by Bill Hussey
‘You like them?’ she asked.
She reached down to take his hand but he snatched it away.
‘They’re very … very pretty,’ he murmured.
‘Next left,’ she said.
The car rattled over the cobbles of a dead-end alley, crowded on either side by tall buildings. A dog appeared in the headlights, picking over the contents of a split bin bag. To their left was the back of a theatre, its windows taped over, tired posters flapping from its walls. Opposite was the rear entrance of a trendy bar. Smoke and steam rolled from pavement level ventilation shafts. Neon lights flashed through frosted windows in time with a techno bass beat.
The engine died and the headlights dipped. He turned and looked at her. She suddenly felt exposed, as if her spirit, troubled at its edges, early in the stages of drowning, had been opened to him.
‘Okay,’ she said, ‘what do I call you?’
‘Jack … my name’s Jack. Please … I can’t touch you … I can’t …’
‘Hey, Jack. Jack, come on, don’t get upset. It’s cool, no problem. Look, I’ll just …’
She pulled off her top, careful not to lose a sequin from the Hot Bitch motif. The bar’s ‘Rolling Rock’ sign bathed her breasts in green light. Her nipples hardened in the dry air from the heater. She found herself relaxing quickly with him. He flipped open the glove compartment and removed a jar of white powder.
‘Hey, no drugs,’ she said, now less comfortable.
‘No, it’s just powder. Talcum powder. Here.’
He unscrewed the lid and she gave it a tentative sniff.
‘Okay, I’m broad-minded,’ she said. ‘What’s the score?’
He poured a little of the powder into his palm and dusted his hands with it.
‘I can’t touch you,’ he said, the emotion tight in his throat. ‘Not with my bare hands. I need – please, I need to touch…’
Terri put out a hand and rubbed his shoulders and back, not as she would usually massage her clients, but the way she sometimes reassured herself at night, when the edges of her life seemed too hard.
‘Please,’ he whispered, ‘I need to touch …’
This was a new one on her, but as fetishes went, it seemed pretty harmless. His hands flinched as she enveloped them, but he did not snatch them back. The powder-rain falling between their fingers changed from white to red to yellow to green in the switching neon light. She placed his palms on her breasts. A white path marked the course of his hands along the slope of her neck. With the touch of a blind man making a mental picture, his fingertips explored the contours of her face. For five minutes, she felt his touch, smelled the lavender of the powder, heard the emotion through his intakes of breath. When she opened her eyes, she saw him rubbing tears from his cheeks, whispering his thanks.
He offered her a tissue to wipe away the powder traces. The lazy-eyed mongrel had taken its nose from the garbage and watched them like a mildly interested peeping tom. Now the show was over, it threw them a final frown and slunk away into the night. It was still early, and there was a city of garbage to pick through, but Terri felt exhausted.
‘Take care, won’t you, Jack? Hope I’ll see you again. Don’t … Well, just take care,’ she said, getting out of the car. Her farewells were usually a clipped ‘Bye.’
He might have smiled, she wasn’t sure. The lower part of his face was in shadow.
She closed the passenger door and watched him reverse out of the alley and drive away.
Eight
Sister Agnes was wondering whether to call Dr Jamison again, when she saw the man on the monitor. As he approached the door, the trip lights fused, cloaking his face in darkness. The security cameras were working but, without light, only grainy images showed up onscreen. His short, bulky silhouette loomed against the glass panels of the door.
Agnes glanced down the empty corridor. Everyone was in bed. She was due to be relieved at 2:30 a.m. It was now only ten to midnight. Although she hated answering the door by herself this late in the evening, it hardly seemed fair to wake Sister Beatrice already. What with her rheumatism, the poor dear had little enough uninterrupted rest.
Beeeezzzz. The man pressed his finger to the buzzer. Beeezzzz. The image flickered. Agnes slapped the monitor. Beeeezzzz. The screen steadied and her eyes narrowed. Only one silhouette moved against the glass of the door. But on the monitor, another figure was displayed, waiting in the darkened vestibule. A ragged, gangly-looking fellow. He was shaking his head slowly, as if disagreeing with his fat companion.
Looks like Jack Sprat from the nursery rhyme, Agnes thought.
The screen went blank. She hit the box again. When the picture returned, the small man with the bag was alone once more. Shadows playing tricks. She went to the speakerphone.
‘Hello?’
‘Good evening, I’m Dr Ethram. I believe you called today asking for someone to take a look at a … Brody, Father Brody?’
‘Oh. Jus’ a moment. I’ll let you in.’
‘Thank you kindly.’
Sister Agnes pushed the door release button. The man who entered had a pinched, lean face that did not sit well with his plump body. He shook out his umbrella and came smiling to the desk. She didn’t like his grin or his nasty yellow fingers. He sneezed and wiped his brow.
‘Filthy day,’ he said. ‘Now, what’s the matter with our patient?’
‘I can’t rightly say. He was his usual self, right up until this afternoon. Then we had a call from a Father Garret. I went up to see Father Brody and … well, the things he said …’
‘Is he still in his room?’
‘Yes,’ she blushed. ‘I locked him in. I’m not sure if I should have, but …’
‘You did the right thing.’
‘He showed me these books. I’m afraid, I’m really afraid, he’s gone mad.’
‘What room is his?’
‘Twelve. Is Dr Jamison still on call? You see it wasn’t an actual emergency, and Sister Beatrice wasn’t on duty, so I didn’t have anybody to discuss it with …’
‘Give me the key.’
Rude little man. She turned to the back wall and the board where the keys were hung. A sense of betrayal, which she had harboured since locking Father Brody in his room, prodded her conscience. This is for Asher Brody’s own good, she told herself.
As she raised her hand to the key, the lights behind her dimmed. She was about to make a throwaway comment about the state of the Home’s wiring, when she saw them. Two shadows on the board. Two people standing behind her. The small doctor. And … Jack Sprat, who ate no fat. Thin as a stickman from a child’s drawing.
Absurd. But there it was, standing shoulder to shoulder with the doctor. The shadow of its head inclined to one side, as if appraising her. Then the head rolled, passing across to the other shoulder, slipping in and out of the crevices of the chipboard and over the key hooks. Lolling left to right … left to right … left to right.
Sweat beaded Sister Agnes’ forehead. Drops touched the corners of her eyes and burned. A series of questions span out in her head like a catechism: What is it? How did it come here? What does it want? Is it really standing behind me? And always the same answer: Run, Agnes, run as fast as you can.
‘Sister. The key.’
The doctor’s voice? No. Different. Older. So very, very old …
She did not want to see, but an irresistible curiosity made her turn.
O, thank God. Stupid woman. No-one else there. No-one else with the little doctor. No-one at all … But wait …
There. Movement. Merciful Jesus, what is it …?
Standing just behind the doctor, where the light barely spread, where the dark held sway: something that should not be. So still, except for its head, which swayed back and forth like the tiring motions of a Jack-in-a-box. In the penumbra of light in which the thing stood, Agnes could just make out the shape of its emaciated body. Ribs poked through the torso. The blades of its cheeks tented its face. A powerful resemblance to Carava
ggio’s wasted figure of the crucified St Andrew occurred to her. The association struck Agnes as blasphemous. Good St Andrew had preached from his cross. This thing could not preach. Could not speak. Could not think, even. Not with its head so beaten in.
Set into the stranger’s skull was a deep depression. It reached so far into the face that there could be no left eye and precious little nose. Straw-like hair moved in the rent, as if fingers kneaded the crippled skull from beneath.
The figure moved away from its friend and towards Sister Agnes. It slipped around the desk, its fingers raking the papers arranged there. As if caught by a breeze, the pages fluttered to her feet. She wanted to move, to obey the command and run, but her legs felt as if they were cemented into place. It was behind the desk now, its attention focused upon her. The thing moved in close until she felt its fetid, dead breath on her skin. It spoke:
‘Give me the key, Sister.’
She did not think. She held out the key. Something inside her head slipped and jarred, and she felt herself lost to the twin hollows before her. Hollows in which eyes had once been held …
‘Thank you,’ said the sightless man. ‘And now for your reward. You believe in God, do you? Then you shall see God.’
In the pit of those hollows, Agnes saw her saviour. A wretched figure lost in a vast, incalculable darkness. She called out to him, beseeching the Lord to comfort her. Shuddering under the creature’s gaze, the man-god turned his back and tended his wounds. It was then that Agnes felt the emptiness of the world close in around her. Like the lights outside, the bright parts of her mind tripped out, one by one, until all that remained was a single sliver of trapped consciousness. Focused through this, she saw the demon’s face crack into a bitter smile.
‘His light falls back before my shadow … Stay with me, Sister, and I’ll show you things you wouldn’t believe.’
SATURDAY 26th OCTOBER 2002
For now we see through a glass, darkly;
but then face to face: now I know in part;
but then shall I know even as also I am known.
I Corinthians 13:12
Nine
Jack closed the report he had requested on Simon Malahyde’s abandoned car. The beautifully restored 1967 Triumph GT6 had been discovered parked on waste ground near a quarry. It had been unlocked but the ignition key was missing. No personal effects and no clue as to the whereabouts of its owner had been found. Below the quarry, a tributary of the Cam ran in a fast, sweeping arc. Divers would have to be sent down if Simon proved elusive.
Jack checked his wristwatch. 10:30 a.m. He thought they had agreed to meet at the station at ten. He was finding it difficult to recall yesterday’s events with much accuracy. Memory lapses, like migraines and nosebleeds, were a side effect of the dreaming. One particular episode from yesterday seemed to have been almost entirely wiped from his mind. He remembered the interview with Anne Malahyde and her dismissive attitude to Simon’s disappearance. He remembered talking to Father Garret, and the sensation he experienced as he touched the radiator: as if someone had called to him through the pipes. But there had been something between those interviews … The forest? No, think. The work shed. Something he had seen in the shadows. Something that had impelled him to warn Dawn not to go there alone. A figure? A face? It was no good. The memory would not come.
His eyes prickled through lack of sleep. As he rubbed them, traces of powder fell from his nails. Twelve hours later, and he could still feel the coolness of her skin against his fingertips.
And the Nobel Prize for Dickhead Decisions goes to… Jack Trent.
He must have been insane to pick up a girl when the visions had only just started again. Yet after spending a day so close to Dawn, and remembering how she felt against his bare skin, he thought he would go mad if he didn’t touch.
Don’t make excuses, you fucking coward. It’s unforgivable.
After he’d left the girl, he circled the city for a few hours, his mind disturbed by the possible consequences of such lapses. He’d parked the car and wandered through the municipal cemetery. The sky had been clear but the cuticle moon had given little light. He had gone straight to the Victorian burial ground. The ends of tombs, thrown up by subsidence, and collapsed obelisks had cast bold, angular shadows across a carpet of beer cans and condom wrappers. His mother’s grave was at the new end of the cemetery. He had seen the modest cross only once: polished granite with a bed of stones the colour of sanitation tablets in public urinals. That smart headstone frightened him. He much preferred the company of those older, tumbledown monuments. It was a perfect example of the fact that, outside his head, he favoured a kind of romantic disorder to cold, unfeeling neatness. Inside the confines of his mind, however, he prized structure above all things.
After what had happened to his mother, he had trained his mind, sweeping away the chaos. It had been his last promise to her. To fight the darkness within him. He had achieved this by constructing a room in a part of his brain farthest away from his consciousness. Inside this room was a toy box. The contents had not been played with since the night of his mother’s death. The room was kept locked and never visited. The box contained impossible things. His mother, influenced by the mythology of her faith, had called such things Demons. Even now, he didn’t really know what they were, except that they seemed to be afraid of order. So, to drown their song, he disciplined his thoughts with mathematical problems.
He had recently immersed himself in a series of algebraic algorithms, using the Newton-Raphson method to approximate the value of certain functions. The exercise was pointless in that, working only analytically, the functions could never be solved. His purpose, however, was never to discover new proofs, he was too plodding a mathematician for that, but to order his thoughts as best he could. He was now working on an equally insoluble puzzle: a number series that aimed to ascertain a progressively more accurate value for pi. This particular exercise seemed to control the things in the box especially well. Jack wondered whether this was because, like them, pi itself was something sprawling that could be harnessed with logic. Perhaps that idea frightened them.
He allowed himself some diversions: comic books, old B-movies. Those were his flights of fancy and he rationed them. Films, art, books, they all fired his imagination, and he had learned from the very beginning that imagination was the thing that woke the Demons; the catalyst that altered their dark forms and gave them substance.
Twenty-five years of this routine had worked. His visions – the dreaming – the Demons’ first gift to him, had weakened and disappeared. Yet part of the routine had left him sealed off from human contact. Their second gift was an ability to see the life, memories and dreams of another by the simple act of touching. Because this gift operated at some imaginative level, it gave them power. When they took such power – when he touched – they could bleed out of him. They could kill.
Bitter experience had now reconfirmed that he would never be able to control them. A month ago, hoping against hope to free himself from loneliness, he had reached out to Dawn Howard. And with that simple connection, they had reawakened, drawing renewed strength from his attempts at intimacy. He had pulled away, severed the connection, but it was too late. Now they were showing him the future again. Something terrible was about to happen in a clearing. In the woods. In Redgrave Forest?
The phone rang.
‘Jack? Hi, sorry I’m late, I’ve had to drop Jamie … Look, I’ll meet you at this lad’s house. Where is it?’
He read out the address. He had touched her. Now the darkness crept back in. His mother’s killers were stirring in the hinterland of his mind.
The row with Jamie, and the guilt that followed, had exhausted her. She slept through her alarm and it was just after ten when she woke. She found Jamie, fully dressed and eating cereal in front of the TV. It was novel to have him up and ready to leave without any arguments, but she felt the sting in his dead-eyed glances and muted responses to her questions. Last night, he had
made her feel angry and stupid, but that wasn’t his fault. He just wanted …
A father? She didn’t think so. It was obvious that he enjoyed Jack’s company. They shared the same idiotic interests and the same stupid sense of humour, but they were friends. They spoke and listened to each other as equals. She’d seen no desire on Jamie’s part to take on the subordinate role of son. But then what did he want? The answer came to her as she showered. He was anxious for her to have somebody. To be happy. And she had repaid his efforts as matchmaker by more or less telling him the hateful truth. That Jack didn’t want him.
Jamie stood by the door, his hands tight around the straps of his rucksack. She pulled the Parka hood back from his face. He wouldn’t look at her. In the car, he pumped up the bass and volume on the stereo. Two rappers, from some quarter of LA Dawn had never heard of, extolled the merits of their respective ‘bee-atches’. For once she didn’t tell him to turn ‘that rubbish’ off.
‘Burger King tonight?’ she asked, as she pulled up at her father’s house.
‘Sure,’ he said, getting out of the car.
Watching her little boy wander up the path, she pictured herself delivering a swift knee to Jack Trent’s groin.
She pulled onto the ring road. Douglas Winters, 17 Berwick Ave. It was little more than a ten-minute drive. Jack’s disintegrating Escort was parked, with his customary disregard for the traffic laws, at a thirty-degree angle to the pavement and across a resident only space. He stood slumped against the driver’s door, tie loose around his neck, a night’s stubble girdling his chin. As she parked, he walked over and opened her door.
‘Hi. You all right?’
‘Yes. Couldn’t get here any earlier. Shall we get on with this?’