Dead Bad Things (26 page)

  Trevor scuttled backwards, across the bed. "What do you mean? You can't hurt me. Not from behind there."

  The Pilgrim nodded his bald head, slowly, deliberately. "And what, pray tell, did I do to your little friend?" This time when he smiled his teeth were pointed, tiny white triangles set into his pale pink gums.

  "Listen. OK, just listen." Trevor pressed his body against the headboard. He felt stupid, helpless, and he wanted this to end. But he knew that he had started something he must now see through and nothing he could do or say was enough to halt the momentum. "You said something about getting rid of Usher for me. Killing him. Did you mean that?"

  "Oh, that's better. Much better." The Pilgrim held out his arms, opened his hands, and showed Trevor the tiny mouths that had opened up on his palms. The two mouths were lined with identical white triangular teeth, just like the ones in his mouth. "I'm in the habit of drawing deals, making bargains, forming pacts." The three voices spoke in unison, the sound emanating from face and palms. "The deal I'm offering you is simple: you get me out of here and I help you to get Thomas Usher. As I've said, I want him too, but I promise that you can deliver the killing blow. Now how does that sound, Trevor Pumpkiss? Tell me how it sounds to you."

  Trevor got to his feet and walked around the bed. He pulled the gold suit jacket tight across his chest, feeling confidence flooding through him. There was power here; he could feel it. Power to control, to conquer. Power to destroy. "That sounds good," he said, smiling. His fear was fading. This man – this Pilgrim – could be a valuable ally.

  "Good, good." The Pilgrim stood, rearing up in a way that suggested he possessed no bones beneath that borrowed skin.

  "Tell me what I need to do to get you out of there. Do I need to break the glass, or is it something more complicated? Rituals? Prayers? A sacrifice?" Trevor stood directly in front of his new friend, staring into his ever-changing eyes. "Tell me what I have to do to help."

  "Oh, it's something more complicated than that. Yet it's also very simple." The Pilgrim reached out a hand and pressed his palm flat against the glass. The small mouth had vanished. The palm flattened against the glass, and then it grew and stretched until it was covering an area of mirror three times its original size.

  "OK," said Trevor, placing his own palm over that of the Pilgrim, seeing it dwarfed by the other's giant hand. The glass felt cold; it was like ice. "So tell me."

  "To put it crudely, I need blood. The living energy in human blood will allow me to become strong enough to break through. I have grown weak; my form has withered. I'm tired, so very tired. I have been stuck here for a long time – a span of time that isn't tied to your world's measure of days and years and centuries. Time doesn't exist on this side of the glass. I hear the constant ticking of clocks, but they are meaningless. They taunt me." He tilted his head to one side, narrowing his eyes. "Blood will replenish my resources. I only need a little. The blood of one person should just about do it, but without that I haven't quite got the strength to break out of here."

  Trevor took his hand away from the glass. "Are you… are you a vampire?"

  "What?" The Pilgrim roared with laughter. He staggered backwards, vanishing for a moment into the grey folds of nothingness, and then stumbled back towards the mirror. "Oh, Trevor. Bless you, Trevor. A vampire? No, they don't exist, you silly man." Slowly he managed to control his hysteria. Then, looking forlorn and regretful, he moved his face close to the glass. "I'm something much better than that."

  Trevor couldn't move. His body was rigid, the muscles and tendons locked, fused together. "What are you, then?"

  The Pilgrim stepped back, swiftly and theatrically. "Why, I'm an angel of course." He fluttered his eyelashes in a hideous caricature of seduction. A long, pointed tongue flicked out to moisten his lips. "I'm an angel who's come to help you."

  Trevor stared intently into the mirror, trying to make out something else within the grey background. He could no longer see the littered landscape, or the fallen building, or the hill with the smoking tree. He did have a sense that there was something more here, behind and beyond the Pilgrim, but he was unable to discern what it was.

  Reality, he thought in a momentary insight, was something that could be shaped. This was not a conceptual notion; it was true, it happened. This creature was the proof of it, and if Trevor stood at the Pilgrim's side he might be able to learn the magic and start to redefine his own reality.

  The idea appealed to him greatly. It would be something to cling to, a dream to hold. And even if the dream in time proved to be a nightmare, at least it was something he could call his own.

 

He waited for nightfall, and then he prepared to leave the house. He had fixed up the last of his gear and taken the lot: one big hit, mainlined right into a fat vein. He felt good, invincible. He felt detached from it all.

  "Be careful," said the Pilgrim, sitting beatifically behind the mirror. He looked like he was hovering above the ground; a perverted Buddha. The grey area above and below and around him was nothing but empty space, the grubby back-end of the universe.

  "Don't worry. I'll bring you something back. Something good."

  The Pilgrim raised a hand and flexed the tips of his fingers in a tiny waving gesture. The fingers did not bend at the joint.

  Trevor left the house and drove to an area where prostitutes and rent boys prowled, canvassing the kerb for business. He trawled the infamous cluster of three or four streets, choosing the least popular stretch, the low end of the scale that was populated by junkies and fetishists and people who had long ago sold their basic humanity.

  He pulled up at the kerb and waited with his lights on.

  After five minutes someone approached, stepping casually out of the darkness. It was a boy, aged about sixteen or seventeen, and he was smoking a short hand-rolled cigarette. The boy had a skinhead haircut and was dressed in a tight black T-shirt and dirty blue jeans. He was too thin, malnourished; his ribs stuck out through the material of his T-shirt and his knees were like billiard balls covered in denim.

  Trevor rolled down the car window and stared straight ahead.

  "You looking for business?" The boy was leaning towards the window but not quite poking his head inside. He was canny, this one; he had street smarts.

  "Depends what's on offer." Trevor was flying. He could barely control himself and felt like he might giggle at any minute, spoiling the act.

  "Depends what you want," said the boy, nobody's fool. "This is entrapment, you know."

  Trevor turned to the boy. He was grinning. His teeth were yellow and there were a few gaps in his gums. He had once been pretty, before the drugs had taken hold, and there still remained a sense of innocence behind his wasted features, even if it was badly corrupted. The boy's eyes were tiny, with dark shadows beneath. His cheeks were hollow, his skin sallow and waxy. He looked haunted. Or hunted. Perhaps both.

  "Well?" The boy winked. It was a gesture that aged him, cracking open the carapace of youth to offer a glimpse of something darker, and in that moment Trevor made his decision.

  "Back to my place. I want the lot: full sex, blow job, tromboning, a bit of rough domination." The words tasted like vomit. "The whole works."

  "That's better." The boy walked around the front of the car, sashaying his pathetically narrow hips, and then opened the passenger door. He climbed in and placed his hand directly over Trevor's crotch. "That's much better. So drive on."

  The journey lasted only minutes but it seemed to last forever. The boy worked his hand in Trevor's lap, making him hard, and with his other hand he turned on the radio. There was a cheesy pop tune playing and he sang along, his voice high and fragile, like that of choirboy. It was a beautiful voice, and its wavering notes made Trevor begin to doubt what he was about to do. Then he glanced down, at the boy's fingers in his zipper, and he regained his composure.

  "We're here." He stopped the car and stared straight ahead, through the windscreen and into the bleak urban darkness. "We can get out now."

  The boy removed his hand from Trevor's trousers, and he wilted. It was an instant reaction, and Trevor knew that his erection would not return, not tonight.

  They walked up to the house and Trevor paused on the stone steps. "Are you sure?"

  The boy laughed. "Don't be daft, man. This is what I do for a living. But I can pretend to be unsure, or a virgin, if that's what you like. You got any drugs?"

  Trevor took him inside and closed the door.

  The house closed in around him. He was acutely aware of the mirror upstairs and the presence behind the glass. Hunger crawled along the hallway, creeping into the rooms and rolling across the walls and ceiling.

  "Upstairs," he said, taking the boy's hand. "In my room."

  The boy allowed himself to be led. "You got drink up there? I'm feeling a bit too sober."

  "Yes. I have everything you want up there. Everything we need." He led the boy up the stairs, along the hall, and into his room.

  "Wow," said the boy. "This is a nice place. Cool mirror. How does it do that? Is it a trick?" he walked straight to the mirror, slipping off his T-shirt and dropping it to the floor. His body was painfully thin, like a doll's torso. There were faint scars on his back; a black rose tattoo was pasted onto his left shoulder. His collarbones were sharp as cleavers.

  "Yeah, it's a trick." Trevor stood at the door, afraid to go any further.

  "You a magician or summat? Those suits are fierce." He motioned towards Trevor's gold jacket, and then the open wardrobe door and the stage outfits that lolled from the gap like drunkards. "You famous? You been on telly? I've never fucked anyone from telly before." The boy began to undo his trousers, slipping them down his thin legs.

  "Hello there," said the Pilgrim, appearing in the black glass. "And what do they call you, my boy?"

  To give him his due, the boy reacted fast. He pulled up his jeans and turned to flee, all in a single motion. He did not scream. Even in extremis, he realised that it would be wasted energy, that there was nobody around to hear. He took a step – just one – and then he halted. The skin of his face went tight, as if someone had clamped a huge bulldog clip onto the back of his head. The flesh began to slough from the bone, but unlike Derek's flesh it came away in chunks. Blood sprayed and hung in the air, clogging into globules like fluid spilled in zero gravity.

  Trevor could not bear to look but he was unable too look away. He stared at the boy, at the clots of blood dangling in the air, and he felt more alive than he had in years.

  The human body holds eight to ten pints of blood, and Trevor watched in awe as every single speck of the boy's blood was drained from his body. The blood gathered above him, forming a surreal crimson reflection, and then it moved sluggishly towards the mirror, dropping down as the boy's exsanguinated corpse flopped to the floor.

  The Pilgrim opened his arms. His eyes were closed.

  The blood-image spread and flattened and pressed against the glass, and then was slowly absorbed into the Pilgrim's world. It smothered his body, writhing against him like a dark red sheet caught in a strong wind, and then it entered his body through the pores in the flesh he wore.

  This last part of the process took only seconds, and when it was over Trevor could barely believe what he had seen.

  "Ah, that's better." The Pilgrim opened his eyes. They were deep red, like orbs of blood. He licked his lips, and his tongue was also red, stained dark from the boy's juices. "That's much better." The skin seemed to fit him now, perfectly; it clung to his form as if he had been born wearing it.

  "What now?" Trevor's voice was weak and raspy as he struggled to gulp down air.

  "One more thing." The Pilgrim shuddered. "Just one more thing."

  "Anything," said Trevor.

  The Pilgrim smiled shyly, shrugging his shoulders. "This might sound trite, but you need to believe."

  "What?" Trevor took a step back, opening his hands and shaking his head. "What do you mean?"

  "I'm like Tinkerbell," said the Pilgrim, grinning. His mouth was as wide as that of a shark. His bone teeth shimmered. "I need you to believe."

  "I already believe in you." Trevor stepped forward, occupying the space he'd just vacated. "How could I not?"

  "No," said the Pilgrim. "You misunderstand me. You don't have to believe in me. I already believe in myself. I need you to believe that I can step through this mirror and enter your personal reality.
Believe
that I can come over there and join you. You see, my friend, it's all about belief. Everything is about belief. Without it, we have nothing. Belief is the glue that holds the universe together, and I need some of that glue from you. Believe that I can come through the mirror, and I will. It's that simple."

  Trevor was shaking. His eyes were filled with tears. "I do," he said. "I believe."

  "Are you sure?" said the Pilgrim. "Are you really, really sure? I need you to be certain."

  Trevor nodded. He couldn't speak. His face had turned to stone.

  "Thank you, friend," said the Pilgrim. "Thank you very much." He sounded like a low-rent Elvis Presley impersonator. He even did a little shimmy, shuffling his feet and grinding his pelvis in a tight little circle. Then he flicked out his hands at waist level, waggling his fingers as if he were playing the piano. "Uh-huh, huh, huh."

  "I believe," repeated Trevor, staring at the amazing being before him. And he did; he really did.