Dead Bad Things (16 page)

  "OK." She shivered; an involuntary reaction. The heating was off. The house was cold. But this physical reaction was not a result of the low temperature, or the inactive radiators. "I want to know. As much as I can."

  "Meet me tomorrow morning, then, at ten thirty. I'll even buy you brunch. Bring two grand and I'll tell you what I know. It ain't much – God knows, he kept his cards close to his chest, that fucker – but it's more than you have." He paused here, but not for long. "You're a copper too, aren't you?"

  Sarah nodded, slowly. There were no secrets, not really. "How did you know?"

  His sudden laughter took her by surprise. She pulled the phone away from her ear, wincing at the volume and intensity of the unpleasant sound. Finally, once it had faded, she returned the receiver to the side of her head and listened. The line crackled, surged, crackled again.

  "Because the apple never falls far from the tree, love. You might think it does, but you'd be wrong. Some things are in the blood. They run deep."

  Her ears were ringing. There was a pressure building inside her skull, a hard, dense shape growing, building, and forming like a tumour. "What do you mean by that?" The pressure grew. It was immense.

  "See you in t' morning, love. Meet me where your dad used to – if you're who you say you are you'll know exactly where I mean. Bring the money, or I'm leaving."

  The money wasn't a problem. Her father had left her well provided for with his slush fund, and she wanted nothing from him. It would be a pleasure to give some of it away. He could have the lot, if that's what he wanted: every fucking penny.

  She held onto the phone for a few moments, her grip tightening on the plastic casing. She tried to hear something behind the white-noise crackle of static, but there was nothing to be heard. Just dead noise. The sound of emptiness. No matter how hard she tried to convince herself that there were voices wailing, trying to be heard, there weren't. She was wrong. She was always, always wrong.

  Sarah crossed to the armchair and collapsed into it, sliding her legs over the padded armrest and sitting sideways. She was back on day shift tomorrow, and would no doubt pay the price for losing so much sleep. The pressure in her head had dimmed, the bones no longer threatening to break apart. She didn't know anything – all she had were a few photographs, some garbled rubbish from her mad mother and a cassette tape. She reached down, into her bag, and took out the tape.

  
D.T.

  
1984

  It meant nothing to her. Initials. A date. What did it signify? The handwriting was certainly her father's, there was no doubt about that. But what had he been trying to indicate upon the grubby sticker, and what was recorded on the tape?

  She struggled to her feet and went to the coffee table, where she'd placed one of his old tape recorders next to the whisky bottle. Sarah only owned CDs, so she'd been forced to rake around in a cupboard to locate the ageing machine.

  Her father had always loved his music, and had always created mix tapes, consisting of his favourite songs. There was a shelf downstairs, in his cellar office, which contained nothing but similar cassettes with only a year scratched on each sticker to identify the contents: collections of songs from that particular year, with no track listing. After every tenth cassette there was another one, made up of his favourite songs from the previous decade.

  The tapes went back to the 1940s. Obviously, the early ones were retrospective, put together long after the fact, but it was just another indication of her father's obsessive pathology.

  Even music was not safe from his madness.

  She slipped the tape into the machine and pressed play. There was a lengthy gap before the first track began – inexpert, amateurish – and she frowned. He was usually so careful, so
exacting,
in everything he did. Why the long delay?

  The first track was by Aztec Camera (or so her memory suggested), and Sarah was disappointed to realise that it was a song she actually liked. She hated having anything in common with her father, even something as superficial as a pop tune.

  It took her three or four songs to realise what was wrong with the recording.

  Just as she'd noticed at the beginning of the compilation, the gaps between each track were slightly too long. It didn't sit right, not with what she knew about her father and how he operated. He would never make such a shabby mistake.

  She reached out and turned off the tape. Then she hit the rewind button.

  Darkness bled through the windows; the meagre light from the desk lamp did nothing to hold it at bay. To Sarah the shadows felt like a subtle invasion, as if something unnatural were creeping up on her, waiting for her to acknowledge its presence in the room. But still she made no move to turn on the main lights. She was far too engrossed with the task at hand, and nothing could swerve her from her course. Again, she despised the parallels between herself and her father. They were both single-minded bastards, refusing to stop until the job was done.

  She listened to the odd pause at the start of the tape seven times before she heard the sound. It was small, slight, barely even audible. So she turned up the volume, pushing it up right to its limit. The tape's hiss and crackle almost covered up the sound, but not enough for her to make out that it was a voice.

  A voice she knew.

  Her father's voice.

  "
Danny Tate. Nineteen-eighty-four
."

  Written on the cassette tape:

  
D.T.

  
1984

  Of course; now that she'd heard the name and the date, the connection was obvious. This tape, it was some kind of soundtrack and her father was whispering an interstitial message, a cipher meant to be decoded only by himself. Did it relate to a case he'd been working on, another investigation with which he had become obsessed? Had he been on the trail of someone, locked in a hidden war against an unseen nemesis? She could imagine him doing this in his spare time: choosing a criminal to become the focus of his obsession.

  Sarah didn't recognise the whispered name at the beginning of the tape, or the year: they meant nothing to her.

  None of it meant anything. Not yet.

 

 

 

 

 
 
 

I was sitting on the threadbare sofa drinking whisky straight from the bottle. After leaving the Rwandan psychic's place, I'd gone over the road to a grubby little off-licence and stocked up on booze. I knew I should be trying my best to remain sober, to work things through in my mind, but the call of the bottle was much too strong, so I filled two blue plastic carrier bags with bottles of the cheapest and strongest stuff I could find.

  Only when I was drunk could I stop myself from caring; somewhere in the depths of oblivion was a place where I could rest, and be unafraid.

  Fear. That was the real problem – or a large part of it.

  I'd spent years trying to convince myself that none of this was scary, that it was just an aspect of the greater map of existence: ghosts, spirits, phantoms, they were all just slivers of us all, roaming lost and confused and slipping between realities like water through cracks in a great damaged jug.

  But that wasn't true. It
was
frightening. In fact, it was terrifying. All of it. The more I experienced, the more afraid I became, and the harder I tried to pretend that I could take it all in my stride, like a man hurrying along a dark alley and keeping his eyes locked straight ahead.

  It was dark outside, and the lights in the house kept flickering. The electrics in grey zones are prone to trickery; the phantoms interfere with the current, making it oscillate, breaking the connection.

  I stared at the main ceiling light. It was surrounded by an original plaster ceiling rose. I wondered if the adjoining houses had the same problem with the electrics, but there was nobody to ask. The council had bought up the neighbouring buildings a couple of decades ago, when some chitty or purchase order had come down the pipe from central government. Most of the houses on this side of the street were empty, near derelict. Boarded windows, security shutters across the doors. Danger signs pasted to the walls, warning of a demolition process that would never happen, not in a million years.

  I lived in a world of lies and half-truths, of pretence and fakery. Nothing was solid; everything shifted all the time, quaking, breaking, and reforming before my eyes. Even reality could not be trusted.

  I glared at the old Bakelite telephone, daring it to ring. If the clockwork voice tried to contact me tonight, I would tell it where to go, and what to do. It could fuck off and fade away into the ether, leaving me in peace.

  The whisky was doing its job. I was beginning to lose interest, to forget that I really did care about this stuff.

  I'd tried to eat a sandwich earlier in the evening, some prepacked crap I'd brought back from the shop. It was supposed to be tuna fish on wholemeal bread but had tasted like cardboard filled with a layer of pulped bone. Gritty. Unappetising. Even the whisky offered more sustenance, at least to my ailing soul.

  The soul: there was something else that couldn't be trusted.

  I slid my legs off the sofa and managed to sit upright. My head was fuzzy; it was a pleasant feeling, that sensation just before you start to get properly drunk. I felt like I could take on the world and win, if only I cared enough to bother.

  I realised that I was giggling. Something in the corner – a shadow within shadows – moved away from the wall. It had too many limbs, and dropped to the floor and sort of scuttled across the room. I turned away, not wanting to see. As long as they left me alone, I would pretend that they weren't really there. The ghosts, and the things that were ghosts of creatures I did not even want to imagine.

  Not all ghosts are human. Some of them – the ones who have become so lost that they will never find their way – are the spiritual remains of other things… things which are
other.

  I drank more whisky. Giggled again. Then I entertained the notion that I was going insane – or perhaps I already had done, months ago when I first encountered the being that went by the name of the Pilgrim and lost the second love of my life in the process.

  But I didn't want to think about him – that fucking Pilgrim. I had sent him away, banished him from my life.

  So instead I thought about loss.

  Everyone I had loved, everything I held dear… I lost it all in the end. There was nothing left to cling to, to hold close to my breast. No warmth; no humanity. No love.

  It took me several seconds to realise that someone was knocking on the front door. The door led straight out onto the street, just beyond a tiny patch of concrete and a low brick wall. It could be anyone, if anyone were foolish enough to wander along this street, and pause outside this house. This haunted house.

  "Go away!" My voice was only slightly slurred. I took another swig of Famous Grouse.

  The knocking sound persisted. Whoever it was meant business. They were not going to leave without a fight.

  Awkwardly, I got to my feet and staggered across the room. The space between sofa and door suddenly seemed to stretch for miles, as if the closer I got the greater the distance became. I closed my eyes, paused, and when I opened them again the room was the same size it had always been.

  A haunted room in a haunted house on a haunted street.

  Through the crinkled glass panes in the front door, I could make out a small, slender figure. I placed my hand on the door, tickled the handle. Then, feeling slightly giddy, I grasped the handle and pulled open the door, revealing the young girl who was standing on the doorstep.

  "Hello," I said, not immediately recognising her. "Can I help you?"

  She was wearing a long green parka that stretched down to just below her knees, and the fur-lined hood was pulled up against the cold to cover most of her face. She was turned slightly sideways, but pivoted to face me when I spoke, and that's when I realised who it was.

  The girl from the psychic's place. Immaculee Karuhmbi's helper. What was her name?

  "Traci," she said, as if she could read my thoughts. "It's Traci. Traci, with an
eye
not a
why
. Remember me?" Her blind eyes burned into me, and I could barely understand what was happening. "
Tee. Are. Ay. See. Eye."

  "Yes. Please, come in." I stepped back, unprepared for such a visit. My hand pushed the door closed as she crossed the threshold, and it felt like I'd let a trickster spirit into my life.

  "I'm sorry to bother you." She shrugged off the hood and then removed the coat. Then, calmly, gracefully – as if she could see so much further and clearer than I ever had – she passed me the coat.

  I reached out and took it, my fingers brushing against her hand. Her cold, cold hand. My mouth went dry. "Take a seat. I'll just hang this up." I went to the staircase and draped her coat over the banister, wondering how long she'd stay. Wanting her to leave. Needing her to linger.

  "Immaculee sent me. She was worried about what happened earlier today. She feels… odd. She feels odd about passing on a message from a voice she's never heard before." She said this as if we were discussing the weather. It was nothing to her: a mere trifle. She even picked at her fingernails, distracted. Her grey eyes were hard and soft all at once. She was beautiful.

  "Believe me, I feel as weird as she does. I haven't followed through on the message. Not yet. I don't really know what I should do with the information." Why was I being so open with this girl? I sat down in the armchair, my hands spread flat against the dusty material.