Pretty Little Dead Things Read online

  She weeps for the world, I think. But that isn't right. Nobody weeps for anyone but themselves.

  "Please sit down next to me, Mr Usher. I think it might be the best place for you, close to the source of grief, as it were." Again that empty smile: there is nothing behind it, just another row of smiles – a mirror-maze of twisted expressions – each one as vacuous as the first.

  Nurse Haggard has gone quiet. Her task is done. She sits in a high-backed chair against the wall and takes a paperback book from her pocket. She recites softly from the book, but I cannot hear what she is saying. It must be a prayer or incantation, or a collection of such. Whatever she is saying, it sounds creepy and I know that it is part of what we are about to try to do.

  Again the urge to flee almost overcomes me, but I suck it up, swallow it down. Push it away.

  I sit down next to Mrs Taylor. She places a chubby hand on my knee and squeezes. I feel sick, yet still, again, there is that sickly sense of arousal. She licks her lips. I close my eyes. When I open them again she is no longer smiling.

  "I don't know what I'm doing here, but Nurse Haggard seemed to think that I might be able to help. I'm new to this… I'm not sure what it is I'm capable of, or how to control it, but I do know that I saw something a few nights ago and I have no doubt that I will see something again. I just don't know where or when that will happen."

  Of course I have doubts: about everything.

  Mrs Taylor nods her big head. Her greyish hair moves independently from the rest of her, like a small animal attached to her scalp. "I know all about you, Mr Usher. I know what happened. I've been to so many so-called mediums and mystics that I feel as if I've worn myself out on the afterlife. None of them have been able to contact my David, but a few of them have faked it."

  "I see." The pain, the loss, the desperation, is written all over her smooth, fat face. I realise now that her smile is not just empty: it is dead. I wish that she would stop saying my name; its overuse is somehow redefining my identity, diminishing it as we speak.

  I realise that this woman – this grief-stricken shell – knows more about my situation than I do. She is certain that I will see something, and that certainty bleeds through her skin and seeps into the room, where it latches onto me.

  "All I ask is that you give it a try. Just empty your thoughts and try to let my David in. If he's here, he'll come to you – I'm sure of it. If not, I can go back to my grief and stop spending all my money on frauds and bastards." Once again she squeezes my knee; then her hand slips up my thigh, moving towards my crotch. I hold my breath, expecting the worst but her fingers linger at the very top of my thigh and go no further. "If my David doesn't want to speak to me, I can put everything behind me and try to get a life back. Do you understand, Mr Usher?"

  "I think so." I can only hope that I did not understand her correctly. The thought of this woman naked suddenly fills my head, and it repulses me.

  Nurse Haggard gets up and turns out the lights. The only source of illumination is now provided by what little light bleeds through the net curtains from the street beyond. Shadows curl and shudder; the walls bow inward; the ceiling lowers, trapping us there, in the dark. The room is different now, an alien place. I feel as if I am leaving the familiar world behind.

  "I'll do my best for you, Mrs Taylor."

  "That's all I ask," she says, lifting her hand from my thigh, but slowly, so that her little finger brushes the crotch of my pants.

  I try to rid my mind of all thoughts but those of the woman and her son, who I have never seen. I do not ask for a photograph. I do not need to know what he looks like. My new, rapidly improving instincts tell me that if his spirit is here – or indeed any part of it; a splinter, perhaps – he will make himself known to me. I know then what I hadn't even guessed at before: I am like a magnet for wraiths and phantoms, and as soon as they become aware of my presence they come to me, drawn by whatever it is I carry inside me like a light that never goes out – only dims, remaining visible in the outer darkness.

  Blackness moves behind my eyes, an ocean of nothingness. I reach out to him, to this spirit, but nothing responds. I sense other movement somewhere in the house, on the upper floor, but it is not a young man. It is an old woman – ancient, really. A woman with no teeth and a bald head, who was once dragged out of this house and killed in the street by a mob who despised her for the things she had done to their children.

  I feel sick with horror; the shabby spirit enjoys my discomfort.

  Hastily I leave the ghost of the old woman behind and mentally grope elsewhere in the darkness, looking for someone else. There is no one; even the bald old woman has gone now, either unwilling or unable to communicate with me.

  "I can't… not here. Nobody here. I'm sorry." But I am not sorry, I am relieved.

  Then, gradually, I begin to sense a blank spot under the house, a place where there is no kind of energy at all. It is like a huge gaping pit, unseen yet clearly there, beneath the foundations, and it swallows whatever energies are close by. Something stirs within the depths of that pit. Not a ghost, but something else. Like a lumbering patch of nothing; a lacuna. Like a blank giant waking from a deep sleep, this gap, this interstice, reaches out towards me, displacing the earth and the air and hungry for my energy.

  I feel afraid.

  I feel sick.

  I feel… I feel… I feel but I don't want to feel. Not this. Not anything.

  Then, just as I am about to scream, it halts.

  Nothing moves.

  Nothing stirs.

  Nothing.

  "David?"

  I open my eyes and see a thin figure standing before me, head bowed, arms hanging boneless at his sides. He is a black shape sliced from the night: a ragged cut-out who has been shoved forward to please us. That's exactly how it feels: as if this presence has been sent to appease us – to appease me, or whatever power I carry. It is a peace offering, a desperate gift to ensure that I leave without stirring up any more trouble.

  But trouble is the last thing I want.

  "That's not David," says Mrs Taylor, her pitch rising even more than is normal. When she begins to scream I think that she might never stop.

  The dark figure blends back into the darkness of the room, and by the time Nurse Haggard has turned the lights back on there is nobody there, just a stain on the carpet where something has stood and burned the evidence of its being into the fibre.

  I am a magnet for ghosts. As they become aware of my presence they come to me, drawn by whatever it is I carry inside me.

  I don't want trouble… I don't want anything. Not this.

  I am a dark magnet: a dark attractor. Pulling forth whatever spirits are near, be they good, bad or merely indifferent to the theatrical posturing of the living.

  But magnets are uncontrollable. They attract whatever nature intends. Place a magnet on a table scattered with iron filings and you cannot pick and choose which ones will be attracted. It draws them all towards it, including those damaged or spoiled.

  Including the broken ones.

  This is the first time I start to consider that what I obviously have, what I possess, may not in fact be a gift, and that it might not necessarily be a tool for good. Like most things in life, its nature is at best ambiguous, and I need to make a decision regarding how to proceed.

  I wonder, not for the last time, if I am strong enough to even begin to pursue the limits of my own darkness.

  TEN

  It was late when we finally left the pub, and I was rather unsteady on my feet. I didn't like the way I was constantly turning to alcohol lately. It seemed like a step backwards, a step I no longer wanted to take. The air was damp but still there was no real sign of rain. There were very few people on the streets; they were all either home by now or perhaps en route to their own or someone else's beds, or had more likely moved on to late bars and nightclubs.

  Still the occasional figure staggered across the road ahead of us, or dodged out of an adjacent side stree
t. I heard the sound of glass breaking. Somebody laughed, long and loud, but I had no idea where they might be. There was a slight air of menace, as there usually is in every big city, but beneath it I sensed something more – a strange churning savagery that seemed to be drawing near.

  Filings drawn to a magnet.

  "This is me, then," said Ellen as we stood in the wash of light that spilled through the hotel doors. Her dark blonde hair was in disarray and the skin around her eyes was still puffy, but she looked beautiful. She clasped my hand, unable or unwilling to let it go.

  "So we'll meet outside the community centre tomorrow at eleven?" I tightened my grip on her small, thin hand. Skin and bone: easily broken.

  "Thank you, Thomas. You always were such a good friend, and…"

  "And what?"

  "And more. So much more."

  There came a moment then, as we leaned into each other and the streets and the buildings receded, that it would have been such a simple thing to turn back the clock to a time when my family were still alive and I had betrayed them with Ellen. It would have been the easiest thing in the world, but just because something is easy that doesn't make it the right thing to do. I drew back slightly, just an inch or two, but it was enough to break the spell. Traffic noise returned to fill the gap we had created, and the bass-heavy throb of music in some nearby club matched the beat of my heart.

  "Goodnight, Thomas," she said, turning away yet still reluctant to relinquish her grip on me. Our hands were the final thing to part, and as I watched her climb the steps and enter the hotel it was all I could do to stop myself from following her inside. The Eastern European women were still there, warming the sofa in the foyer, and one of them stared at Ellen as she passed, heading for the stairs rather than the lift. I noted the hunching of her shoulders, the tension contained within her posture, and for a moment I wished that I had acted upon that momentary weakness of the will.

  I slowly made my way along Wellington Street, walking in the hope that I might rid myself of the state of arousal that was fogging my brain. There was a taxi rank outside the train station, in the large bus terminus, and at this hour the queue would be short.

  It took several moments for me to realise that I was being followed, and not with great subtlety. I became aware of the sound of footsteps matching my pace, and of the sense of being stalked. Not wanting to turn around and draw attention to the fact that I knew they were there, I crossed the road, glancing both ways for approaching traffic and so that I could catch a sly glimpse of the footpath to my rear.

  There were five of them, walking in unison, and each wore a black hooded sweatshirt. The hoods were pulled up to cover their heads and the drawstrings pulled tight to mask their faces. All I could see through the small gap at the front of each hood was a circle of blackness. No features were visible; I could not even make out the shape of a skull beneath the dark material, just soft looking oval mounds.

  I increased my pace, stepping as quickly as I dared without giving myself away. My initial instinct was to assume that these kids were muggers, simply wandering the city at night to pick on drunks and lone women making their way home. This gave way, though, to a more sinister suspicion. It was the fact that the hoods gave only on to darkness that made me realise that what was following me might not be entirely human. They may have been human once, perhaps even recently, but now they were something else altogether. Not ghosts or wraiths, but creatures akin to those things: entities bound to darkness. I could feel it in the air that shimmered between us, taste it in the drizzle that strained to fall from grey and bloated clouds, hear it in the troubling song of distant emergency sirens.

  Something had sought me out, and this time it was not prepared to take no for an answer.

  The five hoodies crossed the road behind me, making not a sound as they followed. This alone was enough to confirm my suspicions: a group of normal kids would be jeering and acting in as threatening a manner as possible. These things were as silent as the spaces between the stars.

  I crossed to the other side of the road, pausing for a moment while a black taxi cruised past me in the darkness. The driver was staring dead ahead, but the passenger – a slim girl with buzz-cut hair and smeared eye makeup – turned to watch the kids as they mirrored my movements. The taxi sped up and went through a red light. The girl's face stared at me out of the rear window, nothing more than a pale blur behind the glass.

  The street had become unusually quiet and empty. It wasn't right, not in the centre of a big city at this hour. There should have been at least a few pedestrians – night-time drinkers and last-gasp revellers – patrolling the footpaths, but the only other people in the vicinity were the hoodies at my heels.

  Just as I had the train station in sight, another group appeared, this time up ahead of me. They stopped a few hundred yards away, effectively blocking my route to the station. They all wore the same apparel: dark jeans and training shoes, dark grey or black hoodies pulled up to obscure their faces.

  I cut along a side street, knowing that it would eventually lead me to the station. Footsteps sounded like clapping hands behind me, a round of applause to reward my decision to go off the main drag and enter an even less populated area. I started to run, not caring now that they saw my panic. I didn't want this; it wasn't fair.

  My tattoos were writhing on my back and arms like snakes. They were agitated, trying to tell me that these things in pursuit were far worse than ghosts – possibly worse than anything I'd ever encountered. The streetlights flickered around me, threatening to plunge me into complete darkness. Lights in the surrounding buildings went out, small squares of black appearing in the walls of flats and offices which offered no shelter.

  Drizzle fogged the air, picking the right moment to turn into proper rain. The pavement seemed to pitch upwards and sideways, trying to throw me off its back like a bucking bronco battling its rider. My throat was tight; my lungs began to ache. My terrible fitness levels were causing me to stumble, and I almost went flat on my face in the road. I prayed for a car to appear – any kind of vehicle, as long as it contained someone I could reach out to, showing them how afraid I was.

  The footsteps behind me sounded closer, but I did not look back. I could not look back.

  Then, finally, I saw the lights at the back of the train station. The road inclined towards this relative sanctuary, and despite the fact that I was almost gagging from the exertion I ran faster, spurred on because I was almost within touching distance of safety.

  Safety. As if there is ever such a thing as safety.

  The second group of hoodies – or perhaps yet a third group – appeared at the crest of the hill, stopping at the railings of a large, detached office building. They leaned against the gate posts, staring at me. Some of them had their hands stuffed into the large frontal pockets of their hooded sweatshirts; the others held their fists at their sides, as if readying for a fight. Still I could not make out a single face. Dark openings leered at me, and as I stopped running, trapped on all sides, I suddenly realised that the last thing I wanted to see was whatever the darkness concealed.

  The group began to move down the hill towards me, walking in a line; a slow procession of dark urban monks. I glanced over my shoulder, at my original pursuers, and saw that they too had slowed to a measured pace and were advancing in a similar fashion up the steep incline.

  I stared in panic at the darkened buildings around me, hoping for a single light. There were none. Nobody was home. Or if they were, they were not open to visitors. From the bottom of the hill a surge of darkness began to rise, coming up behind the marching hoodies. The streetlights went off, one by one, that terrible darkness ascending slowly towards my position halfway up the hill. It was like a vast cloud of blackness, gathering speed now, eager to reach my position, and soon it engulfed the figures which were even now advancing upon me.

  I fell to my knees, vomit rising in my throat. My tattoos were burning, as if hot brands were being applied to my skin. I
had never felt anything like it before, and the realisation almost broke me. What were these things, and what did they represent? Was the encroaching darkness their master, or did they command it like so many dark lords with a pack of hunting hounds?

  When I looked up I was surrounded. The darkness hung back, behind the figures, so that all I could see was them, staring down at me from behind their sweatshirt hoods. The rest of the scene – the road, the side streets, the suddenly distant station – had all vanished, as if I'd been transported to another place entirely. All I could see of their forms before me was the hands that hung out of the sweatshirt sleeves, and they were thin, clawed, and almost skinless. The hands of old men, or newborn babies: creased, papery flesh, bloodless and with the blue bulge of withered veins showing close to the surface. The fingernails were half as long as the fingers they grew from. And they too were white, bleached of all colour, like shards of exposed bone.