by Gary McMahon
When she eventually made it back to Nicci’s place, Emma remained withdrawn and pensive until it was time for her nephews to go to bed. Then she read them a bedtime story before soaking in a hot bath. She lay in the steaming tub with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling. There was a crack above the toilet she’d not noticed the day before.
Her aimless dozing was interrupted by a knock on the door; Nicci’s voice drifted in to break her reverie: “Em, you okay? Can I come in?”
“No, I’m fine. Really. Just a bit down after seeing Prentiss. But you can rest easy. It’s over. I won’t be seeing him again.”
“Okay, hon. I’m here to talk if you need me.”
Emma glanced over at the scrapbook she’d balanced on the rim of the sink. She almost called Nicci back, asked her to look at what was inside the tatty covers. But no, to do so would have felt too much like willingly entering Prentiss’s nightmares. The only cracks she knew of where the ones in his sanity.
Bath time over, she dried herself off and went to bed, looking forward to the end of her stay. She was due to return to London the next day and any enjoyment she’d taken from the trip had been tarnished by her communication with Prentiss. Even now, he was able to ruin small parts of her life, and she resented the power he had over her.
“I’ll miss you,” said Nicci, holding her tight on the doorstep. “Come back soon, big sis.”
Emma returned the hug, and wished that she felt more like staying; it would cost her nothing to extend her trip, to spend more quality time with her family, but right now the thought of leaving Prentiss’s ever-widening circle of influence seemed like a very good idea. “I’ll be back at Christmas,” she said. “In three weeks time. I promise.”
Olly and Jared followed her outside, trailing her along the street as she headed for the Metro. They were good boys, full of life and energy, and she brushed away a tear as they ran off towards the park, waving and calling her name. Even Jared had seemed sad to see her go.
The next train was delayed by ten minutes, and Emma felt herself drawn to her mobile phone. She took it out of her pocket, dialled Prentiss’s number, but didn’t press the button to connect the call. She repeated this procedure three more times before finally giving in to temptation.
The phone rang out at the other end; no one was home.
Feeling deeply uneasy, Emma checked her watch. The London train wasn’t scheduled to leave Newcastle until three o’clock. It was just after one. If she was quick, she could call in on him, just to check that he hadn’t done anything foolish.
The train arrived. She got on, knowing exactly at which station she’d disembark.
She made it to the house in plenty of time, telling herself that all she was planning to do was check on Prentiss’ wellbeing. If he’d had an accident, or even tried to kill himself, she would never be able to look at herself in the mirror again. Despising her own weakness, and his passive strength, she rang the doorbell.
The door opened and a stranger stepped outside. “Oh, hi,” he said, pulling a woollen hat down over his shaven head. “You here to visit someone?”
“Yes, Prentiss O’Neil.” She realised this must be one of the people he shared the house with.
“Ah. I think the queer bugger’s still in his room. I haven’t seen him for days. If he is in, tell him he owes me fifty quid for the gas bill, would you.” Then he was gone, jogging along the street towards the bus stop that was located outside a tiny video rental shop that seemed only to stock titles from the 1980s.
Emma pushed open the door and went inside, wiping her feet on the threadbare doormat. The house was silent; a stale heaviness hung in the air. She climbed the stairs to Prentiss’ first floor room and knocked on his door, her touch lighter than intended. When no answer came, she knocked again, louder this time. The door swung open under the increased pressure from her knuckles.
Emma took a step inside, smelling that same dry yet moist odour and sensing that something was very wrong. The room was dark, the blinds pulled over the single window, and looked in even worse disarray than during her last visit.
“Prent. You here?” She expected no reply, and none came.
There was a naked figure kneeling on the bed, turned to face the wall. It was male – she could at least make out that pertinent detail in the gloom – and his hands were flattened against the peeling wallpaper. Drawing closer, she noticed that the floor was covered in a layer of crumbled plaster; the cracks Prentiss had crudely attempted to repair had opened up, shedding their DIY skin.
“Prent?” She could tell it was him from the familiar curvature of his spine, and the small tattoo of a Rose on his left shoulder.
“What the hell –”
She stopped in the centre of the room, poised to take another step but not quite managing it.
From this angle it looked as if he had tried to force his head into the long diagonal crack in the wall that ran in a jagged line from the corner of the window frame. She could see the soles of his feet on the bed, his legs, taut and skinny, his pallid back, his neck…but nothing above that.
Then, with growing horror, she realised her mistake.
Prentiss had not stuck his head into the crack; the crack had spread across the wall, passing through flesh and bone to shear off most of his head above the jaw line. Prentiss’ skull had become part of the fracture, a jagged black rent through which only darkness could be viewed.
As Emma watched, the wall around the crack seemed to shiver and the area of damage widened. Its messy Rosarch edges sent out spidery limbs to breach plasterboard and brickwork and splinter the dead matter of Prentiss’ rigid torso.
The crack was growing; something was trying to climb out.
Emma ran from the room, slamming the door to shut the monstrosity inside. She stumbled to the station and jumped on the first train to arrive, heading into the heart of the city. Perhaps safety lay in numbers, surrounded by crowds. But there were cracks everywhere: cracks in buildings, in road surfaces, even in people.
When she reached the station she sat in a glassed-walled waiting room under a row of stark fluorescent bulbs. At least where there was too much light she would see them coming, be alerted to their presence before they reached her. She pulled up her feet onto the bench, listening to the groan of plastic, hoping that it would not break. Or crack.
THE UNSEEN
(For Mark Lynch)
(What follows is the slightly edited version of a hand-written manuscript found in July 2005, wrapped in an old cellophane sandwich bag and wedged into a hole in the wall of a derelict house in the West End of Newcastle upon Tyne. The sheets were undated, and no author’s name was legible.)
Our numbers are many, yet still we remain unseen, unnoticed; the vast majority of you honest, law-abiding citizens walk past us on the city streets every day, not even realising that we are there. We are the forgotten. The cast-offs. The outsiders.
We are those who observe you as you go about your business.
Utilising this questionable advantage bestowed upon us by our low social standing, we watch. And what we see is sometimes incredible.
I’ve always kept notebooks, and now that for some reason I’ve been chosen to chronicle the inexplicable, the stark and sometimes depressing truth of our busy little peaceable kingdoms, I have taken care to maintain the habit. Back in my old life, I was a writer of fictions: I wrote thrillers and detective stories, fooling myself into believing that they mattered, and eking out a modest existence from the words I produced. These days the mysteries are real, but my style of recording them has not changed. I have no publisher, no agent, no means of getting my work “out there”, but these things are no longer important to me. All that matters is getting it all down on paper.
I keep a locker in Central Station, and fill it with my loose pages and messy notebooks (no doubt this document will end up there too, taking up space with the rest). Some day they will be important, these seemingly random scribblings penned by a man on the edge; until
then they sit, dusty and neglected, waiting for their time to come.
I’m not quite sure when I first saw them, but I do know when I first noticed their existence. It was Friday evening, a boom time for we who live on the streets: drunken celebrants will put their hand in their pockets to impress their dates; pissed-up workers letting off steam might buy you a kebab or a burger from one of the countless fast food outlets down by the Big Market.
I was lounging by Grey’s Monument with my close pal The Spiker. We were sharing a bottle of rum he’d managed to lift from an off-license in the Cattle Market, and indulging our usual habit of people-watching. It’s what we do; all we have. When you’re down on your luck, you tend to become very observant. You notice a pound coin dropped by a rushing commuter, a half-eaten packet of crisps thrown into a litter bin at a bus stop, the way some people will announce that they’re a soft touch purely by the slant of their mouth or a soft, vague light in their eyes.
The sun was just setting, dragging crimson-hued acid trails through an unusually low and heavy sky resigned to dull grey for most of the day. The Spiker went quiet – he’s usually an incessant talker – and we both just watched for a while, content to pass the bottle between us in an easy, companionable silence.
And that was when I saw it, out of the corner of my eye. Later, I began to realise that was the only way to see them: peripheral. If you look dead-on, you won’t see a thing.
A visibly stressed young mother was bending down to chastise her baby outside a betting shop, her tired face lurid and mask-like in the lowering light. The baby was having a tantrum over some silly incident that matters only to the very young, and the woman was obviously at the end of her tether.
As she bent to the pushchair, delivering a rapid open-handed slap to the side of the child’s head and screaming some indecipherable obscenity, a shadow crossed between her and the subject of her disapproval. It was like a ripple in the air, a slight distortion in one of reality’s layers.
And then it was gone. The woman pushed the baby out into the main flow of foot traffic, becoming lost in the crowd, and I was left feeling puzzled. Surely I couldn’t have seen what I thought I had: the vague rumour of a face hovering in the air.
The Spiker and I got roaring drunk that night, so I gave no further thought to the event. We snagged a couple of bottles of Thunderbird from a bunch of students on a night out to celebrate passing their exams, and retreated to a local squat we knew to pass the time.
At 5am I found myself flat on my back and wrapped up in a stinking sheet next to some woman whose body I couldn’t recall having lain beside. Her hair was thick with dirt, and I could barely make out her face through the layer of soot that seemed to have accumulated there for some reason. I sincerely doubted that anything physical had occurred; I had been unable to sustain an erection for over a year.
Stiff, tired and hung-over, I got up and walked outside to swallow some fresh air.
We were up on the first floor of an old condemned office complex on Pink Lane, were the whores and junkies gather, and I stood on the fire escape and spied on the sleeping city below. Early risers – Worm-catchers, as we called them – tramped the slumbering streets leading from the train station, heading for early shifts, returning from all-night parties, or just trying to walk the night out of their system.
Through the hazy morning air I thought that I could see misty shadows hanging from them, like the remnants of bad dreams. It was an odd sight, lonely and rather frightening, but I put it down to the cheap booze and began to climb down the folding metal ladder to the street below.
Finding some loose change in my pocket, I went into a McDonald’s for a coffee. It was the only place willing to open that early, and I regretted spending the cash, but I had nowhere else to go, nobody to see. Time alone was what I needed, if only to clear my throbbing head.
After the coffee, I walked the streets, waiting for the people to arrive. Saturday morning shoppers were never generous, but sometimes patience might be rewarded with a few quid thrown at you by some witless wag who thought it was the epitome of humour to piss on you from a great height when you were down on your knees. I didn’t mind: money is money, no matter the manner in which it is given.
I walked, sat in shop doorways and avoided company. A few other faces I knew were patrolling their habitual spots, but all they got from me was a nod of the head, a wink of the eye. I was in no mood for chat.
Some time around 10 am, I saw my ex wife. She was alone, climbing out of a taxi on High Bridge Street. There were a few fancy boutiques in that area, and I guessed that she was shopping for some new clothes to replace last season’s wardrobe.
I felt nothing when I saw her. The hate had gone long ago, replaced now by a sort of bitter acceptance. I meant her no harm, not any more. Attacking her that one time had cleared my system of the need to hurt, and now all I wanted was to get on with whatever flyblown tatters of a life I had left.
When my book sales had dried up, she’d left me to move in with my accountant. The two of them had fleeced me for what little savings I had, leaving me without a bean to my name. She even took the house in the divorce, which left me homeless. The drinking soon followed, and before I knew it the world had skidded out from under me and I was living in a corrugated steel garden shed out near Four Lane Ends.
We are all just a short step from the gutter, and if someone chooses to nudge us in the wrong direction, we can fall in without making as much as a splash.
I don’t hate my wife. I pity her. She became addicted to the trappings of being married to a local minor celebrity – the clothes, the parties, the flash cars – and when it all went away she’d forgotten why we’d fallen in love in the first place.
I ducked behind a wall, ensuring that she wouldn’t see me, and in my haste I managed to turn my ankle on the kerb. Sitting down heavily on the pavement, I massaged the area, hoping that I hadn’t broken a bone. People like me have no doctor we can go and see, and we are treated like garbage if we go to the hospital casualty ward. Having no social security number, and no valid ID, we are nothing, ghosts. Such is the price of dropping out.
Feeling a slight but persistent need to be underground, I made for the nearest Metro entrance and hobbled down the stairs. There was a train due in three minutes, so I stood and ignored the dirty looks and muttered comments until it arrived in a screech of air brakes through the huge black oval of the tunnel.
If you jump the barrier at the right station, and keep your eyes open while you ride the trains, you can spend a couple of hours down there in the cool darkness before some overzealous prick of a conductor throws you off the system for not having a ticket.
As I made my way along the train, shambling from carriage to carriage, I saw people glance away if I caught their gaze. They thought I was begging, and the rationale in such situations is that if you ignore the annoyance it will go away. It’s an attitude that’s always amused me, but lately it had begun to provoke only fear and a mute form of rage.
I saw The Spiker sitting alone in the carriage nearest the driver. He waved at me as I approached, and I dragged myself along the greasy handrails to join him.
“You okay, mate?” he asked, nodding at my leg.
“Aye, fell over that’s all. Still a bit muggy from last night.”
He let out a baying donkey laugh. “Not surprised,” he said. “Especially after bedding down with Scary Mary!”
I sighed, realising that I really should have recognised the woman I’d woken up next to. Scary Mary: a petite middle-aged Scottish woman who’d been fleeing an abusive husband for the past eighteen months. Her fits of temper were legendary, and I’d probably upset her by doing a vanishing act.
“What you up to, then?” I asked, trying to divert my friend’s attention from last night’s transgression.
“Not much,” he said. “You want one of these?”
He produced a couple of rigid iced buns from the folds of his thin coat, leaving a layer of sugar in the l
ining. Back in his old life, when he had a job and a mainstream routine, The Spiker had used to date a girl who worked at Starbucks. She’d kept up the acquaintance, sneaking him food whenever she could – usually day-old sandwiches and stale pastries; stuff meant for the waste bin – and he always shared his haul with me. That’s how we operated: as a loose team, dividing to conquer the gnawing pangs of hunger.
It was right about then, when I was sitting munching on a confectionary in the shadow-striped quiet as we journeyed under the city, that I became aware of faint movement around me in the carriage. It was as if the other passengers began to twitch when I wasn’t looking, and whenever I turned to see they stopped moving.
I stared at my hands, counting the crumbs on my fingers as I chewed the last of the food. And saw it at the edges of my vision: fast, blurred movement, like something that shifted quicker than the eye darting only partially into view.
Faces. Hands. Open mouths. The glimmering shapes of unusually supple bodies as they disturbed the still, stale air. Each passenger had a sketchy double, a barely-glimpsed twin, and these others were hanging from them like unruly children, grasping, silently pleading.
I kept staring at my hands, the big, scarred knuckles, wondering if I was going insane.
There was one sitting on The Spiker’s knee, holding his head in its hands and silently screaming into his face. But he was completely unaware, blind to its presence.
When I looked directly at him, it was gone.
Then the train pulled squealing into a station, and I hobbled out onto the crowded platform, pushing my way through weekend shoppers and dazed tourists. I could hear the Spiker calling my name, but I ignored him, not wanting to see that thing on him ever again.
I’m not sure how long I kept running (or limping), only that it didn’t seem to be an escape from what I’d seen. They were everywhere, those things: holding people’s hands as they strolled beneath a weak and heartless sun, sitting across from lovers in bars and cafes, squatting morosely in the back seats of cars. Some of them were quite well defined, and the same size as the people they were dogging; but others were small and withered, emaciated effigies that looked like something out of old WWII photographs taken at Belsen or Auschwitz.
