Ida removed her other shoe and wriggled the toes on that foot. ‘In fact, that should make it easier. There would be a record of his death somewhere.’
‘There is,’ I said. ‘Or, there was. The hospital where the baby was born. Problem is when Mrs Ripstone – her name was Shelly Teasdale when she had the baby, by the way – tried to track down those records herself, she discovered the hospital no longer exists. It burnt down ten years ago and all the records, along with several patients and medical staff, went up with it.’
Henry slid his fingers beneath the glasses and massaged his closed eyes. ‘Er, you’re losing me here. Did – does – the mother know her son is dead or what?’
‘She was informed of the baby’s death minutes, maybe only seconds, after it was born.’
Now he was shaking his head wearily. ‘Then why on earth has she come to us?’
The reason sounded even more crazy when I heard myself telling them.
4
Before heading home that evening to my basement flat on the other side of Brighton, I made a little detour. I’d taken an instruction the previous week from a building society for a house repossession and had gone along with a court bailiff, who was the only one with the legal authority to repo the particular property, and I’d stood by while he went about his business. Fortunately, the occupants who’d reneged on their £90,000 loan from the Halifax had already skipped, so there was no problem with eviction. Less fortunate though, for the creditor that is, those same people had trashed the house before leaving.
Now I know it’s easy to feel sorry for anyone turned out of their home, but the truth of it is it generally isn’t their home. They’ve borrowed the money, a large amount at that, and refused – yes, refused, in this case – to pay it back. So the home wasn’t rightfully theirs in the first place. The building society had done its best with the debtor, a guy in his early forties who, it was later discovered, had a habit of running one business after another into liquidation, every time setting up again a few months later under a different company name. When he’d approached the Halifax, his current business had looked pretty healthy – on paper, at least – so the building society had no problem with advancing him the loan. It wasn’t long before his business went belly-up, though. Almost a year of letters, phone calls and personal visits by the building society people failed to produce a satisfactory resolution – our debtor always promised to pay the next month’s mortgage and somehow make up the rest over a period of time; but he never did. And as I’d been sent round to see him a couple of times, more as a counsellor than a debt collector, I knew he never would. He was a fly-by-night builder who had a record (I eventually discovered) of letting down clients with shoddy workmanship, overcharging and, more often than not, beginning a job and not completing it. There were genuine villains around town that I respected more than this joker, and my advice to the creditor had been to claim the property before the debt rose any higher. As it turned out, the errant builder was smarter than all of us – he disappeared within a week of my last visit.
So this one I wasn’t sorry for at all. And when I’d arrived with the bailiff, whose duty it was to force entry if necessary, I even hated the bastard. Not only had he and presumably his wife and two strapping teenage sons wrecked the inside of the house – skirting boards and door frames were ripped off, light fixtures, sockets, even the fuse box, torn from the walls and ceilings, toilet bowls and sinks smashed – but they’d also smeared the walls with special graffiti. Special? Oh yes, because this moron and his retard family had had a fine old time leaving messages especially for me.
On this particular evening I could have sent one of the others – Henry or Ida – to check out the house, but frankly I hadn’t wanted them to see the ugly and obscene drawings with which the clan from hell had daubed the battered walls. More shame than embarrassment, I think. Embarrassment about my physical irregularities was something I’d managed to get over a long time ago; shame, though, was something different, and a little harder to shake off. Those spray-can daubings had been bad enough, because they were grotesque cartoons, warped but so badly executed they were almost abstruse; but one of the family, one of the boys, I think (I’d hate to think it could be the woman) had an undoubted talent for art, and I don’t mean of the primitive kind. The draughtsman of the brood had used a brush and gloss paint (so much harder to remove or coat over) and his depiction of my misshapen body was exaggerated only enough to emphasize but not to distort. It’s lurid accuracy was what made it so humiliating.
Just why the artist had decided to paint me naked and why he should depict my genitals so enormous and mangled (the one big overstatement he’d allowed himself), I had no idea, except to surmise that the obliquity of the imagination can far exceed any aberration of the physical. And exactly why he’d depicted me copulating with something that might just have been a pig (talented though he was, farmyard animals were not his forte) God alone knew.
No, I’d been shamed before the bailiff and his crew and I had no desire to be shamed further before my own colleagues and friends. I wanted to spare them that.
After the bailiff and his men had left I’d turned off the house’s water supply by the stopcock – water had been flowing down the stairs from the bathroom for at least two days, I figured – before emptying the hot tank by running water from the tap into the kitchen’s metal sink (the only sink that hadn’t been smashed). After that, I’d switched off the electricity from the broken main fuse box, then turned off the gas by the tap on the meter’s main feed out (I suppose I should have been grateful that these lunatics hadn’t tampered with that or left the gas stove turned on). Any telephones that had been there were gone, so I used my mobile to ring a local handyman I hired regularly to change door-locks, board up windows, and carry out any other jobs that would make the property more secure; personally, I had no argument with squatters, but building societies, banks and landlords in general detested them, so it was part of my brief to keep them out. Lastly, I’d taken an inventory of anything inside the house that might be worth selling on, so that the creditor could at least recoup something towards the damage caused. Unfortunately, nothing of much value had been left behind.
That evening – it was a Monday – I’d returned to the empty, vandalized house to check everything was still in order and that my handyman had done his job properly. It’s location was in the rougher part of Kemp Town, the building itself set in a terrace of similar type properties down a narrow turning, and I let myself in with the shiny new key. Because of the boarded windows it was dark inside, like winter dusk, and there was the mouldy stench of damp everywhere.
Any of the undamaged furniture that had been left behind had been removed by the bailiff’s men, and my steps along the gloomy hallway had that echoey resonance peculiar to empty buildings. There was enough natural light seeping through the small, dusty, arched window over the front door, as well as from the unboarded landing window above, for me to see my way, but still I took out the pencil-thin torch I always carried in my jacket pocket and switched on its beam. First I ventured into the front parlour, checking the window boards, making sure they were secure enough. My workmen had done an excellent job as usual, only a narrow shaft of light shining through the middle join. Next I examined the kitchen, trying the dry taps even though the stopcock was off. My report to the building society would state that I’d visited the reclaimed property a second time to make sure everything was in order, all services shut down, the house itself impregnable to the casual intruder. The cost of alarms and stronger defences was prohibitive to the creditor, who had already lost enough on their unwise loan, and my report would say that the precautions now taken were satisfactory. It was when I was checking the bolts on the back door that I heard the noise from upstairs.
It had sounded like something breaking.
I swore under my breath. Surely nobody had forced entry so soon. The squatters’ grapevine in Brighton was finely tuned – they even had their own advice bureau – but I’d
considered this place a reasonably hard nut to crack.
The sound again, sharp, tight, over-loud in the empty building. Outside a seagull gave out a startled shriek as though it, too, had been alarmed by the sudden noise.
I left the kitchen and shone the slim torch beam up the hallway stairs, treading cautiously as I went, for some reason wary of my own footsteps. Stupid, I told myself silently. I wasn’t the intruder.
‘Okay,’ I hollered up the stairs. ‘Who’s there and what the hell are you doing on private property?’
That should be enough to send them scurrying for the nearest window, I figured. Obviously the trespasser or trespassers had found their way in from a garden window at the back of the premises, a window I’d thought not worth boarding. I paused at the foot of the stairs, waiting for more sounds, hopefully of running feet. Nothing stirred, though.
I’d have to investigate. I’d have to go up there. Probably it was only neighbourhood kids up to mischief, aware that the property was vacant. Even more likely, it was an animal of some kind, maybe a cat on the prowl, or mice searching for food. Could even be rats. I shuddered.
‘All right, I’m coming up,’ I called out reluctantly, wanting to give whoever or whatever the chance to make a getaway. I didn’t want trouble – my fee didn’t warrant it.
I began to climb, the damp stair-carpet spongy beneath my feet. Mildew had already begun to set in and the smell was unpleasant. Come on, make a break for it, I said to myself, a voiceless plea to the intruder above, and the dusty stair-rail was shaky under my grip (in their rage, the vengeful builder and his tribe had obviously tried to loosen it).
Half-way up and the noise came again, only this time even louder, almost like the sharp report of a pistol being discharged. It brought me to a halt.
Dust motes swirled in the beam of light from the torch as I aimed it at the landing ahead. Did I really want this? Did I need it? Much better to retrace my steps and leave the house entirely. Inform the police of the break-in and let them get on with it. Like I said, I wasn’t paid enough to put myself in danger. Unfortunately, if nothing else, I’m a pro. Part of my contract with the Halifax was to make the building secure, so it was my responsibility to keep the place free of intruders. Although right then I tried to resist the idea, I knew I had a duty towards my client. God damn it, why hadn’t I gone straight home from the office?
The thought suddenly occurred to me that perhaps the debtor himself had returned to reclaim something he’d forgotten during his moonlight flit. I prayed that was not the case. He’d already unleashed his wrath on the building itself and I didn’t want what was left over taken out on me. The graffiti had been enough to deal with.
Then I thought, what the fuck, and headed on upwards again, working up a steam of anger as I went. Yes, I hoped it was the bastard builder and I hoped his sicko son was with him, because I had something to tell him about his particular artistic gift, a whole lot to say about his mean-minded, bigoted, self-fucking-expression in gloss paint. I stamped the stairs, squelching liquid from the carpet with my heavy footfalls, and pulled at the fragile banister rail, causing it to rock to and fro.
Where are you? I called out in my mind only. Don’t mess with me, I warned, still in my mind. Don’t be fooled by my appearance, I can handle myself all right. Ah, the power – the self-deception! – of anger.
I rounded the bend in the stairs, reached the landing, looked this way and that, craning the whole of my upper body in that awkward movement of mine.
‘Come on you bastards!’ I shouted aloud this time, invigorated (or fooled) by my own temper. ‘You want trouble, you’ve got it!’ All bravado, of course, but it had carried me through before under similar circumstances; a bit of bluster could sometimes save you a whole lot of hassle.
But the landing was empty. The evening sun shone through the grimy window at the far end, reflecting off the wall over the stairs with its word-graffiti, the Neanderthals’ imagination obviously having run out of ideas for illustrations by the time they’d reached the upper level. Even so, the scrawled letters were equally obscene.
There were three open doorways along the landing, one behind me, the other two on my left. The cracking sound exploded again and I almost hopped into the air.
It had been even louder than before and seemed to come from the middle room. I stayed a moment or two, trying to analyse the sound. It was brittle, acute, a sound that cleaved the still, damp air, now more like the crack of a whip than a pistol shot. I made for the open doorway.
And stopped at its entrance, shocked rigid by what I saw across the darkened room.
Then, as the large cracked mirror on the wall opposite fragmented into a thousand more pieces, I stumbled backwards, terrified and aghast by what I’d seen in its fractured reflection, the hideous images, the grotesques mouthing silent screams, curious oddities whose malformed limbs seemed to claw at the glass from the other side. And I screamed myself and heard the sound, the only sound in that terrible tenebrous twilight. And I backed away from the room as I screamed, moving fast, my bent spine breaking the frail banister behind me, so that I plunged into the stairwell below, thudding against the sodden carpet, rolling down, over and over, head over hump, until I reached the bottom.
I wasn’t knocked unconscious, but I was dazed, my one good eye deliberately closed again after observing the hallway revolving around me. The pain of landing had hit me instantly and as I lay there it gathered force rather than subsided.
I whimpered first, and then I moaned. Oh dear Lord, that fucking hurt.
I sucked in a large draught of musky air, then resumed moaning, for a short time the shock of the fall outweighing the fright I’d received inside the upstairs room. But quickly the fright claimed the upper hand and I began pushing myself along the hallway towards the front door. I didn’t get far though: the dizziness and gathering pain soon brought me short. Hunched there, on knees and elbows, I drew in more breaths and closed my eye once more.
The worst of the pain eventually passed, along with the giddiness, and I managed to lift my oversized head a little.
What the hell was that up there?
I blinked, blinked again.
What the hell had I seen in that mirror?
My panic began to ease as I considered the question. Unfortunately, my heart still thumped too hard and too quickly, my hands and arms continued to tremble against the carpet. Shapes, horrible, disgusting shapes – that’s what I’d seen. It was almost as if the room itself had been alive with monsters that could only be seen as reflections in the broken mirror. A long shudder ran through me, seeming to start with my head and shoulders and coursing right down to the soles of my feet. It couldn’t be. The room had been empty. I would have heard those things before I’d even entered the room if they had truly been there. No, something had triggered my imagination. Maybe my own distorted reflections, multiplied by the fractured glass, were the images that gaped at me across the darkened room. Or maybe it was just another acid flashback, a lingering chemical imbalance among the complex neurons of my brain. Lord knows, it wouldn’t be the first time.
Not entirely convinced by either solution, I mentally began to explore my limbs and body, wondering if anything had become broken or detached in the fall. I breathed more easily when everything appeared to be intact; well, as intact as it ever could be. I pushed myself back against the wall and rested there awhile.
I let a minute pass by, then another, knowing what I had to do if only for peace of mind. I had to go back up there and take a second look. No rush though. I had all the time in the world.
I hesitated at the top of the stairs. I really didn’t want to go inside that room again. There was no percentage, no incentive. No gain. Not really part of the job description. Except I had to; for my own satisfaction.
I’d suffered flashbacks before, a result of too much Eighties acid, but they’d never been as nightmarish as this. And the last one had been well over a year ago and had involved hundreds of thousan
ds of dancing legs, a black and white Busby Berkeley extravaganza of torso-less limbs and sparkling sequins, a Grand Guignol musical of severed parts danced to a full Latin-rhythm orchestra. Where that peculiarly horrid fantasy was dredged from, I’d no idea – probably from watching too many Thirties musicals on TV while tripped out on A – but it had been patently unreal, easy to cope with, unlike this latest vision – hallucination? No, there had been something all too real about those mutants in the mirror.
I inspected the broken landing rail before moving on, a delaying tactic, I guess. I must have hit it with some force to smash right through, even though the mounting had been weakened by the last tenant. That was going to be added to my damage report, just another item the absent builder would have to pay for when the building society finally caught up with him. Time-wasting over, my gaze drifted towards the open doorway.
It was so dark in there because, as the middle room, it was windowless, only light from the landing window seeping into the open doorway. I edged closer, unwillingly, treading carefully while not exactly creeping. This time I peered round the door very slowly.
The mirror on the dingy wall opposite had broken into myriad pieces, yet still held together like a great big jigsaw of silvered glass. And it was my own image I saw reflected there, my own fearsome self mirrored a thousand times or more, my imperfections multiplied; and even though I could not understand why the glass had shattered at my approach, I now realized that it had been my own hideousness, viewed in a new and awesome way, which had shocked me so.
I stood transfixed, watching myself in this jagged confederation of plagiarized horrors, this horrendous coalition of likenesses, and after a while I began to weep.
5
I got back to my flat late, having lingered in a bar on the way. Not one of my regular haunts – too many friends and acquaintances would have wanted to gab, even buy me a drink or two, and I had a need to be alone with my own thoughts, my own personal misery. After five Bushmills Malt and three Buds, I’d left, stepping out into the warm night and turning towards the seafront, the salt-breeze almost clearing the fug from my head, which was something I hadn’t wanted. I needed that alcohol haze between myself and my demons, needed it to restrain them, lest their grip clung too tight, held me in terror till dawn. They had come knocking before, more than once, possessing me through the night, mesmerizing, haunting me; and with daylight, I had never understood why.