by Gary McMahon
None of it meant anything. Not yet.
FOURTEEN
I was sitting on the threadbare sofa drinking whisky straight from the bottle. After leaving the Rwandan psychic's place, I'd gone over the road to a grubby little off-licence and stocked up on booze. I knew I should be trying my best to remain sober, to work things through in my mind, but the call of the bottle was much too strong, so I filled two blue plastic carrier bags with bottles of the cheapest and strongest stuff I could find.
Only when I was drunk could I stop myself from caring; somewhere in the depths of oblivion was a place where I could rest, and be unafraid.
Fear. That was the real problem – or a large part of it.
I'd spent years trying to convince myself that none of this was scary, that it was just an aspect of the greater map of existence: ghosts, spirits, phantoms, they were all just slivers of us all, roaming lost and confused and slipping between realities like water through cracks in a great damaged jug.
But that wasn't true. It was frightening. In fact, it was terrifying. All of it. The more I experienced, the more afraid I became, and the harder I tried to pretend that I could take it all in my stride, like a man hurrying along a dark alley and keeping his eyes locked straight ahead.
It was dark outside, and the lights in the house kept flickering. The electrics in grey zones are prone to trickery; the phantoms interfere with the current, making it oscillate, breaking the connection.
I stared at the main ceiling light. It was surrounded by an original plaster ceiling rose. I wondered if the adjoining houses had the same problem with the electrics, but there was nobody to ask. The council had bought up the neighbouring buildings a couple of decades ago, when some chitty or purchase order had come down the pipe from central government. Most of the houses on this side of the street were empty, near derelict. Boarded windows, security shutters across the doors. Danger signs pasted to the walls, warning of a demolition process that would never happen, not in a million years.
I lived in a world of lies and half-truths, of pretence and fakery. Nothing was solid; everything shifted all the time, quaking, breaking, and reforming before my eyes. Even reality could not be trusted.
I glared at the old Bakelite telephone, daring it to ring. If the clockwork voice tried to contact me tonight, I would tell it where to go, and what to do. It could fuck off and fade away into the ether, leaving me in peace.
The whisky was doing its job. I was beginning to lose interest, to forget that I really did care about this stuff.
I'd tried to eat a sandwich earlier in the evening, some prepacked crap I'd brought back from the shop. It was supposed to be tuna fish on wholemeal bread but had tasted like cardboard filled with a layer of pulped bone. Gritty. Unappetising. Even the whisky offered more sustenance, at least to my ailing soul.
The soul: there was something else that couldn't be trusted.
I slid my legs off the sofa and managed to sit upright. My head was fuzzy; it was a pleasant feeling, that sensation just before you start to get properly drunk. I felt like I could take on the world and win, if only I cared enough to bother.
I realised that I was giggling. Something in the corner – a shadow within shadows – moved away from the wall. It had too many limbs, and dropped to the floor and sort of scuttled across the room. I turned away, not wanting to see. As long as they left me alone, I would pretend that they weren't really there. The ghosts, and the things that were ghosts of creatures I did not even want to imagine.
Not all ghosts are human. Some of them – the ones who have become so lost that they will never find their way – are the spiritual remains of other things… things which are other.
I drank more whisky. Giggled again. Then I entertained the notion that I was going insane – or perhaps I already had done, months ago when I first encountered the being that went by the name of the Pilgrim and lost the second love of my life in the process.
But I didn't want to think about him – that fucking Pilgrim. I had sent him away, banished him from my life.
So instead I thought about loss.
Everyone I had loved, everything I held dear… I lost it all in the end. There was nothing left to cling to, to hold close to my breast. No warmth; no humanity. No love.
It took me several seconds to realise that someone was knocking on the front door. The door led straight out onto the street, just beyond a tiny patch of concrete and a low brick wall. It could be anyone, if anyone were foolish enough to wander along this street, and pause outside this house. This haunted house.
"Go away!" My voice was only slightly slurred. I took another swig of Famous Grouse.
The knocking sound persisted. Whoever it was meant business. They were not going to leave without a fight.
Awkwardly, I got to my feet and staggered across the room. The space between sofa and door suddenly seemed to stretch for miles, as if the closer I got the greater the distance became. I closed my eyes, paused, and when I opened them again the room was the same size it had always been.
A haunted room in a haunted house on a haunted street.
Through the crinkled glass panes in the front door, I could make out a small, slender figure. I placed my hand on the door, tickled the handle. Then, feeling slightly giddy, I grasped the handle and pulled open the door, revealing the young girl who was standing on the doorstep.
"Hello," I said, not immediately recognising her. "Can I help you?"
She was wearing a long green parka that stretched down to just below her knees, and the fur-lined hood was pulled up against the cold to cover most of her face. She was turned slightly sideways, but pivoted to face me when I spoke, and that's when I realised who it was.
The girl from the psychic's place. Immaculee Karuhmbi's helper. What was her name?
"Traci," she said, as if she could read my thoughts. "It's Traci. Traci, with an eye not a why. Remember me?" Her blind eyes burned into me, and I could barely understand what was happening. "Tee. Are. Ay. See. Eye."
"Yes. Please, come in." I stepped back, unprepared for such a visit. My hand pushed the door closed as she crossed the threshold, and it felt like I'd let a trickster spirit into my life.
"I'm sorry to bother you." She shrugged off the hood and then removed the coat. Then, calmly, gracefully – as if she could see so much further and clearer than I ever had – she passed me the coat.
I reached out and took it, my fingers brushing against her hand. Her cold, cold hand. My mouth went dry. "Take a seat. I'll just hang this up." I went to the staircase and draped her coat over the banister, wondering how long she'd stay. Wanting her to leave. Needing her to linger.
"Immaculee sent me. She was worried about what happened earlier today. She feels… odd. She feels odd about passing on a message from a voice she's never heard before." She said this as if we were discussing the weather. It was nothing to her: a mere trifle. She even picked at her fingernails, distracted. Her grey eyes were hard and soft all at once. She was beautiful.
"Believe me, I feel as weird as she does. I haven't followed through on the message. Not yet. I don't really know what I should do with the information." Why was I being so open with this girl? I sat down in the armchair, my hands spread flat against the dusty material.
"She also sent you some food. She says you aren't eating." Traci offered up a small package I had not even noticed. It looked like some kind of leavened bread, along with cheese and meat, all wrapped up in cellophane. "She worries about people. About everyone. She worries about us all."
I stared at the girl, taking in the thin short-sleeved shirt with its top two buttons undone, the skin-tight black jeans, and the smooth, dark skin of her arms. She was like a creature from a fairytale: a dark, sinuous temptress painted in the colours of innocence. I was beguiled by her presence in the room.
"Thanks," I said, making no move to take the package. So she put it down on the cluttered coffee table, next to the empty glass. "Can I get you a drink?"
She s
tared at me. Even though she was blind, I could feel the heat of her gaze. "Some of that whisky would be nice." How did she know? How could she see what I had in my hand?
"Yes. Of course. I'll pour you some." I reached out and grabbed the glass. My hand was shaking. I spilled whisky as I poured her three fingers of the stuff, and instead of handing her the glass I put it back on the table before her. It was a test, a silly little trick just to see how she responded.
Traci smiled. She reached out and picked up the glass with her dainty little fingers, the nails painted black and with tiny silver stars. "Thank you," she said, before taking a sip.
"How old are you?" I'm not sure why I asked; perhaps I already knew what was about to happen, and I was scared and alone and filled with a desire that felt dirty.
"I'm nineteen. Twenty in a few months time. Why do you ask?" She paused; sipped. "Are you planning on seducing me?"
The house seemed to lurch, but gently, cautiously, in case it ruined the mood. "No. Of course not."
"What a pity," she whispered, smiling around the rim of the glass. She was toying with me and I loved it. This game, this pretence, it took my mind off everything else. Perhaps, I thought, that was why she'd been sent here: to distract me, to stop me from acting too hastily. A beautiful diversion.
Immaculee Karuhmbi knew more than she was letting on. She was much deeper into this situation – whatever the hell it was – than she might care to admit. Was this girl a relative, a daughter or a niece? Had the psychic lied to me about losing her family in the massacre?
Or was Traci simply a temptation, like something from the Christian bible? Was this to be my time in the wilderness, when I would be approached by the devils of my desire?
Shit, the drink was affecting me more than I had thought. I wasn't a messiah, or some kind of roaming prophet. I was a drunken loser in a grotty house who used to think that he could make a difference.
"Why did you come here? Why did she send you?"
Traci smiled. The tip of her tongue poked out between her small white teeth. "I came here because I wanted to. It was my idea to check on you, and nothing to do with my mistress. When I told her my plan, she gave me the food and asked me to pass on a message. I listen closely and I do the things she wants but I don't ask for reasons. Traci with an eye not a why."
I leaned forward in the chair, half smiling. The timber creaked, the joints complaining. "Tell me this message, Traci with an eye not a why."
Traci put down her glass and turned to face me square on. Her cheekbones were razor cuts in the dark sculpture of her face. Her eyes were like a glimpse of another reality – one I had not yet encountered. "She says that you must follow your heart, whatever your head might tell you. The voice cannot be trusted – pick and choose the information you act upon, and never go against your instinct." She sat back, crossing her legs. Denim whispered conspiratorially in the gloom.
"Is that it?" I was biting my upper lip, breaking the skin and drawing a spot of blood.
"That's it. She tends to speak like that, my mistress. She sometimes talks like she's in a soap opera, or a bad costume drama. She likes to be melodramatic." She laughed, and it was not an entirely pleasant sound.
"Why do you call her mistress?"
She stopped laughing. "Because that's what she was, until recently, when she became very ill. I shared her house and her bed. These days I just clean up after her, and wait for her to die." She uncrossed her legs. This time it made no sound.
"Tell me why you're here." I leaned even further forward, resting my elbows on my knees. The lights flickered again, as if trying to set the scene.
"I came here to fuck you. That's all. Just to fuck. You interest me, and I like to get closer to interesting people… to men and women who can teach me something."
Her smile was like a knife.
"I can teach you nothing. I don't know anything." There were tears in my eyes; my joints had all locked stiff, becoming rigid.
"Let me be the judge of that." She stood without moving, or so it seemed. I was so tense, so out of it, that she seemed to swell out of the chair and hover before me. Her hands fluttered to the front of her shirt and unbuttoned it all the way down. She was not wearing a bra. Her skin was perfect. That's the only word I can use, the only one that fits.
Perfect.
So perfect… like a ghost of herself, a spark of energy caught between the folds of reality. Because all ghosts are immaculate; they all represent a sort of perfection, even the bad ones – the ones who do bad things.
Her shirt dropped to the floor and she reached down, reached out, reached inside me. I took her hand and she pulled me upright, as if I weighed no more than an empty paper bag. She led me to the bottom of the stairs, and I followed close behind. She took me up to my room, and I closed the door. When I turned round to face her, she was standing naked on the bare boards, with her legs set slightly apart, her arms raised up, and her hands held open like wonderful black flowers. Her beautiful blind eyes shone, but they were dark too: it was a dark light that bled from them, filling the room and enveloping me, drawing me towards her, dragging me in.
I went to her, I went to her and I let her strip off my clothes and rub me down with her perfect hands. I was drunk, I was empty, and I was falling into her as she opened up like a vein, like a ventricle, like a heart.
This is what she did: she reached inside me and cupped my heart, squeezed it like a piece of rotten fruit, making it bleed. She squeezed so hard that I was pouring my heart out.
I slid urgently between her legs and she took me in, offered me shelter from the storm, and kept me safe from my demons for a little while. We fucked beneath the cold eyes of phantoms. They stood there, all in a row along the wall, as if they were lost deep in prayer. The figure in the black cloak and white cowl sat on the floor by the door, its legs crossed and its palms held flat against its thighs. It was an avatar, a threat, a shape of things to come. I looked away, not prepared to receive its message until I was ready.
I watched them all watching me, and I did not feel afraid.
I was not scared.
She had given me succour, and I was home: right at home with the dead.
Much later, when we were both spent and sweating in the darkness, we lay on the mattress locked together like conjoined twins. One of Traci's legs was folded between both of mine, as if it were boneless. She stirred at my side, her lips making a smacking sound and our sticky skin snapping apart like sheets of paper torn from a waterlogged book.
"How do you do it?" her voice was soft, part of the darkness.
I blinked, wondering how I could even begin to answer. "How do I do what?" Playing dumb was the only ploy I could think of, but I knew it wouldn't deflect her questions.
"You know what I mean. How do you make contact with them – the dead? The ghosts. How does it work?"
I pushed myself up into a half-sitting position, my head resting on the pillows. The mattress felt like a small boat cast adrift on a dark ocean. There was no land in sight. "I have no idea. Honestly. All I know is that I was involved in a car accident that turned out not to be an accident at all. After that, I started to see them."
The dark swam before my eyes.
"What do you mean, it wasn't an accident?" She shifted on the mattress, her slight body sliding against mine. I felt her ribs, the meat of her thighs. She was dark upon dark.
"Someone made it happen. I found out about six months ago, after believing that it was an accident for a very long time. This person – this thing – he made it happen as part of some plan I can't even contemplate. I think it was some kind of game. He said he wanted what was inside me, the thing that makes me able to make contact with the dead. But he's the one who made me that way. Isn't that ironic?"
"This world…" she paused, as if gathering her thoughts. "This place where we live, pretending that it's all there is. Things happen that can only be part of some bigger plan, or maybe it's just chaos. A massive chaos that hovers at the edge
s, pressing against all our lives." She couldn't complete the thought. It was too big, too fearsome for her to continue.
"You're closer to the truth than you might imagine." It was all that I could add. There was nothing more to say.
Traci curled into me, her soft, lean body adapting to my own hard edges. "You know why I really came, don't you?"
I looked down at her, the top of her head, her vulnerable scalp. "No. I'm confused by all of this. Tell me."
She spoke without looking at me; her face was buried in my shoulder, muffling her words but not enough that I was unable to understand what she said. "I came because I'm frightened. Immaculee… she isn't herself lately. She's dying, and I think that's allowing other voices inside her head – ones that can't be trusted. For a long time now she's believed everything she's been told, and it's all come to pass. All the predictions and the hints of events. It all happened just like they said. But this is different. It isn't right. This new voice – she doesn't even trust it herself."