Fellside

by M. R. Carey

  For a moment, Earnshaw only stared. Then she gathered herself, her whole body, by some huge effort of will. A shudder ran through her. She crossed to Jess in three strides.

  “Tell me who—” Jess said again, and had to stop. Earnshaw’s hand shot out and clamped on her throat. Her other hand reached round to grip the back of Jess’s neck. The flesh there, like the flesh on the right side of her face, was burned and imperfectly reconstructed, but even through that barricade she could feel the calloused toughness of Earnshaw’s grip.

  She grabbed the wrist of the hand that was around her throat and tried to pull it away. She couldn’t budge it. It started to tighten. Earnshaw stared at her at point-blank range, rigid as a statue, implacable as a hanging judge.

  “That’s better,” Grace said. “That’s my girl.”

  Earnshaw drew Jess close. One hand squeezed and the other twisted. Jess struggled as her airway closed. She might as well have been trying to dismantle a wall with her hands.

  I remember! a voice said. It seemed to come to her across a great distance, almost drowned out by the sound, suddenly very loud, of her own heartbeat. It was Alex’s voice. Jess, I remember now! Can you see it?

  Jess thought she could. Dimly, and getting dimmer by the second. But she couldn’t speak to say so.

  93

  What she saw was:

  A prison cell, right here in Goodall block to judge by the floor plan and the colour scheme. Mostly anonymous, grimly generic, although there was a picture on the wall – a sketch of Liz Earnshaw drawn in blue biro. In the picture Liz was smiling, which had to make you wonder if the artist had ever met her or was just drawing her from a verbal description. The shaded areas were done by drawing in lots of short lines, horizontal and vertical. Cross-hatching, like an image in a comic book.

  Nothing else about the cell stood out. There was a table. There were two chairs. There was a toilet without a seat, the cistern clamped to the wall with a thick steel bracket. There was a locker unit with two lockers, an upper and a lower. That was riveted to the wall too. On the windowsill, two ceramic giraffes intertwined their necks in an impossible caress.

  And on the bunk – a real embrace. Liz Earnshaw, gaunt and gangling, was folded around another woman, both of them naked. This second woman was so short that for a second, cradled in Earnshaw’s arms, she looked like a child. Or perhaps the ghost of a child still lingered, for a second, behind her eyes.

  But she wasn’t Alex Beech. She’d only worn his face for a while – from the time when Jess first saw her down in the abyss to the moment, less than an hour ago, when the two of them had stepped into Earnshaw’s dreams. She wore her own face now. Dark skin, slightly angular cheeks, brown eyes with thick black eyeliner, and a flat nose like a blade. No breasts to speak of, and no hips either. She smiled as she pushed back into Earnshaw’s embrace, settling herself there with a smug, proprietorial air.

  “Settle down,” Earnshaw growled. “You’re keeping me awake.”

  “Well, as long as you’re awake,” the other woman said, “you can scratch my back.”

  Earnshaw did as she was bidden with a sigh and a long-suffering “Bloody hell!”

  “Lower,” the woman said.

  “Any lower and I’ll be in your arse crack.”

  “Yes please.”

  The scene broke up in front of Jess’s eyes as her profligate brain burned through the last few molecules of oxygen that were sustaining it. Arcs and streaks of abstract colour replaced the vision of the prison cell. The colours swirled in the air irresolutely, as if they wanted to come together again but something was preventing them.

  I remember! Alex cried again. Jess couldn’t imagine now how she’d ever mistaken that voice for a little boy’s. It was a woman’s voice, with the burr of maturity behind the lightness of it.

  Jess saw the outline of the truth, its angular, uncompromising shape, and it was so unlike what she’d expected that she was dazzled by it. She might have seen it before but she’d only ever known Earnshaw as a monster, a wrecking ball. She’d all but forgotten the story Shannon McBride had told her. The story of Naseem Suresh, of Liz’s fierce love for her and how her death had broken Liz along some pre-existing fault-line, turning her into what she was now.

  An incredulous laugh welled up from Jess’s diaphragm, but it stopped halfway. Her crimped throat blocked all traffic.

  It’s not funny, Jess!

  But it was, a little bit. Jess had been wrong on every count. Ridiculously wrong. She’d seen a ghost without a shape, without a memory, and stamped it with the seal of her own guilt. And then when its real identity was right in front of her face, she’d read it backwards. She’d been so sure that Earnshaw was the nasty girl, the one who’d hurt Alex. But she was Alex’s friend. Naseem Suresh’s friend, rather. The nasty girl was…

  Someone else.

  The grip on Jess’s throat slackened. Her lungs had been dragging at nothing for most of a minute, and they were still at full stretch. Given something to work with, they managed to suck down a slender, burning filament of air.

  Lizzie was my love. My big mummy bear. Nobody dared to touch me when she was there.

  So obviously the nasty girl must have waited. Until Naseem was on her own.

  Jess fell down on to her hands and knees, and into the here and now. She blinked tears out of her eyes, sipped air through her bruised and swollen throat. Earnshaw had dropped her, was turning away from her to face Grace again.

  “Tell me what happened!” she said, desperation in her voice. “Grace, tell me. Naz is here, and she’s listening. What did you do?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Grace said. “Lizzie, finish that bitch off. Go on. Don’t make me do it myself.”

  She didn’t wait. She arranged it. She made it happen. And she got you out of the way so you couldn’t help me!

  “Who did?” Earnshaw bellowed. “How?”

  Jess looked up groggily to see Earnshaw and Grace face to face, one on either side of her, like two dogs fighting for the same bone. But she wasn’t the bone: Alex was. Naseem was. Earnshaw was worrying at the truth, and Grace was trying to snatch it back from her.

  I’ll show you, said Alex. Said Naseem.

  Grace’s cell blurred and went away again. Moulson fought against the vision this time, conscious of the danger she was in, but there was no defence against the ghost’s vivid dreaming. Threads of colour knitted themselves into shapes. Shapes coalesced and acquired volume.

  This time she was in the ballroom. Liz Earnshaw was up on her feet, a fallen chair next to her that she’d just jumped up from. Dennis Devlin was poking her repeatedly in the chest, yelling into her face, which was reddening with rage. “You know how to address a warder. Try again. Try again!” Naseem Suresh, dressed now like Liz and all the other women there in a yellow and black Goodall tracksuit, was holding on to Earnshaw’s arm and stopping her from throwing a punch. It made no difference. Half a dozen guards descended upon Earnshaw and dragged her away screaming.

  The vision blurred and broke apart, leaving Jess sliding on a slippery scree of afterimages.

  “Devlin,” Earnshaw muttered, sounding lost and amazed. “The Devil.”

  “Present,” Devlin said thickly.

  He closed the door behind him and advanced on Jess. He wore a bib of blood. The lower half of his face was a swollen mess.

  Jess was watching his clenched fists, so she didn’t see the kick coming.

  94

  Up in the solitary cells, Devlin had had a plan. Don’t make a pattern, don’t leave any presents for the forensics team, use the tools that are lying around. That had blown up in his face in every sense of the word. He was all done with plans now. Liz Earnshaw was standing in front of him stark naked and whimpering, so this was clearly the ending of days and a man had to respond accordingly. The first thing he did was to kick Moulson in the stomach, putting her down hard.

  Then he went on kicking her with his steel-capped boots un
til, in his opinion, she was unlikely to have any more fight in her. It went some way towards relieving his feelings.

  When Moulson wasn’t moving even to try to defend herself, he hauled her up off the floor and threw her down unceremoniously on to Grace’s bunk. Here he did revert to the plan, because this part of the plan was fine. He grabbed the pillow and pushed it down over Moulson’s face.

  Fight him, Jess! Don’t let him!

  Who the fuck was that screaming in his ear? It threw him off for a second. The voice was so loud and so close that he turned to swat away a hysterical woman who turned out not to be there.

  Moulson was starting to revive a little. Her fingers clawed at the backs of Devlin’s hands. Shit! That meant his blood and tissue would be under her fingernails. More work with the disinfectant.

  Moulson was trying to squirm free. The Devil shifted his weight and bore down on her, teeth clenched with effort. As her movements got weaker and weaker, he thought, Where in the name of Christ did I leave the disinfectant?

  Right then, as though to admonish him for losing concentration, something exploded against his skull like a depth charge against the hull of a battleship. Suddenly he was on the ground, without any idea how he’d got there. A large mass moved above him, a towering shadow in the stark illumination of the cell’s strip light. Liz Earnshaw. Grace tackled her from the side, but Liz hurled Grace away with a convulsive one-armed shrug.

  Reflexively, Devlin threw up his hands.

  Earnshaw brought her arm around in a horizontal sweep, like a reaper, hitting him on the elbow of his raised right arm. He screamed in shock and agony. Her weapon was his own nightstick, which she must have swiped from his belt while he was wrestling with Moulson. She rained blows down on him, putting all her beef and all her hate into the task.

  Devlin kicked at her legs but didn’t connect. Another blow from the nightstick caught him on the base of the spine, and for the first time he was actually afraid. The mad bitch was capable of crippling him, or even killing him.

  He rolled under the bunk. He couldn’t think of anything else to do. Earnshaw gripped his ankle and dragged him back out into the light. He launched another kick and she let go – but only to start again with the nightstick.

  Devlin was trying to get to his pepper spray, but another well-aimed smack from the sidewinder broke his wrist. After that, he just lay there. His best chance of surviving this was to pretend he was already dead.

  95

  Grace had a very pragmatic mind. She also had a shank which she kept to hand as a weapon of last resort.

  It was taped to the inside edge of one of the legs of her bunk, and it had a cardboard sheath from which it would come free at a single tug. She had always felt ambivalent about having a weapon in her cell. If it turned up in a search, it was a mandatory two years on sentence. On the other hand, she had ways of forestalling searches, and she hated the thought of being defenceless if anyone of hostile intent came calling, or if, say, one of her own bodyguards switched her loyalties.

  So there it was.

  Grace tugged the serviceable little blade out of the cardboard.

  And cut Moulson’s throat.

  96

  And then there were two.

  Or three, but Dennis Devlin was playing dead.

  Or four, but Jess Moulson was as close to being dead as made no difference. Her hands clutched to her throat. Thinking, Why can’t I breathe? Then, Oh.

  Right.

  And if the dead were included, then Naseem Suresh brought the total up to five.

  But Earnshaw was still on her feet, and so was Grace. Earnshaw was pounding away at Devlin with the nightstick. She looked as though she was never going to stop. She’d found a home at last for all the pain and sorrow that was inside her, and she was busy repatriating it.

  Grace looked up from Moulson’s sprawled body with the shank in her hand and a glove made of blood. One problem solved, and the shortlist getting shorter.

  She made a run at Liz, who was intent on what she was doing and didn’t see her coming.

  Something crazy happened. Liz’s left hand lashed out and knocked Grace head over heels. Grace was already stabbing out with the shank when the blow connected. The blade grazed Earnshaw’s side, low down, but then Grace was on her back and the shank was rolling away across the floor.

  Jess watched it happen – through dimming eyes, but still she knew. It wasn’t Earnshaw who was responsible for that lightning defence. It was Naseem Suresh playing tail gunner. Naz in Jess’s mind had only ever been a tourist. In Hannah Passmore’s, a burglar. In Earnshaw’s mind, she fitted like a piece of jewellery or a musical instrument into the case that was made to protect it. She was comfortable there. And she had the run of the place.

  Grace tasted blood and raised her hand to explore her split lip – spreading a whole lot more blood, most of it Jess’s, across her lower face.

  Earnshaw turned to find out what her left hand was doing. She saw Grace sitting on the floor a few feet away. Saw the fallen shank, and Moulson on the bed with blood still welling sluggishly from her opened throat.

  “What?” Earnshaw croaked. “What’s happening? Naz, was that you?”

  Yeah, said Naz. Oh baby, I’ve got something else to show you. It’s gonna hurt you, but you need to see it. You too, Jess.

  Another vision blinded Jess and deafened her, dragged her away from herself. This time she wasn’t sorry to leave.

  The ballroom again. Naseem elbowing her way through an indifferent crowd, anxious to avoid being seen.

  Hurrying along one of the lower corridors.

  Ducking into a shower room. Hiding in one of the cubicles, pressed flat against the tiles as though she wanted to sink into them. She peered through the gap in a plastic curtain, making sure she hadn’t been followed.

  But she had. Three women stepped in out of the corridor, their movements unhurried and casual. Two were strangers. The last one closed the door, then turned and put on a perfunctory smile. “Come on out, Naz. I just want to talk to you.” It was Harriet Grace.

  Grace’s grim-faced bodyguards – clearly the Earnshaw and Big Carol of these olden days – took hold of Naseem and held her in place. She was a child again in their grip, just as she had been in Earnshaw’s embrace. One of the two had an arm around her throat. Each of them held an arm, and had a leg hooked around one of Naseem’s legs, locking them at the knees. They’d made themselves into a human torture frame.

  Grace took something from the pocket of her tracksuit. Jess, still watching this scene from a queasy, bodiless perspective, recognised it at once because it was the same shank that Grace had just used on her: a workmanlike tool made from the metal hinge of a door, honed to an exquisite edge and embedded in a slightly tapering piece of wood that might once have been a drumstick.

  “So,” Grace said, “you wanted to have a conversation, is that right?”

  “If you touch me, Lizzie will kill you.” Amazingly, Naseem sounded arrogant as well as scared – as though she thought she had some kind of immunity that protected her even here. “You should drop this, Grace, before you—”

  Grace put the shank to Naseem’s cheek. She incised a short line there, the tip of the blade grazing the edge of Naseem’s eyeliner. A red teardrop trickled down from Naseem’s eye – which widened as she realised she wasn’t invulnerable after all.

  Earnshaw gave a bellow of anguish and tore herself free from the vision, in good time to see Grace crawling across the floor towards the fallen shank.

  Liz got there first. Her hand clamped down on Grace’s wrist and held it, an inch or two short of the weapon it was groping for. Grace looked up, and when her gaze met Liz’s, something sudden and silent passed between them. A renegotiation.

  Grace lost that battle, much to her amazement, but she tried it on anyway. “I made you,” she reminded Liz, through clenched teeth. She tried to pull her hand free, but couldn’t move it even an inch against Liz’s implacable grip. “I picked you up
when you were falling apart. The life you’ve got now – you owe that to me!”

  “Yes,” Liz agreed. Her voice was hoarse, breathy, full of jagged edges. “I owe you that. And what you took away from her, Grace. From both of us. That’s what you owe me.”

  Grace lunged for the shank with her other hand, but Liz kicked it away.

  Grace tried to get her thumb up into Liz’s eye, but Liz dislocated her arm, slowly and remorselessly twisting it out of its socket.

  Jess saw very little of what happened after that. She was dying, her throat filling up with blood and her mind emptying.

  But she caught the gist.

  97

  Jess felt strong, gentle hands lifting her to her feet. Drawing her into an embrace that was warm and welcoming but stranger than anything she’d ever felt. It didn’t begin or end at her skin. It was like being hugged by the sun.

  She surrendered to the joy of it and to the sudden release from her body’s many pains. She knew that the reason they were gone was because her body was gone. She was dead.

  She pulled back at last, but only so she could look at Naseem face to face. It was the first time they had ever met like this, but they knew each other so well.

  Naz had a scar on her chin, and a pitting of rough skin on one cheek, just as she had when she was alive. But when she smiled, as she did now, these blemishes fell below the horizon of Jess’s attention. It was like the alchemy of her own ruined face, but in reverse. Naz’s smile joined the dots of her features into a whole that was unexpectedly beautiful.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey,” Jess muttered. She raised her hand to check that her throat was whole. It was reassuring to find that she had both, a hand and a throat, to a reasonable level of resolution. She seemed to have made the transition into death pretty well. But then she’d had a lot of practice.