Pretty Little Dead Things

by Gary McMahon

  Darkness shivered in the corners and in the doorways, receding, moving away from me.

  Spinks was down on his knees, his large hands clasped in front of his face; he was hiding behind them, afraid of whatever it was he refused to look at. His head was bowed, his thick neck was red and damp, and his broad back was curved in an attitude of defeat. A high-pitched moaning sound came from him, but for some reason it seemed too feminine to associate with such a big man. It was more like the wailing of a little girl.

  I wanted to close my eyes, to erase the sight, but I couldn't. I had to see, had to face it. All of it: every single piece of the picture.

  Kareena Singh swayed before Spinks, suspended from a thick rope which hung around her throat and upper chest like a trailing brown snake. The rope was wrapped once around her neck and its end terminated somewhere up in the rafters, most of which were lost in shadow. Her smooth skin had paled a shade and her eyes bulged from their sockets, fixing me in their bloated gaze. Her tongue was hideous, like a fat grey graveworm, and it protruded between lips as thick and rubbery as uncooked steaks.

  There was some kind of metal stand set up before the body, maybe a tripod for a camera, but my attention refused to focus on the contraption. As usual, I had eyes only for the dead. Her body drew my attention, not letting me go. I stared and I stared and I felt her sorrow like the vibration left in the air by a shriek. I was being pulled back towards death – always, always drawn to it, with any choice in the matter I might once have had now snatched away.

  Kareena's feet dangled slack and lifeless. One shoe was missing and the other hung treacherously from her dainty toes. I could not take my eyes from those feet. Their gentle motion was hypnotic, and it drew me like nothing I have witnessed before or since. They danced in the air with a grace she surely would have lacked in life – the rhythm was that of the grave, the dance of the dead, but she kept the beat well.

  I would be standing there still, entranced by that elegant footwork, if Spinks had not abruptly fallen over onto his side and begun to scream.

  THREE

  "Jesus, Usher, I thought you were dead." Detective Inspector Donald Tebbit stalked the length of the tiny room like an expectant father. All that was missing was the worry frown and a pocket full of cigars. He paused, ran a hand through his sweaty hair, and then resumed his repetitive exertions. "I mean, you just slipped off the edge of the world for a while."

  I smiled, but my mouth wasn't too keen on the expression so I ditched it in favour of a grimace. "I was lying low, taking it easy. I've been advising a few people on certain situations, making some easy money. This is the first big thing I've been involved in for months."

  Tebbit stopped moving again. This time I thought it might stick. "I was worried about you." He looked coy. It didn't suit him. "We had a few things we wanted to talk to you about, ourselves. You could've returned my calls, you know… or even answered my emails." He stared at me as if expecting miracles – it was a look I'd grown accustomed to over the years I'd known him, and it always gave me a bad feeling. A very bad feeling.

  "I don't do that anymore. These days I'm working for the living, not the dead. Strictly for the living." I didn't even believe it myself, so wasn't surprised when Tebbit shook his head before sitting down opposite me at the scarred table. He spread out his broad fighter's hands on the faded wood and flexed his chunky fingers. The wedding ring glinted once, catching the light, and my stomach lurched.

  I stared at him. "I'm not under arrest, am I?"

  "Don't be silly, Usher. You are a witness – our only one, in fact – but that doesn't mean we can hold you. You're free to go whenever you like."

  "I have no plans for this evening," I countered, finally finding that smile.

  Tebbit shook his head again, but this time I knew he was softening, his habitual defences coming down. I'd known the man for over a decade, and helped him on several so-called unsolvable cases, so felt that he at least owed me a few favours. "So you found them like that? The girl already dead and her bloke praying to the gods of muscle mania."

  "Yes. She was hanging from a rope and he was in no fit state to tell me anything about how it happened. How is he now?"

  Tebbit sighed, ran a hand across his lined, damp forehead. "Inconsolable." He rubbed at his right temple, grimacing.

  "Do you think he did it? Do you think he murdered her?" I knew by his face that he'd already decided what he believed.

  Tebbit nodded once, and then shook his head, slowly. Finally he just shrugged his broad shoulders. "I don't know. Probably. Do you?"

  Perhaps I should have spoken up and voiced my doubts, but at that point I was operating without any additional information. The facts were that I'd followed them both to a deserted location, where I'd discovered the girl hanging from her neck and her boyfriend kneeling at her feet, not even trying to cut her down. On the surface of it, this one looked obvious – but I rarely dealt with the surface of things. All my breakthroughs came from somewhere underneath, guided by instincts located far below everything that other people – normal people – try their best to believe in.

  "We have him locked up and awaiting trial. This should happen fast – it seems like a simple case of boy-meets-girl-and-kills-her. Sorry if I sound cynical, but I am." He glanced away, trying to hide from me the doubt in his eyes, and the reflection of something I could not help but see and be afraid of.

  "She's not the first, is she?"

  "I always said you were good. You should be on TV – some sort of psychic hotline, or maybe a chat show." He was trying to rattle me, to cause me to react.

  "I am not a psychic." I regretted taking the bait, but it had been a long day – and an even longer night. Not matter how many times I saw stuff like this, or how often I was forced to swallow my fear, I could never quite get used to the emotional impact.

  Tebbit stared back down at the tabletop, his blunt fingers tracing the innumerable names which had been carved or etched into the wood over many years of intense interrogations: the signs and sigils of so many guilty men and women – and even of some who were innocent. His face was pale, the flesh hung loose on his bones. He looked worse than I'd ever seen him, and certainly worse than our last meeting.

  I wondered if the tumour was beginning to take hold, to stamp its mark on his internal organs, on his bones and blood and tissue. He was completely unaware of the cancer, of course; I'd never had the opportunity to tell him, and had promised not to anyway. If there was a chance that it could be treated, I would have sent him to a doctor, but when the ghost of his wife, Tabitha, had informed me several months ago of his impending illness she made it very clear that it was inoperable and that he was going to die.

  And that she would make sure he did not get lost along the way.

  She was another that I had tried and failed to ignore. The list of names was longer than a trail of tears, and it all led back to the same place: my wretched, broken heart.

  "Come on, man. Don't toy with me. Just tell me."

  When he finally looked up I saw the skull grinning through the skin of his face, and I knew that his time was drawing near. Tabitha would be pleased: she was waiting for him, and had been for quite some time. He would not need me to help him on his way. He had his wife to hold his hand in the long darkness which was even now reaching out to claim him.

  "She's the third in six months. All of them young. All of them beautiful. Each of them hung by the neck to die in agony."

  "Is this one of the things you wanted to speak to me about? Did you want my help on the case?" My hands clenched on the table, the knuckles whitening. I looked deep inside myself for rage but found only despair.

  "Yes." He held my gaze, God love him: at least he was man enough to give me that. The fact that Kareena Singh's death might have been avoided had he been able to contact me remained unspoken, but it hung in the air like a fog – or like the vague shape of a girl strung up by a length of rough hemp, the flesh of her lovely young throat knotted and twisted
, her sad eyes bulging, singling me out and blaming me for it all.

  Blaming me. All of them blaming me. All the fucking time.

  There wasn't much more to be said so I left Tebbit with his own ghosts – the main one being the ghost of himself – and took a walk over to where my car was parked. The rain had let up but the sky remained grey, as if taunting the city with the promise of even more downpours. My mood felt equally dour, and the prospect of driving again made it even worse.

  I sat in the car without starting the engine, waiting for the heavy sense of guilt to lift and disperse. Had Byron Spinks been directly responsible for the deaths of these three girls? I doubted it. Something told me that he had probably not killed Kareena, so it made sense that he'd not done for the others.

  At the scene of Kareena's murder the attending officers had found a stash of professional standard filmmaking equipment. Although the victim was still clothed, it was suspected that she and Spinks had gone there with the intention of shooting some kind of pornographic footage. The mystery third party – the one whose departure I'd felt more than witnessed – was thought to be the man behind the camera, an accomplice. No actual film (digital or otherwise) had been found at the scene, so he must have taken with him whatever they'd shot – if indeed they had even got that far before she was killed.

  The engine started first time, which was always a bonus, and I eased the big battered Volvo out of the parking space and into the road. It was early by now – 5am – so traffic was virtually non-existent, just a few sombre nightshift workers pacing the streets and whatever party people were still intact enough to take early morning taxis home. I felt like listening to some music but the radio was broken, so instead I tried to clear my mind and think of nothing.

  Nothing.

  Darkness.

  The dancing feet: one shoe off; one shoe half-on. Lithe legs in a tawdry ballet. Swinging. Swinging. Never coming to rest, not now not ever, just swinging all the time, never losing time, always catching the rhythm that waits for us all, singing us toward the other side.

  I blinked back tears and concentrated on the road.

  The city skulked behind me like an overgrown naughty child – one with learning difficulties and a penchant for hurting people. The road ahead narrowed, becoming my only route through the shuddering darkness. The horizon line shimmered, weak light bleeding up from the slowly opening wound of day. I wasn't sure why I was crying, but it felt like my tears were for more than the immediate dead. I wiped my face with the back of my hand, and for the first time in such a long time my tattoos twitched: the ink on my back started to crawl, the markings across my chest stretched like waking animals, and the designs on my upper arms jigged and jolted like live electricity cables.

  Whatever power crouched within me was waking from the self-induced sleep. I had managed to keep it down, to push it under, for a little over a year but now circumstances were calling it back, summoning it from that uneasy slumber. That power was like an animal, a hunter, and right now it had been released back into the world.

  This description makes it sound like it isn't part of me, but it is. Without it, I am nothing; without me it is simply unfocused energy swirling around the universe, looking for a home. The car crash that killed my family so long ago (long enough that I was at least able to think about it without breaking down) gave me something more than an immovable rock of grief in my chest. It also opened up doorways within me, forced open fissures, dredged up things from the primordial mind that could never be put back in place. I was granted a gift; a curse, an ability that I could use to help people while at the same time it used me. All I was missing was the knowledge of where it came from and what it was really for.

  What I was really for.

  The countryside usually soothed me, but tonight it just made me feel more alone. The empty fields and broken-down dry stone walls spoke to me of damage done and promises not kept. The slow-rising sun over Otley did nothing to obliterate the darkness; the shadows simply went into hiding, marshalling their power before returning to engulf the land.

  My house lay twenty miles from the city, near Bramhope. It used to be a home, when my family and I first bought it, but now it was merely somewhere to store my things and a place to sleep. I remembered first viewing the property with Rebecca and Ally, moving slowly from room to room, each of us smiling, feeling that the building had been waiting for us to find it. The house was everything we had ever wanted: big, located far away from the city, surrounded by open countryside, isolated enough to be private but not so much that we would feel like a family of hermits.

  Rebecca had loved the place, and seeing her face I'd fallen in love with it too. Ally – a mere baby at that time, not even ready to toddle – had crawled around on the floor and gurgled at the dust and the cobwebs. We'd mortgaged ourselves to the hilt to buy it, and struggled for a while to make the repayments, but the glow in Rebecca's eyes was enough to convince me that we'd made the right choice. It sustained me, that glow, through the tough times we experienced at the beginning of our marriage.

  Now the rooms still echoed with their laughter, the floors reverberated with their long-ago footsteps, and I was never at peace. But I could not leave the house. Selling up was not an option. Some day, I thought, the ghosts may come – my family might return. So I stayed there, counting away the years, hoping that this night, any night, might be the one when it happened and my loved ones would come calling to find me waiting there, right where they'd left me.

  Blaming me. Always blaming me. Always blaming myself.

  I parked on the drive and walked up the gravel path to the front door. I felt a vibration when I placed my palm against the old wood, as if machinery were operating somewhere deep inside. My tattoos swarmed, responding to the energy. I unlocked the door and stepped inside.

  The house was too big for me so I kept mostly to the downstairs rooms. I even had a bed set up in the main reception room, facing the rear patio doors where I could look out onto the overgrown garden to watch the sunrise. Upstairs was all dust and shadow; mourning and memory. I had not been inside the master bedroom for such a very long time.

  I took off my coat and hung it in the cupboard under the stairs. The boards creaked; something vague as a memory scuttled away out of sight. I trod softly towards the room I used as a study, switched on the desk lamp, and powered up my laptop. It was an old model but it had served me well. I have never believed in replacing something just for the sake of it, only when it is broken and can no longer function. Even then, when a replacement is entirely necessary, it pains me to throw things away.

  I poured myself a large whisky and felt the radiator under the window with the palm of my hand. The hand was shaking only slightly, but I knew the whisky would settle that. The radiator was warm but not hot; the system must have just come on. I'd probably forgotten to reset the timer after the clocks were last turned back. I was always doing that, forgetting everyday things. Time was like an enemy, mocking me from afar, tearing away parts of me that would never grow back and leaving me twitching at its mercy.

  I sat at my desk and logged on to my email account. Twenty messages: less than usual. Maybe people were taking the hint and realising that I'd given up the ghost on dealing with ghosts.

  Ha fucking ha.

  The joke was so weak that I couldn't even raise a smile.

  My usual routine was to delete all emails without even reading them, unless it was from someone I could guarantee wasn't looking to recruit my services or the message in the title header moved me in some way. I didn't advertise in newspapers or magazines, nor did I peddle my services from door to door like a window salesman. People heard about me through others I'd helped, and they always found a way to contact me. If they failed to find me, their desire for what I had to offer was obviously not great enough.

  DI Tebbit had sent me something. The cursor hovered over his name as I gripped the mouse, but I couldn't yet find the strength to press the button and open his message. The
shakes had passed, but other tremors – the deeper ones which had nested within my bones – would never go away.

  The email attachment – symbolised in the software program by a small paperclip – taunted me, and finally I could put it off no longer. I opened the email and leaned back in my chair, ready for anything. Ready for nothing. Not ready at all.

  The email read as follows:

  Usher,

  I thought you might like to see the attached. No pressure. Just take a look and get back to me if you feel like it.

  Tebbit

  His manner was always brusque yet it hid a heart the size of a continent. Tebbit was one of those men who let no one inside; their armour is always up, protecting the soft tissue beneath, preventing any potential harm. Like most people, he hid behind whatever armour he possessed, and also like most people he was utterly transparent in his motives.

  I clicked on the attachments and waited for a software programme to respond.