The Last Days of Jack Sparks (34 page)

I’m making Mum sound bad, but that’s not the whole story. She was my mum, you know? She worked two or three jobs, the whole time me, me and Alistair were growing up. She worked herself into the . . . ground. And at the end of her life, when I, I owed something back, I, I deserted her. To think of her . . . this strong woman stuck in bed, getting more ill every day, more scared, more paralysed . . .

CHASTAIN: And wondering if her younger son would ever come back to say goodbye . . . (Jack sobs for twenty-eight seconds.) So . . . after your mum died: was this when you went to rehab?

JACK: Pure masochism. I, I wanted to confront myself, what I’d done, while I, I was sober. To punish myself. And once I’d cleared my head in there, it was just unbearable. I, I became obsessed with saying sorry.

LAWSON: You said it in your sleep.

CHASTAIN: Saying sorry to your mum?

JACK: Must’ve been.

LAWSON: But for whose sake would that apology be? Your mum’s or your own?

CHASTAIN: Selfish by definition, wasn’t it? Because as far as you were concerned, you wanted to apologise to a dead woman, in a world you believed offered no afterlife. A world with no ghosts.

JACK: Well . . . I, I started to wonder . . . you know, if there might be something out there. Just . . . something after death. I, I remembered the thing in the cloakroom, for the first time in ages, and I, I drew hope from that. But—

LAWSON: I thought you said there
was
no thing in the cloakroom?

JACK: But I, I was scared of wishful thinking, too. It’s like . . . the fear of hope. Misplaced hope. That’s the worst thing: misplaced hope. I, I was so scared to leave the grid, you know, to leave science behind, because it meant—

CHASTAIN: Facing the darkness again. Got it. So that’s why you wanted to write
this
book?

JACK: I, I could keep my public face. I, I could set out on this journey with this book, keep myself going with money . . . and . . . er . . . oh God . . . I could search for life after death.

LAWSON: Bloody hell! You hypocrite.

CHASTAIN: Imagine Dawkins writing
The God Delusion
while hoping to convince himself there’s a creator.

LAWSON: So what were you going to write if you found evidence for the supernatural?

JACK: Well . . . I, I . . . (Pause.) I was going to keep it to myself. I had to keep that public face. My persona. My . . . my brand. (Lawson makes vomit noise.) In the book, I’d explain any kind of phenomena away as bullshit. But I really wanted to find a sign. Some sign that one day I’d either see Mum in the afterlife, or be able to contact her.

CHASTAIN: Jesus, you’re unreal, you know that? All those believers you’ve mocked, calling them dumb, demeaning them. And yet you’ve been sliming around, trying to find what they already had.

JACK: Yes.

CHASTAIN: You cowardly, weak, selfish sack of shit.

JACK: Yes. Yes I am. (Pause.) I can speak properly again. Has it worked, has Mimi gone?

CHASTAIN: She seems to have fucked off, yeah. We’ve been stripping you of psychic armour, Jack. Getting to the core of you and purging all that ego, so Mimi had nothing left to cling to. A full transcript of this recording absolutely has to go in your book. Got that?

JACK: Is this revenge then, Sherilyn? Not that I’d blame you.

CHASTAIN: If I wanted revenge, Jack, I’d still be in Auckland getting first-class head. (Recording ends.)

1
No trace of these photographs, or this account, has ever been found online. They may have been intercepted and deleted by the provider, but no records exist of this –
Alistair
.

2
This is absolutely and categorically untrue. My foreword provided the correct account –
Alistair
.

3
Untrue –
Alistair
.

4
Again, untrue. Our mother never, ever struck either of us –
Alistair
.

5
I did not. All untrue –
Alistair
.

Bloodless flesh valleys loop around my wrists and forearms. These marks inflicted by the girls’ makeshift ropes are small fry compared to the Crowley cuts. And the sum total of all this pain, in turn, is nothing compared with what’s about to happen.

Sherilyn had arrived with bandages and Band-Aids. These cover half my body. In their hurry to incapacitate me, the women left me nude. Understandable.

As I wince my way back into my T-shirt and other scattered clothes, I’m flooded with something alien. I think it’s called gratitude. So much gratitude to these two angels who led me out of the dark cave.

Yet when I hug Sherilyn, she becomes rigor mortis personified and soon withdraws. Bex can hardly look at me, let alone brook physical contact. I try so clumsily to embrace her, the apologies spilling out of me, but she backs off, raising both palms. Those hands shake, but her voice holds firm. ‘Jack, I didn’t want anything more to do with you
before
you tried to kill me.’

She does, at least, understand that I wasn’t myself, or the regular me, because she says she won’t press charges.

Oh my God.

Howitz.

The memory of killing him is so hazily dreamlike that I’ve almost convinced myself it never happened. Then I open the closet door, just a crack, and his cloying reek slithers into me. I see him slumped in there. Bug-eyed with fallen coat hangers on his lap, his throat an obscene red-toothed grin.

The sight whips the breath out of me. I click the door shut and lean back against it clutching my chest, my heart thumping the palm of my hand. I look around the blurry room to check no one saw, which feels like such a Mimi thing to do.

I should tell Bex and Sherilyn what happened with Howitz. I just can’t bear the thought of their faces changing when they realise they’ve helped a hands-on killer, even if he was possessed at the time.

Turns out Bex missed her flight home today – yesterday now, since it’s long gone midnight – because of that passport. She’s even more pissed off when I tell her I never really had it.

My heart skips a beat when she mounts a search of her own.

I watch as she opens doors and hauls out drawers.

Drawing nearer to Howitz’s resting place each time.

Cold-sweat shivers spur me into action. Self-preservation wins once again. Have I learned nothing?

Yanking open the nearest wardrobe, I’m relieved to spot Bex’s passport on the floor. When I hand it over, she stuffs it into her suitcase without a word. Announcing she’s heading straight to LAX after a shower, she disappears into the bathroom and jams the latch shut.

Which leaves Sherilyn Chastain and me. Her hair now a dark green mess, Sherilyn splays herself across the sofa. ‘Tired as a cunt,’ as she puts it. I know how she feels. I bury the strong urge to ask her about Maria Corvi and that book from the future which details my death. She’s clearly still recovering from the last favour she did me. I’m supposed to be the new, selfless Jack.

‘How much do I owe you, Sherilyn? Do you take PayPal or—’

She sweeps a limp hand across the lap of her jeans, waving me off. ‘If you wanna know the truth, I did this for me as much as you.’

Off my quizzical look, she says, ‘Three months ago, I messed up a job in London. Really fucked it. Not good. Then the Lengs’ little girl got hurt in Hong Kong because I made a mistake.’

Silence between us as I take this in. ‘So I’m your karmic equaliser?’

She nods, her eyes half open.

‘Thank you anyway, Sherilyn.’

‘You already thanked me.’

‘It doesn’t seem enough.’

‘Fuck off, Jack. I don’t have the energy for embarrassment.’

I push myself, force myself, to pose a question I don’t necessarily want to know the answer to. ‘Did
you
read the chapter about me in Di Stefano’s book?’

Without skipping a beat, she shakes her head and says, ‘You torched that whole section. Now, a couple of things you need to know. Number One: slip back into selfish ways and Mimi will slip back into you.’

Should I tell Sherilyn about Howitz right now? I really should tell her.

From the bathroom, the shower’s white-noise hiss.

‘Number Two: people only see what they want to see. The unconscious mind is great at filtering out stuff that fucks up the status quo. Now that you’ve been purged of so much ego, you may finally see the dead. Or ghosts. Or whatever model you want to place on that kind of energy.’

‘Christ,’ I breathe. ‘Yeah. I want to see an actual ghost. A real person, a dead person.’

With her eyes shut, Sherilyn points down with both forefingers. ‘You’re probably in the right place, mate.’

It takes me a while to catch her meaning. I stare at the floor like an amnesiac, trying to work it out. Then my jaw drops. ‘What if the Paranormals didn’t really make that video?’

She drowsily shifts a cushion behind her head. ‘Tell you something: if they did make it, they did a pretty fuckin’ good job. A video where only you could hear three words on the soundtrack?’

My stomach rolls. ‘Yeah. Any idea what those three words mean?’

‘They mean someone or something is fucking with your head.’

Maria.

‘But why those three words?’ I ask. ‘Why those three demons?’

Sherilyn bucks right off the sofa, back in the room. ‘Ah! Yeah. I worked that out, somewhere over Niue Island. Wrote it down on a scrap of paper.’ She pats her pockets, then heads over to search through zippered sections on her suitcase, which sits beside Bex’s. ‘Somewhere . . .’

‘Could you maybe just tell me?’ I say, trying not to sound ungrateful.

‘Best if I show you. Found it.’

As she hands me a page from a complimentary Air New Zealand notepad, that’s when the world turns to shit.

A slaughterhouse howl rips out of the bathroom.

A raw expression of agony, terror, shock.

I hope my death will at least erase this howl from my memory.

Sherilyn and I stiffen, then race to the bathroom door. I get there first, rattling the handle and of course finding it locked from the inside.

A second howl cuts off abruptly, making bile rise in my throat.

Before I can kick the door, Sherilyn slams her own heel into the wood, knocking it off the latch. And we’re in.

Into the room fogged with steam.

The room where the shower door is still shut.

I wrench that door open, in time to glimpse something red and unthinkable being sucked out of sight, down through the wrecked shower tray. Down through a jagged star-shaped hole, as if something punched up through it. Blood, so much blood, overflows and splashes my bare feet, just before the rest swirls down into the star with a loud glug.

Sherilyn hauls my numb mannequin self aside. Staring at Bex’s blood on my feet, noting strands of her hair curled around my toes, I’m dimly aware of Sherilyn swearing and spraying her aerosol around the edges of that star. I want to ask what just happened, but can only mutter, ‘Bring her back,’ until my attention is stolen by what’s happening in the sink.

Through the steam, you can see the greenish-brown water that fills the bowl, leaves floating on its surface. Somehow alive, this water rises above the rim without spilling a drop, then sculpts itself into a crude human head. One single brow appears above the eyes. Filthy water forms jagged teeth in an open mouth, which speaks with the same thick gurgle I had in my ear at the Rainbow Bar.

‘Hell,’ Tony Bonelli tells me, ‘is having no control.’

Tony’s head collapses, vanishing fast down the plughole. When only the leaves remain, Sherilyn abandons the shower tray and rushes over to spray the sink. Then she does the same to the toilet bowl and every other inlet in the room.

I’m sitting on the floor, unsure how I got down here, quite unable to stand. Sherilyn has to grab me under the arms and pull me backwards across the tiles on my backside, until we’re no longer in the bathroom.

On the way out, I ask, ‘We can get her back, right?’

And all Sherilyn can say is, ‘I’m so sorry.’

Doesn’t matter how long I sit down here on the floor, rocking forwards and back, sucking cigarettes right down to the stubs: the tears don’t come.

How can you be expected to shed tears over something you can’t accept? Something so ridiculous, so impossible?

I brought wonderful, kind, supportive Bex to Los Angeles. I brought her here and she’s ended up . . .

I might as well have killed her myself. God knows, I tried.

The mind recoils. Cannot process. As if I’m standing at the foot of Everest with my face pressed against the bare rock, trying to see the whole mountain.

All the questions I aim up at Sherilyn contain the word ‘why’.

Why does Tony hate me so much?

While spraying the gaps around the bathroom door, Sherilyn gives her opinion. Based on the working draft of this book I emailed her, she thinks Maria Corvi victimised Tony for translating my words in the church. My mocking words. Guilt by verbal association.

‘Oh,’ is all I can say to that. And then, ‘Oh God, why can’t Maria just forget me?’

Standing on a wobbly chair to spray the ceiling air con, Sherilyn says, ‘Because you laughed, Jack. During that exorcism, you stole the limelight. This thing inside Maria demands to be the centre of attention. It demands fear and respect. And it always gets the last laugh.’