The Last Days of Jack Sparks (38 page)

From the centre of this pool rises the horizontal face of Rebecca Lawson. Nose first, then lips, forehead and chin. Finally her baby-blue eyes break the surface, gazing skywards, misty as old glass marbles, unblinking against the downpour. Having risen no more than two inches, her face resembles a desert island surrounded by choppy red sea.

All my pain blurs into irrelevance.

Fireworks scorch, swirl and whistle in my guts.

I end the call, cutting off Living Bex, my eyes locked on Dead Bex. As I crawl towards the blood pool, a whole flood of emotion threatens to break through the dam I’ve maintained since she died. Amid all the intense joy and amazement, there’s so much guilt, not to mention unease at how very alien, how very macabre she appears.

‘This is you, isn’t it?’ I blurt, stupidly.

When Dead Bex replies, I fully absorb the change in her voice. It’s more melodious, and carries a new accent, unlike anything I’ve heard. ‘We get to come back when there’s good reason,’ she says. ‘Unfinished business. Or someone trying to prevent your death. Genuine reasons like that, we call XXX.’

She doesn’t actually say ‘XXX’, or anything like it, but I wouldn’t know how to start spelling the actual word. It’s a fresh new alien sound from somewhere beyond the alphabet. A word I doubt the human voice box could even produce.

I’m on all fours at the pool’s edge. Rain lashes the back of my head as I stare down at this impossible apparition. Questions form in my head, then fall apart. So many questions, jostling for pole position. Yes, I saw Tony Bonelli after he died, but that felt like Maria’s doing. Yes, I saw my own future ghost, but that felt impossible to comprehend. This, on the other hand, feels like the universe raising the curtain on its ultimate secret.

I settle for gushing, ‘So there’s definitely an afterlife?’

Rain steadily washes the blood from Bex’s face, revealing the bluish-white skin beneath. ‘Better call your brother before that phone dies.’

‘Is it like heaven, or—’

‘Forget all that stuff,’ she says. ‘People waste their time guessing. You’re just worms, Jack, trying to picture what’s above the soil. The reality is way beyond you.’

I don’t remember my exact response, but it hinges on incredulous swearing. For the first time, her eyes move and lock on to mine.

‘Listen,’ she snaps. ‘I appreciate you finally manning up and putting yourself second, but I don’t want to be saved. Call your brother instead.’

As the implications sink in, my mouth is a big dumb open hole. ‘Hold on . . . that means . . . this afterlife is
so
good, you . . .’

‘I’m fine with having been sucked down a three-inch-wide pipe to get here, yeah.’

Ashamed, I bow my head. While Bex might be content with her new life, the fact remains that I cut her old one short. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I tell her. ‘For everything. I’ll make it all up to you.’

‘No need,’ says the face in the blood.

An idea jolts me. ‘Have you . . . have you seen my mum over there?’

‘Yeah, sure, Jack, I’ve seen your mum. Oh, and I saw
Neil Yates
too.’

Bex’s cloudy lemonade eyes appear indifferent as her acid sarcasm burns me. She says, ‘You know why most of us don’t hang around? It’s all
this
shit. All the questions. People wanting you to pass on messages and apologies. People desperate to say stuff they should have said to the living. I don’t even know your mum’s name, Jack. You never talked about her. Too busy going on about yourself.’

My emotional dam strains and creaks. A thick crack appears across it. ‘Give her a message for me?’

‘Tell her yourself when you—’

‘Bex, please! I want her to know I’m sorry.’

‘Call. Your. Brother.’

Bex’s eyes swivel to the sky once again. Then the island of her face begins its slow, smooth descent back into the blood.

That’s when my dam bursts. Those fireworks in my guts become a record-breaking New Year’s Eve display. My tears are indistinguishable from the blood and the rain. Half blind, I lurch down and hold a palm against Bex’s grave-cold porcelain cheek. And I tell her I love her.

I tell her this over and over. First time I’ve said it to someone and meant it, let alone said it more than once. Sobbing my head hollow, I gabble at the submerging dead woman, saying sorry until her face is no longer there to be held.

As the tip of her nose sinks out of sight, I yell, ‘Did you hear me? Please say you heard.
I love you
.’

The aching silence seems to last a whole lifetime, before her words bubble back up.

‘Fucking funny way of showing it.’

The blood pool seeps off into the soil, finally submitting to the downpour.

I roll over on to my back and gawp crazily at the darkening sky.

The phone in my hand is soaked through. A total brick.

If I hadn’t tried to save Bex, I might have saved my own neck.

But for once in my life, I wouldn’t change a thing.

Out here in the black heart of the woods, exactly four hundred steps towards nowhere, I clamp my teeth into an idiot grin.

As the rain eases off, I cackle and whoop.

THE FINAL SPOOKS LIST
(Sparks’ Permanently Ongoing Overview of Kooky Shit)

People claim to have witnessed supernatural phenomena for the following reasons:

(1)    They’re trying to deceive others

(2)    They’ve been deceived by others

(3)    They’ve deceived themselves

(4)    Group psychokinesis can produce results

(5)    Supernatural phenomena are real

(6)    The afterlife is real

(7)    Satan is real

(8)    It’s all fucking real. We’re just too wrapped up in ourselves to see it

By the light of a pale moon, I rifle through Sherilyn’s backpack. There are all manner of magical items. And a netbook. This thing will contain the latest version of this book I emailed her. If I can just get out of this rain and find somewhere to write, I can finish the damn thing.

Last thing I’ll ever do.

It is Halloween, after all. I know how this works.

Until recently, I’d never have dreamt the world could keep turning without me.

The moon melts away behind a bank of cloud, painting these woods black. I can no longer see my hand in front of my face.

My imagination ensures that every grotesque, contorted tangle up ahead is Maria Corvi, waiting patiently for me.

At the very bottom of the backpack, my fingers close around smooth brass.

Without having to see, I know it’s the Zippo. Sherilyn must have packed it for me, then forgot to hand it over.

I squeeze the lighter in my hand while hauling myself to my feet.

I plant a slow kiss on the warm brass casing.

Then I toss it away and walk into darkness.

Inspector Tacito Vivante’s phone call came through on the morning of 13 November 2014.

I was getting dressed in the master bedroom of my Suffolk childhood home, which Chloe and myself had inherited from my dear departed mother. That afternoon, I was scheduled to run twenty kilometres for MND (Motor Neurone Disease) Research. As soon as I heard the tone of Mr Vivante’s voice, however, I knew I would not be taking part.

At midnight on 31 October, Italian fire services had arrived at a location two miles east of the church where Jack had witnessed an exorcism that day. A small cottage was ablaze at the foot of the hills, and despite the firemen’s best efforts, there would be no survivors.

One of two badly burnt bodies was identified as the cottage’s seventy-five-year-old owner, Sergio Acierno. Horrifically, Acierno had been crucified against his own kitchen wall by rusty nails, then received a third to the forehead.

It took the Italian authorities longer to confirm that the other remains belonged to Jacob Titherley. The process had been delayed by his nationality, his pseudonym and the process of securing dental records from Brighton. Jacob’s sole cause of death had been incineration, although his body exhibited other wounds consistent with his accounts in this book.

When Vivante broke this news, I sat heavily on the bed, where I stayed for hours, half dressed in running gear, until Chloe arrived home from work. I had expected drugs or alcohol to take my brother’s life for some time. Yet the impact of him dying like
this
knocked me off my feet. It was made all the more poignant by sitting in the very bungalow where Jacob and I grew up together.

Jacob had been found in the bedroom of the cottage, where the police believe Mr Acierno had granted him a place to rest and improvised a makeshift splint around his left leg. While the fire immolated the bed and much of the room, a netbook computer remained untouched on the floor. Small-town superstition blended all too easily with tabloid hyperbole when one ‘inside source’ told
La Repubblica
newspaper, ‘The computer lay open on its side, with a perfect circle of untouched floor around it. The screen, the whole thing, it remained utterly unmarked by ash.’

That netbook was taken into police custody along with other items from the scene. I have been legally advised not to attribute blame, but it is a fact that
Jack Sparks on the Supernatural
then leaked on to the internet in its raw, unedited form.
¹
Starting off in the web’s darker, more esoteric corners, the torrent file spread slowly before gathering speed. By the time Jack’s death was officially announced on 19 November, the internet seemed to explode. Many fans rounded on me, ridiculously blaming me for Jack’s decline – even for his death – and making my online life a misery for months to come. Meanwhile, the British press conspired to make my real life a misery too.

Jack’s death, when coupled with his leaked book, suited whatever your agenda happened to be. If you were an anti-drugs campaigner, then Jack Sparks had finally suffered an inevitable mental breakdown, murdered Mr Acierno, then burned down the cottage himself. If you were a true-crime aficionado, then Jack and Mr Acierno had fallen foul of the psychotic Devil-worshipping teenager Maria Corvi. If you were a believer and/or a subscriber to
Fortean Times
magazine, then you took Jack’s account at face value and
Jack Sparks on the Supernatural
became compelling evidence for everything from the afterlife to time travel.

Myself? I have no agenda and much prefer to stick to the facts.

Fact One: Jack was unable to face up to our beloved mother’s passing, either before or after it happened. Despite what he thought, I never held this weakness against him, but this book clearly expresses his lingering grief and guilt, exacerbated by drug addiction. I suspect this toxic combination warped his previously held scientific views, creating psychological inconsistencies and extreme delusions. Which leads me on to . . .

Fact Two: Jack died on the night of 31 October 2014. Ergo, he could not possibly have experienced the twenty days that followed, as ‘documented’ in the book. Unless we open a whole other kettle of worms and posit that Jack did not actually write
Jack Sparks on the Supernatural
himself (a rabbit hole down which endless internet essays have disappeared), he must have written the book way in advance of his death, perhaps even in tandem with, or directly after,
Jack Sparks on Drugs
. I believe he researched real people like Father Primo Di Stefano and the Hollywood Paranormals in order to create a credible narrative. A narrative that, while wildly fanciful to the point of madness, ultimately seemed to confirm the afterlife. Wishful thinking all the way. This book is fantasy fiction rooted in autobiography, much like
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
, the best-selling 1971 novel by Jack’s writing hero Hunter S. Thompson. Nothing more, nothing less.

Fact Three: for many years, the scientific sceptic and former magician James Randi has offered one million dollars to anyone who can prove their psychokinetic powers. The prize remains unclaimed. With or without the Devil’s help, the Hollywood Paranormals did not create a psychokinetic gestalt entity formed of their own egos that ultimately destroyed them. Such a concept is absurd.

Fact Four: the Devil is a part of Christian mythology, having been invented by man to keep other men in line. And not even the wacky world of quantum physics has begun to prove the ludicrous concept of time travel. So Satan most certainly did not send my brother off on some sadistic, time-warping forty-day journey in order to teach him a lesson about ego and certainty. Contrary to so much fan theory, my brother was not sent two years forward in time at Rome airport, just so that he could buy
The Devil’s Victims
, only to be whisked back again. And neither did he have a panic attack on a flight out of Rome while some ‘future’ incarnation of himself died in a burning cottage thousands of feet below. I have no idea who stewardess Isla Duggan dealt with on that Rome–Gatwick flight, but it was manifestly not my brother.

Ever since my brother’s death, hundreds of blogs, essays and articles have agreed with the above facts, while an equal number set out to dispute them. How the latter group love to cite ‘evidence’ that supposedly contradicts the facts. They point out that the LAPD found traces of Jack’s DNA at the Big Coyote Ranch murder scene. Not to mention all those eyewitness reports of ‘Jack’ during his supposed twenty days after Halloween, from Brighton to Hong Kong to Los Angeles. One theory, more than any other, has gained traction while attempting to explain such alleged inconsistencies.

The Impostor Theory suggests that one mentally unstable person – perhaps an obsessed fan and/or a Satanist – acted out the key events of
Jack Sparks on the Supernatural
between 31 October and 20 November. They somehow gained access not only to a draft of the book, but to Jack’s personal effects such as his laptop and passport. Perhaps, some theorists offer, this impostor stole them from my brother before murdering him and Mr Acierno. Certainly, the Italian police have yet to prove their own thesis that Maria Corvi committed these murders, and the teenager remains missing as I write. The impostor, it is said, may also have planted Jack’s DNA up in the Hollywood Hills.