Last Days (39 page)

But had he been able to see his reflection in Gonal’s intercom panel, Kyle would have watched the spread of the most malevolent grin his own face had ever produced.

‘Wouldn’t give a shit if the Krays were triplets, mate, and you were the last one still with us. There are far greater things to worry about than losing a nose at this point in time. And I think you know what I am talking about. Sister Katherine has more
old friends
than you can shake a stick at, Malcolm.

They don’t seem too happy with those of us who have been poking our beaks in. So now is not the time to be making threats to a man, I am guessing, who is going through what you are, mate. You must be sick to death of redecorating your bloody walls.’

The metallic voice at the other end of the intercom stayed silent. Kyle smiled. After a few seconds the lock mechanism inside the door disengaged.

And Kyle entered the dark house.

Malcolm Gonal was drunk. Malcolm Gonal was witless with fear. Malcolm Gonal was mad. Anyone could see that.

Malcolm Gonal was also a shut-in. Black sacks and the thin greenish carrier bags from local grocery stores, packed taut with rubbish and piled up the walls of the cramped hallway, prevented a full opening of the front door. Kyle stared at them. ‘Council on strike?’

Gonal looked like a shaven mole, enlarged to human dimensions with steroids by a Doctor Moreau figure somewhere in Eastern Europe. His hairless head was as colourless 344

LAST DAYS

as new putty, save for the streak of what looked like undetected soup on his chin. The pudgy flesh was scaly with eczema. Tiny watery eyes of an indeterminate colour peered through square spectacle frames that must have once been very
media
. But his days as an Armani-suited, gruff-voiced talking head on cable television about football violence were over; Malcolm Gonal was wearing a kilt, what appeared to be a frilled shirt that once belonged under a tuxedo jacket, and a bath robe stolen from a hotel. On his feet were a pair of socks with cartoon characters embroidered upon the ankles.

The round face moved towards Kyle so quickly, he stepped back. ‘Don’t you laff. Don’t you fuckin’ laff. These are all the threads I’ve got left that’s clean.’

They weren’t even that; the robe was so filthy only the most desperate tramp would have paraded about the local park within its fetid confines. This was a man who had reached the very end of his wardrobe. The rest of it was thrown in a pile on the lino of the murky kitchen. They passed it on the way down the hallway to a door at the far end. The one that failed to contain the phosphorescent glow within four walls; the light leaked from all around the cheap, unpainted hardboard door that resembled a temporary repair after a house party in a squat.

‘That crack-head bitch downstairs answer the intercom?’

the mole creature said over its shoulder, as he led the way through the dim flat in a quick shuffle.

‘No.’

The figure glanced at Kyle, its eyes haunted. ‘Even she’s fucked off then.’

He wasn’t sure what Gonal meant; he didn’t pause to 345

ADAM NEVILL

explain. Eager to be out of the unlit hallway, the little hunched figure threw open the living-room door and jumped inside.

Stepping around beer cans, silver takeaway trays, Chicken Village cartons patterned with grease, and empty pizza boxes, Kyle shielded his eyes from the blast of bright white light and followed his reluctant host inside the cluttered living room.

‘Born in a barn? Close the bloody door!’

Kyle complied and then stood still on the sticky carpet to stare, open-mouthed, at the walls. The walls completely covered with newspaper. Even the ceiling was spattered with pages from back issues of the
Auto Trader
. Masking tape held it all in place, layer upon layer. The powerful illumin -

ation was coming from a dozen of Max’s dawn simulator wands, connected to new car batteries.

‘They ’ad all the wires out two weeks back. Chewed ’em.’

Gonal’s little eyes swivelled behind the dandruff-encrusted lenses of his spectacles. ‘They was in the bedroom last night.

Bastards!’

Kyle flinched. Open packets of caffeine pills littered the coffee table, as well as blister packs of medicine from a phar-macist. Diazepam, Xanax: Valium. The ashtray was loaded with Benson and Hedges butts and joints with roaches fashioned from Rizla packets.

Now Kyle was inside the flat, his mind went momentarily blank and he wasn’t sure why he had even come here. Perhaps all of his questions had been answered by the state of the room. Someone was making a last stand. And his sinuses were so filled with the stench of sweat, damp newspaper, stale beer, cigarette smoke, and decomposing chicken wings, he 346

LAST DAYS

almost wished Headcase Stratham would come out from behind the telly and bite the nose off his face. The next image to enter the traumatized space between his ears was an imagined recreation of this same desperate and squalid defence built inside his own studio flat. ‘You should go for the Turner Prize, Malcolm. You’d be a shoe-in.’

‘You’s come to take the piss, then you’s can fuck off!’

‘I’ve just seen something in Seattle that I bet matches whatever is under the
Sunday Mirror
up there.’ Kyle nodded at the wall behind the huge leather sofa.

‘Marfa! You bin to see Marfa?’

Kyle nodded. ‘Yesterday. Landed today.’

Gonal grinned unpleasantly. ‘That’s why you come ’ere.

Poor bitch.’ Then he seemed genuinely sad, which Kyle thought such an uncharacteristic reaction he wondered if he’d underestimated the man who was far more loathsome in the flesh than on television; he’d been hoping it was all an act.

Kyle raised the business card between two fingers. ‘She gave me your card. I didn’t even know Max hired you for the same job. I found out from her.’

‘Yeah, started wiv the quality then worked ’is way down.

Man’s evil. Evil, I say. He bloody started it. You know that?

Back in the sixties. Max!’

Kyle smarted at Gonal’s interpretation of Max’s hierarchy, but didn’t have the strength to argue. ‘When did this start?

The . . . visits?’

‘Day before I quit. Which was about a mumf ago. There’s nuffin’ you can do about it. Nuffin’ but use Max’s lights. And daylight. They don’t like it.’ Gonal looked at the ceiling and shouted. ‘You bastards!’

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ADAM NEVILL

‘I worked that much out, Malcolm.’

He seized the lapels of Kyle’s jacket with his plump fingers. ‘They’s followin’ me at night now. Outside. You can’t escape ’em.’

Outside at night
? That was not something he’d experienced, and he immediately wanted to believe it was only the imagining of a paranoid and terrified man.
But then . . .

‘You see her, Marfa? When she went? You film it?’

‘Sorry?’

Gonal seemed confused for a moment, then began to smile.

‘You don’t know, do ya? Eh? ’Cus you was on the plane.’

‘What?’

‘Fuckin’ gone, ain’t she. Dead. Saw it on the internet this mornin’.’

Kyle dropped more than sat amongst the rubbish on the sofa, and stared at the TV listings for the previous week taped to the living-room wall.

‘Careful! Me rushes is on there.’

Kyle looked under his backside, muttered ‘Sorry.’

‘Look, ’ere.’ Gonal scurried across the room to where his laptop glowed on a table under the window. The screen currently featured Kyle’s page on Wikipedia. Gonal had been checking him out, no doubt since he left the phone messages.

But Gonal quickly closed the page to reveal a desktop image of himself with his arm around the shoulders of Trevor Brooking on the pitch at Upton Park. ‘It’s wireless. Is picking up the signal from the neighbours. I can only turn it on for a few minutes, else the battery will run down. I bin chargin’

it in the library. And me phone.’ He glared at Kyle. ‘Nuffin’

else works in ’ere. Feckin’ landlord won’t fix the wires. Says them squatters on the ground floor done it. He ain’t got a 348

LAST DAYS

clue.’ He turned back to his laptop and dropped down his favourites menu, clicked the last item.

In shock, Kyle continued to gape at the wall above the gas fire, at week-old headlines, and advertisements for double divan beds. Martha was dead.
Was it suicide? Had she followed Bridgette Clover?
He tried to swallow, but his mouth was so dry and the bolus of panic in his throat so great, he couldn’t manage it. Martha was anticipating her own end the whole time he was there.
Caught her in the nick of time
, a little voice too similar to Gonal’s said inside his mind until he banished it.
Maybe the interview pushed her over the edge?

‘’Ere. Look. Look.’

Kyle moved on unsteady legs to where Gonal was hunched over his laptop. Kyle’s vision swam around the screen, trying to fix on everything, but failing to fix on anything. Until his eyes paused on the black-and-white press photo of Martha Lake striding through Phoenix airport in 1975. Above it was the headline: LAST DAY OF DESERT CULT VICTIM. It

was the homepage of the
Seattle Bugle
newspaper.

‘Feckin’ savaged by an intruder, it says. Almost unrecognizable. Shots fired it says. Shots! Eh? At
them
, before they did her. Weren’t no knife, we know that. I knew she was in the shit when I was over there, but feck’s sake. Shoulda topped herself. Froo the brain, like. Like the other one. Bridgette. So
they
wouldn’t get in. Fink of that. Fink.’

Kyle covered his mouth with a hand. He and Dan may have been the last people to see her alive. But the interview, their footage: would it be subpoenaed by the police? He immediately chided himself again for his selfishness. Turned his face to Gonal. ‘Max used us both.’

‘No shit.’

349

ADAM NEVILL

‘Did you go to Clarendon Road? The farm?’

‘Nah. Only the Holland Park place from outside. Max

’adn’t got permission. Didn’t get round to France. That was next. So I did Marfa in Seattle. The mine wiv a medium—’

‘A medium! What you do, Malcolm, throw a bloody

séance?’

‘Tried to. Max wanted me to go out there with the filth.

Some old boy who was a cop. But after I spoke to Marfa, I wanted somfin’ wiv a bit more juice, like. That’s what you need, mediums, else you won’t get it on the telly these days.’

‘And did you get any “juice”?’

It shouldn’t have been possible for Gonal to go any paler than he already was, but he did. He hurried across to the sofa and sifted through papers and DVDs. ‘I can’t look at it again. I’ll ’ave to go out the room. It all went tits up. Don’t know what ’appened to Magenta, the medium. She just run off. Into the desert. There was summat in there wiv us. You see it on a few frames.’ He looked at Kyle, his lips trembled, as did the words that came between them. ‘It was up in the air. Over us.’

Kyle’s mouth dried out. ‘Did anything touch you?’

‘Eh?’ He stepped away from Kyle, looking at him as if he were contagious, as if his question were proof of contact.

‘Nah. Not me. You?’

Kyle nodded.

‘They . . . touched you?’ his voice was barely audible.

‘I think so. In Normandy. In the temple. Not sure. I thought that was how they . . . follow you.’

Gonal looked about himself, absorbed with some new idea. ‘You found nuffin’ in your gear?’

‘What?’

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LAST DAYS

‘When I got back from Seattle, I found something in the camera bag. A bone.’

‘Bone?’

Gonal nodded. ‘Little one. Like from a finger. Black. Burnt.

Tiny joint, like.’

‘Where is it?’

‘Froo that filthy fing away, didn’t I. Disgustin’. But I reckoned that’s how they tracked me back ’ere. Else how would they know. You fink that’s how they know?’

‘Heavenly letters.’

‘Eh?’

‘That’s what Katherine called them. The artefacts. The police had them tested at a university. They were five hundred years old. Belial said they came from “old friends”. How is that possible?’

Gonal began to shake. Kyle thought he might start crying.

‘Malcolm. Dreams. The dreams. You been seeing things?

Visions.’

Malcolm scowled in defiance at the suggestion, but then his face suddenly fell. Saliva stretched between his small lips as his mouth dropped. He took his glasses off and wiped the grubby sleeve of the robe against his wet eyes. Sniffed and nodded. ‘Don’t sleep no more. Can’t.’ He looked up at Kyle, his little eyes red and moist, blinking. ‘That’s ’ow they get in.

They get inside your ’ead.’

Kyle turned away from Gonal, stumbled over a pair of discarded slip-on shoes beside the coffee table. Stood by the window, hoping for some fresher air, while blood thumped inside his head; he felt unnaturally warm, almost buoyant, weightless.

Gonal came after him, swift on his little feet inside the 351

ADAM NEVILL

cartoon socks. ‘I bin places. They took me to places. ’Orrible places. All the birds is dead. Everyfin’ is on fire, like. Dogs are cryin’. People screamin’. Being burned. It’s hell, mate.

They’s tryin’ to take me to hell wiv ’em. I can see it all the time now when I’m awake. It’s fuckin’ stuck in my ’ead!’

His voice dropped to a murmur. ‘I been up there.’ Gonal stared in horror at the ceiling. ‘They’s bin gettin’ me out of my body.’

Kyle slumped back on to the sofa and stared at his feet without really seeing them.
Proof.
This was all the proof he needed. Corroboration proved no one could call him crazy.

But he soon would be, because Malcolm Gonal was the future. His future. The floor shimmered at the edges of his vision. He was past depletion now, right through his over-draft and in a hyper-real bright headspace in the void beyond full consciousness. ‘Sleep,’ is all he could say.

Gonal shook his head vigorously. ‘Nah. Nah, nah, nah.

You don’t wanna sleep, mate. That’s when they come. Fink about it. Fink. Fink. They saw ’em first in Normandy in the trance. On acid in the mine. There’s places in our heads that can see ’em. So you gotta stay awake. Conscious. In the lights.