Spanky

by Christopher Fowler

  Chapter 35

  Clubability

  Dis-Establishment. Bluetopia. Sanitarium. Mr Whippy. Pierced. SubStation. Fuck City. After a while, one club started to look just like the next. Black walls, black light, high tech, low tack. I soon perfected the technique of the search. I only had to stand above the pulsing dance floor and scan the room to know if he was there. I didn’t even have to enter half of the bars. I could walk up to the entrance and tell if he’d ventured inside.

  I was learning to play his game.

  In one deafening sweatbox, The Pain Bar, I sensed his cooling spoor, less than an hour old. He was leaving visible traces now, tiny blue specks that shone like dandruff under ultraviolet neon. Clubs were second homes to him, perhaps his only homes. He thrived on the barely veiled aggression and sexual electricity that these places generated. Here victims and predators shone forth as clearly as if they were labelled cuts of meat. It was ironic that these dance-bars derived their names from fashionable masochistic rites, while their patrons retained no genuine concept of intolerable pain or cruelty.

  Leaving the club I walked south toward the river, following the fading trail of my nemesis. My right leg hurt badly and slowed me down, but I pushed the discomfort from my mind and made Spanky’s imprint my only frame of reference. I had earmarked another club on my list, a small streamer-covered bar/dancefloor behind Charing Cross Road called Raw Deal.

  There were too many people gathered around the entrance. Too many mixed-up signals. I had to enter the club to tell if he’d been there. Inside, there was barely room to move. I noticed that people were drinking beer here, a change from the Evian and ecstasy crowd. The place was having some kind of party night, which involved most of the customers wearing Mardi Gras masks.

  His spoor was strongest near the edge of the balloon-filled dance area, in the same kind of corner where I had first met him. He had gone, but his tracks were so fresh that I knew myself to be right behind him.

  I wondered if he, in turn, could sense his hunter.

  I had attempted to keep my mind shielded at all times, but it was difficult to maintain such a high level of concentration. I returned to the club’s main entrance, but the trail had already grown cold. Backtracked to the fire exit, and it was so strong that I could smell his distinctive odour above the sweat and amyl nitrite of the club. I pushed on the bar of the door and found myself in a long, litter-strewn alley running between a pair of Victorian brick office buildings. My heart was stabbing against my ribs now, for the blue pinpricks of light were becoming amber with body heat, so recently had they been shed from their host.

  As I turned the corner, I braced myself for what I would see.

  He was standing with his shoulders hunched over the girl, and his glistening scarlet hands buried deep within her chest. She was dead or dying, her shaven head thrown back so far that her face was pressed against the wall. Her plastic skirt, glistening darkly with his seed, had ridden above her thighs, which were awkwardly splayed around his bare hips.

  The spines on Spanky’s back had sheared through his leather jacket to stand erect up to the nape of his neck. He turned his head slowly and looked at me with red unseeing eyes, caught in the middle of his death-lust. His mouth was bared in a rictus of a grin, saliva pattering on the paper-strewn ground at his feet. Although he took the form of a man he no longer appeared mortal, no longer possessed a recognizable human spirit.

  ‘Martyn.’

  His voice had deepened to a guttural drawl between man and pig, like a tape running slow. He pulled his hands free and dropped the body into the litter without a downward glance.

  ‘You seem to have caught me red-handed. I’ve just eaten her soul. I was surprised to find she had one at all. There wasn’t much to it. If I’d have known you were coming I’d have saved you a sliver.’

  ‘But you knew I was coming.’

  He turned to face me, wiping his dripping hands across his still-engorged penis. With a vague sense of disappointment, I noted that it was slightly smaller than my own.

  ‘To tell the truth, Martyn, I had a vague inkling that you might show up.’

  ‘You’d have been fucked if I hadn’t, wouldn’t you?’ I checked the alley for exits as I spoke. ‘You made it obvious that my presence was requested tonight. Why was that, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t understand this new tone in your voice, Martyn.’

  He had never been more dangerous than he was now. He raised his trousers and buckled his belt, then stepped over the body and walked slowly towards me, still wiping his hands.

  ‘Remember how I wouldn’t tell you about my brother, Spanky? I didn’t want you to know how I felt. I carried his memory inside me. Joey was never far away. I kept him where he would burn. Who’s inside you? Who’s the young man who invited a daemon to come and live inside him?’

  ‘My former identity is no longer of interest, Martyn. It was wiped out long ago. William Beaumont’s body dies at midnight tomorrow.’

  ‘You think you gave him a decent life? You killed his parents.’

  ‘They wondered why he didn’t age. They found out who he had become. But look at the good things. Before William met me, he knew the route of every desperate day. Who wouldn’t seize a second chance? I gave him life and youth. As I will to you.’

  ‘I don’t want it.’

  ‘You don’t have a choice.’

  He was standing less than three feet from me now. I could smell the hot taint of his barely controlled breath.

  ‘Beaumont allowed you to destroy his personality.’

  ‘He put up a fight, but it didn’t amount to much. Others have before. It’s human nature.’

  ‘I think you’re frightened. You’re shitting yourself every time you look at your watch. If you don’t get me, and you can’t find another human host, you’ll be trapped in a carcass that’s collapsing and decaying with every passing second. The unthinkable will happen. Your living soul will be trapped inside a corpse.’

  The roar grew in his throat and he stepped forward, barely able to stop himself from harming me. He did not dare. I was his only remaining hope of survival.

  ‘What happens a few seconds after midnight tomorrow, Spanky? You can’t just take off into the ether, can you? You chose mortality, and you must continue that way or die.’

  Silence. He was always silent when I was right.

  ‘Many innocents will be slaughtered before then, unless you’re willing to trade your life for theirs.’

  I didn’t doubt it, but for the moment I had to call his bluff. I needed time to think.

  ‘I always feel that large-scale atrocities are a cry for help, don’t you? They’re beneath you, Spanky. You’ll be the one going into McDonald’s with a shotgun, another newspaper statistic, not me. It’s a lot of effort just to prick my conscience. You could try the old hallucination routine again, but it wouldn’t work. You see, you made a fundamental error with me. Don’t worry, it’s not your fault. It wasn’t foreseeable.’

  His face clouded, an almost human response. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You thought you were giving me freedom by giving me what I wanted. Nice clothes, a fashionable apartment, sexy women. All the lifestyle things you see on TV. Accessories. I just swapped one trap for a better-furnished one. But take everything away and you give me real freedom. Now I have power.’

  I turned my back on him and walked out of the alley. I was sure he wouldn’t hurt me, but I still had to force myself to control each measured step.

  I had no way of preventing him from causing harm. The supernatural had failed me. There were no charms, no spells, no antidotes that worked on something spawned from within the human psyche. The main thing was to keep him in my sights. And I was pretty damned sure that he wouldn’t stray far from me, either. It was after midnight. Spanky’s last twenty-four hours of earthly existence had begun. There would be no more sleep until it was over.

  ‘I’ll win, Martyn,’ he shouted after me. ‘You have
nowhere to go. No one to help you. And if I die, you’ll die with me.’

  As I walked into the street, the fear returned. I had almost allowed him to possess me once before.

  I wondered what he could do to make me consider it again.

  Chapter 36

  Duality

  Wednesday morning. Dawn was still far off. In spite of the rain, the streets remained stale from the night before. Fried onions, perfume and sweat. The scent of an overcrowded city.

  We watched each other from a distance, Spanky and I. Nowhere else to go, nothing else to do but walk the streets of London and keep each other in our sights.

  Sometimes he caught my eye from across the street and gave a wry smile, trying to make light of our situation. I was thinking furiously, getting nowhere. There was no way of second-guessing him without revealing my own thoughts.

  I’d borrowed a cheap watch which had been lying on the hospital locker next to mine. Its owner was in a coma; he wouldn’t be needing it for a while. I tilted it to the streetlight: 3.15 a.m. The hours had never passed so slowly as they did now.

  We had moved away from the main thoroughfares of the city, into the gloomier avenues that backed them. The daemon walked on the opposite pavement, always keeping pace with me, bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet, biding his time.

  As the deadline approached I could sense that his strength was growing, feeding on his cruelties, and yet he continued to keep his distance. Perhaps any increased proximity would allow me to figure his intentions. I didn’t know what to expect next, and I was starting not to care. I was dog-tired, soaking wet and desperate for sleep. But I was afraid that if I dropped my guard for a moment he might now be strong enough to take control.

  The splint on my little finger kept sliding loose, but my right knee was really killing me. I tried not to let him see how badly I was limping. I looked over at Spanky and instinctively knew that he had picked up the thought.

  By 5.15 a.m., it felt like we had covered half of North London. The streets were still empty except for the red mail vans heading for the King’s Cross depot. We were somewhere near the Angel, but were now heading west. The bastard never tired. If we kept walking like this, he would eventually wear me down. I had to make him stop.

  ‘Hey, Martyn.’

  Maybe he’d caught the thought, because he was beckoning me from the other side of the road. I hesitated, carefully watching him.

  ‘This is getting us nowhere. Come over here for a minute. I’m not going to bite you.’ To break the impasse, I crossed over to him.

  ‘We need to talk this through, you and I.’ He began to walk again, and I was forced to fall in step beside my enemy. ‘Much hangs on the outcome. Suppose I left you now. What would you do? You have nothing to live for. I could leave, you know. Despite what you think, there might still be time for me to find another host.’

  ‘You think someone would consciously, willingly invite you in?’

  ‘I can appear to others in any form I please. I can make the offer very attractive.’

  ‘Then go and do it. You’re almost out of time. Why risk everything waiting for me?’

  ‘You are the one I chose, the most suitable host.’

  ‘No, we couldn’t be more opposite, you and I. All I have to do is hold you at bay until midnight tonight, and you’ll be gone forever.’

  He laughed softly. ‘Martyn, I’ve already thought of a way around that. If you continue to resist me I’ll simply enter the body of a derelict with no time left to live, a homeless drunk, a lonely old woman. You think they wouldn’t accept my offer in an instant? Then I’ll come back to you again. How will you recognize me? A face in the crowd, a beggar in an alley. Who will I be? How will you ever know?’

  ‘If you come back I’ll sense it. You brought out certain abilities in me, Spanky. I’ll always know when it’s you.’

  He was silent for a minute. We walked on past the overgrown front gardens of large Victorian houses, proud homes hacked into flats, each porch eerily lit by rows of plastic illuminated bell-pushes. Spanky lit a cheroot and drew on it pensively, as if he had all the time in the world.

  ‘It was easy to tempt you, Martyn,’ he said. ‘You begged me to do so. I heard your call and answered it. A thin, high sound, borne on the breezes above the city. The invocation was made. It always is. You’ll never be able to resist me totally, because you summoned me in the first place.’

  He held out his arm and brought me to a stop. Ahead, traffic lights pulsed to an empty road. When he turned, he appeared more human than he ever had before. His eyes had softened somehow. His features were less severely defined. As he pressed his hand against my heart, my stinging ribs creaked in protest.

  ‘I am you, Martyn. The dark side of every man contains a hiding daemon, and I am yours brought forth. I showed you how to effortlessly take advantage of people and you loved it. Think of the nineteen eighties, when the nation was suddenly told that it was fine to be greedy, to be rich and callous, to be blind to poverty and suffering. How did we react? We partied, Martyn. We partied for an entire decade. Everyone has the capacity for cruelty.’

  ‘Hit me with every cliché in the book,’ I said dully. ‘I’ve only got to listen to it for a few more hours.’

  He hadn’t heard me. His voice grew harder, his words reverberating and overlapping in my head. ‘I’ll always come back to dog your steps,’ he promised, ‘to whisper in your ear, to tamper with your senses, to wear you down. I exist in every malicious thought, every angry moment, every minor cruelty you inflict. It’s your fault that I live. And with you I’ll create a cruel new life on earth. The old gods, Martyn. They were the ones who brought me here.’

  I knew he spoke the truth. He had never really lied to me. How could he? I wondered about everyone who had been hurt since I met Spanky. How much of me had wished each one harm?

  ‘You know, what shocked me was the ease of it,’ he was the lighter Spanky now, suddenly airy and expansive, ‘finding someone like you. The times have grown callous. I could have inhabited a thousand others—virtually anyone I spoke to would have allowed me in. When I first met William Beaumont, in 1950, I had been searching for three years. Now it’s like shooting fish in a barrel; everyone’s an opportunist. Suggest something wicked and you’ll find a dozen takers. Have you noticed, there are no separate compartments on the railways any more because people can’t be trusted not to rape or kill each other? These are the signs of the times, Martyn, and I must move with them. You have to let me join with you. It’s like Frankenstein and his bride. We belong together.’

  As I listened to his steady, even speech, something within me was worn away. I could see his point all too clearly. Instead of spending the rest of my life as confused as everyone else, at war with feelings I barely understood, why not give way to a bolder, ruthless nature? Surely it was a more honest way to live, to acknowledge temptation and exist with it . . .

  I felt him swarming into me then, attempting to storm into possession while my resistance was at its lowest. The sensation was a sickening jolt, a drop into an abyss of the darkest misery, and my instant reaction was to force it away like a cell rejecting a hostile infection.

  I fell to my knees and vomited violently, retching until my lungs and stomach burned. Spanky had seized his chance too early, and his precipitate action had cured me of any remaining doubt. I rose unsteadily to my feet and lurched away from him, determined that he would never obtain the human host he needed, even knowing that I could never win. Listening to Spanky was like having anaesthetic needles slipped into your veins. As the state of euphoria wore off you looked down to find yourself bristling with syringes.

  ‘You can’t run away from me, Martyn. I’m going to break into houses and do terrible, disgusting things to people if you don’t stay.’

  ‘I’ve seen all your parlour tricks,’ I called back. ‘They’ve rather lost their edge.’ But I knew he could kill. The question was, how many would I allow to die before I surrendered? He
was behind me, moving across the bloated gutters like a wraith, and he had snatched up the thought.

  ‘Want to find out? Here comes someone now.’

  About a hundred yards away, a young labourer was rounding the corner. He had a Dodgers baseball cap pulled low over his eyes and was carrying a canvas bag of tools. He walked without looking up, whistling and swaggering, familiar with his route. Spanky crouched forward and broke into a loping run. I watched him moving faster and faster along the pavement, rushing toward the oblivious workman with such speed that I had no time to react.

  An ominous rumbling scaled the air, distant lightning called to earth in a thunderous vacuum. The daemon was barely yards from his victim and closing fast. I remember bellowing something so that the man looked up in surprise just as Spanky smashed into him, his ethereal frame now carrying corporeal weight.

  The startled workman was punched from his feet and lifted backwards into the air like a window-dummy rammed by a quarterback. His body overturned itself and dived headfirst, grotesquely hitting the pavement with his face. I was near enough to hear the sinuous snap of his neck breaking. As I approached I saw that his eyes were open and fixed upon me, even though his head was twisted in the wrong direction.

  For a few moments he remained alive, long enough, I thought, to identify me as his assailant and to carry my image to his death. I fell back against a low garden wall, breathless with shock, watching as the workman’s face grew pale and watery blood began to leak from the corner of his mouth into the gutter. I wanted to turn his body over, but Spanky would not allow me to approach.

  ‘He’ll remember you for eternity,’ he said slyly. ‘They all will.’

  ‘And how many more would you kill with me as your host?’ I shouted.

  ‘Oh, I won’t commit murder once we’re united. Nothing so crude, I promise you. I see you more in the role of ambassador. A future in politics, perhaps. The progress of civilization is a waking dream. Let’s fill the world with scorpions.’