What Remains (50 page)

I grabbed him by the collar, pulling him towards me, his body jerking as he tried to hold himself back.

‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re going to tell me what you know.’

But it was over.

Whatever tiny flicker of light had ever existed in him fizzled out, and his eyes started a slow retreat into the void. The corners of his mouth, still turned up in the echoes of that last smile, began to drop – and then there was nothing.

I let him fall to the floor.

‘No,’ I heard Healy say. ‘No, no, no.’

He was sitting awkwardly, head looking one way, at Korman, body facing the other, trapped by its binds. One of his eyes teared up, the tear breaking free as he glanced at me, at Korman, just repeating the same thing over.

‘No. Not like this.
No!
’

I didn’t know what to say to him, because this was worse than anything I could have imagined for Healy. This was an ending filled with the tragedy and emptiness of revenge – except the vengeance wasn’t Healy’s, and it never would be. The real vengeance belonged to Korman. He’d denied Healy his retribution, denied any of us the answers we’d so desperately sought, and now all that was left was a promise: the one Healy had made to the girls, as he’d knelt there between their beds, the day he’d entered their bedroom.

And the certainty, now, that he could never honour it.

73

After a while, I picked up Korman’s knife and cut away Healy’s binds, dropping the knife to the ground again. Blood settled around it, around Korman, gathering like a cloak. But Healy didn’t move to him, or get out of the seat. He just sat there, muttering the same thing, tears marking his cheeks, skin bleached white beneath the floor lamp, narrow bands of fat gathered at his belly as he leaned to one side.

I thought about trying to comfort him, about trying to find the words to tell him we’d fix this, but I wasn’t sure what those words were, or whether there was anything left to fix. The answers were lying in a pool of blood on the floor.

Instead, I left him to gather himself, and scanned the arcade, across the tops of the machines, out to where the glow from the floor lamp made little impact. As I did, I recalled the look on Korman’s face as he’d done the same thing. In the seconds before he’d killed himself, what had been that expression on his face when he’d looked out at the arcade? Sorrow? Affection? I rewound further, to everything Calvin East had told us about the weird things that would happen here: cabinets changing position, cracks appearing in glass, cases being revarnished.

And always the same five machines.

I started moving slowly along the middle, in the direction of the mirror maze. There were a hundred machines here, maybe more than that, beginning in straight lines, then becoming messier and less ordered the further I went.
The centre row maintained its linearity, all the way down to the maze, which was why I hadn’t been so aware of the layout the first time I’d been in. But I could see it clearly now as rows intersected, lines of travel merged, the room becoming a tangle of walkways, nooks and alcoves on either side of me as the space accommodated bigger machines with different dimensions – the height of the fortune tellers and laughing sailors; the width of pushers and puppet shows.

I stopped.
What the hell am I doing?

What I should have been thinking about was getting out of here. Korman was dead, and now we had to clear up whatever part we’d played in this. That meant getting rid of Healy’s blood, wiping down surfaces, the chair he’d been tied to. If the police returned here in the morning, we needed them to find Korman, for the forensic team to determine it a suicide, and for no trace of us to be left here. After that, I’d have to figure out the rest.

Should I hand myself in?

Or should I wait for them to come to me?

I started making my way back to Healy, who was hunched and shrugging on his clothes, when something caught my eye, off to the right.

Making a detour, I passed from the middle row into a tangle of different machine types, all set in a rough circle. Among three matching kinetoscopes – Victorian motion-picture viewers – ornate and beautiful, with polished brass peepholes, was a strength tester, set inside a wooden cabinet. On the glass at the front, there was a crack, right in the corner.

This is one of the machines that East described
.

I checked it over, running my fingers across the varnish.
I wasn’t sure how the finish was supposed to feel, or what difference a tin of Hoberman’s might make, but nothing felt strange about it. It was smooth to the touch, and professionally applied. When I went around to the back of the cabinet, I found a rear door, about two and a half feet high, with a handle attached.

I pulled at it and it popped open.

Inside it was empty. I bent down, getting on to my hands and knees, and leaned closer, moving my hand around the interior, checking surfaces for anything that didn’t feel right. There was nothing. My fingers glanced off pulleys and cogs, the workings of the machine, but mostly the strength tester was just a tall, empty box, like a coffin.

‘Healy,’ I said.

He looked up, eyes shifting slowly.

As I waited for him, I continued moving through the arcade, circling the machines, weaving in and out of the chaotic aisles, keeping my eyes on the cases. Once he’d arrived, I returned to the strength tester. ‘You remember how East talked about the same five machines being varnished over and over again?’

He looked dazed, eyes moving sluggishly around the room. He glanced at Korman. ‘We should leave.’

‘We will,’ I said, trying to keep my voice measured. He wiped his eyes with his sleeve and then stood there, as if he hadn’t heard anything I’d just said. I tried again: ‘Once the police turn up tomorrow and find him, we’re not going to have another chance to look around this place.’

He glanced at the strength tester a second time.

‘Healy?’

He nodded.

‘You listening to me?’

He nodded again.

‘There are five machines they care about, one of which is this strength tester. We’re also looking for two bagatelles that are almost exactly the same design as one another, but there’ll only be one here tonight, because the other one is back at Grankin’s place.’ I paused, remembering how it had been hidden inside the false wall. ‘The other two machines are a fortune teller with a scratch down the side, and a phonograph. You getting this?’

‘Yeah,’ he said.

‘I’m not sure how we identify the phonograph, because I’ve seen about three of them already tonight – but let’s try, okay?’

Without saying anything else, he turned and headed across to the other side of the arcade, moving through the sea of cabinets, expressionless, remote. I wasn’t sure how much he was taking in, but he seemed to belong in this moment somehow: a ghost of a man wandering through a forest of archaic machines, surrounded by the façade of a long-forgotten pier. All of it, Healy included, was just a vague hint of something that had once been better.

I carried on moving through the rows, before eventually double-backing on myself and returning to the strength tester. There were countless bagatelles, countless phonographs too, but it wasn’t until I crossed the middle row, to Healy’s side of the room, that I finally found something.

‘Here,’ I said.

He came over. Among a group of bagatelles was an empty space where another one should have been.

‘The one we saw in Grankin’s house must go here.’

But Healy was frowning now, looking over at the other side of the arcade.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘They’re in the same position.’

I glanced from him to where he was looking. ‘What do you mean?’

‘The one we saw in Grankin’s house had a design with three red circles on the front. Did you notice that when we were there?’

I tried to remember.

He gestured across to the other side of the arcade. ‘There’s one with three red circles on it over there, not far from the strength tester you were looking at. I saw it earlier on. The one that Grankin had in his house, and the one over there, they’ve been placed in the same position – just on opposite sides of the room.’

He was right: the one that normally occupied the empty space, and the near-identical bagatelle on the other side of the room, mirrored one another’s position exactly. They were the same distance from the middle aisle, in a straight line across from one another. Had they been purposely placed like that?

I returned to the one that was still here, opened its rear door and checked it over. Just like the strength tester, there was nothing unusual inside.

‘We’re still missing a phonograph and a fortune teller,’ I said, but as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I’d found them both: they were among a crowd of machines between Healy and me.

‘They’re all in a row.’

Healy looked at me. ‘What?’

‘The machines – they’ve all been placed in a row.’

The phonograph was different from the others. It sat atop a wooden plinth, about two feet in length and a foot
high – no rear door, just a slide drawer built into the plinth itself. I opened it up. There was nothing inside. When I checked the fortune teller with the scratch – a smaller version of the Oracle, which I’d seen on my way up to this floor – it was exactly the same: empty. None of the machines was directly adjacent to one another – there were other cabinets in between – though they’d been placed roughly the same distance apart. No one would notice the pattern unless they knew what they were looking for. But because we
did
know, it was absolutely clear: they were in a straight line. If the missing bagatelle had been here and not at Grankin’s house, we’d be looking at a deliberate pattern – the only five machines Korman and Grankin had ever cared about, all purposely placed in a row.

‘Why have they done that?’ Healy asked.

I shook my head, still trying to piece together the evidence I was seeing, when something Korman said bubbled to the surface.

You need a change of perspective.

‘Raker?’

An idea started to form. I ran my fingers across the surface of the fortune teller, which was closest to me, and then over the surface of another, random machine to the right of me. Something was different. The finish on the fortune teller was good, smooth – but was marginally darker, and it was harder to the touch as well, with a texture like chalk.

‘Raker, what’s –’

‘Hold on a sec,’ I said, and removed my phone from my pocket, my adrenalin starting to fizz. I checked my camera app, going through its settings, and when I saw that it had the option I needed, headed over to where Korman had
placed the floor lamp. Following the lamp’s cables, via an extension lead, to the nearest plug point, I found the switch that would turn everything off.

Healy was watching me.

‘I’m going to turn off the lights,’ I said.

‘What? Why?’

The arcade was plunged into darkness. Using the glow from my mobile phone, I returned to the fortune teller and selected the camera option I wanted. Slowly, I levelled the phone’s lens at the back of the machine.

On-screen, the fortune teller lit up.

‘What are you doing?’ Healy asked.

I directed the phone towards the rest of the floor, towards the phonograph and the strength tester; to the bagatelle and its matching empty space on the other side of the middle aisle.

They were all a luminous pink.

Even the empty space was marked with the remnants of it: the outline of a square where the bagatelle normally sat.

‘They used infra-red paint.’

‘What?’ Healy stepped towards me. ‘What are you talking about?’ he said, watching my phone screen now, seeing for himself what this arcade really was.

‘They mixed infra-red paint with the varnish,’ I said, as much to myself as to Healy, ‘and it reacted. That’s why the revarnished wood has slowly got darker over time. That’s why it feels harder to the touch. They made a mistake with the two bagatelles, right back at the start, by getting the mix wrong – it’s why East said it was gloopy and careless. But they never got it wrong again.’

It seemed so obvious now: Korman and Grankin had
chosen wooden machines because, unlike the metal ones, they could revarnish them. But they’d also selected the machines based on their location, revarnishing the same cabinets over and over again to maintain a line of five beacons, all in a row. The missing bagatelle, the fortune teller and the phonograph on the left of the aisle; the remaining bagatelle and the strength tester on the right.

Except the row wasn’t
quite
perfect.

Because the pattern seemed unevenly weighted – three machines on the left, two on the right – my eye was drawn to a point roughly in the middle, between the centre aisle and the bagatelle on the right, where a sixth machine was sitting. If it had been revarnished like the others, if it had shown up under infra-red, it would have fitted perfectly into the pattern, turning five machines into six. It would have made things even – three on the left, three on the right. It would have finished everything off.

But it hadn’t been varnished.

It had been left untouched.

I took a step closer. It was a tall, thin cabinet, some kind of puppet show, its name written across the top in letters that dripped blood:
The Haunted House
. A coin slot on the side had a plate above it –
Do you dare bring the Haunted House to life?
– and, through the glass, there was a domestic scene: four small puppets – two parents, two kids – sitting at the kitchen table. Waiting in the wings, crudely visible through long slots at the side of the cabinet, were ghosts, which would pass back and forth across the kitchen – the family reacting accordingly – once a coin was inserted.

‘What the hell is this place?’ Healy said.

I looked from him to the machine, then back to him. ‘I think it’s a map.’

74

I switched on the lights again, and the map disappeared. To the human eye, the varnished machines were virtually indistinguishable from the ones around them: a little darker in shade, the finish a little drier and firmer to the touch – but you’d have to look hard to see the difference. The only reason we’d even been able to find them in the first place was because of what Calvin East had told us.