Afterlight

by Rebecca Lim

  Jordan leaned in abruptly, resting his forehead against mine, and my unreliable breathing cut out altogether as he looked down into my eyes, the two of us forming the apex of something. Some new thing I was too afraid to name for fear it would vanish like star dust.

  ‘She wants you involved, for some reason,’ he murmured. ‘And I need you: to keep me sane. To separate what’s me from everything else. The usual mechanisms I have for shutting things out—they don’t work with her. She found out what my weakness was. She’s like a storm front. And because I can’t see her when I’m not with you, it feels like it’s happening to me, all the little things she feeds me, expecting me to make sense of them. There’s no order and no distance: it’s like her footsteps are mine, her breathing, her impressions. The fear…’

  He swallowed audibly and all my self-consciousness suddenly drained away. Jordan Haig was actually afraid. He was more rattled than I, or anyone, had ever seen him. I’d crossed over into scaredy-pants land more times than I could count lately, and a feeling almost of protectiveness kicked in.

  I wanted to throw my arms around him again. But it wasn’t something I could take back later so, like a coward, I didn’t.

  ‘I know it’s selfish,’ he whispered, ‘but you’re my control. Come with me?’

  ‘And if she gets what she wants, she’ll go away?’ I breathed, both wanting it to be true, and not.

  ‘And we go back to being nothing?’ Jordan pulled back, his hands falling away as he shrugged. ‘Being normal? Sure, we can only hope, right?’

  He wasn’t angry any more, I could tell from his crooked smile. It felt strange, but not uncomfortable, standing here with him, on the verge of leaving sense and logic behind again. There was no one I’d rather be doing this with, I realised.

  I took a shaky breath, finally, and nodded. Jordan pulled the heavy door open and held it for me.

  I stepped inside and stumbled to a stop only partway in, my eyes struggling to adjust. It was pitch dark in the lobby save for a patch of fluorescent light coming through the glassed-in doorway of the adult shop down a narrow hallway to the right.

  I felt around with outstretched fingers in the darkness, like a blind person. Jordan grabbed hold of my left hand as if it was the most natural thing in the world and led me closer to the only light source. As we tentatively shuffled across the uneven, linoleum-tiled floor, hands still linked, I recognised the delicate compound odour of beer, cigarettes and old vomit, a persistent base note of sticky carpet. We were passing a staircase to our left. It had to lead to the Maximus Lounge, which would be shut at this hour. There wasn’t a sound coming from up above.

  We drew closer to the adult store, hands still linked. Through the glass, I could make out an overweight, balding guy in a black tee with a dirty grey ponytail. He was seated behind a counter festooned with penis-shaped party trinkets. He was side-on to us, his eyes glued to an afternoon talk show on an overhead TV. Any moment now, he would turn and see the two of us just hovering by the door like a pair of underage, sex-mad desperados.

  I caught a glimpse of boxed-up sex swings, nurses’ uniforms and coordinating whip, cuff and chain sets in his or hers colours, fluffy slippers and baby outfits that ran to XXXXL.

  ‘Doesn’t do it for me.’ I could hear the giant grin in Jordan’s voice. He was standing so close I could smell his aftershave, something clean and green-smelling.

  I grinned back, on the point of making some lame joke about how we were taking things way too fast, when I felt someone brush past me, hard. There was the distinct impression of hip, leg, and denim, so real that I stumbled, turning my head in outrage, exclaiming: ‘Hey!’

  ‘What?’ Jordan said, puzzled.

  He followed the direction of my gaze. Now that my eyes had adjusted, I could clearly make out the staircase to the lounge running upwards in the fuzzy blackness. That’s when it hit me that no one could have come past us, bumping me so hard I’d almost lost my balance. The door to the discounters hadn’t even opened to let anyone in or out. The fat guy behind the counter was still glued to the screen.

  I felt Jordan tense at the exact same moment I did, the two of us physically recoiling from a roiling wave of crushed violets in the air. It seemed to enfold us like a blanket, thick and overwhelming in the stuffy, claustrophobic dark. I began to cough.

  As I watched, eyes watering, the absence of light at the top of the stairs began to silver, faint motes of luminescence gathering to rearrange themselves into a familiar outline: long unbound hair, garb as black as a Greek tragedy, long, bare arms and feet. She was dark energy momentarily corralled into human form, and somehow I knew that the testing was over, that whatever this was that Jordan and I were doing, we were already deep into play. This was the main game, and Eve was in control.

  She looked like a queen. She looked like Death itself.

  Against inclination, Jordan and I edged closer to her shining form. She was directly above us, at the top of the stairs, and I could feel how every fibre of his being wanted to bolt in the other direction the same way he could feel it in me. We clutched each other close as Eve gazed down at us with her dark, hollow eyes.

  ‘What does she want?’ I heard myself asking hoarsely, as if I was standing somewhere outside my own body. The things she wanted, expected, were getting worse, I just knew it.

  From above, Eve’s gaze was unwavering. God, I’d felt her actually touch me. Maybe whatever Jordan had, it was catching, and that terrified me even more than seeing Eve again. What had I done? When Jordan had come into the picture, some part of me had hoped that she and I were done for good and everything that had happened was some mere temporary madness, a passing dream.

  ‘Ask her. Please.’ My voice sounded so remote, faint with dread. I’d started something I couldn’t put a name to. I just knew.

  Jordan was silent for ages, lost in his peculiar brand of black magic, that queer ability of his to sift through the fractured language of the dead and wrestle sense from it. Though I had my arms around him, he was both there and not there. I wondered what he saw.

  Suddenly, he made a choking sound and rocked back on his heels, as if someone had just reached out and punched him, hard, in the throat. He let go of me, gasping, and I braced myself as he swallowed again, the sound so terribly loud in the deserted lobby.

  His eyes were wide as he turned to me. ‘What she wants,’ he gasped, scrubbing at his left arm through the sleeve of his jacket in the way I was beginning to recognise as Jordan-in-distress, ‘is, is…’

  It was my turn to place my hands on either side of his face. He was breathing hard, like he was trying to outrun something.

  ‘What?’ I urged gently, though I couldn’t stop the involuntary tremors moving beneath my own skin.

  ‘What she wants,’ he tried again, ‘is for us to…gather up…gather up…’

  I felt my brow wrinkle. ‘Gather up?’

  He started to shake again beneath my hands. ‘What’s left. She wants us to gather up what remains.’

  10

  I broke into a cold sweat. And Eve vanished in a gust so strong I felt it lift the ends of my hair. The stairwell went dark. All that lingered was the scent of crushed violets.

  I p
retty much tried to crawl inside Jordan’s jacket at that point, and I noticed he wasn’t pushing me away.

  ‘Gather what?’ I squeaked. ‘Like…body parts?’ I craned my head up at the darkness beyond the landing. ‘She up there?’

  I imagined Eve, slowly disintegrating on beer-stained carpet, in place of the cat lady. And almost gagged as the stench of Hatherlea rose up again, ghostly, in my nostrils. If Eve was really up there, it would be cat lady to the nth power.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Jordan murmured, troubled. ‘But there are maybe things she, uh, left behind? I think she wants us to retrieve some…stuff for her. From that bar upstairs.’

  ‘What stuff?’ I almost howled. ‘What could she possibly want stuff for?’ I fought Jordan as he started moving towards the stairs. ‘She doesn’t have any arms or legs, hands. A head.’

  I struggled in his arms. ‘We were only supposed to look,’ I insisted, panicked, ‘not “retrieve”. Retrieval indicates the further adventures of and I am not in favour. We did what we said we’d do. We came, we saw. Let’s call the cops now. They can do the gathering.’

  Jordan shook his head. ‘No cops. Not if you don’t want to be the lead story on Today Tonight again. And what would we tell the police? Think about it, Soph.’

  It didn’t stop me trying to fumble my phone out of my pocket. Jordan wrestled me for it, finally wrapping me in his arms and pinning me so tightly I could barely breathe.

  ‘We can’t just walk away,’ he insisted. ‘She can’t do what she needs to do without you. We’ve let her in, now we have to finish what you started. That’s how it works or they don’t leave, they don’t go. You get out of the shower, and someone’s standing behind you in the mirror. Every corner you turn, they’re just there, waiting and expectant. Piling on the shocks until you give in, or break. It’s worse than a horror movie if they don’t get what they want. I told you—that’s why you don’t let them in, ever. No undertakings, no little kindnesses, not for the dead.’

  Undertakings and kindnesses. Is that what Eve had me engaged in? Whatever the compact was that one made to bind themselves to the dead, I’d done it—in spades.

  I was almost sobbing. ‘I didn’t know! How could I know? I’m not like you, I’ve done enough. I just want her to go away. Make her go, Jordan. You can talk to her. Make her go.’

  He grasped me by the shoulders. ‘I’ve seen you.’ His voice was low and soothing as I hyperventilated so badly that the thick dark began filling up with buzzing pinpoints of light. ‘You’re nice to everybody. You help everyone who asks you for help, and you don’t judge. Do you know how different that makes you from every other freak at Ivy Street?’

  ‘It makes me the freaking freak-of-freaks!’

  I struggled harder, trying to block him out. Damn his persuasive hotness, that pine-clean scent of him.

  Jordan still held me and shook me gently.

  ‘It’s up to us, Soph: you and me. God knows why, but she chose us. Could you imagine if Eve had landed on Claudia Perretti’s life like a bomb?’

  I went still in his arms and the fuzzies began to recede a little. ‘I’m not especially brave,’ I muttered. ‘She could at least have factored that into the selection process.’

  Jordan ignored me. ‘Claudia and her clowns,’ he reminded me harshly, ‘would have stood by and watched as that kid got abducted, or that old guy got run over, or that old woman got eaten alive by her own pets, if they even got to them at all. Most people would. Remember what Mr Connelly said in Legal Studies?’

  I looked at him blankly.

  ‘No duty to rescue,’ Jordan continued. ‘So people don’t; they don’t do anything. They stand back and watch. I’m guilty of that, too.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ I said, shocked that he’d somehow taken notice of every crappy lead feature Today Tonight had ever run about me. In order.

  ‘Claudia, Sharys and Harmony wouldn’t have lifted a finger,’ Jordan insisted. ‘They would have said: Not me, not my problem. Eve went to the right person for help. Whatever she was before, whatever she is now, she isn’t purely destructive. She’s just trapped like an animal, and you’d help an animal who was hurt. I know you would.’

  ‘Dogs scare me and I’m allergic to bird feathers,’ I said stupidly, before I could stop myself, because self-sabotage comes as naturally to me as breathing.

  Jordan’s laughter was warm as he released his grip on my shoulders. ‘I’m only here because you are. And we will bloody finish this, because I want her off my back. For good. I don’t like being told what to do…’

  ‘Or who to do it with?’ I snapped back, suddenly hurt. ‘It wasn’t like I asked for this either. This isn’t how I usually go about meeting guys, okay?’

  Hot with humiliation, I stumbled forward in the darkness, wanting to get this over and done with, crying out when the toe of my trainer hit the edge of the bottommost stair.

  Jordan caught me around the waist as I started to fall and I turned on him. ‘So why are we still standing here then? It can never wait. Even someone as dumb as I am gets that. Let go of me.’

  ‘Soph,’ he began again, but I wrenched out of his grip and lurched up the stairs, patting at the maddening darkness until I found a worn railing running just below waist height up the wall.

  ‘She could have left a light on,’ I muttered as the filthy carpet sucked at the soles of my trainers.

  I felt Jordan pass me in the dark on the right, taking the stairs easily two, maybe three, at a time. His voice floated down to me from the landing a moment later, so quiet I had to strain to make out his words.

  ‘If she didn’t, looks like somebody else did.’

  He reached out for me unerringly, guiding me up the last couple of treads.

  ‘Look,’ he whispered, his breath warm against my ear. ‘There.’

  I peered down another murky hall, feeling a slight draft, just a shiver of air against my face, and finally made out a thin line of faint luminescence in the distance. A floor-level sliver of electric light to cut the dark in two.

  Jordan tightened his grip on my hand. ‘How bad could it be?’ he murmured as we padded cautiously down the upper hallway, finding ourselves before a wooden, panelled door.

  He didn’t hesitate. Before I could catch my breath, Jordan let go of my hand, bracing his shoulder against the door, pushing the heavy thing open with a grunt.

  Somewhere deep inside the place, a buzzer sounded twice, faintly. But all we could see, as we entered the Maximus Lounge, was a big, dim, windowless space cluttered almost to the margins of the room with haphazard table and chair arrangements, packed in tight. The air smelt stale—greasy bar snacks cut through with the sour tang of human sweat—and a long, dark wood bar ran along the left hand side of the room, illuminated solely by the light of a single old-style banker’s lamp with a green glass shade. Rows of bottles, glasses and silver shakers were silhouetted against a faceted mirror wall. Jordan and I were dimly reflected in it, just a couple of warped, dark shapes in a sea of other ones. Overhead, a fan churned the air lazily, lifting the loose curls on either side of my face. There wasn’t another living soul in the rectangular room.

  ‘See if you can find a light switch,’ Jordan rasped.r />
  I almost leapt out of my skin when stage lights suddenly went up across the room, centred on a narrow, wooden catwalk, painted a glossy reflective black.

  ‘Is that a, uh, stripper’s pole?’ I flushed, staring at the end of the projected stage. Mum had described them, but I’d never seen one for real. The glittering thing reached right up into the water-stained ceiling, anchored by two sets of heavy-duty brackets at each end. Two more sets of stage lights flashed on and two more poles were instantly illuminated, one on either side of the catwalk. The backdrop was a swagged dark-red velvet curtain.

  A woman dressed entirely in black suddenly emerged from a door hidden somewhere behind it.

  For a gut-clenching moment, I thought it was Eve, and I let out a high and breathless scream. Same pale skin and oval face. Same long dark hair hanging loose and forward over her shoulders, that busty hourglass figure.

  But the figure shielded her eyes with one hand, barking in a voice that rebounded throughout the cavernous room, ‘We’re closed.’

  Not Eve then. Pissed off, too. I shut my mouth, deeply regretting screaming.

  ‘Monica sent us,’ Jordan called out gamely. ‘She wants what she left behind.’

  The woman froze, one hand raised to shoo us out.

  Jordan didn’t look at me. Instead, the untouchably cool expression he always sported when Dr Southey tried to throw him a vicious curve ball in Biology slid into place. There hadn’t been a trace of doubt in his voice even though I knew that, just under the skin, he was all nerves, like I was.

  The woman seemed to give herself a shake before moving down the catwalk hesitantly. ‘Monica?’ she said bewildered. ‘Monica wouldn’t send you.’

  She stopped at the edge of the raised platform and frowned at us through the glare of the footlights. ‘You’re just kids. Shouldn’t even be in here.’