The Ghost
Page 21
As he approached, there was more thudding and shuffling from further inside the room. Hand on his inside pocket, Cook stepped through the door. As his eyes adjusted to the deeper dark, he saw the outline of someone – not Something – sitting on the floor, back propped against an armchair, shoe-heels kicking and scratching at the wooden floor. He lifted his phone and pointed light at the someone, which flinched and lifted a forearm over its eyes.
Watch! He hates this!
Cook dipped the beam and the figure’s red eyes rose up behind its arm. He saw the white hair, the glassy gaze, the sallow skin. He saw the figure’s trembling hands, clamped over a wound on the right side of its chest. He saw a heavy-handled kitchen knife, a lump-hammer, more blood – smear-tracks from the hall, fresh on the figure’s hands, matted around his shirt.
“Hello, John,” said Cook, remaining in the doorway. “What happened? I was expecting your brother.”
John Ray coughed out a chuckle. “I learned to fight my own battles. You might have noticed.”
The voice had roughened with age but still retained its stilted eloquence – the flaring vowels, the stinging consonants. Cook moved further into the room, caution yielding to fascination.
“Well,” said Ray, squinting through the pain. “You haven’t changed.”
Cook stared, in horror and admiration. Was he smiling?
“What’s wrong, Dor? You look like you’ve seen…”
“How did you get out?” said Cook.
“A gentleman of the road,” said Ray. “After you all left, I screamed myself to sleep. The next day, the trapdoor opened and he let me out. I think he was angry that I was squatting in his toilet or something.”
“I heard him,” said Cook. “We saw his stuff.”
“I did think you would have come back for me. Obviously. Until the place burned down. That cunt, Dorian… I wanted him to suffer a lot more, but the last time I saw him, he was so abusive. And he was a coward, you know. He admitted the fire was him, but he blamed you for everything else.”
“Where did you go? You didn’t come back to school.”
“Yes. I’m sure you all missed me. It threw a switch in my mind. I couldn’t speak. My parents wanted to know where I’d been, but I couldn’t tell them. They were separating, anyway – about ten years too late for my mum and her bruises. At least you sped all of that up. She thought it was the bullying, wouldn’t let me go back to Bethesda. She already had her own place so I moved in with her, transferred schools. I’m sorry about your housemate out there, by the way. I got him as he came down the stairs. Didn’t see the fucking knife, though… It wasn’t Brereton who told me you were here, by the way. That was someone else.”
Cook saw little point in giving him the true picture.
“John. I am sorry, you know.”
“Of course you are. Sorry it came to all this. It all ended for me last year. Both parents gone, Darren moved to Spain about ten years ago with a woman he met on holiday. He never knew, Dorian. I thought the ‘D’ thing would get you – before I realised how there are ‘D’s everywhere! Dennis… David… Dorian… I apologise for the melodrama. I honestly didn’t mean to be so cryptic.”
“Where’s Darren now?”
Ray paused to push a hand down on his wound. He took a few cautious deep breaths. “Died. Jet-skiing. Dad went ages ago – lung cancer. My mum killed herself after Darren. You know how tragedy just follows some people around? I suppose all they can do is hope they’re not the last one standing. That didn’t work out for me. The only thing left was to… settle up.”
Grunting and grimacing, Ray dragged himself up off the floor and flopped into the armchair, clutching his bleeding side. Feeling bolder, Cook moved closer and slowly lowered himself into the sofa opposite, keeping his eyes on Ray. He upturned his phone and set it on the cushion beside him. The sharp light was unhelpfully eerie, but just enough to see by.
“Your message was wrong, you know,” said Cook. “No-one is keeping score.”
Ray raised his eyes. “What?”
“What goes around doesn’t necessarily come around. It’s all a continuum. Bad behaviour goes unpunished, good behaviour isn’t always rewarded. It defies all we know about human nature – to impose any logic or order on all of this.”
Ray lifted his head and coughed into the air – atomised crimson. “I know that. And who really wants to be a part of that chaos? Mountford, Brereton, Darren, your friend out there… They’re the lucky ones. I’m getting luckier by the second. You’re stuck with this. You’ve got to find a way to cope – maybe for a long time, yet. The worst thing is that you have to cope in the knowledge that you’re basically nothing – that you don’t matter. We all have such a fine opinion of ourselves and our position in the world. But it’s just delusion – the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem. We all think we have a ‘part’ to play – that we’re something. But really we’re just a collection of self-conscious nothings.”
“But we can choose,” said Cook. “And given the choice, it’s better to be alive. ‘The dead know only one thing – it is better to be alive’.”
Ray smiled. “Full Metal Jacket! I would have thought you’d be more of a Paths Of Glory man. Go on, Dorian. Confess! You might as well. I won’t tell anyone. Do you really think your future holds anything but suffering?”
“Yes, I do!” snapped Cook. “Why the fuck do you think I went through all of this? Yes – I’m miserable. But I’m learning to reject pessimism. Imagine something truly terrible – like being blind. How do you keep going through that? Perpetual darkness. Nothing but nothing. But where are all the blind suicides? Obviously, it’s better to be alive in the dark than alone in the light.”
“You’re not alive in the dark. You’re a hider, Dorian. You always were. You chose the dark because it felt safe. I had no choice. Yes – I suppose it is ‘good’ to be alive and aware and full of possibility. But it’s even better to have not been born in the first place.”
On cue, he coughed up something primal – a belly-deep rasp. There was an impatience to the sound which startled Cook.
“Why did you do it? Why didn’t you come to get me out? Remember what that girl said – what had I done to hurt you?”
“You were different. As different as it was possible to be. And we were kids, and kids are cruel. They have to be. It’s how they deflect and free themselves from all that control and belittlement – all that spite and structure. Remember the world back then? Teachers who could hit us with bits of wood – fucking mark us for life. It was too dangerous to speak up or stand up or stand out when the adults had such a license to keep us quiet, keep us down, keep us in the dark. Teachers – who taught us that physical abuse was just the way of the world. All of that – all the violence it spawned. We weren’t trying to hurt you. We were trying to stop everyone else hurting you.”
John Ray smiled, exposing bloodied teeth. “It’s almost endearing, how much control you think you had then – and still think you have, now. It’s always been my comfort, accepting how little control we have over anything. Because of how I am – how I was – I gave up on conventional happiness before I could walk. You’re not a plotter or a director, Dorian. You’re a walk-on. Like I said – I don’t matter, you don’t matter, this doesn’t matter. The world will just shrug and keep on turning – long after we’ve gone. Once you abandon the silly selfishness of ‘personal fulfilment’, you can zoom right out and embrace insignificance. If you squeeze tight enough, it’s almost spiritual. I didn’t scheme a way towards achieving justice – revenge as a way of restoring some kind of karmic balance. It was animalistic – I had no control, no free will. It’s what I’ve always been used to, and you should start to get used to it, too. However you got me here, I don’t see why you should see any success in it – your grand whitewash. Redemption by disavowal.”
His eyes were frosting over. Cook flinched at the scraping breaths. “What’s it like, John?”
“What?”
�
�Dying.”
“It’s okay. You’ll like it.”
With a ruinous extended wheeze, Ray rose up from the armchair. He tried to lunge for Cook, but fell forward, emptied of energy. Cook scrambled over the back of the sofa and pulled the yellow-and-black M26 Taser from his inside pocket. He aimed with both hands, pointing the weapon at his near-helpless assailant.
Ray dropped to his knees and raised his head. “What are you trying to do? Finish me off or shock me back to life?”
He crawled back onto the armchair, sighed, and closed his unseeing eyes.
The world turned.
John Ray died.
The world turned.
Cook kept the Taser raised. He stood there, stiff and solemn, scanning for signs of life. After a few minutes, the reverie broke and he dared to divert his gaze to an ugly clock on the wall above the television. It was just past 3am. He slid the Taser back into his pocket and stepped forward, avoiding the puddle of blood coiling across the carpet from Ray’s legs. He picked up the lump-hammer from the floor, retrieved his phone from the sofa, tore away one of the curtains and backed out of the room, aiming light at his shoes to check he wasn’t trailing anything. At the hall, he covered the body with the curtain. He turned right into the kitchen, opened the door of the utility room and pulled the light-cord. The door beneath the ceiling-slope was still padlocked. He lifted the lock and twisted it round, so it jutted out horizontally. Cook had anticipated a protracted session of swatting and swearing, but the lump-hammer crushed the clasp after two strikes and the lock fell to the floor with a clatter. Behind the door, Eleanor shrieked.
“Who’s there? Who’s that?”
Cook held the latch. A simple lift and shift and the door would open – outwards.
“You can’t look at me!” he shouted.
“I can’t see! I’ve got a blindfold on! He ties me up for the night. Please! Don’t leave me again! Help me! I don’t care who you are.”
Cook leaned his shoulder into the door and unhooked the latch. He opened a gap of around an inch and peeked through, recoiling at the sulphurous stench. Eleanor Finch lay naked and foetal on a rotting mattress, ankles bound with tape, wrists rope-tied in front, black blindfold tightly knotted. She was trembling – convulsing with cold and terror. As the utility room light passed over her, she spoke – shrill but steady. It was the voice of someone with an urge to make themselves understood quickly.
“I can’t. I can’t take the blindfold off. I managed it once. He didn’t feed me for two days. Don’t hurt me!”
It sounded more like a command than a plea.
“I won’t.”
Cook crouched and began to unravel the rope. Eleanor clamped her palms together, reducing the tension in the knots. He realised that he was now God-like – in complete control. He could stop, stand, walk out, close the door and drive away, and she would die – here in the dark.
“I’m going to untie your hands,” said Cook. “Then, you’ll stay here for fifteen more minutes. Count to one-thousand. Then you should leave, by the back door. Don’t take the blindfold off until I’ve gone. Did you hear me? Do you understand?”
She nodded, whispered yes.
“Don’t leave until you’ve counted to one-thousand. Don’t go down the hall or look in the sitting-room.”
“Why?”
“Just leave. Go. Don’t look back. Don’t even think of looking back. It won’t be good.”
The ropes fell away, revealing livid red grooves, scored in spirals down both forearms. Eleanor massaged her wrists together, groaning with pain and relief.
“Why are you wearing gloves?”
Cook ignored this and turned his back. He stooped and headed for the door.
“Thank you,” said Eleanor, turning her face in his direction, tilting her head up to see him, sightlessly.
And he looked back and saw the scar – the scar at the base of her chin.
A really nasty cut.
His mind scurried back to the day with Inspector Ramshaw and Constable Whitcombe. Ramshaw saying something about her officially changing her name.
She had some kind of crush on me.
Cook squatted down and leaned in for a closer look at the scar. It was absolutely the one – carved in like an emphasis, tracing the curve of her chin. He wanted to say it (“Rebecca?”) but of course he could not. Instead, he removed one of the gloves and, for once, he was the one reaching out. He groped for Rebecca Goldstraw’s hand, squeezed once, skin on skin, saw her smile, and left her there, counting out loud. He eased through the back door, into the muggy morning, unstrapped the spy-camera and walked to his car. He was not the good guy, but the bad guys were gone, the girl was safe and he had not been turned into a pillar of salt.
Acknowledgements
This story has been a long time in the making, and I’m grateful to the friends and family who supported me through its telling.
From the decades, my love and applause to Keith Groom, whose classroom beard-shaving taught me the pleasures of creative expression.
And to my immense, unimpeachable grandmother – so long, and thanks for all the chips and beans.
Andrew Lowe
London, 2015
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