Bad Dreams (16 page)

‘Why you?’ Anne asked him as they climbed the stairs. ‘You’re not his type.’

Christ, did she know
everything
he was thinking? He suppressed the urge to respond, to tease an answer to the question out of himself. He did not want to think about it.

For what was he being punished?

The second floor landing was spacious, a gallery almost, but much less cluttered than the lower parts of the house. Passages fed off left and right. As far as they could see, the walls were plain white, with evenly spaced-out black doors. It all looked like an enlarged version of those laboratory mazes they let rats loose in.

He decided that Anne was probably a very good cunt. Americans were all easy. Except Judi. She had been difficult. Perhaps this expedition did not have to be a total waste. He had screwed girls who hated him before, and had always got something out of it.

He stepped near the girl, and put an exploratory hand on her hip. He tried his nicest smile, and prepared to whisper his suavest come-on line.

‘You have a lovely smile,’ he said, ‘may I taste it?’

She took his wrist between thumb and forefinger, and held his hand up between them as if gripping a putrid fish by the tail. She turned her thumb-and fingernails in and pinched, probing for painful pulses between the bones. She let go.

‘Look, Clive, I don’t like what you do for a living, I don’t like the way you treat girls at parties, I don’t like your taste in shirts and I don’t like the way you look. Therefore, I suggest we concentrate on finding Nina.’

He could not help asking himself: what was wrong with his shirt?

‘What’s the point?’ he said, rubbing his cuff over the place she had gored him.

‘Maybe we can stop her hurting herself.’

‘It’s too late for that. I know a lot of smackheads. She’s got to have stuck it in her arm by now. She’s dead, only she’ll be able to move around for a bit longer. Not much longer.’

‘You kill many this way?’

‘Fuck off,’ he said, suddenly angry. ‘Who do you think you are, Joan of Arc? I’m just like anyone else. I sell people what they want.’

‘But you have to make them want it first. You have to make them want to die.’

What was this girl doing at one of Amelia’s dos? She certainly did not blend it with the crowd. Clive thought she might be a rare type of pervert who gets off on vociferously condemning all the vices she actually practises. He had heard of that brand of peculiarity before. But she did not strike him as a girl who would get much pleasure out of flagellating herself with self-loathing and trembling hypocrisy. She was more the grit in the cream type, born to be a pain in the backside, always getting at you.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s stop arguing and find the girl. I still think she’s on this floor. She’d want the lights on.’

‘Fine. But the corridor is lit up both ways. Which did she take?’

‘It doesn’t matter. She’ll be in one of the rooms. We can go through them easily. I reckon they only have one door apiece, so she’ll be trapped. Not that she’ll be able to do much about running away. She’ll be on a bed somewhere, out of her skull.’

They took a passage to the left, opening each door in turn and flicking on the interior light-switches for each room. This floor apparently was a private gallery of some sort. The first room was hung with explicit 18th century paintings, depicting the classical rapes of chubbily nubile girls by an assortment of animal and half-animal deities. The second was a showroom for garish ’50s jukeboxes.

‘Have you noticed,’ said Anne. ‘There are no windows.’

‘Amelia is nutty. She’s always having the builders in to fiddle around with something or other. She must have had this whole floor bricked up from the outside.’

‘Why?’

‘I told you, she’s nutty.’

The next room was full of mounted animals. They were stuffed and posed in all manner of positions, demonstrating sexual unions between incompatible species. It was supposed to be funny, but Clive thought Amelia’s kinkiness could get monotonous after a while. Anne did not pass comment, and he shut the door.

‘What is it with this Skinner?’ asked Anne. ‘What does he do?’

‘He’s just… just rich, I suppose. Rich and twisted.’

‘There’s a lot of that about.’

‘I know.’ Clive wanted to go on. He had never had anyone to whom he could talk about Mr Skinner. Not even the Sergeant Major. Not even Judi. There was no one he could really trust. ‘But he’s different…’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Amelia and the others. They’re just playing. Mr Skinner is serious. With him, all this… all this stuff is important, almost as important as being alive…’

‘And you? Do you like these games?’

She was good at asking questions, he realized, good at getting answers. Just like Judi. He did not like that.

Judi had always tried to rub his nose in parts of his life he just wanted to let lie there and be profitable. He was glad he had got rid of her. Admittedly, she had been the one who left, but, in the end, he had been the one to do the getting-rid-of. Poor Judi. Poor old, dead Judi.

He opened a door.

‘Jesus Christ!’

The room was a walk-in freezer. Hanging from ceiling hooks were butchered human carcasses. The opened door jarred one, and they swung to and fro, bumping into each other like the elements of an executive toy. Lifeless knuckles scraped the floor.

Anne reached in and turned on the lights. The fridge was not as cold as it ought to have been.

‘Bacon, I suppose,’ she said.

She touched a corpse. He could see now that it was a distorted papier-mâché sculpture, luridly coloured in red. The ribs were wooden struts, thinly papered over. The cooling coils on the walls and the spreading stains on the floor were painted.

‘Francis Bacon, I mean.’

‘It’s fucking sick!’

Clive had thought it would be Judi and Coral again, on a much larger scale. Even the Sergeant Major would have problems with this much cuntmeat.

Actually, after the first shock, the sculpture did not look real at all. The limbs were out of proportion, and you could read the newspaper headlines under the thin red paint. But, somehow, it was worse than real.

Who the hell had Amelia got to make this anyway?

‘Nina,’ Anne shouted. ‘It’s Anne. I want to help you. It’s all right.’

Her voice did not even echo in the passages.

Around the next bend was darkness. The lights were not burning.

‘She must have stopped here,’ Anne said, ‘or doubled back.’

‘No, we’d have run into her.’

‘Maybe.’

Anne called out again. There was no answer of any kind. Clive wondered why they had not heard anything from downstairs. It was odd that the party should get so quiet. There was no music, even.

Then, he felt the world shift on its axis, and knew that a new reality had slotted into its place. New physical laws, new moral dictates, new topographical patterns. It would be a major adjustment, and he did not know how to cope with it yet.

‘There’s something wrong here,’ he said.

‘She could be on another floor.’

‘I don’t think so… Let’s give up and go back downstairs.’

He turned his back on the darkness to argue with Anne. That was when, with a glass-cracking shriek, the harpy brought him down from behind. A talon punctured the flesh under his chin, and tore…

C
live spun around and collapsed at the same time, heaving from his shoulders in a spasm which threw Nina off his back. Anne tried to catch the girl, hoping to embrace her from behind and pin her arms, but missed getting a sure hold on her. She was slammed into a wall by Nina’s weight and momentum, and felt the shock of the impact in her teeth. Knots of pain throbbed in her spine.

Nina was still screeching. It was an inhuman, continuous sound, containing hatred, rage and triumph beyond expression in words. It was a horrible sound. Anne remembered her brother’s premiere. Cam’s concert should have started by now.

She reached for the back of Nina’s ripped jacket, but only managed to get a handful of hair. Nina stood up, and the hair was pulled through Anne’s fist. It was as if a steel rope had been scraped across her palm.

She looked up at Nina and could see that the girl did not recognize her. She was completely feral, a tie-dye splash of blood across her front, her fingers bent into claws. She turned away, and ducked into the darkness. Out of the light, she shut up. Anne heard rapid, birdlike footsteps. Then nothing.

She looked across the passage at Clive. He was half-sitting, half-slumped against the wall, vainly trying to move.

Nina had stabbed him with the syringe. It hung unpleasantly from his ruined throat, broken. The glass was cracked, the handle loose, and the needle bent. It had been emptied, but was more than half full now. With blood. Clive’s jacket and shirt were stained, and little squirts rose and fell from his wound with each heartbeat.

Anne guessed that he had a severed artery. She got up, steadying herself against the wall, and took a few experimental steps. Her back did not ache that much. She had not been damaged.

Clive rolled his eyes, and tried to speak. Blood leaked out of his mouth, but nothing else.

It had happened too quickly to be absorbed. Anne knew that Nina had stabbed Clive, but she was not sure whether she had doped him as well.

He was an ugly mess, and he was still alive, but Anne could find no emotion to feel for him. She had seen her sister ancient and dead on a stretcher this morning, probably because of Clive or someone like him. She did not even have any squeamishness left over.

He moved feebly, trying to lift a hand to probe his wound.

She felt uncomfortable, watching him die and unable to care about him. She did not know what, if anything, to do for him. So she left, and went after Nina.

She did not want to think about him any more.

I
t did not hurt, so he knew it must be serious.

He saw Anne look away from him and leave his field of vision. He could not turn his head. A light came on, banishing the darkness around the corner. She was following Nina, the stupid…

Everything was clear. He was trapped in his body, as surely as a crashed motorist could be held in a wrecked car by a locked seat belt. Unless he got himself free soon, he would die…

He concentrated on trying to stand up. There was some feeling, not much, in his knees and upper thighs. He pulled, and managed to bend forward at the waist like an oarsman. He could touch his toes. He got hold of the polished tip of one of his shoes, and tried to pull himself away from the wall. His head was between his knees and he could smell the blood. The wetness was pooling in his lap.

Then, for a moment, his back and shoulders were working properly. He achieved some sort of upright position, although his treacherous legs deserted him immediately. He staggered through the open doorway, into the painted freezer, feeling his knees giving out with each inept step. To steady himself, he hugged a sculptured torso. An arm came loose and fell off, revealing scrunched up newsprint where there should have been ligament, bone and muscle. He knew he was bleeding all over the work of art.

Someone else came into the room and sat down on a plain wooden chair to watch him struggle. It was Mr Skinner, calm and hungry. The man’s face gave nothing away. He was neutral. He was not going to help Clive out of his crumpled BMW, but he was not going to kick the bent door shut on him either.

He knew Nina had poisoned him as well. He had never had heroin before, but he knew enough junkies to recognize the effects. Although the pins and needles in his legs could perhaps have been from loss of blood. Purple lines floated on the surfaces of his eyes, coming briefly into focus, then retreating into vague smudges.

Purple haze, he thought.

Finally, the pain came.

First it hit him where Nina had, just below his jaw. From this nucleus, it swiftly spread throughout his head and trunk, leaving only his limbs in an unfeeling limbo. He almost passed out, but his eyes would not close. He kept on fighting…

Fighting for what?

…kept on fighting to stay upright. The lumpy statue in his arms was crumbling. Large chunks fell around his feet. Something gave way like the bottom of a carrier bag, and the bulk of the papier-mâché was squeezed out. He realized that in the centre of the soft fake torso was a hard real butcher’s hook. The remains of the sculpture slipped through his arms, and he sank onto the sharp iron prong.

It went into his upper belly, and caught under his ribcage. He felt himself pulled out of shape, his innards adopting new alignments.

The hook was a curved icicle. It was uncomfortable rather than agonizing. The ice spread through his chest, forming around his beating heart.

His hand and arms were free, but his knees and ankles had long since given out. He could feel nothing at all below the hook’s point of entry. He jerked downwards, his entire weight on the hook and chain. It held. He did not fall.

He swung his left arm up in a reverse backstroke, and grasped the chain. He felt the links pressing into his palm. He hauled, taking some of the weight off the hook, but not enough.

Then he felt for the pain in his neck. His hand seemed like a flesh mitten, fingerless and clumsy. He wrapped it around the syringe, ignoring the jagged glass which tore his skin.

Mr Skinner had come closer. Now, his face was only inches away from Clive’s own. He was as near as a lover or a parent could ever come. Clive felt delicate feelers worming through his mind, draining his pain, his fear. It was a great relief. He felt arms around him, lifting his body up, easing him off the hook.

He pulled the syringe out, and weakly flung it away. The bottom half of Mr Skinner’s face was suddenly reddened. Clive heard the fountain, and knew that he had torn something important. He saw an arc of blood, and knew that it came from his own neck. It was oddly like going cross-eyed and seeing the bridge of your nose. Then, the blood got in his eyes.

Clive shook his head, and cleared his vision. Mr Skinner was smiling an impossibly wide smile. Fifty or sixty perfect, pointed teeth gleamed between his parted lips. Then his face faded until, at last, only his smile was left behind.