Pretty Little Dead Things (31 page)

  I was through running; there was nowhere left to run. All I had, all I was, all I had ever been, was my mumbo-jumbo.

  "I'm sorry, Usher. Genuinely sorry… Ellen Lang seemed like a nice woman, and I know you were close. But you can't blame yourself for what happened – it wasn't your fault."

  I turned away from the wall, smiling. I felt insane, utterly insane. "Shut the fuck up, Tebbit. You know nothing about me, nothing about her. You don't even like me. But that's okay, because we have this weird relationship and we help each other out, don't we? And this time is going to be the last. This time I plan to bring down the walls of reality and avenge their deaths – all of them. My wife, my child, my lover. Guilt be damned: this is about vengeance." It felt so good to get that out of my system, even if I wasn't sure that I entirely believed it. The power was in the saying; the magic lay in the words and the emotion they contained. Even violence could be a form of incantation.

  "Are… are you okay, Usher?" DI Tebbit looked terrified. Not scared, or even afraid, but terrified. I wished that I had a mirror, so that I could look into it and see whatever he had just witnessed. Had I transformed into a monster, with bolts of black energy fizzing from the ends of my hair? Had I become death? It certainly felt as if I held death in my hands, and it was a good feeling – one that I could get used to without any problem at all.

  "Let me out of here."

  The emotions behind my words churned and boiled; they were pushing against the surface, getting ready to explode. I knew that I could use this power – tap into it and utilise it to cross over and navigate the fold in reality where I would find Mr Shiloh, the hooded figures, the house on its hideous chicken legs, and hopefully Penny Royale.

  Tebbit paused, and then nodded, stepping towards the door. "Just help me stop this thing… whatever the fuck it is." He unlocked the door and glanced along the corridor. Then he pulled his head back into the room. "Come on. Before anyone notices you're here."

  
Scratch-scratch.

My first port of call was Lord of Ink. I suspected that Elmer Lord knew just a little bit more than he had told me, and if anyone could give me a pointer to follow, it would be him. I realised grimly that my tattooist was the only person in the world who I could trust. Nothing, I thought, could be more pathetic than that.

  This time I went round the back way, ducking along a narrow alley and climbing over the wall to his property. I found myself in a small, rectangular yard, with weeds growing up through cracks in the concrete surface. There were empty crates and barrels stacked against one wall, and a small herb garden contained within a jerry-built greenhouse was situated near what looked like an old water feature gone dry.

  Action was good for me; it helped me to not think about anything beyond the moment.

  The ground floor windows had been painted with whitewash, preventing anyone seeing inside. I had no idea what Elmer might keep there, under the stairs, but I assumed from the heavy wooden hatch set low in the rear wall that the place had at least a small cellar or basement.

  The other door, the one I thought must lead into that downstairs hallway from the opposite end to where I'd entered last time, was firmly closed. I banged upon it, shouting Elmer's name. It took him a long time to answer, but eventually I saw his face appear at one of the upstairs windows. He waved and disappeared. After a short while the back door opened.

  "You okay?" His face was etched with concern. I knew only fragments of Elmer's life story, but we had been more than casual friends for a long time. "Why didn't you use the front door?"

  "I'm feeling paranoid." I shot him a tiny smile. "I need to speak with you. I need your help."

  He stepped aside. "Come in. I'll help you however I can – you know that, amigo."

  I didn't speak again until we were sitting in Elmer's studio, another bottle of whisky sitting on a table between us. This time he sat in the tattoo chair and I was resting on a high stool. I was on to my second glass. "Elmer, I don't want to offend you, but I know you were holding something back before. I need you to be honest with me. Someone has died–"

  "I know," he said, taking me by surprise. Registering my expression, he continued: "I still have contacts on that damned estate. I told you I grew up there, didn't I? A lot of my early years were wasted in that place…"

  I remained silent.

  "Okay, amigo. Here it is." He got up from out of the chair and walked around it, so that he was facing me. Then, taking me by surprise yet again, he quickly took off his shirt. His copious tattoos ranged from the primitive to the most sophisticated examples of skin art I had ever seen. There were brutal prison tats, beautiful oriental images, and so many colourful tribal designs that it was almost like looking at a human kaleidoscope.

  "Wonderful… but what specifically am I meant to be looking at?" Anger brimmed behind my face; it felt like my skin was crawling across my skull.

  Elmer's face sagged; a great sadness was suddenly exposed there, behind the mask, for just long enough for me to see how deeply it penetrated. "Here," he said, pointing at the upper part of his left shoulder.

  "The demon?" It was an elaborate oriental demon of a kind I had seen before, probably hanging on his wall.

  Elmer nodded. "Look closer. Look under the colouring and between the lines. Between the lines."

  For a moment that sounded like the most profound advice I had ever been given, and I understood fully why he had repeated it. I stared at the tattoo, straining to see beyond the ink.

  "Can you see now? The demon is a cover-up job. I had it done by a friend, a long time ago. It's covering something I'm ashamed of."

  I still couldn't tell what he meant: the tattoo looked fine to me, even if one of its edges was slightly ragged, forming a strange bulge in the side of the demon's head.

  "Look, amigo. Look and see. There it is… like I said: between the lines." His finger traced the outline within the outline: the lines that formed the letters.

"There's an M…"

  I could barely believe what he was showing me. What he was telling me.

  "And there's a T."

  "What does this mean, Elmer? Tell me it isn't what I think?" I backed away, feeling as if all of a sudden I didn't know Elmer Lord even half as much as I'd thought I had only seconds before.

  "No, amigo. I used to run with them when I was a boy. There's a lot you don't know about me, and most of it you never will. Things I've seen and done that I'm ashamed of. This is one of them – that's why I had the tat covered up. But scars run deep. You can only ever cover them, and not remove them completely."

  I took a single step forward, if only to let him know that I believed him. My hands were shaking; I couldn't trust them to stay at my sides.

  "They have bases all over that area, amigo. The whole place is like a rat's nest, littered with tunnels and bolt holes. But there's one place – it's the last place I heard that they'd been sacrificing animals and practicing rituals. At the back of the estate there's a bunch of derelict buildings. Condemned bungalows, garages that are falling apart, and a high rise that's barely even standing anymore. Look for them there."

  I recalled the terrible visions of the last few days – the notso-grand illusion of the house on chicken legs that had then surreally become a concrete version of the same. Now I knew where to look, but what I didn't know was how to get there. In this world I would find little or nothing of use; I had to push myself over and into that fold or crease in reality to get close to what I needed. Only there could I even begin to commune with these things: the dead, the undead, and the things that lie between.

  Between the lines.

  There was one more place I needed to visit before I could make preparations to go looking for the missing child, and it was somewhere I had grown to despise. I took a taxi to Bradford, and told the smirking driver to drop me off at the Blue Viper. It was afternoon already and the sky was growing dull. The rain had held off, but its threat was never far away. But even if the weather stayed dry, it felt like it was raining on me.

  I had a few loose ends to tie up to before I went any farther towards the dark. There was a good chance I might not make it back here, to this sunny but often overcast little enclave, this world, this Earth. This beautiful reality. If everything I had learned over the years was even remotely true, then where I was going there were no guarantees, no escape routes or safety nets.

  Unusually, there were no heavies hanging around outside the club. The main doors were locked but the side door looked unsecured; its security barrier was pulled back and sticking out from the frame. It looked as if someone had either gone in or come out pretty fast, neglecting to lock up as they went.

  The Pilgrim's words came back to me:
Oh, that silly little man.

  I looked again at the unsecured door, and everything became achingly clear.

  Breathing slowly, I reached out and turned the door handle, hoping that it would not budge. The handle turned and the door opened. I stepped inside, closed the door carefully behind me, and began to climb the stairs. It was dark in there – darker than it should have been. It was as if night had fallen, but only inside Baz Singh's club. I could hear a distant moaning, muted by the walls and the doors, but not unlike the sound of people having sex. I continued up the stairs and took a left, heading directly for Singh's office.

  The office door was open wide, and through it I could see his desk. The desk lamp was flickering madly, as if insects were trapped inside the bulb and fluttering against the glass. As I approached it popped loudly, the bulb turning to dust. I kept on going, refusing to be spooked – this was just another game, or perhaps part of the biggest game of all. I felt the Pilgrim's hand at work here, and the thought carried with it a strange feeling of contentment. Know your demon; face your demon; put a name to your mortal enemy.

  I know now that my own enemy has many names and wears faces without number: because he is legion.

  I stepped into the office. Lying on the desk was the gun Baz Singh had offered me what felt like years ago but had been only a few days before. There was no smoking barrel, like there always are in the movies or in the lyrics of those crackly Delta blues songs. It just sat there, on its side, on an oversized ink blotter. The blinds were drawn; there were black streaks on the dusty material, as if someone had dragged their scruffy fingers down the entire length of the blinds.

  I turned and left the office, heading for the little room where I had first encountered Mr Shiloh, the Pilgrim, menacing a prostitute. I passed the top of the stairs, glanced down them, but saw nothing moving. Nothing but shadows, Nothing but dust. Or perhaps ashes.

  This door was closed, but there was a smear of red on the wood beside the handle. I knew it was a sign, a signal, and that I was meant to go in there. Part of me screamed to run away, but the rest of me – the stone-cold-hard-as-grief rest of me – stood my ground. I pushed open the door and watched it swing inward, disturbing the already flickering shadows within. The walls were bare, but there were more smears of blood, some at waist level and others, puzzlingly, up near the ceiling.

  There was a flat, dull, coppery odour inside the room: a slaughterhouse stink that forced its way up my nose and down my throat, almost making me gag. The television in the corner was playing with the sound turned down. I turned to face it, looking at the screen, and saw footage of Baz Singh sodomising his daughter, poor dead Kareena, his hands gripping her hips and his body thrusting hard up against her. I tried to avert my gaze but couldn't seem to work the muscles in my neck.

  I watched for a few moments more, noting the look of unalloyed enjoyment on her face and the expression of pure horror that twisted his features into an ugly mask.

  It was wrong, all turned around: the rapist looked like a victim. Kareena, it seemed, had gone willingly into this particular darkness, and was forcing her step-father to acquiesce, to enact his own part in the sordid ritual that the Pilgrim had surely set in motion. Once again, the truth was the opposite of my suspicions.

  Finally I dragged my eyes from the screen and gazed along the floor. There was a trail of blood. Just blood. Nothing more. It led along the floor and stopped at the bed, where it began again, but patchy, more like separate stains now than a constant track.

  There was something under the blankets. Some
things
under the blankets. They were humped in places, as if a number of items had been placed on the bed and carefully covered up. Fresh red stains bloomed even as I watched.

  I looked back at the screen. Then back at the bed. How many of them were under there, taken apart and left on the mattress for me to find? Was it just Singh and his doormen, or perhaps even the rest of the Singh family – whom I had not yet met, and now never would? If those shapes rustled or squelched I did not hear, and if they writhed and twitched I did not see; for I was focused upon something else, something deep within my own being – a sudden and curious sense of righteousness.

  I looked again at the television. I studied the intense look of horror in Baz Singh's eyes: the one true sign that told me he had known for a long time that he was lost and that there was nothing he could do about it. But, I promised myself, if there were any names to add to the list on my back, I would not ask Elmer Lord to make Singh one of them. Only those who truly deserved to be saved were remembered on my flesh; those deserving souls whom I had failed and continued to fail. The ones who never had a choice.