‘Where to?’ he said. ‘Home so early?’ But she said no, and gave him the first direction that would take them through an area of old warehouses and old pubs and nightclubs that changed names and nominal owners every few months. Gradually the pubs would get rougher and rougher, and more of the warehouses would be standing empty, and then finally true dereliction would take over.
What a place to die, she thought. The last sight your eyes ever see.
‘You have a good Christmas?’ the driver said over his shoulder, which brought her attention back to the present.
‘Working for most of it,’ she said. ‘Was okay, though.’
‘Yeah, me too. To be honest, I don’t mind it. Glad to be out for a bit. Couldn’t move in our house without getting a frisbee in your ear.’
The driver lapsed into silence again, and Mercedes sat back. The urban landscape outside was already beginning to deteriorate; the suppressed excitement of all those New Year parties boiling away behind steamy lit windows was starting to thin out and disappear, giving way to the blind shells of Victorian buildings marked for demolition and, with increasing frequency, open tracts of wasteland where demolition had already begun.
They called it an Enterprise Zone; there was a big hoarding somewhere around here to say so, a desperate sign of a too-late attempt at renewal. The businesses that were supposed to be forced to relocate in the city centre developments had somehow dropped out of sight along the way, scared off by the high rents and the overheads. And now this ... a nineteen-year-old girl, student at the Poly, fan of Bronski Beat and Spandau Ballet, smashed over the head with a length of railing and her already-dead body dragged into an empty sidestreet to be stripped, stabbed and slashed twenty-three times, and then partly redressed and covered over with her own coat. Or maybe this wasn’t the kind of enterprise that they’d had in mind.
Mercedes now leaned forward again; the first turn-off was coming up soon, and a number of the sodium lights along the road were either out or else giving the dull cherry glow of a failed element. ‘Here it is,’ she said; and she could sense the driver’s sudden confusion as they made the turn and the saloon’s headlight beams swept across a cobbled street that was strewn with rubbish.
‘Isn’t this where they found that kid?’ he said, slowing and watching for anything that might rip at the tires. The carcass of a thirty-year- old washing machine lay on its side in the road, rusty works spilled all around it.
‘This is the place,’ Mercedes confirmed. She’d only seen it in daylight before, and hadn’t thought that it could look any worse than it did then; but it was possible, she had to concede, it was definitely possible.
‘You’re not getting out here, are you?’
‘Not if I can help it. Can you just cruise down slowly with your lights full on?’
It was a slow, careful, bumpy ride over bricks and glass and rotten timber. The houses on either side were roofless shells, sometimes with entire walls pulled out so that upper storey’s hung in mid-air. Mercedes was watching the shadowplay of light over brickwork, watching for the evidence that she’d been led along here to see; she wasn’t entirely sure of where she ought to be until they passed a couple of plastic traffic cones and some flapping shreds of barrier tape that had marked the sealed-off zone of a careful police search. Suddenly she could see it, that grey morning reconstructing itself in her mind.
‘Just stop here,’ she said, ‘for two seconds. And whatever you do, don’t go away.’
‘Roger-dodger,’ the driver agreed as the saloon came to a halt, and Mercedes got out.
She shivered in the night chill after the warmth of the car. But there was more to it than that; evil still lay over this place like a radiant imprint slow to fade. She could sense it, read it, feel its touch. The tiny pencell beam stabbed out into the darkness. There was the spot where the dead girl had been lying, a second tarpaulin cover over her to keep off the rain but which couldn’t stop the blood from washing out underneath; and here was the place where Mercedes had been standing, shakily recounting her impressions into the UHER’s microphone until the officer from the Community Affairs Division had firmly guided her away as the screens had been brought in. It had all gone out, virtually uncut, the officer’s words included.
She ran the light over the walls, looking for writing. There was a spray-canned ‘GAZ’ in four-foot letters, but it was old and already starting to flake away. Nothing else. Picking her way carefully over the rough ground, she went over for a closer check.
Halfway there, she glanced back at the taxi for reassurance. The interior light was on, her beacon of safety and retreat, but it seemed much further away than the few steps that she’d taken. Shape up, she told herself, and moved on.
Her first impression had been right; there was nothing written on any of the walls, anywhere, that looked either recent or meaningful. She was about to turn and head back to the cab when the figure in the corner raised its head and stared at her.
It was sitting, shapeless and slumped like a tramp, and it moved with a stiff, crackling sound like a dead bird’s wing. The head came up and two dim, spit-colored eyes blinked as if coming awake; they lingered on her for a moment as if recognizing and remembering, and then the head slowly lowered and the eyes were gone. Mercedes turned the light towards it so fast that she almost dropped the torch.
What she saw was two black plastic trash bags, stuffed and loosely knotted and piled one on top of the other. The topmost bag had come undone, perhaps pulled open by some scavenging dog. As she watched, the breeze lifted a fold of the plastic like a sail.
She took a deep breath, and tried to will her hammering heart back to something like a normal rhythm. But her heart didn’t want to know, and Mercedes had to concede that it was probably right. She turned her back on the scene, and made straight for her transport.
By the time that they were rolling out of the far end of the derelict street and turning back towards the main road, most of her panic had turned to anger. She was cold, she’d been scared, she’d probably messed up her boots. The driver said, ‘Find what you were looking for?’
‘Different kind of evidence,’ Mercedes said.
‘Oh, yeah? What of?’
‘The fact that there are people out there with a pretty sick idea of what makes a joke. Fast as you can, will you? I’ve got another bulletin at midnight.’
‘Yeah, midnight,’ the driver said with a trace of despondence as the streetlights came back into view. ‘Another year gone, and nothing to show for it.’
There was more life around here; some of the houses had been taken over by squatters before the vandals moved in, and even a couple of shops had managed to stay open. Beyond them were the outer-ring tower blocks, distant grid-patterns of colored stars against the night sky. The buses stopped running to them at eleven; that was why the girl had been walking home, because somebody who’d promised her a lift back from a party had disappeared and she didn’t have the money for a taxi.
‘You were there, weren’t you?’ the driver said, breaking into her thoughts. It was like he’d just come up with something that he hadn’t expected to remember.
‘Not when they found her,’ Mercedes said.
‘But you did all those interviews straight after. ’
‘Yes. They went out on the network.’
‘So did you see the body, or what?’
Mercedes looked out of the side window at the passing traffic. ‘They’d covered it up by the time I got there,’ she said.
The cab driver was shaking his head. She saw his eyes as he glanced in his mirror, but he wasn’t looking at her. ‘What makes somebody do something like that?’ he said. ‘To a kid, as well?’
‘I can’t tell you.’
‘I mean, you see some of them . . . whenever there’s a trial, the papers dig out their wedding photographs or whatever. And they’re just ordinary blokes—you’d pass them in the street and you wouldn’t even know. So where does it come from? Is it supposed to be in eve
rybody, or what? Because I’m bloody sure it isn’t in me.’
‘Well,’ Mercedes said, ‘we used to be able to talk about evil. But somehow it went out of fashion. ’
‘Yeah, I know. Couldn’t come up with anything to replace it, though, could they?’
She checked her watch. Fifteen minutes to the hour. This was going to be one hell of a tight squeeze, and all over a hoax. The plaza was coming into sight now, the dark mass of the shopping mall topped by the linked tower of the hotel; they floodlit the hotel at night, giving its concrete a warm golden glow that it didn’t have in the day. A couple of minutes, and she’d be there.
In the meantime, she was still thinking about evil. She’d been thinking about it a lot in the past few days. She hadn’t exactly led a sheltered life, but that morning’s visit to the murder scene had been her first exposure to the after-presence of something awesome and real. That evening, when she should have been out celebrating her first major-league report, she’d sat at home in her bed-sit and begun to shake so much that she finally had to go and throw up in the basin. She felt tainted, she felt scared. She’d seen it in the faces of the detectives, that they were in the presence of an old, old enemy, and she now had the sense that she was an unwilling member of their circle.
The nearest thing that she’d ever known to it had been about seven years before, when she was still living at home. The house next door had been broken into and vandalized, everything thrown around and furniture smashed. Nothing had happened to their own place, but a shadow had passed over and changed all that it touched. What she sensed now was something even worse; the passage of a malign intelligence, something whose agents had names and lives and family backgrounds but which simply drew them on as a temporary human skin to carry out its work.
She’d sensed it, all right. And what now made it worse was that she felt that it had sensed her.
She had the taxi drop her by the phone booth at the front of the plaza. There was nobody in it, which was a piece of luck.
‘All seems a bit dead,’ the taxi driver said doubtfully. ‘Is this okay for you?’
‘I’ll ring from here and somebody will come down to let me in,’ Mercedes assured him. ‘I’ll be fine. You go on.’
He nodded, and reached under the dash for his radio mike to report in. Contract rides never tipped, Mercedes knew, and her excursion had probably cut into his sideline earnings for the night. ‘Happy New Year,’ he said, and as she slammed the rear door she said, ‘Same to you.’
She was already in the booth as he was driving away.
She dialed the studio’s unlisted number. It was engaged. So was the newsroom number, which would have flashed a telltale in the news studio that Derek would have been able to see. In desperation she tried the request line, and hung up when she heard the beginning of the usual recorded message.
What were they doing up there? Didn’t they know that she had to be on the air in—she checked her watch—just under ten minutes? To miss the broadcast would be the absolute pits of unprofessionalism, whatever the reason . . . and the reason she had wasn’t even a good one. She tried the studio number again, once, for luck, but her luck was out.
Mercedes stepped from the booth and started towards the service road at the side of the plaza, half walking and half running. The pavement was a mess of grit and sand from a solitary and short-lived snowfall a couple of weeks before. Her only option was to try the door that she’d left by, to hope that perhaps Derek was already down there and waiting for her.
The service road itself was hardly more than a concrete alley, lit by a single bulb at its end and crowded with the bulking shadows of wheeled trash hoppers. She ran flat out, skidding and almost falling when she hit some sodden cardboard which had lain in the road for so long that it had greyed-down to its color. She was half-expecting, half-hoping for Derek to step out of the shadows and wave her in; but he didn’t, and she arrived at the doorway panting and angry and completely at a loss for what to do next.
There was no official procedure for something like this. Nobody was supposed to enter or leave the plaza until the morning security shift clocked in at five a.m.; for any emergencies, the station crew were supposed to call a keyholder. Why couldn’t she simply have passed the hoax message along to the police, as she undoubtedly was going to be told that she should have? Off-the-record approval might have been given if her information had turned out to be worthwhile, but she didn’t even have that to look forward to.
Less than five minutes to go. Even if she went back to the phone and tried again, she still wouldn’t make it. An hour ago, she’d been a competent professional on top of her job; now she was feeling like a child again, sick and awed as she realized too late that simple events were running quickly out of her control.
Shivering and unhappy, she leaned on the door.
It gave silently inward.
She clattered up the dark escalator, slowed by the unfamiliar pitch of its motionless steps. God, the timing of this was going to be tight! She couldn’t even hope to grab a spare minute by cheating with the clock as she’d done at least once before on the graveyard shift, probably setting a few people rattling their quartz-crystal watches in puzzlement. This would be the one night of the year when everybody was counting down to midnight. Once inside the station she’d have no time to do anything more than to grab the eleven o’clock bulletin from the spike and repeat it.
There was the warm light of the foyer, a small pocket of welcome over in the far comer of a vast space of darkness. Her footsteps echoed flatly on the ridged plastic floor; the distance seemed to stretch even as she covered it, almost as if she were flying nowhere in a bad dream. She didn’t dare to check the time again, but it must be down to under a couple of minutes. Don was probably getting ready to read out the teletype himself. Don was a lousy newsreader, even worse than he was a DJ.
Mercedes almost slammed into the glass door. It didn’t give.
She tried again in disbelief, but it was definitely locked. She pressed the buzzer a couple of times to get Derek’s attention, and then she backed off, hopping nervously from one foot to another like a duck on a hotplate, ready to go and animated by her frustration. As she waited, she moved along to take a look in through the newsroom window. She’d have bet anything that Don had been encouraging his schoolgirls to call up all their friends on the company phones. Looking through glass that was smeary with the prints of the noses and hands of daytime spectators—they called the newsroom the only zoo around where the animals were all on the outside—Mercedes saw nobody. The newsroom was as she’d left it.
So, where was Derek? She moved back to the foyer and, as she tried the buzzer again, saw the sweep hand of the reception clock covering the last half-minute to the hour. She started to pump at the button, wondering if it was working at all; it should be sounding right down in the studio corridor, and surely Derek would be listening for it. She put her ear to the glass, holding the button down as hard as she could; but she didn’t hear any faint and far-off bell, just the muted sounds of the late-night music show on the reception speakers that couldn’t be turned off. The track faded, and the drumroll jingle that always heralded the start of the news began.
The news at midnight, she heard the heavily-processed recording say, with Mercedes Medina.
She winced. This was terrible. Not only was Don about to screw up the news, but he’d now made it obvious to everybody that the regular newsreader wasn’t even supposed to be missing. Thanks a million, she thought.
And then she heard her own voice.
The sound was blurred by the thick glass, but there was no mistaking it. She was too stunned to be relieved. She was past the headlines and into the first item before she realized that what she was hearing was a tape playback of the eleven o’clock broadcast.
It was unlikely that anyone would notice. News content tended not to vary much around this time of night anyway, and sometimes it could be a difficult job putting a new-sounding slant on items that
were going around for the fourth or fifth time. What she couldn’t understand was, where did the recording come from? Station output wasn’t regularly taped—at least, not in any form that could be retransmitted—and she hadn’t been aware of anything being done about this one.
Derek must have done it; he was the only technical operator on the station, and it was well within his province. Don probably wouldn’t even know how to patch the signal into one of the studio decks. No, Derek it had to be.
But at eleven, Derek hadn’t known that she’d be going out. Even Mercedes herself hadn’t known it at eleven.
So what was the game?
Suddenly, Mercedes didn’t like it. She didn’t like it at all. She moved back along to the newsroom window and took another look, and this time she was almost prepared to swear that the chair and the phone and the mess on the desk were exactly as she’d left them. Never mind that she couldn’t remember the exact details, she knew. Nobody had been in that office or used that phone, but still she’d been unable to ring in. There was only one possible reason for this that she could think of, an old journalists’ ploy for tying up a phone line so that you could get to someone before the opposition could reach them; you dialed through, waited for the other party to reply, and then made some excuse about a wrong number so that they’d hang up. What you didn’t do was hang up at your own end, effectively blocking the line for all other calls.
Over-sensitive? Perhaps. But the newsroom phone had rung a second time before she’d gone out, and nobody had been there. With that and the studio phone out of use, the station had been effectively isolated from all input.
Gift-Wrapped & Toe-Tagged: A Melee of Misc. Holiday Anthology Page 87