A Few Words for the Dead (16 page)

Dragging the bodysuit all the way home was annoying but these things were expensive and she had every intention of repainting it and wearing it the next time she put on one of her theatrical evenings.

‘Hello house,’ she shouted, as she clambered through the front door and up the stairs to her flat. There was a low murmur from the couple that rented downstairs. They were so impolite. She bet they wouldn’t be so shy once she was famous – they’d soon be returning her greetings then.

She finally got the suit through her front door and sat it down in the bathroom. It would get in the way when she wanted a shower – and having sweated in it for hours she wanted one now – but there was nowhere else it could possibly fit.

First there must be a glass of wine. Life could not possibly continue without one. She turned on her phone and scrolled through the several angry texts, emails and voicemails, lost in threats, insults and demands as she shuffled into the kitchen and scrabbled around in the fridge for the bottle she knew should be in there. Still staring at the screen, her hand waved unproductively around in the largely empty space, singularly failing to fall on anything wine-shaped. She borrowed it back for a minute to wipe at her eyes – why did people always have to be so horrible? Finally, she stopped looking at the awful, mean words and stared into the fridge. The wine wasn’t there. She stamped her foot and wailed in frustration at her day. She’d bought a bottle, thinking it would be a well-earned treat after a hard day being all successful finally in a definitely, actual, proper movie for which she was being paid and everything. So why was it not there?

‘Are you looking for this?’

Grace gave a squeal of surprise and nearly fell backwards into the fridge.

There was an old woman in her kitchen. Why on earth was there an old woman in her kitchen? An old woman that appeared to be drinking her bloody wine.

The old woman raised the bottle towards Grace by way of a toast, then took a large swig out of it. ‘I hope you don’t mind me letting myself in. Spare key on the door jamb really isn’t a terribly clever hiding place.’

‘I keep losing… What are you doing in my house?’

‘Shush, darling,’ said the woman that still was not altogether April Shining. ‘We don’t want to disturb the neighbours.’

‘Fuck the neigh…’ But she didn’t say any more because that was when the woman turned the bottle around and smacked her in the face with it.

Grace stumbled backwards, her foot slipping in the trail of spilled cheap hock, and crashed back into the open fridge.

‘I told you!’ the old woman hissed. ‘Shush!’ And she continued to pound at Grace’s head with the bottle until there was nothing left but a shattered stub of its glass neck.

Sighing with the exertion, she stepped back, took April Shining’s phone out of her handbag and took a photo of Cassandra Grace’s ruined face.

‘I never quite know how to work these things,’ she explained as Cassandra tried to draw a liquid breath. ‘Is it better to email or text? Hang on…’

Cassandra slipped down out of the fridge, half-eaten goods spilling on her from the collapsed shelves.

‘Email, I think,’ the old woman said. ‘Yes. That’s it. August Shining. Yes. Send. Sending… still sending… Sent!’

As Cassandra tried to get to her feet, blind from the blood in her eyes, a question seemed important to her. ‘Woo Gers Hiny?’

‘Who’s August Shining? Oh, my poor lovely, he probably didn’t give you his real name, but according to his files you’ve worked as an agent for him several times. Expert on curses? I’m sure you were very helpful.’

Cassandra tried to make a run for the front door but, still blind, she collided with the wall, leaving a crimson splash on the white paintwork that looked like a child’s painting of a butterfly. Behind her she heard the old woman rifling through her cutlery drawer. ‘Don’t run off, darling,’ she said. ‘Aunty April hasn’t quite finished with you yet.’

Derek Lime dumped his toolbox in the back of the van and made a pretence at wiping the dirt of the Victoria Line off his face with a piece of paper towel.

‘We all square, Derek?’

Derek looked over at Faraday, his boss, and nodded. ‘Reckon so. Just needed to re-channel some of the output through…’

‘Good lad,’ Faraday interrupted. ‘You know me, always get confuddled with the technical stuff.’

Lad? Confuddled? Derek didn’t know what the TFL was coming to these days. And to think the man was named after a genius.

‘So we all good to go, then?’ Faraday asked, offering him a weak smile as if that made all the difference when repeating yourself.

‘Yes,’ Derek said. ‘Good to go.’

‘Poptastic. I’ll pass on the good news upstairs.’

‘You do that,’ agreed Derek. And go away now, he managed not to add.

Thankfully it proved unnecessary as he was immediately left to pack up the rest of his stuff while his boss dashed away to explain how brilliant he was to someone who earned more than both of them put together.

Some days Derek wished he was back on the wrestling circuit. At least then he had been allowed to roar at his opponent from time to time. He imagined rebounding off the ropes and launching himself onto Faraday, perhaps forgetting to take his weight on his arms as he dropped, just slapping right down on him, gravity and gut in perfect symphony. He liked to think Faraday might end up several inches thinner and a foot taller.

Still, with his heart, the wrestling had had to go. It was one thing loving your job, it was quite another dying over it.

Van packed, Derek made to get in the driver’s seat when he saw something that stopped him dead in his tracks. On the other side of the car park was an old Mini. Poking out beyond it, only just visible in the amber glow of the streetlights, was a pair of legs.

Oh Lord, Derek thought. What’s happened here then?

‘Hello there!’ he called, jogging towards the car. ‘Are you all right?’

He rounded the car and saw it was an elderly woman, lying face down on the tarmac.

‘Christ on a bike,’ Derek muttered, trying to remember his first aid training.

He quickly checked her for signs of bleeding but she seemed safe to move. He took hold of her shoulders and gently made to turn her over.

‘Watch it, porky,’ the old woman said, spinning around and punching him in his stomach. ‘Keep your hands to yourself.’

She kept punching at him and he stumbled back, only realising as he tried to stand up that she had a knife in her hand. She wasn’t punching, she was stabbing.

‘What you doing that for?’ he said, falling back onto his considerable behind, looking down at his dark jersey. It hid any sign of damage in the low light. It was only by touching it, by the spreading sensation of heat that crept over him, that he really appreciated the trouble he was in. He sighed, his head spinning as the blood loss brought him close to fainting. Only now did he begin to panic, that unreliable heart of his clattering around. It’ll be the death of me one day, he’d always thought. Sooner or later that damn thing’s just going to stop. He was partially right.

‘Let’s see if you can’t lose a little weight,’ the woman said, as he lay back on the ground, his last short breaths pumping out of him. She straddled him and began to carve.

A few minutes later, the car park was briefly lit by the white burst of a camera-phone flash.

‘I have just checked,’ said Jamie Goss, pouring himself another vodka and coke, ‘and I am entirely full of mimsy.’

‘Shush,’ said his partner, Alasdair, staring intently at the television. ‘Why do you always have to kick up a fuss when I choose the film?’

‘Mimsy levels reaching critical in fact,’ Goss replied. ‘Mimseygeddon mere seconds away. And you always choose the bloody films, ever since we first met. The last time I had full control of my LoveFilm account, my bed had a man called Enrique living in it.’

‘Shush! You’re spoiling it!’

On the screen, a young man fell to the floor of his artist’s garret and wept about his AIDS.

‘I think you’ll find it was spoiled long before I caught a glimpse of it,’ said Goss. ‘I may have to go into the bedroom now before I’m forced to smash the television.’

‘Good. Go away.’

‘You won’t say that when you come in later, you changeable cow.’ As Goss shuffled out of the room with his drink, the young man on the screen was talking to God. God was played by Tilda Swinton.

Deciding to postpone his visit to the bedroom for a few, practical minutes, Goss took his drink into the bathroom, dropped his trousers and took up a relaxed position on the toilet, sipping his vodka and coke and perusing the bookshelf for something jolly.

The doorbell rang. From the lounge there was nothing but the sound of an old Eurythmics song being sung a cappella.

The doorbell rang again.

‘Well, get the bloody door, then!’ Goss shouted, selecting a tourist guide to Greece.

‘You get it!’ Alasdair replied.

‘I am without trousers,’ Goss replied, ‘and if you make me go I’ll explain to whoever it is that the reason they are staring at my balls is entirely due to the indolence of my boyfriend. “The one with no taste in films?” they’ll ask. “That’s him,” I’ll reply. They will pity me.’

The sound of the film ceased just as Tilda prepared to sing about how noble and brutal love was.

‘I hope it’s another boyfriend being delivered,’ Alasdair muttered as he walked past the bathroom door.

Goss took another sip of his drink and looked at pictures of waiters.

He heard the door open and Alasdair say hello.

‘Hello, dear,’ came an elderly woman’s voice. ‘Are you Jamie Goss, by any chance?’

‘He’s otherwise engaged at the moment,’ Alasdair replied. ‘Can I help you?’

‘Oh, it’s all gravy as far as I’m concerned,’ the old woman said and there was a popping sound followed by a crash.

What the bloody hell had Alasdair done? Goss wondered, putting his drink behind him on the cistern and pulling up his trousers.

‘Have you actually managed to fall over just by answering the door?’ he shouted. ‘That’s genuinely amazing.’

He opened the bathroom door to see Alasdair lying in the hallway with a hole in the middle of his forehead. A few feet away, an old woman with a gun in her hand was pushing the front door closed and turning the lock. ‘In all fairness,’ she said, ‘I did help a bit.’

She pointed the gun at Goss who darted back into the bathroom, slamming and locking the door behind him.

‘Fuck, fuck fuck…’ he whispered, his brain spasming all over the place in shock. That can’t have really been… Old women didn’t just come into your house and… Alasdair couldn’t really be…

The silenced handgun popped a couple more times and a pair of holes appeared in the door and, behind Goss, there was the sound of cracking bathroom tiles.

He gave a wail of panic and utter disbelief. What was going on? Why was this woman…?

He fell back into the bath and his body shook a couple of times before going completely still.

Goss was out, his mind lifted from his body and into that other place, the other plane he occasionally travelled to. He had, to use the term he favoured when leaving messages for Alasdair,
gone fishing
. It was this skill, remote viewing, astral projection, spirit walking, call it what you like, that August Shining had found occasionally useful. Nothing beat an agent that could leave their body behind and observe the world around them. Not that the plane Goss went to was the world he had left. It was always distorted, shifted, a nightmare place. But he had frequently picked up messages, translated what he had seen into something that was useful to Section 37. Now, of course, he was just running scared and, as much as his rational mind knew it was useless – there was a limit to what you could do when you’d given up on the benefits of a body – he couldn’t bear the thought of trapping himself back inside it. He had to run, get away from mad women and their guns.

He opened the door – the door in the other plane, the real one would stay resolutely closed – and stepped out into this plane’s version of his hallway. On the floor was the shadow of his dead boyfriend. Lovely Alasdair. Brilliant Alasdair. Poor, long-suffering bloody Alasdair. He was facing towards the ceiling, his face a corruption, an exaggeration of death, a bloated thing of moss and rot. Goss looked away. He couldn’t bear the idea that that would be the last image he would have of the man he loved.

Then he saw the woman, the woman as this plane presented her. She stood a few feet away, and she had become a swirling mass of movement. At the heart of the swirling shape the old woman appeared just as she had in the brief glimpse Goss had had when he’d opened the door. Normal, recognisable, human. But around her the darkness moved, long tendrils of it slapping against the walls, ceilings and floor. It looked like ink in water, dissipating and reforming, as if it were not quite a part of this world but moving in and out of it.

‘Hello, darling,’ it said, and surged towards him with a dull screech like wet skin pulled across glass.

Goss ran, hurling himself at his front door, not bothering to try and open it just passing right through and falling to the blackened stone of the balcony outside. He got to his feet and kept running, heading for the stairs. He half jumped, half floated down them.

He’d never allowed himself to be so fluid before, the panic teaching him skills he didn’t know he’d been missing. Before he had always navigated this world as you would any other, treating his surroundings as physical. Now he was almost flying as he burst out into the central courtyard of the block and towards the main gate.

He looked over his shoulder to see the thing that had killed Alasdair blossom against the front of the building. It rose from the balcony, the old woman still at its centre but unmoving as the black tendrils pushed off against the walls of his home and sailed through the air towards him.

There was no way he could outrun this, no way he could escape it.

There was also no way he wasn’t going to try.

In his times here in the other plane he had often seen creatures lurking at the edge, shadows in the sky, presences in the walls, pushing their way through this reality. When asked for his opinion on these creatures, he would say that they were, like him, passing through from another world, one that was different again from the one we were used to. Was the thing that hunted him one of those creatures? It certainly seemed more than the shadow versions of real people he met here. They were distorted avatars, the psyches of people in the real world extending out into this realm, exaggerated into something grotesque. This creature was more proactive, clearly as comfortable negotiating its way along the twisted streets as he was.