by M. R. Carey
You see?
Yes, Alex. I see. And she did.
She saw too much. Fellside’s inmates were a skewed sample. Every single one of them had a life that ended in the utter disaster of prison. Relationships sheared off. Jobs and reputations lost. Kids left with overburdened partners, thrown on the winds to relatives who didn’t really want them or (dear Christ Jesus!) taken into care. She saw the women of Goodall from the inside, and from the inside they were all of them bowed down by the weight of what had befallen them. They were all on a catastrophe curve, sailing frictionlessly towards this precipice or that. It was little wonder that they were capable of brutality. What was amazing was that they ever managed to be kind to one another.
Jess was overwhelmed by these visions, and she struggled to understand them. The last time she’d walked here with Alex, she’d kept her eyes shut and gone where he had led her. All the same, she felt she knew this place from somewhere. Its contours were terrifying and alien but they were also familiar. That dissonance was the scariest thing of all.
These were other people’s memories and dreams she was walking through, that much was clear. But what did her being here mean? She remembered a story she’d read in school when she was about fourteen, where a man stepping on a butterfly had changed the whole history of the world. What damage could a careless footfall do in this place, where the butterflies were pieces of people’s minds?
Suddenly and deeply afraid, she turned to the boy. Take me back, she told him.
It will still hurt, Jess.
I know, but I don’t like it here. It’s too big. Too… shapeless.
You can make it be any shape you want, Alex said with sublime unconcern. And that struck Jess as the scariest thought of all. That without even knowing what this stuff was, she could run through it and kick it into spray.
Take me back, she begged. And Alex did. He led her through the endless, unspeakable chaos to her own small self, and helped her back inside.
Her battered body creaked and yawed like a house in a hurricane, but it didn’t fall down. And the pain held her close until the morning came.
In the still, pregnant minutes before the rising bell, the blocked memory finally came free. She knew Alex’s night world because it had once been her own. She’d called it the Other Place. She’d told her mother it was like the seaside except that it was all on fire. And as a six-year-old, she’d gone there every night until Dr Carter, with her well-intentioned rummaging, had forced her to beat a tactical retreat.
It was a world of dreams. Dreams with windows that let you look inside. Six-year-old Jess had mistaken the sleeping men and women she encountered for angels. By the time she might have been old enough to recognise them for what they really were, she’d had her passport to the night world revoked.
All of which led her to another disconcerting conclusion. Everything Alex had ever told her about the nocturnal adventures of the G block inmates was true. Not random invention but meticulous reportage. He was seeing – and walking – into the women’s dreams.
No wonder he’d lost so many of his own memories. He’d left them behind in everybody else’s.
50
“I had a weird dream,” Kaleesha Campbell muttered. Her face was buried between Po Royal’s breasts, but Po pushed her back so she could look right at her.
“What dream?”
“Well, first I was watching my dad shave in the bathroom at home with his old cut-throat razor. I used to hate him doing that. But then that kiddie-killer, Moulson, came walking right through the room. With a little blond boy. They were hand in hand. They didn’t say anything to me or my dad; they just went on through and out into the street. It was like she was taking him for a walk or something.”
“I dreamed that too,” Po told her.
“Fuck you did!” But Kaleesha could see from Po’s face that she wasn’t lying. She listened while Po told her her own dream. Not quite the same as Kaleesha’s, because Kaleesha’s dad didn’t show. And besides that, Po knew who the little kid was. She recognised Alex Beech from seeing his photo on the TV news. So she knew this wasn’t Jess Moulson out for a random walk. It was Jess Moulson replaying the crime that got her thrown into prison in the first place. Or else it was Moulson doing a Dante, with the boy she killed acting as her spirit guide (there was a Divine Comedy in the prison library, and Kaleesha had given it to Po to read once when there were no fantasy or horror novels in).
This business was creepy as shit, any way you looked at it. Po and Kaleesha did everything together so they could have written off that weird echo as the two of them being soulmates. In fact that was pretty much what Kaleesha did: she pushed the knowledge away and refused to talk about it. But Po went around the whole of that day asking people what they’d dreamed about the night before.
Mimi Acosta, Todd, Sharpe, O’Hanlan, Sam Kupperberg… The Moulson sightings kept piling up. She was in my bathroom at home, in the corner of the exercise yard, onstage at the Lexie, wherever.
Po tried to rationalise it. Why shouldn’t the whole of Goodall dream about Moulson? There were lots of reasons why she should be in their thoughts, starting with the massive media coverage of her crime and going right on through her botched hunger strike to her turbulent adventures in gen pop. The roots of coincidence were right there in plain sight. You didn’t need to invoke magic to explain it.
And if this was some supernatural harbinger, it didn’t harbinge anything very much. Moulson didn’t rise like thunder that day, or speak in tongues. She went creeping around like her usual quiet self, only with a split lip and maybe a tooth missing and definitely a limp.
“Who’s Moulson been playing bumper cars with?” Po asked Lorraine Buller. Buller had to know but she didn’t answer. She just told Po to mind her own business.
Po gave it up. It was some weird coincidence after all. Even so, she was bracing herself the next night as she lay down next to Kaleesha and closed her eyes. She was scared she’d meet Moulson in the dark, and that this time Moulson would talk to her. Say something prophetic that she couldn’t ignore.
But nothing happened. When she finally drifted off, it was into black nothingness. Moulson didn’t show. The kid did briefly, but he was a little blond scrap at the outer limits of her mind’s eye. An echo of the dream of the night before that barely registered and didn’t merit any special attention.
So there. Reason had triumphed, and it was all good. Po forgot about the Dante hypothesis and had a good laugh at herself.
The truth was Moulson was running scared. The discovery that the chaos realm Alex now inhabited was the Other Place of her childhood had shaken her badly. The boy was dead, not dreaming, but dreams were a gateway to that place. That was how she came and went, and presumably how she’d been able to sense Alex’s presence on her first day at Fellside. She was attuned to that weird night world from which he watched and listened to the living.
But then why hadn’t she met Alex before Fellside at the hospital or in the remand wing at Winstanley? If she’d had the talent even as a child, why had it taken so long for it to wake up again? Was it the drugs she’d been given, or just being so close to death herself?
Even more than Po Royal, she didn’t want to think about what all this meant. When she did finally go back into the dreamscape, it was because she had to.
51
After the court granted Moulson leave to appeal, Paul Levine visited her two or three times in successive weeks to talk strategy. But Moulson mostly wanted to talk about Alex Beech.
She’d been trawling through all those trial documents and depositions, looking for any clue as to who the nice girl and the nasty girl might be. There weren’t many quality candidates, but she’d kept at it and now she had a shortlist of sorts. There were quite a few teenage girls who’d lived in the same low-rise block or in one of its near neighbours and who had had a witness statement taken at the time of the initial investigation. They weren’t called at the trial because none of them knew Moulson or ha
d anything particular to say about her, good or bad. But any one of them could have known Alex Beech.
She asked Levine to do some cross-checking. “Maybe some of them babysat him, or went to school with him. But it wouldn’t have to be that. Any history he had with girls who were older than him. Cousins, neighbours, anyone.”
It was easy to see that Paul was baffled. He’d already told her that the main thrust for the appeal was going to be attacking the conviction on the grounds of mental incapacity and poking at Street’s testimony to show that he could have done more to mitigate the damage. If they were very lucky, they might get the conviction overturned, but that was an outside chance. What they were really hoping for was to get a reduction of Moulson’s sentence by arguing that (a) there was a lack of intent and (b) she wasn’t solely to blame. But none of this required investigating the dead boy’s friends and enemies.
“I mean, don’t get me wrong, I want to help,” he said. And she knew he meant it. He’d been really alarmed by her fresh injuries, had insisted on taking photos of them. He wanted to put pressure on the governor to get her put into solitary for her own protection, but Moulson told him to leave it alone. He kept reassuring her of his good intentions, but she knew he was also trying very hard to shift her thoughts on to another track. “It’s just… we’ve only got a limited amount of time. Anything I do to chase up this stuff you’re talking about will take away from the time I give to… to the central planks of our argument.”
“You mean to the things that actually matter.”
“I mean that I need to do the things that will help you. That’s my job.”
“This will help me,” Moulson told him. “I can’t explain how, but it’s relevant. Please, Paul.”
She used his name consciously, tactically, remembering how it had felt when Alex used hers. She put her hand on his and stared into his eyes. She needed this. If leaning on Levine’s emotions a little would make a difference, she would do it, however shitty she felt about it afterwards.
“Can you give me a clue?” he begged. “What am I looking for?”
Jess hesitated. How to explain the two parts of this, the friend and the torturer? She couldn’t. So she went for the simpler part of the explanation, the one where there might be some actual physical evidence. “If Alex was being abused… I don’t mean sexually, but if he was being hurt by someone close to him, someone who knew him…”
No. It still made no sense. Paul’s expression stayed the same, pained and puzzled. “I think there was another witness,” Jess said, trying another tack. “Someone who was there when Alex died and didn’t come forward because she was afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“That this other stuff would come out. That she’d be caught and get into trouble.”
“Okay,” Paul said. “But what would that mean for us? I mean, unless you’re saying she incapacitated him so he couldn’t get out when the fire started…”
“Yes.” Jess jumped on this suggestion eagerly. “Maybe that’s what happened. And then in the end Alex would still have died from the smoke, not from the other injuries. The forensic evidence would still make sense.”
“But you know we don’t have a shred of evidence for this?”
Jess nodded. “Yes. Of course I know that. I’m asking you to find some.”
Paul looked almost despairing. “Jess, I don’t want to dismiss any possible avenues, but Mr Pritchard will be looking over my shoulder, and he has to sign off on my time sheets. I don’t see any way I can put serious effort into this if I can’t explain to him why I’m doing it. And he won’t take a simple maybe as an explanation. He’ll be looking for something more solid than that.”
“Just do what you can,” Jess begged him. Begging was all she could do. It wasn’t as if she was paying him.
“I’ll ask around,” Paul told her. “But would you please just tell me one thing: what makes you think this girl exists?”
For a wild moment she considered telling him the truth – that she was keeping a promise she’d made to the boy she killed. But if Levine thought she was mad, he’d be much less likely to help her. Then she thought about lying, but she couldn’t come up with a lie that would serve. “I can’t explain,” she said.
Paul smiled weakly. “Just ‘sources close to Jess Moulson’, then? All right, I’ll do what I can. But it might not be much. We’ve got three weeks before the appeal comes up, Jess, and vast amounts to cover if we’re going to have any kind of a chance. You know that’s got to come first, right?”
“Yes,” Jess said. “Of course. Of course it does. Whatever you can manage then. Thank you. Thank you, Paul.”
“Is there anything else I can do for you?”
He said it in an almost ironic tone, but there was. “My Aunt Brenda. My mother’s sister.”
“What about her?”
“I can’t get through to her. All I’ve got is the phone and letters and she’s not answering either one. She’s… she was sick recently. She had an operation. I want to know she’s all right.”
“Where does she live?” Paul asked. He’d already put his notebook away in preparation for leaving, but he took it out again. Jess gave him the address and he wrote it down. “Okay,” he said. “That’s not too far. I’ll go round there.”
Paul knocked on the door for the guards to let him out. While he waited, he turned back to say goodbye to her. Moulson, still sitting at the table, was looking up at him, the swelling of her bruised cheek changing the topography of her features so that one of her eyes was thrown into shadow. Her face had become a kabuki mask, painted black and white.
There was an urgency in her lopsided stare, as though she was waiting for him to get out there and do his stuff and she would keep on waiting in exactly that place, exactly that pose, until he came back.
Their relationship was just as lopsided. It was even exploitative in a way. Well, it was if she knew how he felt about her. Mr Pritchard had warned him about that possibility. “Everybody works the resources they’ve got to hand, Paul. Prisoners have very limited resources so they work them very hard. If you’re going to become a resource to Ms Moulson, go in with your eyes open.”
Paul’s eyes were wide open and he knew exactly what he was doing. He wouldn’t fail her.
52
The word got out over breakfast, a day or two later, that Hannah Passmore had tried to kill herself by chewing through her own wrists. It got out through Debbie Ochs, Passmore’s cellmate.
“I woke up in the night, yeah? There was something dripping on my face. I thought Hannah had pissed the bloody bed, but it got on my lips and it wasn’t piss. It was blood. I shouted until the warders came. It was lights-out, wasn’t it, so I couldn’t tell what she’d done to herself. But when they put the lights on for the warders, I could see it all. She’d opened her frigging wrists up and everything. Christ, she was a mess. It was all over me, all over the bed, on the floor… Couldn’t have been much left inside her, I’ll tell you that much.”
Now Hannah was in the infirmary and nobody knew if she was going to live or die. Debbie wanted to be in the infirmary too. She was shit-scared she might have caught something from drinking Passmore’s blood – AIDS maybe, or hepatitis. And she didn’t think it was the slightest bit funny that everyone on the corridor was calling her Vampirella.
Debbie hadn’t exaggerated though: Passmore had lost enough blood to leave her as white as the sheets she was lying on. As failed suicide attempts go, she had come close to sealing the deal. Dr Salazar gave her three pints of full and one of serum. The only reason she stayed in the infirmary rather than being transferred directly to the intensive care unit over at Leeds General was that she was too weak to be moved.
And it was no secret who was behind this. Every woman in Goodall had heard by now about what Passmore had said to Moulson in the refectory a few weeks before. What did you do to me? And they remembered what Passmore had looked like when she’d said it. Or if they didn’t remember, they h
eard it all over again from Shannon McBride, who was only too delighted to have a new verse or two to add to the ballad of Jess Moulson.
Passmore had been very quiet since that outburst at breakfast. Not peaceful quiet but ominous quiet. Mostly if you spoke to her, you’d get a wild stare and no answer, and then she’d take herself away to somewhere else where she didn’t have to deal with you. There had been something not right with her, that was for certain.
A crowd of people were talking this over in the ballroom when Moulson herself came over. She’d heard Passmore’s name and she wanted to know what was going on. She looked anxious, strain showing in her face like she was asking the radiologist what that shadow on her lung was.
“Piss off out of it,” Marge Todd suggested.
“Has something happened to Passmore?” Moulson asked again. “Please just tell me and I’ll go away.”
She turned from Todd to Shannon McBride and said it again. “Just tell me!” Shannon stared back at her, blank-faced. She was smack in the middle of a great Moulson story, but for once it was a story that had Moulson as the villain of the piece. Moulson appearing in person made the words dry up in her mouth.
“I—” she said. And got stuck there.
“Hannah tried to kill herself,” Po Royal said. “Bit her wrists and bled out. But Ochs raised the alarm and they took her to the infirmary.”
“Does anybody know why Passmore would do a thing like that?” Moulson asked, looking from one of them to the other. “Was something bothering her? Did she get bad news?”
“Nobody knows anything,” Todd said. “What’s it to you anyway? Hannah smacked you up and down the corridor your first night out of solitary. If you want to have a nice gloat, Moulson, go and do it somewhere else.”
