by Gary McMahon
He rolled his head on his neck, as if he were limbering up for some kind of exercise, warming up the muscles before commencing a tough routine. "He told me which ones to take… the kids. He saw the bad things inside them, just like he always did, and I took them and hid them and carried out the ritual. He pointed the way and I followed, and together we opened their minds to let out the dead bad things."
Sarah let out a small whining sound, like a stifled scream. She felt trapped, pinned to the bed. Everything was moving fast now, playing out towards the end game, and the best she could hope for was not to be killed by this fucking lunatic.
"You're ill, Benson. You're not well. Let's talk about this and maybe we can get you some help." It sounded pathetic even to her, like lines from a script that should have been rewritten long before the first act began.
"I killed the first one over a year ago, while Emerson was still alive." Benson was ignoring her, carrying on with his monologue as if she wasn't even there. "I hadn't perfected the technique – didn't realise I had to burn the holes afterwards to seal the exit and keep other bad things out. So I hid the body in a warehouse near an abandoned car park and waited for my next instructions, but Emerson died and I was left not knowing what I should do. I was lost for a while… didn't know what to do."
He paused, remembering. The figure behind him nodded.
"Then, after his funeral, he came to me. Just like the angel had come to him He told me to get close to you. He showed me what to do, where to go, and I did the next one in the dental chair, just for show. It was my own special touch, just to stamp my personality on the act."
Benson giggled. It was not a pleasant sound, nor was it a wholly sane one.
Behind him, Emerson's ghost was laughing too, but silently. His shoulders were hitching up and down in undisguised mirth and his body rocked back and forth on the chair.
"He might have been your father, but I'm his only real child. He gave birth to what I am, what I've done. I'm his one true son." With these words Benson seemed to come back to her, remembering that she was there, cowering on the bed.
He reached up and took off the hood, exposing his scars. His face glowed in the darkness, as if some internal light had been switched on. "These scars… my ruined face. He did it to me, marking me out. I wear them like a badge. That story about my face being cut in the crash, it was all bullshit. Emerson did this to me, scarring me as part of a ritual, an induction, to set me apart from the herd."
He smiled, and it was an awful sight. There was nothing behind the expression – nothing but deep darkness, endless night: a forever made up of scars.
"I wear his mark with pride."
Sarah's gaze kept flickering between Benson and the ghost in the rocking chair. She didn't know which one to be most afraid of. Then she remembered something that Usher had said earlier, about ghosts hardly ever hurting someone with their own dead hands. They used someone else, he'd said: they manipulated the living into carrying out such corporeal deeds.
That was when Sarah realised that the living were so much more terrifying than the dead.
Ghosts won't hurt you, she thought, but they can harm you through the vessels of the living. They can kill you indirectly, controlling damaged and willing people like puppets.
"Don't do this," she said, drawing herself up to her knees. "Don't… just remember what we had, what we've shared. What we could have been if we'd both worked hard enough to make it happen."
Benson's smile slid away; rotten flesh slipping from a leering skull. "We had nothing," he said, deadpan. "We shared nothing. All I ever wanted was to be in this house, close to him." He turned and motioned towards the rocking chair, but Emerson's phantom was no longer there. The chair was empty, but it continued to rock gently, as if someone had just stood up and walked calmly away from the scene.
Sarah was edging back along the length of the bed, towards the door, using Benson's momentary distraction to gain some ground. She kept her gaze locked onto him, willing him to look the other way for just a moment longer. But Benson turned around, and his face was like a white sheet of paper in the dark room: vast and blank and deathless.
"Where the fuck do you think you're going?" He moved along the side of the bed, matching her progress. From the folds of his robe he produced a long-bladed knife. Sarah recognised it; the knife had belonged to Emerson, a tool he'd used whenever he went fishing. Ghosts didn't need weapons; only people needed weapons, along with the will to use them. Emerson had kept the blade downstairs in the cellar. Before he managed to get hold of the scalpels, he had even used it on Sarah, carefully carving the insides of her thighs as he tried his best not to rape and then kill her – fighting his urges to remain true to his angel.
"Let me go, Benson. If you're still in there, please let me go." It hurt her to beg; it was not in her nature to ask for mercy. She was a strong woman, an independent person, and resented the fact that she had been reduced to crawling on a mattress on her hands and knees.
"Leave her."
Sarah turned and looked at the door. It was open and Usher stood in the doorway, his face grim and his eyes as hard and cold as chips of ice.
"He's crazy," she said, somewhat unnecessarily. "He killed them all… those kids. It was him."
Usher stepped into the room. Sarah remembered his admission that he was not a fighter, but he looked intent and dangerous. In his hand he hefted a large meat cleaver, which he must have grabbed from the rack in the kitchen. He adjusted his grip on the handle and raised it to waist level. "Don't make me use this," he said. His voice was low. He meant business – or was at least giving a convincing performance.
"Don't be silly, ghost-man." Benson forgot about her for a moment and turned to face the interloper. "I know all about you – Emerson told me, and the angel told him. You're evil. You're responsible for the dead bad things being in the world. You're the doorway they use to come through from whatever hell they call home." He moved forward, reducing the space between the potential combatants.
Sarah slipped off the bed. She was behind Benson now; he had moved far enough away from the bed that she could manoeuvre herself into a good position to strike. She realised that Usher was bluffing – of course he was: he had already told her that he'd be useless if things got physical. She shifted her weight and prepared to strike, scanning the area for a weapon.
"Just get out of here," said Usher. "I'm not who you think I am. I'm not who anyone thinks I am. Whatever is leaking into this place, it isn't because of me. I know that now. I might just be the only thing standing between this world and chaos."
Sarah grabbed the only thing she could think of, a heavy vase, and pushed herself off the floor. She went into an agile leap and brought the vase around in a smooth arc, resulting in the object smashing into the side of Benson's head. She moved silently; a war cry would have acted as a warning, and people only did that in films. He batted at her arms and shoulders as his body lurched sideways from the blow, but she managed to evade his desperate grasp.
Benson stumbled further to his left, and Sarah took the opportunity to dodge past him and run towards the door. On her way there she grabbed her baton from its hook on the wall, where it dangled next to her uniform on its hanger on the outside of the wardrobe door. She spun and extended the baton: it snickered in the darkness. The sound was like muted laughter.
"Bitch!" Benson staggered towards her, his hands like clutching claws as they grabbed and batted at her shoulders.
Sarah acted quickly. She stepped inside and brought the baton up and into his chin, slamming it with all the force she could muster. Benson made a coughing sound and then began to drop; Sarah stepped outside of his reach and swung the baton against his temple. The sound it made upon impact was sickening: a dry crunch as it hit bone.
Benson fell to the floor face first, his weight causing the floorboards to shudder as he made contact with them. He twitched once, and then lay still. Sarah didn't try to fool herself that she was tougher than him. She h
ad only gained the advantage because he had lost focus, because he had allowed his rage and his madness to control him, while she had remained calm.
"Let's get this sack of shit secured and then decide what to do." She opened a drawer and took out a handful of belts, then looped them around Benson's arms and legs, trussing him up like a prize pig in a farm show. "Yeah," she whispered. "That's it, you cunt. Who's in charge now? Who's the fucking boss, eh?"
She was breathing heavily and her arms ached. She was filled with anger. But her training kicked in again and she made sure the knots were tight as she battled to get her emotions under control. She had no idea what she was doing, and what might come next, but she needed to negate this current threat. She couldn't bring herself to kill him – she was a policewoman, and cold-blooded murder went against everything she was employed to protect. No, killing Benson was out of the question – for one thing, it was exactly what that bastard, Emerson, would have done. All she could do was neutralise her attacker, make him less of a danger – bind him so tightly that he was physically unable to get back up and slaughter them both.
She glanced up and over her shoulder, the sweat running into her eyes and making her blink.
Usher stood to one side, blinking back at her. "Amazing," he said. "You're… amazing. Just like her." He gazed down at her with what Sarah could only identify as pride.
THIRTY
"…amazing. Just like her."
I gazed down at her with a strange sense of pride. She really was amazing, incredible: a woman of such power, such grace… her mother would have been so very proud.
Her mother.
I helped Sarah bundle the bound man – Benson; her ex-lover – across the room and onto the bed, where she tied him to the metal frame with yet more scarves and belts. She moved quickly, professionally, and I realised that she must be one hell of a copper. Her face was stern, the muscles in her cheeks tight as cellophane across her bones.
That steely determination; it was just like Ellen's.
Her mother.
I could barely believe what I was contemplating, what thoughts were speeding through my head. In that moment, as I'd stood confronting that madman with a meat cleaver I'd grabbed from the kitchen work bench, I had been certain. It had all seemed so clear in my mind.
But now I wasn't so sure. Now I was losing faith in the gut instinct that had almost crippled me when I had seen her in so much danger.
I watched as she finished tying up and finally gagging Benson with a strip of tape, and then I went down on the bed beside her. She turned to me, and she looked at me through Ellen's eyes.
Her mother's eyes…
She spoke to me through Ellen's lips.
Her mother's lips…
"We're done here," she said, her damp brown hair falling across her forehead.
Her mother's hair…
Her mother's forehead…
How could I ever have doubted this? Now that I had stopped to think about it, the likeness was terrifying.
This girl, this glorious warrior woman, was Ellen Lang's daughter. I wasn't sure how it had happened, or what had been done to create this situation, but I was certain now that she was Ellen's child.
The Pilgrim's hands had been all over this – it was part of his plan, the events he had put into motion many years ago, before I'd even been aware of my ability to communicate with the dead. I already knew that he had been responsible for the car crash that had killed my wife and daughter – oh, Ally, Rebecca, how sorry I am for these betrayals – and that he had simply been trying to kick-start whatever power had lain dormant for so long within me.
That's what this was all about: the Pilgrim and me, or whatever part of me he wanted to own. Was it an organ, like my heart, or something much less simple to define?
The Pilgrim's plans, his weird and complex plans, I could see now that they were just a part of some bizarre long game, a plot to capture whatever energy allowed me to do what I could do, see what I could see, sense what I could sense.
I stared at the majestic young woman before me, and the tears fell from my eyes like scales, allowing me to see, to truly see for the first time.
I felt tired; but I was no longer alone. At last I had someone by my side.
She looked so much like Ellen; like her mother. But if Sarah had inherited her mother's looks, then what, I wondered, might she have inherited from her father?
What exactly had she inherited from me?
THIRTY-ONE
Sarah stood before the mirror in the master bedroom, inspecting the damage Benson had caused to her arms and shoulders. Already she was beginning to bruise, and the injured areas were tender to the touch. She winced, hating Benson all over again.
She realised now that she should have listened to her instincts regarding the bastard. Her twitch – and that feeling she'd had about something not being quite right between them – had been steering her in the right direction all along. Her heart had seen through the disguise of normality he'd worn, even if her eyes were blind to the horror that he had been hiding.
"Fucker," she said into the mirror. She watched her mouth form the word and was puzzled for a moment when the sound of her voice seemed slightly out of synch with the motion of her lips. Like a scene from a badly dubbed film, her voice didn't quite match the movements.
Sarah shrugged off the effect, putting it down to her senses hitting overdrive when Benson had confronted her. Adrenaline was still pounding through her system, and this was probably an after-effect of the violence she'd displayed in the other room.
Benson was still unconscious – at least he had been when she'd left him in her room. Now she was standing in Emerson and her mother's room, and she felt uncomfortable about being surrounded by the same four walls in which the fucker had systematically raped his wife while he thought about fucking his adopted daughter.
It was the first time she'd allowed these thoughts free reign, without couching them in metaphor, and the anger felt good as it crawled around her body, snarling like a wild cat.
Anger was fuel. It could help provide strength.
Feed me, she thought. Feed me and help me end this.
But what was it, exactly, that needed to end? The haunting, certainly: she was sick and tired of seeing Emerson's ghost stalking her as she went about her business. He no longer scared her; she just wanted him gone. Usher had said that he could probably help with that side of things, and she had no choice but to trust him.
Trust. As far as she could recall, she had not trusted anyone in her entire life. This man, this stranger, was the first. But was he really a stranger? And if so, why did she feel such a bond between them, that she already knew him?
Why was there such a strong connection?
Sarah had so many questions and so little time in which to find acceptable answers. She suspected that even the answers she did find, if she could spare the energy to look for them, would provide only more questions. Things were happening here which were beyond her ability to understand: strange things, perhaps even mystic things. Evidence of the supernatural was all around her, like a thick layer of dust, and everything was tainted by its presence.
Her life was dirty; it was filthy with phantoms.
She smiled, aware that behind the smile there lay a form of madness she didn't want to let out into the world. For years she had been strong, not allowing anything from her past to impact upon her present, but now that she thought about things she realised that she had been wrong all along. The past never dies; it clings to you, never letting go. It touches all that you do and everyone you meet, causing subtle ripples in the present that move towards a possible future.
We are our past, she thought. We are formed from the things we have gone through, and if we took them away we would vanish. Like ghosts.
Ghosts. Why did it always come back to the dead?
She thought again of Thomas Usher, and the way that his world was filled with ghosts. How could he live that way, how did he survive w
ithout losing his mind? Affection for the man flooded her, bringing tears to her eyes. Now that she had properly made his acquaintance, she could not imagine her life without him. In the short space of time since they had encountered each other at the hospital, by their mutual friend DI Tebbit's bed, Usher had become an anchor in her existence. Without him to hold her in place, to tether her to the earth, she might just float away into the darkness that surrounded her and never return.
Sarah dabbed at a brutal welt on her upper arm with the wet cotton ball she held between finger and thumb, gritting her teeth as the disinfectant stung like a bite. The mirror rippled as she turned slightly to the side, its reflective surface shimmering like the waters of a pond disturbed by a slight breeze.
Sarah stood still, wondering if she'd taken a blow to the head and was suffering some kind of mild hallucination. The mirror continued to ripple; concentric circles moved out from its centre, widening as they reached the mirror's edge. Her reflection moved in the same way, subtly altering. It was like something from a funhouse, and the image chilled her as if a childhood dream had suddenly broken through into reality.
