by Gary McMahon
By now Derek was trapped within the energy whose source was the mirror – or whatever hid behind it. His skin trembled, vibrating on the bone, and as Trevor watched the boy's face began to bubble and lift from his skull, as if long, fat fingers were burrowing under his flesh to sever the connection from bone.
Derek tried to scream, but when he opened his mouth his head was spun around and his lips were tugged free, like a sock being pulled from a foot. It happened that quickly: both lips, mostly undamaged, simply left his face and vanished into the big black mirror. His teeth were bared like bone; his new smile was hideous.
Trevor wanted to look away, he really did, but he was unable. The sight was hypnotic. The same drumbeat he'd heard before was sounding in his head, threatening to break his skull.
As Derek was dragged towards the mirror, his clothes were torn from his body, leaving him naked. His skin bubbled, blistering on the bone. It was as if someone was pumping air into his body, and it was separating the flesh from his skeleton. His mouth worked, still trying to scream, but the mirror had his tongue: the free end was held somewhere inside the mirror while the root was pulled taut at the back of his throat.
Trevor was awestruck. He had not expected anything like this. Deep down, he knew that his guest was an offering, a sacrifice to whatever dark entity was trapped in the mirror, but he had hoped for a cleaner demise.
Skin, muscle, tendon, blood… it all went into the mirror. The boy's musculature was exposed for a second, as the skin was peeled away like the rind of an exotic fruit, but then there were only the bones: his skeleton sat, quietly and politely, like an unexpected visitor on the bed. Then, abruptly, it toppled onto its side, the bones rattling like dry sticks.
Trevor stared at the mirror. The motion had stopped. It was just a mirror again; a simple reflective surface. Except for the fact that it was not reflecting anything of the room in which he stood. Instead, there was a figure, and behind the figure a ruined landscape of broken buildings and charred earth.
The figure was bald, and he stood wrapped in Derek's skin. He wore this skin-suit casually, as if he were modelling it for a mail order catalogue. He stood with his head bowed low, his arms raised slightly at his sides and his hands open.
"Who are you?" Trevor stepped forward, closer to the mirror. "Who?"
The bald head tilted upwards, revealing dark eyes and a wide grin. The face, like the head, was completely hairless: no eyebrows, no lashes, no stubble. Smooth, clean. Pure.
"Who are you?" he repeated, standing now in front of the mirror – and before the figure, which barely resembled Derek at all. He fought against the urge to kneel.
The bald head tilted slowly to one side, as if its owner was carefully considering his reply. The grin twitched, forming words:
"I'm the Pilgrim and I'm here to save you."
PART THREE
NO EXIT
SEVENTEEN
The phone call came early, around 5.40am. Sarah was still asleep in the spare room – she hadn't yet been able to face her old room, the one where all the worst memories were kept. Her dreams had been uneasy, restless, as if the confusion making such a mess of her waking life was mutating into phantoms which had seeped in through the holes in her skull – her eyes, her nostrils, even her gaping mouth. Natural holes, rather than ones someone had bored into bone with a primitive hand drill.
She reached out and tried to find her mobile phone, her eyes refusing to open even a millimetre. She felt the weight of a book against the side of her hand as her fingers pushed it off the night stand, and then she tipped over a glass of water. Finally her hand fell upon the phone, and she grasped it like a weapon, dragging it across the crumpled bed sheets and towards her face.
"Yeah. Hello." Still she was unable to open her eyes. They were sealed, glued shut during the night. She imagined old copper pennies balanced on dead men's eyelids.
"It's me. Are you awake?"
"Benson? What? Where the fuck are you?"
"I asked you if you were awake. Wide awake." His tone was dour. He sounded angry, as if she'd pissed him of in some way – and she probably had. "I need you awake right now."
At last she could open her eyes. Light seeped in through the fluttering lids, but not much. The room was dim, musty, and the heavy curtains were drawn tight across the windows. "I'm awake." She sat upright, her senses kicking in. Her copper's instinct told her that something had happened – probably something bad. "Tell me."
"OK, I don't have much time so listen carefully. I'm at Roundhay Park. In the Arena. An early morning jogger found two bodies. Young boys. Both of them have holes drilled into their skulls, and the wounds have been burned. You need to get here if you want in on this. Do you understand me?"
Sarah blinked into the shivery darkness. She felt sick and light-headed, as if she had just downed a bottle of strong liquor. The room seemed to shudder, the walls trembling, and it came to her in a flash that she was trapped – they all were: trapped inside a plot they could barely even understand. Stuck in a moment that might just last forever.
"You hear me, Sarah?"
She nodded. "Yeah. Thanks. Who tipped you off?"
"A sergeant I know – murder squad. He was the first officer on the scene, and knew that we'd found that kid in the dentist chair. He's doing us a favour – doing me a favour, actually. Just don't say I never give you anything, eh?" Then he ended the call, leaving her hanging.
She hated that. It took away her power.
"Thanks," said Sarah, swinging her legs off the bed and lunging for the wardrobe. "Thanks a lot, you prick." But she was actually pleased that he'd called, of course she was. Sarah was not the kind of police officer who liked to be left out; she wanted to be in on everything, right to the last. She and Benson had found the first dead kid, so it was only right that they maintain an interest in the case as it panned out. She silently thanked Benson's friend for the tip-off, acknowledging the fact that he did not have to let them in on anything and she owed him one, whoever he was.
She showered quickly, and put on her uniform without even opening the curtains. She knew the clothing well enough to dress in the dark. These clothes were like a second skin – or perhaps they constituted her real skin.
It wasn't far to Roundhay, and she knew all the back roads and rat-runs by heart. There were very few pedestrians around at this hour apart from returning night-shift workers or early commuters on their way to catch the first buses of the day. Those few people Sarah did see all had the same shambling demeanour, whether they were heading home or towards distant offices or factories. She knew how they felt; it was the weight of the world, the early-morning dead load that pressed down on you and didn't go away until later in the day, when everyone else was up and about to take on their share of the invisible burden.
Sarah was on site before 6.30am. The rain had stopped. It was still dark, of course, but the promise of light hung in the air like a diffuse vapour. She left her car in the parking spaces behind the Deer in the Park public house and walked through a gap in the bushes at the rear of the building. Even from here, a hundred or so yards away, she could see uniforms milling about at the top of the rise, most of them staring down into the wide, deep bowl of the Arena and studying whatever was down there.
At one point, when the huge park was first created, the depression was intended as the location of another lake. Something happened to prevent this, and the indentation was left in place; nobody bothered to fill it in. During the summer months, bands and actors performed there, in the makeshift Arena. It drew the crowds; it entertained the masses.
Right now Sarah was drawn to another kind of entertainment: the thoroughly modern spectacle of recreational homicide.
She nodded at a few familiar faces as she descended the side of the incline, her eyes locked dead ahead and her boots scraping on the packed earth. Three police vehicles were parked with their noses pointed towards the dip, their doors open and their lights on. She ignored the stares from other officers
and carried on down the hill, spotting Benson where he stood near the centre of the Arena.
The two bodies had been covered with white sheets. Scenes of Crime Officers were yet to arrive to carry out their technical duties, so nobody was going near the two small mounds. Someone had taped off an area around the corpses, and Benson was standing by the flapping red barrier, looking her way.
Sarah smiled. He nodded.
"Thanks for calling," she said as she drew near.
"It's OK. I figured we should both be here, just in case we spot something that might make a difference later on." He seemed more relaxed than he had on the phone.
Sarah stared at the sheeted bodies. "How old?"
"As far as we can make out, they seem to be aged around twelve years old. Just a couple of kids."
She looked at his scarred face. His eyes were hard, like pieces of granite. He gave nothing away – that's why he was so good at this part of the job. Benson calmly calculated everything, detaching his emotions from whatever was going on around him. He was the master of this kind of thing: it was second nature to him. "Is it the same as before?"
He turned to her, his mouth twitching. It was almost a smile. "Yeah. Several holes drilled into the skull, and then something like a hot wire pressed into the holes to stem the flow of blood." He turned back to stare at the covered bodies, his hands flexing at his sides.
They stood there in silence for a few moments, infected by the stillness of the early morning and the hushed awe of the other officers who for some reason seemed unwilling to approach the location of the bodies. Birds began to sing; distant traffic noise filtered through; up on the hill, somebody gave out a short, embarrassed laugh.
Then, after what seemed like the longest moment Sarah had ever experienced, someone did finally wander over to join them.
"This is Sergeant Reynolds." Benson nodded at the other man. "He's the one who called me."
Sarah looked at the man. He was tall – well over six feet – and extraordinarily handsome. She'd never seen him before: she was sure that she would have remembered such a striking individual. "Thanks, sir," she said. "I mean, for letting us know about this."
Reynolds nodded. "Benson and I go way back. I owe him more favours than I can ever repay." The two men exchanged a glance containing levels of meaning that Sarah could not even approach let alone penetrate. It was an odd moment, and one that lasted just about long enough for her to be certain she hadn't imagined it.
"All the same… thanks. We really want to be kept in the loop on this one. Is there anything more you can tell us?"
Reynolds sighed heavily, as if he was already tired of talking about the case. "At five o'clock this morning a local solicitor was out taking his usual daily run and he found them like that, laid out like slabs of meat on the grass. We estimate that they couldn't have been there long. All kinds of people wander round here at night, so if the bodies had been left earlier someone would have found them and we'd have been informed. The sight of a dead kid melts the hardest of hearts." He smiled, and suddenly looked ugly.
Sarah glanced at the shapes on the ground. She felt a dizzying wave of sadness wash over her and through her. "So what does it mean? Is this some kind of display?"
Reynolds put his hands in his pockets and bunched up his shoulders. "I think so. It's like he's showing off… maybe even taunting us. He's set these boys out like trophies, showing us what he's capable of. Whoever he is, he's getting more confident. The first one – the one you found – was hidden away. These two are out in plain sight, like a gift."
They fell into an uneasy silence. Benson scanned the top of the rise, looking for someone. Reynolds watched Sarah, and she held his gaze.
"We have a mutual friend, by the way," said Reynolds, buttoning his overcoat against the chill. His breath was a faint white phantom in the air before his face, dispersing as quickly as it appeared. "DI Tebbit. I used to work under him, before I was transferred to the murder squad."
Sarah nodded. "How is he, sir? I haven't heard anything for a while."
Reynolds looked down, and then raised his eyes slowly back to Sarah's face. He blinked; a strange, almost mechanical movement. "He's bad. He slipped into a coma late last night. They don't expect him to come out of it, either."
The news hit Sarah hard. She'd known DI Tebbit for a couple of years and liked him a lot. More than a lot. He had looked after her since their first meeting, when she was a fresh face on the force. Tebbit had known her father, and disliked him with a passion, but he had been taken with Sarah for reasons she still could not define. She'd always suspected that the man had a crush on her, but the notion had never offended her.
"He's a good man." Reynolds was staring her down, almost like an obscure challenge.
"One of the best," she replied, narrowing her eyes and setting the muscles in her jaw. Was he testing her? If he was, she failed to see why and for what purpose. They were all on the same side here.
"I knew your father, too…" Ah, there it was: the kicker to this subtle confrontation. The silence after his words was filled with questions, but ones he was clearly unable – or unwilling – to ask.
"Yes? Well, a lot of people knew my father. Most of them knew him better than I did. Or at least they liked him better." She set her stance, legs held slightly apart. This was getting weird, like some kind of mental warfare.
"He was a great copper. He trained me… showed me what's what." Reynolds glanced over at Benson, and her boyfriend (that word – it still made her feel uncomfortable, like trying on a hat which she knew didn't suit her and never would) gave a slight shake of the head. When he realised that Sarah had seen the gesture, he tried to cover it by raising his hand and coughing into his fist.
The old boys' club was at work again. It never failed to disappoint her.
Sarah felt suddenly trapped between the two men. They flanked her, their limbs forming the boundary of a human cage. She entertained the eerie thought that if she suddenly decided to run they might chase her, and if they caught her away from prying eyes they might do something unimaginable.
Now where had that thought come from? She was growing paranoid; things were getting to her.
The Scene of Crime Officers finally arrived, breaking the strange spell. Several figures in crumpled Hazmat suits drifted down the sides of the incline, drawing in on the locus of the crime. Like mystics, they carried themselves with a grace and confidence that seemed otherworldly. Sarah envied them for a moment: their role in an investigation was defined by rigid scientific parameters, simple scales and rules. Tests could be carried out to discern the truth of a situation, and all emotion could be cast aside. Ambiguity had no place in their lives.
Sarah and the two men watched as the silent SOCOs did their thing. They erected a tent around the bodies and lifted the sheets, carefully combing the area and the corpses for evidence. Their padded white feet moved softly over the hard packed ground; their white-hooded heads nodded, twitched, and occasionally bent towards clipboards to examine raw data.
After a while it became apparent that Sarah and Benson were no longer quite as welcome on the scene. They walked away in silence, each wrapped up in their own storm of thoughts. Sarah was beginning to feel that Benson might be hiding something from her about his relationship with Sergeant Reynolds – or was it something to do with Tebbit? She didn't know what secrets he was holding within, or what they had to do with her, but she sensed his discomfort.
"We need to talk later," she said. "When the shift's over." They walked towards her car, a measurable distance growing between them in terms of both physical space and spiritual empathy.
"OK. If you like."
"Come back to mine? Make it late, though – after eleven. I have a few things to do first. But I think it's time we talked about my father."
Benson stopped walking. He was staring at the ground, at the short grass and the patches of exposed earth between his feet. "Why now?" Finally he turned to face her. His scars seemed to writh
e like snakes across his cheeks.
"I've found… something. I'm not quite sure what it is, but you might be able to help me sort through things and get it straight in my head. I need another brain on this, and, well, there's nobody else I can trust."
Benson's lips curled into a slow, cruel smile. "Are you saying that you trust me now? Is this a breakthrough in our relationship?"
Sarah couldn't help but smile back at him. "What I'm saying is that I can't trust anyone else. Not with this, anyway. You're all I have, and that's not much but it'll have to do."
"Oh, such flattery. I feel blessed." He started walking again, long and even strides she could barely keep up with. Sarah seemed to sense an air of relief about him now, as if he had narrowly escaped a situation that he didn't want to face until he was fully prepared.
She slapped him on the arm. "Take it where you can get it, lover. I won't say it again."
