The Ghost (22 page)

“ZOMBIES EAT YOUR BRAINS,”
said Alfie. “But it doesn't make them clever.”

“I can't imagine it would do you much good, though!” said Cook.

Alfie pondered, draining his milkshake. “It might – if they ate the stupid part of your brain.”

“Let's not talk about eating brains, any more.”

Cook and son were gnawing their way through functional cheese-rolls at a cafe near the cinema entrance. Cook was still faintly traumatised by the film –
The Dancing Dead
– about a troupe of stage-school kids fighting off a zombie invasion. (After being bitten, the group's alpha-teen realises that the only way to defeat the infection is to keep his blood pumping – by dancing. The kids rally around him, working to spread the positive message of dance-based counter-attack quicker than the zombies can overcome the population.)

“What about ghosts, Alfie? How do they work?”

“They don't eat. They are floating souls. If you see one and it knows you've seen it, then it haunts you forever.”

“How does it haunt you?”

“They haunt you,” said Alfie, with exaggerated impatience, “by making monsters scratch on the door and doing red eyes in the dark.”

Cook smiled. “Can you kill them?”

“Dad!”
He sighed – a glimpse of the teenager to come. “They're already dead!”

Cook had collected his son just after breakfast, releasing Gina to an early work meeting. As he approached the house, he had expected to see a burly brute in an armoured van, skulking behind tinted sunglasses. Instead, he passed a slight-looking character in a scruffy suit, pacing – with little urgency – around a dark blue Ford Focus, speaking quietly into his mobile. Five minutes later, as he left the house with Alfie, the man was sitting in his car, still on the phone. This was either an illustration of
Frontline Protection's
mastery of blended surveillance, or Cook had spent close to £10,000 on glorified babysitters. It was now the second week of the ‘operation', and Ackner's daily updates had offered nothing to raise concern. Cook had spent the first three nights parked at Peakvale Avenue, monitoring his live feed, seeing little outside the usual routine.

As he dropped Alfie back with Gina in the early evening, Cook saw that the Ford Focus had re-parked further up the road, and that the man inside had been replaced by a reassuringly broad colleague, shaven head bowed to his lap where he seemed to be jotting notes. To the curious eye, this activity would raise slight interest, but the variation made it difficult to pin down as unusual and, Cook supposed, that was the point – not too visible, not too invisible.

For another two nights, Cook hovered around in a state of calculated insanity, monitoring the house on the corner from the discomfort of his proxy home. He walked from room to room with his phone held up at head height – a sterile spirit guide. He propped his laptop on top of the television, balanced it on the toilet-seat lid as he bathed. With tablet PC and live feed on his bedside table, he slept late and woke early, gambling that ‘D' would not approach the house between 3am and 6am. Cook had estimated that he would be able to make the drive in around twenty minutes, as long as he reacted quickly to any movement.

On Monday morning, for the first time since leaving the magazine, Cook sneaked a look at his bank balance. He could afford to live without income for another couple of months, as long as he didn't need to extend the surveillance. The tracks were rumbling. A kind of closure, he felt, was inbound. It would either rattle on in regardless or, ideally, arrive as a result of his own action. He couldn't allow himself to stumble now – to succumb to a craving for an ending. He had set his scene. Now he had to ensure that his players found their marks.

In the evening, an hour after the lights had gone out – at 11.30pm, as usual – Cook's lips paused at the rim of his tea-mug, as he watched the fence at the back of the house dapple with torchlight. He was up and out and on the road in minutes, laptop on the passenger seat – feed window showing more of nothing and then flickers of torch-beam and then, as he left the motorway and slowed into the deserted slip-road, a tall and unfamiliar figure lingering near the back door. By the time he had parked – a little further down Peakvale Avenue than usual – the figure had gone. He killed the engine and sat there – in the darkness, in withering silence – leering at the screen. He was disturbed by his arousal, but also irritated by the sense of masturbatory seclusion. He pined for an observer.

A low light flicked on upstairs. A ground-floor light – almost as dim – followed soon after, and was instantly extinguished. Cook launched the camera app on his phone and connected to the feed. He closed his laptop and slid the bump-keys out of the dashboard. The other item received from William Stone had been with him constantly since the day he had discovered Eleanor. Outside, he kept it in his inside jacket pocket. At home, it moved around with him – beside his phone on the coffee table, within reach on a glass shelf when he was in the shower, next to his digital radio in the kitchen. Depending on the rhythm and volume of the house's night-creaks, he occasionally stuffed it under the pillow.

He slotted his laptop under the passenger seat, pulled on the leather gloves and stepped out of the car. His heart was neither hammering in his chest nor did it leap into his mouth. If this
was
the end – if he was striding into his final escape – then there was always Alfie, and the love he would leave behind. At least he would succeed where his own father had failed.

It was almost late enough to be early. Cook walked slowly and quietly to the house, glancing at his phone. The feed was now a reflection of his reality – it showed the upstairs light still on and a shadowed figure at the back door, examining a phone. He was quite the auteur – writer, producer, camera-man, director and, now, star.

The door had been clumsily forced – there was no need for the bump-keys. Cook listened – to nothing – for a few seconds, and entered the dark side-return, guided by the glow from his phone screen. He advanced a few feet into the room, casting the light over oblivious furniture. All was clean and correct and undisturbed. He moved on steadily, step by silent step, towards the hall and kitchen. The adjoining door was closed and, as he reached for it, there was no longer nothing. Something stirred – a shuffling sound, beyond the door – not directly in the hallway but close by. Then, more than a shuffle – a thud. Something small but heavy dropping to the floor. Cook touched his ear to the door. Something was alive, in a room across the hall. He reached for the door-handle and, remembering the squeak, turned it carefully and gradually, just enough to release the latch. He opened up an inch-wide gap and squinted through. The weak light from upstairs revealed a scattering of glass fragments from a mirror which lay face-down across the lower legs of a body – also face-down, its upper half slumped across the doormat. Cook pointed his phone-light through the gap in the door. A small table lay on its side, sprinkled with mirror-shards, beside a lamp with a flattened shade and smashed bulb. He opened the door a little wider and stepped through.

The glass crackled beneath his feet. He scanned the body with his light, tracing up from leg to torso to where the head used to be – now a detonation of meat and bone. The arms were posed mid-swim, squelched into a glinting puddle of gore. A metallic smell wrinkled Cook's nose and he quickly shifted his light back down to the body's feet, noting the leather slippers and pyjama trousers. This, it seemed, was the owner of the house – Eleanor's captor and keeper no more. It was his second dead body and despite the violent contrast with Mr Smith's melancholy exit, Cook was troubled by the absence of shock or empathy. He stepped over the legs, crossed the bottom of the stairs and made for the open door to the sitting-room.

As he approached, there was more thudding and shuffling from further inside the room. Hand on his inside pocket, Cook stepped through the door. As his eyes adjusted to the deeper dark, he saw the outline of someone – not Something – sitting on the floor, back propped against an armchair, shoe-heels kicking and scratching at the wooden floor. He lifted his phone and pointed light at the someone, which flinched and lifted a forearm over its eyes.

Watch! He hates this!

Cook dipped the beam and the figure's red eyes rose up behind its arm. He saw the white hair, the glassy gaze, the sallow skin. He saw the figure's trembling hands, clamped over a wound on the right side of its chest. He saw a heavy-handled kitchen knife, a lump-hammer, more blood – smear-tracks from the hall, fresh on the figure's hands, matted around his shirt.

“Hello, John,” said Cook, remaining in the doorway. “What happened? I was expecting your brother.”

John Ray coughed out a chuckle. “I learned to fight my own battles. You might have noticed.”

The voice had roughened with age but still retained its stilted eloquence – the flaring vowels, the stinging consonants. Cook moved further into the room, caution yielding to fascination.

“Well,” said Ray, squinting through the pain. “You haven't changed.”

Cook stared, in horror and admiration. Was he smiling?

“What's wrong, Dor? You look like you've seen…”

“How did you get out?” said Cook.

“A gentleman of the road,” said Ray. “After you all left, I screamed myself to sleep. The next day, the trapdoor opened and he let me out. I think he was angry that I was squatting in his toilet or something.”

“I heard him,” said Cook. “We saw his stuff.”

“I did think you would have come back for me. Obviously. Until the place burned down. That
cunt,
Dorian… I wanted him to suffer a lot more, but the last time I saw him, he was so abusive. And he was a coward, you know. He admitted the fire was him, but he blamed you for everything else.”

“Where did you go? You didn't come back to school.”

“Yes. I'm sure you all missed me. It threw a switch in my mind. I couldn't speak. My parents wanted to know where I'd been, but I couldn't tell them. They were separating, anyway – about ten years too late for my mum and her bruises. At least you sped all of that up. She thought it was the bullying, wouldn't let me go back to Bethesda. She already had her own place so I moved in with her, transferred schools. I'm sorry about your housemate out there, by the way. I got him as he came down the stairs. Didn't see the fucking knife, though… It wasn't Brereton who told me you were here, by the way. That was someone else.”

Cook saw little point in giving him the true picture.

“John. I am sorry, you know.”

“Of course you are. Sorry it came to all this. It all ended for me last year. Both parents gone, Darren moved to Spain about ten years ago with a woman he met on holiday. He never knew, Dorian. I thought the ‘D' thing would get you – before I realised how there are ‘D's everywhere! Dennis… David… Dorian… I apologise for the melodrama. I honestly didn't mean to be so cryptic.”

“Where's Darren now?”

Ray paused to push a hand down on his wound. He took a few cautious deep breaths. “Died. Jet-skiing. Dad went ages ago – lung cancer. My mum killed herself after Darren. You know how tragedy just follows some people around? I suppose all they can do is hope they're not the last one standing. That didn't work out for me. The only thing left was to… settle up.”

Grunting and grimacing, Ray dragged himself up off the floor and flopped into the armchair, clutching his bleeding side. Feeling bolder, Cook moved closer and slowly lowered himself into the sofa opposite, keeping his eyes on Ray. He upturned his phone and set it on the cushion beside him. The sharp light was unhelpfully eerie, but just enough to see by.

“Your message was wrong, you know,” said Cook. “No-one is keeping score.”

Ray raised his eyes. “What?”

“What goes around doesn't necessarily come around. It's all a continuum. Bad behaviour goes unpunished, good behaviour isn't always rewarded. It defies all we know about human nature – to impose any logic or order on all of this.”

Ray lifted his head and coughed into the air – atomised crimson. “I know that. And who really wants to be a part of that chaos? Mountford, Brereton, Darren, your friend out there… They're the lucky ones. I'm getting luckier by the second. You're stuck with this. You've got to find a way to cope – maybe for a long time, yet. The worst thing is that you have to cope in the knowledge that you're basically nothing – that you don't matter. We all have such a fine opinion of ourselves and our position in the world. But it's just delusion – the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem. We all think we have a ‘part' to play – that we're something. But really we're just a collection of self-conscious nothings.”

“But we can choose,” said Cook. “And given the choice, it's better to be alive. ‘The dead know only one thing – it is better to be alive'.”

Ray smiled.
“Full Metal Jacket!
I would have thought you'd be more of a
Paths Of Glory
man. Go on, Dorian. Confess! You might as well. I won't tell anyone. Do you really think your future holds anything but suffering?”

“Yes, I do!” snapped Cook. “Why the fuck do you think I went through all of this? Yes – I'm miserable. But I'm learning to reject pessimism. Imagine something truly terrible – like being blind. How do you keep
going
through that? Perpetual darkness. Nothing but nothing. But where are all the blind suicides? Obviously, it's better to be alive in the dark than alone in the light.”

“You're not alive in the dark. You're a
hider
, Dorian. You always were. You chose the dark because it felt safe. I had no choice. Yes – I suppose it is ‘good' to be alive and aware and full of possibility. But it's even better to have not been born in the first place.”