The Last Days of Jack Sparks

by Jason Arnopp

  It takes all my self-control not to burst into tears when Alistair answers his phone. If I can’t call Mum, then he’ll have to do.

  ‘It’s me,’ I say. ‘Jack. I really need help.’

  ‘How dare you,’ he fires back. ‘How dare you.’

  His contempt leaves me stunned as the line dies. I call back three times, no reply. Badly needing someone who cares about me and can help, while realising how few people fit that bill, my thoughts go to Bex . . . only to recoil for her own safety. While Mimi skulks in my head, I need to give Bex a very wide berth. Just can’t trust myself.

  When I call my agent, at first he says nothing at all. There’s only background office chatter and phones ringing.

  ‘Hello?’ I say again. ‘Murray, I really need help.’

  Before he hangs up, his voice is cool and clipped in a way I’ve never heard before, even when I’ve pissed him off royally. ‘Do not call here again.’

  Sitting with the phone warm against my ear, my thoughts race. Am I already a fugitive: a mugshot on the wall behind a newsreader? Have the bodies been found at Big Coyote Ranch? Surely not this soon. And I’d hardly be difficult to trace. Why hasn’t a SWAT team crashed through the windows? Nope, there’s no way Alistair and Murray know about Big Coyote. Alistair has resented me since Dad left, then hated me for the last year or so. Murray has finally decided I’m more trouble than I’m worth. I’ve torched through any goodwill I once merited.

  Should I call Dr Santoro? No, he’s strictly an appointment-only guy. Doesn’t give a shit.

  Then Sherilyn Chastain springs to mind. She probably loathes me as much as Alistair does, but it dawns on me that only she can help. She understands my situation. She even tried to warn me before it all happened.

  When Sherilyn answers her phone, I’m curled up on the floor. Sweat oozes out of me, despite the rattling air con. Down here on the scratchy carpet, hugging a blood-spotted white towel to my mutilated chest, I am a child running to mama. A child limping home after falling from a tree.

  The golf ball wedged in my throat makes it hard to speak. ‘Everything’s gone wrong. Everything.’

  A deep breath at the other end. ‘Okay. Stay as calm as you can, take a moment, then define “everything”.’

  I tell her about Big Coyote. I tell her I’ll give her all my money if she cures my head and makes sure Mimi never comes back, but she doesn’t seem to listen. Just says she’ll take the next flight out of Auckland.

  With my breath far from calm or deep, I ask how long I’ll need to hold out before she arrives.

  ‘Try not to think about that, Jack. Depends on flights, but at least twenty-four hours.’

  ‘Don’t know if I can wait that long. Don’t know if I can cut myself any more.’

  ‘Just focus. Have you written about what happened? That might help keep Mimi at bay. Email me what you already wrote so far. And only cut yourself again if you really feel Mimi coming back, okay? Avoid arteries.’

  ‘Sherilyn,’ I say, gripping the phone so tight the casing creaks. ‘I know Maria made this happen. The thing inside her, is it the—’

  ‘Jack, I need to book flights. Just keep yourself together.’

  I don’t even have time to thank her before she ends the call.

  I stay on the floor until Mimi starts whispering again.

  ‘You know I’m coming back,’ it says. ‘Just a matter of time. And you know it’ll feel good.’

  I heave myself up and over to the laptop. Yes, I’ll follow Sherilyn’s recommendation and write. Surely that’s twenty-four hours of work right there. Then she’ll arrive to help me and everything will be fine. Once I’m back on an even psychological keel, I’ll approach the LAPD and try to explain what went down at Big Coyote Ranch.

  Yeah, good luck with that, Future Jack. Future Incarcerated Jack.

  So here I am. Twenty-four hours later, I’m all up to date with the book, but everything’s not fine. Not fine at all.

  I’m still waiting for Sherilyn.

  Mimi is a shark threading its way up from the black depths.

  The blade stopped working about an hour ago, maybe because I’m so very tired. I I I think Mimi regains a foothold whenever I I I nod off over the laptop, even for a few seconds. And sometimes when I I I type words like me me me or myself myself myself, I I I can’t stop typing them and sometimes I I I can’t help saying them either. Over the last few pages, I’ve clawed back control and deleted these extra words, but now I I I’m leaving them in, to show you.

  It’s getting worse and worse. I I I I have a nasty feeling that updating this book may have helped me me me me focus on something, but it’s also essentially all about me me me me.

  Which means it’s also all about Mimi.

  Which has paved the way for her to come back.

  Can Sherilyn help? I I I I probably don’t deserve her help. But I I I I’m going to take it anyway, because I’m selfish. We all are, right? It’s survival.

  That’s right, isn’t it?

  It’s what I I I I keep telling myself myself myself myself.

  Can’t spent the rest of my life trapped inside myself myself myself myself.

  Oh please, please let Sherilyn help.

  Mimi rises. I I I I slip back under the waves.

  My med centre MRI results just turned up in a text.

  Their scans showed my brain has only ‘very mild’ damage from drink and drug abuse.

  To see that result when I’m so deeply unstable makes me me me me me weep. And I I I I I can feel myself changing fast, really fucking fast, oh Jesus, hey, I I I I I texted Bex and told her she can come and collect her passport any time she likes, ha ha! She replied and said she’ll be over in thirty minutes, ha ha ha ha ha! Okay, Sherilyn, I’ll email this over now to make sure you’re all up to date. I’m sure you’ll love it.

  Someone’s knocking on the door. Better go :D

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Finally! A chance to write again. I hope I live long enough to tell you everything that’s happened since Mimi came back.

  I’m in a great deal of physical pain, but it’s amazing what you can achieve when you need to write your epitaph. To think I used to put off writing because I had a fucking cold.

  Things have been way beyond bad, which I expected, but also really kind of wonderful, which I did not.

  As I write, this is the fortieth day since Halloween. I worked it out. Not Day Forty in a way that anyone would credit, but Day Forty nevertheless. Thanks to a Good Samaritan, I’m holed up in a warm bed, but you won’t believe where and you especially won’t believe what day it is.

  Let me tell you the story anyway.

  I’m steeling myself, and so should you.

  Blood squelches against my bare behind and the backs of my thighs.

  This bed’s top sheet is soaked with blood. It’s mostly the blood I shed while trying to keep Mimi out, but some of it isn’t my own.

  Marc Howitz knocked on my door at the worst possible time, just after sundown, when Mimi had regained control. I’d already taken selfies of me all bloody and posted them to a newly opened social media account.1 I’d suffered the public humiliation of asking Richard Dawkins for a ‘signal boost’, only to be ignored because I don’t really know him. Mimi did not appreciate being blocked.

  When I opened the door, there was Howitz outside, positively throbbing with wannabe gangster rage. He told me how he’d fired Johnson after catching wind of my séance. And what was this crap about me harassing his room service maid? He wanted me to leave right now, publicity or no fuckin’ publicity.

  I hauled him inside the room by his tie and punched him senseless. Then I used the steak knife to saw through his windpipe. His blood felt hot on my face as I dragged him into a closet. By the time I’d wiped the knife clean on a curtain, the spluttering sounds had stopped.

  That’s how the act of killing Marc Howitz felt to me. That simple, that cold. Howitz was a problem that needed solving. He wouldn’t stop talking
and doing things, so I had to stop him talking and doing things.

  I’m so very sorry.

  As I sit back down on the bed, Mimi is disgusted by all the Crowley cuts I inflicted on my bodily temple while trying to tame it. Real Me has nothing to say, because he’s unconscious in the boot of the car, his head wrapped in electrical tape.

  Someone pushes a keycard into the slot outside my room.

  That awful grind of metal cylinders and chambers as the door bursts open.

  Bex’s face appears in the widening gap. She freezes at the sight of me nude and criss-crossed with red. I had got a great deal of Howitz’s blood on my clothes, so decided to strip. In addition to the infected ladder on my chest, freshly seeping cuts mat the hair on my forearms, hips and upper thighs. The rest of me has been daubed with fingerprints, palm prints, miscellaneous smears.

  She’s in her blue hoodie and jeans, the suitcase behind her. For a moment, I think she’s moving back in, to save me from myself.

  If only.

  ‘Jack, what the fucking hell?’

  I smile reassuringly, the steak knife’s wooden handle gripped behind my back. ‘Don’t worry. It’s really not as bad as it looks.’

  Bex rejected me. Me, me, me. She must pay the price.

  I indicate the waste basket under the desk. ‘Threw the passport in there a while ago, but feel better now.’ I gesture down the length of my body as if unveiling a piece of art. ‘Turned the anger inward, that’s all, and now feel super-calm.’

  Processing all this, she frowns hard. ‘What did you have to be angry about?’

  My serenity is borrowed from the Archangel Gabriel himself. ‘Nothing. Nothing at all, I now realise. Please come in.’

  Leaving her suitcase jammed in the doorway, Bex breaches the threshold with caution. ‘You’re really not well.’

  Her gaze roams compulsively along the highways of my body. Touring the slits, the pus and the scabs. It’s a while before she speaks again. ‘What happened to the experiment? No one’s posted since yesterday. I tried calling Astral . . .’

  I tighten my grip on the knife handle. A sinister old Sisters of Mercy song springs to mind: ‘And she looked good in ribbons . . .’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I say. ‘Jack Sparks is fine.’ I lie back on the bed, to encourage the idea that I’m relaxed and benign. The blood down there sucks at my back.

  Bex is just reassured enough to finally remove her attention from me. On her way over to the waste bin, she says, ‘Jack Sparks needs an ambulance. And talking in the third person? I see you’re doing great with the coke, you fucking dick.’

  I hinge upright with a barely perceptible slopping sound, then spring off the bed and land beside Bex. She’s stooped, peering into the bin and saying she can’t see the passport.

  I kick the legs out from under her so she lands on her back. With the benefit of height, it’s horribly easy to drag her across the floor by her ponytail. Too shocked to make a sound, she punches at my legs and groin. Slapping her buys me a few seconds to get her on to the sofa, face up. The same sofa upon which, according to my current deranged state of mind, she cruelly made me sleep.

  My knees pin her arms down so that I can take my time showing her the steak knife. She shrinks herself as far into the sofa as the firm padding will allow – anything to put more distance between herself and that thing. She is two big eyes in a nest of hair, tracking the knife as I move it in slow, tormenting arcs.

  ‘Oh Jack,’ I say, in a grotesque parody of her voice. ‘Jack Sparks. You always talk about yourself all the time, but now you’re going to listen to me.’

  I intercept her scream by shoving my free palm over her mouth. She tries to bite, but I’m safe as long as I keep my hand outside her lips.

  I lean in until only my hand separates our mouths. ‘Oh Jack, Lawrence wants me to move in with him. Isn’t that great, Jack? Isn’t it?’

  I straighten back up, still straddling her, and bring the blade down across her upper thigh. Slashing through the material of her jeans, then the skin.

  Waking up helpless in the car boot, Real Me screams along with Bex.

  ‘Good times, yeah?’ I say, punching her as she freaks out.

  Her face wet with tears, Bex rocks her pelvis up, desperate to dislodge me and making it harder to keep my hand clamped over her mouth. The idea of shutting that mouth for good springs so easily, so casually to mind. Like Howitz, she’s a problem to solve. Death is the obvious solution to this person who doesn’t value me nearly as highly as I value myself.

  And as Rebecca Lawson squirms helplessly beneath me, I glide my sharp steel down to where quivering tendons ride taut in her neck.

  Her face says: How did I not see this coming? How did I misjudge this so very badly?

  And also: Is this really the end? But that can’t be right.

  ‘Haunt me,’ I tell her.

  The blade meets the gulping bulge of her throat, and darkness descends.

  Alistair Sparks: ‘There follows the transcript of an audio recording made by an app on Sherilyn Chastain’s mobile phone. Dated 19 November 2014, start time 11.02 p.m. PST.’

  SHERILYN CHASTAIN (Incomprehensible speech): . . . with another woman?

  (Pause.)

  REBECCA ‘BEX’ LAWSON: Is that thing recording?

  CHASTAIN: Yeah.

  LAWSON: In that case: no, I haven’t. And, er . . .

  CHASTAIN: Sorry, mate, I’m being totally inappropriate. Jet lag just really gives me the horn.

  LAWSON: He’s . . . twitching and stuff.

  (Jack groans.)

  CHASTAIN: Yep, waking up. Here we go. You ready?

  LAWSON: Not really.

  CHASTAIN: Just remember our goal here, okay? Remember the tactics.

  LAWSON: Yeah.

  JACK: What . . . what? No. No fucking way! Set me, me, me, me, me free.

  CHASTAIN: Sorry Jack, not gonna happen. Your mate Rebecca’s good with knots.

  JACK: I, I, I, I, I decided you should die and so you should be dead. Why aren’t you dead?

  LAWSON: Well, sorry for the incon-fucking-venience. Cheryl said she’d follow me up here, just in case, and—

  CHASTAIN: It’s Sherilyn.

  LAWSON: I thought she was some mad person stalking me from Facebook. Still not entirely sure.

  CHASTAIN: I saw her in pics you’d posted, Jack, then managed to grab her in the foyer. You didn’t reply when I called from the airport, so I had a feeling Mimi might be ruling the roost.

  LAWSON: Took your time getting in here, though.

  CHASTAIN: You try finding something hard enough to knock a guy out, but not hard enough to crack his skull.

  LAWSON: You should’ve just cracked his skull.

  CHASTAIN: You don’t mean that.

  LAWSON: Have you ever thought you were about to die?

  CHASTAIN: Too many times to count.

  LAWSON: Jesus, ow, ow.

  CHASTAIN: Leave that leg alone – it’s just a scratch. Look at this guy.

  LAWSON: He did all that to himself.

  CHASTAIN: Well, in layman’s terms—

  JACK: Untie me, me, me, me, me and I’ll kill you both faster, I, I, I, I, I promise.

  CHASTAIN: In layman’s terms, he was trying to control his own ego.

  LAWSON: What? His own ego? What?

  CHASTAIN: Listen. What the Mimi Experiment did, it projected Jack’s ego and turned it into a psychokinetic entity.

  LAWSON: How can a scientific experiment do that?

  CHASTAIN: Usually it can’t. But with a great deal of help from darkness . . . Jack’s ego was combined with everyone else’s to form a gestalt being. When that being came under threat, it rejected what it saw as the inferior parts of itself and came home to possess Jack.

  LAWSON: You really are mad, aren’t you?

  JACK: My hands . . . they want to do terrible things to both of you.

  CHASTAIN: You’re only human, mate. (Laughs lightly. Pause.) I find humour can help in these
situations. So, Jack, listen: when you were in rehab, did you complete the fourth step of recovery?

  JACK: Go fuck yourself.

  CHASTAIN: Discharged yourself in the end, didn’t you. Thought you were fine.

  JACK: I, I, I, I, I was fine. Nothing gets the better of Jack Sparks.

  LAWSON: Apart from the challenge of achieving a hard-on.

  JACK: You shut your mouth! Shut your filthy lying mouth.

  LAWSON: And you wondered why I called the whole thing off. You limp-dicked loser. You’re not even a man. (Pause. Someone walks across the room.)

  CHASTAIN: Now, Jack . . .

  JACK: Get out of my face, Chastain.

  CHASTAIN: Tell me the first thing that ever scared you shitless. Tell me now.

  JACK: Why should I, I, I, I tell you anything?

  CHASTAIN: Because then I might set you free. And then you can kill us. You’d enjoy that, wouldn’t you, so play along like a good little boy and let the real Jack talk for a while. (Pause.)

  JACK: Sherilyn, you’re here, thank fuck!

  CHASTAIN: Talk, Jack, before Mimi shuts you down again. What was the first thing that scared you shitless?

  JACK: The black hole.

  LAWSON: Huh?

  JACK: The cloakroom in the middle of our house. My brother shut me, me, me, me in there. There, I, I, I, I told you. Now let me, me, me, me go.

  CHASTAIN: I told you to let the real Jack speak, if you want to be free. So stay in that cloakroom for me. Let the real Jack picture himself there now. Why are you afraid?

  JACK: You irrelevant specks of dirt. I’ll make you beg for death.

  LAWSON: Bit dumb, isn’t it, being scared of an empty cloakroom? What do you have to cry about in there?

  JACK: It’s dark, you idiot, so dark. Can’t see a single thing. Remind me, me, me, me: why aren’t you dead? You should be dead.

  CHASTAIN: So what do you do in this room, besides crap your nappy? Do you bang on the door? Ask your bro to let you out?

  JACK: Both. Then I, I, I, I realise he won’t open up any time soon and I, I, I, I start crying. As I’m banging on the cloakroom doors, begging Alistair, he shouts that he hates me, me, me, me because I, I, I, I made our dad leave. He says I, I, I, I can cry until I’m sick and die in the cloakroom for all he cares.2