Authors: Kim Newman
She wrenched a waste-bin off a lamp-post, and held it in front of her, blocking his darting syringe stabs.
She threw the bin at him, and dented his forehead. He slipped, his heels working against the wet sidewalk, making scuffmarks. Overbalanced, he went down again. His left arm shattered like a dropped glass, and he screamed as brown-streaked fluid exploded out of him.
She took a careful, malicious, aim and kicked the sac under his right arm, feeling the satisfying give of weak flesh under her toepoint. The Clive Thing’s screech cut through the cold night and filled her ears with his pain. He writhed, falling apart in the slippery mess. She got her foot under the thing, and easily rolled it over onto its stomach. He moved as if attempting the breast stroke, his ruined left arm flapping. She brought one of her killer feet down on his spine, snapping it in several places. The crack was like a rifle shot.
She walked away. The Clive Thing tried to swim/crawl after her, dragging its sodden lower limbs. It gave up quickly. When she looked back, it was just a man-shaped smear on the road, kicking feebly.
She was in Old Compton Street now, but not the Old Compton Street she had been in that afternoon. And she knew she was hurting him.
The city was less realistic now. The sky above was solid black, like a tent canopy, and the street was closed off at either end like a film set. Most of the buildings were probably false fronts or backdrops. Patisserie Valerie was painted on loose-hanging canvas, not very well, as if it were supposed to register as realistic from the back of the Royal Circle rather than up close. It had been painted for the daytime, with frozen patrons clogging the place and white and red pastries in the windows, and looked wrong in this night scene. The dream was fraying around the edges.
She brushed by a pillar box, and stopped to examine it. The thing had not felt right. The slot for letters was a strip of black pasted onto the red. There was a poster for a rock gig slapped on the side of the box, but it did not have real writing on it, just a series of squiggles. The whole thing was as soft as a pencil eraser. Soon it would be foam rubber, then gelatine, then ice cream, then candyfloss. Then, just a smudge.
‘I think you’re spread too thin, Skinner. You’re rushing things, getting careless. It’s time to turn in, old man, time to go to sleep…’
Another set of lights came on, above an amusement arcade this time.
I’LL GET YOU YET, MY PRETTY.
‘Uh huh? You wish, old man, you wish!’
I
n her dream, Judi was being neglected.
She did not know where she was exactly, but it looked mainly like her father’s house in New Hampshire, although her room was like the bedroom of the flat she shared with Coral in the Elephant and Castle. Looking at the walls, covered with pinned-up pictures and news items from magazines and papers, she saw a collage of her entire life. There were a few posters from her brief infatuation – now a shameful, much-suppressed memory – with John Travolta in the era of
Saturday Night Fever
, and an overlapping series of book-covers, neatly torn from paperbacks like hunter’s trophies, marking her absorption of the matter that had been in the volume. Then, there were magazine illustrations that had caught her fancy at some time in her life – the craggy face of W. H. Auden in black and white, socialites in bow ties grinning in nightclubs, a
Spitting Image
Ronald Reagan as Rambo, a pleasure boat sunk in the Thames, a poster for
Blue Velvet.
There was Cam at a concert, Clive shaking hands with the Prime Minister, Anne trying to get an answer out of a police constable who did not want to be interviewed, her mother and William Conrad in a TV movie, her father in Stockholm accepting his damned prize.
There were other people in the house, but they did not see it as she did. They had their own Dreams. Some of the other ghosts she had known in life. Jeane Russell, who had been a professional swimmer, came in wearing a navy blue one-piece bathing suit, her dark hair dripping. She was friendly, but offhand, refusing to acknowledge that this was not normal. She had a gymnasium somewhere, and was obsessively working on her body. In her father’s study, among the comforting books and signed photographs, she found Coral, one arm stiff at her side, her free hand clamped over her eyes. Judi could not communicate with her either. In the music room, she found Cam, whistling tunelessly. Clive had drifted past once or twice, and tried to catch her attention, but he was strangely shrunken – perfectly-proportioned but only three feet tall, wearing a miniature version of one of his usual smart suits. She was tempted to hit him, but let it go.
On the front lawn, where the children had been allowed to play croquet only if they promised not to argue and always ended up in tearful fights, Judi found Amelia Dorf, a used-up husk in a line of similar remains, some of them dressed in the style of remote historical periods.
There was one ghost who frightened Judi, and who would occasionally loiter around. She was called Giselle and seemed to be a lost little girl, but her face was ancient. She could usually be found on the lawn, playing with the remnants, crooning madly to herself. She was spiteful, and could pinch and nip if she got close enough. Feelings were deadened in the Dream, but there was still pain.
The Dream did not extend far beyond the boundaries of the Nielson property. Judi would sometimes sit in the driveway and look out into the white mists that hung immobile just a few yards down the drive. The road disappeared into them, and the hedges just faded out. Nothing came out of the limbo, and no one ever ventured into it. But Judi knew that, just beyond sight, there was someone. A woman, young and strong, with nearly white hair. She was not in the Dream, but she could tune into the dead channel if she chose. A name formed in her mind: Ariadne. It was a seductive name. She rolled its syllables around her mouth, imagining the name’s owner.
Judi tried to remember the village as it had been when she had been living at home. She and Anne, blessed and cursed with the sophistication due to the offspring of the smart and famous, had never had much to do with the local kids. They had had a private name for them, the stupids.
There had been a point in her life when Judi would have done anything to be a stupid. But you cannot unlearn anything, cannot regurgitate knowledge, experience and aptitudes like an undigested meal. Still, she had tried hard.
She wondered what had happened to Trey, the nineteen-year-old bar-helper she had gone with when she was fourteen. He had been a major stupid. His idea of success was becoming a cop or a rock singer. His first ambition had been out because of his string of juvie beefs, and he had dumped her, after a beating, when she had told him he could never make it in music because he was too white.
Most of the time, it was just boring. She tried the television and the radio, but could only get dead static. The appliances all worked, but the records in their perfect sleeves were all smooth and uncut. She realized that she had read all the books in the house, and wondered if this was Hell…
Sometimes, she was let out. Skinner put her to sleep and woke her up somewhere else, to have her appear to someone…
She could still remember the subway train, and Anne.
But most of the time she was left on her own, to her own devices. She lay in her bed, and tried to practise total recall, seeing how much of her life she could put together in perspective.
She thought a lot about Anne. She wished she had tried harder to get on with her sister, had tried harder not to disrupt the already shaky peace of the family. With a father who was a walking open wound, a mother who flitted by on occasional whims and a half-brother who wandered about like an army officer in a POW camp, thinking only of his hidden escape tunnel and an eventual release, the Nielsons had not been anything like the families she remembered on television,
The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, The Waltons
…
She had never had a chance with Cam, but she could have had a real relationship with Anne. But now, it was too late…
At first, she had been sure she was dead. Now, she knew better. Her body was dead, but she was still around, as part of the Dream. The Dream was somewhere out of space and time, carried around in Skinner and yet immeasurably vaster than him. It was possible to die out of the Dream – Amelia and the corpses proved that – and she sometimes wondered whether she should try to finish herself off and get it over with.
There were already enough zombies in her family.
She could not do it, though. Even at her lowest, she had never wanted just to die.
Remembering, she found more lows than she would have liked. There was a temptation to dwell only on the better moments, but the lows were as much a part of the pattern, and she felt obliged to summon them up.
She did not know whether she had been conscious when Skinner killed Coral, but she saw it replayed over and again as if she had been. Of course, Coral had been there, and Amelia and Clive had been involved. Perhaps Judi could now sample the memories of everyone in the Dream. It had been upstairs in Amelia’s house, in one of the old bedrooms, with the two-way mirror on the wall. Even Amelia had been shocked, and had run for her cocaine stash as a way of handling it. After Coral, came Judi. She remembered the Monster feeding off her, remembered the bursting of her own heart, remembered the struggle that had come afterwards. Skinner had called in Clive to handle the bodies, and from him Judi could see herself propped up in a Soho alley in the early hours, swiftly dumped like a bundle of newspapers for collection. Coral was buried deeper, on a rubbish dump in some to-be-redeveloped wasteland.
Eventually, she went out onto the croquet lawn and found what was left of Coral, her arm separate from her, lying with Amelia and the others. Giselle was sitting next to her, breaking her fingers, trying to feed off the girl but tasting only dry ashes which made her sick. Giselle coughed up grey matter, and crawled away, disgusted. Judi touched Coral, and the remains fell apart completely. The girl was gone. So, it was possible to die more. She wondered if she would miss Coral.
The girl had been fun. Once, giggly drunk in the flat and surprised at themselves, they had made love. It had been pleasant, but they had never repeated the experiment. Very few of Judi’s good memories had to do with sex or love, and so that once was precious. She had never really enjoyed hurting or giving hurt, but that was the way it had all too often worked out.
She slept and ate, or at least pretended to, and changed her clothes regularly. She had a lot of clothes. Everything she had ever owned was in the house, and it all, back to her smallest baby-dresses, still fitted her.
She learned the names of some of the other ghosts. She had long conversations with an Irishman named Niall Baum who thought he was in a Dublin boarding house in the 1870s, and learned from him a little more about the Monster. From him she learned that Giselle was of the Monster’s kind, and that she had been his wife – a thing beyond imagining – until an end was put to her. Too many of the others spoke and thought only in languages she had no way of understanding.
Bored, she tried to kiss Niall, and he disappeared. She felt strange after that, and could remember Shanghai, a series of explosions, and a bloody struggle in a temple in the hills. She felt some of her fuzziness disappear, and was not sure what had happened.
The ghosts were becoming fewer in number, and she was feeling more solid. It took her a while to realize that she was taking them all into herself. It was bizarre, not entirely comfortable, and – she suspected – dangerous.
How could she hope to stay Judi if she were taking all these others on board?
She could understand Mandarin now, and Turkish and mediaeval French, and other useless tongues. She had died in battles from before the time of Christ down to Khe Sanh, and in numberless squalid, fundamentally unchanging, beds down through the centuries. She felt especially close to Macha Igescu, who had died for the first time in Istanbul in 1938; they had both been whores, both been wasted in a city across the sea from the land of their birth, had both excited and touched the Monster… Digging deep, she was surprised to discover a thinned relationship: Macha’s cousin in Bucharest had been married to a Nastase whose uncle had emigrated to America and changed his name to Nielson.
Judi had seen the Clive ghost with a similarly shrunken young man, whose perfumed curls and thin greased moustache made him a childish dandy, and learned from Macha that this was Demetrios, who had been her pimp and protector. After feeding off her, the Monster had killed Demetrios as a favour. It was one of his many capricious gestures.
Eventually, Nina Kenyon turned up. She was wearing torn clothes, and her make-up had streaked. Judi was glad to see her, and they hugged.
‘Judi,’ the other girl said, ‘I’m so tired.’
‘Sleep, then.’
‘I will.’
Judi stroked Nina’s hair, and the frail ghost became faint in her embrace. Macha joined them, more hair, more hands, and Judi felt the Roumanian girl’s cheek sinking through her own.
Suddenly, she was alone, remembering Coral smoking at school and a boat trip across the Bosphorus.
She was still Judi, but she was Nina and Macha too.
She saw Clive and Demetrios, but they were the size of housecats, and scurried away.
She remembered shaving her head, surrounded by religious relics, and vowing to bring down the King of the Cats.
Then, she knew that was Niall Baum’s memory.
As an experiment, she seduced a ghost. A tiny Indian girl with an elaborate pearl ornament shaped like a snail’s shell in one nostril. Judi took her, and absorbed her. There was a rush of unfamiliar experience, and a sense of gratitude at being no longer alone. Kanchi was by far the oldest of the ghosts she had come across, and Judi was startled by the vividness of her memories.
The Monster, whom she thought of as Guillaume of Oswestry, had accepted her in marriage as a gift, and fed off her a little at a time over a period of months. There was nothing in Kanchi’s experience which jibed with any history Judi knew, and so she could not even guess how long the girl had been a ghost.