Spares

by Michael Marshall Smith

  “I can believe it,” I said. “I’m going now. But one thing…The edges aren’t holding.” I turned and started walking back toward the gate. There was nothing more I could do, not tonight, I didn’t have a gun. I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t have a brain.

  Vinaldi stayed motionless. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s not just the hits you’ve got to worry about, Johnny. Word’s going round the lower floors. Word says you’re losing it.”

  “What do I know from people down there? What should I care?”

  “No reason,” I said, opening the gate. I looked back at him for a moment. Tableau: upmarket hoodlum plus human accessories. The two guys at the table were looking at each other. His men knew what I was talking about, and so did their boss. When I was halfway down the path I heard a shout behind me.

  “Randall! What’s done in the past is done, understand?” Vinaldi’s voice echoing over manicured lawns. “It’s over!”

  I kept walking without turning round. Vinaldi was an intelligent man. He knew it would never be over.

  I got off on 72 trembling, and I knew I was going to have to go through with it. My fist hurt from a discussion with the guard by the elevator on Vinaldi’s level, but the fifty dollars was back in my pocket, next to my gun. I felt like I was on a doomed downward spiral, as if I’d reached that stage in the evening when you’ve had too many beers to turn back but know that going forward is going to be even worse. The idea of buying a truck was getting more and more laughable to me, as if it had always been a ludicrous fantasy.

  72 had gone down in the world. It was never stylish. It was just a normal suburban neighborhood, done out in corridors. Originally part of one of the MegaMall’s mid-range hotels, it had a couple of small stores in what used to be suites, but apart from that it was entirely residential. When I’d lived there people had been making an effort, pretending it didn’t matter that they lived below the 100 line. Low-paid white collar: a few cops, some bohemian old people, even a couple of teachers. There’d been window boxes lined up by front doors, in lieu of gardens, filled with struggling flowers grown under little ArtiSun lamps. At the right time of year, walking the subcorridors had been like strolling through meadows in spring, if you ignored the fact you were inside.

  No longer. I stepped out of the elevator by myself and stood for a while, looking down the long corridor in front of me. One of the apartments on the left-hand side had been burnt out. It looked as if it had been reinhabited, and someone had made a reasonable job of patching it up, but the damage still showed and informed the rest of the view. The carpet was five years dirtier, and the paint on the walls looked like a thousand drunks had pissed on it after imbibing unusual substances. The ceiling lights were still working, at least, but with a buzzing and fitful air, as if they reserved the right to stop at any moment. There wasn’t a single window box to be seen.

  I passed doors behind which there might still be people I knew. I didn’t knock on them. I didn’t know which would be worse: discovering the people I knew were all gone, or finding they were still there. I took my turnoff and followed subcorridors that led out to the edge. All were nearly as wide as the main corridor, which I’d always thought gave the floor a feeling of openness. Now it just made it feel deserted.

  Things had changed, but not that much until I made the turn into 31st and 5th. The farther I went down 31st, the worse it became. One light in three was working, often with a haunting flickering which did the corridor no favors. As I got closer and closer to the edge of the floor I saw more doors left open, the interior of the apartments stripped and empty. Life had moved away from 72, and it had retreated from this corner in particular. It wasn’t that it looked damaged. If anything, it was in a better state than the areas people were still living in. There’d been no vandalism—there just hadn’t been anyone living here in quite a while.

  A hundred yards from the end, the ceiling lights gave out completely. I could still see where I was going, by the threadbare moonlight that seeped through the cracked window in the external wall. Something was rising in my throat, and the hairs on my scalp were shifting uneasily. I heard a small sound, and turned to look in the open doorway I was passing. There was nothing to see, but I thought the shadows moved. Heart thumping, I took a step into the apartment.

  A small boy was crouching in the darkness, eyes wide and frightened. He was reasonably well dressed, not a runaway. Someone had combed his hair that morning, and made sure he put on clean clothes: But on the other hand he shouldn’t have been out so late.

  “Don’t hurt me,” he said, breathlessly.

  “I won’t,” I said. “I don’t hurt people.” He looked at me carefully for a while, then relaxed a little. The room was inky with blues and black, and the boy looked like a collusion of shadows topped by a small and intelligent face. “What are you doing here?”

  “I come to sit, sometimes. It’s like a dare. Why are you here?”

  “I used to live down the end,” I said, lighting a cigarette.

  The boy stared. “Why? It’s really spooky.”

  “It wasn’t then.” My eyes dropped, as I considered the idea that what had used to be my neighborhood was now the subject of dares and whispers. I made the effort to smile. “So you guys come down here, to prove you’re not scared?”

  “No,” he said, “Just me. My dad…” He trailed off for a moment. “My dad thinks men should be brave. He doesn’t think I’m brave enough because boys keep beating me up at school.”

  “Does he know you come down here?” The boy shook his head, and I smiled. “Don’t tell him. Keep it a secret, and that way you’ll always know something about yourself that he doesn’t And if he doesn’t know everything about you, then he can’t always be right, can he?”

  The boy took a while to work this out, then smiled back.

  “It’s really haunted, you know,” he said, with enthusiasm. “When more people used to live here, a couple of years ago, sometimes they said they saw a little person walking in the corridor. Do you believe in ghosts?”

  “Yes,” I said, the back of my neck going cold.

  “And there’s someone else who comes here sometimes. I don’t know who he is. I hide. A man, not as tall as you, I’ve seen him twice. He just goes down to the end and stands there for a while. Then he leaves again.” Suddenly, in the manner of small boys, he was on his feet and moving. “I’ve got to go.”

  He jumped over to me and stuck his hand out. I shook it, bemused. Then he was gone, running out into the corridor and disappearing into the sound of small feet padding into the distance. By the time I’d stepped out of the apartment, he was round a corner and out of sight.

  I went to the window at the end, my heart beating regularly and slowly. I looked at the door on my left. It was closed. Either side of it were the only two window boxes left on the floor. The plants, whose names I’d been told countless times but never learned, were long dead, rotted away to nothing beneath the soil, dried to dust above. I reached out and touched the door near the lock, where the wood was splintered and still looked fresh, with no weather to blunt its message. Then I turned the handle and pushed it open.

  The apartment was dark, darker than the one I had just been in. On my right was the kitchen. I felt for the switch on the wall and flicked it, but of course it didn’t do anything. In the light that came through the small square window at the end I could see things still laid out in the kitchen. Pots by the sink; three plates by the stove. Cutlery on the counter and on the floor. Still life with silence. I turned away before I could see any more.

  I stood in the bathroom for a moment, looking at my reflection in the mirror. It was darker in there, and I was glad. I didn’t want to see just how much, or how little, I had changed.

  The living room. Bookcases along one side, cookery and gardening books jumbled up with my cheap paperbacks and forensic texts. Another wall, almost entirely window, a source of great pride to us. We could have afforded to live a
few floors up, but we chose to stay on 72 because we had enough to rent an apartment on the edge here. I’d liked the idea that Angela would be able to see something beyond New Richmond, and on a good day you could see clear to the mountains. Tonight you could barely see the clouds outside, because the window, along with most of the walls and the carpet, was covered in a dried brown smear that was the blood of my wife and daughter.

  I didn’t go into the bedroom. I let my back slide down the wall and sat, arms tight round my knees.

  I’d come back at nine, late for dinner as always. But also as always, even in those last, bad days, Henna had held it for me, and the kitchen had smelled of something good. I’d been so Rapt as I blundered into the apartment that for a moment I’d seen the smell as a color, a kind of deep warm red. I was also drunk, and I was only going to be staying ten minutes, though Henna didn’t know that yet. The Vinaldi gig was breaking at long last, and I was going back out just as soon as I’d fulfilled my duty as husband and father in the thoughtless and perfunctory way I had.

  The apartment was quiet as I entered, which surprised me. Angela’s favorite program was on at nine, some toon featuring a dyslexic cat. Even in my wired and whirling stupor the silence gave me pause, and I walked into the living room with a frown on my aching face.

  I thought at first that more of the Rapt had just kicked in, and that the red smell from the kitchen had seeped into the room, blotting out everything else. Then I realized it hadn’t, and screamed so loudly that no sound came out at all.

  Angela and half of Henna were in the living room. Angela had been dismantled, each limb removed from her body, then broken into smaller parts. Her face had been peeled off in one piece, and was stuck to the television screen in her drying blood. I couldn’t see her head at first. My wife’s torso was sitting upright in the chair she always sat in, her insides spilling out of the torn lower end. Her lower half was on the bed in the bedroom, legs spread wide. Her head was in the wastebasket, with the rest of Angela’s. I couldn’t find Angela’s eyes.

  I saw these things, and then came to just under two weeks later. Someone found me in a disused warehouse area on 12. I was wearing the same clothes and didn’t immediately recognize the person who found me, though I knew her very well. In that period I had developed from a medium-strength Rapt junkie into someone whose body could not survive without it I wasn’t a suspect in the murders, but my job was long gone. It didn’t matter. I barely remembered I’d had one. Five years later I still have no idea what happened during that time, and I don’t want to know; just like I don’t want to think about the fact that I must have turned and walked out of my apartment that night, abandoning the bodies of the two people I loved most in the world.

  Somewhere in New Richmond there would be photographs, I knew, Polaroids taken by the killer to prove the job was done so he could collect his fee. I believed I had just spoken to the man who’d paid for those photographs to be taken, a man whom no one in the police department was interested in taking down. The real bodies were long gone and destroyed, leaving only stains on the floor and the chair, and presumably the bed.

  But everything else was still there, including the blood on the windows and the dried smear I could still see on the screen of the television. I sat absolutely still for a while, looking at these things and listening for echoes: Angela’s laugh, Henna’s sighs. I could hear neither, and so instead I reached into my jacket and took the burning sensation from my pocket and injected it into my arm.

  The day is still hot but beginning to cloud over at the edges, a white sheet of haze thickening into invisibility. Couples and small families walk the beach with red shoulders and faces, some fractious and bickering, others soothed into stillness by the sight of the sea and the squawking of wheeling seagulls. Down on the waterline a man drinks soda from a frosted bottle, the glass glittering in the sunlight as he tilts to get the last mouthful, and clumps of women and children bend, their eyes fixed and far away, to pick shells and smooth stones up out of the sand.

  I was left sitting on a rock, alone and furious after a shouting match with my mom. I wanted an ice cream, she said I couldn’t have one, and when you’re seven you won’t accept any truth as good enough reason for that denial. When the disagreement started, the ice cream hadn’t even been that much on my mind, but as it went on I began to taste the coolness in my mouth, the crunch of a sugar cone, and I dug my heels right in and began to cry, though even I knew that I was too old for that particular kind of blackmail.

  My mother explained that it would be dinnertime soon, and that I would spoil my meal. I know now she was trying to protect both of us from the fact that we simply didn’t have the money. My father would have told the truth and slapped me one to drive the point home, but he wasn’t around because he never came when we went to the sea. Partly because he hated it, partly because he hated us. Mainly so he could sink himself into a weekend of dark futility without real people around to bother him.

  It was three o’clock, and hours from dinner, and I raved and she walked away. As I sat there, watching my mother’s back as she walked farther and farther down the shore, an old man came and sat near me on the rocks. He wore khaki shorts and a faded denim shirt, and the skin on his arms and legs was pale and spotted with freckles and liver spots. He had gray hair, cut short and neat, and his face was the texture of handmade paper that had been screwed up and then flattened out again. He sat and looked at me.

  I stared back sullenly. I wasn’t afraid of him. I thought I knew how bad things could get, that the world had little else to show me. If I was learning how to dodge my father, then a wrinkly like this old guy would be no trouble at all. In fact, I wanted him to start on me, to say something I could wallop right back at him. Already at that age the reservoir was filling up. Sometimes it yearned for a channel to course through, a town to flood.

  The old man turned away and looked out to sea, and for a while I thought that was it. My mother was at the far end of the little bay by then, sitting against the rock wall which climbed away from the water. The argument would not end easily, I knew. My mother did her best with me, always, but we shared a piece of metal in our hearts which made backing down nearly impossible. I realized gloomily that the day was spoiled and that in the evening we were going home. Away from Florida, and the sea, and back to Virginia.

  “Calmed down any yet?”

  There comes a time when people will start cutting through the childish bullshit you feed them and call your bluff, a time when you’re forced to realize that you’re not unique and you’re not fooling everyone. I was not at that age yet. When the old man spoke, I looked at him curiously. It was, I think, the first time anyone ever spoke to me as if I was nearly an adult.

  “Your mama looks tired,” he said then, and I hurriedly looked away and back out at the sea. “Is she?”

  “She’s always tired,” I said, without meaning to. My mother’s tiredness was something I hated and held against her, in the same way I blamed her for the bruises that came and went round her eyes. Had I loved my father even a little bit I would probably have blamed her less. The emotions of the powerless don’t always make much sense.

  “Maybe she’s got stuff on her mind,” the man said. “Like why she can’t buy ice cream for little boys.”

  “We always have ice cream when we come here,” I blurted. “Always.” We did, and as far as I was concerned it was most of the point of being away. I wasn’t just a greedy little boy; the ice cream stood for something in my mind which I was far too young to articulate. Twice a year we got a weekend away from my father—two days when he wasn’t around, forcing us to see the world the way he saw it, cramped and dark and cold. Demons lived in everything my father saw, presences beneath surfaces, evil in mind. He would have understood The Gap very well, but only after it had become strange—life as a mirage, wrapped round horror and preventing us from seeing the truth. Usually, the trips my mother and I took were time away from that. Today, however, it felt as if his s
hadow was still over us.

  “Sometimes you can’t have everything you want,” the man said, a platitude which pushed all the wrong buttons in me.

  “My dad send you?” I said tightly, and glared at him. His eyes opened wide at my tone, and he seemed to look at me in a new way. “I can’t have things because I’m’ a kid, and I stop being a kid when I don’t want them anymore?”

  “Is that what he tells you?”

  “Yeah. That and a whole lot more.” For a moment, I stood on the brink of telling the old man some things, of speaking for the first time about the way life was. I had no friends at the time, because we were kept moving by Father’s endless quest for work. We’d seen most of Virginia by then, and it wasn’t getting any better. My father wasn’t lazy, far from it. One of his most oft-repeated creeds was that a man without a job was fit for nothing but to be fed to animals. He was forever doing something, but to no purpose, with no joy, with nothing but slow-burning hatred of everything around him. Sometimes when he sat you could see his hands tremble, as if his whole body was vibrating with some need to destroy. If he got a job it generally lasted about a week before his fuse burned out and he got himself fired for brawling with someone or messing up because he was shit-faced. Time and again we held a small celebration when it looked like we might be in a town for more than a few days. My mother always tried to mark good moments in the belief that it might make them stay. She would cook a special dinner, and by each plate would be some small gift, carefully chosen from thrift stores. I hated these celebrations for the lies they always told, for the way they smeared her love for us with pointlessness and doom. Even as I unwrapped some new pencil, or small colored box, I would be thinking of the ones I’d had before. Mom would happily stake out the town and find out about local schools, and then within two weeks we’d be on our way somewhere else.