The Last Days of Jack Sparks (29 page)

All I hear is traffic and Ellie sobbing. Then Elisandro pushes the words out. ‘Howie was decapitated.’

Someone seems to have cut the strings that work my mouth.

‘We haven’t called 911 yet,’ Elisandro is saying. ‘I guess we’re in shock. Howie gave us a spare key a while back, so we went in to see why he wasn’t answering the door . . . and we found . . . Oh God. It was like his head had been . . . like,
ripped
. . .’

Back on my feet, disoriented, I work the coffee machine as if I really need more uppers. ‘Does everyone else know? In the group?’

‘Haven’t got hold of Pascal yet.’

Something about Pascal’s name forms an ominous connection that I can’t quite grasp. ‘Where are you?’

‘Melrose, not far. Want us to pick you up?’

‘Yeah, I’ll be outside. And please keep trying to reach Pascal.’

The worried note in my voice infects his. ‘Okay . . . See you in ten.’

I hurry into the shower. As hot water rocks me, all I can think about is Howie’s head disconnected from the rest of him.

Not just disconnected.

Ripped
.

When someone says, ‘Mr Sparks,’ I’m striding across the foyer with black coffee in a paper cup and a coke wrap in my wallet. The idiot’s idea of being ready for anything.

Marc Howitz is standing outside his office door with his hands on his hips. ‘A
word
, please.’

I suspect this word is probably going to be ‘séance’.

‘Maybe later,’ I say without breaking my stride.

‘Hey!’ he shouts, as I pile into the revolving door.

I slide into the back of the Honda, wincing as another coffee spill torches the webbing between my thumb and forefinger.

Into his phone, Elisandro says, ‘You got hold of Pascal yet, man?’

Ellie, all streaked mascara, points at the phone and mouths Astral’s name.

‘Ask him where Bex is,’ I tell Elisandro, who waves a shut-up hand at me. ‘Okay,’ he tells Astral, winding up the call. ‘I’ll let you know if we find him first.’ Then he stares through the windscreen into the middle distance.

‘Fine, I’ll call Astral myself,’ I say, raising my phone to my ear.

‘Don’t,’ says Ellie. ‘He’s as upset as we are.’

Needing to make sure Bex is okay, I speed-dial Astral. When he doesn’t pick up, I punch the back of Elisandro’s seat. He, in turn, punches the dashboard. ‘Jesus, Jack! Cool it or get out. Astral said he left the girl at her new hotel, okay?’

‘Did he leave her this morning or last night?’ My question sits there for a beat, a loaded gun.

‘Please can we focus?’ says Ellie. ‘Pascal’s not answering his phone, email, nothin’.’

Pascal lives half an hour away in North Hollywood. When I tell them we should drive there right now, my concern is again contagious. ‘Oh my God,’ says Ellie. ‘You don’t think . . . ?’

The tremor in my raised hand undermines the attempt to placate her. ‘Let’s just stay calm and get over there.’

Without another word, Elisandro pulls out into traffic and puts his foot down at the first opportunity. Coffee splashes my chest, but I barely notice.

The act of pushing Pascal’s front-door buzzer seems to slow time itself. The wait drags on and on and on.

All the way here, we’ve kept our spirits up, saying how silly we’re being. How Howie’s death has understandably rattled our cages. Clearly, we’re just making connections (
connections, connections
) that aren’t real. While all the time, underneath all this mutual reassurance, we know two things.

Howie’s head can’t have been ripped off by anything human.

The only two members of the group who voted to stop the Mimi Experiment were Howie and the resident of 1033 Tanowen Street, North Hollywood.

We share tight smiles as we wait for Pascal to open up. I stockpile oxygen in my lungs specifically so that I can let it all out in one big burst when the guy’s little round face appears in a window. I might not have known Pascal long, but I like him a great deal more than I did the Waster.

Three, four, five hits of the buzzer and still no response. Ellie holds the button in until the battery dies. Shielding my eyes from the sun, I peer at the upper windows of this small detached house. I toss a handful of tiny stones to drum on the glass. A big old gas-guzzling station wagon slows as it passes, the po-faced old woman at the wheel making no attempt to conceal her curiosity.

Pascal lives alone, Ellie tells me, as the station wagon trundles on its way. Mostly bought this place with inheritance cash.

We steal around the side of the house. Elisandro monkeys himself up and over a tall wire gate, then opens it for Ellie and me. By this point, we couldn’t care less what the curtain-twitching neighbours might think.

All the windows on this side of the house show thick blinds pulled down. The path leads to a modest backyard, with garden chairs and a plastic table.

Locked patio doors afford views into a wide lounge area. We press our faces against the glass, hands cupped around our temples to block out the sun.

I see a La-Z-Boy chair, a big flat-screen TV, a stack of video game consoles. A whole wall of shelves hold DVDs, Blu-rays and some old-school VHS in oversized cardboard cartons.

Then I notice something else at squinting distance on the far wall. Can’t work it out. Elisandro makes the high keening sound of a dog. I squash my nose against the window pane, trying to make sense of what I’m seeing.

Looks like a mass of thick pinkish-red organic matter stuck to the wall. Ground beef or something, spread a few inches thick.

Then I notice the wallet chain hanging from the mess. The shredded material that was once clothing. The blood that still drips down the wall beneath all this, pooling on the carpet.

One detail brings the whole picture together: the frame of Pascal’s spectacles, sparkling in a lone ray of sun. The thin metal has been mangled along with the rest of his body.

‘Oh God, no,’ I say, my stomach churning. That poor guy.

Elisandro’s dog sound becomes a wail of despair.

Ellie doesn’t understand what we’re reacting to. We try to get her away from the windows, but she just keeps looking until her legs buckle.

Seeing a good man who’s been spread across a wall isn’t the worst of it. No, the worst is the realisation, in the back of my mind, that this book will sell more than the others put together.
Maria killed people after I met her, which was good value, but now I’m right here as the murders happen. Right in the thick of it.

All this while two fellow human beings weep and retch by my feet.

This isn’t the first time I’ve managed to disgust even myself.

A ping in my pocket. Bex has finally responded to the text I sent on the way here, begging her to confirm she’s okay (read: alive).

The text says: ‘Do not contact me again.’

I’m so glad she’s away from all this, but the idea of never seeing her again makes me want to prostrate myself beside Ellie and Elisandro.

The Mimi table sits where we left it in the reception lounge, except now it’s the right way up. Eyeing the thing with the caution it deserves, we move on, calling out for the others. When no one calls back, we start to fret.

The serpentine journey up to Big Coyote took twice as long as usual. Ellie kept having to tell Elisandro to slow down, dry his eyes and concentrate on the trail. It was like being driven by an old married couple.

I snorted a couple of crafty bumps off my hand around the back of Pascal’s place. The other two saw me do it, I suppose, but were too busy tugging their hair and sobbing to moralise. I really felt the need to sharpen up – to mentally record every second of whatever came next. And after two more bumps in the back of the Honda right before we enter the studio, my brain is filming in 4K.

Turned out that Ellie and Elisandro weren’t beyond self-preservation. Just as they had after finding Howie, they dithered about whether to call 911.
Will we be implicated?
they wondered, wringing hands. Station Wagon Lady witnessed us ringing the buzzer, but didn’t see us go around the back. There was fraught debate on the pros and cons. Finally, a call to Astral broke the bad news, then made the decision for us: we would all meet at the ranch, then work out what to do. We could call in the murders from there, no problem.

Yeah. No problem. How very idyllic.

We eventually find the others dotted around a ‘live’ studio room, right at the back of the building. To reach it, you thread through a control room. Dominated by a wide console bank lined with buttons and dials, the control room’s where you tend to find producers, engineers and dominant band members. One wall is made entirely of toughened glass, including the door halfway along it. Through this we see Astral, Lisa-Jane and Johann among the live room’s microphone stands and amp stacks, their eyes puffy and bloodshot.

Lisa-Jane sits on the floor, her back against one of the padded walls. Johann stands with his arms folded. Since the guy’s probably seen friends blown up, you’d think him harder to faze, but even he looks shaken.

Astral is sitting the wrong way around on an armless revolving chair, his mouth stuffed with gauze. Seeing me through the glass wall, he looks away. I clamp my teeth together. Anything to stop myself launching into a rant about Bex once I get in there.

Right up until I pull the glass door’s handle, it looks like the trio are just mouthing words to each other in silence. Once you break that soundproof seal, their voices leap out at you. No one says it in words, but you sense everyone’s way more cut up about Pascal than Howie.

‘How did Pascal go?’ Johann wants to know, switched on, the most engaged I’ve seen him.

Ellie and Elisandro gaze at their shoes, so I grasp the nettle. ‘You don’t really want to know.’

‘Don’t tell me what I want,’ warns Johann. ‘What are we dealing with here?’

‘Howie and Pascal weren’t killed by a person,’ says Ellie. ‘Couldn’t have been.’

‘And they were the only two who voted against . . .’ adds Elisandro, trailing off when the others nod. They already made that deductive jump.

No one tries to say these deaths could have been a coincidence. Not even me.
The Truman Show
’s over and I’m not in Kansas any more.

Astral tugs the gauze from his mouth so he can speak. ‘Mimi doesn’t want to go, now we’ve created her. We pulled her out of thin air and she’s alive in some way . . .’

‘Maybe she’s a real ghost, like Ellie said,’ I say, trying not to sound too hopeful.

Astral signals for me to keep my voice down. He looks around at the walls and out through the glass into the control room. He says, ‘We kinda thought she might not be able to hear us in here, but you never know.’

He doesn’t appreciate me laughing in his face. But it’s a funny concept: the idea that a ghost, a psychokinetic entity or whatever Mimi is, couldn’t hear you in a soundproof room.

Astral’s chair squawks in protest as he swivels to face me full on. ‘Fuck you. Two friends are dead here.’

‘All right, mate!’ I say, totally out of line. ‘I didn’t kill ’em.’

Astral heaves himself off the chair, thunderous. I want to fight him, so I stick my dukes up, but Johann jumps in. ‘No! No more of this shit. We stick together.’ Testosterone trickles from every pore as he points at me. ‘
You
watch your mouth.’

I preferred Johann when he was adrift with PTSD. No one tells Jack Sparks to shut up, especially when he’s feeling chemically indestructible. ‘Okay, meathead,’ I say. ‘So what next? We carry on, yes?’

Lisa-Jane pinches her eyebrow piercing and stretches the skin until it looks set to rip. ‘I don’t think carrying on is a good idea,’ she says.

‘Keep your voices low,’ Astral reminds everyone.

‘But if Mimi wants to carry on,’ I say, ‘surely that’s the safest thing to do.’

‘We can’t let our own creation hold us to ransom,’ argues Lisa-Jane. ‘Let’s end this.’

‘How do you un-create something?’ I say. ‘May as well try not to think of a blue elephant. First thing you think of is—’

Astral interrupts: ‘Well, we need to find a way.’

‘Hey,’ says Johann, ‘this might be stupid, but—’

‘I’d put money on that,’ I say, coke-leery, loving how Johann wants to kill me but can’t, because jail.

‘
But
,’ he carries on, ‘Mimi only appears when we’re all together, right?’

‘Obviously not,’ I say. ‘Look what happened during the night.’

‘Johann’s got a point, though,’ says Ellie. ‘Maybe we don’t all have to be in the same room. But if we’re in the same area, maybe even the same city, the PK circle stays intact.’

‘So if we get far enough away from each other . . .’ Astral ponders.

‘You’re clutching at straws,’ I tell them. ‘Pulling rules out of your arse.’

‘Shut your mouth, you wise-ass junkie cretin,’ Lisa-Jane spits.

When the prospect of separation makes Ellie and Elisandro hold hands, I feel my first tug of emotion towards them. I don’t like it. Cold cynicism is so much safer.

‘Let’s try,’ says Johann. ‘We get as far away from each other as possible, then figure this out online.’

Lisa-Jane rubs her temples with both hands. ‘Shit, shit. My job, my mom, the dogs . . .’

‘I’m sure we can soon come back,’ offers Ellie, ever hopeful.

‘I’ll take you to your place,’ Elisandro tells Ellie, ‘and you can pick up your car.’

Everyone stands. Johann talks about Aspen, Colorado; Lisa-Jane her brother’s place down in San Diego. Me? I’m not going anywhere. I vent my frustration on a nearby guitar, punching a discordant twang out of its neck.

Astral is saying something typically controlling – something about how Ellie and Elisandro need to go their separate ways at the
very first
opportunity – when evil creeps into the room.

‘Mimi,’ says a small voice amid our chatter.

‘Mimi,’ it says again.

My spine tingles as I follow the source of the sound.

And there’s Mimi’s face, emerging from the front of an amplifier stack right where the Marshall logo should be.

The face looks younger this time, paler too. The sly, sharp smile burns right through me.