When the maid arrived at seven, the weak sunlight of dawn encouraged him enough to cast away his makeshift cardboard and paper tent. He approached the little Mexican woman and explained how he had just locked himself out of his room while going for a Coke.
She never smiled or spoke, and watched him with suspicion as he gingerly re-entered his room with her keys.
The maid looked at his tattoos and then at the torn sheets, the rents in the pillows that billowed with entrails of cheap foam, and she seemed to identify an immediate connection between the two things. Peering over Kyle’s shoulder from the doorway, when she saw the broken glass of the mirror above the dresser, she ran down to the manager’s office, her 334
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little feet in white sneakers going
phut phut phut
on the asphalt.
Criminal damage. What could he say?
He tugged on his jeans and boots, found a shirt. Fell to his knees and scraped his papers together hurriedly, going for the black-and-white photographs first. The manager would not want to see those. No sir. He forced his laptop and folders into his rucksack. Kyle abandoned his toiletries because he was unable to go inside the bathroom. He eyed its sullen door with nervous eyes as he packed up. He and Dan had to get moving; put some distance between them and this terrible place.
When he popped the trunk of the rental car outside, the day clerk came out of his office, confused by the story the maid was still recounting emphatically at his side. Kyle and the same clerk had briefly talked about music the day before when he and Dan checked in.
Kyle bullshitted to the guy about a guest, alcohol, and a fight. Almost laughed when he realized he wasn’t exactly lying. But inside his room, the day clerk stood agape, his feet planted amongst the broken glass from the mirror. Seemed to recoil at the sight of the sheets torn with such violence, and by something sharp enough to shred a mattress like that.
Kyle jabbered. Kyle cajoled. Kyle promised to pay with the credit card Max had given them. Kyle shut up. Because he too followed the gaze of the mute clerk to the terrible stain on the rear of the door.
He said, ‘Jesus,’ and took a step away from the unclean silhouette of a thing small and thin that had left its shadow on the very wood it had passed through. Kyle had failed to 335
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see it before, while gathering his things; his eyes had been lowered to the wreckage left from its fury. But there it was, like an upright Turin Shroud: unholy umbilical smears seeped out of the wood, dirty and still wet. A sweetish odour of spoiled pork wafted from the mess.
336
TWENTY-TWO
london. 23 june 2011. 4 p.m.
Malcolm Gonal wasn’t answering his phone. At immigration, beside the baggage terminal, and during the wait for the train at Gatwick, Kyle left messages. They seemed to be in the airport for a week. Bright lights, endless announcements, the large loud faces of impatient crowds, drove him further to the point preceding a scream.
He wasn’t sure whether he’d made any sense on the phone either. Frantic breathless mentions of Max, The Temple of the Last Days, his role as director, came out quick enough to be garbled. His voice sounded odd: thickened by exhaustion, brittle with irritation, detached from his mind and from what he really wanted to say, or rant to anyone who would listen.
Fast head, Novocaine tongue, numb jaw: never a good mix.
The exhausted should just lie down.
There was no call back.
‘No joy?’ Dan asked.
Kyle shook his head; it was the first time his friend had attempted conversation since their argument in Seattle. Dan had slept noisily for most of the flight home, while Kyle fidgeted and chewed nicotine gum, harried, witless, and tormented in the seat beside him.
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He’d felt safer on the plane through a refusal to believe that Sister Katherine’s old friends could appear on an aircraft. But he knew the frail sense of security would end the moment they touched down, and it provided no respite from the endless replays of the previous night’s intrusion onto the screen of his imagination, or the shards of the entire living nightmare the production had become, that fell behind his eyes for the duration of the flight: tatty fragments of Normandy, bony faces grinning through walls, the sunlit desolation of Arizona, the jowly detective’s face talking of blood-spatter patterns, the monochrome hopelessness of that Seattle house and Martha Lake’s cigarette-damaged face, the thin hands in her attic clawing for the world. And all framed by a morbid belief in his own imminent destruction.
Yet his thoughts would still change direction, suddenly, and the endless inner debate against the impossibility of it all made him writhe in his seat. Other passengers had turned their faces when he muttered to himself, like a man come undone. Because he had. He’d wanted to walk up and down the aisle of the aircraft and clutch his weary head in bloodless hands. Anything to ease the indigestion of fear, disbelief, rage and panic.
‘Call him another time. Just . . .’ Dan didn’t finish; didn’t need to. Kyle knew what he would suggest; that he should go home and rest, should sleep for days, and forget about the film for a while, if not for ever, so he would stop acting like a crazy man. But sleep could not be risked.
‘I’m going out there.’
‘New Cross. What, now?’
Kyle nodded. It’s all right for you, mate, he wanted to say.
You slept last night. And for eight hours on the plane. Because
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nothing impossible came through the closed door of your
room and tore the shit out of your still warm bed!
Kyle tried Max again. Received his voicemail. ‘Shit!’
Dan shook his head. ‘If I take the files to Finger Mouse tomorrow, will Max be OK with that?’
‘No. Take them there now. See if he can pull another all-nighter. We’ll pay. I need to see it all again. Sod Max. I need it asap. And Gabriel must be back in the UK now. I need to speak with him too. He knows shit that we don’t! I’ve had enough of this crap!’ People paused to stare at Kyle, then moved on. Kyle whizzed through his phone contacts menu and called Gabriel’s home number. A generic BT answering service asked him to leave a message. He did. ‘Need to see you. It’s urgent, Call me on . . .’
Dan fidgeted. Because Dan hadn’t believed him back in Seattle. Was incredulous with disbelief, and what looked like pity, after learning that Kyle had spent hours huddled under cardboard, wedged between the soda and ice machines. His friend had looked at him in shock and a lack of recognition while Kyle stood outside their rooms with no shoes on his feet and jabbered like a schizophrenic drug addict.
Dan’s eyes had implied collusion with the suspicions of the motel staff too; that Kyle had trashed his room and inflicted the figure upon the door. In fact, Dan’s nervous, disapproving silence as Kyle repeatedly recounted his story, appeared to him as proof of Dan’s suspicion that Kyle had faked everything thus far in the production: the arm in the kitchen of his flat, the figures in the Normandy barn while Dan was trying to get Gabriel’s smashed leg out of the rusty trap, and the figure in the old penthouse of Clarendon Road: all of it. Did Dan think he was so desperate for money and 339
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recognition, that he’d fake evidence of the paranormal? Like Gonal had once done with such vigour. Or was he just so tired and paranoid Kyle was willing to believe anything of his best friend? Probably. Dan was in the fortunate position of not being hunted. Scepticism was a luxury for the un -
affected.
In what now seemed like another lifetime, separated by an ocean and the long flight alone with his tortured thoughts, Dan had talked the motel clerk out of calling the police. Had quickly provided Max’s credit card details for the repairs to the door, the destruction of the bedlinen and mattress, and for the broken circuit breaker that was ‘wet and took out the whole block’.
But once they were inside the rental car, Dan had seized Kyle’s shoulders and stared right into his eyes from close range. ‘Mate! No bullshitting me now. But what the fuck, yeah? I know this stuff is upsetting and crazy, but help me out here. I’m struggling with this. You taking drugs or something?’
Annoyed and desperately disappointed in each other, though trying not to show it, they travelled back to London in silence.
Kyle headed out of Victoria Station with the address on Malcolm Gonal’s business card burned into his mind. And felt like he was walking through seawater. His skin was unnaturally hot, he was breathless and his limbs uncoordin -
ated. Regardless of the irrational things he was beginning to comprehend, if not accept, he believed he was now entirely unhinged from exhaustion and sleep deprivation. He would have to sleep soon, but sleep somewhere safe.
Where?
He found himself having to read the tube map endlessly.
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And on realizing that changing from the District Line to the Jubilee Line, and then again to the Docklands Light Railway, was going to be unsurprisingly problematic as two lines were suffering a disrupted service, he gave up at London Bridge and dragged himself and his heavy rucksack up from the underground. In the rain, outside the station, he shivered and waved at the passing Hackney cabs.
Malcolm Gonal didn’t appear to be home. Perhaps he had fled the country and gone into hiding. Who could blame him?
In frustration, using the palm of his hand, Kyle indented all of the plastic buzzers on the intercom panel.
Gonal’s place was on the third floor of an old Victorian, the entry and front yard bulging with rubbish bags and sprouting weeds; his flat was the only one with a name card inserted under the grimy plastic buzzers, suggesting he was the sole occupant in the miserable building, forgotten in its deprived pockmark of South London.
The windows of the ground floor had blankets nailed to the insides of the sash frames. Popular nineties tabloid television director and notorious faker of hauntings falls on hard times.
Pity that.
But why would Max hire such a feckless charlatan? Because a screening of the proposed film was never an aim; Malcolm Gonal was tenacious, unscrupulous, unethical, greedy and hard up. And would do anything to expose sensational mystical secrets of an infamous cult in a straight-to-DVD carve-up. Murder, assault, rape, sodomy, child abuse, embezzlement, kidnapping; Gonal would have had a Viagra-stroke at the prospect of it all. He’d bankrupted Allegra Films in a defamation suit from the Church of England, for claiming that widespread black masses were 341
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a regular occurrence in their churches. It had finished him in mainstream television.
Get out of the eighties, Max.
Kyle was insulted; he knew he was second choice of director, but second to Gonal! And yet, if a theatrical release or television broadcast was not an aim, Kyle was clueless as to what Max wanted to achieve with the documentary from within the safety of his world of light up in Marylebone.
Stepping back, Kyle looked up at the discoloured brick facade of the building. And saw a curtain sway on the largest street-facing window of the top floor. The suggestion of a pale bulbous face moved back from a gap in the curtains, momentarily revealing a room so brightly lit, the illumin -
ation shot straight up and into space. Gonal was inside.
Kyle jogged back down the stone steps to the front path, turned and held up his phone. ‘I just need to talk!’ The curtain stayed closed. Kyle waited and he waited until his hope went cold. Then bent over, closed his eyes and exhaled the dregs of his energy.
‘Piss off!’ a buzzing voice crackled out of the intercom.
Kyle went back to the front door, let his rucksack slide to the greening cement of the porch floor. ‘Mr Gonal. I desperately need to talk to you. My name is Kyle Freeman. I’ve been calling all day. It sounds insane, but it might be a matter of life and death.’
‘Not mine it ain’t. Now fuck off!’
It was a long way back to West Hampstead from New Cross. His vision swam hot and red.
Enough is enough.
He punched the intercom button. ‘Just might be, mate.’
You fat
fraud.
‘Hear me out!’
‘You make me come down there you talentless little 342
LAST DAYS
wanker, and you’ll be using the disabled seat on the bus to get home.’
‘Can you hear me pissing myself, Malcolm, all over your welcome mat?’
The little intercom speaker nearly blew out of the wall.
‘I’m known! You hear me? I’m known round here! Headcase Stratham! You heard of him, yeah? He’ll be payin’ you a visit very soon. I know where you live, you little ponce. West Hampstead is it? Goldhurst fucking Terrace? You’ll do more than piss yourself when your door comes in!’
Unfortunately Kyle had heard of Headcase Stratham; a notorious East End type, implicated in gangland killings and maimings, with a signature of biting off his victims’ noses.
He’d even been apprehended at an illegal boxing match with part of a rival’s nostril still under his tongue; had been too eager to see the next fight to wash his mouth out. A man somehow not inside prison
for ever
. How was that even possible? Kyle had seen his scarred blockhead gurning from at least two lurid red covers of true-crime books in the airport bookshop, in between tomes of football hooligan folklore.
Uncertain ground. Gonal could be bluffing, but Headcase Stratham was just the sort of feral psychopath that Gonal would knock around with. They had form; Gonal had deified him as a local hero in a terrible DVD that Kyle remembered being given away with a Sunday tabloid.
Nausea added itself to the pressure cooker already set to exhaustion. He had to think fast, and in a mind with currents as slow as a brackish stream.
‘Can’t hear you no more!’ Gonal shrieked through the speaker. ‘Eh? You prick!’ He went on and on. Loved the sound of his own bellicose Cockney voice, issuing threats, 343
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glutted with the power of one who has the keys to a violence so irrational and savage only the foolhardy would ignore the merest insinuation of it.