From Dark Places (15 page)

He looked at her, his dark eyes shadowed by his frown. “Death.”

She blinked. “Death?”

“Yes. I caught Death in this sack. I did it for you.”

A loud thump made her jump and him tighten his grip on her. A moan rose through the floorboards; a zombie prowled the hallway below.

“They followed us?”

“They can sense it,” he replied, stroking her hair. “They’re looking for Death.”

She couldn’t stop herself from shaking. “Stop it, you’re frightening me.”

“I’m sorry. I’m just telling you the truth. It’s how I could make you that offer. I caught Death in this bag so you and I will never die. We’ll stay as we are. Together, forever.”

She clenched her teeth, forcing herself to think. “If that’s true, surely we’d still get old? We’d just never die, it would be awful.”

“No, I don’t believe that. Death ages us by stealing the life from us every day. Then in the end he takes what’s left. Now he’s in this sack.” He tilted his head towards it. “He can’t take anything from us.”

The sound of the moaning grew louder, a chilling harmonic of differing pitches.

Rosalind pointed a finger at the loft hatch. “But it also means they’re not dead, when they should be.” She struggled to believe she was even saying these words in real life; she wanted someone to call ‘Cut!’

“I suppose so. It wasn’t part of the plan.”

“You planned this?” The question escaped her lips before she could rein it in.

He nodded. “I saw the studio scouting for a location and pieced some clues together that it was for your next film. Once you were here and I got to know you. I knew my love hadn’t been wasted. You were just as beautiful as you are in the films. No, more so. Perfect.” He gazed at her. “I knew what I had to do, so I did it. I caught Death this evening whilst you were waving everybody off.”

“How did you know he’d be here?” she asked, drawn in, believing him despite herself. He didn’t reply, simply looking towards the sack. Desperate to keep him sweet, she tried again, “How did you trap Death in that old sack?”

“It’s not just an old sack. It’s been in my family for generations. An ancestor of mine, a soldier, traded it for his last biscuit. It traps anything I order into it.”

“Even Death?”

“Even Death.”

She couldn’t recall whether it was better to encourage a psychopath’s delusion or to challenge it. “If you opened the sack, would he come out?”

“Yes.”

“Then those zombies—I mean people—would die… properly, and we’d be safe, right?”

“Yes, I suppose we would be.”

“Then Michael, please,” she implored, not even sure what she believed, “open the sack.”

He sighed and loosened his grip on the hessian. “Death, I give you permission to leave,” he said, loud enough to make the zombies gathering beneath moan even louder.

The light flickered. The room smelt of damp earth briefly and Rosalind felt something like a cold sigh brush past her. Below, the sound of several thuds, and the moaning ceased.

Michael sighed. “It’s done.”

She extricated herself from his grip and lifted the hatch slowly. She squealed and dropped it when she caught sight of her make-up artist’s glassy eyes staring up at her. Several other bodies lay prone, mercifully still, but she didn’t give herself time to take it in. Good God, did this mean he’d actually been telling the truth?

“It’s over!” She sunk to her knees, exhaustion overcoming her. She expected him to say something, anything, like any relieved person would, but he didn’t. “Are you all right, Michael?” She wondered if shock was setting in.

“I don’t know. It depends on you. Will you stay with me? Even though I can’t give you eternal youth?”

She bit her lip, forcing herself back onto to her feet, ready to make a run for it. “Look, Michael, I’m flattered, but after tonight, I just want to go home to London. And see my therapist. And my manicurist. This place… well, I just don’t want to stay here. It’s been…” she glanced at the clippings all over the walls, “wonderful to meet you, and you have a beautiful home, but I have a life in London. A career, you know?”

“I was afraid you’d say that.” He opened the sack slowly. “Rosalind Wilder, I command you to get into this sack.”

She found herself walking towards it, even though she didn’t want to, even though she willed her legs to stop, even though she started to scream inside. As she climbed into the musty sack, tears rolling down her cheeks and her breath catching in her lungs, she saw him smiling at her. That same smile from dinner.

“I’ll take care of you.” He tucked wayward strands of her hair into the sack. “You said in
The Daily Mail
on October 4th 2009 you’d be happy to be a kept woman, there was no shame in being taken care of by a man who loves you.”

She strained to call out, but nothing emerged. All she could do was curl up as the fabric was gathered, the gap closing above her.

“I love you, Rosalind. I’ll never let you go.”

HER FALL

A drop of blood congealed on his shoe. He’d clean it later, right now there was the woman to watch. He took a step closer to the edge, standing with his feet wide apart to brace against the buffeting wind. Looking down, he was amazed to see her still clinging on, sobbing.

 Why hold on? It only prolonged the inevitable.

She must have felt his eyes upon her because she looked up, the wind scouring her bleeding back. Her golden hair, whipped into a thousand tangles, pulled in all directions as the gusts roiled about her. He could see her tears, the bloodshot eyes—eyes once so beautiful to him. Now he could barely stand to look into them, but he did for a moment longer, if only to reinforce the fact he was safe up here and she hung, with no hope, above the dull rumble of the city below.

“Please, please forgive me!”

He shook his head.

“It’s too late.” The wind carried his words down to her, making her cringe. “You know you did wrong, you must accept your punishment.”

“I couldn’t help it!” she screamed back up to him. “It was love! I loved him!”

He examined the tracks of her tears on her cheeks, the blood from her fingers staining the ledge she gripped as tight as she could. He imagined her with the lover, imagined them kissing, her legs curled around him, wrapped in fresh cotton sheets with the sound of the city slinking in through the open window. He imagined her cry out at the pinnacle of her passion, his filthy hands roaming her perfect flesh, defiling her.

He stepped back, turning away.

“Please,” she begged, slipping an inch. “I know it was wrong. I know I shouldn’t have been with him, but I put it right. I ended it. No-one knew about the affair. No-one! Please, help me!” The last words were mangled by her sobs. His anger brought him back to the edge again.

“Selfish beast! You think I punished you for lust? Fool!”

“I know it was wrong. But he’s gone now.”

“Yes,” he knelt on one knee, bringing himself closer to her only to emphasise the distance between them. “He’s gone, because you killed him. You took his life to protect your reputation.”

“No! To protect
your
reputation,” she screamed back. “To protect all of you, all of us!”

“Us?” His upper lip curled in disgust. “There is no us. You killed a man. Don’t you understand? The punishment isn’t for loving him, for letting your lust overwhelm you. The punishment is for his murder. There is no place in heaven for murderers.”

He saw it in her eyes and in her fingertips, the moment she realised she had damned herself with violence, not lust. He looked over to her wings, crumpled a few feet away, the white feathers sticky with her blood, his sword abandoned next to them the moment after he’d cut them from her.

Finally, she fell.

THE SUPPORTING STATEMENT

I sold my soul to the Devil when I was nine years old. It was easy; I did it all by letter. The only hard bit was working out where to send it. I sat on the kerb outside the children’s home I was in at the time, looking between the post box across the road and the envelope addressed to: The Devil, Hell

What to do though? I saw the postman nick a letter once, when he thought no-one was looking, so I wasn’t too keen on using the Royal Mail for something so important.

That letter went around for a week in my back pocket before I decided the best way to get it to hell was down the toilet. Sounds weird, but I knew Hell was under us, and the flush had to send all that crap somewhere. I was a kid. It made sense.

The note was straight forward and went something like this:

Dear Satan,

I need a Mum. Like really quick, and not just any Mum, the best Mum ever. I heard you give people stuff if they give you their souls, so you can have mine, I don’t need it anyway.

 ~ Ben

P.S. I’m not some pillock kid who don’t know nothing. I know if you don’t give me the best Mum ever, that’s a beach of contract, and I get my soul back, so don’t try nothing dodgy.

P.P.S. She needs to be able to cook.

There were more spelling mistakes, but that’s about it. Makes me wince now to think of the ‘beach of’ bit, but I was only nine for God’s sake. I watched it swirl around and disappear.

I wasn’t lying about the needing her quick bit; it wasn’t some kind of clever sales ploy on my part. The home I was in was grim, and there was a kid who knew all the places to hurt you that don’t leave marks. Another kid was just wrong in the head. Most of the kids there were, in some way, but he was a piece of work.

And we all knew that without a foster family, come your sixteenth birthday, you were on the street, alone. But they all want bloody babies like on the telly. Not nine year old boys with a face like a slapped arse and a gob on him that makes old women weep. That’s why I wasn’t too fussed about selling my crummy little soul. It was the only currency I had.

I stood at the window for hours, watching for storm clouds, waiting for my new Mum to turn up. I thought, seeing as she was being sent by the Devil she’d arrive at night, during a really fierce storm, with lots of lightning. Everyone knows the Devil only does stuff at night during a storm, right?

Wrong.

No storm. No best ever Mum.

I was desperate, worried the Devil hadn’t got the letter, so I asked the bloke who ran the home to help, and he said I should go read a book and not bother him with my crap. So I went to the library and found all kinds of stuff online.

A dead chicken later, blood spilt all over the black clothes I nicked from the other kids, and I was certain the Devil got my message.

A week later (I guess hell is further away than I thought) some bird from The Social turned up and said a foster family wanted me. When you’re in a home, that’s like saying you’ve won the lottery. When you’re a slapped-arsed-face boy, it was like winning the lottery by finding someone else’s ticket in a gutter.

So this couple took me in, and for a while, it was good. She was a great cook and wanted to adopt me because she was bored. He was never there, out earning stacks of money. Great house, nice car, they put me in a school where you have to wear a blazer and a hat. That’s it, I thought, I’m made. Just have to keep my nose clean and mouth shut, until they adopt me.

I was a smug little git too. Thought I was so clever, taking myself to the library and finding a magical telephone to Beelzebub. If the Devil marketed himself better he could have the souls of kids in shitty care homes up and down the country. And all for the rock bottom price of one grubby soul. I thought it was a bargain.

Then it went wrong. You knew that though; you knew that couldn’t have been the end of it, didn’t you? She got pregnant, didn’t she? Ten years of trying, all kinds of crap injected into her backside every week and she goes and gets pregnant just before they sign my adoption papers.

It all changed. I knew it was over. Sideways glances and guilty silences whenever I walked in on them. The bigger the bump, the smaller my chances of winning them over. I left the night I overheard them talking about turning my room into the nursery.

I was pretty damn pissed off. I didn’t go straight back to the home. I went to the dump where I killed that chicken. I was pissed off with my almost-Mum. I was pissed off with that speck of a baby in her gut, but not nearly as pissed off as I was with the Devil. I told Satan he was a cheating piece of crap, and if he thought he was getting my soul after only a few poxy weeks of bliss, he had another thing coming.

Then I went back to the home, course I did. It was that or the street, and I knew the home was (only slightly) better. The other kids waited a day, one stinking day, then got stuck in.

They say children are proof God hasn’t given up on mankind. Bollocks. The only thing kids prove is that Satan shags about.

Course there were no more rich Mums looking for a project like me. I’d had my one shot and just like everything else in my life, it turned out to be a big, steaming pile of disappointment. The years passed and a month before my sixteenth birthday came the home’s token attempt to help me work out where I was gonna go next, more to make them feel better than anything else.

I remember it clearly because I panicked. I’m not ashamed to admit it, and I think it’s important you know why I did what I did next. It wasn’t me being a nasty bugger, even though that might be partly true. I was scared, see? All I saw was this empty life stretching ahead, like a really grotty alleyway. I saw me at the end of it, dying, in the small hours of a cold Sunday morning, stinking of piss and cheap booze, some mongrel dog whining next to me. Yeah, I could see that clearer than anything else and I didn’t want to be that bloke. I didn’t want that dog, or those grim clothes or hygiene issues.