Pretty Little Dead Things (20 page)

  The café was a few hundred yards up the slight rise, and if you didn't know it was there you could easily miss it. There was no sign above the door, the windows were dark and hung with heavy net curtains, and the front door was nondescript enough to suggest that the building was a residential property rather than a quaint little eatery.

  I opened the door and walked in – glad that it was not locked. The counter was at the back of the dining room, and a short slim man wearing too much hair gel was busy with a coffee machine that made noises like a cat choking on a fur ball. He had his back turned towards me, and the sound of the machine was so loud that I decided to wait until he noticed me. Several tables were littered around the room, all set for lunch with plain white tablecloths and simple table settings.

  In one corner sat a young couple sharing a pizza. The girl had blue streaks in her shoulder-length dark hair and a ring through her nostril, while the boy wore a smart business suit. This odd couple were feeding each other from a huge central plate, their eyes locked onto one another's face. The only other customer was an older man in a long raincoat who sat near the toilets drinking white wine. There was no food at his table, but two empty carafes sat before him, and the third was already halfway dead.

  "Help you?" The man behind the counter was now looking at me, a crooked smile on his thin dark-skinned face. I had not even been aware of the coffee machine going silent.

  "Table for one, please."

  "Sit anywhere, sir. We're quiet today. Can I get you a drink?" He came out from behind the counter, stepping off the box that he obviously kept there, and I was surprised to realise that he was little over five feet tall, even in his Cuban heels. "Here all right?" he pointed to a table, dragging his arm through the air in what he clearly thought was a dramatic gesture.

  "That's fine," I said, and took a seat.

  "Drink?"

  "I'll have a large glass of house red, please."

  The man produced a menu from I don't know where and slipped it onto the table in front of me, then he skipped back behind the counter, hopped back onto his box, and began to pour my drink. He was humming a little tune under his breath as he worked, and I could not help but smile. He brought my wine and took out a little pad and pencil, raising his eyebrows as I tried to decide what I was hungry for.

  I ordered a seafood pizza and sat back to wait for the food to be prepared. The man disappeared out the back, where the kitchen was located, and I heard him talking to someone who I assumed must be the chef. They laughed together, a comfortable sound that I found relaxing after the stress of the last few days, and the man did not reappear right away.

  I sipped some wine. It was marvellous: plummy and spicy and soporific, as good red wines should be.

  I thought about what Byron Spinks had said as I waited. His message had been chilling and once again opened doors in my psyche that I was not quite ready to step through – not again. I closed my eyes and wondered who "They" might be, and if they were as dangerous as they sounded. Spinks obviously thought so; he'd been terrified when I left the little interview room. Terrified and somehow distant, as if his mind was elsewhere and his body could not quite catch it up.

  "I wouldn't worry about him."

  The voice came from out of nowhere, and at first I thought that it was inside my head. But when I opened my eyes he was sitting there, opposite me, his hands laid out flat and unmoving on the table and his dark eyes staring right at me. Mr Shiloh; the one man I had not expected to bump into today.

  "Pardon me?" I tried to remain calm, pretending that this kind of thing was perfectly natural and not really very shocking at all. The air shimmered around him, as if reality was trying to come apart. He had stepped through a fold, a kink between different states of being, but not in the same way as a ghost. Ghosts get lost, they lose their way; Mr Shiloh was here for a specific purpose and could seemingly move through these metaphysical gaps at will.

  "I said not to worry about Spinks. We'll take care of him." His smile was hideous, more like a leer. His plastic face shone greasily under the fluorescent lights and his hands did not move from the table. He was wearing the same dark suit – or another, identical one – as last time I'd seen him, but this time the T-shirt under the jacket was grey. Like the prison walls; like the sky when it threatens rain.

  "What are you doing here?" I kept my voice low, calm. The couple in the corner began to giggle, but when I turned around they were silent, stony, and glaring at me. The old man in the corner shifted in his seat, but when I flicked my gaze across at him he was motionless.

  "Fascinated, aren't you?" Mr Shiloh's voice held no trace of an accent. The words were dry and clipped, as if he was reciting them from a sheet of paper. He looked bored, vaguely disinterested, and the only reason I knew he was talking to me was because those dark unblinking eyes never left my face.

  And that was another thing: the blinking, or lack of it. I'd been with him for a little under five minutes and he was yet to blink. What kind of person doesn't blink every few seconds? It's impossible not to blink; nature demands that we continually moisten our eyes in this way.

  But Mr Shiloh did not blink. I doubted very much that he even breathed.

  "Fascinated by what?" Still I managed to maintain the illusion of calm.

  "By me; by Them." I knew he didn't mean the other customers in the café – although I was indeed interested to know if they were with him or if I was simply imagining that they were acting strangely. No, he meant the same Them that Byron Spinks had been so afraid of.

  The man who'd taken my order still hadn't come back into the front of the café. I wondered if he was in on this, too, or if Mr Shiloh could somehow control people's actions, make them move a little bit slower than usual, or force them to carry on a conversation that they might otherwise have ended five minutes before. There was power in this man; I could sense it. I just didn't know what kind of power it was, or what its source might be.

  I stared at Mr Shiloh, taking him in properly for the first time. The other two occasions I had seen him, I'd been taken unawares and not had the opportunity to study him, to examine the features that now sat before me, immobile and unknowable as those carved upon an Easter Island statue.

  The first thing I noticed was that he had no eyebrows. The fact had not registered before; I'd just known there was something peculiar about his face, beyond the plastic complexion. Nor did he have any trace of stubble. His skin was too smooth, hairless. Staring at him, I failed to detect even the slightest hint of the normal pores that mark the human face. He did indeed look false – like an oversized doll. His hands, on the table, large as they were, also looked all wrong, rubbery; like the hands of an old Action Man doll I used to play with as a child. I imagined that if I were to reach out and grab one of his fingers, bending it back as far as it would go – way beyond snapping point – the finger would simply flick back into place when I let it go. He looked… undamagable. That's the only word I can think of to describe it, and it probably isn't even a proper word.

  Consensual reality, but on an individual scale: the ability to make things so by the relatively simple act of belief. If Mr Shiloh believed that he could bend his body back into shape, then who was I to argue?

  "Who are you?" At last my voice began to betray unease. I had to force the words out, as if they were large lumps stuck in my throat.

  He smiled. He smiled and it was vile, perverted, like the grin of a father before he penetrates his own daughter: a dead, decayed expression that was almost enough to make me vomit. I coughed into my fist, trying to quell the nausea flooding my system.

  I looked at my wine glass and saw that it was now filled with blood – there were even small chunks of tissue floating near the surface, and what looked like part of a human ear, possibly the lobe.

  It was like a mockery of the Catholic mass:
drink my blood,
eat of my flesh…

  "Who are you?" I whispered it this time, as if the answer – when it finally came – would be too fearful to hear; as if the question itself was a form of blasphemy.

  "Oh, I'm just a fellow pilgrim travelling the road to enlightenment." There was a note of humour in his voice that was, in many ways, even worse than the plague-ridden smile.

  "Mr Shiloh… that isn't your real name. Who are you? What are you?"

"You can just call me the Pilgrim," he said, smiling again.

I didn't know what to say.

  "You got my message, I take it. A rather dramatic way of getting it across to you, I know, but so much fun. Such acts relieve the boredom of being down here among the meat, and I'm all for relieving the boredom."

  Still I could muster no response.

  "Its okay, Thomas, you don't have to speak – not this time. We will have time aplenty to talk, and next time we meet I'm sure you'll have a lot more to say. Perhaps then I'll have more to show you. Just be aware that we have been watching you, and we have been waiting. We've nudged you occasionally across the years, just to make you travel in the right direction, but know ye that enlightenment is close at hand." He let out a soft chuckle, barely there at all. He was having so much fun. "Sooner or later we'll open our hand and show you what we are holding there, glowing like enchanted gold in the palm. Until then, I bid you bon appetite, and hope that you enjoy the rest of the show."

  Something strange happened as he stood out of his chair and at first I couldn't quite grasp what it was. As he raised himself up to his full height, looming upwards rather than standing in any kind of natural way, his hands remained flat on the tabletop, his arms stretching as he pushed himself up and away from the table. Those hands were still there as he headed for the door; I could not take my eyes off them. Then, finally, just as the door to the café opened, the hands lifted from the smooth table cloth and he looked the same as he had before.

  Instantly and blissfully unaware, as if he had only been gone for a few moments, the man from behind the counter arrived with my meal. The pizza was large and flat, with a nicely browned crust, but the stuff on top – the melted cheese, bright red tomato sauce, mussels and prawns and squid – looked like something dredged up dead and decaying from the ocean floor.

…drink my blood, eat of my flesh…

  I paid my bill and left, surging out into a day that now felt tainted. There was no sign of the Pilgrim – the being that I now suspected might be my self-appointed nemesis. Things seemed to have returned to what we like to call normality, and the streets were filled with people who, whatever they did to delay the moment, would die some day soon.

  Every face I saw hid the shape of a skull, and every skull was a shell encasing nothing but empty air.

There is an old Biblical proverb that states "in the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is king". I've never agreed with that way of thinking. To me, the experience of being the only one able to see that which everyone else around you cannot, even if you are only capable of half-glimpses, is terrifying.

  It's my life; it's how it feels to be me.

  In the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is always on the verge of losing his mind, because the things he sees and the company he keeps are almost unbearable…

  The early evening rush hour was starting in earnest, so I stayed away from the main drag, wondering why I hadn't simply gone home after the prison visit. Deep down, I knew the answer to that question: Ellen was in the city, and for some reason I wanted to stick close to her location. There was no real threat to speak of – no one had attacked her, or even mentioned her name – but still I felt that I should remain close at hand in case any trouble started.

  There was also another reason, and it had taken me longer than it should have to even consider it as an option. It had been a long time since I last called in to see Elmer Lord, and a visit was long overdue.

  If anyone could give me more information on Spinks's tattoo, it was Elmer. The man was an expert tattooist, a part-time mystic and practitioner of holistic and other alternative remedies. He had even been known to climb into the ring for the occasional boxing bout. Elmer held a degree in psychology that he had never told anyone about but me, and I was certain that he possessed other qualifications he had mentioned to nobody. A true renaissance man, Elmer had been inking me for as long as I could remember – he had designed and drawn all of my tattoos, and knew the intimate story behind each one.

  Elmer had also given me my very first tattoos, the ones that I could now hardly bear to look at. I had gone to him in shame and told him what I had done, then described what I wanted to mark the occasion, and rather than judge me he simply got out his needles and his ink and he began to tattoo me. During that first session, he revealed to me the power that can be summoned by and held within certain designs placed upon the human body – and when I asked him to design something to protect me, he nodded, then got out his pad and began to sketch.

  Elmer's new studio – Lord of Ink – was located down near the Playhouse, so I about-faced and began to make my way down to the bottom of the hill, moving in a direction roughly parallel to the busy Headrow. The back streets were much quieter, and the people I saw there were in less of a hurry to get wherever it was they were going. Indeed, some of them were clearly going nowhere at all, just milling about in search of something, but even they probably couldn't tell you what that thing was. Killing time; winding away the hours until something happened to change their lives.