by Jason Arnopp
‘Did he leave her this morning or last night?’ My question sits there for a beat, a loaded gun.
‘Please can we focus?’ says Ellie. ‘Pascal’s not answering his phone, email, nothin’.’
Pascal lives half an hour away in North Hollywood. When I tell them we should drive there right now, my concern is again contagious. ‘Oh my God,’ says Ellie. ‘You don’t think . . . ?’
The tremor in my raised hand undermines the attempt to placate her. ‘Let’s just stay calm and get over there.’
Without another word, Elisandro pulls out into traffic and puts his foot down at the first opportunity. Coffee splashes my chest, but I barely notice.
The act of pushing Pascal’s front-door buzzer seems to slow time itself. The wait drags on and on and on.
All the way here, we’ve kept our spirits up, saying how silly we’re being. How Howie’s death has understandably rattled our cages. Clearly, we’re just making connections (connections, connections) that aren’t real. While all the time, underneath all this mutual reassurance, we know two things.
Howie’s head can’t have been ripped off by anything human.
The only two members of the group who voted to stop the Mimi Experiment were Howie and the resident of 1033 Tanowen Street, North Hollywood.
We share tight smiles as we wait for Pascal to open up. I stockpile oxygen in my lungs specifically so that I can let it all out in one big burst when the guy’s little round face appears in a window. I might not have known Pascal long, but I like him a great deal more than I did the Waster.
Three, four, five hits of the buzzer and still no response. Ellie holds the button in until the battery dies. Shielding my eyes from the sun, I peer at the upper windows of this small detached house. I toss a handful of tiny stones to drum on the glass. A big old gas-guzzling station wagon slows as it passes, the po-faced old woman at the wheel making no attempt to conceal her curiosity.
Pascal lives alone, Ellie tells me, as the station wagon trundles on its way. Mostly bought this place with inheritance cash.
We steal around the side of the house. Elisandro monkeys himself up and over a tall wire gate, then opens it for Ellie and me. By this point, we couldn’t care less what the curtain-twitching neighbours might think.
All the windows on this side of the house show thick blinds pulled down. The path leads to a modest backyard, with garden chairs and a plastic table.
Locked patio doors afford views into a wide lounge area. We press our faces against the glass, hands cupped around our temples to block out the sun.
I see a La-Z-Boy chair, a big flat-screen TV, a stack of video game consoles. A whole wall of shelves hold DVDs, Blu-rays and some old-school VHS in oversized cardboard cartons.
Then I notice something else at squinting distance on the far wall. Can’t work it out. Elisandro makes the high keening sound of a dog. I squash my nose against the window pane, trying to make sense of what I’m seeing.
Looks like a mass of thick pinkish-red organic matter stuck to the wall. Ground beef or something, spread a few inches thick.
Then I notice the wallet chain hanging from the mess. The shredded material that was once clothing. The blood that still drips down the wall beneath all this, pooling on the carpet.
One detail brings the whole picture together: the frame of Pascal’s spectacles, sparkling in a lone ray of sun. The thin metal has been mangled along with the rest of his body.
‘Oh God, no,’ I say, my stomach churning. That poor guy.
Elisandro’s dog sound becomes a wail of despair.
Ellie doesn’t understand what we’re reacting to. We try to get her away from the windows, but she just keeps looking until her legs buckle.
Seeing a good man who’s been spread across a wall isn’t the worst of it. No, the worst is the realisation, in the back of my mind, that this book will sell more than the others put together. Maria killed people after I met her, which was good value, but now I’m right here as the murders happen. Right in the thick of it.
All this while two fellow human beings weep and retch by my feet.
This isn’t the first time I’ve managed to disgust even myself.
A ping in my pocket. Bex has finally responded to the text I sent on the way here, begging her to confirm she’s okay (read: alive).
The text says: ‘Do not contact me again.’
I’m so glad she’s away from all this, but the idea of never seeing her again makes me want to prostrate myself beside Ellie and Elisandro.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Mimi table sits where we left it in the reception lounge, except now it’s the right way up. Eyeing the thing with the caution it deserves, we move on, calling out for the others. When no one calls back, we start to fret.
The serpentine journey up to Big Coyote took twice as long as usual. Ellie kept having to tell Elisandro to slow down, dry his eyes and concentrate on the trail. It was like being driven by an old married couple.
I snorted a couple of crafty bumps off my hand around the back of Pascal’s place. The other two saw me do it, I suppose, but were too busy tugging their hair and sobbing to moralise. I really felt the need to sharpen up – to mentally record every second of whatever came next. And after two more bumps in the back of the Honda right before we enter the studio, my brain is filming in 4K.
Turned out that Ellie and Elisandro weren’t beyond self-preservation. Just as they had after finding Howie, they dithered about whether to call 911. Will we be implicated? they wondered, wringing hands. Station Wagon Lady witnessed us ringing the buzzer, but didn’t see us go around the back. There was fraught debate on the pros and cons. Finally, a call to Astral broke the bad news, then made the decision for us: we would all meet at the ranch, then work out what to do. We could call in the murders from there, no problem.
Yeah. No problem. How very idyllic.
We eventually find the others dotted around a ‘live’ studio room, right at the back of the building. To reach it, you thread through a control room. Dominated by a wide console bank lined with buttons and dials, the control room’s where you tend to find producers, engineers and dominant band members. One wall is made entirely of toughened glass, including the door halfway along it. Through this we see Astral, Lisa-Jane and Johann among the live room’s microphone stands and amp stacks, their eyes puffy and bloodshot.
Lisa-Jane sits on the floor, her back against one of the padded walls. Johann stands with his arms folded. Since the guy’s probably seen friends blown up, you’d think him harder to faze, but even he looks shaken.
Astral is sitting the wrong way around on an armless revolving chair, his mouth stuffed with gauze. Seeing me through the glass wall, he looks away. I clamp my teeth together. Anything to stop myself launching into a rant about Bex once I get in there.
Right up until I pull the glass door’s handle, it looks like the trio are just mouthing words to each other in silence. Once you break that soundproof seal, their voices leap out at you. No one says it in words, but you sense everyone’s way more cut up about Pascal than Howie.
‘How did Pascal go?’ Johann wants to know, switched on, the most engaged I’ve seen him.
Ellie and Elisandro gaze at their shoes, so I grasp the nettle. ‘You don’t really want to know.’
‘Don’t tell me what I want,’ warns Johann. ‘What are we dealing with here?’
‘Howie and Pascal weren’t killed by a person,’ says Ellie. ‘Couldn’t have been.’
‘And they were the only two who voted against . . .’ adds Elisandro, trailing off when the others nod. They already made that deductive jump.
No one tries to say these deaths could have been a coincidence. Not even me. The Truman Show’s over and I’m not in Kansas any more.
Astral tugs the gauze from his mouth so he can speak. ‘Mimi doesn’t want to go, now we’ve created her. We pulled her out of thin air and she’s alive in some way . . .’
‘Maybe she’s a real ghost, like Ell
ie said,’ I say, trying not to sound too hopeful.
Astral signals for me to keep my voice down. He looks around at the walls and out through the glass into the control room. He says, ‘We kinda thought she might not be able to hear us in here, but you never know.’
He doesn’t appreciate me laughing in his face. But it’s a funny concept: the idea that a ghost, a psychokinetic entity or whatever Mimi is, couldn’t hear you in a soundproof room.
Astral’s chair squawks in protest as he swivels to face me full on. ‘Fuck you. Two friends are dead here.’
‘All right, mate!’ I say, totally out of line. ‘I didn’t kill ’em.’
Astral heaves himself off the chair, thunderous. I want to fight him, so I stick my dukes up, but Johann jumps in. ‘No! No more of this shit. We stick together.’ Testosterone trickles from every pore as he points at me. ‘You watch your mouth.’
I preferred Johann when he was adrift with PTSD. No one tells Jack Sparks to shut up, especially when he’s feeling chemically indestructible. ‘Okay, meathead,’ I say. ‘So what next? We carry on, yes?’
Lisa-Jane pinches her eyebrow piercing and stretches the skin until it looks set to rip. ‘I don’t think carrying on is a good idea,’ she says.
‘Keep your voices low,’ Astral reminds everyone.
‘But if Mimi wants to carry on,’ I say, ‘surely that’s the safest thing to do.’
‘We can’t let our own creation hold us to ransom,’ argues Lisa-Jane. ‘Let’s end this.’
‘How do you un-create something?’ I say. ‘May as well try not to think of a blue elephant. First thing you think of is—’
Astral interrupts: ‘Well, we need to find a way.’
‘Hey,’ says Johann, ‘this might be stupid, but—’
‘I’d put money on that,’ I say, coke-leery, loving how Johann wants to kill me but can’t, because jail.
‘But,’ he carries on, ‘Mimi only appears when we’re all together, right?’
‘Obviously not,’ I say. ‘Look what happened during the night.’
‘Johann’s got a point, though,’ says Ellie. ‘Maybe we don’t all have to be in the same room. But if we’re in the same area, maybe even the same city, the PK circle stays intact.’
‘So if we get far enough away from each other . . .’ Astral ponders.
‘You’re clutching at straws,’ I tell them. ‘Pulling rules out of your arse.’
‘Shut your mouth, you wise-ass junkie cretin,’ Lisa-Jane spits.
When the prospect of separation makes Ellie and Elisandro hold hands, I feel my first tug of emotion towards them. I don’t like it. Cold cynicism is so much safer.
‘Let’s try,’ says Johann. ‘We get as far away from each other as possible, then figure this out online.’
Lisa-Jane rubs her temples with both hands. ‘Shit, shit. My job, my mom, the dogs . . .’
‘I’m sure we can soon come back,’ offers Ellie, ever hopeful.
‘I’ll take you to your place,’ Elisandro tells Ellie, ‘and you can pick up your car.’
Everyone stands. Johann talks about Aspen, Colorado; Lisa-Jane her brother’s place down in San Diego. Me? I’m not going anywhere. I vent my frustration on a nearby guitar, punching a discordant twang out of its neck.
Astral is saying something typically controlling – something about how Ellie and Elisandro need to go their separate ways at the very first opportunity – when evil creeps into the room.
‘Mimi,’ says a small voice amid our chatter.
‘Mimi,’ it says again.
My spine tingles as I follow the source of the sound.
And there’s Mimi’s face, emerging from the front of an amplifier stack right where the Marshall logo should be.
The face looks younger this time, paler too. The sly, sharp smile burns right through me.
Hi! You all thought you could escape, didn’t you?
Everyone else has fallen silent. I know they’re all equally transfixed by the face.
It.
‘Mimi, Mimi!’ says Mimi. Its eyes widen as it leaves the amp stack and hovers before us.
The boulder from Raiders of the Lost Ark.
That smile evaporates into rage.
‘Mimi!’ comes the scream.
We all bolt for the door to the control room.
How I wish I could claim gallantry. Lisa-Jane’s ahead of me, so I grab her waist and swing her aside to clear my path to the door.
Getting there first, Astral grapples with the handle, but it needs to open towards us. So his bulk blocks its path and we’re all piled up behind him.
Lisa-Jane swings a chair at the glass wall, but it bounces clean off and smacks her in the face.
Mimi’s next scream hurts my ears. I fill my hands with Astral’s doughy back-fat and shove, as if I can somehow force him through the closed door. Yelling at me and Astral, Elisandro pushes Ellie ahead of him, squashing her breasts into my back. Lisa-Jane tries to force herself in front of everyone, also yelling, her nose bloody.
This is when the first person dies.
Johann’s severed upper torso slams against a Marshall stack, having been thrown there. His eyes are all whites, rolled up in their sockets. Gravity sucks him down to the carpet, where he falls to one side, a discarded toy.
Makes sense, says my inner voice, even as I stare horrified at the dead man. Kill the strongest first.
Someone throws up.
Someone else, probably Elisandro, punches me twice in the back of the head, filling my vision with comets and stars. Astral shouts how he can’t get the door open and how everyone needs to get back.
‘Mimi! Mimi!’ Each scream is a needle to the eardrums. Elisandro punches my head again and my hearing cuts out, making all this commotion distant and distorted.
Astral rams himself backwards, using his weight as a weapon, until we all do the domino topple. Yanking the door open, he disappears into the control room. As I spring back up, Lisa-Jane darts out after him.
Two pairs of hands push me hard from behind. I stumble over the door’s threshold, sheer momentum carrying me until I trip and fall. The control room carpet rises to slam into one side of my face.
Ellie and Elisandro trample over me. I wheeze as a foot jams into the small of my back, then watch their fleeing heels shrink.
My hearing snaps back into play, but I can’t hear Mimi.
I use one side of the console desk as leverage to haul myself upright.
The glass door must have hydraulic-hinged itself shut.
Through the glass wall, in the live room, Johann’s legs remain upright, rocking gently from side to side in bloodied khaki shorts. Absurdly, my first thought is that it’s an amazingly realistic special effect. The knees give way and the legs collapse.
Mimi stares at me, hanging immobile in the centre of the sealed room. The shifting mishmash elements of the face have changed once again: more feminine, strangely familiar. The lips are a heartbeat, spasming open twice each time to silently scream her name.
My back jangles as I hurry towards one of the exit doors.
When I steal a last look back, Mimi has disappeared. As unnerving as the spider that scuttles out of sight beneath your bed.
Sure enough, when I dash headlong into a corridor where gold discs flash past on either side, two simultaneous screams ring out. One is Mimi again, but the other comes from Ellie, whose back has somehow become stuck to the ceiling above a junction up ahead. She flails about, but the plaster holds her firm.
‘Mimi, Mimi, Mimi!’ comes the howl, but I can’t see the face anywhere.
Elisandro sprints back to the junction, appalled, like he’s only just noticed Ellie is no longer beside him. I’m still running towards them both and really want him out of the way.
‘Help me get her down,’ he shouts. Before I can respond, something truly horrendous happens: Ellie gurgles, and her head pivots – or is pivoted – to one side. The skin of her neck stretches until bone bursts out.
/> Some of the blood catches Elisandro on the face. He makes sounds that remind me of my mother upstairs after Dad left home.
I’m about to reach Elisandro and sprint on by, when the arcane magnetism holding Ellie against the ceiling is revoked. Her body falls, forcing me to slam on the brakes or end up beneath her.
It’s a small mercy that Mimi’s howls mask the awful crunch of impact.
That horrendous ghost face is suspended in a corridor off to my left. The face has changed yet again, and I shudder as I finally recognise my mouth. It’s mainly masculine now . . . and do I see Astral’s eyes in there? Other people’s features, too. The Mimi face is a collage, but there’s no time to ponder, not with Elisandro grabbing my arm and yanking me back around to face him.
‘Help her! Please help her.’
‘She’s dead, mate, I’m sorry.’
‘Mimi! Mimi! Mimi!’
‘But we can’t leave her here.’
‘She was dead before she hit the ground. Come with me.’
‘Mimi! Mimi! Mimi! Mimi-Mimi-Mimi!’
Painfully aware of the phantom flying right for us, I try to drag Elisandro away, but he digs in his heels and won’t let go of me.
I slam my forehead into his, sending him reeling, then make my dizzy escape.
From up ahead in the reception lounge, I hear Astral’s voice and see his and Lisa-Jane’s shadows flit across the carpet. I speed up, desperate to see the sky again.
Behind me, Elisandro roars incoherently at Mimi until he’s abruptly cut off. Truly dreadful sounds ensue. The sounds of human disassembly.
Sprinting into the lounge, I’m greeted by the smashing of glass. The fallen vending machines now form a barricade across the front doors – Mimi’s work, no doubt – and so Astral has heaved a chair out through a window. He and Lisa-Jane hurry towards this new exit.
And then there were three. If these two die, I’ll be the only survivor. The sole storyteller. And then everyone will listen, no matter how much I talk.
Being appalled by these thoughts doesn’t make them go away. I’ve had similar daydreams before: about being on the receiving end of a terrorist attack, for instance. Maybe not involved enough to get hurt, but just enough to have an engrossing story to tell. Just enough to get people’s eyes and ears glued to me for years to come.