December (32 page)

      
And then, for a frigid instant, she saw it, over by the door,
haloed in dusty sepia, like an old photograph. And - almost - just like a real
person, except that she could still make out the door panels behind it and it
was so tall that it would have had to bend its head to get under the great oak
cross-beam.

      
Its head! She could see the cross-beam through its gaseous head!

      
Meryl - who had once prayed to see a ghost, who attended the
spiritualist church every other Friday to commune in comfort with the dead, who
chatted gaily to the spectral Lady Bluefoot - felt her lungs fill up with
dread.

      
No one, none of the genial mediums in Gloucester, none of the
authors in her Theosophical library, had
ever
said it would be like this.

      
She saw it for barely a second and then it was gone, leaving
the smell of engine oil stronger, darker, corrosive on her nostrils.

      
Meryl couldn't move and she couldn't dismiss the dirty,
swarthy face from her mind, a face which, she knew, would always be with her,
wherever there was darkness. When had hope last burned in those sunken, black,
pebble-eyes? When had the mouth ever known a normal smile? When had it been
able
to smile?

      
'M'lady ... Oh ...' Meryl sank to her knees, fighting for breath,
tearing the velvet diamante choker from her throat.
      
'Help me!'

      
The face - and she could see its image still, vibrating in the
dust-motes of a dingy kitchen she didn't know - had been deformed into a
perpetually twisted, grinning thing, the skin dragged up at one corner until it
almost met the hole where there ought to have been a cheek.

      
The ragged hole, with puckered skin and scabs of black blood.
The hole like a second mouth.

Meryl was flinging herself
around the room, throwing herself at the walls. She didn't scream, she wasn't a
screaming woman; she made little whimpering, buzzing noises like a fly in a
jam-jar. She was desperate for a way out, suffocating, and she couldn't find
the door.

      
He
was here, still.
She couldn't see him, but she knew he was here. Every time she thrust herself
back from a wall or a cupboard she expected to arrive in his sorrowful,
life-draining embrace.

      
Meryl prayed silently to Lady Bluefoot and to God, one to send
him away, whoever he was, the other to accept his soul, oh Lord ...

      
Then she saw him again.

      
This time only a shadow, a shadow on the wall, a shadow
receding
into
the wall, a light burning
dully beyond him and it was a light she recognized - the pineapple-shaped
wrought iron lantern in the inner hall.

      
The kitchen door had opened.

      
Oh, thank you, thank
you, Lady Bluefoot.

      
Her instinct was to go down on her knees, but when Meryl put
out her hands to balance herself she found familiar warm wood, the handles of
the serving-trolley. She took a breath, made herself expel it slowly. Then she
steadied herself, held her head high and walked quickly through the doorway,
leaving the door open behind her, not looking back.
     
Pushing the trolley before her with its cargo of raspberry
mousse.

      
In the hall, in the pineapple light, it was very still and
quiet, not even a buzz of conversation from the dining-room - as if everyone
had gone silent on hearing her footsteps approaching.
      
Meryl tried to compose herself.

      
You have seen a ghost.
Many people have seen ghosts. You always wanted to. Ghosts cannot harm you.
Ghosts are here for a purpose ... reassurance for the living.

      
She took two long breaths and pushed open the dining-room door.
'Sorry I've been so ...'

      
Meryl entered the dining room to find not candlelight, but the
same greenish glow as in the old kitchen, the spirit kitchen.

      
Too late to turn back now; the trolley was already in the dining-room.

      
And what she saw here was far worse than anything she could
have imagined.

There was a deep, yawning
silence like when you pushed open a door and found you had unexpectedly entered
a theatre or a concert hall.

      
There was a slow, throbbing stillness.

      
And there was a smell.

      
It was a warm smell, a smell from Meryl's childhood on the
farm, from the top shed where the pigs went one by one, usually on a Friday morning,
and did not return to the sties.
      
Meryl said, 'Martin?'

      
All the candles on the table were dead, except for the one
closest to her at the bottom of the table which was greenly, greasily alight,
dark smoke spiralling from its frizzling wick.

      
This candle's sallow glow lit the face of Sir Wilfrid Tulley.
He was sitting in his chair, his head thrown back. As if laughing.

      
Laughing fit to burst, Meryl thought.

      
Like cheese straws dipped in tomato ketchup, yellowish tubes
poked out of Sir Wilfrid's throat. There was a glint of white bone, a bib of
blood on his shirt-from. The head of Angela, Lady Tulley, hair still frizzed
and formal, lay amid the shards of a broken side-plate. Lady Tulley's body was
humped across the table, its neck still bubbling black blood.

      
Another candle came to life, this one near the top of the
table, under the Jacobean panelling. Stephen Case lay across the table in an
attitude of sleep, except that one eye was wide open and looking across at Meryl
in surprise and the other was hanging out on a blood-licked sliver of membrane ...

      
Meryl did not move.

      
She heard her own echo. 'Martin?'

      
Two more candles sprouted flames.

      
Martin was also in his seat, midway along the table.

      
Meryl began to laugh shrilly. Hadn't exactly talked his way out
of this one, had he?

      
Martin's face was buried in an exposed and bloodied breast.
The blood river, in spate, had its source either in her chest or his face. Or
both.

      
Neither of them moved.

      
Meryl felt light-headed. The rich, acrid aroma of spilled blood
was strangely intoxicating.

      
She felt her legs turning to liquid and closed her eyes before
she fell.

When she opened them, no
more than a few seconds later, she saw the brown beams of the ceiling and felt
the boarded floor beneath her head. Her mind refused to remember.

      
But the smell remained.

      
Supplemented by sweat.

      
Between two ceiling beams, the big, red face of the rock
musician, Tom Storey, swam into view. Raw meat shrinkwrapped in sweat.

      
Meryl tried to speak. Tom's legs in black jeans were astride
her body. His arms were by his sides, at the end of one a steely gleaming.

      
'Don't mind me, darlin',' Tom said hoarsely.

XIII

Dakota Blues

The coffee swirling round, the
cream making pretty circles in Prof's cup. He wished he could dive into it, go
round and round with the cream, not thinking about anything. He'd be warm and
safe in the coffee, the round walls of the cup protecting him.

      
He looked up at the bloke sitting opposite. The wafer glasses
gone, the blue eyes sparkling. But Prof could tell it was anxiety, not
merriment.

      
'I looked you up in
Time
Out
: Prof poured in more sugar. 'Wasn't what I expected.'

      
'It pays,' Dave Reilly, who called himself Dave Kite, said. 'It's
cheap, it's naff, but...'

      
'It's not cheap and it's not naff, and it's too late for
bullshit, Reilly, and I'm too old for it, so get serious.'

      
They were in some all-night coffee shop a couple of streets
away from Muthah Mirth. Prof had prowled the pavement outside, sobering in
minutes and feeling no better for it.
      
Figuring Dave wouldn't hang around
afterwards, not surprised to see him emerge within five minutes, winding a long
white scarf around his neck, glancing worriedly from side to side, one screwed-up
individual.

      
Prof peered down the side of Dave's stool. 'Where's your guitar?'

      
'Back at Muthah's. I stay in a room round the corner, pick it
up the following day. They've got it off to a fine art.'
      
'Got what off?'

      
'The muggers. They'll have it off you between the taxi and the
kerb, and resold before midnight. I've never been lucky with guitars.'

      
'Bastards.'

      
'Yeh. It's a hard life, Prof.'

      
If it was, it didn't show, not until you got close. Dave was
ageing like Paul Simon: from a distance you'd swear his clock had stopped at
twenty-four and he still wasn't shaving much more than twice a week. How old
was he now? Thirty-nine? Forty?

      
Prof said, 'It's a good routine you got there, son.
Psychologically acute, as they say.'

      
Dave shrugged it off. 'All it is, instead of just learning the
chords and intonation, you start thinking about the person, where they were at
when they wrote the song - I mean, not every song will do. You know
instinctively which are the ones.'

      
Dave was drinking apple juice, slowly, like it was brandy. 'Thing
is, these guys - travelling around, hotels, all this - have more spare hours to
worry about life. And death. They die for the first time at thirty, and then
it's borrowed time. So I just think about that and ... it comes.'

      
'Out of thin air," said Prof.

      
'Yeh.' Dave was glancing over his shoulder, like someone about
to put out a line of cocaine. 'Thin air.'

      
Bollocks, Prof thought. 'Takes a lot out of you, I imagine.'
      
'Not really.' Lying again, Prof
thought. What am I gonna do with this bugger?

      
A psychiatrist would say Dave was retreating into all these
other personalities because he was scared of his own. They'd first met when Prof
was engineering Dave's solo album, back in eighty-seven, Dave having to be
himself then, and finding it hard. Result: not a very good album, only a few
hundred copies sold; the single, 'Dakota Blues', had some airplay - strictly novelty
value, it probably embarrassed people.

      
'Well.' Dave smiled, stupidly. 'Here we are again, then.'
      
He paused. 'Prof, you going to tell
me why you went berserk in there? You back on the cough mixture?'

      
'What the fuck's that got to ... ?' Prof snarled, the way he always
snarled at anyone who raised the booze issue.
      
'You were sober when you were
screaming at me?'

      
'I wasn't screaming at you,' Prof said through clenched teeth.
'I was just bloody screaming.'
      
'Where'd it come from?'
      
'What?'

      
'
Deathoak
,' Dave
said softly. 'Or maybe I misheard.' He still wore the white scarf, like a
neck-brace.

      
Lifting his coffee cup, Prof's hand shook. Two raving neurotics
together. 'Sod it,' he said and put the cup down. 'Not got anything I can put
in here, have you?'

      
'I don't drink.'

      
'Aren't you the little Cliff Richard.'
      
Dave shook his head. 'That's
Simon."

      
'Simon who?'

      
Dave sipped his apple juice, cautiously. 'You said you looked me
up in
Time Out
? What for? Why'd you
do that?'

      
Now he'd come this far. Prof was almost scared to talk about
it. A lighted bus went past the coffee shop window. He wished he was on it.

      
'Maybe you didn't say it at all.'