by Gary McMahon
She played the intro again.
"Manchester. Small, underfed, blonde hair, brown eyes. Easy."
She remembered what Eddie Knowles had told her about her father's vigilante activities. How he and a handful of friends had taken career criminals off the streets and dealt out their own brand of old-school justice. Then, Eddie had said, things went too far. Someone was killed – did he say a dealer, or a junkie? She couldn't recall, but the detail wasn't important. What mattered was the fact that things had… escalated.
Eddie said that the group had stopped after that. They had gone back to their card schools and sex parties. But what if Emerson had been unable to stop? What if he liked it too much to even consider calling time on his out-of-office activities?
She imagined him walking the streets of some quiet town late at night, after playing a gig with his band. The other members would have gone somewhere to drink – a pub, a club, or back to some grotty digs in the rough part of town. But Emerson went for a little walk. Then, Sarah thought, had he picked someone up? A prostitute, a junkie, a housebreaker? Had he walked with them back to his rented van – there were a lot of receipts from van rental companies in the bureau upstairs – and taken them somewhere?
Then what happened? What did he do after that?
How had he killed them?
And later, after he had met his angel, had he then turned his attention to children, having tired of preaching to the converted? Had he seen their criminal futures laid out before them, then taken them from the streets and opened up their skulls to let the evil he had seen there out into the open air?
She thought about the words at the beginning of the tape.
Then she played the tape again. This time she played it all; she fast-forwarded through the songs and listened to the spaces between, the interstitial moments between numbers. She found a pair of headphones in a crammed drawer and put them on, and the sound came through even better, clearer.
Her father's voice. No! Emerson. It was Emerson's voice.
"Manchester. Small, underfed, blonde hair, brown eyes. Easy."
A song by The Sweet.
"Back of the van. Back of the head."
The Sex Pistols.
"Empty shop. Straight-backed chair.
Bread.
"The hood. The blood.
Emerson, Lake and Palmer.
"The blood, the blood, the blood, the blood…"
Sarah's hands were shaking now; at last they were shaking. She turned off the player and ejected the tape, sliding it back into its plastic box. Then she put all of the cassettes – every single one – back on the shelf and sat back in the chair. She looked around, at the gloomy little cellar space, and wanted to cry – but who would she cry for? Unrepentant criminals who had been murdered by a jaded, possibly insane copper? The copper himself, twisted so far out of shape by the job, his inability to father a child, and the fact that all of his friends were either bent coppers or thieves and killers?
Who could she cry for?
The little girl who had been rescued, then subjected to a life of torment? The little girl with no daddy, who desperately wanted to please the substitute daddy she fucking hated, loathed, despised with a passion that made her feel as if she, too, were losing her mind?
Across the room, on the far wall, there was a framed photograph. It was black and white, held behind a dusty frame. Emerson – the figure she'd been seeing for days now, stalking her, keeping an eye on her progress, guiding her to this place, here and now: sitting on a kitchen chair with his hands resting flat against his thighs, wearing a long black robe and a delicate white hood.
She thought about all the things. All the things he had done. To her, and to her mother. All the dirty, rotten fucking things he'd done to them both, saying all the time that he loved them and wanted only to protect them from the filth of the world, the terrible things people did to one another outside these walls, these old stone walls cemented in blood.
All the bad things…
The dead bad things the broken world had to offer.
Then, as she watched, and that phrase resonated deep inside her head, the figure in the picture stood and walked away, vanishing off the edge of the photograph.
The frame was empty. It had never contained a photograph.
Sarah turned around, her eyes aching, and watched as that same figure – the one she'd seen reflected in the dirty glass in a cheap frame – walked out of the room and through the main cellar. She heard the scraping of the door across the stone floor. Then his footsteps sounded on the stairs. She held her breath while he walked across the ceiling directly above her: through the kitchen, then on into the hall, and finally stopping in the living room. He chuckled once, cynically. Just like he always did when he was alive.
Suddenly, drawing her attention from the ceiling, a drawer slid open in the desk. It banged against her right leg, and when she looked down she saw that the compartment had been hidden until now, disguised by the design of the desk.
Hidden; like so much else it was hidden from view.
A secret drawer.
A secret place.
A secret.
Inside the draw was a wooden box about the size and shape of a toaster. The paint had all flaked from the box, and it was old and weathered. The box looked very old.
Sarah picked up the box and placed it on the desktop, staring at it. She ran her hands across the smooth, ruined surface of the box, and then tried the lid. It was locked, sealed up tight.
Without even pausing she took the little silver key from her other hand. She had been gripping it all along, and had almost forgotten that it was there.
The key fitted the lock perfectly.
She turned the key and the lock mechanism slowly went into action. It stuck a little, but she jiggled the key and finally the teeth bit. The lid popped open half an inch. Leaving the key in the lock, Sarah opened the lid fully. Inside, on a lining of white silk – like that hood, that horrible white hood – were several objects.
The first object was the upper part of a human skull, with two smooth-edged holes in the frontal lobe.
The second object was actually a bunch of other objects tied up with string. Human finger bones: ten of them, the small bones of eight fingers and two thumbs.
The final object Sarah at first thought was an old-fashioned wooden-handled drill. The type of thing people had used, long before the advent of power tools, to put holes in various building materials. On further perusal, once she took the object out of the box, she realised that the drill had been modified. It looked different, unlike any kind of conventional construction tool she had ever seen. It was not something a workman would use to build a cabinet or make a hole for a screw or a plug in a hard wall.
The handle was wide; it had a large wedge-shaped top end. And the drill bit was thick with just a corkscrewed tip rather than the full length.
It looked… well, to Sarah it looked lethal. More like a weapon than a tool.
The drill, she realised, had been tweaked for a purpose other than the one for which it had been originally intended.
This drill, she thought, with her heart thundering in her chest and hot, burning bile rising at the back of her throat, had been used to put the holes in the portion of human skull she'd found nested alongside it in the old wooden box.
The drill… This drill…
It was a device used for amateur trepanning.
TWENTY-THREE
Trevor was cracking up; he was losing his mind. That was, if he hadn't lost it already, over the last few months. Since his life had fallen to pieces.
He was standing outside, on the corner of his street, just trying to get some perspective on what had happened over the last few days, during which he'd seen some unusual sights: a malevolent presence had murdered his pick-up, consumed the blood of a rent boy, and then stepped blithely through a mirror and into Trevor's room.
Things like this were not normal; they didn't usually happen, not to peopl
e like him. Men like him did not usually hide skinned bones and drained bodies under their beds and converse with fallen angels.
People like him… and what, exactly, did he mean by that? Ex-stage show psychics with a penchant for little boys? An ageing queen so repressed, so held hostage by his own desires that he could barely even function like a proper human being? A rapist who was responsible for the tragic death of his own brother? Is that what he meant? Is that what he was? The ultimate definition of people like him?
Did he even deserve to be called human at all, or was he a lot more like that fucking creature, the one who called himself the Pilgrim, than he would care to admit? Was he really just some kind of monster?
He held his mobile phone loosely in one hand, trying to decide whether or not to use it. The phone was a modern, lightweight model but it felt heavy, like his guilt. He looked at his other hand, the one formed into a tight fist. Did he dare open it and make use of what was held inside?
He'd taken the folded piece of paper from Derek's discarded clothes; it had been in his rear trouser pocket. After the Pilgrim had stolen Derek's skin, the clothing remained in a heap on the floor. Trevor had bundled it up and taken it out of the bedroom with the intention of burning it somewhere, but Derek's words had sounded inside his head, taunting him:
I have a slip of paper in my pocket with Sammy's address and a code word written on it.
A code word, a safety word: something to inform whoever answered the phone when he rang that Trevor was OK, that he was legit, and Derek had vouched for him. It was a good idea, really, and Trevor applauded Sammy the scumbag's attitude towards keeping his business under wraps. This was heavy stuff; if anyone found out it could mean a lot of people went to the wall. Trevor had moved in these circles before, so he knew the kind of high-ranking officials and media high-flyers with whom he shared his particular fetish.
No, that was wrong. It was more than a fetish. That word belittled what he felt. It reduced it to the level of a mere sexual peccadillo. Trevor's desires were intense; they had formed him, making him the man that he was. He had gone through the fire because of them, and walked out the other side with the soles of his feet smoking…
He opened his hand.
The slip of paper was crumpled into a ball, but it began to loosen even as he watched. He helped it along, opening it up with his other hand. A small paper flower, a bloom of damnation…
He smoothed out the paper onto his palm, where it curled up at the corners like one of those silly fortune-telling cellophane fish he and Michael had loved to consult as boys, and read the telephone number. It had a local area code: it couldn't be too far away. He could make it there and back in an hour or two, and then return home to face the Pilgrim with his mind emptied of the turmoil that now bubbled away beneath his skull.
Trevor tapped the number into his mobile and waited. The ringing sound echoed in his ear, sounding like it was miles away.
"What." The voice was quiet, and it held a subtle note of threat.
"Hello… my name's Trevor. I was given this number by Derek."
"I don't know any Derek." The words were anything but final: they were an invitation to prove himself.
"He told me to call. He said that you were expecting me."
"I said I don't know any Derek." Again, the man did not hang up the phone. He waited for Trevor to continue.
"He gave me a code word."
Silence.
Trevor looked again at the piece of paper. The word was scrawled untidily beneath the number and a partial address: Newsome's Electrics. It was an odd word, but no doubt it meant something to somebody. Unless it was just a phrase chosen at random, perhaps from a book or newspaper that might have been lying around at the time.
"Hummingbird."
The silence stretched. Then, just as Trevor was about to give up, the man spoke: "OK. So you're Trevor. When do you want to come?"
"Well," said Trevor. His throat was dry, But it was not with fear; oh, no. It was dry with passion. "How about now?"
Again there was a lengthy silence. Trevor listened to the emptiness on the other end of the line, trying to make out noises in the background. He heard what sounded like a door slamming, then music from a radio. He couldn't identify the tune, but it sounded familiar.
"OK. You got lucky. I'm free right now, so you have a window. An hour, that's all, and it'll cost you double because of the short notice."
Trevor had no idea what the going rate might be, so could not even guess what it would be times two. "That's fine. Money isn't a problem."
"As a customer recommended by Derek, you can set up a tab. We like our people to come back, so we're good to you the first time." There was humour behind the voice; the man must be smiling.
"Where do I go? I can come right over."
"The Bestwick estate. You know it?"
Trevor nodded, then realised that the man couldn't see him. "Yes. Yes, I know it."
"Newsome's Electrics. It's a shop on the Precinct – the only one that isn't boarded up. The recession, you know. Only our kind of business is recession-proof." Again, Trevor detected a lightness of tone, and he half expected the man to start laughing.
"I'll be there in about twenty minutes."
The man hung up the phone.
Trevor called a taxi firm located a few streets away and told the controller to send a car to pick him up on the corner. In less than five minutes it arrived, the sullen driver staring through the windscreen and paying little attention as Trevor climbed into the back of the vehicle.
"Bestwick," he said. "Drop me off at the Precinct."
The driver grunted and pulled away from the kerb, his meaty hand reaching out to press a button on the digital meter. Voices faded in and out of audibility on the in-car radio; the controller back at the office giving out instructions and calling out for the occasional fare. Traffic was quiet, so they reached their destination in less than fifteen minutes.
"Thanks," said Trevor, passing his money through the toughened Plexiglas partition and pressing it into the driver's sweaty palm. The driver grunted again. "You were great company." He got out and watched the cab drive slowly away.
It was dark at the Precinct. Most of the street lights had been vandalised and a lot of the nearby houses and flats were empty, with their windows boarded over and metal security shutters bolted across the doors. The only obviously occupied building on the short row of derelict shop fronts that formed the Precinct was the one with Newsome's Electrics painted in crude lettering below the eaves. The shop was tiny, stuck between an empty Chinese takeaway and what had once been a hardware shop (remnants of faded posters in the shattered windows advertised power tools and timber treatments).
"Fuck," said Trevor, thinking that he might have been foolish to come here. This was a dangerous area. Anything could happen. Nobody knew where he was, and there were no friends left to care about him anyway.
Glancing around, taking in the dark houses and the brokendown shops, he shuffled towards Newsome's Electrics. High-security wire mesh had been installed over the window glass. The door was barred by a sturdy iron gate with an intercom fixed to the wall at the side of the entrance.
Trevor approached the door. Light spilled down from a room above the shop, but the lower floor was in darkness. He reached out and pressed the buzzer, not allowing himself time to think, to back out and run. He needed what was being sold here; he needed it like never before. He hoped that one of them might look just a little bit like his brother, like Michael. That would make all the risk worthwhile.
The intercom buzzed with static, and then a voice cut through the storm: "Aye."
Trevor leaned in close, suddenly bashful. "Hummingbird," he said, slowly, enunciating each syllable so that he would not have to say it again.
A buzzer droned and then there was a loud clicking noise. "Pull on the gate." Then the intercom went dead.
Trevor reached out and gripped the metal uprights of the security gate. He pulled light
ly, then harder when there was no initial response to his pressure. The gate snickered open. He pulled it further and stepped onto the lower of two concrete steps that led up to the front door. The buzzer intonated a second time and the main door popped open. Trevor, glancing over one shoulder, pushed open the door, and stepped inside. He pulled the gate shut behind him, and once he had moved into the dark hall beyond the entrance, he did the same with the front door.
Ahead of him was a set of stairs. Along the short hallway was a doorway, which he presumed led to the shop. He was unsure of what he should do, where to go, so he just stood there for a moment, caught between two worlds and feeling slightly absurd about his predicament.