by G X Todd
Lacey listened with growing unease, wanting to tell Voice to stop, to quit, she’d heard enough, but somehow she wasn’t able to utter a word.
So when that small voice starts to whisper to Ted that he should kill himself, it’s not yelling, ‘Kill yourself, faggot!’ it’s telling him he’s a truly awful husband and father. Just terrible. Imagine what will happen when they find out what disgusting things he’s been doing in all those alleys, and they will find out. It’s just a matter of time. Imagine the shame. They’d be better off without him. He knows that, right? At least they’d have the insurance money. At least you can give them that, Ted. Oh wait, you have horrible debts now, too, don’t you? What a pathetic waste of space you are. You know what would be best? To take your family with you – that way they won’t have to suffer the humiliation of all the things you’ve done. Won’t have to be homeless on the street when the house is taken away and your bank accounts closed. You don’t want to die alone, either, do you? You want your family with you. Wouldn’t that solve everything? Wouldn’t that be just perfect? What are you waiting for, Ted? You failed at everything in your life, even at being a man, but you can make up for it now. Do something right for the first time in your miserable life. Go ahead, it’ll all be OK. You can do it.
Lacey was silent. She didn’t even feel the cramped pain in her cricked neck and sore shoulders any more.
Two days of a voice whispering that into his ear and Ted is sitting on his bed, sobbing as he loads his shotgun, waiting for his eldest to come home from school.
– Jesus—
Everyone has triggers, Lacey. And I imagine they only increased tenfold when the deaths started, because everyone could see how easy it was. They could see a way out. Sometimes, I think everyone wants an excuse to jump ship and let everything go. It’d be so easy, wouldn’t it? To give up. All this struggle and strife – gone. You could finally rest and stop worrying. All you’d need is a little push.
Something clutched inside Lacey, a lump of despair, black and malignant, pressing up against the hollow of her throat, and her mind finally unlocked and she was able to say:
– Stop. Please stop.
I’m sorry. But you see how simple it must’ve been?
– Yes . . . Did . . . did you kill Ted?
No! Of course not! Ted isn’t real. Well, someone like Ted was real, but I never knew him. Anyway, I wouldn’t do that. I’m not like the others who did those things. They’re different to me. I’ve been here much longer, with someone who accepted me . . . Well, mostly accepted me. Kind of.
– But why? Why did all that happen?
Now, that’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?
– You don’t know?
Instead of answering, Voice said, Hey, I think we’re stopping.
A second later, Lou hit the brakes.
CHAPTER 4
Keeping the car at a steady fifty, the wind whistling through the shattered windows, it took the better part of thirty minutes before Pilgrim caught sight of the vehicle. He didn’t try to catch it up but sat back and kept his distance. His thoughts remained with the boy standing alone at the roadside, one thin arm raised in farewell. Claws of guilt gripped at him. It was an unusual feeling, almost like hunger, scratching at him from the inside. Also like hunger, the feeling, he found, could be put aside when necessary.
The world was all sky, the road he and the unknown car travelled on merely the smallest belt of land, insignificant and unchanging in comparison to the infinity of the skies reigning above. It was awash with a watercolour of neon pinks, tangerines and indigos, its never-ending palette altering with every passing mile.
Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight.
He couldn’t recall the second part of that idiom, but he assumed it didn’t end well.
Every now and then, he would glance down at the fuel gauge but, generally, he didn’t look away from the car in front. It was a mere speck on the horizon, but there was little else to distract him – not a road-side lemonade stand in sight – so he didn’t worry about losing track of it. The longer he drove, the longer he spent thinking, and the longer he spent thinking, the more he probed at the chasm of space at the back of his head. Something about following the car nudged at him, a finger poking at his broken brain, encouraging him to remember.
Poke.
Poke.
Poke.
The sky above him lightened, the dusk rolling rapidly in reverse, clouds dispersing as if by magic to reveal a perfect, steam-rollered blue sky. A heady smell of hops caught in his nostrils. A black cat stared at him from the roadside. As if framed in place, the whole image began to jitter, shaking so fast the animal blurred at the edges and three identical black cats superimposed themselves over the first: one sitting, one standing, one doing neither of those things. And then the shuddering stopped and the cat was strolling away from him, tail lifted high in a question mark. There was another shaking jitter and the walking cat became a sitting cat, lazily licking itself in a strip of sunlight on the top step of a wooden porch. The scene jittered again: the cat was standing. It juddered until it blurred: now sitting. Standing, sitting, standing, then licking its paw, the cat flicked from one to the next at incredible speed until one cat became all cats in all positions at all times. And then it stopped. And the black cat was lying on its side. Silent. Motionless. No more jittering or shuddering or blurring. Its ribcage was crushed, stomped flat beneath someone’s boot, and this final image seemed to hold great meaning for Pilgrim: the cat, who was free to stand or sit or do whatever the hell its tiny heart desired, would always end up like this; stamped on by something bigger and more powerful than itself.
With a thunderous rushing, the clouds blew back in over Pilgrim’s head, but now they were blood-red, dark and bloated and filling up the sky. They began to jitter and shake, just like the cat had, dark veins of dangerous light flickering from inside, except they weren’t clouds any more but vast, pulsing organs, purple and angry, and readying to explode.
And then they did, fire bursting from the sky in all directions. A sky of flames roared down on the Earth, a flash flood of immense heat and shrieking red.
Pilgrim gasped and blinked and was back in the car. It had drifted, the wheels rumbling off the edge of the road, skirting into the dirt. He pulled the car back on to smooth blacktop, and released his death-grip on the steering wheel. The real sky had turned to dusk. In the rear-view mirror, a few stars scattered over the darkening horizon.
Pilgrim passed a shaking hand over his face. For the first time in a long while, he was entirely alone with his thoughts, and he wished to God he weren’t. When he had awoken at the roadside, back when he had wished for death, the silence had confused him. But as his most recent memories came back to him, in disjointed images and tattered flashes of sound or sensation or smell, each one hit and knitted together and jarred something else loose. Something that was achingly absent.
‘Voice?’
There was no reply.
He answered himself in a whisper. ‘He’s not here.’
Pilgrim’s fingers crept to the back of the scarf, where his hair was stiff with blood. He didn’t touch the wound again, remembering the weird sponginess of the bone back there. It made his stomach twitch uncomfortably just thinking about it.
Of course, he had known Voice was gone. There had been something intrinsically missing since he’d woken up at the side of the road with the appalling pain in his head. The world was too quiet. There had been no annoying commentaries or unwanted advice. The distraction of meeting the boy, of having him to talk to, had hidden Voice’s absence, but now the emptiness resounded. He was surprised by how much the realisation that Voice had disappeared angered him.
Had the head wound killed Voice? Previous trauma to the head had resulted in Voice falling quiet for a time, but never for long. Maybe he had retreated to a locked part of Pilgrim’s mind from which he was unable to break free, and was forever trapped? Was there someplace voices went, disp
ersing into the ether like sparks flying from a dying fire and fading into the dark? Or had Voice simply ceased to exist, the electricity that had sparked his existence sputtering in a last effort to survive before finally fizzling out?
All Pilgrim knew was that his mind felt like a church, hauntingly empty, with every pew sitting unoccupied and the cold marble tombs lying silent and still underfoot. His thoughts echoed, solitary and alone.
Dead or gone, it amounted to the same thing. Pilgrim was Voiceless. He suspected that his anger disguised a far deeper feeling of loss, but there was a dark wonder, too. He hadn’t known voices could be lost.
The car ahead stopped.
Pilgrim pulled over, staying a fair distance away, and had to really squint to be able to make out two people climbing out of what he now saw was a pickup truck and cross to the other side of the road to look at something. The sun was setting, but the day’s residual heat had baked into the road and a heat haze shimmered up from its surface, obscuring the truck and its two occupants behind an undulating, underwater-like wall. It wasn’t until one of them went back to lower the truck’s rear panel that Pilgrim realised what was happening.
They had pulled out a long, thin plank and were pushing his motorcycle into the truck bed. The bike had run out of fuel, but Pilgrim had left the key in the ignition, and it was in good running order. It was ripe for the picking.
His hands tightened around the steering wheel, his left noticeably weaker. He flexed the fingers of that hand while he waited for the truck to pull back on to the road. He knew where their next stop would be, but he was done with following like some lost lamb. He floored the gas pedal, and the car jumped forward. He was taking a calculated risk, but all he had was a knife, and they would both be armed.
‘Lacey,’ he said.
He came up fast, the engine revving worryingly high, the wind howling like a lost soul, shivering through the car. A high-pitched squeal came from somewhere under his feet.
The two men must now be aware of his presence, but the truck stayed glued to its lane, its speed barely changing. This suited Pilgrim. He wasn’t ready for a confrontation. Not yet. From rear bumper to front bumper, they were no more than twenty yards apart. Pilgrim could see the man in the passenger seat twisting around to look at him through the rear window.
Pilgrim had the peculiar urge to lift his hand and wave, but he didn’t, he veered the car left into the outside lane and started to overtake. The engine screamed. The wind noise rose in an angry whine, vibrating through the chassis. As the nose of the car grew level with the truck’s front door, Pilgrim glimpsed the bearded profile of the driver. He was older, grey-streaked, with a crooked beak of a nose. Pilgrim didn’t know him. As the two vehicles came level, he lost view of the higher truck’s cab. Then he was past, and still accelerating. Pilgrim veered back into the right-hand lane and watched the truck in his rear-view mirror. The two men were talking animatedly to each other, but that wasn’t what caught Pilgrim’s attention: the girl who was sitting between them did. She stared back at him, looking like she’d seen a ghost.
A ghost, he thought and smiled. He felt like a ghost, hollow and vague and not really there.
Maintaining his faster speed, Pilgrim left them in his dust, hoping they wouldn’t deviate from their mission and deem him worthy of chasing down. He kept one eye on the truck and another on the road ahead, but they didn’t grow in his mirror and, in ten minutes, as the truck grew steadily smaller, he finally lost sight of them.
An hour later, the barn came into view. It sat like a tornado survivor on the horizon, its roof caved in, panels missing from its sides. Pilgrim spotted the black rubber strips in the road where the girl’s car had lost control before flipping, and he had a superstitious moment when he didn’t want his own wheels to pass over them, but by the time the thought had come and gone, his tyres had passed over the marks without incident.
He didn’t expect the body to be there – would have thought animals or human scavengers had dragged it away by now – but she still lay where he had left her. She was on her back, her eyes closed, arms by her sides as if she were taking a nap. He stopped the car, got out and stood over her, his shadow falling across her face. She was smaller than he remembered, somehow younger, like a little lost girl, which he supposed she was. He felt drawn nearer, gazing so intently at her face that he could see every pore, the cracks in her lips, could count every one of her eyelashes. He saw her alive, tall for her age, and too thin – she bowed in the middle as if her bones were hollow and the weight of her head too much, because there was a lot going on up top, Pilgrim knew: there were so many thoughts and designs that they flashed out of her like shooting stars in a firework display, bursting above her head and lighting her up in a multitude of colours – blue and green and purple and—
‘Ruby,’ he murmured, and the sound pulled him out of her, brought him back to himself, and all he saw was a colourless girl, dead on the ground. A girl he’d met before, when her smile was wholly beautiful and her eyes glimmered with intelligence. He didn’t know how, or when, but he had known her. Ruby. How else could he know her smile? He didn’t have the imagination, nor his damaged mind the capability, to conjure up images he hadn’t before seen. At least, he didn’t think so. He longed to ask Voice – he had access to what was left of Pilgrim’s memories, defective though they were, and even some Pilgrim wished were gone – but now that he was willing to accept his help, Voice wasn’t there to offer it. Not any more.
Pilgrim glanced up the road, but there was no sign of the truck yet. It wouldn’t stay that way for long. He carefully, even tenderly, picked the girl up, ignoring the sharp, piercing stab in his ribs. A smell came with her, a whiff of decomposition, but it wasn’t offensive, and again Pilgrim was struck by how unaffected her body was after having been left outside for so long. He found it equally as strange as her body having been undisturbed by animals, but there was no time to ponder further on it. She lay unnaturally stiff in his arms, as if she had been frozen in place, and yet she was warm to the touch. It unsettled Pilgrim to feel her so warm, but he knew it was just a surface temperature, the body having been stretched out in the sun all day. He placed her in the trunk.
He came back and made a few marks in the dirt around where she had lain, crawling and shuffling tracks that headed in the direction of the barn, and then he got behind the wheel and drove up to the front of the barn, backing the car quickly inside and closing the big double doors.
Through a missing slat in the barn wall, Pilgrim watched the truck approach through the heat haze and pull to a stop behind the overturned car. The two men climbed out and stubbed around in the dirt, talked some, even poked inside the upside-down car. Eventually, they looked up at the barn. The hunched man nodded at something the older man said and started up the track, kicking at a brick every now and then on his way. He had a hitch to his gait to match his lopsidedness, as if one leg were shorter than the other. He carried a rifle similar to Lacey’s.
‘Maybe it is Lacey’s,’ he said to himself – or maybe he only thought it. He wasn’t sure any more. He felt unbalanced and incomplete without Voice. Some might even say crazy.
Pilgrim backed away from his spyhole, retreating to the rear of the barn and quietly crouching behind a stall wall. He slid his stolen knife from its sheath at his ankle and pressed his face to the scratchy wood, his good eye finding a second knothole to spy through.
The hunched man heaved open the barn door and came in rifle first. Seeing the car, he swung the gun back and forth, thrusting it into every corner.
‘You’d best come out,’ the hunched man called into the dust motes, the dying sun’s rays slanting through the barn in golden beams, hazy around their edges, spotlighting the floor in a patchy pattern.
Pilgrim watched the man slouch forward and touch the car’s hood. It would be warm, he knew. He also knew when the man noticed the lifted trunk lid because his head came up and he glanced about himself as if expecting someone to be sneakin
g up on him. The man cautiously stepped around the open driver’s door, shoving his gun inside as he checked it was clear, then shuffled to the rear of the car and looked in the trunk. The man straightened up – as much as his hunched back would allow – and Pilgrim felt the waves of astonishment coming off him as he gazed down at the dead girl. Pilgrim was already moving, even as the man’s eyes fell on the body, even as the man gasped quietly. By then, Pilgrim was close enough to hear the breathed word that came out of him.
‘Red.’
Pilgrim stepped up behind the hunched man and brought the point of his blade up under the man’s chin, pricking into the soft, vulnerable skin there. Pilgrim felt him stiffen.
‘Don’t speak,’ Pilgrim whispered. ‘Pass the rifle back with your left hand. Nice and slow.’
The man didn’t move, so Pilgrim pricked him hard enough to draw blood.
‘Now.’
The man slowly offered the gun and, without removing the blade from his throat, Pilgrim accepted it. He almost dropped the thing, the gun too heavy to hold in his left hand. He rested the rifle’s stock on the ground.
Something’s wrong with you. It was the same voice he’d heard before, the one that had told him to stop the car. It sounded like him but it held an authority, a self-awareness, that made Pilgrim pause.
‘Nothing’s wrong,’ Pilgrim replied.
That bullet must’ve caused brain damage.
