The Last Days of Jack Sparks (21 page)

I want to know why I keep seeing and hearing things that make . . .

‘Jack . . .’

. . . no sense.

This new whisper (which does sound like Maria if you think about it. Or Translator Tony. Or Camera Boy.
Hush
,
stupid lizard-brain
) comes from the far end of the corridor.

My bare feet slap the carpet as I run towards it. Never expected to be led away from our door, so didn’t grab shoes, but I can’t resist this siren call. Halting at a T-junction, I consider my options.

To my left, the silver glint of room-service trays outside every third door punctuates a long strip of carpet. At the very end of this corridor, I squint back at myself from a full-length wall mirror.

To my right, the corridor passes more doors and a bulky ice machine half buried in an alcove, before hitting another junction.

‘Jack . . .’

Decision made. I hurry off to the left, following the sound. My mirror image stomps towards me, growing larger, its body language more determined.

Two turns later, the corridor broadens into a square space prettified by vased flowers. Two lift doors along one side and a fire door on the other. My name gets whispered from beyond the fire door and so I burst through it, determined to catch the fucker out.

The stairwell’s stone floor freezes the soles of my feet. Brightly lit stairs coil down six floors. No sign of movement anywhere. No sound of footsteps.

And yet the sporadic whispering continues below, leading me down ever faster until I’m taking three steps at a time. Risking broken toes to get ahead of the game. Because that’s how this feels, like some kind of teasing childhood game, a playground rerun. If someone wants to press my buttons, they’re pressing well.

Down, down I go. Up, up goes my heart rate.

At ground level, I’m confronted with a door marked ‘Lobby’. I sit back on a low step and catch my breath. My T-shirt’s stuck to my back. When I flex my shoulder blades, they squelch. Still, the headache’s gone.

‘Jack . . .’

This from the other side of the lobby door, obviously.

Can you see where this is going? You probably can. You’re smart: you’re reading a Jack Sparks book, for Christ’s sake. But I still have no clue.

I palm open the door and enter the super-chic lobby, where the faux-marble floor does little to warm my feet. Across the other side, at reception, a tall, blond receptionist chats to someone out of sight in a back room. Some bloke in an evening jacket and jeans, probably a night-owl guest or drug dealer, is slumped on one of the artfully misshapen sofas, engrossed by his phone.

The adjoining bar area lies dormant and dark. Its fancy metal stool legs jab skywards, furniture dreamed up in an H. R. Giger power nap. Moonlight stroking shelved bottles of vodka and gin and . . . oh, who cares.

I’m just killing time on the edge of it all. Head cocked at an angle. Hair an asylum-escapee mess. Shoes nowhere to be seen.

Listening, waiting . . .

Waiting . . .

‘Jack . . .’

I track the voice past fountains that spurt dutifully even at this hour, lit with garish blue and pink light, into a short corridor branching off the lobby. It ends with a service door, wedged open by a bucket and mop.

‘Jack . . .’ says that infuriating voice, from the darkness beyond the door.

Maybe I am Scooby-Doo after all. Maybe this is the janitor fucking with me.

I steal a look back to the lobby. From here, I see no one and no one sees me. I drag the heavy door wider open, step over the bucket and duck inside.

Ancient wooden steps cascade down. The light switch doesn’t work, but the bottom of the staircase is dimly lit, so I grip the glossy wooden handrail. These chips in the rail’s varnish surely mirror the state of my sanity in pursuing this.

I test each new step with one foot before applying my full weight to it. Which seems so wise but does me no good. Halfway to the bottom, the meat of my right sole sinks down on to something sharp, skewering the muscle. I bend double, panting, dog drool oozing from my mouth. Standing precariously on one foot, I pinch out the drawing pin, its tip wet.

Once the staircase is behind me, subdued overhead light leads the way into the hotel’s shoddy underbelly. These hot, rough-walled service passages smell dank.

With each new step I survey the concrete floor, for fear of more pins. Or worse, broken glass.

‘Jack . . .’

My shadow jerks and contorts on the wall as I pick up speed.

Soon, there’s no more light to guide me, so I fire up the trusty Zippo.

The damp heat becomes more imposing and I notice a few pipes on the right-hand wall. Ten steps later, those pipes multiply to imitate the London Underground map. I see a junction box. Gauges with flickering dials.

A penny rolls in from the shadows of my mind, ready to drop.

Up ahead, the passage is set to widen. The right-hand wall of pipes ends at a corner.

The low hum of a generator draws louder, closer with each step.

At the end of a ceiling-cord hangs a bare bulb, caked in dust that dulls the light it gives out.

I am gooseflesh.

I’ll admit that something unnameable prevents me from going on. Something clenched and fearful in my guts. Utterly ridiculous but true.

After a few deep breaths, I hold up the Zippo and stride around the corner.

The penny lands, spinning wildly.

I am standing in the boiler room from the video.

There’s no one else here with me. No humanoid shape on the ground. No ethereal figure looming over it. Of course not.

There’s just that pattern of pipes and gauges and boxes on the walls, which makes my head swim with déjà vu.

I take it all in for some time, just
staring
, as sweat trickles into my eyes. The Zippo grows hot in my hand.

The only sound emanates from that generator, relentless.

My trance is broken by something in the corner of my eye. Something that looks a lot like a big shadow, flitting in front of the lift door.

Of course, when I refocus over there, all is still. Just a trick of the—

From behind me comes an urgent rattle of footsteps.

I swing around, my gooseflesh developing gooseflesh of its own.

The Zippo flame reflects in two pairs of wide eyes.

The first pair belongs to a tall, blond guy with a name badge pinned to his grey waistcoat. This, then, is Brandon, who was manning reception. Behind him stands a short Hispanic woman clutching a bedraggled mop as a defensive weapon. Apparently the Sunset Castle doesn’t deem maintenance staff worthy of name badges.

‘Told you,’ she mumbles to Brandon, looking me up and down. Lingering on my dirty feet.

Brandon spreads his hands palm up, calm but firm. ‘Sir, why exactly are you down here?’

‘That,’ I tell him, ‘is a fucking good question.’

Bad things happened since I last wrote.

Blood all over these sheets.

Blood all over me.

I need help.

I keep expecting to hear the grunts of LAPD officers out in the corridor. Expecting the door to burst inwards.

It took so much focus to call Sherilyn Chastain on the phone. My hands have this Parkinson’s quake, and when she picked up I could barely talk properly.

In the back of my mind, those infected words kept going round and round. Those words that wanted to splurge out through my mouth. Out through my fingertips on to the keyboard, then on to the screen.

The thing wants me to let go and just type those words forever. This is worse than drug addiction. Surely you can only carry such a weight for so long before your knees buckle. But I must not bend.

I won’t get the better of myself! I won’t.

Sherilyn stayed calm on the phone, which really helped. She kept her voice all steady and told me to breathe deep.

She knew all this would happen. She must have, because she tried to warn me. Why didn’t I listen when she told me to abandon the Mimi Experiment? Because I’m a fucking idiot and I’ve brought all this on myself. And others. Oh God, oh God.

Between some of these keys – between the Q and the W, and the K and the L – there are these little canals of blood. Beneath them all runs a lake. This whole thing may as well be written in blood, ha ha! Laughing feels good, feels important, got to play it down, got to stay fucking calm here.

I cannot let me get the better of myself.

Sherilyn said she’d take the next plane over. I was so pathetically grateful I cried.

And while I wait, I’m going to write exactly what went down. Because no matter what happens to me now, there has to be a record. And I’m afraid this thing inside will regain full control, this time forever. If that happens, I’ll have no objectivity left. I’ll be a big bag of meat writhing around in a secure facility, screaming those words and nothing else.

Up until now, I’ve described real events while distorting certain truths.

I’ve played down the drugs.

I’ve made no mention of the fear, the tears, all that slow-boil nausea in my guts.

I haven’t told you the real reason I’m writing
Jack Sparks on the Supernatural
.

Let me go back to what happened after I found the boiler room. Three, maybe four nights ago? Since then, I haven’t been able to write anything up because it’s been Mimi during the day, Bex at night.

I have to relive exactly how I felt and thought at the time, no matter how stupid and blinkered it now seems. But now I can be
honest
, both with you and with myself. There’s been so much I haven’t been willing to admit even to myself. Bravado may feel like a shield, but when you’re telling yourself lies, it becomes a prison.

I really hope this writing focus keeps me stable for the next twenty-four hours, until Sherilyn gets here. It may also help me process all that has happened.

And the thing inside had better stay hidden, or I won’t hesitate to use the blade again.

‘Tell me why I shouldn’t dial 911, you little cock-sucker.’

Marc Howitz is sharp and angular, from his attitude to those potato-peeler cheekbones. This room is power drunk, even for a hotel manager’s office. Marble desk, cold marble floor, everything else varnished and polished to within an inch of its life. Sitting there in his Versace, the guy thinks he’s Scarface.

Dawn light bleaches its way across soulless wallpaper. That jobsworth Brandon brought me straight here after finding me in the basement, so I’ve had no time to dream up any bullshit to feed Howitz. I’m still utterly stunned by the video’s boiler room
just so happening
to be tucked away in the bowels of this hotel. I feel afraid and confused, just like Tony Bonelli.

Was that really him on the phone last night?
Of course not.
Yeah, just keep telling yourself that.

I exaggerate to Howitz how I’ve spent months trying to track down the origin of the YouTube video, then lie about how ‘sheer gut instinct’ led me to the Castle’s basement tonight. When Howitz realises I’ve hit the end of the story, he leans back in his brown leather manager’s chair and chews it over. His mouth literally chews. He’s drawing this out, enjoying it.

‘I’m disturbed,’ he says, his voice made of ice, ‘that somebody filmed in an extremely private area of our hotel without permission. And you say it’s some kind of . . .
ghost
deal. Do I look like I believe in ghosts?’

I tell him I don’t believe in them either. I rub tiny pieces of basement grit out from between my toes, hoping he doesn’t notice my grey footprints on his nice floor. I also hope he can’t smell my booze-pickled breath or see coke flakes in my nose hair. You didn’t really believe I’d shunned cocaine since rehab, right? Since Italy it’s been every day, getting worse and worse. This week, I’ve been starting before lunch.

When he asks to see the video, I feed him the Google keywords. He sags and rotates ninety degrees to his monitor, aggrieved that there’s no aide present to do this tiresome manual work on his behalf.

Just before he clicks ‘Play’, I ask him to tell me if he hears any words on the soundtrack. Because that’s something else I didn’t tell you, reader – no one else can hear those three words. Just me. I didn’t tell you, because I thought I was going mad. I could hardly avoid telling you about Maria Corvi in Hong Kong because it was such a pivotal moment, but somehow those three demonic words were worse. More unnerving. Insidious. And now that I’ve
gone
mad and everything’s gone so badly wrong, it really doesn’t matter any more. (
Eleanor: please forget what I said earlier about deleting those three words from the book. I’m sorry. And for the record, I’m really very sorry for the way I’ve treated you.)

‘Adramelech,’ says the voice on the video, loud and clear. The voice that sounds like Maria Corvi.

Howitz says nothing about ‘Adramelech’ or ‘Mephistopheles’ or ‘Baphomet’, because of course he doesn’t hear them.

‘“Oh God, this is it”,’ he announces at one point. ‘I heard someone say, “Oh God, this is it”.’

‘Yeah,’ I say, downcast.

Howitz talks at me, but I’m too busy wondering yet again how it’s possible for audio on a video to only be heard by me. I’m wondering if there might be
any
other people on the planet who could hear this. Maybe people with the same rare blood type? What bullshit. I don’t even know what my blood type is.

‘Open your fuckin’ ears, Mr Sparks. I
said
that this most certainly is our boiler room area on the video.’

‘Thank you for confirming that,’ I say, trying to sound patient. Yearning for another line, just to keep me awake. A busy day lies ahead.

‘So you don’t know who shot it?’ says Howitz. ‘Because it would have involved trespassing, just as you did tonight.’

‘Let’s build on our common goals: we both want to find out who shot this thing. But I’ll need your help.’

Howitz smacks the flat of his palm against the desk. ‘Trespassing is a felony. For all I know, you could have intended to blow up my hotel.’