Fellside

by M. R. Carey

  But whatever Moulson was doing, it wasn’t gloating. She looked scared.

  Sam Kupperberg, founder member of the “Moving Forward group”, looked across at them from the next table. “Hannah had her troubles,” she observed to the room at large. “Had them long before now. It’s not like this is her first time.”

  “That’s right,” McBride confirmed, recovering some of her lost traction. “It was her kid. The baby. The one that had something wrong with his brain. He had a fit or something, and they thought he was going to die. The governor turned Hannah down for compassionate. And then the kid did die. That was when she tried to kill herself. She made a rope out of her sheets, like a lot of people do, but then—”

  “I was there, Shan,” Po said quietly. “Not really keen to go there again.”

  Moulson muttered, “Thanks,” and walked away fast. All the women there could see that something about the conversation had really got to her. “Almost like she’s mixed up in this in some way,” Po suggested darkly.

  No takers. Not even McBride.

  53

  Jess went out into the exercise yard. She found herself a bench where nobody else was sitting, mostly because of the waist-high nettles growing through the fence behind it. She sat down in the blinding sunshine and waited.

  For Alex.

  But Alex didn’t show.

  Please, Jess said inside her mind. You said I just had to think about you. I’m thinking about you now, so please come.

  Nothing for a long time, but she waited him out. Eventually the ghost boy came trudging through the fence and through the nettles, which didn’t move at his passing, to stand beside her.

  What? he asked. His tone was guarded – picking up, Jess thought, on the thoughts she was trying to keep out of her mind. Hannah Passmore with her twisted bedsheet. Hannah Passmore with her wrists bitten through. I didn’t bite her.

  “I know that,” Jess murmured, glancing at him once and then looking down at her hands – trying to give the impression, if anyone was looking, that she was lost in her own thoughts. “But did you do something else to her, Alex?”

  Like what? What can I do?

  “I don’t know. But she was afraid of me. She looked at me like I was a monster. And she said she was sorry for hurting me.”

  Good. It was mean of her to do that.

  “Alex, didn’t you ever say sorry for something just because you’d been made to? Because someone told you you’d be punished if you didn’t?”

  No.

  “Really? Never?”

  Maybe once.

  “Well, that’s what it felt like when Hannah said sorry to me. She didn’t mean she was really sorry; she meant ‘if I say I’m sorry, will you please not do anything bad to me?’ Only I didn’t. I didn’t touch her. So did you?”

  Alex put his hand on Moulson’s and then through it, making her shiver a little despite the sweltering heat. She felt the contact much more vividly than she would have expected, like ice water splashing on her skin.

  “I know, I get it,” she said, shooting the boy a reproachful glance. “You can’t touch her in that way. But did you go into her mind, Alex? Did you touch her from the inside?” He said nothing but there was enough of an acknowledgement in his face to make her press on. “That night when you… when we walked together, what we were walking through was other people’s dreams. I said I was scared because it was all so shapeless. And you said you could make it be any shape you wanted. What did you mean?”

  Nothing.

  “It wasn’t nothing, Alex. Tell me the truth!”

  Across the yard, Harriet Grace was sunning herself in one of her favoured spots, behind the refectory, where cooking smells sweetened the air and the projecting wall of the admin block created a windbreak. She had her usual entourage with her. For some reason, Moulson caught her attention. Maybe it was because Moulson’s face still bore the marks of the smacks and punches she’d got from Liz and Carol, and this in turn reminded her of Moulson’s misbehaviour. For whatever reason, she watched for long enough to be certain that Moulson’s lips were moving.

  “That crazy little bitch is talking to herself,” she remarked.

  Loomis and Earnshaw both looked across at Moulson. Big Carol shrugged and glanced away again, but Liz kept on looking.

  “No good her praying,” Big Carol said. “God’s a bit more choosy than that.”

  “God’s blind, deaf and dumb,” Grace scoffed. “Or else he’s worse than we are. Liz, what’s the matter?”

  Liz was still staring, her eyes narrowed against the slanting autumn sunlight. She looked like someone trying to add up a long column of figures and not quite making it.

  “Nothing,” she said, slumping back against the wall and folding her arms. “I thought I saw something.”

  Moulson was definitely remonstrating with the empty air now, her hands moving as she talked to the vacancy beside her.

  In fact she was still pushing, asking Alex to tell her the truth. But the dead child had fallen into a sulky silence, and finally he faded from her sight. She felt he was still there though. Still within range of her voice.

  “Please, Alex,” she said. “I don’t think Passmore deserves to die because she hit me in the face a few times. But what really matters is that you shouldn’t be the one who kills her. Don’t you see that? You’re just a little boy. If you start hurting people just because you can, then…”

  Then what? He was dead. The worst had already happened. But Moulson’s mind recoiled from the thought of him being at Fellside for eternity, corrupted and degraded more and more by the things he had to see here.

  Because of her. Because she’d killed him, even if she hadn’t meant to. Even if the mean girl had got her digs in first, she’d killed him. And then she’d gone like a pearl diver through the land of dreams to the land of the dead, and brought him right back again.

  54

  It was the second anniversary of Naseem’s death.

  Two years without her.

  Grace had told Earnshaw, right afterwards, that the pain would fade in time. “That’s the way it works, pet. You won’t stop remembering her, but you’ll remember the good times and you’ll smile. What you’re feeling now… that will go. It’s the love that will stay.”

  And the love had stayed. It still humbled Lizzie, brought her almost to her knees, that Naseem had even looked at her. They’d been together for no time at all but really it was all the time there was. Her whole life, squeezed into eleven months. Since then: nothing.

  On Valentine’s Day, the only one they’d had together, Naz had given her a card. A red heart, made out of crêpe paper, glued into a folded order of service from the prison chapel. Lizzie had turned it upside down, then the right way up again, looking for a message. The only words she could read were “HYMN: O GOD OUR HELP IN AGES PAST. SERMON FROM PASTOR SARAH AFANASY. GUIDED PRAYER AND MEDIT”.

  “What’s this?”

  “You’re my heart,” Naz told her. “And my religion.”

  Love like that couldn’t be earned. It was a miracle that fell on you out of nowhere. It would be with her for ever. But the pain had stayed too. It hadn’t moved. It hadn’t lessened.

  On a day like this, death was uppermost in Lizzie’s mind. Perhaps that was why she’d seen, or thought she’d seen, at Moulson’s right hand, a shifting and contradictory shape. Just for a second, dazzling in the sunlight, so tall and attenuated it was like a shaft of sunlight itself.

  Why would Moulson of all people have a guardian angel?

  55

  Alex came to Jess in her cell that night, while Buller snored peacefully away in the bunk above.

  All right, he said.

  All right what, Alex?

  I scared her. I didn’t hurt her, I just scared her. I did it so she’d think it was you that was scary and stay away from you.

  How? How did you scare her?

  I showed her some things. It was because of what you said, Jess, about stories being like wis
hes. I was wishing for her to leave you alone. You said it was all right to wish for things that I really wanted to happen.

  Jess sat up in bed, wincing as her bruised limbs protested at being made to move. “What things did you show her?” she whispered.

  There was a dog that bit her once. A long time ago. It’s really stupid. When she thinks of the dog, she makes it all big like a lion, with millions of teeth. And there was a man who she used to live with, who hit her sometimes. Lots of times.

  “And you… you showed her…?”

  The dog, and then the man, and then you. Again and again. And sometimes I gave you the dog’s teeth, or the man’s hands and arms, so the scaredness would get mixed up and she’d be scared of you too.

  Like conditioning someone not to smoke by zapping them with an electric shock every time they light up, Jess thought. This was awful. Unbearable.

  You have to take me with you, she told him. You have to, Alex. Right now.

  Where?

  Where do you think? Where you were when you did this. Inside Hannah. Inside the thoughts she has about the man and the dog and me.

  The ghost scowled – really looking his age for the first time since she’d met him. I don’t want to go back there.

  But you’ve got to. You made Hannah unhappy. You made her so unhappy that she tried to kill herself. You can see that’s wrong, can’t you?

  Alex grimaced, but he nodded.

  So you’ll take me?

  Yes. He held out his hand and she took hold of it. Just like before, he tugged gently to release the ghostly part of her from the grip of her body. That grip felt a lot weaker now: she was learning the trick of it. They walked together out of the cell and out of the world, into the maelstrom that was made of other people.

  It was different this time. The formless, foaming oceans of dream imagery were still there. But in among them there were glowing spires like lighthouses, irregularly shaped but for the most part solid and stable.

  Alex felt the question in her mind. It’s earlier than last time, he said. Some of them are still awake.

  The towers were a little frightening to look at. They were impossibly tall, without doors or windows. Did all waking minds look like prisons? Was every human soul a Fellside, self-enclosed and blind?

  Every human soul except herself and this dead boy beside her, apparently. Their lives had become tangled together back when he was alive, but it was this that had let them come together again and stay together. This shared ability, or shared citizenship.

  Over here.

  Alex pointed towards a seething space close at hand that was like nothing Jess had seen in the night world. It was more like the oceans than the towers – changing rather than constant, breaking up and re-forming itself with each moment – but there was something terrible about it that marked it out as different and made her instinctively want to avoid it.

  After a minute or so of staring, she realised what it was that was so unsettling. The movements of this piece of dream space made up a sequence, each expansion and contraction precisely echoing the one before it. It was stuck in a loop, repeating itself endlessly. There was less variation in colour too. A sludgy grey-brown dominated, and where other tones appeared, they didn’t last for long. The mass swallowed them back into itself, like sugar sinking into hot coffee and taking the colour of the coffee as it sank.

  That’s her? Passmore?

  Yes, Alex confirmed.

  Then we have to go in.

  She took a step towards the dark, shapeless mass. Alex didn’t move. She turned back to look at him. I don’t want to, he said. It’s not nice in there.

  But that’s your fault, Alex. You did this.

  It wasn’t nice before either.

  We’ll be together. I won’t let anything hurt you.

  The dead boy didn’t say anything. His unblinking stare told her how ridiculous that statement was. This was his element, awake or asleep, now and for ever. Being dead, he ranked her. If anyone needed protecting here, it wasn’t him.

  Please, Jess said.

  But it’s stupid. She doesn’t even like you.

  Are we only nice to the people who are nice to us?

  Alex laughed incredulously. That depends! Are we clever or are we stupid?

  Jess was shocked, as she had been when he’d said that thing about the police deliberately fitting people up for crimes. It was this place, changing him. It had to be. Sometimes he talked like the Fellside women rather than how she’d expect an innocent child to talk.

  She wanted to say that she was doing this for his sake, not Hannah Passmore’s. That they had to fix this so it wouldn’t be on his conscience. And that was a part of the truth. But it was true too that she was clinging hard to a sense of mission. If she wasn’t there to save him, then what was all this for? And since he was dead already, what could she save him from except himself?

  I don’t need to be saved from anything, Alex said sourly. But he came to join her at the threshold of Hannah Passmore’s sleeping mind, its mud-coloured wings beating spastically over their heads. I’ll come, but I don’t want to stay long. It was horrible last time.

  Jess took his hand again and they stepped inside together. It was a strange transition. They were in the same place but the perspective lurched and juddered sickeningly. Things that had been far away became close, and vice versa. Mostly what changed was the weather, both inside their minds and outside: the feel and sense and smell of it. Hannah Passmore had become, for the time being, their world.

  One look was enough to tell Jess that Hannah was in a bad way. The repeating cycles, like the stammering of a broken record, played and replayed on all sides of them. Tight loops of colour, shape, sound, movement, blending into each other at times but always re-forming as themselves. These patterns didn’t resolve into coherent memories now that Jess and Alex were seeing them close up: they stayed abstract, and something about them made Jess certain that their touch would be toxic.

  Where is she? she asked Alex. Everywhere, obviously, but also somewhere. She knew there was a centre to this maze and that Hannah would be there.

  The boy looked around, getting his bearings. The sound of a siren from a police car or an ambulance came to them suddenly and clearly, but then it faded away into random squeaks and caws like discordant birdsong.

  She’s here, Alex said. It was more like, She’s down here, except that the word he used didn’t really mean that Passmore was below them, and the direction that he took and Jess followed wasn’t really down at all. Or perhaps it started out as down and then became something else. In the process, all the other directions shifted in Jess’s head like an optical illusion where a hollow cube becomes a solid one or the space between two faces becomes a vase. It was scary, but it was a revelation too. As with the body she wore, this place was no place at all.

  She remembered, out of nowhere, a moment from her childhood: not a dream this time, but a real memory, if that distinction still meant anything. A swimming lesson. She saw herself clinging to the brass rail at the side of the pool, her legs curled up under her, paralysed by the knowledge that if she straightened them and tried to put them down on the floor of the pool, it would be beyond her reach. Everything in the dream world was like that.

  But once you let go of the bar, you could use your legs to kick off from the side. Where you couldn’t walk, you could tread water. And maybe, eventually, learn to swim.

  More sights and sounds assailed them as they walked. And they must be walking in the right direction, because some of the sights and sounds now belonged to the group of images Alex had described to her in her cell. Jess flinched away from a dog’s muzzle that coalesced in front of her, snapping and drooling. A second mouth gaped behind and around the first, closed on it and swallowed it down. Then both were gone. The rumbling snarl came a few seconds later, sounding like distant thunder.

  Alex slowed and stopped, looking around into the visual soup that surrounded them.

  Are we close?
Jess asked.

  I don’t know.

  But you said…

  I said this was the right way. It was. But she’s hiding. Just wait.

  They waited. Things came and went in the chaos – the same things again and again, although the scale changed radically. A man’s fist filled the sky, his dark eyes floating above it. It descended towards them but was gone before it hit. Then it was right in front of Jess’s face, shrunk to its proper size. At that point-blank range, she could see that the knuckles were streaked with blood, red-raw from recent impacts. The dog’s jaws gaped repeatedly, and the smell of its breath hit them like a wave. Jess could feel its teeth closing on her arm, could feel herself dragged off her feet, as helpless as a puppet, but it wasn’t happening. She was still standing there, with Alex at her side. She hadn’t moved at all.

  Worst of all was her own face, regurgitated out of the random swirl of shapes and colours at least as often as the man and the dog. Her eye was bruised, her lip swollen – but her features were twisted into a predatory leer, as though she wore the damage deliberately, like a threat or a warning.

  Through it all a baby cried, and the sound of the siren came and went until that sounded like crying too.

  This is terrible.

  I told you, Alex said. But we can use it to find her. Listen.

  And again, listen wasn’t the word he used or the thing he meant. He meant that Jess had to pay attention with a different sense – one that she didn’t think she had. But as soon as he said it, she began to feel it. A sort of tension, not sound but just beyond sound, like a million split and broken fingernails drawn down a million blackboards.

  It was Passmore’s pain they were hearing. Her emotion, transmuted into white noise. And Alex was right: it gave them a trail to follow. She took a few tentative steps, then stopped because almost at once there was something at her feet that she nearly tripped over.

  She knelt to look at it, a sick fascination creeping over her as she realised what it was.