by Gary McMahon
Pathetic once more.
I glance around the kitchen, past Ellen's caring face, and watch as something rises from the sink. I can see the sides of the metallic bowl, the mixer tap, and a dark, bulbous shape as it lifts itself from the drain, inching towards the surface. When I blink the vision is gone; there is nothing there but a slightly scratched sink with a bent tap.
"Ellen?"
She smiles at me, her eyes filled with concern. "What is it, Thomas? Do you have something you need to say?"
I look at Ryan South, at his narrow face and his wispy hair; his mouth is twisted into what I can only think of as a snarl. "What happened out there, that night? Out on the road?"
Ellen faces him, and he once again adopts the attitude of a remorseful killer. "I… I still don't know. I'd been to a party, but I wasn't drunk or stoned – not that night. I passed the breathalyser test when the police arrived. It was all so… weird. One minute I was driving along the road at a steady pace, listening to some music, and the next I was hurtling the wrong way through some roadworks. I have no idea how I got turned around… I blacked out… like I wasn't even me anymore." He begins to sob, his hands making fists on the table. His nails are very long, like those of a guitar-player. There are dark hairs across the back of his hands, a thick hatched pattern that worries me but I do not know why.
"That's okay, Ryan. You can cry. It might help." Ellen reaches across the table and grasps his hairy white hand. I almost push her away, but I know that would be madness.
But, then again, this whole situation is mad.
"I'm sorry… you should be the one crying. Not me." His eyes flick upwards, and through the tears I see something stir: a huge darkness peering from behind his skull. Now I know; at last I am certain. Everything I have seen is real.
"We should go," I say, at last. I stand and kick away the chair. It upturns and clatters on the floor, making a sound that seems deafening in the enclosed space. "We should go now, Ellen." I lurch out of the kitchen and down the gloomy hallway, knocking pictures off the walls and banging into a radiator that hisses at me as I veer away, raising my arm in a protective stance. The pictures lie face up on the floor. Now that the dust has been disturbed, I can see that they are all images of death. Monochrome photographs of people lying in state, arms crossed, eyes stitched shut, like Victorian death poses. Anatomical sketches of a baby holding open a wound in its sternum. A naked man on a mortuary slab, one of his legs peeled away to the bone.
Ellen follows me, apologising to Ryan South, telling him that it will be better next time. When I look back at the pictures on the floor I see landscapes and still-life studies: fields and meadows and fruit in bowls – an accumulation of Pound Shop tat which serves as a façade of normality.
But for a moment I saw through the lie, and stared into the depths of another place, an alternative reality. And in that moment I knew… I knew.
Back in the car, driving away from the high-rise, I glance over my shoulder for one final look at the festering nest of nightmare. On the fourth floor, from an upstairs window that I know – just know – belongs to Ryan South, I see a china-doll face so thin that it is painful to look at staring at me from the darkness, an expression of utter delight twisting its features into a demonic mask.
The face pulls back, swallowed by blackness, but its image lingers on my retina like a photographic double exposure.
Finally I am sure. At last I know that I am not losing my mind. The things I see, the ghosts that hover at the edges of my vision – real. All real. Every bit of it.
Once we are off the estate and onto safer ground, Ellen pulls over at the kerb. She parks opposite a fast food place and I watch the young customers queuing for their pizzas and kebabs and burgers. Tears pour down my face, my neck. Ellen reaches for me, pulls me into her embrace. "There, there," she murmurs into my ear. "There, there, Thomas. I'm proud of you. That can't have been easy." She smells of fresh sweat. The side of her neck is damp and smooth. "Can't have been easy…" Her hands are shaking.
No, it was not easy. Not easy at all. But next time I will come prepared, and it will be the easiest thing in the world to face my demon. Because now I know who he is, or at least what he looks like – and I will recognise him anywhere, even if he hides in plain sight, just as he has done tonight.
Darkness surrounds us, pressing against the car, but I am finally at ease with the night and whatever it contains. Now, I realise, there are much worse things than simple darkness.
TWENTY
Staring up at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, I retreated from the memories. It was not time – not yet. Soon, yes, but not now. Dusk had turned to evening, had become night, and the hotel windows were ablaze with illumination. I tried to guess which one was Ellen's room, and if she was in there, but couldn't even recall on which side of the building it was located.
Then, in one of those strange quirks of circumstance that you think happen only in books and films but actually happen all the time in real life, my mobile phone rang. I looked at the number on the screen but did not recognise it.
I pressed the button to answer the call and raised the phone to my ear. "Hello?"
"Thomas. It's me." Of course it was her; it couldn't have been anyone else.
"Hello, Ellen. I've been meaning to call you."
"Me, too," she said, and there was a crisp lightness to her voice that made me glad I was there, only yards away from where I hoped she was sitting or standing or lying on the bed with the hotel phone in her hand, rubbing one bare foot along the opposite shin. Perhaps she was even looking out of the window – which I suddenly remembered was indeed situated at the front of the building. Hadn't I stared out of it only last night to watch Mr Shiloh watching us?
"Where are you?" I looked across the road, judging how many minutes it would take me to get over there, how many steps it was from one kerb to the other.
"At my hotel."
"Me, too."
She laughed and I was in the middle of the road, moving across at a jog, and then landing safely on the other side. "I'll meet you in the bar in five minutes," I said.
Entering the hotel, I glanced at the sofas in the foyer to see if the same Eastern European women where there from before, but the sofas were empty. Few people were present on the ground floor, but as I looked up I saw a handful of residents moving between floors, crossing landings and ascending the wide, carpeted staircase.
I made my way to the bar and ordered a pint of bitter. The area was empty apart from a suited man with an open laptop resting on his table and a middle-aged couple who were chatting quietly in one corner. I took my pint to the table farthest from the other customers and sat on a stool to pretend to watch the muted sports programme on the wall-mounted television screen above the fruit machine.
Ellen came in when I had swallowed only half of my drink. She looked trim and relaxed in dark blue jeans and a pale blue open-necked shirt that went well with her flashing blue eyes. Her hair was pushed back from her face, and she was wearing very little makeup. Either she didn't want to make too much of an effort for me or she was confident enough that she looked good without the slap on her face. The latter seemed a pretty safe bet, as she had never gone in for elaborate beauty routines. She was what my old man would have called a natural heartbreaker.
"Hi," she said, slipping onto the stool opposite. Her neck was flushed. Her eyes jittered around the room, unable to settle on my face.
"Drink?"
She nodded. "That would be good. Get me a half of whatever you're having."
I returned to the bar and ordered another pint of my own to go with Ellen's smaller glass, and then brought both drinks back to the table.
"Cheers," said Ellen, raising her glass and taking a swallow. "That's nice."
"Listen. I just want to say something before this gets even more awkward between us than it is now. I mean, I suppose I want to apologise." I gripped my glass but didn't pick it up.
"Apologise for what?" Her eyes flashed,
but I couldn't quite read the emotion bristling behind them.
"For not treating you with the respect you deserve. For failing you as a lover. For… for last night." I paused, trying to judge the reception.
"It's okay, Thomas. I do understand how you feel, you know. Remember, I was there from the start of this thing. I know how guilty you still feel about Rebecca and Allyson – guilt about what happened between you and me all those years ago, and guilt about the accident. I'm sorry, too. I shouldn't have pushed you." She licked her lips, betraying her nerves.
I sighed, finished my first pint and took a sip of the second. "Yes, I do feel guilty about us – about the past. If Rebecca and Ally were still alive, I probably wouldn't feel it so intensely, but it all got mixed up with the accident. My feelings for you have always been… complicated. My family's deaths simply made them even more so. I… Jesus, I just don't know how to do this, what to feel, what to say. It's all such a mess, inside here." I pressed a hand to my heart, trying so desperately to make her understand things that even I couldn't get a grip of.
"Let's just enjoy our drinks and see what happens. We've been dancing around this thing for so many years that it's bound to feel weird now that we've stepped over the line. I don't want you to hurt any more than you always do." She sipped her bitter. Her lips were beautiful.
"Is that how I come across? Like a hurting man, someone in constant pain?"
She leaned across the table, her eyes now piercing right through me. "Yes, Thomas, that's exactly how you come across. It's what you are. I don't think I've ever seen anyone who carries so much pain around with them, and as far as I can tell you have no one to share it with. You're God's lonely man, a person whose troubles run so deep that they've become like blood, like oxygen. Take away your pain, your guilt, and there's nothing left to drive you. And I don't want to be responsible for that."
The couple in the corner stood up and left. The man with the laptop tapped at his keys, lost in whatever paperwork was so important that he worked on it in a hotel bar instead of enjoying an evening meal or meeting up with friends or colleagues.
I blew air out between my lips and ran a hand through my short, dry hair.
"For a long time the thought of seeing Rebecca and Ally again – the hope of glimpsing their ghosts – kept me going. It was the reason I didn't take a long dive off a high bridge or go to bed with a gun in my hand. Then, gradually, the grief and the remorse turned into something else. I've learned so much since this stuff started happening to me, and the most important thing I have discovered is that death is not the end. It's not the beginning, either. It's just… another thing, the next thing, an experience we all go through.
"It's difficult moving on when I know that my family are still there, that they still exist, and all I need to do is open the right door…" I took a long swallow of my beer to hide the tears that I could feel trying to spring forth. It was the first time I had spoken of this with anyone, and rather than feeling like a burden being lifted it felt like a lid being opened, the contents of an old, secret box exposed to the air, where it might suddenly turn to rot.
Ellen sat back on her stool, crossing her legs. "Wow, Thomas, that was… intense."
I smiled, despite the stew of emotions behind my words. "I know. I've never told anyone that. You should feel honoured."
"I do understand, you know. Not all of it, of course, because all the strange stuff that surrounds you scares the hell out of me, but the rest of it – the deep wounds and the emotional torment – I can get my head around."
I ordered more drinks and we relaxed. We even chatted about her time in America. How she had first been drafted in to work with trainees on the US space programme because of her expertise in the physiological studies of weightlessness and other esoteric interests she had developed when studying medicine, and been surprised by how quickly her career had taken off. She was happy, she said, and there had been a few men, but nobody important, nobody special.
It seemed to me that there was a profound emptiness in her life, and that she filled it with work. But her journey over to England because of the disappearance of Penny Royale, her cousin's child, whom she barely even knew, spoke volumes about the things she secretly craved.
We all have our secrets, and often it takes but a single phone call to lay them bare.
"Have you eaten?" she asked me, eventually. I told her that I hadn't even thought about dinner, and she insisted that she treat me to something there at the hotel. We adjourned to the dining room, and continued to skirt around the issue that stood between us like the decaying corpse of an elephant in the room – the fact that, although it had not yet been mentioned, I was staying the night.
After dinner we had some brandy and held hands across the table. The intimacy felt right this time; it no longer felt dirty, a grubby little affair to be ashamed of. It felt real and wonderful and like something I had been searching for without even realising. I even entertained the thought that I might return to America with Ellen, set up and start again, putting the ghosts – my own and those belonging to others – behind me for good.
Such is the folly of romance.
It was late when finally we retired upstairs. I took the lead this time, just as a man should, and I held her hand tightly as we walked along the landing to her door. She glanced at me before slipping the key-card into the lock, and we shared a smile when the green light above the handle failed to illuminate. Ellen wiggled the card a few times, and eventually the light came on, the locking mechanism clicking loudly to allow us access.
The room was dark, the curtains were drawn. We lay down on the bed and just held each other for a while, allowing the moment to take its own shape and develop its own momentum. When we kissed it was with a hunger that was almost frightening: her tongue pushed between my lips; I bit down on its end, causing her to draw breath and moan.
This time the sex was better – not perfect, but better. We found a rhythm and stuck with it, moving with a lack of urgency but an excess of passion. I came first, but she was not too far behind. In time, I knew, we would find the perfect middle ground and we might be good together – at least as good as we were outside the bedroom, and when we both stopped trying so hard to pretend that we were no good to anyone, even ourselves.
Ellen fell asleep in my arms. I watched her in the darkness, picking out the side of her face and her sharp cheekbones. Lifting the bedclothes, I stared at the curve of her back, the way it sloped down to her firm, large buttocks, and then admired her trim thighs. She shifted on the pillows, her face coming round towards mine, and she opened her eyes. I knew she was still asleep, that this was simply a nocturnal twitch, but it felt good to have her watching me.
I kissed her cheek, the side of her mouth, and ran my hand along her waist. I think I probably dozed off for a while, comfortable with the position we had adopted, and when I opened my eyes again I knew that it was late, approaching the early hours. There is a certain fragile quality to the darkness at that time of the night, a caught breath that hangs in the air, waiting for something to happen.
I knew without looking that someone was standing at the end of the bed; the only information I did not have in my possession was the identity of this third person in the room. I rolled slowly onto my back and peered into the darkness, my eyes adjusting to the black space. The furnishings came into focus first – the bedside cabinet, the chair by the window, the tall wardrobe standing farther along the same wall – and then the shape of the figure sketched itself into the gloom. It was a man – I was sure of that – and he was standing a foot or so away from the end of the bed with his arms held straight down by his sides.
"Who is it?" I whispered, afraid but curious. The figure shuffled, taking a tiny step either backwards or forward, towards the bed. Then, at last, I recognised the contours of a face I had only ever seen a few times in my life, and each of those was a recent sighting.
The figure at the end of the bed, watching us in silence, was Byron Spinks,
the man accused of killing Kareena Singh (and no doubt, in time, the other two hanged girls).
"Hello, Byron. What can I do for you?" I held the panic inside, wondering how on earth he had managed to escape from the jail, and why Tebbit had not called to warn me that the man was on the run. Then, as I came fully awake, I began to realise my mistake. This was not really Byron Spinks before me. It was his ghost. Byron Spinks was dead, and like so many others in his position, he had come to see me.
I climbed out of bed and walked towards Spinks, acting much stronger and more confident than I actually felt. He turned and moved towards the bathroom. The door opened before him, swinging outward before he had even reached it, and the light came on. The illumination was meagre, barely real light at all: more like a torpid flame flickering from a place I did not want to see. I noticed that Spinks was naked, and that he had blood on his back.
