by Jason Arnopp
Silence between us as I take this in. ‘So I’m your karmic equaliser?’
She nods, her eyes half open.
‘Thank you anyway, Sherilyn.’
‘You already thanked me.’
‘It doesn’t seem enough.’
‘Fuck off, Jack. I don’t have the energy for embarrassment.’
I push myself, force myself, to pose a question I don’t necessarily want to know the answer to. ‘Did you read the chapter about me in Di Stefano’s book?’
Without skipping a beat, she shakes her head and says, ‘You torched that whole section. Now, a couple of things you need to know. Number One: slip back into selfish ways and Mimi will slip back into you.’
Should I tell Sherilyn about Howitz right now? I really should tell her.
From the bathroom, the shower’s white-noise hiss.
‘Number Two: people only see what they want to see. The unconscious mind is great at filtering out stuff that fucks up the status quo. Now that you’ve been purged of so much ego, you may finally see the dead. Or ghosts. Or whatever model you want to place on that kind of energy.’
‘Christ,’ I breathe. ‘Yeah. I want to see an actual ghost. A real person, a dead person.’
With her eyes shut, Sherilyn points down with both forefingers. ‘You’re probably in the right place, mate.’
It takes me a while to catch her meaning. I stare at the floor like an amnesiac, trying to work it out. Then my jaw drops. ‘What if the Paranormals didn’t really make that video?’
She drowsily shifts a cushion behind her head. ‘Tell you something: if they did make it, they did a pretty fuckin’ good job. A video where only you could hear three words on the soundtrack?’
My stomach rolls. ‘Yeah. Any idea what those three words mean?’
‘They mean someone or something is fucking with your head.’
Maria.
‘But why those three words?’ I ask. ‘Why those three demons?’
Sherilyn bucks right off the sofa, back in the room. ‘Ah! Yeah. I worked that out, somewhere over Niue Island. Wrote it down on a scrap of paper.’ She pats her pockets, then heads over to search through zippered sections on her suitcase, which sits beside Bex’s. ‘Somewhere . . .’
‘Could you maybe just tell me?’ I say, trying not to sound ungrateful.
‘Best if I show you. Found it.’
As she hands me a page from a complimentary Air New Zealand notepad, that’s when the world turns to shit.
A slaughterhouse howl rips out of the bathroom.
A raw expression of agony, terror, shock.
I hope my death will at least erase this howl from my memory.
Sherilyn and I stiffen, then race to the bathroom door. I get there first, rattling the handle and of course finding it locked from the inside.
A second howl cuts off abruptly, making bile rise in my throat.
Before I can kick the door, Sherilyn slams her own heel into the wood, knocking it off the latch. And we’re in.
Into the room fogged with steam.
The room where the shower door is still shut.
I wrench that door open, in time to glimpse something red and unthinkable being sucked out of sight, down through the wrecked shower tray. Down through a jagged star-shaped hole, as if something punched up through it. Blood, so much blood, overflows and splashes my bare feet, just before the rest swirls down into the star with a loud glug.
Sherilyn hauls my numb mannequin self aside. Staring at Bex’s blood on my feet, noting strands of her hair curled around my toes, I’m dimly aware of Sherilyn swearing and spraying her aerosol around the edges of that star. I want to ask what just happened, but can only mutter, ‘Bring her back,’ until my attention is stolen by what’s happening in the sink.
Through the steam, you can see the greenish-brown water that fills the bowl, leaves floating on its surface. Somehow alive, this water rises above the rim without spilling a drop, then sculpts itself into a crude human head. One single brow appears above the eyes. Filthy water forms jagged teeth in an open mouth, which speaks with the same thick gurgle I had in my ear at the Rainbow Bar.
‘Hell,’ Tony Bonelli tells me, ‘is having no control.’
Tony’s head collapses, vanishing fast down the plughole. When only the leaves remain, Sherilyn abandons the shower tray and rushes over to spray the sink. Then she does the same to the toilet bowl and every other inlet in the room.
I’m sitting on the floor, unsure how I got down here, quite unable to stand. Sherilyn has to grab me under the arms and pull me backwards across the tiles on my backside, until we’re no longer in the bathroom.
On the way out, I ask, ‘We can get her back, right?’
And all Sherilyn can say is, ‘I’m so sorry.’
Doesn’t matter how long I sit down here on the floor, rocking forwards and back, sucking cigarettes right down to the stubs: the tears don’t come.
How can you be expected to shed tears over something you can’t accept? Something so ridiculous, so impossible?
I brought wonderful, kind, supportive Bex to Los Angeles. I brought her here and she’s ended up . . .
I might as well have killed her myself. God knows, I tried.
The mind recoils. Cannot process. As if I’m standing at the foot of Everest with my face pressed against the bare rock, trying to see the whole mountain.
All the questions I aim up at Sherilyn contain the word ‘why’.
Why does Tony hate me so much?
While spraying the gaps around the bathroom door, Sherilyn gives her opinion. Based on the working draft of this book I emailed her, she thinks Maria Corvi victimised Tony for translating my words in the church. My mocking words. Guilt by verbal association.
‘Oh,’ is all I can say to that. And then, ‘Oh God, why can’t Maria just forget me?’
Standing on a wobbly chair to spray the ceiling air con, Sherilyn says, ‘Because you laughed, Jack. During that exorcism, you stole the limelight. This thing inside Maria demands to be the centre of attention. It demands fear and respect. And it always gets the last laugh.’
‘Bex had nothing to do with this,’ I growl, fighting myself into my shoes, keeping the blood and hair on my feet. ‘It’s me Maria wants.’ I roar into the ether: ‘It’s me you want!’
Someone thumps on the wall from an adjoining room, and I scream abuse back.
‘Jack . . .’
It’s that voice again. The whispering voice that leads to the basement.
‘Do you hear that?’ I demand of Sherilyn. ‘My name being whispered?’
Spraying plug sockets, she just shakes her head.
‘Jack . . .’ says the voice.
I’m up on my feet, then out the door, marching through corridors, propelled by rage. Sherilyn calls after me, wanting to know where I’m heading. The basement? If so, she says, I have to wait. She needs more time to prepare.
As the lift doors close on me, I yell at her not to follow.
A breathless Sherilyn finds me at reception. I’m pointing across the foyer to the basement entrance door and ordering some designer-stubbled guy, not Brandon this time, to give me the key. Stubble Guy blanches and reddens, then snatches up a landline handset and hits one number. Then he tries another extension and says into the phone, ‘Ruthie, where is Howitz?’
I reach over the desk, grab the handset and slam it back on to the cradle in a jumble of curly cord.
‘Out, or I call the cops,’ Stubble Guy says.
‘Hey!’ comes the cry from some night owl across the foyer. This anvil-headed thirty-stone black guy leaves his sofa. As he strides towards us, he looks twice as big thanks to his reflection in the polished floor.
While all this is going on, of course, a disembodied voice still whispers my name.
Sherilyn eyeballs the approaching vigilante, while easing a cosh out of the lining of her small backpack. ‘Come on, fellas. No one wants this to get ugly.’
Balling his fists up
tight by his sides, Stubble Guy doesn’t even blink. ‘You need to leave right now.’
I yank my T-shirt up and bunch it around my neck so Stubble Guy can see my ruined torso. All those Band-Aids stained pink from blood, green from pus. All the places where dressings have fallen off, revealing testimonials to a sick mind.
Fishing a key out from under the desk, Stubble Guy hands it over the same way he’d dish out a quarter to pacify some raving street loon.
Sherilyn slides the cosh back into its secret compartment.
Flickering bulbs test my nerve as we prowl the service corridor, down where the air gets warmer and wetter. The beckoning voice has fallen silent.
This burning anger feels useful. So much easier to get to grips with than, for example, massive grief or unbearable loss.
‘Had to leave half my bloody stuff upstairs,’ Sherilyn grouses.
‘I told you not to follow me,’ I say. ‘I just want this over with. Something wants me to come down here, and it sounds like Maria’s voice.’
‘I can’t just let you hand yourself over, Jack.’
The darker these passageways become, the more fear saps my resolve. I dip into my pocket where the Zippo usually sits, only to find it empty. I stop walking, not knowing what to do or say.
Sherilyn jerks her head around. Feline, alert. She utters a migraine moan, then shoos something invisible away with one hand.
‘What’s going on?’ I ask her.
‘Just got a psychic strike.’
Standing beside me, Sherilyn is a silhouette, profiled by limited light from the main boiler area up ahead. The sudden cold feels unnatural: an abrupt change of season. This time I can’t blame the Paranormals’ equipment. My God, what if they really didn’t make that video? It’s strangely comforting to touch the rough, sweaty surface of the nearest wall.
‘What’s a psychic strike?’ I ask her.
‘Whatever this thing is, it knows it’s got company. Probably detects me, so it’s lashing out. So you’re gonna stay here while I secure the area. No arguments.’
I agree way too fast. Like she said during the ego-purging ritual, I’m a coward. I totally wanted her to follow me down here.
From her backpack, Sherilyn takes the aerosol, some kind of figurine and a zipper bag of something. Handing me the surprisingly heavy pack, she says, ‘Hold this for me and don’t move.’
I fight the dread as her clomping footsteps become taps, then barely audible clicks, which merge with the generator hum as she disappears around that internet-famous corner.
I’m waiting in darkness.
My hand goes to that Zippo pocket again.
Waiting in darkness.
It pointlessly explores that empty pocket.
Waiting in darkness.
My heartbeat is improvised jazz played with gong hammers.
Then I remember what’s in the other pocket. A crumpled piece of paper . . . wrapped around my phone.
Waiting in darkness.
I pull out the phone and unlock it. I bathe in the feeble blue light while glancing skittishly around in case it reveals something terrible.
Sherilyn gave me this sheet of Air New Zealand notepaper upstairs, before hell rose up from the sewers. I unfold it by phone-light, struggling to remember what it was even supposed to be.
This is what she wrote:
ADRA ME LECH
ME PHISTOPHELES
BAPHO ME T
Sherilyn’s voice comes back along the passageway whip-crack loud, stern as a lion tamer. ‘Oh, no-no-no. Stay back. You stay back or you’ll get some of this.’
When she speaks again, she’s muffled and under duress. The sudden fear in her voice tightens my skin.
There’s the dull sound of something or someone hitting the ground.
‘Sherilyn?’ I call. ‘Sherilyn, are you all right?’
No reply.
The generator drones on.
I so badly want to run. Yes, run like my dad did. Run like I always do. But this woman travelled across the world to save me, even if she insisted it was really to save herself.
No matter how counter-intuitive it might be, I shrug on Sherilyn’s backpack, then force myself to walk towards the boiler room. I might be acting brave, but my lungs hitch when I try to call Sherilyn’s name again. Best to let them focus on breath. As long as they’re firing white mist out in front of me, I’m alive.
I start filming with my phone. If there really is a ghost, I want the whole world to see. For once in my life, I want, need to achieve something positive. Maybe this thing will defy photography like Mimi did, but I have to try. So I’m edging along the wall with the pipes, approaching that corner, heart pulsing in my mouth. Every single part of me feels heavier, more solid than it should.
If this ghost is waiting around the corner for me, I may as well confound its expectations. So I crouch and crawl. As I do this, something knocks on the door between my unconscious and conscious minds.
I slowly extend my phone around the bend, down low, millimetre by millimetre, then carefully follow it with my head so that I can see the screen.
I gasp. How is this possible?
Across this open area, Sherilyn Chastain lies prone on the ground. I can’t see much of her, thanks to all those heavy shadows, but I know it’s her.
I know all of this.
All of it.
Standing over her is a dark humanoid figure, facing away from me. This figure fades slowly in and out of view.
Only its bottom half is visible on my screen.
I look past the phone at the scene itself, as if to confirm this insanity.
At first I tell myself this is just history repeating itself.
But I know the truth. Oh yes, I know.
‘Oh God,’ I whisper. ‘This is it.’
I am Camera Boy.
I duck back around the corner with a spine full of ice, keeping half of that terrible scene in frame – the exact same terrible scene I’ve witnessed hundreds of times before, along with a million other people.
This is too much to take. It’s bending my head and I have to get out of here. Bravery crumbles and the survival instinct kicks in, telling me to move.
The viewfinder shows that the dark figure is now facing me. It must have slowly turned around while I was freaking out. Of course it did. I know this off by heart.
I can’t see the figure’s face and now I really, really don’t want to.
As I scramble backwards away from that corner on my arse, I know what’s next.
Jesus Christ, it’s coming for me.
The sheer inevitability only makes it worse.
The figure glides fast around the corner, heading right for me, black feet hanging.
As I haul myself upright, a scream catches in my dust-dry throat.
The spectre’s face is charred and cracked. The mouth a skeletal grimace.
Oh, but the eyes. Oh God, those eyes, full of torture. Dragged along for the ride whether they want to be here or not.
This is not just a grotesque parody of my own face.
It is my face.
Of course it is.
I half expect to find myself glued to the ground, like in all the best nightmares. Instead, gazelle legs launch me into action.
And I’m running through darkness, beneath bulbs that have finally given up.
I’m crashing into walls I don’t remember and can’t foresee.
I don’t hear the spectre, but I know it’s there. Flitting behind me.
Soundless, deathless.
I fall on to the staircase that leads up to the foyer. I scramble up these steps on all fours, thinking nothing of the splinters gouging my hands.
Please, please, just let me get back up into the light. What can this thing do to me up there, where there’s people and life and open space?
‘Don’t go in there,’ rasps a sick version of my voice from behind me.
I glance back and see my dead self coming up the stairs.
I se
e the whites of my dead eyes.
Blind in the dark, I slam into the closed door and mount a crazed fumble for the handle. I’m fully aware that if some prick’s locked the door, then I’ll die, either by my own ghost’s hands or through cardiac arrest.
‘Don’t go in there,’ my voice repeats, close, so close.
Dead breath frosts the nape of my neck.
I heave open the door and swing myself through it, rocked by a head rush and an intense flash of red light.
I slam the door behind me, but I’m not standing in the corridor back to the hotel lobby. I’m in total fucking darkness.
All aboard the ghost train.
I keep hold of the door handle, as if a phantom couldn’t glide through solid wood if it chose to do so.
I pray for help, for light.
This door handle feels different. It used to be metal, but now it’s wood. And it feels overwhelmingly familiar. The shape of it, the grooves . . .
Please, please, please . . . if there’s any kind of God, then let there be light.
Nearby, a metallic clink and grind.
A tiny flame erupts.
I think my prayer has been answered, until I see the side of a young boy’s face.
The boy clutches a burning Zippo lighter, trembling so much he’s a blur. The dancing flame highlights tears rolling down his cheeks.
In this cramped space, I see the coats hanging right beside him. One of which he has set on fire.
‘Jacob?’ says Alistair, his muffled voice coming through the door I just entered. ‘Stop winding me up, you ugly little shit.’1
Rooted to the spot, seeing my open mouth reflected in the shiny new brass of the Zippo, I silently will my five-year-old self not to sense my presence.
But of course, the boy’s eyes dart this way, as far as they can go.
And he whimpers.
It’s inevitable.
The boy so wants to be brave. He wants to turn and face the unknown. He’s desperate to look and see nothing at all, so that everything will be fine.
Yet he can’t move a muscle and he’s wetting himself.
Because he knows damn well he sees me in the corner of his eye.
This moment will scar him forever. It will drive him to smother all doubt. To bury so much as the possibility that he saw something in this room.