Fellside

by M. R. Carey

  Jess waited. She didn’t trust herself to speak. Losing control of her bladder again seemed like a very real possibility.

  “You’re still employed, remember?” Big Carol said. “Grace covered this with you way back, so you must have known it was coming. Your appeal’s on Wednesday. Same arrangement as before. Middle cubicle, end of the day. You’re not going to fuck up this time, are you?”

  Jess still didn’t say anything. Earnshaw tutted deep in her throat and took a step forward, but Loomis raised a hand. Wait for it. “You’re not going to fuck up, because if you do, you won’t live past dinner-time. You’ll peg out in the showers, after some high jinks that will make you glad to go. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Jess whispered.

  “Of course you do. So there’s no need for any unpleasantness. You’ll do as you’re told and we’ll all be friends.”

  She clapped a hand down on Jess’s shoulder and shook her affectionately. “You see? This is how it’s meant to be. All on the same side, all pulling together. We’re a team, Moulson. And being on the team is like being in love. It means never having to say you’re sorry. Not that being sorry would help you this time. Okay?”

  The two women left, Loomis giving Jess a cheery wave. Jess sat down again, weak with self-disgust, with relief.

  Buller didn’t return. Possibly she felt like she’d stuck her neck out far enough for one day. Jess sat in silence, her thoughts too scattered to go back to her reading.

  If only the appeal was a bit further off. If only she had a little more time to keep working through the files with Paul Levine while the world stood off and waited. Instead she was being pushed towards a reckoning, or maybe more than one. She thought she would be strong enough to see this through – to stand up to Grace’s threats and to get Alex the answers he needed – but she wished that everything wasn’t happening at once.

  Jess touched her ribs where they still ached from Earnshaw’s kicks. But whatever Grace said, whatever Loomis threatened, they surely wouldn’t kill her? Even in a place as corrupt as Fellside, there would have to be an investigation. Something would come out.

  So it would just be another beating. A bad one, but not a fatal one. Unless Loomis didn’t manage to pull Earnshaw off her in time.

  Jess told herself these things in a tentative way, to see if she actually believed them. It was difficult to reach any absolute conclusions. When Alex arrived, he found her lying on her bunk facing the wall, eyes open.

  What’s the matter, Jess? he asked her anxiously. Did somebody hurt you?

  There was no point in trying to hide her troubled mood. Her emotions were at least as loud to him as anything she actually said. “I’m worried because I have to go back into court,” she told him. “That’s all.” She sat up quickly, turned to face him. It was still too bright in the cell, even with its one little window, for her to see him clearly. He was a sort of vaguely boy-shaped movement. God, it would be so easy to set Alex loose on Earnshaw and Loomis. And so unforgivable. She had to steer him away from this dangerous subject – from the possibility of another Hannah Passmore.

  “I want to show you something,” she said. Fortunately it was true, so she was able to sell him the non sequitur with some real conviction. She spread some of the documents she’d been reading across the table. The dead boy’s gaze ranged across them, impassive.

  “You remember these? Your school reports?”

  I remember being at school.

  “Right. You told me a little bit about your school just after we met. But look at this, Alex.”

  She tapped the top of the sheet. The school’s logo stood out there front and centre, darker and more clearly defined than the text underneath. It was penny plain and indefinably ugly. The letters PLS, in a spindly serifed font, running diagonally down and across an unadorned shield.

  What’s PLS?

  “Planter’s Lane School.”

  She waited for Alex to say something. He looked at the report with his head slightly tilted, trying to see what she was getting at but clearly not very interested.

  “What does dum spiro spero mean?” Jess prompted him.

  “While there’s life there’s hope.” But it doesn’t say that.

  “No. I know it doesn’t. That’s my point. You remember telling me about your blazer? Black with a red badge is what you said. And there was a goat and a flag. And the motto was dum spiro spero. Do you still remember those things?”

  Alex glanced from the report to Jess and back again. His expression was guarded, as though he felt he was being lured into a trap of some kind.

  “Do you, Alex?”

  Yes.

  “And it was definitely your blazer? Your badge? You’ve forgotten a lot of things about… before.”

  You mean about when I was alive. He stared at her with something like reproach. You’ve been there, Jess. In the night world, he meant. In the flood of lives, the nakedness and fury of a thousand overlapping minds. I remembered everything at first. Then I forgot everything and I wasn’t anywhere at all. I was like a nothing that sort of knew it was a nothing. Then you came and I started to wake up again.

  Jess’s mind shied away from this bleak vision, but she forced herself to interrogate it. Alex had found her in the abyss, falling, and brought her back here. He knew his way through the night world, and how to walk there. How to find her body where it lay in the infirmary. So had he come here before her? That made no sense. Surely his link was to her, not to Fellside.

  Was it possible that the night world’s geography was just different? That all spaces came together there? Perhaps she’d always been his focus, his tether, and didn’t even know it until her coming so close to death herself permitted them to see each other. But even that begged so many questions. Were killers and their victims always psychically joined at the hip? If so, Fellside ought to be teeming with unquiet ghosts.

  In any case, she didn’t find it strange at all that rubbing up against all those minds, all those memories, had abraded the boy’s sense of himself. She’d seen first-hand how much he’d forgotten. But the description of the blazer and the badge had been so specific, so circumstantial, she thought it must mean something.

  “So was there another school you went to before this one? Before Planter’s Lane?” she asked him. Alex didn’t answer, so she pushed again. “Did your parents transfer you for some reason? Because you were being bullied there? Is that maybe where you met the mean girl?”

  Just more silence.

  “I’m trying to help you,” Jess said. She could feel a little stridency creeping into her voice but she fought against it, tried to speak more softly. “Concentrate, Alex,” she coaxed him. “Think about it.”

  He stared solemnly into her eyes. It’s hard. It was a long time ago.

  “But you’re sure about the badge?”

  Alex nodded emphatically. My badge had a goat and a flag. I don’t remember this badge at all.

  Jess considered. It was still six days before her hearing. Paul had said he couldn’t help her any more, but this was a tiny thing. If she presented it as a personal favour, he wouldn’t refuse her.

  She had to use up the last of her phone credit for the day, but she made the call. It went to voicemail and she left a message.

  She would wait until the next day to call Brenda again. She didn’t have any choice.

  62

  Sally was leading a double life, and he wasn’t enjoying either of them.

  His normal working week at the prison was comprehensively overshadowed by his hatred and fear of Dennis Devlin to the point where it was hard for him to see anything else. He was distracted and forgetful, allowing prescription drugs to run out, failing to submit reports, even missing clinic sessions.

  Except for the Thursday clinic in Curie. That one ran like clockwork. And afterwards, like clockwork, Sally would go down to the meditation room, where he would drop off Grace’s basket of goodies. The weight of unhappiness that settled on him as he d
id this stayed with him for hours afterwards, cutting the fear and loathing with something even darker.

  Sylvie Stock was very much aware of Sally’s perturbed state of mind since she’d switched to days now and was therefore the one who was mostly picking up after him. She had no idea what it was that was getting to him, so she made the same mistake as before and assumed it had to be her. She wound herself up into a tighter and tighter coil, convinced that her guilt was the one thing everyone was focused on. That preoccupation made her as negligent in her duties as Sally was in his. DiMarta kept the surgery together through that weird time, changing Passmore’s dressings three times a day and reporting on her progress to Dr Salazar’s more or less deaf ears.

  Passmore was doing remarkably well all of a sudden. She’d hit the bottom and done a spectacular bounce, the same way Moulson had done a few weeks before. Miracle recoveries were becoming the regular backdrop to Salazar’s life, and to Stock’s – their patients rallying as they themselves fell apart.

  Stock decided that the only way she would stay sane was if she could put the business with Moulson out of her mind altogether. Just forget it. Not think about it. Let the whole thing fall where it wanted to fall. The first day she tried this strategy out, she was called over to Dietrich block to sedate a patient who’d had a religious vision and responded to it with a hysterical fit. That was what she was told anyway, although the inmate, Waites, had calmed down by the time she got there. “He was an angel,” she whispered to Stock confidentially as Stock prepped the hypo.

  “Was he now?” Stock murmured.

  “And she was with him. That murderess with the ugly face. I think they’re friends now.”

  “That’s nice.” Sylvie pushed the needle in and gave her the dose. Waites sighed, closed her eyes and settled back on her bunk, already half asleep. Sylvie only realised then what she’d been saying.

  “Hey,” she said, giving Waites a hard nudge in the ribs. “Who? What murderess? Who are you talking about?”

  Waites’s lips formed the shape of a name. Stock’s wide eyes took it in.

  63

  The night before her appeal hearing started, Jess finally got through to her Aunt Brenda.

  It wasn’t for want of trying. She had stood in the phone line every day since Paul Levine gave her the number, using up her daily cash allowance each time in three vain attempts.

  “Hello?”

  Jess had given up expecting an answer, so the single halting word from the other end of the line startled her and scattered her thoughts. “Brenda!” she yelped. “Brenda, hey! It’s me. It’s Jess.”

  “Jess!” Her aunt’s voice was slow and slightly slurred. She sounded like she’d had a few too many, but then the effects of a morphine drip were very like a mellow drunk. Her joy and relief came through in any case. “Oh Jess, it’s so good to hear your voice!”

  “It’s great to hear yours,” Jess said, choking up a little. “How are you?”

  “Let’s not go there, sweetheart. Not unless you’ve got an hour or two to spare.”

  “I’ve got maybe seven minutes,” Jess said. It wasn’t a guess: the payphone had a digital timer, which was counting down relentlessly. “But seriously, how’s your back? How did the operation go?”

  “Operations. Every time they fix one thing, they find something else that’s wrong. My back is made of Lego bricks, and they’re not load-bearing.”

  “But do they think they’ve fixed—?”

  “Jess, listen. Listen to me, please, just listen listen listen.” Brenda’s voice was still fuzzy and soft, but she won that tussle by speaking right alongside her niece until she shut up.

  “All right. Listening.”

  “Good. I wanted to tell you something about when you were little.”

  “Still listening.”

  “Actually it’s about Tish.”

  “Tish?” Jess repeated blankly. “Made-up Tish? Imaginary friend Tish?”

  Brenda sighed. It was a brittle, hollow sound fizzing with static from the bad connection. “The little boy,” she said. “You said you saw him in a dream. It made me think of something I hadn’t thought about in a long time. Was he in the Other Place, Jess? The place you used to go to at night?”

  “I…” Jess hesitated. There were a lot of possible answers to that question, but she went with the simplest. “Yes. He was.”

  “And that was where you saw Tish too.”

  “Auntie B, I didn’t make this up. Alex is more than just a dream.”

  Silence on the line. Then: “So was Tish, sweetheart.”

  “What?”

  “Her name was Patricia Mackie. She lived opposite you in Paley Close. And she was in your class at Heathcote Road. At least, she was for a little while.”

  “But…” Jess tried to make sense of this absurd contradiction. “I made Tish up. She had wings. And a magic necklace that sang songs and shot fire.”

  “In your dreams she did. In real life she was an unlucky little girl with a rare illness. Farber disease. I don’t remember all the details but it made her joints swell up so she couldn’t walk, and it affected her heart. That was why she stopped going to school. She was too sick.”

  “I don’t remember any of this,” Jess protested, but already that was a lie. Memories were starting to stir at the back of her mind, to bubble up and burst in quick flashes of random association. Pink plastic beads threaded on elastic. A school satchel with the initials P.M. embossed in flaking gold. Her own name, Jessica, pronounced with a long “a” at the end: Jessicay.

  “She was your best friend in Year One, and then she was gone. You weren’t even allowed to see her because she had to be kept in a germ-free environment. Except that you did see her, of course. You saw her in the Other Place.”

  As Tish. A composite figure assembled from half a dozen books Jess had read to her, with wings and pirate boots and a sword and many magical accessories. That necklace… it… It had been pink. Pink gems all in a line, all identical. It was a magnificent thing but Jess knew that the cheap little toy she’d just remembered had been the source material for it.

  “You didn’t want to let her go,” Aunt Brenda was saying. “Of course you didn’t. So you made her into a hero in your stories. But then you said that she was happier in the Other Place. She was stronger there, and she could do all sorts of things she couldn’t do in real life. You said… she’d decided not to come back.

  “And that was the night she died.”

  Jess’s stomach clenched. The room turned a circuit around her.

  “Jess? Jess, are you there?”

  It was true. All of it.

  She remembered now all the things she’d worked so hard to forget.

  She’d cauterised her mind after Dr Carter. Tish was one of the things she just made herself not think about. But Tish wasn’t a casualty of Dr Carter; she was already gone.

  I’m going on a long sea voyage, Jessicay. To a million places.

  “I’m here,” she said. “Auntie B, was that…?” But she didn’t know how to get the question out.

  “That was why your mum took you to a psychologist, yes. Because you didn’t seem to be coping with Patricia’s death. And because what you said was so upsetting. That she actually wanted to be dead.”

  No, not that. I never said that. I said she wanted to be in a place where she could run and fly and fight and explore and do magic. Being dead was just the price of admission.

  “Jess?”

  “I’m still here.”

  “I hope you’re not upset. But what you were saying about… the boy. It sounded so much like what you said back then, when you were just a child…”

  Jess bowed her head until it pressed against the top of the payphone cabinet. The touch of the cool metal was soothing. “I get it,” she said. “The old crazy stuff coming back.”

  “Not that. Not crazy, Jess. But we all have our own ways of dealing with stress. With grief. Like Dr Carter said, we make the things we need. I wanted you
to remember because it might make you stronger if you know that you’ve been here before, and survived it.”

  “Thank you. Thank you, Auntie B. I won’t forget that.”

  “And Jess… I’m so glad. I’m so glad you’re back. That you didn’t decide to—”

  The counter hit zero and the line went dead, but Jess could finish that sentence off for herself. And she knew why poor Patricia had come into Brenda’s mind so vividly. It must have seemed to her that her niece was making the same choice. To go off on that long sea voyage and never come home.

  After lights-out, she lay in her bunk and counted the hours. She didn’t even try to sleep because she knew she wasn’t going to get there.

  Alex came and sat with her, but for a long time they didn’t talk. Jess was thinking about a lot of things. Paul Levine’s offer of a place to stay. The memories her talk with Brenda had stirred up. And looming over everything else, the orders she’d received from Big Carol.

  Paul had implied that she had a good chance in her appeal, but that almost seemed like a side issue right then. Whatever happened, she was going to reach the crunch point with Harriet Grace long before any verdict came in. If she refused to make the pick-up, Grace would have her beaten and perhaps killed. But if she said yes, she might lose something even more fundamental. Because whatever power had sent her Alex and offered her this second chance to help him, it had to have a working definition of failure.

  Unless the power was hers. Perhaps it was just a knack she had, to talk to the dead, and the dreamers, and the dreaming dead. To gather them around her.

  Grace. She had to decide what to do about Grace – and the package. She could go to the prison authorities, of course. But from what she’d seen, it seemed that Grace owned the authorities. And she had no evidence at all. Nothing but bare assertion to set against the weight and mass of an entire institution.

  The dead boy interrupted her fretful thoughts. You’re going away tomorrow.