Pretty Little Dead Things (3 page)

  I closed my eyes and held my breath, summoning the courage to go on, to follow these two people towards the edge of their personal darkness. I think even then I knew what was coming, but I kept on going anyway, stupidly hoping that this would not turn into exactly the kind of situation I'd been running from.

  When I opened my eyes the taxi had already pulled away; I could see the twin sparks of its taillights as they diminished to tiny pinpricks in the dark.

  I glanced over to where the two passengers were now stumbling over a stretch of rough ground towards the shabby heart of the small industrial estate, holding on tightly to each other in case they fell. Hesitating for only a moment, I left the car and followed them over the rubble-strewn ground. I trod softly, as if I were engaged in some kind of guerrilla warfare. I had no idea who else was around, or who they might be meeting here, and the last thing I wanted was to draw attention to my presence on the scene.

  I recalled Baz Singh's words to me earlier that day: "Just follow her, and if she gets into trouble, intervene as best you can. If she gets hurt, it's her own decision, but I don't want her dead." The man was as heartless as one of the many stone statues that littered his home – artful representations of the Hindu gods he no longer believed in yet paid lip service to in the name of commerce. It seemed to me that he probably wanted his daughter to be hurt so that she might be punished for her transgressions, but even he drew the line at allowing her to come to serious harm. My role here was as a glorified babysitter, but the money was good so it was a situation worth sticking with.

  Or so I hoped.

  Not for the first time, I questioned my own involvement in such matters, and with such unappealing people. In the past I'd always sought out the good, or at least the semi good. Now I worked for anyone who would pay me. Not for the first time, I wished that things could be different. That I hadn't once felt the pull of something dark and hungry and powerful as it moved towards me through the spaces between stars.

  I regretted the people who had died over the years because I might have unknowingly drawn dark forces towards me. And when I saw their faces in my mind, screaming silent accusations at me, demanding their right to speak, I felt utterly lost.

  The truth was I no longer felt able to connect with the departed. Their demands were too intense, and so much more than I was currently willing to handle. I was stuck in some weird middle ground, hating the living and tired of the dead.

  Spinks allowed Kareena to go first and followed her towards the blackened entrance of one of the burned-out warehouses. The timber boards barring the entrance had at some point been stripped away from the door, and the door itself had been kicked in. Darkness swallowed Kareena's small, agile figure. Glancing once over his shoulder, his large pale face leering like a clown's mask in the gloom, Spinks entered the building behind her.

  That should have been the moment that I walked away. Should have been. But wasn't.

  I paused at the doorway when I reached it, sensing something stirring lazily within. Not the couple I'd followed, nor any associate of theirs. No, this presence was something entirely different; it was a thing I'd been fighting not to acknowledge since I'd arrived here at the industrial estate. My failure to see the dead was not an actual breakdown of my ability, it was a deliberate act. For thirteen months now I'd fought against the insight that raged within me, blocking them out, ignoring their voiceless pleas, pretending that they did not still come to me in droves, seeking my aid.

  But the dead were never restful. They were always there, peering over my shoulder, stepping into my path, and it was difficult to ignore them for long.

  The struggle was taking its toll on my physical appearance – I looked thin and haggard and older than my years – and my head hurt constantly. I devoured painkillers by the packet, their effect diminishing with each passing day. A doctor friend who knew almost everything about me, and had done for many years, often suggested I take harder drugs – morphine, even heroin – but that was a route I didn't want to take, despite his promises to carefully administer just enough to fight my demons. No, I had to do this alone – until I was ready to once again allow the dead access to my battered psyche.

  I took a breath and ducked into the warehouse. Every inch of skin on my body was cold, as if I'd sunk suddenly into icy waters.

  I could hear footsteps up ahead. Kareena giggled and whispered something I couldn't quite make out. Her voice sounded slurred, unsteady, and I began to fear for her. I never carried a weapon when I was working, but right then I wished that I had a gun. Baz Singh had shown me a small pistol that he'd acquired for my use, but I'd told him to lock it back inside his desk drawer and hide the key. The taking of a human life was an alien concept to me. I had communed with the dead for so long and so often that I had no desire to add to their numbers.

  The darkness pulsed around me like a sea of organic black matter, clinging to my clothes, entwining with my hair, sticking to my skin. I kept raising a hand to push it away or wipe it off, but could feel nothing of any substance beneath my fingers. It was an illusion, like so many others I'd encountered over the years. The dark was not alive, nor was it sentient – but there was no doubt in my mind that it did contain
some
thing
which thought and probed and hungered. It was looking for the gaps in my armour, the chinks and damaged areas caused by fear.

  Fear was something I could ill afford to show, so I kept it down, kept it at bay.

  The sound of a woman giggling came to me again, this time from farther away. Its source could've been miles ahead of me, but that would have been impossible because the industrial building I was moving around inside took up not more than a few hundred square yards. I lost all sense of walls and floor and ceiling. The air opened up, as if sucking me into a vast and airless space. It was a struggle to hang on to my sense of reality; things wanted to move and shift, and transform into other less solid objects.

  It was a sensation I was more than familiar with.

  Footsteps echoed on the concrete floor and I concentrated on their hollow music, focusing on the sound as if it were a lifeline to what I knew to be real and solid and earthly. Phantoms swam in and out of vision, reaching out to me, clutching at the tattered remnants of my resolve, picking away the stitches of my refusal to accept them.

  "Leave me. Let me be." But they wouldn't listen. Instead, they intensified their attempts to snag me in the dark, groping for my weak points.

  "This way," said a man's voice – one which I assumed must belong to Spinks. Kareena laughed again, and then fell abruptly silent. I stood there for what seemed like hours, trying to navigate the at once familiar country I found myself in. The landscape was soft, blurred at the edges, but the topography was similar to those places I'd traversed before, many times. This was the realm of the dead, a land where the common laws of physics did not hold sway. What disturbed me more than the ease with which I'd crossed over was the fact that I'd accepted such an extreme transition so readily. Fear gnawed at my insides, a rat in a soft cage, and again I tried to block it out, ignore it, and carry on into the dark.

  After thirteen months of denial, I had finally found my way back home – as good a home as any, the only one I really knew.

  It was as if a map appeared before me in the darkness, with a route etched in threads and filaments of light. I knew exactly where to go, and accepted that I was being led – by my weird instincts, and by the dead who walked before me, clearing a path like native guides on an expedition deep into their homeland. I can't be sure how long I was in there, delving into a night like no other, but it felt like ages had passed, the world withering outside, people dying and being born. All clocks had stopped; time meant nothing to me.

  I followed a narrow passage and stood at the top of a flight of concrete stairs. Each of the steps was blackened by an old fire, their edges chipped and cracked. The banister had fallen away at some point, so I clutched the bare wall as I descended, unsure of what I would find at their base.

  The cramped space at the bottom of the stairs was flooded. My feet rested in several inches of standing water. The darkness receded, and then rushed back in increments, but this time it was a normal darkness. My guides had abandoned me, deciding that from here on in I would either know the way or could find it without their help. Water sloshed loudly in the hollow chamber. I reached out in front of me to find some kind of purchase. When my fingers fell upon a ragged door handle, I slowly turned it and pushed. The door opened awkwardly, held back by the standing water, but I leaned my weight against it and stepped into the cold room beyond…

  At first I was unable to see anything beyond the rubble and the dark reflections in the restless puddles, but gradually my eyesight grew accustomed to the poor conditions. I'd come at them from behind, somehow managing to take a route that would allow me to remain unseen. There were two of them inside the damp chamber, yet I had the sense that someone else had recently departed the scene. Ghost footsteps rippled the surface of the shallow pools of water nearby, and the tableaux on the raised concrete platform up ahead seemed incomplete, unfinished, as if a vital element was missing from the whole.

  Darkness shivered in the corners and in the doorways, receding, moving away from me.

  Spinks was down on his knees, his large hands clasped in front of his face; he was hiding behind them, afraid of whatever it was he refused to look at. His head was bowed, his thick neck was red and damp, and his broad back was curved in an attitude of defeat. A high-pitched moaning sound came from him, but for some reason it seemed too feminine to associate with such a big man. It was more like the wailing of a little girl.

  I wanted to close my eyes, to erase the sight, but I couldn't. I had to see, had to face it. All of it: every single piece of the picture.

  Kareena Singh swayed before Spinks, suspended from a thick rope which hung around her throat and upper chest like a trailing brown snake. The rope was wrapped once around her neck and its end terminated somewhere up in the rafters, most of which were lost in shadow. Her smooth skin had paled a shade and her eyes bulged from their sockets, fixing me in their bloated gaze. Her tongue was hideous, like a fat grey graveworm, and it protruded between lips as thick and rubbery as uncooked steaks.

  There was some kind of metal stand set up before the body, maybe a tripod for a camera, but my attention refused to focus on the contraption. As usual, I had eyes only for the dead. Her body drew my attention, not letting me go. I stared and I stared and I felt her sorrow like the vibration left in the air by a shriek. I was being pulled back towards death – always, always drawn to it, with any choice in the matter I might once have had now snatched away.

  Kareena's feet dangled slack and lifeless. One shoe was missing and the other hung treacherously from her dainty toes. I could not take my eyes from those feet. Their gentle motion was hypnotic, and it drew me like nothing I have witnessed before or since. They danced in the air with a grace she surely would have lacked in life – the rhythm was that of the grave, the dance of the dead, but she kept the beat well.

  I would be standing there still, entranced by that elegant footwork, if Spinks had not abruptly fallen over onto his side and begun to scream.

"Jesus, Usher, I thought you were dead." Detective Inspector Donald Tebbit stalked the length of the tiny room like an expectant father. All that was missing was the worry frown and a pocket full of cigars. He paused, ran a hand through his sweaty hair, and then resumed his repetitive exertions. "I mean, you just slipped off the edge of the world for a while."

  I smiled, but my mouth wasn't too keen on the expression so I ditched it in favour of a grimace. "I was lying low, taking it easy. I've been advising a few people on certain situations, making some easy money. This is the first big thing I've been involved in for months."

  Tebbit stopped moving again. This time I thought it might stick. "I was worried about you." He looked coy. It didn't suit him. "We had a few things we wanted to talk to you about, ourselves. You could've returned my calls, you know… or even answered my emails." He stared at me as if expecting miracles – it was a look I'd grown accustomed to over the years I'd known him, and it always gave me a bad feeling. A very bad feeling.

  "I don't do that anymore. These days I'm working for the living, not the dead. Strictly for the living." I didn't even believe it myself, so wasn't surprised when Tebbit shook his head before sitting down opposite me at the scarred table. He spread out his broad fighter's hands on the faded wood and flexed his chunky fingers. The wedding ring glinted once, catching the light, and my stomach lurched.

  I stared at him. "I'm not under arrest, am I?"

  "Don't be silly, Usher. You are a witness – our only one, in fact – but that doesn't mean we can hold you. You're free to go whenever you like."

  "I have no plans for this evening," I countered, finally finding that smile.

  Tebbit shook his head again, but this time I knew he was softening, his habitual defences coming down. I'd known the man for over a decade, and helped him on several so-called unsolvable cases, so felt that he at least owed me a few favours. "So you found them like that? The girl already dead and her bloke praying to the gods of muscle mania."

  "Yes. She was hanging from a rope and he was in no fit state to tell me anything about how it happened. How is he now?"

  Tebbit sighed, ran a hand across his lined, damp forehead. "Inconsolable." He rubbed at his right temple, grimacing.