In the little alcove where we kept the washing machine, I opened the door of the front loader and emptied the bag of death clothes into it, added soap, and switched it on. I put fresh food in the cat’s bowl and replenished his water, then I crossed the landing and pushed the door open.
Sigrid was in bed, but she wasn’t asleep. I sat in the armchair next to her bed and watched her hold a conversation with an invisible someone. She was upset, but I couldn’t tell what about. Her voice had an accusatory tone, but it was low and she whispered as if arguing in a church or a cinema.
Siggie’s ancient cat, Vinegar, lay in a round, black puddle at the end of the bed. He raised his head and yawned at the sight of me, then went back to sleep.
Sigrid had been given many labels over the years: brain damaged, severely autistic. They changed over the years as medical diagnoses advanced. They were all wrong. Sigrid’s problem was that she was dead. Her body just didn’t know it.
My sister died when she was fourteen, and while her body was revived, her soul stayed in the underworld. Her mind wandered the underworld, and her body copied the actions of her spirit in the world of the living.
When I’d told Little I couldn’t bring people back from the dead, I’d lied. I just couldn’t do it right.
‘I’m going to fix you, Sig. I promise,’ I said. I just have no idea how.
I knelt beside the bed, pulled the duvet down a little, and kissed her forehead. She smelt like sweat and sugar.
She was wearing the same clothes I’d left her in, black jogging bottoms and a T-shirt with a tube map on it. The shirt was dirty. I checked her nappy. It was fat with urine but no faeces. She hadn’t been bathed or changed. I got a clean nappy and clothes out of the cupboard, and cleaned her up. The underpad on the bed was still dry. At least the nappy hadn’t leaked.
Sigrid was the older by two years and had been toothpaste-advert pretty as a child and just as chirpy. As an adult she should have been blue-eyed, buxom, and beautiful, but instead her cheeks were sunken, her eyes were red-rimmed, and her short blond hair stuck to her head in sweaty tufts. She had been the pretty one, and I was the skinny, dark grump—the beneficiary of our mother’s hag genes that had passed Sigrid by. Now she wasn’t much more than a body to be cleaned and maintained, and I was... just a bigger, skinny, dark grump.
I got council-provided care for a few hours a week, paid for a few more, and the shortfall was met by a neighbour who watched Sigrid in return for me checking on her dead husband a couple of times a month, making sure he was still behaving himself. I turned down the dial on the thermostat, left the room quietly, and headed upstairs.
Three doors led off the landing. All were open, including the one to my bedroom, where a broken lock dangled from the door. I grabbed the lock, and it came off in my hand, rough where the bolt cutters had cut it in two. I pushed the door open tentatively, but everything looked the same as it always did.
The oak floor smelled like cleaning products. The bed was made, and the mattress was so soft that the outline of my body was still clearly visible in it.
I closed the door behind me and hung my backpack from the hook on the back. I turned around slowly. He’d been in here. In my sanctuary. None of the books on the floor-to-ceiling shelves that took up all but one of the walls were disturbed. The wardrobe door was closed. The blinds on the window made a perfectly straight line at the top. I shut the door behind me on the way out. I popped my head into the other rooms, but Stanley wasn’t in his room or the spare.
I followed the stairs upwards and slowed as I approached the attic. The stink of damp and rot became stronger, as did the scent of flowers, and the steps underneath my feet creaked and bent.
Soft light spilled from the door at the top of the landing. The electricity at the top of the house was switched off—too much damp and too many leaks—so he used an old portable gas lamp.
Stanley was asleep in the far corner, in an armchair covered with fitted plastic sheeting. One corner of his yellow-stained moustache had unfurled, giving him a lopsided look.
And in the middle of the room lay the sharp reek of decomposition that was my mother. If I ever wondered what I’d look like after ten years dead, this would be it.
15
I was the type of child who had a lot of uncles growing up. I have no idea who my father is. I asked my mother once, and she told me she didn’t remember. Stanley was the only one who ever stuck around. I don’t think there was ever a romantic relationship between the two of them, but Stanley believes her claim that she’s a god. She’s not. She’s just been around long enough to think she is.
For Stanley, the war ended in 1916. He was seventeen and had been recruited to one of the Tunnelling Companies on the basis that his father had been a coal miner.
‘That was bloody daft,’ he said once when he was minded to talk about it. ‘I grew up in Limehouse and never knew the man. Still, if it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t have met your mum.’
Once I found a sepia-toned picture of him in uniform. He was wearing a buttoned brown coat, a hat that looked too big for him, and a ridiculous black moustache. He was grinning, and his teeth were wonky. That was when I realised that Stanley had had a mole like a beauty spot just below his lower lip. I’d known his teeth were destroyed in the explosion: he has square false ones in dire need of whitening, but I hadn’t known about the mole. The bottom half of his face is a crosshatch of scar tissue.
The explosion that destroyed his face wasn’t what killed him. The shell came later. Stanley drowned in a flooded tunnel. He died alone in the dark water, fifteen feet below ground.
‘It’s a bad way to go,’ he told me long after Sigrid drowned. ‘Your lungs are screaming for air and you’re desperate to open your mouth and breathe in, but you can’t. Then it gets too much and you do it anyway, and then you choke and choke but there’s only water.’
His body lay in the flooded tunnel for hours, along with his mouse and the other two clay-kickers, until his company drained the water.
It was the caged mouse my mother was interested in. She didn’t care much for the souls of drowning men—she’d seen enough battle deaths—but she’d been dead for centuries and this was the first time she’d seen them take so many mice with them. She wanted to know why.
In the underworld, she pulled Stanley’s soul up out of the water and asked him. When he’d finished spluttering, he said: ‘It’s for the gas. The mouse sniffs out the gas.’
Stanley had brought a not-real version of the battlefield along with him into the underworld: the shells, the gas, the new machine guns.
My mother was curious enough that she decided to leave the underworld for the first time in centuries and take a look for herself. It had been long enough that she needed a guide, and so she took the man closest to her, as well as the mouse.
Stanley’s mates didn’t expect to find two alive people in the tunnel, one of whom hadn’t gone in, but enough strange things had been found in the French soil that no one was too surprised. Stanley was put back to work and was hit by a shell two weeks later, which he survived.
My mother spent the remainder of the war in a prisoner of war camp. She didn’t mind.
‘All very civilised,’ she said. ‘I was captured by the Romans once. They were a real bunch of bastards.’
Stanley was diagnosed with a brain tumour at the age of eighty-nine and given a month to live. He didn’t make it that far and died for the second time a week after the diagnosis. Sigrid found him dead in bed when she brought him his morning tea. My mother shooed us both out, closed the bedroom door, and when it opened again, Stanley was alive. And stayed alive. He came back without the cancer that killed him, but with an unnatural talent for gardening. He was well over a century old now, but the man snoring in the corner of the attic looked no older than the day he’d come back from the dead for the second time.
It may have come across as a little Norman Bates–ish to keep your mother’s dead body in the house, but at le
ast we kept her in the attic and not the cellar. And of course, Norman Bates’s mother wasn’t a hag. That mother was never going to come back. Lucky Norman.
My mother lay in a glass coffin in the middle of the floor. I would have picked something a little more solid myself, but it was Stanley’s choice. It was smothered in flowers that also lay in heaps on either side, so that the horror within was not entirely obvious unless you looked closely. I’d been trying to get Stanley to agree to give her a proper burial. I hadn’t much of a hope, but it would have been better than keeping her in the house. Burying her six feet under wouldn’t stop her from coming back to life, but a mouthful of dirt and the prospect of digging her way out of her own grave might be enough for the crazy old bat to think ‘bugger it’ and head back to the underworld.
I watched Stanley’s chest rise and fall. He’d taken his teeth out, and they were sitting on his lap, looking like a wind-up toy.
The stink in the room wasn’t just my mother. I’d been dead for a time too, and a quick wash in the disabled toilet wasn’t going to cut it. I’d come up the stairs raring for an argument, but watching Stanley sleep, and in the midst of the stench of death, the attractiveness of a good barney suddenly felt a lot less appealing than a long hot shower, but as I turned to leave a voice said, ‘Where have you been?’
I turned. ‘Work, and then there was a necroambulist lockdown. You all right today? I see you’ve eaten.’
‘What do you care? Weren’t even here to make me a cup of tea.’
I let out a sigh. ‘Stan, someone I know died today. I don’t want to have an argument.’
‘Who’s arguing?’
I drew in a deep breath. I was. I was tired and I didn’t want to fight, but I had a bad habit of letting him get away with things because I didn’t like arguing. ‘Stanley, we’ve spoken about my room. I like to have a little privacy.’
‘Your room. It’s not your room. It’s your mother’s. The house is your mother’s. You’re not allowed to lock me out. I’m your father.’
‘No, you’re not, and Mum is dead. If she wasn’t, I wouldn’t be here. I came home to look after you, and I’m happy to do it, but you need to respect my space.’
‘You didn’t come back for me. You came back for your idiot sister. And because you don’t have to pay rent. Your mother is going to be furious when she comes back.’
I changed tack. ‘Maybe, but she’s dead now, and it’s disrespectful to keep her body in a box in the attic. You really don’t think she wouldn’t prefer a proper tomb? A nice old-fashioned one with angels and urns. That sort of thing.’ I wasn’t likely to sell him on it, but I sure as hell was never going to quit trying.
Stanley looked down at my mother’s body. My heart gave a little lift. He was actually thinking about it for once.
‘And a nice big lock on the door so she can’t get out,’ I muttered under my breath. Or thought I had, because Stanley’s head snapped up, eyes furious.
‘Shame on you. She’s your mother, and you know she’s not really dead.’
If she had been the loving, cupcake-making variety, it would have been a fair point, but she wasn’t. She was the ancient, powerful, and absolutely pig-shit crazy version. I didn’t want her in the house, even if she didn’t stink.
‘She’s not alive either. Live people don’t go mouldy.’
‘You would if you stayed under that long.’
I gave up. ‘Fine. Keep the corpse, but I’m getting the lock replaced. Don’t remove it again.’
‘Or else what, you stupid girl?’
‘Or I’ll get my mother declared dead and sell this house. Siggie deserves something wheelchair friendly. You really don’t have to come with.’
‘You can threaten me all you like, girlie. The moment I go into a retirement home, someone’s going to notice I’m not getting any older. And then they’re going to ask questions about you. The world thinks hags can’t bring people back. What do you think the media will do when they find out that’s not true? They’ll never leave you alone. You’re stuck with me whether you like it or not.’
Checkmate. I gave up. Stanley Brisk wasn’t my flesh and blood, but he was the closest thing to it. Neither of us had anyone else. ‘Just leave my room alone.’
I didn’t stay to hear his response. I made sure the old man was clean and fed and looked after, but I was an adult now. He could sit and pay vigil over his rotting Snow White. I didn’t have to pretend to like it.
16
I sat on the edge of the bath and checked for emails while the tap filled the tub with steaming water. I had a few responses, but nothing of note. I clicked over to BBC News. They were showing the same clip of Ben flying off, along with a photo of Malcolm that looked like it had been culled from his passport. Updates came in every couple of minutes, but it was reaching the point where the reporters were starting to report on each other.
I turned the tap off, then rubbed steam away from the bathroom mirror. The harpy scratch stung like hell where I’d rubbed antiseptic ointment into it, but it looked clean and lacked the raised red lines that indicated infection. I put my phone onto the towel and stepped into the claw-footed tub. I closed my eyes as the water lapped under my chin. A steady frozen draft from the warped window frame froze the top of my head while my lower parts broiled. The heat soaked into my bones. I could see most of them. My ribs stuck out like the back of an immersion heater, and my knees looked like someone had stuck a pair of ice cream scoops onto two rulers. I was doing too much dying. Every time I died, my flesh began decomposing, and every time I came back I threw up. My body was suffering for it. I’m vain enough that I wouldn’t have objected if I looked good, but I didn’t. I just looked sick. I needed to eat more, and die less. It shouldn’t be hard. I liked pizza and ice cream and chocolate, and all those lovely foods that are supposed to make you fat. All I needed to do was stop dying long enough for it to stick to the sides.
The only dying I was contractually obligated to do was for the police, who only asked every few weeks. The problem was that every time someone asked me to freelance, I thought of Sigrid. Every extra bit of cash went into my escape fund. Stanley had been right about one thing. I couldn’t afford to pay rent. Or at least not rent and carers. I wasn’t quite sure I could afford a mortgage and carers either, but however I was going to get myself out of this hole, I knew I was going to need a lot more money than I had.
The sound of my sister’s voice drifted under the door. I couldn’t make out the words, but by the shifts in tone and gaps, she was holding another conversation with someone who wasn’t there.
Sweat streamed down the sides of my face, making it itch, and I wiped it with the side of my arm. Stanley made a little cash every now and then, selling the flowers he grew in the greenhouse out back, but he wasn’t willing to share any of his money on something like a carer. He came from a time when people like Sigrid weren’t expected to live very long, and he wasn’t willing to waste good money on someone who didn’t even notice whether she was clean or dirty.
The only solution was to do more dying. I scooped shampoo into my hair and massaged it. The problem scooted round my mind on well-worn grooves.
I scrubbed the dead off my skin with a nail brush, ridding it of all the greasy dead cells and stink until it tingled.
I was just rinsing my hair when I felt the first inkling I was not alone, followed by a low wolf whistle from the end of the bath. The suited ghost from Shafiq’s chip shop was standing on the tiled floor. The dead man had no hormones to trigger any sort of reaction from seeing a naked me in the bath, but life habits die hard, and he was giving me a good ogle anyway. I resisted the urge to cover up.
‘Oy,’ I said. ‘At least have the decency to look at my face.’
‘Nothing but bones on you anyhow.’
‘What do you want?’
‘Found your dead man.’
‘Where?’
‘Putney Vale Cemetery.’ The ghost hopped from one foot to another.
I frowned. ‘What’s with the skippety skip? I’ve died here plenty of times. It’s hallowed ground.’
‘Oh sure, oh sure,’ said the ghost. ‘That’s all that’s needed. Do you know how much hag magic is soaked into this place? It’s like being bitten by rats.’ He shivered. ‘Yeargh.’
I got back to the subject of Malcolm. ‘What about the zombie? Has he lost it?’
‘Uh-uh. Still holding it together,’ the ghost said.
‘And the winged boy?’
‘Not sight nor sausage.’
I reached over the side of the bath to where I’d left my phone on a towel. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Frank Sutton.’
‘I’ll let the guardsman know it’s your choice of film on Saturday. Just give him plenty of time to source it if you’re picking an old one.’
‘Nope. He’s got it. It’s going to be Grease all showings.’
Jeez, I thought, what is it with ghosts and Olivia Newton-John? The dead man dissipated into the steamy air. I leaned back into the bath, which was cooling rapidly. Malcolm, but no Ben.
It made what I had to do a little easier. Legally, there was no option. Failure to report the whereabouts of a known zombie was a minimum five-year prison term. Ben wasn’t there to complicate things, but my stomach still hurt a little as I dialled Dunne’s number. Malcolm and I had never got on, but he didn’t deserve the pit. No one deserved it, no matter what they had in their freezer, and it hurt a little that I’d be the one to send him there.
Frank the ghost had said that Malcolm hadn’t lost it. Somehow that made it worse, that when they came for him he’d still know why and what was coming, but I had no other option. If I didn’t, others would die.
I dialled Dunne with a sick feeling in my stomach that for once didn’t come from dying. When he answered, I passed on the information without hesitation. He didn’t ask how I knew, and I didn’t say.
The Secret Dead (London Bones Book 1) Page 8
