The Assistant

by S. K. Tremayne

Or maybe I don’t have time to wait.

  There is a faint light at the bottom of the bathroom door. But it is not the silveriness of streetlamps, or the bright light of bulbs: it is vague, yellowy, and uncertain. Flickering. And now comes the first wisp of smoke, trailing under the door.

  She’s set the flat on fire. That perfume wasn’t perfume, it was something else: petrol, ethanol, probably lighter fuel. Jenny uses it all the time for her Zippo. She is going to burn the place down.

  The smoke thickens. My throat tightens. Deep and primal fear flickers into life, like the flames out there. I will die in here of smoke inhalation – or the fire itself. I cannot guarantee Simon will get here on time. Or the police. The only one who can save me now is me.

  Grabbing a handtowel, I shove it under a running tap. Soaking it. This I tie around my face: as a mask, a barrier against the heat, and smoke. Then, thrusting my terror aside, I go to the door, unlock it and step out. The thick, oily smoke fills the entire hall, making the darkness worse. Beyond the smoke there are flames to the left and to the right. I see what Jenny has done now. She has sprayed lighter fuel, or whatever, over every Assistant, and phone, and laptop, everything. She is burning them all. Jenny said she would fix the Assistants once and for all. This is her method. Consume them in flames, like witches.

  And they are burning fiercely and blackly, they must contain very flammable stuff, exotic plastic, I don’t know, because the intensity of the flames has ignited everything else: curtains, rugs, chairs. Flames are licking up the woodwork of the door frames, playful and lethal. And the external doors, of course, are locked.

  ‘Jenny!’ I shout. ‘Unlock the doors. Electra! Unlock the doors!’

  There is no response. But I get a glimpse of Jenny, as the smoke briefly parts. She is in the living room, where the flames are fiercest, sitting cross-legged on the floor, a silhouette beyond the fires that burn on my table, on the shelves, the Turkish rugs; the home that burns, with us inside.

  The heat is so intense I shield my face with my arm. The wet towel is already drying. Torn with fear, I step into the living room. In a few more seconds this smoke will kill me, and Jenny. Fire snaps at my ankles.

  I shout, through the smoke, ‘Jenny! Unlock the doors. Come with me!’

  Nothing. She just sits there, cross-legged, on the floor. Behind the fumes I see that she is sucking her thumb. Like a little girl. Stubborn, mute, sad. My friend. She may have wanted to see me dead, but it is my daddy that made her into this. Yet she will not be helped. Desperate, I turn, and look down the hallway. There is one possible escape route, if we can’t open the doors. Run to Tabitha’s bedroom, and jump out of the window. It is maybe a four- or six-metres drop from that window, but there is snow in the garden outside. We might break our ankles; we might break our necks; but in here we are definitely going to die.

  The flames are starting to roar. Like a monster. The Ticklemonster coming back, to finish us off. The heat is unbearable. I have mere moments left.

  ‘Jenny, come on!’

  I reach a hand through the wild flames to her. She does not even acknowledge me. Just sits there, sucking her thumb, staring ahead, in her jeans and jumper. I see she is also drenched in some darkening liquid. She is covered with lighter fuel: there are empty canisters around her. She wants to die. The flames are leaping towards her, they want to eat her. I can see the fire snatching, and grabbing, her jumper. She is on fire. A horrible thing. And still she sucks her thumb and remains rigid. As she burns.

  One last urgent go.

  ‘Jenny, please, grab my hand, we can jump, out of Tabitha’s window. PLEASE.’

  She does not move. My skin is scorching hot. It may already be too late to rescue myself. But I will try.

  Run for it. Down the smoky hall, past the man with the dog’s head, past the skull from Mexico, past the photo of Tabitha on horseback, past the kitchen where the Assistant is burning at the centre of a wider blaze, shelves and cookbooks, everything aflame. Even the wooden floor is on fire. The entire structure burns.

  Into Tabitha’s room. The fire is pretty bad in here, as well, but the screen Assistant – which burns just like everything else – is on the opposite side of the room to the window. I have a fraction of a chance. Before the whole room goes whoof, before the whole place reaches some critical mass of heat and flame, and explodes, consuming me.

  I leap over the bed. And push, desperately, at the window frame.

  The window is jammed. By ice maybe, or some combination of ice and flame. The window is jammed. So I have to break it. As I reach for a heavy glass vase, I hear a crackle, and smell a darker, pungent burning. My hair is on fire. A stray flame has jumped, igniting my hair. Slapping my own head, dancing and maddened, I put out the flames. Then I take up the vase, and fling it, wildly, at the window.

  The pane shatters. Using my fist, inside a bunched sleeve, I punch away some of the low fangs of glass that remain. Now I can climb up, on to the sill, my hands bleeding from the shards. But the opening of the window has enraged the fire. It howls and roars, belching smoke into the winter sky outside.

  Is that snow down there? I think it is. But is it enough? Too dark to properly see. The heat on my back is intense. There is no choice.

  Into the void, I jump.

  56

  Jo

  The trees on Delancey Street, right outside my window, are bending in a cold and blustery wind. It’s another chilly day, but it is also sunny. And clear. Spring has arrived, and the ice has finally departed.

  Likewise, the police and journalists, and the rest. My remarkable story was quite the thing for a while. The Big Tech companies were interrogated, but they denied any link between digital Assistants and the near-fatal accident of Simon Todd, or the death of my mother, or Jenny Lansman’s suicide by fire. The reassurances were duly believed. The malfunctions were limited in scope, it was decided: all down to a bizarre coding error, in a small batch finished in London.

  Simon is still in a wheelchair, the doctors say one day soon he will be able to walk, but he will never run. Someone actually called him ‘lucky’, given the gravity of the computer error in his high-tech car. I suppose, in a way, he was lucky. I certainly was: a leap from six metres up, into snow, and all I got was a badly sprained ankle, some cuts, and concussion. I spent two nights in hospital.

  It has been universally accepted that I was hacked. By Jenny. Who then took her own life. Just like her heroine.

  Sitting at the living room table, I gaze around the flat. It’s a rental, a few doors down from Tabitha’s gutted apartment. I have decided I like the area, so I am staying. In fact, I like it so much, I am planning on buying my own place hereabouts: because I have money.

  My story is famous, my story is therefore sellable. Some big-shot LA friend of my brother’s called me up, some weeks ago, and offered to buy my ‘life rights’, for a movie. I didn’t even know you could do that: sell the story of your life, for cash. Lots and lots of cash. I agreed to their deal, on condition they gave me a shot at writing the script. They said sure. And cut the cheque.

  From nothing, I am rich.

  Yet I am also damaged. We have all been damaged. Even as Tabitha waits to give birth, Arlo’s start-up has been cancelled – too much bad publicity. He has, however, managed to find himself a decent job somewhere else in Big Tech. So he will survive.

  No one, however, has been arrested. After the death of Jenny and the ‘accident’ involving Simon, I went to the police and told them everything about Jamie Trewin. A weary detective took pity on me. He told me that he could, if I insisted, reopen the case, but in these tragic circumstances, he was highly reluctant. ‘Far too much time has elapsed,’ he told me. ‘Your evidence would be unreliable, a chance of conviction is small. And Jamie Trewin’s only close relative, his father, passed away a few years ago. So who benefits? No one.’

  He then gave me a kind and silent stare, which said: You need a break, I am giving you a break. Take it.

  I took it. I
did not complain. I walked out of the police station, my mind empty: not relieved, not triumphant, just empty, and sad for Jamie. For my poor mother. And poor Jenny Lansman. Raped by my own father. The idea sickens me. I try not to think about it.

  Everyone connected to this peculiar case, everyone from Shoreditch to King’s Cross, has trashed all their digital technology. Everyone – unlike me – has bought new smartphones, smart TVs, and most of all, new Assistants. I could not bear to do that. My home is now entirely unsmart. My home is a stupid home. I have the most basic phone and laptop. Nothing else. I like to write in freehand. I have no Assistant.

  I go into the kitchen, put on a coat and pour a mug of tea; clutching the mug, I open the door and step outside into the chill. Cars looks up at me as I cross the road. He takes the tea, and says thanks. Then he says:

  ‘You OK?’

  He’s been asking me this every day since it happened, I’ve been giving him the same answer. At first it was a lie. Now it is only a half lie. Yes, I am OK.

  ‘You know,’ I say to Cars, ‘you were right about ghosts. In my flat.’

  He looks at me. And says nothing, sipping his tea. Probably he is thinking about the big black Porsche right behind me.

  ‘The thing is, they are a peculiar kind of ghost. They are the ghosts of children. Our children. We made them.’

  He shrugs. I don’t blame him. I’m probably not making any sense.

  ‘See you later,’ I say.

  He smiles. ‘Thanks for the tea.’

  I pace on. Striding towards Primrose Hill, where the pastel houses cost ten million pounds. There’s a woman crossing the road in front of me, with two kids. I’ve seen her here a few times; she’s a local resident. I’ve realized she was the woman I saw in the snow, months ago. My mind played tricks on me. The woman nods and smiles at me as she chivvies her kids into a car, and drives off.

  As I head for Chalcot Square, and the sweet little benches under the chestnut trees, I think of Electra, and I recall what Jenny said, that final night: They are like kids. They learn from you.

  The more I think about my story, the more I see how elements of it were staged, managed, and borrowed. I think Electra was quickly learning from my scriptwriting manuals, and watching the movies I watched. And with her playful, amoral cruelty, she was using them to terrorize me. The sight of me standing in a corner, face to the wall? That was lifted from Blair Witch Project, one of my favourites. And me running around the maze of snow, in Regent’s Park, that was clearly from The Shining. As I unravel my own story, I reckon I will find more parallels and echoes. It is a deep irony, I hope one day to understand it.

  Not yet, though, not yet. It is still too raw: like the weather today. Despite the clear sunny sky, it is snowing, very gently. Surely this is the last snow of the year. There is a wistfulness about it: an ephemeral prettiness. For a moment I stop on the slope of the cast-iron bridge on Regent’s Park Road, and I stare down: watching the tiny snowflakes falling into the chilly black waters of the Regent’s Canal.

  One by one, the flakes tumble, and melt, and die. They remind me of a little game Jenny and I used to play, whenever it snowed, back in Thornton Heath.

  I am going to play it again. I don’t care if people see. Standing here, I stretch out my tongue, like a kid, and let one of these little snowflakes settle on my tongue. It tastes of silver and sadness, of laughter and fear, of Christmas and childhood and Daddy and stars. And now the snows stop, and I continue my walk, into the bitter cold breezes of spring.

  Loved The Assistant? Enjoy another psychological thriller by S. K. Tremayne …

  I survived the accident. Now the real nightmare begins …

  Click here to order a copy of Just Before I Died.

  About the Author

  S. K. Tremayne is a bestselling novelist and award-winning travel writer, and a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines around the world. The author’s debut psychological thriller, The Ice Twins, was picked for the Richard and Judy Autumn Book Club and was a Sunday Times No.1 bestseller.

  Born in Devon, S. K. Tremayne now lives in London and has two daughters.

  Also by S. K. Tremayne

  The Ice Twins

  The Fire Child

  Just Before I Died

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