Spanky

by Christopher Fowler

  The apartment was exactly as I had left it, except for the faintest trace of animal sweat, and one other detail.

  Someone had written across the white floor tiles in the kitchen. Two words, capitalized with a thick black felt-tip. More Spanky humour:

  SURRENDER DOROTHY

  I scrubbed the marks away with firm, obsessive movements, wetting a cloth and grinding in cleanser until there was no trace left. I would not allow the apartment to show signs of invasion.

  I cooked a meal and didn’t eat it, flicked through the TV channels, unable to settle. Called Sarah to make sure she was okay, but the line was permanently engaged. Outside it was dark once more, the wind was rising, and I was frightened of what the blackness held.

  But nothing happened.

  The evening passed slowly and uneventfully. I called the airports again. Still nothing. The previous night’s sleeplessness began to catch up, and I dozed before the television, finally finding the energy to go to bed. I replaced the bulb in the table lamp, and tried not to think about the thing that had sat at the end of my bed.

  But I awoke with a panicky start, knowing that something was wrong.

  The lamp was out again.

  The room was in darkness but for the dim green flicker of the digital clock beside my bed, which read 2.17 a.m. Still half asleep, I outstretched my hand and turned on the light. There was a man’s staring face less than a foot from mine.

  It was old, and had no eyes. Strands of grey hair hung from a cracked, skinless skull. The figure wore a filthy suit, rotted and stained with body juices. As I cried out, the face resolved itself into Spanky’s smooth features. He stood upright once more and smiled.

  ‘Thought you might like a visit from your old grandfather, Martyn. Hasn’t worn well underground, has he? I can bring back all of your dead relatives if you’d like. You’ll be able to pay your last respects knowing that they really are the last.’

  He flicked a piece of lint from his sleeve. He was wearing black Katharine Hamnett jeans and a green Jasper Conran blazer, but there were splashes of blood, both dried and fresh, over his chest and knees.

  ‘What do you want?’ I asked, desperately trying not to sound frightened. I possessed one piece of knowledge that had to be kept hidden from him, one simple fact that I could not dare to think of in his presence.

  ‘You know what I want. Just say the word and we’ll be friends again. The perfect team, two working as one. I might even let you have partial mental control.’

  All I have to do is hold out for a week. The thought just appeared in my head, too fast to shield. There was nothing I could do about it.

  ‘You’ll never last a whole week.’

  ‘I know when William Beaumont’s seventieth birthday is, Spanky. Next Wednesday.’

  ‘By then, of course, you’ll be begging me to let you die.’

  Wednesday. Tomorrow was Thursday. Six days to survive. One hundred and forty-four hours. He could only gain entry if I invited him. I repeated the knowledge to myself, running through it like one of Zack’s mantras.

  ‘You never wanted to help me in the first place, did you?’ I asked, stalling for time. ‘All that bullshit about the muses of ancient Greece. This is what you do best, what you really wanted, a chance to cause some suffering.’

  ‘You’re probably dying to know what I’ve been up to,’ he said, ignoring my remark. ‘I’m getting better at being you. I was quite impressed with my performance tonight.’

  I looked at the blood on his jacket, and my heart paced up. ‘Who were you with?’

  ‘Sarah Brannigan, of course.’

  Oh no, oh God . . .

  ‘Vile apartment, all Habitat wicker and Body Shop bathroom accessories. She wouldn’t let me past the entryphone at first. I had trouble getting that awful wheedling tone in your voice exactly right, but she stopped noticing once she saw me in the flesh.’ He dabbed his hand against his jacket and smeared blood between his thumb and forefinger, remembering.

  ‘I acted drunk, told her I knew she’d stayed out all night, that I hated her guts, that I’d kill her for sleeping with someone else. Then I tore her clothes off and tried to fuck her. Bony-assed bitch kicked me in the balls, so I kicked her back. I’m glad we didn’t do it. She’s not my type. Far too professional. I prefer a nice uncoordinated, nervous virgin. Which brings us, it seems, to your sister.’

  He walked away from the bed and seated himself in the corner, watching me. ‘Your family are back, Martyn.’

  The room suddenly started to tip. I fought to maintain control. ‘Where are they? What have you done?’

  ‘I’m sorry you missed them at the airport. The stupid computer had them listed under a completely different name. I don’t enjoy tinkering with technology, but these days how can one avoid it? Don’t worry, they’re quite safe. Your mother and father are back at home where they belong, drugged out of their tiny suburban minds, naturally, but I couldn’t have them running to the neighbours. No one’s expecting them back yet, anyway, and no one is likely to call at the house, so they’re fine for the time being.’

  His half-smile flickered and faded.

  ‘Your sister, though, she’s another story altogether. Since she lost all that weight she’s become, well, rather voluptuous. I wanted to welcome her home, but I became more intimate with her than I’d intended. Gave her the same chemical boost I used to give you, although I changed the recipe a little, added some ecstasy and one or two other “relaxers” so that we could get to know each other better. In fact, we had rather a wild session, but I don’t think she enjoyed herself toward the end . . .’

  I was pulling on my clothes as he talked. Sarah would have to wait. My family’s safety took precedence.

  There would be no more trains tonight, so I would have to drive down to Twelvetrees.

  I ran out of the apartment leaving the front door wide open, with Spanky’s deep-throated laughter ringing in my ears.

  Chapter 25

  Perversion

  I reached the darkened street and my waiting Mercedes. Unlocked the door and turned the key in the ignition, only to be met with silence. No sound at all. I didn’t know much about cars, but I figured something had become unplugged. I released the bonnet catch from inside the car, then climbed out and carefully raised the hood. As I did so, the hunched little figure sitting astride the engine revealed itself. The damned chimpthing I had chased from my apartment flung its body forward and wrapped its arms around me, chittering and screaming into my face.

  I fell forward against the grille, thumping the side of my head, trying to tell myself that the creature fed from my own fearful imagination, but I could smell its bitter breath, feel its claws digging into my neck and shoulders.

  It was pulling at my hair, wrenching me toward the oily metal cavity beneath the hood when the ignition caught and the motor roared into life. Amid the fumes and noise of the racing engine it shoved at my head, forcing me over, determined to obliterate my features against the flashing radiator fan.

  The Mercedes began to move away from me. When the engine started, the brake had been released and the vehicle was now rolling backwards.

  I sharply uprighted myself as the creature leapt from me, hopping and loping off to the bushes beyond the pavement. The road curved. The path of the car didn’t. It crunched noisily into the front of a new Nissan, crumpling its radiator.

  Clutching my burning shoulders, I ran back to the Mercedes and tried to open the driver’s door. I could see the keys inside, but they had been jammed into the ignition with such force that they had twisted in the lock. I looked around for the creature, wary of its habit of leaping from dark corners.

  I wanted to see if I had been cut, but all I could think of now was reaching my family. I had to find some other form of transport.

  The engine of the little Fiat nearly burned itself out on the journey. Debbie had sleepily answered the phone and listened to my frantic jabbering before agreeing to throw down her car keys. I had grabbed a
passing taxi and taken it to Vauxhall, where I collected her car. The banana-yellow vehicle was covered in old ‘Nuclear Fuel! No Thanks!’ stickers, and belonged to the community centre where she worked. It hadn’t undergone a service or an oil-change in years.

  I drove with my foot stamped hard to the floor, and nearly killed myself overtaking a pair of articulated trucks on the motorway. Perhaps it would have been better if I had, I thought, considering the disastrous effect I was having on those around me. With one eye on the road behind, watching for police, I gunned the protesting vehicle forward, nearly overturning it when I realized that I was about to pass my exit ramp and had to cut across three lanes.

  If the rest of the suburbs were asleep, Twelvetrees was in a coma. It was the kind of town where the bedroom lights went on at ten and off at ten fifteen. As I pulled up in front of my parents’ house I saw that the mesh fences had been removed, although the garden was still ploughed up.

  The place was in complete darkness, which was unusual. My father always left the porch light burning on a timer-switch. The electricity had been disconnected while the workmen were re-laying the floors.

  I slewed the Fiat against the kerb and ran up the path, digging for my keys. Inside the front door I groped around for the hall switch and flicked it on.

  Nothing.

  I returned to the car and searched the boot. Debbie was the kind of girl who kept a torch and a toolkit.

  The fluctuating beam crossed bare hall walls. I aimed the torch down, minding my step. The carpets were still missing, and there was a powerful smell of damp. Planks from the floor stood in the lounge doorway, and I was forced to walk between the open boards. In the dining room, the furniture was still under taped-up layers of plastic wrapping. If Joyce and Gordon were back, wouldn’t they first have removed the dust sheets? I couldn’t help thinking how upset my mother must have been to see this, after all her efforts to keep the place dust-free.

  I slowly climbed the bare stairs, fearing the worst.

  Spanky told me he had drugged them. Drugged my parents! I wished I had never interfered in their lives. The flashlight beam bounced off a dust-smeared mirror on the landing, more raised boards, and the pitch-black entrance to their bedroom. I could feel my heartbeat shaking my chest as I walked towards the doorway.

  The torch picked up a human figure inside. Then another.

  When I saw what he had done to them, I froze to the spot.

  On the dressing table ahead of me, the radio glowed to life and began to play the theme to an old request show, Housewives’ Choice. The tune was a familiar one, synonymous with all that was bright and secure about the past.

  My mother was standing upright, hoovering beneath the bed. She was dressed as a grotesque parody of a model housewife circa 1960, a sitcom character in a frilly gingham apron and blouse. Her make-up had been applied like a clown’s, searing red lipstick glossing the lower half of her face, an absurd yellow wig dumped on her head. She was held in position with yards of silver ducting tape which bound her first to a broom, and then anchored her to the floor. More tape clasped the vacuum cleaner handle to her fist.

  My father was similarly arranged, an absurd family figurehead seated in an armchair with his legs crossed ankle to knee, a newspaper bound to his hands and a ridiculous briar pipe jutting from his twisted mouth. Both he and my mother had open eyes painted on their closed eyelids. They were alive but unconscious, slowly and faintly breathing.

  It took me half an hour to cut them free of the tape, but I couldn’t remove the pieces that had adhered to their hair and faces. I managed to lay them beside each other on the bed, massaging the swollen purple patches from their skin where blood had collected. I was unable to tell if their state had been chemically induced, or whether Spanky had simply hypnotized them into a comatose condition.

  I recalled something about people in shock being kept warm. I scrambled on the bed and opened the linen cupboards, pulling down a stack of blankets, in which I wrapped them to their necks before running along the landing to my sister’s bedroom.

  The door was bolted from the inside.

  Laura would never allow us easy entrance to her den. For years she had tried to keep out the world. The door was thin and cheaply constructed. Two hard shoves with my shoulder were enough to crack the lintel and tear the bolt out of its mortice.

  I shoved the splintered wood back and stepped inside. The room was thick with the smell of burning incense. I shone the torch up through the dense curling smoke, and caught her glittering, twitching eyes within its beam. She was conscious, but could not speak. As I panned the circle of light across her body, I saw the reason why.

  Laura was unrecognizably slim. She was suspended from the ceiling by a pair of chains attached to the light fittings on either side of the room. She had been trussed in some kind of complex rubber Bettie Page corset, an obscene pin-up, her feet encased in tall laced patent-leather stilettos. Her wrists were roped together and handcuffed, and she was gagged with what appeared to be a black rubber ball, attached to a cat’s cradle of bootlaces that were wound around her neck.

  Below her were pots of grease, whips and leather flails, half-burned candles and bizarre medical contraptions that appeared to be for use in colonic irrigation. Her arms bore the marks of at least a dozen cigarette burns. She was crying soundlessly, black stripes of kohl running down her cheeks in parallel lines.

  I was able to cut her legs free, but could find no way of releasing her from the handcuffs. At first she failed to recognize me and fought me off, screaming into the gag. Then her body became limp, and she allowed me to manoeuvre her into a position from which I could release her from the ceiling.

  I managed to untangle the chains, and slide them from her waist. As I cut the gag free and threw it aside she began to wail, her voice high and hard. I told her to be quiet, that if anyone else heard the noise and came to investigate, we’d be in even worse trouble. Luckily, Twelvetrees was a typical commuter-belt town. Nobody gave a fuck about anyone else unless they got their car scratched.

  I slipped the black nylon wig from Laura’s head and tried to turn her face to mine, but she pulled free, ashamed to be seen and afraid to be touched. Her wrists were still cuffed, but I managed to break the chain connecting them by twisting a piece of metal through one of the links. She turned aside and carefully removed the rubber belts and contraptions around her thighs, heaving and catching with the pain.

  After a few minutes she pulled a sheet over her breasts, her misery subsiding to a steady low keening. The sheet was decorated with cartoon ducks. She’d had it since she was nine years old. I asked her if there was anything I could get her, and she said she wanted to wash. I made my way downstairs and boiled a kettle on the still-connected gas stove, then filled a bowl and brought her soap and a flannel. I waited downstairs while she tried to scrub away the memories of the night.

  When I returned to the room she had fallen asleep, a child in the dark, retreating into a curled foetal position beneath her favourite sheet. The bowl of soiled water had been shoved beneath the bed. I lay down on the narrow single bed beside her, holding her tight as a dismal dawn flourished behind the shuttered windows.

  Chapter 26

  Restitution

  When we were children, Laura would finish her boiled egg and turn the empty shell over, trying to fool us into thinking that she hadn’t eaten.

  I watched now as she delicately pressed the teaspoon into the egg, cutting away a section of yolk. I couldn’t force her to speak. I knew her better than that. In times of stress she would simply fold her problems away, refusing to share them with anyone. When our brother died I was the only person she would talk to; but I wasn’t prepared to talk to anyone about Joey. So we drifted, Laura and I, and she began her lonely isolation.

  I left home, and the changes deepened. As I watched her now, I saw my sister as she had looked when Joey was still alive. The pouches of fat in her cheeks had disappeared. Her jawline had returned. She sat on th
e other side of the breakfast table with her head down, methodically dipping her spoon and raising it to her lips. Upstairs, our parents were still unconscious, but at least they looked a damned sight healthier than they had during the night. Using my still-augmented powers of perception I could tell that their breathing had changed, grown deeper and more regular, and it seemed that they would awaken as soon as the sedatives they had been fed wore off. At least this way I wouldn’t have to explain their comatose state to a local GP.

  The kitchen was in semi-darkness. I had kept the curtains drawn for Laura’s sake. I had managed to light the boiler, and she had bathed again. She had not spoken a word about what had happened to her. It was nearly noon. With Max away, the office was probably going crazy trying to find me.

  Laura finished the egg and softly asked for more tea. I took that to be a good sign. Finally, I took her hands in mine and asked her if she wanted to tell me what had occurred. She spoke so quietly I had to strain to catch her words.

  ‘We were collected from the airport. A big black limousine. I thought it must have been booked by the insurance company. The driver wore a uniform. Everything was paid for. He brought us all the way home. Dad got embarrassed about tipping him, so Mum had to do it. It was dark when we arrived here, and the electricity was still off. It was supposed to have been turned back on. I was carrying one of the suitcases into the lounge when I heard a thumping noise—I think I asked if everything was all right. There was no answer. I went back into the hall and saw Dad lying on the floor. He looked like he had just fallen asleep. I was trying to think how that could be possible when someone grabbed me from behind. He—put something over my face. A chemical smell. I couldn’t breathe. Then he carried me upstairs. We went into my bedroom. I’d left the door shut, Martyn. I always keep it shut, you know that. But now it was open. He let me go and I fell on to the floor.’