White and Other Tales of Ruin (22 page)

I fled the stares and snickers and found myself in an old preserved side-street, the cobbles shining with evening dampness. The gutters overflowed with litter, a drunk lay sleeping in a puddle of piss and vomit. I was way off the beaten track. Perhaps I’d been aiming here all along.

Nestled between the rear entrance of a smoke-filled pub’ and an unknown Chinese restaurant stood a door. It was clean and freshly painted, so out of place. A sign hung above it, looking so perfect, so appropriate, that I knew it was placed there just for me. The flush of warmth and peace mimicked what I would have felt had I found Laura herself, and for a few seconds I was sure,
certain
that everything was not
going
to be alright …. it already
was
.

Hell
, it read.
Calmed if you enter, damned if you don’t
.

The door opened on frictionless hinges. The ground shifted beneath my feet to carry me into the room, and I felt as if I was flying towards my fate. I did nothing to prevent it. I was not afraid. I’d heard about Hell from drunken friends at the tail-end of parties and strangers in airports, and I knew it was the place for me. I needed a dose of misfortune. Things were bad for me, but so much worse for so many other people. I needed to be told this for sure.

I needed to
see
.

The room was certainly not what I’d expected, but I guessed as I entered that it was merely one of many portals into Hell. It was small, certainly not much larger than the average living room, with several chairs lining one wall and a huge holo-image projected against the wall opposite. It did not move, but it didn’t need to. It depicted a scene I remembered from my days as a teenager, a time when wars raged and the camps had just been discovered in North Africa. This image was taken from one of them. Dry desert. A few stick figures in the foreground, their skin as yellow as the sand, their eyes as dead. And in the background, like some false forest sprouting from the hot desert wastes, hundreds of stakes holding their dead offerings aloft. Desert wildlife, unused to such a proliferation of free food, had made its home amongst the bodies. Lizards fed on the coagulated blood at the bases of the stakes, while scorpions, beetles and flies feasted on the more recent dead. And the eyes of the wandering stick figures in the foreground… when I’d first seen this image twenty years before, I remembered thinking that they looked like they wanted to die. Now, seeing again, I knew how wrong I’d been. These people wanted to much to have never lived at all.

“
Bet you’re glad you weren’t there.”

I spun around and was confronted by the most sensationally attractive woman I had ever seen. I hate to use to term ‘unnatural beauty’ — even then the phrase circled my consciousness like a ghost, too dangerous, too unknown to admit to — but if her beauty were natural, then the world was indeed a wonderful place.

“
Er…” I said, glancing at the holo, then back to the woman.

“
They were killed like that for their beliefs,” she said, face growing serious, her emerald-green eyes darkening as though she were seeing the scene for the first time. “There wasn’t enough wood to make full crosses, not enough nails to hold them up, so they sharpened the ends of the poles and set the people on them. Into their anuses to begin with, then as the killings went on the murderers became more experimental. One man was found weeks later with the spike through his lower jaw, protruding from his mouth. They say he died of dehydration and heat-stroke, his skin flayed by the sun, eyes removed by wandering carrion.” The woman looked at me again as if daring me to challenge what she had said. “Women suffered particularly terrible fates.”

I could say nothing.

She smiled gently, and even the lightest touch lit up her whole face. “But that was a long time ago, and it’s the here and now you’re concerned with, yes?”

I nodded. I felt crazily controlled by this woman, as if she was a teacher and I a young, snotty-nosed pupil. She turned and walked back to the comfortable chair she had been sitting in when I entered. It was a rocking chair, a small table beside it with a cup of steaming tea and a half read book lying face down.

“
I need you,” I said. The intention was not sexual and she seemed to know that. My desperation was welling, the idea that I was nearer than I had ever thought possible — always, inside, was the niggling fear that Hell was just a myth, an urban legend — almost bringing me to tears. There was no shame behind my need, simply the knowledge that something had to be done. Right then, I was not prepared to go mad.

She stared up into my eyes. It felt as if she was viewing my soul, bare and helpless before her.

“
Oh God, yes,” she said. “Yes you do.” She smiled again and asked me to take a seat.

I looked around as I crossed to the chairs. There was a tall rubber plant in one corner with pale spots on its leaves and dried roots showing through the powdery soil. There were more important things, I supposed. The gruesome holo of the impalings was the only hint at decoration. The chairs were comfortable-looking but functional, no ostentation here, no grand entrance to Hell. Simply a waiting room, and a woman whose like I would never see again.

I turned around, smiled at her and sat down.

The smile froze for an instant as I felt a stab in my left buttock. The woman’s calm expression did not change. She picked up her book, still smiling, and took a sip of tea. The room faded, seeming to dissolve away from me, the woman’s gentle smile remaining in my vision like a Cheshire Cat grin, and I imagined her whispering in my ear
I thought it would
. I tried to stand to see what had stung me, but before I could rise from the seat I found myself somewhere else entirely.

There
.

A quiet suburban street. Cars parked along the side of the road, gardens well-maintained, privet hedges trimmed. The houses were all freshly painted, roofs newly tiled, lawns lush with grass of a constant length.

I was in a bus or coach, my seat so comfortable that it must have moulded to my form. The air in the coach was of a perfect temperature and humidity. On a small table in front of me sat several bottles of water, wine and beer, and three packed meals, red self-heating lights all glowing. The lighting was at an optimum level, and although it seemed that the sun shone brightly outside, the windows filtered the glare. It was perfect.

Glancing down, I saw that I was firmly strapped into my seat.

Be glad you don’t live here
, a voice whispered, so intimate that it felt as though it originated inside my head.

I looked outside again and nothing was wrong. Kids played along the pavement, parents chatted over fences or washed cars or cut lawns, a family cycled along the street, passing so close to my window that I could see a shaving-cut on the father’s face. They seemed not to notice us. It was so silent inside the coach — if there were other passengers, their attention was concentrated on what was happening outside — that a sense of foreboding built rapidly, a feeling that nothing could be right with a scene that looked so perfect. Something bad was coming. It
had
to be. We were, after all, in Hell.

My breathing quickened and I almost went to rap on the window, but then I remembered where I was and why. I’d come because I wanted to see things like this. I needed to know that my life wasn’t so bad after all.

There’s no such thing as perfect
, the voice purred, soft, androgynous, a tickle in my ear.

And then the madman came.

It only took a couple of minutes from beginning to end. Our coach moved silently to one side to allow the high-powered car to roar past, scream into a skid and mount the pavement.
A
toddler disappeared beneath its front bumper and re-emerged as a red streak on the pavement, baseball cap fluttering in the car’s slipstream like a wounded butterfly. A bigger kid went flying, parting company with his bike and spinning through the air, blood spiraling as it caught the calm afternoon sun.

I saw a parent open their mouth and heard the scream, and I thought
at least Laura’s still alive, somewhere
.

The car struck a garden wall and the driver tumbled out … and then the true terror of what we were about to see became apparent.

He had guns. Slung around his neck, a belt dangled hand grenades like poisoned apples, full of death. A knife gleamed in his belt. His face was grim and spattered with blood, as if this was just another stop in a slew of mayhem, and I saw that he had a good haircut, manicured nails, a fake tan. I wondered what had driven him to this.

The madman stepped in a soft, red, wet mess next to his car. He wiped his foot slowly and carefully on a clump of grass. And then he opened fire.

I ducked, but the coach seemed to be beyond his sight. He swung the guns around, left, right, left again, then dropped one and plucked a grenade from the belt. People tumbled, sagged, screamed, shoved themselves under cars and behind doors with shattered legs, tried to catch their blood. Sounds and colours combined, the bloody red roar of rifle fire, the black explosions of grenades, the glinting screams of agony as windows burst out and glass lacerated, crumpled brick brained, fire rolled and added to itself.

Overhead, storm clouds had gathered from out of nowhere, and lightning forked down beyond the street. High up I saw a passenger plane struck and begin a slow, terrible roll towards earth.

Our coach pulled away quickly, leaving the scene of devastation behind. I should have been shocked, but there was only relief.

Be glad you didn’t live there
, the voice whispered again. A woman across the aisle smiled softly to herself, and I knew that everyone was being spoken to.

“
Where are we?” I shouted. The woman frowned at me as if I was disturbing the climax of a particularly moving opera. “Where
are
we?” But I knew. I think it was just panic.

“
Shut up,” said a soft voice from the seat in front of me. I could not see the person speaking. The straps did not allow any intermingling.

“
But is all that supposed to help?” I said. I turned to the woman, feeling the need for eye contact, but she had averted her gaze. It was dark outside now and there was a definite sense of movement, but the windows gave no reflection. Unless she chose to look at me I may as well have been talking to myself. “Seeing those people shot,” I continued, “murdered in cold blood, and that plane falling from the sky, who knows what the passengers were thinking? How can that help, all that pain —”

“
It helps because you’ve never felt it,” the man in front said. His voice was still low but it carried, bearing authority and experience and a weariness I had never encountered before. I wondered how long he had been here. The certainty that it was forever sent me cold. “Be glad.”

“
Glad?” I said, but nobody answered. I already knew what he meant. I tried looking from the window instead, and right then I’d have given anything to be able to see my reflection. It was light inside the coach but the windows were a matt black, offering me no glimpse of how my eyes had changed over the past few minutes. First I had been in the waiting room and now I was here, and whatever had happened in between was lost time. Perhaps I’d been drugged.

“
Were you drugged?” I asked the woman across the aisle.

She turned to me and I saw for the first time how striking and wretched she was. I had never thought to find beauty in sorrow, but her hooded eyes and down-turned mouth, the sallowness of her brown skin and her lank black hair … I found it all so alluring. Perhaps because I saw a reflection of myself at last.

“
My son was drugged,” she said.

“
He’s on here too?” I looked around, straining against my straps to see if there was someone else with this woman’s eyes. But however hard I tried I could see no one else, only the grey tuft of hair rising just above the seat before me. It wavered in an unseen breeze.

“
No, he’s dead,” she said. I thought she smiled, but it was a grimace preceding an outpouring of tears. “They took him from school and gave him drugs, fed him them like they were candy, made him an addict and made him dependent. He couldn’t move without his fix, couldn’t wash or eat or shit. They turned him into their slave. His chains were drugs, his life was theirs, and there was nothing …
nothing
I could do. Nothing
anyone
could do. People say they care until they realise that they’re helpless, then they fade away into the background, try to make you forget they were ever there. Maybe it’s guilt. I lost a lot of friends after my son was taken from me. Just at the time I needed them they left, because they couldn’t help and they couldn’t live with not helping.”

She wiped at her eyes but the tears had already ceased. Perhaps there weren’t that many left. “Then they sent him back to school with a pocketful of drugs and a flick-knife. He was expelled quickly, my Paul, expelled and arrested and beaten and arrested again and released and beaten, beaten by everyone. Helpless. I’d lost touch with him by then ... long before then … but I wouldn’t have been able to do anything anyway. I was helpless. When they found him … he was half the weight he’d been when I’d last seen him.”