Dead Bad Things

by Gary McMahon

  When my time came I would go with grace, but until then I had to rage against the dying of the light and use what I had to help others come to terms with their own transition from one reality to another.

  The dying of the light: Dylan Thomas. He was another man who knew more than he had ever let on, other than between the lines of his work.

  Sarah and I sipped our drinks, staring at each other, conscious of the space between us. It was not the literal space inside the room, but the gulf that sat between us in another sense: the terrible distance created by what we didn't know about each other and the situation in which we found ourselves.

  "You mentioned your father – or, more precisely, the fact that he wasn't your father." It felt like a dance. We had to perform the right moves to prevent us from falling on our backsides and spoiling the routine.

  "Yes. That's right. I don't know if you knew Emerson Doherty, but he was well-respected on the police force."

  I nodded. "Yes, I met him a few times. I can't say that I knew him exactly, or that I liked him, but we came across each other occasionally during the course of my work with Tebbit and others. I got the sense that he didn't like me at all, and he certainly wasn't happy with the reasons I was helping out the police."

  Sarah put down her glass on the floor next to her chair. "Yes, for a supposedly religious man he was very mean and closedminded regarding the idea of belief. It was a case of his way or no way at all. He was even like that here at home – more than he was elsewhere, if I'm honest. He… he wasn't a nice man." Her lips were pale. Her face looked drained of blood.

  "What did he do, Sarah?"

  She blinked and it looked like she was fighting back tears. "I keep seeing him. Is he here? Can you sense him, I mean? Is he in the house?"

  "I think so." I closed my eyes and waited. Something moved downstairs, under the floor. In the cellar? I didn't hear anything, not really: it was more like I sensed movement down there, in the darkness. "He's under here." I pointed at the floor.

  "That was his office space," said Sarah. She looked down at the floor. "He was down there yesterday, when I found his secret stuff. I was looking through his things, rooting around for information, and he was watching me."

  I leaned forward in the chair. "Did you see him, Sarah?"

  She nodded again. "Almost… yes, I think it was more like a glimpse of him. He was there, I know he was there. He wanted me to find something."

  The words of the disabled Rwandan psychic came back to me: You cannot help. She is lost to you… I remembered her bloodied body on the floor, and the small girl who sat on her chest, eating, eating, partaking of her damaged flesh.

  "What else, Sarah? What else have you found out?"

  When she looked at me her eyes were moist, shining. Her cheeks were lily-white. "He used to kill children. He said that an angel taught him how to see the evil inside them, to see the terrible adults they would grow up to be. So he took them and he drilled holes in their heads. He used an old trepanning device to… to let the dead bad things out."

  The room seemed to be spinning, but slowly; it was a fairground ride I was unable to get off. "Are you sure?"

  "Yes. There's no doubt, it was him. He even left messages on his mix tapes, between the songs. It was as if he needed to speak to somebody but could only trust himself, so he put it down on the recordings. The thing is, it's happening again. I found the body of a kid in a dentist's chair, and then two more were found in Roundhay Park. All killed the same way. All with holes drilled in their heads. To let them out – the dead bad things Emerson claimed to have seen inside them. That was one of his phrases: dead bad things. It was his favourite way of describing human evil, the general badness he thought was buried deep in the soul of humanity."

  The room was still moving, and I had to adjust myself to the slow-spin of its motion. It felt like we were moving towards something, a home truth or a fundamental piece of whatever puzzle we were locked into. "Do you think his ghost is killing the children? In all the time I've been mingling with the dead, I've not known many of them do that. Not to kill the living. I've known plenty of spirits who've manipulated people into doing it for them, but only a handful who've done it themselves, with their own dead hands. Not ghosts. They don't really like to operate like that. Other things, yes, but rarely the spirits of the dead."

  Sarah stood and paced the room. She kept sticking her hands in her pockets and taking them back out again, unable to settle upon a comfortable position. "I don't know, Thomas. None of this makes any sense. I never used to believe in ghosts, but now I don't know what I believe in. If I'm honest, I'm struggling to believe in anything right now."

  "Just relax. We'll find out what's going on here, I promise. I think your situation is linked with mine. We were supposed to meet and have this conversation. Even he's gone quiet." I nodded towards the floor.

  "OK." Sarah stopped moving. She stood with her back against a book case. "You're right. This feels like it was waiting to happen – like we've both been moving towards this point. I think we can help each other somehow." She ran a hand through her hair. Smiled sadly but tenderly. "Listen, do you mind if I have a quick shower? After that I'll show you your room and we can get some food sorted. I'm tired. I feel dirty. I just need to get clean."

  I raised a hand and waved her away. "No, please, you go and do whatever you need to do. Don't worry about me. I'll just enjoy this fine whisky and wait for you." I smiled, lifted my glass in a small salute.

  "Thanks, Thomas. I won't keep you long. Just make yourself at home and feel free to have a wander, use the phone. Anything you like." Her smile was faint, and she shuffled out of the door looking drawn and tired. The room finally stopped spinning. It was time to get off the ride, and probably hop right onto another one. That's the thing with fairgrounds: there's always another ride to grab your attention.

  I had no doubt now that Sarah was the one both Immaculee Karuhmbi and the clockwork voice had warned me about. The real question was: why had they been so determined to keep me away from her, and from the city I called home?

  The strange sounds and images in the Pilgrim Products warehouse haunted my mind: hanging, severed doll parts; the man with the bellows, working so hard to produce so very little; the hollowed out papier mâché elephant and its wizened inhabitant; the incessant wail of a crying baby; the sight of myself in that haphazard mirror; the contradictory message Go Home appearing on the glass.

  I wish I knew what it all meant, but the truth was I'd probably never find out.

  Before I knew it Ellen had come back into the room… but no, it wasn't Ellen, was it? Ellen was gone. She'd been gone for a long time. It was Sarah. Sarah had come back into the room. She had a white towel wrapped around her head to dry her hair and was wearing a tight white muscle vest and a pair of cut off denim shorts. She looked young and sweet and pretty and athletic, and I couldn't help but smile.

  "What?" she said, clearly much more relaxed. "What is it?"

  "Sorry, was I staring?"

  She was still smiling. "Just a bit, Thomas. You old pervert."

  I laughed. It felt good; it felt real. "It's just that you remind me of someone. Just there, the way you walked into the room, you were the double of her."

  "Tell me who?"

  I hadn't realised until now, but she did look like her. "An old friend of mine. Ellen Lang. She's dead now, but she was a wonderful woman. For a minute there, you looked just like her. I had a little flashback to better times."

  "I'll take that as a compliment." She took the towel from her head, rubbing at her brown hair, and turned to close the door. That's when I saw it: the tattoo.

  The room started spinning again. I was back on that same ride, the one I wanted so desperately to get off.

  I stared at Sarah's back, between her shoulder blades. It had been done in Old English lettering, and was small enough to fit between her jutting bones.

  I stared and I stared and I tried not to see. I wanted the words to vani
sh.

  But they didn't.

  The words stayed right where they were, taunting me with significance.

  Even when I closed my eyes I could see them. The words were burned onto the backs of my eyelids.

  Memento mori.

  A Latin phrase: a terrible reminder of my own mortality. And now of Sarah's, too.

  I remembered the hanged girls, the burning tree, the Pilgrim in his weird domain between realities, stalking the alleyways of night and hatching his unfathomable plans. He had followed me my entire life and he was following me still, even here, even now. No matter how fast I ran or how far I went, he always tracked me down. His influence was like a stain, a mark, a blemish. It would not wash off.

  The Pilgrim was back – in fact, he had never really gone away.

  "Where did you get that tattoo?" I heard myself speak but I could not feel my lips forming the words.

  "Sorry?" Sarah turned around to face me. She had Ellen's eyes. Ellen's arms. Ellen's smile. Why had I not noticed that before? The smile: it was Ellen's. And it was beautiful.

  "Your tattoo."

  "Oh, I've had that since I was about sixteen. Got it done in town." She was rubbing her hair dry with the towel, rubbing it out, rubbing it away. But some things you can never wash out.

  "Do you know what it means?"

  She smiled, nodded. "Yes, it's a reminder of all our deaths. Some day, and sooner than you might think, we are all going to die. I was going through a bit of a miserablist phase; it seemed like a good idea at the time." Still she was smiling. She had no clue; she didn't know what it meant, not any of it.

  I put down my drink and stood, pulling my shirt out of the waist of my trousers. I stared at Sarah, at her lovely, familiar blue eyes, and I wished that I could tell her what was going on. I didn't know myself, not really: all I had to work with was a kind of gut instinct, a deep, vague feeling of unease that wouldn't shift.

  I pulled the hem of my shirt out of my waistband and I lifted it over my stomach, exposing the faint scar. The marks left by my last encounter with the Pilgrim. You could barely see it, unless you knew it was there. A light embossment made by hot ash: a not-so-gentle reminder. I tilted my body into the light, hoping that she could make it out and at the same time praying that she couldn't. "Do you see?"

  Sarah walked slowly across the room, stopping when she was right in front of me. The smile had slipped. There was nothing beneath. She had not taken her eyes off my face as she approached me, but now she looked down, unblinking, at my belly. I felt her hand as it traced the outline of the scar, the shapes of the words, and then I watched her lips as she spoke the phrase out loud:

  "Memento mori."

  TWENTY-NINE

  Sarah woke up in the dark. The room felt smaller somehow than it ever had done before, as if the walls and the furniture had crept towards her as she slept, stalking her like prey. The old single bed was uncomfortable; its old-fashioned sprung mattress was way past its sell-by date and it hurt her back to use. She had given the guest bedroom to Usher and moved into her old room. This bed was the same one she'd slept in as a child, waiting for Emerson to enter her room and watch her, or to take out the scalpel and cut her legs.

  She hated the bed. It would have been better if her parents had got rid of it after she left home. They should have cleared her room and redecorated, changing it all to erase her personality from its interior. But instead they had left everything the same, like a container for the mementos of her childhood. The same girly wallpaper, dotted with ponies. The same posters on the walls of pop stars she could barely even remember and film actors whose names and roles she'd forgotten. Even the books and magazines she'd read back then remained inside the room, stacked along the shelves Emerson had bolted to the walls.

  It was as if her childhood was still here, waiting for her, and now that she'd returned to the family home she was regressing, going back to a point in her life when she had been most vulnerable.

  She blinked into the darkness, wondering what had woken her. Was Usher walking around, sleepless and worrying? When he'd caught sight of the tattoo on her back something had changed between them. His face had drained of colour and his body had slumped. Then, when he had revealed the matching scars on his belly a strange thing had happened: the bond that had been forming between them became more solid, as if the words decorating both of their bodies were yet another link in a chain that stretched so far back in time that neither of them could see where it began.

  In that moment, when Sarah had touched his scars, she felt closer to him than she had to any other human being in her life. Their skin fused; their lives interlocked, like two lost pieces of a jigsaw that had been found again and slotted into place. But still the picture remained incomplete: there were so many other pieces missing from the whole.

  Sarah didn't know what any of this meant, but it felt… profound. Something had changed at a fundamental level: a transformation had begun deep inside her, perhaps within the hidden chambers of her heart.

  She listened to the house, trying to pick out individual sounds. Timber creaked, the pipes in the walls rattled. The cantankerous boiler breathed like an asthmatic old man. She had grown accustomed to these noises during her stay back in the house – they reminded her of old times, of days and nights she wanted to forget. The heartbeat of the house was the same as it always had been. Nothing had changed, not here: everything had stayed the same.

  The curtains were drawn tightly across her window so it took her a while to start seeing properly in the dark. Gradually her vision grew accustomed to the lack of light, and she was able to pick out the familiar objects in the room: the wardrobe in the corner (her empty uniform hanging like a shed skin from the door), the chest of drawers behind the door, the rocking chair near the window where she had used to toss her blazer after school.

  There was somebody sitting in the rocking chair.

  It was him: Emerson.

  As usual, he was wearing his long black robe and the delicate white hood – the hood that resembled an old woman's doily. His features were swathed in white; cruel contours concealed beneath the square of pure silk. He was rocking slowly in the chair, his hands gripping the varnished wooden arms and his toes pressed against the floor. The motion was disturbing, almost too slow. He was looking in her direction, staring at her beneath the hood.

  "I'm not scared of you," she said. "Not any more." She sat up on the mattress and slid her hand under the pillow, looking for the gun she'd taken from the drawer downstairs.

  The gun wasn't there.

  The figure moved one of his hands and placed it in his lap, picking up the gun that rested there, between his knees. "You should be," he said. "You should be terrified." He waved the gun in the air, making small circles with the barrel. "It isn't even loaded."

  Sarah watched the gun. It was useless anyway, against a ghost. So why had he gone to the trouble of taking it from under the pillow while she slept? Why not just leave it there, if only to toy with her even more than he was right now?

  The figure stood, pushing itself away from the chair. "Did you sleep well?"

  That voice… it didn't sound like Emerson, not how she remembered him. It wasn't deep enough; the timbre was all wrong. "Who are you?"

  The figure drifted closer to the bed, but stopped short of touching the covers. It stood there, dropping the gun onto the floor. The weapon fell with a gentle thud. "I'm your ever-loving Daddy."

  Sarah shook her head. "No… you're not him. Not Emerson."

  Behind the figure, in the rocking chair it had just vacated, something materialised. It was another figure, wearing the same ritualistic attire. This one did not move; it just sat there, its head cocked to one side like an inquisitive dog.

  "Who are you?" Her mouth was dry and her tongue felt swollen, filling her throat like vomit.

  "Who do you think?"

  Realisation hit her like a blow to the solar plexus. For a moment, she couldn't speak, couldn't think. She felt stagg
ered by his words and the implication behind them. The truth was cruel; it was yet another punishment heaped on top of all the rest.

  She took a deep breath, composing herself. "Benson. What are you doing?"

  The figure nodded – Benson nodded. She could imagine him smiling beneath the hood. "I told you I'd been coming to see him."

  The figure on the chair shifted slightly, silently. It held up both hands, palms outwards, and waggled its fingers. It was waving at her.

  "He's been guiding me, telling me what to do. Showing me the path he chose for me. I don't have the same gift as him, but he's helped me along, pointing out the way I should follow."

  Sarah backed up along the bed until her back pressed against the headboard. "What the fuck are you talking about, Benson? Tell me what you mean."