Dead Bad Things

by Gary McMahon

  He was tied at the waist and at the throat. The boy. The small, small boy.

  There were holes in his head. The front of his pate had been shaved – not quite down to the scalp, but very short; a fine blonde fuzz. Then someone had slowly and patiently drilled holes into his skull.

  The boy's small, small skull.

  Holes. In his skull.

  Sarah knew that the killer had used an old-fashioned hand drill with a wooden handle. She just knew; she fucking knew it. The fact that the chair was an antique, and the care taken to prepare the victim, meant that whatever scenario had been created here would only have been sullied by the use of modern power tools.

  And she just knew… Her twitch. It told her so.

  So the boy's head had been drilled full of holes – slowly, methodically. Then – and this was the worst part – something narrow and red hot had been pushed into the holes, cauterising the wounds but also searing the brain matter beneath. It was awful – medieval. Like something the Spanish Inquisition might have dreamt up.

  Sarah stared at the chair. At the dead boy. And at the small holes in his small head. There was very little blood, apart from a few drizzles that had run down onto the boy's face. The air smelled faintly of burning; the smoke from singed flesh and blood filled the corners of the room, painting them a muddy yellow colour.

  "Oh, God." Sarah felt sick. Her hands were on the boy, grasping his shoulders, and she stared at his loose body wondering why this all looked and felt (and smelled) so familiar. It was like a dream she'd once had, or a film she'd seen. Second-hand memories scampered through her mind, fleeing before she could grab them and pin a name to their bristling hides.

  "Oh, Jesus…"

  A hand fell upon her shoulder. "Come on. Let's get out of here. Back-up's on the way." It took her several seconds to recognise Benson's voice. Everything was different now, after the discovery of the boy's body. Things had changed – doors had crashed open to release a darkness that she knew she must outrun, if only she could. The world had transformed – or perhaps it had simply taken on its true shape. "Come on, now."

  It was all different now. This was something more, something else: she had been given access to a place she did not want to visit.

  Sarah allowed herself to be guided away from the chair, across the bare room, and out of the door. She stood shaking on the landing, yet she didn't know why. There was fear, yes, and revulsion – but what else was churning through her system, what other nameless emotion was even now charging her body with a terrible energy?

  Was it excitement? No, not that. Please, not that. Let it just be nausea.

  The bloody handprints on the closed doors now looked like they were waving, but was it a farewell or a greeting? Sarah closed her eyes but she could still see the boy. His image was locked forever inside her mind: an unwelcome tenant in her subconscious. When she opened her eyes the red handprints were no longer there.

  "You OK? What happened in there?" Benson leaned in close. His breath was stale; his cheap aftershave was a vulgar presence in her nostrils.

  "I… I dunno. It was weird, like I was walking in a dream – a dream I'd had before. I couldn't stop myself. I knew that boy was in the room, and that he wanted me to see him. He wanted to meet me." The realisation did not help. It simply made things worse.

  "I don't understand."

  Nor did Sarah. She didn't understand this at all, not any of it. A murdered boy wanted to meet her; it was hardly a sane thought.

  Hardly sane at all.

  THREE

  No matter how far I stray from the North, it always calls me back. It never stops. I can always feel its barbs in my flesh and hear its crude whisper in the depths of my ears. The place is in my blood; my bones are moulded from the dark ore of its loathsome hills and moors, the coal from its shut-down pits and collieries.

  The North: it's where I'm from, the place where it all started, and the place where I knew it would all eventually come to an end.

  London.

  I've always enjoyed a love-hate relationship with London. The capital seems always to welcome me, when I feel nothing but loathing in return.

  I'd been there for a few months, but wasn't sure exactly how many. After discovering Penny Royale's body in that bland little house on the Bestwick Estate in Leeds, I seemed to enter a sort of psychological gap where nothing made sense, not even my own flesh. The drink helped, of course; it always had in the past and I knew that I could rely on alcohol to blot out the immediate pain.

  I had lost everything; lost them all. Rebecca, Ally, Ellen, and even the child Penny Royale – a girl I had not even met until she was dead.

  I woke up that morning feeling like I'd swallowed a dead rat: my tongue was coated in a thin layer of fur and my mouth tasted like decay. Blinking into the gloom, I tried to remember where I was. When I was. What I was. I failed on all counts.

  All I knew was that it was somewhere in London, and that I was hung over.

  Flailing around on a soft mattress, I managed to establish that I was in a single bed, and it was situated low to the floor. It took me a few moments to realise that there was no bed at all, and the mattress had been set down directly onto bare floorboards.

  The gloom, I realised, was mostly inside my head. The room was less dark than I'd suspected. There were no lights on, and the curtains were drawn tight across the single window, but weak light was filtering through from somewhere. Perhaps it was the first kiss of dawn, or simply the electric smog of streetlights.

  I sat up. My head ached. As I moved, my right hand came into contact with an empty bottle. The bottle went rolling slowly across the room. It made a loud clanking sound as it hit the skirting board but it didn't shatter. Whisky: it had to be whisky. In the past, during near-forgotten days and nights spent wrestling with my demons, whisky had always been the worst. Or the best. The answer to a question I had not even asked.

  I opened my mouth. Closed it again. It felt like there were rubbery strings – like cold pizza cheese – stretched between my lower and upper jaws. Jesus, I'd really tied one on. Things must be bad…

  Oh, yes. They were. Of course they were. Always.

  I had lost everyone I ever loved.

  Wincing with pain, I managed to stand on my shaky feet. My lower back was on fire; the nerves there were either trapped as a result of bad sleep on a shitty mattress or else they were simply not in the mood for motion. I rolled my hips, closing my eyes and trying to clear my head. I was in a room, in a house. At least I was undercover; if I looked up I could see the ceiling. And it was almost daylight.

  Before long I felt in control enough to walk to the window and twitch the curtain. I didn't open it all the way at first, because I knew instinctively that any kind of brightness would be bad – even a tiny amount of muted daylight might render me blind. It took me a long time to ease the curtains open, inch by inch, and to become accustomed to the dusty twilight I found on the other side of the window. Outside was a street perched at the edge of dawn: terraced houses stood shoulder-to-shoulder, faded white lines marked the road like old scars, and grubby wheelie bins lounged like surly teenagers in unkempt gardens.

  I already knew that I wasn't in Leeds. I remembered that much at least. I had fled to London, searching for somewhere to lose myself. Going underground – deep underground: as deep as I could manage.

  Then it came to me. Of course; I knew exactly where I was.

  Number 14 Blanchford Street, Plaistow. It was one of those addresses, the ones I never seemed to forget no matter how hard I tried: a grey zone.

  I backed away from the window and looked around the room. Bare floors. That limp mattress on the floor. A rickety wardrobe. A scuffed chest of drawers. A lopsided bookshelf, with several well-thumbed paperback books spread out along its length.

  A door.

  Outside that door, a landing. Stairs. More rooms downstairs, each of them similarly basic, decked out with minimal furniture and fittings. Nobody lived here. Nobody came
here. Not ever.

  It was a grey zone.

  There was, at one time, a file held in some obscure government department of every nation in the civilised world – it's probably on a computer hard drive these days, but I'd like to bet that it's still in existence. This file consisted of a simple brown manila cover, with two words typed front-centre: grey zones. Then, beneath these words, there was the name of the city to which the folder belonged. Inside the folder was a list of addresses, at least one for each major city in the world. The one matching the name of the city on the front of the folder was usually highlighted, perhaps in red, sometimes (but rarely) in green.

  As you might expect, one of those addresses was in London. It corresponded exactly with the building in which I was standing: Number 14 Blanchford Street, Plaistow.

  These grey zones, one in each city, in each town of reasonable size and population, are places where you don't want to go. They are the most haunted places in the world. The most cursed locations we know. Over the course of time, each country's government used a combination of compulsory purchase orders and scare tactics to buy up their own nation's grey zones, just to ensure that the buildings remained empty. At least until someone figured out what to do with them.

  As far as I know, they remain empty still.

  Officially, the Dakota building is regarded as perhaps the most haunted or cursed building in New York City. The film Rosemary's Baby was filmed there. John Lennon was assassinated on the stone front steps. But the Dakota isn't in fact the most haunted building in New York – it doesn't even come close. I can name you perhaps a dozen others, each one more haunted than the last. More cursed. The final address I might mention is that of a tiny brownstone townhouse in Brooklyn Heights. In 1957 a serial killer named Theodore Wesley was secretly arrested there for the murder and cannibalisation of over thirty teenage runaways. As soon as he left the house his memory of the crimes was lost, as were the public records relating to the case. Even when they executed him in a bunker located deep underground, Theodore Wesley claimed no knowledge of what they said he'd done. He died in secret; he died in confusion. Less than a dozen people ever got to hear his name.

  That small townhouse is the single most haunted or cursed place in New York. None of the guide books mention it. You'll not see it on the Holiday Show. Only a handful of people know it exists.

  Number 14 Blanchford Street, Plaistow, is the equivalent location in London. Many things have happened there. None of them have been reported. The public, it seems, does not need to know.

  In the grey zones there exist deep gouges in the fabric of reality, where another reality has ruptured forcefully into our own and the psychic bleeding has somehow been contained within the confines of the structure. Nobody knows why this has happened. Rites and hexes help seal the zones, but there is no substitute for simply keeping the buildings empty. People have energy, and whatever is trapped inside these places is often woken by the presence of such energy. And once they wake up, they sometimes try to escape.

  I am one of the few people who can spend any amount of time inside a grey zone. Most other people – normal people – would go insane, if they even managed to get out. A grey zone is like a maze: once you open your mind to its wonders, you can get lost inside.

  You can get lost forever in there…

  There was something in the corner of the room, resting among the dusty shadows. I couldn't make out quite what it was, but there was a vaguely human aspect to its shape and the way that it was slouched there, head in its hands, knees pressed tightly together. It looked like the figure was wearing some kind of dark cowl or cape, but with a grey or white hood. The figure did not disturb me. It just sat there, unmoving, like a shop window mannequin.

  I walked out of the room, sober at last. The figure still did not move. It just sat there, wrapped up in its own despair. I doubted that it even knew I was there.

  Oddly, grey zones are the only places on earth where the dead don't bother me. If they even see me at all, I think they consider me one of their own. They accept my temporary residence in their prisons and allow me sanctuary within their walls.

  I don't like to think too hard about why that might be.

  Downstairs, in the sparsely furnished kitchen, I boiled a kettle and made some coffee. The electric and gas supplies were always kept connected to these otherwise ill-maintained places. I don't know why; perhaps they kept things in order just in case someone dropped by from the other side.

  It was all coming back to me now, through the slowly rising veil of a hangover. I had come to London to lay low for a while, until the heat died down. My old friend Detective Inspector Tebbit had helped me. He had arranged a lift in a prison van at the dead of night, and nobody but Tebbit knew that I was down here. But even he didn't know my exact location; he had requested that I keep it to myself, just to be safe. Too much had happened for me to remain in Leeds while others cleaned up the mess.

  The kettle boiled, giving me a start as the button suddenly popped out with a sound like a kids' cap gun going off. I poured the water into a cup, watching the instant coffee grounds clump together as I tried to stir them into the liquid. The coffee tasted bitter, like lies. But bitterness was something I was getting used to. So were lies.

  Bitterness and lies formed part of my standard diet. They had done for quite some time. I was even beginning to enjoy their taste.

  I went through into the lounge, where I flopped down onto the ratty sofa and stared at a television set which had probably not worked since the 1970s – that was certainly when the model had been manufactured. My reflection in the screen looked tiny, a pale and insignificant scrap of flesh. I watched as it sipped coffee from my cup. My hands were shaking, but the reflection's hands were steady. There was a stocky figure standing behind the sofa, both hands grasping the headrest. It was covered in what looked like a black sheet, with a white hood. I realised that whatever it was must have followed me downstairs.

  I turned around, but knew that there would be no-one there. I was right: the room was deserted, but it was far from empty. When I looked back at the screen the figure was absent. Mine was, too: the screen was flat and dark and empty, reflecting nothing. I knew it was some kind of visual metaphor, but my head hurt far too much to think about it.

  I got up and grabbed the threadbare rug from the floor, then threw it over the television set, obscuring the screen. I didn't want to see – I never wanted to see, but at least here, this time, I had a choice.

  The lamp in the corner of the room was on. I must have forgotten to turn it off the night before, when I'd been so drunk that I still could not remember going to bed. I went to the lamp and extinguished it. The main light came on instantly; a bad joke in a lonely room.

  "Please. Let's not get silly." My voice sounded too loud in the almost bare room. I clenched my teeth, cutting off any more words before they came.

  The light went off. A snickering sound left the room and vanished up the stairs.

  They like to play, some of them. Most of them just ignore me in places like the house in Plaistow, but a very few of them are occasionally keen to mess around, to mess with my head.

  I wondered if it was the ghost of a dead child. Dead children seemed to follow me: my life was jam-packed with dead children, each of them wailing at me, but at a pitch that I was unable to hear.

  When the phone rang I jerked so violently that I dropped my cup. It shattered on the floor, the spilled coffee creating a dark brown splatter-pattern. Like old blood. The phone kept ringing. It was the second time it had rang in as many days. Someone wanted to speak to me badly, but nobody knew that I was here.

  I tried to ignore the phone, but the sound drilled into my skull, nudging my brain. This time the mystery was enough to make me walk across the room and pick up the receiver.

  "Hello."

  There was a short pause, as if someone were taking a long breath. And then a voice: "Hello, Thomas. I've been trying to reach you." The voice was female, but
there was little about it that I could warm to. There was a tinny quality to the voice – not quite computer-generated, but somehow machine-like, as if whoever the voice belonged to was holding some sort of masking device against their lips as they spoke, perhaps as an aural disguise. The first word I thought of was: clockwork. It was a clockwork voice on an ancient phone, speaking to me across a line that should have been dead.

  "So now you've found me," I said. I was scared, but for some reason my voice masked the fear. I had already gone through so much by now that even this strange turn of events failed to break through my armour. I stared at the pitted walls, the outof-date wallpaper, the smeared, unidentifiable pictures held like specimens behind dirty glass in cheap plastic frames.