by Jason Arnopp
I’m sick, I know.
‘Careful,’ Astral warns Lisa-Jane, kicking at some of the glass fangs that jut out from all around the window frame. As if a little broken glass is cause for concern right now.
Lisa-Jane is saying, ‘Not gonna die, not gonna die,’ over and over.
The corridor with Ellie and Elisandro’s corpses has fallen all too silent.
Astral helps Lisa-Jane climb up on to the window frame. ‘Hurry up!’ I tell them, hopping from foot to foot. Flooded with the buzz that only impending death can bring, I’m looking around for another window to smash when—
‘Mimi! Mimi-Mimi-Mimi!’
The sheer volume makes me clutch my ears. Astral struggles to keep both supportive hands on Lisa-Jane’s back. She’s standing on the interior window ledge, clutching the top of the frame. Hesitant, unsure how best to exit, she glances at the remaining glass fangs. ‘Not gonna die, not gonna die . . .’
The face now floats above the table in the middle of the room. Always the centre of attention.
When Mimi screeches again, it’s twice as loud. A sonic shock wave that weakens my knees.
‘Mimi!’
I’m sorry. There’s no nice way to put this: Lisa-Jane’s head explodes.
The sound isn’t what you’d expect: it’s more a hideous ‘clack’ of bone. An eyebrow piercing rebounds off my chest, along with other stuff that makes me gag.
She went faster than the others. Maybe even painlessly. These are the kind of details that will break me worldwide. (Shut up, you fucking monster.)
Lisa-Jane’s limp body falls back from the window into Astral’s arms, leaving him clutching her, lost in horror.
There’s no feminine component left in Mimi’s face. What hangs over the table now is a continuously alternating composite of me and Astral.
Mimi stares at me, but I know that Astral sees the same face staring at him.
An idea skitters through my head, about how he and I could somehow work together to get rid of this thing. Then I remember his YouTube video con. I remember all his sly manipulation. I remember last night’s post: ‘Good times. A’
Only one of us is getting out of here alive.
My lizard brain somehow grasps the situation as Astral lets Lisa-Jane tumble to the ground.
‘Mimi, get him,’ he calls. ‘Kill him, so I can be the last.’
Yeah, he’s grasped it too.
Mimi comes at me. Insane eyes glinting, shrieking its name.
Then it changes course and hurtles right back at Astral with astonishing speed.
‘Mimi-Mimi-Mimi-Mimi-Mimi!’
Astral opens his mouth to yell something, but the ghost face punches right through his navel and flies out through his spine, devastating everything in between. It leaves a gaping hole wide as a saucepan lid.
There’s an almighty snapping sound, and Astral’s body arches at a deeply wrong angle. Gargling, he claws at the cavernous ruin below his ribs. Incredulous, fading fast.
That’s Astral for you, crows my inner bastard. Spineless. I could always see straight through him.
And yet, by the time his big head hits the carpet there are tears in my eyes. The do-or-die lust for survival is eclipsed by the enormity of all these lives extinguished.
Mimi hovers steadily my way, beaming, victorious. It now wears my face and my face alone.
‘Mimi,’ it says, with my speaking voice.
‘Okay,’ I say through a tight throat. ‘It’s over. Whatever you are, just disappear, all right? Just go.’
‘Mi-mi,’ it says, still coming my way. ‘Mi-mi.’
And for the first time, it strikes me that it’s not saying ‘Mimi’ at all.
It’s saying, ‘Me. Me.’
Mimi was the name I chose. Outwardly arbitrary, but at some level . . .
‘Me, me,’ says my own gliding spectral face. ‘Me. Me. Me. Me.’
I back away from it, bumping hard into one of the toppled vending machines.
There’s no time to reach the broken window. So I make a break back towards that corridor, desperate to find another exit. Anything to get away from Mimi.
What am I doing? Just embrace it. Let it in. I was born to be great, no matter what Mum and Alistair thought. (No, no, this thing is evil.)
Electrified by panic, I rattle a door handle on a side wall, only to find it locked.
‘Me. Me. Me. Me. Me.’
I slap a hand over the lower half of my face, when I see and smell what happened to Elisandro.
I have never run this fast in all my life, but it’s not nearly fast enough. My own voice draws closer.
‘Me. Me. Me. Me. Me.’
I duck around a corner, heels hammering along a new stretch of carpet . . .
. . . which leads up to the feet of a teenage farm labourer.
Maria Corvi stands with her arms scarecrowed out, crucifixed out. Blocking my path, solid and corporeal, ten steps ahead of me. As usual.
Her face says it all. The gleeful vindication of someone who has devoted time to engineering a special surprise.
Those yellow eyes blaze with delight.
The rictus grin gloats.
My skin rears up all over, wanting to evacuate my bones.
‘Me! Me! Me! Me! Me!’ shrieks the voice behind me, so loud, so close.
‘Enjoy,’ mouths Maria, savouring the moment.
Something hammers into my back, driving me up into the air so hard that my head whacks a light fitting.
Next thing I know, I’m back on the ground and my vocal cords and my mouth are saying stuff, even though I haven’t asked them to.
‘I, I, I, I, I,’ they’re saying.
‘Me, me, me, me, me,’ they’re saying.
A rising tide of alarm forces me creakily to my feet. What’s happening?
Maria and the ghost face are nowhere to be seen. My mouth jabbers on, unauthorised.
‘I, I, I, I, I . . . me, me, me, me, me . . .’
I try to shut my mouth through sheer force of will, but that doesn’t work. So I try using my hands, but my jaw’s too stubborn. I may as well be attempting to stop an industrial piston.
I try to stay centred. The mortal remains of Ellie and Elisandro remind me that at least I’m still alive. I just need to figure out what’s going on.
I tell myself to breathe and think. No mean feat when your mouth has gone rogue.
What is this?
‘Me, me, me, me, me,’ says my mouth, as I stagger back towards the lounge.
Is it shock?
‘I, I, I, I, I,’ says my mouth, while I head for the broken window, trying not to look at Astral or Lisa-Jane.
Is it cocaine psychosis?
But of course, as always, no matter what I tell myself, I know the truth. Mimi is now inside me. Inside my head.
‘Myself! Myself! Myself!’ says my mouth, louder and with greater force, as I carefully climb out over the window frame, down on to sun-soaked grass.
Wind ruffles my hair as if trying gamely to assure me that everything’s fine. Crickets persist with their reedy chorus as if nothing untoward has happened. I do my best to adopt their mindset.
Just relax, relax . . .
Then I remember how I don’t have a car here. So I have to climb back into the building and fish around in Astral’s wet shorts for his keys. The poor guy gazes up at me. Lights off, nobody home.
‘Me! Me!’ I yell down at him.
Without my permission, my foot kicks him hard in the ear.
Only when I try to jam the key in the ignition do I realise how very badly my hands are shaking.
Experimenting with my new condition, I send a defiant neural signal to my mouth, telling it to say ‘I’m fine, there’s nothing to worry about.’ This command is ignored. My mouth resolutely keeps up the ‘Me, myself and I’ routine.
About halfway down the track, this automatic speech evolves. I say new things, still entirely beyond my control. I find myself saying, ‘I’m great’, ‘You love me’,
‘I fucking rule’, ‘Worship me’ . . . you get the idea.
Admittedly, I’ve said these things before. But now they pour out incessantly without my brain’s conscious participation. It reminds me of the time curiosity led me to try Viagra. Hated it. Despite my cock’s resemblance to a baby’s arm holding an apple, I didn’t actually feel turned on.
So I’m in this car that isn’t mine, rolling down treacherous trails towards the City of Angels. I’m telling no one in particular how brilliant I am, non-stop. And I’m crying.
‘I am superb!’ yells my voice, thanks to wind from my lungs that I didn’t want to contribute and a mouth I would dearly love to seal.
Slowly but very surely, I start to believe my own hype.
Whoever coined the idea that if you say something enough you’ll believe it never expected it to be true in this context.
Yes, at some point, my brain flips and fizzes and gives in. It becomes so much easier to go along with this than to remember all that terrible, violent death back up the hill. In fact, I start to enjoy it. Forget cocaine: this is way more powerful, intense and all-consuming. This is downright phenomenal.
All those thoughts about fame reaped from the death of others, which felt so atrocious back at the ranch? They now feel gorgeous.
I have no guilt, no shame, no restrictive feelings whatsoever.
As a dark force gains dominion over my soul, embers of my former dread still glow, but these are dim, out of reach inside myself, irrelevant.
I spy Maria Corvi standing on the roadside, just as she used to in the dream. She points ahead, smiling, wholly surreal in blazing sunlight.
I smile right back. Ecstatic to have wandered straight into her trap.
‘Every time you go away,’ sing Hall & Oates on 95.5 KLOS FM, ‘you take a piece of me with you.’
I give Maria Corvi the thumbs-up and drive on by, jabbering about how I’m the king of everything.
Alistair Sparks: ‘Brandon Hope is a thirty-two-year-old hotel receptionist from Santa Barbara, California. On the afternoon of 18 November 2014, one hour after the killings at Big Coyote Ranch, Hope was working at West Hollywood’s Sunset Castle Hotel when a guest caused disruption . . .’
ALISTAIR SPARKS: Please summarise what happened in reception that afternoon.
BRANDON HOPE: I feel nauseous even talking about it, considering what happened afterwards. But okay . . . In a nutshell, that deeply sick individual Jack Sparks whipped up a little storm.
ALISTAIR: Were you a hundred per cent positive this man was Jack Sparks?
BRANDON: Oh, you know, I’d rather not get involved in that freaky stuff. All this internet speculation has been such a pain in the ass. I had to leave the Castle because so many crazy people called and emailed and even turned up in the lobby, getting in my face. Listen: far as I’m concerned, unless this guy has an identical twin brother, he was Jack Sparks.
ALISTAIR: And you say you first met this guest when you and the cleaner Arlette Ortiz discovered him in the hotel basement in the early hours of 15 November?
BRANDON: Let me tell you, he didn’t seem so damn sure of himself that night. First time we laid eyes on him, there he was in the boiler room, blinking against my torchlight with this stain on his pants. This big wet map of Italy, running down one of his pant legs.
ALISTAIR: You believe he’d urinated in his trousers?
BRANDON: So I told him he shouldn’t be down here and he looked like he was searching for this great snappy comeback. Then he just said nothing and shrugged. He looked pretty shaken and glad to get out of the basement. But then, three days later in reception, he was suddenly acting like Harvey fucking Weinstein. I don’t know if it was drugs or whatnot, but he marched up to reception with these big hard eyes, determined to have me upgrade him to a deluxe suite. This was right after he refused to tip our valet Pierre and instead proclaimed he’d won an award for writing. Like Pierre could feed his kids with that knowledge.
When I said no to the room bump, Sparks banged his fist on my desk and raised his voice. All the classic spiel came out. All the stuff I already heard a million times. Didn’t I know who he was, he could have me fired, yadda yadda yadda. He had this freaky stutter all of a sudden, but only on certain words. Must’ve said ‘I’ about a thousand times. Then the guy crossed the line, and I’ll admit, it did faze me. He asked how I’d like to be skinned alive and covered in salt. The guy said this smiling and without blinking, like he was inviting me to a dinner party or something. So I assured him the deluxe suites were taken, but offered him a room service meal with our compliments. In my head, I was comparing the dollar value of that meal with the value of getting him away from me. Oh my God, totally worth those eighty-two bucks.
ALISTAIR: Your colleague Ruth Adler, who delivered the meal to this guest’s room, declined to be interviewed. But she has stated that he threatened her too, right?
BRANDON (Sighs): She got out real quick.
ALISTAIR: Why?
BRANDON: Well. She told me . . . she told me Mr Sparks picked up the steak knife and made . . . obscene demands.
ALISTAIR: So given that this guest directly threatened yourself and another employee, did you not consider calling the police?
BRANDON: Oh, thank you so much for asking: I really needed the bonus guilt. Ruth didn’t tell me about her experience straight away – she told Mr Howitz. But what do you want me to say? Did I fail to act on the murderous psychopath in our hotel? Yes, as it turned out, I did. But honey, I meet these people every day. That’s Hollywood.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Thank God, the room service girl flees, deathly pale, before I can force sex on her.
I shrug off the disappointment and sit cross-legged on the bed with the room service tray laid out before me. Stuffing my face with juicy T-bone, eating with my mouth wide open, meat slapping meat, I tell myself how smooth and inconspicuous my return to the hotel has been. And I actually believe it.
The room is swamped with shadow. No lights, because I no longer have any reason to fear the dark. Whatever lurks there will be inferior to me.
As I wash down all that blood-red beef with a flood of fifty-dollar wine, oh my God, that’s when I get a text from Bex.
‘Hey,’ she writes, ‘is my passport there in the room? Think I may have left it behind.’
This pleases me. The woman who rejected Jack Sparks – Jack Sparks! – is still here in America. No doubt still in LA. My sly, bright snake eyes conduct a brief search of the room. But to my foul new way of thinking, it doesn’t matter whether the passport’s here or not. I can tell her it’s here, can’t I?
After all, she’ll never use it again.
Bex clearly didn’t realise she only existed for my benefit. But now she’s of no benefit to me at all . . .
Deep inside, Real Me snaps to attention, desperate to snatch back the reins. Real Me wants to call Bex and warn her to stay away. Real Me wants to arrange to have her passport couriered to her. Or better yet, left somewhere for collection, so I can’t possibly know where she’s staying. I can’t trust myself any more.
But Real Me can’t access the steering wheel. Real Me is bound and gagged across the back seats.
I’m paralysed, fighting for air.
Locked inside this enforced caricature of myself.
The steak knife’s blade glints approval as I mentally compose a reply to Bex, telling her to come and get her passport.
Yeah, come and get it . . .
Remember, whispers Real Me, sneaking the message past Mimi’s defences, syllable by syllable. Remember . . . remember what Sherilyn told you about Aleister Crowley. The straight razor?
‘Yeah, I, I, I, I, I remember,’ I say aloud, picking up my phone. ‘Some crap about cutting yourself to control ego. So what?’
So cut yourself.
I pull a face. ‘Why would I, I, I, I, I want to do that?’ I say, while thumbing out the text to Bex.
Purge yourself. Control Mimi. Save Bex.
S
till typing, I say, ‘You expect me, me, me, me, me to save that fickle, ungrateful little whore, who chose Lawrence and Astral over me, me, me, me, me? No way.’
Do it now.
‘Nah. That would really hurt. Loads more fun to use the blade on Bex. I’m thinking of really drawing the process out. I, I, I, I, I think I, I, I, I, I would enjoy that.’
The text complete, I’m about to hit ‘Send’.
You know how your body sometimes jerks awake, having pulled back from the journey into sleep? That’s what happens right now. A bolt of pure instinct compels me to drop the phone and grab the steak knife. With the other hand, I pull up my T-shirt, exposing my midriff.
Before Mimi can stop me, I drag the serrated blade across and split the skin.
I shake and hiss and sweat as the blood beads up. My eyes water.
This dribbling stripe of torn flesh is a victory for Real Me, who gains more control and makes me do it again, a notch higher.
The whole world pivots around the pain.
‘Stop this,’ says Mimi through my mouth. ‘I, I, I, I, I am precious.’
Scared of Mimi regaining leverage, I cut myself again and again until my torso presents a column of horizontal slit mouths. A ladder of red rungs from navel to neck. My crotch and the sheets beneath are slick with blood.
Hoping it’s safe to stop, I gasp and roll on to my back, relieved to recover my true personality. Even though instinct tells me Mimi is a grotesque amplification of my darkest impulses. Yeah, Mimi embodies the Jack who destroyed Bex’s relationship and anticipated my career boost as the Paranormals were murdered one by one. Mimi is that foul ego, cranked up. The thing inside Maria Corvi hijacked our experiment in order to twist that dial to eleven.
I know I’ve won the battle, not the war. This is only remission. I know this because Mimi whispers from a crawlspace at the back of my mind.
Mimi whispers, ‘me’, ‘myself’ and ‘I’.
Mimi whispers, ‘You know you want me, me, me, me, me back.’
Tinnitus from hell.