The Dead Path (4 page)

Then a young man in a stained corduroy jacket stepped into his vision.

Nicholas realized he must look like a drunkard, and hoped this might grant him license to remain lying there awhile longer. “I’m fine,” he said.

The boy looked down at him, unblinking. He had heavy bags under his eyes, and his skin was as pale as herring scales. His hands fidgeted like spring moles in his pockets.

Shit,
Nicholas thought.
Maybe I’m not making sense.
He reluctantly rose to his feet, wincing in anticipation of the flurry of black claws into his brain. But the headache stayed away.

“I slipped,” he said.

The boy pulled his hand from his jacket pocket. It held a screwdriver. Nicholas’s brain just had time to register it was a Phillips head when the boy shoved the chromed shaft hard into Nicholas’s chest. Nicholas jerked reflexively, waiting for the spike of agony that was sure to come. The boy withdrew the screwdriver, then shoved it in a sweeping underhand into Nicholas’s stomach.

Nicholas braced himself. But no pain came.

The boy watched him, jaw tight, red eyes glistening with tears. Then he took one step back, another …

Nicholas looked down at his chest and stomach. His T-shirt was unmarked. No punctures. No blood. No pain.

The boy took a step backward off the gutter onto the road. A blue Vauxhall was racing toward him, only twenty, fifteen, ten meters away.

“You’re going to—”

The car sped right into the boy, sending him flying. It kept going, accelerating.

“Jesus, Jesus!”

Nicholas took one, two, three jerky strides down the stairs and across the footpath. The boy lay prone on the road, a twisted swastika.
Christ,
he thought.
The car didn’t even slow.

He stared.

In fact, you didn’t even hear it hit him
 …

Then the boy was up. He was back on the weedy footpath, walking toward the flats. As he passed, he rolled his gloomy eyes to Nicholas. Hands in pockets, he climbed the flat’s front stairs to the buzzer panel, pressed it, waited, pulled the screwdriver from his pocket and stabbed an invisible victim twice, then retreated back, back, back and onto the road again before being struck by an invisible car and flying through the air, landing once more in a crippled heap. Then he vanished from the road, was walking on the footpath, and did it all again.

Nicholas was rooted to the spot, transfixed by the macabre loop. A woman with a blue anodized aluminium walker trundled right through the boy as he backed across the footpath.
She didn’t see him.

Nicholas waited till the boy had backed off the stairs, then scurried up, grabbed the boxes and shattered photograph, and ran to his car, shaking hard, not looking back.

  A
CAT scan—booked on the pretext of treating the now-vanished headaches—revealed his brain to be perhaps two percent smaller than average, but otherwise normal.

But nothing was normal.

He was seeing the dead.

After his vision of the boy with the screwdriver, Nicholas drove home to his new and humbly tiny Greenford flat, took three Nytols, and slid into a thick and dreamless sleep. The next day, he’d been able to dismiss the boy as a fata morgana brought on by the bash to the back of the skull, but the CAT scan results were a mixed blessing.

“Seeing things?” the radiologist asked. “What kind of things?”

The look on the woman’s face made Nicholas whip out the first lie he could think of, like an underrehearsed magician pulling out a badly hidden bouquet. “Freckles. All over people. Dark, join-the-dot kinds of freckles …”

She’d explained that there was no physical reason she could see for him to be having hallucinations.

Not ten minutes later, waiting for a bus on New Cavendish Street, he saw a portly middle-aged woman gag on a sandwich and fall to her knees. “You all right?” he called, leaping to help her up. His hands passed through her and he landed painfully on all fours on the gum-sticky concrete, shaving skin off his palms. He scrambled up, aware that a small crowd of commuters had taken careful steps backward, trying not to look at him. The choking woman rolled on her back, sausage fingers to her throat, heaving and turning blue until she fell still … and vanished.

Nicholas found himself apologizing to the crowd, and stalked away on shaking knees to find another bus stop.

He saw them every day after that. Curled broken in space, the invisible wrecks of crashed cars around their suspended bodies. Falling from buildings. Screaming silently as long gone flames turned their splitting skin red and black.

He was sure he was going mad.

And that feeling grew worse when he went back to work.

The “you-all-right?” winks and “lovely service, mate” pats on the back lasted a day or two but felt an eternity, so he was glad to get in a van and leave London. But the gladness was short-lived.

His canny hunts led him into wet-throated cellars, dust-cauled attics, lean-boned garages, weed-choked caravans. Gray places, rich and still. Places that were disturbing to stand alone in when the light was fading from the damp sky outside. These gloomy rooms where he found his booty left such a harrowed feeling in him that he was never tempted to keep any of his finds for himself. Not one old Smithwick’s sign, not one dented Royal typewriter, Hignett cigarette card, Ekco Bakelite wireless, or meerschaum pipe. Nothing. They were all strangely tainted. It was only after his fall down the steps and thump on the back of the head that Nicholas understood at last why those grim, quiet places where he found his dusty curios gave him the willies.

They were haunted.

Now, in those silent attics, garages, basements, and back rooms, behind boarded windows or under musty eaves or paused on damp cellar stairs, he watched empty-eyed men throw ropes over rafters, thin farmers ease their yellow teeth over phantom shotgun barrels, tight-jawed mothers stir rat poison into tea, young men slip hosing over invisible exhaust pipes … over and over and over. To make the horrors worse, he was invariably accompanied by the home’s new owner or oblivious executor, who chattered about the charming virtues of the world’s love affair with all things old, about the latest foot-and-mouth scare, about the weather, unaware that lonely death was being silently repeated right before their florid faces. And the ghosts, in return, took no notice of their living landlords, spouses, children, enemies … yet their dead eyes rolled to stare at Nicholas. They knew he could see them.

Nicholas stuck with his job for three weeks. Then, shaking and sleepless, he quit.

  H
e had felt perpetually like crying. The dead were everywhere. He had to tell someone. In the end, he confided in just three people.

The first was his workmate Toby, a full-faced cabinet-maker who headed the team that prefabricated the stalls and bars of the Irish pubs that Nicholas would later line with books, rods, copper kettles, and Box Brownie cameras. Toby was a bit of a tree-hugger, often talking about how the wood under his hands felt alive, always reading his horoscope in the
Daily Star.
He seemed the sort of chap who might listen to a story about hauntings. Nicholas was most of the way through explaining his fall on the stairs, the attack by the dead boy with the screwdriver, his consequent calls to police, and hunts through newspaper microfiche files to discover that in 1988 a Keith Yerwood had stabbed his girlfriend, Veronica Roy, nearly to death on the stairs of her flat—
my flat!
—when he noticed the expression on Toby’s face. It had been hard for Nicholas to place; he’d never seen anyone regard him that way before: it looked a little like confusion, a bit like skepticism, somewhat like anxiety … and yet it was something completely different, something solid and primal. Then he placed it. It was fear. Toby was afraid of him. The chat ended there. Very soon after, Toby began avoiding him on the shop floor and stopped returning his calls.

Nicholas finally found the courage to make an appointment to see a psychologist. He told the bird-fingered, beak-nosed doctor about Cate’s death, about the headaches, the fall on the stairs, and the haunted places. She nodded, took notes. He told her that he wasn’t crazy: the ghosts he saw correlated with records of deaths he’d found in newspaper records. They were
real
.

She nodded some more, and looked up from her notes. “Do you think you’re unwell?”

The question irritated him.

“I’m seeing the dead. It certainly doesn’t feel fucking healthy.”

She nodded again and propped her head on an avian fist.

“Do you miss your wife?”

Nicholas hesitated. Was that a trick question? “Yes.”

She pursed her thin lips. “And do you think you could be inventing these ‘ghosts’ in the hope that you might, at least for yourself, bring your wife back?”

The question struck like a cricket bat.

He’d been seeing strangers’ ghosts for nearly a month, but had never thought about the possibility of seeing Cate again.

He hurried home to Greenford, heart racing, and grabbed the spare key for the as-yet-unsold Ealing flat.

The sun had dropped below the city’s gray skyline when he hurried past the For Sale sign around to the back of the complex (he studiously avoided the front stairs) and up the rear stairwell to their little place. The flat was clean and empty as a robbed tomb. His heart was throbbing in his chest so hard that his fingers shook. He strode through the echoing kitchen, past the still living room, to the bathroom. It was clean now—the long line through the dust where Cate’s heel had slid as her neck swung down on its fatal parabola to the bath edge was long gone, the plaster dust all swept away. The shower curtain that had popped from the rail as she’d fruitlessly grabbed it to save herself had been replaced. The ceiling remained unpainted.

And she was there.

Straining high on an invisible ladder.

“Cate?”

She turned at the sound of his voice. Put one foot down to a step in the air, another … then one foot slipped and kicked out from under her. One plaster-dusted hand struck out, grabbing at empty space. The other closed around a shower curtain that wouldn’t hold her. She fell. Her mouth opened in a small “O” of surprise. One heel hit the floor, and slid out—much as his own must have done finding the plastic grocery bag—and she arced backward. Nicholas dove to catch her, and his fingers smacked painfully into the tiles. Right under his face, her neck struck the hard, tooth-white edge of the bath and her hair tossed backward. The goggles wrenched off. And her eyes stared up at nothing, dusting white under a phantom mist of powder. Her chest deflated slowly and didn’t rise again.

Nicholas felt his throat twist and tighten. His wide eyes stung.

She looked so small. This was how he had found her the afternoon of the crash: sprawled as if exhausted, painfully arched, eyes open to nothing.

Then her eyes rolled toward his. Just for a moment. It was a look that could mean a million things or nothing. A look as empty as a dusty glass found forgotten on a windowsill. Then she was back up the invisible ladder, floating, sanding, about to die again, and again, and again.

Nicholas stayed until midnight, watching her fall and die, until his eyes were so red and his throat so wretched he could hardly see or breathe. He willed his heart to burst and fail, but it kept squeezing, disconnected from his grief. Then he closed the bathroom door, locked the flat, and drove very slowly away.

He stayed in bed for three days.

The third and last person he told about his visions worked out of a small shop off High Street in between a discount luggage store and a bakery. A hinged shingle proclaimed “Madame Sydel—Readings, Seeings.”

She was a wizened lady, brown and twisted as the trunk of some hardy Mediterranean tree, her wildly dyed hair sown with glazed beads. When she reached under her scalp and scratched purposefully, Nicholas realized it was a wig. Still scratching, she led him into a parlor lined with tasseled silks and smelling of incense and burned hair. She sat him down and took his hand.

He jumped straight into business: “I see ghosts.”

“Oh? How much do you charge?”

Nicholas went home, picked up the phone, and bought his airline ticket out of Britain.

  T
he day before he stepped in the cab for Heathrow, he had woken to a rain as light as steam drifting from the sky. By midmorning, when he reached the cemetery in Newham, the sun was having a tug of war with the clouds and was creating small dew diamonds on the roses and willows.

Nicholas sat heavily beside Cate’s grave.

He looked at her headstone and a felt a swirl of guilt. It was black and angular and Cate would have hated it. “Like something by Albert Speer,” she’d have said. Her parents had done the choosing. Nicholas remembered the typed, formally worded letter asking him for nine thousand pounds for the funeral, grave lease, and a “lovely package where the council plants spring and summer flowers on the grave.” He read the gold-lettered epitaph for the hundredth time.

In God’s loving arms.

Was it true? There was no sense of her here. No feeling that she lay below him. No feeling that she watched from above. The air was cool for summer, and, with the rain drying, felt empty and fleeting. Was she trapped in the silent playback going on and on in the echoing little bathroom in Ealing? Was she gone completely, the spark in her brain extinguished and her with it?

He waited. For a sign. For a whisper of wind. For anything that said she heard him and wanted him to stay.

The willows held themselves silent. A car with a sports muffler rutted past on the North Boundary Road. Nothing.

Nicholas got to his feet and left.

  T
hree days later, a hemisphere away, he lay on his little sister’s childhood bed, listening to rain crash down in an endless, dark wave.

And now he was home.

A ring wedding him to a dead woman. A few thousand pounds. A couple of nice-ish Ben Sherman shirts.

Seventeen years. Nothing.

And his mother? No new man. Same house. Twenty new teapots … otherwise, nothing had changed.