Dead Bad Things

by Gary McMahon

  Eddie shrugged. He blew air through his pursed lips. "No. Back then, blokes didn't interfere in each others lives that way. They gave each other space, and they never questioned anything. Especially blokes like us, who lived that kind of life, who saw the things we saw and did the things we did. Bad blokes… dead bad bastards like us."

  Sarah bit her bottom lip. She didn't know what to say, or how to react. This was all too much; she was overloaded with information she didn't even want to have inside her head.

  The lights flickered again, but this time when they settled the room was much dimmer, nearly dark. It was almost dark in the middle of the day.

  NINETEEN

  It didn't take me long to locate Dock Side on the map. I braved the outside world again and used a terminal in a small internet place near the football ground, glancing nervously over my shoulder in case Traci had decided to follow me again. I hadn't seen or heard from her since we'd slept together, and even then she had left quietly in the night while I dozed. She didn't leave a note. In fact she left nothing behind but the smell of her sex.

  I typed 'Dock Side, London' into an internet search engine and the first hit I got was for a disused riverside warehouse in Rotherhithe, on the opposite bank of the Thames to the old Wapping newspaper plant. According to the link I accessed, the warehouse had once been owned by a company called Pilgrim Products. There was no mention of what that company did, or what it was they supplied or manufactured, but the name rang bells so deep inside me that I feared they might never be silenced.

  The Pilgrim. It seemed obvious that I would encounter him again, even in such an oblique manner as this. He had dogged me all through my life, watching and interfering from the sidelines, until he had finally entered centre stage and taken from me the only thing I had left to care about.

  A long time ago he had killed my family, and then he had done the same to my lover.

  He was the reason – or at least a large part of it – that I had nothing left in this life but a slim hope, a slender promise of redemption that continually danced out of reach.

  I left the café and headed straight for the underground station, feeling as if whatever time I had was slipping away. I had no idea where this sudden sense of urgency had originated – perhaps it was something to do with the Rwandan psychic who had supplied the address; or maybe it was because of the attentions of her ex-lover, who had shared my bed.

  And now here I stood, outside Canada Water tube station. As usual, the day was slightly overcast; thin clouds hung like webbing in the sky. I stared up, directly overhead, and wondered what might be watching from above that grey canopy. My senses were going into overdrive. My tattoos itched. All the old feelings were returning; the familiar signifiers that I was on to something. As if I hadn't known all along that dark forces would find me quickly, even in my silly hiding place: a haunted house in a haunted city in a haunted country; crouching in a pathetic corner of a haunted world.

  It occurred to me, and not for the first time, that everyone and everything was haunted. And it had always been that way.

  I walked down to the river, passing an old pub called The Mayflower that sat with its haunches on the riverbank. I remembered that I had been here before, many years ago. There was a ghost on the premises, one that I had been unable to help.

  The warehouse looked foreboding even in daylight, but that was probably because of the personal connection I had with the building. It was large and decaying. Exposed steel bones poked through ruined layers of cladding and the roof was pitted with holes. PILGRIM PRODUCTS was stencilled in faded white lettering across the front elevation, and I almost turned around and walked away.

  But I didn't. I stood and I stared and I began to be afraid – really afraid, for the first time in months. My previous stoical attitude caved in and the childlike fear beneath stared up into the open air, wishing that it could go back into hiding.

  It might have been a trick of perception, but the sky above the warehouse was darkening, as if it were being churned up by a storm. Silent flashes illuminated the cloud cover over the roof. Dark shapes that could only be birds circled the place, remaining in the grubby air rather than roosting in the eaves.

  I felt like I'd wandered onto the set of a horror film, and I realised that once again I was being manipulated. In reality – my reality, the one in which I existed – the day was bright, the sky was a little clearer. But right here, right now, as I stood and watched, a sliver of the Pilgrim's reality was slipping through to stain my view. If he were here, next to me, he would be laughing. He was such a theatrical bastard, and I knew that all of the set dressing was more for his benefit than mine.

  It was all just part of the joke.

  "I'm not afraid," I said, lying. "I'm not afraid of you." That last part, at least, was true. The Pilgrim himself did not inspire fear in my heart, but the darkness he stood for disturbed me in a way that he could only aspire to and never quite attain. Like me, the Pilgrim knew his limits, and he had to stay within them.

  There are levels to human fear, like the landings of an infinite stairwell. Near the top, closest to the air, there are the common and everyday fears: lost love, a ruined career, living on the streets with no one to care. Then one level down there dwell the fears of age, death and the end of your existence. These are the fears that bite. They have their teeth in us from the very day that we become aware of our own mortality.

  Beneath even these, on other, lower landings – ill-trodden levels where it isn't wise to venture – the spiritual fears roam. The fear of faithlessness, of vanishing into the void, of everything we ever believed in being exposed as nothing but a lie.

  That is where the darkness lives. The shadow between the stars, the spaces between individual souls – the thing we choose to call the Devil.

  The Devil lives on the lowest landing, the rickety one with warped boards and no handrail to break a fall. He sits like a bloated corpse in the darkness we all keep inside, trying to smother it with friends and lovers and commodities while he watches from below. It is the place we never get to see until the moment right before we die.

  That place, the spot where we are most vulnerable, is where I need to operate. It is part of my calling to dance with the Devil, even when I am uncertain of the right moves.

  Breathing deeply, I set off towards the warehouse, noting how much it resembled another similar building, one from my recent past. A steel-framed structure where I'd discovered the hanged body of a pretty young woman and a wailing man on the ground at her feet: the place where all this madness had begun. I tried to imagine if I might have acted differently had I known the events that would follow, but I couldn't be certain. I believe in free will, but it is compromised. With each choice we make in life there comes a price, and sometimes that price is too high to pay. But we must always cough up; we have to pay our dues, even if we change our minds. Once set in motion, the transaction must be completed.

  I stopped before the building's entrance. There were thick chains across the doors, with huge padlocks binding them together. It looked like they were meant to keep something inside rather than to prevent anyone from entering the place.

  The warehouse was a detached steel frame set among other stone buildings, also derelict. At one time the banks of this river had seen monumental trade, but now the old structures had either been renovated or turned into expensive riverside apartments or left to rot. I glanced at its neighbours, aware of the dead eyes of broken windows and the barred mouths of doors.

  Nobody but the Pilgrim would have sent me here. The only thing stopping me from walking away was the fact that I no longer cared what happened to me.

  Graffiti adorned the warehouse walls, but it was patchy and for the most part incoherent. The material covering the steel members was torn and warped, and the damage had obliterated whatever messages previous visitors had daubed there.

  I saw fragments of names, pieces of abusive propaganda, partial telephone numbers and the faint promise of sex
ual acts carried out by whoever answered the call. Then, drawing my gaze like a spray of blood, I saw the only message meant specifically for me.

  Again, it was incomplete, but there was enough of it left in black paint on the grey wall that I understood immediately I had come to the right place. Not that I had maintained any doubts, but if I had done they were now gone.

  …ento Mor…

  Part of a well-worn Latin phrase I'd been tagged by several months ago: a message, a warning, a reminder. A not-so-gentle admonition to inform me that one day I too must die.

  Despite the fear gnawing at my guts, I managed a tiny smile.

  "Let's see what you have for me," I whispered, moving slowly and uncertainly around the building looking for a way inside. I did not have to search for long. On the east elevation there was a rent in the cladding just about large enough that I could slip inside.

  I took one last look at the sky, and saw a clearing directly above me. It was yet another taunt: a glimpse of forever above the canopy of horror under which I walked.

  Then, dropping my gaze, I turned sideways and wriggled in through the gap.

  It was gloomy in there – as I had known it would be – and the floor was uneven. Once I was fully through the skin of the structure, past the beams and columns and hanging teeth of metal, I began to notice the smell. The aroma of old sex, cannabis smoke and petrol filled my nostrils. Shards of daylight poked through holes in the walls. Most of the windows were either boarded over with timbers or had steel shutters, but a few of them – those higher up, near the mezzanine level – had only torn sheets of builder's paper taped across their frames. Through these latter minor openings I was allowed enough light to make my way across the large, open space.

  Used condoms, empty beer cans and broken bottles littered the floor. The remnants of weird machines stood in shadow, and I wondered if they were real or simply another fabrication, the industrial wreckage of a different version of reality.

  Oddly, I sensed no ghosts inside the building. There was an atmosphere, yes, but it didn't reek of the dead. There was a sense of otherness, of difference. It felt like I was walking across a stage, but not inside any normal kind of theatre. I had felt this way before, on several occasions, but rarely had it been so powerful. I could taste something vaguely metallic on my tongue, but it was an alien flavour; my skin prickled; my insides knotted.

  Somewhere near the centre of the wide room, I stopped. The steelwork seemed to make a low humming sound, as if it were transmitting a frequency I could not access. The paper across the upper windows fluttered, but I felt no breeze. The gloom deepened, shifting subtly around me like deep water. I was aware of unknown currents, and felt suddenly out of my depth.

  Something shifted behind me, and I fought the urge to turn around and look. After several seconds, I could fight it no more and spun slowly on my heels. There was nothing there, but a short distance away, against a supporting column, there was the suggestion of coiling movement, as if a great snake was wrapping its thick body around the steel upright.

  I looked away, blinking. This was all shadow-play: a series of cheap parlour tricks meant to unnerve me.

  Groping for a connection to the outside world, I looked up again, peering at the chinks of light that bled through the papered windows. This time when I raised my eyes, I saw other things, objects which at first defied logic.

  Small plastic doll parts were suspended from strings or wires attached to the ceiling. They spun slowly in the darkness, tiny arms, legs, torsos, and heads. When I saw them indirectly, from the corner of my eye, they began to look real – disassembled children left there to warn away trespassers. But when I looked directly at them they were simply doll parts.

  I looked away, and then back at the dangling pieces. They were plastic again, just pieces of manufactured toys. But still, there was something, a detail that didn't quite add up. It took me a while to realise what was wrong, but when I did it hit me like a blow from the shadows.

  Each of the doll's faces was the same – a blank pink oval. I strained my eyes to examine them, and even in the meagre light from the holes in the paper across the windows, I could see the blank plastic skulls. I tried to think of the significance of those empty plastic faces, but the intended meaning eluded me. I was left only with the impression that there was a message here, on the end of those wires, if only I had the ability, or desire, to see it.

  I moved across the space, going deeper inside. The place where I'd gained access now seemed miles away, as if it were receding. I fought the sensation, but it was stronger than me. It felt like I was leaving the world behind.

  "I know you," I said, speaking to whoever was manipulating my reality. "We have met." There was no answer; the dark beckoned, reaching out towards me like a potential lover.

  I saw balloons on the floor. They were fully inflated, almost to the point of bursting, so the features printed upon the stretched elastic surfaces were not immediately familiar. As I drew closer I realised that it was my face on the balloons, but mutated, elongated by the air inside them. "Very clever." I sounded confident, but my defences were fragile. My skin crawled; the ink ran and reformed the protective emblems I wore upon my body. The screams of those I had failed were almost audible as they writhed across my back; inked names slowly ripped from my flesh.

  I kicked through the cluster of balloons, trying not to look at my own strangely shaped features. I stared straight ahead, at a point on the wall. Then I realised that someone was moving towards me. The figure was thin, crumpled, as if it were a crude amalgamation of body parts rather than a whole. I paused, my feet shuffling, ready for flight. Then I realised that I was staring at my own reflection.

  Shards and slivers and squares of mirror had been fixed to the wall. The effect was like a mosaic, but one that reflected reality in a way that was out of true. It was a visual metaphor, another silly trick, and if I had not been so nervous I might have smiled.

  There were other things reflected in the piecemeal mirror, and they forced their way into my perspective as I watched. It was like a painting by Goya, or a nightmare inspired by the ingestion of narcotics. If anyone but me had seen this, they would have lost their minds in a second.

  Behind me, but not really anywhere behind me (just in the twisted reality depicted in the mirror), a huge man worked a gargantuan pair of bellows in absolute silence. He was naked from the waist up and his legs were wrapped in what looked like bloody hospital dressings. His torso was thin but his arms were thickly muscled, like flesh-coloured oak trees. On his head he wore an odd feathered cowl. They looked like the feathers from various birds of paradise: beautiful colours, all shapes and sizes. The bellows were leathery, as if they were made from dragons' wings, and the bone handles were so thick that he couldn't close his fists around them.

  The man worked the bellows as hard as he could, the cords on his body straining, sweat streaking his chest and oversized arms, but they inflated only a little. Like Sisyphus, he had taken on a task that could never be fulfilled, a job with no point other than the allegorical.

  Unable to resist, I turned and glanced over my shoulder. There was nothing but that quivering near-darkness. When I looked in the mirror the man was still there, persisting with his task.

  I began to examine the scene held within the reflective fragments, and as I did so I reminded myself that I was seeing them through a fold in reality, a spot where some kind of heave had occurred and things were bleeding through. The sights I was only beginning to make out were from another reality entirely – one that I had no desire to enter.

  To the right of the man – and over my left shoulder, a huge leviathan lay on the floor. I struggled to understand what it was, and then the familiar asserted its grip, telling my mind what to visualise, and I understood that I was not looking at a real animal. It was a papier mâché elephant, laying on its side, its belly slit open and a very small, very old man sitting on a wooden chair inside its emptied gut. This man had no face: the front
of his skull was the back of a head. That all-encompassing head swivelled through three-hundred-and-sixty degrees as I stared. Back of the head was front of the head was back of the head: it was yet another symbol that I couldn't decipher.

  The elephant's rear-left leg began to twitch. The movement was quick, jagged, and the little old man with no face moved his own leg in tandem, tapping out a silent beat. The two were linked; they were part of the same image.

  I blinked, wishing that they would vanish. Somehow the hollow papier mâché beast and its wizened inhabitant were even more horrific than the man with the dragon-wing bellows.

  "Just show me," I said. "Show me what it is I need to understand. Fuck off with the symbols, the puzzles… just show me what you want me to see."

  In the fragmented mirror something else began to form. The vision resolved itself from a light fog, becoming clearer and clearer, as if in answer to my words. It was a man – a normal man in a dark suit. He was sitting on a three-legged wooden stool, like a milking stool, with his back to me.