‘There’s no production offices in New Cross. Must work from home.’
‘Precisely. Max is scratching around the cult TV has-beens.
Me included. Motive unclear, but I don’t believe he’s thinking of Sundance or Cannes.’
‘Before you do any of that, will you do me a big favour?’
Kyle looked at Dan. ‘What?’
‘Will you get some bloody sleep.’
325
TWENTY-ONE
regal motel, seattle. 23 june 2011. 3 a.m.
And then his eyes opened to a room he did not recognize and he stared at a white ceiling. His skin was pebbled with sweat and cooling fast. He breathed like he was breathing his last.
The bed he found himself inside was huge. The room beyond it vast. His vital signs were monitored by banks of devices within a tent of clear airtight plastic that formed an inner sanctum within the large room. The one he was dying inside.
Beyond the plastic tent, the door to the room was scratched from outside. And it vibrated from the bumps against it, as if a dog pushed at a closed door with its head.
Upon the pillow his threadbare scalp burned. He raised his head and saw that his limbs were mottled sticks. They lay loose and weightless upon the clean white sheets. A red silk robe wrapped his thin body, but was open, rakishly, at the neck. His big bony hands and feet bristled with intravenous tubes, taped down over the liverish parchment that had once been skin. Proud genitals had shrivelled away to a brownish nub. And he wheezed like an asthmatic child into an oxygen mask, vacuuming itself over the gaunt skull his 326
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mind inhabited. Above the mask, his milky eyes stared without blinking at the shape beyond his dead feet.
He saw himself stood at the foot of the bed. Those were
his
green eyes and it was
his
shaggy black hair,
his
shoulders incongruously broader than he gave them credit for,
his
tattoos of dice within flames and of pin-up girls with pistols on
his
biceps,
his
trim waist because he never ate properly and smoked too much,
his
long legs so straight in tight black jeans and
his
belt buckle in the shape of a Maltese cross.
Looking from the bed, from out of the spaghetti of medi -
cinal tubes and the heart-machine murmurs, beyond the rasps and gasps inside his rubber mask, he saw himself. But a self altered. A self apart. He stood straighter than he had ever done, a posture he could not attribute to himself when he owned that body; the one he had been born into and that grew around him. And his own dear face was never so spiteful, so cruel, so gleefully triumphant as it leered down at
him
in so wretched a state upon that sick bed.
In panic, he rattled and rustled upon the thin sheets and within the red robe. Tried to sit up. Watched the figure beyond his feet smile, before it turned and walked away; left him behind as an exhausted bundle of diseased twigs, artificially resuscitated and not long for this world.
The rake of sharp things on the wooden door increased in their haste, in eagerness to get inside.
Kyle woke into darkness and called out for God. Stared up with wide sightless eyes. Raised his head from the pillows in the hot room that smelled of cigarettes and sweat, of whisky and chicken grease soaked into cardboard.
He peered down his body. Could see nothing, but could 327
ADAM NEVILL
sense that he had kicked off the duvet and lay upon a cheap mattress, taut with thin sheets. And even after he blinked twice, he still felt the contours of the wasted torso from the dream extend away from his chin. He was certain his nipples were black, his pectorals shrivelled to the cartilage of a brittle sternum. He could feel the peaks of hip bones spike inside his trunks from a malnourished groin, covered like a handkerchief covers broken crockery. Puppet legs dropped from his pelvis, still dappled with continents of carcinoma and dried sores. And his shocked interrogation of this altered body rested and fixed upon his unseen feet. They were not his feet. Or his toes. They were longer and thinner and the wrong shape. They were someone else’s pale, lifeless feet.
And he called for God again. Cried out that this could not be. This was not
him
.
It
could not have come out of the dream and refashioned him thus. Transported itself from another place into his room and into his bed.
He propped himself up on one elbow and scrabbled for the light cord in the vinyl headboard that operated the bedside lamp. The lights refused to come on even though he yanked the string three times. He tore at the nightstand for his phone.
At his frantic touch across the keyboard, the phone screen glowed and cast a faint light across his body: and he saw his own chest and stomach and arms with half-sleeve tattoos, and his own rangy legs and his own, his very own, his own precious feet; the left big toe broken and healed crooked, the little toenails missing from each foot, a scar white on the inside of his right ankle.
And as he pulled these legs, this cherished body, up and into where he was squashed against the head of the bed, he 328
LAST DAYS
sensed ghostly intravenous tubes tug then fall away from his wrists and fingers and forearms. And he felt his own limbs and body define themselves within these simple ungainly movements.
But something was still not right. In the shock and disorientation of such a ghastly awakening, he became aware again of the sound. Of a now gentle bumping against a wall, or a door. Kyle turned towards the noise issuing from the unseen doorway of his room. The light from the phone screen suggested someone stood, half in shadow, in the place where he remembered the door to be. And he endured no more than a momentary glance at the small figure on its thin unsteady legs before it dropped to all fours with a thump.
Kyle rolled across the disorderly bed and groped for the switch on Max’s lamp on the floor beside the bed. Remembered he had gone to sleep with it turned on, as well as the overhead lights and the bedside lamp. Had fallen asleep in a well-lit room. Now he was wide awake, he remembered this fact, but its comprehension made him so cold with fright that he whimpered. Max’s daylight simulator refused to respond to his activation of the switch. He dropped it.
Something panted at the foot of his bed; water-on-the-chest wheezy. A moment before the screen of his phone winked out to save the battery, and just before he swung his legs over the side of the bed to flee blindly for the bathroom, he saw the faint, narrow face of the intruder peer over the ruffle of bedlinen, at him. More of a maw than a mouth hung open, as if to gulp at the air or utter a shriek of joy.
Vague silhouettes of the furniture and murky shapes of fittings in the room vanished with the light from the phone’s screen. Once again, the space was returned to a lightless state, 329
ADAM NEVILL
sealed from ambient nocturnal light by blackout curtains designed to protect road-weary travellers. A blindness he was grateful for, but only briefly.
Running at, and then smashing his face into the wall beside the bathroom door, shocked him dizzy. But brought him round to total cognizance. He slapped his hands about the wall inside the bathroom door. Found the light cord and yanked it down. No light.
Somewhere near the bottom of the bedframe, he received an impression that the intruder was barely able to stand. So weakened was its state, and so fragile its carriage on those unclean legs, that the shuffles and bumps he could hear in the darkness sounded as if they originated from a series of painful movements. Into his mind it brought a recollection of the figure unwittingly caught on film, tottering like a large puppet on loose strings in the darkness of the Clarendon Road house. And Kyle arrived at a horrible notion that something had recently passed from another place to become corporeal in
this
place. The scratch on wood: the noise of an incarnation.
Nearby in the darkness he heard old lungs work hard at the air of a world that must have felt new. Too uncoordinated while upright, in the trauma of emergence, he heard the figure move again to its hands and knees, while swiping its arms about. More stable when lower to the ground, like an animal freed from a confining wooden stall, he worried it might soon be able to scurry. And down there on the carpet tiles it would be better suited at finding him in the darkness.
He was trapped. The only way out of the room was
through the door that opened on to the car park.
Kyle turned about and resisted the urge to get inside the 330
LAST DAYS
bathroom and latch the door. Because wooden doors appeared an insufficient defence. He thought of ragged heads and dead birds and patchy flesh and dirty fingernails left behind in the skin of the murdered. He stifled a cry.
Padded his hands back towards the bed. If he was to have any chance of escape, he would need to run across the mattress and get to the door quickly. Maybe now, in one rush, while the sounds of an embryonic pawing and clutching at the foot of the bed lacked the rigidity of what he feared might follow. Crawling out there in the darkness, he sensed an eagerness for the world to come into focus; a desperation for a better sense of his presence to avail itself as clear and warm and frightened. He imagined it coming fast like a crab, around the foot of the bed to seize an ankle.
Silently, Kyle made it as far as the side of the bed he had so recently fled, where he paused to wince in anticipation of the impending sound of his own weight hurtling across the bed springs. He squinted into the darkness, but could only guess at the location of the door on the other side of the room.
A bony limb struck the dressing table beneath the television. The hollow knock of bone on chipboard made him gasp. Down at the foot of the bed, but closer to the bathroom than before, he heard a wet breath sucked in with excitement. That grizzled head upon the stringy neck was alert to his movements. It seemed as blind as he was, but it could hear him.
Gently, he groped about on the bedside table and picked up his copy of
Last Days
. He threw the book towards the bathroom. In response, the top of the dressing table was suddenly swept clear of his things; his laptop, folders and 331
ADAM NEVILL
books fluttered and clattered to the floor. It was angry now and stumbled like a foal wet with placenta, but it was gaining in strength.
Like he was running over a trampoline on someone else’s legs, his feet bounced across the mattress. The disorientation of the darkness blew him about and moved the world like a boat beneath his bare feet.
From behind his heels the thing squealed. It had covered much ground. Had been by the dressing table at the foot of the bed a moment ago, but now swatted at the air somewhere near the bathroom door, near where he had thrown the book and where he had not long crouched. Hard fingers scraped a wall. Caught the lamp. Shattered the bulb.
Shooting pains burst inside his ankles and knees as his feet hit the floor on the other side of the bed. Kyle righted himself. Moved forward at the wall that contained the door somewhere within its length. Across which his hands padded silently until they found smooth wood and the stench of bad meat upon it.
His fingers touched the lock. The intruder hissed in the darkness behind him. It was on the bed now, more animate.
It thumped the mattress. A thrashing commenced within the sheets because his visitor wanted his form to materialize beneath its sharp fingers. Desired that he would offer himself for the wet business he could imagine as if it were already happening.
He took the skin off three of his knuckles against the latch.
Flung open the door. Through which he fell, turned and dropped backwards, out of the room, and on to the cold cement of the path before the parking lot.
Taking an unwise, but inevitable glance back inside the 332
LAST DAYS
room, Kyle caught a final and lasting glimpse of the intruder.
Lit partially and briefly in the yellow light that shone into the room from the street lights, it appeared both wet and unnaturally thin. Was close to the mattress. The head was dipped and obscured. The body moved on its front with its arms outstretched. Feet clawed at the sheets as if they were trying to disembowel the bedding. And in an instant, he knew more about Detective Sweeney’s mystery murder weapon than the entire Phoenix police department had ever done.
It turned his legs to water. He slammed the door shut.
Shivering violently in his boxers and a T-shirt, Kyle waited out the last two hours of night wedged between the Coke and ice machines at the end of the concrete strip-motel block.
Bereft of car keys, he sat with his back to a stucco wall and covered himself with broken-down cardboard boxes from the skip behind the manager’s office.
He passed in and out of consciousness as the sun rose red over the frigid highway; he thought he was dying from the cold, but still thought it a better exit from the world than one in his room, within those hands. The very fingers he saw tug at the curtains and heard rake the door for several minutes after his hasty departure from the room, to accom-pany the guttural bellow and whine of the dead thing’s tantrum.
Kyle listened to it and shuddered so hard it interfered with his breathing. When the noise stopped abruptly, he suspected it merely waited in the darkness for him to return.
It had been impossible to rouse Dan. Wary of alerting the night clerk or the other guests, he’d called as loudly as he dared while knocking at the door to his friend’s room. But 333
ADAM NEVILL
Dan had a habit of falling into sleeps like comas with his iPod playing through earphones. And what could be heard over his snoring anyway? Mercifully, the other rooms appeared vacant.
When the night clerk left at six, after a good night’s sleep in his chair that Kyle had observed through the locked doors of the office, and was replaced by the day clerk, Kyle re -
mained hidden under the cardboard. He had no idea how long his visitor could linger in a space occupied on this side of . . . what, he did not even understand. And he had dared not risk the night clerk’s involvement in this impossible thing that he had brought to the Regal Motel. Had he woken the young man for spare keys, and if the clerk accompanied him while the intruder had still been present in his room, or hidden in the shower stall, he might have been accused of the clerk’s murder. So he’d stayed put, concealed under garbage in the cold. What he had been reduced to, by Max.