The Five Gates of Hell

by Rupert Thomson

  ‘He ain’t going to talk to you,’ the old man said.

  Jed frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He’s been here five years. He ain’t talked to nobody.’

  Jed turned away from the old man. Thinking back, he could remember other times when Vasco had seemed to go missing inside himself. On the mudbanks of the river once. Then that morning when they stood in the place where Scraper had been killed. And again the night they torched the construction site in Meadowland. It hadn’t mattered then: he’d always come back. This time, though, he’d gone further. Further than ever before.

  Jed bent close to his friend. ‘I should’ve listened to you. You were doing the right thing. You were just clumsy, that’s all.’

  He sat back. Dinner at Vasco’s house. A three-car garage, a flagpole on the lawn, a wife. Too many distractions. Vasco had tried to warn him that night, and he’d ignored it. He’d thought Vasco was being dramatic. But the drama only came later, when Vasco sold the story to the papers.

  He bent close again. ‘That story you leaked, it never would’ve stuck.’ He shook his head. ‘You must’ve been crazy to try and pull something like that.’ He bent closer still. ‘You should’ve asked me, Vasco. I always had ideas. We could’ve done it together.’

  No, no. That was just dream talk. He’d already been drawn into Creed’s magnetic field by then. He never would’ve taken sides against Creed. ‘Listen, Vasco. I want to bring him down. I want to break him. But I need your help. You helped me before. A couple of times. You can do it again. We can get him, but we’ve got to move now. It’s our last chance.’ He eased back slowly, hands braced on his knees. He waited. But Vasco wasn’t even there. Jed looked down. He didn’t know what else he could say.

  ‘You’re not the first one who’s tried.’

  Jed spun round. It was the old man again. The old man took a step backwards, sniggered. ‘Others’ve tried, don’t make no difference.’

  ‘Others?’

  The old man nodded.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Don’t make no difference who. He ain’t going to talk is all. Me, I talk up a storm. Don’t get enough time for what I got to say. But him,’ and he pointed at Vasco with his hymn book, ‘he ain’t got nothing he wants to say, not to nobody.’

  Jed stared at Vasco. Sharon had told him a story once. It was one of her typical tall stories, it belonged with her magic bag. And yet it seemed to have come alive in his head, and he found that he could remember parts he didn’t even think he’d heard.

  It was about a man who lived in a small village on the other side of the world. This man had a pig that he wanted to sell. On market day he set out for the nearby town, but as he reached the gates of the town he fell down dead. His family buried him in sacred ground, which was up a mountain, Jed remembered, past some big trees.

  Not long after being buried, the man rose up out of his grave and shook the earth from his limbs and walked through the big trees, back into the village. He told his family that he’d had a dream. In the dream he’d appeared at the temple of the dead, but the god who guarded the gate had denied him entry. ‘You’re not ready yet,’ the god had told him. ‘You must go back.’

  How did the story go on? Something about the man turning strange. Something about him sitting outside his hut and staring straight ahead as if there was nothing in front of him, nothing for miles. Jed’s eyes drifted down to Vasco, and he shivered.

  At first the man’s family let him be, but they soon got scared. They asked the wise men what to do. The wise men couldn’t really help. They said that the man’s soul had left his body while he was lying in the ground, and now he was trapped between two lives, just waiting to die. It was then that the mother had an inspiration. ‘We must sell the pig,’ she said. If they sold the pig, her son would have his last desire, and maybe then he’d find peace.

  She put the pig up for auction. There wasn’t much interest at first. A pig, after all, was only a pig. It wasn’t even a very succulent pig; if anything, Jed remembered, it was kind of scrawny. But, all of a sudden, rumours began to fly through the village and the surrounding countryside. There was a pig for sale. The pig had some kind of magic power. Whoever owned the pig would never die. People came from far and wide, the bidding soared.

  By the time it was over, the pig had fetched a huge price. The mother went to tell her son the news, but when she touched him on the shoulder he toppled sideways. She didn’t know whether to laugh or weep. The family buried him again, and this time he stayed in his grave, and his body turned black and sank into the earth.

  Jed looked into Vasco’s eyes. Maybe the same kind of story had happened here. Maybe Vasco had asked for death, and been turned away. And so he’d walked naked through the big trees, and now he was sitting outside his house, waiting for some god to call his name. Jed felt like one of the family: invisible and scared. Like the mother, he had to think of something. He had to try and change where Vasco was.

  ‘You recognise me, don’t you, Vasco?’ He was so close, he could smell the stale urine, the antiseptic. ‘I can’t believe you don’t recognise me.’

  The old man touched Jed on the shoulder and Jed looked round. ‘You want to hear a song?’ The old man was already fumbling through the pages.

  ‘No,’ Jed said. ‘Just leave us alone.’

  ‘I found a good one.’ The old man was holding the hymn book in both hands and shifting hopefully from one foot to the other.

  ‘I said, leave us alone,’ Jed snapped.

  The old man backed away across the ward, his eyes skidding on the floor, the hymn book dangling against his thigh like part of a broken limb.

  Some of the anger was still with Jed when he turned back to Vasco. He’d tried everything and got nowhere. He could only think of one last way he might get through. He put his mouth close to Vasco’s ear.

  ‘I know who killed your brother,’ he whispered.

  He drew back. Nothing.

  He leaned down again. ‘Your brother, Francis,’ he whispered. ‘I know who killed him.’

  He waited. Still nothing.

  ‘It was me. I killed him.’

  Suddenly those pale hands were fastened round his neck. The arms a blur of black hair, blue with all those deaths. Room for one more. Jed tried to break the hold, but the hands just locked and tightened. He was on the floor and Vasco was above him. He could see Vasco’s face and it was blank. Then black ink began to seep in around the edges of his vision. The stench of stale urine. Like old Mr Garbett. The soiled yellow cardigan, the dusty brown bottle on the floor. The click-click-click of a spool still turning when the tape’s run out. A pair of striped pants, an open fly. A shrivelled penis nodding in the gap. Moscow, Brussels, Helsinki. The click-click-click, won’t someone switch that off? Oslo, Hilversum. The penis uncurling, lifting, swelling. The black ink flooding through his head.

  ‘Are you all right?’ The Sister was kneeling beside him.

  He sat up, touched his forehead. ‘My hat,’ he tried to say, ‘where’s my hat?’ but his voice didn’t work properly.

  The Sister spoke to a nurse. ‘I think he wants his hat.’

  The nurse handed Jed his hat. He took it, thanked her, put it on. Then brought one hand up to support his throat. He thought he could hear trees. Leaves rustling, leaves in wind. He looked up. Saw Vasco wrestling with three attendants. The struggle was taking place in near silence. That sound he could hear was the sound of their starched white uniforms. Vasco’s limbs twisted and convulsed, but his face was still blank. His eyes, also blank, were pinned on Jed.

  ‘It was Creed.’ Jed was trying to shout, but his voice would only crack and squeak. ‘Creed told me to do it.’

  The Sister gripped him by the arm. ‘This way, sir.’

  ‘That’s what I wanted to tell you, Vasco. That’s why I came. I’m going to bring that bastard down, but I need your help –’

  ‘That’s enough.’ The Sister steered him towards the door.

  ‘He m
ade me do it, Vasco,’ Jed croaked. ‘He made me.’ The doors swung closed. He could still see Vasco’s blank face framed in the square glass panel that made up the top half of the door. ‘Would you like a song?’ he heard the old man cry. A cackle, then he was round the corner, out of earshot.

  The Sister took him to see the doctor on duty. After a brief examination, the doctor told him it was severe bruising, nothing more, and prescribed a course of pain-killers. The Sister had the prescription made up for him in the hospital dispensary, then she led him back to the lobby.

  ‘I think it would be better,’ she said, ‘if you didn’t visit Mr Gorelli again.’

  Nobody was in when he got back to the tower. He went and stood in front of the bathroom mirror. The ghosts of Vasco’s fingers had appeared on his neck. He stole a scarf out of Silence’s bedroom and wrapped it round the bruises. He’d tell Silence that he had the flu.

  He heated a tin of vegetable soup, but he had to leave all the vegetables. He couldn’t eat, only drink. He couldn’t even swallow the pain-killers he’d been given. It hurt too much. He had to grind the tablets up with the back of a spoon and swallow the powder in a glass of water. He went to bed early and lay on his back in the dark.

  He had a dream that night. He was standing in a garden. There was an old man lying on the branch of a tree. Another, younger man stood below him, listening. Jed spoke to them; they both ignored him. He was just turning away when a strange machine lumbered through the air towards him. It looked like the inside of a radio, but it was the size of a helicopter. He watched it knock against a building and veer sideways, narrowly missing a tree. Everybody on the lawn was scattering.

  Then the machine swooped down and plucked the old man off his branch. At first he seemed to think it was fun, a kind of fairground ride. The machine jolted, twisted, groaned. It collided with everything in sight, but it always lurched back into the air again. Only gradually did it become clear that this was the machine’s way of killing people.

  The old man’s friends managed to pin the machine to the grass. As soon as they’d released the old man they began to attack the machine with anything they could lay their hands on. Some had iron bars, others had planks. One had an axe. When the axe struck, the machine let out a scream, as if it was a human being in pain. Then something even stranger started happening. One moment it looked like valves and pipes and fuse-boxes, the next it looked like a heart, intestines, lungs. It flickered backwards and forwards between the two, it couldn’t seem to decide which one it really was. Still the blows descended, sometimes clanging against metal, sometimes splashing into flesh. Then, suddenly, it assumed its human form. There was even a head, though only the lower half could be seen. And with every second that passed less and less of the head was visible, it was as if it was escaping through a hole in reality, it seemed to be trying to draw its tortured body after it. One of the friends caught on. He swung the axe and severed the head from the body. A scream not of pain now but of rage and the body reared, stood up. It tottered across the lawn, blood spilling from its neck. It grew a new head, and the face was grey and mad. Blood fitted the scalp like a red skullcap. And then it saw Jed, he was hiding behind a tree, but it was no good, the tree was too narrow. It was turning now, it was bearing down on him …

  He woke, the sheets cold with sweat. His neck pulsed. It was agony. He got up, went to the kitchen. Ground two more tablets into powder. Drank them down. He leaned on the window, still trembling from the dream.

  He never dreamed, never. He thought dreams were bullshit, mumbo-jumbo, a waste of time. If somebody started telling him their dreams, he always switched off right away. That red giant, though. He was hard to shake.

  The city lay below, a grid of orange lines, secret parcels of darkness between. He thought of his favourite slot machine. In the bar of the Commercial Hotel in Adam’s Creek. How long ago. All that had happened since. What did it say across the top? ALL WINS ON LIT LINES ONLY. It was the same here. The same now. He’d staked everything on this game. The lines were lit. The rest was up to him.

  Red Flags

  It was a battle to get in, the waves were strong, but soon he was lying on the other side of the water. The ocean cradled him. Moved him up towards the sky and moved him back again. The last twelve hours came to him in flashes. It had happened with such ease. Elation first, then pleasure. Lastly, fear. And there were gaps between, black enough to be unconsciousness. He remembered feeling he’d been taken by a current, remembered feeling he could wait for the next big wave and ride it to the shore; he remembered thinking he’d accomplished that. Now he wasn’t so sure. He felt as if he might still be in that current’s grip. Even now, he thought, those high-powered binoculars could be trained on him. He turned in the water. A wave lifted him and, looking back towards the city, he saw the grey turrets of the Palace Hotel. Even now, he thought.

  When he walked out of the water, Harriet was standing on the beach holding his towel. She seemed to relish his surprise. He took the towel from her and began to dry himself.

  ‘You shouldn’t be swimming,’ she said.

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘The red flags are up. It’s dangerous.’

  ‘I’m a lifeguard,’ he said, ‘remember?’ He rubbed his hair, then pushed it back out of his eyes. ‘What are you doing here anyway?’

  ‘That’s nice,’ she said.

  He sighed.

  ‘I’ve come to take you to lunch,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘I want to talk to you,’ she said and before he could reply she was walking away. ‘I’ll wait for you in the car.’

  He took his time drying.

  As soon as he got into the car, she started the engine and pulled out into the traffic. They drove along in silence for a while. Then, casually, like someone making conversation, she said, ‘You came home pretty late last night.’

  ‘It was pretty late,’ he said, ‘yes.’

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘I was out.’

  ‘Well, obviously.’

  She turned the radio on. One of those easy-listening stations. All swooning strings and lush brass.

  ‘You mind if I change this?’ he asked her.

  ‘I like it,’ she said.

  She tightened her lips, holding the smile inside. It showed only as a narrowing at the corners of her eyes, a kind of temporary roundness in her cheeks, as if she had fruit in there, or candy.

  He looked out of the window. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘A little place I know,’ she said. ‘It’s in Torch Bay.’

  Torch Bay. He might’ve guessed. It was just about the most pretentious suburb in the city. White yachts, beauty parlours, haughty blondes in foreign cars. Some people called it TB, for short. Like the disease.

  They pulled up outside a place called Maison something. Shrubs in tubs on the sidewalk. Coachlamps. Valet parking.

  ‘I’m not dressed for this,’ he said.

  She slipped her feet into black suede pumps, teased her fringe out in the mirror. ‘You’re fine.’

  As they entered the restaurant a waiter took her hand and bent over it, his hair swirling into the crown of his head the way bathwater disappears down a plughole. They were led to a table by the window. Nathan looked around. A peppermint interior. Air-conditioning on Hi-Cool. A woman perched on a stool at the bar in a lime-green jumpsuit, amethyst lipstick and enough gold chains to get her elected mayor. He turned back to Harriet. ‘So what was it you wanted to talk about?’

  The waiter appeared at her shoulder.

  ‘I think we should order first,’ she said, ‘don’t you?’ She didn’t have to look at the menu. ‘I’ll have the avocado salad,’ she told the waiter, ‘and some mineral water.’ She turned to Nathan. ‘What about you, darling?’

  ‘I told you already. I’m not hungry.’

  ‘But you must have something.’

  ‘I’ll have some coffee,’ he said, ‘then I’d better go.’


  ‘Will you have the coffee now, sir?’ the waiter asked him.

  ‘Yes,’ Nathan said, ‘now.’

  ‘That’ll be all, thank you,’ Harriet told the waiter.

  The waiter bowed once, backed away.

  Harriet snapped her bag open. She took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. ‘You’ve lost all your nice manners,’ she said, and she inhaled, her pale lips tightening around the filter.

  He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms.

  ‘You never had much respect for me,’ she went on, ‘but at least you had nice manners. Now they seem to have completely vanished.’ She tapped her cigarette against the lip of the ashtray. ‘I don’t know what your father would’ve thought.’

  She raised the cigarette to her lips, inhaled again. Then she turned her head to one side and blew the smoke across the restaurant. Her eyes never left his face. ‘I imagine,’ she said, ‘that he would’ve been rather disappointed.’

  He saw that she would always use his love for Dad against him. Almost as if she was jealous of it. ‘Is that what you brought me here to talk about,’ he said, ‘my manners?’

  She laughed, but there was no amusement in it. This was something new, this sourness. It told of her many disappointments. It was their residue.

  The waiter was back. Salad, fizzy water, coffee with a dome of froth. Nathan reached for a sachet of sugar. There was an advertisement on the back. THE HOUSE OF SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, it said. YOUR PEACE OF MIND IS OUR SATISFACTION. So they were even advertising on sugar now. The House of Sweetness and Light. They probably had a monopoly on everyone who died of diabetes. He tore the sachet open, watched the granules sink into the froth. He liked the way the froth seemed to open, swallow the sugar, and then close again as if nothing had happened.

  ‘Nathan?’

  He looked up. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’ve seen a lawyer.’

  ‘Oh. What did they say?’

  ‘They say the house belongs to you and Georgia.’ ‘That’s what I told you.’

  ‘They say Rona’s got no claim. None whatsoever.’

  Nathan waited.