Hello Darkness (7 page)

I was impressed.

“How did you trace it?”

“Well, you can use a combination of a custom-designed ion mobility spectrometer with an ultra-violet ionization source and a high-speed capillary column. That will pick up a range of volatile organic compounds, including acetone and ethyl acetate. Or you can … sniff.”

“What?”

“Do you remember the faint smell that the stick insects gave off?”

“Yeah, vaguely…”

“Recognize it?”

I shook my head, which is always a little futile when you’re on the phone. Then I had a vision. My mother getting ready to go out. Sitting in front of her dressing table, draped in towels. Using little pads of cotton wool to clean the old nail varnish off, leaving a clean canvas for the shiny new coating of red.

“Nail polish remover,” I said.

“Precisely. The active ingredient of which is—”

“Let me guess: ethyl acetate.”

“Good boy.”

“So,” I said, thinking aloud, “we’ve got someone who, for whatever reason, didn’t want to mash up the bugs, and who had access to some nail varnish remover—”

“Which means almost anyone.”

“Yeah, OK. Anyone who paints their nails. But it’s something to go on. I don’t know how to thank you, Mrs Maurice.”

“Oh,” she said, innocently, “I’m sure if you tried really,
really
hard you could come up with something.”

“I’ll bring you an apple.”

“It’s a deal. Good night.”

“Good night.”

I flicked through the TV channels. Nothing but garbage, so I climbed back upstairs and out onto my roof.

The evening was clear, but the red hum of light from the city wiped out most of the stars. Just one big, bright planet glowed low down, to the south. Too big and yet too dull for flashy Venus. Jupiter, I guessed, screwing his way through the cosmos. And then I heard a mewling growl, and the cat was there.

“Hey, Cat,” I said.

I was happy she’d come back. She stuck her claws into me with delicate spite as she climbed up onto my lap. She licked her paws and cleaned her face and then melted warmly into me. I felt along the wall behind me for the little box I kept my cigarettes in. I’d started coming up here because my parents would have gone ape if they’d caught the smell of smoke in my room. I lit the cigarette, lay back and blew smoke into the empty night, and thought about nothing, nothing at all.

That night I dreamed I was a defenceless stick insect. I was the last one. The others had all been crushed. And whatever had crushed them was after me. I was doped up on – what was it? – ethyl something. My stick legs moved so slowly. My stick body swayed and trembled with each laborious step. There was a shadow. I looked up. It was coming. It was huge. It was pink.

I woke up drenched in sweat, but then drifted off again, remembering too late about my meds.

FOR
the first six minutes of school the next day everything was normal. I’d walked through the heavy drizzle, and made it through the gates and into the school building. I’d gone down two corridors, and hadn’t yet been strangled, coshed or vamped. I was standing in front of my locker, ready to retrieve the PE kit I’d stuffed in there, still damp and grimy from the week before.

My locker was number 526. It was at the end of the row. The two lockers next to mine – 525, and the one next to that, 524 – had always been vacant. I guess it was a cordon sanitaire, a quarantine zone, to make sure nobody caught whatever it was I had.

Well, now someone was in the zone. Close enough to catch it…

I could tell, even from the side, that she was a stunner. Her features had a calm, almost grave perfection, brilliantly counterpointed by the fact that she was more pierced than Saint Sebastian. Ears, nose and eyebrow I could see: the rest was speculation, although I was prepared to put real money down on her tongue. She was tall in a way that hovered just on the right side of gangly. She had purple nails and purple lips and there was tragedy in her eyes, as if they’d seen bad things. Seen them, forgotten about them, then remembered them again.

I shovelled my crusty sports gear into my bag, hoping that the faint puff of malodorous gas didn’t reach her in exchange for the delicate and decadent aroma of violets and smoke she was sending my way.

I’m a guy who prefers to work to a plan. I can improvise a melody, but I like the rhythm track laid down nice and solid. So I quickly formulated one. I’d glance over in her direction. Then, if she glanced back, I’d give her a smile. I went through a few of my smile options:

There was sardonic.

There was conspiratorial.

There was sexy.

There was the smile that said,
Hey, I’m deep, but I also have a good sense of humour
.

There was a smile that said,
Stick with me, babe, and I’ll show you a heck of a good time
.

And then there was goofy.

My fear was that I’d go for sardonic or sexy and hit on goofball by mistake, like a prospector striking fool’s gold. Anyway, if she answered my smile with a smile, then I’d ask her a question. And if she said yes, then we’d be married in a week and spend the rest of our lives together in a cottage in the woods.

But when I finally got around to glancing at her, she was too focused on getting her key into her locker to notice. It looked like there was something wrong with the key. Or maybe the lock. Finally she rammed the key home and twisted.

I guess what she saw when she opened the door was supposed to make her scream.

Most kids would have screamed.

Not this one. If I hadn’t already been looking at her, then I probably wouldn’t have realized that something was happening. But I was looking, and so I saw her flesh freeze, saw her body become utterly rigid, saw the fine bones in her face sharpen. She had the stillness you sometimes see in a spider, perched at the edge of its web, its long legs alive to the slightest movement of the threads. It was a stillness that comes not from peace, but from an intensified electric energy.

Then I looked down at the locker. I couldn’t see what was in there, the thing that had frozen her like that. But I could see the inner side of door. There was a red dot, as if someone had stabbed the door with a marker pen. Except that the ink from a marker pen doesn’t drip, and this red dot had two small, dried rivulets running from its bottom edge.

I scanned the area. There were plenty of kids around, but none close enough to see.

She shut the locker.

And for the first time she looked at me. Not so much at me, as at the space I occupied.

“Are you OK?” I asked, not bothering with any of the smiles. If only I’d had one that said,
I know something really, really awful has just happened in your locker, but you can trust me and together we’ll get through this
. You’d need some mouth to get that one across.

Her eyes took a while to focus. They were lovely eyes. Here in the shadows they were the colour of the sea on a rainy day.

“You’re that kid, aren’t you? The one that killed the roaches. The psychopath.”

Word travels fast. The worse the word, the faster it goes.

“Stick insects. And, yes, I’m that kid, but, no, I didn’t kill them. I was just
there
.”

“And now you’re just here.” Her face was distant, but desolate, like a wilderness seen from afar. “Did you do this too?”

She sounded almost dreamily calm.

“What’s in the locker?”

“Dead stuff.”

The idea formed in my head like a figure stepping out of the fog: it was another of the school animals. I knew it the way you know a familiar face in a crowd.

“Let me guess.” I made like a chicken, flapping my elbows and doing that chicken thing with my head. I don’t know why; it would have been easier just to say “chickens”.

She shook her head.

“Guinea pigs?”

She nodded.

“Can I look?”

“I
said
you were a psycho.”

She spoke with that same detachment, but she moved away a little and I opened the locker door.

The two guinea pigs were there, side by side. They looked weirdly peaceful. Almost as if they were sleeping. I poked one of them with my finger, half thinking it might open its little black eyes, and the whole thing would turn out to be a joke, that it really was a dot of red marker pen on the door. But Snuffy fell over, and his throat gaped like a second mouth. I didn’t need to look to know that Sniffy had suffered the same fate. I swung the door to again.

“Looks like whoever did this sliced them open somewhere else, then came and arranged them like this. There’d be more blood otherwise…”

“What is this,
CSI Hamster
?”

I let that ride. The girl was in shock.

“It also looks like they forced your locker – see these scratches here around the keyhole?”

“Why would someone do that?”

“Like you said, plenty of psychos about.”

“I didn’t say there were plenty. I said you were one.”

“You’re pretty cool,” I said, “for a girl who’s just found two mutilated bodies in her locker.”

And then I wished I hadn’t said it, because I saw that the stillness I had perceived was an illusion, and that she was trembling. I put my hand on hers. It was as cold as a corpse, and I felt a shiver run through me.

“What’s your name?”

“Zofia Novak.”

“Cute: a zed name. I like zed names.”

For the first time she smiled. It was the briefest smile, like a bird flying across a window.

“And you’re…”

“John. Not so cute.”

“Let me be the judge of that,” she said, and now we were both smiling.

“You’re new,” I said, in a harmless kind of way.

She gave me a slow, quizzical stare. She really was absurdly beautiful. There was no need for it. She could have shaved the top third off her beauty and still qualified as a goddess.

“There’s nothing new under the sun,” she said at last. “Don’t you realize we’ve all been here before?”

“We have?”

“The eternal recurrence.”

“The what?”

“Eternal recurrence. The universe is big enough and old enough for everything that happens to happen again. And again. And again. Death and rebirth. We’re all old news.”

Normally that was about the time I’d be laughing or at least walking away, shaking my head.

Except
… Recurrence, doubling, rebirth… Somehow it chimed with that feeling I’d had about the two worlds, the one made of light, the other of … whatever it was. As if the recurrence were folded back on itself. Wait, there was a word I remembered, half-remembered …
palimpsest
. Yeah, that was it. Back in the days when they used to write on parchment made from animal skins, they would sometimes scrape off the top layer of writing and start again. But the first layer would never be completely erased and would show through, and so you’d get the two texts almost blending together. Was that why those green eyes haunted me? Had they burned their way through from an older stratum?

Who was I kidding? The reason I didn’t walk away was that she was as pretty as a hummingbird chasing a butterfly around a rose.

I tried to think of something witty to say. It was no good; I had nothing in the tank. So I settled for raising an eyebrow, which had gotten me out of plenty of scrapes in the past. She took up the slack.

“But, yeah, new.”

“Where were you before?”

“Belmonte.”

“Nice school.”

Belmonte was an all-girl-private joint. Run by nuns.

“They expelled me.”

Well, if she looked like this when she was there, I wasn’t surprised that the good sisters kicked her out. But then I remembered something else.

“Wait … that was
you
?”

“They lied. It was all lies.”

“I believe you.”

The story had been all over the town. It even made the local paper. A girl, who couldn’t be named for legal reasons, had been expelled for practising black magic. It was absurd, of course. There were no details, just gruesome rumours. And now I thought about it, hadn’t there been something to do with animals…? Animals being …
sacrificed
? I felt a twinge of pressure behind my eye. But then I looked again at that lovely face and knew that she was incapable of anything cruel.

“They didn’t understand what I was… No, I don’t want to talk about it.”

It felt as though we’d been standing in a bubble, but suddenly I remembered that there was a real world out there and two dead guinea pigs under our noses.

“Maybe we’d better go and report this,” I said, waving my hand at her locker.

“No!” she said in a voice that suddenly burned hot as phosphorous. “They’ll say it was me. They’ll say it’s happening again, they’ll say it’s because I’m a…”

“You’re no witch. Any more than I’m a psycho. OK, then, we need some time to think this over. Lock the door. We can—”

And then I heard something that I should have been expecting, given the way things were going.

“LOCKER INSPECTION!”

A
couple of times a term the Shank would prowl down the locker corridor, looking for trouble. He had a master key to all the lockers, but he liked to pick on some poor, furtive, sweating kid, and get him or her to open their own locker. The Shank would almost look disappointed if he didn’t find something nasty in there. And if he did find some contraband – a dirty book, maybe, or some of the unhealthy snacks he’d banned from the school – then the victim would get the full blast of his wrath. There was a story that the Shank had once made a kid lick his locker clean when he found it grimed with football-field mud and mouldy cake crumbs.

The Shank was still at the far end of the corridor. Kids quailed and melted before him, avoiding eye contact, lest he pick on them. He walked on, ignoring them all, his tread heavy and ominous. There were three prefects with him – Funt and Bosola, of course, plus a creepy, lanky kid called Spode. They smacked heads and kicked butts behind the Shank’s back.