Falling Into Heaven

by SIMS, MAYNARD

‘Ever since childhood. I think it was what decided my parents that I wasn’t… shall we say… the full ticket.’

  ‘What are they?’ I said.

  ‘Disaffected souls, I suspect, though I’m not one hundred per cent sure. If you believe that actions in your present life affects your status in the next then the explanation fits. I happen to believe in pure evil. I believe that some people are just born bad, with nothing to redeem them, and I think that when they die they are trapped here by their own actions in this life.’

  ‘Surely that’s not a very Christian attitude,’ I said.

  He shrugged. ‘Maybe not, but a lifetime of experiencing these things has only confirmed that belief. How did Matt die?’

  The question came from nowhere and shook me. It was if he could tell I was holding back. ‘The doctors said he suffered a massive stroke,’ I said hesitantly

  ‘But you don’t believe that, do you?’

  He was looking at me intently, his dark brown eyes fixed on my face.

  I shook my head, took a deep breath and told him what had happened the evening Matt died. ‘I think Slater’s spirit, or whatever you chose to call it, killed him as a way of punishing me.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, nodding his head slowly. ‘That would be the most likely scenario. This Slater character probably blames you for his death. At least that seems the most likely explanation. The question is, how do we stop him? Because I know from experience that it won’t end here. These things, these shades...’

  ‘I call them Dark Souls,’ I said, interrupting him.

  ‘Dark Souls, yes, I like that. Describes them perfectly. Anyway, as I was saying, these Dark Souls, have no conscience, no finer feelings whatsoever. I hate them. They’re evil, vicious…’ His face twisted into a mask of bitterness. ‘They took my wife, and my son,’ he said, his voice dropping to a whisper.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Ancient history now. But I made a promise to myself then, that I would never rest until I’d found a way to drive them back into the Hell where they belong.’

  ‘So this is something of a personal crusade,’ I said – and not about Matt and me at all, I said to myself silently.

  ‘You could put it like that.’

  ‘So, where do we start?’

  ‘Oh, the grave I suppose. The grave of this Slater character. He’s a fresh soul, still throbbing with the memories of his corporeal life. It would make him very strong and a magnet for others of his kind. That’s why there are so many with him now. Well, are you up for it?’

  ‘I don’t really have any choice, do I? I don’t think they’re going to go away, do you?’

  He shook his head, finished his coffee and got to his feet. ‘Shall we go then?’

  I was startled. ‘You mean now? We should go now?’

  ‘I don’t think we can waste time.’

  ‘But I don’t know where he’s buried, or even if he was buried. He might have been cremated for all I know.’

  ‘No,’ Clive Merrimen said. ‘He was buried... and I know where. We’ll go in my car, if that’s all right with you.’

  We reached Blackacre Cemetery in thirty minutes.

  ‘How did you know where he was?’

  Clive smiled. ‘I made a few phone calls last night. Sometimes it helps to be in the trade.’

  We left Clive’s battered Ford in the car park and walked through the gates to the cemetery. The place was deserted. I let Clive lead the way, as he seemed to know where he was going. Eventually we reached a fresh grave. Bouquets and sprays of brown, dead flowers covered the surface. It looked like the grave hadn’t been visited since it was dug.

  ‘What now?’ I said.

  Clive was rummaging in the pocket of his jacket. He produced a small glass phial. ‘First this,’ he said holding up the phial. ‘Holy water.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, barely able to contain my disappointment. Somehow I’d been expecting more, not just religious cant. Clive unstoppered the phial. He spoke a few words of Latin and poured the water over the grave. I watched bleakly. Had the earth begun to heave and lift I might have been impressed, but nothing happened.

  Next he took a large crucifix from the inside pocket of his jacket and brandished it in front of him, speaking more Latin verses, his voice rising in volume.

  I wanted to go home. This was a complete waste of time. It served me right for pinning my hopes on a man whose philosophies were so alien to my own.

  I was watching him as he spoke, waving the cross in front of him like a shield. It was only out of the corner of my eye that I saw something large and black skimming across the ground towards us. Clive must have sensed it as he turned just before the black amorphous cloud swept over him.

  He cried out as the crucifix was plucked from his grasp and sent spinning through the air. The blackness completely enveloped him and he was lashing out with his arms, flailing wildly, at the same time shouting a litany of holy words, calling for the protection of his God.

  I reached out for him but a shadow loomed in front of me and I was lifted off my feet and hurled backwards. I crashed shoulder first into an ancient gravestone, knocking my head and landing awkwardly on my wrist. I hissed with pain as I felt a bone crack.

  Clive was struggling with the black shadow. Struggling and losing. He was on his knees. At least that was what it looked like. It was only when I cleared my head and looked again that I saw he was being pulled bodily down into the ground. His legs had sunk thigh deep and his movements were becoming slow, feeble.

  He’s going to die, I thought. We’re both going to die, just like Matt. I carried the thought with me as I pushed myself to my feet and reached out again for Clive’s hand.

  As our fingers touched a blinding white light crackled around us. Clive’s eyes opened and he stared at me, a look of confusion on his face. The white light suffused his body and he started to rise from the ground. Inch by inch his legs were pulled free of the earth. At the same time the black shadow around him started to recede, shrinking away from the light.

  The scream started as a whisper and rose to a deafening crescendo as the light ripped apart the shadow like a flimsy rag. I caught a glimpse of a face in the blackness. Slater’s face, twisted into an expression of rage and agony as fragments of the shadow were caught in a fierce wind and blown away.

  Seconds later it was over. Clive was standing, arms outstretched, hair blown across his face, incomprehension in his eyes. His left hand was clenched into a tight fist. He held it out to me, opened his fingers and dropped something hard and metallic into my upturned palm.

  Matt’s signet ring, the heavily engraved crest catching the last rays of the afternoon sun, glittering like the light of a new dawn.

  I put it to my lips and kissed the gold.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Clive said.

  I smiled at him.

  I did.

  ‘I love you, Matt,’ I said softly, then linked my arm through Clive’s and together we walked from the cemetery.

  SLIDING DOWN THE SLIPPERY SLIP

  I bought the bottle from a back street shop at Ponders End. Elvis Presley served me. I thought it was odd at first because he shortchanged me, and the King hadn’t been known for that kind of thing, not in any of the books or TV programmes I’d seen anyway. I assumed he was on some of that medication he was noted for in his latter years, but he should still serve the customers properly. It wasn’t until I’d loaded my groceries into the car and was checking the store receipt that I realised he’d given me fifty pence too little in my change. I would have gone back and made a scene but I remembered the look in his eyes as he handed me my money. He knew he was dead, I’m sure of it.

  I mentioned it to Jimi when I got back, but he just shrugged and gave one of his modest little laughs before drifting off into a Voodoo Chile riff, that was all muffled fuzz and high string beacons of sound.

  I buried the dog and made some sandwiches for lunch, which I ate, with a nice bottle of Vouvray, on the patio in the garde
n. I felt like Hannibal Lector when I said that to myself, ‘a nice bottle of…’ just like in the film, although I hadn’t eaten the dog; or anyone else, not for a long time.

  My friends were coming round in the evening and I liked to prepare something special for them. We’d known each other for years, though not from school. I hadn’t enjoyed school, with the name-calling and the crush of people everywhere, meaning there was never any space that one could call one’s own. I didn’t think I would have wanted to keep in touch with people from those happiest days of my life and so I hadn’t, which was just as well as none of them seemed that keen on making arrangements with me after the last day. The last day was emotional as Vinnie Jones said in that film, but for me it seemed a little false to promise to not lose touch with girls I had spent years trying to avoid, even going to the extreme of spending morning and afternoon breaks and lunch hours in the toilet cubicles so I didn’t have to mix with them.

  I know that’s two references I’ve made to films and so it may seem they are a particular interest of mine, but really they aren’t. I just have the kind of mind that relates things to quotes sometimes, and at other times to passages I might have read in books. I like to read as well as to watch films. My mother used to say I lived too much in my mind and not enough in the real world, but if the characters I watched and read about seemed alive to me where’s the harm? It was better for me to distance myself from people I met by assuming the identity through a few words and phrases of fictional characters; was better, and still is. Anyhow, mother is dead now so it doesn’t matter.

  My friends were due round at a little before eight, for our regular bridge, dinner and drinks evening. It was harmless enough though we occasionally had a wager on the results. Competition was often quite fierce, though I could rarely raise the level of my enthusiasm for that side of it beyond mild interest. I enjoyed the company, as I was trying very hard to get back into what was termed normal society now that my medication had been deemed unnecessary.

  Lists are a typical symptom of the chronically obsessed so I was making a real effort not to list everything I did. Obviously there were still issues that had to be logged, but if I kept it to essentials I felt better and believed I could see the way to true recovery. At my worst I didn’t even have to write things down. The lists reverberated around inside my head, like an ever-revolving tape loop, a perpetual motion of checking and re-checking, of mentally filing things away, only to spread them out again in my brain and begin the process of scheduling them all over. I would list my possessions by category, and then break those down by area of the house in which they were placed. That doesn’t sound very clear so I’ll give an example. Say it was my bathroom things, a little personal I know so I shan’t go into full feminine hygiene detail. I would list, in my mind of course, bathroom, and then go into smaller perspective by listing, flannel, soap, then bottles of perfume, talcum, toothpaste. Usually after a few days of this the list was so practised that the items stayed in the same place within the list. Though if I was tired or was interrupted, things got displaced and it might be necessary to start again. After a few months I added a failsafe procedure so that if I was stopped before I had got to the end I didn't have to begin at the very beginning and list every room; that idea saved a lot of time, though it did mean I listed the whole itinerary more often each day, because the task took less time.

  The bottle was full, of course, and properly sealed, which is perhaps the reason behind the enigmatic glance Elvis gave me. He may have suspected my purpose, possibly even shared my anticipation, but I suspected he was more likely to be planning his comeback than bothering with the secrets a thin, sandy-blonde haired woman in her late thirties was going to take to fill her bottle, her own bottle.

  Why mother called me Thujone I have no idea, but it served to increase the isolation at school, and in early adult life as well. People couldn’t spell it, forever making it into ‘two-john’, or ‘through-joan’, neither of which made any sense. Not that the real spelling or pronunciation used to make any sense to me either; not until a doctor in the first hospital told me about the green goddess. My purpose was set in those few moments, and no manner of treatment, no amount of electrode activity could divert me.

  Jim Morrison used to write of ‘weird scenes inside the goldmine’, but goldmines produce a substance of beauty and value. The scenes inside my head were more industrialised than artistic, the repetitive lists infinitely more stark than attractive. My scenes were a fool’s gold of stifled emotion. I mentioned this to Jim once and he issued an expletive that I took to be an offer, but I declined. It was during his bloated and bearded stage, and while his whiskies and lime were green, it’s true, they were not as vividly so as the substance.

  My apartment in Notting Hill is considered to be quite desirable nowadays, but when mother and father owned the shop around the corner it was merely convenient. They meant to have more than one child but mother said it never worked out. I know she suffered at least five miscarriages, both before and after me, and for years I blamed myself for them. I must have jumped on her at the wrong time, in innocent childish play, but harmful nonetheless. I couldn’t have influenced the ones that preceded me, naturally, unless what one doctor had told me was true and my need to be wanted overshadowed all else, even producing physical symptoms alongside the psychological ones. Those physical implications could easily have been the nature’s terminations that mother suffered – brought on by an anticipation of my overwhelming desire to be needed, all day and every day.

  The apartment is special to me and always will be. Mother died here, and although father struggled on for a few months afterwards, he was eaten away by his grief, or guilt, I was never quite sure which. Eaten away, a strange phrase, but apt because that is the best description of what happened to him. Gradually there was less of him; he shrivelled on a daily basis, until I thought I would soon be able to fold him into the pocket of my coat and take him for a walk in the park. Perhaps pop him out if it was a nice day and let the sun warm his bones and the diaphanous skin that covered them.

  The kitchen opened out onto a small terrace that was the head of the small garden. It was a lovely place in which to prepare food. I could have the terrace doors open and let the sun and the busy noises from the streets around waft in as though they were scents from a Parisian evening. I could close my eyes and imagine the Eiffel skeleton, the cafes and the boulevards, the elegance and the mystery.

  My bottle was empty by now, and yet next to the new and untouched one it beckoned like a stranger from a black windowed taxi parked along the pavement by the Seine. It was alluring but dangerous, promising excitement but at a cost that might be too high a price for me.

  I took a glass from the cabinet, a crystal tumbler, poured ice into it and swilled the cubes around, wallowing in the sound they made as they connected. The bottle opened freely, as if it was already prepared for me. I placed my perforated spoon over the glass where it fitted perfectly; it was a beautiful object, crafted from the finest silver, and bought from Camden market many years ago. The sugar I spilled onto the spoon, leaving the actual liquid until last. The green liquor flowed mystically through the sugar, and where it touched the already melting ice it was tinged with an opaque milky white colour that offset the beautiful emerald green. Then the sip, that first taste on the tongue. I have to confess that, coupled with the medication, a single glass of absinthe does set my imagination in turmoil, and the damage to my carefully constructed lists is bloody. I pay for it for days after a binge, but as I have become older the logic of drinking each day has become obvious.

  There are some that prefer the traditional method of pouring water through the sugar and into the already waiting liquor but the resultant colour is so absent of green that I feel it becomes another drink altogether.

  With the glass fully drunk, and the bottle re-sealed, I can begin to prepare the food for the evening. But, no, the initial glass is, naturally, never quite enough, the essence not wholly abso
rbed. And so another, the ritual repeated and the new bottle is now well on its path to oblivion. I arrived there many a long year ago.

  By the end of the evening the new bottle will be empty, ready to be filed away until the next time, while my own bottle, my trusted friend, will be full to the overflowing.

  There are friends that find the décor of my home a little overwhelming. I like green. The dreams that are caught by the colour are the most vivid of all. I lay asleep and by morning the images and thoughts that escape from my head at night are held by the spider’s web dampness of the greenness. It is as though the dew that caresses the grass outside is translated into my rooms as an invisible filter, coating the walls with a rainbow of ideas and trapping my unconscious dream world as though the fantasies are poured into a bottle and sealed for later use.

  The bedroom mirrors the green fairy in its sharp emeralds; the sitting room is paler, an attempt at faded elegance; the hallway a whiter shade of green; the bathroom is different shades of the colour, from the dark tiles to the pastel fittings; and the kitchen has washed effect cupboard fronts, dark green cooker and fridge, and lighter green tiles on the walls and floor. I feel as if I am held safe by a field, by a forest, by the contents of the bottle itself.

  The dog did not enjoy absinthe, what can I say. He had been with me for a while, since I was finally signed away from the hospital, even the outpatient clinics. I hated taking him for walks and so the garden had to suffice. He soon bored of its restrictive perimeters, and so one evening, while the darkness invaded yet the night was warm enough for nakedness, I shared with him some of the liquid from my bottle. Perhaps he would have been safer with the pure liquor but I was in a capricious mood - there were many inside me that night, and I wanted him to join me in the special fluids. He convulsed fairly quickly and, well in a human the phrase would be ‘he wasn’t feeling himself.’ He certainly wasn’t himself after the drink, which he lapped up like water in a desert. He died within the hour.