Others

by James Herbert

  Before I could protest, she was behind the sofa, the palms and fingers of her hands slipping round to encircle my temples. I had to resist jerking my head away; nobody had ever touched me like this before. Almost immediately I felt a heat spreading from her hands into my temples and forehead, a warm, white, invasive seeping which, once the mild shock had passed, became a gentle soothing. Miraculously – or so it seemed to me – I felt the tension leaving my body, the throbbing pain inside my head diminishing to a dull, inconsequential ache until that too, melted away. All this happened within a minute or two and I was astounded; only a good grade hit had worked on me that fast before.

  ‘It’s . . . it’s gone,’ I said unbelievingly.

  ‘I know,’ the clairvoyant replied.

  ‘How . . . ?’

  ‘I absorbed the pain myself. Took it from you, then simply threw it away.’

  I had noticed, or sensed, the flicking movements of her hands, preceded by the soft stroking of my temples and forehead; it was as if she were shedding water from her fingers.

  ‘That’s – ’

  ‘Nonsense? Yes, I know that too. Works though, doesn’t it?’

  I couldn’t deny it and I wondered how well the treatment would work on a regular hangover. A fortune could be made if it could be packaged and marketed.

  ‘Drink your coffee now.’ She came round and sat next to me and I could feel her gaze as I picked up the mug. ‘I didn’t know if you took sugar, so I left it. Too much sugar isn’t good for you anyway.’

  ‘The coffee’s fine.’ It hurt my lips to drink and I realized I had taken more than a slap or punch in the mouth; somebody had put the boot in.

  ‘Can I help you, Mr Dismas?’

  She had put the question quietly and I stared at her, not sure of its meaning.

  ‘I thought it was the other way round,’ I said at last, turning away from her and continuing to sip the coffee. ‘I thought you needed my help.’

  ‘Shelly – Mrs Ripstone – does. She needs your help badly.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ I scoffed, remembering Gerald Ripstone’s will.

  ‘Why the cynicism?’

  I explained the complications over the inheritance and the clairvoyant expressed surprise. ‘Shelly didn’t tell me that.’

  ‘Well, you’re a clairvoyant, aren’t you? You should’ve known.’

  She laughed. ‘I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way. I only wish it did – I’d have a much clearer picture of things.’ She joined her hands together on her lap and I shifted position on the sofa to observe her better. Underlying the sweet aroma of her perfume was a hint of lavender water and I noticed that beneath its thin layer of powder, her skin had a translucent quality, a waxy thinness that belied her years; bluish veins were just visible at her temples and her broad forehead was unusually smooth. It was the lines from her eyes and the corners of her mouth that bore witness to her true age, and the chin that was supported by another more fleshy swelling underneath which gave her matronly appeal. Those pale eyes were quizzical at the moment, but they held a deep compassion within them as well as a kind of knowing, an ability to see beyond the superficial. It seemed that her gaze might reach my soul.

  ‘Tell me something,’ I said, still taking in this weird/ordinary little woman beside me. ‘Which of you was the first to mention Shelly Ripstone’s missing son: you or her?’

  ‘Shelly told me about the birth of her child soon after arriving at my home. She said she couldn’t live with the loss of both her husband and her baby.’

  ‘So she put the thought of the missing baby into your head?’

  ‘No, she confirmed it, Mr Dismas – ’

  ‘Call me Nick. Or Dis – everyone calls me Dis.’

  She gave a brief smile, a nod of her head. ‘Sometimes we clairvoyants need some affirmation, even guidance. It can help clear our minds of extraneous matters, provide a focal point for our perceptions.’

  ‘Sure. So she did instigate the idea of a missing son.’

  ‘I understand your scepticism, but I believe her desire to see me was inspired by a force that we on this Earth will never quite understand. Just as I believe a hidden but no less forceful motivation led her to choose you out of all the many private investigators in this town.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous. My agency was recommended by her own solicitor, someone I’ve carried out a lot of work for over the years.’

  ‘Synchronicity, Mr – Dis. You know what synchronicity is, don’t you?’

  ‘I’ve got a rough idea. It’s when two unplanned things come together for a specific purpose.’

  ‘Well . . . close. It’s a meaningful coincidence in time of two or more similar, or even identical, events that aren’t necessarily related.’

  ‘I think I prefer my version: it’s easier to make sense of.’

  ‘Fine. It’ll do. You see, I believe you were always meant to carry out this investigation.’

  That knocked me back a little. I was still trembling slightly from the beating I’d taken and the shock of the vision in the mirror. I was also still wondering what had happened to the cocaine hit.

  ‘I know it’s difficult when you’re a non-believer,’ the clairvoyant said hurriedly, no doubt worried by the doubtful look I was giving her, ‘but I’d like you to trust me.’

  Trust her? Why the hell should I trust a stranger who believed she could talk to the dead? ‘D’you mind if I smoke?’ was all I could find to say.

  She shook her head, so I reached into my jacket for a pack and lit up. The clairvoyant frowned but made no comment as smoke drifted over her.

  After two slow draws, I said: ‘Can you give me one good reason why I should trust you?’

  ‘Because I know more about you than you think,’ she responded immediately.

  It was my turn to be amused, albeit represented by a very crooked, maybe even sardonic, smile. ‘You know nothing about me. We’ve never met before and as far as I’m aware I’m not in Who’s Who.’

  ‘You weren’t born with one eye. You lost it when you were a young boy, didn’t you?’

  I looked at her sharply. ‘How could you know about that?’ Unconsciously, and a little melodramatically, my hand had gone to the sealed, red-rimmed socket where my left eye used to be. Embarrassed, I let my fingertips fall away.

  ‘A few minutes ago, when I touched your head, I sensed something horrible had happened to you many years ago. An accident of some kind – no, worse than an accident. It was done deliberately, wasn’t it? The shock of it is still present in your aura.’ She touched my shoulder as she asked the question: ‘You understand what your aura is, don’t you?’

  She waited until I’d given a nod of my head.

  Truth was, I didn’t know much about so-called auras except what I’d read in various magazines and newspaper articles. Apparently a person’s body radiates a kind of energy field that can be ‘picked up’ by certain people – psychics, clairvoyants, and the like. They generally describe it as a halo of light, usually multi-coloured, that shimmers around people, or even animals, and that your state of health or mind can be diagnosed by its glow. I’d also heard that nowadays there’s a technique by which it can be photographed.

  ‘Well, yours is very odd,’ she informed me.

  Yes, wouldn’t you know it, I thought. Odd body, odd aura. Seemed natural that the two would go together.

  ‘It’s very weak, Mr Dis – ’

  ‘Just Dis,’ I insisted.

  ‘ – I sensed it even before I came in. It’s somehow depleted.’

  ‘Could be I’m just unwell. A beating tends to leave me below par.’ Not to mention a shock or two. I held up a finger when she started to speak. ‘And anyway, I’m not sure how this aura thing works, but if it’s some kind of reflection of someone’s inner self, then one belonging to a one-eyed semi-crippled hunchback is bound to be somewhat off-colour, you know?’

  ‘You said it yourself: “Inner self”. There’s nothing to say that your inner self should ref
lect your outer self.’

  ‘Inner self, outer self – who the hell cares which it is? I’m not happy inside, can you believe that?’ I was growing annoyed again; why was this woman wasting my time like this? ‘Being . . .’ I indicated my own body ‘. . . this way doesn’t make me happy. In fact, it pisses me off.’

  ‘Please don’t be angry.’

  ‘Angry? Why shouldn’t I be? My mother, whoever she was, gave birth to a monster. Me. I’m that monster. I was so grotesque she abandoned me when I was only a few hours old. Left me among the dustbins at the back of a nun’s convent, not caring if I froze to death, or some urban fox had me for breakfast. And maybe that would have been the best thing for me – a few minutes of pain, or a quick death from hypothermia, that would have been a kinder fate. Instead, the convent’s caretaker found me and took me inside. His name was Nick – Nicholas – so that became my name too. And the surname – know why the nuns called me that?’

  I carried on before she could speak.

  ‘I learned about the name years later when I went back to the convent, when I was trying to trace my origins, trying to find out if they had any idea of who left me there in the cold. And one of them told me about my name, first about the caretaker Nick, then why they’d chosen Dismas as a surname. She told me quite eagerly, as though the knowledge somehow would help me in my future life. She said Dismas was one of the two criminals crucified alongside Christ, the Good Thief, the one who repented before he died and was promised paradise because of it. I was so ugly, you see, those nuns thought I was being punished for some terrible thing I would do later in life. You get that? Not for some past sin in another life, because nuns don’t believe in reincarnation, but for some crime yet to be committed. So they prayed for my soul every day I was with them and long after I’d left. Not for me, the person, the poor thing they’d found among their garbage, but for my invisible soul. They hoped I’d repent before I even sinned and Dismas was their way of wishing me luck!’

  I was breathing heavily by now, the bitterness of years beginning to spill out.

  ‘Living as a freak of nature was bad enough, but it had to get worse. At least when I was young I could see with both eyes, but it seemed that was too good for me, I wasn’t suffering enough.’

  ‘How did you lose your eye, Dis?’ Her voice was soft, encouraging, as though she were urging me to shed some of that bitterness through the words. ‘Someone hurt you, didn’t they? Tell me how it happened.’

  ‘I was put in a home for boys, not a bad place in some ways. You were fed, looked after: You couldn’t ask for much more, not for love and affection, at any rate. When I was eleven years old, one of the male carers tried to make me do something I didn’t want to do. A big, puffy man with slobbery lips and squinty eyes, someone who should never have been left in charge of pigs, let alone young boys. He was a pervert who wanted sex with a freak.’

  I shivered at the memory. I could still see him now, towering over me, his pants down, his lips and member drooling slime.

  ‘I resisted. I hated this man, and I feared him more than anything else in my young life. I hated his foul breath, his scratchy chin, the blackheads that covered his fat nose, and I was terrified when he nuzzled his face against my cheek and tried to reach inside my clothes. I fought against his advances and I think he was surprised by my strength, strength he couldn’t understand was from fear and disgust. And the scissors I picked up were meant for his throat, but instead, in the struggle, they stabbed my own eye. While he ran off yelling there’d been an accident, I was left screaming on the ground, the scissors still in my eye socket.’

  The cigarette was half burnt down and I flicked ash on to the floor, not caring where it landed, not worrying if it scorched the carpet. Louise Broomfield brushed it away with her fingers.

  ‘Others came, adults, other kids, but no one could pull those scissors out. They were stuck there, embedded, and I was kicking too much for anyone to get a firm hold. They took me to hospital like that, the scissors sticking out like some weird attachment to my head, the blood from the wound soaking me through.’

  The clairvoyant closed her own eyes for a moment, either out of pity for me, or to picture the scene, who knows which?

  ‘And he got away with it. That big, perverted slob was never charged, never arrested.’ The words came in a rush, gathering pace until I was almost spitting them out. ‘No, they didn’t believe him when he said it was an accident, because they knew what he was like, they’d always known he was a pervert, but they didn’t want it made public, and now the worst had happened, he’d nearly killed a disabled boy in his care, they didn’t want the facts to get out, didn’t want more investigations because they might uncover other, secret things that had gone on inside that place and they’d all lose their jobs. So they kept it quiet, bided their time before taking action against the perve. Nobody would believe the freak-boy anyway, because Christ-in-Hell, who in their right mind would molest such an ugly piece of shit? Besides the boy was so delirious with pain and shock he couldn’t speak anyway, and when he was on the mend, when what was left of his mutilated eye was removed, they would speak quietly to him, confuse him so that even he wouldn’t remember the truth of it all. Convince him it was all his own fault.’

  Spittle moistened my lips, my hands shook with old hatreds; the clairvoyant sat quietly.

  ‘And later I paid for defending myself. Even when the confusion went away and I remembered exactly how it had happened, nobody would listen. I was just a disturbed child, a kid with too many hang-ups who was traumatized by the loss of an eye. No one listened, and the truth is, no one cared. Freaks like me, too hideous even to kiss, to hold, to cuddle, we never had real understanding. Pity maybe, and sometimes sympathy, but nobody in that place really cared enough to hear me.’

  I was finally running down, exhausted before I started on this trip down nightmare alley, now racked out completely. My voice had lowered and the words were more measured. ‘Every day I wake and I live with this . . .’ I indicated my own body again, the crooked shell I’d been forced to inhabit, no choice required or given ‘. . . and I take the taunts and the stares, the jokes and the abuse, and I learn to accommodate it, even though inside it shames me, and tonight I get the hell kicked out of me by a group of girls, most of them pretty under the junk they wore and the shit they smeared their faces with – and you wonder why my fucking aura is not up to strength!’

  And get this – this is just how pitiful I’d become that night – I began to weep again, silently though, no blubbering this time, the tears oozing from my good eye to slip down my cheek and well along the jawline.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I heard Louise Broomfield say before feeling her hand rest over mine. ‘Please forgive me, Dis, I didn’t mean to be so insensitive.’

  The insensitive sensitive. If my misery hadn’t been so enormous I might have smiled at that. Instead I pulled my hand away and snuffled against the knuckle.

  ‘Okay,’ I murmured. Not, ‘It’s okay,’ because it wasn’t; just okay, leave it there. I revived the half-dead cigarette in my other hand with a long draw and its glow wavered in my trembling fingers. My tears dried and surprisingly, I felt a little better, as though the emotional release had somehow lightened my load, or at least shifted it so that it was less uncomfortable. The mood wouldn’t last, I knew that, but it was a reprieve, short though it might be. I blew my nose and stuffed the crumpled handkerchief back into my trouser pocket.

  ‘Can we talk some more?’ The clairvoyant was cautious. ‘Would that be all right?’

  ‘I’m tired,’ I told her, and it was no exaggeration. I could have added that I’d emptied out, there was nothing left in me that night. Events will do that to you.

  ‘A few more minutes.’ She was pleading, not insisting.

  ‘One more minute. Then please . . . leave.’ I could have cursed again, but I just didn’t have it in me.

  ‘I’ve shown you I have the gift . . .’

  ‘Sorry, lady,
but you haven’t proved a thing to me.’

  ‘I took your pain away.’

  ‘The headache . . . ?’

  ‘Your pain. You were badly hurt when I first arrived: are you in physical pain now?’

  I blinked. My mind probed my body, my fingers touched my bruised ribs; I looked at my hands, examined the marks and grazes where they’d been trodden on; I thought of my battered head and hump. I blinked again, turned to the clairvoyant, the healer.

  ‘It won’t last, the pain will come back,’ she said apologetically. ‘But right now you’re not feeling any discomfort, are you? Perhaps some stiffness, and I’m sure you’re quite numb in places; but there isn’t enough pain to cause distress, is there?’

  ‘How . . . ?’ It was never going to be a fully completed question, but the situation at least required an attempt.

  ‘I explained before. I took the pain from you and discarded it. It will probably return the moment your scepticism overwhelms the idea it could really happen. Only surprise is preventing that from occurring right now.’

  She’d got that right: disbelief was already setting in and the first twinges were already starting.

  ‘I’ve been very disturbed since Shelly Ripstone first came to see me,’ the clairvoyant said without wasting a second more of her minute. ‘I could tell she was deeply troubled the moment I opened my door to her and I sensed it wasn’t just because she’d recently lost her husband.’

  ‘How could you tell?’ I really was curious to know.

  ‘I’d been prepared beforehand.’

  I suppose I regarded her quizzically.

  ‘I had been hearing strange voices for a few days, jumbled voices, confused, distraught. I could make little sense of them until Shelly came to my home. They had first begun when she rang me to book an appointment, and once she was there with me, they became clearer, one of them more distinct than the others. This voice was that of a young man who told me he was Shelly Teasdale’s son. Shelly only confirmed what I suddenly knew.’