Pretty Little Dead Things

by Gary McMahon

  Ellen.

  They had not even cut her down. Nobody had thought to lend her some dignity, some final vestige of humanity, as she hung there, bruised and limp and dead. So very dead.

  Ellen.

  Her body was suspended from a short length of rope that had been attached by a bolt to the lintel across the double doorway to the block of flats. Her feet made tiny circles in the air a few scant inches above the ground. Her neck had been unnaturally lengthened, as if whoever had done this had then dangled from her legs, pulling her down with their body weight in order to snap her spine.

  Ellen.

  Blood on her face. Eyes wedged open, with one bulging out to rest like a peeled boiled egg upon her sunken blue cheek. Lips blue-black. Skin slack and bloodless. She smelled of shit and urine. I would never hear her voice again; never feel her touch; smell her breath. Kiss her body – her twisted, broken body.

  Ellen.

  I fell.

  Ellen.

  I fell down.

  Ellen.

  I fell down on my knees.

  Ellen.

  I fell down on my knees and began to scream her name.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Millgarth police station. Again. But this time I was not in one of the main offices, or even a quiet side room. No, the room I was in was located deep within a part of the station I had never seen before but always suspected existed. Most official buildings have their secret places; the hidey-holes where hushed conversations and clandestine meetings are held. Millgarth police station was no different in this respect: it too had its underbelly, and I had been swallowed by it.

  Swallowed alive… but only barely.

  After I collapsed before Ellen's strung corpse, someone had finally decided to make a 999 call and summon the emergency services. I'm still not sure who arrived at the scene first, police or ambulance, but one of them put in a call to Millgarth and tipped off Tebbit – the right thing to do, of course, considering he was in charge of the case.

  When he arrived Tebbit dragged me to my feet and bundled me into the back of a patrol car. Then he had driven us here, to the station, and we had descended underground, to the basement level, inside an old lift with clanking cage-like doors.

  "I'm lost here, Usher. Really lost. This whole thing has gone completely out of control." He was pacing the floor, clenching and unclenching his fists, and his face was dark and troubled. He kept pausing to rub or scratch the side of his head, but it never lasted for longer than a few seconds.

  Scratch-scratch.

  "What the hell is going on?"

  Scratch-scratch.

  I looked up from the desk, from the names brutally etched into its wooden surface. I could barely see anything beyond the veil of grief, and although I realised that I probably owed Tebbit some kind of explanation, I felt unable to form the right words.

  The room was tiny, with a single bare bulb hanging from the dirty ceiling. The walls were unpainted plaster and the floor was stained concrete.

  "My DCS wants me to put you in the frame for everything. He thinks you're guilty as all hell." He stopped pacing and turned to face me. He looked on the verge of tears.

  So Detective Chief Superintendent Norman Scanlon thought I had killed Ellen and abducted Penny Royale. How neat and tidy – and wrong. So very, very wrong.

  "Come on, man. Talk to me. Tell me something here, so I can do something positive instead of making you into a fucking straw man." His eyes widened, filled with something I didn't recognise. Could it have been compassion?

  Scratch-scratch.

  "I didn't do it. Not any of it." My mouth was parched; there was ash in my throat and I couldn't seem to get rid of it.

  "I fucking know that, Usher. Jesus, if I thought for a minute that you were even remotely involved in any of this, I'd kick your arse right into a cell. I brought you down here to hide you, not to interrogate you. I need a reason to put you back out there on the streets, so you can help me find whoever is doing this shit." I had never heard him so angry, yet also so calm and cold and razor sharp. Tebbit knew exactly what he was doing.

  "I'm sorry. I know… I should have known." I pressed my hands into my cheeks, then against the side of my skull. "That man I mentioned to you – the Russian immigrant, Mr Shiloh. Have you found out anything more?" I was operating purely on my energy reserves now, and pushing all thoughts out of my head. If I stopped to think, I would go under and drown in my own grief.

  Tebbit shook his head. He looked very tired. "That's a blind alley, I'm afraid. I contacted Interpol and a bunch of other international agencies, but none of them had anything on the man. That was unusual in itself, so I dug deeper… and got nowhere. He has all the necessary credentials, of course, but he's clean. Too clean. I could find nothing but the most basic official paperwork. That's all. Nothing else."

  I scored the top of the wooden desk with my fingernails, trying to cause myself pain, to bring me back from the edge. "He's not real. He's something I've never seen before. Not a ghost or a lost spirit… something… demonic."

  "I thought you didn't believe in devils and demons."

  Scratch-scratch.

  Old Scratch? But, no; there was no such thing as the Devil. Not in the way Tebbit meant.

  I looked up at him again, trying to see beyond the surface of things and into the endless void beneath. "Maybe I was wrong."

  "Who else? Who else is involved?"

  I pushed back from the desk, feeling suddenly confined. "Baz Singh is into this up to the collar of his Gucci shirt, but I don't really know how. He's put together some kind of fund to help the Royales, and I've seen him with Mr Shiloh. It's all very vague. I have nothing solid, nothing that you could use to arrest anyone. All I have is feelings and hunches. Things I've seen and felt, but no real evidence. Dead girls and pilgrims. Sighs and whispers. Blood and ash."

  "I need more than that, Usher." He stalked over to the desk and lowered himself so that he was looking directly into my eyes. "Your spiritual mumbo-jumbo isn't going to work with this one."

  I licked my lips, feeling tense and nervous. "Oh, I think that's the only thing that is going to work. Mumbo-jumbo, as you call it. It's the only weapon I have." I stood and walked to the wall, smashed my fist into the concrete just to feel the pain. Plaster cracked. The lone light flickered, casting thick shadows into the corners, and I felt poised at the edge of crossing over, hovering between states of reality as if my loss was acting as a bridge.

  "Mumbo-jumbo," I whispered.

  The shadows crept towards me, reaching out like old friends. I was certain that they were smiling, smiling… smiling at me.

  Everything had changed. I was no longer trying to fight the visions that assailed me – no, by now I was opening myself up to them. Let them come, and I'd take them all on. So what if I was a magnet for the darkness at the edge of the world, the gulf that could possibly consume our reality? If that was what it took, then so be it. Let the whole damn thing come pouring towards me, along with whatever shitstorm it contained.

  I was through running; there was nowhere left to run. All I had, all I was, all I had ever been, was my mumbo-jumbo.

  "I'm sorry, Usher. Genuinely sorry… Ellen Lang seemed like a nice woman, and I know you were close. But you can't blame yourself for what happened – it wasn't your fault."

  I turned away from the wall, smiling. I felt insane, utterly insane. "Shut the fuck up, Tebbit. You know nothing about me, nothing about her. You don't even like me. But that's okay, because we have this weird relationship and we help each other out, don't we? And this time is going to be the last. This time I plan to bring down the walls of reality and avenge their deaths – all of them. My wife, my child, my lover. Guilt be damned: this is about vengeance." It felt so good to get that out of my system, even if I wasn't sure that I entirely believed it. The power was in the saying; the magic lay in the words and the emotion they contained. Even violence could be a form of incantation.

  "Are… are you okay, Usher?
" DI Tebbit looked terrified. Not scared, or even afraid, but terrified. I wished that I had a mirror, so that I could look into it and see whatever he had just witnessed. Had I transformed into a monster, with bolts of black energy fizzing from the ends of my hair? Had I become death? It certainly felt as if I held death in my hands, and it was a good feeling – one that I could get used to without any problem at all.

  "Let me out of here."

  The emotions behind my words churned and boiled; they were pushing against the surface, getting ready to explode. I knew that I could use this power – tap into it and utilise it to cross over and navigate the fold in reality where I would find Mr Shiloh, the hooded figures, the house on its hideous chicken legs, and hopefully Penny Royale.

  Tebbit paused, and then nodded, stepping towards the door. "Just help me stop this thing… whatever the fuck it is." He unlocked the door and glanced along the corridor. Then he pulled his head back into the room. "Come on. Before anyone notices you're here."

  Scratch-scratch.

  My first port of call was Lord of Ink. I suspected that Elmer Lord knew just a little bit more than he had told me, and if anyone could give me a pointer to follow, it would be him. I realised grimly that my tattooist was the only person in the world who I could trust. Nothing, I thought, could be more pathetic than that.

  This time I went round the back way, ducking along a narrow alley and climbing over the wall to his property. I found myself in a small, rectangular yard, with weeds growing up through cracks in the concrete surface. There were empty crates and barrels stacked against one wall, and a small herb garden contained within a jerry-built greenhouse was situated near what looked like an old water feature gone dry.

  Action was good for me; it helped me to not think about anything beyond the moment.

  The ground floor windows had been painted with whitewash, preventing anyone seeing inside. I had no idea what Elmer might keep there, under the stairs, but I assumed from the heavy wooden hatch set low in the rear wall that the place had at least a small cellar or basement.

  The other door, the one I thought must lead into that downstairs hallway from the opposite end to where I'd entered last time, was firmly closed. I banged upon it, shouting Elmer's name. It took him a long time to answer, but eventually I saw his face appear at one of the upstairs windows. He waved and disappeared. After a short while the back door opened.

  "You okay?" His face was etched with concern. I knew only fragments of Elmer's life story, but we had been more than casual friends for a long time. "Why didn't you use the front door?"

  "I'm feeling paranoid." I shot him a tiny smile. "I need to speak with you. I need your help."

  He stepped aside. "Come in. I'll help you however I can – you know that, amigo."

  I didn't speak again until we were sitting in Elmer's studio, another bottle of whisky sitting on a table between us. This time he sat in the tattoo chair and I was resting on a high stool. I was on to my second glass. "Elmer, I don't want to offend you, but I know you were holding something back before. I need you to be honest with me. Someone has died–"

  "I know," he said, taking me by surprise. Registering my expression, he continued: "I still have contacts on that damned estate. I told you I grew up there, didn't I? A lot of my early years were wasted in that place…"

  I remained silent.

  "Okay, amigo. Here it is." He got up from out of the chair and walked around it, so that he was facing me. Then, taking me by surprise yet again, he quickly took off his shirt. His copious tattoos ranged from the primitive to the most sophisticated examples of skin art I had ever seen. There were brutal prison tats, beautiful oriental images, and so many colourful tribal designs that it was almost like looking at a human kaleidoscope.

  "Wonderful… but what specifically am I meant to be looking at?" Anger brimmed behind my face; it felt like my skin was crawling across my skull.

  Elmer's face sagged; a great sadness was suddenly exposed there, behind the mask, for just long enough for me to see how deeply it penetrated. "Here," he said, pointing at the upper part of his left shoulder.

  "The demon?" It was an elaborate oriental demon of a kind I had seen before, probably hanging on his wall.

  Elmer nodded. "Look closer. Look under the colouring and between the lines. Between the lines."

  For a moment that sounded like the most profound advice I had ever been given, and I understood fully why he had repeated it. I stared at the tattoo, straining to see beyond the ink.

  "Can you see now? The demon is a cover-up job. I had it done by a friend, a long time ago. It's covering something I'm ashamed of."

  I still couldn't tell what he meant: the tattoo looked fine to me, even if one of its edges was slightly ragged, forming a strange bulge in the side of the demon's head.

  "Look, amigo. Look and see. There it is… like I said: between the lines." His finger traced the outline within the outline: the lines that formed the letters.

  "There's an M…"

  I could barely believe what he was showing me. What he was telling me.

  "And there's a T."

  "What does this mean, Elmer? Tell me it isn't what I think?" I backed away, feeling as if all of a sudden I didn't know Elmer Lord even half as much as I'd thought I had only seconds before.

  "No, amigo. I used to run with them when I was a boy. There's a lot you don't know about me, and most of it you never will. Things I've seen and done that I'm ashamed of. This is one of them – that's why I had the tat covered up. But scars run deep. You can only ever cover them, and not remove them completely."

  I took a single step forward, if only to let him know that I believed him. My hands were shaking; I couldn't trust them to stay at my sides.

  "They have bases all over that area, amigo. The whole place is like a rat's nest, littered with tunnels and bolt holes. But there's one place – it's the last place I heard that they'd been sacrificing animals and practicing rituals. At the back of the estate there's a bunch of derelict buildings. Condemned bungalows, garages that are falling apart, and a high rise that's barely even standing anymore. Look for them there."

  I recalled the terrible visions of the last few days – the notso-grand illusion of the house on chicken legs that had then surreally become a concrete version of the same. Now I knew where to look, but what I didn't know was how to get there. In this world I would find little or nothing of use; I had to push myself over and into that fold or crease in reality to get close to what I needed. Only there could I even begin to commune with these things: the dead, the undead, and the things that lie between.

  Between the lines.

  There was one more place I needed to visit before I could make preparations to go looking for the missing child, and it was somewhere I had grown to despise. I took a taxi to Bradford, and told the smirking driver to drop me off at the Blue Viper. It was afternoon already and the sky was growing dull. The rain had held off, but its threat was never far away. But even if the weather stayed dry, it felt like it was raining on me.

  I had a few loose ends to tie up to before I went any farther towards the dark. There was a good chance I might not make it back here, to this sunny but often overcast little enclave, this world, this Earth. This beautiful reality. If everything I had learned over the years was even remotely true, then where I was going there were no guarantees, no escape routes or safety nets.

  Unusually, there were no heavies hanging around outside the club. The main doors were locked but the side door looked unsecured; its security barrier was pulled back and sticking out from the frame. It looked as if someone had either gone in or come out pretty fast, neglecting to lock up as they went.

  The Pilgrim's words came back to me: Oh, that silly little man.

  I looked again at the unsecured door, and everything became achingly clear.

  Breathing slowly, I reached out and turned the door handle, hoping that it would not budge. The handle turned and the door opened. I stepped inside, closed the do
or carefully behind me, and began to climb the stairs. It was dark in there – darker than it should have been. It was as if night had fallen, but only inside Baz Singh's club. I could hear a distant moaning, muted by the walls and the doors, but not unlike the sound of people having sex. I continued up the stairs and took a left, heading directly for Singh's office.

  The office door was open wide, and through it I could see his desk. The desk lamp was flickering madly, as if insects were trapped inside the bulb and fluttering against the glass. As I approached it popped loudly, the bulb turning to dust. I kept on going, refusing to be spooked – this was just another game, or perhaps part of the biggest game of all. I felt the Pilgrim's hand at work here, and the thought carried with it a strange feeling of contentment. Know your demon; face your demon; put a name to your mortal enemy.