Dead Bad Things

by Gary McMahon

  We are our past…

  "What?" She reached out and touched the surface of the mirror. It was solid. The ripples were no longer evident. But behind and around her, the room looked somehow different. It was as if the rippling motion had affected the physical space in which she stood, but when she spun around to examine her surroundings everything looked the same.

  She turned again to the mirror, and saw the subtle differences: pictures hung askew on the walls, the bed was lopsided, the wardrobe door was open but its leading edge was curved, the window was frosted over, the carpet moved as if it were a swarm of insects, the walls were slanted inwards near the ceiling, the wallpaper was crawling with flies…

  Again, when she turned around to face the room, everything looked normal. The bed, the walls, the carpet, the wardrobe: all was as it should be.

  "Thomas." Her voice was quiet, nothing like the strong yell she had gone for. She paused, swallowed to clear her throat, and just as she was about to scream for him again she heard a noise across the hall. In her room, something shifted heavily across the floor.

  Her room.

  The room where Benson was lying flat out on the bed, his hands and legs tied with scarves and belts and whatever else she had managed to find at short notice.

  It sounded like someone was moving furniture about, dragging it across the floor. Then abruptly, she heard the bed springs squeaking, as if a child were bouncing up and down on the mattress.

  "Shit!" She ran for the door and pulled it open, moving across the landing. Benson must be trying to escape. She had enough faith in the knots she'd tied to believe that he could never free himself, but if he managed to roll off the bed somehow and get to the door, he could cause them more trouble than they needed to deal with right now.

  Sarah grabbed the handle and opened her bedroom door. The room was silent. Nothing stirred. The previous commotion had ceased instantly, as if a switch had been pulled. The curtains were still closed, so it was dark in there, but she could make out Benson's body on the bed. He wasn't moving.

  "If you're awake tell me now, because if I come in there and find you faking it I'll fucking hurt you. I mean it."

  No response. Benson was motionless on the bed.

  Slowly, carefully, Sarah stepped into the room. She wished that she'd taken the meat cleaver from Thomas, or the knife Benson had been wielding, but the baton would suffice – she had at least been aware enough to bring it with her. She gripped its handle tightly, trusting the weapon to do its job and protect her.

  The floorboards creaked under her weight. It sounded like stifled laughter. Had those boards ever made that sound before, or was this all part of some weird joke?

  "Talk to me, Benson, or so help me I'll fucking kill you."

  Nothing. Not a sound from the bed.

  The boards stopped creaking.

  "Right, you cunt." She strode more purposefully now, taking long steps across the room and holding the baton like a sword. When she stood by the bed she could see that Benson wasn't faking it: he was out cold. But there was something odd about his appearance, a detail that seemed wrong somehow. She tried to focus but couldn't quite pinpoint what was wrong about the way he looked. He was still bound to the bed, and his breathing was shallow. His hands were behind his back and his legs were pulled up and attached to his wrists, preventing any range of movement other than to gain an inch or so of breathing space.

  He had turned onto his side, but that was the only change since she'd left him there.

  Or was it?

  No, there was something else; something fundamental that she really should be able to spot.

  Then she had it: Benson was bald. He'd never been bald in all the time she'd known him, but now his head was completely shorn of hair. Laughter boiled up inside her, threatening to spill out. But this was too weird, too scary, to be funny. In fact, it wasn't fucking funny at all.

  What the fuck had happened to his hair?

  Benson's head turned freely on his neck. His bindings remained tight, fixing his body in place, but his head swivelled freely. "Hello, Sarah. Long time no see." His lips shone in the darkness. He had no eyebrows. His face was as smooth and shiny as plastic. It was Benson, but it looked more like a copy of Benson: a shop window dummy moulded in his image.

  A non-Benson.

  "What?" Sarah backed away. "What the fuck?"

  Non-Benson twisted upright, his arms and legs jinking out of joint. The scarves and belts slackened, allowing him to wriggle free. His limbs looked boneless; they moved like serpents. Before she even registered it, he was standing by the side of the bed, grinning.

  "I win," said non-Benson, his voice bland and without even the slightest trace of an accent. It was the kind of voice you forgot immediately after hearing it, but you always remembered what it said.

  "What the fuck are you?" Not who, but what: what the fuck was it?

  She was moving slowly, yet still she was terrified that she might stumble due to her backwards motion. The door was only yards away but it felt like miles.

  "Me? I'm just your average run-of-the-mill angel." His grin was obscene, like a mutated sexual orifice clinging to the front of his head. His teeth were bone-white and pointed, and they popped up and down in his gums like tiny pistons.

  "Oh, fuck." So this was Emerson's angel, the being that had told him to kill. If the situation wasn't so insane it would have made a strange kind of sense. The thing that had moulded Emerson's insanity and used it as a tool for its own grim purpose had now come to claim her, to take back its daughter…

  "I'm not yours. I was never his and I'm not yours!"

  Non-Benson shook his head. "Oh, I know that. I could never even have sired you anyway. See?" In a flash, he raised the black robe above his waist and showed her an expanse of pale flesh. No hair; no belly button; no meat-and-two-veg.

  Again, she stifled laughter. Meat-and-two-veg. That had been one of her mother's comedy expressions, and the woman had always laughed at her own outdated word-play.

  Sarah knew that she was on the verge of genuine panic. If she didn't get her emotions under control, she was going to die. He would kill her. Non-Benson would gut her like a fish.

  There was a loud crash from behind her, across the hallway. It sounded like the big mirror in Emerson's room falling and breaking. Sarah hoped it was Usher, her saviour. She prayed that he was stumbling to her aid and had charged into the wrong room, breaking the mirror in his confusion. It wasn't much, but it might provide a chance of escape, however brief.

  "Get the fuck away from me!" She felt her hip brush against the edge of the open door, and she turned and ran out onto the landing. Once there, she almost lost her mind completely. Stepping through the doorway from Emerson's room was not Thomas but a small boy with dried blood in his hair, and staggering behind him was a man in a torn gold-coloured jacket whose flesh was hanging in thick red strips from his bones. Shards of broken mirror were laced into the man's slashed skin, as if he'd been dragged through the reflective detritus after the mirror had been smashed.

  Sarah staggered away from the others and half-ran, half-fell down the stairs. "Thomas!" She screamed his name as loud as she could, hoping that whatever power he had control of, he could use it against these… things. These creatures from the mirror.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Trevor's eyeballs were bleeding. That was how it felt; as if the insides of his eyes had turned to flaming blood. He struggled to keep up with the boy-that-was-not-a-boy, the demon-indisguise, grabbing the doorframe to haul himself out of the room. Minutes ago (hours ago?) he'd been standing in his own bedroom, trying to explain to the boy why the Pilgrim was no longer there. Struggling to find an excuse.

  It had all happened in seconds, like some drug-induced vision. One instant he was standing there, before the mirror that had served as his new houseguest's prison and the next he was being pulled into that same mirror by the boy – just like Alice, in his favourite childhood book, he was being taken through the look
ing glass.

  Once there, on the other side of the glass, everything had been different. Not just his surroundings, but whoever he was on the inside of his body had also changed. He had become… what? Nothing. He had simply become.

  Standing in this unfamiliar house, looking over the shoulder of his new master, Trevor knew that he had travelled beyond madness. He had lost his mind and then found it again, on the other side of the mirror. That's what it was, the mirror-side: the discovery of a new way of existing, another state of mind that fell between the cracks of the rational and the irrational and into a brand new reality.

  His body had been ravaged by the journey: his flesh had peeled away, exposing white patches of bone, and pieces of the mirror had embedded itself into the bleeding mess of his frame. But Trevor had felt no pain. He was above and below and beyond all of that. Nothing could touch him, not even the angel, the Pilgrim, the lost one… the one who had now been found.

  "Thomas!" screamed the strange girl, and then she tripped down the stairs, her head slamming against the wall and her back twisting into an unnatural position. Trevor heard the bones crack. His hearing was hypersensitive now. He had listened to the heartbeat of the universe, and been stunned to find that it matched the rhythm of his own black heart.

  But with one major exception: the heartbeat of the universe was not organic; it was clockwork.

  On his short/long/real/imaginary journey he had seen and heard many things.

  Dragged kicking into the insane alleyways between separate realities, Trevor had seen his brother, Michael, and the boy had teeth like a sabre-tooth tiger. His eyes had burned yellow; golden fur had rippled at his throat. Then Trevor had heard the ticking of an infinite clock, a conceptual timepiece that kept the time of the ages and then turned it backwards, sideways, forward once again.

  The heartbeat of the universe…

  Drugs paled into insignificance before such experiences as these. Manmade drugs were nothing, a mere trifle. This was the ultimate high, the kick beyond all kicks. Trevor was taken past the nagging, doubting flesh and into a realm of spirit, and all he had to do was believe.

  Just believe in the heartbeat of the universe…

  "Mama," he said, not even knowing what he meant by the word. "Dada." Blood poured from his eyes, warming his cheeks. "Bruvva! Bruvva Michael." His gashed lips struggled to form the words, but it didn't matter. Not at all. The words were for Trevor and for him alone – nobody else even needed to understand them. They were his; little gifts to the ghost of his sanity.

  "Hummybird!" He half-remembered the safe-word, the one he'd used to gain entry to Sammy Newsome's chicken ranch. Quite why it had come back to him now, in extremis, he had no idea. But it tasted nice in his mouth… like roast chicken.

  He began to laugh but it felt and sounded like he was weeping.

  So what. Who was to know? It was all for him now.

  Long pig. He hungered for long pig. But he didn't even know what it was.

  But he knew it tasted like chicken.

  "Hummy! Bird! Long! Pig!"

  His thoughts were alien to him now; he had no notion of what they meant. The words in his mouth, between his teeth, were random and meaningless, but they meant everything in that other place, the wonderful and terrifying gap he'd found between realities. Perhaps this was the language of infinity, and if he learned to speak it well he could return there and join his beloved sabre-toothed bruvva.

  Trevor no longer believed in this reality, so it bent and buckled beneath the weight of his gaze – he was slowly unbelieving, unpicking the stitches of his own reality. He watched the walls go rubbery and the stairs flip like a giant tongue, and the girl who had fallen began to sing something beautiful in Latin. He couldn't stop this now, even if he wanted to. He'd come too far to falter.

  It's me, he thought. I'm shaping this. He was at least sane enough to know the truth of his condition.

  I'm making it all… or am I unmaking it?

  He wondered if the others saw what he did, but then he realised that he didn't care. Anything he wanted, whatever he could imagine and believe in, would appear before him and be as real as anything else that might be conjured.

  If he believed in the heartbeat of the universe…

  Dimly, barely enough to make an impact on what was left of his mind, he registered that this belief was what held everything together. Without it, the entire universe would fail, and all the other realities would blend into the same point in space and time, creating a chaotic soup of interchanging nonsense.

  The clock – the heartbeat – would stop.

  He laughed again, but deep down inside he was terrified.

  The world – his world – was transforming into a string of sensual non sequiturs.

  "Oh, Trevor. What have you done?" The Pilgrim was speaking to him from a wavering doorway. "Why did you bring them to me?"

  The boy-that-was-not-a-boy – not really a boy at all – cocked his head. Dried blood crawled along his hairline. Then came the voices, two of them from a single mouth: "When you switched skins, We felt you. We saw you expose your true form, so We followed you though the mirror."

  The Pilgrim's face was sad; his bald head drooped and sagged and melted. "None of what you're seeing exists anywhere outside your own little bubble of reality, Trevor." His voice was a swarm of bees. "You've become trapped in a bubble, and now you're no use to anyone."

  The boy, the weird little bloody-headed kid, held up both hands to the Pilgrim. "We've found you now. This must come to an end. You've gone too far."

  The Pilgrim smiled a liquid smile. He laughed a bubbly laugh. "Just wait and I'll show you who's gone too far. Come and see, and then I'll come with you… if you still want me. I'll return to our designs." His words made shapes in the air: tiny hands with flies' wings for fingernails. Buzz-buzz-buzzy-fly. Shoo fly; buzz away. Be gone.

  Trevor buzzed too, but in a different way. The scraps of his mind were drifting back towards the shattered mirror, looking for a way back to the other side.

  Then, like a vision from some other kind of heaven, Thomas Usher appeared half way up the stairs.

  "Shoo fly!" said Trevor, lurching forward – or what he thought must be forward; it was difficult to tell in this buzzing state of flux. "Long pig bruvva!"

  Then, thankfully, the boy with the dry-blood hair reached back, reached around, and sent Trevor flying back into the place behind the mirror.

  He returned to the heartbeat of the universe, and he was smiling.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Sarah was in agony. Her lower back felt broken, as if the nerve endings were wreathed in some kind of sticky flame. She was lying in just the right position to enable her to see up the stairwell, and to watch what was going on. She didn't understand any of it, but whatever was happening, it was important. She knew that, at least. She knew it and she believed it.

  The shredded man in the ripped gold suit who'd been standing behind the boy had vanished. She'd been staring at him, watching his face as it seemed to stretch and warp out of shape, and then he'd smiled, his mouth elongating into an unnatural size and shape, and as the boy had turned slowly and touched his shoulder, the man had slipped quietly out of view.

  That was what had happened: he'd slipped out of view. He hadn't gone anywhere physically, not really; he'd just tilted slightly to one side and slipped through a gap into another place. His image was there and then it wasn't, but in truth he had never really been there at all.

  Had he been a ghost, too? Sarah supposed she would never find out.

  The pain was dimming now; she was losing all sensation in her lower body, becoming numb. That was a bad sign. At least the pain meant that she was still capable of feeling, and that she was still alive. She knew that she had broken something. Something vital. She could only hope that the numbness was temporary.

  "Are you OK?" Usher's face appeared in front of her. He had approached her from behind, bending down to her in the stairwell. Her legs were crumpled, h
er feet touching the wall opposite. Her backside was wedged against one of the risers.

  She nodded. "No," she said. Then she shook her head. But it hurt to do that, so she stopped. "No. Something's… busted. Can't feel my legs." Everything below her waist had simply ceased to exist. There was no feeling there, none at all.

  "I'll be back in a second." He straightened and began to walk up the rest of the stairs, his hand resting on the banister. He seemed calm, unflappable. There was a strength about him that had not been present before, during the confrontation with Benson. He seemed robust, twice the man he had been before.