Pretty Little Dead Things (38 page)

  I suddenly realised why I was there as part of the group, and once more I felt sick to the stomach. I sensed nothing ghostly; there were no presences immediately apparent inside the room. But there
was
something here, of that I had no doubt.

  "A group of property developers recently demolished the building to use the site to build a new residential estate. There were a few problems – horrible smells that wouldn't clear, workmen claiming to have seen things in the empty rooms. The usual stuff. But then they uncovered the bones."

  The Reverend Dr Quaid let out a small squeaking cry, but no one else said a word.

  "The bones of hundreds of people were dug up in the basement. These bones were… well, they were
deformed
. It seems that an old Victorian doctor in charge of the asylum had been conducting experiments on his patients. Work had to be stopped; the project was delayed. Then, once everything was removed and accounted for, the builders were allowed back in. Within a week they discovered a shaft that ran down the structure, inside the walls. They could find no apparent bottom to this shaft, but on a shelf under the basement they found a battered, somewhat scorched film can, containing a single roll of 16mm film stock."

  Dryer coughed. Brand paused, milking the moment. He was a typical politician, always making the most of his part.

  "What was on the film?" Quaid's voice wavered; she was scared already, even though we still had not been given all the information.

  "That, my dear Cleo, is what
you're
all here to find out." He swung the pointer in the air, like a conductor showing off with a flourish. "Only two people have viewed this film. One of them, a site manager for the construction team, went quite mad and had to be locked up for his own protection. The second person was a low-ranking government official, a young woman who worked for the Health and Safety Executive. Much the same happened to her. She is currently in a secure hospital, after trying to bite through her own wrists."

  He swallowed before continuing, loosening the top button of his shirt with hands it obviously took a lot of willpower to keep from shaking. "Due to the fact that the film canister was covered with what look like occult markings, we suspect some type of footage showing satanic rites. Maybe even a snuff film."

  "Bloody hell, Brand. What is this, some kind of joke? Are you trying to whip up some controversy before the next election? If you want to be in my magazine, there are better ways of achieving it – a nice little homosexual affair, some recreational drug-taking…"

  Dryer laughed, but I was more interested in what Brand had been saying. I'd heard of the Daleside, and its supposed hauntings. As far as these things go, and according to my sources, it was a genuine place where energies converged. I'd heard bad things – very, very bad things – about the former asylum, and the recollection of some of these stories brought on another bout of sickness. I belched, smiling an apology to Quaid, who turned around in her seat. My mouth tasted awful; like rotten eggs.

  "Please, this is all true. We've asked you here for your expert opinions on the film. All we can gather is what both of these rather unfortunate individuals kept repeating as they were taken away."

  "And what was that?" I asked, speaking up at last. My lips were dry and I felt like I wanted to vomit.

  "The thing is, both of these poor souls kept saying
exactly
the same thing. Over and over, like a chant. They said they'd seen the face of the devil."

  The sound of shattering glass made us all jump. "Sorry," muttered Quaid, bending over to brush away the fragments of the glass she'd dropped on the floor. "I'm very sorry." Her face had turned so pale that I was about to get out of my seat and offer her a drink of water. "I'm okay… just a shock, you know. A shock to someone in my job."

  The joke was feeble but it broke the tension. Even I forced a laugh.

  "If any of you would rather not take the risk, I'll quite understand. You can leave now and we'll inform you of the outcome later." Brand leaned forward, as if on a pivot. His eyebrows arched up in such a way that we were in no doubt that he wanted us to stay.

  "Just show us the damn film, you pompous oaf." Benedict was becoming impatient; his bluster didn't do much to mask the fear.

  "If we're all in agreement, then?"

  "Yes, get on with it, man!" Benedict got up and stalked towards the makeshift drinks cabinet to refill his glass. His hand shook as he poured, and he seemed to be muttering under his breath.

  The Reverend Dr. Quaid nodded once, and then looked away.

  "I'm game if you are, Thomas." Dryer looked worried, but not so much that he was willing to miss this, not unless I suggested we leave.

  "Yes. Let's watch it." I was surprised how steady my voice sounded.

  "Do you… do you feel anything, Thomas? Any, you know – any spirits?" Dryer's eyes were so wide that I thought they might pop out of his head.

  I smiled. "No, old friend. All I feel is slightly ill." I still do not know, even to this very day, why I underplayed my reaction to being inside that room, next to the film can. All I can think of is that I was trying to spare Dryer my discomfort.

  While we'd been talking, the young laptop operator had switched on a light and wheeled out a trolley upon which rested a film projector. The film was already loaded into the spools; it was dusty, creased, but still looked to be in reasonable shape.

  "You can go now, Travis. There's no need for you to remain." Brand walked to the back of the room and started fiddling with the projector, flicking buttons and rattling the film in the grate.

  Travis left the room. The door whispered shut behind him; the light went out, flickering slightly before it died. My tattoos at last began to twitch, signifying something not quite right – not quite
natural
– about what we were about to experience. It wasn't much, simply a brief and passing sensation across my back and upper arms, but it was enough to ensure that I put up my mental barriers and recited a few Romany charms in my head. All the signs were pointing to some kind of vague, possibly transitory supernatural phenomena; there was nothing to tell me I should be overly worried.

It's funny how wrong even I can be.

  "Let's start the show," said Brand, still in love with the sound of his own voice, and quite clearly thinking that he was just the cutest thing alive.

  The projector made a low humming sound, which was punctuated by the occasional insectile clicking. A beam of dusty light shone out of the front of the machine, and I followed it with my eyes until they rested on the screen.

  The screen went dark. No, that isn't quite right. It was more than that; more severe. The screen went
utterly
black.

  A chair leg scraped the floor and someone coughed quietly.

  The blackness on the screen seemed to pulse, gently at first, but then becoming more insistent. I looked around me, at my fellow viewers, and wondered what they were expecting to gain from this. They were wide-eyed, craning their necks forward, and transfixed by the screen.

  My stomach began to tie itself in knots; the nausea returned, but this time with more force. Yet still, I did not have the sense that anything major was about to occur. It was as if there were dim energies hovering at the edges, the vague outlines of the dead looking in at us through a murky window.

  "When is this supposed to start?" asked Benedict, his anger and impatience resurfacing. "I'm getting bored."

  Then it began.

  The darkness on the screen bled to a soft grey, like the visual static you used to see between television stations on old analogue television sets, or that flickering snow that would appear if the transmission was lost. But there was something underneath the swirls of grey and black: shapes, moving, writhing, and shaking what looked like ill-defined appendages. At first I thought we were watching an experimental film, some silly post-modern attempt at cinematic deconstruction put together by an underachieving student who'd smoked too much pot whilst watching third-generation copies of avant-garde animation.

  I could just about make out a vision of a barren wasteland, populated by hulking humanoid figures. It seemed to me that they were either copulating or merging. I could not be sure which.

  Then I could see nothing, just the visual static. Every time I thought I could conjure an image from the chaos on the screen, it moved, shifted, and I was forced to start all over again. The effect was disorientating, like being on a rollercoaster. Constantly kept on the verge of revelation, it was a strain on each of the senses.

  I managed to wrench my eyes away from the screen and examine the rest of the people in the room. Dryer was leaning back in his chair, his mouth open, hands clawing at his face. Benedict was masturbating, his right hand working furiously at his semi-erect member while his other hand reached out towards the screen. The Reverend Dr Quaid was vomiting quietly into her lap.

  I craned my neck around to look at Brand, still manning his spot at the projector. He had his eyes squeezed tightly shut and tears ran down his cheeks, making pale tracks in the sweaty flesh. He was singing a song, a children's nursery rhyme: I think it might have been "Humpty Dumpty". I'm still not sure why, but the sound of his cultured tones droning such an incongruous tune was somehow terrifying.

  When I looked back at the screen it was dark again. Black. The blackness moved, like tar, like the effluent of the sewers of hell. Shapes – people – struggled beneath its surface; swimmers in that crude adhesive darkness that were being slowly drowned. Or, more likely, I saw nothing but the patterns the rational mind attempts to create when confronted by visual chaos.

  I struggled to my feet, heading for the projector. Despite having seen nothing that could be construed as conventionally evil, or even anything more than distasteful, I wanted more than anything in the world to turn it off. Still my insight failed me; I could sense nothing of what was obviously churning be neath the surface, trying to heave into view. Perhaps it was simply too large, too unthinkable for even my perceptions to contain. I remembered a line from a newspaper article I'd read recently about a soldier in Afghanistan; something about the horrors of war being simply larger than oneself.

  For the first time, I knew exactly what that meant. Some feelings are just too huge to contain; certain imaginings are too complex to decode.

  I lurched towards the projector and turned it off.

  The film spun out of the gate, flapping like a tortured snake. It slapped my hands, drawing blood; it was as if the very film wanted to resume its showing, and it would not go down without a fight.

  Brand was standing in a puddle of his own urine; the crotch of his trousers was stained. I turned away when the smell of shit wafted into my nostrils.

  Of the others, only Dryer was in any fit state to communicate. "Oh, dear God," he said. "What was that?"

  Quaid was by now weeping uncontrollably, her face buried in her hands, around which was wrapped a rosary. Benedict had left the room. The door was still open, letting in dim smears of light from the passage outside. I never saw him again. Shortly afterwards, he sold all his holdings in the communications company, took to sea in his yacht, and blew out his brains with a small calibre handgun.

  "What did you see?" I had to know. Even with my highly attuned sight, I had witnessed very little; certainly not enough to understand.

  "I… I don't know," said Dryer, standing clumsily and turning his ankle as he stepped away from his chair. "I think… I think I saw… I don't know."

  
The face of the devil.

  Just then a young woman walked by me. One second there was nobody near me, the next this girl was drifting over to the projector. She had long blonde hair pulled back into a loose ponytail and her eyes had been messily jabbed out with something sharp, maybe a stick or a short blunt blade. She took the film out of the projector, this wan little phantom, and carried it to the front of the room, where she stepped upwards with one shapely leg, as if taking flight, and vanished into the small suspended screen. She looked back only once, giving me a final view of those sad, ruined eyes.

  I did not know who she was – her identity still eludes me – but I was certain that she was claiming the film to return it to the darkness where it rightfully belongs. I can only pray that it remains there.

  I turned and stared at Dryer, staggering slightly under the onslaught of so much sensory input.

  "I don't know," he repeated, clearly having not seen the girl.

  He was not lying. We'd known each other too long to bullshit, and there was no point in hiding anything, not any more. His hair had turned grey at the temples and the left side of his mouth was twisted, as if he'd suffered a mild stroke.

  "My chest hurts," he muttered, before falling to his knees.

My friend Professor Theo Dryer died of a sudden massive coronary en route to the hospital, in the back of the ambulance I called. He was holding my hand when he went. I did not see his spirit leave his body. I can only hope that, wherever he has gone, it is better than whatever he glimpsed on the screen in that dingy little basement room in Soho.

  Later that same night, Neville Brand left his Kensington apartment and paid a visit to the Reverend Dr. Cleo Quaid in her Battersea studio flat. He raped her first, and then strangled her to death with a set of her own rosary beads. Then he raped her again. After first smoking a cigar and finishing the bottle of whisky he found on a desk in Quaid's study, he walked to the window, perhaps looked up at the stars, and threw himself down into the small paved garden area below the flat. He landed high up on a set of cast iron railings, impaled through the shoulder, thigh and chest. It took him approximately forty minutes to die, and during that time it was reported that several people walked past his suspended body, ignoring his dying moans and not looking up to see where they came from.