Last Days (45 page)

LAST DAYS

took to pissing inside. Nothing new there. But what Kyle now feared to the point of becoming wordless and disoriented, didn’t use doors in the conventional sense.

Odd-coloured doors on every level were made from steel and all had spyholes. A lot of nans too poor to get out lived behind them, in fear. Balcony walkways featured closed doors and the shaggy silhouettes of abandoned flower baskets. But Kyle made the fourth floor without the usual molestation from a character with a perpetually wet nose that protruded between a puffa-jacket collar and long oily hair.
It
seemed to live in the stairwell. If that thing wasn’t home, something was up.

He fished the keys out of his pocket. Because of the rapid exchanges of shared film equipment between them, they each kept a set of keys to the other’s flat. The double lock wasn’t on. Which meant Dan had left and just pulled the door closed behind him. Unusual, because Dan had been burgled twice, and all of Kyle’s Motorhead CDs and Herzog box sets that Dan once borrowed went out the door in a swag bag, along with two cameras and anything else that had a plug attached.

‘Mate,’ Kyle called softly into the darkness through the gap he’d made between the door and the frame. He smelled the tang of a distant unemptied bin, old carpet and the merchant marine taint of municipal paint. No one home.

Reaching inside, he scrabbled for the hallway light switch.

Flicked it down. The scruffy reception was flooded with yellow light. A good sign. Kyle went inside. Navigated his body around a bicycle and closed the door behind him. Listening hard and ready to retreat at the drip of a tap, he carefully opened the door to Dan’s room on the far right side of the passage.

399

ADAM NEVILL

‘Shit. Oh, shit.’

It took a few seconds to stop the shakes in his vision. His friend was pathologically untidy; Kyle knew that from two years cohabitation in a shared house at college. But over the eternal sea of unwashed clothes, magazines, soiled plates, and the poignantly masculine detritus of a male slob, shrapnel from his friend’s valuables added a topical layer of wreckage.

This was no burglary; it was the aftermath of a frenzy.

The destruction of Dan’s Star Wars collectibles would have been mourned with more intensity by their owner than the burning of the library at Alexandria. But the Millennium Falcon had seen its last voyage and was ready for the landfill. The limited edition AT-AT had been hit by something the Rebel Alliance never had in their arsenal. Every collectible miniature, model kit and pricey diorama had been raked from the Ikea shelves, if not hurled with force against the sallow walls.

Clone Troopers and Jedi crunched under Kyle’s feet as he crept inside the room and inspected the damage. Flat-screen television screen smashed. Stereo crushed. Bed eviscerated.

Even the mattress springs were visible. It was like his bed in Seattle, only worse. A greater and perhaps lengthier fury had been inflicted here.

Had Dan been inside it? Kyle sat down in the wreckage of a Tie Fighter and began to shake.

No blood.

Well that was one thing, and it made him leap with lunatic hope. But why hadn’t Dan been in touch since the early hours? In the voicemail message he said he’d found
something
.

Kyle was back on his feet and down the hall in seconds.

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LAST DAYS

Raoul’s room was locked and he kept it that way when he was out of the country. The bathroom looked like the aftermath of a car bomb ignited outside a hotel, but that might have just been Dan being Dan: towels on the floor, cardboard inner tubes from toilet rolls left where they fell, a smell of backed-up pipes and a ring like one of Saturn’s, but brown, around the bath.

But not even ten years of his friend’s slovenly use of the living room would account for the wreckage. Both armchairs and the sofa had been gutted and erupted with white foam.

A coffee table had been swept clear of unwashed crockery, glasses, Pringle tubes and TV remotes. Their camera gear was strewn around the equipment bags from which it had been yanked, but Kyle didn’t stop to see if it was damaged. He banged out of the living room, staggered into the kitchen.

And came to a dead stop.

The smell hit him full and hot in the face before he saw the stain. Sewage, wet ashes, carrion. An old scent, and an uncanny feature of his life these days.

It
had come through the ceiling. Above the little breakfast table. Upon which it had dropped and scrabbled. Splashed a fluid over the Formica. The ceiling had once been white, but was aged like yellow ivory from the thousands of cigarettes smoked by Dan, Raoul and their predecessors. But the discolouration of their residency looked positively clean about the greasy smear with a four-foot diameter. Black at its heart, but veined with moist tendrils to its borders, it would look and smell to the uninformed like the toilet upstairs had flushed right into the heart of Dan’s kitchen. But Kyle looked for and saw the bones; to his trained eye it was as if a blurry X-ray of a fleshless hand, a scapula, and a bottom row of 401

ADAM NEVILL

long donkey teeth had been superimposed onto the plaster by a nuclear flash.

It’s why Malcolm Gonal had papered his ceiling with yesterday’s news.
Gonal
. He’d kept them back with car batteries and dawn-light simulators, but for how long? Dan had refused to believe
they
were possible. The “old friends”. He’d been utterly unprepared; was probably fast asleep with Alice in Chains roaring about angry chairs through his iPod earphones when a martyr from New Jerusalem birthed over the toaster. The lights must have been off; it would have hunted him through the dark as he slept.

‘Oh, shit. Oh Dan.’ Kyle stepped back. His hands covered his mouth when he saw the heavenly letters on a saucer; possibly the last clean plate in Dan’s kitchen.

The saucer had been placed there, isolated. There had been a sudden relocation of bread bags, Olivio spread and Mar-mite around it. Dan must have been grazing when he found it . . .
where?
. . . about his person, or in their gear as he unpacked in the lounge? That’s how a claim had been staked on Gonal’s hunched shoulders. Malcolm said there had been a bone, a black bone in his gear when he got back from the States. And Dan had found a winning ticket too. It now seemed another rune had been cast and they never even knew it. They were all destined for
The Kingdom of Fools
, as foretold in
The Saints of Filth
. No one gets left behind.

‘Mate. Oh Mate.’

Dan had found teeth. Long teeth. Crown and root. Black as coal and cracked like pottery from an archaeological dig.

A handful of teeth, dropped like seeds from the reaper’s hand.

*

402

LAST DAYS

Outside in the streets, revealed murkily like poorly lit photo -

graphs by the lamps and the odd rush of a car’s headlights, his unhinging felt physical. The going of his strength was tangible; like air from a ripped inflatable it gushed from him.

Something loosened inside his skull. There was a slide of his thoughts into unfinished sentences and fragments of irrelevancy. To be followed by a ratchet of gut-level anxiety so acute his mind became a clenched fist. Then an open hand to scatter his thoughts like salt.

He moved like the undead towards the centre of Camden.

Walked towards the lights. Followed a group of people for a while; two couples. Followed them up to the door of a gourmet burger restaurant. Wanted to go inside with them.

Wanted time to go backwards so he could partake of ordin -

ary unexceptional things with them, like the nonchalant eating of burgers and the sipping of beers in a carefree evening.

He recalled his recent life on rewind. Meeting Max for the first time in the production office; an empty house in Holland Park; the ferry to France with Gabriel; the desert; the ranch; the detective’s house; a dismal kitchen in Seattle . . .

he saw all of this, and all else between these points of ref -

erence simultaneously, and he regretted having known any of it. Wished he could wipe his life of every scene of what he’d thought was a great film. The regret left him feeling so weak with hopelessness, he could barely get his breath in and out of his lungs. Despair rendered him limp enough to make lighting a cigarette impossible.

The people sat down to dine, and those others over there

– that girl with the nose ring who laughed into her phone, 403

ADAM NEVILL

the man who read the book in the window of the pub, the bus full of listless faces – they were in a parallel dimension.

One he’d foolishly slipped out of and now could not get back inside, even though he yearned and scrabbled to do so.

Everyone around him existed in a world of familiarity and security and predictability. A place utterly alien to him. He could rejoin it no more than he could pass through a screen and step into a television show. He was a living warning to the foolhardy, the reckless, the ambitious, the naïve; just like Gonal hiding behind a barricade of newspaper. This was why Bridgette Clover topped herself; because she’d entered a dangerous place with one outcome and could not walk back out. Kyle started to shake all over. Wondered if he was in shock.

He wheeled away from the wall he’d slumped against. A man walked his dog past Kyle, going somewhere better than he was ever going to be again in what was left of this life, or the next.

His lips trembled. If he spoke his voice would be glottal with grief. He thought of skeletal figures who danced around a pig with a sceptre.
Was Dan there now?
Did he now scream and cavort among carcasses of sixteenth-century dogs?

He’d as good as killed his best friend. If he hadn’t coerced Dan to go to America he’d still be around. ‘Oh, Christ.’

Around all of the light and motion and purpose in the world he was excluded from, his eyes were pulled into the dark places: the unlit windows, the wooden hoardings covered in flyers for concerts long over, a flattened cardboard box in a doorway that was going to be someone’s bed for the night. Around him all was bleached of colour, stained concrete and dusty tarmac, refuse rearing in the cold wind, 404

LAST DAYS

unnoticed, neglected, and lightless. Leaden weights suspended from twine seemed to pull his spirits and his jaw down. This is how the world was when you knew it was terminal.

Dan was gone. Dead.

405

TWENTY-SEVEN

marylebone, london. 25 june 2011. 1.10 a.m.

In the rear-view mirror the concerned eyes of the driver moved to Kyle’s face then darted away. Another great heave expanded his chest; an attempt to breathe as much as an involuntary reaction to the idea Dan was gone. And his imagination’s insidious enquiry into how Dan
went
refused to be suppressed. Hysteria was coming to the boil. He needed to keep a lid on it. Max had to be confronted, because there was a way to get Dan back from wherever he might be.
There
was. There was?
There had to be.

Fury accompanied shock. The urgency of rage drove Kyle back to Max, ratcheted even higher by his refusal to answer his phone, and he silently willed the vehicle to deliver him with a greater haste than was being taken. To get him to a meeting destined to be their last, before he called in the police, or killed Maximillian Solomon with his bare hands. Over and over again, in the back of the taxi, he imagined how it would feel to squeeze that wizened throat; to stare at the surprised face as it reddened.

But after he bounded past the porter and had thrown himself up the stairs to Max’s floor, he found the front door of the apartment open. Max had anticipated his mood and his 406

LAST DAYS

intentions, and was prepared to disarm them.
No surprises
there.
Though the once immaculately groomed millionaire was now more dishevelled than Kyle thought it possible for him to be.

The executive producer’s pyjama bottoms were spattered with dried blood. The emerald smoking jacket was streaked with long smears the colour of iodine, as if wet hands had been wiped across the front. A medicinal reek hung in the air about the executive producer’s scrawny frame that appeared to have shed half its body weight and could barely stand upright.

Idiotically, Kyle wondered if Iris had served supper improperly and paid the ultimate price after a frenzied scuffle with her fussy master. Briefly, he wanted to laugh with hideous delight at the thought. When the notion passed, he wished to be held down and sedated; had never imagined it was possible to feel so shaken and insubstantial. Tragedy had engulfed him.

But it was the vision of Max’s head that most appalled him, and undermined his intention to beat a confession from the little producer. Because it looked as if someone had done exactly that, and recently too. One side of Max’s head was a thicket of stitches. Purple welts stretched from cheek to artificial hairline and bristled with surgical twine. The eye-ball closest to the inflamed scratches was blood-red. One ear was clothed in white gauze and tape.

Kyle’s mouth felt disembodied, thick with saliva.

‘What . . . ?’

Max stood to one side. ‘Quickly. There isn’t much time.’

But Kyle remained mute and gaped at the little damaged head. Max glared at him. ‘Will you get inside. Please! And 407

ADAM NEVILL

where have you been? I’ve been holding on for hours. Your plane landed at six thirty!’

‘You could have answered your phone.’

‘I couldn’t . . . it’s in that room. Lost.’

‘What room?’

Max turned on a slippered heel and limped to the wall; he needed it to stay on his feet. The other hand scraped a silver-tipped cane across the marble floor.

Kyle’s dread cooled another few degrees centigrade. The hall lights were out. Since the early hours of the morning, new locks had been fitted to a couple more doors in the hall; now Max’s bedroom was out of action, so was the kitchen. Only two rooms remained open; the bathroom and Max’s study.

At the far end of the corridor a squat black machine the size of a car engine, purred and vibrated.
Pro4000E
was printed on one side. A generator that issued a deep-sea squid of red cables that ran into the study. A multi-board that belonged at an outdoor event and had no place inside an exclusive west-end penthouse powered a dozen dawn-light simulators on small stands. Every bulb angled its intense fake light upwards at the ceiling of the hall.