The Five Gates of Hell

by Rupert Thomson

  The tape ended suddenly.

  ‘There’s another one somewhere,’ Georgia said. ‘I’ve been watching them all night.’

  ‘So where’ve you been?’ Nathan asked her.

  ‘I don’t know. Around.’

  ‘I was trying to find you. Yesterday, it was.’

  ‘Yesterday?’

  ‘No, wait. It was the day before. I waited outside your place all afternoon.’ He put his hand on hers. ‘I wanted to see you. It was after I had lunch with Harriet.’

  ‘Talking of Harriet.’ Georgia reached down beside the bed and pulled out another video. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you put this on.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Put it on.’

  He took the video from her, pushed it into the machine, and pressed PLAY. He sat back on the bed. He glanced at her, but she wouldn’t look at him. He faced the TV again.

  The back garden. A hot day. Every blade of grass caught the light. The lawn looked sharp, almost metallic. A bed of nails. Harriet lay in the distance, sunbathing.

  And then close-up suddenly, everything tilting, seasick. Harriet was sitting on a blue towel in her bikini, a can of Coke beside her, a radio. She said something, then smiled. Then said something else. There was tanning oil trapped, like mercury, in the crease that ran across her belly.

  Nathan turned to Georgia. ‘Why do you want me to watch this?’

  ‘Just wait,’ Georgia said.

  Darkness now. Inside the house. The view from the hallway, looking up the stairs. He noted the banisters, the moon painting that Yvonne had given him, and, high up, the pale oblong of the landing window. The darkness was blue, as if lightning had struck and left a low electric charge behind.

  And then a shadow passed the window, coming down the stairs. It was Harriet. At first he thought she was wearing that white silk underwear of hers. Then he realised she was naked. The white areas were the parts of her body that hadn’t been exposed to the sun. She came down the stairs, a smile held awkwardly on her face, as if balanced, her eyes lit with a strange glitter. He couldn’t take his eyes off her breasts, her groin. So white, raw somehow, almost painful. That smile, her nudity, the blue gloom of the house. He turned to Georgia. ‘I don’t think I want to watch this.’

  She didn’t take her eyes off the screen. ‘It’s nearly over.’

  ‘I don’t want to watch any more.’

  She looked at him. ‘I thought you liked her.’

  He shook his head slowly, a sad smile on his face. ‘That’s not why it happened, George.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me? I thought,’ and her voice shrank, ‘I thought we were brothers.’

  ‘We are brothers.’

  ‘So why didn’t you tell me, Nathan? Why did I have to hear it from her?’

  He began to explain it to her. It had started so long ago, he said, long before they became brothers. He told her everything, and she listened carefully, her head lowered, her fingers wandering among the beads of her necklace.

  ‘It wasn’t like sex,’ he finished by saying, ‘not really. It was more like an exorcism or something. She’d screwed me up for so long. I had to get her out of my system.’

  Georgia was silent for a while, then she lifted her head and a smile tiptoed on to her face. ‘You know what she told me?’

  ‘No. What?’

  ‘She told me you were lousy in bed.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I suppose I was.’ Then he began to smile.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ she asked.

  ‘I was just thinking. She’ll never know.’

  ‘Never know what?’

  ‘How good I am in bed.’

  She stared at him. ‘But I thought you said you –’

  ‘We did. But not in bed.’

  ‘Where then?’

  ‘In the summerhouse.’

  ‘You didn’t.’

  ‘We did.’ He looked at her and saw that she was laughing, and then he knew he had her back again.

  But he hadn’t finished yet, he had to go on. This laughter of hers, it would seal her return to him.

  ‘In the summerhouse,’ he said, ‘with all those flowerpots and bicycle pumps. With all those watering cans.’ He shook his head. ‘I was just about to come and I knelt on a tomato.’

  Tears were sliding down her cheeks. All the tiny bottles of pills tumbled off the bed and rolled across the floor.

  ‘I was lousy,’ he said. ‘I was really lousy.’

  Towards midday she dropped into a deep sleep. He didn’t want to risk losing her again so he stayed beside her. Those jets were circling in the small sky of the room, circling like vultures, and he took her hand and held it while she slept. He watched TV, he listened to her breathing change. Then, as dusk fell, he grew tired too. He lay down beside her and soon he was asleep.

  He woke once, sat upright. ‘What’s that?’ he said.

  ‘What?’ she murmured.

  ‘I thought I heard something.’

  She turned over. ‘You’re getting as bad as Dad.’

  He lay down again, and slept.

  The next time he woke, his watch said eleven. He couldn’t believe he’d slept so long. He left the bed and crossed the landing to his old room. He switched the light on, and jumped. A thin man was sitting in the chair by the window. Blond hair, glasses, dark-red leather jacket. The man reached up and scratched his neck, just to the left of his Adam’s apple, with the first two fingers of his right hand. A few flakes of dry skin trickled down through the yellow air.

  ‘Jed?’

  Jed just stared at him.

  ‘I didn’t recognise you,’ Nathan said.

  Jed looked down at himself, as if he’d forgotten, then he looked up again. ‘So what’s new?’ His voice was thin, whittled to a point, like a stick.

  He was wearing different clothes. No black top hat, no black jacket. He looked like one of those street preachers, the ones who come by in the daytime and stick one foot in the door and tell you what hell’s like. Mostly they look like they’ve been there. They’re not easy to get rid of either. If you slam the door in their faces, they just walk right through the wall.

  ‘Who let you in, Jed?’

  ‘Nobody let me in. I broke in.’

  ‘What’s the idea?’

  Jed reached into his pocket and took out a piece of candy. He unwrapped the candy and put it in his mouth. He dropped the wrapper, watched it see-saw to the floor. He smiled. ‘How’s Creed?’

  ‘Creed?’ Nathan swallowed.

  ‘How’s Neville?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘You don’t listen too well, do you?’ The candy grated against Jed’s teeth. ‘The first night we met I told you I used to work for a guy in the funeral business. I told you I did a job for him. I told you his name too. Creed.’

  Nathan still didn’t see it.

  ‘Neville Creed,’ Jed said. He leaned back in the chair. ‘When I told you I’d killed someone, it didn’t seem to bother you much. I thought it was the coke, but it wasn’t that. You’d heard it all before, hadn’t you? You knew all about it.’

  Jed stared at Nathan. There was a splintering as Jed bit clean through the piece of candy in his mouth.

  ‘It’s no use acting innocent. I know you’re sleeping with him. My hunch is, you’re working for him too. You’ve been working for him all along. You didn’t just happen to be in that bar that night. You’d been planted there. Old friend, small world, fuck,’ and Jed laughed, it was a bitter laugh. Nathan had heard Dad laugh like that on the night of the spaceship.

  ‘You’re not making any sense, Jed. I didn’t even know his name was Neville till a couple of days ago. I didn’t know he worked for a funeral parlour. He said he –’ And the whole thing came tumbling down, a set of dominoes stretching back into the past: that meeting on the promenade, the grey man under the umbrella, Reid’s casual questions about his ‘friend’. Maxie Carlo and his anagrams. All he could hear was one
long, rippling crash as the dominoes fell. He’d been so fooled, so used. He stared down at the carpet. ‘Oh shit.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Jed said. ‘Oh shit.’

  ‘He really works for a funeral parlour?’

  ‘Look,’ and Jed’s voice softened with leashed rage, ‘I don’t want to listen to any more of your stories. It’s showdown time tonight. I’m meeting up with Creed and you’re coming with me.’

  Nathan took a step backwards. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t want anything to do with this.’

  Jed reached into his coat. He pulled out a gun and laid it casually across the palm of his left hand. ‘Yes, you do.’

  Nathan sat down on the edge of the bed.

  ‘What’s the time?’ Jed asked.

  ‘About eleven.’

  ‘All right. This is what we’re going to do. We’re going to get in your car and we’re going to drive down to the West Pier and then we’re –’

  Suddenly Nathan remembered Creed’s phone-call. ‘Listen, Jed, when I was with Creed last night –’

  ‘Where’d he take you? The Ocean Bed Motel?’ Jed leered. ‘Christ, I’ve seen a million like you.’

  ‘He made a phone-call late last night. He said something about the West Pier. You be there with the boat, he said. I think it was-’

  Jed uncoiled from the chair. ‘I said no more stories. We’re leaving.’

  It was dark on the landing, and Nathan didn’t bother to turn the light on. He thought of Harriet walking down the stairs in that movie Dad had made. His movements seemed like some kind of replica or echo. He saw himself naked, bars of thick white paint splashed across his chest, across his groin, as if he was taking part in a tribal ceremony, an initiation, even, perhaps, a sacrifice, and he saw Jed behind him, dressed in his true clothing again, the clothing he wore under his skin, that black suit with the shiny elbows, shiny shoulderblades, that voodoo hat perched on this head, a medicine man whose medicine made you ill, not well.

  They left the house by the back door. As Nathan unlocked the car, a bird called from a nearby tree. One low, reverberating call; a rolled R. If nostalgia had a sound, that would be it. It reminded him of Dad, and he wondered what Dad would’ve thought if he could’ve witnessed this scene. The mere fact of driving somewhere at midnight. Mad. And yet they’d been deceived in such similar ways. A different setting, that was all. A difference of scale. Like father, like son. And suddenly he relaxed, stopped caring. He smiled as he reached across and unlocked the door on the passenger side.

  Jed slammed the door. ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Nathan fitted the key in the ignition. ‘What happened to your clothes?’

  ‘I sold them.’

  ‘You think if you change your clothes people aren’t going to recognise you?’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘They’ll still – ’

  Jed touched the gun to Nathan’s ear. ‘Drive.’

  Nathan shrugged. He reversed out to the street. He looked left and right. No grey man tonight. They didn’t need any grey men any more. All thoughts were read, all movements known.

  Blenheim slept. Only one take-out place was still open: HOT CHICKENS. COLD DRINKS. White neon and stainless steel. Two drunks in the doorway, sucking on bones. A faint rasping in his ear and he glanced sideways. Only Jed scratching again. The inside of his forearm this time. His nails left long red smears on the pale flesh. Jed had swopped his clothes and dyed his hair. Nothing he could do about his skin, though.

  He drove through Blenheim towards the bridge. Towards what, though, really? He saw the dead skin falling in the car, falling as softly as snow. He’d have to vacuum in the morning. He kept his thinking light, skimming thoughts like stones across the black water of events, but he knew that sooner or later, no matter how many times they bounced, they’d sink into those depths, depths that held the unknown, the unforeseeable, they’d sink and maybe they would never rise again.

  They’d turned all the lights out on the bridge. After midnight then. He saw the last ferry creep towards the M Street Quay. As he came down off the bridge he took the South Side Highway to the promenade. The West Pier lay off to the right, crouching over the ocean, unlit. It had been years since there had been any life on the West Pier. He looked across at Jed and knew that it was Jed who’d chosen the place.

  The turnstiles were shackled with chains, so they had to climb over. The city council had put up a sign: WARNING. DANGEROUS STRUCTURE. DO NOT PROCEED BEYOND THIS POINT.

  They proceeded.

  Nathan looked down through the gaps between the wooden slats. The ocean unrolled on the beach fifty feet below. He saw the water shatter into froth and then slide backwards fast, sucking at the metal pillars. He thought he felt the pier shake, but it was probably just that notice, the drugs still running in his blood, imagination.

  ‘Hands behind your back,’ Jed said.

  Nathan stared at him. ‘What?’

  ‘You fucking deaf? Hands behind your back.’ Jed began to unbuckle his belt.

  Nathan clasped one hand with the other, held them against the small of his back. Jed stood behind him. Nathan felt Jed knotting the belt around his wrists.

  ‘Why are you doing that?’

  Jed slid the barrel of the gun against Nathan’s cheek. It was cold as toothache. It smelt of oil, his sleepwalking days. ‘We’re going to meet your lover,’ Jed hissed. ‘Don’t want you getting carried away.’

  ‘Oh for Christ’s sake,’ Nathan said. ‘You still don’t get it, do you? I’m on your side in this.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ and Jed smirked, ‘I forgot.’ Then the smirk vanished and he slammed Nathan against the wall of the ticket booth. ‘Now listen, golden boy, and listen good. I don’t want another squeak out of you. Do you understand?’

  Nathan nodded. There was no way of getting through to Jed. He knew that now.

  They began to edge down the left side of the pier, Nathan in front, Jed just behind. DANGEROUS STRUCTURE was right. All the paint had flaked off or worn away, and most of what lay beneath had either rusted or rotted through. If you stood still you could feel the metal pillars totter, you could hear them wince and groan. It was no illusion after all. Nathan had to test every footstep before he took it or he could be plunging fifty feet into the ocean with his hands tied. Nor were the safety railings to be trusted. In some places they had buckled or bent. In others it looked as if someone had hurled themselves towards the ocean with such force that they had burst clean through; each gap had the ominous allure of a successful suicide atttempt. The West Pier was up for sale, he remembered. The asking price: $1. The catch was, whoever bought it had to spend a million restoring it to its original condition.

  Nathan looked east, towards the City Pier. The casino was still open. Lights reached out across the water. If he slitted his eyes, the pier looked as if it was balancing on half a dozen golden springs. He wondered if Maxie Carlo was playing tonight. He stopped, cocked his head. Listened for the organ’s drone, the clip-clop of the drum machine. Instead, he thought he heard coins pulsing into a metal slot. A jackpot, by the sound of it. Somebody, at least, was winning tonight. Jed shoved him in the back and he moved on.

  Halfway along the pier they passed close to a children’s funfair. They were about a hundred yards out now, and a warm breeze blew off the land, threading its way through the abandoned machinery, shifting anything that had come loose. The last curve of the helterskelter had snapped off; it hung at a curious angle, bent backwards, like a badly broken limb. The roundabout turned slowly, all by itself, as if ghosts were riding it.

  At last they reached the end of the pier. An area of wooden slats with metal railings on three sides. On the fourth side, the side nearest the land, there was a weatherboard wall, once white, with a flight of steps rising to a balcony. This would be the back wall of the old ballroom. Nathan looked at Jed. Jed’s pants were too big in the waist. He had to hold them up with one hand.

  ‘Sure you don’t want the belt back?’ Natha
n said.

  Jed glared. ‘I told you to shut up.’

  Nathan shrugged. He looked over the railings. There was a platform of studded metal below, and a winch that leaned out over the water. This was where you would’ve waited for your speedboat ride in the old days. Beyond that, just ocean. He turned back again, leaned cautiously against the railings, his numb fingers touching metal. Jed was standing with one hand in his pocket now. The other dangled next to his thigh, rose from time to time to scratch his neck, his ribs, the side of his face. Ten minutes went by. A clock struck something. One, probably. And as the last note warped in the air and faded, Nathan heard a faint clatter. Jed heard it too, and stiffened. Nathan eased forwards, away from the railings.

  ‘I thought you said it was just you and me.’

  The voice had come from above. They both looked up.

  A skeleton was standing on the balcony. It was Creed. He was wearing the suit of bones.

  ‘You must be out of your mind.’

  Jed still hadn’t spoken.

  ‘To come back here?’ Creed slowly turned his head from side to side. ‘Out of your mind.’

  He began to descend. The steps, though rotten, held. His eyes never left Jed’s face, not once. The bones clicked as he moved, like dice in a gambler’s hand. One throw. Death if you lose. Nathan glanced at Jed. Jed’s head moved in fractions of an inch, keeping Creed in his sights. He was shivering.

  At the foot of the steps Creed stopped. He turned his eyes on Nathan. ‘This is a surprise.’ He didn’t seem surprised. But then nothing got to Creed’s face, not unless he wanted it to.

  Nathan spoke up. ‘He thinks I’m working for you. He tied me up.’ And he turned his back, showed Creed his hands.

  Creed just laughed.

  Jed cut across the laughter. ‘Did you bring the money?’

  Creed opened his briefcase and showed the inside to Jed. The money was stacked in neat, sarcastic piles.

  Jed sneered. ‘You really think you can pay for what you did?’ He drew his gun.

  Suddenly a hand reached through a gap in the slats and locked round Jed’s ankle. Jed tripped, fell. Creed stepped backwards, closing the briefcase, smiling. Then a man leapt over the railings, something black and springy in his hand. Jed twisted on the ground and fired at Creed. The sound of the shot was loud, contained, as if the night had walls. Then the wind snatched the sound away. Creed’s smile had shrunk, but he was still standing. The man struck Jed on the neck. A grunt and Jed’s head hit the wood. The hand holding Jed’s ankle vanished. A second man climbed through a gap in the slats. He was wearing a leather jacket and army boots. Nathan recognised him straight away. The Skull.