Last Days (34 page)

Martha reared up in her chair, her face terribly pale, and unleashed a long mournful sigh that ended as a moan of profound distress. Dan and Kyle flinched.

‘Jesus. Sweet Jesus.’ Her voice swelled with anguish, her eyes shone wet. ‘We were killers. Turned the other cheek when someone got raped. Murdered. When some girl’s baby got . . .’

Martha covered her eyes with her forearm, sank to the table and sobbed into her sleeve.

Kyle and Dan exchanged looks. Dan’s face jumped with nerves, was pale, tight-lipped. Kyle nodded at him, mouthed
keep rolling
. Dan returned to the viewfinder of the camera.

Martha sobbed for over five minutes, head down between her arms. Kyle didn’t want to walk into shot and comfort her. It would have been wrong; wrong for the moment, for the scene, for the film.
Let it play
, he said to himself.
Let it
play
. He’d put the whole thing in the damn film; make people 300

LAST DAYS

sit through it. This wretched woman’s grief, her misery, her mourning, her guilt and her regret. Hear every sob, see every tear, witness every heave that wracked that thin, broken body.

Susan White’s astonishment, Gabriel’s terror, Martha’s grief: let it play.

As her sobs subsided into sniffs, Martha spoke in a broken voice. ‘We dreamed of the burning. Of the bodies on stakes.

We saw the bodies eaten by birds and dogs. We all saw the flames and the ash in the rain . . . That’s how it started. In them sessions. That’s when they come.’

Kyle felt as if he’d stuck a wet finger into a light socket.

Something jolted out of his memory. A series of murky, vague images. Jump-cuts through a nightmare featuring some kind of slaughter in progress, in the rain and smoke and ash. He’d dreamed of it when he came back from France.

‘The sessions . . .’ His voice was a rasp. Dan looked across at him, but Kyle never removed his eyes from Martha. Who sat back in her chair. Shook her head with her hands over her face. ‘The world stops turning. Goes quiet. Still. But it ain’t natural. Then you get the smell. The scent. Ain’t nothing changed ’bout that. Still the same.’

‘When does . . . did this happen, Martha?’

‘In them sessions. We all saw it. Every one of us. We seen the same thing. Them dead people all cut up and burned. In the sessions we all started seeing it. When we was tired. From all the confessions. We all saw it.’

‘A vision?’

Martha nodded. Wiped at her red eyes. ‘Why am I seein’

it again if it was the drugs? Only drugs I take now I get from the doc.’

Kyle swallowed the lump in his throat. ‘You all saw the 301

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same vision, in the temple at the mine, of people being . . .

tortured in the rain?’

‘Weren’t just that. Before me and Bridgette ran, she seen something else. Outside the temple. One of the last ses

-

sions we ever did. She got spooked inside that room. We all did. But she got sick with the smell. And when . . . when
they
came in and they touched against us . . . in the air . . .

Bridgette left the temple. Ran outside to puke. And she told me later the sky was changed. Different. She said she could smell what we had been dreamin’ of. And the sky was full of fog . . . yellow, dirty. Kind of a long way off, but coming down fast. She said there was voices too. In the distance, above her head. Saw two dogs go running at the fog or smoke, raising hell. And they never come back out . . . right before her eyes. They just disappeared. Then she said the dogs was over her head, up in the sky. And the air, she said it was kinda wavy. Like in the heat, if you looked out across the sand when it was real hot. But coming down. Waves coming down from where them dogs were screamin’, in with all them people she couldn’t see. Up there. She weren’t no liar. She seen it.’

Aguilar’s son had said the same thing about a mist; Conway had seen the tail end of some similar atmospheric effect. And had Kyle not suffered some kind of vision, a hallucination in the
fermette
in Normandy . . . after he had been
touched
in that lightless barn . . .
Oh Christ!
. . . and what of his dreams?

Martha wiped at her eyes again, swore to herself under her breath, and reached for the whisky bottle. Dan looked at Kyle, who could not break his own stare from the tabletop, which he was unable to focus on.

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‘Looks like you seen your own ghost and could use a shot a this.’

Kyle looked at Martha, nodded. Dan fetched two glasses from the shelves beside the cooker. ‘You too, huh, big guy?’

Kyle heard Martha say from outside the swarm of thoughts and white noise that filled his head. ‘You said . . . Martha, you said, that it’s still the same. What did you mean?’

Dan lumbered back behind the camera. Martha pushed a glass of whisky across the table at Kyle. She smiled bitterly.

‘I guess I’m sayin’ that no one ever leaves the Last Days.

Once you is in, you is in for life. And maybe after that too.’

Kyle wanted to scream,
but I was never in it!

‘There’s things happened out there.’ She looked at the ceiling. ‘Things that no one would believe less they seen it theirselves. Weren’t natural. Things I put down to the LSD

were real. Was a time I saw Katherine walk a yard clear of the ground in that temple. She just came out of her chair, calling out that they were here. “Among us. Among us!” she was calling out like a crazy woman. ’Nother time she showed us her sin coming out. And I ask you: you ever seen a woman, or a man, spit out frogs? An’ these itty-bitty snakes? Outta their friggin’ mouths?’

‘You saw that?’ Kyle barely heard his own voice. He cleared his throat. ‘We saw . . . I saw the same thing. In Normandy. In her room . . . bed. They were in her bed.’ He wasn’t sure who he spoke to. Perhaps only himself.

Martha looked at him with what seemed to be distaste, or pity, or fear. Maybe all three of these things. But in her blood-shot eyes and in the way she pulled her lips back from her discoloured teeth, he also saw what could only be described as recognition. ‘Like I was saying. We were all contaminated.

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Marked. Whatever you want to call it. And it’s come back again.’

‘What? What has?’

‘The dreams. And the changes that come with the dreams.

When your own hands and feet, arms, legs ain’t your own.

Last two places I had, I started waking up in another room.

Not one I even recognized. That’s why I moved. But it did no good.’ She shook her head, and sighed, resigned. ‘At the mine . . . like I said, somethin’ would git me outta myself. At the mine I used to dream that I was above the desert. Just up there, over it, looking down. Back then I told myself it was drugs. Fuck knows we took a few. But these past few months when it all started up again, I been thinking that it was not enough for Katherine to take our money, our freedom. Not enough. It was like she wanted our bodies too.

Who we were. Our minds. Us, as people, she hated it. Did everything to get rid of us, inside. It’s why she took the kids.

She didn’t want us inside our own children. She wanted them empty.’

‘Martha, where is your son?’

‘Safe. Courts took him because of the way I was living.

Then I got him back in eighty-three. Never got my shit together that time neither. But I got it together enough to put him somewhere safe. ’Cus it was never over. Not in seventy-five, not today. Bridgette knew that.’ Martha teared up again, looked away from them, at the window. ‘I’m the last.

Katherine came back for the rest of them.’ She nodded to herself. ‘And I can’t run no more. It stops here.’

She turned her head quickly to face Kyle, at where he gaped at her, ashen-faced, across the table. ‘Something you should see. Max wants you to film it.’

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LAST DAYS

She stood up. ‘You want to see the Blood Friends, you need to come with me.’ She looked at Dan. ‘You better bring the camera before they fade. Wood doesn’t hold them for long. Or plaster. But the bricks keep their shadows best.’

They passed rooms more sombre than empty churches. Feet thudding on the hollow, uncarpeted stairs, they became featureless silhouettes themselves, moving up and deeper into the dim house. At each of the two windows they passed, Kyle felt the urge to pause and peer longingly through the glass.

But his stomach defined itself with sparks of nervous electricity because he was both reluctant and morbidly excited about bearing witness to what had followed Martha here.

Down a hallway, barely lit by an unshaded yellow bulb, and between closed bedroom doors, Martha led them to a short staircase at the end of the hall on the first floor. Four steps up and Martha raised a hatch to allow access to the attic. She looked over her shoulder at Kyle and Dan. ‘They come in through here.’

Kyle and Dan exchanged looks. Dan started to grin anxiously over the viewfinder, but when he saw Kyle’s face, his fragile need for levity vanished from his eyes. Perhaps he too recalled the fragments of things glimpsed on the walls of places they had been to, and captured in jerky footage while they struggled to breathe through their panic.

Carrying the lights, audio equipment, camera and tripod between them, Kyle and Dan struggled through the narrow hatch and followed Martha into the thick, dusty air beneath the steep-sided cross-gables of the roof. Kyle found some empty floor space and settled the sound equipment and the camera’s tripod upon bare wooden boards.

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Light from an arched window cut long, thin stripes across the dirty wooden floor, but left the sloping inside of the roof in deep shadow. They were surrounded by splintered tea chests, bordered with rusty iron; a pushchair furred with dust; two large suitcases on wheels; Christmas decorations in a box marked
Rinso
.

‘You gonna need them lights to see it. Power’s out up here.’

Dan ran the extension lead back down to the first floor to find a power socket. Kyle set up the tripod and saw to the sound. When Dan returned, he extended the lampstands. He pointed the lights underneath one side of the ceiling that Martha nodded at, a cigarette burning between her yellow fingertips. She stood between bales of old sheets under a wooden stepladder and an office desk made from grey steel.

The lights hummed, then clicked into a sudden warm and welcome explosion of white light that filled the main gable, but threw the corners of the cross section into shadow. And at first, as they all stared at the underside of the roof, Kyle could only see broad wooden boards stained with watermarks. He nearly asked what it was he was looking at. Dan stared into his viewfinder, zoomed in, zoomed out, searching.

And then comprehension seemed to come into them both suddenly and simultaneously.

‘Jesus.’

‘Shit.’

‘Is that . . .’

Martha looked satisfied, though also uncomfortable at the evidence of what appeared before them: some kind of hideous expressionist art that used the gable rafters and vertical boards of her attic as a canvas.

Much of what was visible was striated, formed into moist-306

LAST DAYS

looking seams; the rest had seemingly soaked into the surrounding roof timbers, and faded or disintegrated into a murk of scraps; either greasy opaque sections that lacked detail, or half-completed portions of dark limbs and torsos.

It appeared to Kyle, instinctively, as if a motley and desiccated crowd of figures had all tried to force their way into the attic space, but become stuck on their way through, and then merely faded away to leave ghastly imprints of their emaciated forms behind.

He stared at the most complete shape. Tiny steps of a spectral ribcage led up to the profile of a face, caught in the act of a scream. Impressions of a full set of unnaturally long teeth were intricately detailed. Across an empty eye socket and a nose incompletely formed from what appeared to be cartil -

age, but not entirely obscuring these features, long fingers had been clasped. A smattering of carpals and forearm bones appeared to protrude from the plain wood. It was like the small figure had been suddenly horrified at the sight of something awaiting it inside the attic, which had also stopped its progress. It was small, unappealingly infantile.

‘Here. Look,’ Dan whispered, his voice tight with fascin -

ation, but also shock. Kyle looked at the end of the camera lens and followed a straight trajectory to what Dan filmed near the apex of the roof, beneath the main beam. ‘You seeing that?’

Kyle was, though wished he were not. And longed to be back outside and not staring up, unable to breathe or blink, at the figure with a complete pelvis that clutched at its throat with indistinct hands. Smooth arms crossed its chest. A suggestion of hair fanned about the bony face, the figure caught in some strong headwind as it birthed inside the attic space.

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Bulbous ball joints and long femurs defined its legs, but the lower limbs were tangled behind it from the knees down.

Kyle swallowed. ‘What . . . When . . .’

‘Heard ’em three weeks back for the first time. I was in bed. Heard ’em through the ceiling. Up here. Knockin’.

Bumpin’. Tryin’ to get in. Man across the street knocked on my door. Was the only thing that give me the strength to come downstairs. He was worried that I had a fire. Said he could see smoke.’ Martha sighed. ‘Weren’t that kind of smoke, I wanted to tell him.’ She shrugged, hopelessly.

‘You’ve seen this before?’

Martha nodded. ‘It’s why I moved on so much. Same thing.

Last two places.’

‘What are they?’

Martha looked into Kyle’s eyes so fiercely, he withered inside. ‘Old friends.’ She turned her head away and looked at the mottled roof. ‘What Katherine brought down.’

Kyle couldn’t slow his heart; it beat, paused, gurgled unhealthily. He kneeled down on the floor. Dan asked him if he was all right. He couldn’t answer.

Martha remained preoccupied with her recollections.

‘These come two nights back. Nearly made it all the way through. But I switched the lights on that Max sent me, and—’