Pretty Little Dead Things

by Gary McMahon

  I know now that my own enemy has many names and wears faces without number: because he is legion.

  I stepped into the office. Lying on the desk was the gun Baz Singh had offered me what felt like years ago but had been only a few days before. There was no smoking barrel, like there always are in the movies or in the lyrics of those crackly Delta blues songs. It just sat there, on its side, on an oversized ink blotter. The blinds were drawn; there were black streaks on the dusty material, as if someone had dragged their scruffy fingers down the entire length of the blinds.

  I turned and left the office, heading for the little room where I had first encountered Mr Shiloh, the Pilgrim, menacing a prostitute. I passed the top of the stairs, glanced down them, but saw nothing moving. Nothing but shadows, Nothing but dust. Or perhaps ashes.

  This door was closed, but there was a smear of red on the wood beside the handle. I knew it was a sign, a signal, and that I was meant to go in there. Part of me screamed to run away, but the rest of me – the stone-cold-hard-as-grief rest of me – stood my ground. I pushed open the door and watched it swing inward, disturbing the already flickering shadows within. The walls were bare, but there were more smears of blood, some at waist level and others, puzzlingly, up near the ceiling.

  There was a flat, dull, coppery odour inside the room: a slaughterhouse stink that forced its way up my nose and down my throat, almost making me gag. The television in the corner was playing with the sound turned down. I turned to face it, looking at the screen, and saw footage of Baz Singh sodomising his daughter, poor dead Kareena, his hands gripping her hips and his body thrusting hard up against her. I tried to avert my gaze but couldn't seem to work the muscles in my neck.

  I watched for a few moments more, noting the look of unalloyed enjoyment on her face and the expression of pure horror that twisted his features into an ugly mask.

  It was wrong, all turned around: the rapist looked like a victim. Kareena, it seemed, had gone willingly into this particular darkness, and was forcing her step-father to acquiesce, to enact his own part in the sordid ritual that the Pilgrim had surely set in motion. Once again, the truth was the opposite of my suspicions.

  Finally I dragged my eyes from the screen and gazed along the floor. There was a trail of blood. Just blood. Nothing more. It led along the floor and stopped at the bed, where it began again, but patchy, more like separate stains now than a constant track.

  There was something under the blankets. Some things under the blankets. They were humped in places, as if a number of items had been placed on the bed and carefully covered up. Fresh red stains bloomed even as I watched.

  I looked back at the screen. Then back at the bed. How many of them were under there, taken apart and left on the mattress for me to find? Was it just Singh and his doormen, or perhaps even the rest of the Singh family – whom I had not yet met, and now never would? If those shapes rustled or squelched I did not hear, and if they writhed and twitched I did not see; for I was focused upon something else, something deep within my own being – a sudden and curious sense of righteousness.

  I looked again at the television. I studied the intense look of horror in Baz Singh's eyes: the one true sign that told me he had known for a long time that he was lost and that there was nothing he could do about it. But, I promised myself, if there were any names to add to the list on my back, I would not ask Elmer Lord to make Singh one of them. Only those who truly deserved to be saved were remembered on my flesh; those deserving souls whom I had failed and continued to fail. The ones who never had a choice.

  I glanced one final time at the writhing mounds on the bed, the twisted bloodstained covers, and then I turned and walked out of the room. A wet sound followed me, but I put it out of mind, pretending that I couldn't even hear it. Walking slowly but with a new sense of certainty, I carried on past the stairs, where blackness seemed to reach up and out for me, and returned to Baz Singh's office, where I picked up the gun.

  Obscure spells and ancient rites are all well and good when you are dealing with the ethereal, but flesh and blood demons require less subtle methods of disposal.

  I had owned a gun once before, but never used it. Oh, I had practiced shooting it, and to a reasonable level of competence, but when the time came, and I was in a position to put all that practice to use, I was unable to pull the trigger.

  But this time I would not hesitate. This time I would meet fire with fire, and finally lay ashes to ashes.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  It was time.

  Time.

  Finally.

  Time to remember.

  I had put it off long enough, and the pressure had become too much to bear. I had hidden the memory even from myself, pushing it beneath the guilt and the grief and the all-consuming desire to try and make up for all of my past mistakes. But this one was perhaps the biggest mistake of them all.

  Finally it was time to remember.

  This time I am alone on the drive to Luton. I have a lot of time to think about Ellen, and what might have happened between us if I had perhaps allowed things to develop. But I could not let that happen; my ghosts are too heavy to put down and leave behind.

  My ghosts are heavy, and I must carry them now forever.

  The multicoloured streetlights blur past my windscreen, becoming an ice-cream inferno. People stand in nightclub doorways, scowling at the night. Young women in short skirts and high heels run out into the road, as if flirting with the sparse traffic. Everywhere there are eyes, staring and studying. I feel dissected by their gaze.

  Soon I am in the Marsh Farm area. The grey houses beneath a grey sky; the grey lives held within the shadow of short, grey futures. It all looks familiar – like the rundown places from my own territory – and I feel as if I am just a short distance away from where I began.

  The streets here are clear of the crowds I saw in the outlying areas. There are no late pubs or nightclubs, just dreary tract housing and looming high-rises. Lights are still on in many of the windows. A lot of the residents in these parts do not work, so they stay up till all hours, drinking or fucking or pursuing less conventional pastimes.

  The familiar ten-storey block appears ahead of me and I step on the brake out of some sense of unvoiced fear. The car slows. I turn into the same car park as before, when Ellen brought me here, and sit behind the wheel with the engine running.

  I open the dash box and take out the gun.

  It is old, scratched, and has tape wrapped around the handle to mend the plastic casing. The gun is a small calibre automatic pistol, with six cartridges in the clip. I know that it is unmarked, with no serial number, because the man I brought it from made sure that it could never be traced. I helped him out with a small problem: his porn shop was being haunted by the ghost of an old prostitute who died in the 1800s, stoned to death by a drunken mob. I helped the spirit find her way back on track, and instead of accepting money I asked if he was in a position to supply me with a weapon. He did not ask what it was for. Nor did I offer the information.

  The gun is heavy. Cold. I have practiced many times, out in the countryside, shooting at targets attached to trees. I am not a bad shot, but shooting paper targets is a lot different to killing a man.

  I turn off the engine and sit for a while longer, watching the window. Ryan South is in there, sitting with the lights dimmed. Perhaps he is drinking the night away, trying – as I once did – to soak his demons in cheap wine and whisky.

  I get out of the car and lock the door, pausing with my hand locked around the handle. If I let go, that is it: the decision made. If I twist and open the door again, I can go home and forget about all of this nonsense.

  I wait for seconds but it feels like weeks.

  Then I lift my hand away from the car, slip the gun into my jacket pocket, and stalk towards Ryan South's building.

  This time there is no one sitting on the concrete bollards, but I remember the young girl who sat there last time, asking if I was the police. I wonder if she
is still around, or if in the intervening time she has come to some sort of messy end. The ground is just as scattered with litter as the last time: empty beer cans, crushed fast food boxes, other less identifiable debris…

  The foyer still smells like a pub toilet. I climb the stairs, faster this time as I now know the way. I stop at the fourth floor, staring at the door to Flat Number 411.

  The door is open; just a crack, but open nonetheless. As if he is expecting me.

  Perhaps he is.

  I step forward, the world receding to this single point, and gently kick the door wide. The smell that wafts out of the flat is awful; a rotten combination of raw meat and sulphur invades my olfactory system, making me gag.

  I step inside without thinking, knowing that if I do stop to consider my actions I will turn around and walk back to the car. This is it: the moment. There is no turning back from here on in.

  The place looks nothing like it did last time. I am convinced that the hallway is even longer and narrower than before, and the wallpaper has been messily peeled back, as if by sharp claws. Hanging on the walls are framed pictures torn from anatomical textbooks – images of wounds pulled and pinned apart to show the intricate workings of the human body. I stare at pencil sketches of layers of fat, arteries, and the bone beneath. The human form skinned like an apple, peeled like a banana, chopped in half like a grapefruit.

  On the floor there are scattered photographs: naked children, men and women with blood on their clothes, extreme surgical procedures – lobotomies, vivisections, trepanning, and one particularly nasty close-up shot of what looks like an autopsy.

  I carry on along the hallway, peeking into the living room. The room has been stripped bare. There is no furniture; there are no coverings on the walls, floor or ceiling, and even the floorboards have been lifted to expose the dark crawlspace beneath. The smell of sulphur is strong here; someone has dug down into the skeleton of the building and revealed something foul.

  I move into the kitchen further along the hall. It looks like a butcher shop. The huge, split carcasses of cows and sheep and pigs hang from steel hooks stuck into the walls. A pig's head rests in the sink, covered in flies – the sound of their buzzing begins as soon as I see the head; before that I had not heard a thing. Bones and hooves and fur are stuck to the walls, draped across the dining chairs, and the centrepiece of the small dining table is a slaughtered lamb, its belly opened and books and ornaments shoved into the bloody cavity. Its tiny uterus has been removed and placed alongside it on a dented tin platter.

  Then, abruptly, I hear the creaking of floorboards; the patter of feet across the ceiling directly above me. But the feet sound too small, tiny in fact, and for the first time I begin to taste fear. I draw the gun and back out of the kitchen, then turn and head towards the other rooms, moving deeper into the flat along the hallway, which seems to be elongating as I travel along its length.

  My hand is steady but my insides are shaking. I must be strong. I have to see this through.

  My journey through the flat is silent. No timbers groan and I manage not to stand on any of the filthy plates and crunched up food wrappers strewn across my path. The movement in the flat above has ceased; the building is now as quiet as the grave – and that is exactly what I think of as I continue forward: the ambience of an open grave.

  Bugs and centipedes scurry across the wall to my left, plopping onto the carpet at my feet. I focus ahead, at the darkness that awaits me. The further I go (and by now the interior space seems limitless, as if I should have reached the end long before now) the darker the sights I am presented with.

  A cuckoo clock hangs on the wall, and as I pass it I realise that it is made of tiny bones (the bones of children?). The clock chimes – a mechanical sound rather than any kind of ringing tone – and two doors open, one at each side of the clock face. From these tiny doors appear two skeletons, but with normal skin-and-hair heads resting above white bone. The figures meet at the end of their bone rails, turn stiffly and kiss, then trundle back the way they came, the doors shutting behind them.

  One door now bears a photograph of Rebecca's face; the other has a small portrait of Ally. I dare not even wonder where these photos of my family came from: I have seen neither image before.

  Skulls hang from spikes, and above me, from the ceiling, dangle a row of dried human skins. They rustle like paper as I pass beneath them, shifting in a wind I cannot feel. More pictures on the walls show me upright coffins containing the wide-eyed dead; beneath them are names and Latin inscriptions, faded by time and grime.

  At last I reach what must be the end of the hallway. There are clothes and shoes everywhere, and the doors have been ripped from the frames at the entrance to the rooms located at this end of the flat. Stuffing from pillows and mattresses covers everything in a strange domestic snow, shifting uneasily as I wade through the soft yellowish mass.

  Ahead of me, what looks like a huge, bedraggled lion crosses the hallway, leaving one room to enter the room opposite. It does not see me; it simply walks across my path, its movements slow and easy.

  I take a deep breath and carry on, unwilling to react to these images.

  The rooms are empty (even the lion has vanished), but the one at the end – the final room – betrays a presence. Sickly light spills across the threshold but does not shift beyond the doorless frame. Shadows skitter on the patch of carpet outside the door, as if silent dancers are prancing within, hurling their bodies through the air and contorting into unusual shapes as they practice some strange choreography. But still there is no sound: the flat is silent as a moonscape, and seems to lack gravity and atmosphere in the same way as that haunted husk.

  "I'm here," I say, thinking that I have indeed been expected.

  A low, wet gurgling sound floats from the doorway. It sounds like someone laughing underwater, or choking on their own vomit as they try to scream. The sound continues for a minute that seems like an hour, and then gradually fades away.

  "I'm here to see you, Ryan. I've come back for another visit." I raise the gun, my finger easing onto the trigger and my stance widening almost imperceptibly as I ready my body for action.

  It is by now a familiar stance, yet still it feels vaguely absurd.

  I reach the door and stop, afraid to go much further. I do not know what I might see – and that unknown element is worse than anything else in this damned place. Because that's what it is: utterly damned.

  "So I must come in, then? You're not going to come to me?"

  Nothing. Not even the movement of air inside the still, dense building. Everything is still. Everything is frozen.

  I step forward and turn around to examine the room. Looking through the doorway, I am almost relieved by what I see. It is bad – very bad – but my imagination has already conjured much worse. The small, pink bodies of babies have been nailed to the far wall, above the bed: crucified like so many miniMessiahs. The babies have been painted; their skin is a canvas for signs and sigils and elaborate occult designs.

  Painted infants, all bloody and torn.

  I know that what I am seeing is not real, not in this world anyway, but the knowledge does not make it any easier to take. I am being given a glimpse into another reality – a place where these mutilated corpses are mere baubles, simple ornaments, and where whoever now controls this environment feels most at home.

  "Very clever. Now where are you?"

  The bed is covered with offal. I cannot tell if the viscera are human or animal in origin, but the butchered cattle downstairs give me something to hold onto…

  Then, as if on cue, the babies begin to stir. Hanging from their tiny pierced hands, they writhe against the wall, toothless mouths open in silent misery, eyelids flickering open to reveal empty, redrimmed sockets. Each of the babies now has a huge incision in its belly, pinned open with surgical clamps. The sight is an echo of the anatomical photographs I passed earlier, a grim repetition of obscenities. The small bodies writhe against the wall, the lip
s of their dry, completely bloodless wounds puckering and opening up to show me the pulsing grey treasures held within.

  I turn away, half disgusted and half impressed by the lengths to which whatever is in this house will go to try and shock me.

  "Very clever," I say, facing the empty doorway and the hallway beyond. "Now let's see something real." I do not sound afraid, but inside I am terrified.

  Before I leave the room entirely I look back over my shoulder: bare walls, unmade bed, torn carpet, window with a leather jacket strung across it in lieu of curtains. The tawdry reality I was not meant to see.

  Ryan South is waiting for me outside, at the mouth of yet another open door, performing a contortion which in school gym classes we used to call "the crab". He is bent over almost backwards, with his palms flat on the floor, but his head is craned around underneath his back – so far that it does not seem possible for the human body to stretch this way.