Is that why I’m in the van? Is this guy a disgruntled client? Somebody I followed?
Nobody’s ever caught me following them, though. That’s how good I am at melting into the background, like one of those artists who paint themselves as brick walls or bookcases.
I wish I could remember his face.
No. I need to get out. It feels like I’m in a coffin, the van shrinking around me and, if I think about that too much, it seems like the coffin has no air and the earth’s weighing it down until I’m crushed.
The doors. If I can get to them, I’m home free.
As I try to push myself into a sitting position, I discover my feet are bound, too.
‘Fanfriggintastic.’
Finally, I’m on my knees. I reach for my boot, but the knife I keep there is gone. I swear and bite my lip. Biting my swollen lip makes me want to curse even louder, but I catch the curse and swallow it and focus on getting out. Getting to the sliver of light.
I shuffle on my knees and wonder how filthy it is in here. The reek of oil sears my nostrils. I keep shuffling, inch by inch, wondering how big this goddamn van really is, until finally I’m at the doors. I wrestle with the bindings at my wrists, but they bite my flesh, refusing to let go.
‘Up,’ I order. ‘Get up.’
It’s crazy how difficult moving is when your feet are bound and your hands are behind your back. Even without the rocking van. I think of the driver and I suck in a lungful of stinking air, throwing myself against the doors, digging my boots into the floor.
I’m panting now and it’s like I’m in a furnace. Sweat stings my eyes, but I’m up. I lean into the door and fumble for the handle.
There’s no goddamn handle.
I release a mad laugh. I never was lucky.
The screech of tyres tears into my dark hole and the van jolts under my feet. I’m tossed through the darkness. My face smashes the floor. Everything’s spinning and I’m not too proud to admit I might spew. I’m so busy trying not to heave my guts onto the van floor it takes me a moment to realise we’ve stopped.
Through the throbbing in my skull, I hear the driver getting out. Footsteps crunch and keys rattle. Grey light stabs the dark away.
‘Wakey wakey.’
The voice is tarred with nicotine.
Lying on my front, I feel vulnerable and exposed. Fear pumps in my temples and, yeah, this is bad. I twist around, trying to get a look at the guy, but he’s just a blurry outline, like he’s drawn with chalk. He’s carrying something. It goes over my head and I’m in the dark again.
‘Out,’ hacks the nicotine-tarred voice. Something drags at my wrists and I’m hauled into the rain. The guy’s strong. He seems to have forgotten my feet are tied, though, and I roar as I bellyflop to the ground. The rain batters me. My jeans and jacket tighten around my skin.
‘Are you a moron?’ I shout.
‘Quiet.’ Hands yank at my ankles and the ropes slacken. I fight the relief as I kick them off.
‘Up.’
I scramble to my feet, still blind with the bag over my head, the cuffs working at my wrists like razors.
‘Go,’ orders Nicotine Man. A hand slaps my backside and every nerve in my body erupts. I don’t move. My jaw twitches with anger.
‘Walk!’ the man snaps. He’s to my left. I can see his filthy boots kicking the tarmac. I’m betting he’s armed, but that won’t matter with the element of surprise.
‘I said–’ Nicotine Man begins, but I cut him off by snapping my head at him. Our skulls crack together and purple stars pop inside the blackness of the bag.
Nicotine Man shrieks and I bury my knee in what I hope is his groin. He shrieks again and I can’t help smiling, shaking the bag from my head, savouring the rain as it runs down my face.
‘Broke my goddamn nose.’ He spits blood on the ground. He’s wearing rain-flecked sunglasses and he’s older than I thought. Mid-fifties, but lean with muscle, like a racehorse. Not a single hair on his head.
I hesitate when I see the gun holstered at his hip, but he’s clutching his face, red dribbling between his fingers.
I run.
A derelict warehouse squats across a grey patch of tarmac. I run in the opposite direction, towards the forest. I can lose him there.
‘Hey!’
Footsteps scrape the tarmac behind me. He won’t shoot. He wouldn’t go to all this trouble if somebody wanted me dead. Whoever his boss is, I’m betting he’d be angry if I turned up with a hole in my head. That’s what I tell myself, but it doesn’t stop my heart crashing against my ribs as if it’s trying to outrace me.
I barely make it ten paces before I’m tackled to the ground. My hair’s in my face and I can’t see. He punches me in the kidneys and I coil up, the breath trapped in my throat.
‘Stupid cow.’ He jerks me upright and I get a twinge of satisfaction from seeing his bent nose.
‘What the hell do you want?’ I cough.
His hacking laugh starts again.
‘Why don’t you ask them?’
There’s movement in the corner of my eye. The warehouse’s battered doors are open and five figures in black suits and masks stand outside, each of them training a gun on me.
Nicotine Man’s laughter fills my ears as the bag goes back over my head.
CHAPTER FOUR
I found out what my mother did when I was little.
They said that if you saw her, you started looking for a priest or a bottle of whisky. If you saw Celene Cross, you’d know you were finished. Everybody had heard about the places she’d been, the things she left behind. The way she set a place to rot, and no matter what you did, it’d keep rotting until it collapsed around you.
I’ve seen pictures online and in newspaper clippings. She looks like she grinds bullets for fun. Like nobody could ever hurt her, and she’s hurt people, so she knows all about that.
There was one night, though, that changed everything.
She’s pregnant but that doesn’t make her soft. Her eyes are black cigarette burns, her hair dark and clinging to waxy skin. That’s how I imagine her, anyway. She claws through the night, her cheekbones like jagged blades. The door damn near buckles under her hammering. When it finally opens, she staggers inside, almost crumples to the floor, only someone catches her. She’s hauled to a bed, her teeth crunching together.
‘No,’ she grunts, batting hands away. ‘Him. I need him.’
When the priest appears, he’s carrying a wriggling lamb. Its tongue sticks out at her and my mother clutches between her legs, writhing in pain.
There are no comforting words. No reassuring caresses.
He tears her dress at her belly. Red splatters, still warm. Lamb’s blood, spraying from its sliced throat, its head limp and dangling.
That’s where I came in. Or out. My mother screamed and writhed and screamed some more and out I slithered. But I didn’t scream. I didn’t make a sound. I was purple and I didn’t move, which is how she knew I was dead.
They say she didn’t even stop to check. A woman gives birth, she’s supposed to lie there and think about it. Not her. She took off like Beelzebub had her name and address, and she never looked back. She came out of the night and she went straight back into it.
Thing is, I didn’t die.
The priest thumped my back and I coughed a breath, then kept on breathing.
They say the dead lamb started bleating then.
They say the house shook on its foundations and a shadow passed across the moon.
They say a lot of things.
The only truth I know: my mother was a terrible person. She killed and she didn’t care. Sometimes they called her the Witch Assassin or the Red Widow. Other times The Ghost, maybe because people hardly ever saw her. She went into a place, did her thing, then left. Afterwards, it was like she’d never been there. The dead people had maybe done it to themselves. She was a whisper without an echo.
I’m pretty sure she wished I didn’t exist, either, when she foun
d out she was pregnant. It’s not like I’ve seen her since. She died a few weeks later. Washed up in the Thames, pale and broken. The papers said she had it coming, she’d pissed off too many powerful people, but what do the papers know? They buried her in a cemetery in North London. Seeya, Celene. Nice knowing ya.
I shouldn’t be alive.
Sometimes I wish I wasn’t. I suppose some days, a lot of people wish they weren’t. If you’ve got a crummy job or you hate the person you used to love.
If I had been dead a lot of things wouldn’t have happened.
CHAPTER FIVE
Glass crunches under my boots. If I look down, I just about glimpse the grimy warehouse floor under the bag over my head. I hear rain again, the tinkling of chains – and something else. Scratchy music. The ghostly trill of a trumpet.
A hot stench floods my nostrils and I almost heave into the bag. It smells like rotting meat.
‘It’s worse than a morgue in here,’ I mutter.
Something digs into my back. The barrel of a gun. I keep walking. I swear I can taste whatever’s curdling the warehouse air. I’m actually grateful for the bag; it must be masking at least a little of the stench.
As I’m pushed on the music grows louder. A door opens and I’m shoved forward, presumably into another room, though it’s hard to tell. Something solid knocks the backs of my knees and I land in what must be a chair. Pinching hands bind my feet to the chair legs. I clasp my tied hands together in my lap, rubbing my knuckles, reminding myself to breathe.
Feet scuff away and a door shuts. It’s just me and the crackling record. I assume I’m alone. Reedy music warbles louder than ever and a smoky voice croons about how some guy did her wrong, how he was bad, bad, bad. The usual.
My head jerks to the side. There’s another sound. Soft breathing. Somebody’s nearby.
‘So, here she is. The living Rumer.’
She hisses my name. There’s a hint of an accent in her voice, but I can’t tell where from. How does she know my name?
The bag’s torn away.
My eyes are fuzzy after the darkness and I blink the room gradually into focus. Slatted blinds filter in a neon haze. Something brushes my cheek. The room’s filled with strange ornaments and little shadows flutter everywhere. Butterflies. They cling to spider plants and caress the faces of Chinese dragons.
I thought we were in a warehouse, but this could be a seedy boudoir. There’s even a chandelier. Across the room, a figure lounges on a sofa. In the gauzy light, she’s little more than a shapely outline as she leans into embroidered pillows, dark hair tumbling, smoke curling up from a cigarette.
My stomach’s alive with snakes. For a crazy moment I think it’s my mother. Or the ghost of her. She’s gouged her way out of the ground and, when the light breaks over her face, it’ll be falling apart in chunks, her empty eye sockets like screaming mouths.
No. It can’t be her. She’s long dead, although that might explain the warehouse’s stink.
‘When a man loses something, he loses more than the object that is taken from him. Don’t you agree?’ The outline on the sofa speaks. ‘He also loses a part of himself.’
I twist in the chair but the ropes chew my ankles. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
The figure sits up. Yellow light breaks over a disarmingly pretty face. She wears a patterned kimono that forms a V over a muscular chest and I realise it’s not a woman at all. The man’s eyelids are painted pink. He puts a fresh cigarette to his lips. The flicker of orange from the lighter briefly illuminates his face and I see one of his eyes is milky white.
‘No matter what a man loses when something is taken from him, the thief always comes off worse in the end.’ His voice rasps like torn paper. It wavers between masculine and feminine. Soft then snarling. ‘Jealousy is a dog’s bark which attracts thieves. And you thought you could take from me without consequence.’
‘Take…? I haven’t taken anything from you.’
Something on his hand catches the light. A silver ring.
‘I have little time for thieves and even less time for liars.’
Thief? Liar? I’ve been both, but I’ve never seen this man before. Whatever he thinks I’ve done, he’s mistaken. He rises from the sofa and pads slowly towards me, muscle rippling, skin gleaming. I’ve seen drag queens. They’re beautiful. Animated. This guy wears femininity the way a maggot wears an apple.
‘Tell me where it is.’ He pulls on the cigarette. Orange embers simmer in his eyes and the smoky one shifts as if it’s sensed something mystical, something invisible to normal sight.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I say. ‘I haven’t taken anything from you.’
He bares his teeth and there’s a wink of gold. ‘She lies with her mother’s tongue.’
My stomach boils. He knew my mother?
I’ve forgotten about the rotting stench filling the warehouse. The butterflies. The scratchy music. Everything around him fades and it’s just me and the man in the kimono. I chew my tongue, preventing the questions from erupting in a stinky spew.
He stubs the cigarette out in an ornate ashtray.
‘You’ll tell me,’ he whispers. ‘You’ll tell me where the Crook Spear is.’
He’s so close I smell his perfume. Cinnamon and something bitter. I’m certain I’ve never seen him before. I’d remember a face like that. I’ve shadowed plenty of people for Julian, followed them into alleys and grimy bars, but never this man. He’s not like the others. They’re petty criminals. This guy would eat them for brunch.
‘I’ve never heard of any Crook Spear,’ I say.
‘Lies! I will not stand for them!’
He’s trembling now, snarling, his pink fingernails contorted into claws.
‘You’ve got the wrong person,’ I say, desperation edging into my voice, because the look he’s giving me is like needles and white fire. It makes me flush hot and cold and still the record singer croons about her rotten lover, her bad man.
‘You’ll never leave this place alive.’ Again the accent, soft but implacable. The threat seems to calm him. He’s back in control. When he speaks again, his voice is as thick as syrup. ‘The Crook Spear. Where is it?’
‘I’ve never heard of it.’ My shoulders ache and I realise they’re up by my ears.
‘Your mother would be proud. The lie doesn’t even sound like a lie.’
‘What’s she got to do with this?’
He strokes my cheek. ‘In time. You will tell me where it is in time.’ He looks past me. ‘Take her to the pit.’
Nicotine Man has been standing behind me throughout the whole thing. He tugs my restraints and I kick my legs free. Before he can stop me, I’m on my feet, knotting my bound hands together and pounding them into his gut. He makes an ‘oof’ sound but grabs my hair and yanks. As my eyes stream, I thrash in his grip, but no matter how hard I resist, I can’t stop him dragging me out of the boudoir and back into the warehouse.
Angry yells echo all around me, taunting me in waves, and I’m only half aware they’re mine.
I’m hauled into a dirty grey square of a room. The smell’s so awful bile bubbles up from the pit of my stomach. I see a rusted grate in the floor just as it’s heaved up by a man in a black suit and a mask that covers his eyes.
‘You’ve got to be kidding me–’ I begin, but then I notice Nicotine Man’s drawn a blade from his belt. His brows knit together and he’s enjoying this, snatching my hands and running the blade through my restraints.
My hands snap free but then Nicotine Man tips me through the hole in the floor.
And I’m falling.
Falling.
Then crunch, cement breaks my fall. Angry fireworks fizz in my brain but, as I spit dust and grunt into the floor, something worse distracts me. I try to stop panting; try not to breathe the stinking air at all, because now I know where the stench is coming from.
I’m surrounded by dead bodies.
CHAPTER SIX
/> I’m ten and I’ve chopped all the hair off my foster sister’s Barbie. I’ve used a black felt-tip pen to colour in her nails and I’ve smudged half moons under her eyes. Then I tell my foster sister that this isn’t Barbie, it’s Hormonal Harriet, who’s addicted to sleeping pills. One night, Harriet took so many of them she didn’t wake up for a week. She slept for so long her starving dog ate her left foot before she came to.
My foster sister runs screaming to her parents before I can close the scissors around Harriet’s plastic foot.
(And yes, ten is young to know the word ‘hormonal’, but what can I say? I’m good at eavesdropping on my foster mother when she’s bitching about her colleagues.)
I still have a few customised Barbies in my flat. I pinned one to my headboard like a voodoo doll. Not because I like Barbies. I’m not sure why I keep them around. I suppose they’re a joke but at least they’re in on it. Sometimes they feel more human than the people I shadow.
For a moment, I imagine I’m sinking into the worn mattress that came with the flat. The jar of bottle caps by the bed. A torn Stevie Nicks poster on the wall. Small touches, little things to make it mine instead of a cardboard box.
The mattress is solid cement, though, and I’m not in my flat.
I snap to, coughing into the floor. I must’ve passed out. A person can only take so many knocks before the shutters come down. My eyes scratch open and my lips peel over my teeth so I can draw a ragged breath, tracing a hand over my ribs. As I raise myself up off the floor, the memory of where I am is a fresh blow to the chest.
Indistinct shapes surround me, motionless and reeking.
Uneasiness skitters like a spider in my mind. It’s been there for as long as I can remember, the spider, huddled in a dark corner, watching, listening, brooding on the things it sees.
The nearest corpse looks like it’s laughing at me. It’s lying directly under the grate in the ceiling and a net of grey light lies over it. I can’t believe I didn’t land on it when Nicotine Man threw me in here. The corpse seems to think that’s funny, too.
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