Chapter 19
Nash and his crew stopped again in Deming, New Mexico. Previous breaks had been pit stops, barely long enough to gas up, use the john and grab snacks. Otherwise they simply drove, hour after hour, taking shifts. Hammering the highway up through the centre of Florida, across Louisiana, and then the endless slog across Texas, swinging around San Antonio and up towards New Mexico.
Eduardo and Chex started lobbying for another stop around El Paso. Jesse, who was taking a turn behind the wheel, kept quiet. He knew the decision wasn’t his. He also knew that Nash hadn’t slept since they left Miami. When not driving, his boss had taken the passenger seat and sat staring straight ahead. Jesse liked the idea of a break very much. The truck was thick with cigarette smoke and stale sweat, and the flatulent after-effects of cheap burritos bought from gas station chiller cabinets had not contributed anything pleasant to the ambience. His ass was aching from three straight hours behind the wheel and his eyes were tired and dry. But he knew that Nash could hear the guys bitching in the back too, and if he hadn’t agreed to take a break, it wasn’t happening.
‘You still don’t know?’ he asked Nash. The reason they were driving instead of taking a plane was the boss apparently didn’t know exactly where they were headed.
‘Only that it’s west.’
‘You think maybe Los Angeles?’ Jesse had always wanted to go to LA – even before he learned it was where they made all the movies and TV. His grandmother, born on its outskirts, often nostalgically referred to the city by a longer version of the old Spanish name – the ‘city of angels’. Jesse was old enough now to know there’d be no angels there but he still wouldn’t mind taking a look, in her honour. She’d been like a mother to him after his real mom ran away, but died when Jesse was twelve, bystander in an amateur-night grocery-store robbery that went badly awry.
Neither Jesse nor his boss knew that Nash had fired the bullet that killed her – that Jesse’s grandmother had been, in fact, the first person to die at Nash’s hand, and the only death that, once in a great while and in the deep dead of night, he could bring himself to regret. She had been the gate that opened in front of him and led on to his life’s dark path.
‘I don’t know,’ Nash said. ‘Just drive.’
Deming didn’t look like anywhere in particular, just another town on another highway. But then – for no reason Jesse could determine – Nash gestured towards the side of the road.
Jesse spotted a gas station/grocery store combo and steered gratefully into the parking lot.
The store was the kind of place where it looked like you could pick up a serious skin condition just by touching things on the shelves, but nonetheless had a counter in back where you could buy burgers and hot dogs. The cook was standing out near the battered table, glaring irritably up at a small TV hung from the wall. It wasn’t showing anything. He reached up and slapped it. Nothing changed.
He turned to look at them. His apron looked like it had been run over by a tractor on a rainy day. ‘Seriously?’ he said. He was middle-aged and paunchy. ‘We got robbed just last week. Someone tried, anyhow.’
‘Here for food,’ Nash said. ‘Nothing else.’
‘Glad to hear it. Dave’s kind of pussy when it comes to shooting people, huh, Dave?’
This was addressed to the man behind the register by the door, who was tall and fat and had a shaved head and a tattoo of a spiderweb over one cheek. He smiled, kind of. It was a smile that said his colleague’s previous statement had not been in any way accurate, and that there was a loaded weapon under the counter which he would be delighted to use.
Nash looked at him, then back at the cook, taking his time, and both men understood straight away that Nash was not a guy they wanted to mess with.
‘Cheeseburgers,’ Nash said. ‘Fries. Make it fast.’
While they waited for the food Nash went to the john. This was in a detached block out back and not as bad as he’d expected. Someone, a woman most likely, and paid very little for the pleasure, kept it in a state hovering around the merely unpleasant rather than truly disgusting.
Nash stood in a stall and did what he needed to do. When he stepped back out he caught sight of himself in the grimy mirror above the washbasins. He looked the way he always did – rangy, stubbled chin, dressed in faded black denim – but he barely recognized himself. As he washed his hands he stared at his face. Was that him? Was he the guy inside that body, that shape? Why was he even asking this stuff? What did it mean?
He turned off the tap and wiped his hands on the back of his jeans. That face in the mirror …
That was him, right?
The restroom was quiet and so the noise of the mirror cracking was loud. It sounded like a stone being dropped on glass. The crack went from top to bottom, right down through the part holding Nash’s face. The line went between his eyes.
Nash blinked.
The mirror cracked again, in the other direction. The crack was shorter this time, cutting right across the first, nearer the top than the bottom.
Nash waited, very still.
Scaring Nash was nearly impossible – he didn’t care enough about his life – but this was the closest to scared he’d felt in many years. Neither of the cracks reached all the way to the edge of the glass, which struck him as weird. The cracks were also surprisingly straight. Taken together, they made a shape. A short line crossing a longer one, at right angles, their intersection nearer the top than the bottom.
A very well-known symbol. One familiar from every church, and from the front of every bible.
He heard a gurgling sound.
It was coming from the stall he’d visited, and the ones to either side. It was a liquid sound, but thick and throaty. Like a toilet flushing but in reverse.
As he watched, the water level in the bowl started to rise. At first the water was clear, but quickly turned muddy brown, and got thicker.
It started to smell, too. It smelled bad.
Then it was spilling over the edge, pouring out, in wave after wave, far too much to have been in the bowl or the local plumbing. A horrific reversal, a switch of direction, as if all the world’s shit was gushing back out into this restroom.
Nash backed away and got out of there before it could reach his feet.
The others were at the table, munching their burgers in silence. Nash’s was waiting on the counter. He didn’t bother to tell the guys running the store about the issue in their bathroom – it wasn’t his problem.
As he stepped up to grab his food he realized the TV screen on the wall was no longer dark. There was a faint, swirling light within it. A sound was coming from it, too, but it wasn’t a faint crackling like they’d heard in Mr Files’s store. It was like waves, and also voices. The voices were low, whispering. They weren’t speaking in English. One word gradually started to stand out – ‘Santa’ – though it was nowhere near Christmastime.
Nash looked at the cook. ‘Spanish stations all you got?’
‘Funny guy.’
‘What?’
‘Cable’s been out all day. That black screen and silence is all we get.’
Nash stood, eating his burger, watching the screen, listening to a language he didn’t understand.
He took the wheel when they got in the truck, and drove in silence. The guys in the back fell asleep quickly. Only Jesse stayed awake, kept that way by a low feeling of unease in his guts, listening to the sound of their tyres flashing along the highway across the desert. At one point he thought he glimpsed something out of the side window, a rangy, four-legged creature loping along beside them through the brush, keeping pace in the darkness. Jesse abruptly turned to the front and watched the road ahead instead.
Nash meanwhile could feel something gathering at the edges of his mind. A name of a place. Somewhere he’d heard about long ago. Somewhere on the west coast. To do with surfing, maybe?
‘You know Spanish, right?’
‘Some. From my grandma.’
�
�Whatever. “Santa” means “holy”?’
Jesse shrugged. ‘Yeah.’
Nash thought about the shape he’d seen in the cracks in the bathroom mirror. ‘So what would “holy cross” be?’
‘Santa Cruz, I guess.’
Nash nodded, slowly. ‘Then that’s where we’re going.’
Chapter 20
When they pulled up outside her house in Santa Cruz, Hannah ran to the door but then realized she had no key. Her father had been due to meet her at the airport, of course, so she wouldn’t need a key. But … he hadn’t picked her up.
Nobody knew where he was, and Hannah didn’t have a key. How was she supposed to get back into her house, into her life, if she didn’t even get through the front door?
She hammered on the door with both fists. ‘Dad!’ she shouted. ‘It’s me. Let me in. Let me in!’
She was sobbing by the time the door opened. It wasn’t her father. It was Aunt Zo.
Hannah sat at the kitchen table. Her head ached. Zo had made her a sandwich, but the result suggested sandwich making was another thing – like drawing – that lay outside her field of expertise. Short of getting the thing inside out and putting the bread in the middle and the ham and cheese on the outside, or hiding all of the ingredients in different rooms, it was hard to imagine how she could have got it more wrong.
Hannah wasn’t hungry anyway. She’d listened for an hour while Zo and Granddad talked. The talk was like the traffic on Mission, the main road through town. Sometimes they would talk and talk and you thought they’d never stop. Then there would be a gap, and you thought it would never start again. The talking was making her head hurt, but the gaps were worse. When you were talking, you were doing.
Bad things lived in gaps and silences.
Like Hannah, Zo had tried calling her dad. She’d made the same assumption – that Steve had elected to turn off the ringer or take a break from staring at screens, and that was probably a good thing, right? Granddad nodded when she said this, and Aunt Zo looked relieved. Evidently being twenty-six didn’t prevent you from needing your dad to tell you that you’d done OK.
Steve.
Hannah knew her dad’s name, of course. She didn’t like hearing it, though. When things were OK nobody said ‘Steve’. Hannah called him Dad. Her mom hadn’t called him anything – because when people live together and are happy, they don’t need targets to aim words at – you talk in someone’s general direction and everyone knows who’s meant.
In the weeks before her mother left, Hannah started hearing the word ‘Steve’ more often. A lot more often, by the end. Sometimes like a needle. Sometimes like a hammer. Sometimes like a sigh. It wasn’t only Mom doing it, either.
Kristen – that’s not fair.
Kristen – please let’s talk about it.
Kristen – let’s not do this now: she can hear.
When Zo hadn’t got a response to another call, she’d sent an email. When that didn’t get a reply, tendrils of real concern had started to wrap around her mind. If there was one area of life in which Zoë’s brother could be guaranteed not to drop the ball, it was email. He was vague on things like birthday cards, yes; and Zo – like Hannah – had more than once heard him ranting how emails were the zombies of the twenty-first century. Didn’t matter how hard you fought back, he said, they kept on coming. You cleared the compound each night and thought you were done, but next morning you’d find twenty-six more of the damned things, shambling outside the fence, tugging at it, reaching for your attention, wanting to eat your brains.
He was dogged with them, though – not least because a lot of his work was conducted this way, and he was used to whapping emails back across the net like a tennis player in an endless rally (also, Hannah’s mom was heard to mutter, usually good-naturedly, it was a way of not doing any actual work).
Bottom line was if you sent an email to Steve Green – be you friend, foe, colleague or even relative – you’d get a response by end of play. You could count on it.
But none had come.
And so, not even sure why she was reacting this way (except that she knew how unhappy her brother had been since his power-dressing, Powerpoint-wielding wife moved out, and, like Hannah, had not failed to notice when he didn’t shave), she’d driven down. Of course he’d be there when she arrived, baffled and irritable at her appearing on his doorstep without warning (her brother was not the world’s most sociable person), but she could say she’d got bored and come on a whim and offer to take Hannah out for the afternoon, give him a little space.
Hannah looked up when she heard this. Aunt Zo had evidently not known about her going to visit Granddad either. Dad hadn’t mentioned the plan to her, or to Mom. What did that mean?
‘I’ve called his cell every couple hours since,’ Aunt Zo said. ‘I’ve sent a bunch more emails. Kristen called on the house phone, FYI. I told her I was here helping out for a day or two, that he was at a meeting in town.’
‘Did she have anything to suggest?’
‘We didn’t …’ Aunt Zo glanced at Hannah, as if she’d just remembered that she was there. ‘We didn’t, like, chat. But I got the sense she’s hearing alarm bells too.’
Hannah jumped up and ran out of the room. She didn’t want to hear this any more. Her dad wasn’t ‘Steve’. He was that big, daddy-shaped thing who should be here.
‘Steve’ didn’t say who he was.
‘Steve’ said he was gone.
The Devil was in the sitting room. He was staring with distaste at a picture on the wall, one that Dad had bought for himself. It was a nice painting of Big Sur.
‘Stop looking at that,’ Hannah said furiously. She didn’t understand why she said it, except she knew Dad really liked the picture – though Mom hadn’t seemed so keen – and she didn’t want the Devil looking at it in case he spoiled it.
‘It will be a pleasure,’ the Devil said. ‘Though it has given me an idea. Tell your grandfather I have gone.’
‘But you haven’t.’
‘What a sharp little girl you are, Hannah – and I am famously drawn to the details, after all. I haven’t gone, yet. But I will have by the time you tell him.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘To find out what’s going on. I’ve already wasted too much time.’
There had been a heated discussion at the airport in Russia about whether the Devil would allow Granddad to stay in Santa Cruz, or if he had to drop Hannah off and go fetch the Sacrifice Machine from Seattle. Granddad had stood firm. He’d said the machine would be safe in the trunk of his car at Sea-Tac, or as safe as it would be anywhere. It could not be opened by another person. The machine would not allow it. The Devil could do what he damned well pleased, Granddad had concluded, but he needed to find his son.
In the end the Devil had flown with them to San Francisco. He had remained silent throughout the flight, but an hour before they landed a man in the row behind them had had a heart attack. The man, a middle-aged Italian on the way to America to be reconciled with the brother he hadn’t seen in twenty years, survived the rest of the journey. He would not survive the night.
When the Devil opened the front door to her house, about to leave, Hannah ran and tried to stop him. ‘We’ve got to find my dad.’
‘I’ll keep an eye out for him.’
‘You don’t even know what he looks like.’
‘I know how he will taste.’
Hannah stared up at him, revulsion crawling over her skin. ‘What?’
‘I’ve met you. I know your grandfather. Your father lies somewhere along the middle of that bloodline. I’ll work it out. But in the meantime I need to go to Hell.’
‘You can’t go all the way back there.’
‘I don’t need to. I only had to make the journey that way because I was taking your grandfather, and you.’
‘Because we’re not dead?’
‘You don’t need to be dead. Hell is not a place. It’s not a noun, child. It’s a verb. I need to
find someone doing it.’
‘But you can’t just leave. My granddad made that machine for you. He went all the way to the coldest place on the planet to try to help. You’ve got to help him.’
‘No,’ the Devil said, and walked past her on to the pathway.
She followed. Vaneclaw had been lurking in the front yard earlier, but wasn’t to be seen now. ‘You do,’ she shouted.
‘One of the great things about being me,’ the Devil said, ‘is I don’t have to do anything at all. Especially not over something so insignificant as a single human soul.’
‘I hate you,’ Hannah said, to his back.
It sounded so weak. The first time she’d said these words it was to her mother. It hadn’t been what she meant then, and it wasn’t now. They were dumb words, useless sounds. They were arrows that didn’t land. She needed words that were bigger and heavier and sharper.
The Devil smiled, however. A thin, horrible smile. ‘There’s hope for you yet,’ he said.
In the kitchen, Granddad and Zo were still talking.
‘What are we going to do?’ Hannah asked.
‘Well,’ Granddad said. ‘Zoë and I are going to take her car, check a few places. Zoë stayed here at the house all the time, in case … your dad came back. So now we’re going to leave a note, and drive around a little instead.’
Aunt Zo smiled brightly at her. ‘We wondered, honey,’ she said, ‘who’s your best friend?’
‘Why?’
‘Someone you might be able to … go play with. For a few hours. Or maybe even a sleepover. That’d be fun, right?’
‘No,’ Hannah said firmly. ‘I’m coming with you.’
Zo’s smile faded. She turned to Granddad for help. Granddad shrugged.
‘So let’s get going,’ he said.
Chapter 21
Though it was only four in the afternoon, the Devil headed straight to a bar. This was not because he wanted a drink. Though he enjoyed the taste of alcohol from time to time, preferably spiked with the blood of recently living things (or the dust of the long-dead), he normally only indulged when playing a favourite game, in which he sat with a stranger in a dark place, pretending to care, enabling their resentments and subtly goading them if necessary, in pursuit of the – usually successful – goal of causing them to stagger out of the bar to do something catastrophic.
Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence Page 12