Pretty Little Dead Things (9 page)

  Especially after my wife died.

  That last meeting had been when our communication had effectively come to an end.

  But before that, years before that…

  I'd been a lost soul when I got out of hospital after the accident. I'd spoken to many people – surgeons, psychologists, faith healers – some of whom believed me and others who thought I was suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder. Ellen, a familiar face from my youth, was the only one who actually
listened
to what I had to say instead of giving an opinion as to why I
thought
I was seeing ghosts. Her belief or otherwise was irrelevant. Without realising, she gave me the answer to a question I was too afraid to ask.

  And now here she was, back in my life.

  As usual, I decided to use the downstairs bathroom, but this time so that I could avoid the swinging girls upstairs. They had been quiet for some time and the last thing I wanted to do was disturb them. I sat on the edge of the toilet seat as I ran the water, my thoughts drifting. I imagined Ellen's face, but every time I did so it was overlain by Rebecca's features. My exlover; my wife: the two women who had shaped me.

  The hot water formed a skein of mist that rose from the tub, hovering over the taps. I watched the misty mass, imagining that forms were shaping themselves within it. The steam writhed and bulged, as if something inside wanted to be free, and the image unnerved me. I stood, went to the window and opened it, letting in fresh air that smelled like rainfall. The larger part of the steam dispersed, but strands of it hung in the air like ectoplasm. As I watched it, I began to see a bald head forming out of the vapour – Mr Shiloh, the man I'd briefly met at the Blue Viper as he strode from that upstairs room.

  I blinked, shook my head, bit down against the inside of my cheek. When I opened my eyes the vision was gone, the air was clear. He was no longer there. He never had been.

  I took a long soak, letting the heat and the water soothe my aching limbs. I felt old, outmoded, like a once flashy appliance that had now gone well past its sell-by date. I brought up my hands and moistened my face, a benediction by my own hand because no one else would see fit to bless me. Self-pity flooded in. I felt like giving up, switching off, and the lure of my dead family felt stronger than it had for a long time – almost strong enough to tempt me. I stared at the razor perched on a shelf above the bath for a long time – too long to be serious enough to use it.

  After a while I got out of the bath, dried myself off, and traipsed through to my bedroom. The girls hung above me in silence – I could imagine them up there, watching me. The only movement in the house was the slow, unseen rotation of their hanging bodies.

  I closed the door and lay down on my bed, feeling more tired than I knew how to deal with. I reached across and turned on the radio, tuning it to a local station that played easy listening music – light jazz, movie soundtracks – and rested my head back on the pillow. The music washed over me, pressing me down into the pillow; my eyes shut beneath its rhythmic weight. Soon I was dozing, and I knew I was dozing, but it felt good all the same.

  The door opened and a thin figure entered the room. I was unable to properly lift my eyelids so could see nothing of this figure except a blurred outline, but I sensed that it was female. She stepped lightly, her feet making no sound on the floor, and came around to my side of the bed. She had no aroma; the air around her was still and flat and dead.

  I murmured something but could not be sure what it was – meaningless words, a garbled phrase, perhaps even my wife or daughter's name. It could have been anything; it was probably nothing. Nothing at all.

  Time seemed to slow down, becoming frozen, and the whole wide world held its breath. Animals outside in the fields and hedgerows stopped in their tracks and cocked their heads to listen; aeroplanes stopped dead in the sky above the house, their contrails forming scribbled anchors to the ground; all the nearby towns and cities wound down, the people in the streets and houses dipping their heads and closing their eyes.

  The woman in my room bent over me. Her hair was long and soft; her breath was still, hardly breath at all. Her skin radiated a distant heat, like that of an old fire long extinguished yet still capable of flaring back into life.

  I felt her fingers on my bare chest, tracing a line down and across, across and up. It seemed to go on forever, and I knew that she was marking me, branding me as one of her own. When finally I managed to open the stone slabs of my eyelids, she was gone. The door was closed, but a subtle vibration remained in the atmosphere, as if someone had just strummed a chord on an acoustic guitar.

  I looked at my chest, the muscles in my neck aching as I peered downward. My entire upper torso felt pinned to the bed but I managed to gain a line of vision along my trunk.

  Words of ash were scrawled across my ribcage, a blackened message – or a grim reminder – from somewhere far beyond:
memento mori.

  I struggled off my back and onto my feet, heart racing and muscles pumping like balloons filling with air. My feet got caught in the duvet and I tripped, hitting the floor heavily and rolling. Breathing out of control, I got back up on my feet and leaned against the bedside cabinet. The red numbers on the radio alarm clock were going haywire, spinning through their sequence so fast that they were creating nonsense figures. The figures began to look like words, so I looked away, down at my chest. The blackened scrawl was no longer there.

  Overcome by a feeling of immutable dread, I sat on the bed and waited for the atmosphere to rebalance. I breathed slowly, silently counting to one hundred, and eventually felt calm enough to carry on.

  I dressed in a black suit and went through to the study, where I sat at the computer and waited for it to boot up. When I was able, I accessed my email account and checked for messages. Nothing but junk. Closing the programme, I once again opened the photos DI Tebbit had sent me and stared at each one in turn.

  The names ran through my head:

  Sarah Dowdy.

  Candice Wallace.

  Kareena Singh.

  Three pretty little things – pretty little dead things – hung like party favours on my upper floor. The dream now felt like a message. Or an order.

  The girls in the photographs looked completely different, yet they were also the same: all victims. There was a cast to the eye, a subtle shadow that could only be seen if you looked close enough and knew exactly what you were searching for.

  I studied their faces, the angles of their limbs, the soft curves of their bodies, but nothing stood out against the background of misery and early extinction. There had to be something, a common factor other than their shared role as dead girls in someone's twisted movie-in-the-mind. This was more than some maniac going around killing girls. There was something
other
, something of the beyond about the whole shoddy affair. I just needed to find the link, the connection between three young girls and the realm of spirits. Three young girls and the presence who had invaded my room to leave a message I didn't even want to think about.

  I reached out and picked up the phone, dialled the familiar number. It rang seven times before he answered, and his voice sounded harried, stretched to its limits.

  "Tebbit," I said without preamble. "It's me. I need to ask you a question."

  "What is it, Thomas. I'm worn out, need a drink. Do you have anything for me?"

  His usual dismissive manner was absent. The desperation he must have felt was palpable, like the undeniable presence of another being sitting at his side as he spoke.

  "These other girls: Dowdy and Wallace. Was there anything peculiar about the bodies, other than the fact that they were found hanged, of course?"

  "What do you mean, Thomas? This whole fucking thing is peculiar. I don't know what you want me to say."

  A bird hooted outside my window. Slow shades of an early darkness crept through the glass and across the floor. I licked my lips; they were bone dry. "Were there any messages on the bodies… cut or burned into the flesh?"

  "Jesus, Thomas, don't you think I'd tell you if there was anything like that? I'm not stupid. I know the kind of thing you'd be looking for and something like that would stand out right away."

  The bird hooted again, but this time it didn't sound like a bird at all – more like someone impersonating a bird.

  "I'm sorry, Tebbit, I didn't mean to imply that you were in some way unobservant. It's just that you might have been told not to inform anyone of certain particulars. Okay, I'll try another tack here. Was there anything about the bodies that struck you personally – maybe right at the back of your mind – as being weird or unusual? Anything at all – no matter how inconsequential it might seem."

  The line hummed, as if distant winds were blowing and I had suddenly been connected to their dim wailing. I listened but it made me want to hang up the phone. The sound was awful, like the ceaseless weeping of a distant crowd of mourners.

  "Okay, I mentioned this to my superior officer and he looked at me as if I'd lost my mind, but there was something… something odd…"

  "Tell me about it. It might be important."

  He took a breath before continuing – I actually heard him suck in the air, hold it, and then let it out again, slowly. Slowly. "Ash. Sarah Dowdy had a small amount of ash in her pockets. Candice Wallace had ash on her teeth, as if she'd tried to swallow it. Nobody else noticed, but Kareena Singh was found next to a small pile of ashes, as if a tiny fire had been lit and then put out."

  I thought again of the message I'd seen on my chest.

  "Ash," said DI Tebbit, in a hoarse whisper, before ending the call.

  I sat with the telephone receiver in my hand, listening once again to that unearthly wailing and wishing that it would stop, wishing that it would leave me in peace. But I knew that it never would.

I finished dressing in a hurry and went outside to wait for the taxi. The unnatural darkness had lifted and it was actually a pleasant evening. The rain had let up, the sun hung low in the sky, spreading the remnants of its warmth, and the sky itself was a pastel painting brought to life. Birds sang their final chorus before dark and as I listened I detected a shrill sense of panic in their warbling tune. In my experience, no matter how beautiful the world might seem at any given moment, there is always darkness waiting to encroach, a dusky invader forever poised to break through and cause havoc. Just like that terrible wailing over the telephone wires, it is always close enough to reach out and touch you.

  The taxi pulled up at the bottom of the drive and the driver hit his horn. I nodded, and he raised a hand in response. I hurried down to the car and climbed into the back seat – I never sit in the front; it usually dissuades them from making small talk if you sit behind.

  The taxi moved off with a jerk, rejoining the road and climbing the hill away from my old house. I glanced back, out of the rear window, and admired the rugged detached stone property. It had been our dream house when Rebecca and I had first moved in with our infant daughter, but now it held only shimmering nightmares. As usual, I wished that I had the strength to put the place on the market, but as it receded into the distance I admitted that I never would. It was home, and that meant a lot.

  Home. I barely even knew what the word meant anymore.

  The taxi headed towards the airport, and then down through Yeadon. Pleasant green spaces became small clusters of houses became a series of short high streets boasting pine furniture outlets, fish and chip shops and tatty looking public houses advertising "Fine Food & Ale."

  Before long we were travelling down Stanningley Road, past a cluster of Indian restaurants and fast food venues where men stood outside and glared at the passing traffic. The driver was taking a long route to boost his fare, but I didn't care enough to complain. Along a narrow alley, a man pushed a small wheelbarrow; behind him, two dogs fought beside an overflowing rubbish bin. People smoked outside pubs, crowding around the doorways in a way that surely deterred passing trade. Sullen faces peered through the fading light, their eyes containing only suspicion.

  By the time we reached the Armley Ridgeway I was ready to get out and walk. Only the depressing sight of a sex shop hoarding kept me inside the car. A feeling of claustrophobia pressed against me, pinning my body to the seat, and the driver kept flicking glances at me in the rearview mirror. I finally jumped out of the vehicle at the roundabout near the Travel Inn, stuffing money into the driver's fist and not waiting for any change as the lights cycled to green and the traffic began to move forward around me. I made the opposite kerb safely, yet I felt dogged by a strange sense of muted terror.

  It took a while to cross the adjacent road; traffic was heavy this close to Leeds centre and nobody seemed prepared to let me step out without sounding their horn. At the next green light I lurched off the kerb, slamming into the side of a Mazda and almost falling bodily onto the dusty bonnet of a black Ford Focus.

  Once in the centre proper, I began to feel calmer. My mood lifted as the last dying rays of sunlight caressed my cheek, and as I drew closer to the Crowne Plaza Hotel, I almost felt normal again – whatever the hell normal is.

  I slipped into the pub opposite the hotel and ordered a single malt, downing it swiftly before the barmaid had even returned with my change. "Another?" she said, grinning. I shook my head and pushed for the door, nerves almost forcing me to change my mind. What was I doing here? Surely this was the wrong thing to do. Ellen and I were history. Whatever we had once shared should not be resurrected. Then I remembered that she wanted to ask me something – a favour of some kind – and I eagerly accepted the justification to keep our dinner date.