Spanky

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘You’d better let me be the judge of that.’

  So I told her everything.

  I began with the night I met Spanky. I told her about his involvement in Darryl’s injury, and the deaths of Paul and his father. I described the payment he had demanded of me, and how I was not prepared to provide him with another human conduit. I told her of his visit to Sarah’s, and about Laura. I even talked about Joey. When I finally finished, she averted her eyes and concentrated on lighting another cigarette.

  I sat in silence, waiting for a response.

  ‘As far as I see it, you have no proof,’ she said quietly.

  ‘What do you mean, no proof?’ I asked, raising my voice. ‘You think I’m staging some kind of elaborate practical joke?’

  She brushed her hair from her face as she raised her eyes to mine. ‘Listen, Martyn, you don’t speak a civil sentence to me in over two years, and then you appear out of nowhere with a lunatic story about being bewitched or something, how the hell am I supposed to react?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I apologized. ‘I didn’t mean to shout. I’m under a lot of strain.’

  ‘Well, if this is true, then it’s your fault I’m out of a job.’

  ‘You don’t know you’re out—’

  ‘Come on, Syms told me he wants to speak to all members of staff individually in the morning, and it’s not because he’s giving us all pay rises.’ She waved a jet of smoke from my face. ‘I don’t know why you came to me. I don’t believe in ghosts or spirits. I don’t believe in God. I trust my senses, and human nature. Oh, there’s good and evil all right, in people. And there’s the problem. You have no proof, Martyn. Only you can see this—creature. No one else. You say he took your form to murder Paul? I could be sitting here at my kitchen table with Charles Manson. How do I know it wasn’t you? Suppose you’re mentally disturbed and just don’t know it, have you thought of that?’

  I made to speak, but she cut me short. ‘Okay, these are the options.’ She counted off on three fingers. ‘One, you really are possessed by some sort of trouble-making supernatural entity. I’d have a really hard time believing that. Two, you did these terrible things yourself, which, from what I know of you, seems unlikely. Three, a series of tragedies have occurred and you’ve decided to blame yourself for them. That, to me, seems the most reliable explanation. Your life has been dislocated, and you’ve invented this being in your head to burden yourself with some kind of guilt complex.’

  ‘But he smashed up my apartment—’

  ‘How do I know you didn’t do it yourself?’ Her habit of studying my eyes was starting to unnerve me. ‘How do you know you’re not unstable? Listen, once in a while I get depressed and eat bowls of shredded wheat in the middle of the night, and I have no idea why I’m doing it. How do you know?’

  I knew Spanky existed, but she was right; there was no way of proving it. ‘Wait, he rented the apartment for me. The agent must have seen him.’

  ‘Oh, Martyn. Don’t you get it? Anyone you ask about seeing this Spanky will just say they saw you.’

  ‘But he did things, influenced people.’

  ‘You probably just did it yourself.’

  ‘Then how do you know I didn’t kill someone as well?’

  She shook her head and rose from the table to refill our mugs, talking over her shoulder.

  ‘What, are you telling me you sexually assaulted your own sister? Come on, Martyn. You’re not the type, you’re imaginative, always filling the order books with little drawings, but you’re not one of those obsessives. I’ve watched you for two years.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  I had always assumed that she had won her employment through Max, and had barely bothered to notice her. I’d always thought of her as weird Lottie because she seemed to hang around me without speaking. I felt ashamed now, knowing that the rumours I’d believed about her weren’t true.

  ‘Forget it.’ She turned aside, shifting her bare feet nearer to the fire. ‘Well, what do you think of my theory?’

  ‘I suppose you may be right.’

  She placed a freshly filled mug before me and reseated herself, stifling a yawn. The night air was chilling down the room.

  ‘You reckon I’m projecting all this on to myself because I feel guilty about something.’

  ‘It’s possible. You said your brother’s death upset you. Perhaps Spanky is simply your brother in another guise. You said he’s older, more sophisticated, smarter.’

  ‘The same as Joey.’

  ‘But Joey’s dead. You relied on him, and he died. Suppose you brought him back as Spanky. Once again you come to rely on him—and once again he lets you down. It’s all up here, Martyn.’ She tapped my forehead. ‘A test you set for yourself, a character you’ve created from within to explain a series of unfortunate real events. Tomorrow will seem better, wait and see.’

  I could see that everything she said made perfect sense. If it was true, then Spanky needed to exist no longer.

  ‘Could I stay here?’ I asked. ‘I’m sure you’re right, but I don’t want to go back to my apartment and put your theory to the test tonight. I’ll be no trouble. It’s not a come-on or anything.’

  She threw me another laser-beam stare as she ground out her cigarette. ‘No, I don’t suppose it is.’

  ‘I can sleep on the floor.’

  ‘The fire’s not working in here. You’ll freeze to death, and there’s cat crap all over the place. You can sleep in with me as long as you keep your pants on and don’t try any funny stuff.’

  We slept like children, curled into each other in our clothes, the ticking bars of the gas fire filling the bedroom with a dull sunset glow. For the first time since my ordeal began, I fell into a deep, untroubled sleep.

  But then, after nothing but a dense warm void, an uncomfortable feeling began to grow. I lay in the bed unable to lift a finger, unable to twitch the smallest muscle. I was covered in a fine membrane that sealed my mouth, my eyes, my nostrils, my ears, and stopped me from moving. There was someone inside me, shifting back and forth. I could feel my nerves tingling as he raged about, hear his muffled shouts and squeals as he ransacked my senses, as if listening to a rowdy downstairs neighbour late at night. He was within me, stealing what he needed, preparing to shut down the remaining vestiges of my will, and I felt my dying thoughts drain off into darkness like glittering drops of water . . .

  I awoke with a start.

  ‘Well, this is cute,’ said a familiar, sarcastic voice. ‘In a grotesque, Hallmark cards kind of way.’

  I sat up suddenly, squinting ahead into the darkness, my pulse quickening.

  ‘She has a collection of ceramic turtles in the bathroom, Martyn. I thought you’d outgrown this type of shop-girl.’ I could see him only as a faintly glowing outline in the dark.

  ‘She’s attempting to psychoanalyse me out of existence, you putz. It’s not very flattering being told you only exist inside somebody else’s mind. She’s hopelessly wrong, of course. She’s been crazy about you all this time, and you never even noticed she was alive. If you can’t spot something simple like a lovesick floozie, what on earth makes you think you’re deep enough to perform some kind of complex transference process on your dead brother?’

  You go to hell, motherfucker.

  ‘Temper does nothing to improve your vocabulary, Martyn. Anyway, I just came from there and it was boring. I think we need to teach the little bitch-on-heat a lesson for being so presumptuous, don’t you?’

  ‘Martyn? What’s the matter?’ Lottie had awoken, and pulled herself up beside me.

  ‘He’s here in the room with us right now,’ I explained.

  She became fully alert. ‘You have to tell yourself he doesn’t exist.’

  ‘Go on, Martyn, do as the little lady says.’ He began to glow brighter, lighting the entire room. ‘Tell yourself I don’t exist. Let’s hear you say it. Spanky—doesn’t—exist.’

  ‘I can see him, Lottie.’ I pointed ahead at the radiant
figure. He was naked, bound in a web of leather straps, searing fire flowing from every pore of his body.

  ‘There’s no one there, Martyn.’

  ‘There is!’

  She reached for the bedside lamp and pulled the switch. Spanky walked around the end of the bed and stood beside her.

  ‘She’s nothing much to look at, is she? Pretty eyes, though. I might keep those. Shall we dismember her, take a look at the red stuff, see what makes her tick? Eh?’ He patted his jacket pockets. ‘I didn’t bring a knife with me. What else can we use? Come on, the place could do with redecorating. Let’s really cover the walls with blood this time. Go for a Jackson Pollock effect, only with talent.’

  ‘Get the fuck away from her!’ I screamed, lunging in his direction as he stepped smartly away from the bed.

  ‘Martyn!’ Lottie screamed, falling back. ‘For Christ’s sake, what’s the matter?’

  She was looking wildly in my direction, trying to see what I could see so clearly.

  Spanky was peering into her eyes, his blinding features mere inches away. ‘We could tie her up and do weird, humiliating sex-things to her, I suppose. Use all the kitchen utensils. Teach her not to interfere.’

  Suddenly the daemon’s hand snaked out and seized her around the throat, physically dragging and lifting her from the bed. She tried to cry out, but his grip was too tight. I snatched at his arm, trying to free it, but the limb was like a steel girder, rigid and immovable. He was looking at me and smiling his wide white smile, barely noticing the girl he held in one hand. There was not a hair out of place on his brilliantined head. His cat-eyes shone a luminous emerald, the colour of excitement.

  ‘But—I’m not going to do anything to her, Martyn. That would be too easy. You’re going to do it with a brute strength you never knew you had.’

  His free hand grabbed at my hair, but missed as I ducked low. ‘You could bite her to death,’ he hissed, ‘bite and bite until you’ve chewed a bloody passage through her flesh and your teeth crack on her splintering bones.’

  But I was behind him now, and this time when I brought my fists forward I connected with his body, sinking into viscous, semi-solid matter. A painful tingling sensation enveloped my torso as I passed through him to reach her. I tried to remove his hand from her throat, but my fingers passed through his. I didn’t dare pull on her body. I could see that she would choke.

  Then, as his free hand sought to close her mouth she bit down hard. Unable to hold her in a baggy tracksuit, he released his grip and we both fell back, knocking over the water jug which stood on the bedside table, smashing it against the fire with a sizzling hiss.

  ‘What the bloody hell is going on?’

  A plump young woman in a rumpled Nike T-shirt stood in the doorway. Evidently, we had woken the flatmate. Lottie was gasping and clutching her throat, trying to catch her breath.

  ‘It’s all right, Susan,’ she managed to say. ‘It’s nothing, just go back to bed.’

  One glance around the room told me that Spanky had vanished.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Really, everything’s fine.’

  Susan threw me a poisonous look before closing the door behind her. Lottie rolled away from me and sat at the edge of the bed, massaging her throat as I sat helplessly by. ‘You have to go,’ she said finally. ‘I can’t do anything. You need to see someone, Martyn, get professional help.’

  ‘He was here in the room,’ I insisted. ‘He only just left. You must have felt his hands around your throat. You must have been able to tell it wasn’t me!’

  ‘No, Martyn,’ she said at last. ‘I only felt you, heard you, saw you. Ranting to yourself.’

  She turned, but found it hard to meet my eyes. ‘Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps you are capable of violence.’

  ‘But it wasn’t me who attacked you, Lottie, it was him, don’t you see? I tried to grab him but I couldn’t. He wants you to think it was me who hurt you.’

  ‘He’s doing a convincing job,’ she said, coughing. ‘Show me your hands.’

  I held out my hands and she examined them in turn. Then she raised the side of the right index finger and showed it to me.

  ‘Where I bit you,’ she said, pointing to the crescent of teethmarks that were already starting to darken. ‘How come you passed right through him, but I managed to connect?’ Something else caught her eye. ‘What’s that?’ she asked.

  I looked at my left arm just below the wrist. Smothering the main artery at the joint were a number of blue-black specks, like bruised pinpricks. I had felt a slight soreness there for some time. It was where the daemon always grabbed me when he chemically increased my confidence.

  ‘What the hell have you been injecting in yourself?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I replied, staring at the sickly track-marks. ‘Spanky does it to help me.’

  ‘I think you’d better go right now, Martyn.’

  ‘Wait, wait—please, give me a second—what was the first thing you saw when you awoke?’

  I could see her thinking. She was trying hard to let me have the benefit of the doubt.

  ‘Bright light,’ she said finally.

  ‘But there was no light on in the room, it was him!’

  She looked confused, checked the bedside lamp. Looked back at me.

  The odour, maybe it was still lingering, ask her. ‘What can you smell?’

  She sniffed the air. ‘Something spicy.’

  ‘It’s his spoor, he leaves it everywhere he goes.’ I began to search the spot where he had been standing. ‘Take a look at the bed.’

  Part of the top sheet was torn.

  ‘You could have done that.’

  I held up my bitten nails. ‘With these? Think—he was here while you were still sleeping. Insulting you. He woke you up.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ she said indignantly, ‘who called me a bitch-on-heat?’

  Hallelujah. Touchdown.

  ‘He did!’

  ‘I thought it didn’t sound like you.’

  ‘Now do you believe me?’

  She rubbed a hand over her face, trying to think clearly. ‘Yes—no—I’m not sure. I did hear something, though. Someone else in the room.’

  I was just celebrating the breakthrough when I realized that if she started to believe in Spanky, I would have put her life in far greater danger. The daemon had me in a perfect double-bind. I could only make allies knowing that he would take them from me.

  ‘I have to go,’ I said suddenly, searching for my jeans.

  Ignoring her protests, I dressed and left. I closed the front door quietly and stepped out into the freshly falling rain.

  I looked back at Lottie’s bedroom window, but she was not there this time. Spanky had confused and frightened her. Hell, he’d frightened both of us. I was alone again. And it was safer for everyone if I stayed that way.

  As I walked, I shoved back my sleeve and examined my arm once more. The marks were still there. But which was the illusion, the familiar grip that had not seemed like an injection, or the marks themselves? I couldn’t tell, couldn’t begin to think through the problem. Logic was starting to give way to panic.

  It was Monday morning. In two days’ time, Spanky would have to vacate William Beaumont’s body and take possession of mine if he was to survive on earth.

  And still I had no way of fighting back.

  Chapter 30

  War

  I returned home fully prepared for the worst, which was just as well.

  He had been back to the apartment and had rampaged through it, inflicting an incredible amount of damage. I’d been burgled before but this was different, far worse than any marauding teenager. He’d thrown red paint up the walls and across the windows, punching holes through both, ripped the guts out of the sofa and armchairs, which lay on their backs exuding kapok like dying mammals, and poured a black sticky substance, either treacle or oil, all over the parquet flooring.

  He’d used my iron to smash a hole in the fishtank, and the del
icately tinted creatures lay dead and faded in pockets of glass-filled water. The television and stereo system were strewn in shards of plastic and twisted sheets of solid-state circuitry from one end of the lounge to the other. Bare live wires hung from the wall, blackening the carpet.

  I should have been shocked, but after the events of the last few days I merely felt numb as I stepped through the wreckage. Besides, the apartment had hardly been a home to me.

  But my chequebook was missing from the bedroom, and so was the cash reserve I kept at the back of one of the kitchen drawers. My credit cards were in my wallet, and that remained where it always was, in the rear pocket of my jeans. I hadn’t yet had a chance to withdraw my money from the bank. I had meant to do it before he managed to seal off the account, but now it was probably too late. I knew the way his mind worked. It’s what I would have done first.

  Oddly, I felt no compunction to leave the flat. Wherever I went I would take the chaos with me, so it made more sense to remain in a place that had already been demolished. If I had become a danger to others, it was best to hide myself away.

  The bed was still in one piece, although the frame was slightly twisted. I would still be able to sleep in it if I had to. The telephone had been torn from the wall, so I had to go back into the street to make calls. First I rang Neville Syms and apologized for not being able to attend the staff meeting. I needed to do something that would make me feel normal again.

  ‘Well, it’s no secret,’ said Syms. ‘You’ll be receiving notification any day now.’ The cadence was measured, the attitude guarded. ‘I’ve consulted with Max’s lawyer, and he agrees with me. Without your boss, Thanet has no way of continuing. And that means we no longer have an agreement. If I were you I’d start looking for another job, son. Given the amount of petty cash you owe the company, there’ll be no outstanding money owed to you.’

  It sounded to me as if the old bastard had struck some kind of deal with the lawyers. A man like Syms had spent too many years in gentlemen’s clubs to ever be a gentleman. He’d found a way to get his hands on the business or Max’s money, or both, and wasn’t about to share it with the staff. One thought pleased me. Wait until he saw what had happened to my company car.