Desolation (10 page)

In the living room, Cain sat on the large chest he had brought here with him . . . and he realized that it had moved.

Peter had shoved it into the corner when he moved in two days ago. Like Cain's dreams, it was something that always had to be there but which he would prefer to ignore. And perhaps like the glut of his memories tonight, its contents were weighing it down. He had not opened the chest for years, since before it had been transferred with him to Afresh. The Face and Voice often spoke to him about it, suggesting that by confronting the fears from his past he would be able to tackle them. But he had told them that some things, whether good or bad, are simply best forgotten. They had not pushed him on the matter, but he knew they wanted a look inside, always.

After his father had died, in those long days when Cain was almost alone in the house, he had conspired to lock the shadow in the chest. By then he was more afraid of it than his father, the dreams, even the siren. It terrified him because it knew him so well.

Maybe he had moved it last night. He rapped on the wood, daring the shadow to respond. Silence.

He could remember little of those days alone in the house, his only company the slowly rotting body of his father splayed out on the living room floor. That and the shadow, which haunted his memories as it had stalked that house. He knew that he had sat next to his father for hours on end, constantly expecting the old man to smile and rise, reveal the escapade as yet another experiment performed on his son. He had tried sensory deprivation, emotional withdrawal; perhaps now he was using psychological torture to bring forth the Pure Sight he swore Cain must possess. But the man had remained dead, his form slowly blackening and losing definition, and Cain had eventually been driven away by the smell.

He remembered a fight, something inside himself, a struggle against logic and reason that left little more than a deep, dark absence in his mind. He knew the fight had been real, because the void was real. He could sense its lack of weight. It was a deep void, wide, and sometimes he thought it was so large that it was larger than himself. But that was impossible.

After the fight, something like peace, and the timber chest locked shut with something of that void inside.

And after that his time at Afresh, where people he had never met tried to help him make sense of his life. They said they could help find him a future. To do so, they seemed to spend all their time talking about his past. Maybe they were one and the same, and time itself was the great deceiver.

Cain stood from the chest and moved back into
the hallway, looking again at the black-and-white pictures of treescapes and stormy skies. The tang of cheese in his mouth suddenly made him retch, the aftertaste of the rich fruity wine adding to the effect. He concentrated to keep his stomach contents down, the bland landscapes calming him somewhat, but when he returned to the dining room and smelled the remnants of the mature stilton, he fell to his knees and vomited across the floor. The food and wine came up in great gouts, dripping from his nose. His stomach clenched and spasmed. It felt as though a great hand were closing around him, squeezing and purging him of taste. He puked again. His hands splashed in the mess, but he did not care. Smacking his mouth, he sounded like that mad dog eating something in the dark garage, and he was sick again, just bile this time, colored arterial-red by the wine.

Eventually, the retching calmed and he sat back against the wall, feet drawn up to avoid the puddle of sick. It stank, but the smell seemed to belong somewhere else. He wished he could lose his senses of smell and taste, turn blind and deaf, ridding himself of the curses of perception that his father had been so keen to reveal and destroy. But then the Voice came at him from the dark outside the windows, always waiting there to talk sense.

Whatever he thought he was doing, your father was only hurting you. There'll always be his love there for you to rest on, but remember, Cain, he was
hurting
you. There was no sense to what he was doing, no reason. He kept you there. He kept you alone
.

“I'll always be alone,” Cain whispered, and the dark grinned back.

He sat there until morning, watching his vomit dry into grooves cut into the timber floor by dead Vlad's wheelchair.

When his father died, Cain thought he finally knew what loneliness was. But there was always the shadow.

 

 

 

Cain opened the curtains and watched the sun rise. It emerged above a row of houses, a red smudge that manifested slowly from the polluted air, finally shaking itself free and heading skyward. Red sky in the morning, sailor's warning. The sunrise was startlingly beautiful in a way that he had never been able—or allowed—to express, but the siren remained silent.

In the cool light of day, he began to wonder what he had seen and heard the previous night. Banging, somebody screaming, and then laughter, as if he were being conspired against and tricked. George stumbling through the garden, holding his stomach as if stabbed . . . or perhaps only holding in his own mirth. And the dog in that garage, chewing and snapping and slurping its way into something else's still-warm flesh. It had all felt so staged. So false. So controlled. He had sensed eyes watching over his shoulder all the time, mocking him. The
world laughed in his face as he saw import in everything, sensed significance in the wave of a leaf or shift of a shadow. Last night had been so unreal, like a movie played out in his mind. A movie in which he had played the leading part. He sat on the sofa and shivered, hugging himself close because there was no one else to do it, clasping his own shoulders hard, pressing in his fingernails to make sure he was still awake.

He felt so alone.

Birds sang outside his window, unseen but keen to be heard. Their song was insistently cheerful, even though their chicks may be lying dead beneath their nests or torn apart by a cat. They seemed to be singing for anyone but him.

Cars passed by, ferrying people to work or school or some other important place, leaving him in his flat.

A leaf scraped against the living room window, carried on the breeze, an early death anticipating autumn still several months away. It danced there for a while, tickling the glass as if requesting entry. Cain stood quickly, but the leaf, finding his image wanting, drifted away to some secret demise.

He felt so alone.

There were no noises from within the house, and he wondered whether everyone else had gone out. Either that or they were sitting still and silent in their flats, listening for him. Perhaps they were all together somewhere, wondering how he was going to react to last night's events. That was something he was still unsure of himself.

In the dining room, his vomit had dried on the
floor. He took a few minutes to clean it up, gagging on the stench but managing to not puke again. As he mopped he imagined that he was disposing of last night's experiences, scooping them up and tying the bag so that they could not escape again. Like his dream they lingered on, but also like his dream they were consigned to the parts of his mind where memories and nightmares became inseparable. He knew where he had been and what he had seen—his muddy boot-prints had staggered all over the flat—but he had to find a way to control his fear and confusion.

As a nightmare, last night took on a different shade.

He made himself a strong coffee and then called the Voice.

Hi, Cain
, he said,
I was worried about you last night. You hung up so quickly
.

“Why didn't you call back?” Cain would not have been at home anyway, but he felt suddenly scared at the sense of abandonment.

You're your own man now. You have your own life, and a future. I didn't want to intrude
.

“You wouldn't have been intruding,” Cain said, but he remembered rushing downstairs to follow the injured shape of George, and he wondered just how he could portray any of this to the Voice.

So how are things?

“Fine. They're fine.”

Any dreams?

“Plenty, but then you know that.”

Bad?

Cain took a noisy sip of coffee for the Voice to
hear, giving himself a few seconds in which to think. “Different,” he said at last. “It involved someone else from the flats. Bloke called George. He's already introduced himself, he came to . . .”
Wake me when I was screaming in my sleep
, Cain thought. That was not something he wanted to tell the Voice.

At least you're dreaming about someone else
.

“Yes, and it was nothing to do with the house, or my father.”

Good. Cain, I'm proud of you. You've achieved so much in so little time. You realize that, don't you?

Cain looked around the flat, still smelling the results of last night's nightmare. Outside, the whole world continued without him. “Yes, I suppose so.”

I could talk here for ages, quiz you, ask what you're thinking and what you're doing . . . but I'm happy to leave all that to you. This is your chance now
.

“I'm on my own,” Cain said, his voice flat and emotionless.

That's right. But though I won't question you any more, I want you to know that we're here if you need us. Day or night, any reason, absolutely
anything.
You understand?

“Absolutely,” Cain said. “And I'm grateful. You need to know that.”

I know you are. Take care, Cain
.

“Thanks. I'll speak to you again soon.” Cain hung up.
Grateful . . . grateful for being on my own
. He wondered whether that would have fit in well with his father's ambitions for Pure Sight.

 

Just before midday, he heard the front door two floors below slam shut. He dashed to his living room, looked out, and watched Whistler leave the front garden with Magenta. At least, he thought it was Magenta. She seemed slightly taller today, broader at the shoulder and narrower at the waist. But she was dressed in black jeans and a tight black top, very different attire from the clown costume, and it would have been easy to be mistaken. Perhaps today she was impersonating someone else.

Cain thought of tapping on the glass and waving, but he did not. He and Magenta seemed to hit it off yesterday, and he was keen to see her again. Yet it was her subtly altered appearance that prevented him from catching their attention, not Whistler's presence. She was a slightly different person, and he needed no excuse to feel like a stranger.

Peter had failed to keep his promise to show Cain around the rest of the house and tell him about the other residents. After some prevarication, Cain decided to visit Peter's dilapidated home across the street to ask him a few questions. He needed to know how to use the equipment in the laundry room—the clothes he had worn last night (
nightmare, it was a nightmare
) were dirtied from leaning against walls and kneeling on the grass, and still speckled with his vomit—and he also needed to ask about the scratched door next to his on the landing. There was no flat in there, he was sure—he had seen or heard no sign of anyone living there—but something had wanted in. An attic perhaps,
a storage space squeezed in beside his own flat? He needed to ask Peter these things, and more. And he also wanted some company. The landlord had not put him completely at ease, but if it was a choice between him and Sister Josephine or George, there was no choice at all.

George. If they met again, Cain would have no idea what to say, or even how to look at him. He wondered whether George was home, if his stomach wound was still bleeding, or whether he had simply laughed himself hoarse.

Cain went downstairs. It was a hot, sunny day. He stood in the front garden for a while, listening to the sudden silence from beneath the spiky shrubbery, eager to walk through the gate but compelled to stay. There was something about this garden, a skewing of senses that he could neither explain nor even be certain of. He heard a baby crying from afar, but it could easily have come from behind him, somewhere deep inside the house. A car passed by on the road, sleek and silver, but its growl seemed a second out of sync, as if the sound took too long to pass through the garden hedge.

A woman pedestrian glanced in at where Cain stood watching, nodded uncomfortably, and Cain suddenly knew more than he should. He hated it when it happened like this, but it also gave him a guilty thrill. And even if he had tried, he knew that he would have been unable to avoid the consequence.

The woman was uncomfortable from the sex she'd had last night, a rough, frantic fuck with a man she had known as a friend for a long time. Her
discomfort was both physical and psychological. Her perception of their friendship had changed drastically, plunging it into terminal decline. And yet she had been as keen as he. Cain saw deeper, past the woman's surface concerns to that coal-black knot of guilt that concerned her the most. What he had done to her, what she had let him do, belied the image of the man she had held to be true for many years. It disgusted and excited her in equal measures, and although she felt repelled by the night's perversions, she would welcome him into her bed again at a moment's notice. It would destroy what they had, as surely as hatred slaughters true love. But there was something challenging there now, something rich and risky. Before, the friendship had become simply convenient.

Cain reeled, taking a step back, shocked by the clarity of these alien thoughts. In the split second it had taken for the woman to nod at him, he knew everything, a confused stew of images and senses that made up a whole, coherent story. He could smell the faint whiff of their sex, feel the roughness of the man's hands and the grinding of the woman's teeth, and though none of the visions were clear in themselves, their combination was startling.

More startling was the woman's reaction. She looked away, face reddening, step quickening. She knew that he knew. Cain felt no surprise in her mind. Could guilt blind that easily? Or was this simply the way of things out here in the world? Perhaps out here strangers really
were
simply books to be read.