A Memory of Demons

by Ambrose, David

  38

  It was a one-level brick-box affair which looked as though it had been thrown together in a couple of days to occupy a vacant corner lot. There was a neon beer sign in the window and a dim light above the door. No one left or entered as he approached. He half expected to find the door locked and the lights left on only to deter theft, but the latch pressed down smoothly and it opened without trouble.

  There was a pink glow to the interior that made him think for a moment that he had wandered into a cheap brothel. In fact it was nothing of the sort; a couple of red-shaded lamps on a shelf behind the bar, with another in a corner, created the impression. A second glance revealed a decor of spartan simplicity. A lone drinker sat at the bar nursing a beer, while the barman washed a couple of glasses and didn’t even glance up to see who his new customer was. Two men at a table, one with a beard and ponytail, the other bald and wearing wire-rimmed glasses, broke off an intense conversation to look indignantly in Tom’s direction, as though he had interrupted them. Then, having decided that he was neither a threat nor of interest to them, they continued talking in hushed tones punctuated by earnest hand gestures over their drinks. A young couple in their twenties, pale and washed-out looking, sat at another table, not talking, gazing blankly into space.

  Tom took a seat at the bar and ordered a large scotch with ice. The barman served him without either looking at him or speaking a word. The closest he came to any human response was when the twenty-dollar bill Tom asked him to break caused a surly downturn of his mouth. Tom sat there drinking and wondering what he was doing in that place. He told himself he should call Clare and let her know he was all right – but, later, not right now. For now he needed to concentrate on what he had come here for – to trigger his memory into yielding up what it was so far determined to suppress.

  Unless, of course, there were no memories to trigger.

  But the evidence so far . . .

  He ordered another drink, and asked the barman where he might find a cab around here. The man jerked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘Head on up. You sometimes find one at the top.’

  This didn’t sound too promising, so he fumbled for his cellphone and asked the barman if he could give him a local cab number. He shook his head. ‘They won’t pick up down here.’

  Before Tom could ask why not, the man moved away to serve the drinker at the far end of the bar. Tom hit the memory button on his phone, thinking ironically how much more reliable it was than his own memory, and called up the cab company he habitually used. There was no problem till they asked where he was. He called out to the barman for the address, which he gave as 405 Pike Way. ‘It’s in Grover’s Town,’ he said.

  The reply came back, ‘Sorry we have nothing in that area. We can’t pick up there.’

  Before Tom could even protest, they hung up. He thought he caught the barman glancing at him with a smirk of satisfaction on being proved right. Tom said nothing – except to order another drink.

  He had no idea how long he had been there, or how many drinks he finally had. He was aware of dropping his wallet at one point and seeing the wad of dollars he was carrying spill out onto the floor. Somehow he managed to gather it all up without falling over, which required quite a balancing act, and no one offered to help. He noticed that the man with the ponytail and his friend with the glasses interrupted their conversation once again to watch him. Or maybe he only remembered that later, thinking back in the light of what happened afterwards.

  ‘Like I said, walk up the road. You’ll find one.’

  He’d asked the barman again about calling a cab. The barman had announced that he was closing down and started turning out the lights. The couple in the corner had left some time ago, as had the lone drinker at the far end of the bar. Others had drifted in and out during the evening. Tom had no idea what time it was. He looked at his watch, but it didn’t make much sense; either it or his head was moving around so much that it was impossible to focus.

  ‘OK, that’s it, folks, let’s go.’

  The barman wanted them out of there. Ponytail and his friend finished their drinks and departed into the night. Now Tom felt the barman’s hand on his arm, steering him in the same direction. He was too far gone to argue, though he still made some incoherent effort to insist on calling a cab and saying that he’d have another drink while he waited. He was still talking when he found himself alone outside in the dark, with the door firmly bolted behind him. A moment later the neon beer sign went out.

  He started in the direction he had been told to take. At least, he thought it was the right direction – he was far from sure. He headed towards lights, where he could see an occasional passing car in the distance. It was absolutely clear to him that he was on the wrong side of the tracks, in a part of town where cautious people did not venture at night. Too late for caution now, he told himself, stumbling awkwardly as he tried to walk faster out of there.

  Had Clare been right? he wondered. Was all he wanted an excuse to drink? Or did he need to drink because somewhere he knew that the horror he was hiding from was true? Was he drinking to forget, or to remember? He wasn’t sure he knew the difference any more.

  They stepped out from nowhere. Two men. At the same time he felt a blow in the stomach that stopped his breath and, he thought, his heart. He curled around the pain like a ball and fell to the ground. As he went down, he took another blow on the side of the head. He was barely conscious as he felt them going through his pockets. They didn’t speak, neither to each other nor to him. As fast as they had appeared, they disappeared.

  He didn’t really feel like moving, but a voice inside him kept telling him he had to. It was a mistake. As he struggled to get to his feet, the contents of his stomach gushed up into his mouth. He pitched forward and landed in a heap of retching, foul-tasting helplessness. After a while he found a handkerchief and cleaned himself up as best he could. He took several long, reviving breaths of air, sitting with his back against a wall. The lights he had been heading for looked not far away now, not as far as he had thought. He had almost reached safety. But not quite.

  The corner of his mouth started to hurt, and he could taste blood. He put his hand up to feel the damage. It didn’t seem serious, just bruising and a bitten inner lip. He started once again to push himself to his feet, and felt something under his hand. It was his wallet, emptied of cash and credit cards, of course. All the same, he slipped it carefully back into his hip pocket. He suddenly wondered yet again what the time was, and pulled back the sleeve of his jacket – to find that his watch had also gone. Of course. Why had he not expected that? He realized how slow he was, how damaged and fragmented his thought processes. He reminded himself that he had come to this place to look for the truth, however painful, and all he had done was get drunk. A wave of self-loathing swept over him, followed by another of self-pity. He recognized the reaction. He remembered it from way back. Nothing ever really changes, he told himself.

  Another thought came into his mind: he should call for help. But when he reached for his cellphone, he discovered it too had gone. He struggled to his feet and prepared to head for the lights. He didn’t know whether he overestimated his strength or underestimated the amount he had drunk. All he knew was that after a couple of steps his legs buckled under him and he felt himself staggering helplessly sideways. He didn’t know where he fell or on what, only that a curtain of blackness descended over him.

  For all he knew, it could have been the final curtain of death. And at that moment, he would not have cared.

  39

  Tom opened his eyes to a strip of grey, cold sky framed between two black walls. Perhaps it was the light that woke him; or, more likely, the painful dryness in his mouth and throat. He had no idea where he was, or why he was lying amidst a pile of plastic garbage bags and cardboard boxes. He seemed to be in an alley between two buildings, and from the smell around him one was a cheap burger joint: the air was thick with the stench of stale cooking fat and ketchup.


  The smell made him nauseous. He retched, but threw up only thin spittles of sour bile. The effort brought with it a crucifying rhythm of hammer blows inside his skull, beating time with the pumping of his heart.

  He took his time before trying to stand up. Even then, it was hard work. The main obstacles were stiffness and that thundering headache which got worse with each move he made. But he knew about those kind of headaches. He remembered them well. They wore off eventually, and, like the memory of all pain, became unreal – until the next time. There had always been a next time. And then for all those years, no next time. Until now.

  The alley as well as the garbage sacks and cardboard boxes had protected him against the worst of the cold, but he still felt as though the night air had penetrated right to his bones. He needed a drink.

  Amazing how the craving returned so quickly, he thought. You think it’s gone away, but it never does. You can pretend all you like, avoid the sight, taste or smell of the stuff. But one sip is all it takes to start you off again. That’s why the most you’ll ever be is a recovering alcoholic, never a recovered one.

  His head began to clear slightly as he walked and his circulation started up. Aside from craving alcohol, he needed water. He was parched and dehydrated. He approached a road junction around which were clustered a handful of buildings, each one oddly separate from its neighbour. It was obviously the kind of place where land was cheap and there was plenty of it to waste – which, come to think of it, was pretty much what his cab driver had said. A ghost town since the fifties. The whole place had a bleak, utilitarian look. A couple of general stores, a cheap hotel, an ugly apartment block. The traffic remained as thin as it had looked the previous night, not a cab in sight.

  He stood on the edge of the sidewalk and wondered what he was going to do. In his trouser pocket he found two dollars twenty-five in small change, which his attackers had apparently missed. He went into one of the stores that was just opening up and bought a bottle of water, which he opened even before the haggard-looking man at the checkout desk had taken his money. The man gave Tom a curious look, but made no comment. Tom asked if there was a phone he could use. The man pointed to a pay phone on the wall. He went over to it and started dialling. He wanted to tell Clare he was all right, then figure out how to get home.

  ‘Where are we? What’s the address here?’ he called over to the man on the desk.

  ‘Corner of River Drive and Pike Way,’ came the reply.

  Tom froze. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said, ‘I was dropped off at River Drive and Pike Way last night – down there.’ He pointed in the direction he had come from. The man looked puzzled for a moment, then understanding dawned.

  ‘Down there? No way. You’re talking about Pike Way and Waterside.’ He gave a brief, grim laugh. ‘That’s a bad place, man. You don’t want to go down there. River Drive’s right here. You’re looking out at it now.’

  Tom turned his gaze through the window. His mouth fell open and his head started spinning even worse than before. He stopped dialling and hung up the phone. He could not imagine how he had missed what he was looking at – except that when he had arrived at the store it must have been behind him, at an angle. Now he was looking at it full on.

  Directly across from where he stood, on the far side of a scooped-out piece of ground that he remembered as though he had been there a dozen or more times, as in a strange way he had, was the house in his nightmare.

  His hangover was forgotten as he hurried along the suddenly familiar road. He saw the house now from the angle of his dream, except that in his dream he was running away from it, and now he was running towards it. In the distance a grey horizon was streaked with the same sunrise that he recalled so well.

  Yet there was a difference. The tangle of undergrowth and trees had been cleared away, leaving short grass, rough-textured and dry, but tidily kept. The hedge that separated the formerly overgrown garden from the road had also gone, and in its place was a wire fence with a security firm’s name prominently displayed. He looked through the fence and down to the basement area in search of that half-rotten door he remembered so well. In its place was a wide, sturdy-looking steel door, painted black – probably a garage. In front of it was a turning space, concreted over, with a path leading around a corner and up one side of the house to the road beyond.

  He stood rooted to the spot, needing time to absorb what he was actually seeing as opposed to what he’d been expecting to see, what his brain had told him he must see. There was no question it was the same house, and the same landscape. But with differences – differences which, he realized, could be accounted for by the normal passage of time. Say about ten years.

  The words of his cab driver from the previous night came back to him again: the yuppies were moving in and starting to transform the neighbourhood. Maybe that was what had happened here. There were no longer any broken or boarded-up windows in the house. The brickwork had been cleaned, the roof fixed, paint applied where it was needed. The run-wild vegetation, through which he stumbled in his dream, no longer existed; nor did the old gate that he remembered making such a distinctive creaking noise as he passed through it to the road.

  It was proof that his nightmare was more than a dream. It was a memory, repeating itself as he slept, the heartbeat of his guilt, which would never go away.

  What had he done? He feared he knew only too well. But conscience – he could not think what else to call it – was forcing him to face up to and acknowledge his crime. That was the process he was going through, and it was nearing some sort of a close. The thought of what that close might be made his blood run colder than at any time during the whole awful night he had just spent.

  He started around towards the far side of the house. It struck him that he had never seen it from that side in his dream, so he had no idea what to expect. It turned out to look very like he would have imagined – a once grand house fallen on hard times, and latterly converted into apartments. He could see plants and various decorations in some of the four bay windows and in the tower windows higher up. The place looked comfortably spacious, though not fashionable or chic; but then, he reflected, rents could not be high in this neighbourhood, even though the house was just outside the worst part of it.

  There was a single front door up several steps. Next to it was a vertical line of doorbells. He counted seven of them, with names written alongside. He went up to take a closer look. Benson, Garrett, Sizemore, Webber, Morrissey, Gordon, St Leonard. None of them meant anything to him.

  Even from where he was standing on the top step at the front door, he could not see into either of the angular bay windows on each side of it: they had been built fractionally too high for that. He wondered about ringing one of the bells – but what would he say? What could he say? To anybody?

  40

  Aside from Clare, the only person who knew about the dream was Brendan Hunt. Obviously Tom would tell Clare about his discovery but he could not bring himself to do it at that moment. He did not know how to. He needed to absorb it first, to think about what he must do.

  He called Brendan Hunt from the store where he’d bought his bottle of water. He needed an opinion – unemotional, uninvolved, but from someone who knew everything about the whole story: someone who was neither as determined to put a noose around his neck as he feared Murray Schenk would be, nor as intent on denying he was a murderer, no matter what the evidence, as Clare would be.

  ‘I’m sorry to call so early,’ he said, ‘you’re probably asleep.’

  Even as he spoke, he felt the absurdity of his words. He was in the most desperate situation of his life, and he was apologizing for needing help.

  ‘On the contrary. I’m in my car, I have an early meeting. What can I do for you?’

  ‘I’ve found the house – the house I told you about, in my dream. It actually exists.’

  There was a momentary silence on the line. Then Hunt, calm and professional as ever, asked him to recount what had happened. Tom fill
ed him in on the bare details.

  ‘All right,’ Hunt said, ‘I’ll be right there. Just tell me where you are.’

  They arranged to meet on the corner of River and Pike. Hunt said he’d find it.

  Tom called Clare. She picked up on the first ring, and stifled a sob of relief when she heard his voice.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. It was all he could think of to begin with. ‘I’m all right. I’ve just called Brendan Hunt, he’s coming to pick me up.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Outside Albany. Grover’s Town.’

  ‘What are you doing out there?’

  ‘I’ll tell you about it when I’m home. I can’t now.’

  ‘Why didn’t you call me, not Brendan Hunt? I would have come for you.’

  ‘I know you would. But I have to talk to him about something. I’ll tell you when I’m home.’

  ‘Soon?’

  ‘I promise – soon.’

  Forty minutes later Hunt’s car pulled up, and Tom got in the passenger side. Hunt looked him up and down – not critically, but letting him see that his unkempt appearance had been noted.

  ‘I’ve been drinking,’ Tom said. ‘I passed out and slept rough.’

  ‘Did something trigger it? The drinking?’

  It was a shrewd question, to which Hunt already, Tom suspected, knew the answer.

  ‘Julia. Except it wasn’t Julia. It was her – Melanie.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘She reminded me of something. The place where I was pulled out of a ditch ten years ago. She sent me back here. Then I found it – the house.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Drive over there, and stop on the far side.’

  Hunt followed Tom’s directions. They sat looking down through the wire fence at the strange, now-renovated house.

  ‘In my dream it looks the way it might have a few years ago. Ten, say. About the time Melanie Hagan disappeared.’