World's end taom-1

by Mark Chadbourn

  "That was unbelievable," Church said eventually. His voice was like sandpaper in the arid stillness of the room.

  "You're right," Ruth responded, "because it's not true."

  "What do you mean?" Church eyed her curiously. "We saw the same thing."

  Ruth shook her head emphatically. "Think about it, Church. There must be a rational explanation. We have to use a little intellectual rigour here-the first answer isn't always the right one. We were talking about how memories can be corrupted by other aspects of the mind's working. That can happen, can't it?" she said to Delano. He nodded. "Remember in the pub you made some throwaway comment about us seeing the Devil, so that's exactly what we did see. You placed that thought in both our heads and our subconscious turned it into reality. It was self-fulfilling." She looked to Delano for support.

  "Your reactions were very extreme, which suggests a serious trauma buried away, but if you witnessed a particularly brutal murder, as you told me on the phone, that would explain it," the therapist said. "What you recalled today is known as a screen memory. You create it yourself to protect your own mind from further trauma. Yes, it was quite horrible, but the unbelievable elements allow you to dismiss it within the context of reality as you perceive it so it's not as threatening as it first appears. The true memory that lies beneath is much more of a threat to you. I think we'll need a few more sessions to get to it, to be honest." Delano's smile suggested he was relieved by his own explanation. "I must admit, I was a little worried. I've never come across anything quite like that before."

  Church wasn't convinced. "It was pretty real."

  "Sorry about the carpet," Ruth said sheepishly. Church thought she was going to burst into a fit of embarrassed giggles.

  "Don't worry," Delano said. "Let me just check the recording and I'll make arrangements to get your cassette copy."

  He knelt down and rewound the tape. When he pressed play there was a blast of white noise and what sounded like an ear-splitting shriek of hysterical laughter. Delano's brow furrowed. He ran the tape forward a little and tried again. The white noise hissed from the speakers. A second later the giggling started, fading in and out as if it was a badly tuned radio signal, the laughter growing louder and louder until Church's ears hurt; it made him feel sick and uncomfortable. Delano snapped off the recorder in dismay.

  "I'm terribly sorry. That's never happened before," he said in bafflement. "It must have picked up some stray signal."

  "Remind me not to book with that mini-cab service," Church said.

  Outside, the rain had stopped briefly to allow a burst of insipid sunlight, but the oppressive experience with Delano clung to them. Their reclaimed memories, even if false, were now free, scurrying round, insect-like, in the back of their heads, making them feel queasy and disoriented.

  "I feel much better after that, even if we didn't find out exactly what happened," Ruth said, trying to put a brave face on it. She gave Church a comforting pat on the back. "Come on, don't let it get to you. It was a bad dream, that's all."

  Church looked round at the black office windows above the shops, unable to shake the feeling they were being watched. "I need a drink."

  "Let's see what we can do about that."

  She took him for lunch to Wodka, a Polish restaurant nestling in the hinterland of well-heeled apartment blocks on Kensington High Street's south side. Over blinis and cream and ice-cold honey vodka, they discussed the morning's events and what lay ahead. Church was taken by Ruth's brightly efficient manner and sharp sense of humour which helped her see the inherent farce in even the bleakest moment.

  "You always seem like you've got something on your mind," Ruth said when she felt comfortable enough to talk a little more personally.

  "You know how it is." Church sipped at the strong Polish coffee, but if Ruth noticed his discomfort she didn't pay it any heed.

  "Anything you want to talk about?"

  "Nothing I should burden you with."

  "Go on, I'm a good listener. Besides, after an experience like that we're a minority of two. We have to stick together."

  It would have been easy to bat her questions away, but there was something in her which made him feel like unburdening himself; a warmth, an understanding. He took a deep breath, surprised he even felt like talking about it. "I had a girlfriend. Marianne Leedham. She was a graphic designer-magazine work, some book covers, that kind of thing. We met soon after I'd left university. I had a seedy flat in Battersea, just off Lavender Hill, and Marianne lived round the corner. We'd see each other in the local Spar or in the newsagents. You know how it is when you see someone and you know it's inevitable that sooner or later you're going to get together, even if you haven't spoken?" Ruth nodded, her eyes bright. "I felt like that, and I could tell she did too. The local pub, the Beaufoy Arms, used to hire a boat to go along the Thames each year. It was an overnight thing, lots of Red Stripe, jerk pork and dancing, up to the Thames Barrier and then back again for dawn. I went with my mates and Marianne was there with hers. We both knew something was going to happen. Then just before sunrise we found ourselves on deck alone." He smiled. "Not by chance. We talked a little. We kissed a lot. It was like some stupid romantic film."

  Ruth watched his smile grow sad. "What happened, Church?"

  His sigh seemed like the essence of him rushing out. "It was all a blur after that. We saw each other, moved in together. You know, people think I'm lying when I say this, but we never argued. Not once. It was just the best. It was so serious for both of us we never even thought about getting married, but Marianne's mum was getting a bit antsy, as they do, so we started muttering about getting engaged. Everything was fine, and then-" His voice drifted away; the words felt like heavy stones at the back of his throat, but somehow he forced them out. "Two years ago, it was. I'd been out for the night. When I came back the flat was so silent, I knew there was something wrong. Marianne always had some kind of music on. And there was this odd smell. To this day I don't know what it was. I called out for her-there was nowhere else she could have been at that time of night-and my heart started beating like it was going to explode. I knew, you see. I knew. I found her face down in a pool of blood on the bathroom floor. She'd slashed her wrists."

  "Oh, God, I'm sorry," Ruth said in dismay. "I shouldn't have pried."

  "Don't worry, it's okay. It doesn't hurt me to think about her any more. I've got over all that grief thing, although sometimes I feel a little …" His voice trailed off, but her smile told him she understood what he was trying to say. "It's how she died that I can't cope with. There hasn't been a single day gone by since then when I haven't tried to make sense of it. There was no reason for it. She hadn't been depressed. We'd never, ever argued. As far as I was concerned, everything in our lives was perfect. Can you imagine what that's like? To discover your partner had this whole secret world of despair that you never knew existed? Enough despair to kill herself. How could I have been so wrapped up in myself not to have even the slightest inkling?" He couldn't find the words to tell her what it was that had soured his life since that night: not grief, but guilt; the only possible explanation was that he, in some way, was complicit.

  But Ruth seemed to know exactly what he was thinking. She leaned across the table and said softly, "There could be a hundred and one explanations. A sudden chemical inbalance in her brain-"

  "I've been through them all. I've weighed it up and turned it inside out and investigated every possibility, so much that I can't think of anything else. To answer your original question, that's why I always seem so preoccupied. Nothing else seems important beside that."

  "I'm sorry-

  "No, I'm sorry. It's selfish of me to be so wrapped up in myself. We've all got problems." He looked out into the puddled street. Briefly he considered telling Ruth about Marianne's appearance outside his home, but to give voice to it would mean he would have to face up to the reality of the experience and everything that came with it; besides, it was too close to his heart right now
. "I wish I could put it all behind me, but there are so many things about it that don't make sense. Only hours before, she'd been making plans for the wedding." Church grew silent as the waitress came over to pour more coffee; it broke his introspective mood and when she left it was obvious he didn't want to talk about it any more. "This is a good lunch. Thanks."

  Ruth smiled affectionately. "My philosophy is eat yourself out of a crisis."

  "Yet you stay so thin!" he said theatrically. They laughed together, but gradually the conversation turned to what they had seen beneath the bridge, as they had known it would. "So whose face lies behind the Devil?" he asked.

  Ruth's expression darkened. "I don't know. Why should our reactions in the trance have been so extreme, and identical?" Church understood her confusion. "But it's strange. For the first time in months, I feel like I've got some kind of direction. I really want to keep going until we get to the heart of it."

  Church was surprised to realise he felt the same way. "How ironic can you get? It takes a brutal murder to give us some purpose in life."

  "Of course, there's also the danger that if we let it drop now that awful memory will start its destabilisation again, and I could really do without wrecking my career at this stage in my life." She called for the bill and paid it with a gold Amex.

  "So where do we go from here?" Church asked.

  Ruth smiled. "Elementary, my dear Watson."

  Maurice Gibbons had lived in a three-storey terrace in a tree-lined avenue; not too imposing, but certainly comfortable; it looked like it could have done with a lick of paint and a touch of repointing here and there. The lights were already ablaze in the twilight as Church and Ruth opened the front gate and walked up to the door, shivering from the chill; the night was going to be icy. They'd spent the afternoon quietly at Ruth's flat, drinking coffee, talking about comfortingly bland topics, but now they were both feeling apprehensive. Susan Gibbons was a quiet woman who looked older than her years. Her grief still lay heavy on her, evident in the puffiness of her eyes, her pallor and her timidity as she led them into the lounge where condolence cards still gathered dust on the mantelpiece. She accepted at face value Ruth's statement that they were looking into her husband's murder and sat perched on an armchair listening to their questions with a blankness which Church found unnerving, if only because he recognised something of himself in her.

  "I know you've probably been through all this before, Mrs. Gibbons, but we have to go over old ground in case there's anything we've missed," Ruth began.

  Mrs. Gibbons smiled without a hint of lightness or humour. "I understand."

  "Your husband had no enemies?"

  "None at all. Maurice wasn't what you would call a passionate man. He enjoyed his job and he did it well, but he didn't really have any ambition to move on, and everyone recognised that and accepted it. No one felt threatened by him." Her hands clutched at each other in her lap every time she mentioned her husband's name.

  "I know he told you he was going to the pub. Do you have any idea how or why he ended up south of the river?"

  "No."

  A look of panic crossed her face, and Church moved quickly to change the subject. "Had your husband been acting any differently in the days or weeks leading up to his death?"

  There was a long pause when Mrs. Gibbons appeared to have drifted off into a reverie, but then she said quietly, "Now that you mention it, Maurice was a little … skittish, perhaps. He was jumping at the slightest thing."

  "He was frightened of something?" Church pressed.

  "Oh, I wouldn't go that far. Not frightened, just … uneasy." She let out a deep sigh that seemed to fill the room. "He went to church on the Sunday before he passed on. That was so unlike Maurice. Do you think he might have sensed something, wanted to make his peace with God?"

  "Perhaps he did," Ruth said soothingly. Church was impressed with her manner; her caring was from the heart, and he could see Mrs. Gibbons being visibly calmed.

  "Would you like to see his room?" Mrs. Gibbons asked. "Maurice had so many interests and he had a room where he could be alone to think and read. That's where he kept all his things. You might find something of interest there. Lord knows, there's nothing I can tell you."

  She led them up two flights to a little box room lit by a bare bulb. It was quite tidy, uncluttered by any kind of decoration; just a cheap desk and chair, a filing cabinet and a bookshelf. A pair of plaid slippers were tucked in the corner.

  "I'll leave you to it. Make a cup of tea, how about that?" Mrs. Gibbons slipped out, closing the door behind them.

  "Why do you think he was uneasy just before he was killed?" Church said as he sank on to the chair and opened the desk.

  "Don't start extrapolating. You'll end up with all sorts of hideous conspiracy theories."

  "`Just the facts, ma'am."'

  "Exactly." Ruth crouched down to examine the bookshelf. "I think one of us should pay a visit to the local vicar. You never know, Maurice might have seen fit to bare his soul."

  "Wouldn't that be nice and simple. He fingers his murderer to the vicar and everything falls into place." He started to go through the sparse contents of the desk aloud. "Pens, envelopes, writing paper. Look at this, typical anally retentive civil servant-a big pile of receipts, most of them for cabs."

  "Nothing wrong with being anal retentive," Ruth said tartly.

  "Hoping for some tax deduction, I suppose," Church continued. "A notebook-"

  "A lot of these books are new," Ruth mused. "UFOs, Von Daniken, The Occult by Colin Wilson, Messages from the Dead: A Spiritualists' Guide. Looks like he's been reading that magazine you were rambling on about."

  "That's a bit of a coincidence."

  "Sure. Life's full of them. Anything in the notebook?"

  "The first few pages have been torn out. There's only one thing in it: a phone number. Barry Riggs. Crouch End UFO Association."

  "Great. Little Green Men got him," Ruth said wryly. "We should check it out anyway. You never know."

  They caught a cab back to South London and dropped Ruth off first. Church felt chastened by Mrs. Gibbons' grief. Afraid that the depression would come back to ruin the first halfway-normal mood he had felt in a long time, he quickly switched on the computer and went online. There was an email waiting for him from Laura DuSantiago.

  Greetings, Churchill-Dude (No relation, I hope. I don't want to picture you with a big, fat cigar.)

  I get the impression from your last email that you think I'm full of hot air, but you're too polite to say so. Well, I'll stop teasing, big boy-I wouldn't want a *premature* withdrawal on your behalf. Everyone else who emailed me has scarpered before I had the chance to get down to the *meat*. And I better stop now before this becomes a bad Carry On film …

  Here's the dope: the increase in paranormal activity that all the net-nerds noticed started on the same day. Coincidence? I don't think so. There's stuff happening around the globe, but the epicentre is the UK-and most of it is happening around places of significance to our pagan/Celtic ancestors. Now, statistically, I know that's not difficult in an island like ours, but look at the big picture, not the details. I'm not going too fast for you, am I?

  And here's the big story, Morning Glory. I saw something that changed my life. Me, technohead, feet-on-the-ground Laura DuS. Something that all the crazies and peeks of the UFO/Spirit World would give their right arms to see. And losing their right arms would really hamper those types. This was a drug-free, alcohol-free experience, and it talked to me. You want to know what it said, you'll have to meet me on my own turf. I'm not spreading this stuff around online so I can be branded as another nut.

  But here's a tip: don't go making plans for the next millennium …

  Your new best friend, Laura.

  And there, at the end, was the thing that hooked him and made his blood run cold.

  PS Before we meet I need to know if this name means anything to you: Marianne.

  Church read the line three times,
trying to work out if he was going insane, then wondering if someone was playing a nasty trick on him. It could have been another coincidence, but the way they were piling up gave him an eerie feeling of some power behind the scenes manipulating his life. He turned off the computer and busied himself with mundane tasks for the better part of an hour, but it wouldn't leave him alone and it was only a matter of time before he returned to the keyboard to type out his reply. Then he retired to bed without once looking out of the window into the dark, quiet street.

  Ruth reached the church shortly after 9 a.m. It was a bracing morning, with the wind sending the clouds streaking across the blue sky. Standing in the sun, peering at the skeletal trees through screwed-up eyes that cropped out the buildings, Ruth could almost believe she wasn't in London, away from the smog and the traffic noise and the omnipresent background threat. Sometimes she hated the modern world with a vengeance.

  The vicar was in the churchyard, in his shirt-sleeves despite the chill, trimming the hedge with an electric cutter. He was tall with a red face-although that might have been from the exertion-and a balding head with white hair swept back around his ears. The drone of the cutter drowned out Ruth's first attempt at an introduction, but she eventually caught his eye.

  "I said, shouldn't you have a gardener to do that?" she said.

  "Oh, I like to get my hands dirty every now and then. What can I do for you?"

  "My name's Ruth Gallagher. A solicitor. I'm looking into the death of Maurice Gibbons. I was told you knew him." She was still surprised how quickly people parted with information once she announced her legal background; it was almost as if they considered her a policewoman-in-waiting.

  The vicar nodded ruefully. "Poor Maurice. Still no suspect, I suppose."