The Black Tattoo (16 page)

Jack sighed and — a little unsteadily — followed Charlie in.
 
The light from the street quickly shrank into the enveloping darkness of the empty pub.
 
The sensation that they weren't supposed to be there was, Jack found, very strong.

"Charlie?" he asked, in that ridiculous hoarse whisper you use when you want to be heard but don’t at the same time.

"Over here," came the reply, in Charlie's normal speaking voice.
 
"Come in.
 
Mind the steps."

By the light of the street behind him, Jack could just make out a wide flight of steps, and he followed them down until his trainers made squeaking contact with the bare floorboards.

"Charlie, how about a bit of light?" he asked, in his best casual voice.

"Sure."

Whump!
 
A ball of light appeared over the open palm of Charlie's hand.
 
Charlie grinned.

Jack looked at the glowing fireball, still trying not to boggle too much.
 
Then he looked around himself.

The light of Charlie's fireball thing showed a space that was surprisingly big, maybe even as big as the butterfly room.
 
To Jack's left, a long chrome bar top spanned about two-thirds of the length of the room, and there was a partitioned-off section of tables and sofas along to his right.
 
Charlie stood in the middle of the wide, largely bare open area that took up most of the room.
 
The whole place stank of stale cigarettes and booze.
 
But what Jack really noticed was the high ceiling, which, in the flickering yellow-orange light of Charlie's fireball, seemed very far away.

Jack looked back down at Charlie, who was doing something weird — well, even more weird anyway.
 
He was hunched over, his head sticking out forward as if he were sniffing for something.
 
His hands were groping about in the air.
 
The fireball thing hung over him, following him smoothly as he moved.

"Charlie, what are you—?"

"Here," said Charlie suddenly, turning to Jack with a huge grin.
 
"Here.
 
Feel."

Jack shrugged and walked over, his trainers squeaking loudly as he crossed the bare wood of the floor.

"Put your hand where mine is," said Charlie.

Jack gave him a sideways look but did as he said, putting his arm out.

"Can you feel it?" asked Charlie, still grinning wildly.

Jack felt about a bit.
 
"I can feel... a draft," he said.

"It's not a draft," said Charlie.
 
"See?
 
If I stand in front of it.
 
Here.
 
Or here.
 
Where could it be coming from?"
 
His smile got even wider.
 
"It's not a draft."

Jack frowned.
 
It certainly was very odd.
 
There was a cold space in the air, just above waist level, like putting your hand in a fridge.
 
It was a very small and very defined sort of space:
 
if he moved his arm so much as a few centimeters anywhere around it, the sensation vanished.
 
He'd read stories about supposedly haunted houses that had "cold spots."
 
He wondered whether that was anything to do with this.

"This is it, man," said Charlie, so excited he was practically vibrating.
 
"The Fracture.
 
The gateway to Hell."

"Mm," said Jack, straightening up and looking at his friend.
 
He took a deep breath.
 
"Listen," he said, "are you sure about this?
 
I mean, really?"

"I've never been more sure of anything," said Charlie, "in my entire life."

"But—"

"I can feel it," said Charlie.
 
His face glowed weirdly in the light of the fireball that was still hanging in the air above him.
 
"In my heart," he said, "in my head — and in my blood."
 
He closed his eyes, sniffed in a great lungful of air, and his eyelids fluttered.

Jack frowned at him.
 
"Er, right," he said.
 
"But don't you think, you know, that we should maybe call the others?"

"No," snapped Charlie, his eyes flicking open.
 
"No others."

The two boys looked at each other.

"Don't you get it?" asked Charlie, with a smile that was blatantly false.
 
"The others don't want us.
 
They don’t want to do this."

"But Charlie—"

"Come on, Jack!" Charlie's voice turned desperate.
 
"There's nothing for us here.
 
Nothing!
 
And what we've got — right? — what we've got is a chance to leave it all behind."
 
He stared at Jack, eyes wide.

"Come
on
, man," he repeated.
 
"People never get the chance to do something like this.
 
Not for real.
 
The others had it, but they blew it.
 
We're not going to make the same mistake."

Jack said nothing.

"All right?" said Charlie.

"I guess," said Jack.

"Cool.
 
Now take a step back.
 
I've got to do something here."

Jack did as he was told.

Charlie turned his back on him.
 
He spread his arms, and the ink-black shapes of the tattoo slid down under his skin like they were being poured there.

Jack watched the tattoo.
 
In seconds, Charlie's skin was a mass of black shapes — twisting, curling and caressing.

Then the whole room started to hum.

It was a sound that seemed to come from everywhere.
 
The air in the room seemed to be tightening around Jack like polyethylene.
 
Charlie's outstretched arms began to make strange, jerky coaxing gestures — and an eggshell-thin line of light began to form in the space in the air in front of him.

It was just a crack at first.
 
But as Charlie jerked and weaved — as if he were a puppet being pulled by invisible strings — the line was widening and filling the room with an unearthly red glow.

Slowly, carefully, Jack eased his phone out of his jeans pocket.

Not taking his eyes off Charlie, he pressed the buttons that would bring up and dial the number he wanted.

After three long rings, Raymond answered.
 
"Yeah?"

His voice sounded tiny and far away.

"It's Jack," whispered Jack.

"Hello?" said the big man.
 
"Who's there?"

"It's
Jack
."

"Jack?
 
I can't—"

"I'm at the Fracture," said Jack.
 
"Charlie's— hkh—"

And a blow struck all the air out of his body, immediately followed by a stunning impact from behind that almost made him black out.

When his vision cleared, he was staring into Charlie's face, down Charlie's arm.
 
Charlie's hand was locked round his throat.

Charlie's eyes were full of blood.
 
His face was like a mask:
 
the black shapes of the tattoo seethed and boiled under his skin, wriggling like eels.
 
The corners of his mouth lifted in a strange grin, before the mouth opened, and a horrible voice said:

"
No, no,
no
.
 
That's quite out of the question, I'm afraid
."

Jack forced himself to look down, away from the eyes, and saw (past his own dangling feet) that he was now some distance off the ground, pinned to the wall over the bar, on the other side of the room where he had been standing before.
 
He guessed Charlie must have grabbed him and just flow through the air with him until they'd hit the nearest wall.
 
He looked back up at Charlie as, slowly, Charlie's head tipped to one side.
 
The burning blood-filled eyes glanced at the phone in Jack's hand—

—and I tore from his grasp, shattering somewhere out of sight.

Silhouetted against the low, red glow of the Fracture, Charlie's face turned sad.

"You called them, Jack," he said, in his own voice — slowly, as if he couldn't believe what he was saying.
 
"Why would you do that?
 
Why would you...
betray
me like that?"

Jack said nothing.
 
It was hard to speak when someone had you by the throat.
 
He grabbed Charlie's arm with both his hands, but he might as well have been squeezing an iron bar.
 
The grip tightened, cutting off Jack's breath, and in another second Jack's vision was closing in:
 
great swaths of velvety black were swishing in from all around, surrounding Charlie's face until it was all that he could see.

He was losing consciousness, he realized.

Charlie was strangling him.

Jack felt a pressure on the inside of his skull, a squeezing in his heart, a tearing, thickening, swelling in his blood as it pounded in his ears — and he suddenly felt very stupid indeed.
 
Now, at last, it was obvious:
 
Everything, from meeting Nick for the first time, all the way up until this moment, had been nothing more than a trick.
 
Nick hadn't passed on any powers to Charlie:
 
he'd passed on
the Scourge
.
 
It was
Charlie
who was the Scourge's host body.
 
It was
Charlie
who'd been harboring the demon inside him all this time.
 
And though Jack had
known
there was something wrong with Charlie all along, he'd done and said nothing.
 
He'd been so stupid!
 
Stupid, stupid, stupid,
stupid
—

WHAM!

He glimpsed something slam into the side of Charlie's head.

The grip on his throat was suddenly released.

And Jack fell to the ground, hard.

He sat there in a crumpled heap, gasping for air.

"Esme," he heard Charlie say, surprised.

"Yeah," said Esme, and her amber eyes flashed fiercely.
 
"Me."

Jack looked up.
 
Esme was standing off to his right, on the steps that led down from the pub's entrance:
 
Jack had never been so glad to se anyone in his life.
 
Opposite her, to Jack's left, on another flight of wide steps that were the mirror image of the first, stood Charlie.
 
Across some twenty yards of bare, polished floorboards, Charlie and Esme faced each other.

"I should have known about you," said Esme quietly.
 
Her hands hung loosely at her sides.
 
She shifted her weight from one trainered foot to the other slowly.
 
"I should've spotted you from the start."

"Oh, yeah?" said Charlie.
 
"And why'd that?"

"It's all come pretty easy for you, hasn't it?" said Esme.
 
"Didn't it ever occur to you to wonder why?"

"What are you talking about?

Esme shook her head, smiling.

"You're nothing more than an
accident
, Charlie," she said.
 
"The wrong person, in the wrong place, at the wrong time."
 
She leaned forward a little, staring at him hard to push home every word.
 
"The Scourge needed a puppet.
 
Someone who was easy to push around.
 
You — with your little tantrums — fit the bill perfectly.
 
That's why you were chosen, Charlie.
 
Not for any other reason.
 
And certainly not — God forbid — because you had any
talent
."

"Is that right?" asked Charlie.

"It's like you said, Charlie," Esme told him.
 
"I've been waiting for this moment my whole life.
 
Ever since the thing that you let inside you took my mother from me.
 
You?" she added, and shrugged.
 
"You're here by
mistake
."

And she lunged.

She leaped straight off the steps, hurling herself through the air toward Charlie.

Charlie too leaped toward her, a fraction of a second later.

Jack saw a blur of limbs.

There was a resounding and sickening
crack
.

Then the two of them landed again, on the opposite sides to where they'd been standing before.

Charlie looked shocked:
 
his eyes were wide and staring, and his left arm cradled his right, which was sticking out a an alarming angle.

Esme's mouth was twisted in a sneer of rage:
 
her killing hands twitched at her sides.
 
She leaped again.

Charlie flung up his arms to ward her off.

And then the fight really began.

It was almost too fast for Jack to watch.
 
He could see Charlie doing his best to block her, but Esme was too quick:
 
for every blurring blow of foot or fist that landed relatively harmlessly on Charlie's shins or forearms, there seemed to be twice as many that cracked into a rib, hammered at his face, or smashed the air out of his belly, leaving him gasping.
 
Esme spun on the spot and drove her trainered foot squarely into Charlie's midriff, doubling him over, taking him off his feet and hurling him through the air, straight back into the stairs he'd started off on.
 
As the rest of his body hit the steps, his head snapped back, cracking against an edge.
 
Charlie's hands fell to his sides, his eyes rolled up in his head, and he lay there unconscious.