The Last Days of Jack Sparks (30 page)

Hi! You all thought you could escape, didn’t you?

Everyone else has fallen silent. I know they’re all equally transfixed by the face.

It.

‘Mimi, Mimi!’ says Mimi. Its eyes widen as it leaves the amp stack and hovers before us.

The boulder from
Raiders of the Lost Ark
.

That smile evaporates into rage.

‘Mimi!’ comes the scream.

We all bolt for the door to the control room.

How I wish I could claim gallantry. Lisa-Jane’s ahead of me, so I grab her waist and swing her aside to clear my path to the door.

Getting there first, Astral grapples with the handle, but it needs to open towards us. So his bulk blocks its path and we’re all piled up behind him.

Lisa-Jane swings a chair at the glass wall, but it bounces clean off and smacks her in the face.

Mimi’s next scream hurts my ears. I fill my hands with Astral’s doughy back-fat and shove, as if I can somehow force him through the closed door. Yelling at me and Astral, Elisandro pushes Ellie ahead of him, squashing her breasts into my back. Lisa-Jane tries to force herself in front of everyone, also yelling, her nose bloody.

This is when the first person dies.

Johann’s severed upper torso slams against a Marshall stack, having been thrown there. His eyes are all whites, rolled up in their sockets. Gravity sucks him down to the carpet, where he falls to one side, a discarded toy.

Makes sense
, says my inner voice, even as I stare horrified at the dead man.
Kill the strongest first.

Someone throws up.

Someone else, probably Elisandro, punches me twice in the back of the head, filling my vision with comets and stars. Astral shouts how he can’t get the door open and how everyone needs to get back.

‘Mimi! Mimi!’ Each scream is a needle to the eardrums. Elisandro punches my head again and my hearing cuts out, making all this commotion distant and distorted.

Astral rams himself backwards, using his weight as a weapon, until we all do the domino topple. Yanking the door open, he disappears into the control room. As I spring back up, Lisa-Jane darts out after him.

Two pairs of hands push me hard from behind. I stumble over the door’s threshold, sheer momentum carrying me until I trip and fall. The control room carpet rises to slam into one side of my face.

Ellie and Elisandro trample over me. I wheeze as a foot jams into the small of my back, then watch their fleeing heels shrink.

My hearing snaps back into play, but I can’t hear Mimi.

I use one side of the console desk as leverage to haul myself upright.

The glass door must have hydraulic-hinged itself shut.

Through the glass wall, in the live room, Johann’s legs remain upright, rocking gently from side to side in bloodied khaki shorts. Absurdly, my first thought is that it’s an amazingly realistic special effect. The knees give way and the legs collapse.

Mimi stares at me, hanging immobile in the centre of the sealed room. The shifting mishmash elements of the face have changed once again: more feminine, strangely familiar. The lips are a heartbeat, spasming open twice each time to silently scream her name.

My back jangles as I hurry towards one of the exit doors.

When I steal a last look back, Mimi has disappeared. As unnerving as the spider that scuttles out of sight beneath your bed.

Sure enough, when I dash headlong into a corridor where gold discs flash past on either side, two simultaneous screams ring out. One is Mimi again, but the other comes from Ellie, whose back has somehow become stuck to the ceiling above a junction up ahead. She flails about, but the plaster holds her firm.

‘Mimi, Mimi, Mimi!’ comes the howl, but I can’t see the face anywhere.

Elisandro sprints back to the junction, appalled, like he’s only just noticed Ellie is no longer beside him. I’m still running towards them both and really want him out of the way.

‘Help me get her down,’ he shouts. Before I can respond, something truly horrendous happens: Ellie gurgles, and her head pivots – or is pivoted – to one side. The skin of her neck stretches until bone bursts out.

Some of the blood catches Elisandro on the face. He makes sounds that remind me of my mother upstairs after Dad left home.

I’m about to reach Elisandro and sprint on by, when the arcane magnetism holding Ellie against the ceiling is revoked. Her body falls, forcing me to slam on the brakes or end up beneath her.

It’s a small mercy that Mimi’s howls mask the awful crunch of impact.

That horrendous ghost face is suspended in a corridor off to my left. The face has changed yet again, and I shudder as I finally recognise my mouth. It’s mainly masculine now . . . and do I see Astral’s eyes in there? Other people’s features, too. The Mimi face is a collage, but there’s no time to ponder, not with Elisandro grabbing my arm and yanking me back around to face him.

‘Help her! Please help her.’

‘She’s dead, mate, I’m sorry.’

‘Mimi! Mimi! Mimi!’

‘But we can’t leave her here.’

‘She was dead before she hit the ground. Come with me.’

‘Mimi! Mimi! Mimi!
Mimi-Mimi-Mimi!
’

Painfully aware of the phantom flying right for us, I try to drag Elisandro away, but he digs in his heels and won’t let go of me.

I slam my forehead into his, sending him reeling, then make my dizzy escape.

From up ahead in the reception lounge, I hear Astral’s voice and see his and Lisa-Jane’s shadows flit across the carpet. I speed up, desperate to see the sky again.

Behind me, Elisandro roars incoherently at Mimi until he’s abruptly cut off. Truly dreadful sounds ensue. The sounds of human disassembly.

Sprinting into the lounge, I’m greeted by the smashing of glass. The fallen vending machines now form a barricade across the front doors – Mimi’s work, no doubt – and so Astral has heaved a chair out through a window. He and Lisa-Jane hurry towards this new exit.

And then there were three
.
If these two die, I’ll be the only survivor. The sole storyteller. And then everyone will listen, no matter how much I talk.

Being appalled by these thoughts doesn’t make them go away. I’ve had similar daydreams before: about being on the receiving end of a terrorist attack, for instance. Maybe not involved enough to get hurt, but just enough to have an engrossing story to tell. Just enough to get people’s eyes and ears glued to me for years to come.

I’m sick, I know.

‘Careful,’ Astral warns Lisa-Jane, kicking at some of the glass fangs that jut out from all around the window frame. As if a little broken glass is cause for concern right now.

Lisa-Jane is saying, ‘Not gonna die, not gonna die,’ over and over.

The corridor with Ellie and Elisandro’s corpses has fallen all too silent.

Astral helps Lisa-Jane climb up on to the window frame. ‘Hurry up!’ I tell them, hopping from foot to foot. Flooded with the buzz that only impending death can bring, I’m looking around for another window to smash when—

‘Mimi! Mimi-Mimi-Mimi!’

The sheer volume makes me clutch my ears. Astral struggles to keep both supportive hands on Lisa-Jane’s back. She’s standing on the interior window ledge, clutching the top of the frame. Hesitant, unsure how best to exit, she glances at the remaining glass fangs. ‘Not gonna die, not gonna die . . .’

The face now floats above the table in the middle of the room. Always the centre of attention.

When Mimi screeches again, it’s twice as loud. A sonic shock wave that weakens my knees.

‘
Mimi!
’

I’m sorry. There’s no nice way to put this: Lisa-Jane’s head explodes.

The sound isn’t what you’d expect: it’s more a hideous ‘clack’ of bone. An eyebrow piercing rebounds off my chest, along with other stuff that makes me gag.

She went faster than the others
.
Maybe even painlessly. These are the kind of details that will break me worldwide. (Shut up, you fucking monster.)

Lisa-Jane’s limp body falls back from the window into Astral’s arms, leaving him clutching her, lost in horror.

There’s no feminine component left in Mimi’s face. What hangs over the table now is a continuously alternating composite of me and Astral.

Mimi stares at me, but I know that Astral sees the same face staring at him.

An idea skitters through my head, about how he and I could somehow work together to get rid of this thing. Then I remember his YouTube video con. I remember all his sly manipulation. I remember last night’s post: ‘Good times. A’

Only one of us is getting out of here alive.

My lizard brain somehow grasps the situation as Astral lets Lisa-Jane tumble to the ground.

‘Mimi, get him,’ he calls. ‘Kill him, so I can be the last.’

Yeah, he’s grasped it too.

Mimi comes at me. Insane eyes glinting, shrieking its name.

Then it changes course and hurtles right back at Astral with astonishing speed.

‘
Mimi-Mimi-Mimi-Mimi-Mimi!
’

Astral opens his mouth to yell something, but the ghost face punches right through his navel and flies out through his spine, devastating everything in between. It leaves a gaping hole wide as a saucepan lid.

There’s an almighty snapping sound, and Astral’s body arches at a deeply wrong angle. Gargling, he claws at the cavernous ruin below his ribs. Incredulous, fading fast.

That’s Astral for you
, crows my inner bastard.
Spineless. I could always see straight through him.

And yet, by the time his big head hits the carpet there are tears in my eyes. The do-or-die lust for survival is eclipsed by the enormity of all these lives extinguished.

Mimi hovers steadily my way, beaming, victorious. It now wears my face and my face alone.

‘Mimi,’ it says, with my speaking voice.

‘Okay,’ I say through a tight throat. ‘It’s over. Whatever you are, just disappear, all right? Just
go
.’

‘Mi-mi,’ it says, still coming my way. ‘Mi-mi.’

And for the first time, it strikes me that it’s not saying ‘Mimi’ at all.

It’s saying, ‘Me. Me.’

Mimi was the name I chose. Outwardly arbitrary, but at some level . . .

‘Me, me,’ says my own gliding spectral face. ‘Me. Me. Me.
Me
.’

I back away from it, bumping hard into one of the toppled vending machines.

There’s no time to reach the broken window. So I make a break back towards that corridor, desperate to find another exit. Anything to get away from Mimi.

What am I doing? Just embrace it
.
Let it in. I was born to be great, no matter what Mum and Alistair thought. (No, no, this thing is evil.)

Electrified by panic, I rattle a door handle on a side wall, only to find it locked.

‘Me. Me. Me. Me. Me.’

I slap a hand over the lower half of my face, when I see and smell what happened to Elisandro.

I have never run this fast in all my life, but it’s not nearly fast enough. My own voice draws closer.

‘Me. Me. Me. Me. Me.’

I duck around a corner, heels hammering along a new stretch of carpet . . .

. . . which leads up to the feet of a teenage farm labourer.

Maria Corvi stands with her arms scarecrowed out, crucifixed out. Blocking my path, solid and corporeal, ten steps ahead of me. As usual.

Her face says it all. The gleeful vindication of someone who has devoted time to engineering a special surprise.

Those yellow eyes blaze with delight.

The rictus grin gloats.

My skin rears up all over, wanting to evacuate my bones.

‘Me! Me! Me! Me!
Me!
’ shrieks the voice behind me, so loud, so close.

‘Enjoy,’ mouths Maria, savouring the moment.

Something hammers into my back, driving me up into the air so hard that my head whacks a light fitting.

Next thing I know, I’m back on the ground and my vocal cords and my mouth are saying stuff, even though I haven’t asked them to.

‘I, I, I, I, I,’ they’re saying.

‘Me, me, me, me, me,’ they’re saying.

A rising tide of alarm forces me creakily to my feet. What’s happening?

Maria and the ghost face are nowhere to be seen. My mouth jabbers on, unauthorised.

‘I, I, I, I, I . . . me, me, me, me, me . . .’

I try to shut my mouth through sheer force of will, but that doesn’t work. So I try using my hands, but my jaw’s too stubborn. I may as well be attempting to stop an industrial piston.

I try to stay centred. The mortal remains of Ellie and Elisandro remind me that at least I’m still alive. I just need to figure out what’s going on.

I tell myself to breathe and think. No mean feat when your mouth has gone rogue.

What is this?

‘Me, me, me, me, me,’ says my mouth, as I stagger back towards the lounge.

Is it shock?

‘I, I, I, I, I,’ says my mouth, while I head for the broken window, trying not to look at Astral or Lisa-Jane.

Is it cocaine psychosis?

But of course, as always, no matter what I tell myself, I know the truth. Mimi is now inside me. Inside my head.

‘Myself! Myself! Myself!’ says my mouth, louder and with greater force, as I carefully climb out over the window frame, down on to sun-soaked grass.

Wind ruffles my hair as if trying gamely to assure me that
everything’s fine
. Crickets persist with their reedy chorus as if nothing untoward has happened. I do my best to adopt their mindset.

Just relax, relax
. . .

Then I remember how I don’t have a car here. So I have to climb back into the building and fish around in Astral’s wet shorts for his keys. The poor guy gazes up at me. Lights off, nobody home.

‘Me! Me!’ I yell down at him.

Without my permission, my foot kicks him hard in the ear.

Only when I try to jam the key in the ignition do I realise how very badly my hands are shaking.

Experimenting with my new condition, I send a defiant neural signal to my mouth, telling it to say ‘I’m fine, there’s nothing to worry about.’ This command is ignored. My mouth resolutely keeps up the ‘Me, myself and I’ routine.