Dead Bad Things (25 page)

  "OK." His voice was low, husky. She liked it this time; she liked it a lot. It sounded like hope. "OK, I'm going to tell you something. Just let me speak, and then don't ask any questions. I'm about to tell you all I know – everything. I'm keeping nothing back, I swear it. Not this time." He sounded as if he were speaking to someone else and not to Sarah; perhaps even to her father's portrait watching them from the wall.

  She was afraid to look up in case Eddie changed his mind. Perhaps if he saw her face, looked into her eyes again, he might lose his nerve and withdraw his offer of honesty. So instead she watched her hands fidgeting between her knees. Her fingers looked long, pale, as if they belonged to someone else. She could barely feel them.

  "Your mum couldn't have children. Not many people knew that, and those who did kept the information to themselves. Especially after you came along."

  A clock began to tick somewhere just outside the prayer room: the sound was loud, regular; it sounded strange, false, like a cheap prop in a bad film. Sarah tried to focus on Eddie's voice, on the words that were circling her like flies around a corpse. Time seemed on the verge of stopping. Eddie's revelation held the power to do that, to alter her world.

  "You're not a stupid girl, so I'm assuming you've picked up my meaning. One day your father brought you home. You were a newborn. He said that he'd taken you from some fuckin' junkie scumbag who was going to sell you on the streets for a fix. Nobody questioned him: he wasn't the kind of man to be questioned."

  The sound of the clock faded. She felt like she'd heard that same idle ticking before, at several points during her life.
Déjà
vu
flooded her, making her dizzy.

  Eddie continued; his voice was so low now that she had to strain to hear him. "He pulled some strings and called in a lot of favours. The paperwork went through easily, and he made sure that it went missing afterwards, burned in a small office fire."

  He paused, breathing deeply.

  "This all coincided with a spell when your mother had to stay indoors for a few months. He'd hurt her badly and she was healing slowly. Next time she stepped outside she had a kid. Everyone called it a miracle, but they just called you Sarah."

  Sarah was crying but she felt nothing. Her mind and body were empty. She was like a deep well whose contents had been drained, a dry riverbed in the middle of a massive drought…

  "So there's no need to worry about apples and trees." The expansion was unnecessary, but she was glad to hear him say it, just to prove that she had not misheard or misunderstood his story. Until he said those words, forcing them home, she was unsure if this was some kind of hallucination, a daydream brought on by too much stress and irresponsible daytime drinking.

  Sarah turned her head and looked at Eddie Knowles. He was staring at her, and had clearly been doing so for some time. All the time it took to tell her the truth – or at least this version of it. For the truth, she knew, was always, always relative. Nobody ever knew it all; they just possessed fragments, like the separate parts of a body seen through a torn shroud.

  "That's it. That's all I know. I don't know where you came from or how he got you. It wasn't something you could ask him, even when he was drunk. He told me once that the angel had given you to him, but I didn't dare ask him to explain what he meant. I was too scared. We all were. Everyone was scared of the man, but at the same time we felt safe that he was on our side."

  Sarah nodded. She understood completely. "That's how I felt, too. Even when he was hurting me, or when he beat up my mother. He still made me – made us
both
– feel safe. He protected us from the greater horrors of the world. He was like… I dunno, like some kind of buffer. But lately I'm starting to think that he might have been responsible for all those other horrors, the ones he pretended to save us from."

  Eddie reached out and she took his hand. He squeezed, and she sensed a thousand apologies and a million regrets being sent through his fingertips and into her body, heading for her heart. But she was probably imagining it. Apologies – even unspoken ones – did not come easily to people like Eddie.

  "I know," she said. "I know, Eddie, and it's OK. Really it is. You've told me now, so you can let yourself off the hook. You've let your secret out of the box."

  He turned away and gazed at the small altar, and smiled at the tatty picture of Christ. "I'm not a religious man, but I always felt good here. Comfortable – you know? I've kept all this inside for so many years that it's been eating me up like a cancer. He was a cold, callous man, probably a murderer and certainly an abuser… but he was my friend. And you don't rat out your friends, especially if you're terrified of them." Eddie made a choked sound in his throat, as if he were holding back some kind of grief.

  Sarah nodded. She looked again at her father's face on the wall. This time, when she met his gaze, he was not smiling, but she refused to look away. She glared back at him, challenging him to react. His mouth was a tight line drawn across the bottom of his wrinkled face and his eyes were burning – blazing – but it was a cold fire, a flame created by hatred.

  Come on then, you fucker, she thought. Show yourself to me now. Give me a glimpse of you in that stupid hood, and I'll chase you right back to hell.

  The unseen clock was no longer ticking. Somewhere, loudly, a door slammed. Laughter chased its own tail through the corridors, fading gradually to silence.

  The shade of the man who had called himself Sarah's father remained hidden, as if it were now his turn to be afraid of her.

 

 

 

 

 
 
 

He was floating again. Drifting from up high and falling slowly back down towards the bed. The drug was wearing off and he was remembering who he was, where he was, and what he had been doing. The room came into focus around him; the walls, the ceiling he was moving away from, and the bed that clasped his body in a soft, padded embrace.

  "Michael?" He wasn't sure why he'd said his brother's name, other than the fact that he felt as if the boy were close by. His scent hung on the air. The ghost of his voice vibrated like the memory of a scream in the atmosphere.

  "No, Trevor. Michael isn't here. Your brother is dead, remember? You killed him."

  Trevor sat up, rubbing the side of his head. The good feeling was gone now. He needed more of the heroin to retain it every time he took a little trip. In the past he had used drugs as a recreational pursuit but now he needed them to keep the world at bay.

  "Come on, Trevor. Come back to me. You've been gone for a while, you know. I've waited patiently but now it's time to talk."

  Who was that? Was there somebody else in his room? Trevor looked around, but there was nobody there. The wardrobe door was open and the plastic packing around his stage outfits had spilled out onto the floor, creased and torn. He recalled taking out some of the suits and trying them on, parading before the mirror and reciting some of his old show spiel. He had been performing for someone, that was clear – but for whom?

  "Oh, come on. Pull yourself together."

  Trevor turned around and looked at the mirror by the side of the bed. The man clothed in poor, trusting Derek's skin – the one who had called himself the Pilgrim – was sitting cross-legged behind the glass. He was naked. His body was smooth and hairless. Between his legs, which he now uncrossed, was just a flat area of pink flesh. He had no belly button.

  "Oh, God…"

  "Why do they always have to mention that name?" The Pilgrim smiled; his teeth were as white as bone. Derek's teeth had not been that clean, which meant that they possibly were shards of bone that had ruptured through the gums. "I mean, every time I meet one of you people you call out the name of God, as if it's real. As if he
exists
. Please, give me a break. There is no God, and I'm the closest thing you have to the Devil." He laughed. It sounded like drains backing up, or like the final rattling cry of someone choking to death.

  "Who are you?" Trevor was now sitting upright, his legs hanging off the side of the bed. He realised that he was wearing a silly gold suit with no shirt beneath the jacket. The collars were wide and black; the buttons were gold-plated. The suit had cost him a small fortune.

  "I told you, I'm your saviour. I'm the Pilgrim. How do you do."

  Trevor blinked, but it did nothing to improve the view: the naked figure was still in the mirror, a roiling blackness stretching out behind him. Then, instantly, the blackness dispersed to reveal a view. The flat, empty landscape was littered with burnt machine parts, and in the distance something squatted part way up a slight rise. It was the hollow remains of a partially demolished concrete tower block, the windows empty of glass and the doorways yawning like black mouths. The walls were shattered, and pocked with gaping holes. The tower block looked like it had scaly legs, but that could have just been an illusion caused by the immense destruction of the building: maybe there were a couple of large trees crushed underneath its concrete bulk.

  "That's my old place. It's kind of run down. I could do with somewhere nicer." The Pilgrim's voice had no accent; it held no tone other than that of mild amusement. It was like a cartoon voice, something fake and contrived. Trevor had the distinct impression that the Pilgrim was merely a façade, and his words were toys.

  Behind the broken-down tower block, with its slumped upper floors and spilled insides, the land rose to form a hill. At the summit of the hill there stood a smouldering tree. The spindly outline looked as if it had recently been burning and somebody had only just put out the fire. A long, slightly bulky shape hung in the branches, torn and twisted and unrecognisable. It looked like a dead monkey.

  "I used to know her," said the Pilgrim. "She promised me a ride but when the time came she wasn't quite up to it."

  The view faded, turning to grey. Empty space surrounded the Pilgrim, and Trevor stared at the figure as he began to rise. Derek's skin hung slack on the Pilgrim's bones and it shifted like a loosely wound sheet when he moved. The skin didn't quite fit; it was baggy on his form, slightly too large to contain him.

  "What do you want from me?" Trevor remained seated on the bed. He was too afraid to move, yet something told him not to be. Some inner feeling convinced him that he would not be harmed.

  "It's more a question of what we want from each other, my dear, dear friend." Another smile: a flash of those bone teeth. "I mean, we do both want something, don't we? And I believe that we can work together to achieve those needs. The thing is, you see, we want similar things. We both desire the end of Thomas Usher."

  Trevor twitched at the sound of that name. Even now, after months of trying to rid himself of the hatred, he could not bear to think about Usher. The bastard had ruined him. He had turned up at a show in Bradford and revealed the truth about Michael's death – that Trevor had driven his brother to suicide; that his sexual demands had been so great they had consumed his little brother's sense of self-worth and destroyed him.

  "I hate him," said Trevor. "Hate. Him."

  The Pilgrim nodded. "Oh, yes. As do I. But he has something I want – something I
need
, actually. If I promise to help you kill him, you have to help me first."

  Trevor inched towards the edge of the mattress, the soles of his feet settling lightly upon the floor. "What do you mean?" he stared at the unreflecting glass, at the naked man preening himself behind it. "What exactly do you want me to do?"

  The Pilgrim stalked the short width of the mirror, running his hands along his body and swivelling his hips in an elaborate motion each time he turned to pace in the opposite direction. He made no sound as he walked. His step was light, and his movements seemed fluid and unnatural. Finally he turned to face Trevor. His lower half spun around first, followed by the upper part of his body. He grinned. His bald head shone, the skin wrinkling like wet tissue paper.

  Trevor waited.

  "I need you to get me out of here. Our mutual friend, Mr Usher, somehow managed to trap me here, in the space between mirrors, and I am unable to escape without the help of someone on your side of the glass." He shrugged. The stolen skin of his shoulders crept along his wasted muscles.

  "Hang on… this is, well, it's crazy. You're telling me that there's a space behind all the mirrors in the world?"

  The Pilgrim nodded. Then he sat back down on the ground, once again crossing his legs, calf over shin. "Clever boy."

  "And," said Trevor, "and you're trapped there, behind the glass, inside the mirrors?"

  Another slow nod; his eyes glistened. They changed through blue to brown, and then settled on a peculiar shade of grey. "You catch on fast." The sarcasm in his voice was practically hostile.

  "I can't believe this."

  The Pilgrim inhaled, his nostrils flaring. His features were bland and forgettable. "But you're seeing it now. Here I am, right in front of you, inside the mirror. You can't doubt that fact, can you? I mean, your eyes are showing you the truth of the situation."

  "I've been on heroin," said Trevor. "Strong stuff, too. This could all be some kind of hallucination." He didn't even believe what he was saying, so why should this strange creature even listen to his feeble excuses?

  "Oh, please…" The Pilgrim threw back his head and laughed silently. His narrow shoulders hitched and his chest inflated. This lasted for several minutes, and then he looked forward again, right at Trevor. He was not smiling. The laughter was gone; it had died. "Let's not get silly, now. I'm trying to remain calm, to keep you fully informed. Don't make me threaten you."