his pale, slack skin.

  She had been there to guide him. All she had to do was wait for him to slip away and join her.

  Would my loved ones do the same when it was finally my time to leave? Was that when I'd see them again, my beloved wife and daughter? The thought had crossed my mind too many times over the years, but I was too afraid to test the theory. What if I killed myself and they didn't come? That would be the worst horror of all: taking my own life to find that I was alone on the other side of the curtain, and doomed to continue my search beyond the confines of the reality I had left behind.

  No; that was not the way I wanted to go. I'd been close to ending things on several occasions – one of which was soon after I'd arrived in the grey zone in Plaistow. But I was stronger than I thought, and had not yet weakened enough to take that most desperate of paths. I would survive; I would endure. It was what I did.

  When my time came I would go with grace, but until then I had to rage against the dying of the light and use what I had to help others come to terms with their own transition from one reality to another.

  
The dying of the light
: Dylan Thomas. He was another man who knew more than he had ever let on, other than between the lines of his work.

  Sarah and I sipped our drinks, staring at each other, conscious of the space between us. It was not the literal space inside the room, but the gulf that sat between us in another sense: the terrible distance created by what we didn't know about each other and the situation in which we found ourselves.

  "You mentioned your father – or, more precisely, the fact that he wasn't your father." It felt like a dance. We had to perform the right moves to prevent us from falling on our backsides and spoiling the routine.

  "Yes. That's right. I don't know if you knew Emerson Doherty, but he was well-respected on the police force."

  I nodded. "Yes, I met him a few times. I can't say that I knew him exactly, or that I liked him, but we came across each other occasionally during the course of my work with Tebbit and others. I got the sense that he didn't like me at all, and he certainly wasn't happy with the reasons I was helping out the police."

  Sarah put down her glass on the floor next to her chair. "Yes, for a supposedly religious man he was very mean and closedminded regarding the idea of belief. It was a case of his way or no way at all. He was even like that here at home – more than he was elsewhere, if I'm honest. He… he wasn't a nice man." Her lips were pale. Her face looked drained of blood.

  "What did he do, Sarah?"

  She blinked and it looked like she was fighting back tears. "I keep seeing him. Is he here? Can you sense him, I mean? Is he in the house?"

  "I think so." I closed my eyes and waited. Something moved downstairs, under the floor. In the cellar? I didn't hear anything, not really: it was more like I sensed movement down there, in the darkness. "He's under here." I pointed at the floor.

  "That was his office space," said Sarah. She looked down at the floor. "He was down there yesterday, when I found his secret stuff. I was looking through his things, rooting around for information, and he was watching me."

  I leaned forward in the chair. "Did you see him, Sarah?"

  She nodded again. "Almost… yes, I think it was more like a glimpse of him. He was there, I know he was there. He wanted me to find something."

  The words of the disabled Rwandan psychic came back to me:
You cannot help. She is lost to you…
I remembered her bloodied body on the floor, and the small girl who sat on her chest, eating, eating, partaking of her damaged flesh.

  "What else, Sarah? What else have you found out?"

  When she looked at me her eyes were moist, shining. Her cheeks were lily-white. "He used to kill children. He said that an angel taught him how to see the evil inside them, to see the terrible adults they would grow up to be. So he took them and he drilled holes in their heads. He used an old trepanning device to… to let the dead bad things out."

  The room seemed to be spinning, but slowly; it was a fairground ride I was unable to get off. "Are you sure?"

  "Yes. There's no doubt, it was him. He even left messages on his mix tapes, between the songs. It was as if he needed to speak to somebody but could only trust himself, so he put it down on the recordings. The thing is, it's happening again. I found the body of a kid in a dentist's chair, and then two more were found in Roundhay Park. All killed the same way. All with holes drilled in their heads. To let them out – the dead bad things Emerson claimed to have seen inside them. That was one of his phrases: dead bad things. It was his favourite way of describing human evil, the general badness he thought was buried deep in the soul of humanity."

  The room was still moving, and I had to adjust myself to the slow-spin of its motion. It felt like we were moving towards something, a home truth or a fundamental piece of whatever puzzle we were locked into. "Do you think his ghost is killing the children? In all the time I've been mingling with the dead, I've not known many of them do that. Not to kill the living. I've known plenty of spirits who've manipulated people into doing it for them, but only a handful who've done it themselves, with their own dead hands. Not ghosts. They don't really like to operate like that. Other things, yes, but rarely the spirits of the dead."

  Sarah stood and paced the room. She kept sticking her hands in her pockets and taking them back out again, unable to settle upon a comfortable position. "I don't know, Thomas. None of this makes any sense. I never used to believe in ghosts, but now I don't know what I believe in. If I'm honest, I'm struggling to believe in anything right now."

  "Just relax. We'll find out what's going on here, I promise. I think your situation is linked with mine. We were supposed to meet and have this conversation. Even he's gone quiet." I nodded towards the floor.

  "OK." Sarah stopped moving. She stood with her back against a book case. "You're right. This feels like it was waiting to happen – like we've both been moving towards this point. I think we can help each other somehow." She ran a hand through her hair. Smiled sadly but tenderly. "Listen, do you mind if I have a quick shower? After that I'll show you your room and we can get some food sorted. I'm tired. I feel dirty. I just need to get clean."

  I raised a hand and waved her away. "No, please, you go and do whatever you need to do. Don't worry about me. I'll just enjoy this fine whisky and wait for you." I smiled, lifted my glass in a small salute.

  "Thanks, Thomas. I won't keep you long. Just make yourself at home and feel free to have a wander, use the phone. Anything you like." Her smile was faint, and she shuffled out of the door looking drawn and tired. The room finally stopped spinning. It was time to get off the ride, and probably hop right onto another one. That's the thing with fairgrounds: there's always another ride to grab your attention.

  I had no doubt now that Sarah was the one both Immaculee Karuhmbi and the clockwork voice had warned me about. The real question was: why had they been so determined to keep me away from her, and from the city I called home?

  The strange sounds and images in the Pilgrim Products warehouse haunted my mind: hanging, severed doll parts; the man with the bellows, working so hard to produce so very little; the hollowed out papier mâché elephant and its wizened inhabitant; the incessant wail of a crying baby; the sight of myself in that haphazard mirror; the contradictory message
Go Home
appearing on the glass.

  I wish I knew what it all meant, but the truth was I'd probably never find out.

  Before I knew it Ellen had come back into the room… but no, it wasn't Ellen, was it? Ellen was gone. She'd been gone for a long time. It was Sarah. Sarah had come back into the room. She had a white towel wrapped around her head to dry her hair and was wearing a tight white muscle vest and a pair of cut off denim shorts. She looked young and sweet and pretty and athletic, and I couldn't help but smile.

  "What?" she said, clearly much more relaxed. "What is it?"

  "Sorry, was I staring?"

  She was still smiling. "Just a bit, Thomas. You old pervert."

  I laughed. It felt good; it felt real. "It's just that you remind me of someone. Just there, the way you walked into the room, you were the double of her."

  "Tell me who?"

  I hadn't realised until now, but she did look like her. "An old friend of mine. Ellen Lang. She's dead now, but she was a wonderful woman. For a minute there, you looked just like her. I had a little flashback to better times."

  "I'll take that as a compliment." She took the towel from her head, rubbing at her brown hair, and turned to close the door. That's when I saw it: the tattoo.

  The room started spinning again. I was back on that same ride, the one I wanted so desperately to get off.

  I stared at Sarah's back, between her shoulder blades. It had been done in Old English lettering, and was small enough to fit between her jutting bones.

  I stared and I stared and I tried not to see. I wanted the words to vanish.

  But they didn't.

  The words stayed right where they were, taunting me with significance.

  Even when I closed my eyes I could see them. The words were burned onto the backs of my eyelids.

  
Memento mori.

  A Latin phrase: a terrible reminder of my own mortality. And now of Sarah's, too.

  I remembered the hanged girls, the burning tree, the Pilgrim in his weird domain between realities, stalking the alleyways of night and hatching his unfathomable plans. He had followed me my entire life and he was following me still, even here, even now. No matter how fast I ran or how far I went, he always tracked me down. His influence was like a stain, a mark, a blemish. It would not wash off.

  The Pilgrim was back – in fact, he had never really gone away.

  "Where did you get that tattoo?" I heard myself speak but I could not feel my lips forming the words.

  "Sorry?" Sarah turned around to face me. She had Ellen's eyes. Ellen's arms. Ellen's smile. Why had I not noticed that before? The smile: it was Ellen's. And it was beautiful.

  "Your tattoo."

  "Oh, I've had that since I was about sixteen. Got it done in town." She was rubbing her hair dry with the towel, rubbing it out, rubbing it away. But some things you can never wash out.

  "Do you know what it means?"

  She smiled, nodded. "Yes, it's a reminder of all our deaths. Some day, and sooner than you might think, we are all going to die. I was going through a bit of a miserablist phase; it seemed like a good idea at the time." Still she was smiling. She had no clue; she didn't know what it meant, not any of it.

  I put down my drink and stood, pulling my shirt out of the waist of my trousers. I stared at Sarah, at her lovely, familiar blue eyes, and I wished that I could tell her what was going on. I didn't know myself, not really: all I had to work with was a kind of gut instinct, a deep, vague feeling of unease that wouldn't shift.

  I pulled the hem of my shirt out of my waistband and I lifted it over my stomach, exposing the faint scar. The marks left by my last encounter with the Pilgrim. You could barely see it, unless you knew it was there. A light embossment made by hot ash: a not-so-gentle reminder. I tilted my body into the light, hoping that she could make it out and at the same time praying that she couldn't. "Do you see?"

  Sarah walked slowly across the room, stopping when she was right in front of me. The smile had slipped. There was nothing beneath. She had not taken her eyes off my face as she approached me, but now she looked down, unblinking, at my belly. I felt her hand as it traced the outline of the scar, the shapes of the words, and then I watched her lips as she spoke the phrase out loud:

  "
Memento mori."

 

 

 

 

 
 
 

Sarah woke up in the dark. The room felt smaller somehow than it ever had done before, as if the walls and the furniture had crept towards her as she slept, stalking her like prey. The old single bed was uncomfortable; its old-fashioned sprung mattress was way past its sell-by date and it hurt her back to use. She had given the guest bedroom to Usher and moved into her old room. This bed was the same one she'd slept in as a child, waiting for Emerson to enter her room and watch her, or to take out the scalpel and cut her legs.