Pretty Little Dead Things (29 page)

  "About the accident?" She slides into the seat opposite, brushing crumbs from the table.

  "A little," I say, not wanting to tell her the truth: that I have been thinking about her.

  It has been three months since we went to visit Ryan South in his little flat in Luton. We have not been back, but Ellen keeps pushing for it. Things have changed. I am beginning to come to terms with what happened (but never to accept it) and tentative plans are forming. For the first time since Rebecca and Ally's deaths, I allow myself to think that I might just have a future, but am unsure what form that future might take.

  I have Ellen to thank for this. She has given me a push right when I needed it.

  "How are you feeling? I haven't seen you for a couple of weeks. Sorry about that – been busy." She smiles, but it is a small, fragile thing that disappears just as quickly as it surfaces. She looks pale, drawn, as if she has not been sleeping well.

  "I'm… well, I think I'm fine. I don't feel like killing myself anymore, which is a bonus. I've also moved back into the house."

  "I need a coffee. How about you?" She turns around in her seat to signal the waitress, who has by now come back through from the kitchen. The air around her is still moving, but not nearly as much as before.

  "I'm okay," I say, swirling the dregs in my cup. It is my second cappuccino and I think it best not to order a third. I struggle to sleep at the best of times, and more caffeine would be asking for trouble.

  We don't say anything else until Ellen's drink arrives, and then she takes a long draw from the cup before looking me in the eye. "I have some news."

  "Yes," I say. "You mentioned that when we spoke. What is it?" There is a heavy weight in my chest, trying to drag me down. I am expecting something bad but am not sure how bad it might be. Has Ellen somehow guessed the thoughts that have been coalescing inside my head since she took me to Ryan South's place? But no; that is impossible. I don't even have a firm plan, just a series of unconnected thoughts that, when placed together, add up to form something stupid – stupid but undeniably appealing.

  "I've been offered a job in America. Florida. They called me a week ago and I've been dreading telling you since then."

  Somebody drops a glass on the floor and the waitress moves swiftly across the room to clear up the mess. It is the old man with the eye patch, and he seems more upset than he should be at such a clumsy act.

  "I see." I do not see. I don't see anything at all.

  "I applied over a year ago. A friend got me through the door and I had a telephone interview, then they flew me out there. I hadn't heard anything, so just assumed that either the vacancy had been filled elsewhere or cancelled altogether. Then, a few days ago, I got a phone call…" She stops there, looking away. Her eyes are wet.

  "I don't know what you want me to say."

  She turns back to me, her head whipping around to glare right at me. "It's not what I want you to say… it's what I need you to say. And the very fact that you can't fucking say it speaks volumes." She looks down, at the table. Her hands are tearing apart a paper napkin; pieces of white paper lie on the table top like tiny drifts of snow.

  "I…" But there is nothing there. I cannot find the right words – any words.

  "It's never going to happen, is it?" Her voice is close to breaking; I can hear the regret lodged like crumbs of food between her teeth. "The timing is always wrong. It always was wrong, even that night we finally got our act together and fucked."

  Her use of such a coarse term shocks me; I have never seen what we did as fucking. As far as I am concerned, we made love, and that's why I always feel such guilt. A meaningless sex act is easy to forget, but true lovemaking scars you deeper than bodily wounds, and for so much longer.

  "I can't tell you what you need to hear, Ellen. There's too much going on. My family are dead, and I feel somehow as if I'm to blame. I see ghosts everywhere, but never the ones I want to see – never the ghosts of my wife and child." I am crying now, but silently. I clench my hands into fists.

  "You are crippled by guilt, Thomas. Crippled. Guilt about the time we slept together, guilt about their deaths, guilt that you think you should be able to see their ghosts but can't. Have you ever thought that all this might actually be in your head? That maybe the only phantoms stalking you are those created by your unresolved guilt?"

  I lower my head. This is the first time Ellen has ever verbalised any kind of doubt regarding what is happening to me. I have always known that she does not fully believe it, that she is simply keeping an open mind, but to hear those words feels like a physical blow.

  My own doubts were blown away when she took me to see Ryan South.

  The waitress passes our table. The hem of her apron brushes against my forearm and when I look up she is smiling at someone across the room – the man behind the counter, who is calling her over. The air shivers around her, a riot of subtle movement. I can hear nothing but a wind rushing in to fill up the gaps. The waitress moves slowly, each muscle prominent on her legs, her shoulders. She is a machine, a beautiful meat machine designed only for forward motion, never looking back at what she has left behind, heading always towards extinction.

  I am suddenly aware that I am being allowed a glimpse behind the scenes here, but I understand nothing of what I am seeing. The scene looks fragile, like it might come apart at any minute, and I fear for what might happen if, like the glass dropped by the old man, it breaks and shatters into pieces.

  Then all sound returns and I hear the clatter of cutlery, hushed chatter, chair legs scraping across the tiled floor, and Ellen's voice.

  I hear Ellen's voice and she is saying goodbye.

  "I'm sorry. This is for the best. We can't go on like this, turning in silly circles. Me waiting for you to wake up and you punishing yourself for the things you think you've done. It has to end."

  Her face is hard yet brittle, like porcelain.

  "I know. You
should
go. Whatever there is between us, it will always be there, but neither of us can allow ourselves to be tied down by it. You have to make your own choices and I have to make mine. I do thank you, though, for pushing me. If it wasn't for you I'd still be sitting in that caravan, trying to drink myself to death."

  She reaches out across the table and holds my hand. Her fingers are cold when they should be warm. "Just promise me you'll go to see that man again – Ryan South. I really do believe that your salvation lies in contacting him again. You changed after that first time. Things got… well, a little bit brighter. Push it harder, further. Force the issue."

  I nod, stiff and unfeeling. "Don't worry, Ellen, you have my promise. I will see him again." If only she knew the truth – but even I don't know that.

  She stands briskly, without saying anything more, and when she leans across the table to kiss me I feel like holding on to her so that she cannot go anywhere. But I do no such thing. Instead I keep my arms limp at my sides and let her kiss the side of my mouth.

  I close my eyes.

  When I open them again she is gone.

  My friend, my last best chance at redemption: gone, gone, gone…

  At that moment in time, I doubt that I will ever see Ellen Lang again.

  I say her name, like a tiny prayer.

  I speak it again:

  "
Ellen."

Ellen.

  When I opened my eyes I didn't know where I was, or why my vision was so occluded. I strained to see beyond the clammy darkness that hung in tatters before my eyes, but it was impossible. Raising a hand to my face, I rubbed at my eyes and managed to pull away the ashen caul that I found there, clinging to my face like a secondary skin. I spat, wiped my mouth, and rubbed more vigorously to clear the stuff from out of my eyes.

  There was no sign of the hooded youths. Wherever they'd taken Ellen, it seemed that they were long gone by now. It could have been hours ago or it could have been only minutes since she had been snatched. I had no way of knowing which.

  I tried to sit but felt too dizzy to move. The next time I tried, it was easier and my head had just about begun to clear. I blinked but the sky remained dark. I was lying upon a soft mat of black ash and my clothes were covered in drying vomit. I touched my face again – tentatively, now that I was fully awake – and felt the raised areas around my chin and cheeks, the blood that had dried on my skin. There was little pain now because of the adrenaline rush I'd experienced during the fight, but I knew that I would be aching by morning.

If morning ever came.

  "Welcome," said a familiar voice, and when I looked up I saw the Pilgrim standing before me, naked and glistening like plastic under the sickly light of the moon. Mr Shiloh, Matthew Torrent… whatever he called himself. He stared down at me with an amused look on his face, his pale lips locked together in a grim sneer.

  His chest was smooth and unmarked, and like his head it was completely lacking in hair. Again I thought his skin looked rubbery and malleable, as if no matter how hard I hit him he would feel no pain – he would just absorb the blow as he waited for the next one.

  If I threw something at him, the missile would bounce off him like throwing a tennis ball at a wall. If I blew him up with explosives, the separate pieces would simply come together again and reconfigure. If I cut off his arms, legs and head and buried them, he'd carry on moving like a decapitated earthworm.

  As my gaze travelled across his alien form, I saw that he had no nipples. Nor did he possess a navel – which meant, of course, that he could never have been born as other mammals are born: he had never been delivered by a human pregnancy. I'd already suspected that he was not human, and here was the proof.

  A mad thought entered my head: had the Pilgrim been hatched from an egg, or grown in a dish in some cosmic laboratory?

  His thick legs were also totally without hair, and where there should have been genitals was only a smooth expanse of leathery hide. Not a blemish marked the shadowed spot, and somehow this sight was the most horrific of all. He was not like other men; he was not a man at all. Was he even a beast, or simply some kind of conceptual entity that had crawled into our reality through a loophole in the human psyche? Was he just a bitter little homunculus looking for kicks to relieve his dreadful ennui?

  None of it made any sense. Like the ever-changing rules of dream logic, it seemed that the Pilgrim remade himself as he went along, constantly tweaking and tinkering with the rules of his own being.

  "Once again I apologise for our methods, but some rituals are necessary when one is preparing the way. I'm sure you, of all people, understand that – the unique power of the rite, the techniques involved in conjuring certain altered states and atmospheres." He smiled, and once again I was reminded of a shark. His eyes were black and tiny; they seemed to both swallow the light and negate it. His face would have looked more at home cruising through the ocean depths, searching for prey.

  And he was playing with me like a shark tormenting a wounded seal.

  "Where's Ellen?" My breath was thick in my throat. I felt that I could hardly stand, so stayed there on the ground to wait for my strength to return. Right then, it felt like this would never happen – that I would be grounded forever.

  "Ah, the lovely Miss Lang. Quite an interesting relationship you have there. It's been like watching a soap opera all these years." The smile stayed in place, even while he spoke. "Illfated lovers. Most entertaining, I must say."

  "What do you mean, all these years? I don't understand." I gripped the earth with my fingers and tried to push myself up, but it didn't work. I fell back, rooted there.

  "You'll learn, in time. Or perhaps you won't. It means little to me, or to those I serve and who, in turn, serve me." He turned and walked slowly over to the old bonfire, stopping in its stark night-shadow. He had no cleft in his backside, and no buttocks: just an unbroken area of pale rounded flesh.

  He did not eat. He did not shit. He did not live as we live, but existed inside a rarefied bubble of his own devising.

  "I've given you enough clues to start piecing this whole thing together, Mr Usher. I'm afraid that I'm becoming rather bored with the game now, and am forced to escalate events – to rush onward towards the exciting climax." His body swerved, as if he were dancing. His limbs moved as if they were boneless, bending and flexing in the air. He even clapped his hands, but silently.

  I had no idea what he was talking about. I had never seen this man – this thing – before that day at the Blue Viper, when he'd walked out of an upstairs room and left a woman in tears. How could he claim to know me so well?

  "Please… where is she?" There was ash in my throat, but it would not budge. I couldn't even summon enough energy to cough, or to vomit.

  "They have her. The Empty Ones. The MT. Oh, how very clever, don't you think? I do like a good, dramatic name for the bad guys." He spun on his heels, the entire bottom half of his body turning first and then the upper torso corkscrewing around afterwards, creasing the flesh at his waist. His eyes were now black as tar, and their intensity made me feel even weaker than before. There was a great and limitless emptiness at his core, but I could also see that he was the servant – or perhaps the priest – of some other, greater force that so far I had barely even glimpsed.

  A priest: a dark priest preparing the way, clearing a path.

  "Look at it," he said, raising one arm and casting it back, beyond the point that any human shoulder joint could endure. There was no crunching sound of bone breaking; his arm simply bent backwards and stayed locked in place.