Dead Bad Things

by Gary McMahon

  I stepped forward, having to force my legs to move. It was like walking through mud. The man just sat there, staring into space, stiff-backed and unmoving. I approached the shards of mirror, so close that I could see their perfectly smooth shorn edges. The pieces of mirror had not been shattered; they had been sliced, or moulded.

  "Who are you?"

  The man didn't move.

  "Tell me who you are. Is it you I've been looking for?"

  He nodded his head, once, a tiny movement in the mirror-mosaic.

  "Show yourself. Show me who you are."

  Just as the man began to turn around I realised who he was, and for the first time since the accident that had claimed the lives of my family, I experienced a genuinely spontaneous emotion – one that I didn't have to force or fake.

  The man turned incrementally, as if his joints were rusted and their motion was restricted. He moved awkwardly, like a clockwork toy. His hands were resting on his knees. His feet remained flat on the floor. He twisted from the waist; a wholly unnatural movement.

  I tried to scream but my voice would not come. It was broken: it was busted, like a vandalised machine.

  The man turned and I looked at his features. He turned and I stared into my own face, inspecting my wide, watering eyes for signs of deceit.

  "So you found me." His voice was the female voice I had heard on the phone at the house in Plaistow, and again on the mobile phone in the café opposite the massage parlour. It was a false voice, a clockwork lie. But this time it sounded familiar. The voice was that of Ellen Lang, my dead friend, my murdered lover.

  "Who are you?" I fell to my knees. The floor was hard; it sent shockwaves through my legs. "What is this?"

  "You found me. You needed to find me." That voice: it was summoned from old machine parts, ancient cogs and levers.

  "I needed to find myself." The truth was so obvious that it seemed almost trite, the tired punch line to an old joke. Was this yet another form of mental torture, or had Ellen come through from another realm to help me, perhaps even to protect me… to save me from myself?

  "Stay here. Don't go there. Don't go back. You can't help her. You never could." Words formed on the fractured surface of the mirror, written in breath. A light misty message, one that Ellen's cobbled-together avatar could not possibly hold back. "Don't," she said, and then the figure on the chair – the representation of me – crumpled, fell apart, its dusty clockwork pieces scattering across the floor.

  I read the misted words on the glass, even as they faded, and they were in direct opposition to what the figure had told me.

  Go Home.

  Somewhere far off, probably behind the haphazard mirror, a baby started to cry.

  Then I saw something else in the reflective surfaces, a scene broken into scores of separate images. Only when I took a step back, gave myself some distance, could I see what was forming in the silvered shards on the wall.

  The wailing of the unseen baby grew louder, as if it were distressed.

  I saw the room above the massage parlour: Immaculee Karuhmbi's place. It was a mess. Furniture had been smashed, the walls had been hacked at with blunt instruments, and a body was positioned on the floor, shrouded by detritus.

  The corpse was that of the Rwandan psychic. Her armless torso was face-up, eyes open, her mouth was agape. As I watched, the scene jerked into life, like a film roll starting to play. Straddling the psychic's body was Traci (with an eye not a why), her factotum, her ex-lover. The skinny little girl I had fucked on a grimy mattress in the grey zone. Traci looked insane: she was naked, her hair was writhing like a nest of vipers, and her thin body was soaked in sweat. She smiled – she grinned at me, I'm sure of it. She reached down and tore a chunk of meat from Immaculee's stomach, and then stuffed it into her mouth. I closed my eyes when, slowly and methodically, she began to chew.

  The sound of a baby crying began to fade, gradually turning to silence.

  As I turned away I knew that there had never really been a choice, despite what Ellen had somehow managed to say to me. If it had even been Ellen at all, and not simply another trick by the one who taunted me from the ginnels and alleyways between realities.

  Of course I would return to Leeds; I would always go back, go home. There was nobody left here to cling to, and no other place that would have me.

  TWENTY

  Sarah pushed slowly through the doors and stood in a narrow corridor, wondering where the black-robed figure had gone. She knew that Eddie Knowles would follow her. He had no choice; he was part of this now, even if he denied it to himself. He was just as much involved in whatever the hell was going on as Sarah, perhaps even more so.

  "What is it?" His voice was at her shoulder, hovering like a bird. "What happened?"

  "I saw… I don't know. Someone. Somebody's been following me, hanging around wherever I go. If I didn't know any better I'd say it was my father's ghost."

  Eddie didn't laugh, and that unnerved her. He was not the type to believe in spooks. Eddie lived in the real world, the hard world of greed and violence, not some soft-centred place where things went bump in the night.

  "Say something, Eddie. Tell me I'm being fucking stupid."

  "You're being fuckin' stupid." His voice was deadpan – flat and unconvincing.

  "Thanks," she said, taking a step forward.

  "Any time, love. Any fuckin' time."

  She walked forward, moving hesitantly along the corridor.

  Up ahead were several doors, positioned on either side of the tight space. She could hear the faint strains of a radio playing somewhere in the heart of the building, probably in one of the dormitories.

  "Keep going," said Eddie, still following her. "There's something I should probably show you, now that you're here."

  "Where?" She kept moving, her feet scuffing the floor. The radio fell silent.

  "Turn right at the end, and then go through the first door."

  Sarah did as Eddie asked, and found herself standing in the doorway of an odd little room. Low concrete benches lined the walls, and located at the centre of the room was a sunken area in which sat a small altar – there was a font, some candle-holders, and a small framed picture of Jesus Christ holding a bleeding heart. Assorted paraphernalia of faith: small articles of the divine.

  "It's the prayer room." Eddie stepped past her, walked to one of the benches and sat down. He stared at the altar, his gaze cold and implacable. "Me and your old fella, we spent a lot of time in here. It was a nice quiet place to chat." He looked over at her and smiled, his fringe flopping to cover his lined forehead. It was a strange expression, and seemed somehow more genuine than anything else about the man. In that moment he looked vulnerable, as if he were letting down his defences.

  "OK. So what did you want to show me?" She folded her arms, not yet ready to lower her own barriers, not completely.

  Eddie shook his head. "You coppers… you can be blind as fuck sometimes." He motioned with his arms, bringing them up and out, as if embracing something invisible. "Look at the walls. The pictures. These people were all regulars here at one time or another – this is how they're remembered. They're all dead now, but these drawings are like a shrine to their memory, a way of making sure they're not forgotten."

  Sarah let her gaze wander around the room and took in the delicately chalked portraits that dominated the walls. She had already noticed them of course, but nothing about them had drawn her interest enough to deserve more than a brief glance. They had been applied directly to the plaster render, and then framed with thin plywood strips. Each one was incredibly well done; the level of detail was breathtaking. She did not know any of the faces, but she guessed that the actual men the portraits were based on looked exactly like these representations. "Yes. They're lovely. But what does all this mean to me?"

  Eddie laughed. It was a quiet sound, and slightly creepy. Sarah was reminded of the sounds her father used to make as he prowled the family home, late at night, drinking whisky, talking
to himself and laughing at his own dirty little jokes; all the sounds of madness, or at least of sanity that was coming apart at the seams.

  "Well?" She didn't mean to sound so angry, but she was unable to hold it back. Eddie, she felt, was wasting her time. She had better things she could've spent that two grand on. She unfolded her arms, letting them hang, her hands making tight little fists at her sides.

  "For fuck's sake, can't you see? You coppers… how the hell do you expect to solve anything when you can't even take the time to stop and look at your surroundings? Take another look at the fuckin' pictures." He was angry too; angry and frustrated, and, yes, even slightly disappointed. And there was a tone of sadness in his voice that she had not noticed until now.

  Sarah looked again at the walls, puzzled yet eager to discover what Eddie was talking about, what he so desperately wanted her to see. Most of the men depicted in the drawings had beards or stubble, and they all sported dark rings around their eyes. Even in these idealised pictures, the men (no women: just men) looked tired, worn out and drained by the harshness of their lives. Then, finally, she saw it. She felt like an idiot for not noticing it at once, but it wasn't something she would have expected, not here, in this place.

  One of the drawings was of her father.

  Stern and unmoving, he stared down at her from the wall, his eyes blazing like embers. Even when he was happy he had looked aggrieved. It had held him back, that inability to express anything other than an inner rage. His superiors held him in awe, his peers suspected he was always on the edge of a burnout, and everyone else was afraid of him. His family feared him most of all.

  "Oh, shit. It's him. What the hell's he doing up there?"

  "Well done." Eddie stood and took a step away from the bench, then stopped, as if he was uncertain what to do now that he was on his feet. "Congratulations, you can now call yourself a detective. Have a badge." Beneath the humour, there was a thinly disguised note of bitterness, even contempt.

  He laughed again, but this time the sadness was held at bay – or perhaps she had imagined it after all.

  Eddie walked over to her, moving slowly, with tiny steps. "He was a hero to a lot of people, you know. If you think you can change that, I'd think again. Nobody wants to hear about him doing anything but solving crimes, giving money to his pet charities, and maybe fronting a few sex and poker parties. People like their heroes tarnished. It makes them more believable. What they don't like is to have their heroes ruined."

  Sarah turned to face Eddie, her shoulders sagging. She felt weak, almost ready to give up. "Like I said before, I have no intention of dragging anybody's name through the mud. I don't want to damage his reputation – this is just for me, for my own piece of mind. I feel like I'm going mad, and I need to find out why. I want to know, damn it!" Her strength returned as she spat out those final words, and she clung to her rage as if it might help her continue her search.

  Eddie nodded. Then he turned back to face the room, slipping his hands into his trouser pockets. There was the quiet jingle of loose change, the music of a man's meagre possessions.

  When Sarah looked back at the drawing of her father, he was wearing a white cowl over his head. His shoulders were draped in black. His eyes were hidden. She blinked, and then she saw his face again, uncovered. The hood was no longer in place. She could have sworn that this time he was smiling.

  "Come here," Eddie moved back towards the bench he'd only just vacated. He moved quicker now, as if he were nervy and on edge. "Sit with me for a while. I think we understand each other now."

  Sarah followed him and sat down. The bench was cold and hard; the cold seeped through the seat of her trousers and into the meat of her buttocks. She wriggled her backside on the concrete, trying to get comfortable. "Yes. Yes, I think we do, Eddie. All I want is a little truth, you know. No more lies. No more bullshit. Just some honesty, so I can put that bastard and what he did behind me."

  Eddie was staring into her eyes. His face was open and appealing; in that moment he looked kind and generous, as if he really cared. "A little truth," he said, mulling over her words.

  "He used to hurt me, Eddie. He cut me – slashed my legs to stop himself from doing other things, sex stuff. And he beat and raped my mother. Now you tell me that he abducted and kicked the crap out of criminals, and maybe even killed one of them? Can you appreciate why I need to know – what I need to know? He was my father. What if… what if, like you said back there, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree?" She lowered her head. She had the impression that Eddie was reaching out to her, his hand hovering close to her head. Then she felt the hand move quickly away, as if he had relented and dropped it into his lap.

  "OK." His voice was low, husky. She liked it this time; she liked it a lot. It sounded like hope. "OK, I'm going to tell you something. Just let me speak, and then don't ask any questions. I'm about to tell you all I know – everything. I'm keeping nothing back, I swear it. Not this time." He sounded as if he were speaking to someone else and not to Sarah; perhaps even to her father's portrait watching them from the wall.

  She was afraid to look up in case Eddie changed his mind. Perhaps if he saw her face, looked into her eyes again, he might lose his nerve and withdraw his offer of honesty. So instead she watched her hands fidgeting between her knees. Her fingers looked long, pale, as if they belonged to someone else. She could barely feel them.

  "Your mum couldn't have children. Not many people knew that, and those who did kept the information to themselves. Especially after you came along."

  A clock began to tick somewhere just outside the prayer room: the sound was loud, regular; it sounded strange, false, like a cheap prop in a bad film. Sarah tried to focus on Eddie's voice, on the words that were circling her like flies around a corpse. Time seemed on the verge of stopping. Eddie's revelation held the power to do that, to alter her world.

  "You're not a stupid girl, so I'm assuming you've picked up my meaning. One day your father brought you home. You were a newborn. He said that he'd taken you from some fuckin' junkie scumbag who was going to sell you on the streets for a fix. Nobody questioned him: he wasn't the kind of man to be questioned."

  The sound of the clock faded. She felt like she'd heard that same idle ticking before, at several points during her life. Déjà vu flooded her, making her dizzy.

  Eddie continued; his voice was so low now that she had to strain to hear him. "He pulled some strings and called in a lot of favours. The paperwork went through easily, and he made sure that it went missing afterwards, burned in a small office fire."

  He paused, breathing deeply.

  "This all coincided with a spell when your mother had to stay indoors for a few months. He'd hurt her badly and she was healing slowly. Next time she stepped outside she had a kid. Everyone called it a miracle, but they just called you Sarah."

  Sarah was crying but she felt nothing. Her mind and body were empty. She was like a deep well whose contents had been drained, a dry riverbed in the middle of a massive drought…

  "So there's no need to worry about apples and trees." The expansion was unnecessary, but she was glad to hear him say it, just to prove that she had not misheard or misunderstood his story. Until he said those words, forcing them home, she was unsure if this was some kind of hallucination, a daydream brought on by too much stress and irresponsible daytime drinking.

  Sarah turned her head and looked at Eddie Knowles. He was staring at her, and had clearly been doing so for some time. All the time it took to tell her the truth – or at least this version of it. For the truth, she knew, was always, always relative. Nobody ever knew it all; they just possessed fragments, like the separate parts of a body seen through a torn shroud.

  "That's it. That's all I know. I don't know where you came from or how he got you. It wasn't something you could ask him, even when he was drunk. He told me once that the angel had given you to him, but I didn't dare ask him to explain what he meant. I was too scared. We all were. Everyone was scared
of the man, but at the same time we felt safe that he was on our side."

  Sarah nodded. She understood completely. "That's how I felt, too. Even when he was hurting me, or when he beat up my mother. He still made me – made us both – feel safe. He protected us from the greater horrors of the world. He was like… I dunno, like some kind of buffer. But lately I'm starting to think that he might have been responsible for all those other horrors, the ones he pretended to save us from."

  Eddie reached out and she took his hand. He squeezed, and she sensed a thousand apologies and a million regrets being sent through his fingertips and into her body, heading for her heart. But she was probably imagining it. Apologies – even unspoken ones – did not come easily to people like Eddie.

  "I know," she said. "I know, Eddie, and it's OK. Really it is. You've told me now, so you can let yourself off the hook. You've let your secret out of the box."