Pretty Little Dead Things (34 page)

  I opened the door and stepped into the past, feeling a cold wind caress me as I crossed the threshold. The posters on the walls were still intact, if a little dusty; none of them had come loose. Ponies and puppies and cartoon characters. The wallpaper was a design Rebecca and I had picked out together: colourful clouds and moons and stars, with cartoon cherubs lounging amid the celestial clutter.

  Stuffed toys lay in a group at the top of the bed, clustered up against the headboard. Their glassy eyes stared at me, not judging, just watching, and I felt a tug somewhere deep inside – the tug of a small hand clutching at my heart.

  I got down on my knees and closed my eyes. The power was stronger here, as I had known it would be. I could feel them, both of them, and my desire to see them, even one last time, almost overcame me.

  I said their names over and over again, feeling something stir. I called upon them to aid me, to protect me as best they could, and I'm sure that there came an answer: soundless, wordless, like a silent breath on my cheek.

  I recited lines from ancient prayers once carved in stone, a section of the Torah. Then I spoke the words of a William Blake poem; recited an old Beatles song; a paragraph from John Steinbeck's
Of Mice and Men
, which had always been Rebecca's favourite book. I finished by singing Ally's favourite nursery rhyme:
Baa-Baa Black Sheep.

  It is not the content of the incantation that matters, but the power of the emotion behind it. Magic is an inexact science, and it can often be made up on the spot. This is what most people do not understand: the words, the phrases, mean nothing, but the thing which holds the meaning is what lies
between the lines
. Elmer Lord understood this – it was a similar magic to that inherent in his tattoos. I understood it, too. I always had.

  The real magic is interstitial, it lies in-between what we know and do not know. Enchantment lives in the gaps between what we feel and what we say, what we hear and what we miss.

  My tattoos became animated, the ink flowing across my body, running in narrow, coloured rivers before returning to recreate the symbols of protection they were always meant to be. I felt my friend Elmer Lord's art within me; I heard the sound of the tattoo gun and felt the tip of the needle pierce my flesh. Then I felt as if I were being filled with positive energy.

  I knew that my family were kneeling alongside me and that despite my old betrayal they still loved me, and always would.

  I stood and walked to a door in the opposite wall. It was a built-in cupboard, where Ally had always hidden whenever we played hide-and-seek. She kept her favourite possessions in there, the stuff that she wanted no one else to handle. I opened the door and looked inside.

  Part of me wanted to see her hiding, crouched in the same spot she always hid. But I knew that wasn't feasible – that it would not be so easy. If ever I did catch up with them, it would cost me more than the simple opening of a door.

  It was there. The mirror. I had picked it up in an old secondhand shop for her fifth birthday, when all she had wanted had been a dressing table like her mother's and a full-length mirror. She loved dressing up, and Rebecca allowed her to play with make-up as long as she didn't make a mess.

  Ally had loved the mirror; it had been her "bestest present". I wept when she stood before it dressed in some of her mother's old clothes; my little girl turning into a little woman in the glass. The mirror had always remained her favourite thing. Nothing we bought afterwards could ever replace it in her affections.

  Scrying is simply another method of creating a formula to access elsewhere. An ancient Arabic treatise,
De aspectibus
, outlines much of the power of mirrors. Its author, a man called Alhazen, studied the subject at length, and his book is considered the ultimate written record of the properties of reflective glass. I had read the volume during my early studies, and it had made such an impression that I had subsequently avoided all mirrors for a year.

  Byron Spinks had walked into the mirror in Ellen's hotel room on the night of his death, after he had been killed by another prison inmate who was probably a member of the MT. I had seen him, but I had not followed him. Not then. This time I would. But I would be the one to choose the mode of entrance.

  I stared into the mirror, focusing within me. I reached into my body and dug down deep, pushing aside all the things I used as armour – the secret codes of my pain, the razorwire fences of my psyche. Then, finally, I found it: a small dark box with a shiny clasp. I opened the box and tipped out what was inside: the love I kept all for them, for Rebecca and Ally. I let it out into the light for the first time since Ryan South took them from me – since the Pilgrim, as I now knew him, had used Ryan South as a weapon in a Marsh Farm slum to draw me into his orbit.

  "I'm ready," I whispered. "
Mumbo-jumbo."

  The room went dark; the mirror turned black.

  The glass was fogged, as if heavy, dark clouds churned and boiled beneath it. Some of that fog leaked out, spilling into the room, and slowly I reached out to touch it. The fog was actually ash; it turned my fingers black. I pulled away my hand and raised it to my lips, opened my mouth, and stuck the fingers inside, licking them clean and tasting the ash from a fire that never went out. It tasted of loss. Of memory. Of pain.

  Marshalling my terror, I raised my hands, palm out, and pushed… but they came up against the glass, stopping dead. Dead hands. No entry. Puzzled, I stared at the mirror, at the blackness beyond, and glimpsed movement there, the quick flickering motion of an insect scuttling under a rock, or a snake slithering into shadow.

  My hands were still pressed against the glass. They were cold. So cold and hard and dead.

  Cold hands. Dead hands.

  Another set of hands appeared opposite them, the palms locked with my own. These other hands – so white and smooth and like plastic, but ending in smoky darkness at the wrists – flexed and I felt their pressure against my skin and bones. Then, briskly, they clasped me tighter, our fingers locking as if in a child's game.

Their grip was like iron.

  I tried to step back in panic, but the hands held me there, and then they began to pull. It was too late for regrets. The time had long passed to change the course of events, but fear and doubt and anger collided in my mind to release me. I realised at last that I was not doing this – my own power was not as strong as I'd started to believe.

  This was the Pilgrim's doing. He was dragging me into his realm, just as he'd wanted all along. I had no choice now. I had been tricked and cajoled, and now he had what he wanted.

  He had me right in the palms of his hands.

  I was dragged roughly, violently, into the mirror, afraid of what might be waiting there for me on the other side of the blackened glass, squatting in-between realities and laughing like a jackal.

  Here was where the magic lived, where the Pilgrim walked, where the ghosts drifted.

  Here was where it all ended, one way or another.

  Here was where I finally got to put out the fire.

When the fog cleared I was standing on a street in the Bestwick Estate, or at least a street on an alternative version of the estate. There was no sign of those terrible disembodied hands, or the thing to which they belonged.

  The air smelled of burning: the stench entered my mouth and pushed down my throat, making my insides ache as if they were being squeezed. The buildings around me looked even more rundown than they did on the real estate, if that were at all possible. Windows were mouths lined with jagged glass teeth, doorways were coffin-shaped holes leading into strange black rooms, and weird-looking birds sat along the rooflines, squawking softly.

  It was dark here; it was always dark here. Always dark in the Pilgrim's domain.

  The sky was burned; the roads and footpaths were burned; it was all burned. Ash drifted like dark confetti, riding air currents that I couldn't feel in this stark, still place. I could sense a great lassitude which threatened to overcome me and drag me down to my knees, but I fought against it with all the strength that I possessed. All I wanted to do was lie down in the road and rest, go to sleep, but I held on tightly to the conviction that if I did so I would be trapped here forever, lost between realities and stored like food in the Pilgrim's larder.

  "Mumbo-jumbo," I said again, enjoying the way the words tasted as they filled my mouth. The phrase brought to mind an image of Tebbit, and the plain kind of reality he stood for.

  I walked forward, heading in the direction of the waste ground where Ellen and I had been set upon by those terrible members of the MT. As I walked I sensed movement in some of the buildings. Shapes hovered at shattered windows; disjointed shadows writhed in those coffin doorways. It felt like I was being watched, or scrutinised like a specimen in a lab.

  Far ahead of me I caught sight of a long procession of figures moving along the burned horizon. They were very tall and painfully thin – like skeletons with tissues of pale flesh pulled taught across their bones. Each of the figures was vaguely humanoid in aspect, yet above the neck they all had birds' heads. Large beaks snapped at the sky and tiny black eyes stared unblinkingly ahead. I could make out nothing more of their features, but even this glimpse was enough to inspire the hope that they didn't turn their attention upon me.

  I knew that the Pilgrim was in control here. It was clear that he was able to shape the reality of this place between realities. Everything I might see would be a reflection of his darkling dreams.

  I kept on moving, trying to focus on the road ahead. From behind me there came the sound of doors slamming open and shut, like hungry mouths, and when I turned to look the coffin-shaped entryways were darker, deeper than before, and within the wooden frames I could see fine outlines etched into that darkness, like engravings. The outlines moved, struggling to be born from those upright coffins filled with night, and I forced myself to look away before my concentration was lost.

  I passed the odd sight of a huge cracked egg at the side of the road. It was at least large enough to hold a human being. More hairline cracks appeared in the surface of the dirty white shell as I passed by. A black and yellow claw-like appendage struggled from one of them, tearing at the shell and breaking away chunks that fell to the ground to shatter into yet smaller pieces, which then skittered across the charred paving stones.

  Before moving on, I glimpsed a pulsing caul-like sheet through one of the cracks in the egg, with what might have been eyes staring through the folds in its pulpy mass. Something called out, but not in any language that I could understand.

  Then they appeared.

  
They.

  The MT.

  They skulked out from their hiding places behind the grubby, tumbledown buildings and followed me from each side of the road, stalking me like predators following wounded prey. They didn't attack, simply flanked me and matched my strides as I walked.

  They were the drones, the workers, the part-time hangmen, but I was here to meet with whoever or whatever was in charge.

  Animals walked with them – odd, mishmash creatures made up from differing origins: an alligator with the legs of human children, spiders the size of puppy dogs, with white faces containing a single gelid eye, bats that walked on their wings, dragging behind them silver-razored tails.

  The figures paid these familiars little attention, but they turned their sightless gaze upon me. Ash dropped from their black hoods and dissipated in the heavy air. Their hands grasped emptily at their sides, straining, as if they were being reined in by a greater force. I knew that they were acting as chaperones, forcing me along a certain route, but it was the route I wanted to take anyway.

  There had never been any other way to take. This was the culmination of a choice made long ago.

  I spotted the ruined fence and made for the broken barrier, increasing my speed. I was almost running by the time I reached it, and I crawled through the smashed panel on my hands and knees. On the other side I came upon the old bonfire, which I now realised could only ever have been a funeral pyre. Among the twisted timbers and molten plastic, scorched human flesh had been moulded and fused together to form a nightmarish amalgamation of figures who all screamed silently for release.

  I peered at the mess of blasted tissue, picking out a hand, a leg, a pair of breasts, a face… and two eyes flicked open in an incinerated face, peering at me from a mask of ancient agony. The sound of blackened matter ripping apart filled my ears as the figure opened its mouth. I leaned in, urging it to speak, but all that emerged from its lips was a thin, black plume of ash…

  I lurched away, heading for the far side of the waste ground, where the other broken-down fence would provide a way out. I ducked beneath the leaning timber frame and rolled onto the rubble at the other side. I was breathing heavily, but not from exertion – the altitude here was like that encountered halfway up a mountain, and it held the air like fluid in my lungs.

  The place I had come to see loomed above me, tottering on its tawdry chicken legs. This time the legs were real – massive, scaly and knobbly as old tree branches, they shuffled in the debris that littered the ground, grasping for purchase. Perched atop those terrible limbs was a scorched concrete building with no doors or windows but a single smoking chimney jutting from the pointed roof. The juxtaposition of oversized fowl's legs supporting this grimy modern structure was horrific in a way that eclipsed everything else.