The Immaculate (39 page)

Jack didn't like it when Daddy was sad, which he was sometimes. He closed his eyes and pressed his face even harder into Daddy's shirt. He liked Daddy's smell; it was warm and comforting. He liked the steady boom of Daddy's heartbeat, too; it made him feel safe.

He felt the heartbeat growing louder, stronger, spreading out and enveloping him. Daddy's voice faded beneath it, and Jack felt himself sinking, going back, as if he were crawling into the centre of the heartbeat itself. External sensation—the rough-heavy feel of Daddy's hand tenderly stroking his hair, the material of Daddy's shirt on his face, the long grass tickling his legs—dimmed, merged and finally dissolved into a warm soft limbo where Jack floated, carefree and serene. His senses felt like one sense, unfragmented; his thoughts felt like one thought, uncluttered, pure.

He felt a presence beside him and knew instinctively that it was the complement to himself: yin and yang. Somehow he knew that he was poised, on the verge, but as yet he felt no anxiety, no fear, no excitement. His emotions were a single vital emotion, indefinable, flawless. Together, he and his twin were entire, immaculate.

When the pain came, splitting them, only he was ready.

As soon as the light rushed in he knew that it meant him harm. It was voracious, mindless. It had only its hunger, its desire for destruction, to maintain it. The twins were sundered. The weaker died. The stronger lived, but only just. As he crashed out into a screeching world of light and pain and terrible fear he felt the heartbeat that had sustained him lurch and die, lurch again . . .

And finally whisper its last.

Silence for a time, and then, faint at first, a new beat. Gradually it grew louder, stronger. It was harsh, ugly, and it tore its way out from inside him with increasing violence. With it, all knowledge came rushing back. The years were heaped onto his shoulders once more. The beat was a single word, “No . . . No . . . No . . . ,” repeated over and over. Realising his eyes were squeezed tightly closed, Jack opened them.

He found himself standing alone in the clearing, howling his denial at the moon.

Falling to his knees he began to sob. He was crying for chances lost, relationships unformed. He grieved for the sister he had never known, the mother who had died so that he could live. He cried for his father, too, who had not had the strength to resist the outstretched arms of his devils and who had sought redemption only when it was too late. Though he felt wretched, they were cleansing tears. When they were done, the ache he felt was one of pity and love and loss. A cloud was sidling across the moon now, dimming its light. Jack wiped a hand over his face and climbed shakily to his feet.

“You pathetic bastard,” said Patty Bates.

Jack turned unsteadily. Bates was standing at the edge of the clearing, between two trees. He was mostly in shadow, though Jack could see that his face was creased in rage and disgust, and that he cradled a shotgun in the crook of his arm. Oddly, Jack was not afraid; he merely felt tired and empty. Behind and all around Bates, circling the clearing to ensure Jack would not escape, were Bates' army—mindless, faceless and silent. Jack could smell their expectation, their desire to see blood spilled. Bates had a bandanna around his head. He looked ridiculous. Despite himself, Jack sniggered.

Bates took two more strides forward, posturing and arrogant. “You fucking worm,” he sneered. “Haven't changed much, have you?”

There was a ripple of laughter from around the clearing. Jack sighed. Quietly he replied, “What do you know about anything, Bates? You haven't changed much, either. You've still got the intelligence of a plank.”

Bates looked almost comically surprised. He clearly hadn't expected such defiance. He recovered himself quickly, however, all too aware of his audience. Taking a quick glance around, he lurched forward, roaring, “I know you raped my daughter, you scum!”

He was clearly encouraged by the growls of acknowledgement from around the clearing. Jack, however, stood his ground. He even threw back his head and laughed.

“Oh, for God's sake,” he said, “you know that's not true. It's just a bloody excuse, isn't it? Why don't you give me a break?”

He was treading on very dangerous ground and he knew it, but he didn't much care anymore. After what he had just experienced the threat from Bates seemed puerile, insignificant.

Bates, however, clearly didn't regard it as such. Incensed almost to apoplexy, he screamed, “I'll give you a break, all right, you fucking bastard! Your fucking arms and legs!”

“Repartee,” Jack said. “Very witty. Do you write all your own material?”

In some less reckless part of his mind warning lights were flashing. Jack knew that goading a maniac with a gun was not the wisest move he had ever made. But he couldn't deny that he felt a savage glee in the situation, a sense of almost suicidal power. He was spoiling Bates' party and it felt mighty good. Crimson-faced, Bates' only retort was to raise his gun and point it at Jack's stomach.

Jack lowered his gaze momentarily to glance at the deadly black muzzle of the rifle, then he reestablished eye contact with Bates. In a voice so calm and reasonable he might have been commenting on the weather, he said, “Aren't you now supposed to say, ‘Go ahead, make my day,' or ‘Eat lead, punk,' or something equally melodramatic?”

Bates' face turned an even deeper shade of scarlet. He hissed, “Shut up, you twat, shut up,” as if Jack were spoiling a carefully prepared script.

“You're not looking too well, Patty,” Jack said in mock concern. “Are you sure you wouldn't like me to call you a doctor?”

Bates' lips curled back from his teeth like those of a mad dog. His body went rigid, then his hand seemed to jerk on the trigger of the rifle.

Jack didn't immediately realise he'd been shot. He was deafened by the roar of the gun, which was like having someone slap both his ears at the same time as a bolt of lightning streaked through his head. He felt no pain whatsoever, and was certain Bates had missed him. It was only when he tried to raise his hands to cover his ears that he realised something was wrong. His body would not respond as he wanted it to. His arms felt heavy and woolly, his legs were suddenly weak, beginning to buckle beneath him. Bewildered, he looked down at himself, and saw that the left side of his stomach was a spreading ooze of slick crimson darkness.

Then he fell down.

He lay looking up at the sky. The sensation was not unlike being horribly drunk and knowing you were going to be sick, and being unable to do a damn thing about it. The focus of his eyes was wildly erratic; one second everything would be blurred and begin fading to black, the next it would surge into such breathtaking clarity that Jack felt he could almost distinguish the intricate patterns of the molecules and atoms of which everything was made. A pain, numb and yet simultaneously more deep-rooted and excruciating than anything he had ever known before, began to blossom in his midriff, quickly spread to encompass his hips, his legs, his chest, his arms. Jack felt as though he should have been terrified, but he was not. He thought quite lucidly that the enormity of what was happening was being shielded from him, that his body was anaesthetising him against it and yet even this knowledge failed to breach his defences.

Though sounds were muzzy, and becoming muzzier, Jack got the impression that something was moving toward him (this didn't seem quite the right way to phrase it, but his thoughts were breaking up, becoming muddled, too). His instinct was confirmed when something moved into his field of vision. A fumble through the perishing index file of his brain identified the something as a face. A further rummage gave the face a name: Patty Bates.

Jack grinned, or tried to; what expression he actually managed to produce was anyone's guess. “Hello,” he thought he said. His lips felt huge and wet and uncontrollable. There was a gurgly copper taste in the back of his throat.

Patty Bates' words were only slightly distorted and not particularly inspired. He pointed the rifle at Jack's face and said, “Time to die, wanker.”

Jack's grin grew wider. Something wet oozed out of the side of his mouth, ran down his face and into his ear. What he tried to make himself say, what he hoped he'd said, was, “Go on then. I don't care.”

Time seemed to stop then, and Jack wondered momentarily if he was dead, if his final image—that of Patty Bates standing over him with a gun pointing at his face—had simply been frozen on to his retina. He expected the image to crumble and darken at any second, to dwindle eventually into black.

Then a breeze passed over his face and he realised he was not dead, after all. Not yet, anyway.

If he concentrated very hard, Jack could see that the gun barrel was trembling in Bates' hand, the great black O of its muzzle fluttering as weakly and erratically as Jack's heart. He could see Bates' teeth clenched tight, gleaming with spittle, sweat darkening the bandanna around his head, trickling down his crimson cheeks, tracing the line of his throat. Though his thoughts were vague and fragmentary, Jack knew that Bates was not at all happy with this situation. Bates had wanted Jack to crawl and squirm and plead—he hated weakness, fed on it, was enraged by it—and the fact that Jack had not conformed to his expectations tormented him greatly. Jack would have laughed at this if he had had the strength. Bates might have killed him, but the ultimate victory was Jack's. With a supreme effort, he curled his lips around words that felt almost impossible to form. Hoping that Bates could hear the words, and hoping they were sufficiently taunting, he said, “Well, come on them. I'm ready.”

Bates' face twisted as if in pain; he actually seemed to grind his teeth together. He raised the gun once more, took aim . . . and then with a sound that was very like a sob, he lowered the rifle and allowed it to droop by his side.

“Whassamarrer?” Jack slurred, his eyelids drifting closed, then opening again, his focus blurring and sharpening like an old TV set. “Loss yer boddle?”

Patty Bates' face expanded, filled his vision, a malevolent moon falling to Earth. His voice was a choked whine, almost a plea. “Shut up, you bastard. Shut up, just shut up. I hate you. I hate you, you fucking bastard!”

Jack closed his eyes, smiling in satisfaction as if he'd been paid the highest compliment. When he opened them again an indeterminate time later, all was quiet and Bates' sweating moon-face was gone.

Jack lay gazing up at the night sky, his being reduced to a tiny buzzing core of consciousness. He felt no pain now, no sensation of cold or heat. He felt divorced from his body, from his senses; even his vision seemed to come from somewhere other than his eyes. He didn't know if he was dead yet, or still alive, or hovering somewhere in between, and he found that he didn't much care. Reduced to this, all the Big Questions—life and death, order and chaos, science and faith—seemed redundant, inconsequential, layer upon layer of tissue paper lies with which to envelop and stifle the integral, ultimate truth. He
was,
that was all, and
what
he was didn't matter, and
why
he was mattered even less. Though he had no notion of doing so, he closed his eyes again. When he opened them some time later, he found himself encased in golden light.

Jack mused vaguely that if this was what he aspired to, then existence was worthwhile. The light glittered, shimmered, formed myriad breathtaking patterns that suffused him, filled him,
became
him. In the midst of this light a shape formed. A face. The most beautiful face Jack had ever seen. It was Gail's face, though without human imperfection. Gail was the other part of him, the completion of the circle. Somehow, without words, they communicated.

And then Jack was observing himself, looking down on his own body. It was sprawled in the undergrowth at the base of the oak tree, head back, mouth open, eyes closed. His flesh, blue-tinged, looked clammy. There was a great deal of blood and mess.

Jack knew he should have felt distressed, shocked, but he merely accepted what he was seeing, believing it to be somehow . . .
right.
He couldn't explain it any other way. It felt right, and that was all. There was a movement in the air, a bloom of golden light, and then Gail was beside him, beside the body.

She crouched down, stretching out an ethereal limb toward his wound. The instant she touched it, the light that surrounded her flared like a dying sun, and she dissolved, rushing into his wound like a genie into a bottle, filling it with light. For an instant Jack understood exactly what damage had been caused by the bullet that had entered him, and the chain of events that had been activated inside his body as a result. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, he was gazing into a night sky full of ice-chip stars, and there was pain, far too much of it.

“Gail,” he whispered, “Gail,” but the whisper was no more than a thought and even that hurt.
I don't want this, I don't want this, I don't want this, I don't want this, I don't—

He closed his eyes.

It was August 16
^th
, and the remix of
Love Me Tender
was riding high on the charts to commemorate the umpteenth anniversary of Elvis' death. London was wilting in a heat wave. It had taken less than three weeks for the general joie de vivre to degenerate into frayed tempers, sunstroke and heat rashes. Office workers around the capital grumbled about the lack of air-conditioning in their places of employment; local government employees in Tooting went on strike when a colleague was sacked for refusing to wear a jacket and tie. A hosepipe ban was implemented across the whole of Southern England and stern warnings issued about the “abuse” of water. In the boiling cauldron of the Underground people were dropping like flies.

The big event at Cormorant Books that summer was the release in paperback of Jack Stone's fourth novel,
Splinter Kiss.
Initially scheduled for March, circumstances had dictated that the book be held back until the beginning of July. Widely regarded as Jack Stone's big breakthrough novel, the inevitable decision to delay the book's release had initially been met in Cormorant's publicity department with despair. A bold and expensive marketing campaign had been meticulously planned, dates finalised, money spent. It was, someone had said, like building a palace only to have it destroyed by an earthquake and having to start all over again. That same person also offered the gloomy forecast that seventeen months between hardback and paperback release was far too long a gap. Public interest would wane, he said, and the book would die an ignominious death in the marketplace.