Mike’s eyes went wide. “You’re joking?”
“I ain’t. It’s been a right horrible couple of days. He was a nice lad.”
“Courtney, right? Yeah, I know him. He used to go out with my cousin, Sam.”
“Really? I didn’t know you knew him.”
Mike shrugged. “I know everyone, mate. Anyway, it sucks to hear he’s dead – although he did cheat on my cousin. Maybe it was karma.”
I winced. Dad always told me to never speak ill of the dead, but it was more than just that. Whatever Courtney might have done in the past, he had been nice to me. I didn’t want to think bad things about him.
“So, how did he die?” asked Mike, eyes sparkling in a way that made me want to reach out and thump him. This wasn’t some ghost story like Annie May and the dump.
“He was… It… I’m not really sure. I’m just trying to be there for Sarah. She said she loved him.”
Mike shifted on my beanbag, lifting one of his clearly brand-new trainers onto his knee. “Like ’em? Old man got another cheque for his worker’s comp. Cost seventy quid.”
I feigned happiness. The thing I disliked most about my best friend was how he always shoved his new stuff in my face. Surely he must have known my family struggled with money, but he didn’t seem to care. Did he like upsetting me? “Speaking of dads,” I said, “my real dad turned up on our doorstep the other day. That’s the other thing my family has been dealing with.”
“No way! That’s cool, man. Two dads means twice the presents on birthdays and Christmas. Jammy bastard.”
“Mike, the last thing I’ve been thinking about is how many presents I’m gonna get at Christmas. My real dad abandoned me. I don’t know if I even want to see him.”
Mike put his leg down and leant forward. His smirk went away and he nodded. “Sorry, mate. Can I do anything?”
“Just help take my mind off it.”
“No problem.” He hopped up from the bean bag and put his hands on his hips. “You free tomorrow?”
“I think so.”
“Cool. Then we’re gonna hang out and have a laugh. I’ll bring my N64 round.”
That was music to my ears. “Thanks, man. It means a lot.”
“Hey, it’s no problem. You’re my best mate. My job is to cheer you up when you’re sad.”
I smiled. “I think you should probably go home for now though. My family’s pretty stressed out.”
“I’ll bet. Okay, just let me take a slash and I’ll get out of your hair, mate.”
“You need to go again? Jesus, you literally just came out of our bathroom five minutes ago.”
“I know, right? I had a large bottle of Lucozade on the walk over here. If I don’t go now, I’ll end up going in the bushes by the bumpy slide. Hey, maybe we should hang out there tomorrow. Tracy Collins lives right behind it. Maybe we’ll see her.”
I smirked. Tracy Collins was a good enough reason to do anything. “Sounds like a plan.”
“Sorted.”
I remained cross-legged on my bed while Mike went the toilet. My Karazy Klown doll was lying on its side next to my TV. I was surprised Mike hadn’t seen it, and I considered showing it to him, knowing he’d be jealous. He got nearly everything he asked for, but his mum was strict about horror movies and other adult stuff. Even with all of his dad’s compensation money, Mike would never be allowed a Karazy Klown. But showing him would just make him feel as rotten as I did whenever he flashed his latest pair of trainers at me. I left the doll where it was.
Mike should’ve finished taking a whizz by then, but it didn’t sound as if he’d even started. What was he doing in there?
“Mike? You finished or what?”
He didn’t answer.
I got off the bed and crossed my room. I wasn’t in the habit of following my friends to the toilet, but I wanted to make sure he hadn’t bumped into Sarah or said anything to upset my parents. Mike had a way of getting me into trouble.
On the landing, I looked towards the bathroom. The door was open. No one was inside. I could see the toilet and the seat was down.
“Hey, Martin.”
The sound of Mike’s voice was a relief, and I turned to face the direction it had come from, further along the landing. I spotted him and he had a massive grin on his face.
He was standing inside the room.
My knees deserted me and I slumped against the wall, bashing my elbow and hurting myself. I didn’t care about the pain; I cared about my best friend. “Mike… no…”
He was still beaming, the happiest I’d ever seen him. “I don’t get it,” he said. “How did you build an extension? Where did you get the money?”
The room wasn’t empty like it had been before. This time it was full. A pinball machine stood directly behind Mike and a pool table filled the room to his left.
My mouth was dry. It was hard to speak. “M-Mike, you need to get out of there.”
“You have a frikkin’ games room, mate. How could you keep this a secret?”
Tears filled my eyes, blurred my vision. “Mike, please just come out of there. It’s… It’s not safe.”
Mike frowned. “What d’you mean, it’s not safe? Is it not finished or something? It looks finished to me. There’s a Mortal Kombat machine in here. My mum would freak. Come on, Martin. Let’s play a couple of rounds. Then I’ll go, yeah?”
I didn’t see a Mortal Kombat machine inside the room, and the pinball machine and pool table began to shimmer before my eyes. They weren’t real. They were tricks.
Bait.
I raised my voice, sheer panic working its way through my lungs. “Mike! Get the fuck out of there, right now!”
Mike flinched. I don’t think he’d ever heard me use the F-word before. Or shout it. He held his palms up to me and frowned. “Yeah, okay, Martin. What’s your problem?”
Mike took a step towards me and my breath caught in my throat. Perhaps he would just walk out of the room and everything would be fine. He just had to keep moving until he was safely back on the landing.
Mike paused. A puzzled expression crossed his face. One of his hands rose above his head, the fingers pointing straight out and quivering.
“Mike? What are you doing?”
He shook his head at me and I saw his confused expression turn to fear. His fingers kept on quivering as he held them up above his head.
Snap!
Mike’s index finger bent backwards at the knuckle, a twig broken in two. The sound it made was like a gunshot. His screams were like a siren blaring.
Snap! Snap!
Two more of his fingers snapped backwards. His screaming stopped. His throat bulged like he was trying to bring up an apple.
His entire arm snapped at the elbow.
Mike looked like a puppet on tangled strings. He managed to look at me, his eyes blotted with tears and blood. “M-Martin?”
Crack!
Mike’s neck twisted a full three-hundred-and-sixty degrees, his face turning a full circle. His eyes bulged in their sockets. His neck was a coil of old rope.
And just like that, my best friend was gone.
A hand grabbed me. I shrieked, but then saw it belonged to Dad. Mum and Sarah were standing with him, and all three of them were staring into the room – staring at Martin’s suspended body. Apparently, the room wasn’t done with him yet. The flesh beneath his eyes and around his thick black eyebrows twitched. It looked like invisible crows were pecking at his face one moment and invisible hooks tugging at his skin the next.
“Dad?” I didn’t know what else to say. Nor did Dad, because all he did was squeeze my arm tighter.
There was a sudden whoosh and Mike’s face was ripped away from his skull. Then, like a sheet being pulled from a table, his flesh was torn from his body and he stopped being even a memory of friend. He was an anatomical dummy – muscles, flesh, and veins.
The room’s door slammed shut.
I collapsed backwards into Dad’s arm.
Sarah star
ted screaming. I think I did too.
Part III
19
We tumbled downstairs, all of us screaming. If we needed any more convincing to shatter our spirits completely, it had been offered in spades. Something evil was inside our house and it fed on innocent flesh. First Courtney, now Mike.
My best friend.
“We need to call the police,” said Sarah. “I don’t want to do this any more. I’m done. I’m done. I’m done.”
“Just move.” Dad shoved her in the back. “We need to get out of here.”
“What if we can’t leave?” I fretted. “Like last time. What if it doesn’t let us leave?”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, Martin.”
In the hallway we wasted no time, moving in a panicked jumble towards the door. “Get straight to the car,” said Dad. “I’m driving us to the police station. We can’t hide from this any more.”
I was at the front of the pack, so it was me who yanked open the front door, jabbering and half-mad with relief when it opened.
A man stood on our doorstep, the night behind him. Someone I instantly recognised. Beneath his baseball cap, Thomas Quick’s expression was grim. He seemed unsurprised to see my family attempting to flee the house. “Whatever you’re all planning to do,” he said calmly, “I suggest you don’t. Invite me in. We need to talk.”
“Who the hell are you?” Dad demanded, his fists rising slightly in front of him.
Mr Quick glanced at me and smiled. “I’m a friend of Martin’s. The boy’s been expecting me.”
It was true. I had been hoping to see this bizarre stranger again. “You can really help us?” I asked him.
“I can really try.”
Dad blocked the doorway with his arm. “Who the hell are you and what do you know about my family?”
Quick lowered his head and his shoulders, almost like he was bowing. “Your lives have been taken over by evil – an evil that needs to be fed. Invite me in, Mr Ademale, and allow me to aid you.”
I turned to Dad and tugged at his arm to get his attention. When he failed to stop staring at the man on our doorstep, I had to urge him to listen. “We need help. He knows what’s going on.”
Mr Quick gave me a friendly smile, revealing several golden teeth. “I would also add, what do you folks have to lose?”
Dad glared, looking like he might grab the man and fight him, but he moved away from the door and grunted. “Fine, but if you try to hurt my family, I’ll kill you.”
“Fair enough,” said Quick, who then stepped into our hallway like a fox entering a henhouse. He took off his leather jacket and draped it on our bannister. “Any tea going?”
Dad spluttered at the request, but Mum headed towards the kitchen without complaint. “How do you take it?”
Quick grinned, flashing those gold teeth again. “Milk and a whole lot of sugar, please, ma’am.”
“Let’s go into the living room,” I said, and surprisingly everyone did. After seeing Mike get torn apart, I no longer cared about being a quiet, polite child. I wanted to know about the evil that had invaded our house – and how to kill it.
We waited for Quick to start talking, but he sat in silence until my mum arrived with his cup of tea. He sipped at it and then smacked his lips. “Ambrosia. Thank you for that.”
Dad was bouncing his knee and fidgeting. “Can you get on with what you came here to say? You said you can help us. Do you know what’s going on?”
Quick put his tea down on the coffee table carefully, making sure it fit perfectly on the coaster. “I know fully what is happening to your family, yes. As I told your boy, you folks have brought something into your home. I’m sorry I couldn’t help sooner, but these things need to be dealt with cautiously.”
Dad shook his head and didn’t look like he was buying it. “What exactly do you think we’ve brought into our home?”
Quick shrugged. “You’d know better than me. Djall can take on any form it wishes, but once a person covets it, they give up their souls to its hunger.”
“What’s a Djall?” I asked.
“Not a Djall, just Djall. I suppose you could call it a demon. This particular demon feeds on misery. It grows strong on agony. Like most demons, there is no rhyme nor reason to why it does what it does. It is just what it is. Evil rarely considers being anything else other than evil.”
Dad pinched the bridge of his nose and let his head sag. “Demons? You’re telling us that we have a demon in our home? This is…” He shook his head and laughed. “I want to say ridiculous, but I think we’re past that.”
“So this demon is called Dal?” Mum asked. I was glad to see her taking it seriously, because everything told me to trust this man, Quick. If it turned out that he couldn’t help us, I didn’t see what else could.
Quick laced his fingers together over his knees, every knuckle crisscrossed with scars. “Not Dal, Djall. It escape our possession about eighteen months ago. We’ve been monitoring the news, local police reports, and, more importantly, hospital cases. When we were alerted to a patient who had been badly mutilated, blinded and made deaf, I came to investigate. That amount of suffering stunk of Djall. It’s quite fond of blinding its prey before feeding.”
Dad ran a hand over his bald head and sat up straight. “You said we were alerted. Who is we?”
“The Sphere,” I answered, remembering that part of it from my earlier conversation with Quick. “They’re an organisation.”
Quick nodded at me appreciatively. “Yes, Martin. The Sphere of Zosimus. As I told you, our founder was a pagan from Roman times. It was he who first started to confront and contain the evils of this world. His occult writings serve as the credo for our organisation. We are dedicated to combatting the malevolent forces of this world and allowing innocent people to sleep at night.”
Mum tittered. “You mean you fight demons?”
Quick flashed those gold teeth of his. “Just that, yes, and I have come to believe that Djall is inside this house. For hundreds of years he was stored in the Sphere’s vaults, but two years ago we had an incident – a betrayal to be more precise. Members of our organisation are called caretakers, and only caretakers may enter the vaults. One of our members, Calendo Graves, unfortunately lacked the morals required to perform his duties. It sickens me to say, but he stole several of our wards in order to sell to the highest bidder. We found him dead at the side of the road in one of our vans, but all of the stolen relics were gone. I have been seeking Djall for more than a year now, knowing that I would not come close until someone suffered terribly. I’m afraid that someone is your family.”
“And Courtney,” said Sarah, not looking at any of us, or even really joining in the conversation. She was only half listening by the look of it.
“I heard about his passing,” said Quick, “but it was probably for the best. That poor boy experienced agony and pain that I pray none of you ever has to endure.”
“My friend is dead too.” I pictured Mike’s skin being pulled from his broken body. “The room took him. That’s why we were leaving.”
“My condolences. Did anybody know the boy was here?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Well, let’s hope not. The last thing we need is more people turning up while we do what needs doing.”
A cloud lifted and I finally saw a light ahead. “And what needs doing? How do we stop this?”
“Firstly, we need to find out what form Djall took when you brought him into your home. It could have been an old book or an item of clothing. Quite often, Djall likes to hide in plain sight as a piece of jewellery. Does any of that ring a bell?”
I turned my head until I was looking at Sarah. She was staring down at the floor, but gradually she raised her face to look at us. She was still wearing the green glass necklace against her chest, but she grabbed at it and ripped it free, tossing it into the middle of the room. It lay there on the carpet, capturing light from a nearby lamp. “Oh my God, o
h my God. I did this. I did this to us all? It was my necklace the entire time?”
Quick was a scar-covered monster, but the way he looked at my sister was all kindness. “None of this is your fault, girl. Evil doesn’t target evil. It targets innocence and youth. It targets the best of us. You are not a facilitator of tragedy, only a victim. As are you all. I’m sorry Djall was ever allowed to escaped our possession. If you want to blame anyone, you can blame me, but there’ll be time for that later. Now is the time to deal with this vile thing before us.”
I stared at the beautiful, ancient, wicked necklace on our living room floor. Was it really evil? A demon? “How do we deal with it?”
Quick shrugged. “A little of this, a little of that. A ritual of sorts, for which you must all be present. Djall’s wickedness extends to the accursed and their immediate family – a household. Some used to call Djall the ‘Emerald Cuckoo’ because it makes its home in the nest of others. Emerald because of the treasures it seemingly offers.”
“It grants wishes,” said Dad, and I was surprised to hear him admit it out loud. Whatever doubts he had been holding onto had obviously gone. He believed. Only Mum seemed doubtful. She followed along with the conversation, but it was like she wasn’t really listening. Sarah was barely listening at all, but I knew she understood. She was broken, and I didn’t know if she would ever recover.
Quick reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out a small notebook. Various pages were stuffed with scraps of other papers, and one of these scraps was a newspaper article, which he unfolded before our eyes. “We managed to locate and contain Djall in February 1808,” he explained. “It fell into the hands of a London doctor named Daniel Jarvis, who specialised in maternity. Back then, baby deaths were unfortunately common. Doctor Jarvis, however, never lost a single child between the dates of March 1807 and January 1808. More and more expectant mothers passed through his care, and he became renowned in the city to a point that high society was willing to pay him a small fortune to deliver its babies. At the same time, a spate of disappearances plagued the city – vagrants, mostly, and the odd prostitute. These were people local enforcement cared little for, but it didn’t escape the scrutiny of the Sphere. We have people whose entire job it is to look out for patterns and coincidences that escape the notice of others. Their investigations soon brought to light that Doctor Jarvis was preying on the vulnerable by night and making them all but vanish. He was feeding people to Djall in exchange for medical perfection.”
The Room Upstairs: A Novel Page 11