Fellside

by M. R. Carey

  Devlin went and fetched Grace’s package from the courthouse, using up a favour or two by getting one of the clerks there to let him in through the side door. He would have preferred not to be seen by anyone at all, but you couldn’t get into the back of the building, where the prisoner toilets were, unless you passed through security. So now he was on record as being somewhere he had no business to be, with no more of a cover story than that some other guard had left his cap behind. He hated everything about this.

  But what choice did he have after Grace went down on him? If he’d said no, it would have felt like he was throwing that intimacy, that gift right back in her face.

  He knew he was being played, of course. He wasn’t stupid. But the relationship he had with Grace still seemed to Devlin to be something special, something unique. They might have come together in the first place purely for mutual profit, but after that they’d found each other, found a kinship that wasn’t just about the money or the convenience. They worked well together. So it was okay, he told himself, if once in a while she manipulated him. She would still respect him in the morning. She knew what they had as well as he did, and needed it more. And it had been her down on her knees, not him.

  And much more in the same vein.

  It was past nine when he got back to Fellside, and his shift had finished at eight. That made things more than a little awkward. The Fellside regime, a leaky ship in a lot of ways, was incredibly strict and exacting about logging staff movement. Signing in and signing out was mandatory, and was meant to occur within fifteen minutes of the start and end of your shift. Devlin had slipped out without signing the daybook, courtesy of a stiff bribe to Donaldson, the officer on duty. Now he had to go back on-block when he had no fucking business being there, and pay Donaldson for his trouble all over again. Fortunately, one of Devlin’s duties was to maintain the shift register. The first thing he did was to write himself in for two hours’ overtime.

  With his arse covered, he went to the infirmary. He found it locked up. Fucking Sally, reliably unreliable. But as he turned away the door was unlocked from inside. It opened about an inch, Sally peering through the gap like a rabbit looking out of his hole.

  Devlin pushed the door wide and shouldered past the doctor into the room. He threw the package down on the table. “Is there some fucking reason you’re playing hide-and-seek?” he grunted.

  “The room’s meant to be locked when nobody’s in here. Patience is still on-shift but she’s over in Blackwell, and I didn’t know when you were going to—”

  “Sally, I asked but I don’t care. There’s your stuff.”

  Salazar stared at the package with open disgust. “Well, it can’t stay here,” he said. “Not until next week.”

  That struck Devlin as a really stupid thing to say. The place was full of drugs, wasn’t it? But it didn’t matter in any case. “Find somewhere to stash it overnight,” he said. “Tomorrow you do the clinic again and make the drop-off. We need to keep this moving.”

  Sally had an objection to this too, inevitably. Lots of objections. It made no sense to run the clinic twice. He didn’t have a room booked for a Friday session, he didn’t have appointments. He didn’t have a bastard clue, was what he meant.

  Devlin was suddenly sick of humouring him. It had been a shitty, stressful day even in spite of the blowjob. He’d been made to do something he’d promised himself he wouldn’t ever do. He wasn’t harbouring any resentment against Grace: he didn’t allow himself to go too far along that road. But he was full of a sort of unfocused indignation about how the world worked. Right then, having to stomach a big sloppy dose of Salazar on top of everything else felt like God taking unnecessary liberties.

  The table was covered in all kinds of medical bullshit: Devlin pushed it to one side and off on to the floor. Tearing open the zip-lock, he spilled the contents on to the table. It was what he’d expected to see. A cling-film-wrapped block of cannabis, a smaller zip-locked bag of heroin and another of crack. Some pastel-coloured pills, looking as innocuous as the Swizzels sweets Devlin used to gorge on as a kid, were probably MDMA.

  He broke open this last bag before he’d even thought about what he was about to do, his hands running ahead of his furious mood. Sally’s passive-aggressive bleating was feeding that mood somehow. Devlin had come in here more or less on an even keel, just a little bit frustrated by the locked door, but the longer he had to look at that sad, kick-me face, the more he wanted to take a poke at it.

  In the old days, of course, he might have taken a poke at Sally’s wife Leah instead. He’d had an understanding with her for many years, and it had even lasted some way into her terminal illness. But alas, that well-travelled avenue was now closed.

  He shook out a single pill, a yellow one, and pushed it across the table with his thumb. “Here you go, Sally,” he said. “Free sample. Don’t say I never give you anything.”

  Salazar stared at him in silence for a moment, then turned and headed for the door.

  The Devil got there before him and headed him off. “What, you’re not going to break bread with me?” he said. He smiled widely, knowing what kind of effect that would create. He wasn’t really out of control, but it amused him to let the mewling little prick think he was. “Yeah, you are. You swallow that down or I’m going to take it personally.”

  “I’d prefer not to,” Salazar said.

  Their faces were about an inch away from each other. Salazar was trying his best to hide it, but he was just about ready to shit himself. Devlin pushed him back into the room, nodded down at the table. At the little yellow pill.

  “You’re going to eat that,” he said. “The question is whether you’re going to eat any of your teeth first.”

  Sally shook his head. “You’re drunk, Dennis,” he said. “Or something worse. You should go home and sleep it off. Okay, fine, I’ll take the stuff over to Curie tomorrow morning, but I’m not going to—”

  Devlin had changed into civvies to go to the courthouse but he’d put his blacks on again as protective camouflage when he came back into the prison. So he had his nightstick sheathed at his belt. It made a blade-on-silk stropping sound as he brought it out of the holster and lifted it up.

  The nightstick was a twenty-inch sidewinder made in McKinney, Texas, the home of take-it-or-fucking-leave-it law enforcement – injection-moulded in impact-resistant polycarbonate, with a lustrous midnight shine to it. It weighed less than two pounds, but that was by the by: you could tell just by looking at it what it could do. You could beat a man to paste with it and it wouldn’t look any different, wouldn’t have a dent or a nick or a splinter.

  Sally’s jaw gaped when he saw the baton. He backed away from Devlin, but there wasn’t much space to back into. He came up against the front of a cabinet after the second step. Devlin whipped the nightstick backwards a half-turn, bringing it into strike position against his shoulder.

  “Take your pill, Sally,” he suggested. “I’m all over being reasonable with you.”

  “It’s Ecstasy!” Sally yelled. “How am I supposed to drive home if I’m off my head?”

  Devlin laughed. “Shit, that is a bit of a poser, no denying. Then again, how are you going to drive home if your arms and legs are broken?”

  “Dennis, you’ve made your point.”

  “Have I? What point is that?”

  “I am not taking the—”

  Devlin swung the baton, slamming it into the front of the cabinet a couple of inches above Sally’s head. Sally flinched and ducked, but only after it had hit: he would have left his brains all over the door if Devlin’s aim had been off.

  At the same time, Devlin let out a bellow from deep in his lungs – not just at Sally, but at everyone who’d ever wasted his time or said no to him or looked at him with a sneer on their mouth because of his thick accent and his bald patch and his spreading gut. It came out of nowhere but it seemed to have been building for a while. It felt good to let it out.

  Whatever Salazar read
into that scream or saw in Devlin’s eyes, it did the trick. He grabbed up the pill and shoved it in his mouth. His throat bobbed as he swallowed it down. Then he just stood there, staring at Devlin, his chest heaving as though he’d run a mile.

  “Good,” Devlin grunted. He slipped the nightstick back into its holster. It had left a deep dent in the cabinet door where it had hit – a ridged groove about six inches long, right up against one edge and close enough to where Salazar’s head had been to raise a doubt.

  “If you’ve got any Vicks, you should rub it under your nose,” Devlin said. “Cool you down when the hit comes.” He scooped the bags back into the zip-lock and shoved the zip-lock into Sally’s hands. “Stow these first though, and then fuck off out of it. Stock has got big eyes and an even bigger mouth. The less she sees of you right now, the better.”

  The doctor hadn’t moved since he’d swallowed the pill. He was tensed and braced, his shoulders against the cabinet and his knees half bent. He looked like a rugby forward about to block a tackle – as though he thought the drug was going to slam into him with physical force. Devlin had to laugh. Maybe this would even do Sally some good. Make him cheer up a little for once in his life.

  “Don’t forget the lights,” he said, and left the way he’d come.

  Dr Salazar knew a lot in theory about the way phenethylamines worked. Enough to be aware that he had some lead time, which he put to good use. First, he hid the package underneath the dead files in the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet, where nobody ever had cause to go. Then he tidied the room a little, making good some of the mess that Devlin had made. He stuck up an AIDS awareness poster on the dented cupboard door, hiding the damage as far as he could.

  He clocked out, taking care to bid a courteous and level good night to John Donaldson, the guard on gate duty.

  Then he got into his car, drove it carefully down to the bottom end of the car park, which was empty at this hour, and waited for the rush to come. It might not be very strong at all. It depended on how much of the active ingredient the little pill had harboured. But it would be stronger for Sally than for a regular user, whose dopamine and norepinephrine receptors would be better used to unusual traffic. Outside of the neurochemistry, he had no idea how it would feel.

  The answer was it felt good. Very good. Really quite surprisingly wonderful and uplifting. Sally became purely, uncomplicatedly happy and euphoric for the first time in what felt like years. He sprawled in his seat with his head tilted back against the knobbly beaded top of his orthopaedic backrest, while the beauty and perfection of everything that lived filled him from his toes on up like a thick, sweet liquid.

  He was in love with the world. In love with everyone he knew. He summoned their faces one after another so he could tell them how very much he cared for them.

  But even in that euphoric haze, when he got to Dennis Devlin’s face, he felt the undercurrent of a different emotion.

  “I’m going to kill you,” he murmured, with the tides of hyperactive neurotransmitters drowning his brain and a big lopsided smile slapped across his face. “Oh, I am I am I really am. I’m going to kill you, you bastard.”

  49

  Jess lay in her bunk, the still centre of a world of hurt.

  Loomis and Earnshaw had left her ribs, sides and back monumentally bruised and battered. She couldn’t find a way to lie that didn’t leave her in agony after ten or fifteen minutes – but shifting her position hurt too, sometimes even worse. Every move she made was a desperate sprint across no-man’s-land, looking for cover that wasn’t there.

  Sheer exhaustion was pulling her down into sleep, but she couldn’t stay there. She was like one of those drinking bird toys that keeps on dipping and raising its head as the liquid inside it expands and contracts. Every time she dozed off, her muscles relaxed a little. Then some part of her body moved and she woke in a brimming rush of agony.

  Sweat cooled on her skin as the night went on, but nothing else seemed to change.

  Until it did. Until he came.

  You should have called me, Alex Beech said.

  Didn’t know how.

  Yes, you do. You just think about me and I’m here.

  But Jess hadn’t been able to think at all after the beating. Her brain’s higher functions had gone AWOL. What was left had no plan and no horizon, no future or past.

  You can get away from it. Look, it’s easy. Take my hand, like this, and… no… No, hold on to me. Step sideways.

  His hand was pulling on hers insistently, but she was afraid of what would happen when she moved.

  Alex, don’t!

  Yes. Come on, Jess.

  It was her name that did it. She surrendered to him, and to her instinctive trust in his benevolence. She let him pull her up off the bunk, first by one hand and then by both. He stepped back and she came forward in lockstep, flinching from the recoil of her outraged muscles.

  But the pain didn’t come. She looked into the boy’s solemn eyes. Then back over her shoulder at her own body lying there like an abandoned car, eyes closed and mouth slack. The sudden absence of pain was so overwhelming, she wasn’t even scared about what it meant. All she felt was a fizzing sensation of surprise, and then a dead weight of realisation.

  I’m dead, then?

  No! Alex’s tone was amused. You can go back any time you want.

  Jess looked down at her hands. Her torso. Her legs. She was wearing the rudimentary body that she’d made for herself down in the abyss. It felt a lot more comfortable this time – which maybe wasn’t surprising considering what a desperate wreck her real body was right then. But it had gone back to the way it had been when she first made it, rather than the way it was after she hauled herself up over the pit’s rim. It was no more than a sketch waiting to be filled in.

  Is this my soul? she wondered. But why should my soul look like a badly drawn stick figure?

  Because that’s how you’re thinking about it, Alex told her.

  Jess wasn’t religious. Not even a little bit. She thought all gods were basically big bully-boy cops dreamed up by people who wanted the laws they liked on Earth to be true everywhere else. So she didn’t want to think of this pathetic drinking-straw doll as her soul. This is the ghost part of me, she thought. The part that stays when everything else falls away. It’s just… coming out early.

  She knew now that she could improve it by concentrating on it. She stared hard at her withered, wilting arm, willing it to fill out into something more nearly human. Almost immediately it began to respond. As she watched, her silly-string fingers thickened, and at their tips an area became faintly shinier and smoother: the beginnings of nails.

  Shall we go for a walk? Alex asked. I can show you where I live.

  Jess raised her head again. And immediately she realised what was missing from the scene. “Oh my God!” she whispered.

  Everything. What was missing was everything.

  When she’d first stepped out of her flesh, she was still in the cell. Now she was… somewhere else. There were no walls, or floor, or ceiling. No bunk or table. Or rather, she could still make out those things, just about, but they were tiny and faint. All around them, above and below and woven through them was something else that was much harder to define – a churning, changing mass like a stormy sea somehow tilted so that it stood upright. Colours and shapes moved there, abstract but teasingly familiar, as though they were only out of focus and might resolve at any moment into things she knew. And what was truly terrifying was that it was two things at once: vast and measureless, and yet right there in front of her and close enough to touch.

  She didn’t touch it. She backed away quickly and raised her arm as though to ward it off. “Alex!” she blurted. “What is this?”

  The boy looked where she was looking. He hadn’t been paying the churning mass any particular attention until then. The other one, he said. You know. The woman who sleeps up on top of you.

  “That’s Lorraine Buller?”

  Yes.
>
  “Then… why don’t I look like that?”

  The boy gave her a puzzled, pitying look. You do when you’re asleep.

  “What? But—”

  Everybody does, Jess. You saw what it was like down in the hole. You weren’t anything until you thought about it. And then you got to be a bit more like a person. But when you’re asleep, you’re all kinds of things at once. You’re everything you ever thought about. And there are hundreds and hundreds of people here all asleep and dreaming at the same time. Everything inside them is just all mixed up.

  “And this is where you live?” Her voice was strained. If she was seeing the world the way he saw it – seeing with ghost eyes rather than eyes made out of flesh – then how did he even manage to find her each night? Fellside had thousands of inmates. Wasn’t his world just… oceans made out of other oceans, more and more of this chaos, going on for ever?

  It is to start with. But you get used to it. And it starts to be different when you get closer.

  “Different how?”

  I’ll show you, he said, and took her hand again.

  And he led her through the chaos and the silence, along roads she couldn’t see, through territories she didn’t understand.

  Fellside at night, through the eyes of the dead, was like the first day of creation. The waters had been divided but darkness still lay on them. Some were puddles you could skirt around or splash through, but some were oceans that took you whole.

  After a little while, it was impossible to say what was wet and what was dry. There was no shore, and one stream let into another stream, a river poured out of another river.

  But this wasn’t water she was walking through. It was lives. And Alex was right when he said that distance mattered. From far away, the waves were made of millions of scattered droplets. Close up, each droplet was another wave, each wave another world that you could step right into and then right on through.

  She was circumnavigating the dreams of the women of Goodall wing. She saw what they saw on the inside of their closed eyelids, except that each of them only saw their own dreams, while Jess saw them all, was drenched and deluged by them. One moment she was crossing a busy street, crowds pressing in on her from all sides. Then the wave collapsed and she was somewhere else, standing in a narrow room that smelled of sweat and cinnamon, watching a naked man bowing over a basin as he shaved himself with a straight razor.