The Immaculate (8 page)

“Neither do I,” he said hastily. “I was given that by a friend. I would never have bought it myself.”

When she asked about the skull propping up some paperbacks on one of the shelves, he told her it was a monkey's skull and that a friend of his called Nigel had brought it back from Borneo; when she asked him why he had an enormous framed photograph on his bathroom wall of a centipede emerging from a mound of earth he explained it was because he had a phobia about centipedes and was a strong believer in confronting one's fears.

She spent a long time perusing the bookshelves, pulling books out and looking at them, which he greatly approved of. He was enchanted when, at first, she hunkered down in front of the bookcase in the hall and, with an expression like a child in a sweetshop, asked, “May I?”

“Of course you may!” he replied effusively, and for the next hour he and Gail became embroiled in a passionate discussion about books. At one point they both crouched beside a bookcase, so close that their shoulders were touching. Jack could smell her perfume and the fresh scent of her hair, and he felt almost dizzy with happiness.

They watched the films and ate the food that Jack prepared, and Gail drank gin and tonic whilst he had beer. After the films had ended they talked about them over coffee, and then they talked about other films, and then books again, and then writing, and then London, and then just general stuff. Finally Jack drove Gail home in his Mini Cooper. He dropped her outside her building, which looked white and modern and featureless in the darkness. She thanked him for a fabulous evening, and when she leaned across and kissed him on the cheek, Jack felt the breath hitch in his throat, a grin stretch his mouth for the hundredth time that evening. “Can I see you again?” he asked, aware of how corny it sounded.

She smiled as if she were the lucky one. “Yes, please,” she murmured. “I'd like that very much.”

When Jack arrived home it was 3:40
A.M.
, but he felt far too buoyant to be tired. He lay back on his sofa, lights turned low, the CD of didgeridoo music he had bought the week before playing on his stereo, and he thought of Gail until the memory of her face and her voice and her smell entwined with the ancient magic of the music and tugged him deliciously down into sleep.

When Jack was in the tunnel he became almost overwhelmed by the knowledge that this was the only certainty in his life. It was awful, this knowledge, sickening. It was like a poison seeping through his system, consisting of dread and loneliness and a surging, terrible panic. He could barely breathe; his clenched fists shook as though the fingers were striving to burst open; his heartbeat felt like the cruel rhythmic squeezing of some tender internal bruise. In his soul of souls Jack knew that this place, this dark and dreadful place, was the single inevitable truth. The rest of it was a sham, a delusion of tinsel and glitter, which would fade little by little until he was left dreamless.

He brought his shaking fists slowly up to his face and pressed them against his forehead. No, he mustn't think about that. Such a thought was enough to drive anyone mad. While he could still dream he would try to return there, he would cling with single-minded desperation to the privilege. And he'd try to believe that there was meaning to life, or at least obliteration at the end of it. For even obliteration had a kind of meaning. Far more, at least, than this sense of endlessness, this terror that was growing and growing, and which would continue to do so boundlessly, with no focus to contain it.

Concentrating as hard as he could on holding his thoughts together, Jack slowly spread his arms out to either side of him and touched the black walls with his fists. They were cold and dead, and they seemed to transmit their deadness to him. He felt a sense of despair, of defeat, that paradoxically was all the more acute because it was as murky and indistinct as undersea vision. He wanted to scream, to yell out his fury and defiance. He opened his mouth, but before the sound could emerge, a figure—grey and grainy, more like dust than shadow—emerged from the blackness and began to glide towards him.

He felt sharp, new fear, though now that there was a reason for it the emotion seemed almost welcome. He waited whilst the figure approached. It was so vague as to be sexless and faceless. When it was no more than a few yards away it reached out a hand, which Jack automatically took. The hand was neither warm nor cold; it was simply a pressure enclosing his fingers, offering to lead him. And Jack was quite prepared to let himself be led. It felt liberating to transfer the responsibility for his actions on to this shade, this phantom. The figure turned away, tugging at him gently. Jack tottered after it, feeling like a small child, his legs unsteady, his mind struggling with a situation too confusing to assimilate.

Obliquely, almost covertly, the tunnel first broadened and then changed into something else. He was unaware of this process; all he knew was that suddenly the ground was strewn thinly with undergrowth and stones and twigs, and that the black confining walls had become a wood or a forest, various perspectives of trees crammed into a dense wall of bark.

It was lighter than it had been, though the sky was still murky, as if the prelude to a storm was pressing itself on the land. Despite this the figure was no more detailed than in the tunnel. Jack found it almost impossible to focus upon, as if somehow it deflected his vision.

The woods were eerily still, depressingly colourless: leaves were more grey than green, trees more black than brown. Though Jack was beginning to feel he had a bond with this figure, that somehow he and it were the same thing, he nevertheless felt his dread mounting.

There was another strange spatial shift, and all at once Jack and the grey figure were standing in front of a house. As soon as Jack saw the building he tried to pull away, but he felt feeble and dumb; it was as if only his soul writhed, as if his body which contained it was mute, acquiescent. He felt himself walking through the gate and up the path towards the front door. The figure glided ahead of him, its hand clasped in his. The sky was yellow as curdled milk, the house enclosed within a watery haze, like a painting blurred in the rain. Jack knew this house, though why he knew it escaped his flinching mind. Though he did not know who or what waited inside, the thought of opening that front door and entering was so terrifying that he felt fragile as a glass that the sustained screech of his fear threatened to shatter.

And then he was inside the house, the dark blur of its walls, its thick smell, enveloping him. He had not opened the front door; it was as if the house had oozed around him, sucked him into its darkness. He was alone. The grey figure was gone. Though Jack's mind felt brittle, his flesh vague, there was a deep terrible sickness at the core of him. It felt like a shifting, dark tumour composed of all the badness—all the pain and fear and anguish—in his life. And this place, this house, was its home. This was the place where all the badness had originated.

Jack felt himself moving forward, though he had a strong compulsion to flee. Perhaps it was the house that was moving, sliding over and around him, like some vast slow creature dragging him towards its ever-working, ever-hungry mouth. The smell was pungent and stomach-turning. It was ostensibly the smell of bad food and stale air, of grime and old sweat, though to Jack it smelled of cruelty and violence, of tears and dread. A staircase slid up and away on his right, doors passed by his shoulders. And then another doorway rose and gobbled him, and he was standing in a room.

It was a room he knew, though again the outlines were vague, sketchy, the details washed with a brown dingy murk that was like dust and shadow and muddy water. There were suggestions of furniture in the room, two small windows, a fireplace, perhaps even pictures on the walls. Jack's attention, however, was focused on a dining table and four chairs, two of which were occupied. For the moment, the occupants were blurred; Jack could not, or would not, look at them too closely. He could hear a clock in the room, a slow sonorous ticking. He pulled out one of the unoccupied chairs with a dull scrape and sat down.

As soon as he did so he realised that the table and chairs were much larger than they had appeared to be. The top of the table came to his chest, and though he stretched he could not quite touch the floor with his feet. He stared at his hands, not daring to look at his fellow diners. For, indeed, they
were
dining; Jack could hear the chewing and swallowing sounds they made, the smacking they made with their lips, the slurping and sucking and grunting that was more porcine than human.

And then one of them spoke to him, and Jack almost screamed with the shock of it.
Look at me,
the voice said. There was a threat in there, a dark undertone of menace. Jack did not want to look, but he knew that if he disobeyed, something very, very bad, something indescribably awful, would happen to him. He knew this because it had happened to him before . . . and would undoubtedly happen again.

And so he looked. He raised his head and he turned it in the direction of that terrible voice. The first thing he saw was the mouth—the slobbery lips, the blocky grey teeth and black gleaming tongue. There was food in the mouth, stringy and wet with juices. It was being mashed by the teeth; morsels of it, hanging over the lips like tiny eels, were sucked remorselessly into the maw. The face was huge and rubbery, misshapen as a caricature. Jack saw a prickly beard, a huge nose bulbous as a pear, a ridged slab of brow and wiry eyebrows. The eyes were mean and bulging, the irises completely black. The instant he looked into that face, Jack was hit by two sudden and shocking revelations.

This monster was his father.

His father was the ogre from his book.

Jack was astounded that he had never realised this before, though now that he had it made perfect and terrible sense. He looked down at his lap, upon which now rested the book in question. It was entitled
The Bumper Book of Fairy Tales,
and the cover depicted a princess in a ball gown and tiara kneeling beside a stream, apparently talking to a frog on a lily pad. Jack opened the book, turned the pages until he found the story he was looking for:
Jack and the Beanstalk.
He turned to the page that he knew had a picture of the ogre crouched malevolently over a pile of gold coins, but upon reaching that page he was shocked to discover there was only a black rectangular box instead of an illustration. Once again Jack looked up at the ogre, his father. He saw those black bulging eyes glaring down at him and knew he was in terrible, terrible trouble. The ogre's lips flapped and writhed.
Look at your mother,
it said.
Look what you've done to her, you little shit.
Jack turned his head to look at the table's other occupant.

He saw a woman with white-blue skin and black hair. This was his mother, the way Jack always thought of her. Her face was calm and still, her eyes closed. She wore a white gown that seemed to billow gently in some breeze that Jack could not feel. Her arms were held slightly out from her body, palms up; the image was somehow saintly. All that spoiled the aura of peace were the growing bloodstains on the bottom half of the robe, bloodstains that started as coins of red, and quickly expanded to the size of plates, and then coalesced into a single crimson mass, spreading and covering the white cloth.

Jack saw blood running down the smooth white flesh of his mother's legs and wondered how, if she was sitting behind a table, this could be so. Then he realised she was no longer sitting; she was rising like an angel into the air. She rose above the table and hovered there for a moment. Blood dripped from her robe; Jack heard the insignificant
pat . . . pat . . .
sound of it striking the wooden tabletop. Slowly, she opened her eyes, and Jack saw that the eyeballs were completely white—and even though they were white he felt himself squirming beneath their accusing gaze. A single tear of blood brimmed and then trickled down her cheek. She drifted closer to him. Slowly, her hands took the bloodied hem of her robe and began to raise it. Jack caught the barest glimpse of something slick and pulsing between her legs, something that seemed made of purplish-grey flesh. . . .

And then he woke, bathed in sweat, his choking cry teasing at his throat, puncturing the darkness.

He sat up in bed, panting, his heartbeat tight and violent in his chest. He had a sour taste in his mouth. The cold air quickly dried the sweat on him and started him shivering. He realised he was clenching handfuls of duvet, and relaxed his grip with an effort. He released a shudder of stale breath. Beside him Gail stirred.

“Jack?” she murmured dreamily. “Are you okay?”

He swallowed. “I had one of my dreams,” he said hoarsely.

He heard the soft sound of her body on the sheets and knew that she was striving to wake, perhaps propping herself on an elbow. When she touched his arm he felt his skin flinch, shrivel into itself; a bristling wave of goosebumps coursed up his arm, across his shoulders and down his back. “Poor honey,” she murmured. “What was this one about?”

Jack was getting cold again. He pulled the duvet up to his chin. “The usual,” he said flatly.

“Beckford?”

“Yeah.”

“Was it another childhood dream?”

This time he simply nodded.

She drew closer to him, began to stroke his hair with one hand and then gently to knead the bunched muscles in his neck and shoulders. “You're so tense,” she said. She sat up, dragging herself from beneath the duvet, and then moved behind him and hugged him, her arms going over his shoulders and encircling his neck, her breasts pushing into his back, her legs straddling him from behind. She kissed his ear and cheek. His sweat was like the sediment of his dream, clinging and coppery. “It's okay,” she whispered. “Everything's okay now. It's all over.”

He was silent for a long, long moment. At last he said, “Why is this happening now?”