Only Forward

by Michael Marshall Smith

  I sagged, face in my hands. I’ve lost clients before, and I guess it’s similar to a doctor making a bad call, not doing exactly the right thing at exactly the right time every bloody time. Someone dies. No matter how much you tell yourself you did all you could, that you made the best decisions you could make at the time, it still feels like shit. It’s not your fault, but it is. It is.

  I walked back to the centre of the room. Zenda, Shelby and Snedd watched me, and I felt unwelcomely at the centre of attention. This felt bad. This was not just any client. This was not just any job. The suite felt like a dimly-lit stage and my friends looked like actors left adrift on it. There was no audience and no script. As I stood there watched by the eyes of the people who knew what I was, I realised finally that it was all coming down, that I was going to have to find myself again, and do something about it.

  The moment stretched and burst, and I reached out for the coffee pot at the same time as Shelby asked conversationally, ‘Are you guys aware that it’s like floor-to-ceiling cats out there?’

  Everyone turned slightly, moved, and the room was just a room again.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Snedd, maybe a little uneasily. ‘It’s been filling up for the last couple hours. Stark’s cat is out there somewhere too.’ He paused, and then looked at her. ‘Who are you exactly?’

  Zenda came and got some coffee too.

  ‘Why this suite?’ I asked. She shrugged. I found that I was searching for my lighter, studying my coffee, doing anything except look directly at her. I wondered if she noticed, and if she felt anything. I wished I could tell if it was just me this was happening to.

  ‘We went to Tabby 5,’ she said. ‘But Spangle leapt out of my arms and ran here. We followed.’ She shrugged again, more flamboyantly. I nodded. ‘Listen though,’ she added seriously. ‘Something weird is going on.’

  ‘No shit.’

  ‘Yes, but listen. C came to talk to me about five minutes before Ji called.’ Hearing this reminded me that Darv and three other agents were prowling outside the gate. Maybe inside by now.

  ‘And?’

  ‘He looked tired. He looked very tired.’

  ‘What did he want?’

  ‘I’m not sure. That was what was so weird about it. He came into my office, said hello. Asked how I was. After that he didn’t really have anything to say, but he stayed. It’s as if—’ She came to a halt.

  ‘As if what? Tell me.’

  ‘It’s as if he wanted to say something to me, but he didn’t know what it was. He hung around for a couple of minutes, and then he left. Just before he shut the door he did say something. He said “There’s something very strange happening, and I don’t know what it is. Tell your friend to be careful.”’

  Before I could react Ji spoke.

  ‘Stark, Alkland’s in trouble.’

  I walked quickly over to the sofa and looked down at the Actioneer. His breathing was very irregular, coming in harsh but shallow bursts, and his face reminded me of my grandfather’s face in the snow. The next thirty seconds happened as if driven by a metronome. Snedd suddenly cocked his head.

  ‘Stark, I hear sound.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Next block.’

  ‘Are we armed?’

  ‘Two guns.’

  ‘Kill the lights.’

  Snedd bounded accurately and soundlessly towards the switches and the second before the lights went out froze in my head like a still photo. Ji, straightening up and turning, his eyes still on Alkland’s dying face. Shelby, wrapping her coat around her, looking frightened and alone. Zenda crouching down near the window, and Snedd poised over the switches.

  I moved towards Zenda and the lights went out.

  It was very dark. A little light crept under the door from lamps in the corridor outside, but there were no windows out there. The curtains behind me were drawn, and glowed barely perceptibly from a light down in the street. In the room there were a few soft glints, silhouettes of faces and edges of furniture. That was all.

  We listened. Snedd’s hearing is supernatural: I knew that from experience. It was several minutes before I heard the faintest wisp of sound. It was coming from several streets away.

  ‘Can they track us?’ I asked in a low tone.

  ‘Possible,’ said Ji. ‘Wet pavements. Is the door locked downstairs?’

  ‘No,’ said Shelby tonelessly. ‘Just shut. What are we going to do?’

  ‘Wait.’

  ‘Wait for what?’

  There was a noise from behind a door on one side of the suite. The movement of five heads snapping towards it was almost audible.

  ‘What’s through there?’ I hissed.

  ‘Bathroom.’

  ‘What the hell’s that sound?’

  It came again, and this time I realised that it was a note. It was a voice singing a note, singing ‘la’ so quietly you could barely hear it.

  The ‘la’ came again, on the same note, and then again. In the dark I felt the hair on my scalp and neck ripple, felt moisture pricking in my eyes. I couldn’t blink. Zenda clutched my arm tightly, so tightly I thought she’d cut me, and her arm was shaking wildly. None of us were breathing.

  ‘La, la la.’

  It sounded like the unselfconscious singing of a child, a child who is absorbed in something else and probably isn’t even aware they’re making a sound.

  There was a soft swishing sound, like a mat moving across a tiled floor, and slowly the door to the bathroom began to open. I had to blink to clear my eyes, and I had to breathe, but not yet. I couldn’t.

  The door swung quietly inwards, opening into a room that was even darker than our own. The pool of darkness inside was still for a moment, and then a glint moved across it. I thought I heard a soft sound from the sofa, a deepening in Alkland’s breathing. The glint moved out of the doorway, and the darkness underneath it took shape as it walked into the centre of the suite.

  It was a little girl. It was a little girl with a pretty, chubby face and blonde hair that stuck out cutely every which way, hair that a mother would want to cluck over, but which looked beautiful as it was. Under her arm was a battered teddy bear.

  ‘La la la,’ the girl sang quietly, ‘la la la.’ Alkland’s breathing hitched again, and the girl took a wobbly baby stride towards him, grinning as if she’d seen a doggy wagging its tail. She reached out towards Alkland’s arm and patted her hand on it, palm open. She waited a moment, and then patted his arm again, a little harder, but still gently, still with love, still like a little girl trying to attract her brother’s attention, and then I knew.

  Slowly the girl began to cry, soundlessly, and her face stretched as her mouth opened in misery, a misery that couldn’t find any sounds. She patted Alkland’s arm again desperately, her face turning unseeingly towards us, looking not for us but for a mother that wasn’t there, a father who had died years ago. Her breath hitched in time with Alkland’s as the pain tried to get out, as the hurt and terrible incomprehension cut up her heart as it had sixty years before. Her brother couldn’t help her now either, was damaged as badly as she, still suffering from the same pain and from the guilt of not being able to protect his sister, of seeing the shock settle behind her face so that a smile would never fit there again, of knowing that a hand had pulled her straw hair and bruised her baby’s legs.

  They’d died together that day in the park, that day when someone had taken the little girl’s laughter and smashed it against a wall, smashed it until it bled, smashed it until there was nothing left in his filthy hand but silence, a silence that grew between Alkland and Suzanna because of all the things they couldn’t say to anyone, because of all the ways they never felt again.

  I heard Zenda sobbing into my jacket behind me and blinked my eyes rapidly. I remembered the photo I’d seen, and the feeling, and as the little girl howled with silent horror behind a pane of glass I smelt the pain beneath Alkland’s still waters.

  You never think it will happen to you, never understand ho
w it could. When a smiling father watches his daughter playing in the garden, laughing and spinning beneath the sky, how can he tell that his little princess will end up insane and jabbering, a flea-ridden bundle of piss-soaked rags in a cardboard box under a bridge? If you looked at all the family albums and saw all the little girls clapping their plump hands together in delight, dressed in their best frocks, happy beneath the sun and watched by mothers who look absurdly young, how could you tell which of them would end up scrabbling at their faces, scratching and gouging as they try to tear off spiders that aren’t there?

  And if you were that little girl’s brother, and you couldn’t protect her, and you couldn’t heal her, and you couldn’t make her smile, could you ever forgive yourself?

  Alkland coughed violently, his chest arching up as if punched from within, and suddenly the room was freezing. There was a splitting sound and a line of intense yellow light appeared on the ceiling, a line that streamed from a crack in Alkland’s chest.

  ‘Stark!’ screamed Shelby, backing sobbing towards the wall.

  I stood up, feeling my teeth shifting as they clamped together in fury. I heard a cry from the street outside but it was completely unimportant and I shouted myself, shouted at the growing crack.

  ‘I’m coming.’

  I walked stiffly towards the sofa, past the sobbing child, and Alkland’s eyes flew open in horror as he saw death reach out, and as he felt the evil which had possessed him for weeks or months drop him to the ground to break, used up and finished. Ji stood up too and threw his gun to Snedd.

  The two of us walked together, as we had before, towards the worst of everything, Ji in step beside me for the last time. Alkland’s chest burst open and we strode into the light.

  20

  A ghost once said, ‘I’m not a heaven person.’

  I’m not a heaven person either.

  I killed my best friend. I saw the front of his head burst out, saw his bright green eyes shredded by splintering skull as it threw his brain over the room. There was nothing heroic about it, no big climax, no romantic clash of the titanic forces of good and evil with a cast of thousands. Ji and I tracked him down, hounded him through Jeamland and The City and backed him into a corner in Turn Neighbourhood. Rafe tried to flip back, tried to tear his way back into Jeamland but I held him fast and I was stronger then, much stronger. That was back in the good old days, when I was still me occasionally, when I was still more or less awake.

  I pushed him down onto his knees and he didn’t plead, didn’t ask for mercy. He just stared up at me with chips of green ice as Ji took out his gun and held it against his skull. Then Ji pulled the trigger and spread Rafe’s face over three square yards of rotting concrete in a dark room that smelt of shit.

  Of course it was the town, the dusty ghost town. Ji and I stood in the middle of the deserted square, bathed in the weak afternoon sun. Wind howled through a broken door and tumbleweed strolled listlessly past our feet. The sun glinted off broken panes in the windows of the buildings round the sides, and out of sight beyond the remains of the town was the desert.

  ‘Here again,’ said Ji. Here again, after eight years, eight years which had not made either of us any older. Eight years in which we’d changed but stayed the same.

  We turned at the sound of a crack but it was only a shutter falling open in the wind and smacking against the wall. If we stayed still, if we just stood there in the middle of the old square, nothing would happen. We had to walk towards it. This was our doing, and we had to do it again.

  I looked at Ji and he knew it too. He was not a strong dreamer before someone came to stay in his dreams, but he understands. We could just stand there, feeling young, feeling as if the years had not passed, and the square would stay as it was, trapped in a golden moment. I felt my neck twitch and held it firm, willing myself to keep it together. Ji just stood, knowing he would never understand, never know how this place had been before it all went wrong, never know how it had felt.

  It didn’t last long. I swallowed and then nodded. We started to walk across the square and Ji looked across at me suddenly and I saw something in his eyes. He had some idea of what he was walking towards, knew something about what was going to happen. It can only have been an intuition, but he reached out and gripped my hand hard for a moment, looking me in the eyes. Then he let go, with the faintest of smiles, and we walked on.

  The wind picked up as we walked and the dust began to swirl around our feet, whirling up until we could no longer see the sun, until the sky began to darken with it. We couldn’t see the corner of the square we were heading towards any more but that wasn’t important, because it was not the corner that mattered. The walk we were on was not in space, would not even all be in Jeamland. The darkness grew and while the whirling dust still dulled the light now it was moonlight shining in the afternoon.

  I felt the hair on the back of my neck begin to rise and for one brief, meaningless moment wished we had not moved, that we had just stood in the sun. But we could not have done. Today, finally, it had to all come down, and this time it had to be for good.

  The dust flew and spun in front of us and the square was almost gone, just the faintest hint of structure off to the sides. The light came from the dust now, a black and beating red, and all around us soft sounds began to turn. I could feel the tension rising off Ji, and knew that he could not stand this for much longer. He knew some of what was going to happen, and he would not be able to wait.

  I didn’t think he’d have to.

  I met Ji after I’d been in The City a couple of years. I’d wandered around, trying to work out what I was going to do, how I was going to use up my life. I was running jobs in Jeamland by then, sorting out the mess I’d helped to create, and through that I met some odd people. I gravitated downwards, you might say.

  I didn’t have an office with my name on frosted glass, but I might just as well have done. I was a moron. I’ve always been a moron, but I was at my worst then. I’d found what I wanted and been left high and dry by it, and I had no reserves of character to fall back on. I was just a hurt little boy, wandering round looking for more excuses to feel sorry for myself. If you know someone well you learn to hate them, and I knew myself far too well. I’d looked inside, pulled myself apart and run hunting through the shreds hoping to find something left in there that I could hold onto, and there was nothing. I wasn’t there any more. All that was left was memories, and the space between was filled with bitter sludge.

  I used to hope to God that I would take some little job, some normal thing, and find myself in a back room one day, out-manned and out-gunned, that I’d feel my face smash apart as someone put me down, not knowing what I was and not caring. That was all I wanted for such a long time, just for someone to hurt me. I used to fantasize about it, about cutting myself or being smashed up. And then I stopped, because I didn’t care about anything enough even to hate myself that much.

  All I had to make me feel good in those days was what Rafe was doing, because he was the designated bad guy. With him around I could pretend to myself that I was on the right side, could magic up a white charger to ride on. Everybody needs to be a hero in their own life. Everybody needs to be the good guy, however many lies that takes. And the truth is you just do what you want to do, you protect yourself, and you kill the people who try to screw up what you want.

  I never said that I was the good guy. There are no good guys.

  It was just bad luck for Ji that I was working with him when it all hit crisis point, when Rafe decided to try to tear down the veils. Rafe stirred him up really badly, and so Ji had to be on my side, had to help me if he wanted to live. I saved Ji’s life, and he saved mine. And now Rafe wanted them both.

  As we walked I heard a car starting in the distance, a dog barking, the sound of a bottle smashing. All meaningless, all just fragments, like the sound of boots on stones. We heard a wet sound and looked to the side. A man with green eyeshadow and blue lipstick was squatting by the remain
s of a body, chewing, his jaws champing up and down.

  ‘A Something?’ asked Ji.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘They’re gathering.’

  Something else scampered by in the darkness just beyond where we could see, and Ji’s face twitched.

  There was no fucking Dilligenz II, was there?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘There wasn’t.’

  ‘Do you think Alkland knew that?’

  ‘No. He was just an innocent bystander with enough pain to work on. He had no idea what was going on. I had no idea. I carried him into Cat, remember. I carried Rafe in. That’s why the gate wouldn’t open. When Alkland told me about Dilligenz II, there was a question I should have asked him. I should have asked how he found out about it.’

  ‘Why didn’t Rafe come out before? I mean if he’s been in Alkland for weeks, why didn’t he come out and get you immediately?’

  ‘I don’t think he has been. I think he went in just long enough to plant the Dilligenz II idea, and to push Alkland out as bait. Then I think he got back in while Alkland was stranded in Jeamland by himself. Why he waited then I don’t know. Maybe he wasn’t strong enough. Maybe he wanted you and me together. I just don’t know, Ji.’

  ‘What happened in the hotel room back there?’

  ‘That was a Something too. It must have been.’

  ‘In The City? How the fuck did it get there?’

  ‘I don’t know. Rafe, I guess. That was what he was trying to do last time, remember? Tear down the wall.’

  ‘Where’s he now?’

  ‘Ji, I really don’t—’

  Suddenly everything was noise, a smashing, screaming explosion of sound. The darkness disappeared instantly in a blaze of cruel red light. Hundreds of faces surrounded us, layer on layer in a circle forty yards across, and every face was an identical wide-mouthed scream of recrimination. For a stroboscopic flash of image and sound these faces towered over us in shrieking misery, and then we were in dark silence again.