Dead Bad Things (17 page)

  "She also sent you some food. She says you aren't eating." Traci offered up a small package I had not even noticed. It looked like some kind of leavened bread, along with cheese and meat, all wrapped up in cellophane. "She worries about people. About everyone. She worries about us all."

  I stared at the girl, taking in the thin short-sleeved shirt with its top two buttons undone, the skin-tight black jeans, and the smooth, dark skin of her arms. She was like a creature from a fairytale: a dark, sinuous temptress painted in the colours of innocence. I was beguiled by her presence in the room.

  "Thanks," I said, making no move to take the package. So she put it down on the cluttered coffee table, next to the empty glass. "Can I get you a drink?"

  She stared at me. Even though she was blind, I could feel the heat of her gaze. "Some of that whisky would be nice." How did she know? How could she see what I had in my hand?

  "Yes. Of course. I'll pour you some." I reached out and grabbed the glass. My hand was shaking. I spilled whisky as I poured her three fingers of the stuff, and instead of handing her the glass I put it back on the table before her. It was a test, a silly little trick just to see how she responded.

  Traci smiled. She reached out and picked up the glass with her dainty little fingers, the nails painted black and with tiny silver stars. "Thank you," she said, before taking a sip.

  "How old are you?" I'm not sure why I asked; perhaps I already knew what was about to happen, and I was scared and alone and filled with a desire that felt dirty.

  "I'm nineteen. Twenty in a few months time. Why do you ask?" She paused; sipped. "Are you planning on seducing me?"

  The house seemed to lurch, but gently, cautiously, in case it ruined the mood. "No. Of course not."

  "What a pity," she whispered, smiling around the rim of the glass. She was toying with me and I loved it. This game, this pretence, it took my mind off everything else. Perhaps, I thought, that was why she'd been sent here: to distract me, to stop me from acting too hastily. A beautiful diversion.

  Immaculee Karuhmbi knew more than she was letting on. She was much deeper into this situation – whatever the hell it was – than she might care to admit. Was this girl a relative, a daughter or a niece? Had the psychic lied to me about losing her family in the massacre?

  Or was Traci simply a temptation, like something from the Christian bible? Was this to be my time in the wilderness, when I would be approached by the devils of my desire?

  Shit, the drink was affecting me more than I had thought. I wasn't a messiah, or some kind of roaming prophet. I was a drunken loser in a grotty house who used to think that he could make a difference.

  "Why did you come here? Why did she send you?"

  Traci smiled. The tip of her tongue poked out between her small white teeth. "I came here because I wanted to. It was my idea to check on you, and nothing to do with my mistress. When I told her my plan, she gave me the food and asked me to pass on a message. I listen closely and I do the things she wants but I don't ask for reasons. Traci with an eye not a why."

  I leaned forward in the chair, half smiling. The timber creaked, the joints complaining. "Tell me this message, Traci with an eye not a why."

  Traci put down her glass and turned to face me square on. Her cheekbones were razor cuts in the dark sculpture of her face. Her eyes were like a glimpse of another reality – one I had not yet encountered. "She says that you must follow your heart, whatever your head might tell you. The voice cannot be trusted – pick and choose the information you act upon, and never go against your instinct." She sat back, crossing her legs. Denim whispered conspiratorially in the gloom.

  "Is that it?" I was biting my upper lip, breaking the skin and drawing a spot of blood.

  "That's it. She tends to speak like that, my mistress. She sometimes talks like she's in a soap opera, or a bad costume drama. She likes to be melodramatic." She laughed, and it was not an entirely pleasant sound.

  "Why do you call her mistress?"

  She stopped laughing. "Because that's what she was, until recently, when she became very ill. I shared her house and her bed. These days I just clean up after her, and wait for her to die." She uncrossed her legs. This time it made no sound.

  "Tell me why you're here." I leaned even further forward, resting my elbows on my knees. The lights flickered again, as if trying to set the scene.

  "I came here to fuck you. That's all. Just to fuck. You interest me, and I like to get closer to interesting people… to men and women who can teach me something."

  Her smile was like a knife.

  "I can teach you nothing. I don't know anything." There were tears in my eyes; my joints had all locked stiff, becoming rigid.

  "Let me be the judge of that." She stood without moving, or so it seemed. I was so tense, so out of it, that she seemed to swell out of the chair and hover before me. Her hands fluttered to the front of her shirt and unbuttoned it all the way down. She was not wearing a bra. Her skin was perfect. That's the only word I can use, the only one that fits.

  Perfect.

  So perfect… like a ghost of herself, a spark of energy caught between the folds of reality. Because all ghosts are immaculate; they all represent a sort of perfection, even the bad ones – the ones who do bad things.

  Her shirt dropped to the floor and she reached down, reached out, reached inside me. I took her hand and she pulled me upright, as if I weighed no more than an empty paper bag. She led me to the bottom of the stairs, and I followed close behind. She took me up to my room, and I closed the door. When I turned round to face her, she was standing naked on the bare boards, with her legs set slightly apart, her arms raised up, and her hands held open like wonderful black flowers. Her beautiful blind eyes shone, but they were dark too: it was a dark light that bled from them, filling the room and enveloping me, drawing me towards her, dragging me in.

  I went to her, I went to her and I let her strip off my clothes and rub me down with her perfect hands. I was drunk, I was empty, and I was falling into her as she opened up like a vein, like a ventricle, like a heart.

  This is what she did: she reached inside me and cupped my heart, squeezed it like a piece of rotten fruit, making it bleed. She squeezed so hard that I was pouring my heart out.

  I slid urgently between her legs and she took me in, offered me shelter from the storm, and kept me safe from my demons for a little while. We fucked beneath the cold eyes of phantoms. They stood there, all in a row along the wall, as if they were lost deep in prayer. The figure in the black cloak and white cowl sat on the floor by the door, its legs crossed and its palms held flat against its thighs. It was an avatar, a threat, a shape of things to come. I looked away, not prepared to receive its message until I was ready.

  I watched them all watching me, and I did not feel afraid.

  I was not scared.

  She had given me succour, and I was home: right at home with the dead.

 

Much later, when we were both spent and sweating in the darkness, we lay on the mattress locked together like conjoined twins. One of Traci's legs was folded between both of mine, as if it were boneless. She stirred at my side, her lips making a smacking sound and our sticky skin snapping apart like sheets of paper torn from a waterlogged book.

  "How do you do it?" her voice was soft, part of the darkness.

  I blinked, wondering how I could even begin to answer. "How do I do what?" Playing dumb was the only ploy I could think of, but I knew it wouldn't deflect her questions.

  "You know what I mean. How do you make contact with them – the dead? The ghosts. How does it work?"

  I pushed myself up into a half-sitting position, my head resting on the pillows. The mattress felt like a small boat cast adrift on a dark ocean. There was no land in sight. "I have no idea. Honestly. All I know is that I was involved in a car accident that turned out not to be an accident at all. After that, I started to see them."

  The dark swam before my eyes.

  "What do you mean, it wasn't an accident?" She shifted on the mattress, her slight body sliding against mine. I felt her ribs, the meat of her thighs. She was dark upon dark.

  "Someone made it happen. I found out about six months ago, after believing that it was an accident for a very long time. This person – this thing – he made it happen as part of some plan I can't even contemplate. I think it was some kind of game. He said he wanted what was inside me, the thing that makes me able to make contact with the dead. But he's the one who made me that way. Isn't that ironic?"

  "This world…" she paused, as if gathering her thoughts. "This place where we live, pretending that it's all there is. Things happen that can only be part of some bigger plan, or maybe it's just chaos. A massive chaos that hovers at the edges, pressing against all our lives." She couldn't complete the thought. It was too big, too fearsome for her to continue.

  "You're closer to the truth than you might imagine." It was all that I could add. There was nothing more to say.

  Traci curled into me, her soft, lean body adapting to my own hard edges. "You know why I really came, don't you?"

  I looked down at her, the top of her head, her vulnerable scalp. "No. I'm confused by all of this. Tell me."

  She spoke without looking at me; her face was buried in my shoulder, muffling her words but not enough that I was unable to understand what she said. "I came because I'm frightened. Immaculee… she isn't herself lately. She's dying, and I think that's allowing other voices inside her head – ones that can't be trusted. For a long time now she's believed everything she's been told, and it's all come to pass. All the predictions and the hints of events. It all happened just like they said. But this is different. It isn't right. This new voice – she doesn't even trust it herself."

  I kissed the top of her head. Her hair was damp and kinky. "So why does she listen to it?"

  "Because she has no choice. She's terrified. I've never seen her so afraid. I've been with her for several years now, since she took me from the massage parlour downstairs. She took me in, taught me things, and made me into a whole person. Before I met her, I was servicing fat old men with sweaty bodies and hard hands. It made me glad that I couldn't see them."

  I said nothing. It was not my place to interrupt, or to judge.

  "So it hurts me to see her like this: on the verge of death and terrified. She's wanted to die for a long time, just to be with her family. I was the only thing that kept her going, but now even that isn't enough. And this new voice – this fabrication – it lies to her. It's deceitful."

  "How do you know? Maybe it's telling the truth. How can you even know?"

  She shifted position again, this time bending her neck so that she could pretend to look up at me, into my face. Her eyes were not grey but black: it looked like they'd been scooped out and replaced with darkness. "Because she told me. She told me that it lies. But she's too afraid to ignore it, because it told her that unless she does what it wants she'll never see her family again." She blinked, but the dark patches remained. They saw right through me. She was blind but she could see me as I really was: alone and helpless in the dark, the cold and endless dark…

  I could understand completely Immaculee's fears. The only thing that had kept me going for many years was the hope that I would see my family again, if not in this life, as ghosts, then in the next one, in the next reality. The thought that someone, or some dreadful thing, could take that sense of hope away from me and use it as a threat made me freeze inside.

  I couldn't blame Immaculee Karuhmbi for passing on a message that she knew might be some kind of trap. In her place, and confronted by the same fears, I would have done exactly that.

  Traci slept in my arms, her small body quivering occasionally, as if in the grip of bad dreams. Sleepless, unable to even doze for a second or two, I stared into the darkness of the room, watching the shadows of the dead as they drifted in and out, passing to and fro, and wondering what was in store for me.

  I glanced down at the girl, at her skin and the bones beneath, and knew that I couldn't trust her.

  I could trust no one.

 

I lived in a world of lies and half-truths, of pretence and fakery. Nothing was solid; everything shifted all the time, quaking, breaking, and reforming before my eyes. Even reality could not be trusted.

 

 

 

 

 
 
 

They watched the house. Their patience was infinite. They had no need to rush things, to force a confrontation when one was not required. They simply watched and They waited. They had all the time in the world – this world and all the others They had not yet seen but knew of.

  All the time. Everywhere.

  Their influence was felt in every world imaginable, and in some that could not be imagined even by the most insane of men.

  When They had left the pub earlier, the young man had not reappeared. They had waited a long time, but to no avail. He had moved out of Their reach. So They followed the other man – the one who had escorted Them from the pub and spoken to Them outside on the street. He interested Them. His design was threadbare, a frail and dying thing, but it held traces of…
some
thing
. There was a hint of the lost one, a whisper of his passing just about visible within its folds and niches. The man had been touched by someone who had been touched by the one They sought. Their severed companion, Their long lost brother.