Pretty Little Dead Things

by Gary McMahon

"I don't know what you want me to say."

  She turns back to me, her head whipping around to glare right at me. "It's not what I want you to say… it's what I need you to say. And the very fact that you can't fucking say it speaks volumes." She looks down, at the table. Her hands are tearing apart a paper napkin; pieces of white paper lie on the table top like tiny drifts of snow.

  "I…" But there is nothing there. I cannot find the right words – any words.

  "It's never going to happen, is it?" Her voice is close to breaking; I can hear the regret lodged like crumbs of food between her teeth. "The timing is always wrong. It always was wrong, even that night we finally got our act together and fucked."

  Her use of such a coarse term shocks me; I have never seen what we did as fucking. As far as I am concerned, we made love, and that's why I always feel such guilt. A meaningless sex act is easy to forget, but true lovemaking scars you deeper than bodily wounds, and for so much longer.

  "I can't tell you what you need to hear, Ellen. There's too much going on. My family are dead, and I feel somehow as if I'm to blame. I see ghosts everywhere, but never the ones I want to see – never the ghosts of my wife and child." I am crying now, but silently. I clench my hands into fists.

  "You are crippled by guilt, Thomas. Crippled. Guilt about the time we slept together, guilt about their deaths, guilt that you think you should be able to see their ghosts but can't. Have you ever thought that all this might actually be in your head? That maybe the only phantoms stalking you are those created by your unresolved guilt?"

  I lower my head. This is the first time Ellen has ever verbalised any kind of doubt regarding what is happening to me. I have always known that she does not fully believe it, that she is simply keeping an open mind, but to hear those words feels like a physical blow.

  My own doubts were blown away when she took me to see Ryan South.

  The waitress passes our table. The hem of her apron brushes against my forearm and when I look up she is smiling at someone across the room – the man behind the counter, who is calling her over. The air shivers around her, a riot of subtle movement. I can hear nothing but a wind rushing in to fill up the gaps. The waitress moves slowly, each muscle prominent on her legs, her shoulders. She is a machine, a beautiful meat machine designed only for forward motion, never looking back at what she has left behind, heading always towards extinction.

  I am suddenly aware that I am being allowed a glimpse behind the scenes here, but I understand nothing of what I am seeing. The scene looks fragile, like it might come apart at any minute, and I fear for what might happen if, like the glass dropped by the old man, it breaks and shatters into pieces.

  Then all sound returns and I hear the clatter of cutlery, hushed chatter, chair legs scraping across the tiled floor, and Ellen's voice.

  I hear Ellen's voice and she is saying goodbye.

  "I'm sorry. This is for the best. We can't go on like this, turning in silly circles. Me waiting for you to wake up and you punishing yourself for the things you think you've done. It has to end."

  Her face is hard yet brittle, like porcelain.

  "I know. You should go. Whatever there is between us, it will always be there, but neither of us can allow ourselves to be tied down by it. You have to make your own choices and I have to make mine. I do thank you, though, for pushing me. If it wasn't for you I'd still be sitting in that caravan, trying to drink myself to death."

  She reaches out across the table and holds my hand. Her fingers are cold when they should be warm. "Just promise me you'll go to see that man again – Ryan South. I really do believe that your salvation lies in contacting him again. You changed after that first time. Things got… well, a little bit brighter. Push it harder, further. Force the issue."

  I nod, stiff and unfeeling. "Don't worry, Ellen, you have my promise. I will see him again." If only she knew the truth – but even I don't know that.

  She stands briskly, without saying anything more, and when she leans across the table to kiss me I feel like holding on to her so that she cannot go anywhere. But I do no such thing. Instead I keep my arms limp at my sides and let her kiss the side of my mouth.

  I close my eyes.

  When I open them again she is gone.

  My friend, my last best chance at redemption: gone, gone, gone…

  At that moment in time, I doubt that I will ever see Ellen Lang again.

  I say her name, like a tiny prayer.

  I speak it again:

  "Ellen."

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Ellen.

  When I opened my eyes I didn't know where I was, or why my vision was so occluded. I strained to see beyond the clammy darkness that hung in tatters before my eyes, but it was impossible. Raising a hand to my face, I rubbed at my eyes and managed to pull away the ashen caul that I found there, clinging to my face like a secondary skin. I spat, wiped my mouth, and rubbed more vigorously to clear the stuff from out of my eyes.

  There was no sign of the hooded youths. Wherever they'd taken Ellen, it seemed that they were long gone by now. It could have been hours ago or it could have been only minutes since she had been snatched. I had no way of knowing which.

  I tried to sit but felt too dizzy to move. The next time I tried, it was easier and my head had just about begun to clear. I blinked but the sky remained dark. I was lying upon a soft mat of black ash and my clothes were covered in drying vomit. I touched my face again – tentatively, now that I was fully awake – and felt the raised areas around my chin and cheeks, the blood that had dried on my skin. There was little pain now because of the adrenaline rush I'd experienced during the fight, but I knew that I would be aching by morning.

  If morning ever came.

  "Welcome," said a familiar voice, and when I looked up I saw the Pilgrim standing before me, naked and glistening like plastic under the sickly light of the moon. Mr Shiloh, Matthew Torrent… whatever he called himself. He stared down at me with an amused look on his face, his pale lips locked together in a grim sneer.

  His chest was smooth and unmarked, and like his head it was completely lacking in hair. Again I thought his skin looked rubbery and malleable, as if no matter how hard I hit him he would feel no pain – he would just absorb the blow as he waited for the next one.

  If I threw something at him, the missile would bounce off him like throwing a tennis ball at a wall. If I blew him up with explosives, the separate pieces would simply come together again and reconfigure. If I cut off his arms, legs and head and buried them, he'd carry on moving like a decapitated earthworm.

  As my gaze travelled across his alien form, I saw that he had no nipples. Nor did he possess a navel – which meant, of course, that he could never have been born as other mammals are born: he had never been delivered by a human pregnancy. I'd already suspected that he was not human, and here was the proof.

  A mad thought entered my head: had the Pilgrim been hatched from an egg, or grown in a dish in some cosmic laboratory?

  His thick legs were also totally without hair, and where there should have been genitals was only a smooth expanse of leathery hide. Not a blemish marked the shadowed spot, and somehow this sight was the most horrific of all. He was not like other men; he was not a man at all. Was he even a beast, or simply some kind of conceptual entity that had crawled into our reality through a loophole in the human psyche? Was he just a bitter little homunculus looking for kicks to relieve his dreadful ennui?

  None of it made any sense. Like the ever-changing rules of dream logic, it seemed that the Pilgrim remade himself as he went along, constantly tweaking and tinkering with the rules of his own being.

  "Once again I apologise for our methods, but some rituals are necessary when one is preparing the way. I'm sure you, of all people, understand that – the unique power of the rite, the techniques involved in conjuring certain altered states and atmospheres." He smiled, and once again I was reminded of a shark. His eyes were black and tiny; they seemed to both swallow the light a
nd negate it. His face would have looked more at home cruising through the ocean depths, searching for prey.

  And he was playing with me like a shark tormenting a wounded seal.

  "Where's Ellen?" My breath was thick in my throat. I felt that I could hardly stand, so stayed there on the ground to wait for my strength to return. Right then, it felt like this would never happen – that I would be grounded forever.

  "Ah, the lovely Miss Lang. Quite an interesting relationship you have there. It's been like watching a soap opera all these years." The smile stayed in place, even while he spoke. "Illfated lovers. Most entertaining, I must say."

  "What do you mean, all these years? I don't understand." I gripped the earth with my fingers and tried to push myself up, but it didn't work. I fell back, rooted there.

  "You'll learn, in time. Or perhaps you won't. It means little to me, or to those I serve and who, in turn, serve me." He turned and walked slowly over to the old bonfire, stopping in its stark night-shadow. He had no cleft in his backside, and no buttocks: just an unbroken area of pale rounded flesh.

  He did not eat. He did not shit. He did not live as we live, but existed inside a rarefied bubble of his own devising.

  "I've given you enough clues to start piecing this whole thing together, Mr Usher. I'm afraid that I'm becoming rather bored with the game now, and am forced to escalate events – to rush onward towards the exciting climax." His body swerved, as if he were dancing. His limbs moved as if they were boneless, bending and flexing in the air. He even clapped his hands, but silently.

  I had no idea what he was talking about. I had never seen this man – this thing – before that day at the Blue Viper, when he'd walked out of an upstairs room and left a woman in tears. How could he claim to know me so well?

  "Please… where is she?" There was ash in my throat, but it would not budge. I couldn't even summon enough energy to cough, or to vomit.

  "They have her. The Empty Ones. The MT. Oh, how very clever, don't you think? I do like a good, dramatic name for the bad guys." He spun on his heels, the entire bottom half of his body turning first and then the upper torso corkscrewing around afterwards, creasing the flesh at his waist. His eyes were now black as tar, and their intensity made me feel even weaker than before. There was a great and limitless emptiness at his core, but I could also see that he was the servant – or perhaps the priest – of some other, greater force that so far I had barely even glimpsed.

  A priest: a dark priest preparing the way, clearing a path.

  "Look at it," he said, raising one arm and casting it back, beyond the point that any human shoulder joint could endure. There was no crunching sound of bone breaking; his arm simply bent backwards and stayed locked in place.

  Behind the Pilgrim, towering in the dark distance, I could make out a shape. It was that damned house on fowl's legs, but this time it was different. It was now constructed of concrete, and as it tottered on the spot I saw that it also possessed doors and windows, all of them boarded with heavy security shutters. It was a derelict witch's house: the blasted place at the end of every modern-day fairytale, but one that no author had ever been brave enough to write of.

  The blasted heart of the estate: the core of all this urban despair.

  And behind even this, another sight: a hill, a tree, with pale flames clutching at the sky, and something twisting within the grasp of those flames, as if dancing in triumph. I could see clearly now that the blazing shape had once been a child, a small girl – perhaps even Mathew Torrent's infant sister. But before that, it had been something else, another form entirely. The young girl had merely been a potential vessel – perhaps the first – meant to carry this thing into the world: an unwitting carrier for a dark parasite whose appetite for horror was infinite.

  There are things beyond this world and beneath it, energies that have no formal shape and which experience unnameable hungers, and often they catch sight of us, and we pique their interest. There is no hate, no antagonism: theirs is not a human scrutiny. They simply notice us and drift towards us. But if they are to enter, a door of some kind needs to be opened, a way prepared, and a good way of doing this is by the application of ritual – the content of these rites and incantations matters not, because they are only a means to an end. They are metaphor, a way of creating a mood. A level of belief is all that is required.

  Belief is the key to it all.

  There is no good or evil. No God. No Satan. Everything is real and it is also unreal: all is simply a matter of consensual belief. We fabricate our myths and our legends – our own pathetic little metaphors – simply to hide the face of that which we cannot comprehend. And sometimes, sometimes, that face is the same as our own.

  But occasionally a door is opened, a rift occurs, a layer of reality is breached, deliberately. A way is opened to allow these forces inside.

  Then, and only then, is it possible for some thing to pass through.

  "Is this really what it's all about? Your sister was meant to be a host for something you wanted to bring through? Then, after she was killed, you had to start all over again?"

  He laughed, but it was not a human sound at all. It was more like the whining of a small machine, an engine gearing up for mayhem. "That's only part of it. The other part – the main part – is creased up on the ground before me, writhing like an ant."

  "What have I got to do with any of this? I know nothing about these things. You brought me into this, when you announced yourself at Baz Singh's nightclub." Again I struggled to stand, and this time I got as far as a low crouch, with my hands placed flat on the ground to support me.

  If I could keep him talking, appeal to his colossal sense of hubris, there was a chance that I could gather enough strength to fight back.

  "Oh, that silly little man. He thought that sodomising his own daughter was the height of perversion, and that if he gave her to us as a form of sacrifice he could even bargain his way into some kind of forbidden knowledge. Such a petty little atrocity: one that even amused me – for a little while. We used the girl, of course. She was one of those who prepared the way, providing a little death to tease the palette. Oh, such pretty, pretty little dead things, hanging there, all in a row – all in a row on your upstairs landing."

  The Pilgrim stalked towards me, his hands increasing in size as they opened like hideous flowers.

  "But alas, alas – it all becomes so dull in the end. All of it. I have walked between the lines of realities for so many centuries, and nothing ever interests me for long. I have served many and lorded over millions more. I am the Pilgrim, and this, dear friend, is just another step along the way, yet another stopping point on my great pilgrimage through the realities."

  The derelict tower at his back swayed, the concrete creaking, rubble falling from somewhere within its bulky mass. Then, slowly, the Pilgrim set off towards the other side of the patch of waste ground, where he ducked through a rent in the opposite fence to the one where Ellen and I had entered. He didn't stoop to go under the post – he simply folded, passing through the gap in an instant.

  He had grown bored of me, like a child torturing an insect, and now he was done.

  His face peered back through the jagged gap; his voice hovered in the darkness: "I was there all along. Watching and waiting. I was there when it happened – when your family died. And I was there when you did it."

  I closed my eyes, wishing that I could block my ears just as easily.

  "I was there. I was inside him."

  I didn't want to think, not about this. Not now.

  "I helped you do it. I did it for you."

  Not yet.

  The tree beyond the chicken-footed tower blazed momentarily brighter, its cold fire chilling the sky like ice, and then, like a lamp being dimmed, it went out, taking the image of the Pilgrim's awful, white-staring face with it…

  That was when I heard the screaming.

  Unable to decide which way to turn, I simply dragged myself to my feet and tottered over t
o the nearest possible point of support – a small, half-demolished wall. I leaned against the bricks to catch my breath, and once again someone screamed. It sounded like a woman, and it was coming from behind me, back in the opposite direction to that in which Ellen and I had run.

  I stared at the other fence, noticing that the tower and the tree were gone, and then I turned around to follow the sound of the screams.

  Ellen.

  Limping, yet aware that I was not badly injured, I crossed the car park and headed back towards Shawna Royale's flat. There was a small crowed gathered outside, spilling across the path, and I could hear music. It was almost as if a party had been broken up, and no one had thought to turn off the stereo when they all rushed outside to see why someone was yelling.

  I brushed past teenagers who smelled of cannabis, a middleaged woman in her nightdress, and two young men holding hands with the same girl. Reeling along the footpath, I saw it before I even registered what it was, and when the realisation hit me I was too shocked to do anything other than keep on going, keep limping towards the thing that swayed in the still night air.